Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe Page 4

  For three nights following, the arguments rang out, a relentless shouting match that echoed through the deserted streets and sent the dogs into paroxysms of barking. By the fourth night they had exhausted themselves and silence finally reigned in the house. On the morning of the sixth day, with all the bad blood let, Jodie took control of Michael’s life and put his house in order. She was a beautiful young woman, her father’s daughter, with the same distracted expression and a small fire always smouldering in her case behind both eyes. She gathered up pieces of furniture from the abandoned houses (Michael had almost nothing in his house but an old mattress on the floor) and stocked the kitchen cupboards with food. For the first time since the opening of the estate Nanna found herself a customer: Michael’s house was never again seen without flowers in every room. And should you be up early enough in the morning (and in winter few of us were) you would see Michael and Jodie crawling through a hole in a back fence of West Court, crossing the gully of the creek by the footbridge he had laid the previous year, and walking out together across the dew-laden paddocks. They sat together of an afternoon at Slug’s and every evening the smell of rabbit stew drifted from their kitchen across the square.

  It was enough to restore even the most confirmed cynic’s faith in the strange and sometimes troubled world of familial relations—what any of us would have given for a moment of that: with a daughter, son, mother, father, husband or wife. We’d left them all behind: uncles, aunts, cousins too; we had each other, and it was a family of sorts, but the sight of Michael and Jodie often cruelly reminded us that any family, no matter how bonded, interdependent and happy, is an ersatz family compared to the one linked by blood.

  In every way Jodie became the new force in our lives, and that winter of her arrival—a sickeningly cold and depressing one—was transformed into a kind of spring. Where normally we would have hibernated for the two months that remained and not felt warm blood in our veins again until Vito organised the first new planting, we suddenly found ourselves in the midst of a flurry of activity. Slug’s was repainted and the outside awning extended; six trees—saplings dug up from disused gardens—were planted in the grass block in the centre of the square; the holes in the few streets we still used were re-tarred and the cracks in the gutters and footpaths patched. Michael built a barbed-wire gate to be put up on each of the four streets entering the square to keep the dogs out and a good few were culled as well. (I couldn’t tell you how many dogs there were in ur at that time; from the few strays that had been left behind when the early residents departed they had bred, inbred and rebred so many times that even the number of cross-breeds was uncountable, let alone the individuals themselves—they had long since killed or chased away all the cats and now roamed the streets in packs, feeding on anything they could find, and with their barking, whining and snapping they often made our lives a misery.) It was not that Jodie was in any way the supervisor or even the instigator of these projects (indeed, the barbed-wire gates were my idea) but by the simple fact of her arrival a new spirit of enterprise had entered into us. All in all, by the time the true spring arrived, we were riding a cresting wave of optimism; the future was before us, a mismanaged past behind. And I, poor fool, had fallen hopelessly in love with Michael’s daughter.

  Perhaps it was simply an acknowledgement of a deep sense of loneliness long suppressed but my infatuation soon became impossible. (It’s an unguarded stairway, easily descended, from the warm house of solitude to the dungeon of loneliness and I had without knowing begun to descend it: I simply spent too much time in the house on North Court on my own.) After a good deal of agonising I finally summoned up the courage to invite her to dinner. It was a week of unseasonal and sporadic rains. She accepted; I took the car keys from Vito and drove into town for the first time in over a year to buy something special for the meal. I had no idea what Michael would make of this, I secretly hoped she wouldn’t tell him—to suddenly see him as some kind of father figure was odd in the extreme. I spent all day inside preparing the dinner and deliberately avoiding Slug’s. Soft rain was falling when I heard the dogs barking at the North Street gate. Her hair was wet and fell in strands across her shoulders; I offered her a towel which like all my towels gave off a slight swampy smell. We sat opposite each other at the kitchen table, her thin nose casting a curious shadow across one cheek.

  After the meal I dispensed with preliminaries and asked her straight out why she had come to ur and she answered that she had come to be with her father, to care for him, and to ensure he didn’t get into any more trouble. Has he been in trouble before? I asked. But Jodie remained silent. This thing he’s building, in his garage. What is it? Jodie just smiled. It’s his little joke, that’s all, she said. I uncapped a bottle of cheap brandy. Jodie sipped hers and spoke. It’s been a running joke in the family, she said, on the male side, for generations. It started with my father’s great-grandfather. You know the expression: to be up shit creek in a barbed-wire canoe without a paddle. My great-grandfather fought in the Boer War, when barbed wire was invented by the British to imprison the captured Afrikaners, and came home with his mind in a mess. Apparently, just before he died, he tried to build one of these canoes and sail it up the creek at the back of his property. He nearly drowned, and spent his last weeks in hospital raving like a madman, asking the nurses every morning to fetch his canoe for him: he had an important journey to make. It was all put down to senility, of course, but the thing was that when he died a bundle of papers was found among his things. He’d been making sketches of this canoe for years, the way to launch it, the way to steer it without a paddle, the prayers you were supposed to recite on your way upstream. The papers went to his son and his son after that. And each, apparently, in their final years were struck with the same obsession. On their deathbeds they all asked for this canoe to be brought to them and all died with the same request on their lips. It’s been a joke, as I say, to the rest of the family, but it’s a joke that won’t go away. Dad says he has the old bundle of papers, and he’s begun to build the canoe. Is he dying? I asked: does he think he’s about to die? Jodie shrugged. She skolled her glass, placed it on the table and walked to the kitchen window. What’s that smell? she said.

  I’d hoped she wouldn’t notice. It was the creek. The vandals had visited earlier in the week and completely destroyed the dam wall that Vito had built to divert the sewage onto his farm. I hadn’t told anyone, I was intending to fix it myself. But then I asked Jodie to dinner, everything went a little haywire in my mind, and I kept putting the repairs off; the last thing I was expecting was the sort of rain we’d had over the past couple of days. The creek was up, and even the morning before had been lapping at the back fence.

  It’s the creek, I said, we’ve had sewage problems. Jodie continued to stare out the kitchen window into the dark. What are you all doing here? she said after a pause: you could have all left years ago, I don’t understand… Neither do I, I said, but who’s to say that things won’t change, that a new beginning isn’t just around the corner? There was going to be a park over the back fence there, that’s why I bought this house in the first place. People ask me why I stay, why I haven’t moved down to the square at least; well, it’s because I have no real reason to doubt that the park will come one day and I don’t see why I shouldn’t be here to enjoy it when it does. They say the same thing about the freeway, she said. Yes, I said, and it will come. Jodie looked at me: You still believe in that too? I have to, I said, I couldn’t live here otherwise. Everything is possibility; that’s what defines this place. Your father too, like all of us, he was hoping to make a new start, and perhaps put that inherited pessimism you spoke of behind him in the process. He’s waited this long, and not without reason: you—you are his freeway—you have arrived and the wait was worthwhile. It can be the same for all of us, if we show a little patience.

  Jodie turned away from the window and I saw the look of the doubter in her eye. It didn’t surprise me: how could I hope to prevail upo
n her when I couldn’t even convince myself? She left shortly after and I escorted her to the square. It was a brief goodbye and we didn’t touch. I walked back home and drank the last of the brandy alone at the kitchen table with the rain falling softly on the roof. A barbed-wire canoe? I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous in my life. He’s just building a fence, that’s all, to keep his hand in. Jodie’s imagination was even more fertile than mine, and suddenly my love for her increased tenfold accordingly. Who could not love someone who had the mind to invent a story like that?

  Eventually I washed the dishes—amazed at having two each of everything—and allowed myself the occasional wistful smile as I gazed out the kitchen window into the dark. Around eleven I put on my raincoat and gumboots, took a shovel from the shed, jumped the back fence and walked briskly through the mud to the dam.

  six

  It was summer again, Vito was out on the paddock picking beans when he saw the cloud of dust off in the east, somewhere near the highway. He watched it for four days, moving imperceptibly closer before he asked me to come out one afternoon and look. It rose as a whitish cloud and drifted slowly south on the breeze. We walked together down the access road and in the distance we could hear the diesel engines revving. Two bulldozers and a grader: they were carving a road from the highway across the paddocks towards ur.

  I was convinced it was just a driveway to a new farmhouse about to be built in off the highway. It was not the best land in the district but that didn’t stop someone from setting up house there. The paddocks around ur contained a smattering of livestock and we often heard and sometimes saw a motorbike driving a herd of cows or half a dozen horses from one paddock to another. So there was no reason why one of the owners of these paddocks (whom we’d always imagined living somewhere further north) shouldn’t want to build a house on his land, perhaps the easier to get working on the soil which had been neglected for so long. Vito kept me posted; each day the machinery crept closer. There was no hiding it from the others any more and they came out each day to the access road to look. The work seemed to stop for a day, just short of Vito’s garden, then the following morning they began excavating a large area—about the size of a small football field and three to four metres deep—at the end of the road they’d already dug. Late that afternoon the machinery left and the only malevolent consequences for us seemed to be the cloud of dust that was lifted late each afternoon by the breeze and drifted in over our houses. Then one morning about two weeks later we awoke to the sound of a truck engine and a strange putrid smell. I was the first out on the access road: the truck was disappearing behind a cloud of dust and in the hole was an enormous pile of household rubbish.

  Each day the truck arrived and dumped another load of rubbish in the hole. Within a week the flies were hanging above it in a thick black moving cloud. A meeting was called but no-one knew what to say: someone was turning the outskirts of ur into a tip and we seemed powerless to stop it. The paddocks surrounding ur had always been government-owned and had been bought along with the original estate site in anticipation of further expansion, but when it was obvious that this expansion wouldn’t come—when all eyes turned to the east—the land had been leased back to a couple of local farmers who used it for grazing their stock. Now, it seemed, the local shire had bought this land from the government and set aside a portion to use, yes, as a tip.

  The next day I wrote and posted a letter to the government department that I believed responsible for the fiasco, threatening further action unless pressure was brought to bear on the shire to cease this unsanitary practice. I have no idea what communications then flew back and forth between government and shire—they flew, as it were, above our heads—but shortly after, a four-page reply from the government department in question was delivered to ur (they didn’t know who to deliver it to and slipped it quietly under the door of Slug’s). It said, in effect, that a regrettable mistake had been made in selling the land to the shire, that it was certainly done without knowledge of the manner in which it would be used, that the land had now been repurchased, the person responsible sacked, and that we may rest assured that the area surrounding the Outer Suburban Village Development Complex, including the large tract of land southward originally purchased for use as a freeway, will be retained by the department until such time as it can be put to its intended use. The letter was handed around at Slug’s that night and we all breathed a collective sigh of relief.

  But our relief was premature; a week later the rubbish truck arrived again and the dumping continued daily. We confronted the garbage men out on the paddock but they just shrugged their shoulders and drove away. Soon a tip attendant was set up permanently on the site with his makeshift hut and bulldozer. We could get nothing out of him either but a well-meaning apology: he was just doing his job, he said, it was out of his hands, he didn’t know any more than us why they’d decided to put the tip here. After more than a dozen unanswered letters to the government asking for action to be taken against the shire and to the shire threatening government action—I myself became exhausted by the whole thing and left it to find its own resolution. The rest of ur showed little more enthusiasm for this sudden brush with bureaucracy; we’d lived so long now without such nonsense that everyone found it difficult to readjust. There was a rubbish tip next door; it was extraordinary when I think back on it just how easily we adapted to this fact. By a kind of osmosis the tip had become part of our lives; we soon forgot how, why, or even when, and accepted the fact as given.

  It was a good indication of the collective state of mind in ur at the time. I myself had become more and more detached from this strange half-begun, half-finished housing estate that had originally promised so much. We had tried to adapt, were still trying to adapt, but the fact remained that no amount of adaptation could ever compensate for the fact that the basic idea was wrong. We were living wrongly, pretending it was right, and the greatest tragedy of all was that we could not see it. I’d fallen in love with Jodie, had had her over for dinner, but under these impossible circumstances could I ever really hope to win her? It was not a subsiding house on the edge of a creek in a housing estate fifty kilometres north of Melbourne that I needed to achieve this up-to-now elusive goal, but a house in a verdant suburb in the east, with the bees buzzing above the flowerbeds and a sprinkler turning lazily on the lawn. Then she might take me seriously and forget about her father and his peculiar miseries, stop filling her head with stories that pretended to explain them.

  Yes, I was thinking of leaving, the first time that such a thought had seriously entered my head. I hardly ventured down to the square any more for my usual drink at Slug’s, I stayed home most nights and did little else but plan my next meal with Jodie and the proposal I would put to her over dessert. But I could not get the tip off my mind. And so, one hot, muggy summer’s night, unable to sleep, I put on my clothes, found my torch and went walking down the access road. I would normally have walked the ring road on such a night—its circularity seemed to calm me: after two or three times round I’d finally find myself breathing easier and the door to sleep would open. But that night all my thoughts were of the tip and I felt inexorably drawn towards it. As I passed it on my left I saw a light outside the hut and a figure—the tip attendant, Alex—sitting by the door. He raised his hand and waved to me; I raised my torch and waved back. He shouted: Come over for a drink! I hesitated for a moment, then picked my way across the empty paddocks and shook his filthy hand. Well, he said, sit down—and pointed to a rickety old wooden chair. A cut-down forty-four-gallon drum, half-filled with cold ash and charred lumps of wood, was propped up on bricks between us. He’d somehow laid his hands on some beer from Slug’s, by what route I couldn’t say. He emerged from the hut with a fresh glass and poured me one. Cheers, he said, and as I raised my glass the crack from top to bottom caught the light of the hurricane lamp. I don’t like going down into the square, he said, so it’s nice to have a visitor drop by. The smell of rotting garbage hung in the wa
rm still air.

  What do you think of us? I asked after a silence: to you people in town this must all look a bit strange. Strange, he said, what do you mean strange? I mean strange to an outsider like you. I’m not so much of an outsider, said Alex. Not now perhaps, I said, but before. Not before either, he said. I don’t follow you, I said. I’m Jean’s son, he said. Who’s Jean? Nanna, said Alex, my mother. You’ve been Nanna’s son all along? All along, said Alex with a smile, ever since I was born; I encouraged her to buy her house here in the first place—didn’t you know that every time Craig goes into town he takes a letter from Mum to me and one from me back to Mum with her allowance? Her allowance? I said. I give her half my wage every week, said Alex. (Well, what on earth does she do with it? I thought.) I’ve known Craig for a long time, Alex continued, he used to sleep in a car at the old tip, near the cemetery in town; I suggested he grab one of the empty houses on the estate—they were there for the taking, after all. Poor boy, he’s in love, isn’t he? With a girl from Paris! He tells me he’s been studying French; she’s already saved half the airfare and should be out here soon. Good luck to him—he’s the only one that might get what he wants out of all of this in the end.