by Rosalie Ham
And then someone asked if you could find a library book on a computer and Mrs Goldsack said, ‘Definitely not,’ and then there was an argument because you could do that very thing on the computers at the Riverglen library.
Lana had hoped to have them all setting up mail accounts on that first night but all they managed to do was find the on button and the internet server on the screen. Then it was time for Australian Story so she went around and showed each of them how to switch their devices off again.
o0o
Not far away, as the gloom of evening descended, Mitch’s unloving and unloved wife was marching around the swimming-hole exercise track in stretchy black attire. She finished her second lap and stopped, lifted her hand weights five times each arm, bent to touch her ankles five times, then continued back towards the newsagency, taking the route past the library. She noted the cars and utes parked outside and the dogs tied to the bench. The street was devoid of people, all windows were empty and the curtains static, so she selected a car that was far from the glow of the streetlamp and bent its radio aerial.
o0o
Outside the library, Mrs Horrick stopped to watch Kelli straighten her car aerial. ‘Why would someone do that?’
Kelli’s corpulent mother dragged on her cigarette and snarled, ‘Someone doesn’t like the computer classes.’
They got into the car and Kelli turned the radio on. It worked. She gave Pam the thumbs-up and drove home with her mother to their government house on Single Mothers Street.
o0o
Passing Jasey’s, Lana slowed, thinking she might call in for a drink, but Kevin’s car was parked outside. Inside, Jasey and Kevin froze as the car engine approached and slowed, but she relaxed into his arms again as Lana drove away and Kevin resumed his exploration of Jasey’s pliant body.
Lana stayed in her car smoking, blowing the plume out into the dry, purple sunset. Her computer class was a long way from reading newspapers online and Mrs Goldsack would be there every week, willing the technology to fail.
Later, she curled up in bed with her copy of The Woman in White. Anne Catherick died and Lana said, ‘Oh well, she caused a lot of trouble.’
6.
A circular subject
Gottlob and Vorbach Bergen located the dust cloud and knew that Mitch was heading to the far north paddock to feed and water his rams. The two utes approached and slowed and braked. The tidy Bergens, in their clean truck with their bowling green–neat beards, looked at Mitch, in his dusty heap with his smiling dog. Mitch raised his thumb on the steering wheel in greeting.
Vorbach said, ‘You get that letter last week?’
‘I did.’
‘What you going to do, Mitchell?’
‘Whatever I can.’
They looked over to the new solar-powered meters on the banks of the Jeongs’ raw irrigation ditches, just waiting to be installed.
‘What are you two going to do?’
Gottlob said, ‘It’s our superannuation, that water, we’ll sell it when the price is better. You want to lease our land?’
Mitch shook his head. It held little value without the water allocation. ‘Thanks anyway. I hear you’re opening a cafe?’
‘We applied to the council. Maria will still do the hamburgers and pizzas and ice creams but we’ll do delicatessen and snack food.’
‘Looking forward to takeaway schnitzel and strudel.’
As they watched his ute disappear into the billowing dust, Vorbach said, ‘Er gefickt,’ and Gottlob said, ‘Er kann nach Bali oder Batemans Bay gehen, get a surfboard.’
‘Callum muss zuerst sterben.’
o0o
While water from the tank filled the troughs for the thirsty rams, Mitch climbed to the roof of the ute, waited for the internet to drop in. He paid his phone bill online, trashed the bill, emptied the trash and told himself to remember to delete it from his home email account. It was cold, so he pulled his beanie down over his ears and pushed his collar up. All around him was dull brown and blue, the farm a chilly dead place save for the wind battering the feeble saltbush. But over the horizon, above some distant continent, rain clouds were building and they would float to Bishops Corner and fall on his land at just the right time and grow a fat crop. One day he would press a button from his recliner rocker and the telemetry system would water itself from his vertical sprinkler system, but in the meantime the sound of a speeding vehicle, like a jet plane in the wide open, needed attention. It braked and parked at the fence. The Water Authority. He’d heard about Stacey Masterson. The young man in pale moleskins got out and came towards him, the collar on his blue wool shirt stiff against his neck in the cold wind.
‘How are ya?’
‘Fair to middling.’
‘Stacey Masterson, I’m with the Water Authority renewal project. You’d be Mitch.’
‘Spies, you lot, aren’t you?’
‘For a good reason.’ Stacey rested his foot on Mitch’s wheel rim and pointed some rolled-up brochures at the empty, weed-choked irrigation channel and static waterwheel beside him. ‘Did you know that you forfeit about twenty-five percent of your water allocation annually because of those twelve kilometres of open channel you’re still using?’
‘I do know that.’
‘It’s all lost to leakage and evaporation.’
‘Like I said . . . Why don’t you just give me a couple of million bucks and I’ll upgrade and grow more grain with the megalitres I save.’
Stacey smiled and shook his head. ‘The government can’t possibly be that generous.’
‘Broke after the drought too, are they?’
‘We can help you replace your waterwheels.’
‘But I’ll have to relinquish about three hundred gigalitres, I gather.’
‘But’ – Stacey spread his hands, god-like – ‘you farmers will get that all back in saved water over time, and with the help of our new computer system and a solar-powered pump system. Your neighbours, the Jeongs, have a system just like it.’
‘They also have good IT skills, an internet receiver booster and money to pay for it all.’
‘We’ll teach you all about the computer, it’s part of the deal.’
‘It’s too expensive.’
Stacey beamed up at Mitch. ‘But you need to upgrade. It’s a dry continent, and we need to secure the future of water for all.’ It was a quote directly from the front page of the brochures he was holding in his soft fist.
‘I’ve heard all of this before, and I’ve crunched the numbers. Say I trade you four thousand megalitres of my water assets in exchange for an efficient irrigation system, those new pumps, meters and flume gates will have to work for many years to pay me back in water gains, which means I have to live even more frugally than I do now, but here’s the crunch – I’ve also lost equity in my assets, yet I’m still paying the same for my mortgage at the same rate as I always have, so that means I’m paying more on my mortgage than the farm’s worth, not to mention my loans, so there’s a gap between what I actually have left and what I’m paying for. Sort of paying a hundred bucks, plus interest, for a farm that’s worth fifty, and devaluing as the seconds pass and the cost of running it escalates. And given we can only produce according to the weather, which is traditionally shit of late, then overall it’s not a good business plan for me.’
‘Yes, but –’
‘And I’ll have to maintain all the new equipment, which means I’m paying for that too, as well as maintaining an expensive twelve-kilometre pipe.’
‘Right.’ Stacey nodded, trying to think quickly. ‘But . . . our aim is to save water for you, for everyone.’ The conversation wasn’t going as well as Stacey had imagined. Farmers were meant to leap at the chance to become more efficient. ‘Why don’t you come on in to the office one day and I’ll re-crunch those numbers for you. Or I could come to you in your own ho
me?’
Mitch said, ‘I’ve just explained it but I’ll keep trying, for your sake. On top of paying too much to maintain a farm and business that’s depreciated, I’ll also lose access to water for my sheep. Fewer channels means fewer sheep, and I’ll spend more time and energy moving flocks from dam to dam or trough to trough. Sheep won’t be a viable product anymore, so the only thing I can rely on is crops and the expensive high-maintenance telemetry and machinery needed to grow them on my drought-ravaged farm. It’s a circular subject, mate.’
Stacey looked at the farmer sitting cross-legged on the roof of his ute wearing a beanie and work shorts. ‘It’s a prick of a business for those who choose to do it, eh?’
‘What the fuck else can I do? Sell the land from under my father’s geriatric arse, hand all the money over to the bank and get a job at the hairdressers?’ This clean-cut guy was giving Mitch the shits. ‘Mate, it’s been a long drought and I’ve got worn-out machinery and sick donkeys, an unhappy wife, a deaf father and there are dogs and foxes happy to eat my only profitable thing, my sheep, and I’m about up to pussy’s bow with every fucking thing at the moment, alright?’
It seemed to Stacey that, above, clouds had just formed in the dry spring sky. He had neglected to anticipate this; he had not perfected his counterarguments.
‘You could not have picked a worse time to try to get money out of us, truly you couldn’t.’
Stacey pointed to the clouds. ‘Things are about to turn.’
‘You know these things too, do you? Know I can rely on the elements?’
The representative from the Water Authority renewal project tried a different tack. ‘We just want to make things better for everyone. We’re all here for the same purpose.’
Mitch looked at his phone.
‘Can I leave the brochures with you?’
‘You’re going to need all the help you can get to tackle old Esther Shugg.’
Stacey smiled. ‘Cyril’s got her.’ He saluted Mitch with the brochures – ‘Talk soon’ – and walked away, trying to appear more dignified than he felt.
In his car he opened his iPad to write notes on Bishops Corner and email them to Cyril, but there wasn’t any reception so he just took notes and hoped no one stole the device.
Mitch watched him drive away then turned off the tank and hauled in the hose. ‘I’m worn out,’ he said, knowing it to be true. ‘But at least I have you.’
Tink turned an ear to him, her eyes still fixed on the dirt-grey and solemn flock, drinking earnestly.
And then his phone pinged. It was Neralie. I hear you got rain.
Any time was a good time to text Neralie, but he’d rather talk to her, preferably in person, in the flesh, in 3D, standing there in front of him.
He texted back. A sprinkle. Whatcha doin’?
There was just the sound of the wind, then, Not much. Pissing down here.
You coming home for Christmas?
And then the reception failed. He deleted the text and pushed Neralie from his mind; it was time to go home. As he passed the thick bushy island cupped in the riverbend on Esther Shugg’s eastern boundary, the place everyone called ‘the spot’ – the spot where he often met Neralie – he imagined hiding a pump in that impenetrable wall of weeds where snakes bred. It was a simple thing to bury a pipe and suck himself up a bit of free water. But the consequences . . .
o0o
Esther roared westwards in her old green Dodge, Peppy on the back, face into the wind. Something caught her eye over at the Jeongs’ so she slowed and stopped. The paddocks were ploughed and ready to sow and new small black pipes jutted at regular intervals along the furrows. When they first settled, the Jeongs planted fancy lettuce, butternut pumpkins and broccoli and, as farmers in the district gave up, sold up and retired to the coast, the Jeongs bought their properties. Now they owned most of the land either side of Bishops Road – river frontage – and the access that came with them. They grew everything, even cotton. People parked on the roadside to see the cotton sown, returned to oversee its harvest, took photos of the great ragged cotton bales lined up, and collected the dregs, blown like tissues across the land to catch in trees and fences. Since the arrival of cotton, wealthy farmers with independent water had gained confidence and fields of the crop were spreading; a great gin was under construction at Riverglen.
Esther was wondering over the tiny periscopes protruding from the brown furrows when Sam Jeong rolled along the fence line. It was too late to flee. She watched him get out of his ute and climb through his newly restrung fence. He was too tidy to be a farmer.
‘Hello, Miss Shugg, are you well?’
‘I’m perfectly well, thank you, but your cotton makes this environment sick. It’s alien.’
Sam looked beyond her truck to her paddocks, where weeds thrived and pests bred, then to the Bergens’ property, where hard-hoofed goats pucked the ground. ‘Everyone use chemical for the crops. Good for production. Many thing alien, some thing not good.’
‘Cotton takes all our water, big farm takes big water.’
Sam explained that the small black sprinklers peeping from the dirt were his new underground drip system. ‘We calculate that dollar per megalitre of water, cotton has better outcome, so we conserve water because our return much bigger.’
But Esther narrowed her eyes and asked if they’d sell the cotton to their relatives in China.
Sam smiled and shook his head. ‘I not from China. I sell to Riverglen.’
Esther felt slightly ashamed, so she asked him how his family was, since she knew at least one of them was expecting a new baby.
Sam nodded. ‘Good. Happy here, is better place to prosper. Good people.’
Then she didn’t feel so ashamed because he’d reminded her that he was prospering more than most and she didn’t think that was fair, so she roared off as Sam climbed back through the fence.
Esther turned her Dodge off the road, bounced across the dry irrigation channel and the stock grate, and headed to Bishops Corner homestead. She waved at the donkeys, fat and big-headed at the helm of the mob of ewes and lambs. Callum Bishop rose from the seat by the back door and limped to her, carrying his lunchbox. He closed the house gate behind him and climbed up into the cab. He gestured at the sky, now vacant of clouds. ‘Gone.’
‘All gone,’ Esther said.
The two old friends rumbled back past the donkeys, who sniffed the dirt at their hoofs in case the passing vehicle had dropped sweet lucerne hay by accident. They roared east towards Esther’s at sixty kilometres an hour and Callum said, ‘She’s an inconsistent housekeeper.’
As ever, he was complaining about his daughter-in-law, so Esther knew what to say next. ‘Makes her expensive to run.’
Cal went on to expand – again – on why Mandy’s brain would never save her feet, said that she wasted perfectly good water taking baths and hosing spiders from the window frames and failed to notice they rebuilt their webs by morning. On sunny days she put wet washing in the dryer and then she blew the thing up because she didn’t clean the fluff filter. ‘That was Margot’s dryer.’ Callum’s wife was dead five long years.
Mandy also talked while they tried to watch footy and expected them to come to the table for dinner during the weather report. Her spaghetti bolognaise always sat in a pool of reddish water and her roasts were always dry. ‘It’s not tasty,’ he said, and Esther said, ‘No love in it.’ She missed Margot’s excellent cooking too.
‘Elsie McIntosh tells me that daughter of hers is coming home,’ she ventured.
Cal retrieved the image of the sprightly lass with the nut-coloured voice and a pleasing disposition. ‘Neralie?’
‘Top secret,’ she said, taking her foot off the accelerator. ‘Don’t tell Mitch.’
‘That’ll set the cat among the pigeons.’ Cal felt more hopeful than he had in years. Neralie was coming ho
me, and somewhere in the blue void above more rain clouds were forming and wind was gathering to push them to Bishops Corner.
Esther pulled the stick out of gear and they coasted over the channel bridge onto her property, past her little corrugated-iron cottage towards the sheep yards. Dust rose and curled and was whipped away. Callum was amazed again at the luscious strength of thistles and morning glory, Bathurst burrs and paspalum and the wide fat carpets of bindi-eye, the thick scrub thrumming with vermin. A rough calculation told him he’d need about sixty litres of heavy-duty chemicals to get rid of it all. Vermin was vermin, it had to go. There was good soil under all that toxic scrub.
They drove towards a stand of old pines to a sick ewe huddled against a fallen trunk, its lamb folded at its side. The ewe bleated, struggled, but was very weak. The two old farmers opened the doors and eased themselves down from the cab. Esther wound the winch on the back of her truck, lowering the sling. Callum picked up the lamb and dumped it gently on the cabin seat while Esther spread the sling on the ground and they rolled the ewe onto it. Esther wound the winch again and the ewe rose in her old jute cradle and was lowered softly onto the back of the truck.
They unloaded her at the yards and took the lamb into Esther’s shack. She made up some milk feed and poked the teat into its mouth. It kissed the pale liquid, shook its head and turned away. Persistence paid off and it finally suckled, nudging violently at the teat, then it put its head on the floor to sleep and Cal and Esther ate their lunch with the ABC news blaring from the old wireless. They attended to the fly-struck ewe, clipping away the sodden, fetid wool, leaving her raw, pink skin exposed. Esther sprayed Tri-Solfen on her wounds and put her in the small yard by the house that boasted a patch of green grass. They washed and gathered up the lamb and headed back to the old green Dodge.
o0o
Cyril Horrick wore his fear on the inside as he drove towards Esther and Cal, one arm hanging from the open window and one wrist draped over the steering wheel. He was fearful from early morning, when the sky revealed its pure, rainless blue, until sleep finally came. He wasn’t a God-believing man, but he prayed for grey skies every night. He passed the idle waterwheel on the crusty bank of Bishops Corner’s condemned supply channel and continued on to Esther Shugg’s property, snug against the river at the culmination of the road. He parked his late-model fleet car close to the bridge, making escape difficult for Esther’s green Dodge.