Peter Carey - His Illegal Self

By the time the om was judged complete, Dial was so tense, she had to speak, to get it over.

So, she said, the cat. Buck.

They just looked at her, smiling.

I met with Phil Warriner. He’s your lawyer, right?

Fair enough, said Roger. Phil Warriner, sure.

So he says I can have a cat.

She saw Rebecca about to speak and cut her off. Look, she said, do any of you want to buy me out of this? I’ll sell right now.

The Crystal Community had no money. Its members stared at her, away from her. A bare-bottomed blond-haired child pissed out from the edge of the floor. The pee went into the wild lantana, a long clean arc of crystal.

The woman with the starving chest said her sister was into cats. The sister was not yet at a stage of development where she could get by without her cat. She said everybody couldn’t grow at the same rate. She thought Dial would in time. Then she said, Yes, a fading away kind of sound. Then she said, So.

Roger had cheekbones like ax heads. He said the problem was they couldn’t get their shit together. If they just looked at the community hall they would see that was the problem. The cat was just a symptom, Roger said. He thought they should get the people to come up from Nimbin and lay a rave on them about how to start a bakery and a newspaper. If there was indecision about the cat, it was the community, not the cat.

The real problem, said Rebecca, is that we have a rule that there are no cats. Are we going to enforce it or not?

Roger said that was exactly what he meant. Exactly.

The girl with the starving chest said no one wanted to lay a power trip on anyone else. A lot of people were here because they were through with rules.

The conversation continued like water dribbling from a hose.

Listen, Dial said at last.

Roger had been speaking, but he stopped.

The boy felt the silence, as heavy and dusty as the heat.

I’m sorry about the cat, said Dial. I really am. But you know while we’re sitting here arguing about this, Nixon is bombing Cambodia and Laos. Do you want to think what that is doing to the birds? I mean, I just came from a country where my friends are dying trying to end this war. So you will forgive me if I say.

Say what, Dial?

Dial shook her head and sighed.

You’re really nice people, she said at last. This is a really beautiful place. I’m pleased you’re not planning to blow yourselves up, or anyone else. She stroked the boy’s back. Not thinking what she was doing.

Do you know where you are, Dial?

Oh please.

Do you know you’re living in a police state?

Yeah, yeah, she said. It did not occur to her for a second that this might be, in many ways, quite true. Certainly the name Bjelke-Petersen meant nothing to her. She had never heard of Cedar Bay, helicopter raids and arson committed by Queensland police. She did not know there was a Queensland Health Act which permitted police to search her house without a warrant.

Fine, she said.

She slipped her hand into one pocket and produced Buck, sleek and soft and supple in his sleep, and from the other pocket she took a small silver bell and a piece of string and while they all watched she tied the bell around the kitten’s neck and placed him on the floor.

Buck set off around the circle, rubbing himself against feet and knees.

Only Trevor reached to touch him, to rub his head. When Buck saw how he was received by the others he put his tail high in the air and walked down the broad steps and disappeared into the lantana, his bell ringing softly among the twittering birds.

Dial stood, and her long shadow stretched across the buckled floor.

Well, she said, we’ll see you guys around.

And then she and the boy walked hand in hand down the stairs and up the rough clay road, through the hot and heavy air, to their property.

Why is it bad to be American, Dial?

They’ll get used to us, she said. And fuck them anyway.

His dad’s features existed in his mind like a face made by a windblown tree, but he did have one stable picture and this was in his back pocket and sometimes, in the hot afternoons, he went down into the rain forest to look at it in private. There, in the abandoned dusty little hut with the spooky sculptures by its door, he lay on the sneezy floor together with all his papers and rubber bands. Even in this gloomy place the light shone through his father’s curly hair. Angel-headed hipster, Cameron said.

Not the man in Seattle. Not the man with the hose. That man had a mustache which lifted and shivered as if disgusted by the life in front of him. He bore no resemblance to the photo on the floor.

The afternoons were slow and thick as ants. From the door of the abandoned shack the boy could see the melancholy clouds above the ridge as they folded and dissolved and changed from old men into pretty girls into weeping women, growing warts, losing teeth, a mess. He thought he liked this, but he didn’t. He packed up his papers and secured them one more time with the rubber band. Under the front step he found a rusty tomahawk and he chopped angrily at what they called a wattle tree and watched the black blood come out of the wet white. He hated where he was. He had stolen a clasp knife from Adam’s box and now he whittled at a stick, and although he never felt it cut, the knife slipped, maybe twenty times, and sliced up his fingers. Not really blood, just sticky, sour, no real difference from the sweaty heat, everything smudging into everything else.

He stayed in the forest, hiding from Dial in case she wanted him to walk into Yandina once again.

Dial did not like to drive. They had to walk four miles along a dusty road, four miles back. The heat would kill a spider. Hippies did not stop for them. When they got home, Trevor did not visit. All the single mothers could have said how weird that was, but no single women talked to them. They did not like Buck. They’ll get used to us, he said.

In the town he had a sneaky traitor’s heart and he would stare like a maniac at anyone who glanced his way. Not having been arrested, he trudged back out along Remus Creek Road. It was not home no matter what she called it, but sometimes he saw how it contained the parts of home he would rather have forgotten-the color of sadness, the same light on the moss side of the trees.

They weeded, Dial and he. They slept when the day got too hot. They found wild cherry tomatoes twining through the knee-high grass. The tomatoes burst inside their mouths, hot and wet, like vegetables from outer space. She was kind to him, but teary in the mornings.

The forest around the huts was laced with narrow winding trails, like veins in a creature as yet unnamed. When the boy discovered the first of these he did not mention it to Dial. Sometimes he heard children’s voices echoing, clear as hammer blows or saws, but no child appeared to play, nor did he want them to. He was not used to children, having been brought up alone, Victorian.

In the banana groves he found blue plastic bags the same exactly as the one Trevor used to hide his stash. They were tied around the high fruit, to stop birds’ pecking, he assumed. The banana tree was high and curved, dying like a sappy weed. He grazed his thighs and bloodied up his knees until he tore the blue bag from the fruit and then, in the grassless, shadowed banana grove, he carefully refolded his papers and tucked them safe inside.

His father would come for him, along the lacework paths. The boy was too timid to walk these paths himself so did not know the one that led to the big old dogleg bend on Remus Creek. If it had not been for Buck, they would have known about the swimming hole. They would have had hippies drifting in for herbal tea all day.

Dial definitely did not want to see any hippies. She would not even ask for help. When the boy found her trying to saw a piece of four-by-four along a pencil line, he said she should ask Trevor or the Rabbitoh to come and help.