Eyrie (10 page)

F
urious blank.

A kind of.

Kind of.

Kind of turbulence.

Suddenly down by the marina. Standing, walking. Sleepwalking, really. With gulls like empty thought bubbles overhead. How many minutes had he lost? Ten? Twenty? Closer to forty. Jesus!

Okay.

Tamp down the panic.

Okay.

Nothing you can do about it. Well, nothing you’ll let yourself do. Being what and who you are.

Alright. Whatever.

So.

Here he was.

The marina. The fishing-boat harbour. Prawn trawlers, crayboats. Yachts. Boardwalks. Finger jetties.

He must have had something in mind. During his little lapse in transmission, while the test pattern flashed on and on inside. Some destination, a plan, a notional refuge that eluded him for the moment. But here he was. The marina. Where, yes, he had spent a lot of time in better days. Their little sloop that Harriet referred to as
The Folly.
Okay, he thought. This is where you’ve brought yourself. Old circuits firing. So walk. Walk it out, walk it off.

And as he did he let his safer thoughts unsnarl themselves slowly. Could only think of them as coloured wires now. All brittle, everything ginger. Couldn’t get straight, shiny lines anymore, no orderly layout like something fresh from the shop floor. But he could separate them, more or less, even if they were still nested around that awful pulsing void, the dread he’d been hauling about the past few months. It had no size or shape. Its origins obscure. It was his own dark planet. Within him. And there was absolutely no point in giving it direct attention; it was simply there, he accepted it now, thrumming like something about to detonate. But with sufficient will, bending every perilous thought aside, keeping all wires from touching, you could shrink it from something planetary to just a blemish, a fleck, like a tiny bit of shadow-matter tracking momentarily across the sun. Safer, better, not to look. Took such a shitload of energy, though, powering it down by mental force. Just to make some space and turn your thoughts to lesser mysteries. Like how to make a living, first and foremost. Because it really was conceivable that before Easter he could be working on his grimy street tan like those poor buggers lining up outside St Pat’s. If he didn’t pull up, if he didn’t shake this self-pitying jag he was giving into day upon day, it wasn’t just possible but inevitable. He couldn’t let Doris keep propping him up. She’d paid his phone bill. He owed it to her to get his shit together.

He shuffled away from the boardwalk and the tourist traps, tailed by a posse of gulls. Busy little pricks, gulls.

He thought about going back to teaching. Still possible, wasn’t it? If he could tidy himself up, get his nerves in order. It would weird people out, having him there again, considering what he’d been doing. He was too long out of the game. Things had changed. And now public education was like bearbaiting. He’d faced down proxy thugs of all species, from robber barons to the unions. But he shivered at the prospect of being left alone in a room with thirty 15-year-olds. Maybe something non-contact, a support role? Which had its own complications. Given that he’d probably burnt a few bridges in the bureaucracy over the years. There were heads of department who’d make certain his applications were regrettably unsuccessful.

Which left what – gardening, driving a taxi? For all his skills and achievements these were his best chances and he should bloody well get used to it because to the pollies he was poison, too dangerous, too likely to say something uncomfortable. A decade and a half of supreme self-control and in a few minutes he’d rendered himself a rogue forever. In the media he was a heretic, a traitor to progress.

No NGO could possibly risk hiring him. And in the broader environmental movement he would always be the Great Disappointment. The deepest darkest greens thought he was a hero, but their admiration wouldn’t butter his bread.

He wondered, briefly, about the private sector. Consultancies employed all sorts of colourful folks: disgraced premiers, tycoons jailed for massive frauds, sportsmen with blemished records. There was stuff he could do – lucrative, too. But it would be mercenary work.

Of course the resource sector would take him on in a heartbeat. On the quiet. That was his Patty Hearst option – join the revolution. They wouldn’t need to parade him like a hostage; they had plenty already. They’d just pump him for intel. Plans, policy positions, databases. All those establishment donors from the Golden Triangle they could woo back to the fold with a little pressure from old school chums. A few discreet threats of a purely social nature. He’d seen it done. And who knew the who-where-what like he did? But just thinking that way made him feel grubby.

This was what happened now. It was occurring everywhere. People reduced to toting up whatever made them valuable to the market. Which was to say the bosses. They’d approached him, well before the blow-up. A big mining corporation looking to spritz up its greenwash. The bastards had more propaganda money at their disposal than most nation states. For every eco-ad from a cash-strapped NGO they’d publish fifty lavish fakes. Top whack. Full pages in broadsheets and sixty-second prime-time TVCs. They stood some tame khaki naturalist in front of a red gorge or a bit of forest. A few lies, a couple of half-truths and there they were, all logo and soaring music. Australian Miners – nature’s greatest custodians. And not a hole to be seen. At the time he’d pretended not to understand what they were asking of him. Now he was desperate. And he knew they’d come back. There were unopened emails with jaunty subject headings he’d consigned to the ether. But he’d never do it. Anyhow, his value would only last a few weeks. He’d hardly get through betraying himself and his comrades before he found himself on St Georges Terrace with nothing but a cardboard carton and a non-disclosure agreement.

No, he was a fuckup, but not a turncoat. Which was something to hold onto, wasn’t it, Doris? Wasn’t that the upside?

The gulls gave him up as a dud prospect. He wandered past the boatlifters where someone was blasting a hull clean. The noise was like a dentist’s drill. Made his hair crackle. Sent him on to the sardine jetty with its spangly glitter of scales from the morning’s haul. It reeked, but the smell was comforting, homely.

The upside.

Who knew, maybe Doris was right. Perhaps the CCC would vindicate him. He could eventually launch civil action. Years, it would take, during which he’d be grooming his victimhood and paying for the pleasure all the while, and that would be worse than living like he was now. No, let them do their procedural polka – he just sought a bit of order, maybe a low-key job without excitement or stress. A quiet life. As himself. Because he was still largely himself, wasn’t he? Perhaps not the Tom Keely of old, but still within reach of him. His principles were intact. He wasn’t totally threadbare. Not morally. Was he?

He was staring at the blunt, pitted face of a mooring bollard. As if he’d been addressing it. Beseeching it, even. And maybe he had been. Yes, he had. But, glory, look at this thing. It was massive, bovine, the size of Lang Hancock’s head. Like an inscrutable idol shorn of its horns. In the face of Keely’s puny human query the iron plug radiated mineral contempt. It was indifferent. Which was as it should be. After all, it wasn’t fair on hardware, being expected to dish out spiritual advice.

He stepped away. But for a moment he couldn’t walk straight. Too hard to navigate and manage his thoughts at the same time. He settled for a limestone boulder in the lee of a boatshed. Stared at the junk washing against the seawall above the little coomb where the old slipway had been.

No, he wasn’t so sure what he was anymore. Didn’t feel so righteous. Not after last night. It was one thing to have felt favour at last, however brief. What disturbed him was not the sex but the talk. Gemma telling him about Bunker. That was her mistake and he didn’t know how it could be undone. She thought he was safe, as if he’d earnt that kind of trust. But he was just another randy bloke staring at her legs, yearning to touch, and such misplaced trust frightened him. Whole thing was a bloody mess. They had nothing in common, the two of them, just kid stuff and middle-aged loneliness. And now he was stuck with her. Or without her. Whichever. Only three doors from his hideout. Every day from here on in. With the kid. Who set something off in him each time they met.

So now he was doubly bound, trapped like a bug in a jar – addled, livid, dizzy, butting his head and turning circles. Making a damn fool of himself. Wilting in the full shock and awe of the sun, losing minutes like a man shedding dandruff. He should go home, find a hat at least, but he was so restless. And the pain wasn’t terrible. He could see fine now. Better. And the boats were everywhere, beautiful, familiar, diverting.

He got up and walked on through the clutter of docks, sheds, jetties and dealerships into the hardstandings where yachts, cruisers and workboats stood on chocks and hung in slings to be scoured and anti-fouled. The air stank of diesel, grease, paint, fibreglass, and Keely tried not to think of all the toxic crap washing into the sea. Someone else’s fight now.

He sidled between buffed hulls and scrofulous strakes, beneath stepped masts and exhaust-blackened transoms as drills and sanders wailed in the bellies of launches, ocean racers, gamefishers. He suffered a boyish twinge kicking through teak shavings and bundles of rags, cable-ties, trimmed electrical wire, steel swarf. As he thumbed a burnished bronze prop he thought again of
The Folly
. And was rescued from another sad jag by the sight of Wally Butcher’s clapped-out van.

He hadn’t seen the old rogue to speak to for a year or more. Wally was always in and out of these yards and in better times Keely had enjoyed running into him. Wally was old-school. But since losing Harriet, the boat and then the job, Keely had dodged him guiltily, waving at a distance or faking preoccupation. From shame. Perhaps even vanity. And it was rotten. Ducking the old coot. Because Wally was loyal as a cattle dog. Forty years of hurt and bafflement and not once had he heard the man offer a harsh word about his father.

He’d only been a boy when things went wobbly between Wally and Nev. In the days when most tradesmen were happy to work for the council or a government works department they’d gone into business together, made a go of it on their own. Just a pair of working-class blokes, they were, but they went hard at it, balls to the wall, and had begun to make some headway. Before Billy Graham and his groupies showed up. Before Nev and Doris went all ‘different’. Before Wal was left holding the rag. By all accounts the divergence hadn’t been gradual. Not that it was acrimonious, just bewildering. For the Keelys it was a sudden, radical shift, a total explosion of reality. Happened to lots of people those years, often only a momentary enthusiasm, but for Nev and Doris it was deep and lasting. In the wake of their religious conversion they were fundamentally realigned. And even for Wal, who bore the brunt, whose life was overturned in a manner less joyous, it was impressive – even frightening – to witness.

Nev did nothing in half measures. He was an all-out, open-throttle bloke, and in one blinding ‘Just as I Am’ moment he was letting the dead bury their dead. And the partnership, if not the friendship, was chaff to the winds. He just walked from the business and went out saving souls with Doris. No one could blame Wally for feeling bitter, not after what it cost him to save things singlehandedly and press on. Said it was twice the work and half the fun. He’d survived financially, but without his mate in it with him it was suddenly just work. Nev was lost to Christ. Yet by some miracle of agnostic tolerance the friendship endured. And even if Wal’s teeth were gritted he did his best to give Nev his profane and tender blessing.

Keely remembered him from Saturday afternoons in the garage. His feral sideburns like long streaks of grease as he looked up from the entrails of a Norton. The footy yammering away on the old bakelite radio. Wal was forever urging young Tom to pull his finger, rewarding him with a fart redolent of meat pies and lager. Evenings on the back verandah, the men sat in a pair on the bench seat from a wrecked EH, often speechless in the last light of day. You could sense something solid between them. Despite Jesus. And all the lost Sundays.

Oh, the sight of Wal in church. The only time he ever came. Staring up at Nev in the pulpit. Wal’s face blank and closed like the ex at the wedding. That’s how he’d looked at the graveside, too. Like a man spurned all over again.

Keely angled up to the familiar van. It was parked alongside an old plank riverboat some fool was busy pouring his savings into. Beneath the scaly transom, a midden of tools, rags, oil filter and sump. Between torrents of Wally’s bilious imprecation, snatches of talkback radio rose like the fumes of something noxious from the bilge. Keely stepped onto an upturned milk crate and beheld the hairy arse and the King Gees protruding from the engine hatch.

What’s that in there, a Cummins? called Keely in the blokiest voice he could summon.

Perkins, came the gruff reply.

That’s all a Perkins needs – a greasy one-eyed butcher. Can’t this joker find a proper mechanic?

Wally hauled himself upright and peered evilly over the gunwale. It took a moment for the old bugger’s face to rearrange itself.

Tommy bloody Keely, he said with the makings of a grin. How are ya, son?

Ah, I’m alright.

Christ, by the looks of ya I think you might be kiddin yeself.

Keely laughed. Okay, he said. I’m shithouse. How are you?

I’m old, son. If anyone could find a spare paddock they’d lead me out there and put a bullet in me from kindness.

You don’t look too bad, said Keely. For an ugly old bastard.

Jesus, you look like your old man with that bloody beard. Where you been?

Oh, I’m still in town.

Don’t see you on the telly anymore.

Nah, they rissoled me.

Well, you did call that fat cunt a crook. And on the telly, no less.

I did.

So yer old man was wrong, then. The truth won’t set you free.