The Crying Place Read online

  ‘Elaine?’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘I forgot to put my shoes on this morning,’ she said. ‘I went out to get the paper and wondered why my socks were wet. I’ve never done that before.’

  ‘I keep expecting to see him around every corner.’

  Over by the pavilion the bird still circled. It made a sudden cut in its trajectory, a deep swerve, to correct having strayed too far, while out on the water, a dredger sat flat and unmoving, long tubes siphoning the silt beneath the surface.

  ‘We’ll see you at the funeral, then?’ she said, her voice briefly injected with hope.

  ‘Funeral?’

  ‘Yes. On Monday.’

  ‘So soon.’

  ‘Jed …’

  But the word just hung in the space between us, having breached some taboo. Beside me, the photo. Those unflinching eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, but I couldn’t tell her why – even though I already knew that the journey home was one I couldn’t make yet – Port Phillip Bay stretching out towards the strait that divided our island from where I sat, two places once bridged by land.

  ‘We all are,’ she said. ‘But we’re bringing him back.’

  8

  Back at the boarding house, I opened Jed’s CD player to look at the disc. Kulini. The writing was his, the unmistakable backward slant of a southpaw with his own distinct quirk: Ks that looked more like mathematical symbols than letters. The ink was the indelible type, good for writing on plastic, though scratched in sections. Proof that it had been played over and over again.

  On my way out of the Sacred Mission op shop that afternoon I’d run into Terry, a Roy Orbison record tucked under his arm, Only the Lonely sprawled across it in red letters like some kind of plea. We’d chatted for a bit, mostly about music. Finally I’d asked, What did you mean about him being fucked up? Terry explained he’d been quoting the guy staying in the room next to Jed’s. Apparently Jed plays music at night, the same stuff non-stop. It’s been driving the bloke mad. Drove him back to drink, he reckons – like he needed an excuse. At this, Terry had laughed, his rollie stuck and dangling from his bottom lip. One eye had closed as he’d lit up, the other fixed on the large plastic bag slung over my shoulder. Did you find him? he’d asked through a pall of smoke.

  I pushed the play button and watched the CD disappear. There was a whirring sound and for a moment I thought it wouldn’t work, the breeze coming through the window cold now, autumnal, prophetic even. The fizz of white noise filled the room. Then a crackling, followed by someone snorting and the first notes. A guitar. The slide of a finger across a string.

  From the room next door I heard the clink of glass.

  I lay back on the bed. Focused on sounds in the background, behind the music: feet shuffling on a sandy floor, the clearing of a throat, though it sounded like a woman. In my back pocket was the photo. But I didn’t need to look at it – all I had to do was close my eyes and I could see her.

  Nara.

  He’d called me not long after they’d got together. He’d been working in the community for six months, mostly on maintenance and extending the aged care centre, he’d said. Had rung from some office – No mobile reception out here, mate –though we’d been interrupted, by some people coming in, just after he’d said that thing about her being his country. In the background there’d been laughter, plenty of it, and I’d waited for him to speak again, to tell me more about what was going on, but all he’d said was, I’ll have to call you back. He hadn’t, not a single word. Not until about a month ago, when he’d sent me a text from somewhere on the road, explaining he was on his way back down south. But when I’d called him, he was out of range. I tried a couple more times then left it, assuming he’d get in contact once he was back in civilisation. It was the longest we’d ever gone without speaking.

  The music on the CD was joined by a voice, a man’s voice, singing in a language I didn’t understand. I listened for the gaps between the words, as I’d learnt to after so many years of having to decipher what people around me were saying – Urdu, French, Arabic, Tamacheq. But none of these words were familiar. I could hear no common roots. The song shifted into a chorus, the riffs half western, half something else – desert, as if a place had its own refrain. Music could strip you back to nothing, if you let it. Leave you flailing and raw. Was that what it had done to Jed as he’d lain here playing it over and over again, the photo propped on the bed beside him?

  On the bedside table was a map. I’d bought it at the op shop along with an old woollen blanket, a heavy-duty torch and a few other things I thought might come in handy. The woman at the counter had sold me the lot for thirty bucks, though not before she’d tossed in a few questions about where I was heading, her fingers stroking the blanket.

  I unfolded the map on the bed. Smoothed the dog-eared corners. The continent spread out across it, fringed by seas and oceans and straits, a huge yellow patch in the middle surrounded by a scraggly perimeter of green. The previous owner had circled towns that either they’d visited or wanted to, the trail leading up the Queensland coast in a dotted line from Brisbane to the Cape. But there was not a single mark in the centre.

  At the very bottom lay the small triangle of Tasmania. And at the bottom of that, Hobart, straddled halfway down the Derwent that ran out into the great inky expanse of the Southern Ocean. The arse end of the arse end, my father used to joke, everything is up from here, though as a kid I’d always liked the way it just dangled there at the nethermost point of the map on the wall in our toilet, as if an afterthought of an island might avoid the brutality that afflicted the world proper.

  I traced the road from Melbourne to Adelaide and straight up the Stuart Highway – thousands of kilometres traversed in seconds – though, no matter how much I searched the black line of the western border of the Northern Territory, I couldn’t locate any place that sounded like the name Elaine had spoken of. I could’ve just googled it, though in areas like that details were often sparse. Besides, there was something about the physicality of maps that had always appealed to me. The marks and creases. The paper like the surface of skin. Alice Springs was there, the letters stretching out, bold and linear, into the yellow expanse of the Simpson Desert.

  The song grew plaintive, the man’s voice lonely, accompanied only by the occasional plucked string, the squeak of a finger drawn across nylon, the words rendered more haunting by the fact that I couldn’t understand them.

  I sat up. Tried to gain my bearings amid the song’s disorientating strains. Outside, night had fallen over the bay, a salty wind travelling east, competing with the northerly that had brought unseasonably warm weather with it. The curtains lifted. I zipped up my jacket. Spotted a t-shirt lying on the floor that I hadn’t noticed before. It was blue – the same dark turquoise as the oceans on the map.

  I picked it up.

  Brought it to my nose.

  Smelt for apples, as if death itself were an illness, its advent detectable.

  Closed my eyes, and yielded to the music.

  kulini

  listen to; heed; understand; remember; a premonition felt in the body

  Pitjantjatjara language, Western Desert

  9

  In the rear vision the mist was the colour of a city’s waste, though Melbourne was long gone, already sluicing into memory. The road cut through dry grass and hills, everything sepia except in the ravines where some of the scrub was darker, like unkempt pubic hair. A graveyard of cars idled in someone’s mess of a backyard, their obsession exposed and rusting.

  The trip counter read 176. I’d reset it at zero before I’d driven out, leaving the boarding house and the glaring bay behind. In my head, a line from that Harwood poem was still doing the rounds. Had been since I’d woken sprawled face down on Jed’s bed, the photo beside me on the pillow:

  owl-blind in early sun for what I had begun.

  I shoved Portishead into the CD player I’d put in a fe
w years back when the original stereo, cassette only, had packed it in, the player probably worth more than the car. The music started, disquieting as always, reminding me of the long nights I’d spend burning CDs before each departure: randomly selected tunes that quickly became anthems. The Donnie Darko cover of ‘Mad World’. Something Gregorian. Nick Cave’s ‘Into My Arms’.

  Ahead, the Grampians loomed, a blue stretch on the horizon; European in the way they rose quickly above plains shrouded in the kind of dark, preternatural woods that as a kid I’d imagined were the home of wolves and she-bears. Beside me was a newspaper I’d taken from the café with the big couches that looked over the bay. On the front cover was a picture of an old woman, her head bowed, her skin the colour of coal. The story was about Mowanjum, an Aboriginal community in the Kimberley. The headline read: Cry for help as suicides soar.

  How does a man choose where to die?

  Hollow Mountain, my mother had said, though she’d never been there, not as far as I knew. Had never climbed into its looping caves, smooth and honeycombed, the rock like sinews attaching the skin of the mountain to its bones. Had never heard the wind crawl through the gaps like a rumour in your ear.

  I passed a turnoff marked both with the European name of the range as well as the Aboriginal one, Gariwerd, a cluster of plastic flowers bound to it with gaffer tape.

  Hollow Mountain was further to the north, at the tip of the national park, with its gash of an overhang where we imagined the Jardwadjali must have once camped and done ceremony, maybe the place they’d taken boys for initiation. The pocked plateau near its summit with its sudden alluring drop, like the bluff where we’d go as kids to pit ourselves against the elements, the river always waiting below to collect us.

  At the next turnoff to the Grampians the steering wheel pulled towards the sign, like his handwriting, always veering left. But what use would it be to go there now? Mountains don’t confess.

  On the other side of the highway, a ute tore across a paddock, leaving a pulse of dust. It rose tall as a man, white and insistent, but I kept my eyes on the black line of road ahead.

  Turned the paper over so the woman’s bowed head was no longer visible.

  Didn’t relax my shoulders till I’d passed the giant concrete koala on the way out of Dadswells Bridge. The one you enter through its arse.

  •

  Wail Arboretum said the sign, the irony not escaping me.

  I parked beneath a drooping eucalypt.

  Listened as the engine rattled to a halt.

  I’d quit the highway a few k’s back, followed the curving side road past a gleaming pillar of a silo that had been visible on the horizon for a while, in the hope of a quiet spot to hike the road out of my legs.

  The place had an air of the abandoned, the doors and curtains of the ranger’s hut closed.

  I got out of the car. It felt good to be on my feet. The gate to the arboretum was rabbit-proof with a sign warning about poison, the parched garden beyond it mostly eucalypts and low-lying plants I didn’t know the names of. I lifted the metal catch and went in. The gravel path crunched beneath my boots, too loud for the space, the looseness of smoke in the air, a region not quite done with summer. A honeyeater tracked my progress, its iris a dark dot. I passed an anthill, its workers in a frenzy, feelers locking, measuring the emergency.

  At the edge of the path a large sign had been posted, part of a walking trail. The sign, its colours not yet faded, was devoted to Eremophila, the emu bush. Its various incarnations. Its survival tactics. What hardy little bastards they were.

  Eremos. Greek for desert, I reminded myself. Phileo for love.

  But where I came from was a place made of water.

  Abundant and harnessed.

  Rivers had been dammed and rerouted, lakes created where previously there’d been none, the once-natural Lake Pedder gorged to form a species-razing impoundment, all in the name of hydroelectricity. Tasmania: a divided place. Where people chained themselves to rainforest banks and refused to budge despite being shot at, or set up camp in towering gums that predated white colonisation, paying homage day after drenched day to their idea of the sacred, while others railed about jobs and tried to save their shrinking communities. I was two when the Hydro-Electric Commission announced their intention to dam the Franklin. Was raised on a mixed diet of Peter Dombrovskis’ photos of the great river and the nightly footage of the protests shown on the news, a battle waged in images over water and power and what it meant to be Tasmanian. It wasn’t possible to fence-sit, families split over the issue, Doze a Greenie stickers blistering on the bumpers of utes while the Greens cut their political teeth at late-night Wilderness Society meetings in the city. Our suburb was working class and mostly pro-dam. But there’d been teachers at the school who’d failed to keep their opinions to themselves, so we’d caught both sides; felt the great tug between where we came from and where we might end up.

  Tasmania, a place demarcated by water.

  Yet somehow Jed and I both became desert lovers.

  Eremophila of the human variety.

  10

  I was in London when he called, pulling beers in a pub in Kensington till I found something that paid better. Walking home late to the share house on Cromwell Road that never slept, weaving through the city’s miasma that seemed to awaken on certain nights from the concrete and bring on migraines that only eucalyptus oil and a roomful of silence could lift. He rang from Malaga, a Mediterranean wind clipping his syllables, seabirds forcing him to shout. ‘Quit your job and get your arse down here!’ He was staying with a guy called Sebastián who he’d met building white condos perched like square-jawed squatters above the sea. Sebastián, who regularly ran cars across the Sahara and sold them for a profit in black nations crippled with import tax – a fake-Carnet-de-Passage-and-baksheesh operation – had two battered but un-fucking-stoppable bikes parked in the shed at the back of his property, just begging for it.

  I gave my notice the next day. Gathered my few belongings and headed for the white cliffs and the Continent. But it was the desert I could feel calling me, a great untapped expanse, like a secret you didn’t know you had. That, and the thought of the two of us – boys from old Van Diemen’s Land – carving our way across such legendary sands.

  It took me three days to hitch to Malaga. A Polish rig driver took me all the way from Clermont-Ferrand to just short of Barcelona, but when he turned inland, I got off and aimed south, catching a series of lifts down the coast to where Jed was waiting for me, deep tan, his hair the colour of sea spray.

  He took me straight to the shed and whipped the tarp off those bikes, dust sent airborne. Both of them were blue, their handlebars overlapped as if one never went anywhere without the other. ‘Two grand apiece,’ he said, ‘plus Sebastián will handle all the documents.’ Then he circled them, rubbing his chin like it was the first time he’d thought about it. Asked, ‘Which one you want?’ As he exhaled I could have sworn the word Suzuki grabbed hold of his breath, his desire run so deep it was anatomical.

  ‘Well, there’s no way I’m riding around on anything called DR Big,’ I said, tapping the logo on the side panel, ‘so I guess I’ll take the Yamaha.’

  Leaning against the bikes were two rusty frames and some plastic side cases that wouldn’t make it as far as Gibraltar. So for the next two weeks, I worked with Jed and Sebastián during the day, helping them to finish the job they’d been contracted to do, while at night we stripped down those frames and repainted them, built new side cases out of sheets of aluminium riveted together and siliconed till even a river in flood wouldn’t penetrate them. Soaked the drive chains in diesel and left them to dry out in the sun so there’d be no grease left to trap the sand, Jed’s idea risky but good in theory. And when the sun went down we’d slink to Sebastián’s verandah and drink acidic red wine in full view of the vines on which it had ripened. Listen to his stories about the desert till we felt set to enter mystical terrain – one populated by ‘blue men’
and blind seers and winds that had not only names but favourites.

  The morning finally arrived when we were ready. Off-road tyres were strapped to the back of the white frames, a change of clothes was put in the side cases along with expandable water containers, a spare chain, tools, a puncture kit and a Michelin 741 map of North Africa, the Grand Ergs dominating, great sand seas. Most of what we had was scraped together, recycled, picked up second-hand. But our helmets were shiny and new as we slipped them on and started up our bikes, my Ténéré – named after a vast sand plain stretching from Niger to Chad – and Jed’s DR Big, subtitled Desert Express.

  Sebastián ran his fingers through his hair in feverish envy.

  ‘Bastardos,’ he said, handing us the Carnets de Passage we’d need to get us over the borders – fake ones, in case we ran into trouble and had to leave one or both of the bikes behind, the taxes punishing.

  He raised a hairy arm in salute as we drove out.

  We halted briefly at the gate, just long enough to exchange the kind of stupid grins that can’t survive an audience, before dropping our visors and laying hold of the bitumen, the great curves of it that swept down towards the gleaming coast, our bodies aligning with its contours, willingly seduced.

  Only one name on our lips, suddenly irrefutably feminine.

  Sahara.

  11

  Water tanks squatted like alien warships in a paddock as I cleared road works back on the highway, dust from the track to the arboretum still clinging to my windows. A crow scanned me from a eucalypt that looked like someone had picked it up and wrung out its bark. Something like tumbleweed rolled across the bitumen. The Polish rig driver who’d offered me a ride on my way to Malaga had told me that the loneliest place in the world is a highway.

  Ahead, lightning forked between two parallels and I waited for more – for something spectacular, theatrical – but it was the kind of thing that only happened when you weren’t looking.