Bill stayed for a couple of days, sleeping in his old bed with its striped ticking and kapok mattress. Then he stood on the front verandah, his tired brown suitcase packed and waiting in the boot of the car. His hat already on the back window ledge. The thermos filled again with strong black sugary tea and lying on the front seat. His father stood beside him – tall and straight and lonely. His pipe clamped in his mouth. His eyes staring ahead.
Bill reached for his own tobacco and a packet of papers.
‘What’s wrong with a pipe?’ his father growled.
Bill didn’t answer. He smoked his smoke and stared at the farm track leading back to Elise and Ruby and Marjorie and his good life in the city.
*
And that good life stayed good for a fair while after the funeral, until one day Pa called Bill on the telephone. ‘I won’t be saying much,’ he said. ‘It’s long distance. Can’t be extending every three minutes.’ But Pa then straight away forgot about the expense of a long-distance call. He stopped and said nothing for a while – wasting precious time and money. Bill waited. He heard his father draw a breath before he went on to say: ‘I’m not too old, mind. But a man can’t manage a farm on his own these days. You’re not needed there in the city now that blasted war is over. Your sisters can’t do it. What does a woman know about farming? And anyway, they’ve got their own husbands with their own farms to worry about. But a farm is not for losing, don’t forget, and a real man doesn’t shirk his responsibilities. Not like a woman might.’
Pa was right. It was a short telephone call after all. Over before it hardly started. With Elise and the girls in their lounge room in the city, all warm and innocent and unsuspecting. Pa hung up. And Bill hung up. Pa asked no questions, but Bill knew that really he had. Pa had asked Bill to go back to the Mallee and take over working the farm. To save the farm one more time.
Marjorie didn’t know any of this either. And what things she did know about were discoloured and bleached by now. She had soggy memories. Memories crusted and calcified so the truth of them was hard to locate. Memories that were swamped – like a salt lake had overtaken them. One of those salt lakes that had been rudely woken from primal seabed slumber by the uninvited. That then seeped up from under the clay and the sand to rage savagely and silently against the ignorance of the intruders.
But one of the things Marjorie could remember was running. There was no calcification on this memory. This memory wasn’t soggy. It was Ruby who started it and Marjorie, as she did with most things handed to her by Ruby, took to it with a great and thoughtless joy. She never questioned if they were ever running from or running to. The reason was of no consequence then. Ruby would provide the answers if Marjorie ever wanted to know.
As for Ruby, she didn’t take her decision lightly. Other negotiations were tried at first, around reasonable time and attention. ‘Open the door, let us in,’ she would call as they sat on the back step, hands on knees, staring at the backyard.
‘When are you going to get out of bed?’ she would cry from the kitchen, where their pendulum legs busied themselves ticking against the chair, their elbows plastered to the laminex.
And it would be uncalled-for to suggest Elise didn’t try. She made an appearance. She fed them and dressed them and combed their hair and put in hair ribbons. For a while. But Ruby had a fair idea Elise was not going to be able to sustain that sort of effort for the long term. And she was right. Before too long, bits of Elise started to fade. And Ruby had Marjorie – all vague and thoughtless and clinging on like a strangle vine – to look after. So Ruby had a go at things. ‘Come on, we’re going up the street,’ she would say. And they would be off. Away from Elise and her pitiful melancholy non-compliance. Looking for others that might do.
They ran, day after day. Sometimes they squeezed through the loose fence paling at the end of the backyard and ran through blocks crowded with scotch thistles, massing staunch and stubborn, looking down on Ruby and Marjorie and shaking their heads in the breeze each time they passed. They ran, with nothing above but the thin ribbon of sky carefully resting between the tops of the thistles, and no sound except the quiet thud of their shoes on the dirt. Nothing other than Ruby with her auburn curls streaming down her back, bouncy and gleaming in the sun. And that was all Marjorie needed.
Sometimes they ran out their front gate and straight across the warm asphalt road with never a thought to look. Fearless in their small child ignorance. Running to the houses and yards on the other side of the street. Ruby taking charge. Marjorie following. Sometimes they got down on their stomachs and squeezed under closed gates – ruining their dresses and patent leather shoes; leaving hair ribbons forlorn and flapping on the wires. Ruby would stand on tiptoes then and ring doorbells. And Marjorie would put her head back and gaze up at people in doorways, so tall they didn’t have any heads on. These grownups would say hello to Ruby and Marjorie and the girls would go inside, and then Elise would be there and the talk was soft and Elise would take her daughters home.
After a while, Ruby and Marjorie started to run in bare feet, and without ribbons in their hair.
‘What about socks and shoes?’ asked Marjorie.
‘Who cares about socks and shoes?’ Ruby replied.
‘Shouldn’t we have our hair combed? What about hair ribbons?’
‘What’s a hair ribbon going to do?’ Ruby called into the warm wind.
And it was true, Marjorie had no idea what a hair ribbon was going to do. So there they were, feet bare along the warm footpaths, the asphalt soft and melting. The tarred road welcoming with its summer softness. And they were still fearless and ignorant. Hair free of ribbons. Feet free of shoes. Those neighbours talked oddly to Ruby then, asking questions: Where are your socks and shoes? and, Where is your mother?
The neighbours got together one night when everyone had eaten their tea. They invited Bill over and they talked to him about this running. They had all watched Bill and Elise and knew of their decision about the farm. And they were afraid for them – not sure they had made the right decision. But that was a hard conversation to be had and, anyway, they had no right to that conversation on account of them not being from on the land. What did any of them know about the workings of a wheat and sheep farm? But they all did know of some woman or other who was nervy – whose insufficient woman’s disposition made them a sitting duck for bad nerves from time to time. And they all did know about children and running.
Bill sat in the kitchen. He was handed a glass of cold beer – inviting and hospitable in its amber and froth – and he drank it. Placing it carefully between sips on the table’s clean laminex surface – thoughtfully avoiding the tablecloth so he wouldn’t leave a wet beery mark. He took out his tobacco and papers and rolled a smoke. He looked at the faces gathered in the small kitchen.
‘How is Elise?’ the menfolk asked.
‘We don’t see her much anymore,’ the womenfolk said apologetically. ‘Just the girls.’ Watching Bill. ‘Those littlies running around the place on their own . . . Without their socks and shoes . . .’
And the men and women looked at Bill before looking away at their beers or their cups of tea or pausing to examine the thoughtfully pristine tablecloth.
The talk went on for a long time and Bill listened to it all. When, finally, the talk was done and there was nothing more to be said, Bill planted his hands on the laminex and pushed himself up from the table. He thanked everybody and shook the hands of the menfolk before going home. He thought a lot about what the neighbours had said. But he kept packing.
Bill took Elise and Ruby and Marjorie to live in the Mallee. He went back to help Pa run the farm. Just in time for the wheat harvest.
Chapter 2
The house lay in wait. It was like a huge spider – a golden orb – with a web of red, sandy tracks reaching for miles in every direction. All sorts of things were caught in that web. A small dairy was stuck dow
n the back of the yard. A washhouse and bathroom, huddled and anxious about their segregation, were netted just outside the back door. Chooks and dogs were caught outside the house yard fence. A shearing shed and a windmill were at the edges of the web, hidden behind sandhills. Neighbours were wedged miles out of sight – caught in sand at every corner. The house squatted in the middle of the web. Severe in its ragged wooden verandah. Accusing in its unpainted asbestos-sheeted austerity.
They moved in with Pa. Elise’s music was put on the old pianola in Pa’s lounge room. Her art materials were shoved under the bed in her and Bill’s bedroom. Bill and Elise hid things. Which was odd. Because how can you hide things from a house?
‘It’s just for a bit, love,’ said Bill to the wide eyes staring out of Elise’s head. ‘Then we’ll go back.’
Ruby and Marjorie roamed Pa’s house looking for things, like reason and explanation. One day they discovered a magical crystal and lace dress. They took it to Elise.
‘This,’ said their mother, ‘is the dress I wore on my wedding day.’ And she smiled and touched the crystal beads and ran her hands through the lovely lace.
They did it again. Two small girls arriving in the kitchen, walking in a cloud of crystals and lace. This time Elise’s face burned with fury. And Marjorie was afraid because she didn’t know why the burning fury was there or where it had come from so suddenly.
‘Why have you got that dress out again? For Pete’s sake! Put it back.’
Ruby looked at her mother with quiet dignity before walking from the room. Marjorie followed, red-faced and trying not to cry. Stumbling along with her portion of crystal and lace and her sudden fear. What is the matter, Mummy? is what Marjorie wanted to ask. But that was a very big question for a small girl burdened with crystal and lace.
Once, they found a beautiful crown high up and tucked away. So high and tucked away Ruby teetered on a chair to discover it. And Marjorie, watching her bring out this treasure, was speechless and gawking with the beauty and magic of it.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘It’s a crown,’ said Ruby. ‘It’s for wearing.’
So that is what they did. Until, one time, Ruby’s teetering and reaching brought out a smashed and broken crown. The pearly flowers broken and hanging. The stiff green leaves twisted and bent. Marjorie gazed at the ruined treasure. She touched the beautiful broken pieces. ‘Why would someone smash the crown?’ she asked.
Ruby looked at her sister.
‘I didn’t smash it, Ruby,’ said Marjorie.
‘I know you didn’t, stupid!’
‘Well, who did?’
‘Who do you think, Marjorie?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe the possums ate it?’
Ruby flung the damaged crown onto the shelf before climbing off the chair and marching to the door. She paused and looked back over her shoulder at Marjorie, still standing beside the chair. ‘You know who did it,’ she said.
*
Elise had a fight on her hands with that house. She knew as soon as she saw it. But she gave it as good a go as she could anyway. Elise decorated. She put rugs on the threadbare lino, and hung lace curtains on the vacant, staring windows at the front of the house. She sticky-taped prints in the long, disdainful hallway.
‘Waste of bloody time,’ said Pa, watching the careful sticky-taping. ‘That stuff won’t last the summer.’
And he was right. He knew the sort of fight this house had put up before – and won. The sticky tape turned yellow and brittle, and fell off – but not before leaving its own sallow tattoo. The prints curled and died in the heat. The lace curtains didn’t stand a chance, waving sloppily in the hot summer gusts with their tattered lace bottoms flapping.
Bill had tried the same once, back before he had to go to the city to save the farm. The side verandahs were Bill’s doing, but the house was having none of that. It already had a front verandah and a back porch. Anything more than that was excessive. So it had always managed to keep those side verandahs at bay. If you arrived suddenly and took the house by surprise you could see them, the side verandahs struggling to hang on. Like their roofing tin was separate. Like their posts didn’t belong. Given this previous experience of Bill’s, you’d think he could have given Elise more of a hand in accepting a person’s limits with this house.
He didn’t though. So that first autumn Bill and Elise did give the house what for. Ruby had started school and Marjorie was waiting out the year before she could follow. Bill and Elise had moved out to the sleep-out off the front verandah for the summer. But when the Mallee finally turned from the relentless baking tyranny of summer to the serene warmth of autumn, they didn’t move back.
That didn’t bother the house. It replied with a momentary shudder of the roof trusses in the heat of the day. A louder than usual creaking of the floor joists in the cool of the night. A larger than ordinary warping of the front verandah posts and a warning splitting of the front verandah boards. An imperceptible flaking and dusting and scattering of the bare asbestos circling the house. Then all was quiet. The house didn’t care if they stayed out forever. They were of no consequence. It would outlast them.
Bill thought a garden might help Elise to settle. Something green, something growing within the perimeter of the sagging and belligerent eight-foot-high wire netting fence surrounding the house. ‘It’s autumn,’ said Bill. ‘Let’s plant a garden.’
They ordered seedlings from the city then stood, eager and hopeful, on the bright crushed-quartz platform waiting for the train. Waiting to collect their babies. Each tiny plant carefully wrapped in wet newspaper by a nurseryman hundreds of miles away, stacked upright and close together like small children on stage for the annual school choir, then shoved in a cardboard box for comfort and security during the journey.
‘Gunna do tomatoes again, are ya?’ asked the stationmaster as he handed Bill the damp newspaper babies from the guard’s van. ‘Just like the old days, eh?’
‘Yeah,’ said Bill as he took possession. ‘Give it a go, I reckon.’
Bill knew what it took to grow vegetables in the Mallee. He built walled cities. Tomato plants with stakes, and cabbages on stalks, each surrounded by a moat and a red dirt wall. ‘I’d better get out there and check those vegies,’ Bill would say as he pushed his chair back from the kitchen table. And he’d head out the back flywire door into the warm evening stillness. Out to his walled vegetable city to check for any chinks in the fortifications. Then, reassured that all was well, and within the contentment of the heavy tomato and cabbage smells hanging on the night air, Bill would get the garden hose. He would fill the moats and breathe in the smell of dam water coming out of the hose and hitting the dry dirt.
Elise’s garden was out the front. She wanted lavender and roses and bulbs. Irises. Belladonna lilies, pink and naked. Not vegetables. She wanted her garden to show the house who was in charge. A path from the gate to the front verandah. Gardens either side of the verandah steps. A path going around the side to the back of the house. Neat red bricks set on an angle to define the garden beds.
Bill dug lines of red sand. Working from the right to the left and back again – the shovel stocking-stitching row after row of that red dirt. He raked the rows of piled dirt and corralled them behind the angled red bricks. He got out the dust broom and went to work on the paths so no stray gum leaf dared remain, and the dirt was pristine and free of all stones. But he was worried. ‘How about some geraniums? They might do better than irises.’
‘No geraniums.’
‘They don’t take much water. Especially if I put them in tins. And they come in all manner of colours. I can get some cuttings . . .’
‘No geraniums in tins.’
‘It’s not going to be as easy as back home. There isn’t enough water hereabouts, and what is here is too briny. They’ll burn. I don’t think the belladonnas will do much good at all.
Too far out of their natural place.’ But Bill had overstepped the mark with the talk about the lilies. He saw the warning change in the soft grey of Elise’s eyes and the crumple starting in her face.
‘But we’ll give it our level best,’ he said, rushing to iron out the crumple. ‘We’ll see how they manage.’
And the garden was planted. Further orders were made down the telephone to the city. Further deliveries were deposited onto the platform with its hot quartz surface. This time, wrapped in the cocoon of damp newspaper, delicate irises and assorted bulbs, buoyant roses and hard-wearing lavender. And Bill threw in an order of stocks as well.
‘Irises, Bill?’ asked the stationmaster handling these babies. ‘Naked ladies?’ His mouth screwed up in concern. ‘Do ya think them bulbs are gunna go alright out there in this heat?’
‘Won’t know if we don’t try,’ said Bill.
‘Keep the water up to them,’ the stationmaster called as Bill walked off, by way of encouragement.
Bill took the babies home, bolstered by the kindness of the stationmaster. Kindness wouldn’t guarantee success, though. Those plants looked at Elise out of their damp red dirt. They did their best. They tried to be buoyant and they tried hard to wear well. But it was just too difficult to stay afloat in the Mallee and even the best cast-iron of hardware eventually succumbs. Just ask those steadfast Furphy water tanks lying defeated in their rust across farms everywhere. Just give the Mallee time. Bill battled hard for the flowers. He nursed the stocks through an entire season. But the hard-wearing lavender showed it didn’t have enough wear and tear for the Mallee. The roses burnt to death in the heat and the salt. Nothing was ever seen of the bulbs. The Mallee smothered them in their infancy.
Wearing Paper Dresses Page 2
