August walked along the driveway and up to Southerly. Around the perimeter of Southerly House was a bandage of green grass. There were no native plants in the Falstaff garden, only hedges, tulips, half-century-old rose bushes and the fruit grove. The house was painted pumpkin with a grey trim, but it used to change every few years: Dulux blue gum, Dulux crème, Dulux terracotta. August had paid very close attention to the Falstaff house. She was always hiding in the bushes or trying to get in the door one way or another.
There had been bigger differences from Prosperous than little – but the little had been on the outer walls – the gable ends had ornate patterns, the woodwork carved with intricate grooves, trim was polished, there were two fountains, solar garden lights and a two-toned, diamond-shaped pebble path that ran to their verandah, and they had a yellow hose rolled neatly on a special hose-holder by the house. They’d always had a Welcome brush mat at their front door that looked as if it had never been used. There was no mat anymore, Southerly was different, that bandage of grass had grown out but Eddie hadn’t bothered to attend to it. The whipper snipper was for sale now. It lay on the altar of the ute’s flatbed like a crucifix. There was no point cutting grass when it’d be rubble soon. Eddie saw August approaching and wrapped his arms around his chest, pausing for her. He’d paused his whole life for her.
‘Saw ya nan – she seems alright?’
August walked up to the foot of Southerly. ‘Think that’s how she copes, keeping busy.’
‘How’d you cope …’ he stretched his arms aside his body, that had filled out since he was a teenager, ‘for the last ten years?’ He looked at her watching him pull a collared shirt on and his face blushed, his face that August noticed was a fully grown man’s and no longer a boy’s.
August heard a pulse in her ear, looked away and sat on the step. ‘With what?’
‘Everything … you know …’ Eddie trailed off, sat beside her. ‘Did you ever hear from your mum?’
She hadn’t, and had stopped trying years before. She figured her mother was ashamed, and buried by it, that she’d crossed a line between sad and mad.
‘Nah.’ She reached into her pocket, lit a cigarette.
Eddie nudged her, ‘Go on.’ And she passed him the packet and a sleeve of matches.
He lit his cigarette and stole a look at her thighs, bare below her shorts.
‘You eat much?’ He could see it.
Her pulse became a thump in her ears, her tone defensive. ‘Yeah.’
‘You look different.’
‘How am I different?’ She knew she was, but didn’t know how. She couldn’t remember what she was to anyone before. It felt as if she’d arrived at the person she was in the last decade without a choice. As if she resembled nothing so much as the face and name she was before. It was as if she couldn’t remember herself the way she was supposed to be.
‘You’re still yourself, I didn’t mean it in a bad way. You just look changed.’
‘So do you,’ August said, but didn’t say aloud that she thought it was an improvement.
‘You got a Pommy bloke, I guess?’
‘No.’ There was something stuck between them. The old times that neither of them wanted to be aired. All the unsayable things.
He went on, ‘Of all the places, I can’t believe you went to England!’ Eddie undid his bootlaces, kicked them off.
‘Why?’ she said, thinking as she had thought as a kid, and still at eighteen, that England was where kids were born pure, with teatime and school head teachers, and long socks and boiled sweets and miniature sailboat races along icy rivers. Childhoods like in the old books she’d read.
‘I dunno, because it’s not your heritage. ’Cos Australia’s still pink.’
‘What’s that mean – Australia is pink?’
‘On the world map – pink, isn’t it? You’re a British subject even if you’re a Gondi!’
He laughed then, but August couldn’t laugh. They’d joked like that when they were kids, but she’d grown out of it. Seeing August’s stone face made Eddie wish he hadn’t said the thing. He began to button his shirt to the throat, trying to hide the provocation in flannel.
‘Sorry, it’s just a joke,’ he offered.
‘Why did you stay here then?’ August dragged on the cigarette.
‘For the view, and who else is gunna do it? No bastard.’
She blew smoke into the hot air, away from the conversation.
‘So you got a fella, or what?’
‘What do you care?’
‘I care,’ he said, and looked to find her eyes – her eyes that met his. They scanned each other’s faces for a moment. Eddie leant into the small curl of August’s lip as if it suggested an invitation.
And they kissed, just like that. Just enough that their lips were touching, that their faces were magnified and momentarily blocked the sunlight, a tiny truce.
She turned away, stubbed the cigarette and stood, ‘I gotta go,’ she began to make her way to Prosperous, ‘and help nan.’
‘Alright?’ he said, confused, but she was too far away to hear.
‘Can I help?’
Elsie sat a pot of onions ahead of August. They cooked all afternoon and the heat brought in the wafts of the drying wheat. Elsie let August make the sticky white rice, and only chimed in to spill a dash of coconut milk into the murky bubbling water. She then had August cube the hard carrots and black radish and pick the coriander and green onions. Elsie took over stirring and added the brown sugar, aniseed and ginger and specially ordered red paste, and fish sauce. She dropped the pieces of chicken into the sauce. Her nana was glowing when she was cooking. Then she shook the little orange-and-black tin above the pot and the entire house reeked of Keen’s curry powder.
The smell of the kitchen reminded August of the kids at school holding their noses as she sat down to eat her hot lunch, the students gawking back from their cut-crusted, soccer-ball ham sandwiches, their packets of Smith’s salt and vinegar, their frozen juice poppers. There were other kids that got the same gawks: Jody, who spent the lunch hour begging other kids for ‘a bite’ or for ‘ten cents for a sausage roll’; Luke, whose mum worked at the local motel and who always had hotel butter pats and a single roll of bread, and would sit in the schoolyard preparing his sandwich. There was also August’s friend Louise, who ate cold noodles with chopsticks from a clear plastic bowl. If she wondered about division at school, they were divided only by being poor and more poor. Valley, or Mission farm, or suburb poor. There is something to food, August thought, no longer ever hungry but forever hungry – it made them different or the same.
Eddie had been at a different school. Had he been thinking about her since school, she wondered. Had he really wanted her heart, all broken too early, with its missing bits already? Or just wanted to kiss her because he was sorry, because he knew Jedda and Poppy too, because everything was beginning again or finally ending? She didn’t know. She cared, but tried not to. Not then, not with everything else she needed to care about.
Later Aunt Missy arrived and Aunt Mary, Aunt Betty and Aunt Nora too, who’d grown up with Poppy and then without Poppy, at and then away from the Station. Elsie wiped her hands, set the wooden spoon on the sink and retrieved the linen. She handed August the stack of laundered sheets and sent her out to make up the annexe beds while she and the Aunties continued cooking.
The annexe doors had bolt locks without bolts on the outside; inside every surface was thick with dust. August, having worked most areas of the pub, even the bed-and-breakfast rooms, knew where to start, and opened up the windows first, leaving the doors ajar. Outside she shook the pillows, brought them in and concealed the yellow of them in patterned cases. She flipped the sagged mattresses and tucked the stiff sheets over them, tucking in the thoughts of how many had rested there before. She swept the floor, hung the wool blankets outside on the line and beat them with the worn broom until they shed all the flakes of skin and dust. Bringing the blankets in one by one, she laid them edge to edge on top of the sheets, turning the linen down to make an inviting triangle over each blanket. In the shaded area around Prosperous, she cut stems of native orchid. She didn’t spot Eddie working in the field. She placed the flowers in water tumblers on each of the four side tables.
One side table had a shallow concealed drawer with a little groove at the top. August jiggled the drawer unstuck. A Holy Bible lay inside. She took it out and sat on the made bed. This is a book, her poppy had said the first time he placed one in her hands, speaking with fortified sureness. I want you to read it as if every sentence inside is a lie and, if you find anything true, I want you to write it down.
She hadn’t known if it was a trick or a challenge, but he’d assured her she’d get a dollar coin every time she was right. It had been therapy in his mind, for Jedda being missing. She remembered how she’d filled half an exercise book over summer holidays, and was looking forward to a good amount of candy-buying money at the end. He’d rewarded her with two dollars for the trouble. August had looked through the pages of quotes she’d written and found the two marked ‘Yes’ by her poppy, with a circle around the words. She could only now remember the first. It was Proverbs, Death and life are in the power of the tongue.
August took the Bible out of the annexe and dropped it into the wheelie bin beside the house. It was never the book she was searching for.
Elsie’s energy level had changed since August arrived. She’d charge on keeping busy like a train getting up a hill, and then would slow and become silent again, coasting down the decline. After the Aunties retired in the annexe beds, neither Elsie nor August ate the curry, they instead took turns making tea for each other. In the evening they cooked some more, a stew and a vegetable lasagna. All the dishes were cooled and Tupperware-sealed, placed into the fridge for the farewell.
August poured two glasses of wine she’d picked up from town, downed one quickly over the sink and then filled it up to a polite level. Elsie was ironing lengths of white tablecloths along the dining table. The iron steamed while she massaged her hands, waiting for the pain in her knuckles to pass. August placed and then nodded at the wineglass. ‘I can do the ironing for you,’ she offered gently, not wanting her nana to feel she couldn’t very well do it herself.
Elsie took the glass with one sore hand and flicked the cord from the outlet with the other. ‘Did you eat anything today?’
August wanted to ask her the same thing, but they just let the question hang there. The sad, shrinking women.
‘Should we sit outside?’ August said instead, and pushed the glass door along its track.
They settled on the twin outdoor chairs, the cane bones cushioned with fleece throws. Spike padded up the deck and dropped onto Elsie’s feet.
‘Was Poppy writing a book? Eddie told me that he was.’
‘No, he was writing things down on paper – a sort of dictionary – he was trying to remember the words. He’d been writing it for a month or more.’
‘Can I see it?’
‘I can’t for the life of me think where it is, Augie. Have a look in his office, I’d like to see that too.’
They sipped their wine. ‘I’ll look again,’ August said.
‘Yingaa, that was one of the words I saw him writing on those pages.’
‘Yingaa?’
‘It means yabby, the bush lobster, you know …’ Elsie sipped and added enthusiastically, ‘Our first date was eating yabbies.’
‘You and Pop?’
‘He brought me out here,’ Elsie held her glass ahead of her into the dark. ‘It was the first time I visited Prosperous. He walked me out to the dam and told me all about yingaa. City-girl I was then, I didn’t know anything about yabbies, never had ’em before! I told him that and he ran back to the house and I followed him. Inside,’ Elsie shifted to turn to the kitchen, ‘he starts riffling through the garbage bin there,’ she laughed. ‘When Alb looked up at me I must’ve looked so shocked! I was thinking, What’s this man doing in the bin? Then he held two chop bones up triumphant and we went back out to the dam with a line off of the clothesline. He tied up a bone at each end and dropped them in the water and there we walked around the outside slowly dragging our bait. When the water flinched twice and he showed me how to ease my line out of the dam, lo and behold – well, that was my first feast of yingaa.’ Her nana shook her head and sipped again, smiling at August. ‘He was writing about that!’
‘What a catch,’ August said, and the two women laughed.
‘Why did you come back for Pop?’
Elsie thought for just a moment. ‘I think I noticed that your pop and I could do good things together. That our love could bounce off the world and I was that age, I guess. I was open to him and I knew straight away that he loved me, that he wouldn’t put me down.’
‘Put you down?’
‘That we were both Koori, that we would lift each other because we both knew we needed it.’
Their goodness made August feel sad, thinking about her own mother, how so much went wrong for her. ‘Why’d all the bad stuff happen to Mum, when you two were good together?’
Her nana shook her head. She didn’t have an answer, and while she struggled for one the lights in the workers’ annexe flicked off. They both looked over to the windows gone dark, the Aunties had turned in. ‘Who else is coming tomorrow?’ August asked, taking cue that her nana didn’t want to answer a hopeless question. Or couldn’t.
‘Just the family – mob from here and there. Uncle Fred should arrive, I think, all the way from the cane fields up north. You remember him?’
‘Not really. Just his arm, and that he bought banana ice-creams for us once.’
Elsie drummed her fingers on her glass. ‘I used to think he was the most miserable man on earth, but I like him now. He’s your pop’s older cousin.’
‘What happened to his arm, anyway?’ August asked, bold with wine.
‘He came back from serving in the war. He wasn’t injured there, but they said some shrapnel or something hit him. So he had all this pain in his arm when he got back, nerve damage or something. Doctors couldn’t work it out, he travelled all over the country seeing specialists. No-one could work it out and paracetamol didn’t change a thing. He decided he wanted the doctors to take it off, he even worked with a bad arm slashing sugar cane to save up to pay for it himself. Not one doctor would do it though, ’cos of his functioning hand on the end of his arm. So, one day he got the idea to cut the thing off himself …’ Elsie was shaking her head, her face dimmed once more. ‘You can’t always see a thing that hurts. He bought an axe and a hatch’s spring or what have you, started a fire in a tin pail, cut the hand off with his homemade guillotine, singed the arteries and then threw his hand in the fire so it couldn’t be reattached.’
August gasped and almost yelled, her face contorted in horror. ‘What the hell?’
Elsie continued, nonchalant. ‘So they took the rest of the arm off for him and now he is such a happy fella. Goes to show ….’
‘Show what?’
‘The things people will do for pain relief.’ She rubbed her knuckles against her knee.
‘Don’t chop your hands off, Nan!’
She looked at August shocked, and they both started laughing again. When they’d laughed enough to stir the owls, Elsie said, ‘You’ve always had a good nature, girl – you know you can talk to me about anything, okay.’
It was a statement; she’d just wanted August to know. ‘I know,’ August said, reassured and reassuring at once. August knew her nana wasn’t her guardian anymore, that she could be her confidante, but August still didn’t know how to say the things. The field was buzzing, a sort of beating rhythm. The locusts had settled into their meal for the night. There was a crescent moon and no light fell onto the old field.
‘To Alb,’ Elsie said, raising her almost full wineglass to the darkness.
‘To Pop,’ August said, holding her hand high, and the sliver of silver moon bent through the empty glass.