Whipbird

by Robert Drewe

  Doug frowned. ‘What I’m saying is they’re focused on putting human systems first. They’re looking carefully at the consequences of those systems in order to rebuild trust.’

  ‘In English, please,’ said Mick.

  ‘It means it’s time for you to get off your bloody hobbyhorse. Everything’s under control.’

  ‘Banks feathering their own nests ahead of their customers? Yeah, you’re right – it is my bloody hobbyhorse. No one trusts you lot any more.’

  ‘My lot? I’m an innocent bystander. Out of the game. Retired. And you’re exaggerating what’s basically just a PR problem. You need to get a new theme, Mick. Not that dusty leftover from the sentimental ’70s.’

  ‘You’re out of it just in time, with your golden handshake. Nifty work, Doug, escaping all the financial-planning scandals. The bloody conflicts of interest.’

  ‘You boys stop it!’ Claire said.

  ‘Steady on, guys,’ said Warren.

  ‘Let’s change the subject,’ said Steve. ‘Agree to disagree.’

  Mick was beginning to sway. ‘What about the manipulation of interest rates, eh? The duping of clients? Let’s face it, Doug. Consumer trust is shot. The whole banking culture is fucked from the top down.’

  Doug peered at him over the rim of his glass. His eyes were doing that thing: Dan Cleary’s coldly amused glint. A few seconds passed. Music percussed somewhere, throbbed and stopped.

  ‘No, Mick, it’s just you who is.’

  Suddenly his father’s eyes were more than Mick could bear this particular weekend, at this specific moment in time, well into his seventh hour of drinking, after standing painfully all day in a paddock on his new hip, and being insulted by Christine, and now saddened by Craig and Rani’s misfortune. And the only way he could possibly deal with the idea of Craig’s unjustified retrenchment and Doug’s glinting eyes, just like his father’s, was to take a swing at him.

  Mick’s lack of balance on the paddock’s rough surface, not to mention his extensive alcohol intake, and being seventy-nine, and Doug’s younger reflexes, meant the punch merely grazed Doug’s right shoulder. It jostled him enough, however, for him to douse himself with his full glass of shiraz.

  ‘You stupid old fart! What’s got into you?’

  The momentum of his own swing almost felled Mick, forcing him to dance sideways for several steps in order to stay upright, and then to sashay into Claire’s side, almost knocking her over. He was suddenly so wobbly on his feet it was like he’d been the person struck. Then his new hip gave way and he slumped to the ground.

  Warren and Steve took an arm each and held him up while Doug, dripping with wine, shrugged off Claire’s ineffectual dabbing with a tissue. Cursing, he stomped off to look for Thea to come and cart Mick away.

  His assailant yelled after him, something triumphant in his voice, Guess what? You know fuck-all about football, Doug!’

  Sunday

  30 November 2014

  1

  Father Ryan Cleary headed morosely towards the smell of bacon. A thirty-minute Bible search down by the creek had neither eased his hangover nor produced anything particularly relevant for Whipbird’s blessing.

  The relentless tumbling water roiled in his head. The creek smelled nauseatingly of sour mud, an eggish odour, and the dewy bushes fringing the banks gave off an early-morning, turpentine stench that made him feel even queasier. Bird shrieks teased his headache – two swamphens were tearing apart a stolen duckling in front of its distraught but ineffectually flapping parent.

  Nature, red in tooth and claw. He wasn’t up to considering Tennyson’s views on impersonal Nature functioning without divine intervention. Or theology’s take on it either. Led by his hungry hungover stomach, his senses directed him across the paddocks towards frying bacon.

  This morning’s blessing was made harder by it having to cover the family as well as the vineyard. For the anniversary benediction the old aunts and grandmas would expect a thorough job, divine approval of the family’s existence via their very own priest.

  Wine itself was easy enough to spruik. Wine was the very first miracle. Christianity swam in the stuff. But an appropriate Bible passage for consecrating a Melbourne lawyer’s new hobby vineyard on the lower western plains of the Great Dividing Range of the state of Victoria, Australia? The scriptures were sketchy on that.

  No denying wine’s importance in the Church’s history and ceremonies, but Biblical vineyards hardly reflected 21st-century concepts of fairness or logic. Or the winemaking process, for that matter. The Biblical vineyard was usually a symbol for trouble.

  OK, Ryan asked himself, what’ve we got? There was Matthew, the former tax collector from Capernaum, who certainly took an interest in the grape as metaphor, but his vineyards were not jolly workplaces.

  One of Matthew’s wine growers made a big deal of paying every worker the same salary – one denarius – whether they worked only one hour or eleven hours straight. As if this was an admirable thing. Not nowadays, Matt. Human Resources would be on your case. How could Matthew, with his maths and taxation know-how, not appreciate how this would go over with the buggered workers on the eleven-hour shift?

  And old Noah had attempted to be a winemaker, too. Back on dry land after the waters had receded and the animals had dispersed two by two, he settled down and planted a vineyard. But then he drank his product, became a wino and lay pissed and starkers in his tent.

  Then there was Isaiah’s vineyard owner who worked hard, dug his land, cleared it of stones, planted it with choice vines and hewed out a wine vat, and all it yielded was bitter wild grapes.

  A familiar story, bitterness and hewing. Everywhere you looked in the New Testament people relentlessly hewed. But all that Biblical hewing couldn’t prevent thriving vineyards becoming over-grown with nettles, briars and thorns. Not good allegories for this weekend’s mood, where family ego-stroking and general bonhomie were expected, and the actual vines, let’s face it, looked less than abundant.

  Of course there were the old Grapes of Wrath: Revelation 14:17-20, beloved of John Steinbeck, who’d laid on the Biblical imagery with a trowel. His grapes were the only reason Ryan, in his previous incarnation as a lecturer in American literature, could think of for Steinbeck getting the Nobel prize.

  Would those words work with this morning’s crowd? So the angel thrust his sickle into the earth and gathered the vine of the earth, and threw it into the great wine-press of the wrath of God. And the wine-press was trampled outside the city, and blood came out of the wine-press, up to the horses’ bridles, for one thousand six hundred furlongs. A bit heavy, the Apocalypse.

  He could mention the punningly named greengrocery where he sometimes shopped: Elvis Parsley and Grapesland. But the thought of spelling out the pun to the old grannies filled him with despair.

  The trouble was that nothing serious was registering but his headache and rumbling stomach and those mouthwatering whiffs of bacon.

  Perhaps just be brisk and frank: ‘Hi, folks. Today I’ll be talking about wine, very appropriate with my hangover from all the wine I drank last night with those giggly Godber and Kennedy women who kept flashing their middle-aged cleavages to test whether their charms got a reaction.’

  Disconcerting, the way Rosie Godber kept looking deep into his eyes as if trying to search his soul while her fuck-me scarlet high heels teetered on the paddock’s tussocks and gravel. Her own eyes were watery and streaked with tiny blood threads, he noticed. They reminded him of the bloodshot blue eyes of Michelle Pfeiffer, one of his favourite actresses, when she became upset with Uma Thurman (another favourite), her younger rival for the cad John Malkovich in Dangerous Liaisons.

  He supposed a make-up person had squirted reddening drops into Michelle’s attractive eyes to make them look distressed. Whereas Rosie’s eyes owed their appearance to a day’s solid champagne intake.

  What were Rosie’s lingering gazes about? Wondering what sort of priest the family Father was? A rosy-cheeke
d Irish boyo, sublimating his urges with booze, gambling, cigarettes and football? Or maybe that media favourite, the orphan and choirboy fondler?

  Or was he a frustrated God-soldier masculinised by serving in a war? After all, we macho Jesuits were the soldiers of God, weren’t we? In my case a weapon-savvy captain with three pips and a licence to kill. With a little flirting (all those wrist pats and cleavage flashes!) might I be persuaded to get my balls together before it was too late to join the male gender?

  That’s not to say, Rosie Godber, that I didn’t crack a secret fat at the sly tapping touch of your nails on my wrist while you made your ignorant right-wing conversation points. When your hips kept ‘accidentally’ bumping mine. But don’t be flattered. To privately react is not to act. To answer the question in those shrewd glances, ‘Yep, of course I’m familiar with the deed. And liked it a lot, incidentally, before life took a major turn and I got the call to head office.’

  There was even a woman outside his current job description: his one-day-a-week Italian sweetheart. Coming to Whipbird meant forgoing their regular date at his big weekend breakfast back in Melbourne.

  There was the anticipated relish of the meal itself, at Ponti’s, on his way to the Richmond game. But more explicitly, if he was lucky, was the thrill of eating this tasty late breakfast at a particular table set against the side wall: a wall made up of a huge, digitally printed, black-and-white photographic image of a young Sophia Loren, arms behind her head, languorously reclining in a low-cut strapless gown along the entire length of the cafe.

  In the beginning of this long-running affair he was disappointed if the Loren table was occupied. He’d find another table and content himself with admiring Sophia from afar. But gradually he’d come to accept that while relegating her face and breasts to the middle distance this outlying perspective had the advantage of allowing the contemplation of the whole Sophia, including her hips and legs in their tightly sheathed entirety, and this was something, too.

  Otherwise, masking excitement, he’d nonchalantly make for the Loren table, sauntering slowly at first but prepared to speed up if a competing customer suddenly walked through Ponti’s door. Then he’d sit down with The Age, never blatantly glancing up, his eyes on the newspaper, the menu, the water carafe, apparently on anything but the wall.

  In the several seconds of his progress across the cafe to the vacant Loren table he had a delicious decision to make: which of the two chairs should he take today? If he chose the chair farthest from the door, his head would nestle in the pixelated olive-skinned valley between the beautiful giantess’s breasts.

  But if he sat in the other chair, as he bore down on his eggs and bacon and tomato and sausage and mushrooms and frittata, pausing every so often to catch his breath and sip his orange juice and double espresso and glance surreptitiously up at the exotic wonder of Sophia’s eyes and lips, he could also view, so close it almost brushed his right eyebrow, the soft tuft of hair so Continentally, intimately, exposed in her armpit.

  The Sophia Loren breakfast at Ponti’s always fired him up for the game that followed. He’d turn his mind from her to football. Come on, the Tigers!

  Maybe he was still drunk, he thought, because this morning at Whipbird the image of another woman was not only intruding on his blurry consciousness, but sticking fast. Also joyful in its way. Optimistic anyway.

  Somewhere not too far away a cow mooed mournfully. And he’d heard a rooster crowing earlier. Did Hugh keep cows and chickens? Hardly. With its wining-and-dining connotations and the squatter clothing, the country vigneron role suited Hugh. The silvertail getting his hands dirty. But Hugh was no Farmer Giles or Old MacDonald. There’d be no pigs on the scene, or crutching or mulesing involved. No flyblown sheep’s arses.

  Now! Vineyards? Wineries? Grapes? Yes, I still feel half pissed. No Bible passage seemed right while the rich smells of a country breakfast and jumbled thoughts of women and Elvis Parsley and Grapesland kept crowding in.

  He could give Hugh a jolt with the parable about another rich bastard who started a vineyard. Matthew again, 21:33-41, mentioned a Hugh Cleary type who wanted to be a wine grower, planted a vineyard and leased it to tenants. Big mistake, and a cautionary tale for absentee vignerons.

  When the grapes ripened and this fellow sent three servants to the vineyard to collect his fruit, the tenants slaughtered them! Frankly, hard to imagine, the wine grower then sent more staff over. Seriously. And the bastards murdered them as well.

  So this vigneron, clearly the slowest of learners, didn’t go the usual Babylonian, Hebrew, Islamic eye-for-an-eye route. Well, not yet. He thought, Hmm, they’ll surely respect my son. I’ll send him now. So the moron sent Junior to gather the grape harvest. Surprise, surprise, they killed him, too.

  Talk about a ‘security incident’! This really called for a reaction, surely? A fierce retaliatory assault on the vineyard, explosive destruction and a big body count. Chinooks and Blackhawks landing among the vines. Upturned wine vats and blood and shiraz running together. Twenty-first-century mayhem.

  Anyway, even this vigneron had finally had enough. Now, Matthew pondered, what will he do to those tenants? He will put those wretches to a miserable death and let out the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the fruits in their seasons. At last. Duh. Smoke the bastards.

  Ryan’s forehead ached. Somewhere in the distance the rooster crowed again, reminding him he was in the country, the dusty Australian countryside. Cows still mooed, more sadly than he remembered cows mooing.

  Smoke the bastards? As a chaplain he’d been charged with the responsibility of caring for the religious, spiritual and pastoral welfare needs of soldiers. As a Catholic chaplain he had to provide the sacraments, especially to servicemen isolated from home, from their ordinary, civilian Catholic churches and parishes, or on war operations.

  Smoke the bastards?

  His eyelid gave a hungover twitch. Maybe Captain Padre Father Chaplain Ryan Cleary SJ had been in the war zone too long. Become numbed by the ‘security incidents’: the ambushes and IEDs and six-year-old children wired with explosives and the insider attacks and the Australian deaths. Not all instant.

  And become cynical, of course, about the climb-down from the early lofty goals: human rights, democracy, gender equality. Any change there? Give me a break.

  So are women permitted to laugh now? Not in public. Allowed to go to school? Well, we built two hundred schools – a pity there aren’t any teachers. What about the locals now taking financial responsibility? Well, they’ve been responsible for improving their finances. All those crafty corrupt warlords and cunning fierce governors and sly illiterate police chiefs. Show us the money. And the maze of warring tribes you have to navigate. Suck up to one mob and you make an enemy of the other.

  So nothing was learned from the earlier disastrous Russian experience? Umm, not as such. And eradicating the Taliban – how did that go? Well, many were eliminated but they retained their great survival tactic, their age-old strategy that outwitted the Russians. Waiting it out. Their confident prophecy: ‘You have the watches. We have the time.’

  Since Afghanistan, parables seemed weak and cheesy. Even for a devout, unquestioning Catholic congregation, looking to religion for plot lines had its limits. In any case, as he joined the sleepy crowd blinking in the sun as they lined up by the Posh Nosh barbecues for their bacon-and-egg rolls this fine Sunday morning, he wondered how seriously the family took their religion these days.

  Considering intermarriage over the six or seven Australian Cleary generations, the breakdown of the old wedding barrier to non-Catholics (no more weepy mothers-of-the-bride so scared of their parish priests they were forced to secretly peep through Protestant church windows at their daughters being married), not to mention general Christian malaise and lapse, he guessed only about two-thirds of Conor Cleary’s descendants were practising Catholics.

  If you believed the national census figures, even that number was optimistic. Apparently Cathol
ics were still one quarter of all Australians but only 14 per cent of that 25 per cent said they actually ‘practised’ Catholicism by attending weekly Mass.

  And while it was old Conor’s arrival they were celebrating here, of course this vineyard crowd had other ancestors too, going right back to early settlement. Boatloads of Protestants, too. Quakers and Pressbuttons, Brethren, Methos, Congos, Wet and Dry Baptists, Buddhists and the Baha’i crowd, Piss-over-the-Pailians, Jehovahs and Pentecostals and Adventists and miscellaneous Holy Rollers. Maybe even a lone Jew and a Muslim or two.

  By the look of a young, black-clad, tattooed couple in the crowd, probably Trekkies and Jedi Knights, he wouldn’t wonder.

  ‘Pepper and salt? Onions? Cheese? Barbecue sauce? Jalapeños? Coleslaw?’ Suddenly he was at the head of a breakfast queue. A bosomy girl in a Posh Nosh T-shirt waved a spatula. Rows of fried eggs sat waiting on the barbecue plate, and bacon strips lined up like troops. ‘The works?’

  She had Saturday-night lovebites on her neck.

  ‘The works,’ Ryan said.

  He skirted a table of weary-looking pirates and found a chair with the Donaldsons (Proddies, he presumed), nodded good morning and launched an attack on his breakfast roll. His first vigorous bite squirted eggy sauce on to his pants. Shit! Shit! Shit! The breakfast roll was fighting back. He wiped a glob of yolk from the Bible.

  Calm down. Take it easy. The breakfast roll was a two-handed effort. And a weird combination of tastes. Cautiously, he ate.

  Well, he thought, at least I’ll have a captive audience. Whether they’ve flown the coop or not, 100 per cent of them here are practising Catholics this morning.

  2

  It turned out to be his biggest congregation since another breakfast service, Easter Sunday at the Uruzgan base. Plenty of nonbelievers and non-Catholics there, too, but you didn’t play favourites with wartime pastoral care. No teacher’s pets. No favouring the Micks.

  You just packed up the portable sacristy, moved on to another patrol base and did the job. More withdrawn boys, more dull-eyed wounded boys. More tattooed, whiskered, heavily muscled, gungho but scared boys. Facial expressions somewhere between blank boredom and anxious fear. Shell shock waiting to happen, if it hadn’t already.