The Fine Colour of Rust. P. O’Reilly A.
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through two packets of Jam Jamboree biscuits and four pots of tea and argued about the merits of an earlier visit or a later visit, as if we’d have any say in the matter anyway, and didn’t decide anything except that there was less jam in a Jam Jamboree than there used to be.
Maxine had the answer. ‘Give him a call. Sort it out over the phone.’ As if calling government ministers is an everyday chore of mine.
The minister’s assistant answers the phone.
‘Gunapan,’ he repeats slowly, as if he is running his finger down a long list.
Surely not that many people write letters to the minister every second week?
‘OK, here we are. Correspondence Item 6,752/11. Yes, action required. Schedule a ministerial visit. So, how many minutes do you want him to speak for?’
‘I don’t want him to speak. I want him to save our school.’
‘Ah, you’re that lady.’
‘Yes, I am.’ It’s good to take a firm stand, even though I suspect ‘that lady’ is ministerial office code for raving lunatic.
‘And he’ll need a half-day to get there and back…’
I can hear him flipping through pages.
‘All right. It could be either June 27th or July 19th.’
‘But you’ve threatened to close the school by the end of the second term in April. Not much point in visiting a school that’s already closed.’
I hope he’s blushing. He reluctantly suggests a day in March, complaining all the while that he’ll have to reschedule appointments to make it happen. I complain back that we all have commitments and it’s not so easy for us in Gunapan to rearrange things either. I don’t mention that he’s proposed the visit for a pension day, when the whole town is aflurry with shopping and bill-paying. It’s very hard to get anyone to do anything else. But since there’s no other possibility we agree to set the date.
By mid-afternoon even more birds are sitting stupidly in the trees with their beaks open. This is one of those days when they might fall stone dead to the ground, heatstruck. On the horizon a thin column of grey smoke rises and forms a wispy cloud in the pale sky. The start of a bushfire. Or some farmer trying to burn off on a day when leaving your specs lying on a newspaper could make it burst into flame. There’s no way to be in a good mood on a day like this. No way, when the air conditioning in the car is broken and the steering wheel leaves heat welts on your palms. Days like this it seems as if summer will never end. We’ll go on sweltering and we’ll cook from the inside out, like meat in the microwave. They’ll cut us open at the morgue and find us filled with steak and kidney pudding. On the outside we’ll be nicely pink.
Days like this I think about picking up Melissa and Jake from school and I can see everything before it happens. They’ll fall into the car and yelp at the heat on the vinyl seats. They’ll ask for icy poles from the shop, or ice creams, or they’ll want to go down to the waterhole for a swim. The council swimming pool’s shut for renovations. All winter it was open, the heated pool empty except for five or six people who have moved here from the city and who put on their designer goggles and churn up and down the pool thirty or forty times every morning before they purr back to their farmlets in huge recreational vehicles.
One time I decided to get fit and I went along at six thirty in the dark with the kids. After they got tired of messing around in the free lane, the kids sat on the edge of the pool dangling their feet in the water and shouting, ‘Go Mum!’ as if I was in the Olympics. The other swimmers lapped me four times to my one and by lap five I was dangerously close to going under for the third time.
‘Never mind, Mum,’ Melissa reassured me. ‘We love you even if you are fat.’
Then during the third month of spring this year, the council announces the swimming pool will close for renovations. Right over summer. What renovations? we ask. What can you do to a swimming pool? It either holds the water or it doesn’t. And in summer, after years of drought, when we save the water we use to wash vegetables and time our showers, the pool is our one indulgence in this town. No, they say, we’re putting in a sauna and a spa and we’re building a café. You’ll be glad when it’s done, they tell us. We’ve tendered it out. It will only take five months. Why? we ask again, but no one answers. Truly something stinks at that council.
‘Don’t say a word,’ I tell the kids when they stagger past the wilted gum trees of the schoolyard and into the car. ‘We’re going to buy icy poles and we’re going to the waterhole.’
If they had any energy left they’d cheer, I’m sure, but Jake has dark circles under his eyes from not sleeping in the heat and Melissa turns and looks out through the open window, lifting her face to catch the breeze.
‘Mrs Herbert said we don’t have to do any homework tonight because it’s too hot and I got a gold star for reading,’ Jake shouts above the hurricane of the wind rushing through the car.
I never bother locking the house in this kind of heat. If we shut the windows we’ll never sleep. It’s become a habit to walk through each room when I come home, counting off the valuables. While Jake and Melissa head off to their bedrooms I mentally mark off the computer, the DVD player, the change jar. The telly’s not worth stealing. Melissa shuts her door while she changes. She’s eleven now, but she reminds me of me when I was fifteen. One night not long ago she shaved her legs in the shower. I saw the blood from a cut seeping through her pyjama leg.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ I sounded louder than I’d meant to. ‘Once you start you can’t stop. The hair grows back all thick and black and soon you’ll look like an orang-utan. Then you’ll have to shave all the time.’
‘You do it! Anyway, the other girls were laughing at me.’ She was looking down at her hands and sitting rigidly still, the way she does when she lies.
‘They were not. I bet you saw it in a magazine. Or on TV.’
Melissa arched her head in the kind of movie star huff it took me years to master and stamped off to her room.
Now Jake and I wait ten minutes, fifteen, while she changes into her bathers.
‘Come on, Liss,’ Jake calls, ‘we’re boiling. Let’s go.’
Melissa’s room is silent. I knock on the door.
‘Sweetie, don’t you want to cool down?’
‘I’m not going.’ The door stays firmly shut.
Jake does an exaggerated sigh and collapses on to a chair. I can feel the sweat on my face, running down between my breasts, soaking into my bathers under my dress. Three flies are circling me, landing whenever I let my attention drift.
‘You go.’ Her voice is muffled behind the door. ‘I’ll have a shower.’
‘Please, let’s go, Mum.’ Jake reaches out to take my hand and pull me towards the front door.
Melissa’s a mature eleven-year-old, but I am convinced that if I leave her alone in the house for more than twenty minutes a spectacular disaster will happen and she’ll die and I’ll be tortured by guilt for the rest of my life. I’ve pictured the LP gas tanks exploding, the blue gum tree in the yard toppling on to the house, a brown snake slithering out of a kitchen cupboard. Of course, any of those things could happen while I’m at home too, but I would have no guilt factor. The guilt factor means I may never have sex again, because attractive men looking for a good time rarely drop in spontaneously at my house. On the other hand, it has saved me from many of Helen’s girls’ nights, involving outings to pubs that the same attractive men looking for a good time never visit. I was also lucky enough to miss Helen’s ladies-only party where an enthusiastic twenty-year-old tried to sell dildoes and crotchless panties to astonished Gunapan farm wives.
‘Melissa, either you come or we don’t go at all, you know that.’
‘Noooooo!’ Jake’s cry of anguish echoes on