by Debra Oswald
Sheena responded with her usual abrasive awkwardness. ‘What? Oh. Right.’
She met every overture with a mistrustful frown – she seemingly had no way to process basic good manners from other people. Celia realised there must be reasons for this – a tough childhood, most likely. She felt sorry for Sheena. But that didn’t make engaging with her any more pleasant.
As Celia drove the ute out towards the road, she called Zoe over to the passenger window. ‘I won’t be long. Couple of hours. If there’s any problem, I’ll be —’
‘There won’t be any problem.’
The journey into town always gave Celia pleasure. She loved winding through the mix of orchards, vineyards, acid-yellow fields of canola, green swatches of lucerne and hillsides thick with eucalypt forest. Some days, the days when she was feeling depleted, she would pull over to the side of the road, hop out of the driver’s seat and take a long breath, stretching out her ribcage to suck in more air. If Celia filled her lungs and saturated her field of vision with all that physical beauty, it could reset the mechanism of her mind to something more serene, or at least something more manageable.
Celia never regretted her choice to make a life away from the city. Through the initial blur of grief when Marcus was killed, her friends had been supportive, solid, loving. But at every dinner table, she had been conscious of where Marcus used to sit and it was like tearing open a surgical wound over and over. She’d wondered if there might be some relief in moving to a new place where no one knew her as the remaining half of the Celia/Marcus couple.
But that wasn’t the most powerful impetus. After Zoe was born, Celia had found the city too much. Too many people moving too fast, too much noise, too many volatile elements coming from all sides. She stumbled through several panic episodes out in the street and she started to concoct reasons to avoid leaving the house at all.
Celia seized on the idea of finding somewhere peaceful and safe. She knew this wasn’t logical – bad things could happen anywhere – but it felt right. She held good memories of holidays on her uncle’s stone-fruit farm, remembered the satisfaction she had felt helping in the orchard. She browsed rural property ads in the news paper, calculating her funds – Marcus’s life insurance plus a chunk she’d inherited from her parents. She came across a farm she could afford, one that seemed manageable. The owner, Les, was retiring to Queensland, but he agreed to stay on for a handover period to teach Celia the running of the place.
Her city friends had worried about the plan. How could she possibly cope with a farm and a baby on her own? Did she know anything about growing peaches and nectarines? Celia had been oddly confident about it – hard to believe, when she thought back on it. Probably it was self-delusion. Maybe it was the seductiveness of the vision – a simple, self-reliant life, work that was nourishing and productive.
It was a thirty-minute drive from Celia’s property into Narralong. The town had just under five thousand people, four pubs, and three churches. There was an elegant old movie palace that had been closed down and a newly built monstrosity of a council chambers plonked in the wide main street, a liver- coloured brick fortress.
Celia was fond of Narralong but it had never felt like her place. Her place was the farm, and her connection to the town was a practical and fragmented business. For seven years she had driven Zoe in every day to the smaller of the two primary schools, Narralong North, and had ferried her around to piano lessons, swimming classes and to play with town kids. Celia had to push herself to fulfil the social requirements of being a mother – the chatting by the side of the pool and the swapping of anecdotes over cups of tea at pick-up time.
When the time came for Zoe to move on to secondary school, the choice wasn’t so simple. There were stories about Narralong High – drugs, brawls, a spate of teenage pregnancies – although you had to be careful which scraps of parental gossip to believe. Some local kids were sent to boarding schools but Celia would never have sent Zoe away, even if she could have afforded it. In the end, she opted for the Catholic girls’ school in Evatt’s Bridge, despite her lack of religious belief.
On the town trip today, Celia was determined to move through her list of tasks quickly, so it was disappointing to discover that Neville from the water-pump place was out on a job until two-thirty. She figured she’d make the most of the waiting time by doing some paperwork in the one cafe in town that was air-conditioned.
In the cafe, Celia ordered a toasted sandwich and a pot of the milky coffee the place was known for (apart from its airconditioning). Sitting at a table in the front window, she had a clear view of the main street. Almost immediately she spotted Joe across the road, juggling a sheaf of papers and checking his watch.
When Celia first moved to the district fifteen years ago, Joe had been living in Sydney for some years, studying and then working as a public prosecutor. His bond with Roza and with his stepfather Sandor was very strong. Even so, he must have needed to establish some separation from such intense parents. Roza herself understood that. ‘It’s good to have some air flowing between people,’ she would say, sweeping her hands to demonstrate this healthy current of air. Roza knew Joe had girlfriends in the city but he was careful not to offer up too much information about them for his mother to pick over.
Back then, Celia was busy working out how to run a farm while also raising a baby, and there was no time for socialising. She and Joe met a few times when he came home to visit. He was aware how abruptly and violently she had been widowed, but he wasn’t nervous around her. So many people were afraid of another person’s grief and were awkward with her. Joe was never like that, and Celia appreciated it.
She was about to wave hello to him through the cafe window when she saw Heather walking along the street to join him. Celia let her arm drop.
Heather wasn’t a totally unlikeable person. It was true she could be humourless and quick to blame other people, and she did talk about money an inordinate amount. But Heather was not the evil creature portrayed in Roza’s mythology, even allowing for Roza’s hyperbole and sly humour.
Soon after Sandor died, Joe had moved back to Narralong to support his mother. Within weeks of returning, he coupled up with Heather, an old schoolfriend. Roza painted Heather as ‘a scavenger bird’ who had swooped over the town and grabbed hold of him with her ‘talons’. Joe was presumably a dying wildebeest in this scenario.
To Celia, Heather mostly seemed an unhappy person. She and Joe had trouble conceiving and the poor woman had endured many visits to city doctors, curettes, surgery and whatever treatments she could find. There had been signs that Joe regarded his marriage as an unfortunate mistake and maybe, if things had gone differently, he would have left her. (The demise of the marriage remained Roza’s fervent hope.) But Joe was kind and stalwart when Heather was almost broken by the struggle to have a baby, and Celia respected him for that. Not long afterwards, their son Hamish was conceived, and two years later, Fergus.
Celia observed Joe and Heather talking on the footpath. Was Roza right that their body language was a clue to their sex life? Would that be something an observer could detect when two people were standing in the main street of Narralong? Celia’s mind flashed on Joe and Heather in bed, naked, humping away, moaning, but that felt weird and unfair, so she banished the image. Anyway, you could never know what really went on inside other people’s marriages.
There was certainly no evidence of sexual frisson between them right now. Heather was hectoring Joe about something. Celia could see – even from this distance – his resigned smile and his braced posture, allowing Heather’s bad mood and torrent of opinions to wash over him. She’d seen Joe adopt this position with his wife, and with Roza too, on many occasions. Not that Celia regarded Joe as a weak man. The opposite, really – it was more a matter of him being sturdy enough to handle the circumstances of his life without sliding away from responsibility, without complaint or self-pity.
Even so, Celia wished, as a friend – well, they were virtua
lly family – that Joe might one day claim a bit more joy for himself. The man had been so thoughtful and strong for her and Zoe over the years. When someone not related to you offered your child their devotion, the way Roza and Joe had done unreservedly with Zoe, it warranted a special kind of gratitude. Celia wanted very much for Joe to be happy. She wondered how she might broach the subject with him. Are you wretched, my friend? Surely you and Heather can’t be making each other happy. But people never wanted to be subjected to that kind of questioning. Better to leave them be. Everyone had their own methods and accommodations to make life bearable.
A few moments later, Heather and Joe crossed the street together and Celia realised they were about to walk past the cafe. She didn’t want to look as if she’d been spying on them, so, on a ridiculous impulse, she ducked down from her chair behind a display celebrating regional produce – a series of wicker baskets and cornucopias overflowing with real pumpkins and wheat sheaves mixed with plastic peaches, cherries and bunches of grapes.
Crouching, Celia was concealed by the display, but once down there, she realised she had no way of seeing if Joe and Heather had gone past. How long should she stay ducked down? A couple of other cafe patrons were staring at her, so she made a show of rummaging in her bag as if she’d dropped something.
‘Celia. Hello.’
Celia spun round on the floor to see Joe and Heather standing beside her.
‘Lost something?’ asked Joe. ‘Do you need a hand?’
‘Ha. No. Well, my keys. But found them now,’ said Celia, jumping up. ‘How are you guys? How are you, Heather?’
Heather twisted her face, indicating she wasn’t jubilant.
Celia nodded and then realised the nodding might look like an endorsement of Heather’s unhappiness. But she was unsure what to say to remedy that, so she said nothing.
The three of them stood awkwardly for a moment, until Joe broke the silence.
‘How are the new pickers working out?’
‘Good, good. No, good. Good.’ Celia heard herself sounding like an idiot. That was too many ‘goods’.
‘What?’ asked Heather, irritated that she’d not been informed about something.
‘Oh, Joe found me a couple of people to help get the picking done. He saved the day, actually.’
‘Ah,’ said Heather, still peeved.
When Celia had first moved to the farm, quite a few of the women in the district had been wary of her – a 27-year-old single mother who was presumably poised to seduce their husbands. Which was, in reality, a fucking joke. She was barely holding the shreds of herself together in those early years after Marcus died. The last thing she would have contemplated was a romantic relationship, let alone a spot of husband-stealing.
There had been a couple of attempts by well-meaning people to matchmake Celia with available local gentlemen. They had been pleasant-enough guys but it had never felt right to pursue things. Running the farm and raising Zoe had been enough for Celia to handle. And now, at forty-two, she couldn’t imagine connecting her life to a man again. So, she was certainly not a threat to anyone else’s marriage.
Heather, though, had always seemed suspicious of her. There’d been times Celia had fought an urge to grasp the woman by the shoulders and pronounce, ‘I’m not going to run off with your husband, Heather. I don’t want another husband.’ But there was no point saying anything.
‘Anyway, I must get a move on,’ said Celia, slightly too loudly. She gulped down the remains of her coffee and took a last bite of the sandwich. ‘See you.’
Standing at the counter, waiting to pay, Celia suddenly felt the burn of tears. This was one of the risks of coming into town or visiting her old life in the city. Being in close proximity to other people as they trundled along with their lives, seeing husbands and wives walking down the street, however wretched they may be together, she might abruptly feel the pain of losing her man as freshly as when it first happened. If she had ever let herself experience the deficits and the loneliness full pelt, there was a risk she would crumble, which would be of no use to Zoe.
The cafe girl was distracted, flustered by the complexities of a new cash register, so Celia pushed a five-dollar note across the counter. It was way too much money, but it was better to get out of there quickly before she started to cry and became the subject of Narralong gossip.
On the way to the water-pump place, she stopped in at the bakery and bought a couple of vanilla slices, with their lurid yellow filling and neon-pink icing, a favourite of Zoe’s since she was a little kid.
*
With Celia away for the afternoon, Zoe was the one conveying the bins of fruit to the packing shed. The next time she drove the tractor back into the orchard with empty bins, Kieran was tackling a new row, while Sheena finished the low-down stuff on the previous section.
‘Hey there, Zoe,’ he said.
She watched him pause to take a drink, head stretched back, the muscles of his throat rolling with each gulp of water.
Without making a big deal of it, Zoe grabbed a picking bag and started work on the peach tree next to Kieran’s. When he realized she was helping, he flashed a smile at her through the branches and mouthed, Thank you. Kieran hadn’t shaved for a few days now and she noticed his stubble was growing out a shade darker than his toffee-coloured hair.
Zoe had been observing Kieran during the day and thinking about him at night. She decided he wasn’t a person who would ever ridicule someone, not in a mean-spirited way, so she now felt brave enough to risk talking to him.
Working side by side, picking fruit, was the perfect opportunity to test-drive talking to him – they were close enough to have a conversation, but because they were focused on the task, Zoe could avoid eye contact with him. That way, she wasn’t so exposed.
They chatted about random stuff to begin with, and laughed at each other’s lame jokes. After a while, Zoe felt a small surge of boldness, enough to say, ‘The thing you have to know about me is that I’m socially retarded.’
Kieran laughed. ‘What?’
‘Let me explain how it works. I go to a single-sex school in Evatt’s Bridge, right?’
‘Where is that?’
‘So bloody far away from here,’ Zoe replied. ‘Which means I spend a total of two-and-a-half hours a day on a bus, usually with a few old people going to the chiropodist in Evatt’s Bridge to get their toenails scraped out. So, my day consists of bus, all-girls’ school, bus, home. On weekends and holidays I’m helping out round here. That’s it. Goody-goody daughter whether I like it or not. I live in protective custody.’
‘Yeah? It doesn’t look to me like . . . Your mum doesn’t chain you up at night, does she? I mean, she seems pretty cool.’
‘Oh, Mum’s cool in some ways,’ Zoe agreed. ‘She never forbids me to do anything. She doesn’t have to.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘She does it by emotional blackmail,’ Zoe explained. ‘I can hear the worry clunking round in her brain, even though she tries to hide it.’
Kieran stopped working and looked directly at her. ‘Roza told me what happened to your dad. I’m so sorry. That was . . . far out. He was just standing there, buying petrol and – bang – some psycho shoots him. Your poor mum. Poor you.’
He was looking at her so intently, Zoe had to turn away for a moment. ‘Yeah, well – yes.’
‘Sorry,’ said Kieran, ‘I didn’t mean to sound —’
‘No, don’t say sorry. And yes, you’re right – that’s the thing. There’s a worm in Mum’s mind: People go off in the morning and then never come home. So, if some . . . Like, I missed the bus once and I couldn’t find a phone. When I got home, Mum tried to sound reasonable but I saw the panic on her face. She was packing shit. I never want to see that face, so I don’t do anything. That’s how she keeps me locked up in protective custody. That’s how you end up a sixteen-year-old who’s done fucking nothing. That is, you end up socially retarded.’
Zoe took a breath after
that mouthful of words and realised Kieran was staring at her in that intense way again.
‘What?’ she asked.
Kieran shook his head.
‘I’m talking too much. Sorry.’
‘No, no. I like it,’ he said. ‘I like it a lot.’
A moment later, they heard the sound of Celia driving the ute up from the gate. Zoe dumped her picking bag into the bin and hurried over to help her mother haul the shopping and gas cylinders inside.
After dinner, Celia and Zoe shared one of the vanilla slices so they could save the other one for the next night.
Possibly Zoe went on about the vanilla slice a bit too much. ‘Mm, so disgusting but so perfect,’ she said. ‘The icing’s sugary enough to make your teeth hurt, but then you sink into gooey custard in the middle and it’s just – ah . . . Thanks for getting these, Mum.’
‘You’re welcome,’ said Celia. ‘Oh, hey, how did you all get on this arvo?’
‘All good,’ said Zoe, as lightly as she could utter the words.
Sheena could hardly believe that Kieran had held it together for a full week, putting up with the heat, the slog, the crushingly early starts, then being crammed into the airless little cabin at night, with only his testy sister for company, offered nothing by way of entertainment and without chemicals of any kind to distract him or embellish the experience. Really, her little brother was surprising the hell out of her with this new diligence. A few times, Sheena had glanced across from the ladder she was standing on to observe Kieran working away, focused – quiet for fucking once! – and it struck her that he appeared to have sprouted several mature brain cells right there in front of her. Maybe it was the fresh air.
At the midday break, Celia was hovering in the yard, waiting to speak to Sheena but trying not to make it obvious. The band of muscle across Sheena’s lower belly contracted, like tightening a belt. She was always primed for hassle, suspicious questions, dismissal.