‘Christ,’ he said, ‘that’s all woman.’
‘That’s all woman,’ Jesse mimicked. ‘You’re a poof, Benny, admit you’re a poof.’
Benny heard himself say: ‘She’s mine.’ He meant it too. He committed himself to it as he said it.
He watched the Tax Inspector getting into her car. He had a very nice feeling about her. He had had a nice feeling about her this morning, the way she spoke, the way she looked at him. He took an Aloe-Vera facelette and wiped his cheeks.
Jesse said: ‘You want to fuck a whale?’
Benny looked at Jesse and saw that he was very young, and very short. He had soft, fair, fluffy hair in a line from his ears down to his chin. Benny felt his power come back. He felt it itch inside his skin.
He said, ‘When you’re grown up you’ll like their bellies like that.’
‘You don’t like girls, Benny.’
‘Their tits get big,’ Benny said. ‘Their nipples too. They like you to drink their milk while you fuck them.’ He was smiling while he spoke. He felt his skin stretch. His face was full of teeth.
Jesse frowned.
Benny thought: you dwarf. He thought: I am going to rise up from the cellar and stand in the fucking sky.
‘She’s from the Tax Department,’ Jesse said. ‘I had to carry all the ledgers and that up to your Granny’s flat for her. She’s going to go through your old man like a dose of salts.’
This was the first time that Benny had heard about the Tax Department. He was travelling too fast to notice it. ‘I don’t care where she’s from.’ He looked down at Jesse and smiled as he checked his tie. ‘I am going to fuck her.’
Jesse was going to say something. He opened his mouth but then he just made a little breathy laugh through his nose and teeth.
Finally he said, ‘You?’
‘Yes.’ Benny’s chest and shoulders felt good inside his suit. His posture was good. He was suffused with a feeling of warmth.
‘We can realize our dreams,’ he told Jesse.
Jesse blushed bright red.
‘Also,’ Benny said. He held up a single, pink-nailed forefinger and waited.
‘Also what?’
‘Also I am selling five vehicles a week, starting now.’
Benny smiled. Then he picked up the ‘Petrol Sales’ invoice book and went to read the meters on the pumps.
10
Mrs Catchprice sat in her apartment above the car yard in Franklin, and was angry about what happened in Dorrigo nearly sixty-five years before.
Her grandson chanted. It did her no particular good, although she liked the company. He chanted on and on and on, and she smiled and nodded, watching him, but she was Frieda McClusky and she was eighteen years old and she would never have the flower farm she had been promised.
In Franklin she narrowed her cloudy eyes and lit a Salem cigarette.
In Dorrigo she lost her temper. She emptied her mother’s ‘Tonic’ across the veranda. She threw a potato through the kitchen window and watched it bounce out into the debris of the storm. She would never have a flower farm in Dorrigo. Then she would have her flower farm somewhere else.
She walked out down the long straight drive. She was eighteen. She had curly fair hair which fell across her cheek and had to be shaken back every ten yards or so.
She was tall and slender and there was a slight strictness in her walk, a precision not quite in keeping with the muddy circumstances. The drive ran straight down the middle of their ten-acre block. The gutters on each side of it were now little creeks running high with yellow water from the storm. Occasional lightning continued to strike the distant transmitter at Mount Moomball, but the thunder now arrived a whole fifty seconds later. It was six o’clock in the evening. Steam was already beginning to rise from the warm earth.
There was a dense forest of dead, ring-barked trees on either side of the slippery, yellow-mud road. They were rain-wet, green-white. They were as still as coral, fossils, bones. There was a beauty in them, but Frieda McClusky did not care to see it.
There were three trees fallen across the road. She had to pick her way between the thickets of their fallen branches. She was fastidious in the way she touched the twigs. She kept her back straight and her pretty face contorted – her chin tucked into her neck, her nose wrinkled, her eyes screwed up. When a branch caught in her coat, she brushed and panicked against the restriction as though it were a spider’s web.
She wore a pleated tartan skirt and a white cotton blouse with a Peter Pan collar. On her feet she had black Wellingtons. She carried a tartan umbrella, a small hat-case, a navy blue waterproof overcoat, and – for her own protection – a stick of AN 60 gelignite which had been purchased four and a half years ago in order to blow these dead trees from the earth.
In a year when no one had ever heard the term ‘hobby farm’, the McCluskys had sold their family home in Melbourne and moved here to Dorrigo a thousand miles away. There was, of course, no airport in Dorrigo, but there was no railway either. From the point of view of Glenferrie Road, Malvern, Victoria, it was like going to Africa.
Frieda’s father was fifty-eight years old. He had energy in the beginning. He had blue poplin work-shirts and moleskin trousers which went slowly white. He set out to ring-bark every large tree on the ten-acre block. When the trees were dead he was going to blast their roots out of the earth with gelignite. The ten acres he chose were surrounded by giant trees, by dramatic ravines, escarpments, waterfalls. It was as romantic a landscape as something in a book of old engravings. Within his own land he planned rolling lawns, formal borders, roses, carnations, dahlias, hollyhocks, pansies, and a small ornamental lake.
He had notebooks, rulers, pens in different colours. He had plans headed ‘Dorrigo Springs Guest-house’ which he drew to scale. He listed his children on a page marked ‘Personnel’. Daniel McClusky – vegetable gardener. Graham McClusky – carpenter, mechanic. Frieda McClusky – flower gardener. It did not seem crazy at the time. He wrote a letter to the Technical Correspondence School so he might ‘qualify in the use of handling of explosives to a standard acceptable to the chief Inspector of Explosives of New South Wales’. He bought Frieda
Frieda’s mother was not listed as ‘Personnel’, but the move had a positive effect upon her temper. She bought a horse and wore jodhpurs which made her skittish and showed off her good legs and her small waist. She brushed Frieda’s hair at night, and stopped going to bed straight after dinner. She was less critical of Frieda’s appearance. Sometimes she walked down the drive-way with her husband, hand in hand. You could see them pointing out the future to each other. Frieda watched them and felt a great weight removed from her.
Frieda loved the feel of the soil between her fingers, the smell of earth at night in deep, damp gullies, chicken and horse manure, rich reeking blood and bone from the Dorrigo abattoirs. She liked the smell of rotting grass as it slowly became earth. She liked to dig her garden fork down deep and see the pink-grey bodies of worms, lying still and silent, hiding from the air.
She was stupid enough to be grateful for the life she was given. She did not see what her brothers saw – that they were stuck with mad people. They did not have the decency to share their thoughts with her. They left an envelope propped against the ugly little butter dish Aunt Mae had given them. The letter said they could not have expressed their feelings because ‘we would have been talked out of it’. They said they were now men and had to choose their own lives and would write later. They left their shirts and sweaters folded neatly in their drawers.
Marcia McClusky blamed her husband, although, typically, she never did say this clearly. By noon on the day they opened the envelope, Stan and Marcia McClusky had stopped speaking to each other. By the following evening Marcia was sleeping in the boys’ room. The next morning neither of them got up.
It was grief of course, but grief does not stay grief for ever. It changes, and in this case it also must have
