Dirt Music

  When it was finished she got up and went room to room to open cupboards and drawers. In the main bedroom she tried on sun-bleached dresses that were way too big for her. Lu’s sister-in-law was, in Warwick Jutland’s sweet words, too much woman for her. She felt like a girl trying on her mother’s gear. You could make fists where that woman’s breasts had been and Georgie had neither belly nor hips enough to give those frocks shape. She picked through underthings balled haphazardly in a drawer. In a trunk at the foot of the bed she found a wedding dress wrapped in cellophane. Beneath it, parcelled in the same material, was a mighty stash of old cannabis.

  There was a shoebox of photos. The brother had a sleepy look about him. His hair was black and there was always some kind of knowing grin on his face. There was more grey than blue in his eyes. The woman was all hair and boobs and mouth. The mouth was sensuous, nearly ugly, always open. Her kids looked feral, their silky white hair askew, faces happy, dirty, weary.

  Georgie looked through the kids’ room but didn’t linger. It was too sad.

  And then somehow it was March with autumn in the air and a blanket on the bed at night. The days were still warm—hot, even—but the sting went out of the day the moment the sun hit the sea. Georgie’s father had disavowed her and, for some reason she couldn’t get out of her, Jude refused to see her when she visited. The others maintained a frosty silence. At home Jim was getting irritable. He found fault with the boys at every turn. There was an ashen look about him and he seemed to be losing weight. He spent more time in his office at night. His conversation with Georgie was civil but distracted.

  Beaver had gone into a funk. He filled her little diesel drums with barely a word. And with all the time she spent driving up and down the highway to the farm she hardly saw Rachel either. The one occasion they did have, one evening at the jetty, Rachel broke off the usual pleasantries to declare that there were times in your life when you needed to shake yourself off, drag yourself to your feet and bloodywell act. She sounded exasperated, as though this speech had been a long time coming, and Rachel looked so close to tears that if she hadn’t immediately climbed into her Land Rover and driven off, Georgie might have hugged her and blurted it all out to her—that she was acting, that she already had a plan, that everything would be all right.

  Georgie went every day to the Fox place. The trips energized her. She felt some confidence returning. The days she admitted to having been anywhere at all she passed off as trips to see Jude, but she needn’t have bothered lying because Jim never asked. It seemed that his mind was elsewhere.

  One of those days Georgie rolled an old drum down to the sandspit at the riverbend and began burning junk. It took her all morning and half the afternoon to incinerate Darkie’s clothes, the wedding dress, the dope and all those summer frocks. She made herself burn the children’s things, every stained tee-shirt and pair of shorts, the posters from their walls, the plastic toys and even their pillows. She spared Lu’s room, but she re-organized it to suit herself. She dusted the library and scrubbed the kitchen. She emptied every drawer of its snarls of guitar strings, rubber bands, masscards, allen keys, thimbles and knuckle bones. She saved the stained pair of Levi’s and the double bedspread until last. She’d figured out what the stains were. They were the only things she enjoyed burning.

  DEEP IN THE BOX of pirate tapes Georgie found one marked FOXS. The label was a Band-Aid and the scrawl that of a child. She hesitated a moment but then shoved it into the player anyway and perched on the sofa to listen.

  There was the raw sound of a room. A chair squawked on a wooden floor. A tap rushing on? Yes, and squeaking off. The kitchen. Georgie’s mouth went dry. Someone, a child, asked something in the distance. Up close someone else breathed.

  A guitar began to pick out a melody. It was simple and melancholic. A mandolin and violin joined in. And then someone began to sing. Georgie knew instantly that it was Lu. It made her chest tight to hear it. She didn’t know the song but it was some Celtic-sounding air, the story of a king whose queen lay dying in childbirth after nine days in labour. It was beautiful but there was something savage and unbearable about it. Hearing his boyish tenor only made it harder.

  When the song ended there was a long silence. A sigh.

  Geez, I could murder a beer, said a man. Georgie figured it was Darkie.

  That’s the saddest song in the universe, said the little girl close to the microphone. So—they were her sighs, her breathing before. Her proximity was startling.

  That’s why we need a beer, Bird, said Darkie.

  Instruments clunked. Somebody tuned a string. The chair scraped and there was the suck of the fridge door.

  Did he do the right thing, Lu? asked the little girl. She does ask him: Open my right side and find my baby. But he won’t. Queen Jane—she dies. And it’s so awful.

  Go on, Bird, said the mother. Be tea soon. Go out and play.

  Lu? the child persisted.

  Well, mate, said Luther Fox. I dunno. The old king, he’s frightened, I spose. Would have been pretty radical in those days, doing an emergency caesarian. He says, If I lose the flower of England I shall lose the branch too.

  I hate that, said Bird.

  Never mind. The bub gets born. And it’s just a song, right?

  Too sad.

  If you squeeze the Queen of England, Lu sang impromptu to the same tune, you can seize her ranch too, you can seize her ranch too.

  Lu! howled the girl amid laughter.

  Sorry, Bird. I’m a republican.

  Tell me!

  Tell you what, love?

  What you’d do. If it was you.

  Me?

  Doesn’t have a queen, said a little boy with an adenoidal honk.

  Fair point.

  Shut up, Bullet.

  Bird.

  Tell me? the girl asked.

  You don’t always get a choice, said Lu, between a right thing and a wrong thing.

  Oh, Bird said sounding confused.

  Oi, turn that thing off, Bullet.

  The boy farted. The tape jolted into silence.

  Georgie ejected it from the machine and dropped it back into the pile. She stood at the window beside the ruined piano. She felt that she’d trespassed, but she also felt trespassed upon.

  That afternoon she walked up to the stones on the hill and pulled out that tea tin to examine the contents. There was nothing remarkable about them. The little single-word notes were odd. The tin smelled of boronia and of tea or just dust, maybe. She replaced the cache in the rock’s side and stood there for a time to listen to the hum of insects and the endless note of wind through the fronds of the grasstrees.

  Georgie went to Beaver’s to order a delivery of diesel and bottled gas to the farm. Before she’d even told him where to take the stuff he was rolling his eyes and throwing a rag at his feet.

  Mate, you’ve got shit for brains. He’s not comin back.

  She shrugged.

  Oh, the shrug. It’s so Jennifer Jason Leigh.

  I’m gonna miss you, Beaver.

  You bet your pert little arse you will, he said without smiling.

  She took to playing ‘Kumbayah’ on Luther Fox’s tarnished steel guitar. From the sheet music in the library she taught herself the chords to ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ and doubled her repertoire. She liked the feel of the instrument, the way it zinged and jangled on her legs.

  She lay for hours in the bathtub. The pasta lunches she made for herself filled the house with the smell of garlic. She read novels on the sofa or swinging in the rocker and some days she took a bricklike poetry anthology down to the shade of paperbarks at the riverbend. Wordsworth, Blake and Keats were bruised with underscorings. Robinson Jeffers, Heaney, R. S. Thomas, Les Murray and Judith Wright bore asterisks and exclamation marks in various hands.

  Some mornings Georgie did nothing more than try on Lu’s many fingerpicks. She lay on the sofa flexing her hand while the sunlight flashed off brass and plastic and tortoiseshell. They
made her feel like a different creature, those glinting claws.

  Each day that autumn Georgie collected the mail with a surge of anticipation. It took time to admit to herself the fact that she had begun to expect a sign. Nothing seemed to happen but the conviction grew. The only letter addressed to her was from Avis McDougall, who announced her imminent release from hospital after weeks of surgery. Her emails were all from demented strangers or marketing sharks who’d bought her details from other businesses. Silence from the family, though she tried to call them.

  Jim barely spoke.

  Georgie decided to move her stuff down in stages.

  HE WHEELED THE CRUISER into the sorry-looking farmyard with the jerrycans gulping in the back. The old unpainted house was dark and above it the night sky was blank.

  He grabbed the bottle from between his thighs and took a gulp. The beer was almost warm now. Lightheaded with fumes he wound the window down to get a draught of clean, dry, dusty air. He wanted to get out to stand clear of the stink of petrol but he would not allow himself—he was afraid of what he would surely do.

  Torching the joint wouldn’t cauterize bad luck the way you wanted it to. Nor would it free you of that sensation of being watched and judged by whatever seething, hateful purpose was at work in the world. But, by Christ, it’d have its satisfactions.

  If he got out of the vehicle—under any damn pretext—he knew he’d probably go ahead and do it, he’d light up the fucking night, he’d put stars where there were none and it wasn’t as though a man didn’t have cause.

  And yet within the first few seconds of being there he knew he wasn’t going to. Hadn’t he proven a point to himself? Just sitting here wild as fuck, with the means and the inclination and not doing it, wasn’t that proof-positive you weren’t doomed to repeat yourself forever?

  He finished the beer and steeled himself for the drive back. So bloody tired.

  SHE SAW LU FOX kneeling in a urinous haze. The sun was a penny. He dug in the earth with the bushfire sky behind him. He paused a moment and beckoned. Georgie squatted alongside him to see the black steel pipe beneath the surface with its rash of valves and taps. Saw him twist each in turn. One spewed numbers, another laughter. There were little jets of every odour: your mother, the smell of the back of your arm, food, shit, decay, soap. She heard the cries of children, saw photosynthesis. Chunks of information spurted out like sausage meat. From one tap there was just salt and from the next the smell of fresh-minted money. Lu went forth like a dog digging, with a spray of dirt fanning from between his thighs, until he revealed an infernal network of pipes beneath the earth that seemed to leach and store and ferment every moment of time and experience from beneath their feet. Everything that ever happened was there. She didn’t understand why or who did this or what became of it.

  She began to cry from bewilderment and anxiety.

  And then he looked up, took a peck of dirt, spat on it and rolled it into a yellow pellet. He pressed it gently into her ear and smiled. It sang. Like the inside of a shell. Like a choir on a single, sustained note. Like a bee in her ear.

  GEORGIE SLIPPED back into town each day before three o’clock when school got out. Today, easing the little Mazda into the garage, she wondered whether anyone had begun to notice the extra space since she’d begun taking a carton down the highway every other day. She doubted it. Jim was preoccupied. She was gone most of the week now. She did her domestic duties in frenzied bouts in the morning before the boys went to school. Nobody seemed the wiser.

  Upstairs there were five messages on the machine. Most of them were incomprehensible squawks of excitement and congratulation and it was only Jim’s curt voice at the tail that enlightened her. He sounded tired and flat but you could hear his deckies whooping and shouting in the background.

  We’ll be in just after three, he said. When we’ve unloaded we’ll go straight to the pub. Bring the boys.

  Jim didn’t go to the pub anymore. There could only be one reason for the visit—the traditional requirement of shouting the bar at the end of a killer day.

  Georgie switched on the VHF and caught the vibe on the air. Clearly he’d found the mother lode; he’d killed the pig. You could hear it in the urgency and awe of the radio talk, the admiration tinged with bitterness and the cagey enquiries about co-ordinates.

  While she waited for the boys to get in from school she took up the binoculars and picked Raider steaming in across the bank and into the passage through the reef.

  At four the pub was pandemonium. Georgie had seen it once before and heard stories of other big catches and celebrations to match. In White Point you paid homage to peaks in luck with the same seriousness you employed in ignoring the troughs. You partied for fear that such good fortune might never return. But on a day like this, with a haul so mind-bogglingly huge that it seemed almost supernatural, you had to expect that they would run amok.

  By five Georgie had retreated to the grass outside to spare the boys the worst of it. They were hyper and happy but they didn’t need to see barmaids in g-strings having their tee-shirts sprayed with beer from water pistols. The pool tables were like paddle pools, their felt tops spattering under dancing feet. She wondered if this was the kind of gathering the Fox family had ever been called in to entertain with mere guitars and fiddles. Christ, it’d be like being thrown into a bear pit. As it was the jukebox was killing itself to deliver AC/DC and ZZ Top at the volume required. A bare-arsed deckie dived over the bar and returned so fast you’d swear he’d hit a trampoline on the other side. There was shouted laughter and the sound of breaking glass. She saw Yogi in there and Shover McDougall. Beaver had closed early. He seemed miraculously able to avoid her gaze. She recognized a dozen scab-lipped surfers, parents from the schoolyard, faces from the supermarket. A few had neighbourly smiles for her but none spoke. Everyone was there except Rachel and Jerra.

  Jim came out in a wave of back-slapping, looking solemn for a man who’d just made a nurse’s annual salary in a day. His polaroids swung from his neck. The boys shook his hand soberly and the four of them moved across to sit on the grassy edge that gave onto the beach. Gulls hung over them. The sun leaned toward the sea and in its glare the boats toiled at their moorings.

  How many? asked Josh. How many crays?

  We ran out of crates, said his father. We had to bag them like the old days and put the deck hose on them. We had to empty the ice hold when we ran out of bags.

  Good luck or good management? Georgie asked, teasing.

  Neither.

  Enjoy yourself. I’ll take them home and feed them.

  Wait up for me, he murmured.

  Just then Avis McDougall stepped outside holding her arm like a newborn. Georgie grabbed the boys and slid onto the beach just as Avis laid eyes on Jim.

  About nine that evening Jim came up the terrace steps from the beach and sat down heavily beside her. The boys were asleep. The air was cool. She needed a cotton windcheater in order to sit outside. Jim kicked off his deck shoes.

  Quite a day, said Georgie.

  They’re still at it, he murmured in a bewildered tone.

  Spose you have to hand it to them. Go hard or go home, huh?

  Well, I’m too old for it.

  It was quiet for a while. Jim smelled of sweat and beer.

  You asked if it was luck or brains, he said in the end. You know, right away, before we’d even finished pulling the first line I knew it was something else. It was too weird. Come noon, I was sure of it.

  Sure of what?

  That it was some kind of sign.

  Sign?

  I’m pulling the pin, Georgie. Boris can see the season out from the bridge. I’m going away for a while.

  What are you talking about? she asked with a nervous laugh.

  I’ve enrolled the boys in a boarding school for next semester. I want you to come with me.

  God, Jim, you’ve had a few drinks. Maybe we should talk tomorrow when all the excitement’s worn off.

  Deb
bie’s sister is collecting them on Saturday.

  Do they know about this? The boys?

  No.

  You mean you’ve been planning it?

  Weeks, he murmured. But today confirmed it.

  A sign. I thought you weren’t superstitious.

  I’m not. This is different.

  But the boys, Jim.

  They’re my kids. You know I was gonna do it eventually. And you, you’re halfway out the door; they don’t need to see it. This past few months’ve been a ragged bloody mess and it’s time to make some decisions. It feels clear to me.

  Georgie’s throat was suddenly tight. She thought of that bloody envelope.

  It’s Broome, isn’t it? she said. You’re going to Broome.

  Yes. And I want you to come. It’s important.

  You know where Lu is, don’t you?

  As good as.

  Why? Why should I go?

  Jim sighed. Why move into his house? Why pretend you don’t want him?

  Answer me, Jim.

  I can’t. Not here. Not tonight.

  Then I won’t go.

  You’ll go.

  Don’t threaten me.

  Jesus, Georgie, I’m not threatening you. Look, he said twisting toward her in his chair in a manner so earnest it alarmed her even more. Haven’t you ever felt the need to make amends?