by Garry Disher
Hair
When their squabbling became more than a soul could bear, Eleanor Ison separated her children, sending Hugo and his bed, clothes, books and toys along the passage to the room her father slept in whenever he visited Isonville from the city. It was a gentleman’s room: a roll-top desk, rifles racked to the wall, a shell-casing brass vase from the fighting at Pozières, and an odour of old-time masculinity, composed of gunmetal, boot polish, leather and the tangy oils a gentleman might comb through his silvery hair and slap on his shaven jowls. And books at a lean above the roll-top desk. That’s where you’d find Anna when she should have been collecting the eggs. She liked to clamber onto the desk and pull down the illustrated Bible, a volume of Bean’s history of the war, or Mrs Showalter’s little centenary memoir of the Showalter family. There—the Ison name, on page 4:
Walter and Hugo Ison, brothers from Berkshire, took out a pastoral lease adjacent to the Showalters in 1847. The families became firm friends and neighbours in a relationship that has persisted to this day.
Anna stared at the photographs. It must have been a grim time in which to be a child. Those Isons and Showalters wore the stiff backs, starched collars and prohibitive expressions of a poorhouse warden saying no to Oliver Twist. You couldn’t see the mouths of the men for their whiskers. The women coiled their hair close to their unsmiling skulls. There was Leonard Showalter, aged three, in a sailor suit and ringlets to his shoulders. In the bathroom behind Grandfather Tolley’s shop, Anna’s hair had escaped from her ribbons and blood had pooled in her sock. Grandfather Tolley cleaned her up and patted her dry. Your mother will think I let you run wild. He fetched his oily, snaggletoothed comb from the shelf above the sink: Let’s fix that hair of yours. Anna winced. Her head jerked. She heard her tangles strain and rupture. He didn’t know how to do it. He didn’t know you were supposed to run your hand down the strands between strokes. Such lovely hair, he said. The same colour as your departed grandmother’s, rest her soul. Lockie and Chester broke with constraints before anyone else in Pandowie. Long-haired louts, according to Mr Wheelwright, but Anna found herself being drawn to their air of riskiness and bluff. Maxine showed Anna how to tease her hair: You back-comb it, like this, then spray it to fix it in place. They waltzed at the high school social, their heads puffed up and haloed under coloured lights. Pert little hard-faced mannequins, Anna’s tutor sneered. Very pleased with yourselves. He pushed the album aside. He didn’t want to look at photographs of the younger Anna. He didn’t want to share in her rueful perspective. He was always losing interest in her, abruptly cutting her off, changing the subject, dismissing her. She’d return to her room at the college in tears. And there Lockie would be, patiently sitting by the front desk, waiting for her to return from her lectures and sign him in. Things had got so bad between them, and the tutor so consumed her, that often Anna forgot Lockie’s existence. But there he was, and she stared at him, seeing him without blinkers. His hair was no longer or shorter than was fashionable, but it didn’t look right. Badly cut, she decided. Ugly sideboards scything down his jawbone. And yet she’d always loved his looks. One day Anna stumbled blindly up the college steps and a stranger uncoiled at the front desk to greet her. Lockie had let himself be shorn. She recoiled. Such a naked, belligerent, ignorant and pimply bullet head. He looked so young and mulish. He looked so vulnerable, like a sitting duck. They went to her room. He tugged at her buttons: I’m off to camp tomorrow. Could be our last time. He proposed marriage again. He promised her a good life. He was afraid, and she was his salvation. No, she said, backing away, hugging herself tight. I can’t. Within a year of marrying into the Jaegers, Anna liked to get away from them whenever she could. When Michael was a baby, she’d bundle him into the car and drive to the six-forty acres, where someone was bound to be at home, bound to show her some uncomplicated love, someone she could confide in: You know, Mum, for the first few months he was just this little baby, utterly dependent on me, always wreathed in smiles. But now he’s developing a will of his own. He hates me washing and combing his hair. It’s a real battle of wills. I can feel him trying to manipulate the situation his way. This little baby, who came from inside me, who’s part of me, yet sometimes I feel a kind of coolness and irritation as if he’s a separate being and I can’t afford to let him control me. She laughed: What am I saying? He is a separate being. By the time Michael was three years old, Anna was taking him to Mr Chatters, around the corner from the Four Square Store in Pandowie. ‘Barber’ in a black and gold arc across the front window. ‘Roly Chatterton, Prop.’ Now say hello to Mr Chatters. Anna watched from a hard wooden chair. Mr Chatters never replaced his magazines. He was a neat, perfumed man, snipping at her son’s head. Michael’s hair fell in auburn clumps onto the sheet around his neck and shoulders. Your boy’s got a well-shaped head, Anna. Gets it from his mother. Michael was killed on the sunken road a few days before his sixth birthday. Sam tried to make sense of it: But what were you doing there in the first place? Anna weighed up her options—the truth, a lie, an evasion, silence. She could say: I took Michael in to have his hair cut by Mr Chatters. Often when Anna visits Meg and Becky, she finds them tending to one another at the kitchen table, absorbed, dreamy, comfortable with her but somehow not registering that she is there. One will shape the other’s hair, trace her lips, fasten dangly earrings to her lobes. I missed out on this when I was a kid, Rebecca says. Anna is compelled to protest: But Becky, you hated me fussing around you. Rebecca gazes at her levelly: I mean, a sister. Anna and her mother will become close, friends rather than mother and daughter. Anna will always harbour secrets but her mother will discover a need to unburden herself about the past, as if it no longer had the power to hurt her. I loved your dad, he was everything to me, but Rex Showalter was my first love. He had such lovely curly hair. Funny, we never kissed. The bank will foreclose. Sam will choose to stay on as manager for the new owner rather than change direction. I tell you, Anna, this bloke’s got some strange notions about farming. Angora goats! Hairy bloody things. This is sheep country, for God’s sake. Anna will bear with him, and, when he’s gone, move to the coast. Her hair will go grey, then white. A crescent of Michael’s hair in a locket around her neck, still auburn and shiny, somehow still nourished after all this time.
Hands
Hands were accountable, and they were nothing but trouble. Each weekday afternoon Anna wrapped Hugo’s fingers in hers and led him out of the primary-school yard, past the high school, around the oval and along the footpath to Heinrich’s Garage, opposite the Four Square Store. Look right, look left, look right again, Grandpa Tolley watching as they crossed the road toward him. He’d glance at the clock behind the cash register: on a good day he might be rid of them by four o’clock. Don’t touch anything. But cement had leaked from a bag holed at the seam in the storeroom and the blue-grey powder felt as soft as talc under the children’s palms. Dazed, they patted it, marking time until someone came into town to pick them up. Their mother, their father, or Mrs Mac. They wanted it to be their father, for he spent his long days hooked to the Stock & Station steering wheel and they rarely saw him. He’d pull up outside, bound into the shop and toss them to the ceiling, where buckets and watering cans swayed on hooks and wires. Then into the car, one gesturing hand on the wheel rim again, the other flicking up and down the homebound gears. They were not tough hands. How could they be, when all they did was steer from shearing shed to sale yards to field day, and scribble numbers on dockets and receipts? Not tough, but there came a time when he itched to squeeze them around Uncle Kitch’s neck for driving them out of Isonville. Anna trembled, watching, waiting for it to happen. Her father’s hands grew tough on the six-forty acres. He bought a sun-dulled International header and dragged it through wheat and barley crops at the wheel of an old Massey Ferguson. Watch where you put your hands. He was scrupulous about maintenance: those machines had to last. He’d wind up the header and lean into it with a dented oilcan until the blades whispered and the whirring co
gs sang from belt to belt. One day Anna was so lost to wheat-stubble scratches on her bare legs that she failed to notice that he’d switched off and delivered silence to their corner of the world—until she saw blood drops balling like spilt mercury in the dust around her ankles and toes. Sweetheart, dig in Daddy’s pocket for his handkerchief, will you, please? Anna looked up, arrested by his elbow. Blood beat the seconds, one drop after another, forming at the bony point, growing fat, quivering, falling. Hurry, sweetheart, please. Anna had never seen such hollows in his face before, such white, scooped, pain-etched angles. He didn’t know it but his finger stump had glued itself to his diesely cotton shoulder and all Anna could think about was germs. Hurry, darling, please, there’s a good girl. He stumbled, half crouched, to the little Austin, and slowly they drove back to the house, Anna shifting the gears for him. Oh, he said, hugging himself, oh, his face terribly white. When Lockie told Anna that she had nice hands she said: Nice? What’s that mean, nice? Shapely, then, Lockie said, getting comfortable in his ute. You have shapely hands. Anna sighed, disorder flooding her belly, then tucked her jaw under his chin, where she could breathe him in, an essence of him aroused on the dance floor. The cooling engine ticked and snapped. Her left hand rested across her stomach and together she and Lockie watched her right, which was cupped on the leg of his jeans. He took her hand in both of his, stroking it, rolling the wrist, watching as the tendons and bones shaped themselves in the moonlight. Half crooked like that, Anna’s ring finger was almost more beautiful than she could bear. She was filled with love for her hands. Lockie tensed: Your old man. They watched her father cross the moon-shadowed yard, Kip trotting at his heels, and disappear into the barn. A kennel chain tinkled. I’d better go in. One last kiss, Lockie said. At bath time Anna’s son liked to slap the water, winding himself into an ecstatic release. Appalled, fascinated, he watched Anna take his fingers and munch on them. She said what everyone says: Michael, I could eat you up! Rebecca liked to ride high upon Sam’s shoulders and endlessly track his jawline, bewitched by the whisper-scrape beneath her soft palms. There was nothing so commonplace as the sunken road after seasons of rain, heat and heavy trucks had scored and chopped and powdered it, but there was a day in April when Anna practically sailed over the corrugations, headlights on against the dust, feeling light-hearted, exhilarated, still wet. The drought-hollow sheep grazing upon the banks might not have existed. The boiling dust of the wheat truck ahead of her meant nothing at all. Mummy! Michael shouted, and it froze her blood. She glanced around for a second, a mere second. Oh, it’s only a moth, sweetheart, it won’t bite. A stupefied moth investigating the creases of Rebecca’s sleeping wrist. Just brush it off her. Can’t, Michael said, recoiling. You do it. It is only recently that Anna has understood that she has inherited Tolley hands. She does not find them shapely at all—Lockie had simply been flattering her, all those years ago. The fingers are too short and are beginning to thicken, with little pouchy fatnesses developing between the joints, just as she remembers Grandfather Tolley’s hands and her father’s hands. Odd hands for such tall, shapely men. Hugo is the lucky one. He has the hands of the Isons, long and slender, with a shapely delta of tendons winking between knuckles and watch face. Anna can’t bear to see the nicotine stains on such lovely hands. These days she cannot type for long. Her fingers fudge the keys, her forearms burn, her shoulders lock. If they knew, the locals would call it a judgement, not Repetition Strain Injury. They want the names of their forefathers to shine in the Pandowie sky, not skulk with landgrabbers and thieves—not in this, the lead up to the district’s 150th Jubilee. How could you write such nonsense? Sam wants to know. Their daughter also has Tolley hands, but Rebecca insists that she is not disadvantaged, claiming it’s a myth that musicians benefit from long fingers. Her little hands quiver on the strings. Anna will melt a little, with a heartsore longing, to see her granddaughter’s perfect tiny fingers clasp her forefinger and draw that hoary digit into her toothless mouth. There—a wet, powerful tug. Anna will not be toothless herself, for both the Isons and the Tolleys had good teeth in their heads.
War
There was the RSL hall, the War Memorial in Redruth Square, Anzac Day, Poppy Day, Maxine’s armless father, uniformed men frozen in silver frames upon sideboards and mantelpieces in every house in the district. There was an oak chest, passed down from the first Ison, squatting glumly in the hallway at Isonville, exactly where passing boots and the carpet sweeper might lay fresh bruises upon the old. Anna propped the hinged lid open against the wall, hooked her waist to the rim, and leaned in, parting inessential counterpanes and doilies to reveal the shoeboxes below. She hauled them out. They were marked Ison and Tolley, and linked her to her parents’ youth and wartime. The little she knew of the wars of her grandfathers lay mainly on the surface: Grandfather Tolley’s jumpy eyes after a night of tormented sleep, Grandfather Ison’s cloth insignia, leggings, artillery-shell ashtray and purple ribbons, stored or displayed here and there about the house. These shoeboxes were a treasure trove of photographs: ‘Sunken Road Trench, Pozières Heights, August 1916, looking east’. Mum, is this you? Her mother, dressed in baggy overalls, is straddling a bicycle outside a factory gate. My job, she replied, was to inspect for faulty cartridges. Every day I expected to be blown sky high. Anna also found ration books, a rail pass, her mother’s identity card and a funeral order of service for ‘Flight Navigator Rex Showalter, killed during air operations over Dusseldorf, August 1st, 1942, aged 22 years. Gladly he Answered his Country’s Call’. Anna’s mother blinked away the tears. We grew up together, went to school together, the Showalter boys, Uncle Kitch and me. Rex had been to Cambridge, he was a scientist, they even said he was prime minister material. Anna wondered: Were they meant to marry? There were letters home from Lance Corporal Kitchener Ison, stationed for the duration in a quartermaster’s store outside Townsville:
