Hope Farm (29 page)

‘Oh, I thought you'd gone. There are all these mineshafts, you see, up in the hills, and they're really old and
really
deep, and there's just no way to get down into them, the technology simply does not exist. So everyone's saying he probably fell into one of them, but there's no way of finding him.'

I swallowed. ‘They can't get down the mineshafts?'

‘Some of them they can, but lots of them they can't. Too dangerous, and too deep.'

‘So they didn't find him, his …?'

‘No, they didn't. There was a thing in the paper — they gave up.'

‘So that's it then?'

‘Yep. That's it. Case closed.'

The rest of the phone call he filled with inane chatter while I stood in a daze, only half hearing. His skill in conveying the information about Miller, and in maintaining such a credibly natural tone throughout the whole conversation was such that I might have believed him to be genuinely uncaring, were it not for one tiny revelation, right at the end of the call.

‘I don't know how I'm going to
cope
,' he said, ‘with going back to school. I'll
never
be able to get up in the mornings — I've started sleeping in so late. I've been having trouble …' There was a long pause, into which he allowed a deep, weary exhalation. ‘I've been having trouble falling asleep at night.'

After that, we wrote to each other, letters that were so superficial as to appear to be in some kind of code.

Yesterday I ate almost a whole watermelon and nearly vomited. Linda makes really good cheesecake.
Both verandahs are now glorious mission brown but Dad couldn't bear to let any paint go to waste so out with the roller again and I have been getting acquainted with the shed.
There are two dogs in one of the downstairs flats. They are called Fluffy and Max. Max is cute but Fluffy has this skin thing that is so disgusting, her whole back is nearly bald.
For my birthday this year Mum's taking me to Melbourne to see
The Mikado
at the State Theatre. It's an opera, by the way. I have to pay for some of the ticket but that's all right, I've got plenty saved up.
I am SO BORED!!!!

It was a code, of sorts. When I wrote to Ian I used what I thought to be the voice of an ordinary teenager, bored during school holidays, and he wrote back to me in the same voice.
We are normal
, we told each other.
We are getting on with our normal lives.

The days seemed to hinge on dinnertime. I came to look forward to helping Linda prepare the meals, which seemed exotic at first, with their firm textures and fresh colours, their discrete elements that sat so cleanly on our plates. Slices of smoked trout served with tiny, whole potatoes and neat mounds of chopped salad; lamb cutlets, steamed baby carrots and green beans. I pored over the glossy pictures in Linda's recipe books, the detailed, sensible instructions.
Chop carrots into matchstick-sized pieces and add to broccoli florets. Toss with dressing and set aside.
I took pleasure in getting to know the kitchen, which implements to use for which purpose, where everything was kept. Cooking fumes and steam vanished into the range hood above the stove. The plates, bowls, and cups all matched. There were placemats and napkins; the table would be cleared completely, even though we only needed the two places. Afterwards, I washed the dishes, which barely filled the rack, and wiped the benches clean.

I don't recall what we spoke about over dinner. I don't think we spoke much, but it didn't matter. I do remember the times she tried to press me on things, coming to stand in the doorway to my room. Her soft, apologetic voice: ‘Silver?'

‘Yes?' My insides already contracting with discomfort.

‘Is there anything you'd like to talk about?'

‘No.'

‘Well, if there ever is anything, I'm here to listen.'

‘There isn't anything.'

Unlike Ian, I had no trouble falling asleep. This was when I felt safest, curled in the dark, Linda's bedtime sounds — the creak of her desk chair, soft footsteps, the running of a tap — at the far edges of my drifting consciousness. It was in the early mornings that the terror came, wrenching me awake, my heart galloping. The gaping blackness. His hands, his breath, the awful cry.

I got a Walkman, which helped. I listened to the quizzes on AM radio, soothed myself with the comfortable wash of voices, the mild to-and-fro.

On the weekends we went to see films, or drove to the beach. There was a picnic with Linda's friends. They were all women, none of them married, and this was something they apparently spoke about quite often, in a blithe way. One of them, Suzie — who was glamorous, with bleached hair and pink lipstick — had just broken up with a boyfriend. ‘I'm just devastated,' she said brightly, tearing a drumstick from a cold chicken. She had sunglasses in a 1950s style.

‘Well I've given up,' said Margaret, who was short with spiky hair and tanned skin that crinkled at the corners of her eyes. ‘It's been a relief, I can tell you.'

They drank white wine, and the talk and laughter was constant. Linda was the quietest in the group, but she smiled, following the conversation, and when Suzie leaned into her, laughing, lipstick on her teeth, Linda laughed too and patted Suzie's hand.

I sat on the periphery with a book. Across the grass I saw some teenagers, lying around under another tree. I watched them covertly, burning with embarrassment at Linda and her loud friends, their womanliness, their lack of shame. The dash of pink on Suzie's teeth suddenly bothered me, and Linda's thighs, soft and pale at the cuffs of her shorts. I made shields either side of my face with my hands and bent to the book in my lap.

Driving back, Linda asked if I was okay. I made a noncommittal sound.

‘I suppose it's a bit boring for you,' she said. ‘A grown-up event like that.'

It was evening, the sun low. We were passing through a beachside suburb and a group of kids around my age, girls and boys, ran across the road in front of us. Linda slowed down. They were in swimmers, towels wrapped around their waists, and they were so close I could see the colours of a woven bracelet on a girl's wrist, the sand clinging to their tanned calves.

‘Mandy, wait!' yelled one of the boys, his voice cracking against the tarmac, the deepening sky. They reached the kerb with a flick of heels; Linda accelerated and they were gone.

We went to Grace Brothers to buy me new clothes. I selected the plainest things I could find.

‘What about this?' Linda held up a dress, white cotton with small navy polka-dots and a ruffled skirt. ‘For if you go out.' The question of where I might go, and with whom, remained unspoken.

I shook my head miserably.

She put it back. ‘No,' she said. ‘You're right. It's a bit frilly.'

We went to the underwear section, and I chose navy socks and two six-packs of regular underpants. It was Linda who picked up the bras. Two of them. They were a plain, sports kind, no lace. ‘I think these would be your size,' she murmured, standing close beside me and holding them discreetly folded over themselves.

I didn't thank her for her delicacy. Wordlessly I took them and shoved them under my arm.

Now that I live in a flat of my own, dependent on my own routines, I wonder what it must have been like for Linda to have her home and her life so suddenly invaded by this stranger. And a child at that — or worse, a teenager, with a teenager's inwardness. A responsibility she had been given no time to prepare for and which came with no instructions — Linda with her lists, her weekly meal plans, Linda who kept the manuals for every domestic appliance in a folder, in alphabetical order. What irritations did she hide, and what fears?

She did her homework — I saw books on parenting and adolescence beside her bed — and I like to think I felt some vague gratitude, or at least moments of recognition, like the one that night after Margaret's phone call, but I suspect that I mostly just took what she offered and forged ahead without much thought for her, her feelings or the sacrifices she might be making.

I have apologised, since, for this. With typical gravity she accepted the apology, but said that at the time she was relieved to recognise anything at all like the behaviour of a normal teenager. ‘You were supposed to be selfish,' she said. ‘Whenever you were, I knew I must be doing something right.'

I started school. I didn't make friends. I didn't wear frilly dresses and go out, or run across roads in my swimmers with boys. I worked. I sat quietly in each class, and listened and made notes, and I did all my homework and all the extension work the teachers began giving me. By the middle of the year Linda and I had decided that I would apply for a selective-entry school and change again in Year Nine.

Eventually I did rearrange the spare room — my room. She bought me a desk, which just squeezed in beside the chest of drawers, and I stuck study notes above it, my certificates, my academic awards, and a poster of Albert Einstein.

The letters to and from Ian petered out. Keeping up the exchange of trivial information had become exhausting, and neither of us seemed willing or able to break out of our pretend voices and say anything real. I thought about him less and less often.

I hardly thought about Ishtar at all. Consciously, that is. There was a feeling though, like the cold, etched one that belonged to Hope — always there, ready to overtake me. The Ishtar feeling was warm and sweet and smoky, and came with snapshot images: the swing of her hair, a long-legged step in jeans and boots, the length of her throat and the slip of its creamy-gold skin into the rough wool of a jumper. It was primitive and desperate, and I hated it and the way it arrived with apparent randomness, and no warning. I deflected it as best I could.

Perhaps on some basic level I simply saw Linda as a better bet, and having made that investment, I went on to protect it. It did not occur to me at any stage that I could have them both in my life. Even when Ishtar returned to Australia and the two of them began to take steps — so shuffling, so tentative as to barely qualify as action — in the direction of reconciliation, my old mistrust and my newly inflamed resentment were, combined, so powerful that I could only see risk in that scenario. And the ease with which I was able to thwart them — the hardness of my resolve in comparison to the uncertainty of theirs, which on Ishtar's part I read as simple lack of interest — seemed to me proof of the veracity of my instinct. And she had stayed away so long.

Linda did what she could. She stuck Ishtar's postcards on the fridge; she spoke about their childhood, their parents; she showed me photos. I could see the effort this took — her voice quavered, and she would occasionally blot at her eyes with a tissue. There was always a sense of relief at the conclusion of these conversations — or sessions, as I came to think of them — and I suspected it was on her part as well as mine. A kind of resentful gloom would come over me when I saw her getting down the photo album with its cover of bumpy, porridge-coloured fabric, and I found myself retreating into abstraction, overcome by fits of yawning.

It was during one of these sessions, the two of us kneeling on the living-room floor, that Linda said, seemingly out of the blue: ‘Do you know why Karen — Ishtar — left home?'

I came part-way out of my torpor. Did this mean she knew something, had found something out? ‘No,' I said. ‘Why? Do you?'

‘No, no.' She shifted the album that lay across her lap. ‘I just wondered. What did she tell you?'

‘Nothing.'

‘Well.' Linda was using her extra-careful voice. ‘You have a right to more information, you know.'

I shrugged.

‘You wouldn't have to speak with … Ishtar … if you didn't want to.' The name never sounded quite right when she said it. ‘If it felt too difficult to ask directly. You could write a letter.'

Anger ground in me, like gears clashing. I got up. ‘What would be the point of that?' I said. ‘She wouldn't be able to read it.'

Later she came and sat on the end of my bed and began to speak, quietly. ‘I was fifteen,' she said. ‘Karen and I went to the same school, but we didn't have much to do with each other. I was what they called a conch — all I cared about was studying. I wasn't into sports or the social scene. She was very different. She was popular because of her looks, but I think she lacked confidence. Anyway, she did have a bit of a reputation at school. There were whispers. Not that I ever knew what she actually did to earn it, I was so socially unaware. But I do remember some boys at the bus stop one day, saying something about her, something … unpleasant.'

I lay staring at the wall.

‘One day I came home and she just wasn't there. Our mother said she'd gone away for a while, to a special school, to help with her literacy. I just didn't question it. Then later on the truth came out — about The Path, that she'd left to join them. Now that I do the sums, I think she must have become pregnant with you almost straightaway. Or even …' She was silent for a while, and when she spoke again it was in a more direct, decisive tone. ‘She came back to visit once, when our mother was very sick — about to die — and she and Dad argued about something. She said there was something Mum and Dad hadn't told me about, something that had to do with her leaving.'