Limestone Man

by Robert Minhinnick

  Because Lulu knew everyone… Look, Lulu was mixed race but she was attached to some of the Coorong people. And those people were as local to Goolwa as you could get for blacks. For native people.

  Yeah, she’d come and she’d go. Come and… But everybody knew Lulu. That’s why I wasn’t surprised. When I woke up.

  Because in a way, Lulu was always missing. That’s right, Lulu was always missing. She’d please herself.

  IX

  She’d come and she’d… But after a while I decided to go down to the Murray and look for her. Futile, I knew. Because she always took her own time about things. Yet some kind of action was required.

  And no, she wasn’t in the brewpub. Yes, of course they remembered us being there. First customers of the day. Weren’t we? I’d bought that bottle of cabernet. Hadn’t I?

  We must have drunk it together. Celebrating the rain, I explained.

  Yes, they said. They could see that. Impressive, they said. That’s the word they used. Impressive. But they didn’t look at me twice. Didn’t presume.

  Okay, sometimes you can tell. When people don’t approve. Of a white man. With a black girl. But not there. We’d never have tried the brewpub if that had been a possibility.

  But I couldn’t believe it was the same day. Those pills can really send you off when you’re tired. I must have been taking the pills then, I was blurred with sleep. But no, it didn’t seem like the same day… And God, I used to be able… To remember everything.

  X

  I moved on through the dunes. Then climbed to the highest crest and looked round.

  White sand. White sand whiter than sand on The Caib. I had taken binoculars and looked at the few people walking in the dunes. I could tell none of them was Lulu.

  Because nobody moved like Lulu. Her easy lope, her … grace… Though she was changing. Putting on weight. Only natural. At her age. All those wedges. Not that she was…

  We’d been to the high dune before, the pair of us. The Dutchies had organised a picnic on one of the hottest days. We brought sandwiches from the motel because Lulu didn’t like the look of the food I’d made.

  Yeah, cheese sandwiches and bottles of beer. Very Caib. The world was trembling in the heat haze. The sky was blue and the river was … tangerine.

  Soonthe Dutchies lit up. Toon passed it round and I lay back and thought, it’s not so bad here, is it? Not so bad.

  When I opened my eyes I could see the stream pattern. Where water drained into the Murray. Scores and scores of lines. Like silver fingerprints. Yes, that was the best of times.

  XI

  As to Storm Boy, I found out what happened to the hero, Greg Rowe. I think he was twelve when he made that film. Dropped out of the business soon afterwards. Or it dropped him. The usual thing.

  But at least he’s alive. So he must have coped with being a child star. I’ve got a DVD and I play the film. To bring it back. How the sand moved. How the surf tasted.

  And yes, to remind me of Lulu. The sand child, storm girl. I can show Storm Boy to you any time. I promise if you see that film you’ll smell the southern ocean. You’ll hear those combers rolling all the way up from the Antarctic to the Hindmarsh Bridge. And maybe then you’ll have an idea of everything I’ve had to do.

  But you won’t see Lulu. So I should have made my own film, shouldn’t I? Just as I should film The Caib now.

  That’s why from spring, Badfinger will show the work of local directors and photographers. Music’s had its era. Wonderful and now finished.

  If there are any artists at all out there they’ll be editing their own films. Let Badfinger discover them.

  You know, I’ve thought of giving prize money to the most promising… Just a small amount…

  XII

  That afternoon I was searching for someone I knew I wouldn’t find. Not until she was ready. I scanned the world, but Lulu was stubborn, I always knew that. And so time drew on.

  The evening was when I cried. For the first time. Because the land was impossible. The whole country was impossible.

  No, it wasn’t the wind making me cry. You think the wind on The Caib is hard to bear? It’s nothing to The Coorong. All that spindrift flying. All that space.

  It was raining steadily now. I knew it would be raining for weeks. Understood that the drought had broken and the waters would be coming downstream. Immense waters, miles of floodwater, planes of water gliding by. Coming from upcountry. Down to the sea.

  And it was all too much. The Dreaming was too much, all the dreams. The sandbars and the reefs were too much.

  On the Murray there are hundreds of rivermouths.

  It’s vast there. The Murray mouth is bewildering. It’s so easy to get lost. Or to hide anything.

  It’s a series of freshwater lakes and saltwater lagoons. How the freshwater mixes with the salt is crucial to the balance. It’s never the same, from one day to the next. From one hour to the next, it’s never the same. That’s why the drought had been so serious.

  As I looked down from the crest, scanning the dunes and the river, I knew I didn’t have the words. For Australia. My other world.

  It’s baffling enough on The Caib when the sand blows away like smoke and the map of what you think you know dissolves. Then remakes itself.

  Yet in Goolwa, scale is immense. Change is constant. Salt swamps one day are dry crust the next. And the dunes grow and retreat, as they do here. Like lungs shrinking, lungs expanding.

  Yeah, the sand’s alive on The Caib. But differently alive in Goolwa. Seems I’m cursed by sand. I can’t escape it.

  XIII

  The blacks understood the Murray country. But that had taken them thousands of years. And then we wiped the blacks out and destroyed their knowledge. And no, we can’t catch up. We can never catch up now.

  As to Lulu, she was a native kid. But she wasn’t instinctive. No inherited wisdom. Look, she was raised on the streets of Adelaide. Her grandma taught her to smile at men on Hanson Road.

  The Lulu I knew liked wedges and peanut butter sandwiches and astronomy books. She was just teaching herself, about stars, about life. If she’d kept off the skunk she might have gone to college. Maybe. But college costs a fortune these days. And yes, perhaps, I might have paid. For her future.

  If I had.

  If she had.

  If we had stayed…

  TWENTY-ONE

  I

  Lulu didn’t have a mother. But there was a friend. That was Kath, and she might have been thirty. Maybe less. Hard to tell because Kath was fond of her grog. That booze had had its effect.

  I liked Kath. Her health was going downhill but so was mine. At that time at least. So we always had that in common.

  Kath was … wry. Know what I mean? Yeah, wry. I love that word. Makes me laugh. Made Lulu have fits, Kath was so bloody wry.

  This Kath was friendly with some of the Coorong people. It was all fluid, a big extended family. Impossible to say who was related and who not. She was mixed race too. I’d say she had Greek hair. Or Lebanese. Maybe like Lulu.

  Kath would hang around for a while. Then she’d disappear to Addy or get work in the vineyards at Maclaren Vale. Came into Hey Bulldog a few times, slept there occasionally. Those nights were great, Lulu getting all domestic. Even cooking for us.

  What was it once? Poached eggs. Disaster. Then wedges, first time came out raw, second black. Lulu burned the fat and all we had was this mountain of bread and butter I’d prepared. And three pints of ruined sunflower oil.

  Think we ended up in the motel. One drink led to another, with Kath telling stories of life at the Adelaide racetracks. You know, being a bookie’s runner. Seemed believable.

  But Kath also loved the market. She remembered how it was to work in the Gouger cafés, peeling spuds, washing pak choi. And maybe I liked Kath because she had no kids of her own.

  Look, I never used to think about not having children. Now in a way it’s crucial. The not having, that is. I believe both of us adopted L
ulu because Lulu made sense.

  At times we were competitive in the way that barren people sometimes are. Yes, barren. It’s not a dirty word, believe me. Maybe a mild obscenity. If you don’t like it try incomplete.

  You know, if you can’t bring up your own kids, you’re going to help with somebody else’s. That’s a role you drift into. It’s inescapable. Look at all those wildlife films.

  And soon, it becomes natural. And, yes it’s honourable. Because there’s no shame in it. Oh no, there’s no shame at all. It’s simply a reason to carry on.

  One day we piled into the car and off we went. Kath, Lulu, me. It was hot, worst of the drought. Kath told us she wanted to take me somewhere.

  I was driving but Lulu was keen to learn. As ever. Well, fat chance. We were playing CDs, that Dylan track ‘When I paint my Masterpiece’, Lulu repeating it over and over. Not a great song. Far from it, but…

  When you gonna paint your masterpiece, boss, Lulu asked, her gappy smile flashing.

  Maybe I have, I said.

  Then when was it? she asked.

  Maybe I have and nobody noticed.

  When?

  Yesterday, I said. Or last year.

  Wasn’t yesterday, said Lulu.

  Maybe tomorrow, then. Yes, it’s always tomorrow. Can’t be another day. Can’t be in the past either. Or how do we look forward?

  Yes, that’s what that terrible song is about. Because how could you live? If you knew you’d already done your best?

  II

  Kath was sleeping. She’d given directions and dropped off. I woke her when we came to the turning she’d described, and she explained how to get there.

  It was obvious what she wanted us to see. Rolling hills, once good horse country, but arid. No, worse than that. All the acacias, all the gums, had been burned. The earth was still smouldering.

  The fire had started maybe a month before. We stepped out of the car and nobody said anything. What was the point? That fire stank like the sea stinks in Cato Street. Only one hundred times worse.

  Smoke was still leaking out of the soil. Threads of smoke, fine and white as wire. The smoke was a pelt on that earth, a smoky fleece made up of thousands of hairs. Every hair was a filament of smoke. Smoke like … fur, I suppose.

  In a few places that smoke was still billowing. Yes, there were smoke geysers in the valley bottom and along the slopes. On the ridge a tree was still burning.

  I looked at that smoking tree and thought it was something from the bible. I used to go to Sunday School and I racked my brain. But the verse didn’t come.

  So many other verses I know, from all the hundreds of songs I’ve heard and learned. Even ‘When I paint my Masterpiece’. With its clunking rhymes. Why did I already know that song? Why were we playing it?

  But your mind lets you down, doesn’t it? There was no place for the burning tree in my memory. No, the burning bush, wasn’t it? No space because of all the other rubbish.

  The fire might die down, Kath said. But all of a sudden it’ll catch hold again.

  Because that fire refused to die. It had started a month, two months earlier. The gums had gone up like candles. When a gum burns the fire cracks like whiplash. You could smell the trees’ resin that had oozed from those gums. A burnt oil smell. Like our black chip fat.

  Someone set it deliberately, Kath whispered. Oh yes. It’s well known.

  And that’s all we said. As if we were afraid we’d be overheard. By the firestarters.

  Who? I asked.

  Who?

  That’s all I could say. I was whispering to Kath but she never answered.

  And Lulu? She was overcome. But she did say one thing. Yes, she made a speech. When we were in the ash fields. Where everything was reduced to powder.

  Just think, said Lulu, what it’s like here. After dark. The embers still glowing, burned branches crumbling away. The whole earth cracking and exploding like seeds. And the sparks alive like stars. Yes, stars like rubies. What are they, teacher?

  Arcturus, I laughed. Not sure about the others…

  Well remember them this time, she said. Aldebaran, Betelgeuse. And on and on. We all had to recite them. The names of the red stars. In that white field, thick with ash. Even Kath, who wore a grim little smile. Suited her twisted mouth. Even Kath had to name the red stars.

  No, don’t misunderstand. I liked Kath. She was doing her best. Better than I would in those circumstances. Being foreign in her own country. Being dirt poor. Being ill.

  Jaundice had been the problem for years. You know what causes that. She had a yellow tinge, did Kath. But plenty of those people were the same.

  That’s how a few of the locals knew her in Goolwa. That yellow nigger. Or that yellow nunga if they were being benevolent. But Kath was more yellow than black. And Lulu was not black at all. Not really. Just kept her hair curly as a fashion statement. As a way of being.

  As far as I know the arsonist was never caught.

  III

  Getting out of the car I bent to touch the earth. It was still warm.

  Then in that empty place, I heard a noise. Not a bird was singing, there wasn’t a breath of wind. But gradually we heard an engine. Then this Mitsubishi 4x4 comes over the ridge.

  Rust-red and battered it was. With a spare tyre on the bonnet. Didn’t seem right, that something should be moving. Or anyone should be alive, after such a blaze. Didn’t feel … appropriate, if you understand me.

  It passed us within ten yards. Lulu waved, but the driver, and this blonde girl with him, ignored us all. They were heading into the heart of the fire, with ash white in the tyre tracks.

  Yes, ash everywhere. Ash white, ash grey. Thick quilts of ashes, intricate as snow. Like a goosefeather pillow I remember bursting as a boy.

  That ash lay drift upon drift. Soon there was harshness in the backs of our throats and the three of us were coughing. No matter how carefully we walked, we disturbed the ash. Finer than talcum powder, those siftings. And some of the tree trunks were still crowned with sparks. That fire was clinging to life weeks after it had begun.

  IV

  There was one stump I saw. I thought it was decorated with rubies. Yes, hot rubies in the dust. Like Lulu said.

  And when we passed the tree those cinders glowed again, their fire renewed. Just the breath of our bodies was enough to bring them life. Those sparks in the dust were like red ants.

  But you know what? I remembered The Works and the sinter spread over the beach and the dunes, and my father feeling betrayed. Feeling left out. Jack Parry isolated and alone because his own son had found a job. The wrong job. The easy job.

  We went along the ridge and up the hill. Trying not to disturb the ash. Ash softer than Caib sand, sculpted into fantastic shapes. We tiptoed on through the tree stumps in a charred forest of sticks. There were trees reduced entirely to powder. They crumbled to nothing as we passed.

  We were hardly breathing by then. Holding the coughs in our fists, afraid to disturb a spark. Unwilling to mark that ash with our footprints. Ash deeper than snow. The footprints that were leading up to us.

  V

  And I thought, no, nobody’s walked here before. And no one will walk here again. A frost where no one had stepped. But there we were, the three of us, the first people in the world.

  A young woman in dirty shorts. An older woman in jeans. A middle-aged man on medication. Together on an incinerated hill.

  What did we know? Nothing? What had we achieved? Nothing. Yet we were the first and we were the last.

  Don’t tell me. I know we were fools even to stop the car. Fools to have driven up that dirt road.

  The fire wasn’t out and we had wandered away from the vehicle. Kath said there were people burned to death in a home close by. A boy had run back to the house and climbed into a full bath. He had boiled to death. His mother was trapped in a field and the fire had run over her. Run over her and run through her.

  Ancient legends. Recycled one more time. Fire stories y
ou hear all over that country. Echoes from the mythology of fire, especially the boy in the bath. I didn’t know what to believe.

  But I saw what the fire had done to that ground. Ploughed it and harrowed it. Then raced roaring away.

  I pictured the boy and the woman, mummies made of ash, consumed entirely. Statues of salt. Nothing greedier, is there? And nothing more ignorant than fire.

  But how did Kath know about that place, I wonder? We were one hundred miles inland on that hill, a different country from Goolwa and the Coorong.

  And how gorgeous Goolwa seemed in comparison. Goolwa with its rivers and salt lagoons, its lakes and bayous. Its basking sharks. The Murray at its mouth was salty as a bowl of olives. Yet with all its luxurious water. Thinking about that ash makes me thirsty, even now.

  Back at the car my boots were white. Kath was laughing in her strange way. She said it would be a good place to cook, the ground was so hot. The whole hill was a fire-pit.

  But Lulu was quiet after her speech about stars, her face smeared white. That’s what they did, you know, the aboriginal people. Daub themselves with ashes.

  Some of it was men’s business and some of it women’s. Painting with ashes signified many things. Made quite a ceremony of it, did Little Miss Lulu. Anointing herself that way. With the gold dust on her clothes, already.

  When we were walking back we passed the Mitsubishi. That dirty great Shogun covered in caked mud. And now grey with ashes. The driver and the girl were both out in the ash. This perfect pale pasture.

  The man was filming and the girl, she was … she was dancing. In that ruined place. Where those people had burned to death. Where the fire had obliterated everything.

  Wearing a red bikini, the girl was. Like a flame herself. Crimson, I suppose, the deepest red. No, call it cadmium red. Like a bottlebrush flower or the flowering peas that grow in the desert.

  And quite a dancer she was. The man was urging her on, slowing her up, making her race, laughing at her, soothing her. Bringing the best out of her. In that place of all places. On that part of the hill that had been … consumed.