Dirt Music

  I’m gone, he said with a tone that sounded to Georgie like satisfaction.

  In the bathroom he was dazed enough to let her strip the shorts and shirt from him. She sat him in the old clawfoot tub and sponged his wounds. He had ticks on his arms and neck. He sighed as she washed him down and Georgie wondered how long it had been since anyone had knelt here and bathed him. When he closed his eyes the lids were translucent.

  After ten minutes or so he seemed to revive a little. He told her what he’d done, where he’d been, what it took to get home, and she was thankful he wasn’t alert enough to ask her how she’d spent the intervening period.

  When it came time to get him out she braced herself for the lift but he got up under his own power. Georgie thought of the swabbing and bathing she’d engaged in over the years. The men she’d kneeled to comfort, to clean, to save. This impulse she had. God, she thought, is it any different to the feeling you had looking at Jim the first time and seeing someone bereft, in need of saving? She’d quit the job but it was still Nurse Georgie to the rescue.

  She wrapped him in a towel and walked him to the kitchen where she burnt the ticks out of him with a safety pin heated in a gas flame. She felt, she said, like the Grand Inquisitor torturing him for heretical secrets. He smiled drowsily. All secrets, he murmured, are heresies. Georgie painted him with antiseptic cream and rubbed oil into his sunburn. She put him to bed and sat a while, trying to figure out where to go from here. The car first. Somehow she needed to find one of her own.

  You don’t have any secrets? he asked, eyes fluttering.

  You’re my secret, she said trying not to think of Mrs Jubail.

  He smiled. Well, we’ve blown that out of the water.

  Yes.

  I didn’t tell you. About Bird. That she lived for a while. On machines. They kept shovin all these forms into my hands. I wasn’t gonna do it. I stayed and stayed. Think I just got tired, you know. They wore me down.

  It was mercy.

  He shook his head. A convenience.

  No, Lu.

  You don’t understand, he murmured.

  Believe me, she said, I do.

  He sighed.

  Do you have an atlas? she asked.

  In the library, he said. Why?

  Show you my other secret. My island.

  By the time she returned with the great dusty tome Luther Fox was asleep. Those eyelids were petal-like, marbled with capillaries like those of a child. She kissed his brow and drank his chickeny breath a moment before pulling the curtains.

  Georgie thought of herself a couple of days ago sprawled on this bed, languid as a duchess. With his hand in her, warm and startling.

  She stooped and took his hand. Held it to her cheek. Listened to the night beyond the insect screen.

  SWIMS IN A WINY SEA. All around him, in a mist, the piping breaths of the dead; they surge and swirl and fin beneath, roundabout, alongside him. It smells of soil, their breath, of soil and creekmud and melons. He hauls himself along with his face out, his limbs butted and glanced by slick bodies, one insistent at his hip knocking again and again in bunting enquiry as he goes on like a metronome, a beat without a melody. The water grows thick with limbs, too tangled to swim through and streams of kelp-like hair snag in his teeth, catch in his throat.

  He wakes in the dark room. Curtains spill against the dado wall. Ah. Here.

  He pushes the sheet back and winces at the tightness of his hamstrings. He shuffles to the bathroom and then to the kitchen. The house feels emptier than it ever has.

  Georgie?

  When he turns on the light he finds the atlas on the table. A grubby envelope protrudes from it and he opens the book to read the message written neatly on it.

  Promised to return the car.

  LOVE, G.

  He slides Georgie’s note onto the table. It sticks to his damp fingers but his eye is drawn to the page between his hands. Australia. The continent is a craggy frown and half that frown is Western Australia. He’s never left the state, never crossed even that lowly a frontier. He traces the faintly mottled deserts that separate his coast from the remainder of the country. It makes for a pretty austere chart. Compared to Asia or the Americas it looks short of names. White Point does not appear; there’s a nip of satisfaction in that. Fox anchors his thumb where he estimates himself to be and considers the vast space around him. Such isolation on the page when every bugger in the world is breathing down your neck. He checks the scale and out of boyhood habit lays the short side of the envelope along the map’s key to measure units of two hundred miles. South, there’s only four hundred or so to the rainy granite coast. Forests, fresh water, people. And to the north? Well, it’s all north, isn’t it. A thousand miles of the same state. Mostly empty. Until it peters out in the tropic swamps.

  Fox follows the coast all the way. The far north looks fractured. So many bays and islands. And he gives a little snort of surprise to see it named. Yes, right at the top near the Timor Sea. Coronation Gulf.

  He turns the light out and goes back to bed but he doesn’t sleep.

  two

  BEAVER CAME to the door wiping his mouth and beard on a hank of toilet paper. The service station was shut and dimly lit and from somewhere in his lair behind the office a forties showtune surged and eddied. Beaver’s overalls were open to the navel to reveal the droop of his breasts beneath a thin-stretched tee-shirt. He unlocked the glass door and opened it enough to poke his head out.

  Who’s singing? asked Georgie.

  Ethel Merman.

  You’re a mystery, Beaver.

  I am at that.

  Sure you won’t sell this car? she said handing him the keys to the EH ute.

  Written in stone.

  I’m desperate, you know.

  You’d better go home, George.

  Jesus, where’s that? she muttered.

  Jim’s been round twice this arvo already. Says he’s got bad news. You should go.

  Beaver, he is bad news. You don’t know him.

  Oh, I know him.

  The evening air was heavy with the iodine stink of seagrass. A few gulls skirled in Beaver’s forecourt lights. The sea sounded like nothing so much as steady traffic. Georgie thought of her modest box of chattels up at the house.

  Here, said Beaver holding out a hairy fist. Keep the keys a few days. I’ll look around for somethin you can buy.

  Georgie stepped up and kissed his hoary cheek.

  One day, she said, you’ll have to tell me the story of your life.

  Well, gimme time to go over me notes.

  On her way upstairs Georgie saw Jim’s Cruiser parked in the bright-lit garage and she flipped the light switch off as she went. Jim sat in front of the flickering television with the newspaper and a weather fax in his lap. His face looked blue—you couldn’t tell if it was the TV or exhaustion. Despite all the open windows the house smelled of eggs and bacon. The sea shimmered with moonlight.

  Sit down, Georgie.

  I’ll stand.

  In truth she felt weak enough to lie down right here and sleep.

  Sit.

  I’ll never forgive you for it, she murmured.

  Well, I won’t be hangin out for your forgiveness.

  I want you to call it off. Let him be.

  I already have, he said.

  How did you know?

  Know what?

  About me and Lu Fox.

  Well. Jim folded the papers on his knee and threw them to the floor. It was hearsay until tonight.

  And who told you tonight?

  You did.

  As Jim got up she felt herself backing toward the kitchen. He passed her on his way to the office.

  Call your sister.

  Don’t worry, I’ll go.

  Call Judith, he said over his shoulder. She’s been trying to get you all day. Your mother’s dead.

  GEORGIE’S EARLIEST childhood memory was a shopping expedition with her mother. Herself a toddler in a white nylon harness. The
smells of roasting cashews, of doughnuts, cut flowers, steely tinsel. A baby in the pram at her heels. The memory was so crisp—she could see herself plunging at the end of her leash in Hay Street like a Jack Russell terrier surrounded by the retail cheer of Christmas in the city. Both the image of her straining at her bonds and the nature of that expedition struck Georgie as prophetic; they summed up her character and her relationship with her mother.

  She’d been a willful little girl, and the older Georgie got, the more people said it. Wayward. If everyone wanted to go north Georgie Jutland went south. She was divergent as though by compulsion. At school she was regarded dubiously as ‘a bit of an individual’, the kind of phrase Australians still uttered with their mouths set in an uncertain shape, as though sensing something untoward. Nowadays Georgie wondered how self-conscious her maverick attitude had been. In class and in the quad she was recognized as a type and assigned a role that, instead of resisting, she’d embraced and embellished. Within the narrow confines of the prissy private school she became something of a tough nut. On the train in the mornings she knew she was just another princess from the lady-mill. But in her own circumscribed world she made people anxious. She considered herself popular and never understood until years later that girls and teachers disliked her. She read fear as respect. She didn’t see how lonely she was.

  At home, however, she was under no such illusions. There it was clear. She was the odd one out. She loved her mother—Georgie supposed it should go without saying—but she said it to herself a lot because from an early age she realized that she would never please her. After a certain age she went out of her way to defy the old man—it was food and drink to her—but disappointing her mother was a source of ongoing misery to Georgie.

  She was the eldest of four sisters. Georgie, Ann, Judith and Margaret—the Jutland girls. She had felt loved in her way but it puzzled her to see the immense satisfaction her sisters gave her mother as they grew from infancy into girlhood. Their sheer ability to please was unnerving. Their very teeth and hair caused their mother happiness. The enthusiasm with which they wore their frocks and pinnies and their hunger to wear her clothes and paste on her cosmetics made her queasy. They were ladies in the making. Gels. Georgie’s tomboy streak was instinctive and unconscious but by the age of ten her resistance to girlydom had a bitterness to it. She began to dig her heels in. Besides grooming and deportment, her mother’s only passion was shopping. It was the shopping that finally cut Georgie off from the other Jutland women. Somehow it drew her sisters together and it kept them close to their mother. Twice a week the four of them laid siege to the boutiques.

  Every few years, out of a grimacing loyalty, she made herself go with them, but these interminable outings were indistinguishable from the excursions of girlhood when she’d tramped heavy-lidded behind her mother and hung in doorways stifled by competing scents, bored beyond reason. The swirls of fabric, the clack of nails on registers, the racks and tags and bargains, all made her want to lie down and sleep. Her mother was hurt by her lack of excitement and, long ago, her sisters took Georgie’s refusal to shop as a rejection they found hard to forgive.

  She left home early, bombed out of Medicine, trained as a nurse and remained a bad example the others were supposed to rise above.

  Georgie was in Saudi Arabia when her father, Warwick Jutland QC, left their mother.

  So she wasn’t home for the tears and the confrontations, the hand-holding, and this too told against her. Within a week of the divorce the old man married a woman only nine days older than Georgie. Cynthia—a nervous, decent woman with a beauty that must have reminded him of Georgie’s mother at the same age. She wondered what Cynthia saw in him. As a girl Georgie had adored him for his zest and his fun. They sailed together in river regattas and spoke as equals on the water. Yet one day she simply didn’t believe in him anymore. She’d thought that he enjoyed her company, that he liked her. But quite suddenly, there on the yacht club dock one Saturday evening with all those back-slapping scions climbing up from their boats, she saw that she was a display, a piece of his success. The feisty sailing daughter destined to be the first woman doctor of the clan. She was a bit of spin, some shine on the Jutland ball. So she’d turned against him.

  And now she was parked behind his Jag in Beaver’s ute on the glistening lawn, delaying the moment. Angled there beside the Saab and the two Beemers, the EH looked like a statement of the sort she might once have strained to make. She wished that she’d pulled in to the Fox place on her way.

  The night was balmy. Before airconditioning, when she was a girl, you could have heard the river on a night like this and not simply smelt it.

  Ann’s husband Derek opened the door with his sad family face on and Georgie heard herself sigh. Derek was tall and a little stooped and sincerity wasn’t his strong suit. In the river suburbs of Perth he was notorious as a bit of a pants man. Even had he not been a dermatologist, the word squamous might have come to mind. He greeted Georgie with an embrace of consolation from which he took more than he offered.

  They’re out on the terrace, he said. Drink?

  No. Yes. Vodka martini. She thought: My mother’s dead.

  On the carpet in the livingroom was a long damp patch with an electric fan oscillating across it. It smelt of Pine-O-Cleen and very faintly, despite it all, of urine.

  Cerebral haemorrhage, said Derek handing her a glass. Quick at least.

  And how long was she there? she asked, realizing he’d put vermouth in with her vodka.

  Twelve, eighteen hours.

  God.

  The pool man found her about lunchtime. Saw her through the french doors.

  Where’s the body?

  Gone.

  Oh, she said strangely deflated.

  We couldn’t get you. Jim said you were going through some kind—

  I would’ve liked to see her.

  To dispute the diagnosis, no doubt, he said with a smirk.

  She wanted to chuck her drink in his face.

  It’s a human thing, Derek. You wouldn’t understand.

  There’s a viewing tomorrow.

  Sure.

  Well. I’ll be out with the others.

  Georgie stood thinking of her mother tottering around alone in her high heels in this big house. She felt guilty for not being here. Again. Letting it happen. Her lying there all night and half the day with no one but a stranger to find her.

  Jude found her crying. She took the drink, hugged her, patted her back. You shouldn’t have favourites but Jude was the one. Georgie pressed her face into the soft bulk of her sister’s shoulder pad. The linen jacket smelt of lavender, their mother’s smell.

  How are you, sis?

  Under-dressed, she said, noting that Jude was in Dior while she wore Cargo shorts. Where’s little Chloe?

  We got a sitter. And she’s not so little. Ann’s kids are asleep upstairs.

  How is she?

  She’s okay. It’s Margaret who’s the mess.

  Still the baby sister.

  Christ, she was thirty-two last week.

  Oops. I forgot her birthday. Gimme that drink back.

  Well, a drink certainly cheers you up.

  Got to set a bad example.

  Oh, God, Georgie, Jude said crumpling. She’s really gone.

  They stood clinched again for a while until her husband Bob came in and broke it up and steered them outside. Georgie watched how he moved Jude with a firm hand between the shoulderblades.

  The yard was a series of terraces that descended toward the river. Lights in the trees looked weirdly festive. The pool was emerald. She thought: I grew up here.

  Georgie? cried Ann, already peeved. What are you staring at?

  The yard, she said. Seems bigger. I was here for Easter but I’d forgotten. How big it is.

  You and your lapses of memory, said Ann. Come and meet Margie’s new bloke.

  Georgie let herself be propelled from exchange to exchange. None of her sisters had much hap
piness from men. Ann seemed to endure Derek for the money, and Judith, who looked bombed on Valium again, was miserable with Bob but afraid to leave him for fear of somehow losing her daughter. Margaret’s ex was serving time for tax fraud. The youngest of them, Margaret specialized in a kind of petulant neediness that had served her well since infancy, but Georgie, who still remembered having to change her nappies, was finally inured to it. Her new squeeze wore a fez and satin slippers—what was he, an arts bureaucrat?

  During every conversation Georgie was aware of Himself QC lurking by the pool, awaiting his sententious moment.

  And the conversation—Jesus what was it? There was talk of the arrangements, but little about Vera Jutland. What can we say? thought Georgie. A compliant if distracted wife. A competent and distant mother. Feminine. Good skin, nice manners. Yet how did she distinguish herself? What stories could you tell? It was awful. Even so, it was worse, this suddenly not having her, much worse than not knowing how to be with her.

  In the end the old man cornered her by the pool.

  Georgiana.

  Learned Counsel.

  She pecked him on the bricklike cheek. Beneath the stink of his cigar you could smell Bulgari, Cynthia’s scent. He had his tartan socks on with the tux. He’d come from something else the moment he heard. Cynthia, out of deference to sensitivities, had stayed on.

  Good God, he said. Look at the tan on you.

  Life of the fishwife. Got a bit of colour there yourself, she said tilting her glass toward his florid complexion.

  Ah. The Tipperary Tan, he said. Every drink you ever had decides to take up residence in your nose. Still, some of it’s probably sunburn. We take the boat out to Rottnest most weekends. You still get out?

  Georgie shook her head. Think my sailing days might be behind me. Turned forty, you know.

  Yes, he said as though he remembered. I know. Shame your mother never liked it. Sailing, I mean.

  Well.

  But you were a demon for it. I’d love to see you back on the water. Christ, girl, you sailed to Indonesia.

  That’s what cured me of it, she said with a hollow laugh.