SUNDAY
The sign on the gate droops only slightly. Tooradin Estate. Driving up silent in a new-model Prius, past horses in fields, some in fly veils under the dying cypresses, swishing their tails, the cattle yards freshly creosoted, past the barn that was once the shearing shed, the corrugated iron saddle room, the ancient stables. Lucerne trees struggle to survive in the dust. The chicken coop’s fallen in a heap.
Twenty-four hours since I left LAX, with a five-hour layover at Sydney, the flights on to Melbourne overbooked for Christmas. I should have known I’d have low priority, flying on miles. Exhausted, I park the Prius under the flowering gum, its boughs that drape to the earth. Walking up to climb the stile by the woodshed, the rented car looks akin to something from another galaxy. I take in the hot, dry air, the view to the bush out the back. A distant black shape in the field, the burned-up Mitsubishi, and behind it my grandmother’s cottage still there on the rise, its bay-window eyes staring out at the Pakenham Hills as if watching for fires.
I get my bag and roll it along the bluestone path to the big house. The long veranda striped by the shadows of the cypress trunks in the late afternoon, the lawn all but dead save for capeweed, the garden thirsty but overgrown. This place that’s so verdant in spring. No dog out here to greet me. Just the meat-safe and laundry, the ivy crawling, eating the bricks. The brindle cat spies out from under the bee plant, the bees already swarming.
Staring through the stained-glass kitchen door, I wonder why Isabel isn’t with me to dilute this. I can hear a dog barking but it’s not here at the door. The house unlocked as always, no wreath or signs of Christmas. A lump in my throat as I push the door open. The vague smell of compost and frantic yelping. A glimpse of my mother in the dining room, alive and mobile, armed with a broom and flyswatter. Her movements jerky, the same boys’ jeans cinched tight but baggy now, legs thin as wires as she follows the dog deeper into the house. After seven years I’m afraid to see her face.
It’s usually a bird they’re hunting but as I enter the dining room, a brushtail possum scratches its way along the picture rail. It pisses with fright on the portrait of Aunt Emma Charlotte, then over the pastel of me as a boy. The innocent eyes that were never quite mine. My mother’s face paler, so angular now, the wattles on her throat buttoned like vines into a high-collared shirt. Still she doesn’t notice me, mesmerized by the leaping dog and the hiss of the possum as it plummets to a corner table, smashing plates, and hurtles out past me through the open doors and into the warm Gippsland evening, the dog a blur behind it.
My mother turns. “Hello, my boy,” she says, as if knowing I was here all along. “How was your trip?” She hoists the broom over her shoulder like a rifle.
I give her a hug but her body stiffens as if she’s afraid it’s too American, so I retract my arms and rustle up a smile. “Hello, old girl.”
“Did you get yourself an upgrade?” she asks, but doesn’t wait for an answer, already involved in a project on a kitchen bench, as if I’m a ghost that often appears. Still, I wonder how she’s heard of upgrades.
She’s irrigating ants from a cupboard, wiping them up with an ant-speckled cloth. Her left arm moves awkwardly as though with a life of its own. Is she showing me how she can cope by herself? Wanting me here but showing she doesn’t need me? Observing her in this strange silence, in the no-man’s land between the kitchen and living room, back in this place that’s been here all along. The faint rustle of wood ducks nesting in the chimney, cooing again now the house is still, the house that coos as if calling out. A place for the shelter of various species provided they keep themselves hidden.
“It’s good to see you,” I say.
She waves her good arm. “Nearly finished,” she says. The slur is barely evident now. Maybe she was drunk on the phone, but I doubt it. She’s never had more than a Bailey’s after dinner.
A letter lies open on the kitchen table, the table already set for tomorrow’s breakfast. Set for two. She remembered I’m coming. She’s good at writing things down. But this writing is not hers; it’s angled and childlike, addressed to Those Whom Are Concerned, signed at the top and the bottom, Sharen W.
My mother pretends not to watch as I pick up the heavy crayon paper. She guides a trail of golden ant poison along the ledge. My mother slaughters armies of them, shows off piles of the dead to occasional visitors. Magpies and noisy miners fly down these chimneys, seeking shade, the black and tan dog lying in wait to hunt them, to land them stunned and breathless on the hardwood floor.
I am not aware of how much you know but I can only assume you are naive in the field. That is of the situation of Earley and myself and I will not be harassed by Earley who is bulling me to leave. I pay the same for my horses being here as anyone else but I don’t get the use of the faculties.
I glance up, my mother’s eyes upon me. “She’s illiterate,” my mother says, “but no fool.” Sharen Wells, whose rent checks provide my mother’s shopping money. “Looks like he jilted her or she jilted him and now he wants her out.” The way my father turns on women, except my mother who turned on him first.
I feel sorry for the fire but there is a stigma because of me and Earley. Also I have been attacked by those three black Clydesdales. None of this is safe for me but I will not leave under these provisions. I will get my own soliciter. I will not be railroded.
“Hell hath no fury . . .” My mother trails off as she hands me a dustpan, a load of dead bees and ants, spoils of the sweetness she’s left on the jam jars as lures.
I head outside and stand on the path beneath the lantern, empty the dead insects on a lavender bush, and watch the purple remains of the sky, the glint on the windows of the distant clapboard cottage, way out the back where the wedding bush grows. You can see it from Station Road on the way into town or from the window of the shearer’s quarters, or from here, out across the Lagoon Paddock rise.
The brilliant band of the Milky Way stretching above me, a vivid skin across the sky, and near the horizon the Southern Cross rests on its side, marking its emu head on the lip of the night. Not like our view in LA as we walk up the top of the street to Lookout Mountain from where the city glitters as if the night is upside down.
I think of Isabel there in the guesthouse in the eucalyptus canyon, the lemon-scented gums that remind me of this place. But she’s alone up that winding brick driveway, the call and response of coyotes and local dogs, the rustle of squirrels and raccoons in the leaves. The Christmas gift I slipped under her pillow. I already miss the feel of her, the vague smell of incense and the taste of her rose-scented skin.
The phone rings shrilly, summons me inside. My mother under her jigsaw lamp, leaning over a Wysocki puzzle. She’s always been sharp at cards and crosswords and puzzles—she did a stint in the fifties with the War Office in London as a cryptologist, deciphering codes. Now she has the television on so loud it sounds as if a plane’s about to land on the roof. Oblivious, she gazes at her line of jigsaw edges, the bottom of a lighthouse, as the black rotary phone on the desk goes unanswered. A crackling message being left on the machine. “Ruthie, it’s Sharen. Are you okay? I need to talk.”
“She grows marijuana out there,” my mother lifts her head, “in tubs in a horse float.” She doesn’t mention the fire, returns to sorting pieces of sky. My mother, who dreads the phone and resents others using it. The silver polo mug of familiar pens and broken pencils, the “situation” with Earley. I don’t want to deal with this Sharen. Her number fifth on a list tacked to the wall, after the fire brigade and the vet, my father and Dr. Hopkins.
“Mum, do you want to talk about what’s going on?” I ask.
“Not tonight,” she says. “You must be so tired.”
She doesn’t ask about me, away in her Wysocki world, staring at jigsaw pieces. I traveled eight thousand miles. But she seems strangely detached, parting and closing her lips.
I pull my suitcase along the carpeted hall and let it rest outside the good bathroom. The ori
ginal tiles, the bath with its iron-clawed feet. The same aqua toothbrush with the pick waiting for me here in a small pewter goblet. I squeeze the remains of my miniature Qantas toothpaste and regard the jetlagged ghost of myself in the mirror.
Back in the living room, I replay the message, wondering what my father has done to this one. On the television screen, the marsupial eyes of the new prime minister. Only the dog observes me from its roost in the cushions along the back of the couch.
I dial Isabel but the call goes straight to the service, her new-age music I try to find charming. I leave her a message, “Lejana y sola,” away and alone, quoting the Lorca poem she taught me. “The Song of the Horseman.” I hang up and wish I’d not sounded glib, watch my mother who might just as well be on her own.
I call Sharen Wells from the list of numbers on the wall, a call that rings and rings and has me succumbing to an old desire to escape this house and find out what’s going on, steal out like my father used to. Through the meadow, through the wind, pitch-black pony, crimson moon.
“Earley come, Earley go,” my mother used to say, but at least he stayed local. I got lost in cities far away.
THE SILENT PRIUS glides through shadowy fields, scraping along the overgrown track down toward the windmill, rabbits scurrying in the unexpected spray of headlights. As I close the Lagoon Paddock gate behind me, a whoop above me, maybe an owl, then three dark horses emerge from the night, approach to sniff the soundless car. Heavy part-Clydesdales with wide chests and foreheads, broad appled rumps. The two with no white I don’t quite recognize, but one has a blaze, probably the twin foal born hind legs first the year I left, grown into this giant mare with curious eyes. Dockweed stalks plume her forelock, sticking out like fragile antlers.
Back in the car, I press the shrill horn. The three raise their heads in unison, turn and trot stiffly away, one with its black tail high as a flag in the air. The familiar cacophony of crickets. I try to remember why I don’t live here. The noise or all the silence. The whisper of horses moving through the grass. As if the past might fold in on itself and disappear.
Lights from the cottage, its bay windows beckon through trees, the bedroom where I lay with my grandmother, the book between us. Suddenly there was no more snoring and I could sleep. I didn’t know she’d gone to be with her Jesus. The same bed where Elsie slept and my parents’ marriage ended.
A dark hump appears in the gray beams, the blackened frame of Sharen’s car hunkered among the charred remains. Steel and ash and wood. Thirty yards beyond it, the garden fence, the yard that was once tidy, now a carnival of corrugated iron, engine parts, and overgrowth, a rusted clothesline moaning. My grandmother grew hibiscus here, black-eyed peas and black-eyed Susan, a seven-foot passion fruit vine.
I park under a gum tree near the garden gate and wend my way on foot past an old metal wheelbarrow, rusted fenders, and a sunken laundry trough, to the sagging carport. Gingerly, I knock on the brown waterlogged door, unsure why I’m here. My father’s mess is not my business. Then I remember my mother’s voice on the phone, how she told me the rocking horse burned. And now that I’m here she doesn’t want to talk.
A shout from inside and then footsteps. The door opens a crack, a woman’s face—sun-worn, creased smoker’s cheeks and bright turquoise eyes, her hair a tangled sun-bleached nest. “Daniel?” she asks, suspiciously. As if she half-expected me.
She lets me in, warily. Her nipples press at a long red Cold Chisel T-shirt that stretches down to bare, slender legs, what look like purple welts on her thighs. “Excuse this dreadful mess.” She clasps her shoulders and blames “the boys”; a maze of laundry on the floor but no sign of boys, just the skunk smell of weed. Isabel’s lecture when she spotted me out on the brick patio staring off into the canyon, sucking on a doobie. But I’m not sharing Sharen Wells’s weed.
In a kitchen I barely recognize, Sharen offers me tea. I remind myself this woman lit a fire that could have burned a thousand acres and the town, eviscerated property, and no one called the police.
“Does Earley know?” I ask. “About the fire?”
Her eyes are strangely alluring, a blue glinting green that reminds me of coral, of Isabel’s opal. Staring back so boldly.
“Seems he went down to Lakes Entrance with Elsie.” She says it as though they’re all great friends.
A sink of piled plates and angled saucepans towers precipitously. Shouldn’t she be remorseful? Where did the bruises come from?
“I’m sorry about the furniture,” she says. Her hands shake slightly as she plugs in a kettle. How old is she, forty? Australian years, all the sun and squinting. “I just kind of lost it with your father.”
I’m nodding, looking around to see what’s left, the floorboards bare, stripped of linoleum. The kitchen where my grandmother stood with the sun beaming in on her delicate English face, pouring her Earl Grey tea and placing homemade sultana scones on a silver tray, baking her special rice pudding.
Sharen Wells places the kettle on a cork mat. “The Landlord and Tenant Act requires twenty-four hours’ notice for a visit from the landlord,” she says, so ballsy. I have to remember I’m a lawyer.
“I’m not your landlord.” I try not to look at her eyes. “And what you’ve done is a felony.”
She pours hot water into pale green cups, my grandmother’s gold-lipped china. “I know,” she says too easily. “But I’ve been having trouble with your father.”
“We’ve had trouble with him too,” I say, take a sip and scald my tongue—serves me right for being disloyal. “But we don’t set things on fire.”
She looks down at herself, the cotton clinging to her narrow body. “It was self-defense,” she says. “He appears on a horse at the window at all hours,” she says, “and I rarely wear clothes in the house.”
But according to my mother, he hasn’t been on a horse in years. “I believe he can barely walk,” I say, and still he has power over women like this.
“He’d crawl if he had to, Earley,” she says. “He’s at the door at midnight and when I don’t answer he pulls out my marijuana by the roots.”
“Why don’t you just let him in?” I imagine her in tight-fitting jeans, smoking a joint on the front steps, watching out across the fields. I feel myself vaguely drawn to her Australian-ness, her unvarnished-ness. But the welts on her thighs give me pause.
“Because he won’t leave Elsie and now he wants me out of here,” she says, hugs her steaming cup between her breasts. “He reckons he wants to move back in. Wants to die in his mother’s house. Well, I want to die in his mother’s house too.”
I feel the onset of jetlag, as if my legs might cave, or is it this woman? My father’s most recent endowment. “My mother owns this now,” I say. I don’t tell her how the whole five hundred acres, houses and all, are now in my mother’s name, since my father was sentenced to life with Elsie. Now I’ve got two bitches in my soup, he once told me on the phone. I look over at this woman and wonder if there aren’t three. But somehow I feel for her, her need to talk, her crudeness.
Scanning the squalor of plates and piles of paper, I can’t believe anyone would want to live or die here. Maybe that’s why she divested him of furniture. No sign of a pending Christmas here either. I walk into the bare living room, the Munnings print has gone. I loved that faded painting, the horses being led back from the gallops with blankets over their loins.
He sure can pick ’em, that’s what my mother says.
The last time I visited, my father was buying the farm back, as my mother coined it, on his deathbed in the Dandenong Hospital, pale in one of those paper gowns with pneumonia and congestive heart failure, a shriveling man in a narrow metal cot. But he was still working the nurses, wheezing, flirting, as if there was something left to live for. His wrinkled farmer’s eyes attending the bright young nurses in their robin’s-egg blue. Offering them trips down here to “The Estate,” telling them he’d take them out riding, as if he’d soon be back on a horse. Half dead and
still handsome, still believing he was in with a chance.
“I’ve had him up to here,” says Sharen, the roach in her nail-bitten fingers cutting across her throat. She looks at me as if gauging loyalties, her blue-green eyes more defiant than tearful, but is she more angered or excited by his unexpected visits, the skulking? Or angry that he skulks no more?
“Anyway, I’ll take him to the tribunal if I have to,” she adds. “How dare he try to evict me after all I’ve been through?”
“You won’t take him anywhere,” I say. I don’t move to comfort her, feel no need to share the obvious—my father’s always been a hands-on husband, women pressed against the fridge, my unsuspecting girlfriends bailed up on the hall-stand, that Lipman woman emerging from the haystack with my father behind her in the middle of the night while my mother slept alone up in the big house, the lantern standing dim above the roses. She probably already knows, the way she’s apparently befriended my mother.
Sharen lights a Marlboro, a sudden twitch in her shoulders.
Maybe it would be good for him to stand before a tribunal for something before he dies. I lean on the ledge and try to summon my lawyerly training—any landlord and tenant claim could only be against my mother, since she now owns all this, but Sharen Wells has no cause against my mother, except perhaps some cloven empathy. Still, this woman with her cleavage and teacup wants to lay some stake out on this grease-stained floor. A black oil patch where it looks as if someone has dismantled an engine, takeout food containers adorning the boards. The rocker-recliner my mother mentioned. It could be an artist’s studio, better in some ways without the furniture from Coventry.
Wedding Bush Road Page 2