by Steven Lang
Martin and Jim were playing a game of pool on the three-quarter-size billiard table Jim had picked up at a clearance sale, around which the house had been virtually built. Andy was in one of the armchairs, in front of a small fire, rolling a joint. Several instrument cases were scattered around the floor. Kelvin was directed to pour himself a beer, and as there were no glasses he found a tin mug which did little to alleviate a certain metallic taste peculiar to the brew. He stood by the table. Martin was bringing his habitual force to the game. When Andy was done with the rolling he lit the joint, but then held onto it for two or three puffs, as if he was alone, or wanted everyone else to know whose dope it was. When it was almost half gone, he passed it on with the admonition, ‘Watch out, man, this is good shit,’ squeaked out through a lungful of smoke.
They’d all been watching and waiting, too polite to comment, but the air was tense. Kelvin took a drag and passed it on, holding in the smoke for as long as possible, worrying about how he might get a joint to take away with him. He didn’t want to turn up at Jessica’s stoned if he had none to share. It seemed that Andy was the man with the stash and Andy, demonstrably, was not the generous kind.
He was right about the strength, though, the stuff wasn’t just good, it was psychedelic. After just one puff Kelvin had the sense that the room, despite its strange and eclectic clutter, had become more spacious. Time, too, was becoming less rigid in its flow. He wondered if the others felt the same, or if it was just that way because he hadn’t smoked for a couple of weeks. He put himself down to play the winner of the game, which turned out to be Jim, as you’d expect. But before he could set up the balls Andy came over. He was carrying a black canvas shoulder bag bought from a disposals store, the kind that had been designed for holding gas masks during World War II.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said. ‘A scientific experiment.’
He took out a heavy glass jar with a screw-top lid and placed it in the centre of the table. It was about two-thirds full of a slightly viscous liquid with hints of yellow and blue, enhanced by the light of the lamps.
‘Mind the table!’ Jim said.
‘Right. The fucking table,’ Andy said. He picked up the jar again. ‘Well get us some paper then.’
Jim produced a wad of newspaper onto which Andy once again put his jar. He waited for a moment, glancing at them each in turn.
‘Diesel,’ he said.
Things seemed to be happening rather slowly and Kelvin thought he might have missed something. He looked at Martin and then Jim but could determine nothing from their faces.
‘Now, look at this.’ Andy rummaged in the satchel, bringing out a zip-lock bag of white crystals.
‘Shit!’ Jim said. ‘Heroin.’
Andy looked at him and rolled his eyes. He unscrewed the lid of the jar and poured in the contents of the bag, closed it back up again.Then he picked up the jar and shook it vigorously.
The dope was so good it seemed to Kelvin that Andy’s moving arms left an afterimage behind them.
Jim laughed, so perhaps he saw it too. There didn’t seem to be anything else funny going on.
When Andy put the jar back down it appeared very similar to when he had first picked it up, except now there was a small residue of crystals in the bottom.
‘Isn’t that beautiful?’ he said.
No one spoke.
‘That was sugar,’ he said, glancing at Jim. ‘Out in the forest round here there’s all sorts of machinery. There’s dozers and sniggers and fuck knows what else. No security. I’ve checked. Now, you put this stuff in the fuel tank of one of those machines, you fuck it. I mean fucking completely fucked, all the fuel lines, the heads, you name it. When it gets hot the sugar caramelises and burns, it bakes on.’
‘Right,’ Martin said. Martin knew about these sorts of things. ‘And?’
‘It’s fucking beautiful, isn’t it? You’d need a chemical lab to tell the sugar’s there. And once it’s there there’s no way of tracing where it came from. What I reckon is we go out one night with a drum of this shit and pour it in ten or twenty of the fucking machines. If we work as a team we could bring the mill to a standstill.’
Everyone looked at the jar. Kelvin glanced at Andy. He was enjoying himself.
‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’ Jim said.
‘Fucking oath. How about you Jim-boy?’
When Jim had built the roof he’d used poles that were too small for the span so that when he put on the iron the whole thing had started to sag. He’d had to put a post in the middle of the room to hold it up.Throughout the demonstration he’d been leaning against it. You could see the criss-crossed axe marks where he’d cut the bark before peeling it off. Now he slid down the pole until he was sitting on the floor, his cue held up between his legs.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘What’s not to know?’ Andy said. ‘We’ve had this rave a hundred times. Isn’t that right, Martin? Heh? This is the most simple beautiful thing I’ve ever heard of. Nobody loses except the mill. The machines are built by multi-fucking-nationals, they’re insured by multi-fucking-nationals and owned by banks. They don’t blow up, they just stop fucking going. No one gets hurt, nobody. It’s foolproof. I thought we were against the mill. Or is it too fucking scary?’
‘Damn right it is,’ Martin said. ‘It’s not a game.’
‘No, it’s not, this is where we get serious.You write all the fucking letters you like, you’re not going to stop them. The only thing that’ll stop these bastards from cutting down every fucking tree between here and the border is to make it too expensive for them to keep going.’
‘It’s not that simple,’ Martin said.
Andy turned away from the table, then swung back and took his jar off again.
‘Must be time to play some more pool,’ he said, ‘some more games. I’ll roll us another number.’
‘Jesus,’ Jim said.
Andy took out his little battered tin and started sticking papers together. ‘It’s a dark and lonely job,’ he said. ‘But someone has to do it.’
Kelvin found the balls in the pockets of the table and placed them in the triangle, alternating the big ones and the little ones, putting the black in its position behind the first ball then rolling the whole thing backwards and forwards over the felt until he was sure he had them in the right place.
‘Since when did you become an environmentalist?’ Martin asked.
Andy kept to his work in the armchair.
‘Are you playing?’ Kelvin asked Jim, who still hadn’t moved.
‘I’ve always been one,’ Andy said, ‘always cared about the planet. I told you I’d been up the Daintree. Now there’s some blokes who’re not afraid to say what they don’t like.’ He licked the paper on his joint and rolled it up, put it in his mouth to wet the thing and then regarded it with an expression of surprise. ‘I’ve been driving around poking my nose into these logging dumps. You guys want to get out and about. Have a look. Get yourselves down to this thing Jessica’s got organised in Nadgee.You want to know what a crime is, that’s the place. A fucking disaster.’
‘The difference is, Andy, they don’t put you in jail for fucking up the forests, they do for fucking up machinery,’ Martin said.
‘And?’
‘And I don’t want to spend my life in jail. I don’t want a bunch of loggers out here breaking my legs.’
‘Wouldn’t happen.’
Once again Andy held onto the joint. His stamina, or his resistance to the stuff, must have been phenomenal. He passed it to Martin who took a good toke himself then gave it to Jim.
‘That’s me,’ Martin said.
‘Come on,’ Andy said, ‘stick around, we haven’t started yet, aren’t we gonna play some music?’
‘I don’t feel like it.’
Evidently he’d been hanging on for just one more hit on the joint, because now he gathered up his things.
‘Night all,’ he said.
When he closed the door behind him
it felt as though he had taken more than just himself from the room. For want of anything better to do Kelvin started the game. He hit the white into the centre of the pile and they split with a satisfying whack, but nothing went in.
Jim stood up and took a shot but his mind wasn’t on the game.
‘Jesus, it was only a suggestion,’ Andy said. He came over and leaned against the post Jim had recently vacated. ‘I thought we could do something, make a difference, you know, strike a blow for the trees.’
‘You wouldn’t want to get caught,’ Jim said. ‘They’d fuck with you something horrible.’
‘No way you’d get caught. That’s the beauty. Don’t listen to Martin. He’s just pissed off because he didn’t think of it.’
‘You got much of that dope?’ Kelvin said.
Andy raised heavy-lidded eyes and met Kelvin’s, then dropped them to the table again.
‘For you, Kelvin, my man, anything.’ He had that smile on again, a kind of leer, his lips curling away from his teeth.
‘Just a little bit,’ he said.
‘I wasn’t giving you any fucking more than that.’
thirteen
She is always surprised by the power of small things. Her garden, for example, exerts an influence far beyond its size or contribution to the table. She sits on the front step of the house in the morning with her tea, intending to stay only a moment, sees a weed and is lost; hours pass crouched on the path following back the brittle threads of chickweed to its roots beneath the straw.
Each age has its own approach to gardening. Until recently the idea has been to relentlessly work the soil, digging and turning and breaking, aerating and mixing the top layer, creating a friable bed in which to plant. Jessica is more modern. She repudiates the spade, mourns too deeply the lives of turned worms. They are the gardener’s friends, she says, and adds mulch on the top, doesn’t dig, lets the soil find its own balance. When the council slashes the roadside she goes out with Suzy and stuffs the back of her car with cut hay, trip after trip, harvesting the bounty of the long paddock. She lays it around the stems of tomatoes and sweet basil, corn, capsicums and aubergine. It is a kind of propitiation, an offering to the mysterious plant gods, perhaps more scientific than that of former times, but no less ritualistic. Parsley and marigolds line her beds; in the centre a circular herb garden boasts oregano, rosemary, lavender and geraniums, thyme and yarrow, pennyroyal and comfrey. Around the house it is all flowers, petunias and lobelia giving way to foxgloves and Queen Anne’s lace, stock, coriopsis growing wild. She longs for warmer climes where she might grow gardenias, frangipani, ginger, the tropical flowers with their heavy scents.
It would, she thinks, be easier to be a gardener than to write. All day she is unable to settle. It is the fault of the early morning trip over the hill with Kelvin. It has interrupted her routine. She can’t write so she gardens, except she knows too well that gardening is an excuse for not writing and is therefore forbidden, so instead she drives to town for the mail, to do some organisation. All twelve miles of dirt. No one has got around to changing the signs to kilometres: stone markers still count the miles. Surveyors are out along the road plotting some trajectory across the landscape. Perhaps it is for the long-awaited telephone. Bronzed men in long white socks and short shorts that ride high on their thighs peer into theodolites or hold up wands, their four-wheel drives pulled over at odd angles. Sexually she has been asleep. She has noted this, that without a man to focus on she does not get aroused. Her sexuality is not a thing in itself, it is a factor of the other’s presence. If a lover leaves (and don’t they all, isn’t that the incredible lie at the base of every beginning?) she misses not just the man, the intimacy, the support; she misses, also, the sex. But after a time, two or three months say, it gets easier, the feeling abates. She likes to think of it, her sex, as going to sleep, not dying but hibernating, waiting for the new spring. Her sister, during a slump in her sex life, always coarser, earthier, said, laughing deeply, ‘I think I’ve healed over.’ This is how it has been, and she has got used to it, has been pleased to be no longer subject to its ravening, its embarrassing hungers. When not overcome with loneliness and a sense of failure for having no man, she has managed to relish the focus it has brought to other activities, the breadth of connections she has developed. A relationship always has a tendency to dominate her life; she lets the other aspects go. How else could she have become such a force in the Forest Alliance?
She sits on the steps of the store waiting for the mail bus from Bega with the other Coalwater residents: Alice from over the river with her flock of screaming children and her lank hair and battered face; the storekeeper herself, Joy, a formidable woman with a husband to match; Old Jack in his shoes with the fronts cut out of them to make room for his toes. Coalwater is not a big town. Once upon a time it was bigger, but even then it was not what could be called large. Now it is spread out, ramshackle, lacking visible means of support.There is no industry and it is too far from anywhere to commute to work. The milk truck stopped coming when the quotas were introduced. The land, which back from the river was always marginal, has been given over to desultory steers and the rabbit. The only thing to happen in recent memory was the arrival of the hippies. The residents did their best to ignore them, convinced that their painted Kombi vans were a temporary aberration.
Old Jack was one of the few to give them the time of day. His farming days over, he sits on the veranda outside the store and talks to whoever will listen. Barrel-chested, skull-jawed, his grey hair cut to a Germanic stubble, his thin lips hardly move when he speaks. Great tufts of hair sprout from his ears. All his clothes are old, dark felt trousers, a striped shirt which at one time had a separate collar, beneath that a woollen vest, always the same regardless of season. The skin on his neck is thick, segmented, lizard-like. His eyes follow the hippie girls in their Indian print skirts with nothing on underneath, with their bare feet and their rings on their toes.
He has found out Jessica’s surname, ‘Coalwater Cohen, eh,’ he says, ‘come and sit here till the bus comes. It won’t be here for a bit yet – the way the roads are Alby doesn’t want to rush things.’ He pats the wooden bench beside him and she accepts. ‘It’s a long time since we’ve had a Cohen living here. There was one when I was a young man, lived back of Mt Imlay.’ He points to a hill in the south-east. ‘A strong man he was. Used to come in here once a month for his bag of flour. He’d sling it on his shoulder, a hundred-weight bag, and set off back home again, walking, barefoot.’
She has heard the story before. She stretches out her legs and looks at her feet, her long toes dusty against the weatherworn boards.
‘Out your way, now, that was good dairy country. One hundred twenty cows milked every day. Five ton of butter to Eden once a month by bullock and dray. Before the war, milked by hand.’
He means the Great War, in which he was too young to serve. He coughs a deep throated damp cough. It pulls him over and as he leans forward he exposes a small area of pale skin at the base of his shirt, and this tiny piece of his body that has never seen the sun is enough to make Jessica suddenly aware of him as a man, not just a repository of arcane history. She has been asleep but Kelvin has woken her. The beast is stirring in its lair. Already it is starting to consume her thoughts.
After the mail she uses the public phone. She prefers the box near the school.There are only two in town, the one next to the store and the one perched on a hill with no shade, no protection from the elements at all, just a glass box with a door that behaves badly. But its isolation provides privacy as well as a fine view of the river, that wide expanse of sand with a stream of water threading its way amongst it, gathering in a pool under the bridge pylons.
As it turns out everything is set for the weekend in Nadgee, as well as for going to Sydney to speak to the All-Party SubCommittee on the Native Forests of the South Coast of New South Wales. There was no need to come to town and she is angry about that, about allowing herself to be distrac
ted from her work by this trip in the same way she permitted several hours to pass in the garden. It is all very well to laugh at writers for loathing their work, and for doing anything to avoid it, it does not mean she is excused.
When darkness falls she is at home. She makes a meal, feeds the dog, and Kelvin isn’t there. Still she can’t settle and she is angry at herself for wanting him, angry at him for coming into her life and disturbing her thus, for being who he is, for waking her. She tries to write and fails, tries to read and abandons it, ends up, in desperation, cleaning a kitchen cupboard. By the time he rolls up, against all expectation, stoned, smelling of tobacco and dope and beer, she is out of sorts, distant, critical.
‘I missed you,’ he says, settling himself on the couch, the makings of a joint on a low table in front of him, leaning forward with his knees spread wide to accommodate his arms.
‘Did you?’ she says, unbelieving, pissed off because she has missed him and, really, has no mind to smoke. Then he passes her the number he’s rolled, offers her a match so she can light it, and she says she will, after all, share it with him, ‘If only to be in the same place as you,’ and pulls on it, holding the smoke in her lungs, testing the sensation the drug produces in her brain; finding it, surprisingly, good. She forgets what it’s like, why they are all so committed to it, the sudden clarity it brings, the immediate and absolute awareness of what is important and the falling away of everything that’s not. She raises her eyes from the coffee table and discovers that Kelvin is, in fact, right there; the object of her affections has arrived, and she laughs, a short bray directed entirely at herself but inducing in him a broad smile, his mouth twisting up to the left, transforming his face; he is, how could she have forgotten, beautiful.
