Usually Jean would be the first to step up onto somebody’s shrine and accelerate her metabolism with sex. Usually she’s a wide open iconoclast. ‘They’re toys,’ I tell her. ‘Manufactured in Taiwan.’
‘They’re too much for me to screw in front of. They’re from her childhood. Not Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China or any other sweatshop … they’re from her. Go to bed.’
‘Jesus,’ I tell her. ‘It’s contagious.’
In Adrian’s and my room Thaw is in Adrian’s bed asleep. I turn on my bedside light. On my bed is the green garbage bag full of Adrian’s last things. I get into bed and untie the top of the bag and start to go through it. Plunging my hand in and out like it’s a lucky-dip. First thing I pull out is a Black Gulch pocket knife. Made in Japan. Then a bamboo bong that smells like something rodent-sized crawled into it and died there. Then a small leather pouch that might be made of something gross like a kangeroo’s scrotum. Inside is about two ounces of dried out dope. Then his Favoured Client discount card with the raised nipples that ended my mother’s explorations in this bag. Then an address book. I check under F for Furphy. He’s written: Jack (Brother) Lorne, Victoria, c/-Gene Turner (Girlfriend) 052346232. Then there’s a couple of stick mags filled with Asian girls defoliated below the waist. Then an old Olympus camera. Then a Dolphin torch.
Next thing I pull out is a dog-eared photo of Adrian and Dad and the bronze Ypres soldier who was relocated and became a bronze Vietnam soldier on the top of the Hannah cenotaph. The soldier is bending low, his back horizontal as a quadruped’s. He’s reaching down with one hand to pull his imaginary wounded comrade from the French, then Vietnamese, mud. His face is sad with love at the plight of that friend in the mud. Adrian is up top of the cenotaph astride the soldier’s greened bronze back. He has his hand flung up in the air and he’s yeehaaing and digging in the spurs like a rodeo rider. Dad’s standing in the back of his ute, reaching up shaking the soldier’s hand as it reaches down for the wounded comrade, he’s smiling for the camera, glad to make this sad soldier’s acquaintance.
I pull Adrian’s wallet out of his garbage bag next. I’m tired. I don’t much want to look in his wallet. The wallet’s part of the mind. The wallet should be lowered into the earth with the body. But it’s impossible not to look in a dead brother’s wallet. I open it up. There’s fifty-odd bucks. There’s a black-and-white photo of Mum and Dad on the boat out from England. He’s holding his hands up with his fingers crossed about something. Their new life together? The sea journey? She’s smiling hugely. Happy. It was taken before she knew she was going to be a bank teller in the outback.
Behind that photo is a yellow post-it note Adrian has scribbled reminders to himself on in black lead pencil. Some lines from Tennyson about how the old order changeth, yielding place to new. PINNo.2835. Combination No.3578.
I’m too tired to go through the rest of Adrian’s lucky-dip of personal effects. I go back to the magazines. I start to leaf through the defoliated Asian girls. Hi, I’m Corrinne. I really get off on the extra Length and Width a white man has to offer. They’re fairly unanimous on what the white man has to offer, these defoliated Asian girls. Extra this, extra that. Blue eyes. Hairy chests. Muscles. Beastlike aroma. Piledriving relentlessness. Circumcised dicks. Et cetera, et cetera. And despite me being pretty sure all this is written by some porno sub-editor in Sydney after he’s had the negatives mailed in from the third world, these girls look so doe-eyed earnest with their quotation marks right there surrounding their quotes, that I can’t help feeling somewhat long and wide and blue-eyed and hairy and muscular and somewhat relentless and can maybe smell myself beastly aromatic, too. And can’t help wondering if Jean won’t be persuaded that all this is to be coveted and lusted after despite a rabbit with chewed ears and glass eyes that glint in the moon and despite a doll with no hair whose scalp shines in the moon and despite the drawings hung about her with their gold stars shining and promising a bright future in something creative to a dead girl. Probably not.
There are a lot of things I don’t know about Adrian. Everything really. I’m sorry I didn’t know him as a man. But him calling me a cunt and then calling me a full-on cunt as Dad’s wake died put an end to us. I put his ex-possessions back in the garbage bag and turn my light off.
In the dark I struggle for a while to put the defoliated Asian girls out of my mind. Then I hear my mother pacing in her room. Floorboards creaking. It’s two in the morning. I start to weigh up her sanity. To assess. On the one hand her conversation has been fairly normal … for her. And even if she is pissing on her rose bushes it’s probably only an act of water conservation and a reaction against the new cost of water and a fear the new water they’re supplying is saltier than her own piss, so salty it might kill those roses.
On the other hand there’s how skinny she’s got. How dirty. Boils are more-or-less self-inflicted. Having boils has to be an indication of madness. And there’s her smile. That unending serenity she smiles around now. Her eldest son was shot dead, partially by a lone gunman but mostly by himself, only a month ago, and she’s smiling at people about it and nodding over it as if to say God’s Will Be Done. Every grievous insult that’s dealt her is dealt by God and somehow deserved. Every death inflicted on her is Death-by-God, and thus no bad thing and not to be whimpered over. All part of His Mysterious Plan. Smile wide and get on with it. I can’t work out if this smile is rank stupidity or some tack of madness. If she ripped at and tore at and cursed the whole fucking Godplan and whimpered in grief and shouted about how unfair and cruel it all was … I think that would be sanity. But her lack of unhappiness … I can’t fit that into my idea of sanity.
She’s pacing in her room now. Maybe she throws off religion and rises into unhappiness at night. Maybe that’s when she gets sane. Maybe her sanity is all nocturnal.
The didgeridoo starts playing just after dawn. Its drone rises slow in us all, then dips and swoops and jags, then wavers upwards again to something inescapable and something ominous and something that has me blinking at the ceiling.
Thaw groans and rolls and groans, chased all over his bed by the sound. As he wakes he replaces the groans with Fucks and Shits, still rolling. The tape stops after half an hour. Thaw lifts his head out from under the pillow and thanks Fucking God. The tape is rewound and started up again. He gets out of bed mumbling. He’s in a pair of boxer shorts and his MOTHER tattoo. He walks out into the sunlight and stretches his muscled arms high and yawns and scratches his stomach and wipes his long hair back off his face. Turns a full three-sixty, blinking at all that red ground, all that blue sky with the wind getting up. He walks over to the site-van out front of my mother’s house. Looks up at the speakers hung from brackets on its roof where the sound is coming from. He knocks on the door.
A man in khaki shorts and a yellow T-shirt with a black swan on the front and HANNAH SAFETY AWARD written underneath it comes down the steps of the van to the west of the one Thaw has knocked on and shouts, ‘Morning.’ Shouts, ‘What can I do for you?’
‘I just wanted to know, is that Blaupunkt?’ Thaw asks.
‘Blaupunkt?’ the man asks back.
‘The sound system. Is it Blaupunkt?
‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ the man wants to know.
‘It’s incredible,’ says Thaw. ‘I almost would’ve bet you had a fair-dinkum abo locked in there.’
The man laughs. ‘It’s no abo,’ he says. ‘It’s Bang and Olufsen. Series Two Thousand. One of those miniature jobs. You get sick of this didgeridoo, believe me. But you can’t knock it for sound quality. It’s pure.’ He nods and holds his hands up behind his ears with an index finger touching each one and smiles in a satisfied-listener pose.
‘A miniature. Shit. I wouldn’t have guessed that. A miniature. I’m mega-stoked on good systems. Can I see it?’ Thaw asks.
‘Yeah, come in,’ says the man. He opens the door and takes Thaw into the van and shows him the state-of-the-art-unit, he calls it. Shows him the butto
n that eliminates warp and the button that makes a woofer and makes a tweeter redundant. ‘No woofer,’ says Thaw. Shakes his head. ‘No tweeter.’ And he shows him how tiny the muscle-bound amplifier is that rattles her windows out there and shows him where it says Made in Scandinavia on the side. ‘Absolute state-of-the-art unit,’ he says. ‘Scandinavian state-of-the-art. More state-of-the-art than even Jap state-of-the-art. They don’t fuck ‘round with their technology, those Vikings.’
‘They don’t,’ agrees Thaw. ‘They certainly don’t.’ Then he picks up the whole state-of-the-art-unit, raises it over his head and slams it into the floor where it shatters into state-of-the-art Scandinavian gravel and the man in the Hannah Safety Award T-shirt says, ‘Hey,’ and Thaw turns around and walks back into the house and gets back into Adrian’s bed telling me ‘Bang and Olufsen both,’ as he disappears under the sheet.
I get out of bed and go into the kitchen. My mother is standing over by the sink looking out at her rose bushes with her skinny arms and legs bare out of a yellowed summer nightie. She’s settling her big-lenses over her eyes. The boil on her arm is pulsing red. She asks me, ‘What’s happened, Jack? What’s happened?’
‘Nothing’s happened,’ I tell her.
‘Something’s happened all right, Jack. It’s gone quiet. My skins gone prickly with the quiet. Their noise is stopped. Something’s happened.’
‘Oh, that,’ I say. ‘Thaw made them turn it off.’
She stares at me and her eyes widen and wet and I’m damned if she isn’t crying all of a sudden. She covers her quivering mouth with her hand and asks, ‘Made them? How?’
‘The same old way, I suppose,’ I say.
‘What same old way?’ she asks through her hand.
‘The offer of a smack in the gob way.’
‘He threatened them?’
‘I’m guessing,’ I tell her. ‘But I guess so.’
She shakes her head and blinks tears into the catchment areas of her glasses. She smiles and nods like something is confirmed. ‘He shouldn’t step over the line with those people,’ she says. ‘They’re multinational. Tell him not to do anything silly for my sake. My Faith is enough against them.’ What stops me telling her Thaw’s not going to do anything silly for her sake is how unbelievably happy she is in those tears. She’s standing straight-backed and crying them with a smile now. Delirious or uplifted or some damn thing at the thought someone is about to do something silly for her sake.
‘He’s ended a blasphemy,’ she says.
‘Mum, it’s six-thirty. He’s trying to sleep in,’ I tell her.
‘No,’ she says. ‘No. He’s ended a blasphemy.’ I just shake my head.
I go back to Adrian’s and my room and as I climb back into bed I tell Thaw, ‘She thinks you stopped that noise on her behalf. She thinks you did it to end a blasphemy.’ He’s facing the wall and under his spread of hair I can’t see if his eyes are open or closed. I lie down and attempt sleep and am finally drifting, thinking about those Asian girls come to life and thinking about Adrian come to life with them, when Thaw says into the half-light at the wall, ‘Fuck your mother and her childish needs.’
There is no more noise from the site-vans. No taped messages from relocated friends and no didgeridoo. This is the first day of silence in a long time, she says. She lets on to be confused and unsettled by it to begin with and she can’t really say it’s any better than all the noise they’ve been making that she’s more or less become used to. But she’s lying. She’s lifted. She’s into a fireproof smile. The Dreamtime has given up heckling the Voice of God. Is no longer holding up its validity alongside the Church’s validity.
About mid-morning she gives up the pretence and she gets to supposing out loud that silence is golden after all and she starts thanking Thaw for providing that silence and she can’t, for the life of her, figure out how he talked them into turning their noise off. She starts to do little things for him. Things like empty his ashtray or light his cigarette with her Bic disposable. Things like ask if he’s hungry for something to eat every half-hour and apologise for all her food being frozen. And she starts to call today a Gloriously Silent day. Just throwing it into the conversation whenever she feels like it. And she tracks him in her peripheral vision to see whatever she can see of him that she can’t see by straight-out staring.
Thaw and Jean and I had planned to go for a drive this Gloriously Silent morning to check out what Thaw won’t call anything else but the Great North-West. But after breakfast the wind picks up and starts to show traces of colour. My mother and I start swapping glances. By lunchtime the wind has turned red and begun to howl and the windows are fizzing with sandblast and we include little nods in our glances.
She takes up the sharp-nosed red-handled pliers and tunes the bakelite radio along from the Voice of God to Weather Watch and a recorded voice there tells us what we are about to experience has been christened Aloysius. Aloysius is over Tom Price and heading in a south-easterly direction. Aloysius is rated Category Three. And at Category Three Aloysius will take away many things that Angelique in October and Donna Maree in November, both Category One, did not. The recorded voice runs through a list of items that need securing, starting at corrugated iron and ending with light planes with even a mention of dog kennels in between. The voice mentions sheds twice. Garden sheds and machinery sheds. Sheds are the staple diet of a Category Three cyclone. The recorded voice tells us, Stay Indoors.
The BBK men throw cables over their site-vans and peg them into the rock. Their foreman this week is Phil. He comes to the front door to ask us if we know a Category Three cyclone is on the way and to tell us he thinks we’d be safer in their fully secured vans with them than in the Town Hall because it’s been stripped of all the shelter it had surrounding it last time a Category Three cyclone hit. The BBK men have taken up calling my mother’s house the Town Hall and behind her back calling her the Lady Mayoress.
‘You’re quite welcome,’ Phil tells us, ‘to pitch in with us. We have bunks in there.’
‘We have something a little stronger than cables holding us to the ground,’ my mother tells him. And she crosses herself over her skinny chest and stares at him to let him know what we have is Belief. And lifts her chin at him to let him know that to her a cyclone is just another element in the whole collection of evil elements working on her to get her out of here. A collection of evil elements that starts with him and his company. She shifts her stare down to his beer belly which is dead giveaway of some dissolution and depravity over and above the normal amount a working man has in his life. Behind her I shrug at him. He shrugs back at me and says, ‘Good luck. Sing out if what you got holding you down isn’t enough.’
She’s worried about her fat journalist friend. ‘I’d best ring Charles and tell him to move his caravan up out of the river bed,’ she says. She gets her mobile off the kitchen bench and pokes his number into it with a crooked arthritic finger and waits for him to answer, tut-tuts at the phone and shakes it and pokes the number in again and waits again. ‘He’s not answering,’ she says. ‘I hope he knows this is a cyclone.’
‘He’s not an idiot,’ I tell her. ‘He’ll be all right.’ She gets her three company-issue vacuum flasks that have the little black swan stamped on the side down out of a kitchen cupboard and fills them with hot tea. She isn’t expecting the electricity to last.
Mid-afternoon the rain arrives horizontal on the wind and fades it from red through pink to clear and vicious. It begins to bounce. It howls and fades and howls and fades as it bounces against the house and the whole house shakes every time the wind reaches up into howl. It is always a bouncing wind that lifts roofs and explodes windows. Always a bouncing wind that unravels manmade structures into just their parts stretched out along the course it took and leaves a junk map of itself spread across the land as history in the windless days that follow.
My mother has partially thawed another fruitcake. Jean and my mother and me take shelter in the sitting room
playing cards and drinking tea and trying not to crack an incisor on a frozen glace cherry. Thaw is mesmerised by the whole rip and tear of weather. He’s travelling from window to window swearing and blaspheming in admiration despite me telling him to come away from them before one explodes in his face. He’s telling us, Jesus that’s rain, and, Christ that’s wind.
When the wind goes highest into howl and the house takes up shuddering we go still. Poised with half-thawed fruitcake halfway to our mouths and diamond kings thrust out ready to be laid down in trump over spade aces. Waiting for the burst of wall or the lift of roof or just the general kafuckingboom of everything manmade turning into junk. Jean and I cock our heads, listening for the first tinkling of Armageddon. My mother closes her eyes, her lips move silently. The Lord Is My Shepherd: therefore can I lack nothing. Etc, etc …
Then the wind drops off its zenith of howl and we begin moving again. Laying down our full-houses and saying, ‘Full House,’ and laying down our threes-of-a-kind and saying, ‘Three of a kind,’ and laying down our straight-flushes and saying, ‘Straight-Flush,’ and biting into our fruitcake and making mmmm … noises. But all the time thinking when the wind screams again this house is about to go running west across the land in chunks of tin and fibro and human.
Aloysius bangs at us and night falls and the electricity fails. We decide against dinner. We smoke instead and drink tea and my mother and I tell stories of cyclones in our pasts. Much, much bigger than this one, we lie. At half past eight the green corrugated plastic awning that covered her back door is torn away. It flaps for a minute against the back wall like it might beat its way inside. ‘Then it’s gone. That’ll be the rear awning,’ says my mother. An hour later her solar panels go clattering across the roof and away. I pause in the middle of a story I’m telling about Maggie who came south-east down from Exmouth in 1980 and was named after the British Prime Minister of the time who had excited the Bureau of Meteorology by declaring war on Argentina – in the pause in my story my mother tells us, ‘Solar panels,’ and I continue on about how Maggie got inside the huge Ore Truck Workshop and ballooned its corrugated-iron walls out and left it looking like a space observatory.
Silences Long Gone Page 20
