Marjorie catches sight of Linda Johnson and Harry Baumgarten in the parade, walking side by side in silver sandals, leading a bevy of marching Brownies. Linda is wearing a silver minidress; Harry is wearing only his briefest swimming trunks. He has a remarkably good body. Now Marjorie wants to stay in the dream, to get a good look at Linda’s dress. Who made it? But someone is knocking at the door. As she wakes she tries to hold that last image but it vanishes; she is aware she has been dreaming but the images have all drained away.
Marjorie remains still on the bed, her eyes open, the rest of her body immobile. It is as if she has just come to the surface from the bottom of the ocean. Eventually, she swings her legs over the side of the bed and shuffles her feet into her unbuckled sandals and slaps out to the front door.
We are standing at Marj’s front door, listening to the quiet scuffle of someone on the other side. I’m still bundled in my towel, but I’ve been given a hole to peer out of.
Marj appears, blinking like someone who has just woken up. Her face is older but unmistakeable. Her eyes still have that automatic kindness when they look at people; she still glances at me as if I were a thing.
‘Hi, Marj! We’re here for the fitting,’ says Gemma. She holds up the bundle of me, to indicate who is to have the fitting.
I notice how Gemma has said ‘we’. A little couply, if you ask me.
‘Hello, cocky!’ says Marj perfunctorily. She’ll never be a bird person.
As we pass into the interior of the house, I’m aware of the familiar, forgotten smell of the Kelly household. As we pass from hall into kitchen, the bead curtain drapes itself through hair and feather, needs to be shrugged off.
‘I’ll just pop the kettle on,’ says Marj. A flash of light glints off the stainless-steel kettle as she lifts it into the sink to fill. She opens a new packet of ginger nut biscuits.
I’m desperate for a biscuit.
Gemma takes a seat and lets me hop down onto the table. I waddle over to inspect the writing pad that is sitting there, pages folded back, revealing four or five lines written in shaky blue ballpoint.
Your a very attractive woman. We could go out dancing.
Through the screen door, I can make out the toilet in the backyard. The door is shut. I can sense Kevin Kelly in there, taking his time, just like the old days.
‘Lucky likes to have a cup of tea,’ says Gemma. ‘Keep it weak, though.’
‘Righto,’ says Marj, and gets out another cup.
‘A bit of tea is all right for a galah – it’s got tannins in it, just like the tannins in water that galahs drink in the wild,’ says Gemma. Unlike Lizzie, she talks freely in company.
‘Ke-ev!’ calls Marj. ‘Cuppa tea!’
There is silence from the backyard.
‘How are your bandicoots and whatnot?’ asks Marj, as she puts four mugs on the table and the sugar bowl, a jug of milk, and spoons and the plate of biscuits.
Leaving the tea to draw, Marj nips out to get my suit. I want a biscuit so badly I could explode. But I wait.
When she reappears, holding the little article of clothing out towards me, I recognise the fabric. It is the same as Linda Johnson’s Moon Ball dress.
That long-ago moment comes back to me: Linda Johnson twirling in the backyard, her hair falling out of its bobby pins, the little girls clapping.
The gown was never worn, never paid for. Events overtook it.
Marj and Gemma’s hands are all over me, pulling things this way and that. ‘It’ll need a dart here,’ says Marj, just as she used to say to the ladies who came for their fittings. Then they stand back to look. There’s a diamante button on the front, at the breastbone.
I have a place at the table. A cup of tea. A biscuit. A Moon Ball gown. I could swoon. I let out a happy double chirrup.
‘She likes it!’ says Gemma.
I twirl on the table top, imagining my hair swinging.
Marjorie catches sight of Kevin’s handwriting on the open writing pad. Her bulgy eyes lock on, flaring with curiosity. She’s trying to read the upside-down writing as she half listens to Gemma talking about the Shark Bay mouse.
The toilet flushes, the screen door swings and there is a masculine clearing of the throat. Marjorie’s hand has stretched out to turn the writing pad around, to have a good look, but now Kevin Kelly has joined us, with his red face, thin grey hair and large belly with a blue shirt stretched over it. His own hand reaches the writing pad before Marjorie’s. He whips it away and hugs it to his chest.
‘Who’ve you been writing to, Kev?’ asks Marjorie.
Kevin looks at Gemma, his mouth open and working slightly, trying to think of something.
Kevin glances at me in my ball gown and looks again. It’s a double take.
‘Is that our cocky?’ says Kevin, pointing at me. ‘The one we lost?’
‘Don’t be silly, Kev!’ says Marj. But she looks at me, really looking into my eyes this time.
Everyone goes silent. They gaze at me in my Moon Ball gown, holding my bit of biscuit in one claw, nibbling steadily. There is silence. It is a long, beautiful silence; the silence of surrendering all ideas about anything.
Kevin picks up the newspaper, subtly folding the writing pad into it. He walks over to the stove and takes the box of matches from a knobbly glazed ceramic pot and hurries back out through the flyscreen. He disappears behind the toilet.
Kevin is standing before the blackened forty-four-gallon drum that serves as family incinerator. With the back of his hand, he nudges at the sheet of rusted metal that acts as a lid, letting it drop on the ground. Kevin stands there, the newspaper and writing pad in one hand, matches in the other. Did Marjorie see what he’d written? He cannot bear to read back over his own words, but they repeat themselves nauseatingly in his head. Your a very attractive woman. We could go out dancing. He tears pages out of the writing pad, scrunching them into burnable balls. He takes great hanks of newsprint and scrunches those as well. He lights the paper, watches the orange flames lick up tall. The bikini girl and her palm trees succumb to the flames.
Gemma and I are heading back down Clam Street. Branches are down; the street is littered with post-cyclone debris.
‘I don’t actually believe in birds as pets,’ she says. ‘You fullas should be flying free. But you’d be useless out on your own, wouldn’t you?’
She tries to put me on her shoulder, to carry me the way Lizzie did. Her handling is all wrong. Her shoulder is plumper than Lizzie’s. I have to dig my claws in a little tighter to get a grip.
‘Don’t you dare bite me again!’ she says.
Her ear is so close, so tempting. With difficulty, I resist.
We look out over the samphire flat. A couple of seagulls are flying in the distance. I would indeed be useless out on my own.
I settle myself on Gemma’s shoulder, tuning myself to the rhythm of her gait. I make a mental note to work on my jealousy issues.
The floodwaters have risen over the banks of the Sandhurst River. Great chunks of the banks have been washed away. Silt is coming down from miles inland. The brown river sends watery feelers out across the land, finding whole boxes of fruit and vegetables and the odd wooden chair. It curls itself around these things, bringing them into the main current, pushing them out to the open ocean.
Underneath the Dish, the grizzled old Dogger presses the rewind button on his VHS tape. He has been on a movie-watching binge. He hasn’t been out shooting for years, but he has been lucky: he has been given the job of temporary caretaker here at the Dish until work begins on making it a proper tourist attraction, complete with interpretive signage. It’s somewhere to live, and pays well enough to cover drinks and meals at the Port Hotel. During the cyclone, with the wind howling and rattling outside, he was quite snug, indulging himself in memories of Linda Johnson.
His reverie is interrupted by the
arrival of the men who will take the Dish out of lock and put it back in its usual position looking down over the residents of Port Badminton.
I hear a blast of static, a Dishly clearing of the throat.
Dish: I’ve got the answer.
Galah: What was the question?
Dish: Didn’t you want to know about Evan Johnson? Did he jump or did he fall?
Galah: Oh yes. What was he thinking?
Dish: Midway down, the falling man pauses to open his arms and embrace the entire Indian Ocean. Silver fish leap out of the water and glint in the sunlight. He feels cool water running down his chest. He holds his hand up to the water breaking through the skin of his neck. He presses down on the pulsing vein, feeling the liquid seeping through his fingers. He cups his hand, fills it with water, and takes it to his mouth. It tastes cool and fresh and pure. He gorges on the water and then stops, satisfied, letting it run down his legs, off his toes.
He looks down at the water smashing and roiling on the rocks below and thinks:
Galah: Roger that.
A Note on the Dish
The reader might be interested to know that in the north-west of Western Australia, there is a red dune just outside the town of Carnarvon. A large white dish sits there, overlooking the town. This is a decommissioned Overseas Telecommunications Commission dish and it did not play a role in tracking the 1969 Apollo mission. However, a little way along the dune, there are concrete footings and traces of another dish – an FPQ radar, long dismantled – that did track that giant leap.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank: Peter Bishop for always knowing what this novel was, even before I did; Leah Kaminsky for championing it; Charlotte Wood for top-shelf writerly advice; Jacinta di Mase for agreeing to represent it; Geordie Williamson and Mathilda Imlah at Picador for publishing it; Bruce Fell for a wonderful conversation about the capabilities of the Dish; the Australia Council for a $5000 Emerging Writers Grant in 2005; Varuna the Writers’ House; Penguin for a $5000 editing scholarship in 2010; Merrill Findlay, who wrote a book about my home town; Tony Savdié for help with an airfare; my friends Anna Feord, Vince Melton, Steph Luke, Angela Matheson, Ian Pitt, Martha Gelin, Jane Roffe, Karen Golland, Dawn Nusa, Adrian Symes, Lisa Bostock, Helen Bergen, Ray Mjadwesch and Ali Foley (and others), who read the slow-forming manuscript and encouraged me to continue; Jim and Alison Gregg, Hamish Lindsay and Steve Keogh for sharing their stories of the space race in a small town (all technical absurdities mine); and my partner Steve Woodhall for calmly keeping me afloat every time I thought my ship was sinking. I also wish to thank the red earth, the glittering sea and the underground river that kept me company through my childhood and all the people, animals, plants, insects and other things I found in that particular place on earth, including the moon and the night sky. And I thank my sister Deb Sorensen and parents Brian and Yvonne Sorensen for being with me always.
About Tracy Sorensen
Tracy Sorensen is an academic, journalist and film-maker. She was born in Brisbane, grew up on the north coast of Western Australia and now lives in Bathurst. The Lucky Galah is her first novel.
This is a work of fiction. Characters, institutions and organisations mentioned in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously without any intent to describe actual conduct.
First published 2018 in Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2000
Copyright © Tracy Sorensen 2018
The moral right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.
This ebook may not include illustrations and/or photographs that may have been in the print edition.
The author and the publisher have made every effort to contact copyright holders for material used in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked should contact the publisher.
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available
from the National Library of Australia
http://catalogue.nla.gov.au
EPUB format: 9781760559205
Typeset by Post Pre-press Group
Extract taken from The Lucky Country by Donald Horne copyright © Myfanwy Horne 1964, 1965, 1967, 1971, 1998, 2005. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd
‘Running Bear’ lyrics by J.P. Richardson used with permission.
Lyrics from True Blue
Words and Music by John Williamson
Copyright © 1981 Emusic Pty Limited
All Rights Administered Worldwide by Kobalt Songs Music Publishing
All Rights Reserved Used by Permission
Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC
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