by Alex Miller
The voice of her sister called, ‘You in there Annie?’ Her sandals clattering on the front steps of the verandah.
Annabelle went out onto the verandah and unbolted the front door. They embraced and kissed.
‘Christ, just look at you!’ Elizabeth said. ‘I knew you’d be here the minute he told me you’d gone. Why have you got your mobile switched off?’
Annabelle surprised herself by saying firmly, ‘I’m not going back to him, Beth. So don’t start being an intermediary.’
Elizabeth said, ‘He’ll crumple. He’ll be a hopeless mess without you.’
‘He should have thought of that before he went off fucking his honours students.’
‘You’re being brutal. He was mesmerised. She’s got big tits and beautiful thighs. What do you expect? He’s only a man. She shimmered at him. They can’t resist it. Anyway it’s over. It was a little burst of glory for him. He needs you now. You’re his reality.’
‘I never want to see him again.’
‘Grow up for God’s sake, Annie! He’s just had a little affair. None of us are perfect. You’ve got to let them have a bit of fun now and again.’
‘It’s not that. It’s not him I’m thinking of. It’s me. I’m suddenly free to decide things. I haven’t been free since I was in my twenties.’
Elizabeth said incredulously, ‘Free? You’re not a bloody hippie, are you? Who’s free, for Christ’s sake?’ She stepped into the living room and looked around. ‘God this place stinks. You’d better move in with me for the time being.’
Annabelle followed her sister. ‘He humiliated me. He discarded me without a thought.’
Elizabeth turned and looked at her. ‘You’re being melodramatic.’
‘You can scoff if you like, but for the moment I want to enjoy my freedom. Susan’s been fantastic. She understands.’
Elizabeth said drily, ‘Susan Bassett’s a man-hater.’
‘No she’s not.’
‘She’s never had to deal with this stuff. You’re being too tough on Steven. You’re being unbalanced.’ She stood looking at Elizabeth. ‘Come on, get some clothes on. I’ll shout you lunch. Give yourself a week or two.’ She put her arm through Annabelle’s. ‘Europe was wonderful. I want to live in Paris. I’m going to see if I can wangle it. You’ve got a department of foreign travel and rorts at that uni where you work haven’t you? My French was better than I’d thought. Not the left bank though. Somewhere near the Madeleine. One of those little business streets with six houses in it and a little North African café at the end.’
They went together into the bedroom.
Annabelle looked through the things in the suitcase she’d brought with her from Melbourne. She pulled out a pair of jeans and a white top. ‘You’re looking pretty good for a jet-lagged world traveller.’
Elizabeth said, ‘Thanks.’ She sat on the bed and crossed her legs, observing herself in the wardrobe mirror. She was thin. Older than Annabelle. Below the foundation line on her neck an unhealthy sallowness of her skin against the warm brown tones of her expensive linen dress. A gold wedding band on her left hand, a plain gold bangle on her right wrist, discreet gold pins in her ears, her tinted hair stylish and severe. In her brown eyes a sadness. The worn, discontented, regretful look of an unhappy woman. ‘Mum and dad’s old room,’ she said. ‘Just think of them in here. It all loses its vitality so quickly. The past terrifies me. I didn’t let Peter take any photos this time. As soon as I have a photo taken of myself I think of the photos in those horrible albums of mum and dad’s.’ She looked around as if she expected to see the family snapshot albums. ‘You look at yourself and you’re nearly fifty looking at yourself being twenty and it only seems a minute.’ She smoothed the front of her dress with her hands, admiring her flat stomach, the action caressing and affectionate, for the dress and for herself, pleasure and anxiety in equal measures.
Annabelle was ready. She stood looking at her sister. ‘It’s a beautiful dress.’
‘It’s Italian.’
They admired the brown dress.
Annabelle said, ‘I can’t wear brown. It’s lovely on you. It’s just the colour of your eyes.’
Elizabeth stood up and hugged her, a tear glistening suddenly in the corners of her eyes that were the colour of her dress.
Annabelle said, ‘I met Bo Rennie.’
‘That old charmer. Where did you meet him?’
‘I’ve just been down to Burranbah with him and Susan. You knew him? I mean more than I did. He was just somebody whose name I heard.’
‘About a hundred years ago in Mount Coolon. We run into each other here from time to time. It’s impossible to avoid people in Townsville.’
On their way out, Elizabeth said, ‘We’ll have to get rid of this gloomy old furniture of mum and dad’s before we sell this place. It devalues the house.’
Elizabeth said, ‘Remember how dark the house was when we were kids at Haddon Hill? They did everything in those days to keep the daylight out of their houses. Do people still live like that out there?’ She touched the carved backrest of a settee. ‘This wasn’t really mum and dad’s, though, was it? I mean, it was grandma and grandpa’s originally. It’s been in our family for ever.’
‘Mum and dad never changed it, did they? They lived with it their entire lives. They could have changed it if they’d wanted to change it. It’s ghastly.’ There was a pedantic insistence in Elizabeth’s delivery, as if she were correcting her sister’s misperception of how things had been with their parents. She went out and down the steps. Annabelle followed her and they got into Elizabeth’s maroon Camry, their sense of disagreement silencing them. The old pattern of their early relationship reasserting itself. Their desire to be close thwarted by an embedded rivalry. Annabelle thought of it as Elizabeth’s determination to remain the older sister. To always be the one to know. It was beyond their control. The truth was, Annabelle admitted to herself, she had always found it hard to like her sister. If they had not been sisters, she doubted if she would have persisted with the relationship.
Over lunch she irritated Elizabeth even more by refusing her offer of a bed at her flat for a day or two. But she knew that if Steven followed her to Townsville, at Elizabeth’s flat her position would be weak. She would feel uprooted and vulnerable there. Whereas if she were properly established in her parents’ house in Zamia Street she would be more capable of resisting him. After lunch Annabelle walked to the Kmart on her own and loaded a trolley with groceries, meat, vegetables and household cleaners. It made her feel normal and in charge of her life. She caught a taxi back to Zamia Street with her haul. Before putting the shopping away she set about cleaning the old Bel-Air refrigerator and scrubbing out the kitchen cupboards. There were drifts of mouse droppings in the drawers and cupboards and their pungent smell was everywhere. After the cupboards and the refrigerator she kept going, working herself into a cleaning frenzy, and by the time she gave up it was past midnight. She had almost restored the kitchen to the place her mother had once felt at home in.
She had a shower and went to bed. She lay wide awake in her parents’ old bed, her muscles aching, gazing up through the open shutters at the tropical sky and she thought of her mother lying awake gazing out at the same patch of starlit sky. ‘I am in my stronghold,’ she whispered and went to sleep.
It was towards noon the following day. She had opened all the windows and doors in the house and was on her knees scrubbing the lino, when she heard a car pull into the sideway. She knew it would be Steven in a taxi from the airport. She would not be surprised if Elizabeth was with him. She stood up and wiped the sweat from her face, and tried to compose her mind for the confrontation. She murmured, ‘Wish me luck, mum,’ and went out onto the side steps. Bo was stepping down from the cabin of Susan’s Pajero.
Annabelle felt a surge of relief and happiness to see him.
He turned and raised his hat, grinning and holding up a plastic bag in his other hand for her to see. ‘I brought some mangrove
jacks for your lunch.’
He was obviously not brooding on her failure to respond with the right level of enthusiasm to his offer to take her to his heartland. Seeing him made her think of Burranbah and the poisoned boxforest. She saw herself walking the stony ridges of the Isaac with him. She called, ‘You’re my first visitor.’
He shut the door of the Pajero and walked across. He came up the steps and opened the neck of the bag for her to see. They stood together looking in at the blue-grey bodies of the fish, rainbow gleams along the rise of their immaculate flanks. ‘Mangrove jacks,’ he said softly, as if he confided secret information. ‘They’re sweet little fellers.’ He looked her up and down and grinned. ‘You’ve got up a pretty good sweat there.’
‘Come and look.’ She went ahead of him into the kitchen. She pointed at the lino. ‘See the line where I’ve done and where it’s still dirty?’
He shook his head with admiration. ‘You’re a worker all right.’
She opened a cupboard. ‘See? All clean and stocked up. Will you stay for lunch? I’ve got heaps of food. Not like Dougald’s place.’
‘The old Dougald’s supplies gets eaten out pretty quick by that big boy of his.’ Bo set the bag of fish on the draining board. ‘I’ll clean these fellers. We’ll grill them whole.’ He gestured at the stove. ‘You got a gas griller there that’ll do the job. You cleaned her too by the look of it.’ He waved his hand. ‘You get on with your scrubbing. I don’t mean to stop you.’
She went over and looked at the fish where he’d tipped them out on the steel draining board. ‘Did you catch them yourself?’
He gestured towards the door, ‘You can always get yourself a feed of fish down that Black River boat ramp if you got the right bait. They was jumping onto the hook this morning. I’ll take you down there one of these days.’ He looked at her quickly. ‘You like fish, don’t you?’
‘I love fish.’
‘I see you got plenty of lemons on that tree out there. You gotta have lemons with fish.’
They stood looking out the open window at a big old broken lemon tree.
There was a moment of silence between them and a slight awkwardness.
Bo cleared his throat and looked at her, as if he wished to explain himself. ‘I’m taking Arner and Trace down that Ranna Valley with me on Monday. I’m gonna do that preliminary survey for Les Marra. He’s bringing the dam company people down in a helicopter. He wants me there doing the survey when they visit.’ He fell silent. He made a throwing motion at the half-cleaned lino and the room. ‘You’re cleaning the house, and you’ve stocked up on food. So I reckon you’re not leaving right away?’
‘No,’ she said. She stood looking at the lino with him. ‘I don’t feel ready to go back to Melbourne yet.’
He said, ‘I don’t know whether you thought about what Susan was saying in the servo at Bowen the other day?’
‘About going to Ranna, you mean?’
‘That’s it.’
She met his gaze. ‘I’d like to go,’ she said. ‘But I don’t want to impose.’
He nodded. ‘You won’t be imposing.’ He waited. ‘Trace asked me if you’d be coming.’
‘Did she?’ Annabelle was touched by Trace’s interest.
‘She’s a pretty sharp kid that one.’ He grinned. ‘She’s not as tough as she makes out.’
‘What did you tell her?’
He took off his hat and set it on the benchtop on its crown and ran his fingers through his hair. He turned back and looked at her. ‘I told her you was coming.’
Annabelle made a small involuntary sound of pleased surprise.
They stood looking at each other.
‘I’d better clean these fish,’ he said. ‘Before I get into trouble.’
‘I’ll finish the floor.’ She hesitated. ‘I’m going to have to buy some things before Monday. I’m not sure what I’ll need. Will I need a swag?’
‘Susan’s got everything,’ he said. ‘She’s gonna lend you a swag.’
She said, ‘So you already talked to Susan?’
‘She reckoned you’d probably go. She’s all set to put you on the payroll if you want.’
Annabelle laughed. ‘You two seem to know my mind better than I do.’
‘Well,’ he said, his manner a touch more serious. ‘Susan’s happy having you around. She was pretty down on things till you come up. She said not to say nothing to you, but I know she needs a partner in the business and you coming up here like this has got her hopes up. It’s getting too much for her on her own.’ He shrugged, ‘It won’t hurt to tell you, she’s wishing you’ll decide not to go back to that husband of yours.’
Annabelle looked away out the window. ‘Why aren’t you a partner in the business?’ she asked.
‘I’m representing my clan group on these surveys,’ he said. ‘The other clan groups wouldn’t deal with Susan if she had me on the payroll. They’d reckon she was just looking out for my mob. There’s politics stitched up in all of this. Susan lets it irritate her. But if she just settled back she’d see this is the way it’s always been up here between the clans. Everyone’s looking out for his own mob. No one’s never going to change that. She may as well ride with it.’
A white cat came and stood in the open kitchen door and gazed at them.
Bo said, ‘I’ll have something for you in a minute there, Mister White.’ He spoke as if he and the cat had already discussed the matter of titbits from the fish.
The cat meowed and arched its back against the doorframe, as if it heard its familiar name.
‘How do you know its name?’ Annabelle said. She went over and bent down and scratched the cat behind the ears.
‘These cats all got their names,’ Bo said, his manner playfully mysterious. He stood sharpening one of her mother’s kitchen knives on the steel, looking down at Annabelle and the cat. ‘I think he’s decided to adopt you,’ he said. ‘He must like the smell of Pine-O-Cleen.’
After lunch they went out onto the back verandah and sat in her parents’ old cane chairs overlooking the wildgrown garden. Bo smoked a cigarette. The cat came out with them and rubbed himself against the legs of their chairs then jumped off the verandah and disappeared into the garden.
Bo said lazily, ‘Look out birds, here comes Mister White.’
They sat there not speaking in the warm afternoon shade of the verandah, gazing out at the undergrowth below the coconuts and the mango trees where Mister White had disappeared. The captive cockatoo screeching next door, freight trains hooting to each other in the South Townsville yards.
Bo said, ‘Your people picked out a good spot here.’
‘It could easily feel like home,’ Annabelle said. They fell silent again. After a while she asked, ‘How old was your grandmother when she went to live at Ranna?’
Bo eased himself, the fibres of his chair creaking. He gestured over towards the southwest. ‘Grandma’s people come from that Suttor country where your folks had their run.’ He swivelled around and looked at her. ‘They ever tell you that?’
‘No,’ she said, and wondered if he would believe her. But it was true. What went on between her parents and the local Murri people was never spoken of in the house. Their relations had remained a mystery to her throughout her childhood.
‘Her mob used to camp out there at that redcliff by the chain of waterholes. She used to tell us them Rennies come over there and took her and her sister May down to Ranna when she was eight years old. They had her helping in the laundry at first. Then when she got a bit of age on her they promoted her up to the house to take care of them three girls. And their brother George, too, when he was about the place and not away buying bulls and bloodhorses or looking for new country out west. They was never still, them fellers. There was your granddad, George Bigges and my granddad, Iain Rennie. Them three was young men together and good friends. Rivals too. They liked to travel and visit each other. They thought nothing of riding down to Brisbane and back just to see a horse.’ Bo relit t
he stump of his cigarette, pursing his lips to get the last drag out of it, the fibres of his chair straining.
The cockatoo screeched and the trains hooted and every now and then a vehicle went by along Zamia Street.
Annabelle said nothing. It was the first time anyone had spoken to her about these things. She felt the touch of her own unexplored past in the facts of Bo’s history. The waterhole by the redcliff where she and he had tumbled in the Suttor together as babies, his grandmother and her own mother sitting in the shade of the cliff on the bank looking on, telling each other their thoughts and caring for the children together. There was so much of her own past that she did not know. So much that was no more than a shadow for her. How had her own mother and Grandma Rennie been friends enough to share a picnic, and yet their friendship never been spoken of at Haddon Hill?
Bo flicked the dead butt of his cigarette into the undergrowth and took out his packet of Drum. ‘By the time she was fifteen Grandma was one of them. And easily the prettiest. I seen her photo. She was wearing a becoming gown, with pearls at her throat. May, her sister, was jealous of her getting promoted up to being one of them and never got over resenting it. Iain Rennie was supposed to be courting the eldest Bigges girl, Katherine. But she was stern-faced like all them Bigges women and Iain Rennie’s glance soon slid over onto Grandma.’ He waved his hand at the house. ‘There used to be a photograph hung over the stove in the kitchen at Verbena when I was a kid. Them three Bigges girls and Grandma taking tea on the verandah at the Ranna homestead, May wearing a pinafore, standing holding a tray in the shadow of the doorway behind them. I can just imagine what May was thinking. Your old granddad and Iain Rennie in their dark suits and stand-up collars posted behind the girls’ chairs. Iain Rennie touching the back of Katherine Bigges’ chair but his gaze on Grandma.’ Bo leaned forward and lit the fresh cigarette and he drew in the smoke and coughed and sat back. ‘Grandma used to take that photo down from above the stove of an evening and we’d all crowd around her at the kitchen table over there at Verbena and she’d tell us stories of Ranna Station in them old days and how she lived like a young lady and learned to play the piano and speak French and how Iain Rennie courted her just the way a gentleman should court a young lady.’ He fell silent after the rush of words, breathing and drawing on his cigarette. ‘And she fell in love with him and stayed in love with him for the rest of her life.’ He paused. ‘I don’t know what happened to that photo. That boy of May’s probably got hold of it like he got hold of everything else. It was George Bigges took it. He took photographs on glass plates of all the stations and people in the district.’ He turned and looked at her. ‘Your folks would have had some of his photographs over there at Haddon Hill. I’m sure of that. Grandma reckoned he was never without his camera when he was travelling. He always had a packhorse with him to carry his photographic equipment. You ever see any of them photos?’