The Fine Colour of Rust

Norm has knocked us up a bookcase from the old floorboards of the Memorial Hall and each time I slide a book on to the shelf a cream-coloured puff of powder drifts from below the shelving. He said the insects are long gone. Powder post beetles, he called them. They sound exotic, like tiny rare insects making dust fine as talc, flitting away when they are grown. I told him I could imagine them with transparent iridescent wings, perhaps a glow like fireflies in the forest. ‘Nah, love,’ he said, ‘they’re borers.’

I shelve Prey and The Dark Rider and Coma and Pet Sematary and soon I can’t bear to see another cover promising supernatural thrills and chills. As I am about to check the spelling of cemetery in the dictionary – was all that schooling wasted? – I see a different kind of book in the pile. The cover has small writing and a picture of a woman in a dark red dress. She’s lying on a couch. But when I look closer, because the picture is also small, I see she’s not, in fact, lying on a couch. She’s from a different world. Her world has divans, not couches. And she isn’t lying on the divan. She’s reclining on the divan. Her dress is draped in elegant folds across her slender thighs. Her high-heeled shoe dangles from her foot. I bet she never wears knickers with stretched elastic that slither down and end up in a smiley under each bum cheek.

After I’ve wiggled my hands down inside my jeans and hauled my undies back up to their rightful position, I open the cover. Inside is an inscription:

To my dear M, remember Paris. With love from Veronica.

I’ve never met a Veronica in Gunapan. I know a Vera, who makes the best ham sandwiches at the CWA but wants to sniff everyone’s breath before they go into the hall because she’s the last standing member of the Gunapan Temperance Union. But no Veronica. Maybe the ‘M’ lives here. Could it be Merv Bull? He doesn’t seem the type to recline on a divan in Paris. I flip the book over and read the reviews on the back.

An elegiac work that brilliantly explores the chiaroscuro of love. Hmm, I think. Elegiac. Exactly what I would have said. The dictionary is on the upper shelf of the bookcase and I pull it down.

‘Gabrielle,’ I call into the office. ‘Have you read The Paper Teacup?’

‘No, darling. Why?’

‘Oh, well, it’s absolutely marvellous, Gabrielle, you must read it. I found it rather elegiac.’

Gabrielle doesn’t answer. I wonder if I pronounced the word correctly. I tiptoe over and peer around the doorjamb to see if she’s doubled over with laughter at this idiot who can’t pronounce elegiac. Over her shoulder I see her typing elliejayack into the computer’s search engine. I creep back to the bookshelf and start shelving more Night of the Beast and Death Visitor books.

Ten minutes later Gabrielle leans out through the doorway. ‘I don’t like sad books. Give me a good thriller any day.’

Once she’s left with the information she needs, I finish up my work and make a phone call to the office of the Minister for Education, Elderly Care and Gaming. The night after I got the letter, I rang the SOS committee members to tell them that the minister was coming to Gunapan. It took a while to convince some of them.

‘Is he coming for the BnS Ball?’ Kyleen asked. She’s been talking about the Lewisford Bachelors and Spinsters Ball for a while, usually bringing it up during completely irrelevant conversations. It’s not the biggest BnS ball in the state, but it is known as the one with the lowest dress standard. A frock from the opportunity shop and a pair of boots is acceptable attire, which suits Kyleen well because that’s what she wears a lot of the time anyway. I’m sure she mentioned the ball because she can’t find anyone to drive her the hundred kilometres to Lewisford, but I doubt the minister would give her a lift, even if he was a bachelor and on the lookout for a country spinster.

The letter had said to ring the minister’s office to arrange a date for his visit. I organized an emergency SOS meeting where we got through two packets of Jam Jamboree biscuits and four pots of tea and argued about the merits of an earlier visit or a later visit, as if we’d have any say in the matter anyway, and didn’t decide anything except that there was less jam in a Jam Jamboree than there used to be.

Maxine had the answer. ‘Give him a call. Sort it out over the phone.’ As if calling government ministers is an everyday chore of mine.

The minister’s assistant answers the phone.

‘Gunapan,’ he repeats slowly, as if he is running his finger down a long list.

Surely not that many people write letters to the minister every second week?

‘OK, here we are. Correspondence Item 6,752/11. Yes, action required. Schedule a ministerial visit. So, how many minutes do you want him to speak for?’

‘I don’t want him to speak. I want him to save our school.’

‘Ah, you’re that lady.’

‘Yes, I am.’ It’s good to take a firm stand, even though I suspect ‘that lady’ is ministerial office code for raving lunatic.

‘And he’ll need a half-day to get there and back…’

I can hear him flipping through pages.

‘All right. It could be either June 27th or July 19th.’

‘But you’ve threatened to close the school by the end of the second term in April. Not much point in visiting a school that’s already closed.’

I hope he’s blushing. He reluctantly suggests a day in March, complaining all the while that he’ll have to reschedule appointments to make it happen. I complain back that we all have commitments and it’s not so easy for us in Gunapan to rearrange things either. I don’t mention that he’s proposed the visit for a pension day, when the whole town is aflurry with shopping and bill-paying. It’s very hard to get anyone to do anything else. But since there’s no other possibility we agree to set the date.

By mid-afternoon even more birds are sitting stupidly in the trees with their beaks open. This is one of those days when they might fall stone dead to the ground, heatstruck. On the horizon a thin column of grey smoke rises and forms a wispy cloud in the pale sky. The start of a bushfire. Or some farmer trying to burn off on a day when leaving your specs lying on a newspaper could make it burst into flame. There’s no way to be in a good mood on a day like this. No way, when the air conditioning in the car is broken and the steering wheel leaves heat welts on your palms. Days like this it seems as if summer will never end. We’ll go on sweltering and we’ll cook from the inside out, like meat in the microwave. They’ll cut us open at the morgue and find us filled with steak and kidney pudding. On the outside we’ll be nicely pink.

Days like this I think about picking up Melissa and Jake from school and I can see everything before it happens. They’ll fall into the car and yelp at the heat on the vinyl seats. They’ll ask for icy poles from the shop, or ice creams, or they’ll want to go down to the waterhole for a swim. The council swimming pool’s shut for renovations. All winter it was open, the heated pool empty except for five or six people who have moved here from the city and who put on their designer goggles and churn up and down the pool thirty or forty times every morning before they purr back to their farmlets in huge recreational vehicles.

One time I decided to get fit and I went along at six thirty in the dark with the kids. After they got tired of messing around in the free lane, the kids sat on the edge of the pool dangling their feet in the water and shouting, ‘Go Mum!’ as if I was in the Olympics. The other swimmers lapped me four times to my one and by lap five I was dangerously close to going under for the third time.

‘Never mind, Mum,’ Melissa reassured me. ‘We love you even if you are fat.’

Then during the third month of spring this year, the council announces the swimming pool will close for renovations. Right over summer. What renovations? we ask. What can you do to a swimming pool? It either holds the water or it doesn’t. And in summer, after years of drought, when we save the water we use to wash vegetables and time our showers, the pool is our one indulgence in this town. No, they say, we’re putting in a sauna and a spa and we’re building a café. You’ll be glad when it’s done, they tell us. We’ve tendered it out. It will only take five months. Why? we ask again, but no one answers. Truly something stinks at that council.

‘Don’t say a word,’ I tell the kids when they stagger past the wilted gum trees of the schoolyard and into the car. ‘We’re going to buy icy poles and we’re going to the waterhole.’

If they had any energy left they’d cheer, I’m sure, but Jake has dark circles under his eyes from not sleeping in the heat and Melissa turns and looks out through the open window, lifting her face to catch the breeze.

‘Mrs Herbert said we don’t have to do any homework tonight because it’s too hot and I got a gold star for reading,’ Jake shouts above the hurricane of the wind rushing through the car.

I never bother locking the house in this kind of heat. If we shut the windows we’ll never sleep. It’s become a habit to walk through each room when I come home, counting off the valuables. While Jake and Melissa head off to their bedrooms I mentally mark off the computer, the DVD player, the change jar. The telly’s not worth stealing. Melissa shuts her door while she changes. She’s eleven now, but she reminds me of me when I was fifteen. One night not long ago she shaved her legs in the shower. I saw the blood from a cut seeping through her pyjama leg.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ I sounded louder than I’d meant to. ‘Once you start you can’t stop. The hair grows back all thick and black and soon you’ll look like an orang-utan. Then you’ll have to shave all the time.’

‘You do it! Anyway, the other girls were laughing at me.’ She was looking down at her hands and sitting rigidly still, the way she does when she lies.

‘They were not. I bet you saw it in a magazine. Or on TV.’

Melissa arched her head in the kind of movie star huff it took me years to master and stamped off to her room.

Now Jake and I wait ten minutes, fifteen, while she changes into her bathers.

‘Come on, Liss,’ Jake calls, ‘we’re boiling. Let’s go.’

Melissa’s room is silent. I knock on the door.

‘Sweetie, don’t you want to cool down?’

‘I’m not going.’ The door stays firmly shut.

Jake does an exaggerated sigh and collapses on to a chair. I can feel the sweat on my face, running down between my breasts, soaking into my bathers under my dress. Three flies are circling me, landing whenever I let my attention drift.

‘You go.’ Her voice is muffled behind the door. ‘I’ll have a shower.’

‘Please, let’s go, Mum.’ Jake reaches out to take my hand and pull me towards the front door.

Melissa’s a mature eleven-year-old, but I am convinced that if I leave her alone in the house for more than twenty minutes a spectacular disaster will happen and she’ll die and I’ll be tortured by guilt for the rest of my life. I’ve pictured the LP gas tanks exploding, the blue gum tree in the yard toppling on to the house, a brown snake slithering out of a kitchen cupboard. Of course, any of those things could happen while I’m at home too, but I would have no guilt factor. The guilt factor means I may never have sex again, because attractive men looking for a good time rarely drop in spontaneously at my house. On the other hand, it has saved me from many of Helen’s girls’ nights, involving outings to pubs that the same attractive men looking for a good time never visit. I was also lucky enough to miss Helen’s ladies-only party where an enthusiastic twenty-year-old tried to sell dildoes and crotchless panties to astonished Gunapan farm wives.

‘Melissa, either you come or we don’t go at all, you know that.’

‘Noooooo!’ Jake’s cry of anguish echoes on and on in a yodelling crow call.

Finally Melissa agrees to come and wait on the bank while we take a dip. I tell her that I’m going in even though I have thighs as thick as tree stumps.

‘It doesn’t worry me.’ My bright voice makes my lie obvious.

‘That’d be right,’ Melissa mutters from the back seat.

‘Young lady,’ I start, but it’s too hot to argue so I swing the car backwards out of the driveway and set off.

It’s been three years since Tony left us. Three years in real time, and more like thirty years in looking-after-children time. I’m sure mothering years go even faster than dog years. I can feel my back turning into a question mark. Sometimes I catch myself hunched over the steering wheel or sagging in a kitchen chair, and I can imagine myself after a few more mothering years, drooling into my porridge in the retirement home. Come on luvvie, they’ll say to me, sit up straight now, after all, you’re only forty.

The road leading into the gully swings around the bend and we can see the whole town, or at least as many people as would normally be at the swimming pool, clustered around the small waterhole like ants at a droplet of sugar water. Bush pigs at a billabong, maybe. The waterhole’s half the size it used to be because we get no rain, but it’s still deep enough to swim.

‘What were you two talking about this morning? Bush pigs was it?’

‘Yeah.’

‘No.’

With the ground near the edge of the water trampled to mud, we find a spot further back underneath a stringybark tree and lay down our towels and unpack the iced cordial and biscuits. Melissa goes off to sit next to her friend Taylah. Jake and I make our way down to the water, saying hello to everyone on the way. Some of the mothers who have caught sight of me pretend to be reading the messages on their children’s T-shirts or searching for something in their bags. I know they’re afraid I’m going to ask them to do something for the Save Our School Committee, but I don’t have to now because the minister’s coming to Gunapan.

‘The minister’s coming to Gunapan,’ I call out cheerily, making a fist of victory, and they nod and smile anxiously as you do when a lunatic has decided to talk to you.

Further up on the hill I can see a family sitting apart from everyone else. Four children and a woman. They lean in together, talking.

‘Who’s that up there?’ I ask Jake.

‘Dunno.’ He doesn’t even glance up, as if he knows without looking who I’m talking about.

I keep squinting at them as I wade in, but I can’t make out their faces. Then I feel an eddy of water around my knees and before I can move someone has grabbed my ankles and I’m under, flailing around in the murky water, trying not to swallow any. I make it to the surface for a breath before Jake sits on my head. Even underwater I can hear his shrieks and Kyleen’s unmistakable snorting laugh. I finally manage to stand up straight, my feet anchoring themselves on the squelchy bottom where the silt oozes in silky bands between my toes.

‘Very funny.’

‘Yep,’ she says between snorts.

Further out, the bottom of the waterhole falls away and the water is dark and deep. Even on a day like this when half the town has swum here, water from the depths still swirls in cold ribbons to the surface. I leave Jake playing with Kyleen and her little girl near the edge of the waterhole and I swim out and roll on to my back where the water is cooler. The sun seems to have less power here.

Up on the hill I can see the lonely family still huddled together. They’re moving about now, gathering their things and putting them into plastic bags. They start making their way back to the road, but instead of walking down through the people bunched around the banks of the waterhole, they skirt the long way around the top of the hill until they reach the bus stop further down the ridge. I close my eyes and float for a while, trying to block out the sounds of kids screaming and parents bellowing and the rustle and crackle of the grass and leaves in the heat.

Melissa is waiting when Jake and I clamber back up to dry ourselves with our dusty hot towels. She’s wearing jeans and a long-sleeved top and her face is scarlet with the heat. I wonder if she’s nicked herself shaving again. It would be typical of a child of mine to decide that self-mutilation of the legs wasn’t enough. Why not shave your arms as well? And your stomach and neck while you’re at it?

‘Where’s Taylah?’ Jake asks her.

‘Gone home.’

‘Sweetie, I’ve got a spare T-shirt in the boot, why don’t you put that on.’

‘I want to go home. You said you were only going in for a dip.’

I stretch out my hand to help her up. She ignores it and pulls herself up with the aid of a tree branch, then winces and brushes her dirty hand on her jeans. I can see that nothing will make her happy today. Melissa was always Tony’s little girl. When he left I didn’t know how to make it up to her. She’s grown old in the time he’s been gone. I offered her a puppy for her last birthday and she refused it.

‘Why?’ I asked her.

‘Because it’ll die. And you never know when.’

At home Melissa goes off to her room and Jake hangs around the kitchen while I boil the water for frankfurts. I get him buttering the bread and I lean out of the kitchen window, trying to catch some air on my face. Across from our block is a small farm. Fancy clean white sheep appear in the paddock one day and are gone the next. The farm owners don’t speak to us. A few times a week I see the wife driving past in her Range Rover with the windows closed. She wears sunglasses and dark red lipstick. I can’t imagine her crutching a sheep, much as I try.

I’ve spent some of my great fantasy moments being that woman, usually on days like this when I’m hanging out of the window and moving my face around like a ping-pong clown to try to catch a breeze. In my imagination I’ve sat in her air-conditioned dining room, laughing gaily, my manicured hands and painted nails flitting about like coloured birds as I discuss the latest in day spas. I’ve waved goodbye to my tiresome yet fabulously wealthy and doting husband, and changed into a negligee to welcome my lover, the Latin horse whisperer who lives above the stables and takes me bareback riding in the moonlight. In this dream, my boobs are so firm that even the thundering gallop of the stallion cannot shake them.

‘Mum,’ Jake interrupts as I’m about to drift into my other world.

‘Mmm?’

‘Melissa’s crying.’

‘Don’t touch the saucepan,’ I say, turning off the gas. ‘And butter four more pieces of bread for your lunches tomorrow.’

She doesn’t want to open the door when I knock, but I can hear the phlegm in her voice, so I push the door open anyway. Melissa’s sitting on the carpet beside her bed. I go and sit beside her, my bones creaking as I lower myself to the floor. It’s a little cooler down here, but I’m still sweating. Melissa’s face is all splotchy and snot is coming out her nose. I pull one of my endless supply of tissues out of my pocket and wipe her face. She tries to push my hand away.

‘I’m not a baby,’ she sniffles.

‘I know.’

We sit quietly for a few minutes and eventually I slip my arm around her shoulders and kiss her forehead. She leans in to me and sighs a big shuddering sigh.

‘What’s up, kiddo?’

‘Nothing.’

We sit for a while longer. Her breathing gets easier and slower. She’s not going to tell me anything, that’s obvious, so I decide to finish making tea. When I get to the kitchen, Jake’s so hungry he’s ripped open the packet of frankfurters and is gnawing on a cold one.

‘Did you do girl talk?’

‘Where did you hear that line?’ I’m trying not to laugh.

‘Norm told me that’s what girls say they do, but really they’re gossiping about how to get boys.’

‘Well, Norm’s wrong. And I’ll be letting him know that next time I see him.’

‘Why don’t you marry Norm?’

‘Because he’s a hundred years old and smells of tractor. Why don’t you marry Kimberley? You play with her at school every day.’

‘Yuk!’

‘Yeah!’

At least that’s sorted.

When she finally emerges from her room, Melissa eats two frankfurts in bread, dripping with butter and tomato sauce, and a few forks of salad. After we’ve washed up she drifts back to her room to do her homework. I’ve pulled all the flywire screens shut and I make the kids hold their breath while I go around the house spraying the mozzies. In Melissa’s room I glance over her shoulder. She’s on the internet, looking at a page about the United Nations.

‘Mum, were you around when the United Nations started?’

‘Possibly, if I’m as old as I feel. But no, I don’t think so. Are you doing a project?’

She nods. She switches screens to show me her essay and I see that at the top of the page she has made a typing mistake and it says The Untied Nations. I like that title. It makes me think of Gunapan, a town lost in the scrubby bush, untied from the big cities and the important people and the TV stations and the government. Gunapan keeps struggling on the way it always has and no one takes any notice at all except to cut a few more services. There are probably thousands of towns like us around the country. The untied nations.

‘Why don’t you look up the collective noun for bush pigs?’ I must learn to use the computer better myself.

‘I did – it’s a sounder,’ Melissa says.

‘What a great word! Sounder. Sounder.’

‘It’s not that good, Mum.’

‘Sounder, sounder, sounder. A sounder of bush pigs.’

‘Mum, I have to do my homework.’ She heaves an exasperated sigh that would do a shop assistant in a toffy dress emporium proud. ‘Please, I need some peace and quiet.’

6

A good mother would be culturing organic yoghurt or studying nutritional tables at this time of night, when the kids are asleep and the evening stretches out ahead, empty and lonely. I’ve checked every channel on the TV and tried to read a magazine, but it’s all rubbish. I’m too hot to concentrate on a book. I should be planning spectacular entertainments for the visit from the education minister, but that seems too much like hard work. Now I’m bored. I sound like Jake. Bored, bored, bored. If I was a bloke, I’d wheel the computer out of Melissa’s room and look at porn for a while.

The only trouble with the second-hand computer stand I bought is that it squeaks whenever you move it. Melissa half-wakes and moans, and I shush her and hurry the computer out of the room. I’m not interested in porn, but Helen’s promised me a whole other world of fun on the internet and I think it’s time I found out more about it, as research of course, to protect my children. Last time I played around on the computer, Melissa, through child techno-magic, tracked what I’d been looking at the night before. ‘Are you going to buy a motorbike, Mum?’ she asked. ‘What are spurs, anyway?’ Now I’ve learned how to clear the history of what I’ve been browsing, so I’m feeling daring. I pull down the ancient bottle of Johnny Walker from the top of the cupboard, pour a shot, add a splash of water and realize the only ice I have is lemon flavoured. What the hell, I think, and drop the homemade icy pole upside down into the glass.

Outside the flywire screens, the night noise of the bush carries on. It’s not the white noise of the city where I grew up – the drone of cars and the rattle of trams, the hum of streetlights and televisions muttering early into the morning. It is an uproar. When we first moved out here I was terrified by the racket. It sounded as if the bunyips and the banshees had gone to war: screaming, howling, grunting, crashing through the bush, tearing trees apart and scraping their claws along the boards of the house. Soon enough I realized that the noises were frogs and cicadas and night birds. Kangaroos thumping along their tracks; rutting koalas sending out bellows you’d never imagine their cute little bodies could produce; the hissing throat rattle of territorial possums and an occasional growling feral cat. Against all that the whirring of the computer is like the purr of a house pet.

Once I’m connected to the internet I do a search on myself, in case I’ve become famous while I wasn’t paying attention. I’m not there, so I try my maiden name, Loretta O’Brien. Someone with my name is a judge in North Carolina, and another person called me died recently and her grandchildren have put up pictures of her. She has a touch of the old scrag about her. I wonder if it’s the first name that does it to us. All that unfulfilled singing potential.