It is the only time in recorded history that Paddy McGee is unable to flash his jaunty smile at the class, but he most certainly does not cry and he does not speak. In spite of the wet stain on his khaki shorts, he fixes his glittering eyes on Mr Brady and he stands as tall as his purple-striped legs and drenched pants will permit. The class is as one person, scarcely breathing. It seems to the class that something curious is happening now, that one end of an invisible seesaw is going down and the other end, the Paddy McGee end, is going up. A whiteness has appeared around Mr Brady’s lips. No one moves, no one breathes. Then Paddy McGee turns and walks from the classroom, head high. He never comes back.
That afternoon he does not appear at the back fence, but when Stella slips through the palings and through the bush and across the paddock, she finds him down by the creek. They sit side by side, saying nothing.
At last Paddy McGee says, “You wanna be my blood sister?”
“Yes,” she says.
And with his pocketknife, he makes a small cut in the vein at his wrist, and then in hers, and he places his wrist against hers, flesh to flesh, blood to blood.
She never sees him again. He vanishes. Day after day, she waits for him to come to the back fence, she roams the creek, but the houseboat has gone without a trace. Weeks go by. She begins to fear she dreamed up both the houseboat and Paddy McGee, but then Mr Brady makes a terse announcement. “Good riddance,” he says. “Bad blood.”
And she is comforted. She is comforted by the fact that Mr Brady had to say his name, and by the precious drop of Paddy McGee’s bad blood in her veins.
Who decides what is margin and what is text? Who decides where the borders of the homeland run? Absences and silences are potent. It is the eloquent margins which frame the official history of the land. As for geography, there are divisions and boundary lines that fissure any state more deeply than the moat it digs around its nationhood.
In every country there are gaping holes. People fall through them and disappear. Yet on every side there are also doors to a wider place, a covert geography under sleep where all the waters meet.
From time to time, when I am least expecting it, in the most unlikely countries, I run into Paddy McGee. He wears unpredictable names but I always recognise him by his eyes and by the mark of the outcast on his forehead. Like some ancient but ageless mariner, he keeps seeking me out to finish his tale, he keeps setting his compass for my shores. And whenever I see him, I find I have the mud of a Queensland creekbed under my feet.
In Boston his name was Franklin D. He was one of my students at MIT, though he was a good bit older than the others. He wore jungle-camouflage combat fatigues with the Marines insignia removed. I never saw him in anything else, nor did I ever see him without his rollerblades on. They seemed attached to his feet like calluses and he moved on them with dazzling speed and grace and dexterity, his feats eyecatching and incredible. He could skate up flights of stairs and down them. He moved along the endless corridors of MIT, especially the famous Infinity Corridor, head and shoulders above crowding students and professors, weaving, braking and pirouetting, swooping along like some exotic jungle creature, part human, part bird. Certainly flamboyant. He skated down subway entrances, into trains, onto buses, into bars, and into class. I think the desire to be untrammelled had blazed its own evolutionary detour and caused his legs to sprout wheels. He was doing a Physics degree on the Veterans’ bill. He was black.
In my office, we were discussing the profoundly disturbing stories he had submitted: tales of gang rape as weekend sport, casual deaths, violent excitements.
“I don’t know how to grade these,” I told him. “I can hardly bear to read them. They frighten me.”
It was as though I had turned a key, as though all his life he had been waiting for someone to acknowledge: your life is frightening.
“I’ll tell you two stories,” he said.
His first death: he was six years old, a basketball-obsessed kid in Harlem playing on a charred lot between stripped cars when he saw two teenage boys knife an old man for his cash. The man struggled. “Forget it, Gran’pa,” the boys said, and slashed him several times across the chest. Grandpa’s chest unfurled itself slowly toward the child Franklin D. like a fresh steak, and Grandpa looked at his own ribs in mild surprise and raised his gnarled hands vaguely to hold himself in before he curled forward like the steak of his chest and died on the sidewalk. This happened in slow motion, Franklin D. said. It took an extraordinarily long time for Grandpa to hit the ground. Franklin D. felt nothing at all, he said. Nothing at all. Except that suddenly he had to run inside to the bathroom and vomit.
A story about the Marines: when he turned eighteen, Franklin D. signed up because it was a job, the only one he could get. He was promised good pay, a uniform, status, women, the chance to become a finely tooled killing machine, an adventure to remember. He remembered, constantly, another Marine in the same company. What this other Marine used to do for a hobby on afternoons off, was to catch a squirrel or a chipmunk and skin it alive so delicately, so tenderly, with such a sharp and masterly knife, that the animal still lived and trembled in the palm of the craftsman’s hand after it was totally skinned. Then the Marine would let it go.
“A thing people don’t understand about the Marines,” Franklin D. said, “is that once you’ve signed up, you realise in the very first week you want out, but you’ve got six years like a Mack truck in front of you. I’ve known guys,” he said, “break their own legs to get out of combat drill. The problem with being in the Marines,” he said, “is figuring out how to become a human being again when you get out. When you get out,” he said, “the only people you can talk to are war vets and other ex-Marines. You’re not army, you don’t know how to think civilian, you’re nowhere.
“But what do you do with all the stuff in here?” he demanded, knocking on his forehead. “You need a garbage truck to cart it away. If I could write stories and send them to you … ” he said. He held his head in his hands as though the clamour inside was deafening. “If I could let it out” he said. “If I could send you letters.”
In northern Manitoba, Paddy McGee had a Cree name, and he surfaced in a ramshackle van at a tiny airport, 540N. (I was on a reading tour of prairie outposts, heading north to the tundra.) The drive into town was long enough for two entire life histories to be exchanged, though it seemed to me that the bridge which divides strangers from kin had been crossed (in the mysterious way in which such things happen) before we got out of the airport parking lot.
It was January, deep in a bitter northern winter, about 30 degrees below zero, as I recall. The van’s heater wasn’t working too well, and when we spoke, our words made little white clouds in the night.
“Have you always lived here?” I asked. “Were you born here?”
As though I were Aladdin and had suddenly touched the magic spot on a lamp, he turned to me with an air of immense and barely controllable excitement. “It’s there now” he said, cryptic, intense. “It’s there again, where I was born. I can show you. Would you like to see?”
His eyes glittered in the bitter black air, and so, knowing that whatever this entailed was momentous, I simply said yes. He made a U-turn. Snow barrens stretched as far as the eye could see. Since we’d left the airport, not a single car had passed us either way. We two might have been alone in the universe, under the immense night sky and the stars.
The young Cree Indian (he was about twenty, I think) was lit by some inner radiance. Until this abrupt decision we had talked non-stop, but now silence enfolded us. So great was his excitement, so intense the light within, that an aura shimmered around his body and the van seemed to me full of golden fog. We swung off the road and drove over bumpy packed snow. He was steering either by stars or by instinct. By a grove of scrubby dwarf conifers, he braked sharply and we got out and stood by the shore of a frozen lake, and then he stepped a little way out on the ice and pointed.
“Out there,” he said, transfig
ured by moon and snow and rapture.
It was the week of his birthday. His mother and grandmother had been ice fishing on the night of his birth, camped out on the lake, fishing shack tethered to the ice, unstable, when his mother’s pains came upon her, suddenly, early. They were strong women, his mother and grandmother. By the light of tallow candle, on the frozen wafer that ties December to May, inside the smoke-warm shack, his grandmother delivered him into the world. In the morning she pulled the sled containing her daughter and grandson to shore.
The young Cree held his arms out to the moon and the sky and the frozen lake, embracing his history, paying reverence to life itself and to two strong women and to that birthplace which only existed for a few months each year.
He turned to me but could not speak.
I could not speak.
I was overwhelmed by the magnitude of the honour conferred on me.
In that shining moment, stamping my frozen feet on packed snow, the stars so clear and close they could be touched, I swear I smelled the frangipani tree and Breakfast Creek.
The world spins in the margins of space, Australians float in the edges of the world, Queenslanders live in the rind of Australia, I have always drawn breath in the cracks of Queensland.
Queensland itself is fluid in shape and size, it ebbs and flows and refuses to be anchored in space, it billows out like a net that can settle without warning, anywhere, anytime. It is always larger than would appear on the map. There is no escaping it.
Here where I write, where a brilliant cobalt scar of river has just slashed the white surface of March, where the St Lawrence is still mostly skating rink but part flow, I have smelled and touched Queensland. I have woken, disoriented, to see orchids in snowdrifts. Along the bare knotted trunks of maples and hickory trees, epiphytes and creepers have run rampant. I have smelled rainforest.
Homeland is where the senses steer by instinct when the reins are let go. It is always accessible in that small space between sleeping and waking.
Down at the bottom of my yard, the St Lawrence sucks away at the base of our limestone cliffs, it plucks and thaws, plucks and thaws, subtracting from Canada here, depositing American silt there. New York State smudges the horizon. I live at the desiccating edge of things, on the dividing line between two countries, nowhere, everywhere, in the margins.
Wherever I am, I live in Queensland. I know to what brown country and to what wet rainforests my homing thoughts will fly in the moment between living and dying, when desire shall fail, for man goeth to his long home, and woman too, there where the evening star goes down, and where the first ones and the latecomers make temporary camp together under the violent stars.
Shining on its short stalk, the Evening Star, always there at the clay pan, at the place of the Dugong … The Evening Star goes down across the camp, among the white gum trees … It sinks there into the place of the white gum trees, at Milingimbi.
Amen.
THE END-OF-THE-LINE
END-OF-THE-WORLD DISCO
Flutie reckons it’s an even chance the world will end before the shearing cuts out, and therefore they shouldn’t wait, they should have the party tonight. Sure, a train is coming from Brisbane, volunteers are coming, sandbags and sandbaggers, a train’s on the way, but will it arrive in time? Already vultures hover, a sure sign. When Mike leans out the pub window, their shadows blacken him and his hurricane hair whips across his face. “Hey, vultures!” he calls. He hoists his beer and gives them the finger, gives it to the helicopter pilots, to the Sydney producers, to the cameramen dangling from slings, to the whole bang lot of them. “Hey, vultures! Stuff that up your TVs and poke it!” Grinning, grinning. “Gonna be on ‘The 7.30 Report’ tonight, mates,” he laughs, as he winds himself back inside.
“River’s reached Warrabunga already.” Flutie pushes the phone back across the bar. “She’s coming down like a seven-foot wall, Paddy Shay says. How about another one, love?”
“Cooper’s, is it?” Gladys asks, as though she hasn’t been serving him beer in the Millennium Hotel every day and night for six months, as though in the last ten minutes she’s forgotten every relevant detail about him.
“Drive a man to drink, Gladdie.” Flutie is baffled, exasperated, because she really is waiting for an answer. She really is not certain, in spite of the small regiment of empty Cooper’s stubbies at his elbow. Or maybe she can’t quite believe that a man in these parts would ask for anything but Four-X, and maybe she needs confirmation each time. Or maybe, as Mike maintains, she’s just slow; but Flutie doesn’t think that’s the reason. She’s still standing there with her watery blue eyes looking at him but not quite seeing him, blinking and waiting.
Waiting.
“Yeah,” he says, awkward. “Cooper’s.”
Mike rolls up his eyes, taps his forehead, grins at Flutie, but Flutie frowns. It drives him crazy, the way he feels protective of Gladys, and he’s damned if he knows why, because she’s no spring chicken, she’s not a looker, she’s skinny as a bloody fencepost, almost no tits at all. He thinks – for a reason he can’t fathom out – that it’s got something to do with the tired way she rubs the back of her hand across her eyes, and with that strand of faded hair which is always falling out of the loose bun she twists it into, always falling down behind her ear into a hollow of her shoulder-blade, and he always wants to brush it off her neck, tuck it into the elastic band, and let the pad of his thumb rest very lightly in the hollow below the bone. Jesus. He must be going soft in the head. It’s almost frightening, that hollow, it’s deep as a bloody egg cup. He wants to put his tongue in it.
She’s staring at the spigot in her right hand, the spigot on the Four-X keg, having run him off a pot of draught without thinking. “Oh fuck,” she says mildly. “Sorry.” She reaches for a clean glass. “Cooper’s, wasn’t it?”
“Wake up, Australia,” Mike says. “You’ll miss the end of the world if you don’t watch out.”
“Why don’t you bloody leave her alone?”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Jesus, mate. Keep yer shirt on.” There’s a gleam in Mike’s eyes though. Flutie with the hots, well well.
Flutie scowls, embarrassed. He knocks back the Cooper’s to clear a space, start fresh. “Anyway,” he says, “Paddy Shay climbed up to his roof last thing, saw the water coming. He’s got the wife and kids in the ute, gonna run for it, should be here by dark. That’s if he makes it. Another day, he reckons, and goodbye Charleville.”
Goodbye Charleville, good riddance, Gladys thinks. She leans against the glass doors of the refrigerator and closes her eyes and sees the swollen black snake of the river nosing south. A little higher than her head, preserved as curio, is the last flood souvenir, a decade old but still a clear corroded rust-brown line, threading its way across the white enamel wall behind the stubbies: the high-water mark.
Last time, the high-water level stayed exactly there for six whole weeks. Nothing moved. Not so much as a damn cockatoo moved upon the face of the waters, and all flesh died, both of fowl and of cattle that moved upon the Queensland earth anywhere west of the Warrego. And the flood was forty days and forty nights upon the earth – so Mike says, and so Flutie says, and they can prove it from the Courier-Mail, though the figures were disputed in the Sydney papers – and every living thing upon the ground was destroyed, both man and cattle and crops and creeping things (except for the bloody mosquitoes and flies, it goes without saying). And only Noah O’Rourke the publican remained alive, and that they were with him in the ark of the Millennium Hotel, a regular zoo. And for forty days and forty nights the waters prevailed. Those are the nine last words on the subject from Flutie and Mike, who tell only the gospel truth.
Then Queensland unplugged her drains, glug glug. Ssschloop. There was a swift season of sucking back. The regulars haven’t stopped talking about the “afterwards” party yet – there will always, damn it, always be an afterwards, Gladys thinks wearily. Oh, the regulars c
an trot out befores and afters from 1880 on, but the last afterwards party is particularly vivid. It was more or less yesterday, that resurrection party, that wild fishing-for-stub-bies-in-the-mud party, that jamboree, wangaree, rainbow time. Wheee! what a way to come home.
“This hotel,” Mike will tell every visitor who leans across the bar, “the river took ’er clear down to Cunnamulla in 1990, and then she came floating home on the backwash.” Hallelujah, is the standard response, and don’t let the pint pot stand there. “What we got,” Mike explains, “is life everlasting. What we got is the Hotel Indestructible, we gonna outlive the millennium itself in this here pub.”
Gladys presses back against the slick flood-surviving glass of the Millennium Hotel’s stock of beer, feels the blessed frigidaire-coolness through her cotton shift, feels it sweet as a lover against her sweaty buttocks and thighs, feels herself go heavy between the legs. The wet blunt snout of the river is past Warrabunga. Here, baby, she murmurs, moving her hips.
Wavelets slap against the mirrored wall of the disco and the dance floor is two inches awash but in any case the musicians are on an island dais. Confidence is high. Some tried to flee – in cars, on horseback – but there was nowhere to go, with all the rivers running in packs and the creeks gone brumby. Water water everywhere, it’s a bloody stampede.
The mirror tiles are pocked with black holes. A glittering rind of alum peels from the damp edges and leaves streaks that might be read as a map of the watercourses that are rising in convocation. Revellers arrive and arrive. Under the watchful eye of the helicopter, trucks and utes and horses and drays are still fanning out and then fanning in again like ants, for the disco lures them and where else can they go? This is the place of refuge, the end of the line.
This is the day and the hour.
The great inland sea, vouchsafed in vision to the prophet-explorers, has come into its own, so everyone’s giving up. One by one, they are turning back for the Millennium. For a while, the regulars could watch themselves on TV in the upstairs lounge. There’s Paddy Shay’s ute, they could say. See? With that box thing he built on the back. He’s turning back, keep a Four-X good and cold for ’im, Gladdie.”
North of Nowhere, South of Loss Page 24