Hope Farm

by Peggy Frew

  Dean Price raised his hand, palm up, and wiggled his fingers. ‘Come on, then,’ he said. ‘Giss a look.’

  Ian didn’t move.

  Dean Price gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ he said. Then Newt came over and seized Ian from behind, pinning his arms to his sides and lifting him off the ground. Dean Price ripped the bag from Ian’s hands, opened it, and tipped out the contents. Some loose papers were snatched immediately by the wind and went whipping past me and off along the grassy roadside. A red plastic lunchbox and some books fell to the ground, as well as one of the white A4 envelopes photography students used to protect their prints, which Dean Price quickly put his foot on.

  ‘Aha!’ Casting a jubilant look round, he bent and picked up the envelope. ‘This looks interesting, hey Munro?’

  What happened after that happened very quickly, and almost all at once.

  A vehicle pulled up, a small truck that I recognised with a throb of incredulous relief.

  Ian suddenly twisted and kicked at Newt’s shins, who released his grip for a moment. Ian then grabbed at the envelope in Dean Price’s fist and the envelope tore, releasing a clutch of postcard-sized photographs that scattered and then tumbled over the grass in my direction, borne along by gusts of wind. As they went, they showed glimpses of their printed sides, which were more a washed-out grey than black-and-white: two shapes, indistinct but recognisably people — and clearly naked. Arms reaching, a head thrown back, a grainy but obvious bare breast, an unmistakable clump of dark pubic hair. Someone let out a whistle.

  ‘Catch them!’ yelled Dean Price, and every boy except Ian stumbled into action. But the photos somersaulted on, and before anyone had moved three paces they had all vanished — apart from the one I’d trapped under my foot and the two that had leapt like eager pets to press themselves against the skirt of my school dress.

  I stood still as a post, feeling the plasticky shudder against my thighs, the threat of the wind.

  The mob halted and looked to Dean Price for instruction.

  But Dan had climbed out of the truck now and was walking over, calling, ‘Hey,’ and it was in the shadow of his approaching, adult, presence that all the boys stood, paralysed, and watched as I groped cautiously for the photos that had blown against my skirt and bent to retrieve the other one, then put all three into my bag.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Dan stopped between Dean Price and Newt. He had his hands in his pockets, and was wearing a pair of sunglasses I’d never seen before, with mirrored lenses — and he looked unusually, and blessedly, grown up. Newt and Dean Price stared at the ground. Ian stood, silent, off to one side.

  Dan’s voice wasn’t loud, but its authority was undeniable. He stood head and shoulders above Dean Price, who dangled his hands like a chastened toddler. I stole nearer. Dan took out a cigarette and lit it, cupping it close against the wind and taking his time. He drew on it a few times in silence, then moved closer to Dean Price, ducking to see into the boy’s face.

  ‘These two,’ said Dan in that same low voice, ‘are friends of mine.’ He let out a stream of smoke.

  Dean Price blinked.

  ‘So you’re going to leave them alone from now on.’

  A nod from Dean Price.

  ‘Am I right?’

  Another nod.

  ‘Am I right?’ Dan’s repeated the words in almost exactly the same tone, but this time he clipped the end of right with a metallic sound that somehow conveyed startling menace.

  ‘Yeah. Yeah. You’re right.’

  ‘You okay?’ said Dan to Ian, speaking across me sitting in the middle of the ute’s bench seat.

  ‘Yes.’ The spots over Ian’s cheekbones had gone pink, and he was staring down at his knees.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yes. I’m fine.’ He faced the window. ‘I’m fine,’ he said again, sounding almost irritated. His breaths were jerking in and out through his nose as if it hurt to draw them.

  ‘Where do you live then?’ said Dan. ‘I’ll drop you home.’

  ‘Not the next left, but the one after.’ Now he was mumbling, like someone who’d been hauled up in front of the class by a teacher. He lifted a hand to push back his hair and I saw that his fingers were shaking.

  My own hands I kept firmly on my school bag.

  We drove the short distance in silence.

  ‘Here?’ said Dan, and Ian didn’t answer or even nod, only took hold of the handle and began to open the door before the truck had fully stopped. Away he stalked, onto the ridged dirt of the lane that led to his family’s property, his ears pink, his collar gaping pitifully as always round his weedy neck, not turning to wave or call goodbye.

  ‘He all right?’ said Dan.

  ‘Yeah.’ My voice sounded thin. ‘He’s just embarrassed.’

  But I knew he wasn’t all right, and I knew what was the matter. Everything had changed in the moments in which Dan had walked towards Dean Price, in the moments in which I had rescued the photos trapped against my skirt and under my shoe, and they had flashed their messages to me. I knew something that I hadn’t known before — but I couldn’t acknowledge it yet, give it space, not while I was sitting there beside Dan.

  ‘Next stop your place?’

  I didn’t answer. I stared out at the black and green stripes of tree trunks. When he pulled up at the hut I did the same as Ian, jumping out as fast as possible — although I did manage to blurt the word ‘thanks’ as I slammed the door, looking away.

  I had seen who it was in the photos, recognised the figures as I slipped them into my bag. I needed to check again though, just to be sure, and as soon as Dan had driven off I went inside and into my room, closing both doors behind me. Ishtar was at work, and not due back for a while yet, but still I listened out as I took the prints from my bag and put them on the bed.

  They were of Dan and Ishtar, in the outdoor bath at Hope. Ian must have taken them from his hiding spot up on the hill and then blown them up in the darkroom. He’d had to zoom so far into them that they barely qualified as photographs — they were almost impressionistic, the figures ghostly, swimming among spots of grain like flecks in an old mirror, their features blowzy and dreamlike. They were recognisable, though — instantly so — Dan’s rangy build, the way his dark hair fell at the back of his neck; Ishtar’s long throat, the calm smudges of her eyes.

  I was glad for the smokiness of the images, for their vagueness, as I looked them over, skittering my gaze past the lower reaches of Dan’s nakedness in the one where he was still climbing in, and the blotches of his lips as they met Ishtar’s in the second print and bled into the creamy round of her breast in the third.

  I twisted my fingers in the blanket. More than anything, I felt anger at myself for being so stupid, for never suspecting. Of course Ishtar would have done this — taken what Dan had to offer, if and when it suited her.

  Picking up the photos, I slid them into a pile. Where had I been when they were taken? Washed-out as they were, the prints still gave an impression of brightness, of saturation of light, and I could guess at how they might look had they been printed as they should have been, showing distance — the two small, illuminated figures, the bath like a white boat in the long grass, the backdrop of Hope’s sleeping buildings, the open sky above, everything brimming with the liquid radiance of early morning. I remembered finding Jindi in the lukewarm bath that time, after the party during Miller’s absence. That must have been it — Dan and Ishtar, the last ones awake, lighting the fire as the sun rose, taking off their clothes. Ian creeping over the hill with his camera.

  I shook the image away. It didn’t matter. We would move soon and I could forget about Dan, forget what an idiot I’d been. The wind creaked and tapped and sent a bramble flailing at the window. My stomach ached. Maybe I was going to get my period again; it had only happened that one time
, a while ago now. A memory came, of Dan smiling at me in the hallway one of those mornings after our mortifying first encounter, and I allowed myself a brief lapse into wishing I could go back and feel it again — the gradual recognition of his kindness, his respect for me, and the uncomplicated joy, the soaring delight of that thoughtless, babyish crush. Then the weary, adult feeling settled in once more.

  Looking up at the window, pressing the corners of the photos with my thumbs, I turned my mind to the other thing. I didn’t need to look again to see what else the pictures revealed. The understanding that had buzzed, unwanted, at the edge of my mind ever since that day I’d caught Ian squirming in the grass with the camera, ravenously whirring and clicking, had crystallised — and the question of what was the matter with him had been answered. Ishtar was in those photos, but only just, and only the parts of her that were near or touching Dan. In all three photos most of her back and even parts of her head were cut off, while Dan was right in the centre of the frame. Even exploded into spacey, unreal drifts of grey it was there: the essence, the purpose of these photographs — and my mind couldn’t help sharpening the images, filling in the details, the droplets clinging to the scatter of dark hairs on Dan’s chest, the gradation of stubble along his jaw, the swell and dip of muscle beneath that luminous skin. This was what Ian had sought to trap, to take for himself.

  I thought about him in the truck, his agony. And all those earlier times, when I’d talked on and on about Dan and he’d listened with such avid interest. He was possessed, like Ishtar had been when Miller carried her up the stairs and her head fell back and her whole face softened. Ian’s symptoms were different — where Ishtar’s were joyous, lush, expansive, his were anguished and furtive, acutely self-conscious — but what was the same was the total transformation, the loss of control.

  I knew about homosexuality. At every school I’d been to this was the greatest crime. Poofter. Faggot. Lezzo. And, despite all the lip service that was paid to the ideas of diversity and doing away with labels in the various group houses Ishtar and I had lived in — and despite being told that sex didn’t have to be only between a man and a woman — I had never actually met anyone who was openly gay. I did, from those frank and excruciating kitchen-table discussions in the group houses and also from the probably less reliable things kids at school said, have some idea of what gay men did when they had sex, but this all belonged to some speculative, theoretical realm. And so, when I thought about Ian being in love with Dan, I didn’t think about sex. Not consciously anyway; if it was there, it was in some screened-off area of my mind.

  So Dan, with his own enslavement — watching Ishtar in the dinnertime firelight, running round doing chores for her — was responsible for Ian’s suffering and didn’t even know it. I closed my eyes. It was like a chain of dominoes toppling down, each person hurting the other. And however much I tried to place myself on the outside, an untouchable observer full of disdain or pity, the truth was that I was in there too, somewhere, falling.

  Before Ishtar got back I wrapped the photos in paper and then a plastic bag, and grabbing the trowel, took them out into the bush. Halfway down to the creek I dug a hole under a crooked flowering gum and buried the package there, smoothing the dirt and covering the place with leaves.

  A few days later I was walking back from the bus stop when Dan came past in his truck and stopped to offer me a lift. I could hardly say no, and so found myself sitting again in loaded silence beside him as we bumped along.

  ‘You and your friend all right?’ he said. ‘After the other day?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I tried not to look at the dark hairs that showed at his wrists, to think about him and Ishtar, the blurred limbs, the saturated light.

  ‘They been leaving you alone, those boys?’

  ‘Yeah.’ It was true; who knew how long it might last, but they hadn’t bothered either of us since Dan’s intervention. I sat forward in the seat. We had reached the turn-off for the hut. ‘I can get out here.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yep.’ I reached for the door handle, and was unexpectedly seized by a bout of meanness. How pathetic he was, hanging round Ishtar for so long when she wouldn’t even see him. ‘Unless you want to come in?’

  He gave a tiny laugh. ‘No.’

  ‘Why not? Don’t you want to see Ishtar?’ It was the blade-like voice of one of the prissy girls at school, hand on hip, eyes narrowed.

  Dan waited for a few moments, and then when he spoke it was so directly, so honestly, that my nastiness immediately collapsed. ‘Of course I do,’ he said. ‘But I know she doesn’t want to see me.’

  I sat in mute shame. Suddenly, all I felt was a deep, deep tiredness, and the same secret desire I used to get with Ishtar, but that I hadn’t felt for ages — to be younger, smaller, carried in his arms, wrapped in a blanket maybe, or held in his lap, looked after.

  ‘Thanks for the lift.’ I climbed down to stand in the lee of the open door.

  ‘It’s okay.’ He smiled and tipped his head in the direction of the hut. ‘I can’t help it, you know. It’s not something you get to choose.’

  I looked at him, his lean figure behind the wheel, the length of his legs, the hands loose in his lap. Like the slightest warm breath it came sliding in, that sense I’d had when I first met him, of openness, of potential, of all the freedom and opportunity in the world sprawling beyond as if he was some kind of portal. I thought of Ishtar when she was low — in the place she was now — the endless, joyless, downcast tramping of her circular paths: work, chores, sleep, work. The shadows that reached from her, that sapped, that snaked and tightened like a smothering vine. It was too good, Dan’s light, his freedom — too good to waste.

  ‘How much have you saved?’

  ‘What,’ he said, ‘money?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He squinted, calculating. ‘Well …’

  ‘Enough for the ticket?’

  ‘Yeah. Easily.’

  The urge to cry filled me like the quick, upward wicking of the tabs of litmus paper we dipped in liquid in Science class. ‘You should go then,’ I said, and shut the door and turned to the tunnel of leaves.

  The morning after the incident with Dean Price, Ian had been back at the bus stop as if nothing had happened, but I didn’t see him out in the bush for a few days. Then one afternoon we ran into each other on the creek path and there wasn’t time for either of us to escape.

  ‘Oh, hello,’ he said, gazing into the high branches of a tree.

  ‘Hi.’

  We stood for a few moments, mired in awkwardness. Surely something had to be said. I knew what I could say, what I wanted to: that I didn’t care about the photos, that I didn’t mind how he felt about Dan, that none of it mattered really, everyone did silly things, I had too. But he didn’t want to talk about it, that was obvious, and suddenly I could feel, like an invisible audience, all the jeering faces of the whole school, and hear the insults — poofter, faggot — and it occurred to me that if I did say anything about Dan then Ian would probably just deny it. In the end all I could manage was to mumble, ‘I got rid of those photos.’

  It was as if I hadn’t spoken. He went on studying the tree. Then he took a greaseproof-paper package from his pocket. ‘Cake?’ He held it out. ‘It’s lemon.’

  With a mixture of relief and guilt — because I knew that by quailing before that imaginary crowd of onlookers, I’d failed him as a friend somehow, even if it was what he wanted — I unwrapped it and bit into the crumbly, yellow slab.

  He took the paper and screwed it up, tossed it in the air, tried to catch it, missed, and bent to retrieve it. ‘So,’ he said, ‘shall we repair to the bridge?’

  I swallowed the lumpy mouthful. ‘Okay.’

  We were at the bridge — maybe it was that day, or another around the same time — when Jindi appeared, stumping along the edge of the dirt road. She
was wearing a mustard-coloured velour dress with stains down the front, and running shoes that were too big.

  ‘Jindi.’ I checked the road behind her. ‘What are you doing here all by yourself?’

  Ignoring this question, she came right up to us and stood, gripping the railing. ‘Miller’s lady’s kicked him out,’ she announced.

  ‘Jindi …’ I didn’t like her being out here; she belonged at Hope, safely confined. She was only five — wasn’t someone supposed to be looking after her?

  ‘What lady?’ said Ian.

  Jindi leaned against the rail. ‘You know. His lady who whispers and who he used to keep in his room.’

  Ian widened his eyes at me.

  ‘But she comes out now,’ Jindi went on. ‘Val makes her soup and they play cards in the kitchen. Sometimes I play too, but her hands make me feel sick. They’re all yellow, the nails, and she drops her cards they shake so much.’

  ‘It’s his wife,’ I said to Ian. ‘There’s something wrong with her.’ With relief, I spotted someone — an adult — coming up the road.

  ‘Wife?’ Ian threw up his hands. ‘A wife? This sounds dramatic.’

  ‘It’s not really,’ I said. ‘They’re married, but they’re not — together, you know. It’s just because she’s rich, I think. He gets money from her.’ I turned to Jindi. ‘What do you mean, kicked him out? Where’s he gone?’

  ‘He’s living in the bad paddock. You know, where the bones are.’

  I looked down the road again. It was Gav; I could see the flash of his bare legs under his sarong, and the glint of his glasses.

  ‘The back paddock, you mean?’

  ‘Yeah. In the shed. He’s got a bed in there, and a fire. I’m too scared to go close, but I hear him, he sings and calls out. Even at night. I heard him when I was going to the dunny.’ A cobweb hung from the side of her head; there was a leaf caught in it that quivered as she spoke. ‘When we were having dinner he came in and he was crying.’

  ‘He was crying?’