Authors: Tim Winton
By dawn the fever is gone. His limbs feel heavy on him and every movement is a kind of wading. The air is laced with currents. His skin prickles as though he’s being watched at every point.
He stoops to drink at the tiny, shrinking stream and knows in an instant that he can’t stay. He’s exhausting the food around him; the only way to keep this up is to continue moving up the coast to new reserves of water and fish. Staying only a few days at each place, goaded on by hunger. But he just can’t see himself doing it. He’s not a nomad, he can’t even imagine such a life.
It’s not just exhaustion that disqualifies him but his instinct to linger, to repeat, to embellish. A way of living isn’t enough.
Fox has to stay, to inhabit a place. It’s as though his mind can only settle when he’s still. He feels he’s dragging a life and a whole snarled net of memory across foreign country. None of it lives here; it doesn’t spring from here and it will neither settle nor belong. However good the fishing farther up, no matter how clear and fresh the waterholes, he knows now that he’ll die out here; he’ll eat himself alive like a body consuming its own wasted muscle.
At breakfast Red Hopper presented them with a survey map and a number of likely campsites and before there was any heat in the day they set off down the gulf. They worked their way up creeks and poled through mangrove everglades. They climbed out at rockbars and sandspits and Georgie felt Jim’s mood slip from his early neutrality into a sullen silence. As the day wore on and the colder the trail felt to Georgie, the more dogged Jim became.
Each miserable spring and puddle had to be covered thoroughly and he stormed through the undergrowth of the hinterland until he was speechless with fury.
At the landward end of the gulf, beneath the great striped plateau, they entered a rivermouth a mile wide. Red steered up muddy switchbacks, scattering birds in their path, until the mangrove ramparts became stony banks and the river petered out at a sandstone wall. In the Wet season, the guide told them, this was a cataract and the country above a series of rapids. They climbed up the terraced stone and came to a chain of billabongs whose clear water was dimpled with tiny, brazen fish.
There were shady gums here, and pandanus, but she never expected any sign of Lu Fox. It was a long way from the sea, and the surrounding country felt hemmed in by high ground. The sun was pitiless now. She sat in the smooth stone basin of a waterhole until even Jim conceded that it was hopeless. The three of them sank to their chins in the cool water while fingerlings nipped at their elbows.
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Before he leaves, Fox realizes there’s nothing he wants to take with him but a waterbag and the pack into which he stuffs boots, socks and some sunscreen. He pushes off from the midden and paddles until the glare off the water gouges his eyes. He makes it level with his old island before he pulls up a creek, drags the kayak to high ground and lies in the shade a while until the pain recedes. Even as he lies there the tide peaks. Before long it will begin the run-out and he’ll be paddling against it, and he realizes he’s begun his trek too quickly; he hasn’t thought it out. He’ll have to lie here for hours or press on by foot. It pains him to leave the kayak after all this time, but he’s anxious to get on so he stashes it safely out of sight.
He pulls on socks and laces up his boots. With the waterbag in his pack and the pandanus fringe of his hat clamped low, he sets off. Straight away he’s glad of the boots.
The ground is hot and stony and the spinifex sharp. The country is riven with washouts and escarpments. Trees are sparse and their shade miserly. Several times he comes to impassable gullies from which he must turn back and beat his way round.
The tide is well out when he comes to a delta whose grey mud is veined and wrinkled. The river’s mangrove barrier looks bereft of water. From here the sea looks a mile away. He works his way down to where the mud looks dry enough to cross but the crust breaks at the first step so that he plunges thigh-deep into black stinking ooze from which he has to haul himself with sandflies swarming and biting. The hell with that. Shaken, he heads inland, and crosses at an oystery rockbar. He makes his way to the shade of a sandstone bluff.
He sits there a time to compose himself. He drinks deeply from the waterbag and gathers his bits about him again, but he starts at the sight of two handprints blown in red ochre on the yellow stone above him. He stretches his own hands over them and sees how much smaller the painter’s are. Although he hasn’t meant to touch anything a thumb comes away with ochre on it. He’s surprised to find it so fresh. There’s something not quite right about the whole set-up, an obviousness that makes him think of Axle. He brightens at the idea that the boy might be about, that they might sit down and talk, bang on the guitar, laugh about those maps and how much easier today might be if he had them.
Thinks of the kid out here making himself up as he goes along.
Wants to return the kayak. Wonders about Menzies.
Just past midday he makes the ridge above the fishing guide’s camp and hears the petrol generator wailing away down there like a stranded lawnmower, and his resolve founders. He thinks of all the stuff he’s nicked. What kind of a bloke is this guide? Here he is again, exposed, outnumbered, isolated. His mind wheels in all directions. He lies there in the sun with sweat in his stinging eyes until he works up the nerve to take it slowly, to watch and see.
He comes down in stages, until he reaches the cave roof where a bank of solar panels is tilted. From here he sees the empty beach, the boat gone. He worms his way down a cleft into the cool black shade of the cave and stands in water to his shins. A breeze runs through the cave; it smells of animal fat, LP gas and insect repellent. A long time he stays there, hearing nothing. In the end he creeps out into the light with his heart racing—and a sudden movement causes him to cry out. A big gingery quoll plunges across the bench in a bebop flourish of tin plates and lids and cutlery before disappearing into the rock ledge.
Several seconds pass before he can move. He looks at the plastic tables strewn with bits of tackle and dirty plates. Towels hang from the edge of the shelter. He goes to the cooking bench and sees the pans loaded with leftover sausages, chops, fried eggs and bread. He reaches in disbelief and shoves two sausages in his mouth. He tears meat from a lamb chop and sops bread through the skillet drippings. He goes at it hand over hand until he’s wracked with hiccups. With an egg on the palm of his hand, the yolk all grey and powdery, he sits in a plastic patio chair to savour the sensation of having his arse off the ground and his feet free.
The fridge whirrs. He wolfs the egg between spasms then cracks the door to look at lettuces in Woolworths bags and cans of beer, tomatoes, carrots, apples. He hooks out a plastic jug of orange juice and slugs it down in cold, shocking gulps that he can’t stop. Drinks the entire two litres. He stands there like a moron with the empty container and just stuffs it back in the door. The cold air tingles on his legs while he pulls off his pack and stuffs it with bacon rashers, apples, oranges, a whole lettuce.
At one end of the camp is a nook partitioned by a sandstone pillar. The guide’s lair. A bed. A few steel boxes. A plastic tub of clothes. Above the bed, in a rock niche, beside some candles and a shaving mug, is a toothbrush whose scruffy bristles lie awry, like canegrass in which some beast has been sprawling. Fox feels the coatings of fat and fur on his teeth.
He has to have it. But as he reaches for it he gets a glimpse of himself in the shaving mirror and stops dead. His hair is a dirty spinifex snarl and when he steps back involuntarily he sees the colourless rag of his shirt. He looks more closely at the scabs and scales of his brow, at the festering beard and those wet, red eyes, and he feels himself searching out his own face in these features with a desperation that soils the pleasure of all the food in his belly and the feeling he’s had that this could be it, the day he might come in out of the bush and make peace. But this. You can’t come in as this thing.
He hears the outboard motor and wheels around, knocking the mirror from the rock. It falls to the bed, bounces, and settles back, leaving a crescent of light on the sandstone overhang. Fox snatches up a shirt and some elastic-waisted shorts and blunders through the camp for his pack. From the kitchen bench he grabs a bottle of olive oil. The guide boat spurts from behind the rocky promontory and wheels into the cove while Fox crouches, stuffs the pack closed, pulls it on. At the last moment, as he bolts for the darkness of the cave and the shaft up to the ridge, he filches a book from the ledge and goes like hell.
Georgie held the cold bottle to her forehead while the fishing guide laughed. He rested his freckly arms on the kitchen bench.
He shook his head till his cap fell into the sink and his ears went crimson.
He’s playing with us, said Jim.
Maybe we’re playin with ourselves, Red murmured, still grinning.
Georgie maintained what composure she could. All day her spirits had been sinking. The heat and Jim’s darkening mood sapped her.
Only moments before, she’d arrived flat, and now her hopes were up again and her head and heart were pounding.
At least we haven’t imagined him, she said with feeling.
So what now? Jim asked.
Well, you know the bloke. It’s your call. He’s either pissed off back to his hideout or he’s hanging back in the breakaways behind us. My guess is he’s hungry. Why not have ourselves a monster cook-up and see if he comes in?
Or we could call him in, Jim said. We could walk up into the escarpment and call his name.
Red Hopper pursed his lips doubtfully and looked Georgie’s way.
He raised his eyebrows at her. She set her teeth while Jim spoke.
You know the Christmas tree from down our way, Red? Nuytsia floribunda. Big orangey-yellow blossoms on it—they flower in summer, you see em all along the sandy country. That’s what this prick’s like. All colour and nectar. The bees come swarming.
Everything else around is just low scrub or dry banksia, a few tuarts and grasstrees. You know, your hardworking dull grey western scrubland. The wattles flower, I spose, but there’s nothing like the Christmas tree. That’s him.
Jimbo, you’ve lost me, said Red still looking at Georgie.
Thing most people don’t know, said Jim, is that the Christmas tree is a parasite. The roots suck the juice from all the trees around, they travel a distance you wouldn’t credit. Just to get at what the others have got.
Bit of a botanist, are you, Jim?
Like I said. I’m a fisherman.
Like you said.
Georgie should call him in. He’ll come if she calls him.
There was a smouldering anger in his voice. Georgie knew she wouldn’t do it. The way he was talking you couldn’t let yourself.
I think, she murmured, that Red’s idea is best.
Just go up there and show yourself! said Jim.
She shook her head.
Don’t you want to find the bastard?
Let’s have a cook-up, she breathed.
He’s probably still close by, said Jim. You mightn’t get another chance, Georgie. You know you’ll regret it if you don’t. It’ll eat at you. You’ll be thinking about it all the way home. You’ll be sitting in that house wishing you did.
She looked at her hands.
Christ, he muttered, after all this.
Who’s for a cuppa, then? said the guide.
Georgie felt herself stitching her lips between her teeth.
Jim stood up.
How d’you have it? said Red, bluff but watchful.
I don’t want any fucking tea, said Jim. I want this sorted.
Hey, Jim, settle.
The guide was still grinning but alert now, poised. Throughout the long day he’d been pepping Jim up, joshing him along, managing him, but beneath the jokey bonhomie there was an edge.
Georgie sensed his mounting distrust of Jim Buckridge, even dislike. Until now Jim had seemed so preoccupied as to be oblivious. He stood with his hands on the bench between them.
Christ, she thought, even he doesn’t know what he wants to do when he sees Lu Fox. He can’t even decide what to do with himself this very moment; he’s possessed by rage.
I bloody hope you have a teapot, she said.
The guide looked at her askance.
I won’t drink anything made with tea bags.
Georgie, Hopper said with a smile that looked like relief, nobody likes a snob.
Jim walked out into the hard white light. The gas ignited with a tiny poof. The guide pulled his hat from the sink and wrung it out with a flourish.
Neither of them spoke for a while. It was hot in the shade. There was no breeze.
This bloke you’re lookin for. He your brother or somethin?
She shook her head.
This whole thing’s pissing me off, you know. Somebody better cough or I’ll have to call the plane back.
He needs it, said Georgie. For his own peace of mind. He’s frightened for his children, she said realizing it only as she said it. Jim has the idea that his past is catching up with him and that the world or God or whatever will keep taking revenge on him and his family if he doesn’t put things right.
And that means findin this bloke?
In his mind, yeah.
And that’s why he’s got the shits, then. No result.
I guess. I’m struggling to figure him out.
And you believe that stuff. You know, God and revenge?
I think Jim believes it. But I don’t think the world is like that. Without some mercy, a bit of forgiveness, I reckon I’d prefer it to be completely random—meaningless. In a sick way I envy the fact that he believes in something. D’you believe in anything?
Three square meals a day, said Red. And the sound of a screamin reel.
What’ll happen to him, you think?
Who—your wildman? He’ll either die or come in. By September there’ll be so little water out there he’ll be out of his mind.
He knows I’ve got food, water in the cave and tank storage…
You reckon he wants to die?
Georgie thought about it. All that longing for the dead he had.