North Coast Town:
|
Late Ferry: |
Out beside the highway, first thing in the morning,
nothing much in my pockets but sand from the beach. A Shell station (eith their Men's locked) a closed hamburger stand. I washed at a tap down beside the changing sheds, stepping about on mud. Through the wall smell of the vandels' lavatory, and an automatic chill flushing in the urinal. Eat a floury apple, and stand about. At this kerb sand crawls by, and palm fronds here scrape dryky. Car after car now - it's like a boxer warming-up with the heavy bag, spitting air. A car slows and I chase it. Two hoods going shooting. Tattoos and greasy fifties pompadour. Rev in High Street, drop their first can. Plastic pennants on the distilled morning, everywhere; a dog trotting and someone hoses down a pavement; our image flaps in shop fronts; smoking on past the pink 'Tropicana' motel (stucco, with sea shells); the RSL, like a fancy-dress Inca; the 'Corination', a warehouse picture show. We pass bulldozed acres. The place is becoming chrome, tile-facing, and plate-glass: they're making California. Pass an Abo, not attempting to hitch, outside town. Journey: The North Coast: |
The late ferry is leaving now;
I stay to watch from the balcony, as it goes up onto the huge dark harbour, out beyond that narrow wood jetty; the palm tree tops make a sound like touches of the brush on a snare drum in the windy night. Going beyond street lights' fluorescence over the dark water, a ceaseless activity, like chromosomes uniting and dividing. And out beyond the tomato stake patch of the yachts, with their orange lights; leaving this tuberous small bay, for the city across an empty dark. There, neon redness trembles down in the water as if into ice, and the longer white lights feel nervously about in the blackness, towards here, like hands after the light switch. Flames and Dangling Wires: |
Next thing, I wake up in a swaying bunk.
as though on board a clipper lying in the sea, and it’s the train, that booms and cracks, it tears the wind apart. Now the man’s gone who had the bunk below me. I swing out, cover his bed and rattle up the sash-- there’s sunlight rotating off the drab carpet. And the water sways solidly in its silver basin, so cold it joins together through my hand. I see from where I’m bent One of those bright crockery days that belong to so much I remember. The train’s shadow, like a bird’s, flees on the blue and silver paddocks, over fences that look split from stone, and banks of fern, a red clay bank, full of roots, over a dark creek, with logs and leaves suspended, and blackened tree trunks. Down these slopes move, as a nude descends a staircase, slender white gum trees, and now the country bursts open on the sea-- across a calico beach, unfurling; strewn with flakes of light that make the whole compartment whirl. Shuttering shadows. I rise into the mirror rested. I’ll leave my hair ruffled a bit that way—fold the pyjamas, stow the book and wash bag. Everything done, press down the latches into the case, that for twelve months I’ve watched standing out of a morning, above the wardrobe in a furnished room. |
On a highway over the marshland.
Off to one side, the smoke of different fires in a row, like fingers spread and dragged to smudge: it is an always-burning dump. Behind us, the city driven like stakes into the earth. A waterbird lifts above this swamp as a turtle moves on the Galapogas shore. We turn off down a gravel road, approaching the dump. All the air wobbles in some cheap mirror There is fog over the hot sune. Now the distant buildings are stencilled in the smoke. And we come to a landscape of tin cans, of cars like skulls, that is rolling in its sand dune shapes. Amongst these cast grey plastic sheets of heat, shadowy figures who seem engaged in identifying the dead - they are the attendants, in overalls and goggles, forking over rubbish on the dampened fires. A sour smoke is hauled out everywhere, thin, like rope. And there are others moving - scavengers. As in hell the devils might pick about through our souls, for vestiges of appetite with which to stimulate themselves, so these figures seem to wander, disconsolate, with an eternity in which to turn up some perculiar sensation. We get out and move about also. The smell is huge, blasting the mouth dry: the tons of rotten newspaper, and great cuds of cloth..... And standing where i see the mrage of the city I realize I am in the future. This is how it sall be after man have gone. It will be made of things that worked. A labourer hoists an unidentifiable mulch on his fork, throws it in the flame: something flaps like the rag held up in 'The Raft of the Medusa'. We approach another, through the smoke, and for a moment he seems that demon with the long barge pole. - It is a man, wiping his eyes. Someone who worked here would have to weep, and so we speak. The rims beneath his eyes are wet as an oyster, and red. Knowing all that he does about us, how can he avoid a hatred of men? Going on, I notice an old radio, that spills its dangling wire - and i realize that somewhere the voices it recieved are still travelling, skidding away riddles around the arc of the universe; and with them, the horse-laughs, and the Chopin which was the sound of the curtains lifting, one time, to coast of light. |
The Meat Works:Most of them worked around the slaughtering
out the back, where concrete gutters crawled off heavily, and the hot, fertilizer-thick, sticky stench of blood sent flies mad, but I settled for one of the lowest-paid jobs, making mince right the furthest end from those bellowing, sloppy yards. Outside, the pigs’ fear made them mount one another at the last minute. I stood all day by a shaking metal box that had a chute in, and a spout, snatching steaks from a bin they kept refilling pushing them through arm-thick corkscrews, grinding around inside it, meat or not - chomping, bloody mouth - using a greasy stick shaped into a penis. When I grabbed it the first time it slipped, slippery as soap, out of my hand, in the machine that gnawed it hysterically a few moments louder and louder, then, shuddering, stopped; fused every light in the shop. Too soon to sack me - it was the first thing I’d done. For a while, I had to lug gutted pigs white as swedes and with straight stick tails to the ice rooms, hang them by the hooves on hooks – their dripping solidified like candle-wax – or pack a long intestine with sausage meat. We got to take meat home - bags of blood; red plastic with the fat showing through. We’d wash, then out on the blue metal towards town; but after sticking your hands all day in snail-sheened flesh, you found, around the nails, there was still blood. I usually didn’t take the meat. I’d walk home on the shiny, white-bruising beach, in mauve light, past the town. The beach, and those startling, storm-cloud mountains, high beyond the furthest fibro houses, I’d come to be with. (The only work was at this Works.) – My wife carried her sandals, in the sand and beach grass, to meet me. I’d scoop up shell-grit and scrub my hands, treading about through the icy ledges of the surf as she came along. We said that working with meat was like burning-off the live bush and fertilizing with rottenness, for this frail green money. There was a flaw to the analogy you felt, but one I didn’t look at, then - |
Diptych:1
My mother told me how one night, as would often happen, she'd stayed awake in our weatherboard house, at the end of a dark, leaf- mulched drive, waiting for my father, after the pubs had closed, knowing he would have to walk miles, “in his state”, if no one dropped him home (since, long before this, he had driven his own car off a mountain-side, and, becoming legend, had rode on the knocked-down banana palms of a plantation, right to the foot, and someone’s door, the car reared high on a great raft of mutilated, sap-oozing fibre; from which he’d climbed down, unharmed, his most soberly polite, and never driven again). This other night, my mother was reluctant to go out, and leave us kids asleep, and fell asleep herself, clothed, on the unopened bed, but leapt upright, sometime later, with the foulest taste – glimpsed at once he was still not there – and rushed out, gagging, to find that, asleep, she’d bitten off the tail of a small lizard, dragged through her lips. That bitterness (I used to imagine), running onto the verandah to spit, and standing there, spat dry, seeing across the silent, frosty bush the distant lights of town had died. And yet my mother never ceased from what philosophers invoke, from “extending care”, though, she’d only ever read the Women’s Weekly, and although she could be “damned impossible” through a few-meal times, of course. This care for things, I see, was her one real companion in those years. It was as though there were two of her, an harassed person, and a calm, that saw what needed to be done, and seemed to step through her, again. Her care you could watch reappear like the edge of tidal water in salt flats, about everything. It was this made her drive out the neighbour’s bull from our garden with a broom, when she saw it trample her seedlings – back, step by step, she forced it, through the broken fence, it bellowing and hooking either side sharply at her all the way, and I five years old on the back steps calling “Let it have a few old bloody flowers, Mum.” No. She locked the broom handle straight-armed across its nose and was pushed right back herself, quickly across theyard. She ducked behind some tomato stakes, and beat it with the handle, all over that deep hollowness of the muzzle, poked with the millet at its eyes, and had her way, drove it out bellowing; while I, in torment, stood slapping into the steps, the rail, with an ironing cord, or suddenly rushed down there, and was quelled also, repelled to the bottom step, barracking. And all, I saw, for those flimsy leaves she fell to at once, small as mouse prints, amongst the chopped-up loam. 2 Whereas, my father only seemed to care that he would never appear a drunkard while ever his shoes were clean. A drunkard he would define as someone who had forgotten the mannerisms of a gentleman. The gentleman, after all, is only known, only exists, through manner. He himself had the most perfect manners, of a kind. I can imagine no one with a manner more easily, and coolly, precise. With him, manner had subsumed all of feeling. To brush and dent the hat which one would doff, or to look about, over each of us, and then unfold a napkin to allow the meal, in that town where probably all of the men sat to eat of a hot evening without a shirt, was his passion. After all, he was a university man (although ungraduated), something more rare then. My father, I see, was hopelessly melancholic – the position of those wary small eyes, and thin lips, on the long-boned face proclaimed the bitterness of every pleasure, except those of form. He often drank alone at the RSL club, and had been known to wear a carefully – considered tie to get drunk in the sandhills, watching the sea. When he was ill and was at home at night, I would look into his bedroom, at one end of a gauzed verandah, from around the door and a little behind him, and see his frighteningly high-domed skull under the lamp- light, as he read in a curdle of cigarette smoke. Light shone through wire mesh onto the packed hydrandea- heads, and on the great ragged mass of insects, like bees over a comb, that crawled tethered and ignored right beside him. He seemed content, at these times, as though he’d done all could to himself, and had been forced, objectively, to give up. He like his bland ulcer-patient food and the big heap of library books I had brought. (My instructions were: “Nothing whingeing. Nothing by New York Jews; nothing by women, especially the French; nothing translated from the Russian.”) And yet, the only time I actually heard he say that he’d enjoyed anything was when he spoke of the bush, once. “Up in those hills,” he advised me, pointing around, “when the sun is coming out of the sea, standing amongst that tall timber, you can feel at peace.” I was impressed. He asked me, another time, that when he died I should take his ashes somewhere, and not put him with the locals, in the cemetery. I went up to one of the hills he had named years earlier, at the time of the day he had spoken of, when the half-risen sun was as strongly-spiked as that one on his Infantry badge, and I scattered him there utterly reduced at last, amongst the wet, breeze-woven grass. For all his callousness to my mother, I had long accepted him. After all, he’d given, or shown me, the best advice, and had left me alone. And I’d come by then to think that all of us are pathetic. Opening his plastic, brick-sized box, that morning, my pocket-knife slid sideways and pierced my hand – and so I dug with that one into his ashes, which I found were like a mauvish-grey marble dust, and felt that I needn’t think of anything else to say. |