Hope Farm Page 8

  Nearby, a briefcase, deep reddish brown like an office worker’s, overflowed with pieces of paper. From these I learned his full name: Walter Ronald Miller. A few of the papers had swirly writing at the top saying either University of Melbourne or University of Sydney. Some of the others were from Telecom or the SEC with bold red letters saying things like FINAL NOTICE and PAY IMMEDIATELY. Some of these had Miller’s name, some had other names — names of women.

  Next to the briefcase was a tall carton full of clothes, still in their packaging, from a shop called Henry Buck’s. Five or six neatly folded shirts with pieces of white card showing at the undersides of the collars. Three soft jumpers in sleeves of tissue paper that had snagged and torn where the sticky tape was, but which still held a clean, new-wool smell. A jacket and pants of dark grey, heavy fabric — these had been badly folded and stuffed in and so were very creased, but they were brand new, too, and Miller was handwritten on a bit of paper pinned to the sleeve of the jacket.

  Another box held a diary, bound in leather, with 1978 embossed on the front. Listening for the sound of Miller’s car, I riffled through it: it was mostly blank, the pages opening with reluctance, as if for the first time, but the early couple of months had entries, a few words on each page, marked in a close, sloping script. I struggled to make one out. J. Banner, it said, 2.15 Prelim hearing. Underneath the diary were some spiral-bound notebooks, filled with writing in that same hand. None of it made sense to me — it was all about affidavits and pleas, and prosecutors, and had lots of names I’d never heard of, some marked vs. with another name I’d never heard of. There was a big fat hardcover book, too: The Law of Torts in Australia.

  I glanced at Ishtar’s one suitcase and duffel bag sitting in the corner. They looked their usual compact, neat selves, but even they were being encroached on by the huge, looming tide that was Miller’s mess — and her bedspread, crumpled down at the foot of the mattress, appeared more worn than I remembered, and smaller. I turned slowly in the small central clearing. So much stuff. As if he conjured it with his hands, brought it bouncing and skittering into his orbit, to then fly along in his wake like iron filings following a magnet. Into my mind came the twin images of Miller lifting Ishtar and putting her into the car, and then lifting and carrying her into the room at the ashram — her yielding body, her transformed face. Then I saw him raising Jindi towards the night sky. The power in those arms, and the speed with which they snatched something up — a body, a whole person — and then just as quickly let it go again.

  The feeling of dread that had lapped at me since I entered the room was becoming unbearable. I made for the door, but then stopped. Above the bed, someone had stuck a picture, hand-drawn with coloured pencil on a large piece of yellowing butcher’s paper. It was better than I could do, but amateurish nonetheless — perhaps Year-Nine or -Ten level. The detail and choice of colours were impressive, but the scale was out, giving a sense of vertigo, and the figures had clumsy, too-big heads, and hands without enough fingers. I moved closer to examine it properly.

  At the bottom there were layers of green and brown, with tiny things dotted here and there: networks of tunnels with rabbits and rats in them, bones both animal and human, snakes and lizards, minuscule worms and bugs that I had to get right up close to see; veins of gold with borders of dashes to show sparkling, faceted jewels with their own dashes in ruby red and emerald green; and then, massed into clots, rubbish — scrumples of paper or rag, apple cores, cans and bottles, even a toilet bowl with a crack pencilled across it and, down low in one corner, the carcass of a half-flattened car. All through this section, reaching among these objects, snaked the root system of a tree. This took up the lower third of the paper.

  Then there was a middle section with a background of light blue and the trunk of the tree rising up in the centre, reaching its wide limbs to both sides, bristling with leaves all shades of green. Below this canopy, taking up every inch of space, were plants, animals, people, buildings, even a pool of water with a boat on it, all jumbled in every which way, sideways and upside down, as if packed as closely as possible. I stood for some time taking in all the different elements, because there was a lot happening: a nest of eggs; two people seated at a table, a roast chicken on a plate between them; an aeroplane crashing into a mountain in a grey, red, and yellow explosion; a silver horse twisting her neck to lick her suckling foal; a group of grinning skeletons holding the body and separated head of a naked baby aloft, blood spurting. It was all mixed in together, the lovely and the awful, all shoved in every which way in the cramped blue. My chest felt tight. I glanced at the doorway.

  The last, highest, part of the paper had no background colour, so what was drawn there appeared to float in jaundiced space above the busy scene below. In the middle was a swollen sun, flecked with red and sending out a semicircle of rays. At the end of each ray were the same two figures drawn over and over again in different positions. In every one, the figures were locked together by the man’s penis, which was enormous, almost as big as one of his legs — the man was meant to be Miller, clearly, with his bronze halo. Each snaking penis was sticking into some part of the woman — Ishtar, with her draped hair, her calm eyes. The places where the penis stuck into Ishtar’s body had been drawn as if transparent, so the whole penis could be seen going into one of the two passages drawn like wormholes between her legs — or in some of the pictures her mouth, and throat. In every picture, a spray of droplets burst from the end of the penis, from a dark point marked there precisely in black; the liquid, all colours of the rainbow, shooting into the shaded pink of Ishtar’s body.

  I couldn’t get those enjoined figures out of my mind. In they came, as I lay sleepless on my mattress in the Joni Mitchell room: the brutal, stabbing, oversized penis; the explosions of sperm; the awful angles of Ishtar’s bent-back limbs. The strange peace in the two pencilled faces, as if disconnected from the actions of their bodies.

  I tried to bring a blackness down over them, or to replace them with shimmering blobs of silvery blue by rubbing my eyes hard, but they always came back. I tried to stop the cartoon heads and clumsy hands from turning into the real Miller and Ishtar, with skin and wet tongues and other parts, but I couldn’t.

  I’d glimpsed those dark, adult places before, at those parties — Ishtar there in some sprawl of candlelit flesh — but this was different. And somehow worse. I didn’t know why, but it seemed to have something to do with the towers of junk in Miller’s room, evidence of a vast, messy past that he trailed so blithely, as if it was weightless.

  Pat was right the nurses were mean. They left me alone mostly, on a high bed in a hard white room glaring with lights. Every now and then they came in and looked under the sheet told me to open my knees like the doctor had all that time ago and it hurt when they touched me. It went on and on, it got worse than I could have ever imagined. I made noise I couldnt help it and they came and told me Shh now pull yourself together. Right at the end a doctor came, he was nicer than the nurses. Come on he said, Be a good girl youre nearly there. Then she was born and I heard her cry. The nurses tried to stop me seeing, they took my arms and tried to make me lie back again but I pushed them away and sat up and for a moment I saw her at the end of the bed under the doctors big hand with its white glove. I saw her dark hair all wet and her little pink ear and her skinny arms out wide. I saw she was a girl. And then she turned her head and I saw her face and it was funny because I heard one of the church ladys say once that all newborns look like there fathers but she didnt, I looked at her and all I saw was myself. The doctor cut the cord and then a nurse wrapped her in a cloth and took her away.

  Something went wrong with the plumbing in the bathroom. The bath wouldn’t drain, and had to be bucketed out every time someone had a shower. The room became wetter and mouldier, with puddles collecting on the slippery lino, and the floorboards swelled with damp in the places where the lino had already worn away. Then one day an
elongated hole appeared near the base of the bath, from which freezing air blasted upwards, smelling of dirt and rodents.

  There was a meeting of sorts, in the kitchen. It was a weekend morning, Miller not yet up.

  ‘Three letters, I’ve written,’ said Gav, in a tone that managed to be all at once incredulous, aggrieved, and triumphant.

  ‘They promised to send a plumber,’ said someone else. ‘Straight away. That was last week.’

  ‘And Val’s rung them on the phone, and even gone in to the office.’

  Val’s rattling laugh. ‘The woman said, “Oh, so yer use the bath, then, do yer?”’

  No one joined in the laughter — instead there was a round of tongue-clicks.

  ‘Fascists.’

  ‘Arseholes.’

  Heavy sighs.

  ‘Ah, well …’

  Arms folded, away they slouched.

  People began washing in a small tin tub in the laundry. It was only knee deep, and not wide enough to sit down in. I didn’t use it — there was no door. At any time, a figure might be glimpsed from the kitchen, bending and sloshing, luminously naked in the gloom.

  ‘We’re not paying the rent,’ said Val grimly, setting the envelope of cash on the kitchen windowsill, ‘till something’s done. That’s the only language they understand, the bastards — the language of money. They’ll get off their arses soon enough.’

  I came back from the creek late one afternoon to find Miller out at the wood-splitting stump with a chainsaw, in a storm of noise and spraying woodchips. On the back steps, Jindi jumped up and down, her mouth moving, her voice a tiny peep under the frenzied revving of the machine. Two men also stood by: Jez, who was the guitar-playing man from that earlier night; and Gav, with the glasses and ratty ponytail. Gav also sometimes wore a sarong that showed his hairy white legs above socks and sandals.

  Miller held the chainsaw with braced arms, angled it this way and that, applying it to a chunk of wood. A shape emerged — a wide, shallow, scooped-out grin. The wood inside was a lighter colour, rough from the teeth of the saw.

  At last the noise stopped, and he laid the machine down. ‘Right,’ he said, and Gav and Jez moved forward.

  There were two sections of a large tree trunk turned sideways, the bottom edges trimmed to form a flat base, the tops cut away into half-moons. Gav and Jez took one between them, Miller the other. Away they moved, bodies bent with the strain, past the chicken coop and the compost heap to a level bit of relatively clear ground that lay at the bottom of the hill. There they arranged the logs either side of a small, freshly dug pit.

  The bath they laid on top was the old cast-iron one I’d seen down the side of the farmhouse, rust-streaked and belly-up in the weeds. It had already been flipped and washed out — and with help from Val and Ishtar, Miller and the others got it off the ground to waist height and shuffled with it to the waiting log cradles. With yells and much grunting, it was settled into place.

  Jez, Gav, and Val wandered off. Miller, sweating, retired to the kitchen steps with a glass of beer, and Ishtar took over. Before the sun — indistinct behind an even sheet of cloud — crept away completely, she had the bath filled from the hose and a fire built beneath, banked and settling into coals. A black mark merged with the rust where the flames touched the underside of the bath, but when I looked down through the water the inside was unblemished. When steam began to rise, Ishtar took a shovel and put out the fire. There was the smell of wood smoke and a faint metal tang. Darkness had gathered in the bush and along the fence lines; the light was on in the kitchen, casting a warped, yellow rectangle onto the ground. Someone brought a candle.

  Most people were back from work now and a small crowd applauded as Jindi, her bare skin starkly white in the near-dark, rings of dirt at her neck and wrists, was lifted, shrieking with glee, into the water. The bath was so deep she had to hold onto the edge; grubby trails dripped from her fingers down the newly cleaned rim.

  ‘How is it, Jindi?’

  Jindi wallowed and grinned, her double chin bulging. ‘Nice!’ she declared. ‘Very nice!’

  The kitchen door banged open and out came Val, naked and whooping, arms flung upward, the loose flesh of her belly and thighs quivering. To renewed cheering from the crowd and the engine-like chug of her own laugh, she skipped across the grass, breasts bobbling. The orange-red of her hennaed hair flared in the candlelight as she hooked one leg over the edge and clambered in with a splash.

  ‘Who’s next?’ yelled someone.

  Gav began to unbutton his shirt. ‘Shove up, girls,’ he called. ‘There’s room for one more.’

  I went inside, which meant passing Miller where he still sat on the step, now with Ishtar on his lap. I approached with my head lowered, and at the edge of my vision they appeared to be one merged being with two heads and a sprawling, many-limbed body. Miller’s drawing rose, unbidden, into my mind and I took the steps quickly, gut shrinking with distaste. I imagined the two of them were waiting, with a kind of benevolent tolerance, for everyone else to finish with the bath — Val and Willow and Gav; lesser beings, who belonged in the overcrowded middle plane of Miller’s picture — so that they, who were special and belonged up high in clear space, contorting themselves joyously at the end of each pointing ray of sun, could have it all to themselves.

  ‘Where’re you off to?’ Ishtar’s voice was a half-hearted murmur, and I felt her hand pat briefly at the leg of my jeans as I passed — an absent, dismissive pat.

  In the kitchen I made myself a slice of bread with honey. By the sink lay some potatoes, half of them peeled. A frying pan was on the stove and starting to send up black smoke. I turned off the hotplate and went into my room.

  Lying in bed I could hear them, singing, yelling. Eventually there were the sounds of someone moving around inside the house, followed by the smell of pot and then, after a bit longer, the smell of cooking. My stomach twitched with hunger but I didn’t get up. I thought about Jindi descending naked into the water, the uncomplicated joy in her face, the way she kicked and wriggled, free in her child’s body. I curled on my side under the blanket, pushed with my forearms at the hateful tender places where my breasts were starting to grow.

  The outside bath was popular for a while, until a man came and fixed the bathroom, and everyone started using that again.

  ‘It is glorious, out in the clean air,’ said Val. ‘Just glorious. But it’s also fucken freezing!’

  They put me in a different room. Go to sleep they said, You need to rest. I want to see my baby I said. You cant keep her from me. Not now they said, The babys sleeping now. You need to rest. They went round the bed straightening things. They took my temperature and looked under the sheet again, they were always looking without asking first or saying what they were doing. Please I said. Its best if you dont they said. A new woman came in, a woman in plain clothes. Hello she said and smiled. She had a singsong, false kind of voice. She said Im an almoner thats a funny word isnt it? I almost laughed it was such a joke her talking to me like I was a child, me who had just had a baby. My job is to help girls like you she said. I saw the papers in her hand, I knew what she was doing. Now you just need to sign these she said. No I said. She smiled. Youre tired she said, I will come back later. A nurse gave me an injection. I was so sore and worn out I couldnt help it I fell asleep. When I woke up I didnt know how long Id slept, the lights were off the blind was down and I couldnt tell if it was day or night. A nurse came and I asked again about the baby and she said Later. They brought me food and I was so hungry I ate it all and then I fell asleep again. Next time I woke up the blind was open and it was day. Can I see my baby please I said and the nurse said Not now. Then I thought of some thing. Dont I have to feed her? I said. No no she said, Dont worry about that, shes being taken care of. I dont know how much time passed, I slept again and when I woke up the almoner was back sitting beside the b
ed in a chair. Well youre looking much better now she said in her put on voice and set the papers down over my knee and held out a pen. I didnt take it, I didnt look at the papers. Please can I see my baby I said, I dont want to give her up. She tried to hold my hand but I pulled away so she put her hand on my arm. We already have a couple she said, Waiting. Theyre a lovely couple and they cant have any children themselves. Now dont be selfish. What kind of a life do you think you can offer her? She deserves a good life in a comfortable home and a good education. You cant give her any of that now can you? Mm? I tried to think, my mind wasnt clear. The papers nearly fell off my knee and she put them back again. She slipped the pen between my fingers. I just want to see her I said. Well she said, How about you sign these and then maybe … I felt so foggy and tired I nearly did it, it would have been so easy and maybe she was right maybe I was being selfish. But under the fog I felt hate, I hated her I hated all of them the nurses the nuns my mother, I didnt want to be a good girl I didnt want to do what they said to enter the tunnel like Evie to shut my life down. Id seen that babys face and it was like a reflection of myself. I let the pen go and it fell on the floor. She bent to pick it up and I tipped my knees and the papers slid off and just missed her head. She straightened up all flushed and her voice wasnt singsong any more. Youre a silly girl she said, Why wont you cooperate? Think about your baby, dont be so selfish. Then I saw some thing in the doorway and it was her, Mira, except she didnt have the plaits she had her hair pinned up and she wasnt wearing her silk clothes, she had on a skirt and a blouse very old fashioned. The almoner got to her feet. Who are you? she said, There are no visitors allowed in here. Help me I called. I pulled back the covers and sat up. What are you doing? said the almoner, Lie down now please. She went over to Mira. No visitors in here she said, Youll have to leave. Help me I called, They wont let me see my baby theyre going to make me give her up. The almoner pushed Mira out the door then went out herself.