He screams the saw high before leaning the chain into the soft outer bark of the Schinus molle where the scream flattens with falling revs as the blade disappears and the teeth rip deeper into older growth rings. As it loses revs he eases his weight off and pumps the trigger until it builds again to scream. A wet stream of wood chips fires out behind him onto the ground. The smell of peppercorn is strong in the air.
He snags the traction teeth on the outer bark and uses them to lever the bar tip to its full metre depth. In there, fifty years deep, the chain is slowed on the hard grain, grinding to a halt and stalling the motor. In the silence he swears Jesus peppercorns are bastards to cut and can blunt a chain fast as dirt can. They’re fucking weeds, these things. The others are just struggling along. But these things are fucking weeds. From Peru they are. Bastards. He lifts his visor up onto his helmet and puts a boot up on the trunk of the tree and tries to pull out his saw. He works it back and forward and swears against everything Peruvian until it’s out.
Then he walks around the other side of the tree and drops his visor and restarts the saw and slants a cut down into the one he’s already made. I see the quiver begin in the tree’s fine foliage. The leaves feathering as if in breeze. There’s a groan above the saw noise and he pulls the blade out of the trunk and hits the kill button and takes a step back as it gurgles silent. He watches the tree. Waiting to take a step either way.
Its fall begins in groan and accelerates toward me in an arc that ends in a rampage of branch-fracture with a spray of fish-bone leaves and red peppercorns thrown high and raining wide in the silence.
He starts the saw again and cuts a notch in the stump for the dozer driver to loop his chain through. Then he walks up the street to a Tipu tree with a trunk no thicker than a man and he takes it at red-line revs in one cut so its trunk spears into the ground off its stump and topples over from there. He doesn’t notch the stump this time. It’s puny enough for the dozer to power right over without even gear change. He looks up at me and shouts, ‘Tipuana tipu. Brazil. Nice tree in its place.’ The saw stalls. ‘Lovely filtered shade,’ he says.
Looking back I see the peppercorn stump attached to a D10 dozer by a haulpak tow-chain. The driver eases the huge machine forward, taking up the slack, lifting the chain’s donut-size links into a quivering then still line between machine and stump. He guns a couple of shots of blue exhaust into the sky and puts horsepower down through the steel tracks into the rock. The stump begins to tilt and the earth on its far side to lift and crack. Roots can be heard popping and snapping underground. They begin to appear above ground, springing up into the air as they snap, throwing rocks and dirt. Then there’s a loud subterranean pop of tap-root and the stump heels over and is dragged out of the earth with what’s left of its root system a high wide suck at fresh air.
The saw is off. We walk up to a tree and he slaps its trunk and says ‘Native’, and keeps walking. He stops at another. ‘Acacia baileyana. Cootamundra Wattle. Native. But native to the eastern states.’ He pulls at the starter cord of the saw, dropping its weight against the pull while I back off out of the tree’s reach. His face is relaxed in small smile. No wince at the scream of saw. He’s doing good. A man working to his own Hippocratic oath.
He’s one of five arborealists working their way through Hannah. Each has a small grid of streets. They’re cleansing the landscape of any tree not native to the area. Chopping down anything planted by the mining generations and anything that seeded from anything planted by the mining generations. Introduced species they learnt to recognise from their studies at the fiercely nationalist herbariums of the Whitlam era.
The sound of tree fall and the pop of root runs off into the desert mirage. Tomorrow the black smoke of the diesel they use as accelerant for the bonfires will rise in a map of self-generated thermals.
I leave him cutting and walk back across the red of the land to my mother’s house. Her house is the only building left of the town now. The only building with its roots down into the rock, anyway. There are a handful of semi-buildings around her house up on chocks ready to be lowered and towed away on their own wheels as soon as she gives in.
She’s her own hostage situation now. If she was to dig a trench and take up arms she’d get the Special Operations Group storming all over her in black overalls and hate. But she’s holed up in her own house with her faulty heart threatening to do her in if they come any closer. Her own hostage. With the company held at bay. Not knowing what to do. Sitting at distance with its public relations people bombarding her with happy resolutions out of a megaphone. Waiting for her fatigue to show. For her loneliness to tell. For her resolve to break.
Out front of her house a blond man is leaning out the window of a site-van into the heat. He has the megaphone pointed at her house, reading cheerful, fifteen-decibel postcards from friends who up until a short time ago lived here alongside her. He stops when he sees me and watches me while he works his jaw side-to-side and takes a drink of water because his throat is dry with correspondence. Then he aims his megaphone at her front door and pulls the trigger and fires a few more messages of love and reminiscence and new horizons at her.
‘Val and Ron Keszig are living in Albany now.’ His voice rattles her windows and bounces back at him. ‘In a ten square brick-veneer with their own en suite bathroom. They miss you very much. Listen.’ He begins to read through the megaphone. ‘“Dearest Belle, Just thought we’d drop you a line to let you know how much we’re missing you and to let you know how much we’re enjoying life on the coast. Ron’s been out early and caught us some lovely size whiting for lunch and our new friends, the Watsons, are coming over.”’ The blond man on the megaphone is actually putting on an old woman’s voice, enlivening the whole communication by amateur drama. ‘“They have a boat and are taking us out whale spotting on Tuesday. Whales … imagine. Of course Ron’s mum Vicki is here, as you know, only about two hundred yards away down the road with a lovely English lavender hedge surrounding her and her old headstone sandblasted clean and an ocean view. Imagine trying to get English lavender growing in Hannah. Ha, ha, ha.”’ The blond man on the megaphone laughs so real here you can’t tell if Val Keszig wrote the laugh in her correspondence or he found the thought of someone trying to grow English lavender in Hannah funny all by himself. ‘“Anyway dear, just dropping a line to say we’re missing you (but not all that red dust and temperature) and that life is good here by the sea. Wendy is visiting from Esperance this weekend where she’s doing a ceramic sculpture course and says hello. We still play a lot of Bridge. No one here plays like you and me did, though. When I’m partnering Karen Watson I often play like I was still partnering you and it costs us dear because she’s timid where you weren’t. Ron says I’m starting to ramble now, so I’d better go. We remember you beautiful. I wish you’d join us. Ron does, too. Much love, Val. PS: I’m sending this care of the company because you’re no longer in an area covered by Australia Post.”’
The blond man on the megaphone begins rebroadcasting this postcard at her house as soon as he finishes it, putting new inflections and emphases on it because he’s bored with the way he’s read it the five times before this. This time he doesn’t laugh at the English lavender. His voice echoes off her house and away into the heat mirage.
I walk in my mother’s front door, through the gallery of purple paintings down her hall and into her kitchen. She isn’t listening to what the blond man is telling her of the Keszigs’ new life through his megaphone. She’s sitting up close staring into the last of the bakelite radios, listening to a programme of dream interpretation where people ring in and get told what their dreams mean by some woman dream expert. It’s coming out of Sydney on short-wave and whenever one of the callers mentions where they’re from my mother repeats the place-name in an awed voice.
‘Hello, William,’ says the dream interpreter. ‘Where you calling from, William?’
‘Kogarah,’ says William.
‘Ko … ga … rah,’ repeats my mother into the radio like she’s Peter Finch saying ‘Shangri-La’.
‘Okay William, let’s hear your dream.’
‘Well – it’s sort of weird,’ says William. ‘This woman I sort of know but sort of don’t shoots me in the face and also in the bottom.’
‘Ouch,’ says the dream interpreter.
‘Yeah. Ouch,’ agrees William. ‘Anyway I’m dying and there’s blood everywhere all over my Armani suit and I crawl to a cafe and have a cappuccino and then I crawl to the theatre and see a really good play during which I get this incredible erection and the audience is really impressed and starts applauding it instead of clapping the play and the actors. They call, “Author. Author.” And Oscar Wilde comes out and pats my erection on its head like it’s a puppy or something. Then wild dogs come into the theatre and attack me. That’s it …’
‘Well, isn’t this exciting,’ the dream interpreter says. ‘Exciting about what it tells you about yourself. See, you had some female relative in your early life that tried to hold you back from the brave, creative things you wanted to do. Hence the shooting. But despite this terrible handicap you got on and had a good time and were successful in an outrageous and talented way. Well done. You’ve been very brave. You’ve pushed through and won, hence the hearty congratulations from the famous playwright.’
‘What about the dogs?’ asks William.
‘The dogs? The dogs don’t count, they’re the beginning of your next dream,’ she says.
Then she’s off on another call. ‘Hello, Rosie. Where you calling from, Rosie?’
‘Punchbowl,’ says Rosie.
‘Punchbowl,’ whispers my mother as if she can see herself lying on the white sands of a Punchbowl beach surrounded by movie stars bent over her with their brows knit like surgeons, working on her orgasm. I’m wondering what frame of Robinson Crusoe mind you’ve got yourself into if you can say ‘Punchbowl’ like it’s exotic.
‘Let’s hear your dream, Rosie.’
‘Well, it’s a full moon and I’m going for a swim in the sea and I start turning into a dolphin. Whatever part gets wet becomes dolphin. When I’m under water I’m fully dolphin. Then there are thousands of dolphins everywhere and I lead them all to this safe place underwater where no people can hurt them and anyone who wants to hurt them has to get into the water to do it and becomes a dolphin by getting into the water.’
‘And so become the thing they would destroy,’ says the dream interpreter.
‘I guess so, yeah,’ says Rosie.
‘What a wonderful dream, Rosie. Well done. In fact it’s hardly a dream … it’s art. It’s creativity maxed-up to high-art level. You should be applying for an Arts Council grant with dreams like that. Are you a very creative person?’
‘Pisces?’
‘Sagittarius.’
‘I thought so. Your higher self has a great creative aura. Now, where your dream is coming from is it’s about your higher self telling you to put pressure on the Japanese. Your higher self is passionate about this and you’ve got to act. If I were you I’d get over there to Japan and protest somehow. Run amok on the subway. Go apeshit in a ramen shop. Those bastards are eating whale in there.’
‘Why are all your paintings purple?’ I ask. My mother jumps back from the radio and slaps her left hand up across her heart and sucks a breath.
‘You can still knock, you know. On your second visit in eight years you can still knock when you walk in.’
‘Sorry,’ I say. She sits back down.
‘It’s all right. I was miles away,’ she says.
‘I wanted to know why all the paintings you do are purple.’
She turns her radio down and goes over to the sink and fills her Kambrook Express Boil kettle. With the radio low we can hear the stories of her friends’ happy migrations megaphoned in from outside. Ren and Isa Brownlow are travelling through Scotland in a bus filled with adventurous pensioners, they call them. They wish she was there. Everyone wishes she was everywhere but here.
‘No reason apart from it was cheap,’ says my mother.
‘Purple was cheap?’
‘It’s not purple. It’s Meadow Phlox. Which is some marketing person’s idea of a name for the colour that Paterson’s Curse is. Meadow Phlox. The Hannah Landscape Artists Group bought a job-lot of Meadow Phlox a few years back when Paterson’s Curse was edging up north out of Kalgoorlie and the whole country round here was expected to turn purple under it. But even Paterson’s Curse couldn’t cross the Great Victoria Desert, so the country never turned purple. It stayed red. And all the landscape painters never missed a beat. Kept on splashing away Burnt Ochre. And the Hannah Landscape Artists Group were stuck with 288 tubes of Meadow Phlox with the nearest Paterson’s Curse stopped a thousand mile off. So I bought it – it was cheap. Nothing almighty or significant. Just cheap.’
‘Can I have a few paintings to take with me? Jean’s interested in art. Has a gallery.’
‘It’s not art. It’s just me remembering. Take as many as you want if you want them.’ She pinches up a miser’s pinch of tea out of an industrial-size tea container and dribbles it into the steaming teapot. Only enough to take it one yellow shade off hot water. ‘You having a cuppa?’
‘No thanks.’ She puts the teapot and her empty cup on the formica table top and goes to the freezer and opens it, standing in its boil of fog like a Weird Sister. ‘How many were coming today, did you say?’ she asks.
‘I’m not sure. A couple of Kunimara. A couple of company people. Your fat journalist friend. Eight all up?’
‘Eight,’ she says. ‘Eight.’ She leans deep inside the freezer and starts fossicking with both hands among the stones of frozen food there. Fossicking so hard she’s making bowling-alley sounds. She comes out with what looks like a brick wrapped in tin foil and slams the freezer lid sending a last wave of white up and rolling across the ceiling. She unwraps the silver brick and it becomes a fruitcake of some hard metamorphic type. She half fills the sink with hot water and puts the fruitcake on a baking tray and floats it in the hot water. Then she sits to drink her tea and breaks open a new carton of Marlboro.
That’s how she waits for the visitors or the deputation or whatever it is. By thawing fruitcake. She gives the cake half an hour on its first side before refilling the sink with hot water and turning it ninety degrees clockwise onto its next side. Another half-hour and another ninety-degree turn and so on until the long sides of the cake are done and it looks more like an actual edible fruit cake than a metamorphic one. She tries standing it on its end but it won’t balance with the baking tray riding stormy sink water, so she gives it another session on its first side.
I wait by rolling up paintings and tying them with string for travel. I take about thirty. Twenty-odd sad purple Dads and ten or so sad purple Molly’s. Then I go back to thawing fruitcake with my mother.
About mid-morning the blond man stops megaphoning successful migrations at the house. Silence breaks apeshit upon us. My mother lifts her line of sight out of the patterns in the formica of the kitchen table and looks at me and I look back at her as she tries not to hyperventilate. We look at each other for a while in the silence before there’s a knock at the door. It’s air-conditioned too cold in here but there’s a sheen of sweat on her face. She’s gnawing fast on her bottom lip.
‘Hey, they’re just here to discuss this. To give their side and listen to yours,’ I tell her. She nods and lights another Marlboro. Doesn’t know whether to gnaw her lip or drag her Marlboro. It’s the first time I’ve seen her scared. The whole legal army BBK has ranged against her hasn’t made her so much as ponder that maybe, just maybe … she’s wrong.
But now the Kunimara people are coming. With their point of view. With their Dreamtime. With their forty thousand summers of forebears buried roundabout and sat on rock ledges roundabout. With their skin made all plum-coloured from those forty thousand summers. And with, maybe, their truth.
I invite them all how-do-you-doing and helluva-daying and pleased-to-meet-youing and g’daying into the living room where she waits in an arm chair. The day incidentally, is now so hot it would make you dizzy to walk into it. And no one here is pleased to meet anyone else.
There are five of them. There’s Margot Dwyer, who’s a recurring kaleidoscope of R.M. Williams’ brightest dyes. She has a red cowgirl scarf holding back her hair. She says hi to me and rolls her eyes at me about our previous meeting’s drunkenness. She introduces Richard Finnes, the National Social Resources Manager of BBK, she says. He’s wearing a fine wool Italian suit which is either a kamikaze-brave grab at style or just a show of confidence that he’s high enough up in a big enough company never to have to live more than a minute of his life out of conditioned air. He takes my mother’s hand and holds it so my mother’s facing him and says, ‘Mrs Furphy,’ and looks in her eye for something weak or something untrue. But doesn’t find it apparently, and so tells her, ‘Pleased to meet you.’
Then there’s the three Kunimara. Three representatives of the aboriginal community. When I was a boy aboriginals were only allowed in town on Saturday mornings. In those days I doubt any one of them had ever entered any of the little cubes of conditioned air we lived in and carried with us wherever we went. Now … here they are. It seems somehow shocking to me, like it must seem somehow shocking to her.
Daphne Shackleton has just flown down from Broome to represent the Western Lands Council at this meeting. She’s about fifty and chipmunk-cheeked out soft and round like her metabolism was built for drought and starvation and heat and severe climatic cycle but now gets bureaucracy. She’s wearing a bright red dress. She introduces herself and then introduces Pearl Guriwerd and then introduces Barry Campbell of the Kunimara people, she tells us.
Pearl Guriwerd is dressed in a white shirt and an old tweed skirt. She says soft hellos and smiles apologetic smiles at us that burst and fade like a pulse.
Barry Campbell is untidy in scuffed shoes and dirty jeans and a green cardigan and long tangled hair and beard streaked with white. He carries himself over-important, chin high, shoulders back, little beer belly pushed forward. His whole shape is moulded by a hundred Black cunts low-breathed at him by strangers and the fight that followed his then question of What sort of black did you call me? What sort of cunt? All his pride is right up front now, so people know he’s got it and they don’t fuck with him and he doesn’t have to go through the hassle of fighting them to prove he’s got it.
He stays standing when everyone else sits. Looks straight at my mother with almost a sneer of disappointment. ‘Thing with you white people is, the most harmless lookin’ of yous always causes the biggest shitfights,’ he says.
‘Now, shut up now, Bay,’ Pearl Guriwerd tells him. She slaps at his jeans from where she sits. Daphne Shackleton slits her eyes at him.
‘Bullshit shut up. I’m an old shit-stirring abo radical and she might as well know that right off,’ he says.
‘You a guest,’ says Pearl Guriwerd.
‘I’m not a guest. You got the wrong guest. She the guest. ’Less she’s a Kunimara I never heard of.’
‘No, ‘I’m not any unheard of Kunimara,’ says my mother. ‘I’m one of God’s children, just like you. Would anyone like a cup of tea or coffee and some fruitcake?’
‘I’m no God’s child. No fruitcake for me,’ Barry Campbell tells her. The others all nod and yes-please for coffee and cake so my mother goes out to the kitchen to get it ready and the two black women start in on Barry Campbell about getting things off on the right foot and holding back on the language and being non-bloody-provocative and not denying he’s a God’s child immediately a Christian says he is one which he knows is just a red rag to a bull Christian like this woman here is. He tells them to get fucked right there and Richard Finnes winces and says Hang on, hang on, people, didn’t we agree I’d state your case first up. Well, let me have my say, he says, and I think we can get things rolling along. He makes rolling motions with his hands over a wide smile.
My mother comes back with a tray with what’s left of her wedding Wedgwood on it to hold the coffee and cake. The Wedgwood is white with a navy and gold band around the top. The pattern is called Marquis and Dad used to say of it that even if it was too dainty to eat off at least it was a lesson in nobility and a lesson in spelling.
I help her serve out. She slices the fruitcake thin. It’s still frozen in the centre and when the knife strikes frozen glace cherries they push on down in front of the blade taking gouges from the cake and breaking it up. It’s a mess and she apologises for it.
‘That’s all right,’ says Daphne Shackleton. I never see a homemade fruitcake look any good and I never taste one taste bad.’
‘Mine used to look good,’ my mother tells her. ‘When it was served up fresh and not frozen. But all my food’s frozen now I’m here alone.’
Richard Finnes gets to his feet with coffee in one hand and frozen cake in the other. ‘Mrs Furphy,’ he nods at her. ‘Jack,’ he nods at me. ‘We’re not here today to put the company’s point of view.’ He points to himself with the cake and shakes his smiling head. ‘Which I know you already know. Or to go over our moral or our legal ground – which is high, by the way–I think you’ve seen enough legal correspondence to know that, and I think we know what use you have for legal correspondence,’ he laughs. ‘We’ve come here today,’ he waves his hand at all the people who have come, ‘to try and help you understand the cultural dilemma you’re causing for the Kunimara people,’ he waves his cake at those who are Kunimara and are having the cultural dilemma. ‘Who are great friends of ours and have certainly had dilemma enough over recent years – cultural and otherwise.’ He takes a chew of frozen cake.
‘You see, for the Kunimara people there are certain sacred and Dreamtime sites hereabouts that you’re … well … despoiling by your presence.’ He looks sorry and pouts at my mother for pronouncing her a despoiler.
In the middle of his pout there is a knock at the door and someone comes old-fashioned yoohooing down the hall and into the living room. Yoohoo. Yoohoo. Yoohoo. A fat man appears.
It’s my mother’s journalist-champion Charles Wadlow. He apologises for being late and says he’s got engine trouble. Always got engine trouble, he says. He’s immense in a too-small Hawaiian shirt. Orange and green scenes of surf and tropical foliage are taut across him. He’s bald and from right up on the shine of his head to his bulging, sandal-strangled feet he’s wet like only the truly massive get wet by heat.
‘Engines hate me,’ he says. He introduces himself to everyone as a friend of Belle’s, bowing at the women. He turns to my mother. ‘Is this all they sent, Belle? They don’t look any match for a woman with your cardiac problems to me.’ He laughs and points at Richard Finnes and says, ‘You were saying something. Don’t let me interrupt. And don’t bother with a recap. I’ll catch on.’ He pulls up a seat and pours himself a coffee and takes a handful of cake rubble.
‘I was just going to hand over to Pearl here to state her case.’ Richard Finnes points his cake at Pearl. ‘The case of the Kunimara people. So …Pearl.’ He sweeps his cake at her.
Pearl stands up and unrolls a square of canvas she’s been holding. Lies it on the coffee table right over the uneaten cake and Marquis Wedgwood and holds its ends so it doesn’t roll itself up again.
‘Here, let me help,’ says Charles Wadlow, and he puts a Marquis cup on three corners and a saucer on the fourth until it’s nearly flat, only humped up by a piece of frozen fruitcake underneath it.
‘I want to show you this here map,’ says Pearl. The canvas is about a metre square, dotted with reds and yellows in a grid of circles linked by black lines. There are no geographic features.
‘This is a map?’ asks Charles Wadlow.
‘Yeah. A map,’ Pearl nods. ‘A Dreamtime map.’
‘Do you need this hill here?’ He waves his hand over the hump in the canvas made by the plate of cake beneath it.
‘No,’ says Pearl.
‘Good,’ he says. He slides his hand under the canvas and takes out the cake and begins to eat it.
Pearl waits for a while, watching him. Then she turns back to the map. ‘This is a map of the whole north-west country. This how my people see this country. See these circles,’ she points at one, ‘they stories. The lines connecting them show where one story start and end and another one start. Now this story here,’ she touches one near the centre of the map, ‘this circle is where we are now. This place here. It’s a whole story to us that explain this land to us. Explain every rock, explain every river, explain every waterhole, explain every hill...’cept the fruitcake hill,’ she turns and smiles triangles of broken teeth at Charles Wadlow and he smiles back raisins and glace cherries and yellow dough and tells her the fruitcake hill needs no explanation it just needs a sip of something to wash it down and he takes a drink of coffee.
She goes on. ‘The stories on this map tells us about the rivers and waterholes and rocks and how the rainbow serpent and the Wandjinas give birth to ’em and to us as well. These stories all too secret to tell you, but it tell us Kunimara how we part of the land here. And this story don’t have any white fellas in it. And if the country have white fellas in it here it make the story a lie. Make our Dreaming a lie.’
She stops talking and looks almost apologetically at my mother, goes so far as to pout and flicker her eyes. My mother draws up a deep breath of Marlboro smoke. ‘What about last year? And the year before that? When it had thousands of white fellas in it?’ she asks.
Barry Campbell pushes himself off the wall he’s been leaning on and bends over at her. ‘Them thousands of white fellas add up to a multinational, ‘n’ you can’t cut multinationals out of your Dreamtime story easy as you can cut old women out. Old women you can cut out about seven different ways.’ He leans back on the wall and takes a packet of Drum from his pocket and pinches some tobacco out and stretches it long in his pale palm and rolls it tight then goes for his papers and starts to swear under his breath and search under the remaining tobacco in his pouch as he discovers he’s out. He makes a dignified show of repocketing the pouch like his mind has changed on the charms of tobacco.
My mother throws him her Marlboros and they bounce off his belly and onto the floor at his feet as he flinches and looks at her, then unlocks his knees for a slide down the wall to pick them up.
I beat him to them. I pick them up and wave them at him and put them in my top pocket and tell him, ‘Bullshit. Shit-stirring abo radicals should be strong-principled enough not to smoke the tailor-mades of shit-stirred conservative whitefellas.’ And tell him, ‘You can get fucked if you think you’re going to smoke her cigarettes.’
My mother tells me her sharpest, ‘Jack.’
He pushes off the wall with his skinny arse as if to take a step, but he hangs there and stares instead as the women start in on him again and he gets his legs slapped through his jeans again. And it occurs to me that while he grew up in a third-world settlement never allowed in out of the desert to town except on Saturday mornings, which was a pretty rough place to grow up, I’d grown up in a mining town, only allowed out once a year on school holidays, and that was a pretty rough place to grow up as well, so between us we could probably put up a fairly dirty ruckus if the fighting moment were to catch.
But it passes and doesn’t catch like most of them pass and don’t catch and we drop down the other side of the probability curve to where he’s just going to look tough at me in a promise that the time might come, smartarse, and I’m just going to look back at him and pat the smokes in my pocket. My mother raises her eyebrows.
Then Charles Wadlow is on his feet which is a big enough move of man and tropical foliage to take everyone’s attention. ‘Steady, boys, steady,’ he tells us. ‘You’re amongst jerrybuilt furniture and old ladies here. Steady.’ He waves his hands around and says, ‘Let’s get back to what we came here for.’ And he points at Barry Campbell and points at Pearl Guriwerd and points at Daphne Shackleton and says, ‘Correct me if I’m wrong. But the way I read it you people were always nomadic. Only ever passed through here once in a blue moon.’ He stops and stares and gives them time to correct him if he’s wrong. They don’t say anything. ‘Why wouldn’t you do that now? Wander away from here and summer in another place. Ignore this fibro shack and ignore this old woman. Neither of which, I’m sure you’ll agree, have the look of permanence about them. Then roll back in here in a year or so and see how things are with Belle then. My friend Belle here,’ he waves his hand at my mother, ‘and I know she won’t mind me saying this,’ he smiles at her, ‘doesn’t have a lot of time left to her. Just wants what time she’s got to be here.’
He looks around at them, taking a pinch of jowl-hung chin and hanging his bottom lip. ‘What I’m asking is why don’t you let her die here? Where she wants to be? It’s not likely to take too long.’
They blink at him and shift their weight cheek-to-cheek and foot-to-foot with the mention of her dying. He feels the weight-shifting silence as a point well made by him and he pushes it. ‘Just be nomadic again for a while. Wander away for a while.’ He waves his hand out toward the window in a wander away. Then he uses the same hand to point at me. ‘Are you placing any claim on the land here, Jack?’
I tell him no, don’t be stupid. He ups and outs his palms at us, ‘See there’s no hereditary entitlement claimed here,’ he says. ‘There’s only a woman who says it’s a sacred place to her … her home. And she doesn’t want to leave it.’ He waggles a finger. ‘Now I know what you’re afraid you’ve got here is a precedent. But you haven’t even got that if all of us shut up about it until it blows over … until she blows over,’ he points at my mother who nods and crosses herself and says Amen.
Richard Finnes comes up off the couch with a stupefying breadth of professional smile. ‘Thing is, Mister Wadlow, people don’t shut up about things,’ he smiles. ‘So we would have a precedent. But,’ he points at the fat man, ‘we won’t have a precedent, because Ms Furphy isn’t staying.’ He goes right on wide-smiling as he explains the Kunimara people could remove her from their land tomorrow in a court of law if they wanted to go that way. They have not only the moral but the legal right so to do, he says. No question.
Charles Wadlow wide-smiles back at him and says, ‘The courtroom scenario’ll never happen. For that to happen you’d first have to hand the land back to them with her in occupation,’ he says. ‘And news you were handing back land that was supposed to be white-fella-barren with old, pig-headed white women in residence would spread through the indigenous population so fast it’d make your head not only spin but ache as well and probably even stop it smiling for a while. Vast areas of land would close off to you. Leases you were negotiating would either break down entirely at the table or quadruple in price.’ He holds up four fingers. ‘No, you’re not going to hand the land back to these people with Belle on it and let them fight any legal battles. Because then you would have yourself a precedent. So … let’s not even talk about what the Kunimara people could do in court because you’re not going to let them go to court. You’re going to have to go to court yourself if you want any court resolution. But you don’t want to go to court against an ailing and bereft old woman in view of how the media … me,’ he points at himself, ‘will misrepresent and sentimentalise that legal battle.’
‘What’s your stake in this?’ asks Richard Finnes. His smile is gone.
‘Her husband’s scattered on the roses outside,’ says Charles Wadlow. ‘And her daughter.’ He shrugs.
‘Well that’s as may be. But they shouldn’t be,’ says Richard Finnes. ‘It’s a clear breach of the articles of tenancy that they are. From the moment its first sod was turned this town had a life-span dictated by the supply of iron ore. That’s why it never had a cemetery. It wasn’t a town for family roots to go down into. Never was. And if ashes et cetera have gone down into the soil here then they shouldn’t have.’
‘Still, there they are. Dug in deep she tells me,’ says Charles Wadlow. ‘Her husband. Her daughter, for goodness sake.’
Daphne Shackleton leans forward at me and asks me where I stand on this. Do I think my mother is right or wrong to stay?
‘I don’t know about right or wrong,’ I tell her. ‘I can’t work out who’s got spiritual ownership here. I just don’t think it’s a good idea for her to live out here alone. So I suppose I’m in your camp.’
‘I was born in 1926,’ my mother says. ‘Everywhere’s alone.’ She’s hunkered down deep in her grey vinyl armchair blowing smoke. She throws another packet of Marlboro at Barry Campbell and he catches them this time and opens them and lights up and makes an orgasmic show of sucking the smoke down deep into his person. Looking at me and shaking his head and rolling his eyes in pleasure and thanking my mother.
Richard Finnes’ smile has resurfaced. ‘Listen, Ms Furphy–’
‘Mrs,’ she says.
‘Mrs Furphy,’ he says.
‘Important point,’ she tells him.
‘Certainly,’ he says. ‘Anyway, what I was going to say is … I’ve spoken to leading psychiatric people about you. They all agree your continued mourning is an illness and should be seen as such. They think with the help of friends and professional counsellors you might get well. But you won’t get well out here.’
My mother stills and calms and looks around at everyone and lets her smoking hand fall to the armrest of her chair. She speaks softly. ‘Mourning? I’m not mourning. I’m remembering. And my remembering is no more than the Faith Jesus insists on.’ She lifts her smoking hand pointing toward the ceiling, toward Jesus. I wince. ‘Why won’t you see that?’ she asks. ‘How is it,’ she asks, ‘they’ve made their Rainbow Serpent so much realer than my Frank? Than my Molly, who died on the road outside?’ She’s picking little rayon balls off her slacks as she speaks, flicking them onto the floor. A rayon lint-ball fired with each question. ‘Did their Rainbow Serpent tell the same old jokes for years and laugh like a fool at them every time? Did arthritis trouble their Rainbow Serpent at night, from tightening three-inch nuts across iron-dusted thread all day? Was their Rainbow Serpent a chronic thumb-sucker for so long we had to fly her to Perth to have braces fitted on her teeth when she finally stopped and the orthodontist cost us our holidays for three years? These things happened.’ She looks at the women. ‘How is it you’ve made your Rainbow Serpent so real when I can’t get anyone to believe in my Frank and my Molly? I’d like to know how it’s done.’
The Aboriginal women are open mouthed. Astounded and silent in disbelief that this question’s been turned on them. Then Pearl comes alive and says, ‘The Rainbow Serpent create this place.’ She says it softly. It’s a fact, but she’s apologetic about it.
Barry Campbell laughs smoke. ‘All right, all right. I mighta know this bullshit was coming. Two hundred years they laugh at our Dreamtime ‘n’ call it primitive shit. And for two hundred years they try to educate us out of it. But, holy shit, surprise, surprise, they see the Dreamtime still there after two hundred years. We still dreaming. So, finally a few of ’em start to reconise the Dreamtime a legitimate part of our culture. An’ no sooner this happen than they say we usin’ it to beat ’em with. They call us out for cultural imperialism. Our Rainbow Serpent’s victimisin’ their Mollys and their Franks all of a sudden. Ooh hoo we a mean bunch a bastards with our big fuckin’ bully serpent.’
He lights one cigarette off another. Draws again deeply, eyes closed in nicotine hit.
‘All this Dreamtime legend,’ he waves a hand at the map, ‘maybe an’ maybe not good sense. An’ I maybe an’ I maybe not believe in it. But what I do believe in,’ he points his Marlboro at my mother, ‘because you whitefellas give it to me to believe in and drummed it inta me to believe in … is in property. A black shit-stirring bastard like me find it fairly easy to believe in that. And you on our property, old girl. Not even you denyin’ that. Are you?’ He nods at her. Asks, ‘Eh? Eh?’
She doesn’t answer. Her eyes are glazed. She hasn’t even heard him. She’s away in thought and in fear. Hypnotised by their Rainbow Serpent. Scared of that holy snake and the possibility it might hold some actual truth to counter and deny her own holy truths. She’s locked eyes with it, trying to stare it down. Trying to look at it hard enough to see yes it’s valid or see no it’s a lie. Hoping to see it’s a lie.
Eventually Charles Wadlow says, ‘Belle? and she snaps awake. Looks around.
‘The bones of my whole life are here,’ she says quietly ‘Even him,’ she points at me. ‘All his childhood is here. Every time I see him as a boy it’s here. Here’s the only place I can be with the boy that was him, which to tell you the truth, is the only him I want to be with.’ The two Kunimara women turn and look at me in disgust. She lights another Marlboro and takes to rubbing her forearms which is, with her, a step off crying and bringing up the Lord’s name six times a minute in high hysteria to defend herself. ‘What’s the point of telling me about Val and Ron going whale watching as if that was an option. My only watching is here … over the souls of Frank and Molly.’
She puts her cigarette in an ashtray and sure enough points at the ceiling and invokes the truth of God as proven by His son and The Resurrection as compared to their Rainbow Serpent and their Dreaming which seems pretty unscientific and unproven though a nice idea and she’s not one to scoff at it outright by any means. Invokes the Lord Everlasting and Our Saviour and God Almighty into her speech with such regularity and at such high rotation we see it’s turned into straight and unadulterated rant and the old girl has lost it.
The deputation is practically falling over itself to get out the door when she starts this. Because there’s a tragedy up and running here right before their eyes. A thing so ugly and embarrassing they have to back away outside to where they can’t see it. A mind slipping fast from a position of some competence where it can brew up a fair and tasty fruitcake down to a level of idiocy where it’s invoking supernatural intervention … calling down God’s Hand loud and unembarrassed.
Even Charles Wadlow leaves, saying he needs a lift back to his caravan out at the river because his VeeDub is ratshit. Either spark or fuel, he says. Either spark or fuel. Only Richard Finnes has anything left to say to my mother because he’s used to dealing with the floundering and the nonsensical in his line of work and he’s had the good fortune to be able to convince himself some time ago that pretty well anyone who opposed BBK was mad and so he’s not too disturbed by my mother’s rapid-fire invocations and her ceiling-pointings.
He informs her, through three times as much smile as he needs, that he personally wishes they could allow her to stay, but really it just isn’t fair to the Kunimara people to make an exception for her, either taken from the spiritual aspect or the other far less important aspect, which is property, it’s not fair on them to let her stay. Not fair, moral or just. So, he supposes, one way or another and in one forum or another they’ll be seeing each other again and he tells her it’s been a pleasure and hands her an envelope. Then he kisses her on the cheek and makes an attempt at locking his line of vision onto hers and says, ‘Ms Furphy … we’ll cure you if you let us. We’ll make you happy.’ My mother slits her eyes at him like he’s too much light or too much mystery, and tells him, Mrs.’
As soon as they leave the megaphone starts up again. The blond man reads a postcard at the house from Sylvia Wilson, who was the teller at the next hole north in the security glass along from my mother for eight, what Sylvia calls, and the blond man on the megaphone calls, bitching spectacular years. She’s living in Paddington in Sydney. ‘I’ve joined up Parents Without Partners,’ Sylvia’s voice, the blond man’s voice, vibrates through the house. ‘So far it’s been a bit of a disaster. Should be called “Fathers Without Rhythm”, or “Fathers Without Technique”, or “Fathers Without Clue One”, as far as I’m concerned. I can’t get decent sex out of these little home-wreckers no matter what I do, and, believe me, Belle, I do it …’
‘Town bike, that Sylvia,’ says my mother, recovering herself. ‘Always was.’
‘Sydney’s a big town to hold that position in,’ I tell her. My mother turns her radio on loud to drown out the blond man on the megaphone.
‘She’ll manage,’ she shouts. ‘You should’ve seen how she’d slide her index nail across a new bloke’s wrist as she took his first pay cheque. Times were I nearly hit the security screen to break their contact.’
The envelope Richard Finnes gave my mother turns out to be a water bill. The new rates, calculated and decided upon. It seems with BBK having blown their own reservoir the nearest fresh water in a dry winter is Port Hedland, which is 450 kilometres at forty dollars a kilometre, and with storage and purchase from the Port Hedland Shire thrown in works out to be twenty-three thousand dollars per ten thousand-gallon tanker, the first of which is to be paid up front.
My mother’s brave about her new water costs. Nothing the company does frightens her like the simple fact of the Kunimara.
At first she laughs and rolls her eyes and screws up the bill. Then she unscrews it and flattens it out on the kitchen bench with the heel of her hand and says it’ll interest Charles Wadlow and make good reading in the Western Aussie if they try to force payment. Then she takes it over to the kitchen window and holds it up and shakes it at the rose bushes out there that she thinks, more or less, are the continuing fact of her daughter and her husband and says, ‘Bloody high roller,’ like there he is out there gone extravagant in his dotage and sucking up Krug and Veuve and other liquid gold.
*
I’m lying in my bed trying to reach sleep that night when the footsteps are crept along the hallway again. There is the slow slide of door on ball-bearing again. There is again the wood-screech of ply moving against ply and the slow slide of door tracking back closed along its run of ball-bearings. Then just the cracking and just the creaking again of a house leaking heat into the night sky.
And she’s in Molly’s wardrobe again. Trying again to drag some scent of Molly out of the air in there. Trying to get back to where Molly is alive and demanding to know of her if dinner will be ready early enough that she can go and shoot some baskets after it with a couple of the other girls from the under-thirteen Firsts Netball Team and begging can she stay over at June Taylor’s house because it’s June’s birthday and Julie Oxley and Bridget Carney are both allowed to sleep over so why shouldn’t she be allowed, too? And Mum can tell her back, ‘We’ll see,’ and Molly can ask her, ‘When will we see?’ and Mum can tell her then like she tells her a dozen times a day to hold her shoulders back and sit up straight and don’t slouch around so round-shouldered and slovenly and can listen for Dad to chime in like he always chimes in with, ‘Mum’s right, Moll. Sit up straight. You look like someone’s grandmother.’ And Molly can tell them both, ‘Leave me alone will you. Just leave me alone,’ and stay with her shoulders hunched around what puberty’s doing to her chest. And later Mum can hug her as she walks out the door with her overnight bag to stay at June Taylor’s house and can tell her, ‘Love you, honey,’ and Dad can hug her and can tell her, ‘Posture, Granny. Posture.’ And can take hold of her shoulders with those hands of his lined black with giant-machine grease deep in their cracks and kiss her and bend her shoulders open and squared and make a creaking noise as he does, which makes Molly laugh and tell him loudly, ‘Daaad,’ hidden beneath which he can quickly state his sotto voce, ‘Love you, Moll.’
Which is what goes on in my head while I lie in the dark and hear the hiss of Molly’s wardrobe door closing on my mother. And is only probably what goes on in the wardrobe itself … but is surely something like what goes on in the wardrobe itself … where she’s trying to get back to where everyone is alive. To where everyone she loves is alive.