Limestone Man

by Robert Minhinnick

  And Goolwa grew heavier as the river dried up. Soon the town was hot as a foundry. Even the tropical flowers were unbearable. Yes, brassy trumpets. All that molten growth.

  One evening I went with Lulu down to the river and she told me what I’d see.

  Quiet a moment, she said. Be quiet just an itsy bitsy moment.

  Good advice. I’d been telling her it was impossible to keep Hey Bulldog running. I thought of the dust on the window. The red dust on the counter.

  It was all costing money, though not whatthe shop is setting me back here on The Caib. Yet it was a drain on my time. My precious time. But above all, it meant too many people were unhappy with me. That I was displeasing them.

  And no, I didn’t like that. Can’t stand disappointing people. If you’re an adult, you have to learn the dangers of upsetting others. How much you can get away with. How long you might dare.

  Maybe I was tired. But I was asking questions that were unnecessary. Like, what was the point in it all? The point in keeping a junkshop open on a quiet street. In a one horse town. The point in building, no, creating a ‘scene’.

  When anyone who cared had left for Adelaide, and was wearing mad mascara. And drinking cappuchinos on Gouger Street. Or talking about bloody Blur. Or even ‘Seventy One Fragments in a Chronology of Chance’. Imagine that on The Caib.

  Yes, the real city. Not a back garden with tea candles and jacaranda blossom. Where ‘Wonderful Land’ was played till the vinyl was white. Yeah, a wonderful land under the baffling constellations. Wonderful even with the red ants, the black ants. Like something Lulu’s dad might have done. If Lulu had a dad.

  II

  Parry continued talking.

  Now, said Lulu. Here they come. Right on time. For you.

  It was almost dark. Maybe it was midnight, I can’t remember. The night was full of green music, the river whispering, the current sliding by, thicker than oil. Thicker than blood.

  Those Goolwa nights, when we ventured out, were always filled with mysterious sounds. With dangerous aromas.

  Once I’d seen two camels in the paddock behind the barrage. The field rubbed bald. Not a blade of grass remaining. Just two camels, snoring on the red rubber racetrack where the athletes trained. And I had to remind myself, yeah, this is Oz. Summer in Oz. Where else?

  All evening I’d seen dragonflies on the splintered waters of the Murray. Green dragonflies circling the flood, crawling over the dried pools. Those pools with bleached punky crusts. Green dragonflies, maybe a foot long. Even longer. Yes, definitely longer. Dragonflies uglier than iguanas. Dragonflies whose wings crackled and droned like something electric left on overnight.

  To look at them, it was as if their bodies were made of glass. Or beads, or emeralds. Amethyst engines, Indian ornaments. Yes, glass beads held together by green cotton pulleys. Greener than jewellery boxes pricked out in green lacquer.

  Green was the devil’s colour in medieval times. All art students are taught that. On The Caib, the green woodpecker is the devil’s bird. Because of its mad laugh.

  And those dragonflies looked devilish. Think of the television wars. Army uniforms with their green stars. Those flags sewn full of green stars.

  Yes, the dragonfly bodies rustled in the green darkness under the willow leaves. Below the gum trees with their peeling bark.

  And every tree was wilting in the stagnant air. Because the air itself felt as if it was vanishing. And the camels snoring. The camels whimpering in their dreams. Imagine camel dreams.

  Then imagine the air trembling with all of the nameless creatures that crept down to drink in the shrinking pools. All those animals sharing the atrocity of thirst. Creatures whose names I was afraid to ask.

  Lulu laughed and told me to watch for snakes. She hissed her warning. Hissed and that’s all I could hear, Lulu hissing, hissing, where the black water joined the black earth. Those disappearing pools black as tarsand.

  Then Lulu touched my arm. I’ll never forget that touch. She stroked me as a mother might stroke her child. As a lover might. But natural and innocent.

  And rising out of the dust we disturbed I could see moths. Bright as tournament flags, those moths. Yet moths as pale as the inside pockets of best clothes. Clothes never worn.

  And the Murray waters were suddenly deep at our feet. Green as baize, those waters. Green as shantung silk.

  Then I saw the dragonfly hawks. Suddenly the hawks were there and out of nowhere they were feasting on the dragonflies. Sucking the dragonflies’ green blood. Crunching the dragonflies’ bodies like prawn crackers, the dragonflies’ green bones splintering in the hawks’ mechanical mouths. Until those bodies were like some Thai green curry paste.

  Yes, when those hawks passed over us they were so close I could sense their wings beating. Sense the green gossamer of the hawk feathers.

  I asked Lulu if there were any alligators and she laughed.

  Other end of the country, she said. The rainy end. Good job you don’t teach geography.

  There was a full moon in Goolwa that midnight. And I could see the full moon’s milk, its membrane on the Murray. That moonskin on the mirrors of the dying river pools.

  Those pools were where the children always swam. That was where I watched Lulu shimmy out of her underwear and slip into the current, the riverwater warmer than bloodheat as she held her arms above her head. Such skinny arms.

  Then Lulu was naked. Her breasts were unbroken buds. Buds never to burst. Boyish Lulu, red as Goolwa honey. Red as the hibiscus honey I once bought from that Dutch couple.

  Yes, a rich river, the Murray. Delirious with drought. Dangerous with drought.

  But the earth was dry. There was barely a skillet of dew to be boiled where the midnight dragons crawled in their cannibal carnival. And lay in ruin on the water.

  III

  Yeah, Lulu was quite a kid, said Parry.

  Look, I didn’t have time for the shop. Teaching had to come first. But for a while, for a wild eighteen months, itworked.

  And Hey Bulldog built a reputation for having let’s say, intriguing stock. Postcards, posters, paperbacks. And events, always events. Launches and little festivals.

  Okay, there was nothing coherent in what we sold. But endless fascination. There’d be piled up magazines from Australian poets, old tapes, art books. Anything vaguely alternative. Or self-improving.

  Yes, including yoga. Sorry, not my idea. Some religious stuff got mixed in with it all. With the environmentalism and the more metaphysical material. Again, not my plan, But a garage sale for the soul, all right. A carboot jamboree.

  You see, said Parry, I still believe in self-improvement.

  In that I might conceivably somehow get better.

  That’s the giveaway morality that explains everything I’ve done. The clue to Hey Bulldog that was, and the clue to Badfinger which is starting out. My last wager. No doubting how it will end.

  How did it end at Hey Bulldog? asked Mina.

  Badly. Like all premature endings. Frankly, I couldn’t keep up the pace. There was the job, which was more than enough. On top of that was the deadly commute. It was sixty miles into Adelaide, and I’d hit the road at 6.30am.

  You know what I recall on that journey? Fields of sunflowers the farmers planted.

  Then one day I was driving through those sunflowers. And I realised they were dying. The landowner must have sprayed them with poison. Perhaps so the sunflowers died at the same time. Sunflowers with faces bigger than television satellite dishes.

  I stopped my car in the middle of the sunflower field. And the sunflowers went on for miles. Tell the truth, I was surprised they planted sunflowers. Don’t they take all the water from the soil? Their rootballs are like huge fists.

  You know, sunflower leaves are sharp. Rough and sharp like an old man’s skin. No, rougher than that. Because an old man has gentle skin. Tender skin, like old stained satin.

  But these sunflowers were dying together. There must have been a million sunflowe
rs. Every sunflower face was green and black and swollen with seed. And every seed sharp in its satchel. All I could do was stare at those sunflowers stretching as far as the surf.

  It felt as if I was the only driver on the road. The single commuter. What a fool I was. The solitary driver on that brand new autobahn they’d carved through the bush. And the roadkill was black as the sun came up over the concrete. Watersnakes coiled like lilyroots, dying in agony. Maybe they’d poisoned the snakes as well.

  And it dawned on me what I’d done. The enormity of it all. On a rise I pulled over in the middle of the black sunflowers. And I could see the ocean far away. Its line blue as surgical stitching.

  But God help me, it was the Antarctic Ocean. I was suddenly terrified. What was I doing there? And, yes, there were all these snakes around. But not another human being. Not a solitary soul. Never saw a muldjewangk, either.

  What’s that? asked Mina

  A mudgy? Water monster. Comes crawling out of the lake. Lulu told me about it. Abo legend. Same as the stories here on The Caib. Yeah, the desperate mythologies of beaten people. Then marking, marking, the usual schoolteachering malarkey.

  You see, the school was taking a risk with me. They liked the idea of somebody British, even though by then I was determined to do my own thing.

  Yes, I wanted to write. What a surprise. It’s the usual schoolteacher’s curse. As if there aren’t enough poems nobody reads.

  But no, not music. Something solid like a novel. I’m no good at music. Never learned a note. And that’s been the problem all along.

  But what about my own painting? Sometimes Lulu and I would go behind the Murray barrage. The sun would lie like oils on the water, and I’d think, yes, yes. Get the canvas or the cardboard. Or just strips of bloody melamine. But I’d never have the guts.

  And I know what you’re going to say. I should have painted the sunflowers. That field of black sunflowers. The sunflowers that were poisoned. Or whatever it is they do that’s fatal to sunflowers in Australia.

  And no, I’m not apologising. But this was at the beginning of the internet, so you can imagine the excitement of the scene.

  Before everyone became a blogger. Before the arrival of those madmen with their million word blogs. Who only make life boring. Like it already was.

  Because, you have to understand, every small town has to have a freaky shop like Hey Bulldog. Just to make small town life bearable.

  We had a counter, two or three tables for coffees, our CD racks. And piles of crap. Heaps of it. Magazines and pamphlets, the usual stuff. Really, there was nothing more to it.

  Apart from some posters of The Easybeats and Kafka, Hey Bulldog was just an address in the back of beyond. A nest of bleached bones down a tunnel in the riverbank.

  It wasn’t the outback, no way. Yet it was fairly remote. Buses took a while. But the roads were wide and public transport pretty good, I’ll say that for the Aussies. The trams in Adelaide were a joy.

  Next door to Hey Bulldog was the Goolwa Central Motel, so we had a bar nearby. Kept by a Dutch couple. Good people, who understood what we were bothering about. Grasped that you had to share the madness.

  They were refugees from Amsterdam so knew everything about insanity. And, that’s all we had to do. Link The Easybeats with Kafka. Made for each other, weren’t they? Then depend on the culture and a normal human appetite to do the rest.

  Yes, there were some good people about. I’ll always remember the mango man. He drove a pickup, and, yeah, it was packed with mangoes.

  He carved those mangoes into flower shapes, then skewered them. His wife took the money, two dollars a mango, I think, and then she spread the fruit with relishes. Good business, it seemed. The couple hung around for three months. With an endless supply of mangoes. Until one day they disappeared.

  We knew the fruit wasn’t local. And the way that man used the machete, indicated foreign skill. He looked Greek. Maybe Lebanese.

  Most days I would buy Lulu a mango flower and watch her devour that fruit, mango juice on her throat and fingers. Those mango petals yellow as buttercups.

  IV

  Yes, the appetite. Look, I’m not pretending it was the sixties. This was not so long ago, for Christ’s sake. Trailblazers we were not. You might say I’d woken up late. Mad Max with a hangover. And the house already on fire.

  I was an art teacher pretending I knew about nineteenth-century British painters who sailed off to Adelaide.

  But the shop was still real. And the town needed it. We allowed people to breathe. As we’re trying to do on The Caib.

  Just finding out if people still know how. To breathe, that is. If there are people left who still need their lungs. It’s not certain, you know. Maybe we’ve lost that capacity. Maybe the species is changing.

  Goolwa means ‘elbow’ in the local language. Lulu told me that. It’s a place at the mouth of the Murray, one of the biggest rivers in the country. Down in the south. Deep south. Think of New Orleans without mardi gras. Think of The Caib but facing Antarctica.

  Yes, we’re talking about remoteness here. About the soul’s isolation. What do you think it does to the soul to know the next country is unexplored and uninhabited? That the next country isn’t really a country with history and culture. That it’s an unpenetrated frozen desert. Or that your own country is only badlands and spinifex. That’s thornbushes. Hundreds of miles of thornbushes.

  Some people can cope with that. Others go crazy. In the front of Hey Bulldog was a rickety porch. In the back was a garden with quondong trees.

  Those are wild peaches that the native people used to eat. Wormy and stringy, I always thought. But we had solar lights and lit tea candles and played music until there was nobody left to listen.

  I remember Bach’s Goldberg Variations at three in the morning. Lulu was curled up like a kitten in the indigo dust. Lightning in the sky and the CD on repeat play.

  But there was nothing worthy about Hey Bulldog. What I recall playing most in the back yard was ‘Wonderful Land’. As a tribute to where I found myself. This enormous country, where every river was hundreds of miles long, every patch of countryside a lethal wilderness. Where nothing had familiar names.

  But out in the garden, as if I wasn’t tired enough, those foreign stars would still be puzzling me. Somewhere above the candlelight.

  Lulu had told me the names of the constellations. But Australian stars were like Australian bands. Or Australian writers. Somehow not important. Or just too different. Or maybe important but in a different way.

  Around Goolwa there were islands. Kangaroo Island and Granite Island. Then the ocean, then the Antarctic icefields. Their unimaginable cold.

  So Hey Bulldog made a difference for thinking people there. A difference for people who somehow felt left behind. Somehow abandoned. Somehow betrayed. It proved they weren’t alone and forgotten. That there were others who shared their madnesses.

  Yeah, that’s what Hey Bulldog did. It shared the madness. The madnesses of composers and painters, and insisted in its temporary way, that the public try some of this weird stuff.

  That it could be good for them. Might be a necessary medicine. If you were brave enough. To try it. For all that ailed you. For any gutrot. For any worldwarp. For any soulache. For the migraine where your soul should be.

  I used to walk out in the evenings after Hey Bulldog closed. Well, after I’d locked up. Then I’d ask Lulu to tell me about the planets and stars. But first, it was the birds.

  What’s making that song, I’d ask? Because one particular bird had two voices. So, two personalities. As if it was a choir of birds. What’s making that song? And why is it singing in the darkness?

  And she’d laugh. You mean the magpie lark?

  Yes, that must be it, I’d say. One bird with two names. And two songs.

  And I’d listen to this music that the magpie lark would create. This black and white bird that hid itself in the river willows. In the Murray while the torrent still flowed, even tho
ugh the drought had set in. Common enough, I suppose. But not a lark. And not a magpie. Yet both. A sound like a waterwheel lapping the current.

  Yes, the magpie lark. If ever Australia had typical music for me, it was that bird.

  Sometimes I catch myself listening for it on The Caib. And have to remember that’s it all over for me in Goolwa. And I’m never going back. That I’ll never hear the magpie lark again.

  Woman, was it? Girlfriend like Libby? Not that little Lulu?

  What do you mean? asked Parry.

  The reason you left Australia? laughed Mina.

  In a way. Maybe.

  V

  But let me tell you about Lulu. We’d go as far as the lagoon. In summer the river would dry up. Became a crust on a black wadi. And that sticky water crawling with insects. With black shadows on the water until there was no water at all. Just the ink of shadows.

  So on our walks, I told her about those British artists. Especially the women painters. What a bunch they were. Mad, indomitable. Didn’t know any better. The problem with us, we know so much better. We’ve been forcefed on knowing better. But not those artists.

  Well, once we went as far as the sandhills at the river mouth. I can remember Lulu pointing to Mars, red as a cinder, low over the dunes. A red hot particle, a grain of sand itself, that was Mars that night. Glowing above the evening river.

  The estuary was green in the dusk. The estuary with its herons and hawks and frogmouths. Its moths bigger than a man’s hands. A whiteman’s hands, Lulu pointed out.

  She was a native girl, you see. But there I was, not understanding how rare Lulu was. How incredibly rare was this girl. A child of nature, as the song says. Unique.

  So what did I do? To my shame I spent too long talking to Lulu about bootleggers. About specialists and programme collectors. All the damaged types who congregate around a record store. All those obsessive-compulsives hanging about. On the margin of any enthusiasm.