A Needle in the Heart (21 page)

‘You’re making this up.’ My father was horrified and laughing all at once.

‘Not at all. So then she said, “I’ll get cook to write it down for you”, without giving me so much as a look. All right, I thought, all right. And I went back down the path and waited for the bell to ring, and when it did I pulled it so hard it came off in my hand. So I threw it away.’

‘In the river?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then did you go?’ I could see he was working out whether the whole situation might still be redeemed.

‘No. I waited for her to turn up, trotting down the path in her tatty old silk dress, looking hot and bothered, and she said, “Where’s the tea?” and I told her what I thought about her job. I said, “It’s much harder to find a cook than to keep one”, and I handed her my apron.
“You might need this,” I said.’

My father looked at her as if he’d seen her for the first time.

‘My God,’ he said, ‘you’re a fine woman.’ He was laughing so hard he could hardly stop. ‘We can sell a few more eggs.’

‘They’ll probably think I poisoned them,’ my mother said darkly.

She bought nuts and spices and made the recipe for my father and me. She continued to make it every year, at Christmas time and at birthdays, her wicked ginger treat.

One winter, my father’s friend Frank came to stay, not exactly with us, although he took all his meals at our house. Frank was a much younger man than my father. He had fresh full cheeks and a
raspberry
-coloured mouth and thick eyelashes. In later life he would turn plump. You could see the beginning of it now in the softness under his chin. His checked jacket exuded a grassy smell mixed with cigarette smoke, and bananas, his favourite food. He spent his first few nights at the Homestead, a kind of planters’ hotel in the village with ramshackle accommodation and the only bar in twenty miles. You had to be a house guest to use it. He bought several rounds of gin and tonics for my father and they sat on the verandah and looked down the shimmering stand of blue gum trees in the valley beyond.

‘My cobber bought me a couple of drinks,’ my father said the first night after Frank came north. He giggled and sang. My cobber. My mate. These lapses into vernacular, his way of saying he was a bloke’s bloke, one of the people, sat uneasily inside his posh English voice, and it irritated my mother. As the ritual at the Homestead persisted over a week or two, it became more than the way he talked that annoyed her, it was something else I didn’t understand. She became increasingly silent.

‘His money’ll run out,’ she said.

‘He’s got a job,’ my father said, with triumph.

‘Picking oranges?’

‘Yes.’

‘Maybe you could get one too,’ she said.

My father looked alarmed. ‘My back would never stand it,’ he said.

‘Well then, perhaps I could get a job picking,’ she said.

‘You’d never reach above the bottom branches,’ my father said, but he looked at her with interest.

Frank came to dinner one evening soon after this. He’d moved into a packing shed on a neighbouring orchard, sleeping on a camp stretcher my father had found him. The gin and tonics had run out.

The room in which we ate was narrow, not more than six feet across by about fifteen long, a bench at one end and a coal range on one wall, our gate-legged dining table, oval when it was folded out, creating a barrier between our kitchen and the other end of the room, where a wooden-backed sofa stood. Seeing it like this, it is not a beautiful room, ugly in fact, its cream walls stained with smoke, red congoleum on the floor. But consider our table, laid with an Irish linen cloth, heavy silver cutlery, the knives bone-handled, the plates willow pattern. This was my mother’s dowry, the remnants of some other life. The men wore their jackets with ties, my mother a short-sleeved satin sheath dress in wide horizontal navy blue and scarlet stripes with a scooped neckline. I wore a cotton print dress sprinkled with mauve flowers, a gift from my grandmother; it had a Peter Pan collar and short puffed sleeves that ended in bands above my elbows. We were eating the last of a broiler chicken, which my mother cooked in a slow casserole. But they drank wine, which Frank had brought, out of crystal glasses. Dally plonk, my father said, grinning. Sly grog, my mother retorted, looking at Frank from the corner of her eye.

‘I’ve come north,’ Frank said, obviously for her benefit, because he must have said all this already to my father, ‘because I’m thinking about what to do now that the war’s over. I don’t really want to be a farmer for the rest of my life. My family took it for granted I’d just settle back into Hunterville. But you know, once you’ve been away and seen a bit of the world, you can’t just accept everything the way it was before.’

‘So you just up and left?’ asked my mother.

He shrugged, opening his hands expressively, a surprising gesture, as if his time in Europe had altered him from the farm boy who had
set off for the war. ‘The cows are dry. It seemed like a good time to get away and sort things out and make a bit of extra money at the same time.’

‘You’ve got your rehab surely?’ This was a sore point with my mother. The rehabilitation money for the men who served in the war had got eaten up in this place when it might have gone into
something
more to her liking.

‘I needed someone to talk to,’ said Frank, looking at my father, ‘someone who understood. I might go to university, one of the
agricultural
colleges, something like that.’

‘Good idea,’ my father said. ‘While you’re not tied down.’ And I thought he looked wistful.

‘Perhaps you wouldn’t be too tied down to find something for the pot for tomorrow,’ my mother said. She was serving up pancakes drizzled with golden syrup for dessert.

‘Kill another chook,’ said my father.

‘We’ve only got four left. Don’t you want eggs for breakfast?’

My father looked alarmed.

‘I’ll pay some board next week,’ said Frank.

‘But you’re not boarding with us,’ said my mother. ‘You’re a guest.’

‘Well, if you don’t mind me coming on over in the evenings, perhaps I could pay for my meals, a regular arrangement.’

‘Capital,’ said my father. It was clear that this conversation had been rehearsed.

My mother was a sensible woman. She knew that if he paid her a little on a regular basis she could make it stretch further than my father imagined. ‘Ten shillings a week.’

My father looked taken aback and was clearly going to argue for less when she quelled him with a look so sharp it would have cut glass.

‘First instalment next Friday all right then?’ said Frank.

When they had finished dinner my father said, ‘I’ll walk Frank home.’

‘Surely he can find his way by now?’ she said.

‘It’s a nice night for a couple of fellas to have a walk and a smoke.’ And so it was, one of those starry nights in the north when, even in winter, it’s mild and the air holds the tang of citrus leaves and ripe oranges, and there is a great silence over the shallow hills and valleys. I saw their cigarettes glowing in the dark as they walked off down the road.

This arrangement was all very well, but Friday was still some days away, and so the paying guest had to be fed. A time would come when food was abundant, although never meat.

In the morning, my father said to me, ‘We’re going hunting, Mattie. Get your shoes on, you may need a coat as well.’ I think my mother must have had a word because he’d hardly spoken to me in weeks, not since Frank came. It was not, on the whole, an unfriendly silence but he thought I should be a girl who sang and danced around. When he did notice me, he wanted to teach me songs, but I was not a singer and a dancer, I was a watcher.

The invitation to go shooting was really a command. We set off across the paddocks (why did I think of them as fields?), him carrying a shotgun, me tagging along behind. It was still quite early in the morning, the spider webs spotted with dew, light fragmenting and bouncing off them as the sun rose.

‘I miss the old Dart,’ my father said suddenly, as I trailed along. ‘You know there are a lot of people over there, don’t you? You wouldn’t imagine it, all the people, the streets full of all sorts of people. Merchant bankers, barrow boys, tradesmen, butchers — my goodness, so much meat — and birds in cages hanging in the doorways of houses. We wouldn’t have to be up at crack of dawn over there, someone would have done the job for us. Booksellers, artists, writers … I’m reading a book called
The Purple Plain
right now — its by a man called Bates. Perhaps you’re too young to be reading stuff like this, you’ll have to ask your mother. Music-hall dancers, poets —
oh my God, oh to be in England now
.’

‘What’s wrong with here?’

‘Nothing dammit, nothing. Don’t you listen to a word I say?’

‘Well if there’s nothing wrong with here, why do you want to be in England now?’

‘It’s a line of a poem,’ he said, almost sullenly. ‘And the nothing, that’s what’s wrong — the nothing of everything. The way people look at you because there’s nothing else to look at.’

‘Who looks at you?’ I mentally scanned my more recent forays into adult territory, trying to work out whether the watcher had been watched.

‘Nobody. Here make yourself useful, learn to hold a gun at the very least.’ And he put the gun in my hands and showed me how to hold it up to my shoulder, although the weight of it was almost too much for me to support. ‘Look, we’re out to get a pheasant or two for dinner.’

The sun was rising in the sky and in the golden glow of grass and light I saw something move and my finger squeezed the trigger. A feathered creature rose straight up from the ground and fell back; it was a soft brown hen pheasant. All of a sudden, I was a huntress, a poacher.

Sour fright filled my mouth. I don’t have much of a taste for death.

My mother plucked and gutted the two pheasants that we took home (my father shot the second one), her fingers carefully searching for shotgun pellets. She cooked them with rare brilliance, using some of the leftover wine from Frank’s visit, and told my father to go out and shoot some more.

Like Frank, my mother got work in the orchards, climbing ladders and picking oranges and lemons with sharp steady snaps of her secateurs. She earned one shilling and sixpence for every case and she filled them at twice the rate that Frank did; my father didn’t try again after the first time. She and Frank began to show signs of a camaraderie that hadn’t been there before, although the banter was mostly of her making. ‘And how many boxes did you fill today?’ she would begin. ‘Ten, oh my, but then I noticed you picked the lower branches first.’ My mother, being small and light and fast, cleaned out the tops
of the trees but it was harder work. After a while the orchardists began to pay her a bonus of sixpence a box. By and large it was my mother who paid the bills, while my father worked in a desultory way at home during her absences. His face brightened on the days when she was free to work alongside him.

Sometime round the middle of last century the climate began to change. I suppose it did everywhere but the people in Alderton thought it was a sign that their luck had run out. The summers became drier, and droughts set in: in one year whole orchards wilted and died. At a price, a trucking firm would deliver water, but without natural rainfall, the settlers were at a loss. They ran hoses from taps, but as most of them relied on water stored in tanks from the winter rains, this soon disappeared and then they had only river water to drink. You could see them toiling up and down the banks of the creeks and river tributaries that meandered through their properties, carrying buckets and pots. Sometimes they just sat among the long grass and aromatic pennyroyal near the waterways, looking lost. We didn’t come here for this, you could hear them saying, if not aloud, in their hearts. A few packed up and left.

Others installed pumps, or built reservoirs in their backyards which filled with brackish dirty water, unfit for drinking, but
temporarily
at least, they provided water for the orchards and gardens. My father and Frank built a reservoir behind our house: it needed the two of them to pour the concrete. Frank had thick wide shoulders that he bared to the sun. His fair skin burned easily, so that for days he walked around looking raw and stripped, but he kept steadily trudging
backwards
and forwards between the mounds of cement and sand. He’d been up north a couple of years by this stage. There didn’t seem any pretence that he would go back south now. He was still a big man, but he’d got harder, the edges of his flesh more crisply defined. My father took many breaks, stopping to smoke in the shade of the gum trees, torrents of coughing hurtling out of his lungs. My mother, observing the slow progress of the reservoir, picked up a shovel and carried concrete too, straining against its weight.

This was a summer that held little for me. I had turned ten and my friend Jocelyn had gone away for the summer. Sometimes, in the holidays, I would go south on the train to stay with my grandmother, but my parents had no extra money that year. Water and cement had soaked it all up. My mother was in one of her stubborn frames of mind and wouldn’t take charity from her family. One afternoon, I stood under a gum tree with my father, wishing the day would end, because then it would be tomorrow and I could start doing nothing all over again, and it might turn out better than today. Frank saw my father watching him, and came over.

‘There must be easier ways than this to find water,’ he said.

‘Tell me,’ my father said, wearily, leaning on his shovel. He hadn’t shaved for days and his face looked gaunt and grey, the worse for the cloudy film of cement.

‘There was an old codger down Hunterville way used to be able to divine water, you know, find it in the ground so you’d know where to sink a well.’ Reaching out, he pulled a slim branch from a young gum tree, choosing one with a forked stem. He took out his pocket knife and started whittling a three-pronged Y-shaped twig.

‘See,’ Frank explained, ‘the old joker turns the stick with the long piece pointing upwards and he holds the sides one in each hand.’ He demonstrated how to hold it, curling his fingers right around the two stems, his thumbs pointing away at either side. ‘Then he walks along and when he comes to the place where there’s water, down where you can’t see, the stick begins to turn, pointing out where the water is.’