Hope Farm (18 page)

So there was that try at a commune and then a different one and another man and then some one else and then back to the ashram again for a while. On and on. Maybe you could say at first I was young and silly but by the time Miller came along I should have been old enough to know better. You would think I would have learnt some thing over all those years but now here I was at Hope and in a worse situation than ever before you could almost laugh it was so predictable. Some times I could just about hear my mothers voice saying I knew youd end up coming to nothing having no pride being taken advantage of there was always some thing wrong with you. Nothing to laugh about there. And nothing to do but keep going.

One morning I was hanging up washing and I felt someone standing behind me. It was her, Dawn. It had been a week but she remembered, maybe she wasnt as crazy as Miller said. Why are you still here? she said in a whispery voice, I told you to leave. I didnt turn around I kept doing the clothes but my heart started thumping. Youll leave if you know whats good for you she said, I dont know what hes promised but I can tell you absolutely right now you wont get it. Her voice was so soft I wondered if I was imagining it but I looked quickly while I was bending to the basket and she was there like a skinny stick swaying in the wind. Hes wilful she said. I expect it I expect him to be led by his passions. He has all these silly ideas and some times he gets other people involved. And I let him go. But only so far. She came closer she was right behind me. I turned around and stepped back. She had her hand up and I thought she was going to go for me again but she had it curled like she was holding a leash. He will always come back to me she said in that whispery voice. He is my husband, mine. I was watching that hand so I hadnt seen what was in the other one and it was only when Miller ran over and grabbed her and picked her up and carried her away that I saw it there fallen in to the long grass, one of the kitchen knives. He took her to there room and I got the knife and went and put it away. My hands were shaking and I had to walk to my room and sit down but it wasnt because of Dawn and the knife it was because I needed to think. It was hard to get my mind properly working because I felt so sick and all I wanted to do was lie down and sleep but that was nothing to do with what just happened either. I knew the real reason, the signs had been there for days now but I just couldnt believe it could be true. And for it to happen then when I was so stuck all that money gone and Miller promising and promising, and staying not because I believed him but because I just couldnt face starting again with nothing.

Later he came and found me. Im so sorry he said. Shes never been like this before. Shes asleep now. I dont think shes been taking the right pills. He sighed and sat down beside me. Poor Dawn he said, and his voice sounded all choked. There was hope for us once, long ago. There was going to be a baby. But then she lost it and … He wiped his face and sat there for a minute blowing like a horse. Then he cleared his throat and rubbed his hands slowly together. Hed remembered what he came for now he was doing that thing where he acted like he was my father a wise old man who knows best. Ishtar he said, I think you need to be some where safe until the coast is clear again. He touched my cheek. I am going to have to hide you away my precious jewel. He was whispering even though there wasnt anybody else around. It was so funny now to see the tricks he used making me feel special, well it would have been funny if I didnt feel so stupid for falling for it all this time. He held up one finger. I have an idea. And remember its just till shes gone again. Can I show you? We went to his car he drove out the drive and then partway up the dirt road and turned off. Id seen that entrance before, it was just a gap in the bush no gate or any thing. I hadnt realised it was a little track. The car hardly fit, branches scratched down its sides. We bumped along around some bends and then he stopped again. There was a house there, a shack hardly standing up. We got out and went over to it. Everything was so quiet just birds and that sound trees make like breathing. Its an old miners cottage said Miller. There are a few of them round here mostly derelict. This ones not too bad, looks to have been inhabited until quite recently. He pushed open the door. It was a wreck, there was some furniture but it was all broken and covered in dust there was rubbish everywhere it stank like possums holes in the floor there was just one main room and another tiny one no kitchen no bathroom. I saw myself through my mothers eyes then how low Id fallen and taken poor Silver with me. Miller lifted up a chair that was on its side and tried to bang the dust off it. I will fix it up for you he said. He knelt down and took my hands. I will make it lovely for you my queen. I knew he wouldnt. It was strange to think how it used to be me always looking up to him how he was like the sun dazzling me filling everything how just the sound of his voice made me feel like all my joints had come undone. And now here I was the one looking down on him kneeling. He pushed his face against the backs of my hands he licked my knuckles. Please he said, It wont be for long. All right I said. Just until you pay me back. One month. He grinned up at me then he started undoing my jeans. Full of secret power thats how I should have felt but I didnt. Or angry that he thought I believed him that I was so dumb such a sucker. But I was so tired and even though under the fog there was an idea coming for a way out I felt scared I felt like I was seventeen again and suddenly just like a voice said it in my ear I heard my old name. Miller pushed me onto the filthy chair and my breasts hurt when he sucked at them, I looked up at the cobwebs strung like ropes I swallowed down on my sick fear and waited for him to finish.

‘We're moving,' was all Ishtar said.

I was horrified when I first saw the place. Cold, stale air. Thin light from a small, dirty window. A low roof, close walls, all made of the same dark timber. Broken-off floorboards leaving long holes. Rubbish in drifts — newspapers, old beer cans with the colour gone. Rusted springs leering from the torn seat of a chair.

‘We won't be here long,' she said, dropping her bags on the floor. ‘A month.'

‘And then will we go back to Hope?'

‘Probably not.'

‘Where, then?'

But she had moved away, gone into the other, tiny, room, where the rasping of a broom started up.

Miller, who had brought us there in the car, stayed — much to my relief — for only a minute or two. He strode around tapping on the walls. ‘Beautiful timber,' he said. ‘Local hardwood, last a thousand years. And see this craftsmanship?' He ran a hand along the place where the mantel, which had names and swear words gouged into it and was scattered with empty cans, joined the wall. ‘Absolutely superb. You won't see skill like that these days.'

Ishtar moved round him with the broom, collecting mounds of rubbish and pushing them out the door. At one point he made a grab for her, but she sidestepped and went on sweeping.

‘Won't take us long, will it?' said Miller. ‘To get the place in order.'

Ishtar said nothing. She took a cushion off the rickety little couch and swept underneath it.

Miller rocked up onto his toes and back. Then he went out to where the ghost of the little house's long-ago garden glimmered in rose briars and thickened fruit trees and a patch of weedy grass, bright against the background of silty bush. Round he paced, hands clasped behind his back, as if doing some kind of official inspection. Soon he moved out of sight, back along the track to where the car was parked, and after a few moments there were the sounds of the engine starting and him driving away.

‘Who's going to live here?' I said to Ishtar.

She raised the broom and began knocking the cans off the mantelpiece. ‘Us.'

‘You and me?'

‘Yeah.'

‘And Miller?'

She paused for a moment. Her skin looked strange, moist — I thought of damp clay with its muddy smell. ‘No,' she said. ‘Just us.'

‘Why?'

She shrugged and swept the cans into a rattling pile.

‘Is it because of Dawn?' My ears were getting hot.

‘What do you mean?'

I had a teetering, dizzy feeling. I thought back to the kitchen the other morning, to the way she had told me to go or I'd miss the bus, but then hadn't made me leave. There was some kind of rule there, I knew, to do with listening but pretending not to understand — and now I was breaking it. I swallowed. ‘Because she's his wife?'

Ishtar looked at me. ‘Yeah,' she said, the word descending between us. Then she went back to sweeping.

It was Dan who came to help, that first day. He brought lengths of scrap timber that he sawed to fit into the holes in the floor. He went off again and found a camping stove and spirit lamp at the op shop, and a card table and a couple of chairs, and rigged up shelving with bricks and planks. He stuck a broom up the chimney and shook down a hail of black dust and cinders. He brought milk crates and more timber to make beds for us, topped with mattresses also from the op shop. I heard Ishtar offer him money, but he said no. He brought a bucket for getting water from the creek and a shallow tin tub for us to wash in, standing up, like they had at Hope that time.

At first I kept my distance, stepping round the edges of their busyness. This was much worse than Dan's adoring eyes at dinnertime. Here he was rushing round like some pathetic servant while Ishtar barely spoke to either of us, but went on grimly working, her expression remote and closed. And why were they doing all this anyway? The place was a ruin. Why didn't we just leave, Ishtar and me? Why did she always treat me like this, never protecting me from anything and then when I tried to enter her world, to ask about things like I just had, slamming down a shutter?

I went to the creek for a while, following a trail that sloped through the bush. It came out near a big wattle, which was the place I'd met Ian that first time. But Ian himself didn't appear, and eventually I got bored and went back.

Dan was outside, cutting a plank of wood that he held in place with one knee on a tall stump. The panting of the saw echoed round the clearing. He had lit a fire to burn the rubbish and there were the fresh smells of smoke and sawdust. When he paused in his work, using his forearm to push the hair out of his face, and smiled at me, my resentment and my lonely disdain faltered.

‘Did you see your room?'

‘My room?'

‘Yeah. The little one. You should go and have a look. We've set up the bed.'

I went in, past Ishtar, who was working at one of the walls of the main room with a scrubbing brush. There was hardly space in the second room for anything more than a single bed, but like Dan said, someone — him, I was sure — had set one up, and even made it with sheets that, although worn and musty-smelling and with garish patterns that didn't match, were tucked neatly in. There was also an upended wooden crate for a little table, holding a candle in a saucer and a box of matches. There was still the smell of animal urine and, despite all the sweeping, a layer of dust and grit on the floor underfoot. But something turned over in my chest at the sight of that little room, at the care that had been taken. The rest of my ill will fell away, stiff and crumpled, and was replaced unexpectedly by tremulous, tentative excitement. I knelt on the bed and peered through the small window. Past the thorny branches of a runaway rose bush, the scrub made a dense wall. Hope — Dawn and Jindi, and Willow and Gav, and even Miller — seemed very far away.

I went back outside and Dan handed me a spade. He indicated the pile of rubbish that lay outside the door. ‘Shove some of that load on the fire, will you?'

We got it all done in that one day. I carried water from the creek till my arms hurt and both palms felt raw from the bucket handle. I shovelled up the swathes of rubbish that Ishtar had sent pouring from the doorway like vomit from a gaping mouth and fed them to the fire, black tissues of ash rising to kiss the backs of my hands. Ishtar swept and scrubbed and Dan sawed and hammered, and came and went in his truck.

It was dark when we finished. Dan drove off one last time and returned with fish and chips, and we sat on the rickety chairs round the card table. The traces of possum were barely discernable under the smells of White Lily and the bunch of creamy ti-tree blossoms that Dan had stuck in a jar — and now the salty, hot smell of the food. The spirit lamp burred and threw out white glare; over near Ishtar's bed, with its Indian quilt, the firelight was softer, reflecting pink and orange in the timber. Dan had gotten a rug from somewhere — it was worn and had holes at one end, but it covered most of the patched floor. Someone had arranged a folded tablecloth over the crass carvings on the mantelpiece. The place had the quality of a cubby, or a campsite — a kind of makeshift homeliness that seems heartbreaking now, but at the time worked a kind of magic on me.

I was so tired and warm with the day's unexpected happiness that I didn't even notice Ishtar's wilted posture and the weary, mechanical way she stuffed the food into her mouth — not until Dan cleared his throat.

‘You all right, Ishtar?'

‘Just tired.' But she didn't look up.

My old irritation stirred at the sight of Dan's soft, concerned face, and I took a last handful of chips and got up and went into my new room. Closing the door behind me, I sat on the edge of the bed in the almost-dark and ate the chips one by one, licking my fingers and wiping them on my jeans. Then I kicked off my boots and got into the bed with all my clothes on and lay listening to the sigh and murmur of the bush outside. I didn't hear any further talk between Dan and Ishtar, and not long after there were the sounds of him leaving.

I turned over and stretched out my legs luxuriously. My own bed, in my own room, in my own house. Heavy with fatigue, I fell easily into sleep.