The man’s angry yells became groans. What the fuck is taking so long? he asked. I assured him that the police would answer. The digital clock suspended from the ceiling flicked to 18:35 and Maeve logged off, waving goodbye to me as she exited the room. I waved back as I changed lines.
His breathing became hoarse. I can’t fucking breathe, he whimpered. I can’t fucking breathe. I asked if he would prefer to reconnect to an ambulance. But he didn’t reply.
“I can’t fucking breathe,” I wrote in the notebook.
The police answered the phone then. But the man now didn’t, or couldn’t, respond. There was labored breathing on the line, then the clattering of a phone falling out of a hand.
The caller asked for the police, I said, but he said he can’t breathe and he hasn’t responded since.
Did he say where he was? asked the police dispatcher.
Macquarie Fields.
No street address?
No.
Thanks, operator, I’ll deal with it. Hello? Can you hear me?
I couldn’t hear the man’s breathing anymore when I hung up the phone.
While out in the middle of nowhere on his search for the inland sea, Oxley one morning instructed the accompanying botanist to dig some holes in a clearing. The men planted quince and peach and apricot seeds in the barren soil. They didn’t expect that the trees would grow. After all, they had read their copies of Bacon and Locke. They were rational men. The quince and peach and apricot seeds were a gesture of hope. A hope rather than an expectation that the European trees would mark the passage of European men, “should these desolate plains be ever again visited by civilized man, of which, however, I think there is very little probability.”
On the silent television a new segment began. A heavily fake-tanned woman was shown looking out a window, and then it cut to a scene of her gazing across the rows of cars in a Woolworth’s parking lot. When she was interviewed under studio lighting her makeup appeared so thick it seemed to be smeared onto her face with a trowel. A Current Affair had been running a story for a week about this woman, who was alleging sexual assault by three Sydney football players. Or I thought that was what she was alleging. The television being silent, I was not sure of the specifics.
The men at the nearby phones were talking about the woman on the screen. They seemed to know all the details of the story. They were concerned about how her allegations would impact upon the general morale of the team. The team stood for everything they wanted the country and themselves to be—strong, secure, and mindless. I mean, she’s probably lying, said the one with the thinning Thai hair transplant.
Australia’s “first novelist,” Marcus Clarke, wrote once about those men like Oxley who had landed on the eastern shore and pushed off alone into the wilderness. He had imagined this figure of the ideal man, knowing that “he was lord of that wilderness, that in it he could live unmolested and secure, that he could find there a home and subsistence, with no aid but that of his own hands and his own brains.” Men like Clarke believed that the effort of taming the natural world chiseled out “the whole man” from the poor marble of his birthright. Like women, the bush came wild or tamed, and they knew which one they preferred.
Why do you think she’s lying? asked the thin one.
Well, look at her, said the man with the hair transplant. They both looked up at the screen, at the woman with her eyeliner and leather boots silently explaining what had happened to her.
She’s a fuckin’ bitch. And she looks like that? She’s asking for it.
The thin one sounded tentative. You really think stuff like that?
Yeah. ’Course.
“She’s asking for it,” I wrote in the notebook.
____________
After the eruption of Mount Vesuvius destroyed the city of Pompeii, Christians at the time argued that it could be explained by the sacking of Jerusalem by Rome several years earlier. The sacking of Jerusalem had angered God. The destruction of a city filled top to bottom with Romans was, to Christian minds, divine punishment. It was nothing to get upset about, because only sinners had died. The pure were pure by virtue of their being alive. It was a fantastically reassuring system of logic. God was good and catastrophe made sense. If you had been hurt, you must have been asking for it.
A conversation with Maeve:
Hey, are you working tomorrow? I know we said we’d get dumplings but New Shanghai is not going to happen this week. Maybe in the future when you’re feeling nostalgic for Ashfield we can go, but I’ve got too much on this week.
No problem. And no, I’m not working until Sunday now. I switched some shifts around. I’m in bed. I need some time to try and calm down. I was so stressed out at work last night I was shaking and misdirecting calls.
Why so stressed?
I’m not sure. General malaise? Maybe everything. I’m trying to breathe.
Good idea. Also, try to use work as an opportunity to not think about things. I did it during uni. It was a lifesaver.
Yeah. You know the guy who gets the hair transplants? I saw him on his phone this morning, online shopping for knives. And not butter knives. Properly scary ones.
Wooden steps led down from the veranda and into my mother’s garden. Along the side of the house the fernery grew dense and thick. The paving was all broken, the cracks striped with dirt and weeds. I trailed my hand along the bricks of the house as I walked. Moss grew so thick there, where the hose coiled out of the wall, that when I pressed down it felt sometimes like I was penetrating flesh. There was a scent of crushed insects and soil and decomposing blossoms. It felt very close, down in the thick of the garden with the din of crickets just starting as the light leaked out of the day. My mother stood halfway down the side of the house, directing the hose towards the tibouchina tree, her bare feet wet with the mud she was making.
This is pretty, I said, fingering the grevillea peeping out of the shadow of the tall grasses. She turned and smiled. I’d hug you but I’d get you wet, she said.
That’s all right.
It was comforting to simply be around her. I reached out and smoothed her hair into place, as she did with mine.
I’ll go check on dinner.
I left her alone down there with the hose. She was smiling.
My mother liked to call her garden a jungle. She wanted it green and dense and impenetrable. This was curious to me, because she had expressed no interest in gardening when she was younger, or even when we lived in the house on the edge of the national park with my father. But that changed after the fires of ’94, which had scorched the grass and trees of the garden without passing the property lines. She hadn’t cared about that garden. She had done nothing about the scorched grass. But after we moved into the house in Ashfield, my mother began working on her jungle with a terrifying affection. It had three big gum trees already well established, but not much else to speak of. In that first year alone, she planted bougainvillea vines, the tibouchina tree, bromeliads, Monstera deliciosa, birds of paradise, and jasmine. After the burglary she had higher fences built along the side of the house that bordered the street. I was not allowed to leave the house and play outside under any circumstances, nor to play in the park across the street, and certainly not to walk unsupervised to the more exciting park three blocks down. Instead, my mother built me a swing in the back garden. She grew plants along the border of the fence. She did battle with the gum tree roots that rose up and unsettled the plumbing and the paving stones. And by these methods, she learned to love the thing she had brought under her control.