Kate flung a browning apple core from the twin-cab ute and hastily brushed yesterday’s sandwich crumbs from Nell’s booster seat. She stood back and watched her little girl clamber up and wait to be strapped in.
As Kate turned the engine over, she looked at Nell in the rear-vision mirror, noting her unbrushed hair and mis-matching clothes. Vegemite already stained her shirt front. Kate sighed. What sort of a mother was she? It looked like Nell was coming home from day care, not going to it. She pulled out into the suburban street and memories of her journey from Tasmania to the mainland three years earlier swelled in her. Her unplanned journey to motherhood. It had been just weeks after the Rouseabout B&S Ball. She was on her way to agricultural college, travelling to the mainland for the first time in her scrappy little Subaru ute. There’d been no need for childseats and dual-cab utes back then.
On a dozey summer evening Kate had driven her ute into the open mouth of the ship’s hull. On the wet gleaming deck, Kate had looked up to the cherry-red towers that belched diesel fumes into the crisp air. Two blasts of the horn, the glug and shudder of reverse-thrust engines and the town of Devonport slid away into the distance. People waving from the rocky groyne became tiny specks. She felt the pinch of sadness that none of her family were there, waving. None of what was left of her family.
She recalled the ‘too cool for school’ way she’d slung herself onto the thick upholstered couches in the ship’s bar and sipped at a Bundy, hating the aftertaste left by the town-water ice.
Here she was, a fresh-faced Tasmanian country girl, raised on the windswept east coast. A girl who wore Blundstone boots for work and cowgirl boots for play. A girl with an old kelpie curled up on a blanket in the ship’s dog trailer, below in the hold. Parked near the dogs was ‘Thelma’, Kate’s bomby old Subaru, its mottled paintwork covered with B&S stickers across the tailgate. It was all she’d needed then. A half-reliable ute with a tattered front seat for Sheila to sit on and a torn tarp to keep most of the rain off her bags in the back. And one functioning wiper that scraped haphazardly across the driver’s windscreen.
Back then, she had been off on an adventure. She’d buried the memory of her mother’s death, turned her back on her father and screamed at her father’s new woman before she’d gone. She’d only paused momentarily to kiss her brother Will and hug her horse Matilda goodbye, and take one last look at the farm. Bronty. Her home.
Australia’s mainland was hers to explore. There would be B&Ss and boys and wild, crazy nights with new friends. Along with that, she was hungry to learn. She would soak up all the agricultural knowledge they could give her at college, so she could grow to be like her mother – a woman with a vision for the future of farming.
Kate vowed to take over where Laney had left off, to make a deep and stubborn furrow in the agricultural industry – the industry that should be recognised by everyone as the heartbeat of the country. Kate swigged on her rum and cast her eyes about the ship’s crowd. She heard her mother’s voice in her head. ‘It’ll be your children, Kate, the farmers of the future, who will rescue all of these people. They don’t know it, but food is the most important thing. Farmers are the key to the future. And you can be part of it if you choose.’
That night on the ship there was only one thing that drowned out Laney’s voice in Kate’s head. It was a niggling suspicion, deep within her body, that she had made a huge mistake. She thought of the box that she’d tucked in the side pocket of her backpack. The pregnancy-test kit.
Kate had finished her drink, then shouldered her pack and gone out onto the deck to watch the mutton-birds skitter above the thick dark swell of Bass Strait. When her fingers were numbed from the icy wind, she pulled open the heavy door and made her way unsteadily along the rolling ship’s corridor. Then she locked herself in a swaying toilet cubicle that held the faint stench of vomit and unpacked the kit to find out if what she feared was true.
She remembered the asphyxiating feeling of the ship’s toilet cubicle and the roll and slam of the hull on the unrelenting swell. Her shaking hands had ripped at the foil packet and taken out the plastic stick. When she saw two blue lines screaming ‘positive’, her whole world had rolled too. She was pregnant. Alone and pregnant, wishing like hell she’d never gone to the Rouseabout B&S ball and done what she had done.
Early the next morning, when the impatient queue of cars, caravans and trucks clattered out from the ship’s belly and into Melbourne’s crowded centre, Kate had pulled over at a phonebox on the Esplanade that ran parallel to the brown, newly combed beach. Her mind scrambled in panic. She’d automatically dialled her father’s number, hoping to reach Will. Instead, her stepmother Annabelle had answered.
‘Is Will there?’ Kate said.
‘He’s out and about.’
‘Oh. Is Dad there?’
‘I’ll put him on.’ Kate heard the phone clunk down. ‘Henry!’ she heard Annabelle call. A moment later, her father’s voice.
‘You’re on the other side then?’
‘Yes.’ Kate struggled to hold back her tears. She couldn’t say any more.
‘Kate? What’s going on?’ Her father’s voice sounded annoyed. Kate imagined his cooling coffee sitting beside his congealing porridge.
She blurted it out. ‘I’m pregnant.’
There was silence. For a long time, she could hear the clicks over the optic fibres that lay beneath the seabed. A painful silence stretched across the water from Melbourne to Tasmania, right to her father’s ear. Kate was sure he hadn’t said it out loud, but in her head he shouted, ‘Silly girl! I knew you’d do something like this to me! Stupid bloody girl!’
When he at last did speak he quietly said, ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know.’ She desperately wanted him to say come home. But instead, across the coldness of the line, with a southerly wind at her back, Kate heard his words.
‘Better keep on going to your Auntie Maureen’s. She can sort you out better than I can.’
Kate knew deep down he didn’t mean it that way. Like a slap of rejection. But it was what she had been looking for from him back then, wasn’t it? That last severance between father and daughter.
She slammed the phone back in its cradle and ran to her ute. Holding Sheila’s head in her lap, Kate bunkered down in her ute between Port Phillip Bay and the steep cliff of the city’s sky scrapers, not knowing what to do. Wishing like hell she had her mother with her, here on this earth.
For an hour she sat stroking Sheila’s silky ears and thinking of the tiny cluster of cells dividing inside her. She could book herself into a clinic. Have a termination and then be on her way to college. Life would go on as normal. But then, she thought of her mother. She thought of the seeds in the attic at home on Bronty that Laney used to cup in the palm of her hand and move about with her fingertips.
‘The life in these seeds,’ Laney would say, looking wide-eyed at her children, ‘is a miracle beyond comprehension.’
The seeds had been collected by Henry’s mother and his grandmother and great-grandmother before that. Each generation of women had carefully catalogued and stored them in beautifully crafted wooden drawers beneath the sloping roof of the attic. Seeds from healthy vegetables that had been grown and collected since settlement. Seeds deposited carefully in browning paper envelopes decorated with tiny trails of hungry silverfish that mingled with the swirl of three generations of Webster women’s handwriting. There were tiny black pinpricks or smoother round orbs, all kinds of shapes and sizes of seed from Bronty’s extensive colonial garden.
One day, when Kate was about ten years old, her mother told her a story as she gazed at the tiny black seeds, some no bigger than fly spots.
‘Your gran so desperately wanted a brother or sister for your dad,’ Laney said. ‘But babies sometimes don’t come when we plan them. Life’s all about healthy seeds, and having healthy soil to grow them in. And babies are the same – you can’t have a baby without a healthy seed and a healthy womb. That’s why you’ve got no uncles or aunts. God only gave your gran one healthy and precious seed, and that seed was your dad. And look what a bloody good tree he’s grown into.’
Kate remembered her mother in the Bronty vegetable garden, stooping to point out the curl and twitch of a runner-bean vine that had clambered its way over Kate and Will’s lopsided scarecrow. How she encouraged her children to crunch their white teeth through snowpeas and gorge themselves on strawberries until Will’s already pink shining cheeks broke out in hives.
Kate knew in her heart what her mother would say about the baby. She would tell Kate to let this seed grow, and make a life, in case there were no more seeds within her. This might be the only one.
She sat up straight, resolved. She put her hand on her flat tummy, feeling as if part of her mother was now embedded in this baby. Kate fired up the engine of her old ute and drove on to New South Wales.