One Thing That Matters
1
The crunch of white river pebbles under the car are loud and crisp
as a northern tableland’s frost. I manhandle the big Ford, its engine
silent, one turn of its radial tyres at a time, in the darkness, down
the curve of the driveway to the street. I open the door, slide into
a caramel bucket seat and the welcome scent of vinyl. A Fairmont
is not a Fairlane, but this ‘71 model is the best car my parents have
owned.
The week before an elderly neighbour offered a valued piece
of bush-craft, a simple means to free a car bogged in sand or mud,
he said, is grasp and turn a wheel by hand. He assured me it’s possible
to shift any car this way; manual leverage gives maximum control
over wheel-spin. Now I employ a variation to an end he’d not approve.
Full choke and the engine fires, then falters as I drop the column
shift into Drive. I cut through the back of town past the corner store
remembering twenty cents worth of mixed lollies in a white paper bag,
bought with coins stolen from my mother’s purse, and taken as my
right to offset her notion— a Methodist farmer’s daughter—of a fair
allowance.
I wind out over Kelly’s Plains—room enough to force
the motor’s 250 cubic inches to labour, and discover the magic of one
hundred miles an hour is not quite in its power. Then fast but not too
fast on the gravel roads east with the wide black sky over the Ford’s white
hood. Headlights find corrugations and potholes in shadow, eucalpyts
flicker between the berm and a heavy gauge barbed wire fence. I navigate
with an eye for cattle grids, a rail crossing and the sudden chopped up
bends. Nobody out here on these back roads, but consolation of kind
I had no name for; a resonance apprehended in loneliness; the beauty
and gravity of myself grown large behind the wheel to wonder at.
The very things lost listening to Lou Reed sing Heroin like a god.
Over these unsealed roads the music is my body, an un-apologetic
desire to touch everything that still rings in my Blue Poles, Gough
Whitlam, University and country town days. Only T tucked up
in flannelette sheets, under the perfect arch of her brows, knows
the true geography of the night.
2
It happens without warning, a moment of complacency and the car
tyre slips from my grip—rolls silently over the lip of the driveway.
Somehow it misses my mother’s favourite roses and garden tap. Under
a full moon high in a dome of a winter sky, the gleaming Ford sails
on to the centre of a silvered lawn, and becalmed, begins to sink slowly.
It’s also true I badly want to avoid trouble. The trouble if my parents
wake to six cold cylinders stumbling into life outside their bedroom
window; the trouble explaining over breakfast and a mouthful of oven-
baked muesli, how the car wandered in the night; the trouble if a next-
door neighbour finds me at midnight hunched over the dead weight
of the car. But nobody wakes.
Fierce at the heavy chrome bumper—I’ve
lost faith in my neighbour’s prized means of propulsion—I push up
the slight incline to the street aiming at the gap between the crimson
crab-apples and a sentinel white gum.
One last turn: I take Long Swamp Road past the rubbish tip and down
the hill. I nudge the car under the cover of Monterey Cypress; giants
grown ragged and open-hearted here. Quietly to the front gate no-one
used, breathing the heavy fragrance beneath the trees and listening
for the dogs. I still picture her face, and catch a little of the viola
in her voice. I can’t recall a word she said, and believe me I’ve tried.
What I never forget: Her school day skirt too short for the liking of
the girls’ mistress, a tumble of hair down the back of her cotton tunic,
and our first naked touch. It became ritual two or three nights a week,
to slip out my bedroom window, steal the car, and then idle back into
the carport in the early hours. Six months passed in this way until I
invited my friend J along for the ride. I sensed at the outset his being
there disturbed this other world of mine. We struck a post and rail fence
on the exit to the sandy bend short of her house; crashed into a paddock
of prize bulls.
When there was light enough, I set to chopping back
the damaged bodywork with a borrowed axe, and freed the driver’s side
front wheel. A slow drive home through town—why bother with back
roads—an even slower walk down the hall with its sculpted dark-green
carpet to my mother’s side of the bed. I can’t say if I did it again; I may
have, there was a second car.
3
She was beautiful. Even so a persistent stirring, a want for words that
transcend and cohere; unarticulated lyric hunger is what I call it now.
In making strange beautiful, I broke what we had, and chose instead
to accept her mother’s offer—the road west through Barraba, and work
in the opal mines at Lightning Ridge.
It’s not what you think. She was
prescient, invited me along to share the driving of her ute; unlicensed or
not. She understood I’d be dead or locked up if I didn’t leave. That’s not
all, she knew a ’65 Ford had qualities that would one day make it a classic;
could see clearly as she rubbed it back to bare metal and sighted along
its clean lines in the yard of her weatherboard in Brown Street; trusted
herself, and finished it in the light-toned Silver Blue it left the factory.
Living was cheap and anonymous in The Ridge. A miner’s shack of chicken
wire stretched over leopard-wood, and a skin of bagged hessian, made for
a structure light as a Tiger Moth’s wing. When T hitched up from Armidale,
her mother moved in with friends who ran the News Agency in town; let us
have the place to ourselves.
Soak in the hot mineral springs at the public
baths and wash away the opal dirt. Then amber offerings at close of day—
The Diggers Rest famed for serving more schooners of beer a week than
any other hotel in New South Wales—with strict adherence to first names;
sacrosanct for an underground mob.
Sometimes we’d receive an invitation to drinks on the News Agency’s rooftop
balcony with a view wide-open to the west. In the ground floor garage a glossy
390 Ford Galaxie, dozens of Sydney rock oysters kept alive in a crate under
wet sacks. I made a little extra cash shucking oysters from their shells, then
a cold beer while they sipped Martinis. Our drinks held the last light distilled;
a blush of violet darkening to an inconceivably far reaching span of indigo.
I knew I was lucky. Sixteen. Sleeping beside T, and searching for miraculous
movement and light in seams of black opal. All day shoveling, fending off
a dangerous emptiness at the edge of unoccupied time; beyond the gravity
in her green eyes.
Grip the short handled shovel, knee locked in to give thrust
to my right hand I drive the tapered tip, break the blocky spoil, swing in a fluid
motion beginning with bended legs, up through the hips and with a final twist
land the load with a resonant thud in the heart of the barrow. An art perfected
in uncluttered darkness, cool galleries and the company of broad columns bearing
one hundred feet of overburden; promise and yearning in a Northwest cathedral
crypt.
4
A winter morning in Armidale: clear and cold in the backyard of our rented
house in Barney Street; firewood stolen from next door in a heap by the rear
step. J and I share a cigarette. Without preliminaries he asks if I want to join
him in an armed robbery. His proposal: hold up a bookmaker after the races,
on the last Saturday of the month. He spoke casually, theft, now violence part
of him, perfected, so they no longer asked for conscious thought; like a drug
habit thoroughly rehearsed.
He’d begun with a close study of James Dean’s mannerisms, and then,
Paul Newman’s portrayal of Cool Hand Luke. He finished off with Lou
Reed’s take on cool. Whatever his story of pain, the heroes he chose had
no words for vulnerability. He was blessed and cursed by golden good
looks, and a quicksilver Bob Dylan-like capacity to translate the zeitgeist.
He was a passing comet, and for a while I caught hold of his tail.
5
Smack, heroin: a romance, a ritual, the Fit, the kit—the word itself, stash
the fit—bright blood its back flow in body of the syringe, then delivered.
It was never that alluring; in fact I had always known it was not for me.
J couldn’t comprehend my decision to leave for Lightning Ridge—You
know there won’t be any decent drugs out there. Of course he’d have sniffed out
a source, pulled off a chemist bust or turned supplier. A day later he showed
up with a going away gift. The last act of our friendship: share a needle,
so blunt he sharpened its tip on the side of a matchbox; my initiation.
6
A small boy whispers his prayers. By the time I turn eight, I disappear into
the bush each morning before Sunday School, and my mother gives up her
mission. Yet I prayed at the end of my second marriage, when a positive
blood test for Hepatitis C brought to mind the kind of defeat embodied by
Annie Proux’s character Quoyle in The Shipping News. I found a doctor,
and rented a place to live alone.
The virus: a reason to contact T. She listens
to my message in the back seat of her boyfriend’s car. We met at Bronte
Beach, the southern end; how strange, how precious this unadulterated
passage to the past. And later when we kissed, she said—It’s almost over
with him. I waited nearly half a year; I was already in love.
Much later
she came to see me; by then I’d named the unpolished boy—that particular
innocence reclaimed. No more and no less between us.
7
The bathroom walls in my flat were tiled in white almost to the ceiling;
clinical, ideal for what felt at first like a medical procedure. Interferon—
self-administered by weekly injection; I studied the small print and the far
from comprehensive list of side-effects. I chose a Friday night ritual—
fit the needle, grasp and pierce the flesh of my upper thigh, pull back
the plunger to ensure I’ve not found a blood vessel, and then push it all
the way home. For a moment an almost pleasing exercise in authority
or is it the ringing stillness in the room that appeals?
The treatment is
fifty-two weeks of immune cells jammed on full alert. I daydream of B52s;
saturation bombing over Vietnam and Laos. The middle of the day, and
the middle of my life, and I’m dozing again. At night I’m wakeful, and yet
dreams come: a glittering prime-mover flattens me, and in the next a speeding
car appears from nowhere as I cross the street. This is prophecy—something
is dying and dying hard.
As it turns out it’s not me, and it’s not the virus either. I am losing everything;
muscle, fat, breath, assets, an appetite, the ability not to cry when a less than
sad song plays. A reliable erection is fantasy. Such fatigue, all hustle and striving
are inconsequential.
8
Out the living room window a sudden shower of rain. A drop of water, a full
and glistening curve hanging at the tip of a frangipani leaf. Three Colours Blue
on DVD—Juliette Binoche and the music. While the final credits play down,
the furniture in my living room—the low lime-washed table, a lamp and black
Japanese lacquer tray—become the kind of company in which one can never
feel lonely.
A boy of twelve running down a beach in California, where perfect
slender bodies cover the sand. It’s not the naked beach goers of Bolinas who take
his breath away—iridescent, fresh from the cold Humboldt current—it’s fish.
A bay brimming with anchovies; a super-shoal migrating south. They don’t fight
as they founder; it’s terrible to watch and at once irresistible. The boy runs
the length of the darkened sand, and scoops up as many fish as he can hold in
is arms. He wants to do something in recognition of their impossible number;
to know their still flashing silvered beauty. Or maybe he’ll just bite off their heads.
Published in Broken Ground UWAP