Signs of Life Read online

  MONA: (off) Kept you under a blanket, kept you safe.

  BENDER: (off) Go to sleep.

  MONA: (off, beginning to weep) All them times she’s wild and crazy. Keep you safe, little brother.

  BENDER: (off) Mona, fuck!

  MONA: (off) And you talk about sendin me back? That madhouse? Now we here, in the story, you fuckin talk about putting me back?

  BENDER: (off) Git off me, piss off!

  MONA: (off) You evil!

  Sounds of a scuffle, a chair skids, someone thumps into the wall. GEORGIE takes up the stick, afraid.

  GEORGIE: They’ll be gone in the morning. Won’t they?

  MONA screams cries and wails, winding down into sad hoots of grief until there’s only fraught silence. And then, finally, as if venturing into the yawning gap, the sound of an owl. Three mournful hoots.

  GEORGIE: There it is again. Invisible. In some dying tree. Out there in a bare, dry paddock under moonlight where nothing moves. Watching. Just a solitary ghost-eyed bird, waiting for a twitch, a flicker, any sign of life, for company as much as food. Desolate, lonely. That’s what it’ll sound like, the last bird on earth, staring, peering into the endless, empty night, calling out to nothing at all.

  The sound of beating wings.

  SCENE 3

  Cockatoos screech and chatter above the veranda in the afternoon. At the table MONA stares into space. BENDER has an old newspaper on the table and some small tools. He tinkers with his carburettor and a screwdriver. GEORGIE steps out, squinting in the light. She surveys her guests, hesitates, cocks her head, listening.

  GEORGIE: The fridge. It’s stopped.

  BENDER: Fixed.

  GEORGIE: Fixed?

  BENDER: Bloody thing runs day’n night. Man can hardly sleep.

  MONA: What, snore when you’re awake, now?

  BENDER: Thermostat.

  MONA: Makes him snore all night when he can’t hardly sleep.

  GEORGIE: I should have . . . it’s like I’m still waiting for him to fix it.

  BENDER: (taking this in) Refrigeration. Whitefulla magic, eh?

  MONA: (ruefully) Cold beer, true.

  The siblings glare at one another in a manner GEORGIE cannot read.

  GEORGIE: Sure you don’t want me to look at that carburettor?

  BENDER: I got it.

  GEORGIE: After five hours?

  BENDER: Book in there. Next to the piano.

  GEORGIE: Yes?

  BENDER: The Secret.

  GEORGIE: Oh. God.

  BENDER: What’s that about?

  GEORGIE: I dunno; I couldn’t finish it. Some kind of self-help book.

  BENDER: Help yourself do what?

  GEORGIE: Make money, as far as I can see.

  BENDER: Money.

  GEORGIE: My sister gave it to me.

  BENDER: She rich, then?

  GEORGIE: Well, as it happens.

  BENDER: What she do, what’s her secret?

  GEORGIE: She marries.

  BENDER: Ah. That secret.

  MONA: (urging BENDER) Family business.

  GEORGIE: Spoilt white woman business.

  BENDER smiles.

  MONA: (to BENDER) Ask her.

  MONA’s interjection breaks the light mood. BENDER is both irritated and discomfited.

  MONA: Go orn.

  BENDER: All them olive trees. What’s the point?

  GEORGIE: Oil, mostly.

  MONA: Not what I’m talkin about, Bub.

  BENDER: Olives. Never liked em. Like eatin salt, like . . . like blood. And straight off the tree? Jesus, I thought I’d die. Tasted it for a week. Like battery acid and dogshit.

  MONA: Useless bugger.

  BENDER: Shut up.

  MONA: Missus?

  GEORGIE: Georgie. Call me Georgie.

  MONA: A man live here before? Man up a pole? Sittin up this pole. High up.

  BENDER: Seventy year ago, maybe.

  MONA: Out in a paddock, all day up a pole.

  GEORGIE: A pole? Oh. Yes. Good grief. Wally Fox, Lu’s father, my husband’s father. I know about that; I mean, I’ve heard about it. It was a bit of a fad for a while. People did it for a lark, on a dare, to raise money. But old Wally he was different, apparently. Bit of an eccentric.

  BENDER: Eccentric! Polite way of callin a bloke a fuckin weirdo.

  MONA: (to BENDER) Show respeck!

  BENDER: Climb down off ya broomstick for five minutes, willya?

  MONA: (to BENDER) The river!

  Pause.

  MONA: Bub, the river!

  GEORGIE: I’m sorry, I don’t follow.

  GEORGIE gets nothing from MONA whose focus is intensely on BENDER.

  GEORGIE: Pole-sitting, the river. What are we talking about here?

  BENDER: Well. I was gunna ask. If you wouldn’t mind. (MONA looms, urges, threatens at every hesitation) If we could maybe . . . me’n Mona . . . if we could go down the river a minute. For a look-see?

  GEORGIE: Well, as I said, there’s almost no water anymore. A couple of rancid puddles and a dead billabong just downstream —

  MONA: Don’t care. Doesn’t matter.

  BENDER: Mona, just —

  MONA: For a look.

  GEORGIE: Of course. (unable to refrain from irony) Be my guest.

  But MONA and BENDER don’t move. GEORGIE is bewildered.

  GEORGIE: The track’s right there past the shed. You just follow the tree-line down . . . it’s right . . .

  GEORGIE is up, ready to show them, but neither MONA nor BENDER has made a move.

  BENDER: Better in the morning.

  GEORGIE: The morning? But . . .

  BENDER: Can’t do it today.

  MONA: Plenty shadows.

  BENDER: Yeah, more light. Need more light.

  GEORGIE: But it’ll be the same tomorrow.

  BENDER: Still. I’ll be better then.

  GEORGIE: You’re not well?

  BENDER: I’m . . .

  MONA: You not strong, that’s what. No balls.

  BENDER: Well, Sistergirl, you bloody go!

  MONA: Together. You said together. You promised!

  BENDER: Tomorrow, I said. You heard the lady.

  GEORGIE: Georgie.

  BENDER: Tomorrow.

  GEORGIE: Tomorrow?

  BENDER: Time to think.

  GEORGIE: Oh. To think.

  MONA: Get strong.

  BENDER: If you don’t mind.

  GEORGIE: (dejected) Oh. Why would I mind?

  BENDER: (exiting) Fix this bloody thing.

  MONA goes inside. A gust of wind, voices, steel guitar, until:

  SCENE 4

  The veranda the same evening. GEORGIE stands alone on the step with a mug of tea. She walks out to the house tree. As GEORGIE speaks, LU appears in the tree.

  GEORGIE: A man up a pole in a paddock. Sound familiar? That sort of caper ran in the family, didn’t it? You people. Stiffnecked, wayward, weirdos. If everyone else in the world decided to walk east you’d go west. Just to be different.

  LU: (climbing down beside her) Oh, I dunno about that.

  GEORGIE: You could be standing in a downpour and say it wasn’t raining.

  LU: Bollocks.

  GEORGIE: First day I saw you.

  LU: I think it was night-time, actually.

  GEORGIE: Thinking to myself, Hullo, this is different.

  LU: Eccentric.

  GEORGIE: Creeping around like a thief, you were.

  LU: Off the grid, that’s all.

  GEORGIE: Paperwork-averse.

  LU: Fish, crays, abalone. Cash in hand. Tax-free.

  GEORGIE: Unlicensed.

  LU: Aspirational.

  GEORGIE: Poaching up and down the coast under cover of darkness.

  LU: Saves getting sunburnt.

  GEORGIE: Nuts, all of you.

  LU: Mixed nuts.

  GEORGIE: Salty nuts. Like father, like son.

  LU: No, not him. Think I was more like my mother. She loved the world.
All that lives is holy, she said. Beautiful.

  GEORGIE: Beautiful man. Fell for you like a brittle tree in a gust of wind. One sweet puff. As if I’d been standing there all my life, just waiting to fall, waiting for that breeze, that weird angle, to bowl me over, root and branch. What a lovely catastrophe.

  LU: Awkward. But yes, it was lovely.

  GEORGIE: Then to come here to this empty house in the bare paddocks.

  LU: Not empty. There was a piano, books.

  GEORGIE: True.

  LU: And music. Always music. Veranda music, dirt music.

  GEORGIE: Bare earth down to the river.

  LU: Melon vines. Like green lace.

  GEORGIE: The actual running river.

  LU: Watermelon, rockies, honeydew, grew em all.

  GEORGIE: Solar panels, wind turbine. And no satellite dish.

  LU: Weirdo.

  GEORGIE: Hardly an olive tree on the place then.

  LU: The old man was a hard-arse. He said this world is just a passing dream – shit and gristle. Only had his eye on Heaven. Far as he was concerned matter didn’t matter a bit. But Mum still planted trees. Planted that one there, the very first. She loved the world. He was nay and she was yea.

  GEORGIE: I wish I’d known her. Back then, when we were so much younger.

  LU: And the world still alive.

  GEORGIE: Everything standing up alive.

  LU: Behold, I see men as trees walking!

  GEORGIE: They said you were a weirdo.

  LU: Your weirdo.

  GEORGIE: But you always went too far.

  LU: For you.

  GEORGIE: Oh, bullshit. It’s in your nature.

  LU: You think?

  GEORGIE: Always going too deep, too far from ordinary. And when you were like that, so wilful and reckless, I felt abandoned.

  LU: Some places you go to alone. Have to.

  GEORGIE: I used to steel myself for bad news, like an army bride, always scared you’d push things too far. Not just the rednecks, the cops, the Fisheries, but what your body could tolerate —

  LU: Four minutes, that’s how long I could hold my breath.

  GEORGIE: Just to poach a few crays.

  LU: They seek him here, they seek him there, they seek him in his underwear. Man had to make a living.

  GEORGIE: Come on, it was an addiction. You did it for the thrill, to get away with it.

  LU: Right under their noses, all those White Point big-shots.

  GEORGIE: And didn’t that run in the family.

  LU: But when it got too hard, when I got old, what I really missed was the sea.

  GEORGIE: I know.

  LU: The single breath, the feel of the water, the privacy of that long glide down in the quiet, with only the drumbeat of blood in my ears.

  GEORGIE: You make it sound so bloody romantic —

  LU: Well —

  GEORGIE: But you don’t know what it looks like when it all goes wrong. You’ve never pulled someone from the water all sleepy and smiley and blue in the face like a poisoned junkie.

  LU: Geez, it was only the once.

  GEORGIE: Why should a person have to see that on the face of someone they love?

  LU: Slapping me back to life.

  GEORGIE: Instinct, I suppose, and all those years of nursing.

  LU: Like an angry angel.

  GEORGIE: I was afraid, panicked.

  LU: You were terrific. That day and every day that followed.

  GEORGIE: I didn’t think it’d work.

  LU: The CPR?

  GEORGIE: Us. Me. Here. Maybe we should have gone somewhere different, fresh.

  LU: I couldn’t. This is where all the stories are, the songs —

  GEORGIE: Ghosts.

  LU: Family, love.

  GEORGIE: Went numb, I think. Once it stopped raining. Stopped paying attention, that’s the thing. Because I should have seen it coming. Once you started having those dreams.

  LU: Everyone dreams of flying.

  GEORGIE: That wasn’t flying, it was falling.

  LU: Not nightmares. I wasn’t afraid.

  GEORGIE: Maybe you should have been.

  LU: It wasn’t like falling from grace, just falling to earth. Hurtling at the dirt: dry leaves, beetles, dead grass rushing up, suddenly —

  GEORGIE: Huge —

  LU: Planetary —

  GEORGIE: Geological.

  LU: Made you laugh, didn’t it?

  BENDER comes out onto the veranda.

  BENDER: Someone out there?

  GEORGIE: What? No.

  An owl hoots.

  BENDER: Can’t find Mona.

  MONA: (off) Nooo! Please!

  SCENE 5

  MONA lurches drunkenly in from the yard, chasing a phantom, a vodka bottle in one hand, distressed, hopeful, cajoling.

  BENDER: Mona?

  MONA: Bobby? Carn Bobby love. C’mere, give ya ole mum a kiss, eh? Doan ya wanna. Carn, doan run away. Bobby?

  BENDER: What the fuck?

  MONA: Didden mean it! Sorry baby!

  BENDER: Mona, gimme that, now, give it here. Just give me the fuckin bottle.

  GEORGIE: What’s she doing? She’s been in the tractor shed.

  BENDER: Can’t give her grog.

  GEORGIE: I didn’t give her anything.

  MONA: Doan listen to him.

  BENDER: Christ, you didn’t tell me you had grog.

  GEORGIE: You didn’t ask me.

  BENDER: What is it?

  GEORGIE: Vodka.

  BENDER: Fuckin vodka.

  GEORGIE: Made in China.

  MONA: Done the job.

  BENDER seizes the bottle.

  BENDER: Come here, come on.

  MONA: Fuggin bastards.

  GEORGIE: Here.

  MONA: Found ya secret spot.

  BENDER: Yeah, well that worked out real good, didn’t it, Sis?

  MONA: Takes one to know one, eh? I know all the secret spots.

  GEORGIE: So it would seem.

  BENDER: Careful, she’s . . . Oh, Jesus.

  GEORGIE: It’s perfectly alright.

  MONA: Perfegly.

  GEORGIE: I’m a nurse.

  MONA turns and spits in GEORGIE’s face. GEORGIE recoils.

  GEORGIE: Well, used to be.

  BENDER: She doesn’t know what she’s doin.

  GEORGIE: Well, there’s a luxury.

  BENDER: Go on, I’ll fix it.

  GEORGIE: It’s fine. I’ll give you a hand. I can deal with this.

  BENDER: No. It’s family business.

  MONA: What fuggin family?

  BENDER: Please. Just gimme a minute.

  BENDER hands the bottle to GEORGIE who takes it reluctantly and retreats to watch from the doorway.

  BENDER: Jesus, Mona.

  MONA: Get fucked, you.

  BENDER: Quit a good job for ya.

  MONA: You not the bossa me!

  BENDER: Best job in me fuckin life. Drive down two days and nights to get you outta that place and fer what?

  MONA: Told you fer what.

  BENDER: So I can drive around the country for a week, sleepin in the car, livin like some —

  MONA: Blackfulla.

  BENDER: Jesus, Mona, ya couldn’t keep it together this long.

  MONA: Ya promised.

  BENDER: Eight fuckin days, that’s all ya last.

  MONA: Ninety-seven days sober!

  BENDER: Ya better off back in there. Where ya can’t get any.

  MONA: Just kill me. I’m nothin.

  BENDER: Shut up.

  MONA: Bender, just kill me!

  BENDER: I said shut up.

  She lunges at him, tries to scratch his face and he slaps her, and she falls to the dirt where he hugs her in remorse. She beats her own head, weeping. And stops suddenly, in a moment of clarity.

  MONA: Please, little brother. Here.

  BENDER: It’s just somewhere else on the road, Sis.

  MONA: Here’s good. Here’s right. I can f
eel him.

  BENDER: What’re you talking about?

  MONA: He was here. I can feel him close-up.

  BENDER: You’re drunk.

  MONA: But I can feel him here!

  BENDER: The boy?

  MONA: No. Not him.

  BENDER: What’re you talking about?

  MONA: Pa. He was here. I can feel him close-up.

  BENDER: It’s orright, okay. Whatever you reckon.

  MONA: This the one, this the place. You remember the story?

  BENDER: Yeah, Sis, I remember.

  MONA: Better remember.

  BENDER: Jesus, I remember, orright?

  MONA: Olive tree. Olive tree.

  BENDER: Teacher tied him to an olive tree.

  MONA: Tied him with a belt.

  BENDER: He’s barefoot —

  MONA: Pa —

  BENDER: Short pants, big-eyed, done something wrong, forgot his four times tables, his God Save the Queen. And he’s . . .

  MONA: Howlin.

  BENDER: Teacher cuts a switch with his pocket knife. Just reached up, took a branch, stripped the fruit, the leaves. Everyone suddenly quiet, all them Mission kids.

  MONA: Shh.

  BENDER: That teacher, he’s a shiny-hair religious man. Half minister, half psychopath.

  MONA: Psycho.

  BENDER: And kids’re watchin, hardly breathin. Sound of them olives fallin on the yellow dirt. Real Bible tree, that olive. Extendin the olive branch. Yep, that’s how ya do it. Real Mr Whippy, that stick. Flogged him with it till he pissed himself. Front of thirty other kids, seven, eight —

  MONA: Nine year old.

  BENDER: For his own good. Where’d he go, that little boy?

  MONA: Inside, in deep.

  BENDER: Pa.

  MONA: He was hard.

  BENDER: Like wandoo.

  MONA: Ironwood.

  BENDER: Most the time he said nothin. Get this, pass that, shut up, youse kids or I’ll flog youse. Never said nothin!

  MONA: Wanted to live a long time. Wanted grandkids. Shot roos for half a man’s wages. Drove that bus from Moora to Marble Bar. Went to a lot of funerals. Died thinkin —

  BENDER: Of his mother. In the dialysis ward.

  MONA: Alone.

  An owl calls.

  BENDER: Pa?

  BENDER peers into the dark, a little spooked.

  BENDER: Nuh, it’s dogs. I’ll get you a blanket.

  He gets up to go. GEORGIE retreats guiltily into the house and BENDER follows as the night changes colour.

  SCENE 6

  Night-time. On the horizon a reddish glow. MONA is alone on the veranda step in her T-shirt nightie. She rocks gently. From the glowing tree LU emerges to sit beside her.