Listening to Mondrian

by Nadia Wheatley

  ‘Thar she blows!’ he says.

  ‘Oh darl!’ Mum says first to him. ‘Oh darl!’ she says again to Liv. ‘Isn’t it going to be exciting, sweetheart, living in the country!’

  Liv looks down into a town that huddles in the valley like a trapped beast. Roofs and roofs and roofs, a web of railway lines, mounds of black coal, and above it all a thick dark smear of smoke.

  Coming in through the smell of coal fires, Liv feels the red sweet and sour sauce rising to her throat. What’ll they be like, her new family? Four boys. (‘Four brothers!’ Mum had said. ‘Won’t that be exciting?’) Liv hates boys. Boys always tease her, call her Fatso. And a new school. Liv hates school. Kids always tease her, call her Fatso. She hates him too, and hates this town, hates Mum for making her live here . . . and then she sees it.

  A big brick tower, that rises above the surrounding wasteland. It has arched windows, the kind princesses lean out of, but it’s not all soft and fanciful like fairytale pictures. Nor is it haunted-looking, despite the fact that the roof is missing and the brickwork of the walls is tumbledown and gappy in parts. It is, rather, reassuring – like an elephant, or a cathedral.

  When Liv sees it, she suddenly feels as if she has a friend in town.

  After that, the rest of this first day is almost bearable.

  They park in the street just across from the tower, and four boys (four brothers, Mum says) pour out from a weatherboard cottage. (‘This is Dougie. Dannie. Johnno. And Bruz.’) Inside, in the front bedroom, a skinny old witch inspects her. (‘Say hello to Gramma!’) Then his mates arrive, with a few slabs of beer and a couple of wives. (‘Is that the daughter?’ she hears the women whisper over a plate of Saos. ‘Big sort of girl, isn’t she?’ ‘She’ll wanta be, to stand up to Gordo.’)

  Gordo? Oh, Uncle Bruce. Bruce Gordon. Mum is Mrs Gordon now, but I told her I wanted to stay Doyle.

  ‘What’s your name again, love?’

  ‘Olivia Doyle.’

  ‘O-livia!’ Dougie starts, doing the ‘O’ in an English voice.

  ‘Oh Livia!’ Dannie chimes in.

  ‘Oh Livia oh Livia oh Livia!’ Johnno and Bruz join the act.

  ‘We call her Liv for short,’ Mum apologises.

  ‘We call her Fatso for fat,’ Dougie mutters and the brothers collapse together in a scrum of laughter.

  Liv looks across to the tower of her friend.

  As Liv approached now, through the wasteland, past the new sign threatening ‘AUCTION INDUSTRIAL LOTS’ and the not-so-new sign promising ‘BICENTENNIAL REDEVELOPMENT PROJECT’ she was deciding: where today? For on this nothing-day, the season was unclear: not summer, not winter, not really even spring. It kept changing, as she herself had, back in her room a few minutes ago. Black tracksuit and her khaki army greatcoat; khaki army shorts and her black size XXL T-shirt; or her mid-season outfit of splodged jungle greens with matching top and bottom? She’d decided on the last little number eventually: felt in need of camouflage today. Which hadn’t of course helped her escape unnoticed.

  ‘Where you off to, girl?’ Old Gimlet-Eyes had screeched through the flyscreen that covered the window between her bedroom and the front sleep-out.

  ‘Over the blast furnace, Gramma.’

  ‘Have you done your chores?’

  ‘Yeah, Gramma.’

  ‘Your mother know?’

  ‘Yeah, Gramma.’

  ‘You’ll fall down one of them holes over there one of these days, girl, and that’ll be the finish of you.’

  ‘Yeah, Gramma.’

  It was true – the site was riddled with holes. Huge gaping ones and thin slitty ones, and in one place the land fell down a kind of cliff into a large stagnant pond. There were tunnels too, that might fall in, and lots of broken bricks to lose your footing on, and twisted pieces of rusty tin to give you tetanus. The boys were forbidden to go there – last time they had, Gordo had taken off his belt – so it was the one place where Liv could get away from them. And apart from the odd tourist who’d drive in, take one look, and drive off again, no one else ever went there either. It was Liv’s place.

  So, where today? Her mood, like the weather, was uncertain. Not quite in need of the Cry Cave, where she could huddle inside the earth, but not cheerful enough for Hilltop Grove, where fruit trees grew wild and the breeze blew fresh on your face. And not the Summer House, and not the Winter Quarters. Not the Dwarf Tunnels and not the Dragon Lair. Not the Chicken Coop and not the Elvey Dell and not, definitely not, Snake Lake.

  In the end, it was the Tower that she chose, for she was feeling somewhat princessy despite the need of a fairy godmother this morning.

  This morning. Wake at dawn as usual, even though it’s Saturday, for the witch wakes then, and rattles at the flyscreen for her cuppa.

  No need to dress, Liv goes to bed in her tracksuit, for the front sleep-out is draughty and the nights are freezing still.

  Creep along the hall to the kitchen, throw some kindling onto the smoulders of last night’s coal in the stove, boil the kettle (there is an electric one, but the stove takes longer), make the tea – ‘Not-too-strong-not-too-weak, girl, beats me how you can get it wrong every time’ – spread marge on two slices of bread, cut the crusts off (Gramma doesn’t put her teeth in till after her metho rubdown at half past eleven).

  For a thrill today (Happy Birthday!) Liv puts a flower on the tray.

  ‘What’s that then?’

  ‘A daisy, Gramma.’

  ‘Take it away. You know I can’t abide flowers in a sick room.’

  She sips the tea. ‘Beats me how you can get it wrong every time, girl.’

  Good. I’m glad you said that. Glad you say it every morning, because every morning I need reminding how much I hate you if I am to hold my breath and do the next thing; because to do the next thing I need to feel something more powerful than disgust.

  And so now Liv takes a deep breath then clamps her mouth shut and blocks the air-lock to her nose, then lifts up the seat of the commode, reaches in for the green enamel potty, and carries it (can’t go too fast or you’ll spill it) all the way down the hall (lungs yelling for air like a diver’s) and out to the dunny, and at last tips it down.

  At least today she hasn’t done number twos. (Happy Birthday, Liv!)

  But the sound of the flushing wakes Bruz, who wakes Johnno, who wakes Dannie, who wakes Dougie, and Liv storms into the back room and tries to bribe them with toast, for Mum really needs some sleep (Liv heard her up in the night nursing Gramma) and Liv is damned if the little buggers (sorry, brothers) will wake Mum before seven at least.

  But the toaster only takes two slices at a time and there are four boys and Liv only has two hands, and it’s not long before Mum comes out, her faded chenille dressing gown clutched around her. ‘Need a hand, darl?’

  ‘No, Mum, you have a bit of a lie-in, I’ll make you a cuppa in a minute . . .’

  But Mum stays anyway, pours the dregs from the teapot.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Mum, make a fresh pot.’ I wouldn’t wish the witch’s tea on a dead dog.

  But if Liv is a saint, Mum is a martyr, and so she drinks the lukewarm leafy brew, and drinks it black, because Dougie has got to the fridge behind Liv’s back and finished off the milk.

  ‘I’ll go up the shop and get some,’ Liv says.

  When she gets back, Mum is dressed, and remembers. ‘Oh Liv. I forgot. It’s not much I’m afraid, but darl, you know how it is.’

  Yes, I know. Interest rates are on the rise. The Treasurer said so the other night on TV. So now there’s an official reason for the way this whole town hurts, and Liv’s family with it.

  Liv opens the package that has been carefully wrapped in recycled Santa Clauses. Two hair doodahs – one shocking pink and the other a kind of purple and cerise and yellow. A pair of stockings. A copy of the latest Mills & Boon. And an IOU for ‘1 pair Good Shoes’.

  ‘It’s from all of us,’ Mum lies.

  ‘Oh Mum. Ta.’ Liv’s mother ha
s tried, and Liv knows it, but the present is for a girl who ties back her long fine hair with doodahs, for a girl who clads her long thin legs in stockings, for a girl who dreams of romance as she totters on Good Shoes to the ball; for a girl who is not Liv. ‘But if you don’t mind I’ll use the IOU for a pair of runners.’

  Mum is disappointed. Liv wears thongs in summer and an old pair of work boots in winter, and her mother has been nagging about shoes for ages. But ‘Oh well, it’s your funeral,’ Mum sighs. ‘Happy birthday, darl.’

  ‘Ta, Mum.’

  After a proper breakfast (eggs sausages bacon and tomato) has been cooked for Gordo, and the first load of washing has been hung out, Mum and Liv do the weekly supermarket shopping, carry it all the way home. (Gordo takes the boys to footy on Saturday mornings, not that Mum can drive anyway. But he could at least pick us up, Liv thinks as the plastic carrybags cut her hands.)

  Liv unpacks while Mum goes in to give Gramma her rub-down, then it’s time to change the sheets on the boys’ bunks (they’re fixed to the wall so it’s hard to tuck in the top ones; and when you do the bottom ones you always forget, and crack your head). While the sheets are in the machine, run the vac round the back room, avoiding the race track, sucking up Lego. Now hang the sheets out.

  ‘Heavens!’ Mum emerges exhausted and smelling of metho. ‘Is that the time?’

  Put the pies in the oven, the boys’ll be home from footy in a moment, skiting and starving.

  ‘Anyway, I scored a try!’

  ‘I scored two tries!’

  ‘Where’s lunch?’

  ‘Anyway, I kicked a goal!’

  ‘I’m hungry!’

  ‘When’ll lunch be ready?!’

  ‘Honestly,’ Gordo complains to Mum, ‘I can’t see why you can’t have the pies hot for when the boys get home.’

  ‘It’s my fault,’ Liv says. ‘I forgot.’

  ‘You forget every bloody week,’ Gordo says. ‘Anyone’d think it was deliberate.’

  ‘They’ll be ready any minute now,’ Mum promises.

  So the boys disappear on their bikes, and Liv rinses the worst of the mud off their footy gear and puts it in the machine, and when the boys finally get back the pies are a bit burnt on top and there’s another scene. Liv takes the best two out to Gordo, who is washing the car. Puts the plate on the bonnet.

  ‘Mind the bloody duco! What, have these been through a bushfire or something!’

  Liv takes the worst two pies and sits on the milk crate behind the laundry. The hills that surround the town press in on her, trapping her, while the coal smoke hangs above like a lid. It is not that today is worse than any other Saturday, but that it is exactly the same. Liv often feels as if she is stuck in some sort of time warp, in which the same things happen, over and over again.

  The machine gives a thump to say that it is time to hang out the footy gear, bring in the first load of dry stuff.

  ‘Never mind, darl,’ Mum tells Liv’s long face. ‘It might never happen.’

  It has it has it already has. And it will it will it will.

  Liv gets out the ironing board.

  ‘I’ll do that, darl.’

  Mum looks dead weary after this morning’s session with Gramma. ‘It’s OK. You go and have a lie-down, read the paper.’

  Liv actually smiles as she starts on Gordo’s work shirts. Only half an hour and World of Sport will be on, and they’ll all sit there mesmerised, and Cinderella will escape.

  Arriving at the Tower, Liv bypassed the steps that led up to the broad archway of the front entrance and clambered up a mound of rubble to one of the two narrower arches at the eastern side. Her head spun for a moment: the floorboards of the old power house were completely missing and it was a long drop to the bottom of the machine pit. Down below was a mess of broken bricks, rusty pieces of tin, corroded piping, an old fridge, even a holly tree.

  ‘You’ll fall down one of them holes and that’ll be the finish of you!’ the witch’s curse rang in Liv’s head.

  That’s what you think!

  Facing inwards to the arch and clinging for balance, Liv stretched her right foot across the gap to the top of a brick pier, about two metres square, that had once provided the base for one of the engines. Took a deep breath, leaned all her weight onto this first foot, brought the left foot over to join it.

  Secure now on her platform, Liv danced to the music that was coming through her headphones. (‘This is Radio 2LT Lithgow,’ said the man. ‘Rock till you drop!’) and as her energy filled the space, the Tower itself seemed to remember the enormous power of its past.

  There’s a black and white photograph on Liv’s bedroom wall, that she cut out of the paper on the town’s last Heritage Day. It shows the tower as it once was, standing proudly with its roof on and its bricks all clean and fresh. To its left, there is a little building that looks like a church hall. To its right, the massive cylinder of the furnace itself looms above the heating stoves. Beyond this again, the great pillar of the steam hoist rises up in front of a chimney so tall that it disappears out of the top of the picture. Running between all these structures is a network of gigantic pipes. And crowded in front of all this there are the ant specks of hundreds of people.

  Underneath, the caption says:

  On 13th May 1907, Australia’s first blast furnace was blown in and tapped in the presence of the Premier and a train-load of dignitaries. Fortunately, the noise of the furnace was too great to allow for speechmaking.

  And now it is that day, and Liv pulls the switch inside the power house, and there is a piercing whistle and a belch of smoke and Liv feels the earth shudder as air pushes through the pipes and the metal flows red and molten and the great creature comes to life . . .

  When Liv woke, lying on the platform where she’d danced herself into exhaustion, there was an old woman sitting in the archway of the front entrance with a bunch of scarlet poppies in her lap. For a moment, Liv thought it was the witch come to worry her, and then she thought she was asleep still and dreaming the witch, and then she realised that it was just an old woman wearing a yellow baseball cap and a blue tracksuit and eating a green apple.

  The woman’s lips moved, but Liv had gone deaf. The lips moved again and the woman threw an apple at her. Then Liv realised that she’d turned the sound off but left the headphones in. She pulled them out now and heard ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Liv said, wondering what she had agreed to, and bit into the apple to be polite.

  The woman sitting cross-legged on the top step was skinny, and really very old, Liv saw, and her hair was long and there were yellow streaks in the white and her lipstick was as red as the poppies that she indicated now.

  ‘Thought you must’ve been into these,’ she said.

  Come again?

  ‘When you slept so sound.’

  Liv didn’t have a clue what the stranger was talking about. She had seen the poppies growing around the edge of the ruins but they were just – ‘Opium poppies,’ the old woman explained. ‘Mind you, I only pick ’em for the colour, I like flowers, but there’s others who might use ’em for, you know.’

  ‘Not me,’ Liv said quickly.

  ‘There’s a good girl,’ the woman agreed. ‘What you say your name was again?’

  ‘Olivia Doyle.’

  The woman’s forehead creased. ‘Doyle. Doyle. Wouldn’t be Charlie Doyle’s girl, would you?’

  ‘No. Sorry.’ Doyle was Mum’s name. Liv didn’t know her dad’s name. That was all long gone and best forgotten, Mum always said in the days when Liv used to ask. ‘I don’t come from round here.’

  ‘Tourist job eh?’

  ‘No, I mean . . . I live across the block there. At Gordons’. Bruce Gordon. He’s my’ (choke on the word) ‘stepdad.’

  The woman creased up her face again. It was as if it were vital for her to place Liv. ‘Bruce Gordon? Bruce Gordon?’ The light seemed to dawn. ‘That wouldn’t be Menie Gordon’s boy, by any chance?’

  Liv
tried to think. She was just Gramma. Or Old Mrs Gordon. On her tablet bottles the initial was W. ‘Menie?’ Liv asked.

  ‘Short for Wilhelmina. We called her that because she was such a bitch. Oh! Pardon my French!’

  ‘That’s her,’ Liv said.

  ‘Well fancy! Menie Gordon still alive and kicking! Course, I am myself, but then I haven’t stopped in the one place long enough for Death to catch me.’

  Liv was a bit embarrassed by someone saying ‘Death’ like that. ‘Don’t you live here now?’

  ‘Me? Here?’ The stranger snorted. ‘Oh no, the world’s my oyster, love. Here today, gone tomorrow, that’s my motto. Why, only ten days ago I was up at Kakadu – that was for my annual holidays, mind. Coupla weeks before that, I was in Kununurra for the mangoes. Month before that, it was Nambour for the strawberries . . .’

  Liv was mystified.

  ‘I’m a picker, see, love?’ the woman explained. She reached in her pocket and lobbed a tiny green booklet over the gap to the platform. ‘Here, this is my Bible.’

  Oh no, thought Liv, she’s going to ask me to love Jesus.

  But the booklet was called Harvest Table Australia, Summary of Seasonal Crops Requiring Labour. Inside, there was a calendar for every state, with lists showing all the crops and where they grew. Liv didn’t usually like books but this one was poetry to her. As she scanned the lists she could smell the fruit, feel the morning dew, even hear the laughter and friendship of the other pickers as they worked their way along the rows:

  Peaches Pears Apples Oranges

  Apricots Tomatoes Zucchinis Cherries

  Ginger Grapes Onions Capsicums

  Lettuces Potatoes Bananas Berries

  And when the abundance became too overwhelming she could see the country towns with their wide main streets and lacy pub verandahs, as the rhythm of the place names built a pattern of its own:

  Griffith, Orange, Leeton, Batlow,

  Stanthorpe, Berri, Robinvale,