Hope Farm Page 3

  There was the slam of a door at the other end of the house, and a moment later the baby started to cry again. Willow’s hands fell away from her hips. She swayed, as if preparing for movement, but then just stood, stooped and blinking.

  Jindi took her chin from the table and skipped out into the hallway. I squeezed my fist harder. A woman’s voice called from one of the front rooms, and Willow came unstuck at last and followed Jindi.

  Ishtar’s hands came down on my shoulders. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘it won’t take long to fix the place up.’

  I tried not to feel how warm her hands were, but I couldn’t help it. I was overwhelmed by a quick, hopeless wish to be a little kid — as small as Jindi — able to be lifted and carried somewhere, to a bed, to be wrapped in blankets and laid to sleep. I let my head droop, but then the hands were gone, the cold air sudden on my shoulders, and Ishtar was moving away, stacking the plates and going to the sink.

  I didnt tell any one. I knew though. I never kept track of my months so I couldnt tell that way even if Id known about that which I didnt. It was the 1970s but you wouldnt know it in our house my mother told me nothing about sex and it was the same at school. But I felt sick all the time and my breasts went all hot and sore and I couldnt stand any thing touching them not even the towel when I dried myself. I climbed up on the edge of the bath to see in the mirror. The swelling the shock of them. I knew what it meant that it was to do with him with the things we had done. I knew that much. Even though I didnt believe in religion it was hard not to feel it as a punishment. Now when he touched them and kissed them it hurt and I had to try hard not to push him away. I still went to meet him but there was a sad feeling to it because even though I didnt know exactly what it would be I knew some thing was going to have to change. There was a girl called Evie Dyer in Lindas class, she disappeared for a long time, months. Got in to trouble whispered the church ladys sipping there tea. You could see how brave Evies mother had to be pretending not to hear but her lips shook just a little bit. Evie came back but she didnt finish school she went to work at the chemist instead all lumpy in her uniform folding over the paper bags and sliding them across the counter with her eyes down like shed done some thing wrong. But she wasnt there long either. She vanished again. Got married someone said. I thought I saw her pushing a pram up the hill near the football club one time, her drooping head her steps slow. On Sundays in the long grass with him I narrowed my eyes against Evie Dyer against what was to come. I opened myself to his touch to his hunger, I let it fill me up. I never told him.

  Until Miller arrived, Ishtar slept with me on a mattress on the floor of one of the bedrooms in the main house. I recall this time as a kind of lull, imbued with a sense of waiting. I also recall being knocked sideways by the penetrating, constant cold, which no chilly Brisbane winter morning could have prepared me for. I only ever felt remotely warm in that front room. In bed, even wearing a jumper, tracksuit pants, and socks, and with Ishtar’s back against mine, I slept curled like a slater — stretching out an inch in any direction meant touching mattress so cold it felt wet. It was this sensation that woke me in the mornings, the icy chill crawling across Ishtar’s emptied side to surround me completely.

  The cold inside the house was seeping and heavy. Outside, there was also the wind, which blasted and stung relentlessly. My ears hurt, my eyes watered, and my fingers and toes went numb. None of my clothes were adequate; I soon learned to wear almost all of them at once.

  Before Hope, we must have stayed in communes that were more or less self-sufficient, living off their own produce and bartering with the leftovers — there were dim memories of helping pack up cartons of eggs for a market, and boxes of tomatoes — but these places would have been in the minority. This set-up, where values and reasons slumped, deflated, in the background while everyone plodded round under the weight of the type of resentment that comes with unacknowledged compromise — this was more familiar to me.

  Reminders of what had been were everywhere. In the kitchen a series of hand-made posters, sagging, faded, and blackened with cooking grease were pinned to the wall: instructions on the care of goats and chickens; a guide to composting; a planting schedule with delicate illustrations of vegetables and herbs. There were chickens, of course, but the coop was in bad repair and, until Ishtar did it, had not been raked out for a long time. Of goats there was no sign at all, and the veggie patch was full of weeds, its fence partly collapsed. A scarecrow drooped, waterlogged, grass sprouting from its shoulders. There was a compost heap — it was huge, overfilled, spilling from its chicken-wire frame. No cooked foods, said the discoloured poster, but the tower of compost held small pools of curry and slops of milky porridge. It smelled rancid, and Jindi proudly informed me that she’d seen rats there.

  The residents were as you’d expect: long-haired, worn-looking, with bad teeth. There were around eight or ten adults, most of them women, and — most disappointing of all Hope’s disappointments — no children other than Willow’s screaming baby and disgusting, snotty, close-breathing Jindi.

  ‘When we get our own crops going again,’ the women would say, seated at the kitchen table, passing a joint, ‘we won’t have to worry about all that.’ All that being either bosses or the dole office — because those of them that weren’t on some kind of benefits worked picking fruit or vegetables for local farmers, or in the nearby powdered-milk factory. They would nod vaguely towards the window, the darkening paddocks outside. ‘Feed ourselves then, like we used to.’ The hollow, automatic quality to their voices reminded me of doing the chants in the ashrams, sitting cross-legged on the floor. Nobody made any mention of Miller and his new regime.

  So the crops had failed, the goats were gone, the compost was rotten, but still they stayed, these people. I suppose they had nowhere better to go. It was the eighties — they were a dying breed. And they were tired; their ideals had seized up and grown heavy somehow, and they didn’t know how to put them down. That’s the only explanation I can come up with now. At the time, of course, I gave it no thought. They were just there, they did what they did — or didn’t — and we were there as well, and I would simply, like always, have to put up with it.

  I was used to this, to arriving, to having Ishtar seamlessly meld with the household — working, working, weaving herself into new patterns — to being left to manage my own slow and reluctant settling. I doubt I was a typical thirteen-year-old. I imagine I was very naive in some ways, and unusually worldly in others. What I cared about first, always, was if there were other children my age, who I might make friends with. Then, where would I go to school, and might I make a friend there? Were there sweets in the house? Licorice? Halva? Dates? Honey? What kinds of books were there to read? There was never a television. Hope, it was clear from the beginning, lacked on every count.

  I spent that first week or so — before Miller came and school started — just hanging around. I was alone a lot of the time, which suited me. The farm workers and those with factory shifts went off early, piled into the assortment of rattle-trap vehicles that returned later to skirt the front porch like dilapidated beasts at a waterhole. Those who were left behind — Willow and the baby, Jindi, plus a few random extras — beetled around the place in what appeared to be established routines, not interacting with one another much. The daylight hours seemed to stretch on forever.

  There was a small shelf of books in the front room and I worked my way through them, taking one and finding a place to hide with it; I was always avoiding Ishtar because she might give me a job to do, and Jindi for obvious reasons. There were only a few kids’ books and they were horribly childish — still, I churned through them and then moved on to the adult ones, which were all about Tarot and healing, or rainforests or permaculture, and that kind of thing. There was also a guide to the care of goats, which I found surprisingly enjoyable; I spent a lot of time mooning over the photos of different goats, mentally naming t
hem and attributing personalities. It was depressing to close the cover on those clean, well-fed animals in their tidy, lush pastures and return to the reality of broken-fenced paddocks containing only thistles.

  I watched Ishtar sometimes, from a place up on the hill behind the buildings where there was a huge fallen tree I could lean against, hunched, shivering in my jacket. Even though I had resolved never again to be drawn in by her fervour, the brightness to her movements as she came and went — raking, chopping, sweeping, pegging out loads of washing — every now and then I was struck by a kind of unwilling wonder. From her figure there below, a current seemed to rise through the chill air, to fan out warmly, indiscriminately, stirring the leaves of the clotted ivy that covered the outdoor toilet, the straw of the chicken coop, the ruined vegetable garden, skating up the sodden grass of the hill and, in passing, filling me with shivers.

  One evening I sat watching as she went along the back wall of the house, stooping to pull the lanky weeds that lapped at its base. Beyond, the rust-pocked, wheezing cars were slipping one by one down the track with their loads of potato-pickers and factory hands. The heavy sky was darkening, but just as Ishtar threw the last weed onto the pile, there was a shift low on the horizon and a swathe of watery, greenish blue appeared, and the unexpected edge of a platinum sunset sent everything shining. The kitchen window blazed, and below it the wall met the ground unhampered, seeming to shout its illuminated glory — the simple beauty of a clean line. Ishtar caught the weed pile with a garden fork and tossed it in one swift, elegant movement into a wheelbarrow just as a returned worker came past on his way to the mud-brick building. The worker said something and Ishtar put back her head in a laugh that seemed to puncture the clouds overhead, the light catching her long throat, and I throbbed with reluctant pride. She was amazing. She could gild the edges of even miserable, freezing, grey Hope.

  I had always known there was something special about her, registered it in the way other adults reacted to her. I had never given this any thought; it was just the way things were. And besides, I understood. I’d always wanted her, too — or more of her, anyway. Perhaps every young child wants more of their mother, finds her the most beautiful woman in the world — perhaps this is normal. I wouldn’t know.

  It was at Hope Farm though, it seems to me now, that I began for the first time to pay attention to this, to the machinations of her charm. As with all memory, it’s difficult to know how much I have since manufactured with my retrospective preoccupations, but when I think back to eating dinner in the crowded fug of that front room, seated on the floor with a plate of curry in my lap, I get a strong sense of tuning in properly for the first time to the disturbance, the little maelstrom of interactions that Ishtar, her presence and her looks, always prompted. Perhaps it was the dawning of an adolescent awareness of social nuances. Perhaps it was simply because Hope was far and away the most uncomfortable, ugliest, and most depressing place we’d ever lived, with the most flaccid, uninspiring residents, and therefore the ideal setting for the showcasing of her charisma. Or perhaps, and most likely, it was because of what I’d seen back at the ashram: Ishtar with Miller, Ishtar in love; a glimpse of a new territory, a relationship in which she might not hold all the power.

  I understood that it was because she was beautiful — I’d always known that. The way her skin caught the light, creamy and golden, the darkness of her brows and lashes, the fullness of her lips. The rich brown hair falling heavy and smooth, lightening to caramel at the ends. There was something else though, that shook things up in them, that prompted such a range of responses — the open, soft-faced stare; the covert glance; the bodily adjustments, use of a louder voice, bigger gestures — and it was to do with the way she wore her beauty, her ownership of it. It was there in the way she walked, the straightness of her spine, the reserved grace of her movements, in her speech, her laughter — and in the way she bestowed these things on others, measured them out. She was in charge. She made people want her. I sat in the firelight with my plate cooling against my thighs and saw the gazes that were drawn, helpless, towards her, pulsing with greed, envy, admiration, rivalry — but all of them with desire, either for her or for something she had.

  ‘Why’d you leave?’ said a woman on one of those first nights, when the emptied plates had been stacked and another joint lit.

  Ishtar gave a brief, noncommittal smile. ‘It was time to move on.’

  ‘Did you stop believing?’ said the woman. ‘In the guru? The meditation and all that?’

  Ishtar shrugged.

  The woman frowned. ‘Well, did you ever believe?’

  Ishtar shrugged again.

  ‘But aren’t you s’posed to?’ The woman dragged on the joint and then held it to the lips of the man seated beside her, whose plinking on an acoustic guitar went out of time as he inhaled.

  Ishtar didn’t answer.

  ‘Isn’t that the whole point?’

  Ishtar sat with her back straight, hands on her knees, her face hard and beautiful. ‘I respected them,’ she said after a while. ‘I pulled my weight.’

  There was a pause, and then the guitar man said, ‘Sometimes it’s just time to move on.’ His eyelids lifted, and he gave Ishtar a blurry, slow-smiling look.

  The woman saw and did a kind of head-tossing wiggle, then leaned into him and placed a hand on his leg, right up near his crotch. Someone handed her the joint again and she sucked viciously on it. ‘So how long were you there for?’

  ‘About a year.’

  The woman’s mouth hung open. ‘But you can’t do that.’ She turned to the man but he didn’t seem to be listening any more. She looked back at Ishtar, grimacing. ‘You have to believe. It’s, it’s … lying if you don’t.’

  Nobody responded. Ishtar sat quietly.

  The woman went on. ‘That’s just bullshit. You have to believe, or you’re bringing everyone else down. Like this place. We’re all here ’cause we believe in the same things.’ Her fingers tensed on the man’s thigh. ‘Freedom … and …’ Her eyes were almost closed, but her brow had an angry crease in it. ‘Freedom,’ she said again. ‘A better way, a better future …’

  There was quiet for a while. More and more spaces fell between the guitar man’s notes. His head drooped. Ishtar stood, smoothly, and walked to the curtain. I followed, but not before catching the dulled, resentful dagger of a look the woman sent after her.

  There it was, contained in those two actions, in Ishtar’s unhurried, poised departure and the impotent fury of the woman’s stare: the essence of what made people hate and want her. I’m sure I didn’t fully comprehend it at the time, and the irony would not be revealed until much, much later, but now I think, to them, she must have appeared free — or at least closer to what they thought freedom was than they were.

  My mother guessed in the end. She kept asking if I had any thing for the incinerator and when I said no she stared at me. Then she said Where have you been putting them? You know you cant leave them lying around some where even wrapped up, theyll start to smell. And I said I havent got any. Then she went to the bathroom and checked the cabinet and said You havent used any, did you buy them for yourself? I didnt answer because of course I couldnt buy them for myself what would I buy them with? She came back in to my room then and knelt down in front of me where I was sitting on the bed. She stared at me at my face and then at my breasts sticking out all swollen under my dress. She got that voice. What have you been doing? she said.

  Miller arrived, and Ishtar helped him unload the car. They carried clinking bundles of tools to one of the falling-down sheds at the back — spades and long-handled gardening forks, and then some boxes that gave off a shimmying rustle.

  ‘Look, girls,’ said Miller, sliding a pile of boxes to the ground and squatting. He opened the top one and took out a small paper packet. Jindi rushed forward. Miller ripped off the end of the packet and shook s
omething into his hand. ‘Look,’ he said again. ‘Seeds. The stuff of life.’

  ‘Wow,’ breathed Jindi.

  ‘Can you believe that from these tiny things will burst whole plants? Bearing fruit?’

  The girl bent closer, her face almost in his palm. ‘What kind of fruit?’

  Miller didn’t answer. Swivelling, he raised his hand to his own face and blew, sending the seeds rushing out in a disintegrating cloud.

  Jindi gasped, grabbing at the drifting particles. ‘But what kind of fruit will they make?’

  Miller, seeming not to hear, was gathering up the boxes again, slinging them haphazardly into the shed. Then he strode away towards the mud-brick building, where Ishtar had taken another load of cartons and bags.

  After making a few more grabs at the air Jindi ran to me, fists clenched. ‘Silver!’ she panted. ‘There’s going to be fruit!’ She opened her fingers but the minuscule seeds had vanished into the grime of her palms. She held her hands nearer to her eyes, then shook them before staring up at me in confusion. ‘There were seeds,’ she said. ‘I had them.’

  I could see some of them, a constellation of dark flecks trapped in the yellowy green globule of snot that was descending from one of her nostrils.

  Miller and Ishtar didn’t come back out of the mud-brick building. I had a pretty good idea what they were doing in there. While Jindi was busy pawing through the dirt, I took off.

  The other side of the hill ran down to a belt of scrub and past that was a creek, which swung in a wide curve around the back of Hope’s cleared paddocks. Directly behind Hope and off to the right, the scrub, while only a narrow strip, was choked with blackberry and almost impenetrable, but in the other direction it widened and was much easier going, with a faint path that ran a few metres up from the water, parallel. Quite soon this came out at the dirt road, just a bit further along from Hope’s gateway and weathered, pathetic sign, where a small timber bridge straddled the water. The almost-path continued on the other side of the road, where there were no more paddocks or houses, only bush, and I was able to walk along there for probably fifteen or twenty minutes without coming across any other sign of human life. It was a delicious feeling, to leave Hope behind.