The Olive Sisters

by Amanda Hampson

  I can hear a woman gasping for breath, great choking sobs rising to an animal howl. It’s me. I huddle in the corner of the kitchen and wait for the storm to pass, then I creep into my cold little bed and sleep with my clothes on, mouth sour with the taste of wine.

  The house is cold and damp when I wake at dawn for the third day in a row. I can’t think of a single reason to get out of bed except that I feel so bad lying in it. I haven’t finished unpacking my clothes and have to resort to putting on my father’s dressing-gown that hangs on a hook behind the door. It’s brown, like almost everything he wore – doesn’t show the dirt – but softer than it appears.

  The desperation of the night before has dissipated. I’m back to feeling tired, worn-down and worn-out. I make tea and drink it, only realising I have done so when I see the cup is empty. I make another cup and take it out to the verandah.

  I think about Rosanna swinging on that rope in her underwear. You’d never see my mother in her underwear. Even I didn’t until near the end. When that time came I had to sleep with her to keep her warm at night. She was too weak to do anything for herself. I’d help her to the toilet, hold the bowl while she vomited. Every day I thought my father would come. Finally, she asked for him. There was no one else to say goodbye to. I rang him in Mount Isa, begging him to come. He asked to speak to her.

  ‘Come here and speak to her,’ I hissed. ‘She needs to see you.’

  ‘I’ll speak to him,’ my mother called from the bedroom. ‘Help me to the phone.’

  It took forever to coax her emaciated body from the bed. I could feel my father’s impatience radiating from the phone. At her insistence I helped her slip her robe on, the pale pink silk he sent for her birthday the year before. I smoothed her hair back and twisted it into a knot, just the way she liked it.

  ‘He can’t see you, you know, Mum,’ I said wearily.

  She looked gaunt and pale as she sat down in the little chair she kept by the telephone table. Her hand, like a starving bird, flapped at me to leave. Our eyes followed the trajectory of her wedding ring as it flew from her finger and spun across the polished floor. Her face sagged with dismay. Neither of us moved to pick it up. I didn’t want the burden of it. She didn’t have the strength.

  ‘How are you, Jack? I’m fine, I’m getting there.’ She avoided my eye as I left the room. As I closed the door I heard her say in a plaintive voice, ‘Please try to find her for me, just this one last time.’

  ‘Who do you want Dad to find for you?’ I asked later as I slipped her robe off and helped her back into bed.

  ‘Just a friend, darling. An old friend I haven’t seen for a long time. Daddy said he’d do his best to find her. I’d like you to meet her.’ She lay back on her pillows and closed her eyes. ‘You won’t leave me, will you, darling?’ she sighed. Yet she was leaving me. I felt she was abandoning me, as though she and the cancer were complicit in some way.

  And so she waited. I’ve heard stories about people who hold death at bay until someone arrives or a baby is born, but what if you hold on and on and the person doesn’t arrive? What if you have to be fed a drop at a time to keep you alive for a reunion that is never going to take place? What if you hold on until the light has died in your eyes and you don’t even have the strength to speak? And no one comes. Even my father did not come to say goodbye to her.

  As a child I was instinctively aware that my mother was constantly searching for someone. She would stop suddenly to watch a stranger emerge from a shop or quicken her pace to catch someone walking ahead, always a woman. ‘Just someone I thought I knew,’ she would say.

  Now I know who it was. It was Rosanna. And now I know why she didn’t come. She was my father’s lover. Perhaps he knew where she was all along. Perhaps he didn’t. Perhaps he found her and she wouldn’t come. Perhaps it was too late. I may never know.

  He came to the funeral alone. During the long hours at my mother’s bedside my thoughts often turned to what I would say to him when I finally saw him. It varied from a few barbed remarks to a thirty-minute diatribe on his meanness and his despicable cowardice. My childhood was littered with broken promises from him and in those empty hours I revisited every single one of them, railed against the injustices of his penny-pinching ways and – worst of all – his indifference to our plight. He knew Mum was dying. He knew my youth was being sucked out of me caring for her. I never heard her say a cross word to him. Yet he could not find it in himself to come and spend one hour with her. Why had he even bothered to breeze in and out of our lives all those years? Why didn’t he just bugger off for good like other hopeless fathers? Why didn’t he have the courage to divorce her and be done with us? (Not that my mother would have ever agreed; she had the moral sensibilities of a bygone era.) In the end I couldn’t even be bothered finding out the answers. He probably wouldn’t have told me anyway. At the funeral I gave him the key to the flat and left without a word. I took only what belonged to me. I was nineteen years old when I chose to go out into the world as an orphan.

  I’m still lounging on the verandah when a car comes creeping slowly up the driveway, avoiding possible stone chips on the BMW’s bright metallic gold paintwork. The driver seems to fill the car. He stays in his seat and pushes the door open. A fat globule of saliva lands on the gravel.

  ‘Missus Bennett?’ he bellows. I give a slight nod. ‘Darryl Leeton.’ He doesn’t so much shout as boom. When I show no sign of getting up he reluctantly heaves himself out of the driver’s seat, gently closes the door and leans against the car. They obviously can’t be parted. I’m forced to get up and walk to the top of the steps.

  His eyes flick over me from head to foot and back again. He takes in the old brown robe, the man’s slippers, the very bad hair thing happening. If only I had a cigarette hanging off my lip to complete the picture. It’s not that I don’t care what he thinks, I just haven’t the strength to try to redeem myself in his eyes. And he’s not such a glorious sight himself. He’s got the biggest gut I have ever seen. It’s securely contained in a stretched-to-capacity T-shirt advertising ‘Leeton Earthmovers’ gathered like a balloon at the bottom and tucked into a pair of little-boy elastic-topped shorts. I cannot imagine this man making the earth move for any woman.

  ‘How ya goin’?’

  ‘Pretty good. And you?’

  ‘Yar. I’ll get to the point. I’m looking for acreage and I might just be interested in your property.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I say with a sweet smile. ‘Lucky me.’

  He raises his eyebrows, folds his arms and reorganises his backside on the car. He glances across the expanse of gleaming bonnet, as though to draw my attention to its golden splendour.

  ‘Nice car,’ I volunteer.

  ‘Yer probably used to Sydney prices. Little 30-acre patch like this in’t worth much up here.’

  I can’t decide whether he is deaf or rude. ‘What about the olives?’ I say loudly.

  ‘Olives!’ he snorts. ‘What about ’em?’

  ‘Aren’t they a business proposition?’

  ‘We don’t eat olives around here,’ he says witheringly. ‘Bloody lot of work to pull ’em out, not everyone wants to take that on. But I’ve got the equipment, ya see.’

  In my old life I’d have had a tart riposte at hand but I don’t have the energy. Besides, Darryl clearly isn’t the sort to appreciate a camp retort. ‘Look, I might well be interested in selling. I haven’t had time to think about that option yet. Perhaps you could leave your card and I’ll get back to you,’ I say in my most reasonable voice.

  ‘Don’t yer want to hear me offer?’ he says crossly.

  ‘I don’t want to be influenced by that.’

  He gives a grunt, gets in the car and reverses the entire length of the driveway at high speed. There’s a man who knows how to leave in a hurry.

  I expect I’ll be marked in Duffy’s Creek as an eccentric. The niece of the girl who swam in her undies. People who eat olives. The truth is my mother would be ashamed if she
saw the way I looked right now. We might be losing the plot behind closed doors but in public we always look our best.

  I still remember some of the clothes my mother made me. Lulled to sleep every night by the soft thudding of her sewing machine, sometimes I would wake to find a new dress had been gently laid on the end of my bed during the night. I would be especially careful not to wake her as I made my breakfast and left for school. She was almost never awake to see me try my new clothes on. It made me sad in a way. Our moments of pleasure never seemed to coincide.

  Four

  AS THE SUMMER slipped into autumn, Jack began to go as often as he could to the farm. He boarded in a house in town with two other Austmine employees: a West Australian called Snow, and Michael, an Irishman, both geologists with an interest in amateur boxing. The three shared a bad-tempered landlady, Mrs Migro, whom they nicknamed Mrs Migraine. With a few gins under her belt of an evening she would thump on their doors, shrilling accusations regarding smoking, drinking, blaspheming and women – none of which were permitted in the rooms or in the house. Michael formed a theory that her husband had run off with a smoking, drinking, blaspheming woman. And now she had it in for all of them. ‘Mary, Mother of Jesus, who the fook could blame him!’ he muttered with monotonous regularity.

  Dinner was immovable at 5.30 p.m., devised – all three men agreed – to sabotage their last half-hour of drinking time before the pub closed. It was an unrelentingly dismal affair of boiled vegetables and overcooked meat – hardly worth missing a beer for.

  ‘Don’t go rushing out – I’ve slaved all afternoon to make yer pudding,’ Mrs Migraine would screech from the kitchen as they sat silently, chewing to the beat of the clock.

  ‘It better not be fooking tapioca again,’ Michael murmured into his cauliflower cheese. Pudding was almost always something warm and sloppy they would bolt down, half out of their chairs.

  ‘Just off for our constitutional, Mrs M.’ It was Jack’s job to keep her sweet. The moment they were out of sight they sprinted down the street, invariably arriving at the pub as the last bell sounded, hurling themselves into the fray at the bar. Later they would sit in the park or by the river, smoking and talking, reliving fights they had heard on the radio. Snow and Michael were good blokes but they bored Jack with their constant jawing about rocks. He wasn’t much interested in boxing either, and often ambled off home early to read or sleep. His weekends seemed endless.

  Franco had asked if he would come one afternoon and help him put in a new strainer post for the old fence between the orchard and the olive grove where his three cows grazed. It was a two-man job, not that his girls weren’t up to it, but the women were still busy preparing the nets for the winter olive harvest.

  The warm evenings lingered in early March and Jack enjoyed being outdoors without the sound of the dredge in the background. He had time to appreciate the soft touch of the air on his skin and the pulsing chorus of frogs and crickets. The two men quickly found they liked to work at a similar pace and would stop from time to time and discuss the job or have a break.

  They often sat and smoked quietly, watching the light redefine the landscape as it distilled to gold, creeping ahead of lengthening shadows to its last visible point on the hills that marked the far boundary. One evening, as they sat, Franco gestured towards the hills. ‘I want be buried up there. Is where I find my peace, my God. God made this church with His hands. This is my heaven, I rest in the sun, watch over my oliva forever.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Jack as he flicked his cigarette butt into the hole they were digging. ‘But you won’t get too much sun six foot under, you know.’

  Franco was anxious to have urgent maintenance work on the farm completed before winter when the olive harvest would take place and add to the family’s already heavy workload. Jack helped him build a new pen for Fiori, the big lazy sow. In late autumn they rebuilt the wooden struts for the vines that were the source of Franco’s vino rosso – something Jack was reluctantly acquiring a taste for.

  These comparatively simple tasks held a level of satisfaction Jack had never experienced in his own work, mostly to do with the scale of the projects. He was surprised at how rewarding it was to complete a job in a single day. It was intensely physical, requiring him to lift, push, pull and pound in nails with a hammer. The outcome was simple and obvious. Yet in many ways these small projects were quite challenging. First, there was no money for materials; they had to either exist on the property or be recovered from the local tip. Then there was the plan. Franco was always convinced there was one right way to do the job and would enter into spirited debate with Jack as to what it was. Jack learned to allow Franco the joy of debate while slowly imposing what appeared to him to be a natural sense of order in the work. Franco clearly had respect for the fact that Jack was a foreman with an engineering degree, even if it had little relevance to the job at hand.

  ‘All right – you the boss!’ he would capitulate, hands thrown up in parody of helplessness. Jack was not an easy man to rile and he was amused by the way a recalcitrant nail or a mislaid hammer could set Franco off, muttering furiously, ‘Porca Madonna! Porca miseria!’ Jack’s standard response, ‘Keep your hat on, mate’, became their private joke.

  Many evenings that autumn they worked until dusk laid damp hands on their shoulders and then Jack would feel a surge of anticipation at the evening that lay ahead. It was as though something in him was ripening. It slowly blossomed as they packed up the tools and inspected the work, as Franco clapped him on the back, exclaiming with delight at what they had accomplished. As they walked towards the house, pulled off their boots on the step and pushed through the kitchen door to be embraced by the fragrant harmonies of sizzling onion and garlic, this ripening bud would burst and send a rush of warmth through Jack’s body. It was only looking back that he recognised that the feeling was joy. Warm joy.

  The first few meals with the family had been a little awkward. Unlike Jack’s own family, who were forced to eat in total silence, the Martinos jumped up and down from the table, they passed food and they added helpings to his plate. Franco insisted he have a glass of vino d’uva before the meal, vital for the digestivo; then pasta, olives, basil and tomatoes from the garden; rabbit stew; the dense white bread he often saw proving on the shelf above the wood-burning stove; salad with peppery leaves. No slippery pudding but caffè corretto, spiked with Franco’s precious stock of grappa. Jack often had trouble finding his car when he left.

  There was talk about food, about what was ripe in the garden and what needed to be done but Jack’s role was ambiguous. He sensed there was a contribution he as a guest could and should make but something held him back. Isabelle also remained reserved, shy in his presence. She kept a watchful eye on Jack, which made him wonder what she did with all the information she gathered.

  Mrs Martino, at first suspicious of Jack, began to welcome him more when, on Rosanna’s advice, he addressed her as Signora Martino and discovered that a simple ‘Grazie, Signora’ elicited a shy smile. ‘Prego,’ she would reply.

  Rosanna seemed mildly amused by Jack. ‘Mamma is concerned that my father is corrupting you with his swearing and peasant dialect,’ she told him once when Franco was out of the room. ‘You have to understand that Mamma is a convent girl from Genova; my father is a contadino, a farmer. He thinks that running water in the house is a great luxury.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with being a farmer,’ said Jack, affronted on Franco’s behalf.

  It was in Jack’s nature to be curious about what things were made of and how things worked; what size beam might be required to replace a supporting wall or how much cement might be required to fill a particular hole for holding a strainer post. These were topics he and Franco could and would talk about endlessly. He knew women didn’t have the same sort of interests but it was the only place he was comfortable. It was Isabelle he wanted to engage with but he couldn’t think what to ask her about her work as a dressmaker. Rosanna was a cook at the hospit
al; he often saw her riding a rickety black bike to the bus stop. He told her how disagreeable the food had been in the army hospital in Alexandria. She laughed, unsympathetic. ‘Hospital food is supposed to discourage malingerers.’

  ‘Were you wounded?’ asked Isabelle.

  ‘No, I was with the sappers – engineers. We all went down with dysentery. So, when that was done with, we were pretty desperate for some decent tucker.’

  When, with a slight sense of desperation, Jack began to ask more searching questions about them it was as though the family had been waiting for someone to share their stories with. It seemed that the Martinos’ lives were held together by clusters of stories of the past that somehow safe-guarded the promise of the future.

  Franco told how his family had farmed the olive and produced some of the best oil in Liguria for three generations. ‘The Taggiasca – very special tree. A tree that gives to the family for hundreds of years – maybe 600 years! Is a tough tree, strong and tall. It can live through terrible cold and terrible heat – but not with Domenico, not with my fratello.’

  ‘His brother,’ nodded Rosanna.

  ‘Si, my brother. He is a man who cannot read or write, but ah! He can play the cards for the lira. Gioco d’azzardo bastardo.’ Franco rocked his head in his hands, seemingly stricken all over again.

  ‘My Uncle Domenico was the youngest brother. He went down to the south, to “seek his fortune” as they used to say,’ explained Rosanna. ‘Got in with the wrong crowd, so it seems.’

  ‘Calabrese! Siciliano!’ said Franco with disgust. ‘Terroni.’

  ‘Ah yes, it was all very dramatic and my father had to sell the family farm to pay the loan sharks so my uncle didn’t end up losing his private parts to a Siciliano stiletto.’ Rosanna mimed a gruesome twist and slice manoeuvre.

  Isabelle looked mortified. ‘Rosa, I think you’re giving Jack a bad impression of Italian people.’