A fight broke out at the big fire. Tiger Cat was being beaten up for being a screw, a spy, and doling out deadly drugs. She was called a prick, a scab, a cunt, a fucking this and a fucking that. I don't like Tiger Cat myself and maybe everything they were calling her was correct but the Larrikin and her mates were going a bit far. I had to intervene, though it was difficult without hurting women I much preferred over the victim. However, Virginia, Rory and I did pull the assailants off. The mouthing went on, and the gist was if she wasn't working for the authorities how come she had pills to give away? For nothing. 'Currying favour, weren't you?' 'Weren't you?' 'Anyway they bloody killed someone!' 'We don't want your type around our campfire.' Both her eyes were practically closed from bruising. Cybil pressed a tea-towel of ice on them. And the poor ex-Gladiator was groaning from pain in her ribs.
Chandra suggested I take her home as she couldn't drive herself. Why couldn't it be someone like Cybil Crabbe or Rosemary Turner? But Chandra decided I was the right one. Dee and Rory helped her to my car and promised that they would get her vehicle back to town.
As I was driving through Stuart, I inquired, 'Where to?'
Tiger Cat, still with the tea-towel of ice held to her eyes, directed me off the major road to tarred tree-lined dark ones. I had never been to this area of five-acre blocks with big houses and long driveways midway between the rural town and the coastal one, away from the river. There were too many turns, I was sure I was lost.
Then she said, 'This one.' And pointed to a white-washed fence. A pony came into sight in the light of my head-lamps.
Now I had questions for her. 'What, exactly, are you up to? Is this your place? Are you living with some guy? What is the story with the pills?'
'For chrissake, Margot. Just open the gate, get me up to the house, and let me take a Mogadon,' she begged, miserably.
In front of the wooden gate, I turned off my ignition and calmly waited for an answer to at least one of my questions.
She groaned. 'I look after people's houses, okay? House-sitters, it's a thing on the net. You get to live free all over the country. They go on holiday, they have pets to be fed, burglars to be kept away. So here I am, feeding the pony, the pussy and the puppy while they take the kids to Disneyland. What do I know? I got references. I even mow their lawn. Open the bloody gate.'
Sucker that I am, I felt sorry for her. She was pathetic. I opened the paddock gate and drove through parkland to someone else's home.
When she was pulling herself out, I asked, 'Why are you hanging round the gurls, anyway?'
'Nothing else to do,' she said. 'The only thing in my life is keeping my body trim and going to the gym. Not much social fun in that, is there?'
Following her, actually helping her to the front door, I wanted to know about the pills she gave out at the Spiders barbecue.
She responded with a scoff. 'You think I'm going to tell you!'
'Why not? Got something to hide?' I let go of her so she could find the keys.
'You bet. They call me a bloody informant. What about you, Margot? Can you truthfully say you're not working with the cops?' She unlocked the door and let it take her weight. It was like being checkmated by a fool. I turned on my heel. I left the gate wide open and kept going, but a little bit down the road, I thought about the pony, and pulled up. It was very dark outside the car and there was scrub right down to the bitumen of the narrow road. I walked back gingerly and dealt with the gate.
It was so stupid, but trying to get back to the Suzuki, I got entangled in cobwebs. Cobweb after cobweb. It was all I could do to stop myself from screaming. Every which-way I moved, cobwebs. My skin was crawling, my car full of spiders.
When the gurls finally make their way to their homes on Lesbianlands, they are amazed to find the bridge back in order. Ti Dyer, for one, is glad when she sees it and sits in the lamp-light sharpening the teeth of her own chain-saw. Virginia and Rory are drunk, and Hope drives the Rodeo slowly, like a little old lady of seventy.
35
…like a bully…
Home, Ian Truckman can't believe they're happy to see him. Home-ground, square suburban block and everyone for miles around barracks for Essendon. His mother with a grin and red and black beanies and scarves hanging on hooks in the hallway; he hasn't been so happy for months. Pencil pines spaced like goal-posts. Green grass.
In Shopping Town he buys presents: at the hardware, weedeater, 3.3-kg petrol-line trimmer; at Toyworld, a jigsaw and cricket set; at Harvey Norman, games. His sister says, 'Oh Ian.' He mows the lawn, whipper-snips the edges.
Full of largesse, mobile hooked onto his pants; his big rig, White Virgin, parked in the street, he shows off his gadgets. Plays cricket with the kids and his brother-in-law. The men hit the pissy bowling for six and don't go out till they want to, rather dink the little ones over the fence to fetch the ball. They hoot. The whole family bellows. Nippers are great, he finds, you can yell at them and make them laugh. They're not that happy when he bowls fast and bowls them out, but they gotta learn the rules and what's what. His brother-in-law has to respect him because he has a job, money and a truck. He does what Ian says. They cheat. It's funny. When the youngsters get all sulky they tell them it's a joke. So they laugh. And yell.
Brother-in-law got retrenched. Hanging round the house with Ian's mother. 'What's wrong with his own?' Ian sits in the toilet, talking to the Bomber posters. 'The little nine-year-old calls him Homer. They call me something from the Simpsons too but I don't watch it, don't know what they're laughing at, so I wear it. I call him Homer and it's big deal. Make them wait a day or two before I start up the semi, just to listen to it purr. Show it off to the kids, my sisters kids. Had to be sure they wouldn't mess it up. We all sit up inside and say jeez, ah and wow. Uncle Ian this. Uncle Ian that. Let the kids have a go. They sit in there and watch one of their comic-book videos on my tiny screen. Keeps them quiet while we have a beer.'
Mrs Truckman at him about the grandchildren she never sees. 'Well you'd be bloody lucky.' The ex wouldn't let her within a bull's roar and she knows it but it makes the old woman cry. She asks him doesn't he care. 'Of course I do,' he says, but wouldn't really know whether he means it.
Then she susses him.
'What's wrong?'
Your mother sees through you like a sheet of bloody glass, he thinks. 'Nothing. What do you reckon? Nothing. Pay's coming in. Truck's going good.'
'Yes,' she says, 'I know, but what are you scared of?'
She's a witch, his mother. She's got the sixth sense. Ian flexes his pecs like a goon and says, 'People should be scared of me, not the other way around.' Then she's nasty. Turns into a nag.
'You always were a coward.'
'Was I talking like a coward?'
'No, like a bully,' she says.
Ian gives the lawn another mow and makes the kids help, heaping the clippings under the pencil pines inside the concrete rings Ian got for nothing from a bloke one time. Keep her yard tidy, as neat as a footy field. Beautiful.
He is waiting for the call.
36
…haven't got a clue…
My phone rang at about ten o'clock.
'You want to come fishing you better come now.' Lois gave her invitation in her unique fashion.
Half an hour later I was on the river with Lois and Thrust and Lois's sister, Mae.
Fish were jumping out of the water everywhere.
'The bream are breeding,' explained Thrust. 'The mullet's tasting good enough to eat, and plenty of them. Generally they are bait for blackfish.' At high tide, the river was a liquid mirror. The day still, cloudy. Lazy, satin circles rippled out. Why Lois was urgent was evident. A couple of dolphins broke the surface to catch the leaping fish. I must have told Lois dolphins were my favourites. Immediately they worked their magic. Contented, I grinned.
We, in a tin dinghy with an outboard motor, had gone quite close to town. Mae and Lois reacted to the diving dolphins with casual pride.
Mae is young
er than Lois, and angrier. She talked about politics. The Mabo and Wik cases, women's secret business and the Hindmarsh Island bridge came out of Mae's mouth like a wall of atrocity. Then the Tent Embassy in Canberra. To Mae it was simple. 'This is our land. You stole it. Get out.' She tended to harangue, specifically the rural right wing where she saw the battle lines clearly drawn. I nodded and agreed. 'Ouch.'
Lois and Mae were different in character and looks but close because they were family. Thrust was busy with his line and bait, mumbling away to himself. Apparently the dolphins were his rivals. The women teased him and he grumbled something back, used to having the mickey taken out of him.
'The white virgin,' Mae went on, 'the plastic iron maiden. You see her driving around on television like the queen in an open car?' She made a wave with her wrist past her face like the royal brush. Both sisters laughed.
A dolphin jumped, grabbed a fish and submerged, appearing seconds later a hundred metres away blowing out air. I was thrilled.
'Fast heh?'
'You mob!' Mae yelled out and waved to people on the bank. They shouted back, reckoning the boat was about to get swamped.
'You watch out for yourselves,' she responded. Then to me, she continued. 'They, those whites, reckon they're are hard up and they resent it and they hate anyone who is worse off. They don't like it because we don't deal with it the same. We just sit on the dole all day with our hands out. Just because they're clipping their lawn with nail-scissors, they're better people, but they aren't and no one believes they are anyway, so all the time they are trying to prove it by pushing shit down everybody's throat. Some people are just born with hard nerves, just gotta tell everybody else what to do even though they don't know what it is without being told.'
Mae could talk all day. I sat back with a smile on my face.
'They put you in jail for stealing food for the kids up the Top End, no kidding.'
'Yeah, I heard that,' agreed Lois.
Thrust moaned about the turning tide.
Mae jerked on her short rod. 'Stupid if you ask me.'
Lois played a bite on her line. Mae wound hers in. I kept my eye out for more dolphins.
'They get hatred. They give hatred. And the men? The men want an excuse to kill. They can't kill people so they kill happiness. They got the guns and trucks and farms and, you name it, everything but not one of them has got happiness,' Mae said as she baited her hook, efficiently.
Lois reeled in her line dangling a wriggling fish off a clean silver hook, and showed it off. 'Yeah, working, telling everybody what to do.' Lois used her knife on the fish, and washed the blood off over the side.
'They reckon happiness is sitting around doing nothing, letting everybody else work for you. They pretend they're working all the time.' She flipped the cat-gut through the air in an S.
I said, 'I feel like diving in and swimming with the dolphins.'
'Not me,' said Lois. 'You wouldn't catch me doing that in a hundred years.'
Thrust whistled, 'You wouldn't want to, girlie. They see you as an invader, push you down to the bottom. They hold you down with their snouts until you don't breathe any more.'
'Shut up and keep fishing,' Lois asserted her authority.
'I am starting up this motor in a minute, so youse better move,' Thrust asserted his power, having control of the outboard.
As we puttered back up river towards the punt pier, I listened to Mae.
'White Australians are so stupid and so smug,' said she. I raised my eyebrow and glanced over my shoulder at Lois's loyal husband. 'I mean you and him too, and you know why, because, you don't know whose land you're on. You're ignorant. That makes you ignorant of a lot of other things. Just come and plonk down on any old bit of land and maybe pay a cheque for it or maybe not and say it's yours and then shoot at anybody who tells you different, well that's stupid. With the blackfellas, you got to find out whose land you're on first.'
There was not anything I could say.
'No one feels comfortable unless they are on their own land, that's why the people die of drink and hang themselves and that, because they know they are not on their own land. If you went over to China and proceeded to put your rubbish out and eat the surrounding vegetation and animals, blow out the hillside and make a dam and act like it was yours, that would be ignorant, wouldn't it? Say a polite Chinaman comes along and says, excuse me, sir, but that's my land you puking over, do you mind moving? You go, why? and he says, well sir sit down and I'll tell you why. The Anglo reckons, none of that, don't need education on what I don't know, and shoots him. So he makes damn sure he stays ignorant.'
'You're right,' I commented. Restitution of land to Indigenous people is absolutely necessary, but not my half-acre. I would have to think about this a bit more. She said, whose land are you on? But she didn't mean an individual. She meant a community, a nation, and with that, spiritual worth, non-ignorance.
Mae shook her head. 'After a few generations the opportunity has gone and now we got all these white people and other non-Indigenous ethnics coming begging, saying sit down, sit down, tell me what I don't know and my grandfather wouldn't let you tell me. We say, well if you've got a beer I'll sit with you, but I'm buggered if I know what to tell you. Then these liberal fellas start salivating and panting, anything, anything you got give it to me. You got dotty paintings I'll have that, thank you very much, and you got a didj, well I'll have a go at that too. This is cool, let's have a competition. Australia's too small for a competition. Let's have the competition in London and then an American can win, did jer ee doo, boo bop. When they took the kids away from the communities, they took away the possibility of feeling all right. Now everyone's unhappy and ignorant, and wondering what the shit to do about it. So you take a hit, you sniff petrol, you drink, or if you're a fat cat you buy this and you buy that and build an effing great fence around with a couple of Dobermans to protect it. Still doesn't mean you're not unhappy or ignorant. In fact it proves it, because you look outside and starving in the gutter of your very own street is your brother but you don't recognise him. You don't recognise him because you don't see him. You let him die so you can stay ignorant.'
Mae was going to go far. I said, 'Yeah, I don't know.'
'The truth is they have got no spirit and they don't want to know that.' Mae pulled a beer out of the cooler. 'Want one, sister?'
'And because they've got nothing, they want everybody else to have even less,' Lois added, refusing the drink.
I agreed. Property in my understanding is tied in with the value of money and ownership. I have a big concept of theft and fair dealing. 'I understand that England stole New South Wales in 1788. I do not see what I can do about that now, apart from continuing to be right-minded according to my own lights,' I said soberly.
Mae sank into silence. Thrust gave me a fish to eat. I was fulsome in my gratitude. Lois grinned. I thought about my job for Lesbianlands and Trivia's romantic disillusionment. When I got inside I wrote a note to myself: back to Rory's; when?
Her house is full of strangers, therefore she will be stranger still. And they're after things, not pearls of wisdom. In fact, they are killers. Nomads with gonads attacking monads. She goes about naked to show she is human: 'Do you like my new dress?'
'Put on some clothes, Sofia.'
'Why? Cockroaches have souls too.'
'Sofia, please.'
'Could do with an iron perhaps?'
Sofia is in delusion. Local gurls are not with her now, travellers are. They take down the curtains and put them in the washing machine. They have mops and buckets, and window-cleaning squeegees. They are busy people with objectives in mind before they hit the road back to their own lives. Dressing appropriately in towels and scarves, she repeats her tale to each woman who comes, and sometimes to the same one twice, as if it is the first time she has told it. Those who listen hear the jumble of imagination pinned to a rather narrow base of personal experience, even though as a child she went to Africa, Russia and South
America. She had a nanny.
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