‘I’ve got something to say,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘He waited for you to find him. He was happy to go then, because you were with him. And he didn’t want this to drag out for months or another year.’
If that was true, I didn’t know. I bowed my head and pushed my arm against my forehead and sniffed. My face was hot with tears and I gave into it and put my hands on my face, and inside that dark place, I could only see the wet image of Shane standing and moving towards me.
His arm was heavy around my shoulders and I let him pull me close. He sat there, his hand moving up and down my arm, trying to comfort me. Yet I was thinking of my bed, of pulling the blind down and curling up with my own private thoughts.
‘Can you tell Warren?’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘And who, then, will organise the funeral? Me or him?’
‘Don’t worry about that now.’
‘I’m very upset.’
‘I can see that.’
‘I think I might go to bed.’
A double pat on my arm and he stood. ‘I’ll make some calls and pop back later.’
He left me then, and as he headed for the door, I spoke up.
‘No need to come back, I’ll be fine. Really, I will.’
I suppose it was a test, of sorts.
‘You sure?’
‘Absolutely.’
So I was alone, and the house felt big and terribly quiet. I wondered if Charlie’s ghost was still around me. Based on nothing except the idea he could not possibly have left me, I decided it was. I spoke to him, and said I was sorry for leaving him so long.
I imagined his gruff reply, ‘Go on with you, it’s done with.’
Then Blondie trotted in and sat close to my leg, her warm panting body. I carried her to the front veranda and sat in Charlie’s padded chair. Inside the crepe myrtle a golden whistler sang. A white butterfly flitted by. And out into the depth of the garden, through the trees, to the rose garden, I saw Charlie heading to his studio, hobbling and trying not to. He bent down to a medium-height bush and breathed in the perfume of a rose in his favourite colours, orange and pink.
35
IN the morning I walked the orchard, up and down each row. The Caroline were almost ready and I could now see the pattern of planting – the coming in and falling away of the varieties. Overall, the blueberries had recovered from the deluge, yet they had lost their virginal beauty and could only be described as mature, firm and acceptable. The tray price would be lower now.
I waited a day before calling the pickers and packers back in. Derek and Brenda were kind to me, delivering an asparagus-and-cheese quiche they had cooked in their caravan oven. They offered to sit with me and asked if I needed anything. I shook my head, no. Until Nick brought Sophie home, Blondie was my only company.
The next day Sophie was in my arms, the full weight of her as I lifted her up and swung her around. She had new freckles on her nose.
And Nick’s arm was around me. ‘Are you okay?’
I stepped back so his arm fell away. ‘Yes.’
‘When’s the funeral?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘I’ll stay a couple of days to help out,’ he said.
‘You don’t have to.’
‘I want to.’
The next morning at seven it was on again, the pickers and packers taking their places, and I was running between them all – weighing, checking, and taking packed trays to the cool room. I had made a double batch of blueberry muffins and handed them out to the pickers for their morning tea.
Nick tied a pouch around his waist and went picking. Sophie followed him with her own pouch.
‘I need to understand this gig,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘So I don’t feel so useless.’
He disappeared down Row 24, into the Caroline, and returned two hours later with only four kilos.
‘Not bad for a beginner,’ I said.
‘Bugger that.’
‘San does triple that in the same time.’
‘Impossible.’
‘It’s not.’
Nick snatched up his buckets and headed off.
When the packing was finished, the Dutch girls casually announced they were leaving the next morning.
‘We’re going to Thailand.’
They said it like they had no responsibility to me and the harvest, as if they were merely on a holiday. And they were. The dark-haired one was studying Marketing and Communications at the University of Amsterdam and, somewhere along the way, I had told her about some of my former clients, thinking she would be impressed. She had dismissed me – to her I was only a struggling orchardist. The next morning, the line of their tents was gone, as if they had never been there. I still had the Euroa girls, young women I had become curious about and liked – one had been accepted into architecture at Monash, the other science at Melbourne.
In the bell curve of a harvest, I thought I was on the downward curve, so I hesitated about replacing the Dutch girls. I was a long way from being free of debt and wanted to save the wages.
‘I’ll pack,’ Nick said.
‘Women are better. They have smaller hands and they’re faster.’
‘That’s a sexist claim.’ He held out hands, waggling his long smooth white fingers. ‘Nothing wrong with these.’
I shook my head.
‘Put me on trial then, see how I go.’
So we put on the back braces and tilted over the benches together. He was diligent and fussy, and asked too many questions about weights and blueberries he was unsure about. Then he seemed to catch on and speed up and I stopped watching what he was doing.
While he rolled the trays and plucked off the stalks and picked out the softs and bird damaged berries, he listened to the cricket – the commentators exciting the listeners, the banter, the heightened moment, the dropped catch and the recap. The distraction was good, it helped me shift my mind from Charlie, from seeing him twisted on the floor. And when the shed was swept clean and the cool room was stacked with the day’s trays, Nick, Derek, San, Fateh and Vandit played cricket under the cypresses.
I sat on Charlie’s camping chair by the shed with a cup of tea and watched them. More like, I watched Nick, his lanky run-up to bowl with his shirt untucked, and the way he barracked and cheered with his arms raised. He was happy. As for me, I needed to be somewhere else, to be doing something, and then I remembered, all over again, that Charlie had died and didn’t need a cup of tea, or a tablet, or something to eat.
I lifted from the chair and felt heavy in my body, a strange sensation given I had lost weight since the harvest started. There were wages to be done, other bills, some laundry and then the evening meal.
Nick ran to me. ‘I’ll do dinner.’
I nodded, but he had already hurried back to the game.
Nick took his position at the kitchen bench, chopping and grating salad vegetables and making a dressing from a recipe in his head. I hung clothes on the line and changed sheets on the beds. We were the image of domestic happiness. The three of us sat around the table, eating as if it were normal, but it was very strange for me and I felt withdrawn and quiet. I missed the distraction of Charlie’s jazz and Enrico’s loudness. After dinner, Nick spent a long time wandering around the front garden on his phone, in conversations that I gathered I was not supposed to hear. I sat at the dining table on my laptop, transferring money into pickers’ accounts and printing off my personally designed pay slips that highlighted kilos picked, the kilo rate, tax and superannuation deductions and a net total.
The front flywire door slapped, and Nick was in the room.
‘What’re you doing?’
‘Wages.’
‘You need to go to bed.’
I kept studying the screen, checking my calculations.
‘Can I help with anything?’
‘I’ve got it sorted,’ I said.
‘Are you all right?’
/> ‘Yes.’
‘You seem a bit uptight, not yourself.’
I still didn’t look up. ‘I’m in the middle of a harvest and Charlie died, what do you expect?’
I could have added that he was making me tense – that I didn’t like the way he knew me so well, that he knew my happy from sad, my tired from tense. And in truth, being in the packing shed with him all day, working two metres apart – with the constant murmuring chatter and roar from the radio – the harmony between us unsettled me. I liked him standing there. But I refused to go there. Never again would I entertain Nick’s comings and goings, his long absences and not knowing where he was, and what he was doing, who he was with, and when he would return. The one-way street of Nick’s life with me waiting was done with. Because for years that’s what I had done – wait. One week became two, and three months had passed and he was still having the time of his life, somewhere else.
In any case, Geneva was his new home.
I felt him looking at me.
‘Night, then,’ he said.
From Sophie’s bedroom where he was sleeping, I heard him quietly talking on his phone. It was a short call and I had no idea who he was speaking to, but if it was within Australia it would be to say goodnight to some woman. And if it was an overseas call, to Jordan, Geneva or London, or wherever, it would be to say good morning to her, whoever she was.
36
THE service for Charlie’s burial was held in a grey bricked, flat-roofed funeral home with no garden. The room had the feeling of a small suburban church – an aisle up the centre and a heavy dark-red curtain at the end. I didn’t know it then, but Charlie was behind it, in a lacquered timber coffin.
From my position at the back against the brick wall, I saw Warren and his wife, Celia, and their son, Hugo, arrive. They walked in stiffly in single file, wearing their black mourning clothes. Celia was about fifty and beautiful in a feline kind of way. She was Chinese, bony, thin and tall, although later I saw her heels were as high as her feet were long. The mane of her shiny black hair fell to the side of her face and her lips were firered. Her knee-length gown was black satin with elaborate lapels like wings that extended beyond the width of her narrow shoulders. The boy was about sixteen and handsome. He dressed like a spiff in his black suit and shirt, drain-pipe trouser legs and pointy-toed shoes. The trio looked around uncertainly before they took their seats in the front row. Warren spoke to a few people, a couple of whom I recognised – the big copper, Doug Murray, and Mark Palmer, the real estate agent who had sold me Charlie’s place. The three of them were old school mates and chummy, back-slapping and shaking hands. Warren was entirely different to them with his styled hair and the in-vogue tortoiseshell-framed glasses. His charcoal black suit with the large, shiny herringbone pattern looked extreme in the dowdy room.
I was sitting between Sophie and Nick. Some kind people with serious faces came and shook my hand and shuffled away. I didn’t know their names, but it was nice to be acknowledged. I had phoned Enrico, who’d wept, repeating poor Charlie, poor papa and I could not connect with his grief. He had left us – for good reasons, I knew – but he had also abandoned me to deal with this on my own. He was driving a truck at a cotton farm in Dalby, which was somewhere in Queensland. He said the work was good and that he was all right. I didn’t ask about Tomas and Nikolas, and I didn’t ask if he was coming back, although later I wished I had, and decided I would contact him again.
From my seat, I had a clear view of Shane standing and talking to other men, farmers at a guess, shaved and combed and wearing their old wedding suits. And in the motion of sitting, he turned straight to me and for a strange moment we stared at each other. When he sat, there was a short-haired brunette beside him. Her neck was long and pale, and the cut of her hair-line angled into a narrow V at the nape. Her head levelled at his ear, making her about the same height as me. Jess, I supposed, had come to farewell Charlie. Or maybe she was new, or no one of significance.
Aside from Warren and Shane, only one other of the thirty or so present had visited Charlie in the past year, and that was the pinched-faced Johnny Hart. He was Charlie’s framer, the person who stretched his finished canvases over the pine frames, stapled them in place and put the hanging wire across the back. He had only ever gone to the studio, never the house, and was always quick, a business transaction. I don’t know how he was paid, except Warren probably had some arrangement with him.
A celebrant spoke and did not do Charlie justice, not even close. Warren had made all the arrangements. It didn’t make any sense, Warren’s ongoing fury with me. He hadn’t replied to my two emails. One to say how sorry I was his father had passed away, the second to ask about the funeral, and whether he needed anything. I was reaching out, that’s all.
At the podium, Warren spoke in his important corporate voice, with no heart or tearful note. I learned that Charlie went to Coburg Primary School and that he had an older brother, Henry, who had died in 1943 in Wau, Papua New Guinea, fighting the Japanese. Charlie’s paintings were only spoken of as a sideline, a hobby when he wasn’t helping his wife work in the blueberry orchard. How bizarre that was, when Celia had his paintings regularly crated and shipped to her gallery. Charlie had said she took everything, about six a year.
No jazz was played in his honour and no wreath of garden flowers was resting on his coffin. Two black-suited men wheeled him out from behind the red curtain and I couldn’t believe Charlie was really inside it. Nick reached for my hand as I took deep breaths and studied the Order of Service, a folded A4 white sheet of paper with a coloured photo of a much younger Charlie that I had not seen before. He looked like Al Pacino with blue eyes. The brazen, staring pose captured that thing about him: his intelligence and vanity.
Nick drove Sophie and me to the cemetery. It was only ten kilometres from the orchard, off the main road and up a narrow and winding dirt track. It was just a few fenced off acres in the bush with tall eucalypts and scrub surrounding it. Magpies warbled and there was a pleasant breeze. Holding Sophie’s hands, we walked slowly looking at the tombstones, some dating back to the early 1800s. Many died young, babies and young children. There were dozens of McCurdys – Shane’s parents were under the shade of a pink flowering gum.
Charlie’s plot was the unlidded concrete grave beside Audrey’s closed one. They would now share a moulded double grave with a wrought-iron guard around its edge. The head-stones were identical, with carvings of drooping eucalyptus leaves and gum nuts. Tiny white bush flowers were growing in the grass around the edges. The inscription was stark in its simplicity, In Memory Of … and it still made no sense to me that this was all about Charlie, that he had died and was being put in the ground to lay forever beside Audrey.
Some sense made me look up. Warren was on the opposite side of the grave, the shimmer of his image, the garish suit in the afternoon sun. From behind my sunglasses, it was easy to hold his gaze. He was wearing his new, fancy square-framed glasses, which only partially hid the puffy sags. I stood up straighter, my shoulders square. And there it was, an almost indiscernible but unmistakable disapproving shake of his head. Was I being blamed for Charlie’s death? Celia was at his side, an exotic black orchid, taking me in too, perhaps noticing the fitted plain lines of my taupe jacket and skirt. Getting dressed, I had found the card that came with the pink roses Michael Foster had sent to the office, Always thinking about you Mx. I hadn’t worn the suit in a year. Hugo, the boy, was staring down at the coffin, perhaps wondering about life and death, or who Charlie was. He did have something in common with his grandfather, a kind of proud stance, which might be good, or bad, in the long run.
Three men bent down and gave nodding commands to each other, pushing and shoving the concrete lid over Charlie’s timber box. That was it, then – it was done. We went home. A wake was being held at the local pub in Euroa, but there was no point in pretending I belonged there with Charlie’s relatives and the others, whoever they were.
Once Sophie was
asleep, Nick and I sat out the front. He poured chilled riesling and Rodriguez Live played softly from the dock. I always liked his music, or we liked the same music, either way. Blondie was at my side. A young rabbit stared at us from beside the stone wall and cicadas started their high-thrumming noise. It was warm and pleasant. We sat in silence, waiting for the sunset, and when it came it looked like a beach with ribbons of vivid aquamarine water and sparkling gold sand across the whole sky.
‘Bloody beautiful,’ Nick said.
‘It is.’
‘You okay?’
‘I think so.’
He asked questions about Charlie, wanting the whole story, all the details of why I let him stay, what happened then, and next, and after that. It was good to talk, to quietly sip and remember all the little pieces, the funny family we made, the way he called me love, how cranky he could get, the way he obsessively painted, and the drama with Warren, and how Charlie had sat where we were then, staring out into the garden and beyond.
‘You must be due to leave soon?’ I said.
‘It’s all sorted.’
‘When do you start?’
‘Talk to me about tomorrow. What’s happening?’
‘It’s a week of over 38 degrees, so I’ll irrigate twice a day.’
‘I can help with that.’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘Stop it.’
‘What?’
‘I’m trying to help you.’
Rodriguez was singing an old tune we knew.
‘I don’t need your help,’ I said. ‘I always knew the harvest was going to be tough. It’ll be over in a few weeks then I’ll crash and that’s okay. Plus you need to get going. Your dream job is waiting.’
I stopped, silent. The sarcastic tone hadn’t been intended – a resurfaced habit, an insinuation that everything was always about him.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
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