Hello from the Gillespies

by Monica McInerney

  She’s coming home for Christmas, for the first time in three years, but she can only stay for ten days. It was all the time she could get off, she said. Apparently most Americans have very short holidays. But she’s Australian, not American, and I wish she would come back home for good. Not necessarily to live here on the station with us, but back in the same country again. There’s enough TV and film work in Australia for her these days, isn’t there? Even up here, miles from anywhere – we’re always hearing about film and TV crews staying in Hawker, working on this horror film or that end-of-the-world drama. (It is very beautiful around here, but very empty, hardly a house or a telegraph pole for kilometres, a film-maker’s dream.) But I can’t beg Genevieve to come home, can I? I don’t want to be the kind of mother who puts pressure on her children, especially one as spirited and independent as Genevieve. Even if it’s what I really want and what I think she needs.

  Angela stopped there, feeling oddly breathless but also strangely exhilarated. Joan was right. It felt so good to let all her troubles spill out like this. What was the word for it? Liberating? That was it. She felt liberated. She started typing again, her fingers flying across the keyboard.

  Victoria: I’m worried about her too. I’d hoped my mother’s intuition was wrong, but then Genevieve (accidentally? On purpose?) let a few details slip and I knew for sure. Victoria and the (very well-known) radio announcer she worked with as a producer in Sydney have been having an affair. That married, very well-known radio announcer. That married, very well-known radio announcer who was in the papers for all the wrong reasons last month. Those of you in Australia probably heard or read about it. Victoria always used to tell me his bad behaviour was just an act for the ratings, that he was a complete softie underneath, but I’ve always worried she’s a bit naive, especially coming from a country radio-station background and not really knowing how big-city media types like him operate. And the awful thing is I was right. Look at the trouble he left her in after that incident in the studio. It’s so unfair; none of it was her fault. He was the one who came into work (drunk and more than drunk, from what Victoria told me – yes, cocaine too) after a big night out on the town, ranting and raving like a lunatic, locking her out of the studio when she went to get him coffee and taking to the airwaves throwing libellous insults at everyone you can think of – our politicians, sports people, actors (even Hugh Jackman). Yet she ended up being blamed for it, as his producer, and her photo was splashed all over the papers and the internet. My poor Victoria. It’s been awful, especially because she’s now unemployed while the whole thing has somehow done wonders for his career. I’ll never understand how the media works. I just hope that any relationship is over now they’re not working together.

  I’d never tell her this, but I really wish she would come back to South Australia permanently, maybe even get a job back in her old radio station up here. She’s a country girl deep down. I’ve never thought big-city life was for her. I actually thought that of all the children, she would be the one who would take over from Nick. She was always out working on the station with him, asking him questions, learning about the stock, the equipment. She was his shadow, even talking about going to do an agriculture course at university after she’d finished her journalism degree. But when she and Fred Lawson broke up (the oldest son of one of our neighbours – they went out with each other for four years, until Fred went overseas), she seemed to lose heart and interest in running Errigal. Then Genevieve talked her into applying for the cadetship at the radio station in Port Pirie, and that was that. Before we knew it she was a radio producer on a big show in Sydney. And look where that’s left her now: unemployed and publicly humiliated, all alone there. I hate to think of her like that.

  There was no stopping Angela now.

  As for Lindy: My poor Lindy. She’s already back here on the station, after her latest attempt at independence in Melbourne landed her in a bit of a mess. A bit of a debt-ridden mess. A lot of a debt-ridden mess, if I’m being totally honest. I really hoped she’d found her career niche with her online crafts website. She’s tried so many jobs over the years since she finished her arts degree – nursing assistant, child care, landscape gardening, secretarial work. This crafts website seemed to combine two others from her CV – her brief foray into IT work and her summer job in a fabric store. It sounded like such a good idea too, making personalised cushions for people to mark special occasions. And of course Nick and I agreed to lend her the seed money. And perhaps it did make sense for her to put in a bulk order for her cushion material. But sixteen crates of it? From dubious suppliers in China? Delivered to her tiny flat in Melbourne? The first we knew about it was when she rang in floods of tears begging for help. Thank heavens Nick knew a local truck driver who was happy to pick up not just the crates but also Lindy and her belongings. She arrived a month ago and she’s been crying pretty much since. But I know there’s more to her problems than a loss of face, bad debt and an over-supply of cushion stuffing. I’m waiting for her to tell me she’s pregnant. Or a drug addict. Or a pregnant drug addict. All or any of which would be fine, it really would. We’d deal with it, somehow. But we can’t start fixing it if we don’t know what the problem is, can we? And in the meantime, she won’t leave the station, not even to go into Hawker or to visit any of our neighbours. She spends most days following me around, talking or crying. Talking and crying. Was she always so needy? Or such a drama queen?

  Angela stopped for a moment to catch her breath. A moment was all she needed.

  As for Ig: My darling Ignatius. I love my little Ig very much. Which is why I can say with certainty that he has turned into a very weird little boy. It’s not just his long hair. Or the stubbornness. Or the running away from boarding school in Adelaide, three times in the last term alone. He’s started talking to himself again. Not to ‘himself’, unfortunately. He’s back talking to Robbie, his imaginary friend. When it first happened a few years ago, I decided to ignore it, and sure enough, it stopped, but now it’s happening again. Robbie’s back full-time. Ig is ten years old. Shouldn’t he have grown out of that kind of behaviour by now? Joan tells me not to worry, that lots of kids have imaginary friends, especially youngest kids who live on a station miles from anywhere. But I’ve googled imaginary friends. It isn’t normal at his age, is it? It’s not just funny chitchat, either, asking us to set an extra place or leave a seat for Robbie in the car. He has entire conversations with someone (at least Ig assures me Robbie is a ‘someone’, not a ‘something’) that only he can see or hear.

  But am I overreacting? Should I be glad that he seems so happy in his own company? Even if he isn’t exactly on his own?

  She hesitated then. It had been almost easy to share her worries about her children. But where could she possibly begin with Nick?

  She called Joan’s advice to mind again. Tell the truth. She took a deep breath and began.

  Nick: I am so worried about Nick. Worried and sad and confused, about him and about us.

  He’s leased out half the station to a mining company. It came as a complete shock to me. To the children too. He said he had no choice, that things were still so bad after all the years of drought, after the wool industry collapsed, that he had to accept the offer they made. I knew he’d been having meetings, and had been out on the property with different groups of people in the past year, but either he’d implied or I assumed they were stock agents, that he was planning on building our sheep numbers again, after we’d gradually had to sell them all off in recent years. I was wrong. It turns out they were geologists and representatives from the mining company, running test after test until they’d confirmed they’d found something. The something is diamonds. It’s not that simple, of course. They don’t just dig a few feet and there are diamonds everywhere. It’s a huge operation, a matter of finding something called kimberlite pipes first. And it’s luck as much as geology if they do, apparently. But they have found enough small diamonds to be optimistic enough to strike this deal.
I don’t know the exact figures involved. All I know is that after the initial lump sum for the lease, the money will be paid in instalments, each one dependent on the results of the next geological test. Something like that, anyway.

  I knew things had been tough, of course, even though Nick has always insisted on taking care of the financial side of station life. His late father was the same. His mother, may she rest in peace too, always told me to be glad about it, that it was just the Gillespie way, that I had enough on my plate with the children. But I never felt like that about station life. I thought of Nick and me as equals, both doing what we could to keep the station running through the good and bad years.

  There was no discussion with me about the lease, though. By the time he told me, it was a done deal. All he would say is he’s signed a five-year exploration lease, with him employed in a caretaker role to maintain the fences, windmills, floodgates etc. on their half of the property. The most we can hope for is that nothing will happen for months, or possibly even years, at the exploration stage, and that more time will be taken up after that with environmental studies before they start digging. But what will my station-stay visitors think? What will this do to our beautiful landscape? To tourism in the area? We’re more than a hundred kilometres from the Flinders Ranges National Park, and our station is so far off the highway that we’re not on the main tourist trail, and the mining company apparently assured Nick that there would be minimal environmental damage, but there will still be some impact, surely?

  Only our nearest neighbours know so far. After the deal was signed, Nick visited everyone to tell them. He wouldn’t tell me much about their reaction, but I could guess. Shock. Anger. Joan says there’s been some jealousy too. I can’t blame any of them. I’m also worried about the woolshed party. I don’t know for sure if everyone will still come. Or if there’ll be some kind of a protest if they do.

  It’s not just the mining deal Nick won’t talk about. He and I don’t seem to be able to talk about anything any more. It’s as if he’s closed himself off from me. All he seems to care about these days is his family research. It’s become an obsession. He spends hours on the computer every day, reading articles about Irish and Australian history, ordering history books online, emailing Gillespies in all corners of the globe, tracing his Irish ancestors as far back as he can. He even seems to be talking about organising an international Gillespie reunion. Not here on Errigal, but in Ireland. I overheard him talking to his aunt Celia on the phone. That came as a huge shock to me too. He’s never even travelled outside Australia before. I’ve been waiting for him to talk to me about it, but he hasn’t said a word.

  I just don’t know what to do. I can’t stop thinking that all of this is my fault, that there is something I should have noticed, something I should have helped him with, before it got this bad between us. He’s a different man these days. I feel like I don’t know him any more. It’s not just that he won’t talk to me. Everything is different with him now. He was always so active, up at dawn, outside all day. Now that we’re not a working station any more, now that we don’t have any stock, it’s as if he has lost interest in the outside world. He does the basic maintenance work that needs to be done, but that’s it. It’s been months since he went in to Hawker to have a beer with his friends. I think if it was up to him, he’d cancel the woolshed party too – even though we’ve been waiting for our turn again for years, and it’s one of the biggest annual events out here. I’m worried that he won’t even join us for the party. If he can’t talk to his own wife, his own family, how will he talk to his neighbours?

  Angela had to stop there and decide whether she wanted to put what else she believed into words. After a moment, she started typing again.

  That’s not all. I think he might be having an affair. It’s only a cyber-affair so far, but I am sure something is going on. Her name is Carol. She’s in Ireland. She works for an ancestry website. That’s all I know about her, but he seems to be skyping and emailing her constantly. I don’t know what to do about that either. How to stop it happening. How to fix our marriage.

  Her sudden tears took her by surprise. She had to blink them away before she could keep typing.

  I can’t stop thinking about how good it used to be with him, what we used to have. I’m not imagining it. It was special between us. He was my best friend. Now, he and I scarcely say good morning any more. We don’t spend any time with each other, even though we are in the same house. When the children are away, we can be the only two people for literally hundreds of kilometres, yet it feels like we’ve got nothing left to say to each other. I miss him so much, but I don’t know how to make things better.

  It feels so selfish to say this, but to make matters worse, his elderly aunt Celia is coming to stay, for a whole month at Christmas time. I feel sick at the thought. Not just that we’ll have someone staying with us for so long, but that it’s her. I’ve tried, I really have, but she doesn’t like me. She never has. The truth is, I don’t like her either. If I were asked to sum her up, I’d say this: she’s an insufferable snob and an interfering old bat. I’m sorry to be so harsh but it’s true. I’ve never met anyone with so much to say, and all of it critical. She stayed with us for a fortnight earlier this year, around the time of her eightieth birthday. I hosted a lunch for her, inviting some of our neighbours to join us, but she found fault with every part of that too, from the food I served to the cake I baked to the fact that the weather was so hot, as though that was somehow my fault too. Her husband (Nick’s father’s brother) died two years ago, henpecked to death, Joan joked one night. (It was actually lung cancer; he was a very heavy smoker.) He asked Nick to please take care of Celia after he was gone. Nick was always so loyal to his uncle, and so fond of him too, he’s done his best to keep his promise. Celia’s due here in a week, coming up from Adelaide on the bus. There are flights into the Hawker airstrip, and I know Nick offered to pay but she hates flying. She hates lots of things: spending her money, music, vegetarians, politicians. My cooking. My housekeeping. My marriage to Nick. My children. Me. I keep imagining the person who has to sit beside her on the four-hour bus trip. She’ll fit in a lot of complaining in that time. Celia could suck the joy out of Christmas, to borrow a phrase from my own dear late mother. I just hope she won’t suck the joy out of our Christmas this year.

  It now took Angela longer to find the right words.

  Which brings this letter to me.

  I think something is wrong with me. Something serious. Not just with my marriage, with my children, with these headaches I keep having. It feels deeper than that. Not just physical. I feel so out of place these days. Overwhelmed. Not myself any more.

  I seem to be yearning for something all the time. For everything to be different. To be a different person in some way. To go back and start again, somehow make things better, make the right choices.

  Draw up a list, Joan advised me recently when I was trying to explain how I felt. Put what you really want down in black and white and see what is actually achievable. A wish list, she called it. I’ll try it here now.

  1. I wish Nick would start talking to me again, properly, like he used to. I wish he would tell me that I am imagining things, that he isn’t having an affair, that he does still want to be married to me. That he still loves me. I wish I could turn back time to when we had a good marriage, a beautiful marriage. Because we did. We really did. But I am so sad and so scared that he doesn’t want to be with me any more.

  2. I wish the children were all happy and healthy and independent (Ig aside, I’m happy for him to stay at home for a few more years). I wish I could feel I’d done the best job possible raising them. I always expected that when I got to my age, when I’d been married for this long and had grown children (half-grown, in Ig’s case), I would have everything sorted; I would be calm and wise and content. Instead, I feel like I have nothing under control, that I haven’t been a proper mother, let alone a proper wife, that everything going wrong with my f
amily is somehow all my fault.

  3. I wish I had ignored my mother-in-law’s advice. I wish I’d insisted that Nick involve me more in the business side of the station. I couldn’t have stopped the drought or the drop in wool prices, but perhaps if I’d insisted he talk to me about it, we would have come up with a different solution than this mining lease.

  I don’t even know how much debt we’re in – Nick won’t ever tell me – but surely it can’t have been so bad that we couldn’t have worked through it, together?

  4. I wish I was more artistic. I wish I could create a piece of pottery, even one piece, that I could be really proud of. It’s taken me by surprise how much it matters to me. I only took that pottery course in Port Augusta to fill in the gaps between my station-stay guests. I was feeling so lonely out here, with Nick so distant, Ig at school and the girls living their own lives. But I loved it from the very first lesson. It felt so good to work with the clay, to learn how to make practical things like vases, and to be encouraged to try small sculptures too. And it felt like a sign, an omen of some sort, when I heard that the college was selling off their old kiln for next to nothing and I was able to set up my own tiny studio here on the station. I’ve spent hours out there since. I’ve made dozens of pieces, taking my inspiration from the landscape and wildlife around me. I’m still a bit shy about them. (The first few looked more like collapsed cakes than pieces of art.) But I took my teacher’s advice (‘Aim high,’ he said) and contacted some ceramic galleries in Adelaide about possible representation. I haven’t heard back from any of them yet. I wish I would.