Listening to Mondrian (13 page)

As the band quickly sets up, I look at the list written on the whiteboard, next to the stage. There are still three groups and five solo performers before...

Yep. That’s my name up there. Christian name. Surname. No mistaking it. I start to feel my stomach churn. Did I say that I haven’t played in public, since coming to Radiance Bay? Haven’t auditioned to join the school big band. Don’t even do music as a subject. Because I started the year halfway through, I had to take the leftovers in the timetable, and Ms Pappas is so popular that music was fully booked.

(Why didn’t I call myself something weird when I registered for this? Then I could just piss off, and no one would know I’d chickened out. And if Miss asks how I want her to describe my music – what’ll I say? I haven’t even decided what songs I’m going to do up there! I mean, should I be original? Or just do a couple of covers?)

I clutch my guitar as if it’s my only friend in the world.

I feel so alone.

But as the didgeridoo starts up, and the clapsticks join in, I lose myself in the music. These guys are great. And it’ll take ages till Miss announces me.

And now she does.

‘It seems we have a new talent in Radiance Bay
–
’

I step up onto the platform. Plug in my guitar.

‘This’ll be a first performance here at the Music Festival –’

I can see Ms Pappas giving me worried looks. As far as she knows, I couldn’t play a comb and tissue paper. The standard’s been pretty high, and I can tell she’s scared I’m going to make a fool of myself.

‘Yes, folks
–
recently arrived from the big city
–
we
have
–
’

Re-position the mike. (Last person must’ve been a pixie. Not that I’ve got anything against pixies!)

‘So give a big welcome . . .’

I look down at the crowd. How did it grow so huge, all of a sudden?

‘You’ve got eight minutes,’ Ms Pappas mutters at me before she steps down and leaves me all by myself.

Time for two numbers. I suddenly know that I’m going to do my own compositions. Might as well risk everything.

‘This first song’s called “Alien”,’ I mutter into the mike. ‘It’s about coming to a new town, and feeling strange, and not knowing anyone, and people staring as if you’re from Mars and your skin’s green and you’ve got these two spikes coming out of your head and you don’t speak the language and there’s nobody on the whole planet that you can relate to, and anyway –’

I look down and now the welcoming clap has finished, the silence is so deep that I can hear the rhythm of my pulse beating through my veins.

Is this the sound that Mum and Dad hear, all the time?

The world freezes, and it seems hours that I stand, swaying slightly on my feet in time to the music of my own body. The quiet is so fragile, it could shatter like a crystal wineglass.

I can hear – the stillness of the cypress trees – the flatness of the sea – the greenness of the hills that fold around the town.

And I can hear the look on my parents’ faces, as they stand at the back of the crowd. Dad’s still got his barbecue apron on. Mum smiles up at me and signals wildly with her hands, high above her head:
‘Don’t worry! You’ll be great!’

I look down and I’m not alone.The guitar comes alive beneath my fingers.

It’s going to be OK. More than OK. As I move into the second number, I see Mel and Josh and Noah and Sarah and Turtle start dancing on the grass in front of me, and now Ms Pappas is joining in, and the five feral Kooris...

And I don’t mind when I see Mum and Dad move in from the back of the crowd and start dancing really close to the speakers so that they can feel the vibrations that move from my fingers and my voice through the mike and the leads into the amp and out into the earth and the air. And as I keep singing and everyone keeps dancing, I feel we’re all somehow connected into the one body. I mean, everyone. Everywhere.

L
AND/SCAPE

(1) HOLDING PATTERN

Ant felt a sense of heaviness in his stomach as the plane began to glide down through the clouds and the land took shape beneath the window. He was dreading the thought of the next five days.

And then the captain’s voice blurted onto the intercom to announce that, owing to a queue over Tulla-marine, the plane would be entering a holding pattern. ‘We apologise that our time of arrival will now be slightly delayed.’

As the aeroplane banked steeply into the sky and began to circle over the flat Melbourne suburbs, the rest of the passengers sighed, stared at their watches, or made little popping sounds of annoyance.

‘Wouldn’t you know it?’ declared the woman in the seat beside Ant as she ostentatiously took out the company report which she had just stowed in her briefcase.

Ant grinned at her. He was grateful for even a brief reprieve.

He hadn’t spent more than three or four consecutive hours in the company of his father since his parents had split up – what? Nearly five years ago. When Ant thought back to the time when he had lived with Tony (that’s how he thought of him now; not Dad), he realised that he had been quite a different person, in many ways. It wasn’t just a matter of pubic hair, deeper voice and the height issue (Ant was 199 cm, and rapidly rising), but internal changes, to the way the brain thought about things. At eleven, Ant hadn’t had opinions on matters like Land Rights, refugees, American militarism, the logging industry; now he did. And he knew that his father would have different opinions.

Tony was a member of the Establishment. You could tell by the school that he made Ant attend. It produced captains of industry, graziers, lawyers, and politicians of the Liberal and National parties. It had produced Ant’s father (Captain of the First XI; Dux of the School; Head Prefect; Barrister) and Ant’s grandfather (Captain of the First XV; Sports Captain; Prefect; Judge). Ant had to read their names and achievements written in gold on the polished oak boards in the chapel every morning. Had to cringe with shame every time he bowled a mullygrubber or fluffed a pass, because the coaches always said, ‘I expected better of
you,
Hindmarsh.’

It was the same with the other teachers. Ant was bright enough to pass everything, but he was always in the bottom half of the class. Unlike Tony (his teachers told him) who had been Dux every year from kindergarten until the time he left school. ‘I would have expected more of
you,
Hindmarsh,’ Ant’s English, History, Maths, Chemistry, Physics and even Japanese teachers always said. It was the kind of school where staff members stay on forever, so most of them could actually remember teaching Tony, and one old codger even claimed to have taught the judge. Ant wished he could go to the Creative Arts High School in a nearby suburb, but Mum always said the school was a family tradition, from which Tony wouldn’t budge.

There wasn’t even a chance for Ant to talk to his father about the issue. Sure, there were outings, whenever Tony came to Adelaide, but somehow the opportunity never seemed to arise. As for the regular Sunday night phonecall . . .

‘Hi, Ant . . .’

‘Hi . . .’

‘How’re things going?’

‘OK.’

‘How was school this week?’

‘Not too bad.’

‘Cricket season must be just about finishing . . .’

‘Yeah.’

‘How’d you go yesterday?’

‘Um . . .’

‘Get some runs?’

‘More or less.’

‘Be time to dust off your footy boots soon.’

‘Sure.’

‘Did you get that assignment in, that one you were talking about last time I saw you?’

‘Yep.’

‘Happy with it?’

‘Pretty much.’

There would be a long silence until finally Tony might say, ‘Is your mother handy? Tell her I just need a quick word with her, if that’s all right . . .’

The passenger beside Ant lurched into his shoulder as the plane made a sudden drop. ‘Shit!’ she exclaimed. Ant could see her knuckles whiten as she gripped her folder. The intercom bell rang, and there was a moment of tension, as everyone waited for an announcement that didn’t come. Even when the murmur of conversation started up again, Ant’s neighbour’s hands continued to shake. He wanted to say something to her, but he was no good at talking to strangers.

Fortunately, the captain relieved him of any responsibility. ‘We have now been given the clearance from the air traffic controller . . .’

Ant sighed and stowed away his sketchbook and pencils in his shoulder bag, which was bright yellow with the Aboriginal flag on it and the words ‘Land is Life’.

He glanced at his watch. 14.04. Oh well. Look on the bright side. Most of Day 1 was nearly over. Then there’d just be Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, and on Day 5 he’d be travelling back home again. After that there’d still be nine days of holidays left for him to do what he liked doing: pottering around by himself at home, drawing, painting, mucking about with the graphics programs on his computer, or simply lying on his bed for hours to recoup the energy that his growing body seemed to drain from him. Ant hated the sort of holiday in which you had to rush about and
do
things all the time.

There was a nasty jolt as the wheels touched ground, then a sort of shudder seemed to run through the body of the plane, and now they were taxiing towards the terminal and Ant’s father.

(2) IN THE WILDS

It was half past five when they arrived at Cape Otway. The map showed this as just about the southernmost bit of the mainland, the beginning of the Great Australian Bight.

‘Makes you realise there’s nothing between here and Antarctica,’ Tony said as a cold wind suddenly bit in from the south.

Despite himself, Ant grinned. When he was a little kid they used to have a map of the world on the back of the toilet door, and whenever his father took him in there, Ant would get him to point out the big white land at the bottom, with its magic first three letters that Ant himself could read. He and Tony used to pretend that Antarctica belonged to Ant, and that one day they would go there.

Ant glanced at his father now, to see if he remembered, but Tony was just saying that it would be dark in half an hour. ‘So we’d better get a move on with this tent,’ he added, in the kind of voice that adults use to make an order sound polite.

Sometimes Ant’s mind would seem to click out of his body for a moment, and he would see himself and the scene he was in as if it were a picture that he was photographing. That happened now: into his mind came an image of two extremely tall thin people, trying to put up a tent in sandy, scrubby country as a high wind kept pulling at the canvas and ballooning it out of their control.

Then Tony yelled something and Ant was back in the real picture.

Not that Ant could see all that much of anything, because now rain was drizzling down inside his specs, so he wasn’t being very helpful as Tony kept yelling stuff like
‘Hang on to that guyrope!’
and
‘Just pull on the fly!’

The fly?

As far as Ant knew, flies were either insects or things in trousers. He stood there gawping.

‘Don’t stand there gawping!’ his father said.

It wasn’t Ant’s fault he’d never been camping before. His father should have taken him when he was a little kid. But Tony was always so busy working that Ant couldn’t remember ever going on a holiday with him; nor for that matter could he remember his father going off camping with a bunch of mates, as some men did.

So why this?

Ant had a terrible feeling that Tony wanted this to be one of those Father-and-Son trips that happen in American television shows: where out in the wilds amongst the grizzly bears and snowcapped mountains, Dad and Junior subsist on root beer and wienies while they discuss the Meaning of Life. How else could you explain why his father was taking him camping for five days in the middle of winter in a place that was just about at the South Pole?

At last the tent was up, the gas lamp was burning. Tony had even managed to get a fire going (he’d been a Queen’s Scout, he told Ant three times) and was happily grilling sausages.

Ant was standing uselessly in the rain, with the water running down the inside of his specs.

‘Why don’t you get the sleeping bags out of the car? Make up the beds?’

So Ant got the bags, crawled into the tent with them and spread them in two parallel lines, trying to leave as much room as possible between them. The thought of sleeping so close to his father was somehow embarrassing.

He needn’t have worried. As Ant backed out of the tent and stood up, he tripped over the guyrope and onto the upright aluminium pole at the opening of the tent, which snapped as he went down with it and then pierced upwards, slashing a great hole through the fly. As Ant lay there swathed in canvas, the drizzle abruptly changed to a downpour so fierce that it was as if bathtubs of water were being dumped from the sky. And by the time Tony had pulled Ant and the drenched bags from the wreckage, the fire had gone out and the half-raw, half-charred sausages were cold and wet.

‘How on earth did you manage that?’ Tony snapped.

Ant said nothing. How could he explain disability to a man who had been a Queen’s Scout, Head Prefect, Captain of Cricket and (obviously) possessor of 20/20 vision? How could he say that he simply was not able to see with the rain coming down inside his specs?

Ant, however, was able to see his father making an effort to control himself, not to lose his temper completely. In a strained voice, Tony added, ‘Oh well, nothing for it but to pack up and head back to Apollo Bay and look for a motel, I guess. I just hope we can find one that’s not too expensive.’

Again Ant said nothing. His father seemed to interpret this as some sort of challenge to his last statement. ‘I’m not
made
of money, you know,’ Tony said tersely.

Aren’t you? Ant wondered as he stashed the two sodden sleeping bags in the boot of the car. Aren’t you? Tony would have to be earning a packet. Ant and his mother were certainly well provided for – Mum didn’t work, she did uni courses; and the fees must be astronomical at Ant’s horrible school.

Ant’s father sighed, as he took the wet sleeping bags out again. Ant had just put them on top of all the dry clothes.