New Australian Stories 2 (46 page)

But then, through the shivering electric haze of disturbed atmosphere, the pale blue bars of sky returned to surround them, and the saplings stood sentinel again. Art could see his arms stretched out straight on the wheel like a rally driver's, the veins on his forearms plain as fencing wire. His footwell had shrunk into a small pocket of space around his feet, as if he'd gone driving with his legs tucked into his swag for warmth.

Art turned his head to the left but his wife was not to be seen. In place of the ute's centre front seat was the bole of a tree, as large as a cannon, just where they would put the shopping on the way back from town, or their daughters when they were small. Art bent forward as far as he could, mindful of the pressure of buckled plastic across his stomach, and managed to catch a glimpse of Val on the other side of the tree trunk.

She was upright but leaning away from him a little, towards the side window, as if she'd nodded off, except that her eyes were half open. The front of the car had folded itself around her neatly and symmetrically, like the travel blanket she'd used in winter in the Austin, their first car after they'd married. It was the tree that looked unnatural: dangerous and out of place in the serene, accommodating flow of metal and plastic; its bark a mess of multicoloured pastels and its sharp-edged leaves in khaki and gunmetal blue, intruding on the space between them.

Art pushed forward harder, the dash's pressure against his belly oddly comforting, like the broad leather belt he was supposed to wear for heavy lifting. He took a hand off the wheel and stretched around the cold smooth front of the tree to touch his wife, but she was out of his reach.

He could hear her breathing, stertorous and guttural. As he listened, her breaths gained pace, continuing deep and rough, until she sounded like a man with a pack running up a steep hill. Then they stopped. For five beats of his heart there was silence, then an explosive inspiration, and another and another, racing faster and faster until another deadly breathless pause, the kind that he used to dread on patrol in Vietnam. He used to shut his eyes back then, or look down at his hands. No point in looking if you can't do anything. Doubtful suddenly whether he was sixty or twenty, he tried to see himself in the rear-view mirror, but mirror and windscreen were gone, replaced by air that shimmered with sunlit, suspended dust.

Val's breathing staggered on to another breathless climax, but when he struggled forward even further to try to see her again, pushing against the dash like a stubborn farm gate, she looked unchanged, sitting silently in her navy blue windcheater with the apple trees and clouds painted across her chest, and the cottage with a rose bush and a swing, sitting just below her heart. Her hair was still tidy at the front, though he remembered seeing, as he had half dragged her, stumbling and silent, into the car, that it was uncombed at the back, flattened into a sunburst of grey radiating outwards from a pink triangle of scalp.

She'd slept on the recliner last night, still in her clothes. For all that evening, she'd been restless and clumsy, walking around and around, shouldering the standard lamp to rocking on its stand so that its orange cover tilted and almost fell.

‘What?' he'd asked. ‘What are you doing, love?'

‘Some paper. Where's the paper,' she'd said, her voice slurring as if she was too tired to talk.

‘What d'yer need that for, love?'

She didn't reply at first, disappearing into the kitchen, where he could hear her opening drawers and cupboards but not shutting them again. He stayed sitting in his easy chair with a dull pain in his stomach, listening to her moving from room to room in the house, its yellow strapped ceilings echoing sounds back to him with such familiarity that he knew exactly where she was, and where she was going.

When Val returned to him, she was holding a pen and last year's agricultural calendar from the back of the toilet door and her left leg was dragging. She didn't head for the couch, her usual spot where she would pile up sewing or wool by her side as she worked, but instead stopped at the first chair she came to: the recliner he used when he had a beer. She pushed down on its back as she moved towards him, and Art felt an instinctive shrinking. But when she got to the end of the armrest, she half turned away from him and fell back heavily into the recliner, her hands grasping at nothing. He stared at the television while paper was rustled and her glasses case was fumbled open, then dropped on the floor.

‘Making a list.' Her words came out strident and forced, as if she was on a long-distance call and trying to make herself understood through time delay and static.

He listened with dread. There was no money for shopping: she knew that. No money for anything anymore. But he couldn't say that, couldn't ask.

She seemed to struggle to answer him anyway. ‘All the things.' She took a breath. ‘All the things wrong with the farm.'

Art slid his hands off the armrests and into his lap and looked at them, upturned, the skin yellow with calluses and the creases on his palms dark as the weaving dotted lines that delineate an unsealed road on a map, forming chains and ponds of uncertainty and risk. Dry season only, perhaps. Do not attempt when wet. Notify your loved ones before you commit.

He could hear her pen scratching now, her breathing heavy, and when he turned towards her, her tongue was protruding slightly from the fierce looseness of her mouth, as if she was one of their daughters doing her homework. The pain in his stomach rose again as he thought of their two girls, who did not want to come home anymore. School in Adelaide had turned from purgatory into paradise.

He watched as Val slowly printed on the calendar's blank and glossy back. Red and black lettering ran across the upward curve of the calendar's front.
For All Your Agricultural
Needs
.

‘Drought.' The word came out as if she was still on her long-distance call. Two years' worth, two failed crops in a row.

He cleared his throat. ‘Drought's broken now.' But too late, with the wheat sown but not ready to be harvested, rotting in the ground.

‘Now the rain,' she said. ‘And our girls. Hate the farm.'

‘They don't, love. They're young.'

The blank hostile gaze of his daughters, the last time he and Valda had insisted they come home for the summer break, the constant texting and flat, ironed hair, their refusal to help outside.

‘The big tractor, and the truck.'

‘They just need fixin'.' Three months now.

‘Phone's off.'

‘I'll be talking to the bank, love,' he said, reflexively, hopelessly. Glen Morgan, a good man with ties to the district, had gone years ago, replaced by a series of young men and women that never bought, just rented till they moved on.

Art had left her then, had hauled himself up and out of the chair, walked out to the front porch and sat on the step, peering through smeared glasses at the darkness beyond, feeling pointless and unbalanced without a beer next to his boot. After a while he heard her moving around the house again, the kettle going on and clicking off. That comforted him enough to pull himself up by the verandah post and go back inside, but in the kitchen, the kettle was sitting in the sink and a cup was on its side on the floor, next to a teabag. He went to bed then, walking with averted eyes past the occupied recliner, full of fear for what it might contain.

Art woke in the early hours, heavy-eyed and dry in the mouth as if he really had had a few, and then he forced himself to get up and go and look at her in the lounge. He saw the stiff droop of her mouth and said Val, best get you to the doctor, love. She didn't respond, just looked at him, one-eyed, her reading glasses still on, and he had to haul her up and she leaned on him heavier than she ever had before. As he half dragged, half carried her across the porch to the car, she dropped the calendar and, propelled by the wind, it moved in a series of shushing sweeps across the floorboards, like a subtle, fluttered signal to some watching enemy.

Pushing her into the car was a battle, her left leg unwieldy and resistant. As he strapped her in he thought of the last time he had done that, when she was six months pregnant with the girls and had to be driven to Adelaide for the last trimester. She'd smiled at him then, and he'd felt his own stomach, flat and tight, brush over the taut bounty of hers, with promise and strength.

But this time his stomach had drooped over her sagging breasts like an insult, and they'd driven off, strangely naked without the thermos and sandwiches, jackets and hats that always accompanied them on the two-hour drive to Wudinna or beyond, along with the letters to be posted and the cans for the recyclers, the fresh eggs for their friends in town and the tupperwared biscuits for those sick in hospital.

The doubled row of eucalyptus saplings lining the long drive had flashed past, Valda lurching further to the left each time the car bumped or turned. He couldn't understand why they'd been hit by the tree, the last of the big old trees on the boundary line, as if in leaving the farm he had broken some rule of nature.

Art moved back into his seat again, his stomach burning as the dash's pressure suddenly eased. He would have to drive the truck, and its tank was empty. He would have to get out of this car and leave Val and walk the two kilometres back to their house and then another five hundred metres to the sheds and untie the jerrycan from the tray of the truck and walk back down here and siphon petrol out of the tank and then walk it back to the sheds and fill the tank and then hope, hope it started and drive it down here and then try to get Val out of her metal blanket and lift her into the truck's cabin and drive two hours to town. He felt dizzy at the thought, the planning involved, trying to remember if the jerrycan really was on the truck or under the peppercorn tree where the tractor sat. Would the diff give out before they got there?

Art shoved experimentally on his door, and it grated open, letting in cold air and a side view of close-ranked saplings, and without thinking he pulled it shut again. He rolled his neck and cracked his knuckles as if preparing for one final assault or some irresistible attack, then twisted hard to his left and pushed blindly around and behind the tree's bole, wanting to touch his wife just for a moment. His fingertips met a warm stickiness that must have been at the back of her head.

A crow called, like a baby crying, or a shouted command, and he could see a single ant, like an advance scout, standing on a fragment of glass that edged the windscreen frame. I hate those crows on the road, flapping and pecking, she'd said once. I don't mind the roadkill, it's the creatures coming down after it. He leaned back again, trying to see what he could feel, but the pain in his stomach was worse then, and a wave of coldness rolled upwards from his feet to his knees. ‘Don't worry, love,' he said, or thought he said, as the crow called again. ‘We don't have to look if we don't want to.'

About the Authors

Debra Adelaide
is the author or editor of over ten books, including three novels. Her latest novel,
The Household Guide to Dying
, was first published in Australia in 2008, and has now appeared in a dozen other countries. She works at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Claire Aman
lives in Grafton, an inspiring town. She writes for pleasure. She has had short stories published in
New Australian Stories
,
Best Australian Stories
,
Island
,
HEAT
and
Southerly
. Her writing life has been nurtured by Varuna, the Writers' House.

Jon Bauer
was born in the UK but has lived in Australia for ten years. He is the author of short stories, and plays for stage and radio. His first novel,
Rocks in the Belly
, was published in 2010. Visit him at
www.jonbauerwriter.com
.

Melissa Beit
has had short stories published in various anthologies, magazines and journals. She is mere months away from completing her first novel, helped along by several visits to Varuna, the Writers' House, away from her very noisy children.

Tegan Bennett Daylight
is the author of the novels
Bombora
,
What Falls Away
and
Safety.
She is currently at work on a collection of short stories.

Tony Birch
writes short fiction, poetry and essays. His short-story collections are
Shadowboxing
and
Father's Day
. He teaches in the writing program at the University of Melbourne.

Georgia Blain
is the author of five novels and a memoir,
Births Deaths
Marriages
. Her work has been shortlisted for major literary prizes, and her first novel,
Closed for Winter
, was made into a feature film in 2009. Her latest book,
Darkwater
, is a murder mystery for young adults.

Patrick Cullen's
first book,
What Came Between
, was published in 2009 and includes five stories that appeared in
Best Australian Stories
between 2005 and 2007.

Sonja Dechian
works as a documentary development writer in Melbourne, and was previously a producer and writer with ABC TV in Adelaide. She is working on a novel.

Brooke Dunnell
is completing a postgraduate degree in Creative Writing at the University of Western Australia. Her short stories have been published in the collections
Best Australian Stories
and
Allnighter
, and read on ABC Radio National.