Trails in the Dust

by Joy Dettman

  She tossed the empty spray can into her green bin then stood staring at the house. Pat and Mike Bertram had been concerned about white ants. Their building inspector wouldn’t find any – or in the nineties, when they’d had the house restumped, it was termite free.

  Her mobile was flat. It spent half of its life flat and the other half plugged into its charger. She needed a new mobile, or a new battery, but no one made new batteries for four-year-old mobiles.

  The girls would have replied to last night’s text. They’d probably left messages on her answering machine. She didn’t need to play those messages to know their varied responses. Katie would be pleased. She’d have Jenny’s future living arrangements worked out by now. Georgie would be non-committal. Trudy would blow a gasket.

  She was unpacking supermarket bags when the beeps started coming through. They didn’t interrupt her task. She’d bought a packet of four Magnums from the supermarket. The three she’d squeezed into the motel’s freezer were soft and misshapen. They’d harden up.

  Her freezer was half full of meat she’d bought for Jim. She looked at a roast. He’d liked roasts. He’d liked chops and steak. Lila would appreciate a slab of steak she’d bought to make Jim a stew. He’d loved her steak and onion stews. She placed the steak on the sink to thaw, placed a tray of sausages beside it. She liked sausages. They always reminded her of Norman.

  The stove was dead. The kitchen saw no sun until the afternoon and this morning it needed the stove’s warmth.

  ‘I won’t miss hauling in wood,’ she said, and glanced at her fingernail. It was growing but looked more deformed than the rest. She wouldn’t miss paying for loads of wood either, which she’d need to do again after Easter. She got the stove burning with kindling and junk mail and was on her way out to the wood heap when she diverted to the laundry, a flat-roofed shed, overgrown with wisteria, pretty when it bloomed, but by mid-April, a rampant weed poking its feelers between the weatherboards, attempting to get at the junk stored on ancient shelves – ancient junk most of it.

  ‘When did I last use starch?’ she asked a dusty box full of it. Couldn’t remember when.

  Mike and Pat hadn’t been impressed with the outdoor laundry; it hadn’t killed their interest. ‘Rustic,’ Pat said. They’d wanted character. They’d got plenty of that. They’d never used a wood stove. Would probably toss it. Would probably install central heating after their first winter here. They hadn’t been impressed by Jim’s ramp, which was an eyesore. ‘Easy enough to get rid of,’ the agent said.

  She gathered an armload of wood and when she dropped it on the hearth, she wondered how many tons she’d carried in her lifetime. She added two chunks to the stove, added a bunch of Juliana’s draft printouts then closed the firebox and wondered how many thousands of those pages she’d burnt. She’d burnt Jim’s stockpiled cheque butts and taxation returns that went back to ’79. He’d kept everything. As had she.

  Pat and Mike had loved the garden. They wouldn’t when the leaves fell. They weren’t fond of rosebushes but might change their minds about roses if they allowed the hedge to bloom before bringing in a bulldozer to get rid of their thorns.

  That’s life, Jenny thought, the thorns and the beauty. You can’t have one without the other. Her path was thorny at the moment, but it might bud up and bloom again. She was standing at the window looking at the hedge and the road behind it, remembering that final day of Jim, when she’d stood here watching that road for him to come riding home and eat his leftover chicken casserole and mashed potatoes. There were a few electric buggies in Woody Creek, but she’d always recognised Jim’s from a distance. There’d been so much length in him he’d looked like an adult riding a kid’s tricycle.

  Her mobile was on the bench to her right. Sooner or later she’d have to read her messages. Texts had become her preferred means of contact recently, but she stood staring at the phone for minutes before picking it up

  Katie’s message was brief. GR8 stuff Nanny but don’t you dare sell Amy’s desk. Georgie’s was as brief. The original dark horse. What’s the story, mate? Donna Palmer’s was typical. I told Mum when I recognised your phone number in that Gazette ad that you were up to something over there.

  Trudy had left two messages on the answering machine and in the second of them she sounded as if she were crying. A Helen Anderson had left her name and number twice. She was interested in buying the dining suite from the library. For two weeks Jenny’s advertisements had been running in the Gazette’s ‘For Sale’ column.

  She’d listed the boys’ cot. Its emptiness haunted her. She’d listed the big television, bought so recently by Jim. Trudy’s bedroom suite was listed. They’d bought it for her twenty-first birthday, which made it over twenty years old. It looked new.

  The dining table didn’t. As a twelve-year-old, Raelene had started gouging her name into its surface. They’d caught her but not before she’d gouged the line for the R. Polish disguised it. It didn’t remove it.

  Jenny returned Helen Anderson’s call. She told her about that gouge. ‘Apart from that, it’s in good condition.’ Or it had been before she’d buried it beneath computers.

  ‘We’ll come now,’ Helen said. ‘We’re at Bungala. We’re interested in the easy chairs and television too – if they’re still available.’

  There was a dirt road direct from Bungala to Woody Creek, or a less direct but sealed route through Willama, and when the phone was down, Jenny walked through to the library to make the dining-room suite available. She’d need to clear the table and round up the chairs.

  Her two desktop computers would have to go. She unlocked the glass door, propped it wide, then returned to the library to untangle electrical cords, but found it easier to pull out plugs and worry about the tangle later. She freed her laptop and moved it onto Amy’s desk. The desktop models weren’t as easy to move, but she did it piece by piece. The monitors were heavy, but she got both out to the veranda. One of the towers was heavy. She was making space for her old printer on Amy’s desk when she changed her mind about it and carried it out to add to the pile. She untangled her laptop’s cord but took the others out in their tangle. Harry would take them to the tip.

  The table hadn’t smelt polish in ten years. Its extensions concerned her. They’d been extended and weighted down by computers for so long that she had difficulty sliding one of them in, but it went in and she hurried off to locate and dust the chairs. She’d told Helen they were upholstered in a smoky blue fabric and were comfortable. They were. She’d loved that suite the day she’d chosen it – and had she been in the market for furniture today, she would have bought it again.

  She gave the table top a quick polish, gave the empty bookshelves a wipe over with the polishing cloth, then turned her attention to the easy chairs. They’d lived in the kitchen for the best part of forty years, were well worn but had worn well. Furniture used to be made to last. She smelt Jim’s chair; he’d sat for so long on it, the scent of him had permeated the fabric, but it had to go. Everything had to go. She was removing a stain on its seat with carpet cleaner when she heard a motor that didn’t sound like Harry’s ute. It would be Helen Anderson, who must have taken the back road.

  Lila not fond of strangers, Jenny went out the side door to save her visitor but changed her mind when she saw Trudy’s Commodore in the drive. If he was in the driving seat, Lila was welcome to his leg. She stood, expecting him to get out. Trudy got out of the driving seat. She didn’t look Jenny’s way, or not until the boys were free and running, when Jenny ran to greet them and was almost knocked down by her boys.

  Then blown away by Trudy. ‘You can’t do this, Mum, and I’m not allowing you to.’

  ‘You can’t park there either,’ Jenny said. ‘Harry’s coming around to take that lot to the tip for me.’ The boys were into that lot. They recognised Nanny’s computers that they’d never been allowed to touch.

  ‘Why is your fings out here for?’ Ricky asked.

  ‘They’re too old,�
� Jenny said. ‘Move your car onto the lawn, please, Tru. I need the driveway clear.’

  ‘What the hell were you thinking about? This is my home.’

  ‘Move your car first and argue second,’ Jenny said.

  Trudy walked back to her car and Jenny took the boys through to the kitchen, where she found their plastic cup-a-tea mugs with the bunnies on their sides. She was making tea when Trudy came in ready for war.

  ‘To go and do a thing like that without telling me or Georgie. Your behaviour is irrational, Mum. It’s been irrational since Dad died. You’re cancelling that sale and speaking to a professional.’

  ‘I’ve been speaking to professionals all week,’ Jenny said. She had. Mike was a retired accountant, Pat a retired schoolteacher, add to them the solicitor, plus the agent, and that added up to an overdose of professionals. ‘Tea or coffee?’ she asked.

  ‘Have you signed anything?’

  Jenny made tea for four and placed the mugs on the table. She opened her biscuit tin. The boys liked an oatmeal biscuit with their cup-a-teas. Trudy wasn’t interested in tea or biscuits.

  ‘You’ve lost more weight. Sit down and eat something,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Have you signed anything?’

  ‘Signed, sealed and witnessed – and will deliver in sixty days.’

  ‘When did you sign it?’

  ‘Yesterday, when they paid their deposit – conditional on white ants.’

  ‘There’s a cooling-down period.’

  ‘I’m not hot so you’d better start praying for white ants. Sit down and eat. Your clothes are hanging off you.’ Her jeans were. Jenny had known them when they’d been skin tight.

  ‘Where is the white ants, Nanny?’ Ricky asked.

  ‘I haven’t got any,’ Jenny said. Trudy was standing, so Jenny drank her tea standing. ‘You must have left early,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not here to discuss my timetable. You can’t do this, Mum. You need time to come to terms with your loss before making any major life-changing decisions. Any professional will tell you the same. It’s been three weeks. You’re running blind.’

  ‘Where is Papa?’ Ricky asked.

  ‘He took a rowboat to heaven, darlin’ – and if I’m running blind, you’re running yourself ragged down there while he sits on his arse. Drink your tea.’

  ‘I – don’t – want – tea! I want my home!’

  Jenny’s sigh was a moan. She didn’t need this, not today. She didn’t need a daughter telling her what she could or couldn’t do either. ‘You left home a long time ago, darlin’, and just when we thought you were back, you did it again. It’s a house. You, your father and those boys were my home and I would have lived happily in a tent with them and you. I can’t live here, not alone, so stop fussing and sit down.’

  The boys weren’t accustomed to Mummy being told to stop fussing and sit down. They stared but didn’t interrupt.

  ‘Where are you going to live?’

  ‘In motels,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Can you hear how irrational that sounds? What about Lila, or will you have her put down?’

  ‘That’s an irrational question,’ Jenny said. ‘And what’s so irrational about not wanting to wake up dead one day in this town – and have you wanting to bury me in with the bloody Hoopers?’

  ‘Stop your swearing.’

  ‘Then change the subject or I’ll do more of it.’

  The boys changed the subject to a Nanny samich. It wasn’t lunchtime; they settled for a misshapen chocolate-coated Magnum, and were dripping ice-cream and shedding chocolate when Harry and Lila crept up on them. Lila cleaned up their drips and chocolate and Trudy stopped arguing to greet Harry.

  He wasn’t alone. Lenny, his eldest son, owned a trailer and a 4WD capable of towing it fully loaded. He’d backed it up close to the shed and was waiting out there, so Jenny went out to tell him what to load.

  Two men with a supervisor and small boys saying, ‘Pitch it,’ can achieve a lot in an hour. They pitched two lawn mowers. The third, relatively modern, was worth money, according to Lenny, as was the wood router. Jenny brushed dust and drowsy redbacks from both with a hair broom while the men cleared the bench. Tools used by John the day before he died were returned to his toolbox. The timber he’d been shaping, they leant beside his router. He’d helped fill Vern Hooper’s house for a few years after Amy died. Like Harry, John McPherson had been more than a friend.

  Lenny climbed a ladder once they’d cleared enough space to stand a ladder. He dragged rolls of wire down from the rafters, dragged down angle iron, timber – and a portrait of Jim’s great-grandfather.

  ‘I used to wonder what happened to that,’ Jenny said. ‘Pitch it.’

  ‘Pichit,’ the twins chorused, and old James Richard Hooper with his white rat moustache and his great-granddaughter’s cockroach eyes was gone. The computers were the last to be loaded, and before Lenny vacated the drive, a new Commodore towing a horse float was waiting to back in.

  There were four in that car, mum, dad and a young couple just starting out together. They bought Jenny’s original dining suite and the easy chairs from the kitchen. They bought the big television but didn’t have enough money on them for the cabinet it sat on. Jenny didn’t want it. She couldn’t move the thing to clean behind it.

  ‘Consider it your wedding present,’ she said, ‘if you help me clear out what’s in it.’

  It was packed solid with videos, Jim’s, Jenny’s and the boys’, who were pleased to see their old friends. Helen looked at the one Jim had labelled Juliana Conti and Jenny reached fast for it.

  ‘Mum and I love her books,’ Helen said. ‘Is she on it?’

  ‘My husband taped her one and only interview,’ Jenny said.

  It took two men to carry that cabinet down to the horse float. It took two men to carry the television and the table. The women carried the chairs, and when they drove away, the marks of what was missing were visible. There was vacuuming to be done then, and a video player to connect to the small kitchen television, but working side by side, Jenny and Trudy connected it then played Juliana Conti. The boys would have preferred Beauty and the Beast, but they sat down to watch the lady in pink.

  ‘Dad played this the day we came home from London,’ Trudy said.

  ‘You laughed.’

  She wasn’t laughing today, but she’d stopped nagging. Jenny watched the screen with one eye while making salad sandwiches. That pink suit, that wig, that day was etched deep into her memory. She’d had an unscratchable itch beneath the wig, and the skirt of the suit had been too short. The shoes were her own. She still had them. Never wore them now but hadn’t been able to throw them away.

  ‘Everything seemed possible the day we arrived home,’ Trudy said when the tape was rewinding.

  ‘Winter Boomerang had just been released and was selling like hot biscuits. It was a happy day.’

  ‘What made you do it?’

  ‘Not the house again –’

  ‘I meant the video. That interview.’

  ‘Georgie, Katie, stupidity – God knows.’

  ‘Who was Margaret Morrison, Mum?’

  ‘Margaret?’ Jenny asked. ‘I never knew any Margaret Morrison.’

  ‘My birth mother. Georgie’s told me that she was some form of relative,’ Trudy said as Jenny slid the tape back into its cardboard sheath. ‘She told me she was dead. That she’d died twenty years ago.’

  ‘Papa got dead,’ Jamey said.

  They looked at him, but his words failed to divert Trudy. ‘What do you know about her, Mum?’

  ‘Not a lot. She was nineteen, unmarried, didn’t want to raise you.’ We’re all dealt a hand of cards at birth, and good, bad or indifferent we have to play the game out to the end, that woman in pink had said to a camera, and for lack of better, Jenny used her words. ‘You were dealt a poor hand at birth, darlin’. You were lucky to make it through the first week, but you ended up with the best hand at the table, with the best father in the world and a
mother who did the best she could. That’s all you need to know.’

  ‘How was she related to you?’

  Tell her, Jenny thought, then shook that thought away. Today she couldn’t take the fallout. Trudy’s mobile saved her. It was Nick. She needed privacy to speak to him so took the phone outside. It was a long call. All but one sandwich had been cleared away before she returned, and Jenny was dicing the stewing steak she’d taken from the freezer for Lila. The boys and Trudy liked her steak and onion stews.

  There was no further mention of Margaret Morrison and little interest in the sandwich. Trudy used to like her food. When she’d been carrying the twins she’d put on too much weight.

  And her mobile rang again. ‘Get a job and buy your own,’ she said to the caller. ‘No . . . I said no, Nick.’ And she hung up.

  He wouldn’t leave her alone. She was on the phone when they ate their dinner. She was on the phone again when Jenny tucked the boys into the cot they’d shared since babyhood. They asked her to put the side up, perhaps liking the security of being locked in, or perhaps because they enjoyed climbing over it.

  Trudy was in bed by nine, her mobile left charging on the bench. It rang twice, rang out twice, then started beeping, continuously beeping – and at eleven, temptation got the better of Jenny.

  Answer me, you fucking bitch.

  She dropped the mobile and stepped back from it, washed her hands of it, then wanted to wipe her fingerprints from it – or wipe that text – or read his previous texts. Instead, she went to bed. It was one-fifteen before that mobile stopped beeping.

  *

  The boys were out early. Their breakfasts used the last of her fresh milk and a good dash of long-life, which didn’t taste quite right in tea.

  Trudy ate a few bites of dry toast, drank her tea black.

  ‘The caravan kiosk will be open this morning. They’ll have fresh milk,’ Jenny said. ‘Take the boys for a drive out there and get some bread too.’