“Shaddup!” Arty had said, his last word to her, possibly to anyone. “Shaddup! Don’t talk to me!” She went inside to ring the ambulance.
* * *
And so, the women had smiled pleasantly at the wake. So sad. So tragic. You’ll be alright, Eve? There was insurance? Oh my yes, my loves, there was insurance. A half million dollars. And the farm, of course.
Aah! Isn’t insurance a wonderful comfort in moments of bereavement, then! And isn’t it a surprising world!
Late, late at night, with her own children fast asleep, she waved off the last of the mourners, the men sodden with beer and melancholy, the women clear-eyed and smiling. The great hiccough of a starry sky beamed gently down on her. God’s little snake, she thought. She walked down the drive, out of the pool of light in which floated the house. She walked almost to the highway, fifty metres and there she raised her arms like one crucified. She opened her throat to the night and she howled, “Yahooo!”
It was her one release, her one moment of secret abandon, before she went back to the house and her newfound freedom. On an impulse, she made coffee and plugged in the little sandwich maker for a late night snack. In the back bedroom, the night-light flickered and went out. The little orphaned children slept amid dreams of lovers and demons and great confusions of life.
Tower Zero (first published ‘Australian Short Stories’, No 53, 1996)
From more than a thousand feet up, a tiny figure was released onto the air. It rolled end over end, a silent, elongated speck against the blue sky, like a bird dead on the wing. Over the desert where it hit, a thin, smoky wing of dust fluttered momentarily. Then it too began to fall.
“Did you see that?” Mannie asked his workmate.
Branco stood knee-deep in their trench, his pick halted in mid-swing, his chest heaving with exertion. He followed his partner’s gaze to the distant tower. He shook his head and looked away, bending immediately to his sculpting of the desert hard-pan.
In 1965, Exmouth was little more than an ambiguous patch of ground pinched between the Great Sandy Desert and the Indian Ocean; a remote corner of Australia’s remote northwest. But ponderous steam rollers were massing, to press and compact its dust. Backhoes already clawed and lurched amongst its salt bush. And scattered unseen over its featureless miles, a huge contingent of unsettled men, like Branco and Mannie, were settling to work under the blaze of tropical sun. There would be – there are now – fortress-like houses of pre-stressed concrete for American military personnel. And there was, and is, Tower Zero . . . back then, the tallest man-made structure in the hemisphere.
“There was a man, Branco! A man just fell from the tower!”
Branco paused again and looked with patient gravity, the way a kangaroo might look at a man struggling barefoot through spinifex. He scratched thoughtfully under the brim of his hat, squinted at the sky and spat on the ground.
“Well,” he said, “that’s bloody odd, ain’ it?”
Mannie’s gaze shifted from the tower to his partner.
“Odd? Odd? I tell you a man fell off the top of that tower, an’ you stand there barefaced an’ tell me that’s odd?”
“I only mean,” said Branco reasonably, “you’d wonder why! I mean, it’s not like you’d forget where you were! Why would ya fall?”
Mannie flung his shovel in the trench between them.
“How would I bloody know why ya’d fall? Don’t ask me why ya’d fall! Who even gives a shit why ya’d fall? I’m just tellin’ you, they’re diggin’ some bloke out of a hole over there right now!” He shook his head in awe. “Be dead as a fart!”
Branco nodded agreeably. He put his steel-toed boot against the up-turned blade of the shovel and pushed it gently back.
“Well,” he sighed. “He ain’t the first. Prob’ly won’t be the last. An’ we got our own holes to dig, eh? Whyn’t you check the profiles on this here trench.” He raised his pick high over his head. “Someone’ll tell us,” he grunted as the iron clunked against the red earth. “If we need to know.”
Mannie snatched irritably at the shovel and stood to survey the site. Long, low dunes surrounded them, crest after crest, like a frozen sea. The only sound was the distant grumble of machinery; the only smell that of mingled gasoline and tar. Everywhere was the bruised apple colour of the bulldust.
“Great weeping Jesus!” he cursed. In the distance, a willy-willy scooped up a load of dust and spun off over the horizon.
* * *
It wasn’t until mid-afternoon that the word came around. A high rigger, in the process of moving his safety line, had lost his grip and fallen. Nearly the full twelve hundred feet. Nothing else was said. They worked on, chipping at the sun-baked earth, preparing for the cement houses.
Well before the first vehicles appeared to gather the men for the trip back to camp, Mannie gave up on his shovel. He sat on the ground, turning and twisting a wooden profile in his hands. They were used to ensure the depths and angles were precisely the same in every trench. No room for variation, the American foreman insisted. What the engineers in Los Angeles had specified, they would make exactly in the western desert of Australia. Behind Branco’s back, Mannie placed the profile against the wall of the trench and smashed it with his foot. When Branco finally found it, tossed over the ridge of debris, he wagged his head reproachfully. The foreman would not be pleased.
“How many has it been, do you reckon?” Mannie asked.
Branco leaned heavily on his pick. His eyes glazed over and his lips worked silently through the numbers.
“’Bout five, I guess.”
“Five? Five dead? An’ we don’ even stop work?” He pounded his little cloth cap against his leg and watched the dust balloon around his feet. “We jus’ keep diggin’ bloody trenches?”
“Man’s dead,” said Branco. “Stoppin’ work don’ change nothin’.”
Mannie gave his cap another thump.
“No shit!” Then, “Waddya reckon you an’ me scoot on over to that tower? Soon’s the rest go! Have a look-see.”
“A look-see, Mannie? There’s nothin’ to see. Jus’ more o’ the same! Desert! Anyways, it’s outta bounds.”
“Ahh, so what? So what if it’s out o’ bounds? I reckon we got a right to see. Jus’ what sort of a dent a man makes. See if the mongrels at least left a marker for ’im.
Branco scuffed thoughtfully at the floor of the cleanly sculpted trench. “I reckon this’d be the only sorta dent a man makes, Mannie.”
* * *
The tower was the central focus of a number of broad, straight radial roads, down one of which Branco and Mannie walked when the worksite was finally deserted. The last handful of sunlight was slipping out of the sky and kangaroos were already creeping into the abandoned work areas, to crop the greenery around the taps.
The tower rose ever higher before them, a thin, geometric web of steel through which an early star could be seen. They passed the first of three banked and massive humps of concrete, the ‘dead men’ that anchored the arm-thick steel support cables.
“It’s like a damned big magnet, ain’t it?” said Branco in awe. “An’ we’re jus’ bits of iron bein’ drawn into it.”
Mannie snorted derisively. “You know what this bloody mongrel tower’s for, doncha? They’re gonna use the bloody thing to link up satellites with Yank subs out there in the Indian Ocean! Subs with missiles! You follow what I’m sayin’?”
“Yeah,” said Branco. “I follow what you’re sayin’.” He brought his eyes down from the fading iron glow of the sky which seemed to be resting on the tower’s pinnacle. “An’ you might as well not worry yourself about it, Man. ‘Cause worryin’ don’ change nothin’. It’s just life, see? Life in the twentieth century.”
“Just life? ‘Just life’ is about the dumbest thing I ever heard you say yet, Branco. You know five men fell off this tower jus’ buildin’ it! An’ when it’s done, the mongrel thing’ll likely get all the rest of us! An’ you tell me it’s jus
’ life? Can’t you tell the difference between what we’re talkin’ about?”
He moved off, shaking his head, touring around the base of the tower, weaving through thickening shadows. As Branco had predicted there was nothing to see.
“Bloody baffling. A man’s life got snuffed out right somewhere here, only hours ago, an’ there’s no sign.”
A little breeze, hesitating on its way to the gulf sniffed about the tower, crooned through the steel ribbing and set the cables humming.
“You jus’ don’ know where to look!” Branco called out of the darkness. “Look up! Look at this here tower! ‘At’s his real mark, Man’. ‘At’s his legacy! Somethin’ that rigger is always, always gonna be a part of. Doncha think? Like you an’ me! An’ our trenches!”
Mannie was buoyant with indignation.
“What crap! None of us is any part o’ this! You said it yourself! We ain’ even s’posed to be here! Remember?”
“Well now we are here,” came the soft answer, “I reckon we oughta go up!”
The thought of actually ascending the tower seemed to Mannie so unbelievably foolhardy that he could not contain his outrage. He exploded.
“Oh my word! Bloody oath! Abso-friggin’-lutely! Here we are spendin’ our days diggin’ foundation trenches! That ain’ llivin’, is it? Ye can’t fall outta one o’ them, can ye? We’d best straight away bugger off up to the top o’ this tower, ‘cause people are droppin’ off there like flies! Don’ wanna miss out, do we? Don’ wanna get left behind! An’ while we’re up there, we can get a proper squiz at our ‘legacy’, can’t we? You mad bastard!”
There was an electric platform, a simple, open affair, enclosed only by the ribbing of the tower; an elementary access route for construction workers and, eventually, for maintenance workers. Mannie stormed into it, shouting and waving his arms.
“Come on, come on! What’re ya waiting for?” he demanded. The motor whirred and the cables rattled, hauling them skywards.
To the east, the lights of the camp became clearly visible, surrounded by the million years of desiccated hills and desert – like an exotic gem on a wrinkled dark skin. To the west crouched a bleakly geometric pattern of streets lined with pads of glistening concrete – the unborn town of Exmouth. Further off lay the gulf, the Northwest Cape and the unquiet ocean. Overhead, the stars loomed. Branco pointed out one that came gliding steadily out of the west, like a spark from the sun.
“Lookee there!” he whispered. “Beautiful, ain’ it? You know, there’s folks in the world ‘ud reckon it took gods to build all this!”
“Yeah?” said Mannie bitterly. “Fancy bloody that! You reckon God’s gonna turn out to be a Yank engineer? Well, if he does, it won’t make a shit-load o’ difference, I guess, will it? ‘Cause if he cares about anything at all, it ain’ gonna be little you ‘n’ me, is it? No way! Not us!
“Which means I’m still gonna be liftin’ up my head an’ seein’ men fallin’ outta the sky. An’ no bastard even carin’ enough to stop workin’ . . . to say, ‘Jeez! That’s too bloody bad!’ An’ I’m still gonna be seein’ us standin’ in a trench, workin’ like machines to build bomb-proof houses for some dick-heads who’re never gonna know how hard that hard-pan is or how much cement is under ‘em or how many men croaked out here in the middle of nowhere, jus’ tryin’ to . . . to prop us this fuckin’ tower! Am I right?”
Branco gazed mutely down on the fading pattern of streets.
“You’re not followin’, are ya, Branco?”
Mannie’s face twisted into a joyless grin and he moved suddenly, stepping off the platform, out among the girders and through the access breach. In an instant he was clinging to the outer surface of the tower, one hand waving out a thousand feet above the desert.
“Jesus, Mannie!” whispered Branco. “Jesus! What you doin’?”
“You know what I’d really like?” crowed Mannie with crazy glee. “I’d like to blow this mongrel! I’d like whoever’s watchin’ through that satellite to look down nex’ time around an’ see nothin’ but a fuckin’ great hole here. An’ you an’ me jus’ lookin’ back up at ‘em. Jus’ smilin’ up at ‘em!”
“Jesus, Man’!” hissed Branco. “You slipped a cog or somethin’? You shouldn’ be talkin’ like that!”
“Ever’thin’s so bloody exact an’ precise for you, Branco. Give you a profile to work from an’ it’s a regular bloody religion. Well real life’s a bit more complicated than bloody that! Real life slips away on ya . . . slips over the pads o’ your fingertips. Ya make a grab,” he feigned a swipe at the metal girder with his free hand, “an’ lotsa folks jus’ miss! ‘Cause maybe the profile was wrong, ya know? Maybe their tolerances are wrong. So they fall. Over an’ over. Round an’ round. Like a wheel. An’ what’re ya s’posed to be thinkin’, Branco?.Them last few seconds before . . .” He jerked himself forward, let go his grip and clapped his hands, momentarily unsecured. The sound cracked, fled and was gone, in the same instant that Mannie snatched again at the girders. “POW!” he shouted after it.
“Christ, Mannie!” whispered Branco, reaching out his solid workman’s hand. “You’re scarin’ the shit outta me! C’mere! Gi’me yer mitt, why doncha? Come back in!”
Mannie laughed shallowly. “Why, Branco? In or out . . . it don’ change nothin’! ‘S jus’ one more man measurin’ out his life. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. Gi’me yer hand now. Please.”
At that point, Mannie’s anger began to collapse, unable to bear the weight of his partner’s concern. He rolled his forehead against his wrist.
“Ah shit,” he murmured. “What’s the point? Us against the foreman! Us against the Yanks! Us against the fuckin’ subs out there in the ocean! You know who’s gonna win, doncha, Branc’? Gonna be the desert, every time.”
He reached out. Their grips were firm and dry about each other’s wrists.
“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry I broke the profile.”
“’S all right,” Branco smiled. “Fix ‘er up in the mornin’. Get them foundations right, ever’thin’ else drops into place.”
Mannie wagged his head sadly. “Yeah. Sure. ‘F you say so, mate.”
He leaned gently back, looking up at the remaining few metres of tower . . . looking for the satellite, now lost in the dim eastern sky. He looked down through the black air and waved his free hand. “Pow,” he whispered.
As though he’d turned a switch, a shaft of light stabbed up from the desert floor. He lurched and caught at the girders but his startled movement caused him to miss. Branco, trying to counter-balance Mannie’s weight, slid inevitably into the breach. They clutched at each other briefly, the air opened around them and, quite suddenly, each was alone in the sky.
For a long moment they hung, suspended in the column of light. Then they became a pair of soft satellites, pounding earthwards.
When Branco’s belly hit the support cable, his arms and legs snapped around it and he fired off, head downward, toward the distant ‘dead man’. He slowed, stopped, then continued on. Before his eyes danced the surprised expression of his workmate at the moment the air had claimed him.
The concrete’s nudge was gentle when it came. He let go the cable and lowered himself, trembling, into the dust. Lights came almost immediately. Hands lifted him protesting weakly, back into the air. An American voice bellowed into his ear: “What’s goin’ on here, boy? What’s that man doin’ on that wire?”
A small figure was spotlighted against the sky in the distance. Mannie, clinging to a lower, steeper cable than the one that had caught Branco. He had fallen further, hit harder and had one arm hanging uselessly behind him. They heard him shout once, Branco’s name.
Then, as they watched, one leg slipped from the cable, followed by the second. He swung a little by his one hand, before falling. There was silence . . . whuff! . . . and the plume of dust, transparent in the circle of light, as the desert received him.
The Americans now live
at Exmouth in the houses whose foundations Branco and Mannie shaped. The satellites pass overhead, falling forever into the east. The desert lies in brooding silence, with Tower Zero standing like an arrow in its red flesh.
A Good Innings (first published ‘Oz-Wide Tales’, No. 12, 1990)
“I’ll be blunt with you folks. I’m sure it won’t seem indelicate under the circumstances. He’s ninety-two, after all. That’s a very good innings – much better, I imagine, than many of us are likely to manage. But I’m afraid that he won’t be coming out of hospital this time. He has a ruptured aorta. That means that, in the normal course of events, he’ll shortly drift into a coma and he’ll just . . . go out from there. It’ll be a peaceful and quite a gentle exit, I imagine, so we’ve that to be thankful for. He’s very weak now and probably doesn’t fully realise what’s happening but, perhaps if you’ve a family minister . . . ? He might like to make his peace.”
Ninety-two years had pared the man down into a small dry twig, grey and brittle and thin. Pale hair prickled stiffly around his scalp and cheeks and fountained lightly from his ears. His teeth were flat-topped stumps from years of being ground in his sleep and his hooded eyes gleamed, as though the last bit of moisture in his dry old life had gathered there.
Around him, the relatives stood, like shadows, watching the juddering of his chin, the quest for final, meaningful speech. Ninety-two years, slipping irrevocably under the dark concrete of coma. They grieved, albeit distractedly, troubled mainly by the echo of their own mortality rattling in the old man’s breast. He’d had a good innings, after all. Ninety-two and going out. The minister came but the old man didn’t respond. So. He must make his own peace, in his own way, without intermediaries. The vigil was long.
“Do you think he’s still with us?” one whispered. “I mean, do you think he knows we’re here?”
“Doesn’t look it, does he! Who knows what you know on the edge of coma?”
“Right. Who knows?”
The old man’s eyelids hung like flags on a windless day, not quite covering the whites, not quite fluttering. And the moisture in each eye remained, not quite full enough to form even single tears. His life was a matter of record, a matter of experience. He would answer for it as best he could.