The Party Line (21 page)

‘Yes. Hello there. Hello,’ he said. He didn’t say more. He was beginning to understand that, whoever this person was, she would speak when she was ready. Or, when she could.

There it was again, that strange drawing of air, like a kettle coming off the boil, that final wavering, half-hearted note of shrill.

‘The girl.’ The words barely formed.

‘Pardon me? I couldn’t quite hear you …’

‘Put the girl on. Your daughter.’

‘Who is this, please?’

Silence. Ian waited. The words — the abruptness of them — had triggered recognition. Spoken like a man, but by a woman. Where had he heard that strange, empty voice before?

Gabrielle appeared. Ian held out the receiver to her. ‘It’s for you. I don’t know who it is.’

He watched Gabrielle’s face as she lifted the receiver to her ear.

‘Hello?’ she said.

Gabrielle gave nothing away and Ian couldn’t tell if the person was speaking to his daughter or not. Gabrielle nodded and chewed her bottom lip. Ian saw her face go pale, then flush red.

‘But … I know someone who can help you. I can organise—’

Whoever it was cut Gabrielle off mid-sentence. Her eyes welled, and Ian reached forward to take the telephone from her hand. Gabrielle stepped backwards, away from him. She held her other hand up, stopping him.

‘Okay,’ she said into the phone. ‘I’m sorry. Tell him that. Tell him I’m sorry.’ And she hung up.

‘Gabrielle, what’s going on?’ Ian positioned himself between his daughter and her bedroom. Her head was down, he was sure she was crying, but when he touched her chin she lifted her face and he saw no tears. Her face was calm once more. He couldn’t read it. Damn her, damn her mother for passing on the gift of inscrutability.

The talk was it was going to be the hottest, longest summer in a decade, maybe longer. As December rolled on, every morning dawned as it had on Calf Club Day — azure skies, breathless, searingly suffocating
by midday. Cicadas, confused by the heat, made an early-season dash for the ground’s surface. In the evenings, the barometer dropped just enough to permit restless sleep to the hypnotic shrill of crickets.

It was haymaking season. Jack had given Ian the schedule. All the farmers wanted their hay in before Christmas — before their wives dragged them off on family holidays — so everyone pooled their equipment and their manpower and moved around the district as a gang, putting an entire farm’s hay away in two days.

Every night, the farmers settled in front of their televisions, big brown bottles of beer sweating nearby. They were waiting for the news to finish and the weather forecast for the following day to begin. Night after night, they heard what they were hoping for: fine.

Ian had scanned the haymaking list, looking for the Gilbert name. It was at the end. He didn’t know whether this was a good thing, or bad. What happened if the rain came on your dates? Did you lose your place and go to the end of the queue, or did everyone get shunted back a few days? What happened if Christmas arrived and the hay was still sitting in the paddocks? He couldn’t ask any of these questions, still fearful as he was of Jack Gilbert’s latent suspicion about his farming experience.

Day after day, Ian presented himself at the front gate of a nearby farm. On the first day, he brought the tractor and Jack’s hay turner, but mid-morning the turner broke down in a cacophony of screeching metal. It had been held together by rust and while Ian made an attempt, for appearance’s sake, to weld the machinery back together, it was obvious to him and everyone else that it was a waste of time.

After that, all he had to offer was his labour. In the burning, exhausting sun he walked behind the baler, straightening the bales into a uniform line on the ground, making it easy for the elevator to lift them and drop them on the back of the truck. There, it was the job of two other men to arrange the bales in a neat, compact pattern so as many as possible would fit.

His was the only solitary job; all the others worked in pairs or threes. Ian noticed, at smoko, that the other men traded jobs from time to time, but no one proposed a change of scene for him. Generally, no one talked to him at all.

Farmers and sharemilkers alike pitched in for haymaking, the exception being Jack, who came and went without explanation. By the time Ian came in for smoko, or lunch, Jack had disappeared again. No one asked Ian why Jack wasn’t there full-time. And Ian didn’t dare ask anyone either. He wondered whether it was to do with whatever had happened on Calf Club Day. As long as Jack kept his distance from Ian, and Bridie could be kept at bay, Ian thought he could live with the way things were.

Two days before Christmas, the men turned up to make Jack Gilbert’s hay. Ian met them at the cowshed. No one had much to say to him. They waited for Jack to arrive, but by eight he hadn’t turned up. They set to work.

Ian paced his lonely track up and down the paddocks, lining the tight green bales straight for pick-up. The sun beat hard against the back of his neck; he needed a better hat.

He forced himself to think about Christmas. It would be their first since Bridie had died. If it weren’t for Gabrielle, he would deny the day. Get drunk, maybe, fall asleep with the intention of missing it altogether. But she’d arrived home from school a couple of days ago with an invitation for he and Gabrielle to have Christmas lunch with the Walkers. The message was, Gabrielle said, that Joy Walker insisted.
She won’t take no for an answer.

Ian looked across the paddock, picking out Eugene Walker on the back of the hay truck, arranging bales into regular stacks. Eugene hadn’t mentioned Christmas to him — Ian wondered whether he knew about the invitation. Jack was there now, too. The two men worked in fluid unison, like dancers on a well-worn stage.

At noon, the trucks and tractors stopped and the men made their way to the gate. Jack Gilbert’s car bumped its way slowly along the race towards them — Audrey Gilbert, with lunch. Ian fell in with the other men, listening to the banter and bets about what would be on the menu. He had nothing to say.

They gathered around one of the trucks that had just unloaded at the hayshed. The men leaned against the empty tray, which would serve as a table. Jack opened the boot of the car and lifted a crate of
Lion Red out and onto the truck. Ian took the last of the bottles, making sure everyone else had one first. Whatever it was he’d done to put himself offside with these men would only be exacerbated if he took a beer that rightfully should go to someone else.

The men gulped greedily at the icy bottles, breaking their drinking to chat about Christmas and holiday plans. Ian caught Eugene’s eye a couple of times and waited for Eugene to mention the invitation but nothing was said. The beer made Ian lightheaded and he nearly brought the matter up, but just as he went to say
Thanks
Eugene turned to one of the other men and started his own conversation.

Audrey Gilbert was pulling cardboard boxes out of the back seat of the car and stacking them on the ground next to her. The breeze carried the smell of hot baking — cheese, another smell, something sweet — and Ian caught his breath. He and Gabrielle managed with their repertoire of basic meals, but neither of them had attempted to bake anything sweet since Bridie had died. The smell was the scent of a woman — an expression of her love — and it was as seductive and irresistible as any perfume in a bottle. Ian held his breath, waiting for the intense pulse of emotion to pass, willing the tears in his eyes to evaporate quickly in the glaring sun.

No one offered to help Audrey; Ian thought this was rude, but he didn’t trust himself to approach her and carry the boxes to the tray in case the tears returned. Besides, there appeared to be a ritual, a routine, to this daily delivery of lunch to the gang by the wife of the farm owner. She looked after the food; the men ate, then went back to work while the wife loaded everything in the car and drove away again.

They were leaning against the truck bed. Audrey turned towards them and put the first of the cartons down in front of them. Her right eye was black, so swollen it was barely open. Her bottom lip was fat, protruding grossly like a second chin.

She was wearing a shapeless green dress with no sleeves. Ian looked at her arms. Both of them were bruised — not little dark marks but brutal streaks of black.

She didn’t speak, but turned to the car for the second of the cartons.

Ian shivered, in spite of the heat. He looked quickly across the
faces of the other men. None of them had seemed to notice Audrey’s appearance. They kept chatting to each other, digging into the boxes, tucking into the lunch. Ian felt bile rise in his throat. His thoughts flicked back to the secretive drama between Gabrielle and Jack on Calf Club Day. Then to the phone call she’d received a few nights later.

He picked up the empty beer crate and cardboard boxes and started towards the car. Behind him, footsteps crunched on the sharp cut grass. Audrey, with her damaged arms full of empty Thermoses.

Ian wanted to hear her voice. He turned around. Up close, he could see that Audrey’s swollen eye was bloodshot. She turned her face away from him, raising her arm in pretence at shielding her eyes from the sun. The underside of her arm was bruised too — five distinct, finger-shaped markings, the handprint of a man.

‘Have you got the time?’ It struck him then how odd it was that this was the first time he’d spoken face to face with Audrey Gilbert, his boss’s wife. How odd it was that this woman had shown no interest in Gabrielle, who had no mother of her own. And how very strange it was that it had taken him this long to notice.

Audrey lifted her arm away from her face and squinted at her watch. ‘Just on twelve-thirty,’ she said. Except she didn’t say twelve-thirty. The words came out in a whistle through loose teeth.

It had been Audrey who’d rung that night, waited silently for Elsie Shanks to get off the line before asking to speak to Gabrielle. Ian tried hard to recall Gabrielle’s end of that conversation.
Tell him I’m sorry
— is that what she’d said?
I know someone who can help you
…

Their backs were turned to the men. Ian heard the banter carrying on, but he knew the lunch break would be over in just a couple of minutes.

‘You need help. I can help you,’ he muttered. He kept his eyes down, focused on the load of boxes in his arms.

Audrey reached across him and opened the back door of the car. Her hair, thin and greasy, fell forward over her face. ‘Stay out of it,’ she whispered. ‘I’m clumsy, that’s all. Tell your girl, too. Stay out of it.’

The men went back to work. One by one, the tractors and trucks
started up, their engines overriding the sound of cicadas. Ian turned back to Audrey, but she was already around the other side of the car, climbing in the driver’s seat. Then she was gone.

They finished at nine o’clock — two hours later than the usual stop time, but a whole day earlier than scheduled. Jack Gilbert had had twice as much grass as previous years, thanks to Ian’s care of the pasture, but it was still a lot less than the other farms. When it seemed as though they could finish the entire lot in one day, they pushed ahead, making use of the last of the daylight.

Ian thought the cottage was empty when he wearily pushed the back door open. There were no lights on, the television was silent and the kitchen revealed no sign of supper. He looked for a note on the kitchen table from Gabrielle, but found nothing.

She was lying on her bed, her face to the wall. At first, Ian thought she was asleep, but when he sat down next to her, she rolled over to face him.

‘I saw Mrs Gilbert today,’ he said.

Gabrielle turned away from him again. He touched her shoulder, gently pulled her back to face him.

‘What did you say to him?’

‘Who?’

‘Gabrielle, don’t play games. What did you say to Jack Gilbert on Calf Club Day?’

‘The truth. That he’s a wife-beater.’

Ian took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

‘That’s why I didn’t want to tell you. If you get involved, he’ll sack you.’

‘So why did
you
say something?’

‘I didn’t mean to. I had another plan — Nickie and I, we had a plan to help her. Mrs Gilbert. But when he called me a slut in front of everyone, I couldn’t help it.’

They said nothing for a while. The light dulled. Ian stroked Gabrielle’s arm. He could feel how the day’s sunshine had warmed her skin. Every day it became browner.

‘What’s going to happen now?’

‘I don’t know, Gabrielle. Nothing’s happened so far. Jack Gilbert hasn’t said anything to me yet.’

Ian didn’t tell Gabrielle that Jack wasn’t the only one ignoring him; that the entire district was behaving as though he didn’t exist. He didn’t want to give her something new to worry about.

‘Something else happened today,’ she said. ‘About Christmas.’

‘What’s that?’ Ian realised he had bought Gabrielle nothing for Christmas. No presents, no tree, no decorations. Tomorrow, he thought.

‘You know how we were supposed to be going to the Walkers on Christmas Day?’

‘Hmm.’ Were they? Really?

‘Well, we can’t go anymore. They’ve got unexpected guests, Nickie said today.’

Relief. Ian was pleased it was dark, he was sure it would be showing on his face. He squeezed Gabrielle’s arm, then stopped abruptly, remembering the ugly bruises on Audrey Gilbert’s bicep.

‘Never mind. We’ll have our own Christmas. Just you and me.’ He nearly added
and Bridie
but stopped the words just in time.

It was New Year’s Eve. She was in the back of the car, outside the hall, itching to go inside. Eugene had already left them. Joy, in the front seat, picked up a strawberry that had toppled off the edge of the pav and plopped it back into the cream.

‘Nickie … don’t. Okay?’

‘Don’t what?’

‘Don’t stir up any trouble tonight. Please.’

‘Like what?’

‘With Gabrielle. You’ve got lots of other friends, kids you’ve known your whole life … you never spend any time with Erin and Julie any more. They’ll all be there.’