by Debra Oswald
Of course it wasn’t so much like that lately. Celia could tell there was plenty going on in Zoe’s head that she didn’t share anymore, which was probably fitting. A natural process. A sixteen-year-old should be allowed to have her own private thoughts, without being pestered.
Celia must have fallen asleep while trying to focus on the TV, because the next thing she recalled was Zoe shaking her gently, coaxing her to go to bed. ‘Come on, Mum, you’ll wreck your neck if you sleep here all night.’
Celia allowed Zoe to steer her out of the living room towards her bedroom.
*
It was giving Sheena the shits to be trapped in this festy shack with Kieran, especially if he was going to keep yapping and bouncing around the whole time.
‘Sit down. This place is too small for you to go on like a hyper-fucking-active baboon.’
Sheena immediately regretted saying that – she should’ve realised it would inspire Kieran to have a crack at doing a baboon impersonation. He swooped down into a primate squat and made a few hooting calls.
‘That doesn’t even sound like a baboon – sounds more like a chimp,’ she pointed out.
‘Almost made you smile, but. Almost.’
He jumped to his feet again and made a grand sweeping gesture around the cabin, as if they were in a magnificent hotel suite. ‘Look at this place! Our little cubby’s nicer than any place I’ve ever lived,’ he said. Then he flipped open the door and shone a torch out into the orchard.
‘Check out those peach trees.’ He picked out tree after tree with the torch beam. ‘Look at them, all in rows – wap, wap, wap. Growing food. What a top thing. What do you reckon it’d cost to buy a place like this?’
‘Oh right, and where would you get the money?’ asked Sheena.
‘I’m just saying, if you could, if you could, it’d be incredible.’
‘Kieran. Don’t get carried away. We only just got you a bit settled down.’
‘Yeah, I’m too much of a spaz to run a farm.’
‘I’m not saying that.’
Kieran suddenly flicked the torch off and spun round to face Sheena. ‘Hey, what do you reckon about Zoe?’
Sheena shrugged. ‘Bit up herself.’
‘You reckon? I didn’t think up herself. She’s really – ah – what’s the word . . .’ Kieran whacked himself in the side of the head, trying to dislodge whatever was clogging his thought process.
‘Kieran. Go to bed. You and me are gonna work our guts out tomorrow. The more peaches we pick, sooner we get the car back.’
‘Roger that,’ said Kieran, saluting. ‘Thanks, Sheena. Have I said thanks?’
‘About four thousand million times.’
‘Ha! But I mean it,’ he said and darted across to pepper her hand with grateful kisses.
‘Get off me. Sleep. Now.’
Sheena turned the gas lamp off as they climbed into the two bottom bunks. Kieran’s feet hung a few inches over the edge and the foam mattresses were thin enough to feel the wooden slats jabbing through, but thirty seconds after he bunched up the pillow under his head, Sheena could hear her brother’s breathing fall into the slow, regular rhythm of sleep.
He was lucky – deep asleep within a minute of closing his eyes. He wasn’t one to be awake half the night, head full of prickly thoughts. Kieran didn’t hold anything in his head for long. Te n seconds tops. So he never had black thoughts poking him awake every few minutes. It was up to Sheena to do the thinking and worrying for him. Lucky Sheena.
Kieran had always been an impulsive kid. A disastrous idiot on many occasions. But never malicious. There wasn’t a single nasty bone in that body sprawled over there on the bunk. Especially compared to Sheena’s other maggot brothers. Compared to Sheena herself. Kieran was a way nicer human than all of them.
She wasn’t sure how that had happened. They’d all grown up in the same hopeless-joke house with the same custard-brained mother, but some of them had different fathers. Kieran’s dad was a good-natured, if useless, lump of a man. So, maybe that was it – genetics.
For whatever reason, Kieran turned out a good guy – not necessarily in terms of what he did, but in his heart. Sheena didn’t see that in many people. So she didn’t want to watch it get taken advantage of. Which could easily happen to a kid like Kieran. He could get sucked in by the wrong people – like his poisonous mate Mick – and end up in a mess, because he had no protective coating.
One handy thing about this godforsaken place they’d been marooned was the lack of telephones, not counting the owner’s phone. It was a relief to think Kieran couldn’t ring Mick or any of his deadhead cronies. The longer without contact with those losers, the better.
The sound of Kieran’s sleep snuffles was beginning to shit Sheena to tears. She had a spiteful urge to reach across and thump him in the guts. But if she did that, he’d wake up and start yapping about something and that’d be even more annoying.
Sheena yearned for some form of amnesia, to wipe the mind clean, forget every person and every event that had ever happened in her life. She tried a breathing exercise she’d seen on a yoga TV show. She really needed to get to sleep, as rapidly as possible. They had to get up at fucking dawn to pick fucking peaches all fucking day.
*
Physical exhaustion usually allowed Celia to sink into deep sleep for four hours, but it wasn’t enough to let her stay there. Most nights, like tonight, she would find herself awake at two a.m. Sometimes she would lie in bed and try to bully herself back to sleep. But often, like tonight, she made herself some herbal tea and prowled the house in bare feet, careful not to wake Zoe.
Celia had always been an anxious person. But on the normal scale. At the anxious end of normal. Then when her husband Marcus was killed, the fact of it blasted through her life like a meteor that scorched away all the calming fixtures people install in their minds to defuse anxiety. An unthinkable malignant thing had happened, so anything could happen. The world was a dangerous place. Most people had the luxury of ignoring that, but she could not.
Celia was generally okay in the daytime. In daylight, her mind was busy with the thousand jobs that needed doing, but the middle of the night was a different universe. In the middle of the night, she would wake up and the dangers would be there. They must have oozed up while she slept, until her brain was awash with panic. The panic was sometimes formless, but often about Zoe.
When Zoe was born, they had put her on Celia’s chest and the baby had looked her mother straight in the eye. The challenge was there. I must protect this human being.
Celia had maintained a policy of never cottonwoolling Zoe and she followed the policy as an act of will. She didn’t want to infect her daughter with the fears. So she had let Zoe run, climb trees, dive off high boards.
But now Zoe was older, it was becoming more difficult. Now there was so much, so many more terrifying possibilities that silted up in Celia’s brain. The only way not to feel overwhelmed during the night panic was to repeat certain thoughts over and over. Acknowledging the potential dangers ensured they could not sneak up on her. She would keep her eyes fixed on them and be ready.
A quarter of all road fatalities were in the fifteen- to twenty-year-old age group. Youth suicide had increased thirty-five per cent over the past ten years. The leading cause of death for teenagers was now drug overdose, and reports of sexual assaults of girls were up more than forty per cent. And on and on. So many terrifying numbers.
Celia ran the numbers through her head, meditated on the risks so they wouldn’t happen. She knew this was unreasonable. Superstitious thinking. She was compelled to do it anyway. Just in case. Just in case. Mother’s voodoo.
This was the trade she had made: the night worrying meant that in the daytime, she could be normal and sturdy and get on with things.
Pickers needed to start early, so they could get as many peaches as possible into the coolroom before the heat of the day. Warm fruit didn’t handle or travel so well.
Early was n
ot a problem for Roza. Like other old crones she knew, she never slept much past four a.m. anyway. A cup of tea, some yoghurt with fruit, and she was ready for the day.
Roza’s yellow-painted house was perched at the crossroads where the gravel lane that led to several properties, including Celia’s farm, intersected with the bitumen road into town. For one year Roza had lived in this house with her husband Sandor, and for seventeen years, since Sandor died, on her own.
It was a twenty-minute walk from Roza’s house to Celia’s packing shed. Maybe thirty minutes at the judicious pace she tackled the pathway these days. The pre-dawn light was delicate, fragile, as if maybe, today, the sun might not manage to haul itself fully over the horizon. Lovely.
Celia was already moving briskly around the shed, setting up for the work. And just as Roza arrived, so did the boy, Kieran, bounding up to the yard from the cabin.
‘G’morning, Celia!’
‘Morning,’ she said. ‘Sorry about honking the horn so early. A bit brutal, I know.’
‘No worries. Not brutal. No way,’ he assured her. He spun round to grin at Sheena, who was dragging herself, still not fully awake, into the yard. ‘Sheena! This is the absolute best time of the day, don’t ya reckon? Magical.’
Sheena did not seem convinced anything magical was occurring.
Kieran carried on, undeterred and loud. ‘It’s completely fucking magical! I’ve stayed awake until dawn but I’ve never, like, approached it from this angle.’
‘Kieran,’ said Sheena with a scowl. ‘Use your indoor voice.’
He reduced his volume, which was a relief to Roza. Even for her, it was a little early in the day for this level of boisterous enthusiasm.
In what Roza supposed was his ‘indoor voice’, the young man addressed Celia. ‘I gotta tell you, I am totally psyched about this picking thing.’
‘Well, that’s great.’ Celia smiled, encouraging. ‘Today we’ll be picking the Red Havens.’
She used some peaches already in the shed as examples to demonstrate to the newcomers. ‘We start with what’s called a “colour pick”. We take any fruit coloured from this . . .’ She held up a deeply red, almost overripe peach. ‘ To this.’ She showed them another peach that was just blushing its way there. ‘After that, we do the “strip pick” – we take off whatever fruit is left. Does that make sense?’
Sheena and Kieran both nodded.
‘Let me set you up with bags.’
While Celia moved to the side bench to find two of the better picking bags, Kieran reached for the peaches she’d shown them. He held the peaches close to his face and turned them back and forth with his eyes scrunched up, as if absorbing the colours. Then he sniffed both of them like a curious animal. It was when he started to brush the furry skin of the fruit against his cheek, trying out the sensation, that Sheena flashed him a warning glare. You look weird.
The boy didn’t see Sheena glaring at him, or perhaps he was deliberately ignoring her – Roza was not sure which. But a moment later, when Zoe appeared, he forgot about those peaches in a flash. His attention was entirely captured by her.
‘Hi,’ said Zoe, in a general greeting. ‘Mum, I found some hats.’
‘Terrific. Thanks, sweetheart,’ Celia handed the comfortably battered straw hats to Kieran and Sheena. ‘You’ll need these. It gets very hot out there.’
‘Hot. Got it,’ said Kieran, tucking some of the longer loose strands of his hair up under the brim.
‘A steady working pace is the go,’ Celia advised.
Sheena eyeballed her brother. ‘Hear that, Kieran? Steady working.’
Kieran grinned. ‘You watch me. I’m gonna be so good, you’ll be going, “Is that Kieran? Is that hardworking legend really my little brother?”’
And then he glanced at Zoe. He was showing off for her benefit. That was obvious to Roza and indeed, would be obvious to any person with eyes in their head.
‘Let’s get cracking,’ said Celia.
Zoe drove the little tractor out of the yard, down between the orchard rows, taking the trailer and the stepladders to the section to be picked that morning. Celia followed on foot with Sheena and Kieran. She adjusted the picking bags to suit the two of them. It was always best to make sure the webbing strap hung comfortably on the neck and shoulders, and the bag sat at the correct level against the body.
She then showed them how the picking was done: how to select which peach to take, ease or gently snap it away, taking care not to tear the skin on surrounding sharp branches, then place the fruit in the canvas picking bag. Once a bag was full, they would release the straps in the bottom and let the peaches roll gently into the bins on the back of the trailer.
Kieran and Sheena started on the colour pick with Celia working alongside them, answering any questions. But once the bins began to fill up, she was busy ferrying the fruit back to the shed, helping Roza with the packing, and working the phone to liaise with the markets and hunt for more pickers. Whenever there was a gap, Celia would hop in and do some of the picking, but mostly it was Zoe who stayed out in the orchard with the new comers. As for Kieran and Sheena, they were tentative at first, wary of making mistakes, nervous of damaging the peaches.
When the sun really got itself going and the heat intensified, Celia drove the tractor back into the orchard with a plastic cooler to refill the pickers’ water bottles. Kieran, Sheena and Zoe all stopped work for a few moments to guzzle water.
‘Thanks heaps for this,’ said Kieran.
‘You need to keep the water up,’ Celia advised.
‘Reckon. Feel like my guts, my liver, my entire insides have melted and sweated right out of me.’
Celia smiled. It was hard not to like this young man. ‘You’re going really well.’
‘Yeah? Well, it’s fun.’
Later, in the middle of the day, Celia insisted everyone take a two-hour break – for the sake of the fruit but also for the sake of the people. Kieran and Sheena retreated to the cabin, planning to lie ‘like comatose vegetables’ on the bunks.
It occurred to Roza that these two, having taken off the picking bags and tasted some blessed rest, might decide to give up. They might refuse to come back to the orchard for more hard labour in the heat. She had seen that happen more than once, over the years, often with the big-mouth types who had made the most noise about how hard they planned to work. But these two, Kieran and Sheena, fronted up in the yard at the agreed time, ready to put on the picking bags again.
By the end of the second day, the new pickers had grown in confidence and were bringing in the fruit at a decent rate. Any fair person would say they were good workers.
The young man – he was clowning around one minute, working fast like a crazy person the next minute, but added together, he picked the same amount as a good picker. And from what Roza had seen and heard, Kieran was not a stupid person, unruly perhaps, but not stupid by any means.
The sister would sometimes nag at him to stay focused on the task, snappy with him like a she-wolf nipping and growling at a boisterous cub.
⃰ *
After the first morning in the orchard, Sheena had removed her bracelets, neck chains, hoop earrings and ear studs. There was too much risk of catching them on a random branch and garrotting herself or tearing off an earlobe or something.
She got the hang of the job in the first couple of days and then it was just a matter of tolerating the physical shittiness of it – burning neck and shoulder muscles, shredded hands, aching spine, all to be endured in brain-frying temperatures, wearing clothes clammy with sweat. She did appreciate the fact that when she was absorbed in the task – selecting which peaches to go for, filling the bag, emptying peaches into the bin, moving the ladder, selecting more peaches – she could pretty much switch off all other thinking. It was preferable to fill her brain up with peaches rather than the other miserable stuff that could creep into her thoughts if left unattended. It was just a shame this welcome mind-numbing effect involved working in foul h
eat and making her entire body hurt.
Celia, the owner, never seemed to take a break, shuttling back and forth on the green midget tractor, helping the old Hungarian lady in the packing shed and then jumping in to help with the picking every now and then. Her vigorous, gung-ho routine irritated the shit out of Sheena but she had to grant that the woman seemed to be a decent operator. She was paying reasonable money and the fact was, she had given Kieran and Sheena a go.
Even so, Sheena knew Celia’s judgement of them was buzzing whenever they were in contact. From the first moment they’d met, her skin had prickled under Celia’s critical gaze – assessing, scrutinising, disapproving. Sheena was used to copping that most places she went.
Now, after four days working on the farm, she could still feel Celia’s eyes on Kieran and her. She could practically hear the suspicious questions whirring in the woman’s head. And occasionally, some of those questions would come out of her mouth, always with a fake chatty tone that didn’t fool Sheena for one second.
‘So, Kieran, you would’ve finished school – what, this year?’ asked Celia as she refilled their water bottles from the cooler on the trailer.
‘Oh, well . . . not exactly,’ said Kieran.
‘Did you leave early?’
‘Kind of.’
Kieran threw Sheena a look – What should I say? He had enough sense to avoid blurting out too much to this woman, but he was never much chop at lying.
And Celia, she wasn’t going to let it go, even if she was smiling as she said, ‘Well, school’s broken up for the year now anyway.’