Dirt Music (22 page)

Fox slumps back in the luggage space behind them, sweltering. The music is jagged and pushy and he for one just doesn’t want to bloody hear it but the outbursts of strings and piano are as austere and unconsoling as the pindan plain out there with its spindly acacia and red soil.

Cars and roadtrains overtake in slams of wind. The dirt is the colour of food. This music feels like it’s peeling his skin. He can’t afford this shit. He needs covering, not stripping. Since that terrible night in which everything seemed to unravel in a series of jumpy, uncertain moments, everyone dead so sudden like that, all he’s wanted is to be left alone, and music is a fucking bully—it’s the last thing he needs; it’ll rip him to pieces. There’s simply not enough of him left to withstand it.

Bess is writhing now. Horrie pulls over. She staggers off into the acacias, but there isn’t enough vegetation to hide in so the old bloke follows her out with a shielding blanket. Fox averts his head, swelters. Bess comes back in girlish high spirits but it’s plain she’s masking her embarrassment and discomfort.

How’s your geography, Lu? Draw a line east of this very spot.

Right across the country. Now name everything in the way of your line.

Fox shrugs.

Bess reels them off. the Great Sandy Desert, the Tanami Desert, Tennant Creek, the Barkly Tableland, Mount Isa, Charters Towers, everything between them and the Great Barrier Reef.

He smiles as indulgently as he can.

She twists in her seat, looking feverish.

Now a literary litmus test, she says.

Bess, says Horrie, wiping at her one-handed with a damp cloth as he drives.

Virginia Woolf.

Fox wrinkles his nose.

And why not?

Never trust a non-swimmer, he says, glad that at least the music’s off for the moment.

Would that account for Shelley?

Bad sailor, too.

Careful, she says. I married a bad sailor.

Oi!

Melville, then.

He nods.

But that shark poem, Lu-pale ravener of horrible meat—the sound of an anxious wader.

Fox laughs, bewildered by her antic talk. She goes on without him, jaunty as you like, answering her own questions with a quaver in her voice. Looking miserable and desperate, Horrie watches Fox in the rearview mirror. He slaps Mussorgsky into the deck and Fox squirms in his nest of luggage.

Twice more they stop for Bess. She squats behind the burr-specked blanket, cries out in pain.

Late in the afternoon the radiator boils again and they pull up to the thin shade of a solitary bloodwood. As he slides out to help Horrie, Bess catches his arm. Swimmers, she says. Her breath is bitter. She declaims into his face: And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in their stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

Geez, Bess, he says wiping her spittle from his cheek.

Anne Sexton. Christ knows, she had some swimming to do.

Beneath the hood Horrie is bawling. Fox stands beside him a moment, touches the old bloke’s shoulder. Horrie flinches away.

Fox feels the urge to drag his pack out onto the pindan and take his chances alone, but he fetches the jerrycan of water and helps fill the whining radiator.

For a blessed while Bess sleeps.

Stay a few days with us in Broome, says Horrie. For Bess.

Fox licks his lips. Night falls. They creep on. It feels like walking pace. Horrie goes searching for Arvo P%art on the seat beside him. They yaw across the lightless highway. Out in the black distance the sky flashes. Campfires flicker beside the road. People hunker over meals. Their vehicles angle off into the scrub, some barely off the blacktop.

Like the Middle Ages out there, says Bess, reviving. Look at them all. Makes you think of pilgrims, traders, refugees, crusaders, lunatics. You half expect to see Byzantium appear round the next bend. Except there are no bends. Bend this road, Horrie. At once.

Settle down, love.

Arvo, she says in pain. I want Arvo. It’s death music. Arvo in the arvo.

Bess, love—

Don’t be shocked, Lu. Death’s been round us before.

No, Bess.

Here’s James Dickey. Used to call him James Dickhead but he redeems himself with this.

For Chrissake, woman!

The old girl yells: I wash the black mud from my hands.

On a light given off by the grave

I kneel in the quick of the moon

At the heart of a distant forest

And hold in my arms a child

Of water, water, water.

Luther Fox flinches at this. He has to get out. Bess stabs the tape into the machine and slowly, tidally, the vehicle fills with the tolling of a bell and a descending string lick starts up.

Something rolling down inevitably, compulsively, almost obsessive. Down. Diving. Skin-crackling. So beautiful it hurts.

That bell drones on and on, trapping him beneath a sky and a moon of his very own, on his knees, like the last man alive hearing the sound of the others lilting off into oblivion. He doesn’t give a shit that it’s beautiful; he wants it off.

Along the final punishing straights of the Roebuck Plains he covers his ears. The moment he sees the distant lights of Broome he’s planning his escape. No plea, no weeping sailor will stand in his way.

IV

That summer Georgie’s nervous cooking jag became a feverish binge, as though she was trying to cook her way out of uncertainty. Even Jim, who loved the food, began to wonder aloud whether she wasn’t a little touched by the heat.

One night when she was cooking a risotto in her bikini and taking a bloodyminded pleasure from the endless, steamy stirring and folding, Jim came upstairs and just stood there and laughed. It startled her, broke her concentration. She’d been brooding about Shover McDougall.

Jim opened his mouth to speak and the phone rang. He walked around the benchtop and snatched it up.

Well, I’ll be buggered, said Jim, delighted to hear from the caller. Long time, mate… Second cousins, don’t get bloody familiar. Catchin a few bucketheads up there, are ya?

Georgie kept stirring her rice which had finally gone 258 creamy from all that rolling around the pan and while it absorbed the last of the stock she thought of the surviving chives she might use on it.

He said what? What’d he look like?… Yeah? Well, that’s interesting…. Yeah, too right. Glad you told me.

Georgie turned off the gas and folded the risotto round the skillet a while longer. jim turned slightly away from her where he stood at the counter.

Maybe I will, he said. Yeah, I’ve got a pretty good idea…

Okay, it’ll be my shout. See ya.

He hung up with a delighted but baffled look on his face. He looked boyish and handsome like that. It made her smile.

Good news? she asked.

The farflung family.

Georgie pursed her lips. His parents were dead and he had no siblings.

Didn’t know you had any.

All over the state. Geez, some of the clan are major breeders.

Look at that risotto, he said brightly.

Georgie turned back to the heavy pan. It was indeed a picture.

She felt him lift her bikini strap and plant a kiss on her sweaty shoulder. He smelled of soap and, very faintly, of diesel.

I’ll get the boys, he purred.

Georgie stared at Jude’s email. Men are killing us sis.

Well, it made more sense than yesterday’s. As she dumped the message and began trolling in the soft blue light of the web she made a note to call Jude tonight. Out beyond the plate glass and the airconditioning, it was a hot, clear midsummer day. jim had given the boys a dinghy to use over the holidays and they were rowing it up and down the lagoon to set crabnets on the seagrass, each suspended from an empty milk container which bobbed on the surface. Daylight hovered like a headache at the edge of consciousness while Georgie tried to work her way free into that other milder world. She keyed in the word medicine.

A British woman desperate to be a mother. The miracle of fertility drugs. She is blessed with IVF triplets. And puts two children out for adoption… Australian authorities deport a pregnant Chinese refugee knowing that her child will be killed by a grisly, enforced late-term abortion upon her return… Keanu Reeves’s spleen is listed for sale on eBay… South Africa’s new president declares that HIV does not cause AIDS.

Georgie shut the machine down. She needed to get outside.

By the time the boys figured out who it was swimming toward them from the shore, their puzzlement had given way to alarm, as though her being abroad in daylight and encroaching upon their territory were cause for concern. Georgie sculled right up to the dinghy. Josh was shoving fish heads onto a baitpin and Brad rested at his oars. She saluted. She requested permission to come aboard.

There was a rapid exchange of fraternal glances. Permission was granted. Soberly and with unspoken reservations.

We’re crabbing, said Josh.

Excellent. I’ll be deckie. The three of them worked their way up the line of floats pulling traps and rebaiting them quietly until the boys’ wary politeness wore off. They let her row for a while.

Not so long ago they’d been proud and voluble about Georgie’s boating skills and her prowess with rod and reel. She couldn’t think when she’d last stood at the point with them to cast for flathead and whiting. She’d become so disembodied, so abstracted in the last six months. She decided to view it as a digression.

It was not indicative of the rest of her life; she wouldn’t let it be.

All the crabs that came aboard were dun-coloured females. They were small and none of them were keepers. At midday she suggested they drift for squid, and their immediate success bound the three of them in a comradely warmth. They dangled bright jigs across the weedbanks and brought squid splashing and squirting to the surface. Soon they were giggling and teasing and stained with ink. They filled a bucket. They smeared each other’s faces. When the breeze came in they lay back and drifted in a happy, cavorting uproar, and in the end they came so far down the bay that it was useless to try to row back against the wind, so they came ashore to walk the boat back up through the shallows. When they drew abreast of the house they ran the dinghy ashore.

Georgie was helping to turn it keel up on the sand when she felt her back go out. She fell to the sand with a cry. The pain was so sudden and intense; it was like having a piece bitten from the small of your back. The boys assumed she was still capering away in the spirit of the afternoon, but when Brad knelt down beside her, Georgie’s tears surprised him. Immediately he assumed the calm authority of his father. He shaded her face, slipped his hat beneath her cheek to protect it from the hot sand, and when he thought her ready he supervised the wrangling of her twisted frame up the sand track to the house.

For a day and a night she lay in bed. Anti-inflammatories had little effect and the codeine phosphate brought on the sort of constipation that a few prunes will not remedy. It was misery.

While their father fished the long, trying days of the deepwater phase of the season the boys did their best to look out for her.

From Beaver’s they brought back the sorts of videos they imagined to be suitable for someone of her vintage. All she craved was Cary Grant or Hepburn and Tracy but she had to settle for Jessica Tandy, Michael Douglas, Kevin Costner. She was grateful they drew the line at Meg Ryan. The first day they did their best to watch companionably from the end of her bed, but they soon settled for looking in on her now and 262 then. Before long, though, the outdoor world was too much to resist and they forgot her entirely.

After the best part of a week, with no improvement in sight, Jim suggested he drive her to the city for treatment. But she wouldn’t hear of it. She told him she couldn’t be responsible for keeping him ashore another day this season, especially not during the deepwater run, but in truth she just couldn’t come at the agony of four or five hours wedged into a car. In the end she consented to being driven over to Rachel’s. Word was that Rachel Nilsam knew a bit of massage.

When she came to the door that evening Rachel looked surprised.

Stunned even. She recovered quickly enough and asked them in, but Jim demurred and left them at the threshold. The kids, he said.

Rachel took her through the modest house to a high bench with a batik slipcover. Georgie needed help to undress. It was awful.

She felt like a child, like some frail old lady. She hadn’t realized she would have to be naked. As she lay on the bench her face was hot. She turned her head to the wall. Rachel ran her fingertips down Georgie’s spine. Elsewhere in the house there was music. All Georgie could think was that someone might come in.

Nice old spasm you’ve got there, Georgie. How long’ve you been like this?

I dunno. Days.

You should have called.

I didn’t think to. Tell you the truth I was a bit stunned at first and then I just kept thinking it would sort itself out if I left it alone. How’s that for a problem-solving action? Christ, what a summer.

Yeah, I was sorry to hear about your mum. Listen, I’m gonna put a poultice on this tonight. It’s too inflamed to do anything with yet. In the morning I’ll try and straighten you out.

I wish somebody would. What’s in the poultice?

Oh, you know. Crab mustard, the testicles of a blowfish, the ring finger of a Portuguese deckhand and the sweat from Shover McDougall’s brow.

The New Age finds its way to White Point.

Couple of old Croats in Fremantle showed me. Linseed oil, mostly.

I thought you did relaxation massage, said Georgie.

And go into competition with the Swan Brewery? Are you mad, woman?

Georgie laughed. I heard you were a social worker.

And I heard you were a nurse. Here. Push up. Keep your pelvis on the table.

Jesus!

Again.

You’re kidding me.

I spose it hurts.

Georgie collapsed facedown with a fit of the giggles.

Something chimed nearby.