What could I do? I said, Sorry, Brian, give me another few weeks and I’ll call you. He went to hand me another card but I pointed out I had six of them already. Then suddenly, as if in answer to my loudly thought incantations, he said, Okay, well then, I’m off. And he was.
I shut the door, shuddered, and walked on cold feet on the cold tiled floor to my bedroom, where I finished dressing and sprucing up. I wondered if I’d heard his ute drive off but couldn’t recall, and opened the blind a crack to see him stopped halfway up the hill, leaning against the roof of Gemma’s car, talking to her real close through the open window.
Gemma is the May to my December. I am sixty and she is twenty-one. We have been going out for a year now. We plan to marry, but she loves the city and I can’t stand it. Her friends are there and her job and the concerts she attends with a diligence I find frightening. Even if she only half likes a band, she’ll go just to have gone. But she’s also quick, funny and generous. I feel lucky.
But no matter what Brian implies about ‘hot young bods’ it’s actually got nothing to do with it. You carry on too much, he says. He makes me sick. He is really a pest. I worry about what he’s saying to her but tell myself she can certainly look after herself. I think of him working his balls, twiddling his dick. I feel ill and limp.
Gemma is in the house now and talking at a million miles an hour. She tells me about Ruth having an abortion and about Greg getting busted for pot and everyone else knowing Greg is weak though they love him but if any of them get busted because of it he’d better watch out, not that she’s like that. I wonder about the gram of pot I have hidden in an old shoe in the wardrobe, then shake my head because I don’t even know Greg. Gemma can wind me up but I love her.
She doesn’t mention Brian, so I do. Oh, him! He’s a funny old fella, isn’t he, she says, tweaking my cold, pointy nipples through my T-shirt. Look at you, she says, Standing to attention. I try to crush her to me but get a mouthful of untamed hair in my mouth. She’s not in the mood.
So what did he say to you? I ask.
Oh, he was wondering if I could encourage you to join up. And he asked me, too, but I said I wasn’t around much. He said, I know I know.
He said that? He said, I know I know?
Yes, just like that.
Phew, what a creep.
He is a bit creepy but nothing I can’t handle. I think he’s in awe of me.
Watch yourself saying things like that. You’re of a generation too savvy to peddle that kind of stuff.
She is. And she changes the subject. We are going to go for a long walk and she is going to tell me about the city. Brian has gone, I am sure, but the laughing pink and greys suggest a presence, a residue he has left behind. Opening the back door and looking out at the briefly green carpet over the floor of the world, I’d swear I can taste ash in the air. Just from the chimney, the smoke and waste from the wandoo.
*
With the weather turning fast and the green vanishing, the fires around the district grew. The spring burning-off. We’d had the stubble in autumn, the forests during the winter, and now people were burning as much as they could before the long fire bans came in. Each year at this time, fires in bushland or paddocks set to ‘burn back’ would get out of control and run amok. Brian and his crew would be fighting fires lit by their mates, even by themselves. Around the district the skies were held up on columns of blackness, columns of different width and density. The air was always acrid.
Gemma was with me outside, sunning herself, when Brian next arrived. He ignored me puttering around, and said to Gemma, Wanna come and see a controlled burn?
Before I could intervene, and with Gemma pissed off at me because of a recent failure of mine, she said, looking me straight in the eye, Would love to! Can I ride in your ute?
I followed in my car. I could see them going hammer and tongues, blabbing about everything. Perversely, I couldn’t get out of my mind how gross it was, a middle-aged bloke like him slobbering all over her. I made myself sick.
When we arrived, there were three fire tenders and a bunch of volunteers. I knew most of them by sight and a few of them from the District High where I taught. So he finally managed to nab you, did he, joked one of the women I worked with, who didn’t disapprove, or not overtly, of my relationship. Stu, the phys ed teacher, just turned his well-toned torso away from me, since I was filth and a dirty old man as far as he was concerned. He had tried to chat Gemma up two or three times but she had laughed in his face.
And there was Brian with a burner all ready to go, saying, Stand back and watch how we do it; then talking about the gentle wind and its direction and how it was dry enough to burn but not so dry as to burn too fast and all sorts of other pyromaniacal shit. And she watched, mesmerised.
*
You know there’s something mentally wrong with that guy, I said to Gemma, as we sat before what was likely the last fire in the combustion heater for the year. We were drinking mulled wine, cosy on the big rug in the lounge room, playing a game of Carcassonne which she always won, telling me that she played for sheep stations, and she did.
Yeah, I know, she said.
So why do you humour him? Lead him on?
Excuse me? she said, leaning back. I thought she was going to flick the playing tiles over but she was winning so that was never going to happen.
I mean, why did we have to go out today and watch him torment the earth? Kill insects, drive birds from their nests, lay waste.
Don’t be stupid, darling (she said it like a bad B-grade film actress). Better something small and controlled than the whole district going up when some arsehole throws a lit cigarette out the window of their car in forty-six-degree heat with a hundred-k-an-hour easterly blowing.
I don’t believe it, I said, That’s word for word what Brian has said to me a dozen times. Word for bloody word.
She laughed, flicked me a don’t push it look, and went back to studying the game.
I listened out for the tawny frogmouth that usually started up at that time each night, but there was nothing. Not even the usual insect sounds of that time of year. I wanted to point out the voice of the suffering, but there was nothing for me to grab onto. I wanted to show her that she was being shallow, and a caricature, but I knew everything in the house, on the block, was funnelled through my lens, my perspective. I didn’t even know if what I was thinking was true to me.
Anyway, I added, after a few more turns, He basically threatened to let the house burn down if there was a fire and I wasn’t a volunteer.
Why don’t you just join up? she said, reasonably. After all, you praise them to the skies and you seem to want to do it. Why not?
Do you know how many fires are deliberately started by volunteer firefighters, who then get off watching it and joining in to fight it? It’s sexual and it’s lack of confidence and it’s wanting to be a hero and a lot of other weird stuff thrown in.
And that’s why you’re a maths teacher and not a psychologist.
There’s a lot more to maths than just numbers.
*
When the fire that wiped out half the district came, I was a firie. I fought side by side with Brian and we both watched his house burn to the ground. No one could make sense of how a flame even got hold. The pot plants, maybe. Though that’s just glib. I saw Brian crying, sitting in his patrol car, while others finished the mopping up.
I had broken up with Gemma by then, but she rang and rang again to see if I was all right. I found eight messages from her on my voicemail. Yes, I am okay and the house is okay. Then I told her about Brian and how bad I felt and what an arsehole I had been. It was all coming back on me now.
The phone went silent. Dead silent. Are you there, Gem? What’s wrong?
Then she said, I fucked him, you know. In his house. I rang the number on one of those cards you had stuck all over the fridge. I just wanted to see what it was like fucking a real firie.
I knew I should have been furious and said sarc
astically, And was it hot? Did it burn you up? But I just said, Oh, really. Okay. Well, he’s okay, people are looking after him. He’s in good hands. He’ll bounce back. That’s what I said, and maybe some other shit like that, then I said goodbye and she said, I am so glad you’re okay. And we hung up.
FRIED BREAKFAST ON THE ROAD
The boys stand with their mother on the concrete verge outside the terminal, waiting for the Pioneer Bus to Karratha. Winter, 1974. It is quite cold, but they don’t care – they like the cold. They don’t want to be leaving the cold. They are going up into the heat, way up north.
You’ll like it up there at this time of the year, she says, fussing with the younger boy’s hair, which has that I-can-donothing-with-this look. The boys stay quiet.
Say hello to your father from me, she says. They kick at the ground, and each other, and push harder than they should on their backpacks. If Mum wants to say hello to him why doesn’t she do it herself? She can use the phone. But she rarely does, only when it’s about a ‘visit’.
They are the only kids on the block like this. Teachers at school ask if they are being looked after properly. People tut-tut – No man about the house.
Joel, the elder, says for the fifth time, He won’t want to see us anyway, Mum, it’s just because he has to. Alvin, two years younger, parrots, Because the court says so, squeezing ‘so’ out like it stinks.
The bus is huge. Much bigger than they expected, and that’s good. Their backpacks are under the bus now, but they have some books and magazines they place in the seat pockets in front. They are seated halfway along the bus, waving sullenly to their mother, who looks like she’s going to cry, which doesn’t help. Joel has the window, of course, and Alvin is leaning over him, digging an elbow into his brother’s guts. Joel pushes Alvin away so he yelps, and attracts the attention of the man in front – a big hairy man, a man with a bushranger beard they had noticed getting on, and had both hoped wouldn’t be sitting anywhere near them. But when the driver took their tickets and showed them down the aisle saying, This is not usually part of the service, boys, the bearded man loomed larger and larger.
He is a big man – a fat man – they think it but wouldn’t say it, because they know better. The man has raised both middle armrests and is spread across space meant for two. The boys feel jealous of that.
But now the man has raised his head and is looking over the back of his seats at Alvin, who yelped. Both boys slip back into their seats and feel the tug of the bus as it pulls away. They look again at their vanishing mum and feel bad that the goodbyes went wrong at the last minute.
*
A twenty-two-hour journey, and well into the second half. They are not even sure where they are, but it’s past Carnarvon and well up the North West Coastal Highway, and the ground is flat, with occasional raised bits. Over the speakers the driver tells his audience about the land. The boys were interested in hearing about the banana plantations around Carnarvon, and especially the tracking station, but they’ve tuned out for hundreds of k’s now and so much of the drive has been through darkness.
Yet it is morning and there’s desert about them and a few trees where rivers might be when the floods come, and an emptiness they don’t understand. During the night, the bus hit a kangaroo, waking them with the jolt, but the driver told everyone to go back to sleep and not to worry. Though the sun rising fast over the plains is exciting, they are hungry and both need to piss. But they don’t want to get up, because Big Beard looks over at them every time they even slightly move in their chairs. And Joel is scaring Alvin by whispering that Big Beard watches Alvin when he’s dozing. But Big Beard snores loud and they know he’s asleep a lot, and in Geraldton and again in Carnarvon when they stopped to stretch their legs, Big Beard would go to the bar and buy more booze, which the driver would wink over, saying, keep that out of sight.
They are approaching a roadhouse and the bus is going down through the gears. Rrrrr.rrr.rrrrr.rr.r. Both boys are thinking they can go to the toilet at the roadhouse rather than on the bus, where they’d have to force their way past the seats in front, Big Beard’s seats reclined as they had been the whole way, giving no room in the back. Even when they had climbed out and walked the rocking way down to the chemical toilet, past the old people looking grumpy and tired, saying sorry sorry sorry to their irritation, they had both been scared of the flap flap of the metal tray they had to pee on and both knew they would never do a poo in there on that, flap flap and spill spill into a sloshy background noise and the tyres humming … and holding the safety bar with one hand while trying to direct pee with another and it spraying all over and making puddles on the floor, and slipping out embarrassed and not looking back and hoping people won’t think it was them that made the mess though it was, Joel being older and taking things seriously despite the teasing, going in second and going, URRR YUCK don’t piss on the floor then himself adding more piss.
rrrrRRRr. Jolt. And then everyone up suddenly, and trying to push down the narrow aisle of the bus through the small rectangle of the door which was opened with a hiss. The boys are surprised at how cold it is, and go brrrr …
It should be warmer up here, says Joel, and it will be, but not just after sunrise.
Look at the trucks, says Alvin, and the boys both go, Wowooo!
Their father drives big trucks for Hamersley Iron – Haulpaks – or did … Now he lives in Karratha and runs a garage that sells petrol to trucks and cars. The boys know everything about trucks. They start talking about sleeping cabs and long noses and cabovers at a furious pace then Big Beard steps down off the bus behind them and they go quiet. He lurches past, does a fart and grunts. He stinks of sherry. The boys know that smell.
We gotta eat. We gotta go to the toilet! They wait until the toilets clear then go Phew! at the stench and stand at the tray and piss high and low and Alvin says though he’s smaller he can piss higher, which he can and does. This annoys Joel, who nudges Alvin into the tray and he gets wee on his shoes. Oi, don’t, Joel! It’s not much piss on his shoe, and Alvin instantly forgets, and they wash up and go in to order something to eat. They have done this already – for dinner the night before. Their mother had packed a lunch. They’d ordered ‘steak and vegie’ for dinner in Geraldton and sat proudly as the waitress served them. Joel smiled at her and Alvin said, She’s ya girlfriend, Joel. Joel kicked him so hard Alvin bled a little on the shin. When they finished their dinner, Joel put his hands behind his head, leant back, and said, This is the life. Alvin copied him, which Joel didn’t seem to mind.
What do ya want, Al?
I wouldn’t mind the bacon and eggs, Joel. Can I have that?
Joel has the money. It’s a bit expensive after last night, Al, and I reckon you’ll feel a bit better travellin’ on a ‘light breakfast’.
Alvin had, in fact, been suffering from nausea, and found the heavy meal the night before a little uncomfortable. It hadn’t sat right and it hadn’t come out the other end yet. Joel was constantly annoyed with Alvin when driving in Mum’s car – or Dad’s, way back – when Alvin complained about ‘the car sickness’. His mother would pull over and let Alvin out for a walk on the roadside, but in the old days when their dad was still with them, he’d say to Alvin, Belt up about it, boy, or I’ll give you something to go on about. Not that his dad did … well, not very often, but he was loud and had a beard like Big Beard and stank of sherry even when driving, and it scared Alvin into health.
I want bacon and eggs, Joel. That’s what I want.
Your funeral, says Joel, mature-like, and Alvin looks quizzically and a little frightened at him, but lets it go as Joel has just stepped to the counter, it being their turn, and ordered and paid and taken a printed number.
You boys find a table, says the woman at the counter, who is much older and Alvin thinks nicer than the ‘sexy’ girl who served them last night.
They find a table as far away as possible from Big Beard who is drinking a beer and eating a pie and talking with a t
ruckie – they know it is a truckie from his cap and the Mack bulldog insignia on his jacket. The roadhouse is full so they are lucky to have a table, and Alvin plays with the pepper and salt, making little piles on the table, then squirling patterns with a tube of sugar.
Look, Joel, I’ve drawn a truck … a tree … our house.
Joel is going to tell him off but says, Here! and takes the salt and pepper and makes his own little piles.
When their number is called, they brush the piles onto the floor. They have to go up to collect their own plates and take them back to the table, which they almost lose to a man and a woman they saw earlier standing in the car park alongside a caravan, arguing, the woman shading her eyes as her husband’s shadowy arm waved madly. She’s standing her ground, Joel had told Alvin. They had seen their mother standing her ground many times.
Excuse me, Joel says, that’s our table. Sorry dears, says the woman, but the man says, Rude little bastards, for no reason at all. Their nanna always used to tell them they were wellbrought-up boys. But that was before the divorce. She’s never said it since.
Ignore him, says the lady, who is nice with her comfortable-looking tracksuit and white-framed glasses. The man looks like a weasel. And then they are gone to the counter, maybe hoping that by the time they’ve ordered the boys will have gobbled their food and gone. Which is the truth of it because pissing and ordering and yakking on have taken more time than they realise, and they can see people starting to get back on the bus – they can see it crystal clear through the big painted windows of the roadhouse, out past the petrol bowsers that were pouring fuel into the bright sun of the day, into the cars and utes and four-wheel drives, and further out where the diesel bowsers are, into the great tanks of the prime movers with their triple trailers carrying all sorts of stuff up to the mining towns, and coming back empty or sometimes with poor, bellowing cattle that were always pooing in fright.
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