Gatherers and Hunters Read online

  It was, surely, a country that had entered deeply into his unconscious soul and perhaps it had never left that place. He could not have contemplated return here, certainly not as a permanent measure, at any time in his life before. Charlie recognised that. But now so many things had been discarded, or lost, or removed from him, in this stripping down of expectations and hopes, as well as in this building up of thoughts and alternatives, he had something to come back to, and that was a sort of bonus. He had something to rediscover. Something to reinvent perhaps, but something where those previous negotiations had made preparations, preparations he himself had never fully realised.

  He recalled his retired uncle and aunt, in their little cottage near Bulcock Beach, all those years back. He had never envied them. He had, rather, thought on them with a sort of mordant pity, locked into their minute world of card games in the evening, and endless fishing in the Passage, and an afternoon walk up to the corner store for milk, or sugar or tobacco. What a sad life it had seemed. Now he was not so sure.

  Two

  Westaway Towers was the first high rise set of apartments in Caloundra. Built in the 1960s, its fifteen floors still stand out although the high ridge beyond the town centre and Bulcock Street is now glistening with glass and sundecks. Westaway Towers looks solid, though, its three-bedroom apartments half shut off from the sun by white barricades and viewing slits. You can look out at the distance in Moreton Bay with its big sand island sometimes visible. This is not forefront property, it sits on the rocky ridge where a seedling Moreton Bay Fig has set roots into the unwilling stone and is now twenty-five-feet high, and is the home of a family of magpies, no doubt cruelly territorial in the nesting season. Charlie found it almost ridiculously easy to purchase one of the flats.

  They were old fashioned, which he liked. Solid timber ­fittings in the kitchen, no veneer or laminex, and the bathroom tiles and accessories must have been modish forty years ago. They still had class. He was able to get vacant possession almost immediately, and at a ridiculously low price. Cash, of course. He had spent a week buzzing round the awful strip towards Maroochydore looking for essential furnishings and the necessary bits and pieces, nothing more than perfunctory. It was as if he could not in any sense replicate the specifics of their old home. He congratulated himself again and again on his decision to clear the lot. No reminders.

  A set of plain white crockery from The Reject Shop Warehouse, fitted sheets – essential things like beds, mattresses and a truly dreadful lounge suite came with the deal. Charlie picked and pecked for the minimum gadgets, and a tele­vision, and filled in the appropriate forms for phone contact, the power reconnection, all of it without thinking, almost.

  It was not until he had been there over a week that the running stopped. He was alone.

  In all that long period since Miriam’s death, activity had claimed him. Wonderful how whole months can be filled with meetings and appointments, visits to banks and solicitors and insurance offices, antiquarians and secondhand dealers. Then the cleaning and overseeing of the entire house and premises. In all that time it had been a matter of deadlines and the inexorable sense of pressure to have it all properly and cleanly organised. He had done so much himself. It had seemed fitting.

  Only the necessarily meticulous sorting out of papers and memorabilia had been truly painful, but he had prepared himself for that and, in the end, even the more personal things were tossed. It was an accelerative process, and once he got under way, there was almost a reckless fury that developed, as if he could not throw everything out quickly enough. He remembered his own father, so many years ago, who in his final years spent hours down in the backyard incinerator, in the years when burning off was still possible. At the time, he had argued with the old man, and even salvaged a driving licence dated 1922. His father had laughed, and had shrugged and let him keep it. It had long since vanished – otherwise, Charlie realised, it would have ended up with all his other junk, headed for the tip or burned in his living room grate.

  Aunt Minnie, when she died, left everything in her cottage, from balls of string and unused pieces of soap to carefully ironed Christmas paper and dullish baubles from the tree that Charlie remembered himself helping her to decorate. He must have been nine when she died. His mother had looked over the house, picked at a few Doulton plates and the like, and then called the Salvos to remove the lot. Charlie had even considered that tactic this time, but there was a certain necessity to go through everything, to eliminate things carefully. Eliminate them he did.

  He was sitting on the lumpy lounge chair in front of the 7.30 Report, on his eighth night in the flat and his third week in Caloundra when it happened.

  The happenstance and inveterate peripatetic nature of their professional lives had meant that though each of them had been long accustomed to being alone, in transient rooms or in their own house, each of them also knew the other was there. Within email or phone contact usually. A voice and a shared presence, even during the absences.

  After the immediate shock of Miriam’s death, that absent presence had not really been displaced. Even as Charlie opened her drawers and fingered her underwear and her jewellery or her hoard of office files and her prodigious ­correspondence folders, it had been like conversing with her, sharing old memories and occasions, joint celebrations or the specific times she had read aloud to him Nanette’s ribald letters or those deeply pompous annual epistles from her Uncle Hymie. Tossing all that had been, not an act of sacrilege, but a sort of final salute.

  Final.

  Now it was done. There was nothing to do any more. All this time had been filled out with things to be ticked off. They had been, tick tick. The strange room and the space around him seemed abnormally empty. He was truly alone.

  +++++

  Grief overtook him. Sitting before the television with its reports of distant calamities, his own almost impossibly distant bereavement caught up with him. There was nothing in the place to comfort him. The used furniture reeked of other lives and other holidays and alternative relationships, now surely ended as well. When he first moved in he had imagined, almost playfully, the old widow eking out her last decade, housebound, bored with the views, maintaining a hollow ritual of vacuuming, sweeping, polishing and cooking a proper meal, only for herself or the very occasional married son and his family. He had seen her as the relict of a fleshy solicitor in Brisbane, who had connections with the building contractors who had made the initial risky venture, getting in at a special price. The furniture was certainly holiday weekender stuff, though there were a few hints of class: the built-in mirror cabinet for the display porcelain, the hidden stereo set. When they retired permanently here the husband had intended to do a lot of rock fishing, and to join the local bowls club. His stroke had curtailed all that, and left the widow to fill out another decade or more, wiping over the china and preparing those regulation meals, three veg and the proper gravy.

  Her stroke.

  Miriam had emailed him the night before: ‘After I give my paper I will take time off for a more intensive examination of the Philip of Macedon treasures. Did you remember to put the rubbish out Tuesday night? There is a general collection week after next but you could go through the potting shed and the laundry, there must be some things we can abandon, but I should be back the day before so I can give it a proper lookover. Luv, M’.

  Every word.

  The emails stopped. No phone calls – only the terrible one with the news; a hysterical fellow conferencee who had knocked on Miriam’s door in the morning to ask about her own paper. Later, it was established that Miriam had taken a seizure in the shower, the water was still running (by now cold) when Lorna poked her head in, discovering the door unlocked. Hours.

  It was not morbidity, it was with a sort of deep tenderness and concern that Charlie now attempted to imagine that last event. It was something he had not been able to bring himself to contemplate before; the news, and the shock, and the sudden surge of arrangements that tumbled up
on him made such a thing impossible. Over the phone he had been careful to establish that all of Miriam’s things were at hand: her watch, the three bracelets and the amber beads, her leather purse with the credit cards and the smaller one with bank­notes and travellers’ cheques, her passport. Her passport; it was one of the very few things he had not abandoned, it had not been cancelled yet – when would some clerk somewhere take note and file a requisition?

  With the osteo Miriam had always been careful about the shower. He hoped to God the stroke had been utter and instantaneous. Too much to contemplate Miriam sprawled awkwardly at the base of the tiny shower recess, perhaps with her legs twisted under her, and still breathing, attempting to scrabble for some support or means of reaching her purse and the mobile phone, which she would certainly have taken into the bathroom, her usual precaution. And the water still pelting down on her, like needles by this time. No, no gain in thinking along those lines. Think only the finality of it.

  The finality.

  Finality for Miriam. For himself the endless series of urgencies and activities to bring everything to a completion. To have the funeral and the ceremonies properly organised. Organisation: that was his thing, Miriam had always agreed. He had not broken down, not once. Miriam’s daughters were harrowing enough, even his own daughter, who had always been guarded about Miriam, Clinging to his arm, she had gone to water. Later, she had whispered, ‘How will you manage, on your own, Dad?’ But then she had added, ‘Though you’ve had lots of practice.’

  Practice cannot be compared with the real thing. The real thing comes with a sense of absolute finality. Until this point, Charlie had too much on his hands to have them removed, and the sense of complete vacancy descend. Hands? There were no hands. Feet, body, hair, face. Face: there was no face, no voice, no flash or eyes or that sudden, almost majestic laughter.

  Gone. Taken.

  At some point he realised the tears were streaming down his bristly face, that he was gagging and retching with grief, whole dollops of it. He staggered from the awkward chair and lurched toward the television, fumbling for the automatic controls which he would never remember to take from the console. The noise faded and the images blurred into nothingness. But his eyes still seemed drowned in their own ocean and he realised that a loud deep wail had risen from his mouth, or from deep in his body somewhere, pushing his thorax to get out. The thought went through his mind that the neighbours must wonder, but even as this intruded on his conscious mind something also reminded him that the organisation of these apartments was so clever and soundproofed that a whole entrance lobby and the lift and stairwell lay between his flat and the other one on this level. He could make all the noise he wanted.

  But it did subside. Even the tears completed their task. Charlie lay in the floral chair, exhausted. He was in a room without character amid the cast-offs of other people’s lives, and there was tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, as the Bard said. Even in grief, the cruel mockery of others cuffed him, emphasising his aloneness.

  After a while he got up and went to the kitchenette and turned on the electric jug. A shadow of that old widow woman before him in this place mimicked his actions. That he was not the first offered him no comfort, no comfort at all.

  Nothing and nobody could replace Miriam and the world of ghosts surrounded him, but they were not necessarily even his own ghosts, nor Miriam’s. A sense of strange impersonality did nothing to relieve his grinding ache. If anything, it increased it.

  There had not even been a goodbye.

  The jug shrieked at him. He turned it off, but did not bother to reach for a mug, or the coffee things, or a herbal tea. It hardly seemed worthwhile.

  Too early to go to the bedroom. There was nothing on ­television. Charlie found himself staring out from the windows, misty with the salt air. Somewhere out in the channel a freighter with dullish lights was moving slowly northward. He stood watching it until it passed out of view, beyond the headland of King’s Beach.

  There were a few lights below him on the slopes of the hill, but it was not the tourist season and what was most apparent was how many houses, and flats and apartments were darkened. How empty everything was.

  +++++

  He had a dream. He was on an expedition with someone – ‘her’ – into the Dead Centre, the heart of Australia, with its red soil and, because it must have been a year of good rainfall, incredibly green growth on the smallish trees and shrubs. The shrubs were flowering: golden. The pair of them were rejoicing in the space and open vastness of the landscape, there was a long purple ridge of mountains in the distance and, closer to hand, a sitting-down place, with a pool and white-trunked shade, a billabong. That was when he noticed the survey pegs. He looked further, with increasing concern. The whole landscape had been divided and turned into small allotments, already signs appeared, with FOR SALE and FIRST OWNER’S BARGAIN and GET IN NOW WHILE PRICES ARE LOW. Everywhere he looked, there were already glittering Toyotas and besuited salesmen with sheaves of papers, maps and plans, and a Home Unit developer selling apartments off the plan. An old Aboriginal man who had been sitting down beside them on the shady sand was grinning and showed them the hundred dollar note he had received, but already the bulldozers were roaring in.

  Charlie woke in a sweat, and found himself lying in full sunlight from the window of his new bedroom.

  The dream made no sense. Yes it did. It was almost as if Miriam had been with him, but the sense remained that he had made a decision without her; that he had plunged into this new property without proper consideration or time to weigh up the balances. He had been somehow involved in the destruction of the virgin landscape of his dream, something Miriam would never have countenanced.

  But it was more than that. Charlie was in the kitchenette, again at the hot water jug, when the connection struck. Last week he had been driving back and forth across that flat stretch north of Caloundra, between the shoreline of sand dunes and along the old wallum heath towards Alexander Headland and the cemented and bitumenised carparks of the ugly builders’ paradises – Woolworths, Harvey Norman, the rest. They had been shoved willy-nilly upon what he still remembered as the wildflower plains of his youth. Where there were now oily aisles of glinting cars there had once been Christmas bells; and the other tiny wildflowers had grown there, where it now was simply waste. Hundreds of brick-veneer cottages squatted over what once had been a natural garden of native shrubs and grasses, and none of them had retained the old plants. Instead there were hibiscus from Hawaii, pink and red frangipani from other Pacific Islands, jacaranda trees from Mexico, you name it. The Green Finger Nurseries were crammed with exotics, instant lawn and manicured potplants. And Charlie had himself parked in those very lots for his grotty little purchases. Miriam would have had a seizure.

  He stopped himself at that.

  What he had not yet faced, in his fading recollection of that dream, was that it was not Miriam there, it was Beatrice. The Beatrice who had that time called out to stop the car which Charlie’s Dad was driving. Right there on the new bitumen road up to Alexander Headland. Beatrice had clambered over the rough embankment and onto the heathland. ‘Look!’ she had called, and pointed to the flowering abundance. Charlie instantly clambered out after her, and began tugging at the Christmas bells. But she had stopped him. ‘No, Charlie. Leave them be. Just look at them, and let others look. If we take them all, there will be nothing left. Perhaps next year they will already have gone.’ Charlie had retained the flowers he had picked, though, and they took them home and put them in a glass milk bottle on the window above the sink, where they lived for only a few days.

  Neither of them had fully realised just what a devastation lay in store on that seemingly endless heathland plain.

  As he sipped the bitter coffee, standing up to look out the windows (when you sat you could not see above the high ledge; one of the drawbacks of the older style units), he almost marvelled at the vividness of that recall, and realised that this area hoarded, still, tho
se memories that had long been submerged in the wider, wilder worlds of his later life, of their later life, Miriam and himself.

  Try as he would, he could not install Miriam into this place. Well, wasn’t that the intention? New start? New surroundings.

  The grief returned, but not so vocal. There were no ­hopeless tears. Only the hollowness and the complete purposelessness of things. He found he had been staring out at the same view, from the same angle, for ages now.

  Beatrice must be an old woman. Impossible to imagine what would have happened to her, how she would have turned out. He did not even know if she were alive or dead. Down below the built-up artifice of the Westaway Towers’ gardens, with their Japanese design – square grassy patches, the reed and lily pond, the ordered stepping stones – an older Caloundra still sprawled, down to the rutted and potholed plaza in front of the old hotel. It was all being bulldozed and reorganised now, but wasn’t that where they all went on New Year’s Eve that time, for the fireworks and the loud amplified band from Brisbane and the sweaty night air and the post-midnight surf, all of them reckless with the New Year and the future? For most of them the future was another year at school, or forty-nine weeks in the office or the shop (was it still two weeks or three they were allowed off?) and perhaps the big night at the Cloudland Ballroom sometime in July or August. Yes, they were all innocent. The boys with their warm beer bottles in the car boot, the girls egging them on, puffing at Ardath cigarettes and letting their shoulder-straps dangle.