The Sunken Road Read online

  Rooms

  There was never quite enough space on Isonville. It was unspoken, but Anna’s mother looked forward to the day when she could add Aunt Beulah’s seven rooms to her own. The children squabbled over everything and nothing, hot and unreasoning, leading with jutted lower jaws and windmilling arms, until she would be there among them, clasping their thin wrists with fingers as tight as steel bands: I’ve just about had it with you two. The only answer was to move Hugo’s bed, wardrobe and chest of drawers along the corridor to the room set aside for Grandfather Ison’s visits. Anna sighed. She entered a period of rainbow-chasing and peace. Hugo left a hole in her room but she quickly filled it with girls’ annuals and an old club chair fetched from Great Aunt Beulah’s end of the house. She pressed fat cushions into the horsehairy corners and adjusted the limbs of the rag and celluloid dolls who sat there through the days, watching as she window-gazed and read. She talked to herself and sang. She clipped horses, dogs and disdainful cats from magazines, and Grandfather Tolley gave her a framed set of mail-order prints for her walls. Then one day she told Uncle Kitch, Aunt Lorna and the twins about her new room. Aunt Lorna sniffed: All right for some. Anna felt instantly tactless and small. Of course—Uncle Kitch and Aunt Lorna hated living in the overseer’s cottage. They stared through their narrow kitchen window at the big house across the creek, waiting for Aunt Beulah to die. Anna sensed this, seated with them at their linoleum-topped wooden table in their muttony kitchen. The dark corners and rotting holland blinds trapped the fumes of chops and cabbagy soups. There were dents and chips in the canisters above the sink. Their dog slept in the house and its yellow claws and muzzle grease were there on both sides of the back door. They had uncomfortable habits, their packet biscuits harboured dampness, they were full of glittering envy. I must go now, Anna said. Anna won a bursary to pay her Women’s College fees. She loved her room in the new wing, set red-brick and square where the land at the rear of the Children’s Hospital climbed up to the hedged and tiled North Adelaide mansions. It was like a nun’s retreat, squared-off, low and functional, with cement bricks painted white, hoary brown industrial carpet, a single divan with a bed-head shelf and bed-base drawers, a tiny desk, a two-shelf bookcase. She pinned Che Guevara to her wardrobe door and Ho Chi Minh above her desk. A buzzer connected her to the front desk, a buzz to let her know that she had a visitor waiting, a buzz at ten minutes to ten, all visitors out. Much better in a room than in a cramped car seat on a back road behind the Razorback. The patchwork quilt upon her bed had been passed on to her when Great Aunt Beulah died, and she made love on it on sultry afternoons when Lockie drove down from the bush to be with her. They had never made love in a room before. Lockie didn’t feel so guilty on a proper bed, even if it was narrow. We could get married, he said, you know, before I go in the army. Anna lived in that room for three years, until she was unhinged by grief and fled. She wandered dazedly around England; her money ran out; she stuck her thumb in the air on a sleet-lashed junction near Leeds. Two New Zealanders in a Transit van, and by the time they were on the North Circular, Anna had somewhere to live. Bringing home hitchhikers was a tradition of that Hammersmith house. Dear Folks: From my room I can see mile upon mile of London’s damp rooftops and chimneys. Whenever trains pass on the suspended line just feet from my window, the whole house shakes. Feeling much better—return ticket in more ways than one! It was Sam Jaeger she married, and they lived in a weatherboard and plaster transportable home at the lip of a gully, its four small rooms looking out upon the hills, the valley, and the grim stone Jaeger homestead below. The laundry clarified that house for Anna, leaving her ragged and miserable. The reconditioned washing machine was from Leo’s Discounts in Terowie and it shook the house and shimmered unstoppably far across the tilting floor. Paint blistered in the humid air and her father-in-law told her that she could not have a dryer and don’t waste water. He said, the deep grooves deepening on either side of his fleshless mouth: Icecream, phone bills, and now you want a dryer? Come now, Missy. Her mother-in-law put in: Let’s have a bit of elbow grease on those oil spots in Sam’s khakis. Sometimes Anna stared at the little separated mountains—reeking nappies, greasy overalls, blue singlets, sodden towels, her own greyish whites, over every inch of the floor—and felt helpless, paralysed. At the end of the day Anna shut the laundry door and sat with a sundowner in her chapped hands and thought about Lockie Kelly, his loving hands. Then Sam fell out with his father and they moved to the empty schoolmaster’s house on the sunken road. A cheerier laundry this time, steeped in sunlight—but that room turned on Anna when Michael was killed. Sometimes, in the months following the accident, Anna would pick her way across the damp floor with Rebecca’s little pants, blouses and skirts bundled in her arms and almost, just for a moment, believe that she still had Michael’s things to launder too. Everyone agreed that Anna’s father died a good death. He’d had his setbacks—a lost finger and years of struggle—but you cannot keep a wild man down, and he’d bloomed again when he inherited the Four Square Store from his father. He enjoyed chiacking with all the women, who liked his long, sly face and shopped more often than was necessary and drove home in a little foggy glow. The strokes laid him out in a sunny back room behind the shop. From his heaped pillows he could watch the dipping wagtails on the overgrown lawn outside. There were books from the lending library stacked beside the bed. He liked to turn the thick leaves of his father’s only photograph album, lingering upon a shot of his mother, who was crinkling her eyes against the steep sun on Henley Beach as grey-pointer sharks lurked unseen in the shallows behind her. Anna wondered if he’d rescued her in his mind, been enjoying her embraces all these years. She saw him every day toward the end. When Rebecca skipped classes at the Conservatorium to be with him one last time, she came out blinking, sniffing: Grandpa still makes me laugh. Now that he is gone, the room has become a den: sewing machine, filing cabinet, desk, fraying club chair and divan bed. It’s a room full of memories for Anna’s mother, who runs the shop alone now. Rebecca and her lover have a house in North Adelaide. It was built when Isonville was built, but it has five rooms, not fourteen, and it was intended for a respectable working family, not a squatter’s brood. It’s in the renovated part of North Adelaide, and Anna likes to spend a night in the spare bedroom from time to time, even though she still has a sense that Rebecca continues to watch her warily, as though fearing that she might turn her life upside down again. A baby will come along and the spare room will become a nursery, but by then Anna will have a place of her own, somewhere in sight of the sea, where she may think of her lost son, her lost loves. The perfect distraction for a fractious grandchild will be her Pandowie Jubilee keyring, hung with keys and lives.

  Obsession

  Since Grandfather Tolley had failed to save his wife, he became obsessed with preserving his son. Anna’s father said: He used to watch me like a hawk. Anna’s mother smiled and touched his arm: And you rebelled against it. He returned her smile; they were very close. Stung, and a little confused, Anna butted in with her tuppence worth: When we waited in the shop after school for someone to take us home, he watched us like a hawk, too. Don’t do this, don’t do that. Remember when I cut myself? He got really mad. Anna’s other grandfather was obsessed with how great Isonville could have been. As great as the Park, he said, if it hadn’t been split up. One day Great Aunt Beulah took Anna aside: The Isons are related to royalty, dear. Anna stared at her. If you go to Chancery in London, you’ll find the Ison fortune just sitting there, waiting for a claimant. Beulah was obsessed with Chancery and red tape until the day she died. Anna had long since ceased her wanderings along the back roads to find her father, but became obsessed with his safe return: Please, God, don’t let him have an accident, don’t let him die, don’t let my bad luck rub off on him. When Mr Wheelwright gave the kids a local history project, Anna became obsessed with the identity of the shepherd who had lost his son in Ison’s Creek. For a brief, superheated time when they first became lovers, L
ockie’s penis consumed her thoughts and senses. She controlled and admired it, grasped it in her fist, peered at the ribbing of veins, measured in heartbeats the heavy tick of the stalk. She tasted the word ‘engorged’, a word of salty heat and shapely red-brownness. Lockie was gratified, of course he was, but sometimes a touching delicacy and self-consciousness seemed to leave him wide open for some rough-housing, and then he might twist away and she’d know that she’d gone too far. It was all tied up with sin and penance. She saw the change in his face—regret, and the ebbing of love—after he’d spurted inside her. It was as if he’d been wrung dry. But he was killed and she fled the country to recover. It helped if she counted things. She counted the wall tiles in the bathroom in the house in Hammersmith, counted her way through sit-ups and knee bends, counted the paces from the Sloane Square tube stop to her sales job in the bookshop in the Kings Road. She wondered if Grandfather Ison had been a counter too, when he was recovering from the lost weeks of his life. She wondered if these things ran in families. One day an aerogramme arrived from home: Bet you’re surprised to be hearing from your Uncle Kitch! We were wondering if you’d have time for a little task on behalf of the family, now that you’re in that part of the world. Remember old Auntie Beulah always going on about Ison money being tied up in Chancery? It’s probably all pie in the sky, but why not give it a burl, I always say. Anna sought connections, and for a while could think of nothing else. Conspiracies obsessed her father-in-law. The Jews were in bed with the Reds and the secular humanists. They shared internationalist aims—a one-world government, controlling finance, thought patterns, our Christian way of life. The greatest trap inherent in this philosophy, he said, is that it’s so devilishly clever. He told Anna that the Australian farmer was bearing the brunt of it—the international grain cartels, the international banking cartels. He tapped the cover of a crack-spined, well-thumbed book, his bible, and hissed the title conspiratorially: None Dare Call it Conspiracy, letting fly two filmy white specks of spit. He jerked back embarrassedly, drew a ragged forearm across his mouth, stepped forward again and made a clumsy wipe at Anna’s jeans with one of the huge khaki handkerchiefs so carefully ironed by his wife. Mrs Jaeger’s obsession was with crumbs, grains of salt and sugar, which she whisked away with a damp cloth. Her benches gleamed, and at a bench was where you’d find her. Dust was pouring into Anna’s car. The car rolled and she and the children were thrown about inside it. When the car had settled there was still dust, choking clouds of it inside and out. Dust acted on Anna like a midnight footfall outside a window after that: creeping dread, paralysis, then flailing panic. She could not get it out of her mind, her mouth, her nostrils. Dust menaced her; she lived in a dusty country. One day, she told herself, I shall live beside the sea. The dust broke up before her eyes eventually, but did not fully disappear. Traces congregated on the surface of her hands, trapped by the moisturising cream she applied ten times a day to keep her hands from drying out as a result of her compulsive washing. For many, many years after the accident, Rebecca seemed to watch Anna obsessively from the passenger seat. Although she developed slender, fluid, dark and watchful good looks, she could not be convinced that she was beautiful. Rebecca examined herself obsessively: the mirror didn’t lie. It told her that she was carrying too much weight. If she dropped her chin toward her chest, she felt a fold of unwelcome flesh. Her cheeks might look finely drawn from eyebrow to jaw but she had only to perform the pinch test to demonstrate that the skin there was, in truth, too slack. She sighted along the planes of her body and saw a faint swelling between breastbone and hips: surely she should be concave? She was certain that fat had accumulated on her upper arms. Even her stubby Tolley fingers spoke of fatness. Anna remonstrated: Becky, sweetie, you’re wasting away. Rebecca might have progressed to starveling wretch if Meg had not chanced along and saved her. Now Anna and the two young women make it a point to order cheesecake, profiteroles or icecream whenever they meet for lunch or dinner. Rebecca blithely shovels it in, her thin, sculpted cheeks briefly mobile and overblown. These days Rebecca’s fixation is with home security, for the little house in North Adelaide has been burgled twice. She has installed alarms and bars and better locks, and likes to make the house look occupied and lived-in whenever she goes out. Anna has bursts of house cleaning from time to time. She washes her hands a touch too often. These and other mild obsessions will accompany her to the grave. She will understand that obsessions are common and natural and mostly harmless, ideally a release valve for something, but now and then she will encounter in someone a preoccupation that is dark and corrosive, such as her granddaughter’s conviction that the world will expire in a nuclear war. No six-year-old has any business fearing something like that and Anna would like to wring someone’s neck.

  Shades

  These were its chief colours: gold, pink, khaki, black. By Christmas Day the mid-north was cast in gold: golden hills rolling away to the north, buttery gold stubble by the acre, dusty gold grain-spills at the paddock gates, dead gold grass on the uncultivated land, forearm hair bleached gold in the sun. Then wind, drought and time wore away the gold, and it was a pink country, the pinkness of dirt and dust and skin revealed to the open air. The sheep carried dusty pink fleeces upon their backs and tracked busy pink paths to water troughs, shade-trees, hand-scattered hay. Grandfather Ison went pink in the sun, his cheeks pink with roast dinners and white bread. Anna’s father went brown in the sun, a sinewy, olive-hued man, except when he tipped back his hat. A startling band of naked pink forehead, creased a little in worry: Aren’t you seeing a bit too much of that boy? One day Lockie led Anna along a stony path on the Razorback. Wild goats hoof-rattled in panic ahead of them. They came to a declivity hidden from the road and protected from the winds. Lockie took her onto a granite shelf, past a gnarled tree, to a crumbling hole in the side of the hill. She peered in, on her hands and knees, Lockie comfortably at her side. Can’t you see it? Rock art. Anna concentrated. A stencilled ochre hand, ochre stick-men hunting a kangaroo, an ochre moon face. Overcome, she retreated with Lockie into the warm grass. Propped on one elbow, burrs caught in his hair, his hand on her breastbone: I love the way you go all pink here and here. By late May, the crops and wild grasses were shooting, young and green, trembling in the wind—except that the district was never entirely green, for the damp earth was too dark, the chlorophyll too deep, the licheny hillside rocks and tree clumps too shadowy on the distant hills. Khaki, Anna decided, musing aboard the bone-shaking Bitter Wash school bus. The driver dropped a gear to negotiate the switchback bends of the sunken road. Anna’s face was inches from pink rockface; no sun penetrated; the gearbox howled. Then they were emerging onto the flatlands, where the Showalter Park lucerne sat as dark as camouflage, and the sun blazed into the dusty bus again, lighting the gold stripes on Anna’s tunic. She looked at Lockie, seated opposite her, and caught him gazing at her gold-banded purple thighs. Lockie’s eyes were green at certain times, in certain lights. Otherwise they were grey-green or greeny brown. Honey flecks danced in them. Anna rode the train to Pandowie before Easter in her third year away at the university, dreaming, attempting to re-create his face. She had not seen him for many months. He’d had his hair cropped close to his scalp and gone willingly away to war, but now she wanted him back again, and recalling him in her mind’s eye was a start. But it was hopeless; he would not stay fixed. She looked out. Piebald hills behind the town, pale dead grass patched with ash from last summer’s bushfire. The Razorback was in shadow, its black slope as wickedly jagged as sharks’ teeth. The train slowed for the level crossing outside the town. First the silver grille, then the black snout, then the windshield and black roof of the Showalters’ Bentley. The train rumbled past. Anna could not see if Wesley was at the wheel, or old Mrs Showalter herself. A black Bentley to match their black hearts, so Grandfather Tolley liked to say. And a Bentley, note, not a Rolls. A Rolls would be too flashy. Anna felt a sudden blessed release as Michael slid from her body. He looked stretched and
squashed, clotted-red, slippery, spilling out of her with a rush of fluid onto a waterproof sheet. They said two things: It’s a boy! He’s a red head! Anna amended that. Auburn, she said. He gets it from me, and I got it from my Grandmother Tolley. Anna dressed Michael in shades of green and blue, matching and offsetting his blue eyes and auburn hair. His favourite colour was blue. Anna and Sam buried him in his best blue shirt, his head nestled on his tiny eggshell-blue pillow, the casket lined with royal blue silk. These were not decisions that Sam could make. Anna made them alone. For a time in her late teens, Rebecca wore black jeans, black tops, black capes. Black hair framed her small white face, and she emphasised all that she said with her white hands, hands cut off at the wrist by black cuffs. Sometimes she wore lipstick the colour of a blackening plum. Christ Almighty, sweetheart. You’re going to be wearing black soon enough when you join an orchestra—why do you want to wear it now? Rebecca, dark and sly: Your basic separatist black, Dad. The Showalters got rid of the black Bentley and bought twin black Mercedes saloons. They gutted the big house and lined it with polished hardwood and Carrera marble, one massive black slab of it under the front door. They sank millions into the sperm-bank scheme, promising investors they’d be out of the red by the end of their second year of operation. Bless their black hearts, Anna says now. The collapse has turned Sam’s hair grey. Only the prospect of the town’s 150th Jubilee at the turn of the century is enough to keep him going, she sometimes thinks. Anna will stick it out with him. She will watch her history of the town spill from her printer, the black sentences accumulating, spidering across the page. She will help her mother choose a new lounge-suite fabric, a muted tartan pattern this time, mild reds and greens. Sniff: If your Dad were alive it would have been our silver wedding anniversary last Wednesday. Oh, Mum, I’m sorry, I forgot. Anna will ask herself: What, exactly is the colour of the sea today? She’ll stand still, intent, telling herself to identify what is there, not what custom tells her is there. As much silver and grey as blue and green, she’ll decide. Her granddaughter will confound shoppers and kindergarten mothers. Hesitant fingers pinching her red overalls and green top: A boy or a girl? Auburn hair, though. No doubting that. Almost as if she were a Tolley.