It was so overwhelming this compulsion to just pash him that I was worried if I did it I’d inhale him somehow, overtake us both and then we’d implode. I sat staring at him until he leaned over and gave me an awkward car hug.
‘So, what do you want to do?’
‘Can we go to Geelong? I’ve got petrol money,’ I said, patting my bag in an encouraging, hopeful way.
‘What for?’
I pulled my knees up and rested my chin against them. ‘Don’t you want to go?’
‘No, for sure, I don’t care.’ And he grinned, gunned the engine and we were off.
‘I just want to buy some books.’
He laughed. ‘Two-hour drive just for books. You are such a nerd.’
‘Yeah.’ Then I whispered to myself – in a stage whisper so he could hear – ‘A pretty cool nerd.’
I think he chuckled as he turned on the radio. Soon we were tapping our fingers against the steering wheel (him) and knees (me) in time with the music.
I watched him drive, nothing cautious about him. One hand on the steering wheel, the other resting on his leg. He flicked the heater up and let the demister do its work. I was feeling a bit more demisted myself as well; my top was dry, I was toasty and warm.
I bunched my hair up and wound an elastic around it and sang along, softly at first but louder when Jarrod’s tapping became more enthusiastic. I added chair-dancing movements to make him laugh.
It rained the whole way, the sound of the car wheels sluicing through puddles in harmony with the radio.
Because it was a weekday, everyone our age was at school when we got to town. The people on the street were mums and dads with kids, old people and then just random derros. We probably had more in common with the derros than anyone else, high school dropouts that we were.
We went to this secondhand bookshop I knew, tucked in a back street in the city centre – it’s this cool place with wooden floorboards and walls and walls of books. There were a couple of those ladders on rails and I hopped right on and scooted along the length of the shelf.
‘How far does this place go?’ Jarrod asked, as he disappeared around a corner.
I scoured the fiction shelves, then moved to the back of the shop where the biographies and art books were kept. I looked for the Mitfords; I looked for Mapplethorpe.
Jarrod eventually reappeared.
There were two chairs side by side and we sat in them. I leafed through a big beautiful tome on photography and Jarrod sat dozing with his head back.
‘You don’t want to look at some books?’ I asked.
He didn’t open his eyes. ‘I just like the sound of pages turning. It’s soothing.’
I smiled. And kept flicking.
After a little while I asked, ‘Do you believe in fate? That things happen for a reason?’
‘Nuh.’
‘Don’t think about it or anything,’ I said.
He opened his eyes and looked over at me with that look I couldn’t decipher.
‘I have thought about it. And I don’t believe it.’
About an hour into the drive home the rain stopped. The roads were slick with water and the occasional greasy oil pictures with their smears of colour. Road kill – three possums, two foxes, one majestic roo and a domestic cat, which made me the saddest for some silly reason – was spaced out along the soft shoulder like random punctuation.
The sun came out and soon an amazing rainbow appeared above the paddocks. The best kind of rainbow: strong colours and two definite ends. The kind of rainbow that looks like you could actually find its end – maybe in a water trough in some paddock or at the foot of some wise old tree. The kind of rainbow that always has a ghostly double shimmering above it.
‘Those wet sheep look so sad,’ I said. They were dotted around the paddocks like white blobs, with their heads bowed.
Jarrod hardly even glanced over. ‘They’re eating. They’re happy.’
But I persisted. Their wool must be so heavy. ‘We need more than food to make us happy. Do you really think sheep are different?’
‘Yeah, they just stuff around walking and eating all day. They don’t do anything.’
‘They give us wool, meat and milk.’
‘Gross. Sheep milk.’ He laughed. ‘But they don’t choose to do all that. We shear them for the wool and kill them for the meat. It’s not like they go, “Here, I made you a delicious leg of lamb. I’ve been working on it for a while.” They’re just … I don’t know … sheep.’ He revved the car and swerved into the overtaking lane, flicking his blinker on so late that it was no longer necessary.
We sped past a little old lady in her Holden Barina, both her hands clutching the steering wheel, her wrinkled face like a crumpled paper bag, uplifted to see out the windscreen.
More paddocks, more miserable sheep. And then – too quickly for me to react – Jarrod stuck his fingertip right in my ear. It was wet.
I jolted away, bashing my head a bit against the window, and smacked at his hand. A wet willie! ‘Whatthewhat …?’ I rubbed at my ear. ‘Are you five?’
Jarrod was pissing himself laughing, his shoulders shaking and his neck going all red. He slowed down and stopped the car on the side of the road. Tears were running down his cheeks he was laughing that much.
‘I’m … sorry …’ He had to catch his breath. ‘You … you just looked so sad and serious.’ His body shuddered. ‘I’m sorry, Adelaide.’
I tried not to smile, but one was working its way onto my face, twitching at my cheeks and pulling at the corners of my mouth.
As quick as I could, I unbuckled my seatbelt, reached my hands out to grab Jarrod’s head and licked his face from jaw to temple.
‘You’re disgusting.’
And then he kissed me, without even wiping off my slobber.
Pulling apart after a few minutes, or a few years, we smiled at each other in an embarrassed kind of way.
‘Oh, hey, I found this,’ Jarrod said, and opened the glove box with a rattle and a clunk. He put his hand in, like Jack Horner and the plum, and pulled out a secondhand paperback. ‘I got it for you.’ The look on his face said what a good boy am I?
It was called For Esmé – with Love and Squalor.
‘Thank you.’ I waved it about a little. ‘He’s the Catcher in the Rye guy.’
‘Yeah?’ He pulled another book from a bag behind his seat. ‘And I wanted to give this back.’ A smaller one this time, almost like a pamphlet.
It was the copy of Howl. I took it from him and asked, ‘You had this?’
‘Yeah, sorry, I took it that day at your house.’
‘I thought I’d lost it. What day?’
‘The day the horse was in the kitchen.’
‘Oh, that day,’ I said, and we laughed. Then, more seriously, I asked, ‘What did you think?’
‘Pretty insane.’
My heart went all thumpity as I riffled the pages, pages he’d bothered to read. ‘He was one weird guy, hey?’
Jarrod’s face was a bit pink. ‘I actually thought it was pretty cool.’
After that I forgot about the sad, wet sheep. The radio played awesome songs, fast and loud. We wound down the windows and braved the elements and screamed out, sang at the top of our lungs. I sang from the very pit of my stomach and from that screechy bit at the back of my throat, so loud and rough I could feel the singing reverberate through my head.
A family in a car passed us, going the other way, their staring faces like pink moons with dark holes for eyes and mouths. Jarrod jerked his thumb towards them and shouted, ‘Did you see them?’
‘I know!’ I laughed loudly. ‘I’m glad they thought we were weird.’
Soon, though, I was tired and my throat hurt. I wound my window back up and turned the sound way down when an Aussie hip-hop song started playing. I had a ki
nd of wild, happy feeling. My hair was all blown about, escaping from the elastic. I shook it out.
Jarrod kept looking over with a really goofy smile.
I returned the look – I couldn’t help it. What a pair of goofs we were. And I reached over to his free hand and fitted my fingers between his.
Grandad jangled his keys behind me. ‘You coming straight back with me tonight, young Adelaide?’
I was trying to format a new post on the website and was getting very mad. I huffed. ‘Where?’
‘Dinner tonight. Libby’s doing it this year.’
‘Probably easiest if I just go with you, huh?’ I said. I slowly pressed save. I had forgotten what the day was.
It would be the first time I was around for this day in so long. We never did the kind of thing you see in books or movies when it came to remembering my dad. There weren’t visits to the grave – because he’d been cremated there was just a little plaque on the church wall – and we didn’t mope and mourn on the day of his death each year. Instead we celebrated his birthday each year.
Grandad raised his wine glass. ‘Here’s to Matthew.’
We all touched our glasses together in turn.
‘To Matthew.’
‘To Matt.’
‘To Dad.’
Clover clunked her plastic cup against our glasses and said joyfully, ‘To Matthew!’
How could you explain to her that this wasn’t exactly a joyful moment? Especially when she made us all laugh. The poor mite must’ve been awfully confused, because surely she could tell it was a special event. There was even a cake.
I wondered if people thought it strange that my mother would continue to live in this town long after the death of her husband. That she would continue to be the daughter-in-law of my grandparents and look upon them as her own parents (truth be told, look upon them much more fondly than her own parents) even after so many years and after she had begun a new relationship. Nick had organised to play a gig tonight, because he was sensitive like that.
But then there was something wonderful about my mother. About her story and her place in Emyvale. I was surprised she hadn’t been made the lead character in some ABC series about a tree-change – maybe about an affable middle-aged woman who runs a failing hairdressing salon but thanks to the love and support of all the strange and wonderful townsfolk she makes a success of it and even finds possible love with the ruggedly or unusually handsome single man, who has a complex and probably tragic past.
Sometimes it seemed like we were a book family. An oddball family like the Cassons or the Durrells. Our quirks, contradictions and strangeness made me nervous, pleased and miserable all at once. Maybe it would be nice to have a normal family. Of course, I knew there was no such thing as normal and that everyone who looked as though they had some semblance of normal probably really didn’t and that I had to remember that things went on behind closed doors and to not judge a book by its cover. But still.
As was tradition, we shared our favourite memories of Dad. Gran talked about the time Dad chopped the head off the wrong chook. ‘He felt so bad, the poor love, couldn’t bring himself to knock off the sick one and I had to do it after all. Then Matthew threatened to turn vegetarian when I roasted the sacrificed chook. He stuck it out for three days.’
‘He was a vegetarian when I first met him,’ said Mum. ‘But it didn’t last long then either. Matt couldn’t ever go past a good pub parma.’
I loved hearing their stories about Dad and even better were the ones I remembered, that I had been a part of.
‘Do you remember the big bushfire when I was about seven or something?’ I said. I looked over at Grandad. ‘You and Dad went out with the volunteers.’ I could still remember the smell of smoke, how it burned our eyes. I remember how exciting it was when they called in at people’s houses to ask for volunteers and how Mum joined the other mums to put together a rest stop with food and tea and coffee and first aid, up at the pub. ‘I remember Dad coming in dressed in his CFA yellow, and he tried to scoop me up and kiss me, but he was all black with soot and smelled so smoky I was scared of him.’ Even though I still felt ashamed about rejecting him, it felt good to share it.
‘I remember that day,’ said Gran. ‘The McElliots lost their milking shed.’
‘But Addie,’ Mum said, ‘don’t you remember that night? When we came back to the house and you made Matt use your special bubble stuff—’
‘Oh, yeah! I’d been saving it. Was it a birthday present or something?’ Her words unlocked a part of my brain. ‘And then we all got into bed together and read Harry Potter.’
‘The first Harry.’
‘For the first time.’ I glowed with the remembering. Oh, my little heart!
Clover fell asleep on the floor in front of the stove. It was warm and the rug underneath her was soft so we left her there. It was a bit like having a nice little well-behaved dog.
We told mostly the same stories over and over. I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t heard each and every one of them, and each one told from different perspectives too. I supposed it couldn’t be helped; it wasn’t as though there were any new stories. We got the photos out too, of course. As much as we tried not to be maudlin, it was still just sad. Grandad had tears in his whiskers.
I got up and started doing the dishes. I squirted dishwashing detergent into the sink and filled it with water as hot as I could handle.
Coming over to make tea, Mum moved behind me. I got a waft of her scent: a clean, patchouli soap smell.
She put her hand on my shoulder, slid it along and held her palm flat on my upper back. ‘Thank you, gorgeous girl.’
My desk butted up against the big open window in my bedroom so I could look out on the world. Winter was lingering and it seemed to rain constantly, in an incessant drizzle. When Mum, Nick and Clover were home I was distracted by what they were doing, and when they weren’t there I suddenly had this compulsion to leap away from the desk and the books – feeling very naughty for doing so, but delighting in it at the same time.
I would go for a walk through the few streets of Emyvale. I’d prowl around until I found the house where Jarrod was mowing and gardening and hauling all manner of sticks and logs and cuttings. Sometimes I helped or I talked to the old folks who lived there. They usually were happy to see me, and very rarely had anything to do other than have a chat and tell me that they had known my dad.
Every time I put my raincoat on I imagined what Mia would say if she saw me in this, and once I took a photo of myself and texted it through.
Love it! she replied. My fashionable country friend!
But it was practical and warm and I enjoyed wearing an all-enveloping hood. I felt dry as a bone in my Driza-Bone.
That day, Jarrod was in the front yard of a faded weatherboard house, doing something quite tricksy with a chainsaw and what looked like most of a fallen tree.
It was a boring house but a solid one. The blinds were closed, which gave the house a sleeping look. The front door was open just slightly. Maybe it was snoring. I stepped through the space in the fence where a gate should have been, and probably once was, and into the garden. ‘Hello!’ I shouted.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, loudly. He had earmuffs on.
I cupped my hand around my ear and said as softly as I could, ‘Sorry, what was that?’
He took the earmuffs off, letting them hang around his neck like he was a DJ.
I balanced on a brick that formed part of the edge of the garden path, on tiptoes and with arms outstretched. I wobbled some.
Jarrod, dormant chainsaw in one hand, came forward, hooked one arm around my middle and pulled me towards him.
I permitted a tiny shriek of mock-shock (aka pleasure). We held our faces close, but did not kiss. I tried to keep my face as serious as possible.
Laughing, he let me go. ‘Wha
t’s up?’
‘Ugh, study,’ I spat. Except I literally spat, on the ground, on someone’s concrete garden path. I couldn’t have told you why I did. Caught up in my own drama, I guess. And then, because of course this is how it would go, an old man came out of the house. I stepped my foot over the slimy glob of spit to hide it.
‘Hello,’ he said.
‘Hello,’ I replied, being as casual yet polite as I could be. I’d learned over the years how to be terribly polite – when necessary. Like after you’ve spat on someone’s path.
‘This is Adelaide,’ Jarrod said, pointing at me with his chainsaw.
The old man was stooped and white-haired, almost a caricature. He introduced himself as Mr Cairn and asked, with a beckoning gesture, ‘Do you like scones?’
I did like scones, so I followed him into the house, chucking a grin in Jarrod’s direction.
He just shook his head, like ‘whatever, you sponger’, and went back to his work.
Mr Cairn moved slowly through the hallway and in my mind the creaking floorboards were his old bones creaking. It was a very tidy house, and I looked greedily into every open room. I do this whenever I am invited inside someone’s house, though I don’t think it’s a very polite habit. There were polished tables and paintings on the wall. Photos of people who looked a bit like the man. A bookcase, a floral couch, a little table beside an armchair in front of the telly.
The kitchen was tidy too, but a bit shabby as well. There was a packet of flour on the table and a hunk of butter on one of those little plates designed specifically for butter.
‘Can I help you with anything?’ I asked, feeling awkward.
He arthritically crooked himself into a chair and leaned back. ‘My wife was always best at making scones,’ he said. ‘I still have all her recipes, but I can’t make these come out the way she could.’ He reached across the table and picked up a big index card. It had old-fashioned handwriting on it and a heading that read ‘Scones’. ‘I don’t have the touch,’ he continued. ‘Perhaps you do.’
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