Jacko (37 page)

—Yeah. But did she tell you about the politics eh?

—She did. You did too.

—The Senate. She wasn't elected. But she got the wind in her sails, you know.

When I had first heard this, about the Senate, I had thought that she must have stood for the National Party, the party of rural interests. That would certainly put her on Bickham's blind side, even though all his family except him were probably members. Now, from the airy way Jacko spoke about it, I began to suspect otherwise.

—Whose platform did she stand on?

—Some sort of cattleman's party, it was.

—Anti-land rights, I suppose?

—Well, she and old Jack always have been.

—So she doesn't want to be written off by the minor novelist eh? The way she was by the major one?

—No. That's right, mate. She doesn't.

Turning aside further still from Angela his new producer, he began to tell me his version of how Chloe came to be political.

When it began, Frank had completed his first two years in jail. And Chloe was down in Sydney most of the time still, visiting him regularly and cooking for Bickham and Khalil. Khalil himself was now rather ill with hypertension.

The first problem: Bickham chastised her in his austere way for being too attentive to Frank. And it had to be admitted, said Jacko, backing up what Chloe had herself told me, in jail terms Frank was prospering. He had been moved into low security at some timber farm in the Hunter Valley. Here he'd established a friendship with a very literary safecracker. Frank was permitted to have his sound system in his cell. His ambition on release was to attend fine arts courses three days a week at the Power Institute.

The news that came to Chloe in Sydney from Burren Waters was not so promising. One of Chloe's friends in Hector wrote and urged her to come home. Stammer Jack was more or less openly cohabiting with a woman called Muriel from the black stockmen's quarters, a young Aboriginal woman whose husband was working a long way away at the bauxite mines in the north of Western Australia, near Exmouth Gulf. Chloe called Stammer Jack, who made his normal fricative, inelegant evasions and half-denials. Almost at once, the new bookkeeper at Burren Waters, a young fugitive from paying alimony in Queensland, contacted Chloe and told her Stammer Jack was hitting the rum and had got violent with a few of the stockmen, even once swinging a punch at Petie, Jacko's man-of-few-words elder brother and Stammer Jack's most dutiful son.

This was, in a way, nothing less than she had expected of Stammer Jack. She turned homewards to Burren Waters in a fine but not unfamiliar fury, to sort out the problem her addiction to her jailed son and Bickham had caused for Stammer Jack.

She found that Stammer Jack had been keeping Muriel in the house, in the room which had once belonged to Helen, Chloe's daughter. This certainly violated the limits of behaviour she had set down for Stammer Jack when she'd gone south to Sydney. Returned to Burren Waters, she hurled Muriel's few items of clothing and possessions down the front steps, where they must have lain some time on the excessively watered green lawn of the homestead. She stamped down to the wood-and-corrugated iron shacks of the black stockmen's quarters and told one of Muriel's uncles to get her off Burren Waters and over to her husband. The Wodjiri stockmen of the old school had a long experience of such imperious demands, and said they would do it. It was an improbable assignment to get Muriel from Burren Waters to the Indian Ocean, but the stockmen and their families seemed to rally on demand to cross great dry stretches of wilderness in old Holden cars most of us wouldn't trust to get us to the supermarket. Lanky, delicate-ankled Muriel was gone from Burren Waters overnight.

Very soon after this salvage of the Emptor marriage, Petie and the helicopter pilot Boomer were surprised to find a group of elderly Aboriginal men camping by a plug of hard sandstone in the north-west of Burren Waters' cattle lease. This was one of the more notable features of the Burren Waters run, a fiefdom which was for the most part anciently flat. They landed and discovered not only that what Stammer Jack Emptor called a
bloody anthropologist
was with the old men, but that it was Doctor Fitzgerald of the University of Western Australia, the man who lived with Jacko's sister Helen in Perth.

The old men in the encampment were Wodjiri, relatives in fact of people who worked as stockmen on Burren Waters. So they certainly had some pre-Emptor connection with the land.

Soon enough – Jacko didn't tell me how soon – a notice came from the Northern Land Council and the Aboriginal Land Rights Court in Darwin indicating that a claim for the excision of a sacred site from the bulk of Burren Waters had been made by the traditional owners, the old men Boomer sighted from the helicopter.

In my time in the Northern Territory, I wondered why cattle people seemed to hate excisions. If the excision claim was validated in court, the Aboriginals involved in the rite connected to that place would have right of way into Burren Waters, and the plug of sandstone and a small amount of space around it would become Aboriginal freehold land. The votaries might start bush fires, or consort with the Burren Waters stockmen and, to quote Stammer Jack,
give 'em ideas
.

It is hard to sit inside another person's brain, but it was hard also to understand Stammer Jack's passion over this matter. His cattle run seemed so vast and the excision claims so modest in square mile terms. Those Aboriginals who sought excisions did not seem to me to be making savage inroads upon the cattle stations.

Maybe it was the principle of the thing which appalled the cattle people. Maybe it was simply that they were used to kingly occupation of large spaces.

In any case, I had heard Chloe rant about it occasionally. Miserable, vexatious bastards, I had heard her fume one night. Though on enquiry, it was not the Aboriginals themselves who were to blame, but the city liberals and the shit-stirring anthropologists who
put 'em up to it
.

Jacko himself told me he wasn't sure what mixture of pride and threat to land coincided in Chloe to make her do that silly bloody thing she did. The cattlemen of the North End and the Centre formed something disastrously named the White Defence Party.

Jacko said, If they hadn't been such blithering old bastards, they would have at least chosen a better name.

Their manifesto said that they bore no ill-will to Aboriginal Australians. Their opposition was only to those (anthropologists, lawyers) who self-indulgently sought either to give themselves importance or to suck up to misinformed foreign opinion by indulging Aboriginal claims at the expense of the well-being of the great cattle industry. The very name of the party Chloe had joined, however, made a nonsense of such fine print subtleties.

They wanted someone in the Territory to run for the Senate. They knew they had enough support to take votes away from the established parties. They nominated three candidates. Chloe, still in a fury over the excision matter and Muriel, agreed to be number two.

Bickham wrote her a savage letter. No understanding from that quarter, said Jacko.

—You'd have thought he had more
savoir
bloody
faire
, Jacko told me. West of the Blue Mountains, nothing's easily explained in city terms. She wrote him some sort of sad but firm letter back. She got over it. After all, she got to ask him a few more questions than most people had. Anyhow, back to the first subject. Why don't you go up and see her? Prove you haven't dumped her too.

I shook my head.

—You damned Emptors don't ask for little favours.

—No. We don't, do we eh?

—See Chloe? Or the others? Who do you want to hear from, Jacko? Lucy? Sunny? Delia perhaps?

—The whole bloody
ménage
eh. Why don't you?

I could see Maureen across the room, actively conversing with one of the Marble sisters.

—It's too much to ask, I told Jacko.

Yet I already knew I was going.

The night before Maureen and I left New York for the summer, I excused myself and foolishly went down to Tribeca to say goodbye to Jacko. Ringing at his bell in the cold doorway between the mercantile glitter of the Korean grocery and the warm lights of Mary O'Reilly's, I heard an Australian voice, a woman's on the intercom.

She said, The Emptors. Yes?

I said, Oh. Is Jacko in?

—Oh yes. I'll press the button and you open it when you hear it buzzing.

Her instructions were so explicit that, quite clearly, in the more innocent world from which this voice came, such electronic arrangements were not needed. As I climbed the stairs, I wondered if it was one of the Logans, the one he said he had loved. Had she come to New York for a sabbatical now that Lucy was gone?

An athletic-looking woman was waiting at the head of the stairs, the door held open. She pointed Chloe Emptor's face at me.

—Gidday. Helen. Jacko's sister.

She closed the door behind me and took my overcoat, saying, Jesus, this New York's a bit of a shock to the system eh.

She was smaller-boned than Jacko, and when she spoke Chloe's grin appeared, dazzling and brief. She wore a track suit, but I could see the compactness of her figure. All Stammer Jack's hulking DNA had been expended on Jacko and Petie; Frank and Helen had picked up Chloe's lost beauty.

She led me through the open spaces of the loft towards the kitchen which was partitioned off with glass bricks. We found Jacko by the stove. He was wrapped in a bathrobe and was cooking omelettes with some pretensions of culinary style and much wrist-flicking. A tall, very thin man, red-bearded, fetched milk and butter from the refrigerator and was setting places at the kitchen bench. The place was so busy that there wasn't room for any air of mourning for Lucy, yet a picture of Lucy and Jacko in front of the Grand Tetons was still stuck by a magnet to the refrigerator. Either he was very busy, or else he suffered from no anguish, no nostalgia for Lucy at all.

—This is Fitzie, Jacko said over his shoulder, both hands occupied, one with the Teflon skillet, the other with the egg-lifter. Fitzie and Helen are an item.

The tall, red-headed man shook my hand with little force.

—Fitzie and Helen are also bloody vegetarian abstainers, so I'm glad you're here. We can open some wine.

Jacko began cracking even more eggs and cutting up more cheddar, determined I would eat with them. Since his dawns were still devoted to trespass, he was likely to eat a breakfast omelette at any time of the day.

We sat by the window which had the view of Coghlan's. Jacko ate ferociously, talking with his mouth full. Fitzie sliced his omelette into small penitential morsels and Helen told us of her average experiences that day on the subway as if they were tales from the New Guinea highlands. You knew from the Chloe-like energy with which she told them that many people were going to hear these stories back in Australia. It was strange to see her with pale, lank Fitzie.

Fitzie, a professor of anthropology at the University of Western Australia, had met Helen in the pub in Hector, and she had followed him back to Perth. Fitzie had come to New York now to give some seminars at City College. It was on the way to City College and back that Helen had had her subway experiences.

—I'm going up to Burren Waters myself, I told her.

—Good for you, mate, said Jacko.

For Fitzie's sake and Helen's, and as a joke, he said, I think he's like old Merv. He's got a thing going with the old woman. With big Chloe. He's the bloke who got Chloe in with Michael Bickham.

Fitzie's cool, herbivorous eyes swept across me.

—That must have been a meeting made in bloody heaven, said Helen, uttering playful contempt for her mother in her mother's voice. We'll be up there too sometime over the winter. Getting ready for the excision hearing.

—Oh hell, said Jacko. Yes.

—The Wodjiri have made a claim on a place called Mongil, said Fitzie. I'm advocate for them.

—That's right on Burren Waters leasehold, isn't it? asked Jacko.

—That's right, said Fitzie. They're claiming a two square mile excision. But they're willing to let Burren Waters' cattle graze there.

Jacko began frowning.

—But the old woman tells me, he murmured, that stockmen won't be able to go in there to get them out.

Fitzie, mincing his omelette with his fork, said quietly, They'll be able to drive them out aerially it they want.

Helen said, Or wait for them to come out. Jesus, they've got cattle on Burren Waters they don't even know about.

Jacko made a mouth. It was obvious he had little time for his sister. The way he asked his loaded questions in a false-naive voice made the conversation spiky.

He put down his plate and said, Well look, you know this will upset Chloe. Why don't you talk them into picking some other spot? Eh Fitzie? Why don't you do this legal work and give evidence for another tribe?

Fitzie said, I know it's delicate as regards family and all, but the Wodjiri are my field of expertise. This is a massively important site, Jacko. It literally means the earth to these people. It'll have no commercial impact on Chloe and Stammer Jack at all. I just wish they'd yield a bit on it, that's all. It's possible to arrange these things by consensus, you know. There's no need at all for a hearing.

Jacko turned to Helen and said, You still want to get even with her, Helen.

Helen made a clicking noise with her lips and put down her plate of omelette.

—Well, said Jacko, I reckon you ought to pick on some other bloody cattle baron, rather than old Jack. Chloe thinks her kids are poison, and this'll tend to prove her point.

Helen went through a looking-away-and-gathering-of-one's-feelings process. Then, still staring out at Coghlan's she said, This will be good for them, Jacko. This'll expand their view of the question, and Christ knows they need it. I'm not doing this out of spite. It's a case that has to be won. For everyone's sake.