North of Nowhere, South of Loss (25 page)

“I'll teach you, you insolent filthy little mick,” thunders Mr Brady.

A number of the girls in the class are crying with fright. Stella herself has moved right into Paddy McGee's body, she can feel Mr Brady's claws eating into his flesh, she can feel the sickening air below his dangling feet, she can feel the warm trickle when he wets his pants. Perhaps the still eye of his own storm reaches Mr Brady, or perhaps he hears the nervous shuffling of feet and the murmurs and the crying of girls. Quite suddenly he stops. He goes slack, as though the storm has exhausted him. He drags Paddy McGee back through the window and dumps him on the floor like a sack of sugarcane cuttings and orders gruffly, “Get back to your seat.”

It is the only time in recorded history that Paddy McGee is unable to flash his jaunty smile at the class, but he most certainly does not cry and he does not speak. In spite of the wet stain on his khaki shorts, he fixes his glittering eyes on Mr Brady and he stands as tall as his purple-striped legs and drenched pants will permit. The class is as one person, scarcely breathing. It seems to the class that something curious is happening now, that one end of an invisible seesaw is going down and the other end, the Paddy McGee end, is going up. A whiteness has appeared around Mr Brady's lips. No one moves, no one breathes. Then Paddy McGee turns and walks from the classroom, head high. He never comes back.

That afternoon he does not appear at the back fence, but when Stella slips through the palings and through the bush and across the paddock, she finds him down by the creek. They sit side by side, saying nothing.

At last Paddy McGee says, “You wanna be my blood sister?”

“Yes,” she says.

And with his pocketknife, he makes a small cut in the vein at his wrist, and then in hers, and he places his wrist against hers, flesh to flesh, blood to blood.

She never sees him again. He vanishes. Day after day, she waits for him to come to the back fence, she roams the creek, but the houseboat has gone without a trace. Weeks go by. She begins to fear she dreamed up both the houseboat and Paddy McGee, but then Mr Brady makes a terse announcement. “Good riddance,” he says. “Bad blood.”

And she is comforted. She is comforted by the fact that Mr Brady
had
to say his name, and by the precious drop of Paddy McGee's bad blood in her veins.

Who decides what is margin and what is text? Who decides where the borders of the homeland run? Absences and silences are potent. It is the eloquent margins which frame the official history of the land. As for geography, there are divisions and boundary lines that fissure any state more deeply than the moat it digs around its nationhood.

In every country there are gaping holes. People fall through them and disappear. Yet on every side there are also doors to a wider place, a covert geography under sleep where all the waters meet.

From time to time, when I am least expecting it, in the most unlikely countries, I run into Paddy McGee. He wears unpredictable names but I always recognise him by his eyes and by the mark of the outcast on his forehead. Like some ancient but ageless mariner, he keeps seeking me out to finish his tale, he keeps setting his compass for my shores. And whenever I see him, I find I have the mud of a Queensland creekbed under my feet.

In Boston his name was Franklin D. He was one of my students at MIT, though he was a good bit older than the others. He wore jungle-camouflage combat fatigues with the Marines insignia removed. I never saw him in anything else, nor did I ever see him without his rollerblades on. They seemed attached to his feet like calluses and he moved on them with dazzling speed and grace and dexterity, his feats eyecatching and incredible. He could skate up flights of stairs and down them. He moved along the endless corridors of MIT, especially the famous Infinity Corridor, head and shoulders above crowding students and professors, weaving, braking and pirouetting, swooping along like some exotic jungle creature, part human, part bird. Certainly flamboyant. He skated down subway entrances, into trains, onto buses, into bars, and into class. I think the desire to be untrammelled had blazed its own evolutionary detour and caused his legs to sprout wheels. He was doing a Physics degree on the Veterans' bill. He was black.

In my office, we were discussing the profoundly disturbing stories he had submitted: tales of gang rape as weekend sport, casual deaths, violent excitements.

“I don't know how to grade these,” I told him. “I can hardly bear to read them. They frighten me.”

It was as though I had turned a key, as though all his life he had been waiting for someone to acknowledge: your life is frightening.

“I'll tell you two stories,” he said.

His first death: he was six years old, a basketball-obsessed kid in Harlem playing on a charred lot between stripped cars when he saw two teenage boys knife an old man for his cash. The man struggled. “Forget it, Gran'pa,” the boys said, and slashed him several times across the chest. Grandpa's chest unfurled itself slowly toward the child Franklin D. like a fresh steak, and Grandpa looked at his own ribs in mild surprise and raised his gnarled hands vaguely to hold himself in before he curled forward like the steak of his chest and died on the sidewalk. This happened in slow motion, Franklin D. said. It took an extraordinarily long time for Grandpa to hit the ground. Franklin D. felt nothing at all, he said. Nothing at all. Except that suddenly he had to run inside to the bathroom and vomit.

A story about the Marines: when he turned eighteen, Franklin D. signed up because it was a job, the only one he could get. He was promised good pay, a uniform, status, women, the chance to become a finely tooled killing machine, an adventure to remember. He remembered, constantly, another Marine in the same company. What this other Marine used to do for a hobby on afternoons off, was to catch a squirrel or a chipmunk and skin it alive so delicately, so tenderly, with such a sharp and masterly knife, that the animal still lived and trembled in the palm of the craftsman's hand after it was totally skinned. Then the Marine would let it go.

“A thing people don't understand about the Marines,” Franklin D. said, “is that once you've signed up, you realise in the very first week you want out, but you've got six years like a Mack truck in front of you. I've known guys,” he said, “break their own legs to get out of combat drill. The problem with being in the Marines,” he said, “is figuring out how to become a human being again when you get out. When you get out,” he said, “the only people you can talk to are war vets and other ex-Marines. You're not army, you don't know how to think civilian, you're
nowhere
.

“But what do you do with all the stuff in
here?”
he demanded, knocking on his forehead. “You need a garbage truck to cart it away. If I could write stories and send them to you … ” he said. He held his head in his hands as though the clamour inside was deafening. “If I could let it
out”
he said. “If I could send you letters.”

In northern Manitoba, Paddy McGee had a Cree name, and he surfaced in a ramshackle van at a tiny airport, 54
⁰
N. (I was on a reading tour of prairie outposts, heading north to the tundra.) The drive into town was long enough for two entire life histories to be exchanged, though it seemed to me that the bridge which divides strangers from kin had been crossed (in the mysterious way in which such things happen) before we got out of the airport parking lot.

It was January, deep in a bitter northern winter, about 30 degrees below zero, as I recall. The van's heater wasn't working too well, and when we spoke, our words made little white clouds in the night.

“Have you always lived here?” I asked. “Were you born here?”

As though I were Aladdin and had suddenly touched the magic spot on a lamp, he turned to me with an air of immense and barely controllable excitement. “It's there now” he said, cryptic, intense. “It's there again, where I was born. I can show you. Would you like to see?”

His eyes glittered in the bitter black air, and so, knowing that whatever this entailed was momentous, I simply said yes. He made a U-turn. Snow barrens stretched as far as the eye could see. Since we'd left the airport, not a single car had passed us either way. We two might have been alone in the universe, under the immense night sky and the stars.

The young Cree Indian (he was about twenty, I think) was lit by some inner radiance. Until this abrupt decision we had talked non-stop, but now silence enfolded us. So great was his excitement, so intense the light within, that an aura shimmered around his body and the van seemed to me full of golden fog. We swung off the road and drove over bumpy packed snow. He was steering either by stars or by instinct. By a grove of scrubby dwarf conifers, he braked sharply and we got out and stood by the shore of a frozen lake, and then he stepped a little way out on the ice and pointed.

“Out there,” he said, transfigured by moon and snow and rapture.

It was the week of his birthday. His mother and grandmother had been ice fishing on the night of his birth, camped out on the lake, fishing shack tethered to the ice, unstable, when his mother's pains came upon her, suddenly, early. They were strong women, his mother and grandmother. By the light of tallow candle, on the frozen wafer that ties December to May, inside the smoke-warm shack, his grandmother delivered him into the world. In the morning she pulled the sled containing her daughter and grandson to shore.

The young Cree held his arms out to the moon and the sky and the frozen lake, embracing his history, paying reverence to life itself and to two strong women and to that birthplace which only existed for a few months each year.

He turned to me but could not speak.

I could not speak.

I was overwhelmed by the magnitude of the honour conferred on me.

In that shining moment, stamping my frozen feet on packed snow, the stars so clear and close they could be touched, I swear I smelled the frangipani tree and Breakfast Creek.

The world spins in the margins of space, Australians float in the edges of the world, Queenslanders live in the rind of Australia, I have always drawn breath in the cracks of Queensland.

Queensland itself is fluid in shape and size, it ebbs and flows and refuses to be anchored in space, it billows out like a net that can settle without warning, anywhere, anytime. It is always larger than would appear on the map. There is no escaping it.

Here where I write, where a brilliant cobalt scar of river has just slashed the white surface of March, where the St Lawrence is still mostly skating rink but part flow, I have smelled and touched Queensland. I have woken, disoriented, to see orchids in snowdrifts. Along the bare knotted trunks of maples and hickory trees, epiphytes and creepers have run rampant. I have smelled rainforest.

Homeland is where the senses steer by instinct when the reins are let go. It is always accessible in that small space between sleeping and waking.

Down at the bottom of my yard, the St Lawrence sucks away at the base of our limestone cliffs, it plucks and thaws, plucks and thaws, subtracting from Canada here, depositing American silt there. New York State smudges the horizon. I live at the desiccating edge of things, on the dividing line between two countries, nowhere, everywhere, in the margins.

Wherever I am, I live in Queensland. I know to what brown country and to what wet rainforests my homing thoughts will fly in the moment between living and dying, when
desire shall fail, for man goeth to his long home,
and woman too, there where the evening star goes down, and where the first ones and the latecomers make temporary camp together under the violent stars.

Shining on its short stalk, the Evening Star, always there at the clay pan, at the place of the Dugong … The Evening Star goes down across the camp, among the white gum trees … It sinks there into the place of the white gum trees, at Milingimbi.

Amen.

THE END-OF-THE-LINE
END-OF-THE-WORLD DISCO

Flutie reckons it's an even chance the world will end before the shearing cuts out, and therefore they shouldn't wait, they should have the party tonight. Sure, a train is coming from Brisbane, volunteers are coming, sandbags and sandbaggers, a train's on the way, but will it arrive in time? Already vultures hover, a sure sign. When Mike leans out the pub window, their shadows blacken him and his hurricane hair whips across his face. “Hey, vultures!” he calls. He hoists his beer and gives them the finger, gives it to the helicopter pilots, to the Sydney producers, to the cameramen dangling from slings, to the whole bang lot of them. “Hey, vultures! Stuff that up your TVs and poke it!” Grinning, grinning. “Gonna be on ‘The 7.30 Report' tonight, mates,” he laughs, as he winds himself back inside.

“River's reached Warrabunga already.” Flutie pushes the phone back across the bar. “She's coming down like a seven-foot wall, Paddy Shay says. How about another one, love?”

“Cooper's, is it?” Gladys asks, as though she hasn't been serving him beer in the Millennium Hotel every day and night for six months, as though in the last ten minutes she's forgotten every relevant detail about him.

“Drive a man to drink, Gladdie.” Flutie is baffled, exasperated, because she really is waiting for an answer. She really is not certain, in spite of the small regiment of empty Cooper's stubbies at his elbow. Or maybe she can't quite believe that a man in these parts would ask for anything but Four-X, and maybe she needs confirmation each time. Or maybe, as Mike maintains, she's just
slow
; but Flutie doesn't think that's the reason. She's still standing there with her watery blue eyes looking at him but not quite seeing him, blinking and waiting.

Waiting.

“Yeah,” he says, awkward. “Cooper's.”

Mike rolls up his eyes, taps his forehead, grins at Flutie, but Flutie frowns. It drives him crazy, the way he feels protective of Gladys, and he's damned if he knows why, because she's no spring chicken, she's not a looker, she's skinny as a bloody fencepost, almost no tits at all. He thinks – for a reason he can't fathom out – that it's got something to do with the tired way she rubs the back of her hand across her eyes, and with that strand of faded hair which is always falling out of the loose bun she twists it into, always falling down behind her ear into a hollow of her shoulder-blade, and he always wants to brush it off her neck, tuck it into the elastic band, and let the pad of his thumb rest very lightly in the hollow below the bone. Jesus. He must be going soft in the head. It's almost frightening, that hollow, it's deep as a bloody egg cup. He wants to put his tongue in it.

She's staring at the spigot in her right hand, the spigot on the Four-X keg, having run him off a pot of draught without thinking. “Oh fuck,” she says mildly. “Sorry.” She reaches for a clean glass. “Cooper's, wasn't it?”

“Wake up, Australia,” Mike says. “You'll miss the end of the world if you don't watch out.”

“Why don't you bloody leave her alone?”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Jesus, mate. Keep yer shirt on.” There's a gleam in Mike's eyes though. Flutie with the hots, well well.

Flutie scowls, embarrassed. He knocks back the Cooper's to clear a space, start fresh. “Anyway,” he says, “Paddy Shay climbed up to his roof last thing, saw the water coming. He's got the wife and kids in the ute, gonna run for it, should be here by dark. That's if he makes it. Another day, he reckons, and goodbye Charleville.”

Goodbye Charleville, good riddance, Gladys thinks. She leans against the glass doors of the refrigerator and closes her eyes and sees the swollen black snake of the river nosing south. A little higher than her head, preserved as curio, is the last flood souvenir, a decade old but still a clear corroded rust-brown line, threading its way across the white enamel wall behind the stubbies: the high-water mark.

Last time, the high-water level stayed exactly there for six whole weeks. Nothing moved. Not so much as a damn cockatoo moved upon the face of the waters, and all flesh died, both of fowl and of cattle that moved upon the Queensland earth anywhere west of the Warrego. And the flood was forty days and forty nights upon the earth – so Mike says, and so Flutie says, and they can prove it from the
Courier-Mail,
though the figures were disputed in the Sydney papers – and every living thing upon the ground was destroyed, both man and cattle and crops and creeping things (except for the bloody mosquitoes and flies, it goes without saying). And only Noah O'Rourke the publican remained alive, and that they were with him in the ark of the Millennium Hotel, a regular zoo. And for forty days and forty nights the waters prevailed. Those are the nine last words on the subject from Flutie and Mike, who tell only the gospel truth.

Then Queensland unplugged her drains, glug glug. Ssschloop. There was a swift season of sucking back. The regulars haven't stopped talking about the “afterwards” party yet – there will always, damn it,
always
be an afterwards, Gladys thinks wearily. Oh, the regulars can trot out befores and afters from 1880 on, but the last afterwards party is particularly vivid. It was more or less yesterday, that resurrection party, that wild fishing-for-stub-bies-in-the-mud party, that jamboree, wangaree, rainbow time. Wheee! what a way to come home.

“This hotel,” Mike will tell every visitor who leans across the bar, “the river took 'er clear down to Cunnamulla in 1990, and then she came floating home on the backwash.” Hallelujah, is the standard response, and don't let the pint pot stand there. “What we got,” Mike explains, “is life everlasting. What we got is the Hotel Indestructible, we gonna outlive the millennium itself in this here pub.”

Gladys presses back against the slick flood-surviving glass of the Millennium Hotel's stock of beer, feels the blessed frigidaire-coolness through her cotton shift, feels it sweet as a lover against her sweaty buttocks and thighs, feels herself go heavy between the legs. The wet blunt snout of the river is past Warrabunga. Here, baby, she murmurs, moving her hips.

Wavelets slap against the mirrored wall of the disco and the dance floor is two inches awash but in any case the musicians are on an island dais. Confidence is high. Some tried to flee – in cars, on horseback – but there was nowhere to go, with all the rivers running in packs and the creeks gone brumby. Water water everywhere, it's a bloody stampede.

The mirror tiles are pocked with black holes. A glittering rind of alum peels from the damp edges and leaves streaks that might be read as a map of the watercourses that are rising in convocation. Revellers arrive and arrive. Under the watchful eye of the helicopter, trucks and utes and horses and drays are still fanning out and then fanning in again like ants, for the disco lures them and where else can they go? This is the place of refuge, the end of the line.

This is the day and the hour.

The great inland sea, vouchsafed in vision to the prophet-explorers, has come into its own, so everyone's giving up. One by one, they are turning back for the Millennium. For a while, the regulars could watch themselves on TV in the upstairs lounge. There's Paddy Shay's ute, they could say. See? With that box thing he built on the back. He's turning back, keep a Four-X good and cold for 'im, Gladdie.”

But now the power has gone.

The power went hours ago.

Gladys has strung up the hurricane lanterns, and volunteers have been working in shifts to see the beer safely stowed in iceboxes on the wide upper verandahs. It's party time. No worries, mate. As for the sandbags and sandbaggers, the train was last seen, glugging at the windows, going slowly under somewhere west of Muckadilla. No question, this is the safest place to be. The beer is safe, and high time too, with the years spilling over the Warrego embankment, the years welling up and over like the zeros in an old Holden odometer, the century shifting, the party in full swing.

Oh when the saints …
plays the motley band (one trumpet, one bass, three guitars, four harmonicas tuned to four different pitches, one Jew's harp, real drums, saucepan drums, about twenty people playing the spoons) …
go marchin' in
… The cymbals, two rub-bish-bin lids, are banged with gusto by Noah O'Rourke himself.

“Marching? We're gonna
float
across the New South Wales border,” sings Mike. “We're gonna float to kingdom come. We're gonna float into the next century, mates.”

Oh when the saints,
booms the bar-room chorus,
go floating
in
…

“Amen,” says Flutie. He watches Gladys coming downstairs with more beer. “Put that bloody tray down,” he calls. “It's every man for himself now, let 'em nick up and get it for themselves.” He can feel a sort of bright madness in his voice, he can see it dancing above the heads of every last one of them, tongues of fire, disaster excitement. He takes the stairs two at a time, whisks the tray from Gladys, puts it on the landing, and grabs Gladys round the waist. “Come a-waltzing with
me,
Gladdie darling.”

He knows there's no way in the world she can resist him. He can feel the revving like a dynamo, the cyclone of final possibilities gallumphing down from the Gulf of Carpentaria, an irresistible force that sweeps her down the last steps, past the bar, into the swampy space around the musicians. For just a half-second he feels her body stiffen, then she moves against him and with him. They're both barefoot, everyone's barefoot, and they stomp and splash like children at a wading-pool party. Big Bill, the Maori shearer playing guitar, leans from the dais and booms the words in their ears.
Oh when the saints …

Go barging in, Gladys sings back, and Flutie hears again that edge of wild and dangerous pleasure.

In the mirror, he sees musicians turning into dancers, dancers leaping on stage to have a go on drums or at the spoons. If the water doesn't weaken the foundations, he thinks, the stomping and clapping will. Any minute, the hotel could slip its moorings.

Oh when the saints
… Flutie sing-shouts into the hollow in Gladys's shoulderblade.

“How come,” she gasps, breathless, slapping up a fan of water with the balls of her feet, “they call you Flutie?”

“It's my baritone, my incredible bloody beautiful voice.”

“Come off it.”

“Hey” he says aggrieved. “Listen. You're talking to a winner of a Bundaberg eisteddfod. The nuns made me perform as a boy soprano, a fate worse than death. When me voice was breaking, I swung a punch at every kid who called me Flutie, but I never managed to beat off the name.” He puts his tongue into the dip of her shoulder. “You've been here five months. Six maybe? You run away from a husband, or what?”

In the mirror, he sees her throw back her head and laugh. Her bun has come loose and all her faded red hair flies free. She cannot stop laughing. Flutie thinks they might all drown in her laughter.

Now the ground floor has been surrendered, the revelry transposed up several notches. Although it's far too hot and humid for sleeping, couples are disappearing into the rooms off the verandah. Flutie's looking for Gladys. Pacing the old verandah boards, he can hear the fizz and spit of concentrated life, it's like walking the deck beside a row of pressure cookers just before they blow. It's sensible, he thinks, telling death to fuck off. Where's Gladys?

At the verandah railing, interest in the swooping flotsam is intense. Will the milk can pass the bucking sheet of corrugated roof-iron? Will that green thing (is it the top of someone's ute?) beat the fencepost down to Corones? Will the black water kiss the verandah in one hour, two, three, tonight, tomorrow night, or never? Bets are formally laid.

“Vultures!” Mike shouts, and yes, the whirlybirds are back but what are they dangling? Not cameramen. No. It's a fat sausage-string of rubber dinghies.

They know something we don't, Flutie thinks. The water's still rising. In slow astonishment, because he has always, deep down, believed himself immortal, he says to no one: “You know, we just mightn't make it.”

“Hey, Flutie!” It's Big Bill, the Maori shearer, strumming his guitar at the railing. Flutie has traded punches with Big Bill on the issue of wide combs or narrow combs for shearing. He can't believe his own life. “This is it, Flutie,” the Maori says.

“We gonna make it, d'you think?”

“Dunno, Flutie. This is it, the Big Water.” He plucks at the strings of his guitar.
Oh when the saints …
“Hey, Flutie,” he grins. “You remember that fight at Reardon's shed?”

A funnel of laughter descends on Flutie like a willy-willy and sucks him inside. “The combs …” he tries to say. “We bet you Kiwis would never …” But his voice goes spiralling upwards, round and round, faster, faster, beyond the reach of his breath and into the high whooping grace-notes of absurdity. And Big Bill enters the funnel with him, they are dizzy with glee.

“Jesus,” Big Bill bleats, in pain with mirth. “You silly fuckers bet us … You fuckers claimed that New Zealand wool … You dumb fuckers lost your fucking
pants”

Through the fog of vertigo and laughter, Flutie sees Gladys fishing for dinghies with a pole. He sets his compass and strikes out for her shore.

Gladys thinks that at last has come a day with real
juice
to it, a day she can sink her teeth into. God, how come the bloody water's so cold when they're all sweating like pigs from the heat? She's got it now, she's hooked one of the dinghies. She'll have to share, damn it.

What she'd really like to do is stand in the dinghy and spread her arms and descend on New South Wales like one of the Furies, singing at the top of her lungs. Dimly she senses there'd be a letdown somewhere. There always is.