Spotted Lily (24 page)

—39—

We drove through tall, olive-green eucalypt forest, past the occasional bloated bodies of kangaroos and wombats—night road kills tumbled to the shoulder of the road. Through one-street towns, and signposted villages of one house. We progressed ever inland, through ever drier country. Air shimmered ahead on the hot tarmac. We passed fields of young wheat, and cattle, and then mostly sheep, rocks, and short tough clumpy grasses. We left the tarred roads, and the metal tray behind us banged, Brett's bag and trunk jumping on the frypan-hot aluminium. From a far hill, looking down on us, you might not see the white cab or the glitter of its tray behind, but our wake of dust rose high before settling again, on the scurfy brush all around the gravel track. Several times we were stuck behind a mob of sheep, their little dog masters pushing them from the back and keeping them in order from the sides, a horseman in the lead.

I pointed to one scruffy little worker, never stopping in its weave from side to side across the back of the mob, her eyes locked on her charges. 'See that dog? Dad would've called her a good 'un. Red kelpie. The best. Wouldn't have a bar of your sooky border collies.'

Brett hmm'd politely, but his eyes were as locked on as the dog's.

And before I was really ready, we were bumping down a familiar road, which ended at a gate with the inevitable sign, 'PLEASE SHUT THE GATE'.

Nothing had changed. The hills had not changed their shapes. The stones were still as numerous. The sheep in the distance still looked like lice roaming the head of a grizzled gnome, a gnome with short mouldy hair, all grey-green mottled, and patches of his sunburned scalp showing through. The roof of our house still showed like a wart on the side of his head.

'This is it?'

'Yes, Brett.'

'How beautiful.'

'Yeah,' I laughed.

'I didn't mean it
that
way.'

My first instinct was to take offence, but flicking a peer at him out of the corner of my eye, I saw he didn't
mean
to be obnoxious. In fact, at that moment, I understood for the first time, tourism.

'Where does your place end?' he asked.

Ignoring the 'your place' bit, I answered. 'Not for a long ways. You can't see it.'

'Who's that?' he pointed.

The late sun backlit a hill at our side. On its ridge—the silhouette so sharp it could have been a cardboard cutout—stood a horse and rider.

'One of the hands. Can't run this place without them. Open the gate, Brett.'

'Where the hills are twice as steep and twice as rough. Where the horse's hoofs strike firelight from the flintstones every stride—'

'Brett—'

'Is this near Snowy River?'

'No, Brett. You wanna open the gate, or shall I?'

Never having wrestled a farm gate, he needed help, and a further 'Hey, where's that gate running to!' before I could drive through. While he swung the heavy thing closed and positioned it, and struggled getting the chain over the ball, I had a few moments of solitude for my own thoughts about the home I'd left forever at seventeen.

~

The horseman on the hill that had brought Brett to poetry was one of those scenes just made for tourists, and just as ethereal. Now, when I looked for the horseman, he had disappeared, either over the back of the ridge or lost in its shadow.

 We rattled down the dirt track, and had almost arrived when Brett drew my attention to the sounds of yapping and hoof beats close behind. It was too dark for me to see them, what with looking into my own light beams ahead.

I stopped the car. We hadn't announced our coming.

In a few moments, the horse arrived by the driver's side. The rider jumped off, said
shush
to the dog, who had its own ideas about this matter (Dad would have been proud of the dog—taking its responsibilities seriously), and then there was a wide-brimmed hat with a face somewhere underneath thrust near my open window.

'Lost?' it said. 'Angela!'

'Mum.' I turned to Brett. 'This is Mum.'

He leaned over me. 'Pleased to meet you.' He thrust his hand over me, to shake hers.

She wiped her hands on her moleskins before she took his, and even so, apologized. 'Sorry for the smell. It's lambing time.'

Brett didn't know what she was talking about, and looked to me.

So did she. 'If I'd known you were coming, Angela...'

'No worries, Mum.' This was getting embarrassing. 'We'll meet you at the house.'

She galloped off, following by her little protector.

~

She was waiting for us when we arrived, and it was odd that she hadn't chained the dog. It was beside her, yapping its head off, clearly wanting to rush out to greet us one way or another. She crouched beside it, and held its collar.

'He safe?' I yelled.

'Let's see,' she called back.

'Brett, come behind, Brett,' I ordered. 'No. Leave your bags.'

He came behind obediently, and I offered my hand to the dog, who accepted me grudgingly.

'It's Fly,' Mum explained. 'He's a little spoiled now.'

'Spoiled!' The understatement of the year. 'Dad would never have—'

'It's
because
of Dad, Angela. And he'd kill for me, so don't you ... Now, Brett is it? Just bend down. No, not over him! Get down on your haunches like me, and back away a bit. Now, give me your hand, and I'll...'

And to Brett's surprise and Mum's exclamation, Fly's tail wagged and his tongue darted out in a lick.

'You're in like Flynn,' said Mum.

'That means he likes you,' I explained.

'Just stand up easy,' she said, 'so the spell ain't broke.'

'His tongue meant he liked me?' Brett's question was uttered in a low, amazed warble.

Mum heard it, but didn't notice the stupidity. 'Fly says you're right by him.'

'Get your bags, Brett,' I said.

Mum opened the door (and incredibly, let Fly in), turned on the lights and probably went to the kitchen to put the kettle on.

I waited for Brett, because he had to be introduced to country ways.

'Take off your boots and leave them outside with these.' I pointed to the assortment of shoes and boots, all upside down, lined up on the verandah. 'And hang your cap on the rack inside the door. I'll take those.'

I took the trunk and bag from his arms, dumped them inside by the door, and went to get that awkward homecoming phase over as soon as possible.

Mum was messing about in the kitchen. She worked with her back to me, said she didn't need any help, and asked would I mind just Lanchoo tea, she didn't have anything fancy.

I told her that Lanchoo was just lovely (and meant it, though from her grunt, she didn't believe me), and she asked if I minded milk and white sugar, and I told her that would be great, and she opened the biscuit tin, and then banged it shut, and concentrated on the tea, and how did Brett like his, or would he perhaps prefer coffee?

And he still hadn't come into the house, so I went out to see what was wrong.

He stood just as I had left him, in his boots and with his cap on.

'What the ... ?'

'Angela. Your mum.' He hovered over his boots. 'Would she mind terribly?'

This was stressful enough without his problems. 'You've got a thing about those bloody boots. Just wipe them well.'

'Thank you.'

'But take that thing off your head, or I'll tear it off.'

The coconut fibre mat got the drubbing of its life until I said, 'Enough.'

As he came in the door, I plucked the cap from his head. He grabbed for it, but missed. It landed on a hook on the wall, just as Mum came out of the kitchen.

'White and two is it, Brett?'

'Ta,' I said, and she ducked back into the kitchen.

He took the cap off the hook, and I snatched it again and hooked it so hard, the ball end of the hook popped through.

'Leave it!' I hissed. 'She's seen you without it. The boots are bad enough, but it would be double-rude now to put that on.'

He gave up the fight, and instead, stood waiting for instructions.

The row of hooks was as full of hats and coats and stock whips and other paraphernalia as I remembered.

The walls looked the same. On the opposite wall, show ribbons gleamed. Blue and red, with their big rosettes that had always reminded me of the roofs in Hansel and Gretel's land, from their snowdrifts of flesh-coloured bushdust. On the wall by the kitchen, just above the wall phone, a calendar from the local stock agents displayed a fine Hereford bull.

Another table smaller than I remembered stood in the place of the old formica thing, and this table was veneered wood. Newish metal and plastic chairs surrounded the table, these of a style popular in the sit-down part of Chinese take-away restaurants. There still wasn't a sofa, but there were now three sat-out easy chairs, in what had once been plush.

The desk in the far corner was piled high with papers. One of the Chinese restaurant chairs was its desk chair.

There was the same low bookcase I remembered. There were the books of my childhood:
Mother Goose
,
Grimm's Fairy Tales
,
Anderson's Fairy Tales
,
Alice in Wonderland
, higgledy-piggledy against
Diseases of Livestock
and
Toxic Weeds of Australia
. The pile of games—Snakes and Ladders, Monopoly (I always got the koala, as Dad thought I liked it best), Scrabble, draughts—looked like sedimentary rock. On top of the bookcase family photos clustered beside a drenching gun and a pair of work gloves curved as if there were hands still in them.

The light was the same overhead thing, its hanging frosted dish needing to be emptied of flies. The floor was still lino, but a newer piece.

Looking beyond the lounge to the sag of the clinkerboard walls of the hallway, I remembered a childhood nightmare—our house was really a holed ship, and we were sinking.

'Your tea,' Mum announced, bringing out three cups on saucers, on a yellowed aluminium tray.

'You sit here,' I told Brett. Mum sat at the place closest to the kitchen, and we all sipped at our tea as if it were hot, when in fact, it was almost stone cold.

'You look exotic,' Mum complimented me, and then turned to Brett. 'The furthest I've been is Cunnamulla once. Our daughter's the world traveller.'

I rolled my eyes at Brett. It was his fault. Now that she'd begun, she'd be impossible to stop.

'How's—' But my casual question curdled in my mouth as I caught the drift of her gaze. It was locked on Brett's horns. I had forgotten them in my hate for that cap and in my wish to not give Mum fuel for her fire of vicarious cosmopolitan living. But Mum's powers of imagination could never have encompassed horns.

The possibilities raced around my brain like rats in a grain bin. Would Mum have a heart attack, in terror?

She grasped my wrist. 'Remember Boofhead?' Not taking her eyes off Brett, she said, 'She wouldn't. Angela was just a teenager then, and it was just part of our boring life here. There's his ribbons.'

Brett smiled at her with a guest's politeness, not knowing a bloody thing she was talking about.

I reached over the table and touched her hand. 'I remember, Mum.'

The death of Dad, and her aloneness ... premature senility? She was only fifty-something, but this place could turn anybody batty.

It was as if she hadn't felt my touch. 'Your horns are a sight. Just like Boofhead,' she said. 'We read here, about all this plastic surgery out in the world. And Stuart now, our son,' 

She turned to me. 'Stuart's got his torn ear ... remember his torn ear? It got restored in Nashville, for the record cover.'

'If we'd had that out here in my day...' she said to Brett.

'Thank you,' he smiled.

She got up from the table and pulled over a basket. I had forgotten this nervous quirk of hers. She plonked an enormous cable-knit jersey in her lap and turned to Brett, though she was already plying her needles, their wood clacking like castanets.

'They do marvellous things with plastic surgery,' she said. 'But ears. Remember Alfie Gallagher, Angela? His cousin married a Yank in the war, and anyway, his nephew came to visit only a couple years ago. We all thought he was a bit much with his tee shirts, till he gave a talk at the Bunwup Library. It's bigger now, you know. Anyway...' she yanked her yarn as if it were a stroppy ram. The arm she was knitting had grown at quite a clip.

'As I was saying, oh. More tea?' she asked Brett. Actually, she hadn't taken her eyes off him for a moment, though the complexity of the pattern she was knitting would have taken a computer knitter ages to program.

'No thank you,' Brett answered, his eyes big as soup plates.

'Just say when,' she smiled. 'Now, Jerry Drew, I think that was the young bloke's name. He spoke about that mouse with the ear on top.' She turned to me. 'You know that mouse, Angela?.'

'I know the mouse, Mum,' I sighed.

'Well, you weren't interested in science before,' she said a trifle defensively.

'That mouse, Mum, got a lot of press.' I had read about it for the first time during my ensconcement, when the picture of it sporting a man's ear on its back like a taxi does a pizza sign, hit newspapers around the world. It was weird, but so what.

'We've got a district volunteer force,' she told Brett. 'All set to go for 'em if they make it into the district.'

She turned to me. 'Cane toads still haven't.'

'What is it about these mice?' Brett asked.

'Genetic engineering,' she said.

'Bollocks!' I couldn't help myself. 'Mum. They're for people who lose their ears. They can have a new ear. It's grown on the mouse.'

Brett's eyes went from me to Mum.

She snorted. 'That's exactly the story we read, and the stories in that scrapbook Jerry showed us from America!'

'Well Mum,' I laughed. 'What did this Jerry sell you?'

Her needles clacked extra sharply. Did I tell you that she would have spun the yarn for this bloody jersey, too? She could never just sit. 'How many people you seen with no ears, Angela?'

She didn't look at me when asking the question, so why she should look over at me now, just made my face burn more.