Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe Read online

  Slug was a real estate agent and had opened an office on the square on the western corner of North Street. As the one agent on the estate he was obviously preparing himself to make a killing (he originally employed an assistant and two secretaries, who waited patiently each day behind their desks for the avalanche of enquiries to begin) but of all the original inhabitants he was undoubtedly the greatest victim. He dealt with a good few sales for a while, it’s true, but sales back to the government that earned him such a small commission that it could barely cover his overheads. And after the announcement of the freeway’s ‘delay’ he knew better than anyone that his days as a real estate agent were numbered. Again, as for everyone, it’s hard to say why he stayed. He was a man in his early fifties, divorced, without children, and his corpulence above all testified to his love of the dollar and the many and varied ways to relieve himself of it. But perhaps that’s the point; the collapse of his business produced just the crisis he’d needed to kiss that old life goodbye and seek pleasure and fulfilment in the simpler things. One of these things was Dave’s beer and they became great drinking partners and friends. But his business acumen hadn’t entirely left him and shortly after the last house was sold—the young couple watched weeping on the lawn as their furniture was loaded up and driven away—he transformed his office into the bar-cum-café that had perhaps been his secret dream all along. At first the only customers were Dave and Slug themselves, and they sat together at a table outside drinking themselves into a stupor through the eventless afternoons. But one by one, and with little else to do, the other residents began to stop by occasionally to share a bottle with them. And so for the others, what started out as a casual way of killing an hour or two soon became a habit, and often by the time evening fell you were just as likely to find the whole population of the estate gathered there under the awning on the corner of North Street and the square.

  A motley collection of ill-matched tables and chairs was hastily put together and arranged out on the footpath. Three fridges that had been left behind by owners too tired and beaten to bother moving them were collected from the houses where they had been gathering dust and installed in a row out the back. A sign went up in the window—Slug’s—and there, at any time of the day, you could savour the sweet taste of Dave’s home-brewed beer poured fresh from the bottle by the brewer himself. It wasn’t a grand money-making exercise by any means but Slug wasn’t in it for that. A great weight had lifted from him and he was now content to pass the day drinking quietly with his new business partner and in the evening to entertain the customers gathered beneath the awning with stories of his past excesses.

  If I can trace back through the labyrinthine history of the estate to a place and time of happy memories it would be a summer evening such as that, with the harvest in and the cash box full, at a table on the corner of North Street with a cold glass of Dave’s home brew. A string of lights were hung from the awning to the nearby power pole and the tables and chairs were pushed off the footpath into the square. Slug and Nanna prepared a feast, laid out on a trestle table under the stars, while Dave, in ill-fitting dinner jacket and bow-tie, moved among us with a tray and bottle balanced precariously on the fingers of one hand. The effigy was dressed in its suit and tie, the cardboard briefcase pinned to its hand, and we watched clapping and cheering as Slug put the match to it and the square was filled with a blaze of orange light. Finally, some time after midnight and an hour’s baiting, Craig the squatter locked himself in the phone box and, using his half-remembered schoolboy French, dialled a random number in Paris, France, and asked the voice at the other end for directions to the Louvre. All was drunkenness, foolishness, frivolity: clinking bottles, breaking glasses, laughing, shouting; a cacophony of noise under a still, solid sky. At some ungodly hour we staggered back to our respective homes, the six others across the square to South Street, I the longer journey north with a pack of dogs sniffing at my heels. Daytime passed in a slow, quiet, torporific haze; dogs dozed in whatever shade they could find, out on the paddock a humid concoction of sewage-drenched soil and rotting vegetables rose and hung, invisible, over the ground. The creek dried up, tar bubbled in the streets, two hundred and twenty houses shifted, sighed and groaned.

  four

  Outer Suburban Village Development Complex, the sign on the access road had read, but over the years all but the letters ur from Suburban had either fallen off or been souvenired by the vandals. In time to come we would take this name—ur, a kind of laconic mumble—as our own and keep it as our own private joke, but either way, both then and later, the name remained hidden from everyone but us. We had never appeared on a map under any name, old or new; the cartographers had barely begun to sketch us in before they were forced to erase us again. The dilapidated sign out on the access road was all we had to call attention to our existence, and rare now, if ever, were the times when foreign eyes fell upon it. Occasionally, on a weekend stroll, one of us might see a car pull up out on the access road and a poorly dressed family stand gazing for a while at the strange collection of houses in front of them. But if they had come to consider the idea of moving into the estate then the idea quickly deserted them. The family dog that had scampered down to the ring road corner to sniff the tails of the others who gathered there to greet it was quickly whistled back and leashed, and the family got in and drove away, carrying with them the first chapter of the story they would tell to other poorly dressed families back in the city, a story that would end with the words: No, don’t bother, we’ve seen it and it stinks.

  It did stink. Though the sewage produced by a mere seven individuals may be rightly considered a trifle, it was more than enough to infect the slow-moving creek and the market garden with a rich rotting smell that often and particularly in summer hung over the northern part of ur like a poisonous cloud. It was a smell all too familiar to me. For reasons I am still hard-pressed to explain, I had remained in my house on the edge of North Court and continued to live there, despite the stink, the sinking foundations and the cracks in the walls, through almost all the years of the estate’s existence. Of course, like many others, I had originally bought the house on the strength of the recreation park rumour. But unlike the others I had stayed on after the sewage problem first became apparent and never seriously entertained any thoughts of moving. Bram from the Far North they called me, and, because of my loyalty to my original dwelling, despite the deterioration around, I suppose I was considered something of an eccentric. I spent most days at my kitchen table, working on some new article or other for The Voice, which I still brought out intermittently and for free, or going over the accounts of the fund for which I’d now become official trustee. What I wrote was no longer journalism as such and I’m not even sure, now, how to define it, but my neighbours always waited anxiously for the next issue to appear and were full of praise for its contents when it did. Perhaps they were humouring me, but I was happy to be humoured. And certainly in the height of summer, with the midday heat and the smell from the creek making life outside unbearable, I was content to spend what time I could inside and rarely ventured out until evening.

  It was one such evening, towards the end of the first summer harvest, in fact, when, taking my usual stroll around the ring road, stick in hand to ward off the dogs, I turned into South Street on my way back home and heard strange noises—sawing and hammering—coming from Michael’s garage. The garage door was open and a shaft of light fell onto the driveway. I could see him inside, de-nailing an old piece of timber. What are you making? I asked—a question I’ve since come to believe I should never have asked at all. Michael turned and looked over his shoulder, then turned to his piece of timber again. Nothing, he said. I stepped inside. I’ve noticed you’ve been collecting the old barbed wire and bits of timber from the farms around here, I said: I wonder if I could ask you a favour? Michael stopped working. The rabbits have been getting into Vito’s garden, I said, and eating the new plants. I was suggesting to him that some kind of fence might be
the solution. You seem to know a bit about both—rabbits, I mean, and fences. Michael smiled, the creases tightening in the corners of his eyes. He must have been about fifty-odd, with the wiry frame and leathery skin of someone who has spent most of his life outdoors. But what distinguished him above all was the right eye: something was wrong with it, its gaze skewed sideways and always gave you the disconcerting impression that he was not only looking at you but also at someone over your shoulder. And, as if by way of compensation, his left eye fixed you in a fiery stare that could have burnt holes in concrete. I’m sure you’ve got other plans for the materials you’ve got here, I said, but I’d be happy to help you collect some more from the paddocks and give you a hand to build it. Michael went to the fridge in the corner of the garage and took out a bottle of Dave’s home brew. He took off the cap and poured two glasses. I was a fencing contractor, he said, handing me a glass: I don’t think a vegetable patch would present too many problems for me.

  We drank and talked then, well into the night; I never made it back to Slug’s for my nightcap. The enigma of Michael was penetrated to some extent, though never completely—it still never has. He’d come from a country town in the west where he’d lived with his wife and teenage daughter, building and fixing fences on the surrounding farms and making a reasonable living out of it. But one day at work he tensioned a piece of barbed wire one millimetre too far; it snapped, and took a piece of Michael’s right eye with it as it passed. He was unable to work for almost a year, and the constant friction that had distinguished the relationship between him and his wife finally came to a head. She left him, taking with her their only daughter. The eye eventually healed, enough to give him partial, though badly skewed, vision; he tried to renew his old contracts with the surrounding properties but none of the farmers wanted to have their fences built by a man with only one accurate eye. So he moved to the city, took a night-shift job in a paint factory, spent what little money he earned on drink and the spare time he had left trying to find his wife and daughter. The wife he never found and never would, the daughter he eventually tracked down to a share house in a cheap and ugly suburb, living on nothing and going to the dogs. He took her in with him but had no sooner done so than he lost his factory job, got into a fight with his landlord and was forced out onto the street. The daughter left him again and lived (as hearsay had it) a dissolute life of drink, drugs, arguments and abortions while Michael wandered the uninspiring streets of Melbourne, a one-eyed fencing contractor in a sea of more qualified unemployed.

  After one final and failed attempt at reconciliation with his daughter in which crockery was hurled and a knife pulled on him by her flatmate, Michael left again for the country, saying better a bad life with fresh air than a bad life without. But when he arrived back in the country town of his birth the house he’d left behind had been broken into and vandalised, the furniture smashed, the drawers and cupboards rifled and everything of value gone. He slept on a mattress on the floor with black plastic over the broken windows while he traipsed the surrounding countryside again looking for fencing work or anything else he could find—but again without success. Then one day, returning to his ramshackle house after another fruitless day’s searching, he found a man in a suit and tie waiting on his doorstep. They wanted to widen the highway, he said, and were prepared to make an offer. Michael accepted it without hesitation, returned to the city with the money and had already spent the greater part of it on drink, when, as he described it, while standing drunk under a railway bridge one night he saw the dead-end that his life had become and resolved in that moment to do something about it. He bought the paper the following morning, saw the advertisement for the new estate that was about to be opened on the paddocks to the north and, hoping against hope that the farms surrounding this new estate might provide him with the work that those surrounding his home town had so consistently denied him, he packed his bags and put a small deposit down on a house on the corner of South Street and the square.

  The freeway meant nothing to Michael, nor the petrol station; he felt no (nor did he want to feel any) connection to the city—in this he was perhaps the only original resident of the estate for whom the catalogue of unkept promises meant nothing. But there the exceptions ended, for like all of us the hoped-for employment continued to elude him. There were three fencing contractors operating from the town up north alone, and they had the business sewn up. It didn’t take long for Michael to realise that whatever good may come from his move to the estate it wouldn’t come through pursuing his former trade. He gave up trying, lived off his monthly subsidy and the rabbits he shot and, like the rest of us, found whatever distraction he could to fill up the meandering days.

  He agreed to build the fence, and I worked alongside him through the remaining weeks of summer. We didn’t use the materials in his garage and I never asked him what they were for, but even after a long day’s work out on the paddock I would still hear the sawing and hammering drifting from the half-open door as I took my evening stroll. The fence turned out well, though a little crooked. The rabbits would occasionally try to burrow under it but Vito had only to check the perimeter first thing in the morning and drop kerosene and a lit match down any hole he found to forestall any attempt at a break-in. But more important than that was the fact that Michael, who had to some extent always lived on the margins of our community, was now officially inducted into it. He still kept his distance and often sat alone at his own table at Slug’s, but the aura of mystery around him gradually dissolved and it was possible to talk to him as, if not a friend, then at least a fellow traveller in the same rudderless boat. One night Nanna even asked him about his family—if he had any, where they were. He had a daughter, he said, but hadn’t seen her for some time. Then his eyes grew misty, he fell silent again, and the subject was left alone.

  Though we’d always had trouble with the vandals, that summer the problem grew worse. From your bed at night you might hear the sound of a car engine way out on the access road and the far-off sound of barking dogs. They skirted around the southern edge to the empty houses in West Street and after breaking in would drink their drinks and paint a few slogans on the walls. Sometimes they went further, throwing bricks and shrubs onto the footpaths and driving their cars in screeching circles around one of the empty courts, but we never really felt threatened and accepted it all as a natural consequence of living in such a relatively large, isolated and unguarded place. But late that summer—I think I’m talking about eight years after the opening of the estate here—their nightly invasions suddenly turned nasty.

  In one savage night they destroyed the phone box (every window was smashed, the receiver gone) and threw a brick through the window of Slug’s. We gathered in the square that morning with a strange disquiet. Of course we were all upset, but Craig seemed to have taken it especially hard—he was crouched beside the phone box with his head held in his hands, a picture of abject despair. I walked over to him and asked him what was wrong. He looked up at me, clearly wondering whether I was the one to whom he should confide his secret. Then he blurted it out.

  The phone calls to Paris, which had started out as little more than a drunken harvest-time joke, had become unexpectedly serious. One night his random dialling had put him through to a girl—Marie-Claire, he said, and with such lovelorn sincerity that I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry—and as stupid as it may have sounded he had fallen head over heels in love with her. He’d been ringing her every night; she was smitten too; they wanted to get married. He’d asked her to come and live here and it would only have taken a few more calls to arrange it—now his dream was shattered. I tried my best to comfort him—He could always write, I said. But he didn’t know her address. Well, just take the car into town, I said, and use the phone box there; you can take the money out of the account. By this time everyone else had gathered around us, their faces a mixture of confusion and concern. What’s wrong, said Nanna, has the car been stolen too? I left Craig alone, drew the crowd
aside and explained the situation. They all nodded their heads gravely: no question, let him ring from the phone box in town; if he needs to talk to her he can. I went back to tell Craig that the matter was settled and a great weight lifted from him. He drove into town that night with a pocket full of coins and a farewell party wishing him good luck from the gate.

  The phone box was irreparable and would probably remain so but no-one wanted to see such a night of destruction again; the brick through the window of Slug’s was especially disturbing. So from that night on a new ritual was born. Every evening as the sun went down Michael would bring his rifle to the square and stand sentry there. I found it all a bit melodramatic myself and I tried to talk him in—but he wouldn’t listen to me. They’re Craig’s old friends, he said, don’t you see? That’s what’s upset him most. I won’t let it happen again. But do we really need this? I asked, pointing too obviously at the rifle. Michael didn’t answer, and clutched it a little closer to his chest. Soon I stopped trying to talk sense into him, he would not listen anyway, and I, along with the others, came to accept the sight of him standing out there as part of our daily lives and his ritual pacing of the square at night as one of the many strangenesses with which those lives were now circumscribed. If the vandals from the town up north wanted to try their luck again in the square they would do so at their peril. They didn’t: we occasionally heard strange sounds at night from the empty houses in West Court, but otherwise, and for some time yet, they left us conspicuously alone.

  five

  Though the summer evenings in ur were a special time the long cold winters were hard. Icy winds and driving rain blew in across the paddocks, the creek burst its banks and flooded my backyard. Nights at Slug’s were almost miserable affairs, Michael outside in his winter coat, the others crammed into the tiny former office with an old towel stuffed into the crack under the door. Dave’s frosty beer was undrinkable and most of us turned instead to the gut-warming cheap brandy that now came back from town by the dozen. I spent most days and nights at the kitchen table with my writing: The Voice came out sporadically now, enough to give it the status of rare. If Slug’s was still open when my work was done I would wander down there for one last drink. Nanna had long since gone to bed with her arthritis wrapped in scarves, Slug was snoring fitfully on the couch he’d installed in the corner for the purpose; Michael’s shift was over and he, Craig and Vito were playing their last hand of cards, the biggest pile of matches stacked on the table in front of Craig, while Dave stood idly looking on with a tea towel slung over his shoulder. And it was such a night, a night like that, in the sixth winter since Inauguration and the second since the sewage was diverted, when without warning and to the astonishment of all, Jodie, Michael’s daughter, walked into our lives. A sudden blast of cold air accompanied her through the door; all heads turned but no-one spoke. She and Michael stared long and hard at each other before Michael rose from his chair and walked outside with her into the dark.