It felt as if she was watching herself in that moment. The grappling in her bag for the iPhone. The way she stabbed at the screen, like a hysterical actress in Home and Away. The ridiculous drama of it all as she tossed the phone onto their bed. The phone filling the room with its sordid soundtrack. Charlie’s sex talk, then the woman’s moaning. Rebecca got up off the bed and stood before him, the hurt contorting her face, the tears blurring her vision. And she left him there, standing in his checked boxers, his beer belly with its trail of hair protruding over the elastic, his mouth hanging open, mute, as the phone played back the sounds of the hideous scene.
Part Two
Seventeen
From where she lay on the couch in the bay window of the lounge room, Rebecca could hear the sounds of the Last Post playing on the alarm-clock radio upstairs in Charlie’s bedroom. She knew he was not there to turn it off. He would already be over in the machinery shed, avoiding her. In her sleepy state, she wondered if she could get up and face the day. The boys would soon stir, then she would have no choice.
It had been two months of war at Waters Meeting. A silent, cold war since she’d found out about Charlie’s affair. Along with mental wrestling with herself, of cold-shouldering Charlie. Of midnight talks and tears. Suggestions of counselling from Bec, agreement from Charlie to go, but never an appointment made. There had been last night’s emotionally hurtful sex, where Rebecca had longed to have her husband back and she had tearfully climbed the stairs at midnight to find him. But as she felt his body heat near her, and smelled his coarse odour, the nausea flooded her senses. The knowledge that he had been with another woman seemed to strip everything away. Rebecca had lain beneath him as he humped into her. She’d stared at the blackness, feeling dormant both emotionally and physically. Scrunching her eyes tight, all she could think of was how he had done this very thing to Janine Turner too. She had prised the information out of him as to ‘who’. It was like squeezing a boil and had taken a week to extract from him. The information burst out only to leave a gaping, weeping emotional wound in her. Janine Turner. She was there with them in the room with every angry thrust from Charlie. After Charlie had come inside Rebecca with a groan and a sigh, then tried to hold her, Bec had pulled away from him and begun to cry.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ was all Charlie had said, and Bec had slipped out of bed, moving silently back downstairs like a ghost of herself. Back to what had become her regular night-time place on the couch.
His confession that it was Janine had sparked many nights of raging fights. They shouted in whispers, but soon one of them would roar at the other, the boys’ welfare shamefully forgotten in those moments.
The packages of sex toys and lingerie ordered by Yazzie were still untouched, shoved to the back of the cupboard. Her life in tatters.
And of course there had been two months of business as usual on the farm to endure. In the lounge room on the couch, Rebecca combed her fingers through her knotted long hair and rolled over, streaking her fingertips across the cool pane of glass. Upstairs the Last Post continued to play. A blackness had settled inside her soul. She and Charlie were at a stalemate.
In the mist outside, Bec could see two dark shapes. The curved ridges of the horses’ deep old spines and hummocky old withers echoing the hills beyond. Hank and Ink Jet, Tom’s and her old horses, like old Waler horses, put out to pasture after the war, never to be used again. Charlie always commented that their bony bodies were even too far gone for dog tucker now, their teeth blunt and worn down to yellow stumps. Too weak to tear at grasses. Bec fed them daily with chaff, oats and Completo, and Charlie threatened daily to shoot them both, like he had her old dog.
She thought of dear old Stubby now and wished for the comfort of the old dog’s head that fitted so perfectly under the cupped palm of her hand. Charlie had told her he’d found the dog after a fit, froth in her jaws.
‘Snake or a seizure,’ he’d lied. ‘So I shot her. You shouldn’t have hung onto her for so long.’
Rebecca winced, knowing what he said was true. But she was still shaking mad with Charlie. If only he’d had the courtesy to bury Stubby in the garden, so at least she could sit beside the dog’s grave and say goodbye. But Charlie being Charlie hadn’t thought. Rebecca couldn’t bring herself to go near the offal pit, knowing her dearest old Kelpie had been dumped there.
Now all she had were the horses. They were the last link to Tom and the days when Bec was free to ride the mountains alongside him. Ink Jet and Hank moved eerily past in the white mist. She heard them snort and watched the silhouettes of their lifted heads.
Upstairs in the vacant bedroom, the final heart-wrenching bugle strains echoed throughout the house, then silence. She thought of the fallen Anzacs. The men forever young, hooked dead upon the wire. She thought of the ones who lived, but were maimed in their bodies and in their souls. Her brother Tom was like an Anzac to her. A fallen young man. But now, sitting in the space of her suffering, she wondered, what if Tom had been able to endure life, with all its grotesqueness and harshness? What kind of a man would he be now? One scarred by life’s battles? Or, like her, forced on paths he never intended to take, battling what was within and raging at what was outside himself. Was she grieving the loss of Tom and the Anzacs, or was she grieving the loss of her own youth? Was that what she was grieving of Charlie and herself? The loss of his youth? The romance of him?
As he had aged, his face had become more steely. An expression of disdain towards Rebecca and her ideas seemed to drag his expression downwards when he looked at her. She thought of him now as the young man she had once loved and suddenly she was grieving him. And angry at what she had allowed him to do to her. Now she could see the brutality of his passively aggressive ways with her. Now she could see she had let him scar her so deeply that the wounds were carried within her, from the inside out.
Getting up, she dragged on yesterday’s clothes — work jeans, old grey bra, red T-shirt with the tear in the shoulder and a faded flannelette shirt — then slowly she went to the kitchen.
At the sink she ran the water so it was boiling hot and shoved her hands in so they were reddened and stinging. Her head pounded from clenching her jaw tightly in her sleep. Too many thoughts swam in her mind. Most of them negative. All of them hurtful.
She watched the steam curl its way up the windowpane pressing against the cool misty morning air outside. The house was so quiet she could hear the detergent bubbles pop. Rebecca swiped her nose with the back of her hand.
She thought of her boys.
Some nights she slept with one of them just to ease her loneliness, feeling guilt that she was relying on such young beings for solace. She found comfort in turning back the tumble of the tractor-print quilt cover and snuggle rugs, pulling the warm sleeping body of Archie or Ben to her. She pressed her face against the skin of their necks, breathing in their sleepy little boy smell, as sweet as fresh-mown hay, as divine as chocolate. On nights like that, she watched her whole life unravelling behind the dark canopy of her closed eyelids.
Should she ask Charlie to leave? Could she make a go of it, just her and the boys? She’d run the farm on her own in the past, years back. Surely she could do it again? But her body felt old and busted now. Who could she call on to help? She thought of leaning on her rural financial counsellor friend, Sally, as she had done years before. Even though Sally was busy with twins, she’d pulled her out of a mess before, not long after her dad had had the accident, but could they do it a second time now they were both mothers? Rebecca realised, disturbed, that history was repeating the messes of her life.
She wondered how to protect Archie and Ben from what was unfolding around her. Should she even be making such a big deal? Surely couples went through infidelities all the time and their marriages survived. Didn’t they? But Rebecca knew it was more than that. Charlie had left her as a friend and lover a long time before Janine. The sting of hurt came again and she pulled the image of her boys to her, knowing they were p
art of the jigsaw puzzle as to why Charlie and she had drifted apart.
Now, at the sink, she wondered how long she could stand this silent, unshifting stand-off between them. There was no remorse in him. His anger was hovering in his space like a shroud over him. And he was blaming her. Blaming her for all the miseries he carried inside himself. And she, to a point, had been blaming him for all her failed dreams. Today she resolved she would make some changes. Move things along. Today she resolved she would ask him to leave. It was her farm. It was her Waters Meeting.
She heard the familiar noise of the boys creaking their way sleepily down the stairs in search of her. In the mornings, Archie was always cuddly, Ben hungry. She stripped the little one out of his junior pull-up, throwing it in the bin, before helping him back into his pyjama bottoms. She relished the touch of his tiny hand steadying himself on her forearm as she kneeled beside him. The toast popped as she swooped him and Ben up in a quick good-morning hug, kissing them on their heads. Hastily she buttered the toast and grabbed for the Vegemite. In the lounge room, she rummaged through a small mountain of washing that was piled on the couch to find Ben’s uniform. She set the little dark blue shorts and a light blue polo shirt in front of the kitchen woodstove, running her fingers over the emblem of the Bendoorin primary school, a mountain eagle, embroidered above the heart. It was only then she remembered it was Anzac Day. A public holiday. There was no school today.
She covered her eyes with the palm of her hand and felt the tears burn inside her closed eyelids, the emotion rising like hands about her throat, constricting her breath. Was she going mad?
As she thought this, Charlie sauntered in, tossing an oily machinery part on the kitchen table amidst the tumble of plates, toys, Textas and unopened mail. Busy with what she was doing, she didn’t turn to face him. Instead she felt his presence behind her. Like a sniper’s.
‘Bearing’s gone. Bloody brand-new plough. You going to town?’
‘It’s a public holiday,’ she said, wanting to add ‘dipstick’ to the end of her sentence but refraining, bitterly laughing inwardly at her own joke, mostly pointed at herself.
Archie sent up a bloodcurdling scream as Ben accidentally jammed his little brother’s fingers in the toy box. The sounds of cartoons burbled happily, skippily in the background from the forgotten TV in the corner. Charlie didn’t move to help, instead picking up the paper. As Rebecca went to Archie to comfort him, she shot Charlie a look. He sat amidst the kerfuffle of morning activity sipping coffee, absently spooning porridge into his mouth, reading the paper, as if the farm business depended on it for the day. Rebecca had long given up asking him to wipe down a benchtop or make a sandwich. The days when he helped in the house were long gone.
As she scooped up Archie and inspected his reddened fingers, kissing them better, and as Ben clung to her, saying over and over, ‘I didn’t mean to, Mummy. It was an accident,’ she cast Charlie another dark look.
‘For god’s sake, Charlie, take them for a moment. Please. I need a rest.’
‘A rest? From what?’ Charlie said. He must have seen she was about to cry. He threw the paper down in a huff and stood abruptly. ‘Get your coats,’ he said to the children.
‘But they’re not dressed yet.’
‘And?’
She watched, her body shaking, as Charlie dragged the coats on over their pyjamas and jammed little footy beanies onto their heads, taking them out into the misty morning via the verandah doors and jamming on their boots.
When they were gone, Rebecca silenced the morning cartoons with a flick of the remote and went back to the sink. But as she felt the giant space of aloneness in the big old grimy house, she suddenly felt violently ill. She ran outside to the mudroom toilet, banging open the door and promptly throwing up in the bowl. She had been like this after Tom’s death. She knew her body gave way to stress via her stomach. At least, she thought wryly, I’ll lose weight feeling like this. As she bent, catching her breath over the bowl, she winced at the fresh and crusted splatters from Charlie’s morning crap. Why did his mother not teach him to use a toilet brush? she thought angrily. His mother could bloody well have him back. She thought of Mrs Lewis in her house frock and sensible old-lady shoes. The way she served the Lewis men on the expansive wheat property in the west, silently meeting their every need. Providing them with ironed underpants, cream buns fresh made for smoko, baked dinners and crisp clean sheets. Really, Rebecca wondered, what was the point when the men, if left to it, would live like animals in their own grime and survive on chops, beer, white bread and tinned baked beans.
She shut her eyes and felt another swell of nausea, her body giving way to the stress and grief she had endured.
At the washroom tub she splashed cold water over her face and tried to look at the paddock beyond, but the morning fog impaired her view. The horse paddock outside looked like a gas-filled battleground as the gentle morning sun edged its way up into the sky. A faint morning star to the west blinked weakly at her before fading beneath the cap of a mountain. Swiping a dirty hand towel over the grubby washroom window, she heard the rumble of Charlie’s tractor in the machinery shed.
He was hell bent on ploughing again. She left one sink for another, going from the washroom back to the kitchen. She plunged her hands into the kitchen sink. ‘Chained to it’ was the expression. She certainly felt that way.
She had felt this slow rusting of a marriage. A seizing-up of love. Was she just numb from busyness or motherhood? Or had it all been her own convenient lie right from the outset? Were the farming men of her generation just not advanced enough to let go for a woman? Too many questions. Too many days alone. She had shut herself off from Yazzie and even Gabs, and now she was regretting it. She felt utterly bereft.
She cleaned the kitchen window with a tea towel so she could see a view of the property. This vista looked as barren as the one from the washroom. It wasn’t a case of ‘if only it would rain’. It was more a case of ‘if only Charlie would take on the grazing management systems I’ve been studying’. That way the morning dew would have all been captured by long vibrant living grasses instead of landing on barren and bare overgrazed soil.
She held the thought of what was going wrong with the farm so tightly within herself that every sinew and muscle in her body hurt with the tension of highly strung wire. She was tired, but sleep never seemed to make amends for the years of living that, at times, seemed so pointless on Waters Meeting when the bills kept coming in and money was always so tight. She still thought often of the messages on her phone. The handset sat on the kitchen dresser now on top of a painting Archie had done at mothers’ group last week. Even though Rebecca had erased the voice mail, the memory haunted her.
As she stacked Archie’s Winnie the Pooh plate in the drainer, her eyes caught sight of the horses lifting their heads. They baulked, trotted and snorted, mist escaping their nostrils like dragons. Bec frowned, knowing the old nags rarely shied at anything these days … not even the tarp flapping loose from the ute as it sped by or the sheets cracking in a gale on the clothesline. Something was up.
Walking outside, she rounded the side path. There she could see the young black heifers rampaging about, some of them gaining speed to a gallop, heads low, tails carried high. Some kicked fat hocks in the air. Squinting, Bec strained to see what the commotion was about. She glanced back to the machinery shed. Charlie was in the tractor, and she could just make out Ben playing with a stick in the water trough near the horse yard. But where was Archie?
‘Charlie! Where’s Archie?’ she called, but she knew he wouldn’t hear her. He had the new sound system blaring with AC/DC. In front of her, the young cattle fizzed in excitement. But why?
Bec jogged to the front of the old two-storey homestead and looked down over the bank that fell away to the river flats. And then she saw it. The gate jutted open like a piece of puzzle that had been missing but was now found. The older Angus cows and their one-tonne masculine companion had escaped and were gal
loping fast at a frightening freight-train pace towards the mob of equally stirry heifers in the neighbouring paddock. And there, between the two herds, stood her little boy Archie looking like a small pebble about to be swept away by a massive tide.
‘Archie!’ she called, desperately reining in a scream, vaulting the fence. Her wrist caught on a piece of jutting wire and was instantly etched deeply with bright blood. ‘Stay still!’ She tried to keep the panic out of her voice.
The little boy looked up to see the cattle bearing towards him. They were thundering, flowing around him. He looked beyond them to his mother, his face white, his eyes fearful.
Rebecca sprinted, not registering the pain as the soles of her socked feet met with the sharp corners of rocks that the plough had spewed up from the soil last summer.
She tried to keep a calm expression on her face as she bolted towards Archie, to not let him see the terror that coursed through her. He was so tiny and the cattle so massive and in that vast expanse of riverside paddock there was no trench, no ditch, no tree in which to seek refuge from the crazed herd.
Archie began to run towards her.
‘Stay still, Archie!’ she screamed again. There was terror on his face as he battled over the hoof-pugged black soil flats with his little legs and tiny farm boots.
Just as she was about to reach him, the young Poll bull bore down on Archie. The bull’s head cast low. Then came the sickening thud as the hard black dome of the bull’s head collected with Archie’s body. Like a rag doll, before her eyes, Rebecca’s son was flung into the air. She saw the shocked expression on his face morph into one of passivity as the life and the breath were pummelled from his body.
Eighteen
The giant city children’s hospital was made of the stuff of nightmares. No amount of cheery decor could soften the horrors that shell-shocked parents had to endure. White-faced, Rebecca watched the progression of sick and broken children as they were shuffled in with their parents and sorted by the hospital staff at the registration desk.
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