Hope Farm (24 page)

The sun was low, but it wasn't dark outside yet. The room was full of orange light. I sat up and tried to focus, to understand what was happening.

‘But …'

She cut me off with a quick, firm shake of the envelope. Then she let it drop onto the bed and went out of the room.

I sat staring down at it. The overinflated, spacey feeling came back and I gripped the sheet in bunches. I hated her new starts, I didn't trust them, but even with their fleeting flimsiness they were at least familiar, recognisable. This — this flatness without end, this lack of response to an opportunity — I did not understand. I was lost, spinning in black, grabbing at nothing. We couldn't stay here with her like this, with her not moving or eating, with no money, and no one to care — no Dan. A vision descended: Val taking charge, installing Ishtar in one of the rooms at Hope to lie with staring eyes and yellow fingers, another Dawn, another half-person. Ishtar and Dawn, and Miller out in his shed, wallowing and raving on his mattress — three mad patients in the Hope Farm asylum. And me stuck forever, or at least until I finished school and could get a job.

We had to get away. I would go to Dan and explain, ask for help. He wouldn't leave me with her like this. I put on some shorts and my sandshoes and went out, the envelope in my pocket. She was drinking a glass of water, one hand on the back of a chair. She didn't look up. For a few moments I stood there. I hadn't, in my balloon state, planned on saying anything, but like they had earlier with Dan, words just seemed to come out of nowhere.

‘Why didn't you get an abortion when you were pregnant with me?'

Her eyes looked huge in the dim light. ‘What?'

Quickly, the floating feeling went and my body seemed to tighten from the outside, gather in and consolidate round the sharp, central core that was this question. I didn't know where it had come from, but it was there, stabbing, insistent, undeniable — like a stick poking through rubber.

‘Why didn't you get an abortion?' I repeated. ‘When you were pregnant with me?'

Silence. Slowly, she moved round the chair and sat in it, put her elbows on the table and her head in her hands. When she spoke, her voice was blurred. ‘I couldn't,' she said. ‘You couldn't get them in those days, not in Brisbane. Or maybe you could … but I didn't know how.'

There was a sound in my head, a crack, and then a roar. She was still speaking, but I couldn't hear. My fingers were on the bolt, the door was open, my shoulder glancing off the frame, my bare legs flicking through the weeds as I ran.

The creek reeled in front of me and I went facedown onto the bank, my breath jarring with my fall and the shock of water on my arms. I waited for my fingers to lose sensation but they didn't — the top layer was almost warm — so I splashed my face instead. It felt cold then, prickling against my sweat, but the jangling, deafening howl that beat through me didn't stop. I lay in its grip, panting.

It was the droplets beading on the skin of my own forearms that gave me the idea, set it sawing in my mind. A crow barked like a warning, but I ignored it, jumped up, and ran again.

Under the crippled gum I dug with my fingers, dirt packing under my nails, filaments of blossom whirling, riding my ragged breaths.

He was asleep when I got to him. I kicked him, felt my toes glance off the barrel of his ribs. Through the black-edged pinpoint of my vision he looked small, far away, the mattress a little white oblong like the cakes of motel soap Ishtar used to bring back from her cleaning jobs, and him a miniature doll on top. With one foot I could flip it, send him flying — if I could just get my legs to move properly. But I could only manage these weak, mistimed kicks, and anyway I didn't want to send him flying now, I wanted him to wake up and hear what I was yelling, my voice stretched over the roaring in my ears.

I wasn't afraid of him any more. I wasn't afraid of anything. I was a blunt-limbed pink nothing, twitching in blackness; I mattered to no one and no one mattered to me — and she had done this, she had made me into this.

I hate her, I hate her, I hate her.

‘What? What?' He sat up.

His face wavered. Was I on my feet still, or had I fallen to my knees? There was dirt under my hands, then air; I had dropped the photos. Something crackled and bit at the backs of my legs. My breaths kept seizing, my voice dumping its message too hard, again and again, like waves on a rock, smashing it up. I stared at his smeared face until the ground levelled and the mattress got a bit bigger, and I stepped forward because it was his fire behind me, I realised, burning my legs, and I caught his stench and like ink in water a hint of what I was doing came and dispersed and was gone. I let it go. I wanted the anger — and it had its own force anyway, after all this time. There were the photos, still sealed in their layers of paper and plastic; I kicked them forward and sent my voice out through the squalling static.

‘Ishtar was fucking Dan while you were away. And she was pregnant, but she went to Melbourne and got an abortion. Ask Val, she knows. Ask Dan.'

Then I was up on the hill again, lying on my face behind the fallen tree, dirt in my mouth. I pressed my knuckles to my eyes and the roaring went on for what felt like a long time, before gradually breaking into chunks that at first seemed random but eventually settled into a rhythm. Then I felt that my hands were wet, and realised that the rhythm was my breathing, and that my breaths were sobs, and that I was crying. I lifted my head and opened my eyes and the air stung, bright and clear. A bird — one of Miller's white cockatoos — went ripping across the sky, and as if unzipped by its call the howling stopped and everything was quiet again, my sobbing small rounded waves that didn't break. I sat like that for a while, on my knees.

I had my eyes open, but I wasn't seeing what was in front of me — the side of the hill, trembling tassels of bleached grass against darkening blue; the last streaks of light turning pink — what I saw was a clear space, colourless, glaring almost too brightly to bear. It quivered, taut, shimmering and ready, and I knew what was coming, because I closed my eyes again and covered them, but that didn't work. I made a noise, an animal squawk, and then in it dropped, the understanding; the full acknowledgement of what I had just done. Black and viscous, a roiling glob, it hung for just a moment before exploding to fill everything.

Miller pacing in the room at the ashram that first day, stirring a whirlpool of light-soaked air. Miller snatching up Jindi and thrusting her towards the night sky. Miller's brute arms around Ishtar in the kitchen, the yielding of her neck to his kisses, her closed eyes. His drawings, the vicious penetrations of her body, the fierce sprays of conquering sperm. The wagging of his head in the clearing outside the hut, the groping of his hands. The power that hummed in him as he lay by his fire, that boiled under the addled, cracked exterior, covered but not dampened by the bong and the wine and the whisky and the pills, blindly seething, waiting for an opening, a clear path, a calling-out. And I had called it out. I had set it on Ishtar.

I got up. It was properly dark now, and a fat yellow moon sat right at the bottom of the sky. A song came drifting, something I half recognised — chiming guitars and a warbling, female vocal. I looked down and saw that Hope was lit up, every window golden, the flutter of candles on the kitchen windowsill and even the back steps. For once the place looked beautiful, and for a dizzy moment I wondered if I was in a dream — but then I remembered the party. Miller's fire was still there, off on its own to the side, just a dot. But where was he? I tried to remember what had happened once I'd spoken, once I'd said those words, what he'd said or done, but I couldn't — there was just a jump, a gap, to me lying in the dirt behind the log.

My heart knocking, I began to half-run back down the slope. There was the thought — very faint, hopeless really — that he hadn't noticed the photos, hadn't unwrapped and looked at them; that I could sneak in and steal them back again. But beyond that I had no plan. All my dull, blunt rage was gone. There was no roaring, no pinpointed vision, no sense of hugeness and power. Now I felt everything: the thump of my heart, the jag of my breaths, the whip of grass against my shins — and, wedged solid and straining at my chest as I ran, the raw fact of what I had done.

He was still there, I saw as I got down onto the flat and closer — and he had seen the photos. Their torn packaging lay to one side, and I could see a small rectangular object in Miller's fist where he squatted over the flames. He had taken off his shirt. Three or four wine cask bladders shone in the murk at the edge of the fire's circle, and there were papers and bottles spread further around than before — he had been throwing things. The mattress now lay slumped against one of the shed's side walls. There was a wet patch on the back wall, with trickles running down, and broken glass caught the firelight on the dark earth below. Miller's head nodded, and wordless noises rose from him, snaking to meet the tinny party sounds that drifted from Hope.

I waited a moment, watching that great head-shadow loom and bounce, then change shape as he turned to one side, letting the photos drop. The shaft of the glass bong glinted in the red light, and the voice broke off — and although I wasn't close enough to hear, I imagined the long burbling sound of him drawing up the smoke — and then the voice resumed, louder, and I caught a word this time:
Ishtar
. The shadow expanded, contracted; I saw him stand and stagger, then return to squatting, snatching up the photos and tossing them onto the fire. Another word detached itself from the flow:
witch
, or maybe
bitch
.

Something was going to happen. He was gathering himself, working up to — what? I thought of the press of his black thumbnail into Ishtar's skin.
I could just take you
. Whatever it was, it would be bad. I tried to think, to force myself beyond just feeling, beyond the slap and scrape of the world against me, and the swelling of guilt. Dan. I needed to find Dan. To ask for help and — I now realised, with an extra pang of shame — to warn him.

As I turned, Miller's voice broke into some kind of crescendo, a summoning yell, and when I snatched a look over my shoulder I glimpsed him on his feet, gesturing. Had he seen me? I ran faster. The dark shape of the mud-brick drew closer, bumping up and down against the starred sky, and I was almost at the gap between it and the outside toilet when the sight of figures there in the clearing — one of them unmistakably frail and twiggy, the yellow light in her ghostly cap of hair — sent me swerving around the back of the toilet and past the unused tractor gleaming in the moonlight. I didn't want to be stopped by anyone. I'd go round the other side of the house and see if Dan was out the front, which was where the music and voices were coming from.

Behind the shed that housed Miller's tools and boxes of seeds I collided with Ian. He was crouched at the far end of the back wall, and must have been peering round the corner — at Dawn, or at Sue, who was dancing by herself at the bottom of the kitchen steps — but he was so low and in such a pool of shadows I didn't see him, and fell right over him. We lay for a few moments of silent recognition and recovery, and before he could move I gripped his arm.

‘Shh,' I whispered.

He sat up.

I knelt beside him, my mouth close to his ear, struggling to keep my voice under control. ‘Miller's gone … I don't know — he's gone crazy. He's, he's, I think he's going to do something to Ishtar.'

‘
Yikes
.'

‘Can — can you help me?' The whispers sputtered out as if from a tiny, broken machine gun. ‘You have to hel-help. Help me find Dan.'

He nodded.

I pointed. ‘Out the front, out the front.'

Ian stuck his head out and then ducked back again. ‘
He's coming
,' he mouthed, nodding towards the mud-brick building.

We cowered, listening.

Dawn's voice sounded, abrupt but thin. ‘What are you doing?'

I peered out, enough to see Sue, who wasn't dancing any more, but just standing at the foot of the kitchen steps staring at where Miller and Dawn must have been.

‘Miller?' came Dawn's voice again. ‘Where're you —' She broke off into a weak, protesting cry.

Sue started forward, and I put my head further out in time to see Miller go lumbering away, along the rutted driveway where he'd ridden in on the tractor that day, honking and waving, high and jubilant behind the big wheel. Now he moved with the crooked, menacing advance of a scorpion, his great arms out for balance, his legs widened as if for better purchase. Dawn was on the ground, Sue beside her, beginning to help her up.

‘Quick.' Ian took off and I followed. We ran to the other side of the house, which was crowded by bushes and junk — rusted rolls of chicken-wire, piles of rot-soft planks, an old washing machine, car parts shot through with weeds — and scrambled through as fast and as quietly as possible to emerge under the cover of a largish, shaggy shrub at the end of the porch.

There seemed to be a lot of people on and in front of the porch, but it was probably only twenty or so — all the Hope residents, plus whatever guests they had managed to muster. There were candles stuck here and there, on the railings and the sill of the open windows. Two big metal drums with fires burning in them illuminated the parked cars. Some chairs had been brought out, and I caught sight of Willow on one, and Val, wilted flowers in her hair. No sign of Jindi; she must have exhausted herself with excitement and been put to bed. Dan was there, I saw with relief, sitting on the edge of the porch with his legs dangling.