Bloke, page 25
‘What things?’
‘You and me for a start. There’s a lake up the coast. Freshwater. Hard to get to. We could camp there. Dad used to hide a boat in the reeds, it might still be there.’
I said nothing. I wasn’t up to decisions. Giovanna packed Uncle Marco’s old tent and camp oven, a few fishing rods, some fruit and vegetables, enough eggs and herbs to keep Maggie Beer happy for a year and we drove on rough old logging tracks to a spur of the range.
‘How far?’
‘Follow this to the end of the ridge, and then we walk; few miles and we’re there.’
La Paz was anxious but keen for the first mile and then I had to tuck him into my shirt. We walked through a patch of hakea scrub and the wait-a-while vine, which coiled ready to snatch at your boots or pack. Where the ridge turned and faced west a huge forest of bloodwoods and white ash veered away from the earth into the sky. They were the most massive trees I’d ever seen. Lyrebirds, unaccustomed to seeing humans, watched us from the lowest limbs of wattles, mesmerised by such large noisy creatures. Pilot birds scolded us from the thickets. Rainbow lorikeets, more travelled and worldly wise, simply screeched abuse.
We descended into a riverbed where a stream had cut its way through a seam of pink granite. Small crayfish dawdled about in the pools, seeming uncertain about what exactly they had been intending to do, their entire mind taken up by the task of coordinating legs and claws.
‘We’ll get some of them tomorrow. They’re the best eating,’ Giovanna advised as we clambered up a bank.
Soon we entered a wide clearing surrounded by bloodwoods and angophoras. A giant mahogany sprawled across half an acre, resting its elbows on the ground when the load was too great for its massive washerwoman arms. But just like the tree at Bob’s, from the rheumatic limbs sprang slender, graceful, lime and lemon-tinged branches – as if the young woman within had been suddenly remembered.
I stared about me.
‘The Bora Ring, the old people call it,’ Giovanna said quietly.
‘What old people?’
‘The old fishing families.’
‘I thought you meant blackfellas.’
‘Some of them are. I told you that. Deep in their veins.’
‘Which way?’ I asked, anxious to leave the clearing, not sure if I should have been standing there. So commonly. Without ceremony, invitation.
‘Look, you can see the lake through the trees. Why they built it here, I suppose. To be close to the lake. Hardly anyone comes here now. Two or three a year. Sometimes not that many. Some old Parks’ bloke convinced them to leave it alone. No tracks, no stock, no picnic facilities.’
‘Picnic?’
‘No tourists. No better place to hide.’
We descended through a grove of giant banksias where wattlebirds were hysterical with blossom-liquor glee. The shore of the lake was a clip of white beach skirted by a wrack of dead grey reeds and behind them the living reeds, a dull olive haze in the silver lake, and on the furthest margin a sand dune rose bright and lunar from a fringe of melaleuca and banksia. Not a building, track or person to be seen.
Two musk ducks sailed a lonely voyage across the lake like old pilgrims. My heart sighed in my chest like a deflating tyre. I sank to my knees, glad to have the pack and camp oven off my back.
‘Knew it’d be a good idea,’ she said, and erected a battered hiking tent while I stared, suddenly weary to the point that my ears rang as if one silver fork had been dropped on a stone floor and its echo spread like the tiny ripples of the lake’s faint disturbance. She boiled the billy and made a little damper with raisins and shredded apricots. I watched her hands from the distance of my stupor while La Paz investigated the shorewrack.
‘You’ll be right after a cup of tea. You’ve just let down your guard, that’s all. Hit the canvas. You’ll be right.’
We said nothing as her deft hands arranged the coals to control the heat around the camp oven. The tea did help and the damper’s aroma enveloped us when she lifted the lid to reveal its golden crown. ‘They don’t always work,’ she said, covering pride in her bushcraft with unnecessary modesty.
Butter and honey and the steam of hot bread made the tea taste even more tarry and gum-leaf pungent. The wood smoke lent everything a hint of the bush.
‘Knew you’d come good,’ she said when I drew her to me as we lay in the sand. ‘We’ll go and find Dad’s canoe later on. If it’s still there.’
It wasn’t easy to find, almost impossible if you didn’t know where to start, but eventually we found it on a tiny island beneath a woolly tea-tree, the canoe’s slate-grey body merged with the sooty branches and trunk of the ancient tree. Giovanna put her hands on the hull and began to cry. It was sudden and shook her shoulders but she controlled it and turned to face me.
We turned the canoe over and swept away the cobwebs and frogs that had used its sanctuary. She retrieved one of the little mud-brown frogs, still in shock at the reversal of its world. ‘This one will come in handy,’ she said as she withdrew a long PVC cylinder from beneath the seats. I watched as she unscrewed the cap and withdrew a fishing rod and tackle box, and a long parcel covered in oilcloth – an old single-barrel shotgun and cartridges.
‘Forget the damper, Jacques, we’re going to eat like kings while we’re here.’
‘And queens.’
‘Speak for yourself. Kings always eat better than queens.’
We let the canoe drift where it wanted and she pitched the line, baited with the tiny frog, against the fringe of water reeds. I just sat back and used the paddle to keep us parallel with the reeds and admired the darkening of the water as the late-afternoon sun lowered behind the treetops on the western shore.
She struck suddenly and a great fish erupted from the reeds and raced for the safety of the snags along the shore. I had to try and slow the canoe as the fish fought against its capture.
‘Perch,’ she grunted as she guided the fish in a long taught arc back to the canoe. She gaffed it with a hook of fencing wire. A beautiful fish, four pounds, easy. Her eyes danced with triumph and I thought of the beautiful Retha and was swamped with shame for even considering it. She glanced at me and must have wondered if my mournful look was spleen at not being the fisherman.
‘Come on, Captain Grumpy, paddle on, we have to get a duck before dark.’
We slipped into an avenue of reeds that you’d pass without a second glance if you didn’t know it was there. The canoe sheered between the stems and we entered a narrow creek mouth. She pointed at the gun.
‘When they get off the water they’ll wheel about and come past us before they see the canoe.’
The bow slid across the darkening mirror of the creek’s surface and tiny onyx ribbons carved away from us. Something alerted the ducks and they burst from beneath an overhanging paperbark in a deafening racket of wings and, like she said, they wheeled about and came back past us, heading for the open water.
I fired into the flock and two birds dropped. One almost landed on us and another flailed in the water but she hauled it toward her with the gaff and wrung its neck.
‘You’ve done that before,’ I remarked, cradling the terrified pup’s silken head.
‘Easter. Always two ducks for Easter. One of his rituals.’ Her eyes were bright, brimming with triumph and regret.
‘You loved that old man.’
‘Of course. He was wonderful. But for the grog. I never … I still don’t know what it covered up for him. He could do anything, that man. The country fitted him like a glove and yet …’
‘Well, he taught you to hunt.’
‘And to love. He taught me how to love the country, how to live in it. Fancy a grown man hiding a canoe.’
‘Fancy a grown woman remembering where it was.’
‘Fancy getting a fish and two ducks in the one night. Better get the fire going.’
The water was like jet and mirror-smooth, as water often is at the end of twilight. It was so black that any light sheered off it in silver veneers, the whispering fringe of reeds unfocused and indeterminate, like a low mist. La Paz squirmed inside my jacket, hiding his face against my belly, the smell of duck blood and the great fish thundering an erratic tattoo against the hull too much for his little heart.
I cooked the fish straight on the coals, Munt style, and watched the skin blister and curl away from the white flesh. We hung the ducks from an old cherry tree, out of the reach of dingoes and possums.
‘Can you handle roast duck for breakfast?’ she asked. ‘We have to cook them early so the flies don’t get involved.’
The days passed in a slow, modest pageant of hunting, cooking and – well, can I say it, fucking. We paddled across the lake and walked through the dunes to the ocean beach and collected oysters and mussels, dived in the rock gutters for abalone, and sprawled on the rocks in the sun. She rolled on her back and looked at me, inviting my hand to sculpt her, shameless, fearless. Well, as fearless as adults can be, the scars of loss and betrayal already callusing the ventricles of our hearts.
But a frank and respectful hand on your body can assuage almost every fear, and then that sweet luxury of joined bodies, the slip of it, the warm slide, the swelling acceptance of our meek glory, our fingers pungent with shellfish and each other.
‘Jacques, I’m going to have to ask you never to leave me. I couldn’t bear it. Not after the fish and the ducks. Not after these warm rocks. I’d never forgive you.’
‘You won’t have to. How could anyone leave a woman so handy with a gaff and fillet knife?’
‘Most blokes would run a mile.’
‘Most blokes are fuckwits.’
‘Not my Buloke.’
‘Oh, he’s a fuckwit all right.’
‘Did he fuck that Retha?’
‘No.’
‘Did he think about it?’ I wanted to say, of course, because it was the correct answer, but my courage and pride were finite and so I hesitated searching for something honest and preserving to say. We’d just made love in the sun, on a rock beside the ocean. I daren’t break the spell, but neither could I lie. ‘You tried to kiss her. Lilly said.’ I swallowed, trying to squeeze words through the funnel of my guilt. ‘Any man would have, Jacques, and you’re just a man, really, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’ That was an easy one to answer.
‘But you’re mine now and I don’t share, Jacques, it would kill me.’
I ran a finger from the corner of her left eye to the edge of her mouth, and she took the finger with a tiny parting of her lips. ‘Vanna …’ The shadow of a sea eagle swept over us, as the great bird rocked in its imperious glide, an old-fashioned air ship. I glanced up at it. ‘Vanna …’ She took my finger from her lips and brought my hand against my chest.
‘Swear it, Jacques.’
‘I fucking love you.’
‘Not the kind of swearing a girl craves. But it might do.’ She slid her thigh across my groin and held my face in her hands, her left breast resting on my chest, sun-warmed, fragrant with the sea, tiny gold hairs bright with salt. ‘This is it for me, mate. There’s no going back. It’d kill me. Nothing melodramatic, just … a hollowed-out heart, that kind of death. I never thought this would be possible.’ She swept an arm, indicating beach, ocean, sky, our warm rock, and in the momentum of the gesture her breast slid to the nape of my neck. I closed my eyes, it was ecstasy. ‘And when you didn’t believe me I nearly gave up on you. But now I’ve tasted it, there’s nothing else for me. That’s what a woman’s like, Jacques.’
I held her buttock in my hand, a perfect moon, and my little finger grazed her bush. She moved a millimetre and the finger slipped a fraction, intimately.
‘See,’ she said. ‘I’m yours. Forever.’
‘Vanna …’ Christ I was hopeless with speech.
‘Waiting.’
‘Vanna,’ I said, ‘I’ll never hurt you.’
‘Yes you will, but will you leave me?’
‘No. We’ve shared …’
‘The fish and fowl of foam and field.’
‘Yes, that too, but we’re … we love the same things, we don’t have to … we don’t need to …’ I stumbled. ‘We see an eagle and we turn to look at each other, we catch a fish, paddle a canoe in the dark and don’t need to say a word.’
‘Yes, but I needed you to say them anyway. Thank you, Jacques, I believe you – you’re just a man, but you’re an honest man … and a great fuck.’ She rolled away from me and dived back into the ocean. She rose from the water and hauled her hair back out of her eyes. Do I need to tell you what she looked like with her arms raised and sea water dripping from her body?
‘That’ll do, Jacques, that’ll do, you’ve married me now.’
I sat up and watched as she dived, her arse mooning through the surface as her body arced. I waited until she surfaced again, doing that thing with her hair.
‘And you have to promise me.’
‘Jacques, my dear, I am a promise, a promise I thought I’d – well, I’ve made it now and that’s it. Keeps.’
‘Keeps.’
We just looked. The embarrassment and uncertainty seemed to be sloughed off like the sea from her shoulders. No need to say anything, no need to look away. No need to contrive words or posture. She in the water, me on the rock, as if we’d been born there.
One morning I woke and found her head on my chest and my hand cradling the back of her skull. I didn’t move my hand but concentrated on the sensation of having the hemisphere in my palm. I felt a tickle creep down my neck and realised with alarm that I was crying. I had never touched anyone quite so intimately and no one, hardly anyone, had touched me. The motherless child. Nobody knows. The old refrain. Well, nobody does know what it’s like for those who have never been touched, never had a woman stare down at the top of their head and just cradle it, consider the tiny sphere precious. I had learnt to guard myself if I ever witnessed women show that tenderness, had to pull the rein hard to stop the tears bolting. And when Giovanna caressed me I felt an odd confusion, had to learn how to act like a man, not a child, had to learn to allow for another’s love.
My chest heaved for breath and she stirred and at that very instant there was a rush of air like someone shaking a huge heavy blanket in slow deliberate strokes. Foor, foor, foor, foor. Her eyes opened in alarm and stared at the flimsy fabric of the tent.
‘What’s …?’ she began, but then I felt her relax. ‘Sea eagle.’
‘Flew right over us.’
We stayed like that for minutes, waiting. Neither of us really expecting it to return. Just waited in embrace. And then she turned and looked at me. Not a word.
Inside the sheltered arm of the duck creek I found a bed of cumbungi reeds and harvested enough shoots to make a sort of salad with bower spinach and sea rocket. I shot another duck and caught my own perch. She was right, I was a bit jealous. Back at the camp I made a rotisserie out of green melaleuca stakes and then sat back and watched as she sprinkled the duck with the herbs. All her father’s old tricks. I was beginning to wish I’d met the old bloke.
‘It’s hard to explain how it happened,’ I began, unaware until then that I was going to say anything. She said nothing. Didn’t even look at me. ‘My girlfriend and I were kind of avoiding each other. I was doing some shit job or other, brickie’s labourer or something, and it rained. I came home early and there was a bloke there. Just having a beer. Nothing in it, maybe, but there were a few words between us all and he thought he had to prove who was the better man, protecting her honour, all that shit, think with your fists. I was just going to leave, seemed like an easy way out of it, but he wouldn’t let me, wanted to do a bit of push and shove. He started throwing punches, tried to whack me with a bottle. I hit him in the nose, thought that would slow him down for a bit. And it did. Broke his nose, bone went back into his head, severed an artery, dead as a stone.
‘The girlfriend and I thought he was unconscious. We took him to the hospital but I could tell he was gone when I tried to lift him out of the ute. There was nothing in him, nothing holding the muscles together; dead. I was trying to console the girlfriend. She got a hell of a fright. We both did. Then the police came. The hospital must have rung them. Never occurred to me that I was in trouble until I saw the copper, and then it was like, shit, I’m in strife.
‘I was inside that same day. Never saw the girlfriend again, never … we weren’t really close anyway. She’d lived in a violent family, I’d been in a home, we thought we were outcasts who had found … but we hadn’t.
‘It wasn’t her fault. The bloke just died. Like being stung by a bee, just one of those things. Bit of bad luck. There’s a few inside like that. Pool cue broke and went into the bloke’s eye, fella went backwards and hit his head, ran off the road and killed his mate, over .05, gone. I never blamed her. Neither of us knew enough to get a decent lawyer. Just waited for it to be over.’
The duck skin was blistering and the edges of the blisters sizzled and charred as the fat caught alight in little hissing flares.
‘Well, it’s over now.’
‘It’s never over. It’s always there.’
‘Yes, but it doesn’t have to control your life now. It’s time to get on with our lives, Jacques. You and me. Time we stopped dancing in the shadows. Got on with it.’
‘You’re suggesting we should buy some chickens?’
‘Something like that. Get on with being together, and you’ve got —’
‘A family.’
‘Yes.’
‘And that’s the hardest thing to get used to.’
twenty-two
We had to wait three weeks before we got a big northerly to flatten the sea. We got her in the inflatable tender and walked it in toward the shore. Queen of the Nile. She had trouble hooking the gammy leg over the gunwale and onto the coarse sand, and even more trouble clambering up the rise into the cave entrance. Nugget had one arm and I had the other. Giovanna held the lamp.
‘There they are, Aunt,’ I said as the light from the lantern juddered across the ceiling.
