Dirt Music

  That’s the word.

  From Jim.

  That’s the word, Georgie.

  But why?

  Aw, don’t be wet. Havin a shamateur flittin about on the water’s bad enough, but there’s poachin and there’s poachin, love. Shover probly thought he was doin it for honour. Thinks the fisher kings’ve gone soft in their old age. Figures Jim didn’t know or didn’t have the balls anymore. He always idolized Jim, you know. Bet he did it out of love. Christ, don’t you ever see his missus drivin up and down like a fuckin spy satellite? The satanic white Camry?

  Georgie considered it. Yes, it rang a bell. The car leaving Jim’s the night she returned.

  Shover McDougall, she said.

  And don’t get any ideas. Loves a feud. He’s the good ole days, Georgie. Not even Jim could see him off anymore unless he killed him.

  Georgie blinked at this.

  Relax, I’m jokin.

  Yeah.

  That bloke, he was somethin out of the box.

  Shover?

  No, your mate. Fox. He could really play. They all could. I towed the wreck, you know. The cab, inside the cab, it was like a friggin slaughterhouse. No belts, I spose. But you never seen anythin like it. Four dead in one rollover. People said it was too freaky, like an act of God. Their kind of luck.

  Suddenly so forthcoming, Beaver, Georgie said, unable to listen to any more of this.

  You know me. Ingratiatin under pressure.

  Georgie drove home via the McDougall place, where she pulled over a moment to stare at its fortress façade. Behind the high steel fence and the avenue of cocos palms it hulked on the foredune, all electric window shutters and security alarms.

  Shover McDougall. She’d seen him at school concerts, tall and balding with the perpetual sidelong glance of the maltreated pet. His wife Avis was a dumpy, intense woman with an underslung jaw which Brad likened to that of a potato cod. Shover and Avis. Two more reasons to leave. After Christmas. She’d wait until then. It was only days away.

  At dinner that night nobody mentioned the little yellow car in its slot downstairs beside the Cruiser. They hooked into their lamb fillets and thyme-roasted potatoes and watched a yacht motor in through the passage and drop anchor directly below them. Georgie was grateful for the distraction. She admired the boat’s lines. It was a Dufour, she decided, a nice piece of work. A man and woman went about the business of making fast for the night with a weariness she understood too well.

  Good tucker Georgie, said Brad.

  She picked up her knife and fork, a little startled, and caught the exchange of glances.

  Next morning, on a whim, she swam out to the anchored yacht in the hope of striking up a conversation, perhaps being invited aboard. She needed respite and the vision of the lovely long white boat brought on fantasies she was still not immune to.

  She stroked languidly across the seagrass flats. Mooring chains clanked in the water. Sculling closer she saw the kevlar hull stained with rust and spilt oil. The steelwork was dull and wetgear was strung in the lines like a party of flogged matelots. The steering vane looked battered out of shape and a familiar mouldy locker-smell hung over the water. A rough passage. This time of year you’d be heading south away from the monsoon storms but you’d be punching into southerlies all the way. Georgie thought of offering the use of her washing machine, a meal perhaps. But as she glided within reach of the boat’s transom, the woman rose from the cockpit with such a fierce stare that she swam by as though she hardly noticed the boat was there.

  The bleached, strawy hair. Face burnt and peeling. Shadows like kohl-smears beneath the eyes. The thousand-yard stare. Georgie knew all about it. She wondered if, beneath that stare the woman wasthinking of her luck, protecting it, even disbelieving it after her passage. Only three years ago Georgie had felt that her crossing of the Timor Sea was a feat of luck from which she might never recover. There were times when she suspected you could use up your allocation of good fortune in a single massive stroke like that. Now she was certain of it. But where did that leave her? How did you live a life knowing you’re arse-out of luck?

  ONE AFTERNOON, without any warning or precedent, Georgie’s sister Judith turned up at the door in a sundress, mascara in wretched streaks down her face.

  Josh looked on horrified as Jude fell into Georgie’s arms and wept in the hallway. After a few moments he retreated to the games room and Georgie took her sister out onto the terrace where the sea breeze was only just stirring.

  I just. Miss. My mum, Jude said between awful gulping sobs.

  I know, sis, Georgie murmured. I know.

  Jude was scalding to the touch. Her lavender scent had a cooked smell about it and the back of her neck was livid with a pimply rash. When Georgie brought her sister’s face up to hers she saw that there were blood vessels burst in her eyes from force of weeping. It was a chastening sight. Georgie had only ever achieved red blots like that from kneeling at the toilet bowl, poisoned with booze. It made Georgie feel low: she’d never cried that hard in her life.

  Where’s Chloe, Jude? School’s out, isn’t it?

  She’s at a friend’s. Her friend Angela has such a happy family.

  She pulled her sunglasses down over her eyes.

  Aha, said Georgie.

  What is it with us, Georgie? Us and men.

  Georgie hesitated.

  I mean, Jude went on, look at Ann. She’s married to a—

  Shit.

  Well, yes. He doesn’t love her. She’s an incubator for his offspring. He makes her feel so small and inadequate. It’s like watching Mum all over. Dad was such a pig to her and she couldn’t see it.

  Georgie knew that this talk of Ann’s marriage was little more than Jude’s veiled confession about her own.

  What about Margaret, though, Jude? She’s no victim. She eats men.

  That’s just insecurity.

  Georgie laughed at this. Her sister seemed surprised.

  How bout a swim, sis?

  Jude shook her head. I didn’t bring anything to wear.

  Borrow mine. I’ve got spares.

  Jude looked mortified at the idea.

  So, just go in your smalls.

  What, like you in Mum’s pool? In front of the kids, Georgie—I don’t think Ann’ll ever get over it.

  It’s not in Ann’s nature to get over things, Jude. Anyway, I paid for it. Out of my own hide, no less.

  The sou’wester began to stir the cotton palms. Jude knitted her lips. She looked out across the brilliant lagoon as though it were no more interesting than an eight-lane freeway.

  This is about Bob and you, isn’t it?

  I just can’t believe she’d give Dad everything.

  Have you thought about counselling? Georgie persisted.

  You know I always admired your spirit of adventure.

  Oh, Jude, stop it. You always thought I was bringing the family into disrepute.

  That was Ann. She thought you might be…playing for the other team.

  A lesbian?

  It was that photo you sent from America. You and the other girls with that big car. Like Thelma & Louise.

  Geez, I hate that film.

  But Brad Pitt.

  Jude—

  Anyway, you sailed to Asia with that bloke.

  Brad Pitt?

  Near enough.

  Jude, that guy was a dickhead.

  Gorgeous, though.

  He couldn’t even navigate.

  Dad’s going to give you the boat, you know. The yacht she left him.

  Hell, said Georgie, aghast, I don’t want it.

  We haven’t talked like this in ages, said Jude airily. Have you got a glass of water?

  Georgie fetched her a drink and watched her swallow a couple of tablets.

  I was the one who loved you, George. But you never took me along.

  Oh, Jude.

  No matter. Must fly.

  Georgie found herself trailing her sister to the door as Josh sidled out from his
room. She kissed Jude fiercely and felt her sudden stiffness, the self-consciousness returned. As she swayed across the buffalo grass in that sundress Josh stood at Georgie’s side.

  That your sister?

  Yeah.

  Oh. She’s pretty.

  Yeah.

  They watched her fold herself delicately into the black Saab.

  She’s gonna back into the tree, said Josh.

  You could be right. Don’t look. Ow!

  Josh shook his head the way his father would and their eyes met, but the boy sensed that it was best to say nothing and Georgie was glad of it. Jude had made a five-hour round trip for a fifteen-minute chat. She’d never been here before. The pills were Valium, she was certain, and Jude was blasted. She was totally stuck; they both were. They’d gone in opposite directions to the same end, to become their poor hopeless mother.

  With the Bette Davis festival suspended by tacit agreement, Georgie sat out on the terrace to watch the masthead light of the yacht anchored below and think of the adventures that Jude pretended to envy. Chances were she’d gilded the lily in the recounting of them at miserable family barbecues, and now she felt like a phony. She had driven down the west coast of the States and into Mexico but it wasn’t as glamorous as it sounded, even after the austerities of the Arab world. And Tyler Hampton was beautiful in his bermudas and open silk shirts but there was less to him than met the eye. That wild drive through the States had been mostly bitching and collapsing friendships, and the voyage with Tyler from Fremantle to Lombok had been marked by fear and confusion. Yet some things lingered untainted in the imagination. Like the gulf they had come to as they ran before a squall at the extremity of the Australian coast. It was a long gut of milky-blue water edged by beaches and belts of mangroves. Around its mouth was a rash of islands and at its end loomed a great steamy plateau. In the lee of the biggest of the islands, only half a mile from the mainland, they had anchored in the late afternoon, silenced by fatigue and relief. Across the water dry stone ranges rose in grand disorder into the smoky distance. The country here looked like cured hide. It was wilderness of a sort that Georgie had not encountered before and the island they sheltered behind was a wilderness within a wilderness. The moment she saw it Georgie felt that she’d seen it before.

  It was a great red rock skirted by rainforest, like a mesa grown up through a garden. On its white shelly beach were boabs and vines and from its cliff faces where the late sun flared yellow, pink and purple, came the looping echoes of birdsong. Georgie couldn’t understand this feeling of recognition. It was iconic Australian landscape but not even twenty years of nationalist advertising could account for this sensation. It even smelt right, as familiar as the back of her arm, like a place she came to every night in her sleep.

  Before dawn they were in trouble. By eight that morning they were high and dry.

  They spent two days trying to motor and then winch off the mudbank that they’d stupidly anchored over during the spring tide. Tyler and she bickered and fought, knowing they were hundreds of miles from help. They were screaming into each other’s faces. And from deep in the belly of the gulf came the unlikely sight of a boat. A fishing guide in an aluminium punt with two sunburnt clients and a barramundi flapping on the deck. You couldn’t forget the name or the face. Red Hopper. He was a pugnacious bloodnut with a droll wit and a rollup fag on his lip. The only man for an unimaginable distance and they’d come aground a few miles from his camp.

  He was anxious to see them on their way; in fact he had them gone inside twelve hours, but heading out into the Timor Sea Georgie felt regret as much as relief. She couldn’t get the image of that monolithic island out of her head. The memory of it there in the milky gulf surrounded by a wilderness you couldn’t conceive of for space and distance. She marked it on the chart and in her pocket-book. She thought about it now and then. It gave her a warm, uncertain feeling.

  She was still on the terrace staring out at that masthead light in the lagoon when Jim appeared with a beer beside her. She noticed that he had an old Joe Cocker album playing inside.

  Nice car, he said.

  Didn’t think you’d noticed it.

  Nearly tripped over it, he said smiling. What’s it run on—fairy dust?

  I wish, she said unable to match his tone.

  She looked out across the water until the music expired.

  THE BUBBLE CAR remained an unsettling presence in the garage. It was parked against a pile of cartons that contained the life she’d never unpacked here, the stuff she’d hauled up from the city. Each time she drove to Perth—to buy groceries or presents for Christmas—Jim and the boys seemed mildly surprised to see her back. But she did return. Passing the fruit stand on the highway gave her a few bad moments but Georgie managed to think Luther Fox back into a dim corner where he belonged. He was just another symptom of her weird attraction to suffering. He’d done her a favour. She was, she decided, the kind of person vulnerable to the sexiness of pity. A child’s hot tears against your breast, the delicious collapsing weight of a man bereft—they gave you a power that you couldn’t resist. And there you were, crashing through the overcast as hot as the sun itself, determined that you were the cure. White Point considered Fox gone. Officially he already seemed not to exist—he didn’t appear to be in anyone’s database, he had no tax file number. Well, let him be the ghost of his ambitions. He could stay gone. She was over it.

  On Christmas Eve Jim came in with a whopping haul but he seemed strangely subdued. A big shark had followed the boat all day, its snout visible every time they pulled or dumped a pot. Jim told the deckies it couldn’t be the same animal because the distances they covered and the speeds they steamed at between lines made it impossible. Yet Boris insisted that it was the same shark and by noon Jim had to admit that it seemed to be so. It was a tiger, a good twelve-footer and ugly as an in-law. By the middle of the afternoon Boris was all for killing it and Jim confessed that, had there been a weapon aboard he’d have consented. It gave him the creeps. Boris said it was an omen. But Jim didn’t know what to think. Did Georgie believe in omens? Not on Christmas Eve, she said, giving him a beer.

  That evening, before setting out the gifts beneath the plastic tree, they drank a few toasts to the Raider’s good fortune. The air was mild and there was laughter on the beach. Tomorrow nobody would fish, no one had to get up in the dark to ram bait into baskets or pull the heads off occies or heave pots around the lurching deck, and there was a palpable sense of release in the air, an atmosphere so infectious that Georgie and Jim stayed out late to share a bottle of sparkling burgundy. When the hot desert wind sprang up they lingered undeterred, listened to music, even told a few jokes. That night Georgie left the spare room empty. Their lovemaking was gentle, almost circumspect.

  On Christmas Day the four of them took the dinghy out to the island to lie in the shade of an umbrella and snorkel about the fringing reefs. All of them were wary but amicable and that day a puzzled détente seemed to set in. It felt fragile, artificial even, but after recent events it came as such a relief that Georgie convinced herself that this new mood was a return to something like the life they’d had before spring.

  White Point was feral at the best of times but during the Christmas holiday the place went mad. As the van parks and beach shacks filled, the population quadrupled. The pub was always full and the little shops gridlocked. There were boats and trailers, jetskis, 4x4s, trail-bikes, kites, boomboxes, collisions, altercations, near-misses. The locals were obnoxious and the sun was brutal. At night the air was thick with the smoke of barbecues and the stink of scorched meat, and from Jim’s terrace when the wind got around to the east you were overwhelmed by the greasy stinking vapour of deep fryers.

  In the middle of it all, on Boxing Day, no less, Beaver disappeared. He was only gone the one day but he left pandemonium in his wake. Nobody could get fuel. When he returned, amid tumult and sensation, it was as a married man. His wife Lois was a tiny dark woman with a silver incisor. S
he was Filipino or Taiwanese, depending on who you asked. For days Georgie tried to catch his eye across the throng at the pumps. She saw Lois through the window puzzling at the register and staring bewildered at the stamping mob and she figured that by New Year’s the worst might have subsided and she’d get her moment.

  Georgie noticed the national flag go up on the white pole in the McDougalls’ yard. She’d never seen it there before.

  On New Year’s Eve the traditional brawl at the pub evolved into a riot as a rave party on the beach was driven indoors by the wind. It was, simply put, a clash of cultures. By midnight youths were pulling rooftiles off the White Point tavern and throwing them into the crowded carpark as the place began to burn. Thirty minutes later, the White Point vollies (a little worse for wear themselves) had a firetruck in and were pitching young people from the roof into the very same carpark.

  Jim came ashore New Year’s Day with a paper nautilus. Boris insisted that it was a good omen.

  The day Georgie finally met Beaver’s wife Lois, she discovered that she was Vietnamese. Beaver was sombre with the effort of restraining his pride. Lois, he said, had a thing for Abbott and Costello, though her English was sketchy. The way White Pointers used the language made it a challenge even to those born to it, so Lois really had her work cut out for her. The locals who knew how Beaver had found his bride were already calling her Mail Order to her face. Georgie noticed the way Lois glanced between her and Beaver as though sniffing something suspicious about their friendship. She didn’t quite know to reassure the poor, struggling woman, so she felt it wise to keep her distance. One evening as she cycled past the workshop she heard dishes breaking and the high, tiny shriek of Lois expressing some doubts. She felt like a rat but she figured she was best out of Beaver’s way.

  One humid January day while the remainder of a cyclone brought low cloud and brooding air down across the central coast, Georgie rode back from the post office with a sheaf of bills for Jim and a letter addressed to her in a hand she didn’t recognize.