Georgie thought of the night she got back from Lu’s place. The white car pulling out of Jim’s driveway. It was this car. It was Avis who was running to Jim.
I think you’ve been watching me, Avis.
My conscience is clear.
Except for the dog.
Yes, said the woman beginning to weep from beneath her mask of blood. Except the dog.
Georgie sat there watching Avis McDougall weep. She held her good hand. It was cold. The bad arm looked chalky now. She prayed that this woman did not die. She prayed for her own sake.
I’m sorry, she whispered. To Avis. Whoever.
The siren rolled down across the paddocks.
THAT EVENING Georgie was too shattered to cook. The phone rang incessantly. She let Jim field the calls. The boys were hyper from the afternoon’s events; she sent them out to buy pizzas and the four of them ate on the terrace as the sun set into the sea.
From what I hear that was pretty slick work today, said Jim when the boys had peeled off to watch TV. He looked impressed but also amused. Avis McDougall had survived and the word was they might yet save her arm.
I’ve added to my reputation, said Georgie.
Yeah, the bra was the golden touch.
I had the tourniquet in the wrong place.
Saved her life.
People like Avis can’t be killed, she said without conviction.
You look worn out. This thing with Jude. You’re grinding yourself into the dirt over it.
It’s not a thing.
And you really sold the boat?
Georgie nodded. The sky was a bushfire on the seaward horizon; another sunset, a lost day.
You must hate your father, he murmured.
No, she said. I love him.
I understand.
Tell me about your father.
Some other time.
In three years there’s never been a time, Jim. You know, I thought it was grief the first year or so. Then I realized that I wasn’t someone you wanted to tell things to.
Let it go, George. You’ve had a tough day.
I don’t know anything about you.
I’ve been thinking about the end-of-season trip, he said. I’ve gone off the idea of the Maldives. Indonesia’s a bloody mess. Fiji’s a war zone half the time. Europe’s—well, I can’t be bothered. I’ve been thinking about Broome. Some saltwater fly fishing. I want that forty-pound barramundi before I’m too old to cast a fly.
Georgie sat there a while before the word even registered. She was busy considering the distance between them, this abiding silence. Broome?
Why Broome? she asked.
Like I said. Barramundi. You know, July in the north. Not too humid then. Sit on Cable Beach and drink daiquiris.
You don’t drink daiquiris.
Besides, you can meet the cousins.
In Broome.
They’re pearl divers, most of em. Half the family’s from there.
But you never—
So now I’m telling you.
What brought this on?
Cousin of mine called the other day. Just an idea.
Georgie walked down to Beaver’s. He’d locked the pumps and was sitting out the back in his wreckyard. His eyes and the beercan glinted in the light spilling from the back door but he was mostly a shadow.
Hey, where’d you learn the bra thing, watching M*A*S*H?
Georgie picked her way across to him. He was on the dimpled hood of Avis McDougall’s Camry. You could smell the blood in the heat.
Shover wants this thing impounded. He suspects foul play. Sabotage.
Bullshit, she said with a laugh.
That’s the word. Want a beer?
Georgie declined. She couldn’t bring herself to sit on the Camry so she leaned against some other hulk in the gloom.
Is it because I’m self-obsessed and totally incurious that I don’t know a bloody thing about anybody, Beaver, or is it just that nobody tells me anything?
Beaver’s laugh was wheezy. You want my honest opinion or my shopkeeper’s arse-kiss?
The truth.
Truth is, it’s both.
Ah.
Nobody ever expected you to stay. Why blab to a blow-in? Anyway, you always kept to yourself. And, be honest, you come from a different life.
Georgie smarted at this but didn’t take it up with him.
Avis reckons Jim’s gone soft. That he changed after Debbie died. That true?
That’s the theory.
Changed how? She makes it sound like he mellowed.
That’s the word.
Georgie let a few moments pass in silence. She was fishing and Beaver didn’t want to bite.
We all have regrets, she murmured.
Beaver crushed his can. Yes, he said. I wish I was William Powell. I’ll bloody never get over it.
I’m serious, Beaver.
No, you’re not. Someone like you, the past is just an awkward place to visit. That’s how much regret there is. Some people…you can’t even imagine, Georgie.
Because I went to a flash school? The silver spoon in my mouth?
And because you’re a woman.
That’s a load of crap and you know it.
Some men, he hissed, some men aren’t embarrassed about things they’ve done, Georgie. They don’t get pangs about their past. They’re fuckin terrified of what they’ve been. And they’re scared that they might be the same person they used to be.
You…you’re talking about yourself, then?
Beaver laughed bitterly and tossed the can. It bounced off a wreck in the dark.
Actually, he said, I’m talking about Jim Buckridge. Go home, Georgie, you’re givin me a headache. I’ve just finished my first day as an abandoned husband. There’s no way I’m sittin here all night workin through your little problems. Thought you’d come to cheer a bloke up.
You think he’s changed?
Give me strength!
Okay, I’m going.
Good thinkin.
But Georgie couldn’t walk away.
No, she said. I have to know.
Shit! Ask yeself—can anybody change?
Just tell me if he has.
Well, Beaver said at last. Somethin’s got up him. Like you said—people have regrets.
And that’s your answer? she cried.
Gawd, Georgie. Why stay? Why’d you ever stay?
Same as you, I guess. Thought it was the quiet life. I settled for something instead of nothing.
Don’t compare yeself to me, mate, he said hotly. You can go wherever you want. Right now I wish you’d go home and leave me alone.
I’m sorry.
There you go, your enormous regrets again.
• • •
That night Georgie’s mind wouldn’t settle. The sight of her sister, the ordeal by the roadside, the bottled fury in Beaver kept her awake and she thought of Rachel’s exasperated prodding the other day and this creeping doubt she was stuck with. She was exhausted but she couldn’t let go and she knew a few vodkas were not the answer they truly promised to be as she lay there in the dark. In the end, out of desperation, she relented somewhat and took a mild sedative.
By the time she woke next morning, Jim was long gone.
It was Sunday. She drank coffee while the boys prepared the dinghy for crabbing. They seemed only mildly disappointed that she wouldn’t be accompanying them. When they were safely out on the lagoon she went to Jim’s office and began to snoop.
It was a tiny airless room. The window which looked across town to the steep white dunes inland was never opened. Although it was next to their bedroom Georgie rarely went in there except to clean. It had, she knew, been Debbie’s sewing room. Before Georgie came to White Point, Jim used the desk in the livingroom, but since then he’d retreated here. There was a pine desk, a filing cabinet, a port for his laptop and a few low bookshelves. The walls were bare. It was hardly the den she remembered her father holing up in. By comparison it was a purely utilitarian space. There had
never been anything in the room to pique Georgie’s curiosity. She sat in the beige swivel chair and looked at the shelves. Tomes on shipbuilding, fisheries management, meteorology. Almanacs, tidebooks, a few novels like Deliverance, The Bonfire of the Vanities, East of Eden. Some war memoirs by Ray Parkin. Something called The Knights of Bushido. Dead Men Rising.
She felt strange going through the file cabinet. She was jittery just being in here. The files were the usual business stuff, bank and insurance records, correspondence of the Fishermen’s Association. Nothing to get interested in. But she was surprised to find the desk drawer locked. She searched for the key along the windowsill and the architrave above the door but found nothing. She went next door to the bedroom and opened his bedside drawer. She had lived with him three years and never done this before, open his desk or his bedside cabinet. It struck her now as amazing. What discreet, discrete lives they’d been leading. It was as though she remained a guest in both their minds.
In a cut-glass bowl beside a roll of antacid tablets and a couple of small bullets was the key.
Georgie went out into the livingroom and scanned the lagoon. The boys were setting crabnets.
She opened the drawer. It wasn’t much bigger than a shirt box. There was a white cotton blouse folded small. Size 10. It smelled only of wood. Beneath it was a green book. When she opened it she recognized it as the Anglican liturgy; a prayer book. There seemed to be no special markings in it. The breeze the pages made smelled of pine pitch; it rose in her face. Next she found two sheets of paper fixed by a rusty staple. Names ran down each page. The letters cut into the paper from the imprint of a manual typewriter. The names looked Japanese.
At the back of the drawer was a ziplock bag. Through the plastic you could see two teeth. Milk teeth, probably the boys’. Georgie smiled and set the bag back. Her fingertips rested on something wrinkled, more paper. Before she even smoothed it out on the desk she knew what it was. It had food smears on it from the kitchen bin. The boab tree stamp. The Broome postmark. Inside, the paper was still the colour of dried chilli. She put Luther Fox’s envelope back in the drawer and locked it.
five
FOX HOLES UP at a boarding house in Broome while a cyclone bears down from the Timor Sea. The hot, drumming rain that began within an hour of his arrival has cut the road out. Lightning splashes through the storm shutters. Even with the wind mounting, the air is thick and wet. Fox sleeps. Now that he’s stranded he’s slain by fatigue. He wakes now and then to thunderclaps or the screams of fighting drunks, but the sleep is dreamless.
By the third day, though, he’s restless. The cyclone veers away to expend itself in the desert but the coastal plain is flooded.
Fox walks through the fabled town with its Chinese shops, its corrugated iron storefronts and palm trees. The beaches are stained red from the run-off. Even in the downpour you sense the desert at the town’s back. At low tide the mangrove creeks are little more than rain gutters. At their mouths, pearl luggers tilt on exposed mudflats. The tourists seem to be gone. The faces hereabouts are red, yellow, black beneath their hats. Children wade in the main street. There are smatterings of Japanese calligraphy on red-stained walls. Beyond the port jetty and the mocha bay the sky is black. He half expects to run into Horrie and Bess. They’ll be stranded same as him. He dreads it.
He buys a sheaf of survey maps and spreads them out on the floor of his room. Inland there’s the Great Sandy Desert. Further north the coast looks like a dropped plate, all island shards and crazed rivermouths, and behind this lonely-looking fringe is a profusion of converging ranges and seasonal watercourses. Country he can barely imagine.
Since Wittenoom he’s had no goal, only a vague bearing. North. He could keep going right across the top—through the Northern Territory and into Queensland. Then work his way down the east coast, if he wanted. But the road has cured him of travel. What he wants is to slope off into the bush somewhere, do what he should have done more than a year ago instead of slinking around the edge of White Point like a feral dog. If you want to be left alone then clear out. Go somewhere clean. Some place with water and food so you’re not skulking at the margins to keep yourself alive. A place where you can stand alone, completely alone. No roads, towns, farms—no bloody civilians. Just walk off into the trees. It’s been lurking somewhere in his mind for days, beaten down by talk, by the frigging ordeal of other people and his own numbness. The idea of a place to be truly alone in—wilderness. And quite suddenly, there it is on a map beneath his fingers. He remembers it from the atlas, from the story Georgie told. This is the place. Somewhere to aim for.
He hitches out to the airport and finds a charter outfit. While he’s waiting for someone to appear at the desk he takes in the massive wall chart of the region. Beside it some wag has pinned a map of Ireland which has a similar land mass. Next to this, the same character has laboured to produce a montage wherein the state of Western Australia is made up of multiples of France.
Makes ya laugh, dunnit, says a pilot appearing in the doorway. In his shorts he has the look of a whippet.
Fox reaches up, puts his finger on Coronation Gulf. Can you fly here?
Can’t fly anywhere in this weather, mate. Everythin’s underwater. Outta range anyway, unless we make fuel stops. And like I said, all the strips are wet. Be a few days yet.
Fox lets his hand slip from the chart. The airconditioner rattles.
What about a floatplane? he asks, jerking his head toward the photos of the company’s modest fleet behind the desk.
In bits on the hangar floor, cob.
Fox purses his lips. The pilot looks at him, seems interested in his peeling face and scabby legs.
Flyin costs a bomb up here, mate.
Fox shrugs.
But if you’re keen and don’t mind waitin, we could bounce you up there in a few days.
I’ll think about it, says Fox.
I’ll bung your name on the sheet.
Well—
Just in case. You might get lucky. Where you stayin?
Fox gives him the address of the house above the bay.
Name?
Fox hesitates. Buckridge, he says.
That right? Jesus the country’s lousy with em.
That’s what they tell me, says Fox heading out the door.
That night he’s eating a mango from the tree in the yard when he overhears talk of the road to Derby being open by morning. The smell of a clove cigarette wafts along the verandah. Fox packs his kit. Before bed he sits down to write a letter to Georgie Jutland. He feels the need to explain himself but with a pencil and paper in hand he can’t make sense of his feelings. With her in the room, the smell of her in the air, he had a strange blaze of hope—a whole day of it. But it’s gone and he can only fill the hole with the old determination. A plan, a strategy. And maybe, when he’s settled, a routine. But how do you say this? How do you explain yourself?
He brushes dirt from his swag and looks at how it powders the floor like seasoning. He stoops and corrals the dust with the envelope. Takes a peck in his fingers.
Out on the muddy street he calls from a phone booth. He lets it ring in White Point until someone picks up. A small, hoarse voice.
Georgie?
But the voice is a child’s. He hangs up.
In the morning he hitches a ride north on Highway 1 with a mob of blackfellas in a five-tonne truck. Fifteen people sprawl around inside the steel cage amidst bedrolls and cardboard boxes full of supplies. No one says much. The slipstream and the road noise make conversation difficult. A couple of kids give him shy, curious looks. A toothless old fella offers him a swig from a warm bottle of Fanta. He declines.
They cross the swollen Fitzroy River at Willare Bridge. You can hear it over the sound of the truck. Trees and dead cattle loll in the churning pink current. The river is all over the floodplain.
Out on some intersecting dirt road a semi stands bogged to the axles, its driver out on the bullbar rolling himself a smoke.
/> The land glistens yellow, orange, red. White cockatoos rise into the charcoal sky. Thin trees. Mud. Cattle grids.
As they close on the town of Derby boab trees appear more frequently beside the road. Their smooth flanks shine after the rain. They stand fat and close, and to Fox they’re preposterous and lovely, like a crowd lining the highway, hip to hip, all arse and head-dress in the sun.
The old bloke with the Fanta leans in to Fox’s ear. Dis fulla, he says, pointing out a huge knobbly boab with boughs like obese arms. Same as my missus.
A ripple of laughter goes around the truck as though the joke’s been told before. Up against the cab a woman wags a finger.
At the airstrip Fox finds an open hangar where a boy is shoving a two-seater into position. When he asks about a charter he’s directed to the office. Chugger will fix him up. Chugger appears at the doorway, a silver-haired bloke in pressed shorts, a shirt with badge and epaulettes, and rubber thongs. He sucks his teeth when Fox asks about Coronation Gulf. They go in to look at the chart. The pilot points out the closest strip. It’s high on the plateau inland. It’s either that or a chopper and with half the inland cattle stations underwater there’s not a machine to spare. Besides, says Chugger, he’s not a chopper pilot.
How much? asks Fox. To the plateau.
A thousand bucks.
Fox peels off the notes.
Geez, yer keen, mate. Don’t have to pay today, yer know.
I want to go today, says Fox.
Comin back when?
One way.
You’re the boss, says the pilot, amused. Course there’s paperwork.
Fox counts off another hundred dollars.
Squeaky! the pilot calls. Fuel her up!
I need some stuff in town.
Allow me. I’ll shout you lunch.
Fox buys dried food, a waterbag, insect repellent, candles, sunscreen, lighters, mosquito coils, some first aid supplies to supplement his little box, a light machete, some thirty-kilo handlines, hooks, lures and a polytarp rolled tight as a newspaper. Then he chooses a telescopic fishing rod and a lightweight reel to match it. They look flimsy but everything else he sees is either too bulky or too heavy to carry all day.