The Fine Color of Rust (5 page)

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 subcontracted the work. 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.

“Mrs. Herbert said we don't have to do any homework tonight because it's too hot and I got a gold star for reading,” Jake shouts above the hurricane of the wind rushing through the car.

I never bother locking the house in this kind of heat. If we shut the windows we'll never sleep. It's become a habit to walk through each room when I come home, counting off the valuables. While Jake and Melissa head off to their bedrooms I mentally mark off the computer, the DVD player, the change jar. The telly's not worth stealing. Melissa shuts her door while she changes. She's eleven now, but she reminds me of me when I was fifteen. One night not long ago she shaved her legs in the shower. I saw the blood from a cut seeping through her pajama leg.

“What on earth are you doing?” I sounded louder than I'd meant to. “Once you start you can't stop. The hair grows back all thick and black and soon you'll look like an orangutan. Then you'll have to shave all the time.”

“You do it! Anyway, the other girls were laughing at me.” She was looking down at her hands and sitting rigidly still, the way she does when she lies.

“They were not. I bet you saw it in a magazine. Or on TV.”

Melissa arched her head in the kind of movie-star huff it took me years to master and stamped off to her room.

Now Jake and I wait ten minutes, fifteen, while she changes into her bathers.

“Come on, Liss,” Jake calls, “we're boiling. Let's go.”

Melissa's room is silent. I knock on the door.

“Sweetie, don't you want to cool down?”

“I'm not going.” The door stays firmly shut.

Jake does an exaggerated sigh and collapses onto a chair. I can feel the sweat on my face, running down between my breasts, soaking into my bathers under my dress. Three flies are circling me, landing whenever I let my attention drift.

“You go.” Her voice is muffled behind the door. “I'll have a shower.”

“Please, let's go, Mum.” Jake reaches out to take my hand and pull me toward the front door.

Melissa's a mature eleven-year-old, but I am convinced that if I leave her alone in the house for more than twenty minutes a spectacular disaster will happen and she'll die and I'll be tortured by guilt for the rest of my life. I've pictured the LP gas tanks exploding, the blue gum tree in the yard toppling onto the house, a brown snake slithering out of a kitchen cupboard. Of course, any of those things could happen while I'm at home too, but I would have no guilt factor. The guilt factor means I may never have sex again, because attractive men looking for a good time rarely drop in spontaneously at my house. On the other hand, it has saved me from many of Helen's girls' nights, involving outings to pubs that the same attractive men looking for a good time never visit. I was also lucky enough to miss Helen's ladies-only party where an enthusiastic twenty-year-old tried to sell dildos and crotchless panties to astonished Gunapan farm wives.

“Melissa, either you come or we don't go at all, you know that.”

“Noooooo!” Jake's cry of anguish echoes on and on in a yodeling crow call.

Finally Melissa agrees to come and wait on the bank while we take a dip. I tell her that I'm going in even though I have thighs as thick as tree stumps.

“It doesn't worry me.” My bright voice makes my lie obvious.

“That'd be right,” Melissa mutters from the backseat.

“Young lady,” I start, but it's too hot to argue, so I swing the car backward out of the driveway and set off.

It's been three years since Tony left us. Three years in real time, and more like thirty years in looking-after-children time. I'm sure mothering years go even faster than dog years. I can feel my back turning into a question mark. Sometimes I catch myself hunched over the steering wheel or sagging in a kitchen chair, and I can imagine myself after a few more mothering years, drooling into my porridge in the retirement home. Come on, luvvie, they'll say to me, sit up straight now; after all, you're only forty.

The road leading into the gully swings around the bend and we can see the whole town, or at least as many people as would normally be at the swimming pool, clustered around the small waterhole like ants at a droplet of sugar water. Bush pigs at a billabong, maybe. The waterhole's half the size it used to be because we get no rain, but it's still deep enough to swim.

“What were you two talking about this morning? Bush pigs, was it?”

“Yeah.”

“No.”

With the ground near the edge of the water trampled to mud, we find a spot farther back underneath a stringybark tree and lay down our towels and unpack the iced lemonade and biscuits. Melissa goes off to sit next to her friend Taylah.
Jake and I make our way down to the water, saying hello to everyone on the way. Some of the mothers who have caught sight of me pretend to be reading the messages on their children's T-shirts or searching for something in their bags. I know they're afraid I'm going to ask them to do something for the Save Our School Committee, but I don't have to now because the minister's coming to Gunapan.

“The minister's coming to Gunapan,” I call out cheerily, making a fist of victory, and they nod and smile anxiously as you do when a lunatic has decided to talk to you.

Further up on the hill I can see a family sitting apart from everyone else. Four children and a woman. They lean in together, talking.

“Who's that up there?” I ask Jake.

“Dunno.” He doesn't even glance up, as if he knows without looking who I'm talking about.

I keep squinting at them as I wade in, but I can't make out their faces. Then I feel an eddy of water around my knees and before I can move someone has grabbed my ankles and I'm under, flailing around in the murky water, trying not to swallow any. I make it to the surface for a breath before Jake sits on my head. Even underwater I can hear his shrieks and Kyleen's unmistakable snorting laugh. I finally manage to stand up straight, my feet anchoring themselves on the squelchy bottom where the silt oozes in silky bands between my toes.

“Very funny.”

“Yep,” she says between snorts.

Further out, the bottom of the waterhole falls away and the water is dark and deep. Even on a day like this when half the town has swum here, water from the depths still swirls in cold ribbons to the surface. I leave Jake playing with Kyleen and her little girl near the edge of the waterhole and I swim
out and roll onto my back where the water is cooler. The sun seems to have less power here.

Up on the hill I can see the lonely family still huddled together. They're moving about now, gathering their things and putting them into plastic bags. They start making their way back to the road, but instead of walking down through the people bunched around the banks of the waterhole, they skirt the long way around the top of the hill until they reach the bus stop farther down the ridge. I close my eyes and float for a while, trying to block out the sounds of kids screaming and parents bellowing and the rustle and crackle of the grass and leaves in the heat.

Melissa is waiting when Jake and I clamber back up to dry ourselves with our hot, dusty towels. She's wearing jeans and a long-sleeved top and her face is scarlet with the heat. I wonder if she's nicked herself shaving again. It would be typical of a child of mine to decide that self-mutilation of the legs wasn't enough. Why not shave your arms as well? And your stomach and neck while you're at it?

“Where's Taylah?” Jake asks her.

“Gone home.”

“Sweetie, I've got a spare T-shirt in the car boot, why don't you put that on.”

“I want to go home. You said you were only going in for a dip.”

I stretch out my hand to help her up. She ignores it and pulls herself up with the aid of a tree branch, then winces and brushes her dirty hand on her jeans. I can see that nothing will make her happy today. Melissa was always Tony's little girl. When he left I didn't know how to make it up to her. She's grown old in the time he's been gone. I offered her a puppy for her last birthday and she refused it.

“Why?” I asked her.

“Because it'll die. And you never know when.”

At home Melissa goes off to her room and Jake hangs around the kitchen while I boil the water for frankfurters. I get him buttering the bread and I lean out of the kitchen window, trying to catch some air on my face. Across from our block is a small farm. Fancy clean white sheep appear in the paddock one day and are gone the next. The farm owners don't speak to us. A few times a week I see the wife driving past in her Range Rover with the windows closed. She wears sunglasses and dark red lipstick. I can't imagine her crutching a sheep, much as I try.

I've spent some of my great fantasy moments being that woman, usually on days like this when I'm hanging out of the window and moving my face around like a ping-pong clown to try to catch a breeze. In my imagination I've sat in her air-conditioned dining room, laughing gaily, my manicured hands and painted nails flitting about like colored birds as I discuss the latest in day spas. I've waved goodbye to my tiresome yet fabulously wealthy and doting husband, and changed into a negligee to welcome my lover, the Latin horse whisperer who lives above the stables and takes me bareback riding in the moonlight. In this dream, my boobs are so firm that even the thundering gallop of the stallion cannot shake them.

“Mum,” Jake interrupts as I'm about to drift into my other world.

“Mmm?”

“Melissa's crying.”

“Don't touch the saucepan,” I say, turning off the gas. “And butter four more pieces of bread for your lunches tomorrow.”

She doesn't want to open the door when I knock, but I can hear the phlegm in her voice, so I push the door open anyway. Melissa's sitting on the carpet beside her bed. I go and sit beside her, my bones creaking as I lower myself to the floor. It's a little cooler down here, but I'm still sweating. Melissa's face is all splotchy and snot is coming out her nose. I pull one of my endless supply of tissues out of my pocket and wipe her face. She tries to push my hand away.

“I'm not a baby,” she sniffles.

“I know.”

We sit quietly for a few minutes and eventually I slip my arm around her shoulders and kiss her forehead. She leans into me and sighs a big shuddering sigh.

“What's up, kiddo?”

“Nothing.”

We sit for a while longer. Her breathing gets easier and slower. She's not going to tell me anything, that's obvious, so I decide to finish making tea. When I get to the kitchen, Jake's so hungry he's ripped open the packet of frankfurters and is gnawing on a cold one.

“Did you do girl talk?”

“Where did you hear that line?” I'm trying not to laugh.

“Norm told me that's what girls say they do, but really they're gossiping about how to get boys.”

“Well, Norm's wrong. And I'll be letting him know that next time I see him.”

“Why don't you marry Norm?”

“Because he's a hundred years old and smells of tractor. Why don't you marry Kimberley? You play with her at school every day.”

“Yuk!”

“Yeah!”

At least that's sorted.

When she finally emerges from her room, Melissa eats two frankfurters in bread, dripping with butter and tomato sauce, and a few forks of salad. After we've washed up she drifts back to her room to do her homework. I've pulled all the flywire screens shut and I make the kids hold their breath while I go around the house spraying the mozzies. In Melissa's room I glance over her shoulder. She's on the internet, looking at a page about the United Nations.

“Mum, were you around when the United Nations started?”

“Possibly, if I'm as old as I feel. But no, I don't think so. Are you doing a project?”