Limestone Man (17 page)

Those artists were adventurers. They came to an unexplored new world. There were opportunities for such people, even if they journeyed reluctantly. Whereas Parry was repeating himself. As only a teacher might.

But if teaching in Australia was unsatisfactory, he was uncertain of what else he wanted.

After the illness he was determined to use this thinking time. Here was, he convinced himself, a unique opportunity.

But his attention drifted. He had ideas of starting an Australian diary. It would be devoted to his last months in the country. But he found himself unable to concentrate.

Then why not a sketchbook? he wondered. Scratchy charcoal lines, depicting some of the local birds. Or, better, people's faces? He could depict Lulu and Libby. Maybe that gawky boy with the aquiline nose from 13P.

Parry went as far as buying a drawing pad. But he didn't sketch. Instead, down by the Murray, he followed the paddle steamers. While in the motel bar, or behind the shades of a somnolent
Hey Bulldog
, Messiaen or an inaudible Philip Glass on the DVD, he brooded over his incident.

IV

And paid attention to his dreams. Several times these involved the garden, where Dora Parry had been happiest.

Where Jack Parry too had been at his ebullient best. The man cracked jokes, describing typewriters and coffee percolators. All these things were going to transform people's lives. And it was where Jack had been able to be funny.

But no, he didn't believe the stories he recounted, his son understood that. That was why Jack Parry was funny. Paper knickers would never catch on. The world would have to learn to do without miracle chocolate drinks. Or the unsellable self
-
cleaning shower curtains that filled the car boot.

As to dreaming, perhaps it was Jack Parry who was responsible. His son recalled him describing the boundary wall that separated the plots from the churchyard. This was nineteenth
-
century construction, built with Caib stones.

Parry himself always marvelled at the colours there. Of gold lichen on grey limestone. Golden and grey. Grey, gold. The power of that juxtaposition thrilled Parry in his druggy Australian sleep.

Such a gold. Rich as a double yolker. Or the yellow of mustard in the spice market on Gouger Street. And the grey always worth a look. The same grey as oystershells in drifts and sandbars along The Caib. The stacks of shells on the isthmus of the mussel bed. Or the buried shells his mother dug out of her plot.

It puzzled Parry why he had started dreaming of such things. Lichen and liverworts and their fossil pollen. Those grey roses of the rock. There was also an ice
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white encrustation, as intricate as frost, that flourished over the allotment walls.

This moss to the young Parry was old as the limestone itself. The lichen leaves seemed to belong on the seabed.

After dreaming, he resolved to combine that gold, that grey. Yes, grey and gold belonged together. Their marriage was necessary. While he dreamed, the rightness of the idea filled his mind. But the moment vanished when he woke.

That's it, Parry thought in the Goolwa Motel. But there was an air of abandonment in the bar. Or perhaps Goolwa would always be like this. A town that waited for something to happen.

Regulars were hard to come by. He noted Jann was polishing glasses already clean. Then driving out a red hornet that had flown into the bar. Toon invited him to the greenhouse to look at a new cannabis plant hidden amongst the tomatoes.

V

He remembered arguing with his father. One June day, Jack Parry had complained that air pollution was killing their potato plants.

Yellowing already, he had protested, feigning outrage. Hardly in flower and the leaves failing. Can't be blight. Or, if it is, it's industrial. I blame The Works. Nothing can flourish while that bloody poison factory is open.

Do you mind? laughed Parry. My job starts next month. Handy money, you usually say.

Even killing the moss, said Jack Parry. Moss that's been on the walls a thousand years.

But how, Parry asked himself in Goolwa, might he paint his limestone dreams? He wasn't an artist. He hadn't earned the right.

So instead of art, Parry brooded over the behaviour of his body. The treachery of his brain. Wryness, he was aware, became a new characteristic.

Maybe I'm growing up. At last. Hallelujah. This he muttered to himself one morning in the motel. He had been sipping from his green glass. That wineglass, an old rummer, would stand on the counter awaiting him, leaves of green tea, like seaweed, sunk to the bottom. He would take it to a window seat before beginning in
Hey Bulldog
.

At last what? asked Jann.

At last I'm convinced. I'm a genius.

Is that all? I thought you were already sure of that.

Neither Toon nor Jann inquired of Libby, whom both had met. They were gentle with him. Which worried Parry.

He wondered whether he gave people the impression of ruination, this thin man in a shaft of dusty light. But decided not, he had been struck down and was getting over it. That was all.

Sipping tea, Parry did not look unwell. He was lean enough under the Aussie tan.

The dreams continued. They were not unpleasant and he became convinced they were caused by his medication.

You'll be on those tablets forever. That was how colleagues in school responded when they learned the medicines' names.

Little blue jobs? Like Viagra? Get used to them, Ripper.

Yeah, forever and ever. That's a prescription for life, Ripper.

Hey Ripper! What's it like when you realise GlaxoSmith Kline owns your arse?

VI

One of the dreams Parry recalled was about the church next to the allotment.

This was a limestone fortress. Its pulpit was incised with the flagellation of Christ.

Parry had often viewed this artwork. He was convinced that the artist was local and had deliberately made Christ and his persecutors identifiable.

Jesus and his assailants would have been men of The Caib. Fishermen, boat caulkers, labourers from the quarry.

Part of the legend was that this Christ was not being assaulted with whips but sheaves of stinging nettles. Hard as he looked at the stonework, he could see no evidence for this.

Yet Parry accepted it. The power of local art, when there was so little of it, was considerable.

He had always felt a bond with the sculptor. And marvelled that this artist had flourished half a millennium before his own life. In his Adelaide school he had shown film images of the pulpit, the graveyard, and even the allotment.

Fearing the children's reaction, dreading they would be bored, he was delighted with the response. But showing the films had disturbed Parry. There were strangers tilling his parents' garden now. The raspberry canes had been rooted out. The blackcurrant bushes he had loved to smell in the rain, in misty rain, to breathe and savour and breathe again, had been transplanted.

Sometimes he had kept a pocketful of dried blackcurrant leaves with him in university. Or during his holiday labouring job at The Works. These leaf shreds became an indigo dust, fine as tobacco. Finally a turquoise smear like fountain
-
pen ink.

But some of Parry's dreams shocked him. One morning he had woken in the Goolwa dawn and shed tears.

Yes, there was the pulpit, its stonework deeply chiselled. But the Christ represented was a scruffily bearded Parry himself, still a teenage schoolboy. Jesus Christ was Richard Parry, aged sixteen.

And the two figures who whipped him were Jack and Dora Parry. What had they used for the flogging? Parry could still feel the blows. As in the dream the welts appeared on his limestone skin.

Not stinging nettles. The weapons looked like the lotus flowers Parry had noticed on his visit with Libby to Botanic Park.

Parry laughed through his tears. He found it hilarious but continued weeping. He was the only man in history to suffer whipping with golden lotuses.

VII

The next morning, Parry dreamed once again. He and Libby were outside. An immense plain stretched round them. There were tussocks of grass but overall the earth was outback red.

It was hotter than anything Parry had experienced in Goolwa. Hotter than the country he had visited west of Adelaide.

They were out in the desert, anxious with thirst. The sky was black and The Caib's sulphuric moon hung in the sky. But Parry was resolute. There was a job to do and he had to see it through.

He and Libby were riding in a cart pulled by oxen. At least, Parry imagined these were the creatures. But he had never seen such huge
-
horned animals before.

There was a whip in his hand, this time a real whip. He used it to encourage the oxen further over the plain. Libby said nothing. She was coated in dust and wore her hair in a grey plait. She did not want to be there but did not protest.

The pair came to a red boulder. Parry jumped from the cart and walked around the stone. He was convinced at once it was made of iron.

The boulder belonged in the cart. All Parry knew was that he and Libby had been commissioned to take the iron stone into Adelaide. It was a meteorite and valuable, his headmaster was convinced. The money might make life comfortable. Or different.

All Parry had to do was lift the meteorite into the cart. Then transport it back to Adelaide. That was what the school had demanded. He saw himself stoop to raise the iron onto his back.

When he awoke he felt he was shivering with delirium. It was the coldest morning he had known in Goolwa. Outside he could sense the Murray sliding in olive
-
green sheets towards the sea. And in the room was a smell of smoke. Or maybe it was brakes on a train.

Parry lay wondering. If the smell was part of a dream, why was it there now he was awake?

VIII

‘The Backs' had been the schoolyard name for the alleyways behind the fairground.

Most of the fair's entrances were blocked. But there were one or two possible ways in. The alleys took the curious, or the lost, past a pub called The Catriona, with its abandoned extension. Then behind the ghost train, known as The Kingdom of Evil.

From there, was a path into an area of levelled dunes and blown sand. Then north into Vainquer Street.

As a boy, Parry had used the name ‘The Ghetto' himself, not understanding why. All he knew of ghettos was the Presley song, one of his big comeback numbers. But ‘The Backs' was clear.

Yes, Parry said, on returning to The Caib, and eventually joining the gang at the Paradise Club, the lanes were filthy.

The place was filled with rotting mattresses, with mud in frozen ruts or piles of garden waste, broken bicycles, children's toys. And endless polystyrene trays.

Yet some of the Vainquer houses maintained a dilapidated charm. Many were now flats, or bed
-
and
-
breakfast businesses. Somehow the couples, or usually the widows who kept them, hung on.

And if you looked hard you'd notice the street retained evidence of the past. There were ornate finials, high garden walls. The few Vainquer shops made do with what trade there was. As did the pubs. Nothing is harder to break than habit.

But even in Goolwa, Parry had heard of the town's problems. The Caib was the place where young people killed themselves. As simple as that. And as brutal. The town of hopelessness, it was called.

There had been a Panorama programme shown on ABC which Libby and some of the Australian teachers had seen. Libby had even written to him at
Hey Bulldog
.

Isn't that where you're from?
she asked.
I'm so sorry!

Parry had shrugged it off.

Our turn, he had said to the parents of The Black Cockatoos, who mooched around the shop while their children rehearsed. The Cockatoos were a band created by schoolkids. They rehearsed in the evenings.

Yes, our turn to be famous. That's our fifteen minutes. And already almost over. Who's next?

IX

One night in The Paradise, Parry had asked Mina directly.

How can there be hopelessness here? It's tough. But not that bad. Things don't make sense.

Mina was frank.

Might as well blame the sand for blowing down Cato Street, she said. Or the sand for being sand. Look. Think of your parents. Were they hopeless? Course not. They were grafters. Had to be in those days. I remember your mother with her sunflowers that grew out of the dunes.

You know, she added, we used to live by the allotments in those days. And I'd spy on you from my bedroom window, twti
-
ing down behind the curtain.

Great tall sunflowers they were, some of them orange. But mostly the yellowest things you could imagine.

Then, in the dark, when I was sure you wouldn't come, I made dens. And yes, I'd pick the sunflower seeds off the ground. I remember one year your mother planted this especially long row. Sunflower Street, you called it yourself. A real street!