Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living (Picador 40th) Read online

  Nanna Pett fetches Robbie home. Lillian doesn’t come down to meet them when they arrive and Nanna Pett seems nervous. She unloads her basket in the kitchen and unpegs a line of nappies strung in front of the grate. Robbie hears ‘poorly’ and ‘baby’ and ‘no fire again’ but he’s not sure of the order. The house seems impossibly small and dark, the stairs are so narrow he has to angle his feet sideways. Surely he can’t have grown that much? It’s only been a month.

  Lillian lies in bed powdering her face. She peers into the mirror of her tiny compact and looks around it at him in exaggerated surprise. She beckons – closer, come closer – until he can see the bundle that lies beside her.

  ‘Our Andrew,’ she whispers. The baby is small and shrivelled. A line of yellow milk has dried into a crust on its cheek but more striking is the red liquid that has leaked through his swaddling and stained the sheets.

  ‘Go on then, give him a kiss.’

  Robbie puts his hand out to touch the baby’s forehead. His fingernails are rimmed with dirt. Then he darts his head down quickly and manages to kiss more of his own skin than his brother’s.

  Our Andrew has a soft mewing cry. He sucks at Lillian endlessly. This time of suckling is like time that has closed in on itself. Long drawn-out afternoons of Lillian in bed and Robbie creeping through the house running his fingers along the window ledges, digging in the soil, painting the step with coal dust and spit, shuffling about, heavy in himself.

  Robbie often goes upstairs to Lillian. He sits on the edge of the bed and listens to the baby snuffling as it chews at Lillian’s breast. After a little restless sleep Lillian changes the baby. He is always wet, not about the bottom, but from his leaking wound. Lillian dusts some medicinal powder into the hole. It is the same as Little Enid’s, a gaping cavity in his back, but on Andrew the wound is higher – centered between the curved bones of his tiny shoulders. It is a deep but perfect circle. Robbie is attracted to it – tempted to lean in and touch it. The wound is the most insistent part of the baby; it is more brightly red, more liquid and more pulsingly alive than his face. Robbie makes his mouth into the shape of the hole and traces his tongue around his lips as if following its contours.

  They leave the baby asleep on the bed and Lillian comes downstairs for a bath. She stokes the fire and fills the pans with water. She takes the tin bath down from behind the kitchen door, finds a shard of soap, a towel and a fresh nightdress. When the water is warmed she places the pans on the floor near the bath with a tall jug and undresses. Robbie sees she is stiff from the baby, stiff from so long in bed. She grips the table as she peels off her socks and underclothes. She fiddles with some pins and undoes a dark rag from between her legs. Robbie recoils. It looks like it is stained with lipstick, a leaking sideways kiss-stain from a pair of large lips, but it is too red, too liquid, too soaked with blood. She climbs tentatively into the bath and sits with her knees drawn up to her breasts.

  ‘Quick now, love, before I’m all iced up.’

  Robbie pours the first jug over her back and shoulders, watching her skin soften and spread from the warmth of the water. She rubs the hard soap over her arms and shoulders and under her armpits.

  ‘More Robbie, on my head as well.’

  The water turns her hair to dark copper with a green shine.

  ‘Did he bite you then?’

  ‘What, love?’

  ‘Did he bite you then, on the way out, our Andrew?’

  Lillian touches a wet hand to his cheek.

  ‘Oh Robbie, my love. My love, you have no idea.’

  Robbie downstairs listening as Lillian sings to the dying baby, her voice as soft and breathy as a child’s. Robbie drawing on the back step with a stone – drawing Willie and his pigeons, Lady Henrietta on a tipsy-topsy nest of straw. Robbie thinking about oranges and grains and how much they might cost. Robbie digging up soil with a spoon and sucking on it. Having a little in his pockets all of the time in case his mother wants some. In case they might sit together once again and share.

  — 11 —

  AFTERNOON TEA WITH DORIS McKETTERING

  It is hard to imagine the Mallee before it was cleared. A scribble of thin trees giving off their skeleton light, birds crying into the dry blue air. Now everything is in boxes. The men of the Mallee toil within the straight fence lines of their paddocks. I have swapped the metal box of the train for the timber box of the house, or the houses of others.

  In Elsie Ivers’ front room I sit with Lola Sprake, Iris Pfundt, Wilma Noy, and Doris McKettering. They are showing me their school photograph – Wycheproof District School 1915. The children are balanced on some invisible scaffolding to make a neat pyramid. There are no uniforms. It must be winter as they wear heavy jackets in dark colours. Some of the girls have white hair ribbons tied in big floppy bows that fall down to their shoulders. Growing up here seems to have been an exercise in name-swapping. Lola Sprake started out as Lola Noy, Wilma Noy was Wilma Sprake, Iris Pfundt is unmarried, but her sister, Doris, is now a McKettering. The photograph shows Iris and Doris had two large and handsome brothers, but they were both killed in France, having run away to Horsham to enlist where they could lie about their age without fear of being recognised.

  Elsie doesn’t feature – she grew up in Boort. Although the Wycheproof women say they didn’t know her back then, they knew of her brother who was a champion bicycle racer. He won the Lake Boort picnic race year after year until, at the age of seventeen, he was racing a Buick and the front fender clipped his wheel and dragged him under the car. It seems to me that women should be the ones to carry a name on – we have a better record at continuity.

  ‘We saw your Sister Crock up at Sea Lake and the cooking girl, what’s her name?’ Doris McKettering turns the conversation to include me in it.

  ‘Mary.’

  ‘Mary. Do you know Wilma’s husband gave a report on our trip to the train at the Mechanics’ Institute. What did Les say, Wilma, that thing about the grass?’

  Wilma settles her teacup on her ample lap. ‘The Better Farming Train can teach a man to grow one blade of grass where two grew before.’

  The women titter.

  ‘But did you hear Una Wearmouth?’ Lola asks no one in particular. ‘I think it was in the home economics lecture. The Sister’s going on about kitchen gardens, how you can use your carrots here and your tomatoes there and Una pipes up, ‘What about pigface, Sister? It’s the only thing we can grow up here and that’s when me husband waters it with the trouser tap!’

  Lola slaps her thigh as she delivers the line. She likes to tell a story. Lola and her husband run the Commercial. She’s a good barmaid – a listener and a gossip.

  Elsie had warned me about Lola earlier as I helped her put out the teacups. ‘She’s a bit of a gate is Lola. Not much gets around her.’

  A plate of cakes is passed from hand to hand.

  Iris from the library encourages us to try her slice. She looks as desiccated as usual in a knitted peach sundress that droops sadly at the back. ‘It’s a new recipe, this slice, from a book.’ She gives me a dry smile, all cake crumbs and false teeth.

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought there was much on that train that couldn’t be found in books.’

  ‘I liked the chickens,’ Doris says. ‘There were some lovely chickens. The big white ones – Wyandottes. And that funny little chick-man. Little Chinese. He was a card. What was his name, Jean?’

  ‘Mr Ohno – from Japan.’

  More laughter. Doris blows tea out of her nose and has to dab at her face with a napkin.

  ‘Mr Oh-no.’ She gasps between dabs. ‘His little feet, Jean, his dear little feet. Do you know I dreamt about his little feet? Like a goat’s, they were – cloven.’

  I notice Elsie’s face is flushed. She chews her lip and seems torn between wanting to protect me and joining in the fun. I can hear the boys outside doing laps of the house, waiting for cake scraps and the dregs from teacups. I think of Mr Ohno’s pale pink tongue. Of his cool hands w
ith skin so perfect, so without lines or joins or blemishes they look moulded from clay. I wonder what I am doing with these women whose lives seem to have neither science nor passion.

  I clear my throat to gain their attention. ‘Actually Mr Ohno taught me the art of chicken sexing while I was on the train. It can only be done by those with nimble fingers and a quick mind. I believe he does it for pleasure. In fact when I did it I found it quite pleasurable too.’

  The women lift their teacups in unison and drink through pursed lips. Elsie picks at a rumball on her plate and shakes her head. There is nothing left to do but leave.

  Doris McKettering stops me at the door. She is large and barrel-chested. All of her curves are outwards but in a firm and quite attractive way. She is the only one to meet my eye.

  ‘My husband, Mrs Pettergree, fancies himself as a bit of a scientist – although he’s pure duffer from what I can see. I’m going to send him over. Ern’s his name. Tell your husband to expect him.’

  Then she pats me gently on the arm and lowers her voice. ‘And don’t fret about fitting in. You’ll find your place, lovey. Things just move a bit differently in the Mallee.’

  I’m well down the driveway when I hear her calling out behind me. When I turn around she’s holding a small parcel aloft.

  ‘Jean. Jean. Leftover cakes. Take a box. Sweeten up that man of yours.’

  — 12 —

  SOME THOUGHTS ON FENCING

  The farm is changing Robert’s body. He is hardening. Growing some thicker outer crust to his skin. His hands are bigger. Recently I have woken with his hands on my belly and been momentarily confused, thinking that another man is touching me. Orange soil is seeping into his hands. His face is leaner and a deeper red, while the hair on his arms is so white it is almost translucent. When he scoops water to his face in the mornings, his shirtsleeves rolled high, I am reminded of Sister Crock preparing to bathe an infant – water dripping from her forearms like falling light.

  On Tuesday 9 April Robert sows Rannee 4H south of the house. He sows twenty-three acres with three and a half bags. From 14 to 18 April he sows fifty-four acres with eight bags. On 3 May he sows Wethers thirty-two acres with just under five bags. On 4–6 May he sows the West paddock of twelve acres with two and a half bags of Ghurka.

  On Tuesday 9 April I do out the front room, do out bath, coppers, floors and safe, Bon Ami windows, clean fireplaces, peg out clothes, clean shoes, test new Trio Brite cleanser, bake mutton, potato and onion pie, make rice custard, milk Folly and take her out to graze in the ‘long paddock’, water the house trees and experimental plants, sew some school pants for Elsie’s boys next door, write to Buckleys & Nunn for a Dr Young’s Sanitary Belt and write to Mary.

  I ask Mary for advice about Folly, who often gets the better of me. She is hell to catch and has twice broken into the hay shed and eaten herself sick. Mary has enough on her plate with a new husband and a baby on the way and having to support her parents as the depression has hit Gippsland hard, but she always writes back.

  After lunch I collect Folly from the roadside and tie her under the peppercorn tree for an Insectibane bucket wash to keep the flies away. The chemicals must sting her udder because she skips around and steps on my toes. Robert is bucket washing the car at the same time and I think I catch him smiling at me as I curse Folly and hop about in pain.

  Doris sends her husband, Ern McKettering, and he helps Robert with the fencing. One day Ern brings Robert a dog – an eager collie cross with a tufty coat. Ern says the dog is called Jumbo but Robert calls him Will. The dog trails Robert through the paddocks, nose down and shoulders sloping.

  I take tea out into the paddocks where Ern helps Robert to dig a deep, long hole to take an old strainer post. The timber, mainly greybox, is still metal hard after many years in the ground. The first layer of soil is hot and smooth. Tiny grains pour over each other. I stand back and watch as Robert uses the back of his shovel to shore it up. He tells Ern of his time at the Research Station when he saw men with great skill on the shovel. They were trialling new fencing styles and a team of labourers worked with the students digging holes. He saw a man dig perfect holes, square or circular or even a simple triangle, so smooth and clean and deep they looked like an arrow had been shot into the ground. There was another man who had lost a hand in the war yet he dug with a smooth flicking action, the shovel handle pushed high on his stump. Robert said that these men knew the earth intimately. They knew the exact angle at which to use the blade and the depth and force required.

  Later Robert and Ern remove an old dogleg fence – a fence like a living cross-stitch of timber without a single nail or strand of wire. Ern brings Doris over for a look before they tear it down because she’s in the local historical society. Doris shakes her head at her husband. She doubts anyone would be interested in a dirty old fence. She spends the afternoon in the kitchen and I find her easy company. She tells me about her three boys who are all up in Queensland working on the sugar cane. She laughs at my stories about Sister Crock and is grateful for advice on the double reinforcing of side seams.

  After our evening meal I sit with Robert at the kitchen table. He works on his samples, opening wheat heads on the chopping board to search for bunt and smut. I watch him stroke out the arms of a young plant still pale in its early growing while I hem the curtains for the caravan.

  Robert has built the caravan from old fencing timber. It is a timber box on an old plough axle to be hooked behind the tractor. It will mean he can go further and work longer without having to come back to the house each night. There is a small window at the front and a door at the back. Inside, a narrow bed and a fold-down table. I make him a mattress for his new bed, stuffing kapok into the calico and finishing it in neat blanket-stitch. I sew a loop onto a white huckabuck guest towel that he hangs on a nail behind the door.

  I sit a while in the caravan each day while Robert is out on the farm. It is cool inside and I must check the length of the curtains, but as soon as I am sitting on the narrow bed I fall into an engrossing daydream. I imagine the caravan is my home – and I imagine how I would live in it. My mind carries each of my essential possessions into the tiny space and thinks of ways to arrange them – my books on a shelf above the door, a drawer for clothes under the bed, a corner for my sewing things. The daydream gives me such a sense of completeness and satisfaction I am reluctant to enter the caravan with Robert in case I am drawn into the dream in front of him. I am not sure what it means. It seems to be a wish to be self-contained. There is no space for Robert in the dream, or for science.

  ‘It is your project,’ I say, when he asks me to hold the tape measure. The caravan will take Robert away from me, but it will bring him closer to the land. I would like this closeness too. I would like to lie in the darkness watching the stars through the little window, listening to the earth as it cools and cracks during the night.

  The test run for the caravan is not a success. The floor falls out piece by piece as the tractor does its slow lap around the house. I wave and call to Robert but he can’t hear me over the noise. More timber poles are needed so we plan a trip to the pine reserve at Patchewollock. I come along to tend the fires and make our lunch but mainly because of the clearing sale at Day Trap along the way. A whole farm is to be sold up – all machinery, household goods and a long bobbin Singer treadle sewing machine in good working order.

  Hec Bowd’s farm has poor soil. Mallee sand that shifts underfoot and rises with the smallest wind. Robert says Hec Bowd has made terrible mistakes with fallow. He says he let the fields stand for so long between plantings that the soil upped and drifted off by the time he came back to it. Hec was following advice from the Department of Agriculture Journal – that long fallow would protect his wheat from field smut. They had three bad seasons and were hanging on. The bank took the final decision.

  Robert parks the car under some poplars behind the house. We can see Hec Bowd in the paddock demonstrating his tractor to some prospective buy
ers. It’s a Clectrac crawler that runs on tracks like a tank with a tall air inlet to get above the dust, giving it a military look – like a periscope on a submarine. Robert straddles the fencing wires and walks over to a crowd of men around the tractor.

  Mrs Bowd and her daughter have set up a tea table on the back verandah. They are wearing their best dresses, serving sandwiches and cakes and tea from patterned china normally reserved for a wedding or a christening or Sunday best at least. I have seen them in town before. The daughter, Ollie, is a famous local tennis player. She is strong and spare like her father with a sharp, serious face. I have regularly seen her photograph on the back page of the Ensign.

  The sewing machine belongs to Ollie. She leads me into the dark sitting room where it takes pride of place on the circular table. The auctioneer has tied a large tag to it with a number. Ollie runs her hand over the shiny black metal.

  ‘What do you think, Mrs Pettergree? Dad got it at Swan Hill when he went up with some sheep. It was my eighteenth.’

  ‘It’s lovely, Ollie. I’ll thread it up and run something through it.’

  Ollie must be in her early twenties by now. She brings me her sewing basket and rummages about for some thread and a bobbin. The basket is made of birthday cards covered in cellophane and sewn together with raffia. The auctioneer’s label half covers the face of a white kitten – to our darling ten year old girl . . .