Drunk

Mrs Mac was shickered again. The signs were her rousing laughter and the ebb and flow of poorly remembered songs at the other end of the house. The children’s mother confirmed it: Shickered again. She would never apply so hard a word as ‘drunk’ to Mrs Mac; nor would it occur to her to mislead the children. Mrs Mac sometimes had a little too much to drink—a sad, sad affliction for poor Mrs Mac. The single bottle of Southwark Bitter in their own fridge and the decanter of visitors’ cream sherry on their sideboard were not the same thing at all, for these bottles were scarcely ever opened and the children had better remember that. Their mother’s giggling two glasses on Christmas Day didn’t count, either. Anna kept to the winding path between the hollyhocks and lavender, listening to Mrs Mac, listening to the satisfying crush and snicker of the white pebbles beneath her sandalled feet. She rounded the corner, where the subsided ground had sucked the glassy cement of the verandah with it, and found Mrs Mac planted unsteadily in carpet slippers outside Great Aunt Beulah’s bedroom window. Mrs Mac’s eyes were glittering discs, her lips wide and wetly open over her shifting dentures. She bawled: Now Jim poor soul’s got a belly full of coal and he corfs up lumps of coke, oi! Come on, youngster, with me now. La, la, la et cetera, oi! Anna watched, closed-in and silent. She wanted some sort of showy disaster. She couldn’t see any bottles nearby. They would have been inside the house somewhere. The evidence was all in Mrs Mac: Bad-tempered old cow, your Auntie Beulah. Thinks her shit doesn’t stink. Whoops! Pardon me, your highness. One year the children of the primary school were enlisted by the returned servicemen of the district to collect empty bottles for Legacy. Remember the widows and fatherless children, the RSL president cried above a blustery northerly, and grades five, six and seven were waved through the school gates with chaff bags upon their backs. Anna and Maxine paired off to search the grassy ditches and thistly culverts behind the Stock & Station sale yards. They came back with eight bottles, a wheel-less toy and a mud-and-horsehair bird’s nest dislodged from a tree by the high winds. They sniffed at and upended each bottle before placing it in their sacks. They giggled, fancying that the sharp stale beer whiff had unhinged their senses. Anna staggered in the roadside gravel, bawling: He wears gorblimey trousers and he lives in a council flat! She roamed the back roads behind Isonville and Showalter Park on her bicycle, the pannier hooked to her handlebars so full of bottles that she had to fight to steer a safe line between the potholes, sleepy lizards and heat-snapped fallen branches. The mail contractor slowed to pass her, then accelerated grimly away, his springs creaking, the dust of the sunken road wreathing about her head. She saw him stop at the Park’s massive stone gateposts, lodge the gaol-sewn mailbag in the box, whine off down the road again, and, just as she drew adjacent to the curving drive, Mr Showalter himself was there to collect the mail. He didn’t see Anna at first. His hand went in, came out with the mailbag. Again he reached in, and this time he had a bottle of whisky, a handy pocket size. Anna saw a flash of glass and then the bottle was inside the concealing folds of his jacket as her squeaky wheels betrayed her on the road. He knew that she’d caught him. He winked, his puffed, rubbery features bunching like a glove, then grinned, his bloodshot eyes disappearing. It’s our little secret, he said. Just you, me, the mailman and the gatepost. But his drinking was not a secret; nor was the fact that his friends and acquaintances delivered bottles to him on the quiet; nor that he could be a menace at the wheel of a car when he’d been drinking. For a time at Women’s College Anna drank until she lost consciousness. They all did it. A kind of drinkers’ club existed and they might play poker, and smoke and swig down beer and cheap wine, for twelve hours at a stretch. Anna fell in slow, sleepy, smiling, good-natured stages toward oblivion. She was not an argumentative, bitter or lashing-out drunk. But then one of them pitched head first to the ground from a second floor balcony and was paralysed for life, so they disbanded the club and nobody spoke of it again. Anna learned to pace herself. Two drinks were generally sufficient to relax her clenched jaws, her tight stomach muscles, and drive the demons away. Two sundowners on the verandah, watching Sam, her husband, dust-scribbling on the tractor in the valley below. She almost loved him then. Wesley Showalter was clearly three sheets to the wind before lunch on the day a stud breeder from Dubbo wrote out a cheque for thirty-four thousand dollars to buy Pandowie Showalter Lustre 6. The women of the Ladies’ Auxiliary kept their distance from him behind the trestle bench in the refreshment tent—he was very fumy, very noisy, and rough with it. It was the same every year, the biggest field day in the state, let down by Wesley Showalter himself. His movements during the afternoon left gaps of an hour or so unaccounted for, but a sharefarmer from Yarcowie remembered seeing him fishtail away from the big house in the dusty Bentley at about four o’clock and disappear on to the sunken road, probably bound for the Bon Accord. Anna’s Jubilee history is thematic, not chronological, in structure. She’s found this in The Park: the First Hundred Years, privately published by Mrs Showalter in 1950:

A great many of the shearers and hut-keepers are the offscourings of English prisons, and a more insolent set of scoundrels you could not find. They are much given to spending all their money on drink and bad women, but there are few good men of the labouring classes hereabouts, and, from their long servitude on the Sydney side, they all know a good deal about sheep.

These days Anna may have a glass of wine in the evening. Possibly two, if she’s in the city and Meg and Rebecca have taken her to a restaurant. It’s always Meg who orders the wine. She’s a frowner, never satisfied with the wine list. Rebecca drinks mineral water. She tasted an alcoholic drink once, and hated it. Anna will find a nightly Scotch more satisfying as she grows rounder and more creaking and puts her feet up at the end of the day. It will be a ‘thing’ about her, known to the family. When those closest to her fly back to the country from abroad they will always be carrying a duty-free bottle of Glenfiddich for Anna, who will want to share it and want to save it.