The Vintage and the Gleaning (15 page)

In the afternoon I walk into town, looking for Brett Clayton. I just want to see his face. It remains dank and humid, the air thick, sullied, swimming in filth. The wind has died and all is still. Exhaust fumes hang. There is something strange and unreal about the day.

I find Brett Clayton at The Crown, sitting at a back table with his mates. Uncollected jugs litter the table and those surrounding it. The other drinkers sit away.

Spit joins me at the bar. He is looking gaunt, more so than usual. He is unshaven, his eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot, his face grey. He stinks.

You all on a bender or something? I ask him.

Spit shrugs.

They are loud at the table. Brett Clayton yells over to us.

Hey Spit, he says. That your old man?

Brett Clayton is leaning back on his chair, with one foot balanced on the carpet, the other against the table. He is looking at us. His eyes are glazed and staring. They are the glazed, staring eyes of a violent drunk.

Yeah, Spit yells over his shoulder.

Brett Clayton turns to his mates.

Spit's old man, he says. Shacked up with my old lady.

His mates guffaw.

There is the sound of glass, the smell of beer. A grey cloud of cigarette smoke rolls from the table. Behind the counter the barmaid is drying pots with a tea towel. The other drinkers throw us sideways glances and silent.

Hey Spit, Brett Clayton yells. Ask your old man if it's true love or just a physical thing.

His mates laugh and drink.

Don't worry about Brett, Spit says to me.

When I leave it is me who is shaking.

The sun falls and shadows come. The air has lifted and it is fresh and floats with cooking smells. Birds wheel after insects in the dusk and daytime thins on the breeze. Men are home and few cars pass. Far off across grainy spaces farmers whistle and call to their dogs, turning themselves home, weary, the grind of tractors.

Night and darkness and me and Charlotte are sitting. I haven't put the lights on. I am weary too, something about the day, and I can feel my age and my weakness, the sickness inside me, pains in my bones. Charlotte talks and there is only the glow of the fire flickering across her face, soft light and shadow, her face as though in movement, strange like in dreams, and my eyes strain to see her.

Brett and I went hitchhiking after we got married, she says. I suppose it was our honeymoon, not much of a honeymoon, but that was all we had. We'd been staying at his cousin's place in Melbourne, but we didn't have anywhere to live, back then. My family weren't talking to me, not after everything that had happened, and Brett didn't want to stay with his father. His father was still alive then, but he was already sick, and Brett hadn't had much to do with him for a long time already. So we went hitchhiking, to Surfers Paradise, that was our plan, but we never made it there, just to Sydney, and we had no money so it was all pretty miserable really, the whole thing, not much of a honeymoon, but that was our honeymoon, that was it.

We hitched with truck drivers mostly, semi-trailers. We'd go to the rest stops, where the semis were parked, and the drivers would be sleeping or resting and most of them would give you a lift. Some of them were friendly, others hardly talked to you at all, but I suppose they wanted the company, or it was just the thing to do. Brett said there was no point trying to thumb a lift. He'd done a lot of hitchhiking before, so he knew the ropes.

Anyway, we'd got a ride, somewhere. It was night and I'd lost track of where we were, but it was somewhere on the way to Sydney, and the driver was this young guy, Brett's age. Most of the drivers were these fat middle-aged men who didn't talk much, even the friendly ones, so I would have remembered this guy anyway. He had long hair and tatts, he was a lot like Brett really, and I thought at first that was good, that maybe they'd get along, maybe he'd take us all the way to Sydney, which he said he would when we first got in.

But for some reason, I don't know why, after we got moving, I think maybe because of Brett, maybe he didn't trust him, or he just wanted to scare us, or he was showing off, the driver pulled out this big knife, and he didn't really threaten us with the knife, but he showed it to us and he said he could kill us if he wanted to. I don't know why. It was probably because of Brett, something about Brett. I mean, lots of people don't like the look of Brett, but I would have thought this guy would have been all right, because, as I said, he was sort of similar to Brett. But maybe that's why, maybe he didn't trust Brett because he knew what he was like, because he was like him.

Anyway, after he put away the knife he was friendly and quite chatty, compared to the other drivers anyway, but Brett was furious about the whole thing with the knife. I could tell at the time and I was worried Brett was going to do something, and he did say afterwards that he would have decked the guy if he hadn't been driving, and I suppose Brett was right to be angry. I mean, even if the guy was just trying to scare us, just letting us know not to try anything, it was still over the top.

I don't know where it was exactly, but eventually we pulled up at a rest stop. It was in the middle of nowhere anyway. So we all got out and Brett followed the guy into the toilets and I thought something was going to happen, but nothing did, well, Brett must have said something. I asked him afterwards, and he just said he'd had a quiet word with the guy, but whatever he said, the guy came out of the toilets and got straight into the truck and drove off. I don't know what Brett said, but we lost our ride anyway.

And it was late and you know those rest stops, just lines of trucks sitting there, occasionally one coming and going, but there's something strange about them, something a bit scary, or I found it all scary, out in the middle of nowhere, with no one about, just trucks sitting there with the lights off and the drivers asleep inside. And I thought we'd get a lift with someone else, but Brett was still angry and he said he'd had it with truck drivers.

So we decided to camp out, or Brett decided. I wasn't too happy, because I didn't know where we were and, like I said, the place scared me. Also it was freezing. It must have been winter, now that I remember it. I remember when we got to Sydney it was raining the whole time. It wasn't raining that night, the sky was clear, but it was icy cold, cold and there was frost in the morning. I would rather have got another lift, but it wasn't a good idea with Brett in that mood.

We had a tent, at least. Brett's cousin had lent us his tent and some other gear, and we went away from the truck stop to find somewhere to camp and I just remember how dark it was and going through a lot of scrub. It was pitch black down where we were, you couldn't see anything except the stars, and it got even harder to see when we got away from the truck stop. I really didn't know where we were or where we were going and I got all scratched up from the scrub and wet as well because everything was covered in dew. And I started to get really frightened. I mean, I was just a kid, and I'd never done anything like this before but I suppose I trusted Brett because he had. I thought he knew what he was doing, really he didn't, but anyway, I was just a kid, I didn't know anything. But I thought Brett did.

So we kept walking through the scrub until it started to thin out and then we were walking through paddocks, I suppose. I don't know whether we were on someone's property or where it was, but we were a long way from the truck stop by then. You could still hear the trucks coming and going and the sound of the brakes, but you couldn't see much, just lights in the distance. And eventually we came to the top of a hill and we saw this fire down below and we thought it was probably other hitchhikers camping out, like us.

Anyway, Brett told me to wait while he checked it out. I suppose he did used to look after me like that. So I waited while he went down. The fire was sort of hidden in a ditch, we hadn't seen it at all until we got to the top of this hill, and I stood there in the cold, and I could hear Brett's voice and another voice, and I waited for such a long time, absolutely frozen, just waiting and waiting. I was nearly in tears by the time Brett came back. And he said it was all right, they were cool. And I thought it would be young people, like us, but it wasn't.

What it was, there was this couple, I suppose you would call them a couple. But it really wasn't what I expected. I thought they'd be backpackers or something, other hitchhikers, but young people, like I said. I was sort of happy about it, for the company, until I saw these people, who it was, this man, this awful man, and this young girl.

The man, this man was really, you know when there's just something wrong? When you can just feel there's something wrong, like a gut feeling? Well, this man, there was something very wrong about him. He was probably in his fifties, older maybe, but rough, really rough. I mean he had no teeth and this long beard and his face was sort of tough and sunburnt, you could tell he lived outdoors. And he had some problem with his back, he was hunched over when he walked, or even when he was sitting, and when he talked to you he had to bend his neck to look up at you. I just remember these eyes looking up at me all the time. And he acted nice enough, but that sort of made things seem worse, I mean, he was acting nice, but overdoing it, like he was hiding something, or guilty about something, which he was, I mean, that was obvious. Like I said, I could tell straight away there was something wrong about the whole thing. I could just tell.

And the man had these tattoos on his fingers, like from cards, a deck of cards, aces, spades, diamonds, clubs, on the fingers of both hands, red and black. But they weren't proper tattoos, they were sort of messy and uneven. Brett said afterwards that they were prison tatts, he said in prison they'd cut their skin with razor blades and they'd do the tatts with pen ink or oven grease. I didn't know at the time, but I wasn't surprised when Brett said the man had been in prison. I didn't trust him from the start, and he scared me, and, like I said, I was already scared being alone in that place, out in the middle of nowhere, but this was so much worse, because even though the man was short and bent over, he looked strong, really strong. And I knew Brett could handle himself, but this man could have done anything to us out there, and I wondered why Brett was so relaxed and I just remember thinking, Brett better not go off and leave me here, with them.

So they had this camp set up around the fire and they must have been there for ages, I mean, they lived there, they weren't camping out, they were living there, it was obvious they were living in this ditch and there was all this junk lying around, old car seats around the fire and a fridge sitting on its side and styrofoam eskies and dirty mattresses, piles of sheets and rags and old clothes, just rubbish, most of it. And there was a tarpaulin set up on sticks, near the fire.

But it was the girl, that's what really creeped me out, this old man and this young girl, and I didn't really see her until we'd sat down by the fire, on the car seats. She was just sitting there, not saying anything. She didn't say a single thing, the whole time, not one word. And she was retarded or something.

You could tell by her face, she just sort of looked wrong, in the face. And the whole time she was looking at me, staring at me. When I first sat down I smiled at her, but she didn't react at all, she just kept staring. She was holding a kitten, and she just sat there stroking the kitten, staring at me, the whole time. And she was really young, just a kid, or maybe a teenager, it was hard to tell, but too young, definitely too young to be with this man, living out in the middle of nowhere. She just shouldn't have been there, Especially not with this awful, awful man. It was ghastly. The whole thing was just horrible.

And Brett and the man kept on talking and passing around this plastic bottle. I don't know what was in it, meths, I think. I nearly threw up, but Brett drank it. The girl didn't, the man didn't even offer it to her. She just kept sitting there, staring at me, stroking this kitten. And then for some reason she got up and came over to me and held out the kitten, not saying anything, just holding it out, like a child does, for me to pat it, and I started to stroke it and, I couldn't see it properly, but it felt odd. The kitten. It was stiff and cold and I suppose I could feel it but I kept stroking it and it took me a while to realise that it was dead. And I looked at it more closely and I saw that its face was sort of frozen, like a mask, and it had no eyes, just these black holes, where the eyes should have been. It was dead, a corpse, and it must have been dead for a long time.

But the worst part of it was, after Brett and the man had finished the bottle of meths, or whatever it was, the man said he was going to turn in, and he said goodnight to us, shook Brett's hand, he was still being polite, and he went under the tarp, and the girl followed him, went under the tarp with him. So we put our tent up near the fire. I wouldn't even talk to Brett. And not because I was angry at him, I was too upset to be angry. I just didn't want to talk to him. And even though I was exhausted, I knew I wasn't going to be able to sleep. Brett did, he dropped off straight away. But I just lay there in the dark and the cold and after a while the man and the girl started having sex. And you could hear him talking to her and making noises, but she didn't say anything, or make any noise, you couldn't hear her at all. It was like she wasn't even there. So he kept grunting away, going at it, and after a while I did hear her, very quiet. She was making these sounds. And I realised that she was meowing, like a cat, and sort of purring, making the noises a cat makes. And the meowing got louder and louder. My God it was horrible. It was just unbearable. And I just lay there, in the freezing cold. Having to listen to it.

Charlotte stops talking. Her face swims in the light. She is looking into the fire.

I don't know why I just thought of that, she says. I'd completely forgotten about it. I don't know why I thought of that just now.