by Brian Castro
Impossible to find decent help these days.
14
Byron Johnson is turning even blacker. Blacker than most mainland Aborigines, blacker than any American Black, blacker than most Africans, except for perhaps a degree of blackness found on the Ivory Coast or in the Sudan. He makes people around him peculiar in their pinkness, in their hues of white and brown and freckled amphibiousness. From shades of invisibility he has suddenly become noticeable. It is more a notoriety, for people patronise him, as though it were a malady. They open doors for him. They smile inanely without looking at him. Some feel guilty, but they don’t know why. Others cross the street so they will not be embarrassed by their own reactions. Still others are just plain contemptuous.
He is now a local identity. They see him driving Tom McGann’s Volkswagen around; the one with the soft top and the sign on the bumper which says: __sabled Driver.
He drives out to Northmere on the private road, rippling over cattle-grids. Sometimes he takes the little-used track out to Cape Grim and climbs down to the water, marks the distance to the fresh-air monitoring station with the hip bone of a dead cow buried in kelp, its stomach sunken to a leather bag, a mass of worms and sea-lice emerging from every orifice. He runs his hands through it. A tingling sensation. Putrid smell everywhere. Sometimes he parks on a bush track and sets up his camera with the telescopic lens like an old sea captain searching for spouters. He studies the movements of station hands, waits for the gold Range Rover of Julia Dickenson to emerge and head towards town. He sees sheep raking up a pall of dust along the cliffs and hears the rapid clip of muttonbird wings; smells them as they snap through the air. He follows with his swivelling scope the Range Rover returning to Northmere at nightfall, walks the cliffs lighting great bonfires of leaves and branches, all the time in his ears the shouting and the screaming of the Pennemuker; the Pendowte; the Tomme-ginner; the Pee-rapper; the Manegin.
Some days he drives back past Circular head, turns off into the hills behind and uses his lens to watch Ainslie Cracklewood, her blonde hair tied in a ponytail. Several times he drifts into his narcolepsy, erupts in muffled laughter and falls serenely down into the pale light of a lonely and wondrous condition, the comfort of his mission. At first he muses how all these observations were welded into one plot, but then he realises it was only an illusion, that his office was simply the process of drift and once wedded to it, became an election for life, inaccessible to others. That was the darker path. He descended the hill to a culvert, made his way through the felt of pine needles, stepping carefully over lichens on the deceitful dolerite and crossed the hanging swamp on a rotting boardwalk, corduroyed watercourse of swollen and pulpy logs candied with cottonballs of fungus. Kept his hands in his pockets so he wouldn’t grab at the swordgrass if he slipped. Up on the next ridge the shadowline had already risen above the firetrail, sunlight melting over the tops of whitebarked gums. His mission and his good sense became intertwined. Sense necessarily sought a clearing, he thought, believing that one truth was ancillary to all and that clarity was a sacred duty having a bearing on the compass of honesty, virtue and character. Well, he had that. Life and death figured in equal parts. He saw it so clearly. He found a small pool, took off his shoes and immersed his feet in it. The water was remarkably warm. He sat and watched insects swim and dart away.
Then he packed up, ate his lunch of pig face leaves, shoots of bracken, grass tree pith and shell-fish, drove all the way back to Stanley and sat in the car behind the petrol station, waiting for the tanker to pull in. Checked his watch.
I encouraged Byron Johnson to fulfil his unfriendly mission. I wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t pointed it out first: that death was exactly equal to life.
We had driven that day to Devonport for supplies. He wanted detonators, and I took him to Morris McGann’s. Morris was my cousin and ran a chandlery in the winter. He sold explosives under licence. When the season was nigh, birders blew channels in the rocks to make landings for their boats. They built up the rubble and made sea-walls, piers, jetties and breakwaters. Every winter these subsided.
Byron and I walked along the mall and people stared. That was how I had always experienced myself, but now I had his skin to prove it. We went into a shop and he bought a yellow Walkman radio. That’s when he said that death was exactly equal to life. I asked him what he meant.
See all these people in the street?
There were hardly any. This was Devonport on a Saturday afternoon.
That is life, he said. But that is equally death.
He was fiddling with his radio even before we got out of the shop.
What you are witnessing is an equation that will always be balanced, he continued. One for one. The difference is cosmetic but we invest it with meaning.
He stopped in the middle of the road, seeking some unknown frequency. Luckily there were no cars.
The finality of death is irrevocable… he swivelled, propped one leg on a light pole… though the conception of life is fragile and mutable… yet it is all chance passion and cold death and the middle is nothing but dull perseverance and then it is gone and the equation is completed. It will always be completed.
He looked up at the sky. The question is: which death matters?
And so I encouraged him because I craved that balance. It felt good to be in debt to such equanimity. The emptiness of the streets supported all that. The afternoon glazed over the flat water until the periodic wash of boats sent birds between the derricks, while mulching slime on the rocks swelled and then subsided in deep-green nauseous swirls of hair. Morris’s Shi_ _handlers stood at the end of a silted dry-dock on a bend of the river, its broken sign truculent with deprecatory humility and uninspired idleness, except for the ‘T’ some lame-wit had daubed in the space. The afternoon sun, winnowed through loose cloud, glared briefly and faded and then the sky grew dark, long black nimbus rolling in from the sea. Upturned boats unworked for months lay with paint flaking; rope coils eaten by salt and crumbling powdery into grey sand; motors stripped and unrepaired, big props which once churned serious water stranded in verdigris; slip-rails rearing like snakes on a hillock of sand, twisted and perforated with rust; half buried anchors, shanks just visible as on the seabed; sea slime and weed and lice and crabs seething in yellowing froth; the old hut of raw shiplap listing to one side. For sale. It grew cold.
The receptionist appeared from the toilet surprised, her wedge of a frown transformed from practice into a watermelon smile. She plugged in a tiny radiator. Tested it with a bare foot.
Mr McGann isn’t here. Her face said take that or leave it.
Byron sighed. He was threatening to her in his blackness. He wore a beanie which looked like a tea cosy, pinned with badges. He could have been a noble Moor.
Would you like to come back in ten minutes? Friendlier now.
I heard Morris farting from the toilet.
It won’t take too long, I said.
That you Tom? Morris was gargling something. Spat a whole lot.
Yeah.
The key’s with Carly. Carly, be a good girl and give Tom the key.
I went to the safe. Took out two boxes of detonators. Put a fifty in Carly’s hand.
You take care with that stuff, Tom.
You too, Morris. With yours.
Carly bit her lip. Made a face.
Byron had drifted outside. He stood on a jetty watching the Nora swing on the tide. I put the boxes into a polystyrene container and wedged it between the floor and the back seat of the Volkswagen. I noticed that he was tracing the edge of the jetty with his foot, testing each board like a tender tooth, saw him pull gently on the rope tethering a painter. Suddenly he was watching me writing, back by the window of the car, his movements invisible. You’re never too young to be writing your memoirs, he said.
What do you mean?
Tell me about Emma.
I knew Byron was in love with my sister. I just didn’t know how much.
There’s nothin
g much to tell, I said.
Tell me anyway. I get melancholic on cold afternoons. I think about her hair, her face; I imagine a time that could never be ours.
We drove back. I was sure the woman at the back of a taxi we passed was Ainslie, but I was distracted by his discursion on passion… which he described as a light going out as quickly as a flickering smile, a turn of one’s head, and the only marvellous moments as those of transit between the prisons of the heart… a passionate deferral; a desire never to be released.
It had grown bitterly cold. Curlicues of sleet hung in the clouds.
I don’t deserve love then, he said. I know the precise moment at which I failed as a human being.
It’s probably not your fault, I said. She’s on medication.
15
Emma McGann knows what’s going down but says nothing. She watches everything, notes the seasons, goes birding. She knows he’s seen the curious tattoo over her breasts, so she hardly needs to say anything at all to him. She writes poetry which she doesn’t need to show anyone… little scraps of poems which she keeps in her dilly bag along with pebbles which she takes out like tablets when she gets her headaches, counting down the time aloud with them in her mouth for that moment when she will break out of this confusion and into the light. She wears a ring on every finger and dyes her hair. Sometimes it is ginger, sometimes blonde. She walks alone along the clifftops with her dog and sits in a sheltered cove catching rare summer breezes smelling of warm fur and buttongrass and the fresh clothes on her skin reminding her of a childhood spent swinging on rotary clotheslines staring up at the clouds and the sky with that terrible pain in her chest cutting out a separation… parents that weren’t her own, nothing there that could have been fixed; nothing there that could have existed.
They had a little waterfront place across from Brunie Island, a little fibro house set on concrete piers. At night, in the summers, the possums came down the chimney and ate bread crusts she had left. Nights in bed she’d heard the pop pop of the air gun and in the morning, had seen blood on the carpet and fatty hides hanging in the back shed and the hole which her dog had dug to retrieve the offal. On summer mornings she’d watched the water turn green with the sun and then dark in the afternoons when the storms raged, had imagined whales and whalemen in titanic battle, sailors clinging to the scuppers, the great lash of flukes in the straits. She read and read. In the shed at the back of the yard there were shelves of maritime books and charts. She studied them closely. Knew that she could use that knowledge to chart coincidence.
Then one day he came in, her foster father, lumbering in his shorts and without saying a word, pinned her to the floral settee and lay there for a long time, his sour breath on her neck, silently, heavily, like a whale in his weight, and she was frightened and not frightened at the same time, overcome by the strangeness of it, for it was love and not love and he was tender, but did nothing more until she couldn’t breathe and bit him on the shoulder and he winced and drew away and then licked at her bite which was red and wet and she had seen his testicles hanging loose, freed from his undershorts, again overcome by the strangeness of it, the terrible stress and surprise and guilt of knowledge and the curious attraction she had felt to her own power.
The second time they had come from the sea. She had gone up to the North-west to work as a maid on a large station. She was only sixteen, collecting mussels and slivers of rock on a wind-swept cove on her afternoon off, when around the point came a cruiser seeking shelter from heaving seas and she watched it anchor in the bay, saw several men tugging at the chains, watching the big boat sway and drag and then swing into the wind, the motors revving, and saw them fail and return, doing this several times, shouting to each other, quite happy they were, laughing and joshing, slapping one another about, and when the boat finally swung around and held, they congratulated each other, drank and spying her, waved, soon launching a rubber raft and motored to the beach, hailed her in a friendly manner, asking her directions and then questions about herself, bringing ashore an esky full of drinks which they proceeded to mix, asking her to taste them and when she said she had to go, suggested she remove her shirt and take the sun while there was some sun to be had grinding hot and glary from the clouds, but she refused and walked away, quite dizzy from the drink and sensing danger walked faster and they had shrugged and said if that was the way she felt, then that was okay; so she trudged off through the scrub and made the mistake of looking back, because one or two then got up and followed her at a distance and when she began to run, slowly at first in that graceful way of hers and then jerkily and painfully up the hill, she saw they were running too, gaining on her, so that it was like a dream in which she was running in place and they were imploring: Wait! They only wanted to be loved, they hadn’t done anything to her, so why was she running and what was her phone number? But she kept running and that fired the primitive in them, a chase, a challenge, hounds and foxes and they snorted and were bounding after her, naked now they were, stumbling, porpoising from hillock to hillock, great thighs trembling upon her as she was pinned again, playing dead, gasping and shrieking with pain; each again; and she held the heads of those who seemed to care, feeble exploiters of her grief.
Later when she told the mistress of the house she wanted the police, the woman promptly dismissed her, even though the nanny, an English girl called Cracklewood, had interceded.
So now Emma McGann doesn’t speak very much. She sees things and says nothing, except that once, in a towering rage at his politics, she had told her brother to go back to the reservation. Things will take their own course. Someone will come along and set the record straight. It’s no good remembering, for it brings no comfort. It just creates another hole into which she falls, a temporary amnesia. Why have history otherwise, if not to celebrate the continuity served by ritual, to applaud ritual establishment; the penetration, the amniotic haven of coves and harbours which they prized so much because they came from the sea and needed anchorage in their own reflection, their identity synonymous with conquest? Why have history if not to act, to explode what is necessary? History was a continuity of explosions. It was then that she began to write letters, feeling such a need to communicate her grief to someone she had read in desperation, who seemed to understand the betrayal of his own mother, of her mother and the betrayal of all mothers beyond her, through the painful dissolution of himself.
16
What matter who’s speaking?
An old man then, who has spent his life charting things.
See her getting out of the taxi, legs first, always those legs, dissolute legs, seems a pity to waste them on other women without at least one male observer. This is a quiet town and we all know what’s going on. Here, a butt. Black stockings. Smells fresh. Light. Ah! The principle of the gutter. Shuffle to one side for the gaze to rest on: short black skirt so stocking-tops are visible. Nowadays few stocking-tops, so women looked sheathed all the way to their heads. Nice break in the line. Learned all this working in a manhole. Aha! They never knew what you did down there. The village idiot. Notes from the underground. She dropped a note sliding out of the taxi. Amazing what people drop sliding out of taxis: wallets, cab charges, credit cards, earrings. You could live on it. I did. Like a skunk at midnight; more a bowerbird at breakfast here. Not much nightlife. She walks to a café off the mall. The owner was threatening to close. It was midday. He let her in though, even though nobody else was about, except for a couple of Japanese tourists whom he turned away. Hope they have provisions in their backpacks.
Dear Mr Deakin, the rest torn. Let’s see, a smudge of lipstick… she’s unused to this. My father, Lord Cracklewood… something else here, but can’t make it out. Obviously a first draft of a letter. Not intimate though. Many first drafts. I’ve known first drafts. They sting like the wind in my mountain cabin, pages stained with mulled wine, yellowy-red like blood. Now I sit at bus stops watching the Automatic Teller Machines, rushing over after tourists make their withdrawa
ls, see them standing there looking puzzled and then walking away and walking back and then away finally and I dismantle the black box I’ve glued onto the slot, the notes looking like so many possum skins. Byron Johnson is a terrorist, oh me oh my. I think vaguely of London in a winter of bombings, St Paul’s crumpling beneath rockets. That was the other war, wasn’t it? Got my badge to show for it. A naval veteran. I’m a national treasure and they don’t know what to do with me. Demobbed and living in Tasmania, once in a nice house off Brunie Island down south with a wife and an adopted daughter sweet as a new moon, bronzed crescent of a girl, enough! Harmless. My prostate’s shot. Trickling here and there like a dog. Relieve myself behind this hoarding. Imagine the slush on dirty London streets, the wet underground thronging with police and harnessed sniffer dogs trailing up and down and taking a leak here and there to confuse the issue. Dogs must be carried on escalators. Purchase tokens here.
An aching emptiness. And yet everything comes out of an aching emptiness.
Stand behind the glass and watch her drink her coffee nervously. There was a black man here a while ago with that no-hoper McGann, who considers himself black but who’s really white as a turd from a dying drunk. Black fella spoke with a cockney accent. They all do, nowadays. Sip. That’s what upbringing does, little finger rearing from her teacup, no telling what rebellious flag it flies, surely they do it with digits? Don’t see how any of that can satisfy, not like men, no, shooting in ecstatic release like a V2. But she is seething beneath. I can always tell when they are on missions of vengeance. A sixth sense. Spurned, perhaps. No longer sought in the eternal quests of men. No longer the stony grail of formidable beauty.