The Rip
Page 13
‘Not if you’re careful with your shoe direction.’
‘Don’t try joking with Desiree about this stuff.’
‘Things are OK between you, aren’t they?’
‘Well, they are compared to when a carpet python was curled up in the lounge room. And pointing the wrong way.’ And now he laughed. ‘A two-metre snake living on the TV set really wrecks the feng shui.’
We finished our coffee, I picked up my bag of beans and a selection of his exotic fruits, their spottiness, skin lumps and irregular size pointing out their organic origins, and I started to leave.
‘I don’t believe in that stuff for a second,’ he said quietly. ‘But when I’m undressing I turn my boots around, even if she’s not watching. I’ve tossed out all my old keys. Look, it can’t hurt.’
For a few months, thanks to Desiree’s stern feng shui principles relating to shoes, keys and indoor pythons, Eric’s life seemed on the upturn. Then came the pronouncement the countryside was both dreading and wishing for: details of the long-proposed Pacific Highway upgrade.
After a decade, the new route was finally announced – a major realignment to wipe out the notorious curves and hills between Woodburn and Ballina, and Tintenbar and Byron Bay. It would allow even more trucks, carrying heavier loads, to hurtle faster between Sydney and Brisbane. Apart from abetting the destruction – so its opponents alleged – of fifty threatened fauna species, including the Coxen’s fig parrot and Albert’s lyrebird, and one of the region’s few remaining healthy koala populations, the upgraded highway would wipe out 1000 hectares of farmland.
Eric learnt that his land would be cut in half and he’d lose a twenty-hectare strip of coffee bushes, fruit and macadamia trees right down the middle. The authorities assured him, however, that his farmhouse would not be bulldozed. Instead it would be separated from his plantations by six lanes of speeding traffic. In order to tend his land each day, and roast his coffee beans, he’d have to drive ten kilometres, then cross the highway via an overpass or roundabout. As recompense for the noise and inconvenience, the Roads and Traffic Authority had offered to provide double-glazing for his windows.
This was one piece of life alignment beyond even Desiree’s talents. For three days Eric retreated to the pub to consider fate’s various configurations over neatly lined-up schooners of Coopers Draught. The sudden peril facing the Coxen’s fig parrot and Albert’s lyrebird did not move him unduly (the parrot’s name was a bit of a giveaway); as an orchardist he saw all birds, if not as the enemy, then definitely as collaborators. But he had a soft spot for koalas and was sorry they’d be sharing the latest episode in his saga of rotten luck.
The highway-through-his-land decision joined the list of misfortunes he’d had to bear over the past year, beginning with Jeannie’s journey to the cottage of that snake-hipped painter of dolphins and frangipanis. His mother dying; the brouhaha over her will; his burnt hand in the coffee roaster; the drop in macadamia prices – as he saw it, this litany of bad luck could be sheeted home to bloody Sargasso, the name-thief of the graveyard of ships and the birthplace of eels, who’d also stolen his wife.
By now Eric had had a big enough serving of what life was currently dishing out. A protest was planned against the highway upgrade and he decided to join it. So it was arranged. A convoy of angry farmers driving tractors, farm trucks, bulldozers and a prime mover assembled outside Byron Bay, to crawl at fifteen kilometres an hour along the Pacific Highway to Ballina, where a petition of thousands of protesting signatures would be submitted to the government.
Eric drove his tractor. He was feeling so righteous that for once he experienced a bonding with the parrot- and marsupial-loving environmentalists also gathered at the assembly point. Weren’t they all in this together? As the convoy moved off, people in koala suits enthusiastically indicated with their furry paws and muffled voices that they’d like to join in the farmers’ protest. ‘Jump aboard!’ yelled Eric to one eager koala and, with the traffic already banking up behind them, they set off down the highway.
At fifteen kilometres an hour, under a rigid police escort, two sets of buttocks pressed together on the one metal tractor seat, it was a very long two and a half hours to Ballina. Especially when Eric’s passenger, sweating from the heat after only ten minutes, took off his koala head.
‘We need to talk, man,’ said Sargasso.
Acknowledgements
EARLY FRAGMENTS OF some of these stories first appeared in A2, The Age magazine, for which I thank the editors, especially Sally Heath and Liza Power.
‘The Lap Pool’, ‘The Aquarium at Night’ and ‘How to Kill a Cane Toad’ were first published in Meanjin; ‘The Water Person and the Tree Person’ in Griffith Review and The Weekend Australian Magazine; ‘Stones Like Hearts’ in Lines in the Sand, the seventieth-anniversary anthology of the Fellowship of Australian Writers, Western Australia; and ‘The Life Alignment of the Coffee Grower’ in Rusty’s Byron Guide.
For important reasons, my thanks to Fiona Daniels and my daughter Amy.
‘The Whale Watchers’ is by way of homage to John Cheever’s story ‘Reunion’.