The Year of the Farmer

by Rosalie Ham

  He thought about Neralie again, her brown legs rising from the creek water as she practised handstands after a hot day burr-cutting. But it had been five years and she wasn’t here so it was best he stop thinking about her once and for all. The immediate problem was Mandy. He ran the footage of Warnie’s Ball of the Century again but found himself wondering if Neralie had actually said she was never coming back, and then his thoughts went back to strip poker and Neralie’s breasts, and he rubbed his elbow where Mandy’s breast had connected with his arm at his mother’s wake . . . at his mother’s wake, for Chrissake. He’d recoiled from that soft pressure on his arm and saw Mandy Roper holding a tray of sandwiches, smiling up at him. He said, ‘No thanks.’

  ‘I should have just married Neralie,’ he said.

  His father said, ‘Speak up!’

  ‘How’s your brekky?’

  Callum scooped up the last of his porridge. ‘It doesn’t taste the same . . .’

  ‘I know.’ Not since Mandy turned off the AGA because it was too hot in summer and how was she supposed to cook on it if it had no dials? The new electric stove was meant to improve her cooking. It hadn’t. And the life Callum had built and Mitch had inherited began to wilt as the drought ripened and Callum’s whining about Mandy’s rejection of the AGA joined her whining about how boring life was and it all became part of the music of the house. He got up and checked his phone. No messages.

  ‘Shit,’ he said, and dread settled in Mitch’s heart as he poured his porridge into the dogs’ scrap bucket.

  Mandy Bishop drove in third gear because she was texting with her thumb as she steered. ‘Blot’, she wrote and gained three points on her word game. She flipped to the game of Lolly Crash but her thoughts went to the bathroom door opening and Mitch standing there looking her up and down. ‘What an arsehole.’ Her life as Mrs Mitchell Bishop of Bishops Corner was floating along smoothly up until that morning. She was the thinnest she’d ever been; Mitch even rolled over in his sleep and snuggled right up to her a few nights ago. There’d been no text messages from Neralie McIntosh for ages, none that she could find, anyway. And this morning, Mitch ruined it.

  o0o

  At lunchtime, Lana smoked half a cigarette from her packet as she walked to the library. When she stopped to screw the butt into the grass with her shoe she glanced across to the newsagency just in time to see Mandy pull back between the Lotto sign and the flag advertising prepaid rechargeable phone cards.

  As ever, Mrs Goldsack sat at her walnut desk staring in the general direction of the door. The long-time librarian suffered sugar diabetes and her eyesight was very poor. Above her, Queen Elizabeth, aged but vivid in satin and fat gems, watched from her gilt frame. The two women shared the same hair – a sophisticated shade of mauve featuring a curled tunnel at the temples – and both were a regal presence amid the crowded shelves and toppling stacks of dusty books. The door squeaked open and Mrs Goldsack leaned towards the sound. ‘Good morning, Mrs Goldsack. Your sugar level, how’s it today?’

  ‘Ah, it’s Lana. My sugar levels are level, thank you.’ She held out one hand to receive a book. ‘No Name is under Collins on the shelf to the left.’

  Lana said, guiltily, that she hadn’t finished The Woman in White yet.

  Mrs Goldsack folded her hands in her lap. ‘You’ve had it three months. Big Brother will send you a message.’

  Lana said she’d received the email and had already extended the loan online. Mrs Goldsack sniffed. Lana explained that she hoped to use the back room of an evening. ‘I’ll be running a class using the new computers that the council bought, okay?’

  At the word ‘computers’, Mrs Goldsack shrank from the door that led to the back room, but she reached into the pocket of her knitted cardigan and drew out a bundle of keys. She dropped them on the table. ‘What are you going to do with them?’

  ‘I’ll teach people how to send emails, join Buy Swap and Sell and read the newspapers online.’

  Mrs Goldsack clutched her Silver Jubilee brooch and raised her chin. ‘I think you’ll find your students will be disappointed. Computers are not what they say they are.’

  ‘You heard there are dogs roaming, didn’t you?’

  ‘Oh, no!’

  ‘Well, see, I heard that on the email from Bennett Mockett and now everybody knows.’

  ‘Anyone can tell you that. All you have to do is walk down the main street.’

  ‘Monday nights,’ Lana said. ‘Before Australian Story.’

  Lana didn’t speak when she walked into Mandy’s newsagency. She just selected a sheet of school project cardboard, a packet of colourful pens and a box of drawing pins. Mandy scanned the items wordlessly. It wasn’t until she got to the door that Lana called, ‘Thanks.’

  Mandy watched her go straight to the IGA and when she walked back to her office a short time later, Mandy stuck her Back in 5 note to the door and headed for the supermarket. The sign was between the notice about the water meeting in three weeks’ time and the Buy Swap and Sell items.

  Basic computer skills class starting soon.

  Learn to read the paper online, buy lotto tickets, check results, make appointments with the visiting health service and more.

  Library: Mondays, 6 pm

  Lana

  She dumped a packet of two-minute noodles, some dehydrated cheese sauce and some frozen vegetables on the counter. ‘It’ll never work,’ Mandy declared. ‘People around here won’t even be able to find the on button.’

  ‘You probably struggled the first time too.’

  ‘Yeah, but I overcame it, that’s the difference.’ Mandy turned to Paul at his post office counter. ‘How do you feel about it, Pauly? Less people coming into the shop, everyone sending emails and greeting cards online and not buying anything from you?’

  Paul jerked a thumb at the parcels piled behind him. ‘Online shopping.’

  Triumphant, Jasey scanned the Bishop family’s dinner. ‘You got your own bag or you want one for twenty cents?’

  ‘Don’t need a bag.’ Mandy gathered her groceries. ‘Why, in this small town, do you bother to wear a name tag every day?’

  ‘Because, Mandy Roper, I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.’

  ‘Everyone’s got something to be ashamed of.’ Mandy didn’t bother to close the door after her, and when Jasey stomped over to shut it, Paul said to his fierce landlady, ‘Might be an idea to install an automatic door.’

  o0o

  Mandy stepped through the door of Beau Monde, saying, ‘Some people in town still call me Mandy Roper. They need to get used to the fact that I’m Mandy Bishop.’

  Kelli put aside the magazine she was browsing and looked at Mandy. This week Kelli’s fringe was striped red and green. ‘What can I do for you, Mrs Bishop?’

  ‘I want my nails done.’

  ‘The Japanese is popular.’

  ‘Can you do the Japanese?’

  ‘I can do whatever’s in the bloody stamp book.’

  Mandy reached for Kelli’s appointment book, wrote Mandy BISHOP at a convenient time and went next door to see Denise. The shop smelled of stale people and cured shoes. Mandy asked her if she’d heard who bought the pub. Denise shook her grouper face.

  ‘No one seems to know . . . and that’s very unusual, wouldn’t you agree?’

  Denise shrugged. ‘Paperwork probably isn’t finalised. Did Kelli show you her nail-art book?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Denise said, ‘I’m getting Japanese. What are you getting?’

  ‘Haven’t decided. Black’s fashionable.’

  ‘Why don’t you get something fun?’

  Mandy looked out at the dying trees lining the straight black road that brought new things to the town and took people other places. ‘There’s no fun here.’

  ‘See those clouds on the horizon? That means rain.’

/>   ‘That won’t change anything.’ At the door, Mandy said, ‘Nothing ever changes.’

  ‘Well, you just never know,’ Denise cried, and went to close the door because Mandy always left it open.

  Mandy walked straight back into Kelli’s shop and studied the nail stamp book. ‘Everyone’s getting the Japanese.’

  Later, she found there was still no sign of movement at the pub but there had to be something going on behind those closed doors. She spent the afternoon out on the street washing her front window. Denise popped in to see Kelli then wandered across to the IGA and came out again, having purchased nothing. They always knew something, those women. Then, when Paul left the IGA in his little postal truck, she abandoned her half-clean front windows and followed him home. In his small bachelor kitchen, Mandy trapped him against the stove, one hand on the fridge and the other on the bench. ‘How much rent is Jasey charging you?’

  ‘A reasonable amount.’

  ‘I’ll halve it. The landlord just wants his rent, he doesn’t care who pays it.’

  ‘Half, you’re offering?’

  ‘Half. And you can put your counter along the side so you still get a view out onto the street.’ Mandy didn’t want him to obstruct her view entirely, but the space she was offering was substantial.

  He rubbed his chin.

  She wanted a holiday, she wanted to save money so she could take Mitch to a beach or a mountain, eat nice dinners and watch films. And Paul would look after the shop. ‘You’d have a quarter of the shop and of course there’ll be free newspapers and magazines.’

  He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He was a tall man, heavy set, and she was quite short. She took a step closer. ‘A nice big counter and everyone knows big is best.’ She put her hand on his chest. ‘Come on, Pauly, do it for me,’ and Paul was swept back to that wet and slippery night on the bank of the swimming hole with Mandy Roper. Maybe she’d let him do that to her again?

  ‘I suppose it makes sense, since I’ve got to deliver newspapers every day on my mail run.’

  ‘Yes! Oh, Paul, I hadn’t thought of that! That’s such a good point!’

  He looked into the distance. ‘Give me a twenty-four-hour cooling-off period.’

  He watched her go, studying what he could see of her bottom beneath her long shirt. He smoothed his substantial moustache. There had to be somewhere out the back of the shop where they could do it.

  She gave him an hour to cool off before she rang him and said she’d moved the old cupboard and was waiting for him, then she told anyone who came into the shop that Lana’s computer classes were pointless, ‘because the internet reception’s not up to it, anyway’.

  o0o

  Mandy’s affable husband would not meet her eye, but Mandy had decided to erase the bathroom incident from her life. Uncomfortable things ignored went away, eventually. She checked his phone and email accounts and focused on dinner. She drained the vegetables and noodles from the boiling water, poured cheese sauce over them, sprinkled parmesan on top and shoved them under the grill. When the cheese had melted, she yelled, ‘Ready!’ Over dinner she introduced the topic of Lana’s computer classes. ‘She’s deluded, your old friend Lana. It’ll never work. And she’s stealing customers, from Paul . . . and me, not that you’d care.’

  Callum lifted a fork full of steaming noodles and said people would care if she opened up earlier, that she would keep her customers, and Mandy responded, ‘I knew perfectly well you’d say those exact words, Cal. But why should I open up at six am? Where do all my customers have to rush off to that early? And why should I spend from six-fifteen in the morning until five pm waiting for nothing and no one? What’s so important in a newspaper that all those boring old farts need to know before six-thirty in the morning, anyway?’

  Callum put his cutlery neatly on the plate and Mitch said they weren’t ‘boring old farts’.

  ‘And that’s the difference between you and me, Mitch. You think they’re nice, even entertaining?’ she said, licking sauce from her finger. ‘I don’t. Anyway,’ she continued, ‘all they have to do is turn on the telly to get the news.’

  ‘You’ve defeated your point.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re arguing that Lana took your customers but you’re saying they may as well stay home and watch the news on telly.’

  For just a moment she was taken aback. It was unlike Mitch to argue. ‘There’s only one point to this whole situation, Mitch, and that is: I do not care.’

  Callum pushed his plate away and Mitch felt the bathroom door slamming in his face. He would have said thanks for dinner, but today he said to himself, I don’t care. It was the residual bruise he was nursing, a niggling thought that he might not have been as astute as he thought he was, and he could not make that feeling go away.

  Cal settled in for the news then fell asleep and Mandy ran a deep bath because she knew it annoyed them. All that water . . . in a drought. She poured in bath salts and soaked until she felt pampered and cosy. She ignored the mirror while drying her homely pink body, but finally, checking the door was snibbed, she craned to see what Mitch had seen when he burst in on her. ‘You’re thinner than Denise or Kelli, anyway,’ she told herself. Besides, it wasn’t as if Mitch could rush out and find someone new, someone perfect. She wrapped her pampered self in her nightie, snakeskin dressing-gown and fluffy bunny slippers, and expunged the morning bathroom incident from her memory, again.

  Mitch checked the mail, again, in case there was a bill from the telco. The invoice was due; he needed to get to it before Mandy did, and it was sad that he did. Then he found that Mandy had wiped his careful history of irrigation systems, government subsidies, efficiency savings and commodities markets. He started his online research again but was soon distracted, wondering where it had all gone wrong. What had happened?

  3.

  Water from the sky

  Something was wrong. The air was different. It was thicker, sounds were duller, the morning light subdued, and there was that lovely smell . . . Petrichor. Wet dirt. Mitch flung back the covers and pulled the blind aside. In bed, his wife said something about too much light, so he said it was part of his job to know what the day would be.

  ‘Why? So you can change it?’

  ‘It’s a grey sky.’ He smiled, reaching for his clothes. ‘No sun.’

  ‘Government must have bought it back,’ she said, and he almost laughed. She used to be interested in government buybacks, water and even his sheep. She could be funny, too, and she was warm, or was it just sex? But he’d told her all his dreams and all his secrets too. In the beginning – the very beginning – she was sociable. But as soon as they were married she refused to go anywhere with Lana, Jasey or Kevin. Now he rarely saw them. And had he ever actually proposed? Or was it a decision somehow arrived at in his small, lusty bed? He remembered the lurch of fear when she arrived at the breakfast table that first morning. His father said nothing. Absolutely nothing. Mitch put it down to shock, decided things would change when she cooked nice dinners, scrubbed the place up a bit and the kids came along. But there weren’t any kids. The first night back from Melbourne they stepped into the beery post-harvest, pre-Christmas celebration at the pub, and the place erupted. There was much backslapping and toasting and laughing . . . but were they laughing at him? Kev put his pale freckled arm around Mitch’s shoulders and said, ‘Mate, sometimes relationships aren’t what they seem.’

  ‘Kev, you of all people are surely not trying to give me advice about relationships.’

  And Isobel . . . speeding over the stock ramp in her big square vehicle and striding past him. ‘You’re an idiot.’ She walked straight into the house then stormed back out with their mother’s jewellery box in her hand and her engagement ring on her finger.

  ‘What’s it got to do with you?’ But he knew even as his words melted lamely into the void that it had
everything to do with her. Everyone had everything to do with it. Decisions like marriage and inheritance and reputation and worthiness were a family concern, a community discussion.

  Denise had patted his back, saying, ‘I think this secret marriage is just the thing for poor old Mandy.’ He thought she meant that Mandy, like everyone, deserved the chance for happiness. But was that what she meant? Because, somehow, Mandy had never achieved happiness. Neither of them had.

  His ruminations ended with the sound of first one, then two, then three raindrops on iron, and then a solid splattering that grew to a torrent on the roof. He dragged on his jeans, and ran in his socks, eager to see what the farm held for him on this day. ‘Rain, Cal!’

  Callum was at the living room window. ‘Too late for rain,’ he said. ‘It’ll just ruin that crop of yours.’

  ‘Not much of a crop anyway.’ But as they ate their porridge the late winter rain clouds floated away across the sky, turning it from grey to blue again. The main point was: water fell from the sky, and it would grow a bit of green feed for his sheep. And then the weather report promised more rain in the next twenty-four hours, so he checked the Bureau of Meteorology and it told him the same thing. ‘So if it rains on my crop now, well and good.’

  Cal called, ‘What?’

  He lifted the tin his father kept his hearing aids in, looked him in the eye and rattled it. ‘I said, I’LL BE BACK ABOUT NOON.’

  Cal retrieved the remote control from under the stable table and turned the TV up.

  o0o

  The donkeys watched him ride away, sighed and sniffed the bare ground at their hoofs. Above, the wedge-tailed eagles hung in the thermal, two huge silhouettes, their loose wingtips black against the cumulus. As he followed the track along the channel towards his crop, he scanned the gaunt paddocks for dead or dying sheep. There were no puddles in the channel bed, just dry, rain-punctured dust, and though more rain meant he wouldn’t have to cart water to thirsty mobs all over the farm, there was also the niggling thought that a storm, or rain, could damage those acres of thin but promising wheat heads.