The Sunken Road Read online

  Illness

  You could fall ill. Worse, you could die. In 1919 entire families were lost to influenza. You’d no sooner arrive home from burying your parents when you might have to turn around and see your brothers and sisters into the cold ground. Grandmother Ison died, worn to a shadow from caring for Great Aunt Beulah. Asthma killed Grandfather Ison: asthma and air-conditioned air and cigar smoke in the Adelaide Club. There were germs floating in the air or nudging invisibly on dogs, door handles and old bones, every one of them casting about for a human to latch onto. Anna washed her hands. She learned to freeze, inches from contamination, whenever anyone warned: Watch out for germs. She did not fall ill, unlike the pale, thin, starveling children of railway gangers and shearers, or suffer from Sandy Blight, unlike the Aboriginal children who came in on the Dead Man’s Corner bus. She queued to examine the chicken pox-spotted penis of the grocer’s son. Anna did not run a temperature or break out in spots or rashes, yet it seemed to her only a matter of time before illness might strike her down. She tried to scrape the coating from her tongue. Whenever she walked through long grass she listened for tiger snakes, and afterwards inspected her legs, certain that she would find puncture wounds among the scratches and scabs. She turned all her senses inward, urging them to register the first signs of fever, nausea or the plague. Instead, it was Hugo who suffered. All through the spring and summer months he gasped and sneezed and his eyes itched and watered. He might wake at night clawing at his throat, desperate for air. God had done this to him and he sobbed at the unfairness of it. The children’s parents said: We’re at our wits’ end, and took him to see allergists and quacks. Anna broke down and cried out: I’ve brought him bad luck, but everyone looked at her oddly and replied: Of course you haven’t, don’t be silly. When Anna was warned to expect her first period, the words everyone used were the curse and your monthly. Nothing had prepared her for so much discomfort and pain. Her blood flowed copiously; she felt ragged and vile. Every thirty-one days, for six days, it was like clockwork. She missed one day of school at the onset of each period, and she hated having to explain, hated having it known or surmised the next day. Her damned luck, that’s what it was. She would lie curled in bed, a hot water bottle clutched to her stomach, and stare through the dim light at all the possible lives and worlds beyond her bedroom wall. Why me? she demanded, and her tears broke her mother’s heart. Her mother came to her one day, pinkly embarrassed, avoiding her gaze: Dr Pirie says it can be controlled if we put you on birth control pills, and suddenly the question of license was there between them. A month later Anna said: I feel so much better. She was fifteen. She began to test the waters. She didn’t tell the boys that she was protected but enjoyed their sidling anxiety at school on Monday morning: What if I’ve put you up the duff? She was waiting for a true love. Telling him would be like bestowing a precious gift. But soon everyone knew; Anna had not counted on treachery from her best friend. I am sick at heart; I have a sickness of the soul: nothing else described so accurately Anna’s emptiness when he died. She lost weight and colour and stared through the people who loved her or talked to her; fine, angular bones appeared beneath the surface of her skin; she breathed in microbes and had no resistance to them. Yet Anna was not aware of these manifestations, only that she was unutterably sad, and sadness cannot be weighed or poked at or treated with pills. Anna suffered from nausea, exhaustion and perverse twinges and pain when she was pregnant with Michael. Sam hovered about her, fiercely tender and protective, delivering weak tea and toast and hot water bottles to her bed and keeping the Mr and the Mrs at bay. Then Michael was born and she lost all memory of the long months. Instead, she recalled her pregnancy as an interval of patience and tranquillity, time measured in heartbeats. Michael slept, he put on weight, he rarely coughed or sneezed. But Rebecca did not want to enter the world and seemed to be wary about her tenure in it. She was small, dark, withholding, a child who believed that all surfaces were a lie. Rebecca grasped her asthma spray in both hands and would not let go. She sucked automatically, fatalistically, thinking her dark private thoughts. Unlike her Uncle Hugo, Rebecca did not blame God. She did not blame anybody for anything, but she did expect them to make mistakes. Anna watched her grow. Later the asthma regressed until only extraordinary circumstances might bring on an attack and before long, Rebecca had even cured herself of these. Anna’s father lingered for several months in the sun-drenched room at the rear of Tolley’s Four Square Store. He’d found happiness in his final years in the town. But his third stroke robbed him of speech, movement and recognition, so that Anna, wiping the damp, slack mouth in the skin-and-bone face, prayed for a swift death. He felt so light in her arms; the copper band rattled now on his bony wrist. There seemed to be nothing to him, yet one day she saw his penis and was startled by the loose youthfulness and size of it. Sam’s mother is likely to die soon. She has found life unsupportable without her husband. And so Sam will have been spared the long death of ailing parents, but he does not draw much comfort from that. He is sick at heart because he has lost everything his father put together. You want to know what’s really wrong with this country, Anna? he wants to know, winding himself up again. The New World Order, that’s what. One world government, he says, counting on his fingers, one world bank, one world currency, all devoted to the interests of international finance and international Jewry—and the Australian farmer can go hang. So how come you write about the recession, drought, falling prices, increased costs, over-borrowing, ageing, the collapse of Showalter Park? How come you’re waving our little tragedies in our faces, our suicides, divorces and bankruptcies? These are symptoms, Anna. Anna will be advised by her doctor to walk a few kilometres each day. She will visit her mother in the Clare hospital and be shocked by the length and purple rawness of the stitched incision in her mother’s skinny flank; but her mother will grin like a maniac and flex her new steel and plastic hip: Good as new. Hugo will continue to smoke too much out on the six-forty acres. He’ll ignore Anna’s warnings and say: I’m not Grandpa Ison.

  Drought

  The Drought Paintings. Grandfather Ison expected something recognisable, not fire distortions, wind-twisty bare cliffs, men and women as stripped and spindly as dead trees on the baked earth, sheep’s jaws grinning in the drift sand, carcasses offering up ribcages like tented fingers, bony dogs resembling no dog he’d ever seen in all his years in the station country. He snapped his catalogue against a khaki sky. Have you kids ever seen anything like this in nature? Anna and Hugo shook their heads dumbly: those canvases were their first drought. They trailed behind him through the Gallery’s exit doors and back along North Terrace. After a while, Grandfather Ison said: Pom, pom, pom, for want of anything to say to them. Their mother was waiting outside the Adelaide Club, barred by the doorman, shopping bags at her feet: Hello Dad, hello my darlings! By year’s end Anna had undergone another drought. Locusts darkened the sky, a dusty soup of them, smearing windscreens and ticking, engorged, from leaf to leaf. She stood paralysed in the schoolyard with Maxine, eyes closed, mouth closed, head pulled in, dress gathered tight at the knee, but still those creatures snapped on her arms and crept in her hair. Then the winds bore the topsoil away. Hugo scribbled ‘dust’ on the sideboard, grit particles scratched among the filmy pages of the Methodist Hymnal, and cars crept home from church with their headlights burning. For a brief time in 1967, Anna’s father wrote her two or three letters a week. She imagined the pen barrel balanced awkwardly against the stub of his missing finger: My darling first born. I’m sitting in the ute, pad propped on my knee, in glorious spring sunshine. Kippy’s asleep in his usual place behind the back wheel somewhere. The sheep are spread out between Dead Man’s Corner and the railway cutting, but there’s not much in the way of feed around here. Maybe some maniac will take the corner too fast and put a few out of their misery. Hugo will spell me for a while this afternoon before we take the mob back to the paddock. They’re losing condition fast. It breaks my heart, it truly does, but you don
’t want to hear your old man’s tale of woe in the middle of your exams. After the exams Anna answered a newspaper advertisement. So did thirty others, faces she recognised from lectures and the library stacks. A glittering American revealed his white teeth from behind a table-load of encyclopaedias and said: Why, one of our salesmen earned enough money in his first year to buy his own airplane. Now he flies from sheep ranch to sheep ranch in the outback, where they’re hungry for knowledge. Bullshit, Anna snorted. She was contentious, easily excited, easily wounded, her auburn hair crackling around her head. She went home to Pandowie, to work for a handful of dollars and be with Lockie for the summer. Lockie’s friend, Chester Flood, said wryly: We thought we might have lost you to the longhairs. Well, it had been a close thing a couple of times, but Anna would never tell them that. Besides, Lockie and Chester would not be turning twenty for another eighteen months, so the call-up was not yet an issue between them. She fell with relief against Lockie’s flat, flawless chest, his skin stretched brown and hot over flexing bones. Lockie, wild and laughing, and they went on unchanged. When he was forced to shoot two hundred starving ewes Anna whispered hush into his trembling neck. Two years later he was dead, and as Anna recovered from six weeks of blankness, a gap in time lost to her forever, sensations of home and childhood flared in her so vividly that she saw quartz reefs and dry grass, heard bark peeling in the stillness of the hot days, tasted dust from a willy-willy in her mouth, even as mushy snow settled over London. Funny about that, she wrote in an aerogramme home. Travel may broaden the mind but it also sharpens memory. She felt unlocked, better, now. In arthritic sentence fragments separated by dashes, a style best suited to postcards, she described Stonehenge capped with snow, fog on the M4, the mirrors of Versailles, Pozières, where Grandfather Ison had peered over the lip of a trench they called the Sunken Road, and the sea around the Greek islands as blue as the flooded shafts of the Pandowie mine. When she got home she found that every line had been published, unchanged, in the local rag. Mother, how could you, I sound like an idiot. Their first dead lamb, stretched eyeless and discarded in the dirt, distressed Anna’s children. Michael stamped his foot at the crows; Rebecca turned her back on the buzzing carcass. Then Michael was killed, and every year, in the dry months, when scorching winds and willy-willies and barrelling road traffic filled the air with dust, Anna could be expected to suffer. The dust brought back her guilt. She blamed herself for Michael’s death. Her husband blamed her—not in so many words, but she could sense it in him as though he wore a black hood. But he could surprise her. They were in the Land Rover. The door seals had perished and the dust poured in, bringing back her nightmare. She curled into a ball on the seat. The next moment, Sam’s hand floated from the wheel and rested briefly upon her knee: It’s all right, sweetheart. Anna has been gathering information about notable droughts for her Jubilee history. There is a useful quote from Grandfather Ison’s journal in the family reunion book:

  11 November, 1929. Isonville is hanging on by one small haystack and a horse trough. It is a starved and silent view we have on those chance days are not shut down by the dust.

  There will always be dust in Anna’s life. Even on the coast it will find her: streetlights coming on in the middle of the day; the neighbours discussing the TV news reverently; the famous front-page shot of the cloud closing in on the city. She will sneeze muddily into paper tissues rather than soil her handkerchiefs. She will close up the house and keep a glass of water on hand, for any faint grittiness between her teeth will bring on her panic. She’ll stay indoors, where she won’t have to listen to other old retirees from the bush who have known the real thing.

  Begetting

  Anna idled in the hall outside their bedroom, waiting for them to get ready. She paged through her Bible, passed on to her from Grandmother Ison:

  The Gospel according to Saint Matthew, Chapter One. 1. The book of the generations of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. 2. Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob begat Judas and his brethren. 3. And Judas begat Pharos and Zara of Thamar; and Pharos begat Esrom; and Esrom begat Aram.

  Anna, bumping her heels on the skirting board, heard: Oh Pete, I mourn my younger self. Anna peeked around the door. Her mother stood angled in disappointment at the dressing-table mirror, shoulders slumped, mouth down at the edges, her eyes gauging the swell of her hips, her middle: I’ll never go back to the way I was before I had the kids. Yes you will! Anna jerked back, knocking her forehead. It was her father, jackknifing from behind the wardrobe door, snapping his damp towel, his baggy underpants a stripe of white at the centre of his mad dancing body: You’ll always be desirable to me, Ellie. Love that bum. Love that bum. Peter, stop it. Anna saw her mother twist away, gasping, shrieking: Peter, we’ll be late, stop it. Anna flew through the door at him, swinging and kicking: Leave my mum alone. She saw finally that her parents were only playing, but the playing somehow made it worse. The Fathers and Sons Association instructed the boys, the Mothers and Daughters Association instructed the girls, a lecture with slides in the Institute, the parts of the body, the changes in the body at puberty. But who does what to whom? that’s what Anna wanted to know. Violet Flood was taken into care by the state. Only thirteen, she’d been doing it with shearers out on Showalter Park, charging a shilling a time. Violet resembled Chester, thin, hard and rawboned from poverty, her dark eyes expecting hurt and knowing little else. My age, Anna thought, and she’s pregnant. When Dr Pirie prescribed the Pill, Anna pranced around Maxine at school: Such a relief! She could not control her limbs; she wanted to dance; she felt need and greed stir in the pit of her stomach. Slut, they called her. Am not, she said. I take it for my periods, okay? A doctor at the university health centre advised Anna to go off the Pill: Five years is a long time without a break. There are side effects and possible long-term effects. Anna stepped outside, into the sunlight, onto the Union Building lawn, and it occurred to her that she hadn’t lost control but had more control now. She crossed the footbridge, light and giddy, daydreaming her way back to her room at the college. She could say to Lockie, who’d become such a pain, and say to the tutor, so inconstant and unimpressed that he hurt her every day, that she would not be making love to them for a while. Nope, don’t know when. When I feel like it again. That would show them. But Lockie didn’t hear the part about not making love. He heard only the part about going off the Pill. She hated the hope that reanimated his unhappy face: If you got pregnant, maybe they wouldn’t send me overseas. We could get married. Anna was able to pinpoint the conception day of her son. Sam Jaeger was a comfortable husband, a man of polite attentions, always with one eye looking over his shoulder at his parents, but Anna sneaked him away to a hotel beside the sea, and at last he relaxed, at last he wanted her. The sea wind stirred the curtains and Anna, feeling him pulse, knew at once that she was pregnant. She greeted Dr Pirie’s confirmation with a mild blink and a smile. She felt taller than the rest of humanity. She drove to the six-forty acres and sought out Hugo first, she didn’t know why. Because she knew he’d be the most genuinely delighted, that’s why. And Hugo—sentimental, unlucky in love, exasperated with their father—needed a shot of happy news. Then emotions began to chase through Anna, leaving her bewildered, changeable, stunned. She was elated, she was flat, her belly crawled with fear. She wrote: Dear Maxine, I’m writing to ask if we could be friends again. Maxine had two boys, three and eighteen months, and Anna watched, and listened, and learned. Maxine, jiggling her youngest: Everyone’s full of advice. You take what you need and ignore the rest. Like nipples, for example. I was told keep them oiled, I was told aim them at the sun ten minutes a day, I was told toughen them with an old toothbrush. She shrugged: If you’re the kind who gets sore nipples, you’ll get sore nipples. Anna had her baby, and suddenly found that her nerve-endings were responding to the slightest provocation. She felt a rush of milk in her breasts if Michael looked like an angel, if another baby cried, if another mother’s baby suffered in the new
s. She found herself unconsciously rocking, comforting herself, comforting those distressed babies. Her love was boundless, and she found herself wanting another baby, half thinking that another baby might check and absorb some of that love and keep it close to home. After lunch on a day in late September, the sun shaking off winter, the welcome swallows hauling pats of mud to the battlements of a new nest above the fuse box, she began to attack Sam, slapping and tickling him, coaxing him charmed and hot-faced down the verandah steps to the back lawn, where the rose hedge screened them. They awoke to Michael on his haunches, peering at them, reaching a hand out to Sam’s bare rump, while at the bottom of the hill the Mr bellowed: Sam. Where are you? Time’s a-wasting. The day that Anna made love to Chester Flood, she stood on his carpet, curling her toes, watching him come up for air. He trailed his tongue to her navel, flick, then to her ribs. He swayed back on his heels, assessing: A perfect left breast. Not that there’s anything wrong with the right. Anna pulled his head against them: I’m just glad to call them my own again. All that breastfeeding, I felt distinctly uninviting. He tugged on each nipple: You taste sweet, like a garden, like honey. Anna closed her eyes, blessing Connie, who had advised her in the ways of love many years ago. It’s rosewater, she murmured. When Michael was taken from Anna, she rocked and rocked, gazing at the wall. One day Rebecca came to her, seeking a cure for their unhappiness: Mum, can’t we have another baby? Anna clasped her daughter’s little head to her and rocked. Last year Carl Hartwig published a special liftout in the Chronicle to publicise the Showalter Park sperm-bank scheme. Anna found him working on the layout, juggling bromides: the artificial lake, workmen unloading Carrera marble, Lustre 8 with a Royal Show sash around his neck, a long, low building labelled ‘laboratory’, straws of semen sitting in a tank of frozen nitrogen, Mrs Showalter’s aquiline nose on the steps of the big house. Carl said, choosing his words carefully, not looking at Anna: It didn’t seem likely that you’d want to interview Wes Showalter, given your, you know, history with him, so I went out there myself. He shrugged: It’s quite a set-up. I’m tempted to invest. Anna said: Not me, thanks. When Rebecca and Meg have a baby Meg will be the mother. Birth mother, Rebecca says, holding a reminding finger in the air. Meg, spreadeagled on the hallway carpet before the sperm dies in the syringe—is that how they’ll do it? Anna wonders. Or will they make it more romantic than that? Will the sperm live for a while, long enough for them to get to the bedroom, for example? Anna would like to ask them these questions. She will not offer advice. Not to Meg, the older one, who strides through life; not to Becky, who will not listen. Meg, coming back fuming from showing the baby to some friends at work: I tell you, Anna, the breastfeeding police are everywhere. Anna will rock her granddaughter in her arms, walk up and down for hours to soothe her, and, catching her reflection in a mirror, think: And I’ve lost my young body.