Evie’s son-in-law, Neil, had set aside the city unit for Evie after Henry died. Trish had driven out to the farm especially to tell her, stepping from her BMW in a waft of Joy.
Evie was in the kitchen bottling raspberry jam the colour of blood, while Barnaby lay on a small cloud of sheepskin near the wood-fired stove. Trish settled herself at the table and watched Evie put the blackened kettle on the stove.
‘Neil’s got a special deal on one of the properties he’s developed in Port Melbourne,’ Trish said. ‘It’s a lovely sunny space right next to the beach. You’ll love it, Mum. And the best thing is that because his business partners are overseas investors, they’ll never object to you keeping an old dog. The other residents and the body corporate will turn a blind eye too, because Neil is … well, he’s Neil.’
Yes, thought Evie, Neil was a powerful man. So high up the ladder it seemed he never actually worked at anything, except talking into his tiny, bullet-like cell phone. In the summer, he buzzed around Port Phillip Bay on his jet ski, wearing his reflector sunglasses and looking like a Monaco royal. But it was winter now and Neil and Trish had taken the four-wheel drive to Mount Hotham for the snow. Instead of surfing the white crests of salty waves, Neil was surfing white snowdrifts down the mountain. What he didn’t see from behind his sunglasses was that long after the snow had melted and tumbled down to the river far below, the mountainside was left brown, its compacted soil lifeless and dull. It was how the murky bottom of Port Phillip Bay must look too, Evie mused; a watery desert of crown-of-thorns starfish and sewage, where once a seaweed-green forest had thrived. But Neil would never think like that.
Evie glanced at the bay from her front window. On most days, she preferred to draw her curtains to shut out the traffic and her view of the grubby grey sand that needed to be combed of its rubbish every day. When Evie and Barnaby did venture out, they slipped through the jagged hole in a high mesh fence beside the unit complex to reach the vacant block next door. The block was a no-man’s land, a large barren square choked with weeds and rubble. It was land on hold until Neil gathered more money from overseas so he could stack concrete up high with his mighty machines. Part of a tumbledown fibro house was all that stood after the dozers retreated. A half-house looking like a half-eaten cake.
But, Evie thought, at least the block could conjure the memory of a summer paddock for Barnaby, with golden grassy wisps brushing against his flanks. Picking up her tea, Evie sighed again at the same time as her dog.
At the rear of the units was a large expanse of perfect lawn bordered by neat garden beds. The upper-storey windows overlooked the garden like unseeing eyes. Each unit had a tiny terrace fenced off with high vertical bars. Some residents grew jasmine over the bars, others roses, while still others arranged giant pots with nothing in them. It was all very tidy. No one seemed to be home much, Evie observed, and it was always so quiet except when the young maintenance man came and broke the silence with his whipper snipper, electric hedge trimmers, rattling wheelie bins and his leaf blower.
‘The security system here is fantastic,’ Trish had said the day she brought Evie to the unit. ‘And the complex has both an indoor and an outdoor pool. Plus a sauna and gym.’
Trish had giggled at the gym part. Evie knew the thought of an eighty-something-year-old lady working out on a step machine was funny for Trish. Evie laughed along with her daughter.
Trish hadn’t spent much time on the farm after she left home for university, so Trish didn’t know that beneath her mother’s loose-fitting shirt and trousers was a body that defied Evie’s true age. She was greyhound-slim and her strong bones were supported by lean muscles. Country life had shaped her like no gym could. Evie’s snow-white hair sat like a sunny-day cloud above her radiant blue eyes. Her sun-speckled skin was as patterned and imperfect as a landscape. Etched on her face was her love of hard work and laughter.
In her life with Henry, there had been daily milkings, hoeing weeds in the vegetable plots and helping Henry lug crates full of apples to sell at the local market, along with fresh eggs, pats of creamy butter and jars of golden honey. Then there’d be Saturday nightcaps of homemade wine, she and Henry both a bit tiddly, and dancing together to old-time music.
They’d bought the red kelpie pup they named Barnaby not long after Trish left the farm. When Henry and Evie dipped their hands into the cool red soil to grub out potatoes, Barnaby would wait, paws splayed and tail wagging at the sky. Then Henry would toss a potato his way. Catching it in his mouth, Barnaby would lie beneath the giant eucalypt, roll the spud between his paws and fling it high in the air in his own joyous game of fetch.
Evie and Barnaby were dozing when the rev of a leaf blower ripped through the unit and startled them awake. Then, as it was right on midday, Evie heard the automatic watering system switch on. It came on every day, rain, hail or shine. She watched the sprinklers raise their shiny black plastic heads from the lawns like alien worms as they spat water onto already sodden grass. Barnaby had his ears flattened to block out the droning invasion of the leaf blower. Poor Barnaby, Evie thought, this wouldn’t do.
As the maintenance man came nearer, leaves blasted against the window and Evie couldn’t help but wish she was in that peaceful place where she imagined Henry to be. A place of heaven: green clover, sunshine and the cooling shade of giant leafy trees. Outside her window, the manmade wind lifted curled old leaves in gusting eddies.
‘Strong enough to blow feathers off a chook,’ said Evie. Then a vision came to her mind and she sat bolt upright in her chair. She remembered the way Barnaby would manoeuvre the chooks into a group with the concentration of a chess player, and herd them into the henhouse on dusk. He always barked at the last feathery tuft of tail as it disappeared as if to say, ‘Checkmate!’
Evie smiled, as ideas began to flow as fast as the water that had raced along their farm’s creek bed after days of spring rain. It was as if the weight of her new city world had lifted from her shoulders and she was flying free. She picked up her husband’s photo and embraced it.
‘Henry, darling,’ she said, ‘that leaf-blowing man has given me the most wonderful idea. And it all begins with chooks, Henry. Chooks!’ She stood and waved hello to the maintenance man. He saw her, removed his yellow earmuffs for a moment, and smiled uncertainly before resuming his blowing.
The next day when the bell rang, Barnaby was at the door first, his tail wagging. He could smell them. Chooks! A sturdy man stood at the door with a large box.
‘Where you want chicken?’ he asked with an accent as thick as molasses. It must be the same foreign gentleman Evie had talked to yesterday.
She showed him around the side of her unit, where she’d deftly wired off an enclosure and set up some plastic garbage bins as makeshift nesting boxes. No one would notice a couple of chooks, she thought, not tucked away beside the building like this.
Things worked like clockwork here. The man from unit twelve got his morning paper at 6.10 a.m. The woman from unit two went for her morning jog at 6.30. The corner unit man walked on the beach with the lady from unit seven at 6.45. And then everyone left for work, their cars shooting out from the underground car park to be swallowed up by a slow, gleaming snake of traffic.
It was just the maintenance man who seemed to be about most of the day. He’d arrive, a little after nine, in a haze of blue smoke from his old Mazda. He was young and lean and a little lazy, Evie suspected, and had long hair like she’d seen on Corriedale rams. He always took two hours off at lunch and never spoke to her, even when she said hello. Evie decided that the chooks could roam about the garden during his long lunch break, and Barnaby would herd them back in each day.
The poultry deliveryman set the box down.
‘Here?’ he said looking at the makeshift chicken run as if Evie were mad.
‘Yes, here,’ nodded Evie enthusiastically.
‘Hokay.’ He frowned, shrugged his broad shoulders and set the box down. ‘I get other box.’ He strode out to his v
an.
How kind of them to put a hen each in such big boxes, thought Evie. As the man set down the second box and handed Evie the bill she nearly choked. Chooks had never cost that much in the country, but still, everything seemed dearer here, and she supposed that’s what people in the city did … they shopped. If it made Barnaby happy, she didn’t care. She wrote out the cheque, her glasses slipping down the bridge of her fine nose. Evie waited until the man had left before opening the boxes.
‘Good Lord!’ she gasped. There, squashed in the box, were a dozen hens. She opened the second box, which was also packed full. Two dozen hens!
‘But there’s been a misunderstanding, Henry. I said a couple of chooks … not a couple of dozen!’ She imagined Henry up in heaven on a cloud laughing. He always saw the funny side.
She was about to call the poultry place when she noticed how miserable the chickens looked. Their feathers, normally the delicious colour of Anzac biscuits, were dull. They had red-raw patches of bare skin on their necks. Even though the lids of the boxes were wide open, the hens were too terrified to venture out into the misty rain. Evie couldn’t send them back. Not now. The poor girls. And there was Barnaby lying on his belly, ears pricked, tail wagging at the very tip, every cell in his body bursting for his work to begin. The brightest he’d been in months.
Evie looked through the bars of her garden to the maintenance man in the courtyard. He’d stopped leaf-blowing and was now pruning the spindly leaves of an exotic orange flower that looked like the beak of a tropical bird.
‘Excuse me, young man,’ Evie called as she unlatched the gate and walked towards him. ‘I have a problem and I thought you might like to help.’
Later, with Oliver seated at her small outdoor table, his pruning shears laid down beside him, Evie offered another homemade scone the colour of soft sunshine.
‘It would just be until their feathers grow back and they’ve learnt to scratch the soil,’ she said. ‘Then I can find good homes for them.’
Oliver pushed up the sleeves of his blue work shirt and frowned. ‘A chicken run, here? It could cost me my job,’ he said gruffly.
‘Surely that wouldn’t be too bad a thing?’ Evie said gently. ‘A fit young man like you could get work anywhere.’
‘I’m trying to save money though,’ Oliver said, sinking his white teeth into a scone.
‘May I ask what for?’ Evie drizzled golden honey into Oliver’s tea. It was the last of the honey Henry had collected from the beehives in the orchard before he died.
‘I’m going on an eco-activists tour next year,’ Oliver said keenly.
‘Oh? What’s that, dear?’
‘You know, organised environmental protests. We’re starting down in Tasmania for logging protests, then there’s a trip to the Victorian mountains to protest about cattle up there, then there’s a sit-in against wind farms near the Prom, then another out west to protest about water taken from the river systems for irrigation … and then back home to Melbourne. Environment’s what I’m passionate about, but for the time being I’m working here. Just for the money. You know.’
‘Yes, I think I do know,’ Evie said. She set down her cup and glanced out at the regimented garden beyond the bars of her patio before turning to Oliver. ‘My dear, do you think we could put your plans aside – just for now – and make a start in our own garden? For the moment we’ve got twenty-four sad chooks and there’s all that space out there that they can’t use.’
Oliver sighed.
‘But I’ve never been on a farm. I don’t know anything about chickens.’
‘Don’t worry, Barnaby and I will teach you. And while we get our girls settled, I’ll fill you in on a few more of my ideas … because I have a grander plan to hatch,’ Evie said with a twinkle in her eye. ‘If you’ll pardon the pun.’
Oliver pressed a button on Evie’s brand-new printer and began printing out the Notice to Residents Evie had composed. Trish had bought Evie the computer but until now it had lain dormant in the corner of the room, like a sleeping beast. Oliver handed Evie the freshly printed page.
‘The body corporate won’t like this at all when they find out,’ he said.
‘They won’t see it coming till it’s already done,’ Evie said. ‘That’s the beauty of a grassroots revolution.’
She read over the letter, which informed residents of the forthcoming ‘landscape garden changes’, beginning with a ‘central garden feature’ of a ‘stylish and modern chicken coop’. The letter went on to offer residents a unique share in the community chicken rehabilitation project. All they had to do was contribute household food scraps to the specially labelled bin in the car park. Oliver would collect the bin daily and feed the chooks. In return, residents could collect free-range eggs at no charge from Evie in unit ten.
And so it began. Neighbours came and gingerly knocked on Evie’s door. She welcomed them with the smell of fresh-baked bread and a smile as lively and intriguing as life itself. And as the wintry days unfolded into spring, things began to change.
The chickens gained their feathers and lost their fear. They began to scratch about while Oliver and Evie worked side by side in the garden. As Oliver’s hands sunk into the rich dark soil he no longer talked about protests in places he’d never lived. He began to see the land and nature for the first time, right here at his fingertips in the centre of the city. Old Barnaby was happier too as he dozed beneath a whitetrunked sapling, keeping one foggy eye on the chooks. Then, at dusk, he’d wait for Evie to ask him to herd the chooks away to roost.
The residents came to watch and wonder at Barnaby’s expert moves, so gentle yet so firm. The man from unit twelve became Vern and the woman from unit two became Rita. Even Dennis, from unit five, who didn’t eat eggs, still brought his scraps down from level two in an old blue ice-cream bucket. As the residents delivered their scraps, collected their eggs, made up names for the chickens and stroked their glossy feathers, they began to laugh and trust and talk to each other.
By the time the buds of spring had stretched into the leafy green of summer, Evie and Oliver had dug up most of the soil and even the lawns. They planted herbs, lettuces and other vegetables in designs as intricate as lace. Peas and beans entwined themselves up and over the bars of people’s patios, rich green threads woven by sunlight. Deep-crimson leaves of beetroot flanked pathways alongside rows of upright glossy silverbeet. The green-gold of butter beans led residents into the garden’s heart, where the outdoor swimming pool now teemed with trout. Tendrils of passionfruit vines clutched upwards for a better view of Evie’s garden that now rambled and sang with vitality and life-giving food.
In the evenings, the residents gathered on the pool’s edge and fished together. Men sat in deck chairs, landing fish as silver as new coins. The women chatted while snapping the shells of peas and spooling out their sweet green orbs. The smell of melting butter and fresh fish on the barbecue hotplate drifted up from the courtyard.
The residents strolled amidst the fledgling orchard and inspected where the grey water seeped from a snake of black pipe. And the residents felt good that they now fed the garden with water from their own sinks and showers.
One such summer’s evening, Evie and the other residents asked Oliver to help them cut the fence between them and the vacant block. After that, the garden seemed to spill out into the wasteland, so that a pretty patchwork of corn and sunflowers and carrots were sown in with other vegetables. On the block the residents, hoed, carted, dug and sweated, while the equipment in the gym lay silent.
There was a buzz about the place the day Rita from unit two announced she had a cousin with a cow or two.
‘Since the Royal Show closed down, he can’t show them any more and he’d like us to have them,’ Rita said as she plucked parsnips from the soil.
When the cows arrived, the residents were in awe of their quiet, matronly beauty. Vera was a Jersey with eyes like melted chocolate, and Amelia was a Friesian with ears as black as midnight and a belly as
white as a dove, both with equally pretty calves at foot.
They tethered them next door on the vacant block. That day, Evie swept the rubble and dust out of the ramshackle half-house. Oliver gathered up the rubbish of cans, needles and old wine casks. And together they built a milking bale and filled it with sweet-smelling straw.
Twice a day, the cows wandered in, chewed happily on hay and listened to the sound of their milk zinging into buckets as Evie and Oliver milked them. Children began to sneak into the garden to stroke the white star on Amelia’s face and to see their own faces mirrored within Vera’s deep brown eyes. Peter from unit six would cart the fresh milk to the courtyard and the residents rolled up their sleeves to make cheese and butter and skim off the cream. Laughter rose up from Evie’s garden even on days when rain fell. On wet days, the people no longer scuttled for their units. Instead, they stood out in it as Evie did, because they now understood that the rain was life-giving. As was the food their garden now grew.
It was late when Evie said good night to everyone. They had all been busy, preparing the plots for more plantings. Evie poured herself a port and sank into her old leather chair. Barnaby settled his head on her lap and she rested her hand on his warm head. Then, Evie raised her glass to Henry’s photo.
‘Here’s to you, my darling farmer, for your love. And here’s cheers to Mother Nature, a very wise lady.’ Evie drank happily from the glass and, with a smile on her lips, fell into a blissful sleep.
Trish knocked and knocked on the unit door. No answer came from within. When she slid the spare key in the lock and pushed open the door she almost gagged. The staleness of the flat and the way Barnaby slunk past her legs and out onto the street told her everything she needed to know.
‘Mum?’ she called out, knowing for certain Evie wouldn’t answer.
Trish couldn’t bring herself to look at her mother, dead in the chair, still clutching a photograph of her husband. Instead she called the ambulance right away from her mobile as she stood in the doorway.
Girl & the Ghost-Grey Mare Page 16