‘Good idea. But later. After.’ She’s urgent.
So we fuck. She’s climbs on me, taking the lead, making her statement of love. The ground tears at me with a fierce debris of Norfolk Island Pine. Sad Purple Dads and Mollys keep up a parade in my drunk mind’s eye.
Each stab from the debris and each purple ghost ebbs vital millilitres of blood from my cock back into my torso and up to my brain or to wherever the pain lives. Jean has to use all her earnest dirty knowledge to reverse the flow. It takes her ages. It takes me ages. We finally get there, but we fuck a painful long time in that scree of dried needle and cone. All during our fucking there’s a gentle hiss of deflating crayfish.
We fuck and the crayfish dies. We carry it across the beach and put it into the water. Each fluorescing wave turns it on its back and spins it by its tail up the beach.
We’ve named it and are barracking for it by now. ‘Go, Mimmo. Go, boy. Go. Swim like a bastard. Get out there. Be free, you little bugger. Swim, Mimmo. Swim. Be saved.’ But the creature’s beyond help. It rolls in the push and pull of wave ends.
‘Maybe we should eat it,’ says Jean.
‘I couldn’t eat it. We killed it by fucking.’
‘You killed it by fucking.’ She punches my arm. ‘You were the one who took like forever to get interested. I wanted a quickie. Now I’m aching all over.’
‘And Mimmo’s dead,’ I say.
‘And Mimmo’s dead,’ she says.
9
Red Cordial
Five of us are drinking in the red sand of the Fortescue River. It’s early summer and the river is long underground. Only its red gums and its ghost gums reaching the water with their roots stretched taut and seventy-feet deep by thirst. The river is a thousand-kilometre meander of shade. Shade being what the Pilbara has instead of water.
Lucky Johnson is sitting against a white trunk of gum. Porous Gates is sitting on the esky. I’m lying elbow-propped in the sand. Dad is forced to sit in the armchair Lucky bought for him at a garage sale this morning and hauled out here in the back of his ute and unloaded saying, ‘Sit down, Lucky Sit down.’ Dad, angry about his new rank, but recognising it, sits in the chair. Adrian sits near him holding his stubby and looking down, on the edge of tears as he has been for the week since Dr Jencks told Dad his chronic indigestion was cancer of the oesophagus. All of us are drinking beer except Dad, who can only swallow for survival now, not pleasure.
My usual method of getting connected with Dad is through beer. Has been for years. Now he can’t drink, our lines of communication are cut.
We’ve collected wood and lit a fire and are waiting for the women to arrive with salads and advice on just where it is the fire should’ve been placed. From the middle distance comes the call of a peaceful dove. Middle distance being the peaceful dove’s only known habitat. That ghostly bell always a mile away just back of the crows.
Porous is asking questions. ‘Now, Adrian, what was the most important tool used in the opening up of this country? You can answer this, Jack.’
Adrian looks up. Blinks. ‘The axe,’ he says.
‘The axe. The axe,’ says Porous. ‘No, it was not the axe. Not a bad guess, though. Jack?’
I take a drink. I’m starting to feel the beer. ‘I like the axe,’ I say.
‘Well it’s not the bloody axe.’
‘The esky,’ says Lucky.
‘No good,’ says Porous. ‘Look out there at three o’clock on the horizon.’ He points.
‘A windmill?’ I say.
‘Of course a windmill,’ says Porous. ‘Water above all other things.’
‘It’s not even a tool,’ I say.
‘Most important one,’ he says. And he throws his arm around at the horizon. ‘How many axes do you see out there?’ he asks as if point proven. And he stands and opens the esky and takes out four more stubbies and passes them around and we take their tops off and drink, all commenting how cold and good the beer is. Goading our father, and friend, with our enjoyment. Knowing his love of beer.
‘You bastards,’ he says. ‘You dirty bastards. If I get through this I’m going to tie you up to these trees here and I’ll drink bottle after bottle of it in front of you. All frosted with cold. Until you’re pleading with me from thirst and sobriety. And the only drink I’ll give you is red fucking cordial.’ Red cordial being the most juvenile and offensive drink he can think of.
He makes the joke. But he makes it straight-faced with no hint of a laugh, and I realise then laughter is the first faculty lost. That I’ll likely never hear his laugh again. Which means three weeks ago when Abbott and Costello were in Alaska in a Friday-night movie and we’d opened our fourth bottle and Costello stuck his fork into his whale steak and got squirted in the eyes with whale-juice and then he swapped his whale-steak for Abbott’s whale-steak and Abbott stuck his fork into it and it squirted right across the igloo and still got Costello in the eyes with whale-juice and I laughed and when my laugh ended and I heard the hissing air of Dad stifling any sort of big laugh that would work the muscles in his diaphragm and neck … then that was the end of his laughing. That hiss that was trying not to be a laugh. A hiss. Water on fire. The dual-accelerant comical-genius chemical fire of Abbott and of Costello having its flare-up of humour doused by the clear pain of cancer.
But now it’s not just the clear pain of cancer. It’s the knowledge that the clear pain is cancer … is probably death. And now all the slapstick, absurdity, clownishness, drollery and farce ever devised isn’t enough to flare into laughter and get doused by pain. His ability to laugh just isn’t there any more.
We laugh at his red cordial joke. Porous raises his stubby and says, ‘Until such times,’ and has a drink.
‘Lucky,’ says Lucky, ‘if you get through this I’ll drink your red fucking cordial.’
‘Lucky,’ says Dad, ‘you mustn’t like my chances much.’
Dad moves the conversation into the past by asking do Porous and Lucky remember that Thylacine they saw up in the Victorian Alps in a clearing when they were sitting there having a breather and taking a nip of vodka in the winter of fifty-something … when they all used to live back east? How it came out of the mist? How it stopped and stared straight at them before trotting off through the mountain ash into extinction? And we trotted off into years of being called crackpots and loons. A tiger. Wasn’t that a day?
Reminiscence is the only conversation he can hold now. It’s that or silence. The present has turned ugly and doesn’t interest him. The future just isn’t. He wants to get back romping with the dogs of his boyhood.
So we dredge up the beautiful moments of his past. We reminisce fast and furious about good times and gone people and disappeared species of native fish that you had to be cunning to catch but which tasted specially sweet. Sweeter than anything you’ll catch today, you young blokes, they tell us.
The whole conversation is a chore and a drain on me. Trying to work out what to bring in and what to leave out. Trying to hark back to his good times without bringing in any of life’s shit. At one stage I ask Dad does he remember when we were kids and Mum went away unexpectedly for a couple of weeks and every meal he cooked for us, breakfast, lunch and dinner, was charcoal-grilled off the barbecue.
He just looks around at the trees and I have myself a silence long enough for the peaceful dove to sound into four times before Porous breaks it by asking is it hot enough for us all today, or what?
Mum and Dad fly down to Perth and become spectators at a life and death auction where the bids are for him. The first bid is by his oncologist who says the dose of chemo needed would be toxic to a seventy-eight-kilo sexagenarian. He bids death. Two days later his thoracic surgeon calls this ‘the usual negativism’. Says there are hundreds of people living normal lives right now with half a stomach and a soporific nature. Just a matter of removing what’s bad and leaving what’s good. He bids life.
The different schools of medicine bid back and forward for three months. Surgery m
aking snide comments about oncology and optimism. Bidding life. Oncology making snide comments about surgery and reality. Bidding death.
Alive again. Dead again. Alive again. Christ didn’t have this stamina for death and resurrection. Neither does Dad. He tires to the point where he doesn’t care.
The oncologist makes his final bid. Death, of course. Quickly. The surgeon wets his scalpel in exploration … and is silent. Any more bids? Not a twitch. Humiliated again. Losing bidder, again.
Passages choke off. Tubes go in. His nerves give up doing all the tricks nerves can do apart from pain. They do pain. We do morphine. And my father’s world shrinks to a bed and an hour-wide window of coherence a day.
My last visit is during one of these windows of coherence. At least I hope like he’ll it was a window of coherence. A teeth-grit moment of lucidity. Something like that. Some brave mood out beyond the pain and the drugs. I hope so.
He does the return journey to Hannah in an urn Mum carries nestled in her lap as hand luggage. An urn BBK wouldn’t have let onto any one of their million square kilometres of mining lease if they had known its contents and had guessed at their magical power to turn some patch of their lease sacred and troublesome.
She places the urn on a forty-four-gallon drum in the middle of our back yard. We surround it with bathtubs full of ice and beer. She’s drunk by about ten in the morning and wandering around with a gin in one hand spraying water on the cut flowers, though mostly they’re everlasting daisies that become soggy and wilt with water. The others weigh down under the climbing sun. Only the Sturt’s Desert Pea shows any floral resolve. There’s a steeplechase of wire-link fences running to right and left cutting identical back yards off from each other and we step over into other gardens replenishing our flower supply when we need to. The neighbours don’t mind. They smile and wave for us to take more … grab the hydrangeas, too … take the camellias.
She keeps repeating herself. ‘For Jesus’ sake don’t let anyone stay sober and dry-eyed here today, Adrian. Don’t leave ’em sober. Hear that, Jack? You get ’em all drunk and crying for your dad. Not that the sober wouldn’t cry over Frank. The sober would. In rivers. But you fill ’em up uncontrollable. Case they think they have to be strong. I don’t want this thing staying in hand.’ She has a mind to see just what sort of cyclone Dad’s absence can run through his assembled drunk friends. Or a fear of what won’t run through them sober.
When she’s not staring at me outright slit-eyed she keeps me in her peripheral vision. Wants me to know I’m watched. Wants me to know I’m a known quantity.
An hour later I stand on a chair and propose a toast to the hundred-strong mix of his friends and Mum’s friends and Adrian’s and my friends. I tell the story about how he was going to tie us up and make us drink red cordial if he got through it, we who were bastards enough to drink cold beer in his ailing, unswallowing presence.
Well, as you know, he never got to force that red cordial on us. But I’d like to drink a glass of it anyway, in his honour. In honour of him and how happily I’d have drunk it to see him back well and on the beer and on life in general. And what a pity it was he didn’t get to make us drink it. I’d have drunk it gladly.
And here I raise a glass of red cordial I’ve made beforehand for the toast. Raise it above my head, sparkling, then not sparkling, in the dapple laid down by our two ghost gums that haunt his wake. ‘To Dad,’ I shout. ‘And maybe he really is here making me drink this red cordial.’ And I drink it fast.
‘Get me one, Lucky,’ shouts Lucky Johnson. ‘I’ll have one myself.’ So will Porous Gates. And people start to drink red cordial as a symbol of what they would have done for the old man, the sacrifices they would have made. All those brown bottles sit deep in the thawing ice.
But then we have the conflict that while red cordial pays tribute to the deceased, continued sobriety would be a deep insult to him. The conflict is resolved by Porous Gates’ decision to use vodka instead of water to cut his cordial. More vodka is sent for. More cordial.
Soon all the men and half the women are drinking tumblers of vodka with a dash of Schweppes Raspberry cordial. The weight of the sun on top of this hard grain spirit with its dash of raspberry masking its venom soon has Dad’s wake staggering drunk. Those who loved him best are drunkest of all.
Adrian takes hold of the top rail of the fence and begins vomiting over it into little Mark Renwick’s wading pool. A pink slick forms. Gloria Renwick, red cordial in hand, is patting him on the back saying, ‘There, there, Aids. Don’t worry about it. Grief is still grief, no matter how you express it. Vomit or tears, it’s still grief.’ Those who loved him least are most horrified of all. Gloria Renwick takes Adrian under an arm and escorts him inside telling him grief is an intoxicant all of its own. ‘And your father is certainly something to grieve over. Is intoxicant enough for unruly behaviour.’
Porous tells us this reminds him of the time in the Hannah early days. Before women. When the chiller went out in the wet mess on Anzac day. Fifty-four or -five, can’t remember which, he says.
‘Four,’ Lucky tells him. ‘Nineteen-fifty-four.’
‘A hundred and ten in the waterbag and all the usual beer drinkers going for spirits with a hard Lest-We-Forget reverence. A reverence like now.’ He looks around at the wake. All the glasses of red liquid swaying in and out of sun and shade, flashing on and off like Christmas lights. ‘Shit. I love to see beer drinkers drinking off the top shelf in heat like this. It’s like a reenactment of something historical. We should all be in armour and chainmail hanging onto broadswords.’
He’s truly happy for the old man. His wake an Agincourt or Hastings. And he’s right. Soon the bodies are starting to sprawl. We drag them into the shade as they drop.
Lucky says the only way to get a vodka vomit out of a swimming pool is to burn it out. Only way known. He leans over the fence and pours what he thinks is two-stroke fuel, because he rummaged it out of our mower shed, into the pool. He throws a match in and the whole pool vibrates with a thump of invisible flame. We watch as Mark Renwick’s yellow inflatable duck called Rose blisters to brown and black and lowers its head slowly into the water. Then the pool walls melt and deflate and the flaming water and the blackening duck flow out across a short stretch of dead lawn into the Renwick’s compost heap which comes alive under a coat of blue and yellow flame and smoke that is thick and impressive. Rose is a bubbling splash of black petro by-product at the foot of the smouldering compost.
Mark Renwick, four, is standing in the open back door of their house shouting, ‘Hey … Mister Johnson … Hey.’ His mother, red cordial in hand, is massaging small circles into Lucky’s back, saying, ‘Don’t worry about it, Lucky. Grief is grief no matter how you express it. Tears or vandalism, it’s still grief.’
Mark Renwick starts on a marathon bawl and gets bottom-spanked by his mother for being what she calls an insensitive little arsehole and interrupting what she calls a significant religious ceremony. His grief she locks in his bedroom.
The rest of the wake is through a hang of compost smoke. A smoulder of orange peel on the air. Porous is happy about it. Saying the smoke certainly adds to his battle reenactment theory.
Lucky is bewildered and saying two-stroke shouldn’t just go woof like that. Throwing his arms up in flameburst. Repeating it over and over. Each time me thinking he’s really meaning Frank. Frank shouldn’t just go woof like that … be burnt and gone and thousands of times with him in the past but none in the future.
I’m talking with Francis Beecher and Tony Smith whom I went through school with and whom Dad coached in every football team they starred in since puberty. They’re deep into the hard red cordial. They’ve each cried and cheered up half a dozen times already. Each time they cry they come to me and pat me on the back like he was my achievement. They’re currently cheered up and humorous.
Francis says the strong whisper is that the old man didn’t do it himself. Whisper is that it might have been me who
knocked the old man. Whisper is, in fact, that I’ve scored the first leg of the Oedipal quinella. I poker face. Not knowing the protocol, the what to tell, the what to admit.
‘You remember Oedipus,’ he says. ‘We did him in fourth form to get out of King Fucking Lear.’ I nod. Giving away nothing to their inappropriate ear-to-ear grins.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘me and Tony were thinking if you had any plans to go for the second leg of that quinella now might be the ideal time. What with your mother legless and in need of sympathy and affection … and single all of a sudden …’
I leave them hanging in the long silence where they don’t know if their risky and probably offensive joke has worked … or not. I wait poker-faced. My eyes glancing from one to the other. Maybe hate behind them.
Then I break into a smile and free them to laugh, and they laugh small and relieved at first and then big and leant back at their waists because they think they’re hilarious.
‘The Oedipal Quinella,’ I say. ‘You sick bastards. You blas-fuckingphemers. As if I’d be into such skullduggery. I will, however, as new head of the family, accept offers on her if she turns either of you two on,’ I tell them. They laugh again and I get away with ignoring their accusation about the first leg of that quinella. About Dad’s death. Which was probably why they made the joke up in the first place. To get my response to that accusation without making the accusation the big part of any statement.
In the end all the stories of Dad are told. I break away from the remaining mourners and go and sit up against the Van Egmonds’ fence in a deckchair that was borrowed for the older-type mourners to mourn in who are now gone home and mourning in front of their tellies at the nightly news and at the current affairs shows hosted by people with state-of-the-art hair and state-of-the-art teeth.
My mother is holding his urn hugged right up under her chin now. With it and a glass of gin clinking at each other as she staggers over and joins one circle of mourners and then breaks away from it when she finds it’s talking politics and staggers over to another circle of mourners and breaks away from it when she finds it’s talking orbital engines and staggers over to the third circle of mourners and breaks away from it when she finds it’s talking iron-ore. And staggers past me and clutches his urn even tighter and gives me fierce glare that may or may not be hiss-accompanied but that sets hiss going off in my mind anyway.
Silences Long Gone Page 13