Sadie shivered at the memory. Stock work had always stressed Bryan. And as for all that beer and pork fat, she’d told him often enough to lay off it. At least she could now have Michael inside without Bryan going off his rocker. And she could have the telly on during the day.
Sadie picked up the remote control and pressed the button. There before her flashed a woman and a man on an exercise contraption with ripples of muscle shimmering under their tanned skin. Sadie looked down at her own body. It had taken on the shape of an apple since she had married Bryan.
At the time, as a rosy-cheeked, curvy nineteen-year-old, becoming a wife had seemed like the grown-up thing to do. There were a few scraggly younger men in the district, but they didn’t stand a chance with her mother, the much older Bryan, and his mother about. The Smiths often married Joneses in the district. It was the way it had always been. Or so the mothers told Sadie.
‘Want to change your life?’ the woman on the television said, flashing her dark beautiful eyes and tossing her glossy long hair at Sadie.
‘Bugger off,’ Sadie said, as she aimed the remote at her and changed channels. Up sprung a man and woman, walking hand-in-hand along a beach.
‘I’m happier now than I’ve ever been,’ said the grey-haired, pearly-toothed lady. ‘Since starting Doreen Nature’s Weight Loss System I’ve been given back my life. Do you want to change your life?’ Sadie looked away from the woman’s intense blue eyes, sighed and turned the television off.
She sat for a time in the threadbare armchair, the enamel bowl of beans on her lap, while outside the earth turned slowly, framing the sun between two bush-covered mountains.
‘Well, do I?’ she asked herself now in the stillness. ‘Do I want to change my life?’
Bryan had said she would never change. She would always be useless. Even if she did want to change, how could she? Just then, as the sun dipped beneath the crown of the mountains, a beam of yellow-gold light radiated through the window. Sadie looked in wonderment as the sun’s ray spotlit the parcel on the table. It was like God saying, ‘Open me.’ Suddenly Michael was awake and up on all-short-fours, barking at nothing, tail wagging, ears pricked. Sadie looked out the window, but there was no one. She slumped back in her chair. She remembered a story she’d once read at school about a girl opening a box. A box of troubles. What was it again? That’s right, Sadie thought, it was called ‘Pavlova’s Box’. Or something. Opening this parcel could open up a whole world of trouble. She glanced again at the Apple sticker and was reminded of Reverend Reg’s sermons in church about Adam and Eve. The trouble began with an apple. And with Eve. And here she was being offered an apple. Sadie bit her bottom lip, trying to quash the temptation that fizzed inside her.
The next morning a cracker frost met Sadie at the back porch as she dragged on her gumboots and threw Bryan’s big old khaki coat over her homespun jumper and maroon tracky daks. The metal handle of the milk bucket bit cold into her palm as she trudged across the crusted frozen paddocks to the milking shed, wire-haired Michael in tow. A small mob of killers looked up from their ice-cold grazing and watched the dog and Sadie pass. Frost coated their woolly backs and their breath came as fog from their noses.
Near the shed, Mavis the cow was waiting for her breakfast. A warm steaming pat sat near her hocks, providing one dark splodge in the world of misty white. In the stalls a little black and white calf bellowed hungrily.
‘All right, Poddy, all right! I’m coming,’ Sadie grumbled to the impatient calf. She slung down the bucket, gave the cranky cow her tucker and dropped the pin in the head-bale to keep her anchored. She was moody, this one, and the poddy calf was a nutter, Sadie thought as she swallowed up a stool with her backside. She sat, rubbing her hands together for warmth before reaching into her pocket for the sleek silver device that trailed two white earphones on thin cords.
‘Look, Mavis, you old bag. An iPod.’ The cow responded by stomping her back leg and swishing her tail in bad-tempered resignation. Sadie turned to the poddy calf. ‘Bet you’ve never seen an iPod before neither, hey, Pod? I-Pod. You-Pod.’ She chuckled at her own wit.
‘I know it’s not meant for me, but I might as well give it a try. I’m sending it back as soon as I can get to town.’
She wondered who had ordered the glossy print brochures and books that were part of the ‘Awakening Kit’ that promised to ‘transform her life’. The kit also had a cord to charge the iPod device which, according to the booklet, was already loaded with all the ‘tools’ needed for ‘an awakening of consciousness’. As she’d plugged it in for an overnight charge, Sadie had vowed she would just have one tiny listen first thing, then package it all up again.
This morning she found her hands shaking more from nerves than cold as she shoved the earphones up under her beanie and squinted at the device for the ‘on’ switch.
‘Here goes,’ she said, as the iPod glowed to life.
Even the lightest touch of her forefinger caused the machine to jump to attention, scrolling through a list on the screen. Sadie watched the blinking blue line click up and down the list. She pressed an arrow button and suddenly in her ears came the sound of rain. She snorted with distaste. Here she was living in an area of thirty-four-inch rainfall, where it pissed down for much of the winter. The last thing she wanted to hear was bloody rain. What were these people thinking?
She jabbed a finger at the screen and heard the slow wash of waves over a beach. If she wanted waves, she could get a lift with Reverend Reg to the beach near one of his other parish churches. But why would she go to the beach when there was all that sand to get in your crevices and all those bloody jack-jumper ants?
She poked the iPod again and heard gongs, underlaid with hippy music. It was quite nice, Sadie thought, reaching for Mavis’s teats, even though it did sound foreign. As she began to squeeze liquid threads of milk into the bucket, she wondered how rain, waves and hippy crap would ‘transform her life’. Bloody tech-head townies, she thought, they didn’t have a clue.
As she milked, a man began to speak in soft gentle tones. He sounded American, like one of the Muppets, and he was saying something about Deli Llamas. Deli Llamas? Bloody Americans. They were always going on about their McDonalds and the deli choices on their menus. Why did people have to start eating llamas in this country when Aussie beef and lamb were perfectly fine?
‘The purpose of our life is to seek happiness,’ said the man. To seek happiness? Sadie shook her head. Wasn’t the purpose of life to work and die with bugger-all? Where was happiness when she had the whole farm and house to run by herself, which she had done anyway while Bryan was alive, with no thanks or help from him.
‘Happiness comes from being present in the now,’ said Muppet Man. ‘It is about shutting out the sound of your own voice in your head and being. Simply being. Feeling the life within you.’
What? What voice in my head? This Muppet man was giving her the irrits. ‘You must listen, for in silence you may hear the wisdom of God,’ said Muppet Man.
‘Silence! I’ll give you silence,’ said Sadie, as she jabbed the stop button and shoved the iPod in her pocket. What a load of rot, she heard herself think. Sadie blinked. Was that the voice? she heard the voice in her head say. She almost fell off her milking stool. She had never noticed a voice in her head before, but there it was! She listened again. There isn’t a voice in my head. You stupid woman. Shut up and get on with it. Yes, she could hear it! It was a nasty version of Sadie, telling her she was fat, and sore, and old, and hopeless. Then Sadie noticed the voice sounded a lot like Bryan’s.
Was Muppet Man right about the head voices? Maybe she should give the iPod another go? She reached into her pocket and this time selected something called ‘The Positive Life Meditation’. A woman who sounded like she was from an Indian call centre for Telstra came on saying something about the human brain.
‘This meditation technology leads the listener into deep brainwave patterns to accelerate mental, emotional and spiritual growth,
’ soothed the Telstra lady. ‘Lie back somewhere quiet and comfortable and we shall now begin.’
Sadie wondered what she was on about. As if she had time to lie about! But then some music came on, along with bird noises and waterfall sounds. Cripes, these bloody greenies and their nature. Didn’t they know living out in the bush was hard bloody work and not relaxing at all? But as she milked, she pressed her forehead into the cow’s warm flank, shut her eyes and listened.
She kept a steady rhythm of squeeze, squirt, squeeze, squirt and, as she did, Sadie Smith forgot the coldness of her toes. She forgot the ache in her back. She forgot the endless list of chores she had to do that day. She forgot how scared and lonely she felt. And at last the voice in her head was silent. Instead, Sadie just milked and breathed. For the first time ever she just milked, breathed and allowed the music to wash right through her.
‘I can’t see the point of them,’ Beverly said as she dropped the Toyota back into third going down round the mountain bend. ‘If you want to listen to music, you turn on the wireless.’
‘But what if the cricket’s on? Or what if there’s music on you don’t even like? With one of these things you can put the entire Tom Jones collection onto it and listen to him night and day if you want.’
‘Tom Jones night and day? Well, that’d be just asking for trouble,’ Beverly said, her orange lipstick-coated lips pulling down towards her chins.
‘Where’s the trouble in that?’
‘It’s Tom Jones,’ hissed Beverly. ‘Don’t you know women take their underwear off for him and toss it at him while he’s on the stage?’
Sadie giggled. ‘Imagine that. If we threw our undies at him, Bev, we’d snuffocate him! I’m sure he’d love it, though. Our gigantic undies. His face.’
Bev shook her head.
‘Sadie! That’s disgusting! Your Bryan’s not been long in the grave. You should be grieving. Not thinking of throwing your underpants about! And my underpants are not gigantic. At least not as big as yours.’
Sadie looked down to the parcel on her lap and thought for a few moments. She stared at the bushland blurring past the ute.
‘Unhappiness or negativity is a disease of our planet,’ she said quietly.
‘What?’
‘It’s a quote,’ she said, turning to look at Beverly.
‘What?’
‘From a bloke called Egghard Toll. He talks to me on the iPod.’
‘Egghead who? Sounds like rubbish to me. The sooner you get rid of that thing the better. You’ve been acting weird lately, Sadie Smith, and I think you need to pull your head in.’
Sadie looked down to her flat navy ‘back-saver’ shoes and the dark hairs on her legs that were smothered like a lodged hay paddock against her skin by her beige support hose. Perhaps Bev was right. She had been feeling a little odd lately. One minute she felt incredibly depressed, and the next she found joy and beauty in the oddest things.
This morning, for instance, when she had gone to feed the pigs, she’d gleefully flung the entire crop of Bryan’s broad beans into their trough. As the pigs gobbled up their cows’ milk and beans, she’d noticed for the very first time their intelligent eyes and the way they looked at her adoringly, all because she was the provider of their food each morning.
She realised the pigs were trying to show her gratitude, and even love, despite the fact that every year she and Bryan had taken the sows’ babies away to kill or sell. She had sat with the sows for a time and run her fingertips over their rolling necks, giving them scratches on their thick bristly skin.
With each milking, too, Mavis the cow was less sour in her demeanour and the poddy calf seemed calmer. Sadie had also taken to scratching the cow and calf, admiring the miracle of their markings, the way the black patches met so perfectly with the white. She saw for the first time how amazing the creatures were. And how obliging. The sudden connection she felt with them had brought tears of happiness to her eyes.
Now in the ute she glanced over to Beverly. Should she mention these strange thoughts? Should she tell her how she’d put the iPod earphones into Mavis’s ears and played ‘The Prosperity Meditation’ while she milked? Mavis had given more milk that morning than ever before.
Sadie looked at Beverly in her town hairdo of home-curled culvert pipes of grey, cemented with hairspray. She noticed how Bev’s thick black eyebrows knitted together sternly and her lined mouth was permanently turned down. Perhaps Bev would not be impressed by her putting someone else’s iPod in the grimy, waxy ears of a cow. No, best not to mention anything. And yes, thought Sadie, it was best that the iPod went back.
‘Can’t do a thing,’ the dumpy woman at the post office said.
‘There’s no return address. And it’s your name on the label.’
‘It isn’t. I mean, yes, it’s for an S Smith, but that could mean Sue or Steve or Stanley or Sid … or … or Cyril.’
The woman shrugged. ‘I can’t take it back. You’ll have to keep it. And while you’re here, there’s another parcel out the back arrived for you yesterday.’
Sadie frowned. ‘But I haven’t ordered anything.’
The postal worker rolled her eyes and disappeared into the side room. She came back with a box, the same brown packaging with the label on it: S Smith, Forestdale Road, Edenville, Tasmania.
‘That’s not for me.’
‘Must be for you.’
‘But who’s it from?’
Another shrug. ‘No return address.’
Out in the street, a savage blustery wind blew rain sideways under the post office awning. Sadie drew her coat tight about her and clutched both parcels. Should she open the new one while she waited for Bev? Within seconds curiosity got the better of her, so she set the first parcel down and tore off the tape on the second box. As she did, the packaging fluttered out. Amidst the shredded paper flew hundreds of tiny red paper hearts that swirled down the street. Sadie laughed at the sight. She pulled out a small square mirror with a simple wooden frame. An envelope was tied to it with a golden ribbon, and inside was an embossed card. She read the words out loud.
‘Remember, you are loved.’
Sadie looked into the mirror and her big brown eyes stared back at her. They were the eyes of a child. Blinking back tears, she wondered who had sent the mirror. And who loved her? She flipped the card over.
‘Remember, you must love your self.’ Sadie clutched the mirror and note to her chest and shut her eyes.
‘Sadie!’ Beverly called as she came marching along the street, bags of groceries in each hand, battling the wind. ‘I thought you were taking that thing back, not getting more parcels.’
‘They wouldn’t take it back,’ she said, hastily shoving the mirror and note back into the box. ‘There’s no return address, no company to contact other than the iPod folk and they don’t know nothing about it. Post office lady reckons it’s someone’s internet shopping that’s buggered up. So I guess all there’s left to do is keep it and enjoy it.’
Bev simply huffed as she hauled her shopping onto the back of the ute, grappled for her keys, then unlocked the cab.
‘Let’s get going. It’s awful bitter today.’
‘I don’t know if it’s bitter, Bev,’ said Sadie, loading the parcels onto the floor of the ute. ‘We could choose to enjoy this crazy wind and rain, instead of complaining about it. Doesn’t it make you want to do something wild?’
‘Wild? Like what?’
‘Like jump in a puddle? Or …’ Sadie glanced across the street to a shopfront newly painted with the words Wild Child Western Wear. ‘Or go into one of them shops we’ve never been to. Like that one!’ Sadie pointed.
‘Are you bonkers? That shop’s for young girls. And it’ll be full price. You’re best off at the op shop. Remember, you’re a widow now with no one to provide for you.’ Sadie hovered at the tray of Beverly’s ute, the wind tossing her frock about, making the daisy pattern dance.
‘How old are you, Bev?’
‘You kn
ow that, Sadie. You baked the cake for my sixtieth just this year.’
‘Well, I’m only forty-two. I deserve to go into that new shop. And I deserve to buy something. You can wait here or come with me. Your choice.’
Then Sadie Smith crossed the street without looking back.
On the drive home, with the bags of new Country Belle clothes and two new pairs of Cuban-heeled western slide shoes sitting on her lap, Sadie looked over to a very silent Beverly and began to laugh.
‘Oh, Bev. You look like you’ve sucked on a lemon – and had another ten shoved up your backside.’
‘Excuse me! You’ve made me late for getting Norris’s lunch – and Bryan would be horrified to see you spend money like that.’
‘I’m practising abundance. And besides, Norris can get his own lunch. He’s thirty, for God’s sake! And he has a wife now.’
‘Practising what?’ Beverly shook her head so her grey curls, dampened now from the rain, wobbled. ‘Norris has been working hard on the farm since his father died and he deserves to be looked after. You wouldn’t understand.’
‘No, I wouldn’t, because I’ve never been a mother, have I, Bev? As you keep reminding me. But on my iPod, Egghard Toll says that some parents can’t let go of being a parent, even when their child has grown to be an adult. Poor Norris can’t grow up while you do what you do. Bryan’s mother was just the same. She smothered Bryan till the day she died.’
Beverly’s mouth flapped like a trout.
‘Don’t you speak ill of Shirley! And what’s between me and Norris is my business.’ Her eyes narrowed to slits. ‘I don’t know what’s got into you, Sadie, but I don’t like it.’
Before Sadie could answer they rounded the mountain bend and spotted a furry lump on the road.
‘Road kill! A possum,’ Sadie said. Beverly rolled her eyes and pulled over. ‘Do you mind if I take it this time, Bev? It’ll save me having to shoot something for the dogs tonight. You can have the next one we see. I’m sure there was a roo near the quarry gate that would do for your dogs. Hopefully no one else has taken it.’
Girl & the Ghost-Grey Mare Page 12