Brothers and Sisters (16 page)

Warwick Mickless, said the man seated next to Tony on the plane, had a radio spot on a Darwin ABC rural program, ‘The Stock Route’, reporting on tropical breeds of cattle. The bloke said, ‘Wocka’s a cracker, he keeps the Top End in stitches.’

‘Does he now?’ said Tony with a low chuckle. ‘“The Stock Route”’s a listening must, even for people who wouldn’t know what a cow was?’

‘It sure is.’

‘Ho, ho,’ said Tony.

It was a little too much for the wordman of note to swallow. After checking with Neilsen’s he found he was losing listeners in Darwin faster than anywhere else. Something would have to be done (as it always was). His childhood playmate, surrogate sister, Judy, beats him to the draw on getting her story in print, and now his illiterate pupil (that Brewarrina Centaur) challenges his lifelong playpen by having a radio spot, struth, doing some public good, so claimed, while getting a laugh, a point upon which Tony dwells in the post-midnight hours.

What is the good he’s done? Red Shield Day jams the switchboard annually. The Westmead Children’s Hospital has a wing named after him. Many a soup kitchen gets his cheque, and he’s to be found down there, in the stinking washcloth light of East Sydney, ladling out scrambled eggs through cold winter mornings.

But all Tony can think is that banishing bad to the shadows sums it up. His bad. His shadows. The best Tony has ever been able to do is sell things. Selling people what they don’t need by virtue of having it wrapped in words: corkscrews, flame weeders, luggage wrappers, eggtimers. His garage is full of gratis junk. (Eggtimers make him weep.) There’s also real estate and luxury cars: he owns a good deal of the former, drives three of the latter, knows he doesn’t need as much as he has, far from it, but wants to get rid of it less than he wants to keep it for the reason of holding on to himself. Words made these solid objects out of thin air.

Interesting the letter that reached Warwick Mickless (signed
Tones
). It included a neat transcript of a bunch of Warwick’s pieces, collected by the clipping service Tony used. The grammar, sentence construction and vocabulary were corrected in red ink. It looked like an attack of mad spiders on the page.
For your benefit
, Tony signed off,
old friend
.

This brings us almost up to the present—to a day last year when Tony rang Alan Corker at Whistling Flats, and closed on a parcel of land in the Southern Tablelands he’d been looking at, after selling his place at Bowral, where he’d lived, on and off, for years—always with the thought that somewhere less tamed and manicured by visiting gardeners would be a requirement before the end, if reality was to meet truth in the image of who he was, as being sprung from a patch of raw dirt in a raging windstorm.

The deal was five thousand acres of which about one-fifth was usable for stock, the rest comprising dry forest running up into steep ridges and gullies, rocky outcrops, messmate, brown barrel and alpine ash, formerly milled. Then upwards and on to a spine of granite tors, from where, as Corker told it, you could see out over an entire province of the Great Dividing Range. ‘Halfway to Bourke,’ said Corker, dramatising the view, at which point Tony felt his heart lurch with the possibilities of possession. ‘Sold,’ he said, experiencing a rush, a gush, of feeling. The two men shook on it. They were to be neighbours. Corker’s chunk of land, the Bullock Run, was on the western boundary.

Corker uncapped a whisky bottle and set up a couple of Pyrex glasses on a tree stump. From a reedy gully he extracted a billycan of clear water and asked Tony to say when. After they toasted the purchase Tony wrote a cheque for the deposit, and by the time Corker poured two more snifters of the Famous Grouse they were well away on a friendship riff.

There was more to this, an oddity of congruence. Among auctioneering legends, Careful Bob Corker, Alan Corker’s father, had been the veritable Don Bradman of his profession. Tony remembered Careful Bob ranging north to Haddon Rigg during the 1960s, where Tony, in blue Oxford shirt and Wool Board tie, shaggy hairdo and tight white moleskin trousers, had a season of selling rams. Corker liked the portrait of Careful Bob that Tony presented, a man the rest of the world had pretty much forgotten. Tony recalled gruff humour rising to the melody of a bush singer as the bids came flying in. ‘You’ve got him!’ said Corker. Even the sheep paid attention, said Tony; the crowds on the railings stayed hushed. Careful Bob was a small overweight man the double of Harry Secombe; his upper forehead white as parchment, his face raspberry-red when he lifted his narrow-brimmed hat to a lady.

‘There’s justice in that description,’ said Corker. ‘You have a way with words.’

‘I’m running out of them,’ said Tony.

After their drinks Tony wandered along a bush track, keeping to himself, wondering what he’d done. Corker followed at a discreet distance at the wheel of the Toyota. When Tony climbed back into the car Corker had the radio tuned to Classic FM.

‘So you’re a friend of the ABC,’ said Tony.

‘You could say that,’ said Corker. ‘I do a lot of long drives—five, six, seven-hour stints. Radio keeps me company. It’s been my education, sort of. Then there’s the music. It’s always the music with me.’

This was what people said, digging a hole for themselves, when they weren’t able to come out and say they loathed listening to Tony ‘Give Me Your Ears’ Watson. Tony knew that Corker’s buying group (underpinned by West Australian money) spent big on his show: it was why the Corkers of this world, honest brokers who needed him, couldn’t say they hated him. They didn’t know it was best to let fly, giving Tony the benefit of feeling cornered by desperation and dismal neglect. Didn’t know that his success was forged in silence.

Not that Tony sensed anything like hate from Alan Corker, an unusually warm and confiding sort of bloke. But just for a moment there, in the front seat of the car, Tony turned and projected from his upper chest and larynx into a space only a few inches in front of Corker’s nose something that sounded like ‘Arrgh!’

‘Are you alright?’ said Corker, hitting the brakes.

Tony recovered himself.

‘I’m on the ABC next month,’ he said. ‘“The Media Report”’s doing a tombstone number on my forty years of being me.’

‘I’ll be listening.’

‘You and about three others, that’s the stats.’

‘Come on, the mountain comes to Mohammed, you ought to be pleased.’

‘My sister, Judy Compton-Bell,’ said Tony, ‘must have given them a push. She’s deputy chair of Friends of the ABC, quote unquote. I put up with a tremendous amount of bull-o from her. I’m putty in her hands.’

‘Judy Compton-Bell—she’s your sister?’ said Corker.

‘To wish it were otherwise,’ said Tony, ‘would be very heaven.’

‘Her book’s in our library. There’s always a waiting list. I remember that night in ’98, the Sydney to Hobart . . . It was wild enough up here—wind and weird fog—couldn’t imagine what it was like out there on the water, till I read what she wrote.’

‘Garn, she’s unsinkable,’ said Tony.

‘It was the oddest thing,’ said Tony, when he took Judy out for dinner after she returned from Antarctica a week or so later. ‘I had the feeling all the birds were talking to me, calling out my name.’

‘As the centre of the universe, is this any surprise to you, dear?’

‘A bunch of white cockatoos flew over. They screeched my name from out of the blue. There were these grey little parrot things.’

‘Gang-gangs?’

‘Watch your tongue. It used to be like that when I was a kid. There was even a topknot pigeon, just ahead of me, looking at me from the ground—God, how I loved them—and a pigeon with a zigzag on its chest, like the mark of Zorro.’

‘A wonga.’

‘Speak English,’ said Tony. ‘Hissa, huzza, hissa hissa hissa. Huzz-ah!’

‘What’s that?’

‘A lyrebird, stupid.’

As he spoke, Tony cupped a hand and shook it beside his ear.

When they rose from the table they made a time to drive down south to inspect Tony’s bush block. Judy gave him the name of her doctor—she was always looking out for him. Worried sick about him, was how she expressed it.

‘But there’s nothing wrong with me,’ said Tony.

‘There’s a good reason to keep it that way,’ said Judy, kissing his cheek. He looked rather drained and exhausted. It was towards the end of his contract, his farewell few weeks behind the mike: years had been spent anticipating the end and worrying about Tony’s reaction. Judy and her pals went on about it.

‘I’ll be sticking to you like glue,’ said Judy. She felt that if things went well she’d be getting the old Tony back—the boy who played with her, games without end, with dedicated fondness of spirit. If not? Such desolation.

Complaining, upbraiding her, Tony went to see her ‘complimentary’ practitioner in Randwick. That was the way it was spelled in the handout.

‘It would help,’ said the doctor, a nutritional bloke, ‘if you could fill out this questionnaire.’

‘Jesus,’ said Tony, ‘must I?’

All very well to be asked intimate questions about history of diseases, operations, sexual infections and number of sexual partners (Tony wrote in that square:
Information available on request, if deemed
relevant
). What knocked him sideways was the genetic slant on things, page after page, where your cousin’s uncle twice removed’s propensity for strokes or palsy pointed a finger down into the seat of one’s pants.

The doctor, who rather fancied himself on the psychological scale, wanted to know a lot more than Tony was willing or able to tell.

‘You can have no idea how this makes me feel,’ said Tony, hovering with his pencil and hitting on a rhythm of two ticks, three crosses, three ticks, two crosses, and so on through several pages addressing the nothingness of being.

When he phoned Judy to say what a load of crapola it was, she said, ‘Tony, come on around.’

‘Where?’

‘To my place.’

‘When?’

‘Now.’

A dusty tan stetson hung on the hallstand of Judy’s Rushcutters Bay flat. There was a knobbly cane of mulga wood leaning against the wall. A pair of dark glasses with side shades, ‘burglar glasses’ for the elderly, lay where they’d been placed by the owner of them, whose identity Tony guessed.

‘This is a set-up,’ he said, as he came into the room.

Warwick Mickless rose from a chair.

‘Tones,’ he said, completely without sarcasm (sarcasm Tony deserved).

This craggy giant of a man—he looked eighty—had pouches under his eyes, yellow horsy teeth, a cattleman’s blebs and blemishes of crusty skin cancers on the backs of his hands. Standing beside him was a small Indonesian woman, Betty, his wife.

Tony had the feeling that he was looking into the mirror, an impression gained by the way he hated what he saw, it was so much the best of all his own possibilities ripened and dried like wood. Then he looked away, turned back, and realised that he wasn’t having some sort of optical fit the way the room fractured into cubes and rainbows. Judy fetched a box of tissues into which he plunged a fist.

Now to the present—well, to yesterday, to be exact; the previous afternoon shading through to a crisp, starry night, and then from that purple deepness into a morning where throughout the state at breakfast, on ninety-eight syndicated stations, there came no smash-bang of kettledrums to usher in the daily dose of you-know-who.

‘Aren’t you going to listen to your successor?’ said Judy.

‘No, I’m not,’ said Tony.

Anyway, the reception was appalling, so how could he listen to who-was-not-there-to-be-heard?

He twisted the dial, recalling the whistles and whoops of the old valve set at Blindale, with its green silken speaker cover into which Tony and Judy had long stared, seeing in the dim glow of the valves their entire futures being lived in imagination. And, as it turned out, much as they’d longed those futures to be.

On Aunty reception was better. In these back ranges there was a good reason why the ABC ruled the airwaves and even people who couldn’t be less interested listened to whatever was on, because stuffing one’s ears with words was a human must.