Local Job for a Local Boy

I walked into the driveway of my house under the two towering pines and slung off my swag, wondering momentarily about Givva’s comment that everyone had been waiting for me to return. Why on earth would they be waiting for me? Before I’d left, I lived so quietly – labouring part-time with my brother, rustling up pictures in my barn on the other days, seeing my close group of friends from time to time but consciously going out of my way to keep my head down. Most people would have had to be paying real attention to know I’d even gone at all.

I tied the balloons to the old tugboat rope that has hung from one of the pines since my exhibition of knot paintings in ’96. The balloons looked good there, they brightened up the entrance, and below them on the ground two or three white polystyrene buoys sitting buff on the pine needles looked like part of the new arrangement.

I looked around. Nothing much seemed to have changed since I’d been gone. The only difference I could see was that the grass in the yard between my house and my barn was a foot taller, the house spouting was spiky with pine needles, and the two doors of the shed on the outside kitchen wall had come open. I walked over and closed the shed doors and was about to enter the house when my nephew Oscar drove into the driveway. In a white station wagon. Before I’d left, he didn’t even have a licence.

Oscar was so proud of his new wheels he didn’t get out of the car; he just wound down the window, beamed and gave me the thumbs up. A gust of breeze creaked in the pines and I heard the faint toll of the Plinth bells ringing back down at the rivermouth.

‘Well hello, Ossie,’ I said fondly. ‘Your car?’

‘Yep, Uncle Noely. My car.’

‘How is it?’

‘It’s good,’ he said, with great enthusiasm. He beamed at me, with a bright flash of his big teeth. ‘Where you been, Uncle Noel? It’s been months.’

‘Oh, here and there,’ I said lightly. ‘Camping mainly.’

‘I see your swag’s taken a hammering,’ he said, glancing over to where the tattered bundle of canvas sat on the ground.

‘Yep,’ I replied. ‘It’s been through a bit, that’s for sure.’

We went inside for a cup of tea. Luckily we both have it black, as the only milk in the fridge smelt like expensive French cheese. I chucked it out for the magpies through the front doors of the living room and dug out some shortbread from the end cupboard. We went first things first then and talked about the Plinths.

‘They’re public sculptures,’ Oscar told me. ‘Commissioned by the shire.’

‘I kind of figured that might be the case. But do the bells ring all night long?’

Oscar laughed. ‘They did at first. They’re designed to ring in the slightest breath of wind. And boy did they ring! But then after a week or so everyone kicked up a fuss. You know how the sound travels in this valley. In the end they had to do something about it.’

‘So, what did they do?’

He laughed again. ‘Well, Uncle Noely, they pay me eighty dollars a day to row out and tie the bells down at dusk, then go out again first thing and untie.’

I nearly spilt my tea. Then I made a few quick calculations. ‘Let me get this right, Ossie. You’re saying the shire pays you over five hundred bucks a week to tie and untie those bells every morning and night?’

‘Yep. I just row out in the canoe. Or swim if it’s warm. It’s for something called “The Year of the Maritime”. The Plinths are there to express a shipping feel. Well, that’s what it says in my job description. They’re gonna take them down again after twelve months, though there’s a lot of people round town who seem to like them and want them to stay.’

‘Like who, the cormorants?’

‘Yeah,’ laughed Oscar. ‘Anyway, did you hear about the pub, Uncle Noel?’

‘I did, Ossie,’ I said, smiling. ‘Just before I left town.’

It was actually the very day before I’d left town. I was walking down the hill from the general store with my dog, Pippy, when I saw the white planning permit flapping in the breeze outside the pub. With trepidation I walked over to read it. Our town’s one and only pub was to be knocked down and replaced with a cluster of eco-apartments called Wathaurong Heights.

In my wildest dreams I’d never imagined that with one stroke of a pen our town’s sole watering hole and communal meeting place could be obliterated. Nor had I imagined the proud and sorrowful history of the Wathaurong ever being used as a lifestyle lure, in cahoots with a famous English romantic novel, to appeal to the cashed-up classes. The whole thing was like a sick joke.

But this was the latest in a long line of rude shocks in the town. A few months previous, when our local shire had decided to roof in a section of our creek, so that young mothers and their children could sit on the bank and enjoy the river when it rains, we were simply flummoxed. Then, when it was announced in our local paper that roosters had been outlawed in the shire for reasons of acoustic pollution, we began to get pissed off. And finally, when we had all received a letter in the post informing us that Mangowak was officially no longer to be called a town but rather a ‘village’, my head began to brood. And then this. A piece of flapping white paper nailed to the treated pine pole below the ‘LIVE CRAYS’ sign. As I read what it had to say, some previously wholehearted thing inside me seemed to vanish forever.

I didn’t lash out or fire into an indignant rage. Instead I simply put one foot in front of the other, cut through the spare paddock down the hill to my home in the riverflat, dropped Pippy and my canary, Frankie, off with friends, and later that night walked out of town.

‘Yeah, it’s terrible isn’t it?’ Oscar was saying now, sitting opposite me at the table. ‘They stand to make a lot more money with those apartments than they ever have out of the pub. But where are we all gonna hang out? There’s plans afoot, you know, Uncle Noel. They’re funny plans too, I reckon. I suppose you haven’t heard, though, given you’ve just got back.’

‘No, I daresay I haven’t. What plans are they?’

‘Well, it started off as a joke and that ... but then ... well, I dunno. Maybe I shouldn’t be the one to tell you. Old Kooka’s the one. He’s got all the goss. Go and see him. He’ll fill you in.’

Oscar started giggling, presumably thinking about these ‘funny plans’ to do with the hotel. Quickly he slurped down what was left of his tea and excused himself, saying he’d really only pulled in to the old house to pick up his wetsuit from the line.

I took his cup, clapped him on the back and said it was good to see him. He said, ‘Vice versa, Uncle Noel.’ At the back door I congratulated him again on finally getting his wheels.