“The trouble is that Emily is wrong. There are no other mums working with me on the barbecue stall. I wish there was. I wish I was volunteering with someone like Celia Lily—she’s so pretty and nice.”
“So long as she’s nice on the inside, that’s what counts.”
“She would be, Nev. But anyway, it’s not her, it’s just me and two of the dads. Jack and Cliff. I don’t really know them, Nev.”
He stopped smiling. “Does Brian know who you’re volunteering with?”
“Maybe.”
He winced like his stomach hurt. “I’ll mention it to him. The pair of them are bad apples—rotten at the core.”
“Huh?” She studied his face, trying to work out what he meant. “Are they apple farmers?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“You can tell me. I’m not stupid.”
“You’re not stupid,” Nev said vehemently. “Don’t ever say that.”
“Why do you look angry?” she asked. “What’s wrong, Nev?”
“Nothing. Just, look after yourself.”
She showed him the recipe she had cut from a magazine for him, which was for a low-fat zucchini soup. “If you like the look of this soup, I can make it for you,” she promised.
“Maybe,” he said. “I’m not really into vegetarian food.”
“You should be,” she told him, looking at his tummy.
Breakfast was Nev’s favorite meal; he often ate it for lunch and dinner and Brian said that was why his tummy was as round as a full moon. Sometimes his sweater rode up and you saw his belly button. Nev told her that at night he sat beside his fire and his cat curled up on his stomach and slept. Joelle could imagine that. Cats liked to be warm and there would be a lot of warmth on that tummy. Joelle didn’t say any of these things aloud. Brian sometimes teased her, saying that there was no reason to say every single thing that popped into your head.
Nev tugged his sweater down and agreed to try the soup, as long as she made it herself.
“Who else will make it? Brian?” She laughed loudly. “That’s a good one, Nev!”
She walked home with Brian’s newspaper tucked under her arm. Kookaburras sat on the wire fence, occasionally swooping down to pick a worm out of the wet field. She couldn’t help but think about what Nev had said about the two men she would be working with on the barbecue stall. It was not like Nev to say something mean. It worried her, but by the time she reached the stile to the forest shortcut, she had forgotten about it. There were two rabbits nibbling the green tufts growing around a fence post. She tried to creep up and pat them, but they scampered away before she could get close.
* * *
Cliff Gatenby
Gatenby’s Poultry Farm
Cliff watched the dawn creep up the valley. He had not been to bed and he was not tired. He tapped his fingers on the kitchen table as thick fog slid from the rain forest. A flock of green birds—broad-tailed rosellas—rose from the canopy. A thing like that could look heavenly or apocalyptic. He was not sure which it was.
Seven of the twelve chimneys of the Lilys’ mansion began to appear through the shifting mist. Three of them sent smoke upward. With all that land, the Lilys did not have to worry about buying firewood. Cliff glanced at his potbellied stove. It had burned out in the night. It was bone cold but there was no point building the fire back up yet. He would let Kim do that once the boys were awake.
The church steeple was the next part of the town to become visible. There was a truth in that, he supposed, for the Calendar House and the church were the only buildings in town used for the purposes they were originally intended. Grand buildings, both of them, built with free convict labor and inherited money. A calendar house was a showy thing, with the number of major features totaling either four for the seasons, seven for the days in the week, fifty-two for the weeks in the year, twelve for the months in the year. The ultimate vanity of the Lilys’ Calendar House, in Cliff’s opinion, were the 365 windows—especially considering the cost of glass when the house was built.
Decent men did not covet another man’s good fortune. Cliff was a decent man. He worked twelve or more hours a day in the sheds to provide for his family. Newly hatched chicks were delivered four or five times a year, up to twenty thousand day-old chicks in each batch. It was hard, honest work.
Lately he found himself thinking back to the school holidays when he worked for his Nan and Pop. They had a contract for Ingham’s to catch live chickens. They would drive in the pickup truck to farms across the state where chickens lived in massive sheds. There was a catching technique. You had to crouch down and keep your back straight. You would catch the bird by one leg and get four in each hand. The chickens were put in big cages and loaded onto a trailer and taken to Ingham’s to be processed. The birds shat, scratched, pecked, and pissed all over you and the smell lingered on your skin even after you had showered. It was a horrible job compared to what he did now. But when the day ended you were done and you didn’t have to keep thinking about it, jotting down ideas all night long for growing the business, worrying about how creditors were going to get paid.
Someone moved through the house. A door closed. The toilet flushed.
Cliff drank another glass of water. From the farmhouse window he looked to the west of the sheds where the fog was clearing over the pastures, revealing several gum trees and the few cows who kept the grass down. There was no time to waste. He needed to check the feeders and clean out the water lines in one of the sheds.
He pulled on a woolen sweater and then his jacket. The jacket was one Celia had bought for Jack that was too small for him. It was not what Cliff would have chosen, but it was warm. He yelled, “I’m going to work.”
No one answered. They all would have heard him though.
He walked down the track between the silos, his hands shoved in his pockets and his head hunched against the freezing August morning.
* * *
Jack
Calendar House
Jack considered blindfolding Celia with one of her silk night slips that were drying on a rack in the kitchen, but the girls were eating breakfast at the table and he thought that doing so might stir their curiosity. Instead he placed his hands over his wife’s eyes. She laughed and leaned back against him as he guided her into his study. It was an elegant room with tall bookshelves and six of his favorite oil-on-canvas paintings displayed on the walls. On an easel was his latest acquisition. He had positioned it by the French doors so the morning light would cut through some of the dirt on its surface.
He removed his hands and she gasped. The pleasure on her face warmed him. Celia appreciated art. It was a passion they shared.
“It’s Vanishing Falls. I’ve never seen a landscape of the falls. How magnificent. Are you certain of the artist?” she said.
“I’ll get it cleaned and appraised but I’m confident.”
His collection was mostly composed of works by early Van Diemen’s Land artists depicting life in the colony. He owned sixty-two canvases, as well as a collection of antique furniture and ornaments, which made him one of the most important collectors in Tasmania’s art and antiquities collegiate. His hunch was that this newest acquisition was not the work of an amateur, as the signature belied, but the early work of a colonial master.