Watercolours (8 page)

Mira was only a casual at the fruit shop but her boss, Tony, often disappeared when it was quiet and left her to look after things. She liked the responsibility; resented that he didn't pay her more. Today, he'd given some excuse about landscapers coming to the house but she didn't believe it, not in this heat. More likely he was escaping to the Roper Centre to wallow in the air-conditioning.

Not that she could blame him. It was hideously hot. The town was like a furnace, hunkered down silently as though waiting for a giant timer to ping and announce it thoroughly cooked. The day dragged by and for most of it she accomplished very little. There were hardly any customers. On days like this everyone shopped at the Centre, putting up with inferior fruit and vegetables, chemically ripened, weeks old and trucked halfway across the country, simply to enjoy some cool relief and perhaps a donut and a browse through the CD bargain bins. There was no point restacking the shelves. Waves of baked air were rolling in from the footpath and she could only watch as the produce shrank and decomposed around her. Alone, she couldn't linger in the cool-room so instead she armed herself with a water-sprayer and perched on a stool by the refrigerated herb shelf, trying to revive herself and the wilting greenery she supplied to the shop with regular squirts of cool mist.

For hours she sat there, flattened. Her thoughts drifted to the new teacher and his suggestion of an art program for Novi, but not even this little spark of hope could withstand the crushing heatwave. By the afternoon Mira felt as though she was suspended in a giant web, paralysed, destined to become some vile creature's evening meal. Self-pity took hold as she began thinking of her father, missing him. When Tony finally returned at four o'clock he took one look at her and felt guilty enough to let her go home early.

She drove as fast as she could into the hills. After ten minutes the Morus basin was far below her. In the cover of dense forest it was cooler and she sipped at the rushing air while strands of hair escaped her ponytail and flew around her head in a maddening tangle. Sitting tall, she stole a look at herself in the rear-vision mirror.

Shocker.

Collapsing back against the seat she swore to cut off all her hair, just hand the scissors to George and order him to hack it into a messy waif style — she was so sick of its unbearable
weight
. As the road became steeper she nursed the resolve vehemently (she couldn't
stand
her hair, she would cut it
off
), and yet she knew she'd never go through with it. Wondering how such determination could vanish so easily she found herself accelerating right past her house. She decided to continue up the road towards the winery; a quick dose of the mulberry groves and a walk through the vineyard would make her feel better. The new owners were used to her visits now. Besides, they could get stuffed if they didn't like it.

Another five minutes and she turned into the winery's long driveway, recently graded by the new owners, something her
father never had the money to do. When she was a girl, each trip to town had been a wild ride over potholes and snaking furrows till eventually the poor ute's suspension was obliterated. The same cracked vinyl pinched her legs now as it had back then, when she'd bounced on the seat beside her father. He had a habit of stuffing odd socks into the cracks of the upholstery as the foam fell out; there was no telling how many she was sitting on. Anyone else would be annoyed to discover an unpaired sock, but Umberto would wave his high and say, ‘Another one for the seat!' Glancing down, Mira spied a chink of pale ribbed fabric. She reached out and touched it with her finger. Her heart soared. Her eyes stung with tears and she wiped them, remembering how embarrassed she used to be by this cracked seat, how she hated her friends to see it, even Diana. Being poor was almost as humiliating as being a wog with garlic breath. But Diana didn't care, she did speech and drama eisteddfods, which came with their own set of humiliations: ‘At least you're not posh,' she used to point out.

The ute rattled noisily, even on this newly razed surface. It was a bomb, but she'd never get rid of it, not now, even if they could afford a new one. Its seat of socks was far too precious.

Sun struck the dusty windscreen and for a moment she was blinded. Slowing, she gripped the steering wheel and relied on her knowledge of the track until the car was engulfed in shade again. She drove through bush and dappled sunlight before shuddering around one final corrugated bend. Before her, hundreds of mulberry trees ran in wobbly rows like fat green beads draped over the slopes. It was such a familiar sight, as intimate as the contours of her own body. She felt the landscape filling her in, making her substantial again. This odd, ordered plantation had
been her home. It explained who she was and within it she made sense.

Here, Umberto had raised her on stories of her grandfather and his mulberry tree experiments. It was her grandfather's dream of becoming a silk farmer that had led him to plant the different varieties of mulberry, grafting hybrids, testing which were most suited to the climate and which were best for silkworm food. Because of Umberto, Mira knew that white-mulberry leaves produced the best silk, although the black variety proved the hardiest and most resistant to drought. And because of him she knew that dust could turn a silkworm — the fussiest of creatures — off its food; a number of early silk ventures had failed simply because mulberry groves were planted alongside dirt roads and the dust had rendered the leaves inedible. A silkworm's delicate constitution used to spark one of Umberto's favourite stories. He would always be bursting to tell it, but he managed to adopt a grave tone to begin with, to draw Mira in.

My father's neighbour, he tried and tried to raise silkworms, but he had no luck. Time after time the worms turned sick. They refused to eat. They refused to grow. And this neighbour would scratch his head in confusion and pull his beard in frustration. He tried everything but nothing seemed to help.

At this point in the telling, unable to contain himself, Umberto's long moustache would start twitching like a couple of silkworms itself.
Do you know why the caterpillars wouldn't grow? Why they felt so sick?

Of course she knew. He'd been wheeling this one out ever since she was still small enough to curl up in his lap, but she obliged him anyway.

Bad breath.

That's right! Bad breath!
he'd crow, whacking his big hands together with glee. Despite his amusement, Mira always thought it a sad story. The poor neighbour was a friendly fellow but famous for his halitosis, made all the worse by a set of woefully unhealthy teeth. He and his teenage wife had come to Morus at the turn of the century as part of a small wave of silk pioneers and were meticulous farmers. They fussed over their caterpillars, diligently cleaned out their trays, were zealous in guarding them against ants and wasps, and handpicked the choicest mulberry leaves, drying them carefully to protect the stock from damp. Despite all this their silkworms languished. Hardly any reached maturity and those that did spun only weak silk.

After a while they wondered if they'd been struck by the dreaded pébrine, a disease that had devastated the silk industry in Europe, gradually wiping out all of the native silkworms there. Australia was an isolated island at the edge of the world and this was one of the reasons a silk movement had begun; there was a voracious European demand for uncontaminated silk and eggs.

Suddenly the community was in a panic. Pébrine was contagious, and an outbreak would mean the end of silk for all of them. They called a village meeting, gathering together on the riverbank where the bowling club now stood, and they turned to Mira's grandfather. He had been raised in a silk village in Italy and was the only one among them who had seen pébrine damage first hand. Stroking his long moustache — a style and gesture later handed down to his son Umberto — he suggested that before they worried themselves any further he should inspect the caterpillars himself.

And so he set off to his neighbours' property with clean spectacles and a heavy heart. If any family were to suffer from a
pébrine plague it would be his. He had invested all his money in establishing the largest mulberry farm in the area, buying tracts of cheap bush, clearing it to plant saplings and setting up an irrigation system. Like the others, he was convinced silk would be the next boom industry in the colony of New South Wales. Their village was destined for greatness. One day, Morus would be known as the silk capital of Australia.

After examining the stock he was able to reassure his neighbours that their silkworms did not display the pepper-like spots of pébrine. But after spending a good half hour confined to the magnanerie, leaning with his neighbour over trays of caterpillars and hearing at close range his anxious tale of woe, he suspected what the problem was. Given that silkworms were highly sensitive creatures, it was probably the horrendous breath of their keeper that was doing the damage, and the situation was no doubt made worse by the man constantly peering at them, muttering to himself and sighing despairingly into their trays.

Mira's grandfather was in a fix. What could he do? He was too much of a gentleman to humiliate the man, so instead he suggested there might be something in the air at the farm, some noxious vapour or gaseous emission from the earth that created a bad climate for silkworms. He suggested smoking the magnanerie with smouldering branches of eucalyptus, a remedy he knew to have a magical effect on caterpillars, encouraging them to be strong and disease free.

The neighbour took his advice but it soon became clear not even eucalyptus smoke was powerful enough to cleanse the air and improve the stock. Eventually the couple gave up harvesting silk and turned their efforts to dairying. Cows fed on mulberry leaves yield wonderful milk and at last the couple enjoyed
success. They died years later, Umberto told Mira, prosperous and content, proving that cows really were hardy creatures able to tolerate the foulest odours imaginable.

Reaching the winery, Mira pulled onto the grass, stopping in a patch of shade a good distance from the main building. She opened the door but stayed in her seat, not quite steady enough to encounter a semi-stranger who tolerated her presence with a polite smile and nervous eyes. The new owners thought she was deranged. Perhaps she was. Grief could do that to a person.

The whitewashed sheds flushed amber in the westerly sun. Further down the hill, beyond the vines and the mulberry terraces, flowed the river, a blinding reflection this time of day. The mulberries were yellowish and their leaves tinged with brown, evidence of the drought, yet they seemed as resilient as ever. Mira tried to imagine her grandfather standing here on the rise admiring his flourishing trees. How triumphant he must have felt to see his mulberries thrive in this crazy climate when so many other crops around the country were failing! His plantation defied drought, flood and poor soil and his silkworms were spinning fine thread. Despite all this a silk industry failed to eventuate. The men in government were from a land of sheep, not silkworms. Their vision was a wheat-swept, sheep-dipped country and silk seemed as far-fetched a notion to them as wine. While his neighbours cut down their mulberry trees and turned the land to other uses, Mira's grandfather was unable to give up his dream of silk, even in the face of debt. Years later, Umberto found he couldn't destroy the trees either, not after his father had nurtured them for so long.

Mira had loved that about her father, his unwillingness to abandon things. Unlike her mother. She'd left when Mira was
four. Apparently she couldn't stand Australia and went back home to Italy. Then it was just the two of them; her and Papa. She followed him everywhere, through the groves as he pruned and hung the branches with netting, through the vines as he dusted for fungus and tended to the ancient irrigation system. In the dim light of the sheds she helped stir bark and herbs and peel into copper barrels, adjusting the distillates as they dripped through their curly glass tubing. It was an easy relationship: he was full of stories, she full of curiosity. ‘What was Nonno like, Papa?'

‘Well, he was an old man by the time I was born. Stubborn. Passionate about his silkworms. I was the youngest, so I was his little helper.'

‘Like me!'

‘That's it. I spent more time with him than anyone and I was the only one who really understood him. It was my job to pick the mulberry leaves and chop them up. I tell you, I loved watching those silkworms eat! Munch and munch and grow and grow from a speck to the size of your finger! They went through baskets and baskets of leaves and the sound was like putting your ear to a soft drink, an endless fizzing through the whole barn! Then they'd do their little dance and spin their golden thread.'

‘Golden?'

‘Unless you fed them beetroot leaves and then you had pink silk. We did all sorts of experiments. But a diet of pure mulberry makes the nicest silk. And then came the best part — most of the cocoons we boiled up to unravel the thread but there were always some my father would leave for the eggs. And inside each of those cocoons a two-inch caterpillar would fold in on itself, dissolve and then change into a whole new creature — a moth! To fly and mate and lay its eggs by moonlight. Nature's magic
trick! And think, sweetheart — we're as much a part of nature as any caterpillar. If they can transform themselves, why not us?'

When Mira was older she learned the sadder details, how one by one her father's brothers and sister moved away to try more dependable work in sugar cane and hydroponics. Soon Umberto was the only Cherubini grub left in the tray, listening to his father's rants about Australia's silk destiny and trying to console his long-suffering mother.

They survived by selling off land, but the price was low because of the mulberry trees that needed clearing. They had a few other crops: vegetables and fruit and a small vineyard. As well as table wine, Umberto's mother made her own Amaro-style digestif and a sweet mulberry wine that was popular among her women friends, although she could never afford the licence for commercial production. Wine helped her to sleep at night and forget about silk, which had become nothing more than an extravagant hobby for her husband. His cocoons and thread continued to win awards in Italy and Ireland and every time an envelope with an exotic-looking stamp arrived in the mail, enclosing some paltry sum in prize money, she threw up her hands in despair. It was just another reason for him to retreat into the magnanerie and attend to his silkworms at the expense of everything else. When she died they buried her in a raw wood coffin, all they could afford. Peering inside to say goodbye, Umberto saw that she barely touched the sides; her body had shrunk to nothing but a sinewy skein of worry, yet she was dressed in a shimmering gown made from the finest silk outside Milan.