North of Nowhere, South of Loss (10 page)

“And then he just up and disappeared. The Burketts gave the police a full description and they're putting out a trace, you know, for next of kin.”

“I expect they'll find the body eventually,”John said. “I wouldn't mind buying the canoe, she was a real beauty. I suppose she'll go up on police auction sooner or later.”

“Won't they have to hang onto it as evidence until the body is found?” someone asked.

“I expect so,” John said. “Yes, I expect so. Still, sooner or later. The police boats are out dragging every day.”

“I hope they don't find him,” I said.

Everyone looked at me.

Sooner or later, I think, evidence of one kind or another will cast itself up: a dream, a letter, an item in the newspaper. Every day, I read the “Police and Fire Watch” column in the local paper. Every day, I am relieved that no body has been found. Of course this is ridiculous, and I know it. There's a name for it:
sympathetic magic.

And there's that other matter too, for which Brian had a word:
synchronicities.

What do they mean? I ask myself. What do they
mean
?

In the evenings, I read of doomed voyages.

The Relation of Christophe Regnaut concerning the martyrdom and blessed death of Father de Brébeuf … captured on the 16th day of March, in the morning, with Father Lalemant, in the year 1649. Father de Brebeuf died the same day as his capture, about 4 o'clock in the afternoon … I saw and touched the top of his scalped head …

The Relation of 1702: Father Bineteau died there from exhaustion; but if he had had a few drops of Spanish wine, for which he asked us during his last illness … or had we been able to procure some Fresh food for him, he would perhaps be still alive. Father Pinet and Father Marest are wearing out their strength; and they are two saints, who take pleasure in being deprived of everything … But they do not fail to tell me and to write me that I must bring some little comforts for the sick … For my part I am in good health, but I have no cassock, and I am in a sorry plight, and the others are hardly less so …

I read also of survival against all odds.

The Relation of the First Voyage made by Father Marquette toward New Mexico in 1673: … his Canoe having been upset below the sault, where he lost both his men and his papers, and whence he escaped only by a sort of Miracle …

I check my e-mail every day, I send out messages, I wait. I spin theories and discard them, I shuffle sequences as I might shuffle a pack of cards.

The joker comes up every time. Any riddles for recycling? he grins. Any letters for uncertain destinations? Any unperformed experiments to go?

I'm not even going to answer that, I say.

OUR OWN LITTLE KAKADU

There must be, by Maggie's reckoning, upwards of fifty chooks running loose, but who would know? When she steps carefully between pineapple rows to test the fruit cones, she puts her foot on at least a dozen eggs. First comes the soft crunch, then the streaky corona-squirt of ochre and snot, then the ooze between her toes. The soles of her feet squelch against her sandals, she is practically skating on slick. Hah, she thinks. Walking on water, tiptoeing on eggshells, what's new?

“He took an axe to the chook house months ago,” her mother said on the drive from the airport. At the stop light, her mother had lifted both hands from the wheel, palms up, and raised them toward the roof of the car, beseeching someone, something, to bear witness.

“Jug's violent again?” Maggie was startled. “I mean,
physically
violent?”

“Not toward me, no, no. Not at people. Not even at your brother. But there's something … he
feels
violent, yes. He's against anything being penned in now. Against pruning. You should just see the passionfruit. I could rip miles of it off the laundry shed if I thought I'd get away with it. It's taking up all the clothesline space, I have to hang half our underwear on trees.” She clasped her hands together, the interlaced fingers pressing the knuckles white. “Well, he's never done anything by halves, has he?”

“Juggernaut by name,” Maggie said.

“You can say that again. I never know what it's going to be next. I'm terrified he'll decide
mowing's
forbidden. We've had two pythons on the verandah already, and god knows what's living out there in the bus with him.”

“Mum, the light's green.”

“What? Oh.” The car leaped forward, stalled, rallied. “You don't know what it's been like, Maggie. Chooks roosting in the laundry, in the bananas, in the vegetables, in the –”

“Mum, mind the –! Would you like me to drive?”

“I had a smashed egg in my hair last week. They're laying on the rafters in all the sheds, you never know what's going to fall on you. Not to mention chicks hatching wherever you happen –”

“Mum, pull over. You're upset. Let me drive.”

“I'm not upset, I'm scared. He won't talk to me, he won't talk to your brother, he's started drinking again, he does say things to his mates at the pub when he's pissed, and there's
talk,
there's plenty of talk, but nobody can make sense of it. Nobody knows what happened. That's why you had to come back, I'm counting on you.”

“Oh yes,” Maggie said drily. “We're famous for getting on famously, me and Jug.”

“That's the point. You'll strike sparks. If he gets mad enough, he might blurt out some clue.”

“Doesn't Ben strike enough sparks?”

“It's weird. They're totally silent with each other. Anyway I can't get your brother near the place now, I have to go to him and Liz. And this is a taboo subject with them. Look, I wouldn't have dragged you back from Melbourne for nothing.”

“I think I was looking for an excuse to come back anyway.”

“Yeah? The girl who couldn't wait to get out, couldn't wait to shake the dust –”

“Yeah, well.”

“Melbourne people are so up themselves, I did warn you.”

“Yeah,” Maggie laughed. “Made a bet with myself you'd say ” I told you so' before we got home.”

“And wasn't I right? Didn't they give you the pip?”

“Yeah. Well, you know, there's all kinds. I've got some good friends. It's just … I don't know … You can't even talk about Darwin down there. You might as well announce you've come from Mars.”

“They give me the pip.”

“Whew, I'd forgotten how sticky –” Maggie eased her damp shirt away from her skin and leaned out the window. She wouldn't forgive her body if it had switched allegiance, adjusted to Melbourne chill, lost the knack for wet heat.

And then they passed under the familiar tangle of mango, frangipani, bougainvillea, and she cried, “Hey! You can't see the house
at all'.'

“I told you. Pruning's not allowed, no cutting back, nothing. What we've got here is five acres of new-growth jungle with room to walk sideways round the house. Our own little Kakadu.”

Between the half acre of pineapple rows and the house, Maggie can see flashes of yellow, bits and pieces of the bus. It is almost entirely covered by passionfruit vine, though at the four points where its axles rest in the earth, pawpaw trees rise in thick spiky clumps. He must dump the seeds there, Maggie thinks; it's some new geometric ritual, the compass points of whatever this latest obsession is. He could live on pawpaw and passionfruit without leaving his rusty cocoon, she thinks. He could just reach out through the windows and pick. The light inside must be green now, like under water. He'd love that, Jug would, odd fish in his tank (shark in angelfish clothing? dolphin in sharkskin?), jugging it down,
jug jug,
tanking up in his tank, probably having a whale of a time, driving them all round the bend. As usual.

She sees now what was impossible about Melbourne. It was having to explain this, him, Darwin, all of it, any of it; trying to explain it without having to endure
how quaint, how awful, how bizarre, how exotic, how horrible, how
–. She couldn't bear to expose her perfectly ordinary strangeness, her loony family's ordinary Darwin madness, to people who knew so very little.
Everyone's a bit troppo up there, aren't they?
they would laugh, nudge, nudge.
The Top End's a bit over the top, wouldn't you say?
I could scratch you, she would think, and you wouldn't be one sweat layer thick. But she'd learned to do it herself, play the clown, betray a memory here, the self there, one drink, two, it was easy, pile the accent on thick, get the laughs. Besides, only two years earlier, let's admit it, she'd been frantic to flee,
frantic
, indecently keen to put as much distance as possible between herself and her own little haywired Top End bubble.

I can't
breathe
here, she'd said.

She breathes the damp air, sluggish with pineapple musk, fran-gipani, white gingerflower. I'll drown here, she thinks. I'll never get away. I'm just part of this blissed-out vegetable world, slumping into the Arafura Sea. We're all drugged. We're all troppo.

Hallelujah!
as Jug would have said.

She steps on another egg.

The whole bloody garden must be protein-enriched, she thinks. It seems to be doing wonders for the pineapples. Almost every plant has a plumed cone at some stage of ripening, and when she looks down the throats of not-yet-fruited clumps, she sees the telltale blush of things underway. How sexually blatant plants are, she marvels. She twists four ripe fruits from their serrated nests and cradles them in her arms. Squashing eggs as she goes, scratching her legs on the pineapple swords, she makes for the bus.

“Jug?” she calls tentatively from the door.

It was a school bus once, long ago put out to pasture, deregistered, bought at auction, on whim, for a song. Maggie thinks the most telling census question in Darwin might be this: how many deregistered, de-wheeled vehicles are slowly listing into your five-acre lot? The Darwin average, she suspects, would be three. Beyond the pineapples, beyond the bananas, the mangos, the vast overgrown lawn, the avocados, somewhere down among the compost heaps, there are, she surmises, four earlier family cars now all but invisible, bleeding rust into jasmine that has run amok.

In Jug's bus, all the seats have been removed. There's a galley kitchen in the driver's niche, a bunk where the back seat used to be, a chemical lav in one corner, a hinged lift-up table along the side, a couple of armchairs spilling stuffing. Everywhere there are cobwebs with watchful spiders as large as poached eggs at their hubs. Chickens, eggs, ants: the floor seems busy. A harmless carpet snake, thick as a forearm, has coiled itself neatly into a chair.

“Jug?” There's no answer so she climbs in. She sees him lying on his back on the bunk at the rear of the bus, arms folded behind his head, staring at the ceiling. He is wearing khaki boxer shorts and a singlet, nothing else, and the bus is ripe with the smell of unwashed male. Light comes through the passionfruit leaves, amber green. “Four pineapples,” she says brightly. “Real beauties.” She puts them into the miniature stainless steel sink. “Mum says you've given up on roads and bridges and gone into vegies and fruit. The market man, the green-fingered genius, she says.”

Speak, you stubborn old bastard,
she wills him. She can feel the usual dual pull of rage and protectiveness. For a big blustering man, he looks unexpectedly frail, and she is alarmed by the sight of his skinny legs and bare feet. His face and shoulders and arms are like old leather, but the legs and feet – trousered and shod throughout his respectable years as a civil engineer – are as pale as the skin of young children. She feels embarrassed to see her father this way. It's like seeing some soft creature with its shell peeled off. Improper. She lifts the lid off his icebox and takes out two cans of beer, watching him. She peels the tab off one can. It makes a slight hiss, and brackish foam bubbles out and spills over her hand. She sees his eyes swivel in her direction and she walks down the bus: “Mum tell you I was coming home?”

“Nope. But I reckoned you would, sooner or later.” He accepts a beer and swings himself upright. “Told you I was bonkers, did she?”

Maggie sits cross-legged on the floor in front of him. “Didn't need Mum to tell me that,” she says, cuffing him on the leg. Tactful, she makes no comment about the beer, which he had so dramatically renounced ten years ago. Maggie had been fifteen at the time, her brother Ben, eighteen. “The Lord has delivered me,” Jug told them. “I've been born again, pure as the driven snow.”

“Not much call for snow round here,” Ben said, asking for it. But there had been no oath, no swipe at Ben, no bash across the side of his son's head, so that they had all marvelled and had known something eerie had occurred. Only the rigging in his neck, corded tight, told them the old Jug was still down there somewhere, inside the new one.

“It's funny,” Jug says meditatively now, looking around the bus. “Well, not bloody funny at all. Something plays bad jokes on us, eh? I lived in the back of a truck when I first ran away to Darwin, fourteen years old. Jeez, jeez, jeez. I hate the way stuff comes back. Like bloody spiders crawling into your head.”

He never speaks of his childhood unless he's drunk, and it's a bad sign when he does. They know almost nothing about it. He began brand new on his wedding day, no baggage, no past, except for the bits that sometimes leaked out of beer-soaked cracks, or showed up, mangled, in rage. He was a famously hot-tempered boss on the road gangs, a short-fused husband and father, a weekend roisterer and larrikin of note.

And then the Lord spoke to him from a Gospel Hall pulpit. It was a steamy Sunday night, and Jug, guzzling from a large Darwin stubby of tarblack bitter, was weaving by the chapel's open door on the esplanade when the Lord shouted at the top of His Almighty lungs: “Jug Wilkins, it is required of you this night to be a juggernaut for God.” Jug broke his teeth on the neck of the bottle in shock, and cut his lip, a potent sign. Blood streaming from his mouth, unnerved but belligerent, he staggered into the chapel and walked down its central aisle. “Who the fuck do you think you are?” he demanded, teetering on his feet. “I am the Lord your God, Jug Wilkins.” God fixed him with His pulpit eye, and Jug just stood there, confused – like a kangaroo in truck lights, people said later, swaying at the lip of some steeply pitched gulley. “Decide!” God roared. And Jug did. He jumped. He crossed over. He became an enforcer for the Lord, a role that not infrequently brought him into collision with his rebel daughter and resisting son. Bible in hand – his surveyor's chart – he would chapter and verse them, laying down markers, calling the shots, mapping everyone's road to Eternity.

“Watch out,” he tells Maggie now, fretfully. “I'm infectious. I got these old dreams, bad dreams, coming back.” He bats vaguely at the air and she sees mosquito swarms of nightmares buzzing him, giving him no quarter. “Western Queensland somewhere,” he says, ducking. “Must've been. Between Charleville and the Territory border, I reckon. I'd just nicked off, me old man didn't believe I'd ever do it. I hid in the back of a roadtrain, see.” He is not so much talking to
her,
Maggie thinks, as talking in a waking sleep. His voice seems very far away, inside a bubble in his head. “It was cold as the bloody South Pole, that's the way it is out there, nights, June, July, cold as the bloody South Pole. You wouldn't believe the difference between night and day, she's an oven by day (you could fry an egg on the road), and deep freeze after dark. If you tripped over your foot in the dark, it'd snap right off, you'd get ice in your eye. Blimey, it's cold, it's cold.” He huddles into himself and begins to shake. “I'm shivering under this tarp, which, let me tell you, stinks of bloody cowshit,
stinks
, and me old man steps out of nowhere with his whip in his hand. Steps out of the air,
abra
-bloody-
ca-dabra,
and into the back of the truck and rips off the tarp. He's got horns on his head.” Jug drops the beer and puts his arms in front of his face, warding off blows. He is trembling violently.

“Jug!” Maggie says, alarmed. “Jug, you're drinking too much.”

“
‘ Gotcha'
he says. ‘
Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.
You'll never get away from me, you little bugger, you little twerp.' ”

“Jug, it's okay, it's all right.” Maggie takes hold of his hands, which are clammy. He's sweating like a pig, but feels dangerously cold to the touch.