The Fine Color of Rust Read online

  “I buy the biscuits,” Maxine answers. “I didn’t have time, that’s all.”

  We fall back into silence.

  Eventually I speak. “We could give up. Let them close the school—we can carpool to get the kids to Halstead Primary.”

  No one moves. Brenda’s staring at the floor. I’m expecting her to jump in and agree with me. Her house is painted a dull army green and her clothes are beige and puce and brown, and her kids stay out on the streets till eight or nine at night as Brenda turns on light after light and stands silhouetted in the doorway with her cardigan pulled tight around her, waiting for them to come home. She turns up to my meetings as if she is only here to make sure nothing good happens from them. But tonight she reaches over to pat me on the knee.

  “Loretta, I know it won’t work, and you probably know deep down it won’t work, but you can’t give up now,” she says.

  Kyleen stands up and punches the air, as if she’s at a footy match. “That’s right! Don’t give up, Loretta. Like they said in Dead Poets Society, ‘Nil bastardum—’” She pauses, then trails off, “‘Carburetorum’ . . .”

  “‘Grindem down’?” Norm finishes.

  • • •

  NEXT DAY, NORM’S cleaning motor parts with kerosene when I knock on the tin frame of his shed.

  “Knew it was you. You should try braking a little earlier, Loretta.” He doesn’t even have to look up.

  “Norm, what happened to your forehead?”

  “Bloody doctor chopped off half my face.”

  “Oh, God, I knew it. I knew something was wrong with that patch of skin. Not skin cancer?” My heart is banging in my chest.

  “Not anymore.” He reaches up to touch the white bandage, which is already covered in oily fingerprints. “They think they got it all.”

  He dunks the engine part into the tin of kerosene and scrapes at it with a screwdriver. I want to hug him, but he and I don’t do that sort of thing. I’m going to buy him sunscreen and make him wear it, especially on those sticking-out ears of his. I’ll buy him a hat and long-sleeved shirts. I can’t imagine life without him.

  “Mum, I found some flat tin.” Melissa is in the doorway, shading her eyes with her hand and watching Jake teetering on top of a beaten-up caravan, his arms whirling like propellers.

  “Jake, don’t move!” I scream.

  My toe stubs a railway sleeper as I bolt toward the caravan.

  He was probably fine until I panicked. His eyes widen when he looks down and realizes how high he is. His first howl sets off the guard dogs. His second howl sets off car alarms across town. By the time Norm and I coax him down we’ve both sustained permanent hearing loss. I hold him against me and his howls ease to sobbing.

  “Come on, mate, it wasn’t that bad.” Norm lifts Jake from my grasp and swings him down to the ground. “I’ll get you a can of lemonade.”

  Jake takes a long, hiccupping breath followed by a cat-in-heat kind of moan as he lets out the air.

  “Mum! I told you, I found some.” Melissa pulls me, limping, to the back of the yard.

  My toe is throbbing and I’m sweating and cross. I wonder why I don’t buy a couple of puce cardigans and sink back into the land myself, like Brenda or that truck.

  We drag the bits of tin to the shed, where Jake is sitting on the counter listening to the golden oldies radio station while Norm scans Best Bets.

  “Have you got any paint for this tin? I’m going to make signs for the school.”

  Norm shakes his head. “You’re a battler, Loretta. And I suppose I’m expected to put them up?”

  “On the fence.”

  • • •

  ONE OF MY best dreams is Beemer Man. Beemer Man powers his BMW up to the front of the house and snaps off the engine. He swings open his door, jumps out, and strides up my path holding expensive wine in one hand and two tickets to Kiddieland in the other.

  “We’ll need the children out of the way for a week or so,” he explains, “while I explore every inch of your gorgeous body.”

  “Taxi’s here. Have a lovely week.” I can feel his eyes on my effortlessly acquired size-ten torso as I give the kids a gentle push out the door.

  They run happily to the taxi, clutching their all-you-can-eat-ride-and-destroy Kiddieland tickets, then Beemer Man closes the front door and presses me against the wall.

  “Mum, you’ve painted ‘Save Our Schol.’ And you’ve got paint on your face,” Melissa interrupts to tell me before I get to the good part.

  Why did I decide to do this in the front yard? My arms are smeared to the elbows with marine paint, and I’m in the saggy old shorts I swore I’d never wear outside the house. Imagine if Harley Man or Beemer Man went by.

  I have a terrible thought. Did Norm mean “battler” or “battleaxe”? The school had better be worth all this.

  3

  NORM’S COME BY to drop off more lemons and pick up a few of my lemon tarts. He leans in an old-man-at-the-pub kind of way on the mantelpiece and picks up a postcard I’ve propped against the candlestick.

  “Who’s this from?” he asks, turning it over without waiting for an answer.

  “My sister Patsy, the one who works at the uni in Melbourne. She’s on a research trip to Paris.”

  “She works at the uni?” He props the card back up after he’s read it.

  “Yep, she’s a lecturer there.”

  “She must be pretty smart. What happened to you?” Norm winks at Jake, who giggles and scratches his face the way he’s been doing since he got up. I know what’s wrong but I’m trying to pretend it’s not true. Even though the kids in his grade have all had the vaccine, some have still come down with a mild case of chickenpox.

  “Dropped on my head as a baby. So did you get the windscreen?”

  “Didn’t get it, but tracked one down. A new bloke is doing car repairs out the end of the Bolton Road. Set up the other week. Actually, he’s about your age. Not bad looking either. Good business. Nice and polite.”

  “Beautiful wife, six well-behaved children,” I add.

  Norm leans back and frowns. “Really?”

  “No, but probably.”

  “I don’t think so. He smelled of bachelor to me. Divorced, maybe. Anyway, he quoted me a good price, said to bring the car and he’d put in the windscreen straightaway. So you can take it down whenever you like.”

  “What’s his name?” I ask Norm.

  “Merv Bull.”

  I shake my head. Only in Gunapan. Merv Bull sounds like an old farmer with black teeth and hay in his hair who scoops yellow gobs from his ear and stares at them for minutes on end like they’ll forecast the weather. The image keeps replaying in my mind as I finish wrapping the lemon tarts in waxed paper.

  “You can’t judge people by their names, Loretta, or you’d be able to carry a tune.”

  “That’s unkind, Norm. I may not have turned out to be the talented country-singing daughter my mother was hoping for, but then, neither did Patsy or Tammy. We haven’t got the genes for it. I don’t know why Mum keeps up these crazy fantasies.”

  • • •

  A WEEK AND a half later, after having been held hostage in the house by a child even more itchy and irritable than normal, I set out to get the new windscreen.

  It’s years since I’ve driven down the Bolton Road. I remember when we first moved to Gunapan I got lost down here. I was heading for the Maternal Health Centre. My first pregnancy. My face was so puffed up with heat and water retention I looked like I had the mumps. I took a left turn at the ghost gum past the stock feed store as the nurse had advised on the phone, and suddenly I was in another world. Later, of course, after I’d found my way back into town, I realized I’d turned left at the wattle tree past the Pet Emporium, but anyway, it was as if I’d magically slipped out of Gunapan and into fairyland. The bush came right up to the roadside, and in the blazing heat of the day the shade from the eucalypts dropped the temperature at least five degrees. I got out of the car, waddled to
a picnic bench in a clearing, and sat drinking water for twenty minutes. Hope bubbled up in me. The baby would be fine, my husband Tony would turn out not to be an idiot, we would definitely win the lottery that Saturday.

  Only one of those things came true, but I’ve always loved that bit of bush. I’d come out here with the kids sometimes in the early days and walk the tracks, listening to the sound of the bush, when I could hear it above their endless chatter, and smelling the minty eucalypts.

  We’ve just swung into the Bolton Road when Jake asks if he can have a Mooma Bar from the supermarket. His chicken-pox has dwindled to a few annoying itchy spots, but they won’t let him back into school yet, no matter how much I beg. He’s bored and tailing me like a debt collector. Any excuse to get out is good.

  “There’s no supermarket out here.” The moment I speak I see a shopping trolley on the side of the road. Someone must have walked that trolley five kilometers. Unless it was tossed in the back of a ute and driven here. Further along the road is one of those orange hats they use to steer drivers away from roadworks. A couple of minutes on we see a load of rubbish dumped a few meters off the road. A dozen beer bottles lie around the charcoal of an old fire with what looks like bits of an old picnic bench sticking out of it. A heap of lawn clippings molders beside a brown hoodie and a pair of torn-up jeans. I slow down, pull the Holden over to the side of the road. The trees still come right up to the roadside, but behind them is light, as if someone is shining a torch through the forest.

  “We came here on my birthday,” Jake reminds me.

  He’s right. We came out two years ago with green lemonade and presents and a birthday cake in the shape of a swimming pool. Kyleen and Maxine and their kids came, and we played hidey at the old shearers’ hut. Three kangaroos burst out from behind the hut when we arrived and crashed off through the bush. We called them “shearing kangaroos” and Jake thought that was a real kind of ’roo till Norm put him right. But now I can’t make sense of where that hut might be. The face of the forest is completely different. Ahead of us, a wide dusty dirt road leads in through the trees. I can’t see the picnic area. And that light through the trees is wrong.

  I drive along the bitumen to where the dirt road enters the bushland.

  “I don’t want to go in there,” Jake says.

  More rubbish litters the side of the track—plastic bags and bottles, juice containers, old clothes, building materials—as if this piece of bushland has become the local tip. I peer along the track. It seems to lead into a big clearing that wasn’t there before. The bush used to stretch way back. I would never let the kids run too far in case they got lost. Now if they ran off they’d end up standing in a flat empty paddock the size of a footy field.

  “Footy field,” I mutter. “Maybe they’re building a new footy field.”

  That can’t be right, because even the old footy field is in trouble. The footy club has a sausage sizzle every Saturday morning outside the supermarket to raise money to buy in water. All the sports clubs around here are desperate for water. Some have had to close down because the ground is so hard it can crack the shins of anyone landing awkwardly on the surface.

  “Let’s go. I’m bored.”

  “Hey, Jake, open your mouth again and show me your teeth. I think it might be time for a trip to the dentist.”

  That always shuts him up. We climb back into the Holden and reverse into the Bolton Road to continue the journey to our new windscreen.

  4

  “LOOK AT ALL these cars, Jake.” We pull in with a mighty shriek of brakes at Merv Bull’s Motor and Machinery Maintenance and Repairs. “Why don’t you hop out and have a look around while I talk to the man. Look at that one—a Monaro from the seventies! You don’t see those much anymore. Especially in that dazzling aqua.”

  Jake purses his lips and rolls his eyes and waggles his head all at once. He keeps doing this lately. I wonder if he’s seen a Bollywood film on the diet of daytime television that filled up chickenpox week.

  “Are you trying to get rid of me, Mum?”

  “Yes.”

  He sighs and swings open the car door. He slouches his way to the shade at the side of the shed while I quickly pat down my hair in the rearview mirror before I step out of the car. I can’t see any sign of Merv Bull. A panting blue heeler stares at me from the doorway of the shed as if I’m a piece of meat.

  “Hello?” I call. “Mr. Bull?”

  The blue heeler slumps to the ground and lays its head on its front paws, still staring at me. The sign on the side of the shed says Nine to Five, Monday to Friday. I look at my watch. Ten fifteen, Tuesday morning.

  Jake scuffs his way over to my side. “There’s no one here, Mum, let’s go. Let’s go to the milk bar. You promised that if I . . . you would . . . and then I . . . and then . . .”

  As Jake goes on with his extended thesis on why I should buy him a Violet Crumble, I shout, “Mr. Bull!” one last time. A man emerges from the darkness of the shed. The first thing I notice is that he’s hitching up his pants. He strides forward to greet me and stretches out his hand, but I’m not shaking anything I can’t be sure was washed. When my hand fails to arrive he pulls back his arm and wipes both hands down the sides of his shirt. He’s standing between me and the sun. I can’t see his face let alone its expression.

  Jake’s jaw has dropped and he’s staring at Merv Bull as if he’s seen a vision. He’s this way with any man who’s around the age of his father when he left.

  “Hi,” Jake whispers.

  “Hello.” Merv Bull leans down to shake Jake’s hand. “I’m Merv. Who are you, then?”

  “Jake.”

  “Pardon me?”

  Jake’s awestruck voice has soared into a register that only the blue heeler and I can hear.

  “This is Jake”—I step in—“and I’m Loretta. I think Norm Stevens told you I was coming?”

  “Ah, you’re the windscreen.”

  “That’s me.”

  “Can’t do it till this afternoon, sorry. But you could leave the car here and pick it up at five.”

  “Sure.” I put on a bright fake smile. “Jake and I’ll walk the five kilometers back into town in this shocking heat and have a pedicure while we wait.”

  “We could stay here and look at the cars,” Jake whispers.

  Merv Bull shades his eyes with his hand and looks down at me. I can see him better now. Norm was right, he’s handsome in a parched, rural bloke kind of way. Blue eyes and dark eyelashes. Looks as if he squints a lot, but who doesn’t around here. He’s frowning at me like a schoolteacher frowns at the kid with the smart mouth.

  “I do have a loan car you can use while yours is in the shop. To get you to your pedicure, that is.”

  “Ha, sorry, only joking.” I’m turning into a bitter old hag. I’m reminding myself of Brenda. Soon I’ll become strangely attracted to beige. “That would be great. Any old car will do. I mean, hey, we are used to the Rolls-Royce here.”

  “Mum! That’s not a Rolls-Royce. It’s a Holden!” Jake beams proudly at Merv.

  “You certainly do know your cars, mate.” Merv pats Jake on the shoulder.

  Now I’ll never get Jake out of here. Merv, to be addressed hereafter as God, goes back into the shed to get the keys for the exchange car, and Jake and the blue heeler trot faithfully after him. I watch his long lanky walk. My husband never walked that way, even though he was about the same size as Merv Bull. My husband, Tony—God love him wherever he may be and keep him there and never let him come back into my life—was a stomper. He stomped through the house as though he was trying to keep down unruly carpet; he stomped in and out of shops and pubs, letting doors slam around him; he stomped to work at the delivery company and stomped home stinking of his own fug after eight hours in the truck; and one day he stomped out to the good car and drove off and never stomped back.

  We’d been married ten years. I never dreamed he’d leave me. After the second year of marriage, when I fell pregnant with Me
lissa, I settled down and stopped fretting that I’d married the wrong man. It was too late, so I decided to try to enjoy my life and not spend all my time thinking about what could have been. I thought he had decided that too.

  A month after he’d gone a postcard arrived. By that time I’d already finished making a fool of myself telling the police he must have run his car off the road somewhere and insisting they find him. The postcard said he was sorry, he needed to get away. I’ll be in touch. Cheque coming soon.

  Still waiting for that cheque.

  “It’s the red Mazda with the sheepskin seat covers over by the fence.” Merv Bull hands me a set of car keys on a key ring in the shape of a beer stubby. “She’s a bit stiff in the clutch, but otherwise she drives pretty easy.”

  “Been getting a lot of business?” As I speak I take Jake’s hand in mine and edge him quietly toward the Mazda before he realizes that we’re about to leave his new hero.

  “It’s been good. They told me it’d take a while to get the ordinary car business going again, especially since no one’s worked here for a few years, but I guess I’ve been lucky. I’ll probably have to get an apprentice when the big machinery starts arriving.”

  “Big machinery?”

  “For the development. Whenever it starts. I thought it was supposed to be in Phase One already. That’s what they promised me when I bought the place.”

  “Right.” I’ve lived in this town for years and I still haven’t got a clue what’s going on. “So that big hole in the bush on the Bolton Road is the development?”

  “Yep. But for the moment what I’ve got is cars, and there seems to be no shortage.”

  I look at him again. I want to ask if it’s been mainly women customers but I don’t. I will have to tell Helen about Merv Bull. If Merv is single and if he doesn’t hook up with anyone in a hurry, he’ll be a rich man in this town. He’ll be mystified at how many parts appear to have simply fallen off cars. I inch closer to our loan car, still not letting on to Jake what I’m doing.

  I stop as my arm is yanked backward. Jake has caught on and he’s trying to pull his hand out of mine.