'When Mum died, I rented out her house for a while,' said Melanie. 'I didn't take to the landlord role much. There was one single mum with two kids. I felt sorry for her. She used to tell me the appalling story of her life, but then she took off owing me hundreds, and when I went into the house it just about made me sick. Her life was shit, and she was so self-obsessed and depressed that she didn't care about anybody or anything else. I reckon it even made her feel better to trash what she could of other people's things. There were maggots in the carpet, and tampons thrown into the long grass behind the garage. She'd sold off the curtains and most of Mum's appliances and cutlery. Mouldy pizza ends and chicken bones under the beds, scum in the shower, and a lot of the blue bench tiles were cracked. Poor Mum would've had a fit. No selfrespect, no pride, you see.'
Theo did see. Penny had pride. He realised that, and admired it. So much more had been taken from her, demanded of her, than Melanie would ever realise, but she'd kept her pride, and her love for Ben. The world is opposed to pride, and equates it with vanity, yet pride is one of those trace elements needed for strength of character.
'Do you find it difficult to be here?' Melanie asked him, putting her hand on his near arm, and giving it a squeeze to show she meant the enquiry kindly.
'All the other times she was here. It just seems so bloody strange now she's not. This place and Penny are linked so closely in my mind, and yet now she's back in her flash home in Sacramento. Everything's just the same here, and yet utterly different.'
'But you understand why she's gone?' said Melanie.
'I suppose I do.'
'It's not you, you know.'
'She had a hell of a lot going on. It wasn't fair to expect anything really, but you do, don't you.'
'You don't have to tell me about that, Theo. But I think you've grown in a lot of ways through seeing what Penny went through, and by helping. You did damn well for her when she needed someone.'
'I like to think about the little boy, Ben. I like to think it's worked out in the best possible way for him.'
'That's the thing,' said Melanie, and her fingers closed on his arm again.
In the mid-afternoon they put the guard before the open fire and walked up the gully road. It was passable for cars for only a few hundred metres past the bach, and then became a runnelled, four-wheel-drive track which itself ended at a sluice pond at the top of the small valley. There the shingle mounds from the gold mining days were covered with gorse and broom, which had stock tracks like tunnels winding through. A walking track angled up the tussock ridge above, and when Theo and Melanie reached the ridgeline they could see thick snow lying not far above them, and below were the creek and gully, with the three small huts spaced down the road far away. As always when Theo had come, only Penny's had any sign of life, the smoke barely discernible, because the fire burned dry wood, and ascended almost vertically until it blurred and dissipated.
'It's lovely in its way,' said Melanie. 'Not touristy — no lakes or ski fields, no boutique wineries, no homestay farmhouses with horse treks thrown in. Maybe loneliness becomes a luxury in the end.' Theo said it was a pity the place was so far from Christchurch. 'You can get away from everything here, though,' said Melanie. 'You're bloody lucky.'
Penny hadn't been able to get away from everything here, however. For her the gully close to Drybread must have been a place she knew twice during her life, and at the very worst times. The ghosts would always be present for Penny, here and anywhere else she went. For Theo and Melanie it could be different. They were free to make their own emotional connection with the place.
'In the summer,' said Theo, 'we could climb some of these hills. Some view from there, eh? Next time we'll bring some stuff up and stay the night.'
'I'd like to do that. Everything's so clear, isn't it.' Her fuzzy hair undulated slightly in the cold air, and she was breathing through her mouth after the climb.
Theo understood that Drybread wasn't reliant on either Penny, or him, for its existence. Nature has its own sense of function and completion. Under high sun and full moon, in the ground haze of summer and the mantle of August snow, the three old baches would remain in the gully, paradise duck would fly the creek in pairs, and over that austere country the only sound would be the susurration of the wind, unencumbered by the experiences people may have had there.
How many times had he been there? How many times would he go there again? The visits seemed to coalesce with his recollection of them. The dry, gravel road, the sprawling macrocarpa hedge, the hut with a church pew at its back door, the plum tree and dunny on the slope behind. And the drift of faint background noise an unobstructed wind makes over a landscape. Little Ben looking upward with vulnerable appraisal, and Penny, almost Theo's own height, talking of that childhood place she had ended up in once more. Yes, it was the boy he found most pleasure in thinking about at the end. Ben with his natural mother and father, and having only a hazy recollection, or none at all, of Drybread and a stranger briefly in his mother's life.
Drybread: A Novel Page 22