by Gee, Maurice
‘Not any more. No more, Mike. We’re finished now,’ Ellie said. She turned and walked to the carriage. ‘Get out of my way.’
The woman, Tina, stepped aside. ‘Take it easy, chickie. It’s a long life,’ she said.
Ellie lay on the bed, shivering. Then she jumped up. She wanted to wash. It was as though Mike had lifted his leg on her. She went into the garden and turned on the tap; gathered water in her palms, splashed it on her eyes, her cheeks, her throat.
‘What are you going to do, Ellie?’ Annie said.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Please don’t leave.’
Ellie had not thought of it, but Annie compacted Good Life with those words and put it aside.
All I have to do is pack and go, Ellie thought. It’s not running away, it’s finishing. She felt it like an instruction. Good Life was bundled up; it was property, which she took away as well as left behind. She felt as if the child inside her had said yes.
‘Annie, don’t let him stay too long or he’ll ruin this place.’
She walked as far as the wire. ‘Keep him away from your girls.’
‘Shit!’ Annie said.
Tina was leaning on the truck, rolling another cigarette. She winked at Ellie. The mattress was rolled up in the tray, tied with twine, and Ellie wondered if Boggsie had managed to put this woman to work.
‘Where have they gone?’
‘In a boat somewhere. Relax, kiddo. Boggsie never stays anywhere long.’
‘Five minutes is enough,’ Ellie said.
She put everything she wanted to take in her pack. Annie came in.
‘You’re going?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you mean, the girls?’
‘Nothing. It’s just, he’s low-grade shit. Anything he thinks he can get, he’ll take. I’m sorry, Annie. This woman he’s got probably keeps him happy.’
‘She’d better. Don’t worry, I’ll watch. Mark will have him out if he puts a finger wrong. Ellie, please stay.’
Ellie shook her head. ‘It’s spoiled now. It’s finished for me.’
‘They’ll be gone soon.’
‘He came here once. That’s enough. I know it sounds hysterical, but – I’ve got to go.’
‘It’s because you’re pregnant.’
‘Not only that. Don’t tell Mike. I don’t want him hanging round.’
‘He’d probably head the other way.’
‘Yes, he would. But I don’t want him turning up years from now. That’d be his style.’
She looked around the carriage. Boggsie and Tina would commandeer the bed and put Mike, with his brown baby tooth, into the truck – unless they invited him for threesomes. Ellie was tempted to slash the mattress and put her fist through the stupid picture he had bought. Instead she lugged her pack outside. Her rage subsided and her clear sight came back. The sky was enamelled, blue and hard, the plants in the garden enamelled too. Everything was picked out, lifted off a surface. She wondered if it was some sort of marking of things in herself, a way of possessing.
Annie’s face was lopsided, tragic. Ellie hugged her.
‘You’ll come and see us?’ Annie said.
‘Probably not.’
‘We’ll make this a good place, wait and see.’
‘I know you will.’ She threw her pack on the back seat of Mike’s car.
‘Hey, you can’t take that,’ Tina said.
‘Try and stop me.’ The keys were in the ignition. ‘Tell him I’ll leave it in Collingwood,’ she said to Annie. ‘And give my love to Mark and the girls.’
She backed out past Boggsie’s truck and drove through the paddocks. Terry and Rain were cleaning demolition timber beside the A-frame. She tooted her horn and left them staring. Opened the gate, closed it, and drove, leaving a trail of dust, up the Bainham road to Collingwood.
Ellie spent a week with her mother, then telephoned Jim Barchard. Two days later she was thinning Golden Delicious on the orchard.
‘Where’s your boyfriend?’ Jim said.
‘Dumped him,’ Ellie grinned. ‘If he turns up for a job here, I’m leaving.’
‘You’ve got some sense,’ Jim said.
Ellie drew back from the exchange. That’s my baby’s father we’re talking about. Confusion of this sort might last for the rest of her life. Her feeling of loss for Good Life might last too. For a while it had provided a perfect mixing of time and place. As well, it had shifted something in her, more than a point of view: some method of touching and accepting. She had found a way of seeing that was different from simply letting things happen and looking at them.
Ellie smiled when she reasoned like this. The lessons she had come away with: work was good and people difficult and she could not get by without both of them. But she also began to feel that she had locked herself up. There had been no newspapers or radio at Good Life. She had had little idea what was happening in the world. An election had come and gone: she had picked up that. The party she would have voted for had lost. It had not seemed important at the time. Now it displeased her. She wanted her chance to say no to the right-wing lot, who kept on supporting the Vietnam war.
She had not heard of Charles Manson and his murders. Seven people butchered, one of them a woman eight months pregnant. Ellie wondered if the baby had been stabbed. Her mouth stretched wide with shock as she thought of it. Her own child, although not quickened yet, seemed to shrink, and she clamped her hands low, protecting it. Boggsie might be Manson, although his pan-faced look was nothing like. He had the same savagery.
She asked Jim for a key and kept the pickers’ hut locked at night. Walking on the roads, she stepped away and sometimes hid when cars approached.
Audrey stopped one day in her Mini.
‘You’re back?’
‘Yes. Hello.’
‘What’s the matter, dear. You look evasive.’
‘No, I’m not. I don’t like the dust.’
‘Do you want a ride?’
‘No thank you. I’ll walk.’
‘Well – if you want some books to borrow, come on up.’
Ellie watched regretfully as the car moved off. She had been working all day and would have welcomed a ride. She would have liked to talk as well, and borrow books and be less solitary. She was missing Good Life, and Annie and Mark, Rain and Terry too – and Mike, sometimes in a way that made her breathless and greedy, and at other times ashamed. Mike was gone. They were not connected any more. But oh if she could just have him in bed for half an hour.
It was in this state that she walked out to the road one night and instead of heading down towards Ruby Bay turned into Fan and Audrey’s driveway. It was ten to eight, visiting time. If Fan was unwelcoming she would turn round and go away.
She stopped under the pine trees and heard them sigh. That was simple. That, tonight, was their sound. Their branches closed the sky which, low above the paddocks, was darkening and pricking with stars. She remembered her painting in tar on the carriage roof. The truth of it was in the lines: lines making shapes and the shapes balancing. How had she seen that, looking at the hills? Nothing had been balanced there. She had simplified.
Ellie hummed with pleasure at the memory. She went along the side of the house and knocked on the back door.
Audrey came, like the maid, while Fan, presumably, waited in her chair.
‘Ah Ellie, come in, come in,’ Audrey said in a voice meant to warn Fan as well as welcome Ellie.
‘I thought I’d take you up on borrowing books,’ Ellie said.
‘Of course. Fan, look who’s here.’
‘Ellie Crowther,’ Ellie said.
‘I don’t need to be told. The girl from the orchard. I thought you’d given us up,’ Fan said.
She was sitting in an armchair, listening to music, with only the table lamp switched on. A cave, Ellie thought, with humpbacked Audrey and little Fan, still as a cat and ready to spit, the inhabitants. Above the shadow-line the walls were jewelled with colour that advanced
and then retreated, disturbing Ellie as though with an illusion.
‘Turn off the record, Audrey. Turn on the light,’ Fan said. ‘Sit down and let me look at you.’
Ellie sat. ‘I’m sorry if I left in a hurry last time,’ she said.
‘Where’ve you been?’
‘On a commune over in Golden Bay.’
‘Flower power, all that stuff?’ Fan said.
‘No. Growing vegetables. Hard work.’
‘Back to the soil?’
‘Not at all,’ Ellie said. She could not work out whether this woman meant to annoy her.
‘The simple life?’
‘Do you always want to quarrel? All I came for was some books.’
‘You took some last time and never read them.’
‘Give over, Fan. Let the girl catch her breath,’ Audrey said. She had stopped the record. Now she turned on the ceiling light.
‘Ah, pictures,’ Ellie said. ‘I couldn’t work it out.’
‘Why not?’
‘They were in the shadows.’ She wanted to say that they had been like eyes watching her but thought it might sound stupid. Red eyes, blue eyes, green and yellow eyes turning into fruit and jugs and violins and a woman with black hair sitting on a sofa: half a dozen paintings with objects so sharp and colours so bright her eyes contracted. ‘Are they yours?’
‘If you mean did I paint them, yes I did.’
‘So,’ Ellie said. She did not know how to go on: felt assaulted and occupied and pleased.
‘So,’ she repeated.
Fan laughed. Audrey said, ‘I’ll make some tea.’
Ellie turned in her chair. Further along the wall were darker paintings, brown and green, of trees and foliage and hills. She stood up and looked at them; and felt hollowness inside her, something like hunger, and a prickling of hair on the back of her neck. Trees that were not like trees but were trees. And hills with the roundness and fullness of hills – again not like.
‘I didn’t know you did this sort of thing,’ she said.
‘You thought I was a lady painter? Pretty pictures?’ Fan said.
‘I didn’t think about it at all. Have you been doing it all your life?’
‘All my life,’ Fan said.
‘Can you make enough to live off? Doing this?’
‘I couldn’t always. Now I can, just about.’
Ellie remembered that Audrey had called her a moneybags.
‘I’ve got a dealer in Wellington. He sells one or two.’
‘I suppose I should have heard of you?’ Ellie said.
‘Don’t look any more. Come back in the daytime when there’s proper light. In fact, let’s give our eyes a bit of peace.’ She got up and switched off the ceiling light, leaving only the table lamp. Audrey came back.
‘Ah, so it’s going to be gloom.’
‘Not at all,’ Fan said. ‘We thought we’d talk.’
‘This is my spiced apple cake,’ Audrey said. ‘You eat it with cream. I hope you like cream.’
‘Yes, I do. And that’s one of your rugs on the floor,’ Ellie said.
‘That’s right. It’s just as well you’ve turned off the light or you’d see my mistakes. I sell my good ones and keep my bad. She keeps all her best things, silly girl.’
‘You’ve no idea what’s best, so pipe down,’ Fan said.
Bickering was a game they played. It disguised affection, although better on Fan’s part than on Audrey’s.
‘We didn’t expect you’d come back here. Pickers usually turn up only once,’ Fan said.
‘I just thought I’d like a familiar place,’ Ellie said.
‘Why did you leave your commune?’
‘They started growing marijuana. Besides, I’d come to the end of it. I think.’
‘You’re not sure?’
‘I went there so I could stop going forward for a while – and let myself settle. Things were pretty basic. I didn’t need to worry about myself. I loved it for a month or two. There just seemed to be no uncertainties. No holes you kept falling into all the time. But then it all began to get too static. It started to seem we’d built a wall around us. And I had to come back and start moving again. There were other reasons too.’
‘Men,’ Fan said.
Ellie laughed distractedly. She was interested in her explanation for leaving Good Life. She had found it as if by chance but it seemed to be true, at least in part.
‘I’m pregnant,’ she said. ‘But don’t tell Jim or he might try and stop me climbing ladders.’
‘You don’t look it,’ Fan said.
‘Nearly four months.’
‘So you’re having it, then?’
‘Fan, what a terrible question. Of course she’s having it,’ Audrey said.
‘Some girls don’t.’
‘Be quiet. Take no notice, Ellie. We’re just two childless old women. There are all sorts of things we don’t understand.’
‘And a hell of a lot of others we do. Does the father know?’
‘No. And I don’t want him to.’
‘There are good reasons for keeping them around for a while. But on the whole I think you’re right. They usually cause trouble. If you’re having it you’re keeping it, of course?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘It won’t be easy.’
‘I know,’ Ellie said.
She did not, in any detail. And did not want to think about difficulties yet. She would face them when the time came, and find her way round or through or over. She ate her apple cake and complimented Audrey, who said, ‘Have another piece. You’re eating for two.’
‘Does being pregnant make you want to draw?’ Fan said.
‘Not really. Should it?’
‘I don’t know. I’m curious. I thought there might be a connection.’
‘If there is I don’t feel it.’ She needed nothing like that, no extras, only the baby. ‘But I’d like to borrow that book again. Matisse.’
‘Why?’
Ellie thought. What she wanted to say might sound stupid to Fan, but she would say it. ‘I want to see how he draws his lines.’
‘Ha! It’s easy to see but hard to do.’
‘I did a picture once,’ Ellie said, and stopped.
‘Yes? Have you got it?’
‘It was in tar, on a roof. It got painted over.’
‘It must have been a good one, though, if you remember it.’
‘It was just half a dozen lines. But …’ She could not say why it had pleased her.
‘Do it again,’ Fan said.
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Why not? Do you know how many times Cézanne painted Mont St Victoire?’
‘He was in that other book you lent me. Can I take it as well?’
‘If you like living in Nelson I think you’ll like Cézanne.’
‘She always says she’s broken in two parts, Matisse, Cézanne,’ Audrey said. ‘But listen, dear, you really must be careful climbing ladders.’
‘Yes, I will be.’
‘And you must let me drive you wherever you want to go. Have you seen your doctor?’
‘I haven’t got one.’
‘But Ellie, you must –’
‘Don’t nag the girl, Audrey, or she won’t come back. If you want some paper and pencils, Ellie, I can let you have some.’
‘No. Just books. And could I have another piece of apple cake, please?’
She was happy but wanted things kept equal, between them and between her and them. She would not be pushed where she did not want to go.
Later on, walking back to the orchard with her arms full of books, tears came into her eyes at the loss of Good Life; and then she let her mind go around and over it, and would not have to think of it again as snatched away. Audrey and Fan had shown her how to bundle it up, encompass it. She wanted to know that pair, but not too well. She did not want to go with them too far.
Ellie put the books down and stood with her back against a tree. She listened and waited
. Was that a movement inside her? Was it too soon? She must get other books, pregnancy books from the library. She needed to know. Audrey could drive her. She would ask Jim for time off and they would go tomorrow.
The baby was her company. There was a movement there, so tiny she almost could not feel it; and she said, ‘Yes, it’s you, you’re saying hello. Who are you down there? If you tell me, I’ll give you a name.’
Between times
1970. After the Gravenstein pick Ellie shifts to the packing shed. She would rather be out in the sun – and climbing ladders – but the laden bags sit awkwardly and she is frightened of hurting her baby. She tries out names for it, and chooses Roland for a boy because of a poem Mrs Nimmo had read to her class at Willowbank school: Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. Robert Browning wrote it. Mrs Nimmo had not said what might emerge from the tower when Roland blew his horn. They must work that out for themselves. Ellie isn’t sure she should condemn her child (her Childe) to a life of struggle. She borrows a Browning collection from Fan and reads the poem (it’s longer than she remembers) and thinks: Yes, Roland, but he can choose what he wants to be. A girl’s name is harder to find. Melanie, Jane, Annette? What about Dolores? In the meantime, when she talks to the baby she calls it You: ‘Hey, you in there, how are you getting on?’
She doesn’t read much. She doesn’t draw. She looks at Matisse’s drawings and they don’t work for her. Fan is disappointed, but paints Ellie, both clothed and naked. Ellie is too polite to say, I don’t think it’s me.
She moves into Fan and Audrey’s spare room in her seventh month. The baby is born in June. Ellie doesn’t say, ‘Roland.’ She holds her child’s damp head in her palm and feels it throb and she says, ‘John’ – her father’s name. John Crowther. (Mike is even further away than Roland. Mike is gone.) She telephones her mother and cannot tell if the sound she hears is weeping or laughter, then if the weeping is happy or sad. Cannot answer questions: doesn’t know. All she wants is love, a welcome to pass on to John through a whisper in his ear, through the touch of her hands, although her own love is enough, Ellie knows that.
Audrey offers love. There is a danger it will be too much. A baby in the house will get on Fan’s nerves, so Ellie turns down an offer to stay for a while. She shares a house in Nelson with two other solo mothers, which isn’t easy. Both are younger than her and need more fun. She seems to be back in her first flat, with children added. She tries to like Glenda and Nettie’s two boys, who are older than John, but finds it hard. There are arguments and fights – some pushing, no blows – which interfere with Ellie’s flow of milk. It is lucky that John is an easy baby. He eats and sleeps, he grins and cries, reminding Ellie of Mike, which is a worry. She does some house-cleaning, taking John along in his pram. Noisy vacuum cleaners frighten him. She shifts the pram continuously, keeping it one room ahead, then a room behind. Her wealthiest employers – her easiest house – fire her on her second visit: ‘We don’t like your sort coming here.’ Ellie walks home numbed, then the insult works her into a rage. She goes back in the night and hurls a river stone through their picture window. (In her apple fights with Mike in the orchard she has learned to throw as accurately as a cricket outfielder.) The noise of glass breaking fills her with elation, which does not last. ‘Your sort.’ It seems that Mrs Prime has come back to haunt her.
