Silences Long Gone

by Anson Cameron

  ‘Haven’t the Department of Fisheries worked out where all the crays are gone yet?’ I ask.

  ‘What the fuck the Department know about Fucking Vietnamese?’ asks Cosimo. He’s thinner than Mimmo, his bones rise sharp and close to his skin, but he has the same wild hair surrounding him as Mimmo does. He empties his champagne flute and grabs another off a passing tray. He tilts it at me so everyone knows who’s being spoken at, the red champagne edges up to the rim in my direction. ‘The Department good people for sampling algal bloom, for weighing catches, for checking licences, for counting pots. What the fuck they know about what the Fucking Vietnamese get up to at night stealing our crayfish? The Department more interested in telling us it’s us … us ignoring quotas.’ He shakes his head.

  ‘Or it’s a cycle,’ says Mimmo. ‘When Department don’t have a clue–then it’s a cycle. A cycle too big to see in one lifetime. Which is why we can’t see the cycle, Cosimo and me, and they can – because they have statistic of years and years, they say. But we see the Fucking Vietnamese and they don’t, because we out there on the water.’

  ‘You’ve seen them fucking with your pots?’ asks Thaw.

  ‘We see them watch and we see them wait. And we know,’ says Mimmo.

  ‘Have you caught them actually poaching any crays?’ I ask.

  Cosimo snorts. ‘They on the night-shift, Jack. We on the day-shift. They on the night-shift.’

  ‘Either you hang a couple of red-handed Vietnamese off your hook at the Fish Co-op or I’m sticking with the Department and their cyclical theory,’ says Thaw. ‘Sorry, but there it is. I’ll always take a cyclical stab-in-the-dark before a racial stab-in-the-dark.’ He points his empty flute at Mimmo. ‘Red-handed Vietnamese,’ he says. ‘Or you’re pissing into the wind.’

  Mimmo nods. ‘You mark my word. Bob Sneddon chase a hire boat full of little black hair fellows off his pots last week. They wasn’t black-hair Department of Fisheries El Nino cycles. They was little black-hair poaching fellows.’ He taps his nose. ‘Fucking Vietnamese. Who I could live with fine if they didn’t footpath-spit and eat dogs and my fucking crayfish.’

  Through the crowd Sad Purple Dads and Sad Purple Mollys keep appearing and disappearing. The more I drink the more I lean and crane around live people to prolong the glimpses.

  ‘Jeanie’s looking hot tonight, Jack,’ says Mark Daniel. Everyone agrees with nods and bloodyoaths. ‘Most rootable. Most rootable,’ says Cosimo, nodding.

  She’s wearing a transparent polka-dot top, chiffon with a black lace bra underneath. The most powerful bra money could buy. It’s her tribute to Molly, she says.

  She’s talking to Warwick Custance who is mid-twenties and making money hand-over-fist in what he calls but of home advertising’, which turns out to be just billboards. He lives in Melbourne and is buying up vacant land in Lorne. He’s wearing a sports coat with a yellow silk cravat blooming at his throat. As I move up to them I stop for another champagne and I hear him tell her, ‘A grim and marvellous exhibition, Jean. The painter here reminds me of a woman I once saw standing on top of a building ready to leap. She kept yelling, “Listen to me. Listen to me. Listen to me.” And then, when everyone was listening, only, “Help.” Over and over. A dreadful and piteous cry. One that stayed with me a long time after she jumped. The artist here reminds me of her.’

  He nods and pulls at his lips and lets Jean know he understands what she’s doing here. Lets her know he sees the full vision of mourning and obsession she sees. That they have this in common. That they are wise and significant, both. And that he’s available for sex any time.

  Warwick is the first person here I’ve heard offer Jean anything other than questions on why the same old purple again and again and why the same old people again and again. Jean’s beaming at him for his understanding.

  I kiss her on the mouth to cut their empathy. My eyes are locked with the eyes of a Sad Purple Dad over her shoulder as we kiss. When the kiss finishes I turn to Warwick.

  ‘G’day Warwick,’ I say. ‘Nice tie.’ He reaches up to touch his cravat and frowns and then smiles joke recognition. We shake hands.

  ‘Warwick likes the exhibition,’ Jean says. ‘Says it’s the best I’ve put on since the Whale Products one that featured his own grandmother’s whalebone corsets.’

  Warwick was the hero of another exhibition a year ago when Jean was trying to convey the horror wrought on whales and the irony of the bizarre little trinkets they boiled down to. She had a piece of ambergris and a bottle of perfume that may or may not have had ambergris as its base, and a few sad pieces of scrimshaw that looked like they’d been carved by left-handed boys learning their trade with right-handed tools, and a pair of whale ribs that had been used as an arch over a driveway to a Presbyterian church in Sorrento. It wasn’t enough for an exhibition.

  Then Warwick had appeared out of the blue and into Jean’s panoply of champions with his grandmother’s whalebone corsets. Her still alive in a Geelong nursing home and him rifling her things to find them. Coming up not only with the corsets but with an old dog-eared photo of her wearing one. Him more than happy that it be exhibited alongside the corsets.

  And these camphor-smelling articles not only showing the horror wrought on whales but the horror wrought on women as well. And being highly ridiculous things to kill for and highly ridiculous things to lace into, they were perfect for Jean’s exhibition. She wore one to the opening. It pushed her breasts to a new altitude and squeezed her waist to a new emaciation and a fair percentage of the transition of fluid from the middle-aged men of Lorne to the middle-aged women of Lorne that night was surely tripped by a mind’s-eye vision of her. As it probably will be tonight.

  ‘Purple’s such an appropriate colour for mourning. It’s wonderfully grim,’ Warwick tells us. ‘Especially with you here looking so much like your dad,’ he says to me. He’s another person here who knows these paintings are of my family. ‘My dad died a couple of years ago,’ he tells us. ‘But I was adopted so I didn’t look a thing like him.’ Warwick takes a drink of red champagne. The band is playing something with rhythm now. People are starting to move to it.

  A teenage girl stops and offers us a tray covered with savouries that look as if they were prised off a reef. Seaweeds and shellfish and transparent anemones and tiny finned things with their splinter-sized teeth still in their mouths. Jean takes one and eats. Warwick and I take another red champagne each from a passing tray.

  Across the room Thaw is arguing with a woman. Throwing his arms wide. People ducking away from his lit cigarette.

  Shirley Stanway who runs Lorne Organics green grocery fronts me while I’m standing alone and tells me that to some people this might be art but to her it’s nepotism plain and simple. And tells me my hide is thick as thick can be, foisting this upon the town. Her watercolours are extremely well regarded in regional art circles, she wants me to know. Her Fallen Giant which depicts a storm-crushed eucalypt in all its tragic glory was awarded a Commendation in the Geelong Easter Art Show only three years ago, she tells me. She pulls out the commendation itself and waves it under my nose so I can read the words ‘Commendation’ and ‘Fallen Giant’ and ‘Shirley Stanway’ in gold calligraphy and see the truth of the matter. And for years, she tells me, she’s been trying to negotiate an exhibition with Jean and got one excuse after another as to why it isn’t possible right now. Has watched all sorts of ragtag posturings fill this gallery in the meantime and never uttered so much as a squeak. But this … this here now … this has just got to be the final straw that broke the camel’s back. Your mother, she tells me, and points a finger at my chest, cannot paint to save herself. I wouldn’t mind betting there’s a certain degree of intoxication involved in her attempts. And here she is with her own exhibition. And what a coincidence her little boy Jack is the current paramour, she calls me, of the gallery owner.

  ‘Shirley,’ I am forced to tell her, ‘it’s sad. But there it is. That’s the way of the world these days. You
get a lot further using dick than you do using the tragic majesty of fallen giants. When a majestic giant falls in the bush nobody hears these days. Majesty isn’t legitimate artistic currency any more. Fallen giants are contemptible these days. Fallen giants are bullshit. Very rarely can I look at the tragic majesty of a fallen giant without bursting into laughter.’ Even as I’m telling her about the fallen giants I’m thinking how I’ll have to buy the pale vegetables of the supermarket from now on.

  Maybe I’ve had nine or ten champagnes when the Grey Sister comes up to me. Maybe eleven. Anyway, I’m in the area of a shitload of champagne.

  She’s a tall woman of about fifty with a severe homemade haircut and sensible woollen clothes. She has a watch pinned to the front of her blouse like she wants you to know she’s a nurse or something else semi-medical and fully worthy. But for all that she’d be a good-looking woman if her teeth weren’t all the various colours of shit. Which they are. From yellow to black her smile is the full dull rainbow of bowel possibility, is what I’m thinking when she opens up with that first beaming, Hello Mister Furphy I’m so glad to meet you.

  ‘I’m Neddy Doyle,’ she holds out her hand and we shake. ‘My husband and I live all the way over at Point Lonsdale, but we’re always interested in any artistic happening along the coast. We’re great travellers. Often pack sandwiches and wash them down with a shandy in some wayside stop on our way to an opening or a launch or a community theatre event.’ She smiles a ruptured sewer.

  ‘Shandy,’ I say.

  ‘And sandwiches,’ she says.

  ‘It’s good to meet you,’ I tell her.

  ‘Mr Furphy, I’ve found this exhibition very … very profound. And sad.’ She nods about being sad. ‘I’m with the Grey Sisters. We’re a group who offer pastoral care to those who need it.’

  ‘Any grey parents or brothers, in your group?’ I ask. ‘Or just sisters? I had a purple sister, as you can see. And a purple father, who was going grey when I last saw him.’ She watches me blank-faced, trying to work out if I’m a confused drunk or I think I’m funny.

  ‘I’d like to get in touch with your mother, Mr Furphy. I think she could benefit from some counselling and spiritual support. I think she’s crying out for help here.’ She looks around at the Sad Purple Dads and Sad Purple Mollys.

  Of course she’s right about the paintings and my mother could use all the help a whole grey sisterhood could give her, but I’m damned if I could go through the whole rigmarole of giving a fuck.

  ‘What? My dad and my sister aren’t worth mourning?’ I ask. ‘They’re not a suitable subject for art?’ My voice is rising. ‘Maybe they don’t deserve any sort of tribute. Maybe they should be dumped for landscapes and still lifes. A bowl of purple fucking apples.’ I have my hands risen high in outrage like I’m outraged. My voice is just short of a shout. Other conversations are ending around us. People watching.

  She’s not at all abashed. She’s tougher than I thought. Doesn’t back off. Bares all her shitty-looking teeth and says, ‘You could use some counselling yourself, Mr Furphy. Organising this sort of thing and then being so defensive about it. I think you’re not straightened out about your loss either, if you don’t mind me saying so.’ She waves a hand around at the paintings, at the loss I’m not straightened out about.

  ‘Right … Right. Here I am standing among all these paintings of my dead father and sister, so now I’m the sick one. Is that it? Is that your scenario? Me – mooning about in the family plot … sick? Is that it?’

  That’s what I ask her. But what I’m asking myself is what the fuck’s got into these apologetic pastoral types these days to be so aggressive? And I’m speculating they’re maybe all pumped up on some stimulant, some steroid, to keep ahead of the myriad evils and the infinite syndromes people present them with these days.

  I’m speculating this when Mimmo looms out of the crowd wielding a live crayfish. He starts cutting and thrusting it up in the Grey Sister’s face like it’s a sword. His other hand is on his hip like he’s a Three Musketeer. He’s shuffling his feet in ignorant sword-fight imitation. The cray takes a grab at her every time it passes. Going for eye, nose or jugular with its one boltcutter claw. The Grey Sister reels back and her adrenal gland gives her a shot that jumps her heart-rate high and stands her homemade haircut up savage and makes her scream, ‘What? What for?’

  And Mimmo screams back at her, ‘For twenty-four bucks a kilo, bitch.’ The Cray’s feelers whip at her eyes. She starts backing toward the corridor looking horrified like this huge, wild-haired bastard is going to shove four kilos of angry crustacean down her throat and nobody here looks like doing a thing about it. She backs down the corridor to the exit, shouting, ‘Bruce, Bruce, Bruce.’ Bruce is likely her husband. But Bruce doesn’t break from the crowd.

  Mimmo follows her with the cray thrust forward. He’s shouting. ‘Open wide, bitch. You insult my friend.’ Then they’re both out of here into the night. A rush of comment and laughter runs through the crowd. People applaud. Someone starts a chant, ‘Mimmomimmomimmo,’ like a siren. Soon all the crayfishermen are chanting it.

  Then Mimmo is back. Coming toward me holding the crayfish down by his side.

  ‘Your sister is dead,’ he tells me.

  ‘I know,’ I tell him back.

  ‘Your father is dead.’

  ‘Tell me something I don’t know.’

  ‘I go get this for you,’ he says. ‘It’s best one I’ve pulled up for weeks, Jack. Is a good crayfish in a nothing season. You have it. You and Jean take it home.’ He waves his hand at the runaway Grey Sister. ‘A bitch like that you don’t need abusing you when your friends are doing it,’ he says sadly. He thrusts the crayfish at me. ‘I want you to have it for what I said before about how extremely fucking ugly your family. I didn’t know they was dead, Jack. I’m sorry, Jack. I’m a big-mouth crayfisher fuckwit always try to be funny.’ He grabs a fistful of his hair and rips it slack and taut and starts to cry. ‘I didn’t know they was dead. I never would have mention how extremely ugly if I know they was dead. I’m sorry, Jack. Take the cray.’

  He embraces me. Hooks onto my neck with his free hand and pushes his head hard in there below my chin. My whole face is scrubbed by fish-smelling wild hair. I take the cray to get him off me.

  I wander around with it in my non-drinking hand for a while until it latches onto the hem of a woman’s mini and can’t be moved until I think to splash it off with red champagne in its face that detaches it in a wide-clawed hiss. The woman starts swearing and telling me, Oh Christ, this is Tina Varigos, Spring Collection. And telling me I’ll have to pay for a new one. And asking me, Why is everybody being assaulted with crustaceans around here?

  I hang it off the bottom of a Sad Purple Molly after that. It dangles, the teeth on its great claw bitten into the frame while its puny legs scratch at the wall. I make a joke of telling it to stay there as if it was a dog or some other sometimes obedient pet.

  About half an hour later an old bloke comes up to me and tells me he’s sorry but he thinks the paintings are shocking awful and his cat could have done better. ‘Some cat,’ I tell him. ‘Being able to paint with the brush held in its mouth after being left a quadriplegic from a head-on with a bus like my mother does.’ He runs a million apologies by me. He didn’t know. He had no idea. The brochure should have said something. Is it a charity show? Is there a box here somewhere he can leave donations in for the spinally injured?

  There’s no box, I tell him. Fuck off.

  Jean asks me let’s leave with a flick of her eyes toward the door. I nod. I go and get the cray. Detach it by the usual method of throwing a glass of champagne in its face. It hisses and lets go of the frame and I have it in my hand. I look around before we leave. The crowd is thinned and outnumbered by Sad Purple Dads and Sad Purple Mollys.

  It’s a hot night outside. There’s still a crowd drinking and smoking joints outside Kolorado. A cicada scream shimmers above the wave noise. Jean and I arm-in-ar
m into the park that runs along the beach. We kiss with the occasional tooth clash as we walk. She’s been eating those reef-dwelling morsels. I have the crayfish I earned by half my family being dead held out at my side.

  ‘I hardly saw you tonight. How’d you go?’ she says.

  ‘All right. People think I’m furthering my mother’s career as an artist by bonking you.’

  ‘You are,’ she says. She leans into me and pulls my shirt aside and bends down and licks my stomach. ‘I’m sorry’ she says. ‘I meant the paintings to be anonymous. Thaw told everyone they were your mother’s paintings of your sister and dad. I meant them to be paintings of just a generic, grief-insane woman. An anonymous one. But he goes around mouthing-off to everyone about the artist being Jack’s mother who’s so fucking insane because of what’s happened to her family she’s got her own asylum devoted to her out in the middle of some desert.’ Jean laughs. Then says sorry for the laugh.

  ‘Did you see that Grey Sister Mimmo chased out?’ I ask.

  ‘Yeah. What was that all about?’

  ‘Bitch was trying to save me. Help me with my unresolved grief.’

  We stop under a Norfolk Island Pine just short of the beach. ‘I’ll save you,’ she says, like it’s a chore. She kisses me. ‘I’ll help you with your unresolved grief.’

  We drop to our knees in kiss and she takes the crayfish from me and drops it in the paspalum and peels her shirt over her head. Now it’s just the amazing black bra.

  The cray hisses. ‘Mimmo gave me that,’ I nod toward it. ‘To say sorry for calling my family extremely fucking ugly.’

  ‘He’s nice, Mimmo,’ she says.

  ‘Let’s put it back in the water,’ I say. ‘I want to let it go.’ She’s licking my stomach. I’m not sure if she’s trying to tell me she loves me and will fuck me anywhere or she’s just horny on champagne.