by Rosalie Ham
Under the great blue hat of the sky, the shallow horizon at his shoulder, Mitch waded into the sparse crop and broke a stalk. He rolled the head in his palm and ground out some seed. He chewed it and said to Tink, ‘Too soft yet, but I should get enough for next season’s seed, and maybe some stock feed if it’s not shot and sprung after the rain.’
They set off across the bare paddocks to fill the bin for the animals. At the storage silos, Mitch positioned the auger beneath the silo hatch, making sure it was well positioned to suck up the grain. When he pushed the ignition button and the little engine sputtered to life, he went back to the silo and opened the hatch and grain was sucked up and fell like water into the feeder bin. The donkeys wandered down from the far end of the paddock and stood watching him. Cleopatra hung her long head over the fence. Mitch chucked a few scoops of nutrients into the mix for his boys, his wethers and handsome rams. When the feeder bin was full, he pulled the lever to close the silo hatch and cut the auger engine. Tinka jumped up onto the back of the ute. Mitch told the donkeys he’d be back to feed them next, then they drove away.
The donkeys raised their noses and caught the floating trace of golden oats. The ewes and their lambs arrived to see what their guardians were doing. They stood against the fence staring at the feed silo. It was Cleopatra who pushed on the wire gate that separated her from all that grain, and it was also the jenny who nudged the end of the auger with her big strong nose – and, because Mitch had failed to secure the brakes, it rolled from under the silo, catching on the outlet lever and pulling it open. A great pile of wheat came gushing out, tipping the auger forward so that it dropped its nose and emptied another small pile of wheat from its mouth. Mark went to that pile, Cleopatra stayed at the biggest pile, and then the ewes gathered around, heads down, their lambs gambolling behind.
Way off in the paddock, Mitch looped the string around the rear-vision mirror and wedged the square of timber between the seat and the accelerator. He climbed onto the tray and then stepped across to the feeder trailer. He sent Tink to gather a few confused stragglers, and soon all the wethers were in place along the thread of grain, heads down, and Tink was looking up at him on the roof of the cab.
‘I once thought I would have a son or a daughter who’d help me with things . . . but all I really need is a block of wood and you, Tink.’
The dog blinked and looked uncertain.
When they headed back for the fire truck, he saw the strange sight at the storage silo. The donkeys were hunkered in under the great metal cylinder, sheep loitering and a thatch of pink and grey galahs at their feet. The gate to the silo hung open. ‘No!’
He braked and ran at them, yelling, ‘No, no, no, no!’ The galahs lifted, fluttered and settled again, and the ewes scattered, their lambs calling from behind. Mark and Cleopatra were together, kneeling under the silo hatch, steadily working away at the grain as it leaked free. He slapped at them, kicked their rumps and they stood, appalled. Tinka rounded, yapping, and Cleopatra kicked out, her muzzle reaching again for the pile of grain. Mark turned to Mitch, wheat grains lacing his soft wet nostrils and decorating his thick, lovely eyelashes. Mitch smacked their rumps, careful to avoid the sideways kicks, and eventually Cleopatra gave up and trotted away. She came to a juddering halt just beyond the open gate, suddenly conscious of her very full stomach. Mark stopped, raised his tail and farted, then his nose and ears lowered, and Cleo heehawed painfully.
‘Serves you both right! You are asses, mules and hinnies.’ Though it was his responsibility to prevent harm.
He caught Mark, tied him to the ute and dragged him slowly away. At first Cleo refused to follow and turned her rump to her vanishing brother, but the smaller he got the more often she turned her great fluffy head to him and, in the end, it couldn’t be endured. She hurried to him as fast as her bloated, fermenting guts would allow.
Mitch spent the next hour walking them in circles behind the ute. Then he untied them and left them with the ewes and their lambs again. ‘You may as well get used to the walking,’ he said. ‘You’ll be walking miles every day for a long time and I want you to consider that I’m being punished for your gluttony too.’
The sky was empty above the dry, hard farm, the topsoil curled away in low eddies and the house across the paddocks looked bleak, with its dull trees and dead gardens. The donkeys stood before him, looking truly contrite, their noses close to the ground and ears drooping. ‘I don’t blame you, and I’m sorry I called you asses. It has been shitty lately, but there’s been a splash of water from the sky, rain, and things can’t get any shittier, surely.’
o0o
Neralie McIntosh lay in bed in her Sydney flat while the sounds of the waking city filled her small bedroom. The motorcycle parked beneath the flats banged to life and idled as it did every morning, the engine clacking back from the concrete walls. Then the loud black and chrome thing thwacked all the way down the Coogee Bay hill and its noise was consumed by the din of the faraway day, where it would meet with disaster, Neralie hoped. Outside, a smoker cleared his watery lungs and doors slammed up and down the concrete stairwell. The girl from the flat above shouted instructions about the cat’s dinner from the bottom of the stairwell, and heels clacked on the concrete steps: ‘. . . and if you don’t clean up your room by the time I get home you are not going out this weekend, ya hearmee, Nay-th’n?’
Neralie’s boyfriend, Beau, shut the shower taps off. He did not understand the value of water. He stayed too long under a hard-running shower, let taps flow for no purpose. He wasn’t the sort of boyfriend you could be truly human with. She could never consider taking a pee behind a tree when he was present. Mitch, however, had accepted it was suitable to excrete according to need. She quickly segued from Mitch to panoramas of scrubby plains and oh! round grey sheep. Never had she imagined she’d long to see sheep again. And to hear the high trill of pink-tipped galahs disappearing into messy gums (perfect for peeing behind) and then Mitchell Bishop crept back into her mind . . . but he was with another woman.
Beau came into the bedroom and she heard the elastic of his clean boxers smack against his lovely tanned hips and his arms slide into his shirtsleeves. It was quiet while he buttoned up, then his substantial lips touched her temple, leaving a tiny wet spot.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘there are as many people in this bloody apartment block as there are in my whole home town, but when I wake up there, I don’t hear any of them.’
He kissed her again and was gone. He was the only boyfriend she’d ever had who wore a suit to work. She wept for a minute then tried to weep a bit longer but she was too happy – today was the end of this life; tomorrow another would commence. Or recommence. In the five years Neralie had lived in Sydney, she’d made three real friends: her boss, Steve; Steve’s wife, Wanda; and Beau. She’d been to art galleries and museums, nightclubs and parties, the beach, the opera, the ballet and she’d taken the train to the Blue Mountains and woken in a warm bed that looked at the misty mountains. And she’d been to Fiji and Hawaii and Las Vegas. But always, life felt like a temporary thing. Then one morning, a year prior, on a day like any other, she woke and said, ‘Bugger this,’ and phoned home.
Her brother answered. ‘What’s up?’
‘I’m coming home.’
‘What happened?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’ve been living in a blaring shithole for four years.’
There was silence for two seconds. ‘Make it five.’
‘Levon!’
‘Wait till it rains – there’ll be something to come home to, and I’ve got a proposition for you.’
‘Levon, I need to come home.’
‘The pub’s for sale,’ he said, and she let him speak.
When he’d finished, Neralie understood that her grinding life in Sydney had a purpose after all, and that purpose muted her longing. Within
the hour she’d enrolled in two business courses that would see her return home with a Diploma of Business Management and a licensed premises management degree. Then she went straight to her boss. ‘I’ve got a proposition for you.’
Steve closed his laptop and phoned for his wife to join them. When Wanda arrived in the office, he said, ‘What have you got?’
Half an hour later it was decided that Wanda and Steve would go for a long drive to the country and take a look at this Billabong Hotel.
‘It was a bit of a blood house last time I saw it,’ Neralie warned, ‘but life support for a hundred square kilometres.’
Steve winked at her and Wanda rubbed her hands together. It was a business opportunity for them, and an opportunity for Neralie’s father and brother to invest in the place where they’d spent their working lives. It was a wonderful opportunity for the town and, most importantly, a good reason to go home.
She told Beau over wonton soup and, to hide her happiness, bent down to steady the table with a folded paper napkin.
‘I’ll come too.’
‘You can’t come. There’s no work for performance and productivity managers there.’
Her boyfriend replied through a mouthful of lemongrass chilli chicken, ‘I’ll do IT.’
‘Low demand – and anyway, you won’t last a month in a small town.’
‘I come from a small town.’
‘Thirty thousand people is not small. Five hundred is small.’
He looked around at the Friday-night diners in the restaurant: couples and families, groups of girls, blokes on their own. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever find anyone like you. You’re different.’
‘Yeah.’ She shrugged, and put the problem of sad Beau at the back of her mind, along with ‘Mitch’ and ‘find good hairdresser’.
o0o
Midmorning, Jasey was bending down under her cash register, searching for coins, while three customers leaned on their produce-laden trolleys and gazed through the front window at the pub opposite. A man in overalls was renovating the sash windows and an air conditioner was being hoisted up to the roof.
Debbie sighed and looked over to Paul. ‘Moving up to the newsagents, I hear?’
Paul stopped bundling mail.
Jasey straightened, red-faced from bending. ‘That right, Pauly?’
He nodded, then picked at a roll of sticky tape with his thumbnail.
‘And just exactly when will you be vacating my premises to move your post office business to the paper shop?’
Paul put the sticky tape down and smoothed his pale moustache. ‘Mandy’s offered me cheaper rent.’
‘She would, knowing as I do that rent’s important for a struggling business.’
Paul said weakly, ‘There’s a bit more space for me and my mailboxes in her shop.’
The people in the IGA tried to visualise where the extra space in the newsagency might be, but couldn’t. Paul felt the burn of Jasey’s blue eyes.
‘I’m sorry, I never noticed you struggling for somewhere to put the dozen letters and two packages you get in here every day.’ Jasey found a small bag of change. ‘Anyway, where exactly in your old girlfriend’s shop is this so-called space?’
‘She was never my girlfriend.’
Debbie said, ‘You all say that.’
‘She’s removed the books and calendars and stuff because people don’t use them anymore; they use the internet.’
‘We still make stuff from colouring paper and pencils,’ Debbie said, and her two kids nodded.
Jasey started ripping at the zip lock on the coin bag. ‘She just wants you to open up for her at six in the morning while she lies in bed.’
‘I don’t think so.’ Paul’s chin went up, but if it was true, he’d get to root Mandy, for sure.
Jasey looked across to the shelves behind Paul. She’d changed everything in her shop to accommodate his desk and his postboxes, and now he was leaving.
‘She’ll read all our postcards,’ Debbie said, and her two kids looked disapprovingly at Paul the postie.
‘Debbie, that’s a slanderous thing to say.’
‘True, but.’
Suddenly Jasey smiled. ‘Okay, you organise to get the postboxes removed from my front window and you pay to put it all back exactly how it was, right?’
‘Course.’
She gave up trying to open the small plastic bag and tore at it with her teeth, poured the golden coins into the cash register then slammed it shut so hard that the rack of peppermints and Tic Tacs rattled. She grabbed Debbie’s bananas and dropped them on the scales, jabbed at the keypad, ran the baked beans under the scanner and dumped them in on top of the bananas.
In the car Debbie said to her kids, ‘First drop of rain, everyone goes mad. Best not to cross anyone.’
That evening, the landlord settled in front of the news, feeling pleased because Paul’s presence would bring more people to Mandy’s newsagency. He could finally put the rent up. Over dinner, Debbie informed her husband that Mandy and Jasey were at war and her husband said he wasn’t surprised, everyone knew Mandy was always the unhappiest person in town. Denise and Kelli discussed the tension between Jasey and Mandy and Denise said, ‘Mandy Roper’s been like a knife slicing through polystyrene since she was born.’
Over a drink in the beer garden of the Billabong, Jasey looked at Kevin, her large, red-haired, pale-skinned boyfriend. ‘Bicycle Mandy is being a bitch.’
Kev said, ‘It’s going to get worse, you know that,’ thinking about Neralie, and Mandy, the lank-haired, sullen girl who bullied from the swing at school. She used to twist around and around so the rope was tight then lean back and lift her feet, swirling, watching the sun whorl through the peppercorn canopy, her shoes chopping close to the kiddies waiting for a turn. Happily, Mandy’s attendance at school was sporadic so there were days when other kids got a proper go on the swing. Kev recalled one bitter winter’s day, little Mandy slumped on the swing scraping her shoes in the dirt. The puddles froze that year and the wind was icy, and Mandy Roper’s dad had died suddenly. Lana held out her lunch bag. ‘You can have my sandwich.’ Mandy Roper told her to stick it up her bum.
Mandy Roper had been warming her fingers over the toaster when her dad walked through the kitchen. Her mother butted her cigarette out and said, ‘Bye, love,’ and her husband said, ‘See ya.’ Gloria Roper reached for her coffee and Mandy turned back to her toast and they heard the ute door slam. The sound of a dull shot thwacked through the freezing air. Gloria stood up, took the bread from the toaster, spread it with butter and Vegemite and shunted her daughter out the door and into her car. She drove her to the school bus stop with her breakfast in a plastic bag and left her standing on the side of the road in the sideways rain.
When Mandy’s grandmother retrieved her, the old woman put the girl in her car and said, ‘My son is dead. It’s your mother’s fault.’
o0o
Apart from the light rain, which was only enough to make visibility poor, Isobel’s day had gone to plan. She’d left on time – 5.30 am – unloaded a wool bale at the mill, and over a cup of tea and a sliver of homemade lemon slice had confirmed financial matters, estimated processing times and appointed a date to return for the skeins to coincide with end-of-term school pick-up. She texted the craft ladies and was on the road again by eight-thirty, had reached the outskirts of Melbourne by ten and was double-parked outside Verity’s Collins Street boutique by eleven. At one point, a parking inspector stood in front of her four-cylinder, six-speed Isuzu twin cab and typed information into his small machine. Isobel emerged from the shop in her pale jeans, sky-blue shirt, pearls and puffer vest. ‘Good morning,’ she said, smiling. ‘I’m very sorry, I’ll just be a minute more.’ She picked up a stack of flat boxes and asked, ‘Have you been in the country long?’
‘No.’ He was looking at the Pipparoy spun-wool g
arments Verity was draping around the stiff shoulders of angular mannequins.
‘Where are you from?’
‘Sudan.’
‘Oh, the Nile. Were you a farmer?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m a farmer. Did you grow rice and cotton?’
‘No, millet and goats, and I had some sheep too.’
‘Me too.’ She put some boxes in his arms, picked up the remaining boxes and asked him if he irrigated with water from the Nile.
‘Yes, but it is not like here.’ He followed her into the shop.
Half an hour later, Isobel took a photo of Azim smiling in front of the pashminas and shawls in the Collins Street window. She texted them off to the craft ladies, shook Azim’s hand and gave him her card and told him again where to catch the train and then the bus and that she was looking forward to meeting his wife and children. ‘There’s plenty of room at Girri Girri for you all.’
She headed off to the college, without a parking ticket, to meet the children. Philippa and Rory were scolded over their debit-card and phone accounts, then Isobel spoke to the house mistress and left her children with homemade biscuits and pink lipstick on their cheeks. As she drove towards Aunt Opal’s, she fought the urge to go straight home, pop down to her sheep, sort the mail and organise dinner but there was the matter of the future, specifically Philippa’s future, and, of course, Bishops Corner. As she drove, she planned: first the Bendigo show, next year the Royal Melbourne then Royal Sydney . . . then China. She would go to China and they would love her fine – superfine – merino wool, 15.5 microns, at least. For that, she would need more fine Merino hoggets. Many more hoggets. For these reasons, Isobel diligently attended her duties as niece. Her aunt was both elderly and wealthy.