Dirt Music
It’s him, she said.
He’s long gone, murmured the guide.
That your skillet?
Yep, Hopper said with a smile.
They looked out across the treetops. Behind its levee of mangroves the nearby mainland was spiky and dry.
So few trees there, said Georgie. And it’s like jungle here.
Fire, said Red. You get patches of rainforest over there, too, but only in the lee of big breakaways where the wind can’t blow the fire. Funny thing is, there’s more water over there than here.
Which is why he’s gone, said Jim.
That and he saw us coming. You can see clear to the plateau from here. He’s probably been gone since I first showed up this season.
Jesus, he could be bloody anywhere, said Jim.
Anywhere there’s food and water.
Somewhere on the island?
Nah. No water.
My guess is he’s camped along a creek or on the coast where he’s found a spring. Some place he can fish. He’s got himself a boat somehow. He’s no idiot.
Georgie thumbed the string in the tree. Oh. Oh. She felt the guide watching. Even when it stopped vibrating the breeze soughed over it enough to make her smile.
So what now?
It’s nearly beer o’clock, said Red. And I have to catch your dinner on the way home.
We can catch our own dinner, said Jim.
Well, said Red, that remains to be seen.
That evening they ate panfried fillets from the barramundi the guide had boated in the last of the light. Both of them had lost fish, Georgie from preoccupation and lack of conviction and Jim from uncharacteristic impatience. But the sight of Red’s fish leaping into the air with its gillplates flashing and rattling had stirred her. The fishing guide laughed as though it was the first fish he’d caught in his life; there was no need to ask him why he did this for a living.
After dinner they sat out under the stars while the tide burbled up the beach.
Tomorrow, said the guide as they sipped their beers, we’ll start working through all the freshwater spots. That’s all we can do, really.
What are our chances of finding this bloke? asked Jim.
If he doesn’t wanna be found? Nil. Might find his camp but all he’s gotta do is hide. He’s smart enough. He’ll hear us coming for miles.
Jim stirred. Bloke’s stealing your gear and it sounds like you admire him.
Hopper laughed. Well, you gotta hand it to him. Besides, it keeps you guessin. You should hear my clients talk about him. The pilots get em all wound up. Half the punters are lying in their swags at night waitin to get their throats cut. Seven days of freedom and safety and they’re fangin to get back to Sydney or wherever. They appreciate it, though. He gives em an excuse to be scared.
That didn’t make a lick of sense to me, said Georgie with a self-conscious laugh.
It’s like this, said Red. Half the people who fly in here for a week’s mad-dog sportfishin—at iniquitous cost, as you now realize—spend six nights lyin awake terrified. Now, they’re mostly from the city, so you expect a little culture shock, but I guarantee that if you took every spider, snake, shark, box jellyfish, wasp, sandfly and crocodile out of the equation—just wiped em out at the touch of a button—they’d still lie awake all night.
Well, there’s the heat, of course, said Georgie. And look how bright the moon is. And all the new smells and noises.
They’re shit-scared, if you’ll pardon the language. People are terrified of the wide, brown land.
And you have to reassure them, said Jim.
Mate, these are big beer-swillin blokes. You know, lawyers and surgeons and kick-arse CEOs. I don’t reassure em, I rip the piss out of em.
Jim had to laugh. It must eat into your return business.
Jim, they love it. They’re back every year for more.
Ritual humiliation, said Georgie.
I figure I’m just doin my bit for the nation, you know?
All three of them laughed and Jim’s prickliness subsided minute by minute. The guide had been puzzling over them all day, she felt, and now he’d decided how Jim might be managed. He was no fool.
About nine they called it a night and Georgie and Jim walked up to their insect domes a little way along the ridge. They were separated from the beach by a belt of spinifex. Georgie lay a while wondering if Lu wanted to be found. There was something special about him, not just because she had become obsessed by him and conferred importance upon him by simple investment, but because there was a thing about him she’d been trying to define for herself, and it struck her right there as she zipped herself in and Jim scrunched around on the shells to get comfortable. It had something to do with music. The string in the tree had confirmed it. So many other men were mostly calculation. Jim Buckridge, even Red. The chief impulse of their lives was management. It wasn’t exclusively a male thing but, God knows, men had it in spades. Most of her life she’d had it, too, just living by will, achieving and maintaining control. But Lu was pure, hot feeling. Emotion cut off and backed up. She’d felt it the instant she pulled at his shirt in the hotel room. His startling tears. They’d shocked her briefly; she found it all a bit off-putting. For her it was just an impulse, but she’d started something she hadn’t counted on. He was a man trying to live like a man, by force of will. But it was against his nature. And in that moment of need or mischief she’d broken into something. You could see the relief in him as he cried, even before they made love. Music wants to be heard. Feeling wants to be felt. He’d always wanted to be found, even if he didn’t know it. She had found him once. And that was in the dark. She’d just have to find him a second time.
Georgie sat up in a ship’s bunk and slid dazed to the thrumming deck. The bulkheads groaned in the swell. She wore a starched white uniform that was stained and wrinkled and on stockinged feet she stumbled down corridors and up companionways in search of clues as to her purpose here. It was as though she’d woken from an almighty bender that had fried her memory entire. The fob watch bounced so painfully on her that it felt pinned to her very breast. Flakes of paint fell from riveted steel panels. She felt the ship twist and flex on its keel. She came upon a man in a wheelchair whose hospital gown was askew. His cock and balls lay against one flaccid thigh and a line of sutures divided him like a ragged zipper. As the deck tilted he crashed into the bulkhead and fell across another man who seemed to be riding a bedpan in the swell. A surgical trolley spilled bloody implements and wadding and the whole ship seemed to hesitate a moment as though suspended. A solitary groan issued from the silence, a woman’s voice, chillingly familiar, and then the deck slammed up beneath Georgie’s feet and doors burst open left and right to spill men and women like rubble across her path, people mechanized by traction pulleys and naso-gastric tubes, by bone braces and monitors. The voice from behind propelled her. She began to pick her way through the confusion of limbs and apparatus but ended up just scrambling over as though they were one inanimate mass until she came to a companionway on whose lowest step sat her mother. Vera Jutland had the doll-like rosiness of complexion that only a mortician could supply. There was an uncharacteristic look of concern on her face. In one hand she held a shard of mirror. The fingers of the other hand lay on the wattles of her neck. As Georgie came close she looked up a moment without recognition.
I don’t feel anything, she murmured.
Water began to spill down the companionway and a smell like the mud of mangroves rose from somewhere below.
Georgie sprang up in her swag and blundered against the gauze of the insect dome. The sky was oceanic. She lay back and felt the shells grind softly beneath her.
Orright? murmured Jim in his dome nearby.
Yes, she said.
In the moonlight Jim’s head was cradled in his arms and she knew he hadn’t slept yet. She sensed that he wanted to talk. She fell asleep waiting for him to speak.
STEEL GUITAR. It’s across his knee. He sees his face distorted in i
ts undulating surface as he plays right there on the verandah step with the bottleneck glissing up the fretboard and the slow vibrato shaking the loose muscle of his arm. Such an old, old lick he plays, the first he ever learned, and its physical pattern is as sweet as the sound it makes. Like an old woman’s voice. A shadow falls across his feet. He lifts his head and she’s there, her hair grey, her mouth twisted into a grin.
That dirty music, she says. Someone’ll hear.
Behind her the land is thick with trees. Even the birds stir at the sound of her.
The moon comes to earth in his camp. The midden and the beach and the boabs are pearlescent. His hands, his feet, are lunar. He’s washed in cold light. Transparent.
By dawn the fever is gone. His limbs feel heavy on him and every movement is a kind of wading. The air is laced with currents. His skin prickles as though he’s being watched at every point.
He stoops to drink at the tiny, shrinking stream and knows in an instant that he can’t stay. He’s exhausting the food around him; the only way to keep this up is to continue moving up the coast to new reserves of water and fish. Staying only a few days at each place, goaded on by hunger. But he just can’t see himself doing it. He’s not a nomad, he can’t even imagine such a life. It’s not just exhaustion that disqualifies him but his instinct to linger, to repeat, to embellish. A way of living isn’t enough. Fox has to stay, to inhabit a place. It’s as though his mind can only settle when he’s still. He feels he’s dragging a life and a whole snarled net of memory across foreign country. None of it lives here; it doesn’t spring from here and it will neither settle nor belong. However good the fishing farther up, no matter how clear and fresh the waterholes, he knows now that he’ll die out here; he’ll eat himself alive like a body consuming its own wasted muscle.
AT BREAKFAST RED HOPPER presented them with a survey map and a number of likely campsites and before there was any heat in the day they set off down the gulf. They worked their way up creeks and poled through mangrove everglades. They climbed out at rockbars and sandspits and Georgie felt Jim’s mood slip from his early neutrality into a sullen silence. As the day wore on and the colder the trail felt to Georgie, the more dogged Jim became. Each miserable spring and puddle had to be covered thoroughly and he stormed through the undergrowth of the hinterland until he was speechless with fury.
At the landward end of the gulf, beneath the great striped plateau, they entered a rivermouth a mile wide. Red steered up muddy switchbacks, scattering birds in their path, until the mangrove ramparts became stony banks and the river petered out at a sandstone wall. In the Wet season, the guide told them, this was a cataract and the country above a series of rapids. They climbed up the terraced stone and came to a chain of billabongs whose clear water was dimpled with tiny, brazen fish. There were shady gums here, and pandanus, but she never expected any sign of Lu Fox. It was a long way from the sea, and the surrounding country felt hemmed in by high ground. The sun was pitiless now. She sat in the smooth stone basin of a waterhole until even Jim conceded that it was hopeless. The three of them sank to their chins in the cool water while fingerlings nipped at their elbows.
BEFORE HE LEAVES, Fox realizes there’s nothing he wants to take with him but a waterbag and the pack into which he stuffs boots, socks and some sunscreen. He pushes off from the midden and paddles until the glare off the water gouges his eyes. He makes it level with his old island before he pulls up a creek, drags the kayak to high ground and lies in the shade a while until the pain recedes. Even as he lies there the tide peaks. Before long it will begin the run-out and he’ll be paddling against it, and he realizes he’s begun his trek too quickly; he hasn’t thought it out. He’ll have to lie here for hours or press on by foot. It pains him to leave the kayak after all this time, but he’s anxious to get on so he stashes it safely out of sight.
He pulls on socks and laces up his boots. With the waterbag in his pack and the pandanus fringe of his hat clamped low, he sets off. Straight away he’s glad of the boots. The ground is hot and stony and the spinifex sharp. The country is riven with washouts and escarpments. Trees are sparse and their shade miserly. Several times he comes to impassable gullies from which he must turn back and beat his way round.
The tide is well out when he comes to a delta whose grey mud is veined and wrinkled. The river’s mangrove barrier looks bereft of water. From here the sea looks a mile away. He works his way down to where the mud looks dry enough to cross but the crust breaks at the first step so that he plunges thigh-deep into black stinking ooze from which he has to haul himself with sandflies swarming and biting. The hell with that. Shaken, he heads inland, and crosses at an oystery rockbar. He makes his way to the shade of a sandstone bluff.
He sits there a time to compose himself. He drinks deeply from the waterbag and gathers his bits about him again, but he starts at the sight of two handprints blown in red ochre on the yellow stone above him. He stretches his own hands over them and sees how much smaller the painter’s are. Although he hasn’t meant to touch anything a thumb comes away with ochre on it. He’s surprised to find it so fresh. There’s something not quite right about the whole set-up, an obviousness that makes him think of Axle. He brightens at the idea that the boy might be about, that they might sit down and talk, bang on the guitar, laugh about those maps and how much easier today might be if he had them. Thinks of the kid out here making himself up as he goes along. Wants to return the kayak. Wonders about Menzies.
Just past midday he makes the ridge above the fishing guide’s camp and hears the petrol generator wailing away down there like a stranded lawnmower, and his resolve founders. He thinks of all the stuff he’s nicked. What kind of a bloke is this guide? Here he is again, exposed, outnumbered, isolated. His mind wheels in all directions. He lies there in the sun with sweat in his stinging eyes until he works up the nerve to take it slowly, to watch and see.
He comes down in stages, until he reaches the cave roof where a bank of solar panels is tilted. From here he sees the empty beach, the boat gone. He worms his way down a cleft into the cool black shade of the cave and stands in water to his shins. A breeze runs through the cave; it smells of animal fat, LP gas and insect repellent. A long time he stays there, hearing nothing. In the end he creeps out into the light with his heart racing—and a sudden movement causes him to cry out. A big gingery quoll plunges across the bench in a bebop flourish of tin plates and lids and cutlery before disappearing into the rock ledge.
Several seconds pass before he can move. He looks at the plastic tables strewn with bits of tackle and dirty plates. Towels hang from the edge of the shelter. He goes to the cooking bench and sees the pans loaded with leftover sausages, chops, fried eggs and bread. He reaches in disbelief and shoves two sausages in his mouth. He tears meat from a lamb chop and sops bread through the skillet drippings. He goes at it hand over hand until he’s wracked with hiccups. With an egg on the palm of his hand, the yolk all grey and powdery, he sits in a plastic patio chair to savour the sensation of having his arse off the ground and his feet free.
The fridge whirrs. He wolfs the egg between spasms then cracks the door to look at lettuces in Woolworths bags and cans of beer, tomatoes, carrots, apples. He hooks out a plastic jug of orange juice and slugs it down in cold, shocking gulps that he can’t stop. Drinks the entire two litres. He stands there like a moron with the empty container and just stuffs it back in the door. The cold air tingles on his legs while he pulls off his pack and stuffs it with bacon rashers, apples, oranges, a whole lettuce.
At one end of the camp is a nook partitioned by a sandstone pillar. The guide’s lair. A bed. A few steel boxes. A plastic tub of clothes. Above the bed, in a rock niche, beside some candles and a shaving mug, is a toothbrush whose scruffy bristles lie awry, like canegrass in which some beast has been sprawling. Fox feels the coatings of fat and fur on his teeth. He has to have it. But as he reaches for it he gets a glimpse of himself in the shaving mirror and stops dead. His hair is a dirty spinif
ex snarl and when he steps back involuntarily he sees the colourless rag of his shirt. He looks more closely at the scabs and scales of his brow, at the festering beard and those wet, red eyes, and he feels himself searching out his own face in these features with a desperation that soils the pleasure of all the food in his belly and the feeling he’s had that this could be it, the day he might come in out of the bush and make peace. But this. You can’t come in as this thing.
He hears the outboard motor and wheels around, knocking the mirror from the rock. It falls to the bed, bounces, and settles back, leaving a crescent of light on the sandstone overhang. Fox snatches up a shirt and some elastic-waisted shorts and blunders through the camp for his pack. From the kitchen bench he grabs a bottle of olive oil. The guide boat spurts from behind the rocky promontory and wheels into the cove while Fox crouches, stuffs the pack closed, pulls it on. At the last moment, as he bolts for the darkness of the cave and the shaft up to the ridge, he filches a book from the ledge and goes like hell.
GEORGIE HELD THE COLD bottle to her forehead while the fishing guide laughed. He rested his freckly arms on the kitchen bench. He shook his head till his cap fell into the sink and his ears went crimson.
He’s playing with us, said Jim.
Maybe we’re playin with ourselves, Red murmured, still grinning.
Georgie maintained what composure she could. All day her spirits had been sinking. The heat and Jim’s darkening mood sapped her. Only moments before, she’d arrived flat, and now her hopes were up again and her head and heart were pounding.
At least we haven’t imagined him, she said with feeling.
So what now? Jim asked.
Well, you know the bloke. It’s your call. He’s either pissed off back to his hideout or he’s hanging back in the breakaways behind us. My guess is he’s hungry. Why not have ourselves a monster cook-up and see if he comes in?