That’s all, she said. Please. Go back to the boat.
Red Hopper licked his lip and pulled at the bill of his cap. Jim Buckridge snatched the Ray-Bans at the end of their lanyard and stuck them on his face. A last scrap of sheet fluttered to the shells.
Georgie rooted around in her little day-pack for a pencil and paper with which to leave Lu Fox a message. But there was only sunblock, lifesavers, tampons, the Walkman. She jacked the tape out of the player and laid it on a stone beside the firepit. It was all she could do. Red dragged the swag back under the rock and brushed dirt from its wizened foam mat.
Jim, the guide said through his teeth. Last chance barra. You copy?
What the fuck’s he talking about? said Jim.
We have one good tide left, said Red. It’s beginning to run as we speak. Call me unprofessional but I thought you might like to catch yourself a barramundi before you leave.
Jim was silent. They walked up and over the midden. The boat lay in the still, clear water before it.
Doesn’t sound like I’ve got any choice, does it? Jim muttered.
I’ll make a fisherman of you yet.
Don’t push it.
Georgie got into the boat between them.
HE COMES LOLLOPING OUT onto firm ground and lies there a while just panting and grateful. He gets up and goes on through the jumbled broken country of boulders and trees and dry canegrass until he senses it falling away toward the creek where he left the kayak. He sees the island across the narrow strait. He smells smoke in the air. Tobacco smoke. And voices.
He clambers up to a cleft in the rocks and thinks he’s seeing Georgie Jutland standing on the rockbar not fifty metres away. She’s casting a fly across the water and stripping it back across a submerged snag. In sandy-coloured shorts with pockets all over them and lace-up boots. Her shirt is sweated through and you can see her shoulderblades. A daggy cotton hat shades her face. Sunlight lives in the down of her arms. On her calves the sheen of perspiration or sunscreen. Thinks he smells Johnson & Johnson baby powder and some creamy lotion.
Her posture is all intensity. There is such angelic float in the line as it ripples and rolls in the air above the creek. He understands it isn’t real but he won’t move until it’s had its moment, so he lies there like a dog on a full belly thanking God for whatever it is working along that tongue of rock like something his poor sorry being has conjured from the blurry bush.
Then she gasps and braces, straightens up on a strike. Line rips through her hand and soon she’s palming the reel to slow the fish. The fly rod bellies out over the water and her boots scrape and skid across the barnacle crust. He can’t see the fish jump but he witnesses her upturned face and the look of awe as the shade falls from her. The splash is mighty, as though a steer has fallen in, and men are shouting somewhere around the bend. As it cuts through the water the line spits a little spray. She’s bent at the knees now, getting leverage on the fish, gaining ground, and suddenly it’s in the air where he can see it, a huge barramundi, shaking its head in a red-eyed frenzy, hanging there bright as a thought. He sees the hook come free and the line worming back. Watches its gills swimming at the air, its upturned mouth shut. Georgie Jutland staggers a moment. She stares as the fish crashes back into the water. Then she straightens up and laughs. The men are there with shouts of consternation and laughter.
Fox rises on four points but can’t move. It’s Jim Buckridge. They seem so real, so crisp in his smarting vision as they walk across the bar to the boat. He makes himself get up. The boat rears onto the plane. He plunges and skids his way down but they’re gone around the headland. He bashes through spinifex. The pack snarls and slows him. By the time he gets there the long white train of their wake comes slapping at the rock below his feet.
ON THE RADIO people from Aboriginal communities hundreds of kilometres apart made travel arrangements and checked on the whereabouts of various individuals. Their exchanges were hesitant, repetitious, meandering, and their voices high. There were long, potent silences. At the close of one communication, news came from Kununurra that a plane might be available for Coronation Gulf in the morning. Probably. Definitely.
Red Hopper turned the set down and opened a beer.
Looks like leftovers, he said.
Fine with me, said Georgie.
The guide began to laugh.
What? she asked.
That barra was twenty-five kilos or I’m a wanker.
Well, you said it, muttered Jim.
Fifty bloody pounds of buckethead.
It was a beaut, she conceded.
Georgie, it was a horse!
Just a fish, said Jim. And she didn’t land it.
You would’ve given your left nut, said Red. Mate, I would’ve given me left nut only it’s already bin given.
Georgie didn’t mind the loss of the fish, in fact she was glad of it. Something like that you wanted to share. For the rest of your life you’d need someone with whom you could bring it to mind with nothing more than a raised eyebrow. That thing shining there, like something between you.
The men got drunk.
She thought about the tape she’d left back in the lee of the archipelago. It was a compilation he’d made himself, various blues players young and old. Mississippi Fred McDowell, Son House, Ry Cooder, Bonnie Raitt, Dave Hole, Keb Mo, Ben Harper, Kelly Joe Phelps. It featured the whining bottleneck style she’d come to love. The more she listened the more she was convinced that this was as close as an instrument got to the human voice. Not as brilliant as the violin nor as mournfully rich as the cello. It was something humbler. No graces, no airs. It was as rough and plain as the voice of a crying child.
Would he see it? Would he understand?
The moon got up like a broken biscuit.
She woke to the sound of Jim falling into his swag. He was hammered.
Trouble with you is you can’t bide your time, he said. Even with the friggin fish you screw it up. You can never pick your moment, Georgie, you never could. I spose it’s a woman thing.
Spose away, Jim.
He began to snore with his feet out and the insect dome unzipped.
FOX DRINKS at his stream till he’s ready to burst and then he just wallows in the trickle of it. He knows they’ve been here. Someone’s kicked the crap out of the place. He doesn’t care. She’s there. It’s her.
He limps through the amorous boabs with the net and makes a couple of weak throws. He fills the billy with whiting on the last of the tide. He pulls up some spinifex and lays it over the oystery rocks at the end of his cove and when he lights it the stuff flares and crackles. With a few more sticks thrown over the flames oysters begin to heat up and spurt and open. When the blaze dies out he blows the embers onto the wet mud and sucks the meat from the rock itself.
By the stream he grills whiting and mullet. He peels his final orange, savours every segment.
He soothes his sunburnt limbs with olive oil, rubs it into his lips.
The book is A Field Guide to the Birds of Australia. It’s too little, too late. He flicks through stilts, plovers, sandpipers, recognizes the gorgeous Northern Rosella and the Brahminy Kite, the brolgas and fairy terns. But it’s the owls that he lingers over: the Rufous, the Masked which is rarer, the Grass Owl and the Barking Owl that screams at him some nights. Those big, ghostly watchers’ faces. The earlike eyes. They remind you of a houseful of sleepers, of boo-book nights, cool, mopoking winter nights.
He feels her out there now. He knows she’s real. He’ll have to go in because every poor tree and turtle, any bird, every creature will end up having to be her if he stays.
Dark falls. The air quivers. He oils his eyes and feels the sound in his throat. Feels every living thing, each heating, cooling form lean in on him. His skin crawls with things that were and with those pending. They hang there in the steady note of his song, in his matted hair, in the oil on his cheeks, and when he opens his eyes the quoll is right by him on the rock. Its black eyes shine and it carries moonsplashes
in its ruddy fur even as it withdraws into the dark crevices to watch him. He feels himself within himself. There’s nothing left of him now but shimmering presence. This pressing in of things. He knows he lives and that the world lives in him. And for him and beside him. Because and despite and regardless of him. A breeze shivers the fig. The rock swallows the quoll. He sings. He’s sung.
GEORGIE WOKE with a start in the gauzy light before dawn. Jim was snoring across from her. The sky was blank but for a solitary star across the gulf. She lay back to think about the dream that tipped her out of sleep. In it she was on this very beach with her back to the sea and something was crunching across the shells from the water’s edge. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t turn around. Something had slipped from the water and was coming for her, so slowly, deliberately. Georgie knelt on the beach with her fists at her sides. She couldn’t get up to run. Her skin tightened at the presence of a body right close behind, there was a foul smell and a voice at her ear saying, Sister, Nurse, thank you. I thank you.
At breakfast there was a spent atmosphere, a weariness between the three of them. The men were hungover. They ate their bacon and eggs without pleasure. Georgie looked at the bites and welts on Jim’s legs with grave disinterest.
Sorry you didn’t find your bloke, said Red.
He’ll come in, she said, feeling unaccountably peaceful about it. Tell him I’ll be at the house, will you? He’ll know what you mean. You can bill me for whatever it takes to get him out in one piece. If you could just be kind to him. Just tell him I’ll be at the farm.
For how long? said Jim.
She shrugged. Just have them all leave us alone. That’s all I want, Jim. That’s all you need to do to prove anything to anyone.
He nodded curtly.
Sorry you didn’t get what you wanted, she said.
Did you?
Something. I got something I think.
The guide scratched his chin and watched them. The HF radio squawked his call sign and then his name. The operator’s voice seemed to bend and stretch within the fuzz of static. The de Havilland was booked out. Would the Buccaneer be all right? Red Hopper answered that beggars couldn’t be choosers but that he himself would rather walk. Nine o’clock, said the radio voice. Hopper said, Roger that, and signed off.
They took turns to shower discreetly beneath a waterbag. The men shaved. Georgie shampooed her hair. She couldn’t help but think wistfully of how she might have helped Jim had she known him better all this time. But if she’d known him better would she have stayed? She doubted it. And she wouldn’t have had what it took to save someone like Jim. She’d lived by force of will the same as him. They’d just cancel each other out the way they had already. She realized now that she didn’t like the man and she was afraid of his need to wrestle virtue from himself and meaning from the life around him. He wanted to bring things to heel somehow and it wasn’t working. But however you felt about that, whatever you thought about him, you had to pity him now. This morning he had the face of a man condemned.
Georgie towelled off and dressed and when she came out she felt clean and fresh for about five minutes.
The HF sputtered the news that the Buccaneer was still on the river experiencing fuel problems. It would be late.
Georgie watched a manta ray flounce about in the cove while the guide gathered up their linen and made coffee. She asked Red about the next party which wasn’t due to fly in for several days. He pointed to his Hunter S. Thompson collection to indicate how he’d been spending the downtime.
The morning dragged. The conversation, which had been stilted before, dried up altogether. She resolved to take a separate commercial flight from Kununurra. The plane out of here would be the last time she’d ever share a space with Jim Buckridge. She wondered what it might be like to live in his mind, in a world without forgiveness. She thought of the Fox place and of decent coffee she might make for herself there, of the still flatness of the paddocks and the dry heat of the south.
And finally the plane flashed across the water, green and beetle shiny.
Ugly bastard, innit, said the guide. I’ll be thinkin of yez.
Looks more like a boat than a plane, Jim said.
The floatplane came in fast to land. It did look like a watercraft, a sleek hull suspended beneath a single engine, but it sounded whiny as a power tool. As a conveyance it was altogether unconvincing. When it hit the water, spray rose in sheets and the plane feinted and rocked until it slowed and taxied their way.
Jesus, said Jim. This looks promising.
Before he leaves his camp for good Fox finds the tape on the rock. He’s slept like the dead and got up and probably passed it twenty times in the dawn before the first light hits it and causes the plastic to flare and shine. He knows every track on it. He knows what kind of day it was when he dubbed it, how the light slanted through the library. He’s not the same creature. The world itself has changed. He stuffs it into his pack, walks down past the boabs and the midden and pushes the kayak into the shallows.
He’s sore and weary but he knows he can make this last effort. There’ll be no more treks now and the knowledge of it lifts him a little, gives a bit of sting to his paddle stroke. But the tide is still on the outrun. His progress is slow into the current. Out across the gulf, beyond the island chain, the high secret country lights up in the morning sun.
By the time he draws alongside the big red island the tide is slack. Most of the morning is gone. He hopes a breeze doesn’t get up at noon. He’s tired and sticky with sweat and his eyes are playing up again.
When the green plane rises from the water he just stops paddling. Down the gulf a way it lumbers up like some frightened marine creature whose frogleaps have unaccountably got it airborne. Sun flashes along its green fuselage and as it climbs toward him water spills from its tail.
He’s in the strait between the island and the mainland. Adrift now, the paddle heavy across his knees. The plane banks. Its shadow races across the water behind it. She’s on it. Georgie is in that plane.
As the shadow comes at him he raises the paddle and bellows. He howls at the engine whine and paint dazzle, at the blur of the prop, at the wings and animal-pissing-stream from its belly. He howls at its rushing, trailing, fluttering shadow, and the moment it passes over like some hateful angel, Fox is just a hot, raw, hurting sound that’s swallowed in a rush of wind and noise as though he never was.
As soon as they were free of the buffeting water Georgie became conscious of the island which loomed into view on her side of the plane and at this final sight of it she felt the same queasy jolt of recognition that she had experienced the very first time. But there was no delight in it now, no tantalizing wonder—just the miserable fact of her incomprehension. There it was, like some bearded, featureless head rising, perennially and pointlessly from the water.
From her position in the rear she saw Jim and the pilot turn their heads in the same moment toward the other side of the plane. They began to speak and Jim gestured vigorously but the pilot shook his head. Georgie held her headphones in her lap.
The island fell by and the shimmering gulf was gone. Below them lay the yellow broken land.
Georgie looked up to see Jim still speaking. His finger jabbed the air near the pilot’s cheek and the sinews of his neck stood out. With downcast eyes the young pilot spoke to Jim or to someone on the radio. He appeared to be hesitating, though the plane was still nosing up, seeking altitude.
The cabin smelt faintly of puke.
Georgie saw the young man’s lips stop moving at the same instant the engine’s note faltered. She saw him mouth the words, You bitch!
He suddenly had his hand on one gauge after another as though his fingers might clear the plane’s choked throat. Then he gave up and pumped the plane higher.
She felt him physically levering the thing up in steps, while the engine sputtered and gagged overhead. He put them into the gentlest of turns. Georgie began to see the blades of the prop becoming di
stinct. And then there was just whistling quiet and the prop fanned into a lazy windblown turn and they were gliding.
Jim swivelled in his seat. His face was grey.
Georgie saw the blue strip of water ahead. She saw the island. So this was the shimmer of recognition. You saw this day. But not this comic resignation, nor the whistling emptiness of the air around you. Somehow it’d always felt like a future, not the end.
She heard the pilot talking to himself. Jim breathing deeply. From behind he had the weathered neck of a turtle. He began to writhe in his seat. She was sorry for him.
When the plane chokes and goes silent, Fox feels his gut fall. He’s killed it. With a shout, with that owl scream he’s killed them all.
It turns back toward him losing altitude, chasing its shadow toward the water, toward him. A breeze springs up. At first he thinks it’s slipstream but the whole gulf ruffles around him. The plane tips down at him, with the wind behind it, as though it’s searching him out. Green now, shining. He feels himself cringing on the water as it shrieks over, towed by its own shadow, close enough to feel in the air around him. Too steep, too fast.
Before it even hits the water, he’s paddling flat-out. He feels the seam in his collarbone as he digs toward it. The plane is suddenly a white cataract, a storm. The port wing shears back, flutters skyward, and the whole machine goes over in a cartwheel of spray and noise while he paddles.
Already there’s the flare of a bow wave from the direction of the guide’s camp. He smells kerosene and hot metal. Air hisses from the fuselage as it lists and settles. Voices. A khaki shirt comes up, a man bloody-faced and yelling. Fox almost runs him down as he ploughs up against the gulping aircraft.
A door shoots two metres into the air and the entire hull shudders. Another man swimming.
Fox claws his way along the ragged wing-stub. It’s upside down, windows submerged. With his feet he finds a sill, an opening, and he hyperventilates as hard and fast as he can while there’s time. The fuselage shudders and he soaks his bones with air. With a final breath he plunges under. He gets a handhold as the plane tips away. His hair and beard stream back in the current. His ears pop as he plunges through the milky deep with his eyes burning and his breath aglow like a coal in his chest. You can do this, he thinks with a bright, mad flush. This is what you do.