Read Online Moonlight Downs by Adrian Hyland - Free Book Online Page B

the same words and a melody which occasionally intersected with the original.
    ‘Sounds like the family’s having a welcome-home party.’
    ‘Same one they were having when I picked em up a few days ago.’ More yells. Laughter as well, but it was that lean, desperate laughter which is only a decibel away from murder. ‘In the words of Johnny Cash, the road goes on forever but the party never ends.’
    ‘Robert Earle Keen.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘They’re his words. Johnny just sang em.’
    He frowned, shoved the gearstick into first. ‘Whoever said it, he was a wise man. Give yer a lift?’
    ‘Thanks, but don’t worry about it. I’m nearly home.’
    I’d only taken a few steps before I was sprung by the mob inside the house. A lot of the revellers were ex-Moonlight. They came pouring out the front gate and dragged me inside with an offer I couldn’t refuse: warm wine, wet chips and effusive greetings from a score of old friends, half of whom I’d never met before.
    The scene inside the house looked like a game of paralytic pass-the-parcel—the parcel in this case being a flagon of Fruity Lexia. When one disappeared another appeared in its place. The party kicked off on the front veranda, surged into the lounge room, trailed into the kitchen, staggered out the back door and collapsed under the saltbush.
    I made my way through the crowd. My fellow party animals came in all shapes and sizes, all ages and denominations, the common denominator being thirst.
    Gladys Kneebone, whom I’d last seen serving up the chat du jour , was cracking jokes and laughing like a cyclone. Slippery Williams was gazing at a television which, like him, wasn’t properly tuned in. Jeanie Marble wandered up and wrapped me in a giant bear-hug, then subsided onto the couch and fell asleep.
    ‘Jeanie looks like she’s been through the wringer,’ I said to Gladys.
    ‘ Yuwayi , most of the bloody ringers, too.’
    There were even a couple of whitefellers among them. Whitefellers, that is, in the Territorian sense of the word, which is to say not blackfellers. One was an olive-skinned young bloke—a copperfeller?—with clean teeth, curly hair and a floral shirt. I didn’t catch a name, but from what I could gather from Slippery’s toothless introduction the bloke was either a Cuban or a Cubist. The other whitefeller was an old guy with a head like a radioactive strawberry and a name which sounded like ‘Jack Derrida’.
    ‘Not the deconstructionist?’ I asked Slippery.
    ‘Jack?’ came the reply. ‘No way. Bit of a pisshead, but he wouldn’t hurt nobody.’
    Jack’s contribution to the discourse, ‘Eeeeeaaagheeoo’, was about as comprehensible as that of his namesake. He tried, and failed, to shake my hand, but the momentum kept him going as far as the laundry door, from where he was last seen raining death down on the pansies.
    I wandered out into the backyard, and eventually found myself among the wallflowers—the old, the infirm, the insane, the Christian—perched around a fire beside the fence. They were a sea of tranquillity amidst a mighty ocean of booze. A billy was boiling. Tongues were clicking, teeth were clacking.
    Prominent among the group were Archie and Pepper Kennedy, McGillivray’s trackers, two skinny old brothers with patches on their pants and beards growing out of their noses. Archie and Pepper had been born out in the Plenty Desert west of Moonlight. They hadn’t seen a white man until they were adults and could, it was said, follow a fish through a flooded river. They were sitting on their swags and sipping at pannikins of tea. Pepper silently handed me a brew as I joined them.
    I took a sip, winced, then took another. Suddenly hungry, I pulled out of my pocket a packet of sunflower seeds, the only food I could find, and began to nibble away at its contents.
    Pepper looked on with interest.
    ‘What that you eatin there, Nangali?’
    ‘Try some,’ I said, offering him the packet. He picked out a handful,