Hope Farm Read online

  ‘Hang on.’ His voice was close. He pushed off and his body came forward, his arms either side of me. His chin scraped my temple. ‘And keep your feet clear.’

  I tightened my legs and felt the bike sway then settle into the regular beat of his pedalling. Up the slope we went, in steady strokes, the sounds of the chain and the tyres on the road smooth and reliable. Then we were at the top, and there was no longer that feeling of effort, of drag; Dan’s weight shifted back, so I could lift my head a bit, and there were a few seconds of easy rolling before we slid into speed and the paddocks flattened into blurred lines of yellow-green, the fence posts blipping by faster and faster. My eyes slitted and I heard my shrieking and Dan’s yells whipping away behind us. Down we swooped, and down — my fingers white on the metal, my legs stiff, my whole body braced. When we got to the bottom and the hum of the tyres eased back from their supercharged whirr, I realised I was laughing in loud, ragged gasps and there was a cold, wet trail from the corner of each eye back to my hairline.

  We did it three times, walking back up after each one. Only a couple of cars passed us; they seemed to whizz by apologetically, as if aware that this hill, this close sky, the paddocks spread each side, this silvery-black stretch of road belonged, this evening, only to us.

  When it got too dark we trudged for the last time up and back to the truck. My face felt raw; my grinning lips caught on my dry teeth.

  The market stall was once a month. It was the only job I liked, out in the sun and people everywhere, different people not just the kind you saw in the city. Sitting there behind the bench all heaped with beautiful things and the racks of clothes like bright curtains either side some thing magical happened, I could forget what my life was realy like and almost feel the way I knew I looked wearing my special dress and my hair all smooth. I saw myself in peoples eyes when they came towards me how they wanted to be near me talk to me have me smile at them. I saw men looking and I felt the stirring of that power Id almost forgotten. One time there were some people working on the stall opposite. They were selling soap and candles. They were hippies, a man and two women and they had a van all painted and the man watched me all morning. It was hot and one of the women cut up a watermelon, I saw the juice drip dark in to the dust and I could smell it. The other girl from the ashram who was helping on our stall went off to the toilets and Silver crawled out from under the bench like a hungry dog. The man smiled then he brought two slices of the melon over and held them out. Whats your name? he said to Silver but she didnt answer just stared like she always did and grabbed the melon and gulped it like he might change his mind and take it back. Well whats your name then? His eyes were blue against his tanned skin they moved over me and I could feel my old strength coming back. I cant remember what we talked about, him standing with one arm over the rack of clothes but his eyes never left me and there was opportunity there and the heat in my skin hummed with hope and life and by the time my workmate returned there was a plan and I wouldnt look back.

  I still went to the creek sometimes, when Dan wasn’t around. But more and more I didn’t have to go that far to find Ian — often he’d already be there, waiting just behind the fallen tree, or even closer, lying hidden in the overgrown grass part-way down on our side.

  I accepted this unthinkingly, as if it was natural that Ian would fall in with my own changed pattern, would wait, ready, for whenever I felt like being with him. It did not occur to me that he might be put out by my preoccupation with Dan. I was immune to doubt, bursting as I was with keen and undiscerning fascination. The tables had turned: now I was the talker, and Ian the listener.

  ‘Dan says Bob Dylan is the greatest songwriter of all time.’

  ‘His favourite is Champion Ruby, but if he can’t get that then he doesn’t mind Doctor Pat’s.’

  ‘When Dan gets to New York, he’s going straight to CBGB, that’s a club, where all the best bands play. He’s going to go there every night until he finds a band to join.’

  ‘Dan says it’s a drag getting up early, but sometimes the sky makes it all worthwhile, the dawn can be so pretty. He says every time he lifts another crate of asparagus, he thinks, another twenty cents towards my ticket, another inch closer to New York.’

  I blathered on, conveying every minute detail, and Ian listened with an interest that, had I not been so blinded by my own devotion, might have surprised me.

  I did feel bad when I took the money creeping through the morning dark carefully opening the cupboard feeling for the box, I knew they kept in it all the takings from the market. Youve worked hard I told myself, for more than three years, they owe you some thing surely. I didnt take much any way, I could have taken more there was quite a lot there. I got Silver from the bedroom she was still sleeping her head on my shoulder all hot and heavy. I had my old case packed, I went down the hallway without a sound, one thing Id learned after all this time was how to be quiet. Out in the cool air I sat on the low brick wall with Silver in my arms and the case by my feet. I felt like a husk had been stripped away. I felt strong and so much love for the world for the new sun pink in the sky. I could even feel love for the ashram I could look back and through all the work the loneliness the disappointment and see that still The Path had given me the chance to become who I was now, Ishtar. The van came chugging up the street and I stood. I lifted my case and felt Silvers weight and the love rushed even stronger for her it didnt matter what had happened before, this love was here for her now she was at the centre of it. Everything Id done had been for her and because of her and she would never know, I promised myself. Id turn things around and she would be loved and happy and never feel like a burden never feel blame.

  It took two days to drive to the commune along the coast. We stopped and swam at beaches along the way and slept in the dunes. Randal and the women were brown all over, at first I felt embarassed about my white body that had been kept in side for so long but Randal didnt mind, he swam up and touched me in the water. At night when Silver was asleep wrapped in a blanket and the other two women lying talking by the fire he led me to the van. There was a mattress in the back. My head was heavy from the joint we had smoked, my first one and I kept wanting to laugh and had to try not to because I didnt want to not be cool in front of him. We took off our clothes and kissed and touched each other and it was amazing after so long to do those things again it was actually much better than I remembered but every time we got close to doing what he wanted I stopped him, Id learned enough by then to know that was how you got a baby. Arent you on the pill? he said. What pill? I said. He laughed. Sister you need educating he said. He lay back and I stayed sitting up I could feel him watching me my outline in the faint light and I arched my back. After creeping round the ashrams for so long being nobody it was so good to be noticed. Come on he kept saying. No I said, I realy cant. Everything was slow from the pot but still some where I felt fear, he was strong he was older he could just make me. He reached up and put his hand to the back of my head but it was gentle, he guided me down. Okay then he said, I will show you some thing we can do.

  One afternoon I went up the hill to the tree and Ian wasn’t there. Not sure I could be bothered going any further in search of him, I stayed where I was, leaning over the top of the silvery-smooth trunk to look down on Hope. I’d thought Dan was out, because his truck hadn’t been there when I got home from school, but as I watched I saw him appear on the kitchen steps, standing with one hand tucked into the opposite armpit, smoking a cigarette. I was about to go running to talk to him when I heard a sound off to one side of me. It was Ian. He was lying in the grass not far away, propped on his elbows with the camera pressed to his face.

  As I watched he took a rapid round of shots, the clicks and whirs tumbling over each other, his thumb stabbing aggressively at the winder. I could see the jut of his shoulders, the tense, focused straining of his whole body as he aimed down the slope at Dan. Then he did a litt
le forward wriggle, his pointy bottom lifting for a moment and showing level with the grass, and I got a sudden sense of being the accidental observer of a private moment. I turned away. The view in the opposite direction was of what everyone at Hope called the back paddocks — the land that ran from behind the mud-brick building alongside the hill to the section of the creek bank that was full of blackberry. There was blackberry in the further back paddock, too, a ragged dark island of it right in the middle, and beyond, near the fence line, a half-collapsed shed. I’d gone there only once. Near the shed was a pile of grey bones — the remains of a cow, or maybe a horse; the skull was big and long-nosed. They lay in a patch of bald dirt, in a trough-shaped depression that had made me imagine the animal dying, raking at the ground with its hooves, stretching its neck and rolling in terror.

  Unease slid, cold, through my belly. What was Ian doing? I didn’t want to turn around. Just like at night when a coat hung on the back of a door becomes a figure about to slip down and spring towards the bed, I began to imagine that the person writhing in the grass behind me, all hungry angles, oblivious to everything but his target below, wasn’t actually Ian but some monster, nightmare version of him.

  I heard the kitchen door bang. Dan must have gone back inside. Maybe half a minute later there was a peripheral movement, a swishing of grass, and the settling of another body against the timber beside me.

  ‘Hello,’ said Ian, and when I turned it was the regular old him, of course, but there was a pink, wind-stung guiltiness to his face.

  I looked away again. ‘Hi.’

  We leaned side-by-side, chins propped on our arms. Down below, smoke rose from the chimney and was rubbed out by the wind.

  For some reason Jindi’s voice came into my head: Is Miller coming back? Will you leave, too? A terrible ebbing sensation came over me — as if the lightness of the past couple of weeks had been deftly, conclusively, punctured.

  What had I been thinking, following Dan around? That he would somehow take my hand and guide me into a different place, a different life, magically throw the world wide open for me? Tears prickled, and I cast a low, sideways look at Ian. He held the camera part-way under his jacket, attempting to conceal it, and it was this pathetic, furtive act that brought rage scalding and bitter to the back of my throat.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I burst out. ‘Creeping round like that, taking photos of people without them knowing?’

  Ian went still. I could feel the shame coming off him, and embarrassment of my own made my lips feel numb. But I gritted my teeth and waited.

  When he spoke his voice was strained, trying for breeziness and failing. ‘It’s a science, my friend. Have you not heard of anthropology? The study of peoples? I am merely taking an interest in the rituals and traditions of a particular type. The hippie.’ He threw out his hand, open-fingered, but kept his face averted, the smile on it stiff and awful.

  I couldn’t look at him, wretched ridiculous scarecrow. I hated him for making me feel pity when I wanted to be angry. ‘Well whatever you’re doing, just stop, okay. It’s weird. And wrong.’

  At the last word his smile came unstuck. His lips drew closed, trembling, and he seemed to shrink in on himself, his shoulders like folded wings through his jacket. He gave a long, shuddering sigh and adjusted the strap around his neck. ‘I know,’ he said, and his voice was so completely miserable that the pity won over the anger, and I found myself clapping him brusquely on the arm.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘It’s not that much of a big deal. It’s just a bit weird.’

  He stood with his head lowered, drooping.

  I tried to touch his arm again, but he drew away as if wounded. Why was he so upset? I felt myself blinking into a great void of confusion, at the edges of which something — some dawning understanding — hovered.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I said, but he had turned and was marching away, up and over the crest of the hill.

  Things weren’t the same after that. Some kind of rupture had occurred, and the half-sensed reason for Ian’s behaviour that day went on bumping with gentle persistence at the edge of my consciousness. I tried gamely to ignore it, to claw my way back into the thoughtlessness of the previous couple of weeks. Ian continued to appear at the fallen tree, but without his camera. We went to the creek together and did all our usual stuff, and I was glad to fall into the safety of this, full of an oddly powerful sense of gratitude to him for going along with me in pretending nothing had happened.

  My crush on Dan felt different now too. I still had a fervent interest in him, but it was interspersed with far more moments of excruciating self-consciousness, when I saw myself as an annoying, desperate loser — or worse, creepy, like Ian squirming on his belly in the long grass. Through force of habit I’d seek Dan out in the places I knew I’d be likely to find him alone — chopping wood, or working on the engine of his truck — and plunge into my litany of questions. Where would he live in New York again? Did it hurt his back lifting crates of asparagus all the time? How long had he had his truck, and where did he get it from? Then the seesaw would tip, and I’d be caught in the beam of my own awareness and, stinging with shame, scurry away.

  At school I wrote my answers to the activities Mr Dickerson set us, my pencilled letters round and even; the dots over my ‘i’s careful, miniature circles. My good marks continued, but the couple of times I didn’t get a perfect score there was more than my usual feeling of irritation — I churned and fizzed with a restless sense of failure that took a long time to dissipate.

  ‘Hey Hippie Shit!’ a kid yelled as I got on the bus after school. ‘I can smell yer from here!’ I went on climbing the steps with my usual show of indifference, but once safely in my seat surprised myself with a spray of tears, which I hid by leaning against the window and pressing my face into the crook of my arm.

  Softening winds sent the half-grown lambs in the paddocks lining the school bus route bucking and plunging, and there was a similar wildness to the mobs of uniformed kids that covered the oval at lunchtimes, hair aflutter. Everything seemed to be leaping with life, taking off. But I felt assaulted; I wanted to anchor myself with repetition, to take shelter in secure, static zones.

  I did my best, retreating into books, into my tidy rows of correct answers at school, my test papers marked with tick after tick in Mr Dickerson’s red pen, into the world of the creek that was so reassuringly constant and indifferent.

  When we got to the commune one of the first things I did was ask one of the women to help me get the pill. Bet, the woman was called she took me to a doctor in a town nearby, it was a doctor she knew was cool. The girl in the chemist made me think of Evie Dyer folding over the paper bag and pushing it across the counter not looking at me. I smiled at her any way. At the commune I learned how to make soap and candles. There were other children, Silver played with them a bit but mostly she wanted to be near me. It was easier there than in the ashrams to have her around, there werent so many rules and more women to help with the cooking and things like that. I slept with Randal in his hut Silver slept there too. After dinner I would put her to bed and lie with her face to face how we used to and we would whisper together for a while and then once she was asleep I would go back out side and sit with the others round the fire. We smoked joints and some times there was LSD then it would be a real party, often it would go on all night and in to the next day, we wandered through the paddocks and scrub we lay naked under the stars or swam in the dam we made up songs and dances and did shows for each other and for the kids if they were awake and they did shows for us. Silver never joined in but I think she liked watching. There was never much money all mine was gone. Someone told me about a new pension for single mothers but I didnt know how to get it, I worried they might want information I didnt have like my birth certificate. Some of the others were on pensions some of the men worked jobs in the town or for farmers and there was t
he money from the markets and we grew vegetables and traded what we didnt eat ourselves. There were other groups of people like us in the area some had milking cows or beehives. Everyone just put in what they could to buy what we needed. At first it felt good being Randals woman. I loved when he sat with his arm around me like I belonged to him, even when we went some where and he left me waiting with the van I didnt care if people stared, when he came back I hoped someone would see who I was waiting for, my man. He was kind to Silver and it took a long time but she started to like him. In the mornings she would crawl up from her little mattress at the foot of our big one and get in with us. At first she would only lie on the out side edge beside me then eventually she started climbing in to the middle and we would all laugh and tickle or me and Randal would wrap our arms around each other and squash her, the Silver sandwich we called it. How about you stop taking the pill? Randal said. We could make a baby. It seemed crazy after all I had gone through but I got this little thrill of excitement when he said it at the thought of him wanting me that much. I kissed him and said nothing I tasted the thrill I enjoyed it I even imagined the baby that would make us properly in to a family, it would be a boy I thought with eyes like Randals. I didnt stop taking the pills though, I wasnt that stupid.

  Then Miller came back, and he brought with him a woman. I watched her being taken from the car — Miller bending, one hand at her elbow, another at the small of her back. It was the exact opposite of how he handled Ishtar, grabbing, squeezing, lifting her bodily. This woman he treated as if she was very old, or somehow breakable. Slowly she emerged from the passenger seat, blinking, her small, white hand laid over his in a way that made me think of old-fashioned pictures of people at dances, in ballgowns and suits, wearing gloves. She was little and wispy, with dandelion-silk hair. Her clothes were dark, black and grey, her legs twig-like in close-cut slacks. She fumbled in the pocket of her coat and took out a pair of sunglasses, which she raised with trembling hands to her face.