Hope Farm (6 page)

On the day before my mother took me to the Home I rang the number on the pamphlet. It was a Sunday my fathers mower roaring in the garden Linda studying, my mother at the church hall. I didnt think about the fruit trees on the other side of the fence about him waiting there with his black rimmed fingernails what he might wonder now that I wouldnt come again. He didnt fit in to any possible future. There was only the tunnel of my mothers plan leading to an Evie Dyer life or the thing that made my heart beat fast. The phone was answered by someone with an accent. I met a woman I said, In the city. She told me I could call if I needed help. Wait please they said and then someone else came on. Hello? Hello I said and began to cry because I recognised her voice. Ah she said, The girl from the park. How are you? Im going to have a baby I whispered, Theyre sending me to a Home. I dont know what to do. We are here she said, You can call any time day or night.

In the back of the station wagon I dozed to the tireless stream of Miller's voice.

‘It was the Andeans who first cultivated the potato. More than two hundred species are still to be found, up there on the
altiplano
.'

He seemed to go out of his way to use foreign words, reaching with his tongue right into their difficult corners. Even the names of the different kinds of potatoes he spoke as if the words themselves were tasty foods in his mouth, sweet or spicy.
Sebago
.
Pontiac.
Sequoia
.

Sometimes he recited bits of poems. For this he gathered his voice up and urged it into faster rhythms.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run

He snipped off the end of the word
fruit
, rounded out
bosom
with a purr.

The poetry voice seemed to have a trace of an accent, crisp and proper, like the voice that read the ABC news on the radio. It wasn't the same as the one he'd used with the salesman at the car place, breezy and light, when he'd said, ‘Looks like we've got a deal.'

We parked outside the Kooralang pub. There were lights on in the bar, and faces turned to look.

‘Meet you at the book shop,' said Miller. Before he walked away he reached for Ishtar, kissed her, and I saw his hand on her bottom, squeezing.

Once he had gone, it seemed very quiet. The road was wide and the buildings seemed to lean away from it as if resenting any activity that might occur between them. Ishtar glanced up and down and then started to cross the broad black expanse, boots ringing. I followed, feeling the eyes from the pub.

Inside the op-shop, Ishtar went through the racks of clothes, occasionally bringing something over and holding it up against me; the purpose of this visit was to put together a uniform for me to wear to school.

I stood at the window looking out. A few people passed — farmer-looking men, in hats and boots. A tall, shambling woman pushing a pram with two dogs in it.

After a while, Ishtar went through to the back room and the two women behind the counter began to talk about her. One had a slow voice that went on and on like a ribbon unwinding, and the other kept sticking in sharp little sounds, like pins.

‘She'll be from that place then.'

‘Mm. Yes.'

‘You know, up the hill, near the Munros'.'

‘Mm. Mm.'

‘You know, those people.'

‘Yes. Yes.'

‘The hippies.'

‘Yes.'

A pause. The rustling of newspaper as they unwrapped things from a box.

The ribbon voice lowered. ‘Thought there was only one or two kiddies, but here's another.'

‘Mm. Yes.'

‘Running wild, no doubt.'

‘Mm. Mm.'

I was standing between the two window mannequins. One of them had its hand out and the fingers were chipped, half-moons of chalky plaster scarring the flesh-coloured paint.

‘Used to be a couple of them at the school,' continued the ribbon voice. ‘One was in Mitchell's class, Gail's little boy.'

‘Mm?' pricked the pin voice.

‘Filthy dirty, Gail said.'

‘Mm. Oh.'

‘Crawling with parasites, probably.'

‘Mm. Yes.'

‘
Worms
.' The ribbon voice dropped to a whisper, and I turned to see that Ishtar had come back in.

‘
Lice
.' The woman took another newspaper-wrapped shape from the box.

‘Just these, thanks,' said Ishtar.

The farming supply building was shaped like a shed and built from the same metal, which sighed and shuddered in the wind. It was enormous; inside, it felt like standing in a big-city train station — not a real building at all, but a strange, covered part of the outside, porous and booming. Standing in the entranceway, between the slid-open doors that could have fitted two side-by-side buses, I couldn't see the far wall. Tractors hulked in the shadows and smaller machines stood with their attachments — scoops out front, or cutters — gleaming faintly like the jaws of insects. There were corridors made of open, towering shelves, with piles of shovels and axes and hoes and clippers, hoses and sacks of grain, or boots and hats and raincoats — each shelf so wide and deep and high I imagined making one of them a room for myself, with a bed and even a chair.

Miller stood out among the farmers and the salesmen; it was as if he was too clearly in focus. Where their clothes had a soft look, the colours muted, their jeans grease-stained and white at the knees, his held a freshness, the colours too bright, too evenly distributed. It was the same with the hands. The farmers' hands were battered, the fingers blunt and clumsy-looking, often black at the knuckles and nails. Miller's hands in comparison glared their unmarked cleanliness, their softness — he mostly kept them in his pockets.

‘G'day, mate. Got any Sebago?'

Here was another of his voices — lazy, the words oozing from somewhere between his nose and throat. Still, it rang out too loudly, and I saw the way the men looked at him and then cut their eyes at each other.

When they brought the sacks of planting potatoes, they stood back and watched as he heaved the first few into the back of the car, bending awkwardly to hug them round their knobbly middles, his face reddening.

‘Give you a hand there, mate?' They stepped in, their movements casual, took the sacks by the top corners and used their knees to buck them up and into the boot as if they weighed nothing at all.

Miller stood by, panting, eyes elsewhere. His pink lower lip shone.

Later, in the car, his clipped, newsreader's voice took on a bitter, nasal edge. ‘Lot of inbreeding in these places,' he said, slowing to overtake a tractor that was trundling half on and half off the road. ‘Pity. The gene pool becomes muddy. Results in all kinds of inadequacies.'

Ishtar didn't answer, but nodded.

We passed, and I glimpsed the man on the tractor — hat, flannel shirt, work-scarred hands on the big steering wheel — and then Miller swung his own wheel so we cut very close in front, crossing partly onto the verge, and I felt us accelerate, heard the engine rev and the hard flick and ping of flying gravel — and, receding, the shouts of the farmer.

After dinner he would sometimes go on a rant, pacing in front of the fire, scooping air with his hands.

‘What have we lost, in our comfort, our ease, with our televisions, our houses chewing up electricity, driving around in our cars, sitting on our arses?' This voice was a mixture — it swung between the proper, neat-edged one and the squashed
bewdy mate
one.

A murmured response might rise from an armchair, or from one of the shadowy figures seated cross-legged on the floor, but Miller's questions weren't meant to be answered — he made no pause, left no space for other voices.

‘What have we given away? What power?' The firelight burnished his hair. ‘Understanding.' He clapped the back of one hand into the palm of the other. ‘Consciousness. Awareness. We have tried to push the earth away, cut ourselves off from it. And from each other! We don't know how to live closely any more, how to cooperate. We're each in his own little box, driving off to our offices every day, working, working — doing what? Making money. What for? To spend. What on? Our little boxes, keeping comfortable, warming our soft white arses, staring at our tellies, driving our cars.'

Somewhere in the gloom, Willow's baby began to cry, and there was a shuffling. A woman got up and began to collect empty plates, but Miller talked on as if giving a speech to a vast crowd. He jabbed a finger in the direction of the road to town.

‘They're all stuck in it, in their isolation, this endless, meaningless scrambling for money. They think there's no way out, no other option. But we know.' He tapped his broad chest with a thumb. ‘We know how easy it is! How simple. To return to the earth, to commune with nature, with each other. To simply step outside of the circuit.' He tilted back his head and gave it a slow, disbelieving shake. ‘It's all so simple,' he said, and the flash of a smile broke open his beard. ‘All we need is a patch of land and some seeds.'

Ripples of approval and agreement did stir among those listening when Miller gave these performances, but to me there always seemed to be a feeling of detachment, of separation. And it didn't only come from him, from the one-way nature of his speechifying, the fact that he treated them like a faceless crowd. There was almost an air of indulgence in the way they watched and listened, and in the way — despite the supportive nods and murmurs by the fireside — they went on with their lives, heading off to work the next morning as usual while he strode alone out to the weed-filled veggie patch with a hoe.

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.