shame and retribution, has decided enough is enough and the girl shall have the lot.
She felt the bright sunlight and the warm air and overwhelming rush of relief to be free of it. The grace of her selfless self. Finally.
All the family had stayed in South Australia, most of them in wretched Gawler, except for the two offspring, her own and her sister’s, the wicked witch’s boy, Angus, though he had left the state under some kind of cloud, some where-there’s-smoke-there’s-fire kind of drama after the Adelaide hills bushfires. She can’t remember what.
Then, now, next, she can’t keep it together.
Who cares what happens next? As long as her daughter inherits she is at peace, her sins absolved. It is an epiphany, as she waits there is the blue light with the windows open and the nursing home verandah bathed in the bliss of final decisions, but looking more like starlings in full tweet among the crumbs and cars, their rooves of overheating metal in the carpark. All this, expanding into a new innocence in the sunny afternoon like heaven in her thoughts.
Angus
Driving the bobcat is a big boy’s pleasure: its fast and fussy lifting and turning adds to the toy-like appearance, until you feel its working grunt, that heavy urgency of engines gouging through dirt or lifting and bearing large stones and rocks. It is manic but muscular. Each lift and slow roll as he wedges stones into the retaining wall fronting a small mansion. Rocks everywhere. A growling bobcat twisting and swivelling. In South Australia you find moss rocks, gloriously dark boulders with lichen and moss growths rooted in their surfaces. People pay a fortune for rocks. Well, they pay Angus a fortune for rocks.
Everything is heavy on a job like this. The rate, the pay, the irksome waiting for materials, the badgering with councils… This plan he is implementing is close to being black-listed. Not, as it happens, yet. As for rocks, it would appear Melbourne has less moss and more granite. This, from a city built of colonial bluestone? – the cobbles the kerbs the capable walls? Whether kerbstone or churchstone, the same blue ageing, darkish grey to black.
But in gardens there is also the illusion of weight. He may choose sandstone and slate and as long as it looks like a mountain-side it pays well by merely having volume and vastness. These stones bear no public weight but their own, and they do not wash away even though he insists on trickle irrigation, the most economical watering system and vital to prevent chlorinated water spoiling the stones. Sprinklers are deadly, worse, in some areas they are sourced from bore-water, they spray out iron from shallow aquifers and veil everything in a filthy not a flirty red. They rain unsightly stains as if the stuff came hurtling from the massed backsides of a hundred hippos. Those grumpy animals that like to spray to further seed-life and to show they do not suffer fools.
An irregularly-shaped block of stone will not be forced into the gap. Whether it is a stubborn block or an unwelcoming gap, it has to be done. Angus leaves the engine running, like a good diesel should be, and tramps over to his ute to grab the pick and sledge hammer and his heavy steel chisel. The sky is clear and blue above him, as he pulls on gloves, then the unlikely safety goggles. Roughened hands were once the sign of a macho worker, a type immediately ruined by an eye-patch. Health and Safety is in capitals everyday now, as it never was then, with workers whose first action was to remove the annoying safety guards from machines, and who mocked anyone who worked with obvious care for their hands.
Several blows of the pick knock a small sparking gap in the stone, enough for him to swap the big attacking steel and shoulder-high blows for the chiselling. The hammer is heavier than some blokes could lift with one hand, let alone swing against the ball-end of the steel chisel. It takes slow, determined blows, one, and one, and one. And rests. Then again. Nothing happens fast with this material. No obvious grain like some rocks, or those rocks that give nothing then shatter at your feet. The blows must be judged carefully, given the blunt imprecision of the tools, and to avoid the jarring that kills the wrists and does little to the rock-face.
I’m breaking rocks in the hot sun…
How he wishes he didn’t keep remembering this.
Then a section sheers off and falls beside the block.
He eases the clutch on the bobcat and nudges the boulder forwards into position, against, then into the gap between the other blocks. He pulls back and it stays. Not bad, not bad at all. He feels the satisfaction from making small adjustment to very heavy masses.
From uphill he can estimate the visual design by measure – the slope is cut into two by equal terraces made of stone – but from below he will need to judge it as the neighbours and the passers-by will see it. By eye. On paper it may seem perfect but from below its proportions look utterly wrong. Some might say, as the kids say, whatever. He is not ever, and never ever, a whatever person. He wants it right.
Playing with the stop-start and the left-right dynamics of his bobcat has made him slur with pleasure in the face of the greater powers. The bobcat pushes blade-first into a large ramp of stones. As it lifts the square-ish block he wants, a rounder stone tips awkwardly and the gods seize it, this spherical boulder, they bowl it straight downhill at the most expensive car they can see.
It tumbles out onto the driveway and, as he watches, it bounces heavily down the hard long path and thumps into a parked Mercedes. Black, glossy, German enamel. Quite beautiful. Deeply indented.
It bleeds silver. What to do? The shock of it, his error, embarrassment in full view. When he manages to get down to the car Angus tries to lift the stone by himself. Using the black and yellow bobcat would look like a bumble bee attacking a black car. Instead, staggering, he feels like a crazy Scots tossing boulders. He thinks of his entrails exploding through the fibrous walls of his abdomen or, much worse, his scrotum.
Hey you!
The feeling of this sound is heavier than the boulder. Or hernia. Hate. He can feel its vengeful eyes.
I have just taken a photo of you, shouts a woman. I have caught you red-handed.
As she wobbles fatly down towards him, still holding her mobile, the world’s newest weapon for law-courts and YouTube. She lifts it higher to prove her point and as if she is comparing their held objects: her little iPhone and his cannon ball.
Is it… your car? I guess it is. I’m sorry. We can…
Can you indeed? Well, I have one of you at the car and I have another one of you lifting that thing up to get away with it.
No, look, I suggest you contact the owner and we can see what his insurance…
Insurance! Think you can get away with it do you? NO. That is my car and you’re done. You’re done.
Done? He would laugh if he could. She has been watching too much television. He suggests as much.
That is offensive. That is offensive. I heard the tone, that is very rude. Very very rude, I will see you punished. How dare you, how dare you, you are in no position to…
The stone is too heavy to hold, and too heavy to have to pick up again.
She grunts and pants, and bends awkwardly towards the dented door – legs splayed and belly down, she really is very fat – she is a Sumo for a moment, she is challenging the car – and he sees the flash whitely against the black duco as she takes shots of the dent. Much worse than a dent, the metal is nearly cut open. She could almost cry if she wasn’t so happy to have caught him.
Here, she calls, evidence. Evidence! You cannot say you didn’t when I can show you did. Yes, I have it here.
I am going to carry this rock back uphill. Or do you want to take another photo? Here you go, how’s this? He does a half squat and lift and staggers back still holding the bloody stone against his chest, both his forearms under it, the rocky colour of exertion filling his face.
Aha! Stealing the evidence. Yet she stands there doing nothing.
Reality passes very quickly madam, you’ve got to be quick.
Automatically, just in a time-lapse, she takes his advice, she raises her iPhone and her hand blinks.