30

THE OLD MISSION

The heat seems to stretch time in this town. Its plumes drift up from the bubbling tarred roads. In the generous yards with modest homes, the grass is parched brown.

I’ve been here a week, staying in my grandmother’s weatherboard house on the old mission. The rooms have the musty smell of dust resting on a lifetime of possessions and there is a constant click-click-click of the fan. Nan keeps the radio on and it twangs country music most of the day. She sits on her chair in the noon-time heat. She has shown me how to make real lemonade and we sit and sip from long, chipped glasses.

‘This is nice, Nan, Spending time with you.’

‘Well, I would come and see you more but it is harder the older I get. I need to be near my things. And I don’t like the bus. I feel like a sardine in a tin - with a whole load of white sardines.’

I laugh. I wonder why I have never been here before.

‘Why does Dad never come home?’

She eyes me warily. ‘That’s something you will have to ask him about. Always filled with the questions, aren’t you?’

Suddenly the front door opens and a small whirlwind in the form of my cousin Melanie enters the room. Her younger sister Amanda slips in quietly behind her. They are not technically my cousins. My grandmother and their grandfather were brother and sister but this is a tight-knit community. I’d never met them until I came out to visit this time. My mother would send them the clothes I grew out of as a child and Nan sent some pictures once of the girls prancing around in the ill-fitting garments. ‘Did you bring us any stuff?’ had been Melanie’s greeting when we first met.

‘I’ve had a gutful of this fucking heat.’ Melanie flops herself down in a chair. ‘I can’t believe I have to work tonight but at least there is air-conditioning there.’

Amanda has a baby with her and she has unfolded a blanket on the ground at Nan’s feet and rests the baby on it. The baby is Melanie’s but Amanda quietly, uncomplainingly, seems to do all the work.

‘Where do you work? ’ I ask politely.

‘In the nursing home on the other side of town.’

I suppress a laugh. I could imagine Melanie telling a resident who wanted something to ‘go get it your fucking self’. But the baby is her fourth child and I admire her determination to provide for them. Like many people with brash exteriors, she has a good heart.

‘How’s that father of yours?’ Nan asks the girls.

‘He was in a right mood this morning,’ Melanie chuckles. ‘He says that if the Housing Department don’t fix the plumbing this week he is going to burn the whole place down.’

A smile creeps across Nan’s face. ‘It’s those bureaucrats from Sydney. They come out here on the plane, all clean clothes and shiny hair and a year later they leave on a plane, looking shabbier and a whole lot less shiny. Problems here ain’t so easy to fix with lots of fine talk. We need to pay doctors and teachers more or they ain’t gonna come out here for the long haul. And we need some money to fix that school hall.’

Melanie and Amanda nod in agreement so Nan continues. ‘And by the time they get to know who is who, who to talk to and who to ignore, they are packing their gear and heading back to the city. Just when we have finally got them trained. This last one that came out from the Aboriginal Affairs Department reminded me of the mission manager we had here when I was a girl. We used to call him gawu.’

The two girls started to giggle.

‘Gawu?’ I ask.

‘Yeah. It’s the word for egg in the old language,’ Nan explains.

I still don’t understand and, reading my face, she continues. ‘He would sit around all day and do nothing and everyone would run around making sure he was looked after very nicely. Like an egg.’

‘That, and he was an undeveloped life form.’ Melanie laughs heartily at her own joke and I can’t help but join in.

The baby starts to cry. Amanda lifts him up to Nan and she settles him down in her fleshy arms. I look at how gently she cradles him, how instinctively she knows how to keep him quiet. I wonder yet again why Dad never comes home.

Nan is gazing at the baby she has just lulled to sleep when she says, ‘Why don’t you two take your cousin out to the cemetery later today. It’s too hot for me in this heat but the graves need to be tidied. I’ve some flowers for your mother and for Emily.’

A photograph of Emily, a studio portrait, sits on the wall opposite Nan. Dark eyes and pouty mouth - made beautiful with the same features that made Dad handsome. Beside Emily’s portrait sits one of my grandfather, George. Handsome as well, dressed in a suit. The photograph had been coloured by hand but has faded.

Nan’s eyes flick to Emily’s picture as she speaks and I realise how strange it is to hear the name my father never mentions - ‘Emily’ - said aloud. Mum once explained how he hated to talk about her death and it was a family agreement among the three of us never to speak of it. Now I suddenly wanted to go to see her grave, this mysterious woman who Nan loved. And Dad must have loved her too otherwise her death would not have pained him so.

‘It’s too bloody hot to go dancing around the dead,’ Melanie swaggers.

‘Go later in the day. And have some respect for the old people,’ Nan rebukes her sharply.

‘All right. But we’re taking her car.’ Melanie points at me.

When we pull up at the cemetery, the heat has relented. It’s still warm but not too oppressive to move.

You can learn a lot about a town by the cemetery. We walk past the graves of the babies. ‘Died seven months. With the angels now.’ ‘Died three days old. Always in our hearts.’ And one grave: ‘Died five years old. Our light. Our boy.’ The grave is covered with tiny tin and plastic cars, with whistles and other small toys. The odd, colourful display - like a Christmas tableau - is a tribute to inconsolable grief.

We walk further past lines of granite and marble headstones. Some have one side filled with the other side patiently waiting for the spouse to join them. Here lies Pop. Husband of Wilma.

Melanie talks as we go, noticing my interest. ‘That one there is for Wilma Patterson’s husband. I bet she talked him into that bloody grave. She runs the canteen up at the school. She’s an ox. Old man will be waiting a long time for her to join him.’

Wilma ordered the headstone so clearly she knows that is where she wants to be when she goes. The cynical side of me wonders whether her husband wanted the same thing. Still, how comforting it must be to know where you are heading, to know there is a place for you, to know that there is someone who will rest beside you for eternity.

Melanie gives me an oral history of the other graves. There are several young men and women who’ve been killed in car accidents - friends from school, even two cousins. ‘It’s the mix of the grog and the long distances between towns,’ she says. And the recklessness of youth, that feeling of invincibility that teenagers possess, I think to myself.

We arrive at the grave of Melanie’s mother. Melissa ‘Bloss’ Trindall. Died 57. Beloved wife of John, mother of Melanie, Jack, Jason, Philip, Sarah and Amanda.

‘Dad called her Blossom and it got shortened to Bloss. I sure miss her. There’s plenty of stuff I wanted to ask her before the cancer finally took her off. But at least I can go to Nan for most of it.’ She stares at the grave and a softness comes into her face. She pauses a while in her own thoughts.

‘There,’ she says finally, pointing three graves down. ‘The one with the white angel on it is Emily’s.’

I walk over and place the flowers Nan gave me from her garden, now wilted in the heat. Beloved daughter of George and Frances. Beloved sister of Tony. Died 1972. Aged 17.

‘So young to be taken by an accident,’ I say, thinking of the inexplicable cruelty of losing someone you love in circumstances you cannot control. It must be one of the most disempowering, soul-crushing things in the world. No wonder Dad’s had such problems coming to terms with it. No wonder the sadness never leaves Gran’s eyes.

Melanie has turned towards me, her hands on her hips.

‘She wasn’t killed in an accident,’ she corrects, as though I am soft-headed. ‘She killed herself.’