P.A. O’Reilly
The Fine Colour of Rust

The Japanese have a word, sabi, which connotes the simple beauty of worn and imperfect and impermanent things: a weathered fence; an old cracking bough in a tree; a silver bowl mottled with tarnish; the fine colour of rust.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

1

Norm Stevens Senior tells me I’ll never get that truck…

2

When I show the committee members the letter at the…

3

Norm’s come by to drop off more lemons and pick…

4

‘Look at all these cars, Jake.’ We pull in with…

5

Over the next week, the heat builds until at eight…

6

A good mother would be culturing organic yoghurt or studying…

7

‘What’s that noise?’ Jake has an unerring knack for asking…

8

My sister Patsy has only been in the house for…

9

The next morning at seven o’clock, mouth gluey, skirt rucked…

10

At ten thirty-four on the day chosen for his Gunapan…

11

The headmaster’s taken my signs off the school fence. I…

12

‘He’s got a bloody cheek.’ Tina’s talking on the phone…

13

The next day I’m on the phone first thing. ‘Helen,…

14

The next night, Norm arrives on my doorstep and tells…

15

The shire meeting last night was a distraction, but the…

16

‘What the hell am I supposed to do?’ Norm says…

17

As we head off to Halstead along the road where…

18

The Bolton Road seems particularly long today. My foot lifts…

19

It’s uncanny seeing Norm and Justin together when I drive…

20

When I arrive, bawling, at Norm’s yard, Justin is by…

21

Norm turns up at nine in the evening with a…

22

The next day is the last day of term and…

23

Yesterday I drove down to Melbourne, dropped the kids at…

24

‘Looking a bit the worse for wear,’ Norm says when…

25

Norm’s news has given me the strength of seven Lorettas.

26

It’s dark in the Community Centre car park. We’ve asked…

27

‘Stop it,’ I tell Norm.

28

When I wake up the next day, the house is…

29

I remember Norm saying to me once that he wished…

30

The women who go to the day spa would never…

31

The kids sit quietly in the back on the way…

32

The mail Melissa brought in is fatter than usual. I…

33

At six thirty, the Gunapan pub, once called the Criterion,…

34

Norm Stevens Junior (aka Justin) says I’ll never sell my…

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

Norm Stevens Senior tells me I’ll never get that truck off my land. He says it’s too old, been there too long, the hoist will try to lift the thing and it will break apart into red stones of rust.

‘Leave it,’ he says. ‘Let it rust away. One day you’ll look and it won’t be there anymore.’ He gives me a sideways glance. ‘Like husbands. You look away and when you look back they’re gone, right?’

‘Right.’

‘So have you heard from the bastard?’

‘Nope.’

‘And you’re getting by all right? For money?’

‘I’ve got more money now than when he was here.’

We both laugh.

‘Now, Loretta, you know I can take the kids for a night if you need some time off.’

‘I might take you up on that. I’ve got a prospect. A biker, but a nice one, not a loser. On a Harley, no less.’

‘A Harley?’ He raises his eyebrows. Whenever he does that, a pink scaly half-moon of skin above his left eyebrow wrinkles. He reaches up to touch it.

‘You should have that looked at, Norm.’

‘Yeah, yeah, and I should give up the spare parts work and get out of the sun too.’

He gestures around his junkyard. There are tractor parts, rolls of wire, tyres, motor mowers, corrugated iron sheets all rusted and folded, bits of cars and engines, pots and pans, gas bottles, tools, toys, bed frames, oil drums, the chipped blades of threshers and harvesters. Some of the machinery is so bent and broken you can’t even tell what it was meant for. In the centre of the yard is a lemon tree, the only greenery in sight. It always has lemons. I’m sure I know what Norm does to help it along, but I don’t ask. He’s got four guard dogs too, tied up around the yard, vicious snarling things. As if anyone would want to steal any of this crap.

‘Well, I’d better pick up the kids,’ I say. I don’t want to pick up the kids. I want to send them to an orphanage and buy myself a nice dress and learn to live the way I used to, before I turned into the old scrag I am now.

‘Don’t you worry about that truck.’ Norm stretches out his long skinny arm and pats me on the back. ‘It’ll go back into the land.’

I get into the car, pump the accelerator like I’m at the gym and turn the key three times before the engine fires. I should have that looked at, I think. There’s half a kilo of sausages on the seat beside me, and I realize they’ve been sitting in the sun for half an hour. When I unwrap the paper and have a sniff I get a funny sulphur smell. They’ll cook up all right, I tell myself, and I gun the Holden and screech in a U-turn on to the road. I can’t get used to this huge engine – every time I take off I sound like a pack of hoons at Bathurst.

It’s three thirty already and Jake and Melissa will be waiting at the school gate, ready to jump in and whine about how everyone else’s mum always gets there before I do. Maybe I will drop them off at the orphanage.

When I get to the school gate the kids are both standing with their hands on their hips. I wonder if they got that from me; old scrag standing with her hands on her hips, pursing her thin lips, squinting into the sun. You could make a statue of that. It would look like half the women in this town. Dust and a few plastic bags swirling around its feet, the tail lights of the husband’s car receding into the distance. They should cast it in bronze and put it in the foyer of Social Security.

‘Mum, we have to have four sheets of coloured cardboard for the project tomorrow.’

‘All right.’

‘And me too, Mum, I have to have a lead pencil and I don’t want bananas in my lunch anymore because they stink.’

‘All right.’

As I steer the great car down the highway towards home I have a little dream. I’ll swing into the driveway and sitting next to the veranda will be a shiny maroon Harley Davidson. I won’t dare to look, but out of the corner of my eye I’ll see a boot resting on the step, maybe with spurs on it. Then I’ll slowly lift my head and he’ll be staring at me the way George Clooney stared into J. Lo’s eyes in Out of Sight and I’ll take a deep breath and say to him, ‘Can you hang on five minutes while I drop the kids at the orphanage?’

What I actually find when we get home is a bag of lemons sitting on the veranda. Norm must have left them while we were at the newsagent.

‘Who are these from?’ Jake asks.

‘Norm.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Oil on the bag.’

I bought Norm a cake of Solvol once. Delivered it to the junkyard wrapped in pretty pink paper with a bow. He rang to thank me. ‘I think you’re insulting me.’

‘It’s for your own good, Norm.’

‘You’re a minx. If I was thirty years younger…’

‘Fifty more like,’ I told him, ‘before you’d get those paws on me.’

That night, when the kids are finally settled in their rooms doing their homework, I get on the phone for the usual round of begging.

‘Are you coming to the meeting tomorrow?’

‘Oh, Loretta, I’m sorry, I completely forgot. I’ve made other plans.’

I can imagine Helen’s plans. They’ll involve a cask of white and six changes of clothes before she collapses on the bed in tears and starts ringing her friends – me – asking why she can’t find a man. Is she too old, has she lost her looks? It helps to leave the house occasionally, I have to remind her. She certainly hasn’t lost her looks. Auburn hair without a single grey strand. Straight white teeth. A country tan. Unlike mousey-haired skinny scragwoman me, she even has a cleavage.

‘The grade-three teacher’s coming,’ I tell her, certain this will change her mind. ‘And Brianna’s offered to mind all the kids at her place. She must have hired a bouncer.’

‘He’s told you he’s coming?’

‘Yeah, he left a message on my machine,’ I lie.

So Helen’s in. After I herd up seven others with more lies and false promises, I put the sausages on. Sure enough, the sulphur smell fades once they start to burn. I used to enjoy cooking quiche and fancy fried rice and mud cake. Gourmet, like on the telly, the boyfriend would boast to his mates. Then we get married and it’s, ‘Listen, darl, I wouldn’t mind a chop for a change.’ Now the kids think gourmet is pickles on your sandwich. They won’t even look at a sundried tomato. Last time I tried that, Jake picked them out of the spaghetti sauce and left them lined up like red bits of chewed meat on the side of the plate. ‘Gross,’ he said, and I had to agree, seeing them like that.

The meeting’s in the small room at the Neighbourhood House because the Church of Goodwill had already booked the large room by the time I got round to organizing tonight’s meeting. We’re sitting pretty much on top of each other, trying to balance cups of tea and Scotch Finger biscuits on our knees. Maxine is supposed to be taking the minutes.

I thought I’d made it up, but the grade-three teacher has come, and Helen’s paralysed with excitement and terror. She’s wearing enough perfume to spontaneously combust and the smell’s so overwhelming that Maxine has to swing the door open. Two minutes later the noise from the meeting next door starts up.

‘Yes!’ they all shout. ‘Yes! I do, I do!’

‘Well, I don’t.’ Maxine swings the door half-shut so that we’re dizzy with perfume but still having to shout over the frantic clapping of people being saved next door.

I give the list of apologies and welcome everyone who’s come, introducing the grade-three teacher in case the others don’t know him. Helen’s gone as pink and glistening as a baby fresh out of the bath. She’ll have a seizure if she’s not careful. I can’t see the attraction. The teacher’s five foot four, stocky, and always says, ‘At the end of the day.’

‘At the end of the day,’ he says when I introduce him, ‘I am totally committed to this cause. Our jobs are at risk too.’

Just in case, I look down at his feet, but no spurs. I read out the list of agenda items. Brenda sighs loudly.

‘Do we have to do all this agenda crap? And the motions? I motion, you motion. My Mark’s doing motions you wouldn’t believe and I have to be home by nine in case I need to take him to Emergency.’

‘Yes, we do. Because we’re trying to be bloody official. And as you well know, an emergency department that closes at ten in a town half an hour away is one of the reasons we’re here. Soon this town will have no services for a hundred kilometres.’

‘Oh, yes, ma’am.’

I roll my eyes. Maxine rolls her eyes. For a moment I think of us all rolling our eyes like a bunch of lunatics in the asylum and I almost cheer up.

‘Item one. I’ve written a letter to the member for our local constituency about the closure of the school.’ I pause for the inevitable joke about members which, to my amazement, doesn’t come. ‘We need everyone who has kids in the school to sign.’

‘It’ll never work.’ Brenda is the optimist of the committee.

‘Does anyone know how to drain the oil from a sump?’ Kyleen pipes up.

Only another half an hour, I think, and I can pick up the kids from Brianna’s, drop them at the orphanage and drive straight down to Melbourne. With the experience I’ve got, I’ll land a good job in a centre for adults with attention deficit disorder.

When I pull up at Brianna’s, the kids run to the front door, looking pleased to see me. They’re way too quiet in the back seat. They must have done something horrible.

‘So did you have a good time?’ I ask. I speed up to catch the amber light and the Holden roars with the might of a drunken trucker. I can’t make out exactly what Melissa says, but I might have heard the word fight. I think back. Were they limping when they got into the car? Was there blood? I can’t remember anything like that so I turn on the radio and keep driving along the dark highway, listening to the soothing sound of a voice calling race seven of the trots, something I’ve learned to love since the radio got stuck on this station.

‘Mum?’ Melissa says, as we pull into the unsurprisingly Harley-free driveway.

‘Yes, sweetie?’

‘I don’t ever want to leave this house.’

‘I thought you wanted to live in a hundred-room mansion with ten servants and a personal homework attendant?’

‘Nup.’

‘I know what it is – you love what I’ve done with the place.’ My children were so impressed when I fixed the damp patch beside the stove with a hairdryer, a bottle of glue paste and three of Jake’s artworks. I had been calling the agent about it for months, but my house is clearly outside the real estate zone of care and responsibility.

‘Mum, I’m serious. If Dad sends a letter and we’ve moved we won’t get it.’

I want to believe he’ll send a letter – to his children, at least.

‘Well, that’s settled. We’re staying.’

When we get inside, the kids brush their teeth without a single protest and climb into bed.

‘You OK, Jakie?’ I lean down to kiss him goodnight.

‘Brianna and her boyfriend had a fight,’ he whispers. ‘I think he hit her.’

I kiss him twice, then again.

‘I’m sure she’s all right. I’ll call her tomorrow. You go to sleep now.’

‘I don’t want bananas in my lunch.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it. Bananas stink,’ I say as I turn out the light.

Next morning, as I’m packing bananas into their lunch boxes, I realize I forgot to thank Norm for the lemons.

I drop into the yard on the way back from the shops. He’s down the back of the block with three other blokes, all of them standing in a line with their arms folded, staring at the body of an old tractor. This would be the matching statue to mine: bloke standing, feet apart, arms folded, staring at a piece of broken machinery. No idea how to fix it. We could put Him and Her statues either side of the highway coming into Gunapan.

I wait beside the shed while the delicate sales negotiations go on. I’ve never understood exactly how the communication works. Perhaps the meaning is in the number of head nods, or the volume of the grunt as the customer shifts from one leg to the other. After they’ve stared at the tractor body in apparent silence for five minutes, Norm sees me and ambles up.

‘Don’t tell me you’re going to sell something, Norm?’

‘Not bloody likely. Every month these three clowns are here with some new scheme for making money.’

‘None of them happens to ride a Harley?’

He doesn’t even bother answering, just nods his head at their ute on the road. We step inside the shed for a cuppa. The radio’s on the racing station.

‘Harlequin Dancer made a good run from fourth in race seven last night,’ I remark.

‘You need a new car. I’m working on it, love. Shouldn’t be too much longer.’ Norm hands me a cup, covered in grease, and a paper towel to wipe it with.

There are enough parts in Norm’s yard for him to put together ten perfectly good cars, and he has been trying to build me a new one for years. But his speciality is disassembly rather than assembly. As soon as the collection of engine parts and panels begins to bear a resemblance to an actual car, he decides it’s not right and has to pull it apart and start again.

He takes a noisy slurp of his tea before he speaks again. ‘Sorry I didn’t get to the meeting.’

‘The school’s not your problem.’

‘Course it’s my problem. It’s everybody’s bloody problem.’

We drink our tea. The three blokes wave as they pass the shed. There’s a protest at Randwick in race two. The jockey on the second-placed horse is alleging interference from the winner at the final turn.

‘I’ve got money on that horse.’ Norm turns up the volume.

‘Which one?’

‘The one that’ll buy you a bottle of bubbly if it wins the protest. Long odds. Very long odds. Bring me luck, Loretta.’

The day’s starting to heat up and blowies are banging against the tin roof of the shed. Norm picks up the trannie and holds it to his ear. I look out at the heat shimmering over the piles of junk. Norm’s touching his crusty forehead as he listens for the outcome of the protest. He must win against the odds sometimes, I think – otherwise why bother betting?

2

Thank you for your letter of 9 January. I fully understand the concerns you have expressed and would like to take this opportunity to explain how these concerns are being addressed by your government.

When I show the committee members the letter at the next meeting they hoot like owls. ‘Fully understand!’ ‘Take this opportunity!’ It’s as good as a party, they laugh so much.

‘I told you it wouldn’t work.’ Brenda nods sagely.

‘It’s a step.’ I’m not letting her get away with I told you so. ‘The first step. It’s a game. We make a bid, they try to negotiate us down.’

‘Sure.’ She’s still doing that nod. ‘Like we’ve got real negotiating power.’

‘Shut up, Brenda,’ Norm says.

Helen is here again but the grade-three teacher is missing so Helen is downcast. No, she’s more than downcast. Her high hair has flagged. Perhaps the heat in the air has melted the gel. Whatever happened, the fluffy creation that brushed the architrave when she walked in has flattened out to match her spirit and she’s slumped in the orange plastic chair beside me, motionless bar the occasional crackle as she winkles another Kool Mint from her open bag, pretending no one can hear the sighs and crunches of her working her way through the packet.

‘I’ve written another letter,’ I tell them. ‘This time, I’ve copied it to our shire councillors, the local member, the prime minister, the headmaster, the school board, all the teachers and all of the parents at the school.’

Silence. Kyleen opens her mouth and closes it when Maxine jabs her in the ribs. Norm flips through the pages of minutes in his hands. The air is close and still and next door at the Church of Goodwill meeting someone is talking loud and long in a deep voice.

‘I spent our whole budget on photocopying and postage,’ I go on. ‘You’ll get the letter in the mail tomorrow.’

‘Is that why we haven’t got biscuits?’ Trust Kyleen to ask. I’ve always wondered how many of them only came for the biscuits.

‘I buy the biscuits,’ Maxine answers. ‘I didn’t have time, that’s all.’

We fall back into silence.

Eventually I speak. ‘We could give up. Let them close the school – we can carpool to get the kids to Halstead Primary.’

No one moves. Brenda’s staring at the floor. I’m expecting her to jump in and agree with me. Her house is painted a dull army green and her clothes are beige and puce and brown and her kids stay out on the streets till eight or nine at night as Brenda turns on light after light and stands silhouetted in the doorway with her cardigan pulled tight around her, waiting for them to come home. She turns up to my meetings as if she is only here to make sure nothing good happens from them. But tonight she reaches over to pat me on the knee.

‘Loretta, I know it won’t work, and you probably know deep down it won’t work, but you can’t give up now,’ she says.

Kyleen stands up and punches the air, as if she’s at a footie match. ‘That’s right! Don’t give up, Loretta. Like they said in Dead Poets Society, “Nil bastardum”,’ she pauses, then trails off, ‘“carburettorum”…’

‘“Grindem down”?’ Norm finishes.

Next day, Norm’s cleaning motor parts with kerosene when I knock on the tin frame of his shed.

‘Knew it was you. You should try braking a little earlier, Loretta.’ He doesn’t even have to look up.

‘Norm, what happened to your forehead?’

‘Bloody doctor chopped off half my face.’

‘Oh, God, I knew it. I knew something was wrong with that patch of skin. Not skin cancer?’ My heart is banging in my chest.

‘Not anymore.’ He reaches up to touch the white bandage, which is already covered in oily fingerprints. ‘They think they got it all.’

He dunks the engine part into the tin of kerosene and scrapes at it with a screwdriver. I want to hug him, but he and I don’t do that sort of thing. I’m going to buy him sunscreen and make him wear it, especially on those sticking-out ears of his. I’ll buy him a hat and long-sleeved shirts. I can’t imagine life without him.

‘Mum, I found some flat tin.’ Melissa is in the doorway, shading her eyes with her hand and watching Jake teetering on top of a beaten-up caravan, his arms whirling like propellers.

‘Jake, don’t move,’ I scream.

My toe stubs a railway sleeper as I bolt towards the caravan.

He was probably fine until I panicked. His eyes widen when he looks down and realizes how high he is. His first howl sets off the guard dogs. His second howl sets off car alarms across town. By the time Norm and I coax him down we’ve both sustained permanent hearing loss. I hold him against me and his howls ease to sobbing.

‘Come on, mate, it wasn’t that bad.’ Norm lifts Jake from my grasp and swings him down to the ground. ‘I’ll get you a can of lemonade.’

Jake takes a long, hiccupping breath followed by a cat-in-heat kind of moan as he lets out the air.

‘Mum! I told you, I found some.’ Melissa pulls me, limping, to the back of the yard.

My toe is throbbing and I’m sweating and cross. I wonder why I don’t buy a couple of puce cardigans and sink back into the land myself, like Brenda or that truck.

We drag the bits of tin to the shed where Jake is sitting on the counter listening to the golden oldies radio station while Norm scans Best Bets.

‘Have you got any paint for this tin? I’m going to make signs for the school.’

Norm shakes his head. ‘You’re a battler, Loretta. And I suppose I’m expected to put them up?’

‘On the fence.’

One of my best dreams is Beamer Man. Beamer Man powers his BMW up to the front of the house and snaps off the engine. He swings open his door, jumps out and strides up my path holding expensive wine in one hand and two tickets to Kiddieland in the other.

‘We’ll need the children out of the way for a week or so,’ he explains, ‘while I explore every inch of your gorgeous body.’

‘Taxi’s here. Have a lovely week.’ I can feel his eyes on my effortlessly acquired size-ten torso as I give the kids a gentle push out the door.

They run happily to the taxi, clutching their all-you-can-eat-ride-and-destroy Kiddieland tickets, then Beamer Man closes the front door and presses me against the wall.

‘Mum, you’ve painted “Save Our Schol”. And you’ve got paint on your face,’ Melissa interrupts to tell me before I get to the good part.

Why did I decide to do this in the front yard? My arms are smeared to the elbows with marine paint, and I’m in the saggy old shorts I swore I’d never wear outside the house. Imagine if Harley Man or Beamer Man went by.

I have a terrible thought. Did Norm mean battler or battleaxe? The school had better be worth all this.

3

Norm’s come by to drop off more lemons and pick up a few of my lemon tarts. He leans in an old-man-at-the-pub kind of way on the mantelpiece and picks up a postcard I’ve propped against the candlestick.

‘Who’s this from?’ he asks, turning it over without waiting for an answer.

‘My sister, Patsy, the one who works at the uni in Melbourne. She’s on a research trip to Paris.’

‘She works at the uni?’ He props the card back after he’s read it.

‘Yep, she’s a lecturer there.’

‘She must be pretty smart. What happened to you?’ Norm winks at Jake, who giggles and scratches his face the way he’s been doing since he got up. I know what’s wrong but I’m trying to pretend it’s not true. Even though the kids in his grade have all had the vaccine, some have still come down with a mild case of chickenpox.

‘Dropped on my head as a baby. So did you get the windscreen?’

‘Didn’t get it, but tracked one down. A new bloke is doing car repairs out the end of the Bolton Road. Set up the other week. Actually, he’s about your age. Not bad looking either. Good business. Nice and polite.’

‘Beautiful wife, six well-behaved children,’ I add.

Norm leans back and frowns. ‘Really?’

‘No, but probably.’

‘I don’t think so. He smelled of bachelor to me. Divorced maybe. Anyway, he quoted me a good price, said to bring the car and he’d put in the windscreen straight away. So you can take it down whenever you like.’

‘What’s his name?’ I ask Norm.

‘Merv Bull.’

I shake my head. Only in Gunapan. Merv Bull sounds like an old farmer with black teeth and hay in his hair who scoops yellow gobs from his ear and stares at them for minutes on end like they’ll forecast the weather. The image keeps replaying in my mind as I finish wrapping the lemon tarts in waxed paper.

‘You can’t judge people by their names, Loretta, or you’d be able to carry a tune.’

‘That’s unkind, Norm. I may not have turned out to be the talented country-singing daughter my mother was hoping for, but then, neither did Patsy or Tammy. We haven’t got the genes for it. I don’t know why Mum keeps up these crazy fantasies.’

A week and a half later, after having been held hostage in the house by a child even more itchy and irritable than normal, I set out to get the new windscreen.

It’s years since I’ve driven down the Bolton Road. I remember when we first moved to Gunapan I got lost down here. I was heading for the Maternal Health Centre. My first pregnancy. My face was so puffed up with heat and water retention I looked like I had the mumps. I took a left turn at the ghost gum past the stockfeed store as the nurse had advised on the phone, and suddenly I was in another world. Later, of course, after I’d found my way back into town, I realized I’d turned left at the wattle tree past the Pet Emporium, but anyway, it was as if I’d magically slipped out of Gunapan and into fairyland. The bush came right up to the roadside, and in the blazing heat of the day the shade from the eucalypts dropped the temperature at least five degrees. I got out of the car, waddled to a picnic bench in a clearing and sat drinking water for twenty minutes. Hope bubbled up in me. The baby would be fine, my husband Tony would turn out not to be a nong, we would definitely win the lottery that Saturday.

Only one of those things came true, but I’ve always loved that bit of bush. I’d come out here with the kids sometimes in the early days and walk the tracks, listening to the sound of the bush, when I could hear it above their endless chatter, and smelling the minty eucalypts.

We’ve just swung into the Bolton Road when Jake asks if he can have a Mooma Bar from the supermarket. His chickenpox has dwindled to a few annoying itchy spots, but they won’t let him back into school yet, no matter how much I beg. He’s bored and tailing me like a debt collector. Any excuse to get out is good.

‘There’s no supermarket out here.’ The moment I speak I see a shopping trolley on the side of the road. Someone must have walked that trolley five kilometres. Unless it was tossed in the back of a ute and driven here. Further along the road is one of those orange hats they use to steer drivers away from roadworks. A couple of minutes on we see a load of rubbish dumped a few metres off the road. A dozen beer bottles lie around the charcoal of an old fire with what looks like bits of an old picnic bench sticking out of it. A heap of lawn clippings moulders beside a brown hoodie and a pair of torn-up jeans. I slow down, pull the Holden over to the side of the road. The trees still come right up to the roadside, but behind them is light, as if someone is shining a torch through the forest.

‘We came here on my birthday,’ Jake reminds me.

He’s right. We came out two years ago with green lemonade and presents and a birthday cake in the shape of a swimming pool. Kyleen and Maxine and their kids came, and we played hidey at the old shearers’ hut. Three kangaroos burst out from behind the hut when we arrived and crashed off through the bush. We called them ‘shearing kangaroos’ and Jake thought that was a real kind of ’roo till Norm put him right. But now I can’t make sense of where that hut might be. The face of the forest is completely different. Ahead of us, a wide dusty dirt road leads in through the trees. I can’t see the picnic area. And that light through the trees is wrong.

I drive along the bitumen to where the dirt road enters the bushland.

‘I don’t want to go in there,’ Jake says.

More rubbish litters the side of the track – plastic bags and bottles, juice containers, old clothes, building materials – as if this piece of bushland has become the local tip. I peer along the track. It seems to lead into a big clearing that wasn’t there before. The bush used to stretch way back. I would never let the kids run too far in case they got lost. Now if they ran off they’d end up standing in a flat empty paddock the size of a footy field.

‘Footy field,’ I mutter. ‘Maybe they’re building a new footy field.’

That can’t be right, because even the old footy field is in trouble. The footy club has a sausage sizzle every Saturday morning outside the supermarket to raise money to buy in water. All the sports clubs around here are desperate for water. Some have had to close down because the ground is so hard it can crack the shins of anyone landing awkwardly on the surface.

‘Let’s go. I’m bored.’

‘Hey, Jake, open your mouth again and show me your teeth. I think it might be time for a trip to the dentist.’

That always shuts him up. We climb back into the Holden and reverse into the Bolton Road to continue the journey to our new windscreen.

4

‘Look at all these cars, Jake.’ We pull in with a mighty shriek of brakes at Merv Bull’s Motor and Machinery Maintenance and Repairs. ‘Why don’t you hop out and have a look around while I talk to the man. Look at that one – a Monaro from the seventies! You don’t see those much anymore. Especially in that dazzling aqua.’

Jake purses his lips and rolls his eyes and waggles his head all at once. He keeps doing this lately. I wonder if he’s seen a Bollywood film on the diet of daytime television that filled up chickenpox week.

‘Are you trying to get rid of me, Mum?’

‘Yes.’

He sighs and swings open the car door. He slouches his way to the shade at the side of the shed while I quickly pat down my hair in the rear-view mirror before I step out of the car. I can’t see any sign of Merv Bull. A panting blue heeler stares at me from the doorway of the shed as if I’m a piece of meat.

‘Hello?’ I call. ‘Mr Bull?’

The blue heeler slumps to the ground and lays its head on its front paws, still staring at me. The sign on the side of the shed says Nine to Five, Monday to Friday. I look at my watch. Ten fifteen, Tuesday morning.

Jake scuffs his way over to my side. ‘There’s no one here, Mum, let’s go. Let’s go to the milk bar. You promised that if I…you would…and then I…and then…’

As Jake goes on with his extended thesis on why I should buy him a Violet Crumble, I shout ‘Mr Bull!’ one last time. A man emerges from the darkness of the shed. The first thing I notice is that he’s hitching up his pants. He strides forwards to greet me and stretches out his hand, but I’m not shaking anything I can’t be sure was washed. When my hand fails to arrive he pulls back his arm and wipes both hands down the sides of his shirt. He’s standing between me and the sun. I can’t see his face let alone its expression.

Jake’s jaw has dropped and he’s staring at Merv Bull as if he’s seen a vision. He’s this way with any man who’s around the age of his father when he left.

‘Hi,’ Jake whispers.

‘Hello.’ Merv Bull leans down to shake Jake’s hand. ‘I’m Merv. Who are you, then?’

‘Jake.’

‘Pardon me?’

Jake’s awestruck voice has soared into a register that only the blue heeler and I can hear.

‘This is Jake,’ I step in, ‘and I’m Loretta. I think Norm Stevens told you I was coming?’

‘Ah, you’re the windscreen.’

‘That’s me.’

‘Can’t do it till this afternoon, sorry. But you could leave the car here and pick it up at five.’

‘Sure.’ I put on a bright fake smile. ‘Jake and I’ll walk the five kilometres back into town in this thirty-degree heat and have a pedicure while we wait.’

‘We could stay here and look at the cars,’ Jake whispers.

Merv Bull shades his eyes with his hand and looks down at me. I can see him better now. Norm was right, he’s handsome in a parched rural bloke kind of way. Blue eyes and dark eyelashes. Looks as if he squints a lot, but who doesn’t around here. He’s frowning at me like a schoolteacher frowns at the kid with the smart mouth.

‘I do have a loan car you can use while yours is in the shop. To get you to your pedicure, that is.’

‘Ha, sorry, only joking.’ I’m turning into a bitter old hag. I’m reminding myself of Brenda. Soon I’ll become strangely attracted to beige. ‘That would be great. Any old car will do. I mean, hey, we are used to the Rolls Royce here.’

‘Mum! That’s not a Rolls Royce. It’s a Holden!’ Jake beams proudly at Merv.

‘You certainly do know your cars, mate.’ Merv pats Jake on the shoulder.

Now I’ll never get Jake out of here. Merv, to be addressed hereafter as God, goes back into the shed to get the keys for the exchange car, and Jake and the blue heeler trot faithfully after him. I watch his long lanky walk. My husband never walked that way, even though he was about the same size as Merv Bull. My husband Tony – God love him wherever he may be and keep him there and never let him come back into my life – was a stomper. He stomped through the house as though he was trying to keep down unruly carpet; he stomped in and out of shops and pubs letting doors slam around him; he stomped to work at the delivery company and stomped home stinking of his own fug after eight hours in the truck; and one day he stomped out to the good car and drove off and never stomped back.

We’d been married ten years. I never dreamed he’d leave me. After the second year of marriage, when I fell pregnant with Melissa, I settled down and stopped fretting that I’d married the wrong man. It was too late, so I decided to try to enjoy my life and not spend all my time thinking about what could have been. I thought he had decided that too.

A month after he’d gone a postcard arrived. By that time I’d already finished making a fool of myself telling the police he must have run his car off the road somewhere and insisting they find him. The postcard said he was sorry, he needed to get away. I’ll be in touch. Cheque coming soon.

Still waiting for that cheque.

‘It’s the red Mazda with the sheepskin seat covers over by the fence.’ Merv Bull hands me a set of car keys on a key ring in the shape of a beer stubby. ‘She’s a bit stiff in the clutch, but otherwise she drives pretty easy.’

‘Been getting a lot of business?’ As I speak I take Jake’s hand in mine and edge him quietly towards the Mazda before he realizes that we’re about to leave his new hero.

‘It’s been good. They told me it’d take a while to get the ordinary car business going again, especially since no one’s worked here for a few years, but I guess I’ve been lucky. I’ll probably have to get an apprentice when the big machinery starts arriving.’

‘Big machinery?’

‘For the development. Whenever it starts. I thought it was supposed to be in Phase One already. That’s what they promised me when I bought the place.’

‘Right.’ I’ve lived in this town for years and I still haven’t got a clue what’s going on. ‘So that big hole in the bush on the Bolton Road is the development?’

‘Yep. But for the moment what I’ve got is cars, and there seems to be no shortage.’

I look at him again. I want to ask if it’s been mainly women customers but I don’t. I will have to tell Helen about Merv Bull. If Merv is single and if he doesn’t hook up with anyone in a hurry, he’ll be a rich man in this town. He’ll be mystified at how many parts appear to have simply fallen off cars. I inch closer to our loan car, still not letting on to Jake what I’m doing.

I stop as my arm is yanked backwards. Jake has caught on and he’s trying to pull his hand out of mine.

‘Can I stay here, Mum? Please!’

‘No, Jakie. Mr Bull has to do his work.’

‘I’ll be quiet, I promise. I’ll look at the cars. You go and I’ll wait here.’

Merv Bull looks at me.

‘He can’t bear to spend a minute without me,’ I say.

‘I can see that,’ Merv answers.

Finally we manoeuvre Jake into the car with a promise of a workshop tour when we return.

‘How much will it cost?’ I remember to ask as I pump the accelerator and turn the key the way I would in the Holden. The tiny Mazda lets out a roar of protest. ‘Sorry, sorry!’

‘Might drive a bit differently to your car.’ Merv calmly waves the exhaust smoke away from his face. ‘Should cost about a hundred dollars. Maybe a hundred and twenty, but no more.’

While the magically vanishing husband was not good for much, he did know how to change the oil in the car and do a few odd jobs. He probably could have managed fitting a second-hand windscreen. Now I have to pay for everything. And with Jake sick I’m taking time off work, and I have even less money than usual.

‘Feeling better today? Ready to go back to school?’ I ask Jake with a frisson of desperation as we drive along in the Mazda. The ride is so smooth we don’t even have the sensation of movement.

‘Can we have a car like this?’ Jake asks. ‘When’s Auntie Patsy coming to visit? How long will we be in town?’

‘No. Soon. Until I’ve finished photocopying the Save Our School flyers and it’s time to pick up Liss.’

Helen’s waiting to pick up her neighbour’s boy at the school when Jake and I zip down the road to collect Melissa. I execute a neat U-turn, a feat impossible in the Holden, and pull up at the gate. Helen almost falls out of her car.

‘Oh my God! A new car! Where’d you steal it?’

‘It’s a loaner from the mechanic.’

‘Oh.’ She screws up her face in sympathy. ‘Hey, a letter arrived for you at the school. Melissa’s probably got it. Another one from the minister about the school.’

I don’t ask how she knows. I never ask how she knows what we watched on television the night before and what brand of hair dye I use and how Melissa’s grades are going. But now I know something she doesn’t. I decide I’ll wait and see how long it takes her to find out about the new mechanic.

‘Do you know what the letter says?’

‘Loretta! As if we’d open your mail! But we’ve all guessed. It says, “Thank you for your recent letter. I’d like to take this opportunity”…da de da de da.’

Melissa appears at the car door holding out the minister’s envelope as if it’s a bad report card. I take it and fling it on the front seat and Melissa leans through the passenger side window and peers inside the car. ‘Is it ours?’ she asks.

‘Nope.’

‘Actually,’ Helen calls out on the way back to her car, ‘I’ve booked in to that new mechanic for a service, too. I’ve heard he’s very good.’ She waggles her bottom and kicks up a heel. Of course she knew.

Poor Giorgio, I think. Giorgio is the old town mechanic, pushing eighty, bald and bowlegged. We’ve all used him for years to keep our cars running with bits of string and glue. I decide I’ll keep going to him for my servicing, even if he is getting so absent-minded that last time he forgot to put the oil back in the engine. Luckily Norm noticed the car hadn’t leaked its normal drips on to his driveway.

When I get back to the garage I’m devastated at having to return the keys to the Mazda. We’ve been around town ten times playing the royal family, waving at everyone we know.

‘That’ll be eighty dollars. Didn’t take as long as I thought.’

Jake’s rigid beside me as I hand over the cash. Melissa stands next to him chewing her thumb. I’ve had words with Jake in the car about not nagging Merv for a tour.

‘Mr Bull’s a busy man,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t want to be bothered by little boys. You don’t want him to think you’re a whining little boy, do you? So you wait and see if he offers again.’

‘Anyway, mate, bit of bad news.’ Merv crouches down in front of Jake. ‘I’m sorry, but I have to get away early tonight. Can we do our tour another time?’

‘Yes, please,’ Jake whispers. Melissa puts her arm around his shoulders and they turn away and scramble on to the bench seat in the back of the Holden.

‘I mean it,’ Merv says to me. ‘I’d love to give the little bloke a tour. Another day. Give me a call anytime.’ He reaches into his back pocket. ‘Here’s my card.’

Something’s odd when I drive off: my vision. Through the new windscreen I can actually see the white line in the middle of the road. The Holden throbs and rattles down the Bolton Road and I find myself humming to an old song that I can hear clearly in my head. I can hear it so clearly that I’m singing along with lyrics I didn’t realize I knew. Even Jake seems happier. He and Melissa are bopping their heads along to the beat. Melissa leans over and turns up the volume on the radio and the tune bursts out of the speakers. We look at each other. Merv has fixed the radio. No more race calls, no more protests, no more ads for haemorrhoid cream.

‘I love this car,’ I sing.

‘Me too!’ Jake shouts over the pumping beat. By the time we’ve reached the supermarket, we’re all singing along at top volume, windows rolled down, faces pushed out of the car like excited Labradors. Brenda, who happens to be getting out of her car in the supermarket carpark, hears us roar up, turns, frowns and purses her lips. I’m convinced it’s because we’re exhibiting signs of happiness, until I pull into a parking bay and Brenda comes over to commiserate.

‘I heard there was a letter from the minister. Never mind, Loretta. We knew it wouldn’t work.’

Once we’re inside the supermarket, I tear open the envelope while the kids do their usual wistful lingering in the snack foods aisle. The letter doesn’t say I’ve saved the school. No surprise there. But there is another big surprise. On the way home we drop into Norm’s.

‘Guess what?’

Norm’s running his hand over my smooth windscreen.

‘Nice. The old one had as many craters as the surface of the moon. It was a wonder you didn’t run into a truck.’

‘I got a letter. The education minister’s coming to Gunapan.’

‘Whoa. Here comes trouble.’ He reaches up and fingers the ridge of scar on his forehead. ‘I can feel it in my engine.’

5

Over the next week, the heat builds until at eight thirty on Monday morning it’s already so hot that the birds are sitting on the fence with their beaks open. I walk out of the house with the children in tow and pull open the driver’s door. It squeals as usual.

‘Bush pig!’ Jake shrieks. He opens the back passenger door, which also squeals.

‘Bush pig!’ Melissa’s shriek is even louder. They fall about laughing, swinging their doors open and shut and imitating the squeals of metal against metal.

‘Get in the car.’ No one should be laughing in this kind of heat.

The road to town is flat and empty. As we bump over the pitted tarmac, sprays of pink-and-grey galahs explode into the sky from the fields beside us. On a low hill to the north I can see Les on his tractor, motoring along in the leisurely fashion of a man on a Sunday drive. The sun picks out a shiny spot on one of his wheels and it flashes in a radiant signal each rotation.

‘Mum, what’s the collective noun for bush pigs?’ Melissa asks and Jake bursts into giggles that he tries to smother with his hand.

‘I don’t know. The same as domestic pigs, I suppose. What is that? Is that a herd?’

‘A herd of bush pigs,’ Jake shouts.

‘A pog of pigs!’ Melissa says.

‘A swog!’

‘A swig! A swig of pigs!’

I wind down my window and push my arm out, leave it there for a moment so Les can see my wave.

‘Is that Les?’ Jake asks.

‘Mr Garrison to you.’

‘All the other kids call—’

‘I don’t care.’

We pull up at the school gates. Melissa and Jake sit silently in the back seat as if they’re hoping I’ll turn around and announce a once-in-a-lifetime no-school day.

‘What’s all this about bush pigs anyway?’ I look in the rearview mirror and see Melissa shaking her head vigorously at Jake.

‘Nothing.’ She catches me watching her and blushes. She has her father’s colouring, pale skin that stays freckly no matter how much suncream I slather on her, and sandy red hair. When she blushes her face blooms like a scarlet rose.

They jostle their way out of the car, mutter a goodbye, and run through the school gate, separating at the scraggly hedge and bolting away to their respective groups of friends.

Bush pigs, I think and head off to work.

Gabrielle, the Chair of the Management Committee at the Neighbourhood House where I work, can’t answer when I ask her the collective noun for bush pigs. She has dropped in unexpectedly. The Management Committee consists of volunteers from the local community, most of them women from the larger, more wealthy properties outside Gunapan. Supposedly their role is to steer the direction of the Neighbourhood House, to use their skills and contacts in developing the profile of the house in the community, to oversee the efficient management of the house finances and so on and so forth. In reality, they meet once a month to hear the report of the House Managers and drink a glass of wine before they start talking about land values and the international wool and beef markets.

‘Flock?’ she guesses. ‘Herd? Posse?’

‘Herd, that’s what I said.’

‘Darling, I really haven’t got time to chat about this. I’m on the trail of a wonderful opportunity. Very hush-hush, from my sources.’

A thought occurs to me. ‘Are you talking about that development thing?’

‘No, not the development. I’m talking about wool. The finest merino. I have access to a flock that these people need to sell immediately at a very nice price. Buy, agist, shear and sell in a month. A business proposition that could make someone a lot of money.’

‘I’ll do it.’ A lot of money – exactly what I need.

‘Oh, darling, if only you could. Except it will take about twenty thousand to get this thing off the ground.’

‘Ah.’ I am not surprised.

‘So you carry on and I’ll pop on to the computer for a moment. We have the contact details of the committee members here, don’t we?’

‘About that development—’ I start to say, but Gabrielle waves me away.

‘Sorry, darling, I must get on with this.’

Gabrielle logs on to the computer and I go back to my work of sorting the donations for our book exchange. The covers are embossed in the silvers and royal blues with scarlet blood spatters that attract the average literary type here. Everyone in Gunapan obviously loves horror. Perhaps that’s why they live in this fine town.

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.

The lemon icy pole sure adds a distinctive tang to Johnny Walker. I top up the glass with water and take another sip, shards of melting ice sticking to my lips as I type in Gunapan. We’re part of a geological survey. The Department of Lands has posted a topographical map of the region. Gunapan is an Aboriginal place name. Well, der, I think, tossing back more of the tasty lemon whisky and adding a touch more water. The next hit is an online diary of a backpacker from Llanfairfechan in Wales who stayed for a night in a room above the Gunapan pub. One night is plenty enough in this place, she writes. I had very bad dreams.

Jake calls out in his sleep. He does this – occasionally shrieks in the night – but it means nothing. Bush pig, I think, refilling my glass and pulling a strawberry icy pole from the freezer. It’s weeks since I’ve been tempted to drop the kids at the orphanage and drive to Melbourne to take up my new life of glamour with a hairless odourless body. The little bush pigs have been behaving quite well. Now I realize that was the calm. Something’s coming, but I don’t know what.

I lean back and sip my drink – Johnny and a strawberry icy pole, it’s a Gunapan cocktail – and click away until I’m looking at the guest login for online dating in Victoria. I hesitate on that page a while.

‘It’s not only weirdos,’ Helen told me once. ‘Some blokes look quite handsome. Although that does seem to be mainly the shorter ones. Anyway, you don’t have to do anything. It’s soft-core girl porn.’

I select Rural south west and Male and Over six feet and Doesn’t matter about children. Then Go. The screen comes up with five photos on the first page and a big list of other hits. One hundred and forty-two single men in rural south-west Victoria? This deserves a green icy pole and another shot of Johnny.

I read about Jim, who likes long walks on the beach and romantic dinners. Jim lives in Shepparton in central Victoria, many hours’ drive from the beach. Giuseppe has two grown children and likes working out. Mel loves movies and romantic dinners and golf, and would like to share his wonderful life with a special lady. Joe’s looking for a happy busty lady with no issues. Good luck, Joe.

As I scroll down the list I start finding these people funnier and funnier. Matthew’s spent a lot of time working on his spirituality and he’d like to meet a woman with the same interests so they can grow together. Like a fungus, I think. Shelby would like a petite Asian lady with large breasts who’s open-minded and looking for a good time. Hey Shelby, most of the men in this town pay good money for that. I open up my password-protected email and send Helen a message. Looking for a handsome wealthy man with no issues and a Beamer. Must love slumming it, buying expensive presents for the lady in his life, and have no objections to feral children.

I slump back into the kitchen chair, which is a few inches too short for the computer table. My neck hurts. The screen in front of me has ads all over it. Casinos, jobs, real estate. Maybe I should look for a new house to rent, one that doesn’t heat up to 400 degrees. Thinking about real estate reminds me of the hole in the bush on the Bolton Road.

I type Gunapan development into the search bar. You get thousands and thousands of answers in these searches and none of them are what you want. The council minutes are online. That should send me off to sleep. The local supermarket’s car park resurfacing process is described in glorious detail. I cannot understand why these things would be on the internet. I find the council’s forms for applying for a building permit. I try another search, this time on Gunapan bush. Then I type in more place names from the local region combined with development and then I try bush clearing and then something else and by this time I’m pretty tired of it but I click through to one more page and that’s where I find the article.

It doesn’t have Gunapan in the title, or even in the article, which is from a newspaper in Western Australia, and which is talking about a resort development to take place on twelve hectares outside Halstead. Outside Halstead? The map in the article shows where the development will take place and I can see that it’s the old bush reserve in Gunapan, but our town isn’t mentioned. Only a few lines about how the development may help to revive the depressed small community nearby. Depressed! The only depressed person here is Brenda, and even she picks up during the Gunapan Fair.

The company building the resort is a Western Australian developer with successful resorts in Queensland, WA and the Territory, as well as significant investment in plantation forestry and logging. I want to print this page out but the printer’s still in Melissa’s room.

‘Mum?’

The cry comes from down the hall. Jake’s awake.

‘Mummy.’

He only calls me Mummy when he’s frightened. I clean up the browser and close it down, then hurry to Jake’s room, taking deep breaths to expel the smell of Johnny from my mouth. Jake’s nightlight is on, a rotating globe with fish painted on the outside and a static seascape behind. The mechanical rotation of the outer plastic globe makes a reassuring grinding sound once each cycle like the slow purr of a contented cat.

‘What is it, Jakie?’ I whisper from the doorway.

‘I’m not a bush pig,’ he whispers.

‘Of course you’re not,’ I say firmly. I sit down beside him on the bed and rest my hand on his hot, sweaty chest. ‘Why would you think that?’

‘They said so.’

‘Who said so?’ Anger starts to rise inside me. I remember I started thinking about bush pigs after Melissa and Jake began joking about them. ‘Where did this come from, anyway?’

He doesn’t answer. His steady breathing makes my hand rise and fall as he drifts back to sleep.

Next morning I’m waiting for them at the breakfast table with a pile of bacon on a plate and the spatula jutting from my hand. Melissa and Jake both sit down at the table without speaking, without looking at the bacon. I dish the crispy strips onto buttered toast, slop on scrambled eggs from the frying pan and hand them a plate each.

‘What’s going on?’ I ask. ‘What’s this bush pig business?’

‘Nothing.’ Melissa has her stubborn face on.

Jake’s eyes begin to redden. The circles under his eyes are even darker today. The heat went on and on all night until even the bugs got exhausted and stopped making noise at about four in the morning. There was an occasional crack as the tin roof shucked off the heat of the day and the house settled and sighed. Not only did no one sleep properly, I’m also feeling the effects of my romantic night with Johnny Walker, and I’m in no mood to be messed with.

‘I don’t want silence or sulking or tantrums. Tell me what it’s about. Who called you a bush pig, Jake?’

Silence. My throbbing head. Jake and Melissa stare at their plates. The crispy bacon is wilting, the eggs are getting cold, the toast is going soggy. The urge to shout is rising in me and I want to smother it – I must not become a shrieking single mother.

‘So…’ I lighten my tone of voice. My back is still to the children. ‘I’m not cross. I want to know, that’s all.’

‘I had a project on bush pigs,’ Melissa says.

‘Then why would Jake be upset?’ I turn around to face them, my expression a mask of control and calm.

‘I called him a bush pig.’ Melissa shoves a blackened curl of bacon into her mouth as if that will stop me asking her questions.

‘Is that it, Jake? Did your sister call you a bush pig?’

Melissa’s staring so hard at Jake he’ll start sending off smoke in a minute. He crosses his hands over his lap.

‘I need to go to the toilet,’ he says. Little liar.

‘It’s true! It is, Mum. I did call him a bush pig. I’m sorry.’

Something smells here. I’m sure she’s lying. But she’s as stubborn as her father. I turn to Jake.

‘Lies come back to bite you on the bum. You know that, don’t you, Jake?’

‘I want to go to school now,’ he says for the first and probably last time in his life. ‘Did you put a banana in my lunch?’

The boy is obsessive. I take the banana out of his lunch box and open Melissa’s.

‘I’m not having it!’ she yelps.

‘What is it with bananas and this family?’ I say. ‘They’re good nutritious food and they’re cheap.’

‘They stink!’ Jake and Melissa say together.

By the time I’ve finished the washing-up, Melissa and Jake are ready to head off. I drop them at school and drive on to the Neighbourhood House, sweating in the hot morning sun.

At ten thirty my sister Tammy calls to let me know Mum’s in hospital in Melbourne.

7

‘What’s that noise?’ Jake has an unerring knack for asking awkward questions.

He leans down and peers under the seat between his legs, sits up and cranes his neck, looking around the corridor. I reach over and poke him to be quiet.

‘Mum, your bra is creaking again,’ Melissa whispers crossly.

‘Sshh,’ I tell her.

‘It’s creepy, Mum. You should throw it out.’

‘I’m sure you’d be very happy to have me arriving at school to pick you up with my breasts flopping around.’

‘Oh, disgusting.’ Melissa looks as if she’s about to faint.

‘You’ll have these troubles soon enough, my girl.’

‘No, I won’t, because I’m never buying underwear at the two-dollar shop.’

I was sure I’d never told anyone about buying that bra at the two-dollar shop. It seemed such a bargain until the creaking started. Even with that, I thought it was a waste to throw it away.

‘You can go in now, she’s decent,’ the nurse calls from the doorway of Mum’s room.

Jake runs in first, calling out, ‘Hi Nanna!’ Melissa and I follow more slowly. Jake stops as soon as he gets in the doorway and sees his nanna tiny and yellowish in the big hospital bed. He backs up and presses against me. Melissa stands rigid at our side. Their nanna’s bed is one of four in the room. Two are empty. An ancient man with a liver-spotted head is snoring in the one diagonally opposite.

‘Hi Mum. How are you feeling?’

She turns her gaunt sallow face to me and frowns. ‘Did you bring me a Milk Tray?’

I produce the box of chocolates with a flourish from my handbag and pass it to Melissa. ‘Give these to your grandmother, sweetie.’

‘My name is Melissa,’ my gracious daughter answers.

‘Give me the chocolates, girl,’ my even more gracious mother says. ‘I’ve been waiting for them since eleven o’clock.’

‘Are you sure you can eat those, with your liver?’

My mother reaches for the nurse alarm button.

‘OK,’ I say, taking the box from Melissa and tossing it on to the bed. ‘So how are you feeling?’

I send Jake to the vending machine next to the ward for a packet of chips while Mum tells me about my sisters, Tammy and Patsy. Tammy visited yesterday with her three immaculate children. Tammy brought a hand-knitted bedjacket, five novels, a basket of fruit and best wishes from her husband Rob, who is smarter than Einstein and a better businessman than Bill Gates – apparently Bill could learn a thing or two from Rob about point-of-sale software. One of the children had written a poem for her nanna.

‘Melissa, do you want to read your cousin’s poem?’ I ask sweetly.

Melissa smirks into the magazine she’s picked up.

My other sister, Patsy, visited with her friend. Mum thinks that Patsy’s friend would look so much nicer if she lost some weight and started wearing more feminine clothing. And took care of that facial hair, for God’s sake. Then she might be able to get a man.

‘Speaking of which, have you heard from thingo?’ she asks.

‘Nope,’ I say. ‘So when do you get out of here?’

‘Where are you staying?’

‘We’re in a motel.’

‘It’s horrible,’ Melissa says. ‘The bedspreads smell of cigarettes. And they’re baby-shit yellow.’

‘Melissa!’ I protest, but she gives me the as-if-you’ve-never-said-it-yourself look.

‘You could always stay with Tammy. They have a six-bedroom house.’

They do have plenty of room at the house and we did try staying once, but Tammy and I discovered that these days we can only tolerate two hours of each other’s company before sisterly love turns sour. It became clear that she thinks her wealthy lifestyle exemplifies cultured good taste and mine has degenerated into hillbilly destitution, while I think Tammy is living a nouveau riche nightmare while I represent a dignified insufficiency.

Tammy’s husband rarely comes home because he’s so busy being successful. When he does arrive he’s late, and Tammy’s favourite nickname for him is ‘my late husband’. ‘Allow me to introduce “my late husband”,’ she announces to startled guests. Her husband smiles distantly and gives her a shoulder squeeze like she’s an athlete. Last time the kids and I came down we ate luncheon – not the meat but the meal – at their place on the Sunday. Jake swallowed a mouthful of the smoked trout and dill pasta and before it even reached his stomach he had puked it back into the plate. It looked much the same as before he had chewed it, but the sight of the regurgitation had Tammy’s delicate children heaving and shrieking. ‘Haven’t they ever seen anyone chunder before?’ Melissa remarked scornfully on the way home.

My mother turns her attention to Melissa. ‘And you, young lady, are you doing well at school?’

Melissa looks at her grandmother with an arched eyebrow.

‘Yes, Grandmother,’ she answers.

‘I won’t have any granddaughter of mine being a dunce.’

Melissa turns her head and gives me a dead stare. I can’t believe she’s only eleven.

‘All right,’ I intervene briskly, ‘let’s talk about you, Mum. How are you feeling? When do you get out?’

‘I’m yellow, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

‘Can I get a packet of chips too?’ Melissa says, so I give her some money and tell her to find Jake while she’s at it.

‘Good.’ My mother pushes herself upright in the bed as soon as Melissa has left the ward. ‘Now the children are gone we can talk. I’m going to sell up and move to Queensland, the Gold Coast. Albert’s bought a house on the canals with a swimming pool and a sauna. My liver’s packing up. I don’t know how I got this hepatitis thing, but I can only guess it was from your father all those years ago. That lying cheat. Apparently it’s contagious. You and the kids had the test like I told you?’

‘Yes, we’re fine. Who’s Albert?’ I am incredulous.

‘He’s from the bingo. He’s no great catch, I admit that, but who else is offering me a house in the sunshine?’

‘Not the one with the five Chihuahuas? The one you used to make jokes about?’

‘Having those dogs doesn’t actually mean he’s homosexual. He’s quite virile for an older gentleman.’

‘Oh, Mum, enough detail. And why can’t you say this in front of the kids?’

‘You need to tell them in your own time. I know they’ll be upset I’m leaving, but when they get older they’ll understand.’

‘I’ll break it to them gently.’ I don’t want to point out that we only come down to Melbourne at Christmas and her birthday anyway.

‘Tammy and Patsy’ll miss you,’ I say. ‘And the junior poets.’

My mother almost smiles before she says, ‘I love Tammy’s children dearly, you know that, Loretta.’

‘I know.’

‘Anyway, when I sell, I’m giving you a few thousand dollars. Don’t tell Tammy or Patsy. You need it, they don’t.’

From down the corridor comes a long howl, followed by grievous sobbing.

‘They torture people in here, you know,’ Mum says. ‘The nights are hell. The screaming and moaning, it’s like being inside a horror film.’

I have a bad feeling that I recognize that howl. But rather than spoil the moment, I think about the good things.

‘A few thousand dollars?’ I say.

‘Depending on the price I get for the flat. You’ll get something, anyway. Five or six thousand maybe.’

A holiday for one – or two? – in Bali, I think. Or an air conditioner. Or both! A proper haircut and blonde tips! A bra that doesn’t creak! Champagne and sloppy French cheese and pâté! Silk knickers!

‘I expect you’ll want to spend it on the kids, but keep a couple of dollars for yourself, won’t you. You could use a bit of smartening up. Any men on the horizon?’

‘Actually,’ I say, ‘there’s a rather good-looking mechanic who definitely has eyes for me. He keeps himself quite clean, too.’

‘As opposed to that grubby old junk man you hang around with?’

‘Yes, as opposed to Norm, who has his own special standard of hygiene.’

‘And has this bloke asked you out?’

‘Not yet.’ Needless to say, he hasn’t recognized yet that he has eyes for me. I wonder if I am talking about Merv Bull? Have I developed a crush? Am I becoming Helen?

From down the corridor, the howling and sobbing is growing louder. I can’t avoid it now.

‘You need to look for your mother,’ I can hear a woman telling Jake. ‘Open your eyes, dear.’

‘Loretta, you should give up that political hocus-pocus you’ve got yourself into. Put your energy into finding a partner and a father for those children.’

‘The Save Our School Committee is precisely for “those children”. Anyway, we’ve had a win. The minister for education’s coming to Gunapan in a few weeks. We’ve got a chance to change his mind about closing the school.’

‘Is he married?’

Jake’s sobbing, very close now, startles awake the man in the bed across from Mum. He raises his spotty head and shouts, ‘You buggers! You buggers! Get out of it, you buggers!’

‘Shut up,’ my mother calls over at him and he stops immediately.

‘Nutcase,’ she says to me. ‘Every time he wakes up he thinks the Germans are coming for him.’ Mum lets her head drop back on to the pillow and stares at the ceiling. ‘The Gold Coast. I can’t wait.’

‘So when do you go?’

‘Mummeeeeeeee,’ Jake screams as he runs into the room and flings his round little body on to my lap. He buries his face in my shirt, covering me in snot and tears. Melissa strolls in behind him eating a chocolate bar.

‘The lady says she’s going to clean up Jake’s chips.’

With Jake in my arms I stagger out to the corridor and call out thanks to his rescuer, a woman in a blue cleaner’s uniform who is hurrying back towards the lift.

‘What were you doing on the second floor, Jakie?’

‘Idroppedmychipsntheysaidicouldn’teatthemoffthefloorn dicouldn’tfindyooooooo.’ His sobbing is slowing now. ‘So, so so Itriedtofindyouand, hic, Icouldn’tfindyouandIwent, hm, downthestairsand, ugh, theladysawmeand…’

‘Ssh, ssh.’ I squeeze him tightly to me.

‘I’m tired now,’ my mother says from the bed. ‘Thanks for visiting, darlings.’

On the way back to the motel I ask the kids what they’d buy if they had a thousand dollars.

‘A motel!’ Jake screams.

‘What would you buy, Liss?’ I can see her in the rear-view mirror. She looks out through the window for a while, down at her hands, back out through the window.

‘I dunno.’

‘Go on, a thousand dollars. What would you get?’

She sighs a great heaving sigh and writes something on the car window with her fingertip.

‘Some proper clothes. From a proper shop so I’m not the world’s biggest dag.’

‘Don’t be silly, you look beautiful. You could wear a sack and you’d look beautiful.’

We pull into the motel car park to pick up our bags from reception and have a toilet break before the long drive back to Gunapan. Once we’re on the highway I drive for an hour, and when it gets dark we stop at a roadhouse. We order the lamb stew with chips and milkshakes and sit down at a table beside a man who resembles a side of beef and who appears to be eating a side of beef. At the far end of the roadhouse café is another family. They seem to be trying to stay away from everyone else, like that family at the waterhole.

‘Who are those people we saw up on the hill at the waterhole the other day?’ I ask Melissa, who’s leafing through an ancient women’s magazine she found on the table. She shrugs. ‘I don’t think I’ve seen them before,’ I go on talking to myself.

‘Can I watch TV when we get home tonight?’ Jake asks.

‘No.’

‘Miss Claffy had an engagement ring on yesterday,’ Melissa says. The magazine is open at the page of a starlet wearing an engagement ring that could sink the Titanic. The food arrives at the table. I can tell immediately that I’ve made a mistake ordering the stew. I thought it would be healthier than hamburgers.

‘Is this lamb?’ Jake asks.

‘I think it was lamb a few years ago,’ I tell him through a mouthful of gristle. Grinding this meat down to a consistency I can swallow is a full-body workout.

‘Can we have pizza tomorrow night?’

‘The ring had a diamond on it. Miss Claffy said diamond can cut a hole in glass.’

‘You must have seen those kids at school. Isn’t one of them in a class with you?’

‘I don’t want anchovies on my pizza tomorrow. I want double cheese.’

‘Someone should welcome them. You kids have no idea how hard it is for a new family in a small town.’

‘Why don’t you have an engagement ring, Mum?’

‘What?’

‘Didn’t Dad give you an engagement ring?’

‘I don’t want olives either. I hate olives.’

‘We didn’t really have an engagement. We just got married.’

‘Miss Claffy said her fiancé asked her to marry him in a restaurant and everyone heard and they all clapped.’

‘We had a lovely wedding though. I can show you the pictures.’

‘We’ve seen them,’ they both say quickly.

Melissa and Jake have pushed aside their stew. They dip their chips in the stew sauce and suck on their milkshakes. I wish I’d ordered myself a milkshake. The side of beef beside us finishes his meal, burps ferociously and sways his bulk out to the car park where his rig is waiting for him like a tame T-Rex. Jake wants to go out and have a better look, but I hold him back.

‘Is Nanna going to die?’ Melissa asks.

‘Oh, Lissie girl, of course she’s not. It’s worse. She’s moving to the Gold Coast.’

‘Really?’

‘Really. With her new boyfriend.’

‘She’s an old lady! She can’t have a boyfriend.’

‘And what about your poor mother? Am I too old to have a boyfriend?’

‘You’re married.’ Melissa’s disapproving frown would qualify her instantly as a headmistress. ‘To Dad,’ she adds, in case I’d forgotten.

8

My sister Patsy has only been in the house for five minutes and she is already enthusiastically embracing the joys of country life.

‘When are you going to leave this dump and come back to Melbourne?’ she says.

She’s parked her brand-new Peugeot on the street in front of the house, and I think nervously of Les, the farmer further down the road. On a hot day Les sometimes drives the tractor straight off the field and heads to the pub. His Kelpie sits beside him on the wheel hub, barking madly at cars overtaking them. Late at night, Les will steer the tractor back home down the road, singing and laughing and nattering to himself, the dog still barking. No one worries because the worst that can happen is him driving the tractor off the road somewhere and him and the dog sleeping in a field. But no one ever parks on this road at night.

‘So Patsy, let’s move that beautiful car of yours into the driveway and swap with mine. Wouldn’t want anyone to steal it!’

‘You’ve got no reason to stay here,’ Patsy goes on. ‘That bastard’s not coming back and the kids are young enough to move schools. Mum’s gone to the Gold Coast, so she won’t bother you. Come back to the real world.’

I have thought about going back to Melbourne. A part of me believes that being in Melbourne would magically make me more sophisticated and capable. My hair, cut by a hairdresser to the stars, would curve flatteringly around my face and my kids’ teeth would straighten out of their own accord.

‘Can’t take the kids away from the clean country air,’ I tell Patsy. When Tony and I first moved to the country for a better-paid driving job he’d been offered, we shifted from an outer western suburb, treeless, grey and smelling of diesel, the only place we could afford a flat. Everyone there was miserable and angry and even our neighbours tried to rip us off. For the same money as that poky flat we rented a three-bedroom house with a yard in Gunapan, only forty minutes’ drive from his work in Halstead, and still had enough money for dinner out once a week. Now I’m a single mother with two kids, I could never survive back in the city. I’ve developed a vision of a life where I, deserted mother scrag, can’t get a job in the city, don’t know anyone, spiral down the poverty gurgler until I become an over-the-counter pill junkie watching Judge Judy in my rented house in a suburb so far from the centre of Melbourne it has its own moon. I can’t feed the kids because I’ve spent all our money on an Abserciser off the telly and the chemist keeps asking me has my cold cleared up yet.

‘Loretta!’ Patsy shouts. ‘I said, are you a member of the golf club? George is getting into golf in a big way, so I thought we could play a round when she gets here. Apparently the local course isn’t too bad.’

‘No,’ I mutter, still feeling queasy from my Melbourne vision. ‘I think you can buy a day pass. It’s a bit yellow, though. They’re using recycled water on the greens.’

The next evening, when Norm drops in, George has arrived. She’s sitting on the couch with her arm around Patsy. I’ve wondered how Norm will react when he finally meets Patsy and George. I haven’t told him a lot about my sisters and their families.

‘Unbloodybelievable,’ Norm announces from the doorway, before he’s even put a foot in the room.

‘What’s that?’

He’s got something under his arm. Something green, with wheels.

Norm looks down as if he’s forgotten he was carrying anything. ‘Oh, a trike for Jake. Found it when I was rearranging the junk in the yard. It must have been hidden in that tractor rim for years. No, what’s unbloodybelievable,’ he puts the tricycle on the floor and waves a sheet of paper in my direction, ‘is this.’

‘You’d better meet my sister and her friend first.’

I introduce them all and Norm stuffs the paper in his pocket before shaking Patsy’s hand, then George’s. He looks George in the eye and says, ‘Welcome to Gunapan.’

‘Thanks,’ George says, wiping her hand on her jeans. ‘Into cars?’

‘Nah, love, I’m a recycler. Salvage and parts for all things man made,’ Norm says. He splays his hands in front of him. They’re spectacularly dirty today.

‘Norm, didn’t I buy you some soap?’

‘Don’t want to strip the natural oils from my sensitive skin,’ he says turning his hands over to examine the palms, which are equally filthy.

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