And now they’ll burn the farm. That’s how it’ll go. The end, amen. You bloody idiot.
He pulls off his shirt and hauls the wetsuit back up hot over his shoulders. Drags his fins from the crate and works up enough bily spit to prep his mask. He takes time to pick out the darkest patch in the hazy rumple of the land and makes it his bearing. He drops anchor though it doesn’t make the bottom. Reaches over the stern and opens the cocks. He goes over the side and leaves the boat rocking. Least you’ve picked a good day. In a chop you’d never do it. But today you’ve a chance. Either way you’re gone.
Beneath him the water is purple and blank. He tries a measured crawl and breathes through his snorkel. Long gone.
JIM BUCKRIDGE FELT the plastic phone creak in his grip as he tried to control his fury. Was the whole fucking world populated with cretins?
From the doorway of his office he could see her down in the kitchen making herself another vodka martini. The only thing she was cutting the Stoli with was an olive. Her face looked peeled. The boys were off somewhere, thank God.
So have someone come and collect it, he hissed into the phone. Okay, when you have two people available, then. Yes, I know it’ll cost and I said I’ll pay. Do I need an interpreter, or what? White Point. On the map. Yeah, at the roadhouse. It’s red. Well, it’s your car, mate.
He hung up and watched her slug the drink down. The phone rang. He sat in the office and let it ring.
FOX CRAWLS through the sunstruck water. Feels it part heavily across his skull. The sea is caramelizing in the heat of the afternoon. It’s harder to move through all the time. Like a landslip; the more you dig the more there is to be dug. The wetsuit causes him to sweat but he knows he’ll never be able to take it off with his limbs as heavy as this. Besides, the neoprene gives him buoyancy and very soon he’ll need all the flotation he can get.
After a long time he gives up stroking and just kicks with his trembling arms free. Beneath the surface the water is transfixed by bars of sunlight which ripple and twist in the misty aqua blur below him. Now and then a startled garfish snoots away. Jellyfish float amidst the clouds reflected on the water. They are cumulous, their tentacles like strings of rain.
Looks at his puffy fingertips. The guitar calluses all but gone.
Thinks of lettuces prostrate in the heat. Silver flash of olive trees. The snorkel cuts his gums now. Eardrums tight as banjo skin.
Crawls on. Air hot in his throat. Can’t look at the giddy deep below. It’s giving him vertigo. He rolls onto his back and kicks along with his face in the sun, his eyes pressed shut.
Later. He finds himself stopped. Face down like a dead man. His hands have dune wrinkles. You could lie here and grow old. Like a kite, that’s how it seems. Suspended between worlds. It makes him laugh. Bill Blake did not a fisherman make but still we’re both suspended. Mad as hell, your head a bell, like an angel’s arse up-ended. You’re a poet but you’d never know it and the laugh coming from your snorkel doesn’t sound human.
Keeps the light behind him, the laughter in his legs. Swims on.
Can’t believe he’s getting cold. Cold as hospital air.
Sees the dog pitching against its chain, pink in the brakelights, pink in the sand. And then there’s no light. He swims out of habit. The water, a dark, dreamless sleep. His limbs trail phosphorescent auras. Makes him look all saintly. St Luther of the molten melon. Fuck me dead, it’s the fishin felon. Laughs creepy with chills.
No lights ashore.
No shore at all until the moon rises.
JUST ON DUSK a gentle nor’wester sprang up. It barely shifted the curtains, the kind of breeze that brings some relief but too little too late. Georgie propped herself in the sofa. The vodka bottle stood on the glass table in a pool of its own sweat. A pile of olive seeds sat in the pretty blue butterdish.
Down on the beach a few lamps burned. Locals cast for tailor or sat in folding chairs with their feet in the shallows. Georgie took the bottle and navigated the distance to the door and the terrace. Jim and the boys sat out on the buffalo grass in a plume of barbecue smoke. Their heads turned as she sat heavily. Those upturned faces, they were hardly the same faces she remembered from Lombok. They turned back to their meal, their voices just murmurs. The air was briny.
Two big boats started up simultaneously. Their diesels blubbed across the lagoon and they eased out of the bay under lights. Lobster boats don’t work at night, she told herself. Could be dropliners. Could be anybody.
NOW THAT HE HEARS them breathing in the dark he’s not afraid. Doesn’t Bird breathe warm in his ear every other night and isn’t that chair rocking before he gets to it sometimes? He hears cheeps and snores now, even in God’s own Indian Ocean. He feels the noise of their movement in his chest. Smells their breath in the still air. All about him, in the blackwater world. Singing.
Enchanted, he stops kicking. He pulls off his mask and feels the sudden chill of air on his face. Works the fins off too and feels his feet burn with a surge of freed circulation. Bubbles of talk burst against him. He slips back in a swoon, could go down happy into sleep right now. But the water is all bellies and hips like a packed dancefloor. It holds him up. There are rolling white clouds ahead. The air is full of leaping bodies. Fox tumbles headlong into the clouds and surfs them onto the sand. He gets to his feet and hobbles up into the savoury smell of saltbush.
WHEN SHE WOKE on the terrace the yard was dark and inside only a table lamp burned. Georgie blinked and wet her lips, trying to take it in. The town was asleep. The beach looked deserted. She had the terrible feeling that she’d slept through something important.
Someone had thrown a cotton blanket over her. She tore it off. A torchbeam flickered up through the foredune; it threw shadows across the scrub. Georgie tried to get up but her legs were asleep. She floundered and fell. The bottle dropped and rolled unbroken across the slate. The balcony was washed for a moment in the torchbeam. She picked herself up, wracked with pins and needles.
Ahead of the torchlight she saw the swinging blade of the shovel. Jim’s legs. His feet. The light went out. He crossed the lawn and a few moments later he was on the steps.
What have you been doing? she asked.
Go to bed, Georgie, he said coming past.
It’s a simple question, she said knocking the torch out of his hand. It bounced and glanced off her shin.
Jesus, he muttered. Get outta my way.
We need to talk.
You need to sober up to talk and stop wastin my time. I’ve got children. And a boat to run. Sleep in the spare room. And don’t spew on anything.
Where’s my car keys? You’ve got them again.
They’re safe.
I want them.
Not a chance.
Jim slid the door to. Georgie held onto the back of the sun-lounge. She wanted to follow him in but she looked at the big orange plastic torch at her feet. Inside the toilet flushed.
She took the torch and went down the stairs and followed the beam to the beach where the truck still stood on its rims in the sand. The dog chain was gone and so were the poor animal’s remains. There was a smooth, packed area where Jim must have just buried it.
Water lapped eerily against the shore. She wanted to swim. She wanted to set houses alight. She wanted to drive until daybreak. She wept until she was sick on herself.
HE WALKS RUBBERLEGGED for a while. Comes upon wheel ruts in the heath and follows them south. The heat of the day is still in the sand and it’s a warm night but he shivers in his wetsuit. A couple of roos float by. He pads on until he sees the glint of a tin roof. He goes in closer to find several squatters’ shacks in a hollow. Two beach buggies. A pyramid of beer-cans. A rough-hewn filleting bench and a rope strung with clothes. He looks for a dog but reaches the closest watertank without rousing anything. On his hands and knees he drinks from the tap. The water runs cool and brassy into his throat. He lets it sluice his face of salt and sand.
From the clothesline he takes a
pair of shorts and a tee-shirt which smells of dishwashing detergent and when he’s a good way off he shucks out of the wetsuit and pulls them on. Down the track he finds a big dune gully with a thicket of acacia. He crawls in where there’s a bed of leaf litter and lies down amidst the fidgeting noises of small creatures.
When he wakes it’s midday and hot. He crawls out but the light is too hard, the white sand blurs and the air is woollen in his throat. His legs are tight and painful. He squirms back in to wait for sunset. Sleeps again.
At dusk he feels better and after he’s walked a while his legs feel fine. In time he sees the yellow dome of light in the sky. White Point. He approaches the town from the beach. Keeping to the shadow of the foredune, he makes his way along the bay. Boats yank like curs at their chains. The floodlit jetty is wild with gulls. He sneaks past in the hollow between dunes until he’s well clear and can walk on the beach again.
Where his truck and trailer stood there’s nothing but tiny cubes of laminated glass underfoot. It’s no surprise. This is how it will be, as though he never was.
He bellies up to the perimeter of Buckridge’s place. Within an arm’s length of the lawn he lies watching the windows flicker with television. In the dark, the town sounds benign enough: music, laughter, doors clacking. He rubs the cramp from his legs. Eventually the house goes dark and quiet.
On his way to the garden tap he smells meat on the barbecue. He levers a couple of blackened chops from the hotplate and crouches on the lawn to tear the burnt meat from the bone and drink greedily from the hose.
He thinks of Georgie lying inside. Just up those steps. Sees the form of the shovel against the wall. He picks it up as he takes the stairs to the terrace. The glass sliding door is unlocked. Jim Buckridge asleep in his bed. But his kids too.
He kisses the glass and slips away.
IT WAS A DAY and a half before Georgie surfaced. The previous day was a miserable feverish blur, but from the soiled linen and the towels on the floor she could see only too clearly how she’d spent it. Her head hurt and so did her throat and chest. She had never sunk so low. It killed her to think that the boys might have seen it.
The empty house was in disarray and afternoon light lay in blocks on the livingroom carpet. She went unsteadily to the window to find that Luther Fox’s truck and trailer were gone. She looked about for the keys to her rented car. Downstairs the garage was empty. She came back lightheaded and jittery and stood in the livingroom a while.
It took her a few moments to see the weird smudge on the glass door. Right there at eye level. The greasy imprint of a pair of lips. Georgie shuffled over to the sliding door and stared. With the filthy sleeve of her housecoat she tried to rub it off and when nothing happened she grew panicky until it dawned on her that the mark was on the other side of the glass. She stepped out into the heat and hurriedly did the job.
Then she showered and put herself together as best she could. She knew she needed to eat but she was queasy and her throat so sore she could only manage vitamins and a can of Sprite. Back on the wards a big toke of O2 might have done the job; it was God’s own pick-me-up. She thought about the cops but decided against it. Not while there was a sniff of hope.
Back in the garage she pulled her bike from the tangle of weightlifting gear and reticulation pipe. The seat felt like a fist between her buttocks. She thought of the supermarket, the post office and the school she’d need to pass. She pedalled feebly out into the hard light of day.
To say you look shithouse would be brown-nosin, said Beaver as she pulled up beside him at the pump.
Sell me a car?
Mate, there’s nothin to sell ya.
I’ll rent something.
Jesus, George. I gotta live here.
Just some old banger from out the back.
You sober enough?
Yes.
You bloody promise?
I bloody promise.
He wiped his hands and glanced at her critically. I need me truck, he said. You can take the EH. But—
I’ll be careful.
Yeah, one day, George.
I really appreciate it, she said. I can’t tell you.
No, he murmured. Best if you don’t.
FOX WAKES AT DAWN to see that White Point is only a mile or so behind him. He doesn’t even remember lying down and now he has to walk on in the heat of the day. So slow, so weak and sleepy. He presses on along the soft, empty beach with the roar of surf in his head. The sand is white, blinding, endless. Figures ten miles, no fifteen to go. Now and then he comes upon a bit of vegetation hanging from a blown-out dune and he lies in the precious shade a while to take sips from the plastic bottle he scored from a bin last night and filled from a yard tap.
At the lonely cove beneath the old Buckridge boundary he stares at footprints until he realizes they’re his own. And Georgie’s too—so small. When was this—two days ago? Longer?
He follows his own tyre tracks a short distance up into the hinterland before it occurs to him to keep wide of firebreaks and bush tracks, but the scrub here is savage underfoot. Heady smell of saltbush. The insect hum of acacia. The only trees are rare huddles of coastal morts whose bark hangs like torn bandages. Heat shudders upon the land. A fenceline. Then a nasty belt of banksia country—all sharkskin trunks and serrated leaves—and it’s like wading through barbed wire.
And finally the highway, quartzy as a river. He can’t walk down it in the open. He’ll have to come around the back way. As he limps across he sees a dead roo with its legs in the air on the gravel shoulder. The stench pursues him across the road and into the capstone country and grasstrees beyond.
Drinks the last of his water. Comes into pasture and remnant clumps of tuart trees. A few startled sheep that must belong to a new neighbour he hasn’t even met. And at last there is the strangling ditch of the brackish river. Paperbarks within whose shadows are wagtails, wattlebirds, honeyeaters.
How they flutter and scream and loop; they net the sky across him, stitch him in. He creeps south in shade. Emus step away solemn as yuppie bushwalkers.
At the home bend, where the tyre still hangs from the tilted tree, he soaks his feet. His shadow falls across the water. Past noon. No smoke nor smell of ashes. Eventually he climbs the rutted bank to look.
Prostrate on the baked earth, with wild oats rasping dead at his ears, he clocks the vehicle parked in the yard amidst the puzzling flutter of feeding hens. A 1964 EH Holden utility all buffed in gleaming monkeyshit brown. Tonneau cover and spoke wheels. A real lair’s wagon. And familiar. But he can’t place it. Can only wait and see. Half expects the dog to come bounding down any moment.
Retreats to the shade of the riverbank whose open veins are ropy with shadow. Feels bound to the earth by them. They pull his cheek to the soil.
When he wakes it’s dusk already. There’s light across the farm but behind him it’s dirty dim. Shadows flit across the sandbar below. It takes a few moments for his eyes to adjust. Figures. Boys. Two. One stoops at the water’s edge, commotion at his feet. Suddenly he stands with something silver in his hands, something that flickers and shakes. The earth vibrates.
Fox scrambles up the bank toward the house.
GEORGIE SAW the movement in the trees and stood ready. She was afraid; no use pretending otherwise. She hadn’t heard a vehicle. She had nothing but a blackened firepoker to see them off with. The house phone looked like it’d been ripped from the wall some time ago. Could be a dog, she told herself, some stray cur from a farm across the river. But too upright.
I can see you! she yelled. It sounded prissy, the voice of an eldest sister at hide-and-seek.
He limped up to the steps like a flogged animal.
Me, he said wheeling skittishly as she dropped the poker. Georgie?
Yes.
And who else?
Just me.
I…
Only me, Lu. Come inside.
He stood there a while, his face obscured in the gloom, until Georgie realiz
ed that he needed help. When she touched him he recoiled. He felt jammy with blood and sweat. He smelled terrible.
There’s food, she said leading him up the steps. He had a geriatric tremor and the sleepwalker gait of the post-op patient. At the threshold his eyes glittered.
Georgie sat him at the kitchen table and tried to assume the old professional mask in order to conceal her horror at the state he was in. Lacerated, sunburnt, crusty with salt and dirt, his lips split, his eyes red above bruises of exhaustion. His hair was full of grass seeds and cobwebs. His flayed thighs and feet shook. She took his pulse surreptitiously and thought about an ice bath to bring his body temperature down, but his heartbeat was regular and strong and she was afraid to leave him alone to go in search of ice.
You fed the chooks, he said beatifically.
Yeah.
Was that today?
Couple of hours ago. Here, drink.
She got water into him. He swallowed methodically. It struck her as maddeningly characteristic; it made her eyes sting with tears.
There’s food, she said. I cooked some things. The potatoes were here. The chicken I had to borrow. I’ll run a bath. You’ll stay?
Luther Fox looked at her in complete incomprehension. She left him reaching for a cold baked potato and when she returned from the bathroom he had hiccups. He tried to smile but they sounded painful, sob-like.
Drink, she said.
They comin?
I don’t know.
No fire.
No.
He tore a drumstick from the chicken she’d roasted and ate it haltingly. He struggled to get it down his neck. He seemed puzzled.
The EH?
Beaver’s. It’s his chook, too. I’m stretching the friendship.
Georgie felt his brow and neck for clamminess, for any change of temperature. He seemed stable enough.