Silences Long Gone

by Anson Cameron

  20

  Powerbook

  Now I sit out on our deck with the autumn breeze a murmur of undecided weather through the wind-chimes and I watch to the north. And when I see in the distance that lemon-coloured MG appear over the sea skirting the outer fold of Pearson’s Hill and disappear into the gully that separates it from Cathedral Hill I know we have only a couple of minutes before he’s at the WELCOME TO LORNE * TOURIST RESORT FOR ALL SEASONS sign and only a few minutes after that he will be up here unbuttoning that driving coat and doffing that tam-o’-shanter and squeezing the wind out of that old-growth monument and shouting, ‘Ahoy, the house.’

  So I yell into the house at Jean, ‘Incoming,’ like he’s something ballistic and deadly brewed up in the munitions factories of Homebush, something that only gets its nose screwed on and its detonator cap teased live when the Prime Minister comes on TV to make a solemn announcement of hostilities commenced.

  From in the house Jean yells back, ‘Righto,’ and we snatch off the bench-top and snatch out of the fridge whatever we can, which one day might be a packet of Cheetos and a bottle of vodka and another day might be half a dozen VBs and a packet of chicken chips and a Billabong rug, and we jump into Jean’s old Holden and head up to Teddy’s Lookout.

  Up here in the trees high over the ocean at Teddy’s Lookout there is a cairn with a brass plaque the circumference of a car tyre on top of it. In the centre of the plaque is written TEDDY’S LOOKOUT. 1888–1988. Radiating out from the hub that is Teddy’s Lookout like spokes of a wheel are place names and distances with little arrows at their tips. This plaque is the perfect height to sit on. And if it’s mid-week and no tourists are likely I’ll sit myself on top of it and Jean will sit on my lap facing in to me and we will make love, I suppose, slowly, me tracing her vertebrae with my fingertips and her trying to dig my vertebrae out of my back with her fingertips, rocking back and forward across the place names and the distances and the arrows. And one of us will be looking out to sea while we make love, watching what Jean calls an unparalleled panorama for fornication. For love, she sometimes says.

  If it’s me looking out to sea I end up with Australian Antarctic Territories indented along the back of my right thigh and Hobart 550km indented along the back of my left thigh. But the view means more to Jean than to me so I usually face inland while she looks over my shoulder at it and sobs at it as we rock back and forward and I end up with Ayers Rock 2000km indented along the back of my left thigh and Cape York 6100km indented along the back of my right thigh and she ends up crying out at where the Southern Ocean meets the sky and up here for a while we are beautifully alone.

  Then, when the sex is over, there’s nothing left to do but be refugees. We lie on our rug in the sun and watch the bending white lines of surf crossing the green water way below us. And we watch the weather run in off the ocean to the west. And we get under our rug as the rain starts and watch the weather dull the water from green to grey without ever becoming any colour that isn’t green or grey. And we drink our bottle of vodka and our beers and munch our starch-filled snacks and talk of all the places on that plaque we’d like to visit or to live and we wonder if any of those places have plaques pointing back at Lorne and Jean decides they probably don’t but if they did it would make her homesick for Lorne to see those plaques and so decides she’s probably at home living in Lorne anyway. I, on the other hand, wouldn’t be homesick to see Lorne on a plaque in some far off place.

  Down in the town he’s searching for us. Searching for me. Has parked his MG outside room 204 at the Surfcoast Motel and buttoned the tarp over its cockpit and is wandering on his stumpy legs from Jean’s gallery to Kolorado to Waterborne to the Lorne Hotel to the Pacific and out along the pier with his Powerbook in his hand. Waving to people who shout out at him about his liquidambar and what it did to his shed-slab and asking them have they seen me. Do they know where I might be?

  They look north up Mountjoy Parade and look south down Mountjoy Parade and tell him I could be anywhere. Probably up some windless gully lying to someone who’s just down on their knees begging to be lied to. Telling someone, probably, how life here on the coast in the rainforest is painless with sheer beauty and doesn’t resemble what they’re enduring in the city in any way shape or form. Is painless because we don’t have the things to be pained about. Don’t have the crimes of violence committed on our neighbours three doors up and on our acquaintances three times removed, and don’t have the hang of foul air and don’t have the awful traffic, the pure congestion shot through with car-horn, and don’t have those lights that go from green to orange and then outright red and that you have to cease all progress for and sit for and slam the palm of your hand into your steering wheel and yell Fucksakes about. Probably telling someone how we’ve got peace-of-mind riding on the salt air here in Lorne instead of Fucksakes. Just another part of the environmental whole, like the giant trees … and like the wave roar … and like the shriek of cockatoo and the echoing laugh of the kookaburras.

  All of which is the sorry type of bullshit I have been prone to peddle at prospective getaway buyers before and am likely to again.

  But right now I’m up here at Teddy’s Lookout. Because he has excerpts he wants to read at me. Scenes and scenarios he wants to run by me. Excerpts I can’t bear to hear. Scenes and scenarios that make me sick to look at with that mind’s eye of mine.

  When the sun goes down a Billabong rug becomes a paltry home and being a refugee here in Lorne starts to feel more like being a refugee in those impoverished parts of the world the plaque up here doesn’t point to and doesn’t mention. And being up here isn’t anything but lonely.

  Jean is drunk and cold and sick of being a refugee. In the dark she hands me the empty bottle of Stoli we snatched full off the bench-top in our flight and tells me, ‘Here. It’s empty.’ And then tells me, ‘Fuck him. He’s only a brick and a bottle high. And babyfaced. Who does he think he is? I’m going home.’ And asks me, ‘Coming?’

  I tell her, ‘Soon. I’ll walk. Do me good.’

  And she rests a hand on the back of my neck and tells me softly before she goes, ‘Jack … Jack.’

  She sprays gravel out from under the rear wheels of her old Kingswood and fishtails down off the mountain. I listen to her go. Listen to her engine race between drunk gear changes and listen to the spin of rubber on wet bitumen and listen to her slide into corners. Listen hard. Because it’s the part of humanity that knows me best saying what it has to say about me.

  I walk down Albert Street with Ayers Rock 2000km still tingling down the back of my left thigh and Cape York 6100km still tingling down the back of my right thigh. Destinations lingering in my skin and muscle hours after they were put there. I crouch and stroke my fingertips down over my tingling thighbacks as I walk and try to read in braille through the denim these places and their distance from me.

  Which gets me drunk-wondering, Is Hannah lingering in me somewhere as well? Somewhere too deep for fingertips and for nerve ends? And drunk-wondering, If Hannah is lingering in me in some susceptible place what unit of measure would appear after it to tell of its distance? Which wouldn’t be kilometres or miles and wouldn’t even be months or years, but would be something else altogether.

  Gets me drunk-wondering and fascinated into outright stupor probably, because when I turn south where Albert Street hits the Great Ocean Road I cross the road in front of a set of headlights that veer and light gum trunks momentarily white and that become a hornblast as well and a fading yell that is maybe even the ‘Fucksakes’ I tell prospective getaway buyers isn’t in the traffic and isn’t in the air here.

  I follow the Great Ocean Road to the edge of town. Step off the low side of the road into the moon shadow under the blue gums there. The air has gone cold now and is oozing mist in slow ribbons up off the water through the trees. Below me I can hear the waves guttering along the rocks heading into the main beach in town.

  I stand there under the dripping trees. Shivering no
w. Staring across the road at the Surfcoast Motel that Nick Southby who owns it is now starting to boast about as a haunt for the literati and a hangout for artistic types in general. I stare in through the dining-room window into the dining room that is still lit deep yellow with fog lights from when Nick had his Ocean Voyage theme running. Watch the diners in there that are mostly road workers and fishermen and shop owners and not literary beyond reading the arse-end of the Geelong Advertiser and not artistic beyond designing T-shirt motifs that demonstrate the beauty of Lorne with usually a combination of trees and waves garnished with a seagull or garnished with a funereal cockatoo.

  Watch him in there in the deep yellow. Dining by himself and sipping his Cockatoo Ridge Chardonnay and signing his great novel on the Vietnam War when a bony woman brings it to his table and signing his great book on Rob Roy when the bony woman digs her shy friend in the ribs and the shy friend steps up to his table with it thrust out. And watch him share a joke with them, which is probably the joke about him feeling like a star of Aussie Rules.

  Then watch him pat his Macintosh Powerbook on the table in front of him and drum his fingers gently across its top and tell the bony woman and the shy friend that the next book is in here, and tell them when they ask, to expect it on the shelves soon, when he nails down the last of what it is he has to nail down and when he sheds light on the last of what it is he has to shed light on … or tell them something, anyway.

  Rubs his palm across its top with pride and with satisfaction like there they are … all in there. Sleeping now. But roused at a touch of his finger. And all trained and choreographed to react like integers and divisors and numerators and multipliers in an equation from a species of mathematics sad enough to use them … use Molly and use Mum and use Dad and use Adrian and use Thaw as well to unveil whatever it is about humans can be unveiled. He lays that hand right on his Powerbook and leaves it rest there and smiles up at the bony woman and at the shy friend.

  They’re his now. And I can’t get them back.

  Unless I walk in there. And tell him, ‘You’ve been looking for me,’ while his mouth is full of porterhouse and his manners won’t let him reply. Snatch that Powerbook off his table and raise it over my head and slam it into the fierce yellow chickens that dance in a conga line in the carpet Nick Southby bought at the receiver’s auction of a failed chain of chicken eateries called Chooktastics, and watch it in slo-mo become just plastic casing and just keyboard and just motherboard and just certain circuits slow-scything past certain slow-startled diners and just a hard-drive and just a battery and just a frizzle of silicone chips that ping off the window and off the fog lights like cyber-gnats and that can’t ever again tell of Molly and Mum and Dad and Adrian and Thaw.

  And take hold of him then by a fistful of shirt-front and a fistful of old-growth monument and pull him into my face and tell him through a grit of teeth, ‘That wasn’t them. You missed them.’ And let go of his shirt-front and point down into the carpet, into the conga line of fierce yellow chickens, point at the exploded wizardry there, pull his stare down there by that mighty beard … and tell him again, That wasn’t them.’