by Joan London
For the time being they had to share Prem and Wanda’s provisions, but that was cool, Prem said, his eyes narrowed, he was keeping a tally, which included rent for the carriage and instalments for their share of the land. The money trip wasn’t what it was about, he said. All the same it put Jacob and Toni at a disadvantage. They saw Prem looking at them if they took second helpings, and they felt like bludging guests. Wanda gave them each a special twig from India to clean their teeth.
Thrift and its grim little satisfactions came naturally to her, as it did to all of them, children of parents who had grown up in the Depression and set up house after the war. She remembered Beryl’s bargain hunting and penny-pinching. Even in the midst of a fight with Nig, she would stalk around the house snapping off lights. But now they felt the exertion of poverty, the time and energy it took to make do, mend, barter, plan, go without. Time and energy were all they had. She remembered with wonder the shopping sprees she used to go on in her old life with Felice and Sabine.
They heard there was work at a sawmill, a small temporary outfit called a spot mill, set up amongst the lighter trees at the edge of the forest. Jacob tied his hair back and went off with Prem. He returned exhausted and very quiet. The great whirling saws scared him to death, he told her in the carriage, as she massaged his back and rubbed some of Wanda’s herbs on his cuts and bruises. Machinery had always been his natural enemy. Prem, on the other hand, had even fixed a broken roller for the boss.
Jacob was given the job of loading the non-stop spew of milled blocks onto trolleys, and soon he was the butt of all their jokes. It reminded him of playing football when he was kid, he was never in the right place at the right time. The other workers were a very rough lot. Some of them were on the run from the law. They told stories during smoko about the tricks they played on fellow workers. There were a lot of missed digits and stumps amongst them. It was only a matter of time before it was his turn. Already they called him Jake the Peg. You have no idea, he groaned. The infernal noise, the smoke from burning piles of sawdust … it was purgatory, it was Gomorrah, probably Sodom too if he didn’t watch out, the stories of nights drinking in the shed were bloodcurdling … his voice croaked on and on, like a little boy’s. But the next morning, without speaking, wincing from his injuries, he set off again with Prem. The work was casual, he didn’t need papers. They paid in cash.
They treated themselves to a tin of tuna, eaten on their own in the car. Jacob bought tobacco and a bottle of port. She bought a pair of workman’s bib-and-brace overalls, and canvas sandshoes, all that the store stocked in the way of clothes. Her single pair of city jeans was threadbare, her boots in holes.
She and Wanda dug compost into the vegetable patch, hauled water from the creek, picked bugs off stunted silver-green cabbages. When Prem had time, he was going to make a special pit to process their shit as fertiliser. The natural interdependence of people with the land, Wanda said. They used to have chooks to eat the bugs, but the foxes soon got them. She was hanging out for a couple of angora goats to raise, but they’d have to build a strong pen.
Inside her carriage, which she’d made cosy with Afghan rugs and woven Indian hangings, was a spinning wheel and loom bought by mail order from America. She had a thriving herb farm in a collection of old paint tins and saucepans she’d found in a dump. For relaxation she sat on a stump talking and sewing herb pillows made from cut-up flour bags to sell at the Nannup fair. Her hands were never still.
Wanda had a rosy face, flat-cheeked like a Tibetan, with waist-length, graying chestnut hair. She wore long Indian skirts, faded beyond pattern, hitched up above her rubber boots. All day her slow flat vowels washed over Toni.
It turned out that she had left a child behind with his father in San Diego. A boy, Otto, now nine years old. Now all she wanted was to have a baby. She was obsessed with moon cycles, fertility herbs, propitious times according to the I Ching. She told Toni endless stories of home births, children born on the floor of a tepee while everyone sat around chanting and holding hands.
The clearing was claustrophobic. Toni walked for miles along the road looking for a horizon, but apart from an occasional set of ringbarked karri, there was nothing but the black-green walls of trees. The only solace was to sit by the creek that ran across one corner of the block, and listen to the quiet brown water, eternally leaving, going somewhere. To join the inlet, she supposed, to lose itself in the great Southern Ocean.
Clouds moved in overhead, ready to pour down rain. It was a sodden, remote place and the farmers were hard-pressed. There was a darkness everywhere.
A slow, dishonourable nostalgia took hold of her, not for Cy Fisher, but for the ease of her life with him. How simple everything had been! Without Cy she was back in the real world, fumbling along like everybody else. With Jacob, no doors opened for her, no tables were waiting, no respectful space cleared around her.
It wasn’t that she wanted to go back. But she began to realise how much Cy Fisher had formed her. Because she’d been so young when she met him, he had commandeered every part of her. She was still haunted by his judgements. She couldn’t help seeing the clearing though his eyes, the mud, the musty carriages, the pathetic garden, the hole dug in the bush with the toilet paper stuck on a twig beside it. She could almost see the black car pulling up in the clearing and Cy, with henchmen, stepping out and calmly giving orders. What would he think of Wanda wafting through the trees, putting her ear against their trunks, calling out that she could hear the sap rising? He would say she was a lady who’d taken too many drugs. Prem, on the other hand, he would recognise as a serious player. He always liked to use talent and application if he saw it: he might offer him a place on the team. But if he caught Prem watching her the way he sometimes did, the next day there’d be a nasty accident at the sawmill. Wanda would find herself on a plane back to America. Bulldozers would roll in. The carriages would go up in flames. Her imagination balked at what would happen to Jacob.
What she missed most were the mornings in the travel agency, coming downstairs to drink fresh coffee with Felice. Tuning the radio, discussing their dreams or the state of their hair. The sun shone in the park through the clear window and the boys walked past them to the back room, joking and winking at them, smelling of aftershave. Sabine might drop by with pastries and her new baby. All of them laughing, making plans to entertain themselves that day. However sinister some of Cy’s activities were, everyone was strangely light-hearted around him.
Yet if she walked down a street now and saw her, Felice would turn her face away. She would find the nearest phone and call her brother.
Had she grown too soft for any other way of life? She felt tired and listless all the time. She could hardly face the relentless beans and rice. The hole in the bush repelled her. She hated being dirty. The others got on her nerves. She ached to be alone, for light and space, a bath, an end, a future.
The spot mill closed down. For the time being work had finished. Prem went on the dole, which he collected from the post office in the store. Jacob witnessed Mrs Skinner’s open disgust as Prem signed for it. Prem remained serene, a prophet misunderstood in his own time. Jacob noted Prem’s real name: Gregory Payne.
It was too much of a risk for Jacob to go on the dole. They tried to think of jobs where they wouldn’t have to register. Cabbage picking in Manjimup? Waitressing in Albany? They couldn’t even afford the petrol to get there. Soon they would have to sell the VW, then they’d really be holed up here. Cy Fisher had got them well and truly trapped.
Already she knew more about Jacob than she ever had about Cy. She noticed how he changed with Prem and Wanda, using the right language, ‘man’ and ‘trippy’ and ‘bummer’. To hear him you would think he had no personal past, no experiences that weren’t political or psychedelic. He reinvented himself as one of the new breed.
It hurt her somehow, the way he changed. To see him as the outsider, trying to get in.
In private he was ironic, and had a rather literary t
urn of phrase. He missed books and described his favourites in detail to her. He missed music and films too. ‘What were you like as a little girl?’ he asked her. ‘What sort of books did you read?’ He said he couldn’t live with a woman without knowing about her childhood.
It was a crash course in living with each other. Now that they’d bridged the distance between them, Jacob came right up close. When they were alone together he couldn’t stop touching her. He slept with his arm or leg or hand on her. He said he couldn’t believe what had happened to him. To wake every morning to such loveliness beside him. The carriage rattled on its blocks. It was gritty and sticky, it was teenage passion. It was their test site, their honeymoon. She woke tired, as if even asleep, being with Jacob was intense.
Outside the mornings were dreamlike. His dazed crumpled face across the fire seemed to her to be her own face. He had become her familiar, at her shoulder, always with her, watching out for her, muttering his point of view. He was always telling stories of his life, trying to work it out. We, Jacob said. She wasn’t used to we. She’d never known a man to make himself so vulnerable.
It was like living in a new country, learning its customs and history. But it gave her back her youth, a lightness, an open-endedness. I’m not the slightest bit afraid of him, she thought.
He wasn’t a man of action. Before every task he liked to sit down and have a cup of tea and a smoke. She noticed that he always started with the least important thing first. If it was his turn to light the fire, he took so long spreading cold ashes methodically on the garden that Prem, impatient, jumped up and chopped the wood.
Jacob didn’t know how to work. She’d learnt from Cy Fisher about men and work. Cy would have said he was useless and sacked him.
As time passed Jacob became more and more morose. With no prospect of money they were stymied, stalemated everywhere they turned. He spent hours in the carriage, lying on the mattress with his eyes open. It made her brisk and practical. She tried to curb her impatience. After all, he was in this situation because of her. She was in his debt, a fact he never mentioned.
Sometimes they fought, their lovers’ faces spiteful and ugly, glistening in the dark with sweat and citronella. At heart she blamed him for not getting his act together, even though she wasn’t doing any better. He called her a spoilt middle-class girl, which was too close to the truth, and she didn’t talk to him all the next day. But they always made up, they had to, they had no choice. Under their sheet they clung to one another, grubby and slippery and desperate, not knowing how to save themselves.
One night she dreamt that she was walking through her parents’ house. She had never been back since she left, but now she saw everything with detailed accuracy, the bakelite switches, the ceiling roses, the varnished skirting boards. All the doors were open, swinging in the wind. She went from room to room and nobody was there.
In the morning she told Jacob that she wanted to go to the store and ring Beryl. The last time she’d phoned had been from the hotel in the wheat-belt. How many months ago was that?
Nig answered the phone. ‘Toni! We’ve been trying to find you. We’ve had the police out looking for you all over the north-west.’ Then he told her that last Friday Beryl had a heart attack.
‘She didn’t make it, sweetheart. The funeral’s at twelve tomorrow.
‘She was watching TV after dinner,’ he said into the silence. ‘I went to the club for a couple of hours and when I came back she was still in her chair. I thought she was asleep.’
My mother died alone, she told Jacob. She saw the empty chair in the lounge room under the standard lamp.
She stood still while everything moved around her. All at once, even as a grubby hippie in overalls, she had human status. Mrs Skinner’s son was about to drive the truck to Perth, Jacob told her. He held her hand.
‘Brad’ll give you a lift, love,’ Mrs Skinner called out.
Jacob gave her all the money he had, six dollars. ‘How will you get back?’ he asked, suddenly panicking, as she climbed up next to Brad.
‘I’ll ask my father for the bus fare,’ she called out the window as the truck roared into life.
Brad Skinner left her to her thoughts. He was a bulky country boy who lived with his mother behind the store and served petrol. She couldn’t recall ever hearing him speak. Now he squinted at the road, too shy to look at her. They drove down the winding shadowy roads of the forest into farmland, through miles of rolling tender paddocks. Everywhere she looked she saw light shimmering, at the tips of the trees they were passing, in the haze lying over low hills. The air seemed charged with energy. Is this where her mother had gone?
The closer they were to Perth, the warmer it became. Brad bought her a Coke and a cheeseburger from a roadhouse. She took one bite so as not to hurt his feelings and slipped it into her bag. Maybe later she’d be able to eat. She hated waste now, her mother’s daughter after all.
Brad dropped her off in the city. She caught the same green MTT bus from St George’s Terrace. It was dark by the time she walked down the familiar streets, the gardens luminous with spring blossom. Inside the old house was one thin yellow light. Nig opened the door, wearing worn slippers and wiping his mouth from his widower’s supper, sardines on toast. Still the gentleman, lean and handsome and courteous, though his eyes were very dark like an animal in shock. He showed no surprise at seeing her, but acted like a host, a little at a loss. ‘Help yourself to anything you want,’ he said. There was a bright jerkiness to all his movements. He was just enduring this. She left him to go back to his chair in front of the news while she walked through the rooms.
Already the life seemed to have been snuffed out of the place. The furniture huddled together in the crowded rooms. A large bouquet of white roses was dumped in the kitchen sink. Nig obviously hadn’t known what to do with it. The flowers were wilting, the water had seeped out. In one movement, without thinking, she took a vase from the cupboard, filled it with water and stuffed the roses in it. As she did she saw her mother’s hands. In the fridge were Beryl’s little bowls of left-overs with elasticised plastic covers. Days old now. She emptied them into the bin. Everything was older and smaller than she remembered.
But the bathroom looked luxurious to her. Taps! A toilet! A cupboard full of soothing creams. A mirror. She hadn’t looked at herself for months. Now she saw she wasn’t a city person any more. She was lighter, thinner, burnished by weather and air. She seemed too vivid for the mirror. Her hair fell below her shoulders in wild curls. She stood under the hot shower for half an hour, her overalls and sandshoes a grubby pile on the tiles. It was as if her life in the forest had been nothing but a gigantic children’s game and now she’d been called inside again. She reached for the old blue candlewick dressing gown hanging behind the door and then drew back. It was so much a part of Beryl that to wear it would be like putting on her mother’s skin. She found a big flannel shirt of her father’s to wear.
‘Think I’ll turn in now,’ Nig said. ‘Big day tomorrow.’ He gave her a fixed look, rueful, almost humorous. He smelt of whisky. The funeral represented everything he dreaded. Fuss. Emotion. Pity.
She lay on her narrow bed and listened to the creaking joints of the house. She remembered lying here as a child, home from school with a temperature, listening out for her mother’s sounds, tracking her around the rooms. Her high heels clattering to and from the bathroom sounded panicky when she was dressing for bridge. Her perfume was so strong it smelt chemical when Beryl kissed her, off to the field of battle up the street, an afternoon of fierce gossip and appraisal. Even as a child she knew her mother feared the judgement of women, as of a flock of pecking birds and ripping claws. There were feuds, standoffs, hurt feelings.
The air changed with Beryl’s moods. Sometimes she sang as she dusted, and the sound was like morning sunshine. Sometimes, after a fight with Nig, she lay on the bed and cried violently and the house went dark.
When she grew up she had to cut that bond, she was ruthless an
d her mother was afraid of her. What she didn’t understand at the time, couldn’t afford to understand, was that in running away from her mother she was running away from grief.
Karen walked into the bedroom where Toni and Nig were inspecting themselves in Beryl’s long mirror. ‘So you turned up,’ Karen said. ‘Your hair’s got very long.’ She went over to her father and straightened his tie. Her eye was caught by the dress Toni was wearing. ‘I see you’ve been through Mum’s things.’
It was the dress Beryl always called ‘my good silk’, navy-blue, tailored along matronly lines, but Toni pulled it in with an old leather belt. Her legs were bare and she wore flat leather sandals, the only shoes of her mother’s which fitted her. She’d coiled her hair up but she looked like a gypsy. She had to admit she enjoyed the swish of silk against her legs.
‘Go ahead, take what you want. It’s all going to the op shop in a few days,’ Karen said.
‘I don’t want anything.’
Something had happened to Karen. Her face had tightened across the cheekbones and her eyes were screwed up with tension. Her lips had shrunk. She was gaunt.
‘How’s Lincoln?’
‘Haven’t you heard? We finally got a diagnosis. He’s never going to walk or speak or sit up by himself.’ She turned her head away for a moment. ‘I think it was the last straw for Mum.’
Bevan filled the doorway. ‘The car’s come for us.’ As if to balance Karen, he’d grown fuller everywhere. Toni followed him down the hall and saw a little roll of fat spilling over the back of his white collar.
