Desert Fish (5 page)

It didn't rain all through that January when Pete first came to stay. The days were hot and bright. In the afternoons, we searched the horizon for a hem of cloud that might suggest a storm but the skies remained blank and blue, too tired for the tumult of thunder and rain.

You couldn't hide anything in that kind of weather. You'd walk along the road and see doors and windows thrown open in the hope of catching a breeze. People moved slowly about their living rooms or lay in the warm gaping shade of porches and verandahs. You could see their empty cups on coffee tables, half-finished bottles of soft drink, clothing that had been peeled off and abandoned. There were the unshaven legs of women, the pink bellies of shirtless men. On the road, the light outlined everything and conversations cut through the air like pictures. There was no moisture to soften the heat. The haze of dust in the distance was the only thing that made a blur.

Soon after Pete moved in my mother decided to remake
the front garden. When she told me, I knew she was feeling good, looking ahead. She always started something new when things took an upward turn. When my father began his fruit selling she made me a pair of pink pyjamas on her old treadle sewing machine. I was seven then, and I remember how it took her two weeks by the time she'd bought the fabric and cut it out, pinned and tacked and stitched the pieces together. The buttons had little violets painted on, and there was even a collar, round with a dark pink top stitch where it was joined to the yoke. She bought ribbon too. It matched the violets on the buttons and she wanted to edge the sleeves with it, but she never got around to doing that. I wore them for a month or two without the ribbon with my mother washing them on Saturdays, commenting each time on how she still had to stitch that ribbon onto the sleeves. I didn't want to tell her that the collar was tight and unpleasant to sleep in, and that I felt too dressed up to be going to bed. But then my dad gave up the truck and she couldn't bear to look at them anyway. She put them on the mending pile and I never saw them again until I'd grown out of them, when she put them in a bag for St Vincent de Paul.

Now she wanted a flowerbed. She had marked out a patch and turned over the soil. It was Pete she was pleased with. How he'd settled into our spare room, paying his rent each week with a little extra for food, and eating his meals with us. How she had planned this clever thing, getting someone in so our house could be a different sort of home.

Pete seemed to absorb my mother's tension just by
being there. He brought a certain feeling into a room with him. You could sense the air settle as he sat down and if he had something to say, he put it in a direct, matter-of-fact way. He seemed like the sort of person who would always be alright and it made you want to be near him. He got a job at McGill's Farm Supplies right away. My dad had once worked there, but he'd not lasted long. Pete started on the forklifts and very soon after they asked him to do the stock control. I thought my dad might get a little defensive about this but he didn't mention it once. He liked having Pete around too.

‘Come and help me, Gilly,' my mother said. ‘We just have to turn the soil a bit and then we can put these in. We can do it all today.'

I followed her out onto the porch and sat on the concrete steps while she laid out the seeds and the cuttings she'd got. There was a shrub in a pot too, for transplanting. A camellia.

‘We'll just do it along the front, leading up to the porch,' she said. ‘Nothing too elaborate. A splash of colour before the front door.'

I shrugged. ‘Okay.' There had been other flowerbeds before this, one along the side of the house, another near the back fence. There was a mango tree right outside my window that my mother had germinated from a seed when I was just two. It was her success story. My mother thought that because it had been a seed and now it was a tree, she had a secret green finger, waiting to coax life from the soil.

The cuttings were geraniums, and my mother was tearing open the seed packets. ‘Pansies,' she said, ‘and forget-me-nots. We'll put them along the front here. The gerberas behind. Those geraniums can go at the far end. And a marigold beside them.' She put her hand on a pot. ‘I'll put the camellia at the porch end. The flowers are crimson. They're lovely.' She looked away. ‘And your dad …' She wouldn't meet my eye when she spoke of him. ‘I'll get your dad to put a trellis at the back. We'll get something climbing there.' She frowned. ‘Nothing thorny though. Maybe some honeysuckle, or jasmine. What do you think? It'll be like a cottage garden.'

A cottage garden. It made me want to laugh. Our house was made of weatherboard. Its roof was corrugated iron, painted red, and it had a bare sort of uniformity about its exterior that did not fit with my idea of what a cottage was. A cottage belonged in a world where grass grew soft and green, where ivy climbed stone walls and leaves gathered thick around the branches of trees. The ground around our house was flat and bare. There was some patchy grass, tough blades of it that prickled when you sat on them, and apart from my mother's mango tree, there was only a frangipani tree right near the back fence. My mother's flowers would struggle unless they got a lot of attention. Native flowers would be better suited to the sparse geometry of our house. Wattle or hibiscus. Bottlebrush with its spindly blooms. I liked the thin-leaved plants with peeling bark and waxy flowers that I saw growing along the top of the riverbank and by the
side of the road. But I only knew the names of a few. Not enough to have a debate with my mother. We were not the type of people who knew the names of the things around us. Only the things we put there ourselves. And the flowers that I liked were not the sort you made a garden out of.

‘Sounds nice,' I said. I took up a gardening fork and began turning the soil.

‘Put your gloves on, Gilly,' my mother said. She had hers on already. ‘You'll get a callus.'

‘… and dirt under my nails,' I finished for her. ‘I don't care about dirt and calluses. And anyway, look.' I held my hands out. The nails were bitten right down. The tips of my fingers had grown hard and insensitive, I'd been biting them for so long. The skin met the nails almost seamlessly so the soil only made the thinnest muddy line. It would dissolve with soap and water. It would not have to be scraped away.

My mother pressed her lips together. She hated me biting my nails. My fingers were long and thin. My hands were finely boned. They did not match the rest of me. By biting my nails I made them mine.

‘In any case,' I added, ‘I like the feel of the dirt.' It was cool and damp once I'd got my hands down into it.

‘Waste of money, those gloves,' she said.

‘You can wear them,' I said, ‘when you've worn yours out.' I looked down at the dirt, so she wouldn't see I was giving cheek. She'd had the same gloves since I was small. They were made of nubuck and she dusted them
down carefully after each use. Then she'd hang them on a hook in the laundry. She didn't use them enough to wear them out.

‘Here.' She handed me a packet of seeds. ‘Put those in for me.'

I upturned the packet and let the seeds roll onto my palm.

‘One seed at a time, Gilly,' my mother harped. ‘You'll drop them.' She spoke to me as though I was still a child. It was the heat. It made me sluggish. There was a strip of shade along the length of the garden but where my mother and I crouched was in full sun. It pressed at my neck through the straw of my hat.

‘You should wear a hat,' I said to her. ‘You'll burn.'

She threw me a look. ‘Don't be silly. When have I ever worn a hat?' She hated the ring of sweat it gave her beneath the band, and how it made a flat kink in her tidy cropped hair. ‘A bit of sun never hurt anyone.'

I had my dad's fair skin and my mother believed if I let it burn at the beginning of the summer it would toughen it up, make it resistant to the sun. I had a picture of me as a baby and you could see I'd been left out too long. My skin was red and flaking across my cheeks and nose. Even now, I couldn't bear the sting of the burn and how the layers of skin peeled off after all the other signs of the burn had vanished. It was a nasty trick. I always wore a hat and kept to the shade where there was any.

I pushed my finger into the dirt and dropped a seed in. My mother took the packet away from me and read
it before she checked the depth of the insertion I'd made.

‘Good,' she said. ‘All along the front there. At equal distances. I want a border, see? I'll do the gerberas.'

She went to the end of the patch and reached over to the middle, working her way along and spacing the gerbera seeds with care. I tried to place the pansies neatly to match. I could sense her wanting something from me, the weight of it was there in the space between us, and I felt responsible. The ground was hard beneath my knees. There were seams of clay in the soil and without any rain they baked solid, squeezing the colour from the grass.

Pete came up the path then. He had on his work blues. The collar of his shirt was undone and there was a fine covering of grain dust on his boots and clinging to the hairs on his legs above his socks.

‘You're back early, Pete,' my mother said.

‘Late lunch,' he replied. ‘Thought I'd come home for it.' He caught my eye and I blushed.

‘I'll make it for you,' my mother said. ‘Give me a minute.'

‘Thanks.'

He sat down on the steps. I had to look away. I focused on the dirt, the holes I was making with my fingers.

‘Stop now, Gilly,' my mother said. ‘That's enough. Why don't you put that camellia in?'

Leaning back, I brushed the dirt off my fingers. I could feel the colour rising in my face.

Pete rolled a cigarette. The Rizla crackled as he pressed
tobacco into it. I breathed the rich waxy scent and began to loosen the dirt with a fork.

‘Can I make you one, Maureen?' Pete asked.

‘No thanks,' my mother said. ‘Not right now.' She only liked tailor-mades.

‘Gilly? Can I roll you a smoke?'

I sat back on my heels. Pete was looking at me and I wondered what he saw. I had never smoked in front of my parents. I was not the sort of girl who did things to rebel. There had been the odd occasion to experiment before. Once when I was fourteen I attached myself to a group of girls at a school dance. They were in my year but I didn't know them well. They were drinking a cocktail of vodka in fruit juice outside the hall. They didn't seem to mind me being there. Someone passed me a cigarette and I dutifully put it to my lips and pulled the smoke into my mouth. It tasted bitter and I blew it out right away and thought how false I must appear. The drink was better, the fruit juice was sweet and the vodka had no taste. It made me feel warm and loose, helped me smile at the banter of the girls I was with. But later, when they wanted to go on to a party, I felt nervous. I thought my mother might worry if she was home on her own. Also, I was anxious that these girls might sober up and notice that I didn't belong with them. Or worse, they might try too hard to include me. I would have to acknowledge my decision to be there and I knew it was a lie. I snuck away home without saying goodbye.

Pete was already loosening another Rizla, his lips were
pressed into a smile and the way he leaned forward seemed to direct the moment towards me.

My mother said nothing. She'd not even stopped what she was doing and though I was taken aback at her indifference, I did not want to appear so.

I was not at school anymore, I reminded myself. I was free to earn my own money and make my own decisions. Perhaps this was what my mother was demonstrating, that I no longer belonged to her and my father in the way I had, that I was free to be a different sort of girl now.

I thought about the way Pete had come to us. How I had seen him by the river, and then found him in our house. About how my mother seemed soothed by his presence. I wondered what she wanted from him, and what she wanted for me.

I smiled up at Pete. ‘Yes,' I said. ‘A smoke'd be nice.'

I brushed my hands together and got up. He shifted over so I could sit down, and rolled a cigarette for me. I sat on the step just below him, his legs stretched alongside me and I was aware of the fuzzy nearness of his skin.

‘Look at me,' I said, turning my arm a little and examining my hands. ‘I'm covered in dust and soil.'

‘Doesn't matter,' Pete murmured. ‘You look nice.' He lit his own cigarette with a match and held mine to its end, then handed it to me when it was aglow. I drew back the sharp thick smoke, pulled it right into my lungs. My head spun, my chest hurt in a not-unpleasant way. The sensation lifted my lips into a smile. There was a goldish stain where the cigarette rested between Pete's
fingers and I saw the soaked-in brown of his skin and the islands of paleness on the undersides of his arms. The nicotine made things appear far away and closely outlined at the same time. Pete shifted position. He leaned his forearms on his knees so that the sleeves of his shirt gaped, revealing the insides of his arms and the damp hair in his armpits. I smiled to myself. He did sweat after all.

My mother's garden seemed distant now. She had pushed her geranium cuttings into the ground and moved up to dig in the camellia that I'd abandoned.

‘This'll want a good drink when I get it in,' she said. She smoothed the soil around the base of the plant and then looked up. I kept the rollie respectfully out of sight but she only pursed her lips softly and I thought she was seeing Pete and me as though we were in a frame.

‘I could attach the hose for you,' Pete said.

‘Oh no,' she said. ‘There's a ban on the hose. At least until it rains again. I'll use the grey water,' she said. My mother had grown up in a dry inland town. For most of her childhood she'd been able to walk along the sandy bottom of the riverbed behind her house. You had to buy water when your tank went dry. She always used our household water frugally. It was ingrained in her. When she'd washed the lunch dishes she would bring the old water out and pour it around the camellia. A bit of soap would do it no harm.