Signs of Life Read online

  MONA: Not proper. Not right. Never finish. (she covers her eyes) Can’t put him out. Not proper. Not right. Never finish. Can’t, put him out. Not proper. Not right. Never finish. Can’t, can’t, can’t, can’t, can’t put him out.

  LU: Just a bushfire.

  MONA: No. Ahh!

  LU: It’ll burn its way to the coast by morning.

  MONA: Bobby.

  LU: And tonight, when the breeze dies, it’ll be raining ash. Soft, powdery. Curling flakes, like little boats. Landing in your hair, on your tongue. Carbon. Softer than rain. Like him. Like me. Stardust.

  MONA: Bobby.

  LU: Soft as a whisper.

  MONA: Gorn.

  LU: No. Never.

  LU stands, takes ash from his pockets, spills and sprinkles it around her, upon her. MONA scoops some onto her head in sorrow and penitence. She rocks.

  MONA: Sorry, Pa. I’ll be good. You was here. Weren’t you? Weren’t you?

  The breeze stirs as LU retreats to the tree. Fire roars and crackles. MONA winds down, rocking ever slower. BENDER brings a blanket and lays it out as MONA yawns, fading fast.

  BENDER: Carn, Sis, let’s get you down.

  He settles her on the swag and caresses her tenderly.

  BENDER: You’re orright, Big Sister. I gotcha.

  She sleeps, holds his hand to her, like a doll, a child, a memory. And a gust of wind stirs the windmill, the loose sheets of iron on the roof, the haggard ranks of unseen trees.

  SCENE 7

  Cockatoos shriek in passing and there is bright sunlight upon the veranda next morning. Out on the dirt BENDER inspects a shredded tyre in the yard. Up on the veranda MONA sleeps, curled like a child, and GEORGIE emerges with two mugs of tea. She brings one down for BENDER who pauses in his work to accept it.

  GEORGIE: Please tell me that’s just the spare.

  BENDER: It’s rooted.

  GEORGIE: Well, it’s done some miles by the look of it.

  BENDER: Know how that feels.

  GEORGIE: Yeah, shredded on the inside, and losing your grip everywhere else.

  BENDER: Look, sorry about Mona. She’s hard goin when she’s sober, but when she’s on the charge – Jesus. Like her mother. Alkies, eh?

  GEORGIE: (uncomfortably) Well, yes.

  BENDER: You got a sister.

  GEORGIE: Two. One likes the booze. The other’s got a thing for benzodiazapines.

  BENDER: What’s that – drugs?

  GEORGIE: Respectable drugs.

  BENDER: This the rich one?

  GEORGIE: Yep.

  BENDER: Money, respectable drugs – gunna read that book.

  GEORGIE: Well, look out you don’t end up like her.

  BENDER: On, what, benzo-diaphrams?

  GEORGIE: And a boob job.

  BENDER: No way.

  GEORGIE: True story.

  BENDER: Look out! (snorts, inclines his head toward the shed) That boat. In the big shed.

  GEORGIE: You mean the shed with the really big lock.

  BENDER: Near on twenty foot, that boat.

  GEORGIE: Well, you’re thorough, I’ll give you that.

  BENDER: Saw them big ole outboards on it. Hondas.

  GEORGIE: Four-stroke. First of the low-emission motors.

  BENDER: Petrol motors.

  GEORGIE: Heavy as hell, the Hondas, but they’re quiet. Just about antiques. And the fuel in the tank’s stale, needs draining.

  BENDER: You know about boats, then?

  GEORGIE: A thing or two.

  Pause.

  BENDER: Toota.

  GEORGIE: What?

  BENDER: Big ole photo in the boat shed.

  GEORGIE: No stone unturned.

  BENDER: Fancy frame an everythin.

  GEORGIE: Make yourself at home.

  BENDER: Photo’s there, hangin off a nail, covered in dust. Big white sailboat.

  GEORGIE: Yacht.

  BENDER: Bloke can’t help bein curious.

  GEORGIE: Evidently.

  BENDER: I’m thinking: Toota, Toota. What kinda name’s that?

  GEORGIE: Teuta.

  BENDER: Teuta?

  GEORGIE: She was a warrior.

  BENDER: Like you. Bit of a worrier.

  GEORGIE: Warrior.

  BENDER: Yer husband’s, was it?

  GEORGIE: She was mine.

  BENDER: Huh.

  GEORGIE: Teuta. She was a pirate queen.

  BENDER: Bit of fun on the river.

  GEORGIE: No she was a serious boat, an ocean boat.

  BENDER: Bugger me. Pirate Princess. To Rottnest Island on a Saturdy arvo.

  GEORGIE: Sailed her to Indonesia.

  BENDER: No way.

  GEORGIE: Just the once. Most of it singlehanded.

  BENDER: No bloke?

  GEORGIE: Oh, I took one, but he spent half the trip seasick. Rest of the time he was useless anyway.

  BENDER: Your husband?

  GEORGIE: No, another bloke.

  BENDER: Indonesia. That’s a long way.

  GEORGIE: I’m a good navigator. Always was.

  BENDER: Never got lost?

  GEORGIE: Not sailing, no.

  BENDER: Not once?

  GEORGIE: I don’t think I knew what it meant to be lost until I was forty.

  BENDER: Late developer.

  GEORGIE: But I made up for it when I did. Big time. Lost the plot.

  BENDER: What’re you talkin about?

  GEORGIE: Oh. Well, I suppose I kind of fell out of love.

  BENDER: What? With the bloke?

  GEORGIE: No, with the people I knew, my family, that version of myself. I grew up with a kind of absolute certainty. And somehow it evaporated.

  BENDER: Certainty.

  GEORGIE: About where I was headed. In my life. I’d always been safe. I belonged. Had all the rituals of the tribe. Leafy riverside suburb, private school, uni, yacht club. All mapped out, you know?

  BENDER: No. I don’t know.

  GEORGIE: I could see it all before me, already organized, my entire life, and I panicked. Bolted. But once I turned my back on it, there were suddenly no landmarks, nothing to steer by but my own judgement. And I really was lost. I wasn’t safe.

  BENDER: Christ, sounds safe enough to me. Leafy.

  GEORGIE: Well, it wasn’t leafy. I was in Jeddah at the time.

  BENDER: Where’s that, Queensland?

  GEORGIE: Saudi Arabia.

  BENDER: Jesus, you were lost.

  GEORGIE: Don’t mock me, I was homeless, unemployed, terrified.

  BENDER: Ah, bullshit.

  GEORGIE: How dare you.

  BENDER: You don’t know what fear is.

  GEORGIE: You’ve got a bloody nerve.

  BENDER: I don’t mean feelin anxious. I don’t mean little bit insecure. I’m talkin shittin yourself.

  GEORGIE: What is this, a competition?

  BENDER: If it was, you’d lose it.

  GEORGIE: Lucky me. I guess that means I win.

  BENDER: (relenting) Nil all, draw.

  GEORGIE: Says you.

  BENDER: Well, you started out interestin enough. Before the sob story. What’s all this private school homeless shit got to do with sailin a boat to Indonesia?

  GEORGIE: You ever heard of the Zuytdorp Cliffs?

  BENDER: Heard of em? I been there.

  GEORGIE: Two hundred miles long.

  BENDER: Like I said, I been there. Shootin goats. Rocky, dry, windblown bloody country. Nearly died of boredom.

  GEORGE: Well, I guess you’ve never seen it from the sea, then.

  BENDER: Yeah, funny that, I never could find the keys to me yacht.

  GEORGIE: Not so boring from out there.

  BENDER: Cliffs is cliffs.

  GEORGIE: No, not when you’re underneath them, not when you’re about to smash into them.

  BENDER: Give you a bad moment, did it?

  GEORGIE hesitates.

  GEORGIE: I better check the house batteries.

  BENDER: And
that’s it? That’s ya story?

  GEORGIE: Well, you’re a busy man. I wouldn’t want to bore you.

  BENDER: So what happened?

  GEORGIE: I got caught in a storm.

  BENDER: And?

  GEORGIE is reluctant now, demurs.

  BENDER: Come on. Leave a man hangin.

  GEORGIE: Well, I’m out there. Singlehanded, more or less. I’m halfway along the cliffs, heading for Shark Bay. The wind’s been force five all day, and then it changes direction completely and just builds, you know, until it’s a full gale. Waves like buildings. The sea’s all streaky spume. And we’re getting pounded, hammered, pummelled, flogged.

  BENDER: Yeah, yeah, I get it, Jesus. What happened?

  GEORGIE: I’m trying to beat clear of the cliffs and the sun goes down and I’ve got these huge, hissing swells coming at me in the dark from two, three directions all at once, and any moment one could knock you down flat.

  BENDER: Can’t you pull in somewhere?

  GEORGIE: There’s nowhere, remember? Not for a hundred miles.

  BENDER: Can’t you use the motor?

  GEORGIE: I’ve got it going flat out but I’m just motoring on the spot.

  BENDER: With the cliffs behind ya.

  GEORGIE: I can hear them, see them in the dark. And I can’t believe what the mast’s doing; it’s shivering and shimmying. Oh, God. And then something comes down out of the dark, like a big, roaring road train. Blam. And it’s total knockdown, three hundred and sixty degrees. Everything coming to pieces around me. A few seconds later we’re upright again. But the mast’s gone, the engine’s dead and once I’ve convinced myself that I’m still alive there’s nothing to do but cut everything away and lie to. No sail, sea anchor off the bow, dead in the water. At sea that’s as close as you get to hiding. Lying to. All night, powerless, expecting to die any minute. Those cliffs closer all the time. Yes, I was scared. I thought I was going to die.

  BENDER: Not bad.

  GEORGIE: What?

  BENDER: Nobody made you go. You chose to be there.

  GEORGIE: What’s that got to do with it?

  BENDER: You really don’t know? You really need to ask me that?

  GEORGIE: Don’t tell me – you’ve got a better story.

  BENDER: Well, it’s no sailin princess in it, nothing fancy. Just a life.

  GEORGIE: So tell me.

  BENDER: Nah, you doan wanna hear it.

  GEORGIE: Tell me.

  BENDER: Well . . . we was never steerin. Mona’n me. Went where the wind took us. Ship we sailed in was a bus.

  GEORGIE: A bus?

  BENDER: Lived in it, Pa’s bus. Ten, fifteen years, maybe. Good old bus. Leyland Tiger. Front engine job. Always goin somewhere. New town, cattle station, different people. But, sometimes. Well, like you’n them cliffs. Just a big ole storm come down and it feels like there’s no one drivin. Mum goin crazy, fightin, getting locked up. She come and went, Mum. Mostly went. And Pa, he had these moods. Got hollow and dead inside, like his spirit was extinct. Then he was a stranger.And when he was like that – Christ – I got scared. Pissed me pants sometimes. It was like he might do anythin, say anythin. We didn’t know him. Me’n Mona, we’d hide down under the seats till it was all over, that horrible . . . stormin, wordless rage. What you call that? With no sails?

  Barely noticeable at first, MONA begins to stir. As they speak, she slowly sits up.

  GEORGIE: Lying to.

  BENDER: Lyin to. Yeah. That’s us kids. Lyin to.

  Silence.

  BENDER: Mona, she never had a chance. Born damaged. What ya gotta understand.

  GEORGIE: So who’s Bobby?

  Pause.

  BENDER: She set fire to him. My nephew. Her boy.

  Pause.

  BENDER: He was playin up. She was drunk, crazy. There’s this tin of kero right there and she shuts him up. Big splash, big laugh, comedy show. But one flick of the lighter. And he’s a candle. Eight-year-old candle. Hard work, little fulla like that. Can’t fix him. FAS, he was. You know about it?

  GEORGIE: Foetal alcohol.

  BENDER: Just doin the same thing over and over. Coulda killed him myself if I’d had to deal with it day and night, but I wasn’t there. Out the wheatbelt, workin. Time I found out Bobby’s buried and she’s locked up.

  GEORGIE: Gaol.

  BENDER: Nah, nuthouse.

  GEORGIE: She’s been discharged, released?

  BENDER: She’s a self-releaser. An absconder. Runs in the family. Like the FAS. She’s got it. Like I said, brain damage. Can’t learn, you know, from ya mistakes. But she’s got this idea. Somethin she won’t let go of. Why we’re bloody drivin round, campin under bridges’n sleepin in the car. You wouldn’t tell anybody, would ya? She hasn’t hurt anybody.

  GEORGIE: The child —

  BENDER: It was years ago. He’d be, what, near twenty now. If he’d lived. You won’t dob us in, will you, Georgie?

  GEORGIE doesn’t speak.

  BENDER: Me and Mona, we never had no certainty like you, no safe place, no map. No magic dreamtime rainbird. Jesus, I got no language, no law, no bloody place. Put together from bits and pieces, spare parts. My country’s a broken-down bus and a hundred fuckin dust farms from here to the arse-end of Onslow. Lyin to, that’s me, all me life. All I got’s bad memories and other people’s bad memories and a sister not right in the head. I’m more fuckin lost than you ever bin in ya life.

  GEORGIE still doesn’t speak.

  BENDER: We’ll be gone in the morning.

  SCENE 8

  Beneath the tree, the same day. MONA has a dobro guitar on her lap. It catches the light, flashes in her face. GEORGIE emerges from the doorway and watches as MONA touches one string after another timidly before beginning to strum them all at once.

  The guitar is tuned to an open minor chord and the drone sound unlocks something in MONA. She strums again, and she sings a note in harmony with it. She’s a ruin, this poor woman with the flashing guitar, but her voice is so sad and full of longing it’s somehow beautiful.

  MONA: (singing) Now . . . Benny, now . . . Bobby . . . now? Mona now. Pa now, Mummy now. Now . . . Now.

  And then she catches herself, sensing GEORGIE there, turns.

  MONA: Didden mean . . . Just . . . found it.

  GEORGIE: It’s okay.

  BENDER emerges from the house.

  MONA: Why you cryin?

  GEORGIE: Oh. Nothing. That . . . guitar, it was my husband’s.

  MONA gets up.

  MONA: Everthin you touch, eh. It’s them. They in it.

  MONA hands the guitar to GEORGIE and walks off stage right, begins to run.

  GEORGIE: Mona, it’s okay. Bender?

  BENDER: Where you goin?

  MONA is off.

  MONA: To the car.

  Sound of the car door opening, slamming shut.

  BENDER: No point gettin in there, you’re not goin anywhere. Don’t forget who’s got the keys, Sistergirl.

  GEORGIE: Think I upset her.

  BENDER: Ha. Wallpaper upsets her. Sunshine, bottletops, shoelaces.

  GEORGIE: So she’s like the rest of us, then.

  BENDER: Yeah, bloody pain in the arse. (The sound of the Holden starting.) Oh, Christ!

  BENDER sprints off followed by GEORGIE as the vehicle howls away in a rattling roar. LU emerges from the tree. It’s as if he’s watching history repeat itself.

  An horrific thud and the sound of breaking glass.

  Birdsong reclaims the day. BENDER strides back to the veranda followed by GEORGIE supporting MONA. GEORGIE sits MONA down but she struggles free and storms indoors.

  BENDER: Well, that’s fucked it.

  GEORGIE: Be glad she didn’t make it out onto the road.

  BENDER: Maybe woulda been better.

  GEORGIE: You don’t mean that.

  BENDER: Sometimes I wonder.

  GEORGIE: Mona’s all you’ve got.

  BENDER: I said sometimes.

  GEORGIE:
I get a chill now and then, out along that drive. Husband’s brother rolled the ute there near the gate. Four of them, two little kids. They all died here, every one of them.

  BENDER: What about that old man, the one up the pole?

  GEORGIE: There in his bed. I spose one of them had to die of old age.

  BENDER: Old age. Yeah, there’s a luxury.

  LU: (startled, sensing something a second or two before the others) No!

  MONA appears in the doorway with the shotgun. She points it skyward. Pulls the trigger and sends a sound-cloud of birds shrieking into the distance.

  MONA: Now. We do it now, we go down to the river now, no more bullshit.

  MONA lays the weapon down carefully, as if she’s frightened herself as well as everyone else. BENDER rushes at her as if to strike her, but MONA hugs him.

  MONA: Please, little brother, I’ll go back. I’ll be good.

  BENDER looks at GEORGIE like a man hoping to be delivered.

  GEORGIE: What’s down the river?

  MONA: (to BENDER) The story.

  BENDER: Orright.

  MONA: Thass it, Bub.

  BENDER: Ya see, our Pa —

  MONA: He used to talk sometimes.

  BENDER: Special times round the fire.

  MONA: When he was feelin soft.

  GEORGIE: Soft?

  BENDER: Like a crab changin shell, just all of a sudden, like he couldn’t help it, shell slidin away and there’s just skin.

  MONA: And he’d be soft.

  BENDER: That’s when he’d talk about a place on the river. South a bit. Down from Mogumber, along the river, halfway to the sea.

  MONA: Special place for him.

  BENDER: See, he was took for the Mission. Two year old.

  MONA: Mum for New Norcia.

  BENDER: Him for Moore River Mission.

  MONA: Run away four times, he did.

  BENDER: Nowhere to run, of course. Where’s he gunna go? Doesn’t know who he is, where he’s from, where his people are; language flogged out of him. Doesn’t even know what his mother looks like. So where’s he go?

  MONA: The river.

  BENDER: After he run away they’d have dogs out, coppers lookin. So he just followed the river, miles and miles, stayed in the water, creepin long the bank every day, little bit, hidin. It was good country down here them days when it still rained and we had all the proper seasons.

  MONA: There was roos —

  BENDER: Emu —

  MONA: Goanna —