by Gee, Maurice
‘Welcome,’ Terry shouted.
They were all grinning – even Annie grinned. Ellie and Mike went out to meet them, and Ellie felt herself growing pleased. They made a wall around her, an encircling arm, taking her uncertainty away. She had always been comfortable with people – the touch of hips and elbows, the easy crowding in – since her days in House 4. Being alone was no more than a story she wrote for herself now and then.
‘I think we should hold hands,’ Terry said.
They stood in a circle. Mark, a thickset balding man with a face as round and amiable as Annie’s was forbidding, was on one side of Ellie; the older child, Sandy, on the other.
‘Let’s all be still,’ Rain said.
Ellie supposed something was meant to settle on them. She did not mind.
‘Shawn and I dug a longdrop for you back in the bush,’ Mark whispered.
‘Thanks.’
‘There’s only a seat so far. We’ll get it closed in. You can grow roses.’
‘Hush,’ Rain said.
Terra crawled into the middle of the circle. It almost seemed they were worshipping her.
I’ll start laughing if this goes on too long, Ellie thought. She also needed to use the longdrop. It was something she looked forward to.
‘No words. There’s too many words,’ Terry said.
‘A new philosophy,’ Annie said.
‘Hush.’
They stood quietly for a moment. The smell of compost and river and trees moved through the group on the shifting air. The afterglow intensified then faded in the garden.
I can stay here if these people will be quiet, Ellie thought.
They dropped hands and smiled as though meeting after an absence. The Americans, Lee and Shawn, drifted away hand in hand.
‘Bring your guitar up, Mikey,’ Lee called.
Ellie went back to the carriage. She found a toilet roll on the shelves.
‘Where?’
‘Turn right, follow the path. Don’t fall in,’ Mike said.
The others had gone when she came back. Mike was sitting on the steps, smoking a joint. He offered it.
‘Where’d you get these, Mike?’
‘Wedding present from my old man. Not that he knows.’
Ellie took a drag, then handed it back. It would relax and lift her, a curious combination, then make her droop. ‘Do they have much of this stuff here?’
‘None. They don’t use it. So we’ll have to do it down here on our own.’
‘I don’t like it much, Mike. It puts me to sleep.’
‘You’ll learn.’
‘I tried to learn in London. I’d sooner have beer.’
‘They don’t have that either. Just greens. It’s a pretty pure outfit here, I should have told you.’
‘That suits me. I didn’t come to smoke pot anyway.’
‘Being free, that’s why we came. Hey, relax.’
They walked up to the A-frame, where Rain had made a banquet of rice and curried vegetables. Ellie wondered who made the rules, and how they were made. Would she be allowed to cook the sausages she had bought? She imagined the smell drifting from her stove across the paddocks and Terry and Rain clutching their throats.
‘Joke, Ellie? Share it,’ Terry said.
‘I was just feeling good. I like it here. But …’
‘Ho,’ Annie said.
‘Who makes the rules? I mean, who does what jobs and what do you plant and what do you buy – all that stuff.’
‘It’s fairly simple,’ Terry said.
‘Do you have something we’re all supposed to believe in? Are we all vegetarians?’
‘Ah, beliefs,’ Terry said.
‘Can we drink if we want to? Have beer?’
‘I make home brew,’ Mark said. ‘I’ll bring you some.’
‘But this is Terry and Rain’s house. So when we come up here it’s what they say,’ Lee said.
‘I thought I’d better find out,’ Ellie said. ‘I like the curry, Rain. It’s great.’
Rain smiled. She had her dreamy look. It seemed to come from a kind of intoxication, perhaps from warmth or from situations. It was possible she wasn’t bogus after all. ‘The gardens are organic. That’s a rule but we didn’t make it,’ she said.
‘Who did?’ Ellie said, then felt foolish.
Rain smiled at her, with a mild encompassing movement of her hands.
Oh God, Ellie thought, I’ll have to stay alert.
‘I say what gets planted,’ Annie said. ‘Don’t let anyone tell you different.’
‘She’s a slave-driver,’ Lee said. ‘Say Ellie, will you take my place in the garden? Shawn and I are heading out for a while. We want to earn some money over in Nelson.’ She grinned. ‘It gets cold here in winter.’
‘She’s got me to keep her warm,’ Mike said.
‘Sure, Mikey. Play us a toon.’
He strummed his guitar and they sang old songs, then country ones Ellie had never heard.
‘How long have you been playing that thing?’ Annie asked.
‘Since I was sixteen.’
‘Is bloop bloop all you can do? Can’t you pick or something?’
‘Never learned.’
‘I sang in a choir. I miss that,’ Rain said. She raised her voice and sang: ‘Panis angelicus fit panis hominum, Dat panis coelicus figu risterminum …’ Her voice was pure and natural, rising in a lovely thread, then falling like water, and Ellie felt her eyes fill with tears. Shawn, sitting by her, took her hand. That was natural too, without intent.
It’s going to be good here, she thought. She smiled at Shawn – a dark man, quiet, deep set, whom she hadn’t said a word to yet.
She and Mike walked back through the paddocks, holding hands. She carried his guitar while he shone a pocket torch.
‘We didn’t get the Tilley,’ she said.
‘We’ll light a candle.’
‘Stop, Mike. Hear the river?’
‘Yeah, it scares me.’
‘How?’
‘I lie awake and hear it like a snake. It kind of slithers.’
‘Can we swim?’
‘You’d die. Let’s go to bed.’
They went by the gardens, chasing a possum away from the fence.
‘Can’t keep ’em out,’ Mike said. ‘Possums are the winners.’
‘Why are Lee and Shawn going?’
‘Like she said, to make some money. They’ll come back.’
‘You had something going with her, didn’t you?’
He was quiet for a moment, then he shrugged. ‘Not much.’
‘What about him?’
‘He looked the other way. It’s Freedom Hall, Ellie. When the spirit moves. It didn’t last long. Just a couple of times.’
‘You don’t have to explain.’
‘Rain doesn’t share it round. Nor does Annie. Lee likes to work in the nuddy, that’s all. Have you ever seen a naked sheila digging?’
‘What did you do, go in the bushes?’
‘Yeah, I guess. It might be why old Shawn’s making a move.’
‘On me? A quid pro quo?’
‘Take it easy, Ellie.’
‘I didn’t come here for screwing round. Or for smoking pot. OK?’
‘Sure. OK.’
‘You can do what you like.’
‘Hey Ellie, I love you, don’t you know that?’
‘Well I don’t love you.’
‘But you like me OK?’
Ellie laughed: a single sound, frustrated, like a cough. ‘I don’t know how anyone couldn’t.’
‘And you’ll come to bed?’
‘I’ll consider it. But I want to see the river first. By myself.’
She took the torch and picked her way through trees to the table rock. The river was black, with glimmers on its surface coming out and turning off. It smelled part clean and part corrupt, a smell like eels. She heard the muffled boom where it undercut the bank by the water-chute and saw how it would frighten her if she allowed – but s
he was Ellie and in control. And the river was the river, not a snake, whatever Mike said. It annoyed her that he was twitching her around, making her see things in a way that wasn’t hers. Already he had managed to spoil Shawn.
He wasn’t enough. Not complete. And Annie was right: after ten years he should be able to do more than strum. The only thing Ellie could do was enjoy him.
She left the cold rock, went by the garden into the carriage, where she found him in candlelight, trying to make the bed.
‘Here Mikey, let me do that.’
In the warm blankets they made love. Yes, delicious. She lay awake listening to his breathing and the night. ‘Take it step by step,’ she whispered.
A breeze came up and woke her before dawn. The plastic cover on the roof popped and subsided. She listened to it, smiling. Today we’ll start on the roof, she thought.
Good Life was made up of six clearings, some in the scrub, some in the bush. Annie and Mark had planted fruit and nut trees in two, and fenced the largest for the cows. They kept pigs and goats, a doe and a buck; and were the brains, and the bone and muscle, of Good Life. Terry had income from some source Ellie never found out. He worked in fits and starts, for half an hour, for half a day, while Rain’s way of working was long and slow and semi-conscious. She liked to wash clothes and knit and sew and clean out sheds and paint walls. She milked the cows and hunted for eggs the fowls had laid in the scrub.
‘Everyone finds his own way,’ Terry said. All the same he knew the way he wanted the community to go and kept up a wordless pressure for more simplicity. He did not like Annie and Mark keeping pigs, and took Rain and Terra to Takaka on the day they slaughtered one. Ellie watched – the knife thrust in, the twist to cut aorta and heart, the hanging and scalding and scraping and gutting, and next day the butchering. It made her sick and excited, which she did not like, and she told herself, Get practical, just do it one two three if you’re staying here.
Terry would not allow the possums to be trapped. He would leave the day a gin trap came through the gate – and no poison either, not on Good Life. So Mark went out at night with an old single-shot .22 and Annie with a torch, and they pinned possums in the trees with a beam of light and shot them down. It was necessary. There would be no garden and no orchard if they were allowed to breed. Ellie learned to make possum stew.
She learned to drive the Holden. She and Annie collected trailer loads of cow and horse and pig manure from farms. Annie and Lee had double-dug the garden, trenched and composted and manured, and turned the thin soil into rich.
‘I learned it all from books,’ Annie said when Ellie asked. ‘A lot of it is common sense anyway.’
‘Whoever put the carriage there didn’t have much sense.’
‘Why?’
‘Look at where the sun is. It should have gone on the south side, not the north.’
She was no longer pleased with her choice of the carriage and would have moved to the farmhouse if two American women, sent by Lee, had not got in first. (She hoped they would not distract Mike.) By mid-June the sun barely touched the carriage, and rain leaked through the joins in the new malthoid roof. She looked at the sign painted on the door: Second Class; and thought, That’s right.
‘If I paint it with tar?’ Mike said. ‘And dress it with sand? Next summer, OK?’ He tied the plastic cover back on. For two weeks he helped Terry dig foundations for a community room beside the A-frame. The trenches filled with water in storms, so Terry put the project aside until spring and Mike found a job in the cement works at Tarakohe. Ellie worked with Annie and the two Americans, Bella and Tully, planting cabbages and leeks and cauliflowers. They built a hot-house and a seedling shed and a bean and cucumber fence and potato trays and ran a new hose down from the spring and put in taps for summer irrigation.
Bella and Tully left and a couple from Auckland, Tom and Carrie, moved into the farmhouse. Ellie did not mind. By that time she had grown used to the carriage, its narrowness, the smell of kerosene, the flapping of the plastic on the roof. Mike had built a brick platform for the bath beside the stove-shelter. They boiled water in the copper and carried it to the bath in preserving pans and sat washing each other, sometimes with a storm howling round. Ellie loved it: slippery sex, soapy sex, in warm water in the dark, with rain driving in and slicing their backs. She took risks she never had before. Her supply of Anovlar had run out.
They bought rolls of second-hand lino and covered the floor. Ellie sewed new curtains on Rain’s treadle machine. She dug a flowerbed along the front wall and bought seeds, waiting for spring. Mike brought home another load of demolition bricks and made a hearth for the pot-bellied stove. When their firewood ran low they cut manuka around the clearings and hauled it home and sawed it, two-handed, by the carriage. Looking at her callouses, Ellie remembered the gloves she’d worn as part of the uniform at Willowbank School. They would never fit now. Work had made her hands several sizes larger.
September the first. The weather agreed with the calendar; it was spring. Mike walked about doing high kicks. He spent half a day long-jumping into the sand Terry had bought for the hall foundations – trying to break the record he had set at school. He had left his job at Tarakohe, ready for carpentry again. ‘Jack, Jack, the ladies’ man, He can make love like no man can,’ he sang, walking through the paths. The next morning, naked from bed, he slammed up a window to breathe the air and it rushed down as smoothly as a guillotine blade and broke his thumb and index finger. Ellie dressed him. She bound his arm across his chest, gave him Panadeine and drove him to the doctor in Takaka, then across to Nelson to have the bones set. She sat in the waiting room, half loving him and half disgusted. Mike invited accidents, she was sure. He used them as a way of taking a rest.
She drove home – nervous because she had no licence – while he sat beside her, hand in his lap, humming now and then as though pleased with himself.
‘What fucking bad luck. Just when things were getting sweet.’
They reached the top of the hill and plunged into the valley.
‘I’ve got the tar and sand all ready to go. Someone up there doesn’t like me, eh?’
‘I’d say you’re pretty popular.’
‘It’s not my fault, Ellie. And this thing hurts. I don’t like putting all the work on you.’
‘There’s still some things you can do with one hand.’
‘Yeah, like what?’ he leered.
Oh Mike, grow up, Ellie wanted to say. She saw how things would be ‘sweet’ for him now – how his broken fingers were a sign that he had done enough.
The next day she climbed a ladder on to the roof and started painting it with tar and dressing it with sand.
‘You’ll need two coats,’ Mike said.
‘I know. Why don’t you plant the flowerbeds?’
He knelt and planted half a row. ‘It’s like having only one ball.’ He sat in the sun and smoked a joint. ‘Come on down.’
The tar – gasworks tar – was hard to spread and the smell made her feel sick. She knew that if he sat there inhaling his weed she would tip the bucket over him.
‘Can you drive with one hand?’
‘Sure. I s’pose.’
‘Well go into town and see about going on compo then.’
‘Yeah, good idea. Tomorrow, eh? Hey, I know what I’ll do.’
He went through the path to the farmhouse. She watched him amble away and thought it was like having a child. He had been a grown-up for three months – a husband almost. Did she want one of those? Not if he was Mike. All through winter she had enjoyed him, needed him to make herself feel joined with Good Life. Now she was aware of spaces opening up, and wanted to go there and see what she could find. Did not need companions for that, although Annie might be one, and Rain too in her way. Both had found what they needed at Good Life – Annie plain connections with her family, and Rain the soft acceptance that settled on her in the paddocks and bush, curing her of sulkiness and calming her down.
Ellie stood
on her rounded platform with her tar brush in her hand. Far away, Rain, naked to the waist, was gathering eggs along the fringes of the scrub. Terry sat reading on the porch: he had discovered someone called Carlos Castaneda and was preparing new philosophies. A smell of spices and vinegar drifted down from the farmhouse where Annie and Carrie were making sauerkraut from left-over cabbages. Ellie turned the other way. She could not see the river but traced the narrow gorge bringing one of its tributaries from the uplands. She had rowed the dinghy across to the mouth of Salisbury Creek several times but not explored beyond the waterfall. Winter seemed to forbid it with shadows and wetness and heaviness. Now the land on the other side invited her. The gorge was like a pathway into the hills.
She bent and made three lines with tar on the malthoid roof: a rounded hill, a broken one, the gorge jagging down. They were beautiful and Ellie was thrilled. She had never drawn anything so simple. It was as if the hills said, This is me.
She was dizzy with the knowledge she had gained, and she steadied her feet on the curve of the roof. White soapy clouds came up, making blue shadows: she marked them in with tar – brown tar – on the grey roof. ‘That’s enough, no more,’ she said.
It was her best picture yet. She wanted no one to see it, wanted it for herself; so, after a moment, painted it out, but kept a copy in her head.
Mike came back through the path with a tin basin. She sat down and watched him, still simmering with excitement at what she had done.
‘What’s that for?’
He grinned at her, went into the toolshed end of the carriage and came out with a shovel, holding the basin under his arm.
‘What are you doing?’
‘There’s gold in them thar hills.’
‘You can’t, Mike, with your hand.’
‘You watch me. This is a proper pan, for panning gold. I’m going up past the waterfall. Want to come?’
‘No I don’t. And you can’t row.’
‘I’ll jigger across. If I find gold up there I’m going to build a sluice.’
‘You don’t know how.’
‘I’ll read a book.’
She watched him go, and later saw him come out at the top of the waterfall. He waved to her and was so carefree and somehow so defenceless that she waved back. It was better to have him doing something, anything, up the creek than sitting on the doorstep, smoking pot.
