And sets me thinking what she has in her urn is a fiction. A memory edited to huge distortion by her longing to have got their lives together right. A memory that adds up to flawless love and flawless harmony and all the other flawlesses the Bible and the romantic poets said a man and woman could be. I understand her need. Everyone who visits a grave edits the life interred there. Never a dead man rose up out of his urn or up out of his grave and yelled, ‘Bullshit. Bullshit. Remember how I broke three of your ribs when you swung at me with a broom because I was late and shitfaced for Adrian’s tenth birthday? Remember that?’
When they organised his wake they never said it was anything but paying respects. Never said it was anything but celebrating his life. Never said it was anything but giving him the send-off he deserved. Never said it was another thing altogether. That it wouldn’t be just paying respects and it wouldn’t be just celebrating his life and it wouldn’t be just giving him the send-off he deserves … that we’d be bringing out the last of him that’s left alive and killing it off too. That we’d be standing up with our beautiful memories of him alongside all his other friends and their beautiful memories of him and all his other loved ones and their beautiful memories of him and using those memories up. That we’d be talking those memories out at each other and telling those memories to ourselves and toasting those memories and letting them do to us what they do to us and even as they do it knowing they won’t be able to do it again because memories are stories and stories aren’t ever the same at second telling. Never have the same power.
They never said, the organisers of his wake, that we’d be standing around killing him more.
I sit in the deckchair and watch them get animated about the export potential of orbital engines and about the death of the Labor movement and about iron being a finite resource. The sun is setting and the whole back yard is under a still blanket of compost smoke.
Adrian having earlier resurrected his stomach contents and given his blood a chance to clear has now resurrected himself. He opens up the flywire door slowly and uses it for balance as he steps down the two back steps one at a time and then lets the door go and stands there with his ribs caving in and out, marshalling his strength for the journey. And comes at me slow and frail through the smoke along my line of sight and doesn’t stop until he’s so close his upper body has moved up out of my line of sight and his legs below the knees have moved down out of my line of sight and mostly what’s in my line of sight is just brass belt buckle and a few brass jeanstuds that tell me WRANGLER. I don’t acknowledge him, so he says, ‘Hey,’ and I don’t acknowledge him all over again so he says, ‘Hey,’ again but louder this time. And I look up into his face and he tells me I’m a cunt and sees how being a cunt doesn’t affect me much and so tells me I’m a full-on cunt.
That next midday when I get my hangover out of bed I go to the kitchen for orange juice and for the second time in my life I’m pulled up short of the fridge by the smell of death coming in the back door.
I find her where I found her last time the chookshit smell of death was in the house. In the garden on her knees working with her trowel around her five rose bushes. Digging in the Dynamic Lifter and every now and then sprinkling the condiment of Dad’s ashes out of his urn. Digging and turning and digging and turning that sprinkle of Dad into the soil with her trowel.
‘Gardening?’ I ask her. She doesn’t even look out from under her straw hat at the question. Probably incapable of looking out from under that brim. Probably a scene of desolation and hangover under there. Must have heard me coming. Must have readied herself. Must have drawn in a big breath and bit what bullet she had to bite. ‘Molly didn’t teach you anything at all. Did she?’ she asks me. ‘Was a wasted lesson on you. Molly. A squandered whole tragedy.’ She crawls around on her hands and knees to my side of the rose bush she’s working on so her back is to me and turns some soil with her trowel and takes up the urn and sprinkles some ash on the turned soil. ‘I want you to leave this house,’ she says. And town. I want you to move out of here and not come back. Ever. What you’ve accomplished is clear and premeditated sin. Don’t think, for Godsake, it was anything approaching noble. It wasn’t.’
I’d like to think I didn’t ask her. I’d like to think I was stunned and broken and sucked a deep breath and bit my tongue and turned indoors silently. I’d like to think I was becoming a good man, then. Turning into a figure of some grace and some dignity whose overriding reflex, day to day, wasn’t retaliation. Turning into a man who understood how hate works. Had seen enough of it to be able to dissect it, not replicate it. A man who didn’t immediately hoik up his ten mils of retaliatory saliva out of his throat when he was spat on.
But I asked her. Made an ugly noise that marshalled up all the cotton-spit of hangover and of dread that clung about my mouth and clung about my throat and spat it in spray into the dry red dirt beside the hand that was supporting her. Asked her then if it’d be all right if I had some bacon and a couple of eggs and maybe a fried tomato or so as well before I went, having missed a couple of meals in a row and all, and being hungry enough to eat a baby’s arse through a cane chair, as the saying goes.
10
Thaw
Thaw got his nickname by getting his tongue frozen by a bushfire when he was eight. Before the bushfire came he was called Oliver. When the bushfire came he was alone in the Court House Hotel outside the small welfare town of Wilpenia on the Darling River in western New South Wales. He lived there. His father was the publican.
A red wind was blowing down out of Queensland picking up smoke just north of town. The men had put on their heaviest wool clothing and hosed each other down and climbed aboard tankers to go out and meet the fire.
Thaw was alone because his mother had climbed aboard a blue Fairlane and climbed aboard the struck-it-lucky opal prospector driving it and closed her eyes and blocked her ears to Thaw and taken off for the coast two months before, saying she wasn’t put on the planet to help these poor people, she called the aboriginals, stay drunk and third-world. Saying it was an evil daily routine and she’d no longer be part of it. And saying the Court House was an outpost of empire, a device for keeping the natives drugged and low, an evil tool of white suppression. Saying goodbye.
Thaw had a picture of her she’d sent from somewhere in a horizon-wide wonder of snow and fir tree. The blue Fairlane had shrunk to a snub-nosed Pontiac now, and there she was, with a white breath growing out front of her face, standing in cowboy boots on its short bonnet, arms wide and palms up in a semaphored voila of I-told-you-so, here it is, a northern clime, an earthly paradise, me centre-shot in a year-round Christmas situation. At the front of the Pontiac was a sign that said H’BURG 26 MILE.
Two weeks after the photo arrived Thaw’s father banned all talk of snow. Refused to answer any more questions about whole countrysides turning white and about lakes freezing hard as bitumen and breaths hanging off the front of faces like clouds. Warned him off thinking about frosts and proscribed blizzard-tallk outright. Told Thaw what his mother was living in was not a snow-covered wonderland … but sin. Told him what she was exhibiting was not some sort of mysterious northern-hemisphere style but just neglect and just a legendary selfishness and just a heart of fucking gibber.
So this day while the men in sodden wool are gunning Toyotas toward smoke-rise Thaw is alone. Watching the smoke run across the dry country out the window. Holding his photo two-handed, running his thumbs over the snow surrounding his mother.
Roly-polys are driven off the plain and piling up against the front of the pub. Bark is shrinking off the trees in the forty-two-degree day. Blue-tongue lizards are crossing the killing heat of the road to lick the plate glass of the pub door. The smoke thickens and Thaw begins to realise everyone is dead. Not just the men who went to fight the fire. Everyone. Everywhere. Nothing lives in a wind like is outside now.
He gets lonely and hunted by the wind and by knowing he’s the only human left alive in this whole holocaust.
Then he sees flame and sobs out loud and puts his lips to the snow his mother’s surrounded by. Puts his tongue to the white of the photo.
The flame runs through the field of car bodies out front of the pub. Runs through it thin and fast except for bursting big and orange at each dead car with its head-high upswell of dock and paspalum and treefoil all summer-brittle.
Thaw can’t watch actual flame. Not coming towards him through the dead cars. He goes around back of the bar and opens up the door to the cool room and goes in there and closes the door behind him. Crouches down between a double-gross of hamburger patties and a cling-wrapped block of three hundred hot-dogs left over from the cancelled picnic races. Gets out of the burning world into the cold where his breaths hang out front of his face in clouds like his mother’s breaths do in her white fireproof world.
After five minutes staring at the frost on that double-gross of hamburger patties he leans over toward them and sniffs at them and raps them with his knuckles in wonder at how meat can get as hard as wood. He scratches at their frost with his fingernail and puts his tongue out to lick them, to taste them, maybe, if cold allows taste.
The cold is another type of burn and he tries to rear back off it but can’t. His tongue is frozen to the double-gross of hamburger patties. He tries to work it off with his fingers. Tries to pull it loose by force but can’t bring any to bear. Tries to melt it off with kisses but can’t summon any spit. It’s welded on there. Become part of the whole frozen forty-kilo block of meat.
His skin is goose-bumped and soon he starts to shiver in waves and he sobs white-clouds out of his aching and stiffening jaw and he calls vowel-only lunatic calls for help. His hands throb pain and stiffen and he drops the photo of his mother in her happiness and her snow. His ears and cheeks are burning and he thinks maybe the building’s on fire and he’s being roasted in this steel room. But everything is still covered in frost, and his breaths are still white out front of his face.
The fire burns past the pub taking only sheds and dog kennels and the three red heelers in residence and cutting the power. The lights go out in the cool room and the thaw begins. The three hundred hot-dogs and the double-gross of hamburger patties start their slow climb to room temperature where they will bloom with life as their bacteria reignites. Thaw continues to freeze to death in the slowly warming room. Getting sleepy and wanting more than anything to lie out flat in the black frost and close his eyes and watch his mother stand on the bonnet of that orange Pontiac and spin a three-sixty in her cowboy boots with no regard for the duco.
He leans his whole face hard into the double-gross of hamburger patties to stay upright. He watches his mother melt all the snow around her Pontiac by exposing her breasts which turn out to be mini suns that can enforce a thaw onto frozen country whenever she sees fit to snap her bra open and swing its cups wide like saloon doors. White is receding around her and green is appearing and deepening as she turns and aims her fiery tits at the landscape.
Somewhere between hallucination and death his fainting weight and the thawing hamburgers free his tongue and he drops off them and crawls slowly out of the freezer into the forty-two-degree smoke-haze and cinder-fall and collapses there in the front bar thinking thanks to his mother for warming the world and saving him. For opening those cups wide and doing her cowboy-boot spin.
Thaw’s father could see the funny side of it. Couldn’t see any side of it but the funny side. It straightaway became a family joke, and with Thaw’s father telling it near, far and regular a district joke. And ‘Thaw’ became Thaw’s name.
Thaw’s father joking that it certainly proved the existence of some Higher Being that forty kilos of shrink-wrapped ground-down lips and arseholes thawed in about an hour, while it took just over that for twenty-eight kilos of scrawny arsehole to freeze. Saying that’s close to scientific proof of God. Saying Thaw must have been spared for some purpose, some purpose like getting me another beer right now.
And saying, when people asked why he was called Thaw … because that’s his trick, that’s his one achievement. He can’t do fuck-all but thaw hamburger meat. Thawed forty kilo of it once just licking it like a puppy. And the circus don’t want him. Hard to believe isn’t it.
The Court House was a black pub. The drinkers were black. Drinking their own welfare cheques in the first week of every fortnight and drinking the welfare cheques of their parents and uncles and aunts in the second week of every fortnight. Exercising some serious self-determination, Thaw’s father said. And told it that if a hundred welfare cheques were issued at the Post Office on any day he’d end up with ninety-nine of them by next issue day, and damned if he could hunt down the standout bastard who spent his cheque elsewhere.
Thaw said they looked fierce and talked angry, the local blacks, but mostly they only swore threats at his father or threw inaccurate punches at each other. Were too deep into the piss to do much more than throw half a brick once a year by way of showing they weren’t happy with the way they were and by way of showing they remembered they weren’t this way once.
The local whites drank in town at the golf club whose nine-hole sand scrape course was a sly way of barring the local blacks from drinking there without being racist about it. They drank in chilled air with grey carpet underfoot and the bells and fanfares of dollar poker machines bouncing off the lime-green walls. Sitting at tables filling in golf cards with majestic fictional rounds that were routinely single-putt and studded with birdies and sometimes the odd eagle or so.
The only white people who ever drank in the Court House were men who had turned heavy and mean with unemployment in those suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney built for the unemployed to turn heavy in and to turn mean in and had come up north or had come out west for a week to shoot pigs if they could get them or roos if they couldn’t, or GRID signs and BROKEN HILL signs and WILPENIA signs and red gums if there was a drought on and animals were scarce.
These men were really hunting for what their fathers had got in wars. They were looking for a place where they could get into a fierce adrenaline rush with their friends. A situation that might bloom into a huge story. A memory they could enlarge and darken for their women and their old age.
But when they came north or west they discovered western New South Wales was too dry to support enough wild pigs for their purposes. And when they hunched over their high-powered rifles and squinted through the cross-hairs at kangaroos stilled mid-chew and staring back at them with their heads cocked in wonder, they had to admit, to themselves, that exploding herbivores just didn’t get the job done.
They soon discovered the only place on the Darling you could get an adrenaline rush that would bloom into big history was in the Court House. You had to go into Indian Territory. You had to drink with the blacks.
So they’d come into the pub around midday when the blacks had been drinking two hours already. They’d start drinking in a tight white circle. As they’d get drunker they’d get brave and spread through the bar and start talking to black people. Shouting them drinks, which Thaw’s father always told them not to do, but which they always did. Maybe, after a while, with black girls in their laps who they could feel braless and smell dusty and foreign. The black girls boasting of seeing big cities themselves … of travelling to Broken Hill one time or to Bourke one time. The heavy, mean men laughing at them and handing them smokes, and saying that must have been one he’ll of a journey. Heavy, white, mean men sitting on stools. Black girls balancing in their laps.
If it didn’t end with one of them assaulting a teenage girl out by the toilets it ended with them stopping shouting the beer Thaw’s father had told them not to shout in the first place, and when they weren’t getting shouted beer any more the hands that were in their laps and the hands that were touring their breasts suddenly felt like assault to the black girls, and looked like assault to the black men too when their free beer was shut down. So a black girl would swear at the outrage of it and jerk her breast free of a white hand. Black men wou
ld rise up off their stools and up from their ten-cent poker machines and start calling the white men white fucking cunts and asking them did they want to have a go. Well … did they?
Sometimes the white men wanted to have a go but most times they just wanted to go. So maybe a few punches. Maybe some lost teeth. But it was remarkable, Thaw’s father said, the number of times a black-white incident ended with the white men fishtailing past the front of the pub in four-wheel-drives firing pigshot into the foliage of the peppercorns and screaming about abo cunts as they were showered with cans. Remarkable how it mostly seemed to be the peppercorns that had war declared on them in these incidents, he said. And he bet when these blokes got back to their cities and told their war stories they never told how they unloaded at eighty Ks an hour on unarmed trees. He bet that was a fact omitted from their official campaign histories.
When Thaw is old enough to drink he drinks with these white men. Not because they’re white. Because they’re from the outside world. Have coastal stories to tell and city stories to tell and Asian-girl stories to tell and Italian-girl stories to tell and stories of seeing Gary Ablett play live.
He’s drinking with four of them on November the eleventh, 1987, ‘that unhappy Remembrance Day’ the Coronial Inquest calls it. He’s nineteen years old. The men he’s drinking with are from the Melbourne suburb of Craigieburn.
He runs the pub now due to his father’s infirmities, his father calls them, which are really a wide lazy streak and the grog being on top of him at last. Thaw’s father lives his life in constant pain from his infirmities, he says, on his sofa upstairs watching and rewatching the five porn videos a party of pig shooters had given him three years before. Only able to hoist himself off his back for a weekly shower or a daily shit or to get himself a bowl of Weetbix or to get a bottle of Corio or some Valium or some morphine. By this stage the old boy stunk like the town tip was a womb from which he had just emerged. Thaw says.
Silences Long Gone Page 14