They’re flying me across the country to fight a hag. They think to reason with. But I know to fight. Know the first weapon she’ll use against me is Hitler. How he went ahead and bombed her, though she was only a child and knew nothing of hate, high-explosives or flying bricks. Didn’t stop bombing her until she had learnt of hate and learnt of high-explosives and learnt of flying bricks. And learnt how to live on after people you knew you couldn’t live without had been killed.
You never slept under a table while the Nazis opened their bomb bays on your world, she will tell me. And she’ll nod at me like it explains and accounts for the proven deficiencies in me. You never awoke to see what people could do to people. You had mosquitoes in your childhood nights instead of the Luftwaffe is why you don’t understand how precious life is.
And I guess it won’t take us long to get from my first long-suffering sigh or her first triple tut of reproof to a declaration of war. I guess my first fuck-you of raised eyebrow or my first not-this-shit-again of eye-roll will bring her up off her steaming teacup and out from behind her tannin-stained teapot and around from behind her formica table top pointing crooked with that arthritic finger and regurgitating now, at last, every moment of hate that never quite passed between us but just built up and lay heavy in each of us.
And her snowballing accusations will lead to that shouted accusation she was trying to get herself up for all along. That I went ahead and killed him. For nothing but my own status. Wielded the exhaust-hose and wielded the scotch bottle and wielded the wet-eyed announcement of death like trophies. In order to claim him as my own. An act of straight-out pure self-aggrandisement … and don’t think it was anything more. Don’t think, for God’s sake, it was anything approaching noble.
Below us is the red line of the Great Northern Highway cutting north through country dusted yellow with spinifex. Here and there rock erupts pure red out of the yellow dusted landscape. The whole run of land is jolted with air-pocket and tilted with thermal updraught.
Every ten minutes or so there is a tiny shine of corrugated iron returning the sun. Homesteads surrounded by home paddocks overgrazed red by cattle mustered and ready for trucking up north and slaughtering and fractioning shrink-wrapped for shipping to first- or third-world Asia, depending on how the season was and what the quality of the beef is. Only one year in five is it good enough for the Japanese. The North Koreans will eat it straight out of a boiling red drought.
I ask the pilot to drop us down low, drop us down to a thousand feet, where we can see what we can see. Because also below us, uncoiled into a thousand kilometre string of buildings along the Great Northern Highway is my home town. Buildings joined now only by the CB radio chatter of the truckies arranging rendezvous for burgers and sleep along the road south. Hannah Civic Centre on the back of a Mack maybe parking next to Hannah High School assembly hall on the back of a Kenworth outside a roadhouse in Meekatharra. Or maybe on the back of a Ford in a rest area is the Hannah Courthouse parked alongside a Bedford with the jail on its back the courthouse filled for four decades. The Hannah brothel is maybe dropping its lace in a petrol station alongside the Hannah Walkabout Hotel that filled it for three.
The whole town, all its timber parts and all its tin parts and all its fibro parts, which is nearly all its parts, is driving south towards permanent green, to become outskirts of sandstone and brick towns with reasons to live.
Hannah was an iron-mining town. But now the iron ore is turned into cars that are hunkered low on flat tyres rusting into shitboxes worldwide and everyone who lived in the town has been moved on. Superannuated and retired. Or unemployed and waiting. Wondering where the next iron town will grow.
The pilot tells me okay he’ll lose some altitude, but with us travelling north at six-hundred kph and them south in dust at one-twenty kph and most of the buildings somewhat reconstructed for the journey I’ll need a real gift for reminiscence to get any kind of buzz out of it. He drops the Lear Gulfstream fast enough to lift my stomach and intestines and Margot Dwyer’s stomach and intestines and his own stomach and intestines, which is all the stomachs and intestines on board, hard up against whatever it is keeps stomachs and intestines coming out throats and fast enough to make Margot groan in her sleep.
When we’re under a thousand feet he points out front of us at a small weatherboard church heading south out of the tropics on a semi-trailer with its aisle along the spine of the truck and its steeple sheared off for the journey. Its stained-glass windows have been bid out at auction and red dust is boiling up through its floor and out the empty window frames like it’s on fire. The Church of England.
What I remember of this church is if you sat third pew back from the pulpit you could look between the sandal straps and out through the transparent foot of a leadlight Jesus and see the thirteen-year-old girls of our town get themselves into states of undress before getting into their bathers ready for swim training in the town pool on a Sunday morning in summer. The under-fourteen freestyle class. Joking about the newfound danger of bikini-top fragility and feeling the novelty of first waxings and exposing brave illicit tans. Them not knowing anyone could see them in this corner of the pool yard. Not imagining anyone would take advantage of the transparency of the instep of our Saviour as commissioned by the Church of England to spy on them naked.
The other memory I take out of this church before it’s under us and behind us and south of us is of my last Sunday in it. The day I yelled a highly joyous ‘Blasphemy’ and then an outraged ‘Fuck’. The day Susannah Walter’s two-year-old daughter Taylor started me yelling by yelling a ‘Fuck’ of her own in a most amazing poignant pause the minister was staring down on us from the pulpit. Fuck wasn’t a sentiment anyone had expected from a little girl in a green velvet dress that everyone who didn’t have a little girl to compete for it agreed had a townwide monopoly on what they called sweetness. I was nine and I didn’t expect it so much I jumped off my pew, arms raised and shouted ‘Blasphemy’ and Mum ear-clipped me right out of the pew into the aisle not because of the fact I shouted in church, she explained later, or for what I shouted, but because of the highly joyous way I shouted it.
Me then shouting my ‘Fuck’ after the ear-clipping and the aisle-flopping because it had already been yelled once and was stuck in my mind.
Coming from a kid like me who didn’t have much Sweetness about me, they say, and certainly was never in green velvet, people shouldn’t have been as surprised at my Fuck as they were at the Fuck of Taylor Walters. But they were. Surprised. Outraged probably. And I was frog-marched out of that church and banned for what Mum called a probationary period but turned out to be forever.
‘That all you had for a church?’ the pilot asks like I’m an exposed heathen. I see myself angry twice in miniature in his Top Gun Raybans.
‘There was Catholic,’ I tell him. ‘But they’re not portable.’ The Catholics, like the third little pig, had built in brick. Which made their church the only brick building in Hannah. As kids we’d sometimes come and watch their church be brick because we’d only ever seen other buildings be weatherboard and corrugated iron and fibro. And we’d knock on it with our knuckles to feel it be brick and to feel how even soft knocking on a Catholic church could hurt. And we’d wonder at it and wonder what an amazing thing was a Catholic that he would bring his own actual bricks to keep away a devil and to keep away a wolf and to keep away a cyclone that the rest of us could keep away with only weatherboard and fibro and corrugated iron. Dad told us one time the Catholic devil was a more fierce competitor than our devil and that probably explained it. It wasn’t until we were much older we realised that church was brick just for the flat-out grandeur of brick.
That church probably has a wrecker’s ball taking a bite out of it right now because it wasn’t made for any sort of journey. Would have bled its stained-glass onto the roadside and shaken itself back to bricks before it got to the WELCOME TO HANNAH, HEART OF IRON COUNTRY. POPULATION 3000 sign.
Several more buildings run the highway below us before I recognise a schoolroom I did first, second and third grades in. A portable where Miss Scott taught us left from right and which I still conjure up in my mind’s eye to orientate myself when I’m asked which side of something something’s on.
The next structure I recognise is moving slow on a low-loader with a car out front with an orange light flashing advertising a wide load. It’s the Hannah football pavilion. OPTHALMIA GRANDSTAND the sign at the apex of its boomerang-shaped roof said.
I remember the sounds of the football games my father watched from that pavilion every Saturday morning for four years and that came to me across town to wherever I was that wasn’t at the football. The games of under ten, then under eleven, then under twelve and under thirteen football he coached and that he desperately wanted me to be part of. I remember he sat with his friends in that pavilion and told encouraging lies to them about their sons. Their leap, their anticipation, their pace, their general footy nous and potential.
Nowhere in town could I escape those boy-shrill calls of ‘SmithySmithySmithy’ for a handball or of ‘GregGregGreg’ for a stab-pass or loudest of all the ‘Yeees’ of high mark tailed off by umpires’ whistle and dead silence before the ‘Yeees’ of goal and the honking of car horns when my father was being mock-jocular in that pavilion with his friends while he watched their sons run, jump, kick, and learn lore he was desperate to teach me and was wondering what could be happening in my mind that could keep me from this. A boy would have to walk three miles out into the desert to escape those noises. And even out there the car horns of goal could set up a conversation with galah and crow and corella.
‘We’re a half-hour out of Hannah,’ the pilot tells us. The temperature upon arrival … will be bloody hot.’ He grins at his impersonation of a commercial pilot. Margot wakes and stretches and asks has she been asleep and supposes she has drifted off, what with the jet-hiss and all.
Margot is with BBK. The company that owns the town. Owned the town. In a legal capacity she tells me. She’s a lawyer. She’s met me at Essendon Airport and shaken my hand and ushered me into this jet and told me she’s so glad to meet me and she hopes they haven’t interrupted my week too much and told me thank you for helping out, but she knows I want to be involved anyway, and told me between us she’s sure we can come up with a solution that’s best for all concerned. All concerned in this case being the company she works for and the mother I’m estranged from.
She’s in her late twenties and got up in the outback spirit of the thing in an R.M. Williams white grandpa shirt and R.M. Williams baggy khaki shorts and R.M. Williams saddle-stitched belt and some white socks and R.M. Williams suede riding boots. Doesn’t know that Hannah was never part of the outback. Hannah was an island in it. A trucked-in civilisation of crisp salad and fresh seafood and city papers, all air-conned down to the twenty-four degrees of Celsius that surveys found was optimum comfort-level for mining families. Hannah was an island of union-enforced comfort with a heat-mirage ocean lapping at its fringes and lapping at its civilisation like barbarity.
‘Something for you to look over,’ Margot tells me. ‘Just so you can tell her what options there are and what a happy future and easy relocation we want her to have.’ She holds out a leather satchel across the aisle to me. Inside it are brochures from retirement villages. My mother’s options. Short bright futures deep in the Jason recliners of Eventide Lodges and Sundown Communities.
‘I can hear her when she gets a look at these,’ I tell Margot. Brochures of coastal cooperative retirement. I look through them. Their best offer is a flat in Albany with an ocean view. Rent-free until death. Air-conditioned coach rides to Perth leave daily, the brochure says.
‘My listening skills are really advanced,’ Margot tells me. And if she’d only like to talk it through with me … instead of locking herself into a corner position …’
Advanced enough that if she says something you want to hear you’ll hear it?’ I ask.
Margot takes in some of the country running underneath us and straightens her shirt that has twisted in her sleep and runs her hands up and down the skin of her thighs flattening goosebumps and just generally postpones her answer until she whips around to me with it all of a sudden like it’s just come in and it’s hot and tells me, ‘I’m all about people, Mr Furphy. Someone like her is of far more concern to me than an abstract notion like a company. Even the one I work for. I didn’t do eight years of Law at uni not to help people. Let me ask you something: can you bear the thought of her living out there alone?’
I postpone my answer by taking in some of the country running underneath us because I don’t want to tell her a straight-out yes and be exposed as a straight-out heartless bastard this early in our relationship. And the main point of interest underneath us is that a truck carrying some building has clipped a cattle grid and the building has dropped its walls and they lie shattered on the roadside in aqua tangles of weatherboard and the roof has flipped high and is lying fifty metres off the road in a deadly jigsaw of asbestos sheet and the pilot says, ‘Somebody’s miscalculation,’ and tells us he hopes their House and Contents was paid up. And the time it takes for that house to be under us and behind us and gone is the time it takes me to boil up a lie like the, ‘No, I can’t,’ that I actually tell her.
And for her to tell me back, ‘Well, then.’
I read more brochures. In North Cottesloe, Perth, another beach-front location, is a village called Evensong of twenty-eight self-contained units with communal rooms for bridge and reading and folk sing-alongs. It has its own Art Deco chapel. It has a palliative care staff of four, one of whom doubles as a Thai-style masseur–whatever that means to a generation that knew the place as Siam. It’s all air-conditioned. And you can order meals-on-wheels in three cuisines, by phone or fax.
Margot is looking out her window again at the dribs and drabs of Hannah, at the telephone exchange and the chemist shop of Hannah going south in the red dust. She apologises for the question. Tells me she was out of line. Admits in a soft voice she’s had family dilemmas she wouldn’t even contemplate discussing with strangers. Some things about her father are terminally embarrassing, she says. She watches one half of a Mobil garage slide back under her wing and admits, ‘He’s a ballroom dancer. Specialising Latin American. Dances the Masters circuit. Calls himself the Sultan of Samba.’
‘The Sultan of Samba?’ I ask.
‘The Sultan of Samba,’ she tells me.
All of which gets me staring at whatever I can see of her, which is chiefly goosebumped thigh and left ear as she’s looking out the window. And wondering if her father ever donned a tux apart from for a wedding and wondering if this father thing is only a trick of empathy taught to her by the PR department at BBK. A little production put on to let me know we have this burden, her and me both. Crackpot parents who are an embarrassment and a tragedy and a he’ll of a thing to bear. And here are her and me both, bearing it.
The pilot waggles his wings and rocks us side-to-side cutting into the stare I’m giving this Margot and lowers the pitch of jet-hiss with the air-speed needle swinging back out of high knots into approach and into slow turn.
‘Voila,’ he says, and waves his hand like a proud magician.
Below us off a white slide of right wing, revolving backwards in our circling, is a silhouette of Hannah. A hieroglyphic story of a town written in bare red earth rectangles and bare red earth roads with the bitumen black spine of the Great Northern Highway running through its centre. Red earth roads lead off on either side of it and are joined by other red earth roads into a red earth grid pattern. Only one bitumen road that isn’t the highway leads out of town and it winds six kilometres into the Opthalmia Range to Mount Whaleback and the mine. The biggest hole ever dug for iron. Its shore vast and amorphous like a lake’s. Going down deep in shelves and steps cut by years of trainloads of high explosive. The mine. The tit where Hannah sucked the iron from the earth to feed Japan.
Either side of the red earth roads are hundreds of red rectangular silhouettes of gone houses surrounded by small lawns now given licence to run, but with the night-chirping sprinklers silenced they’re not running, they’re yellowing and whitening into dead admission that here is a species of flora that has no business in the Pilbara.
There are rips of deeper red running angled against the road grid where cables and pipes have been torn from the ground, clotted where tanks have been raised. There is only a random throw of buildings left standing. Most of them surrounded by cranes and low-loaders and men with their hands on their hips and hardhats on their heads. Some of these buildings are being soundlessly stroked ground-level by huge shovels that used to take hundred-ton iron ore bites from the mine’s faces.
Her garden stands out provocatively green with borrowed water. Greener than anything else here. Nothing else is this green for whole latitudes. Her house is fibro. Not big enough and not solid enough to relocate. It was huge when I was growing up in it and it was surrounded by a neighbourhood. Now it’s surrounded by desert it’s shrunk and got fragile and got lonely.
Its roof is piebald with solar panels. There’s a satellite dish in her back yard. She’s becoming an outpost. Becoming the island they say no man is.
Four site-vans are camped out front on the road, but none of the heavy wrecking machinery is close. It’s held at bay by her heart. By her heart condition. By what a cardiovascular surgeon once diagnosed as ‘an interestingly malformed left ventricle’. Which she quickly diagnosed as medical twaddle and told him it was the Blitz that gave her a flighty heart, caused her long periods of black and dream and weakness, not any malformity, interesting or not. Just flightiness. And just the Blitz.
She’s holed-up in that fibro box. Probably bent forward out of her chair, cigarette smoke dribbling up over her face, listening as some radio star puts a hard question to a member of a beautifully broken family. With her town being relocated away from her and outright wrecked around her. Her, keeping relocation at bay and keeping the wrecking machinery at bay and keeping the whole multinational weight of BBK at bay with her freak heart. Flighty heart, she calls it.
But me flying in. Blood. Bad blood. But blood.
The pilot talks to the ground through a black prong of microphone strapped to his head and hung beyond tongue-touch outside his mouth.
‘Hannah field, Hannah field, this is BBK Lear Three. Do you read?’
‘Read and see, BBK Three,’ his radio tells him.
‘I’ll have Mister Furphy zero alt stationary in five,’ he says.
‘Car’s on its way, BBK Three.’
We circle once more while a white vehicle leaves the site-vans outside her house for the airstrip. We watch it driving too fast, sliding around corners, throwing gravel, lifting wheels, in a show civilisation is packing its bags, the boss has lost control, the sack is already given, the rules are eliminated.
‘Would you like me with you when you see her?’ Margot asks me.
‘No,’ I tell her. ‘No, I don’t think so. We’re probably better off one-on-one for whatever’s going to go on between us.’
‘All right. I hope you get off on the right foot, though,’ she says.
‘What makes you think there’s a right foot?’ I ask her.
The pilot punches his ninety-pound-per-square-inch tyres into the strip and cuts our seat belts into us with a scream of backthrust straining our neck muscles against deceleration until he relaxes the engines down from scream to sigh and we are still. He stretches his arms high and lets go a waking-animal noise. Wants it known flying is on a par with hibernation to someone as talented as him. He takes off his headset and seatbelt. Walks down the aisle behind us and pops the door. It swings up and looses a glare and an oven rush of hot air into the cabin that makes us grimace. He grimaces at me and tells me, ‘Welcome home.’
There never was more than a short walk in this town between airs conditioned. Patches of manufactured cold. He’s brought us right up level with our car. We put on sunglasses and thank him and hurry down the steps. Margot looks around horrified at the thousand-mile-wide storm of heat and says, ‘Shit,’ and gets in the back of the car. I get in the front next to the driver. He puts out his hand.
‘Richard,’ he says, meaning himself.
‘Jack. Margot,’ I point at her. We shake.
‘Where to?’ he asks, laughing as he accelerates, banging hand over hand on the wheel in a tight turn, spinning gravel back onto the tarmac, heading for what’s left of town.
Men in hardhats on giant machines are committing reverse archeology here. Tearing down and covering up any sign of town. An environmental reclamation unit is moving east through the whole map reference. Replanting spinifex, ghost gum, red gum and desert oak. Landscaping Dreamtime curves into the country with D10 Caterpillars. Hannah is becoming a deliberate lost city. A planned Atlantis.
We drive onto the bitumen of the Great Northern Highway where it became Fortescue Street for a kilometre and I remember being young in the loudness of the Walkabout Hotel and remember shoplifting things I didn’t want in Johnson’s Hardware House as we drive past their back-to-back foundations.
We drive past what was the town square and there is the broken concrete pedestal of what was the town cenotaph. The cenotaph was for Vietnam, which was the only war Hannah was alive for to lose sons into. Mostly it was for the parents of Billy Morrison and Chas Sutton who kicked up such a fuss at our town’s lack of cenotaph after Billy and Chas were killed by an American Marine troop carrier rolling on them as they were cycling tandem along a dirt road outside Saigon in 1970.
The cenotaph was topped by a statue of a soldier bending low with one hand outstretched to help a fallen comrade. In the soldier’s other hand was a Lee Enfield .303 rifle. On his head was one of those shallow helmets of World War One and, from his knees down, his legs were swathed in the bandages that were a style of legging worn in World War One. He was forged in memory of the dead of that war and stood atop a cenotaph in the main street of another mining town owned by BBK in New South Wales for forty years. That town’s raison d’être was coal and it was all dug up and trained away and the town folded about the same time Billy’s and Chas’s parents started kicking up about their warrior sons’ lack of cenotaph. So BBK shipped it west and raised it up to the top of the new Hannah cenotaph. Said it represented everyman. Every soldier. Represented Billy and represented Chas … who wouldn’t get a statue of their own any other way.
Sometimes people laughed at the cenotaph and said it served Billy and Chas right to get represented by a soldier old enough to be their grandfather, considering they were crushed by an armoured vehicle carrying pig carcasses to a Marine barbecue while they were out cycling. Other times people scowled at it. Said it smelt like treachery to give a man the taxing job of fighting trench warfare and pulling wounded comrades from the Ypres mud, everyone agreed it was Ypres mud he was pulling his comrade from, and then set him up there as if he was pulling Billy and Chas and their rented pushbike out of plain Vietnamese roadside mud where they’d been pressed by the reckless driving of American Marines and half a ton of pork.
Now it’s just a concrete stump sawn off by a bulldozer and the stooping soldier has moved again.
We turn off what was the main street into what was Johnson Street and I tell Margot I had hideouts in a hundred nooks and a hundred crannies and behind a hundred sheds in my day up and down this street where you couldn’t hide out now unless you were some variety of skink.
‘Yeah. It must be weird for you, this,’ Margot says. ‘The place of your whole childhood … and everything.’
‘It is. Coming back here with it all gone. Must be even weirder for her. I can see why she’s confused, or whatever she is.’ I nod at a copse of concrete stumps we’re driving past and tell her, ‘That was our little cinema. The Astor. I first got my tongue in a girl’s mouth in there. The Incredible Journey the movie was. Cat and two dogs outwitting bears and pumas and other shit with a high-tension soundtrack spooking things up. I watched the whole show sideways through one eye with an ache in my neck and tongue. Jenny Watts she was. More concerned with what Disney was inflicting on his lost pets than what I was trying to inflict on her. She just couldn’t get romantic while those pets were in jeopardy, old Jenny.’
Margot smiles at me and tells me, ‘Jack, I’d like to meet her.’ And I ask, ‘Jenny Watts?’ and she tells me, ‘No. Your mother. I don’t want to be pushy, Jack. But I’d like to meet her. I’ve never met her. And, I admit, I sort of admire her. I think we’d get on. And if it’s easier for you … tripartite interface never has the strong negative emotional lock you often get in a bipolar interaction. So if you want me there, as that third entity …’ she offers herself up with her hands outstretched at me.
‘Thanks, but I think there’ll be a third entity there. When we talk there usually is,’ I tell her.
‘Okay,’ she says, reaching over at me and waggling at me the satchel of Sundown Village alternatives I left in the jet.
‘At least a third entity. Maybe even a fourth,’ I tell her. ‘I don’t know. She had conversations going on with quite a few dead people when I last saw her. And then there’s the Almighty to consult from time to time. I might have trouble getting a word in.’
‘Okay,’ she tells me. ‘Okay. But I am a trained negotiator.’
Richard skids us stopped with our red cloud boiling past us up what was Johnson Street but is now just flat red dirt and just country for skinks to crawl across.
Down the side of her house are her roses. Looking incredible out here in the desert. Beyond blood-red. Totally significant. I step over her front fence onto her lawn which even to step on is outrageous green but won’t be soon with them fractioning down her water flow and desiccating it slowly to yellow and then dead as the next demonstration of their power, the power of the place, the futility of her stand. I’m halfway across it before she sees me.
Her voice is an old man’s voice from her vocal cords being dried out by the Marlboros and the years. By the years of Marlboros. Or maybe by flat-out lack of use. Coming out of the black deep behind a flywire door. Stopping me on the outrageous green lawn. Telling me, ‘Ever, I said.’
For eight years I’ve been telling myself she’s been choking on that Ever she loosed on me out from where she was hidden under that wide brim of straw hat. Staying awake about that Ever through a thousand small hours, staring at her bedroom ceiling waterstained all over with cyclone and biting onto her bottom lip and stifling sobs and wishing that Ever was never said, never unleashed into the scenario, never thrust at a son.
And here she is gone and repeated it. Which I can somehow remain cool about, somehow swallow my anger about, because this time it’s not an Ever unleashed and loosed. This time it’s a pathetic Ever, an emaciated Ever that can’t nearly carry the huge weight of its meaning. This time it’s maybe an Ever of regret.
So I’m able to tell her, ‘It’s been ever. Hi.’
She coughs a small shot of smoke through the black of the flywire and says, ‘I was wondering when they’d get around to you. I was expecting you more by phone really.’ She’s a shape moved up to the wire now and each word is a puff of white out of the black.
‘You’re still eating the Marlboros, I see.’
‘I still smoke. Come in, I suppose,’ she says. The flywire swings open. She’s a small dry woman, her face deep-lined and cracked in the skin-drought of age. Wearing wire-framed spectacles with huge lenses that bug her eyes out. Her hair is stood high with dust and neglect. A statement on water conservation. Probably saved a few litres for the roses by not washing it.
We hug only long enough to get the hugging done and to give me a feel of how skeletal she’s become and to smell how solitary she lives and to let me know I don’t want to hug her and probably to let her know she doesn’t want to hug me. I pass her the bottle of Spanish champagne Margot gave me to give to her from me and she asks, ‘What’s this?’ and then says, ‘Champagne,’ and tells me, ‘Thank you. Thank you.’
‘You look good,’ I lie. ‘Strong.’
‘I don’t look anything but ghastly and old. But I am strong. Strong enough. Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘That’d be good,’ I tell her.
We walk through the house. Leaning against the walls down the hall are dozens of paintings of Dad and my sister Molly. All of them in shades of purple. All of them dreamy with artistic incompetence. The same girl and man a hundred times.
‘Did you paint these? I ask.
‘I did,’ she says.
‘You’re a painter now?’ I ask. She doesn’t answer. She’s taken her mourning into art. Has taken it into religion, which was expected, but also into art, which is regrettable. Every canvas is made up of incompetent lust for dead people -people recognisable with their dreamy faces only if you were their brother or son, which I am, or was.
We pass Adrian’s and my old room, and Mum’s room, which was once their room, and we pass Molly’s room. Her door is open and on her bed propped against the pillow are the three dolls called Hairdresser and Daisy and Narny who used to take it in turns to be in and out of Molly’s favour and either sleep in bed with her or up on her chest of drawers with a battalion of other entities like the rabbit with his ears mauled bald and dog in the tartan coat who I see are still there. A paper octopus Molly cut from a 1977 Western Australian is pasted on her wardrobe door. Its tentacles are yellowing and curling out into the room now.
We keep going out into the kitchen. Every unexciting bric or brac tripping a memory and adding to my creep of nostalgia. This house was one of hundreds of identical houses. This kitchen is the same beige lino of all the kitchens of my childhood friends. Now it’s alone here in the desert. And even I, who am in Real Estate and am required by tradition and required by the fraternity and the brotherhood of Real Estate Agents not to break ranks and not to tell or even think a truth that might cheapen a property and that might lead to a million other truths unleashed that would weaken the market and, bingo, before you know it Australia is only worth half what we thought it was and our commission on selling the whole country lock, stock and barrel is only half what we thought it would be and we’re all in debt – even I can’t think of much good to say about this one. I, who am required to call mediocrity possibility and to pronounce an architectural abomination avante garde and to call pure architectural fuck-up a slightly flawed attempt and to call drunken screaming neighbours exciting community spirit and a lack of plumbing old-world charm, can only look out the kitchen window at the run of scrub where the houses of our friends used to be and say, ‘There goes the neighbourhood,’ and watch her look out the window after me and watch her mouth corners tic upward in a nano-second of feigned amusement.
Next to the toaster is the last of the bakelite radios, glowing, with an American preacher speaking out of it in a quavering extravagance of voice control. Its tuning knob has been missing all my life. I was seven before I could take hold of that little silver shaft with the red-handled pointy-nosed pliers that are still sitting beside it and move it off her station which was something like gospel and hymn and prayer and onto mine which was something like rock and roll.
‘What’s that?’ I ask.
‘That’s short-wave in from the Philippines. Reverend Quincy Roberts’ Voice of God. He’s a good preacher of the old school, Quincy is,’ she tells me.
I put the Sunset Village options on the table while she’s making a pot of tea from the same white china teapot with the brown stains seeped all through it. I fan them out like a full house, like they add to great fortune of some sort. A bright future. She starts talking with her back to me.
‘This would make it eight years, Jack. I don’t know if I should be angry to see you … or happy.’ She turns around with the pot full and steaming. ‘But I’m not either one of them. I’m just sad. I’m just thinking, “Here they come again. From another angle. Using collaborators. Using the fruit of my loins.”’
She puts the steaming pot on the brochures in a showy spill of tea and goes for cups. She points backhanded at the brochures without looking at them. Them you can keep,’ she tells me. ‘They’ve been delivered to me every known way already before they thought of you … the fruit-of-my-loins way.’
‘Talking about the fruit of your loins, how’s that bad apple Adrian?’ I ask.
She sits across the formica from me and looks up high on the wall about Adrian and smiles a smile that is probably serene. Adrian never was the bad apple, if that’s your little joke. He was always caring … like some others weren’t. And he’s nearly a saint now. Doing what he does for the dead of his personal acquaintance and making the necessary arrangements for them like he does. He’s a rock so steady in that whole tragedy. Only thing that keeps it running off the rails entirely. It’s a credit to the Good Lord he made someone like Adrian for a situation like Tinburra.’
Adrian was the wild son. Adrian was physical, Dad said. Adrian bit and tore and kicked and punched at his contemporaries until he was feared by them all and hated by their parents. Until a group of parents got posse-shaped one summer and demanded action. And Adrian was sat down by Dad and Mum and Sergeant Dooley of the Hannah police and questioned about his physical tendencies and advised as to where they would likely lead, which was going toe-to-toe with Maoris in maximum security. What came out of the meeting was that Adrian had no special desire to vent all his pent-up energies and aggressions in an illegal manner. Admitted he’d be just as happy to vent his energies and his aggressions legally. So he left school that term and joined the police to become what his friends who’d stayed at school called a legitimised thug.
‘He’s still the only cop up there?’ I ask.
‘’Course he is,’ she tells me. Aren’t many could do it. That’s why Our Father made Adrian for the task.’ She picks up her cup and runs her tongue around the gold on its rim.
It’s all I can do to resist asking why she thinks it is Our Father would make a situation like Tinburra for Adrian to be a steady rock in in the first place. Maybe Our Father set up the whole cancerous tragedy, the whole carcinogenic trap, for Adrian to prove his worth in. Maybe Our Father said to Jesus, ‘Now look here, Jesus, I know asbestosis is a tough call and I know mesothelioma is a debilitating bitch but look at that young man there. I believe he’s made of the right stuff and just needs surrounding with innocent death to be able to prove himself. A young man like that needs opportunity. And if you don’t give me any grief on this I’ll let the Americans find those thousands of P.O.W.s we’ve been holding in Nam all these decades. Is it a deal, Son?’ Something like that.
She’s still talking about Adrian. Adrian has a strong ignore for the evil working on him up there in Tinburra. Like I have here. He phones me regular to see how I’m going.’ She takes a sip of tea that fogs her glasses. ‘Never delivered any adverts to me for old people’s homes, though. Never done that.’ She wants to cut through whatever beat-round-the-bush niceties I can manage and get down to business.
‘Mum, they can force you out without stuffing around worrying about your future you know. They own the house. The land will soon be aboriginal again. The law says they’re right. They don’t owe you a comfortable old age, but if you go now they’ll give you one.’
‘None they could give would be comfortable, Jack. My comfort is here. With Frank and with dear Molly. And as far as force … they can’t force me anywhere. If they could force me they wouldn’t be using what they probably thought was a sly way like you to shift me. She gives a bug-eyed stare with her chin high and takes a noisy tea slurp. Defiant.
I go to her humming round-shouldered fridge and open it. I hear her snort a warning that I’m not the type of close mother-loved son who can wander in and open the maternal fridge at will. In there everything is canned, two of them being VB. I take one out and open it and drink, feeling it go right the way down into my empty stomach. It’s stale on the way to rancid which shows the years since a beer-drinker has been in the house. Mad old recluse even when the town was alive. But I’m to the stage where even near-rancid beer is good. I like to think it tastes vintage or German. Just another step in the brewing process.
‘They can’t force me,’ she says. ‘Because of what they think they know about my heart. They think I’m too weak to be pushed around. To be forcibly evicted. And I go right on letting them think it. Imagine their publicity problem if my heart was to give out during eviction. And my Frank once a long-term employee of theirs. Imagine the headlines.’ She holds her hands up, thumbs inward, fingers fanned out showing banner headlines. But she can’t seem to think of any.
‘Who do you think’s going to write the headlines?’ I ask her. ‘You’re about a thousand miles from anyone who gives a shit.’
‘Not so, Jack. Not so at all,’ she tells me. ‘There’s a journalist camped out there in the Fortescue River covering the whole town-closing theme. Has a particular interest in me. Comes to see me every few days. Lovely young man, though he’s fat as butter. He listened to a whole Reverend Roberts sermon on Banking Sins And Sins of State with me one night. Was held by what he heard. I believe he’s smart. He has his own satellite dish right on his caravan to file stories straight in to his newspaper. Says he’ll report their use of me any way it happens.’
She nods, smiles, comforted by this fat-as-butter presence with the technological edge camped out in a dry river waiting for the company to make its move. She tells me she’ll be blowed if he couldn’t make the whole thing very moving indeed. Has a way with words, she says. And she goes into her dingbat-serenity smile again looking up to where the wall meets the ceiling, thinking what a tragedy he’ll be able to blow her whole sorry circumstance into with his way with words.
‘Water,’ I tell her. ‘If they can’t evict you they can cut off your water. Or if not actually cut it off then dwindle it down to where your garden will die. Your roses … just dead sticks.’
Her hands go to her teacup and she takes hold of it and her knuckles and fingertips fade white as she pushes it into the table and levers herself out of her chair with it. She comes to the window above the draining board where I’m sitting and stares out at the roses. Behind them is a chain-link fence and beyond that now is a thousand-kilometre run of nothing human to the Indian Ocean. The sorrow in her eyes is bugged big by her glasses.
‘“To they who repeat the Word of God in prayer be not their sacred things coveted by tyrants.” That’s from Quincy Roberts. He says not a flower dies that is truly loved by man and through man by God,’ she tells me. The lower curves of her lenses are holding new-moon catchments of tears against her cheeks.
I want to ask her how it is with the whole fucking Sahara desert getting bigger each year and marching over the whole Godmade gamut of floral things in its way and marching over the people in its way too that Quincy Roberts pulls off this leap of logic that protects her roses. But I don’t ask her. Because I figure she hasn’t got an answer but has just got some abuse for me for asking the question and has just got more tears after that in place of the answer she hasn’t got.
‘I love those roses for the path they provide to Frank and to dear Molly. Love them for the message they send to me that Frank and dear Molly are waiting,’ she tells me. ‘My love of those roses is their protection. The Lord’s love of me is mine.’ She has her chin jutted high at the window, at the run of red landscape, at whatever else is out there that might threaten an elderly woman and what she holds sacred.
I don’t know what’s happened here. Last time I saw her she was a straight up and down two-dollars-in-the-plate Church of Englander. For an hour every Sunday she’d sing like a three-tenor. Now she’s getting it on the airwaves from the Philippines in a quavering American accent. Maybe because the Church of England has been loaded-low and driven south on the back of a Mack. Or maybe the C of E lost its buzz before that and maybe she’s needed the whole drug maxed-up outrageous and potent for a while now to get what she used to get from a few simple hymns and a lesson.
There are five rose bushes out there. Tall and rank and dark-leafed from her not having heart enough to prune them hard for maximum floral output. But the few roses that are blooming are double-take outrageous for their colour and size. A red that children from all over town came to look at, not believing such colour existed outside Coke and beer ads. Sometimes they’d run the gauntlet of rake-swing and dry-voiced God-curse to pluck one for a dare or for show-and-tell. And sometimes they’d run the gauntlet of rake-swing and God-curse to pluck one for the rake-swing and God-curse themselves.
‘When they bloom every year it’s your father’s message to me. And it’s Molly’s message to me. It’s him and it’s her. With a beautiful sign held aloft telling me they’re waiting,’ she says.
I take a drink of stale beer and start fondling a porcelain Jesus off the window sill. He also comes from the Philippines. He’s sporting a crown of thorns as fat as a donut. With a foolish smile on his face like a man who had a two-kilo donut hidden about his person would have.
‘If they were to cut off my water and kill those roses it’s probably still a story for my friend Charles,’ she tells me. ‘He has his ways. He could make it seen they’d killed something sacred.’ I put the donut-crowned Jesus back in his dust-free ring on the window sill. Drink some beer. Watch her watch the roses. I count a total of only twenty-seven on all five bushes. Not much of a gesture from the old man and Molly if it is him and her holding them aloft in their boast of continuing love.