Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe

by Wayne Macauley

  The local police had made Michael their number one priority but they found him a wily quarry. With the help of Jodie’s careful planning and studious use of the sympathetic farmhouses, they remained always one step behind. The best they could do was to fill out another report of the damage he’d inflicted, file it away with the others and hope that sooner or later he would make a wrong move and stumble unwittingly into their arms. He’d become an embarrassment, not only to the police but to everyone in any way connected with government or shire. On top of this and to make matters worse a new support group had sprung up and taken on Michael’s cause as their own. It was inevitable, given the special place that rumour has in the life of country towns and the ease with which it can be carried, like a dormant seed, along the network of roads that connect them by truck drivers, delivery men and the forever roving sales representatives of farm machinery firms. Beginning from the town to the north of ur, where almost everybody was au fait with the real motives behind Michael’s exploits, the true story slowly spread. Far from being against housing expansion, and acting as the agent of a handful of selfish farmers, he was in fact protesting against the scant attention paid to it and the timidity with which government and shire had approached the problem up to now. His acts of destruction were symbolic and not meant to be destructive in themselves; he wanted to draw attention in the most dramatic way possible (all other means had failed) to the tardy treatment he and his neighbours in the now failed housing estate had received. The support began with an understanding few and soon grew to a large and righteously indignant mob. They exchanged information back and forth among themselves, printed leaflets and posted them up in shop windows, and traipsed the countryside searching for Michael in order to offer their support. But he remained as elusive as ever. They began clashing with the farmers, often violently; the farmers responded in turn with a violence all their own. Soon the police were spending as much time trying to keep the two factions apart as they were in trying to track down Michael, who for the most part remained blissfully ignorant of all this and continued on his merry way.

  But these new advocates for better and affordable housing were a formidable force and their claims on Michael were convincing. Soon his network of safe houses among the farmers began shrivelling; they were often physically ejected out through the farm gate, and were forced to sleep out in the open again and eke out a living by theft and beggary as best they could. They may have turned to the housing advocates, but the fact was they’d never met one and didn’t even know they existed. As to why the farmers were now ejecting them, they preferred not to think too much about it. Jodie herself had always assumed that that particular honeymoon would be short-lived, given that it was based on a misunderstanding—as almost everything involving the rebel pair now was.

  By this stage Jodie was four months pregnant and her enthusiasm for their fugitive way of life was rapidly waning. Often in their hide-out at night, under the stars, with the tired horse tethered a little way off (they’d been unable to replace it and it was showing the strain) and the two resting with their backs to logs and their feet to a small smouldering fire, Jodie would find herself trying to talk some reason into her father or at least open up certain previously closed topics for discussion. Sometimes it seemed as if a light breath of sanity passed across Michael’s face then and he listened intently for a while. They talked about ur, the friends they’d made, the possibility of the satellite town being more than a rumour and the prospect of perhaps one day living there. It stilled Michael somewhat, to talk like this; beneath the soft blanket of nostalgia his fire was momentarily quelled. Often, and unthinkably before, on nights when a raid had been planned, he would excuse himself with the lameness of his horse, a moon too bright to ensure a clean escape, a headache or a grumbling in his gut, and sit with Jodie instead by the fire talking about their days back in ur. A simple meal was cooked, a billy of weak tea was brewed, and the talk drifted from one thing to another as the coals glowed red between them. It was too much for Jodie to expect to talk her father around to a complete change of thinking; she dared not, for instance, make light of his sense of injustice or his thirst for a fitting revenge, but she managed to calm his spirit a little and had reason to hope that before the baby inside her was born they might have put this squalid life behind them. Michael, for his part, was given time to reflect, something he’d allowed himself little chance to do before: I don’t believe he had a change of heart, far from it, in fact, and would not for one moment have wanted to disown his hot-headed acts back in ur or his even more hot-headed acts since, but I imagine that around this time a small sense of their absurdity may have crept into his brain by the back door and troubled his sleep at night.

  Beyond the light of the campfire, across the dark paddocks of farms, in towns known to those in the city only as names on maps, the fire lit by Michael was already raging out of control. Demonstrations and sporadic acts of violence were being constantly organised in his name. I no longer understand any more the intricacies of those days: there was something about housing, that we should all have a house, and on the other hand something about open space and clean living, the right to walk across the landscape unimpeded by the ugly growths of civilisation. They fought their battles above my head and I understood little of the noises they made. One thing I know, though, is that the freeway we had tried so long and hard to stop, and which had recently crashed so barbarically into ur, was suddenly halted in its tracks while the arguments about it and all things associated with it raged on unabated. It had barely passed halfway through ur before the bulldozers fell silent: the cruel irony of too little too late. The whole thing had become a morass of embarrassment and with Michael—pariah to more causes than could be counted in a day—still on the loose somewhere in the countryside the police were powerless to do anything about it. They knew that Michael’s capture and trial was the only way to end the imbroglio he’d unwittingly unleashed and as each day passed they turned their minds more intensely to achieving that heretofore elusive goal.

  I was still living in the pub in town, on the charity of various friends and strangers. I don’t know what faction these strangers belonged to, or if they belonged to any faction at all; I accepted their charity with thanks but otherwise I kept my mouth shut. I assumed them to be supporters of Michael, in one way or another, who mistakenly saw me as his right-hand man and therefore a friend to their interests. So it came as no surprise to me that one night, a little before closing time, Patterson, the local police sergeant, came in and drew me aside for a chat.

  He’d seen it all, old Patterson, had watched the estate come and go and was the first out there on the paddocks the morning after Michael, Craig and Alex had bombed the earth-moving equipment. His ordinary policeman’s mind was still unable to grasp how the whole affair could have got so out of hand, but I suspected him to be sympathetic and determined now only to patch up whatever differences remained and return the town to the sleepy hamlet it once had been. Bram, he said to me, there are more rumours going around these days than I can poke a stick at. Most of them I wouldn’t bother giving the time of day to but one of them bothers me. They say you are in contact with Michael and encouraging all this lunacy. They say—all right, it’s only a rumour—that this has all been planned from a long way back; that you’re looking to see the estate reconstructed, that you saw its failure from the start and made it into such a shambles that it had to be destroyed so that you could then whip up all this support to have it built again. It may be only a rumour but I have to say it makes a lot of sense. But if it’s not a rumour, if it’s true, listen to me, Bram: it won’t work. They’ve got a plan to capture Michael; I can’t tell you what it is but it will all be over within a week unless he’s made to see the error of his ways. If you’re in contact with him, as they say, do me a favour—do him, Jodie and yourself a favour—tell him to stop, tell him to hide out somewhere until it all dies down; it will all be over in a week if you don’t. I could feel twenty pairs of ey
es staring at me from the far end of the bar. I lowered my head; Patterson lowered his, and cocked his ear sideways. I mumbled under my breath: I’m not in contact with him and even if I was I wouldn’t warn him. The sooner he’s caught the better as far as I’m concerned. And tell all these people here that I’m neither his friend nor theirs. I just want to be left alone. Patterson’s head remained lowered, his left ear still cocked, as if waiting for further explanation. I stood up, downed my glass, and walked upstairs to my room.

  That was the last of my involvement in the ‘Michael affair’; strangers no longer bought me drinks in the bar and banknotes were no longer slipped under my door. Occasionally Ted would put a free beer in front of me; Alex, who was now back working at the tip again (transferred to its original site), sometimes wandered in after work and we shared a glass or two in silence; Tony, the bricklayer, often brought a can or two up to my room late at night; but otherwise I drank alone. The stories of Michael’s capture came back to me in a fractured form; I cared little about their veracity, my only concern being that in each of the tellings Jodie got away and her whereabouts remained unknown. The police went to exorbitant lengths—it was a photo finish as to who was madder now, Michael or his pursuers. They built a mock housing display village on a small country road about twenty kilometres west of the town. From the road it looked absolutely real but was in fact constructed overnight with prefabricated sections of plywood and pine. Inside, over twenty armed policemen sat and waited. Michael rode down the road a few nights later and must have thought himself hallucinating: he’d scoured the countryside for suitable targets, had ridden this backroad many times, but had never seen this display village before or anything remotely like it. He lit a match and checked his list, turned his horse in off the road and trotted towards the first house. Every policeman behind the plywood walls stiffened and cocked his gun. Michael must have smelled a rat, for he suddenly wheeled around and bolted across the paddocks. Twenty policemen ran out of the chimeric houses and fired over his head. He cleared three barbed-wire fences and looked to have got away but his poor skinny horse couldn’t manage the fourth; it hit it straight on, became entangled, bucked and struggled furiously; Michael was thrown, he hit his head on a fence post and lay tangled in the wire, unconscious.

  The trial was brief and quickly forgotten. He was released on the grounds of insanity into the care of a psychiatric institution. Within days of his sentencing the fervour that had accompanied his exploits during the previous months quickly died away. No-one wanted to be associated with a classified lunatic. As for Jodie, well, her whereabouts remained a mystery. She was back in camp on the night of Michael’s capture, would have waited until dawn, realised that something had gone wrong and made quick her escape. There were rumoured sightings here and there, some said she’d reconciled with her mother and returned to live in the country town of her birth, others that she’d gone to Melbourne and sought shelter under a false name in a women’s refuge there, but none of these rumours could be confirmed, for all intents and purposes she had disappeared from the face of the earth and until that night three months hence her whereabouts remained unknown.

  fourteen

  Me? Well, I stayed on in my room in the pub in town but rarely ventured downstairs. A handful still supported me, smarted at the cruelty of Michael’s capture and trial and directed their sympathies towards the only original resident of ur that remained. But already I was making plans to move on. Move on, did I say? Move back, rather; but it would take too long to explain what possessed me. One Sunday afternoon I asked Alex to drive me back to ur; he protested, of course, he more than anyone was reluctant to go rummaging around among the ghosts of the past. Drop me off on the access road, I said, I’ll walk from there. We drove down the highway in silence and pulled up on the access road about two hundred metres from where the gate used to be. I’ll wait for you here—an hour, he said. I closed the door behind me and walked down the road towards what used to be ur.

  The concrete slab that should have been a petrol station was still there, now covered by creeping weeds; on my right the tip had been back-filled and the vegetation had returned. I could still see our irrigation channels, now filled with lush new grass and among the gorse and thistle a few old vegetable plants gone to seed. The sign still stood, announcing our name, but ur itself, that portion of land within the ring road circle, was a strange, anarchic, hotchpotch of rubble. You could see the progress of its destruction and the moment at which it stopped. The freeway itself had been abandoned: the bitumen was laid to just over the south side of the creek, then a large swathe of dirt pushed on through the square to the northern part of the ring road where it suddenly petered out. On either side of this swathe of dirt the destruction was erratic and unfinished. The entire western side of ur was gone, including all the shops, the supermarket, Dave’s, and all the houses west of the square, but on the eastern side Nanna’s flower shop, for example, still remained completely intact. East of that again a few houses on the inner circle of the ring road had only been half-demolished and even a small portion of the East Wall, just north-east of Nanna’s, still stood to four bricks high. It was obvious that the destruction had advanced to a certain point—the freeway down the middle, demolition of the western edge including the wall, then preliminary demolition of the eastern side—before all work had been suddenly and mysteriously halted. The place was deserted, all the earth-moving equipment had been withdrawn, including the rusting grader that had been parked on the access road, and an eerie silence clung to the ruins and rubble.

  I found an old beam to use as a footbridge across the eastern branch of the creek—the ‘moat’ that Alex had dug in the last days, under Michael’s instructions. I laid it down over the trickle of water and passed across to the other side. A large mound of dirt blocked my path then, thrown up by the bulldozers as they carved their path north. I climbed this mound and walked down the other side onto the bare patch of ground that was once the square. A cold shiver ran through me as I realised I was standing on the spot where Dave’s grave should have been: had they taken the body with them or was he still lying under my feet? I hunted around for the bronze plaque, hoping to get my bearings from it, but it was nowhere to be found. I followed the bare patch of ground north then, past where the bar used to be on my left, my second home in North Street on my right, and on past the ring road towards the creek.

  There, where North Court had once been, the mound pushed up by the bulldozers became an enormous mountain of dirt and rubble, dragged up through ur then dumped and left when the freeway was abandoned. I climbed this mountain to get a view of the creek and the site of my original house on the edge of North Court. It was much as we had left it, a few bits of rubble lay scattered about, the stumps of houses stood up out of the ground; the creek flowed past on its original course and beyond it the cows grazed peacefully in the paddocks. Off in the distance I could just make out the rusted shell of the car that Craig had driven into the creek.

  I turned around to look south again: an extraordinary sight. From the most distant point on the horizon the freeway approached, a black ribbon of bitumen marked out in white. Then, as it neared the southern edge, the white markings disappeared, the bitumen continued, then just clayey soil, already reclaimed by the weeds, moving up through the square and North Street to finally and abruptly stop at the mountain of dirt and rubble on which I now stood. All abandoned, all pointless, useless, an ugly scar to an ugly wound. On either side of this scar the outlines of the old streets and courts could still be seen and my eye roved among them, stopping to dwell here and there on some feature that stirred something up in my memory. Why didn’t it work? These streets, these culs-de-sac and all the houses in them gathered around an old-fashioned village square? But then I cast my eye further again, to the ribbon of bitumen trailing off towards the horizon, the vast flat featureless paddocks all around, and saw again the fatal flaw. They looked too far out, I said to myself, and too far out in the wrong direction.
>
  Over the moat, way out on the access road, I could see Alex standing by his car waving his hands above his head. I held my hand up and pointed to my watch. He flapped his arms in the air, a gesture of resignation, and leaned again on the bonnet of his car. I walked down the other side of the mountain to North Court and the site of my original house. The creek flowed quietly by: the level had dropped since the other branch was dug; it was rarely more than half-full now and the water was fresh and clear—gone were the days of stinking sewage, the mud and rubbish washed down in winter. I leaned over, cupped my hands, and drank from it thirstily. A herd of cows trotted across the paddock, stood and watched me, then dropped their heads and drank from it too. It was in that moment, that moment then, that I made my decision to return.

  Alex and I drove back to town in silence; he asked no questions, he didn’t want to know. He lived in town now, had his job, and had put the past behind. Each Sunday he visited his mother’s grave in the cemetery on the outskirts, just down the road from the original tip, and placed a bunch of her favourite flowers on it. That was enough for him, to pay homage to her memory and mourn each Sunday her futile death; all else connected with the last days of ur had been wiped forever from his mind. Late that night I spoke to Tony in the bar and told him of the plans I was making. He thought me a fool, of course—What if the freeway suddenly starts up again? he said—but the desire to demonstrate to me the bricklaying skills of which he never tired of boasting was in the end too great to resist. My plans were not grand, indeed, could not be more simple; it was not even a house I wanted, just a small shack and a patch of land on the ground beside the creek. We went out the following Saturday: Tony with his trowel and plumb-bob, me with a pick and shovel. By Sunday evening we had the foundations laid and we returned the following weekend and each weekend for a month after that. The bricks and all the building materials we needed were all there waiting; we had only to rummage around for the sturdiest length of timber, the unbroken roof tiles, a window frame, a door, and cart them back to the site. The four walls went up and the roof went on; I began digging over a patch of ground by the creek in which to grow my vegetables. Tony asked for no payment; we sneaked a few cans from the cool room in the pub and drank them together at the end of the day; that, and the weals and calluses that had returned to his hands, was all the payment that Tony needed.