She did the sums in her head again, it had become a ritual, a little therapy exercise to calm her anxiety. Even if only thirty plants survived, she thought, and even if she sold them extra cheap, say a thousand dollars each, that was still thirty thousand dollars – thirty thousand dollars! She could get a deposit on a house, a car, get the kids back.
The next day she was discharged. Rick had somehow got wind of it; he was waiting for her in his ute out the front of the Merredin Hospital. He smiled and performed a self-conscious little wave that she recognised as the wave of the ‘other Rick’, the Rick who was gentle and charming. She sometimes imagined ‘other Rick’ dragged around, bound-up and restrained behind the seething, angry, irritable Rick who was always at the fore.
He was kind, bumbling, and when they got home he made her some cheese and tomato sandwiches and a cup of tea. ‘They had a program on sloths on the tele,’ he said. She loved sloths. ‘Beautiful little creatures,’ he shook his head. She wanted to cry, she wasn’t sure if it was the vision of a sloth that had come to her mind, so slow and endearing, or whether it was how nice he was being to her. She took the dog’s head in her lap and gave him a long pet.
She decided to take the dog for a walk. Across the paddock she veered off past the old shearing sheds. The sun was setting but still managed to throw its last sharp rays of yellow light into her face, and she squinted at the ground. The dry grass snapped and crackled under her thongs and filled them with grass seeds. Behind the shed she stopped and took out the extra sleeping pills the doctor had given her. She had three others that she had saved from the hospital. She put the capsules in the little plastic tube with the others. She knew she didn’t have long if she was to get in and harvest the plants before Rick.
Two days later she was opening a can of Emu Bitter and dropping the insides of the capsules into it. In an hour he was sprawled in his recliner chair in front of the TV fast asleep. It was that easy.
She pulled out the bag she’d packed from the bottom of the wardrobe and ran out to the shed. She wound her way at full speed through to the back door. She had the key, pinched and trembling, between her thumb and forefinger.
She took from her bag the big meat knife she’d sharpened from the kitchen and began slicing the plants low down on the stem. She threw them at the door, one after the other. They piled up quickly; in eight loads she took all 134 plants out to the ute, knocking herself on all the accumulated crap in the shed, upturning tins of paint and bags of fertiliser. The plants bulged up under the tarp she fastened over them, and she had to strap them down with a rope. She called to the dog, which jumped on to the passenger seat. She slid into the driver’s seat and turned the key.
She hadn’t driven in a long time and as she went out the front gate she remembered how much she loved the feeling of the steering wheel in her hand, the night air blowing in her face through the window. She rested her elbow on the windowsill and felt a painful bubble come up her throat. At first she didn’t realise what it was. Then she knew, it was a laugh.
She needed to put as much distance as she could between her and that farm. She needed lights, she needed noise, she needed people. Never again would she be trapped in a prison of such endless, terrifying space.
The ute bounced down the gravel road and she thought of Rick waking up in his armchair, tied up with his own rope, every inch of him desperate to rush out to his plants. She screwed up her face at the thought. She looked down at the dog, its black eyes reflecting the headlights, its big brown face almost exploding with joy.
The Tower
In front of the mirror, Beth pouted. She couldn’t take her eyes off her glossy, flawless lips. She pulled back her hair from the side of her face and jutted her chin out. The Ruby Red lipstick always mesmerised her.
Beth spent a lot of time looking in the mirror. Sometimes she thought she was like the girls in the magazines and that meant she was beautiful. Other times Beth thought she looked grotesque and should try not to leave the house too often. Most of her days were balanced between the two. Beth didn’t know, couldn’t decide. It was a fine line and it all depended on how many times and in what light she gazed at her reflection.
All through the house there were pictures of her mother in her youth – modelling shots in black and white, framed magazine covers, elaborate poses against abstract 1970s colours. She found it hard to see her real, present-day mother in the photos. As she’d aged, her mother’s identity seemed to fade, like the writing on a t-shirt that had been put through the wash too many times.
These days her mother took a lot of sleeping pills and was afraid of answering the phone. They lived in a small, falling-apart transportable on the outskirts of town. They’d moved out there to ‘get away from it all’, as her mother put it. Beth knew the town was full of people doing just that.
Beth had been home from school for over an hour. It was normal for her mum to sleep until teatime and she didn’t like to be disturbed. She pulled back the bathroom curtain and through the cobwebs, across the paddocks, Beth could see the tower. It was made of two giant tank stands welded together, with three platforms and several ladders up the sides. Above the steel frame, far above the roofs of the tiny, piddly little town, bolted high on a steel pole, small and spindly so you had to really squint to see it, was an office chair, the type that swivels.
Beth remembered the day she had looked out the window and seen it for the first time. She thought of the tower as some kind of symbol; the man had built it as a stand against everything flat and boring around it, everything the town stood for. She smiled, thinking about the man, and as she did she felt as if she was lowering her body into a warm bath, she thought it was love or excitement but when the feeling passed her jaw clenched and she felt disgusted with herself.
She walked over to Jane’s house. They sat on the bed under a picture of Axl Rose in amongst Jane’s soft toy collection. Jane’s pet lamb was splayed out on the floor next to them.
‘Don’t you ever want to just sit up there and look down on everybody?’ Beth said.
‘What?’ Jane was reading the latest Smash Hits magazine while Beth was staring out the window.
‘Up in the tower.’
‘Not particularly,’ Jane rolled her eyes.
‘He’d probably let me if I asked.’
‘That old pervert?’ Jane pouted, ‘he’d let you alright.’
‘What do you mean, pervert?’
‘What do you think he uses that tower for, stupid? He sits up there perving through bathroom windows, watching us all hop out of the shower.’ Jane flicked through the magazine with impatient hostility. ‘Oh, they say he uses that tower to keep an eye on the refinery, make sure it’s not overpolluting.’
‘Doesn’t he?’
‘As if he cares about the refinery.’
‘He is, kind of, different,’ Beth said. She had seen the man at the petrol station sometimes. He was always alone, a quiet, short man with wild hair. He drove an old Holden ute which had a ‘Stop Nuclear Testing’ sticker on the back window.
‘He is, kind of, weird you mean,’ Jane replied. ‘My dad says he’s some kind of a survivalist; he’s got all these conspiracy theories.’ Jane sighed and placed the open Smash Hits magazine on the bed next to her. A picture of Johnny Depp stared up at them; he had an angry pout and a white bandana wrapped around his head. ‘Oh, and he’s a communist too.’ Jane sounded authoritative, like she even knew what a communist was.
As the sun set, Beth walked home to make tea for her and her mother. She cooked sausages and boiled some cabbage and potatoes.
‘How’s school?’ her mum asked, slouched at the crowded dining table, poking at her food.
‘Good,’ Beth answered, but she could see her mother wasn’t listening by the way she stared, transfixed, at the beige linoleum tiles.
All around them were remnants of her mother’s history, her short-lived modelling career. She got rid of nothing; it was all piled up high and covered with dust and cobwebs.
Half of the dining table was submerged in unopened mail, papers and photo albums that her mum had been ‘sorting’ for years. The hallway was jammed with boxes of clothes gifted by the various designers her mother had modelled for. A mouse scurried out from one of them as they sat at the dinner table.
After washing up, Beth went over to the encyclopedia set on the lounge room shelves. She took out the M–O book and looked up Nuclear Energy, then she took the C–D book and looked up Communism.
The next day after school Beth walked to the perimeter of the man’s property. She stopped at a section of the fence where the wire sagged low. Looking up from that angle the tower appeared terrifying and ridiculously high.
She wanted to go to the top, but also she just wanted to talk to him. Now that she knew what nuclear energy and communism were.
She stepped through the fence, her dirty farm sneakers sinking in the black sand. Up ahead she could see the massive green of the vegetable gardens. Giant dinosaur-like sprinklers stood immobile amongst the lines of vegetables. People said he had an underground tunnel with a bunker, people said he powered everything by the sun, people said he kept a lot of weapons. All Beth could see were solar panels on the roof of the A-frame shed, a lot of machinery and pumps – it looked just like a normal farm. The only thing different, she noticed, was that compared to the several shades of beige that coloured the town, this property was lush and green. It was like a little square of a foreign country had been taken up and transplanted here amongst the barren farms.
She gripped the ladder at the base of the tower and looked up. The chair at the top seemed to rock back and forward in the afternoon breeze. Then she heard whistling. Looking over the rosemary bushes she could see the man walking through the vegetable gardens with a rifle slung over his shoulder.
She crouched down in the bushes watching him pass. She thought about what Jane said, about him being a pervert. She remembered what her mum once told her, about how all men were only after one thing.
His halo of hair was what people in town knew him by. It formed a wiry bird’s nest around his head, red and blond, with flecks of grey. It looked like he had gotten out of bed ten, maybe twelve years ago, and had never bothered to brush it since. He was short but thickset, like an old tree whose roots went deep into the ground. Beth thought of her mother then; tall and thin, she often reminded Beth of a sapling swaying all over the place, unsure of its survival in such inhospitable conditions, with such shallow roots.
She watched as he got closer to her, then he stopped and looked through the foliage. Glancing down, Beth realised she was wearing red shorts and a pink tank top, making it impossible to blend into the surroundings. She stood up. His face was fierce and ruddy.
‘What are you doing?’ he said, articulating each word.
‘Just looking at the tower.’ Her eyes fell on his tattered workboots. She wasn’t used to men. No matter how much she imagined herself relaxed and in control, even interacting with her friends’ fathers was a terrifying situation.
He snorted. ‘You can look from your house,’ his head shot up to the top of the tower behind her. ‘You can see it from there.’
She kept her eyes on his workboots. Her heart seemed to be beating somewhere just at the base of her tongue, like she could vomit it out and it would be lying there on the ground between them, still pumping frantically.
‘You were going up it.’ It wasn’t really a question but she nodded.
‘Well, you just need to ask.’ He was the same height as her, she could notice that much. And despite his sun-worn, beaten-looking face, there was still an alertness, something open that hadn’t been shut.
He adjusted the rifle on his shoulder and nodded towards the tower. ‘You wanna go to the top?’
Beth wasn’t so sure she wanted to climb up now, but when he walked past her he seemed intent.
‘You wanna see what the birds see, huh?’ he let out a deep resigned breath as if he knew that’s really what everyone – with no exception – wanted.
He leant his rifle against the steel railing of the tower stand. ‘Well, up you go then.’ He beckoned her towards the ladder.
Beth took in the rifle, the filthy shirt and face. This hairy, crazy-looking man in front of her telling her to come forward.
Jane was always angry that Beth never found any of the rock stars and movie stars in Smash Hits that exciting. ‘What is wrong with you?’ Jane would say, as if Beth was some kind of perverted lesbian because she didn’t want to drool over another picture of Corey Haim. The fact that Beth found this man intriguing would have disgusted Jane.
The sun was setting; normally at this time of evening she would be making dinner. The man gestured again towards the ladder, this time with a chivalrous flourish, like she was a lady about to enter a grand ballroom. Something about his gesture and appearance seemed clown-like and endearing. She put her foot on the first rung of the ladder.
Within eight steps she was standing on the first landing. Looking behind she could see the small bald spot at the centre of his head as he came up the ladder. She imagined baby birds nested there, happily sheltered.
She breathed in the view all around her; the ground was getting dark with long shadows but the tops of the trees were still bright with different shades of green.
They climbed up to the second landing. It was a smaller space and that meant they had to stand with their arms touching. She could smell wet soil and sweat and the same feeling came over her, the one she’d had looking out the bathroom window.
Looking out from this higher vantage point, she felt her stomach sway. The sheep and fences looked too small. There was nothing – no barrier or even handrail – between her and those far-off fence posts. She crouched down and pressed her runaway stomach against her knees.
‘I think this is far enough,’ her voice came out in a high-pitched waver. ‘I wanted to go to the top, but I don’t think I can.’.
‘Whatever you think.’ He was now crouched down next to her, his eyebrows jutting across his face in a straight line. His concern made her feel even more panicked. She turned around on her hands and knees, her eyes fixed on her fingernails, thinking she might vomit. He took her arm as her left foot searched for the first rung of the ladder.
When they got back down to the ground he said, ‘Next time you want to climb the tower, you come and ask, I don’t want anyone hurting themselves.’
She rushed home and lay on her bed. She ran through the whole interaction in her mind, over and over. Everything he’d said, everything she’d said. She laughed and smiled then curled up on her side. She thought about his hands, thick and stained from manual labour. She imagined them rubbing her hair back from her face softly. Then she imagined them running up and down her arm. She imagined him telling her she was very beautiful and a feeling of supreme comfort and joy came over her. Then she heard her mother’s footsteps on the floorboards. It was dark and she’d forgotten all about dinner.
The next day after school she went to the same sagging part of the fence and stepped over. He was in the vegetable garden harvesting broad beans.
‘Hello again,’ he said and smiled from where he was crouched next to one of the raised garden beds.
She smiled back. Without saying anything she picked up a plastic container nearby and began plucking fat broad beans from the next row.
When their containers were full she followed him into the A-frame building. Inside stood his ute and a long, ancient caravan. Machinery and tools and horse gear were stored on the far wall. It smelt of livestock and hay.
He took her to a long row of freezers against the shed wall and opened one of them. It was full to the brim with bagged-up produce. Above the freezers were lists taped to the wall; items had been ticked off: beans, corn, kale, spinach.
‘What’s all this for?’ she asked.
‘It’s preparation.’
‘Preparation for what?’
‘In case something happens.’
‘What might
happen?’
‘Oh, anything really, at this point in time.’
‘Anything?’
‘Sure, the world – well, this planet anyway – it’s on its way out.’
‘And you want to survive it?’
‘I’ll have to wait and see. I just know I don’t want to starve to death when the shops don’t open.’ He smiled, slamming the freezer door down.
She wanted to ask more, but she had caught him looking at her a few times and she felt ashamed by the intense intimacy of the last hour, and her forwardness. She let her hair fall over her face and glanced down at her skinny, tanned legs. As soon as she could she scurried out of the shed into the orange-coloured dusk.
On her way home she imagined all the ‘anythings’ that could happen. She’d read about nuclear blasts and radiation poisoning in the encyclopedia. If he was prepared, she wanted to be prepared too.
When Beth got home she took out the S–U volume of the encyclopedia on the lounge-room shelf. She went to her room and read everything that was written under the heading Sexual Intercourse.
A few days later she saw him at the supermarket. She was with her mum on their weekly shopping trip. He nodded to her and the two of them exchanged secret little smiles. Beth’s mother, too entranced by her own suffering, didn’t notice the man or their interlude. But later, she said to Beth, ‘You’re always in a dream, what’s the matter? Are you in love or something?’ Beth didn’t respond. She thought it was a reference to the supermarket exchange between her and the man, but then remembered that her mother always said that.
Beth started going to his house every day after school. One hot afternoon he split the biggest watermelon in the garden and they sat and ate and Beth told him about all the baby animals she had raised and where they had ended up – a sheep, a goat, kittens. He moved the hose every so often to water the vegetables.
The Whip Hand Page 16
