by Garry Disher
Waiting
If Anna were to bend her head into a book or gaze into the distance, she heard things: Pete, I can feel them waiting for Auntie Beulah to go, can’t you? It’s as if they’re biding their time over there, ready to charge in with their things as soon as she’s carted out the door. Then: It’s indecent. She’s barely cold in her grave. Then: I feel just awful. I can feel them waiting for us to hurry up and get out so they can have the whole house. Anna’s mother broke off to look at the cool walls, the patterned tin ceiling: I used to love this house. Now it’s just a bad taste in my mouth. Waiting for the school bus, waiting for exam results, waiting around for something to happen. Anna’s father fastened Kippy to his chain, dropped the flap of mutton between his paws, walked across the patch of moonlight to the back door. He must know we’re here, Lockie whispered. He knows, Anna said. Lockie had parked his ute where the pine trees beside the tractor shed cast the blackest shadows. We’re asking for trouble doing it here, Lockie said, anxiety edging in. What if he comes out again? But Anna knew that her father would not come out, just as he’d not glanced their way when he crossed the yard. Reserved, respectful, he’d not embarrass her, or Lockie, no matter what else he thought. It was afterwards that she worried about. Always a waiting game, kissing Lockie goodnight, going inside, making herself a cup of cocoa, waiting for the explosions that never came: Out with that Mick again? What were you doing out there?—as if I couldn’t guess. Do you know what hour it is? Anna heard these things in her head, never in fact. Sometimes she wondered if she actively wanted her father to say something. Bracing her bare feet on the glass of the driver’s door—What must that look like from the outside, her white soles lit by a stray moonbeam?—Anna lifted her rump, helping Lockie, helping herself. She wanted him as deep as he could go. Her hands brushed automatically up and down his back. She stared into the darkness. Fifteen months later, Lockie was fighting in a foreign war. A numbing silence grew between them. She wrote, begging him to write, and in two years of waiting all she got was a postcard. Then one day he wrote to say that he was coming home, tour of duty over, and a weight lifted from her shoulders. He had survived; her luck had turned. She got out the atlas and tracked his passage home, from Nui Dat to Sydney to Adelaide to Pandowie to the Kellys’ rundown house. The hours passed. She snatched up the phone ahead of her mother: Welcome back! Yes, love to see you. Anytime. I mean it, I’d love to see you. Fine. I’ll put the kettle on. When he didn’t arrive, she wondered if he were being cruel to her, paying her back maybe. She waited stubbornly where she could not see the telephone, knowing that it would weaken her resolve. Then it rang and Anna concentrated all of her senses on her mother’s voice, the way her mother breathlessly recited the number, the way she paused, the way the words caught in her throat. Anna walked to the kitchen through a fog: Mum? What is it, what’s wrong?—and was crying before she knew why. She knew that her luck hadn’t turned after all. According to the Chronicle: It is believed that sheep drifted across the road, and, in braking to avoid them, Mr Kelly lost control of his car. The Bitter Wash Road is a deathtrap, claiming six lives since it was widened for the Redex Trial in the 1950s. One might inquire how many more will be lost before our esteemed councillors stir themselves. The advice books, the legions of mothers before her, told Anna that breastfeeding was a time of profound satisfaction for mother and child. So what was Anna doing wrong? How could she make it right? Sure, Michael was born to suck, and she loved the tidal sensations, the rush of milk to her breasts, the ebbing as he filled his little soul with her, but why didn’t their times ever coincide? Sometimes he slept for six or eight hours at a stretch, when her drum-tight breasts cried for relief at four. Should she wait for him to awake, and suffer ropy, knotted ducts, or should she cruelly snatch him up from his cot and run her nipple between the damp little bow of his lips? She was heavy, so heavy sometimes she could cry. In the rented schoolhouse on the sunken road, they waited for better times to come. They waited for years. Becky, remember when you were sixteen, seventeen, no one asked you out for months at a time? Waiting weekend after weekend for the phone to ring, stuck at home with us in front of the TV set? It broke our hearts. Coldly: That’s not how I remember it. Oh? How do you remember it then? For a start, I wasn’t waiting. It’s not as if I was desperate. Do you think I wanted to get slobbered on in the back seat of someone’s car? I had better things to do. Sam looked away from her: Okay, have it your way. No, Dad, you’re having it your way. You’re constructing an image of me that suits your needs. Anna saw her father every day at the end. Poor Missy, waiting for your old man to kick the bucket. Dad, don’t. You’re right, bad taste. But I’m waiting, Missy. I’ve had plenty of waiting in my time. They say that an army marches on its stomach—well, it rests on its hands. We played poker, two-up, you name it. Some of us devoured anything with print on it. We carved things out of shell casings, we washed our socks. Waiting, that’s what war is about. Anna thought: Was it like that for Lockie in his war, desperate to see me again? Did Grandfather Ison wait for a lucky wound in the Sunken Road Trench at Pozières ? Anna is visiting Chester again. He’s watching her carefully, in the lounge where visitors to the prison gather, and finally finds the right moment: I suppose you’ve been waiting for an explanation? Anna hasn’t been—or rather, until now she hasn’t been waiting consciously for one. I did cheat you out of your twenty thousand, he said. Not deliberately, but when Wes Showalter and your Uncle Kitch talked me into joining their Lloyds underwriting syndicate, I found myself stretched for cash, so I borrowed against my clients’ trust accounts. Then when Lloyds got hit by a rash of oilspills and earthquakes, Lloyds Names like us lost everything. I couldn’t pay you back. I’m sorry, I should have told you. Anna pats his hand: You’re telling me now. My regret is that I didn’t buy Becky a cello. Talkback idealogues will wait for society to break down and doomsday cults will wait for Machholz 2 to hit the earth. Anna? She’ll wait for the Committee to decide upon the fate of her manuscript, wait to see Sam decently into the ground, then move to a house beside the sea, where, with time, her grief and guilt might ease.
Flowers
Around the house itself the generations of Isons had coaxed a cottage garden into existence. Bore water was banned—too salty—and there was more cow, horse and poultry manure than indigenous red dirt in the flowerbeds. Roses and honeysuckle choked the tank stands, lobelia crept toward the white pebble paths, lilac grew hard against the walls of the house. Pansies, daisies, hollyhocks, poppies, dahlias, foxgloves. Daffodil bulbs lurked forgotten and dormant along the borders of the lawn until the spring. One evening the children swung their wooden swords at all the dead and fading agapanthus heads at the road gate, a beheading frenzy that left them high-coloured and unmanageable at the dinner table. Beulah had also planted a herb garden—not for cooking, foreign muck, but for the idea itself. Rosemary goes well with lamb, Auntie Beulah, Anna’s mother said. Rubbish, the old woman replied. Anna liked the odour of the bruised leaves on her fingers. Hugo wheezed and sneezed and rubbed his eyes from September to February. There was nothing to see in the vast blue bowl of the sky but, according to Dr Pirie, the air swam with miniscule particles of dust and pollen. Make sure he doesn’t run around in the evenings, no cut flowers in his room, and keep him away when the men are reaping. Anna stood with her mother and the doctor, three heads peering down at Hugo, who gasped on his pillow and tore at his throat as if to open the way for a healing draught of air. The soil on the six-forty acres was very poor, but it always supported a dense blue carpet of Salvation Jane. Anna’s father would stare at it with his hands on his hips. What’s a man to do? Spray year after year? He took her out into the thick of it and taught her how to pinch-pluck the tiny funnelled flowers and suck the base. A hint of honey on her tongue, and she realised that the air was heavy with bees, slowly, dopily lurching from one flower head to the next. Anna was expected to pin a rosebud to her ball gown or tuck a flower behind one ear but she hated all that fuss, that business. A boy gav
e her a chunky envelope. She opened it and inside the soppy card was a sachet, essence of rose. Anna thought of Beulah’s old-woman smells, ‘The Rose of Tralee’ grinding out of the pianola, all that soppy business to do with flowers and love. The boy was waiting, a pink, pimpled, mouth-breather, so she tore open a corner of the sachet and rubbed a drop of the fumy oil between her thumb and forefinger. For a moment she thought of a rose thorn catching in the round pad of her thumb, drawing the blood. You like it? he asked. She blinked awake, put her finger to her nostrils. Cheap and nasty. Anna reeled with it. Put some behind your ears if you like, the boy offered. Anna smiled. On the inside of my wrist for now, she said. One day in Berkshire, Anna bought a postcard to send home. A stone house, a thatched roof, a real cottage garden. She thought it would amuse her mother: The seat of the Isons, Mum! It was a favourable sign, buying and sending that postcard, thinking of someone else for a change. She was starting to recover, she’d found her return ticket. When she got home, a year had passed. She made a pilgrimage to the spot where Lockie had been killed. She was not sure of the exact place, and knew it would worry her parents if she asked, so she set out on foot to find it. Somewhere past the schoolhouse ruin, apparently. The road twisted like a snake through cuttings and washaways. Gravel dust accumulated on her toecaps and tiny pebbles flicked into the cuffs of her jeans. It might have happened anywhere. Would there still be scratches on the rock face, oil or blood in the dirt? In the end she found a jam-jar of wildflowers and a flimsy wooden cross no higher than her knees. Anna guessed that Mr Kelly had made the cross, using slats from the broken-backed chairs he used for kindling wood. Mrs Kelly would have provided the wildflowers—there were never any cultivated flowers where the Kellys lived. The wildflowers were dusty, wilting, four days old. One year and four days since the day Lockie died. Anna saved the water in the jar but tossed out the wildflowers. There were plenty more growing on the banks of the sunken road. Those poor people and their grief. Would they have brought Lockie’s dog with them? Anna was willing to bet that very few locals came a-visiting the Kellys after it happened. When her father took over the Four Square Store, he seemed to grow into a big, beaming, contented man. He had townspeople around him all day long, the very thing he’d sadly lacked, out there on the six-forty acres. He sold everything and dispensed coffee, tea and biscuits in a small cleared area between the groceries and the hardware, warmed by a potbelly stove. Everything, and that included potplants, creepers and cut flowers in a bucket, trucked up from Adelaide three times a week. He suggested a Flower Show at a council meeting. Mrs Allen won with a hybrid rose cultivated half a century earlier on Showalter Park and perfected by her in the garden behind the manse. All month Sam has been telling Anna that it’s cruelly ironic, the bank’s new logo. No phone call, no invitation for a chat with the manager, just this letter out of the blue, announcing the foreclosure, one paragraph on recycled paper decorated with the Sturt Pea. As if they fancy themselves as environmentalists, he snorts. When Anna visits Chester Flood he takes her for long walks in the prison compound, pointing out climbing roses, herb gardens, vast fields of carnations ready for harvesting and sale to the city’s florists. I’ve discovered that I’ve got green fingers, he says. I actually enjoy gardening. Anna will meet the challenge of cramped conditions in her house near the sea. She will enlist Rebecca and Meg to nail lattice walls to the open porch and they will take her to nurseries in the hills behind the city when the weather is fine. Hanging ferns, geraniums in terracotta pots, an African violet on the shelf above the kitchen sink. Flowers on the sideboard, flowers by her bed, flowers in her last grasp.
History
A potted history, Mr Wheelwright said, squealing a chalk line across the blackboard to represent the horizon, then humping the Razorback upon it. In shape, the Razorback suggesting a profit and loss graph, sharp growth followed by a ragged decline past the peak. Finally Mr Wheelwright faced away from the board, clapped one palm against the other, and began a dry washing motion: The plates of the earth rubbed together, creating oceans and forcing landforms like the Razorback to the surface. We’re talking millions of years, you understand. Unique plants and animals evolved, isolated from the rest of the world. Between fifty and a hundred thousand years ago, the first humans arrived, island-hopping from the north. Who knows when they would have reached here, where we’re standing now, but rest assured they’re not here now. All we have are the placenames the Ngadjuri people left us. Right, take up your pens: The richest copper lodes in South Australia were discovered by shepherds. When grass and water were plentiful, and attacks by wild dogs and Aborigines rare, the shepherd had plenty of time on his hands for fossicking. Besides, he would have been on the lookout for the rich colours of oxidised copper, following the accidental discovery of copper at Kapunda in 1843, and the offers of rewards by the mining companies. Who were these men, these shepherds? Many were ex-convicts or men fleeing from trouble in one of the other colonies. Most were old and reclusive, preferring the company of a dog and the comfort of a plug of tobacco to the society of other men. There were few women, you understand. Paid ten shillings per week, what did they have to spend it on but grog the next time they were near a shanty? In July, 1850, came the news of a promising lode on the Pandowie Creek, discovered by one George Catford, shepherd. There were shepherds on the Pandowie Creek as early as 1843. We know this from watercolour sketches of the area, showing shepherds’ huts, made by the colony’s surveyor, Colonel Frome, who was making the first northern surveys. These sketches are in the Gallery on North Terrace, next time you’re in the city. Anna paused, realising that Mr Wheelwright had made an aside. Then she bent over the page again: Of all the shepherds who discovered rich deposits of copper in the colony, none was so meanly rewarded as George Catford. No rent-free cottage, no shares, no allowance, no memorial in the form of a town, street, landmark or building named after him. George Catford was paid just twenty guineas for revealing the lode to the Adelaide syndicate who had ridden up to examine the site, and a further twenty by the South Australian Mining Association, whose shareholders were earning dividends of eight hundred per cent just two years later. And so a fine, long, local tradition of avarice and misanthropy had its beginning here on the northern highlands. A bit of a pinko, is he, your teacher? Uncle Kitch wanted to know. Anna sought out her other grandfather. No, he didn’t know the last name of the shepherd whose son had drowned in Ison’s Creek. The top face of the gravestone had long since flaked away, but the date was there, 1875, so it was unlikely that George Catford had been the shepherd. Anna’s father liked to shock and tease her. She once stood with him in Redruth Square to honour the dead: We grow not old as those that are left grow old. He waggled his tipless finger at her slyly: Here’s a part of me that will grow not old as the rest that is left grows old. Anna was studying in the city when Mrs Showalter and Mr Wheelwright formed the Pandowie Historical Society. They had meetings in the Institute, sought contributions of money and artifacts, wrote pamphlets and convinced the council to adopt a preservation policy and a restoration fund. Every time Anna came home there was a new plaque to see, a Cornish miner’s cottage restored on Truro Street, another item of lacework in the museum, the miners’ dugouts fenced off in Noltenius Creek, a row of ancient almond trees saved from the axe. Successive waves of tourists, film-makers and weekending QCs swept into the mid-north, laying claim to the quaint and the beautiful, leaving only long-abandoned huts and farmhouses for the city poor who came in after them. When Anna lay in Chester Flood’s arms she murmured: What was it like, living in the convent? He replied: It used to be a reformatory, did you know that? There’s a new plaque inside the front gate now, if you’re interested. Let me answer this way—from reformatory to convent was not such a big step. I breathed the same spiritless air in 1960 as breathed by some kid in 1860. Anna’s father-in-law died, leaving the farm to his wife and his son, Sam, fearful that his ageing mother would sign her share over to the Ascension Church, bought her out at seventeen per cent. He did
not want the work of the generations of Jaegers before him to go down the gurgler, especially to a bunch of holy rollers—not your well-established holy rollers, mind you, but the Ascensionists, formed just twenty years ago, with no history or tradition behind them. Anna likes to say that she started in the dark ages of print technology, when the Chronicle was set by hand, then she passed through the offset period, and now she writes, cuts, pastes and designs on a computer screen. This week’s ‘One Year Ago Today’ column is interesting: Workmen gutting the interior of the historic Showalter Park homestead have found newspapers dating from the nineteenth century concealed under floorboards in the ballroom. Included was a perfectly preserved copy of the Chronicle for August 1877, where we learn that owing to the continuous flooding of the mine shafts and the high cost of recovering copper from the ore body, the Pandowie mine has closed, but that the district itself is expected to flourish as a centre for the colony’s pastoral industry. Anna’s Jubilee history is almost complete. She’s had enough of history. She has her memories, and memories are not necessarily history. Many years later, when she is in her eighties, Anna will read that a rare earthquake had hit the mid-north, dislodging a time capsule sealed in a unique stonewall fence used by the early settlers to pen their sheep. According to the Adelaide Advertiser, the capsule was inscribed with the words ‘Interred in the Year 2000 to Mark the 150th Jubilee of Pandowie and Environs’ and as such was considered too recent to be of interest to historians. The wall would be repaired and the capsule resealed in it. Anna will put down the paper and try to recall everything that Sam had collected for the capsule. The Showalter family memoir, a twist of wool, a copper wristband from the Tourist Office, wheat heads, old clippings from the Chronicle. Picking up the paper again she will see yet another edgy reference to Machholz 2, which may or may not be on a collision course with Earth. The last time a comet hit the planet, the force was sufficient to create the Gulf of Mexico and wipe out the dinosaurs. So why bother with time capsules?
