by Gregory Day
The frustrated look on his face vanished when he saw me. Saying, ‘Hello, Noel,’ he quickly dashed over to the Esky and, leaning under the tree, dropped the eel back in with his mates. As he did so, the very last lemon hanging from the previous autumn dropped in alongside them as well. No kidding.
We had a quick chat. Bruce was obviously a bit ruffled about the eel, and I set him straight regarding the nail method. He said he knew you couldn’t hammer the nail in first but that he couldn’t bring himself to hammer it through the head of the live creature.
‘Yair, it’s a bit of a crucifixion,’ I said to him, with a laugh.
He looked at me a little strangely then, and I knew why, I’d seen that look before. He didn’t think a local boy like me would say a vaguely cultured thing like that. You know, a word with four syllables. People like Bruce don’t know the half of it.
When I got back inside I looked around amongst the books on the shelves until I found a couple on fishing. I flicked through one or two, looking for depictions of the eel. The nail-clock drawing idea had got me a bit excited and I wanted to make a quick study of how they were drawn.
I made myself a cup of coffee and, with the sound of the thrashing ditches in the background, had a close look at Anguilla australis, the short-finned eel, which was the local variety. In the book they had drawn it in a loop, with its mouth open and looking angry. It struck me as I focused on it that people always think of eels as aggressive and angry because the only dealings they ever have with them are after they’ve ripped them out of their habitat on the end of a hook or in a drum net. I imagined that eels were as capable of being as relaxed as any other creature, given the right conditions at the muddy bottom of some dark body of water.
As I sat down to make a few marks on the page the image that had concocted itself in my head out the back changed a bit. Now I thought I’d have the eel hanging in the height of midsummer, with its flesh and skin having dried out and its skeleton showing against the wall. Desiccated. Good ol’ Australian desiccation, I chuckled. Things dried out, sucked up by the sun. I realised then that drawing a skeleton rather than a fleshed body would create more scope for shadows on the wall too. The pattern of all the little splays and slivers of bone coming off the spine could repeat itself in hues on the fibro wall.
It seems weird now, thinking about working on that drawing in the front room while surrounded on two sides by ditches full of eels. There was something exciting about doing it but something callous as well. Like emotional science. Because the thrashing of the eels all around the house was becoming increasingly desperate. But that’s often the way with these things. My old man always used to tell me that you had to be ruthless to be an artist. He was thinking of a good friend he’d had, Bob Armytage, who used to make his wife cry just so he could paint the result. Bob Armytage probably stuck in Dad’s mind because he was the only artist he knew and admired, but also because of his excessive dedication to getting a picture. When, at sixteen, I told Dad that I wanted to study art, he just laughed and said I didn’t have what it took. He was thinking of Bob Armytage then, I’m sure. He knew nothing much about it, after all. Apart from what he liked. Which is the main thing. But Bob Armytage was his idea of what an artist was. Big and strong, a larrikin with a strange streak in him. Whereas I was a little kid, and far from being a larrikin. He could see I could draw a bit but he was thinking professionally, he thought I wouldn’t make a quid unless I was as much of a bastard as Bob.
Mind you, he did like Bob Armytage. Or admired him, at least. He talked about him like he was someone courageous, someone he couldn’t be, someone he wouldn’t want to be but was glad existed all the same. So when he was trying to talk me out of going off to Melbourne to study I didn’t really take offence because he was also paying me a compliment. He was kind of saying that I was too good for it, that I didn’t have enough of the devil in me. And like most dads he maintained that he knew what he was talking about, as if his wife and kids hadn’t seen anything of life, and by ‘life’ he meant the dark side, the dangerous stuff. Yair, like most dads, mine claimed the copyright on the dark side of life in our family, and he figured that an artist’d be nothing if he didn’t have a few of the same clues.
Anyway, I didn’t finish the nail-clock-eel right there and then. In fact, I barely even started it, and to this day I haven’t finished it because of the incredible events that followed, but I set the whole thing out and thought I could really sink my teeth into those bones and shadows now that I’d decided on the hot light playing a major role. Because even though the weather was dismal that September, with the rain and all, and a constant bluster battering the cliffs and scouring down our valley, the thought of Jack Toucan’s shack brought back nothing but summer memories. It was as if I never went there in any other season. So, in my imagination, as the eels slushed and churned away all around the house, the walls of which creaked in the wind like a gang-gang, I was picturing an image of January. And the afterlife of an eel.
I think it was at this point that I was interrupted by the schoolkids hitting the ditches with sticks out in front of the hedge. After ticking them off and fixing them up with a couple each to take home, I decided to take a few up to my oldest friend, Nanette, before I made my way to the pub. She’d like that, I thought. And she’d be fascinated by what’d happened.
III
IT WAS AROUND FOUR THAT DAY when I drove past Joe’s riverbend in the Moke and clapped eyes on Fra Ionio for the first time, though I didn’t know it then. Joe’s bend is the spot where the river comes closest to the Dray Road as it winds its way out of the hills and along the flat to the sea. As I drove by I saw a man sitting over on the other bank of the river, the inaccessible one, which was strange in itself. He was hunched over amongst the reeds with an old South Melbourne beanie pulled down over his ears, staring into the water as if he was saddened by something, and I remember thinking how soothing bodies of water can be for people in crisis. You often see it around here: complete strangers staring at the waves or into the river. People you never see ever again. They just come from wherever they live to think things over, to feel. The water dissolves them, reflects them. My brother, Jim, calls them ‘spinners’. I thought Fra Ionio was just another spinner as I drove past on my way to Nanette’s that afternoon.
Nanette’s had a hard time, living unhappily as she did with her husband, Myles, and their three kids until they split up and she was left on her own. But a more forthright person you would never meet. Strangely forthright. And we grew up together here in Mangowak. She was the first girl I ever kissed. When we were eight. Straight after we smoked our first bark cigarette. We coughed and spluttered, we went blue, then we laughed and then we kissed. She made it happen. She took me into the forest out back, near the duck ponds in the hills above the dam. She pulled out the Tally Ho from the chest pocket of her denim overalls, rolled it up and convinced me to smoke it. It was bluegum bark. I nearly died. She did too. I suppose the kiss was half fun, half consolation.
Nanette is sparky. She’s a redhead and she’s wiry and a survivor. She keeps to herself now that the kids are gone, now she doesn’t have to go to events and social functions. She has an old fire tower on her land that looks over the whole of the East Otways. She checks twice a day for the CFA in summer and autumn, even though it’s not one of their official observation points anymore. She reckons she’s grown to love sitting up in that fire tower now that she’s on her own. To make it a bit warmer she’s added a few basic things, like a bed, for instance, and although she’s kept the big windows facing west and three little ones looking to the other points of the compass, the rest of the tower she’s walled in with fibro sheets. When I turned up in the Moke that afternoon she was just about to head there. I’m a bit scared of the climb up the ladder but, as usual, she got me to come along.
She lives on fifty-odd acres, part bush, part failed pine plantation, part pasture. The pines failed because of the fires, which came through not long after VicTree ha
d planted them. Unlike the gumtrees, they didn’t like the fire blast at all and now she’s stuck with twenty-five acres of mangled, stunted radiata. It’s ugly but there you go, life’s not all picnics and equestrian events. Especially not Nanette’s life.
It’s beautiful out there in those Barrabool hills. For me it’s heart and soul, and takes me straight back into my childhood and all the stories my father used to tell me about the magic of the past. Fred Ayling comes to mind. His little camp was not far from Nanette’s place, just west a bit and up along the Gentle Annie track. Fred lived out there on his own for forty consecutive winters, cutting what now would proudly be termed a sustainable amount of timber. He was a great axeman but a person with that implement can only cut down so many trees. It’s all about proportion. Proportion and scale. Fred Ayling was a very big man but he was only one man and the bush was a lot bigger. And he loved the bush, anyway. Understood it like nobody else. I only knew him near the end of his life when I was just a little tacker, but he definitely made his impression. You’d see him coming into town with his swag like something out of the nineteenth century. He’d take a room at the pub and settle in for the night, to get shickered, to have a yarn and maybe even a sheila. He had red hair like Nanette’s too. Red hair, fire, austerity and these hills all seem connected to me.
Climbing up the tower in the wind was a bit scary but I went first, feeling more secure with Nanette coming up behind me, between me and the ground. It’s a decent climb too, a hundred and twenty feet, eighty rungs of the ladder. But once you get up there it’s worth it. The view is unbelievable, virtually one eighty degrees. Once you’re inside, your eye ranges out across treetops and pastured hills, deep into the west. You see the weather come and go, the sleety drifts up on Benwerrin, the fog that cuddles into the valleys, and on a good day in spring you can actually watch the pollens drift through the air, seeding the whole area.
When we got inside, Nanette let out a sigh and put the kettle on. I could see a half-finished embroidery over on a workbench and a picture of her kids above the little bar fridge in the kitchenette corner, but apart from that the room was still spartan. Nan is not the settling-in type. She’s never really nested. There’s too much sheer energy coursing through her, and these days too many demons in her mind, to let her nest. That, of course, was a major problem with Myles. I’ve never met a man I thought was suited to Nanette. The fact that she had three children to him is amazing enough. Expecting them to cohabitate into old age like any other couple was ridiculous. It’s just a shame she can’t see her kids more often. Emma, Trig and Adrian. Flesh and blood, she bore them, after all.
I’d given her a sack with two eels in it when I arrived at the house, and once we were ensconced in the tower I told her what was going on. Her eyes opened wide as the story unfolded. She, like me, is always on the lookout for a bit of extra magic around the place. She laughed when I told her about Darren finally filling his fishing buckets, and rolled her eyes when I recounted Bruce’s confusion with the nail.
When I’d finished, she squinted her eyes up and asked me what was going to happen to them, obviously imagining something terrible like the ditches drying out and the eels dying in air.
‘I don’t think anyone’s thinking about that much,’ I told her. ‘But the sound of the ditches is getting to me a bit. I was drawing in the front room this afternoon and it started to spook me. They sound so feverish.’
We drank our tea and she rolled us both a cigarette. I don’t smoke much, only occasionally. But the fire tower’s a great place to have a smoke.
I asked her what she’d been doing and she told me she’d been mucking around on the tractor, doing bits and pieces, planting tomatoes, writing e-mails to her kids. She pointed to the embroidery over near the big windows. ‘Doin’ a bit of that,’ she said.
‘What’s it of?’
‘Oh, I just got it out of a book. It’s a Shetland Islands fiddle player.’
I went over to have a look. The embroidery was well done, and the scene was romantic – a violinist with hair flying on a sea cliff.
She said, ‘It’s good for me, you know. To be still every now and again, anyway. Otherwise I feel like one of those bloody eels. Stuck in a ditch I can’t get out of. My brain thrashing away in its own juices.’
‘It’s great, Nan. How long’s it gonna take?’
She took a drag of her cigarette and spoke as she exhaled. ‘I reckon I’m a bit over halfway and I started it a couple of months ago. So, sometime before Christmas maybe. I actually really love doing it, Noely. Who would have thought, eh?’
She smiled. It did seem a little strange, my old livewire sitting patiently at embroidery like one of the old ducks in town. Between us we knew she didn’t have a reputation for patience.
‘It’s tricky too, a bit of a challenge. You can’t do it half-baked. I’ve been propping up here some nights and staying up late. I love the wild feeling you get up here at night. Shits on town. No offence.’
I went back and sat down next to her on the little green couch the CFA had left in the tower along with the bar fridge, the porta-shower and a few other useful odds and ends.
‘What about the winds, though? You’d be knocked around a bit up here the last few nights, wouldn’t you?’
‘Well, yair, I would’ve been, but I haven’t been up here for a few days. Been on the tractor and I’m too buggered by the end of the day. You know that old tractor. Fries the nerve ends.’
I told her how I thought my barn was going to fall over the previous night, being right in the path of the winds ripping up the river valley. Nan’s house is out of winds like that, in a fold of the hills facing north-east – she always calls hers a bandicoot’s house – beautifully sited by Myles who, with the help of a couple of mates, built it from scratch. I joked that she didn’t have to worry about the winds, having married a black belt in feng shui.
‘Yair,’ she agreed. ‘He got that right. The poor bugger,’ she said then, ambiguously.
When we were kids we used to walk in the hills all the time, we’d camp out there and get around wild. From my place on the riverflat those hills are pretty much always in view, silent and dark green, with their lovely undulant line silhouetted against the sky. There was nothing to hurt us out there when we were kids. People go on about this and that – ‘falling down a hole’ was always my mother’s big thing – but really, short of stepping on a snake or putting your hand into a fresh nest of redbacks, there was nothing to be afraid of.
We’d swim in the dams, and yabby, we loved nothing better than looking for a platypus, and we knew a hidden track through the bush at Boonah where we could make it down to a creek so old and untouched that it hadn’t ever been mapped. We called it Shitcan Creek because once, not long after we found it, we took Nanette’s cousin from Adelaide down there and she insisted on shitting in an empty rice cream can instead of on the ground. Thinking back we were pretty rough on her – I can’t even remember her name – taking her through that thick, ferny, dogwoody bush full of leeches and expecting her to adjust. Insisting on shitting in the can was just her reaction to being so put out. She was a bit of a snob, though. Nan and her were about as alike as a crow and a caged canary.
The afternoon was slowly beginning to fade as we sat there in the fire tower looking out, pointing at spots that we’d been to or where things had happened. It’s funny but when we were kids the actual landscape wasn’t that important to us. It was just ground to walk on and water to swim in, while we were swept up in our feelings, our dreamings and interactions with each other. Although we were keen on the platypus, we didn’t notice the birds, for instance, unless something dramatic happened and one of them really entered our lives. Like when that pair of gang-gangs nested in Nanette’s family’s power box and used to turn their power off and on. But then, as you get older something about life seems to turn inside out, and the land becomes the foreground and your own story sits back behind it. When you’re fourteen you just want to ligh
t a fire on the beach and spin the bottle. Your preoccupation is the kids you’re with, whether you’re acceptable to them or not, whether they fit in likewise, and you’re always keen on some girl or trying to make somebody laugh.
Nowadays Nanette and I can just sit and watch the topography for hours without saying much. She’ll blab on a bit, she can’t help it, but actually she loves just to watch the land like I do. If you had’ve seen us mucking around as teenagers you’d never believe we could just sit there and get interested in the line of the hills, or a discolouration in the treetops, or the weather, for god’s sake; you’d say we were bored stiff, but that’s how it is. Perhaps it’s a little bit sad. I mean, we’re both single, kind of alone when maybe we shouldn’t be, but it’s funny, it all makes sense to me, it’s like we’re trying to memorise something, something about the ground we live on, something passed on to us through our families, and ironically it’s as if we have to be alone to do it.
Nan and I have never really talked about stuff like that, we just know it. Maybe she’s never thought about it. But she knows it. She’s not as big a thinker as me. But she’s smart as a whip. I worry about seeming dreary near her sometimes. That’s part of the reason I don’t tell her the things like that which enter my head. She’d rather just look at the drawing. She’ll nod and then rabbit on about something or other, something that’s pissing her off or something that’s exciting her. And then later she’ll offer me a hundred bucks for the drawing. I’ll sell it to her for a bit less, I’ll feel a bit guilty, but then again, I reason, she can afford it.