Old Growth Read online

  OLD GROWTH

  JOHN KINSELLA

  MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

  www.transitlounge.com.au

  Copyright © John Kinsella 2017

  First Published 2017

  Transit Lounge Publishing

  All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Cover and book design: Peter Lo

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  A cataloguing entry for this title is available from the

  National Library of Australia: www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN: 978-1-925760-231

  CONTENTS

  The Engine Room Cure

  See that Gully: the Ghost I Have Become in a World of Asbestos

  Firies

  Fried Breakfast on the Road

  Pack of Cards

  The Shopping Trolley

  Tunnelling: A Backyard Story

  The Woodshed

  Arm Wrestle

  The Last Days of the Railway Hotel

  Sisters

  An Introduction

  Bulge

  The Boy who Read Marvell to the Sheep

  The Hannaford Grader Man

  Old Growth

  Cheating the Periodic Table

  The Telephone

  Building the Brick Barbecue

  The Company Christmas Tree

  Grip

  The Coffin

  Selling Desk Sets in the City

  Mother’s Day

  Wrestling Match in the Theatre of Ostia Antica

  Traps

  Licence

  THE ENGINE ROOM CURE

  The engine room was dark even during the day. Chinks of light worked the green paint on the crankcase; dust motes vibrated in the rays, which would have been ethereal if not for the smell of oil and fuel. In summer, it was like a hell-box – a death trap. You’d die if locked in there for an hour.

  The kids would say that the engine was alive, a beast, but it wasn’t. It was just a machine. Yet machines can kill, and don’t care how they do it. You can’t even pretend they care. The engine drove the generator, which fuelled the batteries, which fed the lights, the television, the fridge. Yes, it was like a body – but a machine body. If you went in at night and the batteries were low, the single bulb would glow like an eye on the verge of losing sight. A limp, nauseous glow.

  The crank handle was a prosthetic that had lost its snug fit from years of use. That little bit of give meant that it slipped. The engine kicked. The flywheel, over-sized like that on a traction engine, went centripetal, a belt bringing three turns of the shaft to each revolution of the flywheel. That’s when you could smell and taste electricity. Magnets and tightly coiled wire and friction.

  The television was new. It had a booster. The fridge was also new, but it ran on kerosene – it had nothing to do with the thirty-two volts supplied by the machine body in the engine room. The engine room was both separate from and part of what it contained. It was the skin – the outside and the inside of the skin. There was a cupboard in the shed – a kitchenette cupboard with frosted glass doors – half frosted. Everything requires going over again. The bits that you don’t remember at first. The blemish you don’t discover, or pretend is not there. Or maybe it’s just stepping back – inverting the noseto-spite-your-face rule. The kitchenette was gloss-painted with prominent lever-like handles. You pulled them towards you and a latch would lift vertically within its neat metal envelope. Spares were kept in there. There were rabbit traps hanging over a beam and screwdrivers jammed between the wooden frame and the bulges of the corrugated iron. Oil – thick on the floor, in the cracks, soaked into the wood. Even the floor’s concrete was stained through. Possibly the oil reached all the way down to the water table where it sat floating below and above at once, biliously.

  The engine room lured her at night. She would go in late, often around midnight, to switch off. On the calendar that hung on the corrugated wall opposite the engine, she would mark another day. March 30th, 1970. To be precise, she had to mark it just before the stroke of midnight. Then switch off. Push the tab of metal down to cut the spark. The kill switch. The engine ground down into silence, as if all the beats it had wanted to miss gathered together for a final run at exhaustion.

  By torchlight she flipped a couple of wall switches on the power board to the off position, then backed out of the shed, hunched, expecting something to happen.

  Then she went back into the shed and rechecked the switches, listening hard – to the engine, as if it were still working away, a silencer in place. She even put her hand to the hot crankcase to feel for clandestine movement. She repeated this act three times before reversing all the way out of the engine room, closing the door, opening and closing it again. Chooks, disturbed at their roost, squawked and then settled. A thumbnail moon lit nothing the stars weren’t already lighting, yet she fixated on it. A single light was burning inside and she fixated on that. Turn it off quickly or it would exhaust the batteries. Just enough power for the essentials until she recharged the next day. Inside and straight to bed. Inside and check light switches and wash in the basin because the pump drains the battery. Wash and wash again just to be sure. Put the towel over the rail. Remember doing it, but check again to be sure, down the corridor, but back to the door, to check if the key has been turned, if the key is on its thread, so if it’s pushed out it won’t drop onto the floor to be dragged out on a sheet of paper. Turn handle. Locked. Turn again. Do it five times and touch nose to sign off. Then straight to bed.

  Straight to bed where she lay awake. She wondered about lights and taps and a million other little large things around the place that were probably done, surely done, but maybe not. Always awake. She dozed off just before dawn, and woke a few hours later.

  Going out to the engine shed late at night to shut down was the highlight of her life. She knew this. She was no victim of her own condition who couldn’t recognise its pathos, its overwhelming absurdity. But it was so, nonetheless.

  *

  It was only visitors to the town – strangers – who laughed at her in the aisles of the Farmers’ Co-op. It took her so long to shop, so long to perform the same task over, to check she hadn’t put something back wrongly on the shelf, that she had read the numbers properly, that she had wiped her hands properly with the damp flannel she carried in a plastic bag in her handbag. Locals were fine, and said nothing. You can get used to most things, they’d say. Older staff members would add, sometimes, She wasn’t like that at school – only after her daughter … and then trail off. It wasn’t that much of a big deal now, so long after.

  Though, quietly, some of them would muse over how she managed to run the farm, with all that animal shit around the place. I mean, she’s so clean, can’t stand dirt. No, it’s not that – she can stand dirt, just has to make sure it’s been cleaned off. And off and off and off! But it wasn’t said sarcastically; more desperately. She wasn’t hated or seen to be casting any kind of evil eye. The town’s pharmacy did plenty of business selling mood drugs. That was part of the boom-and-bust or just bust reality of the wheatbelt. Depression was a standard people worked from and around.

  *

  It hurts to be sure. Waiting for the certain pressure and click of a switch, then clicking back to test the pressure again. Sight and sound and touch. Sense in overdrive. Dead and alive at once. A set of addictive platitudes. Set-plays. That’s how to improve, practise, doing the same things over. Again and again. Practice makes perfect. It hurts more than anything, more than bad memories, more than joy, more than loss. I
t hurts like an itch that will destroy you.

  And you think so much about it, it’s all a blank. It just happens but it just happens like a deafening echo. When you don’t think about it, it hurts the brain more than ever. It occupies the head fully and utterly. It’s like a chill, a shudder that increases into waves. It is nausea; it is vertigo; it is a sense of falling when normally you have no fear of heights. It is the brain exercising because it knows if it stops exercising, it will die and forget. It blocks out and amplifies.

  When I go out into the engine shed to oil the crankcase and fuel with the funnel and drum, when I turn the switches on in the right order and twist the crank handle that almost rips my arm off, I push the feeling back, and the roar of the engine stabilises me, and then I wonder if I’ve actually checked the oil because the engine will seize if the oil isn’t okay, but if I haven’t done the fuel it will only run out and that won’t matter as much. I keep it in good order, and I polish the brass and I am all at sea dizzy with calenture.

  I go inside and play my scales on the old piano – my mother’s, the one she taught me on. But I haven’t played pieces for years, no pieces all the way through, not the Beethoven sonatas for which I won the music prize, for which I was given a scholarship. I was going to study in London, I was going to compose the memories of the farm and write pastorales for a new era, and then I was pregnant and I was having sex with the examiner, and I didn’t know what was going on, or why my mother left me when she’d never left me before, down in the city on my own in a hotel taking exams, and then going home and Father blaming the farm’s failure on my swelling belly and Mum scratching holes in her face. This was the way I think it was, though it probably wasn’t; I just play scales until my fingers hurt, I need the piano tuned, and sometimes I play watching television, the cricket in the afternoon, the fuzzy image of low power and the same ball being bowled again and again then a variation catching the batsman by surprise and he’s out!

  *

  She rises against the grain … For years she leased most of the farm to a neighbour, a single man. She’d grown up next to him but not near. At school she’d thought him a bit of a dolt. On the three or four occasions she remembered him being over during her childhood, he’d made jokes about her playin’ the pee-anna. Mother said, Not much in common, but they’re decent people – religious. Her parents were atheists, and she felt alone in this because she felt she should be one too.

  But the boy grew, and when her parents were gone, turned up on her doorstep and asked about leasing. They were both about thirty-five then. Neither had married, but that wasn’t anything to do with anything. He took a lease on her best paddocks and paid on time and that was that. He turned up same time each year to pay her in cash. He’d hang around on the verandah, his old hat in hand down by his side, swatting flies with the other hand, saying nothing really. Then he’d finish with the same thing, year in year out: You don’t need to check the flywire door is shut – it’s definitely shut. And then he’d go until next year.

  But then he’d phoned and said he couldn’t afford to lease anymore. He’d only ever rung twice before – once when asking if she’d lease, then to tell her she need to re-fence a few paddocks, and that he’d do it and take it out of her cheque if that was okay. It bothered her how long he took to say a few words. How he wouldn’t hang up when the conversation was clearly finished. She couldn’t hang up first. But that was a long time back. How long ago? Was it that long? It was only a few days ago that she’d lifted the polished phone from its cradle and paused before turning the crank handle of the phone, sending the signal through to the old exchange, to be connected to the town doctor’s, when listening to the silence – the static – as she always did, she heard voices, as sometimes happens on such default party lines, she heard voices of girls familiar from her childhood, gossiping, Yes, I’ve heard he’s thinking of selling up – can’t make a go of it any longer. He’s selling up, she thought, and put the handpiece back in its cradle, rocking back and forth on her flat heels.

  She rises against the grain and says, Today will be different. Though it makes her cry, and so nauseated she vomits bile, she does every action once and doesn’t check. She goes out to the engine room and goes through her routine and then shuts the engine down and walks out, headfirst. She rarely runs the engine in the morning. She favours torchlight, and on long summer evenings goes out even later to embrace the dark. A cover-up.

  She starts to walk across the paddocks, leaving all her gates open without looking back – she has never left a gate open in her life. Her father would have killed her. Though she never had. But she’d got pregnant, and he would jibe at her that she might go on about never leaving gates open but she’d left the big one open and the whole bloody locker room had walked in. She honestly didn’t understand what he was on about until her mother, weeping, explained it to her. All you need to know about your father is, he enjoys killing pigs. That’s what her mother repeated every day, up until the stillbirth.

  Against the grain she crosses the gravel road, gate after open gate behind her, and walks up her neighbour’s long drive. She sees he’s planted European plane trees, and she thinks that’s odd. She’s driven past here thousands of times and never registered, even in autumn when their foreign leaves must have rained down red and yellow. But they are still green with late summer and she notices twenty-eight parrots briefly touch down, then leave their upper branches in search of more familiar fare. She starts to turn, to look back where she’s come from but, gagging, forces her head forward and trudges on, her ankle-length cheesecloth skirt red with dust, her boots lost to it.

  She finds him by the silos, bagging grain for the sheep. He doesn’t even have the animation to look astonished. What’s wrong? he asks phlegmatically. Nothing, she says. Nothing at all. He stares at her, then goes back to bagging, just like that. She rubs her hands together and rocks back and forth. I was thinking, she says, That you might crop my paddocks this year. Can’t afford it, he says, It’s skin-of-the-teeth stuff … don’t know how you’re surviving selling a few eggs and stuff. Cautiously scribbling in the dirt with her shoe, she says, I’ll lease them to you for a peppercorn rate. If you get on your feet again, we can renegotiate. He looks up. Grabs the sack by the ears and rests it against the silo’s gargoyle chute. Okay, he says. She turns to march back, to close the gates behind her – that’s okay, nothing excessive about that. Time lapse. He calls after her, Hey, want a rag to wipe that oil off your hands? She looks down and laughs. Ha, I hadn’t noticed … engine oil! Looks funny on your hands, he says … On your beautiful pee-anna hands …

  SEE THAT GULLY: THE GHOST I HAVE BECOME IN A WORLD OF ASBESTOS

  ‘Bird thou never wert’

  Shelley

  I tell him, My name is Ghost. And at that very moment, literally, at that very moment, a kookaburra laughs. I find myself thinking that no one owns the laugh of a kookaburra, not even the kookaburra. It’s not copyright. And kookaburras have only been over here, here in the West, for a hundred or so years. People from T’other side often don’t realise that, thinking their way is the normal way. Maybe lyrebirds can mimic a kookaburra’s call where they come from. Wouldn’t know – have to look it up. I can see from the blood in his cheeks, his scrunched eyes, the mild tremor taking hold of his limbs, that he thinks I am laughing at him. I’m not. I am simply saying, My name is Ghost.

  See that gully, he says, yelling and grinding grit with yellow teeth, all incisors – if you don’t shut your mouth, your bloody lippy always goin’ on about shit mouth, I’ll stuff you in it and cover you with dirt and no one will ever find you! He says this with his boots pinning my boots to the ground, his face so close to mine that the spit arcs across, and he means it. I stare at him, and in the mirror of his eyes see the vague outline of myself, the ghost I am, the ghost the I will become.

  I am not dead, but I sometimes feel like I am. I say to him, I am already dead, mate, not really taking the piss, but he thinks I am. Having a go
at him, diminishing him in some way – he can’t tolerate this. I glance around at these, our surroundings. The jagged eucalypts, smoother ones on higher ground, the razor-wire clusters of parrot bush, birds chattering and processing the fibres in the air. Like dandelions, capeweed flowers transforming to seed – introduced, then dispersed. It’s all fibres dispersing, spreading, working their way in. Taking root. I notice the beauty and the joy and the perverse balancing of the equation. I do people’s taxes and know how to balance the books. This book cannot be balanced.

  And so you ask, How has it got to this? Well, I’ll tell you, just for the hell of it – no real reason, because it will have no effect. Nothing will change. Nothing will happen. Entropy. A stultified rebirth. A working-down to fibres … one day, atoms. My name is Ghost. I am fibres and atoms. I am cold. Asbestos keeps out the heat. Bushfire, soaring temperatures … and I remain chilled to the bone.

  *

  It came about when Seve started to knock his old asbestos house down with a front-end loader. He’d moved his girlfriend out, deposited her in the shed along with the contents of the house, and just started smashing the place down, lifting what he could with the loader into the back of his tip truck which he then drove to a bush block a few k’s down the road and dumped. I was witness to all this, and with a T-shirt wrapped around my mouth and nose, I went up to his place and told him what I thought. That was when he was about to dump his first load. He told me to get fucked, so I followed him in my car, suspecting that an illegal demolition would be followed by illegal disposal. Not hard to predict with Seve – it was the way he’d always done things, and anyone who opposed him got a thumping or a bullet in their water tank. Even the cops and the rangers were scared of him and his old biker mates, who every now and again took a run up from the city for a keg and sheep-on-a-spit rage. Seve even put on a live rock band sometimes, bikies and locals sitting together on hay bales arranged around the band, with electrics powered by a portable generator giving static and sibilance to the performance. At such times all wildlife would bolt to my place, or further afield.