Caravan Story Page 4

  Andrew holds the door open and we all get inside. She sits in the front. It’s crowded in the back, we all sit squashed up on the bench seats and spend some time sorting out each other’s seatbelts. We are just about to go when the door slides back and Polly pokes her head in. Ah, good, she says, you’ve got him. The woman next to me grabs me tight, holds me too hard, hugs me, I suppose is the word, and says, laughing: Yes, I’ve got him! Everyone, including Polly, either smiles or laughs. She looks up at Andrew. Did you get the lunches? she asks. Andrew nods. All right then, she says, off you go. She’s about to shut the door on us but then I lean forward. Polly, I’m sorry, I say, I’m a bit confused: does this mean I’m finished with Laburnum? She looks at me. Everyone has gone very quiet.

  It’s a genuine question, I really am confused. She looks at me, I look back at her, but the trouble is she is wearing a low-cut top, red, she is leaning over, and even though I don’t look at her cleavage the effort I make in trying not to means my eyes go all shifty and then, what’s worse, suddenly lock piercingly on to her eyes: I know if I break the stare between us I will look down, I will look down at her cleavage and everything, everything will be lost. I’m not sure whether I am still supposed to continue with my Laburnum piece, I say. I can see a flush rising in her cheeks. Her eyes seem to be almost quivering. We’ll discuss that later, she says. She doesn’t break the stare. I pull my top lip down and nod my head rapidly up and down. I then turn and look out the window as if a bird has just flown past. Polly slides the door back and it closes with a thump.

  We start driving. We circle the gravel track of the oval two thirds of the way around and come out onto a rough dirt road. The writers are huddled together in their circle, the painters are preparing the west wall of the changing shed, the musicians have split into little duets and quartets and set themselves up here and there around the boundary. It’s a peculiar sensation, looking back at all this, all the more peculiar because as I look back at it I think: That’s where I live now, that’s my home. Between some caravans makeshift washing lines have been hung, some now have old tarpaulins stretched out in front of them like open-air annexes; from this distance you can see very clearly the pattern of paths and gathering places where the grass has already been trampled to dirt.

  We’re now on the road back to the highway. Andrew has turned the radio on, it blares out a loud pop tune, everyone in the back screams in protest and he changes it to the classical station. We bump along the road; the air-conditioning is on, it’s very cool in the back; the car is new and there’s a strong smell of lemon air freshener. I look out the window but there is little to see: dry paddocks, fences, a few trees, some cows. The woman next to me asks me a question but I don’t hear it. She repeats the question—Are you going to be with us for a while?—and then adds her name. I’m Marti, she says. I’m Wayne, I say. I don’t know, I add, this is all new to me. She smiles. Marti. I say it over a few times to myself. Is it going well? I ask. Yes, she says. I nod. Then suddenly everything inside the Transit van changes, the bumping and shuddering stops, we’re on the main road, the classical music from the radio seems to swell up and lift us all into a new place. I suddenly feel good, about everything. That’s better, I say to Marti, and she smiles at me.

  Perhaps it has all turned out for the best? Perhaps this is where I was destined to go? I feel good among these people; I am not one of them, certainly—I am of their genus but not of their species—but I am able to take something from them, something I’ve not felt before, the sense of not being alone. There is also a sense of freedom, release. I am moving, I am no longer still. And then it strikes me as I think these thoughts—looking out the window, past Marti’s head, at the fences swooping past—that yes, in fact, we are free, we must be, we, the nine of us, eight actors and a writer, are driving in a Transit van down a country road; Andrew has the keys, has his hands on the wheel, he can do what he likes, he can drive and keep driving, far from here, can pull up, let’s say, somewhere way up the coast, in a carpark at the top of the cliffs, and we can all get out and walk down the track and there at the bottom a white beach will stretch out before us, book-ended by rocky promontories, and not a soul in sight.

  We’re slowing down. I see a house, then another, then a garage with two petrol pumps, then we turn; I lean unintentionally against Marti then straighten up again. It’s a side road on the edge of town, all the houses have low fences and big empty front yards. We turn again, then again. The car stops. Everybody out! says Andrew.

  It’s an old weatherboard church hall—beside it the stone church has been boarded up. The hall has a newly mowed front lawn with neatly clipped hedges and petunia seedlings along the path. Andrew unlocks the padlock on the front door and then the door itself. We follow him in, carrying milk crates full of props and costumes and a cardboard box with tea, coffee, sugar and milk.

  It is dark and musty inside the hall, it smells of old wood and dust and mould. Everyone spreads out; they each seem to know what they are doing. The blinds are drawn up and bright daylight floods in, a circle of chairs in front of the raised stage at one end are pushed back against the wall; I follow her out into the little kitchen at the back. There are benches, cupboards, a kettle, an old fridge, a stove. The stove doesn’t work but sitting on top of it is a microwave oven. The door to the backyard has been opened to let in the air—a couple of the actors have already taken a chair each out there and started smoking. I fill the kettle—the water at first runs brown—and put it on. When I go back into the hall about half a dozen of the actors are playing a game of soccer with a blue plastic ball. I go back outside to smoke.

  At ten o’clock Andrew calls us all in. I hadn’t thought of it before but now I realise he’s the director. He outlines what we are going to do today, introduces me again and suggests that for today at least I just watch the work and take notes—we will discuss the structural possibilities at more length later. I suddenly realise I have not brought a pen and paper—or rather, realise that I should have brought a pen and paper but have not. I’m about to tell Andrew this when things go very serious; we’re all standing in a circle, Andrew says something like ‘feet under shoulders’ and everyone adjusts their position slightly. I do what I think I am supposed to, like everyone else I stare at an imaginary spot on the floor in the centre of the circle and let my arms fall by my side. We all do this for some time. Then suddenly everyone jumps forward and makes a loud Huh! sound. I do that too, but a little late; the circle breaks up, people start shaking their limbs, making sounds with their lips and tongues, walking about.

  I don’t have a pen and paper. I go up to her and in a jokey, coquettish way tell her I’ve been a bad boy and not brought my writing equipment. She giggles at me then pulls me aside and takes me out the back into the kitchen. On a shelf in one of the lower cupboards she finds some scrap paper (it’s from an old dot matrix printer with the holes down either side—on the used side I can see what looks like a church group’s financial records) and then in the cutlery drawer an old blue biro. I test the biro, give it a shake, and eventually get it working. She goes back into the hall. I take my pen and paper outside and sit on one of the smokers’ seats.

  The backyard is mostly concrete, surrounded by a low corrugated iron fence, with a toilet down the end. Someone has long ago shifted an old cupboard out there and it still stands where it was first dropped; the cheap veneer has lifted, like a shell prised open, and the chipboard underneath has begun to swell and split. An old crystal vase stands on top of it, the bottom third stained inside by what I imagine is years of rainwater evaporating, filling, and evaporating again. Above me the sky is very blue. I can hear the occasional sound of a truck out on the highway and the hiss of airbrakes as they slow down into town. In this mood I am tempted to write something, and I actually set the bundle of scrap paper on my knees and take up my pen, but then she is at the back door, calling me in.

  Inside the hall a rough performance area has been marked out with white tape. At first
I am a little confused as to where I should stand, where the audience is; I move first down one end of the hall, then the other, then I realise they are playing ‘in the round’. A chair and table have been placed on their marks in the centre of the hall and on the table is an old-fashioned telephone with its cord dangling onto the floor. Around the playing area various other small props and costume items have been laid out. The wooden floor of the hall is polished and very shiny and there is something very satisfying, visually, I tell myself, in this arrangement of objects on it. The actors have spread themselves out around the hall, some in groups, some alone, some preparing their bodies or their voices, some going through their cues with their colleagues. One actor, a very tall thin young man, is standing on the raised stage area on his own, rolling his spine down until his fingers touch the floor then rolling it back up again. Andrew comes up to me and offers me a chair—to get me out of the way, I presume—then calls the group into the central playing area where he quickly goes over what they are to do and what they are hoping to achieve with this run. Andrew finishes. Everyone goes back to their places. I put my paper on my lap and take the top off my pen.

  The performance begins. It’s confusing from first to last, but I’m never sure, at any point in it, whether this confusion is my fault or theirs. An actor sits at the table. The phone ‘rings’, the actor picks up the receiver, listens, then talks into it. But the trouble is he’s talking gibberish, he’s not trying to make sense in the normal sense of the word but is by his intonation and inflection trying to make a more phenomenological sense. His gestures are big (he waves his free hand often) and his face-pulling almost cartoon-like. He hangs up the phone and suddenly jumps up and addresses me, the audience, in a very animated fashion, but alas still in gibberish so that I don’t understand a word he is saying. He comes right up close, waves his arms about, backs off then comes up close again. It seems like the phone call has upset him and that that’s what he’s going on about but all I am really conscious of are the little drops of spit that keep flying out of his mouth. Then he’s gone. He’s taken the chair, two other actors quickly and efficiently remove the table and the scene, apparently, changes. A man and a woman are walking, perhaps in a park.

  I can’t do it any more. I’m looking but I am not seeing. The couple are walking in the park but I can’t go with them. Some of the other actors, while waiting for their cues, are glancing across at me, wondering what I am thinking. I go to write something down, anything, but the pen doesn’t work; I shake it and scribble hard up on the top right-hand corner of my paper and the ink starts flowing again. Some actors are still glancing at me. The scene has changed again. She this time is on all fours playing an animal, perhaps a dog, yes, a dog, because all of a sudden she’s barking at me. I laugh, then make the note: dog, good. It’s terrible. I don’t know what to do. For a little while I just scribble some gibberish of my own on the paper while feigning interest by leaning forward and smiling with a fixed, gormless smile. But it’s all stupid, it makes no sense, I don’t know why I’m here. I keep trying to understand what I’m seeing because I know when they are finished they will ask me questions about what I’ve seen but my mind keeps pulling in and out of focus.

  They’ve brought the table and the telephone back and now the actor who answered the telephone earlier is interviewing, apparently, another actor who is sitting across the table from him. I watch them acting, very loudly, very boisterously, very pretentiously, and listen to their theatrical gibberish. What has happened? Why am I here? Did I do something wrong? Scene by scene some kind of story unfolds in front of me but I don’t know what the story is. I make notes with my pen but they are just stupid things I am saying, written for the sake of writing something. I try to keep focus on the things unfolding in front of me but it’s as if my look keeps ricocheting off them and landing somewhere else. I look at the two actors now entering as drunks, and the next thing, I am seeing in my mind’s eye Jane Austen’s knickers. I can’t bury myself down into the moment—perhaps I have never been able to—I can’t dig down and get stuck and let its minutiae cling to me. I skip like a stone across the surface of things, I am not grounded, earthed; I ramble or lurch from one moment to the next like a drunk. It strikes me that what is happening here, that what is happening back at the oval, that what is happening, now, in my head, is all designed to tell me, again, how utterly adolescent we are, that no matter how painfully we try to make an impression, how desperately we try to prove that we are worthwhile, that we have something to say, that we belong (Belong!), that we are grown-ups now, that we have found meaning, culture, put down our roots, that we are making art, that it all makes sense, we are in fact nothing but distracted children, reaching for one toy while discarding the other, looking up for approval from above, smiling when we get it, bawling when we don’t. What is this moment here—this bouffon performance, this non-writer taking notes—what if not a contrived collaboration of the stupid with the dumb?

  Then suddenly the actor is standing in front of me again, the same as at the beginning, addressing me directly. I know my eyes have glazed over and I try to bring them back into focus. He’s winding things up. The performance is over, there’s a moral conclusion, they all come on and bow, I put down my pen and clap my hands. Now we’ll break for lunch, says Andrew, do you want something from the shop? I must be looking at him stupidly because after a moment he explains himself: Just because we’ve brought sandwiches doesn’t mean we have to eat them. This is no explanation. There’s a takeaway up the road, he says. Two dim sims, I say. Steamed or fried? says Andrew. Fried, I say. Fried, he says. They all leave.

  I go out the back and sit in the sun. It’s hot out there now, not like the morning; I shift the chair into the shade. I can hear the actors leaving, their voices trailing off down the street; they’re all excited, they haven’t come down. I light a cigarette and look at my notes—it’s a fiasco. I can barely read my writing and what I can read I don’t understand. One line says: Take part rubbish man good. I don’t know what that means.

  There’s a sound inside the hall, then footsteps approaching across the timber floor. A man appears in the kitchen doorway. Who left the door open? he says. I think he means the back door, the door he’s standing in, and I’m about to say I did—then he says: Anyone can just walk in off the street and take what they like—and I realise he’s talking about the front door, the one with the padlock, the one facing the street. The others have just gone down to the shops, I say, they won’t be long. Well, they should have locked it, he says. But I’m here, I say. Doesn’t matter, he says. He’s a craggy-faced man in his fifties, dressed casually but neatly, like a farmer who has just come into town to go to the bank. It’s a stupid arrangement anyway, he says. I don’t know what he’s talking about. He has a bunch of keys hanging off a clip on his belt. Are you the caretaker? I ask. Yes, I’m the caretaker, he says, and if it was up to me you’d all be packed off back to the city where you belong. He needs to get something off his chest; I put my paper and pen down on the ground beside me. The caretaker meanwhile makes himself look busy: he brings a broom out from the kitchen and sweeps the concrete path, he jags some spiderwebs out from under the eaves, he opens the doors of the rotting cupboard one by one and checks to see if anything has been left inside, he takes down the old crystal vase, turns it this way and that, then puts it back again. I mean, he says, while doing these things, I’ve got nothing against you people personally, it’s no concern of mine what you do with your time—my sister Shirley paints, she’s had pictures in the hairdresser’s—but you can’t just trample over people like that. In what way have we trampled over you? I ask. The caretaker is taken aback by this, he wasn’t expecting me to speak, I was going to be his audience: he looks at me briefly then goes back to his pseudo-chores.

  It takes a little while to gather momentum but soon he is telling me a story. He’s a farmer, has been all his life, his father and his father before that ran cattle on a property just out of town. I t
hink it’s easy being a farmer: I read the papers, watch the television, see farmers on their motorbikes and tractors, but really I have no idea what it’s like, I just can’t possibly imagine the hours, the sweat, the labour these farmers put in and then how little help they get. To expect any meaningful government subsidy is like asking for blood from a stone, he says. If there’s a drought, he is saying, or a flood, he says, then guaranteed you’ll see a government bigwig with a flash-looking hat sweep through here saying how much relief they’ll give us but then just as quickly they’re gone again and no talk ever about what good it’s going to do us, how the money’s going to be spent, whether it’s anywhere near enough to compensate us for the damage done by a spiteful, hateful bitch called Nature. I’m not saying we’re anything special, he says—he’d be the first to admit that he’s done things wrong, made mistakes, that it’s not always been the fault of the government or God. But, he says, closing the door of the shed, look around here now, look what’s going on, and tell me who’s getting the rough end of the stick? When the farm started to go bad, he is saying, neither he nor his wife were expecting any handouts. Jude was a churchgoing woman, like her mother before her, so when the minister said he needed someone to do some handyman chores around the place and would pay just under twenty dollars an hour for it, I wasn’t afraid to put up my hand. Mind you, this is on top of getting up at five, sometimes four-thirty, for milking and on top of the weekend work I was already doing trying to drag another dollar out of that thankless soil. So when the farm collapsed—by collapse I mean when we went to see Dom at the bank like we’d done a hundred times before and for some reason that I couldn’t figure out at the time he acted like we had the plague—when the farm collapsed and we were forced to sell (we got nothing for it but the debts we owed and a nest egg the size of a sparrow’s) I kept the handyman job at the church and tried to make as much work as I could from it (I don’t mind saying) by always finding something else that needed fixing or changing or whatever. So that was all right. But then the scandal broke.