His card is taken away and brought back and the waiter thanks him for the tip and tells us to have a nice day and thanks him for the tip again. Richard Finnes reaches a post-lunch stretch at the ceiling and says, ‘Now then, let’s have a look in your lady friend’s gallery. Your mother’s an artist they tell me. And I’m a collector.’
We wander up the street to Jean’s gallery. She’s sitting at the front desk arguing on the phone. She tells someone to go ahead and add the freight charge then, but it’s not going to be paid at this end because the people at this end aren’t wankers. She hangs up. ‘Hi,’ she tells us and comes around the desk and kisses me. I introduce them and tell her Richard here is a collector. Likes to buy things sight unseen. Jean says maybe sight-unseen is the way to sell these babies cos they ain’t moving any other way. He reads out loud the sign on the wall that says, ‘I REALLY AM STILL GRIEVING INCONSOLABLE PROBABLY INSANELY, FOR MY DEAD DAUGHTER AND HUSBAND EVEN SIXFUCKINGTEEN AND EIGHT YEARS AFTER THEIR DEATHS.’
He goes up and taps INSANELY with the back of a crooked index finger and says, ‘Hmmm …’
We go down the hall into the converted squash courts in amongst the Sad Purple Dads and Sad Purple Mollys. Richard Finnes puts some half-moon glasses on the bottom end of his nose and walks from painting to painting stopping only long enough to lean his head back to where his line of sight goes through his glasses and say,’ This is sad. Hmmm … this is really sad. I can’t tell you how sad I find this.’ Margot walks with him and agrees, ‘It is … I do too.’ And they shake their heads pretty much in wonder at the whole gamut of sadness creeping up on them here.
Jean stands in the middle of the room and watches them go around. After a run of This Is Sads and It Is It Is echoes Jean puts her hands on her hips and I can see her getting angry, she looks at me and frowns, looks at them and asks them, Are you at work, or what?
Richard Finnes takes off his half-moon glasses and asks her, ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Well, it’s Wednesday today and I was just wondering … Are you two on holiday?’ she asks. ‘Or working?
‘We’re down here to see your … friend Jack,’ he points at me. ‘On some … personal matters,’ he explains.
‘Are you?’ she says. ‘Personal matters for him but business matters for you.’
He stares at her. ‘Yes.’
‘Mother matters?’
‘I’m not at liberty …’ He looks at me. Tells her, ‘Yes.’
‘Well fuckingwell weep,’ she says. ‘You’re on company time. Getting top dollar. Put some passion into it. Break down. This is heartbreaking stuff.’ She sweeps her hand around at the paintings. ‘Saying it’s sad’s hardly good enough. What about open weeping? Earn your dough.’
Richard Finnes doesn’t weep. He breaks into a graveness. Something still and disappointed that is maybe genuine. ‘Ms Turner,’ he says, ‘I’m currently one of the few people taking this woman’s predicament seriously.’
13
Living Airless
I fly because maybe he’s right. Maybe assessment is needed. Jean comes because, she says, it is my mother after all, no matter estranged or semi-estranged or whatever, and she’s decided she won’t cop some Company Arsehole accusing her of not taking my mother’s predicament seriously. Thaw comes because he counts free air travel a beautiful thing and not only has he always wanted to see the Great North-West but he’s always wanted to see a real live madwoman as well. Especially one pissing in public and ready to die in her own shit.
She has a boil on the back of her neck. She’s sipping tea. Bent forward in her chair, leaning into the Voice of God. The Voice of God is American. It is male. It is loudly accusing her of being a harbour and a shelter and a sustenance not to the live actuality but to the very essence of He who is foul and He who is fallen and He who is evil. Her inaction is an apology for His whole putrid ethos, the Voice of God says. She and her fellows are prepared to let His work continue, to let this world fester and darken, by not taking up the cudgel and striking at Him. When He is ignored He increases. When He is not attacked with prayer through God, through God’s chosen ministers, He is strengthened … emboldened. How long is she prepared to live this cowardice, the Voice of God wants to know. How long will she allow Satan free-throws from the three-metre line while she remains benched by her own apathy? Because Apathy is his work too … Apathy is his foundation evil … the evil which allows all his other evils to flourish and prosper. But her Apathy ends and is finished and over with and forgiven and isn’t Apathy any more when she licks that stamp, when she slides that envelope into the letter-slot of a post box on a street near her. The post box out on a street near her is the real front line in this battle. That post box on a street near her is where she can wage war on Satan. Mail that donation … to private box seven-seven-three-double-zero Manila … so my work, my struggle, can continue, says the Voice of God.
She leans back from the radio and takes a sip of tea now the accusations have thinned and things aren’t so critical and the Voice of God is offering a way out. My shouted ‘Hey,’ jumps her up out of her chair and jumps her hands up to her throat and she sucks breath for what is likely a scream and spins round and sees the three of us and me in particular. She stands there panting and holding her throat while the steam from her spilt tea swirls up off the lino around her legs.
‘I knocked,’ I say, ‘but you’ve got the radio cranked so high you didn’t hear.’
She sucks for breath. ‘I need it high,’ she says. ‘They’re noisy out there, playing tapes of the old gang and that aboriginal music they never let up with.’ She looks at Jean and nods and says, ‘You’re Jean, are you? Hello, Jean. Pleased to meet you.’ And looks at Thaw and nods and says, ‘Hello,’ and her hands fall from around her throat and hang limp down by her sides and she stands staring, waiting for an introduction to Thaw, then collapses onto the lino into her steaming tea.
Thaw whoops and says it’s a great start to a relationship with a madwoman. A promising kick-off, he says, likely brought about by over-excitement at meeting her beautiful potential daughter-in-law. Jean tells him, ‘Shut up, idiot,’ and I tell him, ‘Yeah, fuck up, this part isn’t insanity, it’s cardiovascular.’
She’s a veteran at this. Even before the insanity she did this collapsing part. Has taken many a jump over the years into lino and into carpet and into plain red dirt. I remember at my school sports day one year she collapsed right into a group of under-eight triple-jumpers who were sitting on the grass waiting for their turn to jump. Broke the potential blue-ribbon-winner’s collar-bone with her forehead in that fall. And when I was the eventual under-eight triple-jump champion that day because I had my main rival, Scotty Thompson, taken out by my mother, even the teachers looked at me sideways like I’d nobbled a sure thing. She had that knack of tarnishing my best moments with her falls. I spent most of my childhood mentally begging her not to collapse. Or audibly begging her not to come with me somewhere because she might collapse.
I carry her under her arms with her heels dragging into the living room and put her on the sofa. She’s a bag of bones. My guess is she weighs about half as much as a Rottweiler bitch. She has another boil on her right forearm. Jean finds a paper towel and wets it and starts sponging my mother’s face with it. ‘Jesus, Jack,’ she says. She holds up the paper towel to show me how dirty it is from my mother’s face.
And her hair is beyond desert tribesman now. It’s all stood-up with smack-addict neglect like the Keith Richards hair of the seventies. And who knows how many more boils she’s a harbour and a shelter and a sustenance for in the places we can’t see.
Thaw starts complaining about the heat. Takes hold of his shirt and starts flapping it in and out to get some air across his skin. He says it’s hot in here, no wonder she’s collapsed, it’s hot. He wants to know hasn’t she got at least a fan or something. The air-conditioner isn’t on. I point it out on the wall and tell him to start it up. He goes across to it and fiddles with it. Scr
atches his stomach wondering. Fiddles with it again. Checks it’s plugged in. Swears at it and declares it rooted and a goner.
I’m maybe a concerned son after all. Because I’m horrified to find she’s living here without air-conditioning. Horrified to think she’s at a point where she’s ready to accept life without refrigerated air. Refrigerated air has always been the dividing line between civilisation and the shitkickery around here. The working-class people that made up this town saw air-con as a sign of victory, a medal from a battle won. Those beautiful expensive jets of air were taken from the bosses. Anyone who didn’t have air in their lives hadn’t fought the bosses. Hadn’t stood up for themselves. Didn’t deserve to be free and independent and were probably scared in their hearts and stone-aged in their minds. The aboriginals didn’t have air. They came into town on Saturdays in their overloaded cars with their windows wound down covered in sweat and dust. We watched them through glass as we sat vaguely proud in our goose bumps while the town pulsed and shimmered with summer.
No one lives airless here. Living without air is the sort of thing I’ll commit this woman for. Only the mad or the black ever lived without air around here.
She blinks twice and opens her eyes and swivels them at Jean and me and smiles and says, ‘Sorry. Sorry. I’m all right. I’m fine. Just a stress thing. A nervous thing. Just a hangover from the Blitz. Though Jack probably told you a story about my heart. Anyway, I black out. Nothing serious.’
Jean gives her her glasses and she says thank you and puts them on and looms magnified at us. ‘The air-conditioner’s broken,’ I tell her.
‘Yes,’ she says. She sits up. Feels down her limbs for sprains and barks. ‘Has been since the day I was away at poor Adrian’s funeral. I suspect foul play.’
‘Three weeks it’s been broken? You haven’t mentioned it on the phone. Jesus. Three weeks? You fair-dinkum?’
‘Three weeks. Has it been three weeks?’ she asks. She sighs. ‘Three weeks already.’ She’s smiling, looking up at where the wall meets the ceiling, at whatever she sees there, which isn’t just curling paint and isn’t just cobwebs and waterstain but is likely some heroic vision of Adrian. ‘Poor, dear Adrian,’ she says. ‘Three weeks.’
No limbs are broken and no tendons are snapped. She hustles about getting us coffee and we sit around the kitchen table and she chats to us about what has been coming in on the short-wave and lets me down by not saying anything insane, though I’ve spent a whole five-hour flight preparing Jean and Thaw for the madness. But she does have that smile on her face through everything.
Looking out the back door I see her lawn is yellowed and dead. I go to the window. Her rose bushes are green and healthy. No roses, but that’s probably a time-of-year thing.
I suggest a walk. Jean says she’ll stay and help Belle, she calls her, prepare dinner. So Thaw and I walk. There’s nothing left of Hannah now except my mother and what surrounds her. The red ground has been brushed and stroked by bulldozers and by graders. Here and there are black patches on the landscape where the bonfires of introduced species burned. Looking long across the country you can see where the grooming ends and the ground breaks jagged into natural rhythm and the desert oak and the spinifex starts and the country rises into the Opthalmia Ranges.
Everything is different now. But not so different I can’t work out where I am in what was town. Even at its peak Hannah was mostly landscape – never got two-storeyed and sandstoned and became a geography of its own. Was mostly tin and fibro and rose and fell so close against the land I can still see where I am in it even though it’s gone. Can still tell where things were. Certain buildings. Certain roads. Certain moments.
We walk along in what is now wide open country but was what as kids we called Dead Cat Alley. What I remember about this alley is Dad giving me his perseverance and determination speech in it one night when we were walking home from the pool where I was trying to get my Junior certificate. The speech that was supposed to spark up some perseverance and determination in me. The speech about me being much smarter than him when he was a boy but him having perseverance and determination and perseverance and determination counting for much more than intelligence in this world. He was worried about the way I could lie around on our softer furniture for long periods. That was why he gave me the perseverance and determination speech. I remember promising myself I’d show him some perseverance and I’d show him some determination. Truth is the soft furniture probably won.
We walk up Radio Hill with red dust splashing up off our footfalls and stretching west in breeze. This hill used to have a two-hundred-foot aerial on it so we could broadcast punk rock and other news out into the Dreamtime. We look back down the way we’ve walked. The sun is setting. The west side of everything out there is lighting up gold. The east side of everything out there is dulling black. The manmade things out there lighting up gold and dulling out black add up to seventeen. My mother’s house, a yellow D10 bulldozer, a yellow generator with a fuel tank beside it, a silver water tanker that is positively on fire with sun, a Mack pantechnicon to carry away the building materials of my mother’s house, three site-vans and two porta-potties for the BBK men to live in and shit in and six Toyotas for them to drive.
I sit down on the hot rock. Thaw stays standing. He pulls a fifty-fifty marijuana cigarette out of his pocket and shows it to me and I nod and he lights it up. He looks around and says, ‘Maybe she’s so good at life she doesn’t need anyone else. Maybe that’s what it is to be a first-class hermit. Being really good at life.’
‘She seems to need her late husband,’ I say. ‘She seems to need Molly.’
He passes me the joint. ‘She don’t look ready to die in her own shit, Jack. Looks a long way from it. Christ, my father was five times as insane as her and no one suggested he was mad.’
‘He probably owned the land he lived on.’
‘I wouldn’t commit her if I were you. You do and you’re going to have to live with it.’
‘I can live with it. I couldn’t give a shit,’ I tell him.
‘What? For the one hard moment it takes to say “I couldn’t give a shit” you couldn’t give a shit? Or you couldn’t give a shit for the full journey it takes not to really give a shit?’
‘I couldn’t give a shit.’
‘It’s harder than you think, not-giving-a-shit,’ he tells me. ‘I’ve tried it.’
My mother and Jean have prepared a peppered meatloaf with canned peas and rehydrated potato for dinner. Her meatloaf is the most obvious sign of madness so far. She drinks some of the beer we’ve brought, but never goes outside to piss on the roses. She uses the toilet. Keeping herself nice for her house guests. Or maybe her pissing outdoors was another lie of BBK’s.
When the meatloaf is finished Thaw says he thinks we should have a smoke before we get into the Sara Lee Blueberry Shortcake. He leans back in his chair and flicks the bottom of his soft pack Peter Stuyvesant to get a cigarette running out the top and offers it around. My mother takes it. He flicks himself out another one. They light up and Thaw gets contemplative like a just-lit cigarette allows you to and he asks her, ‘Well, Belle … where do you see yourself in five years from now?’
‘Oliver,’ she says, ‘I truly expect to be with my Frank and my Molly and poor Adrian and perhaps my Mum and my Dad too, though he did drop bombs on cities during the war, so I can’t say for certain about Dad in the sweet hereafter.’ She looks a little off to one side of him as she says it, like she’s talking not to another person but to the general idea of other people.
Thaw looks at her. Studies her hard and says, ‘Well, I hope you make it. Despite it meaning you’ll be dead. I hope you do.’ He looks around the room and says, ‘I, on the other hand, wouldn’t mind being in the Caribbean. Having serious life-threatening carnal relations with some caramel-skinned girl.’
‘Well, I hope you’ll have married her in one of the intervening five years,’ my mother says. ‘And then I hope you make it, too.’ Thaw laughs and
tells her, ‘Thanks.’
She serves up the Sara Lee Blueberry Shortcake and Thaw bolts his down and tells her, ‘Magnificent, magnificent.’ And wipes his mouth on the front of his T-shirt and tells her, ‘Just the sort of tucker Jesus would have dished up to the Corinthians or the Whoevers if it had been invented in his day instead of just loaves and just fishes.’
‘He did what he could with what he had available,’ she says gravely. ‘Stretched things so they went around nicely. And anyway, it’s him in his Grace serving us up this food now,’ she remembers.
‘And hopefully it’ll be Jack in his grace and Jean in her grace doing the dishes while you and me enjoy a smoke,’ he says.
‘No,’ my mother tells him. ‘That’ll be me in mine. You’re a cheeky young bugger, aren’t you.’
I watch her. I assess. I’m right on her case. But her sanity doesn’t seem much more distant than it always has been. She says evening prayers in chorus with the Voice of God right into the bakelite radio. The Voice of God thanks her for them and repeats the private box number.
On the way to bed I go into Molly’s room where Jean is sleeping. I slide my hands through the tangle of sheet to her. She’s wearing a T-shirt, which isn’t normal, but is only proper when you’re a guest in someone’s house, I suppose. I start to run my hands and mouth up under the T-shirt. She moans and then wakes and stops my hands with hers and grabs a fistful of my hair and pulls me up away from her and says, ‘No, Jack. Not in here. Look.’ She points up at the stuffed rabbit with the chewed ears and the glass eyes that are catching moonlight on the top of the chest of drawers, and then points at the bald doll on the window sill with the moon shining off its scalp and points at the drawings hung about the room that Molly was told she had a big future in something creative about and that have gold stars stuck to them Molly was awarded that are shining in the moonlight.
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