Late afternoon. Dirty smoke had caked everything all week but it had finally blown clear. We stood by the creek and towelled ourselves dry and suddenly the sun felt clean again. It blazed onto our bare backs as we walked through the dry grass back towards the house. This clear air felt almost like a miracle. It was only a week since Carmelina’s dad in the souvlaki shop but this sun seemed to unclip us from it. It made us both want to run. Instead of heading back inside, Eden and I chased each other in circles around the house and between the apple trees. At some point Eden disappeared into the field of corn. I followed him without even thinking. We were so wild with energy that we moved through the corn like hot snakes. I looked up at the sky and the yellow-brown fronds were a blaze of sun. We ran and ran like there was no yesterday. It was hot and brown and green and exciting. We ran through the corn so much that we formed our own tracks. We didn’t have to ignore the damage we wreaked because at no point did we stop to notice it.
I didn’t need to be told. As soon as I burst out of the green and saw Bobbie there I realised in the way of delayed shock exactly what we had done, and how much damage we had caused. It was suddenly astonishing to me that we had carried on like that. I looked at the field and I looked at Bobbie and she didn’t say anything but her silence was like a tirade. She looked angry but her anger was not white-hot. It looked more cold than anything. It looked as if she knew exactly what it was like to be trampled on or ignored; she knew carelessness inside out, she didn’t allow it to bubble out of her anymore but she still felt it acutely. If she’d walked out of the house and seen the field of corn ablaze at the hand of a bushfire I believed that she’d have been less affected than she was right then, seeing what we had done, the boys she had turned her life over for. She didn’t look mad, she looked hurt. Not a single word had been spoken and yet the shame I felt was immense. I wanted desperately then to make it up to her. When she finally spoke she almost sounded calm though it was a calm with padlocks on it. She stitched her words like she was sewing them into our face.
‘I’ve eaten a lot of unripe fruit in my life,’ was all she said, as if she was chewing on something sour, as if everyone always dived in first and unripe fruit was all she was ever left.
Hearing those words dug out from her mouth gave them an impact that went beyond meaning. It was like a song where you understood or responded in a deep-down way even though you had no idea what they were really singing. ‘I could pick a bone,’ she added.
She turned then and headed towards the house. I thought of everything that had happened and as I did it grew in me that I wanted to run after her like rain.
*
There was a TV at Flowerdale but we didn’t watch it often. We turned it on that night. Tea was cold meat, canned beetroot and silence. Bobbie drank a few glasses of wine but then stoppered the bottle and put it back in the fat cupboard. Eden and I sat on the floor in the living room and watched Doctor Who. Bobbie disappeared, we weren’t sure to where, though we wondered. I lost track midway through the Doctor Who episode and asked Eden to tell me what was going on. He didn’t know either. Then we watched the news. When Bobbie re-emerged she was wearing a dress and lipstick. She wore pearls about her neck but she also had on thick black Explorer socks. She didn’t have shoes on, as if she’d dressed up to go somewhere but at the last minute had decided she couldn’t be stuffed. She didn’t say anything at first but something made me think she had thawed. Eventually she said, ‘You can build a life around an armful of corn,’ and then she disappeared back into the kitchen. She came back with the half-empty wine bottle and the same glass she’d used earlier. The glass had a purple stain at the bottom.
‘My feet are on holiday,’ she said, glancing at her socks. ‘But the rest of me is at work.’
‘I’m sorry, Bobbie,’ Eden said.
‘The things that make it harder make it better,’ she said.
‘We’ll start cooking tea,’ I volunteered.
‘I’m calling it punishment by promotion,’ she said.
She poured a glass of wine. She took a sip and was about to put the glass down when she said, ‘I’ve been drinking corked wine.’ She stood but before she’d taken a step I said, ‘Can I get it?’
‘The wine?’
She walked to me. She had the wine glass in her hand. Right in front of me she swirled the wine like water in a bucket. She put the glass near my nose, waiting for me to smell, then angled it so that wine reached further up its edge. She dipped a pinky finger into the lap of wine. I opened my lips and for a brief moment her craggy finger was on my tongue, followed by the sour tang of the corked wine. We held each other’s eyes, something we almost never did.
‘What do you think?’
‘Tastes bad,’ I said, ‘with a bit of good.’
‘The good bit,’ she said, pleased of a sudden, ‘is hope.
‘Tomorrow, I’m giving you each an axe. You’re now the Chief Fire Officers of this property.’
‘Axes?’
‘Contact Backchat if you don’t like it,’ she said. And when we looked confused, ‘Type it into your googlenet thingy.’
*
‘Silage maybe,’ Bobbie said the next morning as she talked on the phone. Bobbie’s laugh usually had a depth to it but that morning it sounded more like the laugh of the girls I knew at school. ‘You’re a Christmas turkey,’ she said. ‘Ha. Blind Misère more like.’ The longer I listened the more I thought she was talking to Werner. ‘If your stupidity is intentional’ – she was still smiling – ‘then I won’t rule it out.’ She put her hand over the speaker part of the phone and pointed at the pale pink flowers that were swaying against the kitchen window. ‘Look at those hollyhocks,’ she whispered, then removed her hand and spoke again. ‘Well, I can say for sure,’ she said, ‘you won’t be doing that,’ and she hung up.
‘Doing what?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. But he won’t be doing it,’ she said. She turned for the sink and as she did she muttered, ‘Skasey thinks I’m a bit of all right.’
‘Right.’ She washed her hands and turned to me. ‘The axes.’
She led Eden and me into the garage. There was a work bench at the back of the red spray tractor. From there she pulled out something wrapped in hessian, tied with string. She undid the knot and pulled an axe out from the hessian and then withdrew another, this second one smaller.
‘Axes,’ she said. ‘Of beauty. Not of evil.
‘That’s a pun with a Scrabble-like edge,’ she added.
‘Jack and his axes,’ she went on. ‘Sharpened them on a stone. No Patrick Bateman tendencies, fortunately.’
The garage smelled of oil and tin, earth and grass. As we looked at the axes Eden said, ‘Did Werner kill his wife?’
*
Bobbie jumped on the old red tractor and we followed her to the edge of the clearing. So much had been burned in the area that we were probably safe now but she still wanted us to work on a buffer. We dragged fallen trees and branches, roped some to the tractor, stashed others in gullies where she hoped water might pool. At one point Eden took his top off and I stepped back and he swung at a dead weight of tree and I turned and Bobbie had stopped to watch him too. She noticed me looking and asked, ‘Too privileged to help?’
Later as we packed away the tractor and wrapped the axes back up she looked at us with our chests scraped and scratched by hard bush and said proudly, ‘There’s hope for you boys.’
And when we didn’t answer she said, ‘I should buy you one of those protein shake contraptions.’
‘What for?’ Eden asked.
‘Some gimmicks aren’t gimmicks,’ she said.
*
A new tin of two-fruits, packet custard, the former sloshed with sugar syrup, the latter served warm. Plates licked clean, seconds. Already in our pyjamas as the last of the day’s sun splashed gold onto the wall of Mum. A quick few hands of Uno. Swimming videos on the TV in the background, keeping a tired half-eye. Into bed early, arms and legs and backs
aching, heavy on the mattress, sleep like a drain.
‘Either of you seen the forward wind thing?’ Bobbie called after, looking for the TV remote, the sound of wine being poured.
Some time later in the black and the cold I sensed Eden and woke to find him sitting up. The night-light brushed at his face. ‘What is it?’ I asked as I wiped my eyes. I could hear the walls, the floorboards, the breath of my brother.
‘Mum,’ he said. And I couldn’t see, there was no moonlight, the curtains were drawn. But I heard a sound like water as if he’d licked his lips.
‘Mum was standing over our beds,’ he said. ‘Standing. Looking down.’
‘You were dreaming,’ I said.
‘She was here,’ he said.
‘You saw her?’
‘She was here.’
I said, ‘It’s night.’
And then in the near-dark I felt Eden climb into bed with me. If Mum had appeared then she’d have said how much we’d grown. I moved to make space and there wasn’t much and if we were normal brothers I would have complained but I didn’t because we weren’t.
*
We were busy mixing Sultana Bran through porridge when we heard a dog bark.
The radio was on talk. Bobbie was emptying the bin liner. We all flinched but then we continued as if none of us knew what the noise was. ‘Race One of the Boat People Handicap,’ Bobbie said at the radio, ‘and we have Dole Bludgers and Wogs for the quinella.’ She pulled a near-empty packet of Sultana Bran from the bin. ‘Don’t throw these out,’ she said. ‘I keep the crumbs for Skasey’s chookens.’
Eden stood and got milk from the fridge and poured it on his porridge. I couldn’t catch his eye as he passed the milk to me. The dog had only barked once, like a snap. It was the sound of yesterday and tomorrow rolled into one. I wanted to react but instead I watched Eden and Bobbie. They were busy looking busy.
Eden said, ‘Did we bring any of Fuzzy’s honey here with us?’ The morning sun was the colour of Fuzzy’s honey and it oozed through the kitchen window. At first Bobbie simply repeated ‘Fuzzy’s honey’ as if the words or the memory trickled at honey-pace across her tongue. But then she said, ‘Lunacy is normalised at the speed of light,’ as if she felt this needed to be said. She had the bin bag and the bottles gathered in her hands but she put them down and washed her hands and then picked them straight up again. She walked to the back door and opened it with her elbow. ‘I wish Jack was here,’ I heard her say.
‘Was she talking to us or to the radio?’ Eden asked once she’d gone. He stood and looked out the window at the driveway. As he stood at the sink the amber light of morning hit one of the saucepans from last night’s pasta and bounced onto his face. He glowed. He didn’t say anything. When he got back to the table he waited. It was only when Bobbie came back in that he looked at me and mouthed the words ‘You heard?’
I nodded but as I did I glanced at Bobbie. She had her back to me but I knew she saw everything I did in high definition. She wasn’t looking at anyone but she said, ‘One day I’m going to get a t-shirt printed with a swoosh on it and the words Just Don’t Fail.’ And then came a sound from the front door. It was a knock and a shuffle and another noise too.
Werner spoke at us through the wire door. ‘I don’t care if it’s inconvenient,’ he said.
‘Convenience killed the world,’ Bobbie replied, moving to the door. Her words were defiant but her voice had the tone of a half-empty bottle.
‘I think you just agreed with me,’ Werner said. We couldn’t see behind him, not from the table, and we didn’t move. Werner was now half in the house but he was still bending to hold something back behind his legs.
Bobbie looked around as if she wished the radio had been turned off. ‘She’s Jack’s dog,’ she said as if this explained something.
‘Dogs are all give, no take,’ Werner said.
In my mind there was a pause then as if there were square brackets around her next words, though in reality there were none and her reply ran straight on. ‘If you want to hear what I’m trying to tell you,’ she said, ‘stop listening and just read me.’
Werner must have stopped or bit his tongue or loosened his grip on the dog. He stumbled into the house. For a second he looked ready to argue but then he seemed to read Bobbie acutely. In a weighty way he said, ‘I’m sorry,’ which confused me. His words hung in the air and then we heard the unmistakable sound of Hemi’s bounding paws skip-scratching across the square of lino by the door. I’d never thought of it until this day because she belonged to the farm but in Bobbie’s mind Hemi belonged to our Grandpa Jack.
And Hemi had just run into Bobbie’s house again.
Hemi’s hair was golden like morning sun, like Fuzzy’s honey, like the colour of glory. Bobbie bustled towards the dog like she’d suddenly caught more energy too. Hemi leaped at Bobbie, which made her rear, but then Bobbie crouched and buried her face in Hemi’s hair. Bobbie closed her eyes and held Hemi tight as if the greetings of many lost mornings were being swept up and delivered at once. Hemi licked the side of Bobbie’s face. Bobbie kept her eyes closed the whole time. Then Hemi caught sight of Eden.
Hemi didn’t move, she stayed safe in Bobbie’s arms, but she whimpered or made a sound like that, more than once, a whimper that went straight through you. It was something to see and something to hear. Hemi’s feet started tapping then like she wanted to stay with Bobbie but she desperately wanted to leap towards Eden too. She might have been torn but she would not leave Bobbie, not while Bobbie needed her, as if rejection or hard feelings were banished from the dog dictionary. I looked and listened to all this and I did not feel jealous or left out. I felt proud. I turned to Werner and said, ‘Hemi is an awesome dog.’ I said this as if I was informing him that I’d got married or had had a baby or something. Bobbie finally released Hemi and she roared towards Eden like there was a hurry to save him and she was the only one who could. When she reached him she leaped all over him and then Hemi barked in a way that was so unlike the whimper of earlier. This bark was like the sound of a strike in tenpin bowling, everything for that one split second chaotic and perfect at once.
Bobbie turned towards the coffee machine and said, ‘I was hanging on by my fingernails.’ I watched Bobbie, the nervous speed of her hands as she took the handle from the machine, the way she ripped two cups from the cupboard. I couldn’t tell if she was pleased.
She looked at Werner. ‘I told you,’ she said, ‘if I fail these kids it won’t be because I was too gutless to do what I thought I had to.’ She frothed the milk and purged the boiler and Werner moved further into the kitchen and they drank their coffees standing up, side-on as they leaned against the sink.
I stood and listened to the sound of it all, Hemi’s four extra feet, Eden wrestling with her on the floor, Bobbie and Werner talking. When they’d finished I gathered their coffee cups without having to be asked. I washed the cups in the sink with my hands, hot water and soap. Bobbie wasn’t either my mum or my dad but she had to be both and I thought then how I wanted to help her somehow, even if only in a little or unseen way, like a booster seat. Bobbie didn’t say anything or acknowledge my action but she never missed a move of her stocks.
Eventually she announced that she was going to the shops with Werner. ‘Do you boys want anything?’ she asked as she walked to the stereo. I recognised this moment and knew that she would put on Marcia and it would be ‘Shining’. It was a song that made us all happy for as long as it lasted. But then the music started and it was Elton. He sang about candles and wind and about knowing who to turn to when the rain set in.
Bobbie picked up her car keys and looked at me as if she’d expected me to go with them. I wanted to be with Eden and Hemi and the farm but what I wanted most was for everything here now to stay exactly as it was.
‘What will make you happy?’ I replied to her, the words spilling from me before they’d properly formed.
‘They don’t sell that,’ Bobbie replied. These words soun
ded harsh or short and almost before they were properly out she’d turned away. But then she turned back and looked at me. She didn’t say anything or reach out but I remembered how the word honey had rolled from her tongue only minutes earlier and I knew that she had us by more than her fingernails now and I wanted to tell her exactly that, but I hadn’t learned how to yet.
*
Eden, Hemi and I ran the fields and swam the creek like they were territories fresh for conquering. Hemi was in lockstep with our every move. Even when we flaked down by the creek she sat on the hot stones beside us. I wanted nothing more then than to be saturated with warmth. I thought how I might get sunburned but I could turn pink the length of my body that day for all that I cared. I put my hand near Hemi’s mouth and even exhausted she licked it. The weeds around looked pretty with their yellow-black eyes and I nudged my arm under Eden’s head and we lay there on the stones face-up to the blue sky. ‘Hungry as,’ he said.
‘Hope Bobbie gets some pink dip,’ I said.
‘Bobbie’s mac and cheese is different to Dad’s.’
‘It’s the cheese she uses,’ I said.
‘It has a kind of Bobbie flavour,’ he said.
‘The checkout chap at the supermarket looked like Hymie,’ Bobbie said idly, back at the house later, as she unpacked the shopping.
‘Who’s Hymie?’ I asked.
‘Checkout chap,’ Werner laughed.
‘He was the future but we didn’t know it,’ Bobbie said.
‘What are these?’ Eden pulled a bag from the shopping.
‘We’re outside the dumpling zone here,’ she said. ‘But the freezer zone is endless.’
*
Bobbie had barrels to top so Werner came to watch us race our stretch of creek. As we stepped dripping from the water he asked if we had a proper training plan and we told him how we did squad five times a week.
‘If you’re not doing intervals then you’re not really training,’ he said just before we dived back in.
Werner said he wouldn’t swim but we swam on for ages and he was on a log in the afternoon sun and eventually he stripped down to his undies and strode into the water.
We Were Not Men Page 11
