The waterhole, p.17
The Waterhole, page 17
‘It’s not too early. I’ll be here.’
‘Thank you.’
She got her feet beneath her, got the joey’s pouch over her neck, and then she marched away from the house across the paddock, aiming for the national park and the trails that would take her back to Jack.
25
School resumed. All week, Annette drove the joey up to Bill’s cottage and left him there, collecting him after school was out, and driving home. She and Bill said little beyond ‘Good morning’ or ‘Here’s his milk.’
On the Friday, she told him Edie would be home that weekend, and she’d ask Edie to look after Rufus from then. He’d turned away even before he waved her goodbye, so all she saw was the back of his hand, four fingers flicking.
On Sunday when Jack was at the pub, she put the joey around her neck and drove into town.
Constable West’s police sedan lurked in its regular spot, hidden in the laneway that ran behind Edie’s lodging rooms, and Annette didn’t think much of it—assumed West was waiting to catch anyone speeding through town—until Constable West walked out of the gate at the back of Edie’s.
‘Is everything okay?’ she asked West. ‘Is Edie alright?’
‘Edie’s fine. We were just reminiscing.’ He smiled in a way that showed all his teeth and tipped his hat at her, revealing a layer of sweat-damp hair across his forehead. ‘Miss Vardy. No, it’s Mrs Ross now, isn’t it? You married young Jack.’
‘That’s right,’ she said, not liking the man on sight, and not really making much attempt to hide it. He was broader than she remembered; buttons strained across the front of his shirt, and the tail of the shirt pillowed over his uniform pants. His shoes shone, oiled with black polish. ‘Jack tells me you’re being transferred in the new year, Constable?’
‘I am,’ he nodded, taking a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, knocking one out and lighting up. ‘They’re making me sergeant up at Northam.’
He blew a cloud of blue smoke behind his shoulder as if taking aim at Edie’s washing and held the gate wide to let Annette pass. His gaze arrowed to the pillowslip around her neck and the bump of it about her middle. ‘Have you been saving more baby birds, Mrs Ross? What have you got in there?’
Instinctively she twisted, as if to protect the joey from the policeman’s hungry eyes.
‘Not birds, no. This is a joey.’
He lost interest. ‘Well, goodbye, Mrs Ross. Give Jack my regards. Tell him I’ll see him around soon. Tell him I said he owes me.’
She held her ground. ‘Jack told me the two of you were square.’
‘Did he now?’ He laughed.
She wanted to yell at the horrible man: Leave Jack alone! It seemed like Jack was always doing the constable some favour or other, dropping off all those boxes to the city.
Then Edie Batley called out from her doorway. ‘Annette! How lovely to see you. Come in.’
Constable West closed the gate.
‘Goodbye, Edie,’ he called over the clunk as the metal catch shut, blowing another stream of smoke, this time toward the sky. ‘You might want to bring those towels inside. Don’t forget about them. It sure looks like rain.’
Edie’s face turned as grey as the rainclouds.
Edie’s smile came back as she had a cuddle with the young joey, and talked about Ayers Rock over tea—how red it was, how huge, what a joy it was at sunrise and sunset when the heart of it glowed as if on fire from within.
It was lovely to hear Edie talk. Seeing Ayers Rock for herself felt pretty much as likely as a visit to the moon for Annette. She’d never get Jack to do a trip like that. He had absolutely no interest in travelling anywhere that wasn’t to a pub.
He’d always liked his own patch and his own people. He’d only grown more set on that path each year. He didn’t like the city—he simply wouldn’t come to Perth with her anymore when she visited her parents. He said Perth was full of “slopes” and “krauts” and “wogs” and those fierce-looking Iranians with the black eyes who Jack always said looked through him as if he was bones.
Some of it, she was sure, came from his mother. Morag Ross blamed the Japanese for just about everything: the low price of wool, the low price of wheat, the exorbitant price of a car battery and the massive rip-off price tag of a tractor.
‘Jack wouldn’t go to Ayers Rock,’ Annette said, when Edie took a breath and a sip of her tea. ‘He’d say, why would I want to go where all the Aboriginals are?’ Only Jack wouldn’t use a term as nice as Aboriginal.
‘Bill’s the traveller. Like his dad—’ Edie cut off mid-word, twisting at the ring on her middle finger. ‘I’m sorry, love. I shouldn’t talk about Bill.’
‘Did you know he’s back, Edie? I’ve seen him. He looked after Rufus for me last week when you weren’t here.’
‘Mrs Mac at the post office said that she’d seen him. Constable West told me just now too.’ Edie twisted the ring some more. Her fingers were older now, knuckles swollen, and the ring had made its own groove in her skin that it stuck to like a spinning wheel. ‘How is Bill? How does he look?’
‘He’s too thin,’ Annette said automatically. ‘He’s harder. There’s not an ounce of flesh on him. He never talks about the war.’
Edie’s fingers flew, worrying at the ring.
‘Stop it, Edie! You’ll hurt yourself.’ Annette reached across the table to catch the other woman’s hand in her own before Edie’s nails drew blood.
‘I never meant to use the towel but the pot plant leaked and I washed it and he saw it and I’ve done terrible things! Oh, I hate that man!’ Edie snatched her hands away, throwing them up to cover her face.
‘Edie? What are you talking about? What towel? What man?’
‘Constable West,’ Edie wailed. Abruptly she pushed her chair back and stood, pacing toward the kitchen cabinets, running her hand over the painted timber as if checking for dust. ‘He’s an awful man.’
Annette crossed the kitchen to take Edie’s shoulders. ‘It’s okay, Edie. He can’t hurt you.’
‘The Army is sending someone for Bill,’ Edie mumbled. ‘I’m not supposed to say. He said keep my mouth shut.’
There’d been a tan to Edie’s face from the holiday in the red centre, but now she was washed pale.
‘Bill’s on R and R, Edie. He’s allowed the time off.’
‘The constable said the police station got a call from the Australian Army. They asked him if he can confirm Bill is here. They say he’s deserted. He could go to jail. West said someone tipped them off that Bill had come home.’
‘Who would do that?’ Annette said, mind racing, but the answer was in her head before she could blink. Jack. Jack would do it to keep her and Bill apart.
Fear for Bill caught at her throat, squeezed the breath from her lungs. ‘Edie what do we do? I have to tell him they’re looking for him! Now, while he’s got time to get away.’
‘I don’t know if he’ll go, love. I don’t think he’ll listen.’
‘I have to try.’
‘Be careful.’
She smiled at Edie. ‘Bill won’t let anything happen to me.’
The rain came in one of those south-west spring storms that could roll miles in minutes, borne across the ocean by winds in a broody sky. It bashed like a waterfall, far too thick and heavy for her car’s wipers.
Annette slowed to a crawl as she approached the gravel road into Bill’s. Once she reached the trees there was shelter, but when she came out of the trees onto the ridge, rain smacked her car. She couldn’t see the sheep. She could hardly see the road.
She parked as close to the house as she could, made sure the joey was secure about her neck, opened the car door and bolted up the path. Huge droplets drenched the backs of her legs in seconds, as well as her hair and shoulders where she crouched over the joey to keep his pouch dry. The water was cold as it poured from the heavens but the air within it wasn’t. It was humid and electric, pulsing and alive.
She never got a chance to knock. The door flew inwards and momentum blew her inside.
‘Phew!’ she pushed her heavy hair from her eyes and laughed at the sheer joy of being caught in the storm.
The newspaper lay on the kitchen table. There were breadcrumbs on a wooden chopping board by the sink. The room smelled of timber oil and she couldn’t for the life of her work out why. If he was working with furniture Bill always used his shed.
Her gaze roved the small space, coming easily to rest on the only man she’d ever loved.
Bill stood with his back against the door he’d closed behind her, hands behind his hips, watching her through sober eyes.
She hadn’t moved, but he raised one hand as if he might ward her off.
‘Why can I smell furniture oil in here? What are you making?’
‘I’m not making anything.’
‘The army know you’re here,’ she blurted.
‘I’m surprised it took them this long to work that out.’
‘Constable West told Edie Batley. Edie told me.’
Bill’s eyes sharpened. ‘Why would West tell Edie?’
‘I didn’t ask. Is that really important, Bill? He’ll be out here tomorrow. West has been told to keep you ’til the Army people get someone here to take you back to Perth or wherever they make you go.’
He didn’t move. Nothing moved except the hands on the wall clock; the raindrops dripping down her back; her heartbeat like it always had with him. Bouncing.
‘Why do you just stand there?’ she pleaded with him. ‘You said they can lock you up, Bill. You said you could go to jail.’
‘I’m not running.’
‘But if they can’t find you, when the war’s over you can come back. It won’t be long. All the newspapers say it won’t be long.’
‘What would I come back to?’
‘The farm. This place. All you’ve built here.’
He shrugged.
‘Dammit, Bill. Come back to me.’
His dark eyes flashed. ‘You’re my brother’s wife. I think about that and it makes me sick. Do you know how hard I’ve tried to forget you? I’ve tried not to think about you for years. It drives me mad.’
‘I should be your wife. I wanted to be your wife. They lied to us, Bill. Your mother. Your brother. They said you never asked after me. They said you didn’t love me. They made me think it was hopeless. They both lied.’
‘And it doesn’t matter.’ He barely murmured it, and yet the whisper hit her like the roar of the rain because the words were so shut, so final. He was giving up. ‘You married him. You’re married to him. He won.’
‘And we have to let Jack win. Right? Poor Jack who couldn’t win the woodchopping and couldn’t find a magpie and couldn’t get the girl he loved because his big brother was the better man.’
‘It’s not possible, you and me. It can’t happen. You need to go, Annette. You shouldn’t be here. If the Army come for me it can have me but I’m not training soldiers for Vietnam. So if that means jail. Jail it is. When I get out I’ll stay away. I’ll head up the Queensland coast for a while. I like Cairns. It’s warm there. Who knows?’
‘I’m not giving up on us.’ She reached up behind her neck for the joey’s sling. ‘I’m not giving up on you. If you want to let them take you, that’s your business. But I’m taking what I want too.’
‘It’s too late, Annette—’
‘No. No it’s not.’
She crossed the room to his kitchen table and hung the sling from the back of a chair, satisfying herself it wouldn’t fall.
The rain blasted the iron roof anew. She had nothing else to say to convince him because he wouldn’t be convinced. And words were impossible.
She moved to him.
‘Ah, Netty. Don’t do this.’
On her tiptoes, she put her hand behind the back of his head into the short sharp rough of the shaven hair there. She tilted her head, breathing him in, and felt the delicious rush as his mouth met hers. Her other hand found his clasping the handle of the door behind him and she pried his fingers loose.
‘I’m making a rocking chair for you. That’s the furniture oil you can smell, damn you. I’m making a new chair so I can sit in the sun and imagine you’re sitting in my lap, rocking with me.’
‘That’s why I say we’re still possible, Bill Ross. I won’t let them win.’
‘I won’t get it finished before the Army comes.’
She took his hand and brought it with her, opening a button in her blouse, nudging the material out of the way, pressing his fingers to her breast. Her nipple sprang to meet the rough warmth of his palm.
‘Then you’ll finish it next time you come home to me.’
26
December 11, 1983. Cowaramup
Annette’s car door shut once, quietly, and there was a second noise, a slam, loud enough to make Jack’s head pound. Usually it was Tracey who’d be in trouble with her mother for slamming the car door on the rush to catch the school bus but not today. Today, Annette was doing the slamming.
He was in the dog house. Again.
He was in the doghouse more than that damn puppy Annette brought home.
‘Don’t bloody well say yes to teaching relief if you don’t want to do it!’ Jack had yelled at her an hour ago when the phone woke him to the driest mouth in history, and hammers pounding his skull from the inside.
‘We need the money,’ she’d snapped as she rushed about the house finding her good clothes and ironing her best skirt and doing all that in time to get up to the school by 8.30am.
He licked his lips. It was too early to get in another argument with Annette about money. He slipped his hand in the left front pocket of his jeans, then the right pocket.
‘I planned to let the cockatoos go today. We’ve got a warm week of weather for them. They’re old enough,’ she said, flipping her skirt over on the board. Steam hissed as she pressed the iron to the new side.
Jack felt for the right back pocket of his jeans. Nothing there either.
‘I could do it,’ he said.
Annette lifted the iron from her skirt. ‘You’d do it?’
‘I can let a pair of birds go if you want me to. I’ve done it before.’
Last time the cockatoos had been worth two-hundred dollars each.
‘You didn’t have a crushing hungover that day.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, silly me. You probably did.’ She glared at him then glanced at the door to Tracey’s room, pressed her lips together and pressed the iron back down.
The steam could have come from Annette’s ears.
‘Is this a breeding pair you want to let go?’ he asked her. ‘Out of interest.’
‘They’re too young.’
‘Well I can let them go if you want me to.’ If they were breeding age and a pair, West would pay five hundred flat.
‘I don’t want Tracey to hear us arguing,’ she said, biting her lip. ‘There was enough of that going on last night.’
‘Then stop hassling me why don’t you? I just had a few.’
‘A few?’ Her voice broke.
He flipped a page of the newspaper. His hand shook. He caught her looking and wiped that hand across the back of his mouth.
‘Honestly, Jack. You carry on like you’re twenty-one. How long did it last this time? Three weeks? Four?’
‘It’s gotta be eight.’
‘Four weeks sober. And last night you got barred from the club. Congratulations. It must have been a big one.’
‘Jesus bloody Christ. Give over.’ His head thumped. His mouth tasted like a cat peed in it.
He heard the back door open and shut.
‘Tracey’s up,’ Annette said. ‘She’s got end of year exams today and I don’t want her getting upset.’
I don’t want you upsetting her. That’s what the look in her eyes said.
Way out the back of the house, the toilet flushed. The cistern took an age to fill, wheezing against the back of the house like his mum’s old mongrel sheep dog.
‘You promised me you’d quit for good this time, Jack,’ she said, flipping the skirt off the board, stepping her legs into the waistband. Still had mighty fine legs.
Tracey slunk into the kitchen and set about getting a bowl of cereal. The metal spoon scraped china.
Annette’s lips pressed in that thin line. She had mighty fine lips when they were smiling but they didn’t smile at him much. She didn’t smile at him like she smiled at those damn kangaroos.
She didn’t smile at him like she smiled at Bill.
‘After Christmas. I’ll make it my new year’s resolution,’ he said, giving her his Paul Newman wink.
She wasn’t looking at him, so she missed it.
‘Like last year’s resolution you mean, Dad?’ Tracey said, scraping her spoon through the bowl.
Jack glanced at Tracey. She kept her head down. She had the same beautiful dark hair as her mother but she kept on about getting a colour through it. Scrape with the spoon. She reached out one-handed toward the chair next to her and put her hand inside a pillowslip. Next instant two grey ears pricked up from inside. He could see them twitching, see a grey nose nuzzling at Tracey’s fingers.
‘Anyway, I thought you were driving today?’ Annette said, switching the iron off. ‘How will you have time to let the cockies go?’
‘I don’t have to leave ’til late arvo.’
‘Lucky that. You’d probably still blow over the limit.’
Scrape with the spoon.
‘Can’t you eat a bowl of bloody cereal without it sounding like World War One?’ he snapped at Tracey.
The grey ears disappeared, diving into the pillowslip pouch. Outside, the dog barked. Once. Twice.
‘Please keep it down, Jack!’ Annette hissed.
Tracey looked at him, then her mother, back to him. She swallowed the mouthful of milk and cereal, stood, and—staring at him—dumped her bowl in the sink. Dumped it hard enough to make his head wanna explode.
‘You don’t tell her off for making a noise,’ he shouted at Annette. He pushed his chair in and stomped from the room. Bugger the joeys. Bugger Tracey’s exams. Bugger both of them.
