They pass a small beach upon which a tiger cat strolls, watching their passing, too ignorant of who they are and what they are to flee. It is not afraid of them, but they are afraid of the small carrion-eating marsupial who observes the passing red rafts and their inhabitants as if they were nothing more than driftwood decorated with baubles being washed downriver by the flood, further strange flotsam of faraway worlds.
The day grows dark. An hour or more before midday, the sky looks as if night were about to fall. The patches of blue grow smaller and less frequently seen, until at length they can no more be found anywhere in the black sky, so strong and close and immediate that it makes the punters lean nervously into the centre of the raft. The hills grow steeper until the river is flowing not through a valley but into the beginning of a deep gorge. One of the punters on the Cockroach’s boat begins to sing the old Willy Nelson song about seeing nothing but blue skies from now on. They laugh from relief at having been shown their depression without having to name it. The song ends. The laughter dies. Around them hangs an immense and still silence.
And they continue paddling into it, into the gorge, into the darkness.
Eight
I look into that darkness more now, far more than I did then, attempt to look into its heart. The darkness begins to fragment. It breaks into black pieces and each piece takes on the shape of an animal: a wombat, two ringtail possums, five pademelons, three potoroos, seven blue wrens, four bats, one rather handsome looking green tree frog, two companionable goannas, a serene-looking freshwater lobster, an angry reddening crayfish, and all sitting down one side of an old lino-topped table that has similarly manifested itself out of the darkness. On the other side of the table appears an equally bizarre menagerie: three Tasmanian devils, two tabby cats, a quoll, a Tasmanian tiger - jaw hugely distended, presumably waiting with anticipated appetite - a querulous mob of black cockatoos, a small whip snake all eager twists and turns, and next to it a rather disinterested coiled-up tiger snake seemingly oblivious to its reptilian cousin. An oak skink next to them, and next to that an owl and a pigmy possum, four mongrel dogs, two platypuses, five kangaroos and, right at the end, a shuffling echidina. And standing above this banquet of animals, smiling benignly, is an aged Harry.
The animals are slurping out of their plates and seem to be having rather a good time. Harry looks down upon them like the patriarch he never was. Of course, although Harry and Sonja only ever had me before Sonja died, they did dream of a large family and of all the things that they and their many kids would one day do together. After Sonja’s death Harry continued to serve up a plate of food for her at his weekly barbeque. After a time he began to serve up an extra plate of salad and grilled meat and fish, additional to that he would normally serve for himself, me, Maria Magdalena Svevo and my dead mum. It was eighteen months or so after her death. He began to serve up a very small plate of diced meat and a few squashed vegetables, a baby’s meal. After that, every eighteen months or so, he would add another plate to the number, as though he were feeding some growing family of phantoms. The servings grew over time, as if the ghost receiving them was growing from baby to child to adolescent to adult. Then he began to put out more food and drink for more invisible guests, whom he claimed were long-lost relatives come visiting, or friends of the phantom children. No one ever said anything. As if it were normal, which after a time it became, a curiosity only commented on by the occasional flesh-and-blood visitor to our weekly barbeque.
Toward the end, it must have become faintly ridiculous, though I never saw it, having long since left. Harry had the tables placed next to his barbeque, and he left them each Sunday afternoon heaped with rissoles and grilled fish. You might think that cats and stray dogs would have come and scoffed the lot, but it never happened. The food sat there on the long bench tables, under the grapevine that grew on the rickety old trellis above, until each Monday evening when Harry would whistle, a low eerie whistle, and a slight wind would blow. Animals would appear from everywhere: cats, dogs, possums, wombats and devils. Where, in the middle of a city the size of Hobart, they all came from, to this day I’m stumped. They seemed to materialise out of the earth. They would sit around and upon the tables and eat, sometimes spratting, sometimes sharing, while Harry stood above them puffing away on a hand-rolled cigarette, saying nothing, smiling a bit.
I watch as the Tasmanian tiger pulls itself with its forepaws up to the table edge, observe how it leans across a plate of cold rissoles, picks up an old green-handled kitchen knife and brings the raucous gathering to attention by banging its handle upon the table top. And - I swear it’s true, if I wasn’t seeing and hearing this myself, I would never have believed it possible - she announces she is going to tell a story about loss. The announcement is not greeted with instant silence. A few go quiet, a few continue chatting, and a few howl derisively. The echidina yells out that he isn’t going to listen to any animal that looks like a pedestrian crossing, and he and the quoll collapse into helpless giggles. The tiger tells them to piss off, says she couldn’t care less what a dopey little ball of spikes thought. She has a fine, if somewhat high-pitched, voice, full and resonant, perhaps because of her splendidly large mouth. And so she begins.
an ocean of wheat foretells a death
The two men never exchanged a word, though they did pass the occasional cigarette. Once a year the small man would wait at the place where his farm was entered from an empty dirt road. This small man would wait, wearing a neat pair of purple Koratron trousers - the same pair of neat purple Koratron trousers that he had worn on this same day every year for the last twenty years - and an old faded green-checked flannelette shirt, worn and washed so much that it was now so thin it was pleasant to wear even in the worst heat. The dirt road ran through flat country that remained flat and, to those who did not understand its subtleties, featureless for many hundreds of miles, a land considered remote even to those in the remote town of Esperance, Western Australia, which this road had as its destination. The sleeves of the checked green flannelette shirt were neatly rolled up to the elbows, and below the flannelette folds the muscles of skin-cancer scored forearms twisted like old sisal rope as he rolled up a smoke and put it in his mouth. Once a year he would dawdle up to his farm’s decrepit gate and there lean on a post, waiting for his mate to pick him up en route from Kambalda to Esperance for the annual races. This arrangement was never confirmed or acknowledged by either. It was part of the rhythm of their life which they neither questioned nor considered strange. Once a year a grubby grey-green EH utility kicking up a cloud of dust came to a halt alongside a small rundown farm and picked up a farmer and took him through to Esperance. It was a friendship that knew no doubt and hence required no conversation. It was as large as the country they drove through without talk hour after hour, and as irreducible to words.
Except this year.
This year was to be different. They picked up a hitchhiker, a small stumpy man with a swarthy complexion and a big nose. He wore a pair of faded khaki work trousers, a pink singlet over which was draped a blue flannelette shirt, and on his head was a soiled yellow Caterpillar baseball cap, out of the back and sides of which protruded short red hair. The farmer got out of the EH on that hot dusty road and looked at the flat earth that rolled away forever. He wiped his brow and indicated to the hitchhiker that he was to sit in the middle. After an hour or so of driving, the driver asked where he was going.
‘Home,’ said the stumpy man in a voice that gave away nothing, flat, slow, burred.
‘Home?’ said the driver.
‘Tasmania,’ said the stumpy man.
‘Further than we be goin’,’ said the driver. The farmer in the purple Koratron trousers and faded green flannelette shirt smiled. But only a little. Not so much that the stumpy man could see it. Not that it mattered. The stumpy man smiled too.
Nobody bothered to speak again for a few more hours until they pulled up at a road house that shimmered like a red brick mirage in the middle
of the low blue-bush desert. They all got out and walked around a bit and the farmer looked up at the stumpy man and said, ‘Go home much?’
‘Not much,’ said the stumpy man. ‘Not for ten years.’ The stumpy man looked at the farmer and decided to add, ‘Family business.’
‘O,’ said the farmer, knowing full well that meant something bad. ‘Ya mum or ya dad?’
‘Me dad,’ said the stumpy man.
If the farmer had then asked him when he knew his father was dying, Aljaz would not have been able to say it was when he first saw the wind swing round from east to west in an ocean of wheat in Western Australia. The wheat was bowing in its customary humility to the prevailing westerly wind. The wheat lay swept to the left of Aljaz, entombed within the dusty airconditioned dryness of a combine harvester that was heading relentlessly south. The wheat, which was one flat brown colour, suddenly lifted up then fell to the right of Aljaz, changing to a golden hue as it did so. Then, almost as soon as the colour had altered for as far as the horizon, the wind changed back, the wheat returned to its original position and resumed its dull brown. The ocean had changed colour. It was if the wheat were a Persian rug being flipped first this way then that by a salesman keen to reveal the magic of its perfect weave.
Nor would he have been able to say that it was during the course of the night following that day, when, as he lay in his motel room, airconditioner clunking through the long black evening, he dreamt of sea eagles flying far above a glittering river. But he would have said that after he rang home the next morning - the first time he had rung home in many months - and a neighbour had answered the phone and told him that his father was ill in hospital, he realised he had to go home. He went to the foreman and, asking for his pay, said he had to get home on urgent family business. The foreman said, ‘Come back any time and I’ll see you right.’
‘Sure,’ said Aljaz. The foreman was fair about his wages, paid out what Aljaz was owed, but it was nothing compared to what he would have got if he had worked the full hot summer. They both knew that.
‘Shame,’ said the foreman. ‘You’re good labour. And there’s plenty of work for good labour,’ said the foreman.
Aljaz said nothing. The foreman looked at him and wondered who the hell he was. Most of the drivers were local boys, and if he hadn’t grown up with them he knew someone who had. Aljaz had blown into town, been told about the job in the pub, and applied to the foreman the following day. He had a New South Wales licence, but said he was from Tasmania. Beyond that he didn’t say much at all. People liked Aljaz, for he was easy to get on with. He drank enough with the men that they were not suspicious of him, but not so much that anyone really got to know him. The whisper was that he had done time in Long Bay, but the foreman somehow doubted it. Still, there was something about Aljaz, about his easy straight-batting of personal questions, that made the foreman curious. The foreman kept talking, hoping to find out something more.
‘Plenty work, plenty money,’ said the foreman.
‘Them’s the breaks.’
‘It’s a long way from here to there,’ said the foreman.
‘Yeah,’ said Aljaz. ‘Spose. Spose always has been.’
‘Well, that’s how she goes, I reckon,’ said the foreman.
‘Reckon it is,’ said Aljaz.
The farmer didn’t bother talking any more. They went into the café, had a feed of steak and salad and chips, got back into the EH utility and did not speak again until they arrived at Esperance late that night, when they bade each other farewell under the huge southern night sky.
Aljaz had to wait until the next morning for a light plane to fly him up to Perth. That flight, via half a dozen bush airstrips, took half a day. He got into Perth to find there were no planes east for six hours due to a refuelling dispute. Then he was overcome with a great fear. He suddenly felt too frightened to return home, afraid of the people and the place. He did not know what to do. Having come so far it seemed ridiculous to halt his journey at this point. He felt paralysed and sick. He saw a phone booth and without consciously thinking walked up to it and rang the directory, asking for the number of a Couta Ho in Hobart. He was given a number which he then dialled.
The telephone sounded its pulsing signal twice, thrice, four times, and then Aljaz suddenly hung up.
He walked out of the terminal and looked at the taxi rank and looked at what remained in his wallet from his payout four days before in a faraway ocean of wheat, and made a calculation as to how much would remain after an airfare back east had been paid. He needed a drink, and not in an airport bar. He walked over to a taxi and asked the cost of a fare to town. The taxi driver was a thin middle-aged man with thick black hair that he wore swept back. He wore gold-rimmed sunglasses, of a type that had been voguish ten years previously and no doubt would be voguish again before the taxi driver was finished with them. He looked straight ahead all the time Aljaz talked to him.
‘About thirty bucks, but don’t hold me to it.’
‘Well, I got forty,’ said Aljaz, which wasn’t quite true, but he wanted to impress upon the taxi driver that he didn’t want to be messed about.
‘Well, you’ll be right, I reckon.’
Aljaz went round to the passenger door and got into the taxi. The metre started counting and the taxi pulled away.
‘Mind if I …?’ The taxi driver waved a packet of cigarettes near Aljaz.
‘It’s your taxi,’ said Aljaz.
The taxi driver lighted the cigarette, inhaled and relaxed considerably.
‘Funny,’ said Aljaz. ‘Hardly any money left and I get a taxi. If I had plenty of money I’d be trying to save even more and catch the bus. But when you got nothing, well, it makes no difference.’
‘Poor people are good customers, mate, that’s what I say. People say, get the rich ones. I say, fuck ’em. The rich ones never give you cash, always run dodgy credit cards and always want a receipt. And if I want a smoke - no way. Bugger ’em, that’s what I say. Why you reckon the rich are rich?’
The question is rhetorical. Aljaz looks out the window. The question does not interest him. He looks at the cars shuffling bumper to bumper along the freeway, looks at the endless expanse of housing, and wonders about the lives of all those who live in those houses and who drive those cars, what it must feel like to be anchored, even if it is only to a steering wheel for forty-five minutes every day getting to and from work. And then he wonders if perhaps they are maybe all like him. What if they were? What if nobody was anchored but everyone pretended to be? A panic arose within him and quickly reshaped itself as his old fear, this time scared of this new thought. What if nobody knew where they came from or where they were going? For the first time in many years he sensed that what was wrong with him might not be entirely his own fault, or capable of solution by him alone. But it was only a fleeting sensation that had passed almost as soon as he was aware of it.
‘Why, you reckon?’ asks the taxi driver, repeating his question, throwing his left arm about in a gesture of contempt. ‘Why you reckon the rich are rich?’
‘God knows,’ says Aljaz finally.
‘They’re rich for the reason they’re bad payers and mean as shit, that’s why the rich are rich. Because they’re arseholes.’
Aljaz turns and looks at the taxi driver, shrugs his shoulders and goes back to looking out the window. He wonders why he isn’t rich if the only requirement is that he be an arsehole.
‘I’ve had ’em all in this cab. All the big names. All mean as shit.’ Aljaz continues looking at the houses and for no reason that he can name, bursts out laughing.
Maybe, thought Aljaz, just maybe everybody else was also on the road - from the beats through to the hippies to the yuppies to all the arsehole careerists of today, from me to the taxi driver, all of them and all of us seeking constant flight from our pasts, our families, and our places of birth. Even if we travelled in different standards of fashion and comfort. And maybe all the rest of them were as wrong as I was, though
t Aljaz, and maybe it was time to walk off the road and head back into the bush whence we came.
At this point the Tasmanian tiger halted, her strange story complete. I feel dumbstruck. How could a bloody weird wolf know so much about me? About what I was thinking and feeling back then? But, as with everything else I have wanted to pursue since I first started having these visions, my mind is suddenly rushed off elsewhere before it is finished with the subject at hand. There is the sound of uproar, and the other animals, less enamoured of and interested in this story than me, are again becoming raucous, having broken into a supply of Harry’s home-brewed stout that the oak skink has found. The black cockatoos are levering the bottle tops off with their big hooked beaks and it’s on for one and all. With one of his powerful purple-green pincers the freshwater lobster wrests the green-handled kitchen knife from the echidina, who had been hoping to speak, bangs it as if it were a gavel upon the table, and in spite of many of the animals paying not the slightest heed, proceeds to tell a second story.
Madonna santa! I don’t believe this is happening - but I must stop thinking because the lobster is already into its story and I am no longer sure if it his story or my vision, and if I think any more I’ll miss what he is telling the others.