Chapter One

Bye, Beautiful

Julia Lawrinson

‘There’s nothing here,’ Sandy remarked. The highway ahead was wet with mirage, and the car sang monotone in her ear. All she could see were bare, brown paddocks, with lonely corridors of trees at the margins. Marianne shifted, and Sandy heard her skin separating from the leather like paper tearing.

‘Of course there is,’ Marianne said. ‘It’s just where the wheat was, silly. There’s never nothing.’

‘It’s like the Bible,’ said Laurence, staring out of his own window with glinting eyes, as if he’d seen Jesus himself appear shimmering in the wheatbelt light.

‘The Bible’s nothing like this,’ said Sandy, but she could not think of how to explain what she meant.

‘What would you know?’ replied Laurence scornfully. ‘You don’t even know the books properly.’

‘Yes I do,’ said Sandy. ‘Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges . . . Ruth . . . um . . . ’

‘See?’ Laurence said.

Sandy pretended to look out of Marianne’s window to put Laurence off guard, then brought her elbow up and jabbed him in the arm. Laurence yelped, and reached up to pull Sandy’s hair, but she grabbed his forearm before he got to it. His fingers continued to twist in the air, like pale, fat worms.

‘Sandy,’ her mother said. ‘Be nice to your brother.’

Sandy didn’t let go.

‘I told you kids,’ their father said suddenly from the front seat. Glad turned her head, nodded at her husband and put her finger to her lips.

Marianne pulled a face at Sandy and Laurence, shook her hair across her hot shoulders and mouthed, ‘Babies.’ Sandy gave Laurence’s arm one last squeeze and dropped it, ignoring Laurence’s retaliatory punch. She stared ahead, across the front seat, between her parents’ heads. The paddocks were so dry she could not understand how anything would ever be able to grow there. The bushes that grew at the roadside were rounded and hazy, and they looked as if they should be soft as cotton wool, but Sandy had touched one at the last service station, and its leaves felt like cardboard. The easterly wind blew dust through the car windows, and it settled in the creases of her skin like welts. The sun made her squint, and the squinting made her head ache. She took a deep breath, trying to conceal the rising of her chest from her irritated siblings. She wondered when they would get there, and knew it would do no good to ask.

They pulled up in front of the policeman’s house in the mid-afternoon. The air was still and unmoving, and everything seemed to be holding its breath. The terrible heat intensified the car-sickness Sandy had been feeling, and she put her hand to her mouth. Her mother noticed her face and poured out a remedial measure of brandy. A man in beige shorts and long socks walked up to Frank and shook his hand.

‘Bill Read, council treasurer, among other things,’ said the man. ‘See Read’s Grocery on the way through town? That’s me.’

‘Frank Lansing.’ Frank put out his hand, which Bill shook vigorously. ‘And this is my wife, Gladys.’

‘How do you do, Missus?’ Bill bowed to Glad, and then nodded to the police station next to the house, and the red brick lock-up that looked older than the station itself. ‘Your hubby won’t have to go far to work, will he?’

‘The best thing about a country transfer, in my books,’ said Glad.

‘I tell you, there’s a lot of people looking forward to having you here,’ Bill said to Frank. ‘Last fella, he was a right peanut.’

‘I never met the man,’ said Frank.

‘Sorry, mate,’ Bill said. ‘Shouldn’t say things like that, but it’s true.’ He nodded at Marianne, Sandy and Laurence, and said, in the fawning voice some adults use with children, ‘And here’s your three kids. How’re you doing, you three? Hot after your long drive?’

Sandy saw Marianne lift her left hand to her face, letting her ring glitter in the afternoon sun, as if trying to show that she shouldn’t be put in with the other two, not any more. Bill Read noticed it, and his eyes flickered to Marianne’s blouse before returning to Frank’s stern face. After that, Sandy knew he wanted to look at Marianne again, but dared not.

‘Shame about old Pig Iron Bob, eh?’ Bill shook his head. ‘Didn’t always agree with everything he did, but he’s a decent bloke, if you ask me. One of the old school.’

‘They’re all the same to me, mate,’ Frank said. ‘I wouldn’t trust any of them as far as I could spit. Personal opinion, of course.’

Bill looked puzzled for a moment, then slapped Frank’s shoulder and said, ‘Jeez, here’s me going on about politics, and you just stepped out of the car. Why don’t you come over for a coldie, when you’ve got yourself sorted here?’

Frank delivered a courteous smile that showed he did not like Bill. ‘I’d love to, but I’ve got an early one tomorrow.’

‘Another time, then,’ Bill said, allowing himself to look at Marianne again as a response to the snub. ‘The missus’ll be pleased to have another couple of females up from the city. Give her something new to cluck about, anyway.’

Marianne, hearing that she had been promoted to adult status, raised her eyes to Bill, who winked.

They unpacked their gear into the house, which was dusty and cluttered with the tea chests they had sent up from Perth, and the furniture that the last family had left. The house smelt strongly of mothballs, and Sandy wondered how she was ever going to get used to this place. There were no sounds of traffic or children playing or the hum of appliances, only the shriek of cockatoos she couldn’t see and the shuffling of her family as they moved their belongings into the strange spaces of the house.