Hope Farm

by Peggy Frew

  Linda did what she could. She stuck Ishtar’s postcards on the fridge; she spoke about their childhood, their parents; she showed me photos. I could see the effort this took — her voice quavered, and she would occasionally blot at her eyes with a tissue. There was always a sense of relief at the conclusion of these conversations — or sessions, as I came to think of them — and I suspected it was on her part as well as mine. A kind of resentful gloom would come over me when I saw her getting down the photo album with its cover of bumpy, porridge-coloured fabric, and I found myself retreating into abstraction, overcome by fits of yawning.

  It was during one of these sessions, the two of us kneeling on the living-room floor, that Linda said, seemingly out of the blue: ‘Do you know why Karen — Ishtar — left home?’

  I came part-way out of my torpor. Did this mean she knew something, had found something out? ‘No,’ I said. ‘Why? Do you?’

  ‘No, no.’ She shifted the album that lay across her lap. ‘I just wondered. What did she tell you?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Well.’ Linda was using her extra-careful voice. ‘You have a right to more information, you know.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘You wouldn’t have to speak with … Ishtar … if you didn’t want to.’ The name never sounded quite right when she said it. ‘If it felt too difficult to ask directly. You could write a letter.’

  Anger ground in me, like gears clashing. I got up. ‘What would be the point of that?’ I said. ‘She wouldn’t be able to read it.’

  Later she came and sat on the end of my bed and began to speak, quietly. ‘I was fifteen,’ she said. ‘Karen and I went to the same school, but we didn’t have much to do with each other. I was what they called a conch — all I cared about was studying. I wasn’t into sports or the social scene. She was very different. She was popular because of her looks, but I think she lacked confidence. Anyway, she did have a bit of a reputation at school. There were whispers. Not that I ever knew what she actually did to earn it, I was so socially unaware. But I do remember some boys at the bus stop one day, saying something about her, something … unpleasant.’

  I lay staring at the wall.

  ‘One day I came home and she just wasn’t there. Our mother said she’d gone away for a while, to a special school, to help with her literacy. I just didn’t question it. Then later on the truth came out — about The Path, that she’d left to join them. Now that I do the sums, I think she must have become pregnant with you almost straightaway. Or even …’ She was silent for a while, and when she spoke again it was in a more direct, decisive tone. ‘She came back to visit once, when our mother was very sick — about to die — and she and Dad argued about something. She said there was something Mum and Dad hadn’t told me about, something that had to do with her leaving.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I saw the letter you sent.’

  ‘Really?’ She shifted on the bed. ‘So she got the letters? I never knew that.’

  ‘She got some of them. I found them. She kept them hidden.’

  Linda lapsed back into silence. Eventually she stirred again. ‘Now, the thing is,’ she said, ‘I wonder if she might have already been pregnant with you — if that might have been what caused the falling-out. Our mother was very religious. She wouldn’t have stood for a child born out of wedlock. Maybe she said they had to get married, and Karen didn’t want to. Or maybe the fellow wasn’t interested — or maybe he was, but our mother found him unsuitable.’

  There was another long pause. The sluggish, resistant feeling had overtaken me again.

  ‘Silver, I wonder if it might help you, help the way you’re feeling about your mum, to speak with her about these things?’

  I didn’t respond.

  Linda put a hand on my leg, through the duvet. ‘Only if you want to.’

  ‘No thanks,’ I said.

  I think there was a good six months after her return in which Ishtar made an obvious effort. A visit was arranged but I cancelled it, claiming it would interfere with my studies. I was in my final year of school by then, heading for a perfect score, barricaded in my fortress of overachievement.

  She wrote letters: clunky, bare-bones accounts of the rainforest retreat she was working at, or the yoga course she was doing. Reading them, the litany of logged activities, devoid of reflection or analysis, you would think she was the child, reporting dutifully to some distant relative. Our phone calls — which were as frequent as weekly in those first months — were not much better, but to be fair she was working against my already-entrenched unhelpfulness; they were essentially one-way, and she had never been much of a talker.

  I had cut her off, and the skin had grown over the severed connection, and we all — Linda included — knew this. And none of us, not even those who wanted to, had the necessary resources to make any kind of difference.

  There was also the false security of time. Linda clearly believed the day would come when I’d want to reconnect with Ishtar and, while it’s difficult to say in hindsight, I think the idea was there in the back of my mind also — some unexamined assumption that with age and experience I might come to feel, if not actual forgiveness then at least a desire for a better understanding.

  We did see each other once, when she came to my high-school graduation ceremony, during which I was presented with a prize for academic excellence. She arrived late and I didn’t even know if she was in the audience, and out of pride did not allow myself to scan the rows of faces for hers. Afterwards, as the other girls flung off their blazers and whooped and shrieked, I stood at the base of the stage and watched the two of them approach from different directions — both holding back, each deferring to the other. I had an urge to escape, to disappear through some back door, leaving them to their infuriating cautiousness. At last they joined me, Ishtar first by a slight margin, and there was an awkward round of brief, bony embraces. I was as tall as Ishtar, which felt wrong.

  ‘Congratulations,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks,’ I mumbled.

  Linda began to explain the scholarships offered by various universities, and then stopped abruptly, even though Ishtar was listening and nodding politely.

  A teacher saved us, wanting to take a photo for the school’s magazine.

  ‘Would you all …?’ He gestured with his camera for us to line up in front of the stage, and Linda and Ishtar both lowered their heads.

  ‘Go on,’ said Linda. ‘I think you should.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Ishtar. ‘You.’

  I stepped into the space alone, my certificate scrolled moistly in my hand. The teacher waited a few moments, his smile wilting, then gave a defeated sort of shrug, pointed, clicked, and moved on.

  I don’t recall any more about the rest of that reunion. There is just one other, very small, memory. When the teacher lowered the camera and walked away, and the silver-blue burst of the flash cleared from my eyes, I found I was looking right at Ishtar, and for a moment we stared into each other’s faces with the intense, bold interest of very young children.

  In that picture in the magazine, which I still have, I am scraggle-haired as ever, the collar of my uniform crooked under my blazer. But my chin is tilted and a power crackles in the fierce planes of my face; the empty space on either side of me blazes, unbreachable. I look like my mother.

  A better understanding of Ishtar did come, but not in the way I might have anticipated. In 1995, when I was twenty-three and she was forty, she was killed in a car accident in Queensland, where she was living at the time.

  Linda called me with the news. It was evening; I was in my room, reading, in the house I shared with two other young women who were both nurses and rarely home. Linda spoke in tightly cropped sentences; between them I could hear her crying.

  Ishtar had been a passenger — it was a hired car, apparently, being used by a group of backp
ackers. She did not know them; they were giving her a ride somewhere. The car was full, and Ishtar had crammed in and was therefore not wearing a seatbelt.

  The next morning Linda collected me in her little hatchback and together we drove up to the town where Ishtar had been renting a unit. It took two days — we stayed in a motel overnight, and I slept badly. Linda kept crying, and the more she cried the further I seemed to withdraw — I felt guilty, as if her crying was some form of accusation, even though I knew it wasn’t.

  The town was small and, I thought, uninspiring. It was September, a weekday, midafternoon by the time we arrived, and very warm. The sky was low and grey, with darker clouds hunkering over the domed mountains that stuck up out of the horizon.

  We checked in to a motel on the main street. The police station was visible, just a bit further down the road.

  ‘I think you should stay here,’ said Linda, when we had carried our overnight bags in. ‘While I do the identification.’

  ‘Okay.’ I sat on the edge of one of the beds.

  ‘I think that’s best, don’t you?’

  ‘Okay.’

  When she had gone I lay down and tried to picture what Linda would be doing. Going into some small room, somewhere, at the police station perhaps, or in a funeral home — I didn’t know how these things worked. Chill air, stainless steel, a sheet being lifted. Ishtar’s body. Well, her remains anyway — she was badly smashed up in the accident, Linda had told me in that initial phone call. Damaged, was the word she’d used.

  I stared up at the ceiling. What happened, then, to people without families? Who remained unclaimed? What became of their bodies?

  I fell asleep, and woke when she came back in, eyes small from crying. She sat on the end of the other bed. Eventually, she said: ‘She would not have experienced any pain. It would have been absolutely instant.’ She turned to me. ‘I can guarantee you that.’

  I looked at her, her long, unused-looking legs jutting from the mattress’s edge, her soft hands folded between her thighs. I thought of those years I had lived with her, her constant, gentle company, the meals she prepared, the cups of tea brought to my desk while I studied. She hadn’t known I existed until the day before we met. And despite her general hesitance, her unworldliness — traits that she wore, unquestioningly, like a uniform — she had not for one moment showed any sign of reluctance or resentment.

  The removed, put-upon feeling dropped away, and was replaced by a wave of gratitude. She had done her best for me — she really had. I moved down to the end of my own bed and reached across and took her hand.

  We went to the unit the following morning, to pack up Ishtar’s things.

  The landlord was waiting out the front, an elderly Italian man, pants cinched high over his belly.

  ‘I am very sorry,’ he said, when we had got out of the car and unpacked our flattened boxes and Linda’s industrial sticky-tape dispenser. He stepped to the side, holding the screen door open for us. ‘The furniture belong here,’ he said. ‘Is just her things, her clothes.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Linda.

  ‘Please.’ He bowed his head. ‘When you are finish, you just pull the door, all right? I will come later and check is all okay.’

  It was dark inside, and I walked into Linda, who had gone first.

  ‘Sorry,’ she whispered, and I heard her grope along the wall, then the click of the switch, and the light came on overhead.

  We were in the living room, which was very small, with the kitchen adjoining, off to one side. On the bench was a bowl with fruit in it still, and tiny insects circling above. There was a smell of damp, and of stale pot and overripe bananas.

  No pictures were on any of the walls. Nothing was stuck to the fridge. On the bench beside the fruit bowl were a couple of letters — bills, in their impersonal envelopes — and a copy of a local newspaper.

  ‘She hadn’t been here very long,’ said Linda, as if this might serve as a reasonable explanation for how dismal the place was.

  I went into the bedroom. It was also bare, but the old Indian quilt was on the bed, and the smell was different — it smelled like Ishtar in there, the way I remembered her. I suppose it hit me then, that I had lost her.

  On the top of the chest of drawers, there were two framed photographs. One was my formal university graduation photo, from my first degree. Linda must have sent her a copy. The other was one of the old ones that had always been in the suitcase — Ishtar holding the toddler me, our twin gazes, unprepared and wary.

  I found it very difficult to lift that quilt, to fold it and push it into a box. My hands shook.

  Linda suggested we sorted as we went, so we could take the things we didn’t want to an op shop rather than lug them all the way back to Sydney. But I found I wasn’t able to let anything go. There wasn’t much anyway — her clothes, including shoes, only filled three boxes. Then there was one box of books, mostly photographic ones about nature; another two of bedding and towels; some balls of wool, knitting and crochet needles, though no sign of any work in progress; and the old case, which at the time I couldn’t bring myself to open. In the tiny bathroom, there was soap and shampoo, nothing else.

  I stood in the middle of the living room and saw myself, a lick of shadow, reflected in the blank square of the small television screen. I tried to imagine what it was Ishtar had done every night in this place, after returning from some menial cash-paying job. Did she watch television? Sitting on this scrappy, uncomfortable-looking couch? She didn’t read, I knew that much. An old instinct, surprisingly strong, had caused me to check each room for evidence of a man, a lover, either live-in or visiting — but there were absolutely no signs.

  I found myself thinking about our hut near Hope, trying to remember it. Had it been as grim as this, as soulless, as empty? How strong my desire for a home must have been, to lend that place softness, comfort — to see the honey in the timber and the warm glow radiate from that bedspread.

  On the coffee table was a lighter, some cigarette papers, and an ashtray with a couple of ground-out roaches in it. I went to the cardboardy-looking cabinet that stood against one wall and slid out a drawer. A small stash of leaf marijuana; I took it and dropped it into the garbage bag we’d filled with the food from the fridge.

  Linda went out the back door first, into the little courtyard. I saw her stop short, and the slight drawing-in of her chin that I knew signified fright or discomfort. I went over.

  There was the black plastic council recycling tub, full to the brim, and lined up behind it, against the wall, were five or six old milk crates loaded with empty beer and whisky bottles. Alongside them were two piles of flattened beer cartons.

  ‘Maybe she had a party,’ I said, and the unlikelihood of this immediately seemed to resonate in the bare, walled space, the lonely rooms behind us.

  ‘Silver.’ Linda made a face at me, a sort of brave grimace. ‘The police told me she was known to them, that they’d picked her up a few times, drunk. They said she used to drink at the local pub with the backpackers. I suppose that’s why she was in the car with those people.’ She squeezed her hands together. ‘I just can’t help thinking we should have done more for her. Supported her more.’

  It wasn’t an accusation, but still I put my head down, folded my arms — and up rose my anger, hot and prickling and as strong as if it had been yesterday that Ishtar had ignored the mess in the hut and my shoes in the doorway and instead asked if I was hungry — putting the cover over my secret, leaving me alone with it.

  Linda lifted one of the crates. ‘We’d better take these to the tip,’ she said in a forced, businesslike tone. ‘They’ll probably have a recycling service.’ She clinked past me without meeting my eye, and went back inside. I stepped into the middle of the paved square, breathing the yeasty smell of old beer. There was one palm tree; its leaves rattled in the clammy breeze. />
  The carload of boxes went into storage in Linda’s spare room — my old bedroom. The suitcase I took to my house and put under my bed.

  Linda had made arrangements for Ishtar’s remains to be cremated, and the ashes arrived by mail the next week. Over dinner we discussed what to do with them — at least, Linda kept saying it was up to me, and I kept saying I didn’t know what to do. In the end we put the decision off and the plastic urn with its heavy, gravelly-sounding contents went into the spare room as well.

  I sank gratefully back into work on my master’s degree, resumed my every-second-day swims at the local pool, met with Linda once a fortnight for lunch or dinner.

  It wasn’t until the study year was over and I found myself adrift as usual in those vacant couple of months, swimming every day for want of something to do, reading gluttonously, and looking forward a bit too much to the newspaper’s cryptic crosswords, that I took the suitcase out from under the bed and opened it and found the notebook.

  It was on top, a slim exercise book, like the ones used in schools. On the cover, in the box with spaces for Name and Subject, a single word had been printed: Ishtar. My skin tightened.

  I set it aside. Underneath, as well as what I’d expected to find — Ishtar’s expired passport, her birth certificate, the remaining photo of me and the other hippie kids — there was a large sheet of a slippery kind of paper, folded in half. I pulled this out first and unfolded it.

  It was a copy of a page from a newspaper dated 6th January 1986. It wasn’t a photocopy — the paper was different; it had the same slick surface on the inside as well, and the quality wasn’t quite as good. I ran my fingers over it with recognition. At school, we’d visited the state library and been shown the microfilm machines — how you could flick through collections of newspapers, select a page, and have it printed out. That was what this was. She must have found it herself, after her return from overseas. Pity twanged in me at the thought of her poring over dates and headlines, inching her finger along the words the way she used to do if nobody was looking. I smoothed the page where it lay on the carpet. Search Ends for Missing Man, read the headline.