Jack and Mel were sitting on the fence that separated their properties, watching the sky for shooting stars. The moon was out, looking dishy. It was almost full.
In Jack’s head, he could still hear the theme of Polovtsian Dances as an echo, as if it were dying out in the pinpricked cauldron of night.
‘Well, better be off,’ he said at last, hopping off the treated pine railing and onto the languid grass.
Mel was still staring above. After a brief pause, she sighed, ‘I’ll walk you to the stile.’
They wandered further down the fence line, Mel running a hand along the taut wires. Jack looked down the valley at his house. Jean’s Ford pulled up, the high beams on. They flicked off. Out she got, followed by Daniel and Simon. Jack kicked himself for not getting back earlier. Now he would have to answer his mother’s questions. He watched them stroll to the front door, probably wondering why no lights were on inside. Simon went in first, after dumping his mud-caked boots on the rubber entrance mat, followed by Jean who fussed over him, and lastly Daniel who glanced up briefly at the hill before closing the door behind him.
There was no way in the dimness Daniel could have seen them.
Now that his family had beaten him home, Jack no longer wanted to join them. He was as happy as he had ever been, in the outdoors. More so now, because he was accompanied.
Mel jumped up, trying to pull a gumnut off a low branch of a ficifolia. Almost at once, he worried that this moment—which he was sinking into as if into the most comfortable, sweet-smelling hay—was of excruciating dullness to a girl who’d seen more of the world in her tender eleven years than the townsfolk of Miller’s Creek combined.
‘Must be pretty boring here?’ he queried, his uninvited dejection worsening.
She finally got her gumnut, yanking it off as the branch flew back up as irritably as the swish of a horse’s tail, and just as noisy. She looked at him funny.
‘Being a city girl, I mean.’
Mel turned, surveying the timeless arc of the blueing hills, as she digested his meaning.
‘It’s lonely,’ she answered at last, in an oddly flat tone. ‘Even the trees are lonely.’
A faint breeze got up. Mel nodded in slow motion, mirroring the rhythm of a nearby tree sapling, standing isolated. Jack noted the wire barrel staked round its trunk. Could only have been his father’s work. Without that protection, it would never have survived the cropping of the sheep.
Mel’s throat moved strangely, like she was swallowing nervously. The whole sky and land went a hue darker.
‘If I…’ she stumbled, then admitted the word, ‘died here, though, the trees would have me for company.’
Jack could no longer see her expression, only the outline of her kinked hair. What was the meaning in those words, the sudden change of tone in someone he had so far found ebullient, carefree? Before he could ponder the question further, he heard his father calling. Daniel had stepped out onto the front lawn, and was looking around in an alarmed fashion.
‘Where’s your dad, Mel?’ Jack asked, finding his own voice and tone had subdued with the purpling sky and dimming landscape.
Perhaps because she realised her mood had infected his, she ‘came to’, and adopted a lighter tone and mien.
‘Dad? Oh, well, he’s… I shouldn’t tell, but he’s MI6.’
‘MI6?’ he queried, feeling ignorant and unsophisticated once more next to this seasoned connoisseur of the world.
Mel adopted a shooting pose, like Roger Moore as James Bond in those distinctive opening titles prefacing the films.
‘Secret Intelligence Service. He’s a spy.’
Jack thought about this for a second. His history teacher would often rabbit on about those dangerous commies under Brezhnev.
‘For us?’ he asked in a hurry.
Mel laughed. Her features were coming back to Jack, as his eyes adjusted to the night and the moon and stars grew brighter.
‘Yes, of course, silly,’ she laughed, doing a pirouette. ‘But he’s so secret not even Mum’s allowed to know where he is.’
Something in this did not quite tally for Jack. With Mel’s reference to the tree’s loneliness, that was like he imperfectly understood, and she was unable to perfectly impart. But with these revelations, it was like she was holding back, not quite giving him the full picture. It even sounded like make-believe, and he was an expert on that.
‘But if he’s…’ Jack began, trying to put his doubt into words.
Mel seemed uncomfortable. To cover, she playfully tapped him on the arm. ‘You’re it!’
‘What?’ asked Jack, genuinely confused at her meaning.
She beheld him like he was a simpleton. ‘Hide and seek!’
She ducked behind the large tree she had only minutes before been stripping of gumnuts. Jack shook his head slightly (he was enjoying talking, really talking), but at last decided to join her in her game and walked behind its crusted bole.
To his infinite surprise, she wasn’t behind it! He did a quick circle of the trunk, in case she was niftily keeping him exactly opposite.
No, she definitely wasn’t there.
He heard the sound of his front door shut. He glanced back at his house; Daniel must have gone back inside.
A movement in the corner of his eye caused him to turn around. Mel was peeping from behind one of the ghost gums that were situated further back up the hill towards her house, where they grew thickly.
How on earth had she suddenly got up there?
She ducked behind it. Her heard her voice a moment later, oddly echoing.
‘Don’t give up, Jack.’
He ran up to the ghost gum only to find that she had disappeared from behind that too!
He scanned the others in the clump.
‘Mel? Mel, where are you?’
Jack stopped calling when he heard his father calling him in turn.
‘Jack! Jack!’
Daniel had retrieved a Dolphin torch and was wandering up the hill, the light bobbing about in the grass.
Jack hesitated a second, had one more look around, then jumped the stile and ran down the hill to join his father.
After dinner, when Jack was helping Daniel fix the leaky washing machine which had been moved to the shed, he asked him about that line of poetry.
Daniel took a while to understand, but then finally looked up with his washed-out blue eyes. Jack wondered if they’d ever been as startling as his own, or always that diluted.
‘What line, son?’
Jack felt a sudden acute embarrassment but muttered it all the same.
‘A fairy white, a woodland sprite, an angel without wings.’
Daniel rubbed the grease off his fingers, as if they were suddenly of infinite fascination to him. When he did look up again, it was ruefully.
‘Oh, that’s nothing. I made that up, Jack.’
Daniel got up and walked to a half-stripped cupboard in the corner. He pulled out a musty box and took from it a record.
‘Maybe I should introduce you to some music myself. I used to play this band to death.’
Retrieving a record player from the same cupboard, Daniel set it down on the workbench and lifted the dusty cover. He placed the record on the wheel, and set it spinning. The needle dropped into its trench, and so began a long, aching, musical sigh.
‘‘Waterloo Sunset’ by the Kinks,’ beamed Daniel, enjoying the look of amazement on his son’s face.
The chords tumbled in an inexorable pitiless resignation, creating a feeling in Jack almost beyond his comprehension till his father put it in a word that he perceived would forever reverberate with him, as if tuned to the timbre of his own soul.
‘Melancholy. The Kinks are best described as melancholy.’
The tune then assumed a haunting quality, a strain of hesitancy, as the singer sang, ‘But I don’t need no friends. As long as I gaze on Waterloo Sunset, I am in paradise.’
It became combative once more, the loss, if not totally forgotten, then relegated to the bittersweet. Oddly, the piece for Jack evoked that overgrown garden in the roofless settler’s house.
‘Why do you like it, Dad, if it makes you feel sad?’
Daniel regarded the buttressed ceiling of the shed. ‘Sometimes it’s okay to feel sad, if it helps you remember someone.’
Jean was doing the last of the ironing, getting Jack and Simon’s clothes ready for the morning. She packed up the ironing board and put it in the cupboard, then wandered to the window. Until recently, night had always been dark outside – their nearest neighbours, the Harrows, were a couple of kilometres away and obscured behind a copse of pine at that – but tonight there were two stars of habitation in the sky. Light emanated from the shed where Daniel and Jack were up to goodness knows what, and then there was that more distant satellite up on the hill, signalling the presence of that woman and her daughter.
How Jean had wished – wished again and over – for her isolation to be lessened. How she ached to have a home in town. Daniel wasn’t the social gadfly she was and had difficulty making friends. Traits echoed in Jack. Just a few weeks back she’d taken Daniel to one of her dos in Miller’s Creek, because Mrs Saunders’ husband was also present. (Although he had an excuse to be hanging out with the women: work injury.) Daniel barely spoke, yet was attentive with tea and cakes until the topic got on to that dreadful Prime Minister of theirs, Whitlam, and his appalling policies.
Of all the times Daniel could have chosen to speak, it was then.
‘I like him,’ he’d rambled, silencing the room as he balanced a silver tray of macaroons. ‘He has something extremely rare for a politician… vision.’
Jean had distracted the ladies with some irrelevancy or other, but the words were out. She and her circle had venerated Australia’s former Prime Minister bar one, Menzies. But perhaps Daniel had never forgiven Menzies for the man’s war mania. Daniel had served two terms in Vietnam.
It was 1967 when he got embroiled in it; they’d been together seven years. Simon was six, Jack three. Daniel was working as a mechanic fixing planes at the nearby RAF base. He’d joined the reserves after unsubtle pressure that it would mean keeping his job. The colonel knew about the mortgage on the farm – a result of Daniel’s father’s drinking and debts – and said if he signed up proper, he’d be made a private and stationed out to repair work in Nauru for a year. He’d then be set up with an ex-pat’s loan to regain ownership of his family property.
Jean had been keen on the idea – she wondered vaguely if she’d admire him more if he were in uniform. Daniel had eventually agreed against his better judgement. Six months later, the promise broken, he was in Vietnam, stationed at the US airbase in Khe Sanh, site of one of the bloodiest battles of the war.
He had never spoken about it, except to ask Jean to refrain from mentioning it to their sons, which she felt was akin to siding with the hippies. Quiet and reserved before, he had returned home with a taciturnity bordering on catatonia.
They’d staved off the banks with their war-loan but Daniel hadn’t turned out much of a farmer, unable to give up his sheep to the knackery and only selling their wool. Before long, he had to supplement their income by painting houses. To Jean’s great mortification, people would make jokes of his ewes. ‘Yous with your ewes.’
Because he was away most days, John Harrow took care of much of the management of their sheep, seeing to docking, mulesing and shearing, and pocketing half the profits.
Jean traced the outline of the neighbour’s property on the glass.
That light on the hill had come finally, but it was not the ship in the night she hoped for, but something far more troubling, more enigmatic. The queasy possibility occurred to her that had never struck before: that she might lose a husband she could never claimed to have properly owned.
Jack, with teeth brushed, dressed in pyjamas, and snug in bed, was trying to drift off to sleep. He usually liked to go to the bottom of his bed, turn around, and then make his way back as if from the mouth of a whale, all without untucking the bed. But tonight he was pretending not to speculate just who ‘Waterloo Sunset’ reminded Daniel of.
For Jack knew.
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