Hope Farm (16 page)

So Randal was the first and Bert was the second. Bert who had been camping at the same festival but was from a different commune closer to Brisbane. The time with Bert shouldnt have lasted as long as it did, he turned out to be no good always jealous he frightened me in the end and I had to sneak away in the night. I took Silver back to the city after that, she was old enough to go to school. There was a group house Id heard about, only women. It was a safe place and I got a job in a milk bar while Silver was at school. The women were in to being powerful taking there own lives in to there hands fighting the system all that stuff. I went along with it for a while went to some rallies with them and the groups they held, consciousness raising they called it where they all sat around talking. I understood there ideas I respected them but I didnt feel like they could help me. You should go to university they said, Its free now. I was too embarassed to tell them I hadnt finished high school and even if I had stayed I wouldnt have got the marks any way, nursing was what my parents had thought I might do but I dont even know if Id have got in to that youd need to be better at reading and writing, they were my real problems. It felt strange to think back on that. It seemed so long ago and how funny to think my only troubles then were bluffing my way through English classes fingers crossed under the desk Id never be called on to read out loud. There was some thing in these women I was afraid of they were so tough they were always saying women could do any thing there was no reason why not, I didnt think theyd understand if I tried to explain about my reading and writing theyd be like my mother and just say I wasnt trying. Then I met somebody else he was a teacher and he played the piano. But some thing went wrong like always, I was starting to expect it even when things were so new and beautiful I always knew nothing that good could last. Towards the end he started saying things like We can do this its worth saving, but the more he said those things the less I was able to even try. Well he said, It seems to me you want this to end, this thing between us. I never answered I just started to pack. He was a good man and I still feel sad I couldnt make it work between us. The house of women had gone the group broken up so I went back to The Path for a while to the first ashram. There was nowhere else to go and I knew theyd take me in, they had to they had to always be kind and generous it was there basic rule. Mira wasnt there any more, nobody was from the old days and even the teachers had changed. That made it easier. There were a lot of things that were easier this time. I wasnt as scared of everyone I didnt feel like there was some thing wrong with me because nothing happened when I did the special meditations. I realised that I didnt need to work as hard as I had in the past as long as I contributed enough nobody could realy say any thing against me and if I needed time off to do things for Silver I just said I had to go and they couldnt do any thing about it. They didnt like it but they couldnt stop me they needed me too much to stir up trouble over an afternoon of missed work. Still I never slacked off I only took the time if there was some thing I had to do. I got a job at night cleaning offices, I thought I could save up but I didnt even know what for, I just wanted money of my own but more than that I wanted to work. I worked and worked all day for the ashram and then at night for myself, it was like my own meditation it took me out of myself it emptied my mind.

When I left Randal and went with Bert it took Silver a while but she settled in she started to make friends with other kids I think she liked it that I was happy again I started putting her to bed the old way, lay with her and whispered. I was open to her again because I was open to everything I was set on a new course and full of hope. But then when things went bad the same old gap opened up the weight came down on me the slowness I had nothing left over to give her I stopped touching her and kissing her I just couldnt do it. Then when we left Bert, packed up and ran off in the night and hitchhiked to the city I swung back the other way the heaviness lifted and the love came easily again but this time it was her that turned away. In the womens group house, even with the piano playing man when I was the happiest Ive ever been, she wasnt there with me she was holding some thing back she reminded me of a dog I saw once on a jetty with its ears tipped to the water showing through the gaps body all flat not trusting. She had learned to look after herself pretty well, I saw that when I compared her with other children some of them couldnt do any thing for themselves. She knew not to ask for much from me. Shes a good kid people would say and she was but I didnt feel proud, I never felt proud again like I had when she was just born. I hadnt made her good she just was because she had to be. Now it seemed impossible that she had ever been in side me ever fed from my body ever slept in my arms.

I'm not sure what made me willingly submit to another visit with Dawn. Boredom, maybe, or the car-crash fascination that had gripped me the first time. After only that first encounter I couldn't know, I suppose, what another might hold; perhaps she might show me something else from one of those beautiful upholstered cases, things from the past life that, beyond the confronting reality of her present one — grey, withered, piteous — held such a calm, understated, and intriguingly foreign glow of wealth and privilege. I thought of pearls and gold, of evening dresses. It's possible I also thought of the Cherry Ripes.

Whatever the reason, only a couple of days afterwards — again, in the late afternoon, Miller having driven off somewhere in the brown station wagon and Ishtar still at work — I found myself lurking near the mud-brick building and watching for her. Eventually she did appear, tottering out with surprising speed to take my arm. We enacted the same routine as the first time, me checking the toilet for spiders and then waiting uncertainly before being guided by her insubstantial yet strangely compelling touch down the tunnel of the mud-brick hallway and into the foetid room. I stood at my post by the bedside while she settled against the pillows and took up the zippered album. The chocolate bars, I noted sadly, had disappeared. Dawn made no reference to our previous encounter but simply began talking, starting, to my astonishment, at exactly the same place — the photograph of herself. As if the first time hadn't happened at all, we went through the whole thing again: the studio portrait, the wedding shot, the madness and breakdowns. Even the way in which she told it was almost exactly the same — some phrases were repeated, I was sure, word-for-word — and I recognised this time the tone of a storyteller settling into the worn grooves of repetition.

The rustling voice rose and fell, and again she went from the reclining, dreamy reminiscence to clutching at my hand and pulling me down so she could hiss right into my face. I endured this, tuning in and out while nervously keeping an ear open to the hallway, until she got up to where we'd left off last time.

She was lying back, her fingers curled round mine, and I was half kneeling. ‘They didn't want me to go with him again,' she said, ‘to come here. Well, we go through this every time. Mum asks why he never visits me when I'm unwell, and when I say it's because he just can't stand to see me in those places and to feel so helpless, she says, “Yes, well, I feel that way, too, but I keep coming, don't I, because I know it's the right thing to do.” They're so concerned, Mum and Dad, with what's the right thing to do. They simply could never understand someone like Miller, who allows himself to be led by his instinct, rather than by rules.'

She glanced at me and I gave an obedient nod.

‘Dad says he's just after money, that's the only reason he keeps coming back. Dad really has a very poor opinion of Miller now — he won't even speak to him. He says he's a degenerate who thinks the world owes him a living. But what upsets me most is when he says that Miller never really intended to be a lawyer, it was just a ruse to make them think he was respectable. He
had wanted
to be a lawyer. He was
passionate
about the law. Or at least what he thought the law was. He thought he was going to be able to
effect change
.' An echo of Miller's speech-making voice entered hers, and she gave a weak chop at the air with her free hand. ‘But then he became very disillusioned with the legal system. He had thought it was all about justice, about truth — but, really, more often than not it's about trickery, about pulling the wool over people's eyes. And that, you know, I think that broke his heart. Made him lose his way.'

My mind grated at this impossible image of Miller as some kind of vulnerable being, deserving of tenderness.

‘Do you know,' said Dawn, ‘I'd rather see him destitute and full of happiness than trudging in the door of that flat — which was pretty dismal, I have to say, even if it was in South Yarra — trudging in after a day in court, looking so … so
beaten
down
. That morning, when he sold the flat, I sat outside in the car and I'd been feeling very worried, thinking, oh god what is Dad going to say about all this, but then Miller came back — and he'd signed the papers and he was just
beaming
, he was so full of excitement about moving up north, buying the land.'

She lay in silence for a while, and I eased my hand out of hers, hoping perhaps she'd finished. But she sighed and went on.

‘I wish Dad hadn't been so mean, about the loan. It's not as if he needed the money. He just can't stand someone not doing exactly as he says — someone having ideas of their own. Even if the macadamias had been a tremendous success and Miller had paid him back ten times over, Dad still would have disapproved.'

Abruptly, she turned on the mattress and began clinking through the medicine case. Selecting a bottle, she tipped some tablets out into her palm and picked up a glass of water. I took the opportunity to have another look round for the Cherry Ripes, but there was no sign of them.

‘But they can't stop me from being here with him,' Dawn went on, sipping and throwing back her head as she swallowed. ‘I'm his wife. Dad threatened to cut me off, but I know he won't, Mum won't let him.' She returned to the album, the pages making plasticky sounds as she leafed through them. ‘See?' she said. ‘See how happy we were?'

In the photo, they stand against a backdrop of small, round-topped trees. Gone are the suit and the dress — they both wear jeans and t-shirts, although with the same stagey, unsullied look that set Miller apart from the farmers at the supply shed now — a crispness in the denim, a richness to the colours. Miller's hair has already begun to rise like one of the blobs of dough Ishtar sometimes set in tins on top of the hot-water boiler to perform their gradual, yeasty expansions. Dawn is still sleek and alive-looking — her mouth opened in laughter, her teeth showing, the sunlight turning her hair a bright platinum. Miller reaches across to hold one hand over her stomach.

‘Don't we look happy?' said Dawn, her voice quieter than ever, the words coming more slowly.

‘Yes, you do.' I allowed my eyes to lose focus on the photo album, and the pages became blobs of green and pink. I no longer felt afraid of Miller coming in and finding me there in his room. Nor was I resistant to hearing these things spoken in Dawn's dried-up voice. I had entered a kind of dream state. None of this could be real. The Miller I knew, who was so full of hidden menace, who changed all the time for no reason, speaking in different voices and descending unexpectedly to lift people into the air — and who had drawn those pictures of Ishtar's body being invaded so brutally by his rainbow explosions — this could not be the same man Dawn was speaking of. A man who had lost his way. How could anyone so huge, so loud, so terrifying, be
lost
?

Dawn slipped lower on the mattress and her head lolled.

I blinked and tried to gather myself. I felt incredibly weary, as if her weakness had been somehow leaching into me, transferred, perhaps, by that bitter breath. ‘I'd better go,' I whispered.

The wind bit as I ran up the hill, joined the whoosh of my breaths to fill my ears. I welcomed it, desperate to shake off the dreamy feeling, to wake up. Ian wasn't at the log. He wasn't at the creek either, but I didn't mind. I crouched with my hands in the water until they lost sensation, and gulped air that made my lungs hurt. I jumped up and down on the spot and ran recklessly, dodging branches, until the blood stung in my face and my thawed fingers throbbed. After that I sat tucked into the base of a tree until a wallaby came, the nap of its fur dark and solid-looking, its ears swinging as it lengthened its neck.

Back at Hope I took an apple and a book and read in the front room until it filled up with people and it was dinnertime. And later, when I went to bed, I was able to fall asleep without much trouble.

I kept well away from Dawn after that, sneaking carefully any time I went near the mud-brick building. When I did see her again, getting into the car with Miller, it was from a distance; she had her dark glasses on and seemed once again a mysterious figure, unknown to me.

One dinnertime, in the usual chaos of everyone moving in and out of the kitchen, loading up their plates and carrying them off to the front room, Miller reached past me and I saw his ear. It was deep and shadowed within the sandy frizz of his hair, but small and neat nonetheless, and that young, eager, exposed-looking face from the photo popped into my mind. I saw him standing on the church steps with one hand part-way raised, and I heard Dawn's words —
lost his way
— and a strange pang of pity ran through me with the suddenness of an electric shock. But it only lasted a moment — he straightened and went round to the other side of the table and, before helping himself to the dahl, shoved closer to where Ishtar stood by the stove in order to run his fingers up the back of her thigh and between her legs, and it was a relief to feel the regular current of my hatred take up again.