Hope Farm (22 page)

When I woke, Ishtar was up already, packing.

I went down to the creek for water, and when I got back Dan was there. He was standing right in the doorway, and when I came up behind him he threw me a funny look, a kind of forced, wan grin, and then crossed the room in two long steps and sat down at the table like a dog that knew it was doing something punishable.

Ishtar went on folding clothes and putting them in her duffel bag.

‘Thought you might like a ride.' Dan's voice was hoarse. ‘To the station.'

She didn't look up. ‘I'm all right.'

His long fingers tapped at his knees. ‘Too cold still to be hitching, this early in the morning.'

The quiet swam round us, broken by the rustle of Ishtar's movements. I saw Dan's eyes on her, the lost look of them, and the old anger stirred. I went into my room and closed the door.
Just give up
, I thought, sinking down on the bed. I wished I could grow into a giant and reach down and scrub him out, him and his stupid, gentle, enduring hope.
Just go to America.

Through the door I could hear him perfectly. ‘Val told me what's happening,' he said.

No reply.

‘You don't have to do this,' he went on. ‘You could always keep it — I can help you. It doesn't matter who the father is. I don't care.'

I got up, skin prickling, went closer to the door, straining for Ishtar's response. What was he talking about?

Dan continued. ‘I've got money saved, and I can get a better job. We could move to Melbourne, with Silver, all of us. I could —'

‘Dan.'

‘I want to help you.' His voice was urgent. ‘Please let me.'

‘The decision's made.'

There was a pause. I stood, trying to arrange my thoughts, to properly understand. Did Dan want to be my
father
, was that what he was saying? A house in Melbourne, all of us — I tried to clamp down on the warm shiver that ran through me. Surely that wasn't what he meant, and anyway, what decision had Ishtar made? We must be leaving, after she'd gotten back. Maybe she was organising somewhere for us to go. But the phone number had been for a doctor — I'd thought that was what the trip was for, because she was sick.

Dan spoke again. ‘But either way, come to Melbourne with me, let's —'

‘How old are you?' Ishtar's voice rose, cutting him off.

‘Twenty-two.'

‘I'm almost ten years older than you.'

‘But that doesn't matter!'

‘Wait. I had Silver when I was seventeen.'

My breathing felt strange. I had never heard Ishtar say anything like this, talk at all about herself, her own life, or me and my birth.

She went on, quietly. ‘I've never even been overseas.'

‘But you could still do that,' said Dan. ‘We could go together.'

I was only half-listening now. It hadn't taken much. It wasn't as if Ishtar had actually said,
Silver is a burden to me, she has ruined my life
, but in what she did say —
I've never even been overseas
— and in the tone of her voice, in which thirteen years of helpless longing and dissatisfaction seemed to be held, that's what I heard. I squeezed my hands into fists, digging my nails in.
You knew, anyway
, I told myself.
You already knew
. But it was like something had solidified, taken on a definite shape.
A burden
. The word made me feel squashed and drooping, like something heavy-centred that had collapsed, that would have to be scraped up in order to lift.

‘Why not?' Dan was saying. ‘It would be easier. I could help, you know, with Silver. It would be great for her, she'd love it. We could go anywhere. Europe, America, India — wherever you want.'

At the sound of my name, I tuned back in.
With Silver
.
All together
. What did this mean? Did Dan really like me, want us to be together, the three of us? The warm shiver again. My throat hurt, like there was a sound there wanting to come out. I gazed at the closed door.
Please, please
. In my mind I saw myself open it, walk out there — their two questioning faces turning to me.
What do you want?
My voice, clear and strong:
Please, let's go, the three of us
.

But Ishtar was talking again. ‘No,' she was saying, ‘you don't understand. I need to do things by myself. Without a man. That's what I'm still waiting for.'

The image shrank and vanished.

There was a long silence, and I heard Dan's breathing, loud and compressed, as if he had his hands over his face. When he spoke again his voice was weak. ‘All right,' he said. ‘But at least let me drive you to the station.'

There were footsteps and my door opened. It was Ishtar. Her eyes, unhelpful, met mine. ‘Come on,' she said, ‘we can drop you at the bus stop.'

It was in the truck, sitting between them, staring at the narrow rush of road ahead, that I realised what they had been talking about, what I had misunderstood. Like something from nature — a flower, a leaf unfolding — it moved into the centre of my mind and eased itself open. It wasn't me Dan had meant when he'd talked about being the father, about
keeping it
.

There was a picture I'd seen in a book once, of a human embryo: the tiny curled shape, pink on black; the oversized head with dark, obscured rounds of undeveloped eyes; the beginnings of limbs sticking out, flipper-like. I stole a look at Ishtar, at her body, bundled in secretive layers, arms folded over the top. Her shuttered face. I didn't even know what an abortion actually was, how it was done, just that it meant getting rid of a baby before it really grew into a baby.

Dan pulled over at the school bus stop and Ishtar made room for me to get out. ‘I'll be back by Thursday,' she said. ‘Friday at the latest. Stay at Hope. Val'll feed you and give you a bed.'

I got down. I tried not to but couldn't help glancing up at Dan, catching his sad face. I couldn't imagine growing into a giant now — I felt tiny, helpless, an embryo myself, floating in my own dark space, stumpy limbs twitching uselessly.

The truck moved off along the road. It got smaller and smaller and then disappeared.

I didn't go to Hope. After school I just went to the creek and hung around with Ian as if nothing was different. When it got dark and he went home I went up to the hut and made a fire and heated a can of beans, which I was eating on the couch when Dan tapped on the door.

In the faint light, there were shadows under his eyes. ‘Just wanted to check you're okay,' he said. ‘Val was going to come, but I thought you'd probably prefer me.'

We exchanged thin smiles.

‘Yeah,' I said. ‘I'm okay.'

Cold air was rushing past him, and the night outside looked very dark. I opened the door further, stepped back. ‘Do you want to come in?'

‘If that's all right with you.'

I had that feeling again, like when we'd talked in his truck and I'd told him to forget about Ishtar and go to America — the fast descent of a deep and sapping exhaustion. I saw, as if from a distance, the little hut with its dimly lit windows, a speck in the sea of bush. I saw myself, an even tinier speck of a figure, tending its flicker of a fire — the smallness of my actions, the frailty of my hold against the vast black all around.

‘It's okay. I'm tired though. I might go to bed soon.'

‘That's fine. I'll just sit by the fire for a while. Keep you company. I can let myself out.'

We stood in the cave of shadows. Ishtar's bed glowed orangey-pink in the firelight. Her absence gaped.

‘Cold night,' said Dan.

‘Yeah.'

The kettle on the camp stove began to hiss.

I leaned against the table. I felt so tired I could barely stand. ‘I was just going to make myself a hot water bottle.'

‘I'll do it.'

I watched as his big hands unscrewed the stopper, held up the rubbery neck, tipped the kettle.

‘Here.'

I took it and held the sloshing, hot weight against myself.

‘Goodnight.' He went to the couch and sat down, slipped a paperback from his jacket pocket and opened it. Then he looked over at me. ‘You sure you don't mind if I hang round for a while?'

‘No. It's fine.'

I went into my room and shut the door. Changed quickly and got under the covers, huddling round the hot water bottle. It was easy to fall asleep, listening to the shift of the fire, the turning of pages. The hut felt bigger with him in it, warmer, fuller.

He was gone in the morning. But I thought I heard the truck as I woke, and when I went out into the other room the fire was high, banked with fresh wood, and I could smell him still, his tobacco.

The same thing happened the next two nights.

We didn't talk. He arrived late, and I went to bed more or less straight away, to bed and into black sleep. And I didn't feel anything much. Not my old, grown-up sad irritation, and not the helpless, embryo feeling either — I just felt tired, and grateful, and relieved that he didn't seem to want to talk about anything. Both times he was gone again when I woke up but the fire was left freshly tended, and heading out to the bus stop I felt boosted somehow.

Ishtar didn't come back on Thursday, or Friday.

‘She must have got held up,' said Dan, and then, when I didn't answer, ‘I'm sure she'll be back tomorrow.'

On Saturday morning I stayed in bed, trying to read and not able to stop myself from listening out. She would be on foot, I assumed, if she'd hitched from the station. Unless someone drove her all the way in. But no sound came — neither car nor footsteps — and the time crawled.

I stared at the page. What if Miller and Dawn left, like Val had said? What if Ishtar came back — recovered, awakened, her switch flicked — and saw that she didn't have to worry about Miller, about hiding from him, about being trapped, and saw everything that was so good about this place, where we had our own house and she had a job?

A series of images took off in my mind, reeling through with the same bright, licking light as the films we sometimes watched at school, projected on the wall of the classroom, never quite in focus: Ishtar stooping to step under the branches of the big wattle down by the creek, then looking up to smile; the two of us sitting at the table eating dinner; her sewing while I did my homework, side by side in the clear circle of the spirit lamp. And Dan, his grinning face alongside hers under the wattle branch, or him turning from the camping stove with a frying pan, scooting fried eggs onto plates, his lanky body folded into one of the chairs, his elbow on the table. But here the vision broke down, and I came to with a flare of annoyance. What was the point of thinking about this stuff? It wasn't what Ishtar wanted, and she was in charge. She didn't want Dan — or me, for that matter. What she wanted was to be alone, to go overseas, to do things by herself.

Eventually I got up and opened her case, which held our papers. I ignored the passports, not wanting to remember that trip to the chemist, the jellybeans, the wood smoke, Ishtar's arm around me. I went through the other things. There was my birth certificate, with
Unknown
typed in the space for the father's name and
Karen Mary Landes
in the space for the mother's. Karen Mary Landes was Ishtar's other name — I had always known this, although I couldn't remember ever actually being told so. I had just heard it occasionally, drifting over my head, spoken by adults, but it had never seemed to have any fixed reference; it certainly never seemed to belong to her. It had an official sound, and lived in the same realm of vague meaning as words like
proprietary limited
and
stat dec
.

There was also Ishtar's — Karen's — own birth certificate, which was more faded than mine and soft at the creases.
BIRTH,
it said at the top, like mine, but where on mine the word was unadorned, on hers it had an ornate frame of lines and scrolls. Karen Mary Landes had been born in August 1955, and had both a mother and a father, Mary Evelyn Landes nee Thomas and Robert Donald Landes, whose address was 8 Walkers Drive, Toowoomba West. I had seen Toowoomba on a map — it wasn't far from Brisbane, but I'd never been there. Walkers Drive, along with Mary Evelyn and Robert Donald, had never felt real anyway — they all had the same distant ring to them. My mother, the woman I lived with and followed everywhere, the only constant in my life, clear and alive and blotting out all background names and places, was not Karen Mary Landes — she was Ishtar.

I glanced over the certificates, then moved on to the two photos: the one of me at about Jindi's age, sitting with some other kids on a bench, squint-smiling into the sun, and the one of Ishtar holding me as a toddler, my hand gripping her hair, the two of us looking round as if taken by surprise.

My usual irritation rose. I'd seen these things too many times — when I looked at them my eyes moved as if on a track, touching on certain features in a particular order. There was always the feeling that, if only I could break out of the habit and see properly, look at them as if for the first time, some truth might be revealed to me.