We entered the men’s room together.
—Thank God, he said, stepping up boisterously to the urinal beside mine, a man ready, unthinkingly, to void himself of the sort of effortless stream no doubt long since vanished from Hubert Greenspan’s repertoire.
—That little blonde, Tracey. She could be my producer, mate. Can you imagine it?
—No, I can’t. Not if you two keep playing to each other the way you’re doing.
—Come on, he chided me. I’ve only just got my testosterone working again.
I told him about the warning the dark-haired woman had given me.
—Oh shit, he said, addressing the plumbing above his head. She’s meeting me for dinner next Tuesday.
—If I were you I’d make it lunch. And at the end, I’d shake hands.
—Christ, you sound like one of those Marist Brothers who tried to stop me going for the groin. Why don’t you mention eternal bloody hell-fire?
I was angered. I zipped up with such fury that I caught a corner of my shirt. I promptly amended that.
—Lucy’s only just left, I said. Most people have a mourning period. How long was yours? Three minutes?
—Jesus, that’s low, he said.
He was emphatic but not yet angry himself. I wanted to make him angry.
—Lucy, Delia, this one … Tracey … They’re all just the one continuum of flesh to you …
—Hold hard! he warned me. I’m not thinking of begetting a sodding dynasty with this woman eh. I just want to go to dinner. And God forbid I should be so fortunate as to be allowed, through the generosity of any girl, to get in a bit of good old horizontal folk-dancing!
The truth behind my fury was that Maureen had had telephone conversations with Lucy in Australia. Arriving one humid dawn, Lucy had felt severely exposed beneath the bright, frank Australian day. Recounting it on the telephone, sending her sorrow up to a satellite over the Equator and then down to New York, she wept easily. Lucy told Maureen a great deal and confessed she was also speaking regularly to Chloe and to her own mother who had moved down to Melbourne. Maureen said tremors overtook Lucy’s voice in mid-sentence. Such was the news of grieving, lovely Lucy. While, of course, Jacko laughed in Elio’s.
I said, You really are an utter prick, Jacko. Despite everything. Despite the airfares for Sunny and her nurse. And you’re not even a cunning prick. You’re a dumb bastard! I don’t know why I spend time with you, but I don’t think I’ll be doing much more of it.
There isn’t any reason to recount his pretty explicit reply. He walked out, and by the time I got back to the table, he was saying a polite good night to Tracey and the dark-haired woman and Hubert. A luncheon date with Tracey had been openly arranged. In the meantime she wanted to be faxed the terms of his agreement with Silverarts to verify that he was available for hire. Perhaps, she said, he should bring his agent and his attorney to the lunch as well.
He didn’t say goodnight to me. I made an embarrassed explanation to the company – Jacko lived in a different part of town. I thanked Mr Greenspan and left to find my own way home.
In the taxi I felt more loss than was warranted. Lucy was gone. And now Jacko. In fact, at one point I found myself reciting under my breath snatches of Jacko’s holy text.
—“He hails from Snowy River, up by Kosciusko’s side,
Where the hills are twice as steep and twice as rough,
Where a horse’s hoofs strike firelight from the flint stones every stride,
The man that holds his own is good enough.
And the Snowy River riders on the mountains make their home,
Where the river runs those giant hills between;
I have seen full many horsemen since I first began to roam,
But nowhere yet such horsemen have I seen.”
It was raining very heavily in New York’s friendless night.
19
Maureen and I began our plans for going home as the New York summer set in, as classes were ending in a fug of New York humidity, and the violet trolleys of NYU were delivering bashful graduates and over-dressed parents to Washington Square. Academics and writers I met along West Fourth Street and Broadway were planning summer holidays in places I had seen only in winter: Vermont, say, and Maine. Our summer place was a beach twelve thousand miles away in the mild Australian winter.
Jacko and I had talked stiffly now and then, and even ran into each other in that fairly circumscribed quarter of New York. He would always explain his lack of contact by saying that taping the quiz shows in Los Angeles kept him pretty hectic. But in fact, his timetable was no different from what it had been in the days we used to meet in the Odeon for frequent confessional sessions. He was still doing four doorknocks a week in New York. Whenever I saw his morning television shenanigans, I was impressed by the way he always looked so fresh despite all, so full of zany spriteliness. The act of intruding seemed to give him perpetual vigour.
One night during our last few weeks in New York, Maureen and I met Jacko at a black-tie dinner to open an exhibition of Aboriginal artists from Central Australia and Arnhem Land.
The male and female carvers and painters of the tropics and the desert were guests of honour at this dinner, a strainingly odd affair. I felt silly at having taken on the ridiculous duty of wearing a dinner suit. Maureen and I sat at a table with some of the thin, blue-black women artists from the Australian tropics, who wore their own dazzling batiks, and with two middle-aged sisters called Dotty and Mary Marble, who came from the Tanami Desert southwest of Burren Waters, who knew how cold the night could fall, and so wore large cardigans.
All the male artists were seated at other tables, but were not dressed so differently from the stockmen on Burren Waters, which made us stuffed-shirt Caucasians look sillier still.
All these dozen or so visiting artists had – at the start of the dinner – proceeded into the dining room to the applause of all the people in black suits and long dresses. Taking their seats, the desert and tropic painters had looked both shy and composed, tentative and worldly. I hoped the dinner crowd knew that many of them – including the Marble sisters – had achieved international repute, were used to having their work shown in cities far from home, and sometimes travelled accompanying their work to fashionable places. Some of the men in the stockmen’s clothes and the Arnhem Land women in batik, whose specialties were bark paintings, were accustomed to seeing four- or even five-figure prices put upon their work.
I noticed Jacko at a table across the room from ours. His black tie was loosened and untethered, and he sat with a woman who was not Tracey, who was probably younger in fact, perhaps as young as Lucy. She leaned forward, talking energetically to her companion. Jacko grinned when her speech ended in a spate of more thorough and childlike laughter than worldly Dannie or Tracey would ever have permitted themselves.
Maureen, who thought that having got out of my friendship with Jacko with my health intact I ought to let it go at that, suggested I should use the distance between our tables as a reasonable excuse not to talk to him.
But I was pretty sure he had seen us.
So against Maureen’s advice, and driven by more of a desire to plug myself back into the Emptor melodrama than I’d care to own up to, I went across to the table.
It was a Vixen Six crowd. Dannie wasn’t there but Durkin was, together with his new American wife. Bringing Basil Sutherland’s style of television to New York had made its inroads on Durkin’s boisterous marriages as well.
Jacko introduced me to the girl, Angela his new doorknock producer. I made loose, over-eager, hollow promises about meeting up in the middle-future, when I came back to New York at the start of winter, when my book on China would be published, and so on. I even heartily invited the two women, Jacko’s companion and Durkin’s wife, both of whom I’d never seen before this evening. Such lengths I went to to pretend to Jacko, such lengths Jacko went to to pretend that we were as we had always been. We said sentimental things about the places I’d soo
n be in: about various Sydney beaches and places around the harbour, about eating hurriedly before the opera or ballet, or before one of Evans’s plays performed by the Sydney Theatre Company in the flank of the great white building facing the Harbour Bridge. Dining at Kable’s say, or Bilson’s or Beppi’s, or at Doyle’s out at Watson’s Bay. The world, including New York, might have its casual geography, but Sydney Harbour had its ordained geography, engraved – or you would have thought so from the way we were talking – on our DNA.
And then Jacko became less perfervid, dropped his voice and said, You ought to go and see the old woman.
—Chloe?
—All jokes aside, you ought to go up there. I believe it’s quite a scene. Women’s bloody commune. That’s the other thing that’s changed. Chloe says my bloody brother, Petie, has a thing going for Delia. Sunny’s down to half the medication she was on when she left here. When she’s not hanging around the kitchen drinking tea with Chloe, she trails behind the bloody helicopter pilot, the one called Boomer. She’s become a real helicopter groupie by all reports.
This outcome, however, seemed to please him very much.
—Three women. That doesn’t exactly make a commune, Jacko, I said.
—We’re talking four, he said. Lucy’s gone up there.
—What about the cello? I asked.
Burren Waters was not a credible venue for a virtuoso cellist.
—She’s put off the cello. She’s doing some paintings. Naturally I take the blame for interrupting her career.
—It could be so, Jacko, I told him.
But he didn’t react. By now he expected me to champion Lucy.
—It’s a question of what she wants, isn’t it? If she really wanted the cello thing, she’d do it no matter what.
—Perhaps, I conceded without any enthusiasm.
—She’ll probably tell her problems to some sensitive stockman too.
—Why not, Jacko? You’ve managed to find a few friendly ears yourself.
—Ha bloody ha. Go and see the old woman eh. Make sure you’re back for the fall television series. I’m going to be a national idol.
I laughed despite myself.
—You’ll be even more bloody uncontrollable.
—Damn right, son, he told me. But back to old Chloe. She’s got this idea you’ve cut her off the way Bickham did.
—Why would I cut her off? I spoke to her on the phone just recently.
—Yeah. But did she tell you about the politics eh?
—She did. You did too.
—The Senate. She wasn’t elected. But she got the wind in her sails, you know.
When I had first heard this, about the Senate, I had thought that she must have stood for the National Party, the party of rural interests. That would certainly put her on Bickham’s blind side, even though all his family except him were probably members. Now, from the airy way Jacko spoke about it, I began to suspect otherwise.
—Whose platform did she stand on?
—Some sort of cattleman’s party, it was.
—Anti-land rights, I suppose?
—Well, she and old Jack always have been.
—So she doesn’t want to be written off by the minor novelist eh? The way she was by the major one?
—No. That’s right, mate. She doesn’t.
Turning aside further still from Angela his new producer, he began to tell me his version of how Chloe came to be political.
When it began, Frank had completed his first two years in jail. And Chloe was down in Sydney most of the time still, visiting him regularly and cooking for Bickham and Khalil. Khalil himself was now rather ill with hypertension.
The first problem: Bickham chastised her in his austere way for being too attentive to Frank. And it had to be admitted, said Jacko, backing up what Chloe had herself told me, in jail terms Frank was prospering. He had been moved into low security at some timber farm in the Hunter Valley. Here he’d established a friendship with a very literary safecracker. Frank was permitted to have his sound system in his cell. His ambition on release was to attend fine arts courses three days a week at the Power Institute.
The news that came to Chloe in Sydney from Burren Waters was not so promising. One of Chloe’s friends in Hector wrote and urged her to come home. Stammer Jack was more or less openly cohabiting with a woman called Muriel from the black stockmen’s quarters, a young Aboriginal woman whose husband was working a long way away at the bauxite mines in the north of Western Australia, near Exmouth Gulf. Chloe called Stammer Jack, who made his normal fricative, inelegant evasions and half-denials. Almost at once, the new bookkeeper at Burren Waters, a young fugitive from paying alimony in Queensland, contacted Chloe and told her Stammer Jack was hitting the rum and had got violent with a few of the stockmen, even once swinging a punch at Petie, Jacko’s man-of-few-words elder brother and Stammer Jack’s most dutiful son.
This was, in a way, nothing less than she had expected of Stammer Jack. She turned homewards to Burren Waters in a fine but not unfamiliar fury, to sort out the problem her addiction to her jailed son and Bickham had caused for Stammer Jack.
She found that Stammer Jack had been keeping Muriel in the house, in the room which had once belonged to Helen, Chloe’s daughter. This certainly violated the limits of behaviour she had set down for Stammer Jack when she’d gone south to Sydney. Returned to Burren Waters, she hurled Muriel’s few items of clothing and possessions down the front steps, where they must have lain some time on the excessively watered green lawn of the homestead. She stamped down to the wood-and-corrugated iron shacks of the black stockmen’s quarters and told one of Muriel’s uncles to get her off Burren Waters and over to her husband. The Wodjiri stockmen of the old school had a long experience of such imperious demands, and said they would do it. It was an improbable assignment to get Muriel from Burren Waters to the Indian Ocean, but the stockmen and their families seemed to rally on demand to cross great dry stretches of wilderness in old Holden cars most of us wouldn’t trust to get us to the supermarket. Lanky, delicate-ankled Muriel was gone from Burren Waters overnight.
Very soon after this salvage of the Emptor marriage, Petie and the helicopter pilot Boomer were surprised to find a group of elderly Aboriginal men camping by a plug of hard sandstone in the north-west of Burren Waters’ cattle lease. This was one of the more notable features of the Burren Waters run, a fiefdom which was for the most part anciently flat. They landed and discovered not only that what Stammer Jack Emptor called a bloody anthropologist was with the old men, but that it was Doctor Fitzgerald of the University of Western Australia, the man who lived with Jacko’s sister Helen in Perth.
The old men in the encampment were Wodjiri, relatives in fact of people who worked as stockmen on Burren Waters. So they certainly had some pre-Emptor connection with the land.
Soon enough – Jacko didn’t tell me how soon – a notice came from the Northern Land Council and the Aboriginal Land Rights Court in Darwin indicating that a claim for the excision of a sacred site from the bulk of Burren Waters had been made by the traditional owners, the old men Boomer sighted from the helicopter.
In my time in the Northern Territory, I wondered why cattle people seemed to hate excisions. If the excision claim was validated in court, the Aboriginals involved in the rite connected to that place would have right of way into Burren Waters, and the plug of sandstone and a small amount of space around it would become Aboriginal freehold land. The votaries might start bush fires, or consort with the Burren Waters stockmen and, to quote Stammer Jack, give ’em ideas.
It is hard to sit inside another person’s brain, but it was hard also to understand Stammer Jack’s passion over this matter. His cattle run seemed so vast and the excision claims so modest in square mile terms. Those Aboriginals who sought excisions did not seem to me to be making savage inroads upon the cattle stations.
Maybe it was the principle of the thing which appalled the cattle people. Maybe it was simply that they were used to kingl
y occupation of large spaces.
In any case, I had heard Chloe rant about it occasionally. Miserable, vexatious bastards, I had heard her fume one night. Though on enquiry, it was not the Aboriginals themselves who were to blame, but the city liberals and the shit-stirring anthropologists who put ’em up to it.
Jacko himself told me he wasn’t sure what mixture of pride and threat to land coincided in Chloe to make her do that silly bloody thing she did. The cattlemen of the North End and the Centre formed something disastrously named the White Defence Party.
Jacko said, If they hadn’t been such blithering old bastards, they would have at least chosen a better name.
Their manifesto said that they bore no ill-will to Aboriginal Australians. Their opposition was only to those (anthropologists, lawyers) who self-indulgently sought either to give themselves importance or to suck up to misinformed foreign opinion by indulging Aboriginal claims at the expense of the well-being of the great cattle industry. The very name of the party Chloe had joined, however, made a nonsense of such fine print subtleties.
They wanted someone in the Territory to run for the Senate. They knew they had enough support to take votes away from the established parties. They nominated three candidates. Chloe, still in a fury over the excision matter and Muriel, agreed to be number two.
Bickham wrote her a savage letter. No understanding from that quarter, said Jacko.
—You’d have thought he had more savoir bloody faire, Jacko told me. West of the Blue Mountains, nothing’s easily explained in city terms. She wrote him some sort of sad but firm letter back. She got over it. After all, she got to ask him a few more questions than most people had. Anyhow, back to the first subject. Why don’t you go up and see her? Prove you haven’t dumped her too.
I shook my head.
—You damned Emptors don’t ask for little favours.
—No. We don’t, do we eh?
—See Chloe? Or the others? Who do you want to hear from, Jacko? Lucy? Sunny? Delia perhaps?
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