by Susan Duncan
***
One morning after a phone call from my mother triggers the usual guilt, an unseasonably frigid southerly wind cuts bone deep. Bob sees me layering on sweaters and thick trousers. Less than an hour later, I throw everything off as a dreaded hot flush pounds in. When my teeth start to chatter, I retrieve the clothes.
'I'm going for a walk,' I mutter crossly, loathing and infuriated by the indignity of a disobedient body. How glibly I lived in my young flesh.
I grab Chip Chop and slip her into her harness. She raises a paw to help, like a baby lifting an arm to slip into a sleeve. On the upper track, not far beyond the youth hostel, five male lyrebirds, their tails fanned like exotic dancers, are wooing a hen. Five! Their performance lasts for only a moment, then they dash away. One bird flies to a branch, the others scurry off, though not far. I stand still, watching, hoping for more. None wants to be the first to flee and perhaps lose points with the hen, but then they all move further into the scrub and I lose sight of them.
At home, I rave about the lyrebirds.
'You're so elated,' Bob says, remembering the surly woman who set off less than an hour earlier.
'It was such a privilege to see,' I reply. 'One of those moments that will always stay with me.'
'Got a phone call while you were out. I've been asked to look at a project for a brickworks north of Brisbane. We could spend some time, if you like. Maybe go and see Pia,' Bob suggests, his eyebrows raised in query.
'Sounds great and when we get back, I'd better start searching for a closer home for my mother. She told me she has the flu but not to come and visit. She's always been like an old dog when she's crook, going off into a corner and lying low until she's better. But it's not good. She can't go on and on forever without help.'
'How about we have her to stay when we get back?'
'We could try. But I doubt she'll come.' I turn into my study where I'm writing a story for The Weekly: 'Don't know about this retirement business. Seem to work harder than ever.'
'But you get to pick and choose what you do. That's the bonus.'
***
Pia and I shared a house when she was newly divorced and I was newly a widow and neither of us had the faintest idea what to do next. We had a great time living together and what had been acquaintanceship turned into abiding friendship – with only the usual number of glitches. Looking back, I wonder how I could've been petty enough to bicker about whose turn it was to do the vacuuming. This is a woman who searched the streets for me when I was drunk and hysterical and unable to find my way home. All night she sat and quietly listened while I ranted about a man who was unable to be faithful even to his mistress. She never said a word, either, when the next morning I slipped back on the face of denial and continued with the affair.
Not long after I found Lovett Bay and went my own way, she discovered Brunswick Heads. It's an unspoiled little town on the far north coast of New South Wales, close to crowded and colourful Byron Bay. She bought a rundown weatherboard shack on the main street with draughty gaps between the floorboards and only a shapely poinciana tree to recommend it. I thought she'd lost the plot. To be fair, she thought the same thing when I bought the Tin Shed. She has the knack, though, of finding beauty in the rough. Says she looks at a house as though it's a movie set and every corner has to be a perfect little picture. In less than a year she transformed it into an airy, light-filled palace with a master bedroom and bathroom separated from the main part of the house by a covered walkway. The bridal suite, I call it. It's blinding white with diaphanous curtains that float down to the black-stained floorboards, a couple of white-covered, swan-like antique chairs and an oval table with turned wooden legs. Elegant. Like she is.
She had a scare not long after the hammering and painting subsided and the neighbourhood began stretching its neck over the fence to see what she'd built. And whether she'd broken any local council codes. 'Tired as, most days,' she said during a telephone call.
'Renovating is exhausting,' I soothed her. I didn't think any more about it. I should have known better. A few weeks later, she phoned to say she was having blood tests. The tiredness was unshakable, no matter how many hours she spent in bed. When she turned out to be anaemic, the sirens started flashing. Bowel cancer. They plonked her in Lismore Hospital so fast she barely had time to buy a new nightie. I drove up to try to help her switch off the doomsday monkey that props in your head when a doctor diagnoses cancer. Hard to shift, that damn monkey.
Two days after the operation, though, she sat in bed looking incredibly rosy-cheeked and fresh and said she wasn't worried. 'I know I'll be ok,' she said in a way that left no room for doubt. 'I'm a lucky woman. Got it early. I'm a lucky, lucky woman.'
The day before I began the long drive home, a good-looking fella in a bright red vintage Mercedes pulled up. He jumped out and wandered over to where I was sipping a cup of tea on the new deck. He carried a giant bunch of strelitzias, their orange and purple heads sticking out of tissue paper like fierce tropical birds.
'Hello. I'm John. I'm the other style queen of Brunswick Heads,' he said, full of humour. And bravado.
'Good to meet you, John. But I'm not Pia. She's in hospital. She'll be home in a couple of days.'
He went beetroot red, stammered a little. 'I've just spilled my guts,' he spluttered, 'to a total stranger!'
I laughed and told him to come in for tea. Took his phone number for Pia who called him a while later. He helped her to build a lush and sumptuous tropical garden full of colour and texture and they've been friends ever since.
It's been almost a year since her surgery. Although we stay in touch by phone, it's not the same as sitting down for a good, cosy yarn.
'How long do you reckon we'll be away from home?' I ask Bob when we've set a date for our visit.
'Five days. A little longer if you feel like it. We can take Chip Chop so we don't have to rush back.'
***
It's a mind-numbing twelve-hour drive along the erratic Pacific Highway. Lanes swing from double to single, speed limits switch from fast to slow and then slower. There are roadworks everywhere. Concentrate or pay the price. Chip Chop refuses to stay in the back seat and sleeps on my knees. She feels like a hot loaf of bread. We make our first stop three hours after leaving so she can have a run. She sniffs around, pees but stays close, checking regularly to make sure we haven't left her behind. Maybe she's smarter than we think. Lose her here and she's lost forever.
I pull out the picnic basket, set out morning tea on a lawn alongside a sandy river estuary. The last slices of dark Christmas fruit cake, fragrant with brandy, are wrapped in tinfoil. There are a couple of bananas, and two thermoses of coffee made almost completely with milk and heavily sugared. For wake-up hits. Leftover roast lamb – which we'll have with spicy tamarind chutney, cucumber and lettuce on sourdough bread – is thawing for lunch as we drive.
This is how we used to travel when I was a kid. Only the tartan blanket is missing. There weren't many roadside cafés then. Travellers stopped for picnics in a paddock by the side of the road. Inhospitable farmers hung signs saying Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted where you couldn't miss them, if you weren't welcome. My mother once broke her ankle on one of our picnic stops. Slipped on a riverbank at Tambo Crossing in north eastern Victoria when she wandered off searching for wildflowers. 'You'd just had scarlet fever,' she reminisced one day during a phone call. 'I was looking after you like you were a heart patient. Which is what you did for people with scarlet fever back then.'
My mother didn't watch where she put her foot and slipped on wet grass. 'The people at the hotel were so kind. Brought a mattress to carry me up to the car. We drove to Bairnsdale Hospital where it took a long time to get treated because of the school holidays. There were kids with broken bones everywhere.'
Not far away on the coast where the Brodribb River flows into the Pacific Ocean near Marlo, Nan, Pa, Uncle Frank and Auntie Belle were fishing their hearts out when suddenly, Nan had a flash. '
Something's wrong with Jean. We've got to go home,' Nan insisted. (My mother was called Jean until her sixties, when for some reason – neither of us can remember why – my brother and I began calling her by her first name, Esther.)
Everyone snorted and told her not to be an idiot, but Nan was a tiny, long-chested woman who knew how to put her foot down, as she was fond of saying. So they gave in and packed up the camp.
'On the way home, they drove past the hospital. You and your brother were playing on the front lawn. Uncle Frank noticed you so they stopped and came to see what was happening. Best flash Nan ever had. No-one ever forgot it. Nan's flashes were always spot-on. Mine are, too. It's just that nobody believes me. You should, you know. Second sight is always passed from generation to generation.'
'Not to me,' I retort, unable to believe my mother's story is true. Although I do remember the mattress, the broken ankle, even the grassy slopes of the river.
'No, of course not. You're too much of a bull at a gate. But your cousin Jayne [Uncle Frank and Auntie Belle's daughter], she's got it. Remember that trip so clearly,' my mother continues. 'The car broke down on the way home. The car was always breaking down. Dad couldn't use a screwdriver without asking which end was up. We all scrambled out. I was struggling with crutches. There were cows everywhere. Wild cows! I was terrified but I didn't want you kids to know so I started singing. Those stupid cows followed us. Apparently cows love music. But they didn't charge.
'You and your brother picked wildflowers. Dad walked ahead, hoping to find help. At the top of the hill, he looked back at his little family. "I'm not just an ordinary man," he shouted down at us. "I'm the luckiest man alive!" Never forget that,' my mother says. 'My great big bear of a husband who couldn't get his head around saying "I love you" unless he had a few grogs in him, erupted with joy. Stuck with me all these years, that memory.'
I check the story with Uncle Frank because my mother has a tendency to embroider the past beyond recognition and Barbara's research is teaching me the necessity of establishing the facts if we're ever to truly understand the past. When I think about it, my mother's stories mostly end in a grating one-liner that leaves you nowhere to go. I wonder, sometimes, if that is her goal. To kill the queries before they pierce the shell and the past comes oozing out. Because my mother has secrets, I know she does. One day, she may tell me what they are. Maybe.
'Not quite right,' Uncle Frank says. 'Your brother saw us driving along. When he couldn't catch us, he ran inside. Your father jumped in the car and followed until he caught up.'
Later, I admit to Esther that I ran the story past Uncle Frank to make sure it was true. She's not even shocked or angry. It is appalling to realise we have so little faith in each other.
'And?' she asks, with a hint of smugness in her voice.
'Yeah. Close enough to the truth,' I grudgingly reply.
'You might want to listen more carefully in future, you might learn a few things. Your old mother's not as silly as you think she is.'
'I have never, not for a single moment, thought you were silly,' I tell her. 'Frivolous. But not silly.'
My mother prepared the most glorious food for our picnics. Cold roast chicken salads, new baby potatoes, chocolate cake – made from newfangled cake mix, but we didn't know the difference. Food we kids would eat. It was the best part of any trip. By the time I grew up, roadside cafés were epidemic and picnics faded out of fashion. But I have drifted back to them since I married Bob. I like the quietness of stopping by a country roadside instead of a busy café. Of eating food that I know is fresh. And we can give Chip Chop a run.
Bob and I drink our coffee, eat a slice of cake. Put down a bowl of water for the dog, which she ignores. Then I take over the driving. The black tarmac is smooth under our wheels, like licorice. There's not much traffic and fewer hulking great trucks than usual. Further north the heat builds. We move the thermostat from warm to cool air in the car. By late morning, the sun bounces off the rear windows of cars ahead of us like a pickaxe of light and my head hurts.
'I need a break. How about an early lunch?' I say.
Bob nods, but I can't find a good spot to pull over so I keep going. About an hour later, it begins to rain. Lightly at first.
'Wish we'd get some of this at home,' Bob says, shaking his head at the futility of rain that falls where it isn't needed.
By the time we reach Grafton, the windscreen wipers are going at full strength and on-coming cars loom out of the blur with their headlights blazing. We tune in to the local radio station, listening for the weather. The host is interviewing a country singer, Troy Cassar-Daly. There's no weather report. We pull into a rest stop, leave the radio on, eat our sandwiches and drink our coffee in the car. Brush crumbs from our laps onto the floor.
'Vaccum, Chippy,' I tell her, pointing at the crumbs. 'Off you go.'
We give her a tiny bit of cake to make up for not giving her a run. Bob gets out of the car and races around to the driver's side. I slide across and he jumps in, smelling wet, and wipes his face with his hands.
'Are you cold?' I ask.
'Nah. It's tropical rain. Warm as bathwater.'
Near the turn-off to Evans Head, water falls in black blankets. Bob pulls over. 'Might give Pia a call, see what's happening,' he says, reaching for his mobile.
She picks up immediately. 'Where are you? There are floods everywhere. The Pacific Highway is closed from Ballina. You'd better head for Lismore and come the back way.'
We wait a while for the rain to lighten, but it only gets heavier. Still no talk of floods on the local radio station. We ease slowly back onto the road and travel at forty kilometres. It's too hairy to go any faster. Visibility is mostly guesswork. By the time we reach Lismore, it's early evening. The streets are so empty, it's eerie, as though the whole world has hunkered down. When we reach the river on the far side of town, we find out why. It's flooded and the road to Brunswick Heads is under water.
'I'll get out and see how deep it is,' I say, rolling up my trousers. I look at Bob's face and expect to see tired resignation, but he looks like an excited teenager with greying hair and waves of deep wrinkles chiselled into his forehead and fanning from the corners of his eyes. The drive has become an adventure.
I sigh. The rain has finally stopped. Another car arrives on the other side of what looks like a small lake. People get out, walk to the water as though they might be able to find a way to part it. They wave to us. We all wait a minute or two to see who'll be first to have a go at crossing. No-one moves so I start wading in the headlights of the car. The water is tepid, the colour of tea. The noise of frogs is deafening and mozzies zoom in like choppers. When I'm knee deep, I turn back. There's no way we're going to get through.
'Call Pia. We're stuck here for the night,' I say.
We have dinner in a Chinese restaurant where we're the only customers and stay in an upstairs room of a motel that doesn't allow dogs. Chip Chop is irate. She barks incessantly making Bob so cranky he jumps out of bed to drive the car a block away to an empty city street. No-one there to keep awake. She's euchred.
Overnight the flood waters drop as quickly as they've risen. The Pacific Highway is clear so we retrace our tracks and follow it to Brunswick Heads. By the time we reach the Byron Bay turnoff, it's as though it was all a dream. Only the frogs keep up their torrid chant long after the deluge ends. No rain at home, though. Not a drop. For us, the drought goes on and on.
'Thought we'd never make it,' we tell Pia when we pull into the driveway.
'You need webbed feet to live here sometimes,' she replies.
Bob grabs our bags. Chippy leaps all over Pia, who babysits her occasionally when Bob and I go away.
'I've put you in the bridal suite,' she says.
'No way! We don't want to turf you out of your bed!'
'The spare bed is too small for two,' she replies. 'You'll be more comfortable in the big bed.'
Bob drops our bags inside the door. On the deck there's an old bl
ue and white Chinese pot filled with water plants.
'Tony's?' I ask.
She nods. 'Still miss him, the silly old bugger. Why'd he have to go and die on us?'
'Yeah. Some holes never fill.'
She goes into the kitchen to put on the kettle. 'S'pose you want a cup of tea?'
'Do we ever!'
The next day, Bob is ready to leave for the brickworks before the sun is up. Pia is awake and gives him tea, toast and marmalade. Then she and I spend the day together. Catching up. Going out for coffee and cake. Playing Scrabble. Being silent.
'You look so well,' I tell her.
'We are lucky gels, you and I,' she says a bit tearily. She gives me a hug and I hug her back.
'That's a first,' Pia says, laughing. 'You used to stand stiff as a board if I tried to give you a hug. Like it was an assault of some sort. Bob's good for you.'
'Must be going soft in my old age,' I retort.
'Aren't we lucky gels,' Pia says again, 'to think we're going to have an old age!'
Bob walks in on our tears. 'Thought you girls would be enjoying yourselves,' he says, concerned.
'We are!' we reply, wiping our eyes and grinning like idiots.
6
ONE DAY WHEN THE wind blows in from the south east so hard the sound of branches crashing to the ground is like distant gunshots, I delay Chip Chop's morning walk. 'Don't want to get donged on the head,' I explain when Bob asks me when I'm going to put the dog out of her misery. 'I'll wait till it eases.'
'That's when the biggest branches fall,' he says, grinning and heading for his shed.
'Ok, ok,' I mutter. Because I know he's telling me fear cannot drive life. But there's nothing wrong with being sensible.
Chip Chop jumps on the daybed in my study, sighs heavily and accusingly and falls asleep. I pull out Barbara's files and go travelling into the past. The most detailed and personal document from Mackellar's time at Tarrangaua is the inventory. It is formally set out and reeks of gentility and an era when whatever the wealthy touched assumed an importance, even provenance, of its own, regardless of its tangible worth.
