Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe by Wayne Macauley

Author:Wayne Macauley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary fiction, Australian fiction
ISBN: 9781921961342
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2012-07-25T04:00:00+00:00

ten

I was not a witness to the events that followed, they were described to me later, by Jodie. I had locked myself up in my house: for good, I said, forever. The following morning Vito was gone. He’d apparently left during the night, taking his meagre possessions with him; later that day his tracks were found in the mud by the West Wall and a handmade ladder was found resting against it. He’d jumped the wall, crossed the creek and was probably already halfway to Melbourne. But all this was discovered later: the main drama that morning centred around a section of the South Wall, at the corner of South Street and the old ring road. Craig and Marie-Claire had been up since dawn, they’d roused Dave and Alex too, and the demolition was already well under way. They’d begun the work without any prior discussion and by mid-morning had already opened up a two metre gap. Craig’s motives were pure, however misguided; he’d hung on Loch’s every word the previous night, assumed the wall to be the only hindrance to a resolution of our troubles and had woken early to apply himself straight away to the task of bringing it down. He believed, I’m sure, in his innocence, that the sub-contractors’ trucks would soon be arriving to take the bricks away and in anticipation of this he had begun stacking them into neat piles a few metres apart. By lunchtime, when Michael finally arrived, they had ten or so such piles and the gap in the wall was at least four metres wide.

You would have to have been there; I wasn’t, and can only do my half-hearted best to describe the scene that followed. Michael appeared marching down South Street dressed in a rabbit-skin hat and an old khaki army jacket which, as Jodie said, he’d found that morning among the second-hand clothes in one of the boxes of supplies. He was carrying his gun. At first Craig thought he was simply off to shoot rabbits—a little late perhaps but there need be nothing strange in that. Michael cocked his rifle, aimed it at Craig and told him in no uncertain terms to put every brick back where it had come from, now. Craig was speechless; he was convinced he was doing what had to be done and now Michael was telling him at gunpoint to undo it. Dave intervened, pleading with Michael to stop this nonsense: if they were going to get their subsidies back, the wall, as Loch had said, must come down. Alex chimed in: What point was there in delaying it? The sooner we send the right signal to Loch, the sooner everything will be resolved. Michael repeated his demand. The wall was staying and if Dave or Alex or anyone else didn’t like it then there was the doorway to the city, go. Alex sat on a pile of bricks and dropped his head into his hands. There was a long pause then, as

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.