by Steven Lang
‘Did you see his face?’ she said. ‘Did you see his face? Laugh? I could’ve fucking died. His toupee almost fell off.’
Loud peels of high-pitched laughter in the rail carriage, other people looking their way. She put her hand on Kelvin’s shoulder in parody of Slattery. ‘You will call, darling, won’t you?’ and burst into laughter again. She had told Lola about Kelvin, she said. And Lola was in trouble and she couldn’t trust her and she thought sooner or later she’d blab to Daz about it so they had to get out. ‘Besides,’ she said, ‘I had to get you away. I mean, he was weird, wasn’t he? I mean, the whole fucking thing was weird. I didn’t like it at all.’ Laughing. Sitting opposite him in an all-night train heading somewhere he’d never been before and laughing, and Kelvin was furious with her for fooling him into thinking Daz was coming after him with a razor, for the real fear he had felt, for telling Lola about it in the first place.Yes, she said, yes, but Daz would have found out one day, sooner or later, Kelvin was so stupid, and look, now they were gone, they never had to see Daz ever again, she’d look up the ape-man in Brisbane, he’d give her a job as a dancer in a nightclub and neither of them would ever have to fuck for money again.
And it was true, the idea appealed, getting up and leaving, no attachments. It was the kind of thing he’d imagined himself doing while leaning against the Wall. He was fourteen and on a train going to a city where nobody knew him, with Shelley, and after a while he laughed too. It was good to have Slattery’s hundred dollars and not to have his hands fumbling him that night, he’d never do that again, he’d never fuck again for money. He pulled out the book he’d taken from Slattery, already dog-eared, by a man called Heinlein, about a man from Mars who sees the world as it really is. He looked at his reflection in the window and back across at Shelley and smiled.
‘I saved you,’ she said.
This was another one of her moods. Combined with some pharmaceutical. She would be back down the next day, scratchy and sore and difficult, but her play that night had been extraordinary, standing in Slattery’s flat giving her performance. She was leaning against the window so that he could see her face and this slightly blurred reflection beside it, both of them wanting his approval and there was no way he could withhold it. Sometimes he loved her so much. There was nothing back in their little house he would miss, nothing at all.
‘So, what happened?’
‘Shelley met with her man. He got her work as a dancer.
‘And?’
‘She ended up going with him.’
‘Where?’
‘Sleeping with him, living with him. Perhaps she got over the hair, I dunno.’
‘And you?’ Having to draw it out of him.
‘I didn’t fit any more. I was a bit older, you know, and Shelley was doing well. She didn’t need me any more.’
‘You were well out of that,’ Carl said.
‘I was?’
‘He was a fucking pederast.’
It was late and the table was littered with the detritus of whisky and cigarettes. Kelvin cleaned a pathway through the spilled ash with his forefinger, then crossed it with another pathway whose sides blocked the first one.There seemed to be many different answers he could give but none that were appropriate.
‘I went up to Cairns,’ he said. ‘Then there was Cyclone Tracy so I went to Darwin. There was work for builders’ labourers, and people up that way don’t ask so many questions. I stayed.That’s how I ended up on the boats.’
‘Did you keep in touch with Shelley?’
‘Bits and pieces, some postcards.’
Kelvin was winding down, he didn’t want to talk any more. He wanted to keep the bit about Melbourne and Shelley to himself. It wasn’t anyone’s business but his own.
Out on the veranda the night was clear and cold. A moon in its last quarter cast a yellow glow. Carl sat on the steps with the dogs. It had been a cheap trick with the whisky and no doubt he’d pay for it. He could feel the alcohol in him like a sickness. Maisie came over to see what the matter was and laid her head on his thigh and he was immensely grateful for the gesture. Down in the paddock a cow lowed. Jessica had, it seemed, a knack for choosing the difficult ones. It was not the whisky or the cigarettes or exhaustion that ailed him.The boy’s story had woken something and now it was sitting on his chest, compressing it, making it difficult to breathe. He played with the dog’s ear, ran his fingers along the flow of her pelt.
Kelvin had broken custom. He had revealed himself, and the man he’d chosen to give his confession to was the very person whose story could not be told, who could not afford the luxury. He couldn’t even write it down, hide it in some vault. He had tried that. For several weeks he had filled exercise books with his scribbles, hiding them each night under the floor. But if they found him they would look there, they would look everywhere, it went without saying. There were other people involved. So he’d burned the books, scattered the ashes. He had to live with the choices he’d made. But the boy’s story had pricked him, alerted him to his isolation. Carl was acquainted with loneliness, how in the early evening or in the small hours of the morning it would fall on him. He knew, also, that the feeling would pass, that fighting made it worse. He had come to understand how it was better to surrender; but even knowing that it was hard, and no amount of familiarity with its ways had taught him to deal with the words it whispered in his ear. Still, loneliness was his beast and no one else’s.When he made peace with it there was, on occasion, at its darkest point, a moment of beauty; one tiny instant during which everything in the world seemed to be in the right place at the right time. Out on the steps, with his dog beside him, his arms wrapped around his knees, he wondered if it would come.
They were down by the dam the next afternoon, fiddling with the pump, when he heard a motor. It had been one of those days in which inanimate objects conspire to malfunction, when nothing fits, spanners are the wrong size, threads cross, the simplest thing, a pencil, goes missing and will not be found. He went to the glove box and dug out the binoculars and watched until he caught a glimpse of a white van on the little straight by the creek. There was some sort of decal on the side. Immediately, irrationally, he felt the fear in him, liquefying his stomach, heightening his senses. Where had it been hiding to come up as quickly as that? Was that what his melancholy had really been about? And the day’s reluctance? The problem was what to do with the boy.
No. The thing to do was not to panic. It could still be nothing. At the curve before the second ford he got another look. A blue logo on the passenger door.
It proved to be a Telecom van, driven by a uniformed technician complete with clipboard and name tag, the dogs, as well they might, staking him out, their hackles up, barking.
‘I’ll handle this,’ he said to Kelvin, yelling at the dogs.
The man climbed out, nervous.
‘Howdo,’ Carl said.
‘I’m looking for Cooral Dooral Station,’ he said. He checked his clipboard. ‘Carl Tadeuzs.’
‘You’ve found him.’
The technician held out a hand, said the name that was on the tag. He took in the dam, the paddock, the house a few hundred metres above them.
‘It’s just a courtesy call,’ he said. ‘We’re going to lay cable for your neighbours, see, and we’re making a visit to the properties round about to offer you the chance to connect – while the equipment’s in the district.’
‘I’ll be right thanks,’ Carl said.
The Telecom man checked his clipboard again, ‘There’s only a nominal charge involved, sir, the same as you’d pay for a connection in the city. I think it’s about a hundred and forty, fifty dollars.’
‘I don’t need a phone.’
They stood for a moment longer, the three of them in a little huddle next to the van. He had hoped his tone would finish the thing but the man made no move to go.
‘We’ve got a pump to fix here,’ he said. ‘So you won’t mind if we get back to it.’
‘Not at
all sir. Nice place you’ve got. I wonder if I might trouble you for a signature. Just to say that we did offer you the service.’
‘Sure. Kelvin, my hands are filthy, will you sign for me?’
Kelvin stepped forward.
‘It should be the property owner, sir.’
‘He’ll do it on my behalf,’ Carl said.
The technician went back to his truck and sat in the cabin, making notes. He stayed there a full five minutes.
‘You don’t want the phone?’ Kelvin said.
Carl gave him what he hoped was a withering look.
Watching the van go he thought that he had been right to feel the fear, that the fear was and always had been his friend, his fear was what had kept him alive thus far. He’d allowed it to go to sleep, he’d become attached, he’d settled down in one place and now something was happening and he would have to move again and he did not want to.
The pump was still disconnected, the big plastic bucket of fittings tipped out on the ground beside it, the thick recalcitrant black snake of polypipe curling out of the ground.
‘Let’s clear up this mess,’ he said. ‘We’ll fix this when I get back from Bega with the right bit.’
Kelvin looked at him.
‘I know,’ he said, ‘but the day’s fucked, isn’t it? I need those gates, I’ll go to the co-op tomorrow and get a fitting while I’m there. Let’s have a coffee.’
He had to get rid of the boy, tell him something, take him out of the loop. He sat in the cabin of the Toyota staring at the brown earth of the dam, the brown water, the useless pump, the stained aluminium feed-pipe nosing down the steep bank. Kelvin was beside him, the dogs in the back. Waiting.
A moment before he had been so deeply immersed in this place that he’d forgotten everything else. He clattered the diesel into life and nudged it up the hill to the house.
‘I’ll take you over the Farm later if you like, won’t be much happening around here for a few days. You probably won’t mind that, eh? You can come back Monday.’
On the mountain, in the evening, Kelvin asked him if he was in trouble.
He shrugged. ‘Not as such, no more’n usual. But thanks for asking.’
He could feel Kelvin’s eyes on him.
‘By the way, about last night,’ it was the first mention of it, ‘appreciated you telling me what you did. Meant a lot to me. But about Jessica, I’ve no clue as to you telling her that stuff, that’s something you’ll have to figure out. One thing though,’ Kelvin still not talking, staring straight forward through the windscreen while the truck wound along the old road, tree ferns spilling over the edge, Carl wondering about how it would be possible to put this without sounding false, ‘she’s a good woman.There’s not so many like her.’
eighteen
‘Here,’Kelvin said, pointing to a cul-de-sac with perhaps twelve houses, each with their unpainted boards curling up, children’s toys clustered around the stumps; outside one an aluminium dinghy on a trailer; in the driveway of another a logging truck, its bogey wheels tucked up behind the cabin like dog’s balls, the rig almost bigger than the house.
Jessica pulled onto the gravel edge across from the entrance and took his hand in a gesture that was probably meant to demonstrate compassion, or sympathy for whatever it was she imagined him to be feeling at this point – an empathy she could afford now that she’d dragged him there. It was misplaced. He felt nothing for these houses marooned in their little patches of grass.
Only one was brick, a two-storey affair decorated with concrete pillars and iron railings – the house Angelo Venditti’s father had built on weekends, which for all the time Kelvin had lived next door to it had been a building site rendering up small stolen treasures: discarded nails, a couple of bolts, rusty reinforcing wire, the terrifying satisfaction of a deliberately broken windowpane. Now it was finished it was simply another house. They were all just houses.
The only surprise was that he had somehow forgotten the street’s most obvious feature. Its name, Seaview Court, no matter how clichéd, was at least honest. The whole hillside was exposed to the ocean. The southern ellipse of Twofold Bay was spread out in front of them, deeply blue on this late summer day, lichen-covered rocks tumbling into the water, eucalyptus trees clinging to its shore. Across the wide expanse, on South Headland, the bright stab of the mill. Strange not to have remembered something of such enormity.
Jessica thought that if he saw where it was he had grown up he would feel driven to contact his family. She couldn’t imagine knowing where her family lived and not going to see them. Or perhaps she just wanted proof that all this actually existed; needed emotional evidence, or to meet his mother, to be sure. Well his mother had once lived in that weatherboard house. Perhaps she still did, but even seeing it across the street did not provoke in him the need to go and find out. He wasn’t sure what sort of person that made him. What he did know was that he’d left, and sworn never to return, for reasons that had been good solid reasons then and they still held true nine years later. If it was memories she wanted he could do them. They were coming in spades: bicycling down the hill into town; the track that led out of the top of the street into the back of the old timber mill; the internal walls made of sagging unpainted masonite and the little strips of wood that had framed the sheets, the same stuff on the ceilings, his bedroom an entirely brown world except for the fine white watermarks on the ceiling left by storms which he made into maps of continents. The sound of his mum and dad’s voices in the next room, their movements amplified, their words distorted. The silence and then the deep curt resonance of his father’s voice saying something and his mother’s monosyllabic reply. The scrape of a chair to put another log on the fire.The inevitable rise of his father’s anger, at first not as sound, in the beginning as an absence of sound. He had never known what his father was angry about, only that somehow it had always been to do with him. Was that the kind of memories she wanted? They were there. But they were his. He could not articulate them. He had managed to tell her about Sydney, at least as much as he could bear to reveal to someone with her gender’s special view of sex. He had managed that. Because he needed her. Perhaps that was why he was going along with Andy’s plan. For her. But he would not cross that road.
‘We’re being watched,’ she said.
He turned in time to see a curtain fall across a window.
‘Let’s go then.’
‘Aren’t you going to tell me anything about it?’
Andy and Jim might be going to do it as a demonstration of ideology, or as some sort of prank – for no other reason, perhaps, than that they’d been talking about it for so long and that making up stories has a strength in itself. He wasn’t at all certain why they were involved. But Kelvin was going along because of Jessica, and because of Carl. It wasn’t the scene with the horse that had done it, but it helped. Not the hitting. The staying. Kelvin had no capacity to stand his ground. None. Instead there were only justifications, an endless series of carefully worked philosophical and ethical positions for not standing up to forces which might hurt him. For shifting aside, dodging them. And this code of his, this philosophy that had led him to Sydney and Shelley and on to Brisbane and Darwin and then back to Melbourne and now here, this code had been developed at number five Seaview Court.
‘There’s nothing to say,’ he said.
She put the car in gear, did a U-turn. At the end of the street she turned down into the town, took a left at the Ampol, towards the airport.
Out of the silence she said, ‘You’re a weird cove.’ Smiling.
Something had shifted, or else she just wasn’t any good at goodbyes.
‘You will look after my place, won’t you? And Suzy? I’m trusting you.’
‘Of course,’ he said, remembering what he had forgotten, that she wasn’t going forever, that she was leaving him the car, the house, the dog to look after, and that this must mean something.
‘You won’t do anything stupid, will you?’ she
said.
For a moment he thought she knew.
‘Like not be here when I get back?’ Her hand had mysteriously found its way back onto his thigh, was squeezing it. ‘This is really big for me, going to Sydney. But I want you here when I get home.’
He leaned over and kissed her on the neck, below the ear where the skin was smooth, rich in the smell of her. He wanted to hold onto her, didn’t want to get involved with the others at all. It was just a prank, a joke, a lark. There was no need to get too serious about it. After he’d dropped her off at the airport he’d buy a drum of diesel in Merimbula.
‘I’ll be here,’ he said.
nineteen
The first shower came as they entered town, big drops slapping against the windscreen, the three men across the bench seat of the panel van, the heater on because of the cold but the windows down because of the fumes that leaked in through the rear gate. When the rain hit Jim’s face he started, woken too quickly from dreams.
‘Just what we fucking need,’ he said.
‘This is good,’ Andy said. ‘This I like.’
Kelvin, squashed between them, could not see much to approve of. He was relieved when it stopped as abruptly as it had begun.
All that day the weather had been poor, low cloud tearing itself to pieces on the mountain, the air damp and cold and full of the promise of rain. Bad omens. Andy, thinking otherwise, thinking, This’ll keep the cops off the road, took the highway north, the road slick and shiny and deserted. A couple of kilometres after the Ampol he diverted into an industrial zone. Kelvin had passed by there with Jessica the day before, and again by himself on the way back. On neither occasion had he thought to check it out. He was, he thought, an amateur at this sort of thing. He should have left it as a joke.
The place must have been recently gazetted, for the road was new and black, neatly kerbed and guttered, the pale concrete strip holding back the vacant building sites. The Forestry offices were huddled together on the turning circle of a dead end, a few low buildings with a driveway passing between them blocked by a shiny red and white boom.
