Jules took a sip of tea and nearly gagged. Fiona had stuck sugar in it. She knew Jules hated it in tea. And it wasn’t just one teaspoon. She reckoned Fiona had thrown in six!
‘This one, I think, is really one of my best,’ Fiona said.
Jules slurped uneasily on her tea and followed Fiona’s gaze to a red hibiscus riding a bike and giving the reverse V-for-Victory sign.
What was she going to call it? Jules wondered. I’m a flower on a bike, up yours? Jules should probably ring Davison House. Right now. There was dirty laundry all over the floor and the other cat had pus in its eye.
‘Yeah,’ Jules said and she flattened her cotton skirt. It was fresh-pleated. No need for flattening. She figured now was as good a time as any. She wasn’t going to ask Fiona if she could take some photos of the paintings. It would only encourage her.
‘Have you got those tongs I loaned you?’
‘Oh, yeah, thanks for those. You know how it is, no man around to flip the vegie sausages.’
She winked at Jules like they were in on some secret, but Jules didn’t have a clue what she could be talking about. She knew she had only women friends now and that she’d gone vegetarian. As far as Jules could figure out, Fiona was having a dig at her son. He was her son, after all, and Fiona had better remember it. He might be a rough nut, but he had a warm heart and Fiona had never saw him when he was a kid, softly crying when he’d been told his Auntie Sheree was dead.
Fiona padded across her back decking to the shed to retrieve the tongs. Jules only had time to take photos of two paintings. But that was enough.
‘They’re terrible,’ Peter told her over the phone.
‘Tell me what you really think.’
He laughed.
‘They’re god-awful.’
‘Peter, she’s going to have an exhibition. You know I’ve never understood what you do. But people come along and buy yours.’
‘I think she’s trying to work with symbolism.’
‘Yeah?’
Jules couldn’t have cared less what she was trying to do Fiona was going to embarrass herself. Not to mention go broke. But she was surprised Peter had even bothered to figure out what Fiona was or wasn’t doing with her painting. He’d never taken much of an interest in her at all. But that probably had to do with Simon and the night of the punch-up. All Jules had tried to do was get the family together for a nice anniversary of Ron’s death. Just try to help them do what they needed to do for each other. Just put bad blood behind them and care for each other. At least give each other the time of day. But it had ended in a punch-up in Simon’s driveway, Peter taking his son and hot tailing it back to Melbourne, Simon with scratch marks on his arms, and Jules ashamed and blubbing.
And Fiona? She’d stood on the porch like the proverbial rabbit in the headlights, staring over the side fence at a bunch of bloody red hibiscus.
‘The red hibiscus has got meaning in Polynesian culture,’ Peter said over the phone. ‘You know, all those Gauguins she’s got?’
Jules nodded.
‘Yeah, I think. So what?’
‘The red hibiscus means a woman’s ready to be married. But those fangs and the poses, well, it’s crap work,’ he laughed. ‘But so was Ken Done’s.’
‘Right,’ Jules said.
‘It’s like McDonald’s. Or KFC.’
What the hell was he on about?
‘Mum, she’s just out-working the end of her marriage.’
Out-working? Yep, that’s what she should be doing all right. A black dream. Not black as in sad or angry, just dark. Voices in the darkness. Someone hovering over her. Like he or she or it was operating on her. But it couldn’t be because Jules was fit as a fiddle. Had been for years. Nothing wrong with her. No time to get sick if you keep working and helping people out.
One of the voices was Sheree’s. Or her mother’s. A high-pitched giggle. And one of the voices was Fiona’s; her sing-song that went breathy when she got excited. And another was Jules’s. She was talking. They were all talking, the three of them. But not to each other. It was just gabble, gabble, about bloody nothing, to bloody no one. Jules was angry because no one was listening to anyone. All the boys were amongst it too. And none of them were listening to anyone, either.
In the last of those dark dreams the buzzing was gone. There were just coloured lights. And Ron.
Let her go, Jules.
She didn’t want the rosary or Our Fathers when she woke.
She just wanted to collapse. She wanted time off. A few weeks, months. She thought of the Wimmera River and her mother, flailing and splashing. She thought of her kids and wanted to hold them tight, regardless that they were all in their thirties. She’d been a good mum, hadn’t she? She’d done her best. One off the rails wasn’t so bad. Maybe she’d get on a plane, though they made her sick, and go and find Simon. Bring him home, pluck him away from the crocodiles and that river. God, that river.
But she got up and went to work at Davison. She listened to the patients. They were all nicely showered and dressed, mumbling at each other in the meals room. Sunlight was beautiful and warm through the windows and splashing on their poached eggs and buttered corn. But the more beautiful it was, the angrier Jules became. One patient, Menzel, picked up his plate and threw it at the wall. It landed yards away, but she’d wished it had flown at her. Knocked her out of her misery.
Bloody Ron in her dreams! Flashing like a traffic light!
She left work right on five. She’d told Fiona she’d be at her first exhibition, come hell or high water. The devil hadn’t been in the papers, there’d been a bit of rain, but no flooding. Nothing to stop her Camry from getting there and parking across the road.
The exhibition was in a café called Motoro. Fiona had conned them into putting her hibiscuses on the walls, surely? Seemed not. Because the place was cleared; they’d pushed tables against the brick walls. And there were more people in there than Jules had seen in any café before. Close and sticky in black jeans and motley shirts. Sunglasses on, some of them, and the crowd was almost pressed against the paintings. A lot of them were drinking champagne, far too early in the day for Jules’s liking. She couldn’t get near the register to buy a cup of tea. Turned out she didn’t need to, they were free. A girl in a dress like she’d worn in her twenties, a floral number, walked around with trays of cuppas.
‘Do you want sugar, love?’
‘No. And I’m not your love.’
That didn’t darken the waitress. Off she went, loving and darling . Then it was quiet. A hobo in a brown skirt, grey hair gone wild like Sarah from the Bible, that woman who’d got pregnant even though she was three-hundred years old or something, got up on a chair in the corner.
‘Hello everyone and welcome. We’re here today because Fiona Stevenson has given us all a chance to perceive and understand what we’ve been missing. In so much contemporary art that features and gives precedence to women’s experience, there has been a lack of simplicity...’
There were happy women everywhere. In fact, there was barely a man in the place. Tahitian women, some of them, and a bunch of other girls in those floral dresses; big girls with flabby arms like Jules’s mother’s. Girls were flipping credit cards here and there, and the café owner in her tie-dye was plonking red dots next to all the red hibiscuses. Jules wanted more than anything to join in and God’s sake be happy and laugh and have a good old time. But she was bloody furious. All she could think was, He’s still my son. Simon’s still my boy. She thought about calling Peter, right then, on the spot, but he’d probably have gone on about fast food or something stupid.
Fiona waved from a corner. She raised her champagne glass. There was a strawberry in it. Probably a few spoons of sugar too! The music was too loud and it swayed people here and there on its own.
Two women were dancing. Together. Their arms were around each other like it was midnight. Fiona waved at her then moved her head to and fro. She mouthed that she couldn’t get through to Jules. Sh
e’d have to stay where she was.
Good, Jules thought, good. You stay right where you are. And I’ll stay right here. Jules couldn’t stand it another second. She dropped her cup on the stone floor, deliberately. It smashed and threw tea everywhere, but the room carried on as if nothing had happened.
12. Terry Stevenson
Terry whispered ‘Thank Christ’ when a gang of dark clouds finally surrounded the late afternoon sun. He flipped up his new Monaro VZ’s sun visor and took a bend at speed as he cruised the highway from Bairnsdale to Melbourne.
The move back to Gippsland had done him good, but it meant it was a long way to get to gigs. Decent ones, anyway. Tonight he was off to the AC/DC concert, singing along to one of their CDs. One night stands and rock ‘n’ roll bands. Bon Scott let rip with a bagpipe solo and Terry turned up the volume, too far. His ears stung, but he didn’t care. Just for fun, he tooted the horn. Magpies flew off a fence in fear and he gave them another toot for their trouble.
He’d been out at Bengweeran for the last few days, planning and building a burn off. It was rough work and his knees ached. Even after Kerryn had washed his Parks Victoria shirt, a grease stain hadn’t budged from near the logo. Healthy Parks, Healthy People. But Terry was brand spanking now, in a clean ‘Highway to Hell’ t-shirt. He grabbed a sneaky stubby from the travel esky. He was about to crack it when his boss, Nifty, called.
‘Hey numb nuts, guess what? It’s out of control!’
‘What is?’
‘My dick... Waddaya reckon, Terry? The burn off!’
‘Jesus.’
‘Yep, and all his fucking apostles.’
Terry didn’t bother asking how it had happened. He knew it would be the CFA. The Country Fire Authority—the Chook Fuckers’ Association. If the chookies weren’t stirring up flames to piss their hoses on, they weren’t happy. They’d done it tough on Black Saturday, like everyone had, so why couldn’t they just let a burn off be a burn off?
‘Nifty, you know I’m not comin’ back.’
He’d had a newborn way back in ’96 so he’d missed AC/DC. Kerryn had had the flu so Terry had looked after the kids. But tonight he was going to rock out. And no two-bit bloody chooky cock-up was going to stop him.
‘I don’t care if you haven’t seen them since Methuselah was a pup,’ Nifty said. ‘We need your arse back here. Now.’
Terry hung up and put the phone next to his esky. There was a text chime a few seconds later, but he didn’t check it. Bugger him! Nifty could sort it out. If he couldn’t handle a burn off he didn’t deserve his job.
A few days before, Terry had told everyone concerned that his decision was final: the paddock the abandoned FJ sat in would have to be torched. Old Tom Heath had taken it in his stride.
‘Yeah, nah, I understand Tezz. We’ve got to put safety first.’
Tom had put his pen down on the table. Everyone else in the porta office had shuffled their papers. But nobody had got up to leave.
‘Look, I’m real sorry Tom...’
Terry had a soft spot for Tom. He was good at his job and his wife had finally passed the year before. He’d barely smiled since.
‘Nah, look Tezz, you’re doing what’s right. No choice. Just how it is.’
And he’d got up and walked out. No more arguments. Sud-denly the FJ’s cremation was fine by him.
Terry was shocked. At every morning meeting, Tom had been first to arrive, navy CFA polo on, sharp grey hair and clean-shaven, and offering up a new way to save his dead father’s FJ. And Terry had shot down all of them. Except one.
‘We could try moving it,’ Terry had told him.
It was an afternoon early in the piece when he was standing in the paddock with Tom and inspecting the car. Terry had no intention of moving it. And, as he’d hoped, Tom had shelved the idea for him.
‘We can’t mate. Thing’d fall to bits.’
It would have been a fine motor vehicle in its day. Now it was just a rust bucket with no glass in the front window frame and grass growing on the seats. But it still had a little bar above the bumper proper that looked like a moustache. In the ‘50s, that FJ would have pranced and winked up Bairnsdale’s Main Street. It would have owned the joint.
‘We’ll have to find another way to protect it,’ Tom had said to the wreck, and Terry had watched him join one of his sons for a smoke. As the pair of them had kicked gravel and mumbled, Terry had wondered why Tom didn’t care about the shell of his grandfather’s house. Flames might give it a going over as well if they weren’t careful. He could have asked Tom about it all, but he didn’t get around to it. Too much work on. Bengweeren was 150 square ks of shitfight. The only place in Victoria where Parks Vic, the chookies and the Department, the government boys who always thought they had rank but didn’t, could have a say on how to manage the burn offs.
And didn’t they all give it a go!
When Terry had turned up the first morning of the job, the chookies were already into it. In their yellow coats and hats, they flitted around like stained cabbage moths, reeling hoses off the trucks and slip-ons. Made themselves so busy it was like they expected a bloody fire to flare up all on its own.
Terry knew he shouldn’t rib the chookies so much. Most of them did a pretty good job. Tom, for example, was pretty reasonable when you got him on his own. Knew his way around a long-term fire plan, too, not just the whooshing end of a hose. But blood’s thicker than grass.
‘Grandpa’s old stretch,’ Tom told Terry that first morning, barely waiting for Terry to buzz down the window of his Parks Vic ute. Flies scouted Tom’s cap peak and there was a broken windmill off in the distance.
‘Still got to sort it out, Tom.’
‘Yeah... Lot of memories here though.’
The grass was high enough in his grandfather’s front paddock to hide an infantry unit. It had to be flamed. Only then would the dirt beneath be able to keep everything safe for another couple of hundred hectares. Terry had taken his sunnies off and put them on the dashboard. He’d got out of the ute.
‘Beautiful part of the world,’ he’d said, shielding his eyes.
‘My Grandpa used to say it was God’s own country.’
They’d watched the gums and pines parading on the bor-ders of hay-strewn paddocks. In the distance, it got greener and hillier. Further back, hidden waves bashed away at the coastline, trying for all money to carve it into a new shape. Blackfellas, whitefellas: everyone reckoned they owned that spread from the highway to the waves. And they liked the shape just fine.
Except for the long grass.
‘Place needs a bit of hell to keep it in good nick,’ Terry had said, and Tom had turned to the FJ. ‘My old man bought it new in ‘56. Grandpa thought it was a piece of shit But Dad reckoned it ran on honey.’
Probably did back then. Or kero.
Terry had hauled his computer bag from the car and set up in the shitty porta office. All week he’d argued with the chooky big guns, Department knobs and anyone else who thought God’s own country gave them a right as fat as the Bible to say how to manage it. He’d taken four days to get the plan sorted and now it was on. Cleared, dug and set. But Terry had told everyone he wouldn’t be there to light the torch. The only fire he wanted to see was coming out of an AC/DC stage cannon. He’d walked from the porta-office, given a mock salute and whispered, ‘I’m about to rock!’
He checked his sideburns in the rear-view. Nicely clipped. Bit of grey, but neat. He’d even shaved. What that was about he didn’t know. It wasn’t as if AC/DC needed him to be presentable. But, shit, it was a big occasion for him. Kind of like a wedding. Bigger, really, but he’d never tell Kerryn that. For obvious reasons.
She had to have a violinist on their wedding day. The kid had looked bug-eyed when he’d found out he had to play an instru-mental version of ‘Ride On’. That was Terry’s compromise: she could have a violinist, sure, but he had to play AC/DC. He even compromised more: the kid could play a ballad. Kerryn had laughed under her
veil as the poor bloke had dragged his bow across the strings.
Some people had religion, Terry had AC/DC. Missing that concert in ‘96 was as bad as when his dad had cancer. Not something he told too many people, but there it was. Terry went through a Nirvana stage, like everyone, but he came back to Acca Dacca. He had a room in his house dedicated to the band. Dolls of them playing guitars and drums, posters cover-ing every wall, and AC/DC mirrors on the ceiling. He had all their CDs, DVDs and most of their vinyl stacked in milk crates in the shape of one of Angus Young’s guitars. And it had taken him fourteen years to sew the cotton AC/DC emblem into the carpet.
It was his rosary, he reckoned. And every day he sewed, AC/ DC blaring from a mini-hi-fi, he’d think of his father. He didn’t know why. He’d turn up the volume, thread that carpet, and hum through gritted teeth.
The night before he left for the concert, Terry drove back to get his phone from where he’d left it in the porta office. Moonlight was like snow on the paddocks. Tom stood against the FJ and it spooked Terry to see him there. He supposed the old bloke was just saying his goodbyes. Tom sipped a stubby and waved Terry over.
‘Nice unit in its day,’ Terry told him for the hundredth time. Tom handed him a beer. The stubby was icy. Terry cracked it and gulped. Tom smelt of cologne, something musky, and he drummed his fingers on the FJ’s hood.
‘I grew up in this car. Went everywhere in it. When Dad was a buck, they couldn’t get him out of it either...’
Tom took a long look at the dark horizon. Then he let out a strangled laugh.
‘Jesus, Terry, I don’t know...it’s...’
Then he shut up and Terry wanted to talk for him.
It makes you feel something real, Tom. It matters and you can’t figure out why. It’s way more than just your old man’s ride, but you don’t know what it is. Anymore than I do.
Terry had an Angus Young solo in his head, but then he realised it wasn’t. He was making one up. Different notes, but Angus’s style. He wanted to tell Tom, even hum it to him. But he just tapped the car.
We. Are. Family. Page 12