Corker uncapped a whisky bottle and set up a couple of Pyrex glasses on a tree stump. From a reedy gully he extracted a billycan of clear water and asked Tony to say when. After they toasted the purchase Tony wrote a cheque for the deposit, and by the time Corker poured two more snifters of the Famous Grouse they were well away on a friendship riff.
There was more to this, an oddity of congruence. Among auctioneering legends, Careful Bob Corker, Alan Corker’s father, had been the veritable Don Bradman of his profession. Tony remembered Careful Bob ranging north to Haddon Rigg during the 1960s, where Tony, in blue Oxford shirt and Wool Board tie, shaggy hairdo and tight white moleskin trousers, had a season of selling rams. Corker liked the portrait of Careful Bob that Tony presented, a man the rest of the world had pretty much forgotten. Tony recalled gruff humour rising to the melody of a bush singer as the bids came flying in. ‘You’ve got him!’ said Corker. Even the sheep paid attention, said Tony; the crowds on the railings stayed hushed. Careful Bob was a small overweight man the double of Harry Secombe; his upper forehead white as parchment, his face raspberry-red when he lifted his narrow-brimmed hat to a lady.
‘There’s justice in that description,’ said Corker. ‘You have a way with words.’
‘I’m running out of them,’ said Tony.
After their drinks Tony wandered along a bush track, keeping to himself, wondering what he’d done. Corker followed at a discreet distance at the wheel of the Toyota. When Tony climbed back into the car Corker had the radio tuned to Classic FM.
‘So you’re a friend of the ABC,’ said Tony.
‘You could say that,’ said Corker. ‘I do a lot of long drives—five, six, seven-hour stints. Radio keeps me company. It’s been my education, sort of. Then there’s the music. It’s always the music with me.’
This was what people said, digging a hole for themselves, when they weren’t able to come out and say they loathed listening to Tony ‘Give Me Your Ears’ Watson. Tony knew that Corker’s buying group (underpinned by West Australian money) spent big on his show: it was why the Corkers of this world, honest brokers who needed him, couldn’t say they hated him. They didn’t know it was best to let fly, giving Tony the benefit of feeling cornered by desperation and dismal neglect. Didn’t know that his success was forged in silence.
Not that Tony sensed anything like hate from Alan Corker, an unusually warm and confiding sort of bloke. But just for a moment there, in the front seat of the car, Tony turned and projected from his upper chest and larynx into a space only a few inches in front of Corker’s nose something that sounded like ‘Arrgh!’
‘Are you alright?’ said Corker, hitting the brakes.
Tony recovered himself.
‘I’m on the ABC next month,’ he said. ‘“The Media Report”’s doing a tombstone number on my forty years of being me.’
‘I’ll be listening.’
‘You and about three others, that’s the stats.’
‘Come on, the mountain comes to Mohammed, you ought to be pleased.’
‘My sister, Judy Compton-Bell,’ said Tony, ‘must have given them a push. She’s deputy chair of Friends of the ABC, quote unquote. I put up with a tremendous amount of bull-o from her. I’m putty in her hands.’
‘Judy Compton-Bell—she’s your sister?’ said Corker.
‘To wish it were otherwise,’ said Tony, ‘would be very heaven.’
‘Her book’s in our library. There’s always a waiting list. I remember that night in ’98, the Sydney to Hobart . . . It was wild enough up here—wind and weird fog—couldn’t imagine what it was like out there on the water, till I read what she wrote.’
‘Garn, she’s unsinkable,’ said Tony.
‘It was the oddest thing,’ said Tony, when he took Judy out for dinner after she returned from Antarctica a week or so later. ‘I had the feeling all the birds were talking to me, calling out my name.’
‘As the centre of the universe, is this any surprise to you, dear?’
‘A bunch of white cockatoos flew over. They screeched my name from out of the blue. There were these grey little parrot things.’
‘Gang-gangs?’
‘Watch your tongue. It used to be like that when I was a kid. There was even a topknot pigeon, just ahead of me, looking at me from the ground—God, how I loved them—and a pigeon with a zigzag on its chest, like the mark of Zorro.’
‘A wonga.’
‘Speak English,’ said Tony. ‘Hissa, huzza, hissa hissa hissa. Huzz-ah!’
‘What’s that?’
‘A lyrebird, stupid.’
As he spoke, Tony cupped a hand and shook it beside his ear.
When they rose from the table they made a time to drive down south to inspect Tony’s bush block. Judy gave him the name of her doctor—she was always looking out for him. Worried sick about him, was how she expressed it.
‘But there’s nothing wrong with me,’ said Tony.
‘There’s a good reason to keep it that way,’ said Judy, kissing his cheek. He looked rather drained and exhausted. It was towards the end of his contract, his farewell few weeks behind the mike: years had been spent anticipating the end and worrying about Tony’s reaction. Judy and her pals went on about it.
‘I’ll be sticking to you like glue,’ said Judy. She felt that if things went well she’d be getting the old Tony back—the boy who played with her, games without end, with dedicated fondness of spirit. If not? Such desolation.
Complaining, upbraiding her, Tony went to see her ‘complimentary’ practitioner in Randwick. That was the way it was spelled in the handout.
‘It would help,’ said the doctor, a nutritional bloke, ‘if you could fill out this questionnaire.’
‘Jesus,’ said Tony, ‘must I?’
All very well to be asked intimate questions about history of diseases, operations, sexual infections and number of sexual partners (Tony wrote in that square: Information available on request, if deemed relevant). What knocked him sideways was the genetic slant on things, page after page, where your cousin’s uncle twice removed’s propensity for strokes or palsy pointed a finger down into the seat of one’s pants.
The doctor, who rather fancied himself on the psychological scale, wanted to know a lot more than Tony was willing or able to tell.
‘You can have no idea how this makes me feel,’ said Tony, hovering with his pencil and hitting on a rhythm of two ticks, three crosses, three ticks, two crosses, and so on through several pages addressing the nothingness of being.
When he phoned Judy to say what a load of crapola it was, she said, ‘Tony, come on around.’
‘Where?’
‘To my place.’
‘When?’
‘Now.’
A dusty tan stetson hung on the hallstand of Judy’s Rushcutters Bay flat. There was a knobbly cane of mulga wood leaning against the wall. A pair of dark glasses with side shades, ‘burglar glasses’ for the elderly, lay where they’d been placed by the owner of them, whose identity Tony guessed.
‘This is a set-up,’ he said, as he came into the room.
Warwick Mickless rose from a chair.
‘Tones,’ he said, completely without sarcasm (sarcasm Tony deserved).
This craggy giant of a man—he looked eighty—had pouches under his eyes, yellow horsy teeth, a cattleman’s blebs and blemishes of crusty skin cancers on the backs of his hands. Standing beside him was a small Indonesian woman, Betty, his wife.
Tony had the feeling that he was looking into the mirror, an impression gained by the way he hated what he saw, it was so much the best of all his own possibilities ripened and dried like wood. Then he looked away, turned back, and realised that he wasn’t having some sort of optical fit the way the room fractured into cubes and rainbows. Judy fetched a box of tissues into which he plunged a fist.
Now to the present—well, to yesterday, to be exact; the previous afternoon shading through to a crisp, starry night, and then from that purple deepness into a morn
ing where throughout the state at breakfast, on ninety-eight syndicated stations, there came no smash-bang of kettledrums to usher in the daily dose of you-know-who.
‘Aren’t you going to listen to your successor?’ said Judy.
‘No, I’m not,’ said Tony.
Anyway, the reception was appalling, so how could he listen to who-was-not-there-to-be-heard?
He twisted the dial, recalling the whistles and whoops of the old valve set at Blindale, with its green silken speaker cover into which Tony and Judy had long stared, seeing in the dim glow of the valves their entire futures being lived in imagination. And, as it turned out, much as they’d longed those futures to be.
On Aunty reception was better. In these back ranges there was a good reason why the ABC ruled the airwaves and even people who couldn’t be less interested listened to whatever was on, because stuffing one’s ears with words was a human must.
‘Immediately following the news we have “The Media Report”,’ said the announcer.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ said Tony. ‘Here she comes. Now she is on for young and old.’
He stood at the back door of his Owner’s Cottage, listening to a bowerbird squabbling with a lyrebird, and the radio playing the interview from the kitchen bench. He mouthed what he himself said, almost by heart. A rhythm of short and long sentences, abrupt declarations, deliberate silences running to tantalising suspensions of speech (a Tony Watson touch)—during which he pictured listeners, paused in what they were doing, wondering what the next word would be.
The crumbs of forty years, this felt more truthful to him than any of his thousand-dozen jaunty attacks on all and sundry. If he’d been a carpenter talking about the craft of planes and saws, drills and sanding techniques, he could not have been more on to himself. Judy, watching his face throughout, gave him a hug.
‘Why, I was alright,’ he said, when it was all over. There was nobody in the room to hear him say this. Nobody in that larger room, either, going on and on through boundless space. Outside, sitting on a stump, Judy was crying.
Alan Corker rang: ‘I heard you, Tony. You made a lot of sense. I didn’t know you were an orphan. Never heard anyone talk better about coming from nowhere, having nothing.’
‘I’m depressed by my own intelligence,’ said Tony. ‘It goes to show how easy it is to talk intelligent crap.’
Judy met Alan Corker when she came down to supervise arrangements for getting Warwick Mickless and Betty installed in the Manager’s Cottage. Betty said she would die in the mountain winters, but Warwick wasn’t so sure, even after a lifetime of his thermostat being adjusted to the Top End. He might even like it here. On the way in, as they’d come through a paddock of mares and foals, Warwick had climbed from the car to open a gate and, when they were through, he started walking out among the animals, bringing them up to his hand.
When they were all in the cottage with mugs of tea, Judy brought out their presents, wrapped in white tissue paper and tied with blue-striped string. For Warwick it was the tooled leather change purse, with a motif of desert pea and quandong fruits, that he’d made in boyhood days of saddlery repairs and stock camp evenings, and slipped to Judy after a night of heavy petting at Randall’s flicks. She was returning it to him now with the thought that Betty should have it.
For Tony the gift was a battered Salvationist tambourine, bought in an op shop on Bondi Road.
Tony held the instrument to his ear, giving it a hissing shake. ‘This is the wind,’ he said, ‘wrapping itself around the bluebush on the old Louth Road.’
Tony turned to Warwick: ‘Come on, say something funny.’
‘You never knew it,’ said Warwick, ‘but when you started on the air, all round the country, I’d listen to you on this old trannie I had in my saddlebags. This was when I was at Katherine, not far from town.’
‘Cut to the chase, cowboy.’
‘There was a way you had, it was like a horse, you walked, trotted and galloped. I used to think . . .’ Warwick paused.
Tony looked at him: all teeth and hairless hackles.
‘You used to think what?’ he challenged.
‘Well, that you mightn’t a’ done what you did, said what you did the way you said it, without seeing it done by a pony.’
‘Might or mightn’t,’ said Tony, pulling his jaw shut. ‘I always thought it was the wind that drove me, that wind that never shut up on the river road, and I wanted to get inside out of it.’
‘When I got stuck with Bluebell’s Voyage,’ said Judy, ‘and I didn’t know what to write next, I remembered what you once said, darling, when we were kids.’
‘What did I say?’ said Tony, swivelling in Judy’s direction. ‘What’s all this getting at me about?’
‘You said all the words were there waiting, everything we’d ever say in our lives. You said the words were in the wind.’
‘Well, even without us the wind keeps blowing,’ said Tony, and without knowing why, felt radio drop from his life, needs, and necessity.
TROUBLE
Tegan Bennett Daylight
Emma and I were walking home from school together. It was September, spring, with a cheerful breeze running along with us, new leaves lit and flickering, the houses hung with wisteria and jasmine. We were walking with Peter, who had been troublesomely in love with Emma for several years. If she’d been alone he might not have dared to follow her, but her younger, noisier sister made it easy. I was, without knowing it, combative; sparring with me had relieved the nerves of more than one of Emma’s boyfriends. Emma walked silently beside us, a spray of jasmine dangling from one hand.
A truck, uncommon in our money-quiet suburb, screamed past us. When it had gone, Peter said, ‘A truck drove into my house once.’
‘No, really?’ I was balancing on the low stone wall that ran beside the road. ‘Tell us about it,’ I said, hopping off the wall to land next to him.
He glanced at Emma, who continued to watch the pavement in front of her, which was lumpy with tree roots.
‘We lived on a corner,’ said Peter. ‘It came too fast on the way round, and its brakes failed. It went straight through the fence and into the side of the house.’
‘Amazing,’ I said.
‘It was a big deal!’ said Peter. ‘If I’d been playing in the yard it would have killed me!’
Suddenly inspired, I said sweetly, ‘Do you often play in the yard, little boy?’
Emma snorted with laughter and Peter blushed angrily. He was quite a handsome boy, with thick blond hair and long eyelashes. ‘It was years ago. I was much younger.’
A magpie whose nest we were passing swooped suddenly, clicking its beak in Peter’s hair. He swung at it in fright. It flew up into the branches ahead of us and perched there, glaring.
‘Come on,’ I said, prodding Peter in the small of his back.
‘You’re much bigger than it is,’ said Emma.
We went forward, turning to face the bird as we passed, then continuing to walk backwards. The magpie snapped its beak again and hopped along the branch speculatively, but did not swoop.
When I was eighteen Emma and I moved to London, using money that our grandmother had left us. We had a place to stay: a flat, belonging to wealthy friends of our parents, who lived for the most part in their farmhouse in Surrey. They were in their sixties, and had no children. The flat was furnished with cream carpet and cream brocade sofas. The windows had double glazing, so that the traffic outside could hardly be heard, although it made the ground bounce under your feet when you went outside. The kitchen shone. We took our boots off at the door when we came in, and the carpet would always be warm underfoot.
In our second week Emma started applying for work. I went with her to her first interview and sat outside on the street, in a quickly shifting rectangle of sunlight. First the sunlight was on the steps of the office, which was in a silent lane of low sandstone buildings with pretty window boxes. No cars. Then it moved to the pavement, so I sat there, my back against the cold
stone. When the light moved onto the road itself I stayed where I was, growing colder, watching it cross the narrow space.
The door next to me opened and Emma was handed out by a man in a white shirt and linen pants. My legs had gone to sleep. I tried to get up to say hello but the door closed before I was upright.
‘Did you get it?’ I said. I put one hand on the stone wall for balance while I flexed my stiff feet.
‘Pretty much,’ said Emma.
They were a civilised group of people—all men except Emma—working in a white, light-filled space with its tilted desks set up at a sociable angle. They rarely designed actual buildings—everything they did was a renovation, a conversion, of one of the many difficultly small houses, apartments and offices owned and rented by the well-to-do of London.
Emma’s office was only a few tube stops from our flat, and I met her for lunch sometimes, but mostly I sat at home, too weary to struggle along in the fine bubbles of her wake. I couldn’t get warm. It was only September, and the flat was centrally heated, but I was doing nothing except sitting at the table in our white kitchen, whose window overlooked Vauxhall Bridge Road. Sometimes I ate porridge oats, dry, from a bowl. There was something solid and sustaining about them. You could make porridge in your own mouth, mashing the oats into a warm paste with teeth and saliva. I could eat two or three bowls at once. I looked in the newspaper for work. Sometimes I had baths to try to ease the cold ache in my sides and legs.
One evening Emma brought a friend home from work. When they came into the kitchen I slipped down from my stool, shoving the book I was reading to one side. I wished they’d found me doing something, being busy. I saw myself in the face of the microwave, stomach held in, eyes ringed with black, mouth thick with red lipstick.
‘Your voice sounds English already,’ I said to Emma, unable to speak to Jerome. He was black, and the most beautiful man I had ever seen. He grinned at me, knowing he’d caught me off balance. He wore a grey t-shirt, close-fitting, and dark jeans. His smile made the skin on the back of my neck feel hot and tight.
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