Gindarra 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 bearing many
similarities to the one I’m sitting in right now, and that the ovals weren’t
ovals anymore but rectangles, with H-shaped goals at either end.
We had a problem with the leaf spring suspension on the left wheel
of our trailer. Namely, the steel was about to snap in half. And the mud flaps
were loose, slapping against the tyres like the bits of cardboard put-putting
in a kid’s bicycle spokes. The rear axle was also fucked: at low speed it
sounded like the inexorable pressure of the load we carried in combination with
the thousands of kilometres we’d driven had wrenched the tyres too far forward,
so that now they were rubbing against the wheel arches. I couldn’t see any
smoke but the stink of burnt rubber found its way into the cabin. The trailer
was moving like a boar with an arrow through its side, in torrid wobbles, with
that conjunction of last-ditch intensity and ultimate fatigue. I half expected
the rear axle to break away any minute and smash into the windscreen of the car
behind us, and for us to keep driving for a time in a panic and a blaze of
sparks.
Then we reached Gindarra, population 1763, birthplace of George
Kenniworth, the three-time Olympian. The sport he competed in had been left off
the sign. First to welcome us were the houses, squat and selfsame weatherboard
bungalows with horse floats in the driveways, burnt-out cars and other scrap
metal strewn around the front yards. Some had very symmetrical gardens,
threadbare but pretty. Some had no garden at all but a lot of lawn ornaments,
including one place with a flock of twenty terracotta sheep and their shepherd,
which I took to be Jesus. We drove down the main street – replete with Target
Country and a few bakeries – in the middle of which was a memorial park with a
fountain and a barbecue and a block of toilets, and then we crossed a bridge
over a river; I don’t recall the name of either. To people from the city, I
thought to myself, all country towns were essentially caricatures of the same
thing – the past, queer and distant and unfathomable.
·
There was a little sunlight left. Some blokes were fishing on the
banks beside it, and they had a decent 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. We were on our way to an electronic music festival in Far North
Queensland, or FNQ as the publican here calls it. 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
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; I was told that neither of these was abnormal.
The strong smell of motor oil and coolant made me feel like a man. 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.
Then Dharman asked me to head towards the trees and find a big piece of
wood – I wasn’t sure why, even after he’d tried to explain it to me. I started
to walk along a narrow dirt byroad towards the river. I was barefoot and there
were a few prickles, and the sun was nearly gone, and even trucks, normally
omnipresent, had deserted the Newell at that moment. The amber streetlight on
the bridge was the only one for ages. Oddly, not a trace of the fishermen’s
campfire could be seen. Even the town, Gindarra, on the other side of the
river, was just a bit of vague tracery in the blackening grey.
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 Newell. Pete and
Stuart were eating something out of a can. I could see the silver surface of
the river now and the forked deadwood sticking out of it. I could see that the
river was shallow and moribund, that the drought would probably unmake it
before the decade was out, turn it into a place to pitch a swag, a track for
bushwalkers, still blue on their big topographic maps, dotted with boar
wallows. Then the rains would come and make it again: I thought that rebirths
of waterways warranted new names because bad omens had been tacked to the old
ones.
At my feet there was a long, solid shadow that looked like a log.
After bending down and grabbing it with a certain excitement 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 strings,
and jewels. I could see the curvature of her arse in the flickers, the way it
melted into her hamstrings so lithely, her dark pleated skirt hiking right up.
She made no effort to lower it. She thought she was alone. In a way she was. She
must’ve been wearing tiny underpants or no underpants at all for her arse to be
visible like that; looking now at the arse of the girl behind the bar I think
that country girls wear tiny underwear all the time so as to emulate city
girls, except that they do so in error. They suffer, I suppose, in error.
Her face was so perfect as to be almost waxen and her dark hair was
like water. The eucalyptus 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. They were staring directly into mine, as if she’d
known I was there from the outset. I was on the verge of calling out. Then the
flames started to grow and the girl turned and ran into the darkness, which
took her as quickly as if she’d dropped off the edge of the earth.
·
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 getting regular sleep. Despite the felt Akubra flying off
his head midstride, he seemed to be at me and asking excited questions faster
than I could take a breath.
There was more smoke than fire. The underbrush was twiggy as I think
I mentioned – and barky, and the eucalyptus trees weren’t in any danger just
yet. People are prepared to tolerate such a copious amount of smoke, aren’t
they, in exchange for the succor of a pissy fire on their cold bones, 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 burgeoning bushfire to
notice.
That’s when I started to think about the girls. Some were watering
houseplants of myriad variety and in myriad houses, others were standing in
line for groceries, some were sitting with their seatbelts buckled in aeroplane
cabins, some were blowing up balloons, others were so close to me that out
noses would’ve touched, others were on the toilet, some were dancing, others
were the possessors of noses I’d touched in real life, some were in
straitjackets, some were kindergartners playing with toy animals, but most,
most of the girls were protagonists in scenes so fucked up that I felt like mangling
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.
Stuart announced that the flames could only spread so far because
there was a parking lot between Gindarra’s buildings and the river, and the
night was dead still, that at worst a few trees were going to burn. I breathed
hard and could hear my pulse and smell: two or three different kinds of men’s
deodorant, wood smoke, animal shit, canned tuna, eucalyptus.
·
What seemed like the entire population of the greater region had
gathered in the parking lot. The nearby scout hall’s outside lights were turned
on; soon they were swarming with moths. 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 sirens blazing 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 Gindarra,
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 entyre 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 Gindarra.
All the children seemed to be enjoying it though. We were getting strange, not
to say menacing, looks from certain folk.
I thought differently now about the bareness of the big tracts of
earth by the Newell. I could see 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 the water
pressure rise. 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
total eclipse started to kick in. When we all rip our hands away, said Pete, we
have to say rules is rules.
I saw her. She was behind a very overweight family of four, holding
an old woman’s hand. The old woman looked a lot like Margaret Atwood. Maybe her
clothes were different, maybe they weren’t. 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’s 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.
·
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 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. Why? I don’t really know. And besides, 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 on the bitumen and
was lying flat on its side, I thought at first that the scream had been animal.
I knew that Steele, or something very much like it, was the horse’s
name because the cop who’d been riding him was wailing that word over and over
like a crazy person, and he had sinews of spit hanging from his mouth, and each
iteration he loosed seemed to overlap the previous and be overlapped by the
next. Had there not been the odd different word or two to interpose them all those
Steeles would’ve sounded like a single breathless howl that was identical to
the reaction of the voice box to terrible physical pain, to torture. The horse
was pronounced dead after a horse doctor I heard somebody call Mick had checked
a few vitals. Then the cop began to thrash around and beat the bitumen with his
fists. Then he quieted right down and flung himself on Steele, then he beat the
bitumen again and was screaming again. Eventually things got so bad that the
other cop, the one who’d addressed the townspeople, was forced to restrain his
partner in much the same way as if he’d just apprehended a crook. Even with his
full bodyweight at his knees, plied into the small of the mourner’s back, he
could hardly keep him down.
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 furry ant
hills of them, and to my right I can see the rusted razor wire and excavated
ridge of an open-cut coal mine long-since shut down. Looking at that mine, I
picture the poor bloke clinging by his fingertips to the lip of it, a pit not
filled with foam or even with nothing, as the mine is, and as most pits inside
us seem to be, but with snakes, a pit swarming with snakes that he’d been
trying in secret to wrench himself away from but that the death of his horse
had cast him spectacularly into.
Probably the effect on Gindarra will be just as deep, just as inerasable. There are people who, because
of position or general temperament, aren't expected to break, and when those people finally break into smithereens,
everybody around them feels all the more fragile, maybe even wonders why they
haven't broken yet, maybe even spends more time searching, waiting for the cracks
in their own veneer to show, and veneer is absolutely the right word for it. Even
the firemen had stopped to watch. Smoke from the fire they’d just quelled cast
an abject pall over everything. The whole of Gindarra had gone quiet and looked
to me like a pack of wretches lost in a haze. 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.
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