A Constant Hum

by Alice Bishop

  Horses

  There were still reports, years later, of the horses that night: their coats matted and sweet from sweat in smoke-blurred headlights.

  Taking Back

  I’m caught in the chilly dairy aisle of Woolworths on the anniversary of that scorching summer weekend—the one everyone remembers, now—my pockets filled with all kinds of cheese: the blue kind, Camembert and the little bite-size bits of cheddar, you know, all wrapped up red. ‘Ma’am,’ the handsome bearded security guard says, ‘I’m sorry but I think you’ll need to come with me.’ For a moment I think about taking off, just walking away, but thank gosh my smart side kicks in and I kind of keep my calm, which is probably always for the best.

  ‘Okay, love,’ I answer. ‘Do I at least get to call someone?’

  ‘From the back,’ the security guard says. I think, for a moment, about asking him where he’s from—maybe somewhere like Turkey, Syria or Iraq. But Poppy always tells me not to ask people where they’re from. She says I have to get educated, get informed. Seriously, Mum, my beautiful daughter Poppy always says. She’s on a scholarship even, university. I helped her pick out special stationery at the Officeworks on Alexandra Parade.

  ‘This way, ma’am,’ the guard says. He holds his hand out to usher me to the back. I’m nervous about all the attention—other afternoon shoppers are staring, of course—but it helps that I’ve just reapplied the lippy Poppy got me for Christmas. The shade’s called Pink Suede and I freshened the coat up in the Datsun mirror before I came in. Sometimes pale-pink lipstick needs more maintenance than plain old red. It’s all perfectly applied the moment I’m caught: I can see my reflection in the pea-freezer door. My hair looks okay too; I recently got it blown out at Eastland, treated myself. ‘You’re lucky to still have such a thick head of hair,’ the trainee-beautician girl said. I think she might have even gone to school with Popp. I get a full blond rinse now too, to keep the greys at bay. I’ll stop soon, though; all the magazines say white hair is very much in.

  I was thinking about my makeup routine as I went in through the automatic supermarket doors—about how my usual colours have stopped making me as happy as they used to. I’d seen a nice nude gloss on my girlfriend Elaine the other day and I was thinking that might be my next move. Turning the big five-o in August means it’s the perfect time for a change, a transformation, a new me. Maybe I’ll start wearing real silk nighties too. Stealing clothes is much easier than nicking food, anyway—and although most people wouldn’t know, it really is a thrill. Myer underwear, purple fitness leggings from Target, even expensive dresses from David Jones: you just have to pick the things—there’s always something that’s not been properly tagged. Handbag pliers help too; I bought my pair online. They came in a little fabric drawstring bag.

  ‘This way, ma’am,’ the handsome Turkish, maybe Syrian, security man says when we’re almost out back—near the place where staff get their tea breaks, alongside the alley where all the trucks filled with milk and cheese and other things come in. There is a big TV on the wall and something about bushfires fills the screen. It’s been so hot lately that it’s not really a surprise: the dashboard of my Datsun even melted a little bit. I have to keep a towel to sit on; the vinyl seats are lovely and easy to clean but not so good in the sun. I would never get a new modern car like my Poppy’s two-door Barina, though. Those new models just don’t have any pizzazz.

  ‘Ma’am, please remove the stolen goods from your clothing,’ the handsome security guard continues. He has teeth whiter than in the ads. His forest-fresh aftershave makes me think, for just a moment, about what his bathroom looks like at home: I’m sure it’s clean, simple and well wiped. He’s not even twenty-five, at a guess, and I wish he was dating my Poppy before I realise, again: I need to focus. I do get worried Popp will end up with one of those uni boys, though: the ones who won’t like me at all.

  ‘Ma’am,’ I hear again, ‘the stolen goods—your shirt.’

  ‘Can I make a phone call first?’ I ask.

  ‘You cannot, ma’am, no.’

  People say the compulsion to take things is a diagnosable disease: kleptomania, they say. They say you can get pills for it, maybe little green ones like my girlfriend from Sunday swimming aerobics at the Coburg pool takes for her sadness. But I’m not sad. I think I just started taking things back after I realised I was always having everything taken from me. Self-care—you have to get your own back a little. You know: give and take.

  I’d worked so hard raising Poppy for years while Gary was at work, while he was off with the boys after work and while he was off with other women—before Poppy had even turned thirteen. I cleaned everything, cooked and made sure I always smiled. ‘You’re just not as interesting as you used to be, Eloise; you used to be real free,’ Gary said the day he came right out and told me the truth I’d already guessed. Another woman. A new bride-to-be. For some reason I didn’t get angry like I now know I should’ve.

  ‘Do you still think I’m pretty?’ I asked, like the right bloody drongo I can be.

  ‘Of course, Eloise. But to be honest—and I think I have to be—I’m just not physically or emotionally attracted to you anymore,’ Gary said. He was in the coral Gazman shirt I’d ironed for him that day; I remember ’cause it was a real pain to press.

  I got left with the Datsun: ‘I’ll give that to you, no worries at all, babe,’ I remember he said. Of course, I found out later he’d already bought the fresh woman new wheels—red as anything. I could tell you all about the other woman too, but I’m sure, really, you can already guess. Men like Gary: they’re allowed to pretend they’re young and carefree for much longer than us girls. Because of us girls, really.

  ‘Seriously, Mum?’ Poppy’s face is pink when she arrives in her little Barina to pick me up—and to pay for my pockets of cheese: the blue kind, Camembert and the little bite-size bits of cheddar. It is hotter than anything outside and there is a dark sweat patch on the back of Popp’s dress. Her usually brunette hair has been bleached recently. (I’ll have to do something different with mine: we can’t both be bottle blonds. A nice new copper rinse, I think. It’ll be a fresh start, too; no more taking things.)

  ‘Ma’am, you will need to pay for the goods immediately,’ the security guard says.

  ‘How much do we owe you?’ Poppy says. She doesn’t look much surprised, which is both a relief and maybe a small hurt too. I’ve always wanted to be a good example for my only daughter, sure, but things have just not really gone my way. Your star is rising, my dad used to say when I was just a girl. A man who read like nothing else. Who taught my own mum the insurance trade: my dad was a good man, when he was around. He thought I was smart enough to be an accountant or even a nurse.

  The blocks of cheese are laid out on the tea-break table in front of us as the store manager arrives, looking impatient. ‘You’re looking at forty-two dollars and ninety-nine cents there,’ the manager, Brett, says. By the looks of him Brett is probably no older than nineteen. I imagine he spends all his supermarket earnings on protein powder and at one of the Sydney Road gyms. I wonder if he still lives at home; his bathroom, if he has one that isn’t still wiped down by his mother, would be scattered with stubble—maybe worse things. The fluorescent light shines down on the four of us—me, him, Poppy and the handsome Syrian, Turkish or maybe Iraqi security man.

  ‘If you settle this now we won’t have to involve the police, ma’am,’ the security guard says, ‘but I am afraid you will also be banned from the store.’

  ‘Popp?’ I say. ‘I’ll pay you back next week, love? With interest—cherry on top?’

  Some people say you’re lucky to have one true love. But I feel you at least get two. Gary and his Gazman shirt was my first one, which broke in the end, but Poppy—when she came along all unplanned but shining (looking back, sure, I might not have known it right off), she was the second.

  ‘Forty-two dollars and ninety-nine cents,’ Woolworths Brett repeats.

  ‘Can I pay
on credit, please?’ my daughter asks, not looking at me. She looks like she’s been eating a bit better; her face is rounder and she’s come straight from her weekend job at the fancy hotel—her dress is one of those grey office ones you get in the Target City section. It’d look so out of place on me.

  ‘Sorry, poss,’ I say—and it’s like any guilt or embarrassment I should be feeling has been flicked off suddenly: some kind of switch.

  People say kleptomania is a diagnosable disease. They say you can go to support groups—that you can learn to get the rush elsewhere. But some days everything I’m wearing has been shoplifted, along with everything in my fridge. It doesn’t happen often, maybe once every couple of weeks. But that feeling: it’s like at that moment, rushing—I have got my own back. It’s not admirable, I know. But I really think that’s my version of a whisky on the rocks on Sunday, of a sneaky cigarette away from the kids. Everyone has their thing.

  Popp knows about my problem. She comes in and saves me those few times I’ve ended up getting caught bad—plays up the whole pretty-corporate-daughter-stuck-with-her-old-Datsun-driving-mum thing. And I guess that’s not so far from the truth. I rent a one-bedroom apartment in Reservoir. I can’t hold a job down. My last boss said they wanted their sales staff to be a bit more tech-savvy, which I know means young. So I went from selling fake-diamond-covered sandals to working from home selling anything I could on eBay. That was until the internet got cut off, but Poppy doesn’t know about that.

  Sometimes I think I need to wear a bit more of a berry lip, maybe dye my hair a little darker—like that autumn red in the magazines. Poppy wouldn’t approve. It’d be a new beginning, though, a new me. They have big sales on at DJs next week. That’s the best time to collect a little extra, I reckon. Just to stay ahead.

  Before the Wind Changed

  She’d had hair the colours of faded playground pine bark. I’d loved the way she walked—across Kinglake gravel, without shoes.

  Wattleseed

  Copper-coloured: the land, your hair. Your ends, bleach-brittle, break off to fall about your shoulders like dandruff, like dust. We sit, in the Kulata Academy Cafe, drinking iced soy coffees, tall, with a little extra cream. A girl with wrists of rainbow bands brings us our toast, wattleseed, along with tiny jars of quandong jam. D’you have margarine too, mate? I ask, making sure I smile, but you just look at me with eyes once familiar. Your arms, still soft, are folded—they’re freckle-flecked.

  Two for the Desert Stars Tour: Priceless, the receptionist says. She takes our notes though, pineapples, and you take off your Blunnies on the hotel track. Your blisters, watery, bulge under the glow of someone else’s fairy-lit path. What’d you do, babe, if I just walked on? you say. I look up then, trying some joke about a string of camels, about how we’d have to get a red dog, a few hundred litres of sunblock, some purple-lidded RID, too. Don’t forget that sun’ll rise, that it burns, hon, I say and you smile, sharply: that’s all.

  Cloud-covered clusters, binary stars: we look at sand-sized specks through huge telescopes. Listen, friends, our blue-shirted guide says. Listen to the sounds of silence. It’s 9.07, Mutitjulu Land, and you’re looking at me with black-hole pupils—your irises still the colours of rained-on rust. Do you think those stars’ll collapse in on each other, eventually? you say. No, honey, I answer, but you bring it up, again, later, in our suite, 109—your long legs covered in hotel cream: wattleseed, bushberry, Methylisothiazolinone.

  Later, back at the hotel, I log in to our Westpac account, linked; Moll, I say, we can’t keep spending money, the class-action stuff, like water. You’re at the minibar by then—drinking the tiny bottles of peach liqueur, eating little foil-wrapped pockets of mint creams. Do you still think about the old house? About that big bookcase? you say, though you know I do—the one, now ash, which you’d built from redwood remnants and Bunnings glue.

  But it’s 9.34, now: Mutitjulu Land. Our guide is still in front of us, talking, and you’re looking to the spinifex-spiked horizon, not at the others—linen-clad and walking the path to our left. Your voice is sandal-scuffed gravel when you speak, then, your eyes more open than they’ve been in weeks. Let’s just walk on, you say. And I wish that bristle-chinned guide was close: Follow the track, folks, follow on now, he’d coo.

  A Constant Hum

  Near the end of one summer Dad got an old food dehydrator from the Trading Post, linking it to the generator through knots of yellowing extension cords. He hammered wooden racks, just the right size, to slot in it for fruit and, sometimes, bits of meat. ‘You have to be prepared for anything—even the apocalypse,’ he said, pinching at my nose like he used to when I was really small. I was in my bathers from swimming lessons that day, and Dad was in cut-offs, in the old olive cardigan Jo always threatened to throw out, but never did, along with the growing bags of apple peel. Mum had knitted most of our wool stuff—Dad’s jumpers, my pink fairy gloves, even special bed socks—so maybe it had something to do with that. ‘Anything your mum knitted will long outlast us,’ Dad said one Friday night, over my favourite dinner—fish fingers and potato gems. ‘Outlive us all,’ he added. And so my curtains—covered in the tiny green pompoms Dad said Mum sewed into them when I was born—made me feel funny, a bit sad even, for the rest of the summer.

  There used to be a big water tank at the end of our road, down where the gravel turned to dirt and the potholes never got fixed up. When I was still little enough to ride on Dad’s shoulders we’d go see it—its concrete sides mossy in the winter and still pretty cool when the days got long and the sound of all the special machines came up to us from the valley vineyards, the ones some of Dad’s friends worked at. It’s easy to remember the itchiness of Dad’s mohair jumper against the backs of my legs, and the cold concrete wall against my cheek. Dad’d usually sit me down, though, before handing me Patch’s lead. ‘Stay put, Hazel, honey,’ he’d say. And I’d watch him climb the rusted water-tank ladder, his binoculars dangling from a shoulder strap made from brown string. I thought that he was probably checking up on Mum, then—if he could see across to the ranges, to where she took our other dog, Charlie, and my baby brother, Finn (who’s not at all a baby now), to live among the different trees.

  There would’ve been a house or a shed attached to the tank once. Dad says tanks survive everything. He says the house probably went missing a long time ago—probably from a bushfire, before even Dad was born. ‘Think harder,’ I used to say, hoping Dad’d tell me about a family who took their house with them, on one of those trucks covered in yellow flags. I hoped that was why. But Dad said he wondered too and that it’s okay: houses, like people, sometimes just vanish over time.

  Not long after that, I reckon, is when I hated going to sleep. I’d stand in the kitchen while Dad and Jo watched telly downstairs. I remember the bench was always covered in Jo’s cooking stuff, ’cause she cooked a lot (lots more than Mum): cracked meringues and tiny glasses of setting jelly. Little bits of sandy sugar covered the floor, sticking to my bare feet and ending up back in bed with me. I shuffled around in the scratchy sheets for what seemed like hours those nights, listening to the scary hum of the bush and hoping I would be able to forget about Mum and the house—the one, maybe burnt down now, but once attached to the big old cool tank, at the end of our road.

  Dad started taking me down to the muddy dam behind our block after Jo took me to get my Level 3 Dolphin swimming certificate in the blue valley pools. It was almost as wide as our house, the dam, and dug out by people long before us. My hands would go real red from holding on to the reeds in the shallows, watching Dad swim out to where the brown water got deep. When he dived under, leaving only some murky bubbles, I felt my feet cramp up and my hands get tight. I thought about all the yabbies under the water—down where it was too dark to see anything but brown. Dad’d brought a big one up to show me once, folding its tail back to show me the berries that had grown there. I remember thinking the eggs were actually berries, and that that’s how grapes grew too—
under the tails of dam things: yabbies, prawns, even fish.

  Dad could float on his back for hours, his eyes closed and his big hands splashing the top water, ’cause it was warmer than down below. Jo worked through the school holidays, so she never saw how long we’d stay at the dam—sometimes eating cheese-and-lettuce sandwiches or catching backswimmers and glass shrimp (that’s really what they’re called) in Vegemite jars. ‘Your own special sea monkeys, Haze,’ Dad would say, before making me tip the bugs back into the water. I’d spend most afternoons, though, sitting on my towel among the smelly tea-tree shrubs, waiting for Dad to get out—the hum of the telly replaced by chattering rosellas or the buzzing of cicadas if it was almost dark.

  People from the council took the big water tank back the year I turned thirteen. They put up fences and bright white signs. Dad was sleeping through the day and staying up at night, watching lots of movies and drinking silver bags of wine with Jo. Sometimes I even heard Dad talking about back when he used to be a firefighter, but I don’t even know if that’s true. Once I heard Jo ask Dad about moving house, her voice much higher than usual but still somehow kind of soft. ‘We could be close to everything, safe,’ she said, talking about Preston and something about proper lattes and shops. Dad looked even taller than he was through the crack in my bedroom door that night. He got up and went to the big furry bogong moths thumping at the lit-up kitchen window before looking back at Jo, his face crumpled, like it was before he got in the dam some days.