We left Loch and Layland alone and filed out of the lounge room onto the front porch where we all stood, stunned and silent. The sky had darkened; night was falling. We stood there without speaking for a long time. Eventually Loch came outside; Layland had decided to go back to the city with him. We didn’t object. The two security guards carried him out, his arms around their necks. He gave us a wincing smile as he passed, asked the bearers to stop for a moment and gave Marie-Claire a kiss on each cheek then waved them on again. They carried him across the square through the open gate to the car before returning in a series of relayed trips with our boxes of supplies which they stacked on Michael’s front porch.
As Loch prepared to leave, shaking everyone’s hand in turn, I saw Michael furtively thrust an old dog-eared notepad in front of him—he’d taken notes of everything Loch had said—and ask him to put his signature to it. Loch flinched, momentarily, then took the pen from Michael and hastily scribbled on the final page. Michael put the notepad in his pocket. Loch walked down the driveway, smiling forcedly back at us all and offering a few final assurances before stepping quickly across the square. A few of us strolled over to the corner of East Street and watched the two guards close the gate from the outside, lock it, and position themselves on either side. Loch’s car started up and began reversing up the access road with Layland in the passenger seat, staring blankly back at us through the windscreen.
We’d forgotten to ask him about the power and water. Someone tried the porch light at Michael’s but it didn’t work; Jodie called from the darkened kitchen that the water was still off too. Perhaps tomorrow, someone said. A couple of lamps were brought and we began opening the boxes on the front porch. They were empty, save for some cardboard packing material, half a dozen bricks to weight them and some old moth-eaten secondhand clothes. A fire was lit in the pit outside Dave’s and three rabbits and two cans of beans were cooked. The gate had been left open earlier and some dogs had wandered in off the tip; they sniffed around the glowing bed of coals and cracked the discarded rabbit bones noisily with their teeth. Later that evening I walked with Jodie back across the square to Michael’s house where we found him still sitting on the front porch, gazing vacantly up at the stars. He hadn’t eaten. There’s some leftovers in the kitchen, Jodie said: I’m going to bed. And she disappeared inside.
Look up there, said Michael: look up there at that. I lifted my gaze to the stars. He talks of contraction; look up there and tell me if he isn’t talking shit. A smile broadened across his face. We’ll be spreading out, said Michael, expanding, until the end of time. And we won’t rest happy till we’ve filled all that up too. They could build a ghetto for us, stack us one on top of the other, but the fact is you either get on with your neighbours or you don’t. And if you don’t, and that’s usually the case, you’ll do whatever you can to get as far away from them as possible. There’ll be estates, suburbs, towns like this sprouting up like mushrooms across the universe for the next ten billion years. I’m more concerned about tomorrow, I said. Tomorrow? Michael laughed. Ha! What’s that?
Jodie called from inside for her father to get in out of the cold. I made my way back across the square. The two guards stood smoking and chatting outside the gate, the calm broken intermittently by a burst of static from their two-way radios. They nodded to me as I passed. I heard a voice raised in one of the houses behind me in South Street; it sounded like Craig’s, but I couldn’t be sure. I had saved a small bar of chocolate at home and ate it sitting up in bed by the greasy light of my bedside lamp. Later that night I heard a helicopter flying overhead and saw the glow of its searchlight passing by the window. The dogs started barking and continued long after the thump-thump of the rotor blades had faded into the distance. Much later again I thought I heard someone knocking at my door; I went to answer it but there was no-one there. All was strangeness that night in ur. I pulled the blankets up tight around me and finally slept a sleep full of dreams that would come back to haunt me again and again long after that strange night had passed.
ten
I was not a witness to the events that followed, they were described to me later, by Jodie. I had locked myself up in my house: for good, I said, forever. The following morning Vito was gone. He’d apparently left during the night, taking his meagre possessions with him; later that day his tracks were found in the mud by the West Wall and a handmade ladder was found resting against it. He’d jumped the wall, crossed the creek and was probably already halfway to Melbourne. But all this was discovered later: the main drama that morning centred around a section of the South Wall, at the corner of South Street and the old ring road. Craig and Marie-Claire had been up since dawn, they’d roused Dave and Alex too, and the demolition was already well under way. They’d begun the work without any prior discussion and by mid-morning had already opened up a two metre gap. Craig’s motives were pure, however misguided; he’d hung on Loch’s every word the previous night, assumed the wall to be the only hindrance to a resolution of our troubles and had woken early to apply himself straight away to the task of bringing it down. He believed, I’m sure, in his innocence, that the sub-contractors’ trucks would soon be arriving to take the bricks away and in anticipation of this he had begun stacking them into neat piles a few metres apart. By lunchtime, when Michael finally arrived, they had ten or so such piles and the gap in the wall was at least four metres wide.
You would have to have been there; I wasn’t, and can only do my half-hearted best to describe the scene that followed. Michael appeared marching down South Street dressed in a rabbit-skin hat and an old khaki army jacket which, as Jodie said, he’d found that morning among the second-hand clothes in one of the boxes of supplies. He was carrying his gun. At first Craig thought he was simply off to shoot rabbits—a little late perhaps but there need be nothing strange in that. Michael cocked his rifle, aimed it at Craig and told him in no uncertain terms to put every brick back where it had come from, now. Craig was speechless; he was convinced he was doing what had to be done and now Michael was telling him at gunpoint to undo it. Dave intervened, pleading with Michael to stop this nonsense: if they were going to get their subsidies back, the wall, as Loch had said, must come down. Alex chimed in: What point was there in delaying it? The sooner we send the right signal to Loch, the sooner everything will be resolved. Michael repeated his demand. The wall was staying and if Dave or Alex or anyone else didn’t like it then there was the doorway to the city, go. Alex sat on a pile of bricks and dropped his head into his hands. There was a long pause then, as Dave stood staring at Michael, thinking his situation through: eleven years, mostly happy ones, a business, good friends and companionship. He suddenly turned, walked through the gap in the wall and began striding out across the open paddocks beyond. Perhaps sensing Michael’s presence and more importantly the loaded gun behind him (and remembering the wounding of Layland), he broke into a run, stumbled, fell, picked himself up again and took off as fast as his old legs would carry him. Was he thinking of Slug, and the city to the south; was he running to or from? He veered south-east, weaving his way through the clumps of gorse and thistle while the group at the wall watched his slender figure recede. But way out on the paddocks Dave suddenly stopped, stood there for a long time looking south, then turned and looked back towards ur. He looked out across the paddocks again—What’s he doing? someone said—then finally turned on his heels and ran, arms flailing, back towards the gap in the wall. He stopped about ten metres away, between Scylla and Charybdis, a look of horror on his face. They’re coming, he said.
Just then the crackle of a two-way radio was heard and the sound of footsteps approaching around the outside of the wall. Dave hurried inside, his chest heaving. Michael stepped out through the gap just as the two guards turned the corner and immediately fired a shot over their heads. They turned and ran, one of them tripping headlong into a gorse bush. Michael fired again, and again, and they ran south towards the horizon that Dave had just retreated from, not even bothering
to unholster their pistols. Beyond them then, on the southern horizon, the first sign appeared. A puff of black smoke, the sputter of an engine, and the vague shape of a yellow bulldozer, enormous even at that distance. It’s the freeway, Dave said, still trying to catch his breath: it’s just over the horizon and it’s headed this way.
All that afternoon and throughout the following day no more movement was observed on the southern horizon but Michael wasted no time in preparing for the sudden charge that would surely come. The bricks were quickly relaid and Craig was sent out to check that the rest of the wall was secure. (In doing so he found the evidence of Vito’s departure: the footprints in the mud and the makeshift ladder. A house-to-house search was organised but Vito was nowhere to be found.) Later that afternoon Alex drove his bulldozer out the gate, Craig riding shotgun on the step, and, starting from the spot where the old dam used to be, he began excavating a second branch of the creek southward. I heard the engine revving back and forth all day long and well into the night that followed. The idea, apparently, and I had to hand it to Michael as a good one, was to build a moat, completely encircling ur. The original creek, flowing from the northeast and then around the western edge, would protect us from that direction, the new branch being dug would cut around our eastern edge, cross the access road and join up again with the original in the south. ur would effectively become an island, surrounded on all sides by at best a muddy trickle—but an island nonetheless. In less than two days the work was complete. The bulldozer was brought back inside and parked as added defence inside the access road gate and that night, as if God had smiled on Michael’s supposedly lunatic plans, the heavens opened up, the rains came down, and by morning the new moat was filled. All work stopped then, both inside ur and out on the rain-besmirched horizon; it poured for a week, and aside from a sentry rostered on to the South Wall everyone retreated inside and waited.
When the rain finally eased, ur was a quagmire; we could only hope that the paddocks to the south were too. But within a few days the bulldozers and graders, their huge steel tracks untroubled by the slush beneath them, were on the move again. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the earth-moving machinery grew larger, cutting a wide path through the landscape towards us. From the South Wall you could see the tip trucks coming and going, ferrying the soil away, and back behind the frontline of bulldozers and graders enormous rollers chugged back and forth. Whatever tales the two guards might have carried with them in their mad dash across the paddocks that day (brick walls, a bulldozer, barbed wire and guns) had obviously been ignored and it seemed nothing could stop the advance that—without any doubt now—was closing in directly on ur. Each afternoon at five o’clock a whistle blew, the engines stopped and the workers trudged back over the horizon; each morning at eight they started up again. The weather had cleared—our eleventh spring was almost upon us—and more rapidly each day now the gap between us closed.
I spent most of my time sitting up in bed with the curtains drawn listening to the vague sounds drifting in from the square. I still couldn’t find the strength to face the events unfolding around me. Then one night—I was standing by the sink, unable to sleep, gazing out of the window into the dark—there was the sudden muffled sound of an explosion. Michael, Craig and Alex had begun blowing up the earth-moving equipment. Alex had kept a stash of gelignite from his days with the shire council; with blackened faces the raiding party of three had crossed the paddocks, laid their charges and were now igniting them, one by one. Jodie pounded on my door and pleaded with me to come down to the wall. I threw on some clothes and followed her across the square down South Street. Alex’s bulldozer was parked hard up against the wall with the bucket raised, and sitting high up in it, with a clear view of the paddocks beyond, were Dave, Nanna and Marie-Claire. I climbed up to join them and gazed out in astonishment at the spectacle before us. Far off in the distance two bulldozers were already burning; in the foreground all was dark, then the red glow of a lit fuse could be seen creeping in and out of the gorse bushes and suddenly, with an almighty thump, a third bulldozer rose up off the ground and exploded in a ball of red and yellow flame. In the light given off by this explosion I could then see the three dark figures scurrying to the next fuse; again the tiny red glow dashed through the bushes and again, another explosion. They blew up three bulldozers, two graders and a roller that night before returning to ur triumphant and adjourning to Dave’s to toast their success. I stayed up in the bucket with Jodie, Nanna and Marie-Claire—I would not go down to the square—and for a long time we watched the fires burning against a backdrop of moonless sky.
Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe Page 8