by Gregory Day
Between times, alone on the riverflat with the sheep, Ron would dutifully shoot any fox on sight and with his fishing line would cruise the river on his punt, or killick Mr Bolitho’s tiny black row-boat on a bend, breaming and hooking mullet and eels to take back to Min to cook at night, and always rotating the rabbit traps. He made his own more benign traps too, out of whippy tea-tree spars and bracken fronds and the long reeds that grew by the river. In these riggings, these lovingly snecked box and drum snares, he’d catch the myriad small marsupials that dwelt all around him: quolls, bush rats, bandicoots, possums, sugar gliders. He’d watch them closely and get to know their ways, sometimes feeding them and sometimes taunting them to watch their reaction, even going so far as setting the traps alight with the creatures inside, to witness their relationship with fire, and with fear.
Occasionally he’d catch the strangest things in his traps as well: a tawny frogmouth owl, for instance, a Cape Barren goose, a yellow-bellied water rat, and once a catlike animal he’d never heard anyone ever say a word about. Ron kept this catlike creature in the trap under the river redgums for two whole weeks, fascinated by the pale independence in its eyes and the seemingly unperturbed way it curled up in the trap, as if entirely sure it would eventually be let out. Ron set it free one morning at the Old Breheny Road bridge but christened it the ‘snoutcat’ before he did so, because of its long nose. As he raised the door of the trap the snoutcat bolted, low to the ground, across the river paddocks towards the bush on the other side. Ron never saw one again, but didn’t need to. From then on, looking up from the riverflat at the often purplish collar of the hills beyond, he would always know it was out there, the snout-cat, a symbol of the unknowable nature of the bush, of its sureness, its indifference to people, proof of all the things that could never be proven.
He grew to know all the calls of the birds, the gang-gangs, the parrots, the owls, the groundlarks, the bellyfull cormorants, the various ducks – musk, black, teal, wood, mountain – as well as the other waterbirds. There was one bird in particular whose song he knew as well as any but which he had never seen in the act of singing. Ron called this bird the ‘tinwhistle bird’, purely because, like the snoutcat, he had no other name for it. The tinwhistle bird had a piping repetitious song: first, three notes in rapid succession, high and clear, and then three more in an identical rhythm but lower down the scale. It was like a call and answer, a conversation, and the purity of the sound would dominate the air if ever it was around.
Leo Morris observed the teenage boy closely after Albert Bolitho died and the pastoral lease was broken up when Ron was fourteen. No longer busy with shepherding and unable therefore to disappear each day into his own demesne, Leo had sensed a crowded feeling about the boy, a lostness, a need to replace the feeling of his days alone amongst the sheep and weather on the flat. He also observed a certain held-in expressiveness about him. After the Sunday masses in the music room at Bonafide View, Ron would be monosyllabic but always hovering near the priest’s harmonium and fingering the sheafs of music scattered around on every table and bench. Well, it could do no harm, Leo decided, his own days on the instrument had been shortlived anyway. He’d always preferred the precision of the piano.
And so it came to be, with a smiling wink from the priest, that Ron and his father arrived on the tractor that blue-black day during the war, to take possession of the Thomas pump organ from Ontario, Canada. Leo could see the anticipation in the boy’s crinkled brow as he drank a cup of tea with Len McCoy and talked about the family’s changed circumstances. They chatted about Len’s plans now he didn’t have an employer, about how he could rustle together a living from fencing, mending, digging and shooting, from his knowledge of the ground of the old Bolitho lease, and how newcomers would no doubt need him for similar reasons to Albert Bolitho. They talked confidently about this, and also about the war in New Guinea, for a good half-hour. Ron sat at the table without saying a word.
It was not a crime to be silent, Leo Morris knew that, he’d never found a problem with people who felt little need to use the words the Lord had made available, no, not if one was productive and happy; but there was just this inkling the priest felt, this sense of light somehow trapped and probing, trying to seep from the soul of Len and Min’s only boy.
In the first few weeks after Leo Morris had given him the organ Ron didn’t quite know where to look. They’d agreed to put it in the shed, mainly because Len was wary of what he and Min may have to listen to. Leo had shown Ron only its rudimentary language – the scales, the concordances of the stops, the way to pick out a familiar melody in the right hand whilst droning in the bass with the left. They’d arranged for a weekly get-together to advance upon this but during the in-between times Ron would tentatively explore the potential voices of his new instrument.
It was extraordinary, as Leo had said. With certain arrangements of the stops it could sound like a highland bagpipe and yet in another combination, say with all the stops pushed in but for Principal, Clarabella and Pipe Melodia, it had the dark solemnity of an orchestral instrument. And then again, if all stops were pulled and a simple chord such as E major was played, the sound would blast out of the oak casing, ready to raise a congregation to its feet. Ron would fiddle with the combinations, finding by trial and error the sounds he enjoyed and all the while picking up smatterings of technique from Leo during the Wednesday afternoon sessions in the open shed.
As it turned out, it was the tinwhistle bird that opened the doors for Ron to the addictive pleasure he eventually found with the instrument. For two years after taking possession of the pump organ he would wait until his father was away from the shed and stumble assiduously through the rote instructions Leo had given. After these two years he could passably play a tune – the ‘23rd Psalm’, though with halting chord changes – and he would climb through arpeggios and move his fingers crablike across the keyboard in search of new scales every morning and night of his life. But without illumination. Until one day, three weeks after he had decided to abandon the ‘23rd Psalm’ in favour of the ‘Marseillaise’, he absentmindedly began to search out the notes that the tinwhistle bird sang on the other side of the shed wall. There it was, over and over, first the three high notes and then the answer, the low notes – a dialogue, but all from the same bird.
It took him most of an afternoon, what with finding the notes and arranging the stops for the most faithful sound, as well as experimenting with accompaniment in the bass, but long after the bird itself had flown away to pipe its tune under someone else’s sill, Ron was blissfully pedalling the bellows and playing the tinwhistle bird’s tune. It was like magic. Beyond the treble clefs, the arpeggios and the fingerings, and far beyond any dutiful intent on his behalf to make Leo’s gift worthwile for all concerned, he was playing music. His music. Well, as he’d often reasoned with himself since, the music of his world.
Over and over he played the tinwhistle bird’s tune, eventually abandoning any need for faithfulness of tone and pulling out all stops and then pushing them in. He extemporised and improvised and droned and piped the simple arrangement of notes. It was a new dimension, a gateway, and when his legs finally stilled on the bellows he felt sated in a way he never had.
His heart was full, and yet nobody knew. It was like the sea of diamonds and yet he had it under his fingertips. What else could he hear and play like that? What other things in this world could be taken and fashioned so? It was never ending, he imagined, like the halls of sparkling jewels under the surface of the sea, it was infinite like the night sky, mind boggling and simple all at once. His solace with the pump organ had begun.
THIRTEEN
CRAIG’S BIRTHDAY WISH
Liz had been taking on more work and spending more money since she wasn’t walking regularly. During idle hours in Minapre, she’d wander into shops and be persuaded to buy things that otherwise she would never have dreamt of needing. She bought Victoria Spring jewellery and Scandinavian outdoor furniture, a fram
ed historical photograph of a local fishing boat under sail, lots of polar fleece, and therapeutic candles; she bought an antique Indian bell which she installed next to their front door on Riverview Drive and which Libby, for some unknown reason, loved; she bought loads of tinctures and unctions and foot creams from the chemist, three different Middle Eastern shawls from the cute little shop next to the Tourist Information Centre, and flowers, and fresh organic vegetables from the blue covered stall near the Fishing Charters office, and of course smoothies from the cafes, and coffee and cake.
Craig’s birthday was coming up and as a gesture of remembrance of the time they first met, when they were both young and travelling, she decided to buy him a lavish coffee-table book on Prague that she found in the bookshop near her favourite cafe. Prague was the one European city Craig had always wanted to go to but never had. He’d missed his chance in the late eighties and now he was virtually resigned to the fact that he’d never get there, given the onslaught of western tourism that he felt must have ruined the place in the 1990s. Sure the architecture was still intact, Prague never having been bombed in either world war, but it just wouldn’t be the same, Craig thought, it’d be an excruciating experience: half-pleasure, half-pain, one minute authentic charm, the next minute the golden arches.
Coming home from work on his birthday, November the fifth, after a week of dealing with Colin Batty’s intensity over the news of the Morris house being sold, Craig found that Liz and the kids had piled presents onto the dining room table and were waiting for him excitedly. Under Liz’s firm instructions even Libby was raising a smile and hugged him tightly as he came in the door bemoaning not his job but the lack of surf.
As his stepdaughter hugged him he realised that he’d almost forgotten what she smelt like, it’d been that long. Then Reef came forward with his present for his father wrapped in blue tissue paper and eyes imploring Craig to open it.
‘Can I have the sticker on it, can I have the sticker, can I have the sticker?’ Reef cried even before the gift was revealed.
‘Of course, mate,’ Craig said laughing and raising his eyebrows in amusement at Liz. ‘As soon as I have a quick look at what it is, eh.’
He ripped open the tissue paper theatrically. Reef’s present was a block of blueberry-perfumed board wax, with the big WAXY’S brand sticker on it.
They ordered pizza for tea from Cafe Gosh next to the General Store and Liz had made her apple crumble for dessert. Craig knew all the fuss was an attempt by Liz to revive things in the house. That depressed him. But he didn’t like to show it. That would’ve been cruel. Somehow, though, the whole thing felt staged and he was playing the ‘grumpy dad who needed cheering up’ role. It disappointed him that his wife had created that scenario. He remembered a time when she wouldn’t have known how. He also remembered a time when she was just another Aussie girl with a money-belt, drinking herself sick with the boys on a terrace in the south of Crete. Back when she didn’t interest him one iota. When her and her kind repulsed him in fact.
But he had to be grateful. Libby gave him a smart little book on the cafes of Melbourne (which Liz had bought for her to give to him) and there they all were, around the pizza boxes and the Cascade Pale and the Coke and Sprite bottles. The least he could do was to kick back and enjoy. Maybe I’ll even get pissed, he speculated to himself, but his sensible side knew that would be wrong. Given his mood, things might get ugly.
They wolfed down the pizzas and with the TV turned off played one of Craig’s favourite CDs, Standing In My Shoes by Leo Kottke. Kottke was neutral, almost unemotional, but for that tinge of historical melancholy that couldn’t be avoided.
Craig’s crumble had a candle in it and ‘39’ written haphazardly on it with icing sugar. Liz drew the curtains, the riverflat and the hill opposite disappearing behind them, and the lit candle commanded their attention. Craig leant back in his chair and looked at it, and Reef jumped up and down on his seat.
‘Go on, Craig,’ said Libby, but Craig held up his left palm and said, ‘Don’t rush me.’ Libby turned away and scowled so that he couldn’t see her face.
But Craig wouldn’t have noticed anyway. He had just sensed for the first time since they had left the city that the making of a wish could somehow be important to him. He could wish that things were a whole lot happier, or that the local guys would start to chat to him in the surf, or he could wish to go back a few years in time and have a re-run. He could wish that Liz was thriving, or that Libby was one of those more exceptional teenage girls who didn’t throw away their delightful charm the moment they got their first period, or that Reef would never grow up. But none of that was fair.
As his family waited, looking at him across the light of one candle as Leo Kottke’s twelve-string guitar plucked a delicate tune, it even occurred to him to wish that they move back to Melbourne. Now that was a turn-up. Things had got tough if he was thinking about that. But he couldn’t quit. And moving back was just a joke. Once you’d got used to not locking your car and not getting parking fines, living in Melbourne would be like going into prison.
‘Come on, Dad, blow it out and make a wish,’ Reef piped up, his body uncontrollable in his chair. He was now kneeling on it with his thin arms thrown behind him.
Craig smiled but said, ‘Give me time, Reef, a wish is an important thing.’
Libby rolled her eyes again in the semi-darkness. This stalling of her stepfather’s she saw as typical of the way he liked to control them all. To make them all wait while he, the lord, decided.
Liz’s face had gone blank now as well. She could see his eyes thinking above the candle in the crumble. She hoped he’d wish something for all of them. And not be so isolated, as he had been lately.
Finally Craig leant forward and blew, the candle blinking straight out. Libby got up and ran over to open the curtains. The western light, even though it was late, was still blinding at first. They all raised their hands to shield their eyes. After a few moments, with their eyes adjusted, they could see the black steers way down below, mooning about in the paddocks.
The party dispersed but Liz and Craig kept drinking. Craig sat on the couch facing the big window and Liz had her feet pulled up under her where she sat on the leather armchair that had once been Craig’s father’s. Craig had the Prague book open on his lap and was flicking through its pages. Old faces and architecture from the heart of Europe and from the eye of its twentieth century storm stared out. Maps of the Austro-Hungarian territories, old yellowing maps that showed how the borders had changed. Historical paintings of aristocratic scenes from the 1800s, of the Imperial Hapsburgs, for instance, complete with their heraldry, and a vase of roses on the marble table around which they were all posing.
Then there were photos of a more modern Prague: tourists looking at a red mural of Jim Morrison, a newsagency street stall captured in bright sunlight, with LUCKY STRIKE banners all across the top of it; a still photograph from an experimental movie by Jan Svankmajer, a street model dressed in a vivid green skirt and jacket, with a retro sixties fluffy white hat, swishing across a curving antique street.
Craig loved it, the photographs, the buildings in the background, the air of jazz and art, the edge to it all. Just as Liz had intended, he remembered absolutely lusting to get to Prague when he was younger, but he couldn’t quite recall why he never had.
He sipped his beer, occasionally pointing out an image to Liz, who was content to sit in the chair by his side and drink, and watch him absorb himself in the book. He flicked over page after page, staring at the Russian tanks of ’68, or the modernist monuments of the thirties, gazing ever more happily at the smoke coming from the chimney pots through the grain of the black and white images, the glass lamplights, the overcoats, the trams in the fog, a rack of cellos high up in the music workshop of a Czech Jew sent to death in the camps of occupied Poland. It was all so far away: the motor scooters, the snow on the lapels, the hardship and the style. It made him long to be there, just as he used to in his ear
ly twenties.
He didn’t tell his birthday wish to a soul, of course, and by the time he had laid the Prague book down and started yawning he had almost forgotten it himself. Waking the next morning, however, with Liz open mouthed and sound asleep beside him, it was the first thing that came into his mind. From the little he could see through the gap in their bedroom curtains he sensed the day outside to be bright and windy. Gone were the all-consuming images of Prague and its people. Gone were the sepia tones, the early aircraft and the palaces. In their place was Craig’s resolution, made in the light of his birthday candle, in the presence of his family, to once and for all give up surfing and take up fishing in its place, a sport far more in harmony with the unexpected solitude of his life. He couldn’t put up with the subtle stand-off in the water any longer. He was just too sensitive. He’d noticed the Greeks and Turks catching lots of fish off the beach all through the late winter and spring and whenever he saw a little tinny out on the water on a calm day he’d begun to yearn to be in it. Now he could do all of that. He’d just had to decide. The wording of his actual wish as he stared into the flame of the candle the previous night had been: May the fishing bring me happiness, for the surfing sure as hell hasn’t.
FOURTEEN
SAD MUSIC FOR THE RABBITS AND THE THRUSH
Not once in eighteen months did Min ever go over to the boundary between Dom Khouri’s land and hers to have a closer look at the progress taking place on the building site. Ron thought perhaps it might upset her if she did but, in fact, Min would not have been upset, neither by the extent of the building nor by the men who were clambering about on their former land. She kept her own oblique eye on things from the window above the sink in the kitchen where she found herself lingering over dishes or potatoes that needed peeling, often leaning on her stick now to get a better view. Depending on where certain tradesmen had parked their utes, she could see the progress of the glaziers by how far along the eastern face of the building their Thermoses were placed, and the progress of the stonemasons by watching the oddly shaped blocks of the limestone they were cutting creeping ever higher towards their long string lines. She could also watch the man in charge, Dave Buckley, discussing various things with this or that tradesman, pointing to the roofline or glass sheets or discussing wiring with Joe Conebush, and by watching things closely over the following couple of days she could deduce some of what their discussions might have been about. She couldn’t hear the specifics, but as the months went by she had begun to develop her own version of how things were being done, and why, and how or what was hindering progress and who or what was helping it flow.
