Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [41]
Relating to whom, however, there might have been something to embellish—if Judy Compton-Bell hadn’t taken charge of a sequence of early-life events in a book of her own, blabbing tales of their Blindale paradise. Tony would like to wring her adventurous little neck for telling the world that he’d come to Blindale from institutional foster care, when he’d long stated in press releases that he was a born Watson, ‘rolled onto the linen’ on the Louth road. It made him look stupid, and he was called a con-job in the Tele and Mirror—only just possibly gaining appeal from never being able to be pinned down to any sort of wholesome truth at all. And the truth about Judy at the Blindale Watsons was that she was a paid boarder from a station in the outside country, a child parked with good folk for the convenience of a mother wrapped up in herself and a father at a loss to know what to do.
Where was Judy now, you might ask, after a lifetime of chasing around the world? Sailing aboard a seventy-foot Greenpeace steel yacht in the approximate vicinity of sixty degrees south, a venerated crew member taking seawater samples on behalf of fish; her bulk emails (satellite sent) throbbing on Tony’s desktop computer screen twice weekly. Her cruncher in Bluebell’s Voyage (her lone-sailor-around-the-world topseller) was: I grew up with Tony Watson, a ward of the state.
Now she writes: I am down among the icebergs.
He wishes she’d stay there (not really). His broadcast opinion of environmental activism is that it says more about the people protesting than about what they are trying to save: so get up a tree and stay there, he barks into the mike, you bunch a’ monkeys. It’s all to keep his listeners revved, blowtorched, attentive. Works like that with Jude. Keeps her close on his heels. Lose ’em, lose your life. How does this work? What’s the recipe for eternal listening life, you mean? Don’t ask him. The words are lightning on the branches of dead trees. The words are fistfuls of dust thrown in the wind.
‘A bunch a’ galahs,’ he’ll say—though if one bird brings him up short (in memory) it is galahs in the Bourke park, near the band rotunda, crowding along telephone wires when the Salvos played. All the old derros they’d pulled from the gutter would be sitting on park benches nodding their appreciation. Tony was on the trombone, a tricky instrument to master. Judy would be there, wearing a black straw bonnet with a scarlet ribbon tucked into the pleats of the bonnet trimming, rattling the tambourine and giggling sidelong at Tony’s cissified wrist action on the trombone slide. By the following day or the day after, the rescued would have the screaming blue heebie-jeebies again.
A compulsion dictates with Tony: he’s always tried fitting in with the lowest common opinion, from a conviction of belonging where he comes from, but never being able to say where that is. For this reason he thinks his opinions never count (though never lets on), and this stops him from working them responsibly. To be real he must grate, irritate, exasperate and peeve. He knows that Judy defends him in her corner as never meaning what he says. But nor does she listen to him. As befitting a former ward of the state, Tony is always reaching past the mike to some sort of paradise the government doesn’t want him to have, while Judy’s always saying that paradise is what you’re standing on, but it’s under threat.