Whipbird

by Robert Drewe

  ‘Conor Cleary?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, your great-great-grandfather. Our pioneer family dead person.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘So you should feel at home.’ It didn’t even seem like sarcasm these days.

  Not that his agreement to attend the family gathering looked like relish. Overt enthusiasm had ceased to exist, along with his sense of taste and smell and the old desire for unfiltered Gauloises and Jameson’s whiskey and old-style, pre-hydroponic, North Coast cannabis, not to mention personal grooming, dental hygiene, the Tigers football team, one-night stands and playing music.

  But he didn’t refuse to attend, and these days that was something. Like an obedient robot, he allowed himself to be led along by Willow. And at the vineyard he even seemed faintly more attentive to his surroundings than usual. He wasn’t the slightest bit embarrassed about his relatives’ reaction to him. He had no vanity. No conversation. No emotions. His feelings couldn’t be hurt. It was OK to be avoided and shunned.

  To Sly, the good thing about having what everyone strangely insisted on referring to as Cotard’s Delusion was that sooner or later people got bored with you and gave you up for dead.

  4

  In the kaleidoscopic hullabaloo of relatives, Mick Cleary peered around for people he recognised. A fourth-generation descendant, at seventy-nine he was still more than a decade younger than the oldest two present.

  He noticed them at once because of their mobility aids. Bonnie Hanrahan from Claremont was tootling around on an electric scooter decorated with both the Australian and Irish flags, and the breezy Bunbury nonagenarian Keith O’Leary, rustically decorative in leather Akubra, moleskins and turquoise T-shirt, his free hand gripping a beer, was balanced on a walking frame. Bonnie and Keith unsettled him. They reminded him of his own increasing age and what loomed ahead. If he was lucky. Jesus Christ.

  Gazing around for other, younger, faces, Mick mused on the large number of red-headed kids running around and stirring up the dust. Given that by the fifth generation more exotic surnames – Hu, Stefanizzi, Ioannou and Duvnjak – had begun inviting him for Christmas lunch or a beer in the backyard, the redheads made him feel nostalgic for his own childhood. Every kid was ginger or sandy back then. There were still a few left in the countryside but immigration had made it rare to see a freckled nose in the city of Melbourne these days.

  As well as the Hu offspring there were another three Eurasian youngsters here today, his nephew Craig Cleary’s kids, Jackson, Hunter and Gemi, whose attractive mother Rani came from Aceh.

  Before Craig married Rani (‘sparkly’ or ‘snazzy’ was how Mick always thought of Rani), Mick had never heard of Aceh. At their second, Australian, wedding reception in Perth (the first one being a traditional Muslim ceremony) he learned that Aceh was in northern Sumatra, in Indonesia. The biggest Muslim country in the world: 250 million of them living on Australia’s doorstep. Mick was well aware of that fact.

  He’d always been close to Craig, an amiable, pragmatic conservationist who’d moved from Melbourne to Western Australia in 2003 as a participant in the north-west mining boom, when it became clear that endangered creatures like the kaluta and the pebble-mound mouse and the spectacled hare-wallaby existed in a mineral-rich landscape and that the mining companies’ public images had great need of environmental advice.

  He regarded Craig like a son. Sadly, more of a real son than Simon. A practical, sensible son who listened to him without rolling his eyes or tapping his foot or making that strange whistling sound in his teeth. A son who had no doubt he was alive.

  But no getting around it, he’d found the idea of Craig bringing a Muslim into the family a little disconcerting. Until the tsunami rose out of the ocean floor and crashed over Aceh on Boxing Day in 2004 and flooded back into his awareness.

  He could pinpoint when monster waves first swept into his consciousness. A Saturday night at the East Hawthorn Rivoli in the late ’60s. He and Kath saw Krakatoa, East of Java (there wasn’t much else on, and Kath was keen on Maximilian Schell ‘as an actor’), and as they discussed the film afterwards over coffee at Giovanni’s in Camberwell Road, their weekly after-the-pictures habit, he realised that tsunamis had joined his list of fears (a coronary, sharks, claustrophobic caves, and some disaster befalling the kids) with more frightening power than any of them.

  Ridiculous really, but – he’d read up on it since – even the eruption of the real Krakatoa, its thunderous explosion heard around the world in 1883, was nothing compared to its tsunamis that hit Java and Sumatra. And then in 2004 Sumatra – Aceh – was struck again!

  Cave and shark fears were pretty needless. And the kids were adults now and beyond his ministrations. Heart attack? Well, what could you do about that? He didn’t regard himself as a particularly good Catholic but he believed he was a sympathetic Christian and that 30-metre wave beggared belief. Biblical in its power and devastation, sucking out to sea hundreds of thousands of innocent people on both sides of the Indian Ocean. Or tossing their bloated bodies miles inland.

  The thing was. . . Rani’s sudden presence after an interlude always reminded him of the Aceh tsunami, and at the fresh sight of her his imagination flared anew and his heart went out retrospectively to all those unfortunate versions of her, even though by the time the wave struck she’d left Aceh, married Craig and moved to the coastal suburb of Three Reefs, outside Perth.

  As it was, Craig said they’d even seen the tsunami’s effect there, 5000 kilometres south. When the earthquake, 9.3 on the Richter scale, pushed up the seabed 30 metres and created the giant wave, the ocean level had risen 5 metres at their boat pen in the Three Reefs marina.

  ‘Crazy. Suddenly the boat began rocking and we were floating over the jetty.’

  To Mick’s questioning, Rani had eventually revealed in her giggly embarrassed way that her entire high-school class, her teenage friends of the ’90s, had gone that day. She didn’t say ‘drowned’ or ‘swept away’. She said ‘gone’.

  When that sank in, the mental picture of all those young Acehnese running, screaming, from the wave, skinny Asian kids like the ones in Krakatoa, he had to ask. ‘What about your family?’

  She brightened then. ‘Very lucky. Only three cousins and my aunt and uncle gone. Mother and father and my sisters and grandmother were at a wedding ceremony in the hills.’

  It was odd. She’d been safely 5000 kilometres away, but he still perceived her as a brave little tidal-wave survivor. Even a moment before, as soon as he spotted her across the paddock, giggling as she pulled on a Cleary T-shirt over her shimmery little blouse, he’d done so yet again. Why?

  Whenever they started chatting he brought it up. The massive destruction that turned the capital of Banda Aceh to matchsticks! The tragic victims turned into flotsam! Inevitably, he’d blurt out again, ‘What about that tsunami? Unbelievable!’

  She was always patient, giggled and patted his arm. ‘It’s OK, Uncle, I’m fine. I wasn’t there that day! You know that! Here I am!’ He still looked unsure about that.

  His daughter Thea found the Rani-tsunami effect on him irrational and irritating. He sounded dotty and she told him so. ‘Give the wave a rest, Dad. It was ten years ago. Very sad at the time but the tide’s gone out again.’

  That rankled. ‘What about the huge wave that struck Japan the other day? And the nuclear meltdown thing.’

  ‘Fukushima was three or four years ago. And what’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘I thought you Doctors Without Borders were supposed to be sympathetic to natural disasters.’

  Ouch. But a professional humanitarian could still be wary of feminine adorability and tinselly glamour. And of her 79-year-old father having a crush. Rani’s tolerant amusement at his obsession was also annoying, the way she’d bat her eyes and giggle and tap his wrist, her bright nails like butterflies pattering on his arm.

  Another of Thea’s firm opinions was the way Asians instinctively coped with the inevitability of disaster. She’d
seen it firsthand often enough. The Asian survival instinct: Yes, that was really bad. Luckily I’m all right. The women especially. ‘I see why they have to be flirty and manipulative steel butterflies,’ Thea said. ‘Considering the world they live in, and the men in that world.’

  Did she mean the Muslim thing? Mick’s views on Islam had been moulded by talkback jocks and tabloid columnists and the banter of his football cronies. A football club’s bar wasn’t exactly the centre of enlightened cultural thinking.

  But the Rani he knew was smart as paint and even had some sort of degree from the University of Singapore. She was also pretty and fun, making it clear she enjoyed a glass of champagne with her clove cigarettes and sighing theatrically as she bemoaned Three Reefs’ lack of karaoke bars. And far from downtroddenly peeking out from a burqa or niqab like an animated letterbox, she liked sunbathing in a bikini on their boat off Rottnest Island. Rani was no more a fundamentalist, a manic zealot, than he was.

  As far as he could tell (he’d mistakenly cooked her a breakfast of bacon and eggs once, and her face was a picture), her only Islamic no-no was pork. Hardly a problem. She certainly had a business brain. Backed by Craig’s healthy wages as a fly-in, fly-out environmental adviser in the Pilbara mining industry, she’d even opened her own Indonesian restaurant.

  Thinking aloud as he shared a beer now with his cousin Doug Casey, Mick murmured, ‘They’re not always like the media says. Like you read in the papers.’

  ‘Who are you talking about?’ Doug asked.

  ‘Muslims. Compared to being a Tyke in the old days, some of them are pretty relaxed.’

  ‘Muslims? Relaxed?’

  Mick cleared his throat. ‘In many cases. From my observations.’

  Doug held his beer at arm’s length, stretched out his neck and moved his head from side to side so something clicked each time.

  For some reason Mick found this neck-clicking grating and oversporty. Doug was hardly a gymnast or an athlete. ‘My Muslim niece Rani is a real glamourpuss,’ he went on, and immediately knew this sounded inappropriate. ‘A bright businesswoman, too.’

  Doug arched an eyebrow and slowly surveyed the crowd, as if trying to pick her out, but without much enthusiasm. ‘Looks as if everyone’s enjoying themselves,’ he declared finally.

  Like Lord Muck at the manor’s Christmas party, thought Mick. He gazed around at the cheerful hubbub. Where was Rani? He wanted to show her off to Doug as the shining example of her entire religion and culture. Shrieking children were bouncing on the inflated crab and sliding down the giraffe’s neck while excited dogs barked and tore around them. A woman’s laugh rang out, gathered momentum and age, turned throaty and ended in a rich smoker’s cough.

  ‘Give Aunty a drink,’ a male voice said.

  ‘Make it mineral water this time,’ said another voice, amid laughter.

  People were putting on hats as the sun gathered strength. Mothers grabbed squirming kids as they ran past, kicking up gravel dust, and dabbed them with sunscreen.

  Mick sipped his beer. ‘I’m all for fresh blood in the family,’ he said.

  ‘It’s like when New Australians came into football in the ’50s and ’60s. That was for the better. And the Indigenous players of course.’

  Now Doug was rolling his shoulders like an Olympic swimmer on the blocks. ‘Sure. With their silky skills.’

  What’s with his bloody shoulders now? ‘That goes without saying,’ Mick said. ‘Where would the game be without them?’

  Doug made his neck click again, took a deep breath, and sipped his beer as if it was a novel experience. ‘You can’t beat the Italians and Greeks as midfielders,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Yep, the powerhouse. The guts of the team.’

  Although his cousin’s glass was still three-quarters full, Mick topped it up. You could make your point by being hostly and solicitous, he thought. Being magnanimous and managerial. But what the Christ was all that stretching and flexing about? Doug was sixteen years his junior. He looked as if he lifted weights these days and wanted you to know it. Probably jogged, too, swam laps, played tennis. He was all chest and biceps and shoulders. He’d overdone the bench presses though. His snug Casey T-shirt gave him man boobs.

  Doug still glared at his beer as if it might contain foreign bodies. ‘I’ve always said no one tags better or tackles harder than the Italians and Greeks.’

  ‘It’s their build,’ Mick said. ‘Low centre of gravity. Natural muscle definition even without the gym work. They’re built to absorb the bumps. When they hit the deck they just bounce up again and get on with it.’

  ‘Their small on-ballers can run all day. Don’t need a tracking device to check they’ve run 15 kilometres a game.’

  ‘What about those big Yugoslavs? Natural ruckmen and centre half-forwards.’

  ‘No one quite like the Slavs for withstanding a concussion,’ Doug said.

  5

  The skinny tattooed boy in the black cut-off cowboy shirt led the pale unfocused girl around the paddock, stopping off at various tables and family groups to sample drinks, puff on a cigarette and enthusiastically greet people before frisking away again.

  ‘How are you? Good to see you again!’ the boy enthused, evading tentative questions from a mob of Fagans. He pumped hands and slapped backs and ruffled a few Casey children’s hair. He gave the handlebars of Bonnie Hanrahan’s mobility scooter an admiring pat. ‘Vroom-vroom. Great day for it! Long time no see!’

  Everyone smiled back and said hello, and then looked vaguely puzzled as the couple, like old-time politicians glad-handing the crowd, the boy emphatic but evasive, the girl beaming silently, continued their way confidently around the grounds.

  Bonnie Hanrahan had been grizzling about the choice of the whipbird as the vineyard’s emblem. ‘A nice birdcall but a very drab looking customer. Beats me why Hugh didn’t choose something prettier, like the Splendid Fairy Wren we have in WA. A beautiful iridescent blue colour.’

  ‘Nowhere near as pretty as our Superb Fairy Wren here in Victoria,’ argued Enid Fagan.

  ‘Take it easy, Aunties!’ the boy called out to the old women. ‘Hi, dudes!’ he waved to some kids. ‘Looking good, Uncle!’ he said to old Keith O’Leary. ‘Great to get together. Catch you all later!’

  ‘Who’s that again?’ Keith wondered aloud. He felt awkward being singled out and not knowing. A strange self-assured boy. Keith murmured that he found the tattoos and clothing a bit disturbing, and the boy’s manner a little pushy, ‘But that’s young people everywhere today, isn’t it?’

  ‘Get with the fashion, Keith,’ teased Des Fagan. ‘Plenty of people old enough to know better have them these days. I’ve even noticed a couple of mature ladies with tatts here today.’

  ‘Not in this family, surely,’ scoffed Keith, gripping his walking frame and straightening his back. ‘Unless you were in the navy.’

  ‘Seriously,’ said Des. ‘One old biddy over there’s got her grandkids’ faces on her arms. The kids’ cheeks are looking a bit stretched.’

  ‘Sounds like the McMahons to me,’ sniffed Bonnie Hanrahan. ‘From up Townsville way. Or the Opies from Burnie. Could be the Opies. They were always on the rough side.’

  ‘Takes all types,’ said Keith, primly. ‘OK on a sailor but nothing looks worse than tattoos on a grandma’s bingo wings.’

  They gave the boy the benefit of the doubt. It seemed unfair to think he was mocking and patronising them when he was probably just being high-spirited and getting into the family’s weekend mood.

  ‘I think he’s called Dallas or Phoenix, some modern name like that,’ Bonnie said. ‘It makes me cross, the crazy names parents give their kiddies these days. Naming them after places and drinks and the seasons of the year.’

  ‘American places!’ said Des. ‘There’s Dakotas and Montanas and Cheyennes everywhere you look.’

  Keith grunted his disapproval. ‘Never any kids called Melbourne or Hobart, I notice. No little Brisbanes running around. Not
hing Aussie.’

  ‘I overheard a young mum growling at her mob of kids in Woolworths the other day,’ Bonnie went on. ‘“Come here, Kahlua and Bailey! Behave yourself, Tequila!” Give me strength!’

  The younger ones simply gathered the boy in the black shirt was drunk or stoned. And they reckoned the girl was certainly on something as well. Definitely on the slutty side. And the boy was acting like a prick with the oldies. But no sweat. They supposed he was just having a bit of fun, and he was family after all.

  A couple of the more wayward Opie and Godber boys wondered if the swagger meant he was dealing. He looked each of them in the eye, a firm gaze, exhaled a smoke ring like someone from the last century, gave them a cool handshake and fist bump each, said, ‘Bro, if you only knew,’ and went on his way, his arm around the girl’s waist.

  Most of the groups felt slightly guilty at not being able to place him. The older aunties, however, were still canvassing the Fairy Wren question.

  Enid Fagan was shaking her head and muttering, ‘I much prefer the Superb.’

  ‘When the sun catches a Splendid’s feathers it’s just like a gorgeous sapphire darting about,’ declared Bonnie Hanrahan.

  6

  Blah, blah, blah. Mick took another swig of beer. How annoying to hear his cousin spouting football knowledge like a game commentator. Breezy Doug, the authority on all football codes, was in Mick’s view still a dyed-in-the-wool rugby man. And a New South Welshman to boot. What would a bloody Sydneysider know about Australian Rules football?

  Worse, he considered Doug to be a member of that toffy brigade who convened in the Members’ stand in their weekend tweed jackets and squatter’s boots. Those tossers really got him going. Their Monday-to-Friday uniform, too: the shirts with contrasting cutaway collars and cuffs. Those bloody two-toned shirts and big Windsor tie knots that declared, ‘I’m at ease handling sums and interest rates beyond your pathetic understanding.’