A Constant Hum

by Alice Bishop

  ‘But the real everything’s out here,’ he said, deliberately, slowly, like it was one of the lessons at school. And I knew straight away he’d seen my fingers wrapped around the door.

  Our trips to the back dam slowed down when Dad started getting angry about the electricity. The council workers—suddenly always visiting our road—had looked at a hum coming from the powerline that fed our house. A skinny lady in an orange vest said the noise was ’cause of an uncommon fault in the conductor but, even though he didn’t admit it, I don’t reckon Dad knew what that meant. ‘They are in need of some work,’ he agreed, looking over to the powerlines that were all saggy across our short, steep driveway. He turned back to the orange-vested lady, smiling wide enough for his gums to show: ‘So that’s why I pay late.’ I remember noticing the bulging pockets of his corduroy jacket then—filled with fishing wire, nails and packets of matches. ‘It’s a bit grating though, isn’t it, Haze?’ And I knew, right away, it was my job to nod; the buzz at night was enough to keep me awake anyway.

  It wasn’t long after that when Dad started sending long letters to all kinds of people about the sound—most written on the backs of old phone bills and signed at the bottom with his messy initials. Our table was covered with them before something eventually happened and the power was turned off completely. The new generator Dad got was noisy as well, but it was only on when we really needed it. We began having to turn the water on and off too, and, because I was the smallest, Jo would get me to crawl between our own tanks to switch on the pump like it was a lawn mower. I began noticing more about Jo as she stood above me in her bathing cap, ready for a shower—like the blistering sweat on her face and the way she wrapped her dirty makeup towel real tight around her chest. Maybe it was after she suggested I shave my legs that it started happening. ‘We’ll get you a nice little razor, Haze,’ she said, brushing her hand over the see-through hair on my shins, all patterned with imprints of leaves and sticks.

  On days Jo wanted the house to herself, me and Dad started taking the big yellow car—it was once a city taxi—out to Sugarloaf Reservoir. When I was smaller I’d learned to ride my bike in the empty car parks up there—following the bright white lines while Dad ran along behind me. And though you couldn’t swim in the water, Dad let me put my feet in while he threw Jo’s cat food, rolled in breadcrumbs, out for the fish. ‘Yellow or red?’ Dad would ask and, maybe ’cause we never caught any of the redfin or yellowbellies he was talking about, I imagined that they had scales the colour of all the Crayolas at school, not the boring grey they actually were.

  Dad pulled the car over on the way home from Sugarloaf once. ‘Back in a bit,’ he said, before he started walking the trail that ran alongside the Eltham-Yarra Glen Road, his camping socks pulled up high. I sat with my bare feet among the cat-food tins, the car warming up even though I had wound all the windows right down. In the hours before Dad reappeared—his face not as bunched and his shoulders down—I had counted fourteen mosquitoes fly in one window and, eventually, out the other, sometimes resting on my skin on the way. Jo would have swatted at them but I took after Dad. ‘You can’t kill the little things, Haze,’ he said to me once, when he caught me stomping a line of ants with my sparkly jelly sandals. They had been headed for the sweetened RID, before Dad spent the afternoon putting all the black-specked jam lids he could find in the bin. I never told Jo, even though she always thought it was Patch who’d chewed up the little sticky traps.

  Walking up the path from the dam one morning—dried-up clay cool on our skin—Dad stopped to shake his head hard, like he had water in his ear. The left half of his face was scrunched, along with the fingers of his left hand. ‘You go on ahead, Haze,’ he said, head sideways—‘just put the kettle on for me back home.’ And I didn’t turn around the whole way back, the sun probably bleaching the red stripes out of my favourite bathers and my new thongs rubbing between my toes. Something made me go straight to my room that day and pick up the magazines Jo had bought for me, their covers dotted with purple and silver stars. There was a bookmark in the top one, set in the page about how to make your hair look like you’d been at the beach. Jo’s curly handwriting filled a Post-it—saying something about Grade 6 in the city and how, in Preston, you could get pizza delivered right to your door.

  Dad moved the foldout couch from the spare room out onto the deck sometime during that summer, the one when the big bushfires were all over the news—even though we didn’t have a TV now, and Dad and Jo didn’t find out about them till after. Jo told me that Dad liked waking up outside now. That he wanted to watch the black cockatoos flying across the sky—moving their wings up and down slow, like those wooden birds hung from string. But Dad told me it was because of the humming he still heard, even though the power was off: it happened mostly, he said, indoors. ‘It’ll go away soon, honey,’ I remember he said, pinching at my nose again, though the top of my head was already up to his shoulders. By the time I started to walk up to the fenced-off tank by myself, then, I was tall enough to climb over the tank fence and up the skinny ladder. But looking out across the hills—to where Mum and my brother maybe still lived—things were darker. The trees poking up looked like white skinny sticks.

  Jo got me new curtains that boiling summer—beige ones with roses. She got a new set of pillows too, covered with cream buttons that pinched your skin like I imagined the yabbies did when Dad grabbed them from the dam floor. I found my old pompom curtains, along with Dad’s food-dehydrator racks, on the hard rubbish not long after; Dad’d started saying a lot of things about climate change and he hated using electricity, even the generator, for anything.

  Sometimes Jo would get me to go out and add an empty fish-finger box to the pile, or one of the flattened cardboard containers that had once held her shiny silver bags of wine. They looked like they were from space. Standing out there with my bare feet on the gravel, I thought about where they’d end up, the curtains—the green pompoms fading slowly, turning brown: from March rain, and from the dust of cars. But Dad says it’s okay. I remember. Dad says, ‘It’s okay, Haze, sometimes things just disappear.’

  Cool Change

  The town hall’s floors have been swept and mopped for midyear primary-school performances: for kids dressed in pipe-cleaner headbands and cardboard-box costumes doing dance routines. There are families missing, their names etched into a new board that sits at the entrance. There are no photos. Just a few pots of saltbush, some untouched letters, a Crunchie bar and a pair of motorbike gloves—there are no set rules on offerings for the disappeared.

  Porch Light

  Rose hears the chattering of lorikeets before realising it’s just the dishwasher clinking—cleaning the crescent moons of lipstick from the champagne flutes, the thumbprints of old colleagues, maybe lovers, from the whisky tumblers. The table is covered with flowers, still wrapped in cellophane, from yesterday’s housewarming. Greeting cards that will never be reopened rest in bright white envelopes on the mantelpiece. Rose has given up keeping anything but the basics since the day she came home to find the few leftover bricks of her old house too hot to hold, the wheel rims of Max’s Mercedes running in silver strands through the ash of the ridge.

  The cycle finishes and Rose opens the machine up to a wave of steam. Gold-rimmed glasses dangle from the inbuilt racks and rows of china-handled dessertspoons fill the small cutlery basket. Rose picks up one of the floral plates before sliding it back in between the others—sighing as she shuts the dishwasher door again with a tap. She looks out into the front yard, still dotted with empty bottles and red paper plates—some smeared with relish, some curled or folded into neat quarters. Rose had counted over a hundred people at the party, all coming in through the new pine double doors holding wrapped gifts—eyebrows held a little too high, lips pressed together in pity. A lot of the visitors had just dropped by quickly—due to obligation, maybe a little curiosity. Rose received three potted fruit trees, a tub of basil and some tiny glass pots of bush-tomato seeds. ‘
To plant, whenever you’re ready,’ Jill Harris had said, her painted eyelids never quite opening all the way. ‘We all just love the new house, Rosemary, but you need a garden to match.’

  The day goes slowly—the sun coming in through the new blinds to cast gold lines across the parquetry. Rose avoids cleaning up by flipping through her piles of home magazines and slowly drinking a cup of Earl Grey laced with cream liqueur. Sometimes she sees returning birds on these quiet days—a Jacky Winter, families of choughs, a fairy wren—and thinks of telling Max. Rose’s own reflection, now unfamiliar, fills the shiny screen enough for her to put the phone back in its place among the unopened bills and letters. Sitting by the empty bookshelves, she realises she’s missed some used glasses people have left along the mantelpiece—tucked away behind the cards and the empty wine bottles doubling as vases for cut bottlebrush and too-bright geraniums. Later, in bed, she notices pollen caught in the pale hairs of her arms. She tries to sleep to the eerie croak of returned valley frogs, travelling in through tightly stretched flyscreen doors.

  It’s dark when Rose hears shoes scuffing on the new bluestone steps outside. There had been no headlights shining through the seams of her bedroom’s thin cotton curtains, no torchlight swaying across the recently gravelled driveway. The new terrier, wagging its short tail and shaking all over, makes tiny excited yelps that send shocks up Rose’s now sinewy back. As she sits up, flinging her bare legs over the side of the bed and flicking on the reading light, there is a faint knock at the door. She notices the purple veins across her shins and thinks of Max—how the backs of his pale hands were similarly coloured, how his knucklebones had begun to poke through more than ever.

  ‘Hello?’

  The voice is low—much younger than the voices Rose is used to now that her sons are overseas, contacting her, mostly, through short emails and links to photos around the usual times: birthdays, Easter, Christmas and the New Year. She pulls stockings up over her legs, remembering Max saying, in the absent voice he had developed lately, that he’d put invites in all the letterboxes, fronting houses rebuilt and otherwise, along the road: 3 p.m. till late. Not everyone had known each other before the fire, but they all felt they had something in common now—the day in all its blues, at least; burning eucalypt gas and, especially, the soft grey-white of the morning after’s ash. The woollen dress Rose puts on still smells like the store and her bangles, which she forgot to take off earlier, have put deep red creases across her left cheek. As she opens the door she can smell cologne and flowers. A man holds what Rose thinks are tulips, with their yellow cup-shaped blooms and long grey-green stems—but she can’t be sure.

  The man looks over Rose’s shoulder at the cellophane on the dining table, now glinting in the porch light. He wears a thickly knitted beanie and a small coppery ring through his left ear that, even now, Rose can tell is unfashionable. As he steps in closer to her she notices that his black shirt has faded across the shoulders and that the sleeves are still dark where they have been rolled and hidden from the sun. The man is not as young as he sounds, though still young to Rose—only a few white hairs fleck his amber beard.

  He shifts his weight before saying, ‘Sorry I’m late.’ A single car passes the house, clouds of dust lit up in its high beams. The man and Rose pause to watch it fade along the ridge, before looking back at one another, their feet on either side of the door strip.

  ‘It was yesterday, actually,’ Rose answers, trying to recognise the contours of his nose, his cheeks, as belonging to a child she once knew back when her own children were small enough to ride their bikes, beaded-wheeled, up and down bush-lined gravel roads.

  ‘Join us for Easter lunch,’ at least three separate couples had suggested to Rose during the party. No one really meant it, though: if she were to turn up at any of their places the next Sunday—sandwiches in hand, but no Max—there would have been a room full of half-nods and thin smiles. Most of them hadn’t even stayed at the party for orange cake and tawny port, anyway—drinking their lunchtime limonatas quickly and heading home to the Sunday papers, to coffee and dry biscuits before bed within their own surviving walls.

  There were even two bottles of Glenfiddich brought for Max that day—Rose’s own neighbours still unaware of the missing hatchback, the shoe box beside the front door filled only with women’s canvas slip-ons. Annabelle Elliott, from the weatherboard house down on Steels Creek Road, was the only one who had picked up that something had changed. She watched Max’s perfectly square face doing the niceties a little too eagerly at the party—his mouth carefully held so as not to suggest things were anything other than normal. ‘So, tell me about it,’ she said to Rose, her voice, as always, seeming too deep to have come from her small chest—buttoned up with an equally tiny jacket, embroidered with ochre elephants and outlines of trees.

  ‘He saw things I didn’t,’ Rose said, looking down at her moonstone-jewelled hands, neatly cupped, ‘so I have to understand.’ She spoke of the occasional night she spent in Ivanhoe—listening to the neighbours talk through their days with one another in the shared courtyard below Max’s new bedroom window. Max went to bed early those nights, as he always did now—Rose sliding in beside him like she did when they’d first met. His breath would smell of a new spearmint mouthwash. There was no Scotch in his bright new cupboards, no sherry collection in a cherrywood cabinet. Lying there, watching the red glow of the digital clock change through the hours, Rose felt a heaviness about things like the cabinet that had long disappeared, soon after prickly tea-tree had lit up, like crumbled fire brick, across the ridge. Rose would listen to her husband’s breathing, those nights, sounding almost as strange as the new bed felt beneath her.

  ‘Japanese magnolias,’ the man says, before reaching down to pat the terrier sniffing the white-worn knees of his loose blue jeans. Rose nods, immediately recognising the rush of uncertainty through her middle—a feeling long unfelt. She breathes in, ignoring it and reaching for the hallway lights, their new shades casting patterns of tiny leaves across the freshly painted walls.

  ‘Won’t be able to move for flowers soon.’ Rose smiles, offering to take the paper-wrapped bunch from the man’s grip. ‘But thank you.’

  ‘Not such a bad thing, I guess,’ he says, looking down as he uses the tip of one boot to pry off the other. His jeans are tucked into thick navy socks with too much room around the toe. He looks back up at Rose. ‘Sebastian, anyway, from up near Tuan’s Track.’

  Rose is conscious of the tightness of wool blend across her chest, of her bare feet beneath her, as she meets his hand in the middle—his shake firm and his skin a little too soft. She runs through the places she knows up that way—the Nicholsons’, the Owens’ and the little log cabin run by the woman who only wore orange clothes.

  The man picks up a bottle of champagne, wrapped in pink dotty paper, from the sideboard by the door. ‘Bubbly and flowers, but you probably just want your old stuff back, hey?’

  ‘The little things would be nice,’ Rose says, and the man nods, walking past her and pulling out a chair from the still-clothed and cluttered table—facing it towards the floor-to-ceiling windows displaying the night lights of the valley below.

  ‘That went better than I thought,’ Max had said, his face finally free from its forced smile and his shoulders taking back their curve. The other guests had left and the sun had begun to set behind the regrowth-fuzzed trees that had popped up across the ridge. The two were sitting on the bluestone steps, marked now by other people’s shoes and scattered with dropped plastic cutlery, when Max passed Rose the round-cornered photograph—his wrists seeming thinner than ever. ‘Eva posted it,’ he added, and Rose thought of Max’s sister, of her short lavender hair and the cluttered shelves of her bungalow over in Healesville, close enough to the strawberry farms to smell the dimethoate spray. Rose had always felt uncomfortable sitting in that place, with cups of ginger tea that never seemed to end, the cracked ceiling plaster looking like it would drop around her shoulders any
moment. And Rose barely recognised herself, or Max, in the photograph—standing in front of the stained-glass doors of their old home, their hair unsilvered and their halfway-smiles confident.

  ‘You look all right there, Maxwell,’ Rose joked, looking over to the man who was still listed as her husband, though the certificate had burned inside the beige filing cabinet—one of the few things that retained a semi-recognisable shape after the fire. Max’s lips tightened again—looking, to Rose, as hard and cold as the bluestone below them.

  ‘Come live with me, Rosie. There’s nothing left for you here.’

  The man looks smaller, to Rose, from behind as they both stare out the pearly double-glazed windows at the older, still-standing gums silhouetted by the moon. The trees have yet to sprout their last attempts at regrowth before collapsing into the now thickly carpeted bush floor. Rose realises it’s not even that late: there are truck lights still travelling the valley and the small runway down on the way to Lilydale is lit up. ‘I do miss my old glassware, my good dinner set too,’ she says, going to the dishwasher and pulling out two of the gold-rimmed champagne flutes—now entirely dry.

  ‘Champagne or champagne?’ Rose asks, taking the dotted bottle from where the man put it, perched on the edge of the dull granite bench. The glasses touch, sending out a small ring from between Rose’s fingers, loud enough for the dog to stand up from its crouched spot under the new coffee table.

  ‘Worst in history,’ the man says, focusing on the glasses, now full, in Rose’s ring-free hands—‘bet it looked pretty awful, coming across the pines.’

  Rose pauses on the redwood parquetry as the man continues—talking of the old plantation that ran onto Wallace Road, and the pine needles that carpeted the acres between the ridge and gully. Something in his voice sounds familiar to her, the way it rises in excited peaks that get closer together before petering out.