A Story of Seven Summers

by Hilary Burden

  Fiona was always city-natty, with an asymmetric red bob and a penchant for luscious silk scarves, red lipstick and designer sunglasses. But this holiday, as I gave her the second-hand fur shrug to warm her shoulders, she shared her country Queensland upbringing and the girl that remained inside. She chopped and carried firewood and volunteered her job was to keep the fire stoked, which she did. Leigh, Fiona and I all seemed to find a way of keeping busy at the Nuns’ House without stepping on each other’s toes. The nuns, I imagined, might have been impressed by that.

  One night, while cooking was steaming up the kitchen windows, Leigh searched through Wilf’s old vinyl records for a suitable soundtrack. She tried at least five before finally settling on Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. If you lived and exercised in the eighties ‘the grapevine’ had nothing to do with vineyards. It was an aerobics step that involved a kind of Fred Astaire step-skip, half-star-jump, sideways movement and back again. Soon, Leigh and Fiona were doing the grapevine up and down the corridor to ‘Tijuana Taxi’ and I nearly wet my pants laughing.

  Fiona was enchanted by Jack and Kerouac and called them ‘implacable’. I explained how they pooed in the same spot each time, how they sniffed where they pooed last, then pooed just ahead of it, creating a neat poo trail across the paddock. Her Manhattan-sharp marketing brain promptly went into overdrive, developing a new line of fertiliser she called ‘A Pack of Paca Poo’.

  ‘What are you going to do with their wool?’ asked Fiona.

  ‘I’m going to learn to spin and make scarves and socks, maybe a rug,’ I replied, more in hope than anything else.

  In the blink of an eye she had invented a new form of literature, dubbing it ‘knit lit’. It would be the next thing after ‘chick lit’: stories about love and life learned from people meeting together to knit.

  I loved how Leigh shared her friendships and made us family; we didn’t need to knit. After they left for Sydney and New York, I lay in the hammock on the front veranda with a cigarillo and whiskey. While the local frog orchestra was tuning up for the evening performance, I felt cocooned by the gentle sway of the netting and knew then that Leigh and Fiona would probably be back before I returned their visits. The sound of a car door banging shut in the driveway startled me, and there was a call at the front door. A stranger introduced himself.

  ‘Hi, I’m Paul, I live at Treetops, just round the corner in Karoola Road.’ He told me he’d moved here from Sydney, was thinking of getting alpaca and had noticed the two in my front paddock. ‘Do you mind if I ask you, what are they like to keep?’

  ‘They’re the lowest-maintenance animals on the planet,’ I said, recalling Jillian’s words.

  He was interested in the fleece so I showed him the bags of wool I had stored in one corner of my spare room and the spinning wheel I’d found in an op shop in another.

  ‘I just need to learn how to put the two together . . .’

  ‘You need my friend Vita,’ he said, scrawling a phone number onto a scrap of paper. ‘Make sure you call.’

  I phoned Vita the next morning. ‘Can you come today?’ she said in such a way that I felt it would be rude to refuse. ‘Don’t forget to bring your wheel.’

  Vita was a transsexual in her seventies who lived on her own in an old cottage in Launceston with a veranda that fronted the street. The front door was wide open and welcoming, and the corridor was lined with paintings leaning against the wall. There were portraits of ethereal-looking women, including one, she explained, of her late wife. She was dressed in men’s clothing, a cardigan and trousers, but her nails were long and there was a hint of mascara or eyeliner around her eyes. Vita gestured for me to bring my spinning wheel inside. I set it down in the sunlit hall, just inside the open front door.

  ‘Right, there are a few things we need to do first,’ she explained. ‘The wheel must be oiled and taken care of.’

  She leaned forward over the wheel and started wiping it down right there and then as if it were an old friend, oiling the joints and moving parts carefully with a swipe or two of Vaseline. I’d been told I should learn to spin with sheep’s fleece as it was easier to handle and not as fine as alpaca.

  ‘If alpaca is what you will be using, then why not learn with it?’ said Vita. ‘You won’t know any different.’

  Then, with the fleece between her thumb and fingers, in one graceful, flowing, mesmeric movement she turned the wheel, guided the ginger strands, and spun the fleece that had been sheared off Jack’s back.

  ‘So many people pump the wheel,’ she said, ‘but it’s not necessary. You need to be calm and smooth and slow, like this . . .’

  I loved the moment that seemed spun itself, the light spilling through the front door onto the wheel that turned under Vita’s delicate touch. When it was my turn we swapped seats and I started by getting the measure of the pedal. It seemed the trick was to find a rhythm, to move the wheel at a speed that required the least intervention from the spinner. Vita watched without teaching and that was a lesson in itself; simply her presence was enough to still me. Eventually, some of the fleece I’d seen grow fluffy on alpaca backs in the paddock had turned to soft wisps of wool in my fingers. Vita let me find my own way and said the rest was practice.

  I stayed for a couple of hours, then thanked her, leaving her with the rest of the bag of fleece as well as some blueberry muffins I’d baked that morning. When I got home there was already a message from Vita on the answerphone. ‘Come back when you can. I’ll have some balls of your wool for you.’

  ‘Darling,’ emailed Fiona when I told her I’d been taught how to spin by a transsexual. ‘Whoever said Tasmania was dull hadn’t been to your place . . . Somehow it makes absolute sense that a transsexual should know how to handle alpaca fleece. If you think about it, the animals are quite transsexual themselves with those long luscious eyelashes and come-hither looks.’

  A couple of weeks had passed since I’d talked to Barney about fetching the logs from his property, so I rang him and arranged a time to meet the following day. He was packing up the farm and getting it ready to sell, so was happy to take a break and show me around, to the river first, the rainforest with its fairy glade, and the old train carriage set in the bush not going anywhere. In doing this, he was also saying goodbye to the things he had loved the most, the tree lines he had planted, the romance he had shared with this landscape. Yet, he showed no sign of regret. He knew how to survive. The logs, he said, were in the valley. Would I like to drive the tractor to collect them?

  ‘I’ve never driven a tractor before,’ I said, a little startled.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not really dressed for a tractor.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  It was liberating that it didn’t matter that I didn’t know and I felt struck. I liked how we both seemed open to doing things when they needed doing, recalling the way he just got on with rubbing butter into flour to make the crumble when he’d never done it before. I hopped into the seat of the old Massey Ferguson, noticing how it was shaped to fit the driver’s bottom. I remembered how Doug’s tractor at the farm in Telita had a seat just like that and, again, childhood memories came flooding back: the smell of the pig farm; Doug’s dogs barking, tied to their chains; kids laughing in the hay barn; Neita’s perfect rose blooms and dahlia borders and her pavlovas smothered in bananas and cream . . . memories all revisited in the space of this tractor moment. Barney showed me the gears: ‘That’s first, and here’s reverse.’ As we started chugging up the bush track, I gripped Miss Fergie’s steering wheel and turned to look over my shoulder. Barney’s face seemed to have no angles now— instead it was stretched soft with the warmest of smiles. There’s every chance, I thought, that how I’m seeing him is how I’m feeling . . .

  ‘You’ll have to come over for a Barn curry!’ he said as I left with the logs.

  ‘Yes, I’d like that.’

  A few weeks later, Barney rang to invite me over for dinner that evening.
I liked that it was tonight and not next week; I still felt reluctant to start a relationship, and couldn’t be sure that this was even likely to happen with Barn. But without the expectation of a date planned in advance it felt natural to say yes. By now it was spring and daffodils lined the bend where I’d lost my way some weeks before. Their tight buds continued to appear all the way up the potholed gravel driveway to his house and almost as far as the front door. The air felt cooler at this altitude, the last light lingered over the horizon, and there wasn’t a breath of wind.

  We sat outside on the front veranda to watch the sun setting through the cherry tree in the foreground and over the Pipers River valley. The sky was the colour of a peace rose—all lemony and pink—and wispy strands of clouds teased us with their transitory shapes: That’s a herringbone . . . look, now it’s a galloping dragon, can you see? No, it’s a dolphin diving in circles . . . Nature had wrapped us in her embrace and seemed to cast a spell when I leaned over and kissed Barney on the lips. I think I surprised myself just as much as him, as the kiss had come from nowhere either conscious or expected. The sunset still held our attention and, despite the kiss, or maybe because of it, we decided to move higher to catch every last drop of setting sun. We drove to the top of his mountain property with a bottle of wine and two half-filled glasses. It didn’t matter that they spilled as we hit the bumpy track in his four-wheel drive to take in the view of the north coast at sunset. We drove right to the top of the hill that Barney called Bill Hill, a vast expanse of sloping-away paddock with a view to the sea. I decided to get out and walk, while Barney followed in his vehicle.

  We returned to the house and while Barney cooked a chicken curry from scratch I browsed through his bookshelf. In between the motorbike and management texts, I found a doorstopper called Funk & Wagnalls’ Standard Dictionary of the English Language, and spotted a couple of old women’s weekly magazines from the days when they cost nine pence. It was fun to check our stars for the week when neither of us was born: Barney’s sign, Pisces, read, ‘You’ve begun a cycle which is to shape and colour the next twelve to twenty-five years. If you have that much time. A few potholes on the way.’ Mine, Sagittarius, said, ‘Slowly you are building up a new circle of friends. This week brings a man of unusual personality into your group. Be careful how you handle this association.’ Barney laughed while I raised an eyebrow at the aptness of the words that also held the possibility of wounds.

  The curry was good, hearty, and burned-orange-spiced with turmeric and paprika, cinnamon sticks and pods of cardamom. Afterwards, we kissed again and it seemed to come from somewhere deep inside of us, unspoken and unconscious. It was an old Cosmo relationship story: ‘How to get from the couch to the bed’. But none of that advice came to mind at all. Much later, when we sat talking on his bed with our backs against the headboard, I couldn’t even recall how we did. Barn pulled out his old photo albums and as he turned the pages I saw a typical Aussie boy at the beach, camping, with cars, with mates, with dogs, with girls, with guitars, with a Ducati in his front lounge . . . It was obvious that he’d been a bit of a rogue, confirmed when he told me that he hadn’t finished high school. The childhood images left a more sensitive impression which interested me: close-ups he’d taken of beautiful flowers, with his pets, and of glorious sunsets. He told me he’d spent his twenties doing odd jobs, driving trucks, delivering swimming pools, working on his parents’ citrus farm, travelling through Europe in a second-hand Jaguar, and running a fruit stall on the outskirts of Gosford. I liked the breadth of a six-foot-three tall man who started driving a Ford Thames and went on to race Ducatis.

  Behind the Aussie bravado, I saw a sensitive soul who appreciated natural beauty and was open to sharing it. He turned to a photo of a much wider-girthed oil company man. ‘I don’t think I would have liked you then,’ I said, thinking of the Cosmo girl studying her feminist texts, quickly adding, ‘You probably wouldn’t have liked me either.’

  When I left early the next morning, Barney kneeled at the front gate with one arm draped over his black dog, Harry, and they saw me off together. I wiped the dew from inside the windscreen so that I could see to drive home down the steep misty mountain track, the sun just rising behind me. As the road levelled off at the bottom I felt the same sense of peace I’d felt on Bill Hill the previous night. If it felt this peaceful with someone, I thought, then why wouldn’t I want it?

  I feel like melting bubbles, I texted Barney later that day. I want to permanently melt you, not only when we kiss, he texted back. And I gasped and smiled and melted all at once. When he asked me if that meant we were going out, ‘like boyfriend and girlfriend’, I found myself saying, reluctantly yet truthfully, ‘Yes . . . yes, it does.’

  Barn’s chicken curry

  (adapted from Charmaine Solomon*)

  1.5 kg chicken breast

  3 tbsp ghee or oil

  ¼ tsp fenugreek seeds

  10 curry leaves

  2 large onions, chopped

  4 cloves garlic, crushed

  2 tsp fresh ginger

  1 tsp turmeric

  1 tsp chilli powder

  1 tbsp ground coriander

  1 tsp ground cumin

  ½ tsp ground fennel

  2 tsp paprika

  2 tsp salt

  2 tbsp white vinegar

  2 tins diced tomatoes

  8 cardamom pods, bruised

  1 cinnamon stick

  1 large tin coconut cream

  Cube the chicken.

  Heat the ghee and fry the fenugreek and curry

  leaves with onion, garlic and ginger until soft and

  golden. Turn off the heat.

  Add turmeric, chilli, coriander, cumin, fennel,

  paprika and salt.

  Turn heat on, add white vinegar, stir well.

  Add the chicken. Stir to mix in the spices over a

  medium heat until chicken is two-thirds cooked.

  Add tomatoes, cardamom pods and cinnamon stick

  and cook for 20 minutes.

  Add coconut cream. Taste and add more salt or a

  sprinkle of sugar if desired.

  Serve with rice and poppadums.

  * Charmaine Solomon, The Complete Asian Cookbook,

  Weldon Publishing, Sydney, 1992.

  CHAPTER 13

  Fifth summer, Karoola

  I loved the sounds that drifted across the valley to the hammock on the front veranda. Cattle moaning reverberated up and down the straight and into the distance, and the birdsong in the background was loud and insistent. I pondered how, for a very long time, change had been a constant in my life. Now, it was constancy that moved me; the ritual of waking and moving, like a sunflower, with the day, and of being nourished by one place.

  Sadly, the food magazine I’d been working on for some weeks with Luke and Rodney did not eventuate. Instead I thought about setting up a produce hall and was inspired one day when I took a shortcut to Lulworth Beach down School Road. It was a winding country lane, lined on both sides by a red-leafed hedgerow, interrupted by two buildings of note. A sturdy weatherboard hall sat halfway down on the right-hand side next to a picturesque white weatherboard Anglican church. On the front of the dark-green hall was a sign that read ‘1936 Coronation Hall’. It was built by the Pipers River community in commemoration of the coronation of Britain’s King George VI. Sadly, it now stood derelict, its windows and doors boarded up. To the left of the front door was a raised ticket window. I imagined the men arriving in their smartish hats, and ladies in glamorous stoles, and the ticket-checker peering through the window on the lookout for outsiders, interlopers, or youngsters trying to sneak through for free. Around the back, though, was a window, high up, with one windowpane missing. I found a couple of bricks to stand on among the bracken and the blackberries, and hoisted myself up to peer inside. It looked as though it might once have been the kitchen. Rats’ and birds’ nests festooned the place, and the floor was splattered with layers of droppings, hay and ab
andonment. But there was something about this building that attracted me, and I was filled with a sense of possibility. Outside, I found a small placard in the front yard displaying a typed letter on local council letterhead. The building had been declared derelict and was to be demolished. It would make a great produce hall, I thought.

  Coronation Hall, School Road, Pipers River.

  Leigh was on sabbatical from her job and offered to help bring this vision to life. I invited her to come and stay for a few weeks’ retreat and to play more with the idea. Together we produced a proposal for a food magazine, produce hall and market. Barney said he thought the hall was too isolated to make it work, but Libby and Richard agreed it was worth a go and contributed their ideas. We presented our plan to the council, who seemed interested, although not to the point of committing funds. A lack of funds, after all, was why they wanted to knock the hall down—they couldn’t afford its upkeep. Why maintain a building that was neglected, was the view of its aldermen and women. The answer, I thought, was simple. Because it was the community who built it, it was ours . . .

  Between us, Leigh and I managed to convince one or two potential investors to commit some funds. And we hoped it might be enough, although the profits were not likely to show for some time to come. During this time, Leigh got to know Barney. He wasn’t the kind of person to want to spend hours in our conversations, nor did we expect him to, but she liked how much we seemed to light up in each other’s company and wanted to see it work.