by Simon Cleary
Then, nearer still, he sees the cottage, a satellite of the house, high on its stilts. Though smaller than he remembered, it’s exactly where it should be, set off to the right of where they’re now standing, its water tank nearly as big as the house, and still green, still peeling. The simple pitch of its roof, its single chimney, the same chain-mail fence marking out the same arbitrary yard. Beyond it the cliffs of the escarpment are as close to the cottage as they ever were, a boy’s crude homemade arrow’s flight away.
‘I’ll walk the rest,’ Phelan says to her, and without waiting for an answer sets off down the hill, his dog at his side.
Penny watches him hurrying down the track, as if he is drawn by a new gravity. She follows in the car, idling slowly down the slope, afraid that even the sound of the motor might destroy the moment. Anxious that if she did something to spoil it – and sometimes the smallest things have unimaginable impacts – then everything they’ve been working to rebuild might unravel again. A foolish thought, she knows, a debilitatingly high standard, but sometimes, even after all this time, she can’t help it.
What she wouldn’t give to wind things back to the moment James had slumped on the back deck the afternoon of the fire. An hour, she’d said to him, thinking that’s all the time she’d need away, that he’d sleep the drink off, that what was more important at that moment was war-gaming with Bec a way to save her husband’s reputation, his career, the life they knew. But what if, instead of leaving him, she’d stayed? How overwhelming the thought. If, if, if. And the question overshadowing all those what-ifs: how much was it her reputation as Brigadier Phelan’s wife she was also protecting? Her life?
Regret is now something she and James share. Though not with each other. Because our regrets are, after all, wholly our own.
As Phelan approaches the house his gait slows, and he stops, disconcerted, looking around, his bearings snatched suddenly away from him.
‘What is it, Darling?’ Penny asks, pulling up beside him.
He comes to her, unsteady, holding on to the top of the car door. Something’s wrong.
It’s not that the Big House has been let go, nor that its garden, once immaculate, is now a ramble of trees and bushes and surrendered flowerbeds. As a kid he was drawn to the wilder corners of the garden anyway. No, it’s something else. He turns, taking in the slack fence line, and the crumbling piggery between the Big House and the cottage, and the nearby machinery shed, half-concealed by an insurgent passionfruit vine. The buildings and all the beautiful ruins are, in the geometry of his memory, precisely where they should be.
He looks up. The clouds are high, the sky beyond them almost purple. Two wedge-tailed eagles rise on a thermal, the birds opposite each other in the column of updraft, the solitude of each counterbalancing the other’s perfectly as they spiral slowly upwards.
It’s only then, his head tilted, that he notices the row of bunya pines set back on the western side of the road, and realises what is troubling him. His father had planted six, one for each of them, his parents and their four kids. But now, fifty years on, only three remain. They are wide-girthed and towering, each topped with great conical crowns. Of the disappeared, one has gone without trace, another is a stump cut too low to the ground to fashion even a seat, while the third is black and charred and broken, lightning-struck, Phelan guesses, two or three storm seasons ago. That’s the problem with grand gestures, he thinks, with projecting emblematic meaning onto things. His parents are gone, yes, so that accounts for two of the trees, but only two.
Phelan lowers himself to the ground. He begins what he has been taught to do when he feels his skin begin to prickle, when his heart starts racing. When his irrational anxiety comes on. He breathes. He counts and breathes, counts and breathes, talks to himself, uses the words he’s been given to turn himself around, mantras. After having come so far, he says to himself as it passes, I refuse to see myself as lightning-struck.
The Big House
In less than two months, an early Easter behind them, they move in. They arrive mid-morning in their new Hilux, a practical vehicle they can use for farm chores as well as for Penny to drive to her work at the hospital. They have their most precious things with them in the cab – the jewellery she was wearing on the night of the fire and the few pieces they salvaged from the ashes of the bedroom, her uniforms, his weights, their laptops, his medication, the electric hot water jug and some mugs, the portrait of the Queen he’s carried with him since recovery, some potted plants, the dog, his notebooks, Penny’s gardening manuals. Everything else will come later, with the removalists – the furniture and the clothes, the kitchenware, the whitegoods, everything replaced by insurance and lugged from rental to rental till they rested for a few years in a suburban low-set and its garden.
Penny puts on the jug, and before she’s had a chance to properly open the house up – the doors and windows stiff from being locked up for so long – the water has boiled and she returns to the kitchen to make a pot of tea for both of them. It is autumn. They walk down the long central corridor that runs from the kitchen at the back of the house all the way to the front verandah and the great bull-nosed roof above, Phelan leading the way.
‘Imagine a runner along here,’ Penny says, a few paces behind him.
But Phelan isn’t there. He’s remembering instead how for a week in mid-summer the corridor is perfectly aligned with the sun’s path, and how its dawn rays stream right through the house as far as the kitchen, and then, if the back door is open, through it too and out into the fernery.
They step onto the sun-bleached verandah boards. The sun has already risen above the roofline and the verandah is in shade. Phelan and Penny sit together on the still-warm floorboards, their legs hanging off the edge of the verandah, not quite touching the ground. Phelan pulls the knuckles of his left hand, one after the other, settling himself. They look out to the east and the unimpeded view to the edge of the escarpment, and beyond that, sky and space. The dog is already out there exploring, nosing the earth. Phelan and Penny sit and rock their bodies gently and sip their tea, neither of them needing to talk, their shoulders touching.
For a while, when she brought him home after his first stay in the Keith Payne Unit at the Greenslopes war veterans hospital, she took him to Mass with her, a practice she’d returned to in the first weeks after her diagnosis. It had to be the evening vigil because he was seldom up and moving for the Sunday morning service. Looking back of course, what she was hoping for was nothing short of a miracle. Not the laying of hands variety – she’s too Catholic for that – more that the ritual itself might be transformative. That if he was open to the ancient rhythms of the Mass and allowed their verities to wash over and in and through him, that it would change him. Yes, heal him. That she’d never experienced the Mass in that way didn’t matter. Because it’s at our most vulnerable we’re most open to change. She believes that. And, perhaps, it’s also when we’re most hopeful. At worst, the service would be one more stable thing he could build on.
He accompanied her for a couple of months, but as the days lengthened towards summer and it stayed lighter longer, he grew increasingly agitated inside the church building. On the final occasion he rose abruptly midway through the service and left her in the pews, walking deliberately down the centre aisle, his tired back to the altar, to sit on the church steps and look out at the setting sun. It seemed to her then, twisting her neck to check on him, that if there was a pattern in things he might hold on to, it was out there, in the dusk.
But she kept going. For a while anyway. Give me strength, she prayed, give me strength.
‘When it’s all over I want to come back here,’ he’d said years ago, before the fire, before the breakdown. By which she understood he’d meant his army career. ‘Run a few head of cattle. Write the obligatory memoir. Keep a place the grandchildren can visit.’
‘Maybe,’ the young wife had replied back then, becau
se it was far too early to commit and once she committed to something she tended to stick to it, ‘maybe’. Though even then the idea of living on a farm thrilled her. She was the daughter of teachers, hers a childhood of evening board games, weekends of church and sport, camping holidays by the beach and pets – dogs, a bowl of goldfish, the budgerigars her father bred, the baby possum she nursed after its mother was struck by a car in front of their house. Later, with James, her gardens were tidy, but not overly manicured. She was both more practical and more romantic. She grew herbs and vegetables. She was delighted to find a small chook run in one of their first army houses, and loved the routine of gathering eggs in the morning and giving them to friends as gifts. But she’d also leave corners of her backyards untended so they could take their own shape, to thicken with vines or overhanging branches.
There were no grandkids of course, and his army career vanished soon enough, disappearing between one psychiatrist and the next. But even after the army granted him the pension they still had to wait: delayed by the stints in recovery – each supposed to be the last – the changes in medication, the loss of colleagues, the advent of new friends, damaged or dangerous. The remorseless descent through all the circles of hell.
She tried to find time to garden, to step away from her responsibilities as carer and hospital nurse so she could kneel in the earth and plant, wherever that giddying descent from trial to trial might end. She planted herbs and vegetables with properties to calm the mind: Swiss chard and cherry tomatoes and sunflower seeds. Oregano and St James’s Wort. Herbs for the spirit, for herself as much as her husband. She read somewhere that a day in the garden was worth its weight in Valium. She tried to get James to join her, but he couldn’t stick, the odd mown lawn or load of bark chips spread at her direction, that’s all. A disappointment but there you go. So, soil for her fingers, earth for her hands. Gardening therapy. Prayer gave her strength, yes, but gardening was her salvation.
He might have wanted to retire here. She hopes it’ll be the place he finally heals.
Though she has dreams for herself too, after so many hard years. Dreams of a great unbounded garden, sky-watered. She wants to wade through late afternoon grass until she reaches the horizon. She wants to see a cloud of butterflies. Watch meteor showers from her bedroom window. She wants to smell a paddock-birth and make marmalade from home-grown oranges and follow native bees to their hive. She dreams of seasons, up here on this plateau on the range, that the subtropical city on the river could never offer, could never understand. Where winter, as well as summer, was capable of killing. She has never swung an axe. She wants to split wood and feed it into a fire. She wants to come home from an antiseptically cleaned ward to a house that will keep them company, she and James, grow with them, teach them.
It’s got to be a good sign it’s happened so quickly. That after seven years of unrelenting labour, a route through the universe has opened up, the two of them now just strolling through. A mere two months from her first call to a local real estate agent – ‘No, it’s not on the market, but I’ll make enquiries’ – to settlement. The nodding approval of James’s psychiatrist, Brisbane not too far to come back to for consultations. Her husband also accepting her one condition – though he will be the farmer, though it will be him who puts down crippled beasts and culls dingos – she will be the one with the keys to the gun cabinet. Finally, the ease with which she’d been able to transfer from the Royal Brisbane Hospital to Toowoomba Base.
Surely fate wouldn’t be so cruel, so capricious, that it’d lead them here if this wasn’t where they should be?
In the afternoon he tells her about his history in the house, looking for evidence like an archaeologist might, excavating on his hands and knees. He finds layers of paint from his childhood, messages his sisters inked on the walls beside their beds, the puttied hole where a hook on the back of a door held a cow’s skull. He finds, too, the cuts in the VJs where he’d lain in bed tossing his Bowie knife across the room, night after night till he learned how to get the point to shudder and stick every time.
Phelan hangs the Queen on the back of the old kitchen door. So she’ll look upon them while they eat, so she’s visible from all the way down the corridor.
She also hangs in the common room of the Keith Payne Unit, where she’s been since her silver jubilee year when a group of inpatients painstakingly assembled her – all one-thousand pieces – and, once completed, set her jig-sawed portrait behind its glass and walnut frame and ceremoniously hung her above the billiards table. And there she has endured, down generations of veterans from Vietnam to East Timor and Iraq and Afghanistan.
Each day of his stay she smiled kindly down at him in her pure white dress, and her diamond crown and neck piece, Her brooches, the wide azure sash draped across her breast. ‘Not royal blue,’ he’d explain to any nurse who cared to listen, a meaningless term, ‘but azure’. There’s no judgement in her kind eyes, no counting his failures. And if he was responsible for Beckett, she seemed to accept that too, as she accepts all things always, and in her heavenly way comforts him that there’s really nothing to fear.
She soothed him daily when he was in the unit. When some stupid old bastard from Vietnam had the volume on Apocalypse Now up too high, she intervened with her benevolent smile. Let it go, she counselled. After seven days without alcohol and then eight and then nine and when the nurses on pill parade were lousy with their Seroquel, she was there. When Penny didn’t answer her phone, her presence at least was calming. When Phelan surveyed the spines of the books in the Unit library – his head askew, the Seroquel demanding it – and spied one with the name Haroun in its title and he began to sweat, irrationally, she was there. When he stopped at the whiteboard and read the week’s activities, and saw crosswords again and despaired at what he’d sunk to, fucking crosswords. The cafeteria that had to be endured, Phelan trapped between bodies in the queue, the scraping chairs, the clattering cutlery, the trays dropped to the ground, the dishwasher’s two-and-a-half-minute cycle, the hundred competing bullshit conversations, the whole fucking entirety of that angry chaos. She was dependable in a crisis. Then, when it was his turn to introduce himself at the group sessions and he was going over the words in his brain before he said them – Jim. Army. Thirty years. Discharged – he knew she’d give him courage. She was there while he learned that whole damn language of group therapy – self-talk and crystal balling and catastrophising and fight-or-flighting and mindfulness – smiling, agreeing that it’s a load of horseshit, but persuading him it can’t hurt.
She was there, too, over his shoulder, when he sat in the common room to compose his first poem in the notebook they gave him to record his feelings. When all he could hear was the sound of his pen scratching on paper. My heart is a broken pencil, he’d written, the first time he’d given those words – my heart – shape. Neither she nor his psych seemed to mind that they belonged to someone else. That he’d stolen them. You can be forgiven for all sorts of things, she said to him.
As Phelan moves about the house he glimpses the cottage through the row of pines, its windows boarded, its gutters rusting.
‘Did anyone ever live there?’ Penny asks, following his gaze.
‘There were always people up there,’ he replies. ‘Mum and Dad rented it out. I don’t think they got much for it – it was too far out of town – but it was a bit extra for the kitty all the same. No real estate commission, no tax either, I guess.’
Phelan recounts how his parents preferred having families there, but that they were hard to find. He remembers a golden six months with a couple of boys their own age, all of them sitting tall on rusting tractor seats like they were thrones, or exploring the gullies after rain, or pegging stones into a wasps’ nest in the high fork of the gum that cast its shadow over the small dam.
He remembers an old woman who had a heart attack in the cottage one year, and how it was his job to stand on the track and direct the am
bulance to the cottage in case it overshot and pulled up at the Big House instead.
But mainly it was men who lived there. Men trying to ‘make a new start of it’, his father’s phrase. You’ve got to help a bloke who’s been knocked down and is trying to get back up again, his father would say and his mother never disagreed. These were men who worked in the abattoir, or in the market gardens around Allora, or on the roads with the council. Men who’d leave the cottage in their Fords or their Holdens at precisely the same time every morning, but who returned at all hours, ragged and sometimes unruly. As if you could control how things began, but never how they ended.
He remembers being woken one night by the sounds of a brawl gusting through his bedroom window. And other occasions when police cars would crest the ridge and stop at the cottage, and they’d watch, agape, as constables fixed their hats to their heads and knocked at the door before disappearing inside.
‘I remember one man in particular,’ Phelan says. ‘He’d been in the cottage for a month before we even saw him, maybe longer. Each day, each week that passed, empty beer bottles – tallies – would gather on the steps of the cottage. There was no one to take them away. The collection of empties grew and grew until the stairs were so crowded there was no way of getting down without knocking them over. It was as if he was entombing himself in there. Then, one afternoon when we got back from school – it was a windy day – we saw him. He was younger than we imagined. And there he was, standing alone in the middle of the paddock wearing an old army jacket and holding a homemade kite to the air. He looked like the loneliest man in all the world.’ Phelan pauses, seeing the memory differently to his childhood self, infused now with melancholy. ‘We went up to him after a while – because you can’t be frightened of a man with a kite – and sure enough he offered us his string, as we’d hoped he might. But he never said anything. He just wiped the sleeve of his jacket across his eyes from where he’d been weeping, and stood there until we were done.