“Nope. But I reckoned you would, sooner or later.” He accepts a beer and swings himself upright. “Told you I was bonkers, did she?”
Maggie sits cross-legged on the floor in front of him. “Didn’t need Mum to tell me that,” she says, cuffing him on the leg. Tactful, she makes no comment about the beer, which he had so dramatically renounced ten years ago. Maggie had been fifteen at the time, her brother Ben, eighteen. “The Lord has delivered me,” Jug told them. “I’ve been born again, pure as the driven snow.”
“Not much call for snow round here,” Ben said, asking for it. But there had been no oath, no swipe at Ben, no bash across the side of his son’s head, so that they had all marvelled and had known something eerie had occurred. Only the rigging in his neck, corded tight, told them the old Jug was still down there somewhere, inside the new one.
“It’s funny,” Jug says meditatively now, looking around the bus. “Well, not bloody funny at all. Something plays bad jokes on us, eh? I lived in the back of a truck when I first ran away to Darwin, fourteen years old. Jeez, jeez, jeez. I hate the way stuff comes back. Like bloody spiders crawling into your head.”
He never speaks of his childhood unless he’s drunk, and it’s a bad sign when he does. They know almost nothing about it. He began brand new on his wedding day, no baggage, no past, except for the bits that sometimes leaked out of beer-soaked cracks, or showed up, mangled, in rage. He was a famously hot-tempered boss on the road gangs, a short-fused husband and father, a weekend roisterer and larrikin of note.
And then the Lord spoke to him from a Gospel Hall pulpit. It was a steamy Sunday night, and Jug, guzzling from a large Darwin stubby of tarblack bitter, was weaving by the chapel’s open door on the esplanade when the Lord shouted at the top of His Almighty lungs: “Jug Wilkins, it is required of you this night to be a juggernaut for God.” Jug broke his teeth on the neck of the bottle in shock, and cut his lip, a potent sign. Blood streaming from his mouth, unnerved but belligerent, he staggered into the chapel and walked down its central aisle. “Who the fuck do you think you are?” he demanded, teetering on his feet. “I am the Lord your God, Jug Wilkins.” God fixed him with His pulpit eye, and Jug just stood there, confused – like a kangaroo in truck lights, people said later, swaying at the lip of some steeply pitched gulley. “Decide!” God roared. And Jug did. He jumped. He crossed over. He became an enforcer for the Lord, a role that not infrequently brought him into collision with his rebel daughter and resisting son. Bible in hand – his surveyor’s chart – he would chapter and verse them, laying down markers, calling the shots, mapping everyone’s road to Eternity.
“Watch out,” he tells Maggie now, fretfully. “I’m infectious. I got these old dreams, bad dreams, coming back.” He bats vaguely at the air and she sees mosquito swarms of nightmares buzzing him, giving him no quarter. “Western Queensland somewhere,” he says, ducking. “Must’ve been. Between Charleville and the Territory border, I reckon. I’d just nicked off, me old man didn’t believe I’d ever do it. I hid in the back of a roadtrain, see.” He is not so much talking to her, Maggie thinks, as talking in a waking sleep. His voice seems very far away, inside a bubble in his head. “It was cold as the bloody South Pole, that’s the way it is out there, nights, June, July, cold as the bloody South Pole. You wouldn’t believe the difference between night and day, she’s an oven by day (you could fry an egg on the road), and deep freeze after dark. If you tripped over your foot in the dark, it’d snap right off, you’d get ice in your eye. Blimey, it’s cold, it’s cold.” He huddles into himself and begins to shake. “I’m shivering under this tarp, which, let me tell you, stinks of bloody cowshit, stinks, and me old man steps out of nowhere with his whip in his hand. Steps out of the air, abra-bloody-ca-dabra, and into the back of the truck and rips off the tarp. He’s got horns on his head.” Jug drops the beer and puts his arms in front of his face, warding off blows. He is trembling violently.
“Jug!” Maggie says, alarmed. “Jug, you’re drinking too much.”
“‘ Gotcha’ he says. ‘Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. You’ll never get away from me, you little bugger, you little twerp.’ ”
“Jug, it’s okay, it’s all right.” Maggie takes hold of his hands, which are clammy. He’s sweating like a pig, but feels dangerously cold to the touch.
“He laughs when he does it,” Jug says. “And I never did, I never did, he was right about that, I never got away from him.” He’s shivering, curled into himself, barricaded behind his arms. “He’s back again,” he says. “He’s back. He’s showing up after dark.”
Maggie can’t bear it. “Dad,” she says, hugging him. “Oh Dad, you’ve got the DTs again.”
But it’s the wrong thing to say. Wrong word. A sort of spasm passes through his body, and lucidity, like a brilliant tropical bird, swoops down on him. He leans toward her and takes her chin in his hand. “I do not have the DTs,” he says distinctly. He repeats himself intensely, enunciating each word as only challenged drunks can, exaggerating syllables to such a degree that Maggie, helplessly, thinks of stepping on eggshells, thinks of his chook-mad garden, thinks of the crusted goo on her feet.
“Take my yolk upon you,” she splutters, on the edge of something, anxiety, compassion, hilarity, fearful hysteria. But this does not help.
“That’s cheap, Maggie, cheap. Is that what they taught you in Melbourne? Cheap blasphemy? Blasphemy is cheap. Making fun of the Bible is cheap, making fun of your father is cheap.” His grip on her jaw is tighter, tighter. “Your father does not have the DTs. Can you get that into your fucking head? I do not have the DTs. I know what’s fucking real and what’s not.” Any second now, Maggie thinks, my jaw will crack. “This world,” he says furiously, “is full of fucking people who don’t know what’s real and what’s not. DTs, they say. Visions, they say. Bonkers, they say.” For emphasis, he bears down on her face with rhythmic force as he makes each point. Because she cannot speak, quite literally cannot speak – she can feel her bones giving way – Maggie focuses her outrage in her eyes, and he glares right back. “Don’t you look at me like that, young lady, with the devil between your eyes, and between your legs too, I reckon. Honour thy father, young lady, and fucking remember this: I fucking well know what I’ve seen and what I haven’t, don’t you fucking forget it.”
“If I ever kill anyone,” Maggie tells Ben and Liz. She’s still crying. “If I ever kill anyone,” she sobs.
“Yeah,” Ben says. “I know. Hey, it’s okay, kid. It’s okay. We won’t. I’ve thought it a thousand times, but we won’t. We love the old bastard, and we won’t.”
“But I would’ve,” she says. “If I’d had a gun or a knife in my hand, I would’ve aimed straight for his gut. I wanted to.”
“Yeah, well you didn’t, and you won’t.”
“Ben came close once, though,” Liz says. “In high school, remember?” Ben frowns, a warning, but Liz barrels on. “The night he kicked Ben out. I nearly killed him myself that night.”
“Yeah,” Maggie says. “I remember.”
She remembers the two of them standing there, Ben and Liz, and Jug screaming at Ben: “The beginning of the end, that’s what it is. A man starts fucking boongs, that’s it, he’s into the sewer, mate, and it’s all downhill, all fucking downhill from there.” This was before God had grabbed Jug by the scruff of the neck. Weeks before. “No son of mine,” Jug had roared, “is going to screw around with some black fucking gin. You wanna fuck boongs, go and live in their stinking camps.”
There had been fists and blood and mayhem.
“Get out,” Jug had yelled. “Get out, and take your black slut with you, and don’t ever come back.”
“Too bloody right,” Ben yelled. “You can count on it, mate.” Weeks of storm weather had prevailed, weeks of walking on eggshells.
And then God had spoken.
And then Jug had pulled in his horns.
“She’s all right,” he’d say gruffly of Liz. For a boong: you could hear him refuse to
think the thought. “Red and yellow, black and white, All are precious in His sight,” he’d say. In fact, Liz got on better with the born-again Jug than his son or his daughter did. It’s my Mission School background, she’d say. I know that country.
“How long’s he been like this again?” Maggie asks.
“Didn’t Mum tell you?”
“No. She never said a word in letters till the chooks got her down. So how long has it been?”
“Since the new road from Jabiru,” Ben says.
“Mum says nobody knows what happened.”
Ben says nothing.
“Well?” she says, watching him closely. “Is that true?”
“Yes and no,” he says. “I don’t want to comment. I can’t comment.”
“I can,” Liz says. “He’s been sung.”
“What?” Maggie blinks at her. “By who?”
“By my mob,” Liz says. “By the elders of the tribe.”
“Why?”
“The road,” Ben says. “The mining company. The new road through Kakadu. It runs through sacred sites.”
“He knew that,” Liz says. “We made depositions. The press refused to cover it, per usual, but everyone knew. I faced him one day, with the demonstrators. Nose to nose.”
“So that’s it,” Ben says. “You never told me.”
“No.”
“What’d he do?”
“We just stood there staring at each other. And he said: ‘What can I do, Liz? I’m a working man, I build roads, what else can I do?’ And I said: ‘You can cross the line, Jug.’ And he said: ‘Easy to say, Liz. Easy for you.’ And I said: ‘Don’t do this, Jug, please. It’s our land, it’s our Dreaming, it’s our old people, you’re tearing us up, it’s our country.’ And we just kept standing there, looking at each other, eye to eye, people pushing and shoving, but it was just us two, him and me.”
She is staring at the backs of her hands.
“Yes?” Ben prompts.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I felt he was standing right on the line, I felt he was thinking about it, I thought maybe he just might step over and join me, he just wanted a nudge, so I said …”
Maggie pictures the scene: the graders, the steamrollers, the tiptrucks of crushed stone, the sharp smell of tar, the demonstrators, the workmen in their heavy boots and singlets, the heat. She watches Liz remember it. She watches Ben watching Liz. This is a taboo subject with them, she hears her mother say.
“What happened?” Ben nudges.
“I said something … ”
They wait. Liz studies her hands. “ What?” Ben says. “What did you say?”
Liz sighs heavily. “I said the wrong thing, I reckon.”
“What was it?”
But she’s back at that line, nose to nose with Jug, her mob and his mob, stalemate.
“What, dammit! What did you say?”
“I said: ”You’ve got a grandchild coming, Jug. It’s his Dreaming you’re messing up. It’s his place, it’s his country, your own grandchild’s. You’re desecrating his birthright, Jug.’ ”
Maggie watches Liz breathing, she knows the way of it, how the ragged tempo takes you over, it’s like a weather pattern that you enter when you get too close to Jug. “What did he say?” she asks.
“He said: ”You fucking manipulative boong.’ ”
Ben puts a hand over his face.
“And I told him, I hissed it at him. I said, ‘You’re being sung, Jug Wilkins. You’d better make arrangements, because you’re gonna be sung.’ ” She starts collecting dishes with extraordinary vehemence and banging them into the sink. “Fucking boong-hater,” she keeps saying. “Fucking boong-haters, all of you, deep down.”
When she passes by him, Ben lifts a hand to touch her, but drops it again. Maggie has a sudden lurch of panic: they’ll fight, she thinks; they’ll say things they can’t take back; he’ll turn into Dad. Maggie wants a lightning bolt, she wants to point the bone somewhere, she wants someone to unsing the country, she wants to stop all of this. She gets up and puts her arms around Liz, but Liz pushes her away, furious. “Don’t you bloody touch me!” Liz yells, but the words puncture her rage which leaves her in a sudden rush, half sob. She looks deflated and unutterably weary. “Oh shit,” she says helplessly to Ben: “I’m sorry, mate. I really thought, you know, he was going to cross the line. I was so fucking disappointed.”
She says to Maggie: “Anyway, they did. Sing him, I mean. They did it. He’s been sung, and he knows it.”
Maggie is standing at the very back edge of their lot. It’s night, still stiflingly hot and humid, but there’s a full moon and just the suggestion of a breeze beginning to snuffle in off the sea. Around her rise the burial mounds of old cars. What would an archaeologist make of this? she wonders, this humpy terrain of rusted frames and compost heaps, all smothered and choked with jasmine, al-lamander, bougainvillea, and the ever rapacious morning glory, all of it sliding back into bush. Who knows where the boundary lies? What mad surveyor ever tried to mark such a thing?
“So wha’d’ya reckon, Maggie?” His voice is slurred, rising from somewhere in the smothered heaps of junk.
“Oh god, Jug, don’t do that, you nearly gave me a heart attack. Where are you?”
“Where you gonna place your bet, Maggie?” He knocks on a creeper-clothed mound, and it gives back a hollow note, faintly metallic. “The Earth our Mum? Or the cars? Wha’d’ya reckon?”
She’s still too angry with him for patience, she wants to hurt. “I’ve been to Ben and Liz’s,” she says. “You shouldn’t’ve worked on the road. I know why you’ve gone loco, you’ve been sung.”
“On the road to Ka-ka-du-uu,” he sings drunkenly, “where the crocs and the jabiru play –”
She will make him bleed. She will. “They’ve turned you into the fruit and vegie man,” she says.
But he’s not listening to her. He’s not paying attention. He comes crawling out of the undergrowth on all fours, his head cocked to one side. He’s listening for something else. She thinks of the cats watching invisible birds in the bush, that fixed intensity, his concentration focused at the point where the car humps merge into impenetrable wetland scrub. She peers into the moon-washed darkness, curious. “What are you looking for?”
He gives no reaction, no sign, she might as well have ceased to exist.
”Jug,” she says, irritable. She wades through ground cover, creepers, rotting matter, she crunches sticks and eggs as she goes. “What are you looking at?” And when he ignores her, she pummels his shoulders with her fists. He yelps, and throws her a brief startled glance, but whirls back again as though he dare not waver in his attentiveness. She has the creepy sensation that they are both being watched.
“What are you looking at, for god’s sake?”
“Them,” he says.
“Who?” She batters him with her fists, years of rage, anxiety, helpless compassion all shouting through her white tight knuckles. “Wha’d’ya mean, them, you bloody loony?”
He catches hold of her wrists. She can see he’s snapped out of it now. He’s with her again. He’s just Jug. “You see, Maggie,” he says quietly, “that’s why I can’t tell you. I can’t tell anyone. You’ll say drunk, loony, the DTs. It’s too big for that. It’s too –” He can’t even find a word.
But she knows suddenly, intuitively, what he’s talking about. She has a sharp vision of a Melbourne dinner party, the usual little terrace house, cast-iron lace balconies, North Carlton, candlelit table, a whole roomful of elegance, brittle wit, and glibness. Maggie’s in mid-flight, and all eyes are upon her, waiting. They are waiting for the laugh. And as for Jug …? someone prompts, but Maggie has fallen silent. There’s a line she won’t cross. She has bumped into sacrilege and recognised it in time. I forget, she says politely. I forget what I was going to say.
“Except maybe Liz,” Jug says. “I could tell Liz, but I won’t give her the satisfaction, me pride won’t let me. And I can’t tell anyone else.”
“It’s okay, Dad,” Maggie says. “I know what you’re talking about.”
He puts out a hand to steady himself. “I got vertigo,” he says. “Comes and goes. Ever stood over a crack into nothing?”
“Yeah,” she sighs.
He holds his two hands up against the moon and brings them slowly together. He matches them carefully, palm to palm, finger to finger, thumb to thumb. “There’s two worlds,” he says, trying to explain something to himself. “They’re both as real as can be. They match exactly, so you can only see one at a time.” They both study his hands against the moon, a single dark silhouette. He could be someone praying, Maggie thinks. He sighs heavily. “They match exactly” he says, “but they don’t fit.”
“Yeah,” she says. “I know.”
He looks at her warily and she gestures with her hands, palms up. Who has answers? her shrug implies.
He is assessing something. He reads her gestures and her eyes. He makes a decision. “I saw something,” he says.
She nods.
“But I can’t tell you. It’s too –”
“I know,” she says. “It’s okay.”
They watch each other for a long time in silence. Then she raises her hands, palms facing him, and he brings his up to meet hers. They sit there like two children, fingertip to fingertip, palm pushing lightly against palm, an imperfect fit.
“If I told you … ” he says gruffly.
“You don’t have to tell me. It’s okay.”
“If I tell you, you gotta promise –”
“Cross my heart.” She licks an index finger and gestures over her breast.
“It was before they sung me anyway,” he says. “It was just after me and Liz – well, I blew me top.”
“Yeah, she told us.”
“Didn’t mean to. And then afterwards, I just wanted to smash something. I climbed up on the steamroller. We had the first bed of gravel down, I wanted to crush it meself, I wanted to mash it in, flatten it. I saw Liz leave with her mob. Good riddance, I thought, and I moved ’er up to full throttle. You could hear the road crunching into dirt, it’s a good sound that. I was up there behind the wheel, and I suddenly had this giddy feeling I was on the spine of a razorback. Each side of me there was nothing. Nothing. I mean, if I moved, I could’ve fallen right off the world. And then I got this funny feeling on the back of me neck, this prickle, like when you know someone’s watching you.”
North of Nowhere, South of Loss Page 10