Nevertheless, She Persisted

by Mindy Klasky

  “You need to be awake tomorrow, that’s all I care about.”

  “We need more chips, then, because I want to drink this pub dry.”

  Their plan was thwarted by a man in his thirties. Not bad looking, but with a sense of his own entitlement. When he started flirting, Rachel said, “We gotta go, this was old a lifetime ago.”

  “Why does he keep switching between us, anyhow? It makes no sense.”

  “He wants a fuck,” said Rachel. “Doesn’t care who.”

  “Well, he’s an undesirable piece of snot and has put me in a snit.”

  Rachel looked across at her and pointed to her drink. “Good. Down the rest, and we’ll go explore the park.”

  “There’s a park?” Erin realized she was a little the worse for wear.

  Rachel signed. “You said it was pretty when we came in.”

  “Oh, that park. Did you know I’m a one pot drunkard?”

  “I know that if I could’ve gotten a second into you then you would’ve given that bloke what for.”

  “No, I wouldn’t.” Erin stated what to her was obvious, “I never speak up.”

  “Fuck that for a bowl of chips. You need training, girl.”

  The park was pretty and cold and had a rotunda and lots of moss. Rachel spent maybe fifteen minutes photographing moss and lichen with her camera phone.

  “Does that thing have a map function?” Erin wondered this aloud, trying to sound innocent. She already knew the answer, because they’d already used the map, but she felt wicked.

  “Maps suck,” said Rachel, “big time.”

  “Why don’t you want to get to Robertson?”

  “Don’t want the job.”

  “Then why?”

  “They need me. I’m their girl. I see what they need seen.”

  “That’s why they kidnapped your father?”

  “No, that was to get even.”

  “You must’ve been delightfully rude,” Erin said wistfully.

  “I’ll teach you how,” Rachel promised.

  They sat on a bench, with moss and faint lichen and the railway line at their back and the green in front of them.

  “Do you actually want that coffin?”

  “Fuck, no.”

  “Do you want to bury it, perhaps?” Erin was moving inexorably to a dangerous conclusion.

  “Fuck no to that, too.” Rachel was vehement.

  “Good.”

  “Why good?” Rachel sounded surprised.

  “When we get to wherever we’re going, you tell them the coffin is theirs. They can throw if off a cliff if they like.”

  “He’s my father.”

  “If he’s done even half to you what my husband did to me, you don’t owe him a thing. And they’re doing this emotional blackmail thing. Let them deal. In fact,” Erin was waxing enthusiastic, “we could take off and they could find two other candidates.”

  “I want the job,” admitted Rachel.

  “So do I,” said Erin. “Only that panel…”

  “Yeah, all wrong.”

  They sat in silence for a bit, watching the evening light play out across the park.

  “I know,” said Rachel. “We share the job. They get both or neither. Split the income, share the caretaking.”

  “How does that work?”

  “Dunno.” Rachel was cheerful, nonetheless.

  “Like you wanted to see a platypus?” Erin tried not to sound sarcastic.

  “Nup. Let me think.” Peremptory, that’s Rachel, but grounded, in her way. “It’s like I felt when I saw the ghost and when I knew how to get out of Canberra.”

  Erin nodded. “I’d trust that feeling.”

  “Even if we don’t get the job, we’ll give those fucking interviewers a run for their money. Share the weird.”

  “And the coffin?”

  “Over the cliff,” said Rachel, enthusiastically. “Where it belongs.”

  When they were both sober enough, they staggered to their motel. Erin noted that Rachel snored. She also noted that Rachel took her medicine almost religiously. So quietly that Erin hadn’t noticed until she was looking, though: another kind of silencing. The reed-thin young lady kept surprising her.

  She did so the next morning, for she was wearing a dress that almost came down to her knees. For the interview.

  Robertson hit them before they knew.

  “We could’ve been here last night. Before dinner even.” Rachel was all kinds of depressed.

  Erin was distracted. “Robertson is bikie central,” she said. “So many bikies and so many machines.”

  “Interview time!” Rachel was suddenly too enthusiastic for anyone’s good.

  “No. Next set of directions. Meat pie place.”

  “Oh.” Rachel deflated. “Why the bikes?”

  “I guess the bikies eat the pies, though how that helps us…” She pulled the car into the sole space it would fit.

  Immediately the women got out of the car, a couple of young bikies started in on them. Whistles and looks and gestures. It was enough to make them get back in the car and move on. Or it would have been, if Rachel hadn’t whispered to Erin, “They need to visit Bombala.”

  The women giggled. One young man retreated into his beard and the other bent over his bike and adjusted something with a deep and determined focus. Rachel and Erin speculated on what he was adjusting (and whether it was actually his bike) as they headed into the shop.

  “Welcome to the Famous Robertson Pie Shop,” the red words declared. “Red on yellow,” said Rachel. “Mean something?”

  “If it does, I can’t think what,” said Erin.

  No messages awaited them. No one knew a thing about an interview. The house they were supposed to find was “somewhere over there,” and when Rachel mentioned the “feral meat pie” that they’d been told to look for, she received a huff of offended air.

  Erin felt all kinds of guilty and bought two pies. They ate them then and there and were depressed by the experience. Good pies, but tourist. And early morning pies were just wrong in any case, even if they were full enough of starch to make a truckie’s breakfast at a highway rest-stop.

  “Should’ve had coffee,” said Rachel.

  “Yep,” agreed Erin. “Because we’re both so relaxed that extra caffeine won’t send us into space.”

  They each left half their somewhat gluggy pies as decoration. Erin matched one with the other so that it looked round again, and then Rachel put the reconstructed breakfast dead-center in the middle of the red table. “Red and yellow,” said Erin, “like the painting outside. But not feral.”

  “Wish it were. We tried.”

  “We tried and we are being tried and this whole thing is trying.”

  The women smiled complicitly at each other and left, before their pie reconstruction was noticed.

  “The meat pies were probably great,” said Erin, guiltily, as they climbed back in the car. “It was too close to breakfast.”

  “Should’ve chosen the wildberry.”

  “Yep.”

  “Wait! I know!” Rachel raced back into the shop and came out with a bag. “Two wildberry pies.”

  “Let’s get down the road.”

  “I so agree,” said Rachel. “Our frankenpie was still on that table.”

  Robertson was a strangely flat town. Low houses, low sky. They drove around for a minute and found a green and leafy roadside near a school. A good place to eat third breakfast. Ferns and grass and trees and uneven ground. Erin eyed that ground, assessing which hump would provide the kindest seat.

  The pair scrunched down where Rachel decided. She opened the packet and carefully spilled two pretty wildberry pies onto her lap, face up. Erin could have sworn that they looked back up at the women.

  A set of pastry eyes blinked.

  Rachel screeched and stood up. The pies lay there on the green, tumbled, just for a second, then they sprouted legs. Eight legs each. Just like spiders. And then, just like spiders, they scuttled.


  “Here we go again,” sighed Erin, almost resigned to the unnatural, and she started chasing.

  Those tiny pies scuttled everywhere. Around trees, under chunks of grass, even up to the road, over it and back again. They left a minuscule track of pastry behind them. When the golden, flaky creatures discovered a nicely-trimmed hedge and hid behind it (jeering, in all probability), Erin looked for Rachel. She was still standing where they had sat, brushing her dress down. Her face looked as if she’d swallowed something vile. Erin sighed again. She could possibly catch one pie, but not two. One would have to be enough. And, she thought, they’d better not bite.

  She walked around the hedge and realized that the pies had stopped scuttling. They were nestling (happily, she hoped) in between the hedge and a tree. She smiled.

  “Don’t move,” she told Rachel. “Keep an eye on that hedge and that tree and tell me if the pies try to make a move.”

  She went back to the car and found the light scarf she’d worn to the first interview. Eden suddenly seemed a long way away. Using the scarf as a net, she bent and carefully trapped the pies. The pies wriggled and pushed like tiny lizards.

  “I want to let you go,” she said to them, firmly. “But we’ve been told you’ve got a message for us, and that means breaking you open. Unless you have another idea?”

  The pies stopped moving and all four eyes blinked at her from behind the gauze. Slow blinking. A slip of paper gradually slid out from under the top crust of each. The pies jostled and jumped until the papers were down in the bottom of the improvised bag.

  “Thank you,” Erin said, and gently released the pies into the wild. They scurried back to their safe place. After Erin had picked up the paper, she took a quick final look to make sure they were still there, still alive, still…something. Erin turned away even faster than Rachel had.

  “What?” asked Rachel, as they got into the car.

  “If I’m not mistaken, there will be baby pies in Robertson’s future. Tormenting ants, probably.”

  “God, I hope no one can see them.”

  “So do I, Rache, so do I. We couldn’t kill them, though, or eat them, or do anything except let them go.”

  “Those pies are horrible.” Rachel shuddered.

  Erin gave her a hug and they drove well out of sight of that tree and that small hedge. She stopped down the road, so that they could examine those two pieces of paper. Rachel refused to handle them. “Too much pie,” she said.

  One page was a map, and the other described a gate they had to pass. “If you pass the right gate and the right door and make the right decisions, the house will be waiting.”

  “A house, waiting.” Rachel sounded unconvinced.

  “Maybe it’s the house that needs a special caretaker?”

  “Well, we’re special all right.”

  Erin put the papers in the boot. If I were to ask Rache to choose between living with those pies and that platypus, I bet she’d choose the platypus. There was something quite squicky about those pies.

  Rachel wasn’t the only one discomfited by feral pies. She herself managed to drive for an hour in a place that was so small that one crossed it in five minutes. It was calming. Round and round Robertson they went, avoiding the street with the school and its new wildlife. Going nowhere. They didn’t follow the instructions until then, and they didn’t move far. Neither of them wanted to find the gate. Neither of them wanted to finish the trip.

  “Go left,” Rachel would say, “and left again.”

  Then Erin would go left two more times, and complete the square. It took creativity, filling in an hour driving around a country town, but finally Rachel said, “Achievement unlocked.”

  “What?”

  “We’ve been down every street four times. Some of them we’ve been down twelve.”

  “Are you sure?” Erin was fascinated.

  “Yep.”

  “Then we’d better move.”

  “Coffee first,” Rachel declared, and Erin agreed with her, so they had their coffee (in the car in order to avoid completely the possibility of pies underfoot) and then finally followed the map that was stained with berry juice and almost-cooked cornstarch.

  The map took them past the showgrounds. It said to find Kangaloon Road, but they were already there. Like the short drive from Moss Vale to Robertson in the morning, this was embarrassingly easy.

  “Think of it this way,” said Erin, confidentially. “We’ve kept the buggers waiting a day and a half now. And we’re probably not going to be offered a job, either of us.”

  “They can keep the coffin, and we can go home.”

  “I don’t want to go home,” said Erin. “Home is…bad.”

  “I want something new,” Rachel admitted.

  “Where are you from? Sydney?”

  “Melbourne.”

  “So’m I.” Erin found it astonishing she’d not asked this simple question earlier. “Why don’t we finish the drive to Sydney, spend all our money on renting a two bedroom place somewhere, then look for jobs? We can hire a trailer or something and pick up our things when we’re ready.”

  “Start again, but not here.”

  “Precisely.”

  “I’ve got five thousand dollars,” Rachel admitted.

  “Less than two thousand, by now. I emptied our joint account when I ran, but it’s all gone. Too fast.”

  “Money does that.” Rachel nodded.

  Rachel took out some paper and did some sums. She said, “Let’s do it.” Then: “Oh, look, a gate!”

  It was an old-fashioned gate. Poles sunk into the ground, wooden slats joining the pole and a wire hook to keep it closed. The base of the verticals was covered in ivy.

  “Very pretty,” approved Rachel.

  “Not ours, though,” was Erin’s response.

  “Why?”

  “That farmhouse looks ordinary.”

  “It so does.” Rachel gave one of her elegant, whole-torso shudders. “Modern fibro. Cheap, cold, and full of asbestos.”

  “I was told stone,” offered Erin. “A stone house with a big garden, and they already have a gardener.”

  “Not there yet then.” Rachel was filled with gloom. They went back to the safety of the car and tried again.

  The next gate they checked was almost identical in structure. On each side, however, were willow trees.

  “Must be so wet here,” Rachel commented.

  “Must be,” Erin agreed. “I don’t think it’s ours, though.”

  “They said wet.”

  “They told you different things than me.” Erin decided, yet again, that the interview panel needed a deep psychological evaluation of its corporate brain and probably therapy, to boot. They wanted Rachel, so why did they demand she behave like someone else to get the job? And why the heck did they steal that coffin? And why treat the runner-up like a message-girl? These people were so up themselves they were coming out the other side and into crazy-land. “I can’t see the house.”

  “Nor can I.” Rachel jumped lightly over the gate and walked down the path as if she’d done it fifty times before. “Not ours,” she said, a few minutes later. “Bloody awful place. Fibro and mold.”

  “I bet this whole trip was supposed to be symbolic,” Erin mused. “We left Eden and fell to Earth and did a Pilgrim’s Progress thing.”

  “Well, we mucked up the symbolism.”

  “We made our own.” The thought cheered Erin. She saw that Rachel was in danger of smiling. They drove on, unworried by the nearness of noon.

  “Oh,” said Erin, a minute later. “This is so ours.”

  “It is,” agreed Rachel.

  There were three empty doorways in an old stone wall. Each doorway was topped by a flat stone.

  “You choose,” said Erin, without stopping to think.

  “The one on the left.”

  “Your gut says?”

  “My politics says.”

  “Your politics is like your driving: I don’t want to rest my life-c
hoices on it. Your gut, I’ll trust.”

  Rachel got out of the car and walked to the three doorways. She examined them closely and cautiously. “This one,” she said, and went through the middle one.

  The path was sheltered by trees and was mossy at the edges. Gravel underfoot. “More water,” Rachel pointed out. “A good sign.”

  At the end of the path was what looked like a shed. Slate roof, bricks around the doors, more stone for the building itself.

  “Very swish for a shed,” Rachel said.

  “I bet it’s not a shed. Which door?”

  After ten minutes, Rachel gave up.

  “My gut’s got nothing.”

  “Then we’ll take the one with the working bolt,” said Erin. “Although we could go back to the car and feed that gut of yours.”

  “Want this over.”

  Erin nodded and pulled the bolt, then pushed the door, and they both went through. A very English garden lay before them. Green grass. Spring blooms. A hedge.

  “We’re entering another world,” said Rachel, in wonder.

  “We’ve been in that other world since bloody Edrom. This is merely confirmation.”

  They walked round the edge of that very English garden until they reached a wall.

  “Oh God,” said Erin. “We have a door in a wall in a fairy-tale garden.”

  “And it’s a fairy-tale door.”

  “It is. Old ironwork on the door, and all that ivy that almost covers it, and…” Erin wasn’t sure what middle-aged women did in fairy-tales. She didn’t know if she wanted this door to be the last, or for matters to improve. They pulled the door open together, for of course it was rusted almost shut, and they went through together, too.

  Ahead of them was a path inlaid with different colored stones. Flat. Winding. There were trees all around. The path spiraled around some trees and twisted out of the way of others.

  “Wait a tick,” said Rachel. She darted off, using the trees for cover. Seeing what lies ahead, thought Erin. What a good idea. At that moment, Erin had no idea what she wanted, which of the futures she and Rachel had discussed was the one that bore her name. At that moment, all she cared about was finding out why the selection committee was playing games. If they wanted someone who could see statues move, then they had a choice. They should’ve made the choice, not humiliated the candidates.