Locust Summer, page 21
There went Holt’s deadline – shoot.
There went the article – shoot.
There went my police round – shoot.
When I’d emptied a box of shells she took the gun back and I loaded for her. She didn’t miss once, her face scowled in concentration and determination.
‘Pull,’ she demanded, going faster and faster, racking the shotgun’s slide till the magazine clicked empty, then expertly reloading – two shells at a time one-handed.
A final brace of plates sailed out high into the darkening sky and was exploded like the rest. The silence that followed was immense. Mum laid the shotgun on the grass to let it cool. Smoke unwound from the barrel and the breech, the wet sulphur smell of gunpowder mixing with the perfume of cool night, cut grass, summer weeds lurking.
‘I hope they don’t mind the mess,’ Mum said, looking over the white shreds that had turned the lawn into a stormy night sea. ‘I might leave a note warning to watch out for prickles.’
I grabbed her as she sank forward, holding her tight to my chest. She howled. Screamed into my flesh. Her weight went dead as we sank together to the grass. A decade of despair leached out in a crowded minute.
‘Do we have anything to drink?’ she gasped. I helped her down on the lawn and went to get the whisky from the library. When I returned with the bottle and a pair of glasses she took it neat from me and swigged the fiery stuff straight from the neck. ‘Load the gun,’ she said, taking a final swallow. I slid a single shell into the magazine. ‘Don’t miss.’ She shifted up onto her knees, steadied herself and threw the bottle high up toward the dry creek. The barrel followed. The trigger squeezed. The bottle exploded and a gust of wind rained a fine mist of alcohol.
‘Are there any beers left?’ Mum said. There was an edge to her voice. Something beyond grief. Closer to anger.
‘I’ll see what I can get us.’
‘Us? No. You’re the sober one for now.’ She pointed to the shotgun and the loose boxes of ammo. ‘I’m getting drunk. When you’re done cleaning you can join me.’ She stood and hugged me tight again. ‘Ashes to ashes, and then back to the soil.’
41
On the last day, Sterlo came around to say goodbye. Since he’d finished up at our place, he’d been working at the silos, organising shipments for the grain trains to the export ports. ‘Shit of a job, but they pay better than you mob ever did,’ he said, refusing my offer of a coffee. The kitchen still had the basics. The bedrooms had a few suitcases of clothes. The bathrooms had toiletries bags beside the sinks. All the keys to all the locks were laid out on the kitchen bench. Sterlo picked up the bit for the big shed and ran his thumb over its teeth.
‘Mind if I take a last look in there?’ I nodded yes, and watched him through the window as he opened the sliding door, ransacked Dad’s tools and loaded as much as he could into the tray of his ute. When he was done he came to the veranda, where Mum walked out to meet him.
They talked for a long while. They laughed. Hugged a few times. Wiped away a few tears. Finally Sterlo extended his hand, shook Mum’s, then bent and kissed the blade of her wrist.
‘Bye for now, Rowan,’ he called through the window glass, splaying his hand into a starburst goodbye. He walked to his ute and drove off.
‘Maybe he’ll come and visit me in Perth,’ I said to Mum as she came inside. ‘Maybe you could come when he does.’
‘I think he’s keener on visiting me,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you’re right. This is no place for nostalgia.’
The house was empty. The fields all stripped. Brockman’s Place was no more. All we had to do was pack up the last of our things and leave.
Shorn wheat fields beside the highway west to Geraldton gave way to toast-brown yields still to be cut on the southern run to Perth. White smoke hung in sheets as farmers back-burned the long grass framing their paddocks to reduce the risk of crop fires. The further south I drove, the more harvest there was still to complete, the timetable following the slow shift of ripening sun and the tilting earth.
Just before Perth’s outskirts an unseen meridian flicked the temperature down ten degrees and the metal of my car seemed to dump a month of sunlit heat into the air. Mum would soon follow my journey on her own, then go further down to the south coast where her new place was waiting, cooler again by a degree of latitude.
When I reached my flat in Scarborough I fumbled with front-door keys and spilled inside with tired annoyance. I stalked around the rooms dumping luggage, peeled my sweat-sodden shirt off and stood outside on the stubby balcony. A couple fought a few doors down. Cars drove past on the street below with stereos thumping. A siren wailed somewhere. I was back to the city and suburbs, the coast and the commute, with a view of the strata bins and a sliver of the ocean at night.
Instead of showering, I stripped off and put on a pair of boardies, slipped on my thongs and walked all the way down to the beach with a towel over my bare shoulders. The rushing churning moving of waves hissing through the shallows lured me through the lights of shops and hotels, past kids doing laps of the streets in their cars, looping round a cursive clock tower whose hands read eight o’clock – twelve hours till I was due at work.
Down on the sand, the loom of lights from a new high-rise hotel spilled onto the faces of the breakers, making them taller and wider. Inhale, dive, swim, I went through the rolling rock roar of the foam to the even water where I lay on my back and floated. Brilliant stars in the sky. A plane flew up high on its way to the east, the triangle of its navigation lights winking white, red and green.
Turning over, I screamed underwater, muffling my fury in the dark. I hadn’t cried at the funeral. I felt I had no right. Not with Mum beside me, who had been through so much more. So I held the tears in, saved them up. The dark salt water would take them.
When it was done I struck out for shore and bodysurfed a wave back in, coughing and hissing from gulps of salt water burning my lungs. A teenager ran down from the shadows of the sand dunes and asked if I was okay. I strode away listening to him explain to his giggling mates, ‘Just some idiot taking a swim.’
Holt’s office. The door shut. Watching newsroom hacks through the soundproof glass: bashing the phones, arguing, gossiping, slacking with professional poise.
‘Anyone senior in this racket has either been through the Great Depression, the Second World War or two divorces,’ he said, his words too off the cuff to have not been rehearsed. ‘They smoke. They swear. Them out there make no exceptions for grief. You need to get on with it.’ He picked up a paperweight and slid a pile of yellow legal pads to the centre of his desk. ‘Off you fuck then.’
A few of the old hands on the subs desk gave me a pat on the back and said welcome. The rest blanked me. They knew I’d been shunted aside, made roadkill in a place that valued only the next thing, and the next thing, and the thing after that. As I settled in, Holt came over and took a chair at the main desk, imposing himself on the early edition copy flowing in for the noonday deadline.
‘Harris, front and centre,’ he barked. A skinny reporter strode over, eyes to the floor as scores of others followed him. ‘Read this aloud for me,’ Holt said, passing him a sheet of typed paper.
‘The state government has failed to reach agreement with the teachers union on a pay rise for WA’s primary school educators.’
‘Did they promise to do that? Promise specifically to reach agreement?’
Harris swallowed. No, they hadn’t.
‘They said they would negotiate in good faith. Which enfolds the possibility of a positive or negative outcome in its scope. Negotiations don’t fail. They simply go unresolved till the next round.’ Holt snatched the paper, crossed out the line with red pencil and handed it back.
‘How about “stalled in its attempt”? Walk it back. We all want to hang them. But do it the right way.’
Harris strode away with blushed cheeks. Holt came over, fixed me with his good eye and spoke from the side of his mouth. ‘They are worker bees. Out gathering honey.’ He took a cigarette from his top pocket and lit up with a match. ‘You can correct the sport today. Just remember no Oxford commas, colons, semicolons or anything fruity. Just the facts. Direct language shorn of sentiment.’
‘Everything else is literature,’ I said, quoting his lines back to him, and he showed tobacco-stained teeth and laugh lines. ‘West, get over here.’ He waved to a grizzled sports journo who shambled over, shoulders hunched, face streaked with sweat and worry.
‘Who’s this bloody child?’ West said, not looking at me.
‘New to the desk,’ Holt said. ‘He’s going to have a look at your copy on the America’s Cup. Not long now, eh?’
‘Couldn’t come quick enough. Bores me shitless. Sit in the sun half the bloody day for a boat that could be beaten by a bus.’
Holt rummaged an in-tray and selected a story sheet. ‘Scan and find something wrong. Quickly now.’
I forced my eyes to fall from line to line, letting the meaning come in a single clot. A news story should tumble like a rock falling down a hill. Anything that kinks the movement is discarded.
‘The front of a yacht is more commonly called bow, not the prow,’ I said. ‘Both are acceptable. Bow is vernacular. Which is our style.’
Holt silenced West’s harrumph. ‘Anything else?’
‘Two T’s in attempt. And John Bertrand won the America’s Cup in 1983. Alan Bond just bankrolled it. The honour goes to the skipper.’
‘Smartarse,’ West said, and snatched his copy back.
Holt made a buzzing sound. ‘You’ll make a professional pain in the arse yet,’ he said, and slid more papers over.
I drove the long way home, through the city and right out to the coast road where the sky held that purple time between the working day and free night. Out at sea, a line of freighters wallowed outside the Gage Roads channel. I could simply turn the wheel and drive over the dunes to the water and float out there with them.
After night came, a patter of rain began to fall. I took a chair to the balcony and smoked a cigarette, watching the streets, waiting for something to happen. Maybe a car would skid out of control on the bend and crash into a light pole where a drug deal was happening in the disc of illumination. I’d get the scoop. Deal myself back in the game. The rain became a torrent and the whole of Scarborough shut its doors. I shut my eyes and listened to the drainpipes glugging. This was the kind of rain we prayed for on the farm.
The phone rang inside. It was Mum, marvelling at the rain, soaking as far down the coast as Mandurah where she was settling into her new place. How was the first day back? What did I eat for dinner? How about this rain then?
‘The subs desk is going to take getting used to,’ I said.
She sighed. ‘That’s a euphemism. I know big words too.’
‘Might get you a job then.’
‘Stop talking in riddles. What’s wrong?’
Hard to say. So I said it – plain and simple. ‘Doesn’t feel the same here.’
We could go back to Septimus. We’d be visitors. We could visit Brockman’s Place. By appointment only. Dad’s ashes had been scattered over the rock at the Hoths’, and of course they said we could go there whenever we liked. Nothing was ours anymore.
‘What furniture do you have?’ Mum asked.
‘Classic bachelor pad,’ I said, bare walls and floors.
‘Well, there’s your problem. How about I come up on the weekend? The cheque’s cleared.’
I thought on it. Then said, ‘How about I come see you?’
‘Drive down on Friday night and we can go shopping on the Saturday,’ Mum said. ‘I’ll just get it delivered in a truck.’ There was no stopping her.
‘I’ll get chesterfields then. And antiques.’
‘You’ll have pine and like it.’
She rang off just as the rain stopped. Birds chirped in the trees, an odd sound at night, after rain, and I went back inside and switched on the lights. She was right – the place could use some furniture. Bare walls and an old couch was hardly a home. Humouring her, I picked up the snowdrift of post that had been delivered under the door and found a catalogue for a department store. One page boasted of ‘prices you wont pass up’.
‘Missing an apostrophe,’ I said, and threw it in the bin.
42
The highway to Mandurah was fast and mostly deserted. I made good time breaking the speed limit on back roads that went past a chain of lakes and paddocks that petered out just before the coastal city’s outer suburbs. Mum’s flat in a retirement village was austere and clean, with a simple kitchen right outside the bedroom and bathroom. No extras or frills. It was a space to live simply in, with the sound of the sea ever present as the ticking of the hallway clock, an ornate country touch out of place in her simple sitting room.
‘No fences to mend, no crops to tend, and no meals to cook save breakfast,’ she said, giving me the grand tour. She’d covered the walls with photographs of her and Dad and me and Albert, all of us together and all of us separate in black-and-white and colour, all ages and phases. Most of everything else had gone into a storage unit.
‘I don’t have any photos like this,’ I said, lingering on a portrait of Dad in his wedding suit.
‘I’ve boxes of them. Take your pick.’ She patted the couch. ‘This folds out. So you can sleep here. Just take care not to be too obvious. Visitors aren’t supposed to stay overnight.’
‘Even sons?’
‘Especially sons.’ She put hands to her throat. ‘There’s many a family fortune here up for grabs.’
‘I’d use a pillow,’ I said, and we cackled together. ‘Let’s get to the pub.’
‘I’ve got other plans.’
She opened a sliding door that led to a small courtyard lush with ferns. From there she retrieved two long wooden poles with metal baskets attached to their ends. ‘The blue crabs are on. It’s the first day of summer tomorrow.’
Pictures came. Frozen moments of the years we came to the coast for summer holidays after the hard work of the harvest. All those days in the sun together. It was suddenly strange to be there on the same ground with so much time in between. I felt older, more solid, with a weariness I’d never considered possible before.
‘I’ve got garlic, butter, cream, wine and chilli,’ Mum said, pulling me back to the moment. ‘If we catch enough I’ll knock up dinner. If not, we’ll get fish and chips.’
I took the poles from her and loaded them into my car. They wouldn’t fit easily, so I wound down the back window and stuck their ends out. We drove to the mouth of the Murray River like a pair of sunstruck old fishermen, resting our arms on the poles set between us.
We weren’t so expert at the water’s edge.
‘Do you dig them into the mud and stir them out?’ Mum said as we both rolled up our trousers. ‘Or do you wait till you spot one and scoop him up?’
I set a bucket down on a narrow strip of sand, kicked off my shoes and waded in. The water was warm on my bare legs, brown and rich. The estuary was a wide abundance of reed banks, ducks and seabirds in flight, then the lucky flash of a porpoise playing in the quickening channel dividing the fresh water from the salt, the join made murky by fishing tinnies cleaving their way to the river and the sea.
We walked together in the shallows, both of us scanning the muck at our ankles for the telltales of little crabs. My feet sank into the mud and I squirmed with fear of stepping on something sharp, or slimy, or both. Alby would have laughed. ‘There’s nothing down there but razor-sharp crab claws that will nip your little toe off. Stop being such a wuss.’
Dad would have joined in. ‘If the crab holds on, maybe we can boil your foot up too. Make the dish go further.’
‘Oh rack off,’ I said to them, laughing at their jest to show I was game. Mum patted me on the back, bringing me back to water, wind and the fading afternoon.
‘Where to then?’
‘Over there,’ I said, pointing to a patch of water shot through with seaweed. ‘They’ll be hiding amongst that.’
Mum scooped her pot down and flushed out a brace of crabs, catching them all once with a quick flick of her wrists. She grinned with triumph and waded back to shore, her catch held high then plopped into the bucket for safe keeping. ‘Four in one blow,’ she announced, bowing to the picnickers on the shore and the boaters passing by. ‘Come on, Rowan. I can’t do it all by myself.’
I threw my scoop into the water, churned it around and around and pulled one crab out. It looked undersized. ‘How’s that for a fisherman?’ I said, tipping the little one out.
‘Office hands,’ Mum drawled. ‘You’ve gone soft again.’
I levered the pot in again. Five crabs tumbled into the metal rose and I lifted them clear. ‘More like supple,’ I said, igniting a frenzy of fishing till the bucket was full to the bag limit with twenty good-size crabs. We marched out of the water as though we’d won a war. Mum put her pole down and sat on the river beach, no longer caring if her trousers got wet. I sat beside her and we watched a young family wade into the water, the mother and father leading the way with a girl and boy in their early teens sullenly following.
Gusts of wind creased the water and brought a sudden cold to the remaining sun. She moved closer to me, and pointed to the family. ‘You were just like that. Had to drag you kicking and screaming to everything.’
The boy had his arms crossed and shoulders hunched. The girl was looking to the far distance, as though pretending she was somewhere else. The mother and father worked a fishing net between them, casting around the shallows, pointing and whooping as they circled round a cluster of crabs.
‘How many do you think they’ll get with that thing?’ I asked, and Mum shrugged.
‘Plenty now that their bloody kids are lending a hand.’ She leaned against me. ‘Thanks for coming.’
‘It was no trouble. Friday’s edition is all sport anyway.’
‘I mean the harvest. I appreciate what you did.’
