I lie here for a while. I can hear the chooks fussing. Someone is walking around. Someone is chopping wood. Listen – you can hear the split bits falling to the ground.
Two days Henry Warburton has been here now. Reckon I can’t make up my mind about him, but. He’s been fixing the place up and helping Mum and even playing with me and trying to teach Tegwyn some piano even though she doesn’t listen. He’s big, you know, and kind of ugly and got one eye and that thing that stops him talking completely right, but he’s got a good laugh like a horse and he has a look sometimes that says maybe he could tell good stories. Long time since anyone told stories around here. Grammar is too old and in herself, and Mum is too worried and busy, and Dad can’t talk any more. The only stories these days are the ones you listen in on, or the ones you figure out for yourself.
Yesterday, he walked into Bankside and came back riding an old yellow bike, a crappy old crate with a girl’s carry basket on the front. In the carry basket was some clothes he said he scabbed from Mrs Musworth at the pub. They were old bits and pieces that men left behind in their rooms. Some had been there for years. They were awful and I reckon he didn’t know.
His hands have got blisters on them. They are all soft and pink. What was he doing under that bridge?
‘Do you think the bloke across the road would be likely to give me a bit of work every now and then?’ Warburton asks Mum at breakfast. He eats toast with big, quick bites, like he’s not sure if it’s alive or dead.
We all look at Mum. She has a white shirt on, one of Dad’s. It’s too big for her but it makes her look young.
‘No,’ she says. She sips her tea.
‘Not even a day here and there?’
‘No. He keeps an eye on this place, you know.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Him and Leila jump to conclusions. Anyway, they’re both too damned guilty to give anyone the time of day just now. I think he’s hit the grog a bit.’
‘What do you think, Ort?’
I shrug. I dunno. I don’t really get what they’re talking about much.
‘Why don’t you and me go over after brekky?’
I nod. ‘Okay.’ Tegwyn is still in bed. Grammar is singing in her sleep.
Henry Warburton and me go through the fence and the bush clicks and ticks. There’s a hot wind this morning. It makes the brown grass lie over and it makes the dead leaves fly and it brings the smell of the desert, or so Dad used to say. He said the easterly brings little pieces of the deserts and the goldfields and the wheat-belt: red dust and gold dust and yellow dust. The country is a nomad, he says, always going walkabout.
Cherrys’ roadhouse doesn’t get used much now. People go to Bankside for their juice because it’s cheaper and there’s a pub. Cherrys’ gets people cut short or people who don’t know about Bankside, or people at two o’clock in the morning when Bankside’s shut. They used to sell lunches, too, but no one buys ’em. It’s a sad place.
‘What’s he like, this Mr Cherry?’ Henry Warburton asks. He puts his hand on my shoulder.
‘Bit of a dag.’
‘Ort, old son, you have the gifts of concinnity and concision.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Most definitely. Is that Mr Cherry over there? In the fullblown flesh?’
Fat’s dad is working on his front bowser with a screwdriver. His black pants hang off him until you can see the crack of his bum. He sees us coming, you can tell.
‘Yep. That’s him.’
We go across.
‘Er. Mr Cherry?’
‘You’ve found him. What.’
‘I was interested to know whether you had any need of help.’
‘Help?’ Mr Cherry hasn’t looked up from his bowser yet. Me and Henry Warburton just stand there and look down his hairy crack.
‘Of the hired sort.’
‘A job?’
Warburton looks at me and his eyebrows go up and up and up till they nearly drown in his hair. I almost laugh.
‘I think you have my meaning.’
‘I’ve got your number, too, smartarse. Piss off.’
Henry Warburton unzips his pants real loud. Then Mr Cherry turns around real quick.
‘Oh, hello. You’re with us, then?’
‘Get off this driveway.’ His face is all blue with not shaving and his eyes are red.
Warburton zips up. ‘You have no jobs?’
‘She’s got a bloody hide sending you over here. She’s got a hide, full-stop. Her old man still in the house, under the same roof.’
Henry Warburton moves real quick and has some of Mr Cherry’s shirt in his hand and he looks very much bigger all of a sudden, but then he stops and lets go and stands back.
‘I’m sorry,’ Warburton says, ‘that was silly.’
Mr Cherry looks frightened. I can see Mrs Cherry and Fat behind the flywire door and I feel all sick.
‘What about my Dad’s tools?’ I say, without even expecting it. It happens all the time now.
‘What tools?’ Mr Cherry looks at me like he hates my guts.
‘Some of my Dad’s tools are still in there.’ I point to the workshop.
‘Rubbish. Anything in there is mine, you cheeky little bugger.’
‘Come on, Ort,’ Warburton says, taking my arm.
‘You’re a piece of poop, Mr Cherry!’ I yell. ‘My Dad is nearly dead because of you!’ Henry Warburton yanks me away. We run across the road, jump the fence and then walk home. The ground is flat and hard and brown and hot. Grasshoppers hiccup all over the place.
‘That wasn’t a good thing to say,’ Henry Warburton says. I don’t say anything. I feel all tight and sick and hot. ‘How do you know it was his fault?’
I don’t say a word. Not one.
Later in the morning I stand outside the bathroom door and listen to Warburton washing Dad and talking to him.
‘You can be washed in the blood, Sam,’ he says.
I can hear Mum coming in from out the back, so I slip across into my room.
‘. . . whiter than snow . . .’
I drag out the box of Mad comics from under the bed to see if they cheer me up. One says RONNIE REAGAN HANGS LOOSE. There is an old man on a horse. The horse and the man are smiling and have ropes around their necks. I dunno what it means. I wish it would make me laugh.
The hot white day swims along real slow like the sun is breaststroking through that blue sky when it should be going freestyle. Everyone hangs around the shade of the house listening to the trees in the east wind. The ground is wobbly with heat. The house ticks. You can hear seeds popping, grass drying up and fainting flat. You can hear the snakes puffing.
Henry Warburton pokes around in the big shed all day. Hear him moving things, dropping them. Dad’s Chev truck is out there. He bought it before I was born. It’s older than any of us, except maybe Grammar. Every now and then Dad will go out there in the evening with some lamps and his tools. Me and Tegwyn and Mum sit out on the verandah waiting to hear the sound of the motor. But we’ve never heard it yet.
All day out there in the hot, Henry Warburton bangs around and we sit here inside wondering if we can even be bothered going down the creek; all day until the sun is gone and the east wind stops and we come out with Dad onto the back verandah.
But the same happens again: Tegwyn and me get sent to bed early so they can talk. Tegwyn slams her door and I slam mine; then she does it again, and so do I. I hear the springs going as she jumps on her bed. I knock on the wall.
‘Piss off, Small Thing,’ she says.
So I go out to listen again.
‘Seemed there was more life in what my mother did. Out of clay or stone she made things that were alive. My father’s conjurings with wafers and wine seemed more mechanical than her chipping away with chisels and bits of rock.’
‘What was she like?’ Mum is asking.
‘Oh, I don’t know, really. I never took the time to find out. She had long black hair she used to wind up in a bun, big red
lips; she was thin. I suppose she could have been one of those Darlington wives whose husbands are bone marrow specialists with lots of money and near perfect accents. I don’t know – I was so young. I left at seventeen. Went to university. I didn’t even go back for holidays. I was supposed to be studying literature and music, but I don’t know what I did all those years. It was fun, though. I wound up teaching. Lasted three months at a public high school. I knocked the headmaster over in the staffroom. I was in a hurry. He fell over onto the principal mistress and they ended up on the floor together. It was an accident, but I cracked a dumb joke about how she now qualified as the principal’s mistress and that we should apostrophize her. I got the sack. They found some excuse and I didn’t fight it. That was ’65.
‘Then I just started hitching around. Thought I was Jack Kerouac himself. It was really something to be young and not committed to anything except having a good time. I met lots of people, got into some interesting situations, did a lot of dope, experimented a bit. ’67, I shagged out all of a sudden. Lived in a commune. North Queensland. I thought I was going to be there forever. I used to write poems and look after the kids. My book came out in ’69.’
‘What was it called?’ Mum says. ‘I’ve never met an author before.’
‘I thought you lived with a poet.’
‘Oh, he never had anything printed.’
‘You’ll laugh if I tell you.’
‘It was a long time ago. I’ll understand.’
Henry Warburton is quiet for a while. Dad whistles in the dark.
‘It was called Heavy Dream-Jazz from the Tropic of Capricorn —’
‘Oh, no,’ Mum says, with a laugh.
‘— and Other Verse Statements.’
‘Oh. Oh, dear. Did you make all the poems look like flowers and motorbikes and things?’
He laughs. ‘Yes.’
‘Did anyone buy it?’
‘Not that I know of. The publishers made papier mâché briefcases out of them, I think, and sold them to Chinese diplomats. I don’t know, really.’
The night seems cool with their laughs.
‘What made you stay at the commune?’
‘Oh, a woman.’
‘What was her name? Was she nice?’
‘Her name was Bobo Sax.’ His voice goes all funny. ‘No, she wasn’t nice. She had the voice of a man and she smelt like a labrador.’
Across the road Cherrys’ lights go out. The roadhouse is closed early.
‘Why did you stay with her?’
‘Um. I couldn’t not stay. I don’t know. She was the exact opposite of my parents. She thought nothing, believed nothing, did nothing, pretended nothing. She wasn’t nice or decent or restrained. I really couldn’t say with any conviction that she was even human. She used to lie in her mud hut in the dark. The smell of her . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, I stayed. 1970 I left. I don’t know why. That was the year Jimi Hendrix died, wasn’t it. It was as though I came out of a trance. I just dropped everything one day and walked off. I hitched back across the continent and went home to Geraldton. I got a shock. My mother and father didn’t live there any more. It had been eight years since I left. The priest there told me my father was in Perth, and that he was a bishop. And my mother was dead. Brain tumour.
‘I hitched back down to Perth as though I was stoned. I didn’t know what I was doing. Someone showed me where my father lived. I found his office – it was fairly plush with lots of leather-bound books and dark furniture. My father was in. He didn’t look surprised to see me. He poured me a drink. We stood there in his bishop’s office with the sun coming in the high window, just looking at each other. He was wearing civvies – sensible cuts, sensible colours. His hair was grey and shiny. He probably couldn’t believe the sight of me. I hadn’t cut my hair for eight years. I didn’t used to wash much then. I wore home-made clothes. He just looked at me and I just looked at him. Then he said, “Now neither of us has anyone on this earth” and then he showed me out.’
‘God. What did you do?’
‘Oh, I worked for a while, saved some money and went overseas. Easier to do then. Europe. I met a girl in Frankfurt. Married her and came back to Australia. In ’73 our baby boy was born. We were living in Sydney. I had a job in advertising. Martha and I were happy enough. In 1974 she and the boy died in a rail accident. I drank myself stupid, got sacked, and went back up to northern Queensland.’
He talks like it’s someone else doing all these things. So many things.
‘To Bobo Sax?’
‘Yes. I took a lot of acid and spent a lot of time with her. It nearly burnt me out completely. She died in 1977. It was a . . . bad affair. Our farm was burnt down afterwards by the locals. I ended up with nothing again.’
‘That was seven years ago. What have you been doing all this time?’
‘Oh,’ he says, laughing, ‘learning to live with nothing.’
I tell you, I don’t know if I’m firing on all six. I just got this crazy idea and before I even decide about it, I’m up and off and doing it and the house is behind me as I cut across the firebreak toward Cherrys’. These days I just do things, like me parts don’t need permission from me brain. It’s real scary, like when I say things without giving me mouth the nod. Maybe it’s growing up – or going whacko.
I move along real quick and quiet. The road is still warm when I cross it. The driveway of the roadhouse is oily and gucky under my feet. The big tin doors are down over the front of the workshop. AMPOL, THE AUSTRALIAN COMPANY. Round to the side window. Some nights I used to come here and watch my Dad’s legs coming out from under a Chrysler or a Ford, listening to him sing and make noises with his spanners and I stood there for a long time knowing he couldn’t see me, just watching his legs for no reason.
The window near the front is closed, but further down, the louvre windows are open a little bit, so I start working away at them. The first one comes out real easy, and I put it careful on the dirt and have a go at number two. Hard to see good. No moon. Stuck. I push and pull, try to work the glass out. Oh, geez! It breaks and comes away and I catch both pieces and feel the glass go in the skin and blood come up quick. I put the pieces on the dirt. The next louvre comes out easy, but with blood all over it. I scuff up on the ledge, get my head in the hole and kick in.
Suddenly there’s lights and stars and rainbows and me head hurts like hell. The vise! I shuffle away from it with my hands on the bench, and then I get my feet in and I’m like a dog on the bench, sniffing around. I get down on the floor. Something chinks in the dark. Parts, tools. Up the front past the hoist I find the meterbox and try the lights. They all come on sudden and the place is so bright I cut them down to one little one low to the floor that gives everything a soft light. Radiator hose curls up near me feet. Boxes of old parts. An air filter. Fanbelts. Carbies. Tools, tools, tools, everywhere. Just tools. I can’t tell whose they are. They all smell the same now; there’s no telling one from the other. Some of these tools are my Dad’s. He should have them back. But I can’t tell which ones so I just stuff some into the old pillowslip on the bench that they use for a rag. Spanners, screwdrivers, things like that. On the way back to the window I see the Pirelli calendar from 1969 with the brown boobs pointing at me, so I grab it just before I decide to and stuff it in the pillowslip. There is a light green square on the wall where it was. I go back to the fuse box to turn out the lights.