by Rod Jones
Her friends from London were not the same now. It was impossible to return to those nights in Swiss Cottage. That time was gone. That Cathy was gone.
David came into the bedroom and sat next to her on the bed. His aura was penitential. ‘Come on, let’s go out,’ he said. He had bought his carton of beer and was determined to go to the party.
‘David, I’m not going out tonight.’
CATHY MANAGED TO persuade David to visit the farm in Arcadia during the September university holidays. They slept in Cathy’s old bedroom, in the double bed with its brass bedstead. Each leg of the bed stood in a tin of water, because of the mouse plague of that year. She took David’s hand and placed it on her round belly. ‘Feel that?’ she asked. She was five months pregnant. The baby was beginning to kick.
Cathy drove her dad’s ute to show David around. The dusty cabin of the Valiant was littered with empty beer cans, the Weekly Times, girlie magazines. They bumped along the dirt tracks, Cathy stopping for him to get out and open the gates when they crossed from one paddock to another. It was a clear, blue spring day. They set themselves down on a blanket on the banks of the Yerri-yerri. There was no wind. The countryside spread around them, unnaturally quiet. They ate lamb and pickle sandwiches, wedges of sponge cake made from farm eggs with their deep yellow yolks. Cathy unscrewed the top of the thermos and poured their tea. David lay back with a cigarette and looked at the sky. Cathy had taken her father’s advice and stopped smoking, but she still enjoyed the rich, dark smell of Turkish tobacco.
‘Do you think you could ever live in the country?’ Cathy asked.
‘I don’t know. It’s not something I’ve ever thought about.’
‘There’s something I want to show you, later.’
‘What?’
‘I’m not saying. It’s a surprise.’
‘I hate surprises.’
‘I know you do, but I’m showing you anyway.’
Later that afternoon, they drove to the old Pierce place, dreaming in its fields of wheat beside the lake.
‘Well, what do you think?’ she asked.
‘Who lives here?’
‘A couple of teachers. They’re away in Europe. It’s for sale.’
She showed him the ballroom which, she said, would make a wonderful library, the bay window where he could set his desk. ‘Do you think you could write your novel here?’ she asked.
‘What about our Greek island?’
‘It will still be there, waiting for us to find it.’
Time passed differently at the farm. Days seemed slow; then, suddenly, a week had passed. In the mornings after breakfast, Cathy went to feed the chooks the jug of kitchen scraps, just as she had when she was a girl.
Cathy set David up in the dining room. It was a large room, rarely used, with the piano and the organ and the oak table, where David clattered away on his typewriter, adding slowly to his store of pages. Morning sun streamed through the windows. He smoked, he typed. Cathy hoped he was happy.
In the afternoons, they helped with chores around the farm. While her dad drove the tractor in circles, ploughing fallow fields, David sat in the cabin of the old Bedford truck with his packet of Camels and The Alexandria Quartet.
David asked her dad to teach him to shoot.
‘Why do you want to learn to shoot? You won’t find much to shoot at. All the rabbits are myx-y up here.’
‘I’d just like to have a go. I’ve never used a rifle before.’
The rifle was kept in the pantry as it had always been, the boxes of bullets on a shelf next to jars of homemade jam and tomato relish. It was a Sterling .22. Cathy helped him set up beer cans on a fence post to practise.
One day they watched her dad slit two lambs’ throats. He hung them upside down on hooks in the corner of the machinery shed. That night in bed, Cathy was amused when David told her how he had been fascinated by the solemn way her dad performed the task, the moment when death came, the blood on the earth, the soft blue insides spilling out. Cathy had seen it often enough during her childhood; to her, it seemed unremarkable. The next day, the freezer was full of plastic bags of meat.
In the late afternoons, her dad lit the fire and he and David drank beer and played cribbage. Sometimes Cathy kept them company. They listened to Dad’s stories from his days in the RAAF.
David said, ‘I took a great deal of pleasure in seeing the Americans getting their arses kicked in April, all those helicopters evacuating the US embassy compound in Saigon.’
Cathy nudged his leg with her foot under the table, and gave him a pleading look.
‘Of course,’ David went on quickly, ‘your war against fascism was completely different from the Americans in Vietnam.’
Dad looked dismayed. David’s relentless critical stance was wearing him down. David seemed to find pleasure only in seeking division.
‘When are you going to lose that chip on your shoulder?’ Dad asked David, at last.
‘What chip?’
‘Your anger. The way you’re negative about everything.’
Dad smiled at Cathy with his friendly blue eyes. ‘The thing is—I’d really like you two to get married. I’d like to accept David as part of the family.’
Neither she nor David said anything. What her father said about family sounded so right, just then.
‘School teaching is not such a bad job. Good pay, lots of holidays.’ Dad caught Cathy’s eye again. ‘The old Pierce place is a good buy. I could speak to the bank manager, if you like. I know him only too well! And I might be able to find a way to help you with the deposit.’
‘I appreciate the offer,’ David said, ‘but all I’m thinking about right now is finishing uni and writing my novel.’
‘Well, you’d better hurry up and finish your book,’ her dad said. ‘In the meantime, the offer’s there. Life usually works out different from the way we expect. When I was in the RAAF during the war, flying those Hudsons over New Guinea, if any bugger had told me that I was going to end up a wheat cocky, I would have told him he was mad.’
On Sunday David had to move his typewriter and papers. Dad had invited a couple from town, Maggie and Barry, for lunch. He explained to Cathy that he thought David might get on with them. They might even get him interested in a teaching career.
Cathy did the cooking, and by late morning the aroma of roasting lamb filled the house. Questions about the future hovered over the table. Barry, a bearded science teacher, asked what David was going to do when he finished his degree. David said he wanted to write.
‘That’s a vocation where many are called and few are chosen,’ Barry said. It was not, he added, the kind of steady job required of a family man.
Barry’s talk grated on Cathy’s nerves. He was so smug! He could not imagine that others might aspire to a life different from his own. Cathy looked over at David and saw instantly that something in him had snapped. Without a word, he stood and left the room. A few minutes later, the peace of the wheat fields was broken by the sound of rifle fire. David had set up the cans on the fence post.
That spring they spent nearly every weekend at the farm. They drove up in the clapped-out VW on Friday, returning for David’s seminars on Monday or Tuesday.
One day in October, they found themselves saying to each other, well, even though marriage was an idiotic, bourgeois
institution, wouldn’t it be nice to be married by the time their baby was born? David conceded that, after all, a wedding didn’t have to be one of those ghastly spectacles with the white dress and a veil and bridesmaids and hired tuxedos. Their wedding would be fun. Cathy was thrilled. Things were going to work out. They planned a big party at the farm on a weekend in mid-December. They wouldn’t be surprised if the party kicked on for several days. ‘Bring your own sleeping bag,’ they would tell people. They sat all day in the front room at King William Street, taking turns to type out the invitations.
When David’s friend Jack came home from London, they gave him a party. He moved into the front room. David was pleased to have Jack living with them. The two of them spent every evening drinking beer and telling stories.
Cathy tried to respect David’s freedom, but where was the novel he had begun? Petered out after few chapters, Cathy suspected. She was thinking ahead to the time when the baby would arrive. Where would they live then? Would they still be living in a shared house?
Jack’s girlfriend from London, Julie, had arrived back in Melbourne earlier. Cathy felt awkward when they visited Julie’s parents’ place in Brighton. David argued with them about politics—Julie’s parents were Liberals, of course. Julie told Cathy that her mother, a flirtatious blonde of about fifty, liked nothing better than to sit all afternoon watching the soapies with a couple of bottles of sparkling wine. Her father, a real estate agent, had the shifty, contrite look of a secret whisky drinker. Cathy was bored there and she was disappointed that David wasted his breath. Jack sometimes had Julie to stay at King William Street. But there was also a Polish girl Jack had recently started bringing back. One morning, Cathy happened to find a syringe in Jack’s room.
Cathy thought herself a good judge of character, whereas David was easily influenced by people. She could tell Jack was devious, secretive—the opposite of David—and opportunistic, a thief who would steal a watch or a transistor just because he could. He was good at telling lies, good at getting women into bed even when they thought they didn’t want to.
That afternoon, she took David aside to have it out. ‘When do you think Jack might start looking for a place of his own?’
‘No rush, is there? I like having him here. He’s my friend.’
‘I know. I’ve seen the mountain of beer bottles out the back.’
‘So? What’s it to you if we have a drink?’
‘Since Jack has been here, I haven’t seen you sit down to write, not even once. Giving up your room is one thing. But giving up on yourself is something else. I believe in you, David. You know that. I support you in your writing. But you can’t keep running away from it. And there’s something else—’ Cathy broke off, not sure if she should go on.
‘What?’
‘I think Jack is using heroin.’
‘Who told you that? It’s the first I’ve heard of it.’ David looked serious. She thought his surprise was genuine. ‘I mean,’ he continued, ‘we roll a joint from time to time. But nothing else. Nothing harder.’
‘I’d hate to think he’s got you into it, too. I don’t care about what Jack does. But you—you’re better than that.’
‘Why don’t you lay off Jack, for a minute?’
‘I want you to ask Jack to leave. I want you to stay away from Vanessa. And I want you to get back to your novel. I want you to stick at it.’
‘Sticking at things.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘I’ve stuck by you, haven’t I?’
CATHY WAS THE first to hear it on the radio. The government dismissed. They couldn’t do that, could they? She went through to the living room where David was reading. ‘Guess what?’ she said. ‘They’ve sacked Gough.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘No, really. It’s true.’
Someone had given them an old black and white TV with an indoor aerial and fuzzy reception. There were images of the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, and Malcolm Fraser, who Kerr had installed as caretaker Prime Minister.
And there was Gough on the steps of Parliament House calling it a coup d’état, a putsch. ‘Nothing will save the Governor-General,’ he was saying.
She started to feel anxious as she stood watching David lean right into the screen. Once again, there was that dangerous excitement in him. ‘Fraser will be shot for this! Kerr too! They’re both traitors! They’ll both be put against a wall!’
‘David!’ she implored.
‘Oh, you’re always so squeamish!’
David had once described the Springbok demonstration he attended at Olympic Park in 1971. He had seen a cop push a pregnant woman down the hill. It horrified Cathy when he told her. It still horrified her. She didn’t know how that policeman could live with himself.
Cathy had never been to a demonstration. She had seen them on TV, the famous ones where there was police brutality or where people had been killed, like at Kent State in the US. She would have liked to have the fiery conviction of Vanessa but the truth was that kind of ferocity frightened her.
She knew that David wanted her to be more outspoken. She knew, too, that David was angry with her—he had been secretly angry with her since their first weeks together. She was afraid that he felt humiliated by what had happened and, because he couldn’t admit it to himself, he acted it out through his angry behaviour. He was only with her because she was pregnant: when she put it to herself like that, she felt a great black hand close around her heart.
‘Let’s stay home. Just for today. Come on. Just do it for me. I never ask you for much.’
‘It will be no use taking action when history has passed you by!’ David said, gesticulating. He looked possessed.
‘I’m not feeling well,’ she lied, and as soon as she’d said it, she realised it wasn’t such a lie after all. She felt heavy with dread about what was to come. ‘It’s not just me that I’m worried about.’
‘Just because a woman is pregnant doesn’t mean that she’s politically useless.’ He reached over and patted her head, but it didn’t blunt his sharp tone. ‘Anyway, our child would never forgive us, when he grows up, if he discovered we chickened out of demonstrating against the coup!’
She knew he was joking, but he didn’t sound light-hearted.
Well, this is it, she thought: I don’t want anyone to speak for me anymore. Not Vanessa, not David, not Karl Marx himself. Married or not, it didn’t matter. She was going to be a mother. And, whether she went to the demonstration or not, the roundness of her belly was the shape of her rebellion. Others could wave their fists and shout slogans. The Vanessas of this world could go to demonstrations, not her.
They heard on the radio that a large crowd had already gathered at the top of Bourke Street. ‘Come on!’ David yelled at her. ‘This is it!’
Cathy didn’t say anything.
‘Which side of history are you going to be on? With the people or against them?’
‘David!’ she said. ‘I’m seven months pregnant. Don’t you think the people could excuse me on this occasion?’
‘What?’
‘I won’t come along with you this afternoon, if you don’t mind,’ she continued. ‘But I will go to a demonstration another day.’
‘Another day?’ he choked. ‘But the bastards have sacked the democratic government today!’ He stopped for a moment, the
n added, ‘Well, I’m going. I’ll go by myself.’
She thought, is this really how he wants to live? Every day like some sort of rehearsal for the revolution? And I don’t fit into his plans at all, let alone a child.
‘The time has come for action.’
‘What action? Demonstrations? Selling your newspaper to two dozen people?’
Her tone cut him. He sucked in his breath, making a hissing sound with the saliva. ‘There will soon come a time for real action.’
She looked at him uneasily. ‘Like what?’
‘Fraser’s got a sheep station in the Western District. Rides around on his horse like a squire.’
‘And you intend to do what? Stand at his fence and wait until he rides by, and take pot shots at him? David,’ she begged, ‘explain your ideas in a book, if that’s what you want. Books can change people’s lives. Like Henry says, that’s the way to change history for the better, not what you’re talking about. It’s completely crazy.’
‘What’s so crazy about it?’ he snapped at her.
‘It’s just that I can’t agree with hurting people.’
‘You’re a sensitive soul, aren’t you?’ David’s eyes were narrowed. She felt that he must really despise her.
How had they ended up in such a mess? ‘You are so convinced of everything, aren’t you? You might be right about it, or you might be wrong, but I don’t want to hear any more,’ she said. As usual she let herself back away in the face of his rage.
‘You have the future all laid out for me, don’t you? A school teacher. Ha!’
‘Why should you think that? I’m not pushing you into teaching.’
