by Susan Duncan
'Gets up at five thirty every bloody morning and expects us to do the same,' moans my cousin, Jayne. ' "Frank, it's still dark," I tell him. "We can't start work until the sun comes up." ' But he clanks around the house making such a racket we end up nursing a cuppa at the kitchen table until it's light. 'Been married thirty-one years,' she adds, 'and he's lived with us for twenty-eight of them. Miracle we're all still speaking to each other. Most days, that is.'
'Build him a separate house close by,' I suggested when Bob and I called in to the orchard to say hello on one of our trips to Melbourne.
'Don't be ridiculous. We'd miss the old bugger terribly. Have nothing to complain about.'
When Bob jams the lids on the weed containers, I launch back into my nag: 'Cakes are better when they're made with fresh eggs,' I say. 'Lighter and more moist. As for frittata . . .'
'How many?'
'How many what?' I ask.
'Chooks. How many chooks?'
'Ten, do you think? The chook pen is big enough.'
'Not even you could use ten eggs a day.'
'They won't all lay every day, will they?'
'Do you know anything about raising chooks?' he asks.
'Not much, but there's sure to be a book about it.'
We call friends, Bruce and Lesley, who once lived on Scotland Island but now have a small property at Pindimar on the Central Coast, across the road from Bomber and Bea. They have black chooks, white chooks, big chooks and small chooks. Calm chooks, hysterical chooks, baby chicks and a rooster or two that, like my Uncle Frank, rouses everyone at five thirty every morning.
One weekend when we visited for Bruce's birthday party, Bob stumbled over a pile of eggs hidden in the garden, so many of them lying neatly on top of each other, that they looked like turtle eggs. 'Omelets,' we all shouted. But nearly every one of them floated in a bowl of water. They were rotten as. Lesley placed them in the compost bin one by one so she didn't break them. 'Nothing worse than the smell of a rotten egg,' she said. 'Hangs around for days and makes you think something's died.'
'What kind of chooks would you recommend?' I asked her when we decided to have a few hens of our own.
'You need Isa Browns,' she replied. 'They're great layers. I'll get Bruce to organise a couple for you.'
'We want ten,' I tell her, firmly.
'Ten! What are you starting, a cake shop?'
Three weeks later, Bob and I drive north along the crowded Pacific Highway blasted, like a canyon, out of Sydney's famous sandstone rock. We reach Bulahdelah, a sleepy little town on the edge of the millpond smooth Myall Lakes at lunchtime and find the produce store at the far end of town. A salesgirl with long blonde hair and eyelashes weighed down with clumps of black mascara can't find our chickens. It's her first day on the job, she tells us, and she's still learning.
Bob goes searching on his own and finds two cardboard boxes with air holes punched in them. His name is written on the boxes in large black letters. 'Think these are ours,' he calls to the girl, who comes over, stares at them, then quickly lifts one and, before we can stop her, turns it upside down.
'Yep,' she says. 'Sounds like chickens in there.'
'You could've just opened the box,' Bob suggests. 'Not sure it's a good thing to turn chooks on their heads.'
'They'll be right,' she says, so carelessly I have to make a conscious effort not to slap her.
'Shall we open the boxes for a second, to check they're ok?' I ask instead. She jiggles each box, again so quickly that we can't stop her. We hear the sound of flapping chooks muttering crossly.
'They're fine,' she insists, refusing to open the boxes because she reckons the birds will take off and never be seen again.
Unconvinced and silently raging, we gently place the boxes into the back of the car. It's more than a three-hour drive home and a cool day has turned hot. I've just read Jackie French's Chook Book and I know chickens are fragile. Too hot and they die. Too cold, same thing. Thirsty? Yep, they die. Packed too tightly? Death. We switch the air-conditioning to max and hit the road. By the time we pull into Commuter Dock at Church Point, neither of us wants to lift the lids. We lower the boxes into the boat like precious cargo, heartened by the sound of scratching feet.
'You take them to the chook pen. I'll come up later. I can't look.'
Bob nods. We both know there'll be some kind of mortality rate. It's just a question of how many. Then I go with him anyway. We're a team.
There are two dead chickens in the first box. Two almost dead in the second, heads lolling, yellow eyes closed to thin slits, red cockscombs limp. Six birds are fit and charge out of the darkness ready to do battle. Bob shows them the water tray. Then we sit in the dirt, each of us holding an almost dead chook, drizzling water down their throats.
The tough chooks are already scratching, bizarrely uninterested in the ailing and dead hens. It's as though they can't see them or they don't exist. Chip Chop was the same when Obea was sick. She ignored him as he lay in the courtyard, not even bothering to look his way as she marched past with her bone. I thought she was heartless – Obea was her hero, after all – but perhaps detachment is how animals cope with death. The instinct to survive is overriding and grief can bring you down.
Our two sick little chooks finally raise their heads. We place them tenderly in a couple of laying boxes cushioned with straw, a nook for them to rest and recover. Hopefully. The other chooks keep their distance, pecking at the ground. Bob scatters a few handfuls of grain and we leave them, closing the door after us. They'll be safe. The pen is completely enclosed. No chance of any marauding goannas getting in here. 'It's as good as the Hilton,' I say.
Around us, dusk turns the sky rosy pink, the water too. Yachts point westwards but they are still now. The west wind has glided away. Bob grabs a spade and walks into the bush, the two dead chooks in a box under his arm. I head for the kitchen to start dinner. About ten minutes later, there's frenzied yelling, like someone's being brutally attacked.
Outside, Bob's dancing like a madman, yelling incoherently . . . well, a few words are clear enough. 'What are you doing?' I say, rushing up to him. 'What's the matter, for God's sake?'
He jumps, leaps, yells again. Roars. 'Ants!' he finally gets out. 'Fucking ants. I dug up an ants' nest.'
'Well take your clothes off, you idiot!'
'I'm OUTSIDE!'
'You're in the middle of the BUSH! Who cares?'
He rips off his clothes and stands there starkers, brushing furious black ants with angry red heads off his body, dancing up and down until there are none left. I shake his clothes vigorously and hand them back to him. He puts on his shirt, his jeans. And the roaring begins again. Didn't quite shake out all the ants. Determined little buggers, ants, when they're mad as hell.
'We'll need names for the chooks,' I tell Bob later that night when we're eating a quickly grilled steak and a salad with red onion and a few bits of blue cheese crumbled into it. There won't be chicken on our plates for quite a long time, I suspect. Bob's covered in chalky pink spots of calamine lotion but the heat has gone out of the stings. Amazing what a solid glass of whisky can do.
'How about Edline and Evangeline? Maybe Elizabeth, Emily and Esther. The Esther is for my mother. She loves chooks. Nice to name one after her. Maybe they should all start with "E". Edna and Ethel. Good country names. Strong. Need one more. Knew a woman called Eglantine once. Had a long neck, like a chook. How about that?'
And so the E-chicks bed in. The next day, it's impossible to pick the crook chooks. Two days later, Bob calls me. In one of the boxes, a single, small, smooth brown egg lies like a gift. 'Go on,' he says, 'collect it and take it into the kitchen. We better get a good-size basket. These girls are going to be prolific. By the way, which one's Esther?'
I look at the girls. Already one is the leader. She's bigger, tougher, bossier and the best looking of the lot. 'That one,' I say, pointing. 'That's Esther.'
Within a couple of weeks, even though the girls are still ad
justing to their new life, we're getting three eggs a week. Bob does the figures. Reckons we're running at a baseline cost of $50 an egg.
One lunchtime, I make an omelet instead of a sandwich. The eggs are dense with freshness, saffron gold when they're cooked.
'Worth fifty dollars an egg?'
He looks at me. 'Almost.' But I think he's being diplomatic.
Not long after the girls take up residence in the Hen Hilton, a male brush turkey with a canary yellow scarf and gristly red head begins swaggering across the top of the retaining wall behind the house at the same time as the sun hits the bedroom window every morning. He is an ugly, comical bird, a florid pinhead on a black football of a body with a tail stuck on the end like a dowager's fan.
'That turkey reckons the chooks are his personal harem,' Bob says one morning. 'He circles the pen all day with a lusty glitter in his beady little eyes. Must be the mating season.'
'What do the girls think?'
'Not much. They try to peck his eyes out through the fence.'
'Bit rough, aren't they?'
A few weeks later, Bob finds the turkey scratching bush litter into a huge mound behind the water tanks. 'He's there all day,' Bob says, 'scratching away like a machine. He's building a home for his new bride to lay her eggs in. Except he hasn't got a new bride.' The mound, a great big pile of scratched-up grass, rots slowly and gives off enough heat to incubate a female's eggs. Because once she's laid, she leaves. No maternal instinct in the brush turkey femme at all.
Bluto, as we've named the turkey, won't give up on the chooks no matter how often Bob chases him off. Then one morning, at his usual time, he struts past the bedroom window. Not far behind him there's a dowdy-looking female turkey.
'Bluto has finally found true love,' I tell Bob later.
'Yeah, I know. They've been in the tomato patch scratching out the plants. Had to chase them off.'
Makes me wonder, again, how the early settlers ever managed to survive. Sheer hard work, probably. Like my Uncle Frank.
About two months later, a little black chick with a jerky head, skinny legs and a fluffy black body bolts in front of Bob, neck stretched forward, shoulders hunched. Dashing like a demented roadrunner. It runs flat-out into the chook pen and refuses to leave. Looking for mother love? We let it stay for about a week but when the chooks start to attack it, Bob shoos it out. Then the baby turkey falls in love with Bob, searches for him every day and shadows him around the yard, looking heartbroken whenever Bob comes inside for a cuppa. Guess when you've been dumped early, any surrogate will do.
By the time the baby turkey is old enough to go and build a mound of his own, the chooks are laying prolifically and I have begun looking for cake recipes that call for a minimum of ten eggs. Before doubling the recipe. Then, as Christmas looms, Stewart calls to ask if we can manage another chook: 'There's one in Towlers that's getting raped by a brush turkey and she's not happy.'
So Chrissie joins the girls. She's bigger, tougher and feistier than even Esther. For some reason, though, despite being a brown chook, all her eggs are white, so we can tell which ones are hers. She lays prolifically too, with more double-yolkers than should be physically possible. But she never forgets the trauma of her past and every time Bluto wanders near the chook shed, she goes ballistic and all the other chooks keep out of her way until she regains her composure.
***
Jeanne wants to know if she can bring a group from the Garden History Society to visit Tarrangaua.
'There's no garden, Jeanne, you know that,' I tell her.
'Doesn't matter. The bush is great. And it's a lovely thing to do. Ride the ferry around the bays, go for a walk, look at native plants. The area's rich with flowers and trees you won't find in any nursery.'
'Could give you all a cuppa and a slice of cake. To make the eighty-eight steps worthwhile?'
'I'll bring the cake.'
'No you won't.'
'Yes I will.'
'My house. My cake.'
And we laugh. Because we both know she will bring a cake and I will make one.
A while ago, when Jeanne and I went to a cooking class, someone asked her if I was her daughter. Instead of being offended, because it would have made her a teenage mother, Jeanne was thrilled. 'There's something utterly wondrous about choosing family instead of being lumbered with the accident of birth,' she said.
'Reckon I could manage you for a mother. No law that says you can only have one, is there?' I replied, feeling a sudden twinge of disloyalty. 'Prefer you as a friend, though.'
'Yeah. Fewer fights.'
I like our relationship. Our shared passions, the density of our chats, passing on what we learn from one to the other. Jeanne doesn't let her world shrink. No matter how much her hip hurts, how tired she is at the end of the day, she refuses to let her body set limitations, and she uses her passion to wipe out pain and overcome physical hurdles. She, like Ann from Little Lovett Bay, is a model for how to grow older in a way that is stimulating and useful instead of passive and reduced. How lucky I was to wander down that pitted driveway and tumble into her expansive world.
I write a quick little history of the house for the Garden Society's newsletter, based on information in the Sotheby's auction notice and material from Barbara's files. Quite innocuous, I think. Until the emails from two of Sydney's leading heritage architects rocket back to Jeanne, accusing me of fraudulently claiming Hardy Wilson as the architect of the house. I didn't keep the emails, but I wish I had. They went something like this: 'Tarrangaua was not designed by the architect Hardy Wilson. The owners should be told. And asked to stop making the claim.'
Jeanne calls, worried. 'Sorry to have opened a can of worms.'
'Don't be silly. We don't care if a plumber designed it,' I reply.
***
The moon is high and full, the light mottled like blue cheese. Outside, the night is silent. The scream is so short and sharp, I am not sure whether it is real or a product of my imagination. I listen, heart thumping. Nothing. A dream? A few minutes go by. I drift back into sleep . . . dull, heavy, the satisfying kind . . . Until a ragged screech curdles the night again.
'Bob!' I shake him gently because he has lived with serious illness when a sudden grab means emergency.
'Someone is outside, screaming. Should we call the police?' I whisper.
Bob listens. Nothing.
'Maybe she's lying dead somewhere?'
Another single, chilling screech cuts the night. The tension drains from Bob's body. He closes his eyes. 'It's a barking owl,' he mumbles.
'But it sounds so . . . human.'
'It's sometimes called a murderbird.'
His sinks into sleep again. The wretched screams rend the stillness once or twice more. Bob doesn't stir. Then they stop, and the bush is quiet again.
I'm too unsettled to go back to sleep. I slip out of bed and fling a blanket around my shoulders. Open the door onto the verandah. Lights are on in three houses across the bay. They look like yellow satellites hovering in the blackness. Did they wake, too, to those somortal sounds? I pull the weatherproof covers off the sofa at the eastern end and prop a pillow behind my head. Moonlight ribs the water, yachts are alert, waiting for the sun to rise. White pylons bead the shore like soldiers. At night, there's no whiff of eucalyptus. The air is dank, salty, damp. The night is a silent performance. And the house – no matter who designed it – is superbly sited to embrace it all.
9
CHRISTMAS. HAS ANOTHER YEAR really slithered past so quickly? The drought goes on, and it's hotter than ever. When did temperatures soar so high so early in the summer? My Uncle Frank, cousin Jayne and her husband, Edward, are battling to save their stone fruit orchard at Wangaratta in central Victoria, where their giant dams are cracked and barren with only dirty pools in the bottom like dregs in a teacup. If there's no rain soon, a lifetime of hard slog will be bulldozed into the ground – along with dreams of a comfortable retirement and an inheritance for their two chi
ldren.
'Are you worried, Frank?' I ask when we call in on our way to visit Bob's children in Melbourne.
'Not much point in that. Worrying doesn't change anything. Just wears you out.'
When he needs a break from work, he visits my mother. The two of them sit like ancient parrots in her back room where the television blares from dawn onwards. They have been friends for nearly seventy years, ever since Frank married my mother's sister. They yabber away in what sounds like code because their history is implicit. They do not need to fill in the gaps: they fling around names, occasions, births and deaths, and the moment immediately slots into place. Their sense of humour, too, is from another era, sometimes so corny it makes me cringe. But they laugh and laugh, until I have to join in. Uncle Frank rocks back and forth, incongruous in the baby pink chintz recliner. Nut-brown face, muscled arms, jet black hair like a young man.
On one of my rare visits, my mother sits forward on the edge of the sofa instead of lying on it, like she usually does. Her elbows rest on her knees. She fiddles with bits and pieces on the coffee table – some earrings, a necklace, an old letter that she opens and closes without reading. But try to scoop any papers to throw in the rubbish and she snatches them back. 'I haven't sorted it all yet,' she insists. As each pile reaches toppling point, she begins another. Nests, I call them. They are all over her house. When I check the pile on the kitchen table, the dates go back a decade or more. I know it is time, no, it is past the time, for her to find a new home.
One day soon the two women at the local post office who have known her for nearly twenty years will retire, and when she asks the new manager to fill in her forms to pay her bills, he may say no. She will have no idea what to do then. The electronic world beyond the television remote control is a confusing, foreign universe to her.