I did another three or four, dropped them, flaming, into a pile on the board. A small, steady fire developed, oozing black smoke. I dangled new tiles over it till they dripped. The fire grew. The room was big and airy enough, the smoke wasn’t a problem. I started tearing up the box, adding it to the flames, bit by bit. Then it was some People magazines. There was no joy in it, no fascination. Just the passing of time.
Wayne came out, looked.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Burning the Scrabble set.’
‘But you love it.’
‘I know. It has to die.’
He nodded, watched for while. The flames tried to creep out, away from the board. I patted them out. Wayne went off, came back with some papers and scraps of canvas from his studio. He sat down on the other side of the table. Built the fire. It came to me that I should go and get the few pages I’d actually written, burn them too. I couldn’t be bothered. I didn’t want to move. We watched the fire. Smoke billowed around the room, blown by the ceiling fans. We stopped adding things to it. The Scrabble board was all gone, but the flames kept going, getting fuel from somewhere.
Then the table gave way. A circle in the middle dropped to the floor, taking the fire with it. We’d burned right through. Ash and flames drifted across the floor. We stared at them. Would it matter if the house went up? No one wanted it anyway. We waited. The fire burnt itself out. We were left with a pile of ash and a round ball of plastic slag. We examined the hole in the table. There was still plenty of room around the edges for the dinner plates. It had never been a table of any grace or beauty anyway.
No harm done.
Wayne began clearing out what was left of his studio. He stacked the finished canvases in his room. There were about a dozen. I didn’t know what he thought of them. He didn’t talk about art anymore. Something in him had changed since his visit to Brisbane. He’d become very quiet. Listless. He sat in his empty studio and listened to his stereo.
I found I was worried about him. During our Friday night sessions he drank slowly and silently, staring out. There was no more marijuana, no more attacks on the bourbon, no arguments. I’d talk about Brisbane, the things I’d do when we got back there. Wayne only nodded, smoked his cigarettes. In the past he’d been the one longing to go home. Now he didn’t seem to care.
I cared. I wanted Brisbane. Every day that went by, stretched out into its three-hour segments, I hated Cape Don. Sitting on the front steps, smoking, I’d stare at the lighthouse and the sheds and the wide circle of dirt. I’d feel a fury build-up inside. It was a disaster, a massive waste of six months of my life, and I was still stuck there. I wanted nothing but for it to end.
Finally, I took it out on the dining room. The wreckage in Wayne’s studio gave me the idea. Amidst all the junk and the pesticides, there were several cans of house paint. Red and black and green. There were also the leftover tubes of Wayne’s oil paints. At least one of us, I decided, would paint something. I got all the gear out, set it up in the dining room, started on the walls.
It wasn’t art. It was revenge. Deranged cartoon superheroes. Ludicrous nudes. Meaningless jumbles. I was no artist. Even if I had been I wasn’t doing it to create, I was doing it to destroy. The room was ugly, I made it uglier. It was all I had to say. Wayne watched. After a time he splashed on stuff of his own, carelessly. Even when he wasn’t trying he couldn’t help himself. His was art.
I said, ‘You are gonna paint again aren’t you, when we get out of here?’
He shook his head. ‘I’m getting a job.’
‘Like what?’
‘A cleaner. I’ll clean things.’
‘You’re hardly a neat person Wayne.’
‘I’ll learn.’ He looked at me. ‘I’ll get organised.’
I stopped painting. Instead I took a small brush and a pot of black paint. I began writing lines up there. Short pieces. Rubbish. Some of it in poetry form. I was no poet either. I knew nothing about rhythm or pace. It was bitter. Things about packing tape and shitting and bad masturbation on slow afternoons. Someone might stray into the house one day, years after we’d gone, and wonder who had bothered. And why.
Wayne observed it all. ‘Some of those aren’t too bad.’
‘You kidding?’
‘I’m not saying it’s good or anything. Is that the sort of stuff you normally write?’
‘Hell no.’
He looked up the wall. ‘Just as well, I suppose.’
We were down to the last three weeks. Vince came over. He’d been on the radio to Darwin. He told us that we were not going to be offered a renewal of our original contract. We were not considered to have been a success. The Met. Bureau weren’t happy. We’d missed too many observations, filled out the field-books in a shoddy fashion. The Commission wasn’t happy. We’d damaged a park vehicle and lived like pigs and a senior ranger called Barry had reported that we were fools. The Gurig people had expressed no opinion one way or the other, but certainly they had made no request for us to stay.
‘I’ve got nothing against you guys,’ said Vince, ‘But I know you wanna leave anyway.’
‘Who’ll do the weather?’ I asked.
It seemed the job had already been advertised in the Darwin paper. There would be interviews. Vince, as commanding ranger of Cape Don, would fly to Darwin to join the interviewing panel. The panel would also include someone from the Met. Bureau, as well as one of the Gurig people. Hopefully this time they might get someone more suitable.
It seemed a lot of work just to find a weather observer, but it was their problem now, not mine. Vince flew out with the next supply plane. A week inched by without him. I ran the generators. Vince returned. I drove out to the strip to meet him.
‘Find someone?’
They had. Vince filled me in as we drove home. Our replacement would be a twenty-nine-year old woman called Stacy. She had just returned from overseas, a backpacking tour through the Middle East. She needed work and she was ready to start as soon as Wayne and I finished.
‘Why only one person?’ I asked.
‘I’ll help her out. Do a few observations. It’ll be fine’
‘Did you tell her what it’s like out here?’
‘Yeah. She said isolation was no problem.’
‘And did you tell her about the house she’ll have to live in?’
‘She won’t be living in your house. I’ll give her a room in mine.’
‘Oh.’
I thought about that. About what Wayne and I had been given when we first arrived. And about what Vince had been going through; alone in that big house of his, all these last, useless months.
I said, ‘How many people did you interview?’
‘Eleven.’
‘And was this Stacy the only woman?’
Vince looked at me for a long time. Then he looked away. ‘Yes.’
THIRTY-NINE
Stacy flew in with the supply plane. It was three days before Wayne and I were due to fly out. I went to the strip with Vince to meet her. I was thinking again about first impressions of the place, what hers might be, what mine had been, half a year before. The red rectangle of dust, the dry bush, crows calling in the distance. It hadn’t looked like much, and for me, at least, that’s what it had turned out to be. I found myself getting ready to pity her. The thought of going through it all again. Six long months. It was impossible.
We pulled onto the runway. The plane was there, and the pilot, unloading the grocery boxes. There was no Stacy. Then I spotted her. She was off behind the plane, in the middle of the strip, taking photographs. We stopped, climbed out. She lowered the camera and came over. She was tall and thin, deeply tanned. She had dark, shorn hair and was dressed in loose shorts, singlet, and sunglasses.
‘Hullo Vince,’ she said, ‘Great colours here. That red and that green.’
‘G’day Stacy. This is Gordon. One of the observers you’re replacing.’
‘Hi,’ I said.
‘You gonna teach me al
l the tricks?’ she asked, smiling. There was a touch to her accent I couldn’t place. The Middle East perhaps.
‘There aren’t any tricks.’
She laughed, turned to Vince. ‘This place is great. I saw the lighthouse from the plane. I loved it.’
Vince did his shrug. ‘See if you say that in a few months time.’
We loaded our groceries and her luggage into the Toyota. All she had was a backpack and an old suitcase. I remembered all the junk Wayne and I had carted over. And not even come close to using.
We drove back to the lighthouse. Vince and Stacy were in the front. Vince pointed out things along the way. Types of trees, general vegetation. It was more than he’d done for Wayne and I on our first day. In our first ten weeks. We swung up into the compound. Looked. The lighthouse, the sheds, the houses. The same as they always were.
Stacy laughed. ‘Streetlights. And paths. It’s beautiful. It’s like an old military post of the British Raj or something. In India.’
I gazed about. It was true.
Vince pulled up outside his house.
‘Dinner tonight Gordon,’ he said, ‘You and Wayne’ll be there?’
‘Sure.’
‘How about we all meet at the weather shack for the 6 p.m. observation. Show Stacy what she’s in for.’
I nodded, looked at Stacy. ‘How many of the observations do you plan to do yourself?’
She glanced questioningly at Vince.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘We’ve got plenty of time to work that out.’
Everyone was at Vince’s for dinner. One final time. Wayne and I. Russel and Eve. Vince. Stacy. There was plenty of alcohol. Wayne and I hadn’t ordered much food for our last three days, but the drinks order was unchanged. We planned to make the remaining hours at Cape Don as painless as possible.
The mood was high. Even Wayne seemed better. Beer and wine and scotch flowed. Stacy moved around the room, looking at everything, asking questions. She was serious, fluent, enthusiastic. She wanted to know all about the national park. She sat herself down between Russel and Eve. They smiled, seemed cheerful. She talked to them both, got conversation out of them both. I was amazed.
And they had things in common. It turned out Stacy had worked on a station around the Kimberly region, years before. Eve had once visited relations in the same place. Both she and Stacy knew a little of the local Aboriginal language. They ran through what they remembered, made comparisons with Russel. Vince joined in with his expertise of inland tribal languages. The four of them went through vocabularies and origins. I sat there watching. I was beginning to see what Vince had meant, regarding Stacy, by the term ‘someone more suitable’.
The night developed. Towards nine o’clock we all headed out for the weather observation. It was Stacy’s second look. She’d done her one-day’s training in Darwin, the same as we had. She seemed to know everything there was to know. In the end it was only a matter of practice. I could hardly believe that at first it had taken me twenty minutes to do it all. These days I was doing it in five or six.
I asked her how Lawrence was, back at the Darwin Met. Bureau. It turned out that he and Stacy had got along wonderfully during the day. They’d even gone out for drinks, after the lessons were over.
‘What did he say about Wayne and I?’
‘He said he liked you.’
‘But as weather observers?’
‘Well . . . apparently you guys had problems.’
‘It’s alright, we know we did.’
‘I’m not saying I’ll do any better.’
‘Somehow I think you will.’
Then it was back to the house. Stacy started asking Wayne and I about our lives. The painting, the writing. We did our best to explain why none of that really applied any longer. She refused to believe it. She wasn’t into reading all that much, but she loved art. Historical art in particular. She told us about the things she’d seen on her travels. In Egypt, Turkey, Jerusalem, up to Rome for a while. She and Wayne talked theory.
She was a smoker. The cigarettes she smoked were strange. They came in a small, red pack and smelled sweet. They were called Gudang Garams. I asked her about them. She said they were an Indonesian brand, and they were made of cloves mixed with tobacco. The nicotine levels in them were so high they were barely allowed in most western markets. That was why the cloves were added. They anaesthetised the throat so that the poison flowed down smoothly.
She offered me one. I took it, lit up, inhaled. It was beautiful, like inhaling honey. The cigarette itself was thick, and burnt very slowly, crackling. God only knew what was in it. It didn’t matter. By the end it was sickening. My lips started to gum up. My stomach turned.
‘You smoke this all the time?’ I asked.
‘Sure. Nothing hits like these babies do.’
I still had things to learn, it seemed, about smoking. I lay back on the couch, listened while Stacy talked. Her travels were extensive. She’d been everywhere, done everything. It became clear to me. She was going to love Cape Don and the Cobourg Peninsula. She’d get out, she’d explore. She’d meet Allan Price and she wouldn’t fuck things up. She’d be all over the place, doing all there was to do, within weeks. Even Barry would’ve been impressed. I was impressed.
Vince too. Late in the night, instead of the usual booming classical, he dug out some tapes he’d recorded in Central Australia. Snatches of aboriginal language, songs, music. We listened to old man dreaming chants and the clicking of sticks. I remembered Araru, the night and the stars and the fire. The mutter of voices. Suddenly even Cape Don didn’t feel like Cape Don anymore. It wasn’t just the dust, the boredom, the concrete lighthouse. It was older. I remembered the lizard. What Allan had said. Big Lizard dreaming.
Then it was gone. I was at Vince’s house, on his couch, drunk, and soon I’d be gone altogether. It was too late to be thinking about the things I’d missed. The conversation had dropped away. Stacy was asking Vince whether she should get up for the early-morning observations. He was saying no, Gordon and Wayne could take care of it. Gordon and Wayne stood up, made their goodnights.
We headed out. The compound was waiting there. The streetlights, the lighthouse beam, the hum of the generator, the warm, still darkness. A pale moon hung above it all. I’d only have to look at it twice more.
‘Weird, isn’t she,’ said Wayne.
‘Stacy?’
‘All that energy.’
‘Yeah.’
Energy.
We strolled towards our house, lacking it.
FORTY
Our second-last night. Wayne and I were on the back verandah, drinking. We’d been there all afternoon, already half drunk. Stacy came over, with two bowls of soup.
‘It’s pea and ham,’ she said, ‘I made it for Vince. Thought you might like some.’
We’d eaten, but the soup looked good and it seemed decent of her, so we ate it. Stacy took a beer from the fridge and set-up a third chair on the verandah. She was due to take over the weather observations at 9 a.m. next morning.
‘Good view you guys have.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘House is a wreck though. How come you live over here?’
‘We weren’t invited into Vince’s.’
‘Oh.’ A pause. ‘He seems very nice, Vince. I hope the two of us can get on.’
‘I wouldn’t worry. He likes you.’
She thought. ‘Look, I know the question of fucking is going to come up sooner or later, but whatever plans Vince might have, I’m not here for the sex.’
We all thought about that.
‘He’s been alone a long time,’ I said finally, ‘But I don’t think he’ll try to rape you or anything.’
‘He must have been alone a very long time. He’s painfully shy when it’s just the two of us.’
‘So what d’you plan to do while you’re here?’
‘Oh, nothing. Look around a bit. I’ve been travelling too long. I want a rest.’
‘Well you’ll get
that.’
‘Good. I’m not here to do anything special. I’m not creative like you two. Wayne, can I see some of your paintings?’
Wayne wasn’t at all enthusiastic, but they headed off to his room to view the canvases. I sat and drank. I thought about Stacy and Vince, together in that house for the next six months. Vince on his stool with his scotch and port and classical music. Night after night after night. I liked Vince, but living with him? I didn’t envy her.
As for the sex, who knew. Vince had been alone a long time, maybe it was on his mind, maybe he really did have plans. But then after a few months at Cape Don maybe it would be on Stacy’s mind too. Nothing was ever certain. Wayne and I had been alone too long too. What right did she have to think we were trustworthy, that we wouldn’t make moves.
I supposed maybe we wouldn’t. It felt odd, having someone else sitting there on the verandah with us. Vince, Russel, Eve—none of them had ever sat there. For six months it had been our spot, just Wayne and I. It hadn’t always been good, and lately it had been pretty bad, but still, we were like an old couple, spinster aunts. We were bound to each other. We were no threat to outsiders, to Stacy.
I thought about Wayne and me. We were not, even after all the time together, good friends. Any sort of friends at all. Often enough we’d caused each other nothing but annoyance. But somehow I couldn’t quite dislike him. I pitied him in a way, felt superior. Even protective. Both of us might be failures, but I’d survive in the practical world with an ease that he’d never have. Despite his five thousand dollars.
None of it mattered.
We were just about through with each other.
After a while Wayne and Stacy came back. She’d liked his paintings. Wayne still didn’t. We sat and drank beer. It was pleasant there on the verandah. A breeze was blowing, it was cool. Perhaps even approaching chill. This was deep winter in the Territory. I thought of my leather jacket. It was by no means necessary, but it was a chance to wear it. And it was a festive occasion. Our second-last night.
1988 Page 24
