TUESDAY
The taxi squeals slowly to a stop by the concrete dome of the underground tank. I glance at the meter. Sixty-three dollars for fifteen miles.
“Nice old place,” says the Indonesian driver, sweating from under his burgundy head wrap. “You never would guess this was out here.”
Over the seat, I hand him seventy dollars in the bright-colored cash, feeling ridiculous for getting in the back of the car out of habit, when we’re nowhere near a city, but glad my wallet is in my pocket, the way my mother just drove out of the hospital. An overnight stay for just over three hundred Australian dollars, when I’m uninsured here.
Stiffly, I wave at the driver then limp past the dying lilacs to where the dinner gong hangs on its wire like an owl. Sore in one leg like my father—two days here and I’m lame as he is, my hand freshly bandaged and a plaster on my forehead, plus a white paper bag with a jar of seven Vicodin. When I asked what would happen if I took them all at once, the nurse said I’d probably just vomit.
Standing in the kitchen doorway, I have the sense of a second arrival. I peer through to the dark living room; the television’s on but silent, no possum being hunted. An ache in my ribs at the sight of the boy kneeling at my mother’s feet, his jeans hanging low as a rapper’s; my mother obscured by the back of her recliner, but I can see she’s in a dress. He’s bathing her feet in a wooden bowl of mud. Leaves and a branch from the flowering gum.
“What’s this then?” I ask. The boy stares up with a covetousness that gives me a chill. My mother turns and shrugs as if there’s little she can do. “Reggie’s softening up my toenails,” she says. “You can cut them later if you like.”
“They’re hard as hooves,” he says, massaging her toes, kneading her brown buckled feet. Weird with him in here still shirtless, his young hands on her colorless arches, the purple tributaries that crisscross her ankle. Painting mud up the backs of her calves and on the ridges of her varicose vein. My mother who never wears dresses.
“Sit down, Danny-Do, and watch the tennis,” says my mother. She doesn’t inquire about my hand.
“Why’s he even in the house?” I need to sit down but keep the advantage of height; my mother’s gaze returning to the muted rhythm of tennis, her other blue-veined foot taps the carpet lightly. The boy looks up, a smile in the edges of brown-blistered lips. His knotty hair and big dark eyes. “I just came to live on the farm for a bit,” he says. “Isn’t that right, Ruth?”
Ruth?
Her mouth softens as she hears it, the way he handles her foot, pulling her toes so she smiles as it tickles. I feel the dog against my leg. The dog that usually clings to my mother like a sidecar.
“Sometime I come in,” says the boy. “To help. Coz no one’s here. And now you come and fall off that ladder.” My mother seems to nudge him with her muddy foot, a warning. Everyone here conspires in pairs.
“Without you here,” I say to him, “there’d have been no ladder.” I feel churlish when I should just grab him and turf him out. Instead, I move farther into the room, my good hand poised on the back of the couch for purchase. “Shouldn’t you be with your own mother?”
The boy works on the bridge of her foot, the mud darker than the shining wet skin on his wiry suntanned arms. “Can’t live with Sharen all the time. She’s crazy.” Then he levels up at me. “Anyway, this is my place too,” he says. “My dad was born here.”
I feel my breath get shallow. A memory of round-faced Gracious who worked up here in the house, her sweet, ashy smell, as if she’d been bathed in smoke. A photo somewhere with her holding me as a baby, bundled in her wrinkled arms.
“Before you lot was even here, my Uncle Worry used to work with sheep, when there was still sheep, and Walker ran cattle. Some of them cattle was his.” When the Genonis demanded they leave and Earley, keeper of peace, drove poor Gracie and that son of hers, Walker, up north somewhere near Gundagai in the back of the old Ford Ute. I remember them leaving. I must have been eight or nine.
I can see Walker in the boy’s face, in the rustic strength of it. I rest a knee on the arm of the couch, pretend to be comfortable.
“I told you he was Walker’s son,” my mother says.
“Walker Dumbalk,” says the boy. I don’t tell him how his father gave me nightmares as a child, that I’d see him marauding in the paddocks. My mother called him Darcy Dugan after some famous prison escapee, but sometimes she called him Walkie Talkie because he barely said a thing. Mean dark eyes and bushy brows. He used to slaughter the meat, skinning sheep that hung in the meat-safe, but I never knew he owned cattle.
“Where’s he now?” I ask.
“Down at Yarram,” says the boy. “Where I left him.” But he looks away, shifty.
“Why did you come up here?”
“To get away from him,” he says. “Find my mother.”
“Reggie wants to be where his family comes from,” says my own mother, as if correcting, baiting me. She once told me I wasn’t raised on a farm; a farm raised me. “There is a belonging,” she’d said, but I wasn’t sure if she meant a belonging to the land or to her.
It’s not just the dull ache in my bandaged hand and being laced with Vicodin. This Reggie troubles me; something restive in his bloodshot eyes, his lashes long and laced with dust. His hands are too friendly, plumping my mother’s skin in the mud and brown water.
“You like me, don’t you?” he says, and with that my mother turns too; she gives me an almost inviting smile.
“When I come back he’d better be gone,” I say.
“You’re not coming back,” she says, and I know she means for the long haul.
As I stand to leave, the ache between my stitched-up fingers jabs into my arm. “Perhaps you should attend to your own mother,” I tell the little roof rat.
“Remember, I’m the one healed you,” he says. His eyes are keen, not dull and angry as his father’s, but fractious somehow, dutiful. For all I know he’s a godsend.
OUT ON THE veranda I bathe in the late-morning heat, let the day blind me. They call this sun a “hot white bell.” A hot white bell that takes its toll. Sucks the life force from you and leaves the seeds of melanoma. The dumb eyes of the cattle as they lift their heads and chew their cuds, regard me.
From behind the high wall of the bluestone barbecue, my father appears unexpectedly at the fence line, kneels to roll under the post and rail. He lies flat in the grass and then turns himself over beneath the bottom wire, arms stiff by his side as if he’s in some imaginary straightjacket.
“What happened to you?” he asks.
“Fell,” I say, unsure if I have it in me to tell him the details or walk over to help him get up, but there’s a slope and he seems breathless, struggling to stand. Cast in the grass, the way a sheep gets cast in a field, or the way the disabled girl crawls in the grass in the famous Wyeth painting. My father who won’t get his hips replaced, afraid his heart might not survive the anesthesia.
I extend the fingers of my good hand down to the roughness of his palm. His skin hard as bark from all the years of axe handles and shovels, rasping horse’s feet, and I’m suddenly aware of my own. Once coarse as a farm boy’s because that’s what they were, they’re softer and pale but already burnt and ingrained with gray sand, returning to their old selves. Away from Isabel’s creams and lotions. If she could see me here, standing out in this grass in my socks, bandaged and sore, wrapped in the red plaid cut-off shirt I wore when I was seventeen, my father on the ground.
I hoist him up; this little weathered man who I almost wish could just stay in that bleak house in “Bitter Snug” with Elsie, beyond the reach of my mother’s revenge. Part of me wants to hold him and whisper, Thank you for looking after the place, despite everything, I’m sorry I’ve been gone. My father who rises up light as a marionette and I can almost hear his hips, just bone against bone, crying out for cartilage. Glassy-eyed but smiling still, he stands, hopeful for a moment with me.
I brush the grass sta
lks and prickles from the back of his pullover. “Mum drove me to hospital,” I say. “Last night.”
I notice a mark on my father’s neck. Skin cancer or hickey? He lifts his shirt collar up to hide it. “Over to Berwick?” he asks. “The new hospital? There’s a nurse called Jenny. Did you see her? They’re terrific, the girls there.”
“I wasn’t there for the nurses.”
My father nods, kicks at a sandy divot in the lawn, a place where a rabbit has dug and then perched. “Of course not,” he says.
He forgets there’s no audience for that talk with me. “So what have you been up to?” I ask, try not to fixate on his collar or his too many layers of clothes in the heat.
“Oh,” he says, cocking his head to conceal, “sorting things out with Sharen.”
Unsure what that might involve, I try to imagine what Sharen could do that my father wouldn’t endure—what would she have to incinerate? The houses, the stables, the horses? “Did you get that pony out of the cottage?” I ask him.
“Nearly knocked me down in the hall,” he says and tips his head back with a tight-creased smile, the way he, like my mother, passes off adversity, leaving me with a thin coil of guilt. “I said it could live in the paddock.”
“Will she pay for it?” I ask.
“She’s a bit pressed right now,” he says with that old apology in his red-rimmed eyes. He’s re-ensconced her.
“Her offspring means business.” I point to the roof with my bandaged hand. “Did you know he nests up in the eaves?” Again, a bite of pain between my fingers, the thought of the bark and pulling at the stitches. “That’s how I ended up with this.”
My father collects himself, an extra brush to the seeds on the arm of his sweater. Taking it in. “He’s just a kid,” he says. “Fourteen, but skinny.”
“He’s giving mum a mud bath.”
The droop in my father’s lower lids deepens as if preparing for a great weight of water.
My eyes draw away from Daniel leaving me, the disappointment all over him. I look past the roof into the bright yellow mouth of the sun. The same space between chimneys where I see the old man sometimes, a shape that appears in the memories that run about inside my eyes. If I blink it’ll be gone; a trick of the heat but it haunts me, driving old Gracious and Walker up over the border in that blue Falcon Ute, away from here. Seven hours straight it took me, with the two of them in the back just to make me feel bad. They wouldn’t sit in the front, neither of them, they wouldn’t look at me. Walker glowering at the back of my neck. I was afraid of his fist through the window. All of their things stuffed in three old yellow suitcases and a few hessian sacks beside them.
Before we left I’d tried to explain how it wasn’t my fault, and how it was a favor I was doing for them, taking them, but Walker just spat in the dirt near my boot. I tried to tell them it was Royal Genoni throwing them off, not me. I didn’t even own that piece of land anymore. But they refused to understand, and they didn’t believe I could do nothing about it, other than drive them away. They both knew what was true—nobody wanted Walker on the place, least of all Ruthie.
Near Holbrook, I ran into a dust storm and in the rearview mirror their faces went a dull kind of orange. Gracie’s white dress got covered but still the stubborn buggers wouldn’t sit up in the cab. Eventually, Walker banged on the roof and pointed directions to some fallen-down shack way back off the road in a patch of ghost gum country. It was on the way to Junee.
When I drove in through the dust to deliver them, Gracie’s ancient brother was there waiting, as if he knew. Wiry gray hair and a black birthmark in the middle of his brow, so still the flies looked stuck to his eyes. Uncle Worry, they called him. He was born down here before my time, but I’d heard of him through Gracious. Gracious who raised me but wouldn’t even look at me now and this old brother of hers who didn’t move to shake my hand, his eyes boring through me. Walker walked right past him, took their bags into the house, and the uncle watched as I left him with his sister by his side and his face kept coming back in my head as I drove through the night all the way home, hardly daring to stop for petrol.
When I got back down here I was so exhausted, it was like I woke from a sleep, and there he was up on this roof, in my mind, over and over I saw him up there. Uncle Worry. When I look now he’s gone. Close my eyes for second and he’s not there but it doesn’t mean I’m not worn out by what I think I see.
I head inside and see what the hell’s going on with Reggie. Sometimes when I look at him I see the uncle in his eyes.
Coming in through this back door is dangerous these days. Ruthie and her rules. Even if it was the front door when I was a kid, when we drove in through the avenue of gums and down the Pond Paddock hill, back when Gracie looked after me and took me for walks around the pond. Back before Walker was born and Sharen didn’t exist, and that cottage wasn’t yet there.
In the Senator’s Room the fallen ladder and the hole in the ceiling. I’m not allowed in here and still I’m the one gets blamed for not getting it fixed.
“Wasn’t there for the nurses.” Snooty little blighter. Coming back here and stirring things up. It was better without him; everything goes worse when he’s around. I forget, last time he came he had me sign those papers so I lost the land. Just because I wanted to sleep with Elsie. That’s all I wanted, a body to lie with. Ruthie never even gave me that. Only an occasional cuddle under sufferance, if I was lucky.
I loiter in the hall by the pew as if I’m a burglar in my own house. Sounds come from the living room like distant gunshot but it’s just the television turned up too loud. The tennis at Kooyong or wherever it is nowadays, that new place with the dome and the roof that opens up like an overhead cupboard.
From the doorway I spy her in her usual chair, the blue court on the screen divided by lines. Is it Phillippoussis, the Greek kid with the serve? Or hasn’t he played for years?
“Where’s Reggie?” I shout above the sound, but does she hear? She’s wearing a dress and the dog licks her ankles, a bowl of dark muck at her feet. Like Yarra pudding. I go over to it and take it away. “I want to talk to Reggie,” I shout again and she motions her chin at the half-open window.
“Better late than not at all,” she says and the crowd on the television roars.
THE HORSES PICK on the last remnants of green as rabbits disappear into burrows. I stand among them down by the pump shed in the Boy’s Paddock hollow. A richness of chewing and crickets in the silence. Leaning down I pull up a dockweed with my good hand. I could lie down in this grass how I did as a kid and pretend to be invisible, let my retinas burn, but a vehicle rattles up the drive, changing gears near the stables.
Almost relieved at the chance of outsiders, I listen to the sound wend up to the house.
Heading back up the hill, I climb the stile cautiously, step down near the compost heap, and watch out past the end of the shearer’s quarters. A truck pulling up by the old magnolia, clouded in dust. The dog barks from the garden steps. A four-wheel drive with a high diesel stack. A new silver Land Cruiser with an elaborate tray. Bobby Genoni with a woman beside him, sitting too close. And Jesus, it’s Sharen; they’ve seen me.
Trying not to limp, I move across the unmown grass, coop my dressed hand in my opposite armpit. All of a sudden my fingers ache hard. The tray of the truck decked out with ledges of tools, shovels and pipes, a pump with a bright green tank. Bobby gets down with a brown cigarillo, his face red and blustery, smiling. Sharen slides out from the same side. Her gingham sleeves rolled up, her hair clasped back, her eye shadow blue to cage her emerald eyes.
Bobby’s neck bulges from his collar, his hair thinning over a crimson Australian scalp, and I force a tight, distant smile. “Hey, Bobby G.,” I say.
I’m shaking his hand, reaching slackly with my left. “Sharen said you were in town so I came by to confirm, wish you all Merry Chrissie.” He butts out the cigar on the gravel even though it’s barely been smoked, twists it in with his heel. “You l
ook as if you’ve been in the wars, Dan.”
I shade my face in the sun. “Took a bit of a toss,” I say, sounding awkwardly like my mother.
“We’re on our way to Cranbourne,” says Bobby. “Anything you need?”
The slap of the flywire slamming, my father shuffles along the path behind me. “Maybe you should keep a lookout for antiques,” I say as we watch him emerge from beneath the shade of the ficus out into the sun.
“Thanks for letting Sharen stay in the cottage, Earley,” says Bobby. His hands jingle coins in his pocket.
My father stands atop the bluestone step beside the flagging roses and gapes at Sharen. The longing in his eyes reminds me how he once told me: All I want is a woman who’ll hold me. If we could only learn to hold ourselves.
“I heard she was moving in with you, Bobby.” I pick a deadhead from the nearest bush and feel the dull persistence in my stitched-up hand.
My father inches down beside me. “I told her she could stay on,” he says apologetically, humiliated. A mixture of shrunken and fawning. Despair in the red of his eyes.
Sharen acknowledges him with a cautious smile, but she’s standing by Bobby, her peacock eyes now strained on me, giving me a glimpse of what these men find attractive. Is it the audacity? Or that her jeans sit low for a woman her age, her midriff tan, the silver stud in her belly button?
“Dad, you know that house isn’t really yours,” I tell him, holding Sharen’s gaze. Her cheekbones are high, freckled by sun, and the air tastes raw. A new red mark stains the side of her neck. Our silence broken by the clang of the dinner gong, echoing through the afternoon.
“Lunch,” my mother shrieks through the trees from behind us.
My father brightens, as if we might all be invited, but I don’t move. “We need to do something about Reggie,” I say to Sharen.
“He never hurt anyone,” she says, defensive, but I hold up my bandaged hand as evidence.
Two fingers press against her thin dry lips. “He never did that,” she says.
Wedding Bush Road Page 8
