Blueberry

by Glenna Thomson

  That moment felt like an occasion; good things were happening that required some acknowledgement. I closed my eyes, and to this thing outside myself, to a god I didn’t believe in, I said a Sunday school prayer. But instead of saying thank you, I begged: Please make everything go all right.

  29

  NIKOLAS and Tomas were Belgian backpackers and Enrico seemed very pleased to meet them. His gestures became even more extravagant and he grinned widely as he showed them around. They spoke French together and I hadn’t realised until then that Enrico was fluent in another language besides Italian and English. And I felt impressed and stupid because, of course, I could only speak one. They were all the same age, but there was something else going on – a sort of travellers’ connection, a mutual and instant bond of similar-looking young men, with their baggy clothes, tattoos, piercings and dreadlocks.

  The Belgians set their bright-yellow tent up beside Enrico’s blue van. Then the three of them opened bottles of beer and sat on camping chairs under the shade of the big blue gum. It was warm. Magpies sang. A light breeze chimed through the draping eucalypt leaves. With my arms firmly crossed, I watched Enrico, Nikolas and Tomas from the back porch. Enrico was thrilled about something – he slapped his knee and raised his beer. But it was only two in the afternoon and there were still three rows of irrigation drippers to be checked and now was the only time to do it. The harvest was starting in the morning – and I was almost breathless with the worry of it.

  I walked towards them, still forming what I would say.

  The three men watched me approach.

  ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Glad you’ve settled in.’

  They stared at me, poised in the middle of their conversation.

  I looked to Enrico. ‘I’m wondering if you could finish off the irrigation drippers this afternoon?’

  He jumped to his feet. ‘They are done.’

  ‘There are three rows left.’

  ‘This is incorrect.’

  I looked to the orchard, as if to prove him wrong.

  ‘Right. When did you do it?’

  ‘This morning the last dripper was pressed into the plastic pipe,’ he said, wiping his hands together to show it was finished. ‘It is completed.’

  ‘Thank you. I didn’t realise.’

  He bowed like a servant. ‘This is no problem.’

  Then he beamed across to Nikolas and Tomas and exaggeratedly sat back down and picked up his beer.

  I hurried away, as if I had something important to do, as if I didn’t feel the heat on my neck and face, and them watching me – the boss who didn’t know what was going on in her own orchard.

  They sat under the blue gum all afternoon. For the life of me, I couldn’t imagine what they were talking about or where the supply of beer came from. Picking started in the morning, and here they were laughing and having fun, while I felt sick with the strain of everything.

  At the usual time when we would start preparing dinner, Enrico came inside.

  ‘Greer, please,’ he said. ‘We will all have the dinner together, with Nikolas and Tomas.’

  ‘But we can’t have the pickers inside for meals. There’ll be thirty of them before the harvest is finished. Meals are their own responsibility.’

  I didn’t say that Shane was coming for dinner, that I didn’t want a crowd in the house, that I just wanted it to be six in the morning so we could get going in the orchard.

  ‘So far there are only the two pickers, not thirty,’ he said.

  ‘I will do the cooking.’

  ‘We don’t have enough mince.

  ‘The meatballs is a cheap secret, they will go very far.’

  It was his unsmiling staring face that shamed me into saying, Of course, it was perfectly fine, that they were welcome.

  Tomas and Nikolas stood barefoot in my dining room, wearing shorts and bright singlets, caricatures of modern Europe in their carefree, hip appearance – the single possum-tail dreadlock that hung down Tomas’s back and his 1950s retro glasses, and the blonde shampoo-commercial hair that Nikolas flicked away from his shoulders.

  They seemed polite and anxious to please.

  ‘Please take a seat,’ I said.

  When Shane arrived he planted two bottles of wine on the table, and a light kiss on my cheek, and if Charlie or Enrico or anyone else noticed, I was looking away, shy and unready to be open about what was going on. Shane shook hands with the backpackers and joined them in a beer. Charlie put on Nina Simone and sat with them. I set the table and served the pasta and meatballs that Enrico had cooked. We ate, and drank Shane’s wine. If I could’ve stop thinking about tomorrow’s picking, I might have sat with them and enjoyed hearing about Nikolas and Tomas, a biochemist and dental technician, having a year off. They were discussing how tight airport security had become and the speeds drivers went on European roads compared to in Australia. All I wanted was for everyone to go away, and for Sophie to be in her bed, so I could have Shane to myself, so I could take a breath and calm down. I watched him talking to Enrico and the Belgians, and if he was feeling the same as me it did not show.

  Like a stressed waitress, I served canned peaches with scoops of ice-cream and handed out spoons. Then stacked the plates and wiped the benches. Charlie went to bed and Sophie swapped his music for the TV. I faced the sink and the conversation went on behind me. They were relaxed and laughed and spoke with energy and interjections, some in French. The hot water was slow to come. I rinsed the dishes, staring through my reflection across to the orchard with all those waiting tonnes of blueberries. Ten hours and we’d be in the orchard. I had spent time talking to Charlie and formed a plan – the rows I would allocate to the pickers, the times between collecting the full buckets, how I would weigh them and keep track of who picked what.

  I squeezed the detergent into the sink, and then Shane was there.

  ‘Let me do this,’ he said.

  From Sophie’s bedroom, I heard Enrico, Tomas and Nikolas at the sink, helping Shane, drying the dishes and putting things away. They were talking about the exchange rate, or was it the cost of fuel? When I returned to the kitchen, Enrico and his new friends left on cue. The Belgians were very thankful for the evening, as if it had been special and unexpected. Wet tea towels were folded over the oven door handle.

  Then the house was very quiet.

  Shane and I stood facing the sink, looking into our reflections in the window. Under the crook of his arm, we fitted together; I levelled him at about ear height. In that dark window outline, we looked alike; our faces were the same oval shape. He ran his hand along my back, up and down.

  ‘How about we sit on the front veranda? Watch the birds,’ I said. ‘There’s some wine left.’

  He looked to the hallway and leaned down, lifted my hair and kissed my neck.

  We went to my room. Our love-making wasn’t slow, or very much about me. Still, I liked his body, and to be wanted so eagerly, so I went with it, in my big, white-sheeted bed. I held onto him, believing in the dream. And when the words I love you came to me, I held them back and didn’t speak, because it was Nick’s tenderness I remembered, his deep reckoning and acceptance of me that I was thinking of. I opened my eyes and stared into our reflection in the wardrobe mirror – Shane with his neck thrust forward, straining, his forearms hard into the mattress, and the moving length of his body. And there was me, half-hidden underneath him, my left hand pressed limp on his back.

  Shane rolled onto his side.

  I snuggled in, wanting the closeness.

  He reached for his phone, looking at the time.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Can’t stay.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘A 4 am start. Got to be in Canberra by ten.’

  ‘Why all the meetings in Canberra?’

  I felt his breath on my shoulder as he reminded me about the methane project, ‘… we’re putting together a cross-subsidy arrangement to finance more research.’

  ‘Who’s we?’

/>   He didn’t answer, just kissed my shoulder and pushed away, out of the bed. The empty space he left behind was much bigger than where we had laid – it was not physical and it was beyond me to understand, except I felt confused and abandoned.

  I curled up. He dressed quickly.

  ‘Good luck for tomorrow,’ he said.

  The harvest.

  For a moment, I’d forgotten.

  30

  ON the weighing-in table, not far from the packing shed, I showed the pickers samples of unripe blueberries and bird-damaged ones, and blueberries with stalks and all the other blemishes I did not want to see in their buckets. I stood in front of them like a school teacher, and told them that every hour, on the hour, they were to bring their full buckets up to the table so I could weigh them and tally their kilos. I was faking confidence and hoped it didn’t show.

  Enrico, the Belgians, and San, an Indian–Malay man who’d driven from Shepparton, walked off slowly, perhaps uncertainly, to their set rows with their waist pouches and numbered buckets. It was seven in the morning and already 16°C.

  I went picking too. The distributor would not accept my consignments unless my blueberries had been residue tested to prove I had not used chemicals and my harvest was fit for human consumption. In the nearest row, I picked five hundred grams for him to send to a lab. Another five-hundred-dollar withdrawal out of the pickers’ wages. Then I swept out the packing shed, date-stamped the trays and fussed around.

  At eight, the full buckets were delivered and I weighed each one and recorded the kilos beside the picker’s names. San, with his Bollywood good looks and perfectly tended thin moustache, watched the tally.

  ‘This is good?’ he said.

  At five dollars a kilo he was doing the sums.

  ‘You picked five kilos.’

  ‘I am the winner?’

  ‘Yes, you picked the most.’

  He grinned, gathered up his empty buckets and hurried back down Row 5.

  I carried the full buckets into the packing shed and filled a dozen long plastic sorting trays. The shed felt big around me, like I was standing on a stage with the whole world watching. With my feet firmly planted on the rubber mat, my hands reached forward to the first tray and I rolled the blueberries, searching for the ones that needed to be plucked out. I filled the first commercial punnet. After twelve punnets, the first tray for the season was full.

  I kept working.

  Enrico and Tomas’s picking was bad. There were too many pinks and stalks. I laboured over their trays and it slowed me down. By the fifth sorting tray, I felt pain deep in the middle of my back. To prevent the bending-over pressure the bench had been built to pub-bar height, but it was not enough. I still had to tilt forward to look down into the tray.

  Another hour passed. More buckets were placed at the weighing table. San still out-picked the others. Enrico and Tomas’s buckets were no better.

  Charlie came into the shed. He leaned against the bench, wheezy and short of breath from the two-hundred-metre walk from the house.

  ‘How’s it going?’ he asked.

  ‘Enrico and Tomas are lousy pickers,’ I said.

  ‘It happens.’

  ‘What does?’

  ‘You can never tell who’s going to be a good picker. You look at a drongo and think he’s useless, but then he out-picks everyone and the quality is always good.’

  ‘So what do I do?’

  He shrugged.

  I pushed my fist into my back.

  ‘You need a back brace,’ he said.

  ‘Now you tell me.’

  ‘You didn’t ask.’

  I rolled the long plastic tray, scanning.

  ‘So you’ve got a new boyfriend, love.’

  I was glad to be looking down. ‘Are you okay with it?’ I said.

  ‘Nothing to do with me,’ he said. ‘But his bed was hardly cold from Jess and now he’s over here.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘All I’m saying is, as long as you know what you’re doing.’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  I turned back to the tray and plucked out some pinks.

  ‘I just thought Sophie’s dad was in with a chance,’ he said.

  ‘Why on earth would you think that?’

  ‘He seems like a nice fella.’

  ‘You don’t know the half of it.’

  ‘We all make mistakes, love.’

  ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘I’m not up for a row with you.’

  ‘So let’s not have one.’

  I poured Enrico’s bucket into a sorting tray.

  ‘Check this out,’ I said.

  Charlie leaned in. ‘Doesn’t look too good.’

  He turned away from me, holding the benches for balance, then the door frame, and launched himself back into open space with his arms forward like a toddler learning to walk. He sat in the canvas chair under a cypress and stared across the orchard and into his private thoughts. I could only guess how it was, the years of memories, seeing Audrey with her head scarf walking towards him. It was hot, yet Charlie was wearing a jumper. And not long after, when I walked past him to find Enrico and Tomas, he was asleep with his head back and mouth open.

  They followed me into the packing shed like disgraced school boys. I showed them their picking and explained it was taking too long to sort.

  ‘We will become good. This is not a problem,’ Enrico said.

  They walked too slowly back to their row. I’m guessing Tomas thought I wasn’t watching when he dropped one of his buckets and kicked it along the ground like a ball.

  At one pm, I told the pickers they were finished for the day. It was 35 °C and too hot – the blueberries felt slightly softer in my hands.

  Once they’d left, I had twenty-three full buckets to pack off. I tried to breathe above the knife pain in my back as I worked. The mounted fan on the wall was oscillating on high; it was soothing, not just for the breeze but for the constancy of the rhythm. Enrico’s last pick was no better. I wondered if he were colour-blind – it was the only reason to explain why he could not distinguish between a ripe and unripe blueberry. Tomas’s last bucket for the day was perfect – not one blueberry was flawed – but he had picked only two kilos in ninety minutes, earning ten dollars.

  Enrico came into the shed and thumped his hand on his heart. ‘Greer, I will be a better picker.’

  I turned to him and smiled. ‘I just want to know. Do you think you have trouble seeing the colours?’

  His face became still and thoughtful. ‘No, this is not a problem.’

  I waved at the trays that needed to go into the cool room. ‘Would you mind giving me a hand?’

  He seemed startled.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I have plans to go for swimming at the Polly McQuinns hole.’

  I cheerfully ushered him out of the packing shed: ‘Go, go!’

  But really, I was annoyed and hurt. I blamed the Belgians because Enrico had changed since they had arrived. And maybe I had too, since Shane. I thought about this, trying for perspective as my hands moved lightly across the blueberries. But I became more absorbed in trying to gather up the exact one hundred and forty grams and in one smooth movement, weigh them, clip the lid and slot the punnet into the black tray.

  Enrico didn’t return for dinner. I wanted to text him to see when he would be back.

  ‘Leave him be,’ Charlie said.

  Instead I sent Shane a message, asking him how his day was, and bragged I had packed sixty-two trays that were now in the cool room.

  I waited for his immediate reply.

  None came.

  I threw together a tuna salad for dinner and ordered four back braces online, paying the extra for Express Post. Shane still hadn’t replied.

  By the time I went to bed and closed my eyes to the rolling purple sea of blueberries, I had stopped checking my phone. I fell into a fitful sleep and woke when I heard Enrico’s van cross the cattle gri
d. It was then that the bleep of a message arrived.

  Canberra is good. Excellent progress! Congrats on 62 trays. Shane x

  I drifted back to sleep, calmer and happier, to the faraway voices over at the shearing shed.

  Three more days of tilting over the packing bench and the pain burned and vibrated in an expanding circle across my back. I twisted and stretched my shoulders then started rolling the tray again, scanning the blueberries. To get some relief I walked the rows to check on the ripening, noting the varieties and what was happening with each one. There was no time for note-taking so I snapped photos to help me remember.

  Back at the shed, Enrico was on his knees peering into a tunnel made from cardboard boxes, now empty of punnets. He was talking to Sophie, who had manufactured a long cubby that she would now not leave.

  ‘Did she finish?’ Enrico asked her.

  All week Sophie had been feeding Princess Georgette on her own, mixing the bottle and putting pellets in a bucket.

  When Enrio saw me, he came into the shed and put his bucket on the bench. There was only a cupful of berries in it, a varying mix of pinks. He had refused to wear a hat, probably because none fitted the lump of his dreadlocks. Between fine whiskers, his skin was tinged red.

  As if on automatic, my hands went into the long plastic tray, scooping up blueberries, releasing them into a punnet, checking the weight.

  ‘The picking is not for me,’ Enrico said.

  I didn’t stop working. Thirteen sorting trays were in the queue for packing. I was close to needing another packer in the shed, but if Enrico could not differentiate between a ripe and unripe blueberry, he would be no good at it.

  ‘Please,’ he said.

  There was something in his voice.

  I lifted my hands out of the tray and turned to him.

  ‘Enrico,’ I said, touching his arm, ‘I don’t know what to do. If you can’t pick, then you can’t pack.’

  ‘I have a thing I am going to tell you now. Tomas is not liking the picking. And I cannot do it. So the idea was with us, we go to Sydney for the holiday. To see the beautiful water.’

  ‘But it’s Christmas on Thursday.’