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The great beast’s shining teeth were visible in the east, through the kitchen window. Not that he was looking. But he could feel it at his back, the state capital looming out there on the plain in its sterile Windexed penumbra. It was only half an hour up the Swan River, as close and as incomprehensible as a sibling. For while Perth had bulldozed its past and buried its doubts in bluster, Fremantle nursed its grievances and scratched its arse.
And there she was at his feet. Good old Freo. Lying dazed and forsaken at the rivermouth, the addled wharfside slapper whose good bones showed through despite the ravages of age and bad living. She was low-rise but high-rent, defiant and deluded in equal measure, her Georgian warehouses, Victorian pubs, limestone cottages and lacy verandahs spared only by a century of political neglect. Hunkered in the desert wind, cowering beneath the austral sun.
By God, didn’t a man come over all prosy the morning after. These days he was pure bullshit and noise, just another flannel-tongued Jeremiah with neither mission nor prophecy, no tribe to claim him but family. His thoughts spluttered on, maudlin, grievous, fitful, lacking proper administration, useless for anything more than goading the pain the vicious light had set off already. And, Christ, it was beyond anything the booze could induce. Here it came, the smoke and thunder, the welling percussion in his skull. Like hoofbeats. Two riders approaching. And the wind set to howl.
In the kitchen he scrabbled for ammunition, pre-emptive relief. Any bottle or packet would do. Said the joker to the thief. Lucky dip and rattle them blind from the knife drawer. Gurn them down like bullets. And reload. Or at least stand to. Sprawled against the countertop. Sweating through his soapy freshness in a few seconds. Think of something else.
He reached for the radio. Checked himself. Many, many months now, and he still struggled to master the impulse, as if some ruined bit of him yearned for the ritual of the pre-dawn recce, scouting for bad news before the phone began pinging. Because there’d always be a whisper, a Cabinet leak, a buried press release about another government cave-in, fresh permission to drill, strip, fill or blast. The industrial momentum was feverish. Oil, gas, iron, gold, lead, bauxite and nickel – it was the boom of all booms, and in a decade it had taken hostage every institution from government to education. The media were bedazzled. There was pentecostal ecstasy in the air, and to resist it was heresy. But that had been his gig, to meet the stampede head-on every morning, beginning in the dark, trolling across the frequencies half asleep while the basin filled with shave water and the still functional face took shape in the mirror at roughly the same speed as his thoughts. Part of it was simple triage, belching out soundbites like a spiv’s PR flak. All the while trying to hold to the long view, the greater hopes he’d begun with. Like appealing to people’s higher nature. And getting Nature itself a fair hearing. Which was, of course, in this state, at such a moment in history, like catching farts in a butterfly net.
No easy thing to unwind from. The toxic adrenaline, the ceaseless performance, the monastic discipline. Sucking in trouble every day before sun-up, preparing a full day’s strategy in the shower. Finding yourself in the office at midnight, after the final, five-way phone hook-up, shaking with rage, caffeine and fatigue. But a year’s bitter liberty should have done the trick. Really. For a bloke who was half smart. Getting sacked? That was a mercy, a cold-turkey intervention. For which a man should be grateful. He was well out of it. What had it all been anyway but one long fighting retreat? Mere pageantry and panto. He’d just been something for the cowboys and their wild-eyed cattle to wheel past, a procedural obstacle set in their path while they yahooed on towards the spoils.
Excerpted from Eyrie by Tim Winton. Copyright © 2014 by Tim Winton. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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