Ellie & the Shadow Man

by Gee, Maurice

  ‘Sit in the sun,’ Terry said.

  ‘Not with spray on them,’ Glenys said. She lifted her breasts on her palms as though they were fruit. Milk seeped from the nipples and dropped on her sarong. She got up and fetched the child, who fastened on rapaciously. Glenys was a pretty girl with a sulky face that might be adaptable. Put make-up on, arrange her hair, it could be a Lambton Quay chemist-shop face. She was, Ellie guessed, about nineteen.

  Ellie sat on the porch. ‘What’s the baby’s name?’

  ‘Terra,’ Glenys said.

  Ellie laughed. ‘I can see she’s a handful.’

  ‘No. Terra. The earth.’

  ‘Oh, sorry. It goes with Terry, I suppose.’ She did not want to sit with these people; she wanted to walk, explore the place.

  ‘I’m not Glenys any more, either,’ Glenys told Mike. ‘I’ve changed to Rain.’

  ‘Whatever makes you feel good,’ Mike said. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m Terry still,’ Terry said. ‘A name has got to kind of settle on you. I’m still waiting. Glen – sorry, Rain – was kind of chosen, I guess.’

  He was mild but his uncertainty might be ‘a kind of’ strength – he would say ‘kind of’ frequently, trying to understand. Ellie liked him better than Rain, who was overdoing dreaminess as she fed her child. She might be as bogus as her name. Terry, on the other hand, might be genuine.

  ‘It was soft Rain,’ Rain said, looking as if it was falling now.

  ‘How many people here?’ Ellie said.

  ‘Six adults, three kids. There used to be eight adults but two shot through,’ Terry said.

  ‘And what do you do? How do you make money?’

  ‘Money is dross,’ Rain murmured dreamily.

  ‘We go out and work when we need to buy something. Mostly on farms,’ Terry said. ‘Mark and Shawn are working now. We try to be self-sufficient, though.’

  ‘Do you have gardens?’

  ‘Sure. Down the path behind the house. Have a look.’

  ‘Base metal,’ Rain said.

  Ellie wondered if she meant money or her. Rain might be stoned, but wouldn’t that make Terra stoned too, with all that milk?

  ‘No, stay and talk,’ she said as Mike stood up. She walked across the paddock to the two-storeyed farmhouse. Its veranda roof sagged parallel with the decking – nice lines. She peered through the front door and saw a wooden table with bench seats. A Shacklock stove was set in an alcove beyond. Stairs like an upward-slanting cave went into the dark. Ellie walked around to the back. A shed stacked with tea-tree firewood leaned off the wall, with a broken-backed canoe, a bath, a motorbike with no tyres piled on one side. Blankets aired on a rope line running from a tank-stand to a nearby tree. The tanks were made of corrugated iron, painted green. She tapped one and heard it drum: less than a quarter full. A set of wooden tubs was fixed on a free-standing frame, with an iron wringer clamped between.

  ‘Ha,’ Ellie said, half scornful, half intrigued. She had no idea people lived – chose to live – like this. She went along a wide straight path through fern and scrub and cutty grass and found the garden in a clearing. It was fenced with head-high wire-netting, to keep out possums, she supposed. A woman stood with a wheelbarrow tilted up, while another forked compost from it into a trench. Behind the wire they seemed like workers on a prison farm. Ellie walked around the outside.

  ‘Hi there,’ said the woman with the barrow: American.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘You visiting?’

  ‘Yes. With Mike. Mike Rowe.’

  ‘Ah, Mikey. He’s turned up.’

  ‘If you want to do some work there’s spades in the shed,’ said the other woman.

  ‘That way you earn lunch,’ the American said. ‘I’m Lee. She’s Annie.’

  ‘I’m just having a look,’ Ellie said. She did not like the challenge Annie had made, or the look of her: a long-bodied woman with a contorted jaw and eyes out of balance with each other. Lee was stringy, muscly, like a whippet, with a plump face and curly hair – most Americans managed a bit of the film star look. Ellie went to the shed, a railway carriage with its wheels taken off. Someone had built a hut to one side and installed an iron stove and a copper. A bath stood in the open with its claw feet curled on blocks of wood. So the carriage had been a house before it was a shed. Some of the windows still had curtains hanging on string. She did not look inside, in case Annie thought she was getting a spade. Who said I wanted lunch? she thought. They took her for a townie but she would back herself to work as well as either of them after three months with a forty-pound bag of apples round her shoulders.

  Pale light showed through trees beyond the garden as though the river generated it. Water sliding over stone made a hissing sound. Ellie followed a path over hump-backed roots, down rocks with their edges hammered off. She found a beach of gravelly sand where a clinker-built dinghy was tied to a tree. There were no oars. It made her impatient. She wanted to cross the river and walk on the rocks on the other side. They were glistening in the sun, baking in the sun, around the mouth of a side-creek where a thin waterfall splashed into a pool.

  She edged around the rocks on the downriver side and climbed the bank, using trees as hand-holds, until she came to a rock jutting over the river, as broad as a table. She lay on it, warming herself, then crawled to the edge and looked in the water, where pebbles lay deep down, as white as if she held them in her hands. A world needing nothing from her: Ellie felt drawn into it as though clean and cold were all she had ever wished to be. She saw a fish, a trout she guessed, resting down there, living down there, holding its place with tiny movements of its tail. She watched until it tipped her and almost slid her in, then edged back to the centre of the rock, took off her shirt and bra and baked in the sun. I could live here, she thought.

  The wheelbarrow squeaked, a spade thumped in hard earth, sounds that came more clearly than the voices of the women. She could live with them too, if she had to, even with Rain, if there was work to do and places where she could be alone. She wondered if anyone else had found this rock, from which she could see, downriver, a bending water-chute, as smooth as oil. Blocks of stone like derailed freight cars lay upriver. The waterfall was opposite, with hills rising behind in humps and platforms. Crooked gullies, filled with bush, cut into uplands bare as skin. Poor land, but poor for what? She felt rich with everything around her.

  But there was Mike. If she stayed he would want to stay, and was he good for anything but sex? She heard him calling her. On this bed-shaped rock he’d want one thing, no stopping him. After a while she’d want it too, with his cock standing up so importantly. Ellie shivered and put on her bra, pulled on her shirt, then struggled through the bushes to the garden.

  He was talking to the women inside the wire. Mikey, the American had called him, with a mixture of knowledge and contempt. What knowledge could she have? And why contempt, unless she had discovered him as Ellie had done? She felt a surge of anger, compassionate and possessive at once, and a sour little pricking of jealousy. She walked around the outside fence, ignoring him, and looked inside the railway carriage. Beyond the tools and sacks was a timber-framed bed with seed potatoes spread on the wire mattress. She edged her way to it and pushed it with her foot: built in.

  ‘Move them spuds,’ Mike said from the door.

  ‘Someone lived here once,’ she said.

  ‘Sure, Mack and Jenny. They were Christians. Couldn’t take old Terry’s guff. They’ve gone to Riverside.’

  ‘Where do those two out there live?’

  ‘In the farmhouse. Where’d you get to? I was calling.’

  ‘I wanted to have a look at the river. Do they have cows? All that stuff?’

  ‘They did when I was here. Two cows. They’re in another paddock probably. There’s a whole string of clearings in the scrub. It was rough grazing for some cocky once.’

  ‘Did Terry buy it?’

  ‘Yep. Thirty acres. The rest sort of buy in. Buy shares. You’d better c
ome. Glen’s made some lunch.’

  ‘I hope she didn’t drip milk into it. Do you think this roof leaks?’

  ‘Yeah, it does. Mack gave up on it. He built a sleepout back in the bush. Come on, I’m hungry.’

  They walked to the A-frame, past Lee and Annie washing their hands at the tubs. Rain had spread a cloth on the porch and laid out tomatoes, cucumbers, pickle, butter, bread. She carried out a bowl of salad. Terry followed with a pot of steaming corncobs.

  ‘So,’ Terry said, ‘it’s welcome to our guests.’ The others took no notice but Ellie liked him more for attempting ceremony.

  Rain had pinned a napkin around her breasts. She stripped corncobs with her small white teeth, moving up and down the rows like a tractor. Lee and Annie ate hungrily, while Terry told Ellie about working as a teacher in Christchurch and how keeping discipline had been his problem, how it had made him sick the time he’d had to cane a boy – ‘Literally. I ran into the storeroom and threw up. Then I went back and apologised.’

  ‘The kids really paid attention after that,’ Annie said.

  ‘Well, Annie,’ Terry said mildly, ‘you’ve heard all this. So laugh, OK? I don’t mind. I knew I couldn’t live in that kind of world, that’s all.’

  ‘That and materialism,’ Rain said.

  ‘We’re happy here. We’re trying new things.’

  ‘And it’s bloody hard work,’ Annie said.

  ‘What did you do?’ Ellie asked.

  ‘Lab technician. Mark worked in a bank. Does all this tempt you?’

  ‘Me? No. It’s interesting.’

  ‘What we could do with is a physiotherapist.’

  ‘And some more manpower,’ Lee said.

  ‘Don’t look at me,’ Mike said.

  ‘She was looking at Terry,’ Annie said.

  ‘How old are your children?’

  ‘Six and eight. Carla’s six, Sandy’s eight.’ Annie smiled for the first time. It put her face in balance, although her twisted jaw and offset eyes remained. ‘They go to school in Bainham. There’s a school bus.’

  ‘I’m going to teach Terra myself,’ Rain said. ‘I don’t want her corrupted by false ideas.’

  ‘Like one and one are two?’ Annie said.

  ‘Like money is the most important thing.’

  ‘I’d sock any teacher who said that to my kids.’

  The place is what I like, not the people, Ellie thought – although she might come to like Annie. They would knock against each other for a while, but she could see them working in the garden side by side.

  She and Mike left in mid-afternoon: down one valley and up the other. She sat quiet and still, as though somewhere within her a tuning fork was humming.

  ‘Poor old Glen,’ Mike said. ‘She was top of her form at Christchurch Girls’ High. Scholarship class. Then old Terry came along and lay down and waved his feet in the air. If she’s Rain, I guess he must be Puddle.’ He laughed. ‘If they’d had twins the second one could have been Firma.’

  ‘I think I want to live there,’ Ellie said.

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘In the railway carriage. We could fix it. There must be stuff you can put on the roof.’

  ‘Sure, malthoid. Fixing’s easy. But Terry and Glen are off their bikes. You don’t go for all that stuff?’

  ‘No, I don’t. But nor do the others. Annie doesn’t. We could …’

  It was the river, the warm rocks, the water-chute, the trout holding its place with a trembling of its tail – and the secret paddocks ringed with bush, the possum-fenced garden, the railway carriage unattended by the trees.

  ‘What do they call it?’

  ‘Yeah, I asked. It’s Good Life. They’re waiting for the proper name to “settle”. But listen, Ellie –’

  ‘You have to buy in, you said.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Three fifty.’

  ‘I’ve got six hundred saved.’

  ‘I’m pretty broke, Ellie. My teeth cost a lot.’

  ‘You could go out to work. The other men do.’ She wanted him to go out.

  ‘Terry stays home. He sits there waiting for enlightenment.’

  She did not care about Terry, or Rain. They could be what they liked. The land and the river and the work were what she was after.

  They drove up the hill and across the tops.

  ‘I suppose I could give it a go,’ Mike said. He smiled with his temporary teeth and her tolerance of him almost turned to love. It was as if he’d touched her and they’d joined. She did not try to stop him when he turned into the Canaan road. He pulled up on the grass half a mile along. The dust settled. Silence came out of the ground and piled up in the air. She led him with a finger in his belt. They lay down behind a marble outcrop as sharp as dog’s teeth, where she unzipped him and herself. The horizontal answer to the vertical proposition: his joke, which she enjoyed, although he’d stolen it from somewhere.

  It became love-making. It seemed almost like love.

  Ellie returned Audrey and Fan’s books on her last night. She refused Audrey’s invitation to stay for tea.

  ‘We’re leaving early. Thanks for everything.’

  ‘Did you look at them?’ Fan said.

  ‘I didn’t have time. Well, the Matisse. Not the other one.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It’s sort of clever stuff. It’s like he’s playing games.’

  ‘You don’t like games?’

  Ellie became impatient: examinations again. ‘I just like to look at things and draw them.’

  ‘And you think Matisse didn’t do that?’

  ‘I don’t know. Well, I’ve got to go. Thanks again.’

  She walked back, glad she had escaped them – escaped the bossy one at least. She could sit in her castle and bully her servant or her mate, whichever it was. Their place, their lives, were artificial alongside Good Life – which Ellie had changed to ‘good life’. She was going just to try it and would keep her expectations lower case.

  Wellington depressed her. The hills stood too close. Down in the gullied streets the buildings seemed top-heavy. People walked by in multiples. Ellie looked for faces she knew, but everyone hurried past – on business, to some meeting or conclave – and she felt like the wrong sort of insect in a hive.

  At home her mother seemed shrunken, as though the children had sucked her dry. Ellie slept on the fold-out sofa in the lounge and felt in the way – and felt guilty too at not staying for more than a week. George watched her sadly, judging her.

  Her optimism did not return until she was on the ferry, in the strait.

  Mike met her in Picton and they drove to Collingwood, where they filled a box with groceries and set off for Good Life. Mike had spent the week working on the railway carriage – which had been shipped from Nelson on a barge and used as a holiday bach in Collingwood for ten years. Then Terry had bought it – for a crate of beer, Mike said – and trucked it in halves to Good Life, where Mack put it together and used it as a house. He had moved to a new sleepout by the time the County Council inspector turned up and condemned it.

  ‘Can we live in it if it’s condemned?’

  ‘They haven’t been back. We just keep quiet. Wait until you see what I’ve done.’

  ‘The roof?’

  ‘I’ve tied some plastic over that. I concentrated on doing the inside.’

  She went in through the veranda and found the interior scrubbed and painted. He had borrowed Terry’s trailer and gone around second-hand shops for a kitchen table and wooden chairs, a chest of drawers, a tin trunk, shelving, a mattress and pillows, a box of assorted crockery, and bundles of knives and forks and spoons.

  ‘That’s too much.’

  ‘Don’t you like it?’

  ‘Yes, I do. I love it, Mike.’

  He had bought a picture – the twin of the one George had bought for the Brooklyn house. It moved her in a strange way, as though a path had opened between what she had been then and
what she was now.

  ‘That was five dollars. I knocked him down.’

  ‘Where’d you get all the money, Mike?’

  ‘I phoned my old man. I told him I was thinking of getting married. He sent me two hundred bucks.’

  ‘We’re not getting married, are we?’

  ‘I reckon we are already. We don’t need any legal stuff.’

  Ellie was relieved. He was moving across her like something in the sky – must be getting close to midway now. She would live with him in the carriage until he was gone. What would happen then? Was there any need to ask? She took clothes, her dozen books, some blankets and sheets from her pack and suitcase.

  ‘The only thing is,’ Mike said, ‘they still need somewhere for the tools and gear and stuff. So we’re putting a partition up with some demo timber. You and me’ll still have thirty feet. Thirty by eight. I’ll make a sort of wardrobe across the end. Is that OK?’

  ‘Yes.’ It halved her pleasure, even though she saw how empty the whole carriage might have been. ‘We’ll have to get an eiderdown for winter. Is there a heater?’

  ‘There’s plenty of kerosene ones in the junk shops.’

  ‘What about lamps?’

  ‘Terry’s got a Tilley we can use.’

  ‘Water?’ She had not thought about these things. The carriage and the river and the land had made her irrational. It had been a seduction. She looked out the windows – Mike had cleaned them – and saw the last sunlight washing the garden with yellow and green.

  ‘Mack put a tank in at the sleepout. It’s got a spring feed. I’m running a hose down from there,’ Mike said. ‘The only thing that pisses me, Rain wants us all to eat at the house. They’re building a community room. It’s all part of mutual help and harmony and all that.’

  ‘I’m not going.’

  ‘Me neither. Hey, relax. I’m going to light the stove, eh? We’ll cook some sausages.’

  ‘Visitors,’ Ellie said.

  They were coming round the top end of the garden: Terry and Rain, with Terra swinging between them like a shopping bag; Lee and Shawn; Annie and Mark, with two small girls playing tag behind.