The Mother Fault

by Kate Mildenhall

The road signs are screens flashing info on kilometres, times and hazards onto the data screen in the car, always updating according to the road conditions. She remembers the old signs indicating the kilometres to a destination with fondness, the guessing games they’d play on the way to the beach, seeing who was closest in kilometres to their final stop. Steve always won. Of course. Now the signs give news updates too. The Department had decided everyone needed to be across a small and specific amount of news. Everyone’s curated news had become so filtered that people had started unknowingly driving straight into bushfires and flood zones. Or turning up at the airport to fly to a country whose democratic leadership had just been deposed. The new legislation had introduced a mandated minimum of news stories everyone was expected to know.

  Up ahead is Clarke’s Pass, a mass of hills that rise up out of the flat pastureland, eons old, a dead volcano. She’s always loved the feel of it. Measuring the earth beneath her as the car shifts gear to accommodate the incline. She crests the rise and the lowlands stretch out before her.

  Jesus fuck, it gets drier every year. The good earth of the plains, beneath which the aquifers pulse with their riches, drier now than it’s ever been. Fat pipes worming across the fields from the north, pumping some of the deluges that swamp them every wet season down to the drought-stricken south. At least they’ve stopped pumping it out of the ground. If the science hadn’t convinced the powers that be, the series of increasing tremors that cracked the foundations of industry from the west to the east soon did. It’s not a permanent halt, but it gives the earth a moment to recover.

  * * *

  She can see the neon signs of the service station in the distance.

  Essie stays in the car with her screen on, but Sam is quick to jump out and hovers while she plugs in.

  ‘Can I get something, Mum? What can I get?’

  ‘There’re rice crackers in the car.’

  ‘Yeah, but…’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  She swipes her hand over the payspot on the charge station, waiting for the quick ping of the verification noise. It doesn’t come. Instead there is a buzz and the light flashes red. See attendant, the screen flashes.

  Mim tries swiping her hand again, but the same message flashes. She sighs. Knocks on the window and motions to Essie that they are going inside. Essie nods, looks back at her screen.

  At the counter she tries again on the machine. The attendant is young, bored, smiles thinly.

  ‘Sorry, that’s declined. Did you want to try choosing another method on the touchpad? Another account perhaps?’

  Mim is out of the habit. She just knows that there will be funds, there has never not been. Ben’s wage goes in, does all the things it’s supposed to – mortgage, bills, a little aside for the emergency account, and the rest in the transaction.

  ‘Right, yes.’ She swipes her hand again, sees the options come up and selects the emergency account. She tries to remember the last time Ben told her what was in there. She squirms that she does not know.

  ‘Mum, can I get one of these, I’ll get one for Essie too?’ Sam holds up a flip box of chewy mints.

  ‘Hang on, Sam. Let me do this.’

  She selects the account, holds her breath while the machine thinks.

  ‘Muuuum! LISTEN!’

  The attendant raises an eyebrow, scowls at Sam. He is starting to scrunch up his face and she can see the telltale pink creeping across his collarbone. She feels exhausted already at the prospect of a meltdown.

  The machine pings approval. Her hands unclench.

  ‘Yes, whatever you want.’ She takes the boxes from Sam and slides them across the counter, relief coursing through her.

  She makes the call outside the car, knowing Essie will be all over it if she hears. ‘GeoTech, how may I help you?’

  ‘It’s Miriam Elliot here, I need to speak with someone in management.’

  ‘Sorry, Mrs Elliot, no one’s available.’

  ‘It’s urgent.’

  A pause, Mim prepares to go hard.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  She waits, steadies her breathing.

  ‘Mim, it’s Di Benton here. I’m so sorry we haven’t spoken yet, I’ve just been flat chat trying to work out what’s happening.’

  She’s met Di before. Knows she’s only second in charge. Can’t be that bad, then, surely. Or maybe they think a woman will do a better job of smoothing things over with Mim.

  ‘Have you heard anything about Ben?’

  ‘Not as yet, but we have everyone here working on it. Is there anything I can do?’

  ‘I’m sorry –’ She feels like she is sixteen, asking the bar manager at the footy club for her pay. ‘I’m just having trouble with our accounts. Have you stopped paying him?’

  ‘Stopped paying him? God no, why would we do that? Hang on, let me just check with Chelsea, you poor thing, are you stuck somewhere, I can send a car over?’

  Mim almost shrivels with embarrassment. The ridiculousness of big business. She imagines one of their former university departments offering to send a car and almost laughs out loud. ‘No, no, it’s fine, I just couldn’t work out – I mean, I suppose if he’s not working, if you don’t know where he is…’

  ‘Give me a second, Mim.’

  The line clicks and Mim paces beside the car, smiling briefly at Sam when he taps on the window and eyebrows a question.

  ‘You there, Mim?’

  ‘Yes?’ Mim stops pacing.

  ‘It’s not a problem at our end. I’ve checked.’

  ‘So?’ The anger fails in her throat. ‘So what does that mean?’

  ‘I don’t know, a bank thing maybe? Leave it with me, huh? In the meantime, are you sure I can’t send someone –’

  She cuts her off. ‘No, no, all fine. Really, it’s okay. I just want to know where he is, Di. I just want him home.’ Her voice cracks. Shit. She didn’t want that to happen.

  ‘Of course, of course you do, we all do. I’ll be in touch, you look after you, yeah, and the kids.’

  ‘Who was that?’ Sam asks as she starts the car. ‘Was that about Dad?’

  ‘All good,’ she says, turning out on to the highway and avoiding Essie’s eyes in the rear-vision mirror.

  4

  Before the border they begin to see the ravages of the latest fires. Unprecedented, again. The word has lost its meaning. The hills on both sides are still black. But it’s what’s underneath that’s the biggest problem. The fires burn so hard and hot now that they crucify the seedbed beneath the soil. All that grows back is scrubby acacia, ready to burn again. Flora extinction rates rocketing. Thank Christ for the seed vaults. Mim flips her glasses down. Up. Disaster makes her tired. She opens the window a little.

  ‘Mum, that’s too windy.’

  ‘Sorry, Sammy, just need to wake up a bit.’

  Essie’s serious voice, the one she uses to chastise, to educate. ‘You should pull over if you’re tired, Mum.’

  ‘I’m okay, just want to get there now, only a couple of hours to go.’ She eyes her daughter in the rear-vision mirror, staring out the window at the squares of yellow suddenly appearing in the black.

  ‘Do they grow canola in Japan?’ Essie says.

  ‘Not sure.’

  ‘Why?’ asks Sam.

  ‘For the Friendship Project, with our sister school.’ She holds up her screen and clicks. ‘No one else from my class will have fields of canola.’

  ‘Have you got any pictures yet? From the sister school?’

  ‘Nup.’ Essie shakes her head.

  ‘Maybe they’ll send a pic of an earthquake drill? Do you think?’

  Essie is non-committal. ‘Maybe. It’s meant to be intimate pictures. A real slice of life. Not something we can ask Google.’

  ‘But you can ask Google anything,’ Sam says and Essie whacks him on the arm.

  ‘Mum! Oww!’

  ‘Stop it, you two,’ she says and changes tack. ‘It’ll be good to take some pictur
es of the farm.’

  ‘Yeah, and then Dad, he hasn’t been in it at all yet.’

  ‘Of course,’ Mim says, flipping her sunnies down again as the sun sinks lower on her left and the glare shoots across the dashboard. She opens the window a little lower so that the wind gushes in, and makes it difficult for the conversation to continue.

  * * *

  When they hit the turn-off, she tells the kids to put the screens away. Even in the dark, she wants them to be paying attention, to mark the significance of this homecoming with her.

  In front, an orange streak in the headlights, green flash of eyes.

  ‘What’s that, Mum?’

  ‘Fox,’ says Essie.

  ‘I thought the foxes were all gone?’

  There is a part of Mim that is glad the eradication programs were never one hundred per cent effective. ‘Too smart for that, foxes,’ she says.

  ‘They are the greatest contributing factor to the extinction of small marsupials such as the eastern quoll,’ Essie says.

  Mim nods seriously. Essie doesn’t react well when she feels like Mim is patronising her. ‘You sound just like your grandpa.’

  ‘Was he a fox-hater too?’ says Sam.

  ‘He didn’t like them much. I remember when he shot one once, your uncle Michael went searching for the babies –’

  ‘Cubs,’ says Sam.

  ‘Yeah, cubs, and he found them, and one was still alive, and he kept it for ages, secretly. But when Dad found out he was so mad.’

  She remembers the sound the cub had made, curled up against Michael’s t-shirt in the makeshift nest he had made from old rags and cushions, while the two of them hid out behind the decommissioned digger in the big shed. It was like all those movies where ducklings think a human is their mother – the cub adored him, stuck out its hard little tongue to lick him, nuzzled at his armpits and groin.

  ‘It’s growing pretty quick,’ she’d said, because sometimes Michael needed reminding of the world outside himself, the notion of cause and effect.

  He’d ignored her, strummed his forefinger over the russet neck of the cub’s fur, smiling indulgently. ‘A survivor,’ he’d said.

  Which of course, it wasn’t.

  Steve made sure of that, following Michael one day because he’d got suspicious of the fact he couldn’t be roused to fight. Mim had got there too late. Her eldest brother was standing over Michael, sneering at him.

  ‘You fucking kill it, or I’ll tell Dad.’

  ‘I’m telling Dad,’ Michael had sneered, false bravado, trying to humiliate his thirteen-year-old brother.

  But Steve could be as clever as he could be cruel, and he knew that telling Dad would be a win-win.

  * * *

  ‘What’d he do, Mum?’ asks Sam.

  ‘He shot it,’ she says flatly, because the memory still hollows her.

  ‘That was the right thing to do,’ Essie says quickly.

  Mim makes eye contact with her daughter in the rear-vision mirror. ‘You’re so like your dad, Ess.’

  Essie raises her eyebrows in challenge. ‘In what way?’

  ‘So sure of yourself.’

  * * *

  She leaves the car idling at the gate while she gets out, the crushed rock crunching under her feet.

  ‘Can you two help me with this?’

  Neither of them answers.

  She could do this with her eyes closed, in the dark, the smell of the paddocks, the scatter of stars across the distant ranges, the way they seem to pool in the valley, the dense dark of the gums and the knotted green of the blackberries around the creek at the bottom of the track. They’d tried every year to get on top of them. Never worked. In daylight, she will look across the valley and see the great hunk of the landscape they took out. The bare wound of it. Even now. Despite all their platitudes and saplings and community consultations. In the end it went ahead anyway, cracking earth and family in its wake. She remembers Michael, standing astride the front gate in front of the cameras, his face defiant, his sign, DON’T FRACK OUR LAND, painted on the back of a real estate sign he’d nicked. Dad’s humiliation, that his own kids, his two tearaways, not his eldest, would embarrass him like this. Mim was fifteen when she went to her first protest. An age that had shocked her, seemed to come upon her all of a sudden. The thrumming energy that infuses the blood, a kind of violence almost, in thoughts and sensation, all the ways in which the body betrays you. Anger and desire and a concrete belief that the world began at your own birth, that you alone are the keeper of all wisdom.

  She had blood in the game, or property at least. It felt like blood. Felt entitled to her indignation, furious at the thought that anyone could just waltz through the front gate and dig in the earth her own family had worked for three generations and take something from under it. She extended her righteous fury on behalf of the traditional owners of course, the nuances of the politics of her own entitlement not yet making her ashamed.

  She and Michael joined other unhappy locals. Tree-changers, the hobby farmers – outsiders who weren’t even welcome at the pub anymore – who had formed an unlikely alliance with some of the farmers. During that time a lot of farms had No Trespassing signs that warned you’d be shot on sight if you entered, and everyone understood that to be true. There were A4 flyers up around town, and a group you could join online. They had plenty of information to serve at her dad across the dinner table while Steve sneered and Mum tried to keep the peace.

  Dad listened. She had to give him that. He had all the paperwork from the fracking company, plus the stuff the Gate Closers group had dropped off. And then he had the bank. And the cumulative years of drying. Of seasons where the earth scorched and then, if rain came at all, it came in deluges that washed the topsoil into what was left of the river and deposited it on some other lucky bastard’s farm. Mim heard the conversations at night. Him and Mum, even him and Steve – because, of course, by then he was already at ag college, reckoned he knew everything there was to know, primed to take over. Mum made half-hearted attempts to get Dad and Steve to take it all more seriously, but apparently you don’t get more serious than the bank.

  There is a roar that still vibrates in her chest, all the things she’d like to say, to have said before Dad was gone. She will not call it grief, even if it is. It’s like a hunk of gristle she can’t swallow. It won’t go down, won’t come back up.

  * * *

  She unhooks the chain. No swiping palms against panels for auto-entry here. She relishes the work of it, the muscle pull as she guides the gate back, jumps back in and drives through.

  ‘You two. Remember this? Look at it. It’s beautiful.’

  ‘It’s dark, Mum.’

  ‘You can still see.’

  ‘I’m hungry.’

  ‘Grandma will have cooked something. Ess, can you jump out and do the gate?’

  Mim sees the roll of her daughter’s eyes in the blue light of her screen, but she shuts it off and opens the door. Closes the gate behind them.

  ‘Geez, cold here,’ Essie says at the window. ‘Can I run down?’

  ‘It’s a bit dark.’

  ‘I’ll run in the headlights.’

  Her daughter’s legs are long as she swerves potholes and rabbits crisscrossing the track. She slows for a startled kangaroo which bounds across in front. There used to be hundreds of them, and then, at their peak, thousands. They stopped needing to cull in the end. The dry did it for them.

  ‘Look!’ Sam hangs his head out the window.

  She would have laughed at her own kids if they had rocked up in town when she was young. City kids. Wouldn’t have a clue. She would have felt the strange seesaw of power, knowing she could drive a ute across the paddocks by the time she was thirteen, but didn’t know how to get on a tram. Things change.

  It’s a mistake to come back here, she thinks, even as they pull into the house paddock, as the floodlights come on, as she sees her mother, grown smaller still, come through the screen door of her new unit
and wave them in to park.

  * * *

  There’s a white ute pulled up at the front of the sheds. Her brother is there, leaning against it, and another figure in the pool of light off the shed.

  Sam yells out ‘Grandma!’ and jumps from the car, running over the grass already gathering dew as the night falls.

  Essie is leaned over, breathing steadily, stretching out her quads.

  Mim offers her a bag. ‘Take this in?’

  ‘I can take another one, too,’ Essie says and hoists the bag to her shoulder.

  The figures at the shed are moving towards the front of the unit where her mother is already bent down to hug Sam.

  ‘Hello,’ Mim says, reaching to put her arms around her. Mim holds her close, chin on her mother’s shoulder because suddenly, God, no, not now, she thinks she will cry. She squeezes her mother’s shoulder, brusque, business-like. ‘How’re you going, Mum?’

  ‘Oh, you’re a sight for sore eyes, the three of you. Come in, come on now, you hungry?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘G’day.’ Steve steps fully into the light now. Something in his face has grown harder, older. He could be her father, shirt buttoned down, the slight paunch beginning over his belt, work jeans, hair cropped close because she’ll bet it’s thinning at the temples, just like Dad’s had.

  ‘Hi, Steve.’ She has to step towards him to get close enough for a kiss. This is the way Steve plays it, collecting up each tiny win.

  She turns to the other man and realises who it is, Jay Owens, Steve’s age, from the farm that shares the back boundary.

  ‘G’day, Jay,’ she says, neutral as she can.

  He nods. ‘Mim, how’s things?’

  ‘Good, thanks. How’s Sal, and the kids?’

  ‘Yeah, all good, can’t complain.’

  ‘Say hello from me?’

  ‘Will do.’

  Oh, I know you will. And Sally will lean in and want every detail, how she looks, what the kids are like, the stories will race like wind in the crops all the way into town and everyone will know Miriam Franklin is back at the farm.