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‘Feeling better today? Ready to go back to school?’ I ask Jake with a frisson of desperation as we drive along in the Mazda. The ride is so smooth we don’t even have the sensation of movement.
‘Can we have a car like this?’ Jake asks. ‘When’s Auntie Patsy coming to visit? How long will we be in town?’
‘No. Soon. Until I’ve finished photocopying the Save Our School flyers and it’s time to pick up Liss.’
Helen’s waiting to pick up her neighbour’s boy at the school when Jake and I zip down the road to collect Melissa. I execute a neat U-turn, a feat impossible in the Holden, and pull up at the gate. Helen almost falls out of her car.
‘Oh my God! A new car! Where’d you steal it?’
‘It’s a loaner from the mechanic.’
‘Oh.’ She screws up her face in sympathy. ‘Hey, a letter arrived for you at the school. Melissa’s probably got it. Another one from the minister about the school.’
I don’t ask how she knows. I never ask how she knows what we watched on television the night before and what brand of hair dye I use and how Melissa’s grades are going. But now I know something she doesn’t. I decide I’ll wait and see how long it takes her to find out about the new mechanic.
‘Do you know what the letter says?’
‘Loretta! As if we’d open your mail! But we’ve all guessed. It says, “Thank you for your recent letter. I’d like to take this opportunity”…da de da de da.’
Melissa appears at the car door holding out the minister’s envelope as if it’s a bad report card. I take it and fling it on the front seat and Melissa leans through the passenger side window and peers inside the car. ‘Is it ours?’ she asks.
‘Nope.’
‘Actually,’ Helen calls out on the way back to her car, ‘I’ve booked in to that new mechanic for a service, too. I’ve heard he’s very good.’ She waggles her bottom and kicks up a heel. Of course she knew.
Poor Giorgio, I think. Giorgio is the old town mechanic, pushing eighty, bald and bowlegged. We’ve all used him for years to keep our cars running with bits of string and glue. I decide I’ll keep going to him for my servicing, even if he is getting so absent-minded that last time he forgot to put the oil back in the engine. Luckily Norm noticed the car hadn’t leaked its normal drips on to his driveway.
When I get back to the garage I’m devastated at having to return the keys to the Mazda. We’ve been around town ten times playing the royal family, waving at everyone we know.
‘That’ll be eighty dollars. Didn’t take as long as I thought.’
Jake’s rigid beside me as I hand over the cash. Melissa stands next to him chewing her thumb. I’ve had words with Jake in the car about not nagging Merv for a tour.
‘Mr Bull’s a busy man,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t want to be bothered by little boys. You don’t want him to think you’re a whining little boy, do you? So you wait and see if he offers again.’
‘Anyway, mate, bit of bad news.’ Merv crouches down in front of Jake. ‘I’m sorry, but I have to get away early tonight. Can we do our tour another time?’
‘Yes, please,’ Jake whispers. Melissa puts her arm around his shoulders and they turn away and scramble on to the bench seat in the back of the Holden.
‘I mean it,’ Merv says to me. ‘I’d love to give the little bloke a tour. Another day. Give me a call anytime.’ He reaches into his back pocket. ‘Here’s my card.’
Something’s odd when I drive off: my vision. Through the new windscreen I can actually see the white line in the middle of the road. The Holden throbs and rattles down the Bolton Road and I find myself humming to an old song that I can hear clearly in my head. I can hear it so clearly that I’m singing along with lyrics I didn’t realize I knew. Even Jake seems happier. He and Melissa are bopping their heads along to the beat. Melissa leans over and turns up the volume on the radio and the tune bursts out of the speakers. We look at each other. Merv has fixed the radio. No more race calls, no more protests, no more ads for haemorrhoid cream.
‘I love this car,’ I sing.
‘Me too!’ Jake shouts over the pumping beat. By the time we’ve reached the supermarket, we’re all singing along at top volume, windows rolled down, faces pushed out of the car like excited Labradors. Brenda, who happens to be getting out of her car in the supermarket carpark, hears us roar up, turns, frowns and purses her lips. I’m convinced it’s because we’re exhibiting signs of happiness, until I pull into a parking bay and Brenda comes over to commiserate.
‘I heard there was a letter from the minister. Never mind, Loretta. We knew it wouldn’t work.’
Once we’re inside the supermarket, I tear open the envelope while the kids do their usual wistful lingering in the snack foods aisle. The letter doesn’t say I’ve saved the school. No surprise there. But there is another big surprise. On the way home we drop into Norm’s.
‘Guess what?’
Norm’s running his hand over my smooth windscreen.
‘Nice. The old one had as many craters as the surface of the moon. It was a wonder you didn’t run into a truck.’
‘I got a letter. The education minister’s coming to Gunapan.’
‘Whoa. Here comes trouble.’ He reaches up and fingers the ridge of scar on his forehead. ‘I can feel it in my engine.’
5
Over the next week, the heat builds until at eight thirty on Monday morning it’s already so hot that the birds are sitting on the fence with their beaks open. I walk out of the house with the children in tow and pull open the driver’s door. It squeals as usual.
‘Bush pig!’ Jake shrieks. He opens the back passenger door, which also squeals.
‘Bush pig!’ Melissa’s shriek is even louder. They fall about laughing, swinging their doors open and shut and imitating the squeals of metal against metal.
‘Get in the car.’ No one should be laughing in this kind of heat.
The road to town is flat and empty. As we bump over the pitted tarmac, sprays of pink-and-grey galahs explode into the sky from the fields beside us. On a low hill to the north I can see Les on his tractor, motoring along in the leisurely fashion of a man on a Sunday drive. The sun picks out a shiny spot on one of his wheels and it flashes in a radiant signal each rotation.
‘Mum, what’s the collective noun for bush pigs?’ Melissa asks and Jake bursts into giggles that he tries to smother with his hand.
‘I don’t know. The same as domestic pigs, I suppose. What is that? Is that a herd?’
‘A herd of bush pigs,’ Jake shouts.
‘A pog of pigs!’ Melissa says.
‘A swog!’
‘A swig! A swig of pigs!’
I wind down my window and push my arm out, leave it there for a moment so Les can see my wave.
‘Is that Les?’ Jake asks.
‘Mr Garrison to you.’
‘All the other kids call—’
‘I don’t care.’
We pull up at the school gates. Melissa and Jake sit silently in the back seat as if they’re hoping I’ll turn around and announce a once-in-a-lifetime no-school day.
‘What’s all this about bush pigs anyway?’ I look in the rearview mirror and see Melissa shaking her head vigorously at Jake.
‘Nothing.’ She catches me watching her and blushes. She has her father’s colouring, pale skin that stays freckly no matter how much suncream I slather on her, and sandy red hair. When she blushes her face blooms like a scarlet rose.
They jostle their way out of the car, mutter a goodbye, and run through the school gate, separating at the scraggly hedge and bolting away to their respective groups of friends.
Bush pigs, I think and head off to work.
Gabrielle, the Chair of the Management Committee at the Neighbourhood House where I work, can’t answer when I ask her the collective noun for bush pigs. She has dropped in unexpectedly. The Management Committee consists of volunteers from the local community, most of them women from the larger, more wealthy properties outside Gunapan. Supposedly their role is to steer the direction of the Neighbourhood House, to use their skills and contacts in developing the profile of the house in the community, to oversee the efficient management of the house finances and so on and so forth. In reality, they meet once a month to hear the report of the House Managers and drink a glass of wine before they start talking about land values and the international wool and beef markets.
‘Flock?’ she guesses. ‘Herd? Posse?’
‘Herd, that’s what I said.’
‘Darling, I really haven’t got time to chat about this. I’m on the trail of a wonderful opportunity. Very hush-hush, from my sources.’
A thought occurs to me. ‘Are you talking about that development thing?’
‘No, not the development. I’m talking about wool. The finest merino. I have access to a flock that these people need to sell immediately at a very nice price. Buy, agist, shear and sell in a month. A business proposition that could make someone a lot of money.’
‘I’ll do it.’ A lot of money – exactly what I need.
‘Oh, darling, if only you could. Except it will take about twenty thousand to get this thing off the ground.’
‘Ah.’ I am not surprised.
‘So you carry on and I’ll pop on to the computer for a moment. We have the contact details of the committee members here, don’t we?’
‘About that development—’ I start to say, but Gabrielle waves me away.
‘Sorry, darling, I must get on with this.’
Gabrielle logs on to the computer and I go back to my work of sorting the donations for our book exchange. The covers are embossed in the silvers and royal blues with scarlet blood spatters that attract the average literary type here. Everyone in Gunapan obviously loves horror. Perhaps that’s why they live in this fine town.
Norm has knocked us up a bookcase from the old floorboards of the Memorial Hall and each time I slide a book on to the shelf a cream-coloured puff of powder drifts from below the shelving. He said the insects are long gone. Powder post beetles, he called them. They sound exotic, like tiny rare insects making dust fine as talc, flitting away when they are grown. I told him I could imagine them with transparent iridescent wings, perhaps a glow like fireflies in the forest. ‘Nah, love,’ he said, ‘they’re borers.’
I shelve Prey and The Dark Rider and Coma and Pet Sematary and soon I can’t bear to see another cover promising supernatural thrills and chills. As I am about to check the spelling of cemetery in the dictionary – was all that schooling wasted? – I see a different kind of book in the pile. The cover has small writing and a picture of a woman in a dark red dress. She’s lying on a couch. But when I look closer, because the picture is also small, I see she’s not, in fact, lying on a couch. She’s from a different world. Her world has divans, not couches. And she isn’t lying on the divan. She’s reclining on the divan. Her dress is draped in elegant folds across her slender thighs. Her high-heeled shoe dangles from her foot. I bet she never wears knickers with stretched elastic that slither down and end up in a smiley under each bum cheek.
After I’ve wiggled my hands down inside my jeans and hauled my undies back up to their rightful position, I open the cover. Inside is an inscription:
To my dear M, remember Paris. With love from Veronica.
I’ve never met a Veronica in Gunapan. I know a Vera, who makes the best ham sandwiches at the CWA but wants to sniff everyone’s breath before they go into the hall because she’s the last standing member of the Gunapan Temperance Union. But no Veronica. Maybe the ‘M’ lives here. Could it be Merv Bull? He doesn’t seem the type to recline on a divan in Paris. I flip the book over and read the reviews on the back.
An elegiac work that brilliantly explores the chiaroscuro of love. Hmm, I think. Elegiac. Exactly what I would have said. The dictionary is on the upper shelf of the bookcase and I pull it down.
‘Gabrielle,’ I call into the office. ‘Have you read The Paper Teacup?’
‘No, darling. Why?’
‘Oh, well, it’s absolutely marvellous, Gabrielle, you must read it. I found it rather elegiac.’
Gabrielle doesn’t answer. I wonder if I pronounced the word correctly. I tiptoe over and peer around the doorjamb to see if she’s doubled over with laughter at this idiot who can’t pronounce elegiac. Over her shoulder I see her typing elliejayack into the computer’s search engine. I creep back to the bookshelf and start shelving more Night of the Beast and Death Visitor books.
Ten minutes later Gabrielle leans out through the doorway. ‘I don’t like sad books. Give me a good thriller any day.’
Once she’s left with the information she needs, I finish up my work and make a phone call to the office of the Minister for Education, Elderly Care and Gaming. The night after I got the letter, I rang the SOS committee members to tell them that the minister was coming to Gunapan. It took a while to convince some of them.
‘Is he coming for the BnS Ball?’ Kyleen asked. She’s been talking about the Lewisford Bachelors and Spinsters Ball for a while, usually bringing it up during completely irrelevant conversations. It’s not the biggest BnS ball in the state, but it is known as the one with the lowest dress standard. A frock from the opportunity shop and a pair of boots is acceptable attire, which suits Kyleen well because that’s what she wears a lot of the time anyway. I’m sure she mentioned the ball because she can’t find anyone to drive her the hundred kilometres to Lewisford, but I doubt the minister would give her a lift, even if he was a bachelor and on the lookout for a country spinster.
The letter had said to ring the minister’s office to arrange a date for his visit. I organized an emergency SOS meeting where we got through two packets of Jam Jamboree biscuits and four pots of tea and argued about the merits of an earlier visit or a later visit, as if we’d have any say in the matter anyway, and didn’t decide anything except that there was less jam in a Jam Jamboree than there used to be.
Maxine had the answer. ‘Give him a call. Sort it out over the phone.’ As if calling government ministers is an everyday chore of mine.
The minister’s assistant answers the phone.
‘Gunapan,’ he repeats slowly, as if he is running his finger down a long list.
Surely not that many people write letters to the minister every second week?
‘OK, here we are. Correspondence Item 6,752/11. Yes, action required. Schedule a ministerial visit. So, how many minutes do you want him to speak for?’
‘I don’t want him to speak. I want him to save our school.’
‘Ah, you’re that lady.’
‘Yes, I am.’ It’s good to take a firm stand, even though I suspect ‘that lady’ is ministerial office code for raving lunatic.
‘And he’ll need a half-day to get there and back…’
I can hear him flipping through pages.
‘All right. It could be either June 27th or July 19th.’
‘But you’ve threatened to close the school by the end of the second term in April. Not much point in visiting a school that’s already closed.’
I hope he’s blushing. He reluctantly suggests a day in March, complaining all the while that he’ll have to reschedule appointments to make it happen. I complain back that we all have commitments and it’s not so easy for us in Gunapan to rearrange things either. I don’t mention that he’s proposed the visit for a pension day, when the whole town is aflurry with shopping and bill-paying. It’s very hard to get anyone to do anything else. But since there’s no other possibility we agree to set the date.
By mid-afternoon even more birds are sitting stupidly in the trees with their beaks open. This is one of those days when they might fall stone dead to the ground, heatstruck. On the horizon a thin column of grey smoke rises and forms a wispy cloud in the pale sky. The start of a bushfire. Or some farmer trying to burn off on a day when leaving your specs lying on a newspaper could make it burst into flame. There’s no way to be in a good mood on a day like this. No way, when the air conditioning in the car is broken and the steering wheel leaves heat welts on your palms. Days like this it seems as if summer will never end. We’ll go on sweltering and we’ll cook from the inside out, like meat in the microwave. They’ll cut us open at the morgue and find us filled with steak and kidney pudding. On the outside we’ll be nicely pink.
Days like this I think about picking up Melissa and Jake from school and I can see everything before it happens. They’ll fall into the car and yelp at the heat on the vinyl seats. They’ll ask for icy poles from the shop, or ice creams, or they’ll want to go down to the waterhole for a swim. The council swimming pool’s shut for renovations. All winter it was open, the heated pool empty except for five or six people who have moved here from the city and who put on their designer goggles and churn up and down the pool thirty or forty times every morning before they purr back to their farmlets in huge recreational vehicles.
One time I decided to get fit and I went along at six thirty in the dark with the kids. After they got tired of messing around in the free lane, the kids sat on the edge of the pool dangling their feet in the water and shouting, ‘Go Mum!’ as if I was in the Olympics. The other swimmers lapped me four times to my one and by lap five I was dangerously close to going under for the third time.
‘Never mind, Mum,’ Melissa reassured me. ‘We love you even if you are fat.’
Then during the third month of spring this year, the council announces the swimming pool will close for renovations. Right over summer. What renovations? we ask. What can you do to a swimming pool? It either holds the water or it doesn’t. And in summer, after years of drought, when we save the water we use to wash vegetables and time our showers, the pool is our one indulgence in this town. No, they say, we’re putting in a sauna and a spa and we’re building a café. You’ll be glad when it’s done, they tell us. We’ve tendered it out. It will only take five months. Why? we ask again, but no one answers. Truly something stinks at that council.
‘Don’t say a word,’ I tell the kids when they stagger past the wilted gum trees of the schoolyard and into the car. ‘We’re going to buy icy poles and we’re going to the waterhole.’
If they had any energy left they’d cheer, I’m sure, but Jake has dark circles under his eyes from not sleeping in the heat and Melissa turns and looks out through the open window, lifting her face to catch the breeze.
