Under the Frangipani

CHAPTER

PART ONE

ONE

I tried to block out the drone of the engines. You called me the night before. I’d been waiting for that phone call for years. Since we were children in his choir. You said, I’m headin up to The Kimberley, mate - everybody was mate to you - Paradise Gardens, mate. North o Pearl Town. They call the joint Seaspray. Yer gunna have to meet me there cause I’m scared a whad I’m gunna do to im. I knew you weren’t scared of anything. Then your phone cut out. It was always cutting out because you never paid your bills. And to think that the kid you grew up with is now on the Board of Telstra.

It was too late to leave that night. I had a Board meeting next morning which i couldn’t cancel. And i was leaving for France at the end of the week to see my daughter. You never met her, did you! I rang her to cancel the trip. She wasn’t happy that i couldn’t tell her the reason. When she was growing up i was always too busy to be there for her. Her mother understood. You can’t expect a child to understand the action of adults. The earliest i could get away was after lunch. I checked my mobile later that night. I should have done it earlier but i hate being contactable. It’s the price you pay when you’re a public figure. And that was when i got your voice message: I know where the bastard is mate. I’m gunna chop im down like a fuckin tree! you said. All those years i tried to forget him while you kept feeding your hate. And now the Hate had arrived. I couldn’t blame you when he’d destroyed your life. I’d found a way to get on with mine. I knew your plea was a desperate cry for help, so as soon as the meeting finished i flew out. To rescue you. Again. I’ve always been rescuing you, Trevor.

Once in the air i didn’t move. My shoulder was propped against the window, my eyes following the changing landscape until it ceased to change and became a dry, flat desert and i was in a dream ten thousand metres above my problems in that rarefied blue which becomes deep space. The occasional cloud cast its shadow like a lake on the thirsty earth, and veins of dried up creeks mingled with lines of wind blown sand so that i wondered if anything could exist down there apart from the creatures cursed to live on its surface. And the Blacks. Redeemed by the sun and the desert and the droughts and the flooding rains. Beyond her far horizon was an unknown world, a jewel sea. But mostly it was a wasteland, a never-never land of ancient dreaming. I fixed my eye on a distant spot and watched it gradually approach. Was i drifting toward it or it toward me? The fact was that i was screaming from my past and the future was rushing toward me. I was about to discover My Destiny. I dared not venture down there to pit myself against the cruelty of Nature. The cruelty of Man was enough. One man in particular. Don’t you agree, Trevor! ‘Would you like more coffee, sir?’ ‘No thank you,’ I said. And the Captain called, ‘Prepare the cabin for landing!’

The runway came up to meet us with a screech of rubber and a thump, thump, thump and that wonderful feeling of reverse thrust when you realise that you are in the Eternal Moment. We taxied across the weeds on the tarmac to a quaint building which bore the sign: PEARL TOWN AIRPORT. Someone called out, ‘The most expensive housing in Australia’, to which i thought why would you boast about the un-affordability of housing? God help us when the mining boom is over!

It had been an hour and four beers since we landed. ‘All aboard!’ a woman with a clipboard called, and a line of us filed into another aircraft, this one with two propellers This time i found myself staring over a wing with propellers. A crew member gave us each a brochure which assured us of the benefits of flying the Kimberley with ConAir. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she announced. ‘We may experience a little turbulence because of a tropical depression forming south of Darwin, but it’s nothing we can’t handle. We should be down in twenty minutes.’ She took her place beside the pilot. As we gained height i hoped that between them they would find an airport to catch us. But all i saw was the red earth and the blue ocean and a thin white shoreline which faded into the haze. Paradise Gardens was down there somewhere. What a stupid name for a place stuck in the middle of nowhere. Her voice crackled over the intercom as she explained how an American billionaire had dreamt of building another Vegas in the desert. Paradise Gardens was the first stage. ‘Sin City!’ someone joked. The flight was like a roller coaster. ‘Wharr woould yoo build a joint douwn thaare?’ an American shouted above the noise of the props, with one hand securing his Texan hat from falling off, to which another passenger sang, ‘Money, money, money!’ to the tune of Abba, and on we droned, all the way to … Rome, Paris, London … anywhere, i wished, except where we were going. Then it was the Captain’s turn to distract us from the bumpy ride. His larrikin voice was more suited to driving a bus, i thought. He was, after all, simply providing a shuttle service to feed the resort and the mining boom. It sounded rehearsed: ‘Ladies and Gents, this is your Cap-i-tarn. We’ll be scootin down into Seaspray in a few clicks, just like Luke Skywalker. It’ll be on the starboard side if yer care to take a Squizzy Taylor. That’s to the right for all you land huggers,’ he chuckled. ‘In the old days the place had a jetty for the pearl fishermen, a pub for their brawlin, a church for their sins, and a few shacks for the white ants.’ The passengers laughed on cue. ‘Today, they still have the pub, but evree Tom Dick and Harrison Ford drinks chardy, thanks to Paradise Gardens.’ They laughed again. ‘Still, the old place ain’t changed much. It’ll fleece yer of the pearl dollar, by golly, if yer let it.’ More laughter. We hit an air pocket and a passenger vomited into a paper bag. The pilot resumed his spiel: ‘Paradise has a mini bus if yer need to go into town – Bet Adam and Eve would a loved one a them, eh!’ More laughter. ‘Don’t recommend yer walk, though. Takes a bit over an hour. Road’s not crash hot either. Drive like maniacs up ere. Run down anything that moves, they will. Mistake yer for a kangaroobarb, they will.’ More laughter. I stared at the unfriendly desert and couldn’t laugh. ‘Enjoy your stay, peoples. And as ol Frankie boy sang: Come fly with me, let’s fly, let’s fly away.’

Having barely ascended, we began our descent, circling a cluster of corrugated roofs which clung to a bend in the coast as if their residents were too scared to venture inland. We fell toward a rusted tin roof with its salutation to the great Australian dry throat painted in big letters which said: TOOHEYS BEER. A finger of a jetty pointed into the water and a trawler moved toward it like a whale.

The final approach was turbulent. It would have been worse if the cyclone had been closer. You couldn’t have rung at a worse time, Trevor. I mean, it was the beginning of the cyclone season. But that was always your style. Nothing by halves, eh! The passengers looked horrified as we bounced our way to earth. What a fashionable lot to die with, i thought. And if we survive, they’ll bore me to death in this paradise we’re heading to. Not that i was going for a holiday. I thought about how hot i would be and how much i hated Australian summers with its flies and beaches and Aussie barbeques. And that made me think of our childhood. We loved the beach, didn’t we, growing up on the Gippsland coast. We were always in the water – that’s if we weren’t singing in his choir. You could have been an Olympic swimmer if you hadn’t broken your leg. It never did heal right, did it! Then i heard a bang and thought we’d lost half the plane, but it was only the landing gear clunking into place. Now the pilot began the serious business of finding the airstrip. We circled the town again. This time the wing dipped recklessly close to a cross which stood quite separate to its modern looking church, as if to consecrate the earth it stood on and not what man had erected. We hit the runway with a bounce, and so did our stomachs. ‘Mind the step and have a nice day,’ the co-pilot smiled. But what was there to smile about with a cyclone on the way and your crazy desire to kill the bastard! I hoped i wasn’t too late to stop you.

My feet touched the tarmac. The day was heavy with a sun which shone almost vertically from a blanket-blue sky, except for a bank of cumulus clouds on the horizon. The heat radiating off the ground shimmered into a mirage as the line of us walked toward the terminal, which looked like a bus depot. And as i hastened, swirling red dust stung my face until automatic doors opened and snapped behind me with a rush of cold air. This alien place didn’t know whether to freeze or fry its visitors. A short bus trip later, and it was true what the pilot had said, for i was standing at the Gates of Paradise.

***

After i’d changed my damp shirt, i went outside and cowered from the heat under an umbrella with a complimentary drink and cold face washer. The humidity was frightful, so i got up, trying to appear relaxed, and strolled passed a swimming pool where children squawked like sea gulls, oblivious to the crushing sky. I found a bar - a cool retreat - which someone had fancifully named THE CASABLANCA and searched in vain for Bogart and Bacall. I ordered a cocktail. Men in thongs and tee-shirts had their eyes glued to the big screen and were watching the Test from The Adelaide Oval with its familiar church spires in the background. The bar opened to a patio which plunged into rolling lawns which plunged into a pearl white beach which plunged into a deep blue sea. I watched the ocean pound the shore. Drank my cocktail before it warmed. Counted the monotonous interval between the waves. ‘Where are you, Trevor?’ i grumbled. And the drinkers roared above the roar of the shore. Someone was out for a duck.

You said you would be there when i arrived, but reception said they had no-one by your name, and no-one had left me a message. Typical! i thought. I was bloody angry with you, Trevor. I’d postponed my trip to France to fly up there and sort you out and i didn’t want to wait any longer. ‘You can find me!’ i said, and went to my room and sat on the bed and opened the play by Chekhov which i’d brought with me. We did it at school, but you probably won’t remember because we both hated it back then – the whole class did - or was it that we hated him more for being our English teacher?

TWO

I’ll never forget the look in your eyes the day you left me in the wardrobe. We had been rehearsing Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion for Good Friday. It was to be a momentous occasion, coinciding with the church’s one hundredth anniversary. His boy’s choir was to combine with the local chorale society. Rehearsals were his obsession, remember. And so were we. At the final rehearsal we had to wear our blood red cassocks and virgin white ruffs. We must have looked like lambs to the slaughter as we filed into the stalls below the adult singers, all bleating above. There he was in his black gown with his baton raised like Moses dividing the waters. You said he looked like the devil, but i thought he looked like a whale - the sheer mass of him wrapped in that gown, and us like poor old Jonah. He used to wear that badge - the one shaped like a fish. Mother said the first Christians wore it. They were like a secret society, she said. He was all into secrets. Remember how his black wavy hair used to fall over his eyes. He’d flick it back with a twist of his head. It made us laugh. You used to snort like a pig. We weren’t supposed to laugh in his choir or snort like pigs. But you could never control yourself. One day he caught us and you kicked me in the shin real hard. I tried not to cry. He glared, ‘You two fellas can see me in the vestry later!’ He was always calling us fellas, as if we were animals. I used to hate it.

It was your idea to hide between his vestments in the wardrobe. I objected, but you swore, ‘We’re in his bloody vestry! It’s not our fault if he can’t bloody find us!’ I was terrified. You told me to stop being a girl. Then he burst into the room. I can still hear the squeaking door. The draft caused the wardrobe to swing open on your side and he grabbed you by the ear, but he didn’t see me. I was always luckier than you. He dragged you out. I’ll never forget the dread in your eyes as you looked back at me. ‘Where’s the other fella?’ he said. And you said, ‘He went home.’ I’ve always owed you for that, Trevor. That’s the day we became blood brothers. I can still smell the mothballs above my head as i waited for him to finish with you. All i could hear was him grunting and you saying nothing. I thought you’d left the room. Then i heard him tell you