Jodie returned to the kitchen, I could hear the dishes crashing in the sink then the sound of the back door slamming. I sat speechless, unable to move. Already the storm had broken and the rain was falling on the roof. I looked at Michael and saw for the first time that he was mad. It all rushed forward at me, everything, a blinding flash of clearheadedness. Michael was mad, had already led us into the most inexplicable madnesses and was about to take us even further. I stiffened, something soft and electric-like released itself into my gut. Michael pulled his chair up closer to me. He stank: his clothes, his skin, his breath. He leaned forward and cocked his head to one side, the madman’s look of disarming sincerity in his eye. So you see, Bram, he said, the important thing is that no matter what the cost—two houses, two homes, yours and Jodie’s, Craig and Marie-Claire’s, must be saved. Forget everything else, it must be simplified to this: two couples, two homes, in which two families can be raised. It may be a long shot, Bram, but I’m prepared to do everything in my power, make any sacrifice, to achieve this one, simple and, I now believe, achievable goal. He leaned further forward and lowered his voice into a conspiratorial whisper: But I need your help, Bram; this is my plan. The wall won’t hold. It’s a good wall, a fine wall, but it just won’t hold. We have to reinforce it. There are about a hundred unused houses left; tomorrow I will go to Alex and ask him for one last favour. If he can demolish even half these houses for us before he leaves we will have enough bricks to build another wall inside the one we’ve already got; if they break through the first we still should be able to hold them at the second. But if they manage to break through the second they will be virtually into the square. Of course, I’m counting on them giving up before then—I believe we’ve already worn them down—but if it comes to that we must have somewhere to fall back to. This is what I propose. He leaned back in his chair. Imagine, if you will, when the bulldozer bursts through the second wall with a column of advancing machinery behind it, expecting to find a place of ruin and rubble inhabited by a few miserable souls with rags of clothes hanging from them and the spark of life long gone from their eyes—well, of course they would not hesitate to drive their freeway through it. But then imagine if instead they found this: two neat suburban houses with a common back fence, clipped lawns and newly planted shrubs and flowers, a husband in each front yard with a hose in his hand and in each backyard, chatting over the common fence, two wives with newborn babes in arms. Now tell me if on seeing this even the most heartless worker could continue the charge? This is what I want you to turn your mind to, Bram, I will take care of the second wall but if you can see that vision within it then I want you, I beg you, to do what you can to turn it into a reality. Now, he said, I’ve said my piece. There’s only one last thing. You’ll soon be married, you and Jodie, my only child. I don’t know where I’ll end up after all this is done and it doesn’t really matter but this may be the last time we speak together. You think I’m mad, I know that, and chances are I am. But never think your father-in-law was mad without reason: I want you to have this. From beneath his jacket he pulled out an old leather satchel and handed it to me. I could feel myself resisting, saying: No, I don’t want to take it—but then, inexplicably, something in me melted. I held out my hand and Michael solemnly put the satchel in it.
Jodie took him home that night and put him to bed. After the momentary calm and clarity—for a moment he almost made sense—he flew off again into a series of wild ravings, called for his gun and vowed to go out and attack the invaders that instant in the name of Jodie, his daughter, his son-in-law, Bram, and the grandchildren for whom he’d already found names. My own mind was an uncontrollable brew of indignation and terror. I prowled the house, unable to sleep, eventually threw an old blanket over my shoulders and walked out into the rain. I walked the ring road inside the wall five, maybe ten times round and came back home again drenched to the skin. I sat at the kitchen table with the leather satchel in front of me. I sat there for a long, long time. Finally, I opened it up and pulled out the bundle of yellowing papers. I picked up the first, and held it in front of my eyes:
BLUEPRINTS FOR A BARBED-WIRE CANOE
Be sure you’re sick of life; say to yourself: I’ve had enough. Take a roll of rusted barbed wire and some pieces of nail-infested wood and shape it into a canoe. Choose a moonless night, a night with no moon, the darkest night; you are the only witness, the only one who should see. Take your canoe down to the filthy creek when the stench is at its worst, tighten the chin strap of your hat and button your jacket up hard—the journey will be long and fraught with danger. You will use no paddle, you will need no paddle, but will carry a big jar of salt with you and throw handfuls from the stern. This will propel the canoe away from the dark unfathomable ocean, of which the salt is a cruel reminder, upstream towards the pure crystal waters at the source. Recite the prayer ‘Nothing Matters, I Don’t Care’ three times every hour: this will give you strength. Hold your head up high. Never doubt the wisdom of your journey, do not ask Where or Why; the canoe is a sensitive one, it may turn on a pinhead and rush you back to the ocean or drop like a stone beneath you. All night you will travel and well into the following day. When the salt runs out do not despair, the waters will be clearing now and the canoe will know it has safely left the muck behind. Dip the empty jar over the side and hold the contents up to the light; you are looking for water so clear that it seems not to be there, that the jar itself appears to dissolve in your hand. If you do not find it on the second day, do not despair, go on, if you do not find it on the third, repeat the prayer more often and hold your head a little higher. If you do not find it on the fourth or fifth, don’t worry, go on. If after a week the jar does not dissolve and the water in it is still putrid and thick, take heart, go on, the second week may yet see you safely to your journey’s end. When in the third week the canoe starts leaking, bail it out, be brave, go on, and when in the fourth week you find yourself becalmed and feel it slowly sinking beneath you, bail harder, keep faith, don’t worry, go on. It is then, and only then, as your carefully thought-out and well-constructed vessel sinks slowly towards the muddy bottom that you may allow yourself to cry out: Help! But do it softly, don’t make a big show of it, you are the only witness, the night is moonless again and you are miles away from home; do it softly, sweetly, and as the waters engulf you don’t whatever you do forget to keep your head held high.
This was followed by a series of sketches of the canoe in question, each time adding a little more detail until it looked less like a canoe than an enormous ark, more fitted to journeying up the Amazon, the Nile, the Danube or the Ganges than the tiny creek, say, a stone’s throw away on the other side of the wall. I turned the pages, one by one, until I finally turned to the last: an enormous vessel that whole families could have lived in, a floating city that would never float. I put the bundle of papers together, tapped them on the table, and slid them back into the satchel. I then sat at the kitchen table for a long while listening to the rain outside. Later I heard the sound of a bulldozer starting up and the crashing of bricks from the direction of the South Wall. That’s it, I said. I carried myself slowly to bed, blew out the lamp and lay quietly thinking in the dark.
twelve
Michael didn’t even get a chance to ask for Alex’s help in fulfilling his wild new scheme—the demolition of the houses and the building of a second wall—for by morning Alex was gone. Some time during the night, it must have been about two or three a.m., he’d started up his bulldozer, lowered the bucket and driven it straight through the South Wall and the swollen southern section of the creek across the paddocks towards the gathered mass of machinery. The tracks it left scarred in the soft ground were like pointers conveniently laid down for the oncoming freeway. I woke late that morning from a nightmarish sleep and the place was already abuzz. Michael and Craig were trying to repair the broken section of the wall, while out on the paddocks the day’s work had begun and the freeway inched closer again. Jodie and Marie-Claire to
ok refuge in my house in North Street, well away from the commotion; I went down to the wall for one last-ditch attempt at talking Michael into reason. He didn’t listen; the rabbit-skin hat was pulled down hard over his ears and he continued slapping mud onto bricks and handing them up to Craig. Craig threw me a glance, understanding but reproachful, as if saying: Help us repair the wall, Bram, otherwise get out of the way. I left them to it, returned to North Street and told Jodie and Marie-Claire to gather together whatever they might need for a quick and easy escape. I threw some things together myself, the few worthwhile possessions I had, and shoved them into a suitcase that I left in the hallway by the door.
Just after midday that day the freeway suddenly lurched forward—there’s no other way to describe it. Within the space of an hour the front-line bulldozer had pushed its way to the creek and crossed it and was within metres of the wall. Michael and Craig managed to patch the hole that Alex had made but their work was hasty and slipshod and as fragile as a house of cards. Throughout the afternoon the other bulldozers and graders drew up behind and stood just over the other side of the creek: an enormous, throbbing, threatening mass of machinery. Michael and Craig worked frantically to reinforce their work, dragging up old building rubble, furniture, bedding, uprooted shrubs and anything else they could find. As evening fell and the threat momentarily subsided, Craig returned to my house to check on Marie-Claire, leaving Michael camped amid the pile of junk, presumably planning his next desperate move.
I could hardly look Craig in the eye, so infected had he become with Michael’s madness. I offered him some food—it seemed he hadn’t eaten for days—and left him alone in the lounge room with Marie-Claire while Jodie and I sat glum and silent in the kitchen. The two couples, I thought, that Michael, now standing guard on the last line of defence in the last hours left, was prepared to give his life for. Craig, in his ridiculous hat, mud-spattered, starving and weary, and his fiancée, from Paris; me—a fool even unto myself and tired of the farce my life had become—and Jodie, concerned, as I knew, with nothing but her father’s rapid descent into lunacy. It was we four who were soon to be chatting over our back fences with the smell of fresh-cut grass and freshly washed nappies in our nostrils, we who within the confines of a brick and barbed-wire wall would live, work and procreate in some tiny suburban idyll. These thoughts were suddenly interrupted by a knock on the door: it was Slug, he’d returned, a haunted, troubled look on his face. They’re coming tonight, he said, you have to get out: where’s Dave? I ushered him down to the kitchen, he nodded to Jodie, almost embarrassed, and took a chair at the table. Dave’s dead, I said, they killed him with a food parcel. Slug put his head in his hands and wept; tears streamed down his fat rosy cheeks, his bottom lip blubbered up and down and small drips of saliva fell from it onto the table. What do you mean they’re coming tonight? I said, but Slug wasn’t listening. Where is he buried? he asked, between sobs.
Jodie and I helped Slug to his feet and we walked together out into the square. Yesterday’s rain had cleared and the sky above us was filled with stars. The night was balmy, still and warm. Jodie and I supported Slug as he stood at the foot of the grave, his head lolling on his chest, rocking to and fro. The flowers we’d placed in the beer bottle had withered and died, they were little more than dried stalks and brown petals now and lay limp with their heads on the ground. Where’s Nanna? asked Slug, softly: I’d like some flowers to put on the grave. She’s dead too, I said. He burst into tears again. We walked across the square to the few tables and chairs that still stood on the footpath outside the bar. Moss had begun to grow in the hollows of the seats and the tables were covered in a thin film of green slime. I wiped down three chairs and a table and went inside to the bar. Everything was covered in cobwebs and dust and a thick musty smell hung in the air. I searched the three fridges and the crates out the back and finally found an unopened bottle of Dave’s old home brew. I took off the cap and brought it outside. There were no glasses: we drank straight from the bottle, passing it back and forth between us. Slug finally calmed down, enough for me to give him the details of Dave’s death and ask why he, Slug, had returned. He drew a deep breath, held out his hand for the bottle and took a long swig. They’ll come through the wall tonight, he said: most of South Street will be gone by morning. I couldn’t live with my conscience any more, I’ve come back to help you all out and do whatever I can to set you up with a new life elsewhere. You’ve only got to say where you want to live, pick your house and I promise I’ll get it for you, each and every one of you, on very reasonable terms. My car is parked outside the North Wall, I’ve arranged with the pub in town to provide rooms for the night—no-one else will know you’ve gone or where—and if you know what’s good for you you’ll get what things you need and go now.
For my part I had not the slightest hesitation, though I was sure Jodie would not be so easily convinced. Then suddenly, as if on cue, we heard the sound of an engine coughing into life from the direction of the South Wall. We ran back to my house as one by one the other engines started up. In the lounge room Marie-Claire sat alone on the couch, quietly weeping; Craig had gone back to the wall with Michael, to make the final stand. Jodie swept Marie-Claire up into our group before she had a chance to think—Jodie herself, it seemed, had suddenly and irrevocably made her decision—and we fled up North Street to the wall. We clambered over it, with the help of bits of timber laid up at an angle, and scrambled down the other side on the plank Slug had left there earlier. I was the last up, the others were already throwing the suitcases and boxes into the back of Slug’s four-wheel drive when I saw Craig running up North Street towards me. So he’s changed his mind too, I thought, and waited until he arrived, breathless, at the bottom of the wall. He was carrying a crate of empty beer bottles and I remember thinking: My God, how deeply Michael’s madness has touched him when the only thing he can think of taking with him is that! But then he called up to me: Petrol, we need petrol, ask Slug can we have some petrol? I didn’t know what he was talking about: was it some residue of an ancient hope dashed years ago—the petrol station, the subsidies, the dream of a car on the freeway to town? Then I realised, he wanted to fill the bottles with petrol, the last weapon they had now that Michael’s ammunition was gone. We looked at each other for a moment. Please, Bram. One last favour. For Michael’s sake. He held out a short piece of garden hose and pushed it towards me.
Craig came up over the wall and Jodie and I filled the bottles from Slug’s tank—I could read her thoughts, but she didn’t dare speak—while Slug sat silently waiting in the driver’s seat, knowing better than to interfere. Craig and Marie-Claire stood off to one side, saying a last goodbye. I caught his words, his voice raised for a moment above the distant sound of the engines: I’ll be with you soon, don’t worry—then something in French that I didn’t understand. He climbed back up on top of the wall, I handed the crate of bottles up, then he waved goodbye and was gone.
Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe Page 10