Two of the men Thaw is drinking with on that unhappy Remembrance Day are brothers. Ron and Joe Smith who used to both work for a small engineering firm making cattle crushes, and though they’ve been out of work for eight years apiece they still boast they know all there is to know about restraining beasts. They laugh about it when they say it. The third is a fat man with white hair called ‘Snow, You Fat Useless Prick’ or ‘Snowy You Fat Useless Prick’ by turns. The fourth is an older man named Len Connell who had once been with the Craigieburn Council in many a capacity, he says. He keeps looking around the bar and shaking his head and asking Thaw what he thinks should be done about the abo problem. Thaw keeps looking around the bar after him and asking what abo problem.
Soon an old Koori comes up to talk to them. He introduces himself as a one-eyed carpet snake and points at the empty eye-socket where his left eye had been. He’s wearing a sports coat gone shiny from a thousand sweaty days and his hands are so curled and broken and rheumatic he has to use both of them to hold his beer can. He promises he’ll give each of them a true and real aboriginal Dreaming nickname like his if they’ll buy him a beer. So they each buy him a beer. Four cans. And he starts naming them.
He squints at the Smith brothers and rubs his face with the knuckles of his broken hands, then opens his eye and squints at them again and cocks his head and asks, ‘You two brudders?’ They nod and he laughs loud and taps his head with a crooked forefinger like his own wisdom is too much. ‘You two Emus,’ he announces. They laugh and click their cans together and say ‘Hello, Em,’ ‘G’Day, Emu,’ to each other. He nods, smiling, at ease with the name he’s given them.
The one-eyed carpet snake turns to Snow and has a drink and shakes himself, limbering up for more nicknaming. He looks puzzled by Snow. Squints and rubs his knuckles deep into his working eye. Pouts his lips and cocks his head and goes still in a hard study of Snow’s fat face. After a while he shrugs and says, ‘No. No. No. Fuck it, eh. Nuttn bout you. You nuttn. I can’t tink you is.’ He shakes his head. Beaten. He hands back to Snow the can of beer he was given for naming him.
Then he looks Len Connell up and down quickly and says, ‘You a Emu, too.’ He gathers his three beers in his arms and goes across to where the teenagers are drinking at the poker machines. They laugh to see how much beer he’s taken from the white men by calling them emus and take two cans from him.
Ron Smith says there mustn’t have been anything that closely resembled a fat, useless prick in the Dreamtime and that’s why Snow had the old feller stumped for a nickname. They laugh except Snow who tells them Emu don’t mean anything but pencil-necked with a bloody big Adam’s apple is all Emu means and there’s nothing Dreamtime about it and they’ve been ripped off to the tune of a can each, the Emus have. Thaw leans across the bar and tells them he’s seen old Kurt nickname hundreds of white fellas over the years and for all his face-pulling and head-leaning and hard-thinking he’s only ever come up with Emu.
But the one-eyed carpet snake has broken the ice between these four and the whole black race and before long they’re spread through the bar shouting drinks and sitting teenage girls in their laps. Sitting Kelly Atkinson in their laps. Kelly Atkinson sitting herself in their laps. Buying Kelly Atkinson drinks and handing her cigarettes. Buying her enough drinks that by late afternoon they feel able to lick her ears, witnesses say, and hold her inside her singlet and pronounce her Queen of the Darling and stare drunken-bemused, as she also stares drunken-bemused, at the whiteness of their moving hands on the blackness of her thighs.
There are about three hours of what Thaw calls harmonious race relations. Then in the late afternoon Len Connell tells his friends their kitty is getting low on funds and they’d better stop buying drinks for every bastard who asks for one and just buy them for those they think they might fuck later on in the evening. Which turns out to be Kelly Atkinson. Everyone who’s not Kelly Atkinson is pretty pissed off with the new arrangement. Before another round is drunk two black teenagers accuse the men from Craigieburn of being nothing but white cunts same as the rest of them, which they probably are, Thaw says, but which really isn’t an acceptable proposition to put to four drunk men. There’s an exchange of punches before the white men are backed up against the bar with Kelly Atkinson. Snow has blood running from his mouth from the one good punch thrown. The first punch. The first punch is the only good punch ever thrown, Thaw says. By the time everyone’s drunk enough to fight no one can hit a moving target. Everything after the first punch is just a dream of annihilation.
Thaw gets his baseball bat from under the bar so as to be the first onto the next plane of violence, if that’s where this situation’s heading. No one else can find anything more vicious than a chair. So he clears the black people out of the bar with his baseball bat. Spearing it into stomachs and raising it above his head. Backing them out the door while they state their case loud and outraged. Backing them out not because he reckoned the trouble was their doing, but because you can’t clear white guys out of a bar with a baseball bat without allegations of assault by the world at large and the police in particular. And anyway he wasn’t the white men’s publican and probably couldn’t back them off with a bat seeing as in their case it didn’t have the threat of being barred from the pub to back it up.
Outside he walks up and down the verandah with the bat resting on his shoulder telling the crowd to cool down. The drunk women aren’t afraid of being hit with the bat, they’re pushing up onto the verandah saying he’s got no fucking right. They’re enjoying being braver than their men. He’s shoving them off the verandah with the flat of his hand in their faces. Landing them on their arses in the dust. Telling them to cross the bridge back into town. They shout back at him that they’re not going anywhere without Kelly.
Kelly puts her head out the door and explains Fuck Off, Gary, and you Fuck Off, Max, and you Fuck Off too, Sharon, always thinkin you can fuckin tell me what to do. Well go an get fucked.
They respond with beer cans bouncing off the front door. Foam wheeling white through the air. She pulls her head back inside the pub and replaces it out the door with an upward thrust of middle finger and she’s gone back inside. Thaw explains how, as he sees it, she clearly wants to stay of her own free will, so he’s not about to chuck her out. And he’s not about to let them back in, they can come back tomorrow unless when he goes back inside they start hurling shit through the windows in which case he’ll set his bull-headed red dogs on them and they can come back precisely fucking never.
When he goes back inside they smash two windows but he decides against releasing the heelers because he knows these teenagers have watched him several times in the early afternoon rub Kelly Atkinson’s pubic mound through her footy knicks with the back of his hand just in passing and watched him several times in the late afternoon use the front of his hand for the same purpose only not so much in passing as in concentrated effort. So he guesses he deserves the smashed windows, because it’s a thing his father always told him never to do – fuck with their women. He only goes out back and rattles the chains on the dog cages. The dogs go apeshit and the crowd out front of the pub disperses in expectation of red heelers. Red heelers wheeling around the corner mad with lust, like they get, for bare ankle and bare calf and bare hand and bare wrist.
And yes, Thaw says, he feels bad about it now, but in those days sports hardware and red heelers seemed to be the answer when black people were the problem. It wasn’t always that way. When he was a boy the very people he was waving the bat at that sad Remembrance Day were his best friends. But then he grew up to serve the drinks and they grew up to drink the drinks. Between him and them wasn’t a racial divide, he insisted. What was between him and them was the bar. He was mostly sober and they were mostly drunk and he was daily having to watch them laugh wildly at foolish drunk jokes he was too sober to even smile at. And he had to take their money for it to be this way. He hated them for having to take their money so they could get to a state where he w
as locked out of their laughter, he said. So, mostly, in those days, he didn’t mind letting the dogs out. But not that day, because the fight was part his fault.
Anyway, Thaw says, with the post-fight high they go on to get truly pissed and he carves his own jukebox to junk with the baseball bat because he’s up for hitting something and everything else has backed off or gone quiet when he raised it apart from the Sex Pistols who tell him they are the Anti-Christ and get shards of perspex and chromed stripping and little white cards with defiant song titles and jigsawed pieces of classic forty-fives exploding up and away from his batwork.
The men from Craigieburn don’t get back to their camp on the river. They’re exultant at their victory over the natives. They celebrate by watching Thaw smash the jukebox, and then by telling close-call stories and making toasts to their own pioneering spirit. They laugh at Snow’s war wound. Tell him it’s a fat lip of honour, unlike the rest of him which is just fat. They dance around the bar with Kelly Atkinson. Splash her with beer so her clothes are legitimately too wet to wear. Snow keeps hauling her in hard up against him and trying to anchor her there by way of an arse-cheek in each hand and telling them he’s got the fat lip of honour so he gets the first of anything that’s going and the Emus had better get in line and learn the pecking order.
In the end they crash upstairs in what, in the days of river travel, were guest rooms. A wardrobe, an unplumbed basin and a shearer’s cot apiece. Thaw says most everything between the jukebox-smashing and the crashing-out is lost to him, apart from watching one porn vid with his old man.
He’s woken into hangover by the front of the pub being called up at and abused in the hardest way by Kelly Atkinson’s mother Sal and Kelly Atkinson’s friend Sharon who have come looking for Kelly. He’s on the floor of his father’s room, his father is comatose on the sofa with foul air pulsing off him like he’s road-kill. The television is a blue hiss of finished video. Thaw goes down and opens the front door for them and they push past him asking Where is she, arsehole? Where’s Kelly? He guesses it’s early morning by the shadow stretching long west off the saltbush.
They find Kelly upstairs in room nine in the wardrobe. Her right arm trailing out onto the carpet, broken at the elbow by the wardrobe door being slammed on it over and over like the working percentage of whatever mind put her in there hadn’t been enough to figure out just what was stopping the door from closing. She’s smelling high of whisky and beer and something else familiar and powerful, and is dead via strangulation. Kelly’s mother kneels down and reaches into the wardrobe slowly. Stands up without touching her, like to touch her and feel her cold would be to confirm and accept her new status. Then kneels down again and more-or-less just collapses face first into the wardrobe onto Kelly’s chest and starts to whimper. Sharon is still with her finger tips spread lightly across her lips until she hears that first whimper. The whimper sets her off ballistic with howl. After the howl starts up white beer bellies appear from everywhere rubbing their eyes and shaking their heads and asking, ‘What the …?’
The rest, Thaw says, is testimony. All of them but one trying to testify truthfully back into the mental chaos of extreme drunkenness without being too much concocters of their own self-serving truths. But one of them testifying lies easily out of the darkness of that inebriation.
Three homicide detectives and a forensic investigator fly out from Sydney and take over the Wilpenia Police Station. The detective in charge is a small interested man named Wentworth. He has a permanent wince from trying to see through suspects. He sets himself up in the big old sandstone police station and takes statements. He waves Thaw to a chair and says, ‘Shed some light for me, Oliver. How did these bastards go about this? Start from sundown and tell me your whole night.’ Then he puts his feet up on the desk and leans back and closes his eyes. Thaw thinks the detective may be asleep. He sits still, waiting. ‘I’m all ears,’ says Detective Wentworth.
‘I was megadrunk, I’ll tell you that for starters,’ Thaw says. ‘I locked the pub and left the bar at around nine or so to take up a bottle of Corio to the old boy and to cook him some two-minute noodles. Two minutes being the outer limit for the old man to be sitting up these days so Weetbix being his total culinary gamut if I don’t get there to do the noodles.
‘Joe and Ron Smith and Len Connell and Snowy Reynolds were drinking downstairs with Kelly Atkinson when I left. She had no clothes on, I remember. I’d smashed the jukebox but they were full enough to be dancing to poker machine music and swinging her round and reeling her in and biting her anywhere they wanted with her laughing about it. That explains the bite marks, Detective Wentworth.
‘Upstairs the old man was on his sofa wheezing and drooling and asking where the fuck I’d been. He’d just put on the video of Long John Holmes’ Acapulco trip and he said to me sit down and watch it with him. I remember this because it starts with Long John waving his hard dick in front of the Acapulco skyline with some Mexican guitars playing while he makes general threats and promises to the whole dark-haired female population.
‘So I make the old boy his noodles and though I’m bored shitless with all Long John can do by now I sit down and join the old boy watching, for the hundredth time, Long John feeding it to the starlets of Acapulco. First off he gives it to a news reader right on her desk after the nightly bulletin with the MBS ACAPULCO logo hanging behind them swaying in their rhythm. He thrusts a terminal run of dick into her and she screams, “John. John. John.” Not his movie name, which is Harry. But his real name. John. This feels powerful with authenticity to the old man. Long John’s made her forget she’s in a movie. Made her, with his dick, lose the plot. The old man laughs under his breath at her forgetting where she is and calling “John”. He always laughs at this part. “John,” he says falsetto. “John.” He laughs and sucks up his noodles. Then Long John scrambles further up the desk on his knees and thrusts his second half of dick away out of view. The news reader gives off dying sounds. Then sounds of resurrection. Then sounds of dying again. All done in the confines of one shouted, moaned, sobbed, trilled and sighed word … “Fuck.”’
‘Oliver,’ Detective Wentworth breaks into his testimony.
‘What?’ asks Thaw.
‘I don’t want a movie review. Get back to the happenings inside your pub that night.’
‘This is all I’ve got for happenings,’ says Thaw ‘All I remember for happenings is Long John fucking Mexicans. I wish I remembered more. But the last thing I remember is Long John waving his limp dick at the Acapulco skyline and apologising to the two per cent of Acapulcan pussy he hadn’t travelled and saying how he’d be back some day. I’m not even sure if I remember that or I’m remembering from the other hundred times I’ve seen it before that night. Anyway, I’ve crashed on the old man’s floor and next thing I know people are yelling at me to open up and it’s morning.’
Detective Wentworth knits his brow and winces deeper and chews his fingernails at Thaw like his recollections are the most spellbinding and artful he’s ever heard. Thaw says it made him feel like this Wentworth would be sinking in this whole mystery without him, though he told him what amounted to nothing. He actually leans across the desk and shakes Thaw’s hand and tells him thank you when he’s sure Thaw has told all he can. That’s a fine version, Detective Wentworth says, it’s increased my understanding no end.
Then he smiles at Thaw and he nods slowly at him and winks like they have an understanding. And Thaw doesn’t know if the wink is saying, ‘You and me, Oliver, will between us nail this evil bastard from Craigieburn,’ or if the wink is saying, ‘Look, Oliver, maybe you did kill a girl but life’s confusing these days and it’s hard not to fuck up somewhere along the way … with a failed business venture, or a broken marriage, or a crashed car, or a strangled girl … or something. I know how it is. It’s my business to understand how people naturally fuck up, naturally work at cross purposes to one another. It’s my business, every day until retirement at sixty, to fish around in
the whole congealed aftermath of crossed purpose.’
To take Thaw’s father’s statement Detective Wentworth has to go out to the Court House Hotel, right up to his room where he’s wheezing prone in whisky and Valium. He asks is it true young Oliver spent that night with him watching a certain Mister Holmes holidaying in Mexico? Is it true young Oliver crashed on his floor?
The old man won’t meet the detective’s eye. Lies there watching a half-eaten bowl of Weetbix rise and fall on the belly of his stained pyjamas. Mumbles about it maybe being true and about it probably being true, but that it’s hard for him to say what happened when over these last years. He’s watched John fuck those Mexican girls some hundreds of times, he says, and watched John fuck those college girls some hundreds of times and watched him join Neverending Jim Johnson on their thousand trailer tour of the white trash of Nashville some hundreds of times as well, and with all the repeat viewings and all the morphine he’s taking for his back and all the Valium he’s taking for his Parkinson’s and all the whisky he’s just taking, time itself doesn’t seem to go straight for him any more but is broken up into video-sized chunks, Long John romps that can be assembled in any combination. No morning. No noon. No evening. No midnight. Just Long John in college. And just Long John in Mexico. And just Long John and Neverending Jim in Nashville. And just Long John here and just Long John there … getting it wet. Life just a jigsaw of video-sized pieces. Where real time, your species of time, has wandered round in back of itself and climbed so far up its own arse I can’t say what happened when … or if it actually ever did in the first place.
Silences Long Gone Page 15
