Reading Madame Bovary (26 page)

Often Mick would arrive at our shack with one of the Yudhikara people known as Dolby. They'd roll up in Dolby's ute to collect Bill and go out fishing on the old couta boat that Dolby's father had left him. It was an easy life. ‘I'm glad I took that job with Baird and Markham,' Bill said one night as we lay in bed, reviewing our prospects. He had grown up in the inner city, had spent no time in the country at all and now he was beguiled by it. Between the coast and the valley we seemed to have the best of both worlds.

On one of his visits to collect Bill, Mick announced that Miranda Meacham was soon to return. Immediately my antennae went on high alert; I wanted to know when.

‘Dunno,' said Mick, ‘but Dave's less than thrilled.' He winked.

‘Why?'

‘He thinks she's trouble.'

I wasn't surprised to hear this. ‘I sensed they didn't get on,' I said.

‘That first time we visited and I brought up her name, he went all cold.'

‘Well, as I heard it, she nearly scuttled the whole thing.'

‘Scuttled? How?'

‘Well, they didn't just build those stone houses from scratch. No-one had a clue how to go about it. So Dave sussed out these journeymen dudes that travel around working for people. He organised a couple to come to Yudhikara for a while so they could show everyone how to build in stone.'

‘Journeymen?'

‘Yeah, wanderers. Haven't you seen 'em? I saw one hitching outside Tandarra a few months back. Didn't come near us though.

Probably warned off.'

‘Yes, but who are they?'

‘Tradesmen. Just out of their apprenticeship, usually. Mostly Krauts. You can't miss 'em. They wear waistcoats with little pearl buttons and top hats. And they have big walking sticks. They do their apprenticeship back home and then they travel around the world looking for work to finish off their training. And there are strict rules. They have to carry their tools on their back and walk, or hitch. If they work for you, you give 'em a bed and feed 'em.'

‘So some of them worked at Yudhikara.'

‘It was Dave's idea. He heard of two stonemasons hitching around the south and he drove down and found them and brought them back to the valley. So they could teach him and the others how to build in stone.'

‘Where did everyone live while they were building?'

‘Some were in tents, some rented shacks in the town, or on the coast.'

‘That explains it,' said Bill. ‘I thought those houses looked professional.'

‘Yeah, but they nearly didn't get built.' Mick paused with the knowing look of one who has gossip to impart. ‘Your mate, Miranda what's-her-name, shacks up straightaway with one of the journeymen and soon he's building her house at a great rate. Then suddenly she's fucking the other one on the quiet and when the first one finds out all hell breaks loose. They're big strapping boys and they take to one another with their sticks. Dave had to sort it out and got his jaw broken in the process.'

I think my mouth fell open at this point.

‘Luckily, by then everyone had the hang of it, the stonework and all.' Mick gave a high, barking laugh. ‘Dave read the riot act to Miranda and she told him his fortune. If you listen to what the others say, it's been a power struggle between those two from the start.'

‘He could have asked her to leave,' said Bill.

‘He wouldn't do that. She's a tenant in common for one thing, and for another he owes her. When they were negotiating the sale of the valley, the Hoffmann family changed their minds and wanted to back out but Miranda nailed them, some kind of legal technicality. That's what Dolby said, anyway. Without her they wouldn't be there.'

Each time we visited the valley I sought out Miranda, only to receive the same answer from those who were sharing her house. ‘Haven't heard. She'll be back before long though.' Meanwhile the commune was immersed in preparations for the winter solstice, its big festival for the year. There would be a feast and circle dancing, local musicians had been invited and a giant bonfire would be lit.

One Saturday in late June we drove over to the valley for the solstice. Miranda Meacham had still not returned. As the sky darkened we gathered at one end of the pasture where the settlers had built a bonfire from a huge pile of wood and old tyres. The night was cold but utterly still, the black sky lit by a swathe of stars. On either side of the dirt road there were big white lanterns moulded from papier mâché in the form of goblins or sprites. They dangled from tall, sinewy poles with the eerie glow of benign ghosts and the effect was magical. We sat on rickety canvas chairs in a half-circle around the fire, nursing our mulled wine, and it was noisy; wood cracked and snapped and sparks sprayed into the winter dark like Roman candles. Mischievous from too much wine, I asked Dave about the journeymen stonemasons, saying Mick had mentioned them, but Dave just looked away, over to where Ariel was assembling the children with their smaller lanterns in readiness for the ‘parade of light'. Ariel was often in charge of the children; she had a way with them. They would tug at her skirt for attention and hang on her soft words.

‘The kids have been making those lanterns for weeks,' said Dave. ‘The local school principal's been a big help, lets them do it in class as a special activity.'

I could imagine. Dave would have approached the school and, in his quietly authoritative way, made it sound like an eminently reasonable proposition.

‘The journeymen? Did they stay long?' I wasn't going to let him off the hook.

‘Long enough for us to learn from them. As you can see.' He gestured towards the houses at the other end of the valley. ‘They were incredibly well trained, better than in this country. One of them, Manfred his name was, told me his father had worked on the restoration of Cologne Cathedral. I told him my uncles had flown bombing raids over Cologne at the end of the war.'

‘Was that tactful, Dave?'

‘I told Manfred, the past is the past, we start afresh here. And I apologised for the raids over Cologne.'

‘It wasn't your fault.'

‘I wanted them to know where we stood on the subject of war. That our valley was a place of peace. And to know we valued them. We were stoked to have them here. We took their coming as a sign, a blessing. My God, they could eat though. They ate enough for a platoon. Ariel never left the kitchen.'

Silently I admitted defeat. With Dave the conversation always ended up on his terms. So what if Miranda had bewitched both journeymen, that wasn't the point; the point was that Dave and Manfred had sorted out the bombing of Cologne. Dave wasn't going to tell me about the scandal; the personal was always subordinate to the big picture. To history.

‘You were lucky you found those guys.'

‘Luck didn't come into it.' Dave stared into the leaping flames. ‘If you look past your nose for long enough, Di, you can always find what you need.'

Five days after the winter solstice, Miranda Meacham returned to the valley. Mick dropped by in Dolby's ute with some fish and a red cabbage sent by Dave. ‘Your old schoolfriend's back,' he said. ‘Thought you'd like to know.'

I drove into the valley on the Saturday. Bill was on a fishing trip and I was glad; I wanted to reconnect with Miranda on my own. I was eager to see her again, but also nervous. She could be charming, intimate and confiding, but she could also be mocking and dismissive, a bitch. At school you never knew where you stood with her and I didn't imagine she had changed.

With no phones in the valley, I could take her by surprise. I drove in past Dave's house where Ariel was squatting on the veranda with Gracie in a sling on her back; she was peeling potatoes from a vast wooden tub and dropping them into an aluminium jam pot. I waved but she seemed to be in a kind of trance and didn't see me.

I parked the car outside the stone house I knew to be Miranda's and knocked on the door, which was ajar. A small boy pulled open the door and said: ‘They're out the back.' Damn, she wasn't on her own. Then again, it seemed that no-one in the valley was ever on their own. I walked back down the stone steps and around the side of the house to the rear where a group of sunburnt smokers lay on the grass getting stoned. At first I couldn't see Miranda but then a woman sat up, waved and beckoned me over. It was her. I hadn't recognised her because she had shaved her head, no longer the well-groomed young prefect who ruled the school. Her naked scalp shone in the sunlight, her neck was festooned with thick ropes of red and brown seedpods, her upper arms encircled with silver bangles in the Indian fashion and she wore a saffron-coloured sarong. She was lying back on an old plastic recliner, her legs wide apart, her thin cotton vest unbuttoned and her ample breasts bare.

‘Di!' she cried, ‘Di! Over here!'

As I drew near I saw that her feet were ingrained with dirt and her toenails painted black. ‘Sit,' she commanded, indicating the grass beside her. ‘Somebody get Di a drink.'

And someone obediently did.

On that first afternoon she could not have been nicer. It was the charming Miranda, the I-have-found-my-valley-and-am-at-peace Miranda. Some of this might have been for show, for her entourage, but I was pleased when she suggested we meet in the town for, as she put it, a
tête-à-tête
.

It was a Wednesday and I found her at the Green Goanna, a café favoured by the local hippies. She was sitting by the window looking fresh, almost demure, in a white cotton sun dress. Even with her head shaved she looked good; everyone else had grown their hair long as an emblem of where they were coming from but Miranda had to be different. Over coffee she told me that she and Ariel were first cousins and this surprised me. They could not have been more different, though clearly their mothers had shared a penchant for romantic names. I guessed that it was through Ariel that Miranda had met Dave and heard about his plan for a settlement.

‘Dave's a control freak,' she told me. ‘He comes from some gloomy Welsh valley, and one of those dour low-church families. You can never get that stuff out of you.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘He's serious about everything. He has all these rules.'

‘Don't people agree to the rules when they buy in?'

‘Yes, but you have to be flexible. Give and take. People have to live together. We're mature adults, it's not boarding school.'

Miranda hadn't changed. Everything had to be on her terms, which were of course self-evidently reasonable. Perhaps Dave was a control freak; he did have a flinty quality about him, the sharp nose, the long chin. But I liked him. I liked the interest he took in the valley's history and its German pioneers, the way he looked after their headstones. Miranda was one of those people who had their eyes on the future while looking to finesse the present.

‘You've been away,' I said, changing the subject.

‘I'm looking into imports. It's time I became a trader.'

‘A trader? You?'

‘I need an income stream. There's a shit-load of hippies around here and nowhere to buy incense, clothes, non-chemical soaps, that kind of thing. There are two good markets in this district, one on Saturday at Tandarra and one at Northbridge on Sunday. I could make enough to live. Black market, darling. No Mr. Tax Man.'

‘Where do you get all that stuff?'

‘You have to weasel a good deal out of an importer in the city. Which I have.' She gave a knowing laugh. ‘But that's not my big news.' She paused.

‘Well?'

‘My new man! He wasn't there when you came on Saturday but he's arriving any day. And you won't believe this. He works for John Lennon!'

‘John Lennon?
The
John Lennon?'

‘That's the one.' Her eyes flashed with triumph. Nothing could be more cool than this.

‘What? So he's just visiting then?'

‘No, darling, John has bought a big property around here, up in the hills.' She lowered her voice confidingly. ‘It's a big secret, none of the locals know and I can't say where.'

‘Have you been there?'

‘Not yet, but don't worry, I will soon.'

‘Why on earth would John Lennon buy land around here?'

‘Why not? Privacy, a bolt-hole. Somewhere to escape to when they drop the bomb. Geordie says it's magnificent rainforest country. Used to be a farm but has been neglected for years and is reverting to its natural state. John and Yoko flew out last year from New York and looked it over. Private jet, hush-hush, nobody knew. Then they hired Geordie to look after it.'

‘He
knows
them?'

‘Not personally. Hasn't met them yet. An agency hired him.

The agency put a private detective on him to check him out and everything.'

‘You mean they've never met him and they trust him?'

‘Well,' she pouted, ‘they have to trust someone here if they want the place looked after. And Geordie speaks to John on the phone.' ‘John' was now Miranda's intimate, or soon would be.

‘It gets better. Geordie says they're coming out in October and I'm going to arrange it so they visit the valley. I'm going to break it to the collective at the next meeting. They'll be
hysterical
!'

‘I thought it was supposed to be a secret.'

‘It is, but I've had an idea. We'll explain to John how the valley is a peace haven, a symbol of a new age. He and Yoko had that press conference for peace in their hotel bed that time, remember? Well, we can offer them a follow-up in the valley, a small private press conference, just one camera. We'll take the footage and after they fly out they can release it to the press. And we can make a documentary and incorporate their visit. Nobody will know about it at the time, except us, and we'll release the doco later. What better way to start a new decade? Nineteen-eighty here we come.'