Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe Page 5

  So he was here in the early days? And yes, suddenly I did remember him, vaguely, accompanying Nanna, helping her with the shop, but he was younger then, and cleaner: altogether different. He must have left some time in the second year and found a job at the tip up north. Like so many, I thought, wondering then how many others like Alex still retained some connection. Are there still dozens out there, on the farms, in the small one-shop towns, biding their time, waiting to come home? It seemed extraordinary that Alex himself could have kept up contact with his mother all that time and then by such a roundabout route end up moving back to ur. Or almost. For despite the fact that Nanna still lived in a large and otherwise empty three-bedroom house just a stone’s throw away, Alex persisted in sleeping in his hut. On the outside walls he’d hung bits and pieces of junk he’d scavenged from the tip—old kettles, children’s toys, steam irons, dish drainers, saucepans with pink geraniums cascading from them, bicycle wheels, hub caps—and on the roof a crop of wandering jew spread and hung from a sump filled with soil. The path to the front door was lined with the cut-off humps of car tyres painted white; to the door itself he’d fitted a frying pan knocker, and above the doorway a mobile made from fishing line and tappets tinkled in the breeze.

  So Craig has always known, I said, about you, I mean? Yes, he said, I’d regularly fix him up with parts for the car—you think he could have kept Vito’s old station wagon going for you otherwise?—and he’d bring me a few bottles of Dave’s home brew. There’s more to this relocation of the tip than I’ve been able to figure out yet, I said, still not sure where I was taking the conversation. It had nothing to do with me, Bram, said Alex, you know that; I just work for them. What the shire does, in cahoots with the government or not, has nothing to do with me. So you think the government is behind it? I said. Maybe, I don’t know, said Alex: they’ll have to find some way of shifting you all eventually and getting rid of this blot on the landscape.

  It was strange, but they were the words I’d been waiting for, the words I’d wanted to hear. Because deep in my heart I believed them: ur had become a grotesquerie, and the most grotesque part about it was that we who lived there couldn’t see it. A blot on the landscape, is that what you think we’ve become, I said, and the government and the shire are trying to remove all traces of us with a tip…? Did I say that? said Alex: I didn’t say that, it’s just an expression, that’s all. But you’re right, I said, I believe it too. Have you got any idea what the new eastern suburbs must look like by now, compared to this?—and with a sweep of my hand I gestured towards the collection of houses behind us, strange and spectral in the moonlight. It breaks my heart to think about it. Look at it: a barren, childless place—it’s five years now since the last kid left. We’ve got no school, no playground, no park; ride your bike in the street and you’d be eaten by the dogs. There can never be children here, and without children, a new generation in which to pour all our hopes and dreams, the rot in ur’s heart will eat it away. We’ve become grotesque. Look at your mother: I don’t mean to sound cruel but anywhere else, a shopping mall in the east, a stall at a school fête, it would be the most natural and most beautiful thing in the world—an old lady selling flowers—but here it’s monstrous, absurd. She’s barely sold twenty bunches since the estate began; they sit in her buckets till the petals go brown then end up on the compost heap with all the rest. Look at this, here, now: I’m talking to you, a tip attendant, with a stinking pile of rubbish outside, barely two hundred metres from my house, which with the sewage outfall at the best of times stinks like an open sewer. And has anyone done anything about it aside from using the sludge to grow vegetables, which—I don’t know if you’ve noticed—are now going to seed in the paddock behind us, unpicked…?

  Alex was nodding off, a day’s work done and three bottles of beer under his belt; he tried to open his eyes to me but they just rolled back in his head and the lids fell slowly over them. I slept there that night, with a blanket on the floor, and only woke late the following morning at the sound of the rubbish truck dumping its load. Alex was up and I stood in the doorway and watched him talking to the driver in the cabin, his foot propped up on the step, a cigarette hanging from his lip. There was the foul taste of a hangover in my mouth and my clothes gave off a faint whiff of kerosene. The smell of the newly dumped load of rubbish made me turn away to retch.

  That morning, for the first time in years, I felt the will to go on drain completely from me. My knees seemed to buckle. I sat on the chair outside Alex’s door and watched, as if dreaming, while the truck drove away and Alex climbed up into the seat of the bulldozer and started it up with a splutter and a puff of black smoke. I called out to him—I’m off now!—but he had a pair of earmuffs clamped to his head. He turned the dozer around and began spreading the pile of rubbish.

  As I cut across the paddocks towards home I saw Vito in the garden, making his way along a row of yellowing Brussels sprouts. I waved to him, and he to me. By the time I reached my front door I was retching uncontrollably again.

  seven

  Two weeks later the vandals arrived. Michael was in bed. They started up Alex’s bulldozer in the middle of the night, drove it down the access road and through the eastern gate straight into the front wall of Slug’s, where they helped themselves to the spirits from the shelves and a small amount of cash from the drawer. Dave was already sweeping up the splinters of glass from the footpath when Alex came down to retrieve his machine. I pulled him aside and confronted him straight out: Did he or did he not lend the vandals the bulldozer so that they could wreak this havoc? No, said Alex, a little desperately, and he leaned down under the dash and pulled out two stray wires. Look, he said. He touched the wires together and the motor burst into life, forcing the others who had gathered around to jump back in fright. Any young yahoo would know how to do it, Alex shouted above the sound of the engine: do you expect me to sleep in the cabin with a loaded shotgun? Turn it off, I said. Alex did, and the motor idled, coughed, spluttered and died. They’ve broken the gearstick, he said, almost sadly, and wobbled it with his hand: they probably didn’t mean to end up here but just lost control and bailed out. They’ve stolen every bottle we had, Slug chimed in, indignantly, and the takings from the drawer—I think they knew what they were doing. A solemn nodding of heads confirmed it.

  The following day I arranged to meet Michael in an empty house in West Court, well away from the occupied houses and the square. It felt unusually clandestine and was probably unnecessary anyway; the others were busy for most of the day cleaning up the mess at Slug’s. Michael was already waiting for me when I arrived, sitting on the front porch of a house that—like all the others in West Court—had had every window broken, the front door torn from its hinges, and bottles and cans strewn among the waist-high weeds in the garden. We walked inside and sat on the empty lounge-room floor. Flies buzzed in zigzag patterns around the broken light fitting; the smell of stale urine was almost unbearable. I’ve spoken to Alex, Michael, I said, and if I can read between the lines I’m sure he thinks that the rubbish tip is a calculated move to get rid of us. Something has got to be done. Michael nodded, with apparent understanding. It all makes perfect sense, I said, we’ve become an embarrassment, they can’t let us go on. These vandals are not vandals at all—I’m convinced of this now—they are being paid by the shire or the government or both to make our life here untenable and eventually force us out. Michael stared at me for a moment, then turned and looked out the window. And why are you telling me all this, he said: is it because you are in love with my daughter? I blushed, and tried to regain my composure. Michael gave me a devilish grin. Leave it with me, he said.

  Shortly after, as the first of the autumn rains began sweeping in across the paddocks, Michael started building the wall. I had neither the presence of mind nor the wherewithal to stop him. He seconded Alex and his bulldozer (at the point of a gun, as I later discovered) and had him knock down half a dozen empty houses on the edge of South-East Court. He
sorted the good bricks from the rubble, ferried mud for mortar from the creek, and day by day the wall grew higher. It rose on the outer edge of the ring road, with the footpath for a foundation, and one by one over the winter that followed all the houses outside its confines were demolished to provide the bricks. Michael worked every day until the light gave out, often in the drizzling rain, carting mud from the western branch of the creek on a flat-topped barrow made from scraps of wood and an old bicycle wheel and laying bricks with a home-made trowel. A few of the others tried to talk him in—we feared for his health above all—but Michael could not be swayed. The wall eventually rose to thirty courses, over two metres high, and ur was in the end contained exclusively within the confines of the old ring road, its size reduced by more than half. As Alex’s bulldozer bore down on the last house left standing in North Court I resigned myself to the inevitable, packed up my things and moved to a vacant house on the corner of North Street and the square, diagonally opposite Slug’s. Closer to Jodie, I remember thinking, as if that were any consolation.

  As winter drew to a close, Michael topped the wall with a tangle of barbed wire and broken beer bottles and constructed a huge barbed-wire gate to stop up the access road entrance. With the first days of spring Vito began planting his new crop in the square (he’d already dug up all the front lawns of West Street in preparation for his new system of rotation): the last vegetables had been picked from the old farm and it would now be abandoned. ur had become, by a roundabout route, the village it had never been before, and now within the confines of Michael’s wall its security seemed assured. Some of my forebodings diminished; there was still reason to hope. I cleaned out my new house and unpacked my things. But then, like all the lights flickering in all the houses of a vast suburb before the power fails, there followed a series of otherwise unrelated events that could only be read as premonitory signs of the great upheaval to come.

  Slug left, just like that, without so much as a word. Dave opened the bar one morning to find a note stuck to the fridge: for two days the bar remained closed and the eerie sense that something was wrong hung about the square. On the third day, when Dave re-emerged, he was a shadow of his former self. It was Craig who finally extracted the news from him. Slug had gone back to Melbourne and his former wife to revive his real estate business. The note to Dave was like a bill of divorce, concerned mostly, it seemed, with assuring him that the bar would be his and that he, Slug, would make no future claim on either the property or the business. He hoped this would ensure that the parting was an amicable one and wished him all the best for the future. The bar was eventually reopened but not before all trace of Slug’s influence had been wiped away—from that day on he became ur’s much-needed bête noir. The old sign was taken down and a new one—Dave’s—put up in its place; the padlocks were removed from the fridges and the beer came out again. Dave had aged—Slug’s departure had aged him all the more—but his spirit had not been broken. He again threw himself into the daily tasks of brewing, bottling and serving like a man who wants no time to think.

  Late one afternoon around this time a herd of cows wandered in off the paddocks through the open gate and stood around dreamily chewing their cud in the square. Like a harbinger, I thought, when I saw them that day. They were quickly chased away by Vito and no great damage was done, but it was an irony not lost on us that this kind of thing had never happened before: it was as if the very presence of the wall had encouraged the incursion. The gate was bolted behind them again but every day they gathered outside, a brave few sometimes lurching forward and pushing themselves against the wire. (There is nothing so disconcerting in my memory as the eyes of those thirty-odd cows staring at us from the other side of the gate as we picked the first new crop in the square that summer; I hope I can one day erase it forever.) Then, early one morning a few days later, the final presentiment. Craig excused himself from that morning’s picking with ‘business to attend to’ and drove the car off down the access road, honking the horn excitedly at Alex as he passed. He came back two hours later from the airport with Marie-Claire. She was a plumpish girl, a good deal younger than Craig (who I think was about thirty at the time) and spoke barely a word of English. Don’t worry, Craig said, as we gathered in the square, she already felt perfectly at home. She’d seen the sign out on the access road: ur. Her parents, he explained, had come from a village of the same name in the Pyrenees, near the border with Spain; she felt as if, by the long way round, she’d returned to her childhood home. Though still a little dumbfounded (surely it was time to go, not come), that evening we all gathered at Dave’s to celebrate her arrival. Vito produced a bottle of red wine that, as he said, had been gathering dust under his house for the past decade, and ceremoniously uncorked it; he raised a toast in Italian, Marie-Claire responded in French, and through the long and drunken night that followed Craig acted as tireless interpreter in the strangest series of conversations the old bar had ever witnessed. I stood a little outside all this, slumped in the corner, a dispassionate observer. Why had I stayed? Through the long cold winter of the wall, the lonely nights in the new North Street house, without producing a single copy of The Voice? Aside from Jodie and the hopes I had for us, what was there left for me here? I watched the frivolity surrounding Marie-Claire’s arrival as one who is already drifting away.

  Two days later Craig, Marie-Claire and I drove into town: she wanted to call her parents to tell them she’d arrived safely; I had business at the bank. I was withdrawing the money from the ur account—the accumulated monthly subsidies that the government had been paying us—and closing it for good. This, I believed, and the conversation I would have with Jodie when I returned, were all that now stood between this intolerable present and the new future I had planned. I left Craig and Marie-Claire at the phone box and walked up the main street to the bank—but when I got to the window they told me that no such account existed. I argued with them—It must exist, I said, I opened it myself—but they held their ground. I turned and walked out empty-handed into the street. Craig and Marie-Claire were still in the phone box, Marie-Claire stooped forward with the receiver to one ear and her hand pressed tightly against the other. I stood at the car and leaned on the bonnet. Now? I heard myself saying: go now? Craig held one finger up and pointed at his watch. I slipped into the front seat and waited.

  When we arrived back in ur all was chaos. Vito greeted us at the gate with panic in his eyes. We’ve had a visitor, he said, Michael’s holding him at his house. We drove through the open gate to Michael’s house on South Street where Jodie, Dave and Nanna were gathered outside on the lawn. There was almost a party atmosphere: Dave had brought a table and some chairs from the café and empty bottles lay scattered on the grass. Had we been in town that long? The small crowd fell silent as I strode towards the front door, conscious above all of Jodie’s eyes upon me and of assuming an authoritative air. The flyscreen door banged shut behind me.

  In the lounge room a stranger was sitting in an armchair with one leg propped up on the coffee table. Opposite him, in another armchair, sat Michael. The blinds were partly drawn and, though it was already a stinking summer’s afternoon outside, the room was dark and cool. I nodded to Michael and looked at the stranger, whose brow was wet with perspiration: he kept lifting a handkerchief to his face and wiping it away. The man was forty-odd, with slightly receding hair. He was dressed in a suit and tie—though the collar had been loosened—and I could see a black briefcase on the floor beside him. I was waiting for you to get back before we went any further, said Michael: pull up a chair. I brought a chair from the kitchen where Dave peered in through the window at me with a questioning look. I gestured to him as if to say: Be patient, we’ll just have to wait and see. When I returned to the lounge room, with my eyes now better accustomed to the dark inside the house, I noticed for the first time why the stranger’s leg was propped up on the coffee table. His sock and shoe were gone, the trouser leg was rolled up to the knee and a packet of frozen peas was
moulded onto the ankle. The bruise was already coming out. Michael caught my eye and by way of explanation said: He tripped. I drew up my chair. This is Layland, said Michael: he’s on an errand from the city. Layland, Bram, our resident intellectual. The tone of voice was so sinister—I’d never heard anything like it from Michael before—that Layland could only manage a half-smile in response before raising the handkerchief to his brow again. Layland says we should have received a letter, Bram, said Michael: do you know anything about that? A letter? No, I said, where’s a letter going to come from, the sky? We haven’t seen a postman here in over a decade. Layland was not amused. I don’t know anything about that, he said, if the letter hasn’t arrived that’s not my fault. It should have, that’s all. It was sent, I saw it sent myself. But the point is—as I’ve tried to explain to Michael here—that I was sent here to go over the details of this letter and help you in any way I can. Now, if the letter hasn’t arrived, all right, there’s really no point in my being here, is there? I will go back to the office, tell them the letter hasn’t arrived and if necessary come back in a week’s time when it has. It’s no skin off my nose. I’m only here to help. So he’s serious, I thought, they have sent a letter—but what postman in his right mind would have braved the wall and the barbed-wire gate to deliver it? Quite honestly, I said, I don’t see the point in waiting for a letter that will probably never arrive anyway. And if you’ve come to explain the details of this letter then you must know its contents. I can’t see why you can’t just give us the news yourself. He already has, Michael interrupted. I already have, Layland echoed, against my better judgment and, I might add, under duress. I looked at Michael; he looked away. And on a point of principle, continued Layland, I’m not going to repeat it. It was completely outside my brief to break the news to you in the first place—I was sent here to go over the details, that’s all. He was raising his voice now, and perspiring badly. Michael softly grabbed my arm and ushered me out into the hallway; Layland slumped back into the armchair, looked at his ankle and winced.