She puts the steaming pot on the brochures in a showy spill of tea and goes for cups. She points backhanded at the brochures without looking at them. Them you can keep,’ she tells me. ‘They’ve been delivered to me every known way already before they thought of you … the fruit-of-my-loins way.’
‘Talking about the fruit of your loins, how’s that bad apple Adrian?’ I ask.
She sits across the formica from me and looks up high on the wall about Adrian and smiles a smile that is probably serene. Adrian never was the bad apple, if that’s your little joke. He was always caring … like some others weren’t. And he’s nearly a saint now. Doing what he does for the dead of his personal acquaintance and making the necessary arrangements for them like he does. He’s a rock so steady in that whole tragedy. Only thing that keeps it running off the rails entirely. It’s a credit to the Good Lord he made someone like Adrian for a situation like Tinburra.’
Adrian was the wild son. Adrian was physical, Dad said. Adrian bit and tore and kicked and punched at his contemporaries until he was feared by them all and hated by their parents. Until a group of parents got posse-shaped one summer and demanded action. And Adrian was sat down by Dad and Mum and Sergeant Dooley of the Hannah police and questioned about his physical tendencies and advised as to where they would likely lead, which was going toe-to-toe with Maoris in maximum security. What came out of the meeting was that Adrian had no special desire to vent all his pent-up energies and aggressions in an illegal manner. Admitted he’d be just as happy to vent his energies and his aggressions legally. So he left school that term and joined the police to become what his friends who’d stayed at school called a legitimised thug.
‘He’s still the only cop up there?’ I ask.
‘’Course he is,’ she tells me. Aren’t many could do it. That’s why Our Father made Adrian for the task.’ She picks up her cup and runs her tongue around the gold on its rim.
It’s all I can do to resist asking why she thinks it is Our Father would make a situation like Tinburra for Adrian to be a steady rock in in the first place. Maybe Our Father set up the whole cancerous tragedy, the whole carcinogenic trap, for Adrian to prove his worth in. Maybe Our Father said to Jesus, ‘Now look here, Jesus, I know asbestosis is a tough call and I know mesothelioma is a debilitating bitch but look at that young man there. I believe he’s made of the right stuff and just needs surrounding with innocent death to be able to prove himself. A young man like that needs opportunity. And if you don’t give me any grief on this I’ll let the Americans find those thousands of P.O.W.s we’ve been holding in Nam all these decades. Is it a deal, Son?’ Something like that.
She’s still talking about Adrian. Adrian has a strong ignore for the evil working on him up there in Tinburra. Like I have here. He phones me regular to see how I’m going.’ She takes a sip of tea that fogs her glasses. ‘Never delivered any adverts to me for old people’s homes, though. Never done that.’ She wants to cut through whatever beat-round-the-bush niceties I can manage and get down to business.
‘Mum, they can force you out without stuffing around worrying about your future you know. They own the house. The land will soon be aboriginal again. The law says they’re right. They don’t owe you a comfortable old age, but if you go now they’ll give you one.’
‘None they could give would be comfortable, Jack. My comfort is here. With Frank and with dear Molly. And as far as force … they can’t force me anywhere. If they could force me they wouldn’t be using what they probably thought was a sly way like you to shift me. She gives a bug-eyed stare with her chin high and takes a noisy tea slurp. Defiant.
I go to her humming round-shouldered fridge and open it. I hear her snort a warning that I’m not the type of close mother-loved son who can wander in and open the maternal fridge at will. In there everything is canned, two of them being VB. I take one out and open it and drink, feeling it go right the way down into my empty stomach. It’s stale on the way to rancid which shows the years since a beer-drinker has been in the house. Mad old recluse even when the town was alive. But I’m to the stage where even near-rancid beer is good. I like to think it tastes vintage or German. Just another step in the brewing process.
‘They can’t force me,’ she says. ‘Because of what they think they know about my heart. They think I’m too weak to be pushed around. To be forcibly evicted. And I go right on letting them think it. Imagine their publicity problem if my heart was to give out during eviction. And my Frank once a long-term employee of theirs. Imagine the headlines.’ She holds her hands up, thumbs inward, fingers fanned out showing banner headlines. But she can’t seem to think of any.
‘Who do you think’s going to write the headlines?’ I ask her. ‘You’re about a thousand miles from anyone who gives a shit.’
‘Not so, Jack. Not so at all,’ she tells me. ‘There’s a journalist camped out there in the Fortescue River covering the whole town-closing theme. Has a particular interest in me. Comes to see me every few days. Lovely young man, though he’s fat as butter. He listened to a whole Reverend Roberts sermon on Banking Sins And Sins of State with me one night. Was held by what he heard. I believe he’s smart. He has his own satellite dish right on his caravan to file stories straight in to his newspaper. Says he’ll report their use of me any way it happens.’
She nods, smiles, comforted by this fat-as-butter presence with the technological edge camped out in a dry river waiting for the company to make its move. She tells me she’ll be blowed if he couldn’t make the whole thing very moving indeed. Has a way with words, she says. And she goes into her dingbat-serenity smile again looking up to where the wall meets the ceiling, thinking what a tragedy he’ll be able to blow her whole sorry circumstance into with his way with words.
‘Water,’ I tell her. ‘If they can’t evict you they can cut off your water. Or if not actually cut it off then dwindle it down to where your garden will die. Your roses … just dead sticks.’
Her hands go to her teacup and she takes hold of it and her knuckles and fingertips fade white as she pushes it into the table and levers herself out of her chair with it. She comes to the window above the draining board where I’m sitting and stares out at the roses. Behind them is a chain-link fence and beyond that now is a thousand-kilometre run of nothing human to the Indian Ocean. The sorrow in her eyes is bugged big by her glasses.
‘“To they who repeat the Word of God in prayer be not their sacred things coveted by tyrants.” That’s from Quincy Roberts. He says not a flower dies that is truly loved by man and through man by God,’ she tells me. The lower curves of her lenses are holding new-moon catchments of tears against her cheeks.
I want to ask her how it is with the whole fucking Sahara desert getting bigger each year and marching over the whole Godmade gamut of floral things in its way and marching over the people in its way too that Quincy Roberts pulls off this leap of logic that protects her roses. But I don’t ask her. Because I figure she hasn’t got an answer but has just got some abuse for me for asking the question and has just got more tears after that in place of the answer she hasn’t got.
‘I love those roses for the path they provide to Frank and to dear Molly. Love them for the message they send to me that Frank and dear Molly are waiting,’ she tells me. ‘My love of those roses is their protection. The Lord’s love of me is mine.’ She has her chin jutted high at the window, at the run of red landscape, at whatever else is out there that might threaten an elderly woman and what she holds sacred.
I don’t know what’s happened here. Last time I saw her she was a straight up and down two-dollars-in-the-plate Church of Englander. For an hour every Sunday she’d sing like a three-tenor. Now she’s getting it on the airwaves from the Philippines in a quavering American accent. Maybe because the Church of England has been loaded-low and driven south on the back of a Mack. Or maybe the C of E lost its buzz before that and maybe she’s needed the whole drug maxed-up outrageous and potent for a while now to get what she us
ed to get from a few simple hymns and a lesson.
There are five rose bushes out there. Tall and rank and dark-leafed from her not having heart enough to prune them hard for maximum floral output. But the few roses that are blooming are double-take outrageous for their colour and size. A red that children from all over town came to look at, not believing such colour existed outside Coke and beer ads. Sometimes they’d run the gauntlet of rake-swing and dry-voiced God-curse to pluck one for a dare or for show-and-tell. And sometimes they’d run the gauntlet of rake-swing and God-curse to pluck one for the rake-swing and God-curse themselves.
‘When they bloom every year it’s your father’s message to me. And it’s Molly’s message to me. It’s him and it’s her. With a beautiful sign held aloft telling me they’re waiting,’ she says.
I take a drink of stale beer and start fondling a porcelain Jesus off the window sill. He also comes from the Philippines. He’s sporting a crown of thorns as fat as a donut. With a foolish smile on his face like a man who had a two-kilo donut hidden about his person would have.
‘If they were to cut off my water and kill those roses it’s probably still a story for my friend Charles,’ she tells me. ‘He has his ways. He could make it seen they’d killed something sacred.’ I put the donut-crowned Jesus back in his dust-free ring on the window sill. Drink some beer. Watch her watch the roses. I count a total of only twenty-seven on all five bushes. Not much of a gesture from the old man and Molly if it is him and her holding them aloft in their boast of continuing love.
2
Roses
I open the gift of Spanish champagne and pour us both an unbreakable glass full and hold my unbreakable glass high in a toast and say, ‘Well … champagne,’ and my mother holds hers out just a little and up just a little and says, ‘Yes … champagne.’
We eat a dinner of canned spaghetti on toast and a thawed Sara Lee Blueberry Shortcake while I surreptitiously dwindle Quincy Roberts. He’s boasting out of the last of the bakelite radios about how Fidel, a shrill nine-year-old with about two dozen English words and no parents, has found God. ‘God has enrich my live,’ Fidel says. Quincy Roberts compares him to Columbus in the finding and discovery stakes. Because where the great navigator did it with a level of ignorance and rustic brass equipment that made coming up with the Americas all the more amazing, so Fidel found the Lord after picking rubbish off Smoky Mountain to keep himself alive these past five years. Found God with only that terrible experience of life to guide him. What navigation.
What a little fucking theological Columbus this Fidel is. I have a vision of him rooting around barefoot for tin and plastic on his mound of bacteria and broken glass. Up pulls a white man in a white, chauffeured Cadillac with spare room on its back seat and tells one-and-all he’s working for the Almighty. Hands up who couldn’t navigate a little discovery of God to get on that back seat.
Whenever my mother goes for the fridge or the kettle or the stove I reach back and take hold of the bakelite volume control and dwindle Quincy Roberts by another degree. By the time we’re into the blueberry shortcake he’s an international priest making no more noise than a bottled mosquito.
She stares at me through the meal. Wanting me to speak. Drinking the champagne slowly while the bursting bubbles spot her glasses. Finally she asks me what it is I actually do in Victoria. Not because she wants to know what I do, but because she wants to know how I live with myself. I tell her about Jean and me and how we live by the sea with all Jean’s money. ‘In sin, in luxury, in sloth,’ I confess.
‘All fairly orthodox, apart from the luxury,’ she says. She purses her lips at me and stares. Doesn’t stare and doesn’t purse her lips for the life of sin or for the life of sloth or for the luxury but for the same old reason. Because I’m deaf to commandment one.
‘I sell real estate now,’ I tell her. ‘Beach houses.’
‘Beach houses,’ she tells me back. ‘Beach houses,’ she tells herself.
The sun goes down and the iron of the land starts to pulse heat into the cooling air. The noise of machines dismantling buildings stops with a last truck working up through eight gears out the road south. Sometimes raised voices drift to us.
She takes the warm dregs of the tea out to pour on the roses. I watch out the window as she squeezes her bony hand into the top of the teapot and scrapes the tea-leaves out with her bent fingers and spreads them around the base of a rose bush as mulch. ‘They know about Molly’s ashes and Frank’s ashes,’ she tells me in through the flywire. ‘I didn’t tell them, but they know.
‘They sent a woman horticultural engineer round,’ she says. ‘Girl with a man’s haircut that didn’t do anything for her. She pulled at their leaves and pulled at their trunks … without asking if she could, I might add. She says they’ve got good roots. And went ahead and said to me she’s eighty-five per cent absolutely certain they’re relocatable. Maybe can be planted in a more attractive star pattern. Down south somewhere. With a nice pebble-mix border and a drip system to water them.’
‘So?’ I ask. ‘You weren’t happy with the odds?’
‘Not happy. No. I told her there are some things that aren’t relocatable. Some things are a hundred per cent absolutely certain unrelocatable. I told her that some things didn’t look good in a star pattern and some things couldn’t survive in a pebble-mix border. I think I might have even told her to let her hair grow.’
For a time they weren’t in love – my father, who is the ashes that make the roses sacred now, and my mother, who waters them. But his diagnosis woke them up to the fact they weren’t in love. And his diagnosis put them in love again. Her love for him got stronger the closer he got to death. She set about proving that love with care. She went from telling him, when he came home drunk in greased overalls, to unfreeze his own dinner because she was off to bingo at the church hall with the girls, to the Japanese art-meals she took all day over after he was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Meals that were delicate and tiny and bright like lures to bring some rare species of fish to the surface of a mountain stream.
Then there was the blended stuff of his later, non-verbal stages she made for the syringe that was pump-driven through the night into his intestines. She’d take hours over that. She’d add extra pinches of herb and mineral-supplement to the syringe to make it the perfect food for life. Working hard with the Bamix to blend it down to magic. Sometimes adding ten mils of vodka to prove he could still do the things men do.
She hasn’t stopped with his death. She’s still feeding him. Has taken it beyond death. Is out there now pinching tea-leaves onto the roses. And in the morning will rise early and hunt aphids and smear white oil onto their trunks and tighten the shade-cloth and spoon subtle fertilisers and composts into the soil.
I lie in my old bed in Adrian’s and my old room. The room of my boyhood nights. Even air travel, seven-eighths of a bottle of champagne and two rancid cans is not enough to put me to sleep in this room. So I lie there and light up a fifty-fifty marijuana cigarette, which is a name my father and I got for joints from my headmaster the day I was caught smoking one at high school and was called into his office where he was pacing in his short sleeves and shorts and long white socks and thin moustache. And my father was sitting smoking a Lucky Strike, wearing overalls covered in the thick grease that lubricates giant machines, and had been called in from the mine and didn’t like it. Had made a joke to my headmaster about how, on first inspection, I still seemed to have all my limbs and so what was the big deal here? Had told my headmaster, ‘I got man-hours disappearing on me back at the Ore Truck Workshop.’ And my headmaster had told me, ‘Go on, tell your father, lad.’ And when I didn’t speak had told my father himself how I’d been caught smoking a fifty-fifty marijuana cigarette.
‘Fifty-fifty marijuana?’ my father asked. My headmaster nodded with his chin low. ‘Fifty-fifty marijuana?’ he asked again.
‘I’m afraid so,’ my headmaster said. The lad tried to swallow it, but I made him spit it
up. Fifty-fifty marijuana all right.’
‘So … what was the other half?’ my father asked. And he looked down at my headmaster’s long white socks. Stared right at them. Blew out a Lucky Struck breath that boiled up around them. Flat-out disgusted that this is the sort of thing the educators of the young saw fit to get themselves up in these days. ‘Must’ve been some wild and dangerous shit to get a man emergency-paged at work about … this other fifty per cent,’ he told my headmaster.
When I’ve smoked my fifty-fifty marijuana cigarette I stub it on the flywire screen purchased in the run on flywire of 1972, when the reservoir was completed and was filled by cyclone Clarice and our water no longer came up from the aquifers and mosquitoes came into the area for the first time. The flywire isn’t needed any more because the reservoir is blown and flowed out over the desert and sunk into the desert and vaporised up off the desert and the mosquitoes are relocated like the men and like the women and like the children they banged themselves into the flywire for.
3
Molly
What wakes me is footsteps crept along the hall into Molly’s room. Darkness and loose floorboards making them loud. A run of wardrobe door on ball-bearings in there. The wood-screech of thin ply under moving weight.
Then just the house slow-cracking in the heat leak of early morning again. And she’s settled and still in Molly’s wardrobe in the dark.
During the day her religion has her too lunatic for grief. She’s an automatic smile at any mention of Molly during the daylight hours. Drops straight away stoned and nodding into fundamentalist grin. Her eyes glaze with a picture of Molly in that serene place, with her father now, as is God’s will, probably laughing at his stupid little jokes and telling him to be patient as he taps his foot and huffs and puffs and telling him Mum’ll get here when she gets here.
Silences Long Gone Page 3
