by Kate Lyons
‘Yeah. I’m trying. I told you. We need a part.’ An expensive part. And just yesterday, his money had started running out. He’d stood on the pavement outside the bank, staring at the receipt, Enough left for a few groceries, if he was careful, if it was just flour, sugar, tea, a tank of petrol to get him over the border. Enough to live on for a month. But only if he was careful and he was alone.
‘Sorry. You did. I forgot.’ She sat back sighing, fanning herself with her hat. ‘I’m just tired. I didn’t sleep very well. I keep having that dream. The one I told you about before.’
He opened his beer. His radio beside him, but he didn’t turn it on.
‘It was just like the last time, but more real. It was growing all over the bed this time and up the wall. So green, so lush. That proper English green. I could almost taste it, like a thirst or an itch. Like those people in accidents who dream they still have legs. Then of course I woke up.’ She gestured listlessly, out toward the road or the ridge, or beyond that, toward the city and the sea. Some home he’d never seen.
‘Yeah. Well. The doctor warned you. Maybe lay off those pills.’
‘I know that, Ray. I did hear him. I was there, remember? If I don’t take them, I don’t sleep at all.’ Jaw set, she stared out toward the creek. Something moving out there, at knee height in the steady blow of dust. A humming noise beneath the groan of the windmill blades.
Squinting out, he realised it was insects. Clouds of them, snipping, snapping, whipping through the air, sounding like a thousand tiny sprinklers going all at once.
Before he had time to wonder what they were or what they were finding to eat, a big gust blew up, and they were lost in a billowing wave of dust. She sighed.
‘Jesus. Look at that. Bad as Ruby bloody Downs.’
Here it comes. He took a long swallow of beer, went back to his pump.
‘You know, I think the only green thing when I got out there was me. I remember getting out of Sam’s truck and the heat hitting and seeing Freda shovelling dust off the verandah, mountains of it, and thinking, Jesus, what have I done? They’d had this big storm, the day before. She was taking it out in wheelbarrows. No grass out there. Just rocks.’ Her face was lean and anguished in the shadow of her hat. ‘Those poor bloody sheep. What do they eat?’
‘Saltbush mostly. It’s why they taste like that.’
She sniffed, waving away a fly.
‘Wouldn’t know. Don’t eat lamb. Don’t eat meat, not really. Not unless there’s nothing else.’
Dumbfounded, he reached into his pocket for his tobacco. All those stews and curries he’d been cooking. The Sunday roasts he’d slaved over, in that tiny oven, in forty-degree heat. Just last night, a casserole. He’d thought it was the pills again, the nausea, the way she’d eaten only a potato while pushing lamb shanks round and round her plate, watched intently by the dog.
‘Ruby Downs sounds so pretty, doesn’t it? It’s why I answered the ad. I liked the name. How stupid is that.’ She started picking at the arm of her chair, fretting at the cane, unravelling it, trying to stick it back. ‘Don’t know what I was thinking. Sunsets in meadows or something. What a joke.’ Big hands on her, for such a thin person. Brown fingers, strong wrists. As if what was left of her had been stretched on the scaffold of some sturdier, more capable person, someone she might have been or might be again.
‘Max told me later it was named after some farmer’s wife. Ruby someone or other. Dead, of course.’
He drained his beer. Watched a chicken peck back and forth across the yard, like an actor crossing a stage.
It was always like this, in their conversations on the verandah, at midday, when it got too hot to work, or at dusk, when work was done. Her in the chair with her hat and her tea and the same book she never opened. Him on the step with tea or beer and whatever bit of machinery he happened to be working on at the time. Head down, hands busy. Listening, not listening, to her talking and not talking, to the long moments when she fell headlong and hopeless into a tense silence which was only the absence of the next story. Always the same story, over and over, in fits and starts and circles. Always fretting at the same dry little knot of it. The farm, the creek, the lack of water, lack of money. Gary. Mick. The farm. Lack of rain. Lack of green.
‘I dream of green,’ she’d say, or ‘I’d kill for it.’ Once, ‘I’d die for it,’ before catching herself, with a horrified laugh.
Maybe it was just the illness, the way she was. Her immune system was down. Maybe it was a good sign, this fretfulness. Meant she was getting better, like a child coming out of a fever or a scab itching just before it falls away. Still, hard to take when he was tired from work that was done but never over. Something always nagging at him here, persistent and hopeless, pointless as her worry, peaking at the day’s tipping point, until hot and strung out, he felt like he’d been infected by whatever scouring illness was ailing this place. He wished for a straightfoward job, with a start and an end to it. Even a fence would do.
‘Shouldn’t they at least have some grass on them?’ she was saying now, leaning toward him again, face cross with glare. ‘If they’re called downs?’
Maybe he had it all wrong. Maybe the way she was at first, soft, shy and uncomplaining, was the illness, and this was how she really was, all the time, underneath. He wouldn’t know. Had nothing to measure it against. All he knew was that if he just kept sitting here, working away at whatever broken thing was in his hand, if he didn’t talk too much, didn’t look at her, as if she was a high-strung horse and he a steady point at the end of her rope, she’d stop picking at things, the chair, history, her own skin. Settle into some story or other. His job was to weather her, like a rock or a tree.
‘It’s an English word, after all.’ Her father was English, she’d told him. There was a photo of him on the bookshelf inside. A bald man with big-knuckled hands, playing golf with his new and much younger wife. There was a photo of her mother too, at the opposite end of the bookcase, a small dark woman sitting alone on the verandah of the harbourside home Lily had grown up in, where she’d learned ballet and nagged for a piano and had big plans to visit England, after school, after her year off in the outback, working as a governess. Where she’d met Gary and had Mick. And that was that.
‘I always meant to go,’ she’d told him. ‘Meet Dad’s new family, then go round Europe or something. Before uni. You know.’
He didn’t know. He’d left school at fourteen. He’d gone travelling too, but for work, pivoting away from home in wide parched circles, heading to places containing more sheep than people, always on his own. Ballet, ponies, uni, England. It was all as alien to him as Ruby Downs had been to her.
‘Why don’t you go now then?’ he’d asked, more than once. ‘Just sell up. Go and see your mum.’ In her nice house on the harbour. But the house had been sold, after her parents’ divorce. And she didn’t get on with her mum’s new husband. And there was Mick, in school, and the farm, which couldn’t be sold until she found the papers, which may or may not be in her name. And there was Gary. Who might still come back. And there they were, again.
‘Ray? Someone’s coming. Down there.’
She was pointing out toward the dam. Fear or anticipation in her voice, he couldn’t tell.
‘See?’ A little puff of dust, heading cross-country, up toward the house. He thought of the feral neighbour, the husband and his beer bottles, the scar on Mick’s arm. Had started clearing his lap and thinking about his own gun, still locked in the ute, bullets wrapped in their pillowcase and hidden in the strongbox under his bed, when he heard the sound of the engine, high and whiny, like an overburdened sewing machine.
‘It’s just Mick. He must have got the bike going.’ Although where he’d got the petrol from, Ray didn’t know.
‘What bike?’
‘You know. The one I found in the shed.’ Gary’s old trail bike, which Ray had fixed up, new tyres, new sparks, new fuel line, all on the proviso that before Mick rode it or even touc
hed it, he’d make a start on the henhouse, with all that new lumber Ray had bought with the money he didn’t really have.
‘Oh. Yeah. That old thing.’ She frowned at her watch. ‘It’s really late though. Shouldn’t he be at school?’
‘It’s Saturday. And anyway, it’s the holidays.’
‘Oh. Yes. I forgot.’
Mick had reached the driveway. Together they watched him doing donuts, ploughing his front wheel through the blue metal Ray had lain across the entrance, to quell the dust and fill the holes.
‘He needs a haircut. Before school starts.’
Ray, who had his own ideas about what Mick might need, relit his rollie. Mick was off the bike now, leaving it running, petrol chugging away, while he used Ray’s shovel to scoop and gouge at the metal, mounding it up to form a ramp between the cattle grid and the drive.
‘Should have a helmet on at least.’
‘He’s got one, Lily. He won’t wear it.’
‘I know,’ she sighed. ‘He’s just like his dad. There’s no telling him.’ She could give it a go.
Revving the little motor to breaking point, Mick embarked on a long wobbly wheelie past the house.
‘Gary loved that bike. He was on it when I first met him, you know. Out at Ruby Downs. He was helping Sam with mustering or mulesing or something, whatever new and awful thing they were doing to those sheep.’
Ray checked his watch, then the shadow of the windmill in the dirt. Still too hot to get back on the roof, but he could work on the henhouse. Mick had left it barely half-built.
‘He was really nice, back then. About the only nice thing that happened out there. I needed to post a letter, see, and he gave me a lift into town. Way Freda went on about it, you’d think we’d eloped. She left me this note. No fraternising. She kept going on about it. Couldn’t spell it of course.’
Lily drained her tea and made a face, either at Freda or the tea, which had to be stone cold by now.
‘They’d had some trouble or something, with the one before. I guess that’s why they put the governess quarters so far from the house.’ She snorted, kicking away the chicken, which was trying to peck her toes. ‘Governess. What a joke. Mum said it sounded Dickensian. I said, you want Dickens, you should see my room. I don’t think that bathroom had ever been cleaned.’
Ray thought of the state of her own place when he’d first arrived, but said nothing. Went on shaving rust off a part that would never work, not without another part he couldn’t afford.
‘Don’t know what I was expecting. Latin and shady hats or something. Instead it was heat and dust and sheep poo and frogs in the toilet. And those boys. My God. Freda let them run wild.’
‘Yeah. She’s got a lot on her plate. With the kids. And Sam.’
‘Yeah. Right.’
‘Boys have settled down a bit now. They’re at boarding school.’
A long silence. Ray heard the motorbike again, faint, growing louder in tune with Ray’s irritation. He thought about getting up, despite the heat. If Mick came back down the driveway, he could head him off.
‘And Marcus? What about him?’
‘The eldest? Don’t think I’ve met him. Before my time.’
‘Oh, you’d remember if you had. Big, fat, red hair. Looks like Sam. Always killing things. Pigs, mostly. He looked a bit like a pig.’ The words bitter, sharp, spat out. He glanced round but her face was hidden by her hat.
Relighting the stub of his rollie, he heard a clicking sound. She had her hand out, snapping her fingers. When he hesitated, she raised an eyebrow, as if to say, what difference could it make? So he rolled her one and lit it for her, not meeting her eyes, focusing instead on her wrist, the freckles there, like flecks in brown gravy. Her big teeth snagging on her bottom lip as she picked shreds of tobacco out of her mouth.
‘He was the worst. Those younger ones, they were just naughty, stealing shoes or putting lizards in my undie drawer. But Marcus. You know, I found him with a cat once, out behind the shed. It was horrible. I told Freda. She did nothing of course.’
‘Yeah. Freda does her best.’
‘He put a snake in my room, Ray. A snake.’ A stream of blue smoke, and then a coughing fit. She threw her half-smoked fag into the yard, where the chicken pecked at it hopefully then wandered away.
‘A big brown one, right in the middle of my bed. I spent half the night locked in the bathroom. How was I to know it was dead?’
He got up to stamp the butt out, really to hide his smile.
‘I would have spent the whole night in there, if Max hadn’t come along. Do you know Max? The artist guy, with the long hair? He still there?’ Ray nodded. He knew him, although the artist part was rich. He was the accountant come temp cook come hippie backpacker who’d arrived at Sam’s years ago, looking for a few weeks’ work, then never left. Did odd jobs for Freda, bit of cooking, bit of bookkeeping, this and that. Freda called him her artist in residence. Grog artist, more like.
‘What did he want?’
‘Max? Nothing. Just being friendly, that’s all. He’d bought me some books, because he knew I’d run out and all I had were Sam’s old ones, and they were all about sheep. Had enough bloody sheep during the day, thanks very much.’
She had her hand out again. ‘Ray. Can I have another one?’
‘Sorry. No papers. I’ve run out,’ he lied, hoping she’d give up, go inside, have a lie down. But she kept on talking, into the glare, as if vomiting up something she had to get out.
‘It was my fault, in the end. Such a stupid thing to do, after all that fuss about Gary. But Max asked me if I wanted to come for a drink, with the others, down at the dam. And it was Friday night, and I was lonely, and he was nice. Different. I liked his accent.’ Her teacup now empty, she picked up Ray’s beer, draining the last few drops, putting the bottle back down with a bang.
‘I didn’t realise. When he said the others, I thought he meant the B&B people. Some of them were women. Girls.’
Ray concentrated on peeling the label from the bottle of beer. Didn’t want to ask. Didn’t want to know.
‘What did he do?’
‘Who?’ She seemed lost out there again, beyond the creek and ridge.
‘Max.’
‘Him? Oh, nothing. He wasn’t even there by the time I went over. They said he’d gone off to do some painting. Although it was pretty dark by then.’
She cocked her head toward the track. That tinny whine again, faint but growing louder, heading up the road.
‘It wasn’t his fault, not really. It was the place. The whole set-up. The feeling out there, you know? And I was such a twit back then. They were only kids really, barely older than Mick is now. But they were pretty big. Well, Marcus was. I should have just gone back to my room as soon as they started. But I was a bit freaked out, I guess, and angry at Max for leaving, so I stalked off. On my own. Exactly what you’re not supposed to do.’
Spitting stones, a flurry of crows startled from the fence. Mick, at full throttle, heading toward the ramp he’d made.
‘You know how dark it gets out there. I didn’t even have a torch. I didn’t think I’d gone that far but I must have been walking faster than I thought, because by the time I calmed down and stopped, I couldn’t see the house lights or even the fire any more. And there were all these rustling and cracking noises, probably just animals or something, but I thought they were footsteps. So I started running, like an idiot. Thought I was heading back to the house but I must have got turned around in the dark.’
Mick had hit the metal, mounted it, the bike airborne, twisting sideways, sailing too close to the fence. Amid the dust, a glint of silver, flaming red hair.
‘By the time Gary got to me, I was way out, past the dam, near that old quarry thing. He said I was lucky I didn’t fall right into it. He said it had happened in the fifties, to some girl, and they’d never found her, not even her body. Lucky.’ She broke off, panting, as if she was still running. Ray sucked at the dead stub of his ciga
rette. Wanting to get up, walk away. Wanting to put his fingers in his ears.
‘When Gary found me, he said I tried to run off. Scratched up his face. I don’t remember. Good thing, I suppose. Lucky. Like he said.’ Ray felt sick. ‘I must have thought it was Marcus, see, back again. They’d been shooting together, see. Pigs or something. In the dark, they smelled the same.’
They watched Mick reach earth again, in an ungainly spin of dust and gravel, wheels skewing wildly side to side.
‘Silly sod. He’ll break his neck.’ And still she made no move to get up.
Ray threw his beer bottle at the drum. It missed, smashing on the tap, making Lily jump. The hen squawked, fluttered wildly. Glass everywhere. Another mess for him to clean up.
‘Better get those chickens in. There’s been a fox around.’
He walked fast and furious toward the gate. On the way he saw the petrol flap on his ute was open. The cap was missing, a bit of garden hose sticking out of the tank. The rest of the hose had been cut to pieces, lay scattered on the ground.
He kept on walking, past the henhouse, built in the wrong place of course, right out near the tank, where there was not a scrap of shade. Wonky, wire flapping loose. Wouldn’t keep a rabbit out, let alone a fox. He just walked on, faster and faster, out toward the gate, where Mick was still mucking around with the blue metal, driving fresh ruts into Ray’s new track.
‘Oi! Your mum wants you. Up the house.’
As soon as he spotted Ray, the little bugger roared off in the opposite direction, toward the creek.
Ray turned on his heel. Time to check his phone. He strode up toward the ridge, the only spot he could get reception in this place.
Wind was getting stronger. Dust rising, the far paddock relocating itself to the banks of the creek. Not his problem. Organic. What a joke. This place would never be organic, not in a hundred years. And you’d have to grow something first. For that you’d need to get the bore going, and for that you’d need to hit the aquifer, and for that you’d need a new drill and a new submersible, which would cost a lot of money he didn’t have. Six months, six men, six inches of rain. And who was this you, exactly? Not him, that was for sure.
