Drift

by Brian Castro

  He hears the Volkswagen. Ainslie has returned from town with supplies; nails and more nails. He sees her winding the steering wheel by the handle. She walks towards him angrily, he can tell. She’s looking fit and tanned and has muscles in her arms. She doesn’t carry any parcels, but throws a book down on the table, making the whole caravan thunder. He knows the book. He’s read it from cover to cover, standing in a bookstore in Hobart for an hour without moving. It is Byron Johnson’s latest novel. Ainslie opens it, lays it before him. She tears out several pages and holding them in her hand, begins to read bits and pieces:

  ‘You know anything about her politics?’ A’s father was asking.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Me neither. But ever since she was a girl she was always on the radical side, you know.’

  He waggled the club.

  ‘Here. Just smack the ball. Imagine a little white bottom. Keep the head down and think of a chain hooked from your nose to your balls. A chap wouldn’t want to jerk about too much.’

  Shit, Ainslie says. He didn’t even have the decency to mask my name.

  Ainslie’s face is red. She used to faint when she became emotional, but now she is as cold as a dead bream.

  This is supposed honesty, she goes on. Honesty taken to the nth degree. It’s bloody manipulation and betrayal. Letters of the alphabet. I hate that. Just like that what’s-his-name… begins with K.

  A’s father handed me a small wallet containing five credit cards.

  ‘There’s a limit on each,’ he said, ‘but if you’re resourceful, you’ll find her and have some left over. Bring her back for me.’

  His eyes were glazed. We were on the green and he fished another club out of his bag.

  ‘Now when you’re putting, imagine hair around a hole.’

  Shit, Ainslie says again.

  She walks over to the cupboard, takes out a packet of cigarettes, taps one out and lights it. The air is filled with the sweetness of tobacco. She draws on it and coughs.

  He’s here, she says. I know that tone in his work. I know he’s here.

  Without saying a word, McGann sweeps the paper off the table, reaches forward, putting his hand into her blouse, feeling the sumptuous weight of her breast. She closes her eyes. Turns her head away. Moans softly. Yes, she says. You’ve read it. How am I portrayed?

  10

  Go ahead. Put yourself on the line. Know about palpability.

  Byron Johnson stuck out his arm and rolled up his sleeve. Touch. Feel.

  The sky glared metallic and then the clouds built up and soon a dark tinge crept up the coast.

  What’s this?

  He gave me a plastic tube, crimped at the ends like a bratwurst sausage. I felt the weight of it, sniffed at it. The weather, fast closing, brought on a premature dusk. A fishing trawler rounded the point with a rapid heartbeat and made for the breakwater. He took the tube back from me. Put it into the inside pocket of his coat.

  No, sorry, this.

  From the same pocket he took out a pen. An old-fashioned dip-pen. Gold-nibbed by the look of it.

  My father gave it to me.

  German words inscribed on the stem. I gave it back to him. He thought for a while, holding it in his hand.

  It would have been simpler for Sperm McGann to lie low, he said, living like other sealers, collecting muttonbird and then blending into the new settlements as a potato farmer or fisherman. It would have been much simpler. Nobody would have noticed.

  He shook his head.

  The wind is whipping up the waves though the tide is out and the sand is lined with scallops of froth and weed while Sperm McGann looks down the beach watching for the man to emerge from the shack, has seen him once or twice coming out to urinate, throw something from a pot, scrub his feet on some driftwood. Still cold. Now he’s taken an axe into the scrub, can hear him felling a dead tree, strokes hollow as a shovel on a skull and presently a silence, hears it creaking and then whumping down and a few minutes later there is the steady bite of a practised blade and sees the man return with blocks of wood, smoke drifting from the shack. McGann inhales with a hunger for it. Still shivering. In the late afternoon streamers of sleet had cut lazily through the trees and he’d stumbled along the bank of the creek trying to make a crude lean-to with broken saplings and had sat under it watching the skinned trunks glowing white in the strange light, water dripping mercilessly and relentlessly onto him and he’d held himself shivering, cradling the new gun he’d traded for his horse. Just one cartridge he had, wrapped in cardboard and greased with pig-fat, crimped waiting in the breech. German words printed on it. He took it out and sucked on it and cupped his hands, breathing into them. Then he took out his knife and cut around the base of it and re-inserted it. He stepped into the creek and in a few seconds felt the water soak through his boots and plashed irregularly along pawing at branches and picking off last season’s spiderwebs and soon found himself looking down the beach, behind the bark shack.

  Gummed leaves and bark swirled near the opening to the gravelly beach. The man came out and coughed, softly, like a tiger snake. McGann aimed. Too dark. The man disappeared again, like a cuckoo. Nervous of showing himself. Had a good sniff that time. Maybe he could smell another human. Couldn’t stay there forever. McGann climbs over the bank, crouches down, bellies over from side to side like a lizard, dragging his gun. Gets even closer behind a tussock of grass. From there he would get a good shot off to the back of the head next time. He chews on the leather sling which tastes cold and bitter. Remembers biting into the leather harness as he flailed with the axe at Mrs Bosanquet and the preacher like some mad horse, wrenching himself free from the pathetic defences of the man of God as he tossed, whimpering, a severed hand at him… remembers the blood-rimmed afternoon and the peace of that river wherein he sank his toes. They had abandoned him, one after the other, beginning with his mother. When the soldiers grabbed him on that bitter Liverpool afternoon, she had dissociated herself. He had been thinking, these latter years, whether he had been her child. Didn’t all mothers die for their own children?

  He was dizzy from hunger, his head alternately numbed with cold and flushed with fever. He waited awhile and then stood up. Did a kind of callisthenics, whipping his arms about like windmills, twisting his body, bending and touching the sand. He began to jog up and down in place, mesmerised by the sand and pebbles which kept filling the holes where his feet had been. The darkness had crept over the water and somewhere a bird squealed. The light hurt his eyes. He blinked a few times when the door opened, such was the roaring fire within. He crouched, flipped the gun up to his shoulder and squinted along the barrel. He found he was trembling. He brought it down and caught his breath, felt the weight of it in his hand, ran his finger along the fretwork in the butt, tested the hammer again. He brought his left foot forward, rested the gun on his shoulder. He was steady this time, feeling the pleasure of holding himself in this scene, this moment, nothing in the past, when the moment of mortality transforms itself into amnesia. He always used to regain it… life, the reckoning with the eternal. A moment now, just like the others. A good hero. He was going to be a good hero. He lined up the sight bead with the top of the shack, the white bark providing a good background and when he heard the shuffling, stood up to fire.

  Cavalho’s head appeared; that familiar round and shaven head. McGann steadied. He scarcely felt what had entered his back then, so great was the shock. A pounding, a seizure in his lungs as he was knocked forwards, the harpoon sending blood into his throat and his heart couldn’t rally and he was dead already, his eyes glassing over. Cavalho whistled to his partner. She came from the shack shivering with the blast of cold baying along the cliffs and stared at the body convulsing now, its mouth in mortal rictus and shook her shaven head to say it was still living. No, Cavalho said. Him’s bounty meat now. He went inside and fetched a pot of melted wax and the broad-bladed axe and when he came out again the spasms had ceased and he set to work.

  A waxed head ap
peared in a Royal Easter Show tent in Sydney in the 1950's, accompanied by pieces of firearms, clubs, harpoons and an obscure text about the violence of the early Tasmanians. The wax was sooty and grey.

  11

  I go everyday now, to the hotel to meet Byron Johnson. He’s got a job as a groundsman and has adapted well, exhuming his working class instincts. He has a room on the ground floor, near the grease trap.

  He’s taken a liking to me on account of my sister Emma whom he talks about every now and again and then circumvents the topic like a heeler worrying a mob of sheep. I have to keep telling him she’s maybe up at Flinders, maybe somewhere else, another island, wherever there’s work.

  On his rostered day off, we usually drink several courses, then we shore it up with half a sandwich or a bag of chips or maybe even a gristly steak and then we drink some more to wash it down, the fake-blonde woman at the bar refilling the same glasses to save washing and pretty soon the afternoon is upon us like a bag of wet cement. Then we have several stiff ones in order to linger in the fug of the after-meal, despondent with satiety. After that, a few cleansing ales. The dogs are under our table.

  Byron says he’s got a credit card to cover all this, though I doubt that.

  He’s turning blacker.

  He says they don’t call him Mr Johnson anymore. They don’t call him anything. They don’t even see him.

  Worst of all Cootes the barman wouldn’t serve him. Cootes, sitting on the stool behind the bar as though he were a customer, propping his shit-caked boot up on the shelf of washed glasses, once tied his dog up on the bullbar of his Ford Chieftain and then drove off drunk, forgetting the dog was there, later finding a collar and cursing the mongrel for getting itself loose.

  Byron is so black he’s sick with the toxins in his system, sick from injecting himself with melanotan, sick from the carotene overdose of vitamin A in his liver. He takes out the German dip pen from his pocket and gives it to me.

  Take it, he says. It has pierced my side.

  It’s thin, like a conductor’s baton. He says it has made a wound from which he would never heal, that all his life he was moved more by art than life and now he feared most of all the emptiness.

  Use it, but don’t be confined by it.

  He speaks dramatically, as though others were listening.

  Muffled castanets of ears as the dogs shake.

  I did you a favour, he says.

  His grin shows a degree of pain.

  What favour?

  I threw your book in the Thames. The judges never read it.

  You call that a favour?

  No good you trying to win prizes. Accolades exist for one reason and one reason alone.

  What?

  To silence you.

  That was your favour?

  It’s the greatest antidote to dishonesty. That other thing…

  He struck his heart, hand rough-hewn in eloquent metamorphosis from word to work… and failed to complete the explication.

  12

  Your Honour,

  He asked if I could bring the Volkswagen next time I came and I said okay and drove every time after that, first to listen to him talk about the garden, native, he said, full of deciduous beech, native laurel, leatherwood and fern, and the birds, honey eaters, black jays, magpies, cockatoos, and I watched him scurrying about with his Juncus reed basket pruning savagely all the foreign plants they’d put in, helped him mow the lawns and edge the drive, empty the bins and when he knocked off drove him around, usually up to Northmere, along the dirt roads running towards the station and then along the cliffs, passing through several gates which said Private Property, the car bumping over cattle-grids, before heading north to the weather station, circling and then driving back. Sometimes there would be black ducks gliding in on a dam and I’d stop and set a rat trap with bread and sail it out tied on fishing line and it would take no time at all before we had a fire laid down on bark and duck roasting on a griddle, seasoned with herbs B.J. had brought and we’d have black tea and I felt my childhood crawling up on me, rye grass tickling my neck. Those were good times; the times one never had; the time that was deferred, past and forward, as if the present moment didn’t, couldn’t possibly exist. It was his birthday. I made a mark in my journal with the stylus.

  He was finding it hard to breathe at times, so we drew up at pubs on the way back so he could be sick and then we would have a few drinks and he would be sick all over again, saying black duck didn’t agree with him.

  I said Ainslie knew he was here.

  He nodded, but didn’t say anything.

  In the afternoon we scoured hardware stores and he was looking for particular things: some rope, oilskins, wire, a knife, electrical pliers. Then I said I had to return with Ainslie’s list: coach bolts and planing saws and sanding discs, the night coming on fast and the first icy breaths of moisture sweeping upwards from the ground before it mingled with woodsmoke.

  We went our separate ways then, Your Honour. The pleasure’s all mine. Don’t mention it. This courtroom’s like a colosseum. I have experience of these theatres and pray, even less mention of the operation in case the myth doth live, Sirrah. The truth? Here’s the pen he gave me. Inebriated? Contempt? If it pleases your lordship. I prefer unreliable. Ask others. Subpenis her. Ainslie Cracklewood. In royal succession.

  13

  Ainslie the Absent, you might as well call me. Always the absent. The woman. But I tend to the ordinary things now, no longer eager for theories or the switchblade, determined not to be a literary Moll. I’ve always had good self-esteem.

  I rise early, hire day labourers. No man need apply. I saw timber, compute the geometry of roof battens, roll a joist faster than you can say Ainslie Cracklewood. I carry a nail-gun. For the ongles, if you excuse my Irish. When the morning sun warms the resinous wood something stirs. Creosote fills my nostrils, confuses my tongue, sawdust pecking like pullen at my privates, pollen clinging to fine hairs. Others have been attracted in the past to their blondness. Blow. The sinuses not what they used to be. Still, two men once adored me, in love with privilege. See how the first time they both - strange this twin incipience, this common novitiate of the working class - they both kissed the soles of my feet, and I, crushing their snaking tongues, told them no, and no meant no. How they adored. I listened to their saccharine implorations as they put me on a pedestal, paying courtly love simply and vulgarly on account of what I represented. Notre Dame. That’s what I’m building. A cathedral ceiling. Let no man enter here. See how as I turned away they would have wept, so delicately, each asking if it was all right to kiss me here, or there and finally each at the height of repression, begging for release, when I, already a multitude, an epidermis of tingling pores, a field of disbanded desires, an effulgence of rivers each flowing into an ocean of women, when I simply wiggled and jiggled a few times for them to be spent like poor weeds sown in haste, blown in a slipstream by some dusty country road. How feeble. See how they used to chafe in public, in Stromboli’s café, when I rubbed my silken legs and did not have to feign indifference to see them captured in a field between their attraction and my disinterest, and they became swivelling magnets, alternating currents, dynamos which I delayed, deferred, broke down, restarted, prolonged, overheated… and then performed my own damp and resisting osculation to flower in powder rooms with friends, the door locked, nipple against nipple, mouth to mouth and then equal and opposite directions without the gross necessity of an extra prodding and inconvenient appendage, finally fulfilled and disturbed in that gentle, wet, deliquescent commingling of scents, in the infinite and eternal waters of the balneum of love; thence to float back out to hot and desperate men, kissing each on the mouth to bring them news of another world, of the familiar and strange, of the decentred, oh, glorious!… I was the cynosure of neighbouring ayes, the omphalos of the constellation, directing eager sailors to the most delicious and puzzling taboos of the age only to watch them shipwreck in shoals of sperm; yea, yes. Dumbly they pleade
d the affirmative case, unable to distinguish the source of their pleasure or displeasure. Thus I gave myself to them with contempt and this was new to them, a woman still evolving, and thus too, I taught debate and not passion, initiated sex with electro-shock, stealing words from dear old B.S., in the end alas, infected with his prolixity.

  Yet there was still a desperate contradiction occupying every waking moment of my life… the need for separation and the commonality of that need; dissociation and the ass’s tail of blind connection; giving the lie to universality or the tongue to puritanism… until Tasmania. Where I discarded all for intentional misuse. Discard my overalls now. Take the sun naked on the unfinished verandah. Such simplicity. Stare at the contract labourers through my sunglasses: two women with tumult on their faces. I turn over, imagine their dilatory excitement and control, which is both curious and brave and I make it hard for them with my porcelain accent and my born-to-command tone. They are desperate and polite and maintain the distinction between labour and capital. So I watch the sweat on their arms; young, oh so young; and by dusk they are gone. I reset the beading, nail down the skirting boards, fulfil the contract with a practised hand.