Hope Farm

by Peggy Frew

  ‘It’s your room now,’ she had said. ‘You can change it around if you like. Put up some posters.’ But I was unable to change anything, to make my mark. With my clothes in the chest of drawers and my new pyjamas under the pillow, there was no evidence of my existence. My empty duffel bag lay at the bottom of the freshly cleared wardrobe — every now and then I knelt and reached in to check for it, the familiar thick folds of its worn canvas.

  I spent a lot of time looking in the bathroom mirror. I’d never had such free and uninterrupted access to a mirror before — it seemed I’d only caught my reflection in hurried moments, and in mirrors that were small and dark, spotted or cracked. The mirror in Linda’s bathroom was a clean wide rectangle, well lit by three small, frosted windows above. In it I could see myself from the hips up. After my shower in the mornings I dried myself without looking, mindful of Linda’s nearby presence. But later, fully dressed and with her gone, I indulged in long sessions of gazing. I couldn’t get used to the sight of my own face, and examined it from every angle, peering out of the corners of my eyes. I lifted my hair into a snaky pile that left my neck looking naked and skinny, or plaited it into a rope that fell over one shoulder.

  Sometimes I lifted my top and looked at my puffed-out nipples and the small pads of flesh that were appearing around them. I did this nervously, listening out even though Linda wasn’t due back for hours. I dropped my top again and stood with my shoulders brought forward, hiding the breasts, then back, pushing them out. I smiled, nodded, shrugged. I mouthed words. Hi, I’m Silver. I’m new. I live with my aunt.

  In the afternoons I would often go down onto the street, and around the corner to a long strip of parkland where I would walk along the paths, dazed in the muggy heat. The spectre of Hope — always ready, just at the edge of consciousness — seemed distant but clear, as if etched with lines that were very fine, glittering and chill. Here trees stirred dully, through thicker air.

  Other people passed me, joggers, bike riders, dog walkers, parents with children, their yells and footfalls and whizzing tyres rushing in streaks that stretched and faded. I kept my hand in my pocket, my fingers around the keys Linda had given me, one for the door to the flat and one for the main door downstairs. I felt light on the path, insubstantial. I scuffed my shoes to make a sound of my own. Often I would find myself returning to the flat at a panicky trot, the top of my head burning from the sun, shying at the dark branches of the monkey-puzzle trees. When the key turned and I burst in to find everything just as I’d left it, the feeling of relief was cool and flooding.

  Each day, as the time for Linda’s return from work approached, a different kind of anxiety began to accumulate. I was no longer afraid of not existing or of being in the wrong place. I was here and she knew it; now the problem was that she was on her way, and we were both going to be here together. What were we going to talk about? What were we going to do? By a quarter past five I would be driven to distraction, unable to read or watch television. I paced, feeling enormous, as though I took up too much space. I sat on the end of my bed, not wanting to be in the living room, the first thing she saw when she walked in.

  When she did come though, the feelings of suspension and anxiety — amazingly — lifted. The key in the lock. The door opening. Her level voice: ‘Hello? Silver?’

  As I got up and went out to meet her, the drumming of my heart would already be easing, my breaths loosening. After putting down her briefcase she would take off her shoes and flex her long toes on the carpet, then perch on the arm of the couch and look up at me. ‘How was your day?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Did you get outside?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The exchange was almost always exactly the same every time. What happened during the rest of the evening was also predictable. If we needed groceries we would walk together to the supermarket; if not she sat at her desk for a while, opening her mail and sometimes looking over work papers, and I went into my room and read. Then I would help her with dinner, and we would eat together at the small round table. After that we played Scrabble or watched television — Linda liked cosy British murder mysteries, but also Countdown; any television was compelling to me — until bedtime.

  I can see now that this regularity was probably intentional. She is someone who likes order, certainly, but I think she made things even more structured for my sake. The impression she gave at the time was that it was easy for her to accommodate me — but of course it couldn’t have been like that. She hadn’t even known I existed until two days before I moved in.

  The phone rang one evening while she had her hands full in the kitchen, dicing chicken I think it was. ‘You get it,’ she said, and I picked it up, feeling clumsy.

  ‘Hello?’

  A woman’s voice, jolly and brisk. ‘Hello? That’s not Linda, is it?’

  ‘No.’ My answer came out slowly, and sounded very childlike. ‘It’s Silver. I’m her — her niece.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course, well, hello Silver, it’s Margaret here from the film club, just wondering when Linda will be joining us again.’

  I stood with the phone to my ear, still rattled by the foreign sound of my own words — her niece — and the woman’s unquestioning response, the recognition in her voice. I don’t know what I’d expected. For her to say Who? perhaps, or for Linda to wipe her hands and take the phone, explaining in hushed tones. I hadn’t expected this casual acceptance, this obvious prior knowledge. I felt my face redden.

  ‘Silver? Are you there?’

  ‘Oh. Yes. Sorry, hold on a minute.’

  I explained to Linda. ‘Not for a while,’ she said. ‘Tell her maybe next month.’

  It wasn’t until later, lying in bed, that the slightly inflated, pleased feeling abated enough for me to consider what the call had actually been about. I was the reason Linda wasn’t going to her film club. She was staying home to be with me. Now, of course, I can see the significance in this, how it was emblematic of any number of hidden sacrifices, but at the time, while it made me feel slightly uncomfortable as well as grateful, I was happy to let it go, to retreat into sleep, knowing that the next day would be the same as the others, and that they all were gradually linking into a solid mass.

  I rang Ian one afternoon, from a pay phone. He complained at length about the boring jobs his parents had him doing around the farm, and I listened greedily. Then, as my pile of coins began to diminish, with a sick feeling and a querulous, loaded voice, I asked: ‘Any news?’

  ‘Oh gosh no, nothing’s happening around here.’

  Thinking he’d missed my meaning, I tried to come up with a better way of hinting at what I didn’t want to speak out loud, but before I could he spoke again: ‘Well there is one thing everyone’s been talking about. Did you know about Miller?’ His tone was so convincing — serious but slightly salacious — that for a moment I floundered.

  ‘No?’ I managed, weakly, my cheeks burning.

  Like one actor covering for another who kept forgetting her lines, Ian forged on. ‘Wow, I can’t believe you haven’t heard. Well, he went missing. Was seen wandering off into the bush the night of the fire, very drunk, and never came back. Left all his things — there was another building that didn’t burn down, apparently, and they were in there. Anyway, they did a big search, police stomping around all through the bush, but they didn’t find anything.’

  I leaned against the glass. My heart was knocking so hard I could barely hear.

  ‘Silver?’ came Ian’s voice. ‘You still there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, I thought you’d gone. There are all these mineshafts, you see, up in the hills, and they’re really old and really deep, and there’s just no way to get down into them, the technology simply does not exist. So everyone’s saying he probably fell into one of them, but there’s no way of finding him.’

  I swallowed. ‘They
can’t get down the mineshafts?’

  ‘Some of them they can, but lots of them they can’t. Too dangerous, and too deep.’

  ‘So they didn’t find him, his …?’

  ‘No, they didn’t. There was a thing in the paper — they gave up.’

  ‘So that’s it then?’

  ‘Yep. That’s it. Case closed.’

  The rest of the phone call he filled with inane chatter while I stood in a daze, only half hearing. His skill in conveying the information about Miller, and in maintaining such a credibly natural tone throughout the whole conversation was such that I might have believed him to be genuinely uncaring, were it not for one tiny revelation, right at the end of the call.

  ‘I don’t know how I’m going to cope,’ he said, ‘with going back to school. I’ll never be able to get up in the mornings — I’ve started sleeping in so late. I’ve been having trouble …’ There was a long pause, into which he allowed a deep, weary exhalation. ‘I’ve been having trouble falling asleep at night.’

  After that, we wrote to each other, letters that were so superficial as to appear to be in some kind of code.

  Yesterday I ate almost a whole watermelon and nearly vomited. Linda makes really good cheesecake.

  Both verandahs are now glorious mission brown but Dad couldn’t bear to let any paint go to waste so out with the roller again and I have been getting acquainted with the shed.

  There are two dogs in one of the downstairs flats. They are called Fluffy and Max. Max is cute but Fluffy has this skin thing that is so disgusting, her whole back is nearly bald.

  For my birthday this year Mum’s taking me to Melbourne to see The Mikado at the State Theatre. It’s an opera, by the way. I have to pay for some of the ticket but that’s all right, I’ve got plenty saved up.

  I am SO BORED!!!!

  It was a code, of sorts. When I wrote to Ian I used what I thought to be the voice of an ordinary teenager, bored during school holidays, and he wrote back to me in the same voice. We are normal, we told each other. We are getting on with our normal lives.

  The days seemed to hinge on dinnertime. I came to look forward to helping Linda prepare the meals, which seemed exotic at first, with their firm textures and fresh colours, their discrete elements that sat so cleanly on our plates. Slices of smoked trout served with tiny, whole potatoes and neat mounds of chopped salad; lamb cutlets, steamed baby carrots and green beans. I pored over the glossy pictures in Linda’s recipe books, the detailed, sensible instructions. Chop carrots into matchstick-sized pieces and add to broccoli florets. Toss with dressing and set aside. I took pleasure in getting to know the kitchen, which implements to use for which purpose, where everything was kept. Cooking fumes and steam vanished into the range hood above the stove. The plates, bowls, and cups all matched. There were placemats and napkins; the table would be cleared completely, even though we only needed the two places. Afterwards, I washed the dishes, which barely filled the rack, and wiped the benches clean.

  I don’t recall what we spoke about over dinner. I don’t think we spoke much, but it didn’t matter. I do remember the times she tried to press me on things, coming to stand in the doorway to my room. Her soft, apologetic voice: ‘Silver?’

  ‘Yes?’ My insides already contracting with discomfort.

  ‘Is there anything you’d like to talk about?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, if there ever is anything, I’m here to listen.’

  ‘There isn’t anything.’

  Unlike Ian, I had no trouble falling asleep. This was when I felt safest, curled in the dark, Linda’s bedtime sounds — the creak of her desk chair, soft footsteps, the running of a tap — at the far edges of my drifting consciousness. It was in the early mornings that the terror came, wrenching me awake, my heart galloping. The gaping blackness. His hands, his breath, the awful cry.

  I got a Walkman, which helped. I listened to the quizzes on AM radio, soothed myself with the comfortable wash of voices, the mild to-and-fro.

  On the weekends we went to see films, or drove to the beach. There was a picnic with Linda’s friends. They were all women, none of them married, and this was something they apparently spoke about quite often, in a blithe way. One of them, Suzie — who was glamorous, with bleached hair and pink lipstick — had just broken up with a boyfriend. ‘I’m just devastated,’ she said brightly, tearing a drumstick from a cold chicken. She had sunglasses in a 1950s style.

  ‘Well I’ve given up,’ said Margaret, who was short with spiky hair and tanned skin that crinkled at the corners of her eyes. ‘It’s been a relief, I can tell you.’

  They drank white wine, and the talk and laughter was constant. Linda was the quietest in the group, but she smiled, following the conversation, and when Suzie leaned into her, laughing, lipstick on her teeth, Linda laughed too and patted Suzie’s hand.

  I sat on the periphery with a book. Across the grass I saw some teenagers, lying around under another tree. I watched them covertly, burning with embarrassment at Linda and her loud friends, their womanliness, their lack of shame. The dash of pink on Suzie’s teeth suddenly bothered me, and Linda’s thighs, soft and pale at the cuffs of her shorts. I made shields either side of my face with my hands and bent to the book in my lap.

  Driving back, Linda asked if I was okay. I made a noncommittal sound.

  ‘I suppose it’s a bit boring for you,’ she said. ‘A grown-up event like that.’

  It was evening, the sun low. We were passing through a beachside suburb and a group of kids around my age, girls and boys, ran across the road in front of us. Linda slowed down. They were in swimmers, towels wrapped around their waists, and they were so close I could see the colours of a woven bracelet on a girl’s wrist, the sand clinging to their tanned calves.

  ‘Mandy, wait!’ yelled one of the boys, his voice cracking against the tarmac, the deepening sky. They reached the kerb with a flick of heels; Linda accelerated and they were gone.

  We went to Grace Brothers to buy me new clothes. I selected the plainest things I could find.

  ‘What about this?’ Linda held up a dress, white cotton with small navy polka-dots and a ruffled skirt. ‘For if you go out.’ The question of where I might go, and with whom, remained unspoken.

  I shook my head miserably.

  She put it back. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re right. It’s a bit frilly.’

  We went to the underwear section, and I chose navy socks and two six-packs of regular underpants. It was Linda who picked up the bras. Two of them. They were a plain, sports kind, no lace. ‘I think these would be your size,’ she murmured, standing close beside me and holding them discreetly folded over themselves.

  I didn’t thank her for her delicacy. Wordlessly I took them and shoved them under my arm.

  Now that I live in a flat of my own, dependent on my own routines, I wonder what it must have been like for Linda to have her home and her life so suddenly invaded by this stranger. And a child at that — or worse, a teenager, with a teenager’s inwardness. A responsibility she had been given no time to prepare for and which came with no instructions — Linda with her lists, her weekly meal plans, Linda who kept the manuals for every domestic appliance in a folder, in alphabetical order. What irritations did she hide, and what fears?

  She did her homework — I saw books on parenting and adolescence beside her bed — and I like to think I felt some vague gratitude, or at least moments of recognition, like the one that night after Margaret’s phone call, but I suspect that I mostly just took what she offered and forged ahead without much thought for her, her feelings or the sacrifices she might be making.

  I have apologised, since, for this. With typical gravity she accepted the apology, but said that at the time she was relieved to recognise anything at all like the behaviour of a normal teenager. ‘You were supposed to be selfish,’ she said. ‘Whenever you were, I
knew I must be doing something right.’

  I started school. I didn’t make friends. I didn’t wear frilly dresses and go out, or run across roads in my swimmers with boys. I worked. I sat quietly in each class, and listened and made notes, and I did all my homework and all the extension work the teachers began giving me. By the middle of the year Linda and I had decided that I would apply for a selective-entry school and change again in Year Nine.

  Eventually I did rearrange the spare room — my room. She bought me a desk, which just squeezed in beside the chest of drawers, and I stuck study notes above it, my certificates, my academic awards, and a poster of Albert Einstein.

  The letters to and from Ian petered out. Keeping up the exchange of trivial information had become exhausting, and neither of us seemed willing or able to break out of our pretend voices and say anything real. I thought about him less and less often.

  I hardly thought about Ishtar at all. Consciously, that is. There was a feeling though, like the cold, etched one that belonged to Hope — always there, ready to overtake me. The Ishtar feeling was warm and sweet and smoky, and came with snapshot images: the swing of her hair, a long-legged step in jeans and boots, the length of her throat and the slip of its creamy-gold skin into the rough wool of a jumper. It was primitive and desperate, and I hated it and the way it arrived with apparent randomness, and no warning. I deflected it as best I could.

  Perhaps on some basic level I simply saw Linda as a better bet, and having made that investment, I went on to protect it. It did not occur to me at any stage that I could have them both in my life. Even when Ishtar returned to Australia and the two of them began to take steps — so shuffling, so tentative as to barely qualify as action — in the direction of reconciliation, my old mistrust and my newly inflamed resentment were, combined, so powerful that I could only see risk in that scenario. And the ease with which I was able to thwart them — the hardness of my resolve in comparison to the uncertainty of theirs, which on Ishtar’s part I read as simple lack of interest — seemed to me proof of the veracity of my instinct. And she had stayed away so long.