But at night her religion wears off and she comes sober into grief. Comes with her grief into Molly’s wardrobe.
*
Back in that night sixteen years ago when Molly died I was on this same bed. On my knees looking out through the screen at the houses across the street. Them and their claret ashes silhouette against an electric sky. The night smelling of mosquito coil, a smell still new enough to our town to be exotic because the reservoir was new and mosquitoes were new along with it.
I can hear Molly’s voice among twenty or so others. All of them party-falsetto in the back yard of the Guthries’ house opposite. Me desperately wanting to be there. Jealous of their three extra years. The girls in puberty’s midst. The boys on its lower edge. I’m trying to make out what they’re saying. The mystery of what they’ve become to each other is a dull voyeur’s ache in me, keeping me awake at the window. There is new lust over there. They’ve stolen some rum, it turns out later.
I’m at the window a probable long time before the high voices of Robert Shapard and Molly break out of the party and into my sleep and I’m then eyes open, surprised I’m still there, arms on sill, chin on arms, looking into the night at the sounds of the party.
Robert Shapard is a boy I’ve known for a few weeks. He leaves his mates at lunchtime and enters the junior section of school to find me, making me something of a celebrity there. He always has a Crunchie and he breaks it in half and lets me choose the half I want. I’m in awe and choose small. Then he starts asking about Molly. Wanting me to tell Molly-around-the-house stories. And asking do-you-think-she-likes-me questions that are too subtly put for me ever to understand and to answer. And asking does she ever leave the bathroom door open when she’s showering. No, I tell him sadly.
This night Molly is wearing a first bra she’s been forced into by Mum being outraged at her high-nipple show through her athletics singlet in the conditioned air of the Commonwealth Bank where Mum was behind the counter as a teller. And by Mum deciding it is time Molly is introduced to the brassiere and strolling over to Wendy’s Women’s Gear during her smoko and buying what Wendy called a training bra.
Molly and Mum have a bra fight that rolls all through the house. Mum is pro bra. Molly is violently anti-bra, and especially this demeaning beige creation, she calls it. Mum calls Molly pig-headed and a budding trollop and Molly calls Mum disgusting and tells her piss-off while Dad hides in the shed pretending to straighten the front wheel of my bike and I hide in ‘Hogan’s Heroes’ pretending to be a shot-down American airman of 1944.
Them locked in battle. Molly yelling, ‘Just leave me alone, Mum. Will you just leave me alone. Don’t be gross. There’s no way.’ Mum yelling back, ‘There’s a way all right, my dear. There’s a way if you want to go to this party tonight.’ The compromise finally being a black linen blouse that belongs to Mum and is apparently pretty foxy but will still hide the bra completely and that she will lend to Molly for this night only.
So. Molly at a party for the first time in two pieces of underclothing. Embarrassed as he’ll but carrying some new femme clout all the same.
And now their voices waking me. Robert Shapard and Molly. In chase. Bra discovered and bra to be conquered. Him yelling, Twang. Twang. Twang.’ And laughing. Her laughing as well and shouting, ‘Piss off. Piss off.’
Coming toward me at a run into the quick headlit stretch of road in front of an Ore Truck Workshop ute. Bra snapper chasing bra snappee into the hardening, narrowing light.
Him with a leer of first bra-touch hope on his face. Her laughing and running. Zigging and zagging. Keeping him close behind her. Not leaving him for dead like she could. Looking back. Keeping him close. Dragging him on with proximity and with laughter. This just registering as sexy with the young me before the quietly rubbering tyres of the Ore Truck Workshop ute go gravel-roar into hard-braked driver-panic and terror flinches deep into Molly’s face.
The light sliding past Robert Shapard. But her being thrown up out of it with an actual car crash noise. A boom of fast-bent metal and a spread of glass.
The party hushes and freezes and the Rolling Stones are suddenly loud solo into ‘Miss You’. And they’re asking, Whatsa matter, man? And they’re going to come around with some Puerto Rican girls that are just dying to meet you, they’re going to bring a case of wine … and my thirteen-year-old sister has made an actual car crash noise with just her muscle and just her bone and just her horrified face. Has hushed and horrified and frozen everyone within earshot apart from Mick Jagger who sings on oblivious, mock-American, cool and unmolested by the sound.
What follows is a whole opera of mourning. Sharp and insane with a high asylum soundtrack at first. Then deep and rhythmic and sad-dignified like a caged elephant swaying side-to-side. Until, months later, it’s just glass-eyed stare. Mourning that may, in the end, be habit.
Mourning spread town-wide at first in a half-holiday funeral. But after that half-day only the driver, and Robert Shapard and family, and our family, and Molly’s friends are mourning.
BBK erects a small cross and lays a small wreath outside our house where the skid marks dwindle into the spray of glass which gets called a ghoulish reminder by Dad and gets swept up then by two men in khaki overalls.
The funeral is in Hannah. After it Mum and Dad leave me and Adrian with Val and Ron Keszig and fly down to Perth alone with Molly in a casket. She gets burnt down there and flown back up in an urn. Hannah doesn’t have a cemetery. Hannah is for iron-mining. Hannah is designated temporary, and the deal with the Kunimara people is that we don’t bury our dead here and make it permanent.
But the morning after they arrive back from Perth I go into the kitchen for breakfast and I’m pulled up short of the fridge by the smell of death coming in the back door. I exit that squeak of flywire and I find Mum in the garden on her knees with her trowel poised and five small rose bushes stood in line in black plastic pots. She’s paced them out equidistant and is digging Dynamic Lifter into her five selected sites. Molly’s ashes sit in the shade up against the house.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask her.
‘Gardening,’ she tells me out from under the wide brim of her straw gardening hat. But I know she’s more than gardening. She’s wielding the trowel and sprinkling the Dynamic Lifter with slow hands and with love and with tears. She’s burying.
The driver of the ute moves back to Auckland with a three-hundred-thousand-dollar trauma payout muscled out of the company by the AWU. The Robert Shapards move to Perth, where he can start his puberty again without the stigma of lethal bra-snappery. His father is a geologist but takes a job as a storeman to get Robert free.
Adrian and I forget her pretty quickly. Not deliberately. Our minds just let her go by reflex … because she’s hurting us too much. Like you’d drop a hot saucepan. We get happy again.
And the gap in Molly’s circle of friends closes. Some of them wear remembrance rings that help them forget.
Then it’s just Mum and Dad. Dad keeps the pendulous elephant-sway of mental pain. Until, like any pendulum, it works down over time to a point of stillness and his pain is no longer visible to us.
But for a while I know Mum is insane. That insanity is a tireless capacity to replay tragedy cranked up zenith-high. That the gravel-roar of driver-panic plays on in her head thousands of kilometres long in a hope it may end some other way.
Her every day telling Dad she called Molly a budding trollop. Practically begging him to tell her back that it wasn’t her fault. Which he always does by telling her, ‘Belle, Belle, Belle. Events conspired is all. Events just fuckingwell conspired.’ Which she never believes and which she slits her eyes at him about like he’s a liar and like he won’t face up to the horrible truth … which is her, coercing Molly into that bra, making her prey.
She starts to read the Bible out loud to herself in their bedroom. Takes it up at any hour of the day and her voice gets low and sorrowful and comes to us in hum through our shitty ply walls into the living r
oom, to me and to Adrian and to Dad. And we try to ignore it with ‘Get Smart’ or try to ignore it with the cricket or try to ignore it just by not looking at each other but always we can’t ignore it in the end and Dad looks at the wall below the picture of the two women with parasols dressing a little girl in Chinese costume for a fancy dress party where the hum of Bible is centred and says just at the wall and just at the idea of a grieving Mum, ‘Church’d be a fuck of a small club without Death to sign up members.’
Her mourning is sixteen years old now. Older than Molly ever got. It’s shrunk to short periods of black captivity in that wardrobe. In there with hung dresses and shirts and jeans still holding Molly’s shape. Athletic gear crumpled in the corner that never got to the laundry and that must hold the essence of that last Friday’s hundred metres final. Trying to get back to Molly by the olfactory route. A real and organic route a photo can’t be. Smell taking her back like nothing else can. A reek of ownchild. Making Molly burn in vision on that wardrobe wall. Skinny-beautiful sprint queen in a too-big singlet and a sports-day scowl.
I stand at the door of Molly’s room listening to the creak of my mother’s breathing in there. Her long nasal inhalations back to Molly. I listen for minutes before I go back and sit on my childhood bed. The night is drawing cracks from the walls, sucking heat from the house. I’m tempted to drum my hands on the wall. Softly, like a West Indian on a steel drum in stoned fugue. Calling her out of there.
But in the morning she’s got to be able to deny she was in there. So I sit still, listening. What the men relocating this town can’t relocate is the spot where Molly died. Which is a happened fact in space and time.
4
Adrian the Catalyst
The dawn air holds the trick of all those childhood mornings. It’s a whole new atmosphere chilled like liquor to make you drunk into believing in freedom. Into running at the horizon. Into hunting wild cats out there beyond town outskirts with a sixty-pound glass-beech composite bow that can pump an arrow through them so clean they don’t even lose balance until the wound takes the blood from their brain. Into going for a far boulder to get it between you and town and into stripping naked and masturbating lying in cool sand, avoiding the sharpness of spinifex, thinking of girls seen through a leadlight Jesus foot. Flushed strong with the incredible taboo truth, just learned, that they want what you want.
Early morning air, freeing desert kids into getting all the kill-fuck appetites off their bones before they’re sentenced by the sun into spaces air-conditioned and civilised down to twenty-four degrees. Into sitting-rooms and into living rooms and into school rooms and into supermarkets and offices and cars and kitchens filled and controlled with air-con hum. And not a thing moves overland that isn’t air-conditioned or evolved against the heat. And you’re trapped again.
So I’m up in dawn and out walking with habit. I walk through the scrub on the outskirts of town. The sky is the deep blue of early. Oil drums lie everywhere. Plastic bags. Sunfade stubbies. Old tyres leaking rusted wire. A galah flock lifts in mosaic scream out of its search for seed in the carpet of everlasting daisies in front of me. Screams up from its hundred throats and rolls in tight on itself, cutting and wheeling and looping around a point as the whole tumbles north, fading, then turning, screechbuilding toward me and resettling and silencing into seed-search ahead of me. I put it up into scream again when I’m nearing the site-camp and it unravels into a straight flight west.
When I walk in among the site-vans there are half a dozen men standing, post-breakfast smoking, galah-warned and waiting for me. Dressed in company-issue khaki shorts and shirts. A smoke and a shit between breakfast and their machines.
‘Morning,’ I say. They morning me back. A Maori in a white hardhat with ORA on it in worn texta holds out a packet of Holiday low-tar at me. Big man, weak cigarettes, sign of times. There’s a tattoo on his forearm that looks like one of Dali’s limp clocks. Underneath it is a smudge that was probably a woman’s name but is shined and burned illegible by cigarettes.
‘Got my own, thanks,’ I tell him. I take out a Lucky Strike and light it. ‘Like one?’ I ask.
Ora takes one and lights up and drags and says, ‘Shit, eh,’ holding it up and looking at it wide-eyed for its nicotine bite.
‘You blokes start early,’ I say. They stare at me the way men who work hard stare at men who don’t.
‘Triple time for a sparrow’s fart start,’ a short man with a Scottish accent tells me. ‘We’re gettin’ in as much triple time as we can before who knows how long of no fuckin’ time at all.’ He’s talking about them being close to the end of their working lives for the company that’s employed them so long.
‘Not no time, Mac,’ says the man next to him. ‘Superannuated time. Beer-pot and suntan-growing time. Casting sardines on twenty-kilo line into thirty fathoms with a graphite carrot-taper rod out of a Shark-Cat time. ‘That time,’ he smiles weakly out at the horizon. They all start nodding and smiling bullshit nods and bullshit smiles about their superannuation and the fish they’re going to catch in it.
Dozers and trucks and shovels are starting up around us.
‘You workin’ on her?’ Ora asks.
‘On who?’
‘Your mum. You workin’ on her?’ There’s some threat in the question. Some disgust. Not only do they know who I am and what I’m doing here, they also have a position. They’re on her side. Waiting to see whose side I’m on.
‘We’re catching up is all,’ I tell him. ‘So far.’
‘Catching up,’ he tells me back.
‘Good luck to her,’ says the Scot called Mac. ‘What we all should’ve done.’ A few of the men nod and fuckinoath. ‘She may be troppo,’ he says, ‘or she may have bigger balls than the whole of us. Either way … good luck to her.’
She’s been the only one in the whole town to stand up and fight what’s coming to her, which in her case won’t be casting sardines out of a Shark-Cat. They’re sorry they didn’t fight their superannuation. Glad she has.
‘She’s stuck to her guns,’ he tells me. ‘Company don’t know whether to shit or shoot. Good luck to her.’
Someone calls, ‘You’re lubed, Colin,’ and a thin man drops his cigarette down at his feet and grinds it flat and red in the dust and tells us he’s lubed and walks off.
‘You’re lookin’ for the lawyer she’s in there,’ says Ora, pointing to a site-van at the far end of the line of site-vans. ‘Tell your mum Ora said “hello”,’ he’s shouting now over the roar of heavy machinery warming. ‘She give me flowers once for the rec hall where I got married,’ he shouts. ‘Still see ’em every time I get pissed and pull out the video of the wedding, wanting to see Lilah, me ex, and punch her in her slut face. Red flowers on every table. Some even in the slut’s piled-high hair. Nice flowers. Shit marriage.’ He laughs. ‘Your mum was always giving flowers for occasions. Tell her hello.’
Margot is awake, dressed and breakfasted and waiting for me.
‘How’d you sleep?’ I ask.
‘All right,’ she tells me. ‘I sleep all right anywhere. Even here in this thicket of stiff dick with them calling out crudities all night.’
‘Crudities?’ I ask.
‘And lewdities,’ she tells me. She’s wearing baggy shorts again. I stare at her legs while she makes me coffee from her Birko. It’s decaf on a stale bore-water base. I drink it standing, wincing, watching her.
‘What are your mother’s thoughts now you’ve put your point of view?’ she asks.
‘My mother doesn’t care about my point of view. I told you that before you flew me up here.’
She shrugs.
‘Did you know there’s a journalist camped in the river outside town waiting to report how this comes out?’ I ask.
She nods. ‘Yeah. I’ve heard about him. He’s a sort of black sheep of the family that owns the Western Australian newspaper. Which makes him his own man. Lets him cover whatever stories he finds interesting. And cover them in his own good t
ime, too. He’s been here for months. He gets beer airlifted in by a light plane and shouts the men in all-night binges.’
‘He’s blowing any chance we have of talking her out of here. Telling her how noble she is. How morally right she is. You could do worse than get him moved on.’
‘We’ve tried. That’s why he’s camped in the river. Rivers remain crown land. He’s got a prospector’s licence and a metal detector. Says he’s looking for gold. You know what a sacred cow gold prospecting is in this country. We can’t touch him.’ She shrugs.
‘Silly bastard’ll be prospecting somewhere in the Indian Ocean when the next cyclone comes through here,’ I tell her.
‘Bring on the cyclone season,’ she says. Then puts her hand to her mouth and winces and says, ‘I didn’t mean that.’ Widens her eyes out of wince and looks at me and tells me, ‘I didn’t mean that, really.’
I hold up my hands palms-out as if to tell her not a problem.
From outside there’s an explosion of building run down by fast-moving machine. Men laugh and whoop. Someone yells, ‘Legendary.’ Someone else yells, ‘Check where the fucking air-conditioner landed.’
‘Let’s go talk to Adrian. I need to talk to Adrian,’ I tell her. ‘Can you get us a vehicle?’
Margot puts on her Bulls cap and frowns at me. ‘I’ve been in touch with him,’ she says. ‘Several times. He’s not been much help. His view is that if she thinks she’s living on sacred ground then she is. His view is she’s right.’
‘He thinks that?’ I ask. ‘Well maybe if I can make him see how she’s going to die alone out here like some eccentric goat herder out of a Dick Smith magazine he’ll reconsider.’
‘I doubt it,’ she tells me. ‘He seems to believe ground’s as sacred as you say it is.’ She raises her eyebrows and shrugs her shoulders and doubts he can be brought around. But, she says, she’ll get us a vehicle if I insist.
She gets us a Land Cruiser with the black company swan painted sharp and robotic on the front doors. Air-conditioned. Dual-fuel. Desert-dueller tyres. Two-way radio. Refreshments on board.
Silences Long Gone Page 4
