Hope Farm Read online

  Later I would realise that of course people like him had already come and gone, making little difference. The established residents accepted him as they accepted most things, with the particular combination of indifference and tolerance that seemed to be their specialty. I’ve heard that those who last the distance in communal living situations tend to be the ones without any strong motivations or ideas of their own. The leaders — the movers and shakers, the Utopian dreamers — care too much about their visions and are too uncompromising in them to be able, in the long term, to get along with others. And now, when I dredge up the faces of some of those Hope Farm stayers — Willow; Jindi’s mum, Val, who did most of the cooking; the joint-smoking woman and her guitar-playing boyfriend — I imagine I see, in the settled lines at their mouths and the corners of their eyes, and in the way those eyes gaze out, a sort of enduring and strangely contented apathy.

  They were certainly more than happy to accept the drugs Miller always had a lot of. I’d been around plenty of pot smoking — not in the ashrams, but in the group houses, and Ishtar often had a little stash of leaf in her bag, along with her tobacco pouch and packet of papers — and the smell of it and the sight of equipment such as bongs was something I was so used to I barely paid attention. But even I noticed how full the pot bowl on the low table in that front room always was once Miller had come to Hope, and how much stronger and riper the smell of the smoke that filled the room. And regularly, over the next couple of months, he would produce acid, which got everyone going much more than any speech.

  Although an unpleasant, thick-headed feeling always came over me when there was pot smoke in the air, I had never actually taken any drugs myself, nor tried alcohol. It would have been easy enough — nobody watched what children were doing; I had seen kids not much older than I was drinking and smoking joints at parties. But I had never been interested. I didn’t like what I saw happen to people when they drank booze, smoked dope, dropped acid. The bleariness, the slurring. The loss of control, I suppose that was it. And I didn’t like being around people who were in that state, in those rooms with that building tension, that feeling of unpredictability, danger.

  One night in those early few weeks at Hope, when one of these acid parties was just getting started and I was making my way out of the front room, ducking between the dancing bodies, the smells of armpits and greasy hair, someone moved out of the way and I had a sudden clear view of Miller and Ishtar. She appeared, as she often did, to be a solitary calm point in the midst of the action. Miller stood before her, and I watched as he licked his forefinger and dabbed it in his palm where a tab of LSD must have lain. He held out the finger, and like a shy horse — or someone acting the part of a shy horse — she dipped her head, and then tilted up her chin, opened her lips, and took the finger into her mouth.

  I had seen Ishtar in many situations that were adult, mysterious, threatening. Naked flesh moving in the half-dark, under candle flames or firelight, or the cool glow of the moon and stars. Low voices, giggling, soft kissing sounds. Parts of bodies that my gaze skittered away from. More than two people — three, or four, or five. That heavy smell that hung in rooms the morning after a party, of bodies and booze, pot and Indian perfume. Tiptoeing out, the only person awake in the house. The whispery loop of a record left spinning on the turntable. Sleeping figures on floors, long hair and beards and tangles of bare limbs. Ishtar there somewhere, an arm slung over her, the soft peak of her exposed breast.

  This moment though, watching her take Miller’s finger into her mouth, seemed to bring down in a sick, spinning tumble all those other times I’d glimpsed her there in some dark, adult scene, giving her body, herself, over to things I didn’t understand, things I feared — things I knew, even at the time, that someone should have been protecting me from. And standing there, my hand gripping the coarse fabric of the doorway curtain, I felt all that accumulated fear and disgust — and sense of betrayal — rise and harden, forming into a sharp point of hatred.

  But then she began to dance. She stepped away from Miller and put out her arms. She shook back her hair and I saw her cheekbones, her open lips, the curves of her closed eyes, and all I could see was how strong she was, how beautiful; all I could feel was how much I wanted her, longed for her to put her arms around me, to swallow me up with her warmth, her softness, to look right into my eyes, my face, to put me to bed and sit with me until I fell asleep. And the twisted needle of hatred — vibrating with a power that couldn’t be dissolved, that had to go somewhere — propped and skidded sideways.

  And there was Miller, moving in his own lumbering dance. He tilted back his great, furred head and his wet tongue showed. Out went one fist, trapping a sweep of Ishtar’s hair, and then he had her, her back to him, his paws all over her, that mouth at her ear. I saw his teeth part and then nip at her earlobe, I heard his laughter, low like a growl, and my hatred found a target and took off.

  I pushed through the curtain and gulped at the cold air of the unlit hallway as if it was some kind of antidote.

  He was easy to hate, to despise, as he prowled in his circle of light, talking endlessly. The unfixed gaze directed out somewhere over the heads of his audience, the chop and swirl of his hand gestures, the heedless, blustering assault. The different voices, and the way he slipped in and out of them as if nobody noticed or understood what he was doing.

  When he said, ‘Thank you kindly, madam,’ to the gaunt woman who ran the coffee shop in Kooralang and I saw the flush bloom over her craggy face and at the collar of her blouse, I had to drop my eyes. He calls you Typhoid Mary behind your back, I wanted to shout. He says you’re inbred.

  When he wielded the mattock, I noted the laboured arc of his great arm through the air, the muscles in his back heaving as he dragged it through the earth, the patches of sweat on his shirt, the way he had to stop often, panting. For all his heft, he was bad with tools, inefficient. Even I could tell he didn’t know what he was doing.

  His smell. Dense, bulky, threatening. Pot and sweat and something else, something that made me think of bulls and billygoats.

  The way he grabbed hold of Ishtar and took her from where she sat on the floor by the fire, like a toddler snatching up a toy. The way he kissed her in front of everyone, kneaded her flesh with his hands — her breasts, her buttocks — then turned and walked with his arm round her neck, pulling her in close beside him, locked to him, steering her through the house and out to the mud-brick building.

  And the way she loved it! The gentleness that came over her, the softening. I narrowed my eyes, clenched my teeth in disdain. Pathetic, she was. Sucked in.

  It was before dinner, early evening, and I had been sent out to empty the compost bucket. Jindi was followed me, her prattling a rude trail at my back in the cold darkness, when suddenly she broke off with a squeak. I turned and saw the bush of Miller’s hair, gold in the light from the kitchen window. He had her in his arms, and was holding her above his head.

  ‘Look, look, my little pup,’ he rumbled. ‘The stars are out for us tonight. Can you touch them? Can you? Reach up your arms, my girl. I’ll help you.’ He lifted her higher. ‘Go on, reach.’

  Against the studded sky, Jindi’s figure wriggled. I could hear her eager breathing.

  ‘Did you touch one? Yes? Ah — look!’ He swung her to the ground again. ‘See?’ He stepped back and spread his arms. ‘You did!’ The girl tottered like someone who had just gotten off a ride. ‘You know how I can tell?’ Miller went down on one knee and lowered his voice. ‘I can see it shimmering all through you, the starlight. You’ve got sparkles in your hair.’

  Jindi’s hands went to her head, and she crooked her neck and twisted and turned, trying to look down at herself. ‘I —’

  Miller’s croon, warm and full, slid over her timid whisper. ‘Oh you can’t see it. Nobody can but me.’

  ‘But why —’

  ‘Because, my little puppy d
og, I see things other people don’t.’

  Then he rose and turned and went into the house, leaving Jindi gasping and voiceless, clutching her hair. I waited for her to rush across to where I stood by the compost heap, to appeal to me to check her over for shimmers and sparkles, but she didn’t.

  I squinted at her. Against the yellow glow of the window she was a solid, definite, black. Not one shimmer. But once I’d dumped out the kitchen scraps and walked back with the plastic bucket bumping against my thigh, I saw, up close in the light, how wide and moist her eyes were, the fevered brightness of her cheeks, her parted lips.

  From inside the kitchen came a round of Miller’s laughter. I took the steps slowly. I didn’t want him near me, I didn’t want those big, strange, soft hands to touch me, couldn’t stand the thought of his face close to mine, his breath entering my lungs. But still, I felt myself stiffen with the heavy, lonely pride of the excluded.

  I don’t know why he didn’t ever scoop me up in his arms, purr into my ear, try to summon in me the thrill that set Jindi sparkling, brought the tiny but significant smile to Ishtar’s lips. I wasn’t as young as Jindi. I had no puppy-dog charm — I’d long since passed the age where any adult might want to sweep me up, to hold me in their arms. I was scrawny, my limbs were too long; my face, when I caught sight of it in the small, dark mirror that hung from a nail on the bathroom wall, appeared to have been outgrown by its features; my hair had neither Ishtar’s chocolate-and-caramel sheen nor Jindi’s babyish silkiness, but snaked heavily in all the wrong directions. That could have been the reason: my adolescent awkwardness, and the untouchability that went with it — although it’s hard to believe Miller would notice any such thing. Perhaps he did pick up something of my reaction to him, my hatred, strong as it was. Perhaps that was it.

  If he’d seen me as at all significant, as any kind of threat, then he might have put some effort into winning me over — but he didn’t. He ignored me. And that might have been his biggest mistake.

  In the Home there was only work and prayer time and sleep. High brick walls and a circle of lawns like a moat. I fell in to the busyness, lost myself in it levering sheets out of the giant boiling vats in the laundry chopping piles of carrots in the kitchen scrubbing floors kneeling with the others while a nun said prayers. I forgot everything and became a dumb beast that worked and worked and never thought. My back ached the skin on my hands cracked my mind sank in to a murk. There were some girls pregnant like me and some just in for punishment, those ones were pretty tough. I kept to myself. I was scared, I didnt even talk to the other pregnant ones not even at night when we went in to our tiny bedrooms with there partitions so thin they were like curtains. Some times I heard other girls crying and some times my belly jerked with the kicks like calls for help but I was always so tired I just fell in to black sleep. A girl who was getting big would just vanish and nobody said any thing a new girl arriving to take her place. I didnt know how long Id been there the days stretched endless in both directions. It got harder to reach over the laundry and kitchen benches and to get up and down off my knees with the scrubbing brush or at prayer time but I barely noticed when we were told to have a wash I didnt look down or touch my belly. I didnt think about the people from the park or Evie Dyer or my mother or any thing, the past and the future didnt exist in this place. Some of the girls got visitors some times and phone calls or letters but not me. Then a girl came who was different. Pat she was called or any way that was the name she used some girls kept there real names a secret. She was pregnant she went around behind the laundry to smoke cigarettes and when the nuns caught her she just took a last drag and threw the butt away smiling and went back to work like she could just as easily choose not to. They cant do any thing she said to me We are fallen already we cant be punished any more. She had been there before, this was her second time, she was all the way from Adelaide. There were girls from everywhere, most people sent the pregnant ones as far away as possible just in case any one saw them and found out although how any one could see you in side this prison I didnt know. This is my last chance Pat said and laughed but it was not a happy laugh. Once I followed her out when she went to smoke. Whats it like? I said. It hurts she said Like hell and the nurses are all mean old bitches. And then they take it off you straight away before you even see it and then they make you sign the papers. What papers? I said. She grinned and blew smoke. The papers that say youre giving the baby up for adoption. So it can have a good life. I tried not to look around when she said the word baby, it made me nervous and I kept expecting a nun to come. She ran her hand down her front, smoothed her dress so I could see the shape, kept her hand there. I will tell you some thing she said, You dont have to sign. They tell you you do but you dont. When she drew on the cigarette she looked much older like a grown up woman. The thing is she said, They say its for the best that you can forget about it and get on with your life. But you dont. I said What will you do this time? She dropped her hand then. She had peroxided her hair and there was a stripe of dark at the parting. Oh I will sign. Course I will. What choice have I got realy? Where would I be otherwise on my own with a kid? Id be on the street just ask my mum and dad.

  I told one of the nuns I needed to ring my parents. She took me in to the office downstairs and I dialled the number on the heavy black telephone. My mother answered. Is everything all right? she said. Yes I said. Well what is it then? said my mother. The nun was standing behind me near the door and I had to speak quietly. What if I want to keep it? I said. You cant. Why not? Couldnt you — You cant she said, Dont ask me again. My father said some thing in the background. Nothing, she said to him, Shes just being silly. To me she said This is a respectable family, if you cant be respectable then you are not welcome in this house.

  School started.

  Across the shining, wet road I clomped in my op-shop shoes, my frozen hands pulled into the sleeves of my jumper and my breath sharp in the early air, over to where Ian waited at the bus stop. He was always there first, tall and skinny in his green and grey uniform. Side by side we stood, steadfastly ignoring each other, taking it in turns to peer up the road.

  Cockatoos rasped and shrieked high in the facing wall of bush, and sometimes a beaten-up car would chug out from the Hope turn-off, windows misted, the blurred figures waving as they passed, the dry-throated bleat of a horn sounding. I never waved back.

  The bus, with its tough, craggy driver — smelling of instant coffee and cigarettes, and ever-ready with his yell of, ‘Pipe down or yer can get off and walk’ — took us, sliding on our vinyl seats, past soggy-looking paddocks that erupted every now and then into sudden, bald hills. Ian and I sat separately, of course. At intervals we stopped to let more kids on — all the same kinds of kids that were at every school. There were the bully-boys, loud and dangerous, spreading themselves across the back rows and being shouted at by the driver. Then there were the prissy girls, grouped in twos or threes, with neat hair, who all wore their uniforms, I knew, in mysterious, significant ways, like another language. Then there were the freaks. All sitting near the front. An enormously fat boy. Two girls almost as big — sisters — both with orange curly hair. A boy with glasses, who breathed heavily through his mouth. And me, of course, and Ian. Finally, there were the others, the in-between kids. Ordinary kids with freckles or buck teeth or sticking-out ears, sitting in pairs and talking. I snatched secret looks at them. These were the ones I envied, and always had.

  The hills and paddocks were eventually interrupted by increasing numbers of houses and then, all at once, rows of shops and low-rise office blocks; and finally, the tall, ugly orange-brick school buildings, flanked by an oval on one side and a vast car park on the other.

  ‘She’s from that place, I bet.’

  I sat at a desk by the window, pretending to be interested in the view of the oval below.

  ‘What place?’

  ‘You know, that hippie place. Near Kooralang
. Hope Farm, or whatever they call it. I saw her get on the bus.’

  Other voices joined in.

  ‘Awww! That place!’

  ‘What farm? Where?’

  ‘You mean Dope Farm.’

  ‘You know, near the Munros’. It’s a commune.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s where a whole lot of lazy bastards sit round taking drugs in the nude, that’s what my dad says.’

  ‘Euw.’

  I gripped the metal bars under my desk, bowed my head, waited.

  ‘Yeah, and none of them are married and they all just do it with each other all the time.’

  ‘Euw! Stop!’

  The teacher came in then, and the talk broke off.

  Later, as I searched for the library, trying to look like I knew where I was going, I expected something more. A mob of boys passed and called out, ‘Hippie shit!’ and a pair of prissy girls sliced me with their eyes, but nothing else happened. I found the library and gratefully entered its stuffy, overheated calm.

  ‘Hippie Shit’ became my nickname. I spent morning tea and lunch in the library, was picked last in Phys Ed, and when we had to make pairs in Science, I was always with one of the freaks. But this was all bearable. I was used to it. I was cloaked in layers of difference, thirteen years deep; I didn’t expect this not to go unnoticed. And it could have been much worse — I could have suffered what Ian did with Dean Price: committed, focussed bullying from someone who has decided to really hate you.

  Also, my teacher for all subjects apart from Science and Phys Ed was Mr Dickerson. Mr Dickerson had once thrown a kid from a second-storey window, Ian said — and whether or not this was true didn’t matter, the important thing was that everyone was terrified of him. He was an egg-shaped man with only a few wisps of white-grey hair, and he always wore the same formless beige trousers and a red jumper with a small flag of untucked shirt showing at the bottom. He rarely spoke, and all of his classes were the same. First he wrote a list of instructions on the blackboard. Then he turned to face the class, casting his yellowish gaze out over our heads and banging with his fist on the board as he recited what he had just written in an almost melodic, mournful tone and chalk dust ran off the end of the shelf in a shivery stream. Then he sat motionless in his chair as we all rustled and scribbled away, until it was time for him to read out the answers from a book. We corrected our own work, and I doubt anyone bothered cheating; there would be no point since every now and again, without warning, we were given a test, which we had to hand up to Mr Dickerson himself and which would be returned next lesson stippled with red ticks or crosses and a simple grade — no comments, ever.