Tree Palace (4 page)

Quiet, Moira indicated by holding her finger to her lips. Midge coughed with his mouth closed. He coughed through his nose, a snorting, then spoke, whisper-low, with the spluttering halting him between words. ‘Be good to get a peek at Mat.’

‘Mathew,’ said Moira. ‘Don’t shorten it. It’s Mathew.’

‘That girl can sleep,’ Shane said. ‘She’ll sleep right through tea at this rate.’

‘She’s a bit off-colour,’ said Moira.

Midge stopped coughing. ‘What, sick?’

‘She’s just had a baby. The body has to change and sort itself out.’

Midge nodded. ‘Too right.’

Shane got his sarcastic tone back. ‘What you mean, too right? You had a baby you not told me about?’

‘Nah, just imagining it.’

‘Soon as it dawns on her that it’s Friday night she’ll be trying to con one of us into dropping her off at the town hall.’

‘What would she want at the town hall?’ Moira said.

‘The disco.’

If Shane seriously thought a girl just out of hospital wanted a disco she wouldn’t waste her breath on him.

‘Better not let her go into town or in nine months’ time there might be another Mathew.’

‘No more of that. We had that out,’ Moira said, with her eyes narrowed for arguing.

Even as she said it she knew it was foolish. They hadn’t had it out, not to Shane’s satisfaction. If he had his way he’d drive Zara crazy with his ‘Who’s the father?’ questions. Which led to a worse commotion: how could the girl be six months’ pregnant before Moira knew she was? Before Zara herself even knew? Moira was the girl’s mother and she didn’t pick something like that up. Just thought she was getting chubby. Shane’s favourite question was, ‘Didn’t you teach her nothing?’ Which was not a real question, just a dig at Moira.

He went into the house, taking a long, angry stride over the doorstep. He flicked open the esky in the kitchen corner and got out the bourbon. The bottle was warm but that was the advantage of drinking spirits over beer. Spirits were naturally hot. He fixed himself a glassful, bourbon with some Coke, and sipped it and took a bigger gulp and came outside.

She decided to get in first, moving close to Shane to help keep her voice down.

‘Before you start, I’ll tell you again: she knew. She had to know. It’s common sense. She just wouldn’t admit it to herself.’

‘Didn’t you teach her nothing?’

‘What do you care—she’s not your daughter.’

That was the first time she’d used that line. Shane had to sip his drink and think of something clever. ‘That’s not the point, Moira. Since we been together, Zara and Rory are under my roof.’

‘Roof? Some roof.’

Shane had no answer for an insult like that. He mumbled a few sentences about how if she didn’t like it she and her kids could bugger off and go their own way. Him and Midge would turn this place into a nice little property.

‘Property!’ Moira scoffed. But she didn’t want the fight to go further. She wasn’t about to take the kids and go her own way. She was Shane’s wife, or as good as that, and had been for five years. The longest marriage of her life. The other two she’d had weren’t like marriages at all. They were boyfriends, though from them had come Zara and Rory. One day Shane would have a child with her—that was what he promised. Then he said it would be too crowded. Some days she wondered if he really didn’t love her and was waiting to have a baby with someone better.

Midge didn’t like cross words. He didn’t like them between himself and others. And he hated cross words between Shane and Moira. The world didn’t work properly when it happened. His policy was to pretend he had a chore to do and go off somewhere so he couldn’t hear it.

‘Did you say the car was running funny, Moira?’

‘What?’

‘Thought you said the car was making noises.’

‘Just normal.’

‘I better look anyway.’

Whenever he tried to walk fast his hip locked because of a race fall years ago. His left leg dragged and he had to slow down. It dragged now but he skipped it forward so as to keep up the pace.

Limpy jumped out of a hole under the house and followed him, excited by the prospect of the car starting and wheels to run after. He barked and Moira shut him up with the threat of throwing a stone. Rory’s head popped up behind the wheel of the car, or rather his silhouette. The boy liked the car for its better radio reception, and providing he didn’t run the battery down it was allowable.

Shane’s drink hadn’t lasted long and he got another, making this one not so strong in case it sharpened his tongue too far. He said, ‘Yeah, well, still questions and no answers.’

‘Please give up, Shane.’

‘All right. All right.’

Not a man to be trusted when he did that—gave in easily. The giving-in usually lasted less than a minute. He couldn’t help himself and he’d have one more say: ‘Let me just finish by saying this’ or ‘I’ll say one last thing.’

He sat on a deckchair and sipped his glass. ‘Let me just finish by saying this. Whoever that baby’s father is, he’s got a responsibility or two. Tip in some cash. Pay his way.’

The father could have been anybody—she was always running off to parties. Too drunk to know was probably the truth. Her fantasy was that the poster boys did it.

3

Dinner was a quiet affair. Because of the heat Moira brought the gas cooker outside and propped it between the barbeque stones. Shane lit two kero lamps for her to work by. He suspended them from a limb of ironbark in the collection of trees around the L-shape. Half of them were crooked and almost leafless, with trunks no thicker than their stringy branches. The largest were as tall as any tree and had a mop-top of leaves pale and wet-looking under the moon. These were best for hanging lamps—putting them high up helped to cast the light a fair distance. The crooked trunks looked like people spying from the shadows, or kangaroos bent forward for peeping. A high lamp, combined with the heavens and their star show, kept the unnerving sight of them at bay.

Sausages in spaghetti. Moira got Shane to open the cans instead of just sitting there. She stirred the contents in the pot on the cooker for serving with bread and runny margarine. One can each, including Zara’s for when she woke. Moira and Shane were still arguing though it was a silent grudge and weaker the more the food filled them and the cricket noise shut off, started again, shut off. Silence got so much that when the crickets stopped you heard yourself breathe and the person next to you. The very earth breathed among the trees and across the grasses. You could imagine your feet were hurting it as you stood.

Shane finished eating with his usual wipe of bread around his plate. On a Friday his habit was to drive to town with Midge for a few drinks. The pub had a TAB out the back and they watched the week’s gallops replays and the night’s trots and dogs.

He put the plate beside his feet and told Midge to wolf his meal. ‘We’ll be off, Moira. You go to the bank?’

Moira nodded that she had and went into the house for her shoulder bag. She took cash from the zip pocket and gave it to Shane.

He kept his hand held out as if weighing the cash. ‘Bit light on, in’t it?’

‘I paid for the pram.’

‘And how is Alfie?’

Alfie was Shane’s new bloke, provider of the pot plants.

‘He took ten per cent off the pram.’

‘He’s generous. Antiques racket must be thriving. He sold those brass door knobs I gave him?’

‘Sent them to Melbourne.’

That was Shane’s work, thieving old stuff from the once grand places now closed up, abandoned. Not here so much, but an hour or two south-west where the fields had been sold to companies who farmed from overseas and the homesteads around them, colonial and stubborn, stood orphaned in weeds. He thieved from pretty churches fenced off in paddocks. Schools on forgotten gravel roads and community halls and dusty, bookless libraries. Cedar wall shelves sold for three thousand dollars in the high streets of Melbourne. Press metal ceilings, Victorian fireplaces, rose windows, fancy cornices, brass light fittings, floorboards of the thickest and darkest kind. Alfie of Barleyville Second-Hand shifted it to dealers once a fortnight on his truck. Shane’s fee was the best he’d had in this business: forty per cent of the wholesale price. They’d done three loads together, though it was getting harder because the best places had already been stripped.

‘Did you tell him I got another load for him?’

Moira rubbed her forehead. ‘I meant to tell you. He said for you to hold on to it. He doesn’t want it at his place at the moment. He said the shire had sent heritage people sniffing around and it’d be safer with you.’

‘For how long?’

‘Just a wee while.’

‘Don’t like goods lying round forever. We stripped that homestead next to the state forest clean, eh, Midge?’

‘Yip. Good load.’

‘Verandah lacework—be a hundred and twenty years old. Iron as good as the day it was cast.’

‘Nice tongue-in-groove wall,’ said Midge.

‘And a massive mantelpiece. Carved wood. No white ants.’

Moira said she was sorry but that was what Alfie told her.

Shane shrugged that she had nothing to be sorry for.

She picked up the plates and put them in the wash bucket in the kitchen. There was no water in it yet. They could wait till tomorrow. Tonight she wanted to get Zara out of bed and eating. She asked Shane if he wanted a jacket for town. The air was starting to shift around and stir up streams of chill from somewhere in the night. The flat country to the west, most likely: it always took a few hours to cool off after night arrived and the sky’s fallen orange ball had disappeared completely. Then it got coldest of all the region.

Shane didn’t need a jacket. He asked Midge, ‘You want one? Don’t forget your asthma puffer.’

He’s like a father to him, Moira always thought, more than a brother. Proof he had fatherhood in him, for all his bluster.

Rory asked if he could go with them. He always asked. He always got told no. Still he gave a whine as if grown-up and entitled to be out with the men. He hopped on his bike and raced level with the driver’s door all the way to the sealed road. Then he cut across a paddock where the fences were down and if he didn’t tire he could catch the car up where the road looped back on itself and connected with the highway. Limpy kept with him as far as the sealed road but couldn’t maintain his yappy scampering any further.

Moira wondered if she should wake Zara, if Limpy’s racket already hadn’t. Or fix some formula for when Mathew woke in case the girl refused to be roused. She decided on fixing formula. It was years since she’d done this but that hospital nurse and her had talked: the particular brand to buy, the mix and measurements, the degree of warmth to the touch. Just in case it was needed.

First, the feeding bottle Moira bought would need boiling in water. She put a pot on the cooker and had a cigarette while the bottle bobbled and steamed. Then she placed it on a clean tea towel to dry while she boiled another potful to mix with the formula. When that had churned long enough and shrouded the pot in mist she used the tea towel to grip the pot handle and lift the water onto the barbeque’s brick ledge to cool. The coolest air would be among the trees, too far out of the lamplight to see clearly. If she carried the pot there she might trip and scald herself. She had to be content with the brick ledge. She wanted several trial runs at making mixtures. She dipped her finger until the water felt body-warm. She poured it into the bottle, three-quarters full, and peeled back the ring lid on the can.

The powder was like yellowy flour and had a faint vegetable smell—potatoes. A measuring scoop was in there. She tipped one scoop into the bottle, closed the teat-top and shook. She tested the taste on the back of her hand, another few drops on her wrist, then her palm. The flavour was awful—watery milk with a metal tang. She wondered where the potatoness had gone. Potato at least had an appetising odour. She had prepared everything as told and presumed this batch was as it was meant to be. Breast milk was watery but this was watery and sour. Moira poured it out.

Her second try was no better and she poured that out too. Then she heard Mathew splutter into tears, like crow noise if it wasn’t so soft. She went into the tent and stood still until her eyes adjusted to the dark. She pushed the door flap as wide as she could. Enough natural light to see Mathew fidgeting his tiny fingers. Zara was not stirring. Mathew must be in good working order, she thought: she could smell him needing changing.

‘I think it’s feeding time, Zara.’

Still no stirring.

‘He needs a change. How about I do that while you get ready to feed him?’

She reached in and lifted the baby.

‘Come on, Zara. The men have gone. It’s their night out. We can have a quiet time of it. Come on.’

It wasn’t likely that Zara was sleeping through Mathew’s crying. She was lying there awake with her back to the racket. Moira wasn’t going to start a row, not with Mathew bawling in her ear. She decided to change him and then try the formula on him.

She took the child to the porch and set him down on a deck-chair directly under lamplight. She went back to the tent and tore open the pack of nappies. Then back to Mathew to change him. She’d forgotten to buy tissues to wipe him with but the cleaner edges of his dirty nappy would do for now. Holding legs so small was a kind of farming. She thought of lamb’s legs, newborn the way you see them in roadside paddocks. They take their weight straight away on this earth. Baby legs can’t even kick away your fingers. She spoke to Mathew as she worked, telling him she had formula all ready to mix and that his crying good and loud showed a decent pair of lungs.

There was cooled water left over from her practice goes. She scooped in powder, shook the bottle and was ready to start. She lifted Mathew up, sat down on the deckchair and placed him on her lap with the bottle angled across her breast to feign the real thing. She let a few drops dribble onto his lips and used her forefinger to smear it around and tease him into sucking. He sucked the tip of her finger, and she slipped the teat forward between his lips and he sucked that. It took a while for him to suck as hard as she thought he should. But his hands did curl eventually, a pawing reflex of pleasure.