The forest is addictive. The smell of it, the softness of the light. She feels herself releasing a tension she hadn’t realised she was holding, feels herself melt into the tangle of the leaves and the trees. Slowly the vision of her mother on the veranda fades, and she is consumed by the movement of the horse. He hasn’t forgotten the forest. He is keyed up, head raised, carrying his tail. She sits loose-legged and he goes with hops and skips, spending all his fierceness in blowing and snorting. A soft mouth. She wonders if his fire was always such a bluff, a secret between him and her mother. She was never allowed to ride him as a girl. She remembers him under her mother, crab-walking and jogging, putting in a buck if he thought he could. He feels stiff now with his age, his walk is short and tender-footed, but that attitude is still there. She wonders vaguely how long it has been since he was last ridden.
She takes it gently, lets him set the pace. He travels along in a steady trot, in the end. Just a short ride, her mother’s voice tells her. Go easy on the poor man. She lets him walk home, and he feels better for it, easier in his stride. She should give him some hard feed, she thinks. And she has to fix that fence. She thinks about the scrub in the bottom paddock, and the gate hanging crooked, and the list of chores expands in her mind. It is good to be outside, she tells herself. Good to be home. And she forces herself to ignore the guilt that is warm in her like the sunshine on her shoulders.
They call her sister that night. Hannah clears the table and listens as her mother chats. She imagines Sophie standing in her own kitchen, bright and clean, the phone tucked into her shoulder and her children about her legs. Her mother is sitting deep in the gloom of the living room, and Hannah reaches in to turn on a light.
‘Yes, yes,’ her mother is saying. ‘She will be here some months at least.’
Hannah smiles and turns back towards the kitchen.
‘Hannah,’ her mother says as she goes, ‘Sophie wants to talk to you.’ She is tired, Hannah realises, as she passes over the phone. Her face is grey.
‘Halfway through dinner,’ Sophie says in her ear, ‘so I’ll have to be quick, sorry. How are you? How’s home?’
‘Good and good,’ Hannah says, and pauses. She looks down at their mother, her breathing shallow and desperate on the couch beside her. ‘It’s nice.’
‘What’s up, kiddo?’ Sophie asks, and Hannah can tell she is amused. ‘You and Mum been fighting again?’
Hannah’s throat tightens against the familiarity of her sister’s needling. ‘Nothing’s up!’ she says. ‘It is nice.’
Sophie laughs. ‘Sure, sure. When does school start?’
‘A week,’ Hannah says, trying to control her irritation. ‘I’m going down there to check it out on Thursday.’ She can hear someone call out in the background, Dan, Sophie’s husband. For some reason, the timbre of his voice makes her wonder if they have been drinking. ‘I took the black horse out today,’ she adds.
‘Is Ghosty looking okay?’ Sophie asks.
‘Yeah, still lame though.’
‘I know,’ her sister replies, almost annoyed. ‘He won’t heal.’
Hannah smiles. For an instant, Sophie sounds like her sister again.
‘How’s Mum?’ she asks.
‘I think . . .’ Hannah hesitates, steps away and keeps her voice low. ‘It’s got bad,’ she says. ‘The pain. She’s worse than she’d made it out to be.’
‘I’ll come over,’ Sophie says. ‘Soon as I can.’
Hannah smiles. ‘You better go, if you’re eating,’ she says.
When she hangs up, the room feels suddenly empty and quiet. Her mother is asleep again, her head lolling against the back of the couch. Hannah creeps out and finishes the dishes. The empty rattle of the crockery in the sink is punctuated only by her mother’s occasional sleep-murmur, mumbling groan.
*
On Monday, they start the picking at Mulvey’s. The pairs chatter as they work their way down the vines. Almost as soon as they begin, Mary’s hands are sticky and stained with juice. The space between each row is filled with the clear green light of the leaves, scented with the grapes. From the top of the acreage they can see out over the island, out across the entirety of the grape crop, the subtle shifting in the shades of the vines across the different farms. Heads and hats bob gently in time with the plunk of grapes in the buckets. Picnic is opposite her. He is the only one of the boys from her grade who has to pick. His mother is across the next row. She remembers the boys’ voices yelling out from the beach and blushes, but with picking at least there is a purpose. He is the only one of them as well that she really feels comfortable with, but he isn’t the one she thinks about.
They move automatically, either side of the giant frames, and the leaves brush and rustle beneath their hands. Bucket after bucket fills at her feet, and Mary hauls them across to the tractor row. She pauses to stretch her arms above her head. Picnic grins at her through the vines.
‘What, you stuffed already?’
‘Not on your life,’ Mary mutters. It has only been a couple of hours.
‘Yeah, right. Whatever you reckon.’
Mary grabs a pair of buckets from the stack in the middle of the row, pulls them apart and tosses one through.
‘Yeah,’ she repeats, grinning. ‘Right.’
They are the youngest there by far. They know all the pickers; the crew meets and picks out the island every summer. It is hot work. Sweat begins to bead down Mary’s back. Her eyes never leave the grapes, green in the green, search, put a hand to them and cut with the snips. Clack and plunk, and the grapes pile up in the bucket. The tractor grumbles up the next row and Nugget follows shirtless behind, emptying bucket after bucket into the bin.
At the end of each row there is a pause. People straighten up and stretch, drink water from plastic bottles. Mary’s father walks among them as group leader, sends them back down here or there, sorts the pairs.
‘You coming to Ben’s this weekend?’ Picnic asks her as they go. ‘Tommo is.’
Mary looks at him, surprised. ‘What’s happening?’
‘We’re goin’ down the beach.’
‘Ben never asked me.’
Picnic grunts. ‘So?’
‘So he never asked me.’
‘Since when do you wait for an invitation?’
Mary shrugs. ‘Since he never asked me.’
Picnic eyes her curiously. ‘Why’s it matter?’
‘Dunno,’ she says. ‘Just does.’
He snorts. ‘You chicken?’
Mary rolls her eyes and throws a bunch of grapes at him through the wires.
‘Oi!’ her father calls, coming up the row. ‘None o’ that, you little shits. In the buckets.’
Mary shrinks slightly as he cuffs her across the back of the head. He moves on down the row, wiping his forehead with a sleeve, nodding and gesturing to the pickers.
When they finally call smoko, the pickers stretch with relief and peel the sticky cotton gloves from their hands. Mary’s fingers are wrinkled underneath, softened with the juice of a chardonnay. Back at the top of the vines, they shelter in the shade of the gum trees by the gate, huddle in around the gathering of cars and drink milky tea from thermoses. A blue haze of cigarette smoke rises gently and curls into the leaves. Mary leans back in one of the cheap folding chairs her mother has brought down for them and watches Picnic rummage for food in the back of his mother’s beat-up station wagon. Her father chugs in on the tractor and the backhoe trundles out to meet him, lifting the filled bin from the trailer in an awkward ballet of machinery. Mary’s mother passes her a piece of cling-wrapped hedgehog and a banana. She is whispering to herself, lips moving almost silently, watching her husband on the tractor. When the bin is clear, Mary’s mother crosses herself, lets her hand come to rest on the crucifix at her neck. Mary lets herself wonder if God could care about a bin of grapes. She closes her eyes. The light filters through the trees to leave dappled sunspots on her vision. She could sleep. The world is warm and light and happy w
ith the satisfaction of a gentle weariness.
She does sleep, later, in the bath, soaking the grime and stickiness from her body. The water leaves a mottled reflection on the walls and ceiling, a flickering brightness, light reminding her of the sun through the leaves. Her dream is brief and vivid: she is running after Picnic and the boys, chasing but never catching them, Thomas always just there in front of her. When she wakes, the water is cold and her skin wrinkled – as though from the grape juice, as though she has just taken off her gloves.
The third day in the vines and Mary is tired of it: the work, the grape smut, the inane gossip and the burn of the sun on her neck. Even Picnic seems weary. She glances at him through the vines and wonders if he ever wants to get out, go somewhere else, leave the grapes and the picking all behind.
‘It’s tonight,’ he says suddenly.
Mary pauses and drags her mind sluggishly through the conversations of the past two days.
‘The beach?’
‘Yep. We’re gonna light a bonfire, he reckons.’
‘And you’re meeting at Ben’s place?’
‘Yeah. You gonna come? I told ’em you would.’
Mary stiffens. Something runs white-hot through her and suddenly she is sweating in an entirely different way. ‘Why’d ya say that?’
He glances at her through the leaves, grinning. ‘Tommo’s comin’,’ he reminds her.
She says nothing but can feel the heat creeping up her neck and into her face, wonders how he knows. Her mind flicks back to her dream – running, running, never catching.
‘I dunno,’ she says finally. ‘Maybe.’
‘Maybe?’ he says. ‘Just come! Come to mine first, if you want. We can head over to meet them together.’
‘I dunno,’ she says again, but the reluctance is slowly bleeding out of her voice. She imagines walking down there, imagines a fire.
Picnic grins and they go back to picking in silence.
She sneaks out in the end. It makes it more exciting. The summer evening means it isn’t dark but violet with dusk, an electric sort of half-light filled with shadows. She walks to the village through the grapevines rather than along the road and comes out at the pub, its daytime greasiness transformed now by loud voices and the glowing light from the windows, a slick of yellow that spills across the cracked pavement and out onto the bitumen.
Picnic’s house is behind the pub, down a dirt road, a line of grass separating the two worn wheel-ruts. She stares at the houses crouched deep in their gardens, small and squat, the flicker of a television occasionally showing through a drawn curtain. Nothing moves.
‘Picnic?’ she whispers, and immediately feels foolish. Why would he answer? She is turning to leave when he comes creeping around the side of a dark house. He sees her and smiles, and relief washes through her. She straightens, squares her shoulders.
‘I didn’t think ya’d come,’ he hisses when he gets close enough.
‘Yeah.’
‘C’mon,’ he says. ‘Ben’s down near the beach.’
The boys are waiting when they get there. Ben has a backpack slung over one shoulder. They set off down the track to the beach straight away, talking and laughing. Mary trails behind, feeling out of place. A watery echo of her dream flashes into her mind; ahead of her Thomas’s back is shaking with laughter but she can’t hear the joke. She stumbles over a tree root and he turns to her, the laughter still on his face. Smile, she tells herself, smile, and so she does. It feels foreign, stiff. She jogs a few steps to catch up.
‘You okay?’ he asks, and reaches out his hand towards her. She gapes at him, open-mouthed and frozen.
‘Yeah,’ she says, breathless.
He lets his hand drop again and turns back to the boys.
‘C’mon!’ Ben shouts. He twists around to shine a torch in their faces. ‘We haven’t got all night, slackers!’
The purple of the dusk fades slowly into dark. Mary follows the yellow stripe of Thomas’s t-shirt and the glow of the sand along the track through the dunes. Down on the beach, Ben already has the fire piled high. When he lights it, sparks of orange and white shoot into the black. Mary sits cross-legged and watches the flames change colour with the salt on the wood, blue and purple and white, her cheeks pink and hot. She wants to rotate, warm her back and her legs, but the boys are there and she feels silly. So she sits and says nothing, and Picnic looks across at her and winks. She is sitting next to Thomas. Ben is laughing and talking too loudly. Mary wriggles and sighs gently. Thomas looks at her then quickly away again as their eyes meet. Tension bubbles somewhere in her stomach and she wishes she had been brave enough to take his hand.
Ben stretches, pokes at the fire. ‘We should do something,’ he mutters.
Thomas eyes him across the flames.
‘Like what?’
‘I dunno, just something. Get drunk or something.’
‘Who would you pinch it from?’ Picnic asks, a lopsided sort of grin on his face.
Mary stares at them, holding her breath.
‘I reckon Dad’d give it to me,’ Ben says, and Thomas laughs.
‘Yeah, right. He’d belt you for asking. Mine would.’
Mary giggles and Picnic grins. ‘Mum’s got a box out the back,’ he says. ‘Whisky. I could pinch some pretty easily.’
Ben snorts. ‘Whatever. We just need to do something, ya know?’
‘So get a bottle,’ Thomas says, almost too loudly. He turns to Mary, stares at her a moment, almost like a challenge. She wonders what it means, and stares back. She can see Picnic’s teeth glowing at her in the firelight.
‘You picking tomorrow?’ she asks him, just to say something. It falls limply across the space between them and she feels heat creeping once again in a flush up the back of her neck.
‘Yeah,’ Picnic says, after a minute. ‘‘Course.’ He turns to Ben. ‘So when are we gonna do this?’
Mary looks away again. For the rest of the night she says nothing, just stares into the fire, into the dark, up into the sparks in between, anything not to feel useless.
When she gets home, the house is quiet. Her parents have gone to bed. She climbs the stairs to her room, cold and stiff and tired. The beach and the fire were strangely anticlimactic after the thrill of sneaking out. She feels ancient and alone in the empty house, except that it isn’t empty, her parents are right there, curled together in their bed, not worried about her in the slightest. She isn’t sure why this bothers her.
Her sheets feel clammy when she gets in, and somehow this is her parents’ fault as well. It is late. She falls asleep curled up tight in the fetal position, shivering with cold and disappointment. The shape of Thomas’s reaching hand follows her into her dreams.
*
Hannah sits in the cab of Darcy’s ute and watches the island go by, green and brown in the morning sun. They have been out to check his sheep, his kelpie bringing them up with all the dignity of an elder statesman. Now, heading home, the dog is sitting in the ute’s tray with his back to the rear window, face to the landscape like her. Hannah can just see the tip of his nose every now and again from her window, as he follows something with his gaze.
They stop at the store on the way through the village. Hannah follows automatically as Darcy gets out, tries to remember what’s in the fridge, how much bread they have. Inside, the shelves are dusty with unfamiliar brands, tinned fruit and dehydrated noodles. She goes slowly down the aisles, checking the use-by dates, picking up a few tins. Darcy watches her from the front counter, turning a pack of cigarettes under one hand. He raises an eyebrow at her choices. She finds herself wanting to giggle, feels like a child beneath his gaze. She piles her selections on the countertop with a packet of sweet biscuits and a loaf of brown bread.
‘Coming tonight?’ the woman asks Darcy as she tallies them up.
‘Doubt it,’ he mumbles.
She doesn’t say anything in return but purses her lips.
Hannah takes the change from her proffered hand. ‘
Thanks,’ she says, and the woman smiles artificially. Darcy just nods and turns, pushes out through the fly-streamers hanging over the door.
‘Coming to what, Darce?’ Hannah asks outside.
‘They’ve been having town meetings every month in the church hall. Since when do you eat lentils?’
‘Since I grew up. Meetings about what?’
‘No fucking clue,’ Darcy growls. Hannah raises her eyebrows at his tone. ‘They just sit there arguing. The mothers’ club.’
‘What are they meant to be about, though?’
‘Tourism. They think they can get their kids to stay on the island if they’ve got tourists coming in.’
A pair of boys, school-aged, walk past with towels over their shoulders, laughing and nudging each other, headed towards the beach. Darcy opens the ute’s door and levers himself in. Hannah moves around to the passenger side, shoves her bags of shopping in before her.
‘What do you mean, tourism?’ she asks as she clambers in, reaches for the slack-jawed seatbelt. ‘What is there to see?’
‘The bridge, the coastline.’
‘And what do they expect people to do when they get here?’
‘I don’t know; they just want ’em to come.’ He turns the key in the ignition and the ute grumbles into life, vibrating over the corrugations of the gravel apron as he pulls out onto the street. ‘Like I said, it’s just a group of women talking. Most people think it’ll never happen, and they can’t see that there’s anything wrong with how things are anyway.’
‘Is there anything wrong with how things are?’
He looks at her. ‘There’s no money.’
He pauses to change gears, stamping the clutch into the floor. Hannah watches him and waits. When he starts talking again, his voice is low, almost bitter. ‘One day someone will work out how to tell them all what to do, and they’ll all be so grateful someone’s taking charge that they’ll follow blind, whether it’s the right thing for the island or not.’
‘Jesus, Darce,’ she whispers.
He laughs sardonically. ‘No, doubt it’ll be him.’
Hannah frowns, and he reaches an arm across and rests his hand on the back of her neck. ‘Don’t you worry, kiddo. Nothing’ll change here. They’ll keep bickering, and the young people will keep leaving, until their folks die, then they’ll come back and take over, and it’ll start all over again.’
The Salt Madonna Page 5