Thirty Thousand Bottles of Wine and a Pig Called Helga

by Todd Alexander

  One time we tried to instil a work ethic in the kids by making them face that pile of fence palings Jeff had scored ‘for free’. Usually it’s Charlie who baulks at such a massive task whereas Lucy dives right in, eager to please and get the job done right. This time, however, Charlie (in a display of earthy manliness he clearly didn’t get from his father) pulled off his shirt (at least I didn’t have to tear it off his back myself) and started piling those palings in the neat stack requested of him. The enormity of the task was too much for Lucy, however, and within minutes she was in hysterics, crying that she was getting splinters (no, sorry children, no gloves supplied) and that Charlie was getting in her way. But with Vicky and me dismissing the dramas and embracing Charlie’s enthusiasm (that admittedly didn’t last for much longer than fifty or sixty palings) we managed to get all six thousand four hundred and fifty two of Jeff’s ‘free’ palings stacked neatly on a pallet, as per his instructions. (Disclaimer – the exact number may have been significantly less than this.)

  We did try our hand at hiring help. One day a fifteen-year-old neighbour rode up our driveway on his bicycle. He introduced himself and said he was looking for work. We’d heard from our neighbour Andrew that Matthew charged himself out at twelve dollars an hour and particularly loved doing anything that utilised machinery but there was no way Jeff was going to risk hearing ‘please don’t hate me’ from a teenager so I told him we had nothing at the moment but that he should call me in a month or two.

  Two days later my phone rang. ‘Hi, it’s Matthew, I was just thinking maybe you had work for me now instead of in a few months.’

  You had to love the kid for his mettle and industrious nature.

  ‘Actually, I do have a job for you.’

  I introduced Matthew to the paling mountain. ‘You can come any day you like, work any hours you want, and all you have to do is bill me for the hours you work,’ I explained. ‘We need every nail removed from these palings.’ (Another cost to subtract from Jeff’s ‘free’ score.)

  After an hour or so, my phone rang. ‘Do you have another job for me to do? This is really boring and it’s really hard.’

  I showed Matthew the pigpen and instructed him how to distract Rodney and Billy in order to retrieve their not insignificant piles of poo.

  ‘Are you over it?’ Jeff asked him at the end of the day.

  ‘I’ll see you over the school holidays,’ I said, miming a hammer de-nailing planks of wood.

  Eerily, he never returned.

  For other working bees, friends roped in friends, about half of eBay came at one point or another to pitch in, even overseas visitors like our pig-buying friend Sheena and my mate Andy who I’d met in Africa and have remained penfriends with for twenty-five years, spent hours and hours in the vines doing what needed to be done. And my lovely friend Belinda is always on hand to help, roping her mum, Virginia, in whenever we need an extra pair of hands. When she’s here on holidays from Melbourne our friend Nic transforms into not-so-Lazy Susan, our work experience cleaner. The list of people who have helped is long.

  But when all those people go back home to their city lives, it is just Jeff and me, two sets of hands (though one with a right hand slightly bigger than his left), shaping Block Eight from a one-house, sometimes-harvested, no-animal farm into a thriving, busy, never-dull and never-resting business and farm – and the closest-to-perfect home we could ever hope to share.

  Missing in Action: One Pig

  Ten years ago de-stressing after work meant fighting through city crowds to find a bar with enough seats for the group, waiting an eternity for the bartender to catch our eye and take our order, then struggling to be heard over the noise of office workers debriefing. We’d have a few twelve-dollar glasses of wine then laziness would lead us to a fifty-dollar taxi ride and a greasy meat-laden pizza, and the whole night would set us back about two hundred dollars. Our ears would be ringing from the bar noise, our voices hoarse from yelling above it. And it might have ended with my face in a bucket thanks to my friend Belinda’s bright idea to challenge me to a Rosé-drinking competition.

  Our home was in Annandale on an alleyway littered with garbage bins on a plot of land tightly sandwiched between others, where the only outlook was the neighbours’ roofs and walls. But Jeff and I were content with that . . . until we got a taste of an altogether different life.

  *

  This morning we were woken by the unmistakable sound of a gas cylinder shooting flames. When we went outside in our pyjamas, a hot air balloon was directly above our villa, about thirty metres off the ground. There’s something majestic, otherworldly and completely mesmerising about watching those enormous balloons float on the breeze. We waved at the passengers high up in their basket then got ourselves cups of tea to watch the balloon eventually land on the property next to ours, skimming tree tops as it came down.

  *

  Around 5pm, while Jeff was finishing tiling the bathroom, I walked up to the animal pen. I let Helga out first because she never wanders and Winston is embarrassed when she sees him stepping into his harness and won’t do it if she is present. Once Helga was outside, I placed Winston’s harness around his front legs – lately he had taken to licking me as I completed the task. I tapped each foot I needed him to lift and he complied with a minimum of fuss. Wesley had already gone to the lead and bit it playfully – he loves walks and knows as soon as he sees his brother in his bra he’ll soon be galloping freely and munching on delicious grass.

  I took the animals to the dam in the dip between our two olive groves. The water was lower than it’s ever been since we moved here but there was still enough for my pig. It had been a hot day and Helga made a beeline for the mud, rolling in it awkwardly to cover herself in wet stinky sludge. Wesley found a patch of long grass to eat and Winston used his front foot to bring a branch of a gum tree closer to the ground so he could feast on its young leaves. He’s a bit of a Gumby at these kinds of things but eventually he got some leaves between his teeth.

  Jeff brought two glasses of our own Rosé (Belinda and I have shared many happy nights over it) and we sat on the deckchairs we’d been told we’d never get to use and talked about our day: jobs we’d finished, jobs we were yet to begin. We watched the animals frolic and feast and their antics made us chuckle as we glanced past our vineyard to the commanding view of the national park, and the silhouette of the Great Dividing Range beyond. For as far as our eyes could see there was not a single man-made object. We never tire of this beauty.

  Two of our guests walked over to join us. Patrick and Veronica are a young Italian couple living in Sydney and this was their second visit to us in a matter of weeks: they had fallen in love with Helga and returned with the specific purpose of seeing her again.

  Helga lived up to her reputation and showed them great affection. She crawled over Patrick and leaned up to place her snout against his lips as he kissed and cuddled her with genuine fondness.

  ‘This is his real girlfriend,’ Veronica said teasingly but Patrick was oblivious. His attention was solely on my pig and she was feeding off it; lapping it up.

  Helga sat for him like a good girl and that strange look of pride came across her face. She opened her mouth in what initially looked like a smile but soon developed into a yawn – her bottom teeth are small and comical and the yawn made us all laugh.

  I try to be objective but cannot ignore Helga’s magnetism. There is something about this pig that is hard to define – her joie de vivre is infectious but more than that, this sow seems to touch people in a profound way. They flock to her, feel a need to touch her and bond with her. Later Veronica would post photos of their Helga encounter on Instagram and the caption read: Be kind to all kinds.

  It feels as though life with Helga is the end of the first chapter of what has proven to be one of the greatest experiences of our lives and every step along the way has got us to this point, to wine by the dam late in the afternoon with people we would never have met in the bustle of a cr
owded city. Unlike the boardroom, there are no lies or deception here; there is no self-serving ulterior motive. It just is.

  Later that night I told our neighbour Natalie about Helga’s biggest fans.

  ‘You should write down all your Block Eight stories,’ she said.

  ‘As if I have time for that,’ I scoffed, and poured her another glass of our latest Chardonnay.

  *

  The following morning, I had reached the last part of my routine and the bit I savoured the most. I delivered Helga her bowl of milk and she vacuumed it up in a few hungry seconds like it was the last she’d ever receive. Drunk on its goodness and brimming with excitement, she trotted around her pen then came to me for cuddles.

  Once she was comfortable she started to nuzzle gently into the meaty part of my thumb, making quiet sucking noises. Her breathing steadied and as I scratched her lightly on the belly in regular circular motions, her eyes slowly began to close and I could imagine that she thought she was back with her mother, safe against the warmth of mum’s gut with siblings by her side.

  A sneeze from the goats startled her and she opened her eyes, but only for a moment, and when she saw me above her she knew she was safe. She closed her eyes again to continue her suckling. This moment never lasts long because Helga is very busy and has much to do, but for those few minutes each morning we are closer than I’ve been with any other animal. Together we are quiet and calm.

  While Helga suckled I made a mental list of all the jobs I had to complete and I took deep, contented breaths.

  In an instant she was off, bursting back into the goats’ pen to chase Winston and hunt for their spilled food. I got up and brushed myself down.

  As I began my work day, I thought, How lucky are we? And then, But dammit we deserve this after everything we’ve done to get here.

  The following night, Jeff and I celebrated our fifth anniversary at Block Eight by going to our favourite local restaurant. We had fifty-six dollars in our bank account and were in debt to the tune of a million dollars but to us, it was worth toasting our ‘magnificent success’.

  Two urban yuppies who could barely grow a pot of herbs had thrown in ludicrously lucrative careers to try their hand at farming, building, hotel-running, animal husbandry and everything in between. Our business still wasn’t profitable but it was bringing in more gross income than we received as employees in the big smoke. We now knew how to grow high-quality wine grapes, turn them into award-winning wine and sell out of it each and every year. We had an accommodation business with a weekend occupancy rate in the ninetieth percentile. We knew how to care for animals we’d never encountered before, and even how to massage an eggbound chook. Sure, I still had sleepless nights over finances, but what small business owner doesn’t?

  We’d suffered the heartbreak of losing entire crops and animals we loved but these were balanced by the insurmountable highs of sharing Block Eight with our kids, and Mel and Jesus’s daughters. We’d endured floods and severe droughts, prepared for the worst as thick clouds of bushfire smoke darkened our property, and ran out to see hot air balloons land on our open fields. My in-remission mum was also helping out at Block Eight, getting the villas ready with stock for the guests’ arrival, and the sight of her in her little Block Eight uniform was as cute as a button. Try as I might, I’d also let those stupid bloody tanks run out of water again and again and to this day I have lost count of the emergency phone calls I’ve placed to Phil.

  We’d never worked so hard but we were happier than we had ever been sitting around boardroom tables, and with all of that behind us, the business was edging closer to being in the black – so what if our own villa lacked a shower or kitchen because quite honestly I’d forgotten what those things actually were.

  ‘To five years,’ Jeff raised his glass.

  ‘To us,’ I chinked mine with his. ‘You know, I think it’s time we expanded the business.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ he said with a chuckle.

  ‘No, I mean it. I’ve been thinking . . .’

  And two months later we purchased a tour bus and were in the midst of building a wine bar that levered out over our main dam. It’s a structure we built ourselves, with no help from anyone. I even proved myself a better than competent labourer to Jeff’s builder, pre-empting his needs by fetching this tool or that, keeping a spotless work site just like Pete demanded of Jeff when he taught him all he knew. Me, a builder’s labourer and chief saw operator! Yes folks, I had finally overcome my affliction – well, nearly . . . just don’t ask me to cut along a line with a pair of scissors. We had plans to build our animals a beautiful large enclosure so I was in search of the next addition – undecided between a deer, llamas, a cow or a donkey. If boredom in Annandale was our nemesis, at Block Eight the only thing we ever had to worry about was exhaustion (and angry kangaroos).

  *

  Just when you think you’re on top of things, Block Eight sometimes finds a way to knock you back a peg or two, keep you honest and remind you that you’re at its mercy.

  It began with a broken whipper snipper, but that was fine; we were in drought so the grass wasn’t long. The following week, an air conditioner in one of the villas broke during a forty-degree heatwave. Then, in the same villa, an electrical fault caused the spa bath to stop working. We had to wait on spare parts so apologised to our guests but received our first complaints since opening. It was depressing to have things out of our control impact our guests’ experience. The heatwave had been keeping guests away – for two months our business had been down forty per cent on the previous year – but at least the new tours were helping plug some of that gap.

  Taking advantage of some of the guest-free days, Jeff and I continued to work on the wine room, taking four long, hot, exhausting days to build and install the roof, forcing me to face my fear of heights and just concentrate on getting the job done. It was such a happy milestone for us when we had it all in place. Not long after, the rains finally came and our fields turned from dead brown grass to thick lush green. Then the ride-on mower broke and it took weeks to get the replacement parts and the grass went crazy.

  Our friend Richard was staying with us and, being a builder, he reminded Jeff to strap down the fancy new roof we’d built or one strong wind would blow the whole thing off. But it was a job Jeff was dreading so he put it off.

  Then the front door lock broke in the same villa where we’d just repaired the air conditioner and spa and, after replacing the blades in the mower, I was two hours into my eighteen-hour mow-a-thon when it got a flat tyre. I moved on to whipper snipping with the new machine we’d bought because repairing the old one would have been too expensive.

  But at least the wine room was coming on in leaps and bounds. We’d even started talking about dates for a launch party.

  I took the animals for their afternoon walk and, as it began to drizzle, we took shelter in the wine room with Jeff, who was just putting away all his tools. The rain got heavier, then it began to hail, then the wind whipped up and began to blow the rain horizontally into the unsealed room. The animals panicked and, though the storm was ferocious, we concentrated on keeping them calm. Then in the roar of the wind and rain the entire roof of the wine room peeled off and disappeared. Jeff and I just looked at each other in complete What the fuck?

  But there wasn’t time to think. Helga was terrified and wasn’t having a bar of that shit – she ran off into the rain, heading for the bush. I knew my pig and I worried she would keep running until exhaustion took over and then she would be lost to me forever, disoriented in the bushland adjoining our property and never able to find her way home. My heart sank; I had to go after her. The rain bucketed down and I bolted in the direction she had run but the goats wouldn’t let me out of their sight and, even though they hate rain more than anything in the world, they chased after me.

  I called out Helga’s name as loudly as I could, but I could barely hear it myself so there was no way she was going to know I was looking for her. L
ightning lit up the sky, thunder crashed overhead and that wind – the one capable of ripping an entire roof structure off a building – was bending trees about us at incredible angles. It wasn’t safe for the goats outside, so I ran all the way back to their pen to lock them away. By now Jeff had joined me so we could look for Helga together. The thought of losing her was pure agony.

  As I got to the pen with my confused, drenched and frightened goats I knew my search for Helga might take hours but I would do anything to make sure she was safe. I walked through the open gate . . . and there she was. She was terrified and moaning with exhaustion. I doubt I had ever been happier to see a pig. My lovely little pig.

  Animals corralled, it was time to face the situation at the wine room. Hours and hours of work, thousands and thousands of dollars wasted. But how incredibly close that roof had come to the overhead power lines, which could have severed and shot sparks around wildly, just metres from where the animals and Jeff and I had stood.

  ‘We have to concentrate on how fortunate we were that things weren’t much worse for us,’ I said to Jeff.

  ‘But sometimes you just feel like throwing in the towel and walking away,’ he said. I had never heard him sound so dejected since moving to the property. ‘I had the strapping of the roof down on my list of things to do tomorrow.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Jeffy,’ I said. ‘I’ll help you build it again. I’ll be with you every step of the way. Now come on, let’s go shopping to buy some lovely cushions for our soon-to-be-finished wine room.’

  And just like magic, his face lit up.