Through the night ripping and tearing and flapping and smashing noises come to us, any of which could be the start of the Armaggedon kafuckingboom we’re expecting but none of which turn out to be. Always we look across at my mother who is quick to catalogue the external domestic accoutrement that has been torn away … ‘aerial, I think … satellite dish, I believe … hanging plants, unless I’m mistaken … front porch, I’m afraid … hot water service, by the sound.. .’
We finally get to sleep in the greying morning when Aloysius is pretty much spent. Or more likely moved on. Outside is a choppy wind and a light rain but no glimpse of Armageddon. We’ve shifted to the outskirts of Armageddon.
We’ve tensed with the rising howl of wind a hundred times through the night and we’re exhausted. Jean is asleep on the sofa with her head on a cushion patterned with identical herds of galloping horses stampeding out left and right from under her ears. Thaw is asleep in a deep vinyl armchair with his head back. My mother is asleep curled in the matching chair. In the near total darkness I must have read her lips mime that line about the Lord being her shepherd a hundred times. Never seemed to get past the part about him feeding her in a green pasture before the gust of wind subsided and she came clear of prayer and back to us.
We wake when the BBK men fire their bulldozer up, revving it high and sending shots of steel-blue smoke up from its exhaust west on the wind. Two of their site-vans have twisted under their cables in the night and fallen onto their backs in the mud. The men inside are trapped and calling for breakfast and for urination. The man driving the dozer fronts up to the first site-van and uses the tiniest dabs and squirts of hydraulics to lift it right side up with his blade. Doing as little damage as possible but getting abused for rough handling from inside the site-van anyway.
We walk outside and do a lap of her house, inspecting the damage. It’s just a box now with none of the external protrusions that make a house work. Here and there the frame is exposed where something was torn from the wall and took a chunk of fibro sheet with it. But all in all she’s pretty happy with the outcome.
‘We have withstood the blast,’ she says. She looks uplifted or something. Thaw declares her house an official shitbox. But she says, ‘No, no, no … we have withstood the blast.’ And it turns out that the things that have been torn off her house are the things she can do without. Will make her life simpler by their absence, she tells us.
She looks at the site-vans of BBK toppled over and she looks at her house still standing and she takes it as a direct and obvious sign of the power of prayer and maybe as a direct and obvious sign of the special place God holds in His heart for her, she says. Mum? I want to ask her. Special place? Molly? Dad? And now Adrian? Special place? But what I ask is, ‘How do you think you’ll go getting all this damage fixed?’ And she tells me, ‘The Lord helps those who help themselves,’ which must be comfort to all those do-it-yourself types but shouldn’t give any peace to an emaciated old woman with no tools.
The sky has gone clear blue with stretched white cloud so high it looks like it’s leaking in from space. The wind is only playful.
They start their generator and hook our power back up and she cooks us bacon and eggs. Won’t let any of us lift a finger to help. Spins around the kitchen in triumph. Insists Thaw has four eggs. Announces she might even have one herself. We can hear the BBK men outside whooping now and laughing and telling war stories and accusing each other of shitting themselves.
Jean can’t eat her eggs. She’s white in the face and sighing every now and then until I ask her if she’s okay. ‘I feel dreadful,’ she says. ‘Really crook.’
‘You’re done in,’ my mother tells her. Then asks her, ‘Are you another atheist?’ Jean just stares at her. ‘What saps the energy dear … is fear,’ my mother says. ‘It’s a tiring business, being afraid.’ She’s right. The rising wind has washed adrenaline through us from gland to blood to liver in a hundred little tides and a hundred little highs and we’re exhausted.
She’s not exhausted. She’s bright-eyed and full of needless energy. Walks up to the kitchen table and slaps her shiny palm and her bent fingers twice on its formica top with needless energy and looks down on us all sitting there. Looks down on the exhausted Thaw and the exhausted Jean and the exhausted me. She hasn’t had the hundred tides of adrenaline wash through her. Hasn’t had the hundred highs. Has warded the fear off with the Lord being her shepherd and with the Lord letting her lack nothing and with him feeding her in a green pasture and occasionally leading her forth beside the waters of comfort. Whereas I’ve got a weariness put right into my bones by those hundred tides of adrenaline. A weariness that looks wide-eyed at her energy and at her table-slapping in astonishment and makes me half-wish, or maybe makes me wish outright, that I had a shepherd to therefore let me lack nothing and a shepherd to feed me in that green pasture and occasionally to take a stroll with me forth beside those waters of comfort. But I just haven’t.
She takes Jean’s hand and leads her away to the bathroom and returns cursing the fact of no hot water. She has to boil the kettle seven times to get enough bath to get Jean into. She adds Badedas bath oil that her Poor-Dear Adrian gave her for one Christmas or another and tells Jean that’ll do the trick and tells her to yell out if she needs the temperature boosted.
Before she sits down to her own egg she picks up her mobile phone and pokes Charles Wadlow’s number into it. She waits while it rings. Says, ‘Oh dear …’ and presses END and then prods his number in again and waits again, and waits, and this time just says, ‘Oh …’
She picks up her untouched breakfast and takes it over to the kitchen bin and steps on its pedal and its lid lifts up gaping for rubbish like it did a million times for me as a bored boy with her shouting at me to leave that bin alone before you break it. She tilts her plate and egg, bacon, toast and tomato slide in there and she takes her foot off the pedal and the bin snaps shut on her breakfast like a Labrador.
‘You boys will have to go out to the Fortescue,’ she says. ‘To see if Charles is all right … or not. You know where he was camped, Jack. He was camped near the bridge. Borrow a Land Cruiser from your friends out the front and get out there. Go on. He must be needing help. He calls himself a phone junkie. And now he’s not answering. And my digital display’s saying Out of Range, which it’s never said before. I pray to God he’s all right … but the man was camped in a river bed.’
14
The Fat Man Himself
Phil the foreman tells us of course we can take a Cruiser out there but stay on the highway which is fairly solid and don’t go following the river track downstream looking for him which we probably will anyway but which will get us bogged if we do because it won’t be fairly solid it’ll be more likely an axle-deep situation.
Any sort of real search for him will have to be done by air, Phil says. But you might as well have a look-see now because it won’t be done by air while Aloysius is in the vicinity because police choppers are timid and flighty birds that won’t venture north into the Tropic of Capricorn while there’s an Aloysius hovering or a Maggie hovering or even so much as an Angelique or a Donna Maree around. Good luck, Phil says. And Phil takes me aside and tells me under his breath and just between him and me not to let Thaw get cavalier with the Cruiser, because we all know he can get cavalier with company property … don’t we.
I drive. The water lying on either side of the road is the only sign of cyclone out here. The desert scrub is too shrunken and hard and niggardly to get damaged by wind.
Out toward the Fortescue the ridges start to rise hard out of the yellow spinifex. Either side of the road they go clear red and high and jagged. Thaw’s looking around, hanging his head out the window, saying this is amazing country.
‘Never seen anything like it. Incredible country. Gothic or something,’ he says. ‘You almost expect to see a lone abo up there on the skyline, standing on one leg leaning on a spear, watching us fuck up.’
There’s noth
ing much Gothic about this country to me. It’s just the hills of my childhood. I used to hunt through these hills for cats with a beech-glass composite hunting bow. There’s no human life in these hills now. No one on the skyline. There’s not much of anything alive here during the day unless you’ve got a good dog to hunt it up out of its hiding place into the sunlight so you can kill it.
He lights two Marlboros and passes me one. ‘That’s Apaches,’ I tell him. That’s in Westerns.’
‘Yeah, maybe it is. Those fuckers were always standing around on a ridge somewhere with the sun behind them. But it’s that sort of country. Standing-poignant-on-the-sky-line sort of country.’
It’s only about fifteen kilometres out to the Fortescue but it takes us over an hour because the road is slippery and I’m in second gear fighting to stay out of the table drain where we’ll be in Phil’s axle-deep situation. We finally wriggle over the last rise and the river basin opens up below us for Thaw to say ‘Wow’ about and for me to say ‘Shit’ about and then for me to swap my ‘Shit’ for his ‘Wow’ and him to take up with ‘Jesus’.
I slip the Cruiser into neutral. We sit and take in the violence. We can see the normal course of the Fortescue by the canopies of its red gums as they bounce and shiver against the red water fraying white in their foliage. The water is spread wide and shapeless and fast now.
‘Where was this bloke camped?’ asks Thaw.
‘Below that bridge there. The William Page Wilson Memorial Bridge.’ I point down to where the Great Northern Highway runs into the water. Three hundred metres out in the middle of the water all that’s visible of the William Page Wilson Memorial Bridge are its safety rails. Driftwood is backed up against its upstream rail, every few minutes another raft of it crashing into what’s already there. The pressure on that bridge must be getting critical.
‘Right in the river bed,’ I tell him. ‘In a little, old silver caravan.’
‘We’re not going to find him,’ Thaw says. ‘No way known.’
We’re not either. The country is too wet for us to leave the highway by vehicle and the river is moving faster than we could travel by foot. Even if we could make our way downstream we couldn’t walk far in the mud and he’d be moving ahead of us somewhere, outpacing us. So our search for him is going to be more or less just this swivel of gaze from on high. Not much to offer a man in deep shit. But what can we do?
‘What’ll we do?’ I ask Thaw.
‘There’s fuck-all to do. We’ll smoke a joint,’ he offers.
‘All right,’ I say. ‘No point keeping our wits about us with him gone.’
‘Maybe he’s driven up the road to whatever town’s up north and taken shelter there,’ Thaw says.
‘Tinburra,’ I tell him. ‘Maybe.’ I turn the Cruiser’s engine off and the noise of the river drifts up to us. Water tearing white on rock and on tree and on bridge.
This is my first manhunt and on the drive out here I’ve felt pretty powerful about it. Like an emergency-worker probably feels in his vehicle gunning through red lights with the siren wailing. But now we’re out here and have done no good I don’t even care. Don’t care about Aloysius having this fat man away and gone and drowned before we even gave thought-one to his welfare.
We smoke and watch the river. A fat man dressed Hawaiian has been washed away here, and of course this can’t be a good thing. A life. A mind. Some mother’s son. Some mother who probably ran herself ragged and talked herself convoluted trying to protect his soft self from the wit of his schoolmates is now going to hear he was washed away in a 1950s caravan.
And maybe he was someone’s father. And maybe the over-weight love of someone’s life. Someone who had a pet name for him that made light of his girth. Cuddles? Big Boy? And probably was the life of some parties in his past. And surely the goitre in a few conga lines he joined at weddings in his time. Anyway, a big man with a happy dress sense … which is enough.
He might have been any of these things. He might have been all of them. But thinking about him now what pops up preeminent is that he was the link between my mother and the media. Her way of making her plight heard if BBK ever took the eviction route and took the sledge-hammer to her door and the handcuffs to her wrists and put her in plight. And with him gone BBK can evict her without fear she’ll become the focus of some crusade in the papers. Their PR nightmare isn’t going to happen. They don’t need to take the insanity route. They can take the plain old eviction route.
It’s probably a sorry comment on my soul but what I think looking out at this raging river with him washed away is that all the pressure for me to commit my mother is washed away with him. He was what was holding them back … and he’s gone. And now I don’t have to face the morality of committing her. Of deciding whether she’s sane or not. Of deciding the validity of her claim that this is home. Of deciding the validity of the Kunimara claim over hers. For the sake of the fat man I try not to feel too good about this.
Thaw takes the last drag of the fifty-fifty marijuana cigarette and flicks it out his window and talks the smoke of it out of his lungs by looking down at the bankburst river and saying, ‘Nature’s power, eh,’ and nodding.
‘Yeah,’ I say. I nod too. ‘I’ll back Nature’s Power against the William Page Wilson Memorial Bridge. I’ll give you three-to-one.’
Three-to-one?’ asks Thaw. ‘You want me to back the bridge and you’re only offering three-to-one? Piss off. Check the amount of driftwood backed up there now. That bridge is under big-time duress. If we’re betting here, and if I take the W.P.W. Memorial Bridge, I want eights. For all I know Aloysius is still upstream somewhere pissing down into the catchment, shortening Nature’s Power to unbackable. You should give me tens at least.’
‘I’ll give you six-to-one,’ I tell him. ‘That bridge was built with cyclones in mind.’
Thaw picks a strand of tobacco off his tongue, looks at it up close and decides it’s green enough that it might be marijuana and puts it back on his tongue and works at swallowing it. ‘Are we talking full-on collapse or significant damage?’ he asks.
‘Full-on collapse.’
‘All right, I’ll take sixes,’ he says. ‘Ten bucks.’
‘Right you are. Locked in at sixes.’
We sit and watch the bridge as the river hammers at it with driftwood and its load increases. I barrack for Nature’s Power. Thaw barracks for the bridge. Keeps shouting, ‘Hang on, baby. You can withstand the blast. Hang in there, Dubelyoopeedubelyoo.’
Before it happens I can see it’s going to happen so I have my get-out clause ready and waiting. And when the water rises over the William Page Wilson Memorial Bridge and the river-wide tangle of driftwood floats up free of the safety rail and downstream in slow-spinning rafts crashing into trees and snapping branches and cutting through foliage and Thaw starts jumping around next to me in the cab of the Cruiser and shouting, ‘Dubelyoopeedubelyoo has withstood the blast,’ I say to him, ‘Speculation.’
And he says, ‘What?’
And I say, ‘Pure speculation. The bridge is no longer visible. It may be a healthy bridge. It may be cracked in half. We have no way of knowing.’
‘You slimy bastard,’ he tells me. ‘All the pressure’s gone off the bridge with the driftwood. It’s withstood the blast.’
‘That current,’ I tell him, ‘is treacherous.’ I point down at where the bridge is submerged. ‘Destructive and treacherous. We just don’t know. Speculating gets us nowhere.’
I start the Cruiser. I call up Phil back at my mother’s house on the two-way and tell him the fat man is gone and Phil tells us he’ll ring the police in Hedland and the police in Perth, but you know those police choppers, he says, and their fear of any sort of weather serious enough to get its own Christian name.
Thaw adds about fifteen Slimy Bastards to our bridge conversation before we get back to my mother’s house.
My mother and Jean come out the front door for the full story and we hold our hands out to say c’est la
vie and I shake my head and say, ‘Nature’s power.’ And Thaw looks across at me a dirty look before agreeing, ‘Nature’s power,’ and shaking his head. We tell them about the flooded river. My mother starts to cry in noiseless jaw-shivers and tears and Jean hugs her and rubs small circles on her back that are loud on the crimplene or rayon or raelene or polypropylene or whatever is the plastic stuff my mother’s shiny shirt is made of. We all try to think of something to say. Jean comes up with, ‘Oh … Belle.’
My mother hasn’t cried for more than a minute and hasn’t had more than about three hundred loud circles rubbed on her back before she’s fighting her jaw-shivers with a smile and saying, ‘Well, it’s for the best I’m sure. I’m sure of that. He’s been called. He’s been called.’ I tell her I’m going inside to have a bath. Which is an alternative to telling her I’m going inside to have a bath before the urge to punch her between the eyes overwhelms me.
We spend the rest of that day repairing her house. She starts babying her roses. Asking them if they don’t think they’ll get a nasty burn naked as they are and finding more shade-cloth and draping it over them and anchoring it with bind-a-twine despite them not having any leaves now to be burnt by the sun. She rebuilds the dams around their trunks that hold the water she brings to them. She asks them if they’d like a little snack and digs Osmocote Full Bloom into the wet earth around their roots. Tells them they’ll be just fine when the trauma passes through their systems.
Jean and I work as a team jigsawing pieces of fibro cement back onto the walls. Working out which piece fits where and nailing them up. She’s the recogniser of shapes and I’m the hammerer of nails.
Silences Long Gone Page 21
