by Steven Lang
She had had enough of him right then, she thinks, the whole business with his past, with all the conflicting stories. Before Nadgee, before she uncovered the lies, she was diving into some sort of dream romance where connectivity was assumed on the basis of similar backgrounds. But then Kelvin had proved not to be what he appeared. Lovers perhaps never are, but he was even less so. Something had changed for her that last day, on the way to the airport. She doesn’t even want to consider what it might be. She doesn’t like it that he was raised in Eden. She can admit that.Almost every person on the Farm comes from somewhere else and they each wear their journey to it like a badge, or a pedigree. It is important that they chose to uproot themselves from wherever it was, be it Hunters Hill or Birmingham or Perth.They have turned their backs on society. They have actively gone out and sought to make another one.They have, in one way or another, put their lives on the line for the idea of a different world. But the local people, well, they have stayed at home, they are country bumpkins, yokels, rednecks, they are the scions of the culture which her generation wants to replace. The difficulty is that Kelvin can’t be included in their number. He left too. The problem, clearly, is elsewhere. She had thought he was the son of a bookseller and it had turned out he was the son of a logger, of a logger from Eden, someone who lived in one of those old falling-down wooden houses whose wife, Kelvin’s mother, looked like Alice in Coalwater with that tired beaten face. This is what troubles her, this is what she doesn’t want to see, that and the thought of his cloying need, which only days before she had shared so profoundly.
The committee meets in another room in the same building, although this time it is windowless, low-ceilinged, the walls panelled with timber veneer. The so-called stakeholders of the southern forests sit around a long table on soft swivelling chairs. Glasses of water, pens and paper are provided. Jessica and a girl from the Conservation Foundation are the only women. They sit down one end, together, sidelined for being both women and conservationists. To belong to this particular club you have to be a man and have an economic interest in the forests. The conservationists are tolerated only because they have become an effective lobby group, not because of, but despite, their opinions.
At lunch Jack Mullen comes over to their table. He’s from the Timber Workers’ Union. He’s heavy-jowled, wheezing, fingers stained with nicotine, thin grey hair on a liver-spotted skull, belly over the belt, cheap tie, a man of embarrassing humanity amongst all this sophistication, alongside the polished Norton Rawlings. But keen, like a knife.
His target is Jessica. He, too, is full of flattery. ‘Let me tell you something,’ he says. ‘I like youse.You’ve got your head screwed on, which is more’n I can say for most of them around here,’ and by the sweep of his arm it is clear he means not only the people in the room but the whole of the parliament. ‘You’re a breath of fresh air, that’s what you are. But you’re wrong about these forests.Wanting to lock them up in national parks.’
She raises her eyes to her companion, who meets them and rolls her own. If Mullen catches the glance it only encourages him.
‘You think that way you’re going to get to keep them. But I tell you this, you’ll kill ’em by doing that just as sure as any clearfeller will.’ Pausing for effect. ‘Land isn’t something separate.You need to have a stake in it. Like your Aboriginal. I think I can tell you this, you’re a smart one. Your hippies down there, they’re just playing games – hear me now – they’re children of the upper class, too much education for their own good.All this back-to-the-land rubbish. It’s so much cow dung. I’ve seen ’em. They don’t know nothing about it. To know land you gotta work it.You have to get it to give up its bounty by the sweat of your own labour. Put one of your hippies out there in the forest and ask him to survive, I mean live, on what he can get from it and he’ll have it all cut down as soon as look at it.The rest is just sentimental shit. Pardon my French.You gotta be dependent on land. Making these forests into a national park will turn ’em into a museum. It’ll kill them.’
She should have an answer for him but it is not so simple. She begins to see why those engaged in armed struggle resist coming to the table to talk to their opponents (at least until they are in a position of such strength that they can get what they want). It is much harder to hate the other with quite so much zeal when the other is a person sitting across the room. Which is not to say she has developed affection for any of them, or even sympathy for their opinions, it is simply that they exist as people, holding points of view which, regardless of their validity, they believe in and are determined to defend.Their arguments require attention and she finds herself brought up by their acuity, has found herself fumbling for words, for the simple names of things. Besides, the arguments to counter this sort of thing never seem to be available or in the right currency for men like Jack Mullen, especially when he is voicing thoughts she might have had herself. It is only later, esprit d’escalier, that the illogic shows up and the words present themselves with the due amount of anger:Yes, but you don’t know this land either, you’re not dependent on it. That’s the lie at the centre of it all. You survive simply by killing everything on one piece of land and then moving onto the next bit and killing everything on that; until it is all used up.
On the third morning the news about damage to equipment in the forests breaks. All other agendas are suspended to allow the members to express their opinions on this development. One by one the representatives of the Forestry Commission, the union, Norton Rawlings, the spokesman for the Minister for Mines and Recreation, the manager of the chipmill (visiting for the day) express their contempt and outrage. It is, they say, an indication of the need for greater security – clearly select areas of forest need to be off limits to all but contractors. Calls are made to have harvest allocations confirmed immediately for the next decade. ‘Uncertainty is the single most damaging force in our business,’ the manager of the mill explains. ‘It locks us into unsustainable patterns. We need security of timber supply, not just for the next six months, or the next year, but for the next ten years, otherwise there is no incentive for investment.’
Jessica has never felt so small. If the fuckwits who’d done this could hear these guys, she thinks, they’d regret … no, they wouldn’t … the kind of people who do this sort of thing don’t listen, don’t see, they have their own agendas.
When it’s her turn to speak she says that the suggestion this damage was the work of radical conservationists is not, as yet, backed up by the facts, no one has claimed responsibility, and that the time for apportioning blame will be when they know exactly what has happened, not before. To assume the problem has come as an act of sabotage is to pre-empt an enquiry, or even an analysis of fuel supplies. It is possible, she manages to imply, that it could be the owners of the machinery themselves trying to get the insurance. ‘This incident could not have come at a worse time for the conservation movement,’ she says, marvelling at her capacity to spout words she does not believe. ‘We have only just arrived at the negotiating table. One might be forgiven for seeing what has happened as an attempt to sabotage this process. We give no support to the action whatsoever, either implicit or real. What it does highlight, however, are the problems of continued exploitation of the forests, which are not owned by the timber industry but by the people of New South Wales, who have a right to determine whether or not they will be cut down, and who do not feel they are being listened to.’ But even then, speaking as stridently as this, she thinks there is, in her tone, too great an edge of frailty, too much emotion.
Norton takes her aside, invites her to join him for lunch in the members’ room. He makes sure she chooses the best food on the menu, has her delivered a glass of white wine so chilled that condensation runs down the side of the glass. She thinks he is still playing the same game as the other night, but she has misread his intentions.
‘Tell me,’ he says over the dessert, leaning close. ‘D’you have any inkling as to who might be doing this in the bus
h? There can’t be that many who are radical enough to act like that, it takes a certain, how shall I say, dedication …’
She sips her wine.
‘It’s just I had a little bird tell me that there might be an international connection …’
‘A little bird?’
‘Come now, Jessica,’ he says. ‘We can speak frankly to each other.We’re on the same side. But I can’t reveal my sources any more than you can.’
‘But I don’t have any sources.’
‘How much I’d like to believe that. My work with certain government agencies has given me a reputation as, how can I say, a safe leak …’
Jack Mullen lumbers towards them between the white tables. Jessica wonders how he managed to get in here, but Norton welcomes him.
‘Jack,’ he says, shaking the older man’s hand as if he’s glad to see him, the switch so immediate and automatic she can’t help but admire it. ‘You know Jessica, don’t you Jack?’
‘We’ve met,’ he says from a throat full of phlegm. ‘I was over there with Paddy and I saw youse two having a palaver and I thought I better come and break it up. Protect the interests of my constituency.’ He laughs, and Norton joins in, but Jessica only smiles.
‘We were only talking about the trouble in the forests, Jack,’ Norton says.
‘Bad business that.’
‘It does nobody good,’ Jessica says, for want of another cliché.
‘Nor does saying it was my workers done it theyselves,’ Jack says.
‘That wasn’t quite what I said, I just mentioned there were some teams who’re finding the terms of trade a bit hard, what with more regulation coming in.’
‘It’s called deflection, Jack,’ Norton says.
Jack moves on. They sip their coffee. Norton leans forward again. ‘This was a professional job,’ he says. ‘Efficient, clever, effective. No one on that farm of yours has been talking about this sort of thing, have they?’
She thinks of the Farm, and the evenings in the main house with Martin and Jim and all the others. Of Andy, of the dope, and it seems, at best, unlikely that anyone from there might have got themselves together into something resembling an efficient organisation. She thinks, too, that Norton already knew something about this when he cornered her at the social evening, that his interest in her has always been only for how it can serve him, for nothing else.
Suddenly she would like to speak to Kelvin. Kelvin is who she wants.
twenty-five
Carl thought of all the things that had been forgotten. There had been little enough time for reflection. Not that in Andy’s van in the forest in the dark with what could best be described as unstable cargo in the back was an appropriate moment for it. But there was little else for the mind to do.
Gazza had had no time for his plan. ‘Just fucken leave, man. It’s not so hard.You’ve been sprung, it’s time to go. This,’ and by this he included Kelvin, the farm, the cattle, the dogs, the whole enterprise, demonstrating an unusual grasp of the wider picture, ‘all this won’t count for shit when you’re in jail. Or dead. Me, I’m off.’
When he was young, Carl thought, he had suffered from a kind of failure of imagination. He had believed himself immune to misfortune. Things happened, but to other people. The passage of years had brought, if nothing else, the realisation that he was a person too, just another human like every other one. He, too, was susceptible. He felt for the door handle, locating it in the dark as the car swerved on a tight bend. If there was trouble he could always run. In this sort of forest a hundred yards would be enough, they’d never find you if you could put a hundred yards behind you. How long does it take to run a hundred yards? An athlete can do it in nine seconds, with the threat of death and in these clothes he could probably manage thirteen. Fifteen.Too long. Just possibly with the dark and the trees thirty yards would be far enough. But a hundred would be better. Running straight, head down, not thinking, let the body do the thinking. The body would find its way between the trees for itself. Unless they had dogs of course. But why would they have dogs? Was this the best he could do? Was this the updated version of the never-to-be-forgotten rule, to always have a way out?
Andy had been nothing short of apoplectic when Carl and Kelvin had visited him. He’d come out onto this funny little deck and stood there, keeping the higher ground, looking down at them. Gazza’s description had been right, he was sort of handsome, thick dark eyebrows and an angular jaw, a Roman nose. They’d never met before but Carl could see nothing too complex in the man: he could see the curiosity in his face transform itself into incredulity, and then, when he’d worked out that Kelvin had told Carl what they’d done, absolute, pure rage.You couldn’t fake that. He could hardly get the words out, just this long string of expletives.
‘I figured it out,’ Carl said, inserting himself between the two of them.
Andy turning to him, ‘You can shut the fuck up, just shut the fuck up.’
That was how angry he had been, the words slipping out before he’d even thought them. Once they’d been said, and he realised who he was talking to, he backed off. There was an awkward moment while he took a deep breath. ‘No offence, mate.’
‘None taken.’
No, the man was transparent, lacking in guile. Even for a cop. Like a sheet of glass.Vicious though.
‘Then you won’t mind if Kelvin and I have some words, will you, alone?’
‘I’d sooner speak with you myself,’ Carl said.
You could see him struggling with it.
Carl tried to make it easier for him. ‘I was watching Kel here when it came on the radio and I saw the blood drop out of him. I put it to him he had something to do with it and he lied,’ holding Andy’s eye; it was necessary to keep the pressure on him, they didn’t want to give him a chance to think too hard about anything. ‘I was in Nam, see, and I learned a few things there. I know when someone’s lying.’ Offering the challenge. He held up the bottle of Scotch he’d had in his hand the whole time. ‘But listen, I’m not after trouble. I’ve a proposition.’
Andy looking backwards and forwards between them. ‘So that’d be the cause of his face then?’ he said.
Kelvin with this bruise to his forehead and nose, a scab on his cheek. ‘You might say that,’ he said.
‘So what’s it to you?’
‘I thought we might come in and talk about that.’
Did Andy know who he was? That was the question that was exercising his mind in the van. If Andy had had any idea who he was, then why was he fucking around with the hippies? Setting up all this stuff in the forest? It didn’t make sense. If Andy’s superiors knew who he was, if they’d sicked Andy onto him in the first place, wouldn’t they have pulled him in a long time ago? There was no need for all this nonsense.
The thoughts going around in his head. Rationalisations. He was tired, that was the real problem. He was not used to this sort of thing, being up most of the previous night, driving down forest trails to drop off the bike, unable to sleep when he got back, and now being up again near midnight. These things never used to bother him, he has gone soft, he’s become used to nine o’clock bedtime and rising with the dawn. Which is bullshit, of course, because it has always been like this, always and every time before an event the mind works like a terrier, gnawing at a bone from all sides; that’s its job, to find the weak point, the one which would kill him. The trouble is it doesn’t know when to stop; one part of the mind has to instruct the other to be quiet before it becomes the weakness itself, and that part has gone missing.
‘I spoke to Jess this morning,’ Kelvin said, apropos of nothing.
Nobody took him up on this comment. The van barrelled on into the night. The trouble Carl and Kelvin had arranging that: when they had turned up in Jessica’s car a couple of hours earlier and announced they’d broken a tie-rod in his, Carl’s, truck,Andy had wanted to take Jessica’s car. ‘It’s perfect,’ he said. ‘She’s not here. She’s got the perfect alibi.’ Kelvin had said h
e wouldn’t be in it, he had to protect his girlfriend. Then Andy said if they were going to argue with everything he said the whole thing was off. All sorts of shit. But eventually he’d given in. But still pissed off, which was why, no doubt, he was driving like a crazy man, throwing the Holden into the corners, braking too late and too sudden, skidding out the other side.
‘She’s all done in Sydney,’ Kelvin said, still talking to himself, his voice cracking with anxiety. ‘I’ve got to meet her at the airport, she says she’s had – ’
‘Kelvin,’ Carl said, ‘d’you have to?’
But Andy wanted to keep him going, ‘She say anything about this stuff?’
‘She says it’s all over the papers.’
Andy had taken them inside the tent and sat them down at the small table with the canvas brushing the tops of their heads. He’d hung the lantern on a piece of rope dangling from the ridgepole designed for that purpose but it meant that his face was in semi-darkness while theirs were lit up. Something about the whole setup reminding Carl of South America. Andy accepted a glass of the Scotch and listened while Carl spun his tale about the plans the Forestry had for near his property, about farming and land and all the rest. He said he thought he could bring some special skills to the endeavour, ‘… as bone fides of my intention I thought we could – ’
‘Who’s we?’
‘Why, Kelvin and I.You, if you wanted to join us; Jim.’
‘Jim’s out of it.’
‘He is?’
‘Fucking hopeless,’ Andy said. ‘Worse than fucking Kelvin here.’
At least, Carl thought, having a particular task in mind for Jim, something was going according to plan.
‘Go on then,’ Andy said.
‘I thought we could do something this weekend, hit them while it’s still hot, then lie low. They won’t be expecting anything more right now. If we do something a bit different it’ll confuse the hell out of them.’
