Flock

by Ellen Van Neerven

  May ignored the possibility of Ted. ‘The war will be over soon, there’ll be lots of blokes running about the place. You said you like babies.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jean said, expressionless. ‘Other people’s babies. Now lie flat, or I’ll never hear the end of it from Himself.’

  ‘You mean from you.’ May laughed, for the doctor had said the danger was past. Baby kicked happily now whenever it heard Ted’s voice coming up the stairs.

  The next week, Ted drove his wife into Murwillumbah at speed, churning dust and scaring fowl all the way to the hospital. They returned three days later with a squalling bundle on the back seat. Jean held her breath, waiting to discover if she could stay.

  ‘We called him Eric,’ Ted told the water tank proudly. ‘After me old dad.’

  ‘Eric,’ repeated Jean, reaching down to stroke a tiny pink cheek.

  Later May reported the doctor’s verdict: make the most of this one, because there would be no more babies for her.

  Eric was a plump laughing baby, and then an adored toddler, always wandering, always in the pots and pans.

  ‘Come to Jean-Jean,’ she would cry, and Eric would ball his little fists and hurtle joyfully into her, clutching at her shins. She lifted him high in the air, both of them squealing with delight, until May came out laughing too, and demanded her turn. If the child cried in the night, it didn’t matter to him who arrived to comfort him. Eric was at home in the world, because the world had shown him only love and tenderness.

  ‘If it wasn’t for the fact that I feed him,’ May said casually, tucking herself back into her blouse one day, ‘I don’t think he’d know that I’m his mother, and not you.’

  ‘Oh, he does!’ protested Jean, feeling a sudden thread of fear unspooling in her gut. ‘And he’s the spit of you, anyway. What would he want with a mother like me?’ May glanced at Jean’s brown face, her black eyes and matchstick limbs.

  ‘You’re not all that dark. You’re more like Gina Lollobrigida,’ she said generously. ‘Exotic. Plenty of men would want you for a wife.’

  ‘But would I want them?’ Jean retorted, a question that had never occurred to May.

  After that, Jean held the boy a little less when his mother was around. She let May go to him at night, and was careful to be outside more often helping Ted in the paddock when Eric needed his afternoon bath. May thought they were pals, but Jean knew she could be flung away from the farm with one brief word, catapulted back to the Mission, even, if she couldn’t scrape a better life up out of her own effort and wits.

  May confessed tearfully one day that she had briefly allowed Eric – now struggling on her lap to regain his lost freedom – to stray into the Big Paddock. ‘I actually felt my heart stop. I never knew you could love anyone so much.’

  But I did, thought Jean, with a pang so fierce it made her gasp.

  ‘He’s a terror for wandering, alright. Pity we can’t bell him like Queenie,’ was what she finally managed.

  May caught the bus to town and returned with a tinkling ribbon that had six tiny silver bells sewn onto it by kind Mrs O’Connell. With the ribbon pinned between his shoulder blades, Eric could be heard all over the house and yard, a blue cattle bitch lurking by his side as constant as a shadow.

  The second time Eric got himself lost, he was gone half an hour. They finally found him playing in the mud on the far side of the duck house, three strides from the dam, the ribbon torn off by the wire around the vegie patch. The women, who had each thought that the other was watching Eric, quietly resolved to say nothing to Ted. That night Jean woke the household screaming that a black snake had got in and bitten the baby – but it was only a bad dream.

  It was the barking that alerted them to Eric’s third disappearance, a few weeks later. Peeling spuds on the veranda, Jean became aware of the dog’s frenzied yelps, and realised that she hadn’t heard Eric’s bell for a minute or more. She rocketed to her feet, sending spuds all over the silky-oak floorboards, and ran blindly to the yard where the dog was circling in agitation.

  Jean and May circumnavigated the house, then the paddocks, with no result. Eric would not be found. A search party fanned out, desperate for clues. Here the boy had scratched at the damp creek bank with a twig from the largest gum. Here he had uprooted one of Queenie’s dry pats, to discover what crawling treasures lay beneath. But the signs petered out where the pasture of the Big Paddock turned into scrubby foothills, and nothing was revealed – not that day, nor the next, nor in the awful weeks that followed – that could bring Eric back to them. The boy had quite simply vanished.

  Nobody could fathom why Ted and May kept the dark girl on. But who else would understand why Ted could never go straight to the Big Paddock in the mornings anymore, and took the long way past the dam instead? Who else shared May’s memory of Eric tilting his head to eat his porridge? The high tinkling bell-note of a king parrot’s call made Jean catch May’s eye, and neither of them had to say a word. And so the terrible thing that would have driven any other three people far apart, instead bound them together.

  In spring, Ted planted a silky oak sapling between the house and the gate. At its foot lay an engraved granite boulder. May took to sitting beside Eric’s rock at odd hours of the day and night, gazing past the ghost gums, searching the distant hills. When the wet season arrived they sat, waiting to see what would wash down to them from the forested gullies. But the foaming brown floodwaters of the creek revealed as little as the search parties had. Their vigil, like all of Ted’s endless Sunday tramping, scouring the hills, was in vain.

  Queenie still lowed at dawn, demanding to be milked. The eagles still wheeled over the ridge. The tame grey lizard still came for crumbs in the morning. Jean ventured out from the house more than before; she learned from Ted how to rope and brand calves, and then to jerkily drive the cattle truck into town. Good as any man with stock, he told her boots. Nobody blamed her; nobody asked her to leave.

  Perhaps, Jean reflected wryly, after three more summers had passed, perhaps May was a friend, after all.

  It was two decades, and a new war in Korea come and gone, before the government letter arrived. It has been determined by our engineering division. Ted looked up from the Big Paddock at the hills to be sliced in half by the new highway. May began slamming doors. Soon bulldozers arrived, and men with dynamite. Ted scratched at his scalp. The jungled ridge belonged to the memory of Eric, not to the government. But then what if they turned something up. Hard to know what to think, really.

  When the first young protestors came to the door, Ted walked away, but May dried her hands on a tea-towel and listened. ‘Don’t bother the stock,’ she told them, ‘and shut them bloody gates.’ A village of yurts and Kombis sprang up near the creek. Jean and Ted shook their heads. Girls in muslin dresses staggered up to the house, sunburnt, dehydrated, bitten by spiders. The trees are our brothers, Jean was informed by a boy who needed a lift to hospital the next day, concussed by a falling limb. A jolly fellow with an earring tumbled into the campfire and burned half his face off. At month’s end, the remnant kernel of protesters tried, and failed, to scale the largest of the gum trees to stage a sit-in in its canopy.

  It wasn’t ultimately clear to the district who should bear the blame for the inferno. Most said the protestors, obviously, for lighting campfires in the first place, or May for allowing the city-bred fools on the farm. Some blamed the cop who had deliberately kicked coals towards nylon tents, determined that the hippies be driven out. A few even blamed Ted for failing to maintain his rutted driveway better, so that the fire truck couldn’t get to the paddock in time.

  After the sirens had faded, and the night was at an end, the firefighters had picked up all their tools and taken them home, and the Kombis had all pulled away from the charred ground in disgrace, Ted, May and Jean slumped on the veranda, filthy and almost too tired for sleep. A profound silence fell upon the farm. No stock remai
ned alive to bellow. The only sounds were the faint shushing of a light breeze through the few pathetic trunks still standing in the blackened smear that was the Big Paddock. That, and a strange high tinkling from beyond the creek.

  Bone weary, Jean and May stared at each other. Then they ran, flinging great black clouds of ash in their wake. They forded the creek and ploughed their way through the fire-thinned scrub, until at last they stood below an enormous tallowwood, halfway up the mountain. It was a tree Ted knew; he had eaten a sandwich beneath it more than once on his Sunday treks. The fire had reached it, licked its trunk, caused it to shudder and tremble, but not to fall.

  ‘There.’

  Jean pointed up. Ted and May craned their necks, squinting in the first faint streak of dawn light. What tinkled above them was a narrow thread, dislodged from its resting place by the force of the fire, and spinning now in the breeze which blew across the empty paddock. The merest ghost of a belled ribbon, it had been wedged tight in the eagle’s nest for thirty years.

  Get me an axe, thought Jean.

  Forbidden Fruit

  Jeanine Leane

  Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri writer, poet and academic from south-west New South Wales. Her poetry collection, Dark Secrets After Dreaming: A.D. 1887–1961, won the Scanlon Prize for Indigenous Poetry; and her first novel, Purple Threads, won the David Unaipon Award. Jeanine is the recipient of many awards, including a Red Room Poetry Fellowship, two Australian Research Council Fellowships and the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Prize for Poetry, twice.

  It was summer. The air was thick with the syrupy smell of decaying fruit. Lynne stood beneath the apricot trees and felt the tangerine ooze of spent fruit rise through her toes. She had planted the fruit trees years ago when she bought the house with her new husband.

  Each year she bottled the fruit. Sealed jars of apricots adorned her pantry shelves long after her marriage ended. They sat marinating in their own juices of captured youth and sweetness untapped.

  Lynne prepared to climb the apricot trees and glean this year’s harvest. Parting the branches near the fence she came face to face with her new neighbour. He smiled as he gorged himself with fresh fruit: sticky nectar dripping down his forearms. He was scruffy and unkempt – like a hippy, Lynne thought.

  Hey, he said. I hope you don’t mind but this fruit is spilling into our backyard.

  Oh … no. Lynne masked her surprise.

  Eating fresh fruit is like a religious experience, he continued, oblivious. So cleansing. I love watching it rot on the ground to become part of next year’s richness.

  I usually bottle the fruit, she said curtly, to save for another day.

  I think that’s sad, plucking it at the height of its potential and confining it to jars that may never be opened.

  Lynne shrugged.

  In the kitchen she prepared to cook the fruit, but the image of arrested youth started haunting her. She stared at the laden shelves: her storeroom of trapped potential.

  She abandoned her preserving and sat beneath the fruit trees, inhaling their decadence and contemplating the farcical situation that was her marriage.

  Richard had always wanted to save things for another day. She suggested Europe while they were still young and earning good money. He wanted to save.

  We can see Europe another time – we don’t have to be young, he scoffed.

  He was like that when she wanted a baby too. Let’s save our energy, he said. The world is overcrowded already with vain people who want to replicate themselves!

  The preserved fruit was his idea and like everything else it was for another day. When he left years later with no Europe and no baby, the bottles of fruit were her only souvenir.

  In dreams she felt herself being forced into a jar. Inside the thick glass, apricots became the contorted face of a woman stewing in her own stale juice. Rising, she cleared the pantry shelves. At first light she prised open the lids and began emptying the contents onto the ground.

  The hippies from next door gravitated over. Be free, they chanted as Lynne scattered years of forbidden fruit onto the garden floor. She was liberated.

  She went to Europe. Her neighbours received a postcard from the orchards of Provence.

  I’m pregnant! Lynne wrote. Will be back home in high summer to give birth among the apricots!

  The Golden Wedding Anniversary

  Gayle Kennedy

  Gayle Kennedy is a Wongaiibon woman of the Ngiyaampaa nation of south-west New South Wales. Her writing has won multiple awards, including the David Unaipon Award for Me, Antman and Fleabag, which was also shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and a Deadly Award, and commended for the Kate Challis RAKA Award. Oxford University Press has published eleven of her children’s books.

  Me, Antman and Fleabag went to Uncle Vic and Aunty Bess’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. They’re Ant’s relations. It was a great party. All Aunty Bess’s mob came. Uncle Vic’s brother, his wife, kids, their kids and hundreds of their friends. Their only child, Della, came from Brisbane with husband Chris and two children, thirteen-year-old Buddy and ten-year-old Lulu. They had Old Merv Hanrahan as master of ceremonies. Ant reckons he emcees every local event, from christenings to funerals, engagements to weddings, presentations, sporting or otherwise. He got the job years ago cos he owned a suit and was never lost for words. Uncle Vic reckoned Merv had an opinion on everything and everyone, whether you wanted it or not. Also, his wife Dulcie made the best wine trifle in the district and always brought one along, so that didn’t hurt either.

  The Dandenong Country Drifters were the band for the night. They played country, rock and roll and some waltzes for the older folk, and pretty soon had everyone up dancing. The first one up was Luvvo. Coal black skin, a shock of white hair and the figure of someone twenty years younger, Luvvo could shake it with the best of them. And when she’d throw back her head and yell in her port wine and cigarette growl, ‘I still got it,’ no one doubted her, least of all the women, young or old. They kept their men folk real close when Luvvo was around.

  Later in the evening Bess and Vic danced the Anniversary Waltz. Vic, tall, fair, blue-eyed and sandy-haired. Bess, tiny and dark, with long, thick hair, black but for a few streaks of silver that gave off a sparkle as she danced lightly in his arms. They looked as in love today as they were fifty years ago when they married in the old registry with her mum and dad and his granny looking on.

  Then came the speeches. Different ones got up and talked about what a great couple they were. They talked about how they’d turned their property into the best in the district. About their generosity, their terrific family. Della spoke about what fantastic parents they were, how much she and her husband and kids loved and were so proud of them. Vic and Bess was fairly lit up with pride.

  Finally Vic got up. He thanked everyone – from his friends, family and the Lord for his wonderful life and the gift of Bess, Della and her family. He and everyone else spoke about everything. Everything but what Della really wanted to hear.

  Antman reckoned she’d pestered em for years.

  ‘Please,’ she’d beg. ‘Tell me how you met. I tell everyone how I met Chris at uni. How we fell in love. How he proposed.’

  But they’d just say, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Or tell her, ‘It’s in the past. We’re together now. That’s all that matters.’

  She’d ask their friends or relatives but they’d go quiet. Tell her it wasn’t up to them to say. Reckoned Vic and Bess would tell her when they were ready. It drove her mad. She’d moan about it to Chris, or me and Ant, and we’d say they probably had their reasons. That just gave her the shits.

  After the party, Big Jim West (five foot four in his socks) drove us all home. He’d been the town drunk, proppin up the bar of the Royal Mail from openin to half past drunk for many years. Then he met Ollie who fell in love with the man, not the drunk. Reckoned he was a good sort, just nee
ded sprucin up. She got him sober and he hasn’t touched a drop in twenty years. Non-drinkers were a rarity in these parts, and it wasn’t long before he became ‘designated driver’, the town eventually purchasing a community bus of which Big Jim was supreme overlord.

  The bus belted along the dirt and gravel moonlit roads. People, full of grog and good cheer, sang out of tune as each family was dropped off in turn, until finally all us mob. We was stayin with Unc and Aunt. Uncle Vic, Chris and Ant went ta bed, they was pretty pissed, so me, Aunty Bess and Della sat out on the wide, screened veranda and sipped cold beer.

  ‘Jeez, Ma, it was a beaut party,’ reckoned Della.

  ‘The best thing was you, Chris and the kids comin home,’ replied Bess.

  ‘Wouldn’t have missed it. Luvvo can still shake it, aye?’ said Della, sipping her beer.

  ‘You’re not wrong, daught. I told her she better keep her paws off your father, or me and her will be knucklin up.’

  ‘Oh, Ma! Luvvo’d make mincemeat of you.’ Della laughed.

  Bess chuckled. ‘Don’t bet on it, bubby. Ya father’s worth fightin for.’

  We just sat there all quiet, just listenin to the sound of crickets.

  Finally Della spoke. ‘Ma, please tell me how you met. It can’t be that bad.’

  ‘Leave it alone, daught.’

  Then the low rumble of Vic’s voice disturbed us. We hadn’t heard him come out.

  ‘Tell her, Bess. It’s about time.’

  ‘Gawd, Vic! Sneakin up like that. You sure?’

  ‘I’m sure. We’ll both tell her.’

  I said maybe I should go inside and leave em in peace but they reckoned no, I could stay if I wanted.

  Vic sat beside Bess and took her tiny, dark hand in his, and after a deep breath, Bess started speaking.

  ‘In those days, men had no respect for us Koori girls. They’d come sneakin round camps at night, bringin grog. Stirrin up trouble. Sometimes they’d chase us home from town. They got one of me cousins. She killed herself not long after. Funny thing though, the day after they did it, they was all down town with their women folk, helpin em with their shoppin, actin right and proper, tippin their hats to all the white ladies. Meanwhile Ruthie’s lying bleedin in a hospital bed and no copper would believe her story. Even if they did, they wouldn’t have charged em. They were white, we was black, end of story. Who do you reckon the cops believed? After that, men from the camp would go everywhere with us.’