It was almost dark. Penny drove past the string of run-down cottages, past the sagging fences and For Sale signs, and parked in the street outside her uncle’s home. By the light of a street lamp it looked more run down than ever. Fibro-cement walls begging for paint. Rusted roof. The unkempt lawns sprouting yellow clumps of dandelions. Scarlet geraniums, escapees from their beds, strangled straggly azaleas, once the pride of the garden. Ray’s battered ute slumped in the carport. She sat awhile, determined to stop crying before going inside.
Penny had only left Ray a few hours ago and had not expected to be back so soon. He’d seemed fragile and depressed when she left him, not like her uncle at all. Not like her rock. For that’s what he’d been all of her life. Ever since a drunk driver slammed into her parents’ car when she was a baby. Somehow she’d survived; six months old, strapped into the carnage. Trapped in the shattered wreck with her dead parents. It was a blessing, people always said, to be too young to remember. And it was true – she didn’t. But Penny’s dreams invented memories at least as terrible as the truth.
She found tissues in the glove box and blew her nose – a great honking blow. How to compose herself? Matt had taken her so completely by surprise. With Theo. With his overwhelming lack of trust in her. It was as if she didn’t know her husband at all. Penny’s thoughts ran helter-skelter, searching for answers. Keep Matt’s astonishing secret or expose him? These were her impossible choices. Her mind was racing. She couldn’t dump this problem on her fragile uncle, and she missed Matt already, and she craved to touch Theo again. And she dreaded the pregnancy test lying in the bottom of her bag.
For months she’d suspected. For almost as many months, it turned out, as Theo had lain hidden in their freezer. Theo was why Matt had pulled away, why she hadn’t been able to share her baby hopes. Why she couldn’t face mornings anymore and why Matt turned from her at night. Theo was the albatross around the neck of their marriage.
The porch light was on. Penny hauled her bag from the jeep, stomach still coiled in knots, and walked up the cracked concrete path. The screen door squeaked open and banged shut, the signal for Ray to sing out Come in if you’re good-looking. But today he did no such thing. Penny found him sitting in his favourite armchair before the fire. Just sitting. No television. No radio. No stereo. It wasn’t like her uncle. He couldn’t abide silence – he always had to fill the modest house with music and sport broadcasts and Jackie Chan movies turned up too loud.
‘Hullo, love.’
‘You’re sure I can stay?’
Ray heaved his barrel of a body from the low chair and kissed her cheek, his lined face softening. ‘My girl is home.’ He picked up her bag and led the way.
Nothing had changed in the house since she was a child. The framed grainy photograph of a young Ray with a crosscut saw hanging in the hallway. The prancing pony wallpaper in her room. The frayed patch of carpet where she’d swung her feet out of bed each morning. The homemade shelves spilling children’s books and old Dolly magazines. Soft toys crowding the top bunk.
Penny sank down on the lacy white bedspread, adorned with pink roses. Ray put down her bag and smiled with such warmth that Penny forgot her misery for one sweet moment. But when he left the room, the waves of worry crashed back in. She fished the pregnancy test from her bag. How many times had she taken one of them, only to be disappointed? Yet, right now, if the strip showed positive, she’d surely drown in her own doubts.
Penny crossed the hall to the little linoleum bathroom, with its cracked basin and ridiculous fluffy toilet seat cover. Mouthing a silent apology, Penny turfed Ray’s razor out of the chipped china mug. She used the mug to collect a urine sample, then returned to her room to wait. According to the instructions, the results took an excruciating five minutes. Apparently a watched stick never changes colour, so she wound up her old puppy alarm clock and tracked the second hand as it marched past the different breeds of dogs. When the time was up and she finally dared to look, two bright red bars showed stark on the strip. Positive.
Penny collapsed on her bed and hugged the bunny pillow. A concerned camellia, older than her uncle, swayed outside the dark window, scratching at the glass. She turned on the lamp and made shadow puppets across the pony wallpaper. Their familiar forms reassured her. Everything about this small room, where she’d known only comfort and love, reassured her. All that past pressing down on the present. Waggles peered from her top bunk, so she pulled the little toy down and fondled the dog’s floppy ears, inhaled his musty scent.
And at last it happened. Her pain and resentment fled, replaced with a sense of overwhelming love. A child. She was having a child. She imagined Waggles snuggled in a bassinet beside her sleeping baby. She imagined soothing tiny tears, and whispering Don’t cry, my baby, Mummy’s here – just as her mother must have done for her long ago. Penny forgot about Matt and Theo. ‘My baby,’ she said aloud. It sounded good. Good enough for now, anyway. Saying ‘our baby’ would have to wait.
Penny went to the lounge room, where her uncle sat staring at the flames. The air hung stale and smoky. How sad he looked. Ray covered the hand she laid on his shoulder with his own.
‘Is there something I can do, love?’
‘Yes,’ said Penny, pulling him to his feet and sitting him down at the dining table. ‘You can tell me what’s wrong. Why doesn’t anybody tell me what’s wrong?’ She turned on the lights and the kettle and put the television news on low. She emptied the ashtray. A grey residue of cigarette ash lay in a mound on the floor beside his armchair. Ray followed her gaze.
‘It keeps the moths out of the carpet,’ he said, apologetically.
Penny opened the window, took his knobbly hands in hers and waited for Ray to speak.
‘They laid me off this morning,’ he said at last. ‘For a whole month. That new conveyer belt at Kemp Cove? Never worked properly from the start, it didn’t. Five ships are held up at the wharf and their woodchip pile’s full. So they put off half the drivers, just like that. I suppose it’s worse for them with families …’
‘And what exactly am I?’ asked Penny.
Ray squeezed her hands and gave her a grateful smile. ‘I shouldn’t be bothering you with this, love. You’ve got enough on your plate.’ But his words found their own momentum. ‘Log carting’s a mug’s game these days. Four in the morning until six at night. They gave us these new logbooks to keep track of our hours, to make sure we don’t drive for too long, but we’ve thrown them out the window. Paying the fines is cheaper than not hauling enough loads. Dog-tired, I’ve been, I don’t mind admitting it, and how do they thank you? With a kick in the teeth.’
Penny knew the drill. She’d grown up with the big trucks, knew the strain of forty-five tonnes of logs in the back, of mountain roads with centimetres to spare between you and the guard rail. One wrong move and you’re over the edge. A car veers in front, you hit the brakes … but the big trucks take time to stop. And you can’t afford breakdowns either, or flat tyres, nothing like that. Two, sometimes three jobs a day. Each load a six-hour return trip to the bush. She’d seen her uncle worn out after just one run. But tonight was different. Tonight, his weariness was of despair. Penny made them a cup of tea.
‘If it’s all the same, love, I’ll have a beer.’ He fetched one from the fridge and sat back down. ‘Some people hate us now, especially in the towns. This woman had a go at me last week, said I shouldn’t be driving log trucks. I told her I don’t know nothing else. Forty years in the game. But, for once, I knew what she meant.’ Penny kissed his cheek. ‘There are days I hate to see those trees come down myself. I’m thinking … how in heck do they manage it? Clearing a whole hill in six hours? One feller knocked down a stag tree when he found an eagle nest in it, just so he didn’t have to go through the bloody paperwork. I couldn’t come at that.’ Ray sat up straighter. ‘A lot of truckies think like me. Some don’t. Some don’t think twice. But others do, especially us oldies.’
‘You’re not old—’
‘No, love. Let me finish.’ Ray rose to his feet and paced the faded floral carpet in his work boots. ‘Blokes like me, we remember. We know what it used to look like, but if you’re young, driving them big trucks, it’s just a job. Don’t get me wrong. Young and old, every one of us feels like a robot, ’cause you have no say anymore. And it’s not just us, it’s all the contractors. Pete bought a Timberpro harvester last year. Beautiful machine, but there’s no change from four hundred thousand quid, and that’s second-hand. Now the Tuggerah’s on hold, he has to go farther afield for work. If they put him off, he still pays the loan. A bundle of nerves, he is, ever since that bunch in Opposition said they’d cut down on logging if they get in. Reckons if the Greens get their way, they’ll stop it altogether, along with the new pulp mill. On top of all that, his Mary’s having twins.’
‘Twins?’ Penny reached for her belly. Images of twin prams and twin jumpsuits hijacked her thoughts, and she almost blurted out her news.
Ray went on. ‘There’s fool talk of a strike, talk of every driver and logger stopping work.’
‘Sounds good,’ said Penny.
Ray shook his head and lit a cigarette. ‘Us poor buggers couldn’t run a chook raffle, and we haven’t got the balls besides, pardon my French.’ He slumped in his chair, as if the burst of dissent had winded him. Penny had never heard this sort of talk from her uncle before.
‘What about the union?’
Ray snorted like a wounded bull. ‘The union? Bloody useless. That mob’s not for the workers. They’re in Burns’s pocket. Everything’s upside down these days.’ He sculled his beer, hurled his empty can at the overflowing kitchen tidy, then went and helped himself to another. ‘Want one, love?’
‘No thanks, Unkie. Might turn in.’
‘Righto.’ Ray settled back into his armchair. A current affairs show was coming on the television. Good, he seemed calmer.
Penny retreated to her bed, exhausted, but that wasn’t the same as sleepy. She got up, slipped out the front door and padded barefoot in the cold to the jeep. A quick rummage in the back turned up Matt’s jacket. Penny hurried back to bed and buried her face in it. His smell was in the weave.
Ray tried to concentrate on the telly. ‘Tonight, the Premier predicts savage job losses in the timber industry should her party lose power.’ He felt the throb of blood in his ears, the ropes of veins rising on his throat. Ray turned off the television and went to the kitchen. He poked around behind the coffee tin until he found the little bottle of pills Pete had given him. Helped you sleep, that’s what Pete said. Ray swallowed three with his beer, turned off the light and sat at the dark window, staring into the void.