Fairweather had shown me the heart of darkness here, in this geography. And that warning had, I felt, given me some sort of advantage.
But my reading of the Fairweather story did not prepare me for Bribie Island. I had expected a little fishing village with a clutch of casuarinas tickling the shoreline, but it was a hive of big development, like most of the Queensland coast.
Fairweather had complained of urban encroachment way back in the sixties, when he used to wander about the island in soiled pyjama trousers. He even painted about the invasion of his Shangri-la. The building of the bridge over Pumicestone Passage had rightly caused him alarm. In the outside world his prodigious talents were finally being recognised. Now the world had access to him. And come they did, from local journalists to art critic Robert Hughes to Nobel Laureate Patrick White.
Fairweather had become the very cliché of the artist who lives for only his art. The poet in the garret was in his case the master painter in a Balinese-style hut of his own making. No running water. No refrigeration. No stove.
But the Fairweather story was more than that. In that dim hut on Bribie he wrestled with the great questions, and created a record of his metaphysical struggles with house paint on cheap canvas, cardboard and even sheets of newspaper. In a rat-infested hovel he laid out map after map of his consciousness. He ate kippers, drank rotgut and painted and painted, as the world crept closer.
When the Peugeot had cooled down, I secured a map from the visitors’ centre and drove the short distance to the park that had been consecrated in Fairweather’s honour. It was here his huts had once stood, where he did his major works that now hang in temperature-controlled galleries around the world.
I drove past rows and rows of muffler repair shops and takeaway joints and newish housing estates. It didn’t feel right. I had read reports of Fairweather’s hideaway being almost impossible to find, deep in the bush. But where was the bush?
I was not thinking of the fifties and sixties. It had been more than thirty years since his death. And as I came upon the little straggly pine grove that was Fairweather Park, I felt a pang of sadness for the artist. It was surrounded by bitumen roads, a bus stop, and a regulation Australian suburb.
The huts were gone. The solitude was gone. His cairn of kipper tins — all gone.
I eventually parked off the main road and wandered through the pine grove. The sandy floor of the park shifted underfoot. There was rubbish littered over the pine needles and leaves. In the centre of an amphitheatre of sunken earth, sporadically decorated with flaking timber bench seats, were a huge, misshaped boulder and a plaque to Fairweather. On the concrete apron at the base of the memorial some kids had scrawled graffiti.
I sat for a long time in Fairweather’s grove. I strained to hear the birds he so loved, but only heard the distant gear change of trucks and the staccato thud of heavy machinery. Somewhere, in a nearby house, Willie Nelson was singing about being on the road again.
Tom Wolfe was right. You can’t go home again.
It was dark inside that sorrowful glade. It was late afternoon but the park seemed to have its own light, irrespective of time, and it was as gloomy as twilight. I could just make out the spectral shape of my white Peugeot through the trees. It seemed to me as blurry-edged and mysterious as the weird, haunting blotches of white in Fairweather’s The Bathers.
I connected a couple of dots that afternoon in the glade. In my thoughts I travelled all the way back to the death of Legs, the madam from Atherton, and to a young Boltcutter in his antique store at the Cross. Then there was a newspaper brief from a long time ago about a murdered Brisbane art dealer. It nibbled at me like a Bribie sandfly. I’d have to hit the archives.
When I headed for my car it was almost pitch black in the forest. I stumbled through the sand and undergrowth.
I saw the figure of the man at the last moment. A silhouette, blacker than black.
I even remember the crack across the back of my head.
Then nothing.
~ * ~
8
When I finally opened my eyes again I understood two things.
Firstly, gentlemen of a certain age shouldn’t put themselves too often in a position of being bludgeoned on the back of the head with a blunt object. There are less painful ways to see stars, and more pleasurable paths to a massive headache.
Secondly, I was convinced I was dead. I was in a room with a single light glowing feebly in the distance, and crouched over me were an old man and woman.
They pulled me up to a sitting position. I was on an old imitation leather couch. ‘You’re okay,’ the woman said, pressing a cold, damp flannel to my forehead. The flannel had little African violets stitched around its perimeter.
The room started coming into focus. A recliner rocker with a flip-out footstool. A nest of coffee tables. Cream carpet so old it bore grey tracks of human traffic. A huge, old-fashioned imitation mahogany cabinet television set with a curly copper antenna on the top at one end, and a small white bust of Lenin at the other. There were nondescript pictures on the wall, the type of Hawaiian beach scenes that you could, once upon a time, buy by the metre from somewhere.
‘You want drink?’ the old man said. ‘Here, drink.’
He pressed a big glass tumbler into my hand. It was warm orange-crush cordial. It smelled like a neglected fish pond.
‘You’ll stay for tea,’ the woman said, wiping her hands on her apron and shuffling over to the open kitchen behind the recliner rocker. I could see through the window a sole street light and the scissor shadows of palm trees.
The old man hobbled over to the rocker, rested his cane against one of the arms, and eased into the chair. It squeaked loudly under his weight.
I had no idea where I was or who these people were. If this was heaven, it could’ve done with a good scrub, some new furniture and a squirt of room deodoriser.
‘Am sorry,’ the old man said.
‘He’s SORRY,’ the old woman shouted from behind the kitchen bench. I had witnessed this dynamic with older people. The deaf husband. The wife, in compensation, turning up her own volume, then forgetting lots of other people in the world weren’t deaf. Her voice went into my tender eardrum like someone knocking a knitting needle into my brain with a rubber mallet.
‘Was mistaken identity,’ he said.
‘MISTAKEN IDENTITY,’ said his wife. I winced.
‘Where am I?’ I asked.
‘I’m Igor. This my wife, Manya. You at Bribie.’
Bribie. The Fairweather forest. Yes. Heading for my car. Lights out.
‘Who are you?’
‘I told you. Igor.’
‘He’s IGOR.’
‘Igor, why did you knock me unconscious?’
‘Was mistake. I thought you were the man coming with the shovel.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘For a month, a man come with the shovel. Always at night he come. We keep a watch over the park. He was our good friend, EE-arn Farr-weather. We keep a watch for the last thirty years, you know, make sure is nice for him, his last resting place and things like that.’