As Far as You Can Go

by Lesley Glaister

  ‘Morning,’ she says.

  The door swings open, nudged by Yella. Mara winces, the light stinging her face. ‘Hey,’ she says, croakily. ‘Thought it would be Fred.’

  ‘Fred and Graham have gone on a trip.’

  ‘A trip?’ She blinks at Cassie. ‘No, that can’t be. Larry’s gone, hasn’t he?’ She grimaces, hand cupping down between her thighs. ‘Oh, need to pee.’

  ‘OK. Just a little trip. Back tonight.’

  Mara hauls herself up. ‘He said he’d be back later.’

  ‘Who?’

  Mara sways. ‘They can’t all have gone away.’

  ‘I’m still here. Let me help.’ Cassie holds her breath as she takes Mara’s arm and steadies her as she squats over a plastic bucket; she tries not to hear the heavy splatter of urine. She takes the bucket out, gasping in the fresh air outside, and tips the scummy yellow down the drain. Goes back and waits as Mara sips the Complan. It seems wrong to loom over her. She sits beside her on a cushion.

  Mara pulls a face. ‘This is shit. Don’t we have the chocolate kind?’

  ‘I’ll see.’

  ‘Does he think I’m ill again?’

  ‘I dunno,’ Cassie says uneasily. Seems almost a shame to keep Mara sedated now there’s just the two of them. She could do with some company. Maybe it would help Mara to talk and then Larry would be pleased. She considers taking the mug away. But what if Mara really is a danger, if she has an episode? How would she cope with that? She doesn’t look violent – but then what does violent look like? The big breasts bulge against her solid thighs. Graham has painted this skin, got this close to these nipples, this – stop it, stop it.

  Mara finishes and passes her the mug. She wipes her mouth on the back of her hand.

  ‘When will Fred be back?’ she says. Her voice is like a child’s on a long journey. Are we nearly there yet?

  ‘Soon.’ Cassie suddenly feels overwhelmed, suffocated. They’re leaving. It’s not her problem. ‘Must get on,’ she says, sickened by the sticky Complan smeared on Mara’s face, the stale old joss stick, coconutty, dirty-laundry smell.

  In the kitchen she throws away the flypapers, stuck all over with bodies, some of them quite brilliant, one still feebly struggling. She wipes the table, sweeps the floor, makes herself some tea, hacks a piece of bread off a stale loaf, cuts a wedge of cheese. It’s so quiet. No quieter than usual. Only that today she knows for a fact no one will come.

  Nothing to stop a little exploration. She goes through the door she’s hardly ever been through, into the high, dim hall. Apart from the front door and the cupboard, all the doors are locked. Very cagey, Larry. But that is the word for him. What other words, she wonders, grasping the flowered china knob of the front room and pushing with all her strength. Suave. Dapper. Enigmatic. Inscrutable. Bloody weird. But – kind. Kind? Yes. Kind to Mara. Understanding. Amazingly good about Graham hitting him. Suggesting a holiday for them. You can forgive a person a lot if they are kind.

  She goes back into the kitchen. What to do? If there was only a phone or a computer. She aches to talk to Patsy. She could write another card, but no point since they’re leaving. No letters back in all this time, nearly two months. Somewhere in Australia there must be a pile of letters addressed to them. Anything could have happened out there in the real world. Must be something wrong, address wrong? Unless Larry brings them, all the letters will arrive after they’ve left now. Because Patsy will have written. She couldn’t not. She picks up a book but her eyes won’t stick to the words. Not in the mood for anything. Tips her tea away undrunk and makes a cup of coffee. Eats a bit more cheese.

  Might as well have a clean-up. She goes to get some bleach out from the cupboard under the sink. Such a mess in there: things toppled over, defunct cardboard tubes of cleaning stuff. She’ll sort it out. That would be something constructive, at least. She likes sorting. She kneels down and pulls everything out: Flash; a scrubbing brush all nested up with pearly spiders’ eggs; some filthy cloths; Duraglit; a can of something – she reaches deep into the cupboard but can’t quite get it, it rolls down a gap between the back of the shelf and the wall. She withdraws from the cupboard, sweaty and cross. It’ll just have to stay there. But – she frowns, something snagging oddly at her mind – the sound. The sound when it fell was not just like a tin falling on its side. There was a rattly chink like money or something. It fell on to something. Maybe a stash of coins? Maybe that is Larry’s secret. The place is stuffed with gold.

  Ha ha ha. But still, she feels stupidly excited as she pulls everything else out of the cupboard, filthy, sticky load of crap. Peculiar that Larry is so clean yet can bear to live with such squalor around him. Long as he doesn’t have to touch it. Long as he has his white napkins, shirts, his clean white towels. She sits back on her heels, picks something off her hair, a furry bit of cobweb. She takes a breath, leans in and reaches down, pushes the tin aside. She puts one knee into the cupboard, stretches further, holding her breath till her fingertips just reach and manage to pick up not money but a set of keys.

  Miles away and it’s still all the same. Cool at least in the noisy air-con. Hard to believe it’s really as hot as it is outside, though the road ahead and behind them dissolves into a shimmer. The highway almost empty but for the occasional hurtling monster road train: four, five carriages, great fancy cabs, glinting chrome, funnels smoking. Can’t see the truckers only the sheen of light on the windscreens.

  Fred drives slowly. Lets everything that wants to overtake him overtake. He doesn’t talk much, sticks in another country tape when one finishes, till Graham is sick of prisons, trailer parks and doomy love.

  ‘Poor bloody joey,’ Fred nods towards maybe the hundredth carcass today, this one a baby, paws curled up to its chest. ‘Follow their mums across the road and don’t make it,’ he says. ‘Roll us another fag, mate.’

  Graham rolls a fag each, takes a swig of water. They go over a bump and his stomach dips. Cassie and Mara back there, together and alone. But Mara will be asleep. And, anyway, she wouldn’t say. She promised and he believes her. He feels bad leaving Cassie but – it is great to be away. Like some poxy great rucksack lifted off his shoulders. He looks down at his bruised fist and smiles.

  ‘How do you stick Larry?’ he says.

  Fred doesn’t answer. Acts like he hasn’t heard. Graham looks out of the window. The landscape’s changed a bit at last. After the interminable, rolling, desert scrub the trees are bigger, writhing limbs of gum. A bridge spans an almost dried-up creek, a ruby trickle snaking through cracked mud, the odd green stem jutting upwards, gigantic seedlings. Seems to make a nonsense of the flood warnings – Water reaches this level – showing a metre and a half. ‘Don’t you believe it,’ Fred says. ‘Can’t depend on a road round here, come the rainy season. Hey,’ he nods at a sign. ‘Wagammara, 16 km – fancy a trip into town?’

  ‘Town? But I thought –’ Town, he thinks, pub, he thinks, beer. ‘Yeah, sure. If we’ve got time.’

  ‘All the time in the world, mate.’

  Graham looks at his watch. Not noon yet. Yes, plenty of time. They’d promised Cassie they’d be back by dark.

  Fred turns left down the road, the metalling giving out after a couple of hundred metres. Spiky bushes each side of the road, the grass looks so soft but he knows it would cut like little blades. Must be water hereabouts for all this sudden green. His parched eyes drink it in. An emu, or maybe it’s an ostrich, a giant anyway, poses between the bushes, round eye glinting.

  ‘Is it big, this town?’ It looks to Graham as if there’re getting further from civilisation rather than nearer. No other vehicles. The road so badly pitted it looks as if it’s been deliberately hacked up.

  Fred laughs. ‘Wait and see, mate.’

  He sticks on another tape. Graham grits his teeth against the twang of a banjo, the slither of a Hawaiian guitar. This guy has some sad taste in music. Still. The prospect of a pint or two. And he said he’d ring Patsy if they get near a phone.
But it suddenly dawns on him: he has no money.

  ‘You won’t believe this,’ he says, patting the pockets of his shorts. ‘Haven’t got any bloody cash! Would you believe it, I’d forgotten about money!’

  ‘No worries, mate,’ Fred says, grinning to himself about something.

  ‘I’ll pay you back.’

  ‘Sure.’

  He stops the ute. Ejects the tape. And sits, squinting through the windscreen. Beside them is an abandoned car, door hanging open, headlights smashed. In front, a ripple of red hills, fresh with the green and white of young gums.

  ‘What?’ Graham says.

  ‘Look.’ Fred indicates a signpost.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Get out and take a look.’

  Graham opens the door. The heat hits him like a wall. The heat and the quiet. Very, very quiet. Silent? No bird sound at all. He walks towards the sign, feet scrunching on the dusty road. The sign says 2nd Avenue. He frowns, glances around. And after a moment sees.

  More abandoned cars. A gate to nowhere, fixed to gateposts, padlocked – but there is no fence. Bits of broken stuff that might be kerb stones. Trees and shrubs that look cultivated. As if they were once cultivated. A chimney lying on its side.

  He returns to the ute. ‘This is Wagammara?’ he says. Hoping for a laugh, the thirst growing panicky in his throat.

  Fred slaps his thigh, delighted with his joke. ‘Yup.’

  ‘But. What happened?’

  ‘Asbestos, mate. Mining town, see. Blue asbestos. Look down.’ Graham looks down at the road, the fine glittering dust. ‘Surfaced the roads with it, trash from mines – till they realised it was a killer. The silly buggers. Mine shut down. No mine, no town. Used to be the biggest town for a thousand k each way.’

  ‘But where’s it gone? Where have the houses, everything, gone?’

  ‘Took them with ’em, built them elsewhere. Nothing wasted.’

  Graham climbs back into the ute. Afraid of the poison dust that glitters everywhere. ‘So, no town. No pub.’

  ‘Never said there was a pub, did I? My mate Ziggy lives here,’ he says.

  ‘Someone lives here?’ Graham gazes out. The sign, 2nd Avenue. The car with its door lolling open. The gate leading nowhere.

  Fred drives down an impossible road, so broken and stone-strewn it could be a dried-up river bed. Dust rises in a cloud behind them as they head downwards through a tunnel of trees and out into a clearing; looks like an abandoned car park, with the wreck of an old bus. And there’s water. A deep ripply blue lake. Willowy gums, dappled shadows and, on the water, silhouetted against the light so that they look black, a pair of swans.

  Graham’s eyes drink it in. ‘Might have a swim,’ he says, thinking of Cassie, how she’s been on about swimming. But she wouldn’t want him not to swim.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Where’s your mate live then?’

  Fred points a stubby finger at the bus. ‘Chez Ziggy,’ he says and throws his head back. ‘Better come and say g’day.’

  The slamming car doors echo across the water and against the bluish shine of the cliffs, causing almost visible sound waves in the still air. The tyres of the bus look as if they’ve melted, the chassis slumped low and leaning, gaudy red and yellow painted, stuff strewn all around. PERTH it says on the front.

  Fred bangs on the side of the bus. ‘Zig? Ziggy?’

  There’s no reply. Graham looks back at the water. Blue, like the blue of an eye he can’t read.

  ‘May as well get your dip,’ Fred says. He walks across the broken ground to a turtle-shaped rock under a tree. He pisses against the tree, then sits in the shade, rolls himself a fag. Graham looks at the water. Why is it rippled when there’s no breeze? He walks a few metres away, shucks his clothes, lifts his arms and dives, slices through the surface, rises with a gasp. Though blood temperature on top it quickly graduates to bollock-shrivelling icy cold, black and dark beneath him. How deep? But the shock is a charge and after a moment it is great, his body immersed, the sky above a skin of white and the swans – from which he keeps his distance – are actually black, not just seeming to be. The cliff is rippled with gleaming blue, not a natural cliff he realises but the exposed side of a quarry. He crawls fast up and down a few times before he scrambles out. Stretches his wet body up to the sun before he pulls his boxers back on.

  When he looks round he sees Fred over by the bus. The door’s open and a yellow-haired guy is standing on the step. The two of them are looking across at him. He waves and they lift their hands. He puts on his jeans, sticks his feet in his sandals. Water runs from his hair down his face and neck.

  ‘Nice to meet you, Graham.’ Ziggy’s voice is cultured, very English. He’s coffee-coloured, fat-bellied and skinny-legged with a yellow fuzz of hair and beard and large eyes, pale as mist. Hair froths through the mesh of his stained string vest and Y-front pants. He holds out his hand, horny as hell, calloused all over, huge.

  ‘Yeah,’ Graham says.

  ‘Hear you’re in the art line yourself?’ Ziggy says.

  ‘Sort of, well, yes. You?’

  Ziggy’s laugh is a high and breathy surprise. Every other one of his teeth is missing. ‘You haven’t seen?’

  ‘Open your bleeding eyes, mate!’ Fred shakes his head and the two of them laugh.

  Graham flushes. He looks back towards the water and then he does see. The rock that looks like a turtle has been carved. He walks back to look at the patterns on the shell, intricate, vaguely aboriginal-looking shapes, spirals, tiny representations of stick men and beasts. And he sees that the stump of a tree is carved into a woman’s form, squat, heavy-bellied, an open crack between her legs, like a fertility symbol. Reminds him horribly of Mara. He looks away, back to the pair of swans. They have still not moved. They are carved out of something black, keeping their place in the water. It is only the way it laps against them that makes them seem to move. How did he not see that?

  He goes back, sheepish, grinning. ‘It’s great.’

  ‘The more you look, the more you see,’ says Ziggy.

  ‘You had me going with those swans. How –’

  ‘Ah ha! Do come in,’ Ziggy says. ‘Coffee?’ He leads them up the steps. Following him up, Graham sees a Grand Prix’s worth of skid marks on the back of his pants. He’d like to see Cassie’s face. The inside of the bus is chaos and it stinks. A greasy sleeping bag on a bed made of several bus seats, a narrow passage to a table, stacks of things, almost impenetrable, mostly junk, some of it stuck together in bizarre combinations: bottles, dolls’ heads, heaps of magazines, a split-open tennis ball with a doll’s hand sticking out; an animal skull – kangaroo? – painted pink; a coat hanger hung with bottle tops and birds’ wings.

  ‘Brought anything?’ Ziggy says. He puts a kettle on a tiny Calor stove.

  Fred goes out. Graham tries to look out of the window, but it’s thickly dusted with bluish white. Sees an old-fashioned telephone, a blonde pigtail trailing from the mouthpiece.

  ‘It’s quite –’ Has to say something. ‘Ingenious,’ he says. Ziggy snorts. He wipes a cup on a bit of dirty-looking rag. ‘Hope you take it black.’

  ‘Yeah. Actually don’t bother about the coffee.’

  Ziggy shrugs and turns the gas off. ‘Smoke then?’ He sits down at his table, the top of which is a car door, and rolls a big, pure grass, joint.

  ‘Yeah.’ Last thing Graham wants is a smoke. Just say no then, Cassie would say.

  ‘Where you off to?’ Ziggy asks.

  ‘Heading north to see some indigenous cave-painting,’ he says, thinking maybe he shouldn’t say Abo. Confused.

  ‘This lot not indigenous enough for you?’

  ‘I mean –’

  Fred comes clumping back in with a box of stuff. ‘Not winding him up already, mate? You watch him, Graham. Wind-up merchant extraordinaire.’

  Ziggy shrugs theatrically at Graham and hands him the joint. ‘After you,’ he says, rubbing his hands together. ‘Now, what
have we here?’ He unpacks the tins of tuna and beans, cartons of long-life orange and tomato juice, vodka, Lee and Perrin’s sauce. ‘Ha! The makings of a Bloody Mary. Do the honours, old chap.’

  Graham laughs. There’s other stuff in the box too, bottles and things – and the frame of Cassie’s broken mirror. He lights the joint and sucks in the smoke.

  Fred sees him notice the black oval with its design of faded pansies. ‘Yeah,’ he says, little eyes shifty. ‘Thought Ziggy could use it.’

  ‘But it’s Cassie’s, man.’

  ‘She wouldn’t mind, would she, mate?’

  Yes, he should say, she would mind. But he says nothing, holds in a mouthful of smoke. ‘What do you live on, stuck out here?’ he asks, exhaling.

  ‘Friends drop by – generous friends – and I sell my stuff. My “art”.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  When Ziggy grins, the black spaces between his teeth turn him into a pumpkin lantern. ‘No, not this. I do aboriginal stuff, tourist trade. He pulls a box out from under the table. ‘Take something for your girlfriend if you like.’

  Fred rubs his fingers together, looking at the joint. Graham fills his lungs again and passes it over. He hunkers dizzily down beside the box: painted pebbles and pieces of wood shaped into rough toucans, parrots, crocodiles. He chooses a stone painted with a complex maze-like spiral in ochre, yellow and white that nearly makes his eyes cross, trying to follow it.

  ‘What is it?’ he asks. ‘I mean, some kind of symbolic –’

  ‘Symbolic, my arse,’ Ziggy laughs. ‘It’s tourist tat. Pretty good quality though, if I’m allowed to say. But it might just about qualify as urban aboriginal art.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  Ziggy sways in the smoke. ‘Uses images from the quotidian rather than symbolic representations.’ He draws apostrophes in the air and waggles his head self-mockingly.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s the bus, see.’ Graham squints at it for a moment, trouble focusing, then does see. The tiny dots describe four wheels, like a bus ironed flat, each wheel a spiral, and the steering wheel.

  ‘Ta.’ He puts it in the pocket of his jeans. ‘She’ll like that.’