by Rosalie Ham
Cyril applied his smile and walked towards the two old people, hand extended. He shook Callum’s hand vigorously and ignored Esther. ‘Not every day you get a visit from the regional manager for the State Water Authority, eh?’
‘Thankfully,’ Esther said, putting her hands deep in the pockets of her bib-and-brace overalls.
Cyril looked at the vast paddocks of exposed clay and the arcs of bleached sheep ribs dotting them. ‘Nothing like it, is there? These plains – miles of beautiful barley grass curving over the wide earth . . .’
‘It’d be better if it was wheat.’
‘It will be when we get water again!’
Esther jerked her thumb towards the riverbank. ‘That old pump I have on my river frontage will see me out and I’m not selling my water, so good day to you.’
The two old folk made for the truck.
‘I understand, Mrs Shugg,’ he said, overtaking them.
‘Miss Shugg.’
He stood in front of them. ‘It’s complicated, so I just thought I’d make a few things clear.’
‘You don’t need to.’
‘Your water entitlements were once tied to your quota of land.’
‘I know.’
‘But this has changed.’
‘I know.’ Some men couldn’t help themselves.
‘You can sell your water entitlements to us for just one season, if you like.’
‘I’m keeping all my water,’ Callum said, and Esther said, ‘So am I.’
Cyril stepped towards them. ‘Well, that’s good, because I can get a qualified, certified contractor, government supplemented, to install a new pipe to replace that old channel of yours there. As neighbours, you’ll share costs, and what you save on evaporation and seepage and leakage you can put towards a solar-powered meter, very efficient, a most impressive piece of technology. We’ll also take away your old Dethridge wheel, free of charge, and you’ll be all set to install new hi-tech flume gates to monitor and control water flow into your bays . . . you don’t have to do a thing.’
‘Neither do you,’ Esther said. In the cab of the truck, the lamb bleated feebly.
Callum said, ‘My waterwheel costs me about a hundred dollars a year. Your fancy solar-powered torch system will cost me ten times as much and I’ll have to replace it every time someone in a city office has a new idea, and my water rates will go up to keep the whole thing spinning so you can get overpaid.’
‘Anyway,’ Esther said, ‘we don’t need any of it because there’s a drought – there is no water.’
‘But when the drought’s over you won’t lose six hundred megalitres per annum anymore.’
Callum narrowed his eyes. ‘Spies, you lot, aren’t you?’
‘Sounds pretty good, wouldn’t you say, Mr Bishop? Mrs Shugg?’
‘Miss Shugg.’
He was standing in front of two bloody ancient trees and he was beginning to think they were not going to fall over. It was a bad way to start the day. ‘Think about it! How much more attractive will your land be to prospective buyers with a new system in place?’
Anger at the thought of someone else owning her land sped the blood through Esther’s veins. ‘Why would I sell my home? Anyway, I might want to lease it when I’m old.’
‘Well, then, you may as well increase its value!’
‘There’s a drought, Mr Horrick. Miss Shugg and I haven’t got enough money to buy a new bucket.’
Inside the cab, the lamb bleated again.
Esther said, ‘It’s my land and water, I’ll do what I want with it.’
Cyril looked at the old girl, who needed a shave, and the old bloke holding on to the back of the ute like a man standing knee-deep in a strong current. ‘You can’t. The water is actually ours, not yours. But you can trade, lease or sell your water entitlement to . . . let’s say, Mr Bishop here . . . or to us!’
‘Ha!’ The two old people moved to the doors and held the handles.
‘Think of the saving for the environment. And some will go to the bank of water, so to speak: more water for everyone, whenever you need it!’
‘The bank of water, my arse. You’ll just wait till we’re desperate and sell it back to everyone at even more inflated prices.’
Esther and Callum opened their doors, heaved themselves up into the Dodge, tumbled onto the seat and sat where they landed, Esther clinging to the steering wheel and Callum clutching the seatbelt hanging beside him. The lamb bleated again.
Esther started up the truck but Cyril clung to the windowsill, thinking of Glenys Dingle and the dozens of bloody pumps and meters in the shed. His wife wanted her shed back.
Callum was winding up the window, the truck creeping forward.
‘See you at the meeting,’ Cyril called as Esther’s Dodge moved away. It clipped Cyril’s rear-vision mirror, bending it flat against the duco.
‘I would never give the hard work of my ancestors to a man like Cyril Horrick,’ Esther said.
‘I wouldn’t like to be him,’ Callum said, and Esther thought of his poor wife.
As the sun slipped low in the west they turned into Bishops Corner’s gate. Mitch and Tink and their tall sunset shadows were nudging a mass of garrulous rams towards their new paddock. There was no sign of Mandy’s car over by the house.
Cal opened the door, got out, closed the door and thumped it lightly. Esther raised her finger on the steering wheel and drove away with her lamb, now sleeping.
The donkeys watched her drive past again then turned to Mitch and the sheep, getting smaller in the distance. Mark and Cleopatra sniffed the air in case it held a whiff of wheat.
7.
Predatory
The people along the main street began to stand in their windows and on their stoops to watch Stacey Masterson and the smart set check their wrist monitors and set off on their bikes, a flock of bright cyclists bobbing away on the black asphalt until they were consumed by the plains. On the first day Kelli let it be known that Stacey wore a helmet with little care for his carefully constructed hairstyle, Jasey took up checking her wristwatch each time they left and when they returned, and Denise re-dressed her op shop window with second-hand bicycle gear. Mandy checked daily with Paul for the cheap activity tracker she’d ordered online. This morning, she looked up from admiring her black-lace fingernails just in time to see Lana pass en route to Jasey’s IGA. Three minutes later they walked out of the supermarket and across the road and vanished through the front door of the Bong.
o0o
The main bar was a gutted shell featuring naked furniture, so Jasey and Lana headed to the beer garden, ordered wine and scratchie tickets from Levon, and found a seat under an umbrella beside a gas heater with a clear view of the TV. The current topic of bar conversation was the upcoming meeting with the Water Authority. Levon said, ‘They’re the Charon in the story, keep a dollar in your pocket for them or you’ll be left wandering for a hundred years.’ His companions in the bar told him that he read too many novels. The girls scratched their tickets, swapped, checked, then Jasey went for another round and asked Levon for a couple of steaks for the barbecue.
Levon said, ‘It is not a barbecue. It is a new top-of-the-range outdoor grill, the very latest one.’
Jasey said she was pleased for him, but she didn’t give a fat rat’s clacker what it was as long as it cooked steak the way she instructed it to.
Lana was poised with the tongs over the potato salad when Stacey clicked through the playground and beer garden in cleated shoes and a cycling outfit. He was sweating, and Levon put a glass of water and a steak on the makeshift bar in front of him. He drank the water in one gulp, dropped the meat onto the top-of-the-range grill and continued through the renovations to the stairs leading to the accommodation rooms without looking at anyone in the bar.
Lana signalled to Levon for two more wines and said,
‘I suspected he’d be the reason we’re here.’
‘Kelli says he uses product.’
‘Kelli uses product.’
When he came down again he sat at the bar in the beer garden-cum-playground to watch the news and eat his steak. The girls were careful not to look at him because they knew he could see their reflections in the TV screen. Everything stopped when the weather report came on. All catchments remained dangerously depleted but possible light rain was forecast because of a threatening low.
Then the local carpenter suggested to Stacey that the meeting was pointless. ‘You won’t listen to us . . . our fate has been decided.’
The regulars focused their gaze on Stacey, who said, ‘Not necessarily. Depends how much sense your task force makes.’
Levon asked, ‘Exactly who is the task force?’
The people in the beer garden all looked at each other. No one knew anyone in a task force.
‘We’ve got one – it said so in the newspaper,’ the farmer said, and Levon said it was a myth. Then the carpenter said, ‘But it’s no myth that the Water Authority will eventually take all our water,’ and someone else said that the Asians would take all the land, and the farmer said, ‘Don’t pick on the Asians. They’ve discovered wool – my wool. The Chinese are importing a hundred and fifty thousand tonnes of the stuff!’ But the drinkers on the other side of the state-of-the-art grill argued foreigners imported their own machinery and workers – ‘Foreigners employ foreigners’ – and someone else said, ‘Thank God for the backpackers,’ looking at the perennially unemployed locals, sitting benignly at the bar. The regulars always sat in the same spot and referred to their area as Neutral Bay. Then someone pointed out that foreign investment had always existed, foreigners had always come and gone or stayed, and some of them even paid taxes. Levon asked Stacey what he thought, and Stacey said, ‘It is what it is,’ and left.
The girls leaned over to watch him climb the stairs two at a time and Jasey said, ‘Few changes coming, Lana?’ and Lana said, ‘A few changes.’
o0o
As he drove to Mark and Cleo they hawed, and he knew they were feeling better. Green shoots had sprung over the mounds of manure they expelled, like green profiteroles crisscrossing the dirt. Mitch was happy that the ewes had soft, sweet fronds to nibble on. ‘Good work,’ he called. ‘But you’ve missed Animal Therapy with the oldies. Morton’s fat dog will get the scones this month.’ His barrel-bellied donkeys showed no remorse, so he nudged them until they scrambled up on their thin, aching knees then tied them to the ute. He dragged them to walk in circles, some ewes and lambs straggling along behind, Tink watching the sad, fat procession from the back of the ute. When Mark’s furry knees gave way again, exercise came to a halt. The sheep stopped. Cleopatra stood protectively beside her brother and readied her hind leg to disable Mitch should he further mistreat them. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I’ll let you win . . . just for today.’
Mitch fed his farm dogs and let them off for a run, then headed home. He took the long way to the laundry to wash and found his wife searching for racing bikes on the computer and eating crispy things in loud packaging. She would have already checked the trash file. He plugged his phone in to recharge it and noted the frozen pizzas bases thawing on the sink. He turned the oven on, showered and dressed. When he returned to the kitchen, Callum had turned the oven off. ‘Wasting electricity,’ he said, but Mitch told him (again) that pizzas were better if you put them into a really hot oven. He chopped bacon, sprinkled cheese and some pitted tinned olives on the pizzas, scattered some pineapple pieces on and shoved them into the warm oven. His housemates were both mesmerised by screens and he considered adding rat shit to their pizzas but set the timer instead and rang Bennett Mockett. He ordered drench for his lambs and a truck to take away his Sunday sheep then fell into his chair in front of the TV to endure the daily talk from Callum. Today’s was on raven traps and how to cull lambs for market, which Mitch had spent the day doing, and had been doing for twenty years or so. Then Cal retold the story of Cyril and his desire to trade water. He rubbed his stiff hip with his palm and said, ‘Just knives into the wound.’
The stove called and Mitch served the pizza. He placed a plate at his wife’s elbow near the keyboard and settled in front of the TV again with his father and their stable tables. The news told them that crops were failing in Russia and Mitch’s heart sprang and kicked its heels together. His miserable crop might sell if there was no wheat anywhere else. Then the weather map showed a low in the bight pushing a half-moon of white clouds over the Riverina. They seemed to him to be rain clouds. The BOM site showed ‘possible scattered showers’.
o0o
In the night they woke and left their beds and lairs, backyards and kennels, scraping between palings and slipping under mesh. They moved through streets and joined the group at the river. They mingled silently, tails wagging, ears up, big dogs, small dogs and dogs in between, fat Labradors and half-breed terriers and cattle dogs and a Corgi, a conspiratorial pack with wild blood come to the surface, instincts rousing. Then one moved off, running low, and the others followed, a stream of panting dogs moving with intent, killing in their eyes. Again they followed the river, east this time, running in a pack, tongues lolling, away from the town and far from the road, upstream to the far-flung farms and sheep on the riverbanks.
Mitch woke, unsettled by a cloudburst travelling through his sleep, and listened for the donkeys, but all he heard was the rain rumbling across the iron roof then pattering off to the east. He sank again into nothing, but not before he felt the warm mass of his wife beside him. He moved a little further from the middle of the bed. There was a time when he could have reached for her but the protocols had altered. If there was to be any intimacy it was Mandy who reached, squirmed and straddled, but that was something he no longer anticipated, though in their early days he’d looked for her.
A few weeks into their relationship he’d decided to end what he considered a fling. His happiness at finding her waiting at the pub after a long lonely day had waned. ‘It’s been good, but I don’t want to be in a relationship,’ he told her, and she said, ‘But you promised to take me to Melbourne for my birthday.’ So he did. He took her to Melbourne and they went to the footy and shopping at Queen Vic Market and ate lovely meals in nice restaurants and went to the cinema and the air dried up and crops failed and the drought was made official and life got lean and miserable and the Mandy affair seemed to be a good thing in the mess of it all, but then it became a marriage.
‘I should have stopped it,’ he said to the damp black night.
8.
Divide and conquer
The following week, there was a morning that arrived muted, the air smelling of rain on dust, and Mitch was both buoyant and fearful for his miserly crop, possibly damp and ruined. Mitch’s wife was up early, again. She’d taken to wearing knee-length tight black things and a T-shirt whose purpose was to disguise the body beneath it. Mitch accommodated her shrill presence as he organised Cal’s breakfast, though he hankered for the peace that her past, sullen presence had offered. He took breakfast to his father and she followed him, yakking on about things being quiet in town though there was plenty going on at the pub and how it was all very well that Maria at the cafe was making a fortune from the tradies but she wasn’t really up to making six hamburgers at a time, ‘but if it was me, I’d just make more pizzas and if that’s all there is to eat, then that’s all there is’. Joe Islip had told her that so-and-so was about to go bust and oh my God the price of pushbikes online, and then she asked what he would have to say for himself at the water meeting and, if you asked her, the meeting wouldn’t get anyone anywhere, and Glenys Dingle was ‘only in it for herself’, because ‘Glenys only married that Dingle guy so she could get divorced and take half his farm and money’, and all the while Mitch wondered how it had got this far and why hadn’t he seen what she was like? And then she said sh
e was going to take up cycling again, seriously.
‘You should ride your bike to town,’ Cal said. ‘Keep fit, save on fuel.’
‘I’d need a much better bike. Want to buy me one?’
Callum said he didn’t have long enough to see his money’s worth.
‘I used to be a triathlete!’ She turned to Mitch. ‘How about a bit of support, back me up for a change?’
He considered starting an argument, pissing her off so she’d go to work, but Mandy was the stand-and-fight type. It would be better for Callum if she left before the weather came on, so he told her she was more than capable of standing up for herself and pecked her cheek, and off she went. The men watched through the window as she vanished into the gloom of the shed then rolled her old bike out into the sunshine. She slapped the red-backs and cobwebs from under the seat with a rag, leaned it on the air compressor and drove away. The donkeys, tall and alert amid the ewes and lambs, watched her little white wagon pass. Mitch turned to Cal. ‘Want some bacon and eggs?’
‘My legs are alright, it’s my hip that’s the problem.’
o0o
His happy dog patiently watched him fill the wood box and check the rain gauge then followed him across the yard, the tiny craters the raindrops had left in the dirt tickling her soft paws. She watched him turn Mandy’s bike upside down and blow the bird shit from the spokes and pump up the tyres, run a bit of oil along the chain, adjust the gears and lean the contraption against the tree. Then they spent some time with the disgruntled donkeys, keeping some distance from their rear hoofs, and left some hay for them. Tinka leaped up onto the tray again and barked once at the glorious day because the ute would take them to more places where they would do things together, and she smelled a storm coming. Overhead, clouds gathered in fluffy grey bunches.