Burning Eddy (2 page)

I started working when I was ten. The year Toby was born. I’d always worked with Mum in the garden — since I was in her tummy, so she says — but when I was ten I started grubbing thistles for Graham and Tina. They gave me three dollars a feedbag full. On a good day I could earn nine dollars — great money when you’re ten. As I got older they got me going on ragwort, the prettiest weed ever — sometimes taller than I was — with nodding masses of golden flowers. Cows don’t like it and it takes over. Five dollars a bag. I could make twenty dollars a day on ragwort when I was thirteen. Then the thistles and ragwort ran out. It would take me a full day to cover the sixty acres of steep pasture studded with manna gums and I’d only scrounge up two bags of weeds, so they started me on the blackberries behind the
house. Twenty dollars a trailer-load. That’s where I met Cain and Abel.

Blackberry, like ragwort and thistles, is a noxious weed. Some bright spark introduced it from England ages ago and it’s covered almost every unused patch of ground in Bellan. A blackbird poops out a seed it ate that morning and in a week or so the seed puts down roots in the loam. It sends up a shoot as tall as me that eventually falls over and where the tip touches the ground another plant grows. In a few years one little seed becomes a rambling thicket that spreads like cancer.

Blackberry has thorns. Brutal and remorseless barbs that can tear you to pieces and in the early days I would come home looking like I’d spent the day fighting feral cats. Feral cats often make homes in the blackberry as do rabbits and foxes and wombats and wrens and whipbirds, and the bizarre thing about that is that a fox’s den can be right next to a rabbit-warren but the rabbits are safe because of the thicket. Feral cats can sleep just a few metres from a wren’s nest and the wrens are completely safe. Blackberry fences the predators out.

Graham shoots rabbits, foxes and snakes. I’ve been out shooting with him heaps of times. He’s a serious marksman. He motions with his hand for me to stop, shakes his long dark hair to one side and takes aim at something on the other side of the gully that I couldn’t see even if I had binoculars. The .222 always makes me jump but Graham stays rock-steady, unlike his prey — a few final kicks and it’s all over. Another head shot. Graham has been deaf since he was born, but my hearing is brilliant.

Tina doesn’t like snakes. Neither does Graham. That’s why they keep the shotgun. We can hear the retort from our place more than a k away — it echoes through the valley and every time Mum hears it she looks at me and smiles.

‘Another snake,’ she says.

Graham has a thing about hanging them on the front fence until they rot and fall apart. Bit disgusting.

On the third day of work on the blackberries behind Graham and Tina’s place I had hacked my way into a small rocky clearing and stopped to get my breath, sweat dripping off me. A pair of scrub wrens darted through the thicket twittering and playing chasey — I couldn’t work out if it was kiss chasey or British bulldog — and when their chatter vanished I could hear a dull scraping then a flop. Again, dull scraping then a hollow flop. Moving quietly into the clearing I spotted them — a pair of tiger snakes entwined in a love dance, pushing against each other, heads lifting off the ground, swaying then flopping onto the sunlit rock beneath them. Their movements were liquid and a pleasure to watch. I stood there mesmerised for half an hour. I named them Dave and Mabel. I wanted to run down the hill and tell someone but I knew Graham would get the shotty and increase his handicap by shooting two snakes with one cartridge. He can’t see the beauty in snakes. Mum and Dad think the only good snake is a dead one. Kat says her skin crawls when I talk about them.

Later I found a great book about snakes at the school library that says it’s normally two males that dance. They
were probably fighting and the girl of their dreams wasn’t far away, so Dave and Mabel became Cain and Abel. I told Kat about it on the bus and she told me to piss off. She’s so rude when Mum’s not around.

Toby likes snakes. My little brother is five years old. He goes to kinder two days a week. He gets a lift with Penny Lane, the lady from the other house on the Bellan road. She lives on one hundred and sixty wild acres of goats and blackberries. Her husband died three years ago when a tractor rolled on him. She looks at the ground when she talks. Her daughter Peta goes to kinder with Toby. They’re best friends. So Toby pastes and paints for two days, and runs around home with hardly any clothes on the rest of the time. Mum gets paranoid in the spring when he’s tearing around in the long grass, knowing that the Joe Blakes are waking from their winter slumber.

I found a tiger snake at the back of Dad’s aviaries last summer. Dad keeps caged birds like parrots and doves, and the snake would have been after the mice that live under the feed bin. Kind of handy to have around. It was curled up when I found it, quite content inside a coil of black poly-pipe. The budgies were going berserk. I wanted to open their cage. I wanted to see them fly into the trees. I went back to grab Tobe and gave him a piggyback up to the aviary, then sat him on my knee a safe distance from the snake. It had just shed its skin and it was glossy like wet paint. For the Indians, the shedding of skin symbolises death and rebirth.

Tobe’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. His mouth dropped open and he pointed. ‘Snate,’ he whispered.

I nodded and the snake’s tongue darted out. I put my finger to my lips and walked gently away, holding his hand.

‘Beautiful, hey Tobe?’

Toby nodded with a big smile on his face.

‘When you see a snake, go the other way. Okay?’

He nodded and thought for a minute. ‘Walk or run?’ he asked.

I chuckled. ‘Walk or run. They can bite you but they are frightened of you. Walk is good. Run if you want.’

Two times last summer, Toby came up to me and pulled on the leg of my shorts.

‘Snate,’ he said, and proceeded to tiptoe through the yard to where he’d spotted a sleeping serpent. One turned out to be a piece of poly-pipe in the grass; the other was a tiger snake, up behind the aviaries again. It looked bigger and more vividly banded than the first time we’d seen it, if it was the same snake.

‘We should give it a name, Dan,’ he suggested.

‘Yeah, good idea. What?’

‘Zeb,’ he said.

I looked at him. ‘That’s a good name, Tobe. Where did you get that from?’

He shrugged. ‘I just made it up. Zeb . . . Zebbie . . . Zebra. From his stripes.’

Word about me working on blackberries got around. Tina and the mayor of Greater Carmine, Antonio Calais, are good mates. Mr Calais lives in a posh house in Henning,
the township at the western end of the Bellan road where Kat and I catch the bus every morning. I started doing a couple of hours on his blackberries after school and a few weeks later he got me going on his ride-on mower, cleaning his pond, weeding the rosebeds, planting flower seedlings, and clearing more blackberries. He paid me five dollars an hour, cash in hand, and I worked hard for him. He told me about the Dutch lady. Said her name was Eddy. He gave me her address. He said he’d told her that I was good but expensive. He told me to go see her.

Tina drops Kat and me off at the bus stop every morning on her way to work. She started providing that service a few weeks after we shifted to Bellan. Every second Thursday, Mum and Toby go shopping. They get a lift with Tina into Carmine and shop and hang around town until she knocks off work again. Tina’s a scientist with the EPA in Carmine. She makes sure all the power stations at Carmine and Milara don’t mess up the rivers and creeks and the air. Big job.

I went to the Dutch lady’s place one shopping day. Straight after school. I raced out after the bell and told Kat that I wouldn’t be catching the bus, that I’d get a lift with Tina and Mum and Toby. She wanted to stay in town too but we don’t all fit in Tina’s ute. Well, we do fit — but not legally. Driving to the bus stop on shopping days, Mum
sits next to Tina, Toby sits on Kat’s knee and I ride to the end of the dirt part of the Bellan road in the back of the ute. All the way to the tar. Like a kelpie. I love it. It’s okay on the Bellan road but we’d get in serious trouble if we were caught.

No. 4 Concertina Drive. The number on the letterbox was obscured by vegetation. All the other houses, for as far as I could see, had a square of lawn and two shrubs. Four Concertina Drive was totally overgrown. A solid wall of greenery. There was no lawn, not a tuft of grass to be seen. The driveway was concrete but covered in fallen leaves. Trees had grown and met across the drive and I couldn’t see the house. Ten steps along the drive and I still couldn’t see the house. After pushing branches aside for what could have been a full minute, I found the residence. Well, cottage really, with smooth walls of earth and a chimney formed in blue-grey stone. It seemed to glow in the afternoon sun, filtering through the trees around it. I picked my way along a path to the leaf-laden front step. A small verandah protected a hairy old armchair. I rapped on the solid wooden door.

‘
Ja
, coming!’ sang a voice from inside. ‘Just having a pee-pee. One minute,
hoor
.’

She told me she was having a pee then called me a whore. That couldn’t be right. I jumbled the sounds I’d heard and tried to make sense of them. My head was still rattling as I heard footfalls on a timber floor. The door groaned on its hinges and an old woman peered at me with half a smile on her lips. She was short — probably no taller than my armpit — and she wiped her hands on
a blue and white checked apron. The shape of her face was familiar.

‘Come in, darling. Come in, sit down,’ she said, waving me inside.

‘Hello, I’m Daniel Fairbrother. Mr Calais said . . .’

‘
Ja
, I know, darling. And I am Eddy. Want a cup of coffee? Come, sit down.’

I moved past the old lady and into her lounge room. It was filled with fine leather furniture, potted plants and paintings — old sailing boats on high seas and one of a windmill that looked like a photograph. There was a TV in one corner and it was on but no sound came out. One of the guess-the-word game shows.

‘Sit,’ she insisted. ‘Coffee?’

‘No thank you,’ I said as I sat on the edge of her leather sofa.

‘Lemonade? Juice?’

I could see she wasn’t going to be happy until I had something to drink. ‘Water? Water would be nice.’

‘
Ja
. Water is good. I collect my own,’ she said, and vanished into another part of the cottage. She came back with two glasses of water and two strange-looking biscuits on a plate. She sat the plate close to me, took one of the biscuits and nestled into the armchair opposite the TV. Her chair was covered in a huge sheepskin rug. The old lady reclined a little and a footrest popped out. She sipped her water.

‘So tell me, darling, you are a good worker?’

I shrugged and nodded sheepishly. If there’s one thing I do well, it’s work.

‘Tonio says you have worked hard on his garden. You work hard for me too,
ja
? You work hard, I’ll pay you well. If you don’t work hard, I’ll just pay you.
Geld verzoet de arbeid.
Money will make your work bearable. Okay?’

I nodded. ‘What jobs do you have in mind?’

She chuckled. ‘We can go outside and see. Finish your biscuit and your water.’

She reached over to the table beside her and pushed a button on the TV remote. I jumped when the sound burst from the speakers and somehow resisted the urge to cover my ears.

‘Good show. I always learn something. My favourite,’ she yelled, and screwed her face into a smile.

I picked up the lone biscuit from the plate and hesitantly pecked at the corner. A rush of cinnamon exploded in my mouth and before I could blink I’d eaten the whole thing. I finished my water and sat forward. The closing titles for her show flashed on the screen and she turned the TV off. She stood up and broke wind loudly. She took my glass and broke wind in time with her steps to the kitchen. I didn’t know where to look.

When she returned, she was smiling. ‘Did you hear that? I played a little tune with my bum! A
windje
song. Ha ha!’

She headed for the door. I held my breath and followed.

‘It looks like a mess,
ja
? It is mine yungle. Mine paradise. When I shifted here . . . when my Kasper died, it was just grass. Now look at it. I am only growing plants that are useful. Some have fruits, some have a beautiful smell, some I can eat. All useful,
hoor
.’

I nodded. If I ever had to live in town, then my place would look like No. 4 Concertina Drive.

‘It looks a mess but it’s just wild. I am getting too old to tame it all. I tend my vegies. Here, look.’

She took my hand. Her skin was warm and soft and she led me to an open area planted with spring vegetables. It wasn’t a big garden — the size of two car-park bays — but it was packed to the hilt with lush food plants. The fine leaves of carrots, a pyramid of stakes supporting beans with red flowers and long green pods, a neat row of cos lettuce and a border of what looked like garlic plants in full mauve flower. She took a hose and filled a concrete birdbath that was almost obscured by a citrus tree of some sort, and I noticed the birds. High in the branches were blackbirds, sparrows and a lone parrot quietly whistling and chattering to itself. On the ground, a wren family and a shrike-thrush were rifling through the leaf litter, hunting for dinner. It was an oasis for the birds of Carmine, I thought.

She instructed me on how she wanted things done. Not too much chop-chop — only clear the paths. Her tools were in the shed and the compost heap was beside it. ‘If you run out of things to do, take the ladder and clean the gutters.’

She went inside. I went like crazy. I cut a hole in the fruit-laden shrub that covered the letterbox. The fruit were green and smelled like perfume — probably poisonous. I gingerly sawed a few low branches off the trees that hung over the paths, raked and then swept them clean. The walk from the drive to the front door was paved in red bricks. With the leaves and twigs that had covered it now back
under the trees, it looked like something out of a glossy garden magazine.

As I stood and admired my work, a yellow robin flitted out of the bushes and landed on the broom in my hand. To the bird, I was just another tree, the broom just another branch. It froze and watched the leaves I’d swept off the path. It seemed to fall from the broom onto the leaf litter, grab a white grub and then, in a sharp
brrrt
of wing beats, moved to a branch on an apricot tree. It beat the grub against the branch.

The old lady stood motionless on the front doorstep. There was a faint smile on her face.

‘I . . . I have to get going,’ I said.

She surveyed my work and nodded approvingly. She disappeared inside and returned a few minutes later with an envelope, which she handed to me.

‘Geld moet rollen,
’ she mumbled. ‘You can’t take it with you . . .’

I stuffed the envelope into the pocket of my shorts.

She blinked and smiled. ‘You have worked hard, Dan-ee-el, please come to me again. Clean the gutters. Come when you can.’

I wasn’t at all certain about our arrangements for payment. On every other job, I had agreed on a price before I’d started work. I walked down the old lady’s drive and along about four houses before I couldn’t stand the suspense any longer. I ripped open the envelope and was delighted to see a red-orange twenty-dollar note. My mouth dropped when I pulled the money out and found that there were two twenties folded together. I looked at
the envelope and with disbelief at the money, then turned to look at number four. The old lady was standing on the footpath watching me. She waved. I waved back and bowed a little.