In Lorne no one much wanted to talk about it when it had just happened, but wanted to talk right over the top of it and on to something else. Maybe by clapping me on the shoulder like old Tom Mercer does and looking over that shoulder out through the Norfolk Island Pines at the sea like some endangered species has just surfaced there and telling me, ‘Sorry to hear about your troubles, Jack. Just dreadful. You going to the cricket club do tonight?’ Or talk right over the top of it and on to something else by maybe stopping me out front of the newsagency like Joe Stewart who owns the Sea Vista Holiday Flats does and looking down at the footpath and poking an icy-pole stick right across it into the gutter with the toe of his Blundstone boot like it’s a real and compelling piece of civic duty and telling me, ‘Don’t know what to tell you, Jack. Only we’re thinking of you at the Surf Club. Come down and have a paddle on Sunday Anglesea are coming over for a local ironman.’ Or talk right over the top of it and on to something else by maybe looking down at the Cameron Tartan pub carpet like Pete Armytage does and telling me, ‘Helluva thing, Jack. Helluva thing. Really is. Let me buy you a pot and tell you about my new sixteen-foot Savage.’ Or talk right over the top of it and on to something else like Norm Doñean does by waving the Geelong Advertiser at me with the photograph of Ablett leaping over Hocking at pre-season training on the back page when I’m in George’s Bakery buying a croissant for breakfast and laying a finger on a skerrick of John Barnes in the background of that photo leaning up against a goal post and telling me, ‘Barnes, Jack. Barnes is the key. Now I know you and most people think Ablett’s the key. But it’s Barnes. Getting first touch of the ball and keeping it away from Williams and away from Bradley and the like. Sorry to hear about what happened, Jack. But anyway … Barnes is the key No known way he isn’t.’
Or talk right over the top of it and on to something else even by catching hold of me by the bony part of the elbow with an age-splashed hand as I’m walking past like old Mrs Roberts does and whispering up into my ear, ‘I’ve said a little prayer for you, Jack. And I’ve baked a little fruit loaf,’ and handing me something aromatic and still warm and browned on top and sprinkled with cinnamon and brick-heavy with raisin and apricot and fig. And whispering, ‘Old Pa Drew liked it with figs. So I got used to making it with figs. So there’s figs in it. And I was just wondering … you aren’t allergic to figs, are you?’
Then the school holidays end and all those Range Rovers with all those roof racks change up into fifth gear and get the WELCOME TO LORNE * TOURIST RESORT FOR ALL SEASONS sign shrinking in their rear-view mirrors as they gun north out the Great Ocean Road for Melbourne. And suddenly everybody in town knows everybody else in town again. And suddenly they don’t want to talk about anything else.
Like now we’re alone at last and can talk of private things. Or with the changing of the season they’ve all of a sudden decided it has grown to be more historical curiosity than contemporary tragedy and as such is ripe for historical enquiry. They act like they held a town meeting. Swelled the Catholic Hall with their numbers and took a vote. And voted Yes we can discuss this now. We can delve and can wonder aloud. Can wander back and forward across it at length. Can revel in it and roll in it. Can question and outright interrogate those members of the community who have the answers in them until we have the answers in us.
In first light on the thin beach of high tide when Jean and I are out walking Villi and throwing sticks for him to crash through waking seagull flocks at and crash through waves at it’s the O’Neills. They’re in their fifties and retired to the coast from selling Toyotas and Hondas in Blackburn and in Malvern and in Toorak so she can write the novel she has burning in her and he can catch the mighty fish that may or may not be lurking in the seas roundabout. Their dog Anonymous who has been designed tiny and high-pitched by the breeders of Europe dances around their Reeboks as they walk and sometimes mounts a high-pitched, half-charge at a lone seagull.
Elliot O’Neill walks hard to keep the heart attack that killed his father fifteen years distant in his own chest and Gail O’Neill walks hard to keep her mother’s arse three sizes distant up the clothes rack from her own. So they come upon us fast and come upon us before I have time to marshal all the bullshit I can marshal on the subject even though I know they will be coming upon us fast with the fluorescent patches on their Reeboks flashing on and off in the dawn grey and with Anonymous giving off high yips like he was designed by the breeders of Europe not so much to hunt and eradicate as to debate the rodents that plagued them.
When they get close to us Elliot O’Neill picks up Anonymous because Villi is a red heeler and because Villi was Thaw’s. Villi sniffs all around the legs of Elliot O’Neill while Anonymous yips staccato down at him. And they shout, ‘Morning, Jack. Morning, Jean,’ over the yips. And tell us, ‘Looks like we’re in for a good one.’ We agree, Yeah, it does,’ and they come to a stop on the sand in front of me and Jean skirts round them and raises her eyebrows from behind them and points up the beach with her thumb that she is going to keep walking and whistles Villi and by the time they have softened me up with a few more preliminaries about the day and about the time of year Jean is over the groyne and out of sight along the beach heading for the pier.
It is always him that unleashes her theory and it is always her that unleashes his. And hers is every day another theory of love refusing to fit into the shape she figures we tried to fit it into. And his is every day another theory of drug abuse.
He stares at me in the half light and tells me, ‘Jack, Gail thinks it was a love triangle gone horribly wrong. That Thaw was in love with Jean but couldn’t have her because she was in love with you who wouldn’t give her and so he struck at you the only way he could without hurting Jean … who he loved. Struck at you through your mother.’ I nod, like I usually do, as if her new theory has some sense about it and may even be the key to the thing. But before I can open my mouth and rate it she tells me, ‘Elliot’s convinced it was LSD,’ and I have to nod and knit my brow over that one as well and say, ‘Hallucinogens,’ like ‘Hallucinogens’ is a synonym for ‘Eureka’.
And they demand to know of me whose theory it is I lean toward. Her, out here in the dawn resurrecting the arse of her girlhood? Or him, out here in the dawn resurrecting the heart of his boyhood? He asks me what I think, in light of this new … not exactly evidence … in light of this new … light … that is shed on the subject? Who do I think is closest to the mark?
So I choose between the theory of love refusing to fit into the shape we tried to fit it into and the theory of illegal substances and get told by whatever O’Neill I have agreed with that they think I’m right, they think I’ve been rock solid sensible through this whole thing. This morning I tell them, ‘Maybe it was LSD. Maybe that was it all along. I never met such a bloke to make out crocodiles and other shit in the clouds. He was gifted at crocodiles.’ And Gail O’Neill rolls her eyeballs because I agreed with his Cocaine theory yesterday at the expense of her Illegitimate Son theory and maybe I’m throwing in with the Illegal Substance camp lock, stock and barrel, and he thinks out loud that I’m wise and thinks out loud that society is stupid.
Their theories are only the theories of Toyota dealers who branched out into Hondas late in life as a challenge so they don’t cut much ice with me and don’t move me or impress me or confuse me. Don’t live with me much after they’re speculated out at me. They just delay me and just let Jean and Villi get away from me so I never reach the pier on our morning walks any more.
Villi spots me coming toward them as they’re walking back along the beach and leaves her and comes charging for me and I shout, ‘Sit … sit … sit … down … siiit,’ as he closes on me. But he ignores me like he always does and he barrels into my legs flat out. And when I’ve told him what a stupid fucking prick of a dog he is and swung my Blundstone at him a few times and he’s barked at me and evaded it Jean is up with us and I take hold of her by her shirt and pull her in to me and take hold of her by her arse-cheeks and press her hard up against me and she tells me how painfully tolerant I am and then tells me how many people are out there on the pier and who they are and what they’ve caught. Tells me, ‘Flathead and salmon.’ And I tell her, ‘LSD and a Love Triangle,’ which she thinks she might even prefer to Amphetamines and Free Love, which was her favourite concoction to date.
The O’Neills are just the earliest-risen theorists about town. Through the day others will come up to me and deliver their thoughts and when they’ve delivered their thoughts shake their heads as if they see even their delivered thoughts haven’t cut through the wonder and the mystery of it all now they’ve been delivered out loud. Even their delivered thoughts haven’t got to the bottom of why a man would do what he did to his own finger and do what he did to his best friend’s mother and then do what he did to himself. And after they’ve shaken their heads will say something that comes in a variety of ways but always adds up to, ‘Weird shit happens … fact of life … I s’pose … maybe.’
*
For two years now at the end of the working day I’ve checked in with Geoff Yeomans Senior and told him–as he’s strained to lean back managerial in his ergonomic chair -which couples I have shown up which windless gullies during the course of the day and who of the couple I showed through the architect-designed timber residence in this windless gully is the marital-pants-wearer and who of the couple I showed through the seen-better-days HardiPlank getaway in that windless gully is the marital-pants-wearer and just what are our chances of ganging up with which marital-pants-wearer against their life partner and clinching a sale before auction.
But since the curfew was lifted and what happened to my mother has become a topic for the town it has become habit with Geoff Yeomans Senior when I come in at the end of the day with my report to finish rolling his cigarette and then to cut me off mid-sentence by telling me, ‘Never mind about all that shit now, Jack. Let’s go and have a drink. My shout.’ And to rise stiffly out of his ergonomic chair and come around from behind his desk and put his arm across my shoulders like concern runs deep in his veins and tragedy runs deep in mine and to say, ‘Come on, son,’ and shepherd me up to the Pacific under that arm.
And on the way up to the Pacific he’ll drag on his roly and hold it out in front of his face with his free hand and stare at it and exhale at it and tell me in that smoky breath that what I’ve been on lately is a steep, steep learning curve. And what I mostly want to tell him back is I don’t think I’ve learnt a fucking thing. Don’t even believe there’s a lesson in it. No hint of a lesson from start to finish. But what I tell him back is, ‘Yeah … I have … steep.’ Because I don’t want him getting the idea I’m some sort of bad son who got nothing from his mother being out there … with the isolation … with the champagne … with the duct tape.
In the front bar of the Pacific are the theorists en masse. And some of them have euthanased aged parents by morphine ampoule and some have shared in miscarriages they drove right into Geelong about and some have lost loved ones in the fullness of life to the dread disease and lost crew members at sea and lost family members who accelerated too hard or braked too late or broke out exasperated across a double white line on the Great Ocean Road.
But none of them can walk into the front bar here and get a pause choreographed into the whole mosaic conversation. A pause that wells up into outright silence because their mother has been murdered in cold blood by a best friend whom they had sheltered under their very roof and who crossed a whole continent while bleeding into a bag to do it and then completed the whole of whatever it was he completed by blowing his face away into a ceiling fan that sucked the steam off the five thousand showers of their childhoods.
And right here in the outright silence, before it fractures into chat, Geoff Yeomans Senior has his moment. Has the moment he’s been waiting for all day. And takes his dead stub of roly off his bottom lip and flicks it out at the idea of the crowd but hits the garish reality of the Cameron Tartan carpet and tuts softly into the outright silence and throws up his hands as if to spook livestock and announces loud into that outright silence, ‘Righto, gentlemen. Let’s not gawk and stare like merinos. You’ve all got some bullshit to speak, I’m sure.’
*
But I can take whatever Lorne has to say on the subject. Can take their theories. Can take their silence. Can take their laying-on of arms. Can take their fruit loaves dusted with cinnamon and heavy with fig.
Because if they’re not ex-Toyota salesmen or ex-lawyers, they’re crayfishermen or they’re restaurateurs or they’re plumbers. And none of them smacks of truth on any subject that isn’t Toyotas of the sixties and seventies or Probate Law under Bolte or what the Fucking Vietnamese have done to the crayfish or the twin pillars that are lemongrass and coriander or just when to take up a multi-grip in preference to a Stillson and when to take up a monkey-wrench instead.
It is only him that maybe smacks of the truth and only him that can theorise me into a cold sweat. Only him, who walks up to me one night in the front bar of the Pacific and takes off his tam-o’-shanter and unbuttons the driving coat he is wearing because he has driven all the way down from Sydney in his open-top MG, and asks me, ‘Are you Jack Furphy?’ And when I tell him, ‘Yeah,’ puts his hand out and is set to tell me who he is when I say, ‘I know who you are.’
Know who he is from book backs and from magazines and newspapers but mostly from him being on ‘Burke’s Backyard’ where he was the celebrity gardener and showed us his liquidambar whose roots had broken up his shed-slab, his liquidambar that was only as big as a tomato plant when they bought the house twenty years ago, that is unless his wife planted the damn thing soon after they moved in, he can’t remember.
He tells me, ‘Listen, I’m sorry to hear about what happened to your mother.’
I tell him, ‘I was sorry to see what happened to your shed-slab.’ And he gives off a wry little smile like maybe he regrets that Don Burke and that liquidambar as a career move and maybe he’d rather be remembered for his great novel on Hiroshima or for his great novel on the Vietnam War or for his great book on Rob Roy than be remembered for his shed-slab cracking liquidambar that he doesn’t know if his wife planted or was there when they bought the house.
He strokes his hand down over his wind-bothered beard and sharpens it into the old-growth monument that keeps people from calling him babyfaced and tells me, ‘We had a tree surgeon in. We had it felled.’ The old-growth monument flaps atop his sternum as he talks and makes of him an Old Testament prophet.
He says he’d like to buy us both a pint of draught Guinness. From the can with the widget in the bottom of it that infuses whatever it is it infuses and makes it so like the real Guinness in Ireland. Then he wants me to know what a grand name in Australian history is Furphy, with the novels they’ve written and the watercarts they’ve made. And wants to know if I’m related to the writer of the novels and the makers of the watercarts, to which I tell him, ‘Well, you know, distantly, I think. But Dad’s dead.’ And wants to know if I’ve read the famous book or if I’ve been to Shepparton to see the famous foundry. And I tell him I’ve been to Nagambie, which I believe is fairly adjacent because the road sign there said SHEPPARTON 62, and I’ve just recently read Ken Kesey’s book because I’d seen that movie on video with Jack Nicholson and loved it. And he raises up his pint of Guinness and quotes at me the famous anti-liquor quote from the arse-end of the watercart of the Furphys and takes a sip that leaves foam in his moustache with part of the H in it from where he wrote his initials into the head of his pint.
He got wind of her first, he says, from the Western Land Council whom he still has contacts with from the days when he wrote his book on the stockmen’s strike up there. And got wind of her again through a journalist friend of his called Wadlow whose family he used to work for when he was a cadet. And has talked at length with his journalist friend named Wadlow who told him a remote murder-suicide wasn’t what was wanted in journalism but that maybe the nature of this particular murder-suicide meant it was what was wanted in his more long-winded line of writing. He tells me he thinks it just may be. What’s wanted. He thinks there may be a book in her. In her and in him … who killed her.
He buys us both another pint of the Guinness with the widget in the can and asks me if I’ll join him in a search for the truth of my mother’s story. Writes his famous initials again in the thick head on his pint and asks me if I’ll assist him and join him in his speculations on what he calls the various vicissitudes and vagaries of our still-untamed, and who knows probably untameable, recesses. Asks it as if I have it in me to follow him there into the probably untameable recesses and to speculate alongside him.
I tell him I’ll tell him what I know. That’s all I can do. He says good, good. Don’t do any more than that. He says what isn’t fact he’ll elevate from likelihood to moral truth by literary means and devices.
Then he leans across the table and across the pints of Guinness that read HR and JF and warns me not to get him wrong. Warns me please don’t think he’s going to glorify my mother’s stand, or indeed my mother, in all of this. Because he’s not into Glorification. He’s into truth. So I’m not to get the impression he’s going to glorify her.
Over the next few weeks he shouts me dinners at Kolorado and at Waterborne and I tell him what I know. People come up to him during soup while I’m telling of Dad or during chili prawns while I’m telling of Molly or during coffee while I’m telling of Thaw or any damn time at all even if he has one hand out at me with the fingers splayed speculating on the probably untameable recesses. And they ask him to sign the title page of his book about Hiroshima or sign the title page of his book about the Vietnam War and he always makes the same little joke about how he feels like a star of Aussie Rules getting all this attention and they look at him across the chili prawns or across the coffee like maybe he’s up himself after writing those few books.
And each time he drives his MG into town and seeks me out for dinner and enlightenment, he calls it, he starts off by telling me not to get the wrong idea. Not to get the idea he’s going to glorify my mother. Because her stand was somewhat racist and somewhat colonial and somewhat deluded and entirely pig-headed, he tells me, and doesn’t deserve the patience it otherwise might get if it wasn’t all these things.
But always after the second can of Guinness with the widget in it that infuses what it infuses he starts to pull at and sharpen the old-growth monument that prevents people from calling him babyfaced. Starts to puzzle and worry about the pig-headedness and wonder if maybe the pig-headedness isn’t the point after all. Starts to wonder if maybe there isn’t another name for the pig-headedness and if maybe it isn’t deserving of a little glory and a little elevating by literary means.
His questions never end. They get smaller. They hunt fine detail. They hunt colour. Hunt light and hunt shade. Hunt pins dropped in silences long gone. Silences long ago submerged in the cacophonous interactions of the living.
He wants to know of me what colour was that first bra of Molly’s. That one she got chased for? Wants to know of me what species of rose it was my mother nurtured out there. What shade of red? What type of fertiliser she used? Wants to know, did those roses go under the bulldozer blade?
Wants to know of me when Dad didn’t return from the toilet at the footy that day and I went searching for him and found him out behind the Opthalmia Grandstand on his knees clutching his throat and clutching his chest with pain bending his face which he straightened only long enough to tell me it’s nothing, it’s just indigestion, and to tell me to go back and see how the Sainters were travelling, did he let go of his chest and his throat to tell me that, and did I help him up and insist we get this looked at or did I go back into that grandstand like I was told and see how the Sainters were travelling? And when I tell him what I did that day, wants to know, Well then … how were they travelling?
And wants a picture of the other end of Dad’s illness as well. Wants to know did he shave himself that morning? Shave his own corpse, in a manner of speaking? And wants to know if the windows of that two-tone Toyota Hi-Ace fogged up and painted him in there or if the windows stayed clear and I could see him laid back in his tan bucket-seat staring at the cab roof and coughing that yellow vomit onto his aubergine shirt front. Wants to know the shape of every cloud that floated past east and got reflected off the bonnet and then off the windscreen and then off the roof on that direst day.
And wants to know who was blackest-skinned of the three Kunimara who came to visit my mother and did her fear of people increase in direct proportion to their blackness or in direct proportion to the justness of their cause -which may, he thinks, coincide. Did she seem scareder of that plum-black Pearl Guriwerd than of the others? Or did she treat them just the same?
He leafs through photos of my boyhood to see what the various protagonists, he calls them, looked like and what sort of gear they got around in. Which are almost exclusively photos of people now dead standing in front of buildings now bulldozed in the shade of trees now felled. In pretty shitty gear it’s got to be said. The females in flares and bell-bottoms and velour and puffy shirts and the males in western outfits from Morrisons Travelling Menswear that was a Bedford that pulled into Hannah once a year. And he rubs his finger across Molly in her purple flares and tells me she was going to be a rare beauty, that Molly. And asks me, did she have theatrical aspirations?
He never lets up coaxing the puniest facts from me. And each of the people I tell about becomes less real every time I give up another puny fact. Until I don’t know if I love any of them any more, but just know they happened and are a mind-boggling accumulation of puny facts.
So when he asks me now what were Thaw’s views on this or that, or asks me the titles of those Long John Holmes videos Thaw and his old man were addicted to or what was the name of that preacher in the Philippines my mother was tuned in to, or how big was the field Molly beat in the All State Schools under-twelve hundred-metres final, I cock my head and slit my eyes and pucker my lips and wait there cocked and slit and puckered until he breaks out and asks, ‘Well?’ and then I uncock my head and open my eyes and tell him, ‘Damned if I can remember. Tried … but just can’t.’
He delivers his first theory over a dinner of grilled baby snapper while we sit at a window table in Kolorado. Outside the window a couple of surf types are milling around his lemon-coloured MG. Reaching into it and touching the walnut dash and pushing in the chromed cigarette lighter and working the tiny gear stick and making engine-racing and gear-change noises as they do it. Every now and then he taps on the plate-glass restaurant window with his knuckle and then taps on it with his knife and when they look up shakes his fist at them to get their hands out of his MG cockpit and to keep their jean studs off his lemon duco.
His theory is Thaw got trapped in a Jesus Trap. Like Jesus did. He thinks this is what happened to Jesus. He thinks maybe Jesus never made the Son-of-God boast. Never made the Saviour boast. Was only ever a good man. Had a genius for being just good. Like some people have a genius for just calculus. And caused, by casual conversation, a few people crippled with laziness to toss the crutches aside. Made, with some off-hand inspirational remarks, a few people blinded with apathy accept sight again.
And word got out. Word got right around. Word grew big. The whole deal began to snowball. He got surrounded by people longing for him to be great above just good. Trapped by people insisting he be Saviour. Was bemused at first at how the whole thing had escalated. Then angry. Looked around, momentarily, for a way out. Kicked the ground and swore, ‘Jesus H. Christ.’ Swore, ‘Fuck you people and your childish needs.’ Then said, ‘Sorry, sorry. Forgive me. Slip of the tongue.’
Took a deep breath then and said, ‘Okay, okay. I accept the mission. Take on the whole Son-Of-God contract.’ Knowing even as he said it what the Romans would think of such a claim. But shrugged his shoulders and nodded his head anyway. Said, ‘Yeah … I was sent by Him.’ Seeing he was caught on the rock of their expectation. Knowing he wasn’t prick enough at heart to get off.
Because the Jesus Trap is designed to catch those of us who aren’t pricks at heart. Relatively few of us have a good enough heart to get caught in a Jesus Trap, the Famous Scottish-Australian Novelist tells me. Significantly, you weren’t.
He taps on the window with his fish knife and a boy with long blond hair untwirls his cravat from around his neck and takes off his tam-o’-shanter and lays them back on the MG passenger seat and climbs out of the driver’s seat over the driver’s door and salutes the Famous Scottish-Australian Novelist through the window who shakes his fist back at him through the window and tells me, ‘Cheeky young bugger,’ and picks a snapper bone off the window and a crumb of white snapper meat and wipes the mark his fish knife made into a long smear and tells me, ‘I prefer it cooked in just lemon juice.’
Jesus, he says, is only the most famous person to get caught in the Jesus Trap. There were a million before him and have been a million since. Thaw, he says, wasn’t a prick at heart. Got caught in the Jesus Trap. By my mother’s heartfelt thanks. By her gratitude. By her need. By her belief in him. By the way she rushed up to him to light his cigarettes. By the way she baked him Anzac biscuits. By the way she thanked him for the Glorious Silence and by the way she cried about him ending a blasphemy. By the way she tracked him in her peripheral vision and by the way she asked, ‘What do you think, Oliver?’ and hung on his silence. And maybe by the way she didn’t take off for a northern winter with some opal prospector.
He wasn’t prick enough at heart to get free. I mean, you heard him say, ‘Fuck your mother and her childish needs.’ But in the end, when he was back in Lorne and that beautiful news reader came on the television with her tilt-of-head to tell how New South Wales had turned sharp and decisive right into an Economic Rationalist and a Law and Order government that wasn’t going to mollycoddle recidivists, he took his deep breath and he shrugged his shoulders and accepted the mission.
The Famous Scottish-Australian Novelist dabs at his baby face with his napkin and asks me, ‘What do you think?’ and I, who have become accustomed to agreeing with the whole run of drug theories and love theories and genetically-twisted-fucker theories can only tell him back, It’s a trap-and-a-half that Jesus Trap, to trap a man with only Anzac biscuits for bait.’ And he taps the window with the second knuckle of his middle finger and jerks his thumb get off the car to a youth who is lounging on its boot there and who jerks a finger back, and he lets me not answer his question by telling me it still seems to be all the go to mollycoddle recidivists down here in Victoria.
But that’s only the Famous Scottish-Australian Novelist’s first version of the Jesus Trap. He spends some days walking around Jean’s gallery with her and asking her questions and looking up at the paintings of beach scenes with storms boiling up over them and scenes of Lorne with fire spilling down out of the Otways onto it and spends some time leafing through the Sad Purple Dads and Sad Purple Mollys out in the back room where they are leaning against a stolen park bench and spends some time asking her more questions and she spends some time making her answers long and involved for him and not wearing bras for him and he spends some time appreciating it all.
Then he invites me to lunch at El Cid and over bolognese unloads on me his second Jesus Trap theory, which he has come up with, he tells me, by gleaning info and gleaning insights from my beautiful lady friend.
It’s basically the same as his first Jesus Trap theory but he has dropped my mother’s gratitude to Thaw from this one, and has dropped her need of Thaw and her belief in Thaw and her lighting his cigarettes and her thanking him for the Glorious Silence and has dropped her crying about him ending a blasphemy.
Has replaced them all with me. Out beyond the break on my Malibu staring down through the lit green water to the ribbed sand and the rolling vines of seaweed and watching the falling curtain of sparkling sand and thinking about committing my mother to an asylum, and Thaw paddling up to me over the perfect harvest of waves and sitting astride his Tidal Warrior with his hands on his hips watching me, and asking me, ‘Mister-Couldn’t-Give-A-Shit, eh?’ and watching me silently some more despite our questions, and then telling me, ‘You poor haunted bastard.’ Has replaced my mother’s need of a saviour with mine.
Because he didn’t do it for your mother as much as for you, he tells me. Wasn’t trapped by her need of him. Was trapped by mine. Saw what taking my mother away from what she believed in was going to do to me. Saw what locking her up was going to do to me. And took the power to do it out of my hands.
The Famous Scottish-Australian Novelist lays down his fork and takes up his sky-blue napkin and clasps it across his mouth and holds it there while it soaks up bolognese sauce and then runs it down over his old-growth monument and lays it down at his elbow and raps his knuckles twice on the wooden table because I’m looking hard up at the giant crab breaking out of its wicker pot on the wall. And when I look back at him takes the rapping knuckle and unfolds it into finger and points it at me and says, The big variable is what your friend Thaw knew about himself. What he believed himself to be. And there are three options,’ he tells me. ‘Three scenarios.
‘One is he believed he was guilty of killing that aboriginal girl in Wilpenia. Another is he knew he was innocent. The third is he just didn’t know one way or the other. Wondered about himself all these years and watched himself in mirrors all these years and even when he was approaching orgasm with whatever marginalised female he had under him at the time watched his hands to see they weren’t sliding across the sheet or across the grass or sliding down her raised arms toward her throat, and listened inward in horror for a voice that might boom Do It Do It. And spent the first hour of every day of the last decade taking apart last night’s dreams and searching for a clue … for a flashback … for a stain oozed up from a naturally black soul … or for a redemption. Just didn’t know.
‘Then there’s guilty If he was under the misapprehension he was guilty of that crime in Wilpenia then he didn’t have much to lose by committing the second one. Because the truth of his guilt was about to come out and they were about to offer him all those years in the clink for it. So there isn’t much sacrifice in murdering your mother. And the thing probably doesn’t even qualify as a Jesus Trap. He just did you and her a good turn and it cost him nothing because he had already made his pact. Had promised himself clink wasn’t an option.
‘Innocence,’ he tells me, and he takes a drink of wine and makes a pincer movement with thumb and middle finger that traps and sharpens his old-growth monument. ‘Innocence is in many ways the hardest scenario for you to cop. If he knew he was innocent … Well, let’s just say for a moment that he knew his old man, who didn’t have energy or health, apparently, to get off the sofa for a shower or for instant noodles or to change the video of Long John Holmes in College for the video of Long John Holmes in Acapulco, had found energy and health enough to get off the sofa to rape and strangle a drunk girl. And he decided not to zero the investigation in on his old man by proving himself innocent with his DNA. And after his old man was burnt to death decided this time not to zero the investigation in on his name and in on his memory by proving himself innocent with his DNA … for whatever reasons … whatever the father-son contract stipulates. Obedience? Duty? Conditioning? Biological imperative? Actual barefaced love? The same force, probably, that gets you boiling two-minute noodles for a man like that day after day. Whatever. Let the schools of thought contend. Doesn’t matter. Anyway, was driven to wear the suspicion and the harassment and the hushes in bars and the weight of it all to keep his old man’s name clean.’ Down between his tits he’s still pinching his old-growth monument sharp with thumbtip and fingertip, leaning forward and looking up close at me as he does it, twirling fingertip and thumbtip against each other now as they meet to make a mighty beardpoint.
‘But then, Jack,’ he tells me,’ When that auburn-haired news reader came on your TV and announced the election results and let him know his DNA test was coming … then the cover-up was over. Surely. The truth about that murder back in Wilpenia was coming no matter what. His old man’s name was about to be blackened no matter what. And he had no reason not to tell himself he’d fought the good fight, tell himself he’d done his best for his old man, tell himself he couldn’t’ve done any more. There’s no reason he shouldn’t’ve just sighed and just shrugged and then fronted up with his sleeve rolled high and his forearm veins exposed and said, “Here. Dig deep, Law Enforcers. I think you’ll find me blameless.” And accepted his innocence, and accepted a life of freedom.’
He stops constructing that beardpoint and holds his hands out with his palms facing the roof and looks up there and smiles at the life of freedom up there. Then drops his palms slap, slap on the table top and stops smiling and leans back in his chair and looks at me and says softly so I can hardly hear, ‘Except there was you. There was your mum. There was your predicament.’
The Famous Scottish-Australian Novelist takes a drink of his Cockatoo Ridge Chardonnay and looks up and down the length of restaurant and out across the road at the water and sighs and slumps to let me know the weight of this is on him too. Stays deflated and staring and silent out at the sea while the restaurant chinks and tinkles cutlery on china and rasps chair legs across wooden floor and gasps cappuccino out its machine and talks distracted conversations and stares at me for what my friend did to my mother and stares at him for his books and for what his liquidambar did to his shed-slab.
Then he raises out of his slump using his chair arms and his resolve and brings his gaze in off the sea at me and asks me, ‘Do you think he knew he was innocent?’ And when I only stare back at him asks, ‘Do you want to know what I think?’ And sees I can’t answer him even if I want to because of the watching restaurant and because of what’s happening in my throat and what’s happening in my eyes and because of what would happen if I opened my mouth.
So I look at him with my lower molars ground hard against my upper molars and my lips tight across my incisors and my eyebrows locked up. Holding on. And he tells me, ‘I’ll consider myself advised to go and get rooted. I’ll consider myself told I’m a nosy, fat prick.’ And he leans across our table and lays the palm of his right hand on the back of my left fist and gives two little squeezes that get my lower molars quivering against my upper molars and get my lips puckering out from the tight line I’m trying to hold. And in El Cid then it’s only cutlery tinkle and chair-leg rasp and cappuccino-gasp and isn’t conversation at all.
Two weeks later he brings his first draft to town. Walks up behind me and sits down next to me on the grass in the park that runs along the beach front across the road from Lorne Realty during my lunch break and tells me he’d like to read me some excerpts. Would like me to tell him what I think. Goes and gets his Macintosh Powerbook off his MG passenger seat and opens it up onto his lap and turns it on and begins to read to me what he says are the more poignant excerpts from the hundred and twenty megabytes of what he’s written there.
The first line he reads is, ‘They’re flying me across the country to fight a hag.’ Which I like and which I can live with, because she was a hag then, that first time I was on their jet, and was a hag for all those years before I got on their jet. Only stopped being one when I stepped onto her outrageous green lawn and she delivered her pathetic and emaciated ‘Ever, I said,’ out of the blackness behind her flywire door.
But after that first line I see I’ve shown him one thing and he’s seen another thing … or I’ve shown him one thing and he’s seen fit to make another thing out of it. I only eat a few mouthfuls of hamburger and a half-dozen or so chips before I start tossing them for the seagulls. Little tosses that bring them in close and make their apeshit-caterwaul loud enough that he’s forced to stop reading what he’s written there and to stare at the assembled gulls and to stare at me with my chip in my hand and then watch me lob it just beyond his sensible walking shoes where it is fought over and won.
Then he begins to shout. Through the apeshit-caterwaul of gull and the shadows they send across his liquid crystal screen he begins to shout out what he’s made of my past.
He has Dad die of self-sacrifice so we could grow, when really he just died of cancer. And makes my mother sound lonelier than I ever saw she was. Has her spend whole days in that wardrobe in that desert. Makes Hannah a lonelier town than I ever felt it was. And says distance and isolation were a psychological pressure that sat on everyone who lived in it. And has Molly run in front of that ute for everywoman when she really ran in front of it by accident. And makes whatever the Kunimara say healthy with truth and makes whatever is said to them diseased with self-interest. And he leaves Adrian alive up there enforcing law and order and mortality on his town and every night praying forgiveness from Dad for not helping with his death. And has Thaw walking around Lorne with his chin high in full knowledge of his innocence. Which is never how he walked around. Full knowledge or not. Me he probably gets right.
When I’ve thrown the last of my chips and the apeshit-caterwaul of seagull has broken into outlying squabbles I look at my watch and tell him my lunchtime is over and I’d better get back to work or Geoff Yeomans Senior will be after me on my mobile to know where I am and Geoff Yeomans Lazy, Fat, Stupid and Junior will be carping about me lying around over there in the park when I should be up and selling.
He stops reading and turns off his Powerbook and closes it up and sharpens the old-growth monument that keeps the babyface talk at bay and asks me, ‘What do you think?’
I want to tell him that’s not how it was. Not any of it. But I know he’ll ask me straight back, Well, how was it then? And the questions will start again. Will get tiny with intimacy.
So all I tell him is he’s certainly made me come out of it looking like an A-1 prick. And he looks at me with his face set hard as if he’s about to ask me, ‘Where’s the lie in that?’ but looks down instead and brushes something off the top of his Powerbook and tells me, ‘Literary device.’