My train journey to rural Gippsland was not pleasant. For some reason the seats faced one another, so that I had to sit staring at a toothless old man with a can of beer wrapped in a plastic bag. When my station finally came the payphone swallowed every coin I had.
‘Fucking thing,’ I swore, before noticing an obese woman in a cherry-red American pick-up. She had stopped to stare.
‘Can I help you?’ I asked rudely.
‘Can you help me?’ The woman laughed. She raised up the heavy arm hanging over the pick-up door, revealing a great slab of pasty, bone-white flesh. It wobbled like jelly in a bag.
‘No good putting coins in there,’ she said, nodding towards the payphone. ‘Lost are you?’
The back of the pick-up was filled with fencing materials. And on top of these sat an especially fat boy of eleven or twelve, like a dead weight. He stared at me expressionlessly.
‘I’m fine,’ I said, before looking down the desolate street and changing my mind. ‘Actually, I was trying to call a taxi. Where’s another phone?’
‘Only one. Where you going?’
‘The North property.’
‘North of where?’
‘North. Matilda North.’
‘The Frog Man!’ shouted the boy, startling me. He bounced a couple of times and the barbed wire and metal beneath him creaked and scraped. His mother leant as far out the window as her ample frame would allow, frowning.
‘Jesus Christ, Gizzard, sit still.’ She turned back to me. ‘They’re a fair way out as I recall.’
‘Where’s the local taxi service?’
‘Forget that. Get in.’
‘You’ll take me there?’
‘Well, I won’t abduct you, if that’s your worry.’ She tossed her head towards the lump above the fencing materials. ‘I’ve got three of them.’
‘You sure it’s not out of your way?’
‘I’m sure it is a bit. But I’ll take you. Unless of course you’d rather pay for a taxi, in which case me and Gizzard here will get on.’ Gizzard, peering down at his left breast, looked up vaguely like a dog hearing its name in conversation. With a sigh he climbed down from the corrugated iron and wire, and opened the passenger door for me, following me in.
Walled by flesh, I looked for a seatbelt.
‘Forget that,’ said the woman. ‘Doesn’t have one. Never did.’
‘How far is it?’
‘Fifteen k or so.’
‘Well, this is kind of you.’
‘Gizzard, sit still!’
I stared through the enormous front windscreen out over countless brown paddocks. The midday sun stabbed between roadside gums, flicking on and off like a ceiling light. It pleased me to see gums. Magpies, moving in flocks, swooped from treetop to treetop, their squawks muted by the sound of air over the unyielding pick-up. We slowed for roadworks, passed a bored-looking man with a sign, then sped up. Here and there a tractor trawled by.
After twenty minutes of talkback radio—how dare the banks!—I was dropped beside a purple paddock. There was a gate with a sign: ‘Willoughby’. Nothing ornate. The words had been burnt into the wood with something thin—a soldering iron, perhaps.
I opened the gate, careful to close it behind me, and started up the lengthy gravel driveway. There was an obvious beauty to the endless purple lavender, and something sweet but grassy in its smell. The bushes were planted in gently sloping rows a metre or so apart, and between each was a narrow dirt laneway. There appeared to be nothing but lavender in the paddocks, save for a far-off house and a lone twisted gum.
I set off for the house. The summer day had turned unexpectedly cool; there was an icy breeze which persuaded me to stop, drop my backpack and grope through my possessions for a jumper. Cloud—white and fast-moving above the driveway and dark and stationary on the horizon —drove vast, menacing shadows over the flowers. Normally a brilliant light purple, the plants seemed to bow beneath the weight. Each shadow came rippling in at speed, and as I turned to watch one silently depart I noticed there were in fact two houses, the second a deserted-looking shack.
Something about the air, agitated as it was, led me to think it might rain, and I pressed on. I approached the larger of the two houses, a weatherboard, like an enormous stump in the featureless fields. A man was hunched outside sharpening a thin, hooked sickle. When he stood, hearing my feet on the gravel, I felt I was looking at an academic. He had a small potbelly, close-shaven grey hair, tired eyes and an unmistakeable air of intelligence. He wiped at his forehead with the back of one hand and nodded tentatively, perhaps trying to decide if he knew me.
‘I’m looking for Mr North,’ I said.
‘No one here by that name. Who are you?’
I glanced over at the smaller shack, but there were no signs of life.
‘Noah Tuttle. I’m a friend of Tilly’s.’ The man nodded. Now that he was upright I saw that he did not stand straight. His back retained a hunch near the neck, accentuated by teepee-shaped shoulders. Behind him the weatherboard house—paint peeling from its walls, creating a curious white, pink and blue map—groaned in the breeze. The man glanced back at it, then at me. His face conveyed distrust.
‘My name’s not North,’ he said. ‘But I suspect I’m the man you’re after.’
‘Oh?’
‘Matilda’s father. North was her mother’s name. Mine’s Willoughby. Jim Willoughby.’ He took my hand and shook it, not as a farmer would but as though the two of us were meeting in a café to discuss Keynes.
‘Is Matilda here?’
‘She drove into town to get some things. Should have been back an hour ago, actually.’
‘Mind if I wait?’
‘Nope. Coffee?’ His eyes ran over my backpack. ‘You look tired.’
‘I am, yeah.’
Mr Willoughby led me through a sprawling front yard without a fence or flowers. The grass was all dead and brown except for one lush patch with a dribbling, upturned sprinkler at its heart. When he pulled the flyscreen door back its rusted hinges chirped like a dolphin.
‘Needs oil,’ he said, holding it back for me. ‘We’re about to start harvesting in earnest though, so it’ll have to wait.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, slipping past.
The house, like most farm weatherboards, appeared to have had rooms added as the family within it grew. Some were well put together, obviously by carpenters. Others were not. The front alcove belonged to the latter category. Large and airy, the windows were filled with flyscreen instead of glass. A yellow sofa, red stuffing partially eaten out by vermin, sat at one end, reminiscent of a rotting corpse. And beneath my feet oil-stained floorboards, most tacked over with plywood, creaked with every shift of weight.
Mr Willoughby opened a second, heavier door and gestured for me to follow him in. There was nothing ornate about the living room or kitchen. Both were rustic and yet well maintained, making use of a variety of finished timbers. Most of the household appliances looked to be from the seventies and one wall was coated with posters detailing frog breeds. The ceiling lights all had attractive stained-glass shades, and down a dark, carpeted hallway I could make out a sunlit bathroom and lime-green bathtub with silver legs.
‘Come through to the kitchen,’ said Mr Willoughby. ‘How do you have your coffee?’
Before I could answer a four-wheel drive ute pulled up outside, its tyres skidding on the gravel. I heard the dolphin cry of the screen door, then Tilly was in front of me, blinking. She was thin—terribly thin. She had cut her hair short like a boy and seemed to stand with less certainty.
‘You’ve come here,’ she said.
‘Hi.’
The kettle clicked off. Though Tilly’s first expression had been one of distress, she quickly recovered her composure and dropped the two shopping bags she was holding to give me a perfunctory hug.
‘You startled me,’ she whispered in my ear.
‘Maybe it was a bad idea.’
‘No, it’s not.’
It was strange not getting lost in her hair. Normally it swallowed me up, but now it was so short it spiked my forehead.
‘Dad,’ she said, ‘before I forget, can you check the water on the ute? It’s running hot again.’
‘Falling to bits like everything else round here.’
‘I’ll make coffee,’ I said.
‘Fine. Matilda, come with me, show me what it’s been doing.’
They stepped outside. Unable to hear what was being said I watched Mr Willoughby through the kitchen window. He pulled up the Landcruiser’s bonnet and, bending from the waist, fiddled with a few coloured plugs. Like most things on the property the ute looked to be an old model, well preserved from the outset in anticipation of hardship. Mr Willoughby nodded to his daughter a few times. She put her hand on his back and he stood straight, or as straight as he could. He slammed the bonnet down with a little more force than was necessary and turned for the house. He found me searching through the fridge for milk and looked to be furious.
‘So I imagine you’ll be needing somewhere to stay?’ he said curtly.
‘For a night or two, if that’s okay?’
Mr Willoughby only nodded.
‘Is there anything I can do?’ I asked. ‘To help out while I’m staying?’
‘Yeah. The firewood. I haven’t had a moment to look at it. I’ll show you later on. But for now, grab that backpack and take it through.’
Tilly took me to a large but stark room. She gestured for me to sit on the bed.
‘Your dad didn’t seem very happy with me staying,’ I said.
‘It’s not you. He’s always up and down, especially around harvest. We have to cut 32,000 plants in the next fifteen days and three of the staff we had lined up have pulled out.’
‘What do you do with it all?’ The mattress, when I sat, felt like a stack of wood slats. A Tom Roberts print hung in one corner, letting me know I was in the guest room.
‘We send it overseas mostly—send it fresh. That’s why we have so many plants. We don’t even dry it. We’d be into tourism, into oils, soaps and moisturisers, even lavender lollies, if Dad was a social creature. We’d run a smaller, prettier place. Other farms round here do it and do it well. But Dad likes one burst and then nothing for the rest of the year—a little planting, some rabbit-shooting and weeding, but nothing hard. He’s got a few reliable buyers, so we normally just scrape through.’
‘How did he get the buyers?’
‘No idea. Letters, I think, years ago. So …’ Tilly said, hanging on the word and inhaling in such a way as to suggest we had adequately canvassed the farm, ‘give me all the news.’
‘What news?’
‘Your news. Tell me about the hostel. No, better yet, tell me how you ended up here.’
‘Here? Sightseeing.’
‘Very funny. Is Phillip with you?’
‘Why would Phillip be with me?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. I just can’t picture you deciding to fly to Australia on a whim. I thought maybe this was his idea.’
Through a window I watched Mr Willoughby enter the yard and call for a dog. No dog appeared. He swore, scanning the horizon, then dropped a can of sloppy food onto the ground. Picking up a sickle, he set off for the closest lavender field.
‘Home’s strange,’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Something happened. I don’t know what—don’t want to. Mum’s moved out.’
Tilly sat down beside me, dropping a hand onto my thigh. ‘Since when?’
‘I’m not sure. It’s weird but not bad—not yet. It should be bad but it doesn’t feel that way. If anything it’s weird because it makes sense. Like I’ve known forever. There’s nothing to ask even if I wanted to.’ After this admission, we dropped back onto the bed and lay in silence a while. I heard the dog gulping its food outside.
‘You’ve lost a lot of weight,’ I said eventually.
‘Farm food. It’ll come back.’ Tilly paused. ‘Do you want to talk more about home?’
‘Not right now. Maybe later.’
‘Tell me about the hostel, then. Who’s still there? Who’s gone?’
‘There’s a new guy, Harry.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘He’s okay.’
‘New people already …’ Tilly smiled but I could see she was thinking about something else, something which caused her brow to flicker with concern.
We lay on the bed for hours, until the room’s details— the painting, the knots in the pine, the edges of the sheepskin rug—were lost to a sluggish summer dusk. Only the white lace curtains billowing beautifully across the window were still visible. They looked like a pair of vain ghosts circling in front of a mirror.
I almost told Tilly about Mami then, but there seemed little point. Nothing had developed and the girl was history. I tried to convince myself it was Tilly who mattered now. It pleased me to have her lying to my left, breath soft. She had a concern for me matched only by my parents, but without the desire to steer. By sleeping together we could close ourselves off. She was like a warm room from which to listen to storms.
I lay thinking. When my mother asked if I had made new friends in Japan I had wanted to say no with smug satisfaction, to show how alone I was in the world, how straight I stood without the slightest support. It was an illusion I had painted around myself, an understanding of my life and the worlds I inhabited which paid little heed to Tilly’s influence. If I was to be honest, it was Tilly who protected me from any sense of rejection and loneliness. And while I had no interest in moving forward with her—on into a life together, to marriage, to children—nor did I want to creep back from her. I wanted stagnation, a continuance of the same in every direction like the thin green moss atop a still pond, into which the Mami episode would only ever be a great, sharp-edged rock—the deep, ba-boosh heartbeat splash, the gaping brown wound and final, churning muck. Why bring all that up?
Before bed Tilly showed me her room—that of a younger girl, with pink walls, dolls, big fluffy bears and a Johnny Depp poster advertising 21 Jump Street. It was odd to think of her as a child, and I could not help but wonder why it was a child’s room, since she had lived at home until university. Off in one corner I saw pipes and a gas valve, leading me to suspect the room had once been a kitchen—the building showing its age. I guessed she must have moved rooms at twelve or thirteen. Presumably there was another room reflecting her final years of school.
We reminisced about Japan, about Phillip’s model planes, about sushi and Moaning Man, then I went to bed, sleeping two hours at most. If Tilly did visit me in the middle of the night, it was during this time and I knew nothing of it.
True to his word Mr Willoughby put me to work the next morning. I had expected to cut lavender, having heard about the three absent staff, but apparently this was paid work and the positions had already been filled.
I had never split wood before and I found it difficult to say the least. Mr Willoughby would stack one chain-sawed block on top of another, grain up, then point to where the axe should land.
‘There’s always going to be a circle,’ he said. ‘You look for that circle, then you strike parallel with the grain. Never across. Across, and you’ll get nowhere.’
The axe felt coarse in my hands. Its long, narrow head was roughly equivalent in weight to a brick. The handle was made out of a faded, pink plastic which I guessed to be fibreglass, and grey tape had been wrapped around one end. Whenever I swung the thing up over my head it mostly fell back down of its own accord. I always looked at the position Mr Willoughby singled out, but the axe thudded down wherever it pleased. Sometimes it sheeted off the block or missed outright, lodging itself in red dirt.
‘There’s a knack to it,’ said Mr Willoughby, before ambling off to tend to the harvest.
It was a menacingly hot day to learn to split wood. Sweat dribbled from my hairline into my eyes. Mucus clogged my throat. I kept hauling the axe up into the air, feet braced, only to bri
ng it down ineffectually. Tilly came to watch midway through the morning, dressed in jeans and an old Chicago Bulls T-shirt. She took the axe and gave me a demonstration, lopping blocks into two, then four.
‘There’s a knack to it,’ she said, just as her father had.
At dusk Mr Willoughby brought me a beer. I sat, turned my empty palm up and stared at blisters full of grit. He dropped the dog food—still the shape of the can—into the dirt, then returned to the softly lit house without a word. Crickets harped as the dog cleared the side of the house at a run, pink tongue thrown back like a hanky from a car window.
The living room in which we sat contained three pianos. When I asked why, Mr Willoughby said, ‘Family.’
‘Family?’
‘Big Catholic one,’ he explained, rolling a cigarette. ‘My father, for example, had seven siblings. Over time they all died and we ended up with their pianos. There are actually five in this house. For some reason we get the pianos.’
‘It’s a farm thing,’ said Tilly.
Mr Willoughby nodded. ‘As it is with clocks.’
I cocked my head. ‘Clocks?’
‘You haven’t noticed?’ Tilly laughed. ‘Listen.’
I did. And sure enough I heard clocks. All sorts of clocks, tick-tocking. At a glance I counted one grandfather clock, three wall-clocks and a few antique silver alarms with bells on top. In addition to this there appeared to be a collection of wristwatches piled on the mantelpiece—all broken-in leather bands and lacklustre metal.
‘You do have a lot of clocks,’ I said.
Mr Willoughby finished rolling the cigarette but did not light it. Instead he chased bits of stir-fry around the plate with his fork. He had eaten less than half his meal but did not seem ready to give it up.
‘Do either of you play the piano?’ I asked, thinking I should have known if Tilly did.
‘No,’ said both firmly.
‘How about you, Noah?’ Mr Willoughby asked. ‘Do you play an instrument?’
‘The clarinet.’
‘But he gave it up in Year 9,’ Tilly added, standing to collect the dirty plates. ‘His teacher told his parents they were wasting their money.’
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