Some Rain Must Fall (15 page)

‘H – hello?’ she said.

‘Hello! It’s Willie Spink!’ was the reply.

‘Willie!’ squealed Lindy. ‘Where
are
you?’

Willie had been missing for the best part of a year. Newspaper articles liked to describe him as the first casualty of his invention’s sensational success, and this was true enough. As soon as his gossip cell rocketed through the stock-market roof, his laboratory had been besieged by journalists of all kinds. Willie had lost all ability to concentrate on his research, quarrelled furiously with Ed, wept unconsolably on Lindy’s shoulder, and disappeared in a cloud of media speculation.

Since then, the fortunes of Sperome had continued to rise, reached a peak, and then slipped into a dizzying decline.

When first abandoned by his partner, Ed had sought expert legal advice, the inevitable result of which was that Sperome became a limited company of which Ed, through the alchemy of boardroom manoeuvring, was soon not even the majority shareholder. After a while, the majority shareholders signed a deal with the electricity companies, which, under cover of a glossy publicity campaign about a glorious new era of customer service, effectively raised the cost of Sperome-assisted heating by 500 per cent.

Worse still, the company’s overtures to the food industry provoked disaster when a leading fast-food chain, seeking an overheads edge on its competitors, decided to use Sperome in its coffee and ice cream. Almost immediately, customers were checking in to hospitals complaining that the piping hot coffee they’d sipped hours ago was still piping away in their tender stomachs now, or that a hastily swallowed mouthful of thick-shake had turned their innards to ice. Doctors prescribed drinking warm or cold water in sufficient quantities to dilute the Sperome; a simple, obvious and wholly effective remedy which nevertheless eluded the imagination of most people. Inexorably, litigation followed, with the earliest cases being sniggered out of court, but then
finally an elderly woman in Duluth, Minnesota, got medical opinion to corroborate her claim that she had oesophageal incompetence brought on by the Sperome additive in her banana sundae, and after that the compensation jamboree was on. Universities which had been injecting rats with massive doses of Sperome for many months finally managed to rush some cancers through, and this story, more than any other, spread across the media like a nuclear reaction.

Sperome virtually vanished from the market, and the Jerome family disappeared from the newspapers, except in sober fine-print analyses in the financial pages. There was no more talk of the Sperome Heiress, or headlines like ‘Bags of Monet’ and ‘Ed sees red!’.

Of course, having already been pushed to the periphery of his company, Ed was not as severely affected by its collapse as he might have been. Even more felicitously, a private deal he’d made with a livestock firm, a sort of experimental ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ before the gossip cell was even patented as Sperome, had remained binding despite all the brouhaha, providing Ed’s family with a steady income based on temperature-controlled bull semen.

An acceptable version of normality had returned; now, so had Willie Spink.

‘I’m back in my old place,’ he enthused over the phone. ‘There’s no media people here at all now.’

‘Oh, Willie, good for you!’ Lindy was almost crying.

‘There’s some squatters here, though,’ elaborated Willie. ‘Two girls, a young man and … somebody I’m not too sure of. But we’ve come to an arrangement. I don’t tell anybody about them, and they don’t tell anybody about me.’

‘Good for them!’ sobbed Lindy as Ed wrestled her for the phone.

‘How’s little Fergus?’

‘He’s adorable, walking, talking – learning to swim, even!
He lived with me and Ed for a while, but now he’s back with Helen and her new man, in Tunisia. Except they’re visiting us tomorrow.’

‘Wonderful,’ chirped Willie. ‘I might come. Only I’m working on something: a new synthesis. Plant tissue grown on the same principles as yoghurt from a culture. My lodgers gave me the idea. But there’s something I need to check with Ed.’

‘Ed?’

‘He knows about these things.’

Ed, cheek to cheek with Lindy, had heard everything, and wrenched the receiver from her grasp.

‘Willie?’

‘Ed? Is that you?’

‘Yes,’ said Ed hoarsely.

‘Ed? Is cannabis legal yet?’

‘No, Willie.’

‘Oh.’ There was a pause. ‘Oh, well then, let me know when it is. Bye!’

The bedroom was quiet and dark, and tropically balmy despite the sleety weather outside. The kitchen clock chimed a muffled midnight, and Ed, almost as a reflex action, reached behind the bedhead and squeezed the little rubber thingummy to deliver another drop of Sperome to the central heating. When he turned again, his wife hadn’t moved.

‘Is it too late to get back to where we were?’ he asked.

For answer, Lindy took his arms and wrapped them around her naked shoulders, to show him she was still warm.

GROWING OUT of her childhood on the farm that wasn’t a farm anymore, Margo was never allowed to forget the wolf at the door. By the age of three she’d already known that money didn’t grow on trees, and her father filled her in on the rest as soon as her little mind was big enough to hold it: no detail too dull or too disheartening.

By the age of thirteen, Margo was painfully aware that everything in her life depended on three fortnightly arrivals of money from the Government: an invalid pension for her grandmother, a single-parent allowance for her father, Frank, and an unemployment benefit, also for Frank. Margo wasn’t owed any money by the Government, it seemed. To make up for this, she worked, doing just about everything that still needed doing on the farm which wasn’t a farm anymore. Schooling was out of the question, because her grandmother developed pressure sores if she wasn’t repositioned in the bed at least every two hours, and because her father couldn’t be expected to go eight hours without a meal.

She’d always called her father ‘Dad’, but lately he preferred ‘Frank’ because he said she wasn’t his, and she was doing her best to change. Frank described Margo’s mother as a pig-faced slut who was better off dead, and said if he ever met the black bastard responsible for Margo, he’d kill him. ‘There’s no way it was me,’ he argued. ‘No way. I was always ultra-careful with the birth control. This world can’t afford
children. Children are a bottomless pit.’ By this he meant, of course, that children cost a lot of money – Margo understood that – but she’d heard the phrase from such a young age that it had a powerfully literal sense for her: sometimes in her sleep, she really did imagine herself to be a bottomless pit, feeling nothing but the occasional clod of earth falling into her, and the odd gush of rain.

Awake, she wondered how her father – Frank – could be so sure her sire was a black fellow. Did he have someone particular in mind? Margo never saw any Aborigines: they just didn’t seem to live anywhere near Milwullah, despite its very Aboriginal-sounding name. But Milwullah wasn’t outback anymore: the city had spread out so much it had roped Milwullah in, making it a kind of outer outer suburb. The Post Office even had a computer in it (so Frank said, anyway; Margo had never been there), there was a Chinese take-away next to the pub (Frank had brought some of its food home one Christmas when she’d crushed a finger and couldn’t cook; at $7.95 for a small plastic tub of it she had better not complain) and the grain-feed merchant had half his shop given over to video hire (no VCRs in Frank De Voort’s house, thanks very much). None of this was anything like the outback Margo read about in the
Australasian
Post
.

Maybe an Aborigine had visited once long ago, and her mother had fallen in love with him, if only for a few minutes. It was hard to imagine, though. Margo looked at herself in the mirror, and couldn’t help observing that even at her most tanned, she was still, well,
white
– pale, even. Maybe it was her shape that had given Frank the idea: big head, flat nose, big chest, pot belly, long thin arms and legs. But there again, the evidence wasn’t conclusive. She had been thrown flat on the floor once, for doing things wrong when she was a
toddler; her broken nose might have lost some of its natural shape then.

And as for the round belly, well, that was Frank’s doing. Frank’s.

Despite her lack of formal schooling, Margo knew a lot about a great many things, including the facts of life. Her father – Frank – had provided for her, by giving her an almost complete set of
How and Why Wonder Books
. Not that he’d handed over the whole lot all at once, no: they lived under his bed in a big pile, waiting for birthdays, Christmases and other celebrations, when he would fetch one out and present it to her. Of course, she knew how many he had left, because she’d lain on the floor and peeked under his bed many times, counting them; she even knew some of the as-yet-ungiven titles (only
some
, though: she was too terrified to disturb the pile). And she knew for sure that her father didn’t hand them out at random from the top, that he must have some kind of unguessable selection criteria, because she’d received
Comets and Meteors
only a few weeks after noting its position near the bottom of the stack, whereas
Coins and Currency
, which had been topmost then, wasn’t given to her until three years later. Half the fun was the fervent hoping for a particular volume, an experiment of sorts to see if she could beam messages at her father to influence him in this one small way.

As for the
How and Why Wonder Books
she’d already been given, she’d read them so many times that they were committed to memory. She could have recited them in front of a class at school, if she’d had a school to go to. But a woman from the government had come to see her father – Frank – about school once (Margo had to keep out of sight) and afterwards Frank said that there was no school around here for girls with Aboriginal blood. It was a State regulation, he said.

Nanna used to be a great help with Margo’s education, because she answered questions not covered by the books. Over the years, however, Nanna had developed some sort of gum disease, related probably to the cancer, and stopped wearing her teeth. Understanding her had become difficult then, and she’d started speaking softer and softer, and after a while preferred just to point or roll her eyes.

Television wasn’t much of a teacher for Margo, because it was never hers to choose. Her father didn’t allow her in the room while he was watching it, and when he’d finished watching it Margo would carry the still-warm machine carefully into Nanna’s bedroom and set it up there for the night. By a process of elimination Margo would find the pleasantest most inoffensive programme, preferably a very old American movie or a documentary about animals, and curl up to sleep on the flaccid old bean-bag in the corner. It was ideal, this bean-bag, because it was exactly uncomfortable enough to wake her up every two hours, and then she could turn Nanna over, and reposition the television, too.

Another lucky thing was that her father didn’t mind the TV being on all night: he had a newspaper clipping pinned up on the kitchen wall which rated electrical appliances according to how much power they used up, and televisions were among the least costly. Mind you, if he’d never found that article, he might not have got angry about the electric fan, and instead of it being exiled to the toolshed it might still have been in the house, helping to make Nanna more comfortable in midsummer.

There wasn’t a
How and Why Wonder Book of Cooking
, but Margo soaked the labels off soup tins and sauce bottles and cut the little recipes out for filing in a little notebook called ‘
FOOD
’. Pies and pasties were her speciality, because the pastry was cheap and could be folded around just about any old thing, and the cooking time was so short. (At 65c
an hour for oven use, speed was essential, at least if her father was watching.) How grateful she was that her father had agreed to buy a meat-tenderiser at her request: before that, she had always gone limp with despair every Saturday afternoon when he’d come home with the week’s shopping, because the meat he bought was always the kind that needed stewing or baking for hours, and Frank would not allow that. Now she pounded it, pounded it to mince if need be, and what couldn’t pass for steak she was able to use up in pies.

The washing machine was dumped in the toolshed too (48c an hour), so a lot of Margo’s day was spent at the laundry sink, scrubbing away at Nanna’s bed-linen. Her father’s overalls got very dirty, too, even though there were no more animals on the farm. There was a ute that Frank was always trying to repair, which despite being dead for years was still juicy with grease, and then there were the fences to maintain, despite the fact that there was nothing and no one escaping or intruding.

Toilet paper was a dangerous topic of conversation: at 52c a roll it must not be wasted on old women who could no longer discipline their bodily functions. Margo’s conscience would not allow her to take more than her fair share: that would be stealing. Instead, she developed a mathematically exact system of exchange, whereby she would use strips of newspaper on herself whenever she went to the toilet, and then tear off the equivalent amount of toilet paper for Nanna.

Once, in a newspaper she was about to tear into strips, Margo had read about nursing homes, and how well looked after old people could be. She had dared raise the subject with her father – with Frank. Frank had become very angry. But afterwards, he spoke with a quiet and reasonable intensity.

‘As long as she stays here with us, with things just the way
they are, she’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘Do you think the State would buy her all these pills, every day of the week?’ (Panadeine Forte, $5.95 for twelve, one every eight hours, so $1.48 a day, $10.36 a week.)

‘She’s old and useless,’ Frank pointed out. ‘She doesn’t work anymore. The State can’t afford to keep her alive the way we do. They’d put her in a hospital, give her a big injection of morphine and then she’d be off their hands. The morgue, Margo – you know what a morgue is?’

Margo shook her head, grateful in advance for the rare gift of knowledge from him.

‘It’s where they take dead people from hospitals. They put them in fridges with no clothes on, just a tag around the ankle. If nobody comes to collect them after twenty-four hours, they get used for pet food.’

Margo’s earnest struggle to come to terms with yet another example of how money made the world go round must have been misinterpreted by Frank, because he got a little angry again and said, ‘You think I’m lying? You think they bury everybody that dies? Thousands of people die every day – where’s the room for them all in the ground? Think about it!’

Margo thought about it. She remembered when drought had killed off the last hundred sheep, back when she was about five, back when Mum was alive. The farm was already on the skids then, and a hundred dead sheep was nothing compared to what there might have been once upon a time, but still there had been too many to bury. From her window Margo had looked out over the barren paddocks, watching the gasoline-basted sheep burn, smelling the wholesale roast mutton on the air.

Mum had died so soon after this mass immolation that Margo always associated her death with the smell of roast mutton, but perhaps that was for the best, because nowadays
she almost never got to smell roast mutton or roast anything, because of the 65c an hour. The police had come and taken Mum away, and Dad had gone with them, and stayed away for four days. Then he had returned, without Mum of course, although the ‘of course’ was something Margo could add only with hindsight, because at five years old she hadn’t understood that the mess in the bathtub meant she wouldn’t be seeing her mother again. Living on Vegemite sandwiches and raspberry cordial, she had waited for her parents to return.

Early on the fifth morning, he – her father – Frank – had walked in the front door. She’d left the porch light on for him, her first mistake in this new motherless phase of her life. He had made sure she would never dare to do anything so wasteful a second time.

How and Why Wonder Books
aside, it had been a fairly unhappy life for Margo after that.

But now Margo was thirteen, and her life was changed by the arrival of two more bits of printed fact, neither of them in a
How and Why Wonder Book
.

Firstly, there was the article on abortion in a toilet copy of the
Sun-Herald
, which described how, in the bad old days, many women used to die as a result of unsterile operations performed by persons with no medical qualifications. A quick check of the
How and Why Wonder Book of Medicine
confirmed the need for sterility and surgical expertise in all operations. This led Margo to the conclusion that Frank must be mistaken when he said that there was nothing to fear from the ‘little operation’ he was planning to perform on her soon, to get rid of the baby that was growing inside her.

She accepted without question that the baby must not be born, because Frank had made enquiries and apparently there was some reason why the State would not grant Margo a single mother’s pension. (For a while there, Frank had been in
favour of the baby idea, because it would mean an additional fortnightly benefit of $148. But this was not to be, so the baby must die.) The problem was, it seemed quite possible that Margo would die too, and that was out of the question, because whenever Margo was out of action even for a day due to illness, Nanna would get pressure sores, because Frank didn’t bother to turn her.

So, therefore, Margo must not have the abortion Frank had planned for her. And that meant getting herself and Nanna away from Frank.

The other bit of important information was delivered by the Melbourne
Age
, on its front page, and Margo lost no time in writing away for the mailing address of NASA in the USA.

In view of the fact that she never received letters, it was just as well that Frank was never at home when the postman did his round, because when
The Age
sent her NASA’s address, she would have to intercept the letter, as well as the money that NASA would send her later.

In the meantime, she had many calculations to make, in order not to offend Fate by asking too much.

Then again, money was in some ways the least of her problems. Getting Nanna to the bus stop would be very difficult. As far as Margo knew, it wasn’t possible to order a taxi by mail (no telephones in Frank De Voort’s house, thanks very much), and in any case the money from NASA would probably be in the form of a cheque, which she didn’t think taxi drivers would accept.

She could maybe try to drive the ute, but she wasn’t sure whether the work Frank was always doing on it had affected it sufficiently to get it moving. Besides, she might have an accident and kill Nanna or herself. Of course, if they were merely injured, they would probably be taken to hospital, which would get them out of Milwullah to Albury-Wodonga probably, but then Nanna might be given that fatal injection
of morphine, and besides, the ute would be traced back to Frank and he would come to get them.