Hope Farm Page 5

  The whole drive home my mother didnt speak to me, two and a half hours. At home she unpacked one of the shopping bags onto my bed. Two dresses like tents one brown one navy. Two wide cotton nighties plain white. A bra with huge cups that sat up by themselves. Now I knew why she didnt bring Linda on the shopping trip or take me in to the shop with her, in case any one saw and guessed. Thats how worried she was because what are the chances of bumping in to any one from our town all that way away and in a big city like Brisbane. You wont need much my mother said Its only for while youre there, once youre back home you can wear your old clothes again. When she had gone out I opened my wardrobe and looked at everything so plain and ordinary. I thought of the silks of the woman with plaits the diamonds scattered like stars. I thought of that baby curved against its mothers chest there two bodies like one, the mothers smile no pram no Evie Dyer plodding sad and lumpy. I closed the wardrobe door again, pushed the new clothes to the end of the bed and sat down. I looked at the pamphlet and traced the image of two hands joined and pointing upwards, not like my mothers all white against the church pew these fingers were elegant the shape of freedom. Join Us On The Path it said. I touched my belly low down, the place where it was growing.

  Ian and I met again the next day. He brought a pad of paper and a pen, and drew a map of the school for me, marking out the areas to avoid whenever possible, and also the safe places. There were only four days left until the end of term break, when he would have to return and I would have to begin. The library, he explained, was open before and after school hours and at lunchtime and morning recess, and you could stay in there as long as you wanted, providing you were quiet. There was always a teacher around, and anyway, people like Dean Price didn’t even know it existed. ‘And — bonus — it’s heated,’ he said. ‘And — double bonus — it has its own toilets.’

  We were by the creek again, near the bridge, sitting on a steep bit of bank, Ian with the notepad propped on his knees. He drew two small rectangles near the big shaded section he’d marked Oval. ‘So save your toilet trips for the library,’ he said, and put big crosses through the two rectangles. ‘These other toilets are not at all safe.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Now. The bus. There are a few oafs that catch it, but the driver’s all right, he’s got control, so sit near the front. Nobody else gets on or off at our stop, so you don’t have to worry about that. And, most blessed of all blessings, Dean Price himself does not catch it. His den of idiocy is, I believe, in the other direction from school.’

  ‘Where’s our stop?’

  ‘Just up on the main road. About halfway between the turn-off for your place and the one for mine.’ Ian put the cap on the pen and clipped it to the notepad. He dropped them to the ground, drew his arms round his knees, and turned to me with a pinched sort of smile. ‘Now, this is a difficult thing to say, but I’m sure you’ll understand.’

  I waited. Again I felt like laughing at him, at his seriousness, his old-man speech, and funny, clumsy stork-like body. But there was pride there, too — it glowed in his thin face.

  ‘As far as school goes,’ said Ian, ‘we don’t know each other.’ He gave the small, apologetic smile again. ‘We don’t speak to each other, we don’t look at each other — we do not communicate in any way. All right?’

  I opened my mouth, but he spoke again, quickly.

  ‘It’s just too dangerous. They’re like sharks — you can’t make any kind of splash or it attracts them. And when I say “as far as school goes”, I am in fact referring to any public interaction.’ He waved in the direction of the main road. ‘On the bus. At the bus stop. In Kooralang or Tarrina, or any other town. Basically, anywhere other than here.’ He stubbed a finger at the ground between his legs. ‘Understand?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I did understand. I wouldn’t want to be seen in public with him, either. It seemed sad that it had to be a secret, conducted under such rigid conditions, but still — and my heart lifted — it was a friendship.

  ‘But you know,’ said Ian briskly. ‘I’ll be with you, in spirit.’

  There was a sound from the dirt road, an engine, far off but getting closer.

  He jumped up. ‘Quick!’ Down the steep bank and along towards the bridge he went, feet first, hands grabbing at stones and clumps of grass. He looked like a giant, spindle-legged crab. ‘Come on!’

  I followed, sliding down in the same position.

  The car was coming not from the main road but from the other direction, the other side of the creek. It was close now. I could hear the gravel spitting from its wheels.

  ‘Quick!’ Ian scuttled into the space under the bridge.

  I went after him.

  Side by side we clung to the bank, in the cold half-light, our heads inches from the timber sleepers. The car was closer, the engine roaring, its vibration already running through the bridge. And then it was on us and we were inside the dense, thundering ripple of sound, and I thought of aeroplanes, of waterfalls, of massive machines going full tilt, and I clapped my hands to my ears, almost slipping down, and then it was over. I realised I was screaming, and Ian was screaming beside me, and the two screams went on for a while, reedy and small in the deaf silence, and then stopped — and there was just the hammering of my heart and the panting of my breath, and the soft sifting of the dust coming down between the timbers above.

  He turned to me. His face was white with dust and his tongue came out and licked his lips and they showed suddenly red. ‘I’ll be with you in spirit,’ he said.

  I woke alone in the cold room at Hope, which was bare of furniture apart from the mattress I slept on and a poster of Joni Mitchell stuck to one wall — and bare of Ishtar’s things, too, now that she slept out with Miller in the mud-brick building. I lay, listening to the moan and clatter of the morning around me — voices from the kitchen, the strained jigger of someone starting one of the cars out the front, Jindi’s footfalls thudding up and down, the steadfast howling of Willow’s baby — for a moment not remembering, and then it filtered in, set up a buzzing under my ribs and in my fingertips. I had a friend.

  On the day before my mother took me to the Home I rang the number on the pamphlet. It was a Sunday my fathers mower roaring in the garden Linda studying, my mother at the church hall. I didnt think about the fruit trees on the other side of the fence about him waiting there with his black rimmed fingernails what he might wonder now that I wouldnt come again. He didnt fit in to any possible future. There was only the tunnel of my mothers plan leading to an Evie Dyer life or the thing that made my heart beat fast. The phone was answered by someone with an accent. I met a woman I said, In the city. She told me I could call if I needed help. Wait please they said and then someone else came on. Hello? Hello I said and began to cry because I recognised her voice. Ah she said, The girl from the park. How are you? Im going to have a baby I whispered, Theyre sending me to a Home. I dont know what to do. We are here she said, You can call any time day or night.

  In the back of the station wagon I dozed to the tireless stream of Miller’s voice.

  ‘It was the Andeans who first cultivated the potato. More than two hundred species are still to be found, up there on the altiplano.’

  He seemed to go out of his way to use foreign words, reaching with his tongue right into their difficult corners. Even the names of the different kinds of potatoes he spoke as if the words themselves were tasty foods in his mouth, sweet or spicy. Sebago. Pontiac. Sequoia.

  Sometimes he recited bits of poems. For this he gathered his voice up and urged it into faster rhythms.

  Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

  Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun

  Conspiring with him how to load and bless

  With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run

  He snipped off the end of the word fruit, rounded out bosom with a purr.
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br />   The poetry voice seemed to have a trace of an accent, crisp and proper, like the voice that read the ABC news on the radio. It wasn’t the same as the one he’d used with the salesman at the car place, breezy and light, when he’d said, ‘Looks like we’ve got a deal.’

  We parked outside the Kooralang pub. There were lights on in the bar, and faces turned to look.

  ‘Meet you at the book shop,’ said Miller. Before he walked away he reached for Ishtar, kissed her, and I saw his hand on her bottom, squeezing.

  Once he had gone, it seemed very quiet. The road was wide and the buildings seemed to lean away from it as if resenting any activity that might occur between them. Ishtar glanced up and down and then started to cross the broad black expanse, boots ringing. I followed, feeling the eyes from the pub.

  Inside the op-shop, Ishtar went through the racks of clothes, occasionally bringing something over and holding it up against me; the purpose of this visit was to put together a uniform for me to wear to school.

  I stood at the window looking out. A few people passed — farmer-looking men, in hats and boots. A tall, shambling woman pushing a pram with two dogs in it.

  After a while, Ishtar went through to the back room and the two women behind the counter began to talk about her. One had a slow voice that went on and on like a ribbon unwinding, and the other kept sticking in sharp little sounds, like pins.

  ‘She’ll be from that place then.’

  ‘Mm. Yes.’

  ‘You know, up the hill, near the Munros’.’

  ‘Mm. Mm.’

  ‘You know, those people.’

  ‘Yes. Yes.’

  ‘The hippies.’

  ‘Yes.’

  A pause. The rustling of newspaper as they unwrapped things from a box.

  The ribbon voice lowered. ‘Thought there was only one or two kiddies, but here’s another.’

  ‘Mm. Yes.’

  ‘Running wild, no doubt.’

  ‘Mm. Mm.’

  I was standing between the two window mannequins. One of them had its hand out and the fingers were chipped, half-moons of chalky plaster scarring the flesh-coloured paint.

  ‘Used to be a couple of them at the school,’ continued the ribbon voice. ‘One was in Mitchell’s class, Gail’s little boy.’

  ‘Mm?’ pricked the pin voice.

  ‘Filthy dirty, Gail said.’

  ‘Mm. Oh.’

  ‘Crawling with parasites, probably.’

  ‘Mm. Yes.’

  ‘Worms.’ The ribbon voice dropped to a whisper, and I turned to see that Ishtar had come back in.

  ‘Lice.’ The woman took another newspaper-wrapped shape from the box.

  ‘Just these, thanks,’ said Ishtar.

  The farming supply building was shaped like a shed and built from the same metal, which sighed and shuddered in the wind. It was enormous; inside, it felt like standing in a big-city train station — not a real building at all, but a strange, covered part of the outside, porous and booming. Standing in the entranceway, between the slid-open doors that could have fitted two side-by-side buses, I couldn’t see the far wall. Tractors hulked in the shadows and smaller machines stood with their attachments — scoops out front, or cutters — gleaming faintly like the jaws of insects. There were corridors made of open, towering shelves, with piles of shovels and axes and hoes and clippers, hoses and sacks of grain, or boots and hats and raincoats — each shelf so wide and deep and high I imagined making one of them a room for myself, with a bed and even a chair.

  Miller stood out among the farmers and the salesmen; it was as if he was too clearly in focus. Where their clothes had a soft look, the colours muted, their jeans grease-stained and white at the knees, his held a freshness, the colours too bright, too evenly distributed. It was the same with the hands. The farmers’ hands were battered, the fingers blunt and clumsy-looking, often black at the knuckles and nails. Miller’s hands in comparison glared their unmarked cleanliness, their softness — he mostly kept them in his pockets.

  ‘G’day, mate. Got any Sebago?’

  Here was another of his voices — lazy, the words oozing from somewhere between his nose and throat. Still, it rang out too loudly, and I saw the way the men looked at him and then cut their eyes at each other.

  When they brought the sacks of planting potatoes, they stood back and watched as he heaved the first few into the back of the car, bending awkwardly to hug them round their knobbly middles, his face reddening.

  ‘Give you a hand there, mate?’ They stepped in, their movements casual, took the sacks by the top corners and used their knees to buck them up and into the boot as if they weighed nothing at all.

  Miller stood by, panting, eyes elsewhere. His pink lower lip shone.

  Later, in the car, his clipped, newsreader’s voice took on a bitter, nasal edge. ‘Lot of inbreeding in these places,’ he said, slowing to overtake a tractor that was trundling half on and half off the road. ‘Pity. The gene pool becomes muddy. Results in all kinds of inadequacies.’

  Ishtar didn’t answer, but nodded.

  We passed, and I glimpsed the man on the tractor — hat, flannel shirt, work-scarred hands on the big steering wheel — and then Miller swung his own wheel so we cut very close in front, crossing partly onto the verge, and I felt us accelerate, heard the engine rev and the hard flick and ping of flying gravel — and, receding, the shouts of the farmer.

  After dinner he would sometimes go on a rant, pacing in front of the fire, scooping air with his hands.

  ‘What have we lost, in our comfort, our ease, with our televisions, our houses chewing up electricity, driving around in our cars, sitting on our arses?’ This voice was a mixture — it swung between the proper, neat-edged one and the squashed bewdy mate one.

  A murmured response might rise from an armchair, or from one of the shadowy figures seated cross-legged on the floor, but Miller’s questions weren’t meant to be answered — he made no pause, left no space for other voices.

  ‘What have we given away? What power?’ The firelight burnished his hair. ‘Understanding.’ He clapped the back of one hand into the palm of the other. ‘Consciousness. Awareness. We have tried to push the earth away, cut ourselves off from it. And from each other! We don’t know how to live closely any more, how to cooperate. We’re each in his own little box, driving off to our offices every day, working, working — doing what? Making money. What for? To spend. What on? Our little boxes, keeping comfortable, warming our soft white arses, staring at our tellies, driving our cars.’

  Somewhere in the gloom, Willow’s baby began to cry, and there was a shuffling. A woman got up and began to collect empty plates, but Miller talked on as if giving a speech to a vast crowd. He jabbed a finger in the direction of the road to town.

  ‘They’re all stuck in it, in their isolation, this endless, meaningless scrambling for money. They think there’s no way out, no other option. But we know.’ He tapped his broad chest with a thumb. ‘We know how easy it is! How simple. To return to the earth, to commune with nature, with each other. To simply step outside of the circuit.’ He tilted back his head and gave it a slow, disbelieving shake. ‘It’s all so simple,’ he said, and the flash of a smile broke open his beard. ‘All we need is a patch of land and some seeds.’

  Ripples of approval and agreement did stir among those listening when Miller gave these performances, but to me there always seemed to be a feeling of detachment, of separation. And it didn’t only come from him, from the one-way nature of his speechifying, the fact that he treated them like a faceless crowd. There was almost an air of indulgence in the way they watched and listened, and in the way — despite the supportive nods and murmurs by the fireside — they went on with their lives, heading off to work the next morning as usual while he strode alone out to the weed-filled veggie patch with
a hoe.