When Hillary at last ushered Caroline out, the sun was sinking low in the sky. Caroline walked towards the shadowy house next door. Her mother’s house. Her house now. She went in through the back door. Creaking. She turned on the kitchen light and ran her hand along the bench tops.
What to eat? She went to the pantry. Inside stood lines of jars containing the richness of summers past. All perfectly packed by her mother’s hands. There were bread and butter cucumbers, reds, greens and yellows of pickles, sauces and chutneys. Tall jars of Scotch broth and mulligatawny soup. Short squat jars of pickled eggs. Slender jars of beans, asparagus and baby carrots. Neat and tidy. Each vegetable or fruit the same size as the other.
With aching bones Caroline stepped up on the kitchen stool and reached to pull out a jar from the shelf containing the meats. Her hand clasped a squat Vacola bottle.
She held it to the light. In the murky golden pickling solution, pressed against the glass, was the face of a woman. No skull. Just skin. At the base of the jar, curled around in a perfect spiral, was a string of pearls.
‘Hello, Mother,’ said Caroline as she placed it carefully back in its row. Next to it, in another jar, her mother’s hand waved at her through golden liquid and glass, her wedding ring catching the light from the kitchen in a sparkle. Caroline waved back and picked up a jar from the same row. It was a jar of what could have been mistaken for potted beef. Then she gathered up a box of rat poison. Perhaps Hillary would like to join her for dinner. She shut the door, stepped down from the stool and sighed with pleasure. She loved the perfect sound of a seal being broken and air rushing in as she stuck a knife under the lid.
Grandma’s Gift
The other girls had been excessively envious of Edna, my grandmother. Even today, the ones who are left still whisper to each other. They shuffle their old bones into my grandmother’s house, which always seems to be filled with sunshine and bright flowering geraniums.
The women sit on chintz-covered chairs for their game of bridge and eye Grandma with suspicion. Their cracked old lips, painted with lipstick, sip at gin and tonics. A slice of lemon, a ‘chink’ of ice on crystal and a little small talk. The women sit straight-backed, bristling with curiosity.
Grandma once told me how the other girls had swished in their white dresses and giggled on the lawn at her eighteenth birthday party, their downcast eyes looking out from beneath the brims of shady straw hats, in a charade of giggles and pouts.
The would-be actresses were playing to the most handsome soldier in the district, Archie Heathcote. He was not just tall and very handsome in a country way, but he also possessed a kind and gentle soul. He had the gift of calming other souls, whether they belonged to crusty old gentlemen or the flighty young horses Archie would break in for the army. Everyone knew he was the catch of the district, but even the prettiest and smartest girls didn’t stand a chance. Not while Grandma was around.
‘He was a dish, your grandfather,’ she would say to me with a satisfied smile. And I would curl my legs up on the couch and hope she would tell me her story again.
His eyes had scanned all the girls at the party, but it was Edna who captured his gaze. She wasn’t slim or tall or particularly outgoing. She had a gift – if you could call it that. Edna’s mother had first noticed it when Edna was a girl, and was made to take tea with Mrs Brightling, who had called in to pass away another sweltering afternoon.
Edna hated taking tea, especially with Mrs Brightling, who always took great pleasure in commenting on Edna’s tomboy nature. Edna loathed nibbling politely on cucumber sandwiches and chitchatting about the weather. She preferred to roll on the springy green buffalo grass in the shade of the massive red gum with the sheepdogs, or wade in the billabong with mutton on string, fishing for yabbies. She was happiest of all in the dusty sheep yards or on a sweating stock pony tailing a mob.
Sitting bolt upright on the couch, Edna felt a hot trickle of sweat run down her spine. Her angry gaze fixed on her milky tea. And there and then, at tea with Mrs Brightling, Edna created her first storm in her teacup. Little waves splashed wildly against the floral-print cup, dark clouds hovered over its rim and torrential rain fell into the milky turbulent ocean. Bolts of lightning flashed into the cup’s depths followed by low rumbles of thunder.
The cup and saucer shuddered in Edna’s small hand and made rattling noises. Edna’s eyes were fixed on her mini storm and her young cheeks flushed red. Her mother delivered a stinging glance at her daughter and her sisters stifled giggles.
Edna felt her mother’s gaze, blinked, and the waters of her milky tea calmed.
‘Edna, darling, why don’t you go and water your flower bed? It’s awfully hot,’ her mother diplomatically suggested.
Later, her mother had sighed and said that Mrs Brightling had luckily mistook the thunder for Edna’s rumbling stomach and the shaking of her cup as ‘nerves’. But the event could well have caused great embarrassment and even distress to poor Mrs Brightling.
‘No more storms in tea cups, Edna!’ her mother had decreed.
So, instead of storms in tea cups, Edna took to flying. She would leave her body in the bed, so her mother would not notice her gone, and take to the night skies.
‘It was how I won your grandfather’s heart,’ she would say to me.
On the night of her eighteenth birthday party she lay on her back in a streak of moonlight and closed her eyes. She felt herself lift from the weight of her body, and through the window she flew. Up towards stars, over the top of the giant red gum. She would touch her fingertips on the sleek gum leaves that shone in the moonlight and smile. Lingering from the pleasure and sensuality of those cool, rich-smelling leaves. But this night she had a plan. She was flying beyond town to Heathcote’s property, Lal Lal, where she would touch his heart in his sleep.
She could see the shine of the fence wire as she whisked away above the dirt road. She was soon over the wide street of the town, then over the dully shining corrugated iron of the huge sleepy verandah that hugged the large hotel. A stray dog in the main street was the only living creature to sense her pass. The hungry thing looked up to the night sky and barked uncertainly.
She flew above the road to the south, faster now. Her cheeks red, yet cool from the pleasure of the rushing night air. She could see his family homestead. Soon she was there, hovering above Archie. He was on the bed. Short dark hair, freshly cut. Head thrown back in sleep, limbs twisted in sheets. She noticed his army kit bag packed ready to go. A frown passed over his brow but it lifted as he felt her presence. She tilted her head to the side with a gentle smile as she took in his beauty, softness and strength, sprawled out in sleep.
Edna stretched out a cool fingertip and traced a path of love over his brow, his eyelids and mouth. Her gentle finger glided over soft male skin and coarse male hair. First, his shaven chin, then over his neck and chest. He stirred a little and she breathed in the smell of him and the love of him. Then she was gone. Back across the skies and the outstretched arms of the red gum to her bed.
‘He rode like a man possessed to our verandah the next day,’ my grandmother delighted in telling me.
‘I could see his saddle bags were full. He was off to war.’ The horse’s sides heaved, and froth from sweat gathered along the line of the breastplate and girth.
Archie swung a lithe leg over the horse, landing polished brown army boots on the gravel. He urged my great-grandmother to allow him a word with her youngest daughter. Open-mouthed, the sisters watched as he took Edna’s arm and led her across the lawn to the shade of the red gum.
He told her of a dream he’d had the previous night and how he must have her consent to be his wife before he left for Europe. He pressed a kiss on her lips, gently but urgently. He promised to return.
That was the day my grandmother’s friends began to view her with envy and suspicion. After church the young girls would gather under the shade of the pepper trees and read out excerpts from the letters penned by their young soldiers. E
dna received the most frequent and loving letters from her husband-to-be. My grandmother would convert the passion contained in the looped ink writing of my grandfather to words, and the words would bring jealous tears from the other girls.
After a while the letters to Grandma’s girlfriends failed to come, or failed to be written.
‘I was fortunate,’ my grandmother would say mildly and with genuine sadness for her friends. During those awful war years she would fly away in the night, flying faster than the wind, over land, mountains and oceans – over entire continents.
‘Beautiful trees,’ she sighed, remembering the soft greenness of Europe’s treetops rushing past beneath her. There were streets of cobbles, which would shine dappled after rain. Above rooftops she flew to Archie in France. She would find him stretched asleep on a canvas bed in a row of tents in a field. She would lie next to him to ease his horror and loneliness, pressing her body against his and placing an arm across his chest. He would awake filled with her. Loving and looking only for her. Those visits kept him alive.
She had travelled to him as he lay on the big steamship, tossed by angry seas, and touched him with healing in his dreams and fever. When he finally arrived home he rode his horse right up the steps and onto the verandah, straight to her.
They decided to marry under the red gum, and filled their life together with sunshine, geraniums, children and dogs amidst the difficulties of farming. One night, after many happy years, Archie had peacefully left as he slept beside Grandma. Flying upwards and out from his tired old body.
‘Don’t you miss him?’ I asked her one day.
‘No, dear. Not at all,’ she said. ‘Some nights I feel him fly down to see me.
He lies with me and touches my face. I can feel him with me, always.’
The old women who sit on her couch and drink her gin can’t understand. They have never been able to work out my grandmother’s happiness – life should be crueller to women. Widows shouldn’t feel so complete.
While I sit near them, frustrated by their jealousy and suspicion of my grandma, I notice the cup and saucer in my hand is beginning to rattle. Small angry storm clouds are forming over my cup and I can hear the sound of thunder rumbling.
The Tractor Factor
Casey Brown couldn’t help sighing a little as her housemate Suzie dragged her by her handbag into yet another noisy, buzzing city pub. Despite Casey’s pretty, country-girl face, wavy chocolate hair and divine Nigella Lawsonesque body, she never did much good with the city fellas. There were always plenty of men initially interested, even though she had climbed past the age of thirty. But the moment the men swivelled around from the bar and pushed their beer nearer her to ask, ‘So what do you do?’, she’d feel her cheeks colour.
‘I’m a semen rep,’ she would mumble.
‘A what?’
‘A semen rep. I sell semen …’ Despite adding hastily, ‘For the dairy industry,’ the reaction from men was always the same. They would frown, then, like a puzzled kelpie, tilt their heads quizzically to the side. ‘You sell semen?’
Most men would then burst out laughing, saying things like, ‘Classic!’, ‘For real?’. Or, if they were in their twenties, ‘Totally random!’ or ‘Wicked’, and slap her on the back like she was one of the boys. Then pretty legal secretary Suzie, with her straight blonde hair, stick-of-cabana figure, artificial nails and fairy voice, would sweep in and score the pick of them. Casey would mentally throw her hands in the air, swilling beer down her throat like a viking.
She was the only child of a dairy farmer. A child that was supposed to have been a boy. A child that had been raised as a boy anyway. There was no one to teach her feminine charms on the farm. Her mother wore baggy navy overalls, which exactly matched her father’s, daily to the dairy. She even made a tiny pair for toddler Casey to wear when she dawdled about the concrete yards, poking at steaming pats of manure with a stick, or playing beneath the lonely pine that stood near the forcing yards, throwing pine cones into the effluent pond beyond the ringlock fence, waiting for her mother to be done with the milking.
There was a photo on the kitchen buffet at home from those days: Casey, a mini-me of her mother at six, standing outside the hay-filled barn, with her mum and dad in their matching clobber of gumboots and brace and bib. Looking, as Casey thought, for all the world like a mentally deficient family from Green Acres. At thirteen, Casey had tried to buck the system and came home with nail polish from the Two Dollar Shop. Her mother had shared her dairywoman wisdom that warned ‘manicures and milkings never mix’, and as the polish chipped off and Casey felt the warm splatters of manure rain down from above her in the pit, she realised that maybe her mother was right.
Even though Casey had loved the cows, and her dad’s rough red-coated sheepdog, Massey, who sported droobles of matted fur behind his soft ears, she had been desperately lonely as a child. In her bedroom she had lost herself in books. Books that expanded her world and broadened her mind. History books, travel books, essays and, for rainy days, her mum’s Mills & Boon. Casey longed to find herself in the pages of those romances. To walk, talk and dress like the heroines who stood on the precipice of being rescued by some incredible man.
So when Casey first kissed a freckle-faced Byron Cooper behind the dunnies at the Regional Heifer Sale near Shepparton, and he’d groped her breasts like he was checking for udder mastitis, she was mightily disappointed. Later, in her twenties, there was the older neighbour’s son, Liam Dennison, who’d picked her up in his Torana and taken her out to the local pub for a chicken parmigiana. Instead of complimenting her, Liam found all kinds of adjectives to describe the beauty of her father’s cows. It was as if he was already planning a merger of the herds and Casey was the key to his milking empire expansion.
Over the years Casey found the dairy boys nice enough, but as time passed, she became convinced that a dairyman would never do. A life of daily milkings would never do either. She needed a bigger life than that. Hence the move to the city and her quest. A quest that seemed to be stalling no matter how hard she tried.
As they pushed through the pub crowd Casey shouted to Suzie above the din, ‘I’m looking for sophistication and intellect. But I don’t reckon I’ll find it here.’
‘Forget those qualities for now. You have to start at the bottom and just look for someone to shag. Work your way up.’ Suzie steered her strategically to the bar, placing Casey between herself and a group of young men whose long Friday lunch was merging into after-work drinks and, potentially, Saturday morning spews.
‘At least I won’t find a farmer in here. All dairy farmers do is talk about cows. Boring.’
‘Like you do,’ said Suzie.
‘I do not!’
‘You do. When you come home from work you always rave about the new bull or cow you’ve found and what embryos have travelled first-class in eskys to where. So for tonight, drop the cow talk and stick your tits out. Those blokes are looking.’
Casey glanced over at the rabble at the bar, who were, in fact, eyeing them off.
She felt like she was being hunted. She watched Suzie now as she preened herself in strategic feminine ways. Perching on a barstool like a bird, leaning forward to expose just enough cleavage. Legs crossed in a ladylike fashion yet with her skirt hoiked up to her thighs, beaming at the best beau from the bar. She had perfected the art of sensuality, stroking the straw of her drink with red bejewelled nails. Casting her head coyly to one side while look up through long lashes. Then a blonde toss of locks. Casey looked down to her own hand wrapped solidly around her pint glass and the way her feet stood squarely under each blocky hip as if she were about to start a chainsaw.
Sure, in the dairy pit back home she could chuck cups on teats with her eyes shut, and at the semen depot she could swing giant canisters of frozen semen about as if they were lemonade cans. And she knew every Holstein bloodline back to front from Canada to Germany, to Ireland and Australia and back. But did she know how to pick up a fancy city
bloke? No way.
Casey surveyed the man standing next to them, who flashed perfectly polished teeth. His tanned, waxed chest was set off by a floral shirt. His blond-tipped funked-up hair and groovy glasses gave him an ‘I’m uber cool, even though I’m getting on a bit’ kind of look.
‘Having a big night out after work, girls?’ he said. Casey nodded. Suzie preened. Then he asked, ‘So where do you work? What do you do?’
‘I’m a legal secretary,’ twittered Suzie. ‘And she sells semen.’
‘For the dairy industry,’ Casey added quickly.
The man faltered for a moment then, with a huge grin on his face, said, ‘You sell semen?’
‘Yes, semen. Bull semen. And embryos. For the dairy industry.’
Should she tell him she was runner-up in the Semex Semen Seller of the Year at International Dairy Week last year? Should she say she had secured deals in genetics all over the world, including cracking it big time in the Asian market? No, she didn’t think so. Instead of impressing him, she knew it would make him laugh at her more. If she had won semen seller of the year, she harrumphed to herself, she’d now be in Canada on a dairy genetics study tour instead of stuck here talking to him.
The man spun around to his mate. ‘Hey, Rog,’ he said, slapping him on the chest, ‘this chick here sells semen.’
‘For the dairy industry,’ Casey added.
She sighed as she saw his mate turn to her with glinting eyes.
‘You sell semen.’
‘Yes. Bull semen.’
‘No way!’ the very drunk mate said, looking her up and down lasciviously.
Here it comes, she thought.
‘So do you actually wank bulls off?’
Casey shut her eyes and smiled tiredly. A vision of her father in his seventies terry-towelling hat and overalls, which these days looked as if he had stuffed a beach ball down the front, came to her mind.
‘If you can’t beat them, Case,’ she could hear his drawling farmer tone, ‘join ’em.’
Girl & the Ghost-Grey Mare Page 9