Mercury. A hundred cc’s or so, given to me in a jam jar by my grandad, at age thirteen. An unusual present, you might think. And you’d be right. Because up until then I’d always gotten the same thing. Every birthday since I could remember, my grandad gave me a large cardboard box, which I’d open to find scrunched up newspaper, and another, smaller box, which I’d open to find scrunched up newspaper, and another, smaller box, which I’d open to find more scrunched up newspaper, and I’d get to the smallest box, and open it, and invariably find a tin of Nestlé’s condensed milk.
I figured my grandad must have a whole lot of cardboard boxes and newspaper. Piercing the tin lid with two triangular holes, I would suck out the liquid white chocolate. This would last me a day. When we went bush, a tin had to last a whole week. He’d windmill the billy around his head, then pour the tea into enamelled mugs. Spoonfuls of condensed milk followed, one for each of us, and we’d wait for the leaves to settle.
Thirteen.
I’m sitting in the shack at Ora Banda, facing my grandad across a worn pine table.
Its legs stand in fruit tins, half-filled with water, discouraging the ants. The night is quiet after the loud heat of the day. We’ve been dynamiting diggings down south of Broad Arrow. Pounding the yellow rock in the dolly. Sifting and panning. Rumbling back across salt-and-pepper flats in the landrover, twenty miles or so to the shack, through scrubby mulga and ghost gums. Ghost gums were always my favourite, with their eerie white bark and leaves like new green moons. Widow-makers: they will silently drop a branch on the stillest of days. Midday we’re swimming in the tanks at Grant’s Patch where they use cyanide to get at the gold. Then out past Carbine, up the back way towards Riverina or someplace, I don’t know. He never takes a map. Afternoon spent poking and pounding rocks in a quartz outcrop, a low ridge above claypans.
Quiet now, you can hear mice scratching away behind the whitewashed hessian walls. He pours two glasses of water from a squat, square plastic bottle, and carefully refits the lid. He drains his glass and says, I found my old mate Bert dead three weeks back, out at his shack at Grant’s Patch. He’d been drinking the metho. Don’t know how long he’d been there dead like that.
He pauses, studying the tips of his fingers.
Tried to lift him up. My fingers went straight through his skin and meat and hit bone.
He looks up at me.
Metho will do that to a bloke. Steer clear of it.
I nod a mute promise.
He goes outside, and I hear him clanging about in the dark. The screen door flies open, and he comes back carrying a large, heavy, steel flask. It thuds onto the table. Clinking through empty jars under the meat safe, he takes a tall one, puts it on the table and removes the lid. Hold that still, he says, and unscrews the lid of his steel flask. As he lifts it to the horizontal, a sudden, bright, heavy stream pours noisily into the jar. Carefully replacing the lid, he hands the jar - surprisingly heavy - to me. from nowhere, a birthday card. These always say the same thing. May you live long and die happy.
Living long strikes me as the easy bit, as I swirl this liquid metal around thirty years on. What am I going to do with it? There’s a rubbish tip up Stock Road that takes toxic stuff. I look down at an old wooden box that holds lenses and filters and things. I scrunch up some newspaper and pack the bottle carefully inside, then place this box inside a larger cardboard box. More newspaper follows. I’m moving house. Again. Maybe I’ll go bush for a while.
Mark Coddington
Every time I move house, which is often enough, the flask reappears. This time it waits quietly in the tall bookshelf, hidden from view by a few old hard covers. Just like before, I lift it carefully from its resting place. Just like before, I feel the sudden shift in weight as I tilt it onto its side. And just like before, I wonder: what am I going to do with this thing?
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