How the Dead Live (34 page)

They got up and she took a hundred dollars from him. A hundred fucking dollars! Unbelievable. Within minutes she was so fucking stoned she could’ve taken on entire football teams of beefcake. Natasha had learned a terrible lesson, an awful disappearing trick. She didn’t know it, but she’d turned a definitive corner and henceforth things would never be the same again. But for now she basked in her warm opiate tank. See Natasha the clever pin-prick-pupil dolphin at Sea World.

People imagine that when junkies are loaded on smack, or alcoholics get drunk as lords, or coke-heads fly stratospherically high, they enter a fantastical realm of unlimited bounty, where they are possessed of great wealth, infinite allure and enormous talent. Not so. They may set out for an artificial paradise, but the real estate they all end up inhabiting is one and the same. In it they are
all right.
That’s all. They’re
all right.
Not alcoholics, not addicts – simply OK. Just like everyone else. Oh sure, they may have done dodgy things lost a few jobs, broken a couple of marriages, had some kids taken into care, been deprived of the odd limb – but basically they’re
all right.
And so this mighty traffic – bigger than the entire world’s legitimate trade – goes, in large part, to service such a nugatory requirement. To supply deviants with the delusion of normalcy.

Natasha and Polly argued eventually. What was Natty
playing at?
Polly shrieked. Hanging out with deadbeats in Redfern and Paddington. Getting drunk. Going to bars. Pretending to assist a community project by doing yet another fucking mural. Another dumb daub which would dull out within a couple of years, as chaotic and unintegrated as the community it was intended to serve. What was the
point
in Natty’s coming to Australia anyway? She was meant to be getting over losing the baby. She was
meant
to be getting herself together. She had – Polly knew for a fact – been smacked out last Wednesday.
And
come back to the flat without her fucking knickers on. What was all
that
about? She lay on the sofa, smashed, and embarrassed Polly’s friends. Nice people. Teachers. Lay on the sofa and babbled about gallah birds with soft cocks. When was she going to see something of the country? Why didn’t she just get the
fuck out.
The entire continent had been giving Polly Passmore assertiveness training. Natasha got out.

For weeks, then months and eventually years, Natasha traversed Australia. This, a continental island so large that whole sectors of its drought-blighted territory received no radio signals – let alone the impress of a foot. A country like another planet, so distinct were its flora, fauna, and even landforms from those of the other, flatter sides of the earth. Over this immensity, a seeming culture was stretched, like a thin, tan drum skin across a cavernous gourd. A culture of knee-socked mock colonials whose overlords, the squatocracy, inhabited mansions built in the dunny vernacular. This, a vast slice of burnt toast, floating in the southern ocean, with only a few scrapes and smears of Vegemite on its chomped edges. This, a surrealistic nightmare, where men had laboured to construct rabbit fences visible from space, then unleashed an eye-exploding virus on Flopsy, Mopsy and – nominally Cottontail. This, a noble democracy, ruled by a cerise goddess who lived in the day before. This vast unplace, where white men and women huddled together to play disco music, gamble, fornicate and watch soap operas, in a desperate attempt to keep out the cold heat. This oven, where a fall of half a degree in the temperature had its inhabitants scampering for fleece-lined nether garments. This parody of civilisation, where some seven million northern Europeans and some seven million southern Europeans camped in concrete tents along thousands of miles of littoral, wandering between each other’s barbecues. While in the hinterland a handful of ancient, mystic wizards plugged the open veins in their scrotal sacs with beeswax, only uncorking them to mix their blood with the sacred earth itself.

Natasha felt right at home in this caricature of it. She took bar jobs in Brisbane and waitressed in Wagga-Wagga. She drove a sloppy Holden cab in Townsville. She ventured as far as the sauna-steamy shores of the Northern Territory and crossed the dry Nullarbor on the old Ghan. When she didn’t want to work – she didn’t. She sat and she thought. It would be nice and resounding to say of her that she thought often of her dead mother, summoned up Lily’s loving sarcasm and her bitter wit – but this would be a lie. Occasionally Natasha would see a woman in late middle age, with thick, untidy, blonde hair, crossing a flat boulevard under a hot sky, whose lumpily angry emanations and canvas book bag recalled Mumu. Then Natasha would feel the gummy, toothless baby talk they used with each other rise in her dry throat, and wish she were the child she’d never been, impossibly again. The child she never could be, except in the unloving arms of Morpheus.

Hammer – as, in a doubly contrived version of rhyming slang, the Australian junkies termed heroin – Natasha avoided. There was so much of Australia, and Australia itself was such an avoidance, that this seemed easy. Anyway, this was a place where bulky youths already browned with incipient melanoma drank themselves into a whirl of projectile vomiting, in bars constructed like cages, or bars white-tiled, or bars with broad verandas – all so they’d be easier to hose down. Drinking in venues styled like toilets made its emetic aspect only too acceptable. Natasha drank, and in this dry climate it didn’t seem to catch up with her too much; and if it did – who? what? with whom . . . last night? – she moved on again. There was always more nowhere to run to.

Australia, where affect itself was animated and you met cartoons of the people you’d partied with in the city before, in the subsequent one – and the one after that. Hi Bob! How-zitdoin’ Julie? Good t’seeya Steve, or Bruce, or Robyn, or Kerry, or who-fucking–ever. In a young country all relationships can seem, for a time, to be adolescent flirtations, cunts and cocks lightly entwined like sweaty fingers. No heroin and very little sex. After the incident in King’s Cross – the shredded ethics in the shredded bark – some part of Natasha did, at least partly, discern the danger of this.

On Magnetic Island, on the inner edge of the Barrier Reef, there was a brief liaison with a young woman from Melbourne – Cynthia, on the run from whoring and junk, not unlike Natasha herself. But Cynthia was artily unattractive. Legs, arms, chest, all flattened cylinders. A suit of a person, left out in the rain, on this, a monsoonal isle. They lay together, uncomfortably bunched in a hammock, for five days, and touched each other with hesitant hands not quite understanding why they – who’d never, either of them, done such things before – felt the need of this need. Cynthia collected crushed toads. Mashed roadkills scraped from the bitumen ribbons which ran for thousands of clicks between the chirruping cane fields. She kept them in an Ansett flight bag. The two young women sorted through the flat corpses, playing snap with them as they sat, cross-legged, on the veranda of the house where the hammock hung. An old house, for these parts, with a mansard roof of corrugated iron upon which the hard rain beat down. A house lent to Cynthia by a junky she’d known in Melbourne, a man very like her, on the run, escaping the spiritual auction, getting out from under the hammer. For those five days he was away prawn-fishing, out beyond the Reef.

So, like the lopsided eat’s cradle of the Ansett Airlines route map itself, Natasha looped her way around the edges of the mighty ochre land. As she travelled she met more Cynthias, more internal exiles in a culture that was itself shut out from the rest of the world. Until, eventually, like so many others, she realised there wasn’t anywhere much else to go – save for the interior. The Red Centre. In this upside-down realm the outback always felt – to Natasha – exactly like that. A chill behind her head, the sense of vacuity prickling hairs at her nape. It was a place that was no place. An open door in the back of the sub-urbanity of white Australia, which led elsewhere.

Not that Natasha was unaware of the traditional inhabitants. Who could be, when fragments of their metaphysical maps were reprinted all over T-shirts, tea towels and the menus of restaurants? And when their placenames now graced graceless suburb after slapdash subdivision? And when their sacred monody issued forth from hidden speakers on temperature-controlled shopping concourses? Another genocide that had ended in the textile department.

During Natasha’s time in Australia the adolescent overlords had finally broken down in a wholesale attack of guilt, tasting at last the blood on their beefburgers. An entire hierarchy of weeping ministers and puling professors were intent on handing back, to the ancient wizards of the interior, something that had never really been theirs to give in the first place. The wizards – for whom all time is Now, and who understood their own thoughts to be merely the reveries of the earth itself – found it terribly difficult to explain what the fuck was going on. They were that fucked over. How to deal, in the vast land, with childish rulers who spoke in a gooey argot of babyish diminutives? Who called their own elders ‘wrinklies’, and their wounded ‘sickies’, and their campfires ‘barbies’. How to share reality itself with tough, tough boys living in a Barbie world?

Natasha was staying with a kid in Canberra, the pseudo nation’s bogus capital. The kid was a friend of a friend, of someone who wasn’t really a friend of Natasha at all. Beyond an artificial lake, which did nothing to ornament the place, stood a parliament building with an enormous hypodermic finial poised above it. This was the theatre wherein barristers, bewigged like magpies, sought to divine how to do business with the wizards. Very occasionally a wizard could be seen, checking into the Holiday Inn on Manuka Circle, a gaggle of pink advisers fawning in his dark train.

The kid, who was the son of an anthropologist at the uni, was well-meaning and thought himself –like so many before, so many after, so many who saw her only for an instant, constructing imaginary lives of deep intimacy on the basis of a glimpse of her from a passing bus – in love with Natasha. They went out drinking in bars of exceptional ugliness. They returned to the kid’s parental home in the pulsing night, to find curious, velvety cloaks all over the screen doors: an imbrication of bogong moths, who, tiny Australians themselves, had embarked on a long journey, orienting themselves by the moon, only to end up thus, glued to suburbia.

Down a musty corridor in the anthropologist’s bungalow, Natasha lay in a creaky old foldaway bed. From the walls, bark paintings dangled on straps of kangaroo sinew. In the bookshelves, volumes of Pitt Rivers, Malinowski, Strehlow and Levi-Strauss jostled for elbow-room with contemporary periodicals. On the big kneehole desk, the anthropologist’s carefully assembled collection of coproliths sat with utility bills and jars of Biros. These people will hunt and gather any old shit. Natasha lay naked, between linen sheets which had been carefully tucked in by her wannabe lover, and read
The Magician’s Nephew
by C. S. Lewis, hearing her Mumu’s voice in her inner ear. Mumu spoke to her of the Wood Between the Worlds, where trees with tall, straight trunks were spaced with sinister regularity, between small pools of absolute circularity, beneath a canopy of utter impenetrability. And Mumu told her of how a child who dived into anyone of these pools would find herself in another world altogether, whether it be Victorian London, or the dying empire of Charn, or Narnia itself, where God was cuddly and the creation myth easily anthropomorphised.

The next day the two of them left for Alice Springs. They had no exact plan, but in this casual realm of instant acquaintance, they presumed they’d find a berth with one of the anthropologist’s postgraduate students, who was doing field-work in the Northern Territory. From the Alice, an airconditioned coach took them north, out of the pitiless, ferrous landscape of the Centre and into a no more hospitable environment of disorienting, endless verdancy. Stand after stand of thorny shrubbery spread out beneath the sun-full sky. On the coach, wrinklies sat in rows, wattled necks straining to see a video screen which entertained them with a film about a neo-Nazi conspiracy. Natasha and the kid watched the too much of nowhere roll past. It appeared innocuous enough but it wasn’t. To go out in it, without a compass, without litres of fresh water, would be to find yourself hopelessly lost in a savage parkland. Completely disoriented, succumbing to sunstroke within a few, short yards of the bandstand, or the icecream stall, or the duck pond. Instead of feeding the birds being fed to them.

After six hundred clicks or so there was a waft of feral meatiness by Natasha’s ear, and she turned to see an aboriginal man in a preposterous white Stetson hat, making his way to the front of the coach. When he reached the driver he said something to him, and turned back to face the wrinklies, none of whom wavered from their contemplation of the conspiracy. He was middle-aged, thin to the point of wiry. He wore R. M. Williams jeans, R. M. Williams, elastic-sided bush boots and a plaid shirt. His face – fat-lipped, round-cheeked, leather-necked – was everything you would expect of a wizardly countenance. His eyes, shielded by mirrored sunglasses, reflected the wrinklies back at them. The coach slewed to a halt, outside wheels dropping off the metalled surface and sending up a clump of dust. The door whooshed on its pneumatic arm. The wizard stepped down, and without so much as a backward glance walked off into the scrubland.

‘They have an innate sense of direction,’ the kid told Natasha earnestly. ‘My father’s done research on it. Seems like they may have a kind of magnetic compass actually in their heads.’

Natasha told him to shut up.

At Stearns, a truck turn seven hundred clicks up the Stuart Highway, the postgraduate met them off the coach and took them to a dirty little guvvie house. It was empty save for a bundle of long hunting spears, with mulga-wood shafts, propped in a corner, and a slew of coverless paperbacks on the scuffed linoleum floor. Clamped to the windows of this un-breeze block were air-conditioning units like miniature versions of the house itself. These groaned and whistled with the effort of struggling against the big heat. Natasha, coursing with sweat, dribbled lukewarm water over her lankiness from a rusted spigot. She put on shorts and an old Che Guevara T-shirt. She donned an enquiring mien and went out to find the postgraduate, who was under the bonnet of his car, a big, yellow, rotting Ford saloon.