by Cate Kennedy
‘That was for the Blockade,’ Rich said.
‘Like tents — talk about leaps and bounds there,’ said the salesman. ‘Have you had a chance to have a look through? We’ve got Everest, Safari, Alpine and Hunter. It really makes camping a luxury option now.’
‘It wasn’t then, let me tell you,’ he replied with a laugh. ‘Sheltering under the dripping trees there on the bank, rainforest all around us, putting your wet clothes back on the following day. And I mean thick, virgin forest. No designated campsite there.’
The salesman picked up the anti-microbial shirts and smoothed them on their hangers and tucked them back onto the rack. ‘Anything I can help you with, just give me a hoy,’ he said, stepping away.
They must train them, Rich thought sourly, in the art of deflection. Or else they make them in a lab out the back, and just hang them up in the cupboard at night with the recharger on.
He went to look at the tents.
Sophie would’ve received the card by now, he thought. So when her birthday rolled around — he had the date in his diary — he’d ring her and just sound normal. Just cool. Say she was fifteen now, and what with one thing and another (he’d address this later, obviously) they hadn’t been in touch much, and he was feeling the lack of it. No that he could understand if she was feeling the lack of it. Thought it was about time they got to know each other, adult to adult.
He’d read about the six-day walk through the national park in Tasmania in one of his travel photography magazines, and thought immediately it would be something that might work. A father– daughter hike, something to give them both a week of focus while they got to know each other, lots of other people around to take the pressure off. One thing, he mustn’t seem awkward, or over- eager. He’d just suggest the walk and leave it with her until the next school holidays; give her a chance to think it over.
He came to the end of an aisle of tents and turned left into a street of packs. He stopped and stood looking up at the battalion of backpacks hanging overhead. A giant mural-sized image showed a snowy alpine scene in which an impossibly pretty male climber in designer stubble stood gazing into the distance, kitted out in daypack and snowboard, with an expression on his face like he was trying to remember where he’d left his keys.
Rich studied the image thoughtfully, his chin in his hand. Hi, Soph, it’s Rich, he could say. Or, Hi Soph, it’s your dad here. No.
He remembered with crystalline clarity the shock he’d felt when Sandy had told him she was pregnant, shock that had swerved quickly sideways into a braced sense of challenge.
His mind had sprung to an image of himself — almost readymade, it seemed, and waiting there in ambush — carrying a baby (boy or girl? he couldn’t tell) in all its detail. He saw his handspun jumper, the baby in the striped legwarmers someone at the market knitted back then, both of them in no-nonsense beanies against the crisp morning air.
Women always gravitated towards a man holding a baby, he’d noticed. Well, a certain kind of man. A man confident in his masculinity, unflappable. It must have been something about the aura of nurturing they found so attractive, or perhaps in a town like Ayresville any man who seemed like decent father material was appealing.
Parenting, Rich thought idly as he wandered along another aisle, noting packaway Frisbees and carabiners and polycarbonate dinner sets, parenting was a verb now. You had to watch yourself with language; it warped and morphed all the time, as if it wanted to catch you napping. At a dinner party once at their place, years back, he’d said ‘homeless kids’ and Paul’s bitch of a wife had said, ‘Don’t you mean “disadvantaged youth”? Don’t you think “homeless” is such a pejorative assumption?’
And he’d grimaced, made a joke of it, and said of course he did, although to tell the truth he had only the haziest idea of what ‘pejorative’ actually meant. Then before he knew it, just as he’d got used to that mouthful, someone had corrected him again, telling him the term he really wanted, if he was really serious about being inclusive and non-judgemental, was ‘marginalised young people’.
You couldn’t be careful enough with language; you could be turned on and criticised for everything, even things you didn’t really mean. Like the woman in that self-actualisation workshop Sandy had dragged him along to once, itching to find something to be the centre of attention about, tearfully protesting that she felt disempowered by how articulate he was. See, it got you coming and going, you couldn’t win. There was offence everywhere.
And poor people, surely, just called themselves poor. Didn’t trip over themselves saying they were ‘socioeconomically disadvantaged’. Rich just wanted to have a serious conversation that didn’t have to contain the word ‘socioeconomic’. That, he thought, was the surest indicator of any that the speaker was middle class. Well — that, and using ‘lifestyle’ as an adjective.
So. Now you parented, you didn’t become a parent, although you didn’t want to spend too long with people who used that one with a straight face. ‘I was home, parenting my daughter, when it happened ...’ All verbs. Impacting. Empowering. He’d even heard dialoguing at one meeting. But fathering — that was in a different league to mothering. One suggested conception, the other, everything that came after, and in Rich’s view no amount of consciousness-raising in the world was going to change that for a good long while. Hi — Soph? It’s your biological father here. Your bioparent.
‘Can I help you with anything?’ asked a different salesperson, another clear-skinned clone from the lab out the back.
‘Um — backpacks.’
‘Rucksack, hybrid, trekking or travel?’
‘Just get that one down for me, will you?’
Sophie, lugging the shopping back to the car park, felt her feet crunch on something plastic scattered on the bitumen, and she looked down at jagged orange and red fragments. Both the taillights of her mother’s car had been smashed. The bumper bar of the car was scored with two long dents, pushing it in so far the boot had popped open. It sat there now, like a slightly gaping, stunned mouth.
‘Someone’s hit you, Mum. Bastards!’ She put down her two shopping bags and ran her hand along the dents. ‘Some wanker in a Landcruiser, probably. See how it’s like the two steel bars in a bullbar?’ She glanced at the front of the car to see if there was a note or phone number left under the windscreen wiper. Nothing. Of course. And still her mother stood there, staring stupidly at the damage, not moving, and then turned to look at her.
‘I’m not insured for this, I’m almost positive.’
Surprise, surprise, Sophie thought. ‘Well, there’s no note,’ she said out loud, feeling the low-grade thrum of irritation start up in her again. That helpless, dependent look her mother shot her, her indecisive dithering. It would be Sophie who’d find the insurance company number in the phone book at home, and who’d end up phoning them too, while her mother hunted pointlessly for papers. (Very organised, her school reports said. Shows a maturity beyond her years.)
She watched Sandy now, putting out her hand and tentatively attempting to close the boot. It clicked back open and rose again on its springs.
‘Will you look at that?’ breathed her mother softly, almost conversationally. Like she was just waiting for the real adult to come along and sort things out.
‘I know,’ she snapped, exasperated. ‘It’s broken.’ (Sophie has no trouble identifying priorities and following through on tasks. She demands an extremely high standard of herself.)
‘No, not the boot. That.’ Sandy was pointing, mesmerised, at the crumpled bumper, at the one single section that remained unscathed, exactly the length of the purple and silver glitter sticker that adorned it. The sticker that proclaimed: Magic Happens.
‘That’s incredible,’ Sandy whispered.
‘What?’
‘The whole bumper is crushed, but that one small message isn’t even touched. That’s a sign.’
‘Wait — you’re saying that someone crashes into your car and drives away, and because y
our bumper sticker’s still OK, that’s karma?’ Please God, Sophie thought, don’t let any of my friends be hearing this conversation.
‘It’s still driveable. Look, the globes in the tail-lights haven’t even been broken. I just need to get some more covers from the wreckers. They’ll have another Datsun bumper lying around, and I bet they fit it on too if I ask them nicely.’
See, right there — that was the way she handled everything, as if life was one long, messy series of favours. People being forced to take pity on you if you just proved you were hopeless enough. Sophie jerked open the door. She couldn’t relax even for a minute, she had to be looking out for her mother all the time. Her and her stupid, flabby, wafting uselessness. (Sophie has trained herself this year to work unsupervised with diligence and focus and is self-reliant in achieving her goals and objectives.)
Another thing. This was really starting to freak her out lately. If she gave her mother an order in a voice like a teacher, Sandy obeyed unquestioningly, like a meek, submissive child. She tried it now.
‘OK, fine, get in.’
And her mother did it, without even noticing.
‘See something good in this, Sophie,’ was all she said as she fumbled for her seatbelt. ‘You’re getting so cynical.’
‘Aren’t you even angry?’
‘Imagine how the person who did this is feeling right now.’
Sophie slung the shopping bags in the back seat and dug for her chewing gum.
‘The person who did this? They’ve stopped thinking about it, Mum. They probably barely noticed.’
‘Well, that’s their bad karma, not ours.’
‘Right. Magic happens.’
‘It does. You just wait and see.’
They drove home, Sophie wincing every time she heard metal scraping on metal. That’s right, she thought. Home in their shitbox car to their crap TV and dial-up computer that was so slow it was like watching paint dry. Home to a miserly water-saving shower with biodegradable hippie shampoo that didn’t even wash your hair properly and a house full of garage-sale junk. Then another morning at the markets tomorrow where her mother would tell everyone about the sticker miracle in hushed tones, like it was a weeping statue. She groped for her phone.
OMG sum prik hit our car, she texted to Ariel. its almost totalled.
She opened the paper bag from the music shop and checked the title of the new ambient music CD her mother had bought: Spirit of the Loon. God, you couldn’t make this stuff up. She looked askance at Sandy, who returned her glance with a defiant shrug as she changed gears.
‘It’s a bird,’ she said.
‘Right.’
Bouncing over the potholes down the drive, the car’s boot sprang open from its broken lock with the sound of gnashing teeth, never to close again without a rainbow elastic strap haphazardly tying it down — a temporary solution, Sophie knew with dull certainty, that would go with the car to its grave.
Rich made his way to the checkout with a pile of wicking microbe-killing clothing, a sleeping bag called an Odyssey Pathfinder that looked eerily like an Egyptian sarcophagus, a backpacker butane stove, a high-performance geodesic tent and a honeycomb self-inflating mat loaded with customised comfort features. He could make do with the backpack he already had, at those prices. And he thought he could probably live without the frisbee.
He got his credit card out ready and tapped it on the counter, keeping his eyes studiously away from the digital price display on the register as each item was added up. If he could get some really topnotch photos in Tasmania, sell them on to someone, he could claim the trip on tax and maybe claim some of this gear as well. In fact, he should find out where this store sourced its wall-sized images from and see if they were interested in some Cradle Mountain shots. Pay for it all that way. And she’d want to come. He was almost sure of it.
He did a quick check of the tally. OK. A shade under two thousand; that wouldn’t quite max him out, and he could transfer some money from his savings account in the interim. It felt good, anyway, buying a stack of brand-new clothing from this high-end chain, in the latest colours and styles. After all, he’d have his teenage daughter, soon, judging him on his fashion sense, his knowing what was what. It didn’t hurt to splurge occasionally, if it meant making the right impression. Anyway, no going back now. The cashier tapped another button and the figure reduced itself slightly. Rich looked surprised.
‘All the clothing’s ten percent off,’ she said, flashing him a smile. ‘Our new season’s stock is coming in next Tuesday.’
Three
Sandy drove down the main street, praying the cops wouldn’t notice her crumpled bumper bar and pull her over. Early Saturday morning, and the place was jammed with tourists. Terrorists, her friend Annie called them disparagingly, but even Annie had to grudgingly admit they kept the whole economy going, and even she was talking, now, about re-borrowing on her house and building a bed-and-breakfast weekender in her back garden, which was a licence to print money, according to the real-estate agents in town. They couldn’t keep up with demand.
Sandy recalled the town when she’d first seen it, nearly — what? — twenty years ago. She and Rich, coming up to Ayresville for that all-night solstice party. They’d stayed in a room someone had built in the garden, a yurt — whatever happened to yurts? — and the next morning, nursing a vicious mulled-wine hangover, she went with the host of the party to the arts and crafts market up the hill to stock up on provisions, and had a long look around at the stalls selling pottery and honey and jewellery.
It was nice jewellery, she’d thought with a rising sense of excitement and yearning, but nothing she couldn’t make herself, given half a chance. If she came to live here she could have a stall here too in the green sunny park and drink chai tea with these new friends with the same familiar ease, and maybe Rich could sell his photos or make cards out of them.
‘You know what? I reckon we should move up here and out of the city,’ she’d said to him when she got back to the party house, where he was lounging on the verandah. Her idea, originally. Hers. She’d had to talk Rich into it, however much he tried to rewrite it later to friends when it turned out to be such a great move. They’d scraped together the deposit on the old house on Runnymede Street, and she was the one who’d made it special. She’d found those big windows at the second-hand timber yard and sanded the floors, and even though it had taken a long, long time, their friend Daniel who had aspirations as a builder had eventually built on the verandah and put in the French doors.
And she did start up the jewellery stall at the market — she had a natural flair for it, and there were always customers from the city in a good mood and ready to buy an original string of beads and earrings. The crystal pendants she made threw prisms of light that hit the ground in rainbows, and what with that and working part-time at the wholefoods shop, they’d made enough to pay their mortgage, something they couldn’t have believed they would ever have.
That mortgage. Bloody Richard always had to make such a big issue out of it every time they had people come up and stay; over dinner he’d never fail to mention that they were turning into a cliché of some conservative middle-class couple. Opening another home-brewed beer and talking about subverting the dominant paradigm. Everyone used to come up, back then, and crash at their place.
She’d felt again a glimmering of the same exhilaration and purpose she’d felt at the Franklin Blockade, the same impassioned talk about ideas and possibilities. Everything had seemed so much in ascendancy, then. Going upwards on a rising wave of energising purpose.
Where had that all gone? Things changed so fast it was a blur, like a huge, hulking vehicle roaring past you on the road, overtaking you when you least expected it and leaving you in a gritty swirl of dust. Cruisy, sleepy little Ayresville suddenly a boom town, filling up with freelancers and designers and garden landscapers, and the new-age therapy practitioners who eschewed hands-on massage and just hovered their palms over you, or placed stones
along your spine. Taking a quick, confident look at your tongue then telling you that your problem was you had some heavy qi energy on your spleen. You couldn’t keep up, thought Sandy, who had only just enrolled in an expensive shiatsu course when kinesiology came to town. You got left behind. It was as though you nervously traded your hard-earned money for one currency only to wake up and find there’d been a new revolution while you slept, and now your notes were worth nothing, and people looked at you with the kind of pity that said: Get with the program.
A bunch of academics discovered the town was commuting distance to university if they left early enough in the morning, then the road was turned into a freeway. Cottages around the town that had sat vacant for years started being advertised as ‘weekenders’, and one day she’d driven past the old weatherboard house where they’d first come up to the party all those years ago to see it had been sold and turned into a wedding and convention centre. Where the backyard yurt had been there were now three Tuscan-style villas. Then one by one the shops on the main street began to close and reopen transformed, and at first it all seemed like a great thing to have so many good cafés. No matter what you asked for — a double decaf soyaccino, a skinny moccalatte — they had it. It was all vibrant, all eclectic, all booming. Then suddenly you turned around and saw the old butcher shop was a day spa.
They’d lost it, she lamented privately now as she swung into a vacant space. She hated to admit it, but they’d let it spin out of control, and now it was changed forever. The market had swelled, to accommodate other people who also loved the idea of making pottery and turned wooden bowls during the week, and the new artists rolled their eyes at the craftsworkers’ collective — which, admittedly, was a bit lackadaisical — and started up a new chamber of commerce, which ran the annual Solstice Party now at $45 a ticket.
Council built a gym and an indoor pool, and meanwhile the house that she and Rich had bought quadrupled in value and then, ridiculously, just kept on rising.