‘They are both geniuses,’ said Pam, stalking past him. ‘But you knew that.’
‘Yeah, well. It’s the genes, isn’t it?’
‘Mine, you mean?’ she called over her shoulder. ‘Did you get the stew out?’
Mick walked into the kitchen and stood next to Pam, who was now holding open the fridge door, surveying its contents. ‘I wasn’t sure what time you’d be back,’ he said.
Pam reached forward and grabbed a wine bottle with one hand and a stew-filled glass container with the other, and placed them both on the bench. ‘Veggies would be good too. Want to give me a hand?’
Mick, biddable as he often was, fetched his beer and stood beside her, cutting up carrots and potatoes while she topped and tailed beans then put the stew in a pot.
‘You’ve got your good dress on,’ he said.
Pam sighed wearily, as though she had only just realised. ‘I thought I’d get home to change before the interviews but I ran out of time.’
‘You could change now.’
‘I really want to get dinner on.’ She sounded peevish.
‘Hungry, huh?’ She didn’t acknowledge him so he continued. ‘How long did that lunch go on for?’
‘Long enough.’
‘And?’
‘I’ll tell you after dinner.’
‘Hmm,’ he grunted. Then he caught her eye and saw the look on her face. ‘You all right?’
She shrugged noncommittally. ‘It’s been a long day.’
After dinner, Pam did the dishes. It was a solitary act that attracted little interest from anyone else. Mick had become distracted with something on TV. Scott and Loren had disappeared into their bedrooms. Loren had ruefully declared she had homework to do after a bruising assessment from her maths teacher about her waning numeracy skills. Scott had simply disappeared, as he could do. The stealth bomber, Simon christened him once long ago, half disparaging, half admiring his ability to create havoc, then exit without trace. Pam noted that at least on this particular occasion he had taken his plate to the sink. Somewhere between the food heating and the food eating she herself had managed to slip out of the yellow dress and into a shirt and cotton pants. She stood barefoot at the sink now, her wrists in suds, staring out the window. Daylight saving was over and night had closed in early. The glass in front of her was a mirror in which she could see the outlines of her face, her hair in its unchanging wavy cut always managing to make her look upbeat and cheerful, as though she was about to walk into a 1950s whitegoods ad. She didn’t mind doing the dishes. Occasionally she hassled Mick and the kids about helping with the washing up and occasionally they did. But it was usually just her—cooking, clearing, washing. Mick had said the solution was to get a dishwasher. But she didn’t want a dishwasher, just an occasional helping hand. There was something restful about the doing of dishes, something almost meditative. She thought of what Aurora had said in their yoga session last week as she carefully ran the dishcloth around the rim of a glass, then up and down its sides: that every act done mindfully could be an act of meditation, a giving over of her ‘self’ into a simple activity, making the best job of it she could. It took her away from herself, and yet it had a purpose as well. She liked that idea. Two birds with one stone. No just lying on your back and breathing in and out, in and out, dishes still piled up at home.
‘A penny for them.’
In the window reflection she could see Mick behind her. At the moment she registered him he put his arm around her. She felt the warmth and weight of it and bent her head to one side and briefly rested her cheek on his shoulder.
‘No thoughts,’ she said. ‘Just washing.’
He picked up a tea towel from the oven handle and started drying. She saw him glance tentatively at her. He wanted to know about lunch. He couldn’t help himself, wasn’t going to wait for her. ‘Okay, so what did the old bastard have to say?’
‘He asked me why I married someone so uncouth.’
‘Uncouth? What the bloody hell does that mean?’
By now she had finished the last of the washing and was scrubbing the sink down as it drained. ‘Want a cuppa?’ she asked, although she didn’t know why she bothered. She’d never known Mick to turn one down.
They sat at the table. Background sound from the TV wafted from the living room to the kitchen, not impeding conversation but softening it, giving shape to the aural space.
‘He wants us to move up there,’ she said.
‘What?’ he said, although it wasn’t really a question.
She inclined her head slightly, flattened her mouth in a pantomime of ‘I know, how ridiculous’.
‘What did you say to that? And why the hell wasn’t I there?’ Irritation flared briefly in his eyes. ‘That gives me the shits.’
She put her hand out across the table. ‘Hey. Come on. He was only sounding me out.’
‘He thinks he can get to you.’
‘What are you talking about? Besides, you don’t even know the offer yet.’
‘Offer? Yeah, right. Of course there’s an offer.’
She made a small disparaging noise. ‘He’s only trying to think of our future. With Pete already up on the farm, I mean. Dad wants to see everything shared equally. I can see where he’s going with this.’
‘So what’s the deal?’
‘He wants to split the land up. Pete takes one half, we have the other. We can have his house.’
‘And you think this is a good idea?’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘You’re not a farmer, Mick.’
‘So you said that on my behalf, did you?’
‘Yeah.’
He laughed then, and took a gulp of his tea. ‘So what’s the reasoning?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Avoiding tax somehow. Making a partial gift of something or other. We talked about a few other ways it could be done. I said you were too old to start farming now. Forty-five, you’ll be retiring in a wink.’
‘Bet he laughed at that, the old bugger. He’ll never bloody retire. Which is why I can see that even if we wanted to take the land over he’d never be out of our hair. He’s never out of Pete’s.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Anyway, why now?’
‘Old age. Fear of being alone. Who knows? It’s been a while now since Mum died. Perhaps he thinks he could pop off anytime. You know his heart’s not great. He’s seventy-nine. I reckon secretly he thinks Scott might want to be on the land one day.’
‘Scott! You’ve got to be joking.’
‘Well, he is the one who goes up there.’
‘Only to ride the quad bike around. Use the shed to tinker with bloody motors. Do god knows what with his mates.’
She sighed. ‘It makes the old man happy. To see someone, I mean. To see someone enjoying the place in some kind of way. Not that I’d know, really. It’s not like he’s ever going to tell me what makes him happy. I don’t think he knows himself. But that’s my guess.’
‘He’s short-changed with Pete only having one girl.’
‘Dad doesn’t have anything against girls,’ said Pam. ‘He’s always supported me. Well, you know, in his own way. I think he’s only thinking about who might want to make a future on the land.’
‘Pete’s doing it already.’
‘Yeah, but Pete can’t have it all. Once Dad goes it has to be divided up. He does have two children, you know.’
Pam thought suddenly of her brother, realising she hadn’t seen him for a while and that she should give him a ring. They had never been close, but then they had never been entirely distant either. When their mother had been alive they were constantly being brought together, following her summonses. But since her death, their relationship had disintegrated into something more occasional, seasonal and obligatory. Birthdays, Christmas. Fathers’ Day. A perfunctory, odd familiarity.
‘What are you guys up to?’ Loren appeared at the kitchen door. ‘You didn’t tell me there was a cup of tea going.’
&n
bsp; ‘It was for the dishwashers,’ said Mick.
Loren made a grumpy face. ‘That’s not fair.’
‘Fair?’ said Pam. ‘What’s fair got to do with it? If I was using fair as my benchmark I would say it wasn’t fair that you weren’t helping with the dishes.’
‘You know I had homework to do. Remember what Mr Watts said, Mum. I need to put more time into maths. Which means I can’t do everything. Not all at once, anyway.’ She smiled charmingly as if that might make her sound more reasonable.
Pam sighed. ‘What’s in the pot is probably still warm enough.’
Loren moved to the bench, poured a cup and sat down with them. Pam thought again, as she seemed to do a lot of late, that her daughter was becoming an adult before her eyes. She could vaguely remember the age herself, being sixteen, and sometimes it shocked her to realise that Loren was only now three years younger than she had been when she met Mick. Scott was only a year off himself and Simon, at three years older again, was in fact the age that Mick was when they met. Surely that couldn’t be right? She tried to imagine her bespectacled, industrious son about to settle down to domesticity. He was barely an adult, still had to finish his course and start a job. Mick had already been working for six years when he was twenty-one. The times were different. Did it mean they were more mature in her day? She had a feeling that in all likelihood they just had a different focus. She had probably been just as naïve, just lucky to have had the support system (as they called it these days) of family.
Nowadays education was starting to mean a lot more. Kids aimed for professional jobs. She didn’t remember the word ‘professional’ being bandied about much when she was young. People were just what they were: doctors or lawyers or accountants. Farmers, businessmen (even if they happened to be women, which of course was a rare occurrence). There was an invisible scaffold that it all hung on, knowing that some people had more money, were better educated, more powerful. Still, despite this current notion that professionals were going to inherit the earth, she wasn’t a stickler for her kids going to university. She certainly expected them to finish school, because that gave them options, but overall she felt that education was something you could gain in all sorts of ways. She was happy to support them as best she could. She was only getting used to the idea that Scott might take up some post-school study when she’d been quite convinced he would find his own way to doing something useful with his life. She hadn’t really talked to Loren about her future, but she could see she’d have to start making some decisions soon with her final two years of school looming.
‘You okay?’ she asked.
‘Sure,’ replied Loren, a brief flicker of puzzlement crossing her face. ‘Oh, you mean after that bollocking from—’
‘Language,’ Mick interjected, a tone of mock sternness.
‘From Miss Hicks?’
‘And your English teacher, what’s her name again?’
‘Callahan. She didn’t say anything bad, did she?’
‘No, but I got the impression she thought you could do a little better.’
‘Well, that’s the way they think, isn’t it? Always critical,’ said Mick, a little huffy.
Pam sighed. If only Mick went to school once in a while he would see that it was no longer like his Catholic education circa 1960. ‘I felt she thought you were capable of more.’
‘Yeah,’ said Loren slowly. She gazed into her teacup as though she was reading her fortune. ‘She probably does. I probably am.’
It had always been art that had held Loren’s interest. She’d been drawing since she was old enough to clutch a crayon. At eight she’d told Pam that she was going to be an artist. A year or two later they had bought her an easel and a set of acrylic paints. Since then she’d moved through watercolour, gouache and oil phases. She set up a kind of studio space in one half of her room close to the windows that looked out onto the side garden, where the camellias and the rhododendrons had taken over and formed a kind of mini Himalayan forest and created a diffuse, soft light for painting. Loren’s bedroom door was opposite Pam and Mick’s and the putty-like scent of linseed often filtered out into the hallway. Pam hadn’t considered fumes when she’d suggested the studio situation. In retrospect she hoped they weren’t toxic.
‘Have you thought about when you finish school? What you might work towards?’
‘Si says there are painting courses I can do in Melbourne or Sydney. He knows someone who’s doing one. Thinks it’s pretty cool.’ She shrugged uncertainly.
‘What would you do with a painting course?’ asked Mick suspiciously. ‘What kind of a job would you get with that?’
‘What is wrong with you tonight, Michael Green?’ Pam scolded. ‘So negative.’
Mick shot her a look that told her she should know the answer to that question. The business with her father had put his nose out of joint. There was no way around it. She was going to be in a dog box of kinds for a day or so for having gone off by herself; although, in her defence, she didn’t know her father’s mission when he’d ordered her to lunch.
‘I want to be an artist,’ said Loren. ‘I think I’m okay. I can work hard. I want to. It’s not even like work when I’m painting.’
‘Well, people with art degrees can teach and work in museums and art galleries. You know, if you need a back-up plan,’ she heard herself say, but thinking at the same time why shouldn’t her daughter be an artist, do something she was passionate about. In two minds. That’s what she was. She wanted so much for her children, maybe Loren in particular. And yet she wanted to keep them safe as well, not to suffer for their choices. How to encourage, but keep a lid on things? Keep perspective? It was so much easier when they wanted to be accountants or engineers. Or mechanics. She seemed to be in luck with the boys.
Then it occurred to her that this conversation wasn’t about the future, that she had missed the point entirely. This conversation was about right now. Loren was opening up in a way that she hadn’t done for a while. Shifts that had been happening since Lori started high school. A little less information, a little more distance. Almost imperceptible. And now, almost imperceptibly again, a shift back, a slow welcoming in.
April 2016
Melbourne
Brunswick Street, just north of Johnston, lunchtime. The narrow pavement was choked with pedestrians following the north-south route in search of food and drink, something quirky, a bargain if they were lucky. On the road, a long queue of cars was stuck behind a tram. Cyclists flew past, threatening to bowl over unsuspecting jaywalkers who had assumed now was a good time to cross while the traffic was stationary.
Lori had taken the last seat at an outdoor table, on the corner of one of the side streets, where cafés colonised the space. It was a sheltered spot, guarded by a fledgling tree that was just losing its leaves and enclosed by a hip-height planter box, full of rosemary and thyme. Quieter here too, away from the main action but close enough to the buzz to still see what was going on but not get caught up in it. She pressed her back against the metal chair and felt its reassuring warmth, absorbed from the heat of the midday sun. All around her diners sat eating and chatting, reading, gazing at their phones. The usual urban tableau.
On the corner opposite, a young man sat hunched on a grubby-looking blanket, a wiry-haired dog curled up against his leg, a cardboard sign with a scrawl indecipherable from this distance but one she knew would be asking for money for food, or offering up the story of how he had fallen on hard times. When she was last over this way there hadn’t been any beggars. Now they were everywhere. In the city, in Balaclava, in St Kilda. A constant reminder of the fragility of life. The thin line so easily crossed; what might have been, what could become, just a few metres away.
A waiter appeared and slid a menu in front of her, asked if she wanted a coffee to start. She looked up, glad of distraction. He was young, early twenties, but with a world-weary demeanour that took her back. She thought it was a thing of the past, that insouciant, detached attitude. These
days waiters all seemed so friendly, almost American in their relentless desire to charm the customer. This guy reminded her of the old days. The Fitzroy of the nineties, full of wannabe actors and artists all trying to make ends meet, working in cafés, looking down their noses at those who might have (given a chance, and for entirely different reasons) looked down their noses at them first. The eternal battle between the bourgeoisie and the counterculture, or whatever you wanted to call the ninety-nine percent of creatives who’d never work in their chosen fields. She could have almost included herself in their numbers, and would no doubt have fitted the bill with her incessant scribbling and sketching and obsession with art and design, but she’d cleaned houses for a living then rather than waiting on tables. It was better for her. The job satisfaction, the pay, the freedom that came from not having to constantly deal with people face to face. A level of anonymity.
Lori put her hand up to shade her brow from the sun that threatened to bounce over the top of her sunglasses and blind her. ‘Is Schiller still here?’ she asked the waiter.
He hesitated, surprised by the question. Not the usual ‘Do you have gluten-free bread?’ variety. ‘Schiller? Sorry, I don’t think so.’
‘He used to own this place.’ She fanned her hands either side of her head. ‘Long hair.’
‘Ah, you mean Chris?’ he said.
Gazing up at the waiter, she thought about how she’d once been a part of this place. Once she would have come here and known people. Today she could almost believe she’d never been here at all but was simply looking at the set of a familiar TV show, now with a brand new ensemble cast. Except for Schiller, who it seemed was still here but had taken on a new role. They’d never called him by his given name. It took her a moment to connect the two. ‘Yeah, Chris. Is he here?’
The waiter shrugged the shrug of the terminally incurious. ‘He’s usually in at some point. Haven’t seen him today.’
She ordered a long black and resigned herself to the idea that she wouldn’t meet up with Schiller after all. Perhaps that was for the best. It had been a long time and there were no guarantees that he’d even want to see her. She joined the ranks of those around her, took her phone out and checked the time, scanned her emails and glanced at The Onion, in the hope of distracting herself both from the thought of meeting Schiller and the very reason she was in Fitzroy in the first place, while she waited for her coffee to arrive.
Life Before Page 6
