—Where is she then? said Bob’s robotic voice, under threat from further unutterable anguish. If she’s still spelling …
Jacko did not either answer or press him, and said goodnight. Then he sat, ready for sleep, drinking malt whisky in the bar of the plane. At first sip, he was approached by a woman in a yellow suit, who identified herself as some sort of executive from CBS. She had, said Jacko, that ageless look: her mysteriously maintained face, a self-made and perhaps even prosthetically-manufactured body.
She said, Hello, you’re Jacko Emptor. I’m so-and-so. You’ve booked the bedroom, and I have a favour. I’m utterly exhausted. I simply have to sleep.
Jacko said that he was sorry, he was exhausted too. He’d been up all night last night, and tomorrow morning had to go straight from the plane to talk his way into someone’s door in New Jersey.
—Well, she said, couldn’t we share? You know what I’m saying. I’m saying share. Would you permit that?
Jacko thought of those papers that sell in supermarkets: I conceived Jacko Emptor’s child at 37,000 feet.
But what was more likely, Jacko quickly saw – for it was in her tone, her briskness even when tired – was that they would lie chastely side by side as a matter of course. It was an idea not customarily encountered in the Northern Territory.
—If I had made the smallest suggestion, said Jacko, she would have called it molestation. Maybe she’s right eh. I don’t know any more.
Bewildered Jacko told her please to take the room. He found the sofas in the bar very comfortable, and there weren’t a lot of people aboard. No, please. I’ll sleep like a log in a rocking chair! Please …
I was sad that I could not tell Maureen the details of Jacko’s confusion so confidentially passed on to me, and, above all, of his survival that weekend as loyal spouse of Lucy. Since I couldn’t, the question of Jacko’s virtue continued to be a debate in our family.
In the end, Jacko drank himself to sleep and slept till the last moment of his approach to La Guardia, to a different air, the grit of the day in part absorbed by dirty washcloths of cloud and a dawn of sorts.
A car took Jacko to Paterson, New Jersey, picking up on the way through Manhattan the sommelier of the Rainbow Room. They managed to find the microwave truck and the young producer who substituted for the bewildering Dannie. As expected of him, Jacko chose a house at random and made friends with its occupant – a fifty-year-old retrenched foundry worker, a man frank about his afflictions. His wife had left him. He’d just had open-heart surgery and five of his toes amputated because of diabetes.
—Job, Jacko told the audience. A man of sorrows.
Jacko thought twice about giving him the option. The sommelier had brought seven champagnes, French and Californian, for tasting, but perhaps they should find a householder in better health.
—To hell with it! said Job. I wouldn’t be able to afford this stuff if I lived to be a hundred.
And so, his bloody gauze-wrapped stump of a foot rested on his coffee table, the man drank Dom Perignon, Veuve Clicquot Grand Dame, Heidsieck, Roederer, Krug, and said, Ay, I can see why they go for this stuff! And laughing with the man, Jacko felt safe for the moment from the weekend’s complicated claims.
4
My first contact with the Emptors occurred three years before I went to NYU, and it was not so much with Jacko as with his mother and with the scene of his childhood. I was travelling in the winter through the Northern Territory with a photographer named Barry Larson, half-Norwegian, half-Jewish, and utterly Australian, with both a Norseman’s and a Hebraic enthusiasm for desolation. The country either side of the road from Hector to Burren Waters, part bitumen and part red soil, is by some standards plain. The country is graced only by rare hills. There is disconsolate grey scrub, and clumps of the imported folly of rubberbush, which someone in the late nineteenth century had scattered in the belief it was good stock feed.
In some lights – early in the day and late – the Burren Waters country is beautiful. But unlike the full deserts to the south, you could never quite call it splendid. Even Australian eyes, used to being beguiled by evaporated landscapes and by what light can do to them, could find the Emptor country pretty tedious.
On our way through it, I made the mistake of saying so to Larson. He got the closest to being angry with me as ever he did in our three-week journey.
—Are you a Pom or something? he asked. Did you get so buggered up by Wordsworth and Tennyson and all that stuff at school that you can’t even see Oz?
I argued no, and I went into praises of the Tanami Desert and of Docker River west of Alice, all of which I’d loved and written about and closely remembered.
But Larson said, waving a hand to the right and then the left of the car, There isn’t one yard of it that’s the same as another!
At that stage, as we would both discover to our separate griefs, his more furious than mine, he had only some fifteen or sixteen days still to live. He was entitled to all his frantic loves.
It is hard to over-exaggerate the isolation in which the Emptors lived, in which Chloe and Stammer Jack had their marriage and begot their family. If you imagined the African veldt without villages, then you would come close to it. Before the coming of Stammer Jack’s father, the Wodjiri people, whose country it was, had moved across it in small family groups, setting fire to it to flush out game, celebrating and obeying its scattered resources of food and water by keeping on the ancestral track, and cherishing it in luscious song as if it were a place of bounty.
But in a sense it was a vacancy even then, before the rubberbush, though you couldn’t tell Larson that. It certainly came close to being a vacancy in these days of the Emptors. In Grandfather Emptor’s day, you needed a Wodjiri tracker, a compass and a sextant to get you here. In Stammer Jack’s adolescence the two hundred and more miles had been dirt. And now, the last ninety miles were red-grey dirt.
All this was part of Grandfather Emptor’s twelve-thousand square mile leasehold, shrunk now through bad seasons and cyclical drought to the best fifteen-hundred square miles!
On the road into Burren Waters homestead, even the occasional white road post was coated in red dust. As for signs of the Emptors, a dirt airstrip came first, then a few cattle grids, and then at last the Emptor homestead and encampment. It was a genuine village. The red dust widened to become a square. One side of the square was taken up entirely by the mustering yards and a sales ring where – we would be told – Stammer Jack exhibited his horses to people who came in from all over the Commonwealth, camped and bedded down here in the Emptor piazza for three days, and then drove out, hung-over, towing their chosen yearling.
An aircraft hangar and offices and Boomer’s helipad also sat on this side of the red dust square.
On the south side of the piazza were, first, the black or Wodjiri stockmen’s married quarters, a series of corrugated iron huts, then a huge cookhouse and kitchen, built in brick – perhaps to defeat the termites of the area. Next a schoolhouse, single white stockmen’s quarters, and a set of offices. For bookkeepers were needed in the cattle and quarter-horse business as in any other.
Chez Emptor itself, the homestead, lay in a highly watered patch of green. Palms, ferns, rhododendrons and other shrubs had been encouraged by a heavy outlay of water to grow there. The homestead structure was an enormous bungalow of red brick, the kind fashionable in the ’60s in outer suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne. Suitable to the place, however, it had wide, deep verandahs all around.
Larson and I felt like newly arrived troubadours at some minor medieval court. We did not go at once to the big house with its emerald garden, its pyramid of bottles out the back, monument to the Emptor thirst and its television satellite dish, which had come to Burren Waters late in Jacko Emptor’s adolescence, taken his soul and transformed him into Manhattan’s Jester of Trespass.
We went instead to the offices near the cookhouse. Beyond a screen door we found a large flaccid man with a boozer’s pallor, wo
rking at an Apple Mac. He had a Celtic complexion, and sun sores on his lips, and his sleeves were buttoned, as sleeves were in sun-blasted Burren Waters, to the wrists.
—Oh yes, said this man, the bookkeeper. Mrs Emptor knows you’re coming. She’s up at the house.
When we traversed the garden and reached the huge open verandahs of the Emptors’ red-brick palazzo, we found that long, ceiling-high bookshelves flanked the front door, and after they finished, a herd of beds, packed together, disappeared around the corner. It proved that this was where friends of her largely vanished children slept on visits to the great outback, or perhaps where favoured clients were put up during the yearling sales. The beds gave the Emptor homestead the look of a country hospital.
—They shouldn’t bother with this green bloody lawn they’ve got, Larson whispered. No use pretending it’s bloody Toorak and fighting against the realities of evaporation. They ought to plant xerophytes.
Xerophytes were Larson’s favourite plants. He tried to keep a little cactus garden healthy in moist, sub-tropical North Sydney. At the Emptors’ front door, his brave eyes glittered with the concept of a garden of desert plants.
The middle-aged woman who answered the door could only be the chatelaine, Mrs Emptor. She was slightly more than medium height. She had a broad, frank, worried, slightly fleshy face, sun-leathered but not wrinkled. She wore a mumu. The flesh of her shoulders was brown and smooth – she took the sun well, unlike her bookkeeper. She displayed the upper third of the breasts which had suckled young Jacko (whom I barely knew at that stage) and his three siblings, the one predictable brother, and the mad other two, girl and boy. She was not at first view a big enough woman to have produced such a thumping lad as Jacko, but then she had mated with an earlier thumping lad. Stammer Jack.
—Oh Jesus, she told us. Culture’s arrived in this bloody place at last!
I would find later how she knew and vaguely liked a few of my books, and knew and despised a few others. She knew Larson had a reputation in the film industry too, as a cinematographer as well as a stills man. A stills photographer of such stature that Chloe Emptor had seen his work on the Sunday afternoon arts program on the ABC, the only channel Chloe Emptor’s satellite dish allowed her to get.
—Got to get you blokes tea, said Chloe. Think we’d better sit out here on the verandah with the books. That’d be bloody well appropriate eh.
She had the Northern Territory way of making her questions statements. Perhaps this was because there were far fewer than two hundred thousand people, Aboriginal and white, in the Territory’s half million square miles. Questions went out into a vacancy, were absorbed by space and had the inquiring tone leached out of them.
She led us to the shadier end of the verandah, and the floor to ceiling books were here, by the cane furniture, more or less al fresco, There was a high proportion of hard covers and as honourable a list as you’d see in any academic library. The Dickens, Thackeray, Twain, Melville, Tolstoy, Hugo had – she later told me – been poshly bound by a firm in Melbourne, and needed to be regularly wiped, and inspected for mildew and ants. Grandfather Emptor had brought these in by dray. I noticed plenty of Thomas Mann also, including Death in Venice. Jacko himself, angry at his homosexual brother Frank for reasons which will be canvassed in this tale, once described Death in Venice to me as an endless bloody rigmarole about a poofter who dies of cholera. But Chloe got more out of some things than Jacko did.
She sat us down beneath Marquez and Joyce and William Golding and the Australian Nobel Laureate Michael Bickham, and then wandered further down the verandah to where the bookshelves ended and there was a window which gave into the interior of the house.
—Sharon! she yelled. Would you mind making my guests some tea love? We’re out here by the literature.
Having got the answer she wanted, but one we couldn’t hear, she came back towards us. I’d presumed that she’d been wearing sandals, but I saw now that she was barefoot.
She sat down sighing.
—My son Petie’s new girlfriend, she explained. He’s had a succession. He meets them at some bar in Sydney, brings them up here and they last about three months. You know, the isolation and the boredom eh. Nice girls. But none of them bloody readers you know, and the other stuff only lasts fifteen minutes at a time eh. So there you go! But he’s a deep one, my eldest son. Though he’s had the decency to stick around, unlike the other ungrateful little buggers. The one most like the mongrel bastard just the same. You’ve got to be like the mongrel bastard if you want to enjoy staying here eh.
She gave no explanation of the identity of the mongrel bastard. You quickly got used to the term though, and found that the person she meant was Stammer Jack. Like a lot of Australian insults, the words were also a form of perverse endearment.
She leaned forward. Might as well tell you, you’re not going to meet him this time, the boss feller, Mr Emptor. He’s in his room with a bottle of rum. He’s such a bloody hypochondriac. Men are children eh. He had this accident with his ankle, and it’s painful but it’s not the fall of the bloody Roman Empire. Had a bit of an accident with a helicopter. With this dead-beat American we’ve got up here. Just a little twist of the ankle. If it gets worse, I might call the Flying Doctor. In his book, this gives him the right to be totally bloody unsociable. Anyhow, let me tell you, you’re not missing much.
—Then son Peter’s out in a mustering camp about eight miles out. He’ll be bringing some three thousand cattle into the yards here this afternoon. I could take you out to meet them, but I’d rather not. The romance of cattle is over-bloody-done eh.
She turned to Larson.
—You’ll be able to get plenty of good shots when they come in here. There’ll be dust and black stockmen and helicopters and cowshit and everything you bloody want. You can even go up in Boomer’s bloody helicopter, if that’s your fancy.
Larson looked at me and shook his head.
I should say that all the ironies operated in Larson’s case. He kept saying to me that as much as he liked the words-and-pictures book we were doing together, he didn’t want to go in any cattle mustering helicopters.
—Zero height, zero brains, zero chance, he said.
It was bad enough, he said, flying in helicopters for cinematic purposes, hanging by a strap for the sake of live pictures.
The sad and worthy story, which is not really part of the grotesque tale of the Emptors, but which I must relay so that we can get on with Chloe, was that he had an appointment in seventeen days to shoot some footage from a helicopter for a tourism commercial. This in the high alpine meadows west of Canberra, the national capital Territorians like the Emptors despised for its alien bureaucracies. Larson was to film a man and woman riding horses on a great green plateau.
When he took off he would be strapped in with his young assistant cameraman, Bo, a Tasmanian, and a director Larson frequently worked with. As could only happen in reality, just before that seventeen-day-distant take off, Larson would leave a letter-tape for his father in which he would say. Here comes the bloody chopper. God, I hate those things.
There was a power line, not marked on the pilot’s map. Larson and Bo and the director would all be killed in the crash.
But at the Emptors’ place with me he knew he had a choice about getting into the things, and he was exercising it.
Chloe Emptor leaned towards me.
—Listen, my television idiot of a son said he’d met you. In the studio. He and the blond drongo do that morning program. You know, big Jacko Emptor?
I knew but found it hard to believe that she was associated with hulking Jacko Emptor of Morning Oz. The frantic three-and-a-half-minute interviews authors got on Morning Oz (if you were trans-sexual or a cabinet minister resigning under a cloud, you could get as much as five) seemed eons removed from the geologic quietude of Burren Waters.
—He’s not a bad boy in fact, said mother Emptor. But he ought to leave those astrological sisters alone eh. They don’t have a c
oncept between them.
Chloe meant the two Logan sisters who, between them, wearing long, primary-coloured gowns, did the astrology on Morning Oz. The Logan girls arrived by the same limo as Jacko at the opening of new malls and cinemas in Sydney. And never losing their breath, they took part in fun runs Jacko was invited to but did not choose to expend himself on. That, in fact, was how I had first met Jacko, one drizzling morning in Darling Harbour, where I was trying to finish a ten kilometre loop on the strength of boyhood fitness and the cut wind of a middle-aged athlete. Hardy, kindly, practical women, the sisters jogged beside me on the spot for a time, attended by Jacko, massive on a trail bike.
Sharon arrived with the tea. She had a pleasant broad face but it was disfigured by some kind of tiredness and by a gloss of sweat. Chloe asked her did she want to drink tea, but she said no in a distracted way. She was not anxious to meet visitors. She went back inside unconsoled.
Chloe said, She won’t last long now, poor kid eh. Feel sorry for Petie. He’s the pick of the crop. While his dead-beat bloody brother’s up to his armpits in sisters in ball-gowns.
She called after Sharon, Might as well go and ask the bloody malingerer if he wants some tea.
She said she didn’t know why anyone with lives as interesting as ours would want to write about some hopeless bloody cattle station on the limits of nowhere. The arse had fallen out of cattle, she said. The European Community had utterly stuffed everything. Now, as we well knew, the Australian cattleman had to look for favours from the Saudis!
Grudgingly, she took us out for a walk around the place. She wore no shoes, relying on the soft, familiar dust. The school was out for a morning break. She introduced us to the teacher, who was a German the Northern Territory Department of Education had somehow managed to sign up. You needed to be a mad German, a sort of Voss of pedagogy, even to think of teaching at Burren Waters. Native born Australians, said Chloe, knew too much to sign on for such a task. You needed to have seen a lot of National Geographic programs in some green place, and you needed to have been as deprived of sunlight and desert places in childhood as Jacko had been of locked doors.