Читать книгу The Fine Colour of Rust - P. O’Reilly A. - Страница 7

Norm’s come by to drop off more lemons and pick up a few of my lemon tarts. He leans in an old-man-at-the-pub kind of way on the mantelpiece and picks up a postcard I’ve propped against the candlestick.

‘Who’s this from?’ he asks, turning it over without waiting for an answer.

‘My sister, Patsy, the one who works at the uni in Melbourne. She’s on a research trip to Paris.’

‘She works at the uni?’ He props the card back after he’s read it.

‘Yep, she’s a lecturer there.’

‘She must be pretty smart. What happened to you?’ Norm winks at Jake, who giggles and scratches his face the way he’s been doing since he got up. I know what’s wrong but I’m trying to pretend it’s not true. Even though the kids in his grade have all had the vaccine, some have still come down with a mild case of chickenpox.

‘Dropped on my head as a baby. So did you get the windscreen?’

‘Didn’t get it, but tracked one down. A new bloke is doing car repairs out the end of the Bolton Road. Set up the other week. Actually, he’s about your age. Not bad looking either. Good business. Nice and polite.’

‘Beautiful wife, six well-behaved children,’ I add.

Norm leans back and frowns. ‘Really?’

‘No, but probably.’

‘I don’t think so. He smelled of bachelor to me. Divorced maybe. Anyway, he quoted me a good price, said to bring the car and he’d put in the windscreen straight away. So you can take it down whenever you like.’

‘What’s his name?’ I ask Norm.

‘Merv Bull.’

I shake my head. Only in Gunapan. Merv Bull sounds like an old farmer with black teeth and hay in his hair who scoops yellow gobs from his ear and stares at them for minutes on end like they’ll forecast the weather. The image keeps replaying in my mind as I finish wrapping the lemon tarts in waxed paper.

‘You can’t judge people by their names, Loretta, or you’d be able to carry a tune.’

‘That’s unkind, Norm. I may not have turned out to be the talented country-singing daughter my mother was hoping for, but then, neither did Patsy or Tammy. We haven’t got the genes for it. I don’t know why Mum keeps up these crazy fantasies.’

A week and a half later, after having been held hostage in the house by a child even more itchy and irritable than normal, I set out to get the new windscreen.

It’s years since I’ve driven down the Bolton Road. I remember when we first moved to Gunapan I got lost down here. I was heading for the Maternal Health Centre. My first pregnancy. My face was so puffed up with heat and water retention I looked like I had the mumps. I took a left turn at the ghost gum past the stockfeed store as the nurse had advised on the phone, and suddenly I was in another world. Later, of course, after I’d found my way back into town, I realized I’d turned left at the wattle tree past the Pet Emporium, but anyway, it was as if I’d magically slipped out of Gunapan and into fairyland. The bush came right up to the roadside, and in the blazing heat of the day the shade from the eucalypts dropped the temperature at least five degrees. I got out of the car, waddled to a picnic bench in a clearing and sat drinking water for twenty minutes. Hope bubbled up in me. The baby would be fine, my husband Tony would turn out not to be a nong, we would definitely win the lottery that Saturday.

Only one of those things came true, but I’ve always loved that bit of bush. I’d come out here with the kids sometimes in the early days and walk the tracks, listening to the sound of the bush, when I could hear it above their endless chatter, and smelling the minty eucalypts.

We’ve just swung into the Bolton Road when Jake asks if he can have a Mooma Bar from the supermarket. His chickenpox has dwindled to a few annoying itchy spots, but they won’t let him back into school yet, no matter how much I beg. He’s bored and tailing me like a debt collector. Any excuse to get out is good.

‘There’s no supermarket out here.’ The moment I speak I see a shopping trolley on the side of the road. Someone must have walked that trolley five kilometres. Unless it was tossed in the back of a ute and driven here. Further along the road is one of those orange hats they use to steer drivers away from roadworks. A couple of minutes on we see a load of rubbish dumped a few metres off the road. A dozen beer bottles lie around the charcoal of an old fire with what looks like bits of an old picnic bench sticking out of it. A heap of lawn clippings moulders beside a brown hoodie and a pair of torn-up jeans. I slow down, pull the Holden over to the side of the road. The trees still come right up to the roadside, but behind them is light, as if someone is shining a torch through the forest.

‘We came here on my birthday,’ Jake reminds me.

He’s right. We came out two years ago with green lemonade and presents and a birthday cake in the shape of a swimming pool. Kyleen and Maxine and their kids came, and we played hidey at the old shearers’ hut. Three kangaroos burst out from behind the hut when we arrived and crashed off through the bush. We called them ‘shearing kangaroos’ and Jake thought that was a real kind of ’roo till Norm put him right. But now I can’t make sense of where that hut might be. The face of the forest is completely different. Ahead of us, a wide dusty dirt road leads in through the trees. I can’t see the picnic area. And that light through the trees is wrong.

I drive along the bitumen to where the dirt road enters the bushland.

‘I don’t want to go in there,’ Jake says.

More rubbish litters the side of the track – plastic bags and bottles, juice containers, old clothes, building materials – as if this piece of bushland has become the local tip. I peer along the track. It seems to lead into a big clearing that wasn’t there before. The bush used to stretch way back. I would never let the kids run too far in case they got lost. Now if they ran off they’d end up standing in a flat empty paddock the size of a footy field.

‘Footy field,’ I mutter. ‘Maybe they’re building a new footy field.’

That can’t be right, because even the old footy field is in trouble. The footy club has a sausage sizzle every Saturday morning outside the supermarket to raise money to buy in water. All the sports clubs around here are desperate for water. Some have had to close down because the ground is so hard it can crack the shins of anyone landing awkwardly on the surface.

‘Let’s go. I’m bored.’

‘Hey, Jake, open your mouth again and show me your teeth. I think it might be time for a trip to the dentist.’

That always shuts him up. We climb back into the Holden and reverse into the Bolton Road to continue the journey to our new windscreen.