Limestone Man (15 page)

It felt as if I was the only driver on the road. The single commuter. What a fool I was. The solitary driver on that brand new autobahn they'd carved through the bush. And the roadkill was black as the sun came up over the concrete. Watersnakes coiled like lilyroots, dying in agony. Maybe they'd poisoned the snakes as well.

And it dawned on me what I'd done. The enormity of it all. On a rise I pulled over in the middle of the black sunflowers. And I could see the ocean far away. Its line blue as surgical stitching.

But God help me, it was the Antarctic Ocean. I was suddenly terrified. What was I doing there? And, yes, there were all these snakes around. But not another human being. Not a solitary soul. Never saw a muldjewangk, either.

What's that? asked Mina

A mudgy? Water monster. Comes crawling out of the lake. Lulu told me about it. Abo legend. Same as the stories here on The Caib. Yeah, the desperate mythologies of beaten people. Then marking, marking, the usual schoolteachering malarkey.

You see, the school was taking a risk with me. They liked the idea of somebody British, even though by then I was determined to do my own thing.

Yes, I wanted to write. What a surprise. It's the usual schoolteacher's curse. As if there aren't enough poems nobody reads.

But no, not music. Something solid like a novel. I'm no good at music. Never learned a note. And that's been the problem all along.

But what about my own painting? Sometimes Lulu and I would go behind the Murray barrage. The sun would lie like oils on the water, and I'd think, yes, yes. Get the canvas or the cardboard. Or just strips of bloody melamine. But I'd never have the guts.

And I know what you're going to say. I should have painted the sunflowers. That field of black sunflowers. The sunflowers that were poisoned. Or whatever it is they do that's fatal to sunflowers in Australia.

And no, I'm not apologising. But this was at the beginning of the internet, so you can imagine the excitement of the scene.

Before everyone became a blogger. Before the arrival of those madmen with their million word blogs. Who only make life boring. Like it already was.

Because, you have to understand, every small town has to have a freaky shop like
Hey Bulldog
. Just to make small town life bearable.

We had a counter, two or three tables for coffees, our CD racks. And piles of crap. Heaps of it. Magazines and pamphlets, the usual stuff. Really, there was nothing more to it.

Apart from some posters of The Easybeats and Kafka,
Hey Bulldog
was just an address in the back of beyond. A nest of bleached bones down a tunnel in the riverbank.

It wasn't the outback, no way. Yet it was fairly remote. Buses took a while. But the roads were wide and public transport pretty good, I'll say that for the Aussies. The trams in Adelaide were a joy.

Next door to
Hey Bulldog
was the Goolwa Central Motel, so we had a bar nearby. Kept by a Dutch couple. Good people, who understood what we were bothering about. Grasped that you had to share the madness.

They were refugees from Amsterdam so knew everything about insanity. And, that's all we had to do. Link The Easybeats with Kafka. Made for each other, weren't they? Then depend on the culture and a normal human appetite to do the rest.

Yes, there were some good people about. I'll always remember the mango man. He drove a pickup, and, yeah, it was packed with mangoes.

He carved those mangoes into flower shapes, then skewered them. His wife took the money, two dollars a mango, I think, and then she spread the fruit with relishes. Good business, it seemed. The couple hung around for three months. With an endless supply of mangoes. Until one day they disappeared.

We knew the fruit wasn't local. And the way that man used the machete, indicated foreign skill. He looked Greek. Maybe Lebanese.

Most days I would buy Lulu a mango flower and watch her devour that fruit, mango juice on her throat and fingers. Those mango petals yellow as buttercups.

IV

Yes, the appetite. Look, I'm not pretending it was the sixties. This was not so long ago, for Christ's sake. Trailblazers we were not. You might say I'd woken up late. Mad Max with a hangover. And the house already on fire.

I was an art teacher pretending I knew about nineteenth
-
century British painters who sailed off to Adelaide.

But the shop was still real. And the town needed it. We allowed people to breathe. As we're trying to do on The Caib.

Just finding out if people still know how. To breathe, that is. If there are people left who still need their lungs. It's not certain, you know. Maybe we've lost that capacity. Maybe the species is changing.

Goolwa means ‘elbow' in the local language. Lulu told me that. It's a place at the mouth of the Murray, one of the biggest rivers in the country. Down in the south. Deep south. Think of New Orleans without
mardi gras.
Think of The Caib but facing Antarctica.

Yes, we're talking about remoteness here. About the soul's isolation. What do you think it does to the soul to know the next country is unexplored and uninhabited? That the next country isn't really a country with history and culture. That it's an unpenetrated frozen desert. Or that your own country is only badlands and spinifex. That's thornbushes. Hundreds of miles of thornbushes.

Some people can cope with that. Others go crazy. In the front of
Hey Bulldog
was a rickety porch. In the back was a garden with quondong trees.

Those are wild peaches that the native people used to eat. Wormy and stringy, I always thought. But we had solar lights and lit tea candles and played music until there was nobody left to listen.

I remember Bach's
Goldberg Variations
at three in the morning. Lulu was curled up like a kitten in the indigo dust. Lightning in the sky and the CD on repeat play.

But there was nothing worthy about
Hey Bulldog
. What I recall playing most in the back yard was ‘Wonderful Land'. As a tribute to where I found myself. This enormous country, where every river was hundreds of miles long, every patch of countryside a lethal wilderness. Where nothing had familiar names.

But out in the garden, as if I wasn't tired enough, those foreign stars would still be puzzling me. Somewhere above the candlelight.

Lulu had told me the names of the constellations. But Australian stars were like Australian bands. Or Australian writers. Somehow not important. Or just too different. Or maybe important but in a different way.

Around Goolwa there were islands. Kangaroo Island and Granite Island. Then the ocean, then the Antarctic icefields. Their unimaginable cold.

So
Hey Bulldog
made a difference for thinking people there. A difference for people who somehow felt left behind. Somehow abandoned. Somehow betrayed. It proved they weren't alone and forgotten. That there were others who shared their madnesses.

Yeah, that's what
Hey Bulldog
did. It shared the madness. The madnesses of composers and painters, and insisted in its temporary way, that the public try some of this weird stuff.

That it could be good for them. Might be a necessary medicine. If you were brave enough. To try it. For all that ailed you. For any gutrot. For any worldwarp. For any soulache. For the migraine where your soul should be.

I used to walk out in the evenings after
Hey Bulldog
closed. Well, after I'd locked up. Then I'd ask Lulu to tell me about the planets and stars. But first, it was the birds.

What's making that song, I'd ask? Because one particular bird had two voices. So, two personalities. As if it was a choir of birds. What's making that song? And why is it singing in the darkness?

And she'd laugh. You mean the magpie lark?

Yes, that must be it, I'd say. One bird with two names. And two songs.

And I'd listen to this music that the magpie lark would create. This black and white bird that hid itself in the river willows. In the Murray while the torrent still flowed, even though the drought had set in. Common enough, I suppose. But not a lark. And not a magpie. Yet both. A sound like a waterwheel lapping the current.

Yes, the magpie lark. If ever Australia had typical music for me, it was that bird.

Sometimes I catch myself listening for it on The Caib. And have to remember that's it all over for me in Goolwa. And I'm never going back. That I'll never hear the magpie lark again.

Woman, was it? Girlfriend like Libby? Not that little Lulu?

What do you mean? asked Parry.

The reason you left Australia? laughed Mina.

In a way. Maybe.

V

But let me tell you about Lulu. We'd go as far as the lagoon. In summer the river would dry up. Became a crust on a black wadi. And that sticky water crawling with insects. With black shadows on the water until there was no water at all. Just the ink of shadows.

So on our walks, I told her about those British artists. Especially the women painters. What a bunch they were. Mad, indomitable. Didn't know any better. The problem with us, we know so much better. We've been forcefed on knowing better. But not those artists.

Well, once we went as far as the sandhills at the river mouth. I can remember Lulu pointing to Mars, red as a cinder, low over the dunes. A red hot particle, a grain of sand itself, that was Mars that night. Glowing above the evening river.

The estuary was green in the dusk. The estuary with its herons and hawks and frogmouths. Its moths bigger than a man's hands. A whiteman's hands, Lulu pointed out.

She was a native girl, you see. But there I was, not understanding how rare Lulu was. How incredibly rare was this girl. A child of nature, as the song says. Unique.

So what did I do? To my shame I spent too long talking to Lulu about bootleggers. About specialists and programme collectors. All the damaged types who congregate around a record store. All those obsessive
-
compulsives hanging about. On the margin of any enthusiasm.

Hanging around in the space I'd created at
Hey Bulldog.
Polishing my floorboards with their dirty trainers. Bringing in that brickred Murray dust, thick as talcum powder.

Of course, it was really about music. Because music is always the core. It's music brings young people. And if that music is seething with sex, you're halfway there. Most of the way.

But it was even more fundamental than that. In Goolwa, at the end of the world, it was all to do with belonging. A place for nurturing. That's what Lulu sensed.

And yes, for too long, I talked to her about the things that didn't matter. And of course, now I'm doing it again on The Caib. Searching for similar sufferers. Fellow fanatics. Fed by the same delirium. Hunting out the same addicts.

But I tell you what. I don't regret it. All those collectors? The people who stapled the poetry pamphlets together? Who trawled through old suitcases full of flyers and posters? To check who was top of the bill ten years ago in a back bar in Adelaide? To work out the set list of a forgotten gig? No, I don't regret that.

Because it mattered. It mattered like crazy. It mattered as the most important thing in the world. I kid you not, there was a kind of holiness about the people attracted to
Hey Bulldog
. A powerful innocence. Remember how the song goes. How it goes.
Some kind of innocence…

Anyway, they were searching. For meaningfulness. Which is what young people do. Or the dreamers before they're warned to stop dreaming.

No, it wasn't all mistaken. So, who told you about Mars? I asked Lulu.

It's in books, she said. Wonderful books.

I'll always remember that phrase. ‘Wonderful books.'

I looked for Mars in the encyclopaedias and the almanacs. Sand
-
coloured Mars. Bronze as a hornet.

Or one of those maybugs we used to see on The Caib. Cockchafers, we called them. Droning through the dusk like electrical charges. And they'd collide with you and hold on to your shirt with their talons. Sticky as gel.

Are they still around, the maybugs? They used to detonate like grenades in the girls' hair. Like big seeds. Funny how it all starts to come back. After it all falls away.

VI

I remember a girl I knew. Somehow she was covered in flying ants. I was about seventeen and we were in the dunes here one August. We used its river of sand as a pathway. Suddenly, her hair was alive with ants. Black ants, crawling black ants. Thousands of ants.

And this girl tore off her clothes and ran off through the sand. Her hair was a torrent of ants. Skinny and pale, skinny and pale, her hair smoking, her hair fiery with ants. Down to her knickers and the sand flying, her foal's legs skinny and pale, skinny and pale.

Yes, racing down to the beach. She ran through the roses and I can still see the rosepetals floating away. Those creamy rose petals stuck to the soles of her sandals.