by Steven Lang
‘It’s not such a bad thing is it?’
‘What?’
‘To like those things?’ Cooper said. ‘What I don’t get is why people think everyone has to be the same as them. I don’t want these freaks to be like me. I’m happy for them to go off for their runs in the woods and sing their happy songs. To believe in stuff. I just don’t want to do it.’
‘So it wasn’t your choice to go to camp?’
‘As if.’
Coming up onto the plateau, the road more level and familiar but with a terrible surface. Another car appearing around a corner, its headlights shocking after all this time.
‘It was my dad’s idea.’
Nick not sure what to say to that.
‘You know who my dad is, I guess.’
‘I’ve heard of him. He asked someone who asked someone else who asked me to go and get you. So my knowledge of him’s not what you’d call direct.’
‘That’s the way to keep it.’
‘Do you live with him?’
‘Hardly. I live with my mother. Number two wife. Number three’s in charge these days. Lyris. Not as nice as the name sounds. Then there’s Michael, my brother. He’d be as old as you.’
‘I’m forty.’
‘Well not quite that ancient.’
Nick taken aback by Cooper’s openness. He didn’t know what he’d done to deserve it. He wondered why he didn’t have conversations like this with Josh. Maybe it was because he didn’t shoot him full of morphine.
The lights of town now in sight.
‘I believe I’m a disappointment to him,’ Cooper said.
‘That’s a shame.’
‘It’s all right. I don’t think it’s just me. I think the world disappoints him. Anything that’s not subject to him disappoints him.’
‘Maybe you don’t have to take that on board.’
‘Oh I don’t. Not for a minute. Well. Maybe that’s not true. I agreed to go to the camp, didn’t I? I guess there has to be some deep emotional need waiting to be expressed, doesn’t there? That’s what my therapist would say.’
‘You have a therapist?’
‘Doesn’t everyone?’
‘No. I’d go as far as to say most sixteen-year-olds don’t.’
‘Well there you go then. You see, I’m special.’
Nick glanced at him. He was smiling. They were in the town by then. A young man with a sense of humour. He pulled up under the porch outside Emergency, the car dripping, the rain teeming down beyond the pillars.
Nobody coming out to meet them. He went inside, found a wheelchair and pushed it out to the car. Levered Cooper into it and wheeled him back through the automatic doors and into one of the observation rooms. A woman called from two rooms away, through the open doors, the same voice as on the phone, softer in real life; said she’d be there in a minute. Nick got Cooper onto the table. Shoes squeaking on the linoleum. Suddenly very tired. The boy even more vulnerable under the harsh light than he’d been in the camp’s infirmary. Dried blood cracked on his skin.
Looking around for the blood pressure unit. ‘Are you warm enough?’
‘I think so.’
He caught a glimpse of the nurse moving about in the adjacent room, pushing a cart. Slim, tall, dark hair.
‘I had another call after yours,’ she said, still out of sight. ‘There’s a child in One if you want to take a look. When you’re ready.’ He could hear her opening cupboards, taking things down from shelves, clattering something on a tray. ‘I know you’re not on call, but I thought while you’re here, why bother pulling in Miles? I mean, Doctor Prentice.’
Coming into the room pushing a cart. Nurse’s uniform, white flat rubber-soled shoes.
‘Hi,’ she said, addressing Cooper, not him. Just a nod in his direction. ‘Let’s have a look at you. What’s happening here?’
Cooper visibly brightening at the sight of her. The power of the female of the species. Or perhaps just this one. Putting a hand on the boy’s wrist and looking at her watch.
‘I’m Eugenie Lensman,’ she said, looking up at him. ‘You must be Doctor Lasker.’
three
Eugenie
She cut the onions at the island bench, the big screen on the opposite wall lighting up the room with the unnatural green of some football stadium’s grass, filling the space with the noise of the crowd and the patter of the commentators. David splayed before it in an armchair, a beer by his right hand.
Over the years she’d trained herself to block out the sound, to see it as part of life, and even then not the most offensive. These days, though, with David away for three weeks at a time, she’d grown accustomed to the quiet. Now it didn’t seem to matter where she was in the house, what she was doing – cooking, cleaning, reading – the machine’s insistence penetrated her defences. It was, perhaps, not even so much the noise that got to her as the self-righteousness which accompanied it: the way he occupied the room, watching his sport on his television – which, she was more than happy to admit, he was justified in doing, even without having undergone the privations of fly-in/fly-out, earning shitloads of money, wheelbarrow loads of the stuff, with which the screen, the new Colorado, the tinny, the mortgage, had been bought. Never mind that he was still working at home even now, the mobile always by his side, taking calls from the accountant, supplier, the team on site – it was that it also somehow negated everything she did; as if getting the girls to school and their post-curricular activities in town or down the coast, keeping house, still managing two shifts a week at the hospital, things which didn’t operate on a three-weeks-on, one-week-off rotation, weren’t as important as his work. As if what he did gave him licence to generate the moods which, let’s face it, had always been his speciality: the steady production of clouds of negative ions filling their house from floor to ceiling – he was at it right then – viscous but invisible, something you had to push yourself through, but silently, otherwise the anger might be provoked, anger or disdain, one of the two, neither much better than the other.
She finished with the onions, wiping her eyes on the sleeve of her cardigan, a slim woman in her late-thirties wearing a summer dress because it was warm and she’d been to town that afternoon while David had taken a nap after the late-night flight, but also because she’d thought he might like it, her thick hair pushed back, not needing anything these days to stay where she put it, the dampness from her tears glistening on her wide Scandinavian cheek-bones, not beautiful, she’d never claimed that of herself, but striking, statuesque. Steering the pungent chopped flesh from the board into the hot oil, pouring another kettle of boiling water into the pot for pasta; turning back to rummage for garlic beneath the counter; pausing to look at David, her husband, resolute in his chair before the game; he, feeling her gaze, glancing over at her.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Nothing.’
Turning back to the television.
She’d not been raised, at least for the first few years, with one of the devices in the house. The community where she’d grown up hadn’t run to electricity, far less televisions. Perhaps that contributed to her intolerance. The ability to shut them out hadn’t been bred into her.
Sooner or later she was going to have to tell him what she’d been up to, what she planned to do. Perhaps he already knew. His mother would have no doubt been delighted to fill him in on her latest outrage. But he’d be waiting for it to come from her. This was the reason for the mood. He was working up his arguments.
It would not be fair to say that this list of activities: children, work, house, described all she’d been doing while he was away. Her involvement with the campaign against the dam had continued to grow, become more than simply something she’d supported out of solidarity with Lindl. After the girls it had become almost the central thing in her life, sometimes resented for the time it required, always engaging.
David had never been keen, claiming he didn’t give a shit either way, he just thought the NoDam crew were wa
sting their time. ‘What makes you think the government’ll listen to you?’ he said. ‘You lot know nothing about what goes on. These bastards made up their minds about this shit long before you ever heard about it. They’ve started building the pipeline, for fuck’s sake, you think they’re going to stop because it upsets you? Because your friends are worried about some trees?’ Turning to Sandrine and Emily for support. ‘Your mother’s whacked in the head,’ he said.
And while much of this might or might not have been true his scepticism was, she thought, nothing to do with the politics, it was cover for his dislike of her having a life of her own, interests that didn’t include him or have a direct economic input on the household. He wanted to be in control. Not always in a bad way. Would have preferred it if she’d let him support the family instead of going back to nursing when the girls were old enough for school. In this case, though, his dislike of Marcus would have been reason enough. Lindl was her friend. She’d invited them both over for dinner, several times. David considered them a bad influence, like she was a child, easily led. Marcus, Lindl’s husband, was a university professor, older but not much wiser. He’d made the fatal error, early on, of correcting David – as if he was doing him a favour, which he probably believed he was – It’s pronounced kasm not chasm. Some such thing. Maybe it had been his grammar. Done instead of did. Marcus not even noticing he’d given offence. David never forgot. He wasn’t the type to forget, didn’t, anyway, like entertaining. Hadn’t grown up to it. He told her once he couldn’t think of a single time when people had come to dinner at his parents’ house, except for a funeral, and that had been family.
When they’d got together, who their parents were had been the least of their concerns (her mother dead of an overdose, her father back in France ever since the fire). She’d not appreciated that he was a Lensman, the son of dairy farmers whose parents and grandparents had worked the land around Winderran. What that meant. She’d visited for the first time after she’d agreed to marry him. Even then she hadn’t understood. It was only when they came to live on the block of land given them by his parents, subdivided off the farm, that she began to grasp it didn’t matter where she’d met David, what drugs they’d done together, what adventures they’d had, what politics they’d agreed on during those heady days, these were his family, this was their town; blood would out. His parents were good people, generous to a fault, hard-working, but they were also bigoted, narrow-minded, ignorant. People who by definition regarded her with as much suspicion as she did them even without knowing about her childhood in a hippie community. Their innate prejudices were, it seemed, irrevocably lodged in David’s psyche, a subconscious slur against her character that was the subtext behind the description of the NoDam campaigners as ‘you lot’. Never mind that she had even less time for her hippie heritage than him.
The community’s name, Bene Gesserit, had been taken from a sci-fi novel. It meant, in the made-up language of the book, truth-teller. The people who lived there, who had named it thus, a bunch of mainly women, preferred to simply call it The Farm, though it could never have been such a thing, in anyone’s imagination. It sat within a vast eucalypt forest, astride a sandy-bottomed river, the hand-built houses nestled amongst the trees. No possibility of growing anything except more trees. The only access the rough fire trail over the hill from Yowrie, which itself was just a place, not a town.
Her mother’s little house, their home, had been built out of sleeper off-cuts, the discarded flitches of former forestry operations; layers of newspaper on the inside to cover the cracks, pages and pages of it stuck on with glue made from flour. The insects ate it. During the night they could hear them gnawing at the walls. The final layer painted over, but roughly, so that snippets of articles and advertisements leached through. Yvette, her sister, when she wanted, could tell the missing parts of these stories. The two of them huddled under a pile of blankets against the cold, Eugenie begging her to tell, pointing with the torch at the words, following them with her finger, Local Boy Wins, and sometimes Yvette would oblige with the story of the boy who won a ticket to the moon and what happened there, or maybe, another time, how he won at archery and was sent to boarding school in Sydney where he met a girl hiding in a tree who had special powers and taught him how to defeat the bully – Yvette having no knowledge of proper schools, only that derived from books because Bene Gesserit was so far out along bush roads, across fords, along fire trails, that they did home schooling with the other children in different people’s houses on a rotation which did not include their own because it was too small and primitive even by the standards of that community.
The stories were always changing, this was part of their magic. It was the same boy, but each time a different adventure.
She’d made peace with David’s parents, learned what could or could not be said in their home, learned to bite her tongue when Harold made pronouncements about women or the government, Aborigines or asylum seekers; found a way to make it all right in her mind that the girls went to his mother when she was off nursing; arranged things so that at family events her own father, Jean-Baptiste, also now a resident of Winderran, wasn’t present.
Now, however, the dam had raised its head. They were, predictably, in favour, if only because it was further evidence that the bad old days were gone. The objections to what they regarded as progress confused them. The newcomers, it seemed, had forgotten, or never known, how miserable life had been, milking cows by hand, barefoot in the mud. To cap it off, there she was, just the week before, a Lensman, going down to Brisbane with old Mal Izzert to milk cows in George Street, letting the milk run onto the cobblestones in front of Parliament House while the cameras rolled. Standing there with her hippie greenie friends talking nonsense on national television.
Opening a couple of cans of tomatoes and pouring them onto the onions and garlic, slicing them with the spatula.
Really there was nothing for it.
‘Can I talk to you? Or is the game at a critical point?’ she asked.
‘What was that?’
She said it again. He turned off the sound, left the picture on. Which would have to do. Looked over at her.
‘Thought you might like to hear what I’ve been doing.’ Watching the sauce as it started to bubble around the edge of the pan. Not looking at him. Giving the pasta a stir. As if she was at ease. ‘You’d have heard about the stunt we did down in Brissie?’
‘I did.’
‘What d’you think?’
‘You know that Mal Izzert’s as crazy as a cut snake, don’t you? The lot of them are.’
‘He’s making a go of the dairy. Selling cheese into China now. Had a delegation from Sichuan out to visit the farm last week.’
‘Doesn’t mean he’s not fucking mad.’
‘He’s going to lose some of his best land. Doesn’t he have a right to object?’
‘They’ll more than compensate him. And he gets lake frontage to boot.’
‘But has to stop dairying.’
‘Yeah, well, that’s not such a bad thing, love.’
Claiming a kind of genetic knowledge of the land and the industry she could apparently never attain. She wasn’t going to rise. She wasn’t going to argue. Keep it calm. Stir the sauce.
‘Not sure why you’re siding with him, but,’ he said.
‘I don’t believe it’s the right policy. On any level. In terms of the site, the economics, the environment. Dams don’t work.’
‘I don’t need a fucking lecture.’
‘You asked.’
‘What d’you want to tell me?’
‘They liked how it went down in Brisbane, you know, me in front of the camera. All the news services picked it up. Good copy. Did you see it? I don’t suppose you did. D’you get to watch the news up there?’
‘Sometimes. We missed it that night. I guess I should be thankful eh? My fucking mates weren’t saying, Hey, Davo, is that your missus up there running milk in the drain?’
Ta
king a sip of his beer. They were allowed four a night in the canteen. The place he worked was like a gaol, he said, except that they paid you. They told you what you could do every minute of the fucking day. When you could eat, have a shit. All of them out there in the morning in rows, doing stretches, like they were North Koreans. They called it Alcatraz. She’d told him he didn’t have to do it but he liked the money, liked the success, liked the fact that his business turned over more every shift than Marcus made in a year. It was part of the bigger plan.
The dinner was almost ready. She’d left her run a bit late. She cut a bit of fresh basil to throw in the sauce. The wide-bladed stainless steel knife large in her hand.
‘They’ve asked me to do all the media from now on,’ she said.
‘Who’s they?’
‘You know, the group. Marcus, Mal, Geoff, Alt, Ruth, Sam.’
‘And you’ve said yes?’
‘Yes.’
Looking up at him for the first time. Standing up for herself. Proud of it.
He didn’t say anything. Looked at the screen. An advertisement showing now. All power to the mute button.
‘We’re having a debate in town on the weekend,’ she said. ‘Organised by the uni. In the community centre. I’m representing the NoDam crowd. You’ll still be here, eh? You could come along. Bring the girls.’
‘You don’t mind what you fucking do, do you?’ he said, straight up, no pause.
Taking a breath. Letting it out.
‘What does that mean?’ she said.
‘You know what it fucking means.’
‘It’d be good for the girls to see their mum standing up for something.’
‘Something useful. Not this greenie shit.’
Faltering, but determined not to show it. Standing her ground. Unsure where the new-found strength had come from. Scared. He wasn’t physically violent; had never hit her, or the girls. Occasionally he’d thrown something. It was just he got so angry. The male potential for violence always there, she guessed. But more often simply cold and mean. A capacity to search out a person’s weak spots, to cut directly to the rawest point, without, she thought, even necessarily knowing what he was doing, how much it hurt. Some injury in him that went on the attack in its own defence. That’s what she used to think. In the days when she used to want to excuse it, could still forgive it. Going for the girls as a way of getting to her if the frontal attack didn’t work.