The Orchardist's Daughter

by Karen Viggers

  3

  At five o’clock, in the takeaway shop in the main street of town, Miki changed her apron ready for the Saturday night rush. This afternoon between customers, she’d swept and mopped the floors, wiped the benches, scraped the grill, fished the burnt bits of batter from the fryer, restocked the fridges and shelves, and topped up the salads. Now there was nothing to do except wait. She leaned against the counter and looked out through the window, watching the world go by.

  Her brother Kurt was in the rooms at the back of the shop, where the two of them lived. He was working on the tax and accounts. The tax had been due at the end of last month, but he was slow when it came to paperwork. Miki had offered to do it—she was good at numbers, thanks to all those hours muddling over maths in the kitchen with her mother. But Kurt said it was his job to look after her, and that was the way he planned to keep it. Men’s work and women’s work separated, just like on the farm. Miki had to use secret ways of keeping in touch with the finances. When they worked together in the shop, she added income in her head while Kurt took payments and counted the cash.

  Miki’s life had been jobs since she was small. On the farm, she and her mother had shared the domestics. Then Mother’s arthritis had worsened, and she’d become heavy and slow, always tired, with sore joints that made kneeling for prayer difficult. Despite constant pain, Mother had still taught Miki’s lessons during the week, still enjoyed untangling convoluted maths problems. Miki had spliced her chores between lessons: cooking, cleaning, milking, washing, tending the vegie garden, setting the fire, feeding the chickens, raking up leaves. She was used to working hard.

  Now, though, she was nearly eighteen, and the shop was too small for her. She yearned for more involvement and freedom, but Kurt had constructed a scaffolding of rules all around her. She had to minimise interactions with customers. Avoid eye contact. Keep her head down and keep working. Kurt made sure she always had things to do, so the only time she could stop to take a breath was when he was out of the room. He was her guardian, older by a decade, and he was in charge.

  Mostly Miki didn’t mind the shop—she’d learned to accept it. She’d found it difficult at first, so much more confined than the farm, with less air and less light, and often her chest felt constricted.

  On the farm she used to live for Sundays. When the jobs were done, she would switch her skirt for overalls and head for the forest behind the orchard where her heart lifted and freedom beckoned. Kurt always came with her. They would trudge in gumboots past the packing shed with its tractor, tools and cool-room, past the vegetable garden that fed them most of the year, beyond the compost heap of vegie scraps—which, in turn, fed the local wildlife—and into the orchard where old man apple trees raised their gnarled arms to the sky, and grass grew in lush profusion. At the boundary fence the forest waited: shadowy, secretive and inviting. Miki would slip between the wires, while Kurt climbed over a post. They would follow a faint trail up past the beehives and between slender grey-barked eucalypts. As the bush folded around them, Miki would feel lightness on her skin, happiness settling. She loved the swaying skirts of the leaves high above, the squeak of wood rubbing against wood, the sigh of air in the canopy, the crunch of sticks beneath her feet, the minty scent of the scrub. In the bush, she felt more alive, more real. The week fell away and her father’s rules faded. She was somebody. Herself. A young woman with hope in the world.

  They would walk across-slope to their favourite gully, clambering over fallen trunks laced with moss, crossing a creek where ferns splayed their fronds and large rotting logs made moist chairs to sit on. Often, it was quiet. Grey fantails tinkling. Time and space expanding. There, she and Kurt would become equals for a few hours. Miki would ask him questions. ‘How’s Father?’—always the same every week. She hoped for meaningful answers, but with Kurt you never knew whether it would be sunshine or storm. He would shrug his broad shoulders. ‘Bossy,’ he would say. ‘His way or the highway.’

  She would think of the road leading from the farm, imagine it joining with other roads and then the highway going all the way to Hobart. She’d only been on that road once, when she was seven and Father lost his fingers. But she’d always thought that one day she would walk away from the farm and never return. She hadn’t expected it to happen so soon.

  Sometimes, they would speak of Mother’s arthritis. ‘I’m worried,’ Miki would say. ‘Mother’s getting slower. Do you think she needs treatment?’

  Kurt would raise his eyebrows. ‘You know what she’s like. Won’t take any poisons. She’d rather live with the pain.’

  But that pain had been a rope for Miki. A rope that wound round and round her future, keeping her tied to the farm.

  It had always been different for Kurt. The rules had been more flexible for him because he was a boy. He’d gone to school till he was ten, whereas Miki had been home-schooled from the beginning. He’d always had more freedom, driving to town from the farm, buying supplies, meeting people. But Miki hadn’t been allowed to leave at all, because Mother and Father said the world wasn’t safe for women. They’d spoken of drug addicts and thieves, people without morals or God, men who forced themselves on women, rich people stealing from the poor, women showing too much skin. All evil.

  Now Miki knew otherwise. Kurt said the locals and tourists were wicked, but she had studied their lives. She wasn’t allowed to leave the shop, but the world came to her. She learned by listening to customers, reading faces, absorbing talk, watching the way people moved, their language and interactions. She recognised regulars by scent. The farm had smelled of grass, mud and manure, the woody aroma of apple trees. Here, everything was more complex and layered. Body odours. Perfumes. Cigarette smoke and food.

  Even so, Miki longed to escape. To walk wherever she wanted. Talk to people. Go to school. But Kurt wouldn’t allow it. Whenever he went out, he locked her in. He said women needed protection and he was keeping her safe. It was what Father and Mother would have wanted, he insisted. The same applied to school. Kurt said education was overrated for girls. A waste of time. How could Miki explain that she missed her lessons with Mother because she’d enjoyed using her brain?

  Eighteen months had passed since the fire, and not a day went by without Miki remembering it. Everything gone in one awful night: her parents, her home and her life. Her family had worked hard to serve God, so surely he should have given them some sort of warning. And yet she’d revisited the day of the fire so many times in her mind and could find nothing that hinted at what was to come. Kurt said this was evidence God didn’t exist; if God was real he should have protected them. Her brother had given up religion after that. And, although Miki had felt lost without God at first, a small voice inside her agreed. Had all those hours of prayer counted for nothing? It made no sense to her. If the fire was supposed to be a test of her faith, it had been too much to ask.

  How did you recover from a loss so large you could barely believe it? Grief crept up in quiet moments, swamping her like a river in flood. She missed her mother, who’d been patient and kind, so different from Father. He had always been hard and unyielding, but he’d loved her in his own way, and Miki missed him too. At night, she imagined her parents in their burning bedroom. Father trying to help Mother out of bed. The ceiling falling in. Mother’s nightie catching fire. Their cries for help drowned by the voice of the flames.

  The morning after the blaze, while the chickens pecked around on the lawn, Miki and Kurt had waited for the authorities to leave, then they’d picked through the ruins of the farmhouse, looking for something that had been spared. But there had been nothing left. The scorched chimney. Mounds of twisted tin. Rows of concrete stumps. Bits of molten metal. Glass, melted smooth. Among the rubble, Miki had found the tarnished face of the mantelpiece clock, a broken doll’s hand, warped and dinted coins. Holding these things in her soot-smeared hands, she had wept. She could have been walking on her parents’ bones.

  She had been destroyed by the fire, but life was insis
tent. In the bed of ashes left behind, a small seed had germinated and fragile fronds of a new beginning had started to unfold. Miki likened herself to a young tree, finding its way to the light. Those first few days, she and Kurt had lived in the shed, eating eggs and tins of baked beans heated in a pan over the gas cooker the men used for melting wax to graft shoots in the orchard. Once or twice, Miki had seen a car drive slowly by, possibly neighbours. But no one came in. Visitors to the farm had never been encouraged.

  On the third day, Miki had huddled in a nest of blankets, while Kurt pored over the papers from the black leather folder he’d saved from the fire. She’d asked to see the papers too, but he had waved her away, saying she didn’t need to worry about such things; he would take care of it. But she kept thinking of Father and that folder, how important it had been to him, the way he’d carried it with as much respect as his Bible. He’d never left it lying around, and she hadn’t known where he’d kept it—so how had Kurt known where to find it?

  Here, Kurt kept the folder hidden away too, possibly in the locked room under the shop where the fizzy drink was stored, and where he liked to retreat for some peace. Kurt said the folder was their ticket to the future, so he had to look after it. Miki couldn’t imagine what might be in there—maybe his chequebooks and the lease for the shop. What else could there be?

  After the fire, Kurt had wanted to stay on the farm. He’d planned to transform the shed into a home and have Miki help in the orchard. But when he’d visited the bank and discovered the farm was in debt, the only solution was to sell. With barely any money after settlement, the lease on this shop was all they could afford. Since then, they’d been working five days a week, seven in the morning till eight-thirty at night. It was a source of income, which they needed, and close to the forest, which they loved. And the shop had been successful. Kurt had bought furniture, a large colour TV, a new ute, gym equipment. He said they had savings and were on their way to having a deposit for their own farm. She knew he was devastated by the loss of the family property and couldn’t wait to take back what had been theirs.

  He emerged now from the rear of the shop as the first evening customers came in: big tattooed Toby from the mill with his tribe of four children. Toby was a giant of a man, with a bald head and a bushy beard like a nest of lichen draped from his chin. Weekdays, he smelled of sawdust and sweat, but weekends he wore aftershave with a hint of oranges, just like the cleaner Miki used on the floors. At a nod from Kurt, she lowered her eyes and stepped aside so he could take the order. He was gruff: ‘What do you want?’—Miki would have done it differently.

  Toby didn’t bother with niceties either. ‘Family pack of fish and chips and twelve potato cakes.’ He frowned. ‘How many bits of fish do I get?’

  ‘Five. Same as always.’

  ‘But there’s six of us. Me and Steph and the kids.’

  ‘Want an extra piece then?’

  ‘How much are you going to charge me for it?’

  ‘Prices are on the board.’

  Miki would have added an extra fillet anyway; this was a weekly argument. The men bristled like dogs in the street even when there was nothing to fight over. Kurt charged Toby for six fillets while Miki slipped in a seventh and sank the frying basket into the oil. When Kurt’s back was turned, Toby winked. He knew she was neutral territory.

  Miki liked Toby because, although he looked ferocious, he was kind to his children. He wore T-shirts even in winter so you could see his tattoos. An ink snake wound from one arm to the other across his shoulders; Miki had seen the whole thing one time when he’d come in bare-chested on a hot day. He had a tiger on one bulging thigh, a red devil on the other, and more tattoos filling the spaces between. Now he thumbed through magazines from the rack while his children eyed off the lollies and Kurt glared at them.

  Hiding her smile, Miki watched the fish and chips frying, bubbles rising, the soft hiss of boiling oil. She hummed along with the drone of the fume hoods. When the batter was golden, she tipped the order onto paper, dashed on a shower of salt and wrapped it quickly so Kurt wouldn’t see the extra piece of fish. Then she gave the bundle to Kurt, who handed it over to Toby.

  Miki found it easy to carry out small deceptions like this. When Kurt was in the shop, he manned the counter, taking orders and handling the money to protect her from exposure to locals. With his back to her most of the time, it wasn’t hard for her to manipulate orders. She did it to make up for the way he treated customers; her little gifts were surely one of the reasons people kept coming back to their shop.

  The next customer was blond-headed Mooney with his two little daughters. He had a strong smell that no deodorant could disguise. Miki didn’t understand how someone could look angelic when he clearly wasn’t. It didn’t make sense that this good-looking man with his smooth face, tanned skin and silvery blue eyes could beat his wife, Liz—whereas thug-like Toby was kind and thoughtful. Miki had heard the women talking while waiting for morning coffees after school drop-offs. Mooney’s up to his old tricks again. Have you seen poor Liz? A black eye this time, patched up with makeup. Last time it was bruises round her neck. I saw them under her scarf. Miki never gave Mooney extras, saving them till Liz and their girls came in without him.

  She had just lowered Mooney’s order into the fryer when more people crowded in, and the Saturday night rush was on. Customers chatted while they waited, dissecting the footy and the weather. See that screamer Toby took today. Bloody amazing. What about Mooney’s goal just before half-time? The man’s a champion.

  Saturday was known as Mum’s Night Off, and for the men that meant buying takeaway. Most ordered fish and chips or burgers, but some even bought salad. Occasionally strangers would lob in, couples or groups in fleeces and beanies, people who’d been hiking up in the park. They were friendlier than the locals because they didn’t know Kurt. He treated them the same, and when they fled with their orders Miki knew they wouldn’t be back. That was why she courted the locals with extras. Fortunately there wasn’t much choice for fast food—if you didn’t buy here, it was twenty minutes to the next town. Saturdays, most of the men drank a few beers, and they didn’t want to drive and risk getting caught. Miki had heard the women talking about how the rot set in after the footy. Sometimes it started down at the oval, sometimes in someone’s backyard, sometimes at the pub. The local policemen weren’t very strict—it was common knowledge that a warning was as far as it went. The police had to live in town too, so they let things slide, even when Mooney laid into Liz. Miki wished they would take action on that. But Liz was good at hiding things. And maybe the police didn’t hear gossip. In a way, they were outsiders around here too, just like Miki.

  Just as she was thinking this, one of the local policemen strode in: Fergus Connolly, with his boys, Jaden and Callum. He was out of uniform but a hush still fell over the shop. He loudly said hello, and everyone stood aside to let him through. During the week, he smelled of shaving cream and soap, but on weekends Miki always caught beer on his breath. Usually he was strict on his boys, but after a few drinks he stopped noticing their behaviour and the big boy, Jaden, had a tendency to get out of hand. Miki didn’t like the way he pinched and hassled his younger brother.

  A stranger slipped in during the rush—Miki noticed him because it was late for out-of-towners, who mostly came mid-afternoon. He was maybe mid-twenties, lean and fit-looking, with messy orange hair, pale skin, a snub nose and crinkles at the corners of his eyes. She saw him nod at Shane and Max, who were waiting for their Saturday night family pack. Max offered him a lolly, which was unusual—the boy generally held tight to his sweets. While she was measuring out chips and dipping fish in batter, Miki heard the stranger ask for a burger with the lot but no pineapple, and she had the meat patty on the hotplate before Kurt had even handed her the order. She was proud of her efficiency and liked being organised. But it was often boring in the shop. Five long days a week cooking and cleaning. Only one day out of here, when she and Kurt went up to the f
orest on Mondays. Tuesdays sitting around while he went to Hobart. No one to talk to.

  As she cooked and wrapped and delivered orders, Miki noticed the way the men looked slantwise at the red-headed stranger and sidled away from him. Even in the busy shop he seemed lonely. She knew how that felt, so she made his burger with special care and slid a Freddo Frog into the bag before putting it on the counter. Hopefully the chocolate wouldn’t melt. It would be a nice surprise when he opened his meal.

  At eight-thirty, after the last customer had been served, Kurt locked the front door and started counting the money. This was Miki’s signal to clean up. She turned off the fryers and fume hoods, covered the salads and slid them into the fridges, mopped the floors, wiped the counter, and restocked the drinks from crates in the kitchen. Then she made steak sandwiches for dinner, and they sat at one of the shop tables to eat.

  This was their usual Saturday night routine. After their meal they would go to the tip. The garbage wouldn’t wait till Thursday; they needed bin-space for tomorrow when the Sunday tourists flocked into town.

  While Kurt carted the rubbish out and tossed it on the back of the ute, Miki collected the meat scraps she’d saved during the day and put them in a plastic bag. Then she changed into overalls and slipped the bag into her pocket.

  The tip was on a gravel side street at the edge of town, and Kurt always drove the rough road too fast. This evening, he swung through the open gate and sped to their usual spot beneath the fluorescent light near a large mound of garbage, pulling up so sharply Miki jolted in her seat. Kurt was laughing as he jumped out and dragged the rubbish bags off, tossing them onto the heap where they split open and leftovers surged out, cans and bottles and wrappers. ‘That was funny,’ he said. ‘You should have seen your face while you were trying to hold on.’

  Miki hadn’t been laughing, but now she smiled too. Kurt’s moments of humour were rare since the fire, so it was important to make the most of them. It helped her survive darker times.