Nine Months Of Summer

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Book excerpt

Chapter One

Dents in the loop-pile carpet marked the legs of once-present furniture. The walls, bare, rendered an insipid peach. There was a faint smell of acrylic paint. Shutting herself in, she closed the bedroom door behind her, the slap-back echoes jeering, a clamour of recriminating voices.

She would never be enamoured with shoulds.

It had been a shrine in here. A room for storing the past. A box of a room, smaller then with all the clutter. When Yvette was last here, a teak-veneer wardrobe and a white melamine chest of drawers took up one wall. A single bed occupied the full length of the other. Hanging above the bed was a whimsical print of a young girl in a shabby brown dress, standing in a cobbled street beneath an industrial-grey sky, walled in to either side by flat-faced Victorian terraced houses receding to a point behind her. That print hung in all of her childhood bedrooms. The chest of drawers was crowded with artefacts. The gaudy vase she bought for her mother’s birthday one year. The pink jewellery box with the plastic ballerina that still twirled shakily to Fur Elise when she opened the lid. A content Snoopy lying atop his money-box kennel. The generous-faced alarm clock her mother gave her when she was ten which she had wound so tightly it never ticked again and had stayed stuck between eight and nine ever since. Yvette had been too ashamed to tell her.

A blade of sunlight sliced through the window’s beige fabric bars and stung her eyes. She hefted herself out of bed and swished the blind aside.

The window faced northeast, protected from the intense sun of summer by the foliage of a silver birch. She was in no doubt her mother had lined up the angles to make sure. The crisp light of early morning shone through the branches, now wintry bare, making a filigree pattern on the frost-burnt grass. Two parrots, bright and keen, preened on one of the lower limbs. The birch was set in a neat garden of clipped lawn and rose beds. Dotted here and there were grevilleas and bottle brushes, all neat and trim. Her mother had a fondness for reds, stately reds, traditional and rich. There ought to be topiary. Box hedges and cascades of wisteria. And white picket fences. Instead the garden was hemmed by barbed wire strung between red-gum posts, electrified to keep out the cattle. Beyond, there was a backdrop of undulating paddocks peppered with majestic red gums. The entire valley embraced by an armchair of forested mountains. Bucolic paradise, worthy of the brushstrokes of Alfred Sisley.

The air was calm. Dew glistened on a spider web hanging under the veranda. A kookaburra’s cackling crescendo burst into the silence.

Forcing herself into the day, she pulled a baggy red jumper over her head and slipped on the size-eight jeans she used to wear as a teenager. She could scarcely believe her mother had kept her old clothes. But she was grateful. She owned nothing but the handful of sarongs and summer dresses she’d squashed into her cobalt-blue travelling bag when she left Malta, rugged and dry, for the moist and fecund Bali. The same cobalt-blue travelling bag she used to move her things into Carlos’s house. Her beloved Carlos. She couldn’t bear to look at the bag. She’d shoved it behind some shoe boxes in the bottom of the wardrobe the moment she arrived.

Where was he now? Still in Bali? Heading back to Malta? No doubt coveting the backside of every stewardess on the flight.

She sat down on the edge of the bed without feeling the grip of her jeans against her belly. Weren’t these the pair she used to zip up with the hook of a coat hanger? She was thin, a waif, sure to wander hither and yon, pulling her heart behind her like a clobbered plastic duck on squeaky wooden wheels.

Hearing a clatter of plates, she closed the door on her discontents and headed to the kitchen.

Her mother’s presence permeated the whole of this open-plan Hardiplank kit-home. She was in the three-piece suite, the hearthrug and the pine dining table, so highly polished the reflection of the morning sun dazzled as Yvette walked by. She was in every framed print hanging on the walls, in every ornament and knick-knack, from the Spode plates, Wedgewood saucers and porcelain figurines right down to the glass rolling pin she kept in a kitchen drawer. Even the doormat had her footprint on it. In this house Yvette could only be her daughter, the prodigal returned after a ten-year absence.

Her mother, Leah, was bending down to reach into the cupboard under the sink. Her buttocks bulged like buns in the seat of the dull-blue track pants she wore around the house. Hearing Yvette enter the kitchen, she turned and raised herself up to her full height, much shorter than Yvette recalled, and smiled before her gaze slid away. Leah had aged. Short curly hair, ten years earlier a mop of nutty brown, now thin and white. The freckles on her face had joined together, giving her fair skin a sandy patina. Her hazel eyes were still vigilant, yet softer, more resigned. There was a slight downturn to the mouth. Her face had lines, wrinkles and creases where once there were none. Yvette found it hard to accustom herself to the changes. And there was a sluggishness in the way her mother moved. Yvette remembered her energy, always darting about, not exactly agile, but deft. She felt remote. And was saddened by it. Too many years living intensely while her mother grew vegetables. Yvette was a stranger to her but she didn’t seem to know it.

She grabbed a cereal bowl from the cupboard beside the cooker and opened the pantry door.

‘Tea?’

Yvette turned to see her mother pouring boiling water into a second cup.

‘We’ll fill out the immigration forms after breakfast,’ Leah said, heading out through the back door with an ice-cream container of vegetable scraps. Her mother was the most practical woman Yvette had ever known. She’d sent off for the permanent residency forms the moment Yvette told her she was coming.

She had to get out of Bali. She was too distressed to stay. So distressed that the travel agent in Kuta, a small and wizened man with a permanent and insanely broad grin, had driven her all over Denpasar on his scooter to help secure the holiday visa and the one-way ticket to Sydney.

Yvette went to the dining table with her breakfast, sitting with her back to the sun. She flicked through the form. She wanted to gain residency through the deadlocked back door. She thought she might be eligible under the family reunion category. She read through the instructions and found she wasn’t. Her father was still in England. She hadn’t seen him for years and had no intention of ever doing so, but he was a blood parent.

Her mother came back inside and joined her. Yvette passed her the form and watched her leaf through the pages, scrutinising the instructions, lips tightening.

‘Perhaps there’s a loophole,’ she murmured.

A loophole that benefits a refugee? In the Department of Immigration and Border Protection’s draconian rule system? Impossible. Besides, she could hardly claim that were she to return to Malta her life would be in danger. That when Carlos had reached across that restaurant table in Bali and pulled her hair, his fit of frustration constituted an act of persecution or torture. Yvette was seeking refuge from the wreckage of her life.

Leah leafed again through the pages. ‘There might be compassionate grounds.’

‘Mum, I don’t…’ She stopped speaking. They both knew there wasn’t a skerrick of compassion in the Department of Immigration’s institutional bones.

She drained her cup and took her breakfast things back to the kitchen then wandered across the living room and gazed out the window. A long lock of mist drifted in the valley, slipping through a stand of red gums.

Leah was watching her closely. ‘You’ll have to get married,’ she said matter-of-factly, as if in the time it had taken Yvette to walk to the kitchen and back she’d conceived the solution.

‘Married?’

‘It’s the only way.’

‘I couldn’t,’ she said emphatically, shocked that her mother would even consider the thought. It wasn’t the deception that bothered her. There was a part of her, the romantic and the fool, adamant that marriage had to be a contract founded on love, not convenience.

Without another word Yvette filled out the form and slid it into an envelope along with a vague hope of a miracle and the relevant photocopied pages of her British passport—the holiday visa, the page with the photo of her face with its wooden grin and harried brown eyes. She knew she was far prettier than that.

It would be months before she heard the outcome. Meanwhile she needed a job. For that, Leah told her she needed a tax file number. Even for the most menial of casual work.

‘The post office will have the form,’ she said. ‘Shall I run you into town?’

‘I’ll walk.’

She stuffed the envelope in her pocket and went outside. The air was fresh, the morning bright. Taking up one of the plastic chairs beside the woodpile, she shuffled her feet into a pair of Leah’s old volleys and tightly tied the laces to compensate for her size feet. Leah was a nine, Yvette an eight.

Her mother’s cat, a plump tortoiseshell, rubbed against her calf. She ruffled her hand through its fur. The cat followed her to the fence then lost interest and trotted back to the house.

She closed the gate behind the garden and picked her way through the paddock, avoiding the spats of cow manure, and across the cattle grid. The farm straddled the lower reaches of gullied hills some two kilometres north of Cobargo. Heading for the highway, she walked up the dirt track that snaked through a neighbour’s property. His paddocks were denuded. Dead trees, ghostly white, their contorted limbs stretching heavenward, stood like monuments to the forest pre-dating the squatters. The only surviving trees were the apple gums growing on batholithic hillcrests. Their roots smothered in middens of cow dung heaped by generations of paddock-clearing farmers.

Leaving the paddocks behind, she followed a dirt road that flanked a hillside of bush, and reached a T-junction. Directly across the highway, in a swathe of mown grass, the cemetery displayed the gravestones of the departed to every vehicle travelling up and down this remote stretch of road. Somewhere among the gathering of Catholic graves lay her stepfather.

She turned right and headed down to the village huddled at the bottom of the valley, a quaint gathering of gift shops and cafes housed in historic weatherboard and brick buildings. She crossed the road at the newsagency and passed the art gallery, formerly a petrol station. On the forecourt, in the shade of a deep awning, an elaborate sculpture spilling from an old iron wheel rim sat beside two defunct petrol bowsers. Ahead, on the other side of the creek, was the hotel, a brick and tile boozer no doubt frequented by she’ll-be-right-mate beery blokes and their whisky-and-coke drinking sheilas. On a rise a short way up the road that wound west to the hinterland of dairy farms and wilderness were the primary school and the Catholic church. The Anglican church stared piously from its equally lofty location to the east. The village, with a history entrenched in milking cows, remained as self-sufficient as ever it was, supplying the needs of man and beast. There was a doctor’s surgery, a vet clinic, a police station and even a swimming pool. The few back streets contained a smattering of vintage weatherboard cottages and contemporary brick and Hardiplank houses interspersed with vacant blocks. The village hadn’t changed an iota since she was last here. The butcher, baker, supermarket and post office were exactly as she remembered them. The sweeping views that surrounded the village failed to inspire her. They might as well have been murals plastered to her mother’s living-room walls.

The year Saddam Hussein was found guilty of crimes against humanity, her mother for the second time upped to a better life in this land of plenty, settling here in Cobargo with Yvette’s stepfather and sister, Debbie, the moment they arrived in Australia, foregoing all the opportunities that Sydney might afford for a pastoral dream. Not a tree-change, they were too conventional for alternatives. They felled the remaining red gums on their hundred-acre block before Yvette followed, and six weeks later, left, before her stepfather, Joe, a robust gung-ho sort of man with a penchant for guzzling lager, lost his life to a chain saw. Leah and Joe hadn’t been together long. A sudden and gruesome accident, the sort of tragedy that rips into all that is soft and vulnerable. But her mother was a tight-lipped woman; her letters never mentioned her grief. With Yvette back in England she turned to the only family she had here, Debbie.

When Yvette last saw Debbie she was a smug sixteen-year-old, proud to be engaged to a local boy. She had her own story; distinct from Yvette’s as cotton wool and splinters, a cushiony narrative of stability and marital harmony. Now Yvette couldn’t walk down the main street of the village without being identified as Debbie’s sister. The moment she entered the post office a buxom woman, squeezing past on her way outside, looked her up and down and said, ‘Are you Debbie’s sister?’

‘That’s me,’ she said with a forced smile, thinking, no actually, she’s my sister since I was born first. Even as the words ran through her mind she felt contrite. Resentment wasn’t becoming. Yet the people around here hadn’t a clue who she was. And she wasn’t about to tell them. Only she didn’t want to be defined as her mother’s daughter or her sister’s sister, aligned with the secretary of the agricultural show society and the dairy farmer’s wife.

Her mother was working on next year’s show when she returned. Notepads, forms, old programs, raffle tickets and a cash box were spread across the dining table. Yvette sat in the chair furthest from Leah and read through the identification requirements on the tax-file-number form. Bank account, driver’s licence and Medicare card, none could be acquired without showing her immigration status.

‘It’s no good, Mum,’ she said, dropping the form on the table and leaning back in her seat. ‘I can’t get one.’

Her mother peered over the rim of her glasses. ‘I thought not.’ She put down her pen and folded her arms under her bosom. ‘We should have become citizens before we went back to England.’

‘You weren’t to know.’

‘At the time I never thought I’d come back. I’d had enough. I spent those last years here cleaning the corridors and classrooms of your old primary school.’

‘And I caught the school bus.’

She’d started school the year Alanis Morissette vied with Celine Dion for first place in the charts. On that bus Yvette must have listened to Ironic and Because You Loved Me twice a day for months. Even then she preferred satire to sentimentality.

Those first years of school were fabulous. There were sleepovers at her best friend Heather McAllister’s place. Fun in the park across the street. The orange tree beside the house, laden with the juiciest, sweetest fruit. She had the best year. Her mother had her worst.

It was her mother’s decision to emigrate, both times. The first was in 1993. Leah wanted to leave the London of working-class council housing estates. Common-as-muck, she’d say. Leah had left school at sixteen to spend a few months skivvying as an office junior before moving on to work in a cinema kiosk and a shoe shop, then becoming a traffic warden—a career that appealed to her because she worked outdoors and alone, unmolested by bitchy co-workers, creepy patrons and dithering customers with smelly feet. Yvette’s father, Jimmy, was a skilled factory worker. He was born a Cockney, his family relocated to South London during the post-war slum clearances. Leah wanted to better Jimmy. She thought Australia held the promise of a better life for her. That’s what the brochures told her. So she filled out the forms and flew them to Australia.

Leah’s best friend at primary school, Gloria, along with her family, had migrated to Perth twenty years before. They were ten-pound Poms. Gloria had written to Leah regularly ever since. One of a small store of Grimm-family vignettes was how fortunate they’d been to avoid the Nissen huts of Graylands. Poor Gloria—that was what her mother called her friend—had gone from a three-bedroom terraced house in London to bunk beds in a migrant hostel. Leah thought the conditions scandalous. The hut had unlined corrugated-iron walls and bare wooden floorboards. And Gloria’s family had to share communal dining and communal ablutions with all the other migrants from Europe and the Middle East. Pentonville, Leah called it. Pentonville. For years Yvette thought her mother meant one of the pale-blue set in Monopoly. Leah was referring to the jail. You could stay there for months, a voluntary sentence, but a week had been enough for Gloria’s mum.

It was Gloria who’d arranged the three-bedroom rental in Kwinana and suggested Jimmy apply for a position at the aluminium refinery. Leah went on to buy a brick and tile home in Perth’s English-migrant capital, Rockingham.

Five years later, Leah was ready to move back to London. Australia didn’t fulfil her expectations. She couldn’t find satisfying work. She wasn’t happy. She wasn’t happy with Yvette’s father.

Back in London, Leah returned to her preferred career of traffic warden, much to Yvette’s teenage consternation. While Yvette chewed the ends of her Biros in class, her mother’s life was unfolding apace. Leah Grimm became Leah Betts. With a new husband in tow, she emigrated a second time.

Yvette stayed behind, and stayed Grimm.

She couldn’t fathom why, when she was just eighteen, her mother chose to emigrate for a country where she found so little happiness the first time around.