Silences Long Gone Read online

  The Aboriginal women are open mouthed. Astounded and silent in disbelief that this question’s been turned on them. Then Pearl comes alive and says, ‘The Rainbow Serpent create this place.’ She says it softly. It’s a fact, but she’s apologetic about it.

  Barry Campbell laughs smoke. ‘All right, all right. I mighta know this bullshit was coming. Two hundred years they laugh at our Dreamtime ‘n’ call it primitive shit. And for two hundred years they try to educate us out of it. But, holy shit, surprise, surprise, they see the Dreamtime still there after two hundred years. We still dreaming. So, finally a few of ’em start to reconise the Dreamtime a legitimate part of our culture. An’ no sooner this happen than they say we usin’ it to beat ’em with. They call us out for cultural imperialism. Our Rainbow Serpent’s victimisin’ their Mollys and their Franks all of a sudden. Ooh hoo we a mean bunch a bastards with our big fuckin’ bully serpent.’

  He lights one cigarette off another. Draws again deeply, eyes closed in nicotine hit.

  ‘All this Dreamtime legend,’ he waves a hand at the map, ‘maybe an’ maybe not good sense. An’ I maybe an’ I maybe not believe in it. But what I do believe in,’ he points his Marlboro at my mother, ‘because you whitefellas give it to me to believe in and drummed it inta me to believe in … is in property. A black shit-stirring bastard like me find it fairly easy to believe in that. And you on our property, old girl. Not even you denyin’ that. Are you?’ He nods at her. Asks, ‘Eh? Eh?’

  She doesn’t answer. Her eyes are glazed. She hasn’t even heard him. She’s away in thought and in fear. Hypnotised by their Rainbow Serpent. Scared of that holy snake and the possibility it might hold some actual truth to counter and deny her own holy truths. She’s locked eyes with it, trying to stare it down. Trying to look at it hard enough to see yes it’s valid or see no it’s a lie. Hoping to see it’s a lie.

  Eventually Charles Wadlow says, ‘Belle? and she snaps awake. Looks around.

  ‘The bones of my whole life are here,’ she says quietly ‘Even him,’ she points at me. ‘All his childhood is here. Every time I see him as a boy it’s here. Here’s the only place I can be with the boy that was him, which to tell you the truth, is the only him I want to be with.’ The two Kunimara women turn and look at me in disgust. She lights another Marlboro and takes to rubbing her forearms which is, with her, a step off crying and bringing up the Lord’s name six times a minute in high hysteria to defend herself. ‘What’s the point of telling me about Val and Ron going whale watching as if that was an option. My only watching is here … over the souls of Frank and Molly.’

  She puts her cigarette in an ashtray and sure enough points at the ceiling and invokes the truth of God as proven by His son and The Resurrection as compared to their Rainbow Serpent and their Dreaming which seems pretty unscientific and unproven though a nice idea and she’s not one to scoff at it outright by any means. Invokes the Lord Everlasting and Our Saviour and God Almighty into her speech with such regularity and at such high rotation we see it’s turned into straight and unadulterated rant and the old girl has lost it.

  The deputation is practically falling over itself to get out the door when she starts this. Because there’s a tragedy up and running here right before their eyes. A thing so ugly and embarrassing they have to back away outside to where they can’t see it. A mind slipping fast from a position of some competence where it can brew up a fair and tasty fruitcake down to a level of idiocy where it’s invoking supernatural intervention … calling down God’s Hand loud and unembarrassed.

  Even Charles Wadlow leaves, saying he needs a lift back to his caravan out at the river because his VeeDub is ratshit. Either spark or fuel, he says. Either spark or fuel. Only Richard Finnes has anything left to say to my mother because he’s used to dealing with the floundering and the nonsensical in his line of work and he’s had the good fortune to be able to convince himself some time ago that pretty well anyone who opposed BBK was mad and so he’s not too disturbed by my mother’s rapid-fire invocations and her ceiling-pointings.

  He informs her, through three times as much smile as he needs, that he personally wishes they could allow her to stay, but really it just isn’t fair to the Kunimara people to make an exception for her, either taken from the spiritual aspect or the other far less important aspect, which is property, it’s not fair on them to let her stay. Not fair, moral or just. So, he supposes, one way or another and in one forum or another they’ll be seeing each other again and he tells her it’s been a pleasure and hands her an envelope. Then he kisses her on the cheek and makes an attempt at locking his line of vision onto hers and says, ‘Ms Furphy … we’ll cure you if you let us. We’ll make you happy.’ My mother slits her eyes at him like he’s too much light or too much mystery, and tells him, Mrs.’

  As soon as they leave the megaphone starts up again. The blond man reads a postcard at the house from Sylvia Wilson, who was the teller at the next hole north in the security glass along from my mother for eight, what Sylvia calls, and the blond man on the megaphone calls, bitching spectacular years. She’s living in Paddington in Sydney. ‘I’ve joined up Parents Without Partners,’ Sylvia’s voice, the blond man’s voice, vibrates through the house. ‘So far it’s been a bit of a disaster. Should be called “Fathers Without Rhythm”, or “Fathers Without Technique”, or “Fathers Without Clue One”, as far as I’m concerned. I can’t get decent sex out of these little home-wreckers no matter what I do, and, believe me, Belle, I do it …’

  ‘Town bike, that Sylvia,’ says my mother, recovering herself. ‘Always was.’

  ‘Sydney’s a big town to hold that position in,’ I tell her. My mother turns her radio on loud to drown out the blond man on the megaphone.

  ‘She’ll manage,’ she shouts. ‘You should’ve seen how she’d slide her index nail across a new bloke’s wrist as she took his first pay cheque. Times were I nearly hit the security screen to break their contact.’

  The envelope Richard Finnes gave my mother turns out to be a water bill. The new rates, calculated and decided upon. It seems with BBK having blown their own reservoir the nearest fresh water in a dry winter is Port Hedland, which is 450 kilometres at forty dollars a kilometre, and with storage and purchase from the Port Hedland Shire thrown in works out to be twenty-three thousand dollars per ten thousand-gallon tanker, the first of which is to be paid up front.

  My mother’s brave about her new water costs. Nothing the company does frightens her like the simple fact of the Kunimara.

  At first she laughs and rolls her eyes and screws up the bill. Then she unscrews it and flattens it out on the kitchen bench with the heel of her hand and says it’ll interest Charles Wadlow and make good reading in the Western Aussie if they try to force payment. Then she takes it over to the kitchen window and holds it up and shakes it at the rose bushes out there that she thinks, more or less, are the continuing fact of her daughter and her husband and says, ‘Bloody high roller,’ like there he is out there gone extravagant in his dotage and sucking up Krug and Veuve and other liquid gold.

  *

  I’m lying in my bed trying to reach sleep that night when the footsteps are crept along the hallway again. There is the slow slide of door on ball-bearing again. There is again the wood-screech of ply moving against ply and the slow slide of door tracking back closed along its run of ball-bearings. Then just the cracking and just the creaking again of a house leaking heat into the night sky.

  And she’s in Molly’s wardrobe again. Trying again to drag some scent of Molly out of the air in there. Trying to get back to where Molly is alive and demanding to know of her if dinner will be ready early enough that she can go and shoot some baskets after it with a couple of the other girls from the under-thirteen Firsts Netball Team and begging can she stay over at June Taylor’s house because it’s June’s birthday and Julie Oxley and Bridget Carney are both allowed to sleep over so why shouldn’t she be allowed, too? And Mum can tell her back, ‘We’ll see,’ and Molly can a
sk her, ‘When will we see?’ and Mum can tell her then like she tells her a dozen times a day to hold her shoulders back and sit up straight and don’t slouch around so round-shouldered and slovenly and can listen for Dad to chime in like he always chimes in with, ‘Mum’s right, Moll. Sit up straight. You look like someone’s grandmother.’ And Molly can tell them both, ‘Leave me alone will you. Just leave me alone,’ and stay with her shoulders hunched around what puberty’s doing to her chest. And later Mum can hug her as she walks out the door with her overnight bag to stay at June Taylor’s house and can tell her, ‘Love you, honey,’ and Dad can hug her and can tell her, ‘Posture, Granny. Posture.’ And can take hold of her shoulders with those hands of his lined black with giant-machine grease deep in their cracks and kiss her and bend her shoulders open and squared and make a creaking noise as he does, which makes Molly laugh and tell him loudly, ‘Daaad,’ hidden beneath which he can quickly state his sotto voce, ‘Love you, Moll.’

  Which is what goes on in my head while I lie in the dark and hear the hiss of Molly’s wardrobe door closing on my mother. And is only probably what goes on in the wardrobe itself … but is surely something like what goes on in the wardrobe itself … where she’s trying to get back to where everyone is alive. To where everyone she loves is alive.

  8

  Sad Purple Dads

  When I give Jean the canvases covered with Sad Purple Dads and Sad Purple Mollys she’s impressed. She won’t have it any other way but my mother’s life is a great statement of obsession. Of obsession and grief, she says. Of grief. And of obsession.

  She wants to know how it got that way. She wants to know something more of my father. She asks me for stories of his death. ‘For the exhibition,’ she says. ‘Because the exhibition isn’t so much an exhibition of your mother’s art as it is a performance piece. A piece showing her trapped in an orbit around these deaths. Showing these deaths are the sun she’s trapped by and lit by.’ She thinks about this metaphor. Tilts her head about it. ‘Anyway, the exhibition’s a statement of obsession,’ she says. ‘A statement of grief. Tell me about your father’s death.’

  I’ve already told her how Molly was killed by her own bra. She likes that. Likes how puberty can be terminal. She cried at the story, because I had to hold myself silent while my eyes swam during its telling. Had to stop and point to the kettle that she should make us some coffee before I could go on. But she loves the fact of it showing how powerful and dangerous it is to turn into a woman.

  What she wants now, she says, is to understand my father’s death. To understand why my mother is still obsessed with him all these years later. It’s natural enough never to get over a child’s death, she says. But why is your mother still so carved-up about your father?

  It’s like your Chinese sign says, I tell her. It’s to do with my mother’s insanity. She’s mad as a March hare.

  Jean has the sign hanging on the wall facing people as they walk into the gallery. It’s in black and bone and a hard-to-read calligraphy like you sometimes see on T-shirts that say FUCK YOU surreptitiously.

  It says: ‘I REALLY AM STILL GRIEVING INCONSOLABLE PROBABLY INSANELY, FOR MY DEAD DAUGHTER AND HUSBAND EVEN SIXFUCKINGTEEN AND EIGHT YEARS AFTER THEIR DEATHS.’

  The quotation marks are misleading in that they suggest my mother, the artist, said this. What they actually mean is someone said it. Me. In the Pacific. But Jean trusts me not to mention that. The sign goes with the paintings.

  Tell me how he died, she says.

  I tell her I don’t know anything on the subject that could add to her view of my mother’s obsession. I tell her my mother never replaced Molly or Dad with anything. That’s why she still has to deal with them every day.

  Tell me something about his death, she says.

  All I can think to tell her is about the red cordial. How everyone drank red cordial at his wake. It’s not too illuminating. It’s just something that sticks in my mind. All those red drinks sparkling in the sun. So I tell her that.

  Jean says it is a wonderful story that says more about him than his eulogy did, she bets.

  There was no eulogy, I tell her.

  Than a eulogy could’ve, she says.

  She says we’ll all drink red drinks at the exhibition opening.

  Her gallery is two converted squash courts at the end of a long corridor. People begin arriving right on time at five, which can be put down to it being known Jean hosts a good gig. There’s a Melbourne caterer, an open bar and a jazz quartet playing something drawn long and spaced with significant silence.

  In the centre of the first court is a long dining table made from one piece of blond wood with knots and grain through it fine as Byzantine tapestry. A sign on it tells it’s Fiddleback Mountain Ash cut from a log saved from a windrow, bulldozed ready for burning by woodchippers after they’d moved through Kennett River. Jean saved the log and had a table made from it by a couple of gay carpenters who live deep in the Otways worshipping wood and not caring how long it takes to bring out its spirituality. The table’s a statement against logging that cost her seven thousand dollars.

  On the table are rows of champagne flutes with champagne boiling red in them. The champagne is Veuve Clicquot. She’s added a drop of cochineal to each glass to equal the redness of the drinks I’d told her were drunk at my father’s wake.

  Around the walls are my mother’s paintings of Dad and Molly taking turns to look sad about being dead. Sad Dad, Sad Molly, Sad Dad, Sad Molly, and so on. All from a woman who never took any lessons with the brush, and is, to my mind, three parts insane anyway.

  I recognise about half the people here. They’re locals, mostly tradespeople who work on the beach houses of the half of the crowd I don’t recognise. The half of the crowd that has come down from Melbourne for the weekend and is pale with office work and is well dressed from office work.

  It’s clear from the start people don’t like my mother’s art. It’s only an exhibition for about five minutes. Art considered and discussed. Pretty-well unanimously despised. Then it’s a party. The men hive off from the women and make circles and start to talk football, fishing and stray sex. Snatching off-shore morsels and flutes of red champagne from silver trays carried past by teenage girls.

  That’s where I feel sorry for Jean. She goes to all this trouble to get the significance of life and death through to the world and what she gets turning up here is crayfishermen and their sea-despising wives and Real Estate agents and women who make furniture from driftwood and people too happy to talk anything but football.

  I exchange my third empty champagne flute for a full one and join a circle including Thaw and the Mangione brothers, Cosimo and Mimmo, whose father’s gift to them before he moved to the Gold Coast was a crayfishing licence each, which made them landlords of a sort. Men with a bit of the planet to protect and be fierce over and to hate about. Men who are up to their sittingroom windows a hundred times a day with binoculars to their eyes watching leisure craft cut across their fat slice of sea. Scanning their property right in to where it frays itself white on the rocks. Tuning their binoculars, waiting for an anchor to drop close enough to one of their buoys that it might mean poachers.

  There’s also Mark Daniel a carpenter who impoverishes himself by going surfing in all the bad weather. And a builder named Clive who went to one of the country’s best schools and disgraced himself by not becoming a stockbroker.

  ‘Jackfurphy,’ says Mimmo as I walk up. He raises his eyes at me. He’s a heavy man with hair as wild as a Grateful Dead. ‘These your family?’ He waves a red champagne at the paintings.

  No one was supposed to know these paintings were anything to do with me. I raise my eyebrows at him in surprise. ‘Yeah, they are,’ I tell him.

  ‘They extremely fucking ugly,’ he says. Everyone breaks up. Thaw bends at the waist and does a full three-sixty on one Cuban heel. Mimmo smiles wide to be so funny.

  ‘My mother’s a shithouse painter,’ I explain.

 
‘Why they all same colour?’ he wants to know. ‘Why they all same people?’

  ‘I think that’s the point of it, Mimmo. It’s not about the paintings themselves, which are obviously shithouse. It’s about the fact someone would paint them at all … this many … same people. It’s a “Statement of Obsession” I think Jean calls it.’

  ‘A statement of obsession?’ he asks.

  ‘So I’m told.’

  ‘My father make a statement of obsession on all my sheds,’ he tells me. ‘A anti-rust statement of obsession. He paint all them all KillRust pink last time he down from Queensland on holiday.’

  ‘Is that why all your sheds are pink?’ asks Thaw. ‘Your old man painted them?’

  ‘His anti-rust statement. Take him two weeks. He do it all with a brush because he say a roller is contraption invent by paint-makers to waste paint.’

  ‘They’re a severe blot on the landscape, those sheds. The environment protection people should come down on you for those sheds. You can see them from wherever you surf from the main beach right round to the point,’ Thaw tells him.

  Mark Daniel agrees with Thaw that Yeah, they’re a real landscape blot and stick out like dog’s balls.

  ‘They look shithouse,’ Thaw tells him. ‘You owe it to your neighbours to repaint those sheds something dull,’ says Thaw. They’re an insult to the whole town ambience.’

  ‘They are,’ says Mark Daniel. ‘Whole town ambience.’

  ‘You leave my sheds alone,’ Mimmo tells them. ‘You think I’m some megagreek to repaint, repaint, repaint whenever he feels. If the crayfish come back, then maybe I get my father down again to paint the shed dull, something Aussie, something nice and not stand out. Maybe then enough money for repaint.’