As in Sydney, the place was teeming with swanky restaurants offering just about every cuisine that the mind can imagine, and after some hesitation we chose a glitzy-looking place called The Jetty, which seemingly offered something from just about everywhere on a single menu: James ordered a beef burger and I plumped for risotto primavera.
As we sipped our drinks, the temperature fell a little and the empty tables around us filled with revellers. The ambient noise level began to rise and in response everyone simply spoke ever louder to compensate. James and I were soon shouting at each other just to be heard. Everyone seemed happy though, and the temperature was dropping, the wine was smooth and velvety – I was recovering from my jet lag and feeling good as if, perhaps, the tipsy, relaxed atmosphere of the place was infectious.
“So what do you think of Brissie?” James asked.
I looked around at the eating, drinking hordes, at the lovely waterscape beside us, and smiled at him. “It’s lovely,” I said. “It’s a bit like the place we ate in Sydney. Only more relaxed, somehow. More languid maybe.”
James nodded.
“And hotter, of course . . .”
“Yes, that takes some getting used to, huh?”
I looked around again and noted a vague feeling of unease within me, and analysed it to try to find the source. It was something to do with the newness, the shininess of everything, to do with the lack of history, or innate culture perhaps . . . It felt a little as if Ikea had been commissioned to “do” the whole town, and just as I always have a vague feeling of something lost when I enter an old building entirely gutted to make it “modern”, I sensed here that something was missing. These chic hotspots of Australia seemed to be taking our whole culture of consumerism, our “out with the old and in with the new” obsession to a whole new level, and again, I thought about the Aboriginal Australians – one of the most ancient cultures on the planet, yet so entirely absent here.
James leaned down to look into my eyes. “Something wrong?” he asked.
I shook my head and smiled. Other than strange European cravings for old grubby decors, for tradition, for buildings older than myself, everything was lovely; it was as enjoyable an experience as I could have hoped for. “No, it’s great,” I said. “Really.”
“Make the most of it then,” James said. “Tomorrow it’s back to real life.”
I squinted at him and smiled slyly. “You’ve warned me about the farm twice now. Is it really that bad?”
James raised an eyebrow. “Things are in a bit of a mess, that’s all. There hasn’t been a woman around the place for a while, remember.”
I nodded. For no apparent reason, a terrible thought popped into my mind: that perhaps this was what James needed most – a woman around the place. But I kept that to myself. “Well, I’m sure it’ll be fine,” was all I said.
Our charming and very camp waiter returned at that moment with our food, and the plates were so absurdly large, and the portions on them so inversely small, I couldn’t help but laugh. But though tiny, my little mound of risotto was delicious, my second glass of wine as good as the first, and with James playing footsie with me under the table as he wolfed down his burger, it would have been hard to think of anything that could make the moment better. I felt as happy as I had been in years.
The next morning, we took a train to a suburb called Morningside, where James had left his battered four-wheel drive to be serviced during his absence.
The drive north took us through more suburbs, and then out into open country. Much of the highway was bordered with tree-lined embankments, but on the more open stretches I caught glimpses of vast sandy beaches and river inlets and lakes. As the high rises of the city shrank behind us the spooky forms of the Glasshouse Mountains rose ahead.
“It looks better on a clear day,” James commented, and I nodded and imagined that without this oppressive blanket of grey over everything, the views would indeed be stunning.
“The beaches look amazing,” I said. “You can see why they call it the Gold Coast.”
“This is the Sunshine Coast actually. The Gold Coast is to the south.”
“Is it like this?”
“Kind of. The beaches are bigger. It’s more glitzy. These are more family oriented.”
Once we left the highway and started to head inland, the countryside grew greener and opened out into gently rolling swathes of green. The road would rise to the top of a hill providing majestic views of grasslands and forests in the distance, then slip back down into a copse of trees. Every time we broke cover, the chimney-like forms of the mountains in the distance provoked a small intake of breath, and when at one point the cloud cover broke allowing shafts of sunlight to push through the humidity, illuminating a stretch of plain, I murmured a wow and struggled to pull my camera from my bag. As always with these things, by the time I found it, the sunlight had vanished.
My first glimpse of the farm also provoked a sharp intake of breath, but for a different reason. After a series of ever smaller roads and finally a bumpy muddy farm track, the car rolled and lurched through potholes and puddles, and then finally burst out of a strip of woodland revealing the farm in front of us.
Stupidly, the word “farm” had conjured up, for me, romantic images of stone cottages with roses around the door. I was expecting a dusty farmyard with chickens clucking around. The reality was a wide flat plateau of muddy grassland surrounded by industrial fencing to keep the grazing cows in place, a series of breeze-block cowsheds and beyond those, the house. This was an enormous single-storey building, the left half of which seemed to be the rotting original wooden construction, and the right half, a more recent, unfinished breeze block add-on. The grass around the house had been trampled to mud and various bits of rusting farm equipment were dotted around the place, seemingly left wherever they had expired. Virtually all of the paint had long since flaked from the wooden slats of the original building, whilst the newer section, lacking rendering and even a couple of windows, had clearly never been finished.
“Gosh,” I said.
“I did warn you,” James said with laughter in his voice.
But the truth was that he hadn’t. Only a photo could have prepared me for this, and it was probably for the best that I hadn’t seen one before my arrival, as I’m not sure I would have wanted to come at all.
No sooner had we parked, than a man in his thirties, in grubby jeans and T-shirt, burst from the screen door and strode towards us. He bear-hugged James, and then glanced shyly at me.
“Hannah, Ryan. Ryan, Hannah,” James said by way of introduction.
Ryan shook my hand, then smiled and looked down at his feet. It was a sweet, timid gesture, and I warmed to him immediately. “Sorry to have dragged your man away,” Ryan said, addressing me.
“Had to happen sometime,” James commented. “I couldn’t spend my whole life on holiday, eh Han’?”
A number of flies were buzzing angrily around my head and when I swiped at them James said, “Here, come inside.” He led me through the screen door into a large unfinished part of the newer extension. The walls here were still of bare brick, the roof above us uninsulated – rooms without ceilings or doors. Building materials were massed along one wall and yet the layer of dust over everything gave the impression that it had been in stasis for quite some time.
James must have been reading my mind as I glanced around because he raised one eyebrow and explained, “We were halfway through rebuilding the place when the accident happened. Everything just kind of stopped.”
Of course it did, I thought, my heart lurching in sympathy for him. On a day-to-day basis James seemed so well balanced, so straightforward and reasonable that it was almost possible to forget that fact that his wife and child had both been killed in a road accident. Stupidly, it hadn’t crossed my mind that I would be staying not only on James’ farm, but on what used to be James’ and Judy’s farm, and even before that, Judy’s parents’ farm. We’d presumably be sleeping in James and
Judy’s bed too, and I wasn’t sure, suddenly, how I felt about that.
“It’s more comfy through here,” Ryan said, leading the way into the original part of the building, and indeed, from the inside at least, this was much more the way I had expected an Australian farmhouse to look, albeit in a state of shocking disrepair.
We crossed a large lounge with tatty sofa and chairs and a rug that was so threadbare it was impossible to guess what the original pattern might have been. Beyond this was a large open kitchen with old-fashioned wooden cabinets on the walls and an enormous dining table in the middle.
“Big,” I said. It was the only positive adjective I could come up with.
“It’s a nice kitchen, ain’t it?” Ryan said.
James laughed. “He’s hoping you’re gonna cook for us all. I wouldn’t say a word if I were you.”
Despite a rather pleasing image of myself ladling out stew from a huge pot, I took James at his word and simply smiled wryly.
“So where are the others?” James asked.
“Top end,” Ryan replied. “Just heading up that way myself.”
“They’re planting,” James told me.
“Corn,” Ryan confirmed.
“I’ll come up and see you all in a bit,” James told Ryan. “I just need to get Han’ here settled.”
“Of course,” Ryan said, briefly catching my eye, and then turning to leave.
“So, as you can see,” James said, gesturing around him. “Lounge, kitchen . . . the bedrooms are through here.”
He led me across the kitchen and through a door covered with flaking green paint and then along a dingy corridor. “Bathroom,” he said, pushing open the first door to reveal an old-fashioned bathroom with a worn enamel bath and deep green wall tiles, of which a number were missing.
“Dunny,” he said, knocking on the next door.
“Which is the toilet, right?”
“Yep. We’ll make an Aussie of you yet.”
James tapped with a knuckle on the following door and announced, “Ryan’s room.”
“He lives here?”
James paused and turned back to face me. “They all do, Han’. It’s a way to keep the payroll down. Free board and lodging. Well, used to be. Just lodging these days really.”
“Your wife used to cook for them all?”
James combined a nod and a shrug.
Judy’s husband. Judy’s farm. And now the men were hoping I’d be filling Judy’s shoes in the kitchen. James’ dead wife was becoming shockingly present.
“Charlie’s room,” James said as he continued on down the corridor. “Gio is in this one.”
“Gio?”
“He’s new. Giovanni. Italian guy. And then these two are ours.”
He opened the left-hand door, revealing a double bedroom, which was clearly doubling as a store room. “Don’t worry,” he said, rapping one of the stacked boxes with his knuckles. “I’ll get this all moved out.”
I stepped around the boxes and crossed to the French windows, pulled back the grubby net curtains and looked out. Beyond the window was a strip of trampled grassland on which sat the skeleton of a long-deceased motorbike and some kind of spiral drilling mechanism, both rusty and brown and tangled with weeds. Beyond the field was a ditch, a fence, and then a much deeper stretch of churned field curving down from the house and meeting, at the bottom of a shallow valley, an orchard of neatly planted trees. Beyond these, hazy, in the distance, rose the peaks of the Glasshouse Mountains.
“Great view,” I commented.
“Yes,” James agreed, moving to my side and enthusiastically yanking back the curtains. “Yes, it’s a good one, isn’t it?”
I could sense his relief at my having found something positive to say about the place. Encouraged, I asked, “Are those fruit trees?”
“Mangoes,” James said.
“God, I love mangoes,” I told him. “When’s the season?”
“Right now,” James said. “We can walk down and pick some if you want.”
I was just about to say yes when James added, “Judy always reckoned that if you eat them straight off the tree, they’re the best mangoes in the world.”
“After lunch maybe?” I said, instead. “I’m pretty hungry. I think I need more than mangoes right now.”
“I hope there’s something to eat in the kitchen,” James said. “Let’s go look.”
Despite my best efforts, I glanced around at the devastation of the bedroom. It looked like a squat really.
“I’m sorry the place looks so shitty,” James said reaching out to touch my shoulder. “I just haven’t had the time to sort it since I got back.”
“It’ll be fine,” I told him. “I’ll help you fix it up a bit while I’m here.”
James pulled me against him and wrapped his arms around me. “That’d be great,” he said. “Because I’m gonna be pretty full-on for a few days.”
Though the refrigerator was empty, the freezer was full of ready meals and we were hungry enough that even microwave-in-the-box beef burgers managed to hit the spot. All the same, if this is what the men had been eating, I could understand why Ryan’s eyes had twinkled at the idea of me in the kitchen.
After lunch, James headed to the top field to see Charlie and Giovanni and generally show that he was back in control, and hit by a sudden wave of jet-lag tiredness, I peered into the second of “our” rooms – it was a child’s bedroom, untouched, I would guess, since her death.
I sat down – big Hannah sitting on little Hannah’s bed – and stroked the pillow, and looked around at the toys and wondered how James had managed to survive so much trauma. And then, feeling rather sad, I retreated to the master bedroom to sleep.
The sheets were dirty and musty and I couldn’t find any fresh ones anywhere. When I tried to sleep on top of the blankets I ended up having a sneezing fit – I doubted that James had changed them once since his return – so I quickly gave up and stripped the bed and went hunting for the washing machine.
In a trance, driven by the strange idea that the tidier the room was, the less of the past it contained, I began to blitz the place. By the time the daylight started to fade, I had not only washed and dried the bedding and curtains, but had also moved the stack of boxes (all of which contained plastic bags of dried milk powder) out to the new, incomplete building extension.
There had been a lot of boxes, and they had been heavy, but I felt pleased with the result. Once I had tidied and hoovered the room and remade the bed, the room looked like a bedroom again and the process of making it that way had felt like homebuilding, something which gave me a warm feeling inside.
Once the bedroom was done, I set about cleaning the kitchen, and though what it really needed was stripping and redecorating if not gutting entirely, that too looked at least a bit more functional by the time I had finished.
Despite my reservations about replacing Judy, had there been a single natural ingredient in the house, I would have cooked a big meal for everyone too. But as it was, the best I could manage was to select five pizzas from the freezer and heat them in the oven along with some chips.
Dinner with the men that evening was a strange affair. Both Ryan and Charlie – a spindly balding man in his late fifties – seemed embarrassed by my presence. It was almost as if they had never seen a woman before. Even James struggled to find a topic of conversation that could include both the men and myself, and so alternated awkwardly between farm talk – I nodded knowingly – and discussions of things I might want to do and see around the area. Only the new guy, Giovanni, seemed at ease, and I think we all felt a sense of relief when he launched into an explanation of his roots. His parents’ escape from the post-war depression in Italy made a great story and Giovanni, a five-foot mass of hair and muscle, told it with true Italian panache.
When he had finished eating, Ryan thanked me. “That was really great Hannah, thanks.”
“I would have cooked something from scratch,” I said, “but there wasn’t a
proper ingredient in the house.”
Mocking me, James bowed then shook his head.
“I’d be happy to run you up to Costco tomorrow if you want,” Ryan offered, grinning at James.
And though I knew exactly the trap I was stepping into, I said, “Yes, that would be great. But you’ll have to tell me what kind of food you like.”
“Anything proper,” Ryan said.
“Pasta?” Giovanni said, predictably.
“Shepherd’s pie,” Charlie volunteered. “I’d kill for a decent shepherd’s pie.”
“Works for me too,” Giovanni said. “If you can do it.”
“I can,” I admitted. “And you, James; any special requests?”
James shrugged and grinned at me broadly. “If you’re really going for it, then a lemon meringue pie might hit the spot.”
“Lucky for you lemon meringue pie is one of my specialities,” I said.
“Hell, James loves lemon meringue pie, don’t you, James?” Ryan said, and suddenly, the past was with us all over again.
In a way, James had been right. Once I had offered to cook that first meal, once I had delivered on my promise with such panache (that lemon meringue pie could have won top prize in Masterchef) the die was cast.
Almost every day, Ryan would ask me what would be for dinner that evening, and would ensure that any missing ingredients for the requested dish were efficiently supplied on time. He was a strapping young man who liked his food, who appreciated the finer points of any effort I made, but who seemed incapable of learning even how to boil himself an egg.
But the truth was that despite my unease at the idea the men were comparing my meals with Judy’s, I enjoyed cooking for them all. The produce in Brisbane was as fresh and varied as I had ever seen anywhere, and the reception the men gave every meal I delivered, whether it be a prawn curry or a Sunday roast, left me on a high that lasted until the following meal. It was like cooking for a large family, only a special kind of family that actually appreciated the effort.
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