Authors: Tim Winton
He sits on the smooth warm terrace looking out across the treetops. He drinks the entire six pack and falls asleep in the dirt.
For days after the six pack Fox feels persecuted by thirst and heat. He’s listless and in his afternoon stupors he fantasizes about refrigeration. Beaded cans, foggy plastic containers of lettuce, sweating bottles, red dripping tomatoes, snowy ice shavings and the trickle of chilled liquids. The torment ruins his new plenty; it sullies the luxury of soy sauce and chilli and the soothing balm of paw-paw cream on his many wounds.
The evenings lag. He lights a fire just for something to watch.
Something is building in his head; stuff fizzes and flickers, bloated pictures and half-thoughts that run into one another and cancel themselves out. Even simple, physical tasks no longer organize and pacify him. He believes he’s going mad.
Lubricating his reel with precious cooking oil one afternoon, Fox plucks the taut-strung leader tied to the last runner of the rod and hears something like B-flat. He twangs it again and laughs. From the spool in the cave he reefs off a couple of metres of nylon line and strings it between two limbs of the fig tree shading him. The slack old note it gives isn’t much of a sound but when he tightens and re-ties it he likes it well enough. It makes a nice drone, a sound just outside nature but not dissimilar to it. He clears his throat uncertainly and hums the note. He thinks of Darkie’s little hairless bum sticking out of the piano as he pulls the strings. His heart races; it feels dangerous, listening to this, giving in to the sound, but his thumb whacks at the string out of reflex. How many times in the past year has he walked past that steel guitar and seen his face distorted in its tarnished steel curves and just kept on going by? God knows, music will undo you, and yet you’re whacking this thing into a long, gorgeous, monotonous, hypnotic note and it’s not killing you, it’s not driving you into some burning screaming wreck of yourself—listen! Within the drone, all those sweet multiple timings there to embroider with, the gaps and fills, the hot gurgle coming to your throat. The sudden groove you’re in— damn, just listen to that! You’re humming and stamping and chanting nylon bloody B-flat and it’s good. Whang-whang-whang-whang, wucka-whang, whang!
He growls out a chant, his throat burning with pleasure, and begins to hyperventilate to sustain it. His body fizzes. Bubbles on his skin, twisting strings of bubbles in his vision; they dance across the gulf before him while his ears chirp through the pressures of descent and his collarbone aches. There’s an inward glide in the drone. Like the great open spaces of apnoea, the freedom he knows within the hard, clear bubble of the diver’s held breath. After a point there’s no swimming in it, just a calm glide through thermoclynes, something closer to flight. Within the drone, sound is temperature and taste and smell and memory, wucku-whang.
And when he surfaces from it, the sun is down and the mosquitoes are upon him. The sound of the world is raw. At his ear, in the fig tree beside him, a leafball of green ants chickers a scratchy gossip and beyond it he hears the wing-beats of outward-bound bats and the frothing mandibles of crabs at feast amongst the mangroves.
He rubs paw-paw ointment into his hand and sits up in the dark feeling sated, stunned, excited.
In the following days, whenever he’s not gathering food, he plays the drone. At first he plays for the liberation of it, as rebellion against the discipline that he’s maintained so long, and the return to music is sheer physical pleasure, a kind of relief-in-relenting which is more than sensual. But when he has exhausted plain musical playfulness, the hide and seek of improvisation, he finds that within that long, narcotic note there are places to go.
He beats a path south, across deserts and mountains to the coastal plain of the central west. He strides across the parched, alkaline paddock to the verandah steps and down the dim hallway to the library and hour after hour he swims into books. Their covers creak like doors. Sometimes they give up the tiny gasps of split melons and he moves through their lines as a man walks through home country. He scrambles up through the crags of The Prelude and Tinntern Abbey, across hot, bright Emily and into the spiky undergrowth of Bill Blake. The lines come to him. He chants them in B-flat, in a kind of monofilament manifold monotone that feels inexhaustible, as though it’s a sea of words he’s swimming in, an ocean he could drink.
With this fullness, this ecstatic sense of volume, there’s only one regret and that is having no one to share it with. He thinks wistfully of Georgie and her playful prodding, her curiosity about the books, and his stunned inability to say what he felt. God, the things he had wanted to tell her. Fox doesn’t know what you’re supposed to make of Wordsworth and Blake, how you might speak of them if you’d been taught by experts, but he knows he would have tried to explain this sense of the world alive, the way they articulate your own instinctive feeling that there is indeed some kind of spirit that roll; through all things, some fearsome memory in stones, in wind, in the lives of birds.
After some days of chanting, he finds he can travel beyond the library, move through the house with exquisite intimacy; an almost painful vividness of presence. He smells his own bread baking. And there he is at the sink, beside himself in his own kitchen, barefoot in Levi’s. Before him, the window needs washing. There’s a riverstone on the sill and Bullet’s front tooth in a butterdish beside it. The sound of the kids somewhere in the house. When he turns, Sal looks at him from the dust mote cascade of the doorway and scratches herself with the rosined bow as though he’s no more present than a dog under the table.
Out in the laundry he’s small and pressed against the whirring Hoover twintub which threatens to launch itself into space. But the whor-whor- whorr, the sound of it!
And the sleepy sound of the rip saw in the jarrah log, sheet home, sheet home, sheet home, while his father’s sweat shines in the sun. Standing beside himself, Fox rocks on his dimpled infant legs to the rhythm, puzzled at his father’s wry grin.
Bird wrapped in his denim jacket, her milky breath upon his face as she sings hymns in his arms. The north wind is tossing the leaves, the red dust is over the town, the sparrows are under the eaves, and the grass in the paddock is brown. Christmas, then, it has to be Christmas, and her head no bigger than a runty cantaloupe.
Fox walks out to himself hunkered in the noonday paddock amongst watermelons at picking point. Hot Christmas. The sun on the back of his neck. And he looks up to see them, Darkie and Sal, sprawled on the verandah steps watching him work.
Standing behind Bird in the shed. She’s paralyzed at the sight of the old man’s sign.
Christ is the head of this house,
The unseen guest at every meal,
The silent listener to every conversation
The day after the poor old bugger’s funeral Darkie tore it off the kitchen wall and here it lives. Bird gives it a wide berth on her way out into the glare of the day. She knows when you’re there. The way his mother knew if you were there, or when one of you was hurt. A sudden hand across her chest. You saw it yourself.
In the afternoons the sharks cruise the shallows but he plays the drone. His thumb is callused now; he can go for hours.
Fox sings himself down sheep pads and yellow washaways to walk up the dry riverbed towards the farm. Paperbarks are shrivelled spindles of themselves. The silicate soil of the high paddock squeaks underfoot and where the house should be there is no house. His trees are dead and not even a silver filigree of dead melon vine remains on the ground. He expects at least a mound of ashes, a lightning crater, but there’s nothing. Only the bones of rock up there on the hill. When he gets up among them, the pinnacles’ shadows are treacly. The air smells bitterly of sweat and piss. The monoliths lean on the wind but even the perennial southerly is no more. Fox stands there beside himself and slips his hand into the stone fissure for the tea can, and the limestone stirs against him, its hip on his as he leans in. It’s hot and damp inside and slippery on his arm as though felted with wet moss. The tin is just out of reach. When he strains deeper, the rock moans and cries out in his ear and right beneath his leaning weight it grows a bluish bark, a smooth, fleshy covering that causes him to recoil so fast that when he rips his arm from it there follows a gout of blood and water.
Fox stops playing. The night sky is purple now and red stars spin earthward. There are crickets in the trees and a nightjar whooshing by. Back in the rocks quolls scuffle. He’s awake. Not drone-stoned but conscious and present; his knees are sore, he needs a leak, but the sky is wild with red falling stars as though he’s dreamt them or sung them up. They’re like windblown embers pitching out toward the mainland for minutes at a time until it’s just purple night again.
He lights a candle for the comfort of light and to eat some rice gone sour in the heat since noon. He dabs hanks of cured fish in chilli dust and eats, troubled by the image of the stones. It’s not a memory. It’s something else and it frightens him. He resolves to give the droning a rest.
Next day he’s tired from broken sleep, and he gathers oysters, feeling woolly-headed and abstracted from things. Hunkered amidst the burbling rocks at low tide he chips the big black-lips from the boulders with the back of his machete. There’s a tune in his head as he works, a repeated descending phrase. He opens shells with the bladetip and eats his fill, puzzling over the music.
It’s the same over and again, like a tree endlessly dropping its leaves. Each note floats inexorably, almost unbearably to the ground in its own time. Cellos and a bell. The unravelling thread of it is familiar. He tries to bring his mind to bear. The music makes him queasy with its familiarity. He fills his calico bag with oyster meat but the signature phrase rises through his heels; it chimes in his spine, and resonates in his neck. And then it’s gone, fading like the rush of a vehicle passing distant upon a highway. Bess, he thinks. That’s the music. Bess’s music on the torturous Roebuck Plains on the way to Broome. Death music. Arvo, she said, play Arvo in the arvo! Our little Estonian mate! He knows! And Fox is certain that he’s just felt the old lady’s death. Right here, right now. He stands there a while and then he lifts a hand palm outward. Can’t decide what the gesture means; doesn’t know what else to do.
He takes up his bag and heads for camp. The dead, he thinks, it’s always the dead. I’m hearing dead people and singing their words.
I’m dreaming of them, that’s all I do. All my people are dead people.
When he gets to the boabs on the beach he squats in the shade a moment and opens the bag to smell the clean, briny flesh. Georgie Jutland. That’s who it reminds him of, that pure smell. The smell on his hands that day, those days, that one night. Even the scent in her hair after swimming—like clean seagrass, shiny against your lips. Well, that’s one live one, he thinks.
He bolts for camp thinking in flashes and hot arcs and he blunders into a low branch that nearly takes his eye out. Lying sprawled in the dry litter he berates himself for his carelessness. He gets up shaken and bathes his face at the shallow pool on the camp ledge. No more singing. No more music.
Or you’ll go insane. You always knew it. Since the day you came back alone to the farm with that awful static in your ears, you understood. For weeks it persisted, that stuffed sensation in your ears; it was like the hiss and fuzz left in your head after a rock gig, the half-deafness of bombardment. And it protected you, numbed you a little. But when it wore off you were naked. You had to put yourself out of reach. Of music first, and also memoty because one lived in the other, but people too, because they could say anything, do anything, bring anything out at any moment and do you in without even noticing.
For a treat he fries oyster meat in precious oil and a handful of crushed ants, drizzles in some soy and sprinkles chilli pepper across it and feasts. He savours the physical fact of it, the meal’s every detail. This is what’s required. Attention to now.
Fox works on his rebuilt bough shelter and thatches it with spinifex and palm leaves. He weaves himself a pandanus brim to fortify the ruin of his cloth hat. He stockpiles pulpy mangrove wood along the ledge and goes searching for birds’ eggs. Some days he plays fitfully with the sharks but he’s cautious about it now; it seems like a waste of energy. The taut nylon drone hums in the afternoon breeze but he doesn’t play it anymore. And yet memories flash at him, persistent and chaotic, like creatures spilling through a torn fence.
The image of the old man pulling down all the icons and snatching the candles. The cold fury that came upon him the day he got shot of Rome for good. And no idea why. Only their mother knew. Old Wally went into Protestantism like a hard man into a cold bath.
Had Fox been born a few years later he might have been a Calvin and not just a Luther. But then, one day before they carted him off to die, the old boy sat up in bed and made the sign at the empty doorway, then crossed himself absently, methodically, the way a man shuts down a machine or locks a vehicle.
He thinks of Bird climbing in beside him smelling of pee, of her crouched in winter sunlight over the cat’s cradle, and those little message pellets—SORRY. And Bullet asleep—asprawl on his bed, cupping his little dick and mouthbreathing. He considers the bighearted chang of a dreadnought guitar ringing up your arm, in your lap, down the heels of your boots. And the three of you out on the verandah in the evening, feet up on the rail, swinging some smoky J. J. Cale thing, knowing that this was it, you were blessed, that they had real music in them and you could only be glad, for without them you were nothing. Those evenings you knew what was holy. Just the smell of the night and the smiles on their faces and the chords slipping each to each.
But he remembers, too, way before then, the ugly orange pumpkin of the school bus pulling up on the highway with Dogger Dean at the wheel. The smell of Brut 33. Sal with her suntanned cheek pressed to the glass as they climbed up out of the shade of the fruit stand. The old Leyland hawking into gear as they lurched down the aisle to where she waited on the long back seat. Those mornings she and Darkie kissed and passed Juicy Fruits tongue to tongue, their hands all over each other. They made feeding noises right there beside him. Darkie tugging at the nipple pressed up in her white blouse. With him, his brother, right at the end of his elbow. The lowing sound in her neck sent a charge through his body. The paddocks blew by. His bag crushed into his lap. The blood and bone smell of her that rose every time she shifted her thighs. He’s guilty about the memory, for having it at all, for letting it back. It dishonours the dead. It shames him.