by Karen Manton
Greta and Raffy found the camera equipment in a box on a coffee table. They sat on the sagging couch to go through it.
‘Take a picture and let me see it.’ Raffy struck a pose.
‘This one doesn’t work like that.’
Greta opened the camera to show him where the film canister fitted. ‘You have to wind on the film for each picture, wait till you’ve finished the film, take it out, and then develop your negatives and prints. Until then, you don’t really know what’s there.’
Raffy was intrigued.
‘Are you a photographer?’ she asked as Brynn arrived with Toby and Griffin.
‘Not me,’ said Brynn. ‘Henry.’ She sat beside Greta to roll a cigarette. ‘No point keeping it locked away. He’d want it used.’
‘Why doesn’t Henry want it now?’ asked Raffy.
‘Henry’s dead,’ said Brynn. ‘Cancer got him.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Greta.
Brynn lit her cigarette. She took a long drag and exhaled slowly.
‘Can you blow smoke rings?’ Raffy wanted to know.
Brynn laughed. ‘Ha! You’re funny!’
Greta looked through the box to find a slide viewer, a light meter, developing tank for negatives, a tin of developer powder and an orange safe light. Raffy asked to hold the safe light. Why was it orange? He had a thousand questions.
‘You’ll need a darkroom,’ said Toby, looking at all the paraphernalia.
‘There’re dark rooms in that old house,’ called Griffin, swinging in the hammock. He stretched its red net around himself to make a cocoon. ‘Dad says any walls left are burned black.’
‘I’ve got my eye on the old freight van,’ said Greta. ‘I think your cubby’s my darkroom.’
‘No way!’ Griffin sat up too quickly and had to struggle against capsizing.
In a second box on the floor Raffy found another contraption. ‘What’s this?’
Greta carefully took out the enlarger. It had a domed hood and the lens on a bellows. ‘This is a vintage one.’
Brynn nodded, pleased Greta understood.
Toby and Raffy moved closer to see. Greta described how a hidden globe inside could shine on a negative and project the image onto photographic paper. It reminded Raffy of how they’d looked through a cardboard pinhole to see a solar eclipse.
‘I’m not a photographer myself,’ said Brynn, leaning back. ‘It’s all too arty for me. Too technical and bloody time-consuming.’ Her hand tapped the developer powder tin. ‘There’s more of these in the coolroom, and film in the freezer, black and white only. Don’t let me forget them.’ She looked at Toby to make him the reminder.
Greta thanked her and unwrapped the three extra lenses. There was a 28-mm wide-angle lens, a 135-mm short telephoto, and a 300-mm long lens for close up.
‘It’s a good kit, Brynn.’
‘Our grandmother Vivian was a professional,’ said Raffy, picking up a sachet of silica to squeeze. ‘She taught Mum.’ He paused. ‘And then she walked into the sea and died.’
‘True?’ asked Brynn. Her dark eyes were on Raffy.
He nodded. ‘We weren’t born yet. Mum was just a kid.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Brynn.
Raffy’s voice fluttered to a whisper. He kept his gaze on Brynn. ‘Not a soul knows where she went except her.’
‘Oh, Raffy,’ sighed Griffin, and tipped himself from the hammock.
Greta looked through the camera’s viewfinder to check he’d landed safely. Click.
‘Gotcha,’ she said.
‘There isn’t even any film in that,’ he replied and shimmied off the verandah into the garden.
A couple of hens stepped in line behind him. Toby hurried after them. Raffy hung back for a turn in the hammock.
‘Cuppa?’ Brynn asked.
Greta followed her into a small sitting room with a piano and an armchair. Raffy soon joined her to see Henry’s photos stuck on the walls and curling at the edges. A cocoon hanging from a leaf. A green tree ant’s nest of eucalyptus leaves welded with white silk thread. The lightning shots impressed him most, jutting through night skies, lighting up rocks and termite mounds.
‘Henry was a storm chaser,’ Brynn called from the adjoining kitchen. ‘Up at all hours and out in terrible weather. I was always waiting for him to be struck.’
She came to lift the piano stool’s lid. A stack of photos was inside.
‘Pick one you like and you can have it.’
Raffy took out a bundle and sat with his back against the piano, near the pedals. Above him numerous ivory keys were missing. The whole instrument was bowed and out of alignment. The top was gone, so its innards could be seen. It used to live outside, Brynn explained.
Greta admired the garden sprawling down the slope. She explained her own plans for the shack.
‘The soil’s the challenge here,’ said Brynn. ‘I’ll take you up to the export yards next time I go. Get yourself a tray of cattle manure. Mix it with dirt and sand from Ronnie.’
‘I haven’t met Ronnie yet.’
‘You will.’
When the tea was ready they went back to the verandah. Brynn smoked another cigarette, quiet now, as if she’d had enough of talking. Greta wondered if Henry and the lightning photos had silenced her. She drank her tea and began repacking the camera equipment.
‘Raffy, choose your photo and find your brothers,’ she called into the room behind her.
But Brynn suddenly snapped out of her reverie and stood to fling the dregs from her cup.
‘Can’t let you leave without some plants. This way, my girl.’
She walked swiftly along the narrow track. Her back was ramrod straight. The dogs scampered up, excited. A small black pig followed.
‘Don’t pat,’ Brynn warned Raffy, pointing to the pig. ‘She bites.’
She selected a pawpaw for him to carry, saying, ‘You can grow anything up here,’ and that was how it seemed as they passed the mottled backs of watermelons and the spiky heads of pineapples.
Raffy kept close to Greta, keeping an eye on the pig that trotted beside the wallaby-skinning woman. He stopped short at a dead thing on the ground and squatted to poke it with a stick. Its soft brown, spiny shell had split open. Greta could see he was thinking baby echidna.
Brynn laughed. ‘Jackfruit.’
She pointed up the tree trunk beside them where hefty green, stubble-skinned fruits were hanging out from the side of the trunk. ‘Good for curry when they’re green, dessert when they’re yellow.’
A little further on they stopped to see an impressively large pumpkin fenced in with a riot of greenery. ‘See my winner?’ said Brynn, opening the gate. ‘I grew her for the Darwin Show but couldn’t part with her.’
It was sagging underneath, an overgrown orange moon dropped by the night. She passed her hand over the pumpkin’s barnacled skin. ‘Must be a hundred kilo. I’d have won if I put her in the show.’
‘It has its own private cage,’ Griffin smiled as Brynn shut the gate against the pig and its relatives. The idea reminded him of those unusual cages they’d seen over the neighbour’s fence. He asked Brynn about them.
‘Trapper’s critter world.’ She rolled her eyes at Greta. ‘An albino monitor, he says. A flying possum. A talking cockatoo and a three-horned goat. Freaks of nature, he’ll tell you. He lures tourists occasionally, panning gold in the creek, selfies with his menagerie.’
She stopped to uproot turmeric and galangal for Greta. ‘Stick those in the ground, give them plenty of water. They’ll grow.’
For a nursery she had a couple of trestle tables holding seedlings in pots, with a shade cloth overhead. She packed a crate with young plants. Griffin read out the labels. Snake bean, custard apple, kaffir lime, tamarind. The boys carried off pawpaw and banana plants in pots to the ute while Brynn found rolls of wire and shade cloth.
At the last moment she sent Toby to the coolroom for the developer and film, where he could also see the wallaby ag
ain. Then she gave Raffy a bag of hose adaptors, and an old sweet potato sprouting roots like tentacles for him to plant. He held it warily like it might move. She led the way to the car with pots of eggplant and cherry tomatoes.
The pig trotted on one side of her, Raffy on the other.
‘You’ll keep your pig then,’ the boy suggested.
‘I will,’ said Brynn. ‘I like her. We have the same mood swings.’
A whiff of bushfire smoke was on the air. She paused to register the wind’s direction. ‘That’s a fire at the wrong time of year. Some twit with a match or a welder.’ She shut the ute tray with a slam.
Greta went to collect the camera equipment and enlarger. When she was done she handed Brynn a wad of money and slid in behind the wheel. A soft clucking came from the back seat. She turned and saw a black hen nestled on Toby’s lap. Griffin held a brown one. Raffy’s was the smallest, and white. The boys grinned at her.
‘Don’t say no,’ Brynn told her. ‘They’re layers.’
‘Thanks.’ Greta gave her a wry smile. ‘For everything.’
‘I’ll sell you some guineafowl if you’re interested. Always let you know when a snake’s around. Chase off a dingo if they have to.’
She stooped to pick up a brown feather with white spots and placed it on the dashboard, then slapped the car roof. ‘I’ll come by in a few days.’
The ute moved forward. The guineafowl dispersed. Greta imagined them at her place, rounding up the children, the man, herself and the new hens.
She tooted the horn and waved out the window. In the side mirror the steely woman watched them go.
‘I was thinking,’ said Raffy as Greta turned onto the road. ‘You know how Henry was a lightning chaser?’
‘Sure.’ Greta gave him a quick smile in the rear-vision mirror.
‘I think it’s why he liked Brynn. I think she was his lightning bolt.’
6
Two whistling kites glided in circles above Greta. She was standing in the middle of a rough garden bed edged with rocks. Shallow dents marked the ground where she was trying to dig holes. She struck the earth with the hoe. It bounced and dinged back. Across the valley the escarpment glowered heat. She hit the ground again. Next to her, various seedlings waited in their pots. Clouds assembled overhead like curious onlookers. Her thoughts drifted out of her and mingled in the heavy air.
She was glad of the excuse to pause when a ute rumbled up to the shack. It was Brynn, with two rockmelon vines, a wild passionfruit and trellis.
‘I’m here for a stickybeak. And a coffee.’
Greta took her up to the verandah. She and Joel had laid decking the day before.
‘Homey!’ Brynn admired the retro lime-green table with matching vinyl chairs, and the pair of well-loved wicker armchairs facing the escarpment. ‘I like the table!’ Her hand patted it.
‘Joel says he needs sunglasses to look at it. I thought it was tropical.’
Greta set up the coffee pot. Brynn leaned against a verandah post to light a cigarette. Together they put the trellis at the end of the verandah for the passionfruit vine. It partly obscured the view of the ruin.
‘But no one will cry over that,’ Brynn said.
‘No,’ Greta agreed.
After coffee they planted the melons in the rough garden bed Greta had made from the water tank to the verandah. Brynn chatted as she worked, and Greta slipped in a few questions about the town and how long Brynn had lived here.
‘Must be eight years now,’ Brynn answered. ‘It was Henry’s idea. He loved the place, not that he had long here in the end.’
When they’d finished she stretched her back and said, ‘Well, that’s it for me. I’ll see you next time.’
She promised to return in a few days, and offered to share driving up to Darwin for shopping. Her last advice was about bananas. ‘Plant three together. They like friends.’
Afterwards, showered and wrapped in a sarong, Greta sat in a wicker chair and put her feet up on a milk crate topped with a square of plywood. Toby had made it to double as a coffee table and footrest.
There was a breeze lurking up on the hill. She heard the homestead’s iron roof lift and clang. Good place to fly a kite, she’d suggested. But Joel seemed to be avoiding the old house. There was a risk of falling beams, he warned her, and walls that might collapse. ‘Don’t take the kids.’
He hadn’t taken her either.
She was tempted to venture there now, while he was checking fences and the children were at school. She could try out Henry’s camera.
The incline up to the homestead was steeper than she’d expected. It was a bald hill, scattered with bronze-coloured rocks, a few sand palms and skinny saplings with wide leaves like green, yellow and red flags. The sun bit through her shirt, and the tripod’s makeshift rope strap dug into her shoulder alongside the camera bag.
Every few steps the boulders multiplied. She imagined they had eyes. At night they might speak. For now they let her pass, and held quiet their secrets.
She paused out the front of the ruin, taking in the place. The station owner, Donegan, had bought two half-destroyed houses for a song after the ’74 cyclone and trucked them to the property. Fedor and his brothers rebuilt them into a home. Maria planted around it for shade. It was a luxurious move after the freight van, silver bullet workers’ van and open shed where they’d been living. They called the new place ‘the homestead’ among themselves.
After the fire and twenty-three years of abandonment, the stumps had sunk, skewing the face of the house. The verandah was lashed with charcoal fingers. Its floor had collapsed. The windows of every room were long, melancholy eyes. Decaying shutters were pinned back to the walls.
She passed a Hills hoist in the grass on her way to the back of the house, where rusted cars were lined up with crooked towers of used tyres and car parts. The paddock behind was overrun with gamba. Among the trees and termite mounds were the shadows of other wrecked vehicles. The grass hummed with insects and heat.
How must it have been for Joel’s father to arrive here with his brothers, fleeing a terrible incarceration? And his mother, escaping her own secret traumas? After Europe’s colder climates how did they adjust to life on this bald hill, with its relentless sun, the unforgiving soil? She imagined Maria hoeing the tough earth, pregnant, breastfeeding, running after toddlers in the heat and pining for mountains, music, tulips.
At the side of the house a section of wall was missing. Greta stepped inside. Dead leaves crunched under her boots. The noise was too loud, announcing her. A spell might break, incite an avalanche of ant-eaten wood. Something was here still. The imprint, the after-breath of souls.
She was in the old kitchen. The walls were blackened but the room was intact. A single window shutter was still propped open—the old, tropical kind that pushed out and up. An upturned enamel bath was at one end, and a cast-iron oven at the other. The oven door hung loose from its hinge and the flue reached for the sky through a missing section of roof. Here Maria would have stirred her chicken soup and sliced the salami Uncle Vadik made.
Down the hallway the frame of the house was bare in places. The fire must have rushed through, licking one room and destroying the next. She felt a surge of sadness to look on the devastation of a family. It made her think she shouldn’t take photos.
The living room’s ceiling was gone. Flaps of iron roofing clung together at odd angles so shafts of light beamed down. One lit up a long mound of charred debris. The family table perhaps. She conjured it back to life in her mind, with children around it and Maria lighting a candle in her crystal candlestick, the one possession she’d brought in her suitcase, miraculously unbroken.
‘Stolen!’ Fedor would growl—which was a lie, because the children knew the candlestick was a secret gift from a rich count to their mother’s mother’s grandmother.
Greta had spliced together a strange mix of Joel’s anecdotes and her own images over the years from glimpses he gave—an incident, a trait,
a song or story to amuse the boys. She interwove them. But standing in the actual place where they’d lived, her knowledge felt scanty. The images were fading in real light, pieces were missing, fractured. All she had were tenuous threads. And her imagination.
She focused the camera on a thick wreath of black strands under one of the shafts of light. It took her a moment to realise it was a burned car tyre. The noise of the shutter lifted something in her. She breathed easier. Joel wouldn’t care about photos, she told herself. He’d say the past is the past.
A light wind breathed around the building. Flaps of metal squeaked above her. A window shutter pulled and rattled, eager to speak.
She stepped onto the sunken verandah. Greta imagined Fedor with his gammy leg limping to and fro, muttering his discontent, shouting for Maria.
She retreated back into the house and made her way to the next room, which was less touched by the fire. A cast-iron bedframe was still there. Something gripped her heart to see it. Had Maria died in this bed? Was this where Joel had read to her by lamplight? And lifted her for the last time, her body shrunken and yellowed?
Greta set up the tripod and camera. Perspiration stung her eyes. The empty bed blurred and sharpened in the lens.
The roof was gone from the next room. The sky was vivid blue against the charred beams. Two bunk frames remained. She knew from Joel that all six brothers had slept in one room. Mick, Lars, Seb, Radek, Danny and Joel, their real names morphed into easier-to-pronounce ones for the new country where they were born. Half of them blond-haired and blue-eyed like their father. Half of them black-haired and brown-eyed like their mother.
Across the hallway, Magdalen’s room was not much bigger than a walk-in wardrobe. A stained and mouldy mattress lay on the floor, with yellow stuffing bulging from its side. There was a hole punched in one wall. Next door was the bathroom. Its floor had fallen through, and the green ceramic basin lay on the ground below.