by Rodney Hall
She came back pearly and soap-fresh from the bathroom.
– You can’t live like this, he told her. It’s not hygienic. Those things are so bloody dirty. You never catch me treating a place this way.
– Maybe you don’t see what matters and what doesn’t, she retorted tartly.
– What! he shouted. Cleanliness not matter!
– Right, she turned it to a moral issue. Could be a sign of hating your own body.
– How can I hate my own body?
She only laughed gaily and kicked her sweaty clothes in a heap and bowled them to one corner out of the way. Then she kissed his knotted forehead.
– Tell me, he invited because he wanted to understand. About your childhood.
She answered – I loved the days of the week.
Yes, she had loved the washing rituals of Monday, steamy soapy sheets grown cold and still flapping in the damp English air by the time she came out of school. Tuesday the first day of the desert that stretched monotonous dunes of arithmetic, botany, geography as far as the future. And yet the very next day known to be Wednesday, the halfway mark achieved, with the downhill run ahead and still time for playground plots to hatch. Thursday black with boredom and made blacker by an afternoon of compulsory sports for character-building, hockeysticks snickering, ankles viciously bruised, short skirts flying up round thick girlish thighs and girls’ faces thuggish with teeth. Friday and the class was a dream in the tired teacher’s mind, nagging but tolerated, the smell of sour milk, the clash of empty lockers. Then the catherinewheel of Saturday jerked into action and flowered dizzily, the gang on the loose, the hectic squandering of breath, climbing, chasing; her household duties at home, even, a reprieve at the end of afternoon joys. But Sunday she specially loved because she must submit. The town walked round in a hush: shutters and blinds drawn across shop windows; the pavements wider than on weekdays; chimneys smoking already by ten in the morning and at midday the aromas of cooking lunches mingled, lamb and dumplings hung about the sacrificial streets; loafers on crossroads hurried for cover; and sure enough crowds of ritually hatted and overcoated citizens swarmed out of the churches to the strains of Handel and Parry (the bells above still rocking), their voices squabbling peaceably as sparrows, lured by the smells of their own ovens, emptied of the vice of patience by the sermon, promenading down the middle of streets to assert the timidity of cars; the well-fed afternoon ahead, lounging in fleshy grass and watching the canal turn in its hundred-year sleep, tipping blue and green dragonflies into the fringes of wild parsley; a bar of elderberry wine under the bridge; the fear of giant pike in the mud and a single sparrowhawk stamped on the sky, a coupon in the blank rationbook of excesses of the flesh. Ah to roll lazily in the dirt and know it was Sunday, to hear and smell Sunday and have Sunday feeling up your skirt and puffing your blouse out like a woman.
– Touch me like that again, she invited Billy, who did his best though his confidence failed him.
At the rim of a rocky slope each man found himself looking down on a grassed clearing, human evidence, the place he had wanted to reach all along, that ghost of a settlement, the worn remains of foundations, groundplan of a village, the blurred grid of civilization already observed earlier in the day from higher up the mountain.
Faint as an overgrown Roman road, the grassed carriageway cut an improbably straight line along the flank of the ridge; hummocks of greenery stood at intervals on either side, igloos with clusters of daffodils around them, the alien presence of a figtree; a dead sulky reared its shafts in a burlesque threat against intrusion, causing the visitors to hesitate, alert for evidence of more recent habitation, seeing only the ghost of a town as it lay printed in the green dusk washed across the clearing; and the question unspoken, what town? and why like some prehistoric relic, a mere ten or fifteen miles by the crow from their own safe, dull, unsuspecting homes?
They would camp here, why not, filled as the place was with departed times. The ruin had knowledge of its own; the deepest secrets of civilization set out in the symmetry of streets, the parallels, right angles, the centrality of large sites, the defensive eminence of location. You could fill your lungs with the perfume of a place once loved, while the eye lingered on its regrets. In a letter Lance wrote his girlfriend in Sydney he put: you could feel the people really lived there.
The men did not build a fire, nor did they talk. The party had fragmented, only the twins went together. Bill Swan who had a sense of living presences, a nose for ghosts as his grandfather put it, was first to carry his pack and sleepingbag in search of a place to lie down and think and sleep … wandering, a solitary black shape in the cloud-diffused moonlight, a figure in quest of Beauty or Truth or Honour or some such medieval Dignity; and attaining the stature of a courageous man, the character of the pitiful.
For Tony McTaggart the night journey into this vanished community was a time of apprehension, not because of the lovable commonplace of night, nor the unfamiliar surroundings, nor being alone: no, he sensed an aura of snake around, and he had never been wrong about a snake, perhaps a premonition that he and the dead town were destined to be linked; so he walked the perimeter of this lost refuge with a knife in the small of his back, scrotum painfully tight… the body ready for an emergency, he held on to the coins in his pocket.
Dave the wrestler lay in his sleepingbag fingering his body, exploring the smooth muscles of his arms and hairless thighs, rubbing, kneading at his groin, gazing half-blind, his own warm skin setting up shivers of pleasure and delicate strokes, his back beginning to arch, the ridges of his abdomen like flat river stones under his hand, loneliness glaring down on him from empty space, hand flicking at his penis, the bow of his spine taut, the arrow poised; then the need for love being stifled by that warm private liquid across his belly, while he sensed the mooning whites of his brother’s eyes.
Billy was shocked to recognize old McAloon’s dead face high up there sliding backwards after that nerve-hammering bang; the sky a blackened timber ceiling with knotholes, the moon’s mouth gaping in toothless funk at seeing Dave and himself, the veiny eyes, the shocking angle of the face tilted up, with the rifle jammed between chairback and tabletop before it sprang free of his grasp and bounced clattering on the rammed earth slab … not to forget the soles of his bare feet, themselves dead moons in their own right, the pale dead balls of his feet with their tidemarks and craters, never seen before, things mystical.
Lance had a girlfriend in Sydney and he kept her a secret, she hated touching him, frightened by his size and immaturity and wasn’t keen on having him maul her either, but for the sake of knowledge allowed him now and then the ration of a hurried fuck, during which she would whisper: hurry up, hurry, somebody might come, somebody’s there, oh Lance have you done it yet? and she was a little ashamed to be three years older than him, as if this meant something she’d have to live with; Lance smelt the memories in this abandoned town, smelt the record of despair and resilience.
Tony McTaggart willed himself in his waking dream to face the sun suddenly there, let it blaze in, the lining of his skull a limitless shining blot of gold, but then he screwed his eyes shut in pain, conceding to his shame as acolyte that the sun had failed him, that it too was a face, resting there above the horizon, what’s more it was a particular face, Mr Ping, and Tony McTaggart was not responding as himself, for Mr Ping appeared to be more than just an employer, a figure of godlike power and presence risen from the east: Tony was the first asleep.
Once upon a time nine inches of rain fell in one hour. The ferocity of water raged down from the higher slopes of the mountain and carried away live goats, overturned sulkies, silted up machinery, broke one paddlewheel of the crusher, poured and trickled into the ill-sealed homes people had made, set up such a roar on bark roofs that the town dogs began howling in unison, and ducks cowered in fear looking up sideways as they do when eagles are about; so the entire population went with picks and spades to dig the stormdrain trench where the Maggot now lay
dry and sleepless.
The long voyage to New South Wales transformed the known world: after three months at sea the shape of a hill was reduced to a quibble of oil-paint on canvas, the taste of fresh water a craving vicious in its liberty from moral control, conversation with a stranger a forgotten art, the elementary act of walking had become perverted to a grotesque dance compensating for the dipping, swaying deck; even the basic appetite for food simplified its reactions to distinguishing between salted meat and salted fish (apart from that brief shock, of Cape oranges).
Pete lay floating in moonshine, illusions playing unwanted games with his imagination: he had seen the film 2001, so right now his capsule spun headlong among the stars, vast reaches of space hurtling past, cleft by his face, new forces threw things out of known relationships, they were beyond him to think out … he worked his capsule sideways and lay gazing at himself as someone else, unable to believe the convention that this was his brother Dave engaged glassily in some ecstasy, independent unlike a miror reflection, but as intimate as a shadow.
Without warning the twins faced each other, abandoned their dreams, confronting a face feline and androgynous, brutal and delicate, clean eyes, crisply outlined and bearing a brilliant moon floating on the dark surface, lips parted giving a hint of tooth, lean hollow cheeks … as they lay, the eyes beautiful as objects, but set like boxers’ eyes, wary, aggressive: so the twins lay alert, few cruelties could be put past the man with such a face, hideously thrilling animal despite its feminine fineness, what could be more male than the set jaw, the wolf eyes among the lashes?
Bill Swan sat up to assure himself of where he was, he stared gratefully at the soft igloos of soil and timber, at the vines and grasses growing over them, at the sulky down the way raising its frail antennae at the soft wash of moonlight edging the flat granite slab under him, while he reached one arm out into the cold and allowed his fingers to trace the neat incisions, so that above his head they read the letters IN LOVING MEMORY OF ALBERT SWAN DIED 18th NOVEMBER 1894 and at the right side of his chest OUR BELO and at the left side ND FATHER.
Seven
It was a Sunday morning and nothing had happened; the known world restored. Already the mist was busy creating a forest and trying out its ideas of a mountain. The six young men were up early, raucous, cheerful as they packed their sleepingbags and boiled a couple of billies for tea, the steam mingling with camouflaged air. Talk ranged over yesterday’s experience and they agreed not to waste today scavenging leftovers from worked-out mines, the purpose was to find clues to the Golden Fleece, the black motherlode of gold. Sixty years of bushfires might well have laid bare what was previously hidden. Or perhaps converging wallaby tracks would lead them there. Or the big rains of 1952 could have washed the soil from a seam of quartz once covered up, or a landslide revealed it.
This, at least, was the way they talked. Yet being on the spot you found such hopes hard to credit now the mist had finished its work and dispersed, the mountain towering massively impersonal, the bush so dense, the unexplored areas dominant. Where could you begin? How could you survive?
Except for Tony. Since yesterday Tony was floating, the mountain a giant wave buoying him up. And he knew that Billy sank, shrivelled to a solid weight, cousin to the rock he sat on.
– Worthwhile for what we’ve seen already, Lance the tourist suggested, ready to leave and trying not to think of the corpse among things seen.
– Come on you piker, Maggot challenged him. There’s hundreds more places to look.
And Tony loved him for it. Naturally he had a softness for Maggot, Maggot being the one who had ideas and made things add up. But this support he had not anticipated. The mines called him.
– I reckon we’re going to have our work cut out getting the truck home by nightfall, Lance grumbled.
– Can’t be more than twelve miles at most. Downhill! Dave sneered because nobody was going to talk him out of becoming a millionaire.
They set off to the creek with plates and mugs to be washed, their boots kicking at stones, their strong bodies breasting the undergrowth, whistling shrilly and discordantly among the trees.
– Well mates, Maggot declared as he sluiced his plate in cold swirling water. This’ll be our last expedition together in any case.
– The last, Lance confirmed, awkward in his haircut, his cheerful shirt, with his knowledge of judo, already out of place as a plainclothes policeman.
The others busied themselves with cleaning. Even those who enjoyed planning the future didn’t talk about it now. Words were not their way in a case like this. There were pitfalls in words; they might find themselves having to talk about friendship, they might even thank one another for something, or enter the treacherous waters of putting a name to affection. No. Instead, they stood, flicked the drops from glistening fingers, and sauntered back, outlaw fashion, the way they’d come, whistling among those ghosts of a forgotten security, the grassy hummocks and ditches, foundations and streets put there by ancestors. And packed up.
So they pressed on, touched by yesterday’s mood, a whole generation, the youth of Whitey’s Fall, and all males. This was the death of Whitey’s without a doubt. These young men going away for careers. There’d be no youth coming in to take their place. Outsiders never understood the district, they wouldn’t fit in even if they wanted to; Yalgoona people spoke of it as the ends of the earth. Nothing could be done about this. Not since they were small lads screaming after the mystery of what girls were did it have to be thought about. You couldn’t explain it. The flower of Whitey’s Fall. The last flowering, the curse of the male child. And so many boys already gone away before them: the three weedy McTaggarts, John, Ross and Brendan, the blond Buddalls and their cousins the dark Buddalls (dark because their mother was a McAloon), Stan, Ray, Kewie, as well as their poor in-laws who lived in the timberyard shack, Greg, Ricky, Jack, Cec and Les (Maggot’s bullying half-brothers), all had gone now. That plague of males migrated, carting off their parents too. Opportunity lured them to Goulburn and Bathurst, to Tamworth and Wollongong and even to Eden. But they left their grandparents and great-grandparents behind. They said they’d come back someday to visit. But sorry as you were to see them go, they weren’t wanted in their Holdens, flaunting their new aimlessness, their cash, their tales of wall-to-wall, hot-and-cold, steel radials, their soggy hands, their hardness softening down so in a horrible way they’d become great hairy kids, and their skins pale as if they’d been sick a long time and indoors under the mosquito nets breathing balsams that steamed your pores open. Once they went away they weren’t wanted back. You saw enough of casual visitors from the towns as it was, no week went by without at least one intruding car, and the only local who knew how to handle them was Felicia Brinsmead, old crow, madbag Brinso, hairbag the witch, who gave them the evil once-over, showed them the dead mice among her lollies, kissed the cat, told them their business, switched on a fake expression and packed them on their way glad to get out of the place uncontaminated.
– Yes this is the last time together Lance, Tony drawled with equanimity, recalling his pang of surprise when he felt the vigour of that young man’s body, upsetting everything you could depend on, for a Lang who’d always been one of the younger kids to toss him on the ground. Within a couple of weeks Lance’d be gone, so would Maggot, and the twins with their little ones. Let them go. Bill would stay, so what the hell.
– When we were at school, Tony continued eventually. There were twenty-two of us. Remember that? And all blokes. He folded his big arms and inspected the arms, their matting of blond hairs.
– There’ll be you and me left mate, Billy contributed without expression, looking over to where the forest marched steeply downhill into a lake of blue air.
As they collected their gear from round the fire and headed back to the Bedford, Bill Swan wasn’t thinking of those twenty-one other schoolboys, no. Cut into the foot of that grave, he’d found a riddle Fear not, tis only I. We’re all just relations, he realiz
ed bitterly. He watched Maggot’s back; the jaunty angle of his disreputable hat, the scruff of bright ginger hair sticking out from under it. Yes, he wished Maggot would stay. He wanted to tell Maggot how much he would miss him.
– Get a move on, short-arse, he shouted.
– Up you, you conshie, Maggot replied happily.
The others grinned with relief from their haunted thoughts of the hermit’s death, and what he might have feared, the scorn of that policeman leaning out under his flashing blue light to say, oh Kel is it, Kel McAloon the dirty scab? The corpse would not forgive, lying on the floor with his mouth sour and pulled to one side, his eyes staring at nothing so you had to check for yourself. The resistance of the mountain itself making you unwelcome, the weather brooding in sympathy, cloud banking up again and compacting, light rain beginning to set in.
– Shit. This could ruin everything, Billy foresaw.
Near where they left the Bedford, they discovered a pair of gateposts and the relics of a fence leading north and south.
– There’s writing on the post, Dave said. T W something something TEY.
– T. Whitey.
– Might be nothing there.
The house was so hidden behind a rocky bluff they didn’t spot it till they turned to go back. It was a slab hut with some of the roof still on and most of the walls. Wild clematis wandered among the rafters and the chimney spouted a dense cloud of leaves where a young tree had grown slender and straight in the fireplace, the window trembled alive with light, the garden was scattered with animal droppings.
They clustered in the house, trod rustling across the floor now deep in grass and weeds. The walls, spongy with plants and fungus, in any other country would call to mind enchantments, kidnapped children, ancient practices subversive as they were innocent, unspeakable appetites and a dislocation of the natural order.
