Bloke, page 13
I hated it. Their poverty and my distaste. The years in the gym had never prepared me for it. Cells were scrupulously clean, the only scruples we ever enjoyed. The orphanage was the same. Relentless in its purity.
I flushed scarlet trying to disguise my suspicious glances at the cups and cutlery. Too good to use our cups, are ya? Unvoiced but palpable. When the dog sat under the table to scratch raw mange my leg itched and I drew it beneath the chair. I was ashamed of my inability to mask revulsion. I’d hardly ever had my own home but where I’d lived most of my life there were always slaves to wash dishes, clothes and floors. The inmates. When I was a kid I’d lain awake trying to imagine a mother, and as an adult I’d try and imagine a house, my house. The crockery would be clean, like in a gaol, but it wouldn’t be thick and white. The cutlery would be clean but not plastic. I was used to cleanliness but I craved beauty.
‘Nother cup of tea?’ Mrs Bowlglah asked, eyeing me. She took the cup and washed it ostentatiously, making sure I knew the dishes were washed properly in her house. ‘Pity you didn’t know your mother,’ she said from the sink.
‘They told me she was dead.’
‘Hmmph.’ Her scorn was barely withheld. ‘Ever look for your other mob?’
‘Never knew I had any. I was an orphan.’
‘Wouldn’t have hurt to look.’
‘I didn’t know, I was just a kid.’
‘In the mirror, I meant.’
I was about as popular as a ferret in a rabbit burrow.
That night the eighteen-year-old son came home drunk and angry, his misery gripping my throat and heart like a vice. Shane Bowlglah gave me a dark, sneering glare as he thrashed into the room with a slam of flywire door and a rattle and scrape as he pushed chairs out of his way.
‘What the fuck’s wrong with you, Shane?’ his mother bawled.
‘What the fuck do you reckon?’
‘How would I bloody know? Ya just come in here slammin doors, as pissed as a fart.’
‘Them cunts,’ Shane grunted, giving me a baleful glare.
‘Who?’
‘Them rotten fuckin cunts, they’ve unroadworthied me ute.’
I’d seen the ute by the other wrecks in the backyard. No rear-vision mirror, one door handle, bald tyres, one with wire sticking out of it. As unroadworthy as any car I’d ever seen. Mothers would be in their rights to dob in the driver. Especially if their daughter was inside.
‘Well, get it fixed.’
‘What with, ya silly old bag? What the fuck with?’
I could see the copper’s point of view, I could see Shane’s, and was sickened by my avoidance of this fate. I lay awake that night, trying not to recoil from the texture of the blanket. I could hear Shane almost whimpering in his sleep, tortured by his impotence in the face of laws designed for people with money.
‘Shano,’ I whispered, my voice stretched and hesitant, wondering if he’d heard me, or would bother to reply.
‘What?’
‘I can get some mirrors and wheels and stuff for the ute.’ The gym boys told me about a bloke who helps with car parts. Nearly new some of them. Suss as you like.
There was a long black silence. ‘Got no money, cuz,’ he muttered.
The ‘cuz’ admonished me.
‘I know a bloke in Wy Yung who can give us a hand and I’ve got a few quid.’
‘What’s a quid?’
I didn’t answer. He was just deflecting my offer, resisting any chance of friendship, of filial love. I lay in the dark wrestling with my revulsion of their poverty and the weird sensation of being surrounded by relatives, family. People I was supposed to know. Love. I felt a sort of panic crawling in my belly and I recognised that feeling – fear of losing control. And I fought it like I’d fought it all my life, by outstaring the dark.
But I had more than a few quid and I slipped Bill Gratorex three hundred bucks while Shane was inspecting another heartbreaking EJ. Bill nodded, twigged to the situation.
‘Actually, mate,’ he said, leading Shane further up the yard, not afraid to touch a black man, a sign for black eyes to give white skin the benefit of the doubt … for the moment. ‘There’s a car what’s just come in. It’s a poofter car really but it’s a ’91. Only done eighty-five thousand. Had a fair old whang in the back, but these old Bluebirds have got a deep boot and real good suspension. She’s straight as a giraffe’s neck underneath. I picked her up after a road accident. The old sheila went to hospital. Eighty she was, the copper as good as tore up her licence on the spot.’
Shane’s mouth made a grim line. Hard to know if it was coppers or Nissan Bluebirds which disgusted him most.
‘You could have her for, well … you know, how does two thousand sound?’
‘I got nothin like that.’
‘What about your old EJ?’ I prompted.
‘Yeah, lot of call for EJ parts,’ Bill added, keen to hang onto the three hundred in his pocket.
‘I got another EJ and an EH in the yard,’ Shane responded with a flicker of interest.
‘Fifteen hundred then. I bought her cheap from the old girl, the son wanted his mum out of that car as quick as he could … and he wouldn’t drive no Bluebird.’ I scowled at Bill. He didn’t seem to have much of a grip on key sales points. ‘But she’s a ripper machine. Big donk in ’em, surprising torque for a car their size.’
‘But I got nothin like that money.’
‘I could lend you five hundred,’ I urged.
‘And I’d do up the back of her for nothin,’ said Bill, clinging to the notes in his pocket.
‘A grand for a ’91 model. Low k’s. It’s a good buy, Shano. Sort of car you could have for years.’
‘It’s white.’
‘Cream. But the seats are red – leather.’
‘That’s not leather.’
‘It’s a kind of leather,’ Bill added, convincing me he should stick to removing headlamps with a spalling hammer.
‘All right then, nine-fifty – an’ me cousin’s five hundred.’ Shane had the tone in his voice of someone who was beginning to think he drove a harder bargain than Rupert Murdoch. Most blackfellas hate bargaining, unnecessarily prolongs conversation with white people.
‘And your EJ and the other two wrecks.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘You’ve got a good car there, Mr …’
‘Bowlglah,’ Shane murmured, worried his surname might ruin the deal.
Later, I was having a beer out on the verandah, enjoying how the dusk softened the shabbiness of the neighbourhood. Shane was taking his little brothers, sisters and nephews for a drive up and down the street.
‘Good car that, Jimmy,’ Uncle Binny murmured.
‘Yeah, pretty good deal Shane got, I reckon.’
‘Yeah.’ Insect bats made rapid sorties around the streetlights as they flickered into life. ‘Bill Gratorex’s yard, was it?’
‘Yeah, down by the saleyards.’
‘His mum’s Koorie, ya know. Hard to tell lookin at Bill. An’ he says nuthin.’
‘Boys at Barwon told me he was okay to deal with.’
‘Yeah, not bad.’
Shane drove the car into the drive and ran his sleeve over the front wheel panel where kids’ lolly hands had smeared it. The action of a man who’d never owned a car with straight panels and a full coat of paint. He looked at me and there was a mixture of shame and pride, hurt and wonder in his glance.
‘Thanks, cuz,’ he murmured as he passed me.
‘Like a married magpie, that Shano,’ Uncle Binny observed.
I sat bolt upright in bed and heard the tap of the kettle on the gas ring, the clink of cups. I was angry. Someone’s dawn cuppa had woken me from a dream where my lips were about to brush the fine blonde hairs on Giovanna’s arm. Zoom in to upper arm. Crisp white shirt emphasising the tan of the arm, the crispness and whiteness accentuating the muscle development and the hairs, the goose pimples aroused by some cool breeze. I admired that arm. A woman with upper body strength sculpting the unbelievable beauty of the bicep. My lips sought the point where the declination of that muscle joined the sacred skin inside her elbow.
And then the kettle and crockery shattered the dream.
I walked outside and pissed on the lemon tree. Three dogs thought their signature was required for the same transaction.
‘Mornin.’ Uncle Binny was sitting on the verandah drinking tea from a mug the size of a small saucepan. ‘Best time of the day this. Yer can talk to the dogs without no bother.’
And the cockatoo apparently. The creature, like a plucked chicken with blue tin snips for a beak, sat on his knee, safe in its fully plumaged body image. Uncle Binny had convinced him he was a fine feather of a bird.
‘Poor ol’ Uncatoo likes a bit of a chat too, ya know. We’s cousins, him an’ me, bout the same age too.’
Bristow, one of the dogs, slumped with a flurry of dust in the bowl the chooks had scraped before the Holdens had been towed away. ‘Good dog that one,’ Uncle Binny remarked. ‘He’s the thinker, the others just eat, shit an’ shag.’ We watched the dog whump its head into the dust for an intellectual snooze.
‘Ol’ Coordinate’s comin home today. Been away on holiday.’ He said ‘holiday’ in the tone we all recognised. ‘Dossy’s brother,’ he said, referring to his niece.
‘He’ll need the room,’ a voice said behind the flywire door. Dossy must have been watching us.
‘Yairs,’ Uncle Binny continued, ‘an’ besides, they’s been askin bout you in the pub. Might be just curious, might be goin to try an’ trade information for a slab, dunno, but they’s the kinda mob normally never talk to me. But they came over and asked about you. Funny, eh? Some people are always lookin for an excuse to dob our mob in.’ The cockatoo climbed up his arm and whispered in the old man’s ear. ‘Might be safer on the road for a bit, me brother.’
So I was being kicked out. On the advice of a cockatoo.
‘Uncle Munt’s camped out down near Nowa Nowa. Might be good to go with him for a bit. Out the back a way. Goin up to Bega for the corn. Pickin season. Not that he picks, but it’s his time to be in that country, ya know.’
I never liked being given the push. It had happened too often. Made me resentful, hurt really, rejected. I said nothing, aggrieved at first, but the more I thought about it, the more attractive it seemed. Get me out of the crowded house. Slum, was how I thought of it. Save me from trying to hide my repulsion. Allow me to breathe air that hadn’t come second-hand. Family air.
‘Nowa Nowa,’ I said.
‘Yeah, by the lagoon behind the old school.’
‘Does he know I’m comin?’
The cockatoo and Uncle Binny stared at me without answering. What can you say to ignorance? Of course he’d know I was coming.
twelve
Three burnt billets represented Uncle Munt’s fire, a whisper of smoke betraying a bead of heat in the coals. I pushed sticks closer to the fire and crumbled wattle-seed cases, tickling the fire into life. I looked about for the teabag and billy and saw what I should have seen earlier. A very old, very black man sitting with his back to a paperbark and gazing at the lagoon.
‘Sorry, Uncle,’ I said. ‘Uncle Binny said I could come and see you. Travel with you a bit.’
He said nothing, but an index finger tapped once on his knee.
‘You got a billy, Unc?’
The old man stood up and began cutting at a wattle branch. He said nothing. Nor did he hurry, but with deft strokes of the knife he incised the bark at the elbow of the branch and prised away a scroll the size of an elongated dinner plate. He scooped water from the lagoon and walked to the fire, where he nestled his ‘billy’ in the coals. His walk was that of an old man, not crouched and stumbling like most old blokes you see, because he was erect and lean, but with the caution of one who knows his bones are old, one break away from immobility.
The bark didn’t burn as expected but the water boiled as I hadn’t expected. The old man picked a stone from the base of the fire with a twitch of young wattle bent into tongs. He dropped the stone into the coolamon and the water erupted with a hiss and bubble and outraged steam.
The tea – well, it had a taste of wattle, ash and stone, but it was strong and tarry like those funny Russian teas you sometimes get at flash cafés.
He never spoke to me at all. Not one word. Only spoke to his dogs, in language. When we finished the tea he rolled his swag, and at that cue three dingoes rose from the shade of the trees and walked over to the fire. Old Munt murmured to each of them in turn and they neither capered nor took their eyes from him. He hauled a heavy old English bike from the grass and loaded his provisions, including the ‘billy’, into the saddlebags.
The dogs fell into step as he pushed the bike along the track, one leading the way, another trotting on the outside of Munt’s long stride, and the third, after glancing at me, falling in behind. Was I supposed to follow? Something about the carriage of his shoulders and head indicated I should.
And I did. Sometimes on the crest of a hill the old man would climb on the saddle of the bike and coast down the hill, the dogs breaking into an easy lope but never breaking the formality of their retinue.
I plugged along behind. At the bottom of one particularly long, gradual slope I found him in the shade of some trees by a creek, patting dough into johnnycakes and splatting them onto stones at the edge of a fire that appeared to be lit in an old place.
We ate the cakes, made moist with raisins and a gob of butter scraped from the rind of a soiled wrapper. The charry tea was welcome. I’d begun to look forward to its sticky black heat.
Later that day we joined a sealed road, and occasionally a ute or truck would pull alongside and offer us a lift in the tray, but the old man neither looked at them nor spoke. He had a manner about him that didn’t offend good people, and only the good offered lifts. They drove off unconcerned by what others would consider disgraceful arrogance.
‘See ya, Munt,’ some of them called, familiar with the old man and his ways.
The first night, he repaired one of his old shelters with a few wattle branches and bracken ferns, on the second we slept in an old roadworkers’ hut, and the third on the grassy sward beside a tiny stream.
Several nights later – no, a week or more, when the moon was a day past full, I woke in its light and tried to work out where I was. I saw the campfire, the wattle billy, and I lay back on the blanket. Ah yes, Munt. The meandering march through Gippsland. A glimpse of silver water and a comb of surf: Tamboon. The fire smoked. Munt and the dogs were gone but I heard what had woken me, an old man’s voice murmuring in song. ‘Narroong, narroong Tamboorna.’ Something like that. The air was still, the voice crept across the water, seeming to slip in stealth on the gauzy path of moonbeam. That’s it, the moon – the old man was singing the moon, the country, Tamboon.
The clearing beside the beach was bright, ablaze with moonlight, any chip of quartz leapt into light at its touch. Banksia cones, grizzled and spent, remembered their youth as their horny lips and shaggy hair were fluxed, silvered with the moon.
‘Narroong towurrna,’ the feeble voice called from across the estuary, and I sat up and peered between the gouty limbs of the banksia forest and there he was, standing on a curled raft of bark, poling in silence across the water.
One of the Carter brothers temporarily exercising in the gym had pointed to a moon tattooed on his arm. ‘Narroong,’ he explained. The other arm had a fish – ‘Towurr.’ The moon and fish. Munt was singing their song. Occasionally the moon lit a filament dangling from his hand. Fishing and singing in the silver light.
I saw the profiles of the three dogs sitting on the beach, seeming to listen in educated audience to the recital, versed in the nuance, the theatre. And like the dogs, I watched enthralled by the stillness and silence, until an eruption appeared behind the bark and the old man hauled the fish, hand over hand, into the craft. I saw him extend a foot and secure the silver quiver.
‘Towurr, towurr, Tamboorna.’
I pretended to sleep when he beached the bark but soon smelt the scorch of fish skin. I’d seen their profile dangling from his hand. Tamboorn, the estuary perch. I felt sure the old man heard my indrawn breath as I savoured the aroma of cooked fine white flesh.
The moon doused itself on the dark edge of the horizon and I slipped from wakefulness into sleep, wearied by my vigil. Of course when I woke the old man and the dogs were gone – it seemed they hardly slept – but beside the fire, on a plate of river peppermint bark, an entire fish was steaming in a swatch of grass warmed by a neat parcel of hot stones. Peppercress and warrigal greens, I considered as my tongue and palate appreciated the moist flesh. Maybe cumbungi and – I separated flesh from the stomach cavity – and blood mussels.
So, Munt the society chef, bush gourmet. Perch first thing in the morning is a fine breakfast, the flavour light but tangy with the herbs and shellfish. That’s what the old man sang – the old life. I sat up and searched the beach for the bark canoe, but it was gone. I stood and followed the dingo prints to the beach but that’s where they disappeared. They must have stepped in the retreating tide. Old habits. Secrecy, care. Treading in the world like wraiths. Now you see them, now you don’t.
But at the far end of the beach, I saw the lean brushstroke of a man and three daubs beside him searching the littoral. Ah, pipis. So lunch wouldn’t be a problem either. I idled along the shore, inspecting the bleached and abraded remnants disgorged by the sea, the single thong, the plastic net float, the Harpic bottle, the knot of faded cray line, the broken wing of a nautilus, a toothbrush.
I stopped and looked over my shoulder at the four shapes at the end of the beach and wondered how far we’d come from accepting the sea, knowing her. Me, a bloke who’d spent most of his adult life shuttling around its shores, confident in my knowledge, smug in sailor security, and here was this quartet of spirits in a slow ballet, a sombre rendition of salty faith, the steps of their dance erased by a secret tide.
