Ride a White Mare

By Patrick McGowan

Marco Gentolini wants to discover what he can about jade in Australia. It started after he visited the world’s biggest carving of a single piece of imported gem-quality green jade housed at the Buddhist Temple near Bendigo, where he was prompted to ask: is there any gem-quality jade in Australia? The experts say no. And no white jade either. But whisperings tell him otherwise. Quitting uni, dropping his girlfriend and leaving his lifelong mates behind, he takes to the road to find answers. He travels in the dark, but his desire is so strong. He finds helpers and companions who take him to unknown corners of the land. Marco compels us to ask whether we can believe all we’ve been told in the past. He writes his story in a unique and polished way worthy of the stone he has grown to love: ‘There’s jade and then there’s jade’.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Patrick McGowan
• Release date: Apr 13, 2016
• ISBN: 9780992581237

Patrick McGowan

I completed a Master of Creative Arts (Prose) at the University of Wollongong in 2011 and have been writing pretty much full time since then. Previously I have worked as metallurgist, health food retailer, government bureaucrat, diplomat and entrepreneur.While my work overseas for the Australian government took me on postings to many places including Europe, Asia and Africa, I like to write about the contemporary Australian experience. I began short story fiction writing in the nineties, had some short stories published, then put my writing on hold as I gave full attention to my diplomatic career.I'm a taiji health exercise enthusiast, an avid jade collector, and I'm also a keen follower of William Gass and his theory of sentence writing, that each sentence has a soul, and that all good literature comes from the well-constructed sentence.I live in Loftus, a suburb of Sydney, and am a member of the South Coast Writers Centre.

Book preview

Ride a White Mare

Manton mine & the myth of white jade in Australia

a novel by

Patrick McGowan

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© Copyright Patrick McGowan 2016

Smashwords edition

ISBN 978-0-9925812-3-7

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e-copy available at smashwords.com/books/view/629689

hard copy available at lulu.com/fomelhaut

blog: www.pjmcgowan.com

enquiries: [e-mail]

twitter: @_pjmcgowan

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All characters in this work are fictional creations of the author

and are not based on any person or persons in real life.

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This book is dedicated to Simon Lim, teacher & healer

"The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you've gotten the fish you can forget the trap.

The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Once you've gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning. Once you've gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can talk with him?"

ZHUANG ZI, Chapter 26

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Table of Contents

Bendigo

South Australia

Broken Hill

The Great Serpentine Belt

Manton

Beijing

The Gravel Road Home

Epilogue

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Bendigo

Ride a white mare in the footsteps of dawn

Trying to find a woman who’s never never never been born

Page & Plant, Going To California

1

It was winter and freezing outside. A cluster of neon signs beckoned. Already past eleven pm.

Marco sighed. ‘I’d love a break. Looks like a food place up ahead.’

This was the road from Melbourne to Bendigo, a whoosh of a drive for some and a dissonant series of stop-start negotiations for others.

Marco Gentolini was driving. He was a handsome young man, of Italian heritage on his father’s side. His eyebrows were unusually shaped: thick and with two distinct inflection points which could induce one to see in them the wings of an eagle on a divine mission. And his eyes, big, spoke of a belief that the world was a beautiful place, that it was a storehouse of surprises, and that a strong focus would take you a long way to where ever you wanted to go. He was in the middle of second year at uni, majoring in journalism studies.

Marco grew up a fairly regular guy. He was part of a generation that, on paper, had it so good, a generation that didn’t need to fight for causes or freedoms or the removal of other strangulating rules and regulations, and a generation that didn’t need to make sacrifices for the things it loved and believed in. He was part of a generation that only needed to stay on track and life would roll out fine.

So far, it had been working well.

But lately Marco had been awakening more and more to his own deeper interests, his own way of seeing the world. He reckoned his parents worried too much about things that were none of their concern but, at their age, they would always struggle to learn a better way. So the best course was to let them be themselves and love them as they were. But he wanted the same treatment in return.

Marco and his girlfriend, Angelina Tendergrass, who was sat in the passenger seat, were close in a generational sort of way. They had even uploaded videos of themselves making out because, hey, they all wanted to mark their time in a fun way.

‘Let’s get home as quick as we can. I’ve got a splitting headache.’

‘It was that bad, was it?’

‘Never said that.’ Angelina wasn’t always so crabby. It’s just that she’d had a long day with work at the grocery store in the morning as well as attending a few lectures at uni and preparing for this trip to Melbourne. On top of all that, Marco had been bugging her for a while now with random talk about his wanting to sort out his future. There had been a few times where he ranted about his wish to find his own way with an urgency he had never shown before. It seemed to her that what he wanted was a guarantee on all his tomorrows, to future-proof himself. Angelina showed little sympathy. She thought he was getting ahead of himself, was too impatient, and he would be better off if his future unfolded one day at a time.

When he asked her whether it was that bad, Marco was referring to the live QandA show in Melbourne they had just attended. It was broadcast from the Edge Theatre as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival. Germaine Greer had been on the panel.

Marco didn’t really want to go, but Angelina insisted on how important it was to her, to attend a QandA show and how much she wanted to hear Germaine speak live.

Before leaving the theatre, Angelina was excited after receiving numerous texts from friends who had seen them live on air. The camera had fixed on them at least twice. But the over-excitement was now taking its toll. The high became a low. Angelina had developed a headache that led Marco to feel righteous in his desire not to go to Melbourne.

His jaw tensed as he held back any unkind word about Germaine Greer. He tried to change the focus of his attention to other things as his foot pushed down on the accelerator. Perhaps the best thing to do on a night like this was to get home as soon as possible and get some sleep. They left the township behind without stopping.

Visions of Marco’s dream run at uni so far danced before his eyes, synching with the steady shifts and flickers of light and shadow on the road. His first year at uni had been one beautiful run. Studying there was a case of catching up to where he always thought he was anyway. Having embarked on journalism, he reckoned he was going to be a first class journalist. He had dreamed of being a journalist ever since he first learned to write.

For a few years before uni, he worked on the student newspaper at high school like a workaholic, busy doing interviews, writing personal interest stories and profiling issues for students. This was the essence of journalism, just that in future he would practise it on a bigger scale. First year at uni had a lot of theory, communication subjects, tagging so many ideas that were floating about in his head. He had already asked himself most of those questions. He rose to every challenge they put to him.

Marco’s reverie was broken by a blue flashing light approaching from behind.

As he sat in the car on the side of the road with still fifty kilometres to go before home, he watched in the rear view mirror as the police officer got out of his car. Angelina was waking up to the situation more slowly.

‘Good evening. Is this your car?’ The officer asked.

‘No, sir. It’s my mother’s,’ Marco replied.

Angelina sat stiff and silent, until a new text message rang out, another one about the show. The police officer watched her intently before fixing his gaze back on Marco.

‘Can I see your licence?’

The two waited as the policeman examined the licence. He didn’t say a word. It was perhaps in his breath that he conveyed his displeasure with standing out there in the cold, in winter, late at night.

After some moments he peered back into the car. ‘Do you know the speed limit along here, sir?’

‘Yes, officer, eighty.’

‘And yet you were doing ninety-five.’

Marco was silent for a moment then blurted out. ‘Sorry, officer. It’s cold. I need to get home.’

‘And you aren’t displaying your P plates.’

‘What? They were on there when we left,’ Marco said.

‘You may like to step out of the car and show them to me.’

Marco glanced at Angelina’s face before alighting from the car.

‘I told you to watch the speed limit,’ Angelina said as Marco got back into the car. ‘Now see what you’ve done.’

How can she say that? Marco thought. One minute she wants me to get home as soon as possible and then all of a sudden she’s siding with the cop and accusing me of driving too fast.

It was moments like this that led Marco to question the whole thing about making other people happy. From one angle, Angelina was the loving person he knew and believed her to be. Then from another angle, he suddenly felt he had lost her, that he didn’t recognise her. He felt a panic that he would never find the other Angelina ever again.

Marco turned on the ignition and drowned out her voice. As they pulled back out onto the road, he explained that he faced the prospect of losing his licence for a year. And he didn’t even want to go to Melbourne that night. He went there just for her, something he knew he shouldn’t have done. No wonder he was so restless, living his life for another person like he was doing.

In that dark silence, Angelina knew that Marco, inside his own head, was back on that rant about his future, about the importance of everyone finding their own bliss, about the uselessness of following the advice of others who were only ever pushing their own barrow, about the present moment, about momentum and how we can get it to work for us. Maybe that’s why people needed to talk about these things: to get it all clear in their own minds.

‘If I don’t change direction soon, I may end up in a place I don’t want to go,’ Marco muttered as they turned into the road close to Angelina’s place.

‘Funny. Didn’t Germaine Greer say something like that all those years ago?’ Angelina asked.

2

Marco lived in a granny flat, certainly not grand but princely enough for a guy of his means. It was tucked in the corner of the Gentolini family’s backyard, mostly an open space though lined on one side with pomelo trees and lumbered with a few senescent trees behind and beside the flat. Marco’s father, Aldo, a builder with twenty-five years experience, put the flat up for him over the holidays before the start of Marco’s final year in high school. It was a simple design with three parallel spaces: a living room at one end, a bedroom at the other, and a kitchen space in the middle behind which the bathroom was tucked away. The bathroom was accessible from both from the living room and the bedroom. It was a simple functional design, at odds with Aldo Gentolini’s inherent style for flair, because Marco had successfully argued his case for practicality at the design stage. Aldo’s victory came later in the choice of paint colours for the walls. These included Naples Yellow, Veronese Green, and Earth Sienna.

The granny flat immediately became Marco’s hideaway, his man cave, thankfully a place for undisturbed study as they had planned, but it also became a recluse where, when he was alone for too many hours at a time, thoughts and daydreams began to spin and weave and gain momentum. He thought and dreamed a little too much for his own good, because it was in here that he began to morbidly ponder his future rather than simply living in the present.

The history of Marco and Angelina’s relationship was entwined with the life of this flat. It was one month after Marco moved in that Angelina first stayed over. They both knew what they were doing when Marco presented her with a bunch of red carnations at the door that night. What later started as a pillow fight and a fun wrestle on the living room floor turned into a breathtaking game of searching the apartment high and low for the flowers they thought they had lost. When they awoke the next morning, their eyes reflected a joy and a longing for more such fun as each of them revelled in their school yard lost flowers and four carnation jokes. Angelina went home that morning and told her mother and stepfather in a far more direct language what she had done at Marco’s the night before. This prompted her mother to rush over to her once innocent babe and hug her tightly as she cried.

Marco threw the occasional big party in his granny flat, leading to gatherings that spread across the backyard and out the gate, but he mostly entertained small numbers of guests careful not to overdo it careful to not put his privileged accommodation at risk. The original idea for the flat was to provide a place for quiet and uninterrupted study allowing Marco to get the results at uni his parents so dearly wished for him.

The flat received the sun after it cleared the old trees mid-morning, so that from midday on it got awfully warm in the summer months. This also made it a cosy shelter during winter. Marco cleaned the flat once a week, usually Saturday morning, by which time the floor was cluttered with odd shoes and socks, dirty clothes, bags, newspapers and books, and boxes of various shapes and sizes.

*

Marco and his friends had no fixed pattern on how they spent their Friday nights. It was true to say they had mellowed a lot as university students compared to their wilder high school days when Friday nights involved a lot more experimentation whether it be binge drinking, smoking illicit substances, hooning in cars, crashing parties or just doing dumb shit calculated to shatter the civilised façade of people who came across as too cool for their own good.

On this occasion, some weeks before Marco and Angelina’s trek to the QandA show in Melbourne, it was supposed to be a regular Friday night of fun, with a few drinks in his dining room before heading downtown to join their fellow students for some Mexican food and later dancing.

Angelina sat next to Marco. Also at the table were two of Marco’s mates, the McCechnie brothers, Don and Jim, both thick-faced, aspiring football players, sturdy, muscular, though not as tall as the top players in their team.

Marco had served the wine from the mini-fridge and was now busting open a packet of chips and pouring them into a glass dish.

Free of his host duties, Marco raised his glass. ‘Sure feels good to be back. Cheers everybody,’ he said.

Glasses clinked. Marco had been up to Sydney with his father to attend a funeral of a relative.

‘To the Bendigo boy!’ Jim said.

‘Back from the big smoke!’

‘Thank Christ,’ Marco said.

‘You were only gone three days!’ Don pointed out.

Marco leaned back. For no particular reason, he stared at Angelina as if he was seeing her face for the first time. He loved her brown eyes, could never get enough of their mystery. His glance lingered for some moments and then more.

‘Don’t do that.’ Angelina wriggled uncomfortably.

Marco took a breath as his eyes locked in harder.

Angelina raised her hand to block his view. ‘Don't. You’re creeping me out.’

Marco remained frozen with his stare, became too insistent. He felt like he’d stumbled upon something. ‘Feeling a little guilty, are we?’

Angelina slapped the table with her hand. ‘Marco, stop that now!’

Marco relaxed a little to nod his head. ‘So you want to tell me?’

Angelina turned to Jim. ‘See, I told you he’d find out.’

Marco twigged something had gone on between the others that he didn’t know about. So he continued. ‘Best if you tell me, Angie.’

And so Angelina confessed that she and Jim had kissed each other one night when they left the pub after a few too many. It was Don who dragged Jim away.

‘Truly, man, there was nothing in it,’ Jim insisted.

‘Honest! Marco. It’s the truth,’ Angelina added. ‘We were just a little pissed.’

Marco winced once as he allowed the black snake of jealousy slither through him, wondering where it would finally settle. He wasn’t sure if it had settled or dispersed, as he felt reluctant to deal with the issue at that moment. He remained silent, poker-faced. Angelina was her own person. Of course, if they were boyfriend and girlfriend, he expected closeness and exclusivity. But, mentally, the arguments were unclear. This ownership thing rarely worked.

As he sat there watching the three eye each other back and forth, waiting for the words to come, Marco’s mind shifted to a new perspective. He slowly began to marvel how he unearthed this story. He didn’t have to say a word. Didn’t offer a question. He merely looked, looked and waited, while the story came to him. No words and no action. And presto! Yes! This is how it should be! He would love it to be this way: for the truth to rise to the surface so easily. Marco sensed a new goal as a journalist: to let the stories come to him. It was blindingly clear. This is what he wanted.

At last, he spoke up. ‘Not much I can do about it anyway. Like it’s not as if I own her. Besides, it’s time we headed off for dinner.’

The brothers slyly looked at each other as they stood up from their chairs. The four of them cleared out of the flat.

The truth will rise to the surface, maybe sometimes at least. Even after his almost two years of study at university, the idea of truth still perplexed Marco, just as it has bamboozled some of the greatest thinkers through history. But whatever truth was, Marco decided it had a way of speaking when we were ready to listen.

3

Mick Melrose’s father, George Melrose, reckoned a speeding find was no big deal, but not having P plates on the car could make the case messy. He advised Marco to appeal the charges on the grounds of them being his first offence.

George was retired but he loosely held a job as social worker with St Vincent de Paul. Though unqualified, he made it his mission to keep as many young men in the town out of jail as possible and he’d had many wins over the years. George was a skinny, bony man, with little hair and few teeth. His health was never good. He’d undergone his share of operations and had a plastic oesophagus and various other synthetic body parts. That he was still alive was a miracle in itself. if you listened to George, the nurses were in no doubt he was alive whenever he was admitted to hospital the way he pestered them with his incessant charm. He regularly attended the local court as a roving social worker and was familiar with all of the magistrates.

‘For God’s sake, don’t tell the magistrate you’re studying journalism. Tell him it’s communication or something,’ George advised Marco early on.

So out here in the real world, this is how journalists are viewed, Marco pondered.

The day of judgement arrived. Marco waited for George at the steps in front of the courthouse.

George, with hunched shoulders, moved in close to Marco and looked him up and down.

‘Great suit, boy, that’ll help a lot,’ George said.

‘Bought it just for today,’ Marco said. It came from the menswear store down the main street which had a closing down sale every second month of the year.

‘What about your papers?’ George continued.

Marco lifted his brief case. ‘They’re all in here.’ Marco was referring to his school records, his character references, and his letter of contrition.

‘Okay, let's go inside and check them.’ George led the way into the building. This short, hairless man with his crooked back stayed two steps in front of the much younger, tall, centurion-like figure. The court was in session. The magistrate, from behind his wooden bench, was lecturing a woman in her thirties on a drink driving charge.

George and Marco sat together in the public section of gallery. Marco clicked open his briefcase and took out a handful of documents for George to examine.

George fiddled with the papers. ‘They’re all over the place. You need a few paper clips,’ He said before standing up. He walked through the gallery and across the space to the bench. He reached over to a small dish on the bench. The magistrate glanced at George