by Derek Hansen
She waited until Rodney’s back was turned and slipped into the kitchen. Having recovered from the initial shock, she gently lifted the opal from the matchbox and examined it. Rodney had done a beautiful job of polishing and shaping it. It was clearly a labour of love and that had worried her momentarily. The opal was a statement, but not the one she’d at first feared. While it was a labour of love it was not a declaration of love. He knew that she and Billy were seeing each other and had even encouraged them. A smile spread across her face as she continued to stare at the opal and the way it flashed different colours at her depending on the angle she viewed it. She couldn’t recall anyone thanking her for her friendship before, and if they had, they certainly hadn’t done it so touchingly. A wave of affection for the little man swept over her.
She’d invited Billy to a romantic dinner of fresh prawns and ocean trout which she’d brought back from Dubbo and wondered how he’d react if she invited another guest. Rather than speculate, she rang his home and was lucky enough to catch him on his morning tea break. She told him about Rodney, the opal and her wish to reciprocate.
‘I think that’s a great idea,’ said Billy without hesitation. ‘Rodney doesn’t get invited to dinner much.’
Linda smiled at the understatement.
‘You don’t mind?’
‘Why would I mind?’
‘See you about five,’ said Linda. ‘And don’t work too hard and wear yourself out. I have a big night planned.’
As she hung up, she realised that her life in Jindalee Downs was too precious to ever give away entirely. She had family in Sydney and a company that employed twenty-two people full-time and countless others on a job-by-job basis, but no one made her feel more valued or appreciated than her two country neighbours. The phone rang and she thought immediately that it would be Billy ringing with some smart comment or to see if she wanted him to bring any extra vegetables from his garden.
‘Yes, Billy Dwyer,’ she said.
There was no response yet she could tell that somebody was there.
‘Billy? Say something. Hello? Who is this? Who’s there?’
The continued silence began to alarm her. But it wasn’t quite silence. When she pressed her ear to the earpiece she could hear something, something familiar.
‘Hello? Hello …’
Whoever had called gently placed the phone back on its cradle but not before Linda recognised the music playing faintly in the background. Had she been meant to hear it or was it an oversight, or even a coincidence? Her blood turned to ice and she stopped breathing. It didn’t matter that Kind of Blue was one of the greatest jazz records of all time or that millions of copies had been sold. There was only one person she knew who admired Miles Davis to the point of playing his music almost compulsively. And he was the last person Linda wanted to hear from.
In a panic she rang Al.
‘Al, I think Grant just called me. What’s happened?’
‘I was about to ring you. I just heard.’
‘Heard what, for Christ’s sake?’
‘About Grant’s presentation to Garuda. You’ll never guess who Garuda’s new marketing director turned out to be.’
‘Who?’
‘Sharna’s brother. Can you believe it?’
Sharna’s brother. Linda mouthed the words but no sound passed her lips. She had a dim recollection of Sharna’s brother sitting grimly in court, never missing a session, the only member of the family to put in an appearance. She’d wondered at the time whether he was there out of a sense of duty, as the family representative — Sharna had hardly mentioned him — rather than because of brotherly love and the pain of loss. Maybe they’d been closer than she thought. She listened numbly as Al told her how the meeting had been aborted before it had even begun, with Sharna’s brother threatening to fire the agency if they insisted on using Camera.
‘I don’t know what the situation is between Grant and Cameron but the word is, Cameron has had enough,’ said Al. ‘It’s only gossip at this stage and, as you can imagine, the whole industry is buzzing with it. The only thing that’s certain is that Grant will not be making the Garuda commercials.’
Linda gripped the phone so hard her knuckles turned white. The more Al said the more she was convinced that it was Grant who’d called her and the more certain she became of his motive. She started shaking uncontrollably. He had nothing to lose any more, nothing to lose by coming after her.
Linda’s management training had taught her how to focus on a single issue at a time and not be distracted by other matters. Her training got her through dinner, although she was aware that Billy sensed something was amiss. Her job was made easier by Rodney’s obvious excitement. He was like a child on an outing. He’d arrived wearing suit trousers that were ancient but spotless, and a white shirt several sizes too big. Only his boots, hat and shotgun were part of his regular garb and he left them at the door. His eyes sparkled and his ever-changing expressions did their best to settle into a smile. His joy was infectious and, despite everything, Linda couldn’t help but get caught up in it.
Nobody ever ate a prawn with greater reverence or ocean trout with more wonder. The tastes fascinated Rodney and his determination to love everything on his plate even got him through the shock of the wasabi mayonnaise accompanying the fish. It wasn’t just Rodney’s delight in his discoveries that made her laugh but the tales he and Billy told about their years growing up together. However, it was the chocolate mud cake dessert Linda had bribed the Country Club chef to make that really stole the night and captured Rodney’s heart. Prawns and fish were rare and exciting but chocolate was something he understood.
His excitement had him bobbing about and almost dancing when Linda wrapped up the remainder of the cake and gave it to him as he was leaving. Rodney paused on the veranda and forced himself to stand still. Goodbyes weren’t part of his repertoire. He came and went, usually in a fury and always with purpose, real or imagined. But happiness had transcended his anger and he stalled in uncertainty. Without hesitating Linda leaned forward and kissed the little man lightly on his cheek. Rodney stood there stunned, immobile, so uncomprehending that even his hammering jaw for once stilled. Then, tentatively, he reached forward and kissed Linda’s cheek. For a brief instant afterwards their eyes locked and it was Linda’s turn to be taken aback. Whether Rodney’s eyes just happened to catch the light at that very moment or somehow generated it internally, they blazed with the brilliance and colour of the opals he spent his life digging for. Without a word he spun around, grabbed his shotgun and took off into the night. Linda heard him chuckling all the way up to the top of the ridge.
When she went inside she found Billy had cleared the table and gone to sit outside on the front veranda. He’d poured himself a beer, her a wine, and sat with his feet up on the rail, smoking.
‘That was a nice thing you did for Rodney,’ he said.
Linda turned off the lights, came up behind him, kissed him on the neck and settled into the chair alongside him. A slight breeze, warm from the dry lands to the northwest, brushed over them. Gradually Linda made out the silhouettes of the ridges and the horizon across the treetops to the north. Overhead the Milky Way appeared as a low cloud almost within touching distance. Somewhere a small creature shrieked as it fell victim to an owl.
‘You didn’t drink much.’
‘Couldn’t,’ said Billy. ‘I couldn’t drink more than Rodney and Rodney can’t drink much. He watched me the whole night. Only drank when I drank. He and I both know what happens when he goes at it too hard.’
‘Poor Billy. Do you ever stop looking after people?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Was that story about the football and Blackie true?’
‘Every word. Blackie got put down after he ripped into an Aboriginal kid. One of his mates threw his schoolbag over the fence and he went to get it back. You should’ve seen the mess Blackie made of him. The doctor had to put fifty or sixty stitches into him. All I could think o
f was it could’ve been me.’
‘You were lucky.’
‘Funny thing is, we lived in fear of that dog but, Jeez, we missed him when he was gone.’
‘It’s often the way.’
Billy stubbed out his cigarette and dropped it into the jam tin.
‘Linda?’
‘Yes?’
‘Are we going to talk about nothing all night or are you going to tell me what’s up? Something happen down in Dubbo?’
‘Dubbo? No, why would you think that?’ She leaned back and gazed up at the stars, wondering what to say. ‘Grant rang this morning.’
‘Your ex-husband rang you?’ Billy sat up. ‘What did he say?’
‘Nothing. That was the whole point. I guess he was just checking out the numbers from the phone account he took and I answered. He knows my number. He knows where I am.’ She told him about the music in the background and about her phone call to Al.
‘Hold on a minute,’ said Billy. ‘You have a film company? You’re running it from here? I thought you were a schoolteacher.’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘I think it’s time you told it.’ He turned and looked at her. ‘Don’t you?’
Linda took a long sip of her wine and stared out across the plains. She wondered whether the moon was still on the rise or had already been and gone. She remembered the lack of moonlight driving back from Dubbo the previous day and guessed the moon’s appearance had been both early and brief.
‘I don’t have a clue where to begin.’
‘Start when you were a schoolteacher.’
Linda took another long sip of her wine. Billy reached for the bottle and topped up her glass. It was a clear indication to her to take her time and leave nothing out.
‘Billy, do you know what a westie is?’
‘Someone from Sydney’s western suburbs.’
‘The term didn’t exist when I took up teaching but the condition did. Being a woman and a westie meant having limited horizons and even more limited ambitions. My parents’ only hope for me was that I’d do well enough at school to get a job somewhere nice, where I could meet nice people, marry someone nice, live in a nice house and produce nice children. I exceeded all their expectations when I did well at school and went on to university. They were ecstatic when I decided I wanted to become a teacher. Whoop-de-do. Kids nowadays complain about lack of opportunity but they should go back to the late sixties, early seventies. Girls didn’t go into interesting occupations like marketing, finance or management. We were encouraged to become nurses or secretaries and only the very brightest and most determined hung on to become doctors, dentists, lawyers or accountants. The only other alternative was teaching.
‘Initially I wanted to teach in primary school so I could teach a broad range of subjects. But I grew increasingly interested in art. Art opened my eyes to a world I never knew existed, a world of unlimited scope where any dream was possible. It was a world of unrestrained ambition and unbounded imagination where things didn’t have to be nice, proper, orderly and respectful. Indeed, a lot of the work I loved was deliberately disturbing, disruptive and anything but nice. When the government bought Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles I could hardly wait to see it. I went up to Canberra and just stood in front of it, staring at it in absolute awe for hours on end, day after day. I couldn’t believe that something so wonderful, so fresh and groundbreaking, actually existed. I went home and raved about it to parents who couldn’t believe the government had wasted so much money on something so ridiculous. And do you know what? Almost everyone I spoke to outside of art school thought the same thing. For the first time in my life I began to suspect I didn’t belong. But if I didn’t belong there, where did I belong? I was a westie. What did I know about anywhere else?
‘I discovered I had an aptitude for painting. My parents encouraged me and nearly fainted when they saw the drawings of nudes I did at life class. Nice girls didn’t draw naked people. I think I was supposed to do watercolours of African violets. But I persevered despite their reservations and graduated with honours in art and distinctions in English and history. When I finished my training I thought, given my passes and the kind of person I was, I’d be sent to a nice genteel school somewhere, the kind of school my parents imagined, where the kids were well behaved and eager to learn. Instead they sent me to a school further west, where few of the kids were well behaved and even fewer could give a damn about learning anything.’
‘Sort of thing the army does,’ said Billy.
‘I knew that in my little westie world I’d been sheltered from the sophistication and progressiveness of the eastern suburbs. Not even university cured me of that. I felt intimidated by students from the eastern suburbs. They all seemed so worldly and with it and knew so much more than I did. When I was posted to my first school I discovered how sheltered my life had really been. I knew nothing about life in the poorer suburbs. I went there bursting with optimism, remembering how I’d felt when I’d discovered the liberating effect of art. It was like a precious gift that I wanted to pass on and inspire others with. Dear God! You know, every lunchtime panel vans lined up along the streets outside the school and girls from years ten, eleven and twelve used to go and hop into them. They’d have sex with their deadbeat, unemployed boyfriends — kids who’d been students at the school only a year or two earlier — and then amble back to class where I was supposed to teach them. Can you imagine it? I was still a virgin. I was their teacher and still a virgin while they were having lunchtime sex with no more thought than I’d give to a peanut-butter sandwich.
‘Some of the boys in the vans were also dealing drugs but I had no idea. I knew students at uni who smoked a bit of marijuana but these kids were popping pills and God only knows what else. I’d be talking about Renaissance painters and the revelation of perspective to a class in which half of my students were no longer capable of stringing two words together. So much for my gift! So much for opening their eyes! It didn’t take me long to realise I didn’t belong there either.
‘Time passed and I didn’t so much teach as cope. There were days when even coping was a triumph beyond all expectations. I turned to colleagues for sympathy and understanding. The sympathy and understanding turned into invitations to parties and to dates. I suddenly realised I was in the “meeting nice people” phase of the cycle and that the “marry someone nice” phase was next on the schedule. The fact was, my best prospect was to marry another teacher. That was what teachers did. We were so wrapped up in our little world that we didn’t meet anyone else. I felt suffocated, and every day the walls closed in tighter around me.
‘After three years I was transferred to a school closer to home, where the students were a whole lot better behaved and with whom I felt some affinity. I was back in my comfort zone and that made me vulnerable. I started going out with a maths teacher ten years my senior. He was a gentle giant with a big full beard and an easy-going, tolerant nature. He was like a big bear and this bear was looking for a mate with whom he could settle down for life. Of course my parents loved him, and for a while I thought I did too. He had a wider, more gregarious circle of friends, most of whom came from outside teaching. We went to dinner parties where people actually talked about politics, religion, money, the arts and even philosophy. It didn’t dawn on me that it was this contact and conversation that I loved, not my big cuddly bear.
‘Our interests embraced movies. We got involved in a film club that hired the local cinema one night a month to show classics like Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring and Milos Forman’s The Fireman’s Ball. Afterwards we’d debate the movies endlessly over pots of coffee and cheap wine. I loved it. It was like discussing art. One night one of our friends brought along a guest speaker who was a real live film director. Even though he only directed commercials, he’d actually been to the Cannes Film Festival and won awards in the advertising festival. He was utterly amazing. He stood up on the stage after the show and talked about th
e processes of making film, the people he’d met in Cannes and the magic of cinematography. He held us spellbound. I was over the moon when he agreed to come back to our friend’s place for a drink. I’d never met anyone like him before. He was so cool, so with it, so handsome, so entertaining, so enthusiastic and so worldly. He lived on another planet, a world I craved. He must have sensed something because he asked for my phone number. I responded by asking for his. My friends looked on in astonishment. They couldn’t believe this little westie could be so brazen. My big bear sat across from me with a sad half-smile on his face. He knew. He knew his future mama bear had slipped the shackles, kicked open the door of the cage and walked.’
‘I take it Mr Wonderful was your husband-to-be?’
‘Yes, it was Grant. I adored him. No, I worshipped him. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven when we started going out together. He took me into a world I knew existed but had never dared venture into. It was like I’d been reborn. His friends were all clever, witty, outrageous and utterly irreverent. They said things I didn’t even dare think. He took me to restaurants where the meal cost more than I earned in an entire week as a schoolteacher. He took me to premieres of movies, to jazz concerts and art gallery openings. On a couple of occasions when I saw paintings I thought were outstanding he bought them for his apartment. Just like that. Money no object. Despite everything that’s happened since, I have to say they were the most magical days of my life. I’d never been so happy. I felt that I’d finally found where I belonged. Oh, I didn’t belong at first but I was like a giant sponge. I absorbed everything around me. I became one of them by osmosis. Everything about my new life was perfect, except for the fact that I was a modern-day Cinderella. At the end of play I still had to go home to my parents’ house in westie-world and to my school to teach.
‘Shortly after Grant split with the company he worked for and set up on his own, he asked me to move in with him. I didn’t hesitate. My parents were appalled. For a while my teacher’s salary helped keep us afloat but then things started to happen. He convinced me to give up teaching and go to work with him. He didn’t have to ask twice. With my art background I began as a stylist-cum-wardrobe lady, running around and organising props and clothes for shoots. It was exciting, but exciting mainly because it was different. It didn’t take me long to see what I really wanted to do. I wanted to become a producer and cost, organise and coordinate entire productions. I wanted to be the florist not just one of the flowers. Grant encouraged me. He took me under his wing and taught me the business. He claimed I was a natural and, I tell you what, I was a bloody natural. It had taken me a long time but I’d found my true vocation. I loved my job to the point where there weren’t enough hours in the day or days in the week. Grant had to drag me out of my office, away from the set or out of a sound or videotape studio, to take me to dinner. I was the third of three producers but within six months I was winning more business than anyone else. Grant took on another couple of directors and the company grew.
