Dirt Music

  Get the gate, will you? he murmured.

  Whose place is this?

  You mean you don’t know?

  Georgie shrugged. Flies came in through the open door.

  Jim Buckridge.

  You’re kidding, she said.

  Don’t dawdle.

  It was more a firebreak than a track. They swayed and jounced uphill in four-wheel drive along a fenceline between grasstrees and acacia scrub.

  This is the northern tip, said Lu. Most of this end was never cleared. Goes right through to the coast.

  I thought the farm was long gone.

  The original place, yeah. They sold in stages to some developer. This end still hasn’t settled.

  Is…is it safe?

  There’s a house another kay or so south. Got a manager in but the place’s in limbo. He’ll be inside watching the cricket, don’t worry.

  Georgie held on, absorbing this news until the sand of the trail turned white. They slalomed up the back of a dune and came drifting down onto a hard pan of beach behind a scrubby headland. He just got out and walked into the surf while she sat there watching. The sea was still smooth in the offshore breeze and in the calm beyond the breakers where he lay it was sandy green. It was too hot to sit in the cab so she stripped off and scuttled down to join him.

  This strikes me as somewhat reckless, she said, hearing the attempt at irony transmit as prissiness.

  He spouted water, lay on his back.

  You enjoy it too much, she said. What’s the history here?

  Just neighbours, you know.

  A feud, I take it.

  Nah.

  What then?

  My old man. He wasn’t the deferential type.

  All that stuff in your house. You were married?

  He shook his head.

  The kids’ stuff, all the photos.

  Lu rolled over and stroked away. He was good in the water. Georgie looked back at the truck on the beach and the wild scrubby country that ran down to it as far as you could see. She wondered what else she didn’t know about Jim Buckridge. She was sober now and jittery. She stood on the sandy bottom and waited for him to turn back to shore. The melons, the fruit stand, they rang a bell but she couldn’t think of the connection. He swam back and dived. He surfaced beside her with his eyes open.

  My family, he said. There was an accident.

  Jesus, she blurted. You’re that family? The musicians, she thought. The rollover.

  As they stood there the sea changed colour and the wind died. Within a few moments the first cool breath of the southerly was upon them.

  I don’t know what to say.

  You’ll think of something, he said.

  Georgie remembered the party at Gilligan’s, one of those rare occasions when she’d bothered. The keg hissing on the verandah. The groom’s father rolling his eyes at the endless delay. The band, the bloody band. Someone rigging up a stereo in the meantime. The beery vibe rising, the celebration going on regardless. The bride throwing someone through an asbestos wall. Coloured lights raining onto the yard amidst all that laughter. Just White Pointers running amok. She remembered Yogi ostentatiously taking a call. Shoeless in flares. Sidling off with the keys to the ambulance. And then, so much later, on their way out, with Gilligan and his bride gone and the first real fights brewing, the news rolling up the lawn. The musos. Right in their own bloody driveway. In a ute. Three of them dead and one of the kids critical. People sat around on cars to drink and speculate. Jim took her by the hand and was silent all the way home.

  C’mon, said the shamateur. Time to go.

  I never heard you play, she says, still towelling off from the shower. People say you were good. The three of you.

  Fox slides the omelette onto her plate and proceeds to wash the few dishes on the sink.

  Don’t keep shrugging like that, she says. It’s infuriating.

  I didn’t notice, he says.

  You rolled down the shutters, Lu.

  Sorry, he says unapologetic.

  I’ve crossed the line, then?

  Fox catches himself smiling, thinks: Lady, you’re all over the place, you’ve never seen a boundary in your life.

  I guess I should go?

  Eat your omelette.

  Yes, Dad.

  Tell me about his kids.

  Jim’s? she says only pausing a moment from loading her fork. Nine and eleven. Boys. Nice kids, really.

  Really.

  I’ve…been very fond of them.

  So you’re the one after Debbie.

  Yes. That’s me.

  Ever want any of your own?

  Georgie Jutland chews for a while and swallows. No.

  Fox wipes his hands.

  My sisters, she says, had all the babies. It looked to me like accessorizing. I’m the wild aunty.

  With stepchildren.

  Exactly.

  Fox looks at her. Even fresh from the sea and a shower she looks spent, as though she should go to bed with a fan until tomorrow. Despite the sweet, tousled hair there’s a wound-up look to her that gives you the idea she’s forgotten how to rest.

  And you don’t work anymore? he says.

  Ran out of puff.

  Be a hard job, nursing.

  She smiles.

  You’re the first man I ever met who can scrub a bath properly.

  Well, it took years of study. Did it all by correspondence.

  Good omelette. And look at that stove. Christ, you’re completely domesticated.

  Even shit in a sandbox.

  Play me something. Just to ice the cake.

  I don’t play anymore, he says.

  Not at all?

  He shakes his head and takes the empty plate from her. All this talk feels dangerous, worse than the stuff about fishing. Like being caught in a rip. Half of you knows it can’t kill you but the rest of you is certain it must. You stay calm, swim across it not against it. Sooner or later it’ll spill into placid water.

  So what did you play?

  Guitar.

  I mean, what kind of music.

  Oh, I dunno. All kinds, I spose. Anythin you could play on a verandah. You know, without electricity. Dirt music.

  As in…soil?

  Yeah. Land. Home. Country.

  You can’t mean country and western?

  Nah. Though we’d play Hank and Willie, Guy Clark. Plenty of bluegrass and some Irish stuff. Whatever felt right with a guitar, mandolin, fiddle. But mostly it was blues. Country blues, I spose. You know—Blind Blake, Doc Watson, Son House.

  Um, she says blankly.

  Rootsy stuff. Old timey things.

  Folk music.

  I spose. No, not really. Well, I dunno.

  My mother made me do piano lessons, she says, scrutinizing him.

  Same. We had to take turns. Darkie used to lift the lid and pull the strings. The old man brought home a guitar he found in a pawn shop in Midland. That was it. Borers got the piano. He was the real player. Darkie.

  Your brother? That was his name?

  No. William.

  So where did Darkie come from?

  Dunno. That’s what we called him. Except Mum.

  Where’s she?

  Dead. When we were kids.

  And your father?

  Mesothelioma. I was seventeen. He was at Wittenoom before we were born. Mining asbestos.

  Jesus, she murmurs, I probably nursed his mates. Him, even.

  All dead. Weird, you know. He was dyin our whole life. But we didn’t know it.

  Did he?

  I did wonder. Later.

  It’s his library, then?

  Mum’s. The old boy didn’t care for books that couldn’t show you how to fix an engine or save your soul. Bumfluff, he called it.

  Was…was Darkie a reader?

  Nah. Could hardly even read music. But you’d play him something and he could crank it back at you.

  That’s a gift.

  Fox finds himself uncoiling somehow, as though h
e can’t pull back once he’s started. He babbles at her about how they practised to tapes and LPs on the verandah instead of doing their homework. How they taught themselves from liner notes, how they played J. J. Cale and early Bowie at high school bong parties in empty rope sheds, after which Sally Dobbins began to hang around with a mandolin and an old Rod Stewart record. And suddenly there were three of them. Endless afternoons of tuning and de-tuning, of arguments and sudden breakthroughs. They got hold of bootlegs—Skip James, Robert Johnson, Blind Willie—and found a Taj Mahal record at the White Point rubbish dump. Darkie taught himself banjo and then the fiddle. They found a washboard in the shed and made guitar slides from the necks of plonk bottles. Sudden watersheds, like the first time they made it all the way through ‘Cripple Creek’; the moment they heard Ry Cooder. Deckies heard them play on somebody’s porch and then they played for beer at parties. Skippers’ wives began to book them for twenty-firsts when everybody expected punk or disco. They played a few country halls where farmers wanted Glen Campbell. But in the end, despite the fact that they were Foxes, there came a grudging respect. Not everybody liked the music but people admitted that they played like demons.

  He tips back against the sink appalled at this outburst.

  Always envied people with languages and music, she says with a wry grin.

  I need a walk, he says. Feel like a walk?

  Not really.

  Think I’ll go. You mind?

  Will I need shoes?

  No.

  Georgie followed him across the ragged paddock where runty melons grew wild. The grey sand was hot underfoot and the afternoon sun roasted the back of her neck until they came to a grove of tuarts whose shade and pad of fallen litter offered some relief. From there, with the dog trotting between them, Lu led her down the rutted yellow riverbank, mottled by the shadows of melaleucas.

  You had a market garden, she said joining him in the lee of a cantilevered paperbark.

  Just watermelons.

  God, there must be money in it; that’s a nice boat you’ve got.

  Lu smiled.

  In melons? Nah. Not at the rate we were growin em, not after the old boy got crook. Even before that things were pretty lean. The old fella used to cut through that Buckridge land, slip out with the dinghy and liberate a few lobsters from the pros’ pots. Boil em up, sell em on the sly down the highway.

  Like father, like son.

  Anyway, he must have suspected somethin about the cancer, cause he insured himself. We didn’t know until afterwards. Darkie got the pay-out. He was the eldest. Blew most of it on sixties Holdens and Fords, vintage guitars. We lived for years on what was left. That and melons, and the occasional gig, but playin never paid much. Last summer I sold everythin up, a whole shedful, and bought the boat. Figured I could get by.

  So. The disreputable Foxes.

  That’s us.

  Georgie looked down into the shallow tea-coloured water. It was cool here. The southerly shivered the leaves and hoary bark.

  I don’t understand what you’re doing, she said. Living like this. I mean, why stay on?

  Things, places, they’re hard to shake off.

  Georgie tried not to grimace. She had never understood the grip that places had over people. That sort of nostalgia made her impatient. It was awful seeing people beholden to their memories, staying on in houses or towns out of some perverted homage.

  I did think about goin north, he said. Just wanted to leave everythin and bolt. You know, disappear. I already felt like a ghost.

  A ghost?

  Like I was dead anyway but the news still hadn’t got through to my body. Like in a bushfire that rolls over you so fast you’re cooked inside but still running.

  Jesus.

  But then I thought, I’m gone already. Why not disappear without leavin?

  You’ve lost me, Lu.

  I came back from that last funeral and burned all my papers. Licences, any ID, school reports. Never had a tax file number anyway. Just go off the grid, you know. Live in secret. Be a secret.

  But what’s the point?

  Privacy. Privacy. Sooner or later your secrets are all you have.

  The Ghost Who Walks.

  That’s me.

  So you poach on the high seas and read books and play music out here on your own.

  Music, no.

  You really don’t play anymore?

  Don’t even listen.

  You can’t or won’t?

  Both.

  What, never?

  Ever.

  That’s terrible.

  Lu gave her a pained, defiant smile and she could see the boyish refusal in him. It was hard to hold it against him but you could only sense it bringing trouble down on his head. He was stuck. And all the more endearing because he reminded Georgie of herself.

  You ever have that dream, he said, when you were a kid, that everyone’s got back in the car and driven off and forgotten you?

  I know exactly the one, said Georgie bitterly.

  He smiled and Georgie couldn’t account for it; she had no idea where a smile like that could come from.

  How about a place? he said. Ever have a special place?

  As a kid, no. Though I liked the river where we lived.

  Where?

  Ah, Nedlands.

  But no special spot.

  Georgie felt as though she was failing a test of some kind. He obviously had no notion of how different they were. He was some autodidact farmboy and she was a refugee from the winner’s circle, a girl who chose nursing to thwart the old man’s dreams of a doctor in the family.

  I’ll show you something, he said.

  The dog rose from its belly and looked at him.

  She caught herself looking at her watch.

  Fox takes her up the hill above the quarry. The dog rifles through the dry grass chasing something unseen.

  I should have worn shoes, she says.

  You want a piggyback?

  No.

  I don’t mind. You’re only little.

  I’m forty bloody years old! By the way, how old are you?

  Thirty-five.

  How old did you think I was?

  About that. You getting up or what?

  Fox hoists her up with his arms through the crooks of her legs. God, the weight of another living body. She holds him round the neck and presses into his back.

  Won’t take long, he says.

  Who’s in a hurry?

  You can be back before dark.

  Who says I’m going back at all? she says sharply.

  You are going back. You’re just testin the water.

  Bullshit!

  Little bag full of lipstick and credit cards, come on.

  Put me down.

  You were on the way back, he says. Be honest. You needed time to get yourself straightened out.

  Let me down! she yells, tugging at his hair and ears. He stumbles and the dog barks and they go sprawling into the dirt.

  Jesus Christ, it bit me!

  The dog retreats a metre or two to look doleful and contrite.

  You scared him, Fox says, trying not to laugh.

  Has he had his shots?

  Only shots around here come from a rifle, lady.

  Don’t fucking lady me.

  Orright.

  He picks her up and kisses her hair. She wipes her eyes on her arm.

  • • •

  Georgie followed him up to the clump of stones in silence. The yellow sand was soft and cooled by the shadows that streamed from the pinnacles. The stones were encircled by grasstrees whose fronds twitched in the wind.

  Came here as a kid. Bird liked it too. My niece. Here, look.

  He stepped up to the tallest stone and pulled something from its side. Then hesitated.

  Just a tin, he said. Her secrets.

  He put the container back without opening it and looked at her confused, embarrassed, it seemed.

  There was somewhere once, said Georgie, from pity a
s much as solidarity. A place I got stuck in. Up north.

  Stuck how? he said.

  In a boat. Aground, no less. There was an island and mangroves, boab trees, birds. I had this feeling of déjà vu about it, that it was a place I’d always known.

  You’re a sailor, then?

  If I was a sailor I wouldn’t have got stuck on a mudbank for two days.

  Show me sometime. In an atlas.

  Coronation, she said. Coronation Gulf.

  And it’s way up north?

  In the tropics.

  He smiled again and Georgie knew, even though she was headed for White Point any moment, that she wanted him. You couldn’t trust an impulse like this.

  What’ll we do? she said.

  Who knows.

  We should be sorry we met.

  Yeah.

  You can trust me.

  I will. Fuck, I have to, he said. Just be careful.

  But what’ll we do?

  It’s a long life.

  What does that mean?

  I’m not goin anywhere.

  The stone shadows interlocked now like a maze at their feet, and the dog panted over the sound of crowsong while Georgie considered the unlikeliness of anything working out between them. It was futile even to think of it as anything more than an interlude, a simple accident you had to leave behind.

  WHEN SHE’S GONE Fox heads back along the river with the dog in tow. He doesn’t understand the impulse but he feels driven out of the house, compelled to retrace his steps, the path they took this afternoon. What is this lurching, plunging sensation, this panic that alternates with a new fatalism descending upon him? And this return, is it some kind of purifying ritual which some part of him thinks might reclaim the safety and solitude he had until twenty-four hours ago? All that work, the hard exercise of discipline unravelling even as he stands there.

  Wind ruffles the water. Trees groan and lock horns above him.

  How might he have told her that the way he lives is a project of forgetting? All this time he’s set out willfully to disremember. And some days it really is possible, in a life full of physical imperatives you can do it, but it’s not the same as forgetting. Forgetting is a mercy, an accident. So it’s been no triumph, but it’s got him here, hasn’t it? Through a whole year without burning up.

  He stares along the dappled bank. As a boy he thought the place was alive somehow. At night in bed he felt the ooze of sap, the breathing leaves, the air displaced by birds, and he understood that if you watched from the corner of your eye the grasstrees would dance out there and people wriggle from hollow-burnt logs. Those days you could come down here and stand in the water on the shallow spit and clear your mind. Stare at the sun-torched surface and break it into disparate coins of light. Actually stop thinking and go blank. It was harder than holding your breath. You could stand there, stump-still, mind clean as an animal’s, and hear melons splitting in the heat. A speck of light, you were, an ember. And happy. Even after his mother died he had it, though it waned. Later on only music got him there. And now that is gone there is only work. It’s a world without grace. Unless the only grace left is simply not feeling the dead or sensing the past.