by Lois Murphy
There is no way we can leave her in that state till morning, and no way we’ll be able to lift her into the Land Cruiser. I manoeuvre their Honda as close to her as possible, and Stick and I lift her, as gently and as swiftly as we can, into the back seat. She screams and gasps, punctuating her sobs with such phrases as ‘You have no idea’. It is going to be a long drive.
And it’s nearly five o’clock. We don’t have much time. I tell Tom to get a blanket and some overnight things for Gail. He’ll need some too. He blanches.
‘Don’t think for a minute you’re not coming,’ I tell him. He stumbles towards the house. I leave Stick with Gail and go after him. Sure enough, he is at the sink, pouring bourbon.
‘You’ve got two minutes,’ I say, ‘or I’ll leave her here.’
He looks sheepish, but downs the drink in one swallow before staggering in the direction of the bedroom. I stand at the door barking at him: bag, nightdress, toothbrush. He is hopeless. As we head for the door he veers away to the kitchen, cramming the half-empty bottle into the overnight bag.
At the car Gail is a little more subdued through lack of an audience. Stick is leaning against the bonnet, surly, his eyes hooded and red. He is unshaven and looks as if he hasn’t seen soap for a few days. He’s obviously going to wait till I’m off the scene before he drives home. Not that drink-driving is of much consequence in Nebulah these days.
Gail is a woman of no resilience. She whimpers and cries out with every bend of the road, every touch of the brake. When I point out to her the darkening sky and the need to clear Nebulah as soon as possible, she starts to keen. By the time we’re safely out of town my nerves are shot. Beside me Tom is a useless blob, slumped and remote. When we pull up at the small emergency department of Woodford Hospital, just over three hours later, I’m wrung out and exhausted.
When Gail has been manoeuvred onto a stretcher and wheeled away, I park the car and then pocket the keys. I wouldn’t put it past Tom to bugger off the next morning and leave me in Woodford. There’s a phone by the hospital entrance. I ring the motel, but Alex has already left and there is some kind of car club meet passing through town – they’re fully booked. I ring Sean. He says he’ll meet me in a pub nearby sometime after nine.
I put one last call through to Milly, tell her what’s happened and say I’ll ring her in the morning to see if there’s anything they want picked up in Woodford. She’s concerned about Gail, but more sympathetic towards me. In the background I can hear Neil Young crooning. I wish I was there.
It’s only a ten-minute walk to the pub and I find myself wishing it were longer, it’s such a novelty being out after dark. But it’s getting chilly and I’m still in my old work clothes, and I don’t want to risk being too late for a feed. And I am, just: the kitchen closed ten minutes ago. Luckily a table of late orders means they’re still cooking, and the barmaid is Sally, a plump and jolly woman whose ample bust adorned the front bar of the Nebulah Tavern for many years, till the mist moved her to Woodford. She winks and says they’ll rustle me up a chicken schnitzel no worries, before pulling me a much-needed pint of Guinness. Earl is doing a stint as publican out at Meekatharra, she tells me. His hair has never grown back, though.
The pool players call for another round and she sashays off to pour shots of Jim Beam and refill jugs. I try to remember the last time I ate out at night, or was even out for a drink. It’s disorienting, being suddenly launched into a normal, public life again. I’m glad of my sudden decision to groom yesterday morning, but I mourn the whim that made me leave my tobacco at home. I try briefly to persuade myself that this is a good opportunity, but quickly descend into self-serving congratulation about how virtuous I’ve been, rushing Gail to hospital – I’ve soon convinced myself that I have both earned and deserve the reward of a cigarette. The cigarette machine beckons the way I imagine a poker machine calls to a gambler.
The tailor-made cigarettes are putrid; they crackle with chemicals like party sparklers and burn up within a few puffs. But my schnitzel comes piled with chips and salad – there is something to be said for ordering at the close of service. I have a second Guinness, then a third and a fourth with Sean when he arrives. Again I am glad of my haircut and shave, he looks relieved when he sees me and offers no further lectures on my health.
When we get to his place he produces a single malt left from his birthday, and the night wears on as we discuss the ridiculous amount of annual leave he is owed, and his need for a holiday. Rachael is fretting, talking about refitting bathrooms and installing a new kitchen, so he’s planning a trip to Queensland to see some family, to distract her.
‘God,’ he grunts as he tops our glasses, again. ‘I hate renovating.’
The next morning Sean is on a later shift, which is just as well, with both of us more than a little bleary at the breakfast table. Rachael has already left for an early meeting. Next to the depleted whiskey bottle there’s an amused and sardonic note about the tidal effects of my company. I’m glad to have missed her, though: still in my work clothes of the day before, I feel grotty and on the nose.
Still, at least I’d had a bed, unlike Tom, who was forced to try and doze on the uncomfortable-looking chair next to Gail’s bed, deprived of his bourbon, which a nurse sternly confiscated. When I arrive, late morning, they’d had the X-ray results and Gail’s hip is indeed badly broken. They’ll be keeping her in for several days. She has taken to the role of invalid with great enthusiasm and natural talent. Tom’s keen to get away. I arrange to pick him up in an hour and leave him to receive instructions about visiting hours and lists of toiletry and wardrobe requirements.
I ring Milly again from the public phone. She is grim – the Barrys called Li that morning with their final order. The bank has refused to refinance them, even for the short term, and they’ll be closing the co-op at the end of the month. They’ll take one more delivery next week, but it will be the last. Li is okay; the Barrys recommended a possible outlet in Mandurah, but it all depends on the cost of freight. Milly has to come to Woodford on Friday for a doctor’s appointment, and will do the weekly supply and post run then, but asks for some milk.
I buy the extra milk and some bread, and add a box of the particular Swiss chocolates that are Li’s guilty pleasure. A bleak future is a pretty good excuse for an indulgent present.
While I’m at the shops I decide to swing by the co-op and offer condolences. Already it seems dusty, the stands of fresh produce peculiarly altered by the imposition of a deadline. The cheery murals appear frozen, as if aware they are soon to be shut away.
The Barrys are reeling. John is convinced there is a secret agenda working against them; he keeps his back resolutely turned away from his shelves of stock, transformed by a single phone call from a business to a failed dream.
‘We only needed to hold on till the new subdivision was established – another year, tops, would have been enough. We’d have more than recovered.’
‘We’d been planning to add a nursery section out the back, with a little cafe,’ adds Evelyn. Her eyes are red, she looks as if she hasn’t slept for a week.
‘We’ve been nutting it out with Suzanne O’Neil for months. Her kids are at school now and she was going to take on the cafe. Nothing major, just cakes and coffee. She was really keen, she’s been experimenting with gluten-free brownies for weeks.’ I shudder. ‘We’d have been able to employ someone as well.’
‘Local employment only matters if you want to destroy something,’ I say, probably not helping.
John’s face is bitter. ‘Yeah, you’re not wrong.’
‘Did they offer any hope? Advice?’
‘Come off it. Apparently our “rationalisations” aren’t cost-effective enough. As if a friggin bank knows anything about sourcing organic produce, edible food. But there you go. Computer says no and we’re down the gurgler.’
‘Will you stay in town?’
‘Nah, doubt it. What would we do, get jobs at the IGA? Nup, time to regroup. Evelyn’s
brother has a banana plantation in northern Queensland, biodynamics. We might think about setting up something along those lines, somewhere new. It’ll take time to get back on our feet, though.’
I compliment John on his winemaking, and suggest it as a potential new direction. He chuckles, rallying briefly. ‘Yeah, that batch turned out okay. Reckon we’re gonna be needing it over the next few weeks.’
‘After two bottles I thought I was Keith Richards.’
‘Christ! That’s a scary thought. I’ll give you another bottle before you go – might be enough for an Eric Clapton.’
I’m the driver on the trip back to Nebulah; Tom’s eyes are too red and his hands too unsteady. He’d demanded his bourbon back from the nursing staff, and swigs openly from it on the journey, abandoning all pretence. With bad grace I invite him to join us that night, and with obvious relief he accepts. I pray Gail doesn’t draw out her convalescence.
I’ve often been struck by the cruel indifference of nature, how it casually refuses to correspond to our moods and circumstances. Bad news can be accompanied by the most stunning weather, like being thumped with a perfumed glove. And then, if you manage to convince yourself that the glorious sunshine is a gift, a reminder of all that life still has to offer, the next setback is accompanied by the most oppressive of skies, clouds of disapproval and ill-will, to disperse any breath of optimism. Sometimes it’s hard not to believe that it’s intentional rather than random. Or is that just me?
I can still remember leaving the doctor’s surgery all those years ago, reeling from his grimly professional prognosis. I stumbled out of the clinically sterile reception area with what seemed like the dead weight of my own corpse on my back, only to stagger outside into brilliant spring sunshine. Even the trees seemed to hum with the joy of being alive. There were tiny honeyeaters flitting between a grevillea laden with delicate flowers and a birdbath on the lawn, and their speed and their song, the energy and life they embodied seemed, in the face of my diagnosis, some kind of malicious joke.
The days following the Barrys’ news are of a similar hue. The sun bursts through the morning dew: nature’s equivalent of unbridled laughter. As evening falls the air fills with scent, the bush responding to the unseasonal warmth. The fragrance floats through the dusk to dissipate at our closed doors, locked with even more resentment than usual.
I had lent Li the Land Cruiser and she, wasting no time, filled it with boxes of sample potatoes and apples and drove off on missions to Mandurah – fruitlessly, to risk a pun. The only possible distribution outfit refused to cover freight costs for what seemed to them insignificant consignments, and offered such small returns for her produce she would actually lose money. The supermarkets were contracted to suppliers already. A cafe was interested, but the quantities involved were so limited it wouldn’t be worth Li’s time or petrol. Not to mention the unavoidable expense of replacing the truck.
In the unseasonal weather her trees shine with health, already laden with a record yield of glowing, unwanted apples. I sometimes think that if there is a God, then she is a sour bitch.
Li’s crop isn’t the only one thriving in the generous weather. I stumble across Stick’s as I’m foraging for firewood in the bush down behind Evans’s old place. It’s less than 200 metres from the old farm’s crumbling back fence.
This crop is much, much bigger than the one I was already aware of. Evidently our lethargic Stick has a work ethic after all. I estimate there’s easily several hundred plants nestled into a scrubby boundary, a nicely hidden copse. I would judge it to be dangerously close to the main road out of town – which is a shrewd bluff – and a considered distance from Stick’s own place. Due to the overgrown surroundings, despite its vicinity to the road, it’s quite a remote spot; it is only by chance that I come across it.
The plants reach towards the mottled sunshine, their pruned branches eloquent in the morning silence.
At first I keep Gina back, keen not to leave any trace of disturbance that would alert Stick to our intrusion. But I soon relinquish these worries – what the hell. In my pocket is the remains of the packet of Winfields from the pub. I light one up and keep exploring.
It’s a huge crop, way beyond the menial challenge of keeping the Woodford back bar deadbeats in pot. The plants have been pruned rather than harvested – evidently his technique is to concentrate on the valuable heads alone, rather than risk trying to transport entire plants when he’s confined to daylight hours.
The cuts are still green, recent. It’s unlikely that he’ll have had time to dry and dispose of the yield. A light breeze stirs the surrounding bush and the sunlight starts to dance. The whole scene is utterly peaceful, Eden-like, fertile and forbidden. I think of Li’s apples withering on her trees. Stick will have no trouble selling his produce.
This is a God-forsaken place.
I don’t think I’ve been out to Stick’s more than a handful of times. He lives just beyond the town’s sealed roads, down one of those long dirt driveways that look as though they lead only to an archetypal Australian bush clearing, strewn with the remains of long-cold fires, littered with half-burned debris and faded aluminium cans. His small fibro house is hidden from the road, on the opposite side of town to his gardening efforts.
It’s an uninviting place, even without the demented Elvis’s bloodcurdling greeting. The house doesn’t nestle, in the way that bush-enclosed dwellings usually tend to do; instead it echoes Stick’s presence, hunched and hooded, unremarkable yet vaguely disturbing. While not unkempt or neglected, it epitomises disengagement – a small vegie garden is purely utilitarian and somehow unappetising, and the uneven strands of clothes line sag with age, the framework rotting from lack of paint. His trips to the tip are obviously sporadic.
There’s no sign of Stick or his Patrol when I pull in. I make no attempt to conceal Li’s truck and take a perfunctory stroll around the house. Its vacancy is somehow malevolent; it’s as though the house has its own gaze, its emptiness seems to seethe with scheming. Even though I’m sure Stick isn’t here, I find myself unwilling to turn my back on it.
By the clothes line round the back is a faded timber shed, the kind legendary for hoards of dried-up old paint tins, rats’ nests of shredded paper and huge cocoons of dusty cobwebs. It looks disused, its windows blockaded with junk, but beneath the rusty bolt on its door hangs an expensive, new bronze padlock.
I turn back to the house. Every window is closed and every curtain drawn; I imagine the stale air trapped inside, the time-layered stench of unwashed clothes, smoke and dog. It would smell like Stick himself.
The windows are all locked, and the back door is padlocked with the twin of the lock on the shed. The front door is an outdated commission-house special, its four horizontal panels of ridged glass opaque with dust. There is only a standard circular Yale lock. It is an open invitation; he might as well have left the door open. I reach for my wallet.
But I’ve already changed my mind and put away my ATM card when I hear the approaching grind of Stick’s gearbox. It’s not that I’m worried about being caught, it’s more that I’m suddenly overwhelmed with inertia, a sense of pointlessness that sees me turn my back on the house with all its dull sordidness. I retreat down the porch steps and slump against its concrete edge. There is no sense in breaking into Stick’s, he’s way too cluey to have the haul in there, and I find the thought of entering his house vaguely abhorrent. I’ve been in so many houses like this, closed and stale, with the threads of corruption concealed but still so evident that they cling to you like cobwebs. The effect of their crawling touch coats you for days. You become steeped in them, in a cynicism that congeals into disgust, and eventually taints your very humanity. I’ve seen people who live in this atmosphere, faces sallow from years of contact with the webs, as if mummified, their only visible emotion a predictable mix of animal cunning and fear.
Plain and simple, I just don’t want to go in there. The old copper urge I succumbed to at Rolf’s is conspicuousl
y absent here. I can’t face being exposed to it all again. I’ve digested and accepted my reluctance when Stick pulls in beside the truck. Gina sits bolt upright in the cab.
Elvis starts going berserk in Stick’s back seat. Stick closes the car door on the dog, keeping its frenzy contained. He is nonchalant as he approaches me, but his eyes are sharp and alert. I see him immediately note the Winfield packet in my shirt pocket.
‘Pete,’ he says with a nod. ‘You’re a long way from home.’
‘Sure am,’ I agree mildly. ‘Firewood mission.’ Stick’s eyes flash to Li’s truck, with the chainsaw and a motley pile of branches.
‘Yeah, should be thinking bout that meself. Getting on to that time.’
His eyes keep darting back to the cigarette packet. I pull it from my pocket and offer him one.
We use our own lighters, his old black Bic struggling to achieve more than a spark. When he manages a dull flare he draws deeply. His eyes are hooded. ‘I see you found me farm,’ he says. His eyes glance at Gina still at attention in the truck and he flicks his ash. ‘Dog turd. Winnie butt. Didn’t know you smoked tailors, couldn’t think whose it was.’
‘Cigarette machine at the pub in Woodford. No choice.’
He nods, understanding. We smoke. After a minute’s silence he straightens and grinds his butt. ‘So, you here for a friendly cup of tea?’
I shrug. ‘Where’s the harvest?’
He guffaws. ‘Not here. Fuck!’
‘I want it.’
‘Bet you do.’
‘I destroy it, I keep my mouth closed.’
Stick scratches his stubble. I try not to notice the flakes of skin. His expression is closed.
‘It’s the best I can offer you,’ I tell him.
When he laughs he sounds disturbingly like his dog. ‘Okay,’ he says, ‘here’s the deal.’
‘I don’t deal.’
‘That’s your word. Me, I tell your bluebottle mates you’ve been in on it for months, keepin quiet for a cut. Only you get too greedy and when I won’t give, you suddenly up and shop me, like a good ex-cop. Everyone knows you’re always prowlin round, keepin tabs. You can plead innocence till your arse is raw, but Joe Public loves a bent cop.’