Blueberry

by Glenna Thomson

  He had driven to Canberra for a meeting and I’d not heard from him since Saturday night. A few times I’d played with my phone – my thumbs tracing the outline of what I would say – but I would not contact him first.

  That morning I had taken the red rosebud out of the vase, patted it dry, placed it between layers of kitchen towel and put it in between two heavy books, my old school Oxford Dictionary and the latest edition of The Field Guide to the Birds of Australia.

  Enrico was on his knees under the skirt of a blueberry bush. Beside him was a black plastic tub of drippers.

  ‘This is too crazy,’ he said.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Too many along here,’ he said, waving down the length of Row 28. ‘All of these are too bad.’

  The irrigation was on so we could see which drippers were faulty. I knelt a few bushes away from him and for the next two hours we laboured down the row, pushing new 4mm adjustable flow drippers into the poly irrigation pipe.

  I wondered if Audrey had pressed these old drippers in, the ones I was pulling out. I imagined her there and tried to see the shape and size of her, her dark hair tied back in a red scarf. For the length of the row, I worked beside her and spoke silently, asking about Charlie, how she’d managed him and telling her how I was struggling. He’s stubborn and doesn’t eat and he’s drinking in the morning. I’m about to start picking and no one understands how nervous I am because I’m stuffed if the harvest fails. I wanted a word or sign from her about Charlie that everything would be all right, that the harvest would be fine. I breathed in deeply, waiting. But all that came back was the smell of clean fresh air. My knees hurt as I dragged myself along, hobbling sideways. All around were small and large clusters of ripening blueberries. I was hopeful for a good harvest. I needed it. Even though I was living more cheaply – no wine, and I had cut the food bill by a third – there were unpaid bills. I was on a payment plan for the electricity. I had increased the limit on my credit card and maxed it out, now only paying the interest on it. I was still nibbling into the pickers’ wages and trying to be careful with the second card, although there was already almost three thousand on it.

  I thought about going back to Charlie and apologising, to make sure he was all right, but I could see the end of the row and wanted it finished. And when I was finally there, the soft bleep of a text message came from my pocket.

  I pulled off my gloves.

  Shane.

  I knelt back, opened it.

  Looking for an excuse to come see you

  You don’t need an excuse. Picking S up at 3.30

  On my way

  27

  IN the space before Shane arrived, I hurried to Charlie’s studio. He was in the rose garden, cutting long stems with his secateurs and placing them on sheets of open newspaper. He moved stiffly and deliberately, almost in slow-motion.

  ‘They look nice,’ I said.

  He bent down and gathered up the parcel of roses. ‘These are for you, love.’

  We were standing beside a fragrant pale-orange rose – the copper name-plate said Amoretto – and I put my arm around his back, smelt whiskey, and felt how light he was.

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ I said.

  ‘I ate most of it.’

  ‘Can I get you anything? Do you want a cuppa?’

  ‘No, love. I’m going to have a lie down now.’

  As we walked to the house, my hand was a grab away in case he tripped. And in those slow steps, I thought of my father again and how little I had seen of him in the months and years before he’d died. The last time he was in a rented hospital bed in the lounge room of his home, a long, thin line under a cotton blanket. He had tried to speak, but I couldn’t make it out so I leaned closer. His breath was glycerin clean. I’d watched his lips move and still couldn’t understand, so I’d turned to Alison, but she was staring into her clenched hands.

  Charlie climbed the veranda steps like a toddler, one foot flat on the step, then the other beside it.

  ‘If you want that Frances woman to come from time to time,’ he said, ‘I’ll go along with it, but I’m not keen on it.’

  ‘Thanks, Charlie.’

  ‘Anything for peace.’

  I brought the washing in, pulled a garlic bulb to see if it was ready for picking and put the hose on Enrico’s potted mint, parsley and basil. I picked some lemons and examined the small green figs that were hard and not close to being ripe.

  Still Shane hadn’t arrived.

  It was warm with a good breeze. I sat on the back step and in the billowing clouds, I watched Africa morph into a battleship. Two unseen golden whistlers were singing, dee dee dee ah whit.

  Then a distant drone, growing louder from behind the shearing shed. His head first, hands on the handlebars, Shane came over the crest on his dirty red quad bike.

  I went to open the gate, but he beat me. The clouds were still moving and a shadow swept over us and away, leaving us standing in bright sun. I raised my hand to shield my eyes, and that’s how I saw him, more handsome but different, wearing a cap and sportsman sunglasses I had not seen before.

  ‘Had to check the troughs,’ he said.

  ‘What’s wrong with them?’

  ‘Tanks are empty, found a float off a valve.’

  I looked down at the ground between us, capeweed and rye grass, and wondered how to close that space and if I should. Shane crossed his arms and smiled, and I started talking, saying something I’d not properly decided on: ‘Charlie told me when I decided it was time to harvest, to wait a week. I thought we could do some picking to see what volume we can get.’

  ‘Jump on then,’ he said.

  He climbed on the bike like mounting a horse. He started the motor. When there seemed no other way, I gripped his arm for balance and stepped onto the footrest and slung my leg over the seat and dropped down behind him. I arched back so our bodies didn’t touch.

  ‘Hold on.’

  And off we went, too fast, and the wind smashed my face and my hands went around him to keep steady. We travelled over the dips and rises of the outer paddock and along the row of cypresses. I wasn’t prepared for the thrilling shock of it and when he pulled up at Row 60, close to the packing shed, I was first off, acting neat and unsurprised.

  ‘I’ll get the buckets and pouches,’ I said.

  We walked to the Denise variety where I knew the blueberries were ready. We stood a bush apart. He started picking, concentrating on what he was doing, taking it very seriously, as he should. I watched him for a moment, both hands reaching in, plucking two or three or more blueberries at a time and dropping them, plop, plop, plop, bouncing on the bottom of his plastic bucket.

  I started to pick. Many had pink bottoms, a few were bird pecked, or had the imprint from their tiny claws. I went for the darkest ones. Some I ate like juicy lollies, tasting sweet and tart. We traded stories as we moved slowly down the row, filling the small buckets around our waists and emptying them into the larger ones at our feet.

  He was peer reviewing an article on something to do with dairy cattle. And he was in a stoush with the local council on the increased rates. I spoke about Charlie, and the new ute I was trading my Golf in for. I didn’t tell him, but I would end up with some cash, which was already committed.

  ‘Have you had it RACV checked?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  In the open air, our voices were calm and clear. A brush cuckoo flitted close by and was gone. My hands worked rhythmically. And about twenty bushes down in Row 48, we found ourselves working on the same bush, standing close. It was unconscious, the way I turned as he reached out, pulling me to him, and we kissed. It was deliberate then, putting our buckets on the ground and stepping into the centre of the row, under the canopy of a few loping canes.

  I was aware of the time. And I was not late parking beside the peppercorn tree outside the school, behind someone’s dusty silver Kia Sedona. When Sophie snapped open the car door and climbed in and started chatting about how
Annabel had said this or that, and did I like her drawing – It’s beautiful, darling – I was still in Row 48 with Shane. We’d had fifteen minutes, and parted between the start and finish of something that became urgent and surprising and I had liked it. And when I’d stood, I looked up and saw an Airbus heading north and a flock of cockatoos heading south. I’d felt dizzy.

  With Sophie in front of the TV, I went to the packing shed and hoicked the four buckets Shane and I had picked up onto the pub-bar high bench. I weighed each bucket on Audrey’s old scales; the dial flickered and settled on seven kilos. In small portions, I emptied the buckets into the long, white open-weave plastic trays. I gently shook each tray to roll the blueberries, looking for blemishes, stalks, pink, bird damage – anything that wasn’t perfect. There wasn’t much for the chooks. It wasn’t too bad.

  I put an open punnet on the new digital scales.

  The shed was quiet and I had a sense of myself, standing there against the high bench with my feet firmly pressed on the rubber mat. I gently scooped up what felt like around one hundred and forty grams and released the blueberries into the punnet. The measurement settled short. So I added a few more and saw it was just right. Then, lifting the punnet off the scales, I pressed the clam-shell lid shut, clip.

  I filled a black tray with two layers of six punnets. Then I kept packing. The seven kilos made four trays. I stacked them one on top of the other and stood back and gazed at them. They were beautiful, a creation, something I’d make happen. I felt a happy lightness. Shane and this.

  Leaning against the shed door I looked out across the orchard, the green leafy canes. Some had grown too high to reach, others were curved low from the weight of the fruit.

  A couple of lorikeets soared out of a row like they were racing.

  I took a breath.

  The Denise variety was ready.

  But I’d do what Charlie said. I’d wait one week.

  28

  IN second gear, I drove my 2006 white twin-cab Toyota Hi Lux up the rutted slope to the pine plantation. Sophie was low in the front passenger seat, her neck craning to see out the window.

  I parked on the high side, with a view across the dam, orchard and house. I’d never seen the property from this angle before, looking west. A small lone duck was swimming a tight circle in the dam. Enrico’s van was gone; he’d driven to Euroa and caught the train to Melbourne to see Verdi’s Requiem. The corrugated roof of my house definitely needed repairing, or replacing. This money bind I was in just kept getting worse. Everything depended on a successful harvest. But I was hopeful – the blueberries were almost ready, there was plenty of water in the dam for irrigation, the packaging was all in place. I was just waiting.

  To the right, beyond the shearing shed and across the paddocks, I could make out the tiny chimney peaks and leafy tops of trees over at Shane’s place. There was a sickness in me – the loved-up cramp had turned to anxiety. I’d not heard from him in four days. I looked to the orchard, where we had been. When I’d said I had to leave to get Sophie, he had pulled away and hugged himself like he was cold. So there it was, the dilemma, the not-knowing what was going on, or what to do next.

  The pines shaded the ground, filtered sun rays slanted through. Red toadstools with white dots stood in clusters.

  ‘Fairies might live here,’ Sophie said.

  ‘You think?’

  We walked on a thick, spongy mat of pine needles and chose a straight, two-metre branch to be our Christmas tree.

  Sophie stood back as I climbed into the pine, legs on different branches and with my pruning saw I cut it down and watched it fall. We dragged it to the ute.

  In the lounge room, Charlie and I watched Sophie decorate the tree with paper stars and reindeers she had made at school. Watching her reach up and hang each one, I remembered the previous Christmas in Prahran, after Nick had left, when I’d made no attempt to put up our plastic tree, let alone drape it with the red and gold tinsel and the flashing lights.

  Charlie had a half-glass of whiskey. I joined him.

  ‘Thank you for everything,’ I said, kissing his pale cheek.

  He struggled to his feet and slowly bent down. From beside his chair, he brought out a worn square cardboard box and took the lid off. Inside was a Christmas decoration stored in tissue paper. He made a ceremony of it by asking Sophie and me to stand in front of him. Then, with outstretched hands, he handed it to me.

  ‘This was Audrey’s, and her mother’s before that. It goes back a long way. Many generations.’

  It was a small, bronze, angel-like figurine with studded crimson glass beads. Twine looped through a hole in the back so it could be hung.

  ‘It’s yours and Sophie’s now,’ he said.

  ‘We’ll put it up every year.’

  He nodded, satisfied, and sat back on the lounge. In the short time it took me to put the angel onto the tree’s peak, he fell asleep with his head bent forward. I wondered about tilting him back, but decided to leave him.

  Want to see my new ute?

  Yep. How about we all have dinner up the top paddock. You can drive us

  Great. When?

  Tonight?

  And so with Shane in the passenger seat, Sophie and Charlie in the back, I drove the Hi Lux across Shane’s bridge at the creek and up a long, bumpy embankment, with eucalypts and granite boulders on both sides, and further up into his back paddocks to the edge of the State forest.

  Kangaroos high-jumped across the fence and disappeared into the bush. A bird of prey, a kestrel standing on a stump with one sharp eye on us, took flight.

  We sat at a timber table and benches, balanced and chocked on a granite plate. The view was west across Shane’s property – two thousand acres of square and rectangle paddocks, some with distant cows, and a winding tree-lined creek. Far off in the distance was the tall hedge that hid his house. Above was the big pale sky with lacy wisps of floating cloud.

  Shane laid placemats and plates. From an esky he pulled cold chicken, salad, bread, cheese and fruit. He poured from a bottle of chilled riesling.

  ‘You’ve done this before,’ I said.

  ‘Once or twice.’

  I served Charlie and Sophie’s food and put plates in front of them. Charlie said no to bread, but asked for salt for the chicken. And Sophie didn’t want any salad, only chicken, and sulked because I had only brought her water to drink. Then Charlie wanted the mozzie spray, so I took care of that and passed him his evening tablets with a glass of water.

  A flock of cockatoos slowly winged their way into the bush to their nests. It was peaceful.

  ‘I used to camp up here when I was kid,’ Shane said. ‘It’s even better in winter.’

  ‘Audrey did too,’ Charlie said, ‘when she was a girl.’

  Off he went, Charlie quietly talking, with tiny dabs of saliva in the corner of his lips, about the old days when he and Audrey first moved from the city back onto the tableland. We ate and drank and asked questions and heard his stories about the bushfires that went through Huntly in 1990 and the drought that almost wiped them out the year after. Nature always felt harmless in the city, and I wondered what was ahead of me living here.

  ‘The heat was terrible and the ground harder than rocks,’ Charlie said, turning to me as if he had just caught the memory of something. ‘Remember this, love. Don’t pick in the afternoon heat …’ But I wasn’t fully listening. Under the table, Shane’s leg was touching mine – just resting there, both of us feeling the sensation.

  I drove us down the hill. The setting sun was before us, a burning red circle surrounded by a bruised and beautiful sky. We crossed the bridge at the creek and travelled along the laneway to Shane’s place. I liked us all being together this way; I thought we looked like a family.

  I helped Shane lift his esky and cane basket from the tray of my ute.

  ‘Can I come over later?’ he asked.

  ‘Give me an hour.’

  Charlie and Sophie were quick to their beds. I showe
red, preened and fluffed my hair. I stared into the mirror and wished my nose was different, that my top lip was fuller, but overall I decided I looked all right. I put the same clothes back on so I didn’t look too keen.

  From the back porch, I watched Shane rise out of the driver’s seat.

  He hadn’t seen me yet.

  He tapped lightly, opened the door and stepped inside.

  ‘You’re here,’ he said.

  ‘Waiting.’

  ‘I think you’re really beautiful,’ he said.

  ‘I think you are too.’

  He smiled and looked away, as if he had never heard that before, as if he was self-conscious, and perhaps he was even blushing. I took him in – his neck, the hard lump of his Adam’s apple, the groomed beard and the just-right imperfect line of his teeth. The smell of toothpaste on his breath. We faced each other, not moving or touching. Crickets were loudly chirping somewhere in the backyard.

  It was me who reached out and took his hand – a working man’s hand, soft but with calluses, and I led him to the hallway, and smiled with my finger to my lips. Be quiet. With his hand firm on my back, we hurried along the thin floral carpet to my bedroom.

  In the morning, I watched him dress, and noticed his sequence was the same as Nick’s – jocks first, then jeans, then the top half socks last. When I heard the back door clip shut I didn’t get up but stared into our after-image in the wrinkled sheets and saw us together – the clumsy unpractised moves, him not looking straight at me, as if embarrassed or something else. I wondered if he was uncertain about being with me. And there, a small voice asking myself the same thing. When his tyres slowly hummed across the cattle grid, I still didn’t move, but lay there and looked forward into the days ahead, and saw how they would unfold – the full buckets of blueberries that would come into the shed, the weighing and packing. The distributor had committed to paying me every Sunday, provided I filled out the green, hard-covered order book properly.