Dirt Music (28 page)

Ah, he murmured. Wonder woman.

G’day, Yogi.

Always wondered what bras were for. To keep ladies’ arms on with.

Me mum never told me.

I bet she didn’t tell you a lot of things, Yogi.

Told me to steer clear of bad luck.

And did you?

See a lot of bad luck when you drive an ambulance.

And some good luck, remember.

But any fuckwit can pick a Jonah, Georgie.

She looked at him. He had the binoculars back to his eyes. Are you referring to me, Yogi?

Yogi pursed his lips. Those Foxes, he said. Shit luck from go to whoa. The mother, you know, she was killed by an act of God. And the old man, Wally—Christ. He’d go out on a boat and they’d put him ashore before the end of the first day. Crayboats, prawners, sharkboats—he just killed their luck. Like a bad joke. You know one year he built a tree house up a pole in the front paddock.

Lived up there for weeks. Bloody fishermen, they’d turn their head drivin past, look the other way so they didn’t get touched.

You don’t whistle on a boat, Georgie, and you still don’t take bananas out, but, round here, most of all, you don’t take a bloody Fox on board.

What was he doing up a pole? Georgie asked despite herself.

Christ knows. Waitin for the end of the world, I spose. Fuck, he was the end of the world, the silly old prick. He was rubbish.

They were all rubbish.

They’re all dead, Yogi, she said with feeling.

Bar one.

Yes, bar one.

And what d’ye figure the odds are on that, all of em dyin in a rollover on their own driveway? I was there, love. You can’t bloody imagine. And that last boy sittin in the ambulance like a zombie. You could feel it comin off his skin like electricity; just pure and simple shit luck. That’s what you were foolin with.

People did you a favour, love.

Well, thanks for the enlightenment, she said, pushing off the doorsill.

Community service, he muttered. That’s me.

Ever think about luck? she asked Jim that evening.

He looked up from the weather fax. He seemed startled by the question.

No.

Jim, every fisherman lives by it. All of you.

He shook his head. Knowledge, he said. Seamanship. Experience.

Good data and record keeping. A bit of lateral thinking and instinct maybe. Bad fishermen need luck.

You’re no different, though. You ban bananas.

That’s just to keep the deckies happy. They’re superstitious.

And you’re not?

No.

//Hm.

What’s this from, some movie?

There was a tone of dismissal in his voice that Georgie resented.

No. I was just thinking.

People are at the mercy of their own actions, he said.

Consequences. But it’s nothing to do with luck. Hey, I can’t believe you sold that boat. Could have sailed around the world in that.

So you never had bad luck?

He gazed at her. No.

You didn’t feel unlucky when your wife got cancer?

Jim’s stare was cool and searching. He broke it off to look at the fax in his lap. Georgie saw the anger in him. Debbie was out of bounds. Talk of her—even from the boys— caused him to shut down with a kind of instant fatigue.

He went to bed without speaking.

Georgie pulled in at the fruit stand. It was a forlorn structure.

Much of it was held together with fencewire. Only a single sheet of iron remained on its one-sided roof. The tilted wooden uprights were weathered grey.

She drove on up the white ruts through the front paddock past the olive trees ghosted with limestone dust until she reached the yard between the sheds and the house. She parked in the shade of the casuarinas. A few feathers lay snagged in brown weeds but there was no other sign of poultry. Climbing out into the heat she got a whiff of tainted air, the sort you got passing a dead beast at the roadside.

With a stone she broke a pane beside the back door and let herself into the kitchen. There was a glutinous ooze at the foot of the fridge. She flicked a light switch. The power was out. She didn’t like the smell. It gave her a spurt of fear, a charge of memory. Mrs Jubail.

Georgie didn’t know why she was here. The boys were at school and Jim at sea. She just had to get out of town.

She figured the power bills hadn’t been paid and the company had cut off supply. But then she remembered the generator droning out in the shed. They weren’t even connected. Chances were the diesel had run out or he’d switched it off.

Georgie supposed that some last part of her had hoped he might have slipped back in under the radar. There was that much to admit to yourself.

As she got closer to the shed the smell got worse. By the time she entered the open maw of the workshop she was pinching her nose. Flies billowed in her path; they were a black crepe upon the freezers. An irrational dread took hold of her as she advanced upon them. She threw back the lid of the first and found bags of octopus an angry shade of foaming purple. They looked like shrunken heads piled there, warty with tentacle suckers. The second chest was big enough for what she dreaded most. She summoned a bit of nursery steel and hoiked the cover up. When she saw the writhing nest of feet and feathers she blurted a laugh.

It helped to think of the diesel generator as an overfed replica of the sort of motor she knew about. She had once laboured over a Yanmar marine diesel in the lonely tidal nightmare of Camden Sound. Here at least you had a stable platform and room to manoeuvre. You didn’t have to hope the fool up on deck could keep you off the rocks while you worked.

The manual hung off the wall from a piece of string. The fuel tank was empty. She knew enough to realize that she’d need to bleed the lines. The smell from the other side of the asbestos wall was horrific; you could feel it on your tongue as you worked. There was a five-gallon drum of diesel beside the empty reservoir. She tipped it in and primed the thing as best she could. It took an hour to get it going but it gave her an absurd sense of pride, far more than she’d taken in keeping Avis McDougall alive.

She left it roaring and went in and cleaned the kitchen. As she worked she considered what Yogi had said about luck. She remembered her crossing of the Timor Sea. They did it without a hiccup, the original piece of plain sailing, and she knew it was undeserved. They had no right to be let off so lightly; they shouldn’t have even been out there. She felt she was using up her quota. And hadn’t it all come undone at the very last moment? Colliding with another vessel as they entered the anchorage at Senggigi. Screaming disaster.

Georgie had always assumed that an obsession with luck was the preserve of passive people, others unlike herself. Hadn’t she been a great resister, holding out against all those limiting expectations? Trouble was she’d begun to see how little her resistance had brought her. Lately it seemed to her that she’d expended so much of her life’s energy digging in her heels that she rendered herself powerless. There was a fraudulence about her rebellious spirit. She was drifting, had been for years. Even in the job. There’s nothing like an institutional organization for dressing you up in an aura of action and hiding your aimless passivity. She hadn’t made things happen for years. Things happened to her. Wasn’t that simply, blindly, trusting herself to luck-without having the honesty to admit it? At least White Pointers owned up to their dependence on fortune.

Georgie made herself a coffee. She found a clothespeg and a shovel and buried the purulent freezer loads out in the paddock.

Afterwards she tipped bleach into the chests and left their lids up.

Later she showered and lay on the dusty sofa in the library room while her clothes dried in the hot wind, and as she sprawled there she realized that her situation had altered again so quickly and in so many ways that she couldn’t keep up. Whatever the hell Jim was up to she had a car now; she owned it. And there was enough money in her account to give her real choices.

This place, for instance. It was empty. It was somewhere, wasn’t it? She couldn’t countenance the idea of returning to the suburban blandness of Perth. And she had no desire to travel. This might be a short-term option. But how would she spend her time? Even if the White Pointers let her alone, how long could she seriously expect to last in a farmhouse hours from any suitable employment?

Still, she thought, whatever happens, however long it did last, it might be some sort of sanctuary. For a while. If she ever did make up her mind.

At her elbow a book of poems bristled with leaves, paper clips, twigs which marked the pages. She picked it up absently and opened to a heavily marked passage.

There were those songs, a score times sung, With all their tripping tunes, There were the laughters once that rung. There those unmatched full moons, Those idle noons!

Annoyed she clapped it shut and set it down.

She woke up with a start at two o’clock that afternoon. Naked and dry-mouthed and, for a few moments, quite befuddled. She stumbled onto the verandah to find that her clothes had been blown to the dirt below.

At the highway a few minutes later she got out of the car and dragged the farm gate to.

A few days later, Georgie went back to the Fox place with two five-gallon drums of diesel. She tried to figure out the bank of batteries and how much fuel she’d need to keep the generator going. She cleaned the entire house, folded clothes and put fresh sheets on Luther Fox’s bed. She stocked the fridge with a few things and added groceries to the cupboards.

On the third trip she brought the espresso machine from its box in Jim’s garage. She made herself little lunches of ricotta cheese on Ryvita biscuits and sat in the library scanning the shelves. She flipped through the fruitboxes full of LPs. There were Australian records from the seventies—Matt Taylor, Spectrum, The Indelible Murtceps, Tully—and weirdo albums by the Mahavishnu Orchestra, King Crimson, Sopwith Camel, The Flock, Backdoor, Captain Beefheart. There was an entire box of blues records and another of bluegrass and folk. In a tin trunk she found a deep jumble of sound cassettes, most of them pirate dubs with names scrawled across them in biro.

She just picked out a name—Chris Whitley—and stuck it in the machine. She lay on the sofa and listened to the languid voice with its momentary looping falsettos. The guitar was wiry, almost harsh-sounding. Georgie didn’t know much about music. She’d stopped being avid about it after adolescence and just bought stuff she heard on the radio. Yet there was once a time when she lay barricaded in her room lying on the bed with albums whose every song spoke directly. You could feel the singer pointing the words, the emotion, right at you. She lay here now staring at the water stains on the ceiling while these melancholy, enigmatic songs poured through the house. She’d never heard of this guy.

She wondered what it meant to get over to the big sky country and be kissing time goodbye. All the words puzzled her and that strange wailing bottleneck guitar took some getting used to. But it stirred her. She lay back on the musty sofa and listened to the entire album.

When it was finished she got up and went room to room to open cupboards and drawers. In the main bedroom she tried on sunbleached dresses that were way too big for her. Lu’s sister-in-law was, in Warwick Jutland’s sweet words, too much woman for her. She felt like a girl trying on her mother’s gear. You could make fists where that woman’s breasts had been and Georgie had neither belly nor hips enough to give those frocks shape. She picked through underthings balled haphazardly in a drawer. In a trunk at the foot of the bed she found a wedding dress wrapped in cellophane. Beneath it, parcelled in the same material, was a mighty stash of old cannabis.

There was a shoebox of photos. The brother had a sleepy look about him. His hair was black and there was always some kind of knowing grin on his face. There was more grey than blue in his eyes. The woman was all hair and boobs and mouth. The mouth was sensuous, nearly ugly, always open. Her kids looked feral, their silky white hair askew, faces happy, dirty, weary.

Georgie looked through the kids’ room but didn’t linger. It was too sad.

And then somehow it was March with autumn in the air and a blanket on the bed at night. The days were still warm—hot, even —but the sting went out of the day the moment the sun hit the sea. Georgie’s father had disavowed her and, for some reason she couldn’t get out of her, Jude refused to see her when she visited. The others maintained a frosty silence. At home Jim was getting irritable. He found fault with the boys at every turn.

There was an ashen look about him and he seemed to be losing weight. He spent more time in his office at night. His conversation with Georgie was civil but distracted.

Beaver had gone into a funk. He filled her little diesel drums with barely a word. And with all the time she spent driving up and down the highway to the farm she hardly saw Rachel either.

The one occasion they did have, one evening at the jetty, Rachel broke off the usual pleasantries to declare that there were times in your life when you needed to shake yourself off, drag yourself to your feet and bloodywell act. She sounded exasperated, as though this speech had been a long time coming, and Rachel looked so close to tears that if she hadn’t immediately climbed into her Land Rover and driven off, Georgie might have hugged her and blurted it all out to her—that she was acting, that she already had a plan, that everything would be alright.

Georgie went every day to the Fox place. The trips energized her.

She felt some confidence returning. The days she admitted to having been anywhere at all she passed off as trips to see Jude, but she needn’t have bothered lying because Jim never asked. It seemed that his mind was elsewhere.

One of those days Georgie rolled an old drum down to the sandspit at the riverbend and began burning junk. It took her all morning and half the afternoon to incinerate Darkie’s clothes, the wedding dress, the dope and all those summer frocks. She made herself burn the children’s things, every stained teeshirt and pair of shorts, the posters from their walls, the plastic toys and even their pillows. She spared Lu’s room, but she reorganized it to suit herself. She dusted the library and scrubbed the kitchen. She emptied every drawer of its snarls of guitar strings, rubber bands, masscards, allen keys, thimbles and knuckle bones. She saved the stained pair of Levi’s and the double bedspread until last. She’d figured out what the stains were. They were the only things she enjoyed burning.