The Adelaide Hills

(Bake bread)

I can’t sleep. We’ve been home for three days and still I can’t sleep.

‘It’s just jet lag,’ Shannon says. ‘Try thinking of something monotonous and boring.’

‘All I can think about is Ulrike’s pasta madre. I think I’ve done something really stupid.’

When the pasta madre had dried in the hot Tuscan sun it looked like a cake of heroin. At least I think it did. I actually don’t know what a cake of heroin looks like, but we joked about it at the time. I put it in the pocket at the back of my pack and pretty much forgot about it. Until we arrived at the train station on our way to the airport. There was an announcement about what to do if you saw a suspicious package, and from that moment my foil-wrapped bread starter began a process of mental fermentation that had me in such an agitated state I would have ticked all the boxes for a strip search.

‘What have you done?’ Shannon asks sleepily.

‘I posted it.’

‘The pasta madre?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where? When?’

‘At the station, on our way to the airport.’

‘Why did you post it?’

‘I thought we’d get in trouble if I brought it into Australia.’

‘You should’ve just binned it.’

‘I know that now, but I wasn’t thinking straight.’

I didn’t want to leave Italy. I’d settled into our nomadic life, and moving slowly had become second nature. As we packed for the last time I came across my foil-wrapped memory of Tuscany and was overwhelmed. I thought about throwing it away ten times between Tenuta Antica and the train station, but at the last minute I let an image of Ulrike’s bread filling my kitchen with its familiar aroma guide my hand. I bought stamps and an envelope, wrote my name and address in clear block letters, slipped in the pasta madre, licked the flap and sealed it. Then I dropped the package in a letter box.

‘I wouldn’t worry. It will either turn up, or it won’t. Now try and sleep.’

But I can’t. By the time Shannon’s breathing has slowed I’ve let the night take hold, and it’s easy to imagine the discovery of my foil package and the massive police operation it will initiate. I see the farm in Tuscany being raided by Interpol, Ulrike dragged from her kitchen and the dough on her hands scraped off and bagged as evidence. When the wind blows against the side of our house, I imagine it’s the federal police breaking down the door to search for other contraband. I pull the covers up tight around my neck and wonder what the penalty is for bringing seed and grain into Australia without declaring it.

When I finally sleep, I find myself in a small room. A desk lamp the only illumination, its light blinding. I endure hours of questioning about what I intend to do with the package, and though I try, I can’t remember exactly how to make a sourdough loaf. As the sun rises on my nightmare, I finally cave in and admit that my real plan was to crush the contents into a fine powder and sell it on the street for $200 a hit.

In the morning, Shannon suggests I call customs and fess up. Customs put me onto quarantine, who put me onto a lovely man called Paul, who explains that my starter was likely to be destroyed, but if it did arrive in the post I could pop in and have it examined as a courtesy to the Australian public.

~

The pasta madre hasn’t arrived. After four weeks I expect it won’t, and I’m deeply disappointed. I wouldn’t have a clue how to make it from scratch, and this is reason enough to buy a loaf at Woolworths, even though I have all the time in the world and a financial imperative to make my own.

I’m tired. I have a feeling that I brought something valuable back from Italy, but I can’t remember what it is. I look at photos to jog my memory, but the longer I stare at them the more Italy seems to be turning into a still life. When I look out at the carpet of soursob that has grown out of control during the wet Hills winter, I have an uneasy sense of having been nowhere at all.

Raspberries. They fill the photo I’ve landed on, and I remember thinking I’d never seen so many, and how spoilt we were to be eating them by the fistful when they were $6.99 a punnet at the supermarket back home. The boys grazed like the offspring of gods that day. Stefan showed them how they could push a blackcurrant inside the cavity of a raspberry and create a taste sensation that rivalled any they’d find in the confectionary aisle. Their fingers and faces were stained with the pleasure of it. But I’m torn between this image and the memory of Elisa weeping. As worthy as it is, I just can’t imagine myself as a farmer, and I know now that it will barely pay its way.

So I sit here, contemplating the soaking rain and the fertile land it falls on, wondering how to tell Shannon that going to Italy has been like trying on a dress that looks fabulous on the mannequin and realising that, as much as I want it to, it just doesn’t fit.

He wraps my hand around a glass. It’s hot, half-filled with coffee, just as Romano would make it.

‘I need to get a job,’ I say to him.

‘Yeah, you do, we’re broke. It’ll be a while before this farm earns its keep.’

‘I need it for more than money.’ I can’t look him in the eye, so I keep looking out the window.

He sits beside me, looking out at the garden.

‘I don’t think I want it anymore,’ I say.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I thought I loved it before we left. But now I think I just loved the idea of it. I don’t think I can do what Stefan and Ulrike do. I don’t think I want to work that hard; there’d be no time for anything else, and no money.’

‘I know what you mean.’ He puts his arm around my shoulders. ‘The thought of removing all that soursob makes my stomach turn. I barely know where to start, and right now it’s hard to imagine this will ever be a going concern.’

‘But you wouldn’t want to give it up, would you?’

‘Of course not.’ He holds me tighter, as if he thinks I might fall. ‘I think we should give ourselves some time to settle back in. See how we feel about everything once we get back into some sort of routine.

‘But if I get a job, we’re back where we started.’

‘No, we’re not. We hadn’t been to Italy when we started,’ he says.

‘I flip-flop between wishing we’d never gone and desperately wanting to be back there.’

‘Why do you wish we’d never gone?’

‘Because then I could still be dreaming.’

He’s silent for a long time.

‘Do you remember when we were stacking wood at Pia and Mauro’s?’ he says.

‘Which time? We stacked wood a lot at Pia and Mauro’s.’

‘Towards the end. We had a production line going because the pile had reached the roof of the shed. You were at the bottom, I was at the top and everyone else was in between.’

‘Oh, yeah. It was quite a celebration when I picked up that last piece of wood.’

‘It was. And afterwards we sat in the dirt looking up at this monument we’d built and you said you might write about it.’

‘About the wood stack?’

‘Not the wood stack, about our Italian summer. About weeding our way around Italy.’

‘Did I?’

‘You know you did.’

I can feel my heart rate quicken. ‘That would be quite an undertaking.’

‘It might help.’

‘It wouldn’t help you. Writing a book takes time. You’d be stuck in the garden all by yourself.’

‘Pip, that’s exactly where I want to be. As long as you’re nearby, doing something you want to be doing, I’ll be happy.’

~

A loaf of Ulrike’s rye is cooling on the kitchen table when Shannon comes in from the garden. The hint of coriander is unmistakable.

‘It’s about time,’ he says, pulling off his boots.

‘Well, I had to make my own pasta madre, it takes a while.’

‘Not six months.’

‘No, not six months.’

‘So what’s changed?’

‘I’ve been writing about Il Mulino. Do remember Ulrike’s salad bowl?’

‘No. Why should I remember her salad bowl?’

‘No reason. It was a cheap plastic bowl with a crack in the bottom.’

‘So what’s so special about it?’

‘It was good enough, even though it leaked.’

He looks at me, puzzled, but decides to cut a slice of bread instead of quizzing me further. Steam rises and we’re back there, in Ulrike’s kitchen.