She knows that box, that building, where her emptied body lies on a pistol metal trolley that clanks as it hits the hard door edge, jerking her body against the rails, her jelly limbs wobbling, unable to resist. The orderly mumbles an apology and backs up before edging her through the narrow door; she hangs limp and drained as they slide her onto the bed—drained of a life, drained of the past, hooked up like the drip in her arm to a future she couldn’t imagine yet. Crisp steps tap over the tiled floor stopping at her bedside, a white shape forming near her head, metal bowl in hand; cold tears slide down her cheeks and mix with the vomit she retches, sick from the pain, sick from the fear, but most of all sick from the choice she has made.
It was the ‘choice’ of everyone at Ngala; she only lived there for two weeks, the baby came early, but in that time she found comfort sharing the other girls’ swollen lives, and girls they were, for nobody was over twenty. No one asked for details other than when you were due and what you were going to do next. Instead, it was in the daily routine, the carrying out of tasks, that they carried each other forward, or the respectful distance others kept when one cradled another in a weeping corner. Perhaps she wasn’t there long enough to feel the reality of it but she never wept at Ngala.
She cried later, quietly, after she was born … borne away … as agreed, signed and sealed to another life, unsighted, slighted, gone, gone for good, whose good? A union marked only by a name, Charmian, and the thin lines snaking round her hips and shiny silver traces on her breasts. They gave her something to suck the nurture out, leave her dry, able to return in time to sit her exams then sit, once removed, with Rena and plan a future.
This future. Now.
She stared up at the cloudless sky. I’ll get through this. I made the best choice I could and I can’t regret it. She played with the watch on her wrist. I’ve carved a pretty good life for myself. I enjoy my work, I’ve made friends. Still, the gnawing emptiness, the crippling waves of loss that she’d sealed away, felt close. Aimee took a deep breath. I need to talk to someone, she realised.
She wished it could have been Lee.
Seeking their zenith, the sun’s rays found entry through the vines, juicing the fruit and warming Aimee’s face. She breathed deeply and slowly, regaining control. She picked up her glass from the tray and, leaning forward in her chair, shielded her eyes with her hand and peered into the sunlight for Lori.
Lori reached into the evergreen tree bearing clusters of small yellow-orange plumlike fruit. She loved their sweet juiciness but more, she loved the memories associated with the fruit. Her papa planted a dozen fruit trees, including the loquat tree, down the back of the quarter-acre block and established the original vegetable garden, larger than the one she now tended. One of her earliest memories was sitting on his shoulders, she must have been about three, being urged to pick a nespola, a loquat, from the tree and tasting its sweetness for the first time, dribbling the juice and spitting out the seed onto Papa’s bald head, and his laughter, making her bounce up and down. After that, each time she visited Papa and Nonna she ran down the passage, out the back door, across the patio, over the lawn and into the orchard, calling out nespola, nespola, with Papa running behind her, till it became their ritual, loquats or not, for there was always something to pick. Papa taught her the seasons—of the earth, of life—and here in his garden she felt him present, more so lately, since meeting Aggie. She had always talked to him here, weeding or planting, sometimes in her head, sometimes aloud, until, self-conscious, she would look around hoping that no one had heard.
Spying a golden cluster of fat fruit near the top of the tree, she fetched a short stepladder, a cane basket and secateurs from the wooden work shed nestled in the corner of the garden. The ladder stood astride a three-legged footstool Papa made for the three-year-old Lori to sit on and watch as he potted new plants, propagated old ones, filled boxes with soil and seeds, and told her stories of leaving Italy for the goldfields. He had not always felt welcome in his new country. Some locals resented the employment of Italians in the mines, or them having their own clubs. Fights broke out. But mostly it was a good life and Papa had thrived. While working underground for ten years he developed a market garden on a few dry acres on the edge of town; then, with Nonna’s help, a greengrocers in the centre of town.
She stood on top of the ladder and snipped free the fruit. From up here she could see across the quarter acres of her neighbours. It was a leafy neighbourhood, an old part of town furthest away from the Golden Mile; her house was on its edge not too far from where Papa’s market garden had once been. Now it was the more expensive part of town where earlier in the century mine managers and bankers built their houses and insisted on English trees and gardens, tree-lined streets and a hefty share of the pipeline’s precious bounty. Looking further south, the trees thinned out, straggly bottlebrushes on verges that fronted ubiquitous rectangles of couch grass skewered with lanky gumtrees, all struggling to survive on the town’s nine inches of rain and recent council water restrictions. Papa had long ago set up a system to re-use household water for the garden, so her vegetables had not been affected.
She climbed down with her pickings and returned the ladder and secateurs to the shed. She closed the rickety door and noted the old metal top hinge was loose, one of its screws missing. Now where did Papa keep that old biscuit tin full of screws, she thought. Under the bench at the back, she heard Papa say. She laughed as she remembered Aggie telling her what she already knew—that Papa watched over her—and what she didn’t know—that through meditation she could build her connection with him. At Aggie’s house each month, she was learning about spiritualism and discernment. After each visit she felt floaty and exhilarated, reluctant to dim the feeling by closing her chakras, as Aggie had taught her she must, before falling asleep. She’d now read dozens of books from the library on spiritualism and other topics esoteric, from out of body and near-death experiences to the occult, New Age and eastern philosophies. Aggie encouraged her to read widely, find her own truth, meditate regularly, practise her discernment and wait for her guide to appear. All these she had done, discussing it with no one, apart from telling Aimee that she continued to meet with Aggie about reading tea-leaves.
Her guide had not yet appeared—Aggie had said it could take a while. And that was fine, she thought, she had enough to think about. Paddy came to mind. She reopened the shed door and bent down to look under the hand-carved wooden bench. There at the back was the biscuit tin. She smiled to herself, Thanks, Papa. She would repair the door after Aimee left.
Walking back to the house, she saw Aimee looking out for her and sensed her sadness. A wave of compassion rose up for this new friend, then the urge to make her a good breakfast.
Maybe now was the time to tell her what she had learnt from Aggie: ‘You have the sight, Lori, but you have to learn how to harness it.’
The smile on her face grew. Perhaps it might help her broach the subject with her family. Nonna won’t like it though. She took a sharp breath. Would Patrick disapprove? Her scalp tingled. A warning shiver ran through her.
‘They look delicious,’ Aimee’s voice carolled from beneath the vines.
Lori hoisted the basket of loquats and brushed away her sensing.
CHAPTER NINE
Thrust by a forked branch, the washing line rose skywards, propelled by Aggie’s skilful hands. Two sets of sheets—her own and Jack’s—flapped furiously in a fight with the southerly spring breeze. Jack still did his washing in the copper in a lean-to washhouse out the back but had finally accepted her offer to do his sheets, every Friday, in her twin-tub washing machine. She had bought the machine the year Frank died, to try and keep up with the constant changing of sweat-soaked sheets, the spin dryer a blessing on windless winter days.
Her mother had used a copper for boiling up sheets and Aggie remembered helping feed them through a hand wringer mounted on the edge of dual concrete troughs in the outside laundry. Washing would take up the entire day
and Aggie hated it—that and ironing. After marrying Frank, the second thing they’d saved for was a washing machine (the first, a new car, a green Hillman) and three years later she’d taken delivery of a cream-coloured cylindrical machine with an attached wringer as her neighbours, leaning over their front gates, watched. Jack had helped Frank extend the back of the house to accommodate the new machine and, later, an internal toilet. She never missed the demise of the copper or the outdoor dunny, nor the late night clanging of tins when the nightcart rattled up the back lane.
‘They won’t dry any quicker watching them, dear.’
She heard Jack laugh as she picked up the empty wicker washing basket. She shaded her eyes from the rising sun and strolled over to the tin fence where he stood, his head poking over the top.
‘And that’ll be enough cheek from you, Jack Gray,’ she countered. She noticed how thin his hair had become and remembered his thick straw-coloured thatch when they first became neighbours. Jack was in his late thirties then, a handsome man with a high forehead over an aquiline nose and the palest blue eyes she had ever seen. He’d never married; thought about it once in his early thirties, but the woman didn’t wait for him to finish his army stint at a munitions factory in a secret desert location, north of town.
When he returned, his widowed mother took ill. Jack used his savings for a deposit on a house and had shared it with her till she became too ill for him to care for while he worked, forcing him to place her in the Pensioners’ Lodge. Jack had spent every Sunday with his mother until she’d died five years later. He cried every time he told her the story, distraught over his decision to put her in the lodge, and he visited her grave every month with a small bunch of flowers from his garden. They both had the sentimentality of a distant Irish heritage, and like many Irish, a dislike of injustice.
‘That’s a pot of tea I owe you. Come over when you’re finished and we’ll have some bread and jam.’
‘Thanks, Jack, I’ll see you then.’
She hitched the washing basket onto her hip and strode across the wide back lawn, stopping to turn off the hose trickling on her roses. Deep and regular watering, within the council restrictions, that was the key to the ten thriving rosebushes softening the fence that divided the quarter-acre block. Frank’s domain was the back half of the block, where Jack had helped him build a garage off the laneway and a shed in behind that.
The shed remained how it was when Frank was alive; a place for everything and everything in its place, he’d say with pride. Jack occasionally fossicked in it for a washer or a screw or the lend of a tool. Last week she’d found him out there, sitting on Frank’s old three-legged stool, faraway-staring, warming himself in a window-square of morning sun. She’d tiptoed away, knowing he was with Frank, and put the kettle on, keeping an ear out for Jack’s knock on the back door and his, ‘Any chance of a cuppa?’
A cup of tea was calling her now; one more load to hang out, a bunch of roses to cut, then over to Jack’s. She moved the hose onto the next rosebush, a tall Mr Lincoln, and caressed its crimson velvet petals, breathing in the dense perfume with the familiarity of a lover. Her roses loved the dry desert heat as long as she kept the water up to them over the summer months. Each rose had a sentimental significance and the cultivating of them, the smelling, touching, gazing at them, gave her endless pleasure. She would cut Jack a honey scented favourite, a yellow Peace rose, but first the washing.
She put the last of the clothes into the tub and closed the laundry door behind her to reduce the noise. Her kitchen was dominated by a wooden table and chairs with the cupboards and benches a surrounding frill. Along one side stood a large wood stove that she loved to cook on and warm up by. Most winter mornings she sat near the stove, feet on the open cast iron oven door, a cup of tea in one hand and a book in the other. Without a book she would be lost, her favourites the historical novels that she used to buy from the Reader’s Digest club or borrow from the local Mechanic’s Institute. Frank had preferred war stories. Now the town had a modern library where she’d discovered a whole section on esoteric subjects. She borrowed from it regularly, most recently a book on spiritualism she wanted to show Lori.
It was overdue but Kerry usually turned a blind eye.
Last month when she’d returned her books, Kerry had seemed distracted. She’d given back the books Aggie was returning and put the books Aggie wanted back on the shelf. They’d laughed but she’d sensed something amiss—she’d asked after Kerry’s mother and Kerry assured her she was keeping well. She remembered Kerry’s mother, Mrs Smith, coming to have her tea-leaves read, a year after her husband was killed in that dreadful accident. She’d wanted reassurance that she’d done the right thing taking Kerry out of school, that Kerry would be all right, that death wasn’t the end—and Aggie had provided it. Several years later, Kerry herself came seeking answers to a future she’d wanted to create. Agnes usually forgot most of what she discerned but not that day—a light had shone in the cup, they both saw it, and in its centre, the shape of a child, a sunlight child, captured in the tea-leaves.
A life will be given to you and a life taken, they had said.
Kerry had stopped her there. They’d never finished the reading. Two years later she saw Kerry at the mine’s Christmas tree do at the sports oval—it was the last work function Frank had attended—and a group of women crowded around a pram that Kerry was pushing. And she’d remembered.
Agnes pushed away a sense of foreboding. Not now, she thought. Jack’s waiting. She searched for her library book and finding it down the side of a chair in the lounge room, she laid it beside the phone—a reminder—she forgot more than she remembered these days. She returned to the laundry and dragged the clothes from the tub into the spin dryer, covered them with the rubber mat and hooked the outlet hose onto the laundry sink; she closed the lid and set the clothes spinning. Arms folded, she stood back and watched the washing machine shake as it settled its load, and thought how much easier the machine made her life—she hated the drudgery of housework and looked for any shortcut that would give her more time for reading: books and teacups.
Back in the kitchen she rummaged in a drawer for the secateurs. She liked to cut her roses late, gently pressing the end of the stems before placing them in cold water to which she’d add a bit of sugar to make them last longer. But not today. She wanted to fill the room with perfume before Lori came over. Flowers on the table were her one constant, even when Frank was dying—especially when Frank was dying. They lifted her mood and signalled some sense of renewal, a life signature of sorts. She found the secateurs and on the way out, grabbed a sheet of newspaper from the woodbox beside the stove. In the garden, she cut a bloom from each rosebush, making a neat incision in the stems. She sniffed each one—she saw no point to a rose without a scent, or without a colour so there were no white roses in her garden. She wrapped the newspaper around the blooms as protection from the thorns and returned to the kitchen where she arranged them in a vase to make a luxurious display for the middle of the table. She stood back and admired her handiwork, well, God’s handiwork, Nature’s, whatever, they all combined to lift her soul.
Lori will love these. She repositioned an aromatic Mr Lincoln into the centre. Along with discussing psychic development they shared gardening hints and gave each other cuttings. She smiled, her eyes moist. Lori came for lessons once a month now. Some evenings others joined them and they’d have a circle, but not tonight. Tonight it would be just the two of them. Is Lori the one? She hoped so. Agnes chuckled. Despite her gift she wasn’t always right.
She cleaned up and returned the newspaper to the woodbox. She added a few sticks to the fire and closed it down. It would soon be too hot to have on all the time and she would do most of her cooking on the little gas stove beside the kitchen bench. Jack had found the stove for her in a second-hand shop when Frank was sick. He wouldn’t take any money for it so at first she repaid him by having him over for dinner with her and Frank and now, every second Sunday
, they shared a roast, taking turns to cook.
The silence announced that the washing had finished. She piled the clothes into the wicker basket and, eager to go next door, hung them out with scant regard to order—hankies with socks, a shirt by its collar. She pulled off the dry sheets, returned the basket to the laundry and covered the machine in a blue and white floral tablecloth. The sheets folded, she placed Jack’s on the table beside the vase where, like Jack in his kitchen, the Peace rose waited patiently. In the tiny bathroom, off the kitchen, she ran a steel comb through her silver curls without bothering to look in the mirror and hung her apron behind the door. On the way out she collected Jack’s sheets and his rose.
She unlatched the gate that Frank and Jack had built into the side fence. They’d helped each other out so often, doing odd jobs together, sharing a few beers on the weekends, that they’d put in a gate. Jack’s narrow block had very little garden—geraniums, daisy bushes and pigface that grew in a motley range of pots, tins, drums and old tyres on the edge of a paved back verandah, over whose posts a straggly grapevine twined. Two long rectangles of lawn, halved by a narrow brick path, ended two-thirds of the way down the back at a dividing fence covered in creepers. Behind the fence stood Jack’s corrugated iron garage and a smaller version of Frank’s shed but there was no guarantee that anything in Jack’s shed would be where he said he’d left it. Tidiness was not one of Jack’s strengths but being honest was—and loyal and kind. For Jack it was about doing the right thing, fair and square, and she loved him for it. She had seen the light around him the first day they’d met and some days as they sat, quiet, drinking their tea, it grew so bright she had to blink. He didn’t hold much with her ways of seeing but respected her nonetheless, so she never mentioned the light.
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