a small stream
When we were both twenty, Hetty and I went to stay on a farm about an hour’s drive north-west of Melbourne. Hetty and Sean hadn’t been talking for weeks—they were on a break that I hoped would last forever—and she’d asked me if I would come with her to stay in a house on a farm that had within its boundaries a small school run by the author of young-adult books that were popular when we were growing up. The school was deliberately separate from the mainstream, and the pupils were treated like budding creative scholars with things to offer and a capacity to learn about the land. We would help out with the running of the place and stay in the old farmhouse for free, and it seemed like the right time for me to do something, anything, and for Hetty to get away.
We drove there in my white Corolla, coated with a reddybrown dust by the time we arrived, and played Laura Marling down low on the broken stereo, which I remember felt comforting. Hetty was hopeful that this time away in the bush would help her decide what to do with her life and about Sean, and I wanted to join her.
When we arrived it seemed as if nobody had been expecting us. It was a beautiful hilled property, with the school in a small domed building up near the highest part. The farmhouse we would be staying in was to the side and we were guided there by a man called Cliff, who was too tall and had the quietest voice—as if he was telling us secrets. He helped us with our bags across the creek, showed us to our little rooms side by side, and then he left, telling us we could get a lift to town later to pick up groceries for our dinner, if we needed.
There didn’t seem to be a kitchen, but eventually we found it: a small separate room, clinging like a clam to the side of the hill. We were so hungry we didn’t feel fussy. I found some spaghetti in a cupboard and boiled it with salt and margarine from an old fridge for us to eat. Out on the verandah, sunk in to a comfortable outside couch with a bowl full of golden noodles, I was glad to be there. It smelt like cut grass and scraps, and there was a hog watching us from across the garden, his thick body dirty behind a wire fence.
We found out the next morning that the hog’s name was Bill. He was businesslike when we went to feed him—a big bucket of half-finished yesterday’s lunch from the school and some spotty bananas—and immediately began huffing it down with his tiny tail wiggling. I wanted to pat the white-pink-dust hairy skin of his back, but I had been told once that hogs could be vicious, even though this didn’t seem likely now that I had met one. Hetty leaned over and ruffled his big ears. He ignored her entirely. Cliff was with us, and he whispered words of encouragement to Bill across the fence as he ate.
We had woken early that first day, and once dressed had wandered up to the school and found ourselves in the midst of morning-tea prep—a kitchen full of sturdy women in aprons slapping buttered bread slices upon buttered bread slices onto laminex benchtops. Hetty hadn’t seemed fazed. She told the sturdiest woman who we were and why we were there, and the woman introduced herself to us as Belle. She told us she supposed we should meet with the author, David, and took us out of the main dining area and across a bit of grass to another, smaller building.
It was strange, knowing we were about to meet the man who had written books I had read over and over when I was younger, someone I had imagined to be so mysterious and intelligent that he couldn’t possibly be living a life I could see for myself. After Belle knocked on the door we waited, and then she knocked again. I looked across at Hetty as we stood there and noticed she was standing tall and serious, her face poised.
Just as Belle raised her small red fist to knock again, the door opened. The man standing there was tall and grey, with strong shoulders. He wore a red wool jumper full of holes and jeans, and behind him I could see rows and rows of books on shelves, from the floor to the ceiling. He smiled lightly, as if he understood something beyond us, and as Belle told him who we were I watched his face move to say hello. There was an air of quiet to him in that moment that stayed, despite how much we went on to talk to him and to hear him talk, despite all his words.
Hetty shook his hand too long and stared—I remember that because he commented on it, gently, and we laughed. He thanked Belle and she left to get started on ‘lunch for the ratbags’. I felt their personalities separate against each other as she left and started across the flat ground towards the kitchen. She was no-nonsense in her capability and foresight, her face like the dawn sun. He was complex and faltered against his own darkness.
We did all sorts of things during those few weeks. Pulling weeds, mixing cakes, sitting in the nurse’s station with the delicately injured children while she had her lunchbreak, watching for brown snakes as we mowed the angry grass. I drove us around and up and down bump-hills in the ATV, with Hetty hanging on behind me, her warm arms wrapped around my stomach, my heartbeat a little quick. We picked apricots and plums in the orchard, and ate too many; we lay around in the library after all the kids had gone home, letting the cool air indulge us as we read and rested. We talked to each other, as we always did, and were free with our thoughts about the place and what was happening there.
A tiny school for children whose parents wanted a different sort of education for them—a special one. A teacher who seemed to understand young people in the way he wrote and spoke, as if he wasn’t that far away from that time in his own life, though he was. A thick bush surround, with creek maps. I told Hetty I wondered if David was too critical of mainstream education, that it might be a bad thing that he wasn’t open to it, that his vision was idealistic and inaccessible. Hetty disagreed in her easy way and told me she thought he was the realistic one.
I got very sunburnt one afternoon a few days before we were leaving and had to go to bed early, placing a wet towel over my red chest and naked body, with the fan on and near. I felt sick and thirsty, and wished I was back in Melbourne, where there was less dark and more noise outside the windows. Hetty decided she would go alone to a dinner that David had invited us to—after I insisted over and over that I would be fine—and I was sad to see her go. It was at the house of a friend of David’s who also taught at the school, and we had been so excited to be asked, feeling it was confirmation that David liked us and thought we were interesting. I see now he was likely being polite, and using the dinner invitation as a way of thanking us for our time on the farm, but we were hopeful back then, and unsure of our worth, and this edged our minds towards the grandiose.
After she had left, dressed in a linen shift with nectarine lipstick, I tried to rest. It was a slow night and I woke often, getting up to let my bladder loose of the large amounts of water I had drunk to ward off heatstroke, noticing each time that Hetty hadn’t returned yet. Her bedroom door was wide open and the light of the moon made her untidy bed glow. It looked so empty without her long, edged body. I didn’t worry, because I was too hot and sore and tired.
I woke early in the morning and pricked my ears to hear Hetty in the next room, snoring, but there was nothing. When I got out of bed, slowly to avoid the crinkling of my damaged skin, and went to check, she was still not there. I wondered who I could check with, who might know where she was, and whether it was too early to do so. Outside the grass was dewy and I could see Bill behind the fence sleeping in a dried-up mud bath, his fleshy face slack against the dirt. I didn’t know where I was going, but walking up the hill towards the school felt purposeful, and I could see people rushing around preparing for the new day, which eased my anxiety.
No one in the kitchen area or the eating area or the nursing area had seen Hetty. I kicked at grass and walked around the grassy hill behind the main building deciding what to do, and could only think of the author, David, and how he had seen her last, at the dinner, and how he would be the one to know where she was, if anyone did. It didn’t feel right to go and knock at his office door, as we had done on the first day with the support of Belle, but I couldn’t think of anything else that would be easier, or more helpful, and I reasoned that he would probably not even be in there yet.
It was still early, and there were still signs of dew. No children had arrived for their day yet, and breakfast was still a plan in Belle’s head rather than a pile of egg sandwiches. I carefully moved myself down towards David’s office, making sure to go slow and sideways like a crab. It was slippery and steep, and I was sleepy.
He answered his door almost as soon as I had finished quietly knocking. He was smiling in his knowing way, and beckoned me in before I could tell him I was there to find Hetty. Further inside was stacked with books—piles and piles of them hiding other piles, a bookshelf absolutely crammed. They were teetering and worn, well loved.
‘I’m looking for Hetty,’ I told David after he had asked me how I was, and I had politely answered.
He raised his eyebrows and laughed, took his glasses off and looked to be wiping at one of his eyes.
‘Hetty? She not back yet?’
He told me that she had stayed on at his friend’s place after dinner, too tired to journey back to the farm and not able to get to the car for a lift with David and his wife. I understood this to mean she had been drunk, and I pictured her sleeping on a couch in an imagined house, with big windows and tall gums watching her from outside.
David smiled a small smile and told me not to worry. It had been a pleasant evening; she would be back soon; his friend would give her a lift as soon as she woke. I cringed for her inside, and made myself laugh lightly, to make sure it was nothing. Hetty drank when she was nervous—more than me because it gave her pluck rather than a muddy head. I hoped she hadn’t lost herself.
That evening, after Hetty had returned and recounted, with lifted shoulders, details about David’s friend’s house and the meal they had eaten and the way she had woken up without any memory of why she was there, arms covered in thin sleep lines from lying in one place too long, we ate eggs on toast on the verandah and swatted the mozzies away. I made mine into a sandwich, and Hetty sliced hers up into tiny yolky squares, and I let the feeling of her next to me make me happy, as I often did. She didn’t apologise for scaring me. I liked it that way. We laughed at Bob snuffling some banana peels and planned our trip home along the Ring Road.