Dirt Music (12 page)

Wondered if the Joni Mitchell was really hers, told herself that if she calmed down she might find the keys to the rented car; it was due back in Perth at noon. How could she lose them? She was high and dry. She needed another drink. Then she’d calm down.

The Stoli burned in her neck but the warmth didn’t spread. And she didn’t find the keys. Sometime during the day she just stopped looking. Even stopped packing. She just curled up on the sofa feeling cold.

When Jim came in Georgie wasn’t yet too pissed to notice that he was hours early. His face looked boiled. Hers felt frozen.

Found your keys on the drive, he said, lobbing them onto the sink beside her.

You fucking liar, she said following him unsteadily to the bathroom.

Christ, the boys’ll be home in a few minutes.

I can’t believe you’d do it. You vicious bastard, I don’t know how you could.

Georgie, sober up.

He closed the bathroom door on her and the lock fell to with a sullen plunk.

Open the door!

Cool off, for Chrissake, he said muffled by the door. The shower ran.

Georgie went back to the kitchen and took up the binoculars. A mob of kids milled at the jetty already, their school uniforms in puddles on the landing. The bravest of them shinnied up the crane to jump from the top and send gouts of spray into the air. The water was bronze and their bodies backlit. There was still no breeze. People made their way down to the beach for relief from the heat. She watched them drive down to the water’s edge in Patrols and Cruisers. It was turning out to be a sociable afternoon. Big women in merciless lycra shorts hefted toddlers into the shallows. Men brought out beers in neoprene holders; she watched their lips move. Nobody seemed curious about the truck and the dead dog a few hundred metres up the beach.

The phone rang again.

Georgie scanned the sea. She couldn’t think where he might come ashore. There was nowhere else you could bring a boat safely to shore on this coast. It was all surf beach north and south and there wasn’t another anchorage for seventy kilometres. Maybe he had fuel enough for that. She doubted it. Still, the conditions were perfect.

The boys came in. She tried to assemble herself.

Fox goes and goes across the flat sea. The wind in his teeth. The tinnitus whine of the Hondas. He’s numb with speed, nearly mindless with going. Eventually the outboards falter and lose revs. They cut out with their throttles wide open and for a few moments the boat surfs its own momentum before settling onto its chines and lagging to a halt. He stands at the helm, blank as the afternoon sky. The boat’s wake finally catches up; it tosses him about a little and stirs him from the stupor. He stares at the fuel gauge. Tries to calculate how far he’s come. The compass has him bearing nor-nor’west but without sonar or GPS he can only estimate how far out he is and guess how far north he’s come.

White Point is out of sight and the landscape is just a dun smear. He stares at the seaward horizon. The binoculars are home in the shed with the navigational instruments. He takes a punt. Five miles out? Maybe ten miles north?

He kneels at the gunwale and retches up a little tea-coloured stain. The sea’s surface is silver but underneath it’s black.

From the dive crate he takes a bottle of half-frozen water and drinks until his throat burns. He considers the radio, the packs of flares beneath the console. But he knows who will come looking. He’ll be out here alone on the open sea armed with nothing better than a speargun. The old White Point story. No witnesses but White Pointers. It’ll be another tragic accident at sea.

He sits on the gunwale. The deck is hot underfoot.

Fucking Buckridge. He tries to think back through yesterday. Did someone see them on the highway? Or was it the swim? Could have been the caretaker on the old farm; he might have been about after all. Unless she’d just gone home and fessed up of her own accord, made a clean breast of it. Shit, he doesn’t know what to think.

And now they’ll burn the farm. That’s how it’ll go. The end, amen. You bloody idiot.

He pulls off his shirt and hauls the wetsuit back up hot over his shoulders. Drags his fins from the crate and works up enough bily spit to prep his mask. He takes time to pick out the darkest patch in the hazy rumple of the land and makes it his bearing. He drops anchor though it doesn’t make the bottom. Reaches over the stern and opens the cocks. He goes over the side and leaves the boat rocking. Least you’ve picked a good day. In a chop you’d never do it. But today you’re a chance. Either way you’re gone.

Beneath him the water is purple and blank. He tries a measured crawl and breathes through his snorkel. Long gone.

Jim Buckridge felt the plastic phone creak in his grip as he tried to control his fury. Was the whole fucking world populated with cretins?

From the doorway of his office he could see her down in the kitchen making herself another vodka martini. The only thing she was cutting the Stoli with was an olive. Her face looked peeled.

The boys were off somewhere, thank God.

So have someone come and collect it, he hissed into the phone.

Okay, when you have two people available, then. Yes, I know it’ll cost and I said I’ll pay. Do I need an interpreter, or what?

White Point. On the map. Yeah, at the roadhouse. It’s red. Well, it’s your car, mate.

He hung up and watched her slug the drink down. The phone rang.

He sat in the office and let it ring.

Fox crawls through the sunstruck water. Feels it part heavily across his skull. The sea is caramelizing in the heat of the afternoon. It’s harder to move through all the time. Like a landslip; the more you dig the more there is to be dug. The wetsuit causes him to sweat but he knows he’ll never be able to take it off with his limbs as heavy as this. Besides, the neoprene gives him buoyancy and very soon he’ll need all the flotation he can get.

After a long time he gives up stroking and just kicks with his trembling arms free. Beneath the surface the water is transfixed by bars of sunlight which ripple and twist in the misty aqua blur below him. Now and then a startled garfish snoots away. Jellyfish float amidst the clouds reflected on the water. They are cumulous, their tentacles like strings of rain.

Looks at his puffy fingertips. The guitar calluses all but gone.

Thinks of lettuces prostrate in the heat. Silver flash of olive trees. The snorkel cuts his gums now. Eardrums tight as banjo skin.

Crawls on. Air hot in his throat. Can’t look at the giddy deep below. It’s giving him vertigo. He rolls onto his back and kicks along with his face in the sun, his eyes pressed shut.

Later. He finds himself stopped. Face down like a dead man. His hands have dune wrinkles. You could lie here and grow old. Like a kite, that’s how it seems. Suspended between worlds. It makes him laugh. Bill Blake did not a fisherman make but still we’re both suspended. Mad as hell, your head a bell, like an angel’s arse upended. You’re a poet but you’d never know it and the laugh coming from your snorkel doesn’t sound human.

Keeps the light behind him, the laughter in his legs. Swims on.

Can’t believe he’s getting cold. Cold as hospital air.

Sees the dog pitching against its chain, pink in the brakelights, pink in the sand. And then there’s no light. He swims out of habit. The water, a dark, dreamless sleep. His limbs trail phosphorescent auras. Makes him look all saintly. S//t Luther of the molten melon. Fuck me dead, it’s the fishin felon. Laughs creepy with chills.

No lights ashore.

No shore at all until the moon rises.

Just on dusk a gentle nor’wester sprang up. It barely shifted the curtains, the kind of breeze that brings some relief but too little too late. Georgie propped herself in the sofa. The vodka bottle stood on the glass table in a pool of its own sweat. A pile of olive seeds sat in the pretty blue butterdish.

Down on the beach a few lamps burned. Locals cast for tailor or sat in folding chairs with their feet in the shallows. Georgie took the bottle and navigated the distance to the door and the terrace. Jim and the boys sat out on the buffalo grass in a plume of barbecue smoke. Their heads turned as she sat heavily. Those upturned faces, they were hardly the same faces she remembered from Lombok. They turned back to their meal, their voices just murmurs. The air was briny.

Two big boats started up simultaneously. Their diesels blubbed across the lagoon and they eased out of the bay under lights.

Lobster boats don’t work at night, she told herself. Could be dropliners. Could be anybody.

Now that he hears them breathing in the dark he’s not afraid.

Doesn’t Bird breathe warm in his ear every other night and isn’t that chair rocking before he gets to it sometimes? He hears cheeps and snores now, even in God’s own Indian Ocean. He feels the noise of their movement in his chest. Smells their breath in the still air. All about him, in the black-water world. Singing.

Enchanted, he stops kicking. He pulls off his mask and feels the sudden chill of air on his face. Works the fins off too and feels his feet burn with a surge of freed circulation. Bubbles of talk burst against him. He slips back in a swoon, could go down happy into sleep right now. But the water is all bellies and hips like a packed dancefloor. It holds him up. There are rolling white clouds ahead. The air is full of leaping bodies. Fox tumbles headlong into the clouds and surfs them onto the sand. He gets to his feet and hobbles up into the savoury smell of saltbush.

When she woke on the terrace the yard was dark and inside only a table lamp burned. Georgie blinked and wet her lips, trying to take it in. The town was asleep. The beach looked deserted. She had the terrible feeling that she’d slept through something important.

Someone had thrown a cotton blanket over her. She tore it off. A torchbeam flickered up through the foredune; it threw shadows across the scrub. Georgie tried to get up but her legs were asleep. She floundered and fell. The bottle dropped and rolled unbroken across the slate. The balcony was washed for a moment in the torchbeam. She picked herself up, wracked with pins and needles.

Ahead of the torchlight she saw the swinging blade of the shovel.

Jim’s legs. His feet. The light went out. He crossed the lawn and a few moments later he was on the steps.

What have you been doing? she asked.

Go to bed, Georgie, he said coming past.

It’s a simple question, she said knocking the torch out of his hand. It bounced and glanced off her shin.

Jesus, he muttered. Get outta my way.

We need to talk.

You need to sober up to talk and stop wastin my time. I’ve got children. And a boat to run. Sleep in the spare room. And don’t spew on anything.

Where’s my car keys? You’ve got them again.

They’re safe.

I want them.

Not a chance.

Jim slid the door to. Georgie held onto the back of the sun-lounge. She wanted to follow him in but she looked at the big orange plastic torch at her feet. Inside the toilet flushed.

She took the torch and went down the stairs and followed the beam to the beach where the truck still stood on its rims in the sand.

The dog chain was gone and so were the poor animal’s remains.

There was a smooth, packed area where Jim must have just buried it.

Water lapped eerily against the shore. She wanted to swim. She wanted to set houses alight. She wanted to drive until daybreak.

She wept until she was sick on herself.

He walks rubberlegged for a while. Comes upon wheel ruts in the heath and follows them south. The heat of the day is still in the sand and it’s a warm night but he shivers in his wetsuit. A couple of roos float by. He pads on until he sees the glint of a tin roof. He goes in closer to find several squatters shacks in a hollow. Two beach buggies. A pyramid of beercans. A rough-hewn filleting bench and a rope strung with clothes. He looks for a dog but reaches the closest watertank without rousing anything.

On his hands and knees he drinks from the tap. The water runs cool and brassy into his throat. He lets it sluice his face of salt and sand.

From the clothesline he takes a pair of shorts and a teeshirt which smells of dishwashing detergent and when he’s a good way off he shucks out of the wetsuit and pulls them on. Down the track he finds a big dune gully with a thicket of acacia. He crawls in where there’s a bed of leaf litter and lies down amidst the fidgeting noises of small creatures.

When he wakes it’s midday and hot. He crawls out but the light is too hard, the white sand blurs and the air is woollen in his throat. His legs are tight and painful. He squirms back in to wait for sunset. Sleeps again.

At dusk he feels better and after he’s walked a while his legs feel fine. In time he sees the yellow dome of light in the sky.

White Point. He approaches the town from the beach. Keeping to the shadow of the foredune, he makes his way along the bay. Boats yank like curs at their chains. The floodlit jetty is wild with gulls. He sneaks past in the hollow between dunes until he’s well clear and can walk on the beach again.

Where his truck and trailer stood there’s nothing but tiny cubes of laminated glass underfoot. It’s no surprise. This is how it will be, as though he never was.

He bellies up to the perimeter of Buckridge’s place. Within an arm’s length of the lawn he lies watching the windows flicker with television. In the dark, the town sounds benign enough: music, laughter, doors clacking. He rubs the cramp from his legs.

Eventually the house goes dark and quiet.

On his way to the garden tap he smells meat on the barbecue. He levers a couple of blackened chops from the hotplate and crouches on the lawn to tear the burnt meat from the bone and drink greedily from the hose.

He thinks of Georgie lying inside. Just up those steps. Sees the form of the shovel against the wall. He picks it up as he takes the stairs to the terrace. The glass sliding door is unlocked.

Jim Buckridge asleep in his bed. But his kids too.

He kisses the glass and slips away.

It was a day and a half before Georgie surfaced. The previous day was a miserable feverish blur, but from the soiled linen and the towels on the floor she could see only too clearly how she’d spent it. Her head hurt and so did her throat and chest. She had never sunk so low. It killed her to think that the boys might have seen it.