‘The Sultan of Samba?’ I ask.
‘The Sultan of Samba,’ she tells me.
All of which gets me staring at whatever I can see of her, which is chiefly goosebumped thigh and left ear as she’s looking out the window. And wondering if her father ever donned a tux apart from for a wedding and wondering if this father thing is only a trick of empathy taught to her by the PR department at BBK. A little production put on to let me know we have this burden, her and me both. Crackpot parents who are an embarrassment and a tragedy and a he’ll of a thing to bear. And here are her and me both, bearing it.
The pilot waggles his wings and rocks us side-to-side cutting into the stare I’m giving this Margot and lowers the pitch of jet-hiss with the air-speed needle swinging back out of high knots into approach and into slow turn.
‘Voila,’ he says, and waves his hand like a proud magician.
Below us off a white slide of right wing, revolving backwards in our circling, is a silhouette of Hannah. A hieroglyphic story of a town written in bare red earth rectangles and bare red earth roads with the bitumen black spine of the Great Northern Highway running through its centre. Red earth roads lead off on either side of it and are joined by other red earth roads into a red earth grid pattern. Only one bitumen road that isn’t the highway leads out of town and it winds six kilometres into the Opthalmia Range to Mount Whaleback and the mine. The biggest hole ever dug for iron. Its shore vast and amorphous like a lake’s. Going down deep in shelves and steps cut by years of trainloads of high explosive. The mine. The tit where Hannah sucked the iron from the earth to feed Japan.
Either side of the red earth roads are hundreds of red rectangular silhouettes of gone houses surrounded by small lawns now given licence to run, but with the night-chirping sprinklers silenced they’re not running, they’re yellowing and whitening into dead admission that here is a species of flora that has no business in the Pilbara.
There are rips of deeper red running angled against the road grid where cables and pipes have been torn from the ground, clotted where tanks have been raised. There is only a random throw of buildings left standing. Most of them surrounded by cranes and low-loaders and men with their hands on their hips and hardhats on their heads. Some of these buildings are being soundlessly stroked ground-level by huge shovels that used to take hundred-ton iron ore bites from the mine’s faces.
Her garden stands out provocatively green with borrowed water. Greener than anything else here. Nothing else is this green for whole latitudes. Her house is fibro. Not big enough and not solid enough to relocate. It was huge when I was growing up in it and it was surrounded by a neighbourhood. Now it’s surrounded by desert it’s shrunk and got fragile and got lonely.
Its roof is piebald with solar panels. There’s a satellite dish in her back yard. She’s becoming an outpost. Becoming the island they say no man is.
Four site-vans are camped out front on the road, but none of the heavy wrecking machinery is close. It’s held at bay by her heart. By her heart condition. By what a cardiovascular surgeon once diagnosed as ‘an interestingly malformed left ventricle’. Which she quickly diagnosed as medical twaddle and told him it was the Blitz that gave her a flighty heart, caused her long periods of black and dream and weakness, not any malformity, interesting or not. Just flightiness. And just the Blitz.
She’s holed-up in that fibro box. Probably bent forward out of her chair, cigarette smoke dribbling up over her face, listening as some radio star puts a hard question to a member of a beautifully broken family. With her town being relocated away from her and outright wrecked around her. Her, keeping relocation at bay and keeping the wrecking machinery at bay and keeping the whole multinational weight of BBK at bay with her freak heart. Flighty heart, she calls it.
But me flying in. Blood. Bad blood. But blood.
The pilot talks to the ground through a black prong of microphone strapped to his head and hung beyond tongue-touch outside his mouth.
‘Hannah field, Hannah field, this is BBK Lear Three. Do you read?’
‘Read and see, BBK Three,’ his radio tells him.
‘I’ll have Mister Furphy zero alt stationary in five,’ he says.
‘Car’s on its way, BBK Three.’
We circle once more while a white vehicle leaves the site-vans outside her house for the airstrip. We watch it driving too fast, sliding around corners, throwing gravel, lifting wheels, in a show civilisation is packing its bags, the boss has lost control, the sack is already given, the rules are eliminated.
‘Would you like me with you when you see her?’ Margot asks me.
‘No,’ I tell her. ‘No, I don’t think so. We’re probably better off one-on-one for whatever’s going to go on between us.’
‘All right. I hope you get off on the right foot, though,’ she says.
‘What makes you think there’s a right foot?’ I ask her.
The pilot punches his ninety-pound-per-square-inch tyres into the strip and cuts our seat belts into us with a scream of backthrust straining our neck muscles against deceleration until he relaxes the engines down from scream to sigh and we are still. He stretches his arms high and lets go a waking-animal noise. Wants it known flying is on a par with hibernation to someone as talented as him. He takes off his headset and seatbelt. Walks down the aisle behind us and pops the door. It swings up and looses a glare and an oven rush of hot air into the cabin that makes us grimace. He grimaces at me and tells me, ‘Welcome home.’
There never was more than a short walk in this town between airs conditioned. Patches of manufactured cold. He’s brought us right up level with our car. We put on sunglasses and thank him and hurry down the steps. Margot looks around horrified at the thousand-mile-wide storm of heat and says, ‘Shit,’ and gets in the back of the car. I get in the front next to the driver. He puts out his hand.
‘Richard,’ he says, meaning himself.
‘Jack. Margot,’ I point at her. We shake.
‘Where to?’ he asks, laughing as he accelerates, banging hand over hand on the wheel in a tight turn, spinning gravel back onto the tarmac, heading for what’s left of town.
Men in hardhats on giant machines are committing reverse archeology here. Tearing down and covering up any sign of town. An environmental reclamation unit is moving east through the whole map reference. Replanting spinifex, ghost gum, red gum and desert oak. Landscaping Dreamtime curves into the country with D10 Caterpillars. Hannah is becoming a deliberate lost city. A planned Atlantis.
We drive onto the bitumen of the Great Northern Highway where it became Fortescue Street for a kilometre and I remember being young in the loudness of the Walkabout Hotel and remember shoplifting things I didn’t want in Johnson’s Hardware House as we drive past their back-to-back foundations.
We drive past what was the town square and there is the broken concrete pedestal of what was the town cenotaph. The cenotaph was for Vietnam, which was the only war Hannah was alive for to lose sons into. Mostly it was for the parents of Billy Morrison and Chas Sutton who kicked up such a fuss at our town’s lack of cenotaph after Billy and Chas were killed by an American Marine troop carrier rolling on them as they were cycling tandem along a dirt road outside Saigon in 1970.
The cenotaph was topped by a statue of a soldier bending low with one hand outstretched to help a fallen comrade. In the soldier’s other hand was a Lee Enfield .303 rifle. On his head was one of those shallow helmets of World War One and, from his knees down, his legs were swathed in the bandages that were a style of legging worn in World War One. He was forged in memory of the dead of that war and stood atop a cenotaph in the main street of another mining town owned by BBK in New South Wales for forty years. That town’s raison d’être was coal and it was all dug up and trained away and the town folded about the same time Billy’s and Chas’s parents started kicking up about their warrior sons’ lack of cenotaph. So BBK shipped it west and raised it up to the top of the new Hannah cenotaph. Said it represented everyman.
Every soldier. Represented Billy and represented Chas … who wouldn’t get a statue of their own any other way.
Sometimes people laughed at the cenotaph and said it served Billy and Chas right to get represented by a soldier old enough to be their grandfather, considering they were crushed by an armoured vehicle carrying pig carcasses to a Marine barbecue while they were out cycling. Other times people scowled at it. Said it smelt like treachery to give a man the taxing job of fighting trench warfare and pulling wounded comrades from the Ypres mud, everyone agreed it was Ypres mud he was pulling his comrade from, and then set him up there as if he was pulling Billy and Chas and their rented pushbike out of plain Vietnamese roadside mud where they’d been pressed by the reckless driving of American Marines and half a ton of pork.
Now it’s just a concrete stump sawn off by a bulldozer and the stooping soldier has moved again.
We turn off what was the main street into what was Johnson Street and I tell Margot I had hideouts in a hundred nooks and a hundred crannies and behind a hundred sheds in my day up and down this street where you couldn’t hide out now unless you were some variety of skink.
‘Yeah. It must be weird for you, this,’ Margot says. ‘The place of your whole childhood … and everything.’
‘It is. Coming back here with it all gone. Must be even weirder for her. I can see why she’s confused, or whatever she is.’ I nod at a copse of concrete stumps we’re driving past and tell her, ‘That was our little cinema. The Astor. I first got my tongue in a girl’s mouth in there. The Incredible Journey the movie was. Cat and two dogs outwitting bears and pumas and other shit with a high-tension soundtrack spooking things up. I watched the whole show sideways through one eye with an ache in my neck and tongue. Jenny Watts she was. More concerned with what Disney was inflicting on his lost pets than what I was trying to inflict on her. She just couldn’t get romantic while those pets were in jeopardy, old Jenny.’
Margot smiles at me and tells me, ‘Jack, I’d like to meet her.’ And I ask, ‘Jenny Watts?’ and she tells me, ‘No. Your mother. I don’t want to be pushy, Jack. But I’d like to meet her. I’ve never met her. And, I admit, I sort of admire her. I think we’d get on. And if it’s easier for you … tripartite interface never has the strong negative emotional lock you often get in a bipolar interaction. So if you want me there, as that third entity …’ she offers herself up with her hands outstretched at me.
‘Thanks, but I think there’ll be a third entity there. When we talk there usually is,’ I tell her.
‘Okay,’ she says, reaching over at me and waggling at me the satchel of Sundown Village alternatives I left in the jet.
‘At least a third entity. Maybe even a fourth,’ I tell her. ‘I don’t know. She had conversations going on with quite a few dead people when I last saw her. And then there’s the Almighty to consult from time to time. I might have trouble getting a word in.’
‘Okay,’ she tells me. ‘Okay. But I am a trained negotiator.’
Richard skids us stopped with our red cloud boiling past us up what was Johnson Street but is now just flat red dirt and just country for skinks to crawl across.
Down the side of her house are her roses. Looking incredible out here in the desert. Beyond blood-red. Totally significant. I step over her front fence onto her lawn which even to step on is outrageous green but won’t be soon with them fractioning down her water flow and desiccating it slowly to yellow and then dead as the next demonstration of their power, the power of the place, the futility of her stand. I’m halfway across it before she sees me.
Her voice is an old man’s voice from her vocal cords being dried out by the Marlboros and the years. By the years of Marlboros. Or maybe by flat-out lack of use. Coming out of the black deep behind a flywire door. Stopping me on the outrageous green lawn. Telling me, ‘Ever, I said.’
For eight years I’ve been telling myself she’s been choking on that Ever she loosed on me out from where she was hidden under that wide brim of straw hat. Staying awake about that Ever through a thousand small hours, staring at her bedroom ceiling waterstained all over with cyclone and biting onto her bottom lip and stifling sobs and wishing that Ever was never said, never unleashed into the scenario, never thrust at a son.
And here she is gone and repeated it. Which I can somehow remain cool about, somehow swallow my anger about, because this time it’s not an Ever unleashed and loosed. This time it’s a pathetic Ever, an emaciated Ever that can’t nearly carry the huge weight of its meaning. This time it’s maybe an Ever of regret.
So I’m able to tell her, ‘It’s been ever. Hi.’
She coughs a small shot of smoke through the black of the flywire and says, ‘I was wondering when they’d get around to you. I was expecting you more by phone really.’ She’s a shape moved up to the wire now and each word is a puff of white out of the black.
‘You’re still eating the Marlboros, I see.’
‘I still smoke. Come in, I suppose,’ she says. The flywire swings open. She’s a small dry woman, her face deep-lined and cracked in the skin-drought of age. Wearing wire-framed spectacles with huge lenses that bug her eyes out. Her hair is stood high with dust and neglect. A statement on water conservation. Probably saved a few litres for the roses by not washing it.
We hug only long enough to get the hugging done and to give me a feel of how skeletal she’s become and to smell how solitary she lives and to let me know I don’t want to hug her and probably to let her know she doesn’t want to hug me. I pass her the bottle of Spanish champagne Margot gave me to give to her from me and she asks, ‘What’s this?’ and then says, ‘Champagne,’ and tells me, ‘Thank you. Thank you.’
‘You look good,’ I lie. ‘Strong.’
‘I don’t look anything but ghastly and old. But I am strong. Strong enough. Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘That’d be good,’ I tell her.
We walk through the house. Leaning against the walls down the hall are dozens of paintings of Dad and my sister Molly. All of them in shades of purple. All of them dreamy with artistic incompetence. The same girl and man a hundred times.
‘Did you paint these? I ask.
‘I did,’ she says.
‘You’re a painter now?’ I ask. She doesn’t answer. She’s taken her mourning into art. Has taken it into religion, which was expected, but also into art, which is regrettable. Every canvas is made up of incompetent lust for dead people -people recognisable with their dreamy faces only if you were their brother or son, which I am, or was.
We pass Adrian’s and my old room, and Mum’s room, which was once their room, and we pass Molly’s room. Her door is open and on her bed propped against the pillow are the three dolls called Hairdresser and Daisy and Narny who used to take it in turns to be in and out of Molly’s favour and either sleep in bed with her or up on her chest of drawers with a battalion of other entities like the rabbit with his ears mauled bald and dog in the tartan coat who I see are still there. A paper octopus Molly cut from a 1977 Western Australian is pasted on her wardrobe door. Its tentacles are yellowing and curling out into the room now.
We keep going out into the kitchen. Every unexciting bric or brac tripping a memory and adding to my creep of nostalgia. This house was one of hundreds of identical houses. This kitchen is the same beige lino of all the kitchens of my childhood friends. Now it’s alone here in the desert. And even I, who am in Real Estate and am required by tradition and required by the fraternity and the brotherhood of Real Estate Agents not to break ranks and not to tell or even think a truth that might cheapen a property and that might lead to a million other truths unleashed that would weaken the market and, bingo, before you know it Australia is only worth half what we thought it was and our commission on selling the whole country lock, stock and barrel is only half what we thought it would be and we’re all in debt – even I can’t think of much good to say about this one. I, who am required to call mediocrity possibility and to pronounce an architectural abomina
tion avante garde and to call pure architectural fuck-up a slightly flawed attempt and to call drunken screaming neighbours exciting community spirit and a lack of plumbing old-world charm, can only look out the kitchen window at the run of scrub where the houses of our friends used to be and say, ‘There goes the neighbourhood,’ and watch her look out the window after me and watch her mouth corners tic upward in a nano-second of feigned amusement.
Next to the toaster is the last of the bakelite radios, glowing, with an American preacher speaking out of it in a quavering extravagance of voice control. Its tuning knob has been missing all my life. I was seven before I could take hold of that little silver shaft with the red-handled pointy-nosed pliers that are still sitting beside it and move it off her station which was something like gospel and hymn and prayer and onto mine which was something like rock and roll.
‘What’s that?’ I ask.
‘That’s short-wave in from the Philippines. Reverend Quincy Roberts’ Voice of God. He’s a good preacher of the old school, Quincy is,’ she tells me.
I put the Sunset Village options on the table while she’s making a pot of tea from the same white china teapot with the brown stains seeped all through it. I fan them out like a full house, like they add to great fortune of some sort. A bright future. She starts talking with her back to me.
‘This would make it eight years, Jack. I don’t know if I should be angry to see you … or happy.’ She turns around with the pot full and steaming. ‘But I’m not either one of them. I’m just sad. I’m just thinking, “Here they come again. From another angle. Using collaborators. Using the fruit of my loins.”’
Silences Long Gone Page 2