Reading Madame Bovary (27 page)

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Authors: Amanda Lohrey

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BOOK: Reading Madame Bovary
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‘You're nuts.'

Her eyebrows shot up. ‘You sound like Dave.'

‘He knows about this?'

‘Not yet.' It was the way she said it; all I could do was smile.

‘Anyway,' she continued, ‘come out with Bill and meet Geordie.

He's utterly gorgeous. In every way.' She was practically drooling.

‘Will he live on the property?'

‘He'll live with me, of course. There's an old farm house on John and Yoko's property but it's derelict. And Geordie's going to put in a garden for me. I've been such a slacker in that department.' She rolled her eyes. ‘The others are pissed off with me because I never grow anything.'

I could see that even if Geordie turned out to be lying about the John and Yoko connection, Miranda might still come out ahead. All of the stone houses had a thriving vegetable plot, except Miranda's, and the rampant buffalo grass around her foundations had done nothing for her credibility in the valley.

That night I told Bill the big news and he pulled a face. Bill didn't take to Miranda. I once described her as a free spirit and he said: ‘Free spirit? That would be another name for wrecker, would it?' But he loosened up when she started to drop in on us, usually on her way back from the city to collect goods for her market stall. She would arrive wearing a flowing dress in some bold tropical print and clutching a bottle of champagne in each hand, and over dinner she would regale us with funny stories. Unlike most women she could tell a joke and she had an eye for the absurd. Bill would chortle despite himself. Then she would fall into our spare bed because she was too drunk to drive back to the valley. It was not beyond Miranda to roll up and greet us effusively as Mr. and Mrs.

Boring, but at least she said it to our faces, and because she seemed to have some genuine affection for me I never took offence. That was the thing about Miranda: either you bought the full package or you didn't buy at all. Bill didn't buy. ‘She's alright when you get her on her own,' he'd say after she left, but in matters general he was on Dave's side.

By mid-August, Geordie McCausland had moved into the valley. Mick announced his arrival on one of his regular visits to the shack and we asked what he thought of him.

‘Is this stuff about John Lennon for real?' Bill asked.

Mick shrugged. ‘Seems to be.'

‘What's he like, this Geordie?'

‘Seems okay. Haven't spoken to him on his own.' He winked. ‘You'd have to prise Miranda off him.'

Eager to meet this unlikely steward, we drove into the valley the following Sunday and knocked on Miranda's door.

‘Come in,' she called, and her voice had a happy sing-song note.

Things were obviously going well.

We walked through the whitewashed passageway and out onto the back veranda where Miranda was lolling on a scruffy day-bed in a see-through sarong, bare-breasted as usual and entwined with a man in skimpy jocks. We took this to be Geordie. He eased himself up into a sitting position and extended his hand to Bill while I looked him over. He was attractive, no doubt about that. He had broad shoulders and long reddish-brown hair that fell in loose curls over a high forehead. His skin was weathered into a dark tan and his full mouth and long scimitar nose made him look like a bush Arab. His legs were strong and muscular and he had a way of holding himself, a relaxed, almost feline slouch of the kind that suggested he knew how to take his time. Miranda gave me a look, a gloatingly possessive see-what-I've-got look. I laughed.

We sat for a long time and drank our way through a cask of wine. No mention was made of ‘John'. Geordie talked knowledgeably about the valley's vegetable allotments and his plans for Miranda's patch but there was something odd about him, something creepy and at the same time childlike. He certainly seemed to know a lot about soils, and phrases like ‘potassium deficient' and ‘seaweed mulch' came and went on the mild afternoon breeze.

Weeks passed and it was some time before we returned to Yudhikara. There were problems with the construction of the bridge and Bill was working long hours and coming home spent. In his time off he slept a lot and didn't feel like going anywhere. We hadn't seen Miranda for ages and I imagined her to be preoccupied with Geordie.

Finally Mick turned up one Sunday in Dolby's ute and plonked himself in a chair in the kitchen. He looked like a man who had had a surfeit of something. ‘Had to get out of the valley, mate. Major shitfight going on there.'

‘Yeah?'

‘The three-year anniversary celebration. No-one can agree how to handle it. Dave and Miranda are at each other's throats. It's getting ugly. Had a meeting of the collective last night, bloody thing went on for five hours. Dave wouldn't let it go and neither would Miranda. Since Dave is usually the one to call stumps I thought we were going to sit there all night.'

‘What's the problem?' asked Bill.

‘Bloody John Lennon, that's the problem.' Mick grinned. He'd knocked back a double brandy and was starting to relax. ‘Miranda wants to phone him, via Geordie, and invite him to the anniversary celebration. Like, to preside over it. A new era of peace and all that bullshit.' He snorted.

‘As if.'

‘Exactly, mate. As if. Like they'd be able to keep it a secret and it wouldn't leak out. But Miranda's going on about it being a cosmic moment, a gift from the universe. “What better way,” she goes, “to see in the '
80
s?”' And he gave a naff imitation of Miranda's haughty tone.

It wasn't leakage I was thinking about. I was wondering why any of them thought that John Lennon would want to hang out with a bunch of hippies at the bottom of the world. George, yes, maybe, but never John.

‘Miranda's gone off her trolley,' said Mick. ‘She thinks the sun shines out of Geordie's arse. Full stop.'

‘What does Dave think of him?'

‘Dave didn't mind him moving in, especially after he put in Miranda's garden. Now she's got the best laid-out patch in the valley. And Dave checked him out and found his father runs a big nursery in the south, so he's a gardener alright. But Dave's got doubts about the John and Yoko thing. For one thing I don't think he believes it, and for another, even if it's true he doesn't want to invite them to the valley. “We're not into celebrity stuff,” he says, last night. “That's not what we're about.” Then Miranda goes spare. “But the man's a genius!” she goes. “He's a peace warrior! Isn't that why we're here, isn't that what we believe in?” She was spitting chips from the word go, like she's made her mind up and Dave's just getting in the way. The more wound-up she gets the quieter Dave goes. You know what he's like. He just lets her go on and on until she's said her piece. And then he says, very calmly, “That's all very well, Miranda, but you can get burnt by this stuff.” And he tells this story about when Dylan came on his first tour of Australia and sang at The Black Swan folk club in the city. A friend of Dave's called Okie used to make guitars and he took his best one along and offered it to Dylan, who strummed a few chords on it and said: “This guitar's shit, man.” Okie never got over it.'

Bill laughed derisively. ‘What did the others say? Was there a vote?'

‘No, no vote. Dave said we'd leave it “in abeyance”, whatever that means. He knew Miranda had got to a lot of people and he might lose a vote.'

Sometimes Mick surprised me: he didn't miss much.

‘Miranda stormed out in a state. Fit to burst. Now she's working her way round the valley, talking down Dave.'

I could picture the scene all too vividly. ‘What did Geordie say?'

‘He wasn't there.'

‘Isn't it a rule that everyone comes to the collective meetings?'

‘Supposed to be. Ariel wasn't there either. Little Gracie's crook. Everyone else turned up, not that they got much of a word in.'

‘Nothing serious with Gracie?'

‘Don't think so.'

‘Wise of Geordie to stay away,' said Bill. ‘Leave it to the power-brokers.' He shot me a fleeting glance.

‘So, Mick, is Geordie up for all this,' I asked, ‘or is it just Miranda's idea?'

‘Dunno. He's hard to read, is Geordie. But he knows a lot about rainforest restoration and he showed me the draft plan he's drawn up for John. He also seems to be pretty cashed up. Heaps of dope. Someone's paying him, even if it's not the Beatleman himself.'

‘He probably grows the dope on John's plantation,' said Bill.

‘If it exists,' I added.

Mick shrugged. ‘Any more of that brandy?'

Mick stayed with us that night and he and Bill got up at four to go fishing off the beach. They clumped about so noisily that I couldn't get back to sleep so I lay there until sunrise wondering why I hadn't yet conceived. In the seven months since Bill and I arrived on the coast, two women in the valley had got pregnant. Dave maintained that the valley was on a ley line and had a rare fertility, so perhaps Bill and I should spend a night at Yudhikara. But I wasn't worried. There was plenty of time.

The men returned with perch for breakfast and we fried it up and ate it with a cob of the Yudhikara bread that Mick had brought. Then I left them drinking on the veranda and drove off to do the weekly food shop in the town. It was a bright spring morning and I was in the best of moods. This really is the life, I thought, as I parked the car in the pretty little car park behind the beach and its crumbling pre-war promenade.

After I had worked through my shopping list I sought out Dave at the market where he and Ariel ran a weekly stall and sold their vegetables. He was carrying Gracie in a backpack and had dark rings under his eyes.

‘You look wiped,' I said.

‘Ariel's got a fever.' He frowned. ‘I've been worried about her. She's been off colour for weeks now. No appetite, nothing.' He looked dejected, kind of hollowed out, which was unlike him.

‘Can you take a break?'

‘I certainly feel like one.' He called to a teenage boy whom I recognised and who lived in the valley. ‘Jamie, can you mind the stall for a bit?'

We sat at the Green Goanna and I thought I had never seen him so deflated. I asked him about the meeting of the collective, and then confessed that Mick had already given us an account of it. There was no point in hiding anything from Dave; he had a nose for where you were coming from.

‘Oh, that,' he said, as if it had been a minor difference of opinion. He knew Miranda was a friend of mine. But I prodded him gently until at last he gave in to his exasperation. ‘It was a bit much,' he drawled, ‘when Miranda started on about the old German settlers, and how we needed to keep the peace tradition going, and how Lennon was a link to all that. A modern peace pioneer, she called him.' He sniffed. ‘Holding a press conference in bed in a luxury hotel, I'd hardly compare that to packing up and leaving your home to sail across the world.'

I didn't know what to say. I didn't want to take sides. We sat for a minute in silence while Dave pushed the orange Smartie in his saucer around and around the base of his cup until the chemical dye began to run in blotches on the white porcelain. ‘History repeats itself as farce,' he sighed. Gracie began to wail.

We parted in the car park beside the beach. ‘Don't worry, Dave,' I said, lamely. ‘It will work itself out.'

And it did, though not in the way we expected. Later that afternoon Dave would pack up his stall as usual and drive home to the valley with Gracie asleep on his lap, back to the haven of peace he had so patiently husbanded. When he arrived at the door of his stone castle, the one he had built with his own hands, the princess Ariel was gone. She had run off with Geordie McCausland.

And now here we were, Mick and I, driving towards the valley after a gap of fourteen years, speeding along the coastal road where the sea-changers and their money had moved in and the old fibro shacks had been demolished in favour of over-designed palaces of wall-to-wall glass and vaulting decks. None of this was new to me. Since my father retired to the shack I had been coming to visit him for years, but Mick had been long gone and, as he told me now, living of late in a commune in New Mexico. That he should turn up out of the blue when I was at the shack for just a few days to pack up my father's things was beyond belief. When I opened the door and saw him there on that dusty, windswept porch – unchanged but for grey hair and a thickness around the middle – I could have wept.

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