Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe

by Wayne Macauley

  It was an odd-looking thing, I won’t deny it, but appearances mattered little. It all came together in the end: a rough brick shack between the mountain of rubble and the quiet, slow-moving creek. A little fence surrounded my vegetable patch, to keep the rabbits out, and a chair stood by the back door from which I watched the sunsets fade. The government was my benefactor, I was now officially unemployed. Ted gave me an old second-hand car to use—I think he was glad to finally get rid of me—and I drove it into town every fortnight to do my shopping. The days passed slowly, each morning I stood on top of the hill and scanned the horizon in the hope of catching a glimpse of Jodie, returning at last to the home I’d built for us out of the ruins of the past. But she did not come, and the days grew longer. As evening fell I walked the old streets of my imagination, greeted my neighbours, sat on a chair outside Dave’s until dark, then walked my habitual walk around the ring road and back up over the hill again home. Jodie would come soon, I was convinced of that, it was only a matter of biding my time and keeping my best face on. And when she came, and she would, I would take her with me, our baby sleeping safe inside her, on that peaceful evening stroll around old ur until the light gave out, when we would at last return home for a long dreamless sleep enfolded in each other’s arms.

  I had no visitor but Tony and he would soon be gone. There was a rumour about a new housing development thirty kilometres to the west, near the town of Haranhope; it wouldn’t be a satellite town by any means but he was already making plans to move there and be first in line for the work when it came. He tried often to talk me into going—I could be his apprentice, he said—but I could not be swayed. I’m waiting for Jodie, I said, and left it at that. He still thought me a fool, I’m sure, but had gradually warmed to my stubborn ways. Every Saturday at lunchtime I’d hear his car pull up out on the access road and the rattle of keys as he trudged across the paddocks around the hill to my door. We drank and talked but as evening fell the conversation petered out and the silences took over: there was nothing more to say, he was leaving soon to pursue some dream of building houses in the west that after all I’d been through just sounded like so many houses of cards. He brought me the gossip as it came to him about life in the town, the small scraps of news he thought might be of interest. Slug, he said, turned up occasionally in the bar to drink with a few old friends on his way to some new real estate deal or other and often asked after me. Tell him I send my regards, I’d say with a smile, and I hope he dies a slow and miserable death. Layland, our hostage, had apparently won a long court battle for compensation for the loss of his leg and now lived in an affluent Melbourne suburb with the wife who had so cruelly spurned him. No news of that other one, Loch, Tony would say, but you could do worse than hope he’s dead. One day he brought me a postcard, sent care of the pub in town: it was from Craig and Marie-Claire. I had only to glance at it before I burst into tears. They were well and happy and holidaying in Marie-Claire’s parents’ house in our namesake village, Ur; the postcard showed a snow-capped peak of the Pyrenees, glistening in the sunlight. Marie-Claire had signed it with kisses, Craig’s postscript was written up along the edge towards the stamp: I was going to address it to ur but thought it might confuse le facteur! Tony awkwardly put his hand on my shoulder as I sobbed and blew my nose. Craig and Marie-Claire, so far away and happy! How strange and ravelled our lives can be!

  Tony left shortly after, but not before trying one last time to convince me to come with him to Haranhope. I kept the friendship open, saying: Maybe one day. We drank our last few cans together and I raised a toast to his future success. It was eight months since the destruction of ur and a long hot summer was drawing to a close. There was still no sign of Jodie and the days of waiting grew longer. I kept everything clean, ordered, ready; there was no telling when the day would arrive. It was no house in the east I was offering, I knew that clearly enough, but we could make our own east, here in the paddocks of the north, and live here just as happily. I say all this, and could feel it to the marrow of my bones at the time, but those last days were hard, trapped as I was between past and future in a speculative half-lived present. It was a time distinguished only by its possibility again, by the potential of this moment to become a more fulfilling other. How many days of my life had I spent in such a state—was it not the thing that distinguished all of life in ur?—and how many more days were there to come before the missing parts fell into place and the circle was complete? On the one hand there was fecund Jodie, waddling just over the horizon towards me, and on the other the ruins of our former life. She must come soon, she must, because without the breath of future she would bring with her I would be drawn more inexorably each day back into the past.

  But she did not come, weeks went by and she did not come and I began to give up all hope of her coming. This was my life now, living among the ruins. Each day I dug down into the hill of rubble with my shovel, sitting for hours in the crater I made, blowing the dust off the bits of junk I found and laying them out in a row beside me. Hours I spent among these things, piecing together small moments of our history, saying: Yes, I remember that—what a time it was! They rose up out of the ground around me: Inauguration Day and the unveiling of the plaque (here it is), the first taste of Dave’s brew one warm night in the square, the strange construction in Michael’s garage, Craig in the phone box (here was the mouthpiece), vegetables, rabbits, dogs, barbed wire, the wall, the siege, the food parcels falling as gifts from the sky; all these things and the stories in them lifted themselves up out of the ground each day and marched past me at night in my dreams. Every day I dug a little further down, each night I went home and made notes at my table. I stacked the artefacts up in the house and in the garden all around it: objects as signposts to memories that I struggled through the nights to record. Autumn came, and with it the rains, the hole in the hill filled up with water but I bailed it out and struggled on, dragging whatever I could up out of the mud and washing it clean in the creek. The skies cleared, then the rain returned; again they cleared, days on end of blue, I worked furiously, between hill and creek and home, with one eye always on the western horizon, no longer looking for Jodie but for the gathering storm clouds that would finally bring my work to an end.

  When the rains returned they returned with a vengeance; that day the western sky blackened, the clouds were boiling heaps of buffed metal, rolling across the paddocks towards me. I gathered up my pick and shovel and retreated inside my shack. Lightning cracked the sky, thunder shook my roof and walls and rattled the windows in their frames; the clouds burst and the downpour began. I lit a fire with broken bits of timber and watched from my window as the rain swept in across the paddocks beyond the creek. Days and nights I worked then, with scraps of notes and pieces of ur jumbled up on the table before me as the rain fell hard on the roof. The story of ur had to be told; what point was there in all that had happened if it wasn’t? The estate, its inhabitants, and the terrible tale of its destruction may end up as little more than a footnote in history but if I didn’t write that footnote, who would? I’d given up on Jodie, the happy home, the flower-filled days of spring; mad Michael, our hero, sat in a blubbering silence in a room with white walls; the others, gone, all gone. I had little left but these straws I clutched; they were mine, I returned, I had claimed them. To hell with what anyone else might think!—they were mine, I returned, I had claimed them.

  I remembered the night, but only later, much later; I remembered it among all the nights as the darkest, both outside and in. It was all very well to be trying to make out of all these fragments a sensible story for the edification of generations to come but that night, the darkest, in my yellow pool of lamplight with the rain hammering hard on the roof, it was as if suddenly all the shards had flown off to all points of the compass, smirking back at me as they went. I could no longer link one note to the next nor link a relic to that note; they remained utterly themselves, pieces, fragments, determinately unwilling to cooperate and become parts of th
e whole. I remember pacing around the table, saying: Something’s missing, something is still buried out in the hill or still lies, unseen, on the ground. I remember my fear, a deep, uncontrollable fear, that whatever this thing was the rain would wash it from the place where it lay down into the creek and carry it away from me forever. I wanted to go outside, but didn’t: the rain was like a wall of falling splinters of glass at my door. I stood and watched it and the dark night beyond. I heard nothing, saw nothing, knew nothing but that implacable fear of something slipping slowly, inexorably away.

  I know what I dreamed that night because I still have it here with me, on the small piece of paper that I groped for in the dark and scribbled on hastily in the hour before dawn. It was a dream of my father, of all things, who’d died many years before. I caught sight of him passing through a dark pine forest; light rain was falling, water dripped from the trees, the ground was sodden and squelched underfoot. He passed some way off, rows of pine trees separated us, then suddenly my perspective shifted or he had turned towards me, or both, and he was walking in my direction down a pine needle-covered path between two rows of trees. He was bent over double, carrying something on his back: I couldn’t make it out. Then in an instant he was passing by, without looking up or speaking, and I saw that the bundle on his back was a kind of swag, of tangled barbed wire and broken bits of wood; he had his thumbs hooked into the straps and walked past stooped and wheezing heavily. But as he passed I heard him whistling an old favourite tune: he was a good whistler, I remember that well, and a carpenter by trade. Where are you going? I called after him. He didn’t stop, didn’t turn and look back, but I heard his voice clearly above the sound of the rain and the heavy drops falling from the trees. Down to the creek, he said, and continued on his way. I woke from this dream suffused with warmth, the most beautiful feeling, impossible to describe. I put the piece of paper on which I’d written the dream in my pocket and swore to keep it with me forever, to remind me of that indescribable warmth, an inner glow, like a small smouldering fire, impossible to describe. And when I set about my work at the table again that morning I did so with a sudden and renewed vigour, as if all the fears of the night before had too been so many dreams, as if nothing were missing and I’d been a fool to think so and that the task of reconstructing the story of ur from my many and varied fragments was little more than an admittedly time-consuming formality. But I had all the time in the world, I told myself; Jodie would not be coming now, nor would anyone else, and my days alone among the ruins had only just begun.

  fifteen

  In the end it rained for four weeks solid. In the days following Jodie’s death and my last trip into town the heavens seemed to open like a floodgate and hurl more water than the earth had ever seen down upon those barren paddocks north of Melbourne. Both branches of the creek had burst their banks, the footbridge to the access road had long ago been swept away; each morning I slapped more mud and rubble onto the retaining wall around my shack to keep the waters at bay and three times daily I emptied the saucepans and placed them again below the leaks in the roof. I wrote—what else could I do? The one thing I’d felt to be missing from my archaeological records, the glue that would bind the whole thing together, had suddenly been served up to me on a cold stainless steel slab. I’d brought back a lock of her hair and kept it beside me on the table; that was all I needed, whatever little gaps remained in the tale I could fill with fantasy and fiction. I wrote, a sensible story for the edification of generations to come, the story of the housing estate north of Melbourne, the people who lived there, and the sorry circumstances that led to its destruction, abandonment and ruin. I tried to keep it simple; if I wandered too far off the track I would pick up one of the objects from my table—a piece of amber glass from a broken beer bottle, a brown house brick or a charred rabbit bone—and finger it gently for a while until the direction of my story became clear to me again and I could bend down low into the yellow pool of lamplight and let my pen once more run swiftly, without thinking, across the page. The drumming of the rain on the roof was my constant companion. I ate frugally from the little food I had stored and drank from the saucepans to quench my thirst. I was happy, indescribably happy; I had witnessed the most monstrous tragedies, savage humiliations, pointless deaths, but at last it all made sense.

  As the rain finally began to ease I had only one last section to write before the story of ur would be complete; then I would take all the objects I’d unearthed and bury them back in the hill. The days began to break blue and sunny, a few clouds scudded past high above, the waters slowly receded, I emptied the saucepans for the last time and put them away in the cupboard. One clear morning I pulled on my gumboots and trudged through the mud to the top of the hill. All around, smooth lakes of water lay glistening on the paddocks, the huge swathe of dirt below me was now a muddy dam. Then out on the access road I saw a car pull up. Patterson got out, went around to the back and opened the boot. I saw him climbing into a pair of green fisherman’s waders, snapping the straps shut, then out of the boot he began dragging a tangle of barbed wire and broken wood. He tucked a cardboard box under one arm, dragged the canoe behind him with the other and started out across the paddocks east of the moat. He saw me watching him from the top of the hill, called out something and pointed towards my shack.

  I cleared the things from my table and Patterson emptied the cardboard box onto it. He’d brought me supplies, canned food mostly, and a few cold cans of beer. The broken canoe lay in a tangled heap outside the front door. We’ve finished our investigations, he said, and recorded it as death by misadventure. The canoe was supposed to go to the tip but I thought you might like to have it. He reached into the breast pocket of his waders—And this—and drew out the old matted rabbit-skin hat. The hat lay on the table between us, exuding a damp animal smell, as we drank our beer in silence. Finally Patterson found the courage to speak. We found the baby, out on Huntington’s back paddock, he said: there was no hope of it surviving. I got up from the table, turned to the window and looked out at the rain-drenched paddocks beyond the creek. I saw the scene: Huntington, probably a craggy-faced old farmer with a stooped-back walk, rising from his bed on the third clear day when the floods that had swept across his paddocks were finally beginning to recede, pulling on his gumboots and walking out into the still, damp air to check his fences and animals on the far side of his farm. And there, over the creek, in the back paddock where muddy puddles still dotted the ground, he saw a herd of cows standing strangely in a circle, their heads hung low, still and silent. He called them up; one by one they peeled away from the circle, revealing in its centre a tiny blue-grey bundle of flesh lying on the ground, stark and unmistakable against the background of sodden grass. Patterson woke me from my reverie. I had a message from Tony, the bricklayer, he said: he’d heard about Jodie’s death. Work has started on that new housing development near Haranhope. He’s offering you a job, if you want it. Perhaps you should take him up. I wanted to turn, say: No, I’ve got other work to do, can’t you see all these things lying about, the papers stacked up in the corner? I don’t want to lay bricks in Haranhope. But it sounded so stupid, and I continued gazing out the window in silence.

  Patterson left; I watched him cross the muddy paddocks and the moat in his waders back to his car on the access road. I dragged the broken canoe inside and shoved it into a corner. I warmed up a can of baked beans in a saucepan while I put the rest of the food away in the cupboard and arranged my papers on the table again. I opened a can, ate my beans and sipped my beer slowly as I stared at the tangle of barbed wire and broken wood in the corner. I carefully selected a few objects from the floor and arranged them around the rabbit-skin hat. I did nothing then, for a long time, but sit and sip my beer. Evening fell, I lit the lamp. I washed out my saucepan and plate. Cows were lowing out on the paddock—so long since I’d heard that sound! The silence and stillness after a month of rain was palpable, cloying. I had only one last section to do for my story to be c
omplete and should not have spent so much time in girding my loins for the task. But what if I botched it, now, at the end, just when all the pieces seemed to have fitted together? Finally, around midnight, the command I’d been waiting for came to me, suddenly, as if from somewhere else. To hell with it anyway! I heard my mind saying; who but you will ever know if the story rings true or not? And if you don’t, if in the end even you never know—to hell with that too!—the oil in the lamp is almost spent.

  She came that night, the darkest night, a night of no moon and torrential rain. Across the sodden paddocks she came, dragging her home-made canoe. She’d built it back at camp, in the weeks following Michael’s arrest, ripping the wire and bits of timber from the tumbledown fences around her and piecing it together from the sketches she carried, her hands all scratched and torn. Each night she read the instructions and waited for the moon to wane. And then, on that night, a night with no moon, she dragged it across the paddocks towards the old ruins of ur. She crossed the freeway, well to the south, then journeyed north-east and crossed the access road too. She stopped then, and thought for a moment of wheeling around across the paddocks to the shack she could now just make out in the distance through a sheet of driving rain, a thin plume of smoke rising from its chimney. But instead—her reasons were her own—she continued north, over the old tip site, to the edge of the swollen creek. She pushed the bow of the canoe into the water and with the jar of salt in her hand she stepped gingerly inside. But hardly had she gained her footing than the current grabbed it and began to carry it swiftly downstream. She struggled to stay upright as the canoe turned around and around in maddening circles, bow first, then stern, then bow then stern again. She steadied herself with one hand on the bulwark, the barbed wire ripping her flesh, as with the jar in the other hand she tried to bail out the rising bilge. Past Vito’s old vegetable garden, the junction of the moat and the scattered ruins of North-East Court, the canoe drifted and spun, sinking ever-lower in the water. I’d have been at my table, my back to the window, when it passed by almost sunk in the swollen creek at the far end of my garden. Did I hear her feeble Help!, cried out as instructed? No, I don’t think so. I was watching the fragments of my story fly up from my table like so many startled starlings from a tree. I was saying; sleep now, dream, and in a dream the idea may come that will bring them all back to roost. The rain fell hard and unending on the roof. All the ghosts of ur were sleeping. The night was as dark as a whale’s belly. She passed by swiftly, cried out softly; I wasn’t listening, I couldn’t have heard.