The Sunken Road Page 5

  Money

  Anna banked her pennies, halfpennies and weighty scarce florins in a nude plastic pig. From time to time she hefted it in her hands but felt no satisfaction, only greed, spite and injustice. She settled that by upending Hugo’s tin moneybox and shaking out a handful of his savings and transferring them to the pig. The guilty expect guilt in others, and so Anna told herself that she was simply stealing back what her brother had stolen from her. Probably stolen from her. They were Tolleys and the Tolleys were poor. They had come from nowhere with Grandfather Tolley and they had no money, not like the Isons, her mother’s family, who had been around forever and had money to burn. Great Aunt Beulah Ison took Anna aside on her tenth birthday and said: There is an Ison fortune tied up in Chancery, dear. I’ve missed my chance. Your grandfather stopped in London on his way back from the first war but the blighters bamboozled him with red tape. Your mum’s not interested and, frankly, your Uncle Kitch wouldn’t have a clue, so it’s up to you. That’s Ison money, dear. See you get it back for the good of the family. And so Anna was reminded that she was an Ison and a Tolley. Her birthday present from Uncle Kitch and Aunt Lorna was a cheque for five shillings, and in a Tolley counterstroke she altered the five to fifteen. Uncle Kitch could afford it. He had got Grandfather Ison’s acres and Anna’s mother had not. For seven years Anna waited for a hand to descend on her collar. She’d heard that a statute of limitations existed for certain crimes, that after seven years had elapsed she could not be prosecuted. Lockie visited Anna every weekend when she left to study in the city, and in the course of her first year away she noticed a shift in him, a gradual refinement in the configuration of his dress, hair, face and conduct. He’d been observing her friends. He didn’t want to stand out, the country bumpkin. One day he said: The blokes back home, I told them you pay your half when we go out anywhere, and they looked at me like they thought it was a great idea but it would never reach further than the suburbs. A laugh bubbled up in Anna. She remembered the solemn ritual of a year, two years ago: The man always pays. But as doubts and differences crept in to shape their hours together, Lockie began to practice small, irritating, unnecessary economies. Why can’t we see a flick? Doesn’t cost much. Because I’m saving, he explained at last, hot-faced, defiant. For what? Stubbornly: For when we get married. Anna’s husband fell out with his father and money was at the root of it. I’m worth more, Sam insisted. I do all the hard work. I’ve got brains. I’m not a slave. But what will you do for money? Anna’s mother asked, when she heard the news. Anna stuck her jaw out; she didn’t want anyone to know her business: We’ll manage. They rented the old schoolhouse on the sunken road, and in those times, marked by the seasons, when the locals had no odd jobs for Sam, the little family relied upon Anna’s pay cheque, two days a week on the Chronicle. Sam didn’t fully come to terms with that. One day Rebecca asked him for a Star Wars toy, and got a dry crackle from his newspaper: Hadn’t you better ask your mother? They drove to Isonville for the reunion of the Isons, and the first thing Anna saw, when she stepped into the hall, was a table piled high with Uncle Kitch’s booklet, The Ison Family: 1850–1975. A money box, a small card: $5 please, to cover costs. Anna flicked through the pages and found ‘The Wit and Wisdom of the Isons’ at the back: If you spend two bob, the other fellow has it and you can’t get it back again. Don’t look at the sky, that won’t make it rain—best look at the ground, where you might find a sixpence. Anna wandered through the big old rooms. There was wallpaper where there hadn’t been wallpaper before, a textured Regency pattern that seemed to crowd her in. Here and there Uncle Kitch had taped reminders under switches: Turn Off After Use. With infinite patience, never raising her voice, making it a game, never letting her frustration show, Anna taught her daughter about paying her own way: No I won’t buy that outfit for you, but I will help you make one like it, or you can buy it yourself when you earn enough pocket money. Because we’re poor, that’s why, and your cello lessons cost money. Sam said nothing when Anna’s father died, leaving her twenty thousand in his will. One, it was her money; two, if Sam laid claim to it he’d feel that he was little better than his mean-spirited father. Anna took that twenty thousand to Chester Flood one day and asked him to put it to work for her. They rarely talked about Lockie, but Anna could picture Lockie whenever she saw Chester. Lockie and Chester had flashed their white teeth and crinkled their eyes at the world, one cheerily, the other knowingly. Men like that are apt to make you feel better. They can bring you luck. If they make a mistake it’s not through obvious greed or spite or calculation—so Anna likes to think. The Department of Public Prosecutions had asked her to give evidence against Chester, but she could not, she would not. She was one of dozens who’d lost money—let someone else bring him down. Today, as Anna and Sam are driving through North Adelaide on their way home to the bush, a young suit—sharp as a blade, ear-ringed, mobile phone—darts through the traffic, forcing them to brake. Sam punches the horn and pounds the wheel. Anna has never seen Sam so teary, frustrated and vicious. Yet she knows it isn’t the yuppie man as such, it’s the loans manager saying no thirty minutes earlier, confiscating their chequebooks, suggesting that they stay on as managers until a new owner can be found. No wonder the Pandowie branch’s recent offer to mount a float in the Jubilee Parade and finance the time capsule is more hypocrisy than Sam can bear. The Showalters have gone from Showalter Park. A receiver-manager lives in the big house now. Put all that together, Sam says, and what have you got? Hidden forces at work, serving the interests of international finance, that’s what. The banks determine the availability of credit, placing us in unmanageable debt so they can take us over. Anna’s mother tends to agree with him. Sales and turnover at the shop have dropped by fifty per cent in recent years, and she can no longer afford to employ the local kids. Australia is ageing and one day Anna will be one of the aged. She will depend on the government for a pension, for who in her position has superannuation? She will never have quite enough money, but she’ll not let anxiety about the lack of it wear her down.

  Luck

  Grandfather Tolley had the bad luck to lose his wife to a shark. Anna grew solemn when she heard that, impressed by the notion of a swift, random, soulless agency at work in the world. Why was Grandma taken and not someone else? And why to begin with? This led her by degrees to a contemplation of luck: good luck, bad luck, no luck at all. She decided that she was a person to whom good things happened. In this regard, she’d not been tainted by the blood of the Tolleys. She had a sly, nimble, distracting beauty and a good brain in her head, and she was an Ison—even if her name was not—growing up on Isonville, once home to a merino stud second only to Showalter Park’s. And then she was undone by a string of frustrations, reversals and unfortunate reminders, all in the space of a year. She scored low in tests and exams, the other kids ganged up on her unaccountably in the playground, and she was a little ashamed of the public way in which her father was obliged to spend weeks racing around the countryside at the wheel of the Stock & Station Holden, usually at the beck and call of the Showalters. Anna referred to this run of misfortune as bad luck. It was a short step from that to overlooking all the good things in her life and seeing herself as a luckless person to whom more bad things would happen; from there to comprehending that she was bad luck, full stop. She transmitted bad luck to others, merely by existing. What if she were to replay the past, erasing herself from the story, and her parents’ meeting and marrying, and Grandfather Ison’s many sisters? Why, her mother would not have been cheated of Isonville land when Grandfather Ison died, that’s what. Anna was there the day her father lost the tip of his finger in the auger drive. It was a harvest-time of broken tailshafts, ruptured tyres and wheat fouled by star thistle seeds, and to top all that off he suffered cruel pain and fear, all Anna’s fault. Something went out of him after that. No one fondly called him a wild man again, as if Anna had bled the wildness out of him. Oftentimes a whole year could be bad. Anna told herself one December: This ye
ar Matt Heinrich broke my hymen with his finger, I lost Maxine’s friendship, they began to call me names. Maybe next year will be better. Anna dared not hope for a good year, only a better one, by which she meant that no bad luck would come her way during the course of it. And so her teenage years went by. She was ready to believe that fortune smiled upon her when Lockie Kelly stole her heart. She dared to hope. A year went by, then a second and a third, and he continued to adore her. But badness crept in, finally, staining everything that Anna touched. Anxious, confused, she cast about for its cause—and remembered her bad luck. Funny how she’d forgotten. Bad luck had left her alone for three years, and she had bounced back so thoroughly that she had forgotten all about him. He had a human shape. He was a colourless chill shadow moulded to her back. He poisoned everything. He leapt across lighted spaces and brought down her loved ones. Lockie need not have died like that, Anna sobbed. A damn shame, but these things happen, the family replied, consoling her, but Anna knew better. Before she married Sam she warned: I should let you know, bad things happen around me. I think I’m jinxed. She watched his open face closely, trusting that he would laugh away her fears. She was not disappointed. Sam was so solid and dependable, so lacking in an inner life, that he could not see the figure on her back. Sam repelled everything that bad luck stood for. He might lack grace, agility and swiftness, but not simple strength. Bad luck would fail to find a handhold on Sam’s broad back, would slide to the ground, wither and die. But oh, she should have been more vigilant. She should have known that bad luck was easily provoked. Her joy in her children provoked him, her joy in Chester Flood provoked him, and he undid all of her happiness in a moment’s inattention. Another mother might have overcompensated after the accident, erecting safety barriers around her surviving child and smothering her with over-anxious love, but Anna took a fatalistic step or two back. Sam didn’t. He hovered. And so Rebecca was the product of bipolar love. She’s had to learn to be her own warden. It has been twenty years since she landed a smacking kiss on Anna’s lips. But at least bad luck leaked away through that fractured side window, twenty years ago. Anna has maintained a wary watch over her loved ones since then and not seen him strike again. She cannot feel him on her back any more, and she’s certain that he did not slither through the wreckage of the car on to Rebecca’s back. Rebecca likes to read books about goddess medicine and goddess magic. There’s simply no comprehending, she says, all that’s carried in the head and heart of a woman. Meg, her lover, is apt to scoff. She’s more down to earth. She might state that Friday the thirteenth is lucky for witches, lesbians and the left-handed, then throw back her head and laugh. Sam attributes the attitude of the bank to a conspiracy of the Jews; Anna attributes it to the times they live in. Neither mentions luck. Anna would like to have been able to reassure the suicidal woman on Showalter Hill: You were not the cause of anything. You did not bring bad luck upon yourself, or others. Anna will have no time or patience for worriers, crystal gazers or the lessons of history. Even if certain events can be prefigured, she won’t waste time on searching for patterns in the bad memories or in depending for her happiness on the good. She knows that she is bound to die sometime but she’ll not look ahead to the day.

  Wool

  Great Aunt Beulah had an S.T. Gill lithograph on her wall: ‘Labourers washing sheep, Isonville head station, 1847’. The Isons, their habits of thought and action, were founded on wool. An entry in Anna’s baby book: Funny Sayings. As I was watching Grandpa butcher a hogget for the coolstore I said ‘You can’t cut my legs off and throw them away, I want to wear them.’ One afternoon in late May, Grandfather Ison rattled back from the end paddock with a pair of three-day-old lambs in the tray of the Land Rover, the offspring of a first-time mother confounded by triplets. The children helped him to untie the twine that bound their spindly forefeet and carry them into the laundry. Where Grandfather Ison saw years of profit saved from foxes and icy winds, Anna saw painfully concave bellies, tiny bowed spines, ears like flaps of pink-tinged white velvet, mucousy nostrils, a viscous brown plug stopping each sorry anus. She named the lambs Cynthia and Bert. The children fed them heated milk from a bottle twice a day, panting, laughing, calling out involuntarily at the sensation of powerful small mouths tugging on the teats. The ropy little tails wiggled ecstatically; a milky froth gathered at each set of tiny jaws. Anna gave her middle finger to Cynthia. The tug was there, certainly enough, and it was powerful. Each lamb wore a ribbed nap of greasy white wool. Anna always washed her hands each time she fed the lambs. Cynthia and Bert were released into the yard a few days later and back with the ewes at the beginning of August. For about a year after that, the children were able to identify them in the mob, and Cynthia and Bert half approached or acknowledged them out of habit, but time, a new season and a coat grown and shorn and grown again soon made them forget. When Anna was twelve she woke up screaming from a dream of slathering, bloodied lips. Earlier in the week a knotted old bushman had come to help her father tail the first mob of lambs he’d produced on the six-forty acres, and Anna had seen the man draw the testicles from the lopped scrotum of the male lambs with his teeth. She’d watched, fascinated, as he neatly dipped his head, snapped his teeth on each pale nude bulb, jerked back, spat. Hugo and her father were in the pen, catching the lambs one by one, proffering the crotches on a stained wooden rail. Hugo was small, but he wanted to feel useful. He closed his eyes and turned his head as the blades trimmed and sliced the flesh, uttering a high, nervous hum and whistle that calmed no creature there in that gory corner of the sheepyards. The blood: gouts of it on the old bushman’s shirtfront, flecked in his whiskers. It sprayed finely from every tail stump, masking Hugo’s face. Anna stood far behind the old man’s shoulder and when her father noticed her watching he gave a quick jerk-frown of his head as if to say: Lovey, you shouldn’t be seeing this. Later he said: The last of the oldtime ways. For three years Anna and Lockie made love on a woollen blanket. It was tartan. They had nowhere else to go, only a sagging bench seat behind a worn steering wheel and a cluttered glove box that refused to stay shut. The blanket protected them from dust and erupting seat springs. Anna identified another odour in Lockie’s composition of odours: he smelt of wool, of the lanoline in wool. He worked the sheds of the district and the wool kept his hands soft, even as bale hooks, blades, rough-weld holding pens and jute bales abraded the skin. One Sunday afternoon, returning flushed from their lovemaking on a back road behind the Razorback, Anna and Lockie ploughed into a poddy lamb that his brothers and sisters were rearing. Lockie wailed. He braked. The tyres skated in the red dirt. Anna saw him scramble for the door handle, and when she found him a moment later he was on his knees, sobbing wretchedly: I didn’t mean it. Don’t die, I didn’t mean it. She knelt with him. The lamb bleated, struggling under their probing fingers. I’ve broken its back. No you haven’t—only its leg. They severed the leg where the splintered bone had torn through the flesh beneath the centre joint, then sewed a flap over the wound with stiff black cotton. Lockie splashed antiseptic over the stump and lifted the lamb to its feet. They watched it totter away, clearly puzzled, shaking the shortened limb as though it were whole and somehow offensive, maybe mired in wire or mud. Behind them Lockie’s dog bellied closer, snapped the amputated leg in its jaws, crept away. I wanted to bury that, Lockie said. Anna had noticed, but kept to herself, that the lamb carried the earmark of Showalter Park. So Lockie was a bandit in the night, not only a lover creeping to her window. She smiled to herself. The Kellys were entitled. They had shot and burnt and buried two hundred sheep during the drought and needed to build up their flock again. And here’s another contradiction, Anna would say, in her arguments with her father. You’re anti-communist yet you don’t mind selling your wool to Russia or China. Your lot would sell it to North Vietnam if there was a buck in it. There were starved sheep grazing on the tussocky banks of the sunken road the day that Anna returned from seeing Chester Flood. She could feel him leaking out of her. Her breasts tingled w
ith the memory of his hands; his sheepskin hearth rug still cushioned her undulating hips and spine. One by one the old family properties are being broken up or sold to agricultural companies. The decline and fall of the Showalters has been the most spectacular in the district. Wesley Showalter borrowed sixteen million dollars from the banks to develop his sperm-bank program, and now the only sheep on the property are the embryos and straws of semen sitting frozen in tanks of liquid nitrogen. Many of the locals had subscribed, all had lost their money, and if they were to meet the Showalters face to face now, some would spit on the ground. Notwithstanding that, the 150th Jubilee Committee has obtained a handspan of Pandowie Showalter Lustre 8’s fleece for the time capsule. Anna jokes: Maybe they should include a foreclosure notice as well. There is not much money for Christmas presents this year, but Anna has scraped together the cash to buy Rebecca and Meg a wool underlay for their bed. The significance of this gift, and others like it in the years to come, will lie in Rebecca’s realisation that her mother has let her lead her life without remark or interference—acceptance, indeed, and support. When she is old, a permanent chill in her bones, Anna will wear wool next to her skin, wool on top. But she’ll shop for youthful styles, and the girls in the North Adelaide house will exclaim admiringly over her. Mutton dressed as lamb, according to Anna.