Etiquette for a Dinner Party (22 page)

Now I know what you're thinking, in regards to what happened the next day. You're picking that I woke up with one hell of a sore head, and forgot all about education, and university, and Frank Sargeson: the whole deal.

Well some of that is true. It's correct that I didn't feel so great when I woke. It might have been summer, but the nights were still cold that far south. I'd passed out in just my old sweater and skirt and boots, and though someone had put a smelly old oilskin over me it had slipped off in the night.

So yes, I was cold and not feeling my best. But I was still keen on getting my money back. And I still wanted that book.

My fellow students had moved on, leaving a pile of empty bottles by the other park seat. My backpack was still under my own bench, and I rummaged through for my toilet bag and tidied myself up at a tap over in the corner of the park. Then, seeing as there was no one around, I nipped behind the sad angel and quickly changed into a cleanish tracksuit.

After that, I planned my day. Back to the bookshop, to pick up my book and my nineteen dollars fifty. Then, university. .

The feeling came down on me when I was still a block away from the bookshop. I had to wait a few seconds for a streetcleaning truck to pass in front of me, brushes swishing away on the road, but I had already seen.

The shop was shut. The lights were off, and the door was closed. It looked no different to any other shop on the street.

I crossed the road and tried the handle. It wouldn't move.

I peered inside: there was no one there.

I stepped back from the shop, and looked again at the front window. There it was:
The Stories of Frank Sargeson
, sitting back on its little grey stand. And the price was still fifty cents.

That old rage inside of me was just starting to simmer along nicely when I saw the little note stuck to the inside of the window. It was a page ripped out of a child's school maths book — the sort with squares rather than lines on it — and it said: Gone Home For Christmas. Closed Until Further Notice.

I thought about his mother, about how she might feel when he turned up. I hoped she would be pleased. Then I headed off to the bus station for a cup of tea.

1
He is selling his land today. They have finalised a deal, he and
the real estate agent. Soon the agent and the buyer will arrive with papers
to be signed. The buyer is bringing a lawyer with him, to witness the sale
and make sure everything is in order.

He will also have a lawyer present, because his interests must be protected. But as he sees it, it is a straightforward thing he is doing. Selling his land.

A fair price has been negotiated, a substantial amount of money placed in his bank account. When the papers have been signed, the land will no longer be his.

He will have no land.

He is uncomfortable about meeting the person who will own his land. He would rather not. He has asked the real estate agent several times who this person is, but the agent is vague.

'I'm not exactly sure,' the agent keeps saying. 'It's all being done through the lawyers.'

The real estate pamphlet says his land is three hundred and ninety-five hectares of pasture, in fee simple, capable of carrying four thousand stock units. It is profitable, with uninterrupted rural views, a woolshed and a dwelling. Just two hours' drive to the coast.

2
The dwelling is his home, where he is now sitting, waiting for the
buyer and the others to arrive with the papers. He has lived in this house
all his life. The land was his father's, became his after he married. He does
not know how to describe how he feels about the land. He is not the sort of
person that can pluck from thin air the right word for a moment.

The stock, Hereford cattle, have already gone. The uninterrupted rural views go for twenty-three kilometres. After that, there is a road. You would have to know what you were looking for by way of an interruption; a thin, grey, unsteady line in the distance, unconcerned with destination.

The real estate agent says that quite possibly the new owner will want to remove the dwelling. Thinking about this makes his heart beat fast. Where to? he asks. But the agent laughs.

'In
this
case, remove,' the agent says, 'means demolish.'

The agent's top lip curls up and under when he talks. He looks like a dog that might be snarling or smiling.

Even so, he will mention it to the new owner. He understands,
of course, that it will be the new owner's dwelling, once the papers have
been signed. To keep or remove, as he wishes.

3
At the supermarket in the town, he asked for cardboard boxes for
the packing. His wife would have had this sorted out, but she was dead.

'How many do you want?' said the young girl with the uninterested face and black circles around her eyes.

'Enough to pack up a dwelling,' he told her.

She became even less interested.

'A house.'

'I can give you seven,' she said. 'No more. It's the rules.'

4
He has no choice but to sell the land. The money is needed for other
things. He cannot always remember what they are, the other things.

5
The three men who have come to buy the land are not the new owners.
The new owner lives overseas. The three men are the new owner's representatives.

'So who exactly is buying my land?' he asks them.

'The Blue Corporation,' one of them says.

He has never heard of the Blue Corporation. The three men are smiling: proud to be acting on behalf of an honourable enterprise. They tell him this over and over.

He becomes brave and asks the representatives about the dwelling. He is calm when he says it. 'Does the Blue Corporation have plans for the house?' He tries to make it sound like something he has just thought of.

The real estate agent snarls, or smiles.

'We are glad you have asked us about this. We would like to talk to you about this matter,' says one of the representatives. 'The Blue Corporation wants you to stay on, work the land on its behalf.'

'How will I know what to do with the land?' he asks. He cannot bring himself to say
your land.

'The corporation will instruct you,' one of the representatives
says.

6
His phone/fax machine is the size and shape of a small breadbin.
His wife bought it and sometimes faxed people. They needed it, she said, being
so far from civilisation.

She would stand at the door, look down into the valley, shout 'Is there anybody out there?' He never saw her fax a single thing.

A telephone receiver is attached by cord to the body of the machine. The three representatives stand around the fax machine — touching, pressing, lifting it up to look underneath. He cannot understand the language they are speaking and he wonders why they speak English only some of the time. It is not possible to offend a fax machine, he thinks. And he would not be offended by anything they have to say about it.

'Does this function well?' one of them asks. He is the tallest of the men; he holds the telephone receiver to his ear, pushing buttons, listening and talking at the same time.

'I think so,' he says. 'As a phone it works. I've never faxed.'

'Do you know how to use a computer?'

'No.'

The representatives talk some more, then one goes out to the car in the driveway. He returns with a cardboard box.

'Here is your new fax machine,' he says. 'You will like it, it is a very good model.' He unplugs the old machine and nudges it out of the way with the toe of his shiny black shoe. Almost a kick.

Thin grey cords flick here and there — click, snap — and the new machine blinks and whines like an animal waking. One representative reads from the instruction manual; another pokes at the grid of numbers and letters on the smooth flat surface. A series of notes play out and then the machine sighs and settles. The blinking stops.

'There, sir. It's working now. Tell me — what is your telephone number?' The representative takes a small black notebook out of his pocket, and opens it to a clean page. He writes in shapes and lines, then small black numerals as he takes down the number.

There is more bowing and handshaking before the representatives and lawyers and real estate agent leave. The real estate agent's car flicks up gravel as the back wheels spin; he is first out the gate.

7
Three months later, he is jolted out of a deep sleep, discovers he
is standing naked in the cold black bedroom. He is panicked, lost as to what
is wrong in the night. The shrill rings are foreign. He follows the sound
through the dark house, stumbling, reaching out to feel his way along the
walls and doorways.

He sees lights flicking across the face of the fax machine. In the dark, he watches. It is the first time, day or night, that the machine has made a noise since he sold his land.

The ringing stops and a different noise begins. A quiet sound, a hum and then a grind. He wonders if he should say something, whether the representatives have taught this machine to talk to him.

'Hello?' he says, leaning towards the machine, conscious now of his nakedness. His hands form a cup over his genitals.

A tongue of paper slowly appears from the front of the purring box. For a moment it seems to flick up towards him, licking, towards his protecting hands. Then it unwinds into the darkness and drops to the floor.

He picks it up and turns on the light. Across the top of the paper are unusual shapes and lines, similar to — possibly the same as — the ones across the paperwork of the land sale documents.

Underneath, in large dark typeface:

PLANT CAMELLIA SINENSIS. CHARGE COSTS TO ACCOUNT: 0047583922345740

There are no markings that look like a telephone number on
the paper. He thinks now the markings on the paper could even be some kind
of decorative edging; they might not say anything at all.

8
One thousand tea bushes arrive. According to the yellow labels, the
shrubs will create a medium-sized hedge up to two metres tall. They should
be planted facing the north, in places protected from the wind. They are susceptible
to frost and wind burn.

When the plants are five years old, they will each yield about one kilogram of leaves, which in turn will produce two hundred grams of dry tea. A spring harvest will produce the finest and most tender leaves.

All this information fits on one tiny yellow label.

9
He has prepared the soil for the first of the shrubs. Now he digs
and plants, digs and plants. The little shrubs form a brave line across the
land; he tries to imagine how they would look to a bird flying overhead. It
is the first time he has thought about things in this way.

The first tea bushes die as he prepares the soil for the next delivery of plants. They bend defeated in the wind that blows up the valley; fragile leaves withering to brown, then black. They crumble to dust in his hands. When the delivery truck arrives with the second thousand, he turns it away.

'What's the point?' he shouts at the driver, waving his arms wildly in the wind. 'Does your wife drink tea? Plant them for yourself .'

10
He looks for paper — the kind to write letters on — but
there is none in the house. His wife must have had some, in order to fax,
but he does not know where she kept it. He has had trouble finding things
since she died.

So he uses the page that rolled out of the fax machine in the middle of the night. Turns it over and pushes it flat on the kitchen table. Writes, in his clearest, slowest hand: Tea bushes dead. Not suited to high country pasture. Please advice. He thinks later that advice looks wrong — maybe it is an 's' not a 'c' — but there is no paper to start afresh.

11
His wife would go on and on about going to the coast. 'Just two hours'
drive, and we'd be there,' she'd say. She went on and on about it. On and
on.

12
He sets his alarm clock for three o'clock in the morning, the exact
time that the Blue Corporation tea bush fax arrived. When the alarm rings,
he walks through the dark house and pushes his letter into the machine, into
the same thin slot it came from.

It falls to the ground, so he picks it up and holds it there again, forcing it slightly as he presses the green button on the top of the machine. It makes sense to push the green button, he thinks, in his absence of knowledge about the fax machine. Nothing happens.

13
Twenty thousand avocado plants die, followed by fifteen thousand
banana trees.

The land is pitted with empty holes and trenches ready for new plants and trees. Exotic foliage rots — he has pushed it into piles at the edges of the fields. He wonders how his land — the land — looks to the birds high above now.

He no longer gets out of bed when the fax machine rings in the middle of the night. The pieces of paper keep coming, but he does not place the orders.

The plants arrive anyway. Passionfruit. Bamboo. Mangoes. Rice. Coconuts. Mushroom spawn.

14
In the middle of the night a figure stands over him; for a moment
he thinks it is his wife, come back to ask him for one more impossible thing.
He rubs his eyes to wake himself fully, sees it is the fax machine. It has
feminine arms, and hands that sit firmly on its hips. Looking very much like
a woman annoyed at the way things have turned out.

'Ignoring me is not an option.' The voice is sure of itself: not his wife's, but similar. It is the first female voice he has heard since he took his wife's body down from the rafters.

He sits up in bed, looks the machine up and down. It has two shapely female legs, untanned. He reaches out and touches one of the legs — they are soft, human. The feet wear his wife's old dusky pink slippers. How did the machine find the slippers? She was wearing them when she died.

The machine leaves the room, and he sees that the extension cord for the vacuum cleaner is trailing along behind. There is a sexy swing to its walk. When it reaches the door it turns, and speaks again. 'It's Angela, by the way. A-N-G-E-L-A. Not "You-Shit-of-a-Machine".'

15
He can smell breakfast. In the kitchen, Angela is dishing eggs, bacon
and toast onto a plate. She passes it to him.

'Aren't you having any?' he asks.

'I ate earlier,' she says.

She walks to the end of the kitchen bench and bends over to pick up a piece of white paper on the floor. He looks at her underneath. It is an interesting surface of screws and holes.

16
In no time at all, Angela has the house shipshape. She cleans, cooks,
mends the holes in his clothes. After some weeks she starts to lose her sharp
edges; they blur one day, reappear the next slightly rounded.

It takes a month, on average, for an edge to become a curve.

Angela finds all the lost things: toothpaste, matches, the wedding album, shoelaces, paper, condoms, odd socks, spare light bulbs, chocolate.

She has arms and legs and a place for sexual relations. But no head. Nothing to love and hate and argue with and kiss and punch and get worked up about.

17
Angela is holding the piece of paper up in front of her, level with
her touchpad and blinking lights. He sees fine hairs along her arms catching
the sunlight that comes through the kitchen window.

'According to this, you have a golf course to build,' she says.

They will work together on this project, starting with the first hole and tee. He needs paper — long uninterrupted sheets — so Angela reaches up, as though to scratch her invisible head. She pushes a button. White paper comes out of her; she holds the button down.

'Say when.'

'When,' he says.

Angela kneels on one end, and he on the other. They each have a pencil, and together they draw a tee, and a fairway, and a green that sits up high on the ridge by the woolshed.