by Helen Garner
If I sit still, my gaze comes to rest on the shifting treetops on the other side of the valley.
No matter how I squint and tilt my head, it is plain that the top dam is losing water. The earth here is shaly, yellow and hard; fissures are natural to it, and are encouraged by the roots of trees planted on and below the dam wall. Rabbits have tunnelled into the wall, their pellets give them away and when my father, arriving without warning from Geelong at 8 a.m., spots their droppings and the cracks made by the tree roots his mouth twists in scorn and he turns away to inspect the runoffs.
‘What is a runoff?’ I ask humbly, standing behind him with clasped hands.
He points. ‘How the hell did you think the water got into the dam?’
‘Oh,’ I say, with the foolish giggle I despise in others, ‘I thought it got filled from the—from the raining sky.’
He plunges away to the house, where I make a cup of tea and he tells me that frankly the dam is probably beyond repair and furthermore the place is a firetrap, that no one would be fool enough to insure it, that kero lamps are lethal, that the gutters are almost certainly choked with leaves, that if I went for a walk after dinner leaving the door ajar a draught could cause a flare-up and next thing the hut would be a raging inferno. As he speaks the cabin fills with huge noisy blowflies attracted by the smell of the shanks cooking.
After our tea he declines to go for a walk, saying he can see the eagles quite nicely from here, and sits with upright spine on a chair on the verandah, staring out over the gully. I take the blunt hedge-clippers and hack away at a part of the garden out of his line of sight, though from where I’m crouching I can hear the busy fidget and swagger of rosellas along the guttering where they are no doubt proving him right about its unkempt state, eating the grass seeds that have congregated there: but I wonder whether the pleasure of being right again will prevent him from losing his breath at the sight of the rosellas, whose feathers compress colour into essence and bring it squirting up into the senses from the depths of the mind.
I return with a bunch of very early violets. He must have seen the feathers for he consents to hold the flowers in his large blunt hand and even to have his photo taken in that pose. Then, departing, he says in a low voice, ‘I could live in place like this, you know; but Mum wouldn’t have a bar of it.’ Later, in town, I get the photos back and there he stands against the verandah rail, contemptuous as a farmer, head back, eyes slitted; but in his coarse paw the tiny bunch of violets.
If I sit still, the wind blows, then there is a quiet moment.
I forgot to show my father the two commemorative trees in the bottom of the gully: the cypress planted when Phar Lap won the Melbourne Cup, the pine for Carbine—or is it the other way round? I forgot to ask him to show me how to start the pump. I forgot to shut the top gate after his car. I forgot to check with him whether there is any point in getting the place properly fenced, though I do remember him saying that a kangaroo can clear a six-foot fence in a standing jump: that he has actually seen this happen.
If I sit still, the koala hunches its grey shoulders round its bowed head and clings to the swaying trunk a few feet away from my table.
While I am making a hasty list of things to do, the phone rings in its hiding place under the bed. An old friend is calling from the township, through which he is passing on a long trip round Victoria with his seven-year-old daughter. Directions are too complicated to give, so I tell them to wait at the crossroads till I come, and we drive in convoy along the ten kilometres of dirt road back to my place. The closer we get to it the prouder of it I feel, the more satisfyingly I imagine how beautiful he will find the timber cabin with its windows on all four sides and the high verandah on which we will sit together to eat our soup and from which we will gaze out over the timbered ridges, up into the sky with eagles, and down to the black triangle of the bottom dam lying deep and close in the view like a heavy brooch dropped into a loosely spread handkerchief.
We park the cars inside the top gate and his daughter prances down the track to the house, but he approaches slowly, with wary, even suspicious steps, looking this way and that, registering the arrangements of useful objects whose one-syllabled names, he used to say, make us love the English language: spade, boots, rack, hose, bin, rake, broom, saw, box, axe. From back door to front verandah, across the one-room house, needs only four steps, and there he stands on the verandah, confronted with all that air.
He turns his head to show a strange, pursed smile. ‘I thought you told me on the phone that it was beautiful.’
‘Well, isn’t it?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘No, not beautiful. I’d say it was only pretty.’
This is the nature of our friendship, I now recall: as if by agreement, I inflate, he produces the pin.
‘Everything’s small,’ he says, backing into a chair on the verandah and raising his brogues to the rail. ‘It’s too neat. I feel like someone on a film set—a Hollywood western. See the angle of that ridge? It’s too perfect. It’s tidy. Like a painted backdrop. Our place down the coast is wilder. That’s beautiful. You must come down one weekend. Our front window there looks straight out over the ocean. Hey, Mini. I know it’s probably not a very good question—but would you say you liked this place better, or our place down the coast?’
The girl drops her eyes. ‘I don’t think it’s a very good question, Dad. I’ve only been here five minutes.’
‘Yes, but just say you had to make a choice. Which would you say you liked the best?’
‘I think,’ she replies soberly, ‘that I like both of them exactly the same.’
A pause; then he soldiers on. ‘You ought to have a weapon up here. Specially as a woman.’
‘I’ve got a waddy,’ I say, ‘and I keep the axe beside the bed.’
‘No—you need a gun. You open the door at night with a twenty-two in your hand and they’ll get the hell out.’
‘But guns get fired.’
‘I know that’s what Chekhov says, but he wasn’t a woman sleeping alone in a house with windows all round and no curtains. What if you woke up and found—anyway, I think you ought to get yourself a rifle.’
Very quietly I serve the soup and he tells us of the beauties and the histories of parts of Australia he has visited. While he is speaking I notice that the koala in the tree behind him has woken; it sashays backwards down its sapling, scrambles over the fence and heads off on all fours towards the forest. His daughter sees it too: its unexpected speed on the ground, its heavy head straining up to glance in all directions as it travels. The girl returns her gaze to her plate and continues to work away with her spoon.
After lunch, I suggest a walk to the opposite ridge so I can show them the eagles’ nest which has been in this particular tree for nearly ninety years. When I point out to my friend the commemorative pine and cypress he is very impressed and stands gazing up into the scraggly branches with an expression of severe respect. There is a fair amount of soil erosion on the forest ridge which I have not noticed before: it looks shameful to me; I feel it to be my fault though it is not and there is nothing I can do about it, and I am afraid he will remark on it, but he plods ahead of us through the tussocky grass, eager for nature where it intersects with dated human history. ‘Ninety years!’ he says. ‘They must have built this nest during the Boer War!’ A kangaroo bounces away behind a clump of blackboys and we all cry out and follow it with our eyes.
Once we reach the top of the ridge and head along it, it should be easy to pick out the eagles’ nest, which is in the fork of a tall tree growing so far down in the Moorabool valley that our eyes and the conglomeration of twigs ought to be on a level: but I can’t find it. I sweep my eyes left, right, left again, trying not to strain, trying to let the nest present itself simply to me as it does when I am alone. No use. I have mistaken the spot. There is nothing for us to look at except trees, more trees, our native trees, and the usual mess on the ground.
It is getting chilly and they have to
drive on to the next big town where they will spend the night. On our way back up to the house we pass the clinker-built rowing boat lying tilted in the grass. Painted a dusty Reckitts blue, it belongs in a dream of some Greek island where all the buildings are brilliant white. The name fading on the stern is mythological too, but when asked I am unable to recall the story attached to the stranded boat, or to explain how it got so badly holed.
‘You should remember these things,’ says my friend. ‘Your interest in this place is rather shallow, isn’t it? I’m disappointed in you.’
The little girl’s sole slips on the smooth grass and her elbow bumps my hip. She quickly finds her feet and plugs on up the hill between us, with her wilting stalk of a plait poking out over the collar of her jumper.
Although it is only mid-afternoon, the sun is dropping behind the ridge into which the house backs, and the shadow of that ridge rises up the face of the opposite one as slowly and as steadily as a tide. If boats could float on shadow, this blue one would be bobbing, then shipping darkness, then slewing and foundering with the weight of it. ‘Goodbye,’ we say at the top gate; the girl stands with hands in cuffs and face turned away towards the forest as her father and I kiss each other. Our cheeks are cold and our eyes averted, and no one mentions the sadness of a visit that has been a failure. In our hearts we are angry, and envious of one another for reasons we can no longer find names for, if we ever could; we have obliged a child to act as a buffer; and they drive away.
If I sit still, the afternoon sun fills the cup of the next valley with light, pours light into the cup of the valley till it is brimming over.
Cup? Pours? Brimming over? This is nature sentimentalism, verging on the purple. Is it really what late winter sun in a valley looks like? Yes. It is. And lovelier, and more peaceful, more comforting; and the light on the tufted grass is more tender, and the wind drops, and the whole landscape is holding its breath.
I walk along the rim of the slope that overlooks my gully, at the very bottom of which, a hundred yards away, the bottom dam shines like a drop of black ink. An old olive tree grows here on the grassy rim, and in against its trunk, under tough foliage, leans the bench for sitting still. I didn’t put it there: it was here when I arrived, waiting for me to learn how to use it, It is still winter but before I take my place I check for snakes, and then I sit. I put my hands on my thighs, I count my breaths and tune them to my heartbeat, loosening the tempo as my pulse slows down and settles to andante. Whatever I needed to be comforted for stops hurting me. I close my eyes, and the space freed from what I saw is now gently filled by what I hear: the frogs carry on their cricketing down in the black bottom dam, and their cricketing forms a pattern round the silence of the pool like a complex lace edging on a cloth; but at the same time they are laying down a faithful rhythm track for the kookaburras who test the air with chuckles then decorate it with the absurd spasms of their evening’s sociability.
After a long time, I open my eyes. The light is fading so steadily that I might be steadily going blind.
I walk up to the back gate and cross the road into the forest, to drag home branches for the fuel stove. Visitors always ask me incredulously why I have not got myself a chainsaw. I reply that it is against the law to cut down trees in a state forest, and that in fact even taking fallen timber is said to be forbidden, though I don’t see the harm in a little gathering and collecting; but the real reasons are that up there it is still almost possible to maintain a connection between luxuries, like light and warmth, and the physical labour that produces them; that I hate the indignant cries of a chainsaw, its sneering; and that dragging and sawing by hand places another buffer between myself and the necessary: sitting still.
Tonight, if I hadn’t sat still for so long, I could have tramped down past the bottom dam again, and up the slope of the forest ridge beyond it, among the airy timber whose parsley tops jostle and hiss whenever a gust of wind flows in and out of the gully. For some reason the fallen branches under those trees are pale, dry, clean, and very densely textured: they make firewood that pleases the senses in the gathering and burns slowly with good heat, while the wood I collect here, in the bush up behind the house, is dark, crumbly, ugly, rotten, as if a cloud had hung over these trees for their whole growing lives; not simply that the fallen boughs have decayed on the ground, but as if the trees themselves were rotten in their being. But to get the healthy wood, I would have to walk a good kilometre, which is already out of the question as darkness fills the gully from the bottom. Tomorrow I’ll get the good stuff. Tonight this rubbish will do, though I need more of it than the good, and its texture is repellent to the hand. My boots are so heavy that they encase my feet in two concrete bunkers. When I walk in them I crush things: but I can kick and plunge, which is satisfying, and wasn’t that a car?
There is someone coming along the thickening road. I squat down behind a trunk. It’s a ute, with a man at the wheel and beside him at least one other head dipping and rising. Although their eyes like mine must be webbed by the frustrating hour between dog and wolf, I stay down in a crouch till they’ve passed; and just as I heave a couple of branches over my shoulder and set off for the back gate, I hear the clash and whine of the vanished ute being thrown into second: he’s a stranger then; he got a fright when the polite orange road dropped away on the turn and went stony, and in a moment he’ll hit the ford in the almost-dark and then there will be cursing and gnashing of teeth.
The leafy plumes of the dead branches bounce lightly behind me on the uneven ground, out of sync with the rhythm of my walking, and the whispering they utter, full of agitation and pauses, steadies me with a sense of responsibility, as if I were a teacher in charge of a crocodile of small, serious girls. Though the fence on either side of it has long since collapsed into the soft grass, I close the gate carefully and force the rusty metal loop over its hook, meaning this for a sign.
From the sawhorse close to the gate, arranging the first branch across its double V, I glance down the slope and try to surprise myself with the familiar. How visible is the house? Would I notice it if I didn’t know it was there? Would I respect the token gate, or would I take it into my head either to wrestle with its clumsy catch or to step round it? Would I have the nerve, the energy, the curiosity to walk all the way down the sloping track, seeing the small car there, and would I assume it was a woman’s car, if I were a man? How do men think, at night, now, for example, when the light has been lifted clear of the gully and the house hunches itself in the deepening dark with its back to the track that leads down from the gate? (But I know that outside this gully there must be a beam of sun still in the sky, for the kookaburras have not quite finished their paroxysms, which tail off weakly as if they were exhausted by their own hilarity: Oh, stop! Don’t say another word! I’ll die!)
How do men think? I unhook the bow saw from the shed wall and as I begin to cut, quickly working up a sweat and having to strip off my jumper and tie it round my waist, I remember the body that was found last month in the bush along this road. It was a man’s body, a long time dead, rotting and half-devoured in a plastic bag; the body of someone that no one missed; never identified, claimed or explained away. At the time I said to my father, ‘Wouldn’t you think a murderer would bury a body? Wouldn’t you think they’d hide it properly?’
‘They’d be in a hurry,’ said my father. ‘I imagine they’d just chuck the body into the scrub and go for their lives—but I don’t know how to think like a murderer.’
I don’t know how to think like a man. The poor wood crumbles and drops into ragged hunks beside the sawhorse, and I carry an armload of it, barely enough for the night, down the cleared slope to the house. I am still sweating from the work, and the dark air slides past my cheeks and my bare arms with the suaveness of a blade. The clammy breath of the bottom dam rushes up the gully side and surrounds me: the air consists (like water when you wade deeper) of waves of chill, bone chill, then stone chill: chill and chill again. This is the true
arrival of night.
Both doors of the house are wide open and when I enter it the small room feels abandoned, hollow, only a tunnel through which night floods to join itself on the other side. I put my jumper back on, roll the sleeves down over my knuckles, and loop a woollen scarf twice around my neck. I have read that water is always the last thing to get dark, and notice with gratitude that the bottom dam holds on its black surface the reflection of a tiny, high streak of light, perhaps the one that has overstrained the kookaburras which now are silent, though frogs and crickets persevere.
The box of the fuel stove is small but fire grows in it quickly and I heat the remains of the soup and eat it standing up, straight from the saucepan, as people eat who have not yet arranged the habits of their solitude to suit an abstract ideal. I fill the lamps with kero and light them, and by the time I have got the enamel kero heater going at the other end of the room I have four combustion sites to keep guard over, so my eyes flick constantly from one to the next. The cold begins to crack in the roof iron of the house, making its mettle felt through the uncovered windows and unlined walls. It is barely seven o’clock.
If I sit still, the fuel stove burns with occasional crackles and soft, ashen collapses, and the kero heater sings a long breathing note.
What will I do now?
I will turn on my radio.
On ABC-FM they are playing a sonata by Ravel for violin and cello, and although I listen with pleasure, I am uncertain as to how I should dispose my limbs while listening: there is no immediate furniture between straight-backed chair, on which I feel foolishly formal, and bed, which can lead only to sleep and thus, so early, to an interminable night of dreams, or worse still, of no dreams at all. After each movement of the sonata the humble, persistent frog-music from the bottom dam reasserts itself, rising powerfully on cold washes of air. It makes me understand, as I hesitate on my feet between chair and bed, that not only shall the meek inherit the earth: they are in charge of it already.
