by Tim Winton
And it took me a minute or two to cop on but when I did it fucking set me off, put a wasp up me clacker that did. The chick in the movie, the one in the fire gutsing it out like all them kings and soldiers and flames and dirty laughing bastards couldn’t break her.
Even for love he says. Even for a baldy-head girl like Lee is what he means. Well screw you I thought, you said you never looked at me phone that time or any other time I got suss about it. But how the hell else you gunna know who and what she looks like?
By now there probably wasn’t a bee’s pube of battery left anyway, I didn’t even check anymore, didn’t dare in case I needed that last ray of power later on, and now the idea of it being pissed away. By Fintan fucking MacGillis. While I’m out there hunting up a feed. Him like a dirty bush cat going through me stuff, his paws and his priesty eyes all over her. Christ, was I wild.
But I never touched the cunt. It was like I was there in me own fire. And I had control.
I stood up a mo. Rubbed me scabby bald head. Brushed all the fuzz off me arms and chest. Then I went straight up me camp and dug the thing out, saw it was dead and gone. I stashed it in a hollow log where not him or any other shithead could get at it. Battery or no battery I couldn’t come at the idea of people touching that phone now.
I spose I took a minute or two to kick the skin off some poor tree minding its own beeswax. And then I went back down and give the old dude a red hot mouthful. Told him he had no fucking right, the filthy perv. And he swore he never once touched the thing but I knew he was lying. I told him I had a bloody gutful. Said he had no self-control, he was like a fucking child, said he bloody disgusted me. Then he give me the puppy eyes and when that didn’t work he did the shaky lip thing and I said I should break all his fucking fingers but I wouldn’t because then I’d have to do all his bloody jobs as well as mine. Then I ran out of things to say and he went in and layed on his bed and had a bit of a sook.
So that was me day rooted. I took the Browning and fucked off. I could of left for good that time. And true I got close. For a while out in the ridge country I thought of coming back for me gear and pissing off there and then. But I chilled a bit. Just from walking really. There was birds to see, finches and quail, things to take me mind off him.
And in the afternoon I sprung a big red roo. Truth be told, we sprung each other. He looked at me like he couldn’t believe I existed, like me being there just wasn’t right. I shot him as he turned to go and he spun round like he was dancing and when he went down I felt kind of sick.
For a few minutes I didn’t go near that buck. I wasn’t taking any chances getting me guts ripped open if it wasn’t properly dead. That was part of it. But also there was this sad feeling, something I never got when I took me turn to off a goat down in the mill yard. Fact is I wasn’t real keen to get over and see what I done. A goat’s got eyes make it pretty easy to kill. Them flat snaky pupils, they stop you feeling like a prick for doing what has to be done. But a roo’s got a big round cow eye and it makes everything different. Same with dogs and cats. I can’t never kill another one of them, not even for mercy.
Mrs Mahood come over one day when Mum first got crook. We thought it was like a sick visit, but not even close. Said she had a mob of kittens nobody wanted and she didn’t have the heart to deal with them herself, would Mr Clackton see to it for her. Seeing as how he wasn’t so particular. Mum kind of froze her off then. Like she was a fucking Mormon. But that night there was a bag of cats outside the back shed. When he got in the Captain said the fuck he would and he left them there. Two days later the old girl come over again and saw the bag still goomfing and meowing all over the path and she cracked the waterworks. Mum was in bed and the Cap was at the shop so it was up to me. She said what kind of person could treat creatures that way? Like wasn’t I ashamed?
Well I picked up that wriggling pissy sack and took it out in the street. Heard her clomping along behind me as I went down, kicked her gate open. Right up on her porch I took it, up with the white swans and the flowerpots and all. Bashed them kittens to shit against the verandah rail. Four, five, six times. She made this noise like a strangled crow. Looked at me like I was a fucking monster. Not even a thank you.
Anyway the afternoon I shot that big red roo I faffed round like some old woman putting off the messy bit, the butchering that is. Told meself I was letting the meat set, that I was getting the knife edge back up before I got into it. Shit like that. But I knew I was only stalling.
In the end I stepped over the rocky ground between me and this old buck and saw he was bled out and dead as a rock. But when I squatted down with the Dexter I looked at his big brown eye and saw meself, a reflection of me, a kind of shadow looming out of the sky and I had this mad idea, like there it is, Death, that’s me, that’s what I am. A few weeks ago a thought like that woulda charged me up but now it was depressing. All the same it didn’t stop me trimming him down and dressing him out while he was still warm and flexible. I reckon it took me near on four hours to get him back down to the shepherd’s hut and when I was still a long way off old Fintan come out and met me and it was like I’d brung him a present, a peace offering, he was clapping his hands and dancing like a nut. I got a good fire going and we had ourselves a feast and after that things were okay between us again. More or less. I even started sharpening his knives for him to make it up, ground away while he read stuff or said it out from memory.
Like I said, we got along okay most of the time. Except for when we set each other off. Sometimes that was accidental, like one of us’d say something without realizing and it made the other one blow turds and kick the wall. Other times we knew we was digging and niggling and we did it because we was bored or just evil for a minute. And some days it was hard to know if the shit we said was random or if it come out on purpose. Like when I asked him about dead people. Because it wasn’t just the once I piped up on that. There was something about the way he talked the first time made me want to try him again. He said I come back to that business like a dog to its vomit.
See, I kept remembering what Auntie Marg said in Moora that day we went down to see Nan dead in her house. She said Nan had a good death. I was only a kid then but it still got me. And now I’d seen three dead people and touched two of them and I didn’t need to lay a finger on them to see what they were. The moment you come near, everything in you goes cold. In your arms and legs and teeth you know what you’re seeing is horrible. When they’re dead the whole of them is wrong. It doesn’t have to look like what I saw out there in the shed, it’s bad however it happens. And I kept thinking, is a good death just a stupid thing people say? Like what some of them said at Mum’s funeral, I’m sorry for your loss, like they were on the fucking telly or something. Because I just didn’t see the good in it, all the peaceful merciful bountiful bullshit the padre said about death before he give the nod and the coffin went in.
So it was one morning up the junkpile. I was digging a new hole with the mattock even though it wasn’t Soup Day, because we figured it was better if you dug it the day before and didn’t have the bucket standing there reeking to the fuckhouse for half an hour while you tried to chip out a dip in the stony dirt. I stood resting a second and saw Fintan looking at them old beds and kero fridges and rolls of barbwire. I didn’t even think to be dark on him for standing round while I did the digging, I just had that good death thing on my mind.
You seen dead people, I said.
Yes, he said without even looking my way. Too many. I told you.
You’re a priest. I spose you buried them.
Buried? I’ve seen them pushed into pits with bulldozers, he said.
I didn’t know what to say to that. I was standing there with me mouth open.
Seen them stacked and burnt like piles of rubbish.
Jesus. Where?
It doesn’t matter. And don’t ask.
I took a swing with the mattock and sparks flew off a stone and I straightened up again. I looked at him and thought, well
that’s the end of that talk. But Fintan lifted his singlet and scratched his guts and kept looking at all the wrecked stuff in the pit.
A hole bigger than this trench, dug with a machine. Full of bodies. And you know something? I sat in the shade of a butterfly tree and drank tea. It was a grand pot and a lovely tree.
I don’t get it.
Well, that’s two of us. Because I didn’t feel a twinge. And yet when my own dear mother lay dead on her bed I was deranged by it.
You mean you went mad?
Not truly. Though it felt that way. There was no smell, no flies. She went peacefully in her sleep, and there was a turf fire burning in the grate and gentle traffic outside the window. All the same, you’re at the scene of a horror you’ll never come to terms with. Nice people bring you cocoa and you look at it like it’s poison. You think, I’ll never eat or drink again.
Which come first?
Whatsay?
What happened first, your mum or the other thing?
Are we not observing the rule today, lad?
I dunno, I said. Is that the same as not observing my phone?
Oh, are we after that again? Have you not a shred of mercy?
I wanted to ask him where he saw this bladed ditch full of bodies. And I didn’t know what a butterfly tree was neither. But I bit me lip and got on digging. Because I wasn’t in the mood for arguing. Then a minute later I started up again and told him about Auntie Marg and the good death she kept talking about. I told him how that got up me, it didn’t seem right any way you looked at it.
Perhaps what she meant to say is your nan had an easy death, he said. Sure enough, it’s something to be grateful for. So many hard ways to die.
I know, I said.
I fear you do.
I’ve seen it.
Yes, lad. I have no doubt. I sense it in you every day.
So if one’s easy and the others are hard, then what’s she talking about?
Oh, Jaxie, who could say?
I just thought someone like you would know.
And then he give a sort of groan.
I don’t know that I do, he said. Everything I once stood for was predicated upon a noble end, the example of a brave, fine, pure death. And by God, half the people I knew and loved went in search of something like it, to emulate it. We were all mad for it. Seems to me we spent half our born days curating our own good deaths. Nowadays that strikes me as absurd and perverse, utterly monstrous. But I’m not a good judge of monsters; I don’t know if the idea of a good death repels me now because it’s in itself repellent, or because I no longer have the courage to seek such a thing.
I don’t know what any of that means, I told him. Can you say it in English?
He pressed his knuckles to his head. For a bloke not doing any digging he looked hard worked already.
Alright, then, he said. You know what a sacrifice is, yes?
The Anzacs.
Whatsay?
When you die for your country, I said.
Oh, he said. I see. Well, yes. For your family, your country, your faith.
You don’t believe in that?
That’s how I was raised, lad. These are the good deaths. Apparently. But we have something in common, you know, you and I. We recoil before the notion. Every death is a horror, is it not? Every end a cataclysm, an outrage.
Fintan gummed on them plastic teeth of his and kicked the side out of a rusty drum and the old 44 shook but didn’t roll.
Those feckers who blow themselves up outside hospitals and markets. The eejits who fly aeroplanes into city buildings. They think they’re martyrs, you know. They’ve studied on it, the business of giving themselves a good death.
That’s not a fucking sacrifice. That’s murder.
Well, it takes some courage to be a murderer too, you know.
Bullshit, I said. That’s sick.
Or a soldier. Or a bureaucrat. Or a priest who tells a million people their deaths are willed by God, the fruit of their obedience, an ornament to their reverence for life.
I spat on me hands, mostly for the chance to look away. Because now I wished I hadn’t asked him anything at all. I didn’t go for the way he was talking right then. And I hated the eyes on him when he got like that. Eyes of a steer. It made me sick to look at him.
Jaxie, be happy for your nan. An easy death is something to be envied. There’s no shame in it. Isn’t it what any sane person would wish for, to go quietly in his sleep?
Fuck that, I said. I don’t ever wanna die. I’m gunna go down fighting.
Could be it’s harder to surrender.
Jesus, listen to you with your arse-about talk. Brave to be a murderer. Harder to surrender. You’re all fucking words and no balls.
Oh, pish posh, boy. Are we finished digging this hole yet?
Here, I said, ditching the mattock his way. You fucking finish it.
Down at the lake there were trees up in the sky, all stood on their heads. It was beautiful and funny like he said it was, so at least he was right about one thing. And seeing that made it hard to stay angry at him. It was just a stupid mirage but I stood out there and watched it till I didn’t mind it wasn’t real.
So we had some blues, me and Fintan. He said we were merely conducting civilized conversation. But sometimes it was like he didn’t know how close he was to getting his head stove in. Or maybe he didn’t care. Even so, everything was peaceful more or less. Until the wind come round from the north.
III
Out there by the lake the weather was near on the same every day. Of a morning, before dawn, the wind got up from the east. Then by about noon it come round from the south. In this way it was no different to Monkton that time of year. Some people would find that boring but it suited me fine.
But then one morning the easterly didn’t show at all. That day was hot and breathless. The air got sticky and the lake stunk like a tadpole puddle. In the middle of the morning a string of emus come in from the salt and stood watching me and Fintan as we twisted out washed sheets and hung them on a wire off the mill tower. They give us this horrified look like what we were doing was some weird ugly shit, what Fintan called crimes against nature. But emus are total goony birds, they always have that shocked look on their faces and they can stand there and stare for hours, the dumb buggers. They just parked out in the samphire and peered at us while we strangled the water out of innocent laundry. And it was funny for a while. Then they got on me tits and I chased them off with a lump of wood. I don’t know if I did it from plain shittyness or because there’s nothing like seeing an emu run. Thing is, once I saw them off I didn’t feel any better. Like I said, the weather was strange. Everything started getting up me. Peevish, the old man said I was. Fucked off more like.
Fintan was a wanker for doing laundry. We had words about it every week. But naturally he always had the most words. And he could spout them in Irish too. Guttersnipe, gobshite, gouger, all that shit. Mostly it was just gobbing off to pass the time and mostly I never give a damn, it was just talk. Sometimes it was fun. And it wasn’t so special that day, the stuff he walloped on with, but once we got the sheets hung out I got a mood on. That old restless feeling.
All the time I was at the shepherd’s hut it come and went, that itch. Some days I had this feeling I was stuck. Like I’d let meself get comfy. That I was no different to him. I had meat and water and a swag. And I didn’t go to sleep worried or get up scared. But the thing is I wasn’t going anywhere. And knowing it got me itchy to go.
That was how I was that still, sticky day. I’d seen enough trapped goats by then. Watched them figure out they was caught. And I thought, that’s not gunna happen to me. The next time Jaxie Clackton’s stuck they’ll be nailing him in a box, and you can take that to the bank.
But I was kidding meself totally because I mighta been safe but I was fenced in at the shepherd’s hut fair and square. I was kidding meself thinking I was free. The truth of it bubbled up like acid and got me filthy on everything. I knew ri
ght then I was gunna run.
Fintan knew me moods good enough by then so that morning after the washing he steered clear of me. I sulked off and hung under me tarp all day, sat there without a shirt and plaited up some rawhide. I got the idea to make a band for the old man’s gay hat, give it to him for a goodbye present. And I finished it up late in the arvo but I never did give it to him. I tidied up me crap a bit to make it easier to load when I pulled the pin. Did it sly so he couldn’t tell. Let him think I just had the pouts. He wouldn’t guess I was getting ready to leave. Tomorrow might work. Day after at the latest.
At sundown I come in by the fire and we et our meat and tomatoes and greens. And I let him give out about Ireland to keep him happy. He went on about some dude called Christy Ring who he swore was a bloke but I wasn’t really listening. Me mind was on Lee. And heading north. Getting free. It’s funny you know because Fintan used to ask me all the time, like a possum chewing at a live power cord, Jaxie, lad, what is it you want, what is it you’re after from life? And I’d say, what does anybody want? And he’d go, most lads only think of sex. And I said speak for yourself.
In the end he wore me down. Always asking. And the answer I give him is still the only one I have. What do I want? Peace. And it actually shut him up. He didn’t niggle me about it. It was like he got it straight off. I don’t just want quiet neither, I want peace.
I kind of wish we’d talked about that sort of thing this warm evening. Instead of him going on about Christy Ring and me not listening. But I sat there and went away in me head and after a long time I saw he’d talked himself dry and was nodding off. So I kicked the fire in and called it a night.
But when I got to me swag where the sheets were clean and slippery smooth I was too keyed up to sleep. Everything was quiet down the hut and in the bush but I could feel meself listening for something, like I was expecting Fintan to start clanging round down there. Nothing at all was happening but I was waiting, straining to hear.