Rural Dreams Read online

Jack’s father turns away and I feel a tug as the rope pulls me in.

  I woz ere, ere I woz

  The team is filing back into their positions and the kids are calling out ‘Imp –e– ri– als! Imp– e–r i– als!’

  I woz ere, ere I woz, woz I ere?

  Yes I woz.

  I can’t believe I’ve returned. I can’t believe I left.

  ~~~

  Down by the river it’s one of those still, hot days. The old gum trees droop toward the water and the mud sticks fast. Sam comes out of the water, soaking wet and grinning, running along on tiptoes, over the hot sand.

  ‘See me?’ He says, shaking his arms, ‘See how high I went up?’

  The flicked water from him, a thousand droplets of sunshine.

  ‘I saw you,’ His mother answers. ‘You did a belly wacker when you landed.’

  ‘Didn’t even hurt,’ he says – though the skin above his boardshorts is a fading red. ‘Why don’t you give it a go?’

  She raises up on her elbows and moves her head sideways so that his shadow blocks her from the sun. He appears bigger, older than his ten years and the sun at his side shimmers and glows.

  ‘That rope swing wouldn’t hold me’.

  ‘Yeah it would,’ his shadow shifts as he hops from foot to foot and she has to keep moving her head to see him properly in the light. ‘It could hold an elephant.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘Go on Mum!’

  And when she looks at him again, looks at him hopping about on the sand, the sun bouncing off him and his wet hair flopping about she decides that yes, she will have a go.

  There are one or two other families on the bank, but the adults are nowhere near the tree and there are only a few kids playing about on the sand. She walks down to the bank and kicks off her thongs. It’s cooler by the water and she walks along on the edges of it, her feet sinking into the brown sand. Her footsteps make her think of that poem she got so sick of, the one about the footsteps on the sand and Jesus carrying you. That poem was everywhere in the 80s. She wonders what happened to it. Sam is still bouncing about, babbling instructions and as they reach the rope swing tree she stops to look at him. His beauty surprises her, as it always has. Sometimes she wonders if she only finds him beautiful because she loves him, or because he is hers, but other people have commented on his looks too, ‘What a beautiful boy,’ strangers often say, and she knows that there is also an element of surprise when they say it, an elevation at the end of ‘boy’ and what they are also saying is, ‘What a beautiful boy for an average looking mother.’ She knows it’s true. While she is not ugly in any way, she doesn’t stand out. She is not beautiful like him, but she is strong. She’s always been strong. Perhaps ten kgs heavier than when she was last up here, but strong nonetheless and confident in what her body can do. As she climbs up the old rivergum, she remembers doing this as a child. Then, her bare feet wouldn’t have noticed the rough, warm bark and the intricate spiderwebs in between the spindly branches. She wouldn’t have noticed how high the lower branch sits out over the river and now, as she walks out on it, arms outstretched like a gymnast she feels a twinge of nerves. The rope swing dangles out over the water and for a brief moment she feels relief, she won’t have to do it. She can’t reach the swing unless she jumps out to it and she’s not doing that, but Sam has walked out behind her and is passing her a stick. She takes it and reaches out long over the water. On her first go she hooks the rope and pulls in the swing, grabbing the wooden handle. She throws the stick in the water and watches it travel away, fast, toward the curved bend downstream. The current is fast here, more so when the river’s lower.

  ‘Is it cold?’ she asks giving a sideward glance, already knowing the answer. But it’s standard, everyone has to ask it. Everyone has to give the answer.

  ‘At first.’ Sam is standing close behind. ‘But you soon get used to it.’

  She tests the wooden handle. It feels sturdy; it feels like it could hold her. But it’s been over 20 years since she’s had a go and her legs shake a little as she inches out further along the old branch. The last time she had a go on this swing she was probably a few years older than Sam, girls didn’t tend to use it as much when they entered high school. Well, here’s one for the middle-aged women, she thinks. The middle age, middle class, middle looks. Here’s one for the elephants.

  ‘Go right out!’ Sam’s arm reaches in front of her and he points to the middle of the river. ‘Swing right out as far as you can go.’

  She nods. Here’s one for you Sam, she thinks, and with a great inhale of air, she leaps off the branch. High into the air she goes, high into the blue still air and she’s flying, flying, her breath like a laugh in her chest and her legs out in front of her like a long jumper. She’s in the air; and the sky and the world and the universe have never felt so close as they do right now. It’s a suspension, an elongation of time and she sees her hands reach out long before her, blue sky piercing through her outstretched fingers. It’s like she is a newborn, forever startled at the new. She lets go when she’s highest and the river rushes toward her, brown and strong. She closes her eyes and meets it hard. Feet crash onto the surface, and next it’s her back, skin slapped by a quick hand. She’s pulled down fast. Down, down below the surface it’s cold, it’s so much colder than she expected and for a terrifying second she’s suspended in the dark before she relaxes, arms outstretched and feels the water wrap around her. Then she’s kicking, kicking to the surface watching the bubbles and her long white arms propel upwards.

  Before she breaks into the air she hears the cheers. Sam is standing on the edge of the bank and there’s a couple beside him clapping.

  ‘Well done,’ the man is saying. ‘Good effort.’

  There is a boy beside them about Sam’s age, half turned away; his face a slack, dull expression.

  ‘That’s my mum,’ Sam says.

  ‘Your mother is braver than me,’ the woman says to him. ‘You wouldn’t get me up there.’

  ‘No,’ says the man. ‘You wouldn’t.’

  She waves to them all and says something about the cold. Then she swims around for a bit.

  She is getting used to it.

  She floats. Her skin hurts, her back hurts but she smiles up into the blue sky. Just floating here, it would be easy to forget about all the bad and boring parts of life. It would be easy to think that life could float on forever. Here, she could imagine her farm as profitable and sustainable – that all her efforts to improve it were making a difference. She floats. Easy to think too, that the reason her husband spends most of his time in Melbourne is because of his work and that his colleague Sharon is just a friend. For this time at least, she floats and worries not a bit.

  Two weeks later, she’s surprised to note that the new Principal is the man who clapped her by the side of the river after her leap. She’s at the school preparing for term one Year Eight Art when they meet properly. She’s talking about excursions when he interrupts and begins speaking with a kind of false comradery. It’s a lonely person’s tone.

  ‘It was you on the rope swing wasn’t it? That was the first full weekend we spent here and I said to Virginia that what sort of a town this must be! I remember thinking that it would be so good for our family, in this town, where adults are not afraid to swing as high as that over the river.’

  He holds his hand out, ‘Hugh’.

  She takes it and they shake, ‘Fleur.’

  ‘You have a son around the same age as my boy Jackson,’ Hugh says. ‘It would be good if they met. We don’t know many people yet.’ He’s a quiet talker and she has to lean in to listen. He’s got thick brown hair and broad shoulders. She leans in a little more.

  ‘We’ll have to get them together before school starts. Perhaps you and your wife would like to come around for dinner soon, meet a few of the locals.’

  ‘Ah well now,’ he says, looking at his hands. ‘Virginia has left me, more or less. She’s moved back to Melbourne. Not sure how tha
t will go with the parents and friends’ committee.’

  It’s a startling admission for someone she’s known for two minutes. She looks at him more closely. There’s something about a sad man. A sad and single man.

  ‘Don’t worry about the P and F. Quite a few of us have been through that.’

  ‘You too?’ he asks.

  ‘Pretty much.’

  A moment, a long moment and the fate is sealed. Later on, when people say that they don’t know how affairs start, she’ll think they’re lying. It’s not hard to work it out – all it takes is Drinks After Work. Drinks with all your colleagues and then just a few and then one other. Drinks at a pub, drinks at each other’s house, drinks in a hotel. Nothing sophisticated or mysterious about it at all. ‘Pretty much’ can mean many things but in the context of an Australian affair, it’s a green flag to begin racing.

  But where to go? Where to meet in the small rural town? The complexities, at first exciting soon become tiresome. The driving here and there. The uncomfortable trysts in cars too small and the cost of city hotels. Fantasy gives way to paranoia and hushed phone calls become terse. Side glances at the post office grow narrow and exciting options give way to dull alternatives. Too soon, pretty much all is regretted. Plus, there’s always the children to consider.

  Jack, unlike Sam who was resigned to it, took poorly to sole parenting. There was some window smashing, a stolen bike. There was the drinking. Sam, easily led and following the other boy onto private property, lighting small fires, sneaking out at night.

  On that day, she’d gone to Hugh’s house to finish it. She driven past swollen creek beds and paddocks, past huge gums fallen by the wayside and saw in them a metaphor for her own life. She’d gone around to say that it was over, that it had gone too far. She was sick of herself. Jack was out the front with Luke – another sidekick. They were wrestling, Jack on top of the smaller boy and grinding the side of his face into kangaroo grass. She called out something about visiting to drop off school reports and they stopped fighting for a moment, Jack sly and jubilant, Luke’s smile uncertain, a graze blooming on his face. A thin boy, she remembers now. A thin boy with freckles and a football jumper too small.

  Inside, she stood a distance from Hugh and noted for the first time the poem of Jesus and the footsteps on a fridge magnet.

  ‘That poem,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what to make of it.’

  He took a step closer, she took one back.

  ‘He’s always there in the bad times, doesn’t that seem suspicious to you?’

  Hugh nodded in a grave, sad kind of way and put his arms about her. Outside, the boys played in the distance and a motor started up. On the wall, footsteps on the sand.

  A short time later, a high yell from outside. A sharp cry and as they both jump apart turn to the window where they see Jack running through the paddocks, mouth agape and hair askew. They hear his sobs and both of them are out of the house and on the porch before he arrives. A rising panic as Hugh leaps toward his son and bypasses him calling ‘Where’s Luke, where’s Luke, where’s Luke?’ Because it’s every rural family’s nightmare – an accident on the farm.

  She’s running, running through the side paddock and toward the dam. Running past sheep and through fence lines and along the dam edge, sinking in the weight and seeing the four-wheeler half submerged and tipped on the side. Running in a blur and hearing Jack shouting and crying and Hugh taking off his jumper as he runs and then diving in and coming up again and diving in and the water so brown and deep and still and she’s running to the house again and calling the ambulance and everyone crying and the police and ambulance coming and Luke dead, trapped and drowned under the bike.

  And people coming to the house, Luke’s family – his screaming mother wanting to see her boy, his slight father made huge with grief and the children, bewildered and upset. The neighbours, the police and the ambulance officers. Luke is dead.

  And after the horror, after the initial shock wears down – all remember seeing her there. When the red and weary eyes rise from the small coffin in the ground, it’s hers they meet. Her name in every police report. The thing that was out of place. Her there, in Hugh’s house on a Saturday evening alone and with her husband in Melbourne. Her there with Hugh and the boys outside and Luke who could barely ride at all, on a four-wheeler around the dam’s slippery edge with no adult to supervise.

  The branded woman, the other woman, the marriage wrecker. She gave herself labels like tattoos and watched how neighbours eyed them. The farm suffered. Weeds sprung up, rabbits multiplied and the garden ran wild. Divorce papers came and were signed without a care.

  She didn’t apply for a new contract position at the school and leased the farm’s paddocks to Landcare and the farmers next door. City lights beckoned. Sam became a week-in week-out child. But every Saturday during football season he’d made the trip back, first by train and then driving himself, to play for his former town. She thought about him and why he made the trip. Friends, she knew, connections from primary school, but something more than that. When Sam was young, he’d spend hours in the paddocks, digging post holes, tightening wires on fences and building rafts for the dam. Whole afternoons with Sam could be spent in the paddocks digging holes. When he was younger, he’d call her to come and look at them and she’d be all admiring, staring into the holes and the piles of dirt. Sam was the boy who’d been drenching and marking lambs since he could hang around the yards and he wouldn’t complain about the early mornings. For all his city education and opportunities, Sam loved the farm best.

  Now she’s back and the faces are friendlier than she’d remembered or cared to think about. People nodding, the woman on the sausage stall giving her extra onions and telling her she’d been missed. She remembers everyone’s names. She remembers everything.

  ‘We’re coming back!’ the man beside her said. ‘We’re bloody coming back!’

  They’d been on a losing streak for years and now, on the day she arrives they start winning. It had to mean something.

  On the way to the game, she’d taken a detour and driven up to the farm – let the younger kids ride on the gate while she opened it. Her paddocks, still leased to the neighbour, were alive with the canola and native grasses. Bursts of yellow and up ahead the long stretches of bush she couldn’t bear to clear. It had grown, prospered while she was away – the branches curved and leaned down toward her, the curling leaves graceful in their sweep. The speckled light sprinkled the dirt road with gold and she smelt the keen scent of wattle. The old farm-house looked neglected, but not dilapidated. It had the look of someone who’d been sleeping in the warm afternoon.

  ‘He’s gunna take it! He’s gunna take it!’ The man was almost crying into his pie now, watching the sea of blue rush toward a loose ball.

  Speeding back from her farm earlier that afternoon, she’d seen light and shadows in every paddock and sensed they’d always be with her. The fine soil of her land was spread wide and deep with stories untold and a waiting history. A thin figure shimmered in the corner of her eye. Light and shadows. She’d need to recognise and acknowledge each one. How to live with them was the trick, but she was prepared now, to give it a go. She must. Her whole being depended on it.

  Fifteen points ahead now with five minutes to go and her boy scoops the ball and takes a long kick toward goal. The cheer raises with the arc of the ball and the younger kids hurtle themselves toward the end of the oval. The ball curves in between the goalposts and the umpire gives his two-hand salute. The crowd goes wild, the players hug like it’s the end of a long war and the man beside her is made beautiful in his dewy, meaty smile.

  After this, they’ll collect Sam and take their drinks down to the rope swing. They’ll talk about the game and the time she jumped and Sam will show the little kids how to balance on the branch and how to step out slowly and he’ll hand them the swing, just like she held it out for him.

  He’ll show them how to get it just right so that when they l
eap, it will be in the deepest, safest part of the river where the cool water envelops and caresses you, and where for just a second in time you can feel what it is to be a native fish who exists always, in its firm and ancient grasp.

  THE ROMANTICS

  By the mid-90s my friends and I are burnt out and in various states of backpacker decline. Tired and ill from months of travelling and too many nights out; we lie around share houses, hung over and broke.

  A sprained rib from a mishap in Japan, possessions stolen in Peru, a wound from Red Sea coral that won’t go away. We’re used to being weak with laughter, but it doesn’t seem funny anymore that two Greeks have followed us to the UK.

  Rumours reach our country town in Australia that hint at us turning wild; anxious parents take long flights to issue threats. The act is a wake-up call, we scatter across the globe.

  I sign up to a job agency in London, looking after old people. I say I’m willing to go anywhere that doesn’t involve a flight. That same afternoon, I get a job looking after a woman near a small village in Kent. It’s for two weeks only and I resign myself to boredom. The quiet nights will do me good. I sleep the whole way there.

  When I first meet her, Lady Jane is in her wheelchair, waiting. She has a tartan blanket over her lap and a string of pearls about her neck. She is wearing a purple jumper with a white shirt and her mauve skirt is long and pleated. Behind her; a manor house three storeys high and acres of landscaped grounds. Lady Jane asks if I’m named after the Queen’s sister. I say no, my aunt. The old Lady tutts, turns her wheelchair around and I think, this is not going to end well.

  The first few days are long and lonely. I help Lady Jane get dressed, I cook her meals, I assist with toiletries. A nurse comes once a day. At night, I lie in my single bed with thick cotton sheets and I listen to the big old clock, given to her by some cousin of the Queen going tick, tock, tick, tock. I’m used to stumbling home and sleeping with my friends in the same room or having chats to some stranger in the bunk above or below. I put a blanket over the clock to muffle the sound but still I hear it; tick tock, tick tock. Old nightmares threaten, I fight them and mostly win.