‘The kids have been making those lanterns for weeks,’ said Dave. ‘The local school principal’s been a big help, lets them do it in class as a special activity.’
I could imagine. Dave would have approached the school and, in his quietly authoritative way, made it sound like an eminently reasonable proposition.
‘The journeymen? Did they stay long?’ I wasn’t going to let him off the hook.
‘Long enough for us to learn from them. As you can see.’ He gestured towards the houses at the other end of the valley. ‘They were incredibly well trained, better than in this country. One of them, Manfred his name was, told me his father had worked on the restoration of Cologne Cathedral. I told him my uncles had flown bombing raids over Cologne at the end of the war.’
‘Was that tactful, Dave?’
‘I told Manfred, the past is the past, we start afresh here. And I apologised for the raids over Cologne.’
‘It wasn’t your fault.’
‘I wanted them to know where we stood on the subject of war. That our valley was a place of peace. And to know we valued them. We were stoked to have them here. We took their coming as a sign, a blessing. My God, they could eat though. They ate enough for a platoon. Ariel never left the kitchen.’
Silently I admitted defeat. With Dave the conversation always ended up on his terms. So what if Miranda had bewitched both journeymen, that wasn’t the point; the point was that Dave and Manfred had sorted out the bombing of Cologne. Dave wasn’t going to tell me about the scandal; the personal was always subordinate to the big picture. To history.
‘You were lucky you found those guys.’
‘Luck didn’t come into it.’ Dave stared into the leaping flames. ‘If you look past your nose for long enough, Di, you can always find what you need.’
Five days after the winter solstice, Miranda Meacham returned to the valley. Mick dropped by in Dolby’s ute with some fish and a red cabbage sent by Dave. ‘Your old schoolfriend’s back,’ he said. ‘Thought you’d like to know.’
I drove into the valley on the Saturday. Bill was on a fishing trip and I was glad; I wanted to reconnect with Miranda on my own. I was eager to see her again, but also nervous. She could be charming, intimate and confiding, but she could also be mocking and dismissive, a bitch. At school you never knew where you stood with her and I didn’t imagine she had changed.
With no phones in the valley, I could take her by surprise. I drove in past Dave’s house where Ariel was squatting on the veranda with Gracie in a sling on her back; she was peeling potatoes from a vast wooden tub and dropping them into an aluminium jam pot. I waved but she seemed to be in a kind of trance and didn’t see me.
I parked the car outside the stone house I knew to be Miranda’s and knocked on the door, which was ajar. A small boy pulled open the door and said: ‘They’re out the back.’ Damn, she wasn’t on her own. Then again, it seemed that no-one in the valley was ever on their own. I walked back down the stone steps and around the side of the house to the rear where a group of sunburnt smokers lay on the grass getting stoned. At first I couldn’t see Miranda but then a woman sat up, waved and beckoned me over. It was her. I hadn’t recognised her because she had shaved her head, no longer the well-groomed young prefect who ruled the school. Her naked scalp shone in the sunlight, her neck was festooned with thick ropes of red and brown seedpods, her upper arms encircled with silver bangles in the Indian fashion and she wore a saffron-coloured sarong. She was lying back on an old plastic recliner, her legs wide apart, her thin cotton vest unbuttoned and her ample breasts bare.
‘Di!’ she cried, ‘Di! Over here!’
As I drew near I saw that her feet were ingrained with dirt and her toenails painted black. ‘Sit,’ she commanded, indicating the grass beside her. ‘Somebody get Di a drink.’
And someone obediently did.
On that first afternoon she could not have been nicer. It was the charming Miranda, the I-have-found-my-valley-and-am-at-peace Miranda. Some of this might have been for show, for her entourage, but I was pleased when she suggested we meet in the town for, as she put it, a tête-à-tête.
It was a Wednesday and I found her at the Green Goanna, a café favoured by the local hippies. She was sitting by the window looking fresh, almost demure, in a white cotton sun dress. Even with her head shaved she looked good; everyone else had grown their hair long as an emblem of where they were coming from but Miranda had to be different. Over coffee she told me that she and Ariel were first cousins and this surprised me. They could not have been more different, though clearly their mothers had shared a penchant for romantic names. I guessed that it was through Ariel that Miranda had met Dave and heard about his plan for a settlement.
‘Dave’s a control freak,’ she told me. ‘He comes from some gloomy Welsh valley, and one of those dour low-church families. You can never get that stuff out of you.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘He’s serious about everything. He has all these rules.’
‘Don’t people agree to the rules when they buy in?’
‘Yes, but you have to be flexible. Give and take. People have to live together. We’re mature adults, it’s not boarding school.’
Miranda hadn’t changed. Everything had to be on her terms, which were of course self-evidently reasonable. Perhaps Dave was a control freak; he did have a flinty quality about him, the sharp nose, the long chin. But I liked him. I liked the interest he took in the valley’s history and its German pioneers, the way he looked after their headstones. Miranda was one of those people who had their eyes on the future while looking to finesse the present.
‘You’ve been away,’ I said, changing the subject.
‘I’m looking into imports. It’s time I became a trader.’
‘A trader? You?’
‘I need an income stream. There’s a shit-load of hippies around here and nowhere to buy incense, clothes, non-chemical soaps, that kind of thing. There are two good markets in this district, one on Saturday at Tandarra and one at Northbridge on Sunday. I could make enough to live. Black market, darling. No Mr. Tax Man.’
‘Where do you get all that stuff?’
‘You have to weasel a good deal out of an importer in the city. Which I have.’ She gave a knowing laugh. ‘But that’s not my big news.’ She paused.
‘Well?’
‘My new man! He wasn’t there when you came on Saturday but he’s arriving any day. And you won’t believe this. He works for John Lennon!’
‘John Lennon? The John Lennon?’
‘That’s the one.’ Her eyes flashed with triumph. Nothing could be more cool than this.
‘What? So he’s just visiting then?’
‘No, darling, John has bought a big property around here, up in the hills.’ She lowered her voice confidingly. ‘It’s a big secret, none of the locals know and I can’t say where.’
‘Have you been there?’
‘Not yet, but don’t worry, I will soon.’
‘Why on earth would John Lennon buy land around here?’
‘Why not? Privacy, a bolt-hole. Somewhere to escape to when they drop the bomb. Geordie says it’s magnificent rainforest country. Used to be a farm but has been neglected for years and is reverting to its natural state. John and Yoko flew out last year from New York and looked it over. Private jet, hush-hush, nobody knew. Then they hired Geordie to look after it.’
‘He knows them?’
‘Not personally. Hasn’t met them yet. An agency hired him.
The agency put a private detective on him to check him out and everything.’
‘You mean they’ve never met him and they trust him?’
‘Well,’ she pouted, ‘they have to trust someone here if they want the place looked after. And Geordie speaks to John on the phone.’ ‘John’ was now Miranda’s intimate, or soon would be.
‘It gets better. Geordie says they’re coming out in October and I’m going to arrange it so they visit the valley. I’m goi
ng to break it to the collective at the next meeting. They’ll be hysterical!’
‘I thought it was supposed to be a secret.’
‘It is, but I’ve had an idea. We’ll explain to John how the valley is a peace haven, a symbol of a new age. He and Yoko had that press conference for peace in their hotel bed that time, remember? Well, we can offer them a follow-up in the valley, a small private press conference, just one camera. We’ll take the footage and after they fly out they can release it to the press. And we can make a documentary and incorporate their visit. Nobody will know about it at the time, except us, and we’ll release the doco later. What better way to start a new decade? Nineteen-eighty here we come.’
‘You’re nuts.’
Her eyebrows shot up. ‘You sound like Dave.’
‘He knows about this?’
‘Not yet.’ It was the way she said it; all I could do was smile.
‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘come out with Bill and meet Geordie.
He’s utterly gorgeous. In every way.’ She was practically drooling.
‘Will he live on the property?’
‘He’ll live with me, of course. There’s an old farm house on John and Yoko’s property but it’s derelict. And Geordie’s going to put in a garden for me. I’ve been such a slacker in that department.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘The others are pissed off with me because I never grow anything.’
I could see that even if Geordie turned out to be lying about the John and Yoko connection, Miranda might still come out ahead. All of the stone houses had a thriving vegetable plot, except Miranda’s, and the rampant buffalo grass around her foundations had done nothing for her credibility in the valley.
That night I told Bill the big news and he pulled a face. Bill didn’t take to Miranda. I once described her as a free spirit and he said: ‘Free spirit? That would be another name for wrecker, would it?’ But he loosened up when she started to drop in on us, usually on her way back from the city to collect goods for her market stall. She would arrive wearing a flowing dress in some bold tropical print and clutching a bottle of champagne in each hand, and over dinner she would regale us with funny stories. Unlike most women she could tell a joke and she had an eye for the absurd. Bill would chortle despite himself. Then she would fall into our spare bed because she was too drunk to drive back to the valley. It was not beyond Miranda to roll up and greet us effusively as Mr. and Mrs.
Boring, but at least she said it to our faces, and because she seemed to have some genuine affection for me I never took offence. That was the thing about Miranda: either you bought the full package or you didn’t buy at all. Bill didn’t buy. ‘She’s alright when you get her on her own,’ he’d say after she left, but in matters general he was on Dave’s side.
By mid-August, Geordie McCausland had moved into the valley. Mick announced his arrival on one of his regular visits to the shack and we asked what he thought of him.
‘Is this stuff about John Lennon for real?’ Bill asked.
Mick shrugged. ‘Seems to be.’
‘What’s he like, this Geordie?’
‘Seems okay. Haven’t spoken to him on his own.’ He winked. ‘You’d have to prise Miranda off him.’
Eager to meet this unlikely steward, we drove into the valley the following Sunday and knocked on Miranda’s door.
‘Come in,’ she called, and her voice had a happy sing-song note.
Things were obviously going well.
We walked through the whitewashed passageway and out onto the back veranda where Miranda was lolling on a scruffy day-bed in a see-through sarong, bare-breasted as usual and entwined with a man in skimpy jocks. We took this to be Geordie. He eased himself up into a sitting position and extended his hand to Bill while I looked him over. He was attractive, no doubt about that. He had broad shoulders and long reddish-brown hair that fell in loose curls over a high forehead. His skin was weathered into a dark tan and his full mouth and long scimitar nose made him look like a bush Arab. His legs were strong and muscular and he had a way of holding himself, a relaxed, almost feline slouch of the kind that suggested he knew how to take his time. Miranda gave me a look, a gloatingly possessive see-what-I’ve-got look. I laughed.
We sat for a long time and drank our way through a cask of wine. No mention was made of ‘John’. Geordie talked knowledgeably about the valley’s vegetable allotments and his plans for Miranda’s patch but there was something odd about him, something creepy and at the same time childlike. He certainly seemed to know a lot about soils, and phrases like ‘potassium deficient’ and ‘seaweed mulch’ came and went on the mild afternoon breeze.
Weeks passed and it was some time before we returned to Yudhikara. There were problems with the construction of the bridge and Bill was working long hours and coming home spent. In his time off he slept a lot and didn’t feel like going anywhere. We hadn’t seen Miranda for ages and I imagined her to be preoccupied with Geordie.
Finally Mick turned up one Sunday in Dolby’s ute and plonked himself in a chair in the kitchen. He looked like a man who had had a surfeit of something. ‘Had to get out of the valley, mate. Major shitfight going on there.’
‘Yeah?’
‘The three-year anniversary celebration. No-one can agree how to handle it. Dave and Miranda are at each other’s throats. It’s getting ugly. Had a meeting of the collective last night, bloody thing went on for five hours. Dave wouldn’t let it go and neither would Miranda. Since Dave is usually the one to call stumps I thought we were going to sit there all night.’
‘What’s the problem?’ asked Bill.
‘Bloody John Lennon, that’s the problem.’ Mick grinned. He’d knocked back a double brandy and was starting to relax. ‘Miranda wants to phone him, via Geordie, and invite him to the anniversary celebration. Like, to preside over it. A new era of peace and all that bullshit.’ He snorted.
‘As if.’
‘Exactly, mate. As if. Like they’d be able to keep it a secret and it wouldn’t leak out. But Miranda’s going on about it being a cosmic moment, a gift from the universe. “What better way,” she goes, “to see in the ’80s?”’ And he gave a naff imitation of Miranda’s haughty tone.
It wasn’t leakage I was thinking about. I was wondering why any of them thought that John Lennon would want to hang out with a bunch of hippies at the bottom of the world. George, yes, maybe, but never John.
‘Miranda’s gone off her trolley,’ said Mick. ‘She thinks the sun shines out of Geordie’s arse. Full stop.’
‘What does Dave think of him?’
‘Dave didn’t mind him moving in, especially after he put in Miranda’s garden. Now she’s got the best laid-out patch in the valley. And Dave checked him out and found his father runs a big nursery in the south, so he’s a gardener alright. But Dave’s got doubts about the John and Yoko thing. For one thing I don’t think he believes it, and for another, even if it’s true he doesn’t want to invite them to the valley. “We’re not into celebrity stuff,” he says, last night. “That’s not what we’re about.” Then Miranda goes spare. “But the man’s a genius!” she goes. “He’s a peace warrior! Isn’t that why we’re here, isn’t that what we believe in?” She was spitting chips from the word go, like she’s made her mind up and Dave’s just getting in the way. The more wound-up she gets the quieter Dave goes. You know what he’s like. He just lets her go on and on until she’s said her piece. And then he says, very calmly, “That’s all very well, Miranda, but you can get burnt by this stuff.” And he tells this story about when Dylan came on his first tour of Australia and sang at The Black Swan folk club in the city. A friend of Dave’s called Okie used to make guitars and he took his best one along and offered it to Dylan, who strummed a few chords on it and said: “This guitar’s shit, man.” Okie never got over it.’
Bill laughed derisively. ‘What did the others say? Was there a vote?’
‘No, no vote. Dave said we’d leave it “in abeyance”, whatever that means. He knew Miran
da had got to a lot of people and he might lose a vote.’
Sometimes Mick surprised me: he didn’t miss much.
‘Miranda stormed out in a state. Fit to burst. Now she’s working her way round the valley, talking down Dave.’
I could picture the scene all too vividly. ‘What did Geordie say?’
‘He wasn’t there.’
‘Isn’t it a rule that everyone comes to the collective meetings?’
‘Supposed to be. Ariel wasn’t there either. Little Gracie’s crook. Everyone else turned up, not that they got much of a word in.’
‘Nothing serious with Gracie?’
‘Don’t think so.’
‘Wise of Geordie to stay away,’ said Bill. ‘Leave it to the power-brokers.’ He shot me a fleeting glance.
‘So, Mick, is Geordie up for all this,’ I asked, ‘or is it just Miranda’s idea?’
‘Dunno. He’s hard to read, is Geordie. But he knows a lot about rainforest restoration and he showed me the draft plan he’s drawn up for John. He also seems to be pretty cashed up. Heaps of dope. Someone’s paying him, even if it’s not the Beatleman himself.’
‘He probably grows the dope on John’s plantation,’ said Bill.
‘If it exists,’ I added.
Mick shrugged. ‘Any more of that brandy?’
Mick stayed with us that night and he and Bill got up at four to go fishing off the beach. They clumped about so noisily that I couldn’t get back to sleep so I lay there until sunrise wondering why I hadn’t yet conceived. In the seven months since Bill and I arrived on the coast, two women in the valley had got pregnant. Dave maintained that the valley was on a ley line and had a rare fertility, so perhaps Bill and I should spend a night at Yudhikara. But I wasn’t worried. There was plenty of time.
Reading Madame Bovary Page 20
