by Rosalie Ham
o0o
The showers in the night washed the dust from the eucalypt leaves, perfuming the air with clean trees and wetted dirt. Mild morning sunshine steeped the air, illuminating the landscape. The bush and clouds were tinted gold and the brittle grasses fringed white. On their low perch the ducks ruffled their feathers and stared down, their dark eyes wary in their little matchbox heads. Jasey followed their gaze and found the white breast and dull red coat of Mr Fox. She raised the rifle, put her eye to the scope and steadied the crosshairs. She held her breath, felt the steel curve of the trigger holding back the rush of bloody victory and squeezed when a snap, loud as a gun blast, split the morning, sending the birds flapping. It was a branch cracking. An impatient gum had chosen that moment to shed one of its thirsty limbs. The mighty branch thudded onto the hard ground, twigs and leaves crashing across the bare slope of the river’s edge, the loud echo of screaming, fleeing ducks and birds travelling up and down the water. Jasey walked down to the tree, the gun in the crook of her arm, and studied the fleshy cavity where the limb had ripped from the trunk. It smelled sweet, and was cool and moist to the touch, though not as moist as it should have been. She patted the tree and looked again to the promising clouds.
Lana’s royal blue Commodore came up Jasey’s gravel drive, sun shafts spotlighting the vivid plains behind it and music rumbling through its doors. The girls drove away singing but midway through the first lap around the barbecue area their singing ceased. Lana braked suddenly. Jasey reached over to the CD player and shut the chorus down. An army of colourful marchers circled the swimming hole. Everyone was there, even the 35-year-old grandmothers from Single Mothers Street were rushing along. The briskly fit Rural Women’s Club, headed by Megan Mockett, in her white tracksuit, overtook the single mums on the outside, their hand weights lending extra push, and all the town girls – Keira and Madison, Amelia and Bree-Anna and Loren and Trixie and Nicole and Debbie and Coral and Kelli – were racing against the flow and jabbering as if they did it every day. Even Mandy was there, so early!
‘Jesus Christ,’ Lana said, ‘Mandy’s jogging,’ and Jasey said, ‘Struggling’s more the word.’
And then they saw the swimmer. A figure in a partial wetsuit was splashing along in the chilly spring water from the jetty to the pontoon. He wore goggles and had the fluid action of a competitive swimmer – the new boy in town.
Stacey located the round black forms in the dull freezing water and knew they were the forty-four-gallon drums holding up the pontoon. He executed an Ian Thorpe turn and pushed through the churning murk. At the jetty, he climbed the small ladder and stood on the planks, water dripping from him, while the women turned to stare. The new man in town had a swimmer’s broad torso, a cyclist’s calves and curated biceps. Breathing hard, he pressed the activity tracker on his wrist, removed his goggles and earplugs and checked his time. Slow, but that was okay – new pool, muddy water and all that.
Lana looked at Jasey and shook her head. ‘I’m not scared of the competition, but exercising . . . I don’t even do stairs.’
Jasey studied the waddling walkers in their thrusting lycra. ‘No way. Your strategy will be allure, Lana. Be alluring.’
‘If he waterskis I could watch.’
‘We’ll get Megan to take us out. You can sit in the corner with the wind through your hair and call out when someone falls off.’
o0o
Mandy peeled away from the exercising scrum as soon as Stacey turned on the tap at the rainwater shower, so that by the time he got to the newsagency, she was leaning on the counter with her cleavage on show and her lipstick fresh. He stood in the middle of her shop stabbing at his phone, wearing a wool jumper and towel. Water flowed from his hairless legs and rolled off his feet. ‘Reception’s patchy.’
Paul said, ‘The government’s fault.’
‘How am I s’posed to get the daily prices?’
Paul looked at the puddle growing in front of his counter. ‘Like to keep fit, do you?’
‘Comes in handy,’ Stacey replied.
‘And you’ve started a trend,’ Mandy said, tossing her hair. ‘I’ve never seen that exercise track so crowded.’
The newsagent was smiling at him. Again, he took this as an indication that she wanted him, which was all very well, but after a while you needed someone you could talk to.
‘How do you find the swimming facility?’
He took his newspapers from her. ‘It’ll have to do, eh?’
‘There’s a filter on the inlet from the river, but you never quite know what you’re swimming in.’
He walked towards the door, searching through the pages for the market prices.
‘You staying at the pub?’
‘Yep.’
‘It’s got new owners.’
‘Bonza!’
‘I can get the key to the footy club gym,’ she called, but Stacey called back, ‘So can I,’ and Paul said, ‘He could get just about anything he wanted, I bet.’
She rolled the newspapers, put elastic bands around them and dumped them on Paul’s counter for the mail run, and spent the rest of the morning leaning in the doorway. No one looked in her direction. Tradies came and went from the pub, yet each time she checked, its back gate was padlocked.
At lunchtime Mandy went for a stroll that took her to the library. She borrowed a novel, which Mrs Goldsack said was due back in three weeks, but Mandy’s main interest was in the computer room. Only one person was using the computers. She wandered back to the IGA, where she found Jasey standing proudly in front of her vast and brilliant display of notepads, stickers, satin-covered horseshoes, confetti, sequins and streamers and the box of Christmas decorations. She paid for her tins of creamed corn, and neither woman spoke to the other.
When she got back to the shop, Paul announced that he’d be putting in more postboxes, and it dawned on her that the postie was providing a service that meant no one ever had to cross the stoop. ‘That’ll bring the customers into the shop, won’t it, Paul?’ she said, wanting to plunge a knife into his soft body. Paul knew then that she’d probably never let him root her again.
o0o
The rain followed Levon’s ute all the way from Sydney. It burst from the sky as they left the lovely beaches of Clovelly and pooled in the tarp protecting Neralie’s possessions. It rained while they ate toasted sandwiches at the Gundagai cafe and it rained while Levon drove and Neralie talked like she hadn’t talked to anyone in five years, the wipers a rhythmic nuisance on the windscreen. Then she drove while he read An Obolus for the Styx, and when he finally closed his thick book he said he’d better drive the last leg into town.
It stopped raining when they pulled up at Esther’s front gate. Neralie stood on the wet asphalt in the silence and inhaled the rain-washed, pre-dawn air. Faint birdcall came from the spot where the land formed an oxbow and leeches as fat as thumbs bred in the cumbungi. Everything she would encounter from this point held her life to date, and Mitch.
Levon said, ‘On we go, Nelly,’ and they drove on towards Bishops Corner. There were no lights shining from the house, no headlights sweeping across sleeping lambs or irrigation bays, just the woolshed and the yards silhouetted against a sky faintly illuminated by stars.
‘Those donkeys alright?’
‘They fronted up Anzac Day and they still do Animal Therapy even though they ate the vegetable garden at the nursing home. Don’t know about the nativity scene.’
They laughed, remembering that day at primary school, the end-of-year concert and the nativity, and Mitch with his donkeys, just foals at the time, and one of them shitting on baby Jesus in his manger.
Levon said, ‘They must be about twenty-five or thirty years old by now.’
‘Old,’ she said, and felt the pang for the last five years wasted. Impulse wanted her to run up the gravel driveway, skip through the house and jump on Mitch in his b
oyhood bed, but he didn’t sleep there anymore because he was married.
‘Why didn’t anyone stop him?’ she asked, and Levon shrugged. ‘We just didn’t think it’d actually happen.’
She glared at him.
‘I’ll tell you right now, no one wants to be told that they failed to stop Mandy from trapping Mitch, alright? We know already. We don’t see him anymore . . .’ She’d used the old divide-and-conquer tactic. First her sullen presence was like an infection in the corner, then she accused Mitch’s friends of being mean to her, slighting her; Mitch was compelled to support her, defend her; friends retreated then became estranged, and Mandy had Mitch all to herself. It was easier for him, for everyone, that way.
‘And anyway,’ Levon continued, ‘you left! And how were we supposed to know she’d sneak him off to Melbourne? Not even Isobel knew. Apparently she said she was pregnant.’
‘That old trick. Almost serves him right for believing it.’ She wanted to cry. How stupid of Mitch, how stupid!
The town came into view and her palms started to itch and her heart raced because soon she’d be standing in the kitchen with her mum and dad, and Lana and Jasey and Kev, and she wanted to cry more.
‘Just focus on the pub, Nelly.’ Her brother glanced across at her. ‘It’ll all work out, nothing surer.’
‘It has to.’
They turned and drove over the bridge and pump station and there was the asphalt track that led to home, and there was Elsie’s struggling orchard and the corrugated-iron roof of her parents’ house. The biggest decision she’d ever made was to leave home. She found out that coming back was the best decision she’d ever made.
9.
I knew all along
He wasn’t sure if he’d harvest or plough in his crop. There was no point spraying. Was it worth the effort, or the fuel, to plough it? He gave the old header harvester a bit of a service and was grinding a few tines, just in case, when his wife wheeled her bicycle into the tool shed. ‘I’m taking up swimming again,’ she declared, as if she’d been a swimmer in the recent past.
‘It’s a bit cold.’
‘It’s spring. The water’ll be warm.’
‘Swimming and cycling?’
‘Yes.’
Mitch shrugged. ‘Whatever floats your boat.’
He watched her ride back over to the house and manipulate her bike into the back of her little wagon and drive away to work.
In town she sold a few papers to customers who speculated about the meeting the following day. ‘I bet they say they’re taking five hundred gigs, not three hundred . . . I bet they put the rates up again.’ When she could, Mandy ducked out the back to monitor a truck she heard driving up the lane towards the pub. A group of men unloaded a new stove, and when she got back to her shop, Paul was there reading the paper, so she stuck her Back in 5 note to her cash register and rode her reconstructed bicycle to the swimming hole.
Stacey was not splashing up and down between the jetty and the pontoon, but the 35-year-old grandmothers from Single Mothers Street were huddled with the briskly fit Rural Women’s Club. She slid quietly up to them – ‘Morning’ – and they squirted off in all directions. When she was young and sad and searching, before she’d found Mitch, Mandy found companionship in food, as the unloved sometimes do, and occasionally she got pissed at the Bong and lurched off into the night with some boy she’d been to school with, and so she’d become accustomed to these huddles, seen them disintegrate the second she rounded a corner. It got worse when she married Mitch, so she rode along behind the walking women, pushing them, so that their arms pumped enough to ache and they peeled from the frantic pack, one by one, to bend over gasping at the grass between their expensive exercise shoes.
When they were all lying exhausted either side of the exercise track, she rode over to the outdoor fitness equipment, where the carpenter lay on his back on the soft rubber cover, his right toe placed on the ground next to his left knee and his face reflecting his pain. She got off her bike and put her foot up on the stretch station. ‘How are you?’
‘How do I look?’ He straightened his leg and put it back where it belonged, raised his left foot and tried to make it go to the other side of his right leg, but it hurt too much.
‘What is it?’ Mandy asked.
‘Slipped disc, sciatica.’ He rolled carefully onto his stomach and raised and lowered his feet. Mandy held the stretch station and lifted her foot against her disappointed buttock. ‘What’s happening at the pub?’
‘No idea.’
‘How come you didn’t get the job?’
‘You might have noticed, Mandy, I’m not fit to demolish anything, build walls or carry plaster.’ He rose to all fours.
‘They could have given you something to do – paint stools or something – just to support local business.’
He cut his stretching session short and went back to his ute, a hand on his lower back. Mandy got back on her bike and rode around and around the swimming hole, her direction anticlockwise so she had a clear view of the main street as she pedalled. Someone in this town knew who bought the pub. The townies knew everything. Denise usually told her things, or Kelli. Someone always let something slip because that’s what they liked doing. It made them feel powerful, no matter how small the news. But they were not telling her anything and she couldn’t think why.
She called in to see Denise. ‘What’s happening?’
Denise shrugged. ‘Looks like rain.’
‘It won’t rain.’ Mandy picked a cardigan from the box Denise was sorting. ‘How much?’
‘Ten bucks.’
‘I’ll give you five.’
‘It’s for the church, you’re not broke or homeless.’
‘Yet.’
‘Make it eight bucks?’
‘Seven.’
‘Done.’
Then Levon McIntosh’s ute cruised past and Mandy took a step towards the window, so Denise asked if she was going to the water meeting.
‘Of course.’ She looked at Denise. ‘I bet someone knows who bought that pub.’
‘We’ll all know soon enough.’
Mandy went next door to Kelli, who was studying the Women’s Weekly. ‘See this bald girl on the cover?’
‘Cancer,’ Mandy snapped.
‘She died. She had the most beautiful long dark hair.’ Kelli sighed then looked at her iPhone. ‘Gawd, is that the time? I’m too busy to chat.’
‘I can’t see any customers in here.’
Kelli looked at her from beneath her cherry pink eyelids and her blue-striped fringe and said, ‘You always have to argue. I’ve got to go out, alright?’
As Mandy left, she slid the door so hard that it bounced out of its tracks.
Back in her newsagency she found a nail file and ground her fingernail art to a rounded shovel shape, eradicating the lacework.
It was another quiet day in Mandy’s shop. It was those computer lessons of Lana’s. People were reading the paper online. Or were they?
o0o
‘Cirrostratus,’ he said to the grey skies, but the clouds were hanging. ‘Thick cirrostratus? Or maybe nimbostratus?’ Mitch lowered the plough and was about to drive off, ripping the crop to shreds behind him, but couldn’t. Would it rain, and if it did would the crop be shot and sprung or would it dry out? What if he spent all that time and effort ploughing it in and the cloudburst drifted away? But if he left it to harvest, would it be worth the cost of fuel, the wear and tear on his ancient header, to strip this piss-weak crop before him? And what if the ominous clouds did spill their guts and he bogged the combine harvester? Could he bear the sight of Kev’s laughing face? And what would he say to the bank manager? And what of the stubble, the acres of weed-riddled, rodent-infested straw? Was there any kind of future in trying to farm like this? He sat in the tractor cab under the churning sky with hi
s hands on the steering wheel.
‘It’s a circular subject, Mitchell,’ he said, and wished he had someone to tell him what to do. And then it was too late. He ignored the first crack on the cabin roof but the drops started coming in twos and threes, big fat splats on the tin, and then drops came steadily, heavy racking the air and stirring a cold breeze.
‘Well, holy frigging shitballs.’ He let go of the steering wheel and then could scarcely hear himself think for the sound of rain on the metal cab. A wide wisp of steam shifted across the bonnet and dust slid down the windows in beige trickles. The sweet smell of rain on dirt came to him and he opened the little window vent at the side and inhaled, the sound of rain swelling and loud drops pelting his crop and a thunderclap rumbling past. Lightning split the boiling, grey sky and water hammered down, a great roar of it, and his eyes filled with tears and he hoped Tinka had thought to shelter under the ute.
Then he thought he heard something, a call, but when he listened all he heard was rain on metal, so it must have been a bird. The birds bathing on branches! A crow. Spiders would be scurrying to their funnels, snakes racing across roads, the lambs confused, never having experienced water falling through the air. Then something moved beyond the streaky windscreen – a figure of blue and pink shimmering behind the rainy glass. And then the figure was climbing up the ladder at the side of his tractor and the door opened and there was a woman, familiar, sudden and very real, crouching in the dreamy solitude of his cold grey cabin in the middle of a miserable crop. It was Neralie, smiling at him, rain dripping from her hair.
‘Thought I’d better meet you here rather than . . . you know . . . giving you a fright in the pub or something,’ she said.
Neralie McIntosh was sitting beside him with her teeth and her face and her eyes. A real thing. A person.