Smoke Encrypted Whispers (8 page)

For a while, Dad worked in a ghost town. He'd take us there on weekends after the government moved an entire community. Empty building after empty building, like some big science-fiction filmset. Wandering through deserted houses we were the first Aboriginal people to analyse the remains of the first Europeans to be cleared from this soil. Streets strewn with all sorts of treasures; Armageddon with its apocalyptic merchandising. Earthmoving equipment droned in the distance, always closing in. And the birds: dark-wings scuttled from silent twisters of smouldering debris and detritus. Doorways whistling breezes, a cadence of toothless old skeletons that filtered the smoke encrypted whispers of this mass grave. I think of those whispers every time my plane lands on the unmarked tombstones of one of Brisbane's least known burial grounds.

At Capalaba down by the bay, we had a house on a lake. I hated the trees there. At twilight, twisted human faces peered at me from the bark of their trunks. An old uncle from Arnhem Land came to visit and taught us how to make spears from saplings. He passed on the riddles of fire, that the peak of the flame hardened the spearheads the best, and that the ghosts of time were all around us. Weeks after he left, a blaze engulfed the bush. Trees toppled in the middle of the night. I ran into Mum and Dad's bed chased by the heavy groans of falling giants. Years later, one of my brothers saw that same house on
Australia's Most Wanted
—about the unsolved murder of a woman in the kitchen. Mum and Dad could never explain why all those years ago we moved out of the house at one in the morning ... And that's why that old uncle from Arnhem Land would never sleep under our haunted roof.

standing under the ex-wife's house concrete pillars covered in the hieroglyphics of grubby little hands hanging pieces of antique chairs that we had planned to restore together arm-rests of that old couch, the old dining table that belonged in our first house, silent in this elephant's graveyard of carved husks there are the spider-legs of a hotplate that fed the guests at our little boy's Naming Ceremony when suddenly I realise, I'm caught! gazing over the past this ensemble of assorted relics she's been busy under here making the sander scream the electric plane has been driving the kids nuts as she shaves the timber the skins of furniture from one of my lives golden curls of treated pine sit at the floor of the workbench I remember reading Robert Adamson's poetry the day she called it quits over and over, I read the poems about a troubled boy and his blond mop of curls I look down and my own little boy has found a pile of shavings grabs a handful in his muffin-fist holds it at me falling through his grasp these curls, What are they Daddy?! They're pieces of my brain, I tell him and he tosses his fist into the air particles swab us like pixie dust the afternoon sun steals through catches the golden flakes and my little boy's toothy grin he wakes me before I drown in a tide of old regrets

Look here Dad ... I'm playing with your memories!

Sitting with a colleague in a bar, she turns to me, sort of puzzled, ‘You don't say much sometimes ... I never know what you're thinking.' After World War II, my Grandpop didn't say much either. When Mum was a little girl, she said he would come home, silent and black, after a day in the smoldering sugar-cane fields. A resonance of sweet smoke followed him. He only ever talked to me about fishing. After dinner, we'd sit on the front steps of the old house where he'd roll a smoke, and then, only then, he'd really come to life. I was amazed by his old body, constant bloody cuts from labouring in a brick-works, and yet his mind was always elsewhere. I'd like to think his thoughts stayed on the water, quietly tending his line. And that was the greatest gift my Grandpop would ever leave me ... his gift of silence.

Childhood anxieties would eventually help me realise the power of imagination.

For a better part of my life I was terrified of the dark. A black, stagnant pool that I named ‘Midnight's Plague' smothered me at bedtime and paved the way for many hideous characters, which I met nightly when I tempted to cross the bridge of my mind.

To counter these fiends, I built machines in little boxes—fantastic contraptions that I made from the components of old televisions, radios and motorised toys.

For years I rigged these gadgets, hoping to snare the whispers of my demons as they crawled out from under the bed, drawn to the warm, uneven breath from my tonsillitis-ridden throat.

The chance encounter of hearing these whispers was what I feared most.

But, as chance encounters happen, it was ultimately the construction of a poem that enabled me to finally capture a whisper. One breath, deep inside of me, always within my possession.

I had to grow up someday ... so I moved to Boundary Street, West End, in the last residence on the old bitumen line. I'm in a forgotten hotel that's croaking grey, like a decaying plantation in Indochina. Now I live on the brown river, this is
my
outpost on the dark snake. And at 31 I may not speak the rhetoric of ghosts, but here, I can understand the tongues of mangroves, or what mangroves there are left ... not enough of them to cleanse the brown waters of the darkroom in my head, developing countless images of everything I see. Rain falls on my first night here, so I have wine and a cigar on the balcony in praise of my dark water muse and toast the matrix of her ephemeral dot paintings.

It was where my brother caught the tiger's skin, shoved his entire arm down this hole and pulled out the abandoned mojo of a venomous snake. Fisherman Islands on the gape of the brown river, land reclaimed from the sea. This place was a construct of dirt, sewerage works and shipping terminals, scarecrows of smokestacks. Void of life ... void of soul. The deadest soil you could ever walk upon. No substance. No song. But we explored the shoreline anyway, turning up the jetsam of Brisbane, listening to the mystic whispers from the mouth of the river. Slowly, fishermen waltzed on the pipes of the dredging-lines, their forms a distorted mirage in the midday heat. Maybe they too were props? Cardboard cut-outs on this man-made archipelago. Artificial land with its artificial spirits, and the luck that floated here, with nothing to guide it.

One day, you try to get up ... 'cause your own darkness tides at your feet. I've had high-water lines at my ankles, the dreams of cement shoes, and when I'm stuck, I can't move. Dreams leave their spawn in the mixed-up sheets, but
she'll
come home one day to change them, and unexpectedly
she
came home, telling me to get up, 'cause I hadn't been moving. While the sun is free,
she
said, ‘Move!' Marking my way, a spent cigarette on Boundary Street ... and how a snail trail can reveal a glint of silver, burning the retinas of your mind's eye blind when you write for days, on the paper trails to midnight

All good wordsmiths get ‘the thousand-yard stare'. That's when you're looking beyond the page. Some writers never cross beyond the second or third dimension of a page. After a while, writing on a ‘rack' is like reaching into yourself and arranging the words on the inside of your ribcage ... you're looking out ... visualising the rack and how those words translate to the reader, how those words feel on you. You're always looking out, in and beyond.

The ribcage offers some choice ‘wire' for the word. But if you're going to use the ribcage as a rack, don't use permanent ink, and what I mean by ‘permanent' is overloading your rack with the dark ink that stains for life. I started making my own rules about writing and devising my own nomenclature: a ‘rack' is a page, a ‘wire' is a blank line. A ‘hump' is a full-stop.

After words are yanked from the pool in my head, I hang them out on the ‘wire' to dry, and then after the sun goes down, I throw them on the ‘rack' and stretch them out a bit.

New year's day, 2003. The sun was loud, but as bland as yesterday, last year, 2002AD. In the early postmeridian hours, the temperature took advantage of the deserted streets, spirit-dancing inches above the bitumen, a seductive helix that undulated on the horizon, like an exotic dancer,
you can look ... but you can't touch!
And the breeze was curt, as scarce as traffic on this public holiday. Houses side by side vibrated ever so gently. The lizard rhythms of lounging bodies behind screen doors, lethargic organic masses that slither, physically and emotionally depleted in the lull of celebrations. The siesta of new year's day ... the only moment on the Australian social calendar when every citizen is almost equal;
hungover we are united!
Trekking down Boundary Street, West End, Brisbane, the residue of Moet on my forehead, the cinder of last year's resolutions in my scalp. I needed coffee to pull me up as the bitumen pulled me down. One litre of milk was going to cost me 10% extra for wisdom: a public holiday surcharge worth the returns of a frown. When suddenly my ears popped! A lone shark hooked the rise in front of me, tearing through the glutinous skin of Dreamtime and Earth, scattering the wings of those haze-angels with a high-octane Beowulf growl. Veering past me, I did not wave, because none of the passengers wore a face—expressionless. Just white linoleum wrapped from foreheads to jowls. I stared down into the puddle in the gutter. It was decorated with a petrol-based rainbow. My reflection was disappointing. I hadn't changed since last year. But if I'd stayed long enough, my reflection might vary.
Oil takes longer to evaporate. The litter in the street ruffled briefly in the car's wake. There was a saunter of hooves from synthetic leviathans. A cool vent of air stroked my ankles as the car disappeared into a solar flare on the next rise. The silt of silence resettled.

Maroon tentacles languished upon a surface pledged for human trampling. Veneer walls held up ceiling that was originally pearl before the tincture of cigarettes invaded it. A window hampered by vintage blinds was reinforced with a lifeless drape of lace curtain. Natural light was prohibited, but traffic and insect noise presented itself to the room at unregulated intervals. For what should have been a sterile environment, it lay strewn with the bric-a-brac of a forgotten fashion. A gang of string instruments, rudely piled against a wall, necks sprained and bellies bloated. Grey soot-caked frets smiled dog-teeth ivory. And as sleeping giants are portrayed, a grossly inflated antique television was the most formidable furnishing of the room. It wept an odour of electrocuted dust through aged vacuum technology.
He
was placed in the opposing corner: the Proprietor. An old man of tubes, frail body commissioned by synthetic vines. The ruins of a cursed temple outwitted by a jungle of life-support equipment. The rhythmic portions of his machine-aided breath sang in unison to the cricket-beat of the excluded dusk air.

my arrival in Aotearoa, Wellington,
New Zealand
: I checked into a room at Booklovers B&B, positioned in the hills above a turquoise harbour. A cable-car rattled past and the world shook, and then a radio spluttered, ‘the second Gulf War has begun...'

Nothing could have prepared me for the
marae.
Amongst a group of visitors waiting some distance from a great hall of wood carvings, wondering all the time what the Maori elders would do with me. Large pines towered in the hills around us and poles carved in respected totems studded the landscape, sentinels of an old, quiet spirit. A young woman emerged from the
marae
calling, wailing, and as a group our footsteps automatically carried on her haunting cry, reeling us in ...
te hongi, te haka
and the elders, all waiting to meet us, ‘We knew your spirits were out there ... we've known that you've always been out there. Welcome home.'

On my first reading in a Wellington bar, I was caught in a reef of wordplay. Some words jagged, some soft; this poetry of allsorts. And as I floated a multitude of coloured smiles played with me. Smiles like schools of small, beautiful fish. This bartender, with a grin as wide as a semi-trailer, kept me stocked on a good Australian red—‘Your money's
no good
here, Bro!'

I remember one of my first jobs. I was published in a magazine with a bunch of established writers, most of them with several novels under their belt, whilst I had a handful of unpublished poems. As contributors to this certain issue, we were all invited to read at an official launch. I'd only read once before, in a small art gallery on the Gold Coast, and there I was, amongst a group of writers with their short stories and articles, about to perform in my first literary cabaret. I had only one poem in the magazine. I had one shot. The stage lights were bright, like I was shooting straight into the sun. I picked my target. He was the biggest, most obnoxious-looking punter in the audience; a man who sipped his Chardonnay with the air of someone well-read and cultured. Each writer before me had read with spirit and arrogance. I breathed easy, and squeezed the poem out gently. I had this punter's blank face in my cross-hairs and as the poem hit its conclusion, his complexion exploded in sheer appreciation. Applause followed. I hit my target. One message, one story, one stanza.