We’ve arrived at Mount Carbine and don’t want to drive any further.
We’ve been driving for four days. Dharman says that if we were hypothetically
to take the Peninsula Development all the way to Cooktown, to the very top of
the cape, there would be another three solid days of road left. Solid days of
slick shifting dirt road, that is – the road here is still bitumen. Bitumen’s
better for mirages, isn't it? Makes them look clearer, wetter. Like iridescent
parachute pants moonwalking away, on the polished floor of a room that’s narrow
and empty and endless.
We won’t drive far enough North to hit the dirt and that’s all
right. That’s more than all right.
Anyway, for now we aren’t in a hurry to drive anywhere, or do anything
except sit and drink beer, which I’m not enjoying much either. It’s almost
forty degrees and you can feel every single one of them. There’s water left in
some of the creeks running under the road; the vegetation around the dry creeks
is green and abundant enough to suggest that there was water in those ones too,
not so long ago. There are two dead kangaroos in my field of vision, little
mucked up ones with burnished eyes, on the road at either side of this
township, Mount Carbine as I’ve already said, which is really just a couple of
houses, circumscribed by wooden verandahs, built around the pub I’m currently
sitting at, the whole lot situated at a pretty remarkable point in the
biosphere at which the Daintree gives over to the red termite-ridden barrenness
of the inland cattle stations. People miss those transitional points in the
Australian landscape, the ones that for four days have stirred me like the
beating of some gargantuan drums or something, quite simply because they are
few and far between and there is subsequently fuck all reason to be anywhere
near them. I also see a place called Mount Carbine Preserves that purportedly
sells jars and paraffin wax, but it looks closed, maybe abandoned.
An illusion: the rainforest mountains seem far closer to us than the
GPS says they are, looming in front of the horizon as though bent forwards. But
the tropical air – cloyed with sugarcane and banana and mango and the sea – we
breathed in so giddily yesterday is long gone. What has replaced it is dry and
hard to describe and equally hard to inhale. Across from where I’m sitting – on
the verandah of the pub – there is a wooden fence painted green and then the road
and then a fucking enormous tract of copper desert and then the mountains, the
loveliest I think I’ve ever laid eyes on, even lovelier than the Rockies or the
Andes that make brushy ant hills of them, and to my right I can see the
excavated ridge, like the lip of a fancy salad bowl, of a decommissioned
open-cut coal mine.
The XXXX beer beside this notebook is probably warm by now. The boys
have gone inside where they serve counter meals and have a lot of
seventies-style ceiling fans going. But I hate the feeling of fanned hot air
more than I hate the hot air itself and so I have stayed out here. I’m not
hungry. The total absence of wind out here is almost disconcerting, but isn’t.
Trash spills from a wheelie bin resting against the lamppost our Landcruiser is
parked next to. What I know as stink bugs teem like a greenish shadow around
the trash. Then Dean blusters through the green plastic ribbons in the doorway
of the pub and looks at me. Then he looks at my notebook. Then he blusters back
through the ribbons; I think some were hanging onto him the whole time. I think
he was coming to ask what I was doing. He looked drunk, which I’m happy about
because I like it when the boys get drunk, especially Dean. It’s somewhere
between three and five o’clock in the afternoon. I notice that the sliding
door, also painted green, has come off its thread and is basically leaning
against the weatherboard side of the pub like rubbish awaiting the arrival of a
skip; maybe the pub never closes.
I’m going to use this stopover to tell the story of a single
incident that has happened to us on the road and that strikes me in this first
moment of proper contemplation as being special. Maybe it’s cowardly occlusion
to say so, or fatigue, or self-sabotage, but I reckon that this will be the
only writing I do until I get back to Melbourne. I’ve never set down anything
like that before. I’ve also never kept a travelogue and finally understand why:
writing about experiences inevitably eats into and therefore detracts from the time
for experiencing them. Now the publican is on the veranda and I’m looking at
her deferentially, as if she were a kind of outback goddess. She could be the
girl’s mother…but I’ll get to her later. The publican’s hair is dyed blonde,
she has on faded blue jeans and high heels, and is either an old-looking forty
or a youthful fifty. For a moment the callous thought of wheedling my way into
her heart so as to steal all her money lights up my imagination. Worse, I think
that depending on the circumstances I might be capable of fraud by love, the
worst kind of fraud, because the prospect of it doesn’t seem to bother me at
all. Then I think about what the publican’s armpits look like and how they
smell, which does bother me.
She asks me how I am. Good, I tell her. She asks me if I’m finished
with my beer. Yes, I tell her. When she asks me if I’d like another beer, I
tell her no. As she is walking towards the ribbons and I’m paying vague and unfeeling
attention to the way her arse moves, I picture those hundred millilitres of
flat beer drizzling down the drain very clearly all of a sudden, very clearly
and very affectingly; the feeling it arouses is closer to disgust than fear,
but not much closer. My skin catches the sunshine and I shiver. Then the green
ribbons go still and I shake my head, mime something I instantly forget, and
turn back to my notebook.
·
Gilgandra is either at the top of New South Wales or the bottom of
Queensland. I don’t remember exactly where it is and have no phone reception to
check. As a Victorian, it’s all the same to me. What’s for certain is that
there were XXXX signs on the pub, a very beautiful old pub, and that the ovals
weren’t ovals anymore but rectangles, with rugby goals at either end.
We were having problems with the leaf spring suspension on the left
wheel of our trailer. And the axle was fucked. And the mud flaps were shredded.
In short, the trailer was all at sea. At low speed it sounded like the tires
were rubbing against the checker plate; it was trailing so wonkily that I half
expected the whole lot to become the problem of the car behind us at any moment.
Driving through Gilgandra, the decision was made to stop and finally do
something about it.
There was a little sunlight left. We crossed a bridge over a river,
the names of which I don’t recall. Some blokes were fishing on the banks beside
it, and they had a large campfire going. On the other side of the bridge there
was a stretch of road that seemed as good as any to pull over on, and so we did
and then all of us got out. By ‘we’ I mean Pete, Stuart, Dharman, Sean and me.
Next to the road was a big expanse of nothing, naked earth, grassless and
weedless, which slowly gave over to a few shrubs and trees closer to the river.
My being out of the Landcruiser at all was almost symbolic: I knew
absolutely fuck all about cars, let alone trailers. I didn’t really know much
about anything, besides books that was. But still I stood with my arms and legs
crossed and nodded whenever Pete or Dharman – who by then was underneath the
trailer bashing the axle forward with a sledge hammer – said something about
what was wrong or how they planned to fix it. There was heat and a simmering
sound coming from the engine; neither of these was abnormal. The strong smell
of motor oil and coolant wasn’t bad. Then Dharman asked me to get the jack out
of the checker plate box on the front of the trailer. I got it and handed it to
him like I knew how to use one. Then Dharman asked me to head towards the trees and find a
big piece of wood – I wasn’t sure why.
I started to walk along a narrow byroad towards the river. I was
barefoot and there were a few prickles, and the sun had gone down completely, and
even trucks, usually tireless, had deserted the Newell. The amber light on the bridge was the
only beacon for ages; relative to the darkness it looked brighter than it
actually was and I still had a lucid enough recollection of bright lights to
know the truth. Oddly, not a trace of the fishermen’s campfire could be seen.
Even the town, Gilgandra, which I began to see on the other side of the river,
was nothing but a craggy silhouette.
Except for immovably big branches on the eucalyptus trees, I soon discovered
that there wasn’t any wood that was of use to us. There were a lot of twigs,
but they wouldn’t do; I even asked Dharman across the plain and he yelled back
no, they’re useless. When looking back towards Dharman I was surprised at how far
the river had ended up being from the Landcruiser, the Newell. It must’ve been
a trick of the night. I could see the silver surface of the river and the
forked deadwood sticking out of it. I could see that the river was shallow and
weather-beaten, that the drought would probably unmake it before the decade was
out, turn it into a place to pitch a swag, a dependable track for bushwalkers,
still blue on their big topographic maps, a wallow for wild boars. Then the
rains would come and make it again: I thought that rebirths of waterways
warranted new names because bad omens had been made of the old. At my feet there was a long, solid
object that looked like a log. After bending down and grabbing with a certain
excitement it I found that it was made of cement and wouldn’t budge. I was
pondering the existence of such a strange and seemingly purposeless object when
a light appeared across the river. It was a cigarette lighter, jacked to a
sizeable flame, being held with both hands by the most beautiful girl I’d ever
seen.
·
Her ankles, I saw as I watched her bend down – quite gracelessly,
but a gracelessness that made my dick go hard – were festooned with bow-tied
strings, and jewels. I could see the perfect curvature of her arse in the
flickers, the way it melted into her hamstrings so effortlessly, her pleated
black – or brown or navy – skirt hiking right up. She made no effort to lower
it. She thought she was alone. In a way she was. Her face was so perfect as to
be almost waxen, and her hair was like water. The tree that hid my body now was
the widest along either bank, and, like a professional peeping tom, I’d gone so
still and quiet that I was hardly breathing. I soon saw that the girl had a bag
with her and that she’d crouched down to get something out of it. Then the
flame went out. I heard some indeterminate noises and then nothing. There was
nothing.
Her eyes were what I saw when it came on again, and I jumped in a
sort of shamefaced panic. Her eyes were staring directly into mine, as if she
had been aware of my presence the entire time. At that moment the flames
started to grow and the girl turned and ran into the darkness, which took her
too quickly for me to do anything.
Fire! There’s a fucking fire! I heard from behind me. The words sounded loud and soft at the same time.
·
Pete’s gangly limbs looked out of control in motion. Dharman didn’t
swing his arms. Stuart had a cigarette in his mouth and lagged behind. Sean, a
champion district basketball player before he discovered ice pipes, still ran
like a man who’d been going to sleep; despite the felt Akubra flying off his
head midstride, he seemed to be at me and asking excited questions just a fast
as she’d been at me with her eyes, floating into the foam and snake pits of my
soul, and just as fast as she’d taken off.
There was more smoke than fire; the underbrush was twiggy like I
said – and barky. Meager. I thought about the amount of stinging, reeking,
choking smoke that people were prepared to tolerate in exchange for the succor
of a pissy fire and the beautiful glow of embers. I thought I could feel the
temperature changing, but not necessarily getting warmer. Then the calluses on
the sides of my feet began to bother me; no matter how I stood I was
uncomfortable. And I shifted and slouched and straightened until the idea of
having to engineer a certain stance at all left me strung out, bamboozled
almost. I sat down on the ground. My hands, which were propping me up from
behind, dug shallowly into the earth. The earth was damper than I’d expected,
or would’ve expected, if I’d expected it to be any which way. The boys were too
wrapped up in the fire to notice.
Although she was gone for
the time being, one girl after another was appearing in my head in rapid
succession. Of the parade, some were watering houseplants of myriad variety and
in myriad houses, others were standing in line for groceries, others were sitting
with their seatbelts buckled in aeroplane cabins, others were so close to me
that out noses would’ve touched, others were on the toilet, others were the
possessors of noses I’d touched in real life, others were put with no aid from
my volition into scenes so fucked up that I felt like pitching my head against
the cement log on the ground to make them stop, scenes I won’t even dignify by
describing or thinking too much about, especially while the publican is out
here. The girls were succeeding each other so rapidly that there was a kind of
flipbook singularity to it, and a sense of time accelerating towards something
absolute or at least resolutely towards something unknown. The mind it races was an expression I’d understood only crudely; I understand
it better now. I half expected a red brick wall to appear and to crash straight
into it and wake up hypnic jerking. When I breathed I could hear my pulse and
smell: two or three different kinds of men’s deodorant, wood smoke, animal
shit, canned tuna, eucalyptus.
The flames, we figured, could only spread so far: there was a
parking lot between Gilgandra’s buildings and the river, and the night was dead
still. At worst, a few trees would get overrun and wrecked, trees locals would
point out to people from out of town as the sole survivors of the Big Fire. In
the half hour that followed, what seemed like the entire population of the greater
region poured into the parking lot. It was as big a convergence of people in a
small area as I’d ever seen, I think. Everyone was coughing. Most of the people
were older than fifty and overweight. It was either a Friday or Saturday night.
Then a fire truck arrived and, moments before or after, two policemen on
horseback. I wondered why the police would send the mounted unit instead of a
squad car, and thought that maybe there was no squad car in Gilgandra, but then
trumped that thought with the thought that that was stupid, if there was a
mounted unit then of course there was a fucking squad car.
At a guess we were thirty metres away from the townspeople; we were
also a river and a small bushfire away from them. Ostracised by the rumble of
all those conversations, all the familiar names I could hear being used to
address people I didn’t know, I began to fixate on the policemen’s boots in the
stirrups. The appearances of the cops themselves were of no interest to me
whatsoever. I tried to figure out what brand the boots were and concluded that
it was a Doc Marten knock-off, probably standard issue for both cops and the ADF.
From there I panned out until I could see the whole animals – not the riders,
just the horses. They were the colour of the steam that plumed into the air
after you doused a fire with water, or the pall of steam that hovered over
bubbling green liquids in the science labs of villains in the movies. They
looked twice the age of any other horse in the world. I was looking at them
while chewing the skin off my fingertips when suddenly Sean stood over me and
made a gesture right in my face that was like a tiger clawing and said, I’m
gonna maul you in a minute. And I said, what? And Sean said, get the fuck up,
we’re crossing over to get amongst it.
Walking back over
the bridge, I saw that the fishermen had left. Some coals in their fire were
still weakly aglow. There was a dark object next to the fire that I thought
looked like a fishing bucket. Had they forgotten it? Stuart spat over the side
of the bridge, listening carefully for I don’t know what, the spit landing on
the water possibly, or something else, and then pulled his pants up because
they were too big for him and had fallen down so far that his entire arse was
exposed.
·
Then we were in
the thick of it, and the looks on the townspeople’s faces weren’t what I’d
expected them to be. There was hardly a trace of consternation, still less of
fear. It wasn’t that nobody gave a fuck though, only that the expressions on
display pointed to other feelings, feelings of either annoyance or exasperation
or outright rage, and it struck me that this was probably not the first
incident of its kind to have happened recently in Gilgandra. The kids, and
there weren’t many of them, seemed to be laughing and having a good time; some
of them had even tied their windcheaters over their mouths. We were getting
strange, not to say menacing, looks from certain people.
What must the
riverbanks have looked like in the daylight? I thought differently about the
bareness of the big tracts of earth by the Newell. In my mind I saw huge
territories burning to cinders, helicopters water-bombing woodlands, corrugated
iron roofs melting like caramel, charred photographs, men lying facedown on
grandmotherly beds. We watched the fire crew jump out, watched the hose
unravel, watched as the water pressure went from trickle to torrent. We watched
the motivational huddle: more than one of us said how cool it would be to do
that sort of shit. The decision was made to assume a similar position when the
triple-drop of acid we’d planned for the upcoming night of the total eclipse
started to kick in. When we all rip our hands way, said Pete, we have to say rules is rules.
Behind a very
overweight family of four, I saw her. Maybe her clothes were different than
before, maybe they were the same. She was holding an old woman’s hand. The old
woman looked a lot like Margaret Atwood. Both smiling faces flashed with the
light of the fire sirens. Then one of the cops trotted to the front of the
gathering, just shy of where the firefighters had already more or less
contained the blaze, and everybody fell silent. The fire is under control, said
the cop. He then added, unbelievably slowly as I remember it, that anybody with
information should make themselves known to police right away, that the
offender or offenders had despoiled public land and wasted taxpayer money for
the last time. We’re prepared to impose a curfew if need be, said the cop. If
you don’t want us to be forced to impose curfews on the whole community, if
that’s not something you want on your conscience, then I urge you, if you’ve
got any information at all, to come forward now. A wave of murmurs broke
through the crowd, but quickly died out.
Still holding the
old lady’s hand, she was talking to a group of boys around her age – seventeen
I’d have guessed. For what felt like a long time I stared at her. All the
willpower I had I poured into getting her head to turn towards mine. I wanted
to tell her I knew, but that her secret was safe. I wanted her to tell her to
watch as I marched up to the cops and blamed the fire on those fishermen, which
is what I was about to do. Yeah, as the publican puts a jug of ice water and a
pot glass in front of me, and I thank her more profusely than is necessary, I
can say for sure that I was prepared to finger those poor fucking fishermen for
the crime. And for what? To acquit that girl? Because of a slavish, priestly
devotion to the altar of female loveliness? The story I’ve told, reading over it
now, seems to give that impression. But I don’t know. For some reason I don’t
want to bluntly chalk it down to the fact that I’m a man who likes women and
she was a perfect example of one. I want it to be more than that. And anyway,
the girl never turned and so I turned and saw my mates taking silly photos in
front of the fire truck.
·
I was getting my
photo taken when there was a terrible sound. It was a hard thud and then a
scream, or the same but in reverse order, and when I turned and saw that one of
the police horses had given out the bitumen and was lying flat on its side, I
thought the scream had been animal. But the scream didn’t stop. It was the
policeman, and Steele, the name he continued to shriek like a madman, would
never get up again. A horse doctor whose name was Mick rushed over and after checking
a few vitals he pronounced the horse dead. The other cop was forced to
physically restrain his partner in much the same way as if he’d just
apprehended a crook. It was a bizarre and adrenaline-spiking scene that even
the firemen had stopped to watch. Smoke from the freshly quelled fire cast an
eerie pall over everything. The whole of Gilgandra looked to me like a pack of
wretches, like an army of the damned. In fairness, everyone was sad, everyone
except the girl, who was no longer standing where I’d seen her last and was
therefore, for all intents and purposes, no longer alive either.
·
The home job we
did on the trailer lasted until Mackay. I thought that was pretty impressive,
and so did the bloke who fixed it properly for us. Dharman and Pete should’ve
taken all the credit, since they did all the work, but they told the bloke it
was a team effort. I asked Pete why and all he said back was rules is rules. Earning the respect of
that trailer repairman filled me with a sense of pride that was so alien to me,
and I doubt I’ll ever feel such an edifying and pure sort of pride again. Now Dharman
and Pete are inside the Mount Carbine pub with the ceiling fans and a couple of
locals, already half-cut, and I think it’s high time I bought them a pint or
two to say thanks.
