Chapter 2
Lamont Donleavy moved south along the peninsular with his head down. The cold south easterly whipped the surf and pitched salt spray across the thin stretch of land to the lake. Gulls lined the beach in rows and pointed their beaks to the wind.
His apartment block stood incongruously tall among the straight line of single storey beach houses. From the thirteenth floor Marit Donleavy watched her son. Her hands worked the dishes as she thought of his other school uniform, wet and still hanging over the shower rail. She waited for the lift to clunk its way down to pick up her boy. The Milo was hot and the muffins began to brown in the toaster.
Lamont lifted his head toward the glow of his mother’s kitchen in the sky, almost hidden by the bleakness of the afternoon storm. He hurried across the sand to the shelter of the building’s foyer and with the taste of the sea smarting his lips, pressed the lift button.
Lamont’s father, Frank, had met his mother at the Victoria falls Hotel in Rhodesia during the peaceful years before the government of Rhodesia declared independence unilaterally from Great Britain in 1965. The British refrained from warring on their enfranchised kin and this ushered in the bitter bush struggle that drove a sad wedge between the black and white people of that scenic country. The war encroached upon Frank’s freewheeling lifestyle and after his marriage to Marit van Schoor, an Afrikaner, he grabbed his wife and belongings and headed south to the tiny kingdom of Swaziland.
Marit became pregnant and Frank had not forgotten a pact he’d made with an old cohort during his youth at Sydney’s Kings Cross. ‘I tell you, it’s not crap!’ He pushed his hands further into his pockets, truculently with pout. ‘I promised him. He promised me. We’re mates and mates don’t forget.’
‘But Frank – ’
‘Marit, I know it’s a long time ago but a deal is a deal. We don’t have to stay in touch to honour our word.’
He watched her worry as it wove patterns in her face. He had attacked her sense of honour and when that failed he tried to mollify her with humour.
‘Come on, Marit. It’s not so bad, is it? I’ll pick the names, you can vet them and when the kid’s born we can pick the lucky name out of a hat. How’s that?’
‘You’re a skelm, Donleavy!’
There was little she could do in the face of her husband’s devilment. Her daughter was born bush-style. Open brown faces welcomed the tiny, pink figure into the world. Marit had worked her contractions on a straw matting bed in a cosy Swazi hut just outside the town of Manzini. While she was in labour Frank sought desperately for appropriate female names just in case. It had been a mate’s joke and long years of laughter had melded hilarity into a serious pact that was to have quirky repercussions upon their descendants.
‘It’s a girl.’
‘Jesus!’
‘That’s not a girl’s name, Frank!’
‘Shit!’
‘And that’s not either!’
They both laughed.
*
A year later Frank, Marit and their daughter, Juno Peta Donleavy, were driving as hard as the truck could go up the slippery slopes of a mountain in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Marit was again in labour and the mission hospital was yet another kilometre up the track. Frank was cursing the bumps as his wife thudded mercilessly against the door of the cabin.
‘Get back on the fucking road, you clapped out shit of a truck!’ Frank screamed at the dashboard as they charged across a gap in the track. The rain was full of drops the size of oranges and the ground changed shape incessantly. And Frank was an anxious father in a hurry.
He finally drove the truck into the hospital drive and shouted for assistance. Marit was helped by gracious nurses into the ward where everybody gathered to see how the white missus gave birth to her child. Crones with their grandchildren, small wide-eyed boys with mouths stuffed with sugar cane stalks, and the little girls with intent eyes and secure smiles, crowded around Frank and his family in the corner of the ward.
Frank sat next to Marit and rubbed her back while cradling young JP in his other arm. The midwife hovered between Marit’s outstretched legs, a chasm of wonder for the peering crowd. As the furry head popped into view, the crones made joyous sounds and craned forward to watch the body of the new infant slither into the hands of the smiling midwife.
That his son was clearly a boy was incipient in the singing of the crowd. The faces were mobile and there was a sort of celebration in the way they described the potent manhood of the new-born child. As Rex Mossop, Kel O’Shea, Arthur Rimbaud and Lee Gordon swirled with other names from the past, Frank picked out the name for his son.
‘Lamont Cranston! Oh, no, please not, Frank!’
‘Marit, it could have been worse.’
‘Lamont? Cranston?’
‘It could have been Merlin!’
Their happiness was bouncing about the ward and outside a small boy laughed.
*
The wind drove a blast of salty rain into the faces of the four schoolgirls. They huddled under a garage awning, watching the rain pelt down.
‘I’ll never get home in this.’ said the girl with a cigarette cupped in her hands.
‘Bullshit, Lorraine!’ roared the girl with the mango-shaped face.
‘Jesus! I’ve got a fuck at four!’ cried Carol and suddenly darted into the rain and was lost from sight.
Lightning strobed the darkened afternoon. Ghost figures flashed. They leaned closer to the wall. Black clouds dragged the horizon closer to the beach.
‘Shit! I’m going for it’
Juno broke away from her friends and hurled herself into the awful wind.
*
Lamont sat by the lounge windows, watching the storm rage its bad-tempered crusade across the sea. He wondered how fish felt during a storm. Then Juno was sprinting across the stretch of sand below and he viewed his sister curiously.
The Donleavys had arrived in Sydney a month before via a languid cruise through Asian waters. They had embarked at Mombasa and had disembarked finally at Darwin. Frank would not fly. He had been in no hurry to get home to Sydney, though he’d been away for over thirty years. Returning meant refraining and Frank was not the sort of person to clamp irons on himself. The distance between Frank and his past was in the way Sydney had altered. There was the Opera House without its cranes and scaffolding. An expressway swerved past the Royal George and had cut off its charm. It had become a eunuch pub by the wharves.
So as to be free to alter his life’s course at a moment’s notice, Frank rented a furnished flat on the edge of the beach. If it drove him mad he could piss off whenever he wanted. The extra rent was worth it. He was prone to the life of a hermit and as winter had begun and the skies had become greyer, he knew the beaches would be devoid of people.
Juno, at seventeen, was in her final year at school and the transition from Africa to Australia had been painless. In a month she had selected her friends and had settled down to her way of life.
After a lifetime of traipsing after their father through Papua New Guinea and Africa she and Lamont had hardened. The sight of decaying children provided their escape from the romanticism of fairy tales and television. The years of war, famine and terror had become the boundaries of their existence. She had a unique way of scooting across the spectrum of life without changing colour and as she rushed into the foyer and shook the rain from her hair, she felt as if she’d lived here all her life.
She pushed the lift button and waited. When the lift door opened, an elderly man stepped out and dipped his hat to her. She smiled hallo and vanished into the lift. She was home.
‘Where’s Dad?’ she asked as she flung her schoolbag under the kitchen table.
‘Social security rang.’ Marit answered wearily.
‘And Monty?’
‘Watching the storm.’
Juno wandered through into the lounge and saw her brother with his face pressed hard against the window. A big circle of haaaahh covered the pane where his mouth breathed hot air against the cold glass.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Pulling myself, stupid!’ Lamont growled into the window.
‘Yes. They say that’ll happen.’
Lamont stared hard at the distance for a moment and then his face changed shape.
‘Funny!’ he decided without humour.
*
The storm followed the sun over the horizon behind the massive cliffs at the back of the lake. Just in time to explode a final tribute of colour. Frank Donleavy returned from the city. He was exhausted. He hated the queues. He hated the waiting. He scorned at the need to justify himself to paternalistic public servants in their cubicles.
He had journeyed to Sydney, standing in the bus, his six foot three inches frame bending in a futile effort to see out the window. Everyone wore after-shave or perfume. They stank. No one opened windows.
Sitting in his corner of the lounge he tried to reach into the ether, to stay there, rather than remain and have to deal with the mess his life had become.
‘Nil desperandum, my sweet.’ Marit said as she laid the coffee cups on the window ledge.
‘Non sequitor, pater noster and etcetera.’ Frank replied, pulling his wife onto his lap.
A little splutter of pink resisted the advance of night until an errant blotch of black cloud smothered it.
‘Better put on the light.’
‘Let’s do without it for a while?’ Frank murmured distantly.
They sipped their coffee to the sounds of television through the wall. Their neighbours seemed slightly disadvantaged in their hearing capabilities and their television adopted stentorian proportions.
After ten minutes of buzzers and answers and orchestrated applause, Frank wanted to turn it off. He shouted at the wall. There was no answer but the contestants. Then he banged the side of his fist as hard as he could against the wall and the noise lowered.
‘Christ! I’m so detribalised I could shove this facile society right up Glenn’s arse.’
‘Glenn? Who’s Glenn?’
*
The next afternoon was clear and cold. The only movement in the streets was of vehicles and schoolchildren hurrying homeward-bound. Cockatoos squawked their irritation from the trees as Juno and Lamont waited for the streetlights to turn green.
‘Who’s that?’ Lamont was watching the girl waving to them from the other side of the road.
‘That’s Carol.’
The coffee lounge was dim. Cockroaches were squashed against the skirting, as if hiding from a hasty broom. Stale air from piles of crushed cigarettes and Lamont was toeing paths through the mess. His eyes lingered on Carol’s sharp breasts that stung the fabric of her school blouse. He swirled his toes faster.
‘Did you catch him yesterday?’ Juno gushed as she shuffled her books into the bag on her lap.
‘Shit! The prick didn’t wait.’ Carol exclaimed in mock disappointment. ‘I mean, Christ! I run all the way through the fucking rain and he’s not there.’
The lost opportunity of sensual pleasures was rapidly replaced by the rumination of intimacy with Juno’s hunky brother. Carol calculated her movements so that her pencil-tip nipples would draw exciting patterns against her blouse.
‘What a waste of a day.’ said Juno as she pushed the slop of coffee in the saucer to the middle of the table. Then she slurped the cup empty. With inattention she dropped the cup back into the saucer and the dirty liquid splashed a frothy stain on Carol’s blouse.
‘Ever tried sucking coffee out of a sheila’s bra, mate?’ Carol suggested.
Juno left her brother and the salacious Carol at the coffee lounge. She jogged across the road with her school case irritating her thighs. Within minutes she had dumped her gear in her bedroom and descended to wait out the day on the beach. Sitting on the slopes of the sand hills she dug her bare feet into the sand.
There was little wind. There was no surf either, just a few gulls awaiting the worm. The beach was no different here, she thought. Blue, green, thunderous, still. All fish swam in water, and shat and ate and died. The water near India was as fetid as the water off Bondi. There was no difference at all.
An hour passed slowly. It had been an ugly day of ugly people. Juno shook herself from her mood and wandered down the beach where the footsteps of runners made holes in the sand. If only I could run off the edge of the earth, she mused without feeling.
It started off as a dot in the distance where the beach curved toward the sea. As it grew she realised it was running toward her. Protecting her privacy, she waded into the water where the runner wouldn’t go. The sandbank was big and she seemed to walk far to sea with the water about her ankles. She turned to see a boy waving her back to shore.
‘Get lost!’ she shouted her annoyance and waded still farther into the sea. Then she stopped and looked around. The boy was following.
‘Can’t you get it into your thick head that I want to be ... ’
Juno’s feet slipped with the sand as the bank collapsed. Her head went under as she sank with the rip. She was flowing in the sandy gutter of the surf as it drained out to sea.
*
The hands were cruel upon her back. She was conscious and in pain as she vomited but the hands continually pumped rib-cracking rhythms against her spine. ‘Pump two three four five ... pump two three f...’
‘Get off, fuck you!’ Juno cried.
Rane sat on his haunches. His blond hair framed his face, dark and beautiful. She stared at him. She had never seen a more gorgeous male. She watched him as his mouth opened, white and pink interruptions in that sculptured dial. He laughed with his head thrown back, like an imbecile at the theatre.
‘What are you laughing at?’
It was a ludicrous attempt to regain dignity as she realised she was sitting in the mess she had thrown up. Her hair, coarse with sand, stuck out in spikes.
His hands went to her head and tried to pat the hair down. His face was all smiles.
‘You think it’s funny?’
‘Hold still!’ Rane commanded as he tore off his tracksuit and eased it over her shivering body. A thin strip of cotton covered his groin. Goose flesh covered his body. ‘Where do you live?’
‘Up there!’ Juno pointed up the beach to her building.
‘Not the monolith?’
Juno anticipated his irony and began to head off home. Suddenly she reached out and stroked his skin. ‘We’d better get me home before you break out in boils. Jesus! You really are cold, aren’t you?’
His briefs were brown as his skin. Like a stunning picture of man on some pristine coast Rane walked with a lithe and sensual grace. Juno held his hand tightly as she trudged the sands with him. She was in shock from the terrifying moments in the surf and she was enjoying the distant delicious feeling of lewd exhibitionism as they caused curious curtains to open and faces of hopeless neighbours to peer down upon them.
‘You know, there’re two morons up there somewhere who keep a small white dog and they never let the poor little bugger out for a run. It’s a poodle or something like that. It pisses and craps on their balcony and every weekend the old lush of a woman comes out in her nightie and washes the shit with a hose. It just rains down on all the other balconies below.’
‘And it barks when they go out?’ Rane guessed.
‘You know then!’ Juno grinned mirthlessly.
The lift was empty when it reached the foyer and they stood silent as it rose again through the building. Each floor had its peculiar sounds; the fourth a cat fight and the seventh a church service.
‘Love the insulation.’ Rane shook his head.
Juno made a face and said nothing.
The door opened again and they emerged onto thick commercial carpet that stuck to the soles of their feet as they walked. Juno pressed the key into the lock and the flat greeted them warmly with its smells of coffee and incense.
A short corridor led into the lounge with its panoramic windows and threadbare furniture. Beyond, through an inter-leading door, lay the rest of the flat.
‘I won’t be a moment.’
Juno passed through the door and Rane went to the window. Down below he could see the little white dog on the balcony, shut out from its mistress. It was yapping as it paced back and forth within its tiny enclosure. Then Rane noticed the television through the wall. He moved closer and listened.
‘This is Mary Kostakidis – ’
‘Good heavens! How can anyone live like this?’ he thought.
‘What’s your name?’ Juno asked as she re-entered the lounge. She passed his tracksuit to him. He dressed.
‘Rane Hollard.’
‘Hmm! Nice name. As in the wet stuff from the sky?’
‘No. With an en and an EE. My Dad’s got this thing with names.’
‘Oh no! Not you too?’
‘Why? What’s yours?’
‘Juno Donleavy.’
‘Then your second name is Patricia or something?’
‘Close! It’s Peta. You’ve read him?’
‘Only the Unexpurgated Code. Dad’s got the Mad Molecule and a few others. Quite a funny writer.’
‘I’ve been obliged to read his works. My Dad has ambitions of being a film director, you know, dicing out roles for all his characters. He was gone on the Shadow and lumped my poor brother with the spook’s alter ego. Lamont Cranston! Can you imagine?’
‘Lamont? Lament the name Lamont. Is it buried?’
‘We call him Monty. It’s the best we could do. Anyway, it’s better than Lam.’
‘Is it?’
Marit bundled her tray into the lounge with a sheepish grin. She set the coffee and biscuits down. ‘My! You’re the gallant lifesaver. I am happy to meet you ... ’
‘Mum! This is Rane.’
‘It was a Godsend that you were there on the beach. You would not expect the surf to be dangerous in weather like this.’ said Marit with a nervous glance out the window. ‘You must come and have dinner with us sometime soon, hey?
‘My! Anyway, Rane, it was nice to meet you and you must excuse me but I’m in the middle of baking bread.’
Just then, the people next door changed to the seven o’clock news. Rane stood. Marit hurried away. ‘Considerate mob next door!’
‘Them!’ Juno said scornfully. ‘Deaf to the world.’
*
Lamont left an unsatisfied Carol by the privet in the reserve. Her panting had become a snarl when he told her he would burst if he didn’t go soon. He ran like a crab to the toilet near the boatshed. The concrete floor was wet and slippery. The urinal overflowed. White stones like mothballs clogged the drain. Cigarette butts swam in the turgid effluent. Lamont stepped over the mire and went into the pew at the end. The seatless porcelain was covered in grime and the dispenser behind the door had a single sheaf of paper; the short square shiny stuff which will not absorb.
‘Shit!’
He pulled his trousers up to his knees and lowered the top half in a fold around his thighs. With his feet on the rim of the porcelain he squatted and let his eyes roam the graffiti on the back of the door. In a striking display of graphic art, the figure of a bespectacled man with his head between a girl’s legs seemed both trite and amusing. But the words printed below left Lamont with a helpless anger, the kind of injured anger he knew when he faced the cane because of someone’s lies.
‘How can anyone stand in this muck and etch that kind of perversion into the fucking door?’
The shiny paper was insufficient and as he fastened his trousers he felt clammy and clumsy. ‘Shit! That poor girl!’ He stood down reluctantly and his feet recoiled from the slime. He opened the door and went back to find Carol. She had gone.
Immediately, he searched the bushes and returned to the toilet with a broken beer bottle. He scraped away the wording first and then, finger-cramped and cranky, he removed the head of the girl. When he was finished he was glad he had tried.
He went home to the apartment and the aroma of fresh bread. Juno was flopped on the lounge.
‘And where have you been, Romeo?’ Juno asked knowingly.
‘Shut up!’
*
Dinner was a desultory affair. Frank sat in a wooden mould, opening his mouth for food only. Marit busied herself by helping her family through the meal. Juno thought of the skin she had touched that afternoon. It was Friday night and the noise from the hotel band along the road was drowning the sounds of The Greatest American Hero next door. It was not the night to stay home.
The stars twinkled a message of devilment. There was no moon and it was cold to the marrow. Lamont wore his leather jacket and leered at himself in the mirror. At sixteen, he was nearly as tall as his father, though not nearly as broad. He had the same blue eyes as Juno, not the iridescent chameleonic eyes of their parents. But a strain of vermilion tinged the brown hair of all his family.
‘Where are you off to?’ asked Juno. Smirk-less, she stood by the door, coat in hand, feet astride in long furry boots.
‘Where it doesn’t cost!’ Lamont snapped and brushed past her. He relented a little by holding the door open for her to pass into the foyer.
‘What time are you two getting back?’ Frank sang out from the lounge. He was a little pissed.
‘Not out for long, Dad.’ Lamont replied tiredly. With his eyes thrown toward the neighbours’ wall, he added. ‘At least till they go to sleep.’
They dug their hands deeply into their pockets and roamed the streets. Down by the cement bridge, fishermen and their male offspring tossed their lines. By the cold mercury light exhaust streamed from their mouths, hovered for a second and then disappeared.
‘They’ve all got their own rhythms, haven’t they?’ Juno stared along the bridge. A dozen faces bent forward, fixed on the thread before them. ‘You know, frosted vibes.’
Teams of gawky youths loud-mouthed their way over the bridge. The fisher people ignored them. Excitement built at the bridge’s end where a woman lay bloodied where she had tried to cross the road. A distraught old man gibbered to the police. It was Friday night suburbia.
The clackety-clack ring-ring of a grimy pinball machine was discordant, like a fingernail across a blackboard. Lamont and Juno hesitated in the doorway of the hamburger joint that had not changed its decor since the sixties, as if it were cultivating the look rather than admit to lethargy. They watched keenly these latter-day bodgies.
‘You heard of a bird called Dali Hollard?’
‘Nope.’ replied Juno with finality. Then she added with a softening of her eyes. ‘But I do know the kookaburra, magpie and cockatoo. The Hollard I don’t know.’
‘Quit goosing around. This is serious!’ Lamont scowled at his sister.
‘What’s got you into ornithology tonight?’ Juno had not allowed her attention to wander from the crotch of the pimply bodgie at the pinball machine.
‘You try my fucking patience, girl.’ grinned Lamont sourly. ‘Just shut up, follow me and fucking well listen!’
The beach was full of lapping waves. Juno’s eyes widened as her brother went into his solemn tale of the afternoon. The full moon introduced a newer note of cold upon the sea as they wandered along its edge.
‘... and when I was shooting politicians at the porcelain, there it was, scrawled over the fucking door. Some maniac’s got it in for her, the poor bitch. Wherever you look, there’s her name and an almost artistic face. The eyes! Chinese perhaps ... or something like that. But the intent is so fucking obvious.’
‘I was pulled out of the surf today by a bloke called Hollard. I wonder if they’re related. Nuh! That doesn’t seem right.’
Lamont tried to recognise the face of a girl being physically interrogated by her lover on the sand. The stab of sadness made him turn away. ‘You remember that unmemorable graffiti about Kaffirs being the product of a union of camels and Arabs?’
‘It’s not something I’d hang onto, Monty.’ replied Juno with an askance look at her brother. ‘You got more of the same, perhaps?’
‘Jesus! You’re a fucking smart arse! Look!’ Lamont stammered angrily. ‘If you saw something that reckoned you were living testimony that your kind had sideways cunts, you’d be all out to war, wouldn’t you?’
‘I’d say shit to it all.’
‘Fucking bravo on your heroics, girl.’
Lamont turned sharply and stamped off over the sand.
‘Where you off to now?’
‘I’m going to find out where she lives.’ Lamont shouted.
‘Hang on!’ Juno commanded with resignation. ‘I can save you energy. I’ve an idea where.’
*
‘Okay!’ Max guffawed, spraying volleys of marijuana smoke and well-chewed peanuts. ‘Okay, okay ... ooooooooh shit! Straight down middle stump ... okay. The inimitable Aussie accent has managed to bastardise its own slang, sweetheart.’
Dali remained unimpressed. She refused to take on her father’s humour, leaving it stranded at the kerb, so to speak, orphaned, if you prefer.
‘Look Dali, morons aren’t people like us!’
Dali couldn’t suppress a smile.
‘Ya gotta look at it from a long distance. I know it’s tough, but ... for hundreds of generations these morons have been ... like ... the worms that eat the cheese ... or the parasites of the animal world ... you’ve seen enough of it on TV.’
‘Daddy, you’re just prejudiced.’ Dali countered half-heartedly.
‘It’s the same with Tykes, Wogs, Jews, and bloody painted women, and witches, and bus-conductors and garbos, fish and chip-shop owners, and priests and those blokes who paint the white lines down the middle of the fuckin’ roads ... ’
‘I didn’t mean that kind of prejudice, Daddy, and you know it!’ Dali pouted, pretending insult. ‘And stop swearing!’
A car sounded its horn outside and a gentle quiet precipitated in the lounge. Dali closed her eyes for a while and when she opened them, her family was far away in thought. More cars moved along the track and stopped, then growled as if burrowing a parking space into the embankment. There was a further noise and the family in the lounge stirred.
‘Hello! You two took your time.’ Rane said as he opened the sliding doors, ambled onto the verandah and waited by the trapdoor as Juno and her brother climbed into view.
