‘You go,’ I said. ‘I’ll clean up.’
‘No! Come,’ Nick said.
‘Please, please,’ Sophie begged.
‘I’ve got to get things ready for tomorrow. And I need a sleep after the sangria.’
‘Go on with you,’ Charlie said. ‘Put your togs on and off you go.’
I laughed and stood, making a joke of how I was reserving my energy for the weeks ahead. ‘But you take Sophie, Nick. She loves it there.’
So with them gone and Charlie having a lie down, I cleared the table and packed everything away and did the dishes. In the silence, I thought of Shane – what he might be doing and which of his old friends and good mates he was with, all the ones I had never met.
The house creaked in the heat, as if constantly settling into itself. The windows were open; a tinge of bushfire smoke was now inside. I lay on the couch and stared into the Christmas tree, Sophie’s stars and Charlie’s crimson-beaded figurine, and thought I should put the irrigation on, but instead I fell into a gentle, warm sleep and woke with Sophie leaning over me. I looked up at her newly grown front teeth. Out on the front veranda, Nick was on the phone, hushed and eager, and I knew he was talking to a woman, and not his mother. From years of experience, I had acquired a tuned ear and knew the flirting voice he used with female editors when he was jockeying for work. He had always said it meant nothing. But all the female editors around the world were off somewhere enjoying Christmas, so this couldn’t be a work call. I felt weary.
And later, after we had picked at the lunch leftovers for dinner, and the mozzies had driven us all inside, Charlie went off to bed and Sophie went to mine. Nick sat on Charlie’s old brown leather chair and put his arms on the rests.
‘Who would’ve ever thought you’d end up here in this place,’ he said.
I suppose it was the melancholy in me from the disappointment and surprise of Shane’s news. I wasn’t sure. But instead of telling him that it was the most beautiful place I had ever lived and how content and happy I was – or that it was hard physically and that the financial stress stopped me from sleeping – all I could do was smile and agree with him.
‘Are you looking forward to Geneva?’ I said.
‘I think so.’
‘Isn’t Lila there?’
He studied me. ‘Yes, she is. But we’ve separated. That was a thing that lasted only a few weeks.’
I nodded.
‘But the resources are brilliant in Geneva,’ he said. ‘And I’ve built up a network of good people. It’ll be fun.’
Nick having fun – that’s what it was all about.
‘Are you okay? Last night you were upset,’ he said.
‘I’m all good. It was just a small problem that’s now sorted.’
He wanted to talk about Sophie and reminisce on the times when we had rented a cottage at Beech Forest. He poured wine, and said we should have tried harder to find a place. I waved the bottle away and stood up.
‘Big day tomorrow,’ I said.
‘Thanks for today.’
I nodded and went to bed.
33
TURBAN-WEARING Sikhs arrived in a mini bus from Shepparton. San and his pregnant wife Kalia followed in a rattling yellow Datsun. Derek and Brenda walked to the orchard from their caravan. The Dutch girls, along with another dozen backpackers who had set up camp around the shearing shed, came too. At 7 am on Boxing Day there were twenty-five pickers standing at the packing shed waiting for instructions.
I went through the drill, and allocated rows. The pickers hurried off with their pouches around their waist – Kalia’s belly was so big she wore hers on the side. Bunches of blueberries clung to the canes, full-bodied, heavy and ripe. By now, I knew the taste of the perfect blueberry – it weighed five grams, was the size of a large grape, and was almost black in colour. When I found one, if no one was looking I put it in my mouth and let the sensation burst.
The system worked. On the hour, the pickers brought their numbered buckets up to be weighed and logged. The Dutch girls sorted and packed. I monitored the quality of everything. The volumes were good, and at the end of the day we had packed a record two hundred and eighty trays. Nick sent a message saying he and Sophie had arrived in Adelaide, and all was good.
One day led to the next. We packed more than three hundred trays, three hundred and sixty, and on it went. Ten pallets went to Melbourne Market. Then the Northland variety came on and the volumes got out of control – we ran out of sorting trays and over-filled picking buckets were lined in a queue. I liked the women packers best – their hands tended to be smaller and they handled the fruit more gently. Two girls from Euroa between Year 12 and uni joined the packing team.
The weather was hot, in the mid-thirties. Picking started at six-thirty and finished at midday or one, and the packing didn’t finish until five. I was irrigating twice a day. Two polite young Sikhs wearing their baggy cotton clothes, Fateh and Vandit, helped me pack the pallets and wrap each one with cling wrap. The truck arrived at six every evening to take them to market. Once the packing shed was swept clean and everyone had returned to Shepparton or their tent, and barbecue smells wafted across the backyard, I made dinner for Charlie and me.
‘You’re always on at me about eating, but look at you,’ Charlie said, waggling his finger at my untouched ham salad.
I had lost my taste for food and only picked at bread, cheese and leftover Christmas pudding. I was waiting on the distributor’s first payment to arrive. I had phoned, he said he only paid on Sundays, his one day off. Four days away, and another twenty-four hours after that till it landed in my account.
‘I don’t know why you’re killing yourself with all this work,’ Charlie said.
‘Audrey worked hard,’ I replied.’
He turned his shoulder and looked away.
Sometime during the day, Frances, Charlie’s palliative care nurse, came to the shed. She had appeared beside me at the weighing table, her eyes darting behind her magnified glasses, watching my hands lifting buckets – weighing, recording – and pickers retreating back to their rows with empty buckets. She had dropped off Charlie’s walker and shower chair and checked his medication. I was so busy I hardly looked at her, but thrust six punnets of blueberries into her arms.
‘Did you see Frances today?’ I said to Charlie.
‘I’m not bothered with any of that.’
‘You should use the walker if you come to the shed.’
‘I’m not using that stupid contraption. And I’m not coming to the shed anymore. It stresses me out.’
‘Are you painting?’
‘I’m enjoying the peace and quiet, sitting out the front. Today an echidna waddled across the lawn.’
My tiredness was like jetlag. I wanted bed, but even there the swirl of activity still carried on in my brain, always anxiety about money.
On Facebook, I asked if anyone had seen SOPHIE’S BLUEBERRIES. The answers came quickly. Yes. They were in Prahran market at three different stalls, selling for six dollars a punnet. I knew how the punnets would be laid out on the benches, shoppers casually picking them up, not knowing anything about me, the grower. IGA supermarkets had them too, and some were in Woolworths. I was only making two dollars fifty a punnet, less with my costs out. Then someone posted that Aldi were selling imported New Zealand blueberries for ninety-nine cents, a promotional price to get people into the store.
On Monday I was paid. There was no word from the distributor that he had done this amazing thing, but there it was in my bank balance – a set of numbers that took my breath away. I bowed my head. All those months of work and there it was, the reward. Then an email, so cold and business-like: a statement of what I had sent and what it was worth. Thirty-five dollars a tray, the high end of market pricing, and it was only the start of the season. I breathed in: the weight of it, the journey of paying everything off, had begun.
34
THE next evening the half-closed blind in the lounge room caught the wi
nd and floated upwards. The air thickened and the windows rattled. There was less light, a darkening that felt threatening. Then lightning came and the thunder that followed was like cracking marble. Still, the birds in the garden sang. The rain started; slow at first, then built up to hard slapping and splashing on the ground. The roof gutters flooded. It was still hot and the air flowing through the open windows was cool and good. The birds continued on singing as if happy for the rain. But I wasn’t sure, the blueberries couldn’t be handled when wet and pickers were coming in the morning. Directly above came an explosive snap of lightning and I gasped and dropped my pen and my hands fumbled to pick it back up. I positioned torches, and filled pots and the bath with water in case the power went off.
During all of this, Charlie sat at the window watching the sky, transfixed. I showed him the weather radar on my phone app, the shades of orange and red, and he seemed vaguely interested before turning back to the grey bubbling sky with its flat, moving underbelly. Blondie sat at his feet, ears up with that question mark frown. Thunder rolled deep and deeper and kept going into itself and further away. Then silence, until it started again. Always in the background was the hum of rain and finally it settled to something that sounded good and firm. The birds were now quiet.
In the morning when the storm had passed and everything was rich in colour and smell, I emptied the rain gauge – one hundred and seven millimetres. In the orchard, the blueberries were swollen with the too-rapid uptake of water. I had never thought unpicked fruit could react so obviously. It was damp but the rain had stopped. The warm humid air had already dried the blueberries so I sent the pickers to work.
It was an eight-thousand-dollar mistake. By midday, I had to pay the wages for twenty-five pickers and I lost the market value of half a tonne of water-gorged blueberries. Some were all right, but the sorting was impossible because we had to fingertip touch every blueberry to detect the firm from the soft. With the heat and rain, some had started to break down as if they had been lightly simmered. I tried to remember what Charlie had told me, and a couple of times I thought about going to him, but the packers were stressed so I stayed. At eleven I made the decision to stop packing and Fateh and Vandit helped me dump the lot in the paddock near the dam. I didn’t know what that meant. Was the harvest over? It couldn’t be – it had only just begun. There was still new fruit coming on.
I hurried back to the house, across the front lawn, to ask Charlie what he thought. He would be sitting out on the veranda. A dark-pink crepe myrtle was in flower beside the lounge window. Bees were hovering all over it.
His chair was empty.
I went inside.
‘Charlie.’
No answer.
He wasn’t in the bathroom.
I stepped onto the back porch and turned left. His door was closed. I knocked, and he didn’t answer. I knocked again, opened the door and walked straight in. His bed was unmade and he wasn’t there. I was confused. Then I heard the little jingle of Blondie’s name tag as she padded around from the other side of the bed. She looked at me, ears up.
Five strides and I was at the end of Charlie’s bed and around the other side. And there he was on the floor – twisted in a strange way with an arm caught underneath his body. He was only dressed in a singlet and Y-fronts and I saw his white skeletal thighs and legs. His knees seemed very large. One bare foot was in the leg of his trousers.
I knelt beside him. His eyes flickered open and slowly closed again.
‘What happened, Charlie?’
I tried to lift him gently, but I was clumsy and too fast in the way I freed his arm, and he winced in pain. Supporting his shoulders, I rolled him onto his back and straightened his legs. I kissed his cheek.
He was cold to the touch so I pulled the cotton blanket from the bed and tucked it all around him, then pushed a pillow under his head. And a moment later, with a breaking voice, I was explaining to some efficient operator I needed an ambulance.
‘No,’ Charlie breathed, less than a whisper.
‘You’re hurt,’ I said to him, and I kept saying I was sorry.
He slowly mouthed, ‘No,’ again as I gave my phone number and address to the operator, and Charlie’s age and medical history. And while all that was going on he was still trying to move his lips to speak, and I leaned down to hear but I couldn’t understand. His breath was sour, old milk. I stroked his hair.
So there it was. Charlie twisted on the floor beside his bed for up to five hours – I had no idea how long he’d been there. He had been getting dressed and lost his balance putting his trousers on and I’d not checked on him since breakfast at six-thirty. He was in the kitchen then, wearing his silky blue dressing gown with the sash tied tightly. It had been a normal morning. I had given him his tablets and it had taken him two goes to swallow them. Then he’d eaten a single Weet-Bix with milk and sliced banana. That’s when I had left him.
‘I’ll be back later, for morning tea,’ I’d said and he had dismissed me with a flick of his hand.
But I hadn’t returned to the house when I said I would, because all morning I’d had my head buried in the worry of engorged blueberries that smelt like jam.
The ambulance operator said paramedics were on their way and we hung up when she was satisfied Charlie was covered in a blanket and had his head on a pillow and was trying to speak.
He looked asleep, too still, and I felt for his heart. Nothing.
In his neck there was the slight tick of a pulse.
‘Charlie.’
His lips were apart, I could see the pink of his tongue against his teeth. He was still cold – too cold for the temperature in the room.
I sat there on the floor with him and the ambulance did not come. Twenty-five minutes from Euroa to Huntly and only fifteen minutes had passed. So I stared down at his beautiful pale face with its fine blue veins, and I saw him as a baby and toddler and child. I imagined him as a young man, with the dark conceited looks that I had seen in photos – the man he had told me about. And I thought about all those married years with Audrey. I relived him painting in his studio, with his camel-coloured corduroy pants on and the orange cable-knit jumper with the frayed cuffs. And I remembered his eccentricity and arrogance and passion. I leaned down and kissed him again. I heard his music, all of his loves – Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Louis Armstrong, Stan Getz, Ray Charles and Carmen McRae.
He was too still. With the fingers of my left hand, I gently pushed on his neck, feeling for his life, and felt a tiny flicker. Just one beat. And I tried again with my right hand, even more softly in different places, towards his throat and further back.
He was still too cold.
I bowed my head over his face and gently stroked his forehead and brushed his hair and spoke to him quietly, soothing. ‘You’ll be all right. I know you will. But I want you to know I love you and that you’re beautiful and precious. Thank you for everything you’ve done for me. You’ll be fine.’
I checked his throat once more. A feather beat. Maybe not.
I felt my own throat to get the right spot and I could not even find my own pulse. All I could feel was my breath, in out, in out. I tugged the blanket up closer to his chin, and pushed the edges more firmly into the curve of his body and smoothed it out.
‘Charlie,’ I whispered.
The ambulance came fast across the cattle grid. The back door opened and closed with certainty. It was the male paramedic who had been here last time; the other was younger, a red pony-tailed woman. They were Rory and Jodie.
They took charge and I stayed close. They did not ask me to move. I couldn’t exactly tell what they were doing because I had tears in my eyes, seeing things in watery parts. Hands were moving, a stethoscope, them leaning forward and talking quietly between themselves, a pink-gloved thumb lifting Charlie’s left eyelid. It felt professional and there was some comfort in that. Across the room Blondie was crouched under the walking frame that Frances had told him to use when dressing to help with balan
ce.
There was a pause, a sudden silence and lack of movement.
I was breathing through my wet nose.
‘Greer.’
I didn’t move.
‘Greer.’
I turned to the voice. Rory looked tired and sad. There was a thin, red track under his right eye, maybe a pigment blemish or a healing bruise.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘For what?’
‘He’s passed. Charlie has died.’
I held my breath and leaned back and sucked air in through my nose. I stared into Rory’s face, the pasty look of him and his balding brown hair. He had a gold hoop in his right ear. He held my gaze.
It was not going to be like this. I had not said goodbye. There was supposed to be more time, months.
Rory and Jodie left me. I could hear them in the kitchen, moving around, muted voices on their phones, and they helped themselves to tea or coffee. The kettle boiled, the fridge opened and closed.
I sat there, dumb, holding Charlie’s cold, soft hand, not believing. In a kind of clutching, desperate way, I felt happy for him. It was done, Charlie. And I replayed it all again and again and there I was, on the floor in Charlie’s bedroom.
They took him away, and Shane came. He was the first person I thought of when they asked me who they should call.
He walked straight in and pulled out a dining chair and sat down. We faced each other and he let me talk and I repeated myself too many times, the story of how I got caught up in the packing shed, confused about the quality of the blueberries after the heavy rain. And I hadn’t checked on Charlie in a few hours, maybe up to five, but it could have been less. I didn’t know. Although, he was trying to dress himself after his shower, so it was likely to be around eight o’clock when he was doing that, so it was more like four hours he had been on the floor, all twisted up in pain and unable to move and wanting me to come find him. I cried deep sighs, trying to catch my breath.
He went to fridge, pulled out two beers, twisted the caps and put one in front of me. Then he settled back in his seat.
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