Silences Long Gone Page 5

  The unmade road to Tinburra is a five-hour ride of slid corners, shock-absorbed washouts and leapt rises. Wheels astride the camber. Balancing. Me feathering the steering-wheel against a possible slide into table-drain and beyond, trying to hum the corrugations up fast enough to equal traction instead of drift. The Cruiser is loud with gravel on its underbody.

  I’m one of those guys who thinks he’s a good driver right up to the moment of impact. So Margot is white-knuckled onto her thighs for the ten minutes before her hands begin aching and she takes the fatalist stance of staring off at distant landscape.

  We look down as we cross the single lane William Page Wilson Memorial Bridge over the Fortescue and twenty metres below us is a round-shouldered caravan of the fifties parked in the river bed under a gum. Nests of driftwood are tangled in the branches high above it. A Volkswagen beetle is parked beside it. Outside the van sitting in the sand of the river bed is a fat man with no clothes on. Or maybe he has underpants lost in the depths of his lap. There’s a rifle lying beside him and a can of Emu beer stood in the sand.

  I’m about to joke to Margot about how if he’s a prospector he must be searching for nuggets with the crack of his arse, when he looks up at us as we pass and I see he’s crying. Margot waves and smiles. He waves back, crying.

  The spray of gravel on the underside of the Cruiser and the chop and bounce of the road is hypnotic above the fear of death and above the wonder of the landscape after an hour. Margot sleeps. Her unconscious fight for balance becomes another variable for me to factor into the moving-things-under-my-control problem.

  Landscapes fade in and out. Us closed in by mulga scrub. Then lone outcrop on a horizon-wide spinifex grassland. Through twenty minutes of dry white lake, rimmed with blue-green succulents rooted in salt. Through ranges of termite mounds built knife-edged along the sun’s axis.

  Margot wakes as we’re driving into the red stone country. Out of BBK’s lease into the lapsed lease of Theozinc Mining. Into country whose ownership is confused by two competing tragedies. Into the deep red gorges where water can lie and where black people lived their forty thousand summers and where white men mined blue asbestos for their forty.

  Ghost gums rise white out of every black crevice in red wall. Margot’s saying how beautiful it is. She passes me sandwiches I eat one-handed. I ask her if she minds if I smoke. Not if I open the window, she says. So then I have the hot-fresh-air versus smoky-cold-air versus Margot’s-anger versus not-smoking-at-all dilemma. I resolve it by lighting up and cracking the window about a centimetre. Not letting in any heat. Not letting out any smoke. Accepting Margot’s stare.

  ‘Your mother went to the toilet six times last night,’ she says.

  I stare at her long enough for her to tell me, ‘Lookout. Watch the road, for Godsakes.’

  ‘Six?’ I ask. ‘Christ, eh,’ I tell her. ‘How is that a topic for us? And how would you know that?’

  ‘Hers is the last plumbed building in town. We supply her flush, as well as everything else. Every time she flushes her toilet one of the last remaining gauges over at the waterworks palpitates and a scrawny guy on night-shift over there who I had the pleasure of meeting last night raises an eyebrow and makes some ghastly comment about your mother’s plumbing … her bladder, that is. Or bowels … I suppose.’ Margot’s looking out her side window. Anyway,’ she tells me, ‘the point is she can’t be very well. Can she?’

  ‘How do you know I didn’t go five times and her once?’ I ask.

  ‘She goes six times a night minimum, the man on night shift tells me. Point is, she’s at an age where her body’s failing her, Jack. She’s going to need some sort of support system before long.’

  ‘I can’t believe you pay a man to keep tabs on my mother’s toilet visits.’

  ‘We don’t. It’s his hobby,’ she tells me. ‘Anyway, it’s a reality that needs addressing. Because we stop supplying that flush she uses six times a night soon. Which is just a hint of the tip of the iceberg of the whole range of services she’s going to be missing.’

  We drive for some kilometres listening to the gravel-roar after she tells me about the six flushes a night of reality that need addressing.

  Then I light another cigarette and blow the smoke up against the windscreen and across to her side of the cabin because now she’s admitted to spying on my mother pissing I clearly have the moral high-ground and I can blow smoke anywhere I want. As she’s waving swirls of it off her view and off her face I ask, ‘From your point of view, Margot, from BBK’s point of view that is, why do you really give fuck enough to be flying me around the country? Why not just let her sit pat. If she’s sick enough to be using the dunny a half-dozen times a night and if that makes her as infirm as you say it makes her then she won’t be around too long. Why not let her die out there alone? What’s the big deal?’

  She tucks strands of hair back into her cap and waves at smoke and exhales her shot of clear air through my smoke and tells me, ‘Really and honestly, and I’m not letting anything go here because you’ll find out soon enough … it’s because of the Kunimara People.’ I ask her The what? by knitting my brow and puckering my lips and she tells me, ‘Indigenous people,’ and even then my brow doesn’t unknit quick enough to stop her telling me just plain, Aboriginals,’ as if that explains everything.

  So I tell her, ‘Oh …’ as if it does. But then can’t stop myself asking, ‘What about them?’

  ‘We’re leasing land off them all over the country for mineral exploration and extraction on the proviso we return it to them in its natural state at lease’s end. The chief meaning of “natural state” is that it has no new white settlement on it and no new white claim on it. Now if we were to offer the Hannah region back to them with a permanent resident, in the shape of your mother, they won’t like that at all. And what they’ll like even less is she’s been granted her stay of eviction because of her spiritual beliefs. That’d be a very dangerous precedent for them. Who’s to say someone won’t do it every time we start a new mine on a new lease. Who’s to say whole towns won’t try doing it. Anchor themselves to their cemeteries and refuse to budge. You can see the trouble we’re going to have getting new leases on aboriginal land with this a possibility. The prices we’ll have to pay for the leases we do get.’

  She reaches over and takes the styrofoam lunch box off the back seat and opens it up and asks me, ‘Apple?’

  ‘No,’ I tell her. ‘No.’

  This country holds a hundred and twenty species of natural fauna. We see none. Everything of scale, feather, fur and carapace is crept into shade or burrowed into the earth or crawled under rock and stretched out, mouths gaped, wings opened and breath panted. Zombied-slow into a miserly conservation of bodily fluids and heat reduction. In the day this country is dead under the sun. In the night feral cats big as Labrador bitches hunt it clean of marsupials.

  Tinburra is overhung by red rock to the east. To the west it opens out into shattered undulations of red rock across a plain of spinifex and occasional desert oak. Tinburra was a mining town. Now Tinburra is where the wave of shame and guilt that is turning the white land around here back into black land breaks on a rock as sad as itself. Because between these WELCOME TO TINBURRA, POP 80 signs is a tragedy that happened all white and happened as hard as the black tragedy it’s surrounded by.

  In the 1950s a company board sat around a boardroom table and put their fingers to their lips and hissed hush at each other about Tinburra. Willed each other into leaps of mathematics and statistical purities.

  The Theozinc board, chaired by a man who’d been in the Western Desert fighting Germans only a couple of years before. The Theozinc board, sitting around brow-knit-listening to the breaking scientific fact, delivered to them by an employee of their own, that the stuff they were mining over in the north-west was likely to cause forty-five deaths for every thousand people who handled it for a year. The board brow-knit-thinking. Stroking their ties and rubbing the filed edges of their thumbnail
s across the filed edges of their fingernails.

  The board then brow-unknit when they find a way of thinking through this news in beautiful little philosophies of possibilities, statistics and fractions. This way of thinking detouring them around the forty-five human faces. This thinking not saying ‘Today we allowed forty-five poor bastards to die for profit.’ This thinking saying: ‘All we’ve done is increased a given population’s risk of terminal illness by four-point-five per cent. Nothing statistically drastic.’ And allowing them to hiss their metaphorical hush and turn the talk to the Spring Carnival and to the Demons’ chances against the Magpies.

  When the mesothelioma and asbestosis outbreak broke in the news Australia’s wish for Tinburra was to close it fast and call it gone. Get a crew of dozer drivers space-suited up and push the whole town into the poisonous hole it came out of. Sign the whole area over to the tribe that made the land claim on it.

  The government and the Theozinc mining board of the eighties made a multi-million dollar gesture of relocation south into subdivisions and farmlets to the ailing citizens. Tried to buy them out of Tinburra and move their deaths into scattered anonymity in the big population below thirty degrees south.

  Hardly any of the Tinburra residents accepted the offer. They refused to move. Became a big test of civil liberties. Dying of mesothelioma from the dust of their finished working lives and the roads they drove on and the buildings they lived in. They wouldn’t budge. ‘If we’re dying ugly, let us die at home,’ was a quote from Barry Stafford that became a headline in a 1989 Western Australian. He was the Tinburra mayor until he died ugly in his living room and became some sort of example to the people of his town.

  Now Tinburra is even less town than the POP 80 its sign announces, because Eugene Walsh who worked for the Shire and was in charge of municipal accoutrement like population signs and in keeping their stated population within five per cent of the number of actual residents died of cancer three years ago which was thirty-two asbestos-related deaths ago.

  It was once a town of over two thousand. Now it’s a thin scatter of green gardens and maintained homes in a dead copse of European trees and cyclone-shattered houses.

  On the main street there are only two maintained buildings. One that calls itself a General Store & More, and the pub. The General Store & More has two rust-brown petrol bowsers out the front under a big peppercorn. A sign says: HONK FOR PETROL. OR DIESEL. HONK FOR THAT, TOO. A bull-headed dog is attached to the tree by enough chain to place the bowsers in his territory but the town has shrunk to a size where the dog has a tail-wag for everyone in it. His use as a guard dog limited by his familiarity with the whole race of potential fuel thieves. He sleeps.

  We pull up and honk. For diesel. The dog gives us a side-eyed five-second head raise. An old woman with her hair back in a tight ponytail limps out in a billow of yellowed frock. Her lips are an inward wrap over no teeth.

  ‘Lovely day,’ I say. Conversational. She looks around at it as she unlocks the diesel pump and says, ‘You’re a long way north.’ She knows this by the black swan on our Cruiser.

  ‘We heard you were building paradise here,’ I say. ‘So we came.’

  ‘Did ya?’ she smiles no teeth. ‘Did ya? Well, word will get out. How do ya think we’re doin’ so far?’ She sweeps her hand at the wreck of town.

  ‘I doubt you could sell it to the Japanese,’ I say.

  ‘Maybe if we had a golf course,’ she laughs.

  Margot gives her fifty dollars for the forty-two dollars of diesel the whining bowser has pumped into our vehicle. No change is offered because the black swan on our Cruiser means a company is paying. Companies are on the moral low ground here, people are allowed to take whatever they can from companies.

  ‘Where’ll I find Adrian Furphy?’ I ask. The old woman stops smiling.

  ‘Pub,’ she says, pointing. ‘Unless Brendan Oliver has kicked the bucket. In which case he’ll be at his place. Or John Turn-bull has kicked the bucket. In which case he’ll be at his place. Or Doug James has kicked it. In which case he’ll be at the pub.’ She points at the Ironclad again.

  The Ironclad is two storeys of rammed earth walls under a corrugated-iron roof with a deep balcony running around its first floor. Its walls are a foot thick and it has a stone floor. It’s a pre-town and a post-town building. We walk inside through a heavy wooden door.

  In here is a slow-chirp of medical machinery sounding like a finch flock dulled with valium. Small silver boxes and small cream-coloured boxes and small beige boxes are hanging from wheeled tripods and hanging from the walls by straps and hanging off bodies by slings. Boxes pin-lit with slow-pulsing reds and greens. Monitoring liquids into and palpitations out of the thin men they’re attached to by tube and electrode. Digital numbers are constantly changing in the tiny windows of these boxes like odds at the tote. Sometimes running down small and single digit like a betting plunge, like some hardening certainty. Sometimes gaining ominous tens and hundreds like the odds are lengthening.

  Half the population of Tinburra is in here in the semi-dark air-con hum. Mostly they’re thin men with medical boxes attached to them. Mostly they’re holding low conversations punctuated with long silences. A minute between one speaker and another. Between question and answer. Conversations stretched for the full distance of the opening hours.

  Even in this sparse talk we hear a hush for us. Adrian looms at the bar in his khaki uniform. He’s a big man by genes. Getting bigger by beer. He turns and watches us walk in. Nods his head like he knew it all along.

  ‘What’s the enemy say?’ I ask. He has a look at his watch.

  ‘Twelve-fifteen,’ he tells me. ‘Your hook.’

  ‘Two pots,’ I tell the barman. I look at Margot. ‘What’ll you have?

  She’d simply love a gin and tonic.

  Adrian and I shake hands. Adrian,’ I swing a palm-up hand from him to her, ‘Margot Dwyer. Margot’s doing a PhD on your mother’s ablutions.’

  ‘I’m doing no such thing,’ she tells him. They shake and say each other’s names.

  ‘Margot and I speak on the phone now and then,’ he says. ‘How are you?’ he asks. She tells him she’s good. The barman gives us our drinks and waves away my money and Adrian tells me he’s got everyone pretty sweet here as far as paying for shit goes.

  I look him up and down and tell him, ‘Jesus. You’ve got yourself a little beer-pot already. What’re you … thirty-six? Beer-pot.’ His eyes narrow and his belly lifts and becomes chest.

  ‘I live upstairs here,’ he says. This is more or less the office.’ He looks around the bar. ‘You mannerless prick. We haven’t seen each other for years and I get gut-size chat first thing.’

  With the rise in Adrian’s voice a black-haired man who is asleep on a stool face-down on the bar mumbles something about external guttering into the drip cloth and gets told to shut up and gets told he’s a drunken waste of Chinaman by Adrian.

  I notice Adrian notice Margot’s nipples become aggressive through her Williams shirt with the conditioned air. He asks how are things over east? How those houses selling? How’s that Jean of yours? Jean is it?

  I tell him, yeah Jean. She’s good. I tell him they’re going off okay, the houses. Beach houses sell in good times and bad. Because in good times every bastard who’s out wants in and in bad times every bastard who’s in wants out.

  ‘You got ’em coming and going by the sound,’ he says.

  ‘What about you, Adrian?’ Margot asks. ‘Do you have any crime to work on in this town? Any cases to crack?’

  He thinks about the question, staring from her to me.

  ‘Very little of policing is about crime,’ he tells her. ‘I get the odd motorbike rider fallen and pinned under his bike on hot rock in a forty-degree day out in the park who needs finding before he heat-exhausts terminal. Never found one alive yet. But I’m hoping to get my act together so some day my response-time will be impressive enough to find a living one. I’m working on that. But
no cases to crack. No.’ He shakes his head. ‘We got no crime here. We’re good people here. We have sickness instead of crime here. Serious illness,’ he explains.

  He points at a stack of chairs and bar stools against one wall of the bar piled up on each other halfway to the ceiling and wired together with ignorant twists of fencing wire. Hundreds of chairs. Some of them have engraved plaques pop-riveted to them. I go over and read one. CLARRIE GIBBS 1926-1985.

  ‘That’s our wailing wall,’ Adrian tells me across the room. His belly has dropped down and become just belly again. ‘Our monument to drinkers gone. Furniture retired in honour of dead friends.’

  A man whittled down by his sickness to just translucent skin and just sharp bone is sitting at a nearby table watching me read the plaque. ‘Wouldn’t shout if a shark bit ‘im, Clarrie,’ he says to me. ‘That’s why we didn’t fork out for any engraved compliments. Not even a middle initial, as you might have noticed – which would have been T for Theodore. Straight-up name and dates for Clarrie.’ He’s speaking by holding a small plastic box up to his throat and letting it read the tiny vibrations of vocal chord there and amplify them to me. No sound comes out his mouth. Though personally I would have forked out for “Tight as a Fish’s Arse”,’ he says out the box. He holds up his free hand with his thumb and forefinger made into half a square, which would be half the imaginary plaque he’s talking about, and says, ‘Clarrie Gibbs. Tight as a Fish’s Arse.’ And his eyes pulse with amusement and his P.O.W. chest heaves with amusement and the box he’s holding to his throat laughs.

  I go back across the room to Adrian and Margot at the bar. ‘What do you do here, Adrian?’ I ask.

  He nods more drinks from the barman. ‘What do I do is a hard question.’ He rubs his hand back and forward through his blond hair, breaking its Akubra mould. ‘What I do is kick-start the cycle of mourning and loss, I suppose.’ He nods at the pile of retired furniture.