Silences Long Gone Read online

  Both Margot and I ask him the cycle of what by our blank faces and he rubs his hair again and says, ‘Okay. Okay. Let me tell you about Con, for instance. On Wednesday, I think it was. Yeah, Wednesday. Wednesday Con is missing from the morning session in here. So here’s Con’s empty stool.’ He points at a small stool with a red vinyl seat leaking horse hair at the top of the monument of retired chairs.

  ‘It’s just a stool now,’ he tells us. ‘But Wednesday morning it was up at this bar significant without him. Like a tombstone. Everyone watching it. Watching me. Waiting for my move. Only just having the restraint not to ask me what it is I think I’m doing lingering around here in the bar. Just having the restraint not to prod me and ask, “Well? Well, Adrian?”

  ‘It’s not even a hint or a sign or a maybe. It’s an actual set-in-stone fact about Con, this stool … empty on Wednesday morning. This town’s obituary. So I have to go.

  ‘So here’s me walking at Con’s house. Stepping onto his porch. It creaking. Me standing there, sucking one big breath under a record spread of buffalo horn Con got in the Territory. Then me slow-opening his flywire door in a long groan of rusted spring. Footsteps echoing up his hallway. Haunted house echoes of me. Police-issue leather soles.

  ‘The whole house is cross-ventilated in through walls of fallen-off panels of blue asbestos that nobody ever replaced because of their power to kill the man that laid hammer and nail to them and raised their dust. Swallows fly a track through the house. They give sharp noises as they cut around me in crisis-late diversions that have me nearly flinching, and as I close on his bedroom nearly not flinching.

  ‘And when I get to his bedroom door I hear movement in there. Sharp movement. A tensing. A clench. And I know what sort of game we have now. New game. Me the main player. Me the catalyst. And I’m into my fiercest moment of state employ.

  ‘“Con,” I shout through the door. “Con, you knew I’d be coming, Con. Don’t make me feel shit by doing it now I’m here to help, Con. Don’t you want to see the coast again? This isn’t the real you, Con. The real you wants to see your kids again. I know that. Peter and Sophie. Down south.”

  ‘Bullshit, I’m thinking, the real him is in there with fears and memories and deadlines going off in his head. But going off muffled now like depth charges. Big thoughts dulled down under the depths of fatigue his sickness has laid over him. The real him is in there tired enough of spirit now to nap eternal by his own hand. The real him is in there hammer-back, ready to hose cranial meat over the ceiling. Only the big biblical threats of the Greek Orthodox Church of his childhood postponing his action.

  ‘“A trip south, Con,” I shout. “Get into some of the green country you grew up in. I’ve got a bottle of Bundy here. Let’s have a drink, Con.”’

  Adrian stops talking and takes a big drink of beer and rubs his hair around again and tells us, ‘I didn’t really have a bottle of Bundy. That was another lie for Con,’ and drinks the second half of his pot and tells us, ‘Anyway, I step up to his bedroom door with a big slam of police boot. Catalyst at work. Fuck the green country you grew up in, I’m thinking. And fuck Peter and Sophie, too, who never visited you. Let’s get on with it, you little Greek fucker. I hate you for this.

  ‘There’s a long silence where I can’t think what to yell. Then I think, what does it matter what I yell? My push not my voice is important here.

  ‘There’s an open box of muesli on the hall table behind me. I lean back and pick it up and I start to yell its back-of-pack blurb at him through the door like it’s critical and wise and appropriate to talk a man off suicide with. “Con,” I yell, “everything you need for a great start. At the pace of life we lead these days there’s an ever present danger that our diet will lack the balance of nutrients essential for good health. Listening, Con? To start things on the right track breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Con?”

  ‘“Stay out there,” he calls. “Don’t come in. Leave me. I need time to think some more,” he lies.

  ‘No, Mister Zurcas, I think. No, sir. I get no overtime. Let’s do this thing efficient. You’re deep terminal. No, sir. I’m coming at you.

  ‘Hand to door handle I loud-rattle my coming. This is what I do.

  ‘And the shot is so muffled and puny it sends a deep wave of appreciation through me for Con who I now love again like a … better than a brother. Con, who shot everything big he could get a safari up for, and who shot with calibres and velocities beyond military, has popped himself through the palate with a twenty-two he must have bought from a passing rabbiter. For me. An against-character no-mess trigger-pull. A gesture of consideration for my part in this. A shoelace leak of oral blood onto his floorboards and no exit wound. That’s how we care for each other up here. I do my part. They do theirs. I love them for letting me help. It’s an honour.’

  Adrian draws breath. Orders us more drinks with a nod at our empties.

  ‘You quoted a muesli box blurb at a suicidal man?’ asks Margot.

  ‘I’m a cop, not a priest. I don’t carry a Bible or any crisis publication. And anyway, I believe there’s truth in most fields of knowledge. The cereal manufacturers have their own insights,’ he tells her.

  She stares at him. He smiles. ‘No. Listen. As I said, it was my push that was wanted, not my words. They get the help they want. My hand rattles their doors.’

  ‘If you didn’t turn up he might not have done it,’ Margot says.

  ‘I turn up. Duty. Love. Whatever. I turn up.’

  ‘Doug James?’ I ask. ‘Why wouldn’t you turn up for him? The woman we bought fuel from said if he kicked the bucket you’d stay in the pub.’

  ‘Charlotte. Yeah, she’s right. Old Dougy was the explosives foreman at the mine for the best part of his life. When Dougy goes he goes with a bang I don’t intend to be part of. There won’t be so much as a corpuscle left of Dougy to post south to his family. That’s him there. Tied up like an Alsatian dog.’ Adrian nods at a crew-cut man with his elbows propped on a table and his head in his skinny hands. He’s in short pyjamas, his mouth and nose covered by a transparent plastic mask held to him by dirty elastic straps around his ears, a tube leads from the mask to an oxygen machine plugged into the wall beside him. Every few minutes he tilts the mask off his face and pours some beer into his mouth and resettles the mask.

  There are four other people in this bar wearing these masks, giving off occasional medical beeps.

  ‘He’s got explosives?’ Margot asks.

  ‘That’s his boast anyway,’ Adrian tells her.

  She purses her lips and blows out a silent whistle. ‘He might blow you all up,’ she whispers. Adrian looks an offended frown at her and then shakes his head at us both like he can’t believe what he’s heard. Can’t believe she’s come up with such an offensive whispered theory.

  ‘Dougy’s not a killer. Dougy’s part of the family, for Christ’s sake,’ he tells her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘But dying puts immense pressure on the mental processes. Who knows what tack a mind might take?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what tack a mind takes dying. Con, for instance, who I just told you about, could have shot me through his bedroom door when I went over there Wednesday. Easy as pissing off a log. But who did he shoot? Con’s who he shot. People don’t lose their humanity just because they’re dying. Probably gain some, truth be told.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry,’ she tells him. ‘But I just think … explosives … you know.’

  We reminisce superficially over more beers while Margot puts scrutiny on us over gins four, five and six. All the time I’m asking myself what Adrian is doing here in this town, and I’m answering myself maybe he’s here because of what happened to Dad and what he didn’t do about it when he had a chance to do something about it. Because of Dad’s death I took charge of while he was deciding, in bouts of face-stretched meditation, what was best for all concerned. What he called deciding anyway, which was actually not deciding. And what he called medita
tion, but was more likely his mind’s-eye caught in a loop of grief-scenes.

  Maybe he’s here because of his guilt at being off in that grief-loop when he was needed most as favourite and eldest son. Maybe that guilt has him here in this town for all these other deaths. The deaths of these strangers he tells us he loves.

  By dusk we’re upstairs sitting in cane chairs on the long verandah Adrian’s rooms open onto. We’re looking out across the shattered town watching the heat-shimmer get replaced by darkness. We’re all on gin now. Drunk. Margot’s bootless, hatless and down to her shorts and a white lace bra. Working ice from her drink up and down her arms.

  Adrian and I delve deep into what’s insignificant between us and discuss at length what’s transient in the wider world and skip over whatever is poignant in our pasts.

  We do some wholly ignorant delving into how the weather’s getting hotter and how it’s probably Greenhouse but could be El Nino or may possibly be the two of them working in tandem and cahoots together with probably Greenhouse doing most of the work and El Nino just pitching in where it can.

  And we do some impassioned discussing at length of why it is Geelong chokes in the Grand Final and if only Bairstow had kicked that long bomb in ninety-two things might have been different and how unfair it is that an upstart like West Coast who hasn’t paid its dues and hasn’t made its supporters reek of pure despair year after year should get up and win two of the things.

  And we delve into and discuss at length the phenomenon that is the mobile phone and how it’s revolutionised the whole of life in general and business in particular and I tell him how much of Real Estate is done on the mobile and he tells me how much of police work would be if the bloody things worked out here but they don’t because of the distance and because of the rock escarpment over the town.

  We skip over Dad while we’re delving into football by Adrian saying at least Dad didn’t have to watch the Cats go down in their last four Grand Finals and by me telling him yeah I suppose that’s a saving grace … or something.

  And we skip over Molly by me saying to him, ‘Well neither of us have gone and got any kids yet.’ And asking, ‘Do you think Molly’d have any if she was around?’ And him saying back, ‘No more than about six or seven if you remember the way she put on that walk in her last year or so when my friends came around and especially Ken Johns came around who everyone said looked Nordic.’

  And we skip over how we haven’t talked to each other since the day we drank red cordial at Dad’s wake eight years ago and how his last words to me then were, ‘You cunt. You full-on cunt,’ by him saying, ‘It’s been a while,’ and by me agreeing, ‘Eight years, I think.’

  And we skip over Mum by not even mentioning her at all and are delving into how big feral cats have grown in the years they’ve been out there when Margot stops stroking her limbs with ice and asks us, ‘Cats? Cats? Hello … ? Hello … ?’ And when we look at her asks us, ‘What about your mother?’ and tells us, ‘You boys of hers have some big decisions to make. She’s a seventy-year-old widow. Not a town unto herself.’

  And I tell Adrian, ‘This drunk woman is right, Adrian. What about Mum? Christ, she might die there and not be found for weeks … months. Dehydrated. A husk. A rigor-mortised Rice Bubble of mother. We’ll have to add water or milk or something to blow her back to full size for burial. Snap, crackle and pop of Hag right there at the funeral.’

  Adrian tells me not to call her a hag. And tells me how she dies is a red herring here and her funeral is irrelevant. And tells me what happens to the woman after her life doesn’t matter a damn and he doesn’t care if she spontaneous combusts and starts a bushfire that runs from Hannah to the coast.

  ‘There is no Hannah,’ says Margot and we both look at her and she laughs and shrugs and says, ‘Small point.’

  ‘What matters is what she believes now,’ Adrian says. And if she believes she’s living on some sort of sacred site of her own making, then I say she is. I say a site’s as sacred as you say it is. I say no one else knows how deep you believe.’

  ‘So what the old bitch wants the old bitch gets,’ I say.

  ‘Old bitches should,’ he says. ‘And don’t call her an old bitch.’

  ‘I just believe she could do with some companionship and some care in her twilight years,’ I tell him.

  ‘Look, pumpkin soup isn’t care for this woman and sing-alongs aren’t companionship. She may be something of a dingbat but she’s got companionship and care there where she is. With her version of Dad and her version of Molly and her version of God. I don’t think the pumpkin soup and the sing-along is any sort of replacement. Her comfort’s a spirit-of-place type thing. It’s what she believes. And there’s no good fucking with it.’

  ‘But we’ve got to fuck with it,’ says Margot. She’s pouring herself another gin from the jug on the table between us. ‘One way or another we’re going to fuck with it … with her. We can move her peacefully with your cooperation, or we can fuck with her. Fucking with her being our least favourite option.’

  ‘You’ll find it harder to fuck with her than you think while she’s got the media around,’ I say.

  She shakes her head. ‘We may be a corporate giant, but we’re a smart enough corporate giant to play like a David and paint her the Goliath,’ she says.

  ‘I’ve lost you. Who’s the Goliath in your scenario?’ I ask.

  ‘We are,’ she admits.

  ‘Goliath got killed. Slain. David slew him,’ I tell her.

  She screws up her face. ‘So he did. She is, then,’ she says. She’s poised with an ice block at the top of her cleavage trying to untangle David from Goliath.

  ‘So what are you going to do,’ I ask, ‘when her fat journalist friend tells the world BBK is evicting an old woman from the property where her daughter’s and husband’s ashes are buried?’

  ‘We’re going to tell everyone she’s trying to evict the aboriginals from the site where their Rainbow Serpent slept. We’re going to tell them she illegally dug the ashes of her family into a sacred site. We’re going to beat her sacred site over the head with their sacred site.’

  ‘And you can’t give her a few years to die where she wants?’ asks Adrian.

  ‘No, we can’t,’ Margot tells him. ‘She’s making a claim on the place. And if we give her any period of grace we legitimise her claim. And we’re not about to legitimise her claim because of the Labrador Factor. Because everyone’s got a Labrador buried somewhere. And given an inch everyone’d like to think their Lab’s got an eternal soul and where it’s buried is a sacred site. So we’re not opening the floodgates with her. We can’t give her an inch. Because of the precedent it’d set. Even if we wanted to give an inch … we can’t. Though I personally would.’

  ‘Labrafuckingdor?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh … sorry,’ she says, and she looks horrified and moves her fingertips up to touch her lips and says, ‘Shit,’ right into them and then takes them away again hovering just off her face and tells us, ‘Shit.’ Tells us, ‘I didn’t mean your sister and father. I didn’t mean them. It’s just our name for the principle of the thing. The Labrador Factor. How everyone’s got something they love buried somewhere. Often a Labrador. Not your father and your sister, though.’ Her fingertips go back to her mouth again and we can see she really is sorry about how Dad and Molly got thrown into the same hole as the family pet and their eternal souls got compared with its eternal soul.

  I stand and go to the verandah rail with my glass clinking ice. The sun is down now and the town is dark. Below us across the road moths are swarming around a street light that is blinking on and off over the rust-brown bowsers. There are only eight other lights scattered through the whole spread of dilapidation. Eight lit houses. With whole streets and blocks of unlit wreckhouses between them.

  ‘Anyway, forgetting the Labrador Factor and what you will or won’t allow and how many inches you will or won’t give,’ Adrian tells Margot, ‘here’s some facts. She’s an old w
oman. With a known faulty heart. With the ashes of her family beneath her. And the press is watching. You’re going to find it damn hard to move her. You wouldn’t want her to die mid-eviction.’

  ‘Yeah, her heart.’ I hear Margot tell him. ‘Her condition. If only she was younger and stronger. Her condition’s a fucker of a stumbling block.’

  Part 2

  5

  Lorne

  Today the swell is coming at us from the horizon in long lines with their faces blackened in shadow and the whole town is booming and crashing and roaring with what sounds like an overture written to tell of war neverending, using violent water and fast wind and aural drift as instruments, playing loud into the amphitheatre that is Lorne.

  Our house is high above the beach and through the blue gums with their foliage reaching frenetic east with wind the horizon is a curve of world. The swell is breaking out near the pier, then blunting again as the bay deepens again and moving fast in toward the beach underneath the trees out of sight. Promising a muscular left-hand break. And it being mid-week only a few of the unemployed and a few plumbers’ apprentices bedridden with flu will be out riding it.

  Jean is lying on the sofa reading a woman’s magazine and exhaling Fuck-Me-Deads of disbelief and indignation with her cigarette smoke. Wooden wind chimes are staccato out on the deck. Up through the floor Thaw has Buffalo Tom playing ‘Summer’ on his CD. It’s his favourite song of the moment. He plays it loud, over and over. It’s a song of regret. The singer’s sad about summer being gone. But he’s American so I can’t help thinking his loss is our gain.

  Thaw lives in the rooms under our house. He survives now by stealing Range Rovers. Held several jobs along the coast hereabouts when he first came down from New South Wales. But always Senior Constable Malcolm Lunn wandered in to his place of employment and stood there and looked around at every little thing, wandered over to an anchor and nudged it with his shoe point, squatted down to run his fingertips across a set of scales, opened a dumpster and peered inside, picked up a chainsaw and stared close at its blade. Like they were all clues. And when he got asked, ‘Can I help you, officer?’ by the man or by the woman who ran the place or captained the boat he nodded at Thaw, and asked back, ‘Know what you’ve employed yourself there?’ And looked into the potentially horrified face of the employer or the captain and asked, ‘Eh?’ And when the employer shook his or her head, just laughed out loud in disbelief and looked across a muddy yard or across a warehouse floor or across a boatdeck at Thaw and back into the eyes of the employer and back again across the muddy yard or warehouse floor or boatdeck at Thaw, roping them both in and making them accomplices with his line of sight. And turned around and walked out ignoring further enquiries and shouts from the employer about what it was he or she had employed … because he or she didn’t know … so what was it … is it?