The Party Line (7 page)

‘I never wanted to farm. I should’ve shot through early on, before the old man got sick,’ Jack said.

‘What did you want to do?’

The cigarette had gone out. Jack pulled a box of matches from his shirt pocket and relit it. ‘Dunno. So long ago I’ve forgotten. Just wanted to take off. Hated shitty bloody cows, milking twice a day. Didn’t know then what I wanted to do, but it didn’t matter.’

Jack stood up, flicked the butt on the top step, and stood on it. ‘Hung in here long enough, hoping to pass it on to my kids.’ He laughed. The noise was somewhere between a snarl and a spitting pain, caught in the back of his throat. ‘Maybe you’ll like it here long enough to buy it off me. One day, that is. That’s what sharemilkers want, isn’t it? That’s what you all think you want … your own piece of muddy swamp?’

The migraine started in the early morning, just after four. Joy bumbled around the house, searching for aspirin, trying to avoid crashing into the furniture. Her sight had slipped to peripheral; she knew the sickening pain wasn’t far away. She took enough pills to send her back to sleep before the wave crashed inside her.

She woke later to rain that sounded like an endless roll of thunder. Joy tried to focus on that sound, laying still. During her migraines, her other senses became piercingly sharp. She could hear individual drops hitting the windowpane.

The pain had eased, but lingered across the space between her temples. She ran her hand across the other side of the bed. Eugene was up. The bedside clock said it was two in the afternoon. Apart from the rain, the house was silent.

She was drifting back into sleep when the smell reached her. It crowded her head, scratching at the surface of her headache like fingernails down a blackboard. There was the scent and the suffocating closeness of the damp of the rain and Joy panicked, fighting for breath.

It was sweet and thick and dark; she could taste it in the back of her throat. June the first, standing at the front door of the Gilbert cottage. The bizarre vision, the girl — Gabrielle — peeking around the corner, looking like a painted doll.

The next time she woke it was dark. Her headache was gone. She picked up the clock — seven o’clock. A whole day had disappeared.

There were voices in the kitchen, the crashing of pots. Joy noticed other odours now — the rich aroma of gravy and slow-cooked mutton. She pushed the disturbing memory of perfume to the back of her mind. She was hungry.

Eugene was sitting at the table, reading the newspaper. He looked up at Joy when she came in. ‘How are you feeling, love?’ he asked. ‘A nasty one, eh?’

‘Killer,’ Joy said. ‘But it’s gone now.’

She leaned against the doorway, wobbly on her feet, and looked at the back of a person at the kitchen bench. ‘Excuse me, young lady — what is that on your head?’

‘A scarf.’

‘I can see it’s a scarf. Where’d it come from?’

Nickie swung around from the bench. Her face was red and blotchy, for a minute Joy thought she’d been crying. But there were traces of glitter across her cheeks and eyes. Dark smudges of mascara, or something, under her eyes. And, the shocking smell of that perfume.

‘And what’s that make-up doing all over your face?’

‘What make-up?’ Nickie turned away from Joy, scowling.

Joy grabbed Nickie’s arm, pulled her around to face her again. ‘Don’t
what
me, Nickie. I asked you a question. I asked you two questions. What’s all the muck on your face, and where did the scarf come from?’

‘None of your business.’ Nickie wrenched her arm out of Joy’s grip. ‘Why are you picking on me anyway?’

‘You’ve been at the Baxters’,’ Joy shouted. She turned to Eugene. ‘Don’t just sit there. Look at the state of her.’

Eugene did just that — just sat there. He looked over his paper, watching Nickie and Joy fighting, as though it was a tennis match. Finally he spoke. ‘Do that again, Nickie.’

‘Do what?’ she asked, swinging around to face him this time.

‘Shake your head like that. It looks neat, the way the sequins sparkle.’ He was grinning at her. ‘Don’t you reckon, Joy?’

Joy grabbed at the scarf and pulled it off. For a second she was caught off-balance by its sensual nothingness, by the contrast with the materials she knew — wool, rough cotton, the chamois of the wet-weather jackets.

‘Be careful, you stupid — the sequins can come off, you know.’ Nickie glared at her, shouting as though Joy was a peasant. She took the scarf back and adjusted it on her head, checking her reflection in the kitchen window. ‘It was Gabrielle’s mother’s. She wore it when her hair fell out from cancer.’

Joy looked at Eugene. He stared back. Neither of them said a word.

‘Let me get this straight,’ Joy said. ‘You went over to the Baxters and … Mr Baxter gave you his wife’s scarf? His
dead
wife’s … cancer scarf? To keep?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Nickie. ‘It was Gabrielle that let me have it. She insisted that I take it.’

‘Oh yes?’ said Eugene. Joy gave him a look.
Thanks a lot for finally stepping in here.

Nickie flicked the scarf away from her face. ‘Well,’ she said slowly. ‘The thing is. She asked me to take it because … um … she’s not supposed to have it. Actually.’

‘So, are you saying, Nickie, that she stole it off her father? Because if that’s the case—’

‘No no,’ Nickie interrupted. ‘She didn’t steal it. She’s not supposed to have it because … no one’s supposed to have it. After her mother died, her dad was so devastated that he threw most of her stuff out. That’s what Gabrielle says. And she didn’t want him to get rid of it all — she wanted to keep her mother’s things — but it was too upsetting to even talk to him about it.’

Joy looked at Eugene again, waiting for him to say something.

‘So Gabrielle watched where he put it, and she managed to sneak the best things back inside, before it all went to the rubbish dump or wherever it was going to go. But she has to keep it hidden now.’

‘So explain this to me, Nickie. How is Mr Baxter going to feel if he sees you wearing his dead wife’s thrown-away scarf?’

‘I’ll make sure he doesn’t see me wearing it.’

‘Let’s make it easy,’ said Eugene. ‘In fact, you won’t be wearing it again, Nickie. It’s just not right. And to make it even easier for you to avoid upsetting Mr Baxter, you won’t be going to his house again either.’

‘Dad …’

‘I’m not saying Gabrielle can’t come here. But you’re not going over there again.’

Joy and Eugene sat silently after Nickie stomped out of the room. Joy let her chin rest in her hand as she stared at the newspaper on the
table. Her fingers brushed across the dry, weathered skin on her cheek. Make-up brushes hadn’t danced their magic across her face for years, not since she and Eugene had been courting. Even then the paintwork had barely been visible — Joy’s memory of getting ready for a date was dominated by her mother hovering with a wet flannel and revelations about the relationship between heavy make-up and heavy petting. Ordering Nickie to
Get that muck off your face
was a family keepsake.

‘You need to keep her occupied, Joy.’

Eugene’s words startled her.

‘Too much bloody time on her hands. That’s the problem.’

‘I’ve been thinking … she can be in charge of feeding the calves this year. What say we pay her? She’ll have to stick with it then,’ Joy replied.

As Eugene sniffed and smirked at the notion of paying his daughter to stay out of trouble, Joy’s fingertips brushed across her eyelashes. She was surprised to find them thick and long.

Country Women’s Institute was the following day. They were meeting to decide on the final recipes for the year’s fundraiser, a cookbook.

Joy had been against the idea of the cookbook from the beginning. They’d tried it five years earlier and the arguments over the selection of recipes had threatened to scar friendships forever. She was tempted, given her mood, to not bother going. She didn’t trust herself to hold her tongue when the pettiness began.

She spent the morning of the meeting in the garden weeding and planting out vegetable seedlings she’d started off in the kitchen. There was still the possibility of frosts, but she felt warmth in the rich black soil as she let it tumble through her fingers. She always gardened with bare hands, the touch of the earth revealing more about its readiness for new planting than any other sense. The sun heated her back as she bent and dug. It seeped into her bones, diluting the gloominess of the previous days.

The phone rang shortly after eleven. Joy ignored it. She couldn’t think of a single person she wanted to talk to. It rang a second time, stopped, and then a third. She threw down her trowel and went inside to answer the call.

‘It’s Audrey.’

Joy sighed.

‘Could I get a ride with you this afternoon?’

She hesitated, tempted to say no, that she wasn’t well and wouldn’t be going. Any other woman would intuit the hesitation as reluctance, and quickly backtrack on the asking of a favour. Audrey said nothing.

Joy listened to breathing down the line. Her own breathing fell into time with her neighbour’s. Behind her, on the hallway wall, the clocked ticked. Audrey would wait forever.

‘I’ll pick you up at quarter to,’ she said finally.

‘See you then,’ Audrey replied.

Audrey was waiting on the side of the road, by the letterbox. A bright yellow dress marked her clearly from a distance. It belted at the waist and flared from the hips. She was clutching a book and at her feet was a large hamper basket. For a terrible moment, Joy thought it was Audrey’s washing basket, but it was smaller than that. Audrey pulled open the car door and slid into the passenger seat, putting the basket at her feet and clutching the book to her chest.

The car sped along the road. Audrey hadn’t shut her door properly and it rattled. Joy imagined Audrey leaning, leaning, falling out the swinging door of the speeding car, bouncing like a discarded apple core to the side of the road and landing, eventually, upright in the long grass. Her book still in her hands, her expression unchanged.

‘What sort of a morning have you had, Audrey?’

‘Not too bad. Got the washing done.’

‘That’s good. With the weather the way it is. What’s in the basket?’

‘A cake … I’ve brought a cake for afternoon tea.’ Audrey’s chin was high, she blinked evenly and stared at the road.

She was a tiny woman, not much bigger than Nickie. Like Nickie, she wore the battle marks of a tomboy; bruises and scars marking her arms and legs. Joy glanced down at her own limbs, heavy and bloated. Childhood scars had long disappeared.

Joy knew very little about Audrey — where she’d grown up, who she was, and the time had long passed for asking. Jack Gilbert had turned up with her on his arm at a district dance about a year after
Neville had died. Joy remembered that night; she was dating Eugene by then. Unlike her friends, she’d refused to make Audrey welcome; she simply ignored her. Eugene, sensing her agitation, had stayed by her side for the barest time before joining the men at the bar.

Joy’s friends had reported back. They’d said, taking sidelong glances at the newcomer, that although Audrey might be easy on the eye, she wasn’t quite the full quid and that explained a lot, didn’t it? It explained everything.

Nickie, too, sometimes said that Audrey was beautiful, like her namesake Audrey Hepburn. Like a pixie. Joy had always scoffed at that, but now she saw the fine angle of the woman’s jaw, the deep clavicle, her cheekbones defining her triangular face. Unlike any other woman in Fenward, Audrey always wore layers of make-up; powder and rouge on her face, bright eyeshadow, deep red lipstick. It was applied heavily, reminding Joy of a child made up for a pantomime. The childless Audrey could be the mother of the embossed, glittering Gabrielle Baxter.

‘What’s that book, Audrey?’

‘Recipes. It’s Jack’s. Well, not Jack’s exactly, it was his grandmother’s.’ Audrey placed the book in her lap and stroked the hard cover. It was brown and stained. The spine was fraying, pages were slipping out of place, protruding from the edges. ‘She left it to Jack.’

‘It looks like a precious thing,’ said Joy.

Audrey shrugged. ‘I don’t use it much. But there’re one or two good recipes.’

Audrey smoothed out imaginary creases on the cover. Joy didn’t like to say that it was too late to be submitting new recipes for the fundraiser, if that’s what Audrey was thinking.

It occurred to Joy — for the first time — that Audrey might not know about Neville’s death. Who knew what Jack Gilbert had shared with her? It wasn’t as if Jack had shown remorse for the part he’d played in the accident … perhaps, by the time the strange and waiflike Audrey had crossed his path, he’d swallowed his anger about his stock loss and forgotten about it.

‘Eugene was saying about the hay,’ Joy said, after a spell of silence.
‘How it’s rotten, and your new man’s got no winter feed.’

‘We’ve never had extra winter feed. We don’t need it. That’s what Jack says.’ Audrey was smiling the smile of a woman who knew. ‘We’re lucky, having the land down by the river. Plenty of pasture there.’

Audrey Gilbert, the Peter Pan simpleton sailing through life with nothing on her mind except clean washing. Joy contemplated raising the subject of Ian Baxter, and his precocious daughter with her makeup and slutty perfume. Audrey reached across and switched on the radio. She hummed tunelessly to the music.

Joy looked at Audrey’s smooth, tiny hands. Her nails were perfectly manicured and painted a pearly off-white. Child’s hands. Her own hands, positioned steadily on the steering wheel, looked chumpy; meaty and rough, dirt still visible under her fingernails from the morning’s gardening. The skin was dry and her nails ragged. Joy lifted the seatbelt away from the folds of her belly and sat up straight in her seat.

Joy pulled open the heavy door to the hall kitchen. The Zip whistled and white teacups lined the bench underneath. Two bottles of milk sat to one side, next to the big stainless steel teapot. On the counter, spread across three piles, were stacks of recipes: Luncheon, Supper, Afternoon Tea.