The World Without Us

by Mireille Juchau

  Will there be dancing?

  Of course, Heidi, says Marlene. But you haven’t got your hopes up? It’s been a long while since we’ve seen him.

  Jim ambles off through the camphor air past a rack of ties and belts that conjure the men he sees, sitting out their final days at the Hillsdale Home by the river. He picks through the broken-spined hardcovers with their faded dedications, the scuffed picture books, the liver-spotted Penguins, and spots two volumes of Neruda, a dog-eared Robinson Crusoe. A nice companion to the Thoreau he’s been reading the kids.

  Then he climbs the stairs to a mezzanine. Veneer cabinets, old suitcases and a keyboard jostle in the cramped space. New music, louder here. On the shelves, Skyhooks and John Travolta posters in cracked plastic frames, teddies gazing benignly through glazed eyes. As Jim sidles by a glass-topped table he hears John Lennon’s voice swelling, then sees, by the row of encyclopedias, Heidi Tucker swaying, face upturned, eyes closed and singing.

  She twirls, pink gloves out, terror and longing on her face. Jim immediately sees that this is some deeply private ritual, and steps quietly back downstairs. Mother. He recognised the song, he’d learned it himself on the guitar as a kid – Lennon had written it for his mother, Julia, who died when he was seventeen.

  Is she OK up there? he asks as Marlene lines up knitted booties. Eight miniature feet.

  It’s her favourite song, Marlene says. She comes in every fortnight.

  Jim hands her the paperbacks, some coins.

  Poetry! Marlene says. Well, no one ever, unless it’s Pam Ayres!

  Then she leans in closer. I suppose I can trust a person who reads poetry.

  Heidi used to meet her son in the shop, she tells him. Not Thomas – the older boy, Peter. The staff soon realised she was giving him her benefit because he always came Thursdays. But he hasn’t been in for more than a year. There were rumours about police trouble. He was always a bit furtive, that one.

  We play along, just for Heidi, Marlene says. We’ve pretended ever since that he might still turn up. It’s the ritual that counts most, after all.

  She bags the books and counts out change.

  His daughter lives round here, Marlene says. Estranged was what he called her. But he was always saying how very keen he was to get her back.

  Later, in his cabin, Jim drinks vodka and reads the dog-eared Defoe. Every now and then, glancing up. Lights blink on at Honig Farm. But he forces himself back to the book, thinking of Lennon, who was said to have never recovered from his mother’s death. He thinks of Heidi, waiting for her son amid the cast-offs. And of his own young, feeling self. What to do with all that emotion? He looks at the glass. Drains it. Still thirsty, and breathless. Still restless. He turns back to the book and starts underlining:

  I went up the Shore and down the Shore, but it was all one, I could see no other Impression but that one, I went to it again to see if there were any more, and to observe if it might not be my Fancy; but there was no Room for that, for there was exactly the very Print of a Foot, Toes, Heel, and every Part of a Foot; how it came thither, I knew not, nor could in the least imagine. But after innumerable fluttering Thoughts, like a Man perfectly confus’d and out of my self, I came Home to my Fortification, not feeling, as we say, the Ground I went on, but terrify’d to the last Degree, looking behind me at every two or three Steps, mistaking every Bush and Tree, and fancying every Stump at a Distance to be a Man …

  Defoe, on his island, haunted by footprints, by signs of strange habitation. Heidi, waiting for the son that will not come. Jim’s feet in his mother’s shoes, trying to figure out how it is actually possible that she won’t be coming home. He tightens Veronica’s gown around him. Then starts idly sketching on a scrap of paper. A mountain; a tree; a child’s sandal roped to the trunk.

  18

  You girls know how to do eggs? asks Nora, parking a basket on the porch table.

  Tess and Meg squint into razory sunshine, both in pyjamas, their stomachs churning because they’ve forgotten breakfast. Now it’s nearly noon. Tess, scratching her head, yawns. Three days into spring holidays. Bored already.

  Thanks, says Meg. But we have chooks, so … plenty of eggs.

  I bought them for your mother’s lying-in, says Nora.

  You’re way too early for that, says Meg. Besides, she’s at the clinic.

  Anyway, says Nora, how exciting, girls!

  Tess, watching with pursed lips and folded arms, slowly shakes her head.

  Nora wriggles on to a porch chair.

  Omelette, scrambled, fried, poached, frittata, she says. Huevos rancheros. A real favourite at The Hive. So nice to cook from your natural larder, eh Tess?

  Tess looks at her blankly. Her mother hasn’t eaten an egg since she found the fourth duckling among the chickens, henpecked to death. Tess had found her after, filling the tiny duckling grave, in sudden need of a hug. But Nora, who’s been coming around more often, wouldn’t know that. Nora only appears when their mother isn’t here.

  So, will it be a brother or sister? Nora asks, her eyes very eager. A boy might be nice.

  The girls stare with closed, hostile faces.

  I’ll never forget the night you were born! she says quickly, tapping Tess on the head.

  Tess frowns, scrapes her hair into a ponytail, tipping her neck right back. She yawns, she’s got more urgent stuff to do than listen to Nora. Their mother’s left a list, things to be washed and folded for the baby. Clothes from a trunk stored in the attic. Last worn by baby Pip. When their father saw these, piled on a chair, he said, Put them back – we’ll buy new ones. When their mother asked, what with, he’d said, the last of the honey money. But the clothes stayed in the lounge because no one had it in them to return them to the ceiling.

  At The Hive Birthing Cell, Nora’s saying, there was boiled water and clean sheets. But no epidural or gas, just marijuana and meditation.

  Your poor mum had an awful time. We all heard her, clear across the common ground. At first the moaning, later came the screaming …

  Meg turns her mouth down, then disappears, disgusted, into the house.

  Well, you ought to know about it, Nora calls after her. Specially if she’s having it here! There is pain, girls. There’ll be blood.

  Tess looks back through the shadowy house. Meg taking her time, clanking things in the kitchen. Tess feels cold in the chest; she clenches her fists and sighs loudly at Nora.

  First June’s stories and now Nora’s. I was born here, Tess thinks, a home birth. Just like Pip. The doctor won’t let her mother risk that now, even though she hates hospitals, and says, Well maybe I won’t make it in time, considering St Catherine’s is three hours away. Maybe I’ll just lie in the barn like Mary did with Jesus. How’s she supposed to travel that far in labour? She must book in early, the midwives told her. But there’s just no way, says her mother, she’s not spending another week in St Catherine’s.

  Nora settles on the porch chair, crossing a thigh. When Meg comes out with toast and tea, Nora asks,

  What’s the due date?

  Out along the lane a white goat is wandering. Tess looks across to the bee huts, where her father’s trialling Demaree swarm control, confining the queens to a lower chamber with the brood on top, though he’s almost given up rehabilitating these particular bees. She sees his blue denim back bent over and feels very sorry for him. Should she tell him about those bees on the mountain? If you stumble on a secret, are you bound to keep it to yourself ?

  Still not talking, Tess? asks Nora. Plenty of folks probably think you’re rude. But I understand. She helps herself to tea, tipping some into her saucer then lapping at it like a cat.

  Tess glares at a heifer in the front field, crosses her arms more tightly.

  But if you want to ask the hard questions, Nora lowers her voice as she eyes their father, hammering propolis, you should. Don’t spend your life wondering, she says. Once your parents are gone, all their stories go too.

  Meg brushes the grubb
y table with the side of her hand. Everything lately, silted with brown. Dust rolls across the dead-grass fields and wafts inside, dulling the floorboards. It aggravates Meg’s asthma, so their mother damp-mops every day just to get her off the Flixotide. Whenever Meg has an asthma attack Tess hears her mother’s words, wasting her breath speaking for you, and feels responsible.

  After the endless autumn rain – six weeks now of dry.

  Nora stares at their father, his face a mystery beneath the bee veil.

  Everyone on the commune was so excited when you arrived, she says, turning to Tess. A young woman’s first baby is always auspicious.

  Nora helps herself to Meg’s buttered toast.

  So, she says, chewing, everyone at The Hive was counting down the days and when you finally came there was panpipes and drumming and Jack just couldn’t wipe the grin off his face. He hadn’t the first idea about babies, though. Even if you were asleep he’d pick you up and joggle you. He had to have you awake, see. Then he’d throw you into the air like he’d seen someone do, way back, some memory of dadness. He throws you up, you scream – you were too small to be thrown, anyone could see that, your scrawny neck was loose, you were only good for swaddling, you certainly had no idea about fun …

  … Then why do it? Meg asks, foraging in her pocket. Three pencils clatter on to the porch.

  Jack did what Jack liked, says Nora. No one questioned him. Except your mother but even she turned quiet after the baby deal went sour. He chooses you for his favourite, OK. Decides you’re the one for reaping, you for peeling potatoes and you’re for beekeeping. Yes sir. Throws a newborn in the air … Okey-doke.

  Meg takes her cue from her sister’s face. It’s all closed up with that violet tinge her skin gets in the cold.

  After I was sent to fetch Lana Beaufort, Nora says, Angel never forgave me.

  Meg, still scowling at Nora, asks, What do you mean, baby deal?

  But Tess has suspended the facts because, in this story, she sounds a bit special. Even if a lot of Nora’s tales, as their mother says, aren’t true. Even if Nora’s heading perilously close to Krazy Town. Not because of the rainbow hair, or the very short skirts and shorts she wears in all weathers. Not because they once watched her at a town picnic drunkenly dance towards their father and trail a scarf around his neck while their mother looked on very pinch-mouthed and sceptical. It is something about the expression she wore when their father pushed that scarf away. It’s how she surveils the family’s land. It’s how, when their mother is here, Nora magics into another, apologising person. The girls cannot reconcile that she and their mother were ever friends.

  Tess wants, more than ever, to cry out. She clamps her jaw, pulls her ponytail headache-tight. What had she heard that day, careening down the mountain on June’s Appaloosa? Its muscles moving so sinuously against her own that she felt herself becoming a new creature. You and me were too small to remember what happened up here. We have to rely on other people.

  Leave me any tea, Nora?

  It’s their father. Dust-caked, sweat-runnelled. In one scratched hand, a metal hive tool refracting bright shapes across the veranda. The bee helmet with its black mesh. When Tess feels his palm on her shoulder she starts to breathe freely.

  Guten Tag, Stefan, Nora says.

  Meg, still glancing at Nora and Tess, says, But you must mean some other baby? Because Tess and I were born here, not in the commune. Right, Dad? Tess wasn’t even …

  … Everyone remembers the past differently, says their father, shooting Nora a stony look. And if actually you’re a drinker, you’re looser with the facts.

  Nora stands, tugging the raw edges of her shorts in a waggle-hipped movement that makes Meg and Tess stare at her bum.

  Expert advice from you, Stefan, she says.

  You came all this way with rumours for my daughters? he asks.

  Eggs, she points to the basket. For Angel’s lying-in. Then she says, I hear the police think it might be Pete.

  Tess stares at Nora’s thighs, imprinted with checks from the canvas chair.

  The police had come to her place asking. She told them Peter had relatives in town – and enemies.

  Girls, says Stefan. Inside!

  Tess looks at the dry earth almost reaching the foothills now. It has not rained, it has not rained. The bees have nearly all gone. Fifty hives in the bee yard stolid and empty. José’s entire colony – stolen. Everything, waiting. The dirt on her father’s shoes fine as talc and holding to nothing, not even the roots of trees, not even to itself. On the mountain, when they fell the ancient eucalypts, there’s a second when the trees hover, suspended by a final splinter of trunk. Dust whirls up from the weekend tourists’ four-wheel drives, from the semis that rattle through town in the morning. Tess arrived at school last week covered in it, eyes watering. Mr Parker offered tissues and asked did she need some privacy? She stood by the lockers and rubbed her eyelids, but only scratched the grit in deeper. She wanted to tell him that she’d gone up the mountain, that she’d seen the commune ruins and what had moved in after everyone was gone. She wanted to ask about the Rilke poem on the whiteboard.

  the fathers who lie at rest

  in our depths

  like ruined mountains

  and the dry riverbeds

  of earlier mothers

  the whole

  silent landscape under a clouded or

  clear destiny – girls, this came before you.

  Because she thought she understood about the fathers at rest in our depths, thought maybe she’d figured it. But her silence was bricked up, it was a habit she could not break. She coughed instead, and dust flew out of her mouth.

  As Nora steps off the porch a soaring, vertiginous feeling overtakes Tess.

  Inside, the phone starts ringing.

  Tess? Meg’s saying, one hand on the door. You OK?

  Better get that, Meg, says their father.

  Tess, whey-faced and shaky, stays fixed to the chair as Meg dashes inside. Nora’s hand is on Tess’s arm, patting, patting. Put your head down, Tess, she’s saying. On your knees if you can. Her voice, sounding submerged.

  A faint, Nora’s saying. Some water, Stefan!

  Tess jerks her arm free of touch, she turns towards the creaking door, her father’s back disappearing. The static air with its black lines of frantic bees.

  You’re breathing too quick, Nora’s saying to Tess. Slow down, sweetheart.

  Don’t touch me, says Tess, and her voice, a dry forgotten croak, surprises even herself.

  19

  Tom Tucker wanders out. A dirty sky, flecked with altocumulus. He sniffs the air for particulates, tastes them on his tongue. Then turns to his native bees. He’d set their hives just below the fence so the neighbour couldn’t see. Annette Turrell, a swatter of insects, a Baygon can permanently in her hand. A collector of dolls. Twenty glass-eyes follow Tom whenever he passes the side window. Girls in uniforms of the world. Tartan kilts, feathered headgear, grass skirts, Swiss-maid aprons.

  When she was sharper his mother had joked about this collection. Afternoon tea at Mrs Turrell’s, she’d say, like a UN meeting at the Playboy mansion. His mother had once been queen of the barbed story, the wicked quip, but illness had white-anted this part of herself. She’d lately grown dogged and literal; tunnelling deeper into some more temperate trait.

  Now she’ll stand on the threshold at Turrell’s, date scones in her gloved hands, not seeing how overdressed she is for neighbours. It was after the commune she’d turned churchy, quickly shedding the cheesecloth and tie-dye, the tinkly anklets and nose-stud. And ever since has favoured skirt and jacket combos, high-necked blouses with bows and buttons her arthritic fingers can no longer master. Now – Sunday hats! Gloves supplied by the charity shop, impossible snub-toed, cube-heeled shoes. Her hair grew higher every day, scaffolded with pins, nets and sprays, haloed by its own toxic weather. Despite years of this, there remained something unpractised in her get-up – all that outdated tailoring
and inexpert make-up – Tom often thought she looked like a person in drag.

  He walks to the first bee hut. Something white, slotted in the entrance. The bees frantically zapping, trying to get in. Closer, he sees paper jammed inside. He pulls and twists, then opens the hinged lid and sticks one hand in the combs to get it out.

  An envelope. On the front, instead of a stamp, one of those chemist reminder stickers for organising his mother’s medication. Monday. Beneath this, an address and the half-familiar name of a man.

  Mr Ian Tucker

  Yellow Hill Holiday Park

  155 Palms Road

  Little Haven

  Only the bees witness Tom’s flamboyant rumba of surprise, one fist tugging the air, YES! From a distance you might think he’d been stung, the hand in the hive then fisted like that. Whoever posted it must surely know that native bees are stingless.

  Tom scrawls a note for June, for his mother, then kicks the tyres on his old Ford, gladly noting their buoyancy.

  Four hours’ drive north of Bidgalong there he is, pottering about his caravan garden. Tom watches from his position outside the holiday park as the man fondles his green tomatoes, their skins cracked from lack of water, then weaves some starveling beans up a pole. Potatoes, wilting, aphid-infested broccoli. After a quick reconnaissance Tom had chosen this scrubby corner, half-screened by blazing wattle.

  From here he can observe Ian Tucker weeding with one hand, taking his time about it, pausing frequently to smoke in such long, stertorous drags that his cigarette is in seconds more ash than Marlboro. He sits now in a rusting deckchair. Its canvas so low to the ground he might as well have put his arse right in the dirt. He reads the paper, folding it in quarters and holding it hard against his eyes. Racehorses. He puts some biro on the page and says aloud: Lucky Susan five to one. Through the caravan door, an oddly spotless kitchen, everything cleared, everything shipshape, a word that ambles into Tom’s memory. Everything shipshape, son, before your mother comes home. Now and then a figure passing the caravan windows.