THAT YEAR, THAT summer when Anna went to live in the commune, was the first year Bethany found herself alone. Alone, that is, in the sense that there was no man living in her house. Her husband, Peter, had left her the previous winter. He said he felt trapped. Peter travelled in his job, auditing government offices in the area; not long periods away, but each time it seemed harder for him to settle back at home. She always sensed his excitement when he was due to pack his bag for the week, but she believed it would pass. She ironed his handkerchiefs and put them in little stacks beside his freshly laundered white shirts.
Now she rose each day, her eyes red and heavy, to the demands of two small sons. At the end of the day, she read them stories and put them to bed on her own and couldn’t think where the hours had gone. When their lights were turned out, the house was so quiet she could hear herself breathe. After a while, she thought that the pain wouldn’t kill her. It was a summer when the grapevines she and Peter had planted together bore their first good crop. The leaves formed fans across the verandah, the weight and quantity of the fruit was excessive and smelled over-ripe.
‘I should make wine,’ she said to Gerald, the man she had begun to see. It was his idea. She hadn’t been looking for a man, but she liked the habit of sex.
He offered to help but the skins had begun to split, the grapes past their best. Sometimes Gerald stayed late at her house but he still lived with Janice, which was difficult. Gerald and Janice believed in zero population growth, so they didn’t have children. Bethany thought she was falling in love with him but it was hard to tell whether it was just the desire to fill the odd empty spaces in her house. His bulk and a kind of ruggedness appealed to her. He used to play rugby but had given up macho pursuits. He spoke in a cultivated accent about the evils of racism, the virtues of the anti-war movement, and the exact site of her erogenous zones. Your plumpness is so erotic, he told her. She should have known then.
When he wasn’t around Bethany sat on the verandah and smoked cigarettes and read books. She read Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and A Proper Marriage, novels in which she could sense her own uncut lawns and shaggy gardens, her children’s bodies, remembered heat, the weather, fevers, sex.
When Anna said she was going to live in the commune down Five Mile Road, Bethany was surprised but not shocked. Anna had been through some devastating times — she had said goodbye to her baby without ever holding him, she had lost her job at the school. The Freeways commune was on the outskirts of town, based in a neglected apple orchard. The trees were old, some of them planted at the turn of the century. They should have been taken out, local orchardists said, when the place went bust. Just because they were spreading and picturesque, covered with lichen, did not mean they should be allowed to stay. Their rot infected new trees when they were planted. Anna didn’t know all these details. What she knew was that, in the spring when she visited an old friend from her teacher training days, now living in the newly established commune, the orchard seemed enchanting, branches shimmering with blossom as far as the eye could see, petals falling on her face, an almost intolerably penetrating perfume surrounding her. As summer progressed the orchard became a dense green haven. Bethany, alone in her solitude, among her grapes and summer’s swollen plums, could see how it would appeal. The two sisters seemed not unalike in their circumstances.
THERE WERE TWO houses in the commune, one large plain two-storey dwelling, early twentieth century, with box-like joinery and bad plumbing, and electricity. Five bedrooms, one tiny kitchen, an enormous dining room with the same old kauri table that had been there since the house was built. Everyone on the property ate there together once a day, some sitting on battered chairs with rush-woven seats, others squatting, their backs against the wall as they balanced their plates in front of them. Further down the orchard was a worker’s cottage and, beyond that again, a packing shed. It was the packing shed that locals objected to — twelve people were sleeping in it, without sanitation, when the first petition was circulated.
Anna slept in the cottage, sharing one of its two rooms with a woman called Sheryl. On the window ledge stood a row of orange candles that provided the only light at night. The candles had dripped over the ledge and down the wall, leaving bright trails of wax. Papier-mâché peonies stood in an acid jar with ‘Poison’ printed in black letters on its side. Posters lined the walls. One said ‘Today is a new day’, and another, ‘Présence est immortalité: To exist is to co-exist’, and yet another showed a picture of a young man with long hair wearing glasses that reflected light — ‘You Can Hold it in Your Hands but Not in Your Mind’, the caption read. Other pictures were simply psychedelic collections of colours. These belonged to Sheryl.
The room next to them was occupied by Chris and Donna and their baby, Lucky, who had translucent skin and eyes like pools of dark honey. When he heard music his hands clasped and unclasped themselves as if they had a life apart from him, his delicate fingers tracing patterns in space. Chris and Donna both wore medieval clothes, their long hair falling from centre partings. They believed in astrology and Tarot cards, and in the spring, when Anna first met them, they stood in the orchard and read Shakespearean sonnets under the trees. Donna was learning to weave. Anna, who had relieved in homecraft classes when she was teaching, thought they could work out some patterns together. Chris was planning to make mandolins. Within a year, they reckoned on selling their wares in a yet to be set up craft market in town.
‘I wouldn’t mind living here myself,’ Gerald said. He and Bethany had driven over in Bethany’s rusting Beetle to look the place over.
Bethany had brought gifts, a pot of mint for Anna to plant near the stream, though Gerald said he thought this was ecologically unsound, and Anna looked equally doubtful, a platter of dolmades, because none of them ate meat, and a dish of spread made from aubergines and garlic.
‘You are getting exotic,’ said Anna with a laugh. She had collected a bowl of small, newly ripened tomatoes warmed by the sun. They spread out the food on the long table and rang a bell. The members of the commune emerged from various houses. At the time there were twenty-seven people living there. Most of them looked young and eager, although there were one or two older men and women accompanied by children, who looked more cautious and slightly bemused.
At the head of the table sat John, the commune leader, a cocky, fair youth with long, matted hair and a ginger beard. Bethany wondered why he was the leader. Anna muttered something about John having the economic savvy to get his hands on the property. Anna looked flamboyant, dressed in a gypsy dirndl. Her skin was dark and tanned. ‘When I think of the staffroom at high school. God, if they could see me. Uptight, thank God it’s Friday mentality, let’s all get boozed and discuss little Johnny’s problems, and then talk about our own. I’m out of all that. Yes.’
To her left was a girl called Cindy, a misty, apparently dreamy girl who had done well in school and was now walking around barefoot in a muslin dress. She smiled now and then, saying little.
‘Did you make these?’ Cindy asked, speaking to her for the first time, through a mouthful of dolmades.
‘Yes,’ said Bethany, ‘I did.’
‘Really? Actually made them?’ Cindy said it as if she was sending her up. Although it was not how she saw herself, Bethany guessed she looked conventional, dressed in an above the knee skirt and white boots.
‘It’s easy if you’ve got the patience,’ she said, a trifle more sharply than she intended. ‘And plenty of vine leaves, which I have.’
‘First catch your leaf,’ said Cindy, rolling her eyes, and somebody laughed.
‘No, listen.’ Bethany was suddenly determined. ‘They’re really simple. You just cook the rice and add some fried onions and enough olive oil to make it moist.’
‘Olive oil. Don’t you put that in your ears when you’ve got wax?’
‘I do buy it at the chemist’s,’ Bethany admitted, and hurried on, sensing the ridicule in their expressions. ‘Blanch the vine leaves in boiling salted water. And then, inside each leaf, lay a teaspoon of your rice mixture. You fold the leaf up like a little parcel.’
‘Do you?’ asked Donna, who was sitting to her right. ‘What stops the parcels from falling apart?’
‘You squeeze them together in the palm of your hand.’ Finding that she had captured the group’s attention, Bethany began to mime a fist curling into a cup. ‘Squee-eeze them, so.’ Following her, they bunched their fingers, visualising handfuls of the food they were eating. Slicks of the foreign oil had formed on their chins. She saw how they savoured the subtle flavour of the sauce.
‘Hey, that’s so clever,’ Donna said. She had torn an end off a newspaper from the couch behind her, and was jotting the information down with a pencil supplied by John. ‘Squeeze them together,’ she murmured, her voice lingering over the phrase. There was a rising heat of sexuality and sexiness in the room, to which Bethany could see she was somehow contributing. Gerald’s eyes were fixed on her face, John balanced a little tomato on the tip of his tongue and sucked it into his mouth.
Bethany, describing the addition of lemon and tomato juice to the dish of prepared dolmades, felt restored and maternal, as if she had created the harmony at Freeways on her own.
‘Wow,’ said Cindy. ‘Très compact. Uh-mmm.’ Again Bethany had the feeling of being mocked, but everyone else was rapt in their attention, as she gave Donna quantities to write down.
‘My sister’s experimental phase,’ said Anna, breaking the spell, and their attention turned to her. Gerald’s eyes slid over her face and back to Bethany’s.
‘DON’T YOU HATE not having hot water?’ Bethany asked her when they were leaving. The kitchen had become overcrowded and steamy. She had begun to feel headachy and dull, as if the effort of freedom was too much to sustain. They began to walk back to the cottage.
‘Trust you. I don’t even notice. We bathe in the stream half the time.’
‘So do you think they could make room for me?’ Gerald asked.
‘I expect so,’ Anna said. ‘I’ll have to ask John.’
John had disappeared into the upper part of the main house.
‘Shall I phone you?’
Anna looked fazed. ‘Come and see us next week, there’s only one phone at the main house. There’ll have to be a meeting about it, I guess.’
‘John seems a pretty laid back kind of a guy,’ Gerald commented, hoping to encourage her.
‘Yeah, he’s okay, when he doesn’t think he’s Jesus Christ.’ They couldn’t tell whether Anna was joking.
‘You wouldn’t really, would you?’ Bethany asked Gerald, as they were driving back to town.
‘I’m going to leave home,’ Gerald said, taking her hand in his. ‘It would be a good way to move on.’
Bethany understood what he meant. If they were going to be together, and Gerald seemed to have decided on this, an interlude at Freeways was better than a direct transfer from one household to another. Bethany was still married to Peter, although she supposed that was a technicality, one Peter had abandoned. Gerald stayed nearly until morning. ‘My wife is a heavy sleeper,’ he told her. They drank wine in bed. ‘Nobody holds things up to rigorous observation any more,’ Gerald said. ‘Your sister’s right, we’re too hung up on materialism. Who needs flash houses to be at one with the universe?’
‘This isn’t a flash house,’ Bethany said protectively, leaning back against the pillows and sipping her Velluto Rosso.
‘Well, of course it’s not,’ said Gerald, offending her. She rather liked her house. ‘It’s the principle I’m talking about.’
‘So we give in to chaos. Isn’t that where anarchy begins?’
‘Does it matter? That’s a rationale for not breaking loose, Bethany. Even Peter saw that. Bloody old Pete.’
‘Perhaps you should go now,’ said Bethany. ‘Your wife might have a bad dream.’
Gerald groaned, running his hands through his hair. ‘Think about pure nothing, Bethany. Perhaps Einstein was right. Perhaps the mountains aren’t mountains.’
But he made her laugh, he made her come. He said, I love you, which men who are screwing women on the side don’t always say. Pretty well never. She felt less lonely than she had for a long time. She had been reading another book, about a woman who travelled the country in a feckless way, following love and heartbreak. ‘It is hard to explain what I want to be and do and belong to, something that I cannot put into words, and if someone else puts it into words for me I say, “No, not quite that …”’
Her own certainties overturned. This felt closer to her experience than the faraway heroines in London. But Peter was the one who left.
There was a phrase that haunted her at the end of the novel. She returned to it over and again, and heard it in her head when she least wanted to. It was about ‘the road unwinding dreamlike before her’.
Perhaps, really, they were all heading in the same direction.
ALL THE SAME, things were moving faster than she anticipated. The next night, when Gerald wasn’t there, both the boys were fractious and heat beat down on the iron roof, keeping her awake. She felt afraid of the dark, not because she sensed danger, but rather because it would just catch up with her. Solitude didn’t sit well with her, after all, she decided. Perhaps she could go to the commune too, but there were the children to think of and that would defeat the point of Gerald’s move. Besides, there were some things she couldn’t get used to the idea of sharing, and she had never been able to recite sonnets. Although she remembers the line ‘for thy sweet love remember’d’.
As it turned out, Gerald didn’t go to Freeways. He came and went and their lives turned into a private commune of their own. Bethany took to wearing long, colourful dresses and let her hair grow down past her shoulders. Free and easy, it felt to both of them, until his marriage, if that’s what it was (they were learning to talk about relationships these days), wore itself out, and she was pregnant and the house felt filled with new presences, or ones to come. They were so poor they drank Chianti from basket-covered bottles and listened to Saturday Night at Home for entertainment.
YOU COULD TELL there was going to be trouble. Cindy’s parents came to visit with a box of food, and the next thing there was a fuss going on in town. Her parents were so upset about the defection of their clever daughter that they wrote to the local newspaper about the place. There were people sleeping on mattresses on the floor, and goodness knows what going on including, for all they knew, smoking dope. People wrote back and said if they couldn’t keep their cat in their own back yard there must be something wrong with them. The parents wrote another letter to the paper and said that the local council should be stopping the whole thing. As it turned out, John had done his homework, the commune was outside the borough limits.
The trouble came to a rolling boil when Freeways announced that it would host a rock festival. This was the second year of the commune’s existence. Posters sprang up round the town, stuck to telephone poles and walls. The city newspapers began to run stories. Five thousand expected at Freeways, said one headline. Ten thousand, said another. Young people are preparing for a mass exodus from the cities to the country, blazed another report.
Anna began appearing at Bethany’s round meal times, for the night, even to stay over for the weekend. She showered until the water went cold. Beneath her tan a gaunt look was beginning to emerge.
‘How many people are there now?’ Bethany asked one evening.
‘About fifty. It’s the kids sleeping in cars that gets to me,’ Anna admitted, in a rare burst of confiding that all was not well at Freeways.
‘I guess they’re old enough to make up their own minds.’
‘No,’ said Anna, wrapping her arms around her chest. She was wearing a skimpy buttoned cardigan, even though it was a warm night. ‘I mean little kids, three or four of them in a car with their parents. There’s grass growing up through the seats of some of the cars. They never go anywhere.’
‘Do you want to leave?’ Anna’s magnificent hair looked flattened against her skull.
‘Where would I go?’
‘You could come here.’
‘With your baby?’ Bethany had to strain to hear her, she spoke so quietly. ‘It’s okay,’ she said, straightening, ‘I have a great time there. I mean, I’m doing some paintings and drawings, I’ve always wanted to do stuff like that. Just a few hangers on, you know what I mean.’
Bethany felt afraid. It had seemed to her for some time that Anna’s life was like a mounting illness, that was about to culminate in something deeply serious. If it had a name it was probably loss.
Another time, Anna came on a foggy, wet afternoon, and sat on the verandah, staring moodily down the sodden garden. Bethany stood near the window, holding Abbie in her arms.
‘You need warming up,’ said Gerald. ‘Why don’t you bunk in with us for the night?’
‘You mean with you and Bethany?’ She held Gerald’s eye. Bethany felt herself stop breathing. ‘Have you asked Bethany about this?’
Gerald looked up at the window. ‘You’re disgusting,’ Bethany said, and laughed as if he had been making a joke. They all laughed then.
CINDY’S FATHER STARTED a petition. Cindy had left the commune and gone to work as a clerk in the police station. She helped her father circulate the petition, now that she had, as she said, seen the light.
‘It’s getting ugly,’ said Anna, on one of her visits.
‘Is that girl in danger?’ Bethany asked. ‘Are they going to do Cindy over?’
Anna was evasive. ‘We believe in non-violence.’
‘Then what’s bugging you?’
‘There’s spooks around, you can tell.’
‘God, this is New Zealand, Anna, you’re getting crazy ideas out there.’
‘Don’t believe me then.’
‘I’m sorry. So what’s actually happening?’
Anna’s face closed, then relented. ‘Look, why don’t you come over for the festival? You could bring the kids.’
‘They’ll get trampled,’ Gerald said, when Bethany mentioned it to him later.
‘So don’t you want to go?’
Gerald looked evasive. ‘I have to work overtime that weekend.’
‘I thought I might go for a little while.’
‘What about Abbie?’
Gerald was sounding as prejudiced as the townfolk. ‘You could look after her for a couple of hours, couldn’t you?’
Gerald sighed. He had grown his hair long and tied it back in a ponytail. He wore baggy shorts and a red cardigan and jandals. It helps me to relate with the kids better, he explained to Bethany.
It rained the weekend of the festival, like Woodstock. The mud along the unsealed road was ankle deep by the time the first hundred cars and motorbikes arrived. The stalls around the entrance to Freeways were waterlogged. It was just possible to make out the hand-painted signs, ‘Scarfs, $2’, ‘Macrame, $1’. The stall holders were vainly stretching plastic over their wares. Inside the gate some had begun to shed their wet clothes. Bethany saw Donna, bare-breasted with Lucky on her hip.
‘Some shit,’ said Donna.
Bethany thought there might already be a thousand people milling around. The packing shed had been cleared to create a long market of food stalls and the smell of garlic and onion and cooking fires curled through the wet air towards her over the sweet smoke of marijuana. Under a covered stand a band of five had just finished a number.
John jumped on the stage and grabbed the microphone. ‘It’s going to clear folks, forecast is for clearing weather, don’t go away, we’ve got some great numbers coming up, lots of hot food, somebody’s going down to town for a marquee, like we’re having a wedding here. Yee-hah.’
‘Yee-hah,’ chorused the crowd. ‘We’re going to be all right.’ ‘All right man.’ ‘Stay in peace, yeah?’ ‘Yeah.’
But the rain wasn’t clearing and people kept on coming through the entrance where the rickety wooden gate was pulled back against the fence. Bethany found Anna working a hot dog chain, spreading mustard on slices of bread. She looked up from her task, her face smeared with soot.
‘You’re wet. Where’s the car?’
‘I left it parked, there’s people stuck in the mud already.’
Anna put down her knife and drew Bethany aside. ‘Did you see anything, like funny, know what I mean?’
‘What sort of funny?’
A man with a beard paused in passing to place his hand on Bethany’s thigh. ‘Hullo sweetheart,’ he said, his eyes unfocused.
Anna pushed his hand away. ‘Fuzz. Spooks. We’ve heard there’s going to be a raid.’
Chris came up to them, a bundle of mandolins he had taken off his stall in a sack. ‘There’s cops and people down the road. We’re going to sit outside to stop them. You with us?’
‘Bethany,’ said Anna, ‘we’ve got to get out there.’
The crowd inside Freeways was melting out into the road, already sitting ten deep across the entrance. But there was a new smell, that of raw fear, like animals trapped. None of them had been in danger before. The rain fell, steady, vertical, wiping their faces clean. The more it rained, the younger the people from the commune looked, like children playing under hoses, the boys’ skinny ribs sticking out, the girls’ puppy fat rolled beneath their waists.
Clad in sturdy plastic mackintoshes and slouch hats tied under their chins, shod with rubber gumboots, the people from town were armed, the women carrying tightly rolled umbrellas, the men sticks and garden forks. And the police were with them, their cars forming a phalanx behind the vigilantes, moving steadily, unhesitatingly on, giving the impression that, when they arrived, they would simply mow down the group seated on the ground. Someone began to sing ‘We Shall Overcome’ with quiet desperation and the rest of the group took it up. The words stuck in their throats. The police cars did stop, the police sitting and watching as mayhem was unleashed.
The sisters stood up clinging to each other, Anna embracing Bethany.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Anna, ‘I never thought.’
‘It’s all right, darling,’ said Bethany. She wished she could get it through her head that childhood was over, that she couldn’t take care of Anna any more.
It was not all right. A man reached over the heads of the crowd, and half-lifted Anna above them, clearing a way through that Bethany followed.
‘Get in the car,’ he said, pushing them towards a heavy old Falcon parked close by the police cars. He opened the back door of the car and motioned them inside. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’ He reversed the car at a speed that was terrifying, given the people who were now pushing from the rear as well as from the way they had come.
The man drove without speaking, the two women holding each other.
‘I shouldn’t leave,’ said Anna. ‘There are kids back there. Some of them might be hurt.’
The man merely grunted.
‘Where are you taking us?’ Bethany asked. Near the town they were still passing groups of bedraggled festival goers walking towards Freeways, not knowing what was happening.
‘I should take you to the police station. You’ve been obstructing justice, you lot.’
‘I told you, Bethany,’ said Anna, ‘I told you the place was full of spooks.’
‘Name’s Des Callahan, security patrol.’
‘Who are you working for?’ asked Anna.
‘Nobody, ma’am. Just out seeing the fun.’
They had reached the outskirts of town; Des pulled in to a neat brick house with concrete-edged gardens, dahlias heavy-headed in the rain. Aluminium window frames, venetian blinds, chrome-yellow trim.
‘You people didn’t have a permit.’
‘We did so,’ said Anna. ‘I helped write the application.’
‘John said it had come.’
‘I’d ask John about that next time you see him.’
‘I have to go back,’ said Anna again.
‘And I’ve got to collect my car,’ said Bethany.
‘You’d better dry off.’ Des Callahan sat in the car without moving. It couldn’t be said, afterwards, that he had made them do anything they didn’t want to do.
‘Will you take us back, if we just come in for a minute?’ asked Bethany.
‘Spare me, I could’ve picked up some work back vere.’ They hadn’t noticed his speech impediment before. Bethany saw the way he looked in the rear vision mirror at Anna.
‘Why did you pick us up?’ demanded Anna.
Des leaned over and opened the door for Anna, not quite touching her arm. ‘Ma’am, I couldn’t give a shit show in hell about people like you as a rule. You once did give my boy a good word at school. You don’t remember me? Parent teacher night. Well, I don’t expect you would. You’re a bloody waste of a teacher if you ask me. What are you, sick or somefing?’
He walked ahead, producing a key out of his oilskin pocket, a man in early middle age whose hard chin gave the appearance of tilting slightly upwards like a gnome’s, eyes deep set beneath a low forehead. Inside, the house was clean, sparsely furnished. A cross (his wife’s, as it turned out) hung on the wall of the plain living room, a boy’s bike stood inside the doorway of the kitchen. There was a lack of texture in the house. Everything was smooth and unyielding — the floor coverings, mostly linoleum, even the chairs upholstered in a plastic material. This was the house of Des, the widower.
IT TOOK DAYS for the mud to dry out. The weather was erratic, spells of hot, steaming sunshine followed by fresh, hard showers. The festival had been called off but people still swarmed all over the place. The Health Department and welfare came down and removed some children. Anna told Bethany this, some weeks later, after she had left. Anna had gone back to Freeways the same night the riot broke out, passing Bethany’s overturned Beetle on the way. People on both sides had been arrested. The police turned back newly arriving festival goers; buses and military jeeps were called in to clear out others, but still, some managed to stay. Anna found Chris and Donna sheltering in one of the cars with Lucky.
‘What are you doing out here?’ she asked.
Someone moved into their room, they told her, while they hid in the orchard. ‘They’re spoiling, really pissed,’ Chris reported, after he had unsuccessfully tried to regain possession of the room. Anna’s room had been broken into but whoever had been there must have been bused out. All their things had gone; only the candles remained. Sheryl had gone too. Someone said she had decided to go south, down round Punakaiki way.
‘You’d better move in with me,’ Anna told them. ‘You can’t keep Lucky out here in the cold.’
The room was too small for the four of them. Lucky began to cough, a dry, retching kind of cough from his chest. They all stayed awake. The group in the next room banged on the walls to shut them up. In the morning Lucky was pallid and clammy.
‘We should get him to a doctor,’ Anna insisted.
‘Tomorrow,’ said Donna. She had smoked a joint and drunk some wine during the night, trying to get to sleep but it only made her high.
Lucky seemed better during the day. ‘His cough’ll break, for sure,’ said Chris. ‘I used to get colds.’
But by the middle of the second night Lucky, panting between bursts of his croupy cough, didn’t recognise them.
‘I can’t stand this,’ said Donna. ‘We’ll take it in turns to get some sleep.’ Donna gathered up Lucky in her arms. ‘I’ve got a blanket.’
The moon was struggling between the patchy clouds over the abandoned cars.
‘You can’t,’ cried Anna. ‘I reckon he’s got pneumonia.’
‘For Chrissake, Anna. Mind your own fucken business,’ Donna said.
Anna sat by the window while Chris dozed. She heard Lucky coughing. As she described it, Anna recalled the way everything seemed to have come to a head: the smell of the latrines in the dark, the faint scent of wild geranium, the eerie, distant crackle of thunder in the hills in the wake of the storm, forks of sudden garish lightning, the feeling that she was on her own, the possibility that she could make some difference, if she did try, this once.
‘Chris,’ she said, when it was their turn, ‘We’ve got to get a doctor.’ Chris blinked in the candlelight. ‘I’ll go up to the main house and call one.’
‘John won’t let you use the phone.’
‘He will.’
‘He’ll kill you, Anna,’ said Chris, his eyes big and frightened. ‘John’s been very very fucken unhappy about the way all this has turned out. He had a bottle of bourbon round afternoon tea time and he’s not seeing things very straight at all.’
‘Lucky’s going to die.’
‘The gods are just,’ muttered Chris.
‘Chris, Shakespeare’s not going to fucking save him.’ Her language had acquired the flavour of theirs, as if cursing might get through to them.
But Chris had passed out cold on Anna’s mattress.
‘I’ve got a knife, John,’ Anna said, when she woke him. More than that. It was a machete, bought the previous weekend for cleaving watermelons. The unused blade was bright and mean in the red lamps. She didn’t have to cut John’s throat, though that was what she promised. She took the tousled hair of his unconscious head and wrapped it round her hand, like Judith holding the head of Holofernes, after it has been parted from his body, and held the machete beneath his chin. He opened his eyes and promised whatever she asked.
Nobody was going to come to Freeways in the middle of the night. Not doctors. Not taxi drivers. Anna opened her wallet and took out a number, the last she could think of. Why didn’t you ring me, Bethany would say. I don’t know, Anna would say, and she didn’t. Although there was the ruined Beetle on the side of the road to consider.
‘I need help,’ she told Des. ‘Please, please come.’
Please God, she said, as they rode into town in the Falcon. Don’t let this kid die. Des offered to give him the last rites in the hospital parking lot.
‘Don’t waste time,’ she said. ‘Just don’t muck about.’ And ran. As hard as she could, Lucky in her arms, to the emergency entrance.
THERE WAS A small embarrassing scene when the head teacher asked her to visit. ‘I was going to say no,’ Anna told Bethany, ‘but I do need the money. Well, I thought it was worth half an hour of squirming, just to check it out.’ Her best friend from her old days on the staff, a woman called Marjorie, had put in a good word for her. Marjorie Ross was a solid country woman who had gone teaching just in order to leave home, as she put it. Anything, rather than stay home on the farm. She presided over Home Economics; they don’t know anything, these kids, she complained in the staffroom. D’you know, the other day one of them described toast as burned bread. Did you ever? Nothing like Anna at all. For those who didn’t know better, Marjorie might have been described as complacent. Anna listed loyalty as one of Marjorie’s shining virtues and left it at that.
‘We really need someone like you round the place,’ the headmaster said when Anna appeared in his office. She hadn’t bothered to dress for the interview; she wore a cotton T-shirt with COUNTRY BRATS written on the back, and rumpled slacks. ‘A lot of kids are dropping out of school, they need someone who understands them.’
Anna knew about the wave of baby boom kids growing up who were poor, come in from the country, violent, frightened children with only television English. And, since the commune had been abandoned, there were families living in condemned railway houses, people who had moved out but hadn’t moved on. A couple had kids in school. The parents were remote, untidy people who straggled along the main street on benefit day. There had been a court case over John, dope of course, as well as an illegal transaction over the land at the commune. If you caught them in an unguarded moment, their eyes were bitter and disappointed.
‘You think I’m respectable again?’ said Anna to the headmaster. ‘Couldn’t you do better than me?’
‘I’m sorry about what happened,’ he said, uncomfortable in the role of having to ask her. ‘We advertised the position.’
‘Nobody wanted the job?’
‘We had some applications.’
‘And?’ Anna knew she was entitled to extract the price of his humility.
‘Nobody was as good as you.’
‘Did Marjorie Ross tell you that?’
He was silent. It wasn’t until later Anna discovered, by accident, that Marjorie had threatened to resign if he didn’t give her the job.
‘I’m getting married soon,’ Anna told him, ‘to one of the boys’ fathers.’
He brightened. ‘So I heard.’
‘My old salary scale?’ Her face scarlet.
‘Assistant head of English — you’ll get a lot more.’
Anna sat back then, her knees slightly apart, hands behind her head and smiled at him.
NOW SHE HAD money, Anna wanted clothes. Armfuls and armfuls, she said. If I’m going to get married I might as well look good. She and Bethany scoured the shops but there was nothing Anna liked. In the fabric store she bought soft leathers and silk, her hands greedy when she felt them. ‘I’ll get it all made up,’ said Anna, when Bethany remonstrated at the amount and the extravagance. ‘I could get something made up for you as well.’
‘It’s okay, thanks. If you don’t mind, I’ve got to get back to the sitter.’
Anna caught her up in the street. ‘Don’t huff off on me. What’s the matter with you?’
‘Nothing,’ said Bethany.
‘Why don’t you and Gerald get married?’
‘Like you?’
‘What about me?’
‘You and Des. Don’t marry him, Anna. Honey, don’t do it.’
‘Don’t give me crap, Bethany, what’s the matter with you?’
‘I CAN HEAR you eating,’ Gerald said. ‘Have you thought of going on a diet?’
Bethany thought about it all the time. ‘I hardly eat a thing,’ she said. What she meant was, she was just hungry all the time.
ANNA RAN THE used clothing stall at the school fair. She put some things away for the boys. Bethany came down to the hall in the afternoon to see what she had. Anna held up clothes against herself, showing off the labels. Pleated skirts, velvet jackets that still held the imprint of brooches on their lapels, shirt-waisters, a voile silk skirt, a wrap-around skirt with a loose top to match.
‘Oh,’ said Anna, ‘I could get married in this old thing.’ She held the wrap-around suit up against her.
‘Very nice,’ said Nell Parker, fossicking at the other end of the trestle table. ‘I used to love wearing that outfit.’
‘Oh, was that yours?’ cried Anna.
Nell Parker had been a friend of Bethany and Peter’s, in the far-off days of their marriage and of Anna, too. She saw herself as a respectable woman; she hadn’t called Bethany for the last two years. ‘And how are you, my dear?’ she said to her now. She didn’t say m’dear, in that endearing fashion that has been adapted to intimacy, but as if Bethany were a recalcitrant girl. She ignored Anna altogether.
‘I love the gear you’re wearing now,’ said Anna smoothly.
Nell was clad in a red poplin boiler suit, belted at the waist.
‘Sydney?’
‘Yes, as a matter of fact.’
‘You look terrifically modern. I don’t suppose I could try it on?’ Nell looked nonplussed. ‘Oh, come on Nell,’ said Anna. ‘It won’t take a moment. We’ve got a little cubicle made up at the back of the stage. You’ll mind the shop, won’t you Bethany?’
‘Yes, go on, Nell,’ said Bethany, as if they were still friends, suddenly full of Anna’s malice.
Nell was discomforted enough to want to make amends. She hesitated, and gave in. The two women disappeared behind the curtain. Soon, Anna reappeared, parading herself. Nell’s face peeked out from behind the curtain, her hand over her mouth. ‘Shit,’ she said.
Anna looked magnificent, her hair let loose and tumbling across her shoulders, a cinch belt off the stall holding her tiny waist.
‘I’ll trade you,’ said Anna, taking Nell’s old suit off the stand, and throwing it towards the curtain.
‘You can’t do this,’ Nell said.
‘Are you coming after me?’ Anna called, laughing.
Bethany was doubled with laughter, waiting for Nell to chase Anna down the hall in her knickers. She knew it wouldn’t happen.
‘I’ll give you fifty, no make it a hundred, you won’t get a better offer than that.’ Anna took some money out of her purse, and threw it after the wrap-around suit.
Nell appeared in a few minutes, her face red and furious. Bethany remembered the time Nell told her, with sadness, that she couldn’t eat gravy any more with her roasts.
PHOTOGRAPHS. THIS ONE, she finds loose in the back of a book when she is dusting. The red boiler suit is what Anna wore to her wedding. She stands by Des, dressed in a stiff out-of-date blue suit, his crinkly thinning hair slicked back from his forehead, a worried look on his face, as if he didn’t know what he was doing there. Perhaps there is a look of pained disappointment already in his expression. Anna stands radiantly by his side, as if it is all perfectly normal, a white bouquet held against the boiler suit. You can tell, looking at it now, that it is all disaster ahead. Lyle was a skinny, tall boy whose acne resisted every treatment. He was addicted to squeezing pimples, in long, tortuous sessions in the bathroom. He didn’t want a mother.
‘You’ve got to be joking,’ Gerald had said, when he heard Anna was marrying Des. ‘That guy was in the military. He went to Korea. Besides.’ Besides what, he decided not to say.
He seemed to get over his aversion quite soon. All the same, he said Anna was wasted on Des. Anna was always being wasted on someone, Bethany thought.
FREEWAYS CAME UP for sale. The place was a ruin, only fit for demolition, the land agents said, but the land was rich. Fertile. A great market garden if everything on it was razed. ‘It’s not as bad as that,’ Anna reported. The cottage had burnt down before the last of the commune moved out, but the main house was intact, if you disregarded the bottles and tins lying around and a few broken windows. And the packing shed was fine. Not that it was much use to anyone unless they did plan to market garden. ‘If I had the money,’ Anna said, ‘I’d buy it myself. Eh, Petal?’ she said, squeezing Des’s cheek.
Des smiled, a silly, pathetic look of gratitude that he had been noticed. They were a match for Jack Spratt and his wife. Des had become more inward and old-looking, as if he was out of his depth. Almost overnight, he appeared diminished from the burly, key-swinging guard who had captured the sisters at the festival. Bethany was fairly sure they didn’t sleep together. Perhaps they did once or twice at the beginning, as some sort of honouring of the contract. But it was clear that Des slept in the big bed with dark, stained oak ends, in a room that showed no sign of Anna. In the next room, Anna’s make-up stood on the dressing table and the single bed was covered with a bright Indian-weave spread.
Yet there was something about Des that told Bethany he knew Anna as a wife. There was a term she remembered from the schoolyard, a grubby phrase, but she couldn’t get it out of her head. When Des looked at Anna, what she thought was, he’s cunt struck. Whenever she came near him, he furtively touched her arm or her wrist, as though she might dissolve if he did not confirm her reality to himself.
At first it had appeared that he knew nobody in town, despite his long residence there. But gradually it became clear that he knew a great many people at a distance. As though he had been watching them, Bethany thought, and shivered. The people he did know were from the church his wife had attended before her death. Some of the women came to the church, wearing black, to watch him marry Anna. None of them came near him, after the wedding.
So that, in the beginning, he and Anna were out on the same kind of limb as Bethany and Gerald, still pursuing their sinful private existence. In spite of himself, Des liked visiting them. It made Anna more content. And Bethany found she didn’t mind Des singing ‘Land of Our Fathers’ like Harry Secombe, whether the All Blacks were playing Wales or not. ‘Wales, Wales, Wales’, they all sang, stamping their feet, until her boys woke up and poked bleary faces round the door. Des cried when he sang, emotion so naked it frightened her sometimes. But it was real feeling and lately Bethany had found that this had become a blurry subject.
THEY STAYED UP all night and talked when Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance came out.
‘We were before our time,’ said Gerald to Bethany. ‘I told you to think of the gap in the mountains.’
‘He thinks he’s Phaedrus,’ said Bethany, and Anna laughed. Only Des, who hadn’t read the book, was silent.
‘Actually, you told me that the mountains might not be mountains.’
‘It’s the same thing,’ cried Gerald.
‘I don’t think it is,’ said Bethany.
‘You’re talking about the existence of matter.’
‘I’m talking about what matters. I’ve been thinking,’ he said, suddenly portentous. Bethany didn’t like him when he was like this, expecting everyone to hang on his words. ‘I wouldn’t mind buying Freeways myself.’
‘Dreams are free,’ laughed Bethany. She could feel danger brushing her cheek. But there wasn’t much to laugh about these days. She wanted to be a couple with Gerald. ‘What would you do if you lived at Freeways?’
‘Make clay pots.’ Gerald had been going to pottery night classes for the past year. ‘I reckon there’s a huge market for domestic pots out there. Gardens are coming back all the rage. I could build a kiln out the back. That packing shed would be brilliant for displaying them.’
‘Very tempting, sweetheart.’
‘No, seriously. Would you come and live out there?’
‘Where are you going to get the money?’
‘We could sell this place,’ he said easily. The room had gone quiet.
‘No,’ said Bethany.’
‘Think about it. What’s so great about this?’
‘You’ve mentioned that before,’ she said stiffly. ‘Anyway Peter’s still got money in it. I wouldn’t get that much out of it if I sold.’
‘No, perhaps you wouldn’t,’ he said, and poured them all another drink.
AFTER WORK, THE next evening, Gerald carried a bundle of papers when he walked into the house, not quite meeting her eye.
‘Busy day?’
‘Hell, really. We’ve got an inspection on at the office.’
He put the papers down on the bench beside her, not wanting to comment on them, but meaning her to see them. The top paper was a signed option on Freeways.
‘Gerald! How?’
‘A bit of money I had tucked away.’ The paper mentioned a deposit of forty thousand dollars.
‘But you haven’t got that sort of money.’
‘Well.’ Shifting from one foot to the other. She remembered his father the bishop, purple and gold, she supposed. The bishop had been dead for years. He threw me out, Gerald once told her, in a moment of pathos.
‘Gerald, have you been sitting on money you haven’t told me about?’
‘I’m offering to share it with you now.’
‘I think you’d better go,’ said Bethany.
‘I don’t get it,’ said Gerald, leaning against the fridge door.
‘Get out of my way, I need some milk.’ Bethany began to push him, but found herself beating his chest with her fists. ‘Fuck off, Gerald.’
He caught her wrists and held them in the air. ‘You know your trouble, you just want to have control over everybody. You’d have had control over my money years ago if you knew I had it.’
‘You believe that?’
‘Well, look how you’re carrying on. I mean, look at you.’
Bethany did look, but at him, his laziness, his arrogance; she thought about what he had taken from her. She wondered what on earth she could have found attractive. Flashing before her, that summer when she had been alone, a vision lurking at the back of her consciousness for the past year, but she wouldn’t admit to it. That solitude, it was still tempting.
‘You’ll see the kids then?’ She didn’t know whether it mattered to the boys or not. She was ashamed of how little she knew what they thought these days.
‘What’s this about, Bethany?’
‘You don’t get it, do you?’
‘You’ll be over this in a few days.’
‘It’s not my period.’
‘Then what? Tell me.’
‘Trust.’
‘You’re acting as if we’re finished. There’s nothing to stop you from coming to Freeways,’ Gerald said. He took a beer out of the fridge and flicked off the top. ‘I’m still Abbie’s father. That seems kind of important, that a kid has a father.’ Playing Peter’s absence against her.
‘I expect you’re right.’
‘It’s a change in direction. We can work it through. You’ll be surprised how this thing will go. I’ve done all the research. You’re not going to stop me, are you?’ Knowing that she couldn’t stop him doing anything.
No wonder the bishop had thrown him out. All the same it wasn’t just over, the way she had, for a moment, imagined it might be.
ANNA WENT OUT to help Gerald set up the pottery at Freeways. It’s not because he’s such great company, she explained to Bethany, it’s just that I always could see what it could be like out there if it was properly run. Three young people were employed by Gerald, two strong men and a woman who, Bethany, gathered from Anna, was there mostly to do the cooking and cleaning up.
‘It sounds like him,’ Bethany snorted. ‘I’ll bet he pays them peanuts.’
Though it was astonishing how much money Gerald appeared to have to spend on the project. Bethany herself didn’t do much cooking or cleaning in his absence. Solitude was great, and it relieved one of the need to make much effort. She read, she smoked, she lay on the bed, her face upturned to the ceiling, and looked at nothingness. In the summer the kids went out into the bush, and she liked the quiet, the requirement to do absolutely nothing.
But Gerald did better than anyone expected. His glazes were deep and richly coloured; Bethany could see that perhaps he had found something he could do, after all. They didn’t say they lived apart; sometimes Bethany thought she had made a mistake not going with him. She wondered, occasionally, what she would say the next time he asked her to join him. But he didn’t.
HERE IS ANOTHER picture, one of herself she keeps at the back of the album. The face of the woman is bloated and strange, her clothes dowdy and unkempt. It is a photograph kept only because it is the last one her son Ritchie took of her, with the last gift his father ever sent him, a fancy new camera with a flash. It is one of a series of photographs her sons took over one holiday, when they camped outside at nights, like wild animals. Their bony, bare-chested bodies, the tiny biceps they flex as they look at the camera, a cigarette she never even thought of them having at the time. But why should she? For nearly two years her children were people she saw in a dream. Now she wonders, were they afraid at nights?
WAS SHE TOO hard on herself? At the time, she did know that the boys were, more or less, safe.
‘I’ll keep an eye out for them,’ Des told her, on one of his visits. He had taken to turning up unannounced. Anna was away at teachers’ in-training courses, at conferences on children with special needs, at Freeways, helping Gerald. Bethany didn’t know whether Anna was having an affair with Gerald or not. She was sleeping with someone — you could tell from the way she glowed, the secret, amused smiles she gave the world, the way her eyes wandered off into space when she was talking to you. She was smitten with someone, not Des.
It never was.
Over the summer, Des prowled round at night, watching over her boys, out there in the wild. He had a regular round through the town, checking on business premises that hired him to guard their properties against burglary. Crime was rising. People were afraid of the way the town was changing, gone out of control; it started when that bunch of weirdos settled out at the commune.
Not that there was any problem with the place now, very productive, buses carrying tourists visited the thriving little industry that had sprung up at Freeways. The owner showed people around at the weekends, wearing tight jeans and a white shirt open to the waist, a gold chain nestling in his chest hair.
Des sometimes sat with his hands hanging between his lap, a far-off look in his eyes. ‘I said to her, where were you? Where did you go last night?’
‘What did she say?’ Bethany knew it was expected of her to ask this, but she hated herself all the same for doing so. A betrayal. Her sister.
‘Said nuffing. I could follow her, you know.’
‘But you wouldn’t, would you?’
‘No, no I wouldn’t.’
Bethany was appalled. Poor bastard. You don’t want to know. Christ, Anna. There was something unravelling there in front of her, like a piece of knitting falling apart; she couldn’t pick up the stitches, her fingers like sausages, fat and clumsy.
‘I do love her, you know,’ he said, one morning, gulping down coffee. ‘I love Anna.’
‘Of course you do.’
‘Never fought I’d love anyone else after the wife died. Married her for Lyle’s sake, which you might say was a mistake. But not for me. You’d never know. Never know, Befany.’
‘Never know what?’
‘How much I want her near me. Just so I can watch the fings she does. Watch her when she’s asleep. Go into her room and watch her breeve.’ He paused, tears watering at the edge of his eyes. ‘I watch her hanging out the washing, arms up, you know, looks like she’s dancing.’
Bethany worried about Des, although she told herself it wasn’t her business. Des had shaved his skull like a storm trooper’s, a scary look, but he said it was good to feel light round his head.
‘He doesn’t look okay,’ she told Anna. ‘He said he’s got headaches.’
‘Who hasn’t got headaches?’ said Anna, with impatience. ‘Everyone gets them.’
Des had come in with a big bruise on his forehead.
‘I banged my head,’ he told Bethany.
‘How did you do that?’ she asked, thinking he had walked into something, or an object had fallen on him.
‘Like this.’ He stood up and banged his head against the wall, faster and faster, as if she wasn’t there. When he stopped his eyes seemed adrift.
‘He said he couldn’t see straight,’ Bethany told Anna.
‘I’ll say he can’t,’ said Anna. ‘I wish he’d sort Lyle out. I’m sick of that boy — he’s the dirtiest kid you ever came across. Just about as untidy as you.’
‘Well thanks for nothing.’
‘I’m sorry, but honest to God, what are you doing to yourself, Bethany?’
The sisters seemed to be asking the same questions of each other. ‘Do you have a death wish or something?’
After Ritchie’s funeral Anna cradled Bethany in her arms. ‘Sister,’ she said, ‘sister, what have we done to ourselves?’ They stood in the funeral parlour beside Ritchie, his little glassy freckled face with its downy upper lip. His mauve eyelids were like those of a choir boy.