“I thought you liked him hunting,” I say.
“Not what’s up that tree,” she says. She folds herself down into the car and pretends to look comfortable. I look at her from the driver’s side, the stick a primitive javelin beside her.
“What is it?” I ask.
She drops the car key on the driver’s seat. “We got a visitor,” she says.
Travel bits and soft clothes, camomile or cashier, whatever they call it, smooth as lamb but make no sense in this heat. I prefer the feel of sun and keep my dirt shoes. I reckon I can feel where water flows underneath. Artesian, Walker calls it, reckons I could be a diviner if I wanted. But he reckons too many things and I’m glad to be away from all the rustling, the things he makes me do. Dig deep and pull a shiny white headphones machine says Beats Music. Probably cost a hundred, and who got a hundred here to spare but Ruthie hidden in her linen cupboard safe? I reckon she knows I take my share. It’s not so much coz I can live a week on thirty, I get my snacks from fridges. She even leaves me some food in the boot room.
Nice gold pen tho’, different, heavy with a point shape like a violin and unscrews. Look. And dribbles. Parks a little blue turd on his pants and lucky they dark. Wipe my fingers on my face and see what else. A hard thing down the bottom. Wrapped in a shirt, I pull it up slow, a silver frame photo of a girl. His rich city one, smooth skin and blackcolor hair, earrings like a movie star, Spanish maybe, probably famous. A model girl. The one he had on the phone maybe, who make him laugh and then look sad. Wonder if Ruthie seen this.
Do a freeze for footsteps, head up to the ceiling hole. Can’t be Earley, saw him gone. When I asked Sharen if she’s called him Earley coz he comes too soon she said he’s too old to come at all, but she didn’t think it was funny. Footsteps in the hall. It’s that ol’ egg lady Margaret Boatwell. She never come in this far.
Need to be quick and hitch up this big white cupboard door and shim my way through these spiderwebs to my plaster hole, to get back safe. But I got even better this time. Put on my big new headphones and press play for music. Listen to some weird guitar and jerk myself to Danny’s girl.
“DON’T STOP.” MY mother’s cutthroat whisper beside me as we pass Sharen out on Langdon’s Road. My mother raises the carved head of her curious stick as best she can and tips the brim of her cap, then stares out ahead. “She’ll be the death of us,” she says as Sharen disappears in the rearview mirror, misted in dust. I feel as though I’ve been here for days. My mother beside me, resurrected, pursing and parting her lips, resilient inside her own bleak thoughts, staring out over her land, over the Station Road Paddock that’s virtually empty, none of those brown Devons that used to be boarded, just a few Herefords now, and those black horses seem to make their own arrangements.
My mother examines the grooves in her dappled walking cane, pale against her marbled hands.
“Just a stick,” she says, calm as you like, dissolves back into her silence, save for the nervous tap-drip sound from her lips. I glance over at her ferrety face, the gleam of tenacity in her deep-set eyes, and feel myself being swallowed, by her and by the heat of the day, the angry glare of the sun as it skewers the windshield, the dead insects and flies in the cobwebs that shroud the wipers. In Los Angeles they wash their cars all summer as if the water supply is endless, not stolen from the north. But here the sky feels as though there might never be rain, until it floods. It used to still be green in December, but not in a year like this. The light so harsh, eats everything up. My tiny carcinomas that get frozen off with liquid nitrogen by the flirty dermatologist on Bedford Drive. The spots that appear on my right arm and temple from this no-ozone heat, all the years I drove on this side of the road with my elbow out the open window.
Thinking of Isabel, I swerve in the gravel, turning right onto Station Road.
“Keep your shirt on,” my mother says. I look over, heartened by how she seems mean and marvelous as ever, regardless. The disloyalty lodges in the pit of my stomach for leaving her here.
We pass the Albertinis’ farm, the house low and painted pale olive now, veiled in natives: acacias, banksias, a melaleuca. “That nice gray thoroughbred of theirs was bitten by a tiger snake. Dead as a stove in the grass,” my mother says.
I’ve forgotten how death and hardship are passed off here like so many handkerchiefs, laughed away with a weary acceptance. It makes my Los Angeles life seem self-obsessed, but here we have our particular breed of narcissism, just earthier, parochial in its own way.
Off to the right, my grandmother’s cottage peels into view. Its faded green-striped blinds look more ripped than I remember. In daylight it seems so innocent, save for the blackened sedan crouched in the field. One of those horses reaches to sniff the charred bonnet, its head extended straight from its neck while the other two are off grazing, picking at the tussocky grass.
“I love those big horses,” my mother says.
I pull onto the verge, roll to a halt among the rumpled trunks of long-dead wattles. “They seem to have the run of the place,” I say. The rise of the land folding into the edge of the scrub, pocked with the white star flowers of the wedding bush. My chance to actually talk to my mother. But the dog’s up in the back, prick-eared and whining, and my mother stiffens, leans forward.
It’s Earley emerging from behind a windbreak, holding onto his deerstalker’s cap. He’s examining the carnage in the field, what’s left of England blackened and strewn.
My mother drapes a hunting scarf over her cap, trying to poke the ends in the neckline of her Fair Isle, as if primping. My father moves to the other side and kneels in the grass. “He’s pretty agile for a cripple,” she says, readying herself to get out and supervise from here.
Unaware of us, my father shoos the horses away then looks up at the sky. He shouts something out but his oaths are swallowed in the wind. She holds her stick between her hands and regards the lopsided figure now scuffing through the dry paspalum in his gumboots toward us.
“You don’t seem to have married anyone,” my mother says as if it’s such an accomplishment. “What are you, forty?”
“Thirty-five,” I say. “But I’ve met someone.”
My mother doesn’t seem to hear. “Let’s go,” she says, “before we have to cope with him.”
Gazing down at the windblown grass, my father approaches the fence line and I consider getting out to greet him, to avoid watching him deal with the fence. “You know his parents were cousins,” she says. “Hence all the problems.” As if she hasn’t told me a hundred times. But the words feel sad now. “Hung around like a spent penny,” she says, tensing as he inches down low through the barbed-wire fence, snags his windcheater. He tries again, raises his dilapidated face and attempts a worn-down smile, as if to say life is much more than any of us bargained for. I get out and pull up a wire. The roughness of his farmer’s fingers clutching mine as I lift him up. A silent moment’s contact that might mean something.
“Thanks, son,” he says when he’s up, but he’s limping over to the car to deal with my mother. “Bloody unbelievable,” he says but my mother doesn’t answer, playing with the dog leash.
“Does she have her hearing aid in?” my father asks me. Provoking. The hearing aid now covered by the scarf, as if it’s a national secret. A deafness especially designed for the timbre of my father’s voice. He turns to me, motioning to the car out yonder and shaking his head as if familiar with loss. “What a bloody shame.”
“So you’ve sorted it out with Sharen?” My mother forms the words clearly and loudly, no slur at all, as if making allowances for his hearing, the fact of him out in the wind.
“I dropped off another Order to Vacate.” My father’s tone is obedient, talking now as if he’s an employee. “Gave her two weeks.” Words half-directed to me in case they need repeating.
“She’s not going anywhere,” my mother tells him. “She delivers some illiterate letter. Burns your supposed antiquities. Shining us on, that’s what she’s doing.”
My father pushes a swath of gray hair from his face but the wind blows it back. His scabbed hands cup the top of the wound-down window. “We’ll have to get her vehicle out before a horse gets hurt,” he says. The anger in the clench of my father’s jaw, his teeth worn down, hers rotting, her pouted lips. Me as some kind of conduit. Like little old children they play our parts.
“She burned my rocking horse,” I say.
For a moment they both look at me, unsure if I’d care. Then my mother shakes her head. Tries to turn around. “She’s coming. I can feel it,” she says.
I glance in the side mirror. A figure striding along the road in our direction. Sharen at a hundred paces. My father fighting with the back door, struggles to get inside. “What do you think you’re doing?” my mother asks him and the dog’s growl is low, but I’m helping him in, going around to start the car.
Bloody Earley. Just like him to tell me to take the road to meet him out here and there he is peering round at me through the dirty wiper-shape back of Ruthie’s car. So much for going to the cottage and sorting things out. It’s so friggin’ hot it makes me wish I’d shoved that bath towel over Ruthie’s nose and snuffed her. They’d notice me then. On this burning bitumen pulling these stupid Genoni sandals off. Can’t even tell if what I’m doing’s for real or just for effect. No one left to watch, and if my eyes weren’t so sore I’d cry but they feel raw as my feet and my eyeballs are burning. No zinc on my nose and no cars to run me over.
“What you doing, Naika?”
Reggie’s a shadow, calling me little duck or little dog or whatever it means in his made-up language. His bare feet beside mine and his jeans are frayed big time now, cut off high to make them short. His legs tanned and his hands and they hang loose as usual. I shade my eyes and look up at him—stripes smudged on his cheeks like ink. “What you done to your face?”
He doesn’t offer me a hand. “Think I found myself a girlfriend.”
“What do you mean?”
“In the big house,” he says.
I know to be careful round him. If I say one wrong thing I won’t see him for days. “Isn’t she a bit on the old side?”
“Maybe,” he says. His hair is bleached from the sun and from living out. He’s even woolier looking. The shape of Walker right there in his cheekbones, getting clearer.
“I been back in your house early,” he says. “I refurnished.”
Oh Jesus. Give him a room and he makes it a tree house, invites the possums. “Where you sleeping?” I ask.
He stands with one knee bent, his foot pressed against his skinny upper thigh like he thinks he’s some old-time aborigine. “Been up the trees.” He points off into the bush. “And I got a new roof place for naps. I been fixing it too.”
I’d try to stand and be like a mother but he’d still be taller and what’s the point? “Where you going now?”
“I got some money,” he says. “Going to town.”
“Where you get it?” I look up at him suspicious and scrunch my eyes.
“Not nothing bad or nothing,” he says. “I just take some payment for what happened to Walker and Gracious.”
I know it’s half in his head because his bloody father and granny were sent away a hundred years ago. “Got some for your mother?”
“Go get your own,” he says.
I pull Earley’s crumpled eviction notice from the pocket of my jeans, hand it over. “They’ve gone and made it official. Fuck the lot of them.”
He frowns and makes mouth shapes as if he’s reading but I’m not sure he can. “You should change the names around,” he says. “So it’s them that’s got to leave the house.”
He gives me a pen as if that’s easy then he takes a passport from his shorts and points to the emu and the kangaroo. “Look what I found? I just need to fix the photo.”
“Whose is it?”
“Who do you reckon? He has an American and Australian,” he says. “He’s not going anywhere. Anyway, I left him the American one so he can go back where he came from if he wants.” He shows me the picture of Daniel with his hair slicked back from his face and wearing glasses. His eyes stare out all serious as a judge.
“I could put my name on this one and get a photo of me stuck in. Easy peasy,” he says.
I taught him easy peasy when he was small and it makes me want to smile.
“You better put that back,” I say.
“Don’t worry, Mum, I just borrowed it for the day.”
And I got nothing but Vicki Genoni’s stolen sandals dangling in my hand and they don’t even fit right. Reggie looking at me as if I’m tragic then he kneels. “You gotta learn to look after yourself,” he says. I know he’s right. He’s the one does fine with nothing.
“You know what I heard Ruthie say about you?” He looks at me hard like he’s my teacher. “If Sharen can’t make a home, she’ll break one.”
“I still got a home,” I say, point to the cottage in the distance.
“Yeah, and how’s that going?” he says and spits on the road.
I feel myself sagging, being lectured by my own son. I look up at him. “Why you so mean to me, Reggie?”
“Coz you’re the mother you have when you don’t have a mother.” He kisses my head and leaves me, walks off as if he’s already forgotten.
IN THE REARVIEW mirror there’s no Sharen in the distance, just the dog eyeing my father in the backseat. I switch on the wiper washer but the rubbers just scrape the glass, smearing insects. “Well done,” says my mother.
When I ask Isabel to marry me will I even tell these two? No: Have you met anyone? My mother wouldn’t leave here if she could, she’d stay to feed the dog, keep an eye on the animals. Does she even remember what I do in LA? Twenty-something hours since I landed at Tullamarine and I barely remember myself. The alternate universe of the forty-first floor at Pickering Lardner. On a windy day, the view runs all the way to the bridges of Long Beach and the hills of Palos Verdes. Piles of documents rowed up on my desk like Stonehenge—Val Verde Unified School District, Tehachapi Valley Health Care District, Victor Valley, Pasadena, Centinela, the agency financings that run together in my head. Work I’d never stomach back here is bearable elsewhere, especially when a green card came with it.
What would it be to have parents who wanted something more for me than to just come back here to pick up where it was all left off, saving them from each other? From themselves?
“Did you tell Dad how Sharen found you on the bathroom floor?” I ask to shake things up.
“I just felt a bit woozy, that’s all,” she says, the bag and dog leash clasped in her lap, her fingers kneading gently like her lip. “Took a bit of a toss.” She stares out at the mangrove-choked river and returns to her thoughts.
We pass the spacious playground at the primary school, speckled with children already out for recess, cheeks plastered white with sunscreen, scarlet slouch hats for shade beneath the eucalyptus.
“We’ll take you in to see Dr. Orry this afternoon,” I say.
“Over my dead body,” she says, then laughs at the irony.
Friday nights I was allowed to come down here from school and play tennis with the Tooradin juniors, Bobby Genoni, and the Tomkins. The tennis courts rippled with weeds and now there’s a glinting machinery shed. Then small mansard-roofed houses crouched on each side of an orange brick edifice that rises up from behind a white ironwork fence. Old man Genoni’s house.
“Monstrosity,” my mother says, the word she always uses when we pass all of these buildings on what was once part of the farm. The town creeping out in our direction, over the bracken-covered rise we called Fox Hill, just a fibro shack with a family who worked on the place. They were sent away when the Genonis bought, back when my father called Italians “New Australians.”
“What’s this?” he asks from behind, leaning forward to pull at my mother’s new stick from beside the seat.
“Sharen’s son made it,” I say, just guessing.
; “His name’s Reggie,” she says as if I should know. She scratches at her psoriasis, tiny flakes falling as snow on her shoulders.
“They’ll be gone soon enough,” my father says.
My mother turns to me, her face freckled dark as a basket weaver’s, the side of her neck gathered like a lizard’s. She could be a peasant from anywhere, but she’s the daughter of a dead postmaster general. “Your father’s sorting things out,” she says and then there’s silence as we round the bend.
The inlet always surprises me, the fact of this town right on the coast, the farm so near the water. Pelicans and fishing boats, the gray sand foreshore, a far cry from the white sand of the Ninety Mile Beach or the Great Ocean Road, a further cry from the winding highway up the California coast. Here it’s tidal; armies of miniature crabs pock the mud.
I picture Isabel on the cliffs at Big Sur, watching out to sea. I picture her sitting outside on the sidewalk at that restaurant on Larchmont with its blue and yellow Provençal tables, speaking French to the waiter, or trying to, her hair swept back by sunglasses. As I arrived I watched her as she braided her hair into two long plaits and tied it up behind her, then she pulled her glasses down over her eyes and smiled. An African bangle easy on her arm and the small tattoo of the virgin.
My mother examines the coins in her purse as though they might be her last. It’s Isabel who comes from nothing, who’s re-created herself, encourages me to do the same.
“Park there,” my mother says, pointing to the sandy hillock by the pale green fibro hall where she always insists she walk in from, where the Tooradin Historical Society hosts its annual chair contest. My father, society president, deputizes Margaret Boatwell to beg my mother annually to donate a chair from the big house, but my mother annually doesn’t. Earley wins anyway, with the tablet-armed chair of his grandmother’s, a dark cherry-wood with one arm widened for writing, as though turning into a flattened upturned hand, where he believes his own great-grandfather once worked on sermons back in Barnard Castle in County Durham. A chair now charred out in a field.
Wedding Bush Road Page 5
