Or we could call him in, Jim said. We could walk up into the escarpment and call his name.
Red Hopper pursed his lips doubtfully and looked Georgie’s way. He raised his eyebrows at her. She set her teeth while Jim spoke.
You know the Christmas tree from down our way, Red? Nuytsia floribunda. Big orangey-yellow blossoms on it—they flower in summer, you see em all along the sandy country. That’s what this prick’s like. All colour and nectar. The bees come swarming. Everything else around is just low scrub or dry banksia, a few tuarts and grasstrees. You know, your hardworking dull grey western scrubland. The wattles flower, I spose, but there’s nothing like the Christmas tree. That’s him.
Jimbo, you’ve lost me, said Red still looking at Georgie.
Thing most people don’t know, said Jim, is that the Christmas tree is a parasite. The roots suck the juice from all the trees around, they travel a distance you wouldn’t credit. Just to get at what the others have got.
Bit of a botanist, are you, Jim?
Like I said. I’m a fisherman.
Like you said.
Georgie should call him in. He’ll come if she calls him.
There was a smouldering anger in his voice. Georgie knew she wouldn’t do it. The way he was talking you couldn’t let yourself.
I think, she murmured, that Red’s idea is best.
Just go up there and show yourself! said Jim.
She shook her head.
Don’t you want to find the bastard?
Let’s have a cook-up, she breathed.
He’s probably still close by, said Jim. You mightn’t get another chance, Georgie. You know you’ll regret it if you don’t. It’ll eat at you. You’ll be thinking about it all the way home. You’ll be sitting in that house wishing you did.
She looked at her hands.
Christ, he muttered, after all this.
Who’s for a cuppa, then? said the guide.
Georgie felt herself stitching her lips between her teeth.
Jim stood up.
How d’you have it? said Red, bluff but watchful.
I don’t want any fucking tea, said Jim. I want this sorted.
Hey, Jim, settle.
The guide was still grinning but alert now, poised. Throughout the long day he’d been pepping Jim up, joshing him along, managing him, but beneath the jokey bonhomie there was an edge. Georgie sensed his mounting distrust of Jim Buckridge, even dislike. Until now Jim had seemed so preoccupied as to be oblivious. He stood with his hands on the bench between them. Christ, she thought, even he doesn’t know what he wants to do when he sees Lu Fox. He can’t even decide what to do with himself this very moment; he’s possessed by rage.
I bloody hope you have a teapot, she said.
The guide looked at her askance.
I won’t drink anything made with tea bags.
Georgie, Hopper said with a smile that looked like relief, nobody likes a snob.
Jim walked out into the hard white light. The gas ignited with a tiny poof. The guide pulled his hat from the sink and wrung it out with a flourish.
Neither of them spoke for a while. It was hot in the shade. There was no breeze.
This bloke you’re lookin for. He your brother or somethin?
She shook her head.
This whole thing’s pissing me off, you know. Somebody better cough or I’ll have to call the plane back.
He needs it, said Georgie. For his own peace of mind. He’s frightened for his children, she said realizing it only as she said it. Jim has the idea that his past is catching up with him and that the world or God or whatever will keep taking revenge on him and his family if he doesn’t put things right.
And that means findin this bloke?
In his mind, yeah.
And that’s why he’s got the shits, then. No result.
I guess. I’m struggling to figure him out.
And you believe that stuff. You know, God and revenge?
I think Jim believes it. But I don’t think the world is like that. Without some mercy, a bit of forgiveness, I reckon I’d prefer it to be completely random—meaningless. In a sick way I envy the fact that he believes in something. D’you believe in anything?
Three square meals a day, said Red. And the sound of a screamin reel.
What’ll happen to him, you think?
Who—your wildman? He’ll either die or come in. By September there’ll be so little water out there he’ll be out of his mind. He knows I’ve got food, water in the cave and tank storage…You reckon he wants to die?
Georgie thought about it. All that longing for the dead he had. He could have killed himself any time. You don’t swim the ocean and trek the land if you don’t want to live. There were moments when she told herself that he wanted her. She couldn’t get through a whole day being certain of it but some stubborn part of her clung to it. That was as close to faith as she came.
Red pulled a leg of lamb from the fridge and laid it on the sink.
We’ll cook up a whole poultice of food tonight, he said. God’s own picnic.
Yes, she murmured. That’s what we’ll do.
FOR HOURS HE SQUATS up there in a paralysis of indecision. He’s wedged between baking rocks that scald him at every point. He realizes that he’s skylined himself, that he’d be visible the moment he tried to worm out over the bare rock to get across the ridge. Back there he might have found a bit of shade in which to think it out, to work up nerve enough to take his chances and face them, whoever they are, but he’s caught out here in the crucifying sun where you can barely think straight.
Three people. That’s all he had time to count before he bolted. Two bigger than the third. Big enough. And yet what can happen? There should be nothing to fear. It will just be awkward, that’s all.
He pulls his tattered hat low. Against the stones his gut is churning.
Fox tries to imagine the picture he’ll be—this ragged creature, a shambling beast come suddenly into their midst. Slinking in like a feral dog.
He pulls the bright blue tee-shirt from his pack and sniffs it. Fabric softener. In white letters across the back it says I’M WITH STUPID. When he smiles his lip splits. He tastes blood. His own shirt comes apart in his hands as he tries to reef it off while lying low. The sandstone grates him and the old rag smells like something dead. After he wriggles into the fresh shirt and shorts he splashes his face with the last of his day’s water to sluice off some of the grime. He tries to smooth his beard which is full of twigs and grit. The sun eats at him, radiates from every direction. Even through the lids of his eyes it lances him. When he blinks involuntarily the movement is audible.
His gut really hurts. Feels like he’s swallowed acid.
But he hasn’t shanked it all this way to sit here in the murdering heat and do nothing. Thinks instead of clean sheets, cold sweating mangoes, the potent bodies of living people. The bus they’ll put him on. The road south to the sand country. Verandah step. Yes.
The cramp comes over him just as he pulls himself up against the rock. A downward rolling spasm. He presses against the sandstone to wait it out but it only gets worse. He drags his shorts down and shits across the back of his legs, his boots. It splashes the pack, flecks the waterbag even while he’s leaning miserably away. When it’s finally over he wipes what he can with the old shirt. The fresh shorts are history. He hasn’t water enough to clean up. He lies there exhausted in the heat and hears himself weep. Not like this. Not like this.
And then there’s the impossible sound of water on the rocks. He levers himself up to a crack between stones and peers down toward camp. There is a man there backlit by the sun. He’s standing on the roof of the cave more or less, taking a leak with his head down. Finishes up with a comic shiver, gives it a shake, slips it back into his shorts and looks up. Right this way. Fox knows it’s the sun. It has to be the sun. He squats there, reeking and spent, and watches this man scan the ridge, the shell beach, all the rugged gullies of the country beyond. He’s
looking right this way. Big square face. Hair with a bit of steel wool about it. Kicking at the stone with a deck shoe.
Jim Buckridge.
He’s saying something but you can’t catch it. And then he’s gone and you’re asking yourself, feeling yourself limp and roasted, smelling yourself, putting together your sorry bundle and, no matter what, breaking for the ridge the best you can.
IT WAS ONLY EIGHT O’CLOCK but it had already been a long, tense evening by the time Georgie helped Red clean up the remains of their gargantuan meal. They’d stuffed the leg with garlic cloves and baked it in a camp oven dug into the hot shells beneath the fire on the beach. Even now the cave stank of caramelized onions, of potatoes and sautéed mushrooms, of damper and burnt sugar. Georgie felt a surprising equanimity. The food had fortified her; she felt revived by it. They drank shiraz at almost body temperature. She savoured its jammy flavour and the tannic feel of it on her teeth.
The guide lit himself a little something which he offered wordlessly, but she declined. They stood out under the moon while he smoked.
Tomorrow, she said, we’ll head back up into the islands.
You’re the boss.
I’ll pay for anything he’s stolen.
The guide shook his head. Nah.
A bird flapped by in the dark.
What’d you do in your other life, Red?
Real estate.
And?
Found it was a contradiction in terms. You?
Nursing.
The life you save may be your own. Who said that?
Georgie shrugged. That your motto?
The guide laughed and expelled a column of smoke that rose in the moonlight. Fish are where you find them, he said. That’s my motto.
And now you’re a fisher of men.
Why’d you quit nursing?
I lost my way, she said.
You woulda been a good one.
I was.
Hermit crabs tottered in their thousands across the beach.
You can radio in a plane whenever, before the week’s up? she asked.
Just say the word.
Jim was awake when she got to her swag.
Fox dies out here, he murmured, you think it’ll be my fault?
Go to sleep.
I want to know if you’ll blame me.
Jim, I’ll hardly think about you. Either way.
He bolted from White Point for a reason. Because he thought I was coming for him.
Well, apparently you weren’t.
Christ. It’s like the past keeps at you. Whatever you do, however you change.
Georgie lay there a while.
You could leave White Point, she said. Why not start over? Sounds a bit wet, but maybe you need to forgive yourself. All this talk about change. Why not change all of your life? Quit. Sell the boat and take the boys somewhere nice. You could live in Broome. You’re loaded, Jim. Why not live with your own kids while they’re young, if you’re so concerned? Don’t repeat the family story. Don’t be the family story. Cut them out of the pattern. Hell, you don’t need to work, but if you want the structured thing find another job, something fresh.
Jim scrunched around inside his insect screen.
Jesus, Georgie. I’m a fisherman.
Right.
HE WALKS INTO THE DARK. Follows his moonshadow. The night is noisy with the grub and scrape of his boots and the tittering of bats and some owl’s low query from the black mass of a tree. Fox scrapes at his eyes and stumbles on. Rockrats, quolls, a dingo. Everything scritches and murmurs and yowls about him. If he stops, the rocks sigh with a spinifex hiss. He falls and starfish leap up; they spin red beneath his eyelids. And out there someone is singing.
He sees trees as men walking, as women tearing their hair.
The tune is familiar. He halts to cock his head. It’s from behind a scree slope. Rising into the bleached sky. A hymn. A tune both of them liked. Bach. His mother and father. He recalls them on the verandah, all combat suspended. Singing quietly.
As he scrambles up the rise the pack hammers him. Down in the next gully there are five, six figures. Walking. You can hear the jolting in their voices. He slips and skitters their way. Their calico shirts and dresses glow in the light of the moon. They look too big, distorted. And then he sees the chairs and clocks and trunks strapped to their backs. One of them plays a wheezy organ. The straps cut her almost in three. A sour smell of sweat comes off them, dust too, and furniture polish. They’re singing in German, it seems to him, and he follows for as long as he can but can never quite catch them.
He wakes in the sun, his cheek embossed by stones. His eyes are gritty. He looks quickly about to get his bearings and sees on one side the eastern horizon and, on the other, the blue strip of the gulf in the distance and he understands that he’s come way inland. Within moments his eyes are no good. The light pierces his head but it hurts to close his eyelids. He remembers the oil in the pack. It’s beneath him; he’s lying on it.
The oil is hot and heavy on his eyes but it soothes them a moment. As he lies there it trickles back into his ears. He digs out an apple and sucks the juice from every bite. It’s a Fuji. God’s own sweet apple.
With the landscape glistening and smeary, he walks on. He comes to a low escarpment and sees something daubed on the stone. A keyhole? A lagoon ray? A sperm? Just a body with an upstanding tail—or neck. And one dot on its back. It’s a bloody guitar.
Fox wheels about, peers through the oily haze. Axle. He hears bees or flies. Along the breakaway a solitary tree. He cups his hands to his temples to make out the bundle nested up in the thin foliage. It’s like a rolled swag and he’s too far away to tell but it seems textured, as though made from dry palm leaves or paperbark. The pool of shadow beneath the tree rises as a man and tilts his head upward.
Axle? he calls.
Something falls from the tree. Fox registers the flash of bared teeth, the figure’s mouth open as though catching dark sap from up in the boughs.
Axle?
The face turns. It sings the sound of a thousand flies and Fox’s ears burn. That face is only a mouth, nothing more. He turns away and walks seaward, doesn’t look back until the sound is gone and he can smell the festering mud of the delta.
Out on the gulf the comet streak of a boat wake.
He stops to pour more oil on his stinging eyes. Everything is glazed now and indistinct. He thinks he’s found the rockbar he crossed before but it’s suddenly slimy underfoot and he flounders into mud, falls and claws himself upright again in a hot rash of insects. All about him the mud bubbles and farts. Oh, well done, he thinks. I’m with stupid. Before stupid was, I am. A life writ in mud.
A smear of colour ahead. He wallows toward it hearing the saurian creep of the tide coming slow across the muck, and to keep afloat he churns forward, arms and legs, grinding through the slurry like a machine. The mud is peppered with cockleshells and sharp twigs that score him. Skippers or worse writhe across his belly.
Hears the ragged panting he makes.
The great silhouette form is a mass of mangroves. He stumbles against the coiling roots, begins to drag himself through the lowering forest where the water sluices and the trees burble and fizz. Fiddler crabs flee from his path and hot white birds. The sludge beneath him is mined with a tangle of limbs. The slippery, upstanding pneumatophores across which he writhes become agitated by his passage through them. They feel slimy and animated, like horrid gothic fingers all over him. Even stumbling, shitcaked and blubbering, into the fishermen’s camp would have been better than this.
BEHIND THE MIDDEN they came upon the tiny stream and a billycan. Oystershells, fishbones. In the shade of the rocky overhang, a rancid swag. It was a good situation but there was an air of misery about this camp.
There’s me old thrownet, said Red.
Jim kicked the fire-blackened billy across the shellgrit. At the wizened fig tree he wrenched the nylon line from between the boughs. When he hauled the swag out and began rippi
ng the filthy sheets from it, the fishing guide laid a hand on his arm, but Jim elbowed him away. Red Hopper staggered a moment and hesitated. Jim tore a grey sheet into shreds; it seemed to fall to pieces without any force.
Leave him be, said the guide.
Red, said Georgie. I want you to call the plane in. Today.
Not till we find him, Jim said.
This tour’s over, said Red.
I paid for a week.
Mate, you can shove your week fair up your date! said the guide snatching at the rag in his hand. Jim stepped into his space.
And you call yourself a bloody professional.
Sport, you need a holiday by the look of you, and I’m not it.
They were in each other’s faces now. Jim’s cheeks were mottled pink and grey and his eyes were sunk so deep that she doubted he’d slept in days; the last time she’d actually seen him asleep was in Broome. She backed into the shade. She wanted to get back in the boat and leave them here.
We need more time, said Jim strangling on his anger.
No, Georgie said. No more.
This isn’t your charter, Georgie, Jim said, still fronting the guide whose jaw was set in a mocking grin.
When could they come, Red? The plane.
It’ll be the middle of tomorrow morning, said Red nose to nose with Jim Buckridge. By the time they got here today it’d be late afternoon and they’re not licensed to fly in the dark. It’ll have to be tomorrow.
Go if you want, said Jim. But pay your way. I’m staying.
The guide shook his head slowly. They were almost touching now.
Beside the ash mound of the fire was a machete. Georgie felt alone out here. Once something started it would spin out of control. She wasn’t afraid so much as enraged by the prospect. The sight of their heaving chests made her sick.
That’s it! she said with a quiet ferocity that startled them. Back off, the both of you. Get the fuck back.
Each of them looked at her, hesitated, and stepped aside.