Fox stops playing. The night sky is purple now and red stars spin earthward. There are crickets in the trees and a nightjar whooshing by. Back in the rocks quolls scuffle. He’s awake. Not drone-stoned but conscious and present; his knees are sore, he needs a leak, but the sky is wild with red falling stars as though he’s dreamt them or sung them up. They’re like windblown embers pitching out toward the mainland for minutes at a time until it’s just purple night again.
He lights a candle for the comfort of light and to eat some rice gone sour in the heat since noon. He dabs hanks of cured fish in chilli dust and eats, troubled by the image of the stones. It’s not a memory. It’s something else and it frightens him. He resolves to give the droning a rest.
Next day he’s tired from broken sleep, and he gathers oysters feeling woolly-headed and abstracted from things. Hunkered amidst the burbling rocks at low tide he chips the big blacklips from the boulders with the back of his machete. There’s a tune in his head as he works, a repeated descending phrase. He opens shells with the bladetip and eats his fill, puzzling over the music. It’s the same over and again, like a tree endlessly dropping its leaves. Each note floats inexorably, almost unbearably, to the ground in its own time. Cellos and a bell. The unravelling thread of it is familiar. He tries to bring his mind to bear. The music makes him queasy with its familiarity. He fills his calico bag with oyster meat but the signature phrase rises through his heels; it chimes in his spine, and resonates in his neck. And then it’s gone, fading like the rush of a vehicle passing distant upon a highway. Bess, he thinks. That’s the music. Bess’s music on the torturous Roebuck Plains on the way to Broome. Death music. Arvo, she said, play Arvo in the arvo! Our little Estonian mate! He knows! And Fox is certain that he’s just felt the old lady’s death. Right here, right now. He stands there a while and then he lifts a hand palm outward. Can’t decide what the gesture means; doesn’t know what else to do.
He takes up his bag and heads for camp. The dead, he thinks, it’s always the dead. I’m hearing dead people and singing their words. I’m dreaming of them, that’s all I do. All my people are dead people.
When he gets to the boabs on the beach he squats in the shade a moment and opens the bag to smell the clean, briny flesh. Georgie Jutland. That’s who it reminds him of, that pure smell. The smell on his hands that day, those days, that one night. Even the scent in her hair after swimming—like clean seagrass, shiny against your lips. Well, that’s one live one, he thinks.
He bolts for camp thinking in flashes and hot arcs and he blunders into a low branch that nearly takes his eye out. Lying sprawled in the dry litter he berates himself for his carelessness. He gets up shaken and bathes his face at the shallow pool on the camp ledge. No more singing. No more music. Or you’ll go insane. You always knew it. Since the day you came back alone to the farm with that awful static in your ears, you understood. For weeks it persisted, that stuffed sensation in your ears; it was like the hiss and fuzz left in your head after a rock gig, the half-deafness of bombardment. And it protected you, numbed you a little. But when it wore off you were naked. You had to put yourself out of reach. Of music first, and also memory because one lived in the other, but people too, because they could say anything, do anything, bring anything out at any moment and do you in without even noticing.
For a treat he fries oyster meat in precious oil and a handful of crushed ants, drizzles in some soy and sprinkles chilli pepper across it and feasts. He savours the physical fact of it, the meal’s every detail. This is what’s required. Attention to now.
FOX WORKS on his rebuilt bough shelter and thatches it with spinifex and palm leaves. He weaves himself a pandanus brim to fortify the ruin of his cloth hat. He stockpiles pulpy mangrove wood along the ledge and goes searching for birds’ eggs. Some days he plays fitfully with the sharks but he’s cautious about it now; it seems like a waste of energy. The taut nylon drone hums in the afternoon breeze but he doesn’t play it anymore. And yet memories flash at him, persistent and chaotic, like creatures spilling through a torn fence.
The image of the old man pulling down all the icons and snatching the candles. The cold fury that came upon him the day he got shot of Rome for good. And no idea why. Only their mother knew. Old Wally went into Protestantism like a hard man into a cold bath. Had Fox been born a few years later he might have been a Calvin and not just a Luther. But then, one day before they carted him off to die, the old boy sat up in bed and made the sign at the empty doorway, then crossed himself absently, methodically, the way a man shuts down a machine or locks a vehicle.
He thinks of Bird climbing in beside him smelling of pee, of her crouched in winter sunlight over the cat’s cradle, and those little message pellets—SORRY. And Bullet asleep—asprawl on his bed, cupping his little dick and mouthbreathing. He considers the bighearted chang of a dreadnought guitar ringing up your arm, in your lap, down the heels of your boots. And the three of you out on the verandah in the evening, feet up on the rail, swinging some smoky J. J. Cale thing, knowing that this was it, you were blessed, that they had real music in them and you could only be glad, for without them you were nothing. Those evenings you knew what was holy. Just the smell of the night and the smiles on their faces and the chords slipping each to each.
But he remembers, too, way before then, the ugly orange pumpkin of the school bus pulling up on the highway with Dogger Dean at the wheel. The smell of Brut 33. Sal with her suntanned cheek pressed to the glass as they climbed up out of the shade of the fruit stand. The old Leyland hawking into gear as they lurched down the aisle to where she waited on the long back seat. Those mornings she and Darkie kissed and passed Juicy Fruits tongue to tongue, their hands all over each other. They made feeding noises right there beside him. Darkie tugging at the nipple pressed up in her white blouse. With him, his brother, right at the end of his elbow. The lowing sound in her neck sent a charge through his body. The paddocks blew by. His bag crushed into his lap. The blood and bone smell of her that rose every time she shifted her thighs. He’s guilty about the memory, for having it at all, for letting it back. It dishonours the dead. It shames him.
Down around the rocks where the water comes in deep, a great school of spanish mackerel rises to storm a ball of baitfish. He snatches up the rod, ties on a chrome lure and goes down to cast for one. He picks his way out across barnacle-crusted rocks, wishing he’d thought to pull on his boots, but the sight of those spaniards mauling bait is too much to resist delaying for footwear. Birds shower the water and snatch up the wounded anchovies. The surface boils with silver and black flashes. Fox lands a cast outside them and winds for all he’s worth and gets an instant hook-up. The reel screeches and he spits on the spool to ease his burning thumbs. The thing feels bigger than him; it slams the rod over, bends it to the very butt, and takes line so fast that the steel base of the spool begins to show through. He has to stop it. He cranks on the brake and suddenly he’s sliding down the rock across oysters and barnacles sharp as broken glass. Rod and reel fly from his hands. He skids into the water with his feet shredded. He scrabbles back on hands and elbows, sees blood in the water, looks out to see the rod skipping across the bay.
He tries to limp back to camp but completes the trip on all fours. He rests a while at the remnant waterhole and washes his feet to see how bad it is. There are gouges and lacerations every which way. Pieces of shell are embedded like shrapnel beneath the surface.
He crawls along to camp and pulls the tweezers from the bottom of his pack. He washes his feet again and sets them on a clean piece of driftwood. Then he takes the tweezers and begins to dig. The pain is terrible but the sensation of the steel so deep in his skin is worse. He gouges and probes and fishes, willing himself to keep at it for fear of lameness and infection and God knows what else. When he drags out the first inoffensive-looking skerrick of black shell, his hands are shaking and he doubts he can go on with the rest. The longer he procrastinates the worse his dread becomes. He tries a little ditty to distr
act himself a moment and that’s how he goes on, in a kind of humming, groaning, wincing trance, never letting go of the riff longer than a second or two lest he give up again altogether.
It’s nobody’s fault but mine (no sir!) Ain’t nobody’s fault but mine(fuckin shit!) if I die and my soul gets lost, it’s nobody’s fault but mine.
And the tune takes him off a little way into thoughts of Darkie and Sal. Hard thoughts in the pain. Disloyal thoughts.
That sideways look that Darkie had. He never looked at you. You loved and loved him and always wondered and despised yourself for your wondering. Yes, you did. Hated yourself for it secretly. But he barely glanced. It was slant, like a bullock sizing you up. And Sal’s laugh—heh, heh, heh—from girlhood onwards, the same snicker, from behind the hair and all that glossy skin, as though she was laughing at you, not with you. Neither of them—you might as well bloody admit it—neither of them ever lifted a finger. It was always you out in the melons, you at the fences and up to your elbows in the generator, you in the kitchen and at the bloody school parent nights. Jesus, you bought the Christmas presents, you did all the saving for housekeeping. And mostly you didn’t mind; you were happy to be along. Wasn’t it their place, wasn’t Darkie the eldest son? Besides, there were the kids, there was the music and you were your brother’s brother. He was your hero, wasn’t he? The boy could play a wet string bag. It was what saved you all from complete disgrace. It made you battlers, not losers; it was what earned you that last grudging shred of respect in the district, and in your heart you always believed that it was because of them, not you.
And yet, when you let yourself think it, what a pair they really were. Their need for one another was ravenous but it didn’t extend to anybody else. They were fond of you and they loved the kids in their distracted way but there was no passion, no sacrifice in it. What they loved was playing; it was the best of them. For years you thought the music was in them, that it came from them. You knew your own instincts were good, that you felt the music deeper but that your playing couldn’t match it, didn’t reach their level of virtuosity. Didn’t you tell yourself three thousand nights of your life that you forgave them the rest because of what they could do? Because of the music? But that only held when you believed in them as creatures inspired, as sources of the music. Now that they’re dead, though, you’re just willing it to be so; you don’t really believe it anymore. You always wanted them to be so much more special than they were; you needed it in order to keep yourself in line, to make living with them bearable, so you wouldn’t lose the kids. But beaten down like this, with nothing to protect you, with a piece of shiny steel going halfway into your foot over and over again, you just don’t have the energy left to convince yourself anymore, you’re down to the bare wires here. The music wasn’t in them. They barely felt it. They just liked playing. They loved performance and riffing off one another and being good at something and squeezing a reputation out of going hard and fast to raise themselves out of the old White Point contempt. But they were just players, people who knew their licks. Darkie was an inspired mimic. He loved playing but was only fond of music. Both of them were as careless with it as they were with their children.
There it is, he tells himself in a cloud of pain, you’ve thought it.
There, like your suffering prick every morning on the school bus. Like Darkie sliding his finger under your nose so you could smell her. Why do that to your brother? And why after those first, mad gigs, why drive out across the Buckridge tracks to the coast with the radio spitting the Ramones so they could park on the beach and go at it like you weren’t even there? Why climb out and lie all over the hood and leave you there watching her hair all over the windscreen while the car pitched and the keys swung and jangled in the ignition? Why do that? Was that just carelessness, too, or did they enjoy the cruelty of it? You might have murdered them for that, for years of it. And then when they were gone? You and those jeans. Is that what it was really all about? Revenge? Did you imagine yourself getting her in the end to spite him? No. That’s too much, that’s not how it was. It was just a shape he was responding to, the outline of a woman, not Sal, not someone with her voice, her blank pauses and her strange domineering needs. She was one-dimensional, like an adolescent’s idea of a woman. He wanted something more intricate, more animated. He wanted some wit, some memory, some kindness, someone who saw him, saw through him, saw the music of him. That’s what he conjured up night after night like an alchemist in their bedroom, like some opium-addled poet going again to the darkness for what couldn’t live in nature. God knows, it’s shaming enough to remember but there’s a shred of solace in the knowledge that he might have wanted something better than to be his brother and to have his wife. The kids were the best of them; that’s what he did have. The rest was desperation and unholy Romance.
If I die…
His hands shake again now and his feet have stopped bleeding. Soul gets lost. His throat is sore but he doesn’t relent from his growling chant. Fault but mine. There’s nothing left. The fragments of shell lie on the driftwood and he douses his feet in antiseptic and binds them and stuffs them into his boots to keep them clean. His whole body is slick with sweat. He crawls deeper into the shade and lapses into silence.
Shadows morph across the dirt as the day wanes. He lies on his swag in a fugue of shock. It’s as though he’s robbed himself of something. And now, in addition to everything else, he has to mourn his idea of them. It leaves him more diminished than liberated. All he can do, while he lies there with his feet throbbing, is to wonder why he stayed, why he persisted. Why he’s lived this past year in homage to these people even after their death.
Why? he asks himself in the falling dark. Because you loved them. You did it out of love. And owning up to what they were really like won’t change that.
THAT NIGHT Fox dreams that the boy Axle comes up the beach under moonlight. He emerges from the solemn mob of boabs with gills in his chest, horizontal slits that give out thin bands of light, and as he approaches, labouring somewhat across the million white shells, he drags a wing like a wounded crow and calls out, teeth flashing, in the chord of D-major.
Fox makes himself walk. The moment it’s light enough he pads his feet in an extra pair of socks and hobbles about to prove to himself that he’s not lame. Within minutes he has to sit down again but he knows he can get back up and walk if he has to. With no rod and reel now, it’s important to hold onto the knowledge that he can still walk. Lameness is death.
Within a couple of days he realizes that the only way he can fish successfully with handlines is to troll up and down the deeps in the kayak trailing a lure as he paddles. It’s hard going but it saves his feet and hours of fruitless casting. He catches mackerel that tow him so fast he fears a capsize. When he fillets them out on the beach the sharks fight over their football-sized heads and their two-metre backbones.
He cleans his feet twice a day until his antiseptic cream is gone and all he can do is dab paw-paw into the puffy wounds and hope for the best.
Some days he thinks of nothing but the hairs on the back of Georgie Jutland’s arm. He remembers lying there like a dog while she pulled ticks out of him. Her breath on his skin. The feeling of calm. Funny to think it but those few hours with her he was unafraid. Maybe he was too tired to be afraid. But he begins to think that it was more than that. At the centre of Georgie’s wildness there was a calm. You could feel it in her hands. There was a competence, an authority, a seriousness. Yes, and passion. Almost despite herself she was a person of substance. He trusted her. And when he woke in that house and she was gone he was just plain scared. Before he met her, Fox was furtive. He was cunning. He was never scared.
He begins to plan another raid on the cache down the gulf. He needs another rod and reel and there’s food there and tools he could do with. While he’s down that way he’ll go the extra distance to the plateau and hike up to visit Menzies and Axle. The dream has stirred him and he fools with the idea of playin
g that cheap little guitar again. Yes, when his feet are completely healed, when he can manage the walk.
He’s on the beach one morning stepping gingerly in his boots when he hears a confusing drone. It sticks in his ears but it feels like something outside of him. The plane bursts from the island bluff so suddenly, with such glossy redness, such a toothy-faced radial engine and shattering noise, that he stands there like a stunned mullet for a second before diving into the shade of the boabs. The shadow of it splashes across the beach and Fox rises on his elbows to see it bank out across the gulf and shrink to the size of an insect. It disappears behind a headland at such low altitude that it seems to be seaborne. Less than an hour later, while he’s still crouched uncertainly in the shade, the thing reappears down the gulf and rises from the water to list out across the mainland with its white floats flashing in the sun.
Next day he sees the white streak of a boat wake way out on the water. He rakes the beach clear of footprints and gathers up anything that might give away his presence. He waits up at camp for the inevitable and by morning it comes in the unmistakeable form of a bow wave.
Lying in the shade of his rock shelter, and hidden by the lattice of the fig, he watches the boat skate into the island’s lee where the mackerel are. It’s a solid beamy thing. Aluminium plate, maybe eighteen feet. Open, with a casting deck like a bass boat or a barra punt. Three men. They troll for a while, making parallel sweeps only a stone’s throw from the beach. One at the rear tiller. The other two holding rods. Fox smells fumes. Now and then the helmsman’s face flashes pink and Fox senses him looking his way. They have strikes and break-offs. The motor goes silent and they drift a while, jigging with white lures. Now and then the silver flash of a jumping fish rises above the water. He hears men’s laughter.