Silences Long Gone Read online

  And soon Thaw was free again of work and of pay, and of purpose, which he was free of even when he had work and pay.

  *

  The blue gums here in Lorne grow right down out of the Otways to the water. Only place in the world where they do, Geoff Yeomans Senior will tell you if you wander into Lorne Realty when he’s working the counter presenting his honest face and his lies to the world. Or Geoff Yeomans Lazy, Fat, Stupid and Junior will tell you if it’s one of those rare occasions he happens to be working the counter and presenting a lazy, fat, stupid face and his lies to the world. Or I will tell you if I’m there presenting my face and the lies of the real estate fraternity in general to the world.

  The real estate of Lorne is made exclusive by geography. There’ll only ever be two thousand ocean views in Lorne. They’re a limited edition. That’s the beauty of it all, Geoff Yeomans Senior and Geoff Yeomans Lazy, Fat, Stupid and Junior will tell you so quick and so off-hand they won’t even have time to remove the aromatic roll-your-owns they both smoke from between their teeth. House two thousand-and-one will be built over the ridge on the slope running back into the bush silence of the Otways, they will tell you. They make the lack of surf-roar and the lack of ocean view sound like death. Then Geoff Yeomans Lazy, Fat, Stupid and Junior will likely cough at you because he’s never got the hang of talking with a cigarette between his teeth.

  The two thousand views are close enough to the eastern suburbs of Melbourne to make them perfect habitat for the Range Rovers Thaw hunts. The Range Rovers make only weekend visits in winter. But in summer they’re here right through the week. Easier prey in mid-week summer because the house they’re parked outside has no man in it. He’s back in the city in a tall building engaged with distant markets via a liquid crystal screen or reshaping corneas with a laser beam or editing age out of a face with a scalpel or punting on changes to zoning laws or on the phone pressing information out of a selection of sources lower on the business zig-gurat than himself who, taken altogether, add up to a clear overall picture of just where it is opportunity is lurking for his capital to seek out and embrace before it is sought and embraced by that other two per cent of the cognoscenti that means you’re too late and what you’re embracing was opportunity but is now an overpriced fuckup set to crash back to pre-opportunity prices.

  It’s just the wife seasonally widowed with the kids at the beach in summer. Holidayed off into coastal town.

  So Thaw takes his Range Rovers mid-week in summer. When the worst he can expect if he’s caught in the act is a quavering, ‘Who’s that?’ called from a top step behind a security door and a promise that the police are on their way. A promise he knows is empty. He only needs three or four Range Rovers to make his year.

  Opens their doors with blue strapping tape. They pop quiet as a fridge. He thanks British Leyland for that. He lies on the front seat and wires them under the dash. Then drives them out of Lorne at night on a back road through the Otways. Enjoying British engineering sideways on the gravel. Keeps to country roads through Victoria until he links up with the Hume Highway as it crosses the Murray up into NSW. He rebirths them in Balmain through some friends of his at Tiger Town Brit Cars. Is usually back a week later looking haggard from the drinking binges they shout him on as they try to talk his price down. It costs him in the vicinity of five thousand dollars to refuse that last drink and make a break for the outskirts of Sydney, he tells me.

  He’s already been out surfing and back into a hot shower so long it sends steam leaks up through our floorboards. Now he’s down there smoking the day’s first joint, which is also seeping up through our floorboards. Singing and spastic-dancing, then running back to his desk, writing down the day’s first sentences. His red heeler Villi is barking at him as he dances. Every now and then he shouts something. Something I can’t make out. Either about lesbians or thespians. Thaw tells us he is a writer and the way he writes is to shout it out to see if it makes sense loud.

  Jean gets off the sofa and says she’s going swimming. She strips out of her clothes right here in the living room. Steps out of her Levis leaving them standing concertinaed with her panties in them. Walks out naked onto the deck to where her bathers are drying. Will I come swimming with her, she asks. No thanks, I tell her. I’ll surf later. After lunch.

  She walks downhill to the beach barefoot in her bathers. Male retirees come out to pull weeds from their perfect gardens or to tinker with their smooth-running mowers as she passes. They wear dark glasses on even the most overcast days so they can pull the weeds and tinker shamelessly at her.

  She usually swims the few kilometres along the beach and out to the pier. But with the size of the swell coming in today she’ll jog around to the pier and swim back into town with the sea. She’s lived on this beach all her life and the lifesavers know she can swim this swim. They take occasional glances through binoculars at her appearing, then disappearing, behind rolling water. She’s not a worry for them.

  There will be council workers wandering the beach with spiked sticks for rubbish where she emerges. They’ll be wearing mirrored sunglasses to kill the glare off her white bathers gone transparent over the rise and fall of her hard swum lungs.

  Or all these sunglassed men are coincidental and I’m awry with jealousy. I don’t know.

  Thaw comes up into the house. He has an idea for a story. He makes us both a cup of coffee. ‘The idea,’ he says, ‘is this.’ He paces back and forward across the view as he talks. Every now and then breaking his train of thought by an inspection of the swell rolling in to the beach. The back of his neck is red from my hot water bill.

  The story he’s working on is about a guy who has sex with lesbians, he says. Fucks women normally off-limits by claiming to be a male lesbian himself, he tells me.

  ‘A male lesbian?’ I ask.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘The guy claims to be a woman trapped in a man’s body, desiring other women. A male lesbian. Uses this line to lure crew-cut stunners off bar stools into his bed. To access pussy normally off-limits.’

  ‘Is it just porn?’ I ask. ‘Or is there a point?’

  ‘It’s not porn at all,’ he tells me. ‘Well … incidentally maybe. Maybe incidentally it’s porn. But what it’s really about is how anyone can assume any identity these days. Men can be women. Women can be men. Men can be poofs … et cetera, et cetera. It’s the spirit of the age that you’re accepted as what you say you are. People are fierce with acceptance these days. So a lesbian’s stuck, see. Because a lesbian’s as open-minded as anyone, Jack. A lesbian’s seen all she ever wants to see of narrow-mindedness. So a lesbian’s as fierce with acceptance as anyone. And when a guy tells a lesbian he’s a lesbian too … tragically trapped in this brute of a body … she’s got to believe him or deny her own philosophy of open-mindedness. She can’t just say, ‘I’m not sleeping with you. You’re a bloke.’ She’s trapped. She’s got to take dick in the spirit of the age. Got to take it for the sisterhood.’

  ‘Your lesbians,’ I ask, do they orgasm?’

  ‘Whinny with it,’ he says. ‘I don’t want the guy to look like a dud.’

  ‘Lose the orgasms. Where’s the self-sacrifice if they orgasm? They’re probably not even lesbians if they orgasm for dick.’

  ‘My lesbians orgasm for dick. Orgasm for the political act of sleeping with a sister trapped in a man’s body.’

  ‘I don’t think they’re lesbians.’

  ‘They’re lesbians all right. With pierced nipples,’ he insists.

  ‘All right. You write it like that. But I think they’re better off with no orgasm. If you’re trying to make a point about them doing it for the sisterhood, being self-sacrificial, inducting a male lesbian into the sisterhood, then it’s better they don’t get off on it.’

  He’s frowning out to sea.

  ‘Work it out,’ I tell him. ‘If they orgasm it’s probably porn. If they don’t it’s probably literature.’

  ‘No. Damn you. My lesbians get off when I want the
m to.’ He’s getting angry. I shrug. Indifferent to how his lesbians take their pleasure. ‘Send it to Penthouse letters section,’ I tell him.

  ‘It’s over five thousand words already,’ he says.

  We start drinking beer out on the deck. Jean is walking up the hill, bending down low over her thighs, pushing at the gradient. Old men tinker furiously with garden machinery. She walks right up onto the Jacksons’ nature strip and picks a couple of unripened Golden Delicious off their tree. Reg Jackson is kneeling only five metres from her, deep in a bed of dahlias with his gardening gloves poised for weeds. He’s still as a herbivore. In no position to comment on her theft because he’d have to break cover as a secret admirer of her see-through bather display that has already shortened his breath and gagged his throat. She knows he’s there. That’s why she takes the apples. She knows she has him frozen mute.

  She juggles the apples high as she comes up to the house. One glances off the branch of a bottle brush and bounces out into the middle of the road and rolls back down the hill picking up pace past the Jacksons’ place and out of sight under blue gums toward the beach. We watch Reg’s head leave her arse in a slow turn above his dahlias following the apple down the hill. She doesn’t turn around to see where the apple goes. Thaw’s laughing. I’m laughing too, but thinking what an evil witch to freeze an old man in his dahlias with her spell-casting arse and steal his fruit.

  That afternoon we’re drinking in the front bar of the Pacific where the tourists don’t come. In here is a gallery of balding liars stretched along the bar on stools. Lies escalating through the day with the beer and the foundation of lies already laid down. A jukebox has Van Morrison right up, making them lie loud. Occasionally someone turns and looks at the sea and makes comment on how unworkable it is today. Many of their lies are about legendary storms. Varnished fish hang on the walls in here.

  Below the pub the cray boats are craned up out of the water, sitting in cradles along the pier. At the end of the pier is the Fish Co-op with its front wall plastered with sheets of shiny fish-wrapping paper, on the paper is poetry written in texta. Stanzas of Byron, Shakespeare, Hardy, Eric Bogle and Jim Morrison with a few of Mimmo’s own, dated but not signed, interspersed among the others like maybe the fish-buying crowd aren’t discerning enough to tell the difference between great poetry and crayfisherman doggerel.

  And always drifting out that roller door where the octopus and shark hang for the public to ooooh about and to aaaah about and to take their holiday snaps about is The Doors in their weirder long-song moments with Mimmo and his brother Cosimo and their men standing wide-legged in white gum boots on public display scaling and gutting every marine thing with fast hands and bored looks while Morrison sings about killers on the roads and about the music being over. It’s a fisherman’s cool apocalypse right there. Played out daily for the civilians standing out front with their cameras poised, deep in their awe and their annual leave.

  Thaw is standing up at the bar and the drinkers of Lorne who have visitors from out of town are nudging them with their elbows and jerking their chins in his direction. Pointing him out. Nudging the strike bowler of the Apollo Bay cricket team, nudging the ruckman of the Wye River footy team, nudging the visiting cousin and nudging the visiting brother, and jerking their chins and telling them, ‘That’s him.’

  Nudging their visitors and jerking their chins because some of the septuagenarians of Lorne have killed what they called Fucking Nips with Bren guns, and a couple of the quadragenarians of Lorne are said to have killed what they called Slopes by radioing down Americans in jets, though speculation is that what the Americans killed on their behalf was just water buffalo and just jungle. But none of the people of Lorne have killed an actual indigenous person, and least of all have they killed an indigenous person hand-to-hand. So they nudge and they point and they jerk their chins and they tell, ‘That’s him. That’s him there.’

  He’s talking to a girl with a Samoan tattoo on her shoulder and dyed black hair. She’s a back-up vocalist in town with Hoss, the band that’s playing the Pacific tonight. He’s got to the stage where he can only get interested in a woman with a tattoo now. Or a pierced nose, or treble-pierced ears, or a severe head shave. Or maybe an aboriginal woman, or a Vietnamese woman, or a woman with needle tracks, or one with a kid and no man.

  When a woman of this type enters town he’s on her like a tick. Because Thaw has his libido to wield like the rest of us. But he can only wield it at the marginalised.

  I’ve seen Thaw affected by beautiful women. By main-stream women. I’ve seen him when the surf carnival is here, rusted still on the beach at the sight of Queensland iron-women come down to compete in competitions of blondeness. I’ve seen him standing with his ears roaring blood pressure at perfect young mothers with gym-wrought limbs as they stand in the shallows inserting index fingers under the sides of their bathers and running them down to the crotch, easing them low and comfortable as they watch toddlers on styrofoam boards. But these women he can only look at. Hasn’t touched one for years because of what she might turn out to be.

  He’s holding strands of the singer’s long black hair now, touching it on his lips, holding it against his own long blond hair, shaking his head in wonder at it. She’s touching his arm, impressed by surf muscle. He has a tattoo there of an anchor with MOTHER written beneath it. He tells people he doesn’t know it’s his joke about tattoos. Those of us he knows well he tells it’s his joke about mothers.

  Jean and I are at a table. We buy five tickets in the cricket club’s Hundred Can Raffle from Tom Mercer, a leg spinner who apparently turned the ball sharply once back in 1969 when it landed on a Christmas beetle, and who’s been hoping for a pitch invasion by that beetle’s descendants ever since so he can turn it again. He tells us it’s a mathematical certainty we win the raffle soon with all the tickets we’ve been buying. Jean tells him she hates to see an old leggie so low and guilty about the scams he’s running that he’ll pretend they’re a question of probability. ‘We know you raffle the same old original hundred cans every week, Tom,’ she says. He gives her change and winks and tells her, ‘No, no, no. You got it all wrong. We pay up when a team member wins it. Just to save the cans from going stale.’

  Jean starts asking me about the paintings of my dead father and of Molly my mother has up and down the hall of her house. Jean owns the art gallery in Lorne and she’s always on the lookout for what might pass as art or might pass as statement. ‘Are they any good?’ she asks.

  ‘Worse than shithouse,’ I tell her.

  ‘But can you see grief in them?’

  ‘All I could see was Molly and Dad a couple of hundred times. But if you weren’t their son and brother, which I am … or was, you’d see an incompetent purple mess trying to be a girl and an incompetent purple mess trying to be a man.’

  She has a drink of beer. ‘Can you tell they’re dead?’ she asks.

  ‘I know they’re dead,’ I say. ‘I saw them both die.’

  ‘Be serious,’ she says. ‘Can you see the artist’s pain in the paintings?’

  ‘Only if it’s arthritis,’ I tell her. I refuse to take any more of my mother’s pain seriously. People have been taking her pain seriously for years. I’ve come to enjoy ignoring it. ‘You can see the artist doesn’t know what she’s doing,’ I say.

  ‘They’re really bad?’

  ‘They are,’ I tell her.

  ‘I want some,’ she says. She’s looking out at the waves running under the pier in a string of white explosions and rolling away toward town.

  ‘What for? I’ve just finished telling you how shitful they are.’ I finish my beer and get two more. From the bar I see the divisional van pull up outside and park next to the truck Hoss’s sound equipment is being unpacked from.

  ‘I want them for an exhibition,’ she tells me when I sit down.

  ‘It’s not exhibitable. Unless for mockery, if that’s what you want.’

  ‘What about I hang them as a s
tatement of grief. Not good art technically, but worthwhile as honest language.’ She flattens her hands at me, fingers forward in question.

  ‘A freak show. If you want a fucking freak show forget the paintings and just hang a blow-up photo of the woman herself on the wall with a sign next to it saying: “HERE’S ME. I REALLY AM STILL GRIEVING INCONSOLABLY, PROBABLY INSANELY, FOR MY DEAD DAUGHTER AND HUSBAND EVEN SIXFUCKINGTEEN AND EIGHT YEARS AFTER THEIR DEATHS.”’

  ‘Perfect,’ she says. ‘I’ll hang it right alongside the paintings.’

  ‘Well, it’ll be hanging in her house in the Pilbara, because that’s where the paintings are staying,’ I tell her.

  There’s a clunk and rattle of handcuff and of .38 and of dog-walloping device and a tinkle of other felon-reducing accessories against the glass of the door as Senior Constable Malcolm Lunn punches his belly into it and swings it wide and walks in settling the shaken-up felon-reducing accessories low on his hips again and making sure the cuffs are just here and the .38 is just here and the dog-walloping device is just here.