Already I know I will take her. I see myself doing it, helping her in and out of the car. Of course I will do it. But I want to drop to the floor and cry. Then my thoughts flip the other way and I see that my manic rush to get the funding application in is ludicrous. All this panic for nothing, because we’ll get knocked back anyway.
‘Margie, let’s go,’ I say. ‘We’ll have lunch first.’
She slowly eases herself off the bed.
‘I’d like her in a wheelchair,’ the physio says, ‘until we know what’s happening.’ He must see in my expression that this is another problem to solve. ‘We rent them here. Fourteen dollars a week.’
It is much easier getting around with Margie in a wheelchair. She grips the sides as I push her into the Harvest Café and find a table towards the back where I can tuck the wheelchair in. She looks pale and asks for a glass of water. I watch her fumble with the foil blister strip and want to help her, but she keeps it close, not looking at me. She swallows a blue tablet.
This is new for both of us. In the fourteen years I’ve lived at Maryhill, we’ve never socialised alone. If I didn’t go to her place in Bishop Street when I went to shop in town, I’d never see her. For some reason she separated herself from the farm and has only visited us three times. The first was after Isobel was born; Margie brought a homemade sponge cake and a crocheted blanket with washing instructions pinned in a corner. I never used it because I was afraid I’d ruin it.
Then one year we had a family Christmas, a day that will never be repeated. After drinking a bottle or more of chardonnay, Caroline raged that Alice Ballantine’s sideboard should be hers, that Ross and I have everything ‘and I have nothing’. There’s some truth in this, but what can I do? Those inheritance decisions weren’t made by me. And besides, I like the sideboard. Later that day, I noticed that one of the silver candelabras in the dining room was missing; Caroline’s initials were written in the dust beside where it had sat.
The last time Margie came over was when Jemima was eight weeks old. She said she didn’t like her name. Two granddaughters twenty-five minutes away and Margie’s hardly seen them, except if they were with me when I popped in. Sometimes I think things would be different had Ross and I had a boy, if Harry had lived. The Ballantines always worshipped boys.
I order a chicken salad. Margie asks for the roast of the day and I wonder how long this is going to take. The silence while we wait for our food is killing me, so I gush about the grant application. I describe the questions I’m trying to answer, what the artistic concept is. I hear the intensity and passion in my voice, and I can tell my face is beaming. Margie seems startled. I keep going because I am obsessed and bored and frustrated, telling her and the air between us that Victorian Rural Arts want to know how we plan to capture our audiences.
Then I stop. Because I suddenly remember doing all this before, a long time ago when I met her for the first time. Her mouth is open in exactly the same way. The only question that needs to be answered is, why am I trying to please this cow of a woman?
Our meals are served.
I’m sad, wretched. Tears wet my eyes because I realise we won’t get the funding. Time has run out. I need to think, to process this information so I can move on.
She cuts into the lamb.
I move a cashew around in my salad.
Then I hear my voice and am surprised at the kindness, the calm beseeching. ‘Margie, do you understand that the play I’ve been writing for more than thirteen years requires funding? People are counting on me to get the application in. It’s due today, and now I’m not going to make the deadline.’
She sighs and pushes roast potato onto her fork.
‘Do you understand what I just said?’ I ask.
She looks at me, her knife and fork in midair. I want her to see the tears on my face and don’t wipe them away.
‘I can see it’s important to you,’ she says. ‘But it makes no sense to me. Your floors need vacuuming and a good wash with metho diluted in water. And there are cobwebs and dust in every room.’
She slays me. I lift my face and silently laugh into the café. ‘Don’t you care about me, Margie?’ I wipe my eyes, blow my nose. The table is a small white landscape with salt, pepper, glasses of water, sprigs of flowering rosemary in a small vase. ‘What do you care about?’
Margie leans forward. I get a feeling of confidentiality; her mouth is moving as if whispering something too soft for me to hear. I blink in surprise. Her lips tremble. She clasps her hands together. Something seems to terrify her, and it is her turn to cry.
‘What’s wrong?’ I ask.
She quickly dabs her eyes with a serviette. Then pushes the plate away. ‘Take me home.’
And I know she means Maryhill, not Bishop Street.
‘The X-ray first,’ I say.
‘I can’t bear it.’
‘What?’ I say.
‘Never mind,’ she says, but there’s childlike pleading or sadness in her tired brown eyes. I reach out and touch her hand, and she doesn’t pull away.
We wait thirty minutes for the X-ray. I’ve left my laptop in the car and sit in silence, mulling over the funding questions, still composing answers – but my thinking is perverse because I know it’s not going to happen. When I get home I’ll send an email to the group. Margie is beside me, asleep in the wheelchair. She looks uncomfortable, her head lolling to the side.
At three we are on our way home in time to get the girls from the bus. I phone Ross and tell him.
‘No worries, my darling.’ He’s forgotten his mother can hear, because after he tells me the truck was on time to pick up the weaners, he says the electric fence energiser ‘is completely fucked’ – that he’ll have to replace the whole unit. ‘But I need new chainsaw blades and some fuel, so I’ll go to town tomorrow.’
I tell him I’ve not done the grocery shopping and he’ll have to do it.
Down the Hume, I set the cruise control to 110. A police car is behind me, and even though I’m on the limit I slow down. At the Violet Town turn-off, I get a brave idea and pull over; the tyres spit on the gravel and I park under a yellow box. How appropriate.
When I get out of the car, Margie doesn’t ask what I’m doing. And I don’t say.
I dial and walk away with my phone to my ear. I’m staring back up the freeway – cars dash by, a campervan, a B-double – when I ask the cultural partnership person at Victorian Rural Arts for an extension. We’ve spoken before: she understands the project, and now she knows that my mother-in-law, who is recovering from a hip operation, has moved in.
‘Is it possible?’ I ask.
Silence.
‘Please,’ I beg.
I’m put on hold.
Margie is sitting stiffly in the car, watching me with tight lips.
‘We’ll give you another twenty-four hours,’ the cultural partnership woman says.
Fist in the air. ‘Yes!’
Chapter 8
Margie
STELLA drives too fast. I glance at the speedo and see we are on the limit, but even so the gum trees and paddocks rush by. On Black Wattle Road a swamp wallaby stares at us from the verge and I expect it to jump towards us, but it turns and disappears. Driving this stretch of winding road from Violet Town to Maryhill is hard work, although Stella’s automatic car seems to make the corners easier to deal with. Norman always insisted we drive manuals, even when I had that trouble with my left knee.
The painkiller has done its job; the constant ache in my hip has gone, but the tablet has made me sleepy – or I’m just generally weary from our excursion today.
Stella is happy. Someone has just given her more time to organise the application. She’s staring forward, smiling. Her pale hands on the wheel are free of blemishes, the nails short and neat with no polish; they help give her the appearance of a practical person, yet she’s not like that. She doesn’t have an engagement ring. Her wedding band is gold, wide and studded with rubies – it suits her and I can’
t explain why, except that it’s unconventional.
We’re listening to the same woman vocalist as this morning; her mournful voice comes from a speaker somewhere on the dash and fills the car. I hear lyrics about not becoming who she wanted to be and missing her mother. I take those words inside me. They uplift me because whoever the singer is, she understands how I feel.
You’d think at eighty I wouldn’t be nostalgic for my mother. Her name was Lillian, and Dad called her ‘my-Lily’. Images flit through my mind of her moving around in the Arundel Street house where I grew up. I recall the closeness of her soft body when I sat beside her on the couch. She used to scrub her strong and large hands with lemon juice. When I married and moved to Maryhill, I modelled myself on her industriousness and sometimes pretended she was standing in a corner admiring my work. Sometimes I had to block her out so she wouldn’t see things, those times I went to the black cockatoos … see how they’re low-flying, five, six, as they land in the wattle branches. There was that one time I needed medical attention and Mum visited me in hospital. I hoped my practised lie was convincing – that I’d been careless and got myself between a cow and new calf in the home paddock. But her face was flat, a mask, and I knew she guessed my troubles with Norman. I couldn’t hold her gaze because there was nothing to be done. She didn’t ask any awkward questions and I knew not to tell her. When she left, she patted my arm and I had the feeling she was dis appointed in me – as though it was somehow my fault that I was in hospital with a fractured forearm and a bruise to my cheek. She didn’t know that the doctor’s main concern was my pink urine.
Even so, when Mum left the hospital, I apportioned a share of blame to her – for encouraging me to marry Norman in the first place, and then not rescuing me when she knew I was in trouble.
I breathe my mother away, with love. It’s just the way it was.
Coming up on the right is Chester and Laura’s place, concealed by an overgrown garden as if they’re trying to hide. I know it’s a two-bedroom granite house he built with his own hands between 1958 and 1961. And there it is, the hedged row of lilly pillies and the cluster of silver birches; hundreds of snowdrops will appear among them in early spring. I remember that day Chester and I first spoke – at his back door when I was picking up Mark from an after-school visit with Justin. The ground was matted with gold and red leaves from the liquid ambar beside the water tank. Autumn and overcast. I was looking up at Chester standing on his back step. ‘Why are you wearing sunglasses?’ he asked.
Stella is talking to me and it’s all such a tangle, and I clasp my hands together and squeeze so they don’t tremble like they did in the café at lunchtime. I make a promise to myself never to be weak again.
‘How are you feeling?’ Stella asks.
I nod to say I’m all right. It still rankles that she knows Chester, that he’s involved with her play. It makes no sense to me.
I consider the self-assured way Stella carries herself – staring ahead, thinking, listening, knowing what she’s going to do next, and all the time caught up in this theatre interest. Ross loves her, I can tell. And he’s made a go of the farm. Freddie would be satisfied with what he’s done: rotational grazing and an increase in the stocking rate. The Weekly Times says the cattle price is high and I know Ross is shipping heifers to China. I’m not sure about that, but Stella told me the Chinese buyer came to the cattle yards and said the cows were going from one good home to another. I wonder what the Ballantine forefathers would make of that, Maryhill cattle going to China.
Stella pulls up at the corner of Maryhill Road and Marion Road, where the school bus will stop. There’s a mat of fallen bark all around, as if the manna gums are shedding skin. When I used to pick up my children, I parked across the road in whichever model of Holden we had at the time. I liked the Premier best; it was the first car we had with air-conditioning. Mark was always off the bus first, looking up, grinning when he saw me. And here I am waiting for Ross’s daughters. Time passes so fast, and yet so much has happened. Some wounds never heal, yet I’m tired of it, the regret, and now I don’t even know what I’m thinking. Stella is staring into the screen of her phone, not talking but reading. I’m curious to know what, but I won’t ask.
The bus arrives. The little girls hurry to the car. Isobel and – I’ve got her name now – Jemima. The back seat is filled with backpacks and smiling faces, a sort of jumbling, light happiness. Stella chats with them and I don’t understand what they’re talking about, something to do with India, then I realise it’s a girl’s name. I turn and smile, and they look at me as if I’m a zoo animal, something to stare at and admire. Then Stella is up the driveway at sixty, a dust storm behind.
The children grab their bags and leave us. Stella is already adept in unfolding the wheelchair and positioning it close to where I need it. She’s patient as I gather myself out of the car and sit. Then we’re off. She almost runs to the house. From the path I see a couple of dozen green tomatoes drooping from the trellis. It’s too late for them to ripen, but they’d make up beautifully into a relish. I won’t mention it; Stella’s not the relish-making type. And there’s washing on the line that was there yesterday and it’ll be dry by now.
It’s too difficult to manoeuvre the wheelchair inside the house, over the step from the back porch into the dining room, then past the narrow turn that leads to my storeroom bedroom. I return to the crutches and move slowly to a dinner-table chair. The girls quickly disappear to the back of the house with mini packets of shop-bought biscuits. Jemima is holding Dot’s cat in her arms, close to her face – while eating. Stella makes us tea and then vanishes into the old dining room, carrying her mug and phone, her enormous bag over her shoulder. I watch the door sway behind her. Faint tapping of piano scales comes from the front room.
I am alone. All around are the stirred-up ghosts of my past. It’s Chester who’s done it. At his back door. The liquidambar’s gold and red leaves at my feet. I was looking up as he carefully reached forward with both hands – his watchband was brown leather – and lifted my sunglasses away.
The way his mouth moved, as if he, himself, were in pain. ‘Who did this?’
His voice was very quiet.
But I didn’t tell.
The muted sound of Isobel practising piano, a faltering classical piece difficult to recognise at this end of the house. Her hands, green fingernails, flitting and pausing across the keyboard. I’d like to wander up there to watch and hear properly, but I’m distracted by my bladder. The idea of standing and finding my way to the toilet feels too difficult; nonetheless, I must act. I lift myself up, struggle with the crutches and launch myself towards the bathroom.
It is only four in the afternoon with two or more hours before dinner. After the bathroom I ease myself onto my bed and pick up the Maggie Smith biography. I open the cover. And blink. It’s a month overdue for return to the library and I now can’t concentrate on it. The book must be returned without delay.
A cobweb is dangling in the corner of the room and it reminds me of how useless I am. Once I would’ve taken a swing at it with the broom.
Then the call of a red wattlebird in the maple, and I lean back against the pillows to enjoy it.
I’m surprised to discover I’ve napped; a whole blessed hour has passed all by itself. There are voices in the dining room. Ross is inside. I sit up.
‘How’s it going?’ Ross says to me when I appear at the family-room door.
It’s too big a question because I have a lot to explain to him and don’t know where to start. The cat. The overdue library book. The dust in the house and the cobweb in my room. The hard mattress on my bed. The unsatisfactory meals. The condition of the garden, the unmown lawns, the weeds in the vegetable boxes. The dry washing on the clothesline. He has no idea I’m a prisoner to my disability.
He turns away before I answer, announcing he’s having a shower before dinner.
What dinner? Stella, I assume, is still behind the closed dining-room door. The
girls are now sitting orphan-like, gaping at the television.
I sit and watch the clock. Time moves slowly and there is no movement in the kitchen. Sometimes I hear Stella on the phone, short conversations. The cat is staring at me from the couch. I look away, disturbed by its presence.
Finally, Stella slaps the swing door open and moves around the kitchen. The gas lights, the fridge door opens and closes, the toaster pops. A handful of cutlery is dumped in the middle of the table. Ross takes the newspapers and drops them on a chair. As though she’s still waitressing in a restaurant, Stella neatly serves three plates at once: scrambled eggs and toast. She’s added too much milk to the egg, but I pretend not to notice. She does everything too fast, doesn’t measure anything. I glance between Ross and Stella and it confirms what I think: Ross isn’t happy with the way the house is run, yet she does as she pleases.
Even though the eggs are quite terrible, I decide to be positive and ask Ross if he remembers the chickens we once had.
He barely looks at me. ‘Yes,’ he says.
‘And the rooster, like the one on the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes packet.’ I smile, trying to engage my son in conversation.
‘No,’ he says. ‘I don’t remember that we ever had a rooster.’
I decide not to go into it, the details on how his dog got into the pen and injured the bird’s wing.
I put more salt on the soggy eggs. The girls niggle each other, and I can’t understand why. Ross opens his iPad and I think that is very bad manners, but he’s obsessed with the weather, always searching for rain as if the radar will perform a miracle. Jemima lets out a pink open-mouthed wail, saying her sister has stolen her favourite horse swap card. Stella glares at Isobel and I can hardly bear all this carry-on.
‘Stell,’ Ross says, ‘it won’t be too hot in the yards tomorrow.’
She looks blankly at him.
‘Pregnancy testing the spring calvers,’ he says. ‘The vet’s coming.’
Stella and Margie Page 8
