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AUSTRALIA VAST, LONELY
1. Bullabulah
You can choose to live or you can choose not to live. I was so fucken pained. I was like a bull blinded by the red in pain, the blood that pain bleeds behind the eyes. I got a hammer and smashed a couple of things. Then I felt real good. It was the only powerful thing I could think of, where I used my muscles and didn't have to think. But once I started it was hard to stop and I could've gone through the whole fucking house in that same way with the hammer. I was smashing pain and since my life was full of it, I wanted to smash my whole fucking life. I wanted shambles and then what was left of myself. My face was a red locomotive, my mouth full of boiled lollies. My father said, 'you don't have to kill yourself. Life's too short for that. You'll be dead before you know it'. I felt an immediate sense of relief. My father was describing a painless life, that is, 'one that was over before we knew it.' But suddenly my life wasn't over and I knew it and the pain came sweeping back across my whole existence. 'You got to keep moving,' he said. 'Don't give in to it. I got bored with the television. People are fucking parasites. And what am I hangin' around for? Patch and I have had our run. We're just waitin' around to die. Whilst we wait, we put on Lotto. They owe me a lot of money. It's best to keep busy. I did the housework last night. I cleaned me frypan for four hours, came up real shiny it did, sparkling. It's stainless fucking steel. Yeah, we all get lonely. I got real fucking lonely out at Bullabulah. I used to walk to try and kill the loneliness, throw it down like a dark rug and walk across it. I walked a mile to the old shearing shed with Patch, then I sat and drank a bottle of beer and watched the kangaroos come in around dusk. I was real fucking lonely. Then I walked back again. There was a white phone that never rang. It was christmas and then my birthday came. You know how many friends you really got, when you got to go away and need someone to mind your dog. Then see how many fucking friends you got. The ones you can trust anyway. They're few and far between. Best to trust fucken no one.'
2. Coastline
Drop your heart onto the ground. Let it rest there like a stone. The wet wild heath will shudder on it. The sea wind in the perfumed heads tossed by salty air. The earthy brown of the heathlands beside the Indian Ocean. Before rain it is after rain and close to rain. During the storm the place is expressed. The coast and all its covering is in a ruckus. Eyes grow wider from the hollows as the fur grows darker with wetness. Feathers are water ladden. The stillness of the birds will help them survive unnoticed. The storm is the big wet night for their unseeing eyes and their fragile nests. This challenge keeps you company. More than silence. How does it feel to be eaten by emptiness? It's eating your guts like a carnivorous insect. Does having no centre drive you crazy? You want ants and plenty of them. Maggots from the east or at least a magnetic termite mound. But tonight you are the walking sky. The beach that spoke of nothing human brings it on. You have the whole of the Australian coastline to yourself. You can choose to listen or the silence can eat you alive. The wolf crater inside you is as big as that open gathering, its crumbling sides along the Tanami Track. I felt like I was starving, that I hadn't eaten kindness. Suddenly the tables were turned, and it was if someone has dropped a sinker into your stomach. You are sinking like a coastal shipwreck. Everyone ate the last meal off your chest, but no one saw your face. They swim in you like an ocean. You call out from beneath the waves. You wait for days when the wind is louder than your thoughts, the howl that streaks the land, that sands down the stone and occupies the bushes. The silence is the worst you've experienced. One day a solitary dolphin came in to the shallows at Geraldon in Western Australia and you thought he was a friend. But he floated north like a slow moving beach. This was your only meaningful relationship. So you settled on self-dialogue, where flies are philosophers, the jarrah, karri and sooty crow. Listen, trees and birds.
3. Clinic
I cried because I had about thirty years to go. I said to the dog, 'I'm not gonna make it'. But he would make it, because he only had eight years to go. 'I don't want to be on the earth when you aren't,' I said, burying my face into his thick blue neck. His only response was love and affection. He would talk the pain away if he could. Then it got real bad into the night, and it came in like a choppy black tide. There seemed no alternative. I thought, perhaps I can get my dogs put down, and then I would have no hesitation in ending my life. Dad said, 'don't kill your fucking dogs'. I said, 'well there is no one to fucking look after them. You won't fucking look after them. I can't fucking look after them. I got no fucking money'. I hate fucking money. They would die without me anyway. At least this way they wouldn't suffer. But in my heart I knew that there would be no turning back. I would like to be put to sleep with my dogs, both resting on my chest. Binda always requires my attention, so him first. He could lie there as the vet gave him the needle. He has always wanted to enter my soul and live there, because he loves me so much, and he's not such a strong dog. Perhaps on dying there would be this illusion for him, this final sinking into my being. Kindi likes to be a little farther away, just on the outskirts of my body, where she keeps guard for us all and avoids intimacy, my hand scrunching the muscle and black fur along her back. She could end like that. Once I knew that both were safely dead, I would want to go out like a light, before the pain set in, just like I did in the abortion clinic in Melbourne. I was meant to be distraught about losing the child that wasn't. I am not ashamed to say that I was simply lonely about it, that I welcomed the anaesthetic, because it took away the pain of my decision for awhile. 'It was peaceful during the procedure, when they removed myself and the soul of my unborn from each other's lives forever, except in those sad dreams that advanced and receeded like winter tides, there was nothing further'. Dad said, 'yeah, that's infinity'. There wasn't even a star or a light or a fear or a hope. At least it was less lonely than this country, which is pretty fucking lonely. I fell into consciousness abruptly. When they brought me back, I wept. |
