Now at night beneath the quilt their bodies lay apart. To Merridy, the hand and mouth that had touched her with such intimacy were nothing but a hard limb and an empty hole smelling of what she had fed him. She piled all her blame on the wardrobe that had filled her with a desire she had never sought and could not satisfy. She had sensations of vertigo, when she wanted nothing so much as to curl up inside and seal the door. But there was also a vital part of her that wanted to remain faithful to the promise which she and Alex had made on their wedding night.
In the meantime, the future lay open and darker than the inside of any Jacobean wardrobe. A future to which neither held the key.
CHAPTER SEVEN
TALBOT’S STORE will be closed on Christmas and Boxing Day. The owner and staff wish all our customers a safe and happy Christmas and New Year. And remember–give the Emergency Services Workers a Christmas present. “Go easy on the Grog” and “Take care with Fires”. Cheers everybody. A.T.
The talk that summer was of the drought. It was a time of red poppies and grasshoppers that hiccupped through the barley stalks. In the blaze of sun and salt, conversations flapped and fell, and lips became drier for the heat or worry. A mile up the road a sixteen-year-old girl had twins eight weeks prematurely in a shack that no one had known was there. That summer, it was so hot that it seemed to Merridy everyone was giving birth. Save for the Welsh sisters, who announced what many in the community had all along suspected: they were not sisters.
On an oyster shell in the shade of the pine, the cat paralysed a dragon lizard. Merridy found the lizard going black. She held the shrivelled creature by the tail and was looking around for a place to put it when a hoot sounded from the bottom of the drive and the next moment Tildy’s white Honda sped into view.
Merridy had been married six years on the morning in late December when Tildy appeared with Zac, Montana and Savannah for the Doves to babysit during the New Year long weekend. At the very last moment a grateful client of Ray’s had presented him with a three-night package at the Freycinet Lodge in Coles Bay. Tildy was looking forward to her first weekend alone with her husband since Zac’s birth. All she had to do was find a babysitter.
In the early days, when she assumed that it would happen, Merridy had felt kindly to others and did not mind if Tildy took advantage. Now she experienced a flicker of resentment before agreeing to give up her New Year to childmind her godson and his two sisters.
“We’ve never had all three to stay at once.”
“It’s the same as looking after one. And they do adore you.”
Merridy came out from the shade of the tree as Zac and Montana spilled from the car and ran to torment the horses. She helped Tildy, who held a sleeping Savannah, to carry the bags into the house.
In the kitchen, it was a lot cooler. Merridy had made little iced muffins, laid out on the table on a plastic sheet, and prepared a jug of lemonade. “You’ve chosen the hottest day of the year,” pouring out five plastic cups. “Any plans?”
“I can’t speak for Ray, but I don’t intend to leave our room. We’re going to go at it,” Tildy promised, “like you and Alex. At least, I presume you still…” And scrutinised her friend.
“Hey, look at my tail,” laughed Merridy, and turned. As much to conceal her face.
Meanwhile, Tildy had spied a wickedness taking place through the window. “Zac!” putting down her cup. “Don’t DO that to Montana!” And streaked from the kitchen.
Moments later, she shepherded her children in. Montana wore a top that Merridy had bought her from Pumpkin Patch, now stained brown with banana. She was sobbing: “He said he was going to kill my belly button.”
“Zac, wish Merridy a Happy New Year.”
“Happy New Year,” said Zac sepulchrally.
“Now, I want you all to behave with Merridy,” Tildy said, plonking Savannah on the table beside three baskets stuffed with clothes and squidgy toys. “I want no repeat of Christmas.”
“Why, what happened at Christmas?”
Tildy rolled her eyeballs. “I decided this year we wouldn’t go to church, I’d take them to Louisa Meredith House.” Succumbing in a foolish moment to a charitable instinct, Tildy had introduced her children into the nursing home, Zac encased in a scarlet Spider-Man outfit with prominent pectorals, Montana in a fluffy bear suit and Savannah dressed as a fairy. But instead of cheering up the inmates, her son and daughters proceeded to terrorise them. They had punched the emergency button in Doris Prosser’s bathroom, switched off the live carol service from King’s College, Cambridge, that had mesmerised Sadie Wentworth into a contented rhapsody, and stolen Mr Carr’s burgundy fez. No one had seen the hat since.
Tildy inspected the baskets with unseeing eyes. “I reckon you have everything you need. Seeyah all Monday.”
Over that weekend, Merridy reached a deeper understanding of why people who had children so often looked distraught; much the same as people desperate to have them.
Barely had Tildy’s car disappeared from the drive than Zac vomited. The vomit splashed up from the kitchen floor and a speck of it landed in her mouth.
Montana’s nose meanwhile was stubbornly charred with dried snot, infecting Alex with a touch of gastro and a streaming cold that he would not shake off until March.
As for Savannah, she had to be restrained from rushing up to her siblings and plucking at handfuls of hair and then sinking her teeth into their backsides.
“They get on very well,” Tildy had said. “They’re inseparable, in fact. It’s me they have the problem with. Zac still won’t let me hug him.”
Away from their mother, the children did not get on. At lunch Zac pulled away Montana’s cup of lemonade. She reacted by tipping it over his head.
“All girls are princesses,” Merridy reminded Zac, towelling his carrot-coloured hair. “Boys have to understand that.”
“She’s not a princess,” glowered Zac. “She’s a big, fat, hairy triceratops, and I’m going to kill her belly button,” and lunging from Merridy’s grasp, he slapped Montana on the stomach, hard, with the bread knife.
“Please be nicer to your sister,” Merridy implored. The most hopeful words in the English language.
As Montana howled, Zac began tugging at Merridy, speaking with sudden seriousness in a grown-up voice. “Merridy, I think Savannah has a pooey bum.”
Savannah had not stopped smelling since her mother deposited her on the kitchen table. But Tildy in her haste to join Ray at Freycinet Lodge had forgotten to leave nappies. By four in the afternoon, Merridy discovered that she had run out of her reserve supply, and so, to distract the children with an expedition, she loaded them into her car, a challenge in itself, and drove to Talbot’s where Rose-Maree reacted with a look of feral curiosity to be asked about nappies.
“Row four–where cereals used to be.”
Talbot’s had sold out of Huggies for girls. The boy’s Huggies that Merridy bought would keep slipping down over the weekend.
Merridy had left the three children sitting peacefully in the car, but two of them had managed to undo their seat belts. She found Montana at the wheel and Zac with a gleeful expression switching on and off the headlights and the windscreen wipers going full tilt. With a terrific struggle, she strapped both children back in their seats.
For the rest of the weekend, she supervised the children in the garden, trying to encourage them to paint and fielding questions.
“What’s this?” asked Zac.
“A dragon lizard.”
“It’s not moving.”
“No,” she agreed. “Bring it over to paint, if you like.”
“No thanks,” said Zac, who looked as if he might prefer to eat it. He tossed the shrivelled thing behind one of the gravestones. “What about that?”
She gazed at the thin stalk in the earth. “A geranium,” she said. And to herself: Still hanging on. Foolishly.
“Looks dead,” exultant.
And at breakfast, squinting at the contents of the g
lass dish: “What’s that?”
“Lemon marmalade. Here, have some.”
“It’s got weeds in it. I don’t like weeds.”
And at lunch: “I don’t like sea-horse tails.”
“That’s pasta.”
“No, it’s not. It’s sea-horse tails.”
“What would you prefer?”
“I’d like Coco Pops.”
“But you had them for breakfast.”
“No, I didn’t.”
She glared back at him. Shocked at the distance between this face and the face that she had stroked moments after his birth in the Royal Hobart. You uttered bird-like squawks and when I smelled your breath it was as if it had come up through a dank rock. You opened an eye and it was by far the most ancient thing I’d ever seen. You…
But Zac did not appreciate being looked at. It was then that he landed his punch. She was removing his plate when he asked: “Where are your children?”
“I don’t have any.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want them.” And sensing herself ill-equipped to be in the presence of a child to whom she had not spoken the truth, she stood up and carried her godson’s plate to the sink. But when she turned around Zac’s mouth hung open and the hairy legs of his words flailed out of it.
“Does Alex have one?”
“No, he has…he has…” But what did he have, her husband? Zac’s question made her frightened. She had a powerful image of Alex going off with someone as she had gone off with the chandler. She saw her fate with absolute clarity of vision, as described with such relish each week in Tildy’s magazines. He would trade her in for a younger model and she would join the great confederacy of unused women.
Her eye stabilised on the Welsh dresser. “He has his ships.”
But Zac, staring down into his mug of rainwater, had spotted something floating.
“What’s that?” for the first time wanting to know.
She took the mug from him. “A wasp, it looks like.”
“I don’t like wasps.” He pushed back his hair and she caught sight of an ugly scab.
In a new voice full of concern she asked: “Zac, how did you get that?”
At night, she calmed them with stories. She did her best to interest Zac in Edward Lear, but he was not having it. Tildy had packed his favourite book. He wanted to be read that.
“Where did your mother find this?”
“The Op-Shop.” Like many of Tildy’s things.
“Then before I begin, I’m going to ask again. How did you get that scratch?”
“Mummy bit me,” looking uncomfortable.
“What do you mean, she bit you?”
“She did. She bit me.”
“I don’t believe you, Zac.”
“It’s true,” Tildy confirmed later with not a smidgen of shame. “His ear was next to my face. I was so annoyed, I bit it.”
Her sleeve was being tugged at. “Get on.”
He was asleep before she reached the end. She looked at the smile on the pillow and saw that he did not have his father’s mouth but Tildy’s and was glad. She read on anyway, reluctant to leave a story unfinished. Even one so derivative.
“The rider of an old horse who had galloped through the darkness slowed to a canter and then to a trot and reined in above the bay. The man looked down and took brief note of the unusual colours, then spurred his horse and rode off across the sea.”
On New Year’s Eve, Merridy was woken by Zac screaming. The boy stared at her through a veil of sleep and horror and threw an arm across his eyes, moaning. She coaxed him back to sleep in the bed that she had bought in the first months of her marriage, a different child in mind, and thought of Ray and Tildy, in all probability making their fourth baby, and for the first time admitted to herself: Who in their right mind would want this? What if it’s better the way it is?
Soon it was safe to close the door. On couches in the living room, Tildy’s two younger children snored through blocked noses. She opened the window and breathed in. The clear air affronted by the smell of Savannah’s nappy.
She crawled back to bed and hugged her husband. The children would be leaving the next day.
“What’s wrong?” he sniffled, half-succumbed to Savannah’s cold.
“It’s all right.”
“What’s all right?”
“We have each other.”
But if she thought it was over, it was not. At breakfast, Tildy telephoned to say that Ray had developed kidney stones. “We have to take him to Hobart. Isn’t it typical? They say this is something that comes the moment you start to relax.” The ambulance was on its way. He would have to be operated on immediately.
Tildy went on: “Listen, I’ve used up all my red chips with Ray’s mother. The truth is, Merridy, no one will take my children. Could you look after them? Please? It’ll only be for a few days. And they do adore you.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
WELLINGTON POINT SUMMER FLOWER SHOW:
Vegetable and fruit: onions over 8oz–H. Ford.
Flower arranging (themed arrangement)–Garden of Eden. Joint
First: Rose-Maree Kemp, Merridy Dove.
Thereafter, the subject of their childlessness was added to the list of no-go areas that included Ray Grogan, Merridy’s university course, the Doves’ car crash, Alex’s penny and Hector’s disappearance. Something that they did not mention. Like a couple who years before had come to an agreement never to talk about it.
When exactly nine months later, Tildy gave birth to Cherokee, Alex and Merridy consoled themselves in the same unspoken way: They could not afford a child, it would wreck the shape of their lives, it was not meant to be.
Nonetheless, they had had a tough trot, and it might have continued. Alex had his land, and this gave him satisfaction. But what about her? The solidity he found in his farmwork was denied Merridy. It was not enough to redecorate the house, or replant the garden, or potter around in the dunes, or seek the ultimate in red pasta sauces, or once a year cook big mutton roasts for the shearers, or make the daily journey into Wellington Point to collect the Mercuryand milk, plus a blueberry muffin over which to read the crime column.
But what to do? Her abbreviated time at uni was a broken arrowhead inside her and more excruciating that any kidney stone. She had cancelled her subscription to Engineering World, but if ever she glanced at the spines in the spare room–the two shelves of textbooks and, above them, the single row of children’s books–a complicated regret assailed her. She felt her father’s disappointment that she had not achieved her tiny miracle. Worse, she had not given herself the chance to know even what she would have been good at. And yet too late to go back to college. Besides, to leave Alex on his own was out of the question. So she tried to entertain visions of herself driving the elderly at the wheel of the community bus. As a firey. Or a volunteer for the ambulance service. Or reading stories to children at the day care. But none of these options excited her.
She had become conscious, too, of another no-go area. They were running out of money.
It remained a source of pride with Alex that he had not merely broken even during the first years of their marriage but had steered the farm into modest profit. Then, he could still afford a cleaner once a week: Alice, who brought her blonde, curly-headed daughter to play on the lawn while she ironed his shirts and trousers, or dusted his bottle collection. In the expectation of continued profits, Alex had supported Merridy in her makeover of the house. He had footed the bills for three rounds of IVF treatment and bought her a car and paid her a monthly allowance. But he concealed from his wife that money had since become an issue.
Like other farmers Alex lived on an overdraft, but interest rates had risen so steeply that he was overstretched. He had looked into harvesting different crops–poppies, walnuts, wine, peas–but it would almost certainly take several years before he generated the sort of turnover to satisfy his bank. Meanwhile, income came in twice a year, barley at a differen
t time from cattle and wool sales. And it was not enough.
While Alex had made his share of mistakes, there was no avoiding some costs. He had had to raise the dam by a metre after a bad drought in which the barley failed to come up. A pivot irrigator set him back the equivalent of a year’s income. And when his father’s ancient tractor expired halfway up Barn Hill, he had little option but to replace it with a John Deere, bought second-hand off Jack Fysshe. That tractor was nearing the end of its life, as often on a block in Nevin’s garage as in the paddocks. He could not see any way to affording a new one.
Little by little, Alex had gnawed away at the investments left him by his parents until less than $7,000 remained. A further fall in the price of wool or a hefty garage bill could wipe him out. On top of it all, his bank was making persistent demands that he find ways to reduce his overdraft.
TALBOT’S STORE. Applications are invited for a temporary holiday worker. Some experience in the service industry desirable.
One Thursday towards the end of January, Alice failed to turn up.
“That’s unlike her,” Merridy said at lunch, and kept turning her eyes to the window.
Until Alex looked from his plate. “I’ve let her go.”
Merridy failed to understand. “Go where?”
In a flat voice, he explained. His father’s folks had paid for his education. Now Uncle Matt was dead in Sedbergh, and there was no one in the family whom he could draw on for a loan. “We don’t have a brass razoo and the ANZ is saying: ‘We own 67 per cent of your farm and we are thinking of making this asset of ours a little bit liquid.’”
“What about Ray? Doesn’t he specialise in loans?”
No sooner had she blurted the words than she was chiding herself. Alex would never seek a solution with Ray Grogan, who according to Tildy had made a complete recovery and roared across the bay at the helm of an even faster boat.
Secrets of the Sea Page 19
