The Party Line (2 page)

‘Me, too,’ said Nickie, knowing it would never happen.

Erin gave the earrings back to Gabrielle. ‘How did your mother die?’ she said, after a while.

Nickie couldn’t believe she’d asked.

‘She had cancer.’

‘Couldn’t the doctors fix her?’

God, Erin,
Nickie thought.
Obviously not.
She held her breath, waiting for the answer.

‘Nope. It ate her brain up.’ Gabrielle’s mouth had turned into a little pink straight line, and her eyebrows had sunk a bit towards her eyes, as though she had a headache. ‘There’s just me and Dad now.’

He tucked his chin into his chest, walking across the playground. Hail landed in his collar and tracked freezing down his back. He put his hands in his pockets, clenched his fists to hold his jacket closed. The zip had broken back in early March. Bridie tried to mend it, but by then she was too sick to sit for long enough at the sewing machine. Too sick to sit anywhere.

Ahead of him, the women ran to their cars. Most of them wore gumboots. They lumbered along lopsided and heavy. Conversation —
See you, Ring me if you need
— flickered in the wind. He slowed his steps, keeping his distance; the words weren’t meant for him.

Gabrielle was the only girl among the new kids. He hadn’t thought about that until leaving the cloakroom, when he took a last look at her to make sure she was okay. Nine lads and Gabrielle, right at the end of the row.

He was careful not to catch her eye, for his own sake as much as hers. They were trying to learn, the both of them, how to be alright. It was the sudden locking of eyes that set him off. A shutter-click near the back of his brain and Bridie was still alive. Afterwards, deep in his chest, there was a pain so strong he expected his heart to stumble, then stop.

In the cloakroom, the women had spat into their hankies, rubbed breakfast off their sons’ faces. Bridie never fussed over Gabrielle like that, like a monkey.

The high-pitched prattle of all those women was suffocating at first. He fought hard to stop himself backing out of the cloakroom, leaving Gabrielle to cope on her own. After a while, though, the noise became almost comforting, in the way the waves of a fever could be. The women were talking about the cold and the hail and the Godforsaken mud and how were you supposed to get anything dry in this weather and and and … like a race commentary, or a relay; no start or finish, one picking up where the other left off.

One mother dragged a comb out of her pocket and pulled it through her boy’s hair. Good idea, another said, then she was patting the pocket of her coat for a comb that wasn’t there. Here, use this one, the first one said, no nits, too cold for nits. More laughing as the comb went around the group, head to head.

All the time they looked at Gabrielle: away and back, giving her the once-over, but more than once, many times. Taking in her hair and her face and her clothes and feet. Leave her alone, that’s what he wanted to say.

The cottage was the colour of spinach; it faced the road square on. There were no wooden fences separating a lawn from the surrounding paddock. Gabrielle had laughed when she saw it for the first time.

‘It’s like a kid’s drawing,’ she said. ‘You know, Dad, how a little kid would draw a house.’

He felt a pang of sadness at that — at the natural way she had distanced herself from childhood since Bridie’s death. And she was right about the house. It looked as though it had dropped out of the sky and bounced to a soft landing.

When he got home from school, he made tea and sat at the kitchen table. It was still raining. The cows grazed in the next paddock over, black and white smudges behind the grubby, wet window.

Empty cardboard boxes were stacked in the hallway. They’d started Saturday afternoon, agreeing to put away just the essentials. First, the kitchen — pots and pans tucked into cupboards, cutlery clattering out of the carton straight into the drawer with its wooden dividers. They worked quietly together unpacking groceries into high cupboards, the few cold things in the chilly bin into the fridge. There was no heavy furniture to move — the place came furnished.

By late Saturday afternoon the kitchen and bathroom and lounge were done. Their spare linen — one set each of single and double sheets — was folded on a shelf in the hot water cupboard outside the bathroom door. There were two bedrooms — a large room with a double bed, facing the road, and a smaller one.

‘Gabrielle,’ he said, as she dragged the first of the boxes marked
with her name towards the small room. ‘How about you take the big room?’

‘You mean it?’ She smiled, glancing in at the double bed. ‘The bed, too?’

‘Why not? You’ve got a lot more stuff than me. And it’s the nicest room, sunnier.’

It made him feel better, seeing her excited. She quickly pulled the box out of the small bedroom and slid it around the corner to the big one. ‘Shall we just do our own rooms?’ she suggested. ‘You know, when we feel like it?’

He nodded. ‘No hurry, is there?’

She grinned. ‘No time like the present,’ she said, disappearing into her new room and closing the door behind her.

The rain didn’t stop. He took his tea into the bedroom and pulled up the single flannelette sheets, white with tiny pink flowers, and the purple candlewick bedspread, Gabrielle’s old bedding from up north. Tucked the corners of the sheets and blankets in tight.

On the other side of the room there was a white four-drawer tallboy. Above it hung, at child’s height, a mirror, the edges embossed with leaves and vines and branches. He stood in front of it and looked at the reflection of his chest and waist, then lifted the mirror down and pulled out the hook. With a hammer from the tool chest in the corner of the bedroom he nailed the hook higher up the wall.

His clothes were still in a box by the door. A single box — they all fitted in there. His suit was gone. He burned it after the funeral. It had smelled of Bridie; all through the service her smell had filled the space around him. At one point, he reached for her hand. It had slipped into his own big paw and he had stroked it, feeling anxiously for her missing wedding and engagement rings. They weren’t there — the little hand in his belonged to Gabrielle. He’d resisted the urge to pull away, instead letting it rest, clammy and still, in his own.

He dragged on his wet-weather gear and gumboots and stood on the front steps of the house. His eyes closed, he breathed deeply. He
was growing accustomed to the dankness; moist, thick air rising from the ground to merge with heavy-bellied black clouds. Pungent, too, the vinegar stench of fresh cow piss and the curdled sulphur of the animals’ shit as they fed, processed and emptied just feet away from where he stood. Funny, he thought, how he’d never noticed it at Silverdale. The stock had been just as close to the house there. He took it all as a sign of good luck, in a general sense. A sign that he was breathing, alive, aware.

He’d mapped out his day — feed out first, then walk the farm. He wanted to step out every boundary, cross every paddock, taking notes on what needed attending to.

Jack Gilbert’s dark brow had creased, puzzled, and he’d cocked his head like a rooster, when Ian had suggested the idea the day before.

‘Makes sense, I suppose,’ Jack said, finally, lifting his grubby towelling hat and scratching the back of his head. ‘Seeing what needs doing, before calving starts. Don’t spend too long on it, though. This business of
walking the farm
.’

Jack Gilbert was one minute calm, the next viciously scathing. The change happened mid-sentence, sometimes mid-word. The alternating currents of the man’s thinking were terrifying.

The cows had abandoned the nearby fence and, in a steaming mass, slopped through the mud towards the gate. They were waiting, preprogrammed, for feed. Ian could hear them bellowing from the doorway of the decrepit hay barn, where he surveyed its contents.

Bales were stacked against the back wall, more had tumbled down and were strewn across the wet ground. The wind blew through gaping holes in the walls and roof, and when it eased he could hear the rustle of small animals somewhere in the shonky towers of hay. Rats, probably, or feral cats.

There was a strange smell. It swirled behind the gusts of chilling air, something past the sweetness of hay, something sour, rotten. Outside, the cows bellowed louder. Ian would put that on his list: find the dead thing in the hay barn.

He was unsure how many bales to feed out. The shed was about
half full, but Jack hadn’t told him how long the supply needed to last. He backed the tractor in and loaded five onto the tray, then drove out into the weak sunshine.

The stench followed him. Ian jumped off the tractor seat and went around the barn. He readied himself for the discovery of a dead animal — something big — but found nothing except rusted machinery and a spectacular crop of gorse.

The cows were tearing at the bales on the tractor tray. Ian pushed his way through them and pulled a knife from his pocket. The green twine flicked as he sliced through it and the first bale split open.

The black spoors exploded from the centre of the packed hay. Ian recoiled, coughing, waving his hands to clear the air in front of his face. He stepped backwards off the tractor tray, turning away from the toxic cloud. The nearest cows tore at the open bale while others gnawed frantically at those yet to be split.

Ian paced beside the tractor, unsure what to do. The hay was rotten, mouldy, yet the cows must have been eating it before he arrived on the farm. He pulled his shirt up over his face and quickly flicked the blade of the knife through the twine on the other bales. Then he threw the fetid black hay as far as he could. The cows ravaged it as he drove the tractor back into the barn.

Ian returned home along the road, away from ravenous stock and mud and gorse. He tried to reason through the problem with the hay, but there were too many unknown variables. The animals had survived eating it so far, but how much rotten feed had there been to start with? He didn’t even know what the risks were, or if there were any at all.

A red truck slowed next to him. The driver was smiling cheerfully. ‘You must be Jack’s new man? How you doing?’ He reached out towards Ian, offering a handshake. ‘Eugene Walker. From up the road.’

Ian shook Eugene’s hand and bent to greet the man sitting in the passenger’s seat. That man smiled and nodded but didn’t speak.

‘Hans Janssen, my sharemilker. His English’s not so hot,’ said Eugene. ‘Just a few words, the essentials, eh Hans?’

‘My wife does the speaking,’ the man said slowly.

‘Does she ever,’ said Eugene. ‘So. How’re you getting on?’

Ian scuffed at the tarseal and looked back towards the barn. The cows had finished the hay and were grazing the sparse growth of the paddock again. He pulled at his ear, unsure what to say.

Eugene smiled again and flicked his cigarette butt onto the road. ‘How about a cup of tea?’

They took their cups outside. Ian remembered handling the mouldy hay and darted back inside to quickly wash his hands.

‘The feed. Jack’s hay in the barn. It’s rotten,’ he said, returning.

Eugene stretched his legs out in front of him and set his cup on the ground. ‘Jesus. All of it?’

‘I don’t know. Short of cutting open every bale, I don’t know how to tell.’

‘It’s been sitting there two years. Jack never made hay last year. He wasn’t ready, when the time came.’ Eugene pulled cigarettes out of his pocket. He offered the packet to Ian, who waved it away.

‘What’ll it do to the stock? I mean, if you feed it out, do you know? I’ve never had mouldy hay before.’

‘There’s always been talk that it can cause cows to abort. I’d be chucking it out.’ Eugene shrugged. ‘Then again, I’d make sure my feed was dry and the bloody barn wasn’t falling down to begin with.’

Ian didn’t know what else to say. ‘I’ll talk to him about it. See if we can buy in some more feed. I guess that’s the only thing to do … unless I can find good growth down the back of the farm …’ He remembered his plan to walk the entire property, looking for tasks. He was starting to understand that the tasks would come to him, faster than he could ever complete them.

Eugene coughed. ‘You’ll get to know how things are with Jack, Ian.’

Ian waited. Waiting and listening, learning that way, seemed as though it might be the best plan. ‘He doesn’t like spending money? Is that what you mean? Because the place needs a lot of capital, I reckon …’ Ian bit his lip.
Careful
.

Eugene squinted up at Ian.

‘Needs capital, you’re right,’ Eugene said, passing his teacup to Ian and hoisting himself off the step. ‘But it’s more than that, with Jack. He’s got a lot on his plate. He’s not a bad bugger, he’s alright.’

Only the body and legs were visible. The beast was side on, blocking the narrow road, its head buried deep in the long grass between the tarseal and the pitiful excuse for a fence. Joy tooted at it. It looked up at her for a few seconds, chewed and contemplated, then dropped its head back to the feed.

Joy turned off the car and put her hand flat down on the horn. The cow didn’t look up again. It was raining; she wasn’t getting out to chase it off the road. She turned the key in the ignition and revved the motor, inching forward. The cow didn’t move. She did it again, her hand flat against the horn, the front bumper of the car so close to the animal now that surely it must be touching.

Rain pattered the windscreen and the cow kaleidoscoped under the wipers. Joy’s foot rested steady on the accelerator. She glanced down at it, encased in its brown town brogue. If it pushed forcefully, suddenly, the car would lurch forward and the thin legs of the cow would snap one two three four.

The altercation with Jack Gilbert had happened a few weeks earlier, after midnight, at the do at the hall to farewell the departing sharemilkers. The do was an annual ritual, although some years Joy wondered why they bothered. This had been one of those years.