Читать книгу Pilgrim Souls - Jan Murray - Страница 4

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul

W.E. Henley

Late afternoon, I decided to go into the village. The occasion called for a bottle of celebratory wine.

Solitary drinking?

Not something I normally did but normal needed to make way for novel.

And I needed to pick up a copy of the Byron Echo to check out the Classifieds for a handyman, someone good with timber. I obsessed about replacing the aluminium horrors. The electricity couldn’t be reconnected until the official transfer of ownership so there would be no power for a few days and that meant I would also be needing candles, sweet aromatic ones, the kind I had noticed in the Magic Happens shop. And I would need mosquito coils.

I stayed in my work clothes but ran a comb through my hair. This wasn’t the Eastern Suburbs or Sydney’s north shore. Here, the scene was come-as-you-are. Here, you would be valued for how you lived, not how you looked. The Golf waited up the front of the yard in the shade of the big garage. I was ready to head into the village.

I drove up Alcorn and turned right. Already, I felt like a local as I passed the half dozen small stores on Clifford Street. On seeing the BP Service Station just past the pub corner, I remembered that, in my more rational moments I’d promised the Golf a grease and oil change.

‘Hi,’ I said to the grey-haired man in overalls as he emerged from the workshop wiping his hands on a grimy oil rag.

‘Yeah. What can I do ya for, mate?’

‘I need a service.’

The middle-aged man tucked the greasy rag in his back pocket and raised a quizzical eyebrow. ‘Y’reckon?’ he said with a grin. ‘Your desk or mine?’

‘Ouch!’ I had not seen that coming.

His laugh was a genuine expulsion of joy as he wiped his hands down the backside of his pants then put one out for a shake. ‘No offence, hey?’

‘None taken.’ I shook his hand, aware I had just collected my share of sump oil for the day. ‘That’s it over there,’ I said, pointing. Can I book it in?’

I would later learn that I’d been recognized as a TV face. In addition to my now burgeoning Beauty and the Beast career, since the early Seventies I had appeared intermittently as a panelist on the Midday Show, and in the Eighties, I was a media-hot PR operator and an opinionated ministerial spouse.

And of course, as my friend the mechanic had just made apparent, I was recognizable from my decade-old Sixty Minutes interview. I had created a media storm with that little gem, the segment becoming such a ratings sensation it surpassed even the TV wonder, Alf, on the Sunday night in March ‘87 when both shows went to air.

In passing, I just want to say about that notorious desk story that I had intended it to support my feminist views about a woman’s place in the scheme of things, but thanks to Channel Nine’s judicious editing of three hours of film into a ten-minute package, my militant message was skewered to imply I was celebrating John's rise to the Ministry. Far from it. I was claiming my conjugal rights at a time they were being seriously denied me by Canberra's political system.

The story that aired had unintentionally titillated the nation’s imagination. Such is life and life goes on...but crazily, it seems from the comments I still regularly receive, I’m to carry the notoriety into my crone years.

I don’t mind.

I think my story of love on the desk shed a little glow of mirth around our national politics. One newspaper wrote that I should have been made Woman of the Year. The sports journalist Roy Masters had a different take on it. Roy reckoned ‘Jan Murray’s mouth was John Brown’s Achilles heel’!

While the cheeky mechanic went back inside his workshop to check his sheet, I wandered over to where the vehicles for hire were parked on the edge of a gully and dense rainforest patch. A big trailer for the mountain of rubbish was what I’d be needing once I started ripping out kitchens and bathrooms and aluminium frames.

I bent over the side of one of the trailers to look inside and gauge its dimensions.

‘Oh, my God!’

I jumped back.

A rush of adrenalin had me grabbing my chest to stop a galloping heart escaping the corral.

A massive reptile lay coiled up in the bottom of the trailer, baking in the sun, a monster! Brownish, with a tawny coloured diamond pattern all the way down its creepy back, heavy, oozy and lethal. Be calm, oh beating heart, be calm!

‘Big bastard, isn’t he?’ said the mechanic as he came up behind me and leant in, tracing, with the tip of his finger, the reptile’s languorous curves.

The sleepy creature gave a shudder. It rippled down its length but it continued to doze.

‘He’s a pet. Lived with us for yonks. Can’t hurt you. Only a python.’

‘Oh, right. Only a python?’ Get this man’s blithe spirit.

‘Diamond python. Eats mice ‘n stuff. Won’t poison you.’

‘Okay. And it won’t strangle me to death?’

‘Harmless.’

‘Okay, then.’ I brushed hair from my eyes and drew in a deep breath, determined not to let this reptilian monster get the better of me. My new neighbour must see me as being at one with God’s creatures. A true Byronian wouldn’t resile from a mere six-foot long deadly python, and anyway, I was curious. And they’re not deadly, anyway, said the man.

‘Touch him. Go on.'

‘Okay.’ I leant in, taking the mechanic at his word that the ductile creature wouldn’t rear up and strike me with its forked tongue.

For several moments I gazed down at the reptilian mandala. My chest felt constricted, my heart an electric blender pulsing at full speed. Primal fear. An involuntary reaction. Serpents. Sin. Adam and Eve. The Garden of Eden.

Of course, there would be a serpent in Byron Bay. This, after all, was Paradise.

Finally I took the plunge and traced the creature’s shape with the tip of my finger and watched what I imagined were ripples of pleasure run down his back. It seemed in the moment that I had just passed some kind of supernatural test, that I belonged.

‘I just moved in this morning,’ I said to the mechanic. ‘Bought a place round in Alcon Street.’

‘Yeah, I heard. You bought the shack. The one on the beach.’

I nodded, perplexed, and then I got it. ‘I guess I should open an account with you,’ I said. Young Mr. Real Estate Agent had possibly recognized me, and news travels fast in a small town.

‘Get used to it, then,’ he said, indicating the python. ‘Bet y’balls that fella’s got family around at your place. They live under the house,’ he chuckled.

‘You’re kidding me!’

‘And you got one of those ti-tree fences down the side of your joint, right? That’s what they love. Curl up on the top, the bushy part. Same colour as the fence. You’ll hardly notice but I betcha you’ll have ‘em. And smell ‘em. They pong a bit.’

This wasn’t good.

‘They come across the road from the everglades.’

‘Everglades?’

‘The rainforest, undergrowth, the stuff you’ve got all around you. That stuff,’ he said, indicating the darkness on the edge of the service station.

I stared into the depths of the shadowy undergrowth. Its green stillness appealed. Strange things could happen inside such denseness. Even the word ‘everglades’ resonated, conjured images of wetlands and alligators, nights on the bayous and Tony Joe White’s smoky swamp music. There was a creek in there. I could hear frogs. I also heard a bird, a high-pitched melodious call. Could one hear rustling through there as well, I wondered, still goose-bumped and freaked when I thought of the possibility I might have come face to face with one of these colossal pythons when I was dragging rubbish out from under the shack an hour ago.

‘Don’t know whether to say this or not,’ the mechanic said, interrupting the image of life on the bayou. He looked over his shoulder, scoping the place before continuing.

‘Say what?’

He stared into his workshop, then glanced across to the main shop, across at the pumps and then, having done the full scope, back at me. Finally, ‘Uh-uh. I can see the snake’s shaken you up a bit. Shouldn’t go putting me big foot in it about other things that might spook you.’

‘Other things?’

The man wasn’t smiling any more but creasing his bushy eyebrows and looking uncomfortable.

‘What other things?’

He seemed undecided.

‘What?’

‘That big shed at the front of your property? The huge garage? The windows all boarded up?’

‘What about the garage?’ I said. The fact I had lowered my voice to ask was probably symptomatic of the fact I felt bad stuff coming down the pike.

He hesitated. ‘Nah, don’t matter. You’ll find out soon enough.’

‘Please tell me? What should I know about the garage?’

He seemed to make some kind of compromise with himself. ‘Okay, the hydroponics ... for a start.’

‘Hydroponics?’

I knew what hydroponics were.

Not good news. Thirty-six poisonous chemicals.

I had smoked grass. Of course, I had smoked grass. And I had inhaled. But not the chemical variety. It had been years ago when the weed we smoked came down from heaven and not via a hydroponic lab.

I’d been a regular visitor to Canberra after Gough Whitlam’s victory, having worked hard campaigning for Gough in those 1972, 1974 and 1975 campaigns.

Thanks mainly to the Its time campaign I had become seriously addicted to federal politics, aided and abetted by a neighbour and close friend, the Member for Prospect, Richard Klugman. He and I discussed politics relentlessly; me from a bleeding heart Left perspective and Dick from his long-time Andersonian civil libertarian position. Along the way it seemed he recognized some kind of intelligence lurking within my Stepford Wives persona and in the early Seventies convinced me that although I had left school at fourteen and become a mum by the age of twenty, and now with five little darlings I was knee-deep in motherhood, I could yet matriculate and then go on to university.

Richard guided me all through the years of my Political Science and English Literature Honours degree at Macquarie University and thanks to his friendship––and his parliamentary travel entitlements, which enabled me to barter my research and writing skills with various politicians in return for interviews and information––I came to know several of the Labor Party’s luminaries during my frequent trips to Canberra.

This suburban housewife got off on being close to the centre of the action, and action there was aplenty in those turbulent political times. I was able to use my privileged access to the political elites to gain intimate knowledge of Canberra politics, and interesting perspectives on the policies, which helped me in pursuit of my degree.

It was during these heady days of the Whitlam era that I occasionally found myself, late at night after the House had risen, sitting in an outdoor steamy spa in the company of some of Canberra's elite who regularly coalesced around a beltway institution known fondly as a particular staffer's hot tub. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!

‘But you said, "For a start". What else?’ I asked the mechanic.

‘Well ... um––’ He looked over his shoulder, then back at me. ‘…a bit of heroin dealing went on, too, I reckon. Plenty of junkies round at that joint. Coming an’ going at all hours. Never knew who was living round there. A Yank had it last, I think. Or maybe not.’

‘My place, you’re talking about? The old beach shack?’ I mentioned the street number.

‘Your property alright, mate. I know the block, right enough.’ He wiped his forehead with his oily cloth. ‘Yeah, that big garage up front.’

I shrugged and asked no further questions. I resented the fact my Xanadu was sullied. I had promised myself it would be a place of good karma. I arranged to drop the Golf in the next day for the tune-up and was almost out of the driveway and onto the road, my right-hand flicker on when a teenage girl rushed up to the window and tapped. The girl asked if she and her boyfriend could grab a ride into town.

‘To the Great Northern?’ said the girl. ‘We’re supposed to start work at four and our bomb won’t start. The man said you’d give us a lift. Is that okay?’

Black pants, white shirts and neat appearances, obviously dressed for bar work, both of them. Almost four o’clock. ‘Fine. No worries. Hop in.’

The girl took the back seat and the youth came around and sat in the front. As the doors slammed, I remembered I’d flung my handbag onto the floor at the back. I was about to reach around and grab it when the girl handed it through to me. I felt shame colour my cheeks. I must learn to trust. ‘I need these,’ I said, digging out my dark glasses and holding them up before passing the bag back to the girl.

‘It’s got a bit or a bad repo, your joint. Drugs ‘n that,’ said the youth as we travelled along Bangalow Road into Byron. I had just finished answering the young man’s friendly interrogations about what part of the world I hailed from, how long I’d lived in Byron and what I thought of the place, of my own piece of the Bay, in particular.

‘What do you know? Or is it just rumour?’ I said, looking across at the boy and into the rear vision mirror to catch the girl’s eye.

The youth hesitated, turning to look behind to his girlfriend. I couldn’t see, but I felt they were exchanging cautious looks. ‘A bit of heavy stuff used to go on there, that’s all,’ he said.

‘Junkies ‘n that,’ the girl volunteered. ‘That big garage you got up the front? Grew hydroponics in there. Lots.’

‘Bit of heroin dealing went on, too,’ said the boy.

‘Where’s the best place to catch some good music?’ I wanted out of this conversation with these strangers. This sure ain’t Kansas, Toto. If I’d landed in Oz then I wanted rainbows. I didn’t want to hear any more about bad things that might or might not have happened around at my new home. Especially not if the bad thing was heroin. Dirty, lay-about heroin addicts didn’t do it for me. I was in the zero-tolerance camp at the time of landing in Byron Bay. Sydney had had a spate of house break-and-enters. I felt the scourge had been around long enough for even the dumbest kid to know the perils of starting down the heroin highway. There had been stories of young nurses and police being stuck with dirty syringes, having to wait to know if they were HIV-positive and likely to die from AIDS some day.

‘The Rails Friendly Bar,’ the pair chorused. ‘Best music.’ They seemed relieved themselves to have made it out of the quicksand and onto safer ground.

‘Y’know why they call it the ‘Friendly’ bar?’ asked the girl, who went on to answer her own question. ‘It’s because, up till a few years ago ... according to my Mum, that is, when the trains still used the railway and holiday makers got off there at the station ... well, like, the part of the station that was the pub had a band that would come out onto the platform and play music to greet everyone. How cool’s that? The band from the pub welcomes you as you get off the train!’

‘Best music’s at the Rails, for sure. No cover charge, either.’ The youth checked his watch. ‘Not like at ours. And Cornie’s pub’s always too crowded. Too many tourists.’

‘Everyone gets up and dances at the Rails. That’s what’s so great about it,’ said the girl.

‘Don’t matter if you’re on your own, even.’ The boy was looking my way as he spoke. ‘Or old,’ he added before the girl leaned though and jabbed him in his ribs to shut him up.

I pulled the car up across the road from the Great Northern on Jonson Street and thanked them both for their company. ‘I’ll save it for another day if that’s okay,’ I said when the girl offered to fix a drink for me if I cared to park and come inside.

‘See you, then. Toodle pop,’ said the girl as she took her boyfriend’s hand.

Halfway across the road, the boy doubled back. He came up to the car window and leaned in. ‘Don’t worry about your garage. It’s gonna be okay. It’s gonna be great. Welcome to the Bay.’

He straightened up, looked to where his girlfriend now stood in front of the hotel––pointing frantically at her watch––then back at me. He took something from his pocket and put his hand through the window.

‘Chill,’ he said, opening the Golf’s glove box and placing something in it. Then the youth, as he crossed the road, gave me a wave over his shoulder.

By the time I discovered the fat joint, my passenger had already caught up with his girlfriend and the pair had disappeared indoors.

I shut the glove box on my illegal bounty, took a deep breath and counted to ten as I came to grips with the fact that a Byron Bay welcome seemed not to be the usual polite knock on the door by a friendly neighbour carrying a tray of scones.

‘Chill,’ the youth had said and that’s exactly what I intended to do.