1988

by Andrew McGahan

  I was alone with the boils.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Sleep was going to be the problem. I rolled around in bed that night, awake. The two boils ached. I could feel a third developing on my hip. It didn’t matter which angle I lay in, they hurt. And then there were the observations. After I finally fell asleep I was woken by the alarm at quarter to three. I was back in bed by five past three, asleep towards four, up again at quarter to six. Asleep again by six-thirty, up at quarter to nine. It wasn’t restful. I liked sleep. I needed it in good eight, nine hour stretches.

  It wouldn’t happen. Not if I got all the observations, and I was determined to get them all. It was a matter of pride. I needed an achievement. Everything else about my life might’ve gone wrong, but I intended, at least, to do this one thing. I would run Cape Don, smoothly and competently, and I’d do it alone.

  Still, it would be dull. I spent most of the second day reading, perched awkwardly in a chair. I’d long since finished my own collection of books. I was into Vince’s store of Le Carré and Graham Greene. I wrote part of a letter. I smoked cigarettes. I took care of the generators. I sat on the verandah and stared. The day passed. No yachts sailed by. No planes flew over. Everything was quiet.

  I turned to alcohol. Maybe I couldn’t handle drinking alone back in Brisbane, but now there was no choice. I started on the beer. It turned out to be only a matter of perseverance. The drinks went down slower without conversation, but they still went down. After five or six it grew easier, and then very easy. My brain circled and thought and kept itself occupied. The evening developed. I didn’t need company.

  I went to bed drunk. Even then I couldn’t sleep properly. Every three hours the alarm was ringing. The months of heavy use had told on it. It’d lost its sharp tone, the springs were going. It was down to a death rattle. When I rolled out of bed for the 9 a.m. observation I was thinly hungover and tired. The boils throbbed. Outside, the day was bright and fine as always. I glared at it, got dressed. It occurred to me I needn’t bother. There was no one to notice me, naked or not. And clothes irritated the boils.

  I rejected the idea. I wasn’t big on nudity. Mine wasn’t much of a body and I liked it better clothed. The day ticked by. I lay on the bed reading, suffering the boils, starting every three hours at the alarm. At one stage I dozed and was woken by an aeroplane engine. I went out, but the sound was already fading. I couldn’t see the plane. I took the Toyota and drove to the airstrip. There was no one there. I drove home, got out of the car.

  I stopped. I could hear voices. I looked around. They were coming from the weather shack. I went over, looked in. It was the radio. I stared at it. I didn’t understand. The radio wasn’t switched to one of the public channels. Wayne and I usually flicked it to an empty one, between observations. Otherwise we’d be listening to people all day, the public channels were in constant use. I’d never heard anyone on this channel before, it was supposed to be dead air. But the voices were there. Loud, blaring, male. There were two of them.

  ‘There’s someone else here.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m here. I’ve told you’

  ‘I can’t see.’

  ‘There’s someone else here.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  It kept going. There were sounds I couldn’t identify. Snatches of other words. The voices were toneless, made flat by static. There was something disturbing about it. Senseless. I switched it off. I walked out into the compound. Looked around. Nothing.

  Another night passed with the alarm clock. I was keeping up with all the observations, but I was feeling the lack of sleep. Things were beginning to blur. My head was slow, my eyes felt grainy and inflamed. But I couldn’t actually sleep. No matter how tired I was, I could always hear the clock ticking beside the bed, knew it would go off in one hour, two hours.

  And the boils were getting worse. There was one in my groin now. I was sprouting the things everywhere. I finally abandoned my shorts, they were rubbing in painful places. I walked around naked from the waist down. It didn’t help much. The boils kept bumping things. Chairs. Walls. The mattress. I plastered bandaids over them. I watched my penis for the inevitable signs. It would happen right at the tip. The biggest boil yet. I’d probably get an erection squeezing it. And it’d come bucketloads of semen-ridden pus.

  I remembered Wayne’s marijuana. I hadn’t smoked any for weeks. The supply had dwindled down to about a quarter of a bag. Wayne had left it behind, confident of finding more in Brisbane. That night I drank bourbon and smoked several joints, laced with tobacco. I could inhale the stuff more deeply now that I was a smoker. There was no more coughing.

  The marijuana helped the pain. It didn’t help the mind. I reeled around the house, confused, leering at things. I sat in Wayne’s studio and stared at the old paintings. They were nauseating. I heard a phone ringing, started up and went out to answer it. I stopped. Gazed around the darkened compound. The only sound was the generator, humming in its shed. There were no phones at Cape Don.

  I went back to the bourbon. I walked around the house. I didn’t like the empty rooms. The buzz of the fluorescents. I sat on the back verandah. It didn’t work. There was no peace. I felt restless, full of nervous energy. There was no way to spend it and no distractions. No Scrabble, no one to talk to, no TV. I thought about going over to Russel and Eve’s house to watch videos. I couldn’t do it. Their house was dark and closed. Their presence was still there, even if they weren’t.

  I drank, grew very drunk. At two forty-five a.m. I hobbled over to the shack. These walks at night I was finding the worst, out in the open with nothing but the lighthouse beam overhead, and the pale streetlights glowing along the paths. The houses around me were empty, the bush was empty. It was nothing but darkness for thirty, forty, fifty ks in any direction. In all the world there was only this small circle of dim light, and only me, walking across it.

  I stopped ten feet short of the shack. Swayed. Stared. The door was blocked by a giant lizard. It was huge, a good eleven or twelve feet long. It was a dinosaur. Mottled grey in the light spilling out from the shack. Sinewy. Ugly. It was up on its front legs. Its mouth was open, red tongue half out, eyes glaring at me. I glared back.

  What the hell was it? A big goanna? A monitor lizard? We stood there, unmoving, eyes fixed on each other. The night hung still around us. Then the lizard moved. It swivelled and ran off around behind the shack. I followed. It wasn’t there. I heard loud, rustling sounds, branches snapping in the scrub. There was no scrub there. There was nothing behind the shack but the cliff, dropping straight down. There was nowhere it could have gone.

  I stood there, breathing hard. The sound of a phone ringing, that was one thing. Giant lizards, that was another. Something wasn’t right. I entered the shack, sat at the desk. I looked at the radio. Static. Empty air. I thought about the voices I’d heard. What if I heard them now. What if they spoke to me. I waited, dreading it. In the corners the spiders sat in their webs and watched me. The radio didn’t speak. I started the weather, finished it. Outside again I played the torch all around the shack. Nothing. I walked back to the house, very carefully. Listening. Watching.

  The house was waiting. Deserted rooms. I went into my own and shut the door. Shut even the French windows. I didn’t know what might be outside. I lay on the bed, my limbs distorted and painful. I set the alarm for two hours and forty minutes time. Stared at the ceiling fan. Didn’t sleep.

  Next day the supply plane arrived. I was on the verandah when it flew over, saw it do the circle. I put some pants on, drove out. The pilot seemed solid and real and cheerful, and I was very glad to see him. Last night didn’t mean anything.

  ‘Just you now is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Just me.’

  ‘Sure you don’t wanna jump on board? Get out like all the others?’

  ‘I’m alright.’

&nbs
p; And I was. But then I drove home. Cape Don clamped down around me again. I stacked the food in the fridge, opened a warm beer, walked up and down the front verandah. There was something nagging about the view. I’d been looking at it too long. I put on some shoes and went for a walk. It was painful and slow because of the boils, but it seemed important to get away from the house.

  I explored the scrub at the far end of the point. It narrowed to a strip maybe fifty yards wide. On either side low cliffs fell down to the mangroves. The bush was littered with junk. Drums, bottles, sheet iron, unidentifiable rusting lumps. A dump. It was dreary and hot. I needed to piss and shit. I couldn’t do it. I felt watched.

  Finally I emerged to a small clearing at the very tip of the point. Below me was a wide strip of mangrove, and beyond that the ocean. The air was hazy, the sea flat and pale. In the clearing itself there were two circles of cement, four or five yards across, with large holes in the centre.

  I knew what these were, they were the remains of the gun emplacements. Vince had told me. In World War Two the army had stationed some men at Cape Don. They were supposed to be guarding the channel against a Japanese invasion fleet. I lowered myself gently and sat on the cement. Lit a cigarette.

  I remembered the story. The men had spent most of the war here, slowly rotting. There was nowhere for them to go, nothing for them to do. After a while they’d fallen to fighting amongst themselves, or to wandering off into the bush. Someone had been killed in one of the brawls. Another three men disappeared in the scrub, were never seen again.

  There were some names inscribed in the cement. I didn’t look at them closely. I didn’t want to know. The clearing was lonely, brooding. I walked back through the bush. Most of the junk, I supposed, was the army’s. Things had fallen apart. Halfway down one slope I noticed a small, concrete bunker. It was overgrown and half-buried in dirt. I thought about climbing down. Didn’t. There would be nothing in it. It looked dark. A hole into the earth. I went back to the house, and emptied my bowels.

  The walk hadn’t helped. I felt ill. I was surrounded by decay. Over the next two days I alternated between drinking, and short, useless snatches of sleep. I avoided getting stoned, but it made little difference. Between the boils and the observations and the fatigue I was losing grip. I heard more phones ringing, more planes flying over. I’d drive out to the airstrip and there’d never be anything there. At night I’d hear faint classical music coming from Vince’s place. Things crawling around under the house. Iron creaking in the roof. I’d suddenly realise that the sound of the generator was gone. I’d have to shake my head and slap my ears until I could hear it again.

  I contemplated abandoning the observations, at least the night ones. There was genuinely no need for me to be doing them. Even the Bureau back in Darwin could hardly have cared during the dry season. Night after night the conditions were identical. No clouds. No wind. No real variation in temperature. It wasn’t weather at all. But I couldn’t do it. The observations represented order. They strung out, one after the other, they were beacons. All I had to do was make it to the next one, and I’d get by.

  But there came a night, finally. I was out of stamina. Out of bandaids. I had five active boils. My armpit, my back, my shoulder, my groin and my hip. The sheets of my bed were spotted with blood. Every itch on my skin felt like a new one rising. I was going to die from boils, I understood that. I’d given up on clothes altogether. It made me feel uneasy and foolish, but it was necessary. The boils had picked the worst possible pressure points. I was bursting them as soon as a head appeared, but new ones replaced the old. I could think of nothing else to do with the things.

  It was around midnight. I’d been smoking small joints throughout the day. I’d also been drinking steadily, without any real awareness of amounts. I was dealing with a running hangover, four or five days old, the body had no more use for alcohol. I was shaking, sweating. I needed something to do. An escape. I thought about reading. I was out of books. I’d finished the last one that I’d borrowed from Vince. I needed more.

  I put on a shirt. I took the torch and a can of beer and went over to Vince’s house. It was all darkness inside. I could hear the whirr of the ceiling fans. Soft movements from the bedrooms. I knew there was no one there. I edged along the hall until I found a switch, flicked it. Fluorescents blinked into life. It was only Vince’s house.

  I made it to the living room and the bookshelves. I squatted down, looked. I didn’t know why I wanted more books. Books were the last thing I needed. I suddenly felt an utter hatred for every writer who had held on long enough to finish something. I never would. The hatred was physical, it was a sickness. I went through the titles. I pulled out Sartre. Herman Hesse. More Graham Greene. Hemingway. I dropped them, threw them away. They were evil. Then I saw a sex book by Norman Mailer.

  I looked at it. It was called The Prisoner of Sex. I flicked through the pages, came to a section about the female orgasm. Stop it, I thought. Not this. Not now. I’d read far too many books about sex. They hadn’t solved anything. All they’d done was confuse me, fucked me forever.

  I threw Mailer away. I saw a bottle of Vince’s port on the desk. I sat there, swigged from the bottle. I went over and picked up Mailer again. I lay on the couch. I read what Mailer had to say about fucking. About good fucks and bad fucks. I lost track of the context. I saw something about the most beautiful fuck ever. I lay back, let the words swim. The most beautiful fuck ever. The most beautiful fuck in history. In the world.

  I dropped the book. Anger came from somewhere. I grabbed my prick. I’d give Mailer the most beautiful fuck in the world. I clenched and pulled. The erection came. There was no thought of sex in my mind. It was nothing but brute force. I jabbed and jabbed like a dog. I sweated and rolled, exhausted, maddened. I pulled off my shirt. The boils rubbed on the couch. Broke, bled. I worked at it, teeth gritted, fucking the pain. It wouldn’t come. My prick was raw.

  I stopped, furious. I was panting. I sat up. There were spots of blood on the couch. I headed for the bathroom. I needed to throw up. I needed more bandaids. I went in, switched on the light. I was facing the mirror over the sink. It was large. It reflected my body as far down as my knees. I hadn’t seen myself for months. There were no mirrors in my house, only the one on my desk. That one was covered with books and letters and sheets of paper. This was something else entirely. I stared at myself in the fluorescent glare.

  I was hideous. Huge and round and white. Streaked with grime. My erection poked out from under my belly. It was tiny. Ludicrous. There was a bandaid tangled in the pubic hair. And there were boils everywhere. Red pus oozed from their heads. My eyes were pink, my face covered with a dirty, ginger fuzz. It was disgusting. I was a monster.

  I reeled away. I forgot about the bandaids, they weren’t going to save me. I made it to the front door, looked across the compound. I couldn’t go out there, couldn’t cover that much open space. Not looking like this. Not feeling like this. I debated, hesitated, swore at myself, finally hurried across. It was like broad daylight in the centre of a crowded street. I was exposed. I was visible. Someone somewhere was watching this and they were sickened by it. I got to my front door, hid in my room.

  I lay rigid on the iron bed. My hands gripped the sheets. I was in crisis. Terror. I wasn’t going to make it. From outside I could hear the generator. It was impossibly loud. The sound of it filled my head, rose and fell. It was loose, out of its shed, circling the house. I knew it wasn’t real. It wouldn’t stop. It was coming down the hall, huge and lumbering. It was right outside my door.

  I got up. I had to sleep. I went out to the kitchen, found my supply of antihistamines, found some wine. I washed down four of the small red tablets. I looked at the tinfoil sheet. I took four more. Then four more again. I went out to the front verandah and stared at the compound. I told myself there was nothing and no one there. That the generator was secure in its shed. Then I went back to my room. I lay down, pulled the sheet up over my body. Waited.
>
  The antihistamines swung in. It was a long, dazed night. At times I slept, but the dreams jolted me out of it. Vivid dreams. Fucking. Screaming. I shifted and feared. Dawn arrived. I was still in the grip of the drugs. I gazed at the light stupidly. Planes were flying over again. I dozed. Woke. There were noises from the back verandah. Clunks. Mutters. They stopped. Finally I rose and went out. The verandah was empty. I had known it would be. I walked down the hall, opened the screen door at the front.

  There was a black man sitting there, on the steps. He was smoking a cigarette, eyeing me.

  ‘Which one are you?’ he said.

  ‘Uh . . .’ Nothing emerged. I could only look at him. He was old, white-bearded, heavy-browed. Stern. I’d seen him somewhere before.

  ‘Didn’t you hear the plane?’ he went on, annoyed, ‘I had to walk here from the strip.’

  I stood there, naked, boil-ridden, lost. I realised who it was. Allan Price. Chairman of the Board of the Gurig National Park.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. Then I went back inside to get some clothes.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  I got dressed. I thought Allan Price. At a time like this. I was doomed. I went back out. He was still there.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘Which one, the painter or the writer?’

  ‘I’m supposed to be the writer. Gordon.’

  He gave me a long, unimpressed look. Even dressed, I didn’t feel like much to see. ‘Woke you up eh?’

  I nodded. ‘I didn’t hear the plane. I didn’t know you were coming.’

  ‘Where’s Russel? Where’s Vince?’

  I explained where Vince was, where Wayne was, where Russel and Eve were.

  He frowned. ‘No one told me. You know how to run this place?’

  ‘The weather station. And the generator. That’s all.’