Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [44]
Warwick Mickless, said the man seated next to Tony on the plane, had a radio spot on a Darwin ABC rural program, ‘The Stock Route’, reporting on tropical breeds of cattle. The bloke said, ‘Wocka’s a cracker, he keeps the Top End in stitches.’
‘Does he now?’ said Tony with a low chuckle. ‘“The Stock Route”’s a listening must, even for people who wouldn’t know what a cow was?’
‘It sure is.’
‘Ho, ho,’ said Tony.
It was a little too much for the wordman of note to swallow. After checking with Neilsen’s he found he was losing listeners in Darwin faster than anywhere else. Something would have to be done (as it always was). His childhood playmate, surrogate sister, Judy, beats him to the draw on getting her story in print, and now his illiterate pupil (that Brewarrina Centaur) challenges his lifelong playpen by having a radio spot, struth, doing some public good, so claimed, while getting a laugh, a point upon which Tony dwells in the post-midnight hours.
What is the good he’s done? Red Shield Day jams the switchboard annually. The Westmead Children’s Hospital has a wing named after him. Many a soup kitchen gets his cheque, and he’s to be found down there, in the stinking washcloth light of East Sydney, ladling out scrambled eggs through cold winter mornings.
But all Tony can think is that banishing bad to the shadows sums it up. His bad. His shadows. The best Tony has ever been able to do is sell things. Selling people what they don’t need by virtue of having it wrapped in words: corkscrews, flame weeders, luggage wrappers, eggtimers. His garage is full of gratis junk. (Eggtimers make him weep.) There’s also real estate and luxury cars: he owns a good deal of the former, drives three of the latter, knows he doesn’t need as much as he has, far from it, but wants to get rid of it less than he wants to keep it for the reason of holding on to himself. Words made these solid objects out of thin air.
Interesting the letter that reached Warwick Mickless (signed Tones). It included a neat transcript of a bunch of Warwick’s pieces, collected by the clipping service Tony used. The grammar, sentence construction and vocabulary were corrected in red ink. It looked like an attack of mad spiders on the page. For your benefit, Tony signed off, old friend.
This brings us almost up to the present—to a day last year when Tony rang Alan Corker at Whistling Flats, and closed on a parcel of land in the Southern Tablelands he’d been looking at, after selling his place at Bowral, where he’d lived, on and off, for years—always with the thought that somewhere less tamed and manicured by visiting gardeners would be a requirement before the end, if reality was to meet truth in the image of who he was, as being sprung from a patch of raw dirt in a raging windstorm.
The deal was five thousand acres of which about one-fifth was usable for stock, the rest comprising dry forest running up into steep ridges and gullies, rocky outcrops, messmate, brown barrel and alpine ash, formerly milled. Then upwards and on to a spine of granite tors, from where, as Corker told it, you could see out over an entire province of the Great Dividing Range. ‘Halfway to Bourke,’ said Corker, dramatising the view, at which point Tony felt his heart lurch with the possibilities