No one looked at her.
Late afternoon. Maggie lay prone on the ground at the end of her yard, waiting for the enemy, loading and firing her Daisy rifle. Shot after shot, each one deadly accurate. Within ten minutes she’d deposited a tiny slug of lead into each of the lemons on O’Reilly’s tree.
The screen door banged open and O’Reilly sauntered out into the yard, making for the lemon tree. He unzipped and stood there, his cock snaking out of its dark nest. Maggie kept her eye on him this time, aiming the rifle carefully. As a stream of urine splattered onto the dry ground, O’Reilly noticed something odd about the lemon in front of his face. He kept pissing as he looked at its neighbour and then another and another and saw that each fruit had been sabotaged.
‘Bloody hell,’ he said, and Maggie gently squeezed the trigger and the pellet hit him on the end of his cock and he screamed and fell to his knees.
Later, when Maggie called out sweetly from the front door and his heart lurched as it always did, William remembered vaguely he had something to tell her, but couldn’t remember what. They had afternoon tea together in the dining room and he opened the carefully wrapped bar of soap and smelled rosemary and he was back, alongside Maggie, shooting things with her Daisy rifle, his leg pressed against hers.
The Gap Between the Sandbars
Tuesday, 2 September
A fine drizzle pricks my face as I lob an off-cut of treated pine at the cat that woke me up. The ginger Tom ducks over our eastern fence, followed by the poisonous lump of pine, and I wince as an image of the eco-warrior who lives next door floods my groggy, pre-dawn mind.
I’m in the front yard of our Largs Bay home. A mild nervous breakdown sees me, for the first time in a long time, fit for nothing much but taxiing my children from home to school and back again. The sun will rise soon.
I’m on extended leave from my ten-year stint in middle management in the Department of Premier and Cabinet. The so-called Communications unit. On one level it’s a relief to be out of there, if only for a couple of months. I was sure I was going to kill someone.
Three hundred metres to the west lies the murky waters of Gulf St Vincent, the massive body of water and tidal flats wedged between Yorke Peninsula and the Adelaide plains. In two or three hundred years, this’ll all be underwater. We’re on borrowed time. Above, the power cables moan with the wind off the gulf. Across the road, the Jacksons’ white picket fence glows in the milky light, a constant reproach.
Jack and Sarah are in the back of the car. Twins. I read somewhere that twins are more commonplace than we think, at least in the womb. But something will often go wrong, one of the embryos will fail and then will be ‘swallowed up’ by the other, leaving no trace of its existence. This may explain some of the natural antagonism these two display. I can imagine them eyeing each other off in utero, watching each other for the first sign of failure.
We’re off to school. The car is barely out of the driveway before Sarah starts up.
‘Which is better, Jack? A tiny piece of ice or a tiny piece of snow?’
I look at her ten-year-old face in the rear-view mirror, bright with feigned innocence.
‘Ah, ice. No, snow. No, ice!’ says Jack, panic in his voice by the time he gets to the third option.
‘Which one?’ asks Sarah, all sweetness and light.
His voice drops. ‘Ice. A tiny piece of ice.’ The panic has gone, replaced with resignation. He knows he’s going to fall into a trap no matter what his answer is. He just wants it over and done with. I’m with him on that.
‘Well, they’re the same thing. Ice and snow are the same.’
‘No they’re not.’
‘Yes they are.’
‘DAD!’ he yells.
Parenthood has been a confusion of delights and devastations. One morning they’re at me, mercilessly pushing all my buttons, undoing my defences one by one just to see how they work, messing with my mind. The next they beg me ‘Do the rubbish truck, Daddy!’ and they lie side by side on the lounge-room floor, covered in rugs as I rumble around, gears screeching. I pick up each one in turn, hoist them over my shoulder and ‘dump’ them on the lounge as they giggle and squeal.
What is that all about? Wanting to trust someone else? Or wanting confirmation that someone close to you is powerful beyond your comprehension? That would be a comfort I guess. A comfort that adulthood will strip from them as quickly and cleanly as scales from a freshly caught fish.
Part of the deal to keep my job is regular meetings with a counsellor. Bruce is a local man: a decade or so older than me, a drinker, with a degree in philosophy and unorthodox methods. Narrative therapy. I’m to write things down. Find a way to understand my life as an unfolding story.
He thinks I should seize the chance and opt out for a year or two. Renovate myself (not the house), grow tomatoes, help out occasionally at the school canteen. Middle-manage my waistline. Get back to basics. He’s an unreconstructed hippy. We have a session each week, paid for by the department.
But the first thing on my list this morning is the white picket fence. Thirteen months ago, our entire fence fell over one windy August night. The idiots-we-bought-this-house-from used untreated pine for all their outdoor projects. Saved themselves a couple of bucks, put up a facade, and sold the problem on to us. The posts were riddled with white ants.
I’m glad to be outside. The shower is dripping. You can hear it from any room in the house. I’ve changed the washer, to no avail. That steady drip drip drip makes me feel less of a man. I’m taking things way too seriously.
I set to work. Yesterday I put in the posts, sawing timber, digging holes, mixing concrete. I spent an anxious twenty minutes aligning each one as the concrete set around them. I was a mess by the time I’d finished. Hands raw and tight from cement dust. Hamstrings ablaze.
The posts look fine. Now I have to cut notches for the horizontals to rest in. I have no idea how to do this properly. And it’s clear to me that for every possible task there’s at least a million dumb ways of doing it and two or three really clever and elegant ones.
As I’m pondering the problem, Ken, the retired naval engineer from two doors down, shuffles by and asks if I need a hand. He tells me to use a circular saw to make horizontal cuts in the posts and then a chisel to knock out the waste. Sounds good. He offers me his saw. Within minutes we’ve clamped one of the cross-struts to the poles and I’ve marked out exactly where the cuts will go.
We toddle off to his house to get the saw. It’s a Californian bungalow, circa 1920, with honeysuckle covering the front veranda. Ken’s wife of forty-five years died ten months ago and a group of us have been looking out for him. It’s that kind of street. A small, leafy oasis of friendliness, three streets back from the gulf.
‘How are you, Alan?’ he asks, as he puts a cup of tea in front of me on the kitchen table. Ken’s hair has gone a bit wild and he’s wearing a brown cardigan and trousers. You rarely see him in anything else. Besides that, he’s holding up reasonably well.
‘Ah, you know. Doing okay.’ I take a sip of hot, sweet tea. ‘I’ve got the team-building thing on Thursday. We’ll see how it goes.’
Wednesday, 3 September
When I pick up the kids from school, I notice Jack has a smug little smile on his face. Here we go. He waits until we’re in the car.
‘Which is better?’ he offers Sarah. ‘A telescope or nothing?’
He’s obviously put a lot of thought into this. A lot of thought for a ten-year-old boy, that is.
‘Nothing,’ snaps Sarah.
‘Why, Sarah? You can see things from a long way with a telescope.’
‘Nothing.’
‘Don’t you want to be able to do that?’ says Jack.
‘No.’
Silence.
I half-remember a quote from my university days – American Literature 210. Something along the lines that a man – a real man, that is – could be destroyed but not defeated. Judging by the look on his face, Jack’s go
t quite a few years to go.
After dinner, I read a carpentry book while Donna is on the phone to her mum, my mind wandering to tomorrow. The team-building workshop was another thing I agreed to so I could keep my job. As I’m thinking about it I feel the first prickle of panic and I try to empty my mind but, too late, the prickles multiply and take over.
It’s like when I go for a swim in the gulf on a warm summer’s night. I walk out to the gap between the first and second sandbars. Then, in waist-deep water, I begin swimming, parallel to the shore, the vast expanse of the gulf on my left. The seabed shelves away into the deep, where the sharks live. We have big ones here – Great Whites, five metres long. Fish that can bite you in half. The seabed shelves away … but I don’t look or else I’ll lose my nerve and stop swimming.
I’ll have to take a pill to get to sleep now.
What is the problem? Why the breakdown? I haven’t figured it out yet. Clearly it has a lot to do with the feeling I had in Premier and Cabinet that I was achieving nothing of real importance in my work, engineering the re-election of a politician I had lost all respect for.
And then there was Shaun. My boss. A ‘whizz-kid’ at communications, he had very quickly cottoned on to one of the guiding principles of advancement in the public service – appropriate the work of those below you in the food chain and pass it off as your own.
I know that I grew to hate my workplace. I developed a rash that, at one point, engulfed my entire body. I stopped sleeping. I felt weak but couldn’t find a way forward. My head felt as if it had been hollowed out and pumped full of gas. I had to get out.
Thursday, 4 September
I find myself sitting on a bare wooden floor in a renovated church in Unley. It’s cold. Around me sit my workmates, each with a pillow, each of us concentrating on our breathing as Julia, our twenty-something, yoga-teaching, tofu-eating ‘work relations consultant’ circles us, critiquing our collective lack of posture and our total inability to breath as nature intended.
Ours is the most dysfunctional unit within Premier and Cabinet. It’s no surprise that we are the first group chosen to undergo a team-building workshop. We’re the guinea pigs and it’s clear, right away, that the ‘facilitators’ are new to this and gloriously out of their depth.
Somewhere during the morning session – between having to pretend that our bodies are trees swaying in the wind and watching Samantha, our Communications Officer, silently pour a cup of cold water over Shaun’s head – Cecilia, the thirty-something project officer I got on with best, sidles up to me with a question.
‘Did you ever have moments when you thought, “If I wasn’t here, would I be missed”?’
‘All the time,’ I said, and we both laughed out loud.
But it was the exercise in which we were made to sit in a circle and each say something positive about a nominated person that drove Samantha to do what she did with the cup of water.
Friday, 5 September
I spend the morning outdoors helping Ken with his paving, glad to be doing something that will result in soreness and tiredness and allow me to surrender to sleep.
At 3.20 I pick up the kids from school. There’s something on Sarah’s mind.
‘We’re not gonna leave, are we?’
‘What do you mean?’ I ask, looking at her in the mirror.
‘I heard you and mummy talking about the house.’
I remember the conversation. The what-happens-if-I-can’t-go-back-to-work chat. The how-will-we-pay-the-mortgage chat. Donna, bless her, assured me we’d get by. We’d just have to cut back, maybe get some chooks and plant more veggies, maybe I could bone up on the renovation stuff and set myself up as an odd-job man for a while. Paving, carpentry, fencing, gardening. Plenty of work around.
‘Don’t worry, honey,’ I tell Sarah. ‘We’re not going anywhere.’
After I’ve dropped them off at Nanna’s I continue into the city, looking for a sign. Should I go back to work?
When I walk into the building I came to loathe, the first person I see is Shaun, at the downstairs cafe. Neither of us wants this but he indicates the chair opposite him and I sit down. He’s drinking a coffee, his eyes darting constantly to his watch. He asks me how my leave is going and I tell him about the paving.
‘And you’re happy?’ he asks after a while, as if he can’t imagine it is possible.
‘Yeah, I am.’ I look down at my hands and my nails are blackened and I have the beginnings of calluses on my palms. I notice him looking at them.
‘All my own work,’ I say to Shaun, and smile. He doesn’t even blush. There it is, I think to myself. There it is.
Landscapes
Late afternoon. Vanessa stood outside the most expensive real estate money could buy in Victor Harbor and smiled for the first time that day. She expected to make $60,000 from this sale. There was a Jeffrey Smart painting – leaden sky, yellow street sign – coming up for auction next week in Adelaide. She wanted it.
The house was new – four hundred square metres of marbled floor on two levels. Its facade alternated thick plastered walls with expanses of smoked glass. Vanessa knew the owner had baulked in the final stages. Overwhelmed by the cost and by his losses on the stock market, he had insisted the builder not use the double-glazed glass the plans prescribed. So it would cost a fortune to keep cool in summer and warm in winter.
With a property like this, the trick was not to talk too much, just allow the grandeur of the view to do its work, without interruption. The client would walk up the central staircase and into the upstairs living room and be faced immediately with floor-to-ceiling glass, framing a seascape beyond reproach. She looked at her watch.
‘Permanent, infinite views,’ she said to the young man with a blonde on either arm. He let out a low whistle of approval. He sized up the room, replete with all the props a house like this demanded – black leather couches, an expensive globe of the world on a mahogany stand by the glass wall. And there it was – the telescope on the balcony.
‘Claudia, look. Look at that,’ he said. Vanessa heard the little catch in his voice as he realised that this, right here, was the life he’d been promised in all the lifestyle porn he’d flicked through every Sunday morning over Florentine eggsand a double macchiato in Hindley Street.
One of the girls – Vanessa was sure they were sisters – unhooked herself from the man and sauntered over to the window. She draped herself across a black leather chair, her mini-skirt riding up the half-inch required to remove all doubt from the mind of a man. Her red knickers, Vanessa judged, were an almost perfect colour match for the low-slung car they’d pulled up in.
‘We’ll take it,’ she said, and the young man laughed rich and loud. Vanessa found it hard to take her eyes off him. There was a swagger in his every move. The intoxication of knowing that you could buy anything you looked at.
‘And what would we do down here during the week?’ said the other blonde. She looked a year or two older. Her skirt rode an inch or two lower.
‘Everything you’ve always wanted,’ said the young man, taking her hand and steering her towards the view of the bay.
As they took it all in, Vanessa said nothing of the bikies, the casual lawlessness of the summer crowd, the recent downturn in sales. ‘Buyer beware,’ was her motto, and she knew they’d give as good as they got. All-night parties, young things wearing five-hundred-dollar tracksuits, cocktails of drugs. The soundtrack to their lives would be all synthetic drums and bass, bereft of melody, at 120 decibels. There would be complaints.
By contrast, the house on Bennett Street in Goolwa wasn’t much to look at. Bright blue weatherboard with white trim around the windows, doors and gutters, it was a fisherman’s shack masquerading as a Greek Island villa. Surrounded by fresh McMansions, it stood smack in the middle of an unfenced, treeless nine-hundred-square-metre block. Try buying one of those now for less than a million, thought Vanessa, as she walked up the steps.
Vanessa had grown up on one of the m
ore prestigious properties in the district – an 1870s homestead on 180 acres of land to the north-west of Victor Harbor, with views of Granite Island. When her father died five years ago, she was thirty and forced to move. The cafe she managed had failed and she had gone to work as a personal assistant to a real estate agent. There had been many things he had asked her to attend to until, finally, she had married him.
She banged on the screen door, brushing a piece of lint off her charcoal-grey jacket.
‘It’s open, come in,’ a voice called out.
Vanessa opened the mesh door and stepped into the little shack. This was hers. She liked to drop in once a fortnight to collect the rent and check on her investment and David didn’t seem to mind. The living room opened up to her right. There was the same odour she always smelt and she saw the crayons, the cloudy jam jars bristling with brushes, and she was back in the crafts building at Victor Harbor High in her school uniform.
‘David,’ she called out. ‘Vanessa. Here for the rent.’
David had moved to Goolwa when Adelaide became unbearable. With a modest inheritance from his mother he left his public service job and vowed never to return. He was looking for somewhere to rest and paint, and to ponder how he’d ended up, at the age of thirty-three, without a partner and with a job he couldn’t care less about.
He had stayed a night in a motel on the outskirts of Goolwa and walked the two kilometres into town the next morning, along dusty, narrow roads bereft of footpaths. He had seen right away it was a town living within its means, where things that weren’t absolutely necessary to keep the wheels of commerce turning just weren’t built. It was also a lot flatter than he’d remembered, and a lot less interesting, landscape-wise.
Behind the locked-up public toilets he tucked his shirt into his jeans and then presented himself to the real estate office. He filled out a form while the receptionist smiled to herself and joked on the phone. Then he was ushered into Vanessa’s office – all brown leather and pine furniture stained to resemble walnut. It was during the interview with her that David realised how horribly lonely he was. His eyes kept lodging within Vanessa’s cleavage and his head swam with her scent.
The Colour of Kerosene and Other Stories Page 8
