Thaw re-erects the short-wave aerial in her front yard. He talks the BBK men into holding it up for him with their bulldozer blade while he stretches out the wire guy-lines and fastens them to the ground with star-pickets he borrows from them. They hold the pickets for him while he hammers them in with stoned swings of a sledge-hammer that they keep ducking away from and dropping the pickets because of, while he yells at them to Hold Fuckingwell Still For Chrissakes, I’m Just A Little Stoned.
And she’s back in touch with the Voice Of God. Can take hold of her red-handled, sharp-nosed pliers and grasp that little steel shaft on her bakelite radio and can tune it off Weather Watch and up the dial to where the Voice of God broadcast what it is they broadcast that she can’t get enough of, and can get it clearer than ever. Clear as a bell. All the way from the Philippines. Because of Thaw. First he silenced the didgeridoo, and now this. She’s taking shifty little glances at him when he’s not looking. Squinting at him. Trying to recognise just what sort of angel he is.
She bakes a batch of Anzac biscuits for everyone to share, she says, but mostly for him to hog alone we can see by how often she hands them to him and asks him breathlessly, ‘Oliver?’ Asks him with biscuit tray out-thrust and an unblinking stare locked onto him like it’s a much bigger question than just concerns a hunger for biscuits and a much bigger name than just Oliver.
The next day is clear blue and hot like statistics say 358 of them out of the 365 will be. Aloysius has gone north and smashed up Broome and is now downgraded to Category One, running out of puff, tacking across the Timor Sea to Indonesia to get renamed in honour of one of Suharto’s Generals and to smash up peasant dwellings with its dwindling winds.
The BBK men have nothing to do but wait. And they wait in their air-conditioned site-vans throwing down their flushes and their straights and their fours-of-a-kind and sometimes we can hear the yelling and swearing and cries of Cheating Bastard and Oh Bullshit of a royal flush being laid down reverently.
Thaw and I spend the morning shovelling away the dirt that’s washed up half a metre deep against the west wall of the house. Jean behaves like a member of the Rum Corps and tells us we’re lazy blackguards and urges us to put our puny backs into it. We land shovel-loads of dirt on her bare feet. She goes walking then. My mother stays inside learning to live without hot water and listening to dreams being interpreted in Sydney.
In the middle distance a peaceful dove is tolling and Thaw and I lean on our borrowed shovels and get into an argument about where birds ride out a cyclone. His preferred theory is they flee before it comes and they return when it’s gone. My theory is they cop it on the chin and a lot of them are killed by it. ‘Listen to that mournful sound,’ I tell him. That’s a bird in mourning for a loved one.’
‘That’s a bird tweeting the one note in its repertoire,’ he says.
We’re still leaning on our shovels developing our theories of birds in big weather and listening for the peaceful dove when we hear a diesel engine coming in slow from the north-west. It’s working hard, cutting mud. It gets onto the highway just north of what were the outskirts of town and moves up two gears and then hits the bitumen of where the highway ran through town and it moves up another one. It’s a Land Cruiser ute. It turns into what was Johnson Street and works back down through the gears and comes to a stop between us and the site-vans.
Barry Campbell is at the wheel. Self-confessed shit-stirring abo-radical of the Kunimara people. Next to him is a little black boy with wild sandy hair jumping around and leaning right across him trying to put his head out the window at us. The boy’s hyped-up and shouting non-stop about how he found him in a silver can just like tomato soup or just like tuna or peas or just like Milo … in a silver can … with Kunimara people kissing all over his stomach and all over his back. Barry Campbell is telling the boy, Shut up for a second, Lally. Just shut up for a second.
He leans out of the cabin and says at me, ‘G’day. Got a smoke?’ I smile at his joke but before I can answer a commotion breaks out in the back of his ute. There’s a yellow roo-dog standing up there with its front paws on the cabin roof and its tongue hung into the stopped breeze. And there’s something else there the roo dog is tiptoeing around trying to stay away from. Something alive under canvas. Struggling now and fighting to uncover itself, rising up and striking at the canvas and asking, ‘Are we here, then? Have we arrived?’ And when the canvas is finally tossed back the thing is Charles Wadlow. He stretches and yawns. Has been asleep apparently Napping. In another Hawaiian shirt. His midriff is ringed not with Kunimara-black but with silhouette-black lovers kissing under silhouette-black palm trees in the foregrounds of a series of purple sunsets with waves white on the sea behind them. His big khaki shorts are covered in mud and ash and blood. The blood is from dead kangaroos that have lain in the back of Barry Campbell’s ute where he has lain. He has bruises and cuts and barks all over him.
Thaw looks at me wide-eyed in question and I tell him, ‘The fat man himself.’
The boy Lally is pointing up at him through the rear window of the cabin going ballistic, shouting, ‘That’s him I found from the silver can like the Milo ‘n’ like the soup … with the people kissin’ on ‘im. That’s him.’
Charles Wadlow shakes his head and tells us, ‘Hello.’ Tells us, ‘I’ve been rescued … by a nine-year-old who works on the finders-keepers principal.’ Barry Campbell just shrugs and the boy continues on his rant about how he was the finder of the man and he found him in a silver can like tomato soup or baked beans except look he’s got Kunimara people kissing all over his stomach and all over his back.
I admit it’s another sorry comment on my soul, or maybe just the same sorry comment all over again, but when I first see this fat man rise up out of the canvas and the dead and stand up into the sun in his Hawaiian shirt all I can think is, Shit, now my mother is watched by the media again and now BBK can’t evict her again and now they depend on me again to have her committed, and again I have to work my way up to some sort of decision as to her sanity and as to whose holy land this is.
The BBK men pour out of their vans with their potential flushes and potential straights and potential full-houses hidden from each other deep in their clasped hands and gather around the ute and start asking questions. But mostly what they get is information about the Milo and the soup and the baked beans. I tell Phil to tell the police to call off their helicopters. My mother emerges from her house and declares it a miracle and when Charles Wadlow can climb down from the ute she wraps her arms around the crowd of kissing couples and the sunsets and kisses a palm tree in the middle of his chest, then steps back and says, ‘I’m sorry, Charles,’ and looks down at his feet. He grabs her and pulls her back in among the kissing couples and tells her there’s nothing to be sorry about, tells her he’s been on a rather hairy ride and needs a hug.
When the BBK men find out there’s no death and no real mayhem to speak of they lose interest. The worse card players among them owe their whole super packages to the better players now, and they can’t afford minutes blinking out here in the sunshine. They have to get back in there hunkered low over their hands in the air-con, hoping they’ll get a run of what the other bloke’s been getting a run of and hoping that run will be all royalty of the same race. So they go back into their site-vans and start planning again the straights and the royal flushes and praying for the winning streaks.
We go into her house. She stops Barry Campbell at the doorway with her fingertip on his sternum and asks him to take his muddy boots off if he would. He looks at her and looks down at his boots red with mud and looks at her carpet which is red with the mud of all our comings and goings and looks at her again and laughs and pulls his boots off. Then he looks at Lally whose bare feet are covered with mud and asks her, ‘How about the young fella?’ And she tells him, ‘The boy’s all right. Clean as a whistle … for a boy.’ And he laughs again and shakes his head and says, ‘I’ll be rooted,’ and walks inside.
; We settle in her living room. She gets us coffee. She feeds Anzac biscuits to Lally to mute his news about what he found and where he found it while Charles tells us of what he calls his rather hairy ride.
‘I swear to you it wasn’t even raining,’ he says, ‘when the old girl was bumped off her chocks and started to move. It was hellish windy but not a drop of rain, or I wouldn’t have been waiting in a watercourse.’
‘Unbloodybelievable,’ Barry Campbell says to Lally. ‘Unbloodybelievable where your white fella will camp.’ He says it solemnly like it’s a wisdom he wants Lally to keep always.
‘Anyway,’ says Charles Wadlow, ‘I’m lying in my bunk when, bang, a wall of water has the old girl up and away and bumping and tipping across the ground and at first I think it’s a mining company bulldozer has hold of me but then I know it’s water. And it’s tossing all my possessions at me first from one side and then from the other. Knick-knacks and keepsakes and souvenirs that have been a comfort to me for years are now attacking me left and right. And I’m trying to save the breakables and put away the heavy items that are bruising me up and threatening to put my eyes out. The canned goods and the Magi-Mix and the jaffle-iron are particularly vicious,’ he says, and he points out injuries inflicted by each of them. The jaffle-iron has cut his ear.
‘All night this goes on. All night. I’m swept along all night, and it’s dark and I can’t even tell which way I’m floating so as I can brace myself for impact until whatever side of the old girl is the bow at that particular time runs smack into a tree and sends me sprawling flat into the rising water on the floor and sets the old girl spinning downstream in the river to run smack into another tree. And this is all I do all night is float and sprawl and spin and float and sprawl and spin with the old girl getting more and more misshapen by the trees she’s confronting and taking on more and more water and getting heavier and heavier until I’m knee deep and sure she’ll burst.’ He looks at us and nods at us all one by one to see we’re paying attention. Taking in the horror.
‘In the end I lie right in the water. Float there with my toiletries and my knick-knacks bobbing about me. And I’m thinking the old girl was never a very stylish van but she’s a fairly stylish coffin if it comes to that. And, Belle, you’d probably have said a little prayer at a time like this but I didn’t. Instead I ate a whole box of Cheezels that was floating ‘round my face and bobbing up against my chin begging to be eaten.’ My mother refills his coffee and tells him she thought he’d been called.
‘Probably was called, Belle,’ he says. ‘But didn’t answer. Because the old girl didn’t burst and didn’t sink. Because she’s a Continental Tourer, and Continental Tourers were built between fifty-three and fifty-six in Maine by men who took a great deal of pride in their work and who probably believed the touring of continents was some sort of modern-day pilgrimage.’
He pats the sunset over his stomach and wonders about the biscuit supply and my mother brings him more biscuits and tells him she’s happy to indulge his greed because she never thought she’d get another opportunity to indulge it.
‘So anyway,’ he says, ‘next morning I’m watching the trees whiz past and wondering what to do and what of the bobbing foodstuffs to consume and I hear an outboard motor. Here … a million miles from usual water. And Barry here and Lally here come out to me in a boat and hitch me up and haul me in and I’m rescued and they’re pretty astounded about me. And I’m pretty astounded about them, too.’ He makes an upward motion with his hands as if end-of-story.
Barry Campbell takes over the telling. ‘Lally, who was in the flood river where I told him not to be, heard him out in the water squealin’ for help and came runnin’ and got me.’
‘I was singing,’ says Charles. ‘Not squealing. Opera.’
‘Squealin’,’ says Barry Campbell. ‘So we chase ’im along in my little tinny and catch ’im ‘n’ tow ’im out of the current ‘n’ there ‘e was ‘n’ he wades across to us ‘n’ they nearly capsize me tinny, him tryin’ to lay a hug on me ‘n’ Lally tryin’ to bail out the other side screamin’.’ Barry Campbell laughs. ‘Startin’ off near the bridge out along the road there ‘e must’a floated fifty mile out to the mission.’
‘Fifty miles,’ my mother whispers like fifty miles is the recognised miraculous distance to be washed in a flood. ‘Fifty miles.’
So the fat man himself is back. And I’ve got to work out if she’s mad again. He talks into the night about what he calls his rather hairy ride. He drinks three bowls of canned potato and leek soup while my mother dabs at him with hot towels and Mercurachrome and he tells her he’s all right only fatigued to the max. Then my mother offers my bed to him and he thanks her and gets in it and says, ‘Ahh … civilisation,’ and snuggles down. He complains he can feel the whole house moving, like a sailor come home from the sea with all its moves still in his metabolism. I’m allocated the sofa with its galloping horse herd cushions and its planned obsolescence. I lie awake tortured by its sag.
I sneak into Molly’s room after lights-out to get into bed with Jean but she won’t have me sleeping in there because she’s sure I’ll get sexy, or she’ll get sexy, anyway sex will ensue, she says, once someone accidentally rubs someone’s something in the night. And sex is something Jean does wide-eyed … and there’s still that little stuffed rabbit with the chewed ears and the glass eyes catching the light looking down from on top of the drawers and there’s still the doll with no hair on the window sill where the moon shines right on its bald head and there are the various drawings hung about the room that Molly got gold stars for and got told she had a big future in some creative field about. There’s just too much Molly here for Jean to allow me into her bed.
I bed down on the sofa again. I toss and turn to find where the comfort is. And I assess my mother. Whom I remember from the mists of my preschool days when I was short enough to nap on this sofa in comfort once asked my father, ‘What would we do without him, Frank? Look at him lying there. What would we do without him?’ Or maybe someone else said that about someone else. As I said, mists of preschool memory.
I assess my mother. Snap my fingers in the dark. Decision made. Maybe not fully sane, but sane enough to look after herself anyway. For now. Which is probably just postponement of assessment, but will do me.
Because I can hear her through this wall. Her creaking as she paces back-and-forth in her unlit bedroom, not able to get into Molly’s room tonight. Not able to get into that wardrobe.
And maybe the closer you get to sanity the closer you get to grief. So maybe we’ve got no right to demand it of her anyway.
Part 5
15
Windless Gullies
She’s hot for the windless gullies. Wants to get in among the blue gums and the tree ferns and the black wattles and revel in nature. Even if it means this fifties weatherboard with small windows and an obvious stump problem and not enough decking to entertain on in any fitting manner.
He says blow the windless gullies, if you’ll excuse the pun. He’s for the southerly views. Because when you pay your money for that cream brick four-bedroom back up there in Armytage Street not only do you get your four bedrooms and your permanence of solid cream brick you get a hundred kilometres of the most beautiful coastline anywhere on the whole planet, which you haven’t paid for, and you get a perfectly endless expanse of sea, which you also haven’t paid for, and which is a constantly changing pageant. And you can sit behind that plate glass window and drink it all in and feel the distance seep back into your bones and you can feel … he doesn’t want to sound like a wanker here … but you can feel … well … free. Which is definitely what owning a getaway is all about … getting away … feeling free.
She says, Crap, Michael. If you want to feel free use Dimple like always. And she tells him the sea is a constantly changing pageant because of the constant. And the constant is wind. Wind, Michael. And I’m not travelling all the way down here on the weekend just to stay inside out of it. Look at
the beautiful trees down here in this windless gully. Splendid giants. And imagine the magnificent garden well have. And there’s the birds of the rain forest. What are they again?
I run through the Crimson Rosellas and the Kookaburras and the Gang-Gangs and the Funereal Cockatoos and the Sulphur-Crested Cockatoos and the King Parrots and have done the honeyeaters and am just mentioning the magpies by saying not to mention the magpies when she tells him, See? Hear that, Michael, what the young man is telling us? All those beautiful birds.
And Michael says the view down here in this gully is all broken up with foliage and he bets this is the arse-end of Lorne. And she says, Michael. And he looks me in the eye and wants to know, Is this the arse-end of Lorne?
I flatter myself that I had no gift for the skills of Real Estate. Had no knack for eradicating white ants with a lie and for curing rising damp with a denial. Had no special aptitude for picking bids like apples from trees. Had no real grasp of how to talk fifty thousand dollars higher to the vendor on my mobile than to an interested buyer who was waiting on hold. Would never have thought to give a slab of beer to an unemployed plumber to use his Saturday morning making dummy bids for me. Didn’t easily say straight-faced that a ramshackle shitbox was a real character ripe for renovation when I had a perfect opportunity to call it just a ramshackle shitbox.
In short didn’t have the hereditary gift for telling which client belongs to that legendary sub-set Some-Of-The-People whom you can fool all of the time and which client belongs to the more dangerous group of All-Of-The-People whom you can only fool some of the time. I like to think I had to be taught it by long and arduous trial and error. That Geoff Yeomans Senior was forced on occasion to despair, to puff out his cheeks and blow a shot of own-rolled smoke across his desk at Geoff Yeomans Stupid, Lazy, Fat and Junior, and announce, ‘I don’t know if Jack’ll ever catch on. Maybe he hasn’t got what’s required.’ I like to think Geoff Yeomans Lazy, Fat, Stupid and Junior coughed back at his father and agreed, ‘He’s no natural, that’s for sure.’
Silences Long Gone Page 22
