MORNING AROUND THE COOKING FIRE, Fred stirred his lumpy grains and chewed his dried apricots softened by overnight soaking in spring water. An early mist drained off through the treetops. Erica looked numb, shivering beside the fire wearing a man’s moth-eaten pullover. ‘I could have done with another hour,’ she grumbled.
‘Had a rough night?’ Fred wanted to say, but didn’t. Without any rights in a matter he could still feel stung, and it showed.
‘Dig in,’ he announced in general, swivelling around on his heel, holding out an aluminium dish.
This offer for anyone to share his seeds rang a bit hollow. Erica took some and flicked a dollop onto Claude’s plate. They sat hip to hip, a little bit dazed, both of them. Just to confirm the dissolute impression she turned to Claude as if Fred wasn’t standing beside them and gave Claude the unmistakably dazzling smile of a woman awakening into love. Claude gave her cheek a slow brush with the back of his hand. What a shithead, what a seducer. Oh, don’t you know Claude Bonney that you are fated to reckon with others when there’s winning to be done?
Fred thought of the light he’d seen in the middle of the night – mysterious, hovering, dazzling – and then gone back into a thick muck of sleep. Resentment claimed that brilliance: a surge of longing for Erica, insatiable as a moth’s ache. Just off the fire a cast-iron pan held bacon, scrambled eggs, baked beans. A two-gallon billy held strong black tea with floating sticks. Others swooped but Fred ignored plenty on the grounds of pride. His stocky, greedy frame had needs distinct from his mind’s elevation, however, and when there was still some left he turned his back on Claude in particular and shovelled it in.
‘Fred? Freddo?’
Odd man out has feelings, so wait, was the message neoned across Fred’s stocky shoulders. Then, having pulsed his sour grapes back up into their bunch, he turned around.
Erica picked the floating sticks from a mug of tea and handed it to him. ‘I’m sorry if I bitched a bit last night,’ she said. ‘You were terribly sweet. How did you sleep?’
‘Like a pig.’
‘Did you see the light? At two in the morning the whole sky lit up. Everyone’s talking about it.’
‘It woke me but I have a habit of thinking things like that are just in my head.’
‘Oh, they sometimes aren’t,’ she said, ‘surely not everything is,’ leaving Fred to wonder if he really wanted to be confused by her, just in order to hope. Her physical proximity gave an answer – skin of dull gold, a perfect stillness in the way she stood with her knees a little awry and her pearly toenails grubby from campsite dirt and showing through the straps of her leather sandals.
‘You could get bitten by a snake in those,’ he said.
The subject of the Sydney Rockclimbers was UFOs, but Normie and Claude debated propensities of light, atmospheric lensing effects, temperature inversions dimming and enlarging distant pinpricks of light – headlights on the Dividing Range, refracted landing lights of small planes below the horizon, or, listen to this, a small plane piloted by a maniac they knew, Gilbert Dalrymple, with a gravel airstrip on his family’s hardscrabble farm. They’d gone to school with him – a skinny, freckled ratbag grown into a handsome, copper-haired Robert Redford look-alike in a bomber jacket with a turned-up fur-trim collar.
‘But what about aliens?’ said one of the other party. ‘UFOs.’
Normie gave a high laugh, his trademark of intellectual contempt. ‘UFOs,’ he said. ‘U bloody fucking F fucking Os – I’ve never heard so much crap in three letters. Put it the other way around,’ he challenged the Sydney Rockclimbers, hazarding aliens scouting the earth for landing sites because humankind was sending out all sorts of crisis alarm signals: ‘Scrap UFOs. Make it OFUs – O, object, F, flying, U, unidentified – would you be so convinced what it was? No, you wouldn’t. And you’d have it perfectly described as a natural phenomenon. An OFU. “Must be a natural effect”.’
‘But what?’ came the peevish reply from the girl in the Rockclimbers’ party.
‘Do your science,’ said Normie. ‘It’s what it’s for.’
The camp site was like Pitt Street. Somebody shouted there were horsemen coming. Everyone peered back down. There they were, riders head to tail in the vertiginous valley of the Isabel, ascending a fire trail in sheriff’s posse formation, sparks flying from hoofs. ‘They’ll be that hairy wool tie brigade, the Knoxes,’ said Claude. ‘They never come up here, but they’ll want us to know it’s private land and warn us off trespassing.’
‘If it’s Tim Knox I’ll talk him round, no problem,’ said Normie. ‘Don’t mention it, though,’ he added, going around to each of the small group of core mates (Fred included) – meaning don’t mention it was private land to the cameraman, Bob Flitch, and his offsider, the sound recordist, who were already feeling conned over putting their lives at risk, being asked to dangle from ropes while operating camera and mike. It wasn’t in their contract (verbal, with Claude), but then neither was staying in their swags past breakfast with hangovers, said Claude, while the rest of them kicked their heels waiting.
When Claude went to them, two grubs on the dirt, and banged a spoon on a saucepan, Flitch barked without getting up that they could have stayed at the pub in the Junction and still got to the Walls in time. ‘He’s been spewing,’ Claude said when he came back to the others. ‘There are half-digested onion rings on the bursaria thorns.’ It was Claude’s first venture into documentaries. He was feeling the strain. His eye for detail was hungry, but dyspeptic.
Two soldiers arrived for the climb, a senior Australian officer, Chook Hovell, and a former commando adventurer, Gideon Pugh. The commando was the one who’d put an ice-axe through the skull of his best friend during a delirium episode in Antarctica. This information was impressive, otherwise two soldiers were the same as everyone else – no braver, no less afeared of gravity waiting on a whim of crumbling rock. Yet the knowledge they were soldiers kept them apart and a whiff of competition drifted on the breeze. Chook Hovell (of Hovell Mills, the flour-milling dynasty) had risen through the promotion ranks since winning the MC as a captain in Korea, doing it hard in barracks and jungle command posts when he could have lived the country life like his cousins, the polo players and Royal Easter Show grandees, the Pullingsvale Frizells. He was now a brigadier.
They’d made a separate camp in the night, now they came up to the overhang, ready for the day. Their arrival motivated Flitch into getting his camera out and starting work with a will. No longer a young man, he’d been a photographer with the 2/1st Battalion in Crete, escaping to Egypt in an open boat and navigating with a map of the Med torn from Pix magazine. The story was deemed unlikely by Claude, but Hovell vouched for this gloomy dog of a man who looked like death and could not find work in the film and television business despite having shot footage with Charles and Elsa Chauvel and taken flattering stills of Chips Rafferty, who was not a handsome man. In the code of Claude Bonney all were equal on the slopes, but what Fred liked was the underlying elitism and the way it couldn’t be suppressed. As in acting you could be the best but still had to wait for the role to allow you. In that there was no call on democracy, architecture was the same – hold to the structural vision, ignore the rest – and just on this point Fred agreed with Buckler. The hand of authority surpassed consensus.
Looking up at the Isabel Walls in the changed light of morning, Fred had trouble working out where it was he’d scooted vertically as a boy. He’d been surer last night, on arrival. Now he began to have doubts over whether this was even the same place. An amble around the cliff-line would tell him, but before he could start there were groupings to be sorted. The Hovell Foundation was paying Claude’s film and photographic costs and Erica’s wages if she decided to join him. Hovell, who was well past forty, had never climbed. He was peerlessly willing, nonetheless. The commando Pugh was one of Claude’s toughs from the Carstensz Pyramid – an ice climber, a former Royal Marine who’d mixed it on the heights with ex-Nazis.
‘Meet Fred Donovan,’ said Claude, doing the introductions. Fred gave Hovell the sardonically friendly salute he sometimes gave Buckler, and something about the way Fred slung him the fingers made Hovell look at him twice.
‘You must be the architect,’ he said, giving Fred the satisfaction of having been talked about, and having been talked about in the shape of the most idealised conception of himself, beloved of both Rusty and Buckler – ‘architect’ – of which ambition in his life so far he had fallen short, a role that might nonetheless leave behind at curtain-fall something more enduring than just the shimmer of an effect.
Chook Hovell and his commando had an air of having seen things, done things, that necessarily made them sad, proud and ashamed. (Fred, of all people, could guess: he was a reader of seared emotions.) They were recently back from Malaya and Indochina, now doing higher duties at the Royal Military College, Duntroon, and needed the dry crackle of the Australian bush in their ears, Hovell said, and the whiff of Australian dust in their nostrils to know what they stood for. They held back, checking and re-checking their ironmongery of karabiners and pitons. The commando, Pugh, was a short, square man, of the sort that was said never to get on well on rock, with legs like barrels. It showed how you could be wrong. Chook was almost freakishly tall and thin. He was well over six feet with a narrow protuberance of chest bones that crowded up towards his throat and made him look suspended in the act of swallowing, even while talking. His face was narrow, his nose beaked and his jaw was angular, off-centre, and he had a strange need, every few minutes while eating, to lay down his spoon, take hold of his jaw with both hands and crack it back into line. His eyes were something else altogether: they offered trust.
Shakespeare for Schools last year was a medley of scenes from the history plays. Mentally Fred opened the script to lines that weren’t his, but he knew all too well:
Say Warwick was our anchor; what of that? And Montague our top-mast; what of him? Our slaught’red friends the tackles; what of these? Why, is not Oxford here another anchor? And Somerset another goodly mast? The friends of France our shrouds and tacklings?
Among others, in a varied cameo, Fred had been France on the tour and the Queen Margaret speaking these lines his intense (heart-punching) girlfriend of a lifetime’s hopes condensed to a mere week of backblock hotel iron bedsteads; and, he supposed, with jealousy so intense it tattooed strain lines on his face, the list of lords she recited and threw that lord France at him (while he was louring off-stage) were her past, present or proposed conquests. If women’s hurts were big enough to fill every bucket of tears in the world, men’s were a bucket of shameful want.
Shame unassimilable, to use a Buckler phrase on the murderous possibilities of the battlefront and the frontier life of his youth. That was Fred, battered but going forward, and he saw it in Hovell and the commando. It seemed to dust them with understanding equivalent to something that either could not be put into words, or if words were possible, they’d be from the Bard.
Fred found himself standing next to them when lots were being drawn on climbing teams, and he saw Claude distinctly shuffling the list, so that, to his surprise, it was: ‘Fred, you’re army.’
While Claude and Normie and the others planned routes, and the soldiers got ready, and the cameraman screwed and unscrewed lenses, and the sound man counted to four, and again to four, as he played himself back, Fred scooted around the cliff-line to a starting point. The Sydney Rockclimbers were already on their way, having elected to do something impossible for which they were likely to be remembered in thirty or forty years’ time. Fred clambered around them and watched as the first and then the second (including their curly-topped, skinny, flat-chested girl) winkled handholds from a narrow crevice, which they all went speedily up.
Fred moved around the corner out of sight. Somewhere like this was what he remembered, a clean wall with deep-fissured cracks with gum trees growing out from them. He remembered when he came with Buckler the way the Walls’ rock sprang straight up from under the ground, clean as a cut, as if it had happened yesterday and not two hundred million years ago. It was Fred’s primal playground revived on a grander scale, home of the Superboy-cloaked Petaurus breviceps, short-headed rope-dancer, ribbon in the rock, emotion set in stone. Here at Isabel Walls it had proved to be so – Erica stepping from that imprisonment, driving Fred a little insane before stepping back. Rock’s hard and rock’s permeable aspects remained true to a conundrum: you were given in total what you could not have.
Across to the left was an exposed curve profiled with backlit handholds, and Fred decided on a quick warm-up before his name was called. So he extended a hand experimentally and flexed his toes in his Dunlop Volleys, then slipped and slithered, gouging grip into his footsoles until he reached a place where the handholds were knobbly, and he could start moving up confidently instead of low and along. The rock was sandstone conglomerate, an old seabed quitted of its storms and thrust inland over the millennia. Just above tree height it became more vertical, but the going was easier, almost laughably like climbing a ladder, a laced fretwork of choices that sped him, before he knew it, onto a ledge that he remembered so clearly and plainly and personally now. It was a true part of himself. Snow gums. Outlook. Half the world under his feet.
But this was shocking. It was where he’d reached for the sky, sure enough, and looked down at Buckler with his feet poking out from under his hat. It was where he’d remembered his triumph and gained his great sense of himself at the age of thirteen. And it was not very high at all, perhaps only thirty or forty feet out of the available three hundred. It was only about one-tenth of the way up the flatirons, snub-nosed slabs that took a step back from there, then continued soaring, stack after stack after stack. On his right was the gully where he went slithering down to Buckler’s nod. So the most boasted part of that day, its pinnacle, so to speak, which had brought him back here yesterday, dancing ahead of his mates, was a lie.
Fred stepped to the edge and looked down. In a clearing out from the overhang appeared the party of riders, men and women, with Normie Powell moving among them, talking. There was shouting – maybe a conflict brewing – but there was laughter. Fred made his way slowly a bit higher, to get a better look and check out routes as best he could, being careful to be sure he could work his way back to the ledge again. His legs were going nervous on him, beginning to shake. Everything vertical had gone vertical beyond belief. Diagonally higher, the Sydney Rockclimbers were stopped in their progress, belting in expansion bolts with ringing blows. Was Fred expected to go up there? He next heard cheering from below. Faces all looking up. At him? It was likely if he made it so, so he posed, King Kong – X of clammy fur at right-angle to the up.
‘Catch!’ someone yelled.
Fred looked up and saw a face far above and an arm holding a coil of rope. Catch pronounced kotch.
A cascade of nylon came whipping down. The Sydney Rockclimbers peered across from their neighbouring pitches where they were busy copyrighting their names in slow motion.
The rope floated uncoiling until it speeded dramatically and struck Fred’s ledge like a whip, doubled, tripled, quadrupled, pouring into a pile on the flat stones at his feet. Then, way above, a figure stepped out into the void and came abseiling down, bounding, cursing, talking to itself – yodelling the descent, stopping every now and again to wrench at bushes hurled away over a shoulder.
‘Filthy Cooper,’ he named himself, or seemed to, as he landed. Wolfie Keuper: he wore boots like blocks of brown wood, bristling long socks up to his knees and leather half-trousers held up by braces, a checked shirt and a Tyrolean hat. He had a pencil-thin moustache and eyeballs like black beads that stared at Fred as if he wanted to destroy him. ‘Bloody Aussies,’ he challenged, with flecks of white foam on his lips.
A wedge-tailed eagle soared, eyeing the crawling humans.
The sound was like the beating of a lumpy carpet or a coarse pillowcase, a whooshing, swiping, dragging flutter of calico against threads and hard knots. The wrist action was somehow sportslike, a golf stroke by a lone player meeting with clumsy rebuttals all the time, coming up hard against the stalks and needles and woody stems of acacia and hakea, banksia and bottlebrush and whatever else lived in suspension in the semi-sky of the Isabel Walls.
Fred, lashed to a rock, belayed Claude from above, adjusting slack while Claude did work for the camera. If Claude fell he’d be safe thanks to Fred. On a higher ledge Chook Hovell held Fred in turn. Major Gideon Pugh called Erica a tasty bit of cheese. Erica, whooping with laughter, was swung aloft in a bosun’s chair to show the cameramen it was easy. A sprite of a girl could do it. Spring into the empty air and propel herself along the cliff-edge by the toes. This was the party now. A great success with Claude away on his new career.
Into Claude’s calico specimen bag fell spirals of wiry blossom, gingery streaks of pollen and sticky extrusions taken from beaten plant-life, where insects dwelt at this time of day, on this particular slab of cliff: a selection of creeping, crawling, buzzing, fluttering specks enlarged for the small screen as the hefty Arriflex whirred. Flitch sweated and held the camera grip to his shoulder. Claude put his nose in the bag, grazed his eyes over the haul. When he turned the bag inside-out over a fist and sucked on the tube – the ‘pooter’ – whisking selections into the capturing chamber, he was the wickedly intelligent boy outclassing his classmates in a town too small for his brain. ‘This is me,’ he seemed to say. ‘It’s what I do. And I’ve only just started.’
The horseriders far below, far from raving, greeted Claude and Normie as prodigal sons of the soil. They watched through pocket binoculars the camera pair being lowered to change film and batteries. Then the whole universe seemed activated, magnetised as the hum of an aircraft was heard; and an ugly low-winged monoplane with a narrow, high cockpit emerged between hills and plugged along the cliff-line throttled back with its wingflaps lowered like dunny doors. The pilot waved. Suspended in lazy time he hung there intent on an object, on a moving fleck on the Walls, on a person, on Erica – dusty-gold girl in a green T-shirt and shorts, fresh as a blossoming gumnut flower, thought Fred, sourly, as the pilot backfired the agricultural Auster in a firecracker sequence, pinning her to admiring echoes.
‘Oh, dear God,’ said Erica. ‘Dalrymple.’
‘Who?’ said Fred.
‘Gilbert Dalrymple,’ said Claude.
‘There’s never excitement like this in a town unless Shakespeare for Schools gets the call,’ said Fred, wrenching attention onto himself. ‘Then it’s Gertie get your pants off.’
‘The old town was never a hotbed of wild ideas,’ said Claude. ‘My old man and a schoolteacher, Jack Slim, were on the outer and proud of it. Old man Dalrymple was a nut case. My father, the level-crossing keeper, was the hammer, the sickle of intellectual Bolshevism was Slim.’
‘Jack Slim?’ said Fred. The name had mythical overtones.
‘My best friend was Eddie Slim, the son, we had a wake the night Stalin died, smoked ourselves silly, saw things we shouldn’t have. I cheated for Slim in exams, wrote up his formulas. He’s gone on to geology, I suppose it’s not that hard.’
They joined Chook Hovell who used army binoculars on the bunch way below.
‘Who is that one?’ he said from his perch on the next ledge up.
‘Which one?’
‘The bloke on the grey, ten o’clock from the woman in the red scarf.’
Claude said, ‘It’s Edwina Knox in the scarf, the dowager queen. Next to her’s Tim, her youngest, who’s Normie’s mate. On the grey? That’s Kingsley Colts, the referee when Normie’s father was made a quad.’
‘A damaging sort of a bloke, then,’ said Hovell. Not a question, more a pronouncement.
‘He’s the last one anyone blames,’ said Claude.
‘Kingsley Colts,’ said Fred. ‘Good name for a man on a horse. He should wear a crown.’
‘Colts,’ said Hovell with a tight, sick smile. He put his binoculars away and noisily cleared his throat. He tilted his head and gave it a couple of hard shakes until his jaw gave a click.
Fred watched him from the side.
You are the strangest-faced, freakiest old scarecrow I’ve ever had the pleasure of looking at, thought Fred.
A little later Fred found himself alone with Hovell, their backs to the rock wall and their knees pulled tight to their chins.
‘Architecture,’ said Hovell, with a gift of encouragement in his voice. ‘Tell me about your architecture, Fred.’
Fred found himself spilling it out.
One day, he improvises – leaping over the obstacles of Central Railway workdays and a non-existent university degree, and indeed leaping over his acting hopes and what they might mean – one day he won’t do any designing at all, just lead clients to rock shelters and give them an etiquette for sewage control. Let them feel the wind curve around the bones of their foreheads – the first verandah. Let them pound a stone – the first kitchen. When Fred talks this way he gets a nod of understanding. He remembers, he says, his childhood. It was all up trees and chimney-like crevices. Architecture and the tree. The cave. The shelter. ‘The world is a house,’ Fred declares.
‘Well put,’ says Hovell. ‘But a troubled house.’
‘I’m one of the lucky ones,’ Fred blurts. ‘Our house had forty rooms, each with a numbered door, cooks, waiters, maids with brooms and a yardman with an old Ford truck loaded with beer barrels that I got to ride round the town before I could practically walk.’
‘You’re still a big kid?’
Fred laughs. For sure. But he doesn’t mean that. He just means lucky. Hovell draws it out of him. Because why Fred should be lucky or say he’s lucky beats him. Just when he’s had his heart hammered, squared off and packed down under a billion tons of sedimentary rock. Just when he’s turned twenty-five, his quarter century (ye gods) of non-achievement.
Without quite realising how it was done, except in a kind of daytime dream, Fred finds himself three hundred feet up, at the pinnacle of the Isabel Walls, where climbers are able to step off onto somewhat flat ground. It is a geographical surprise up there. A lost kingdom. Fred likens it to getting to the top of a steep escalator and gliding off onto a lumpy level floor, with a low forest of scattered white-trunked gum trees and a rutted two-wheeled track running through. Here is Wolfie Keuper’s Kombi Van in a glade. Here the Isabel Walls lean their praying hands on the cheek of the rusting Buddha, Mt Knox, a head of dry grass and scattered sub-alpine mallees.
One by one, the others arrive. Fred props his satchel against a tree and reclines in the shade, looking out for Erica.
Normie’s boots tom-tom an old log bridge soil-covered after years, with gaps showing a clear stream running underneath. ‘Water!’ yells Normie Powell.
All the elements of Normie’s world are at hand – sustenance at the root and out to the tip the motto. Happiness, he remembers, climbed from water where it found its time to live in arduous circumstances. Urey and Miller had shown it in 1952. Look them up, he has no time to tell you. Normie himself saw, eleven years later, in a river swimming hole, a space where solid matter slid into air, and water diverted to earth creating life: where a done man breathed and splashed. Normie and Chook Hovell converse animatedly, then Claude cries, ‘Action!’ and Normie turns to the camera and explains interconnectedness to which he gives the name ecology. The acting is bad, the technique could be improved. Normie is awful, Claude is better, but Normie is the great teacher now.
And again, it is Fred who knows all this. Sees Chook Hovell taking in the words while Gideon Pugh looks bad-tempered, kneeling, sorting through ironmongery and ropes. It appears that Pugh had words with Erica; he wants her, like a toad wants a juicy bug. He might put an ice axe through her if she spurns him. She will need protection. How does Fred know this? Doesn’t have to be told. Clumping, ordinary old Fred with his mental flashes. Or so he casts himself, hero of the hour, bearer and preventer of lusts bedevilling a woman he’ll love until he dies, but in all probability never have.
Claude Bonney, Chook Hovell, Normie Powell and Gideon Pugh slither around the bridge and slide down a peaty mass of wet roots. At their feet is a gravelly ledge where clear spring water spills into a bowl of rock. They gulp down water. It is hot now in the midafternoon. Erica stripes a hand up through her hair, dippers cool water behind her ears and feels a pair of eyes on her neck. Must wonder lightly if it’s any one of them, but no, it’s Fred. She’s a little away from the rest. He’s holding wattle blossom and presents a sprig with a gruff line: ‘Churl, upon thy eyes I throw all the power this charm doth owe.’
‘Act two, scene two. Beautiful,’ she twirls the blossom, then hands it back to him. ‘But I’m just a bit allergic to this stuff.’
‘You seem like one of those people who studied a play once. Carved it up in sections.’ Fred parks the offering in a bush. ‘Layered it into yourself. And never forgot.’
‘My Intermediate year,’ she nods. ‘Correspondence school in a kangaroo shooter’s caravan at Byrock. Just me and my dad, Silvio.’
‘It can’t have been all that long ago,’ Fred tries a little harder.
Claude, on his knees, intones for the camera, ‘This is just great! Drosera peltata – don’t step on it.’
The others are drinking their fill and don’t even think about what he means – a swathe of glistening sundews higher up the bank, light catching on their sticky insect-trapping tentacles. Flitch says Claude’s continuity is up shit creek.
‘Well, fuck continuity,’ says Claude.
‘You can’t do that,’ says Fred, looking over Flitch’s shoulder. Fred is a film festival habitué and director manqué. He’s everything and nothing in all of his contexts.
Erica sits rubbing her knees – they have begun to ache on the climb – and watches Fred ripping into a tin of sardines. Churl indeed. Now he’s made that swipe she can’t take her eyes from him, the way when crossing an open paddock she keeps eye contact with the bull. Sullen-eyed, Pugh has backed off.
‘Anyone want some?’ Fred’s arm goes back, he’s about to fling the empty away. Then shamefacedly he crushes the can under his boots, wraps it in newspaper and drops it back into his pack. It wasn’t even his. It came from the communal haul. Tonight he’ll burn, bash and bury. This for Erica’s sake. A fiery sanction to a bushland queen.
‘I’ve tried explaining to Silvio, my dad, what Claude and Normie do, how it’s important and worthwhile, but he can’t understand it. Not when it’s not about survival the way he understands survival. Why do they have to go all those places and find the little kangaroos? He can give them all the big roos they want.’
Fred leans back, pulls his hat over his eyes and takes a five-minute smoko. After an interval of resistance a woman finds herself open to persuasion, and why not? Because it happens. Blink awake Erica Molinari and be in love.
Claude and Normie carry on that everything hasn’t been got the first go. It’ll be another day tomorrow. Flitch is exhausted, exasperated, and it falls to Fred to explain the need for close-ups and cutaways a little more carefully to Claude, who until he learns to use a movie camera will obstinately hold that a movie gets made by the simple expedient of sweeping the lens like a fire hose back and forth over whatever is being looked at.
Down they go abseiling to the bottom of the cliffs again to get ready for another try. Again, it’s Fred with his rehearsed wisdom who shines light into the day. Trees, rocks, pathways – beams of sunlight blessing them like pilgrims – flats of lomandra awaiting a bushfire’s torch, a flash of a rust-pelted animal – dingo? The tracks say yes, but nobody believes the evidence of their eyes. Something has torn open the sack hanging in a tree holding perishables. Maybe a brown dog run loose from a bush camp and genetically turned back to something finer. Too wonderful to be true if so.
And on that score take a long smooth wall of stained granite the Sydney Rockclimbers have moved their camp under – it must be twenty feet high, set out from the great cliff-line from where it fell, eons ago, with gnarled snow gums and strange mallees fringing its out-of-reach top. Their eyes tell them it’s a geological formation, but their hearts cry out, ‘It’s a monastery wall!’ and behind its shelter not the click of insects they hear but the hum of prayer wheels and the chant of saffron-robed monks.
That night by the camp fire Fred recites a one-man show of bushland tales: how his father, a miner, as he describes him, a famous old fart, took him camping and cooked a vomitous mix of nut meat and sweet potato. Fred would rather have starved, so tipped his plate behind bushes, coming back at his father with a wide grin.
Well, some of that is invented. Not all of it, though. The camping bit, the two of them all alone. It happened.
‘There was a tree I remember,’ Fred begins, then goes vague again. To admit that a man who was a First World War survivor fathered him in a goat’s old age might age him too much. Precocious wisdom’s all right but not wearing an old man’s trousers.
Others take up themes: one of the Sydney Rockclimbers, Jim, is Greek. Sitting in the sidestreet outside his father’s Marrickville fruit shop, leaning on his schoolbag against the wall, doing homework on the footpath because it’s easier than in the house, he goes on to become a lawyer.
‘I like Greeks,’ says Fred.
‘How do you know any?’ asks Jim.
‘Well, there’s the milk bar, the fish and chips. “The Greeks”.’
‘Careful what you say.’
‘I had a Greek stepfather.’
But that is not true. Fred hardly knew his mother’s man-friend with the waxed moustache.
Erica for some reason confesses her first boyfriend, who wore a three-piece suit that made her feel safe as he drove his car up a side road in Dubbo. It also made her laugh, which was her ‘downfall’. And still is, she smiles at Fred, without saying it, though Fred gets it, as if it’s addressed to him uniquely, for his own sour delectation. He after all has a great sense of humour. He can be the butt of a joke. He can love and surrender his love. He can tumble in the torrent of life, appearing and disappearing in the foam.
‘Where’s Fred?’ chortles Jim, remembering another story he wants to tell that most appreciative of sponges.
But Fred is nowhere to be seen. Odd man out has feelings.
They are fuzzy from the pleasure of drinking wine under the stars, good wine cooled in the spring, firelight reflected in a bright circle against the black, owl-hooting, animal-crashing night. The camera team has bush-bashed and then driven into the Five Alls for cold beers on a clean-wiped bar and the promise of a feather bed.
Fred stands out beyond the ring of fire and pursues the fingernail moon. She loves me, she loves me not. Time to cast the die, except an imponderably weepy part of himself knows the die is already cast. For the last half hour he’s been crassly positioning himself so that when Erica chooses between him and Claude – he has the shabby dream of a partner-switch – she’ll find his shoulder handy to lean her sleeping head upon. Some quest.
It leads him to the base of a vast old tree. There is a noise in the tree – a scrabble of claws. What’s going on up there? he wonders, in those shattered branches and late-shooting eucalyptus buds? He shines the narrow beam of his torch and sees a pair of enormous eyes and a damp, pink nose – squirrel glider! Why does this fill his heart? Why does he breathe the words, ‘You’ve come back’?
When he returns to the camp Claude’s head is in Erica’s lap, and she’s stroking his hair, oh so predictably sweet, and the whole damned lot of them are singing ‘Yellow Submarine’.
Conclusion: Fred is the odd man out for life. But the feeling suddenly isn’t bad – quite the opposite, really, except for brushing away a tear – and Fred comes into the firelight noisily, heavily, commanding. ‘The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve. Lovers, to bed; ’tis almost fairy time. This palpable gross play hath well beguil’d the heavy gait of night.’
‘Amen,’ say the voices by the fire.
The next day climbing, Fred declares he’s giving up acting. He’s going to write a book. Architecture? Ditto for the shove. A book to draw the elements of his half-created life into a place between two covers, sewn, glued and stamped with gold lettering.
But nobody believes him and he doesn’t believe it himself, because slumped by the trackside fatigued and guzzling water he gets the idea for the part he’s auditioned for lately, but spurned – Estragon in Godot.
It’s not coming. It’s not going. It’s a railway platform. It’s a situation in the bush, under a cliff-line, in the natural way of things. That’s what he knows and it makes him sit up, look around – this architecture of the world’s stage. It’s somewhere here in the crumbling socket of a tree. There’s a tree in that play onstage throughout. God knows what it means but it’s Fred’s tree anyway, by which he was found just in time somehow, and yet so trustingly, when the iron tongue of midnight struck.