‘Sorry, love,’ he said.
‘It’s the new medication. It needs to be changed.’
‘Bloody oath, it does.’
He closed his eyes. His face looked pale and shrunken and his white hair sat limp on his shoulders like he was an ancient wise-being, Gandalf without a beard. From the laundry, on the other side of the porch, came the sound of running water and Enrico’s off-key singing.
‘I can call the doctor now to sort something out,’ I said.
‘I’ll take a couple of Tramal. That’ll do me for the night.’
‘You’re only supposed to take one.’
‘Don’t argue with me.’
So I got him a double dose of his old painkiller and a glass of water and held it close to his mouth to make it easier for him to sip and swallow.
He asked to be left to sleep. I closed the curtains, pulled two pillows away and picked up the plate with the barely touched toast and the half-full mug of tea. He was sleeping before I left the room, flat on his back, quietly breathing through his mouth.
In the morning, Charlie was too weak to get out of bed. His mouth was dry and he seemed confused when I spoke. He kept falling back to sleep. With all the vomiting and emptying out, there was nothing left inside him. I tried to get him to sip water, but he wouldn’t sit up and seemed too vague to understand what I wanted.
I phoned the medical clinic and asked for Julie Maxwell, but the receptionist said she was with a patient.
‘But it’s important,’ I said.
‘What’s wrong?’
And when I told her, she said I needed to call an ambulance and all at once it was an emergency and I hung up and dialled 000.
It took thirty minutes for the ambulance to arrive, all the way up those twenty-five kilometres of climbing and winding roads from Euroa to Huntly.
A dark-blue uniformed man and woman walked in through the back door. They were about my age, but larger, and unhurried in the way of calm purpose and tiredness. Around their waists were pouches and they each carried a zipped bag over their shoulder.
They knew before they arrived what the problem was. So I added to the bad news, that their patient, who had metastasised prostate cancer, had self-medicated to fix his constipation.
‘A side-effect from his new medication,’ I said.
‘Where is he?’ the man asked.
I pointed and kept talking – as if I was helping.
They got to work without speaking, glances between them. The man knelt down beside Charlie, and as he pulled on pink disposable gloves, he started asking questions.
‘What’s your name?’
Charlie, with eyes closed, whispered his name.
‘Where are you, Charlie?’
‘Home.’
‘And how old are you?’
‘Too old.’
He was eighty-two because we’d celebrated his birthday in August with an orange-and-polenta cake Enrico had made. But he looked much older than that, ninety or a hundred, too frail to be alive. It felt hopeless and remarkable that his heart was beating of its own accord, and his organs kept doing whatever they did, and his mind was still clear.
I stood close to the bed while they got to business with electrodes and other things and finally he was attached to an IV drip through a catheter inserted in the back of his left hand.
They said they were taking him to Shepparton hospital.
‘Probably just a couple of days,’ she said. ‘They’ll sort him out for you.’
I took Charlie’s hand and leaned down and kissed his cool forehead and said I’d be in to see him later, in the afternoon after I’d picked Sophie up from school. Already I was thinking about new pyjamas, slippers, a dressing gown.
He smiled weakly with his eyes closed. And I knew then he was as relieved as me that he was being taken away to get his medications and pain all under control.
I went to the rose garden with my sharpened secateurs. At the base of each bush, among fallen leaves and mulch and weeds, was a copper name plate with Charlie’s cursive script in white paint – La Minuette, Patricia, Sharifa Asma, Jean Ducher, Belle Amour, Scarlet Sunblaze.
The roses were in their first spring bloom, dramatic and unblemished with no yellowing leaves or blackspot. I had thrown some of the blueberry fertiliser around them and done a quick prune one Saturday afternoon back in late winter.
I cut the brightest and most perfect. Sharifa Asma was my favourite – layers of curly pink petals and a fragrance so feminine I wanted the bottled version.
It was another life when Michael Foster had sent me those unscented mass-produced pink roses to my office. And Lena, with her age-stretched skin, had shamed me as I had tried to avoid owning up to who had sent them.
Now, I was here.
Charlie was in a twin share, still connected to an IV drip. Another thin old man, wearing 1970s glasses, had the window view across the almost full car park. He was watching a small touch screen suspended by an arm from the ceiling. The volume was up too high, as if it didn’t matter that Charlie was asleep less than three metres away.
Enrico placed the only chair close to Charlie’s bed and waved for me to sit. I pulled Sophie onto my lap and the three of us watched the slight rise and fall of Charlie’s chest and the occasional flicker of his closed eyes. We listened to a game show – buzzers and bursts of excited talking.
No one seemed to be around. Looking down the length of the corridor, I saw a nurse dart into a patient’s room, another hurried in behind her. Something was going on. So after we’d had enough of staring at Charlie’s sleeping face, we decided to leave.
I put the roses on the table above his bed. On the chair, I laid out two pairs of new pyjamas, slippers and a dashing silky blue dressing gown that I knew he’d love, along with toiletries in a black vinyl zip bag.
Collapsed into the bed pillows, I drafted an email to Warren. The words came quickly because there wasn’t much to it – the reason Charlie was in hospital, that he was all right, and that I would update him as things progressed. I signed off, Best regards; with a hasty PS saying the harvest was only a couple of weeks away and the packaging was due to arrive. We’re almost ready! I watched the fast tapping of my fingers on the keypad and hit send. The email was too friendly and I couldn’t think why, except he was Charlie’s son and his silence had made him somehow less menacing.
What I did next had been settling in me for hours. My phone was in my hand and it only took a second to press Shane’s number.
It was just past nine-thirty and when he answered his voice was hesitant and far away and I knew I had woken him. I apologised and he said it was all right.
‘I’m back in Canberra, drove up this morning,’ he mumbled. ‘Been a long day.’
I continued on and told him what had happened, that Charlie was in hospital and that when we visited he had slept the whole time.
‘I sent Warren an email,’ I said.
‘Probably the right thing.’
I stared into the chipped ceiling dome with its hanging amber light, thinking what else to say, wondering why I had called, and hating myself for doing it.
‘What time will I pick you up Saturday?’ he asked.
‘Are we having dinner first?’
‘Sure.’
So it was settled. With the light off, I curled up with the second pillow against my back, terrified about what had just occurred. Caught between happiness and fear, I wished the night out wasn’t happening, yet I drifted to sleep thinking about what I’d wear. I brought my clothes forward, each on display – my t-shirts and shirts, my brown pants and jeans and skirts – and I asked myself which of them Shane had seen before, and whether any of that mattered.
Within half an hour of arriving home, Charlie shuffled impatiently through the front garden. With his pain under control, he seemed stronger and his colour was better. As he turned into the rose garden, a parrot – stunning vivid green – landed on the top rung of the garden chair. The bird and I watched Char
lie disappear towards his studio.
At lunchtime, I took him a sandwich and a thermos of milky sugared tea.
‘How’re you feeling?’
‘Stop worrying about me.’
Nina Simone was quietly singing some slow, moody song. The studio was spare, half empty with only the first stages of new clutter. It didn’t feel right, but neither of us had made an attempt to recreate it as it had been. The Fowlers jars were filled with his old brushes and palette knives, all in a row on the table beneath the window. Within a hand’s reach was a freshly opened bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a half-full glass. There was an open bottle of turps with rags lying around. The red velvet chaise lounge was back where it had always been and a framed canvas was leaning against the wall near the door, covered in a dirty paint-spotted sheet. It was the new Marilyn.
‘Can I look?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’m not ready yet.’
On the easel was a small canvas of palette knife scraps and carvings of yellow paint. It was a painting of the front veranda with the rose trailing along the length of the house. The lounge room window was in the shade and the faint pencil sketch outline of a person could be seen sitting on the veranda.
‘Is that you?’ I said.
Yellow paint was on the tips of his fingers, and on the back of his hand was a dark-red bruise where the catheter had been inserted for the IV drip.
‘Yes, love.’
We stood in silence while he worked in a slow rhythm, his hands moving, perhaps to the music, layering and gradually developing the trailing rose.
‘This morning I spoke to your oncologist,’ I said.
‘So you know, then. It’s official. I made her write it down. I’m just taking the pain tablets from now on. Nothing else. Not even a blood test. I’m done with the lot of it.’
I couldn’t stop the inevitability of Charlie dying.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ I said.
He took a mouthful of whiskey and brushed his lips with the back of his hand. ‘Give me some good news.’
‘The blueberry packaging is arriving this afternoon.’
He nodded, picking up a tube of paint.
‘And tonight I’m going to the pub and the movies with Shane.’
His pale blue eyes looked up. ‘Are you now?’
‘You seem surprised?’
‘I thought he’d be off of women for a while.’
‘Why?’
‘Once bitten, twice shy. You know, after all the carry-on with Jess.’
And while Charlie played with the wet yellow paint, angling the tip of the palette knife, he kept talking. ‘And to be honest, I could see his point of view. It was his inheritance, passed down from all those generations. And after fifteen years of marriage and no kids, she scooped the pool.’
‘Did he love her?’
‘It looked that way to me. She was nice. But a city girl who locked herself away all the time with her head in her books. She hardly left the house.’
I had an image of Shane with a brunette under his arm, yet I didn’t even know if she was brunette.
‘What did she study?’
‘Something to do with history and literature. And when she got her qualification, that’s when she shot through to Melbourne.’
‘She must’ve been unhappy.’
‘Never liked the isolation and hated the cows. I don’t blame her there.’
As I backed away, he stopped working, the palette knife poised.
‘Are you keen on him, love?’
The answer was yes, perhaps too keen, the way I had stood in front of the wardrobe mirror and looked at my naked self, posing with my chin up, and finding fault with my small breasts and big backside, and the cowlick at the side of my fringe, and my short fingernails, which now seemed impossible to grow.
‘Just friends. There’s a good movie on.’
‘Will I have Sophie then?’
‘She’s sleeping over at Freya’s.’
It was a faraway throbbing, an almost silent beat that grew. Then the groan of lowering gears.
The packaging had arrived.
By the time I walked from Charlie’s studio to the packing shed, Enrico was already there, running from side to side and waving his arms, directing the driver as he backed up.
The truck doors were flung open. Inside was a flat block of large cardboard boxes filled with clam-shell punnets, and the bound, flattened trays that needed to be assembled.
The driver was skinny and fat-gutted. He tapped a cigarette out of a soft packet and put a smoke between his thin lips. He flicked a pink lighter and I remembered the street lepers in Melbourne – workers huddled together with smokes between their fingers.
‘Give you a hand, if you like,’ he said.
‘That’d be great. But you need to put your smoke out. I have a no smoking policy here.’
‘What’d yer mean?’
‘No smoking on my property.’
‘Fuck that, luv.’
He took a drag and blew smoke sideways into the breeze and I stepped back from the smell.
Enrico touched my arm. ‘The unpacking needs the three persons.’
‘Can you go and stand somewhere else, then. Until you’ve finished it.’
‘I’ll be in me cab. Let me know when you’re done.’
‘If you’re not going to help we’ll be using a different carrier next year.’
He smiled, revealing missing teeth. ‘Good luck with that.’
It took two hours. The cartons were so heavy I could only push them along the floor. I saw the faithful straining in Enrico’s back as he lifted and stacked. And, in all of that effort, I was thinking it was impossible that we would use that many trays and fill that many punnets with the blueberries that were so close to being ready to pick.
When we were done and the driver had left, I pulled open a carton and lifted out a wad of punnets. I peeled one off, a single clam shell, and folded it in half. The label, SOPHIE’S BLUEBERRIES, jumped out in bright-pink letters.
In Row 28, I found a patch of Denise blueberries, each the size of a plump grape. Most were pink at the stem but looked ripe at the top. I filled the punnet quickly, and stared into it, seeing that it was mine. I shook it to hear the blueberries move against the recyclable plastic and I turned it upside-down to see if the clam stayed sealed, and it did. Then I posted a close-up photo of it on Facebook, saying it was the first punnet and that harvest would start in about ten days. The likes and comments came quickly, wishing me luck. How exciting! Go girl …
Overhead came the quiet whoosh of beating wings, a hundred or more starlings were in flight, turning and moving as one, like a shoal of silver fish. I walked up the row, stopping and looking into the bushes and wondering how I would know when to get the backpackers in.
24
SHANE tried to get to the passenger door first, but I hurried ahead. I couldn’t bear him treating me differently to other times – like this was special, like we were on a date.
I shut the door firmly.
We clipped on our seatbelts.
He had cleaned out the cabin – there were no power tools or fencing equipment. The floor mats were dirt-free and slightly wet.
At the end of Josephs Road, he turned right into a long dirt stretch I had hardly noticed before. We passed distant houses with long driveways, surrounded by paddocks.
‘Who lives out here?’
He pointed, giving the names. ‘Eddie and Diane are over there,’ he said, slowing at a house almost camouflaged by trees, the peak of a grey corrugated roof. ‘He’s a good mate. Works for me sometimes and looks after my place when I’m away.’
We travelled along the spine of the Strathbogie tableland, through commercial pine plantations with panoramic views across the State forest. The sky changed to the palest mauve as we settled on Charlie’s decision not to have further treatment.
‘Only morphine tablets. Two kinds.’
‘How do you feel about it?’ he asked.
‘It feels far away, something I don’t need to worry about yet.’
‘Did you hear back from Warren?’
‘No.’
Then down into dairy country, piebald cows loitered outside a shed. Two wedge-tailed eagles, feasting on road kill, shied away into the bushes as we passed.
Shane was matter-of-fact about this strange drive across the mountain. Paddocks and eucalypts flew by and we crossed a narrow bridge and passed a general store. And in all those kilometres, I considered the weirdness of where I was, and who I was with. I imagined Nick, and my dead father and absent mother – and everyone else I knew – watching me sitting there beside Shane McCurdy in his twin-cab. I saw their surprise, curiosity and approval, and by the time we arrived at the pub I felt more myself, breathing normally.
We sat at a cosy table against a timbered wall. I liked the size and feel of the place – a faux Tudor pub, with antique tankards on a ledge surrounding the room, and grainy black-and-white photos of the early logging done in the area.
A pretty girl with a nose ring and Irish accent told us the specials.
We ordered quickly.
And so we faced each other. A red rosebud, in a copper vase, was on the table between us.
‘I think the food’s all right here,’ he said. ‘They turn the chefs over regularly, so you can never tell.’
I tried to make a joke, but forgot to smile. ‘I’ve not been out in almost a year, whatever it’s like, it’ll be just fine.’
He half grinned, amused and was about to say something when our drinks arrived. The froth from his Guinness spilled over the side, onto his fingers.
‘Cheers,’ he said.
We touched glasses.
‘Do you miss Melbourne?’
‘No, not really,’ I said. ‘I’ve been too busy.’
‘You don’t miss anything?’
‘What would I miss? Traffic? Pressure? Stressing over billable hours?’
‘I’ve wondered about you. Why you’d buy a neglected blueberry orchard.’
So I tried to explain what my old job was, what it was like working for snap-your-finger clients and managing Sophie on my own.
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