We were less than thirty miles from home now. The land was growing uneven. Soon there would be canefields on either side of the steeply dipping road, dairy farms smelling of silage, and little smooth-crowned hills that had once been wooded and dark with aerial roots and vines, till the loggers and land-clearers moved in and opened all this country to the sky, letting the light in; creating a landscape lush and green, with only, in the gully breaks between, a remnant of the old darkness and mystery, a cathedral gloom where a smell of damp-rot lingered that was older than the scent of cane flowers or the ammoniac stench of wet cow flop, and where creatures still moved about the forest floor, or hung in rows as in a wardrobe high up in the branches, or glided noiselessly from bough to bough.
I must have nodded off. When I looked up, we were already speeding through settlements I recognised and knew the names of: wooden houses, some of them no more than shacks, set far back and low among isolated forest trees, the open spaces on either side of the bitumen strip narrowing so quickly that what there was of a township — a service station, a Greek milk bar and caf — was gone again before you could catch the name on a signpost or register the slightly different smell on the air that signified settled life and neighbourliness.
I loved all this. But Katie was right. I too would leave. As she would, as Braden would.
He met my eye now and then, as the ute swung out to pass a slower vehicle and we had to reach for the side and hang on to steady ourselves, but I was less certain now that I could read his looks. He had already begun to move away.
The difference was, I thought, that he, like Katie, would not come back. But for me there could be no final leaving. This greenish light, full and luminous, always with a heaviness in it that was a reminder of the underlying dark — like the persistent memory, under even the most open of cleared land, of the dankness of rainforests — was for me the light by which all moments of expectation and high feeling would in my mind for ever be touched. This was the country I would go on dreaming in, wherever I lay my head.
We were bounding along now. Sixty miles an hour. From the cabin of the truck, Jem Riley's voice, raw and a little tuneless, came streaming past my ear. “Goodnight, Irene,” was what he was singing, "I'll see you in my dreams.”
Braden took it up and grinned at me. I followed. A doleful tune, almost a dirge, full of old hurt, that people were drawn to sing in chorus, as if it were the sad but consoling anthem of some loose republic of the heart, spontaneously established, sustained a moment, then easily let go. Before we were done with the last of it the quick-falling tropical night had come. A blueness that for the last quarter of an hour had been gathering imperceptibly round fence posts and in the depths of trees had swiftly overtaken us, with its ancient smell of the land and its unfolding silence that was never silence. “Goodnight,” we sang at full pelt, foolishly grinning, "goodnight, goodnight, I'll see you in my dreams.”
Every Move You Make
When Jo first came to Sydney, the name she heard in every house she went into was Mitchell Maze. “This is a Mitchell Maze house,” someone would announce, "can't you just tell?” and everyone would laugh. After a while she knew what the joke was and did not have to be told. “Don't tell me,” she'd say, taking in the raw uprights and bare window frames, "Mitchell Maze,” and her hostess would reply, "Oh, do you know Mitch? Isn't he the limit?”
They were beach houses, even when they were tucked away in a cul-de-sac behind the Paddington Post Office or into a gully below an escarpment at Castlecrag. The group they appealed to, looking back affectionately to the hidey-holes and treehouses of their childhood, made up a kind of clan. Of artists mostly, painters, session musicians, filmmakers, writers for the National Times and the Fin Review, who paid provisional tax and had kids at the International Grammar School, or they were lawyers at Freehills or Allen, Allen & Hemsley, or investment bankers with smooth manners and bold ties who still played touch rugby at the weekends or belonged to a surf club. Their partners — they were sometimes married, mostly not — worked as arts administrators, or were in local government. A Mitchell Maze house was a sign that you had arrived but were not quite settled.
Airy improvisations, or — according to how you saw it — calculated and beautiful wrecks, a lot of their timber was driftwood blanched and polished by the tide, or had been scrounged from building sites or picked up cheap at demolitions. It had knotholes, the size sometimes of a twenty-cent piece, and was so carelessly stripped that layers of old paint were visible in the grain that you could pick out with a fingernail, in half-forgotten colours from another era: apple green, ox-blood, baby blue. A Mitchell Maze house was a reference back to a more relaxed and open-ended decade, an assurance (a reassurance in some cases) that your involvement with the Boom, and all that went with it, was opportunistic, uncommitted, tongue-in-cheek. You had maintained the rage, still had a Che or Hendrix poster tacked to a wall of the garage, and kept a fridge full of tinnies, though you had moved on from the flagon red. As for Mitch himself, he came with the house. “Only not often enough,” as one of his clients quipped.
He might turn up one morning just at breakfast time with a claw hammer and rule at the back of his shorts and a load of timber on his shoulder. One of the kids would already have sighted his ute.
“Oh great,” the woman at the kitchen bench would say, keeping her voice low-keyed but not entirely free of irony. “Does this mean we're going to get that wall? Hey, kids, here's Mitch. Here's our wall.”
“Hi,” the kids yelled, crowding round him. “Hi, Mitch. Is it true? Is that why you're here? Are you goin’ t’ give us a wall?”
They liked Mitch, they loved him. So did their mother. But she also liked the idea of a wall.
He would accept a mug of coffee, but when invited to sit and have breakfast with them would demur. “No, no thanks,” he'd tell them. “Gotta get started. I'll just drink this while I work.”
He would be around then for a day or two, hammering away till it was dusk and the rosellas were tearing at the trees beyond the deck and dinner was ready; staying on for a plate of pasta and some good late-night talk then bedding down after midnight in a bunk in the kids’ room, "to get an early start,” or, if they were easy about such things, crawling in with a few murmured apologies beside his hosts. Then in the morning he would be gone again, and no amount of calling, no number of messages left at this place or that, would get him back.
Visitors observing an open wall would say humourously, "Ah, Mitch went off to get a packet of nails, I see.”
Sensitive fellows, quick to catch the sharpening of their partner's voice as it approached the subject of a stack of timber on the living-room floor, or a bathroom window that after eleven months was still without glass, would spring to the alert.
As often as not, the first indication that some provisional but to this point enduring arrangement was about to be renegotiated would be a flanking attack on the house.