Charlie was sitting on the bed, staring out the window across to the paddock beside the shearing shed. He was dressed in black trousers and a charcoal shirt with burgundy stitching. His white curls were damp from his shower.
He waved at nowhere in particular. ‘It hasn’t even started yet and I’m already sick of it.’
‘You mean the hospital visits?’
‘What else?’
‘Can we talk about this in the car?’
He closed his eyes.
I sat beside him. ‘It’s not like you to feel sorry for yourself.’
He shrugged.
‘You know this will be good for you. And the other thing is,’ I shifted to make him look at me, ‘we can’t be late because I have to get back in time to pick up Sophie.’
‘Another reason to not go.’
‘Come on, stop this.’ I stood.
He carefully moved his body into a black suit jacket. They were old clothes, but they looked all right with his long white hair and attitude. Then he pulled a pair of Ray-Bans out of a pocket. ‘All right then, let’s get on with it.’
We followed the signs to Radiology down the half-lit avenue of pale-green walls. There were no external windows and every door was closed. White-lit Exit signs were centred above some doors. The hospital smelt like dishwashing detergent and the air-conditioning was too cold.
At the reception, it was me they addressed.
‘I’m the patient.’ Charlie put his elbows on the counter. ‘Greer’s my driver.’
Forms were filled out and referrals handed over. I watched Charlie painstakingly write his name and address in blue pen. Each letter was a miniature of the same curious curves and rounds he did in his paintings. They soon called his name and he tapped me on the knee.
‘Won’t be long.’
The stiffness in his hips made him waddle and the arc of his spine stooped his shoulders. Once he’d turned the corner I went through the magazines stacked on a small table, but they were all out of date so I didn’t pick any up.
I was reading Humans of New York on Facebook when my phone rang with an unfamiliar number.
‘Ryan here. We’ve had a look at your floor. You’ve got a pretty big problem.’
I took a breath, waiting.
‘We’ve been under the house. Wet rot. It stretches right across the back, across the kitchen, dining room, hallway and through to the bathroom and back porch. The floor needs to be replaced.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The timber has never been treated. It’s a common problem in old places like this.’
‘What about the new kitchen?’
‘We can’t put it in on this floor. You need new boards across the whole back of the house. It’s pretty bad in the bathroom. There are a couple of spots where it’s rotted right through.’
I asked him to send me a quote. The random figure of five thousand dollars came to mind and straight away I was doing mental sums, ticking off budget items. I’d figure something out. By the time Charlie appeared, looking just the same as when he went in, I had called another builder to do an independent inspection.
‘What’s wrong?’ Charlie asked.
‘Nothing. Let’s go.’
Before we’d arrived at the arterial roundabout to Euroa, Charlie was already asleep, his head lolled forward. I was relieved to have the space to think about the floor and looked out across the flat, dry countryside. The stark reality of getting paid only once a year hit me. And what if the harvest failed? I wondered about getting some casual work. Lena sometimes contracted projects out to experienced freelancers. She might need me. There was no money coming in until the harvest in five months and that income had to last a year.
Charlie’s head was now against the side of the seat. His sunglasses were askew and his mouth was slightly open. There were faint stains of paint around the edges of his fingernails – pink and yellow.
Ryan’s quote came via a pdf attached to an email. No one was there to see my reaction – the blind stare followed by a hand to my mouth, and the seconds it took before I looked up. He had laid out three options. For sixteen thousand dollars, he would lay insulation and replace the floorboards and skirting boards across the back of the house. The floorboards would be left unpolished. The second option was the same as the first, but included having the floorboards polished. That would cost twenty-one thousand dollars. The last option was to lay the floorboards, install the new kitchen, then polish the floorboards. At forty-six thousand dollars, it was out of the question. I didn’t even have that much money in my savings. And what I did have was allocated for blueberry packaging and labour costs.
The next afternoon, while Enrico and I were working our way down Row 31, pruning two bushes apart, he asked me why the kitchen wasn’t being installed.
‘I’m deciding what to do,’ I said.
‘You can go to the work. To make the money.’ His back was straight, neck muscles tense. ‘Because the floor wood is a problem, right?’
The sun had come out and we had dropped our coats to the ground. By now I was pruning automatically; my secateurs just went to the canes without thinking, shaping the vase.
‘I don’t have time to go to work.’
‘If you need the money, you have to get the employment. I can do the pruning, all of it.’ He quickly bowed his head.
And for the next twenty bushes, I let my mind dream about starting up a communications consultancy and working from home.
That night I registered a business name, Greer O’Reilly Communications. I was doodling a logo, entwining G and O and C, when I heard the toilet flush. Charlie shuffled barefoot into the lounge. He was wearing a black baggy tracksuit and his thin body was lost inside it. Standing in front of the fire, he shivered.
‘I can’t sleep from thinking about this business with the floor,’ he said. ‘I want to pay for it.’
‘I’ve already told you that you’re not.’
‘But you wouldn’t have bought the place if you’d known.’
‘Don’t worry about it. It’ll be all right,’ I said.
‘I’m speaking to Warren about it.’
‘This has got nothing to do with him.’
‘Then sell some of my paintings. Celia does.’
‘Who’s Celia?’
‘Warren’s wife.’
I hadn’t heard about this before but it made sense. Charlie had been painting for decades and there wasn’t a lifetime’s worth of paintings lying around. While we drank tea, he told me Celia had a gallery in Singapore, Celia Tilly Arts, and she had been selling his work for all the years she had been married to Warren.
‘She’s his second wife. Patty left him. Don’t blame her, either.’
‘How long has Warren lived in Singapore?’
‘Since after he got the job there. That’s where he met Celia.’
And the story unfolded. Celia had a son with Warren, his second child. There was another boy with Patty who had drowned.
‘A teenage party, he’d been on the grog. They didn’t cope very well and were done within a year. Patty moved out.’
‘Who buys your paintings?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. People who go to her gallery.’
‘Do you make much money?’
I was afraid of where I was going with this. The old house, the frayed carpet – and under the vinyl that we were standing on, the floorboards were rotten.
‘Warren’s in charge of the money. And I get my pension, that’s all I use.’
Charlie went back to bed and I Googled Celia Tilly Arts Singapore. Her gallery was a little off the main drag, near the museum. I browsed through the building and entered white-painted rooms with large paintings hanging from wires in the ceiling. There was enough depth of space to stand back and gaze at them. The plumbing and air-conditioning pipes were exposed, which created an austere and chic feeling. There was a sense of quality and skill; Celia Tilly was a good operator. Warren was a director in the business. There
were scheduled exhibitions and they seemed brave to me – one on Power, Gender and Sex with painted images of life-like brightly painted naked bodies. Her main theme seemed to be modern Chinese art and sculpture. Two of Charlie’s paintings were registered for sale; both could be seen in the catalogue, one for ten thousand US dollars, the other for fifteen. Large canvas works in his typical style of bold close-up floral design, he was referred to as ‘… the modern Monet.’ They weren’t on the virtual gallery tour, or not that I could find, but there were written testimonials from buyers of his work from Auckland, Sydney and Tokyo.
After that, Greer O’Reilly Communications seemed puny and worrying. I had no clients and desperately needed some. It was late now, past midnight, but I quickly drafted up an upbeat friendly email to Lena to let her know that everything was going very well and that I was available for freelance work. I didn’t intend to send it, but with my finger on the touch pad it was too easy to hit send and that’s what happened, and then the email was gone and couldn’t be brought back. I opened the Outbox and reread it slowly, looking for the mistakes, but it seemed all right.
In spite of how we parted, I always believed Lena liked me and she knew I was a good operator. But after two days it was clear she wasn’t going to reply. So I went to the privacy of my bedroom. Sophie was at school, excited about an African mask-making and drumming special event. Nick was Skyping later in the day to hear all about it.
I closed the door and sat in the centre of my bed. Cloaked in the doona for warmth, I scrolled through my old work contacts and started phoning. In every call, I faked cheerfulness. I heard myself laughing along, and it sounded like someone else. Everyone loved hearing from me. We caught up on the news and almost all of them said to come and see them when I was next in Melbourne. ‘We’ll do lunch …’ My old mining client said he’d think of me every time he ate blueberries. But, in the end, I’d been forgotten. No one had any work – but they were all keeping me in mind.
I could hear the happy off-key rhythm of Enrico singing in the laundry. It was raining so he had quit pruning for the day and was doing his and Charlie’s washing. I tossed off the doona, slid off the bed and stood at the window. It was grey outside, the rain steady. The gutter was leaking; water was splashing down into the hydrangeas. Another unbudgeted expense. I’d have to get the roof and guttering replaced at some point. I knew from when I had worked with Michael Foster that he’d wanted a Product Recall & Crisis Manual drafted, and the Wrens Style Manual also needed updating. I put my palm on the windowpane and suppressed the pain of icy glass. They were two perfect jobs to give a freelancer and I could charge him three hundred dollars an hour. By the end of the year, I’d have the extra money I needed for the new floor. It was specialised work, and I was that specialist. I went back to bed and once again pulled the doona tightly around me. I thought about my dreams for the place and how naïve I had been, pinning all my income hopes on an annual harvest.
I found Michael’s mobile in my contacts list. And remembered the strength of his milk-white body, his urgency. It would be all right, though, because I would establish boundaries from the very start.
I dialled. In that warm nest, I waited for him to pick up.
His voice was unhurried and lighter than I would have thought, but it was him: ‘Michael Foster here.’
Time slowed as I waited for the words to come. My breath was shallow and I stared into the white weave of the cotton doona cover and the curved stitches in their floral pattern.
‘Hello, Greer.’
Yes, he would see my name on his screen.
Enrico had moved closer, was in the lounge room now. He couldn’t sing and didn’t know it as he tried to reach yet a higher note.
‘Are you there? Greer.’
I shrugged the doona off, stretched my back and took a full breath. It wasn’t a real decision. My thumb just pressed end call and the line went dead. Sitting on my unmade bed, in my cold bedroom, with yesterday’s clothes strewn across the cane washing basket and the splashing waterfall from the leaking gutter outside the window, I bowed my head, knowing what I had to do.
I dragged myself into the lounge where it was warm. Standing in front of Charlie’s thin and fraying Y-fronts and Enrico’s stripy jockey briefs, and a line of brightly coloured odd socks, draping t-shirts and singlets, I phoned Kitchen Masters and cancelled the kitchen.
‘But the cabinets have all been made,’ the tall woman said.
I told her I couldn’t afford to have the floor replaced and the new kitchen installed and I didn’t know when my circumstances were going to change. She said I would lose the deposit and I didn’t argue.
The last call was to Ryan, asking him to start on the floor as soon as possible. His quote had been the best.
‘You want the high gloss stain?’
‘Leave them unpolished,’ I said.
After all that I should have felt relieved – decisions had been made. But instead I was depressed. Here I was, living in a rundown house with an old dying man and a chance of making some money in summer. The blueberries would grow. Somehow I’d arrange for them to be picked and packed and sold. And if I did that well enough, only then would everything be all right.
16
FOR most of the next fortnight, after the trips to Shepparton and in between napping, Charlie worked in his studio, designing the label for the blueberry punnets. On the evening of the unveiling, the three of us – Charlie, Enrico and me – sat around the kitchen table. Sophie was watching TV. The dirty dishes from Enrico’s baked tomato rigatoni were stacked by the sink.
There were four label versions. Charlie laid them out side-by-side, slowly, with a teasing flick of his wrist like a card dealer. Each mock-up was on a perfect square of thick white cardboard the size of a slice of bread – big enough to examine the detail and small enough to imagine it on a punnet. The differences between the versions were subtle; even so, we spent a long time discussing the exact colour of a blueberry and which font would be best for the lettering.
I had been buying blueberries for months to collect differently labelled punnets, and they were now spread along the edge of the table. We examined them again, one by one. Then we referred to what Charlie had created and collectively decided on the design with a single blueberry in thick purple oil, with a glint of mauve and white where the sun might be touching it. The berry was round and fully ripened and the paint texture gave the curious impression of plump firmness.
It was Enrico who’d previously insisted the trading name should be SOPHIE’S BLUEBERRIES, and of course, it was perfect, my little girl branding this adventure. Her name was in bright pink letters and bordered the edges of the white label. All the other requirements were ink sketched in dark blue: the barcode, that it was a product of Australia, that it weighed one hundred and twenty five grams, and my address for tracking purposes. I was thrilled with the result and could tell by the liveliness in Charlie’s eyes that he was enjoying himself and was pleased that I was happy.
Later that night, Shane phoned. I had just left Sophie’s room and was standing in the hallway as I answered. There was fly dirt and cobwebs on the amber glass light fitting, so I flicked the dim yellow light off and stood in the shadows.
He said Warren was arriving on Saturday. ‘And I thought I’d have you all over for dinner that night.’
‘I’m a bit worried about meeting him.’
‘I don’t think you can avoid it.’
Enrico was talking to Charlie in the kitchen – a chair scraped on the floor as they moved about.
‘It is okay if Enrico comes?’
‘No worries. See you at six-thirty.’
On the short drive to Shane’s, no one spoke. Charlie stared forward with a tight jaw. My arms were stiff on the wheel. And Enrico, tuned to the vibe, wore a worried expression. Only Sophie was pleased with the outing because I had braided her hair. The wattles were out, yellow bursts all along the road.
A black Holden Commodore was beside the tall
clipped hedge; I presumed Warren’s rental. I parked beside Shane’s twin-cab. In front was the silhouette of a single pine and the pink shimmering glow of the unseen sun.
I stepped back and let Charlie lead the way.
The black dog was chained beside a kennel and lay watching us. Charlie walked past it without an affectionate word, or even a glance. We followed him through a wide, deep archway cut into the hedge and down a curved concrete path. A white timber shed with a green door was on the left. A security light flashed and spot-lit the back entry to a white timber house with a green corrugated iron roof. The naked branches of a wisteria twisted the length of the long veranda. Beside the path were raised garden boxes with silverbeet and the stalks of a root vegetable. Most were empty and unkempt – perhaps Shane’s wife had been the gardener. Further back were fruit trees – the yellow of hanging lemons.
Charlie took a heavy step up onto the veranda and pulled the wire door open. He knocked loudly on the solid back door, and without waiting for an answer, turned the knob and walked straight in. We followed him through the porch, catching a glimpse of a long table filled with black plastic hose, gloves, wire, tools, too much to take in. Work boots were lying on their sides and coats were hanging from the wall. Up another step and we walked towards the welcoming smell of curry, and the light melodic voice of Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, into the lounge and dining area. No one was around. The firebox was glowing. The room was warm.
Charlie looked at me and I glanced at my phone.
‘We’re on time,’ I said.
He walked, hunched and deliberate, to the end of the room, turned right through a door and disappeared.
Enrico, Sophie and I stood close together. The room was longer than it was wide and had three bay windows with cushioned ledges. A tabby cat stared at us from the ledge closest to the fire. Beside the firebox was a cane basket half filled with logs. Dust and bark chips were on the hearth and scattered on the timber floor.
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