Saturday Conversation

 

I see the neighbour walk towards his car in the driveway and quickly duck behind the chicken coop. The neighbour is friendly and relaxed, (too relaxed in my opinion, the day after they moved in I decided to welcome them with a bottle of wine and he answered the doorbell in his underpants and stood talking to me for a solid five minutes with a semi) but he’s a talker, and while I would like to be, I have a nervous stutter and so prefer to avoid things like saying words to people. 

He sees me duck and ducks himself, but not before there’s eye contact and we are caught out. His grin is sheepish and I imagine it matches my own. 

“It’s all downhill from here,” he says.

I’ve got no idea what he’s talking about. He gestures around him. “The weekend. We’ve had a lovely Saturday and now it’s just a coast downhill until Monday.”

I think this is quite funny and smile. “I only work three days a week, so I’ve got a few more days up my sleeve,” I say. So far so good. Voice is steady.

He leans on his car. The paint on the door doesn’t match the rest of it, and it reminds me of my very first car, the one I bought for $300 when I was seventeen. I was studying Spanish at university, and so I named her Lupe, short for Guadalupe. My own Spanish name I’d decided to take Lucia, which was a great deal more exciting than my actual name.

“Now Clare,” he says, and I am surprised that he’s remembered my name because I most certainly cannot recall his, “I thought we were going to be friends. But a real friend would not say such things.”

It’s at this moment that I realise my new neighbour is handsome, and although he’s too young to be interested in me I feel a flicker of regret that he brought along his girlfriend when he moved.

“What do you do, anyway,” he’s asking. 

“I’m a language teacher. For foreign students.” A chicken has started to peck at my bare feet and I nudge her away, but she keeps coming back. I worry sometimes that I will have a heart attack in the chicken coop, and when I come to the chickens will have pecked away at all my soft parts. Not that I’m in the bracket for a heart attack, but it’s something I think about. 

“I’m a teacher too,” he says, and I think he’s going to say he teaches maths or science at the local high school. “A pilot instructor.”

I make a face. “That’s far more exciting than what I said. Maybe I’m going to have to start lying about what I do. Can you ask me again what I do?” I’ve started to talk to fast, but at least my stutter is off duty for the moment. 

He smiles and folds his arms across his chest. He’s tall and has a nicely shaped beard. I wonder if he might be a hipster, but his clothes look daggy, and not self-consciously so. 

“Tell me Clare, what line of work are you in?”

“I’m an astronaut in training. That’s why I’m down to three days a week. They’ve cut all our hours. It’s hard to social distance in a shuttle.”

His grin broadens into a laugh. He says something and I don’t quite catch it, and so I smile. His face becomes puzzled, and I realise that the smile wasn’t the appropriate response, but it’s too late because the exchange is over and my neighbour is giving me a wave and getting into his car, and I wave back and push the chicken away and lock the coop after me. 

And I go upstairs and spend the rest of my evening worrying about what he did or didn’t say, and wonder how other people manage to form relationships with others when the most complex one I have is with a chicken who lets me stroke her feathers while she pecks at my toes. 

 

The Drover's Other Wife/Life

It’s a simple house, with weatherboards and a tin roof. The yard at the back is roughly double the size of the house itself, garage included.

Trees all around, palms and stringybarks and lillipilly and jacaranda. Neighbours either side and at the back, all on matching blocks. Clotheslines and trampolines and a tyre swing. Clipped grass and flowers in the garden beds. Shops down the road, the supermarket and the bigger shopping centre a short bus ride away.

The tradesman, an ex-drover, will be home for tea. His wife and children are never here alone for long.

Four plump, red-cheeked children play on the rug in the living room. Their mother sits on the couch, jaw moving in slow, regular circles. Every once in while the chewing pauses and there is the sound of another sweet being unwrapped. The mother pushes the sweet between fleshy lips and lifts her left buttock from the couch just high enough to tuck the foil wrapper between the cushions. Later, the second youngest, a solid child with pretty gold hair her mother sometimes does up in ringlets, will dig out the wrappers from the couch and lick at the sticky residue.

There is a thump against a wall and the baby looks up and begins to cry. A crow has flown in through a window and is desperate to find its way out.

“It’s going to get me!” The eldest child, a sensitive boy of twelve, wraps his arms over his head and curls into a ball while his sisters shriek in delight and dance around the room. The crow, crazed with panic, swoops around the room, knocking over vases and glass figurines and picture frames.

The fat mother on the couch screws her eyes shut and stretches out her fleshy arms, calling her children. The girls pick up the baby and run to her. The boy is hysterical and won’t be consoled, even when his mother gives a sweet to him.

At that moment the cat glides into the room, a striped grey cat the ex-drover brought home as a kitten one Christmas for the children, and leaps onto the back of an armchair. It pounces on the exhausted crow in one swift movement, and they fall to the floor in a heap. The crow flaps its wings awkwardly, but the cat has dug its claws in, pinning it to the ground. The boy scrambles up the back of the sofa behind his mother’s head, while the baby bawls on her mother’s lap, dimpled arms extended in rage. The mother buries her face into her ringleted child’s head as the cat drags the crow into the kitchen.

It is near sunset and the children are beginning to fret and whine because they are hungry. The mother says she won’t go into the kitchen because the cat is still in there with the crow. They hear the flap of wings against the floorboards and the pitiful caw of the crow as the cat torments it. “We’ll wait for your father to get home,” the mother says. He’ll know what to do.

The sun sets and the mother turns on the television. The children watch, eyes vacant, exhausted from the events of the afternoon. The eldest boy has dislodged the baby from his mother’s lap and sits with his arms around his mother’s neck, his face pressed tightly against her. His face is tear streaked, and his jaws work in slow, methodical circles as the light from the television plays across their faces. 




I wrote The Drover's Other Wife/Life a few years ago for a uni discussion piece. The story was to be based on the Drysdale painting rather than the story, but of course I cheated and read the story too. 

I've always really liked the idea of alternate realities, and that's how this piece was born. The drover's wife was such a strong, competent woman, what would have happened to her if she hadn't needed to be?

Just testing...

to see if this works...