I fly because maybe he’s right. Maybe assessment is needed. Jean comes because, she says, it is my mother after all, no matter estranged or semi-estranged or whatever, and she’s decided she won’t cop some Company Arsehole accusing her of not taking my mother’s predicament seriously. Thaw comes because he counts free air travel a beautiful thing and not only has he always wanted to see the Great North-West but he’s always wanted to see a real live madwoman as well. Especially one pissing in public and ready to die in her own shit.
She has a boil on the back of her neck. She’s sipping tea. Bent forward in her chair, leaning into the Voice of God. The Voice of God is American. It is male. It is loudly accusing her of being a harbour and a shelter and a sustenance not to the live actuality but to the very essence of He who is foul and He who is fallen and He who is evil. Her inaction is an apology for His whole putrid ethos, the Voice of God says. She and her fellows are prepared to let His work continue, to let this world fester and darken, by not taking up the cudgel and striking at Him. When He is ignored He increases. When He is not attacked with prayer through God, through God’s chosen ministers, He is strengthened … emboldened. How long is she prepared to live this cowardice, the Voice of God wants to know. How long will she allow Satan free-throws from the three-metre line while she remains benched by her own apathy? Because Apathy is his work too … Apathy is his foundation evil … the evil which allows all his other evils to flourish and prosper. But her Apathy ends and is finished and over with and forgiven and isn’t Apathy any more when she licks that stamp, when she slides that envelope into the letter-slot of a post box on a street near her. The post box out on a street near her is the real front line in this battle. That post box on a street near her is where she can wage war on Satan. Mail that donation … to private box seven-seven-three-double-zero Manila … so my work, my struggle, can continue, says the Voice of God.
She leans back from the radio and takes a sip of tea now the accusations have thinned and things aren’t so critical and the Voice of God is offering a way out. My shouted ‘Hey,’ jumps her up out of her chair and jumps her hands up to her throat and she sucks breath for what is likely a scream and spins round and sees the three of us and me in particular. She stands there panting and holding her throat while the steam from her spilt tea swirls up off the lino around her legs.
‘I knocked,’ I say, ‘but you’ve got the radio cranked so high you didn’t hear.’
She sucks for breath. ‘I need it high,’ she says. ‘They’re noisy out there, playing tapes of the old gang and that aboriginal music they never let up with.’ She looks at Jean and nods and says, ‘You’re Jean, are you? Hello, Jean. Pleased to meet you.’ And looks at Thaw and nods and says, ‘Hello,’ and her hands fall from around her throat and hang limp down by her sides and she stands staring, waiting for an introduction to Thaw, then collapses onto the lino into her steaming tea.
Thaw whoops and says it’s a great start to a relationship with a madwoman. A promising kick-off, he says, likely brought about by over-excitement at meeting her beautiful potential daughter-in-law. Jean tells him, ‘Shut up, idiot,’ and I tell him, ‘Yeah, fuck up, this part isn’t insanity, it’s cardiovascular.’
She’s a veteran at this. Even before the insanity she did this collapsing part. Has taken many a jump over the years into lino and into carpet and into plain red dirt. I remember at my school sports day one year she collapsed right into a group of under-eight triple-jumpers who were sitting on the grass waiting for their turn to jump. Broke the potential blue-ribbon-winner’s collar-bone with her forehead in that fall. And when I was the eventual under-eight triple-jump champion that day because I had my main rival, Scotty Thompson, taken out by my mother, even the teachers looked at me sideways like I’d nobbled a sure thing. She had that knack of tarnishing my best moments with her falls. I spent most of my childhood mentally begging her not to collapse. Or audibly begging her not to come with me somewhere because she might collapse.
I carry her under her arms with her heels dragging into the living room and put her on the sofa. She’s a bag of bones. My guess is she weighs about half as much as a Rottweiler bitch. She has another boil on her right forearm. Jean finds a paper towel and wets it and starts sponging my mother’s face with it. ‘Jesus, Jack,’ she says. She holds up the paper towel to show me how dirty it is from my mother’s face.
And her hair is beyond desert tribesman now. It’s all stood-up with smack-addict neglect like the Keith Richards hair of the seventies. And who knows how many more boils she’s a harbour and a shelter and a sustenance for in the places we can’t see.
Thaw starts complaining about the heat. Takes hold of his shirt and starts flapping it in and out to get some air across his skin. He says it’s hot in here, no wonder she’s collapsed, it’s hot. He wants to know hasn’t she got at least a fan or something. The air-conditioner isn’t on. I point it out on the wall and tell him to start it up. He goes across to it and fiddles with it. Scratches his stomach wondering. Fiddles with it again. Checks it’s plugged in. Swears at it and declares it rooted and a goner.
I’m maybe a concerned son after all. Because I’m horrified to find she’s living here without air-conditioning. Horrified to think she’s at a point where she’s ready to accept life without refrigerated air. Refrigerated air has always been the dividing line between civilisation and the shitkickery around here. The working-class people that made up this town saw air-con as a sign of victory, a medal from a battle won. Those beautiful expensive jets of air were taken from the bosses. Anyone who didn’t have air in their lives hadn’t fought the bosses. Hadn’t stood up for themselves. Didn’t deserve to be free and independent and were probably scared in their hearts and stone-aged in their minds. The aboriginals didn’t have air. They came into town on Saturdays in their overloaded cars with their windows wound down covered in sweat and dust. We watched them through glass as we sat vaguely proud in our goose bumps while the town pulsed and shimmered with summer.
No one lives airless here. Living without air is the sort of thing I’ll commit this woman for. Only the mad or the black ever lived without air around here.
She blinks twice and opens her eyes and swivels them at Jean and me and smiles and says, ‘Sorry. Sorry. I’m all right. I’m fine. Just a stress thing. A nervous thing. Just a hangover from the Blitz. Though Jack probably told you a story about my heart. Anyway, I black out. Nothing serious.’
Jean gives her her glasses and she says thank you and puts them on and looms magnified at us. ‘The air-conditioner’s broken,’ I tell her.
‘Yes,’ she says. She sits up. Feels down her limbs for sprains and barks. ‘Has been since the day I was away at poor Adrian’s funeral. I suspect foul play.’
‘Three weeks it’s been broken? You haven’t mentioned it on the phone. Jesus. Three weeks? You fair-dinkum?’
‘Three weeks. Has it been three weeks?’ she asks. She sighs. ‘Three weeks already.’ She’s smiling, looking up at where the wall meets the ceiling, at whatever she sees there, which isn’t just curling paint and isn’t just cobwebs and waterstain but is likely some heroic vision of Adrian. ‘Poor, dear Adrian,’ she says. ‘Three weeks.’
No limbs are broken and no tendons are snapped. She hustles about getting us coffee and we sit around the kitchen table and she chats to us about what has been coming in on the short-wave and lets me down by not saying anything insane, though I’ve spent a whole five-hour flight preparing Jean and Thaw for the madness. But she does have that smile on her face through everything.
Looking out the back door I see her lawn is yellowed and dead. I go to the window. Her rose bushes are green and healthy. No roses, but that’s probably a time-of-year thing.
I suggest a walk. Jean says she’ll stay and help Belle, she calls her, prepare dinner. So Thaw and I walk. There’s nothing left of Hannah now except my mother and what surrounds her. The red ground has been brushed and stroked by bulldozers and by graders. Here and there are black patches on the landscape where the bonfires of introduced species burned. Looking long across the country you can see where the grooming ends and the ground breaks jagged into natural rhythm and the desert oak and the spinifex starts and the country rises into the Opthalmia Ranges.
Everything is different now. But not so different I can’t work out where I am in what was town. Even at its peak Hannah was mostly landscape – never got two-storeyed and sandstoned and became a geography of its own. Was mostly tin and fibro and rose and fell so close against the land I can still see where I am in it even though it’s gone. Can still tell where things were. Certain buildings. Certain roads. Certain moments.
We walk along in what is now wide open country but was what as kids we called Dead Cat Alley. What I remember about this alley is Dad giving me his perseverance and determination speech in it one night when we were walking home from the pool where I was trying to get my Junior certificate. The speech that was supposed to spark up some perseverance and determination in me. The speech about me being much smarter than him when he was a boy but him having perseverance and determination and perseverance and determination counting for much more than intelligence in this world. He was worried about the way I could lie around on our softer furniture for long periods. That was why he gave me the perseverance and determination speech. I remember promising myself I’d show him some perseverance and I’d show him some determination. Truth is the soft furniture probably won.
We walk up Radio Hill with red dust splashing up off our footfalls and stretching west in breeze. This hill used to have a two-hundred-foot aerial on it so we could broadcast punk rock and other news out into the Dreamtime. We look back down the way we’ve walked. The sun is setting. The west side of everything out there is lighting up gold. The east side of everything out there is dulling black. The manmade things out there lighting up gold and dulling out black add up to seventeen. My mother’s house, a yellow D10 bulldozer, a yellow generator with a fuel tank beside it, a silver water tanker that is positively on fire with sun, a Mack pantechnicon to carry away the building materials of my mother’s house, three site-vans and two porta-potties for the BBK men to live in and shit in and six Toyotas for them to drive.
I sit down on the hot rock. Thaw stays standing. He pulls a fifty-fifty marijuana cigarette out of his pocket and shows it to me and I nod and he lights it up. He looks around and says, ‘Maybe she’s so good at life she doesn’t need anyone else. Maybe that’s what it is to be a first-class hermit. Being really good at life.’
‘She seems to need her late husband,’ I say. ‘She seems to need Molly.’
He passes me the joint. ‘She don’t look ready to die in her own shit, Jack. Looks a long way from it. Christ, my father was five times as insane as her and no one suggested he was mad.’
‘He probably owned the land he lived on.’
‘I wouldn’t commit her if I were you. You do and you’re going to have to live with it.’
‘I can live with it. I couldn’t give a shit,’ I tell him.
‘What? For the one hard moment it takes to say “I couldn’t give a shit” you couldn’t give a shit? Or you couldn’t give a shit for the full journey it takes not to really give a shit?’
‘I couldn’t give a shit.’
‘It’s harder than you think, not-giving-a-shit,’ he tells me. ‘I’ve tried it.’
My mother and Jean have prepared a peppered meatloaf with canned peas and rehydrated potato for dinner. Her meatloaf is the most obvious sign of madness so far. She drinks some of the beer we’ve brought, but never goes outside to piss on the roses. She uses the toilet. Keeping herself nice for her house guests. Or maybe her pissing outdoors was another lie of BBK’s.
When the meatloaf is finished Thaw says he thinks we should have a smoke before we get into the Sara Lee Blueberry Shortcake. He leans back in his chair and flicks the bottom of his soft pack Peter Stuyvesant to get a cigarette running out the top and offers it around. My mother takes it. He flicks himself out another one. They light up and Thaw gets contemplative like a just-lit cigarette allows you to and he asks her, ‘Well, Belle … where do you see yourself in five years from now?’
‘Oliver,’ she says, ‘I truly expect to be with my Frank and my Molly and poor Adrian and perhaps my Mum and my Dad too, though he did drop bombs on cities during the war, so I can’t say for certain about Dad in the sweet hereafter.’ She looks a little off to one side of him as she says it, like she’s talking not to another person but to the general idea of other people.
Thaw looks at her. Studies her hard and says, ‘Well, I hope you make it. Despite it meaning you’ll be dead. I hope you do.’ He looks around the room and says, ‘I, on the other hand, wouldn’t mind being in the Caribbean. Having serious life-threatening carnal relations with some caramel-skinned girl.’
‘Well, I hope you’ll have married her in one of the intervening five years,’ my mother says. ‘And then I hope you make it, too.’ Thaw laughs and tells her, ‘Thanks.’
She serves up the Sara Lee Blueberry Shortcake and Thaw bolts his down and tells her, ‘Magnificent, magnificent.’ And wipes his mouth on the front of his T-shirt and tells her, ‘Just the sort of tucker Jesus would have dished up to the Corinthians or the Whoevers if it had been invented in his day instead of just loaves and just fishes.’
‘He did what he could with what he had available,’ she says gravely. ‘Stretched things so they went around nicely. And anyway, it’s him in his Grace serving us up this food now,’ she remembers.
‘And hopefully it’ll be Jack in his grace and Jean in her grace doing the dishes while you and me enjoy a smoke,’ he says.
‘No,’ my mother tells him. ‘That’ll be me in mine. You’re a cheeky young bugger, aren’t you.’
I watch her. I assess. I’m right on her case. But her sanity doesn’t seem much more distant than it always has been. She says evening prayers in chorus with the Voice of God right into the bakelite radio. The Voice of God thanks her for them and repeats the private box number.
On the way to bed I go into Molly’s room where Jean is sleeping. I slide my hands through the tangle of sheet to her. She’s wearing a T-shirt, which isn’t normal, but is only proper when you’re a guest in someone’s house, I suppose. I start to run my hands and mouth up under the T-shirt. She moans and then wakes and stops my hands with hers and grabs a fistful of my hair and pulls me up away from her and says, ‘No, Jack. Not in here. Look.’ She points up at the stuffed rabbit with the chewed ears and the glass eyes that are catching moonlight on the top of the chest of drawers, and then points at the bald doll on the window sill with the moon shining off its scalp and points at the drawings hung about the room that Molly was told she had a big future in something creative about and that have gold stars stuck to them Molly was awarded that are shining in the moonlight.
Usually Jean would be the first to step up onto somebody’s shrine and accelerate her metabolism with sex. Usually she’s a wide open iconoclast. ‘They’re toys,’ I tell her. ‘Manufactured in Taiwan.’
‘They’re too much for me to screw in front of. They’re from her childhood. Not Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China or any other sweatshop … they’re from her. Go to bed.’
‘Jesus,’ I tell her. ‘It’s contagious.’
In Adrian’s and my room Thaw is in Adrian’s bed asleep. I turn on my bedside light. On my bed is the green garbage bag full of Adrian’s last things. I get into bed and untie the top of the bag and start to go through it. Plunging my hand in and out like it’s a lucky-dip. First thing I pull out is a Black Gulch pocket knife. Made in Japan. Then a bamboo bong that smells like something rodent-sized crawled into it and died there. Then a small leather pouch that might be made of something gross like a kangeroo’s scrotum. Inside is about two ounces of dried out dope. Then his Favoured Client discount card with the raised nipples that ended my mother’s explorations in this bag. Then an address book. I check under F for Furphy. He’s written: Jack (Brother) Lorne, Victoria, c/-Gene Turner (Girlfriend) 052346232. Then there’s a couple of stick mags filled with Asian girls defoliated below the waist. Then an old Olympus camera. Then a Dolphin torch.
Next thing I pull out is a dog-eared photo of Adrian and Dad and the bronze Ypres soldier who was relocated and became a bronze Vietnam soldier on the top of the Hannah cenotaph. The soldier is bending low, his back horizontal as a quadruped’s. He’s reaching down with one hand to pull his imaginary wounded comrade from the French, then Vietnamese, mud. His face is sad with love at the plight of that friend in the mud. Adrian is up top of the cenotaph astride the soldier’s greened bronze back. He has his hand flung up in the air and he’s yeehaaing and digging in the spurs like a rodeo rider. Dad’s standing in the back of his ute, reaching up shaking the soldier’s hand as it reaches down for the wounded comrade, he’s smiling for the camera, glad to make this sad soldier’s acquaintance.
I pull Adrian’s wallet out of his garbage bag next. I’m tired. I don’t much want to look in his wallet. The wallet’s part of the mind. The wallet should be lowered into the earth with the body. But it’s impossible not to look in a dead brother’s wallet. I open it up. There’s fifty-odd bucks. There’s a black-and-white photo of Mum and Dad on the boat out from England. He’s holding his hands up with his fingers crossed about something. Their new life together? The sea journey? She’s smiling hugely. Happy. It was taken before she knew she was going to be a bank teller in the outback.
Behind that photo is a yellow post-it note Adrian has scribbled reminders to himself on in black lead pencil. Some lines from Tennyson about how the old order changeth, yielding place to new. PINNo.2835. Combination No.3578.
I’m too tired to go through the rest of Adrian’s lucky-dip of personal effects. I go back to the magazines. I start to leaf through the defoliated Asian girls. Hi, I’m Corrinne. I really get off on the extra Length and Width a white man has to offer. They’re fairly unanimous on what the white man has to offer, these defoliated Asian girls. Extra this, extra that. Blue eyes. Hairy chests. Muscles. Beastlike aroma. Piledriving relentlessness. Circumcised dicks. Et cetera, et cetera. And despite me being pretty sure all this is written by some porno sub-editor in Sydney after he’s had the negatives mailed in from the third world, these girls look so doe-eyed earnest with their quotation marks right there surrounding their quotes, that I can’t help feeling somewhat long and wide and blue-eyed and hairy and muscular and somewhat relentless and can maybe smell myself beastly aromatic, too. And can’t help wondering if Jean won’t be persuaded that all this is to be coveted and lusted after despite a rabbit with chewed ears and glass eyes that glint in the moon and despite a doll with no hair whose scalp shines in the moon and despite the drawings hung about her with their gold stars shining and promising a bright future in something creative to a dead girl. Probably not.
There are a lot of things I don’t know about Adrian. Everything really. I’m sorry I didn’t know him as a man. But him calling me a cunt and then calling me a full-on cunt as Dad’s wake died put an end to us. I put his ex-possessions back in the garbage bag and turn my light off.
In the dark I struggle for a while to put the defoliated Asian girls out of my mind. Then I hear my mother pacing in her room. Floorboards creaking. It’s two in the morning. I start to weigh up her sanity. To assess. On the one hand her conversation has been fairly normal … for her. And even if she is pissing on her rose bushes it’s probably only an act of water conservation and a reaction against the new cost of water and a fear the new water they’re supplying is saltier than her own piss, so salty it might kill those roses.
On the other hand there’s how skinny she’s got. How dirty. Boils are more-or-less self-inflicted. Having boils has to be an indication of madness. And there’s her smile. That unending serenity she smiles around now. Her eldest son was shot dead, partially by a lone gunman but mostly by himself, only a month ago, and she’s smiling at people about it and nodding over it as if to say God’s Will Be Done. Every grievous insult that’s dealt her is dealt by God and somehow deserved. Every death inflicted on her is Death-by-God, and thus no bad thing and not to be whimpered over. All part of His Mysterious Plan. Smile wide and get on with it. I can’t work out if this smile is rank stupidity or some tack of madness. If she ripped at and tore at and cursed the whole fucking Godplan and whimpered in grief and shouted about how unfair and cruel it all was … I think that would be sanity. But her lack of unhappiness … I can’t fit that into my idea of sanity.
She’s pacing in her room now. Maybe she throws off religion and rises into unhappiness at night. Maybe that’s when she gets sane. Maybe her sanity is all nocturnal.
The didgeridoo starts playing just after dawn. Its drone rises slow in us all, then dips and swoops and jags, then wavers upwards again to something inescapable and something ominous and something that has me blinking at the ceiling.
Thaw groans and rolls and groans, chased all over his bed by the sound. As he wakes he replaces the groans with Fucks and Shits, still rolling. The tape stops after half an hour. Thaw lifts his head out from under the pillow and thanks Fucking God. The tape is rewound and started up again. He gets out of bed mumbling. He’s in a pair of boxer shorts and his MOTHER tattoo. He walks out into the sunlight and stretches his muscled arms high and yawns and scratches his stomach and wipes his long hair back off his face. Turns a full three-sixty, blinking at all that red ground, all that blue sky with the wind getting up. He walks over to the site-van out front of my mother’s house. Looks up at the speakers hung from brackets on its roof where the sound is coming from. He knocks on the door.
A man in khaki shorts and a yellow T-shirt with a black swan on the front and HANNAH SAFETY AWARD written underneath it comes down the steps of the van to the west of the one Thaw has knocked on and shouts, ‘Morning.’ Shouts, ‘What can I do for you?’
‘I just wanted to know, is that Blaupunkt?’ Thaw asks.
‘Blaupunkt?’ the man asks back.
‘The sound system. Is it Blaupunkt?
‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ the man wants to know.
‘It’s incredible,’ says Thaw. ‘I almost would’ve bet you had a fair-dinkum abo locked in there.’
The man laughs. ‘It’s no abo,’ he says. ‘It’s Bang and Olufsen. Series Two Thousand. One of those miniature jobs. You get sick of this didgeridoo, believe me. But you can’t knock it for sound quality. It’s pure.’ He nods and holds his hands up behind his ears with an index finger touching each one and smiles in a satisfied-listener pose.
‘A miniature. Shit. I wouldn’t have guessed that. A miniature. I’m mega-stoked on good systems. Can I see it?’ Thaw asks.
‘Yeah, come in,’ says the man. He opens the door and takes Thaw into the van and shows him the state-of-the-art-unit, he calls it. Shows him the button that eliminates warp and the button that makes a woofer and makes a tweeter redundant. ‘No woofer,’ says Thaw. Shakes his head. ‘No tweeter.’ And he shows him how tiny the muscle-bound amplifier is that rattles her windows out there and shows him where it says Made in Scandinavia on the side. ‘Absolute state-of-the-art unit,’ he says. ‘Scandinavian state-of-the-art. More state-of-the-art than even Jap state-of-the-art. They don’t fuck ‘round with their technology, those Vikings.’
‘They don’t,’ agrees Thaw. ‘They certainly don’t.’ Then he picks up the whole state-of-the-art-unit, raises it over his head and slams it into the floor where it shatters into state-of-the-art Scandinavian gravel and the man in the Hannah Safety Award T-shirt says, ‘Hey,’ and Thaw turns around and walks back into the house and gets back into Adrian’s bed telling me ‘Bang and Olufsen both,’ as he disappears under the sheet.
I get out of bed and go into the kitchen. My mother is standing over by the sink looking out at her rose bushes with her skinny arms and legs bare out of a yellowed summer nightie. She’s settling her big-lenses over her eyes. The boil on her arm is pulsing red. She asks me, ‘What’s happened, Jack? What’s happened?’
‘Nothing’s happened,’ I tell her.
‘Something’s happened all right, Jack. It’s gone quiet. My skins gone prickly with the quiet. Their noise is stopped. Something’s happened.’
‘Oh, that,’ I say. ‘Thaw made them turn it off.’
She stares at me and her eyes widen and wet and I’m damned if she isn’t crying all of a sudden. She covers her quivering mouth with her hand and asks, ‘Made them? How?’
‘The same old way, I suppose,’ I say.
‘What same old way?’ she asks through her hand.
‘The offer of a smack in the gob way.’
‘He threatened them?’
‘I’m guessing,’ I tell her. ‘But I guess so.’
She shakes her head and blinks tears into the catchment areas of her glasses. She smiles and nods like something is confirmed. ‘He shouldn’t step over the line with those people,’ she says. ‘They’re multinational. Tell him not to do anything silly for my sake. My Faith is enough against them.’ What stops me telling her Thaw’s not going to do anything silly for her sake is how unbelievably happy she is in those tears. She’s standing straight-backed and crying them with a smile now. Delirious or uplifted or some damn thing at the thought someone is about to do something silly for her sake.
‘He’s ended a blasphemy,’ she says.
‘Mum, it’s six-thirty. He’s trying to sleep in,’ I tell her.
‘No,’ she says. ‘No. He’s ended a blasphemy.’ I just shake my head.
I go back to Adrian’s and my room and as I climb back into bed I tell Thaw, ‘She thinks you stopped that noise on her behalf. She thinks you did it to end a blasphemy.’ He’s facing the wall and under his spread of hair I can’t see if his eyes are open or closed. I lie down and attempt sleep and am finally drifting, thinking about those Asian girls come to life and thinking about Adrian come to life with them, when Thaw says into the half-light at the wall, ‘Fuck your mother and her childish needs.’
There is no more noise from the site-vans. No taped messages from relocated friends and no didgeridoo. This is the first day of silence in a long time, she says. She lets on to be confused and unsettled by it to begin with and she can’t really say it’s any better than all the noise they’ve been making that she’s more or less become used to. But she’s lying. She’s lifted. She’s into a fireproof smile. The Dreamtime has given up heckling the Voice of God. Is no longer holding up its validity alongside the Church’s validity.
About mid-morning she gives up the pretence and she gets to supposing out loud that silence is golden after all and she starts thanking Thaw for providing that silence and she can’t, for the life of her, figure out how he talked them into turning their noise off. She starts to do little things for him. Things like empty his ashtray or light his cigarette with her Bic disposable. Things like ask if he’s hungry for something to eat every half-hour and apologise for all her food being frozen. And she starts to call today a Gloriously Silent day. Just throwing it into the conversation whenever she feels like it. And she tracks him in her peripheral vision to see whatever she can see of him that she can’t see by straight-out staring.
Thaw and Jean and I had planned to go for a drive this Gloriously Silent morning to check out what Thaw won’t call anything else but the Great North-West. But after breakfast the wind picks up and starts to show traces of colour. My mother and I start swapping glances. By lunchtime the wind has turned red and begun to howl and the windows are fizzing with sandblast and we include little nods in our glances.
She takes up the sharp-nosed red-handled pliers and tunes the bakelite radio along from the Voice of God to Weather Watch and a recorded voice there tells us what we are about to experience has been christened Aloysius. Aloysius is over Tom Price and heading in a south-easterly direction. Aloysius is rated Category Three. And at Category Three Aloysius will take away many things that Angelique in October and Donna Maree in November, both Category One, did not. The recorded voice runs through a list of items that need securing, starting at corrugated iron and ending with light planes with even a mention of dog kennels in between. The voice mentions sheds twice. Garden sheds and machinery sheds. Sheds are the staple diet of a Category Three cyclone. The recorded voice tells us, Stay Indoors.
The BBK men throw cables over their site-vans and peg them into the rock. Their foreman this week is Phil. He comes to the front door to ask us if we know a Category Three cyclone is on the way and to tell us he thinks we’d be safer in their fully secured vans with them than in the Town Hall because it’s been stripped of all the shelter it had surrounding it last time a Category Three cyclone hit. The BBK men have taken up calling my mother’s house the Town Hall and behind her back calling her the Lady Mayoress.
‘You’re quite welcome,’ Phil tells us, ‘to pitch in with us. We have bunks in there.’
‘We have something a little stronger than cables holding us to the ground,’ my mother tells him. And she crosses herself over her skinny chest and stares at him to let him know what we have is Belief. And lifts her chin at him to let him know that to her a cyclone is just another element in the whole collection of evil elements working on her to get her out of here. A collection of evil elements that starts with him and his company. She shifts her stare down to his beer belly which is dead giveaway of some dissolution and depravity over and above the normal amount a working man has in his life. Behind her I shrug at him. He shrugs back at me and says, ‘Good luck. Sing out if what you got holding you down isn’t enough.’
She’s worried about her fat journalist friend. ‘I’d best ring Charles and tell him to move his caravan up out of the river bed,’ she says. She gets her mobile off the kitchen bench and pokes his number into it with a crooked arthritic finger and waits for him to answer, tut-tuts at the phone and shakes it and pokes the number in again and waits again. ‘He’s not answering,’ she says. ‘I hope he knows this is a cyclone.’
‘He’s not an idiot,’ I tell her. ‘He’ll be all right.’ She gets her three company-issue vacuum flasks that have the little black swan stamped on the side down out of a kitchen cupboard and fills them with hot tea. She isn’t expecting the electricity to last.
Mid-afternoon the rain arrives horizontal on the wind and fades it from red through pink to clear and vicious. It begins to bounce. It howls and fades and howls and fades as it bounces against the house and the whole house shakes every time the wind reaches up into howl. It is always a bouncing wind that lifts roofs and explodes windows. Always a bouncing wind that unravels manmade structures into just their parts stretched out along the course it took and leaves a junk map of itself spread across the land as history in the windless days that follow.
My mother has partially thawed another fruitcake. Jean and my mother and me take shelter in the sitting room playing cards and drinking tea and trying not to crack an incisor on a frozen glace cherry. Thaw is mesmerised by the whole rip and tear of weather. He’s travelling from window to window swearing and blaspheming in admiration despite me telling him to come away from them before one explodes in his face. He’s telling us, Jesus that’s rain, and, Christ that’s wind.
When the wind goes highest into howl and the house takes up shuddering we go still. Poised with half-thawed fruitcake halfway to our mouths and diamond kings thrust out ready to be laid down in trump over spade aces. Waiting for the burst of wall or the lift of roof or just the general kafuckingboom of everything manmade turning into junk. Jean and I cock our heads, listening for the first tinkling of Armageddon. My mother closes her eyes, her lips move silently. The Lord Is My Shepherd: therefore can I lack nothing. Etc, etc …
Then the wind drops off its zenith of howl and we begin moving again. Laying down our full-houses and saying, ‘Full House,’ and laying down our threes-of-a-kind and saying, ‘Three of a kind,’ and laying down our straight-flushes and saying, ‘Straight-Flush,’ and biting into our fruitcake and making mmmm … noises. But all the time thinking when the wind screams again this house is about to go running west across the land in chunks of tin and fibro and human.
Aloysius bangs at us and night falls and the electricity fails. We decide against dinner. We smoke instead and drink tea and my mother and I tell stories of cyclones in our pasts. Much, much bigger than this one, we lie. At half past eight the green corrugated plastic awning that covered her back door is torn away. It flaps for a minute against the back wall like it might beat its way inside. ‘Then it’s gone. That’ll be the rear awning,’ says my mother. An hour later her solar panels go clattering across the roof and away. I pause in the middle of a story I’m telling about Maggie who came south-east down from Exmouth in 1980 and was named after the British Prime Minister of the time who had excited the Bureau of Meteorology by declaring war on Argentina – in the pause in my story my mother tells us, ‘Solar panels,’ and I continue on about how Maggie got inside the huge Ore Truck Workshop and ballooned its corrugated-iron walls out and left it looking like a space observatory.
Through the night ripping and tearing and flapping and smashing noises come to us, any of which could be the start of the Armaggedon kafuckingboom we’re expecting but none of which turn out to be. Always we look across at my mother who is quick to catalogue the external domestic accoutrement that has been torn away … ‘aerial, I think … satellite dish, I believe … hanging plants, unless I’m mistaken … front porch, I’m afraid … hot water service, by the sound.. .’
We finally get to sleep in the greying morning when Aloysius is pretty much spent. Or more likely moved on. Outside is a choppy wind and a light rain but no glimpse of Armageddon. We’ve shifted to the outskirts of Armageddon.
We’ve tensed with the rising howl of wind a hundred times through the night and we’re exhausted. Jean is asleep on the sofa with her head on a cushion patterned with identical herds of galloping horses stampeding out left and right from under her ears. Thaw is asleep in a deep vinyl armchair with his head back. My mother is asleep curled in the matching chair. In the near total darkness I must have read her lips mime that line about the Lord being her shepherd a hundred times. Never seemed to get past the part about him feeding her in a green pasture before the gust of wind subsided and she came clear of prayer and back to us.
We wake when the BBK men fire their bulldozer up, revving it high and sending shots of steel-blue smoke up from its exhaust west on the wind. Two of their site-vans have twisted under their cables in the night and fallen onto their backs in the mud. The men inside are trapped and calling for breakfast and for urination. The man driving the dozer fronts up to the first site-van and uses the tiniest dabs and squirts of hydraulics to lift it right side up with his blade. Doing as little damage as possible but getting abused for rough handling from inside the site-van anyway.
We walk outside and do a lap of her house, inspecting the damage. It’s just a box now with none of the external protrusions that make a house work. Here and there the frame is exposed where something was torn from the wall and took a chunk of fibro sheet with it. But all in all she’s pretty happy with the outcome.
‘We have withstood the blast,’ she says. She looks uplifted or something. Thaw declares her house an official shitbox. But she says, ‘No, no, no … we have withstood the blast.’ And it turns out that the things that have been torn off her house are the things she can do without. Will make her life simpler by their absence, she tells us.
She looks at the site-vans of BBK toppled over and she looks at her house still standing and she takes it as a direct and obvious sign of the power of prayer and maybe as a direct and obvious sign of the special place God holds in His heart for her, she says. Mum? I want to ask her. Special place? Molly? Dad? And now Adrian? Special place? But what I ask is, ‘How do you think you’ll go getting all this damage fixed?’ And she tells me, ‘The Lord helps those who help themselves,’ which must be comfort to all those do-it-yourself types but shouldn’t give any peace to an emaciated old woman with no tools.
The sky has gone clear blue with stretched white cloud so high it looks like it’s leaking in from space. The wind is only playful.
They start their generator and hook our power back up and she cooks us bacon and eggs. Won’t let any of us lift a finger to help. Spins around the kitchen in triumph. Insists Thaw has four eggs. Announces she might even have one herself. We can hear the BBK men outside whooping now and laughing and telling war stories and accusing each other of shitting themselves.
Jean can’t eat her eggs. She’s white in the face and sighing every now and then until I ask her if she’s okay. ‘I feel dreadful,’ she says. ‘Really crook.’
‘You’re done in,’ my mother tells her. Then asks her, ‘Are you another atheist?’ Jean just stares at her. ‘What saps the energy dear … is fear,’ my mother says. ‘It’s a tiring business, being afraid.’ She’s right. The rising wind has washed adrenaline through us from gland to blood to liver in a hundred little tides and a hundred little highs and we’re exhausted.
She’s not exhausted. She’s bright-eyed and full of needless energy. Walks up to the kitchen table and slaps her shiny palm and her bent fingers twice on its formica top with needless energy and looks down on us all sitting there. Looks down on the exhausted Thaw and the exhausted Jean and the exhausted me. She hasn’t had the hundred tides of adrenaline wash through her. Hasn’t had the hundred highs. Has warded the fear off with the Lord being her shepherd and with the Lord letting her lack nothing and with him feeding her in a green pasture and occasionally leading her forth beside the waters of comfort. Whereas I’ve got a weariness put right into my bones by those hundred tides of adrenaline. A weariness that looks wide-eyed at her energy and at her table-slapping in astonishment and makes me half-wish, or maybe makes me wish outright, that I had a shepherd to therefore let me lack nothing and a shepherd to feed me in that green pasture and occasionally to take a stroll with me forth beside those waters of comfort. But I just haven’t.
She takes Jean’s hand and leads her away to the bathroom and returns cursing the fact of no hot water. She has to boil the kettle seven times to get enough bath to get Jean into. She adds Badedas bath oil that her Poor-Dear Adrian gave her for one Christmas or another and tells Jean that’ll do the trick and tells her to yell out if she needs the temperature boosted.
Before she sits down to her own egg she picks up her mobile phone and pokes Charles Wadlow’s number into it. She waits while it rings. Says, ‘Oh dear …’ and presses END and then prods his number in again and waits again, and waits, and this time just says, ‘Oh …’
She picks up her untouched breakfast and takes it over to the kitchen bin and steps on its pedal and its lid lifts up gaping for rubbish like it did a million times for me as a bored boy with her shouting at me to leave that bin alone before you break it. She tilts her plate and egg, bacon, toast and tomato slide in there and she takes her foot off the pedal and the bin snaps shut on her breakfast like a Labrador.
‘You boys will have to go out to the Fortescue,’ she says. ‘To see if Charles is all right … or not. You know where he was camped, Jack. He was camped near the bridge. Borrow a Land Cruiser from your friends out the front and get out there. Go on. He must be needing help. He calls himself a phone junkie. And now he’s not answering. And my digital display’s saying Out of Range, which it’s never said before. I pray to God he’s all right … but the man was camped in a river bed.’