Silences Long Gone

by Anson Cameron

  Phil opens the esky and the fish are floating white-belly high in dirty water that back across the Nullarbor was likely dirty ice and they’re smelling like they’re that thousand hot miles from home. He winces and says, ‘Thanks. Boarfish, eh?’

  ‘No worries,’ says Thaw. ‘You’re a long way from the sea. Thought you could use some fish.’ He’s walking little staggers forward and back to keep from falling over.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Phil asks him.

  ‘Visiting.’

  ‘What you do to your hand?’ asks a young man who’s a grader-operator on his tax form and has lost his tan playing poker in a site-van and is trying to get it back wearing just shorts and a necklace.

  ‘Cut myself,’ says Thaw. He lifts his bagged hand in front of his face and twists it around as if he’s looking at the back of it and then looking at the front of it and not just looking at a shopping bag blackened all over on the inside with blood bled days ago.

  ‘How’d you do it?’ the pallid grader-operator asks.

  ‘Cut myself,’ says Thaw.

  ‘Hurt?’ he asks.

  ‘Not now,’ Thaw tells him. With his good hand he opens the rear door of the Range Rover and pulls out a black Nike track-bag which he hangs in the crook of his right arm. Then he reaches inside the open front door and pulls out the ignition keys and asks the pallid grader-operator, ‘What sort of car you own?’ and the pallid grader-operator tells him, ‘Motorbike,’ and Thaw tells him, ‘Have this one,’ and throws him the keys which he catches off his bare chest and his necklace. ‘Only don’t ever drive it into Victoria,’ Thaw tells him.

  Right there when Thaw gives away that beautiful car Phil thinks, Jesus, there’s something seriously amiss here, maybe I should restrain this bloke. And several other of the BBK men later confirm that they too think, Jesus, there’s something seriously amiss here, maybe I should restrain this bloke. The pallid grader-operator only thinks, I’ll be buggered I’ve got myself a free car, and he starts to admire its metallic green finish and its leather seats and to wonder wouldn’t it look good with fats and to ponder how isn’t it lucky he never had any desire to visit pissant little Victoria anyway.

  The men who think there’s something seriously amiss with Thaw and contemplate physical restraint all stand and watch him instead as he steps over my mother’s front gate and staggers up to her front door and shouts, ‘Hello? Hello, Belle? It’s me.’ Then opens the door and stumbles into the dark while their speculations on restraint go past-tense into, Hmmm, maybe I should’ve restrained that bloke.

  I like to think it was like this. I like to think he found her hunched over the Voice of God and coughed he was here. I like to think she hugged him and told him she knew he’d come. I like to think he hugged her back and made some comment about how he was just passing through and thought he’d drop in that she smiled at … maybe tittered at.

  Then she reels back at the sight of his bagged hand and insists let me have a look at that while he tells her it’s nothing. And while she bathes the black crust off it in a Dettol bath and interrogates him about how on earth such a debilitating … painful and debilitating … injury came about, he concocts a story of working men and heavy machinery and just the tiniest lapse in concentration. A story that takes her back to her girlhood in London where it was common for the older men in her family to be missing fingers and by the time she was five and had gone from awe to disbelief at their stories of crocodiles and tigers they told her their stories of being men working with heavy machinery who had suffered just the tiniest lapse in concentration.

  And as she bandages his hand he suggests a cup of tea because he’s feeling faint, probably from the drive as much as the finger, and tells her he has an inkling a cup of tea will restore him. And she tells him the restorative powers of a cuppa can’t be overestimated. And while she boils the kettle and fills the old tannin-stained pot with Robur Cafeteria Blend he complains how hot it is in here and goes and opens the living-room window to let in some air and she is delighted all over again about the magnificent silence that is also out there suddenly and comes flooding in with the air. She says he wouldn’t believe what a gasbag is that Bridget Slee with all her international travels.

  And while they drink their tea she asks him how’s Jack getting along and he lies to her that I’m getting along real well … better than real well. He goes stratospheric with the bullshit. Absolutely killing them, he says. Has just won a Real Estate Institute of Victoria award for selling the most coastal properties above the three-hundred-thousand-dollar mark in a financial year and his employer Geoff Yeomans Senior, as opposed to Geoff Yeomans Fat, Stupid, Lazy and Junior, is throwing a party in his honour. And this, he tells her, is only one thing to celebrate about your son Jack, the other being that we’ll be hearing wedding bells very soon because the lovely Jean, for some inexplicable reason, has consented to wedding bells.

  And she rises from her chair with her fists clasped up under her chin and tells him she’s been praying for just such a thing and it’s down to God. Oh, how wonderful. What a lovely and beautiful girl. It’s down to God. And he says maybe it is down to God but he’s the one supplying the Champagne of France. And out of his Nike track-bag he pulls, Da … Daa … a bottle of Krug as hot as boarfish. And he tells her sit down and be still while he gets some glasses and they’ll have a celebratory drink and then maybe after that they’ll ring the happy couple because they’ll be home from work soon, Victoria being three hours ahead of WA.

  In the kitchen the bottle of Krug goes off like a shotgun. In the living room she blesses her soul. He comes out with glasses full and they drink the Champagne of France talking about my and Jean’s future marital bliss. And he keeps adding brilliant possibilities like a church wedding and like children and each time he invents another happiness he proposes a toast, holds his glass high and says, May the first girl be called Belle, and urges her drink up, and holds his glass high again and says, May the first boy be named Oliver, and urges her drink up again.

  Until they’ve toasted enough of my and Jean’s future happiness that my mother has drunk four glasses of Krug with four Mogadon dissolved in each glass and says she’s feeling woozy, super woozy, and isn’t used to champagne and had better lie down before she throws up. And Thaw tells her Don’t throw up. For Chrissakes don’t throw up, Belle. And he helps her to the sofa where her eyes start to narrow and her head starts to loll over the galloping horse herds on the cushion and her breathing relaxes and she looks up at Thaw who is standing above her asking can he get her anything and she asks a question of him that is too low to hear and he asks back, ‘What?’ and bends down and puts his ear close to her mouth and she asks again, ‘No wedding?’ And he looks startled and then smiles and shakes his head no, and tells her no real estate prize either and she whispers, ‘Oh, well,’ and tells him, ‘Thanks anyway’

  Which is all made up and speculated on by me. Because no one knows what passed between them other than she bandaged his hand and they drank some tea and somehow he induced her to drink a lot of champagne. Drink about half the bottle of Krug with its Lorne Hotel price tag on it and its Mogadon in it.

  And having watched my mother’s shallow toasts at any amount of Christmases and birthdays and anniversaries I know half a bottle of champagne was out-and-out revelry for her. Probably only the safe birth of Wendy Keszig as a healthy and normal baby when doctors had predicted she’d be a Down’s Syndrome baby ever got half a bottle of champagne into my mother in the years I was watching. And I like to think what was driving her to out-and-out revelry on this occasion was my future happiness. My marriage. My Real Estate Award. I hate to think what else was driving her.

  What he did next he did alone, so I won’t be inventing any more conversations between him and her. Won’t be inventing he took a roll of silver duct tape from his Nike track-bag and taped a rectangle of it across her mouth as she lay there on the sofa with her head stilled by Mogadon in between two identical herds of galloping h
orses that looked like they’d been spooked inside her skull and were stampeding out her ears. Because they found that screwed-up rectangle of tape under a chair in the corner and they unscrewed it and found a print of my mother’s lips and most of my mother’s white moustache still on it. And found another rectangle of screwed-up silver duct tape under the same chair and when they unscrewed it found what of her moustache they hadn’t found on the first piece and also found a print of her nostrils and a considerable amount of nasal mucus.

  Bruises tell he held her by the wrists for the minute or so asphyxiation and its attendant cardiac arrest took. Then folded her arms across her chest like some amateur mortician or like some caring son or like someone caught deep in a Jesus Trap. And tore the tape off her face and screwed it up and flung it away into the corner.

  Then fulfilled Senior Constable Mai Lunn’s predictions for ventures short and suicidal by going into the bathroom with his black Nike track-bag and closing the toilet lid and sitting on it and taking out of the bag the three parts of an old single-barrelled shotgun and assembling them into the old single-barrelled shotgun itself and inserting a number ten cartridge designed for the destruction of quail and putting the butt of that gun onto the half-moon piss stain on the lino in front of the toilet that was there from me and from Adrian and from Dad and craning his neck high and crooking his neck hard and staring down into the black innards of the gun with his right eye while he watched with his left eye his left big toe come up sliding across the stock across the chequering in the wood and across the cold metal and into the trigger guard.

  The best hand being held in a site-van at the time is four jacks and not even the man with four jacks swears about how his rare hand is made redundant and how he’s cheated of certain victory. He only moves his eyes. Like they all only move their eyes. Up off their kings and queens and jacks and into other eyes lifted up likely only off eights and nines and tens. And the men who thought maybe I should’ve restrained that bloke think it again prior to wondering, like they all wonder, should they rush into the house because a man has discharged a firearm in there or should they rush into the desert because a man has discharged a firearm in the house.

  They decide on the desert. They start their Toyotas, and a Russian immigrant by the name of Sam starts his Range Rover because in between the time Thaw entered the house and the moment the gunshot brought them up off their cards the keys had passed to him because he had had a straight flush just when a metallically greened piece of British art had rolled up in a dust cloud to have a straight flush about and the pallid grader-operator had had the usual handful of nothing but shit garnished with one red ace, he called it.

  They drive off a few hundred metres into the desert and park out there in the middle distance where the house takes on heat shimmer that no one could shoot through accurately.

  Phil has brought with him the megaphone the blond man delivered my mother’s mail through. He takes it out of the cab of his Toyota and points it at the shimmer of house and pulls the trigger and it screeches and he throws his free hand to his ear and he twists the megaphone around in the air pointing it at sky and ground as all the other BBK men tell him where exactly to point it to eliminate the screech and the screech goes from one pitch to another but doesn’t go quiet and he swears and turns a full circle sweeping the horizon with screech until, about thirty degrees east of the house, the screech finally stops and he puts his mouth up to the pointy end of it and asks the shimmering horizon thirty degrees east of the shimmering house, ‘Belle?

  And over the next hours asks the shimmering horizon thirty degrees east of the shimmering house, ‘Belle, can you hear me?’ And asks it, ‘Oliver, can you hear me?’ And tells it, ‘We thought we heard gunfire.’ And demands of it, ‘Dammit, Belle, are you ignoring me? What’s going on in there?’

  At sundown they’re all still out in the desert. Not crouched down behind their vehicles now but sprawling over them and sitting up in the backs of them and exposing their persons to gunfire they’re pretty certain won’t come. They’re thirsty for beer now and they decide the questions better get a little more poignant. So Phil pulls the trigger and asks the darkening horizon thirty degrees east of the house, ‘What the hell’ve you done, boy?’ And asks it, ‘Is anyone alive in there?’ And tells it, ‘Well. Fuck you, then.’

  18

  All the Niceties

  He doesn’t knock like authority. He knocks more like charity. At first I wonder is he the Red Cross and then I wonder is he the Salvos and then I wonder is he maybe the Royal Children’s Hospital and finally I decide no he’s the Lorne Surf Life Saving Club on their annual fund-raising drive. So I roll over front side down to the mattress and think, Blow you blokes, Jean’s old man donates squillions … practically the whole roof over your heads, the Tom Turners One through Six … everything.

  But the knocks of charity stop soon after a normal and healthy conscience would have got whoever is within the house off their sofas and to their front doors. His timid rappings go on forever.

  When I open the door he’s staring down past his belly at the felon-reducing accessories hung on his belt, making sure his handcuffs are just here over his left buttock and his .38 is just here on his right hip and his walkie-talkie is just here above his right buttock and his dog-walloping device is just here on his left hip where it won’t slap against his thigh when he’s striding toward whatever situation it is his responsibilities demand he strides toward.

  So for a while I look at the top of his hat he got for taking an oath and swearing to uphold some principles and then for a while I look down at his big belly he got by breaking the same oath and ignoring the same principles. And then I say, ‘Yeah?’ and he looks up and sees the door is open and I’m standing there wrapped in towel.

  ‘You’re home then,’ he tells me. ‘Not working today?’

  ‘Haven’t been to work all week,’ I tell him.

  ‘Haven’t you? All week?’ he asks. And then asks, ‘Fishing?’

  ‘Some,’ I tell him.

  ‘Rock or boat?’ he wants to know.

  ‘Bit of both,’ I tell him.

  ‘Sea’s been nice and flat for it,’ he says, and all of a sudden I realise we’re engaged in idle conversation. We’re chatting.

  So I ask him, ‘What is it?’ and he starts to work on the dog-walloper again which he seems to think has come round forward on his belt into the realm of thigh-slap and so I have the top of his hat to look at again as he readjusts and wriggles it pretty-well nowhere. Then he whips his hat off his head like he’s just remembered it needs whipping off for the sake of protocol and procedure and he looks up at me and says, ‘Well, then:’

  He’s confused. Because he’s got the two things to be right about and the one thing to be sad about and the way he’s usually right about something is to smile and put his chin up high and to be happy and to gloat outright and to let you know he has, in his time, seen just about every form of human malfeasance there is to see, which makes him some sort of social philosopher, and you’ve only seen the kind of human malfeasance that occurs in your own home, which makes you some sort of social moron. But he can’t smile and put his chin high and gloat outright about the two things he’s right about when he’s also got the other thing which protocol and procedure say he has to be sad about and have his hat off about and to have his chin low about. So he forgoes the natural gloating and happiness but can’t quite bring himself to the sadness, which was only protocol anyway.

  He just blurts it out. Just tells me, ‘Well, then,’ and then tells me the two things he was right about. Tells me, ‘I told you those advanced SMs didn’t stick it out for too long. Were suicidal. And I told you he was a bad bastard, too.’ And then tells me the thing he’s sad about. ‘He’s driven over there to the west and murdered your mother. With champagne and duct tape. I’m sorry.’ Then he puts his hat back on and screws it tight and looks up at me again and obviously isn’t satisfied with what the news has done to me and tells me
, ‘Your mum.’

  There are no free flights now I’m no longer next of kin to their problem but am only next of kin to a sad happening they’re vaguely associated with. So Jean and I get up at four in the morning and drive down the Great Ocean Road to Melbourne and take an Ansett flight to Perth. Flying with the sun we arrive in Perth mid-morning. From the airport we take a taxi out to the Peppermint Grove cemetery. We wander lost through its old maze of family plots and family crypts where groups of Smiths and groups of Atchisons and groups of Wallaces and groups of Camerons are laid out together and groups of Patcholis and groups of Sumichs and groups of Materas are stacked up together and where all of them are spelt out deep in marble under the swaying shade of peppermint gums and where you can trace a family line by who is calling whom BELOVED in gilt.

  Jean steps up onto an Atchison with the given names John Derrick who is sadly missed and fondly remembered and who is the beloved husband of Mary, who is beside him, and the beloved father of Andrew and Catherine, for whom there is an unkempt area of paspalum and dock and Scotch thistle for. She takes his fresh daffodils right out of the cement vase held aloft by the cement angels that are set into his cement grave perimeter close by his pink marble headstone so it will be brushed and fondled by petals when the Fremantle Doctor springs up of an afternoon. She steps off him again and holds a vertical finger of hush to her lips at me. I speak a mock ‘Jean’ of reproach, and she gives me back a mock look of contrition and takes one daffodil out of the bunch and puts it back in the cement vase so at least the Fremantle Doctor will have that to work back and forward across his headstone when it comes up later today.