Tide (17 page)

The farm is a legacy. I like to think I look after the soil. I don't over-plough, and am happy to make less money for a year or two and cultivate on a fallow system. I am a bit medieval. I loved history at school. But I left when I was fifteen to work for my dad. He didn't pay me; he said I had to earn what I was going to inherit. That's your payment, he said, in his torn hat and patched greasies. He barely moved his lips when he spoke, but I always understood him. I make a point of rounding my vowels when I speak – I got that from Mum, who taught drama at Northam High. People would say they were a strange pair, but it pained me to hear it. They weren't strange at all.

I was thinking about snow when I decided to travel here. It wasn't a straightforward thought. I was sitting in the green armchair in the lounge, a mallee root burning hotter than hell in the fireplace, when the television reception suddenly dropped out. That was commonplace when I was a child, for the reception to drop out – the television ran on thirty-two volts supplied by our own generator and there was a booster attached to an aerial five times the height of the house. I used to yell out, Mum! Mum! The snow's come on the television! And she'd come in and jiggle with the booster and either bring the picture back into a vague kind of focus, or shut the television down and say, Sorry, it's the climatic conditions or maybe sunspots playing up. She always said this with a dramatic flourish because she was a dramatic woman.

So there was snow on the television and there was the fire, but the clincher was the newspaper. I turned off the telly and picked up the paper, and a few pages in I read an article that said: After a warm and dry winter a cold snap is expected later this week, with ten to fifteen centimetres of snow expected over much of the south of England. It went on to say how sleds and skates hadn't even left the cupboard that winter. Mum had been born in England, right down south where they got little snow, even back in times when it seemed to snow more. She was born on a farm. She used to describe the farm to me, and the soil, which was heavier and more fertile than what we have here. She knew I loved soil. She called me her Child of the Soil. Sometimes I dreamed of the dark soil on her childhood farm, but I'd never wanted to go there. Not at all. Mum had encouraged me to keep a passport, though I told her I'd never use it. She'd say, Just in case you change your mind.

So I went to bed with snow and static and my mother and soil in my head. I fell to sleep half forming and losing thoughts. I didn't dream snow but I tried to dream snow. I woke knowing I was going somewhere and it wasn't in Western Australia.

There was a ticket on the following night's flight via Singapore. I grabbed it. I packed quickly and drove myself to the airport. Actually, I was no stranger to the airport. Neighbours and friends in town were always asking me to drive them down so they wouldn't have to put their cars in the long-term car park. I said to them, I don't mind, but I would want my own car there when I arrived home.

When we were a few hours out of Heathrow, the voice over the speakers said our landing would be delayed due to bad weather. The snow had started. Not heavy, but making things slow and awkward. I was in the middle of the plane, and I felt there was no reality outside the asylum I'd committed myself to. Give me my own car and a long drive out into the desert. It provides you with all the intimacy and alienation you need at once. The plane was just compression and breathlessness.

I thought I'd make my way north into the snowier parts. I had nothing booked, but it wasn't what they call holiday season, so I didn't envisage problems finding a room. But the snow had set in hard and I had to settle on an airport hotel because transport wasn't working. Not even the Underground. It was like being in a disaster movie. I was lucky to get a room and I could only book it for one night. But after I'd checked in, I stood in the car park and let the snow cover my sickness. My jet lag. I felt out of my body. I felt like I'd been on the tractor for weeks at a time, feeling every jolt, every clod of earth. I went inside, ate something nondescript in the hotel restaurant, showered and shaved (which I forgot to do before dinner – I live on my own), and then fell into a deep sleep. I woke at nine, and check-out was at eleven.

I pulled back the curtains and it was a clear blue sky, but there was snow over the ground. Everywhere. I dressed and went straight down to the front of the hotel where kids were rolling snowmen. I joined them. The odd plane straggled down from the sky, but it was eerily quiet. The snow was quite thick. The kids laughed and I laughed. Their parents were nowhere to be seen in the concrete and steel and glass and snow. We threw snowballs at each other. Just like boondies on the farm when I was a child – though the impact was less (my sister would have cried with snow, never mind boondies). I was a master of snow. I knew all its tricks instinctively. I was inside the television set.

The day was warming rapidly and the snow was becoming slushy. I had checked out and stored my baggage. I ate a meal in the restaurant and went out and played in the snow. The snowmen were losing their features. The snow is very short, I said, and people looked at me. But I knew what I said made sense. I went into the lobby and asked them to see if there was a spare seat on a Qantas flight back to Perth that evening. They were very accommodating. I managed to adjust my ticket with only a little extra cost, though to tell the truth, if it'd been five times as much I would have paid. But I didn't let on about that.

My car was waiting for me in long-term parking. I drove back to the farm with the air-conditioning on full. It's a good air-conditioner. It can turn summer to winter, and I will always have a head full of snow.

THE BET

They were half-friends. Occasionally played together, tolerated each other when forced to sit together, but had never gone round to each other's homes after school.

On the day of the inter-school swimming carnival, they both had summer colds and ‘wagging it' slips from their mothers. It was a small school and they were the only two to stay behind, watched over by the headmaster himself; he had better things to do so he set them doing art all day. They had a classroom to themselves.

The swimming carnival wasn't far away. The boys could hear the crowd yelling and shrieking and carrying on. Three schools from neighbouring districts were competing. The school champion, a classmate of theirs, mocked them just before the school marched off in its files according to factions: You don't look too sick, you two sissy bludgers. His body rippled with pride and self-love. The two stay-behinds looked at each other and smirked. Another thing in common.

Des was the bigger of the two, and slightly lorded it over Garry, the elder by two months. Garry was a nervous sort, but that was more of a ploy, like the snail retreating into its shell at times of threat, but probably quite happy and secure in its own fluids and ecology. If threatened, Garry had a litany of interest-piques up his sleeve, like: I flicked Gabrielle's dress up with my ruler and saw what colour knickers she's wearing. And if the reply came, So what, everyone's seen Gabrielle's knickers, he'd retort: But she doesn't call them knickers, I've heard her say ‘panties', and everyone knows that means she's a slut.

Des and Garry did art. They drew rank cartoons of their teachers having sex with sheep and goats. The headmaster was turned into a goat, having sex with a sheep, which might well have been their teacher, Miss Morris. And they drew Nev, the school champion, swimming with a flagpole up his arse, the flag flailing in the water. It had to be said, they both had talent and possibly a future as cartoonists for the state newspaper.

It was a stinking hot day. Garry mused that even with factor 30 sunblock, all the kids would be cooking. Chlorine and that chemical that changes the colour of the water when kids piss, and those lemon-scented gums they've got planted in strategic places so the limbs fall and kill the kids stone dead. You can smell those trees when it gets this hot. I can smell them from here, said Garry. Nah, said Des, that's the gum trees around the school you can smell. Garry looked at him, bemused, not knowing how to tell him that he was making a joke; but he sniffed hard, and
could
smell the lemon-scented gums through the school gums and over all that distance.

The day wore on. The carnival kids would either go home straight from the pool, or line up out front for the buses back to school. Visiting teams would be collected by their buses outside the pool. Garry and Des talked this over, ate their lunches early because the headmaster was nowhere to be seen (they didn't bother hiding their cartoons), and out of boredom resorted to bragging.

Des bet Garry that he could shoot ten pieces of paper into the rubbish bin from where he was sitting. Garry bet he couldn't. What'll you bet? asked Des. I just bet you can't, said Garry. Des shot the ten pieces into the bin.

Garry told Des he'd taken Miss Morris's birth control pills from her bag, and fed one of them to the guinea pigs in the science lab. Des, not knowing what the pills were, bet him he hadn't. What'll you bet? asked Garry. Nothing, said Des, it's not worth anything.

This went on for a while until they got bored all over again. As the afternoon wore on, they went repeatedly to the toilet, sprayed water from the fountains over each other, packed up their cartoons, planning to plant them on the school champ the next day, had an arm wrestle which Garry lost and Des crowed over, and farted so loud that the room resonated and Des punched Garry repeatedly in the arm for ‘letting off', though he'd done the most, the loudest and the smelliest.

They discussed shooting through, but as they were about to go, the goat of a headmaster poked his head into the classroom and asked if all was well, boys, using the time constructively, I hope. And if their hearts faltered at the thought that he might ask to see their work, they underestimated his supreme indifference; he vanished as fast as he appeared.

Des said, I bet you can't shoot ten pieces of paper into the bin from here. Garry, thoroughly tired of Des now, and hoping to never have to talk with him again after that day, looked at him carefully, screwed his eyebrows, eyes flickering, and said, You're on. What odds will you give me?

Des said, as per their earlier games, I won't bet you anything … it's just a dare.

Nah, said Garry, let's bet proper. You name your odds.

Des thought of whacking Garry, but laughed. Garry was a dope. Slow or somethin'. Odd. Peculiar. A weed. A joke. He'd pants him. He wasn't sure what was meant by ‘odds', so he replied, If you lose I'll pants ya in front of Gabrielle.

And if I win? asked Garry.

You won't. You can't get ten pieces of paper in the bin from here. They won't even go that far. Even I couldn't do it, never mind a dope like you.

I bet you five hundred dollars. So you give me five hundred if I win, and you can pants me if I don't.

Sure!

We'll write it down and sign it.

What? Why? Well, why not.

Garry wrote it up and they both signed it. Des joked, It should be signed in blood! He looked at Garry, trying to intimidate, but Garry said, Sure, why not. Thumbprints of our blood. We'll prick ourselves with compasses. And they did, thumbprinting next to their signatures,

Garry scrunched the paper as hard as he could and shot ten out of ten. He was good at it, having whiled hours away in his room doing the same thing. When his dad was on the piss, he had to keep out of the way if stuck indoors, this was as good a sport as any.

That's five hundred bucks, please, mate, said Garry, who had filed away the betting slip in his back pocket without Des registering.

Piss off! said Des, and pummelled Garry's arm so hard that Garry whimpered and leapt out of the room as the school siren rang, echoing through the emptiness of the classroom, the school.

Though Gary's father was a violent man, he strangely doted on his son as a chip off the old block. But Garry detested his father, and carried out secret errands for his mother to undermine his dad's authority. He poured booze down the sink; he snuck out to the shop to buy food not cigarettes.

Riffling through his son's pockets for a fifty-cent piece (pocket money his mum gave from housekeeping) to make up the price of a bottle of sherry, Garry's dad came across the betting slip.

What's this, boy?

Nothing, just a joke, Dad … a
pretend
bet I won at school … shooting bits of paper into a bin … you know, just muckin' round with a mate. The father looked cockeyed at the boy, thirsty and shaking already. He was in no mood. Five hundred dollars and signed in blood. That's a legal document.

No, said Garry, we're under-age. Garry knew about such things; Des would have been well-advised to look deeper into what made Garry tick. He was no dope.

We'll see about that, said his father. Des Bailey. I know his old man.

Don't do anything, Dad! It was just a joke. Garry shuddered. Every pummelling of his arm ricocheted through his body, and he found it difficult to play dumb any longer. But he did. Don't embarrass me, Dad! Which was a red rag to a bull, and, what's more, impossible, given Garry's humiliations at the hands of his father were legion, and he was pretty well immune.