Further into the bush there stood, between bent saplings, a flapping canvas structure that enclosed a hole cut into a wide plank. Elton was appalled to find that from that ghastly hole rose the concentrated odour of many defecations, a mighty column of effluvium as stout as the trees themselves. No one liked to use the latrine but Elton utterly loathed it and could only manage it seconds before his bowels resolved to nest in his only pair of underpants. And afterwards he would stagger out of that calico flytrap, a captive released from torture, and stumble gagging and gasping back to the questionable safety of the camp. There, beside the caravan under a weak fluke of water falling to the ground from a plastic pipe that splashed his shoes, he could wash his hands, and dry them on a shred of towel hanging from a length of fencing wire hooked around a window stay. Whatever else happened, from that day forward Elton would value his city environment as a mammal values blood in its veins.
Jess sat in the shade with a blue biro, scratching at an old travel magazine, filling in all the O’s. She cocked her head to observe her handiwork.
‘Who’s the Leader of the Opposition?’ Elton said.
Jess looked up at him. ‘Who’s the what, what, what?’
‘The Leader of the Opposition, in the government?’
‘Are we doing a quiz?’
‘I was just wondering who you are going to vote for at the election. The federal election.’
‘I don’t know if I will vote. Or I might vote for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. What’s it matter?’
Elton placed his elbows on the plastic arms of the chair, thrusting his shoulders upwards. ‘I agree. My vote wouldn’t make the slightest difference.’
It had been arranged for the pair to sleep in Jess’s mother’s car, and that night as darkness fell, Elton became particularly spooked. Without appropriate lighting and no actual walls, the night moved in; a creeping, unstoppable force. At home he loved the dark – it enabled him to see a screen more clearly – but it was he who created it and he who could undo it with the flick of a switch. But this menacing presence that descended in the thick of a bushland setting consumed things – first the underbrush far off and then the vegetation closer in. Unquestionably it would also devour his own visible presence and he needed no encouragement to scramble into the back of the car and slam down the hatch.
With the seat flattened, they arranged a bed and lay side by side, obliged to allow their bodies the informality of direct contact. Jess liked it; it was the closest she had been to him without some other agenda. Elton lay stretched out, his neck twisted to avoid contact with the back of the seat. Separated from the raw earth by four hoops of black rubber, doors securely locked, he looked out at the hostile, enveloping blackness from which he had no more protection than the thickness of window glass, and wondered what possible tweet could convey such absurdity.
WHEN HE AWOKE the next morning, a mosquito engorged with half a litre of his blood was suspended from the roof-lining directly above him, and Elton wasted no time angling out of the car. Jess was already up and, as he stumbled towards her, it took a moment to twig that this was the same person he’d sparred with the previous day. With her hair combed out, no makeup and somewhat shed of her usual accoutrements, Elton was surprised to find himself in the company of a regular, fresh-faced young woman.
‘When I see that kid, I’m going to punch him in the guts,’ she stated, emphatically.
Elton peered through lids still cracking the seal of sleep. ‘We might not see him, Jess. He might’ve gone wild.’
Jess winced. ‘Are you for real? He’s not a fucking monkey.’
‘Never said he was, but why would he bother coming back?’
Jess watched Elton attempting to tidy his clothes. He looked different this morning, unshaven, hair tossed, shirt rucked. He moved towards the arrangement of chairs under the tree.
‘At least I kept an eye on him,’ he said. ‘Which is more than anyone else.’
‘Honestly, Elton, you can be such a wanker. You kept an eye on him from the inside of your freaking data lab. That does not constitute friendship … or love.’
‘Love?’
‘Yes, love. He loved, Elton. He cared about things. And he just wanted us to care about things as well.’
Was this the same Jess who had images of mummified cats on her computer? They sat on opposite sides of the wooden table, their folding-chairs turned slightly away from each other. Elton tapped on the painted wood which caused a fly to be attracted.
‘I’ve got some plans,’ he said, withdrawing his hand. ‘For one thing I’m going to quit online games.’
Jess sighed. ‘You think he cares about that?’
Elton rolled his eyes. ‘No – I never said he did.’ He swished the air, ineffectually. ‘What does he care about then?’
‘Us.’
‘Serious? What gives you that idea?’
‘It’s obvious. He just wants us to do something.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like … something, I don’t know. Get a job.
‘Both of us?’
‘Why not? At the library.’ She wasn’t sure where she was going with it but the idea somehow felt heartening. Elton swiped at the air again. His latest issue was bushflies. They seemed to have singled him out, and the more he objected the more determined they were to alight on his face, hands and clothing. His uncle had given him a spraycan of insect repellent which, the night before, he had emptied liberally onto his clothing creating a noxiousness that only the flies seemed to appreciate.
‘We could earn some money,’ he suggested, watching the flies alight on everything, including the empty pressure pack.
‘I might do a course,’ Jess said.
‘I could … I could go back to uni.’ Blurted into the real world, the idea caused a distinct tremor to pass through Elton. Gradually he settled, his mind slowly warming to the concept. He could do it; he could gain a qualification. Information Technology – he had online friends who worked in the field and they were always bragging. Elton imagined his uncle asking him about his profession. IT, is all he would say, and Chris would nod approvingly, though the specialisation would be a mystery to him.
Mutually occupied with these unlikely thoughts of the future, Jess and Elton’s focus drifted from the general to the specific: each other. In such a primal setting, they felt obliged to regard each other a little differently. Exposed, out of their depth, and without the encumbrances of city life, their usual concerns were disintegrating, just as the white ash had blown off the hard earth revealing a substratum supporting a tactile, material world.
‘Shaun likes you, Elton,’ Jess said.
‘He likes you best.’
‘It’s not a competition, Ello.’ She paused for effect. ‘Do you like me?’
‘What?’
‘Do you like me.’
‘I don’t know, I –’
‘You don’t know?’
‘Okay, I do know.’
‘And?’
‘And … yes.’
‘And yes what?’
Yes … I like you.’
Jess looked at him squarely. ‘Then why don’t you come over here and pash me?’
Elton’s face tensed and he refused to meet Jess’s eye. She remained still for half a minute and then abruptly marched around the table to his side. She parked herself in front of his chair – before plonking down on his knee. Elton felt the full weight of her body and it alarmed him. She put a hand behind his neck and he tried to relax. He placed his arm loosely around her middle; it seemed like the appropriate thing to do. He did like her, of course he did, but should that necessitate involvement? It was a concept with dubious long-term prospects. As his mother had often repeated, despite the best intentions, relationships rarely lasted.
Jess’s shinbone was skewed sideways and it created a dull ache – which Elton believed was entirely appropriate, the proper outcome of such direct physical impingements. He felt a stirring in his groin which was also just at i
t should be, his rudimentary erection trapped uncomfortably beneath her right buttock. They sat that way for a full minute, both mutually constrained, until it suddenly seemed urgent to relieve things.
‘Do you think Shaun will come back?’ Elton asked, his nose brushed by strands of Jess’s hair.
She sighed. ‘Can’t think why he should. He’s had it pretty bad.’
‘I guess so. You have as well,’ he added, sympathetically, thinking of her scarred torso.
Jess looked past Elton’s shock of red hair, her mind skating across the kaleidoscopic aspects of her life.
‘Let’s just stick to the facts, Ello,’ she said at last.
CHRIS TOO had slept in his car, though slept hardly described it. It was his fault the boy was missing; he should not have left him. In the morning, he sat upright on the ute’s front seat and gazed out over the bonnet past a bent chrome aerial rising from the mudguard. A small wood-wasp bounced on the inside of the glass, unable to deal with the enigma of an invisible barrier. Ford Falcon utility, not his idea of a car but it would do for now. When the fire threatened he’d lent his Subaru to a neighbour and had not seen it since.
All these people with him now; none of them should be there. They were not equipped for it, not bush savvy – especially Elton. Was that young man the future? This tree you are sitting under, he had said to his nephew. Take a good look at it. Notice anything different? It’s probably the first tree you have ever seen like that in your life. I’ll tell you what’s different about it, Elton: it’s self-sown. It wasn’t a criticism; he just wanted to see how the young man would react, how he might feel regarding the end of such a thing as uncultivated landscape. But he really shouldn’t have said anything. If an original bushland was to go, then all the better that no one should miss it.
Shaun, on the other hand, was different; he knew the bush, it was in his blood. Elton doesn’t get it, the boy had said to his uncle. ‘Well of course he doesn’t,’ Chris had replied. ‘But not everything is about trees and birds, Shaun. It’s not all good here; there are plenty of unhappy people in the bush. They have fears and anxieties just like everyone else,’ he told the boy. ‘Nature is not a solution, son, it’s just another way of thinking.’ But Chris realised now that he may have missed Shaun’s point. Perhaps the boy just wanted his older cousin to let go of whatever was containing him, set aside his constricted sense of selfhood and cast himself, for a short while, into the abyss of selflessness.
Chris looked across at his caravan, the towbar chocked on bricks, and observed a curtain draw back momentarily revealing the hand of a woman. He had given his bed over to Adele and Stef and now he saw the van tremble slightly as someone stood up in its narrow galley.
Adele was the older of his two siblings, the city girl. Since childhood she’d wanted nice things, neat clothes, delis, shops and restaurants within a stone’s throw. That was when their parents lived in Ivanhoe. Morris was the next-born, the adventurer – as a fifteen-year-old exchange student, he’d opted for a placement in New Guinea. And Chris was the baby, born at the height of the freshly emerged ‘environment era’ when everyone was trying to save things: trees, whales, pandas, rivers. All three children were often regaled with stories of the things their parents had saved, as if single-handedly they’d turned the tide on disappearing species, caged bears, the spread of cane toads, cactus, camels and feral cats. And much to Chris’s embarrassment, his parents would fondly recount the moment of his conception: that warm summer evening of free love on the banks of the Franklin River during the Stop the Dam protests. When that issue was finally resolved they did not rest but moved onto other pressing concerns: the ozone, climate, whole ecosystems. Being the youngest, Chris was raised on a diet of advocacy – along with home-made muesli, burghal and brown rice – and by this legacy, became the family environmentalist. Someone had to do it, he told his siblings; there was little point in all that rhetoric unless someone actually followed through.
But now, sitting in the cab of an old ute that had been charitably given to him, and looking out to his pitiful surroundings through the smeary windscreen, it all seemed a little absurd. It was obvious: people can’t control anything, they can’t save anything. Come to think of it, he’d known it all along. Years earlier he’d decided that the best he could do was purchase a little piece of what was left and fence it off – like Scrooge gathering his hoards. On that patch of bush he’d built a house with a wide deck and a view onto the grey-green of serenity – until the day that same view was transformed into a crackling inferno.
Could he start again as Shaun suggested? There were many in Australia enduring worse dilemmas: abuse, poverty, terminal illness. He was free to decide and no partner to consider. He could return to the city, move to town or he could just stay put. Determination was a trait he’d once admired, even obstinacy – it had stopped the building of the Franklin Dam. But could it stop a bushfire?
He wound down the side window, spat onto the dry grass and watched Jess, the young dishevelled twenty-first-century goth, weaving her way towards the makeshift dunny.
JAMES OWNED a small laminex table with rounded corners and metal legs. It had been donated to him by his girlfriend the day she left, when she’d decided that changes needed to be made. At nineteen, she’d commenced an economics degree with firm plans for a career in politics. But over their lengthy relationship – a full seven months – she’d concluded that James just wasn’t on the same page. One night as they sat at their tiny shared table, green-flecked, she told him emphatically that, unlike herself, he was going nowhere. Then she departed, leaving behind the fashionably eccentric object that she’d rescued from a nearby nature strip.
It was at this little table, under a single naked globe, that James now sat with a table-knife between his middle fingers, bouncing it on the laminex like a chrome drumstick. Ting, ting, ting, it went, and points of scattered light danced around the blemished walls. He put the knife down and picked up the book Shaun had given him, Native Trees and Shrubs of South-Eastern Australia. For the very first time, he opened it, and was surprised to see that Shaun had autographed it: To James. Climb the trees. Love Shaun.
No doubt, James guessed, the boy was trying for a pithy epigram rather than attempting to deliver a salient message. Climb the trees, indeed! He’d never really bothered, in the metaphorical sense. Though the day after his arboreal meeting with the boy, he’d intimated to his mother that he might be moving. And hadn’t he told Jess that he was thinking about a uni course in Gippsland? But it was all just pie-in-the-sky stuff really, and he’d made no further plans.
At that moment James looked up and was startled to see his father standing in the bungalow doorway. He could not remember ever having a visit from the man.
‘Just thought I should let you know,’ Simon said. ‘Shaun has gone missing again.’
‘He’s run off a second time?’
‘Seems so. The others are staying on until he’s found,’ he added. ‘Up in the bush.’
‘Okay,’ James replied. ‘I hope they find him. I really like that kid.’
His father hesitated on the coir mat before taking two steps into the room, the reduced space between them doubling the uneasiness.
‘Listen, James …’ He looked grim and lightly clenched his fists. ‘I think it’s fair to say, I haven’t been the ideal father have I?’
Strange words: not a confession or apology as such, just a statement of fact. At best it seemed to acknowledge some sort of enduring culpability.
‘No,’ James replied, surprising himself. Under the circumstances, he had imagined he’d be more accommodating, yet it was a simple no that left his lips: negative, father, you have not. Perhaps he was responding less as a son and more as an adult of equal status.
‘We can change that,’ his father said, unmoving. ‘What about coming in and keeping me company later tonight? Watch a bit of television?’
James nodded and the man returned to the house. Unexpectedly, it left James
with a discomforting hollowness, not in relation to his father but to Shaun, the one who had taken off, apparently dismissing them all – Jess, Elton, the boy’s own aunt, even him – as if they had not measured up to his expectations. The presumption! People made their own choices and James’s default setting had always been to postpone things, a path as valid as any other. No one – not even the naïve young – should assume otherwise.
Climb the trees; touching if it wasn’t so audacious! No one – especially the naïve young – should assume they could just step in and present a new direction for someone else. Was the boy’s own life any better?
Alone and sitting at the little table dragged home by his ex-girlfriend, James casually turned the first few leaves of Shaun’s book and read, The Land and its Vegetation. If he was going to start anywhere, that page seemed as good as any.
THE SUN rose over the caravan casting a polygonal shadow across the clearing. On that second morning, all five slouched around the wooden table and allowed the first solar rays to poke and prod their somnolence, to permit its covert benevolence to seep in. The air remained still, a few shining leaves shimmered on the tips of branches, fine trails of horizontal spiderweb glistened, seemingly attached to nothing. Insects were waking, they buzzed and droned; touched by the sun their cold blood was warming, enabling flight. Would the summer ever end?
The group tried to eat, Chris serving cups of tea, instant coffee and toast as dry as a cork placemat. An unidentified bird called raucously from the branches and Elton feared something unpleasant might drop on him. He held his plate on his lap and chewed thoughtfully. With the tip of her chipped black fingernail Jess pushed some crumbs towards a small ant on the table that was backing up and bumping forward as though still getting used to the gears. Stef stretched and looked past the group into the shadows.
‘It’s so … quiet,’ she said, and caught Elton’s attention.
‘That’s because nothing’s happening,’ he said.
The Colour of the Night Page 23