Hope Farm (7 page)

And there was Miller, moving in his own lumbering dance. He tilted back his great, furred head and his wet tongue showed. Out went one fist, trapping a sweep of Ishtar's hair, and then he had her, her back to him, his paws all over her, that mouth at her ear. I saw his teeth part and then nip at her earlobe, I heard his laughter, low like a growl, and my hatred found a target and took off.

I pushed through the curtain and gulped at the cold air of the unlit hallway as if it was some kind of antidote.

He was easy to hate, to despise, as he prowled in his circle of light, talking endlessly. The unfixed gaze directed out somewhere over the heads of his audience, the chop and swirl of his hand gestures, the heedless, blustering assault. The different voices, and the way he slipped in and out of them as if nobody noticed or understood what he was doing.

When he said, ‘Thank you kindly, madam,' to the gaunt woman who ran the coffee shop in Kooralang and I saw the flush bloom over her craggy face and at the collar of her blouse, I had to drop my eyes.
He calls you Typhoid Mary behind your back
, I wanted to shout.
He says you're inbred
.

When he wielded the mattock, I noted the laboured arc of his great arm through the air, the muscles in his back heaving as he dragged it through the earth, the patches of sweat on his shirt, the way he had to stop often, panting. For all his heft, he was bad with tools, inefficient. Even I could tell he didn't know what he was doing.

His smell. Dense, bulky, threatening. Pot and sweat and something else, something that made me think of bulls and billygoats.

The way he grabbed hold of Ishtar and took her from where she sat on the floor by the fire, like a toddler snatching up a toy. The way he kissed her in front of everyone, kneaded her flesh with his hands — her breasts, her buttocks — then turned and walked with his arm round her neck, pulling her in close beside him, locked to him, steering her through the house and out to the mud-brick building.

And the way she loved it! The gentleness that came over her, the softening. I narrowed my eyes, clenched my teeth in disdain.
Pathetic
, she was.
Sucked in
.

It was before dinner, early evening, and I had been sent out to empty the compost bucket. Jindi was followed me, her prattling a rude trail at my back in the cold darkness, when suddenly she broke off with a squeak. I turned and saw the bush of Miller's hair, gold in the light from the kitchen window. He had her in his arms, and was holding her above his head.

‘Look, look, my little pup,' he rumbled. ‘The stars are out for us tonight. Can you touch them? Can you? Reach up your arms, my girl. I'll help you.' He lifted her higher. ‘Go on, reach.'

Against the studded sky, Jindi's figure wriggled. I could hear her eager breathing.

‘Did you touch one? Yes? Ah — look!' He swung her to the ground again. ‘See?' He stepped back and spread his arms. ‘You did!' The girl tottered like someone who had just gotten off a ride. ‘You know how I can tell?' Miller went down on one knee and lowered his voice. ‘I can see it shimmering all through you, the starlight. You've got sparkles in your hair.'

Jindi's hands went to her head, and she crooked her neck and twisted and turned, trying to look down at herself. ‘I —'

Miller's croon, warm and full, slid over her timid whisper. ‘Oh you can't see it. Nobody can but me.'

‘But why —'

‘Because, my little puppy dog, I see things other people don't.'

Then he rose and turned and went into the house, leaving Jindi gasping and voiceless, clutching her hair. I waited for her to rush across to where I stood by the compost heap, to appeal to me to check her over for shimmers and sparkles, but she didn't.

I squinted at her. Against the yellow glow of the window she was a solid, definite, black. Not one shimmer. But once I'd dumped out the kitchen scraps and walked back with the plastic bucket bumping against my thigh, I saw, up close in the light, how wide and moist her eyes were, the fevered brightness of her cheeks, her parted lips.

From inside the kitchen came a round of Miller's laughter. I took the steps slowly. I didn't want him near me, I didn't want those big, strange, soft hands to touch me, couldn't stand the thought of his face close to mine, his breath entering my lungs. But still, I felt myself stiffen with the heavy, lonely pride of the excluded.

I don't know why he didn't ever scoop me up in his arms, purr into my ear, try to summon in me the thrill that set Jindi sparkling, brought the tiny but significant smile to Ishtar's lips. I wasn't as young as Jindi. I had no puppy-dog charm — I'd long since passed the age where any adult might want to sweep me up, to hold me in their arms. I was scrawny, my limbs were too long; my face, when I caught sight of it in the small, dark mirror that hung from a nail on the bathroom wall, appeared to have been outgrown by its features; my hair had neither Ishtar's chocolate-and-caramel sheen nor Jindi's babyish silkiness, but snaked heavily in all the wrong directions. That could have been the reason: my adolescent awkwardness, and the untouchability that went with it — although it's hard to believe Miller would notice any such thing. Perhaps he did pick up something of my reaction to him, my hatred, strong as it was. Perhaps that was it.

If he'd seen me as at all significant, as any kind of threat, then he might have put some effort into winning me over — but he didn't. He ignored me. And that might have been his biggest mistake.

In the Home there was only work and prayer time and sleep. High brick walls and a circle of lawns like a moat. I fell in to the busyness, lost myself in it levering sheets out of the giant boiling vats in the laundry chopping piles of carrots in the kitchen scrubbing floors kneeling with the others while a nun said prayers. I forgot everything and became a dumb beast that worked and worked and never thought. My back ached the skin on my hands cracked my mind sank in to a murk. There were some girls pregnant like me and some just in for punishment, those ones were pretty tough. I kept to myself. I was scared, I didnt even talk to the other pregnant ones not even at night when we went in to our tiny bedrooms with there partitions so thin they were like curtains. Some times I heard other girls crying and some times my belly jerked with the kicks like calls for help but I was always so tired I just fell in to black sleep. A girl who was getting big would just vanish and nobody said any thing a new girl arriving to take her place. I didnt know how long Id been there the days stretched endless in both directions. It got harder to reach over the laundry and kitchen benches and to get up and down off my knees with the scrubbing brush or at prayer time but I barely noticed when we were told to have a wash I didnt look down or touch my belly. I didnt think about the people from the park or Evie Dyer or my mother or any thing, the past and the future didnt exist in this place. Some of the girls got visitors some times and phone calls or letters but not me. Then a girl came who was different. Pat she was called or any way that was the name she used some girls kept there real names a secret. She was pregnant she went around behind the laundry to smoke cigarettes and when the nuns caught her she just took a last drag and threw the butt away smiling and went back to work like she could just as easily choose not to. They cant do any thing she said to me We are fallen already we cant be punished any more. She had been there before, this was her second time, she was all the way from Adelaide. There were girls from everywhere, most people sent the pregnant ones as far away as possible just in case any one saw them and found out although how any one could see you in side this prison I didnt know. This is my last chance Pat said and laughed but it was not a happy laugh. Once I followed her out when she went to smoke. Whats it like? I said. It hurts she said Like hell and the nurses are all mean old bitches. And then they take it off you straight away before you even see it and then they make you sign the papers. What papers? I said. She grinned and blew smoke. The papers that say youre giving the baby up for adoption. So it can have a good life. I tried not to look around when she said the word baby, it made me nervous and I kept expecting a nun to come. She ran her hand down her front, smoothed her dress so I could see the shape, kept her hand there. I will tell you some thing she said,  You dont have to sign. They tell you you do but you dont. When she drew on the cigarette she looked much older like a grown up woman. The thing is she said, They say its for the best that you can forget about it and get on with your life. But you dont. I said What will you do this time? She dropped her hand then. She had peroxided her hair and there was a stripe of dark at the parting. Oh I will sign. Course I will. What choice have I got realy? Where would I be otherwise on my own with a kid? Id be on the street just ask my mum and dad.

I told one of the nuns I needed to ring my parents. She took me in to the office downstairs and I dialled the number on the heavy black telephone. My mother answered. Is everything all right? she said. Yes I said. Well what is it then? said my mother. The nun was standing behind me near the door and I had to speak quietly. What if I want to keep it? I said. You cant. Why not? Couldnt you — You cant she said, Dont ask me again. My father said some thing in the background. Nothing, she said to him, Shes just being silly. To me she said This is a respectable family, if you cant be respectable then you are not welcome in this house.

School started.

Across the shining, wet road I clomped in my op-shop shoes, my frozen hands pulled into the sleeves of my jumper and my breath sharp in the early air, over to where Ian waited at the bus stop. He was always there first, tall and skinny in his green and grey uniform. Side by side we stood, steadfastly ignoring each other, taking it in turns to peer up the road.

Cockatoos rasped and shrieked high in the facing wall of bush, and sometimes a beaten-up car would chug out from the Hope turn-off, windows misted, the blurred figures waving as they passed, the dry-throated bleat of a horn sounding. I never waved back.

The bus, with its tough, craggy driver — smelling of instant coffee and cigarettes, and ever-ready with his yell of, ‘Pipe down or yer can get off and walk' — took us, sliding on our vinyl seats, past soggy-looking paddocks that erupted every now and then into sudden, bald hills. Ian and I sat separately, of course. At intervals we stopped to let more kids on — all the same kinds of kids that were at every school. There were the bully-boys, loud and dangerous, spreading themselves across the back rows and being shouted at by the driver. Then there were the prissy girls, grouped in twos or threes, with neat hair, who all wore their uniforms, I knew, in mysterious, significant ways, like another language. Then there were the freaks. All sitting near the front. An enormously fat boy. Two girls almost as big — sisters — both with orange curly hair. A boy with glasses, who breathed heavily through his mouth. And me, of course, and Ian. Finally, there were the others, the in-between kids. Ordinary kids with freckles or buck teeth or sticking-out ears, sitting in pairs and talking. I snatched secret looks at them. These were the ones I envied, and always had.

The hills and paddocks were eventually interrupted by increasing numbers of houses and then, all at once, rows of shops and low-rise office blocks; and finally, the tall, ugly orange-brick school buildings, flanked by an oval on one side and a vast car park on the other.

‘She's from that place, I bet.'

I sat at a desk by the window, pretending to be interested in the view of the oval below.

‘What place?'

‘You know, that
hippie
place. Near Kooralang. Hope Farm, or whatever they call it. I saw her get on the bus.'

Other voices joined in.

‘Awww! That place!'

‘What farm? Where?'

‘You mean
Dope
Farm.'

‘You know, near the Munros'. It's a commune.'

‘What's that?'

‘It's where a whole lot of lazy bastards sit round taking drugs in the nude, that's what my dad says.'

‘Euw.'

I gripped the metal bars under my desk, bowed my head, waited.

‘Yeah, and none of them are married and they all just
do it
with each other all the time.'

‘Euw! Stop!'

The teacher came in then, and the talk broke off.

Later, as I searched for the library, trying to look like I knew where I was going, I expected something more. A mob of boys passed and called out, ‘Hippie shit!' and a pair of prissy girls sliced me with their eyes, but nothing else happened. I found the library and gratefully entered its stuffy, overheated calm.

‘Hippie Shit' became my nickname. I spent morning tea and lunch in the library, was picked last in Phys Ed, and when we had to make pairs in Science, I was always with one of the freaks. But this was all bearable. I was used to it. I was cloaked in layers of difference, thirteen years deep; I didn't expect this not to go unnoticed. And it could have been much worse — I could have suffered what Ian did with Dean Price: committed, focussed bullying from someone who has decided to really hate you.

Also, my teacher for all subjects apart from Science and Phys Ed was Mr Dickerson. Mr Dickerson had once thrown a kid from a second-storey window, Ian said — and whether or not this was true didn't matter, the important thing was that everyone was terrified of him. He was an egg-shaped man with only a few wisps of white-grey hair, and he always wore the same formless beige trousers and a red jumper with a small flag of untucked shirt showing at the bottom. He rarely spoke, and all of his classes were the same. First he wrote a list of instructions on the blackboard. Then he turned to face the class, casting his yellowish gaze out over our heads and banging with his fist on the board as he recited what he had just written in an almost melodic, mournful tone and chalk dust ran off the end of the shelf in a shivery stream. Then he sat motionless in his chair as we all rustled and scribbled away, until it was time for him to read out the answers from a book. We corrected our own work, and I doubt anyone bothered cheating; there would be no point since every now and again, without warning, we were given a test, which we had to hand up to Mr Dickerson himself and which would be returned next lesson stippled with red ticks or crosses and a simple grade — no comments, ever.

I liked schoolwork. I was good at it and always had been, but in the past I'd feared drawing attention to myself. Now, in the safety of Mr Dickerson's reliable silence, I was free to do well, and to take secret pride in my test results — the rows of tidy ticks, the circled grade at the bottom, lovely in its unadorned completeness.

So I was lucky, really. But Ian was not.

I saw Dean Price on the first day, after school. At the edge of the oval a huge boy stood with a much smaller boy tucked under one of his arms. I could tell it was Ian just by the legs. They stuck out, skinny and unmoving. The bigger boy swung round and I saw Ian's face. His arms pointed to the ground and his head hung down, too, eyes half closed; his whole body seemed both passive and wary. The bigger boy — who had to be Dean Price — didn't have the pimples I'd imagined, and at first his eyes looked quite normal, but then they narrowed and his face twisted, and I saw the cruelty in it. His mouth opened and his tongue showed, red and fat. Bellowing something unintelligible, he lifted Ian higher and began to shake him.

I got on the bus and stared out the window in the opposite direction. My heart thumped and my hands shook, and I thought of what Ian had said:
As far as school goes, we don't know each other
.

As kids got on and went up the aisle, I flicked my eyes to check — and eventually saw Ian, dishevelled and pale. He passed without meeting my gaze, and later when we met at the creek he said nothing about it.

Every day after school we met — and on the weekends, too, if he didn't have too many chores to do at home. He brought sandwiches his mother made: white bread with a rubbery slice of something he called
straz
, which I suspected was a kind of meat, greyish-pink and salty. Sometimes it was sweets: caramel slice or yellowy cake that squeaked against my teeth, the cream in the middle oily on my tongue.

One day he brought a camera on a strap around his neck, its clunky body impressively big and black against his bony chest, the scuffed case undone and swinging below. It was from school — Year Eights did photography and were allowed to borrow cameras over the weekends, although there was a waiting list. ‘Too many dumb girls,' said Ian, ‘taking photos of their
horses
.'

The camera did have a worn, institutional look to it, and there was a number engraved on the bottom, but he handled it with such practised, proud skill that I soon forgot it wasn't his.

‘This is my ticket out of here,' he said, lying on his back under a tree, the viewfinder to his eye, his fingers delicately rotating the focus back and forth. ‘Get a portfolio together, send it off to
National Geographic
, wait for the call: “Is that Ian Munro, oh gosh, we just
love
your work,” then off I go, international man of
mystery
, out on
assignment
.' He peered out at me. ‘Jet-setting around the place, helicopter into the Amazon, undercover job in Beirut.' With the camera still to his face, he got up on one knee, pointing, adjusting the focus, and clicking so quickly I didn't get a chance to change my expression.

‘Hey.' I raised a hand.

He lowered the contraption. ‘You don't believe me.'

‘What? Yeah, of course I do.'

He grinned his narrow grin and said nothing, but the next time we met he brought the print and I saw for myself the doubt in my own face, the assessing eyes, the mouth ready to curl in disbelief. I also saw the skill in the shot, the angle of it, the way the light seemed to radiate from my skin, the perfect clarity of the lines, my eyebrows and lashes, the faint dabs of freckles across the bridge of my nose. I stared, entranced. This was
me
; this was how I looked from the outside: a clever, tough girl.

Ian leaned in. ‘Pretty good, wouldn't you say? It's just a
bit
overexposed, but I like that. Gives it a kind of magic glow.'

I was still gazing down at my own face. With a further jolt of surprise I realised that I found it beautiful — not just the shot but the face itself, the double peak of the upper lip; the wide, clear eyes; the neat, pointed chin; the wild hair snaking against the tender-looking earlobes and neck. A skirl of something — pleasure and embarrassment — went through me, and I passed the print back to Ian and began swiping leaves into the creek with the end of a long stick.

‘See?' said Ian. ‘I know what I'm doing.'

‘Yeah, okay. You do.'

I sent the leaves into the water, keeping my head down, holding in a smile. I had a feeling of incredulous pleasure, like the time years before when a kid at school was giving away a pet rabbit and it was my name that the teacher picked out of a hat, the room seeming to stretch, the faces of the other kids tiny and far away as they turned to look. It was like a dream, but it wasn't one — the next day the kid brought the rabbit in a box and gave it to me. The feeling lasted for ages — a thrumming, disbelieving joy — and it was not just because of this wonderful thing that had happened to me, but also because it was still happening, had not ended. It lasted until we had to move out of the place we were living and into one of the ashrams where, Ishtar said, pets weren't allowed, and we had to leave the rabbit behind.

Now I glanced at Ian standing with the photo held out in front of him, and then back at the water rushing like cold black tea at my feet. I felt the sun on my back. I bent and picked a blade of reedy grass and pulled it, squeaking, between my fingernails, put it to my tongue. I had a friend. I had this place. Impossible to believe, but things had turned out kind of okay.

Ian's voice was musing. ‘I'm very happy with it actually.' He tilted his head. ‘The hippie child. The gypsy girl.'

‘I'm not …' I began, but then stopped. I was what I was, the photo showed that. I stole another look at the picture and the thrumming feeling went on, undeterred.

Ian squatted to slip the photo carefully back into its envelope, and then the envelope into his bag. He glanced up at me. ‘Shall we
repair
to the bridge, my gypsy friend?'

‘Okay.'

Following his back — lean, purposeful, oblivious — through the wattle, I let the smile out at last, and my cheeks hurt with it. The watery sun turned the round blooms into golden explosions that smelled of honey.