by Tim Winton
But the blitz truck was gone and the tractor, too. A great mound of coals smouldered on the sand. Where the big tent had been there were bottles and cans and the smooth imprints of mattresses and bodies. The harvest, he thought. There must be rain on the way. He took the hook from his pocket. It looked blunt and misshapen. It shone in the sun. Vic’s leg throbbed and burned. He looked out across the sea for the first sign of cloud, for any kind of signal of a change in the weather, but the sea and the sky were as pale and blue and blank as sleep, as empty as he felt standing there on the lapping shore.
Aquifer
VERY LATE ONE EVENING not long ago I stirred from a television stupor at the sound of a familiar street name and saw a police forensic team in waders carry bones from the edge of a lake. Four femurs and a skull, to be precise. The view widened and I saw a shabby clump of melaleucas and knew exactly where it was that this macabre discovery had taken place. I switched the TV off. My wife had long gone to bed. Through the open window I smelt wild lupins and estuary mud and for a time I forgot where I was. Life moves on, people say, but I doubt that. Moves in, more like it.
I went to bed. But I lay awake all night. I thought of the dullards I would face in the morning, the smell of their dirty hair, the stiffness of their hands on the instruments, the Mariah Carey tunes they’d bleat at me. In flickering bursts I thought about the war but I knew that I was only trying to think about it, because my mind was elsewhere, travelling in loops and ellipses away from middle age on the all-night sound of the moving tide.
Before dawn and without waking my wife or even leaving her a note, I rose, made myself coffee and began the five-hour drive back from Angelus to the suburbs where I grew up.
The battlers’ blocks. In the early sixties, that’s what they called the meagre grid of limestone streets of my childhood. Suburban lots scoured from bushland so that immigrants from Holland, England and the Balkans, and freckly types like us, barely a generation off the farm, could build cheap houses. Our street wound down a long gully that gave on to a swamp. A few fences away the grey haze of banksia scrub and tuart trees resumed with its hiss of cicadas and crow song. Houses were of three basic designs and randomly jumbled along the way to lend an air of natural progression rather than reveal the entire suburb’s origins in the smoky, fly-buzzing office of some bored government architect. Our homes were new; no one had ever lived in them before. They were as fresh as we imagined the country itself to be.
As they moved in, people planted buffalo grass and roses and put in rubber trees which brought havoc to the septics a decade later. From high on the ridge the city could be seen forming itself into a spearhead. It was coming our way and it travelled inexorably in straight lines. The bush rolled and twisted like an unmade bed. It was, in the beginning, only a fence away.
The men of our street went to work and left the driveways empty. They came home from the city tired, often silent. They scattered blood and bone on their garden beds and retired to their sheds. All day the women of the street cleaned and cooked and moved sprinklers around the garden to keep things alive. Late in the morning the baker arrived in his van, red-cheeked from civilization, and after him the man with the vegie truck. At the sound of their bells kids spilled out into the dusty street and their mothers emerged in housecoats and pedal pushers with rollers in their hair. Everyone was working class, even the Aborigines around the corner whose name was Jones, though it seemed that these were Joneses who didn’t need much keeping up with. We were new. It was all new.
At night when I was a baby my parents went walking to get me to sleep and while they were out they foraged for building materials in the streets beyond where raw sandy lots lay pegged out between brickies’ sheds and piles of rough-sawn jarrah.
The old man built a retaining wall from bricks he loaded into the pram that first summer. A lot of sheds went up quickly in our street. All those jarrah planks, all that asbestos sheeting, those bags of Portland cement. It was all taxpayers’ property anyway. Great evening strollers, the locals.
I grew up in a boxy double brick house with roses and a letterbox, like anyone else. My parents were always struggling to get me inside something, into shirts and shoes, inside the fence, the neighbourhood, the house, out of the sun or the rain, out of the world itself it often seemed to me. I climbed the jacaranda and played with the kids across the street and came in ghosted with limestone dust. I sat on the fence and stared at the noisy blue bush and in time I was allowed to roam there.
When the road crew arrived and the lumpy limestone was tarred the street seemed subdued. The easterly wind was no longer chalky. In July and August when it finally rained the water ran down the hill towards the reedy recess of the swamp. A little way from our place, outside the Dutchies’ house with its window full of ornaments, a broad puddle formed and drew small children to its ochre sheen. The swamp was where we wanted to be, down there where the melaleucas seemed to stumble and the ducks skated, but our parents forbade it; they talked of quicksand and tiger snakes, wild roots and submerged logs so we made do with the winter puddle outside the van Gelders’. I remember my mother standing exasperated in the rain with the brolly over her head at dusk while I frog-kicked around in my speedos.
Eventually the road crew returned to put a drain in and my puddle became less impressive. Then a red telephone box appeared beside it. I suppose I was five or six when I learned to go in and stand on tiptoe to reach up and dial 1194 to hear a man with a BBC voice announce the exact time. I did that for years, alone and in company, listening to the authority in the man’s voice. He sounded like he knew what he was on about, that at the stroke it would indeed be the time he said it was. It was a delicious thing to know, that at any moment of the day, when adults weren’t about, you could dial yourself something worth knowing, something irrefutable, and not need to pay.
When I was old enough I walked to school with the ragged column of kids who made the mile-long journey up the hill. From the high ground of the schoolyard you could see the city and the real suburbs in the distance. You could even smell the sea. In the afternoons the blue bush plain was hazy with smoke and the dust churned up by bulldozers. At home on winter nights great bonfires of fallen trees flickered in the sky above the yard. Beyond the fence cicadas and birds whirred. Now and then the hard laughter of ducks washed up the street; they sounded like mechanical clowns in a sideshow. When summer came and the windows lay open all night the noise of frogs and crickets and mosquitoes pressed in as though the swamp had swelled in the dark.
The smallest of us talked about the swamp. Down at the turnaround where the lupins and wild oats took over, we climbed the peppermint to look out across that wild expanse, but for the longest time we didn’t dare go further.
Bruno the Yugo went to the swamp. He had a flat head and he was twelve. He ranged down through the reeds until dark, even though his oldies flogged him for it. Across from Bruno lived the Mannerings. They were unhappy Poms whose house smelled of boiled cabbage. George the father had very long feet. He wore socks and plastic sandals. His son Alan waited for me after school some days to walk behind me and persecute me wordlessly the whole way home. He was twelve and scared of Bruno the Yugo. I never knew why he picked me from all the kids in our street. He never said a thing, just poked and prodded and shoved until we came down the hill to within sight of our homes. He was tall and fair, Alan Mannering, and though I dreaded him I don’t think I ever hated him. When he spoke to someone else beyond me his voice was soft and full of menace, his accent broadly local as my own. Some days he threw his schoolbag up onto the verandah of his place and headed on down to the swamp without even stopping in and I watched him go in relief and envy. Mostly I played with the Box kids across the road. There were seven or eight of them. They were Catholics and most of them wet the bed though it was hard to say which ones because they all had the same ammonia and hot milk smell. I liked them, though they fought and cried a lot. We slipped through the bush together where there were no straight line
s. Beyond the fence there were snarls and matted tangles. We hid behind grasstrees and twisted logs and gathered burrs in our shirts and seeds in our hair. Eventually the Boxes began to slip off to the swamp. I always pulled up short, though, and went back to dial 1194 for reassurance.
Another Pom moved in next door. I saw him digging and stood on the fence to watch, my shadow the only greeting. I watched him dig until only his balding head showed. He winked and pointed until I climbed down into his yard. I shuffled over to the lip of his hole and saw the wet earth beneath his sandals. A puddle began to form around his feet.
The water table, he said in a chirpy accent. It’s high here, see. Half these fence posts are in it, you know.
The rank, dark stink of blood and bone hung in the air. I climbed back over the fence but kept watching him dig.
Looks dry this country, it does, but underground there’s water. Caves of it. Drilling, that’s what this country needs.
I went indoors.
Someone hung a snake from our jacaranda out front. It was a dugite, headless and oozing. My mother went spare.
Across the road one night, Mr Box left his kids asleep in the Holden and went indoors with his wife. It was for a moment’s peace, my oldies said, but a moment was all they had. The station wagon rolled across the road, bulldozed the letterbox and mowed down our roses.
George Mannering with the long feet trimmed his buffalo grass every week with a push mower. He liked grass; it was the one thing he’d not had in England though he reminded us that English grass was better, finer. My mother rolled her eyes. George Mannering bought a Victa power mower and I stood out front to watch his first cut. I was there when two-year-old Charlie lurched up between his father’s legs and lost some toes in a bright pink blur. All the way back inside to my room I heard his voice above the whine of the two-stroke which sputtered alone out there until the ambulance came.
I forget how old I was when I gave in and went to the swamp. It felt bad to be cheating on my parents but the wild beyond the fences and the lawns and sprinklers was too much for me. By this time I was beginning to have second thoughts about the 1194 man. My parents bought a kitchen clock which seemed to cheat with time. A minute was longer some days than others. An hour beyond the fence travelled differently across your skin compared with an hour of television. I felt time turn off. Time wasn’t straight and neither was the man with the BBC voice. I discovered that you could say anything you liked to him, shocking things you’d only say to prove a point, and the man never said a thing except declare the plodding time. I surrendered to the swamp without warning. Every wrinkle, every hollow in the landscape led to the hissing maze down there. It was December, I remember. I got off my bike and stepped down into dried lupins like a man striding through a crowd. Seed pods rattled behind me. A black swan rose from the water. I went on until the ground hardened with moisture and then went spongy with saturation. Scaly paper-barks keeled away in trains of black shadow. Reeds bristled like venetian blinds in the breeze. Black water bled from the ground with a linoleum gleam.
From the water’s edge you couldn’t even see our street. The crowns of tuart trees were all I saw those early years before jacarandas, flame trees, and cape lilacs found their way to water and rose from yards like flags. I found eggs in the reeds, skinks in a fallen log, a bluetongue lizard jawing at me with its hard scales shining amidst the sighing wild oats. I sat in the hot shade of a melaleuca in a daze.
After that I went back alone or in the company of the Box kids or even Bruno. We dug hideouts and lit fires, came upon snakes real and imagined. I trekked to the swamp’s farthest limits where the market gardens began. Italian men in ragged hats worked on sprinklers, lifted melons, turned the black earth. Water rose in rainbows across their land. I went home before dark, amazed that my parents still believed me when I swore solemnly that I hadn’t been down the swamp.
At school I learned about the wide brown land, the dry country. Summer after summer we recited the imperatives of water conservation. Sprinklers were banned in daylight hours and our parents watered glumly by hand.
One summer my mother announced that she’d come upon some Cape Coloureds at the nearest market garden. I thought she meant poultry of some kind. I met them on my own one day and was confused by their accents. We threw a ball for a while, two girls and me. Their skin had a mildness about it. They didn’t seem as angry as the Joneses. The Joneses were dark and loud. Even their laughter seemed angry. I never had much to do with any of them. I rode past their house careful not to provoke them. They gave my little brother a hiding once. I never knew why. His nose swelled like a turnip and he nursed this grievance for the rest of his life. It made his mind up about them, he said. I kept clear. I already had Alan Mannering to worry about.
The Joneses never went near the swamp. I heard they were frightened of the dark. Their dad worked in a mine. Bruno said vile things to them and bolted into the swamp for sanctuary. It was his favourite game the year Americans went to the moon.
One sunny winter day I sat in a hummock of soft weeds to stare at the tadpoles I had in my coffee jar. Billy Box said we all begin as tadpoles, that the Pope didn’t want us to waste even one of them. I fell asleep pondering this assertion and when I woke Alan Mannering stood over me, his face without expression. I said nothing. He looked around for a moment before pulling his dick out of his shorts and pissing over me. He didn’t wet me; he pissed around me in a huge circle. I saw sunlight in his pale stream and lay still lest I disturb his aim. When he was finished he reeled himself back into his shorts and walked off. I emptied my tadpoles back into the lake.
What did he want? What did he ever want from me?
I was ten when people started dumping cars down at the swamp. Wrecks would just appear, driven in the back way from behind the market gardens, stripped or burned, left near the water on soft ground where the dirt tracks gave out.
Alan Mannering was the first to hack the roof off a car and use it upturned as a canoe. That’s what kids said, though Bruno claimed it was his own idea.
I was with half a dozen Box kids when I saw Alan and Bruno out on the lake a hundred yards apart sculling along with fence pickets. Those Box kids crowded against me, straining, big and small, to see. I can still remember the smell of them pressed in like that, their scent of warm milk and wet sheets. The two bigger boys drifted in silhouette out on the ruffled water. One of the Boxes went back for their old man’s axe and we went to work on the scorched remains of an old FJ Holden with nasty green upholstery. One of them came upon a used condom. The entire Box posse was horrified. I had no idea what it was and figured that you needed to be a Catholic to understand. Before dark we had our roof on the water. We kept close to shore and quickly discovered that two passengers was all it could carry. Several Boxes went home wet. I doubt that anybody noticed. They were always wet.
Next day was Saturday. I got down to the swamp early in order to have the raft to myself a while and had only pulled it from its nest of reeds when Alan Mannering appeared beside me. He never said a word. I actually cannot remember that boy ever uttering a word meant for me. He lived over the road for ten years. He all but walked me home from school for five of those, poking me from behind, sometimes peppering my calves with gravel. I was in his house once, I remember the airless indoor smell. But he never spoke to me at any time.
Alan Mannering lifted the jarrah picket he’d ripped from someone’s fence and pressed the point of it into my chest. I tried to bat it away but he managed to twist it into my shirt and catch the flesh beneath so that I yielded a few steps. He stepped toward me casually, his downy legs graceful.
You’re shit, I said, surprising myself.
Alan Mannering smiled. I saw cavities in his teeth and a hot rush of gratitude burned my cheeks, my fingertips. Somehow the glimpse of his teeth made it bearable to see him drag our FJ Holden roof to the water and pole out into the shimmering distance without even a growl of triumph, let alone a word. I lifted my tee-shirt to in
spect the little graze on my chest and when I looked up again he was in trouble.
When he went down, sliding sideways like a banking aircraft out there in the ruffled shimmer of the swamp’s eye, I really didn’t think that my smug feeling, my satisfied pity about his English teeth, had caused the capsize. He didn’t come up. I never even hated him, though I’d never called anyone shit before. After the water settled back and shook itself smooth again like hung washing, there wasn’t a movement. No sign.
I went home and said nothing.
Police dragged the swamp, found the car roof but no body. Across the road the Mannerings’ lawn grew long and cries louder than any mower drifted over day and night.
That Christmas we drove the Falcon across the Nullarbor Plain to visit the Eastern States which is what we still call the remainder of Australia. The old man sealed the doors with masking tape and the four of us sat for days breathing white dust. The limestone road was marked only with blown tyres and blown roos. Near the South Australian border we stopped at the great blowhole that runs all the way to the distant sea. Its rising gorge made me queasy. I thought of things sucked in, of all that surging, sucking water beneath the crust of the wide brown land.
Back home, though they did not find his body, I knew that Alan Mannering was in the swamp. I thought of him silent, fair, awful, encased in the black cake-mix of sediment down there.
The next year, come winter, the night air was musky with smoke and sparks hung in the sky like eyes. Bulldozers towing great chains and steel balls mowed down tuart trees and banksias.
I learned to spell aquifer.
Three doors up, Wally Burniston came home drunk night after night. His wife Beryl locked him out and if he couldn’t smash his way in he lay bawling on the verandah until he passed out. Some school mornings I passed his place and saw him lying there beside the delivered milk, his greasy rocker’s haircut awry, his mouth open, shoes gone.