She told me that her dad’s mate would come around fairly often. She had wanted to call him Uncle Dave, but he’d refused the title. He was one of these Tasmanian men who seem gregarious, but whose silence can also be deafening. One of these types who disappear into the bush for months at a time, or come over at the tail-end of a horrific bender and need looking after. A bloke whose most important possession was a fishing boat.
They’d sit around a pot-belly stove in the backyard, and her dad would do most of the talking. As a kid she’d crawl onto Dave’s lap. She told me her dad said that when she was a child, he didn’t know what to do with her. It was like giving a footy to someone who’d never played before. Dave had never really felt comfortable with children. “I don’t understand them,” he’d apparently said. But my friend had always felt good around Dave. She said at some point she realised she could tease him without any consequences. He was too gentle to ever bite back. So she was in control.
Looking back on it, my mate said to me, that friendship had a strange dynamic.
When she was a teenager, Dave would take her for long bike rides in the bush behind their place. They only ever owned run-down old bikes, and half the time, on their tours through the Trevallyn Reserve, one would break; they’d have to walk back to the house, wheeling those contraptions cross-country, along rutted and rocky terrain. But it was fun while the bikes held up. The tracks around there were rough anyway in those days, poorly maintained, and you’d end up sliding through mud or getting whacked in the face with overhanging branches. There wasn’t much talk to be done, my friend said, which we supposed suited Dave better. Action without words.
My mate had taken on a nickname as a kid, Bubbles, and as you might imagine, she vehemently rejected it as a teenager. But Dave never got the memo, so he kept calling her Bubbles.
When she was 14, Bubbles started drinking beer with her dad and Dave out the back. Sometimes Dave would pull out their old guitar and warble a few tunes from the 70s, although my mate said they sometimes seemed like they actually came from some other country. I took it that Dave wasn’t a good singer if he sounded like he was singing in the Persian scale without trying. I imagined they were old campfire songs, ditties he’d picked up along the way. “Did he ever work in forestry, or in the mines?” I asked. My friend wasn’t sure. It was as if she had only known him in the present tense, then.
Once when she was a bit tipsy, she said, she climbed onto his lap again, like the old days. She wondered if he was still as awkward about it – maybe more, or maybe less – now that she was nearer to an adult.
The next day they went out on the bikes again. It was a hot morning. She remembered that she wore a singlet and shorts; Dave was in a pair of baggy trousers, which kept getting caught in the chain. It was the height of summer, because Dave stopped to show Bubbles the native cherries, which they ate, and sometimes they were tasty and sweet. And at some point, a copperhead unfurled itself just beneath Dave’s front wheel – it was a bee’s dick away from being crushed.
At some point Dave’s trousers got stuck in the chain and ripped. Dave swore, and skidded to a halt.
They had travelled a fair way from home. It was a patch of bush that seemed infrequently visited. “Bubbles,” Dave said, “I’ve got something to tell you.”
My friend said that she had her heart in her mouth at this point.
“It’s something I can’t tell your old man,” he said, “and I’ll need you to keep it a secret. At least for a little bit. Okay?” Bubbles nodded nervously. When she told me the story later, she could still remember that a trio of black cockatoos flapped overhead, and that Dave paused while they passed.
She said she was very anxious at this point, like the cockatoos had been an evil omen.
“I’m leaving,” Dave said. “And I don’t know when I’ll be back. Could be never. I’ve just gotta get outta here.” He was looking down at the ground and had his right hand stretched along his hairline, his thumb and index finger like a vice around his forehead. “I can’t work out how to tell your father. He’s been a good friend. But I have to go.”
Dave was crying. Bubbles hugged him. They stood there in the middle of an empty track in the bush for a while. Dave let go of her and tore the bottom part of his trousers off, just below the knee on the right leg. The material was all cut up and had black grease smeared over it.
He was going to just throw it in the bush, but Bubbles told him not to litter. “I still have that bit of material,” she shrugged. She finished the last of her beer, and was staring at something far away from the balcony, although I knew there was nothing in particular there. “We never did see him again,” she said quietly.
Bert Spinks writes poetry, and poetic prose, about wilderness. He has also played football on Queenstown’s gravel oval. In this blog, he fills in some of the space between these essentially Tasmanian extremes.
