Deeper Water (4 page)

‘An axe,’ he answered, and then he asked me out to dinner.

Sophie said he was just nervous and that’s why he told the joke, but I said no anyway, though I liked him well enough before that.

‘Billy is …’ I was thinking of the way Hamish rubbed the place just at the base of his neck, that it was the only sign he ever gave of feeling stuff.

‘Alright, for your first time round.’

‘I hardly ever see him anymore. He avoids me.’

‘Hell hath no fury …’

My sister was sounding more like her old self with every passing minute. She reached down and broke the suction of the baby’s lips on her breast with her little finger, lifting Lila upright so she could burp. The baby looked disorientated, and I guess it would feel strange to be always moving unpredictably through space.

‘I hope she doesn’t poo. Bath and baby poo right now is not my idea of fun.’

We’d seen this before, a few times. It basically meant starting the whole bath process again.

‘Do you want me to take her and get her dressed?’

‘Just let me wipe her quickly with a washer,’ Sophie answered.

I handed my sister the wash cloth, and she smoothed it across her baby’s skin, swiping it over all the creases, gently prising up her arms and neck to clean all her delicate baby crevices.

‘She’s wonderful, Soph,’ I said.

‘I know.’ Sophie’s voice was soft, like she was mesmerised. ‘She’s perfect.’

When she finished cleaning Lila, I bundled her up in a towel and took her out to find her some clothes.

Half of my mother’s pottery shed was filled with unglazed, unfired pots. They were majestic things, large and curved and white. She didn’t make just pots, but huge plates and platters too. When they were fired they’d come out deep, dark colours, but I liked them just as much this fragile white. It was the same with most things in flux—I liked the caterpillar just as much as the butterfly.

Mum would disappear for days at a time, throwing pots almost bigger than her arms could span. Watching her at the wheel was like glimpsing the world at creation, like she held a whole universe in her arms. She taught me to use the wheel when I was small, and I can throw a pot as well as the next person, but throwing pots like Mum requires a strength and stamina that most people don’t have. It’s a gift, or that’s what the gallery man says when he comes on his buying trips.

When the next day came out sunny, Mum headed to her shed straight after breakfast. Sophie bundled the babies up and took them back to her own cabin, so it was only me and Hamish left in the house. I’d been up early to check on the calf and let the chooks out. The water over the bridge was still too high to cross, but it wouldn’t be long now. We’d be able to get out tomorrow.

With the sunshine out, Hamish was restless. I sat at the kitchen table, the old dog at my feet, but Hamish paced around, patting his empty pockets. Endlessly checking the time.

‘I can’t believe you don’t have internet.’

It was the second time he’d said it that morning. I wasn’t sure how to respond. I guess I didn’t know what I was missing.

‘Why’s it so important?’

‘You know, emails and stuff.’

‘Not really.’

‘You don’t know what an email is?’

‘Yeah—I mean, it’s a message sent on a computer.’ I knew that much. ‘But I’ve never sent one.’

‘You’ve never sent an email?’

‘No.’

Hamish stopped moving and stared at me.

‘Come on, you must have sent one once … somewhere along the line?’ He sounded disbelieving. ‘What about at school?’

Because we didn’t have a working computer, I’d done all my school correspondence via plain old mail, but I didn’t want to tell him that.

‘Nup.’ I leaned down and gave the dog a scratch behind her ears. She was a scraggly old thing, smelly but familiar. These days she didn’t ask for much—a pat here and there and a bowl of food. She hardly left the house. I couldn’t remember a time when her big brown body wasn’t sleeping somewhere in a corner—ears twitching, dog-snuffling through her dreams.

‘That’s amazing.’ Hamish shook his head. ‘I would have thought everyone under the age of fifty would have sent an email.’

I was trying not to feel affronted. ‘What about all those people in remote areas?’

‘Yeah, maybe. But, Mema, this isn’t
that
remote.’

I shrugged. I had no answer to that. ‘What do you like about it so much?’

He started moving around the kitchen, checking out all the things in jars. We always had everything sealed up to keep the insects out. The pantry door fell off a few years back and we hadn’t got around to fixing it yet. There were a few shelves above the bench too, so most of our food was on display.

‘I’m not one of those guys who’s glued to a screen twenty-four-seven or anything,’ he stated. ‘I mean, I hardly even update Facebook.’ He sounded frustrated to be talking about it, even though he’d brought it up. ‘It’s not … my life. I just need emails for work. It’s how my whole job runs.’

I was thinking about how panicked Hamish had been on that first afternoon when he realised he’d lost his laptop. I knew he must have been in shock from being trapped in the car like that, but standing in the pouring rain, sodden and mucky after the cow birth, he looked like his whole world had washed down the drain. As though the computer was everything he had.

‘And, you know, I work to a deadline. They sent me all the way out here, and when I get back into town I’ll have to work out how to retrieve all my data. I’m not stupid, I back up really important things, but not everything. I had so much stuff stored on that laptop, stuff I’d collected for years. It’s just … annoying.’

He was still looking at the pantry, distracted by a jar of flour with obvious signs of life. Must have had weevils or something. He peered at it but he didn’t comment. ‘Will I be able to buy a new laptop in town, Mema?’ he asked over his shoulder.

‘I don’t know, maybe. You’ll have to ask.’

I tried to imagine what it must feel like to have everything that was important to you inside a small machine. It was hard to get my head around.

‘Email is just such an instantaneous form of communication,’ he said, almost like he was talking to himself.

‘More than a phone?’

He stopped perusing the jars for a second and turned back to look at me, thinking. ‘No, I guess not. It’s just you don’t have the time to talk to everyone, and so you send people things and they can read them when they want, you know? When they have time.’

‘So, it’s not instantaneous then?’ It didn’t make that much sense to me. ‘’Cause they might not read it straight away?’

‘But they probably will. They just might take a little while to get back to you,’ he said. ‘Usually, you can be pretty sure they’ve read it.’

I wasn’t really seeing it.

‘But if you called them, you’d get to speak to them, and then you’d know for sure. Right?’

‘But you’d have to go through all the small-talk parts of having a conversation. It’s time consuming when you only want to tell someone one thing.’

I didn’t much like talking on the phone, so I wasn’t going to argue with that. Hamish walked across to the window and looked out over the rolling hills. It was always beautiful after the rain and I waited for him to say so.

‘I can’t believe I lost my laptop
and
my phone,’ he said instead, squinting out at the view. ‘That’s a first.’

The whole time Hamish had been stranded in our little farmhouse in the pouring rain he’d hardly complained at all. This was the most I’d heard him speak. He had a way of choosing his words carefully, like he was weighing things up in his head. Most of the people I knew just blurted out their thoughts, but Hamish was different.

I didn’t know what to do with him there. Normally in the mornings I might help Mum in the shed, throw a few mugs for the markets, muddle about in the vegie garden, or just clean up a bit. With the sun out I wanted to get on with things, but I wasn’t sure how, especially since he’d finally started talking.

‘When I get out, I’ll get back online and there’ll be one thousand emails waiting for me. And it’ll take me forever to sort through them.’

‘To do with work or what?’ I was trying to think of something we could do for the day.

‘Yeah, mainly to do with work, but other stuff too.’

‘And you can’t be away from them for a few days otherwise they bank up?’ I asked. ‘That’s why you’re getting stressed out?’

He was pacing around the way Anja’s dad did when he needed a drink. Our ratbag cat was perched on the back of the couch, and even from the kitchen I could see his tail flicking from side to side as though he was listening.

‘It’s just, I have a deadline and I’m already behind. But I’m not stressed.’ He stopped pacing and sat down at the kitchen table. ‘Well, maybe a little jittery. I can’t believe it’s sunny and I still can’t get out.’

I didn’t know what to say about that. It was just a fact of life. Rivers rose and then they fell. The timing was unpredictable. The old dog sighed at my feet.

‘I guess it’s also that I’m missing out on things I need to know about. News and information. That kind of stuff.’

I put on the kettle for tea. It seemed a logical step. ‘What kind of information?’

‘What’s happening in the world. You know. How do you find out what’s happening in the world, Mema?’

‘Sometimes we listen to the radio, or someone buys a paper.’

He glanced around at me standing at the kitchen bench. ‘Sometimes?’

‘On occasion.’

‘Right.’ He sounded deeply disappointed, as though that was the worst response he could imagine.

The truth was, the world outside didn’t hold much interest for me. Hearing about conflicts in faraway places seemed pointless if there wasn’t anything I could do. I knew there were all sorts of things happening out there ’cause sometimes I heard the news, but if everything was always shifting, if the world was in a constant state of change, I didn’t really know why keeping up to date mattered.

‘Why do you need to know?’

‘What do you mean?’ He was starting to sound frustrated. ‘I like to stay informed.’

I thought about this. Being informed. ‘But does it change the way you live?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘In what way?’

‘In the decisions that I make. In what I’m willing to support.’

I wasn’t sure about this—if he was talking politics or just the painstaking choice between quinoa or spelt, biodynamic milk or soy—which products were the healthiest, least destructive buys. That stuff is part of old hippie lore, and we’d always been careful, but I wondered if that’s what Hamish meant.

‘Do you mean voting? Or what you buy?’

He shrugged. ‘Both, I guess. Plus, I need to be informed for work. Informed about current issues that might affect my work.’

‘Like what?’

‘Environmental issues. Stuff like that is always changing. New scientific discoveries. I need to keep on top of it.’

‘Okay.’

‘It’s what I do for work. It’s part of my job.’

‘I thought you said that you were some kind of consultant.’ I had no idea what being a consultant meant.

‘Yeah, an environmental consultant.’

Clearly, I had missed that part of his job description.

‘Companies pay me to assess the environmental impacts of their proposals, that kind of thing.’

‘So what are you assessing now?’ It was a world so far out of my experience I wasn’t sure what to ask. ‘Something around here?’

Hamish rubbed the back of his neck. ‘It’s a bit hard to explain.’

It wasn’t much of an answer. I waited for him to say more but he didn’t. Hamish often left a silence where someone else would try to fill the gap. It was a bit unsettling.

‘Try.’ I guess I liked hearing him talk.

‘You know how there’s a sugar mill on the outskirts of town?’

I nodded. It was a gigantic construction, always blowing out smoke. Been there since before I was born. It was on the other side of town from us, so I rarely went past it, but I always marvelled at the preposterousness of it, industrial and smoke-coughing, right against the forest-covered mountains.

‘Well, there’s been this proposal to turn the sugar waste into power, green power.’ He tapped his fingers on the table. ‘You know how they burn the cane fields?’

‘Yeah, if the wind is blowing our way, sometimes we get some ash.’

‘Well, instead of burning the cane in the fields, they’ve converted the mill so they can burn it there, harvesting it for power. In theory it could power the whole town, maybe even the whole district.’

‘That sounds good,’ I said, and it seemed a neat enough solution.

‘The company I’m working for wants me to check it out. They’re thinking of investing. They want to know how much it will cost and all that stuff, but I’m more interested in if it will
work
. How much power will it use? How much will it create? Is it really green? I’ve got my own agenda, see.’

‘Agenda?’

‘You know, all these ideas. I’ve got a billion ideas.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, but you know how it is. Hard to get them off the ground. Ideas are like arseholes, everybody has them.’

That was a statement. But I wasn’t sure I did know. I didn’t really feel like I had ideas. We sat in the quiet, waiting for the kettle to boil. I probably put too much water in ’cause it seemed to take forever.

‘So, your mum makes a living from pottery?’

‘Yeah, I mean, we don’t need much. We get by.’

It was a tricky subject, even for me.

‘That must be pretty unusual,’ he continued. ‘She must sell a lot of pots. She must be good.’

‘Her pots are amazing. She loves it, she always has.’

‘Maybe I could check them out later.’

He was still tapping his fingers.

‘I’ll take you out there, if you like. I could show you how to throw a pot. Have you done it before?’

He shook his head. ‘You make pots too?’

‘We all know how to do it. I just make small things for the local markets. Cups and things like that. Simple stuff.’

‘I’m terrible at making things. But I’d like to watch you do it.’

I don’t know why but this comment made me blush. The kettle was boiling so I got up to make the teas. ‘Later on. When Mum’s finished.’ I poured the steaming water into mugs. ‘You should have a go, though. Shaping clay makes you feel kind of powerful. It doesn’t matter so much about the outcome, what you end up with. It just feels good to do.’

‘Maybe.’ Hamish seemed unconvinced. He squeezed his fingers into a fist to stop them tapping.

Being cooped up in such a small space with Hamish reminded me again of my brothers. When I was small they used to sneak out when it stopped raining to ride the creeks on their body boards. Mum didn’t like them doing it ’cause it was dangerous, but they weren’t taking any notice of her by then. Sometimes when the water dropped a bit they’d take me and Anja too. And sometimes, when we could get away with it, Anja and I would still go. We had boards stashed in the branches of a tree beside the creek, upstream from the bridge, out of reach of even the highest flood. It was one of our secrets, even more precious than the rain-running. And then it dawned on me that it might be a good thing to do right now.

‘We could ride the creeks,’ I said, passing him the teacup. ‘The creek’s still high but it would probably be okay.’

I watched his hands as he held the cup. His fingers were pale, not sun-darkened like mine, but they were strong.

‘What’s that involve?’

‘Going upstream a little way to a spot that’s not running quite as fast, then jumping on a body board and riding the creek back down.’

‘Is it—you know—safe?’ He took a sip of tea. He didn’t seem scared, but maybe he was remembering washing off the bridge.