On the way home she stops off at Quan Sing’s haberdashery and mercery opposite the war memorial and buys a couple of yards of printed cotton fabric. After dinner, Linda mentions to Evan that she bought some fabric for a new dress and also went for a little walk on the beach. Evan registers this information with as much interest as if she’d said, ‘Today I mopped the laundry floor.’
The next day, in town and among her friends and acquaintances, nobody remarks that they saw the Johnsons’ EH Holden heading out over the causeway. Clearly, she has done nothing remarkable or unusual.
She did, however, take Harry Baumgarten’s Alcools with her to Pelican Point. The pelican saw her reading it.
Tranquil bird with inverted flight bird
Who nests in the air
At the limit where our planet shines
Lower your second eyelid earth dazzles you
When you raise your head
She’d seen the book on the passenger seat of Harry’s Zephyr as she took the driver’s seat. At the end of the night, after waving everyone off and returning to the silent kitchen – a bombsite of dirty dishes – she found she had it in her hand.
A few days later Evan flies out to the Goddard space centre near Washington, D.C., for a three-month training course, leaving Linda with the EH Holden and a freewheeling entomologist.
***
Cyclone Steve’s advance party is here. It’s still not certain whether he intends to doss down in town or just wave from a distance. Either way, they’re battening down the hatches in the caravan parks, shouting at each other to move it this way and that. Fishing boats are heading prudently back to shore.
Tropical Cyclone Steve, a male cyclone with a beer belly and long, grey, windswept hair, thongs flapping at his feet, formed out of the ether somewhere in the Pacific. He spun like a dervish, gathering force from water and wind. He first moved in towards the Queensland coast to biff at coastal towns, leaving them flooded and dishevelled. Then he moved north, pummelling the coast as he went, not out of rage but out of sheer high spirits, blissfully unaware of damage, inconvenience and insurance premiums. On he went, up over the two points at the top of the continent, before his joyous slide down the western side. Now he is finally starting to tire. He is almost ready to cross the coast and call it a day, becoming, as they say at the weather bureau, a rain-bearing depression.
But he’s still dangerous, no question about that.
The Dish is hauled into lock position, its aerial pointing at a perpendicular angle to the ground, its bowl turned perfectly upwards, like a teacup held level. This is a more stable position against cyclonic winds.
Kevin Kelly, a volunteer with the One Mile Jetty Preservation Association, is at the wheel of a tiny faux steam engine. Once a week, he is rostered on to spend the morning taking tourists for a run out to the end of the jetty and back. He waits for his passengers to settle before beginning his introductory patter. This lot will be the last ahead of the cyclone. He shouldn’t even be taking these, but they’d looked at him imploringly. They had only meant to duck in to Port Badminton for some groceries and a quick look around town before heading off to see the dolphins, but now they’ve been told the roads are closed in both directions. They’ll be stuck here for days in their hired motorhome. Kevin had relented.
Kevin explains how a little steam engine used to drag bales of wool to waiting ships. ‘This one runs on diesel,’ he adds quickly, in case anyone is stupid enough to ask (it has happened).
The wool, says Kevin Kelly, came in from the giant sheep stations on camel teams driven by turban-wearing Afghans. The word ‘turban’ escapes him. He points at his own terry-towelling hat to convey the idea.
The camels used to drag their laden wagons down the main street and turn into Dromedary Lane. ‘What does dromedary mean?’ he asks the children suddenly.
They look at his red face blankly.
He tells them: ‘Dromedary is a fancy word for camel.’
Mid-sentence, he stops to catch his breath. His face has gone purplish against his faded hat; his cheeks and nose are a riot of broken capillaries. There is an anxious silence. It was always a thrill when a ship came in, he gasps. Kevin starts the motor, and resumes talking normally. ‘Ladies loved it. They got their dress patterns and whatnot.’
As they clatter away from the shore, the passengers glimpse muddy sand and seaweed between the big gaps in the old grey boards, and then swelling green water. They pass fishermen walking in, hunched against the wind, their plastic buckets beside them.
Kevin’s passengers disembark. He tells them to be quick, on account of the weather. They get out and look at the choppy water. Seagulls cry against grey clouds on the move. Without being told, they almost immediately return to their little seats.
After the tourists have gone, Kevin potters about in the kiosk, closing things down. There’s a stand of wire frames holding postcards: Port Badminton – The Sun’s Winter Home and I Fished The One-Mile. A laminated poster urges visitors to contribute to the Jetty Preservation Fund because the jetty is rotting away and, without an injection of funds for maintenance, its future is in doubt. The fund is housed in a catering-sized instant coffee tin with a slot in the lid. It is full of ten- and twenty-cent coins contributed by penny-pinching grey nomads: no match for the slapping waves.
Kevin’s anger has risen steadily, a little more every year, like the layers of fat around his middle. He feels it at his temples, in the arteries of his neck. Not long ago his heart imploded and Marj had to call an ambulance. He had an operation that has bought him some extra years.
But what to do with them?
Marj doles out pills for him and makes matters worse by banning the remaining pleasures in his life: beer, cigarettes, and those large yellow things called rock cakes, a kind of cross between a scone and a biscuit, studded through with bits of burnt sultana and eaten with a good slathering of butter. For years, Kevin bought these cakes from the True Blue takeaway shop where he also bought his Winnie Blue cigarettes and a can of Coke. The girl used to get these things ready as soon as she saw his car, so that by the time he got inside she’d have them lined up on the counter, her hand hovering over the till. It was a pleasant ritual. But now it’s the end of all that.
Marj says, ‘Why not try a diet lemonade?’
Kevin Kelly says nothing. He is ropable.
Kevin is thinking about a woman who is not his wife. She is at least twenty years younger than he is. He holds an image of her in his mind: her summer frocks, her red hair, her strange, wide-set cat’s eyes. Her name is Kimberly.
Marjorie Kelly grabs a kitchen chair and carries it out to the cracked cement path between the back of the house and the toilet. She leaves the chair in that position for a moment as she goes back inside the house, reappearing with a large brown ceramic ashtray in her hands. She hoists herself up onto the chair. The chair, with its spindly chrome legs and old foam seat, rocks unsteadily. Shifting her weight to compensate for wobbliness – surfing – Marjorie looks down at heavy object in her hands. It still smells faintly of thirty years’ worth of cigarette ash despite the fact that she has scrubbed it clean with hot water and dish detergent and set it to dry on the windowsill. After Kevin’s heart attack, she had wrapped it in layers of newspaper and tucked it into a dark corner of what the Kellys have always called the Long Cupboard.
Then she’d had a thought. Why was she even keeping this ashtray? Smoking was unhealthy. Nobody should smoke. If they did, they’d have to do it right out in the backyard, behind the toilet. So there was no need for an ashtray.
It’s difficult for her to do what she is about to do. The Kelly house has always taken things in, given them a home, found a spot. It rarely destroys or throws away. But she has decided to follow through. She holds the ashtray above her head. She’d bought it because she thought Linda Johnson would be impressed by it. Linda had not even noticed it.
She lets it fall from her fingers. It dashes itself satisfyingly against the cement, spraying tiny pieces all around. Nimbly, she climbs off the chair. She picks up the large jagged pieces and wraps them in the expert manner of a butcher or fishmonger, the way her mother had taught her to wrap scraps. She gets out the dustpan and brush and sweeps up the tiny bits.
There. It’s gone. Kevin need never know.
***
The houses in Clam Street were for married trackers; the single men’s quarters were less salubrious. A long, functional building was made for them opposite the seawall; they slept in four-to-a-room dormitories. It was like boarding school without a housemaster, cook or laundress. The single men had to work things out for themselves. One brought with him a grey cat – he liked to say it was a Russian Blue – called Samantha. Samantha travelled to Port Badminton by road in a sturdy cardboard box, hissing and wailing at first, then giving up the ghost. I’m dying. See what you’ve done.
Installed in her new home, she quickly commanded the respect of the single men by lashing out with tooth and claw if asked to move from a comfortable chair. She would return later, to those with whom she had fought, and expect to be scratched under the chin. At night, she moved freely from bed to bed, forcing grown men to curl uncomfortably around her. They went fishing for her, bringing back tasty whiting to be fried in butter and served to her on a platter.
As Samantha’s second birthday drew near, the single men decided that it should be celebrated in style.
News of Samantha’s party travelled quickly through the tracker community. Babysitters were booked. Hair was done. On the evening of the party, Samantha greeted the first few wellwishers and then, annoyed at the din, stalked off into the night.
Linda leaves Jo with Marjorie and goes along to the party by herself. She can do this, she tells herself, because she has panache and because she needs to return Alcools. She won’t stay for long.
As the party intensifies, it does not escape notice that Linda Johnson is spending a disproportionate amount of time talking to Harry Baumgarten. She is seen passing him a book, and he is seen exclaiming warmly and going to put it safely in his leather satchel. He returns to Linda after that, and they continue their animated conversation.
There is hilarity all around them, but they pay no attention. Someone falls backwards into a wall, cracking the Department of Supply’s new pale green-painted asbestos sheeting. Someone else stumbles about calling, ‘Samantha? Where are you, Samantha?’
Harry says to Linda: ‘Tell me, what did you see in Evan? He’s a good man, but don’t you find him dull? A woman like you must find him a little dull.’
For this part of the conversation they have moved to the laundry of the single men’s quarters. Linda sits balanced on the edge of the concrete laundry tub, her feet resting on a kitchen chair. She is drinking vodka from a silver cup. Harry leans against the wall nearby, a long-necked bottle of beer in hand. He scratches at an itchy spot left by the biting sandflies out on the island. He lifts his shirt to show a stomach aflame with red dots and scratch marks. ‘They’re all over me,’ he says. ‘On my back, down my legs. They itch like hell.’
‘Let me have a look,’ says Linda.
Harry puts his beer bottle down carefully on the floor of the laundry, under the concrete tub, out of harm’s way. He steadies Linda as she gets down from the tub.
From across the yard, a couple of trackers notice them entering the single men’s sleeping quarters. They exchange glances.
Linda and Harry are a little unsteady on their feet. Samantha is on one of the beds, a leg over her shoulder, licking. She stops, jumps off the bed and scoots out the door. Harry removes his shirt entirely so that Linda can see the extent of his spots. Linda laughs and says they are very sweet. She reaches out a hand to touch them. Someone opens the door.
‘I think I may be allergic to sandflies,’ Harry tells the tracker who appears in the doorway. ‘Darned itchy.’
‘Calamine lotion,’ says the tracker, entering the room. ‘My kiddies were going mad with mozzie bites until we painted them in the stuff. Calmed everything right down.’
Harry begins to scratch himself, recklessly. He scratches his stomach and tries to scratch his own back. Linda and the tracker move forward to help. The three of them work together on finding the right places and scratching pressures.
‘Oh my God!’ says Harry. ‘This is such bliss. Don’t stop.’
But eventually they do stop.
Harry is overtaken by a desire for calamine lotion. He thinks about this lotion – thick and pink and calming – in his tent. He has been camping out at Ticklebelly Flats, preparing to record the chiming wedgebill.
‘I think I’ll be getting off,’ he says. ‘Hooroo.’
He wants to keep scratching himself in private. Nothing else matters.
After three or four hours of sleep, Linda wakes up, thinking about the party and the scene in the dorm. She senses that there would be something not quite right, biologically or emotionally (leaving aside morally or socially), about an affair with Harry Baumgarten. When he took his shirt off, showing the red dots against the whiteness of his skin, he seemed more a brother than a lover. Their pheromones had little to say to each other.
It is an understanding that Linda shoves to one side. She loves him, she loves to talk to him, and the thought of spending the rest of her life with Evan Johnson is suddenly untenable. She must act now. She thinks of Apollonaire’s giddying words:
And they flew.
She decides to go and talk to Harry this minute. She gets out of bed – Jo is still safely asleep at Marjorie’s house – and puts her party dress back on, smoothing it down. She splashes her face with water and goes back out to the EH Holden.
As she settles into the driver’s seat she feels that the car is watching her, sadly, thinking of Evan far away on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., learning about the rendezvous and docking of two vehicles in earth orbit. But she starts the engine just the same, and drives off to find Harry.
Did the practical, unemotional Evan Johnson experience jealousy when he saw his wife and Harry Baumgarten together? When, under Harry’s influence, she announced to the assembled dinner-party guests that she was the daughter of a communist, did Evan notice and flinch? If so, it would have been hard to pick. He was looking forward to his training course at Goddard; he was immersed in the Gemini mission, the bridge between Mercury and Apollo. He was writing lists and packing bags and checking things. He was polishing his horn-rimmed glasses and sharpening his pencils. Perhaps he was jealous, but perhaps more than that, he simply trusted Linda to use the EH Holden for wholesome purposes only.
***
I envy those without jealousy and fear. I feel mine rising with the wind, threatening to overwhelm me. I know Lizzie wants to get back to The Lore of the Lyrebird, to read it secretly when she thinks I’m asleep.
Despite the homeliness and sentimentality of our relationship, I think she wants to get rid of me. She thinks I’m too clingy. I know she doesn’t like the way I drive off visitors, her grandniece in particular, the one who has been to uni and has a nice car and works out on the islands restoring habitat for threatened species. She’ll stand out in the yard calling, ‘Aunty! Aunty!’ until Lizzie goes out to her. They’ll talk for a long time. Recently I think I once heard the grandniece say: ‘I don’t know, Aunty Lizzie. She bites people and poops everywhere. She’s high maintenance.’ What was that about?
Sometimes she will cart Lizzie off to hospital for check-ups.
‘You stay here and be the guard galah,’ Lizzie will say. ‘Won’t be long.’
She’ll shut the back door, pulling it to with a click.
I’ll be left alone for hours, simmering in my own stew. Lizzie is probably lingering, lapping up time away from me, being with her relatives. She might even be having a takeaway coffee with the grand
niece, sitting companionably on a bench on the seawall, looking out over the water. Just thinking about this makes me go weak with jealousy.
***
Evan Johnson, blue biro over his heart, is thinking about his wife and the entomologist. He sees them together, so neatly matched, like brother and sister. He puts this thought in another part of his mind – seals it off the way Linda might burp and seal a Tupperware bowl before putting it in the fridge – and focuses on the calculations, their comforting scratchings across the blackboard.
‘Incoming private thoughts Aunty Lizzie,’ says the Dish.
‘No,’ I say. I don’t want to know. I’m right here on Lizzie’s shoulder. Her thoughts are right there, on the other side of hair and skull.
‘But it’s –’
‘No, not authorised, delete, go away,’ I say.
‘I think it’s important,’ says the Dish.
‘NO!’ I screech, in English.
‘Shhhhh,’ murmurs Lizzie soothingly. ‘I know you don’t like the cyclone. We’ll be all right.’
The Dish is behaving strangely. It never used to argue.
SEVEN
True Blue
Kevin and Marjorie Kelly sit on old kitchen chairs on the back verandah. They are attempting a moment of innocent happiness – so simply and easily achieved in the past; more difficult now.
The wind is rising and rain seems imminent but, sheltered on three sides, they feel quite cosy. A tendril of smoke from a green mosquito coil rises up into the fading light. Kevin watches the end of the coil, which has a soft grey burnt end, a long one, that has not yet dropped away. The little metal holder looks like a tree trunk; the green coil itself like the branches and leaves of a flat round tree.
The Lucky Galah Page 10