•
She sat up suddenly. She must have dozed off but now she was sharply awake. Jack had left no message on her phone, nor was there any word from him on the answering machine. There was no training tonight, no soccer, no swimming. The silence pressed on her, seemed to be slowly suffocating her. A slow nauseating wave of panic uncurled in her stomach, pushing upwards, tugging and clutching at her heart. She scrambled off the bed, put on a jumper and her pyjama bottoms and walked into Jack’s room. Its emptiness startled her. She wanted it to be full of him, his smell, his presence; she wanted to fill the house with him. She lifted the cane basket under her arm and walked, stumbled, to the laundry. She pulled the clothes out one by one and tossed them into the machine. His school shirts, his trousers, his T-shirts, his shorts, his singlets, his socks, his underwear, the crusted handkerchiefs. Come on, Jack, she pleaded, please come home. She was carrying the cane basket back to his room when the exterior light on the back verandah flicked on. She waited, holding her breath, listening for the sound of the sliding door.
Her son walked into the dark kitchen. ‘Mum?’
She could breathe. She inhaled. She could breathe him in. He switched on the light and the brightness hurt, making her close her eyes. No, it wasn’t the brightness. She opened her eyes. He had come up next to her, his shirt untucked, his schoolbag over his shoulder, looking down at her (how much taller could he grow, how much more handsome?), alarm in his eyes, concern.
He moved towards her. ‘Mum,’ he said softly, ‘are you alright?’
She shut her eyes again, kept them closed. She could hear the washing machine chugging through the cycle, she could hear his shallow anxious breaths, smell the day and the sweat and the boy of him. She couldn’t open her eyes. She didn’t dare look at him. Looking at him, how it hurt.
Civil War
AFTER DRUGS THERE IS ONLY GOD. I don’t want to forget that it was drugs that taught me how to feel. Before drugs, I was immersed in a stultifying mediocrity where the cold, clammy hands of the modern world reached deep into my heart and psyche. There was no joy in school, family or the tense bravado of adolescent friendships. When I was a very young child, it’s possible I may have felt moments of great elation. I remember fragments of intense light: staring at the wings of a fly, tracing the path of a slug and watching the sun reflect off the slime. In those moments I may have experienced that phenomenal pleasure of intoxication which begins as a pinprick deep in the gut and then grows to flood the physical body. But these fragments are stray pieces from a jigsaw and I cannot imagine what whole they belong to. Was I a happy child? I have no idea. My first memory of being happy is as a teenager, smoking a joint with a cousin after school.
I am thinking about God, what it would look like, taste like, smell like. Outside the window of the truck the ochre ocean of the Nullarbor spreads out before me. The massive vehicle I’m travelling in is dwarfed by the grandeur of the prehistoric earth. Its deep guttural snorts, its thundering wheels are no competition for the explosive silence of the desert.
God is absent from this landscape. Or rather, God too is eclipsed by the rocks and the dirt, the scrub and sand. I began this journey across the desert to search for some intimation of spirit. Unable to perceive it in my usual urban environment, I am hoping to catch a glimpse of it out here in the naked wilderness. I cannot pretend to know what it may look like or what it may feel like but I am determined to experience it if it exists. If I fail to uncover divinity out here I will slink back to the city, tired and cynical, and I will pursue again the euphoria of chemical intoxication. It will be a pursuit of death, the day-to-day, minute-by-minute abandonment of self to dissembling and forgetfulness. Every step I have taken in my worship of the chemical I have been aware of the stripping away of myself. First the body, then the mind and finally the abandonment of soul. (I cannot offer an exact or universal definition of what I mean by the word ‘soul’ except to say that it is the part of me which resists being numbed, be it by drugs or money or inertia.) It is my soul, not my intellect or my pride, which has led me into the desert, searching for a divinity that does not eschew life.
The truck driver, overweight and ravaged by sun, offers me a Marlboro. I suck on it gratefully.
‘Where are you heading, mate?’ he asks me.
‘Over east,’ I reply. Aware that the question demands more of me, I make up a destination. I say Sydney, though I am not yet sure of where this journey will end. Probably when the one hundred dollars in my pocket is spent.
‘Is this your first time across the Nullarbor?’
I nod.
‘I must have done this journey a few hundred times.’
I glance over at him. His skin, shockingly pale at the edges of his singlet, is coarse and dark where it has been exposed to the sun. In particular his face, which is still handsome but lined with the history of too much alcohol and too many cigarettes, is the colour of the desert earth. We pass the skeletons of abandoned vehicles on the side of the road. In time the scrub grows over the decaying bodies and forms shrubs in the shapes of Volkswagens and EJ Holdens. Nothing can withstand the hold of the desert. The truck driver, over a working life of breathing in this landscape, is also becoming part of it.
‘Don’t you ever get bored by it?’
He laughs loudly and points out to the plain. ‘You can’t get bored by this. I get real fucking bored by this road, by the asphalt and the bloody white lines. But you can’t get bored by this,’ and again he points across the scrub. ‘This land that looks like an atom bomb hit it is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’
He lights a cigarette and offers me another one. I again accept gratefully.
‘Why Sydney?’ he asks. ‘I hate the place.’
‘To get away from Perth,’ I tell him.
•
Perth, all bland office buildings and vast suburban stretches, is a modern city at the edge of the world. It is an automated, clean city. The railway stations don’t have toilets in them, as though it wasn’t a city for human use, for the daily animal cycle of eating, drinking, shitting, pissing and sleeping. People there are proud of their trains. But the landscape makes a mockery of their attempts to control and master the environment. Even in the middle of the business district, in the dead centre of the city’s heart, the ancient sand seeps through every crack. With every strong gust of wind the sand rises and swirls and dusts the concrete and plastic with a faint orange tinge.
The sand is not the only ancient element which taunts and threatens the city. This white city lives in fear of the shadows cast by its black inhabitants.
They drink too much.
They are lazy.
They hate work.
They steal cars.
They are dirty.
They are animals.
Like the sand, the shadows remind the city that it too will decay.
•
It was a thin young man with beautiful dark eyes who taught me that the sand is one of the weapons the landscape uses to fight back against the arrogance of the city. The unfathomable sky is another. Dwarfed by the sky and breathing in sand, Perth feels like a make-believe city. I kept meeting people who told me how in a few years it would be one of Australia’s great cities. A few even suggested that one day it might be one of the world’s great cities. But when I got to Perth I had no time for claims of a grand future. I was not impressed by the swiftness of the electric trains and the efficiency of the state-of-the-art communications systems. Instead I loved hearing him talk about the soil eating away at this baby metropolis. By the time I’d arrived in Perth I had stopped believing in cities.