by Lois Murphy
It’s only when you get to the other end, become an adult yourself, that you learn the obverse of Snap! I win.
Which is, Snap! You lose. Snap! You lose. Snap!
You lose.
It’s easy enough to pinpoint the beginning of the mist as the first night it rolled over the town: 22 June 1998, the night of the winter solstice and the day the line of grey four-wheel drives cruised into our town and then disappeared out to the cemetery. Literally.
Most of us had noted them: they cried out to be noticed, with their deliberate sameness, hulking size and tinted anonymity. Their air of menace. They’d driven in slowly, and that too was a threat in itself, denoting power, but power contained, subdued. As if awaiting release.
The five vehicles had cruised up the main street, unhurried, maintaining an arrogant, possessive pace, as if they owned both the town and time itself. They parked just out of our reach, beyond the local shops, purring to a halt one after the other, as if connected by an invisible cord. Three men emerged from each car. The engines remained running and the drivers did not appear; curiously, they were not observed by anyone, even though by now a number of people were watching the spectacle of the new arrivals, unusual in a small rural town.
Fifteen men gathered on the footpath beside the cars. They were all absolutely nondescript. When witnesses tried to recall them afterwards, there was not a single defining feature that anyone could come up with, nothing to identify or distinguish an individual. Only this uniform, suited grey mass.
Merle Goodman, who was nearby watering her garden at the time, claimed that each man carried a small black Bible, but Merle is an unreliable witness, given to embroidery. Never let the dull facts spoil a good story, is Merle’s motto.
It was a Saturday afternoon, and the RSL had set up a sausage sizzle outside the pub, fundraising. The shops were all closed for the weekend, but the races were on in Perth, so there were enough punters in the front bar to keep the sizzlers busy. The smell of frying fat, burning onions, and cheap tomato sauce filled the afternoon air.
From the pub door I watched these men walk silently as far as the shops, looking around themselves dismissively before turning back. Without the armour of their vehicles the sense of threat they carried dimmed, and they appeared to be little more than a group of featureless men. As they returned to the cars they clustered together, murmuring. Their words were indistinct, and the hum of their voices was like the sound of distant traffic on an otherwise peaceful day. They were utterly oblivious to us, failing to respond to the jovial offers of burnt sausages, or the Mafia taunts that pelted from the public bar. They made no acknowledgement of us at all; it was as if, even though they appeared to be looking around, they could not actually see. They moved with the contained oblivion of the blind, their eyes hidden by sunglasses, physical shields which heightened the sense of removal emanating from them.
But somehow, despite the lack of expression maintained throughout their brief survey of our home, our lives, the impression left was one of disdain. They returned to their vehicles with the same sense of defiant, unhurried purpose, and in their wake floated an evaluation of worthlessness. It was palpable and strange, but unusual rather than eerie or disturbing. The sense of menace came from the cars themselves, their dark, monolithic, almost bestial forms. Somehow they put you in mind of jackboots, marching in formation.
Once the men returned to their cars, I jotted down some rego details on a serviette. It wasn’t until the convoy started driving away, slow and snakelike, that the mood broke. Suddenly the air was full of trepidation; the intrusion had left a chill, as if the vehicles’ expensive air-conditioning had permeated the atmosphere around them. The jokes stopped.
We watched the procession turn into Tucker’s Lane, home of the disputed block, the four and a half acre parcel that had divided the town so bitterly. We had known, of course, that it was this piece of land that had called these men here – there was nothing else in this town to attract their like. Men like that, so removed and self-contained, alert but blind to their surroundings, had by nature to be associated with business, development. Destruction.
Although the cars were out of our sight, we remained grouped outside the pub, silently watching while sausages hissed and charred behind us. The sudden reappearance of the vehicles was a surprise, their engines were so quiet, low growl rather than roar. They’d been an unexpectedly short time; they must have only given the site the same detached once-over they’d given the main street.
Now they turned left and cruised slowly away from us, to the east. Nothing unusual in that: the road formed a loop back to the highway; they were heading out of town. The crushed serviette I’d been dutifully scribbling on suddenly seemed ridiculous. Force of habit.
I was about to turf it into the bin beside me, which was already overflowing with its grease-and sauce-stained like, when the vehicles unexpectedly signalled right, and without braking veered into McKenzie’s Rise Road and passed from sight. It seemed unlikely that fifteen men in business suits would be visiting the dam on a winter’s weekend afternoon. Which, of course, left only the cemetery.
‘Probably want to stick a McDonald’s out there,’ spat Bluey Jordan, and the afternoon, which had been bright with winter sun and fragrant with food and beer, turned dim and sour. The old tension over the disputed land, the proposed supermarket, flared again and men started to jab fingers and raise voices, the start of the next race overlooked.
This moment entered the realm of folklore later on: a young mother claimed that at that precise instant (she had bet on the two-thirty trot and had just tuned in to the starting call, so she could be exact), her sleeping baby woke apoplectic with squalls for no accountable reason. It screamed nonstop for almost an hour, to the point where she was in a panic about it, before subsiding into an exhausted, whimpering sleep.
Other parents chipped in with babies suddenly crying; children happily at play inexplicably erupting into scuffles or tears.
So it goes, anyway.
And who am I discount these claims? Outside the pub the mood was tangible. Whether it had been affected by something malevolent emanating from the visitors, or whether it was just a reaction to the audacious intrusion of wealth and power, the line of luxury four-wheel drives that no man in Nebulah could ever afford, cruising through our Saturday-arvo sausage sizzle so dismissively – provocatively, some might say – I don’t know. All I know is that tempers suddenly became ragged and the arguments for and against the proposed supermarket were wrestled over yet again. A gut instinct told me something here was wrong; I asked Earl if I could use the pub’s phone and put in a call to Sean, saying I thought he should maybe get out here, but I was unable to give him any sounder reason than that a visiting clutch of business types seemed to be making people out of sorts.
I stayed at the pub, waiting for Sean, my eye always to the cemetery road, willing these men to reappear, with handshakes and a plausible, inoffensive explanation for their visit – preachers come to bless the graves, dignitaries visiting Anzac memorials – anything would do, as long as it shattered the bell jar of their remoteness, their presence that seemed somehow more an absence.
As I watched the road, I listened to the theories and arguments around me, while the RSL entourage bought themselves beers and scraped the charred debris from their grill. Young Markie Lamb, large and lumpy in football colours, stood beside me with a half-empty packet of bread, methodically chewing the innards out of every slice, oblivious, as he generally was, to everything going on around him. I found myself fascinated by his industry as he unselfconsciously chewed the soft middles from the border of each crust.
At one point he gazed indifferently at me. ‘You waiting?’ His voice was monotone, blurred through a mouth stuffed with churning dough.
‘Yeah, mate – I’m waiting for my friend Sean.’
‘No, waiting for the men with no shadows,’ he said, in the same matter-of-fact tone.
I stared at him, but he was down to th
e last slice in his bag, and was already focused on Murray’s van, where the leftovers were being loaded.
When Sean arrived towards the end of the afternoon, he had Daniel Napes, his constable at the time, with him. I climbed into the back seat and apologised for dragging them all the way out for nothing more than suspicion. Sean shrugged and pulled out in the direction of the cemetery. Behind us the pub burst into activity, spilling people in our wake, and three carloads pulled out and followed us.
Sean kept an eye on the rear-view mirror. ‘Sure seems to have stirred things up, all right. S’pose it’s just as well we’re here.’ Napes looked out his window with a disgusted scowl – you could hear the thought Waste of time and resources tap-dancing against his shaved skull.
We’d just turned off into McKenzie’s Rise Road when the radio crackled into life. The trace on the registration numbers I’d given them had come through. There was nothing. They didn’t exist.
Sean turned into the cemetery car park. ‘Be interesting to meet these guys.’
But the cemetery was deserted, and back at the dam we found only a carload of local teenagers with a couple of illicit slabs of beer, mortified at being sprung not only by uniformed police, but also by a few parents in our entourage. They’d been there since morning footy practice and swore there’d been no one else through that afternoon. We left Napes there to deal with them, and to placate the fathers of the unlucky girls, and returned to the cemetery.
There was nothing. No cars, no men.
No tyre tracks. No footprints. Absolute silence. The gum trees stood unruffled and vacant. Behind us the carloads of spectators, geared up for some action, stood surveying the lifeless scene, confused.
The cemetery was at the end of the road. The convoy hadn’t returned to town, and there was no other road out. But they were gone. No one was game to say anything until finally Michael Tinsdale broke the confused silence. ‘Jesus wept,’ he spurted. ‘That’s a bit bloody creepy, isn’t it?’ His words seemed to bite through the emptiness. That was when I realised the birds had gone.
That night the mist descended on us for the first time.
So while it may seem easy enough to say Snap!, the mist started at this point, 22 June 1998, it is hard to claim with certainty that this was the start. Some would say that it began with the appearance and disappearance of the unwelcome convoy, but others would say it was merely part of a progression of events. Perhaps they introduced the mist, but were they really a beginning in themselves?
Could you really, when you’re dealing with a situation so esoteric, as ephemeral as mist itself, snap your fingers with such a definitive Yes!, and aim your focus at an obvious point, and say, ‘There is the beginning’? Behind every beginning is a sequence, a series of movements that leads to the climax of enforced change, labelled the beginning but actually merely the unfolding of consequences. Before each bombed building is the escalation of war, the breaking down of peace processes; before each snapped bone is the decision to follow a particular course of action, thinking, I am invincible, or simply, I am safe.
To find a beginning is like trying to identify the onset of Alzheimer’s, so easy to pinpoint the diagnosis as the instant of change. But beginnings will never arrive clean and weightless, they always come encumbered with a history.
You could, legitimately, claim that the whole situation started with the proposal for the new supermarket. With the surveyors from Perth who drove into town with their maps and titles and equipment, and declined to discuss their assignment with any local who approached them, but who happily told Earl at the pub, in return for a free round, that they’d been employed by a major retail chain, which was negotiating to purchase the vacant land on Tucker’s Lane for a new supermarket.
Once the news spread, opinions and alliances shattered the town’s lethargic harmony. The town split, severed cleanly as if the blade of a bulldozer had torn a boundary that clearly divided loyalty and progress. Murray and Janet Monroe, the owners of the IGA that had serviced the town unchallenged for years, were suddenly forgiven for their empty, dusty shelves, inflated prices and out-of-date Twisties, and were transformed overnight into town heroes, battlers in the true Australian way: Davids facing the corporate, multinational Goliath. The loyalty camp were vehement in their support of the dusty locals, all gripes about overpriced grey meat frozen onto polyurethane pushed to one side when faced with the challenge of an alternative.
Others were thrilled with the proposition, thought with longing of uniformed sameness, fluorescent organisation, aisles of regimented variety. And, of course, the endless, clichéd carrot of jobs hanging from the end of a large corporate stick, like a cattle prod.
It was said there were deals, promises, reassurances and payouts swirling in the private background of all the aboveboard public negotiations, floating in whispers and handshakes over the prickly scrub that had claimed the land for years. Sometimes these rumours were recalled in the light of our current predicament, in the endless scavenge for causes.
The site remained a wasteland of discarded whiteware and thistles, but some people were never forgiven for their opinions about it.
It seems ridiculous that a few acres of dried-out scrub on the road to the local tip could really be the cause of something as diabolical as the mist, but the unknown always breeds speculation, which all too quickly hardens into certainty, the concrete weight of fact, simply from repetition or a chance collaboration.
Earl Thompson, publican of the Nebulah Tavern for over thirty years, knew the town as intimately as his own underwear, keeping the threadbare patches well hidden from any source of light. For this he was seen as the local expert; his opinions carried the weight of proof in themselves, usually backed up by Wally Todd, the town’s historian and the driving force behind its attempt at a museum. Earl’s bar-room yarns, grounded by his elbow resting proprietorially on the beer taps, assumed the mantle of local fact – the real history, the only one that mattered, because it was undocumented and therefore belonged only to locals.
Earl had another beginning to offer for the mist: he reckoned the land on Tucker’s Lane was marked, cursed early in the town’s life by a dispute over a claim that led to the brutal and cowardly slaughter of four miners – one only sixteen – at that very spot. He talked authoritatively over his taps about spilled blood and the possibility of buried remains, while Wally, keen not to be sidelined, would nod earnestly and assert ‘Yes, that’s exactly right’ every now and then. And so yet another Snap! is added to the linchpins of the proposed supermarket and the appearance of the pack of men.
But we can go back further still. It was Rolf who pointed out one day that Nebulah had no Indigenous population or known history – inconceivable in a region renowned for its climate, rainfall and fertility.
Rolf had a lifetime of association with Aboriginal people, both on the stations he worked at and on his journeys between them. ‘They know,’ he’d said to me once, in the early days of the mist, when we were still desperately convinced we could find a cause. He laughed at Milly travelling to Canberra, devoting weeks to fruitless research.
‘Blackfellas don’t come here, should tell you everything you need to know. They read the land through the soles of their feet, have done for thousands of years. You don’t have to understand it, just accept it.’
Another beginning, so far in the past it makes our present a mere fingernail, continuing to grow fruitlessly long after the corpse is cold and stiff. A present trying desperately to deny the certainty of its fate, helpless in the face of the decay ahead of it.
As if it can sense a stranger, the mist is ferocious tonight; it cyclones around the house in a frenzy. Even for me, conditioned by the drawn-out months that I’ve endured it, it’s like being under siege. Alex’s face is drained of colour and she has started to close her eyes for extended periods, as if gathering her wits, or suffering from acute pain. She refuses the offer of the spare room with a shudder, saying she doubts whether she could sleep in such
circumstances, and I leave her barefoot on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, with Gina curled at her feet.
On the television people drenched in fake tan demonstrate exercise equipment with huge, bleached smiles, while a shrill woman delights in its ‘life-changing’ benefits.
It takes me a long time to get to sleep, and when I do there’s no relief – I sleep shallowly, trapped in an entangled maze of dreams: long, dark stretches of bush, branches tearing at me; a dog, fangs open and reaching for my face, so vivid I can feel its breath. I swirl out of range of the jaws, but the grin follows me, like some kind of feral Cheshire cat. I stumble through doors into empty rooms, but none offers shelter because always, behind me, there is something lurking, though no matter how often I spin round, I cannot catch sight of it. My neck prickles with exposure. I am alone in the impenetrable dark, and all around me are teeth, and doors that swing open behind me or closed in front. Over it all presides the canine grin. It lights the air around it and … I break free from the image of a skeletal hand, elongated fingernails shredding a blue straw hat, and rise to wakefulness, not quite sure if it is an escape. Outside, the mist is unusually quiet, its shrieking reduced to a kind of mesmerising chant, somehow more unsettling than its howls. There will be no more sleep for me tonight.
From the front of the house floats the sound of low moaning. I pad from the bedroom in bare feet and peer into the lounge, where Alex, sitting upright, has lain her head back on the top of the couch and is gasping, her face greenish with sweat. In one hand she is clutching the bucket she used earlier to clean Gina’s mess, and the room smells of vomit. Gina is awake with her ears high; she gives the slightest of whimpers when she sees me, and raises and lowers a paw as if instructing me to be quiet.
I return with water and a damp towel. Gently, I ease the bucket from Alex’s grasp and wipe her face, starting from her brow. Her eyes open – she is not asleep, just exhausted, caught in the grip of something beyond my comprehension. She groans lightly at the touch of the towel and her eyes close again. I carefully wipe her mouth, then slide my hand under her hair and lift her head to wipe the back of her neck. She moans again, but it is softer this time, as if in relief. I lay her head down again, then lift her arms in turn and wipe them down, finishing by pressing both her hands between the wet towel, and squeezing her fingers through it. A part of me feels guilty at the pleasure I take from this soothing; it reminds me of Julie as a child, tiny and whimpering with the fever of measles. I would sit beside her, keeping her subdued and cool in the same way, in the time when her fevers were only physical, and damp towels and gentleness were enough.