Content Warnings (click to reveal)
Depicted: Animal death
Discussed: Stalking, homophobic slurs
From the Offset
Grace’s bare feet tap on the dashboard.
Bowie spills from the windows into the quiet road.
We pass an abandoned milk bar.
A petrol station.
A stockyards sign.
—And if you say hide, we’ll hi-ie-ie-ide!
Her voice is brighter now.
—Because my love for you, would break my heart in two!
—Gracie, smiling.
—If you should fall…
—Gracie.
—…into my arms…
—Gracie!
—…tremble like a flaw-wer! WHAT?
—What colour should we paint it?
She’s still dancing from the waist up. —What? The house?
—Yeah!
I indicate left checking my blind spot.
—Pink! It’s a lady house now, house of ladies. No boys allowed.
I suppress a shiver at what she really means. No ex-partners leaving tracking devices.
Laughing it off, I reply.
—You’re such a cliche.
—How do you make love without being a cliche?
She faints dramatically against my shoulder; I nudge her off and change gears.
She watches that damn falafel movie once a year.
—I’m serious! It’s important, we can’t leave it that toothpaste and puke colour.
I’m chuckling as I guide us through a roundabout. —What’s a nice colour?
—I dunno.
She wiggles her toes on the dash. —Like the house from Pollyanna… no! No! Green Gables!
—So, green?
She reels against the passenger door in mock horror. —You’ve never read it!
—Yes, I, have.
—No, you, haven’t!
—…No, I, haven’t.
—Take this left!
—THE GPS SAYS STRAIGHT!
—LEFT!
I bat her hands off the wheel and do as she says.
We’re at Bunnings. At the colour wall.
She’s got her nose to the Beige section.
I’m letting the meridian of blues into greens wash the GPS instructions from the back of my eyelids.
—This one!
Taubman’s Gourmet Mushroom
F5E1CB
—Great! Let’s go!
Back home, the thought arises again.
—Why Anne of Green Gables?
—Huh?
I’ve interrupted her checking the tomato plants. She’s planted them in pots under the old lemon tree, they climb bits of string she has attached to the lower branches.
It’s not a big garden, one of those classic Reservoir joints. But Grace has made it a food forest. Things sprout up everywhere she goes. She’s not so much a green thumb, more like green feet. Just by walking past, she seems to make plants thrive around her. The tomatoes will come with us, so will everything else. Grace is rigging up a contraption to keep them from damage in the hatchback.
She is in her gardening get-up. Denim overalls and nothing underneath. No shoes, no shirt, no problem, as they say. She says she likes to take a sunbath, but she also needs pockets. A happy compromise. I can’t say I don’t enjoy it. At the present moment, her overalls are hanging at half-mast and there is something liberating about the way her breasts tip with her as she stoops over her plants.
—Green Gables, what’s the deal?
She straightens, hands on hips. She nudges her fraying Bunnings hat off her brow.
—I dunno, I read it when I was a kid in the city. I’d never seen a place like that in real life, somewhere quiet where you could run around all day and not meet anyone. I loved the way Anne made things up in her head. I liked how pretty everything was. She was comfortable… un-self-conscious.
Sometimes I forget that she can sleep with the window open in the city at night. I forget how loud her life was growing up. We have the same aversion to cars and busy roads, for opposite reasons. I’m new to it, she’s had enough.
I smile. She smiles back.
Later, while she’s in the bathroom, I download the eBook.
A week later, his emphysema wheeze on the phone.
—I’m just waiting to die. Then it’s all yours.
My elation buries my shock. Old cockies can be a bit abrasive. Nothing to worry about.
I put my hand over the phone and Grace and I dance in the car park.
—Just one thing…
I scoop the phone back to my ear.
—Yep?
A wheeze.
—promise…
I would promise anything to be free of the $500 a week rent on a house with no heating in Reservoir.
—Ah! fuck it, the place is yours, do what you want with it, I’m done.
I should have pushed him, asked what he meant.
But I’d got what I wanted, so we signed and celebrated with dinner at Trippy Taco.
On Day 61 we pull into the driveway at 8am. Macca’s coffees in hand.
The sun is up, melting the nighttime frost from the grass blades. Pink stains still rest in the sky. It looks like a bush block from the road, but once you pass into the property, it clears and you can see the little weatherboard house reflecting the dusk’s purple light. The sick green softened. The cleared area at the back was used for stock, the front acted as a woodlot and protection from prying eyes.
To us, it’s ten acres and a house with a bath.
30 minutes from town down a road you’d be mad to drive.
Grace takes the Esky and shopping into the kitchen.
Savouring the moment, I walk softly to the little dam at the back. The trees thin out as I go, opening into the familiar devastation of bushland forced into pasture. The grass is high and yellow from lack of rain.
A wattle tree nearby reminds me of one on my family’s farm.
I take my shoes off to feel the soil. Our soil.
A breeze rustles the gum leaves overhead, and I breathe in. But rather than eucalyptus, there is something else. I turn towards it, scanning my surroundings for the source.
It’s clearer to me now, the candied rank of rotting meat.
It penetrates my nostrils and won’t leave. Churning up my senses, filling them with muck.
Grey flesh.
Wet shit.
Flies.
It’s familiar to me. Something from the drought when I was little.
Dazed, I walked towards it.
The buzz of flies is deafening.
The smell rancid.
Lanolin, puss, sweat.
Sheep carcasses litter the paddock. White wool stained by dirt. Entrails scattered by the careless feast of birds. I approach one, her sky-facing eye is gone leaving a violent hole. I’m tempted to put my finger in there, see if it fits.
She’s been shot in the chest. The wound has ripped through to her rib cage.
Whoever did the job didn’t take any chances. These girls wouldn’t have suffered for long.
Later, after a stiff drink and a cigarette, I reckon there were about thirty of them. If you included the lambs.
Grace rounds the corner of the house, takes one look and retches.
—Jesus fuck!
Like I said. Old cockies. Sometimes it’s easier to shoot the stock rather than sell ‘em them in a drought year.
A couple of city dikes were hardly going to want them.
Better not to let them suffer.
We tie scarves around our faces. Probably more placebo than anything.
We don’t have a digger. So we shovel individual graves.
They’d been there at least a week. Birds had ripped legs, eyes, and tongues out.
The remaining carcasses are too far gone to just bury. It’s hard to move a dead animal when the skin slips off the bone as you’re dragging it.
We dig a hole for each one. It takes us three days to put them to rest.
I siphon petrol from the car the old-fashioned way, and with a sour taste still on my breath, we give each one a meagre Viking funeral before heaping earth on it.
I keep count with each burial. Twenty-six.
Nineteen ewes. Seven lambs.
No doubt some of the smaller ones got scattered through the bush by birds of prey.
The smoke cleans the air.
Blowies disperse.
We move to the next one and cover the destroyed face with flame and earth.
We collect the shells in a bucket. Far too many for the number of dead. Whoever did this was a hellish shot, even with the wider spread of a shotgun. Or maybe they were just enjoying themselves and went for a few extras?
A week later I wake without Grace.
She usually leaves a note, but there is none.
Rather than panic, I make eggs and take them to the back porch.
I’ve started sitting there in the mornings, and evenings. I like the way that purple light filters through the trees.
I sometimes imagine the twenty-six lumps in the paddock. I imagine watching them graze over the soft grass under the gum trees.
I scoop scramble and toast into my mouth with my fingers. Slurp my tea and wait for my girl to return.
I know I haven’t been good company since we arrived. She says I get too in my head about things. She’s right, but how do you stop doing something like thinking?
She suggested getting some sheep. We’d need them to keep the grass down in the summer anyway. I dismissed her with something about the BOM, there’d be no feed for them after November, and we couldn’t afford to be renovating and paying for feed.
Really, I think I was afraid of having to shoot them myself.
Eggs finished, tea cooling.
The car horn beeps, and she is home.
She has that look in her eye again. The one that says she’d done something and even if I’d known about it ahead of time, there was nothing I could have done to stop it.
—Don’t be mad.
She flings open the boot. It’s filled with saplings.
Twenty-six little trees.
We dig back down into the soil. Not so far this time, and plant the saplings on the mounds of earth.
They’ll send down taproots feeding each other nutrients, keeping each other company.
We’ll water them from the bore. They’ll drink deep and then shoot up.
I imagine four years from now. The trees will give us shade in the summer, their quiet leaves rustling on hot evenings.
No one will come down our road unless we invite them.
No shotgun shells will litter the paddock.
Nothing will disturb us as we lean against the veranda posts sipping tea.
We’ll paint the house pink.
Brionadh is an Irish-Australian fiction writer and dog-walking enthusiast operating out of Gunaikurnai Country. Her literary influences include Cate Kennedy, Oscar Wilde and the literary war stories of Snoopy the Beagle.
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