The Fine Colour of Rust. P. O’Reilly A.
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he’s a hundred years old and smells of tractor. Why don’t you marry Kimberley? You play with her at school every day.’
‘Yuk!’
‘Yeah!’
At least that’s sorted.
When she finally emerges from her room, Melissa eats two frankfurts in bread, dripping with butter and tomato sauce, and a few forks of salad. After we’ve washed up she drifts back to her room to do her homework. I’ve pulled all the flywire screens shut and I make the kids hold their breath while I go around the house spraying the mozzies. In Melissa’s room I glance over her shoulder. She’s on the internet, looking at a page about the United Nations.
‘Mum, were you around when the United Nations started?’
‘Possibly, if I’m as old as I feel. But no, I don’t think so. Are you doing a project?’
She nods. She switches screens to show me her essay and I see that at the top of the page she has made a typing mistake and it says The Untied Nations. I like that title. It makes me think of Gunapan, a town lost in the scrubby bush, untied from the big cities and the important people and the TV stations and the government. Gunapan keeps struggling on the way it always has and no one takes any notice at all except to cut a few more services. There are probably thousands of towns like us around the country. The untied nations.
‘Why don’t you look up the collective noun for bush pigs?’ I must learn to use the computer better myself.
‘I did – it’s a sounder,’ Melissa says.
‘What a great word! Sounder. Sounder.’
‘It’s not that good, Mum.’
‘Sounder, sounder, sounder. A sounder of bush pigs.’
‘Mum, I have to do my homework.’ She heaves an exasperated sigh that would do a shop assistant in a toffy dress emporium proud. ‘Please, I need some peace and quiet.’
6
A good mother would be culturing organic yoghurt or studying nutritional tables at this time of night, when the kids are asleep and the evening stretches out ahead, empty and lonely. I’ve checked every channel on the TV and tried to read a magazine, but it’s all rubbish. I’m too hot to concentrate on a book. I should be planning spectacular entertainments for the visit from the education minister, but that seems too much like hard work. Now I’m bored. I sound like Jake. Bored, bored, bored. If I was a bloke, I’d wheel the computer out of Melissa’s room and look at porn for a while.
The only trouble with the second-hand computer stand I bought is that it squeaks whenever you move it. Melissa half-wakes and moans, and I shush her and hurry the computer out of the room. I’m not interested in porn, but Helen’s promised me a whole other world of fun on the internet and I think it’s time I found out more about it, as research of course, to protect my children. Last time I played around on the computer, Melissa, through child techno-magic, tracked what I’d been looking at the night before. ‘Are you going to buy a motorbike, Mum?’ she asked. ‘What are spurs, anyway?’ Now I’ve learned how to clear the history of what I’ve been browsing, so I’m feeling daring. I pull down the ancient bottle of Johnny Walker from the top of the cupboard, pour a shot, add a splash of water and realize the only ice I have is lemon flavoured. What the hell, I think, and drop the homemade icy pole upside down into the glass.
Outside the flywire screens, the night noise of the bush carries on. It’s not the white noise of the city where I grew up – the drone of cars and the rattle of trams, the hum of streetlights and televisions muttering early into the morning. It is an uproar. When we first moved out here I was terrified by the racket. It sounded as if the bunyips and the banshees had gone to war: screaming, howling, grunting, crashing through the bush, tearing trees apart and scraping their claws along the boards of the house. Soon enough I realized that the noises were frogs and cicadas and night birds. Kangaroos thumping along their tracks; rutting koalas sending out bellows you’d never imagine their cute little bodies could produce; the hissing throat rattle of territorial possums and an occasional growling feral cat. Against all that the whirring of the computer is like the purr of a house pet.
Once I’m connected to the internet I do a search on myself, in case I’ve become famous while I wasn’t paying attention. I’m not there, so I try my maiden name, Loretta O’Brien. Someone with my name is a judge in North Carolina, and another person called me died recently and her grandchildren have put up pictures of her. She has a touch of the old scrag about her. I wonder if it’s the first name that does it to us. All that unfulfilled singing potential.
The lemon icy pole sure adds a distinctive tang to Johnny Walker. I top up the glass with water and take another sip, shards of melting ice sticking to my lips as I type in Gunapan. We’re part of a geological survey. The Department of Lands has posted a topographical map of the region. Gunapan is an Aboriginal place name. Well, der, I think, tossing back more of the tasty lemon whisky and adding a touch more water. The next hit is an online diary of a backpacker from Llanfairfechan in Wales who stayed for a night in a room above the Gunapan pub. One night is plenty enough in this place, she writes. I had very bad dreams.
Jake calls out in his sleep. He does this – occasionally shrieks in the night – but it means nothing. Bush pig, I think, refilling my glass and pulling a strawberry icy pole from the freezer. It’s weeks since I’ve been tempted to drop the kids at the orphanage and drive to Melbourne to take up my new life of glamour with a hairless odourless body. The little bush pigs have been behaving quite well. Now I realize that was the calm. Something’s coming, but I don’t know what.
I lean back and sip my drink – Johnny and a strawberry icy pole, it’s a Gunapan cocktail – and click away until I’m looking at the guest login for online dating in Victoria. I hesitate on that page a while.
‘It’s not only weirdos,’ Helen told me once. ‘Some blokes look quite handsome. Although that does seem to be mainly the shorter ones. Anyway, you don’t have to do anything. It’s soft-core girl porn.’
I select Rural south west and Male and Over six feet and Doesn’t matter about children. Then Go. The screen comes up with five photos on the first page and a big list of other hits. One hundred and forty-two single men in rural south-west Victoria? This deserves a green icy pole and another shot of Johnny.
I read about Jim, who likes long walks on the beach and romantic dinners. Jim lives in Shepparton in central Victoria, many hours’ drive from the beach. Giuseppe has two grown children and likes working out. Mel loves movies and romantic dinners and golf, and would like to share his wonderful life with a special lady. Joe’s looking for a happy busty lady with no issues. Good luck, Joe.
As I scroll down the list I start finding these people funnier and funnier. Matthew’s spent a lot of time working on his spirituality and he’d like to meet a woman with the same interests so they can grow together. Like a fungus, I think. Shelby would like a petite Asian lady with large breasts who’s open-minded and looking for a good time. Hey Shelby, most of the men in this town pay good money for that. I open up my password-protected email and send Helen a message. Looking for a handsome wealthy man with no issues and a Beamer. Must love slumming it, buying expensive presents for the lady in his life, and have no objections to feral children.
I slump back into the kitchen chair, which is a few inches too short for the computer table. My neck hurts. The screen in front of me has ads all over it. Casinos, jobs, real estate. Maybe I should look for a new house to rent, one that doesn’t heat up to 400 degrees. Thinking about real estate reminds me of the hole in the bush on the Bolton Road.
I type Gunapan development into the search bar. You get thousands and thousands of answers in these searches and none of them are what you want. The council minutes are online. That should send me off to sleep. The local supermarket’s car park resurfacing process is described in glorious detail. I cannot understand why these things would be on the internet. I find the council’s forms for applying for a building permit. I try another search, this time on Gunapan bush. Then I type in more place