Out to sea Mimmo is holding a memorial service for Cosimo who has been killed by panic being naturally more widespread and easy to come by than medical knowledge. Has been killed by dropping the worry beads that Mimmo says were a death-bed bequest from his father into the engine bay of the Cosmos where the prop-shaft leaves the engine. But with Mimmo being a reflexive elaborator probably they weren’t anything more than an off-hand purchase at the Apollo Bay market, those worry beads. Probably that death-bed bequest mention was only invented to make Cosimo’s choice of where to put his hands not look so foolish. Then again, maybe Cosimo’s dying father did give him the beads.
He was killed, anyway, by unlocking his knees and dropping down and diving his hand into the sump-oil and seawater to retrieve that probably invented death-bed bequest, and having his sleeve snag on a nut on that spinning prop-shaft and having his arm pulled into the spin of metal hard enough to stall a Briggs and Stratton marine diesel. Which, they say, these fishermen, is unbelievable, for just meat and only bone to stall horsepower like that. Low-geared, diesel horsepower.
Cosimo rose to his feet out of that engine bay a fully realised forty-pounds-per-square-inch fountain of lifeblood. Asked softly into the engine-stalled silence for a doctor. A doctor fucking quick. A fucking quick doctor. Someone medical and close handy.
But blood will make a bystander perfectly inactive. To see it airborne. And raining.
They got Cosimo onto the pier where instead of meeting a doctor he met a fainter. Got him into the carpark at the end of the pier where instead of meeting a nurse he met a gagger and instead of meeting a St John’s representative he met an eyes-averter and face-coverer. He was now only a half-realised forty-pounds-per-square-inch fountain of lifeblood, or a fully realised twenty-pounds-per-square-inch fountain of life blood. Was turning into more a scene of historical than of contemporary tragedy.
They got him into the bucket seat of Mimmo’s Ford Fairlane and went for the hospital without ever meeting anyone who knew how to pinch a vein or apply a pressure bandage or do anything at all apart from get turned to stone by airborne blood. Outside that white-painted hopeful building they met a couple who looked sensibly dressed and medical, him in a bow tie and her in a pantsuit, who got screamed at by Mimmo for looking that way. But they only knew how to take a shallow step backwards and to throw their hands to their mouths when the front passenger door of the Fairlane was swung open and to murmur, ‘Fuck,’ and to murmur ‘Jesus Christ.’
They only met ditherers. Just met people impressed into inaction by large amounts of blood. Until, in the carpark of that hospital, Cosimo met Saint Peter and met God in turn, or met no one at all. Depending.
Then, two long Fairlane hornblasts beyond cardiovascular recall, a doctor emerged from that white-painted building and met Cosimo. Hip-deep in lifeblood in the bucket seat of a Ford Fairlane. Laid two fingers on Cosimo’s neck atop a deflated artery and lifted his other wrist to look at his watch but let that wrist drop back down to his side without ever looking at it and looked at Mimmo instead, howling for some sort of university-learned magic, and told him, ‘Sorry. There’s nothing I can do. He’s gone.’
There are eight boats anchored in a circle out there with their captains and their captains’ wives all dressed long and dark. The women are bracing themselves with their hands, not leaning, not allowing their best dresses to pick up the fish smells off the boat that they spend their lives trying not to pick up off their husbands. A priest is shouting across the flat water in Greek. Fisherman prayers. Mimmo has launched a three-metre by two-metre redgum cross into the water between the boats and they’re raining the agapanthus and the gladioli and the roses of Lorne across the water where it floats.
We see them periodically as they rise together on their moment of swell before it passes beachward and they fall behind it into green water. A smell of incense lies wide across the water right in here to the beach. Thaw smells it and starts looking out to sea, lays down his book right where the pilot has come home haunted and spinally injured and stands up with his tiptoes spearing into the sand to get a better view of them when they appear on the swell.
Thaw isn’t the sort of person to be left out of a ceremony when he thinks he should be included in a ceremony. He reckons Mimmo would have meant to include him. He’s just got forgetful and got scatterbrained in his mourning, Mimmo has, Thaw says. Thaw crewed on Cosimo’s boat many a time. And while Cosimo was nobody’s idea of an even-tempered and sensible captain, or man, Thaw had always liked him. Said rashness deep as Cosimo’s, a fired-up spontaneity which usually ended up breaking his own equipment or bones, was an honest and attractive quality in a bloke.
So he paddles out to pay his respects. Picks a bouquet of wattle blossom and gum leaves and gets on his Malibu and paddles out to gatecrash the service.
Brio has a protest planned for this afternoon on the Mt Sabine road. The forest people are going to bring log trucks to a standstill. The Channel Seven chopper is flying in with their weather man with all that permed hair and environmental concern. Her father knows the weather man’s father’s next-door neighbour and she’s actually spoken to him, the weather man, on the phone about the destruction and the ozone layer and the beauty of the Otways and the great toasted sandwiches at El Cid, so hopefully they’ll get a sympathetic, prime-time run for their protest. We wish her luck. She drives away with her Renault weighed down with five-gallon drums filled with chain to fasten her friends to bluegums with and to fasten her friends to mountain ash with and to fasten her friends to black wattle with.
Jean puts on one of those shapeless transparent summer dresses and we walk along the beach. It’s Saturday. We walk with our feet in the water past high-pitched naked kids running for their lives from thin wave ends reaching for them through the outfield of beach cricket games where the fielders field one-handed and drink one-handed. We dodge the hardbodies jogging through the shallows who hate us for not watching them the full neck-swivel south-north as they pass. We pass on the low side of big camps of fully dressed Greeks and Turks loud with parental control, with feasts spread on checked cloths in their midst. We stare at gays sun-screening each other defiantly and performing operas of Tai Chi in their Speedos. Poised one-legged like wading birds.
Up by the surf club are Western District farmers sitting on towels with their sun-leathered arms on their knees and their white backs going red, thinking about what needs doing back home in this fine weather which is only a window of opportunity to get things sown or get things harvested or get things shorn. The women towel-hop with news of who’s getting married and news of who’s getting renovated and news of who’s gone belly-up and got bank-auctioned out of the district. Cicada-screech drifts down to us from the trees above the surf club.
We walk up off the beach onto the rock, heading for the pier. Jean asks me, don’t I ever get angry about any fucking thing? She asks it flat and shakes her head in wonder. For a moment I contemplate asking her what she’s on about. But she knows I know what she’s on about.
‘It’s just didgeridoos,’ I say. ‘It’s just recordings of old friends.’
‘It’s not just didgeridoos. Those bastards are playing the Dreamtime soundtrack at her. And you said yourself the only thing that frightens her is the Dreamtime. You told me when you came back last time the only thing that really shakes her is the possibility their spirituality might be as valid as hers. Might give them as much claim to the place. Might even give them more.’
Up until now Jean wasn’t sure whose side she was on. She knows, from listening to me, my mother’s a sad case … lost and disoriented in the wonder of what was. She also sees, from listening to me, that to the Kunimara people my mother isn’t lost, isn’t disoriented, is found, suddenly, right there in their heartland and in their Dreamtime. So, whose side to be on has been problematic for Jean.
But she knows whose side she’s on now. Because if BBK are going to be pumping didg out of a sound machine at Australians with a moral conscien
ce then, hey, that’s below the belt.
‘As long as they’re moaning at her out of hollow logs they’re not about to kick down her door, whack her in a strait-jacket and fly her down south to some facility for fuckwits,’ I say. ‘She knows that. Them playing didgeridoo music at her’s a fair hint at how impotent they are. It probably reassures her.’ We walk up off the beach onto the rocks heading around to the pier. The sun’s over the yard-arm and we really should be drinking by now.
‘Let’s get this straight. Just so we can see I’m the one making sense here,’ Jean says, and she holds her hands up, fingers spread wide trying to create order. ‘She’s totally calm about the company? Not worried about whatever they decide to do? You said that.’
‘It looked that way to me,’ I admit.
‘But the Kunimara and their Dreamtime freak her out? Her face covered in a cold sweat, you said?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Okay. I’m not even going to bother to hammer my point home about what the day-long drone of didgeridoo’ll be doing to her psychology.’
‘You’re not,’ I say.
‘But,’ she says, and here’s her point about to be hammered, ‘I think it’s a seriously mentally cruel way to try and achieve their goal. They’re using a stick when they could be using a carrot. For God’s sake, she’s an old woman. Mentally un … mentally rooted, you say. There’s no need to beat her with a fucking stick.’
‘Nominate a carrot they could use. We all want to know,’ I say.
‘Arsehole,’ she explains.
We walk out along the pier. The water is clear and we can see leatherjackets sniffing in and out of the kelp as it ribbons upwards then straightens northward with the passing swell and then ribbons upwards again. There are about forty long-pole fishermen out the end, rugged-up against the wind that’s always here. The decking is piebald with squid ink. Italians and Greeks travel down from Geelong and out along this pier at night to catch the squid. They’re gone by sunrise. Only these panic-black shots of ink show they were here.
The Otways roll away north whitening with distance behind sea air. Off the end of the pier hanging over the sea out near the horizon is the Aireys Inlet lighthouse.
We don’t stay long among the fishermen and the view because it’s Saturday and because Bombay Sapphire is a gin of England with ten botanicals in it and Lou who runs the bar on the other end of the pier will give us tall glasses of it mixed with tonic and with a slice of lime if we pay him. The arrangement suits us. So we pay him. And we drink.
We sit at a table outside in the sun where we have a view of the sea around the point to the south where it’s white-barred and dangerous. We talk about anything that didn’t give birth to me.
We drink for an hour or so before Jean gets bailed-up by some semi-hippies out of the Otways – a Jesus-haired man and a woman with feathers in her hair whom Jean knows from a couple of dope deals done in the dope drought of last year when her usual supplier ran dry and apologetic. They pull up chairs. They want Jean to exhibit their jewellery in her gallery. ‘Jeannie, Jeannie,’ they say.
Jean’s worn the cliched craft of the semi-hippies of the Otways plenty of times. Has bought it in the weekend markets in the coastal towns and slid it on her arms and her ankles and ears and around her neck. Only yesterday she was wearing a bracelet above her elbow that was once a serving spoon until a semi-hippy hammered it flat and bent it circular and called it an Upper-Arm Icon. The day I met her she was wearing an anklet strung with she-oak acorns with tiny astrological signs carved on them. She knows it’s crap, but she wears it anyway. She has boxes of the stuff at home. She likes to support them in their gentle ways. She admires their stubborn refusal to come in out of nature to the towns. But it doesn’t get into her gallery. She won’t go that far.
The Jesus-haired man’s name is Ray. He leans close to her and says maybe they can rent the gallery with payments of a certain fast-growing intoxicant that seems to just sprout up naturally like mushrooms on the banks of the creek that runs along the side of their block.
Jean says it’s not about payment, it’s about the standard of what goes into the gallery. Keeping a certain standard. You know. Art. You know. Something original, something on the edge. Not craft. It’s an art gallery, not a craft market, she tells him.
‘What’s the difference,’ the feather-haired woman asks, ‘between art and craft?’
Anything that was originally cutlery doesn’t get in for starters,’ Jean tells them. And anything with feathers on it. And anything with seashells arranged in zodiac signs. Or tree roots that aren’t modified at all but were just interesting shapes to begin with and will relieve stress if you caress them. They don’t get in either. Which pretty well cuts you out,’ she says.
Ray throws his hands up. ‘Jeannie, Jeannie,’ he says. ‘This is the grossest discrimination. What about all that purple crap you’ve got hanging in there as we speak.’
Jean widens her eyes and covers her mouth with her hand in a fair representation of shock. ‘His mother painted those,’ she whispers, pointing at me.
Ray looks at me with his eyes widening as well, says, ‘Man … Man,’ and shakes his head and holds his hand out at me. We shake. ‘Man, I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘Normally I’d never denigrate someone else’s art.’
‘Try fucking her, Ray.’ I point at Jean. ‘It’s not dope she wants … it’s orgasms. How do you think I got my mother’s paintings in there. Orgasms. You got to fuck her to get exhibited. Simple as that.’
Ray and his lady with feathers in her hair stare at Jean. The woman with feathers says, ‘Hey …’ at her in a disapproving way as if Jean’s put forward some shocking offer.
Jean points at me and says, ‘He lets people beat his mother with a stick.’ They both look back at me.
‘It’s a hollow stick,’ I tell them. Then I go to the bar to get a couple more Bombay Sapphires.
Lou tells me it’s a beautiful day as he’s unscrewing the tonic and I tell him, magic. He apologises because there’s no more ice to go in our gins.
‘My fridge would go on the blink on a perfect drinking day,’ Lou says. ‘Mimmo taste one stubby and take Cosimo’s whole wake up to the Pacific. I ring Kozminsky the refrigeration specialist, he says he can’t get anyone down here from Geelong ‘til Monday. “Monday,” I tell him, “is when all my drinkers are back in fucking Geelong.” Kozminsky the refrigeration specialist? Kozminsky the fucking layabout,’ Lou says.
I pay him for the drinks. ‘You think you got troubles, Lou. Some bastard’s beating my mother with a stick,’ I say.
‘No,’ he reels back. ‘The one done all those shitty paintings? She been through enough.’
I take the drinks back to our table. Ray and the feather-haired woman are gone. Jean and I smile at each other because we’re acknowledged funny bastards who can take the piss out of semi-hippies. We look across the sea and drink. Then Jean breaks down completely and says, ‘Hey shithead,’ and extends her hand at me with the palm skyward, all backed-up by a little pout. Contrition acted out. Wants to hold my hand. Wants to be public lovers. So we actually sit there holding hands not even caring what it looks like to the people wandering out along the pier.
Everyone who comes to this town wanders out along the pier in the end. Hangs around out there for a few minutes in the wind looking back at the hills. People we half know keep passing on the way out there to the wind. We’re constantly waving to people and asking ‘How You Going?’ to people and after a few hours I’m asking ‘How they hangin’?’ to people because the gins are adding up and I get a kick out of asking semi-strangers How They Hangin’? Man or woman, there’s always something hangin’ to ask about. And they usually look uncomfortable as if they want to readjust some part of their clothing and they tell me, ‘Yeah, all right,’ or ‘Not too bad,’ or ‘Good, good thanks,’ and wave.
Wendy Little is passing in her ute when we finally walk up off the pier onto the main road. We thumb her down an
d she tells us, ‘Get in, Inebriates.’ Wendy’s a baker. She has racks of croissants stacked up on the seat next to her. She has her two Rottweillers in the back. ‘Not on top of the croissants, Dickwit,’ she tells Jean when Jean opens the passenger door.
‘Sorry,’ says Jean, and looks at the croissants and looks at the Rottweilers and looks at Wendy and looks at us. ‘This is a bit like that thing with the duck and the bag of grain and the fox and the bloke who’s got to row them across the river. How we going to arrange this?’
‘You want a lift?’ asks Wendy. She jerks her thumb over her shoulder. We get in the back with her Rottweilers. Pasha and Min are round-faced wolves hooked on the taste of strangers covered in sea-salt and gin. They stand over us and lick us. We yell foul abuse at them and karate chop them but they keep right on licking, heading for nooks and searching for crannies with their steak-sized tongues in and out of their brick-hard heads. They’re addicted to us.
When Wendy drops us off outside our house I come up to her cabin window and spread my arms and look down at myself wet all over with wolfspit in my private places and say, ‘Jesus, Wendy, check this out what your hungry bastards have done.’
And she looks down at me wet all over with wolfspit and looks over at Jean who is looking down at herself wet all over with wolfspit and says, ‘He puts the duck in the boat and rows it across the river, leaving the fox with the bag of grain. He comes back and gets the bag of grain and rows it across the river and picks up the duck and rows it back to the original side, he puts the duck out and picks up the fox and rows it across the river and leaves it there with the bag of grain and then rows back across the river and picks up the duck and rows it across.’ Then she shrugs her shoulders and tells us, ‘Next time.’ And I look down at myself wet all over with wolfspit and tell her, ‘Next time bullshit. In your world croissants and Jean and me all turn out to be ducks and no one turns out to be the bag of grain.’ She laughs and guns her ute and her stranger-addicted wolves away down the hill.
Silences Long Gone Page 17
