The Fine Color of Rust (26 page)

“My husband was killed in war.” She shakes her head in the dark car beside me, as if she wants to shake out what she has just said.

“I'm sorry. It must be so hard for you.”

“No!” she says so loudly I almost slam my foot on the brake before I realize she's not angry. “No, please do not be sorry for me. For us. Everyone always staring at us, always sorry.” She thumps her hand against the dashboard. The radio turns on, but she doesn't seem to notice. “I do not want sorry.”

“I see.” I hesitate. Should I stop asking her questions?

“No one ask me about my husband because they are so sorry. When they introduce me, they say this is Mersiha, the refugee.”

“Right.” I'm treading carefully because this is exactly the kind of moment where I'm likely to say the wrong thing.

“I am more than refugee. I am normal person. My kids, they are normal kids. We want to be normal, not always everyone so sorry, so sorry.”

“Got it.”

Driving down the road to her house, I think about what she said. One day I will ask about her husband. When we reach the house, the veranda light is on and the monster dog is lying in its usual spot.

“That is an enormous dog,” I remark.

“You know this dog?” Her eyes are wide. “You know who belong to this dog? Please take this dog!”

“You mean it's not yours? Who feeds it?” I wonder if she used to have more children.

“I do not know. In the morning it goes away. In the afternoon it comes back and stays all the time until the next morning.”

While we sit in the car talking, the ancient evil woman I saw the day I came here twitches open the curtain to the left of the front door and spears me with a death ray.

“My grandmother,” Mersiha says. “She is very old.”

No kidding. I think she might be a first cousin of Methuselah. “I'll get Norm to take the dog to the pound. And thanks for coming to the meeting. The committee is finished, though. No more Save Our School.” I have to admit it. I've failed.

Mersiha shrugs. “That is too bad.”

“But if you'd like to join a committee, the Neighbourhood House Management Committee has a vacancy coming up.” At last, we might have a committee member who doesn't own a four-wheel drive and property. They won't be happy about that. I feel an uncharitable glee. We could stack the committee with migrants, refugees, and bogans. Of course, we'd never get another grant. We're supposed to help the disadvantaged, not be the disadvantaged.

“Please, come inside. A cup of tea.”

I tell her I'd better head off. It's only eight o'clock, so I'll drop by and ask Norm to take care of the monster dog. Another excellent excuse to see how he's doing.

•  •  •

THE SCREECH OF
my car tires must have alerted Justin. He's standing in the doorway of Norm's place, framed by light, when I walk up the drive.

“Loretta?”

“That's me,” I reply, still pleased at the thought of our new Neighbourhood House committee member.

“How did you know?”

The thumping of my heart begins as a slow erratic stutter and quickly rises to a fast drum roll.

“Know what?”

“He's gone in the ambulance to Halstead. I'm about to follow.”

“STOP IT,” I
tell Norm.

He breathes quietly. His chest lifts the bedsheet in a small, quick billow, like a puff of air under a silk dress. He is sunburned dark brown against the whiteness of this hospital ward, with the scar on his forehead a lighter color, as though he has missed with the fake tan.

“Stop this rubbish and wake up, Norm.”

I take his hand and rub it briskly in mine. Justin sits on the other side of the bed watching as I fuss around. Norm's hand feels strange. The skin slides over the flesh and bones like a soft glove when I rub, as if his body has separated into different parts.

The doctor told us earlier that Norm might not wake up.

“Don't be stupid. Of course he'll wake up,” I replied.

The doctor nodded sympathetically at me as if I was the sick one.

“He's repairing a stationary engine for my auction,” I explained. “It's one of the big-ticket items.”

He nodded again and patted me on the arm before moving to a bed further down the unit.

I'm tucking the bedsheet more neatly under the bed when I
think Norm has stopped breathing. With my heart banging so loudly I can't hear anything anyway, I lean down and place my ear against his chest. The sparse gray hairs tickle my ear. His chest rises to meet my ear and Norm's warmth presses against my cheek. I stand up and take a deep shuddering breath. No matter how much air I suck in, I can't get enough into my lungs, as if I'm leaking from a thousand tiny pinpricks.

“Loretta, sit down,” Justin says.

“Did he knock back treatment? I'll kill him if he refused the chemo.”

I move Norm's hand gently along the heavy cotton sheet. His other hand is wired up. So is his nose, and there's another line snaking up under the bedclothes from a machine on a wheelie stand beside the bed.

“What's wrong with him?” I hear my voice becoming increasingly shrill. “He said he'd be fine. He said even if he didn't have treatment he'd be alive for years.”

“He has been having treatment. It's an infection. The doctor just told us that, Loretta.”

Justin stands up. He pats his own cheeks as if he's trying to wake himself up.

“You go home. I'll call you if there's a change,” he says.

“No, I'm here till he wakes up.”

“Mum's coming soon. We're only allowed two visitors at a time.”

So that's it. I'm being thrown out. My life with Norm tossed aside by a son who hasn't seen him for fourteen years and a wife who dumped him. I never did understand the story of the prodigal son. The one who has been good and faithful and devoted all those years is taken for granted while the one who abandoned his family gets a party and a pig on a spit. What's right about that?

My feeling of airlessness grows even stronger in this stuffy hospital room. I'd better get home and clean up for the kids. They'll be home the day after tomorrow. I have to make a good home for them so they don't go out and rob a bank and go to jail and abandon me, then waltz back in after fourteen years and turf out the poor sods who've been my good friends while they were gone.

I can't even squeeze out a goodbye. I swing around and charge out through the open door of the ward, wheel past the nurses' station, and thunder down the hallway, tears blurring my vision and a trail of runny snot winding its way around my top lip.

•  •  •

AT HOME, TERROR
edges her way hesitantly into the kitchen and begins nosing around the kitchen table.

“Help yourself,” I tell her as I take the kettle to the sink to fill it.

Panic clatters into the room and butts her way past Terror to join in.

A bar of soap sits on the kitchen windowsill for Norm to wash his hands when he comes to tea. He is everywhere in this house. Lemons from the tree in his yard fill the fruit bowl. Terror, his lawn-mowing gift to us, stands in front of me with her spooky green eyes. I pull her close and she burrows her head into my armpit. Her coat smells of hay and eucalyptus. She's wearing a bell that Norm welded together from a Toyota cylinder housing and the key to an old tractor.

At eight in the evening I drive back to the hospital. The nurse making notes at the nurses' station tells me that Norm has two relatives with him, so I'll have to wait in the visitors' room at the end of the floor. A man and a child are waiting in
there too. The little girl sits astride her father's knee, playing an electronic game, while he stares, with the same hollowed expression as mine, at the gaudy figures on the television screen flickering silently on its bracket above us. As the minutes tick on, I wish my children were here for me to hold, to hug tight, even though I know it is better that they don't have to experience this descent, this excavation of hope. The longer I wait, the more I sense the dreadful impending absence of my closest friend.

At nine twenty, Justin and Marg walk slowly past the visitors' room toward the lifts. Marg is weeping. Neither of them sees me.

At nine twenty-four I stand beside Norm's bed. An orderly waits at the entrance to the intensive care unit. Around us the hospital is alive with the sounds of coughs and televisions and muttering and squeaky trolley wheels and the hum of machinery. The activity makes the silence and stillness at this bed seem like a hollow core.

Norm's face is stubbled with gray as usual. His head is turned to the side, as if he was looking off to the horizon before he closed his eyes. I lean my face down to his, dripping tears onto his creased skin. No breath comes from his mouth. No smart-aleck comments, no bad jokes, no deadpan asides. He isn't telling me off anymore, or shaking his head in disbelief.

“Take your time,” the orderly says before he draws the curtain around me and Norm.

I sit down on the bed beside his long skinny body. I take his cool hand in mine, examine the fingernails, their black rinds of grease from broken machines and rusty spare parts. I press his cobbled fingertips against my cheek. I imagine I can feel his body turning into something other than Norm,
powering down to a cold hard object like a machine that has been turned off.

He has no last words for me. I turned my back and he slipped away.

“Damn you. Damn you, Norm Stevens.”

WHEN I WAKE
up the next day, the house is roaring with emptiness. I lie in bed most of the day waiting. Waiting, like the house, for Norm to appear, his narrow frame leaning against the doorjamb. Waiting for the phone to ring so he can ask me to drop by and help him get the lid off a jam jar. He could fix any machine, could build anything given enough time, but he could never get the lids off jam jars. Or maybe that was an excuse to ask me to come around. The house creaks with faint echoes of his voice. It is so unbelievable that he is gone that I doze and wake up with a shout of shock. He's not coming around. How will I tell the kids? My breath is all caught up in my chest like a wound-up scarf. How will I tell the kids?

When I wake up the next morning I know I have to drive. I stop at the hole in the wall in Halstead and take out money for petrol. I fill the tank of the Holden, and I head out to the highway. An emptiness seems to follow me, so I put down my foot and speed along the bitumen past the Myrnabool junction until I reach a road I've never heard of, and I turn off. Thoughts about how to tell the kids, whether to call them at Patsy's or wait, drift into my mind but I push them out.
I don't want to think, only cover distance, feel the tarmac grumbling against my tires, the engine throbbing and choking and roaring as I swing around curves, accelerate through level crossings, fly up and down the hills of the countryside. Always the emptiness looming up behind me like a darkness in the rearview mirror.

I drive past houses with neat trim gardens and colorful flower beds, past broken-down shacks whose roofs are rusted and patched with tin. Past farms of fluorescent green canola and past dry, dusty paddocks where sheep scratch around for a few stalks of yellowed grass. Through single-road towns with one general store and one pub, a park bench outside for the smokers, an antiques shop, and someone selling free-range eggs from a self-service stand on the side of the road. Through bigger towns with a bakery sending out the stink of confectionery sugar and a fish and chip shop with a Friday family special painted on the window. I gun the Holden up hills to local lookouts from where the vast flat plains of the country stretch out and a tired old sign declares this to be a place where the explorers Burke and Wills stopped on their ill-fated trip.

On a road outside a grain town I see a small half-starved brindle dog trotting along the verge of the road and I cry. The reptile tourist park near the Goonah Reservoir has a hand-painted tin sign attached to the gate saying
Closed for Business.
I cry. A magpie swoops across the road so close to the car I am afraid I've killed it, and even when I see it soar into the air behind me, I cry.

After two hours, the car's temperature is heading toward the red zone, so I pull over into a truck rest stop and turn off the engine.

I don't know how I can live in Gunapan without Norm.

I REMEMBER NORM
saying to me once that he wished he was Irish because they knew how to send people off.

“A slab of beer, a barbie, and a good laugh,” he said. “That's how I like to say goodbye to a mate.”

But no one laughed at Norm's send-off. It was too sudden. We weren't prepared.

In the days after he died, the
Shire Herald
was full of notices from people everywhere. Melissa and Jake and I cut them out of the newspaper and pasted them into a book. We put in photos of Norm that I'd taken over the years, and some of the notes from him—often written on the backs of betting slips—that I'd stuck to the fridge because of their Normness.

The service passed by in a flash with women crying and sobbing and blokes consoling each other with handshakes, arm jabs, and nods. Marg said a few words and so did Justin. I hardly heard a thing because I was blowing my nose most of the time, or trying to cuddle Melissa, who wanted a cuddle but was trying to pretend she didn't, or grabbing hold of Jake every time he started inching toward the door of the church where men had gathered in the back pews to slap each other's
backs and nod and grunt meaningfully before they headed off to the pub for a few beers. I heard there was some unrestrained male sobbing in the pub car park later that night.

Now that a week has passed, the number of people dropping off casseroles and cakes and frozen meals has slowed down. I'd been delivering most of them on to Justin anyway. I'm sure they would have taken stuff directly to him, but barely anyone in town has officially met him yet, although a few blokes have started turning up to the yard again, probably missing their long consultations. When I delivered the last batch of food, I found Justin standing in the middle of the yard, staring at the horizon. He looked so lonely I wanted to hug him.