Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [47]
Anyway, the reception was appalling, so how could he listen to who-was-not-there-to-be-heard?
He twisted the dial, recalling the whistles and whoops of the old valve set at Blindale, with its green silken speaker cover into which Tony and Judy had long stared, seeing in the dim glow of the valves their entire futures being lived in imagination. And, as it turned out, much as they’d longed those futures to be.
On Aunty reception was better. In these back ranges there was a good reason why the ABC ruled the airwaves and even people who couldn’t be less interested listened to whatever was on, because stuffing one’s ears with words was a human must.
‘Immediately following the news we have “The Media Report”,’ said the announcer.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ said Tony. ‘Here she comes. Now she is on for young and old.’
He stood at the back door of his Owner’s Cottage, listening to a bowerbird squabbling with a lyrebird, and the radio playing the interview from the kitchen bench. He mouthed what he himself said, almost by heart. A rhythm of short and long sentences, abrupt declarations, deliberate silences running to tantalising suspensions of speech (a Tony Watson touch)—during which he pictured listeners, paused in what they were doing, wondering what the next word would be.
The crumbs of forty years, this felt more truthful to him than any of his thousand-dozen jaunty attacks on all and sundry. If he’d been a carpenter talking about the craft of planes and saws, drills and sanding techniques, he could not have been more on to himself. Judy, watching his face throughout, gave him a hug.
‘Why, I was alright,’ he said, when it was all over. There was nobody in the room to hear him say this. Nobody in that larger room, either, going on and on through boundless space. Outside, sitting on a stump, Judy was crying.
Alan Corker rang: ‘I heard you, Tony. You made a lot of sense. I didn’t know you were an orphan. Never heard anyone talk better about coming from nowhere, having nothing.’
‘I’m depressed by my own intelligence,’ said Tony. ‘It goes to show how easy it is to talk intelligent crap.’
Judy met Alan Corker when she came down to supervise arrangements for getting Warwick Mickless and Betty installed in the Manager’s Cottage. Betty said she would die in the mountain winters, but Warwick wasn’t so sure, even after a lifetime of his thermostat being adjusted to the Top End. He might even like it here. On the way in, as they’d come through a paddock of mares and foals, Warwick had climbed from the car to open a gate and, when they were through, he started walking out among the animals, bringing them up to his hand.
When they were all in the cottage with mugs of tea, Judy brought out their presents, wrapped in white tissue paper and tied with blue-striped string. For Warwick it was the tooled leather change purse, with a motif of desert pea and quandong fruits, that he’d made in boyhood days of saddlery repairs and stock camp evenings, and slipped to Judy after a night of heavy petting at Randall’s flicks. She was returning it to him now with the thought that Betty should have it.
For Tony the gift was a battered Salvationist tambourine, bought in an op shop on Bondi Road.
Tony held the instrument to his ear, giving it a hissing shake. ‘This is the wind,’ he said, ‘wrapping itself around the bluebush on the old Louth Road.’
Tony turned to Warwick: ‘Come on, say something funny.’
‘You never knew it,’ said Warwick, ‘but when you started on the air, all round the country, I’d listen to you on this old trannie I had in my saddlebags. This was when I was at Katherine, not far from town.’
‘Cut to the chase, cowboy.’
‘There was a way you had, it was like a horse, you walked, trotted and galloped. I used to think . . .’ Warwick paused.
Tony looked at him: all teeth and hairless hackles.
‘You used to think what?’ he challenged.
‘Well, that you mightn’t a’ done what you did, said what you did the way you said it, without seeing it done by a pony.’
‘Might or mightn’t,’ said Tony, pulling his jaw shut. ‘I always thought it