by Susan Duncan
I chucked a U-turn and went back up the hill. Bob stood at the campsite with Chippy in his arms. ‘Helluva racket,’ he said. ‘You woke the dog.’
‘Bastards wouldn’t ride to orders. And that baldy’s trouble. Thanks for helping out.’
‘Knew you’d manage. There’s a country girl buried inside you. Always has been.’
Girl? I kissed him hard and we dragged our camp chairs into the shifting shade. Bob tossed another piece of wood on the fire, disturbing the ashes. The smell of charcoal, achy and ancient, mingled with a puff of white smoke. The eagles had flown off and the sky was turning deep pink. Hillsides were lurid green, red and gold in the evening light. Soon, the sun would sink behind distant blue and violet hills stacked up against the horizon like frozen waves.
Looking back, they were heady, splendid days filled with the fecund scents of a wet spring with hints of the summer heat to come. Rain fell steadily and regularly. Grass grazed our knees. Freedom from the pressure of responsibility for my mother’s wellbeing was like being relieved of a great weight. There were many quiet hours by the fire drum when I thought about the serendipity of one choice versus another, and marvelled over and over at the string of small miracles that had led to a point in time I understood fully was sublime. But the outdoors was the real magic. As soon as the fire was lit, the camp chairs put out, the tent secured, I felt nothing dreadful could touch us here.
‘In a perfect world,’ Bob said thoughtfully, ‘what would you like in a house?’
‘To bring the outside in,’ I replied without having to think.
During one of our camps, the former owner of our land roared in on his trail bike, stockwhip twirled around one shoulder, boots heavy with mud, battered hat on his head. ‘Bob around?’ he asked. The two of them had spoken on the phone but never met.
‘Over there.’ I pointed a long way off. ‘Your cattle,’ I added accusingly, ‘they don’t ride too well to orders. Tried to turn them back the other day. One of them, the baldy, dug in. Thought he might get nasty.’
‘Nah. They’re a quiet mob. Cattle are curious. That’s all. Got any idea what you’re going to do with the land?’ He leaned back on the bike, ankles crossed, arms folded across his chest. Not unfriendly, but distant. Like the jury was still out on Bob and me.
‘Not a clue. We’re both novices and haven’t got the faintest idea what we’re about.’ A grimace crossed his face, like he’d been struck suddenly with a crippling pain in the gut. He said not one word. Swung his leg over the bike. Took off towards Bob with a roar. I stood there like a complete git.
Too late, I remembered interviewing a nuggety young bloke who from the age of nine had farmed sheep and wheat through droughts, floods, freezes and heatwaves alongside his soldier settler dad. ‘There’s blood in every corner of this land. Dad’s blood and mine,’ he’d said. I was almost certainly standing in a pool of blood, sweat and tears. All that work, he was probably thinking, for a couple of dilettante townies to build a house with a nice view and play at farming while weeds, bushfires, rodents and every other rural pestilence ran rampant. I cringed with shame.
When he rounded up his Red Polls and drove them along the dirt road to their new home a few kilometres closer to town, the baldy behaved impeccably and it was a peaceful swap-over. There was clearly an art and skill to handling cattle, although when I talked to cheery Don at the organic fruit and vegetable shop in Wingham, he told me he’d once been put up a tree by a wild beast.
‘Bull, was he?’ I asked, trying to sound knowledgeable.
‘Nah. Steer. Rounded up out of the bush by men on horses with nipping dogs to persuade the most cunning draft dodgers to fall into line.’ He must have seen the naked alarm on my face. Quickly added: ‘Cattle are raised differently these days. Handled nice and easy from the start. Members of the family, some of ’em.’
‘Yeah, right!’
After every farm stay, the tension between my mother and me abated for a short time then, in the brief span of a beachside picnic lunch or restaurant lunch, once more intensified to fierce levels. I no longer excused her cruelties as thoughtlessness or poor attempts at wit. Now when she aimed her knife at me, I turned it straight back on her. She immediately took shelter in a transparent lie. ‘I was only joking,’ she’d say, over and over. As a result, silences stretched out between us but less blood was spilled in the confined capsule of the car.
As her world kept narrowing, her anxieties about minor details, more to do with her convenience than her wellbeing, seemed to increase. ‘We’re very short-staffed,’ she said. ‘And even so, they’re trying to cut back everyone’s hours. I didn’t get bathed until ten o’clock this morning.’ A hint of outrage in her tone. Bathed? As though it was a spa pampering instead of a quick hose while she sat in a plastic invalid chair.
‘Never mind,’ I said, refusing to be drawn in.
‘It’s all going to pot, you know. I told Stefan about it. He was terribly worried for me. He offered to buy back my old unit.’ I sat up at this.
‘I thought Stefan was terribly ill.’
‘Oh, he’s much better. We’ve been lunching again. His daughter is quite wonderful to him. Makes a difference, having a daughter like that.’
‘I’m sure it does. But even so, I doubt he’d buy your old unit, Esther. You must have misunderstood. Anyway, I told you at the start, there’s no going back.’
‘I didn’t misunderstand anything. He has a house in the mountains where I can stay until it’s all sorted out.’
‘Don’t be silly. You can’t even pull up a side zipper without help.’
She continued as if I hadn’t spoken: ‘I went up there the other day. To my old unit. It’s a wreck. Rubbish chucked all over the place. Terrible, what’s happened to it.’
‘It’s still empty, Esther, but it’s fine. Just the way you left it.’
‘I’ve seen it with my own eyes! It’s been trashed. Vandals, probably.’ She sounded adamant, but I knew absolutely that she was now physically incapable of the distance from assisted living to her old unit and that management would clean up a mess left by vandals in a flash. Messes and vandals were bad for business in retirement villages offering security, safety and lifestyle for the over fifty-fives. Except the over fifty-fives aged, and after a couple of decades lifestyle didn’t mean much. Only life mattered.
‘Did someone take you there?’ I asked, trying to get to the bottom of it.
‘Nobody had to. I walked up on my own.’
‘You sure?’
She nodded, impatient with me. So losing her mind or a secret agenda, I wondered. We sat silently. I made a mental note to call the manager of assisted living. Esther’s medication needed adjustment or she was suffering from a low-grade urinary tract infection. I knew by then that they were the two most likely triggers for the sudden onset of a woolly, scatty and even hallucinogenic mind in the aged.
‘He wants to marry me, you know,’ she continued. And now I was sure her brain was crisscrossing, that she was confusing dreams with reality until neither made any sense. ‘Can you believe it?’ she said. ‘Imagine anyone thinking about marriage at his age.’ I raised my eyebrows. Hastily, she added: ‘Or my age.’ She played with her rings for a while.
‘Those rings are too tight, Esther. One day I’m going to call in and all your fingers will be lying in a pile on the floor, rings still attached.
‘Fiddlesticks.’
‘You need to be careful. Those pain patches deaden senses. You sure you need them?’
A baleful look. ‘Wait until you’re my age. Then cast the first stone.’
‘We both know, Esther, that you’ve always had a … taste … for painkillers. I am not being judgemental. I am not being critical. At your age, you’re perfectly entitled to do as you please. I am just trying to point out that if you use drugs unwisely, there’s a serious downside. The day may come when you’re in desperate pain, and you’ll need a dose that would kill a horse to have any effect.’
&nb
sp; She thrust out her chin. Stubborn. ‘I was a nurse, remember.’
‘Nurse’s aide,’ I muttered.
After a long time, she said, ‘If something happens, let me go. I’ve had a good life. A great life in the early days.’
‘Hope you don’t expect another wake,’ I joked.
‘Bury me next to Wally.’ Wally was her Rottweiler. Even though pets were permitted at the Village, the rule didn’t extend to Rottweilers. He moved in with us, and when he died of old age we buried him at Tarrangaua, near the chook pen. ‘Don’t put me next to your father. They shifted him about thirty years ago and I’ve no idea where he is now,’ she added. She’d mentioned this before, so I knew to let that one slide into the atmosphere without remark.
‘So you want to be cremated,’ I said.
‘Good god, no. Don’t believe in it. The soul has to leave your body and it can’t if it’s burnt.’
‘There’s a law against burying bodies in backyards,’ I responded. ‘You’ll have to have another think about all this and let me know.’
Our tone was jocular but it was a sad conversation. Fifty years of escalating disappointments, I thought, resulting in having someone wash your backside and being buried alongside your dog. I was knocked flat by the waste. Vowed to avoid a similar scenario at any cost. Wind picked up sand, spinning and twirling it upwards in red clouds until it disappeared into nothing. Like us, when it was all over. And I suddenly grasped that if my mother died before me, despite the uneasiness and even quiet fury that hovered over us at every meeting like smoke from a fire, I would grieve. Be lost and, for a long time, anchorless. So I told her in fumbling, grudging encouragement: ‘You can’t die. You’re the source of my best material.’
She replied in a snippy voice coupled with one of her sly looks: ‘The longer I live, the better your genes stack up. That’s the real reason you’re barracking for me.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It’s all about me. Hang in anyway, will you?’
That day, I handed her an éclair on a china plate with a linen napkin I’d brought along to pretend for a moment we were dining in style. She barely noticed. I sipped my coffee. Passed her the cappuccino.
‘Leave the lid on,’ I reminded her, as I did every time. ‘Sip through the slit.’
‘The girls tell me you and Bob are leaving Pittwater.’
Ah, I thought, so that’s what prompted the death discussion.
‘Where would they get that from?’ I asked, genuinely surprised. ‘Some story about you in the paper. You were asked if you’d ever leave Lovett Bay. You said you might.’
‘We’re not leaving Pittwater, Esther.’
I told her, then, about the farm. ‘We have bought some land; we plan to build a simple, sustainable house that we will visit when the weather gets cold. But we belong in Pittwater. Always will.’ Then, in a cunning but inspired confabulation worthy of my mother, I added: ‘You’re getting too old for us to leave for too long, so we’ve given up overseas holidays. We’ll never be far away anymore if you need us.’
She smiled, smug. The look on her face suggested she deserved all this and more. Then she asked for her handbag. She rummaged and eventually removed an envelope, handed it to me with a flourish. ‘Electricity bill,’ she explained. I opened it. Somehow, in a one-room apartment not much bigger than a ship’s cabin, in one month she had racked up a debt of nine hundred and seventy-eight dollars.
‘You’ve got to be warm,’ I said, ‘but it does seem high. I might get someone to check the meter.’
‘I have the windows open all the time, of course. Fresh air is very healthy.’
Later, Bob said, ‘I’ll bet she doesn’t know how to work the heating remote control so she boils and opens the windows to cool down.’
A few days later, the Village manager told me Esther had set off the fire alarm in her unit at 2.50 am. ‘She was making toast,’ the manager explained. ‘Why would she be making toast in the small hours of the morning?’ I could think of a million reasons but I shrugged silently, knowing I would have to remove the toaster because the fire brigade fee for every false alarm, we were both informed, was seven hundred and fifty dollars, and this was already her second offence (if that was the right word).
‘I’ll have to confiscate the toaster, you know,’ I told her.
‘Don’t you dare!’
‘No choice. Sorry.’
‘I’ll buy another one,’ she said defiantly.
‘I can’t help you if you won’t help yourself.’ And she backed off without firing another shot. To soften the blow, I added: ‘I will bring it back in a couple of weeks. We just need to show that we’re doing our best.’
‘Yes,’ she said.
We both understood that the toaster was gone forever.
14
EACH TIME WE SET OFF FROM PITTWATER for the farm, there was a great sense of excitement. The property was a blank canvas waiting to be transformed. On the four-hour drive we tossed ideas back and forth, energised by the whole project and the sense that our dreams might be realised. After we were clear about our aims, Bob suggested a chat and a site visit with a couple of Wingham architects who’d helped Michael work through complicated council regulations for the installation of the new brick kiln. They’d lived in a small town long enough for any transgressions – small or large – to surface, and the general consensus was that they were bold, clever and practical, understood the meaning of budgets and listened to clients. It was a place to start.
Russell Austin and Carolyn McFarland, a husband and wife team, suggested we take their all-wheel drive to the property. It was a grey day. A wafty drizzle dampened the ground. Out of town, and beyond a forest of shedding paperbarks growing in low-lying swampy land, green paddocks rolled out like endless carpet. It was impossible to conceive the possibility of drought, of grass so dry underfoot it broke with a snap, the green turned to dull yellow. Dust kicking up in clouds thick enough to blind you. First impressions were believed to be the constant norm. Change a cruel trick.
The men, Bob with short grey hair, Russell with black hair pulled into a ponytail, sat companionably in the front seat, talking quietly. In the back, Carolyn and I chatted about her children, our Pittwater life, where to find great coffee or a decent sandwich. At one point, she suggested a visit to her home to better understand their style to be sure it suited us. That way, we would all have a clear idea of direction. ‘For your own sake, let’s make it a day after the cleaner’s been,’ she said, smiling.
After all the heavy rain, the floodway was deep and running strong, the dirt road past the decrepit dairy shed rough with rocks, potholes and stony outcrops where the gravel had washed away. At our front gate, Bob jumped out, swung it open. The Great Hill was hatted with cloud. The drizzle threatened to ramp up a notch. Bob directed Russell through a pretty grove of gum trees, pointed out the turning on to a mushy red clay cutting that divided the Great Hill into two layers, like the filling of a cake.
At a subtle dip, the car skidded in a single, sweeping fishtail, leaving the front wheel on the passenger side and both back wheels hovering over the sludgy edge of the cutting. We froze in stunned silence. A small nudge and we’d all be somersaulted to the dam way below.
‘I’m outta here,’ I said, feeling strangely calm. I opened the door very carefully. Almost slid to the ground on wet grass and clay.
‘Me, too,’ Carolyn said with what sounded like relief. We women stood together on level ground.
Bob and Russell remained immobile inside the vehicle. Finally, Bob said, ‘Sorry mate, you’re stuffed.’ He climbed out. After a minute, Russell followed. Safely on firm ground, we all stood in a line, staring at the stricken car. Our damp woollen sweaters gave off a pungent, agricultural smell not unlike the wet cow dung around our feet.
Russell smiled with a touch of irony. ‘Guess all-wheel drive isn’t quite the same as four-wheel drive,’ he said.
Bob pulled out his mobile phone and called the brickworks. ‘We need a tow,
mate. Russell has skidded off the track.’
Rural life, I thought. Get used to it.
While we waited for help, Carolyn and I trekked through fog and mist to the top of the Great Hill, carefully dodging steaming piles of cow shit. I bent often to pull out weeds. ‘Every little bit helps,’ I said. Soon, Carolyn joined in. A puny effort but it gave us both a chance to pause and catch our breath, to gaze at country blurred by a soft grey haze.
‘Shit!’ I dragged a boot through the grass trying to clean it. ‘Prolific blokes, aren’t they?’ I pointed at another pile so Carolyn could avoid it.
When we reached the summit, Carolyn gazed in awe. ‘Beautiful,’ she said. ‘I can see why you fell in love with the place.’
‘Bob and I think this is a great site. Are we mad?’ I asked her.
She hesitated a fraction too long. ‘It could be spectacular,’ she said finally. ‘It won’t be easy, but the result will make it worth it.’
‘Yeah. It’s all good.’ After a while, in the distance, we could see Michael’s dark-blue ute travelling along the road. Carolyn and I descended in silence. It was more slippery and harder on the muscles than the ascent.
Michael quickly decided two utes would be better than one. He called Norm, who drives the truck and excavator at the brickworks. ‘In a bit of bother, mate, can you get out here?’
After a while, Norm arrived in a battered white ute. Circling the car, hands on hips, he bent to look under the chassis, humming and hahhing. ‘Made a pretty good job of it, mate,’ he said. ‘You were bloody lucky, if you want my opinion.’
Chains were attached. Engines revved. Hands waved to direct the turn of the steering wheel. Tyres spun. The car was even more perilously perched. ‘Saw a bloke working his paddock not far from here,’ Michael said. ‘I’ll drive over and see if he can lend a hand with his tractor.’
Carolyn and I looked at each other: ‘Would you be going back to town after that?’
