He says, ‘You ever been driving with him?’
‘When I was younger. I think it’s a father/son thing – I can’t really see the appeal.’
Zach closes the magazine and leans forward to put it on the coffee table.
‘I suppose,’ Rebecca says, ‘if I was a son I’d be following in his footsteps.’
‘Mmm.’
‘You gunna work on the farm when you finish school?’ she asks.
‘I’m meant to be getting a trade first. Dad says a trade helps on the farm, and makes you appreciate being self-employed. I guess I’ll do it. Maybe carpentry. What are you gunna do?’
In a persistent habit from childhood, Rebecca interlinks her fingers and bends them back and forth, twists them in front of her.
‘I’m going to get a job and save up enough to go to NIDA.’
‘What’s NIDA?’
‘National Institute of Dramatic Arts.’
‘Oh,’ he says, a flat quality to his voice, another box he’s slipped her in to. ‘You want to be an actress.’
‘Not necessarily, just something in the industry.’
‘My mum studied art,’ he says, offhand. ‘She still paints sometimes. Over in the hayshed.’
‘Really? What sort of things does she paint?’
‘I don’t know … Surrealist stuff.’ He brings up his hand and makes a self-conscious sweeping action in front of his face. ‘Colours and … shapes. She won’t show it. Says it’s too personal.’
‘Do you like art?’
‘No.’
‘Maybe carpentry is really an outlet for your creative side.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘Do you want something to drink?’
‘No thanks.’
A dog comes in the front door and sits on the mat to scratch itself. A couple of willie wagtails flit in through the window and perch on the ledge; they twitter, disappear in a flash of black and white. What should be a pleasant reminder of nature only has Rebecca breaking out in a prickle of sweat.
‘Do you want to come into my room?’ she says. To stop her hands fidgeting she folds her arms across her chest. ‘We can put some music on. What do you like?’
He doesn’t move. She thinks he might stand and announce he’s leaving – a bad idea coming, too unsettling to see the step down he has to take to accept her. She wishes he hadn’t come. She’d said his house, not hers. She’d pictured time together by the river, or walking in the paddocks, not time spent here. It’s all the stupid shame and embarrassment she knows she shouldn’t feel. It’s the bitter taste of resentment in the back of her throat. The same resentment she knows chewed her mother up, ate into every part of her like the cancer and made her eagle-eyed and fork-tongued. She doesn’t want to be like that. It’s tough, though – a real struggle with Zach’s good breeding so evident in everything about him. Pedigree seems to ooze from his skin.
‘Midnight Oil,’ he answers belatedly. ‘Or AC/DC.’
This time when he follows her he walks closer. She feels his gaze heavy over her hair and her shoulders, almost as though he feels resentment of his own.
Zach has long limbs, not yet filled out or muscled. His back and chest are pale, with dark moles in what seem like predesignated spots – on his shoulder blade, high on his chest, on his lower back, spaced and perfectly placed, as though his artist mother had drawn them on. He has dark pubic hair that runs in a thin line up to his navel, soft brown hair beneath his armpits, narrow hips, a hollow stomach, big hands and bony wrists. Feet and legs she can’t say – his pants stay mostly twisted and bunched around his thighs, and then around his ankles. He doesn’t like to be naked, she can tell. What some boys would have taken advantage of – an empty house, no chance of being sprung – leaves him still reserved. The kiss, when it comes, is more or less a disco pash, perhaps a bit more urgent considering the circumstances.
He pushes her back on the bed, lies on top of her, has her smiling beneath his lips because it is so
back seat of the car
, so rushed. She closes her eyes and waits for some degree of arousal to come over her; nothing does.
He touches her, and she ends up against the wall in an effort to make him touch her more gently. Pressure in general he seems mixed up with – his hands hover over the places she wants him to touch and don’t touch the places they should. What is nice, if nice is the right word, is his arousal. He is like he was on the bus: excited but with the brakes applied, held back by inexperience.
Sex by numbers, dot to dot, is what it is like under him – fingers inside her, tongue in her mouth, hand on her breast, erection pressed against her leg. Not that she minds. The general sense is that they have a job to do, a hurdle to get over. At least he’s aroused.
So she believes herself responsible when things start to go wrong.
The reality is she is shut up tight – mind, body, soul, her eyebrows drawn in, mouth pressed into a thin line, frowning even harder as he puts his weight between her legs, tries to push inside her. It’s no wonder she looks up to see him staring down at her, the sleepy look gone from his face, able to focus, his breath coming short and sharp. She has to suck in her cheeks to try and wipe the grimace from her face.
Sorry
is probably not what you’re meant to say to a man at the moment of penetration.
‘Sorry,’ she says.
He withdraws.
‘No, Zach, I want you to.’
But he is pulling up his pants, reaching for his shirt.
Fair to say he runs. What she does get to see of his face is a strange softness around his mouth, a vague look in his eyes, confusion. She has the impression he will get out of view of the house and stop to catch his breath, gather his thoughts, but he isn’t going to do it in front of her.
They speak briefly in the kitchen. He runs a hand through his hair and mutters something about getting back, his father thinking he’s at the dam checking the pump. She wraps her arms around herself and nods.
‘If it’s hot tomorrow,’ she manages, ‘do you want to meet at the swimming hole?’
‘I might have to work,’ he says.
5
If the Kincaid property is big and rambling – kilometre-wide tussock-filled gullies, a blue sky from one horizon to the other, nothing to break your line of sight – then the homestead is perfectly positioned in the centre of it. The house is airy, with wide verandas, spacious rooms, everything clean and managed. The garden is neat and free of weeds, the winding paths topped up with white pebbles, the birdbath scrubbed, pristine – no algae in the water, no slime or the presence of anything remotely organic.
A farm has very little to do with nature, Zach has decided. It’s unnatural in fact, and his father runs a particularly tight ship. Zach likes to think of the farm as homogenised instead of harmonised. It seems to him his father is the only organic and animate thing on it – everything else is fake.
He arrives back to hear his father’s raised voice in the kitchen.
‘What do you think you’re doing! You’re on the phone to her? What is that? Explain to me the sense in that! And you wonder why I didn’t tell you – well, it was exactly for this reason. You’re a self-fulfilling prophecy, Joanne, an absolute fucking nut!’
His mother says something Zach misses. His father’s voice lifts another octave. ‘Well, it wouldn’t take much, would it!’
A cupboard door slams and there is the clink of cutlery being tossed in a drawer.
His mother rallies. ‘You’re the one shouting. You’re the one following me around.’
‘You’re on the phone to her the minute I walk out the door!’
‘She’s my friend. I was asking her why she didn’t tell me. We weren’t talking about you, we weren’t talking about him, we were just … I was just …’
‘You don’t know what you were doing – you’ve got yourself confused with one of your daytime soaps. Do you need me to write it on the fridge for you? Don’t ring her, don’t talk to her, don’t talk to him. Should I make it into a little mantra for you to chant while you do the housework?’
‘Stop it. Stop talking to me like this. You can’t expect me not to talk to her.’
‘That’s exactly what I expect.’
‘We live in the same town, we have the same friends – I have to clear the air.’
‘Clear the air?’ His father’s voice is breathless with disbelief. ‘How do you think you’re going to
clear the air
? What are you going to say to make it comfortable next time you sit around sipping herbal tea? She understands better than you. She hasn’t ever told you because she knows it’s a pointless exercise. You falling around in tears, trying to patch things up,
clear the air
, only makes it worse.’
‘Why do you talk like you know her?’
‘I do know her.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘No-one expects you to understand.’
‘Does she speak civilly to you?’
‘Why wouldn’t she?’
‘I thought …’
‘Don’t think too hard, Joanne, the tablets don’t allow for that.’
‘Do you like her?’
There’s a pause. His father’s voice grows faint, as though he’s turned away or bent to retrieve something.
‘Did you like her at the time?’ his mother asks.
His father laughs. ‘Don’t psychoanalyse me.’
‘It’s just another Kincaid infamy for you, isn’t it?’
‘What the fuck is that meant to mean?’
‘Exactly that.’
Zach hears his father moving around the kitchen, a chair being pushed aside and the rattle of keys. ‘I’m taking your car keys. I’m not having you driving in and making a scene.’
‘You can’t take my car keys.’
It sounds like he tosses the keys in the air and catches them again. His tone when he speaks is insolent. ‘Rephrase that and you’ll see that’s exactly what I can do. Actually, spend the rest of the day going through all the things that you think are yours, and replace
mine
with
his
, and you’ll see there’s not a lot around here you can lay claim to.’
‘Give me back my keys!’
‘No.’
‘Give them to me.’
The table shudders over the slate tiles. A pen or pencil drops onto the floor.
His father says, ‘You know I always thought it would be heartening to see you with a bit of spirit, but it turns out you’re screwed up in that department too – you don’t know, do you? You act, every time, the exact opposite of how you should act.’ His voice drops to low and menacing in an instant. ‘Get back from me. Touch me and I swear to God …’
‘You’ll what? You’ll —’
‘Say it and you’ll regret it.’
‘Is it when a woman stands up to you? Is that the trigger?’
There are sounds of a scuffle, a bird-like cry from his mother, the cutlery drawer shoved closed, or someone shoved against it. Zach closes his eyes.
‘Try for a second to think of your son instead of yourself,’ his father says. ‘He handled it better than you. He’s stronger than you are.’
His mother’s voice cracks as she speaks. ‘You didn’t tell him everything …’
‘I put up with you,’ his father draws out slowly. ‘I buy the tablets, I put up with the weeks in bed, I pay for the latest course or part-time degree you can’t live without – I do all that. No-one else is going to do all that. You’re weak. And you’re all the weaker because of these little flare-ups of strength you think you get. Go to bed, Joanne. Zach and I cope fine without you – and you made it that way, so don’t go sobbing about that too. I was up in the middle of the night with my son before you’d even come home from hospital, remember. Mark your own son down as another one of the things that belongs to me.’
His mother begins to cry. It becomes muffled. Zach pictures her hands covering her eyes, that way she hides behind them, cries at the table, cries at the washing line, cries while weeding the garden, her dirty hands flat over her face. A moment taken to sob and choke out apologies to herself, to anyone who will listen, not bothering to get up and leave, not when it is so much a part of her every day, not when she’ll sniff and keep on with whatever she was doing.
A sheep is bleating somewhere in the paddocks. A sheep is always bleating. The sliding door is pulled back and Zach starts forward again, as though only now arriving.
Zach’s father is not a big man. He is lean like many farmers – tall and brown-haired. He reminds Zach of that generic settler – those men leaning against horse-drawn carts in old photos. Any one of those faces in sepia-tinted shots taken in the main streets of towns when they were wide and dirty – long bodies and folded arms, men with an adolescent way about them but with hard gazes fixed down the camera lens. Some days that sepia tint seems to have coloured his father’s hair, coloured his clothes – he can be standing in the yards, dust rising around him, a rust-coloured sun setting behind him, a sheepdog at his feet, and you’d swear you’d stepped back in time.
His voice, though, is modern: deep and rounded. A city voice. Educated. He likes to talk. A silent father has always struck Zach as a perfect father: present, but without the running commentary and constant advice. Anything would have to be an improvement on a father who says what he thinks all the time.
‘Zach, I didn’t know you were back.’
‘Just got back now.’
The sound of a door closing in the house has his father turning to listen. It gives Zach a chance to compose himself, to breathe in deeply and try to steady his racing heart. He works to keep his face impassive as his father turns to him.
‘How’d you go with the pump? Get it fixed all right?’
‘The intake pipe must be blocked. I’m going to go back with the bike and waders.’
Zach’s mother is crying in the bedroom now, wailing, that manic state she sometimes works herself into, behaviour that would have a man committed. His father puts his hand on Zach’s shoulder and turns him around; he steers him out the door, through the rose garden, under the wisteria arch. The crunch of their boots on the pebble path drowns out the sounds of his mother sobbing. His father’s arm goes around him, pulling him in, squeezing him as if to say,
I know you, son, we’re one and the same, you and I
.
6
Desperate for a cigarette, Rebecca finishes cleaning the house– mostly writing Zach’s name in the dust and wiping it away. She takes a fifty from beside the Easter egg her father has left her on the top of the fridge and heads out the door. The seat of the old sedan burns the backs of her legs, and the steering wheel is just as hot. She leans over and winds down the passenger-side window, checks under the visors for any spiders, takes the keys, throws a faded T-shirt onto the back seat and begins the necessary praying to get the old girl started.