by Rodney Hall
Now she had begun packing she saw herself for the first time. Is this the woman I am? Have I been waiting for the chance all these years? Tip the lot out, burn that, give those away, how beautiful, how bare, how exciting, I’m so nervous. Mind you she knew that when the time came she wouldn’t be able to look back at Whitey’s as Eric started the van or she’d burst out sobbing, but she also knew she wouldn’t weaken. She and her family must see it through to the end. This was a decision. She must hurry. Maybe they were moving too late as it was. Would there be room on the ladder?
Whatever is the matter Susie, don’t cry sweetheart. I’m busy with packing. I know, I know you’re worried, but there isn’t any need. We won’t be going for good, you’ll be seeing Nanna again and Grandpa yes and Myrtle and the chooks. We’ll come back to visit. Wherever we go we’ll always know there’s home here and we only have to drive up the road to be back, everyone’ll still be here to give us a welcome. It isn’t halfway round the world. And just you think of it: where we’re going you won’t only have animals and old people to play with, you’ll have friends your own age, other girls like you, it’s true. How does that make it worse? Won’t it be wonderful? What’s that about Merv? But why darling? Well of course there’ll be kids in Goulburn with their eyes a different colour. Goulburn’s got everything.
Elaine McTaggart was fitting her household in boxes, folding her present reality away. You couldn’t miss the tone of her ceremony, the ritual ownership. This was her denial of belief in the airyfairy theories of the locals. She never understood what others saw in their Remembering. Had no patience with all that stuff about the past. Was there a crumb of evidence you could pick up in your hand? There was not. Where was the past anyhow, when Grandpa Ian could remember a time before the first buildings were put up at Whitey’s, when it was all trees and the wreckage of gold fossicking. Ask him for yourself, he could give you the drum, screwy as he is. One day I’ll fly in a jumbo jet, she promised herself. She was definitely ready for the fortune-telling computer, and nuclear power was the power she wanted. Wait till she could get some nuclear in her kitchen, then watch out. As for the silly chickens whingeing about radiation, what did they know? She’d never seen radiation. People were too timid. The minerals were saving the country. That was the future. The past was definitely a lot of hooey. The past was her old clothes, as far as that went. What’s more they were only good as long as you could still use them and couldn’t afford better. She was folding them away in boxes while she planned the future. I don’t know why I left it so long, she reassured herself, ruthlessly squashing a tear against her cheek.
Elaine McTaggart was packing.
Five – The Victim of Ambition
The faint bagpiping of Tom Whitey’s hollow skeleton was so subtle it did not disturb even the corpse of Kel McAloon newly installed in the next door grave. But Tom Whitey’s spirit heard. And heard the skirling as a question.
Well we’re all different in that respect, replied the spirit. It’s true most of us have white swan-type wings, but some have big swallow’s wings, parrot wings, even eagle wings.
The bones droned hopefully.
No, the spirit apologized, I didn’t score eagle wings. Well, since you ask, it’s like being able to breathe underwater and …
At this point a merciful flight of red-backed parrots swept through the cemetery carrying Tom Whitey’s angel away with them. The bones were left moaning, content with the memory of roasted swan’s meat and having a plan for a viaduct to Dead Reef, a television tower on the mountain, and a major road down to the coast.
Six – The Shape-Thinker
Fido occupied himself thinking he was where he always was. And thinking what he had thought all along. The mountain picture developing to a flurry of pale green, a smudge, an exquisite veil, a memory of Corot’s France transmuting to ochre, a haze, a grain of light, with a sky bleached negative and grey and not mattering beyond the unfocused lace edges.
He was changing it so that wet clouds came up and stood over the mountain with plum and brown underbellies, the mountain leaping to the challenge with its dark earth red and aggressive, also giving away touches of mauve and purple.
Fido wasn’t going to put up with this at all. Not any longer. He wiped everything he had thought so far. A fresh beginning. He discovered there was room for possessiveness, sentiment. That’s right. A cheerful mountain touched by a plume of blue smoke doubtless rising from some man’s camp where work was going ahead, trees felled, fences going up, and a future implied in every choice of line, with birds diving through the intervening space to show all was perfectly perfect.
Actually this didn’t satisfy him for long, being a boy and expecting so much. The trick was to treat the mountain as an interior, a screen, the idea for a decoration, sweet in its outline, attenuated ridges falling as blue hair to the scooped-out gullies, whimsical ghosts of a Europe long dead frolicking among the trees to the ice-green of flutes, the irresistible art-nouveau spotted gums, world-weary beginnings and a childlike nervousness.
He had another idea, an old one, much handled, a stone buffed smooth as a pebble in a creek, it was possible. And the thought so slippery. Strange because it oughtn’t to be like that: an uncle ought not to be a father. The idea worn glassy by constant thinking, washed over by his fast-moving imagination, still-life, solid with planes, actually shaping the mind round it. If the stone were taken away, he would be lost. Fido had observed them at lunch, woodcuts of people; Adam and Eve repining, gazing back through a trellis at the forbidden garden. He thought, supposing I were the angel with a sword I would forgive them, I’d say I know the famous secret you are ashamed of, so you needn’t be ashamed about it with me. They never do understand I could kill them like this so they’d crash together, china plates, smashing to bits as they kiss. And he realized this exact design had been in his mind when he set them up with corned beef on their forks and talk of cooks burnt to death, for him to wind up the clockwork of love and release them so their fatal kiss might happen.
I wonder, he wrote in his diary, what this benighted shop looks like from outside.
Once the family came home from India, that dreadful trip, he’d been so ill, Uncle Sebastian got the moon times wrong and they were caught in a full moon like daylight, the van had to be backed right up to the door while Fido’s mother huddled him into cover loaded down and disguised as a mobile heap of blankets in case some stickybeak might be awake and prying, which was likely to be the case. He had glimpsed the shop; and it wasn’t so different from the two distant houses to be seen out of the kitchen window.
Hanging above me as though it would topple, he wrote.
On another occasion he wrote, I read everything that happens but nothing happens to me. This is what I think, that people don’t think there are other people thinking.
The mountain in this dilemma rushed upward, a surface of chewed tatters, then revealing itself as a writhing mass of beastly heads, a clash of energy, a tangle of horns and wings in the desperate throes of murder or escape. Fido faced it clear-eyed, curious and without fear.
Try as he might, although there were a million words in his brain, he needed a couple more he couldn’t find. Take the case of his father whom he had to call Uncle Sebastian. He wrote in the eternal diary, I have to call my father uncle. What he needed was a word he didn’t have; because, of the two words he did have, who could say one was true and the other wasn’t? He pictured it this way: an uncle-uncle, great ragged shapes of wormy wood with a rock falling out of his eye for a tear, facing a father-uncle living grub-like and pallid in the seclusion of a chrysalis not noticing it had split and his damp fatness might be tempting a ravenous Fido on black feather wings.
Refinement, Fido read in the Town and Country Journal of October 28th, 1876, is not fastidious. It is not luxury. It is nothing of this kind. It is far removed from excess and waste. A person truly refined will not squander or needlessly consume anything. Refinement, on the contrary, is always allied to simp
licity and judicious and tasteful employment of the means of good and happiness which it has at its command.
He imagined a burglar coming to steal his gelignite. In the dim room, lit only by the luminous mountain remote as the moon, intruding eyes big and white with intentions, his shadow paler than himself, a ghostly bride on his muscular arm. He wished the burglar would come so somebody could see him and be given a shock. So somebody would notice him and speak. Fido vowed to scream if the burglar wouldn’t sit down and tell all about himself. And listen also. I would write him in my diary, Fido promised, and never tell on him if he promised to come again. On a new page the boy set out these words:
How are you going? Are you going with me?
I love you. If you love me, write back.
love
Fido
Fido was thinking he was where he always was, but with a difference. Uncle Sebastian planned to change the world by drilling a hole in the den wall for reconnaissance, a truly refined alteration, tasteful in its promise of good and happiness.
– Yes, Felicia explained. The shed fell down years ago, you wouldn’t remember, but somebody might come sneaking round to find out what’s buried there underneath and you’re to watch through the peephole as often as you like and give warning.
This promised to end the tyranny of the mountain picture. There would be other things to see once the hole had been drilled. Fido threw his paint at the window and smeared it across the remote glass with the straight-edge of cardboard. A judicious simplicity. In this way he dragged the paint into a semblance of the spirit of the mountain. It was the best day he had had for ages.
Seven – The Webster
Miss Bertha McAloon was swimming. Yes, she enjoyed a swim in the dam as long as she didn’t have to walk home afterwards, and young Peter Buddall would be coming for her before sundown in his Land Rover. You could depend on it. The water in the little dam warmed by muggy air. She didn’t care a fig for the world while she floated there, not on your life. She had her own way of swimming too, the Bertha McAloon style, a backstroke tending toward sidestroke, allowing you to ferry yourself around like a distressed raft. When she was swimming she was anywhere you like, so there. It was no good thinking: Miss McAloon is in the dam at Buddall’s where the cattle drink, not minding the rain, working her way across and back. No good at all, because the Empress Marie Louise was in fact placing one foot on Napoleon’s stocky neck and daring him to lay Russia in her lap as a Christmas present, a White Christmas my love. It would be a dreadful mistake to say there’s a crazy old lady floating naked in the dam, because that’d be Mattiwilda Shenandoah the forty-stone black freak with three breasts each big enough to feed four healthy babies, also with the stump of a tail too, that she’d only show as a special favour and then no one but men of good family, right now queening it in a stately home overlooking the wide Missouri, at a birthday party for herself, dressed in luminous green oh glory and how her eyes sparkle and how she laughs and wait till they want to see my tits. Anyway, as it was, nobody need look at the dam if they didn’t wish to, the peeping toms, nobody need see her ferrying her starved grey body round and around, let them mind their own business into the bargain, so what if her scrub of grey pubic hairs surfaced now and again, so what, she wasn’t even looking herself. She’s the Pope and they all come humbly to kiss her toe, no mistake about it, the bosses of the Mafia come like three wise kings with their gifts, followed by Isadora Duncan who is Bertha McAloon’s double would you believe, and then comes that bitch Annie Lang now rightly being given the raspberry by his Holiness herself, what else? Who does she think she is? Next please, put your hot lips there RudolphValentino mydear, I think I’ll have another off you while you’re here. How did that Annie Lang get into my cathedral in the first place, clap the guards in jail, if they can’t spot a heathen by now they don’t deserve their jobs, just wait to one side Rudy and we’ll have a private chat when all this bowing and scraping’s finished with for the day, I don’t mind admitting I’m longing for a cold bath in my crystal tub, III show you how I float, oh yes suck me there, why can’t I forget, oh yes you’ve got it, oh that’s lovely, I needed you. What’s the matter, I can’t forget, I can’t grow old, cold.
So she lay in luxury, Miss McAloon, swimming while the warm rain pattered on her and hissed into the yellow water of the dam. She could not see the mountain, she made sure she couldn’t even see the banks of the little dam itself: there was simply water and water falling gently into water to keep it there and keep it fresh. Hisses.
She lies on a heap of cushions dressed only in beads, fantastic skirts and bodices of beads, jewels in fact, her head caged in jewels, her arms weighed down by the bloody things, and a hundred boys of fifteen years kissing and petting her with their half-grown hands and their tentative roughness, ah, and rolling her about like a game and yes they’re so strong and so fresh you could slap their thighs hard, such fat hard thighs you’d never believe, and them being only boys with their chests not yet filled out, oh Lord so beautiful, let me have you all, but the things they want, you can’t teach them a trick these days, I’ll have you all, enough semen to fill a cup perhaps, a jug, yes all of you, a quart of semen, a gallon, I’ll have it, I’ll have it flowing out of me and keep some for breakfast, each one bigger than the last, good as a bull, hurt me if you can, I’m eighty-one you rotten little sneak I should tan your bottom, oh help, how strong, mercy, ooh, delicious, all spurting it out for me me me me and I can’t have enough, I’m slopping around in it, lovely, see the hairs coming like goats their legs already thick with hairs, they’ve got no shame, look at this one’s balls hanging like a black fig and his thing as thick as my wrist, whose son are you then? You’re better than your father was and your grandfather for that matter, I’ve had them all. Why don’t you bite me? why don’t you come back when you’re seventeen and kill me with it? Now don’t you try putting it in my mouth you pig, I’m going to drink you up for breakfast in my own time, you make me cry, those long eyelashes you evil thing and your spotty face. You want to come again, you’ll have to wait your turn. But no man’s big enough to give me satisfaction. As for boys, don’t make me laugh. Here take a jewel for doing what you could. How much have I had so far: a hundred boys of fifteen years, a gallon is it? Twice each and no one failed, raped by children, raped by grandnephews and grandchildren, a jug filled up with their two hundred children, children’s children, and I’m to drink the lot instead of eggs and bacon in the morning, you think I won’t but I will I’ll taste them all, they’ve broken my back for me and still I haven’t had enough. What a bitch that woman is, the cow of a thing. I’ll make her hop before I’ve finished with her.
Miss Bertha McAloon inspected her soggy fingers with their mauve nails and swollen joints. She floated on her back, one hand held up close to her face. The water framed her in a dozen concentric circles of yellow and silver, a dear old picture of time past. There was nothing above her and nothing below, the rain raining upwards and downwards. Untouched, she dipped her hand back like an article she had decided not to purchase and resumed the Bertha McAloon stroke.
She is revered for her wisdom, disciples come from the Himalayas that’s correct to visit her cave at Whitey’s Fall, she can’t even ask the time without it sounding profound. And yet she’s so beautiful she has to caress her arms all day and her legs too. All over herself she strokes freely feeling the firm soft beauty of what she is, while she says these things that bring the disciples and keep them listening. And this puts rubberlips Madam Brinsmead’s nose out of joint and no mistake. Not before time, the whore. Professors come to learn what she knows, and she doesn’t even have to try, doesn’t need to think even, but out come the sayings they’ll be turning into hymns a thousand years from now. She dresses herself in light, wears it like a fashion, swathed around her in lengths. No one would touch. Too holy. They get the idea. Naturally I’m pure as far as that goes; moral, must be, especially with Indians who set such store on being gentlemen and do it so we
ll. Sir I cannot let you touch me, not so much as the hem of my garment, but do please show me how you lie down on a bed of nails, I admire you for looking so relaxed and breathing easy the way you do. Up your bum Felicia Brinsmead if you think you can read my thoughts! She’s got her own secrets, never you mind. You hear her calling that dog of hers, you hear the silly devil calling Fido Fido, but who has ever seen the dog? I wouldn’t go so far as to say she’s drunk oh dear no, just raving bonkers more likely. If you ask me she’s dosing herself up with whatdoyoucallit, that drug stuff. She’s not all there at times, young Felicia isn’t, I’d testify to that, screw loose, nutty as a fruitcake, your Worship.
Into the clayey pool the new rain rained gently, blurring boundaries, also the world: an open egg where Miss McAloon lay contemplating the life to come. It would be a crass mistake to say that more than half a century ago she’d married Arthur Swan and borne his child. Even worse to say she’d been cast off by him because he never loved her. Lies, hideous slanders. Who ever said such things? Also that she’d wept and crawled, begged and screamed. Snap out of it. She was Miss Miss Miss McAloon proud daughter of Paddy and Nell. Paddy whose head was filled with the Mabinogion and all those dreadful stories of people being right and wrong, perhaps because his own father had been a strict bigamist; and Nell Swan the aunt of Arthur and mistress of two languages, who could recite the ‘Idylls of the King’ and could give ‘The Ode to a Nightingale’ backwards from finish to start. And of course of course Bertha had a talent of her own a dreaded malforming possessive lumpish talent which filled her with shame so she’d sooner disown it when she could, when it let her, but she never could forget. Not to mention her own child too, the steamy embraces of her son George who hadn’t the gumption and wouldn’t revenge her when she wanted, ached for, revenge. The avenger slopping in a tin bath of suds, the games and the catapults. Possible. So that she’d whisper why do you think I named you George? And now I’ll tell you the story, Saint George is your very own saint and his job was to save this lady in distress and kill this dragon, see. Oh yes, Bertha fed her son and nourished him so he’d grow strong, she made him sleep outdoors to toughen him up, she supervised his exercises with a copy of The Sandow Technique and had imported a Sandow chest-expander for his sixteenth birthday while she dreamt of his father floating in a pool of blood, an axe in his skull, or writhing on his promiscuous bed with the cord being tightened relentlessly round his sweaty neck, or howling into space as he fell from the top of Whitey’s Waterfall where the boy had picked him up bodily, lifted him above his head and flung him to justice, or broken his spine across his knee like that, snap. But what had she got? Bloody George the dumb ox who wouldn’t know a good revenge if it stabbed him to death. Sneak thief of her love and trust, letting her build such hopes of peace all for nothing, who went round at the age of fifty would you believe boasting that he’d learnt to ignore his father. That’s the last thing. I want you to hate him, to murder him, to see the lifelong injustice of these years I’ve suffered and watched. Does it mean nothing to you that he sleeps with every woman but his lawful wife your mother? Does it mean nothing that he abandoned us to our own devices when you were a little boy, to survive as best we could while he went trumpeting round the countryside on his bullock dray, on his truck, on his bus, skiting about his fame so you’d think they’d put him in the Guinness Book of Records for sheer bloody stamina and for a champion liar too, I hope? Does it mean nothing that all the years since your marriage to that idiot Rose I’ve lived in a cowshed nobody wanted, when I should have been in a palace by rights? I’ve given you everything, but what do you give in return? You owe me this. There’s only one thing I want and I want it. I’m living for it, that’s why I won’t die, and I won’t die till I get it. Yet you don’t give it to me. You dare to mention my talent as if it’s public, like a toilet anyone can visit and piss in. I’ll shoot you God support me, see if I don’t. Anybody comes snooping round’ll know what to expect from me. Talent. Dirty word, another failure too. You don’t get out of it that way, because I remember. And I even told you straight – George I wish you’d kill your father. Him, you had the gall to answer, sometimes I feel like doing it too! Well why not, why not for heaven’s sake get on with it? Has he got to lie down before you’ll step on him! It’s forty years since I gave you your axe and sent you across to Ping’s to learn how to keep it sharp. Have your brains addled or something? Then your Uncle Kel taught you to shoot straight, I sold my milker to buy you your rifle but what did I get for it apart from ten years’ free supply of rabbits? The Lord is my witness George you turned out to be a worm. And don’t dare talk to me about your own layabout son, that’s a sore subject, he’s the worst poison of all, hanging round his grandfather like a lovesick cow, with a tell me this and a tell me that and a how does the other and why and when and what does it mean granddaddy. Disgusting. Whose fault is it? Whose fault could it be but yours and your silly mouse Rose’s. Don’t ask me what put it in your head to marry her when I wanted an ally who’d urge you on, to shame you for wearing a heart so white, a fierce big giant of a woman not afraid to mess her own hands with the blood, I wanted an Amazon and you brought me Rose! I wanted her to be strong enough to educate her son in case you failed me. But she tricked you, she’s smarter than you, she made young Billy love him, she did it because she’s a mouse and afraid of me. I should poison your dog and I just might come and shoot the horse to teach you. I’d sooner have anything happen to them than have this happen to me, that’s for sure. Where is there justice to be had? What does it all mean? Don’t talk to me of my bloody talent, I’ve given it up. Fat compensation!