Silences Long Gone

by Anson Cameron

  Then the school holidays end and all those Range Rovers with all those roof racks change up into fifth gear and get the WELCOME TO LORNE * TOURIST RESORT FOR ALL SEASONS sign shrinking in their rear-view mirrors as they gun north out the Great Ocean Road for Melbourne. And suddenly everybody in town knows everybody else in town again. And suddenly they don’t want to talk about anything else.

  Like now we’re alone at last and can talk of private things. Or with the changing of the season they’ve all of a sudden decided it has grown to be more historical curiosity than contemporary tragedy and as such is ripe for historical enquiry. They act like they held a town meeting. Swelled the Catholic Hall with their numbers and took a vote. And voted Yes we can discuss this now. We can delve and can wonder aloud. Can wander back and forward across it at length. Can revel in it and roll in it. Can question and outright interrogate those members of the community who have the answers in them until we have the answers in us.

  In first light on the thin beach of high tide when Jean and I are out walking Villi and throwing sticks for him to crash through waking seagull flocks at and crash through waves at it’s the O’Neills. They’re in their fifties and retired to the coast from selling Toyotas and Hondas in Blackburn and in Malvern and in Toorak so she can write the novel she has burning in her and he can catch the mighty fish that may or may not be lurking in the seas roundabout. Their dog Anonymous who has been designed tiny and high-pitched by the breeders of Europe dances around their Reeboks as they walk and sometimes mounts a high-pitched, half-charge at a lone seagull.

  Elliot O’Neill walks hard to keep the heart attack that killed his father fifteen years distant in his own chest and Gail O’Neill walks hard to keep her mother’s arse three sizes distant up the clothes rack from her own. So they come upon us fast and come upon us before I have time to marshal all the bullshit I can marshal on the subject even though I know they will be coming upon us fast with the fluorescent patches on their Reeboks flashing on and off in the dawn grey and with Anonymous giving off high yips like he was designed by the breeders of Europe not so much to hunt and eradicate as to debate the rodents that plagued them.

  When they get close to us Elliot O’Neill picks up Anonymous because Villi is a red heeler and because Villi was Thaw’s. Villi sniffs all around the legs of Elliot O’Neill while Anonymous yips staccato down at him. And they shout, ‘Morning, Jack. Morning, Jean,’ over the yips. And tell us, ‘Looks like we’re in for a good one.’ We agree, Yeah, it does,’ and they come to a stop on the sand in front of me and Jean skirts round them and raises her eyebrows from behind them and points up the beach with her thumb that she is going to keep walking and whistles Villi and by the time they have softened me up with a few more preliminaries about the day and about the time of year Jean is over the groyne and out of sight along the beach heading for the pier.

  It is always him that unleashes her theory and it is always her that unleashes his. And hers is every day another theory of love refusing to fit into the shape she figures we tried to fit it into. And his is every day another theory of drug abuse.

  He stares at me in the half light and tells me, ‘Jack, Gail thinks it was a love triangle gone horribly wrong. That Thaw was in love with Jean but couldn’t have her because she was in love with you who wouldn’t give her and so he struck at you the only way he could without hurting Jean … who he loved. Struck at you through your mother.’ I nod, like I usually do, as if her new theory has some sense about it and may even be the key to the thing. But before I can open my mouth and rate it she tells me, ‘Elliot’s convinced it was LSD,’ and I have to nod and knit my brow over that one as well and say, ‘Hallucinogens,’ like ‘Hallucinogens’ is a synonym for ‘Eureka’.

  And they demand to know of me whose theory it is I lean toward. Her, out here in the dawn resurrecting the arse of her girlhood? Or him, out here in the dawn resurrecting the heart of his boyhood? He asks me what I think, in light of this new … not exactly evidence … in light of this new … light … that is shed on the subject? Who do I think is closest to the mark?

  So I choose between the theory of love refusing to fit into the shape we tried to fit it into and the theory of illegal substances and get told by whatever O’Neill I have agreed with that they think I’m right, they think I’ve been rock solid sensible through this whole thing. This morning I tell them, ‘Maybe it was LSD. Maybe that was it all along. I never met such a bloke to make out crocodiles and other shit in the clouds. He was gifted at crocodiles.’ And Gail O’Neill rolls her eyeballs because I agreed with his Cocaine theory yesterday at the expense of her Illegitimate Son theory and maybe I’m throwing in with the Illegal Substance camp lock, stock and barrel, and he thinks out loud that I’m wise and thinks out loud that society is stupid.

  Their theories are only the theories of Toyota dealers who branched out into Hondas late in life as a challenge so they don’t cut much ice with me and don’t move me or impress me or confuse me. Don’t live with me much after they’re speculated out at me. They just delay me and just let Jean and Villi get away from me so I never reach the pier on our morning walks any more.

  Villi spots me coming toward them as they’re walking back along the beach and leaves her and comes charging for me and I shout, ‘Sit … sit … sit … down … siiit,’ as he closes on me. But he ignores me like he always does and he barrels into my legs flat out. And when I’ve told him what a stupid fucking prick of a dog he is and swung my Blundstone at him a few times and he’s barked at me and evaded it Jean is up with us and I take hold of her by her shirt and pull her in to me and take hold of her by her arse-cheeks and press her hard up against me and she tells me how painfully tolerant I am and then tells me how many people are out there on the pier and who they are and what they’ve caught. Tells me, ‘Flathead and salmon.’ And I tell her, ‘LSD and a Love Triangle,’ which she thinks she might even prefer to Amphetamines and Free Love, which was her favourite concoction to date.

  The O’Neills are just the earliest-risen theorists about town. Through the day others will come up to me and deliver their thoughts and when they’ve delivered their thoughts shake their heads as if they see even their delivered thoughts haven’t cut through the wonder and the mystery of it all now they’ve been delivered out loud. Even their delivered thoughts haven’t got to the bottom of why a man would do what he did to his own finger and do what he did to his best friend’s mother and then do what he did to himself. And after they’ve shaken their heads will say something that comes in a variety of ways but always adds up to, ‘Weird shit happens … fact of life … I s’pose … maybe.’

  *

  For two years now at the end of the working day I’ve checked in with Geoff Yeomans Senior and told him–as he’s strained to lean back managerial in his ergonomic chair -which couples I have shown up which windless gullies during the course of the day and who of the couple I showed through the architect-designed timber residence in this windless gully is the marital-pants-wearer and who of the couple I showed through the seen-better-days HardiPlank getaway in that windless gully is the marital-pants-wearer and just what are our chances of ganging up with which marital-pants-wearer against their life partner and clinching a sale before auction.

  But since the curfew was lifted and what happened to my mother has become a topic for the town it has become habit with Geoff Yeomans Senior when I come in at the end of the day with my report to finish rolling his cigarette and then to cut me off mid-sentence by telling me, ‘Never mind about all that shit now, Jack. Let’s go and have a drink. My shout.’ And to rise stiffly out of his ergonomic chair and come around from behind his desk and put his arm across my shoulders like concern runs deep in his veins and tragedy runs deep in mine and to say, ‘Come on, son,’ and shepherd me up to the Pacific under that arm.

  And on the way up to the Pacific he’ll drag on his roly and hold it out in front of his face with his free hand and stare at it and exhale at it and tell me in that smoky breath
that what I’ve been on lately is a steep, steep learning curve. And what I mostly want to tell him back is I don’t think I’ve learnt a fucking thing. Don’t even believe there’s a lesson in it. No hint of a lesson from start to finish. But what I tell him back is, ‘Yeah … I have … steep.’ Because I don’t want him getting the idea I’m some sort of bad son who got nothing from his mother being out there … with the isolation … with the champagne … with the duct tape.

  In the front bar of the Pacific are the theorists en masse. And some of them have euthanased aged parents by morphine ampoule and some have shared in miscarriages they drove right into Geelong about and some have lost loved ones in the fullness of life to the dread disease and lost crew members at sea and lost family members who accelerated too hard or braked too late or broke out exasperated across a double white line on the Great Ocean Road.

  But none of them can walk into the front bar here and get a pause choreographed into the whole mosaic conversation. A pause that wells up into outright silence because their mother has been murdered in cold blood by a best friend whom they had sheltered under their very roof and who crossed a whole continent while bleeding into a bag to do it and then completed the whole of whatever it was he completed by blowing his face away into a ceiling fan that sucked the steam off the five thousand showers of their childhoods.

  And right here in the outright silence, before it fractures into chat, Geoff Yeomans Senior has his moment. Has the moment he’s been waiting for all day. And takes his dead stub of roly off his bottom lip and flicks it out at the idea of the crowd but hits the garish reality of the Cameron Tartan carpet and tuts softly into the outright silence and throws up his hands as if to spook livestock and announces loud into that outright silence, ‘Righto, gentlemen. Let’s not gawk and stare like merinos. You’ve all got some bullshit to speak, I’m sure.’

  *

  But I can take whatever Lorne has to say on the subject. Can take their theories. Can take their silence. Can take their laying-on of arms. Can take their fruit loaves dusted with cinnamon and heavy with fig.

  Because if they’re not ex-Toyota salesmen or ex-lawyers, they’re crayfishermen or they’re restaurateurs or they’re plumbers. And none of them smacks of truth on any subject that isn’t Toyotas of the sixties and seventies or Probate Law under Bolte or what the Fucking Vietnamese have done to the crayfish or the twin pillars that are lemongrass and coriander or just when to take up a multi-grip in preference to a Stillson and when to take up a monkey-wrench instead.

  It is only him that maybe smacks of the truth and only him that can theorise me into a cold sweat. Only him, who walks up to me one night in the front bar of the Pacific and takes off his tam-o’-shanter and unbuttons the driving coat he is wearing because he has driven all the way down from Sydney in his open-top MG, and asks me, ‘Are you Jack Furphy?’ And when I tell him, ‘Yeah,’ puts his hand out and is set to tell me who he is when I say, ‘I know who you are.’

  Know who he is from book backs and from magazines and newspapers but mostly from him being on ‘Burke’s Backyard’ where he was the celebrity gardener and showed us his liquidambar whose roots had broken up his shed-slab, his liquidambar that was only as big as a tomato plant when they bought the house twenty years ago, that is unless his wife planted the damn thing soon after they moved in, he can’t remember.

  He tells me, ‘Listen, I’m sorry to hear about what happened to your mother.’

  I tell him, ‘I was sorry to see what happened to your shed-slab.’ And he gives off a wry little smile like maybe he regrets that Don Burke and that liquidambar as a career move and maybe he’d rather be remembered for his great novel on Hiroshima or for his great novel on the Vietnam War or for his great book on Rob Roy than be remembered for his shed-slab cracking liquidambar that he doesn’t know if his wife planted or was there when they bought the house.

  He strokes his hand down over his wind-bothered beard and sharpens it into the old-growth monument that keeps people from calling him babyfaced and tells me, ‘We had a tree surgeon in. We had it felled.’ The old-growth monument flaps atop his sternum as he talks and makes of him an Old Testament prophet.

  He says he’d like to buy us both a pint of draught Guinness. From the can with the widget in the bottom of it that infuses whatever it is it infuses and makes it so like the real Guinness in Ireland. Then he wants me to know what a grand name in Australian history is Furphy, with the novels they’ve written and the watercarts they’ve made. And wants to know if I’m related to the writer of the novels and the makers of the watercarts, to which I tell him, ‘Well, you know, distantly, I think. But Dad’s dead.’ And wants to know if I’ve read the famous book or if I’ve been to Shepparton to see the famous foundry. And I tell him I’ve been to Nagambie, which I believe is fairly adjacent because the road sign there said SHEPPARTON 62, and I’ve just recently read Ken Kesey’s book because I’d seen that movie on video with Jack Nicholson and loved it. And he raises up his pint of Guinness and quotes at me the famous anti-liquor quote from the arse-end of the watercart of the Furphys and takes a sip that leaves foam in his moustache with part of the H in it from where he wrote his initials into the head of his pint.

  He got wind of her first, he says, from the Western Land Council whom he still has contacts with from the days when he wrote his book on the stockmen’s strike up there. And got wind of her again through a journalist friend of his called Wadlow whose family he used to work for when he was a cadet. And has talked at length with his journalist friend named Wadlow who told him a remote murder-suicide wasn’t what was wanted in journalism but that maybe the nature of this particular murder-suicide meant it was what was wanted in his more long-winded line of writing. He tells me he thinks it just may be. What’s wanted. He thinks there may be a book in her. In her and in him … who killed her.

  He buys us both another pint of the Guinness with the widget in the can and asks me if I’ll join him in a search for the truth of my mother’s story. Writes his famous initials again in the thick head on his pint and asks me if I’ll assist him and join him in his speculations on what he calls the various vicissitudes and vagaries of our still-untamed, and who knows probably untameable, recesses. Asks it as if I have it in me to follow him there into the probably untameable recesses and to speculate alongside him.

  I tell him I’ll tell him what I know. That’s all I can do. He says good, good. Don’t do any more than that. He says what isn’t fact he’ll elevate from likelihood to moral truth by literary means and devices.

  Then he leans across the table and across the pints of Guinness that read HR and JF and warns me not to get him wrong. Warns me please don’t think he’s going to glorify my mother’s stand, or indeed my mother, in all of this. Because he’s not into Glorification. He’s into truth. So I’m not to get the impression he’s going to glorify her.

  Over the next few weeks he shouts me dinners at Kolorado and at Waterborne and I tell him what I know. People come up to him during soup while I’m telling of Dad or during chili prawns while I’m telling of Molly or during coffee while I’m telling of Thaw or any damn time at all even if he has one hand out at me with the fingers splayed speculating on the probably untameable recesses. And they ask him to sign the title page of his book about Hiroshima or sign the title page of his book about the Vietnam War and he always makes the same little joke about how he feels like a star of Aussie Rules getting all this attention and they look at him across the chili prawns or across the coffee like maybe he’s up himself after writing those few books.

  And each time he drives his MG into town and seeks me out for dinner and enlightenment, he calls it, he starts off by telling me not to get the wrong idea. Not to get the idea he’s going to glorify my mother. Because her stand was somewhat racist and somewhat colonial and somewhat deluded and entirely pig-headed, he tells me, and doesn’t deserve the patience it otherwise might get if it wasn’t all these things.

  But always after the second ca
n of Guinness with the widget in it that infuses what it infuses he starts to pull at and sharpen the old-growth monument that prevents people from calling him babyfaced. Starts to puzzle and worry about the pig-headedness and wonder if maybe the pig-headedness isn’t the point after all. Starts to wonder if maybe there isn’t another name for the pig-headedness and if maybe it isn’t deserving of a little glory and a little elevating by literary means.

  His questions never end. They get smaller. They hunt fine detail. They hunt colour. Hunt light and hunt shade. Hunt pins dropped in silences long gone. Silences long ago submerged in the cacophonous interactions of the living.

  He wants to know of me what colour was that first bra of Molly’s. That one she got chased for? Wants to know of me what species of rose it was my mother nurtured out there. What shade of red? What type of fertiliser she used? Wants to know, did those roses go under the bulldozer blade?

  Wants to know of me when Dad didn’t return from the toilet at the footy that day and I went searching for him and found him out behind the Opthalmia Grandstand on his knees clutching his throat and clutching his chest with pain bending his face which he straightened only long enough to tell me it’s nothing, it’s just indigestion, and to tell me to go back and see how the Sainters were travelling, did he let go of his chest and his throat to tell me that, and did I help him up and insist we get this looked at or did I go back into that grandstand like I was told and see how the Sainters were travelling? And when I tell him what I did that day, wants to know, Well then … how were they travelling?

  And wants a picture of the other end of Dad’s illness as well. Wants to know did he shave himself that morning? Shave his own corpse, in a manner of speaking? And wants to know if the windows of that two-tone Toyota Hi-Ace fogged up and painted him in there or if the windows stayed clear and I could see him laid back in his tan bucket-seat staring at the cab roof and coughing that yellow vomit onto his aubergine shirt front. Wants to know the shape of every cloud that floated past east and got reflected off the bonnet and then off the windscreen and then off the roof on that direst day.