It was the possibilities of Dylan’s misbehaviour that had begun to worry me the most. The quality of my fear had to do with being back here, and with the utter despair I’d experienced years ago on realising that I’d got myself knocked-up at my nineteenth birthday party, and there were two possible candidates.
There was never any clarity on that night. A hatful of golden caps, furtively shared, was mostly the reason. I hadn’t expected the ecstatic, kaleidoscopic sense of hilarity that overcame me, so by the time long-lost Jed, a surprise turn-up, walked into the clubrooms, all my usual inhibitions had fallen by the wayside, and I was so excited to see him again that I grabbed him, and I remember dancing and laughing giddily and somehow ending up in a cupboard full of vinyl raincoats down a corridor somewhere near the double doors that faced the cricket pitch. He already had a fledgling fame then, and was probably quite used to girls throwing themselves at him, and also quite used to casual sex too, and so in those few moments of our connection within that dark cupboard he possibly never registered that he’d taken my virginity. I barely registered it myself. I can hazily remember tumbling out of the cupboard into the hallway, straightening my clothes and still laughing. Vince Kingston happened to be standing in the double doors having a smoke, and while there’s never anything much that hoves into clear view, I can vividly picture his face in that moment. The slight leer.
Perhaps Jed had left by the time the atmosphere started to go sour, and the crazy group high was warping and turning ghoulish. Taxis were called. There I was, wobbling unsteadily out. It was somewhere near the little outside shed where the mower was kept that Vince got me cornered and subjected me to a few dark minutes of forced sex. Happy birthday, he’d said as he pulled up the fly of his greasy jeans.
Looking back, I can only feel a sad remove for that girl, shamed and sullied and feeling too guiltily complicit ever to speak of it. A rough come-uppance was received by Vince a year or two later when he managed to seriously damage what there was of his brain while car-surfing down the highway on top of his mate’s Camaro. This news at least enabled the letting go of one thing – the feeling of social irresponsibility that by staying silent I’d allowed a rapist to walk around scot-free.
Yes, the odds had been worked over and over, again and again – when I boarded a plane to attend a cooking school in Melbourne, thinking I might just secretly get rid of it, when I asked a doctor about options for adoption, when I felt the one big significant kick that seemed like the baby was exerting his presence in my life, when I met my parents off the plane with an infant in my arms and they kindly never asked – always in the back of my mind it was being weighed up. Q. If a girl has sex with two men in quick succession, which one is most likely to have impregnated her? The man who was first or the man who was second? The man she’d always admired or the most despicable creature that ever lived?
It would be logical, wouldn’t it, to put your money on the man who was just over the fence, playing his guitar.
Somehow for all these years, living away from home, I’d been able to excuse myself from thoughts about any of that. But here, now, my fidgety, non-communicative, lanky-limbed son suggested the one who might have fathered him, and it was not the one I would have chosen. I can hardly look at him without fearing for his future, and for all the young girls he might know.
There’d never been a time when the boundary line between Jed’s property and ours hadn’t held a powerful allure for me. I tried to resist it. As the days ground onwards, I tried to mount an effortful case for retaining my distance and my dignity, but a nervy grief was seeping into the emptiness, and self-control began to seem like a secondary necessity. Day by day the pull grew, and I was seduced into some casual spying on Jed. This involved crawling under the brush hedge to get to the fence – one occasion when a lack of height was a good thing. If it was managed correctly, a person could break through at the exact place where there was a knothole just right for placing the eye against. I was pretty sure of its location, having spent a good deal of my childhood pressed up against that very spot. The surveillance revealed:
He works alone in his glasshouses.
At about 10 a.m. he stops for a break.
He goes into the garden shed and emerges with a hot cup of something and his guitar.
He sits down on a wooden bench built into the sunny side of the shed.
He strums his guitar.
He sips his hot drink.
For a short time he sings.
There was something forlorn about it. And was it significant that he used a kettle inside the shed to make his hot drink, rather than returning to the house? A person could conclude he avoided the house because he didn’t like his wife all that much.
Spurred on by the need for more activity, and less stealth, I pushed my way through the door of my father’s garden shed, took out the big extendable ladder, placed it against the hedge, and then returned to the kitchen and loaded a plate with some strawberry crostata that I’d made in preparation for a visit from Roma. From the top of the ladder I waved at Jed, aware of the strong possibility of oncoming social mortification in doing so.
‘Thought you might like a little something to go with that cuppa,’ I shouted when I had his attention.
He came over to the fence. ‘Hey Evie, you’re still here?’
‘Reckon you can catch if I throw a little something down?’
‘I’ve got a better idea,’ he said, and walked off towards his set of sheds. A few seconds later he came back with a chainsaw and a grin on his face.
‘Do you think they should let you be in charge of that?’ I joked.
‘Yeah baby,’ he said, and for a moment adopted a mad zombie expression.
It took three pulls on the cord to get the chainsaw going, and then in a haze of two-stroke smoke he cut across three wide boards of the fence. They fell away and he yelled up, ‘Shall I clear some of the hedge?’
‘Go for it,’ I yelled back.
When he’d made a gap, I came down from the ladder and stepped through onto his property. It had such a different dimension from my father’s back lawn that it felt like I’d been welcomed to a new, much more fertile part of the world.
‘I’ve been in that kind of mood lately,’ he smiled. ‘I’ve got a couple of big old hinges in the shed. I’ll fix that up later, make a proper gate.’
‘Cool. Jam tart in the meantime?’ I offered the plate, and was nervous for a moment about how fancy the pieces looked.
‘Yum,’ he said, and as he ate he nodded towards the fence. ‘That would’ve been an even better idea when we were younger, eh.’
‘I know,’ I replied, thinking how different life might have been if access to Jed could have been that easy.
‘So are you staying around?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know yet.’
‘Want to see the glasshouses?’
A wave of tropical heat hit us as we entered the first building and I followed Jed down the central alley. The plants on either side of us were guided upwards by taut twine stretching from the rafters to the ground, and hanging amidst the foliage, like slyly misfurnished Christmas decorations, were ripening bell peppers. But I was less focused on the plants than on the way Jed moved along in front of me, commenting about things over his shoulder. The structures, he told me, were imported by his grandfather in kitset form in the 1950s. The metal supports were made out of recycled war planes. He had a particular way about him, long-backed, loping easily along, his shoulders broad, his stride confident. There was a powerful sense of belonging, while I, with my small feet stepping quickly and lightly behind him, became aware of an essential difference between us – I have never in my life placed my feet as confidently on any piece of earth as him.
‘My father didn’t have any interest in them, and at one stage was talking about pulling them all down,’ Jed said. ‘I think I wanted to set them up again as a kind of rebellion at first. It’s probably just a classic intergenerational thing. I admire all the
things my grandfather stood for, and my son will probably think my father is the real hero.’ He stopped to reach out and correct a plant tendril back on to its supporting string while I thought about all that lineage, then he straightened and directed my gaze upwards. ‘I used to spend my spare time between touring replacing all the glass, and sealing around the edges with silicon. It took me about four years to get them into shape.’
‘Was there a particular reason you chose peppers?’ I asked, the words working themselves around all sorts of unsayable things that had long settled in my throat like tiny, incidental growths.
‘Well, I did run through the options. I liked the idea that working on the property could constitute a job of some sort. My grandfather mostly grew tomatoes and strawberries but that seemed kinda mundane. Herbs seemed sort of clichéd. And flowers were just too, well, flowery. I mean if I was going to put all this time into something, it had to be a bit interesting. For a while I explored the idea of converting them into tunnel houses for mushrooms, cos mushrooms are amazing things, but I would’ve had to black them out … and after all that glasswork … and you have to produce heaps of compost for them to grow in and I didn’t think the neighbours would’ve appreciated the pong.’
‘I think I can vouch for all neighbours and say a great steaming pile of pong would most likely upset the tranquillity of adjacent relations.’
There was a small amount of recognition in the smile he gave me, a folding back of years. When we were thirteen there was a tacit understanding that we got each other, and could banter along in a jokey way that was beyond some of the others. I knew at the time it was one of the main reasons I was included in Jed’s gang for that summer. For him it wasn’t just about being impressed with my drawing skills, it was that my ability to keep up with him in the head department helped him to steam along at a greater rate.
‘What are these signs on the end of some rows? Ferrari, Spider, Coletti, Viper?’
‘Seed varieties. I’m experimenting. The capsicum seeds all come from the Netherlands and someone over there must have a sports car fetish.’
‘Are you making a living from this now?’
‘Almost,’ Jed said. ‘It’s supplemented with inheritances.’ He smirked slightly as if he might be joking, but it was also quite feasibly true.
‘And Lauren has her career?’
‘Yep – we send her out every day to help put bread on the table.’
‘And music royalties?’
‘Yep, when you have a hit in a country like New Zealand the royalties are a fortune.’
‘You’re joking me,’ I said, re-commissioning a long-lost phrase.
‘What do you think?’
‘What about the international fame and fortune?’
Answer: a shrug.
Over the years I’d had occasional dreams about being in conversation with Jed. I’d once dreamed I was in his band – playing the tambourine, which was weird and not exactly an eyes-open fantasy. But there had been other imaginings too. Not fatalistic dreams, but actual picturing of us as a family unit. Me and him and Dylan. I always knew I could have made a choice, simply picked the one I preferred. There had always been the option of opening my mouth and playing the dangerous game. Saying, ‘Remember that night of my nineteenth birthday when we had sex in the coat closet? That was the night I fell pregnant.’ I could’ve done it years ago, but I was too scared. At first it was because I didn’t want to load Jed down with a reluctant responsibility. The concept of saying nothing, of wearing it stoically and alone, had seemed feminist and noble – I wouldn’t be one of those women who entrap a man, especially when I wasn’t sure if it was the right man. But over the years I’d become aware of a tight knot of grief developing in Dylan where a father’s regard should have been, and that made the imperative grow stronger. The problem then became working out when the right time was to appear out of nowhere and make a claim. At the peak of his fame? On the announcement of his engagement? After the birth of his son? When his second album was failing? And what if I’d actually done it back then, and Dylan had grown up to look exactly like Vince?
‘Is your father still alive?’ I asked.
‘Yep. He made a stink-load of money by selling off the family farm piece by piece, and investing it well. But the day he signed the papers for the last subdivided lot to be sectioned off he had a heart attack or, as I like to think of it, a serious attack of the guilts. Anyway, he recovered, and he got himself a pacemaker, and with that a great leap in ambition. He built himself some hotels and a theatre to play with, and now he lives in grand style in Coffs Harbour, with no time to let himself think about how he saw off most of his father’s land. Comes back over to stick his oar in now and again, though.’
‘And he just left you this tiny garden and that ugly old shed of a house to live in?’
‘Did I sound ungrateful? Did I mention he lumped my stepmother on to me too? She lives in the cottage over there.’ Through the hazy glass I could just see the front door of a cottage, nestled in trees, accessed by a small wooden bridge that crossed a creek. Alongside was an enormous weeping willow, its branches reaching down with a certain despondency towards the creek’s banks.
‘While you only live in the mansion?’ I nodded over my shoulder towards his hugely ornate double-storey white colonial standing on its rise like a beacon of prosperity and available options.
‘Is there something wrong with that?’ He half-smiled. Above us some clouds shifted and I could feel the fierce intensity of the sun as it shafted down through the glass. Jed reached over to open a side vent and said, ‘Actually it was her choice. When they split up she had that cottage rebuilt for her. She’s lived there for years and didn’t want anything to do with the big house because it represents too much of Dad’s side of the family. Don’t think she’s not capable of being bitter, though.’
There was a sound of fluids trickling down through pipes. ‘The drip watering system,’ he explained. ‘At this stage each glasshouse gets six minutes’ flow of bore water per hour. For the first couple of months the plants just seem to grow before your eyes, and then before you know it they’re gifting up masses and masses of peppers and chillies. There are capsicums and paprikas in this house, and over there jalapenos and—’
‘Are you still recording as well?’
‘I tinker about. It’s why I like working in the glasshouses. It’s sort of mindless so you have lots of room in your head. I make up songs. I hum them to the plants. The plants appreciate them greatly and respond by producing big red peppers.’ His smile was almost apologetic. The missing years between us contained both his rise to fame and also, apparently, a large decline in scope.
‘Aaah, I was going to ask what you liked about peppers, but now I understand. You needed a captive, or should I say capsicum audience.’
Jed shot me a look, but I knew already, as soon as the words dropped out of my mouth, that I’d accidentally crossed from whimsy into something more conspicuously over-egged. He turned over a leaf on a nearby plant and began examining the underside with an eyeglass he’d taken from his pocket.
‘Have you been missing it? Performing?’ I asked.
Jed glanced at me and didn’t speak for a few moments. I understood in that time that this might not be a straightforward question. Maybe the answer was yes – he had missed it – but it would cost him greatly to admit it even to himself. Or perhaps he’d missed some of it but not all of it. He might be tired already of hearing this question from people like me who no longer knew him all that well, or who were still caught up in an iconic image of him delivering a post-punk hit that was now so mainstream they regularly played it on Classic Hits radio stations.
He was looking at the underside of a new leaf further down the row. I realised I had no real idea why he gave it up. I didn’t even know if he still had a band together. I knew nothing at all, except for rumours of a comeback that were so frequent they pointed to some truth, and the assumption that the born performer could pro
bably never really escape the need for an audience. And there was my own belief, too, that if somebody was lucky enough to have talent, then surely it was a complicated form of civic crime for that to be constrained.
‘See that,’ he said, handing me the eyeglass. ‘That’s a good guy.’
It took me a moment to find the tiny yellow mite moving about near the spine of the leaf. ‘What does he do?’
‘Eats the eggs of thrip. He’s called cucumeris and if he’s around that’s a good thing – no thrip.’
‘What does thrip do?
‘Mostly chews on the flowers, and no flowers, no fruit.’
‘So these little predators are introduced?’
‘Yup. I try to use biological control as a convention. It’s better than sprays and shit.’
He was not going to answer my other question.
‘I’m not missing working in the restaurant,’ I said after a while.
‘Is that what you’ve been doing? If that so-called jam tart is any indication of how you’re idling away your time, I think I’m going to like having you around.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Look, I’ve got a delivery to make now. But come again,’ he said. ‘Come tomorrow – I stop for morning tea around ten.’
I very nearly said, ‘I know.’
In the Neighbourhood of Fame Page 5