It’s like she’s drunk and giving way to desires that are completely stupid, she says. I trust her to sober up in time, don’t I? She asks through tears.
At work, every time I go near the ex-middleweight he flashes his Nikon in my face, and laughs. I don’t know why he does it but my guess is it’s a flash of challenge. A slap of light instead of glove. In my brief orange blindness I hear the air whistling-twisted through his broken nose as he chuckles the laugh right out into a sneer. At these moments, after he’s taken my photo, there’s a Stones tune leaping around in my head, keeping thought out. Because I can’t bear to ask myself who gets Jane. Can’t bear even the taste of the question.
Our sub-editor notices the bursts of light around the office. He asks what’s going on. There’s a photographer keeps snapping my photo, trying to steal my soul, I tell him. He laughs as if I’ve cracked a joke. The ex-middleweight and me circle each other in wordless hate. His strength is oppressive. I finger the knife in my pocket to counter it. I can’t help but see his V-shaped back bent over Jane.
A few weeks into this I take a sickie. I follow Jane to court. Her not knowing I’m there. It’s a workers’ compensation fraud case. A Turk in a neck-brace broods in the dock. I sit up the back, behind about forty-five softly moaning aunts and uncles where Jane can’t see me. I watch her perform for hours. Through the copse of bobbing turbans and veils she looks so modern and brilliant and low-cut.
The prosecution shows a video of the Turk high up a ladder picking pears, swivelling his head like a parrot, up there in the thinning foliage, searching for fruit, fit as a fiddle. The Turk tenses in the dock and the moans drift heavier from his family.
Then Jane produces an ancient orchardist. The old bloke says that, no way could a josephine, which is the variety of pear in the film, your Worship, no way could a josephine be ripe at the date indicated on the film, your Worship. Not a josephine. No way. Your josephine’d be two months dropped and rotted by the date on that film. He’s unblinking, jaw-jutted, immovable on this point. He keeps looking over at the Turk, like only his strong knowledge of the josephine can save another Bruno Hauptmann tragedy unfolding here.
The judge is naturally a fierce Luddite and he likes this rebuttal of technology. And of course she keeps walking directly below him so he can crane for cleavage. This helps. Three times during the morning I see him wink at her. And when she sums up she brings the mood down to light by making a joke to the judge about him being the Ottoman’s umpire.
The Turk walks. She’s wailed over and petted-up by the relatives. It’s hard to make an outstanding job of loving this woman. There are so many trying.
I go straight home after the case. It’s early afternoon. I wander from the TV to the window to the bar-fridge. Again and again. I’m half tanked watching Playschool when the phone rings. I pick it up.
‘Just count up the nights he read to you in his study,’ says my mother slowly, so her voice, which is thin with pain, doesn’t break. And she hangs up before I can put two and two together, let alone count up the nights in any study. For a minute I think she has been giving the bottle more afternoon nudge than usual. Then a picture comes into my head of the study in question.
On hot nights. His big wooden desk covered with creamy waves of open legal books in an insect-studded circle of light. Insects scuttling over aforesaids and heretofores. Him ignoring them and ignoring the law they trod. His voice deep in the Geebung Polo Club. Filling it with awe for the boy on his knee who insisted on that poet in that voice.
That’s how stampeded my thoughts are by Jane. I’ve forgotten my father lying cold. Missed his funeral. Thirty years of stories read, outback trips shared, football games taken in, beer and friendship supplied free with the enlightening ride. And in between times him grinding his nose on the law he hated to get me to the schools he admired.
I suppose my little brother did the eulogy. I hope it went all right, cobbled together outside the crematorium as it must have been. Him filled with anger and sorrow, wanting to wipe tears with his left hand while snapping my incisors with his right.
The phone starts to ring again. I let it. That’ll be Jane. She would have been there, saying and meaning memorable words. She would have gone straight from the Turk fraud case to the service.
That night we lie together and try for an orgasm we never reach. We go through the lip work and the tongue work … all the trials of suction. We are up to the nails dragging, the small threats and tests of muscle, when I pull up. The whole opera’s not working for me. It’s yawed off-key. Her rhythms have changed. I’m no longer a soloist. I’m a statistic from a women’s magazine. I get out of bed and go and get us both a deep whisky. I turn the light off as I go.
With the darkness and the slap of my non-cooperation, I think now might be the time to reincarnate the ghost of Manny Ghan. I sit on the edge of the bed and hand her drink into the dark. She takes it.
‘You know he killed some poor bastard?’ I ask. There’s an ice tinkle. A flinch has run down her arm into her drink. A hard blow of news has rocked her, I think. I follow up. ‘Some half Koori. Fighting to put food into his kids,’ I say.
‘Don’t, Jack. You’re making me sick. It’s so horrible … what it does to him.’
This time my drink rattles.
‘How it’s scarred him. How he shakes and cries and nightmares over it. And how it shrinks him into himself and closes him up. And how he needs to be given so much guilt-counselling, and tenderness, to fill out again, even for a while. He carries a hell of a burden,’ she says. Then I hear her glass go to her mouth. The ghost of Manny Ghan has done a one-eighty and come haunting back at me.
She feels my silence. And she feels my tremors through the mattress. She wraps her arms around my waist, with the cold of her glass in my lap and the heat of her breath in the small of my back. She whispers she loves me, don’t mistake compassion for love, she loves me, into the base of my spine.
Thursday night they throw our Christmas party without even leaving the office. It’s all of forty outside, and hotter in here since the air-conditioning overloaded. It shapes as a miserable shindig. Most of the journalists here get as drunk on any Thursday, Friday or Saturday as they do for Christmas. They’re doing their best, week-in, week-out. They can’t do any more. Forget some two-millennium-gone messiah. Unless there’s fresh news rolling off the Reuter screens on that front no one here can get worked up about it.
Someone at least is in spirit enough to have the Kings College Choir loud out of a portable CD player. Everybody keeps one eye on the Reuter screens. When the screens are chugging the party slows, when they slow the party remembers itself. They start spewing an IRA-Harrods situation and the party is lulled by it.
A cadet, not in the job long enough to be addicted to the screens, sees me sitting at my desk alone and comes over to me. She’s drunk herself earnest. Journalism’s an important job. She tries several topics that fail because I’ve got no heart for them. But she doesn’t give in. She’s not willing to fail at conversation in a room full of raconteurs. She hits harder. She starts on office scandal. ‘You see that thick-set guy over there?’ She points out the ex-middleweight across the room, leaning back laughing at some probably lavatorial joke. ‘Apparently he takes the most exquisite porn shots of our rock critic’s wife. Dirtier than porn even. Arty dirty.’ She’s not moving well. She catches her pearls on her glass as she tries to take a drink. The sopranos in the choir are working up the highs on ‘O come, all ye faithful’. The hymn isn’t lost on me.
She looks over the crowd. ‘Do you know which one he is, the rock critic?’ she asks.
It’s times like these I’m glad we don’t have our mug shots next to our by-lines the way they do at some broadsheets. Anonymity is where I need to be. I point out James Clay, our libel lawyer. He’s hair-down into his Mao jacket with a cracker-pulled, pink and green paper crown pasted on his sweaty head. I’ve never liked him.
‘That’s him,’ I tell her. ‘The one d
ressed Chinese. Does he know about it? I mean, do you think he might approve of … even be paying for, the photos?’ I ask. I want to know how foul the gossip’s got. How small I’m being diced.
‘Who can tell? It takes all types,’ she says. ‘But what sort of closet queen would hire an ape like that to do the job?’
I cut my finger on the blade in my pocket and I jerk my hand out. To cover the pain I turn my sudden movement into a reach for her empty glass. I grab it so fast she jerks back and her pearls whip up and snag on the foot of the champagne flute I’m taking from her. Her heirloom explodes between us and skitters and rolls and bounces across my desktop and drips to the carpet. Dozens of pearls sit racked up in my keyboard.
She covers her throat with her left hand and stares at the pearls and starts whispering, ‘My grandmother … my grandmother … my grandmother …’ With her other hand she starts to gather up pearls from my desktop. It’s slow work one-handed. I don’t help. She has to pick one right off the cover of Keith Richards: A Study in Decadence. She’s drunk enough to read its title out loud and get its significance from hearing herself. It’s the last thing she says at this Christmas party. I spot at least five pearls still on the carpet after she has gone.
When we reach the hour where the sports writers start photocopying their anatomy and faxing it to faraway lusts I decide to leave. I finish a flat beer and start down the corridor toward the lifts. Half way there I’m stopped by the ex-middleweight stepping out of the darkroom, blocking my path.
‘I’ve got something to show you,’ he says, smiling. And he takes hold of my elbow softly enough that I have to follow.
The darkroom has a red pulse from a faulty fluorescent. Cheap vinegar is throat-itching thick in its air. He keeps his unbreakable fairy-hold on my elbow and leads me over to a row of shallow tubs.
‘I want you to have a gander at some of my work,’ he says. ‘A paid assignment for a lady friend. My first freelance job.’
I feel it welling up that, Oh Christ, here it comes, it’s true what that girl told me about him taking pictures of Jane. He is going to show me Jane in contortions he dictated. Scenes I can’t stand to see.
He takes a plain white sheet of archival paper and wobbles it between our faces. ‘It’s a portrait. My client wants it for a memory. Memory of a love over,’ he says. Then he dunks it in the clear shallows of the first tub and starts to slice it back and forward.
It turns into a scene I’ve watched so many times before. This face lifting out of the white. Usually it’s as the fan drinks the fog winding out of our bathroom into the roof, clearing the air and the mirror I shave in. Usually she’s standing behind me, over my shoulder in the mirror. She’s just stepped from the shower, and as I shave I watch her towelling herself, breasts lifting and sharpening with the cold air.
But now it’s just me. Just my face. Floating up off the white of the paper. Staring wide-eyed at the roof. Clear liquid rippling over me, setting the spooked expression hard.
‘Caught your essence, you reckon?’ he asks. And he lifts the photograph dripping out of the tank and holds it at arm’s length, staring from it to me. He smiles. Then he places it in another tub of liquid. ‘Know what that photo is, Jack?’ he asks. ‘It’s a T.K.O. It’s the ref announcing her decision, raising my hand … saying you can’t go on.’ With his right hand he takes hold of his left wrist and lifts it over his head and pumps it high a couple of times. Referee and champion in one.
It’s a searing Christmas Eve. I can feel the sweat running down my face and I can see it pulsing red on his. His shirt is smeared on his torso like paint. As he stretches arms-high in his victory dance he opens up long straits of rib-slatted lung to me. I see it’s a short reach in there between those ribs to a ghost of my own. A ghost to haunt me always. A ghost to cast me victim-low and lovable. A ghost out of whose grasp only Jane’s love can wrench me.
DID SHE NOT HAVE AUTUMN?
KEVIN WORKS the old Bedford into reverse, revs it goaded-dog high and slips the clutch. The truck leaps back into the cutting and buries its tray six inches in dirt and rock and ice and stalls as our heads bounce off the back window and fire from our lip-sat Log Cabins drops into our laps.
But the shock is not enough. The snow-drift above the road stays put. The winter silence resettles.
‘Shit,’ he says. ‘Country’s frozen solid.’
‘Shaken, not stirred,’ I say. I put out my hand. ‘Snow-plough,’ I say.
He reaches into the hollow of his door where the panel has come off and he pulls out three sticks of gelignite and puts them in my palm.
‘Just bite off enough for the tray. Don’t bury me,’ he says. He sits back and unwraps a curried egg sandwich out of waxed paper, the daily making of which keeps his pelvis-pulverised mother alive.
I high-step up into the snowdrift with a shovel to a place I think is high enough to fill the Bedford. I dig a hole in the snow and press fuses into the three sticks and twist them together as tight as I can. Then I put a match to them and drop them in the hole and move back up the slope under snow gums.
It turns out I miscalculate on two fronts. I leave one of the fuses a millimetre long, which means that stick explodes over my head somewhere, throwing me deep in the snow by a violent nerve-muscle display. When I lift my whining ears out of the cold I see my other miscalculation is to cut off a fifty ton avalanche onto a ten ton truck.
The Bedford is hunched down on its suspension inside a white pyramid. No part of it showing. The fire likely in Kevin’s lap again. Me pleased at least my ear-whine and the pyramid of snow has muffled his certain spray of abuse.
In the silence my fear starts that maybe the glow plug has shaken loose again and maybe Kevin won’t get the diesel hot enough for ignition. And the buried him and the lightly dressed me may not get down off this mountain.
Before I can put my nearly-frenzied shovel to work on the pyramid over the Bedford I hear the engine start deep in the snow. Kevin, building fast revs to damp down his fear. He gets it to maximum cycle and slips the clutch and the whole pyramid shivers and the engine dies with no Bedford emerging. There is a long silence before it starts again.
Then the muffled rise and fall of motor as Kevin rocks it against the weight of snow. He works the accelerator and clutch until the chains start to lock onto the rock of the road and pass the stress back to the motor, which tenses, and drops revs. The pyramid shakes and rocks.
Just when I’m thinking the drive shaft will snap and Kevin will have to make the thaw on curried egg and beer the Bedford comes nosing out of the pyramid, carrying the high apex of it on its back.
I open the passenger door and step up onto the horsehair-stuffed seat next to Kevin. He just stares at me.
‘Full enough for you?’ I ask. He turns the steering wheel with an index-finger to show how light the front wheels are.
‘The hairpins will be interesting,’ he says. And he laughs because now it’s my turn trapped.
What I don’t tell Kevin is all the way off the mountain I have my door ajar, ready to bail. And if he loses it, he rides into the mountain ash alone. Not being able to take his eyes off the road, he can’t work out where the wind is getting in to stir up snow in his line of sight and to freeze his ears. Being only semi-prisoner of gravity and bad machinery, I can enjoy the ride.
And a ride is what it is. With the ice on the road and the front wheels pounding high off the ground and the weight of snow pushing us too fast through hairpins into shoulder-gravel and Kevin working the air brakes asthmatic while he sweats himself shiny and blows white right across the cabin. It’s a sideshow experience.
When we get to bitumen he has the skin and eye of an only-just-victorious boxer. He loosens his grip on the wheel and drinks beer from his thigh-crushed can. ‘We might take two trips next year,’ he says.
We plane across the road toward town spilling snow off the bonnet and roof and wheel arches into moving blankets on the road behind us. We’re all smiles now, thinking how
The Shire has paid us for a half day’s hire of a snow-plough we don’t hire.
Outside town we drive into the eight hour scream of trees being made into timber. Riley’s mill is hectares of bark-shorn mountain ash logs lying in pyramids, with a sprinkler on the top of each one shooting arcs of water wavering and crashing over them to fool them into keeping their sap still and stop them from splitting. Giant kilns smoulder at the back of the screaming saw shed.
Outside Riley’s gate is the greenies’ camp. A five-month-old protest of strung canvas and hung sheets painted into logger-hate phrases. Rainbow colours. The greenies stand around forty-four gallon drums with fires in them. In army-disposed clothes and Jamaican hair.
They’re singing a song we can see in their synchronised white breaths. One time in town I asked them why the fuck (always ‘the fuck’ when questioning greenies) they were forever singing. One of them explaining, their singing is a symbolic alternative to the sound of the saws. Kevin walking straight past them into the Hibernian, counter-explaining as he went that the symbolic alternative we were after was that well-known one to sobriety.
As we pass, Kevin blasts the horn and we give them the finger and a sneer that breaks their breaths back to random. Some of them laugh. Some wave. Some shake their heads. Like rats become immune to strychnine, they’re used to our fingers and our sneers. “We’d like to give them something stronger. But to touch them, everyone in town reminds everyone else, is to play into their hands. Bring the media down on us in helicopters with headlines of redneckery. Still, when they go into town they go in groups of four.
In town we drive up onto the median strip between the mountain-bound traffic and the mountain-been traffic. We pull up under a lemon-scented gum and Kevin puts the truck in neutral and revs it high and kicks in the hydraulic tilt. The Bedford sheds its load onto the lawn and jumps up on its suspension, almost flipping us off our seat.
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