Hope Farm Page 11

  SPRING

  It’s difficult to tell how much I took in when it was all actually happening and how much I have since pieced together, or made up. There are times I recall that year of my life in bright snatches of mindless physicality, and I wonder if that’s mostly how I did experience it. Stretching out my legs under the rough blanket as the early light coated the empty walls and Joni’s face greeted me, grave and faded. The ache of frost at the bus stop. The bus smells of exhaust and vinyl and sandwiches. Air zapping fresh as I ran to the creek, my toes blocks of cold in my shoes. The comfortable flow of Ian’s voice. The bush flexing its great, porous hide as we moved, tiny and blissfully unimportant, between its bristles. Maybe that’s all that registered and it was all the other stuff that ran on underneath, managing every now and then to surface into consciousness but mostly embedding itself for later. And then there are times it seems to me that they were inescapable, the tensions of the adult world — the fraught and febrile aura that surrounded Ishtar and those in her orbit, that whined and creaked like a wire pulled too tight.

  In and out she dips, in my memory, wheeling like a star, cutting the chill, dank air of the farmhouse. Bleary with sleep, I pull back the rough fabric of the front curtain to glimpse her getting into one of the cars, the white puff of her breath in the grainy morning light, the sweep of her hair, the belt of her coat trailing. I am always just missing her. In passing she might touch me, run a quick hand across my shoulder blades, kiss the top of my head, pull me to her so I feel the brief softness of a breast or the point of a hipbone. And then I am released, as on she goes, and on, to the next thing.

  ‘How was school?’ she might murmur, taking up the peeler and a handful of carrots — but her back is to me, and if I don’t answer she never turns around, just goes on whisking the blade down and down, the slivers of peel flopping one by one, waving their weak arms as they fall.

  Or is this only how I remember her? Perhaps she did turn, did set down the peeler and come to sit by me at the table, to put her arm round me, to lean in close so her warmth filled my breaths, asking me a question and then waiting for the answer. I often wonder if I have done her a disservice in the way I recall her, in what I have managed to haul from the murk and lay out under the harsh beams of examination and analysis. But I am at the mercy of memory. All I can do is hang on, attend to what I’m supplied with, squint and puzzle over it.

  Miller, also, has most likely suffered from some stereotyping, some streamlining of character. Did he really only appear when in the grip of inspiration, ablaze with ideas, rattling them off in volleys, resonating with their urgency? It might have been just one or two impassioned speeches, a couple of LSD-fuelled rave sessions. Maybe, at times, he acted like the rest of us — came to the breakfast table, spoke in an ordinary voice, made regular conversation, went off to work.

  I don’t know. I can’t remember, not clearly. But this is my story, I suppose. To me they were not ordinary, either of them; they were strung up in some straining net of intrigue, suspended, pulsing with impending drama, with the approach of a veiled but certain ending — an explosion, or a collapse.

  This is how it all seems to me now, the way it has lodged in my mind, and so this is the only way I can tell it.

  After a while they started me working. Everyone must contribute Mira said, And Silver is not a newborn any more, your time of rest is over. Before I just stayed in the house, I slept a lot during the day when Silver did I was so tired from feeding her and changing her nappies at night. I didnt know that about babies the tiredness the not sleeping. But before it hadnt mattered I just slept when she did, day or night. I didnt have any thing else to do. Some times I helped in the kitchen or cleaning the house. I didnt mind those jobs, I wanted to help to show how grateful I was. But now there were real jobs that took up the whole daytime, there was no time for sleeping or just lying on the bed with Silver watching her face making her smile. There were three different jobs delivering storeroom and housekeeping. Delivering was walking around the streets putting pamphlets in peoples letterboxes. I went with three or four others straight after breakfast, we left with our bags of pamphlets and me with Silver tied on too. Usually we caught a bus to a different neighbourhood, some times in to the city where we offered the pamphlets to people on the street. Delivering was the best job even though I got so tired with all the walking and carrying Silver, but she liked it the walking kept her happy she always wanted to be rocked and bounced, it helped her sleep. Storeroom was taking things out of big crates and sorting and packing them in to smaller boxes, clothes and bags and little jewellery cases and things they came from India and were sold at markets to raise money. It was across town and we caught the bus there too I didnt like doing storeroom much because it was hard to keep Silver happy while I had to stand at the sorting table I had to sort of sway from side to side while I worked. Housekeeping was just helping Mira but it meant doing all the shopping, there was a lot of it and even though we had a trolley each we always filled them right up and had to carry bags too weighing down our shoulders. It was hard getting on and off the bus with all that and a baby as well. Then we had to cook and I worried about Silver I wanted her near me but there was never anywhere safe to put her down so I just kept her tied on with the cloth but then she was so close to the big boiling pots of food and hot oil and it got so hot she always cried. All the jobs were tiring and Silver was growing getting heavier to carry. I went to bed exhausted every night some times I fell asleep at satsang sitting up. I knew I needed to contribute like Mira said but it was so hard with Silver I didnt know it was going to be like that I suppose I never thought about what it was going to be like realy. I tried to be like Mira not hurrying not making mistakes doing everything in order and neatly but I was so tired and Silver cried so much I felt clumsy and slow always behind I got things wrong. Sorry, I was always saying, my voice and Silvers cries too loud in the quiet house. Sorry, sorry. Mira never said any thing she just kept on with her work. One time in the kitchen it was such a hot day the air choking with frying smells and steam and Silver crying and crying, and Mira just took her just untied the cloth and took her from me. She put her in my room and shut the door and then shut the kitchen door when she came back. But I knew she would still be crying in there even if I couldnt hear it. As soon as Id finished work I went in and there she was still screaming in the middle of the mattress all red in the face and she had vomited. I felt like I couldnt breathe and the milk hurt in my breasts. I grabbed her up and kissed her and kissed her. Im so sorry, I whispered. But I had to do it after that, shut her up in the room if she was crying too much, Mira never said any thing but I knew it was what was expected. It broke my heart, my love for Silver was still so easy then all I wanted was to be with her every moment.

  It was while Miller was away that Dan came to Hope — quietly slipped in. His entrance didn’t boom and clang with importance the way Miller’s comings and goings did; in fact, from the very beginning, he seemed to exist as a kind of demonstration of how to be the exact opposite of Miller.

  Dan was younger than all the other adults — even I, to whom most grown-ups appeared either old or really old, could tell — the whiskers on his cheeks sparse and soft-looking, and with big wet-dark eyes like those of the wallabies that hid down by the creek. He was always in the background, in the shadows, and I wouldn’t have paid any extra attention to him if it wasn’t for something that happened on one of the first nights he was there.

  I’d gone to bed early with a stomach-ache, heavy and low in my gut, and woke some time later to a different kind of pain, stronger, dragging. I sat up and there was a sudden warm seeping feeling in my underpants. I snapped properly awake, clenching my muscles — had I just wet my pants? But it happened again, another ooze, and the strange dull tug of pain again. A numbness came over me. It’s your period, I thought distantly. This is what it feels like.

  My body was still, my breathing even, but u
nderneath the stillness something squirmed and twisted, fought blindly. I held the muscles between my legs tight, but the leaking kept on, persistent, frightening.

  For some reason an image leapt up: a woman, a house mother in orange robes, from a long time ago. Kara or something, Khana — the name swam just beyond my reach. Her smell, like cooking; the pink of her palms as she worked dough thin for samosas; her fingers nipping my cheek; the crooked shine of her teeth in a smile. How big this woman loomed — I must have been very small — and how importantly. Some of the house mothers had been mean; sometimes they’d shouted, or hit, or shut me in a room. But this one had been different — this one had been kind. I turned on my side, hoping to prevent the leakage from running between my legs to the mattress. More memories barged through, marched out in a bright string — the woman clapping her hands in a back yard, under a lemon tree, the chant of her song; following the orange swish of her robe back into the kitchen where the first samosa would be set aside; waiting, watching it steam; the taste of its crumbling, sweetish shell and fresh, soft inner. A desperate feeling rose and swelled, a lost, sad, grown-up feeling. I couldn’t even remember the woman’s name.

  I got up, cast around in the half-dark, put my boots on. I reached into my duffel bag, right down to the bottom, for the packet of pads that Ishtar had given me at some point, perhaps a year earlier, along with a factual but typically removed explanation of fertility and sex, things I already knew about anyway. I pulled a pad out, and some spare underpants and a pair of old corduroys that were getting too small, bundled them all to my chest and went into the hallway.

  There were voices from the front room, and the strum of an acoustic guitar. Most of the bedroom doors were closed and dark.

  Through the kitchen I crept and out, trying not to rattle the loose doorknob, shivering in the fresh cold. There was light coming from a window in the mud-brick building, and by it I could just see the shape of the outdoor toilet, leaning wonkily by the woodpile. I stepped down into the grass and tried to walk quickly, hugging the bundle, stumbling on the uneven ground. I’d never had to use the toilet so late at night before.

  The timber door scraped and the stink slid in the chill air. I couldn’t see anything inside. I fumbled against one wall for the shelf I knew was there, the matches and candle, but caught a fistful of cobwebs. The pain rippled in my belly. Something scuttled in the dark. The toilet smell choked me and my stomach heaved.

  I let go of the door and stepped back, sucking in clean air, wiping the cobwebs on my jacket, then my nose with the back of my hand. The bundle came undone and there was a fluttery sound as something landed on the grass. I sank to my knees and felt around.

  ‘Everything all right?’

  There was a figure between me and the lit window — a man, slight, with longish dark hair. The red dot of a lit cigarette flared and I caught more of his face, a curve of mouth and cheekbone, dark eyes. It was him — Dan.

  ‘Got a torch here, if you need one.’

  ‘Oh, no, it’s all right, it’s —’

  But there was a click, and a circle of light broke over the grass, showing the underpants with leg-holes gaping, the awful, incriminating oblong of the pad. I sprang and seized them, then stayed crouching, face burning, staring at the edge of the light’s sphere where his legs showed: blue jeans, worn brown work boots.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, after a moment, the word hardly coming out, a scratchy whisper.

  ‘No worries. Here you go.’ He bent and the light neared, then its dazzle turned away from my face, its beam playing out towards the black slope of the hill.

  ‘Thank you,’ came the whisper again, and I reached with my free hand and took the heavy metal cylinder. I could smell the smoke from his cigarette. I still couldn’t look up. The blood drummed in my face.

  ‘You can just leave it on the doorstep there.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I didn’t raise my eyes or get to my feet until I was sure he’d gone.

  Dan never said anything about that night. I fully expected him to. There were a lot of good things about how open most people were in the places we lived — about sex and other matters of the body — but there were also some behaviours I would now consider inappropriate. I’m talking about a certain attitude in which the aversion to prudery or preciousness is so strong that a kind of brutal honesty is affected, and there is a focus on drawing attention wherever possible to sex and bodies, often in the form of teasing or jokes. Someone less prudish than I suppose I already was would perhaps not have minded this at all, but I experienced it as unnecessarily heavy-handed, and at times actually quite cruel. So I expected from Dan some kind of public humiliation — a lewd joke at the breakfast table, an announcement. Incredibly, he said nothing. We passed one another in the hallway the next morning and he only gave me one of his gentle smiles, which I, blazing with shame, almost missed and certainly didn’t respond to. It took a few days and two or three repetitions of this — the friendly smile, the lack of comment — for me to accept the fact that he was not going to mention what had happened.

  Perhaps out of gratitude for this unexpected kindness, or perhaps because, like Ishtar — and Miller I suppose, although he would always be in a category of his own — Dan stood out from the rest of the Hope residents in having some special vitality, I developed a kind of crush on him.

  Unlike Ishtar, he appeared to be completely unaware of his own charm. He was so understated, so undemanding, there in the place he’d chosen for himself — off to one side, removed yet assured — that I thought myself alone in appreciating what he had to offer. Which was plenty.

  Dan got things done. He had plans that would be realised. Not that they were on parade — I only found out what they were because I questioned him. He was absolutely not going to stay on at Hope Farm. He was only there because it was cheap and he wanted to save up quickly the last of what money he needed for a plane ticket to America, where he was going to play in bands. I don’t know what made me believe his story any more than anyone else’s, or trust in his ability to follow through, but I did.

  Maybe it was this that I was drawn to, this sense of purpose, of connection with the outside world; this logical, sensible sequence of actions through which — calmly, without any need to involve or inform others — he was making his way. Where Miller was all bluff and bluster, a human hurricane churning in ineffective circles; where Ishtar continued to erode my faith in her with inexplicable, fraught decisions and extreme, untenable commitments; Dan, I had decided, was in complete possession of personal integrity. Dan made sense.

  I sought him out, waiting on the front porch for his arrival back from work, or lying on my mattress with a book, listening for him to emerge from his room across the hallway so I could follow him into the kitchen and be there while he made a cup of tea. I never entered his room to snoop, but was thrilled just to inhale the air near its doorway, to catch sight of its interior — a guitar propped against the wall, a jumper across the back of a chair. He took over the splitting of the firewood from Ishtar, and as he worked I stood in attendance. I became his Jindi — his follower, waiting around corners, overflowing with questions. I knew this and sometimes, with a spasm of guilt and embarrassment, admitted it to myself; but mostly I managed to ignore it, curtain it off with the rosy cloud of my adoration.

  He tolerated me. Maybe I wasn’t really as annoying as I think I was, or maybe he was just a patient, generous person. Maybe he felt sorry for me. Whatever the reason, he never asked me to leave him alone, or seemed irritated by the way I gazed, rapt, as he rolled and lit a cigarette, as if his long brown fingers were the only fingers ever to do such a thing; ever to deftly fill and massage the flimsy scrap of paper, to put it to the pink tip of his tongue for the fast, sealing lick; to give it one last reshape before raising it to his lips, before the strike of the match.

  ‘Where will you live again? In New York?’

 
A slow exhale of smoke, a thoughtful nod. Setting one foot on the wood-splitting stump and laying his forearm across his knee. ‘Well. There are a few different places. I’ve heard in the Lower East Side you can get a cheap room, and it’s near where all the clubs are. You know, where the bands play. Then there’s Chelsea.’ Another drag. A fringe of fine wood splinters hanging from the underside of his sleeve. ‘But I’m not sure what the rent’s like there.’