We Were Not Men

by Campbell Mattinson

  *

  Werner had hold of Bobbie’s car keys. ‘You’ll grow into yourself,’ he said to Eden as we waited there for Bobbie.

  Hot chocolate, I thought. I suddenly wanted a hot chocolate.

  ‘I keep walking past these big trees in my yard,’ Werner said, ‘and thinking, I remember you when you were first planted.’

  ‘Stick it up ’em,’ Bobbie said, coming back. ‘Just jump in the pool and stick it right up ’em.’

  ‘Here,’ Werner said. He held Bobbie’s car keys out to me. ‘Make sure she doesn’t drive.’

  *

  It was downhill from Werner’s to our Flowerdale house. It made us walk quicker than normal. ‘Stop screwing me up,’ she said as she tripped and stumbled. She told us to slow down but instead we took an arm each and assisted her.

  ‘I’ll buy him a box of cherries for Christmas,’ she said as if amends were in order and cherries would do it.

  ‘Fuzzy’s coming to Flowerdale,’ she then said. ‘Bringing his buzzy bee boxes. They’ll go ape when they get a whiff of our flowering gums.’

  ‘I’m hungry,’ I said.

  ‘I just got bitten by a bull ant,’ Bobbie said. ‘That ant’s going to have a nasty taste.’

  We turned off the road and swung open our front gate. ‘Hack off a chunk of bread when we get in,’ she said, turning to me. She opened the front door, switched on the light, the picture of Mum the first thing we saw. ‘Long time since I’ve had a night to myself,’ she said.

  *

  I didn’t know what he was up to but as soon as Eden stepped out of bed and began to dress I was out and unscrambling yesterday’s clothes.

  We had to be in the creek early on Saturdays because we’d moved to three-hour sessions and we had our Chief Fire Officer duties and then we had to prepare the best shaded place for the arrival of Fuzzy’s bees. We had trees to cut and logs to clear.

  ‘It’s way early,’ I said, worried already.

  ‘Come with me,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t wake Bobbie,’ I said.

  Eden could do things that I couldn’t. Bobbie was asleep on the couch just beyond our bedroom door but he led me out and headed right past her as if confidence could be hypnotic. He walked with a flat bare-foot stride but I was on tiptoe. He didn’t head to the kitchen but instead did the unthinkable and went to the door on the other side of the loungeroom. This door had been kept shut our whole time at Flowerdale. It was Bobbie’s old bedroom, the one she used to sleep in with Grandpa Jack.

  If we opened her old bedroom door and she woke we’d be caught in full view. It was a mild morning but suddenly my spine froze. Bobbie still used the wardrobes of her bedroom but she always closed the door behind her. Eden turned and looked at Bobbie as he twisted the handle. He was still looking at her as he pushed the door open and stepped in.

  I wanted at least to hesitate but instead I hurried in after Eden. He shut the door behind us and we stood still in the dark as if gumption was like dust and needed to settle. Then he clicked the bedroom light on. The light cast a soft warm glow. The curtains were mostly closed, there were two chairs piled on top of one another in a corner, there were clothes, belts and gumboots jumbled on top. There were books and CDs beside this chair, a tea mug, a dirty baseball cap. It looked as though a pile of Grandpa Jack’s favourite stuff had been collected and stored here for safekeeping. What grabbed our attention most though was the double bed, which was unmade. Both the sheet and the doona were pushed into a high mound down one side of the bed so that it formed a kind of cliff. The bed looked like a paddock with one side grown wild and the other drenched with herbicide. This made the side where there was no doona seem as though it wasn’t empty and instead was full of the fact that Grandpa Jack wasn’t there.

  On the floor beside the bed was a scrunched pair of pyjama bottoms. It looked as though on his final night Grandpa Jack had been too hot in bed and had pushed his pants off.

  Eden took a step towards the bed and towards the pyjama pants as if he was going to pick them up. As he did I saw his bare feet make footprints in the dust on the floorboards. ‘Stop,’ I whispered. I was so keen for Eden to stop that I reached out to grab his arm. I looked around then and noticed that there was a clear path. Bobbie took the exact same steps every time she moved through the room. The day Grandpa Jack died was being preserved not in a casual or haphazard way but with determination.

  I pointed out the footsteps on the floor to Eden. I saw then that a small area around the pyjama pants had been disturbed, as if the pants had been picked up and replaced. The dust around them had been smeared back into place. I held onto Eden’s shoulders and leaned further forward. I made sure not to move my feet. In the dim warm light I saw on Grandpa’s old pyjamas a patch of red, deep red, as if they had been pressed many times against red chalk or roses or lipstick.

  ‘Do I have to remind you,’ Bobbie called out then, no doubt still lying on the couch, her voice so clear and cold that hearing it was like swallowing ice-blocks, ‘who washes all your towels?’

  I turned back to the bedroom door then and watched it start to open, or at least I thought I did. I saw what fear wanted me to see. I let go of Eden’s shoulders and together we stepped back through the room, careful not to disturb any more dust.

  ‘You’ve still got your dead husband here,’ Eden said to Bobbie, as if the situation was his to command, as if he’d deliberately avoided calling him Grandpa or Grandpa Up the Bush or Grandpa Jack.

  I hoped in a crazy way that Bobbie would say something light or flippant or jokey. She might have paused, I was all awry, but I know she then said, ‘There’s stuff I still want to tell him.’

  I wanted then to turn for Mum, her picture, but Eden looked down and we both noticed that there was a wine bottle and glass beside the couch. It was nothing in a something way. It didn’t seem amazing that she’d started drinking again after we’d gone to bed, even though we’d had to help her walk back from Werner’s. The sight of the half-full bottle though made me feel not just scared but vulnerable. The cork lay on the floor and I had an urge to shove it deep back into the bottle’s neck.

  ‘The scars come out at night,’ Bobbie said.

  Eden didn’t step immediately towards her but it felt as though he did. The light in the room was low, early and yellowed; the room was mostly shadow. ‘You’ll sink,’ he said at first.

  And then he did step forward. He picked up the wine bottle and glass, and as he did he blocked my view of her. He was about to speak but Bobbie got in first. ‘You change as you get older. You’re not just an older version of your younger self.’ As Bobbie spoke she must have moved her hands, in gesticulation, because I saw them flutter out from behind Eden like the tiny wings of a bird.

  And then Eden said it, he ground us to the bone.

  ‘You are our world,’ he said to Bobbie. He said this with some force, almost but not quite gritted. He lifted the bottle and glass as if he was going to do something with them but then he simply walked with them to the kitchen.

  Bobbie aimed her next words at me more than she did at Eden. ‘The wine bug bites at the holes in people,’ she said.

  *

  Bobbie and I stood in the lounge in the early morning light. I should have been in the creek, submerged, the cold water, consumed by speed. I should have been changing, or running, Hemi at my heels, tearing after Eden. From the kitchen though came the sound of running tap water, of rinsing. I stood frozen, eyes fixed on the floor as if I was waiting, idly. When I eventually looked at Bobbie she stared straight back. She said neither as an apology nor in defiance, ‘I tell myself’ – she took a breath – ‘that I drink wine for a living.’ The softness of her voice made me think that she was talking only and especially to me, even more so now than a moment before, though I immediately then wondered whether she meant for me to pass her words on. I ran a hand through my hair as if nervous and she turned as if frustrated by my response. She spoke louder then, considerably so. ‘I tell myself I
drink wine for a living,’ she repeated. She said these words as if she was calling them out to a crowd or to a floor of traders.

  Eden had moved to the fat cupboard. ‘Bobbie,’ he called out, ‘did you buy spirulina?’

  Bobbie did not pause. ‘Yeah nah,’ she said, ‘not buying that crap.’

  *

  I pulled out of the creek after hours of swimming and Fuzzy was standing beside Werner. ‘He’s good,’ Werner said to Fuzzy as he nodded towards me, ‘but you want to see his brother.’

  Fuzzy had driven his tray truck down the dirt track to the edge of our creek. It was loaded with boxes of bees. ‘His technique,’ Werner continued, ‘gets better under stress. You tell them to go flat out and his stroke just gets smoother.’

  ‘You can’t reverse engineer that,’ Fuzzy replied.

  ‘Or get it back if you lose it,’ Werner said.

  ‘Imagine,’ Fuzzy said, his hair all lit up with yellow morning light, ‘rocking up as a twelve-year-old and realising that you’re born into the same age-group as Eden and Jon Hardacre.’

  Our training sessions were so long now that by the end of each one my voice had usually gone. Eden pulled up and I was going to tell him what Werner had just said but before I could he turned to Werner and said, ‘I’m worried about Bobbie.’ Eden’s voice was scratchy and depleted too. He spoke as though Bobbie had become pent up in his mind throughout those head-down hours in the creek.

  Werner, slender as a pine and feathered with sawdust, stood between the sun and us, side-on, side by side with Fuzzy, both of them with coffees in hand.

  ‘In what way?’ Werner said gently.

  What Eden then said was as much the bleeding obvious as it was the unsayable. As he spoke I knelt down and placed a hand flat on the stony ground. ‘She’s a drunk,’ he said. ‘She’s a drunk and all anyone’s doing is ignoring it.’ I wanted to lift my hand because the sun had made the stones hot already but I worried that I’d topple if I did.

  ‘She’ll harden up,’ Werner replied quickly, suddenly more serious.

  ‘She’s a winemaker,’ I said as if this word might excuse her, though I wasn’t sure what a winemaker really was or if I properly believed it.

  ‘She’s drinking herself back to Grandpa Up The Bush,’ Eden said.

  ‘Peaceful in the country,’ Fuzzy interjected. He turned to walk in a jittery, almost nervous way but then he pointed at the bank on the other side of the creek. ‘Soils here are red,’ he said. He didn’t quite wolf whistle but he almost did.

  The stones were pale with sun and the creek had a sparkle in its step and I looked down so that I didn’t have to look at anyone.

  It occurred to me then that we were two boys and two men by a creek in the bush and that we were discussing a woman as if it was our right and something about that didn’t seem fair, or at least not while Bobbie wasn’t there to fire back. In my mind then I heard Bobbie use the word vultures.

  ‘You’ll know this from racing,’ Werner said. ‘But sometimes when you’ve gone flat out for as long as you can, and for longer even, and you look up and see that there’s still a ways to go and so you have no real choice, you just have to knuckle down and close your eyes and keep on going as hard as you can for as long as it takes.’ He flicked his coffee into the bushes. ‘I think Bobbie’s been living as though she’s in that last head-down stage for a while now.’

  ‘We’re all paddling, we’re just paddling,’ Fuzzy started, and I think he was about to contribute more but we were all distracted by Hemi. She jumped onto the back of Fuzzy’s tray truck and from a height started barking.

  ‘Today’s been a weird week,’ Bobbie said marching towards us. ‘Where are the boxes going?’ she asked, turning to Eden.

  ‘Up the back of the cornfield,’ I said.

  ‘Elegant solution,’ she said.

  ‘You’ve got cockies here,’ Fuzzy said. They squawked in the distance.

  ‘They steal all the best hazelnuts,’ she said.

  ‘If I had this place I’d make it a bee farm.’

  Eden and I climbed onto the back of Fuzzy’s car and pointed to where he should go. We helped him unload the boxes before heading to get axes, shovels and gloves from the garage. I then went back to the house for water. I entered through the side laundry. Bobbie and Werner had come back and were in the kitchen. I got the water bottles filled as quietly as I could. ‘Four minutes doesn’t mean eight minutes,’ I heard Bobbie say, though I couldn’t read her tone.

  It wasn’t quite in reply, I missed the next exchange, but I then heard Werner say to Bobbie, ‘You’re infuriating.’ I could not read Werner’s tone either but his words had more tension than slack.

  ‘All the best women are,’ I heard Bobbie reply.

  *

  Just before tea as the sunlight turned soft Bobbie pointed to a bunch of white sheets she’d put on the kitchen table. ‘Hang those out on the line,’ she said.

  ‘They’re dry,’ I said as I picked them up.

  ‘They look good when they billow,’ she said.

  We set the card table up outside and arranged knives, forks and glasses. Bobbie was right about the white sheets because a breeze came down from the hills and in the late sun the sheets flapped and shone. We all couldn’t help stealing glances at them. Fuzzy had stayed to help and so too had Werner and we’d not only set the bee boxes up but we’d swung axes and ratcheted the fences and carted water. We’d worked hard. We’d showered fresh before tea and put on clean clothes and with Fuzzy there as an extra and Werner too it felt as though we were part of something more.

  ‘He’s got a keyring,’ Bobbie said as I helped her take out plates, ‘with a hundred keys on it somewhere.’ We were only just out of Werner’s earshot. ‘I bet he used to walk around with it jangling from his belt.’

  We rounded the rhododendron and the lemon tree to where they’d got a fire going below a rusted old grill.

  ‘She calls the pantry the fat cupboard,’ Werner said to Fuzzy.

  We ate cutlets and mustard and potatoes and green beans. We picked lemons from the tree and squeezed them in bursts. ‘Beats defrost spag bol,’ Bobbie said.

  ‘Or hot tongue and cold shoulder,’ Werner said, daringly, though it seemed to amuse her.

  ‘Blatherskite,’ she said. ‘If you don’t like it you can go back across the road.’

  ‘That sun’s beautiful,’ Fuzzy said, angling his face towards it. The sun caught at the edges of his hair and made it look like streamers. I looked up at the sky as if it held a ball of our mum.

  ‘They’ll privatise the sun one day,’ Bobbie said.

  And then licking at cutlets and buttered green beans Bobbie looked straight at Fuzzy. ‘I don’t know how it now sits in your head,’ she said, ‘but that night when you stood up to that bastard you did good. I’m telling you for all of us, you did good.’

  *

  Near the end of their first day at Flowerdale, Fuzzy’s bees took flight and swarmed. It didn’t matter. Werner and Fuzzy were there, cockies cracked through the best of the hazelnuts, Bobbie started with white wine but didn’t move on to red. The bees might not have yet settled but it felt as though we had. Eventually we heard the hum and saw that the bees had flown over the corn and followed us. Soon the air was jumpy and thick with them. We stood from the card table and watched them as if looking straight into the eye of our good mood. The hum, the smell and suggestion of honey, the wide slow blaze of sun. The creek had a special smell at the start and the end of each day and I thought the bees then might have smelled it.

  ‘Can we swim with them?’ I said like a kid all swept up.

  ‘Bees can’t swim,’ Fuzzy said as if otherwise we could.

  It was a day and a moment of gold. Werner helped clear the plates, Fuzzy stayed for stewed rhubarb and whipped cream, Eden and I got to lick the beaters. Every now and then Bobbie tried to get Werner and Fuzzy into a game of Scrabble and every time Fuzzy said that he was going home soon. But he stayed. At one point the
swarm turned the air into a chicken soup of bees, like long hair in a torrent of wind, the crazy beautiful, the kind of crazy you wanted to bottle. When Fuzzy spoke of the bees he whispered. He said that you couldn’t blame them for wanting to spread their wings to see. He said he’d wait and let them play and then he’d guide the queen back to the boxes. The rest of the bees would then follow. He was sailing the bees on the same wind that made Bobbie’s white sheets billow.

  Eden looked at the swarming bees and said, ‘They all work for the same queen?’

  Before Fuzzy could answer I said, ‘They can’t swim?’

  Our words sat on the breeze and lazed in the sun.

  ‘If you move bees a metre they freak out,’ Fuzzy said. ‘But move them twenty miles and they’re fine.’

  *

  ‘Bobbie,’ Werner leaned in and whispered to me as Fuzzy’s truck crunched its way out of our driveway, ‘started a sentence in about 1998 and still hadn’t reached the end of it when your Grandpa Jack died.’

  The grasses and flowers were dim now without light. Bobbie returned. ‘Whatever happened,’ she said, ‘to those multi-coloured globes we used to string up?’

  *

  It was not a special day but it would become so. The school bell rang and Eden set for home and I stayed to wait with Carmelina. If the afternoon sea breeze hadn’t been so brisk we would have sat on the oval in the clean white sun and looked up and cleansed our faces with it. But as we walked towards the oval the wind knifed through us and so we kept walking to the oval’s edge. The fence there was made mostly of wire but a small section was a wall of weatherboard. It was our shelter from the wind. There were holes beneath this wooden fence and paths where animals had burrowed. Over the fence we could see towers of cacti with their prickles dotted in immaculate rows. We sat on the ground against the wood and although Carmelina didn’t hold my hand at first she tucked herself in and eventually held it.

  ‘You look sad sometimes,’ she said.

  I didn’t feel sad but I looked out at the wind-blown grass and at the unfinished scoreboard and I wondered if there were autumn leaves in my eyes and that she saw them when I stared.