Dirt Music

  Because my mum died?

  Jim rinsed his hands and wiped them. Even from where she sat you could see how huge and brown they were, how burled with scars.

  They’re not stupid. They pick up on stuff. They’re hearing things already. Every kid in town has a father or brother on the boats. I don’t want them to feel like it’s their fault.

  What?

  How you are. What you’re doing. I’m busting my nuts to be reasonable, Georgie.

  Sounds like ambivalence to me.

  I woulda thought you’d be grateful for complete bloody indifference, he said flaring up at her stupid, flip tone. Anyone else in this town would have knocked your teeth out and put you on the step like a sick cat.

  Here it comes, she thought. This is what you’ve always feared. Deep down.

  Well, she said, her heartbeat right there in her voice, a girl should be grateful she’s in the hands of a gentleman.

  Fuckin right.

  So the Buckridges close ranks. Pull in the washing. Show them we’ve sorted out our differences?

  You wouldn’t even recognize the differences, Georgie.

  Oh, I might.

  Why do you do this? Jesus, your sisters are right. You think you’re too good. You turn things to shit.

  She got up, more stung than afraid, but when he came across from the sink she backed away.

  Sit down, he said.

  Go to hell.

  Sit the fuck down.

  You think you’re so bloody civilized, she said with her last gasp of defiance. Because you went to some snob-factory school and read Shakespeare and rowed like a champion. But I know what you are. I know now.

  Sit down!

  He came at her so fast she sat down without thinking.

  I’m trying to tell you, he hissed. I didn’t do it. I didn’t approve it or organize it. I don’t have a fucking firearm and I’m not happy that it happened. Are you hearing this? I’m saying stay or don’t fucking stay because I feel bad about it and because I’m trying to be decent. I have children. My life is bigger than you and who you play with and what you think. But you might consider how decent you’ve been. You might like to think about that. You don’t know what I am. You can’t even see what you are.

  Georgie closed her eyes. She felt the sun find her there on the sofa, its heat creeping down her face to her chest. She wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that in its glare her bones showed clear beneath her skin.

  IN THE WEEKS before Christmas, while the fleet pursued lobsters on their annual migration west into deep water, Georgie stayed on at Jim’s in a state of sober, confounded lethargy. Within a day or so of returning she resumed her household duties which she discharged with a competence that belied the mess she was in. She felt cauterized inside. After the funeral and Ann’s outburst, after lobbing up to the empty farmhouse and then enduring Jim Buckridge’s withering homily, she had the sensation of having been pushed outside herself. The routine was a kind of shelter. She didn’t even think about her daily offices; they just happened to her. They were what she lived.

  She kept to the spare room and Jim to his office. The boys were subdued, even solicitous. Georgie felt reduced to a working house-guest. The skin peeled off her sunburnt arse and gave her a shabby look that, as the fog began to thin in her head, she began to see as emblematic.

  Jim rose hours before dawn now that the deepwater run was on. He was travelling between twenty and forty miles to get to his lines and each pot lay in darkness at the end of a rope the length of the Eiffel Tower. It was something he used to joke about, winching crays from touristic depths, but now in those few hours he was around and awake, he said little. He was courteous, almost courtly, but not familiar.

  Some afternoons, when she found herself without chores to occupy her, Georgie sat out on the terrace and watched trucks come and go from the jetty, bait trucks, live trucks, freezer trucks. Some trucks were piled high with coils of orange and yellow rope. She could no more imagine all that rope in the water than she could take in the idea of the tonnes of lobsters arriving alive in Tokyo that night.

  She stayed away from the beach. She shopped for supplies in the city. The only time she ventured outside was to hang washing, and then the light felt too bright.

  What finally roused Georgie from her state of suspension was anger, but it was, for a time, hard to identify the source of this fury which persisted morning and night like heartburn. Ann’s griping calls about the secrecy over the will were merely an irritant, and Judith, whose emails seemed to fluctuate from whimsy to misery within the space of a single day, had begun to worry her a little. It was driving by the old fruit stand on the highway on her first trip back into the city that brought this anger into focus. It was Luther Fox. His cowardice. And the humiliation of being abandoned. She had torched her whole life in White Point for his sake and he couldn’t wait a couple of days while she buried her mother and gathered her wits. It was the misery of knowing that she’d done it to herself again, been suckered by her own stupid urge to rescue lame ducks. This time, though, she’d really exposed herself to someone. She’d been more than intrigued by Lu. She was gone on him the way she never had been before and he turned out to be just another self-absorbed prick. What had she been thinking anyway? He was a farmboy, some creepy, secretive thief with a death wish. A grieving mess. She was no better than those bourgeois princesses who fall in love with tattooed prisoners. You had to ask yourself if this entire sordid episode of finding yourself caught between a big-knuckled fisherman and his hillbilly rival was anything more than a pointless and embarrassing perpetuation of her adolescent rebellion. At forty did a woman still need to go to such extremes to define herself against her family? She was furious with herself about it, but it was only simple stupidity. It’s not as though she’d cut and run. She wasn’t like Fox; she was no coward.

  For a while she felt sorry for Jim and guilty for shaming him before his peers. But she began to see that his wounds were hardly mortal. When things settled down she could see that he was pained but not devastated.

  His reaction puzzled her. It was not that he was without emotion. She had seen him hurt, ruined, incapacitated—that was the state in which she first knew him. Debbie’s death had all but killed him. You could tell he’d loved her; and, in truth, the afterglow of that devotion was part of what attracted Georgie those early days on Lombok. But it was chastening now to see the difference. Georgie saw that his feelings had never run so deep for her. Not even in the ballpark. She supposed she’d always known—after all it was mutual. The heat of her interest had been as much for his situation as for him. Yet it stung to realize that Jim Buckridge had been merely…well, fond of her. And now she had nothing while he was visibly re-grouping. She had no idea of where to go or what to do.

  Jude’s emails became more weird and insistent. She posted things which might be jokes but they made no sense. Georgie stopped trashing them. After a few days they racked up in the mailbox like an anthology of demented koans. Georgie knew she should call her.

  She began to venture onto the beach. To avoid sticky meetings with White Pointers she kept clear of the jetty and favoured distant stretches of the lagoon. On the point itself windsurfers from out of town rigged up on the bonnets of their clapped-out stationwagons, among them Swedes, Danes and Germans who came every year for the wind that drove others mad. In their fluoro wetsuits they looked like übermenschen. She felt invisible in their midst. Out on the bay and against the towering surf of the outer reefs a hundred sails raced and flew. Georgie walked the lonely beaches south where she saw nothing but windblown cuttles and the pounding relay of the shorebreak. Some days she hiked for hours but like a domesticated creature she eventually turned back to the enclosure she knew best.

  • • •

  One afternoon, almost home, she lay in the pigface blanket between dunes and wept for her mother. She had only stopped to rest and escape the breeze a moment, but the long fingers of the succulent groundcover brushed aga
inst her face and suddenly reminded her of her mother’s hands on her cheeks. How long had it been since her mother’d done that, held her face and really looked at her the way a mother will? She missed the plainness of early childhood, the years when you lived without a mask, without acting your part. Those days Georgie just wanted her; hadn’t learnt to hide her child-hurt by pretending she didn’t care.

  Georgie sobbed till she was hoarse, until there was nothing left but a spent calm. There in her hollow between the dunes she looked up and saw specks and bubbles in the air. The sky was a sea, blue as a coma. Around her, bees toiled in the pink blossoms, their drone soporific, musical. The shadows of dragonflies fell across the bared skin of her belly. Sand creaked beneath her. The dune, now she listened, seemed to thrum like a boiling kettle. Georgie lay there for some time in a sort of overheated swoon while the world teemed.

  That night Jude called. She seemed in such high spirits. It turned out that all their mother’s savings, her shares, the house and a yacht that nobody had the slightest knowledge of had been left to Warwick Jutland QC. It was astounding. He was already wealthy. He was her faithless ex-husband, for crying out loud. It was hilarious. Georgie found herself laughing for the first time in a while. Our sisters, said Jude, aren’t taking it quite so well.

  BEAVER SAW HER some days. There were times he wished he could say something to her. She was like someone who didn’t realize they’d wandered into the cinema during the third reel. There was so much stuff she didn’t know about this place, about Buckridge, even about himself. Christ, things she couldn’t imagine. She might have made a confidante, an ally, and God knows he could have helped more than he had but there was so much frigging backstory it was hopeless. He liked her. Fancied her, if he was honest. But she’d be gone soon. Like a bloody sub-plot. He kept his eye out for a decent car. It was best she went. He didn’t need Big Jim breathing down his neck a moment longer than was necessary.

  Shame, though. She had the sort of face you only saw in wank mags. The fuck-you look. Must have been a firecracker once. Like Jennifer Jason Leigh.

  GEORGIE BEGAN DREAMING once more of Mrs Jubail. She woke in a panic and went through the house and turned on lights.

  Mrs Jubail was from a middling merchant family in Jeddah. She’d probably never been beautiful but you guessed she had mild features to suit her gentle disposition. Before the fungating sarcoma colonized her face she’d probably suffered the veil as all women did in Saudi, but by the time Georgie encountered her the poor woman craved concealment so much that you could barely get at the horrible tumour for shrouds of black linen. She held the veil to her chest fearful and ashamed. The cancer was so advanced and so bewilderingly aggressive that the staff all knew the moment they saw her that this was a purely palliative situation. The woman’s family was strangely absent. Every week or so an emissary from the Jubail clan came to reception twitching his thobe nervously to ask after her condition, the sorry details of which were usually delivered by a fellow male.

  The miserable patient writhed and sweated beneath her cover while that mask of vegetative tissue consumed her day by day. From out in the corridor you could smell her, foul and sweet as compost. The surface of her cheek was like a rotten cauliflower and only one eye, compressed into a slit by the pressure of swelling, could follow you round the room while you prepared her pissant treatments on the trolley. Her English was quite good. Once, before the analgesia and the heavier tranquillizers took over, she said she would like to see Australia. She asked was it true that Arabs imported camels from there. Georgie told her of the wild herds in the north that were the legacy of the Afghan traders. Early on in her time in hospital, Mrs Jubail was afraid. Before long she was reduced to addled puzzlement.

  In order to deal with that face up close Georgie found that she had to make a monster of herself. Her bedside dialogue had a flippancy to it that felt spiky as a carapace. Tough and tender, that’s how the girls in oncology saw themselves. But you knew when you’d lost the tenderness. She’d seen people suffer and die before and a few who suffered and lived for what that was worth, but she’d never struggled with simple visceral disgust to this degree before. It built to the point where you could barely perform the most basic clinical procedures on her without giving in to a kind of hysterical convulsion which threatened your competence as a caregiver. One time, after supervising the irrigation of Mrs Jubail’s tumour, Georgie stood in the corridor beyond her room wracked with giggles. Her laughter turned heads along the ward. It must have been audible to the patient. And while her junior colleague looked on, Georgie bent double with shrieks and peals that degenerated into gulping, horrible sobs.

  Mrs Jubail, of course, died. It seemed to Georgie that she’d been well cared for. Short of killing her, they’d spared her as much suffering as the law permitted. Had Mrs Jubail asked, Georgie knew that she would probably not have euthanased her. It was madness in a country like that. She had a career to think of.

  Georgie was away when Mrs Jubail died. She was skin diving up at Sharm Abhur with two doctors—a couple of Brits she didn’t mind. They got back to the compound late in the day where a radiologist friend gave her the news. Instantly Georgie could tell that her contented sigh seemed inappropriate. She didn’t even feel the smile on her face, but she saw it in the reaction of her friend, who wheeled in confusion toward the pool, and she heard about it later that week around the compound, about what a callous bitch she was. It was there that she lost the magic, the belief she had in herself and her chosen path.

  At White Point, in the lead-up to Christmas, Georgie had Mrs Jubail come visiting in her sleep. Down hardlit corridors with her veil thrown back and her grisly face out-thrust behind those arms. Sister! Sister? Georgie ran and used the steel trolley to batter her way through stone and glass in a shower of paper cups and ampoules. The sweet smell blew on her. And there was always a wall, a blind alley she couldn’t broach.

  GEORGIE HAD ALWAYS LIKED to cook but now she felt herself pitching toward mania in the kitchen. It felt counterfeit in a way, but there was some satisfaction in the companionable silence they all enjoyed at dinner. She rendered them speechless with the variety and the quantity of food she cooked. It became a form of management. She didn’t know what else to do.

  She was cooking osso buco one afternoon in the last week of school when Brad came in to snaffle a piece of celery.

  What’s that? he asked.

  Bone marrow.

  Cool.

  Georgie looked at her hands to avoid looking into his face. It was the first non-essential conversation they’d had in a while.

  Zoë Miller likes me, he said.

  Cool.

  But I don’t get it.

  What, mate?

  What she wants. I don’t even talk to her. I mean you’re a girl.

  Um, yeah.

  What is it, then? That youse want.

  I don’t know, she stammered. What does anyone want?

  Well, boys just wanna be left alone. With our mates. Anyway she’s Monkey Miller’s kid. He’s a greenie. They’re rubbish.

  I thought she was so nice, she said in a small voice.

  He shrugged and looked hungrily at the shanks she was browning.

  • • •

  Beaver found her a car. Some Norwegian sailboarder had to fly home in a hurry and Beaver had bought it with her in mind. It was, he said, a cherry. When Georgie got down there, though, and looked at what lay behind the door that he hauled up so laboriously on its chain, she saw that it was more jellybean than cherry. The little Mazda was canary yellow. It was so tiny she wondered why he’d gone to the trouble of cranking up the roller when it would have been easier to bring the thing out under one arm through the office.

  Sons of Thor, he chuckled. Can they pick a colour or what?

  A bubble car.

  Like a ju-jube with jaundice, eh.

  Georgie shook her head ruefully. You had to smile.

  Does it go, Beaver?

  Runs like a ki
d at bathtime.

  This Euro had boards and masts and sails strapped on it?

  Beaver laughed. Well, he had the car strapped to the gear, put it that way.

  Okay, she said. I’ll take it.

  But we haven’t haggled.

  You do both sides, Beaver. I’ll pay whatever you wear yourself down to.

  Oh. Righto.

  You got the keys and papers?

  Yeah, yeah. Listen, sorry about your mum.

  Georgie realized that Beaver had probably known about her mother’s death before she did. That and plenty besides, she imagined. More than she cared to think about.

  Tell me something, Beaver.

  No worries, he said patting his pockets, licking his lips.

  Had she imagined the tiny tremor of wariness that came over him?

  Did you tow the truck and trailer? she asked.

  Keys must be in the ignition.

  Beaver? The F-100.

  Whose?

  You know whose. Lu Fox.

  Ah. Melon boy. Nope.

  Georgie followed him inside across the oily floor to the tiny yellow car. He had to squat to look in the window.

  I don’t know what I’m doing, Beaver.

  You’ll be gone soon. Don’t worry about it.

  Why d’you stay?

  He shrugged. It’s somewhere.

  You know anything about shotguns?

  Plenty, he said resting his elbows on the roof.

  Did you help him?

  He didn’t do it, Georgie.

  Least you both got your story straight.

  It was Shover.

  Shover McDougall?

  He’s a fuckin loose cannon.

  Georgie considered it. Shover McDougall was not an unlikely prospect. He was paranoid and litigious, universally despised as a cutter of ropes and spoiler of potlines. He was a teetotaller and hated drugs. Last season he’d rammed another vessel. He was a supremely successful lobsterman. He had a kid in Josh’s class.

  How do you know? she asked.