Love in the Age of Drought

by Fiona Higgins

  ‘Hello?’ I called out. No response from within.

  ‘Excuse me?’ I called, craning my neck and peering towards the back room, hoping to catch the attention of a staff member. My eye fell on a note on the counter: ‘Gone to lunch. Back 1.00 pm.’ Did they forget to lock the shop? I checked my watch; it had just gone midday. Next to the note, another sign of life, a two-dollar coin and a scrawled message beneath it: ‘Harry, I took a washer. Ta. Bob.’ Now wait a minute, I thought to myself. Surely we’re not operating on an honour system here?

  I backed out of the store and walked around the corner to the newsagency.

  ‘Hi, Bill,’ I called, as the door swung inward. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Not too shabby,’ Bill replied. ‘How’s y’self?’

  I glanced about the store. ‘Do you sell D-size batteries?’ I asked.

  Bill shook his head. ‘Nuh, but the hardware store does.’

  ‘Mmm, I just popped in there,’ I said. ‘The door was open, but no-one seemed to be around.’

  Bill chuckled and leant forward on the counter. ‘Yeah, Harry likes an early lunch with his missus,’ he said. ‘So just go back and take what you need, and leave a note for him. You can pay him next time you come to town.’

  But I don’t even know Harry. How can he trust me?

  ‘Well, I’ll do that,’ I said, amazed. ‘But I need a birthday card first. I almost forgot my friend’s birthday in Sydney. She wouldn’t forgive me.’ Bill waved a hand towards a stand of greeting cards in the back corner.

  ‘They’re over there,’ he said.

  The selection was limited; I chose a generic, slightly feminine card and walked back to the counter.

  ‘Do you sell stamps, Bill?’ I asked.

  ‘Nuh,’ he replied, ‘the post office does.’

  I sighed; this was turning into a frustrating shopping mission.

  ‘But the post office doesn’t open until Monday, and I won’t be able to get back to town before late Monday afternoon,’ I complained. ‘So my card won’t go until Tuesday, which means I’ll miss her birthday.’

  Bill sauntered over to the newspaper stand and collected a copy of The Australian.

  ‘Want one of these?’ he asked helpfully. ‘I ordered one ’specially for you.’

  ‘Thanks, Bill. That wouldn’t happen in Sydney.’ I smiled. ‘And a Turkish Delight, please.’

  As he placed the items on the counter, Bill looked up casually. ‘Y’know, you don’t have to come to town to buy your stamps on Monday at all,’ he said. ‘The way Jim works round here is a bit different, I guess.’

  ‘Who’s Jim?’ I asked absently, digging around in my wallet for coins.

  ‘Jim’s the postman, y’duffer,’ Bill replied. ‘If you need a letter posted, just pop it in your letterbox and Jim’ll take it for you when he delivers your mail.’

  I stopped digging and paid attention.

  ‘And if you don’t have any stamps just leave Jim some money and he’ll buy some for you. He’ll bring your change next time he comes by.’

  I stared at Bill, agog. A postman who collects your mail and buys stamps for you? I marvelled at this level of service.

  ‘And you know,’ added Bill, ‘if you ever need a birthday card again, don’t bother making a special trip into town. Uses too much fuel, which is a bugger at these prices. Just give me a call and I’ll pick one out for you. I’ll give it to Jim on his postie run.’ Stunned by this generous offer, I thanked Bill for his advice.

  The system worked a treat. On Monday morning, I left three unstamped letters in my mailbox – including Genevieve’s birthday card – with a note for Jim the Postie, enclosing ten dollars. Hi, Jim. Would you mind buying ten stamps and sending these letters in today’s post? Many thanks, Fiona. The mail was collected and delivered three times a week in Jandowae. On Wednesday morning, some 48 hours later, a white postal van pulled into the driveway and stopped in front of the Danube. Out hopped a man in a fluorescent vest.

  ‘G’day,’ he said, sliding my office door open. ‘I’m Jim. I posted your envelopes on Monday. Here’s the change for your stamps.’

  I shook my head with admiration.

  ‘Jim, that’s fantastic,’ I gushed.

  ‘And here’s your mail for today,’ added Jim, tossing a pile of envelopes into the inbox on my desk. He stopped for a moment and glanced around my office.

  ‘I’ve been trying to guess for weeks what Stu had growing in this donger … thought it might have been hydroponics,’ he said with a sly grin. ‘Turns out it was a sheila from Sydney.’ I laughed aloud as Jim waved goodbye.

  Later that day, I waxed lyrical to Stu about the postal system.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ I enthused, ‘I mean, in Sydney, some posties get surly if you speak to them at all. Jim’s a breath of fresh air.’ Stuart looked thoughtful.

  ‘Yeah, it’s pretty good,’ he agreed. ‘But it does have its drawbacks. Remember how you sent a Valentine’s Day card last year addressed to “Spunky Higgins”? Well, Jim had a bit of fun with that. In fact, so did Peter the postmaster. They kept calling me “Spunky” until August.’ My laughter had a guilty edge – at that time, I’d had no idea of the lack of privacy in Jandowae, nor the power of the bush telegraph.

  ‘But overall,’ I said, ‘you’d have to say the benefits of rural life outweigh the disadvantages, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Well, it has its moments,’ he said. ‘Let’s see how you feel in a year’s time.’

  It was certainly clear that unlike the anonymity of the Big Smoke, where terrorists, sadomasochists and anarchists could melt unnoticed into a mass of surging humanity, citizens of Jandowae couldn’t change their underpants without someone noticing. This was driven home to me during a local barbecue, several days later.

  ‘Now, I’ve heard around the traps that you’re a vegetarian,’ said Joan, the hostess, with brusque efficiency. ‘So I’ve organised a lovely tuna quiche for you.’

  ‘Thanks, Joan,’ I replied, reluctant to advise her that I wasn’t the fish-eating variety of vegetarian.

  Joan guided me towards a group of women standing near a manicured rose garden. Guests spilled out across a lawn kept absurdly verdant in defiance of the drought.

  ‘I’m determined to have my piece of green,’ said Joan. ‘A woman has to have a lawn out here, even if it does mean bucketing water from the shower. You should ask Stuart to put some turf down for you.’

  I nodded politely. While I understood the psychological boost a lawn might offer against the relentless brown of the surrounding landscape, it wasn’t a priority in my current hierarchy of needs. I was flat out convincing Stuart to install wire screens on our windows to keep the wildlife at bay.

  We approached a small gathering of mostly middle-aged ladies clasping Bacardi Breezers.

  ‘This is Fiona,’ Joan announced to the assembled group. ‘She’s just arrived from Sydney, so be nice.’ Then she fluttered away.

  ‘Hello,’ I said self-consciously, glancing about the group. I scanned the crowd for Stu, catching a glimpse of the back of his head among a group of farmers tossing steaks onto the barbecue.

  A tall brunette turned to me and smiled. ‘Paul tells me you’ve been doing a bit of jogging along the Warra–Marnhull Road,’ she observed. ‘Like to keep fit, do you?’ I wondered who Paul was and why, if he’d seen me jogging, I hadn’t seen him.

  ‘Well, it’s such beautiful country around Gebar, it gives me good reason to get outside,’ I replied.

  ‘But what’s beautiful about Gebar?’ demanded a petite redhead. ‘I mean, you’re right on the corner there, with trucks going past all the time. That high-voltage powerline’s bang on your doorstep. And the house could do with a coat of paint.’

  I gazed at her, mystified. Coming from Sydney, I’d never noticed a traffic problem or paid much heed to the transmission line near the property. And I was too busy admiring Gebar’s natural environment to be hung up on the paintwork.

  A stocky blon
de steered the conversation back on track. ‘Well, jogging ruined my ankle,’ she bemoaned, ‘and Darrell says it will never recover.’

  It took me several minutes to determine that Darrell was the district’s physiotherapist and by then, it was too late – the conversation had bolted. Listening to the ebb and flow of the discussion, I tried to keep up as the talk ranged over little Matthew’s teething troubles, the reseeding of the school oval and one family’s poaching of another’s nanny. But when the topic turned to the difficulties of living with an uncommunicative farming husband, I fell silent, adrift in foreign territory.

  ‘I do the books in the morning and the cleaning in the afternoon. I pick up the kids from the school bus, then Ross turns around and expects me to help him move some machinery. And have his meal on the table by 6.30 pm,’ a short brunette named Shirl complained. The other ladies nodded sympathetically.

  And I thought snakes in the house were bad.

  The stocky blonde, Trudy, twisted the lid off a Bacardi Breezer. ‘But you know, Shirl, Ross is under a lot of pressure,’ she said. ‘The only thing our fellas can rely on is dinner on the table every night. Lord knows they can’t count on the weather.’

  Shirl snapped a pretzel in two, nibbling on the smaller piece. ‘Yeah, there should’ve been some rain by now,’ she replied. ‘The cotton’s looking pretty sick. And when that happens, Ross just clams up. We haven’t had a proper conversation in a fortnight.’

  Shirl caught my eye and leaned in towards me. ‘He just stops talking. One season he didn’t speak to me for a whole month,’ she confided, lowering her voice. ‘So I dragged him off to marriage counselling in Toowoomba. Can you believe it? Seeing a marriage counsellor about the drought!’ She shook her head, incredulous. ‘But that’s what you get when you marry a farmer. You know what it’s like.’

  ‘Mmm,’ I agreed, feeling like a con. What did I really know of how hard these women worked, or the mental health challenges of their drought-affected spouses? I hardly stepped out of the Danube during the day. And despite the nervous wait for rain, Stuart seemed to be coping remarkably well with the hiatus. I swallowed a mouthful of white wine and wondered, briefly, whether Stuart’s resilience would last. Dismissing that thought, I smiled at Shirl. ‘Well, speaking of farmers, I’d better find mine,’ I said, excusing myself.

  But there was little conversational solace to be found by the barbecue. Groups of farmers stood about with their Fourex Gold beers, complaining about the fluctuating market and gossiping about machinery acquisitions. Their agricultural jargon was impenetrable to my untrained ears. ‘Johnno reckons it’ll be a three-bale year if those damn aphids don’t let up,’ said a wiry 60-something farmer, as I approached the group. With no sense of what that statement might mean, and Stu nowhere in sight, I resolved to keep walking. I ranged around the property until finally I discovered an external bathroom near the garage.

  Closing the door behind me, I sank onto the toilet in semi-darkness. A suspect sound from the cistern caused me to consider, briefly, if I should have checked for frogs. My eye fell on a calendar plastered on the back of the bathroom door. Closer inspection revealed a ‘Babes and Boars’ theme. The month of March featured a blonde woman (Renee from Townsville) in knee-high white boots and a purple string bikini, cradling a slaughtered baby boar against her well-endowed bosom.

  I flicked through the remaining months of the year, all featuring lurid photographs of women in various states of undress, alongside gory porcine carcasses. The calendar had the backing of a sporting shooters’ association, and marketed itself to men who appreciated ‘hot chicks and grunters’. Joan’s husband clearly counted himself among this group. I sat on the toilet imagining how I would feel if Stuart had a predilection for such calendars. Well, he does own a gun, I recalled.

  Later that night, as we drove back to Gebar in the ute, I mentioned to Stu my encounter with the ‘Babes and Boars’ calendar.

  ‘What do you use your gun for?’ I asked.

  Stuart paused before replying. ‘Well, in all honesty, I have shot a few wild pigs with it. And the odd feral cat.’

  I recoiled at the thought of Stuart killing anything with a gun: it didn’t sit comfortably with my Buddhist-inspired avoidance of harming animals. But what had I hoped he might use it for – target practice?

  ‘Are you okay?’ asked Stuart, reaching over and grasping my knee.

  ‘I guess so,’ I replied. ‘I just didn’t realise you used your gun so much.’

  ‘I don’t actually use it very often at all,’ he said, ‘and I don’t use it for fun, that’s for sure. On a farm, a gun’s useful for pest management. Almost every farm’s got one. You can’t always just shoo the snakes out of the house,’ he said, casting a wry sidelong glance at me.

  I smiled in spite of myself; he had struck my Achilles heel. Here I was, high and mighty about preserving animal life, but only recently I’d practically bayed for serpentine blood.

  ‘Well, if it makes you feel any better,’ he continued, ‘the gun’s locked away and you don’t have to see it. Not even Rhonda knows where it is.’ I yawned, resting my head against his shoulder as the ute bumped over the corrugations in the gravel road.

  ‘Who’s Rhonda, again?’ I asked, closing my eyes.

  ‘The cleaning lady, remember? You’ll meet her on Monday,’ said Stu, as I nodded off.

  Early Monday morning as I stepped out of the shower, I heard an imperious rap on the door and a woman’s voice called out, ‘Who’s there?’

  I hurriedly grabbed a towel from the rack. Shouldn’t I be the one asking that question?

  ‘Hello?’ called the same voice, nearer now. The sound of footsteps in the kitchen made me nervous; it had to be Rhonda, and she’d obviously let herself in. I squeezed the ends of my wet hair and wrapped a towel around myself.

  ‘Yes?’ I called out, sliding the bathroom door partially open.

  A motherly looking woman in her early fifties was heaving a bucket, a mop and two brooms across the kitchen. A slim, tanned male of roughly the same age shuffled dutifully behind her, labouring under the weight of a box of detergent, wipes and brushes.

  ‘Well, this must be Fiona,’ the woman pronounced, waving at me. ‘I’m Rhonda and this is Carl. Let’s have a cuppa.’

  ‘Great, I’ll just put on a robe,’ I said.

  It turned out that Rhonda and Carl were relative ‘newcomers’ to Jandowae, having moved from regional Victoria three years before. As retirees, they’d been attracted by Jandowae’s ‘$1 Block’ scheme – a population-building initiative of the local council to entice newcomers. Like other small country towns in rural Australia, Jandowae had been compromised by a reduction in government services, bank closures and prolonged drought. Its population was dwindling due to rising unemployment and mass relocations to larger regional centres. In an attempt to arrest this decline, the Jandowae Council developed a radical scheme to sell off 38 blocks of superfluous residential and industrial land for just one dollar each. At the time, sceptical locals speculated that they wouldn’t be able to give them away.

  So the locals were surprised, and the council somewhat overwhelmed, when publicity about the initiative went gangbusters – Jandowae rapidly became a topic of conversation in New Zealand, Hong Kong, England and America. There were so many people – including Rhonda and Carl – wanting to buy a block that the council was forced to adopt a ballot system to manage the process. There was a condition, though, for all lucky winners; they had to build a house on their block within twelve months. The council hoped that young families, as well as people willing to start businesses and address critical skills shortages, would be attracted to life in Jandowae.

  While Rhonda and Carl missed out in the ballot, they managed to acquire a modest tract of affordable land the following year, on which they proceeded to build a kit home. Carl, a painter by trade, had single-handedly put the whole home together over several years.

  ‘He’s not just a handyman,’ explained Rhonda,
bursting with pride. ‘He’s the best sponge-maker in Jandowae, and an expert with Christmas lights. He wins prizes almost every year in the Jandowae Show and the Jandowae Christmas Lights competition.’

  This was not the first time I’d heard locals speak of the importance of these two competitions – both seemed to involve as much rivalry and intrigue as any Olympic event.

  ‘So,’ sniffed Rhonda, the tenor of the conversation changing abruptly. ‘I s’pose you won’t be needing our services anymore.’ Confused, I stared from one to the other. What exactly did she mean? For a couple of years before my arrival, Rhonda, assisted by Carl, had been employed to clean Stu’s house.

  ‘Why’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, I s’pose you’ll be doing all the cleaning now,’ Rhonda observed.

  Of course, cleaning is the little woman’s job. I moved quickly to disabuse her.

  ‘Me? No, I’m working full-time up here,’ I explained. ‘I’ll have to fly to Sydney once a month and stay down there for a week at a time. So we’ll probably need you more often, actually.’ Rhonda looked relieved.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you just let me know if there are particular ways you like things cleaned and organised.’ I imagined standing over Rhonda with a stock whip and demanding that the pillowcases be folded just so.

  ‘Thanks, Rhonda,’ I said. ‘But I’m sure you’ll do it beautifully.’

  Over the ensuing weeks of regular cleaning visits, Rhonda attempted to galvanise my interest in the domestic arts.

  ‘Why don’t you put up some curtains?’ she appealed. ‘This place could do with something a little fancy.’ I glanced at the windows with indifference. We didn’t have any neighbours, I reasoned, so why did we need curtains?

  ‘It’s the Jandowae Show next month,’ Rhonda reminded me. ‘You could look at the arts and craft display for ideas.’ I muttered lamely about needing to complete an important work project.

  Rhonda was insistent, however, and after days of badgering, I relented on the matter of curtains. Then the floodgates opened; not only did Rhonda string curtains across windows, she inserted drawer liners (aha!) in places that had never seen the light of day and installed mandatory rural items all over our house. These included a crocheted tea cosy and kitchen towel, doilies for vases and an oval-shaped glass dish for our toothbrushes. Stuart noticed the latter as we brushed our teeth one evening.