by Rosalie Ham
‘Say, “Hello, Neralie, nice to see you.”’
‘I can’t speak.’ He couldn’t take his eyes off her. There she was, in his cabin, sitting right next to him on the little plastic cover that protected something in the engine. It was for guests, kids who wanted a ride on a tractor, and she was sitting on it and then he felt her arms around his waist. She squeezed against him. She was just the same, only smoother or something.
‘You’ve lost weight.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s my hair.’ She wiped the top of her hair with her hand. ‘I’m brunette . . . for a while, anyway. I just came to tell you I’m back. What are you up to?’
‘I’m ironing shirts.’
‘Still a funny bugger, eh?’
‘I was thinking about either ploughing in my so-called crop or maybe spraying, but now it’s raining.’
She nodded. ‘I know.’
Neither could think of anything to say so she looked out the window. ‘My car’s over there. Your wife will see it if she comes home.’
‘She’s at work . . . in the main street, where everyone knows everything.’
‘There are some secrets the good people of the town keep.’
He could see the little white lines in her blue irises. ‘Who knows?’
‘Everyone. Except you . . . until now.’ She sniffed, the damp air and dust making her nose run, and they just sat there looking at each other because it seemed the natural thing to do. Normal, yet extraordinary. Mitch looked the same – he was tanned, the creases at his eyes were still white when he wasn’t smiling, his shiny black hair was still sitting up at the crown, his mouth open, perfect teeth, neat biceps that moved up and down under his firm skin and the kind of thighs men used to have, and she remembered what it was like to be enveloped in that lovely torso.
And there she was, in the flesh. Neralie, with her lovely skin and lovely mouth and all he wanted to do was take her home with him. Forever. And then the enormity of their situation was filling the cab.
Mitch was married to Mandy.
But Mitch loved Neralie and Neralie loved Mitch.
‘Meet you at the pub’s opening night?’
At the pub. In front of everyone.
‘Everyone will finally get to see the new owner.’
‘Most people have seen me before.’ She put her hand on his knee, because she just wanted to feel him. ‘But not as much of me as you have.’ And though she’d promised herself she wouldn’t, she kissed him on the lips. It was the best kiss she’d ever fallen into.
She pushed the door open and said, ‘By the way, you’ve got a flat.’
He didn’t understand what she meant.
‘Your tyre is flat, the big one.’ And then she was gone, her blue jeans and striped top flitting over the wet clods behind the rain-splattered windscreen while the meaning of what Neralie had just said fell like Smarties into a pretty cup. He looked up at the ceiling of the cab, at the dust and the yellowed plastic over the light globe, and he said, ‘Friggin’ PERFECT! I can’t not see her. She’s bought the pub.’ He slammed his palm onto the steering wheel and stamped his feet. He’d often lamented that there was only one pub, meaning there was no escaping the usual crowd when you wanted a quiet drink or a meal with Isobel or Cal without some half-pissed local plonking down and hijacking the occasion. But now he knew why there was only one pub. ‘Thank you, God, or town planners, whoever . . .’
Neralie was back, everything would be alright, and they knew now that in going away it was proved – things were only right when they were near each other. Nothing had been alright for a long time. And there was still the matter of Mandy, and the farm. But the universe would align, sooner or later, and things would be right again. They could wait a little longer to live in the manner where all things were correct. Good. He stood, banged his head, fumbled at the door, opened it and called out through the driving rain, ‘Come back!’ But she’d run too far from him through the useless crop. He looked at his tyres. One was indeed flat. He wondered if Neralie still ate her Weet-Bix with a fork and drank the milk from the bowl, if she still preferred her toast cold, if she would be at the meeting tomorrow night.
Neralie watched her sneakers chopping through the low sparse wheat, felt the dull stalks slap against her jeans and the raindrops tap her shoulders. She put her tongue out to catch a drop and tasted salt because she had started to cry. She was surprised to feel a huge tension drain away, and then so much happiness it made her ache.
o0o
It was going to rain any minute, so Lana stopped at her beautiful blue Holden, parked outside the empty butcher’s shop. She knew Mandy was lurking in her gloomy shop, taking in everything from Lana’s boots to her earrings. She hoped there was no toilet paper hanging from the back of her skirt, no line across her bum from elastic in her undies, but then she summoned the power of the secret she held and waved. ‘Hi, Mandy!’
She saw a faint movement of Mandy’s hand.
When Debbie dropped in with her kids they found the newsagency deserted and Mandy out in the back lane staring at the pub gate.
‘I see new bar stools have arrived.’
‘And a new pool table. You got my knitting magazine?’
Mandy handed it to her. ‘It’s like the whole town knows everything about that pub and no one’s telling me.’
Debbie flicked through her magazine. ‘There’s dogs about.’
‘I know. You gunna pay for that magazine or leave without paying again?’
‘I did that once, by accident, five years ago.’ Debbie paid and waited with her hand out for her change, which she checked carefully.
‘You suspicious about your change?’
Debbie put the coins into the appropriate compartment in her purse and left, just as thunder rumbled from the east and travelled off to the west. A moment later, lightning cracked the sky and rain began to pour.
‘Shit,’ Mandy said. She could hardly go out walking now. From her stoop she saw a figure leave the pub and get into Levon’s ute – a dark smudge of a figure wearing overalls and a baseball cap pulled low, like a celebrity buying toilet paper. And there was a man on a ladder leaning over the door of the pub, painting something. She stuck her Back in 5 note on the door, grabbed her plastic bike poncho and hurried up the back lane to the pub. She peeped through the gap between the tall corrugated-iron gates, the rain drenching her hair, more alive than she’d ever been, yet slightly nauseous, and her bladder was suddenly full and pressing. She hurried around to the front of the pub.
The man and his ladder were gone, but there, painted in bold black on gold, was a sign: billabong hotel, licensees l. and n. mcintosh.
Goosebumps puckered her flesh and she flushed hot, but forced herself to walk, not run, the rain hard and loud against her poncho. She squelched around the track circling the swimming hole and followed it along the river past Mrs Maloney’s house on the opposite side, her cow grazing on the meander, then the Jovetics’ neat vegetable garden, Jasey’s very tidy yard and finally she was opposite the sprawl of the McIntoshes’ house, rain pelting down on its small orchard. She leaned on a tree to dig into her shoe for a stone that wasn’t there and surveyed the scene. The McIntosh house was deserted . . . but then the screen door opened and a slight figure wearing denim overalls stepped onto the back verandah and stood at the top of the steps. It was Neralie McIntosh. And emerging from the gloom were Jasey and Lana, who came to stand either side of her. Between Mandy and her nemesis, the river flowed sluggishly, raindrops hitting it like thousands of falling marbles, carp leaped and splashed, the ducks swam in happy circles.
They had not told her. The entire town had kept a secret. This was far worse than her rejection from the Rural Women’s Club. Mandy realised her mouth was hanging open, so she closed it. How could she possibly go to the new pub and have fun and be happy with Mitch again when that woman ran the place
, when the entire family plus frigging Jasey and fucking Lana would be there twenty-four hours a day? How could Mitch do this to her? He must have known.
Mandy stepped away from the tree and faced them across the swollen, littered waterway, the rain bellowing in her ears and water sliding from the tip of her nose down her shirtfront. Jasey smiled and Lana waved for the second time that day.
Mandy turned and walked away.
o0o
Jasey and Lana followed Neralie into the house, where they picked up their glasses of wine and sat on the couch side by side, looking at the wall and the array of snack foods in front of them. Lana lit a cigarette and Neralie said, ‘Give me one of those, will ya?’
And Jasey said she might as well have one too. They went back out onto the verandah to smoke and look at the spot where Mandy had stood dripping in a clear plastic poncho.
‘We’ll fix it,’ Jasey said.
‘We will,’ Lana said.
Neralie nodded but she still couldn’t quite trust them because, after all, they’d let Mitch be captured by that woman.
o0o
It continued to pour down on the drive to Bishops Corner, the windscreen wipers flapping and the dull wintry landscape rolling past, and Mandy replayed the scene in which the new publican had stepped onto the verandah with her two bitch friends. But they hadn’t really won, the people of the town. She’d known all along something was up. They hadn’t told her, but they didn’t have to. She knew. Neralie McIntosh might hold prime position at the pub, but Mandy had Mitch. Really, it was Neralie who would fail, had failed. She hadn’t married that guy in Sydney. She hadn’t snared a rich property developer or a smart city businessman, she didn’t have a fabulous career on telly or a baby or nice shoes. She didn’t even look any different. She had come back, sneaked back, and now she would work as a barmaid in a small town until she died.
But Mitch probably still liked her – possibly loved her.
Mandy would hang on to him. He’d married her, after all. She was Mrs Mitchell Bishop. Then hate and disappointment rose up, so bitter that she could taste it inside; something felt bad, wrong. She’d thought she’d be somebody when she married Mitch. She’d been swindled. Again. Nothing had changed in her life except she’d moved twelve kilometres from nowhere to an old house on a failing farm with two farmers in the dried-up countryside where gunshots thwacked through the thin air as farmers assassinated starving stock then, one by one, sold up and went to better lives, leaving houses emptied of living souls and a void of paddocks of grass and no hope. Not one single thing held any inclination to thrive except for weeds and rodents and predators. And now, it was raining, pissing down, and rural life would wake, smiling. Things were about to get better and Neralie bloody McIntosh swans back into town and sucks out the centre of her future. Everywhere Mandy went from now on she’d have to anticipate her, them. It wasn’t fair. Her entire life would be shadowed, ruined, by Neralie and Jasey and Lana and that pub just down from where she, Mandy, worked, and there was only one pub for a hundred kilometres: one place to eat, meet, celebrate, dance, sing, live. It was all ruined forever.
Perhaps she could ruin their lives?
An oncoming car flashed its lights and she gripped the steering wheel, preparing to scare the car into the sodden irrigation ditch; they’d never know for sure in the fading light with headlights blinding . . . But that’s what it was: a friendly reminder – dusk, rain, time to turn your headlights on. In the rear-vision mirror she could just make out the shape of the car. Stacey Masterson. She watched his glowing tail-lights and smiled. Lana and Jasey had their sights set on him, nothing surer. The water meeting was tomorrow. And he lived at the pub, the one place to eat, meet, celebrate, dance and sing.
She swung through the gates and over the bridge and rumbled across the stock grid. ‘Fuck you,’ Mandy cried to the dull house through the rain. ‘I will not be dumped for a barmaid.’ And she felt happy – started to laugh, in fact.
o0o
It was the way she drove into the yard, the way she splashed through the puddles at speed and braked, sat there with the rain falling down all over her little white wagon, and then the look on her face as she strolled across the wet yard that confirmed it.
‘Shit,’ Mitch said, and Cal took possession of the remote and reached for his hearing aids.
He felt her eyes on him while the frozen patties spat and sizzled under the grill. While water dripped from her wet hair and ran down her face, he opened and rinsed a packet of salad leaves and arranged them on buttered bread rolls with some sliced beetroot. He knew she liked chicken-flavoured onion rings, but Mitch didn’t bother with them. And while the eggs burned, he put some tomato sauce, salt, pepper and cutlery on the table, and as he put the plate in front of her, she said quietly, ‘I’m not hungry,’ and left. The bathroom door slammed and the house winced, then was sucked by the violent surge of hot water through resting pipes.
Cal said, ‘Crikey,’ and bit into his hamburger. Mitch put his aside.
o0o
She would hurt them, she would pour salt into the barrel of Mitch’s precious guns hiding there on top of the laundry cupboard, see how he felt about that. Then she would leave and take her half of the farm, finally have what she’d been denied by her grandmother and parents. But then she’d be alone again in a town with her failed relationship with the most popular bloke in town or she’d be forced out, made to leave, to start again. But where to? She rubbed the towel over the foggy mirror in the warm, steamy bathroom and saw her pink face. Her future was a void, and she felt the comfort of coming home to those two men, irritating as they could be. They were harmless, well-mannered, old-fashioned men who deferred to her on womanly matters and opened doors for her and serviced her bicycle and said thank you when she cooked dinner. And there was no one else for her. The void widened and all she registered was rejection and loneliness. Mitch wouldn’t want her now.
But if he didn’t have her . . . he would get everything he wanted. And she wouldn’t get anything she wanted. ‘Fuck that,’ she said.
10.
The meeting
Mandy was not surprised to wake to a quiet house, her father-in-law in bed and her husband away with his sheep – or donkeys or machines, whatever it was he did out there in the wilderness. She would not squib. She dressed carefully and was behind her counter early. Stacey was her first customer and he set the tone for the day, hurrying in and out, the meeting on his mind. Her customers followed suit, rushing in (bearing correct change) and leaving quickly, saying nothing apart from, ‘See you at the meeting tonight,’ or similar. But they found that outwardly, the newspaper proprietor appeared her usual self. Mandy noted that Debbie sent the kids in for the Saturday papers.
At noon, and not before, Mandy shut up shop and drove home. A new banner at the pub replaced the sold sign. This one announced, in bold red letters, a grand opening. Mandy smiled, knowing she had a couple of weeks to prepare, but first, the meeting.
She spent most of the afternoon in the bathroom. Cal remained in his study and her husband enjoyed the company of his dog, somewhere.
Though her face was still hot-water pink, the mirror reflected an attractive woman with lovely hair, curled, but not too much. Her make-up was pleasing, unlike the overdone paint jobs Lana and Jasey made of their faces. And though Lana would be up the front at the meeting with Stacey, Mandy had plenty to say. She had opinions, and not many of the other girls who came to stare at Stacey would offer opinions on irrigation, that’s for sure. Again, she dressed carefully. Her jeans were tight, but not as tight as Lana Jovetic’s. She chose a cowl-necked blouse and rope wedges, then added pearl drop earrings and red lipstick. Rural, but not Isobel Prestwich rural. She raised her chin and squared her shoulders, flicking her tresses.
In the kitchen she stood next to Mitch as he washed dishes. ‘You look nice,’ he said, but it was not sincere.
�
��I knew all along something was going on.’
Cal leaned in his recliner to listen.
‘Well, I only found out yesterday.’
‘And of course you didn’t ring to warn me.’
‘I didn’t want to upset you.’
‘Oh? There’s a reason I should be upset, then? Well, I’m not upset. I’m inspired. But I’m not prepared to have a threesome, like Kevin, Jasey and Lana.’
‘What people do is their own business.’ He just wanted to keep things as calm as possible, take it slow, establish what, if anything, might unfold.
‘I’m quite content here,’ she said, admiring her new fingernails. ‘But you can go if you’re not.’ She would not be left homeless again.
And now Mitch was faced with the future, and the one worry that was always circling in the background – for reasons to do with debt, banks, breakdowns, fire, flood, the weather in general or any sort of setback – was staring back at him. The farm might be at stake, the legacy, a hundred years of hard work; but, above all, at risk was his father.
o0o
Cyril Horrick had one finger poised above a green button on a control panel. All around him, water was falling in tumbling cascades. Jasey said, ‘Don’t,’ but he pressed the button with his extraordinarily long finger and a huge wall of water burst from the dam, rolling down the river along with homes and livestock, and then it was a giant flow of thick, muddy slush laced with European carp, rotted boats and drowned fishermen, eskies and rusted drum nets brimming with dead turtles and lost children. The wave, high as a building, rolled towards the town, consuming the bridge and the refurbished water pump station, and then it crashed into Bennett and Megan Mockett’s boxy concrete castle, spoiling the white carpet, and Jasey was swimming, struggling against the flow, and somewhere, way off, an alarm was ringing. She reached out and shut it off. Kevin was looking at her and the sound of water tapping on tin filled the room. ‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘You’ll never believe what I just saw.’