Whipbird

by Robert Drewe

  Brigitte Bardot, alas, had been disappointingly prim. It was the women he didn’t expect to be at all earthy (Maggie, Jackie, the Queen), and had never found attractive in waking life (Thatcher and the Queen), who not only revealed their surprisingly basic natures but were unexpectedly sensual in bed or wherever it was they seduced him: in Thatcher’s case the back stalls of the Rivoli, and Jackie’s the lino floor of his childhood bedroom in the Riverview.

  Desiring ‘somewhere high up’, the Westgate Bridge was the Queen’s preference for their first assignation. But thereafter their congress was transported magically to Pellegrini’s cafe in Bourke Street and to half-time at the Punt Road Oval. Her Majesty was an avid Tigers supporter.

  During restless nights, his version of counting sheep, he’d sometimes try for sleep by listing the last Richmond premiership team in his head – the 1980 heroes. From the back line down: Malthouse, Bourke and Dunn. Strachan, Mount and Smith. Welsh, Raines and Wood. Rowlings, Jess and Bartlett. And when he got to Kevin Bartlett he’d recall KB’s comb-over flying in the wind as he weaved and snapped his seven goals, and he wouldn’t bother naming the other forwards. He didn’t feel calmed exactly, or sleepy, but somehow more resolved.

  Why were his moods so up and down nowadays? Because some things mattered. Had the non-Tiger members of the family no sense of loyalty, no recognition of the games their own blood relations, his uncles Barry (‘The Brick’) Cleary, in 1928–31, and Colin (‘Clacker’) Cleary, from 1946 to 1955, had played for Richmond?

  Clearys had been loyal Tiger fans ever since settling in Richmond; present at the inception of the Richmond Australian Rules football club in 1885. Enthusiastic followers through the good times (the ten premierships), and the not-so-hot years (no premiership since 1980, seven wooden spoons, too many wobbly off-field administrations, and snowballing debts). Anyway their final position in this year’s competition – eighth out of eighteen – showed promise. They’d made the finals, given it a good shot.

  Mick believed character was the term for it. Unlike the other old working-class sides, Collingwood, Carlton and Essendon – teams their rivals loved to hate, all filthy-rich clubs now, with 22-year-olds on half a million a year driving Porsches and Maseratis, all media darlings with reckless hairstyles, sleeves of tattoos and tangerine boots – the Tigers still had the blue-collar ethic.

  The acerbic pub comments about serial losers? Tiger fans could take them on the chin: ‘We’re not serial losers. We’re just thirty-five years into a forty-year rebuilding program.’ Their players’ mullet hairdos and prison-style throat tattoos, their sudden flashes of goal-kicking brilliance, the way they waxed hot and cold, had the ring of authenticity. No one ever accused Richmond boys of acting above their station.

  ‘They’ve got – what’s the phrase? – a cult following,’ he liked to say. ‘Not cult in the sense of gurus or tambourines. Cult in a good way.’

  In this second decade of the 21st century the Tigers still stood for grit and resilience. Like the Cleary family itself, thought Mick. The Clearys had risen up in the world because they had something solid behind them.

  As he sipped his drink and gazed out across his son’s vineyard at the Tiger-striped marquee and the Tigerish banner flapping in the breeze and the Tiger guernseys running around the paddock on the backs of the family’s boisterous kids – that dramatic lightning-bolt flash of yellow on black – for a brief moment, as a blast of cold wind, a touch of winter, completed the feeling, he was back at the old Punt Road ground with hordes of kids mobbing the field, all kicking their own footballs around crazily after a victory in a close game.

  To Mick Cleary, for a brief moment on this memorable afternoon by the Kungadgee Creek, the Tigers and the Clearys seemed synonymous with history.

  12

  The meat smoke was dispersing, descendants’ bellies were full of food and alcohol, and Hugh Cleary, countrified in dusty boots, moleskins and kangaroo-skin belt, stood on a portable dais by the as-yet-unused wine cellar (its rammed-earth wall nevertheless providing the most photogenic backdrop), rolled up his shirtsleeves to look more like a wine grower than a Melbourne barrister, nodded to the photographer from Brides & Babies, cleared his throat and tapped the microphone.

  ‘One-two. One-two. Can everyone hear me?’ He was answered by a piercing audio-feedback screech, and from the multicoloured horde of after-lunch drinkers came cheers, whistles and cries of both ‘Yes!’ and ‘No!’ and ‘Silence in the court!’ and ‘Go, Hughie!’

  There was irony in some cheers, and alcohol beginning to talk as well, and a few smiles and amused groans at the audio squeals, but to give Hugh credit, also an appreciation that Whipbird, his new consuming interest, had provided the weekend’s venue, and that his persistence and organisational skills had brought everyone here together, and that in the absence of anyone else assuming control he was probably the family’s de facto leader. Some of the crowd pointed their phone cameras at him, and most of the raised faces were expectant and agreeable.

  Yet as Hugh gazed silently across the vineyard he seemed absorbed by something else: deep emotion perhaps, or sentiment or pride or family history. Maybe seeing the deadpan expressions on the faces of his siblings, Thea and Simon. It was certainly disconcerting to see Simon here today.

  However, what he was wondering was Where on earth is Christine? Just as he was about to speak, she was nowhere to be seen. Lately she was likely to abruptly extract herself from events. From a conversation. From a room. From his company. These silent withdrawals made his stomach churn and his head pound and a feeling of wretchedness sweep over him. Increasingly, he’d spot her off to the side somewhere, murmuring into her phone.

  Several times he’d asked, ‘Who was that?’ But her answer, ‘No one important’ or ‘Just a friend’, was so upraised-chin defiant it rendered his question oversuspicious, petty and altogether beneath him, and although he did feel suspicious, and would run a list of their male acquaintances and potential lovers through his mind (thinking possibly, no, maybe, never), he was too proud to inquire again.

  For a few moments on the dais Hugh felt inexplicably lost, aswim in a blurry crowd of strangers. Crows gargled invasively on the homestead roof. The breeze was picking up, and he felt his hair rise up rebelliously and flop sideways, askew and possibly ridiculous. ‘Daddy’s Prince Charles,’ his girls affectionately called his comb-over. Should he try to pat down Prince Charles or bravely let it fly about? It was impossible to leave it. Self-consciously, he raked his fingers through his hair. To little avail.

  Two restless young people in the front row were also unsettling him. Was that his second cousin Lucas snuffling into, and puffing cigarette smoke over, a pale tottery girl? Was the girl a distantly related Fagan? A L’Estrange perhaps?

  Were they out for mischief? The boy, (was it Adam Opie, or Brock Duvnjak?) wasn’t wearing the required family T-shirt but a black cowboy shirt with pearl pocket studs and sleeves cut off raggedly at the shoulders, the better – Hugh imagined – to show off his tattoos. The girl’s loose black singlet revealed purple bra straps and feathery wings inked across her plump upper chest. Both heads displayed jagged clumps of ink-black hair.

  Now they were competitively blowing smoke into one another’s necks. A couple of nearby people coughed. How strangely unsociable cigarette smoke looked these days. He hadn’t thought of putting up ‘No smoking’ signs. Was it too late now?

  Hugh turned away from them. As was his custom with jurors in court, he looked for a friendly, open face to concentrate on. As he searched for a suitably receptive person, all those expressionless upturned faces stared back at him. He found one eventually: an elderly woman gazing firmly at him. He focused on her.

  Then she frowned. ‘T-shirt!’ the woman (a Casey? An Opie?) called out. ‘Where’s your Cleary colours, Hugh?’

  Half hidden beneath his country laird’s chambray shirt. With a self-conscious grin he undid a couple of buttons to reveal the yellow and black of his father’s Tiger
fetish, one he shared less enthusiastically.

  ‘That’s better,’ the woman called. There was a pattering of applause.

  For a second, his mind a blank, he agonised, Who are these people really? What do they want?

  Why did he feel he lacked full control of the moment? Was he ill? All his court experience, advocacy, the decades of public speaking, the pleasurable grandstanding, the liking – actual enjoyment – he used to feel for the adversarial legal system with its fairness and firmness, abruptly counted for little. God, it was the junior inter-school debate all over again, being fourteen and First Affirmative speaker on the topic ‘That Television Is More Educational than Books’.

  For the first time his debating opponents were girls, three extraordinarily tall, smug, confident girls from Genazzano Faithful Companions of Jesus College. Girls tall as giraffes. Grown women, really, with substantial breasts. And another fifty or sixty of these proudly breasted women in the audience!

  He’d stood up, walked through a mist to the lectern, croaked out ‘My proposition is...’ and everything clouded over: his notes, the audience of breasts, the school hall, the honour boards and the gallery of dead former principals spinning on the walls, the whole world.

  After what seemed a decade or two of wordlessness he scraped together enough presence of mind to walk back through the fog and find his seat. And the First Negative speaker, a Grace Kelly type who looked at least twenty-five, smiled confidently over her breasts at the giggling audience of her full-breasted cronies and declared, ‘Clearly my opponent watches too much television.’

  He struggled to clear his head now. Shouldn’t have had those three or four wines so early, he thought. Not on top of a hard week of whispers back in chambers, his organisational fatigue and today’s varied emotions and, above all – this was the crux of it – a certain deeply felt disappointment.

  When he’d sent out the invitations, in fact all year, he’d anticipated that this celebratory weekend would coincide with the important annual announcement by the Victorian Bar. What nice timing it would be for the notice today – in Saturday’s Age, in front of the state’s serious newspaper readers, not to mention the assembled Cleary clan – of this year’s appointments to the prestigious ranks of Queen’s Counsel.

  He’d had a tip-off back in May: this year he was home and hosed. The word was out. Certain foes at the Bar had died or retired to their Portsea beach houses and Gippsland cattle properties and Tuscan villas. And the announcement had come on schedule. Eighteen new silks had been appointed, but Hugh Michael Cleary, for eighteen years a significant figure at the Victorian Bar, and on his fifth year of applying, was still silkless.

  Was it the barrister in him, the frustrated actor, the disappointed silk-in-waiting, who now seemed to require total audience attention and silence, an absence of all distracting crowd movement and bird calls and hair-disturbing breezes? A world where wives didn’t keep mysteriously vanishing, and where audio problems, weird overcoated siblings, garishly illustrated young smokers and the Bar’s selection committee did not exist?

  His studied pause caused parents to hush skylarking children, and those kids who continued to bounce on the octopus and crab, or chase dogs and cousins around the adults’ legs, were surprised to be shushed to silence and stillness by unfamiliar distant relatives in different colours.

  Abruptly the breeze freshened over the paddock of assembled descendants: the intractable weather of Ballarat. It no longer felt like late spring or early summer, and the air smelled of wintry dust. Too lightly dressed in their T-shirts, some of the women began shivering and murmuring about fetching their jackets. Toddlers hugged their mothers’ legs. Down by the creek, crows rasped and gagged, and in an adjoining paddock Zoe Cleary’s nervy Arabian, already agitated by all the unaccustomed activity, was spooked by a windblown plastic bag and whinnied and galloped around the boundary fence.

  In the hiatus, a disappointed Staffordshire terrier belonging to the Kennedys or the O’Learys, though no one claimed ownership, yelped and tore optimistically around everyone’s legs for a few minutes, hoping to rekindle dog and child play, before skidding to a halt at the dais.

  Hugh frowned as the audio system screeched again. ‘Welcome to you all,’ he said eventually. The black-clad boy and girl giggled. The audio squeals and the reckless dog now had the merrier, more noncompliant elements in the crowd looking forward to something amusing and uncontrollable happening. Something anarchic enough to ruffle a stuffy lawyer and focus their phone cameras on, something funnier than technical problems: a terrier’s raised leg or drawn-out crap. Better still, a complicated canine mating.

  From their keen faces, the boy in black and the pale girl were definitely of this mind. The suspense grew. But unfortunately for the audience’s rebels the dog briefly sniffed the edge of the dais, found no interesting scent, declined to urinate, and waddled off on its bowlegs.

  Hugh snapped out of it. Enough nonsense. ‘Welcome to Whipbird, everyone,’ he repeated. ‘I hope you’re enjoying our family’s160th anniversary.’

  He paused as if awaiting applause. There was some polite clapping and the boy in black gave a piercing whistle.

  Hugh frowned in the whistle’s direction. ‘First, a housekeeping announcement. Christine wants to remind everyone that the portable toilets are over there by the camping paddock, so please use them and have mercy on our septic system. And the creek is deep and fast-flowing at the moment, so I implore everyone to keep an eye on your kids.

  ‘This weekend,’ he went on, ‘is certainly a significant occasion, and not only for the Clearys but for the nation as a whole. You know of course that the battle at the Eureka Stockade, the historic miners’ uprising that changed the fabric of our nation, happened just down the road from here and it’s celebrating its 160th anniversary as well.’

  There was a muted audience reaction. A few murmurs. Some of the adults recalled a school history lesson on Australia’s small, swift civil war. But not much education time had been spent on it. Who could remember the date involved when there wasn’t even a public holiday for it?

  Hearing Hugh link the family celebration to Eureka, and noting the audience’s lack of response, his sister Thea wondered, not for the first time, why she found Australian history so boring.

  It had taken an evening meal in a refugee camp in South Sudan three months ago for this to dawn on her. She’d struggled to pin down Australia’s character in answer to a dinnertime question while picking at some indefinable dark and stringy meat. She was hoping it was goat or camel rather than bush meat because her weight had dropped to 45 kilos here and even vegetarians could tire of watery millet porridge.

  She was agonising over whether farmed animals were ethically nearer to vegetarianism than species-threatened gazelle, white-eared kob or tiang when the question came, from a young Portuguese surgeon, Agostinho D’Cruz.

  ‘Can you please describe Australia to me?’

  Agostinho had serious brown eyes and an overwhelming nose she felt sorry for. He was appealing in a strange way, like a pet anteater or echidna. Was it just his nose, which the lamp was exaggerating to an outlandish silhouette, the nose of an Indonesian shadow puppet, a wayang kulit, that aroused her compassion? The nose made him look vulnerable, which was odd when its shadow dominated half the side of the dinner tent.

  During meals it was a rule, a little slice of civilised behaviour, for MSF teams not to speak of the political mayhem where they currently laboured. But home countries were allowable discussion topics. Agostinho and his shadow-puppet anteater nose politely persevered.

  ‘My apologies, but I’m ignorant of your faraway country.’

  Just polite dinnertime conversation over the camel or goat, or maybe bush meat, but by this stage she’d seen several international skirmishes, epidemics and disasters, and the fierce disorder of extreme religion and nationalism, and felt momentarily homesick for a country and a system that, despite its blemishes, worked well by comparison. She found hersel
f gushing.

  ‘A secular democracy on the Westminster model – safe, reasonably prosperous, generally honest, comparatively fair and proudly egalitarian.’

  How boring and wishy-washy – she could have been talking about Switzerland. Already his eyes were wandering to the boiled-water jug, the tin of salt and rice grains on the table, the spices to make the stringy meat edible.

  Feeling guilty for this First World smugness, she went on. ‘An odd thing though. Think of a place as far away from Australia as possible, a different hemisphere, a country with no gripe with us whatsoever, all in all a dubious proposition for an enemy, and we’ll send our soldiers to fight there without a quibble.’

  ‘We used to do that in the past,’ Agostinho said. As he reached for the water jug and sat back again, his nose’s silhouette stretched all the way to the tent flap and then contracted. ‘But only for empire-building purposes. And then to try and retain the colonies when they grew up. But we’re over that foolishness now.’

  ‘We’re not quite over being a colony,’ Thea said.

  ‘You must like wars then.’

  ‘Strategic ones. Insurance wars. We suck up to the biggest boy in the playground so he’ll protect us from the scary boys in the next class.’

  On her Sudanese stretcher later that night, suddenly feverish and sleepless, more things to tell Agostinho tumbled madly through her head. (But not that she found his nose attractive in a sad way.) Like the fact that Australians traditionally celebrated the suffering of heavy casualties. In subsidiary roles. In far-off places. In lost battles.

  ‘That’s our big one. But we’re also known for transforming fatally flawed explorations into heroic civic statues. Oh, and we easily forgave the contemptuous disregard of us in two world wars.’

  ‘Seriously?’ wondered the Agostinho of her fever. ‘Just like us?’

  OK, she told herself. I’m semi-delirious, feverish and nauseous in a North African refugee camp. Malaria? Not Plasmodium falciparum, thanks. Probably too far north. Maybe Plasmodium vivax. Shit!