Drybread: A Novel (19 page)

'I know you do,' Penny said.

'It was absolutely bloody serious for me.'

'I know that too.'

They went out together, and parted without kissing at
the lights on the busy corner. To suffer is part of growing
up, but you become fully adult only when you have
caused suffering in others. Theo watched her walk away:
tall, blonde, small bosomed, in her skirt and boots, and the
jacket with the bright leather panels of green, yellow and
blue. There was nothing to show she was fucked up, and
nothing to show of her resolution despite that.

Theo didn't see Penny again before she returned to the
States with Erskine and Ben, and he wrote no more articles
about her. It wasn't pique, just the feeling that for him
the story had ended, and subsequent events were better
told by others. Over a month later, however, he received
an email from Penny in which she said the Californian
court had withdrawn the custody orders because of
formal reconciliation. Ben was settled and happy. She
didn't say the same about herself and Erskine, but then
she wouldn't, not to Theo, even if it were so. Drybread
she did mention, hoping that he would go up there soon,
in winter. 'It's even quieter in winter,' she wrote. 'I hope
you have some good times, summer and winter. The bach
is a bit of a dump, but the country around is fantastic. I
like to think it'll be a happier place for you than me. One
of the things I'll never forget is the calls of the parries
flying up and down the gully.'

He did decide to go down in winter and asked Melanie
to go with him, perhaps unconsciously seeking some
shield from the memories that would be there. Dansey's
Pass often had heavy snow at that time of the year, so Theo
took the route through Oamaru and then up the Pigroot
from Palmerston. It was a still, cold Sunday, with frost
on the paddocks when they left Christchurch very early,
and, hours later when they were heading for Ranfurly,
still white in the strips protected by gorse hedges, shelter
belts and inclines. There was snow on the tops of the
Kakanuis and light skeins of mist draped in the steeper
valleys. Melanie wasn't familiar with the landscape. 'Wait
until we reach the Maniototo,' said Theo.

There the sky occupied more view than the land:
an arc of cold blue, and the air not moving. There was
hardly a car, and only occasional smoke ladders above the
isolated farmhouses. The sun glinted on the ice of stock
ponds close to the road, and the snow was splendid on
the Dunstan Range and even heavier on the Hawkduns.
Theo remembered Penny telling him that the Hawkduns
lay across the prevailing weather. The horizon they made
with the sky was as sharp edged as the fencepost shadows
close at hand. 'You don't get the long view like this in
Europe,' Theo said. 'The horizon fades out in a haze.'

'There's hardly any trees,' said Melanie.

'This was originally all tussock country, some of it up
to the knees of men on horseback.' Theo imagined the
sight it must have been: to break through into Central
Otago and the Mackenzie Country, and find a sea of
tussock stretching out swell after swell.

In the gully close to Drybread, the snow was on the
ridge above the three old cottages, but not on the road
itself. Theo parked by the great hedge, and they walked
up to the sod house.

The long-shanked keys he'd been given by Penny were
brown with a fine rust, but turned without difficulty. He
still thought of it as Penny's house; perhaps he always
would. Although he knew she was gone, there was just a
moment when he went into the main room that he half
expected to see her and Ben at the table, or the old sofa
— her fair hair, and her son's dark hair and perfection of
skin. How cold and still it was without them: the place
quite different, inanimate, without the languid heat of
summer and the presence of Penny and her boy.

Theo lit the open fire, and for a minute or so the smoke
eddied out into the room because the chimney was cold
and damp, but then the convection began and the flames
leapt up. Melanie inspected the thickness of the original
walls, then went into the single bedroom. 'It's tiny, isn't
it,' she said, meaning the whole place. Beside the bed was
a small, wooden locker with scratches, cigarette scorch
marks and a candle stub in a crockery holder. The soft,
buttoned mattress with a fading pattern of stripes sagged
on the bed wire, and on the porous composite of the
unpainted ceiling, water stains were outstretched like
giant butterflies in brown outline. Theo remembered Ben
sleeping there, and Penny's expensive travelling cases
against the wall on the marmalade lino.

So that Melanie wouldn't ask anything of him,
wouldn't see his face, he went back into the main room,
and when she came through he mentioned the black,
wood-burning oven, and they talked about the difficulties
of cooking on it. He took her to the back door and
pointed out the long-drop on the slope, emphasising with
apparent zest how primitive it all was. And as he talked
he noticed the leaves and beetle cases windswept and
compacted into the corners of the church pew on which
he'd sat on his summer visits while he talked with Penny,
and Ben played beside them. How can things be the same
and so different at the one time? How can someone be
the essential focus of a place, and yet that place remain
intact when they've gone? How can you reconcile urgent
and intense hope with the flat outcomes of reality?

Melanie and Theo didn't light the range, but sat by
the open fire and ate the picnic lunch she'd brought.

The room grew warm quickly, and the noise of the fire
was cheerful. The leather arms of the sofa were worn
to the soft grey beneath the tanned outer skin, but the
squabs were comfortable and Melanie and Theo sat close
together there.

'How long was Penny here?' asked Melanie.

'Must have been over five months,' Theo said.

'Jesus. All that time without phone and power, no
neighbours, and with a kid.'

'And cellphones don't work here,' he said.

'That reminds me. You didn't ring Robin and get stuck
into him about me, did you? He reckoned it was Barry
Mellhop on the other side, but that wouldn't be right.'

'Me?' said Theo. 'What was it all about?' And he had
only a hazy recollection of being the culprit.

'Doesn't matter,' said Melanie. 'It must have been
awful at times for Penny. But she's a strong person, isn't
she. All of the stuff she's had going on, and yet look how
she's left the place. It's pretty primitive, okay, but she
hasn't left it grotty. I mean she's cleaned up, and not just
shot through.'

It was a typical woman's observation. Theo hadn't
thought of it, but Melanie was right. All that Penny had
suffered there, and yet at the end she'd burnt rubbish,
carted stuff away and left the bach in shabby and stark
order. Maybe even then she'd decided to give it to Theo.

'When Mum died, I rented out her house for a while,'
said Melanie. 'I didn't take to the landlord role much.
There was one single mum with two kids. I felt sorry for
her. She used to tell me the appalling story of her life, but
then she took off owing me hundreds, and when I went
into the house it just about made me sick. Her life was
shit, and she was so self-obsessed and depressed that she
didn't care about anybody or anything else. I reckon it
even made her feel better to trash what she could of other
people's things. There were maggots in the carpet, and
tampons thrown into the long grass behind the garage.
She'd sold off the curtains and most of Mum's appliances
and cutlery. Mouldy pizza ends and chicken bones under
the beds, scum in the shower, and a lot of the blue bench
tiles were cracked. Poor Mum would've had a fit. No selfrespect,
no pride, you see.'

Theo did see. Penny had pride. He realised that, and
admired it. So much more had been taken from her,
demanded of her, than Melanie would ever realise, but
she'd kept her pride, and her love for Ben. The world is
opposed to pride, and equates it with vanity, yet pride
is one of those trace elements needed for strength of
character.

'Do you find it difficult to be here?' Melanie asked
him, putting her hand on his near arm, and giving it a
squeeze to show she meant the enquiry kindly.

'All the other times she was here. It just seems so
bloody strange now she's not. This place and Penny are
linked so closely in my mind, and yet now she's back in
her flash home in Sacramento. Everything's just the same
here, and yet utterly different.'

'But you understand why she's gone?' said Melanie.

'I suppose I do.'

'It's not you, you know.'

'She had a hell of a lot going on. It wasn't fair to expect
anything really, but you do, don't you.'

'You don't have to tell me about that, Theo. But I think
you've grown in a lot of ways through seeing what Penny
went through, and by helping. You did damn well for her
when she needed someone.'

'I like to think about the little boy, Ben. I like to think
it's worked out in the best possible way for him.'

'That's the thing,' said Melanie, and her fingers closed
on his arm again.

In the mid-afternoon they put the guard before the
open fire and walked up the gully road. It was passable
for cars for only a few hundred metres past the bach, and
then became a runnelled, four-wheel-drive track which
itself ended at a sluice pond at the top of the small valley.
There the shingle mounds from the gold mining days were
covered with gorse and broom, which had stock tracks like
tunnels winding through. A walking track angled up the
tussock ridge above, and when Theo and Melanie reached
the ridgeline they could see thick snow lying not far above
them, and below were the creek and gully, with the three
small huts spaced down the road far away. As always when
Theo had come, only Penny's had any sign of life, the
smoke barely discernible, because the fire burned dry
wood, and ascended almost vertically until it blurred and
dissipated.

'It's lovely in its way,' said Melanie. 'Not touristy — no
lakes or ski fields, no boutique wineries, no homestay
farmhouses with horse treks thrown in. Maybe loneliness
becomes a luxury in the end.' Theo said it was a pity the
place was so far from Christchurch. 'You can get away from
everything here, though,' said Melanie. 'You're bloody
lucky.'

Penny hadn't been able to get away from everything
here, however. For her the gully close to Drybread must
have been a place she knew twice during her life, and at
the very worst times. The ghosts would always be present
for Penny, here and anywhere else she went. For Theo and
Melanie it could be different. They were free to make their
own emotional connection with the place.

'In the summer,' said Theo, 'we could climb some of
these hills. Some view from there, eh? Next time we'll
bring some stuff up and stay the night.'

'I'd like to do that. Everything's so clear, isn't it.' Her
fuzzy hair undulated slightly in the cold air, and she was
breathing through her mouth after the climb.

Theo understood that Drybread wasn't reliant on
either Penny, or him, for its existence. Nature has its own
sense of function and completion. Under high sun and
full moon, in the ground haze of summer and the mantle
of August snow, the three old baches would remain in
the gully, paradise duck would fly the creek in pairs, and
over that austere country the only sound would be the
susurration of the wind, unencumbered by the experiences
people may have had there.

How many times had he been there? How many times
would he go there again? The visits seemed to coalesce
with his recollection of them. The dry, gravel road, the
sprawling macrocarpa hedge, the hut with a church pew at
its back door, the plum tree and dunny on the slope behind.
And the drift of faint background noise an unobstructed
wind makes over a landscape. Little Ben looking upward
with vulnerable appraisal, and Penny, almost Theo's own
height, talking of that childhood place she had ended up
in once more. Yes, it was the boy he found most pleasure
in thinking about at the end. Ben with his natural mother
and father, and having only a hazy recollection, or none at
all, of Drybread and a stranger briefly in his mother's life.