Eugenie
She cut the onions at the island bench, the big screen on the opposite wall lighting up the room with the unnatural green of some football stadium’s grass, filling the space with the noise of the crowd and the patter of the commentators. David splayed before it in an armchair, a beer by his right hand.
Over the years she’d trained herself to block out the sound, to see it as part of life, and even then not the most offensive. These days, though, with David away for three weeks at a time, she’d grown accustomed to the quiet. Now it didn’t seem to matter where she was in the house, what she was doing – cooking, cleaning, reading – the machine’s insistence penetrated her defences. It was, perhaps, not even so much the noise that got to her as the self-righteousness which accompanied it: the way he occupied the room, watching his sport on his television – which, she was more than happy to admit, he was justified in doing, even without having undergone the privations of fly-in/fly-out, earning shit-loads of money, wheelbarrow loads of the stuff, with which the screen, the new Colorado, the tinny, the mortgage, had been bought. Never mind that he was still working at home even now, the mobile always by his side, taking calls from the accountant, supplier, the team on site – it was that it also somehow negated everything she did; as if getting the girls to school and their post-curricular activities in town or down the coast, keeping house, still managing two shifts a week at the hospital, things which didn’t operate on a three-weeks-on, one-week-off rotation, weren’t as important as his work. As if what he did gave him licence to generate the moods which, let’s face it, had always been his speciality: the steady production of clouds of negative ions filling their house from floor to ceiling – he was at it right then – viscous but invisible, something you had to push yourself through, but silently, otherwise the anger might be provoked, anger or disdain, one of the two, neither much better than the other.
She finished with the onions, wiping her eyes on the sleeve of her cardigan, a slim woman in her late-thirties wearing a summer dress because it was warm and she’d been to town that afternoon while David had taken a nap after the late-night flight, but also because she’d thought he might like it, her thick hair pushed back, not needing anything these days to stay where she put it, the dampness from her tears glistening on her wide Scandinavian cheek-bones, not beautiful, she’d never claimed that of herself, but striking, statuesque. Steering the pungent chopped flesh from the board into the hot oil, pouring another kettle of boiling water into the pot for pasta; turning back to rummage for garlic beneath the counter; pausing to look at David, her husband, resolute in his chair before the game; he, feeling her gaze, glancing over at her.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Nothing.’
Turning back to the television.
She’d not been raised, at least for the first few years, with one of the devices in the house. The community where she’d grown up hadn’t run to electricity, far less televisions. Perhaps that contributed to her intolerance. The ability to shut them out hadn’t been bred into her.
Sooner or later she was going to have to tell him what she’d been up to, what she planned to do. Perhaps he already knew. His mother would have no doubt been delighted to fill him in on her latest outrage. But he’d be waiting for it to come from her. This was the reason for the mood. He was working up his arguments.
It would not be fair to say that this list of activities: children, work, house, described all she’d been doing while he was away. Her involvement with the campaign against the dam had continued to grow, become more than simply something she’d supported out of solidarity with Lindl. After the girls it had become almost the central thing in her life, sometimes resented for the time it required, always engaging.
David had never been keen, claiming he didn’t give a shit either way, he just thought the NoDam crew were wasting their time. ‘What makes you think the government’ll listen to you?’ he said. ‘You lot know nothing about what goes on. These bastards made up their minds about this shit long before you ever heard about it. They’ve started building the pipeline, for fuck’s sake, you think they’re going to stop because it upsets you? Because your friends are worried about some trees?’ Turning to Sandrine and Emily for support. ‘Your mother’s whacked in the head,’ he said.
And while much of this might or might not have been true his scepticism was, she thought, nothing to do with the politics, it was cover for his dislike of her having a life of her own, interests that didn’t include him or have a direct economic input on the household. He wanted to be in control. Not always in a bad way. Would have preferred it if she’d let him support the family instead of going back to nursing when the girls were old enough for school. In this case, though, his dislike of Marcus would have been reason enough. Lindl was her friend. She’d invited them both over for dinner, several times. David considered them a bad influence, like she was a child, easily led. Marcus, Lindl’s husband, was a university professor, older but not much wiser. He’d made the fatal error, early on, of correcting David – as if he was doing him a favour, which he probably believed he was – It’s pronounced kasm not chasm. Some such thing. Maybe it had been his grammar. Done instead of did. Marcus not even noticing he’d given offence. David never forgot. He wasn’t the type to forget, didn’t, anyway, like entertaining. Hadn’t grown up to it. He told her once he couldn’t think of a single time when people had come to dinner at his parents’ house, except for a funeral, and that had been family.
When they’d got together, who their parents were had been the least of their concerns (her mother dead of an overdose, her father back in France ever since the fire). She’d not appreciated that he was a Lensman, the son of dairy farmers whose parents and grandparents had worked the land around Winderran. What that meant. She’d visited for the first time after she’d agreed to marry him. Even then she hadn’t understood. It was only when they came to live on the block of land given them by his parents, subdivided off the farm, that she began to grasp it didn’t matter where she’d met David, what drugs they’d done together, what adventures they’d had, what politics they’d agreed on during those heady days, these were his family, this was their town; blood would out. His parents were good people, generous to a fault, hard-working, but they were also bigoted, narrow-minded, ignorant. People who by definition regarded her with as much suspicion as she did them even without knowing about her childhood in a hippie community. Their innate prejudices were, it seemed, irrevocably lodged in David’s psyche, a subconscious slur against her character that was the subtext behind the description of the NoDam campaigners as ‘you lot’. Never mind that she had even less time for her hippie heritage than him.
The community’s name, Bene Gesserit, had been taken from a sci-fi novel. It meant, in the made-up language of the book, truth-teller. The people who lived there, who had named it thus, a bunch of mainly women, preferred to simply call it The Farm, though it could never have been such a thing, in anyone’s imagination. It sat within a vast eucalypt forest, astride a sandy-bottomed river, the hand-built houses nestled amongst the trees. No possibility of growing anything except more trees. The only access the rough fire trail over the hill from Yowrie, which itself was just a place, not a town.
Her mother’s little house, their home, had been built out of sleeper off-cuts, the discarded flitches of former forestry operations; layers of newspaper on the inside to cover the cracks, pages and pages of it stuck on with glue made from flour. The insects ate it. During the night they could hear them gnawing at the walls. The final layer painted over, but roughly, so that snippets of articles and advertisements leached through. Yvette, her sister, when she wanted, could tell the missing parts of these stories. The two of them huddled under a pile of blankets against the cold, Eugenie begging her to tell, pointing with the torch at the words, following them with her finger, Local Boy Wins, and sometimes Yvette would oblige with the story of the boy who won a ticket to the moon and what happened there, or maybe, another time, how he won at archery and was sent to boarding school in Sydney where he met a girl hiding in a tree who had special powers and taught him how to defeat the bully – Yvette having no knowledge of proper schools, only that derived from books because Bene Gesserit was so far out along bush roads, across fords, along fire trails, that they did home schooling with the other children in different people’s houses on a rotation which did not include their own because it was too small and primitive even by the standards of that community.
The stories were always changing, this was part of their magic. It was the same boy, but each time a different adventure.
She’d made peace with David’s parents, learned what could or could not be said in their home, learned to bite her tongue when Harold made pronouncements about women or the government, Aborigines or asylum seekers; found a way to make it all right in her mind that the girls went to his mother when she was off nursing; arranged things so that at family events her own father, Jean-Baptiste, also now a resident of Winderran, wasn’t present.
Now, however, the dam had raised its head. They were, predictably, in favour, if only because it was further evidence that the bad old days were gone. The objections to what they regarded as progress confused them. The newcomers, it seemed, had forgotten, or never known, how miserable life had been, milking cows by hand, barefoot in the mud. To cap it off, there she was, just the week before, a Lensman, going down to Brisbane with old Mal Izzert to milk cows in George Street, letting the milk run onto the cobblestones in front of Parliament House while the cameras rolled. Standing there with her hippie greenie friends talking nonsense on national television.
Opening a couple of cans of tomatoes and pouring them onto the onions and garlic, slicing them with the spatula.
Really there was nothing for it.
‘Can I talk to you? Or is the game at a critical point?’ she asked.
‘What was that?’
She said it again. He turned off the sound, left the picture on. Which would have to do. Looked over at her.
‘Thought you might like to hear what I’ve been doing.’ Watching the sauce as it started to bubble around the edge of the pan. Not looking at him. Giving the pasta a stir. As if she was at ease. ‘You’d have heard about the stunt we did down in Brissie?’
‘I did.’
‘What d’you think?’
‘You know that Mal Izzert’s as crazy as a cut snake, don’t you? The lot of them are.’
‘He’s making a go of the dairy. Selling cheese into China now. Had a delegation from Sichuan out to visit the farm last week.’
‘Doesn’t mean he’s not fucking mad.’
‘He’s going to lose some of his best land. Doesn’t he have a right to object?’
‘They’ll more than compensate him. And he gets lake frontage to boot.’
‘But has to stop dairying.’
‘Yeah, well, that’s not such a bad thing, love.’
Claiming a kind of genetic knowledge of the land and the industry she could apparently never attain. She wasn’t going to rise. She wasn’t going to argue. Keep it calm. Stir the sauce.
‘Not sure why you’re siding with him, but,’ he said.
‘I don’t believe it’s the right policy. On any level. In terms of the site, the economics, the environment. Dams don’t work.’
‘I don’t need a fucking lecture.’
‘You asked.’
‘What d’you want to tell me?’
‘They liked how it went down in Brisbane, you know, me in front of the camera. All the news services picked it up. Good copy. Did you see it? I don’t suppose you did. D’you get to watch the news up there?’
‘Sometimes. We missed it that night. I guess I should be thankful eh? My fucking mates weren’t saying, Hey, Davo, is that your missus up there running milk in the drain?’
Taking a sip of his beer. They were allowed four a night in the canteen. The place he worked was like a gaol, he said, except that they paid you. They told you what you could do every minute of the fucking day. When you could eat, have a shit. All of them out there in the morning in rows, doing stretches, like they were North Koreans. They called it Alcatraz. She’d told him he didn’t have to do it but he liked the money, liked the success, liked the fact that his business turned over more every shift than Marcus made in a year. It was part of the bigger plan.
The dinner was almost ready. She’d left her run a bit late. She cut a bit of fresh basil to throw in the sauce. The wide-bladed stainless steel knife large in her hand.
‘They’ve asked me to do all the media from now on,’ she said.
‘Who’s they?’
‘You know, the group. Marcus, Mal, Geoff, Alt, Ruth, Sam.’
‘And you’ve said yes?’
‘Yes.’
Looking up at him for the first time. Standing up for herself. Proud of it.
He didn’t say anything. Looked at the screen. An advertisement showing now. All power to the mute button.
‘We’re having a debate in town on the weekend,’ she said. ‘Organised by the uni. In the community centre. I’m representing the NoDam crowd. You’ll still be here, eh? You could come along. Bring the girls.’
‘You don’t mind what you fucking do, do you?’ he said, straight up, no pause.
Taking a breath. Letting it out.
‘What does that mean?’ she said.
‘You know what it fucking means.’
‘It’d be good for the girls to see their mum standing up for something.’
‘Something useful. Not this greenie shit.’
Faltering, but determined not to show it. Standing her ground. Unsure where the new-found strength had come from. Scared. He wasn’t physically violent; had never hit her, or the girls. Occasionally he’d thrown something. It was just he got so angry. The male potential for violence always there, she guessed. But more often simply cold and mean. A capacity to search out a person’s weak spots, to cut directly to the rawest point, without, she thought, even necessarily knowing what he was doing, how much it hurt. Some injury in him that went on the attack in its own defence. That’s what she used to think. In the days when she used to want to excuse it, could still forgive it. Going for the girls as a way of getting to her if the frontal attack didn’t work.
‘I won’t have it,’ he said.
Putting her hands on the edge of the benchtop. Holding on.
‘It’s not for you to have or not,’ she said.
He turned his back on her again. She could see the tension in his shoulders, those great muscles running up into his neck, pulling his head down like a bull. Years of this sort of thing. Having to fight him for whatever piece of ground she’d gained: about the girls; work; his parents; her father; the house; money, lots of times about money. Going back to work as much to have some of her own as anything else, to buy things for herself or the girls. To not be beholden. Giving way lots of times when she shouldn’t have, giving way because she wanted peace, or at least not a fight.
This was perhaps the thing. His going away to work meant she’d been alone enough now to know she could survive without him. Intimacy long gone anyway. If intimacy meant sex. But sometimes just physical generosity, too. The desire to be held. To sleep in someone’s arms. You couldn’t say they’d swapped it for wealth, it was lost long before the mine work started. Sometime after Emily was born. Or maybe even before that, when her body had started to change with the pregnancy, and this time, with another small child to take care of, there hadn’t been the energy for that shared curiosity about her transformation which was both intimate and sexual. Her swelling belly, her swollen breasts, she’d thought, disgusted him. Afterwards, they never found their way back.
She didn’t know what he did for sex – presuming he did anything. She didn’t ask, didn’t want to think about brothels in the Pilbara or elsewhere. Or another lover. If she allowed herself to think about it a kind of crushing guilt would overtake her. As if the failure of this aspect of the marriage had to be, by definition, her fault. Growing independent but still tied to him in so many ways. Unwilling to think of alternatives. For all sorts of reasons, many of which had nothing to do with him or the girls but were bound up in her sense of who she was; a substantial investment in the picture of herself as the happily married mother of two girls.
He couldn’t contain it any longer. Stood up and came over to the bench with his beer in its stupid fucking stubby holder, like a boy with his teddy bear, working up to a tantrum. Waving it around.
‘You don’t give a fuck do you?’ he said. ‘You think you can get together with your crowd of blow-ins and stir up trouble and it doesn’t come back, eh? You can plaster your face all over the fucking television, saying all kinds of shit that I don’t know where it comes from. You forget I have to live in this town, too.’
‘I live in this town. That’s why I’m doing this. That’s why we’re all doing this. Because it’s about where we live. It’s about caring for the land.’
‘Don’t give me that shit. You don’t give a fuck about the land.’
To which she could answer exactly what? I do. You don’t. I do. The whole thing reduced to a screaming match.
‘What you’re really saying is this is about you, isn’t it?’ she said, just as angry as he was. Hanging onto the bench for dear life. The dinner all but forgotten. The house eerily silent without the television. The girls no doubt listening hard from their rooms.
‘Fucking right it’s about me. It’s about me and my fucking family.’ Waving his beer around.
‘Which happens to include me,’ she said.
‘Yeah, well that was a mistake, wasn’t it?’
Terrible the way things got said in an argument that weren’t meant. Or were meant but not like they sounded. Weren’t supposed to come out like that.
‘So that’s it, is it?’ she said. ‘Our marriage is a mistake?’
‘Was a fucking mistake.’
Watching him standing there with his face distorted by a rage that was entirely out of proportion to what she’d done or was going to do, a rage in him which was always there below the surface, in varying levels of intensity, waiting to spring up, as if it was the only tool he had left to maintain control over his world or at least that part of it which was circumscribed by the home, and to which she’d always been susceptible, had wanted to ease for him, because she loved him or felt sympathy for him, or because it scared the crap out of her for reasons she had no desire to analyse but were probably something to do with her own father and all the shit that had gone down there, none of which had a fucking iota of relevance to the present situation of her wanting to be nothing more than who she was. Tears running down her cheeks despite her fury. Angry, too, that she couldn’t hide her emotions. That even if her investment in him had diminished she still put value in their marriage and here he was, articulating things she barely dared allow herself to think as a tactic to win some tiny battle, as if it was just another thing on the table. He’d said this sort of thing before. The threat. Pretending it didn’t mean anything to him. And just because it was pretence didn’t mean it didn’t hurt. The cheapness of him.
‘Don’t start fucking crying,’ he said.
‘I’m not fucking crying.’
She turned her back on him. Threw the colander into the sink. Lifted the heavy pasta pot off the stove, poured its contents in. Refused to look around to see what he was doing. Threads of spaghetti slithering over the edge and into the drain.
She wouldn’t back down. Wouldn’t stop doing what she believed in because it inconvenienced him. There were plenty of dairy farmers in the area who thought the dam was a rubbish idea, not just Mal Izzert. The Campbells and the Wyndhams had come down to Brisbane as well, a whole convoy of farmers’ trucks blocking George Street, putting the wind up the politicians and the police (who hadn’t a clue what to do with Friesians. Who to arrest? The cows? The farmers?). Cameras everywhere, the opportunity for media disaster abounding. The fun of it. That’s what David didn’t get, and should have, because he didn’t like authority any better than she did, it was just that he’d lost that bit of himself. Lost it in his grand pursuit of money.
The campaign was, in part, the source of her strength. That she could do this thing. That even if she couldn’t find the right words to explain it to him there was an excitement in being able to stand up in front of the cameras and be an advocate for something. In other people wanting her to do that. She was a good nurse. Nursing was something she had done, she did still, because it paid well and because, when she’d been eighteen and finished school, she’d had to do something and it was what was offered, was one of only two professions for an educated woman that existed in her nan’s imagination. But it had never been her passion.
These last months she’d discovered something new in herself: an ability to sit in a room full of people and understand what was going on. She could tell who was there for what reason and act on that knowledge. A talent for activism. It wasn’t an alternative profession, but neither could she imagine not doing it because her husband didn’t like it.
This was how far she’d come.
Someone, not her mother, had built that house on The Farm, put up those timber walls, the dirt floor, the fireplace made from curved sheets of corrugated iron which also served as the cooking stove, the double bed built into the wall where her mum and Jean-Baptiste slept when he was around, which wasn’t often. Only one room to the whole thing, a portion cut off by a curtain for her and Yvette to sleep, a veranda with a bark roof where there was a hammock in which she had lain beside her father while he read, curled within his smell, which was tobacco and marijuana, coffee and sweat.
The book he’d been reading was called The Brother. She remembered because Jean-Baptiste had told her it was a book about him. Because she thought it remarkable that someone had written and printed and bound a book about her father and when she said that he’d laughed and corrected her and said, ‘No, it’s not about me personally, it’s what happens when you put a young boy in the hands of the Jesuits.’
‘What,’ she asked, ‘is a Jesuit?’
‘Ah, now there is a question,’ Jean-Baptiste said, drawing heavily on his cigarette, letting the smoke curl back out over his lips. ‘Something we hope you never meet. Men in black robes who tell you how wrong you are. Anything you want to do is wrong.’ Waving the hand now that held the cigarette, his other arm around her. ‘Say you want to go down the creek, that is wrong. Say you want to stay here and read a book, or play music, or simply to think; that is wrong. Or it is the wrong book or the wrong music, or you are not sitting up straight enough, or you are thinking the wrong thoughts.’
‘What,’ she might have asked, ‘are wrong thoughts?’ except she already knew that because her mind was always full of wrong thoughts, about her mother (even then), or Amanda, the friend who had come to live on the property only recently, a girl her own age, whose mother was an Orange Person. They had been to India. Amanda had seen what life was like there. Men, she said, went to the toilet in the street. Yvette had called her a liar. She knew things, too, she said. She wasn’t stupid.
At eight years old it is impossible to understand context. Bene Gesserit had been started by a group of women inspired to go bush through a complex weave of feminism and ill-informed mysticism. Over time the teachings of Osho had taken hold, including an unusual level of sexual freedom, even for those years. Some better suited to the arrangement than others. Jean-Baptiste, for all his liking of women, no good at it at all. He moved out, found someone else’s hippie house to rent closer to town, another lover, a local band to play with. The weekend of the catastrophe Eugenie hadn’t gone to stay with him. She’d had a sleep-over arranged with Amanda. It was Yvette who was alone in his little cabin when something – a spark from the fire, a kerosene lamp, a candle – set it alight.
In the aftermath – the police, the coroner’s report, the inquest, the what-turned-out-to-be-illegal burial on Bene Gesserit attended by her distraught and confused grandparents, complete with all-night chanting and dancing by robed members of the community – it was found that Jean-Baptiste had overstayed his visa by ten years. He was deported. In the light of her mother’s incapacity to deal with her grief – her need to go to India to process what it meant to have lost a daughter – Eugenie was given into the care of her grandparents.
Turning back with the drained pasta. He was still there, in the middle of the room. A solid man. Like his father. In a singlet that showed off his shoulders, his biceps. Board shorts. Sturdy legs. He’d always had a kind of boyish face, cheeky, but you could see, now that his hair was starting to recede, that there’d come a time, maybe in not so long, when he’d put the tools down for the last time and put on a pair of glasses and take up management completely, and that when he did he’d look like anybody else, like an accountant or a businessman. She almost felt sorry for him.
He looked away. Picked up the remote and flicked on the sound, filling the room with the roar of the crowd. Someone must have scored. His back to her, affecting to watch the screen in much the same way as she had the dinner. A man who lived and worked amongst men most of whom had only a rudimentary interest or understanding of the environment or politics (never mind women). Ripe for manipulation by television and the popular press. There was that phrase she’d heard somewhere: it is hard for a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not doing so; but she wasn’t sure where the observation left her, sharing the benefits.
‘Do you want to call the girls?’ she said, pulling plates out from the cupboard. ‘Dinner’s ready.’
He switched off the sound again, the anger brimming but the protocols of living together still holding sway. For a little while. Going down the corridor to stick his head in their rooms.
Leaving the words he’d said hanging.
She put the plates out on the bench, then stopped, resting her hands on the edge again, her weight on them. Having to, to stop from falling. From the force of holding herself against him. Surprised he hadn’t let loose. Wondering if it was still to come. If he would try to use the girls to make his point. Or if, perhaps, something had changed in her that had prevented him. That maybe he sensed she didn’t care enough anymore. The awful power of indifference. The idea lurking in the back of her mind that she might have other choices. Not just because of what she was doing with the dam. At three o’clock in the morning a couple of weeks before she’d been in the hospital when the new doctor had brought in a patient. Nothing had been said, nothing done, but she’d felt it in her bones. In her waters as her nan used to say. And it didn’t matter that nothing would or could happen as a result of it. That all such feelings are, by definition, fantasies. That wasn’t the point. Someone had seen her. Someone had taken the time to look. It made all the difference.