Which of course, it wasn’t.
Steve made sure of that, following Michael one day because he’d got suspicious of the fact he couldn’t be roused to fight. Mim had got there too late. Her eldest brother was standing over Michael, sneering at him.
‘You fucking kill it, or I’ll tell Dad.’
‘I’m telling Dad,’ Michael had sneered, false bravado, trying to humiliate his thirteen-year-old brother.
But Steve could be as clever as he could be cruel, and he knew that telling Dad would be a win-win.
* * *
‘What’d he do, Mum?’ asks Sam.
‘He shot it,’ she says flatly, because the memory still hollows her.
‘That was the right thing to do,’ Essie says quickly.
Mim makes eye contact with her daughter in the rear-vision mirror. ‘You’re so like your dad, Ess.’
Essie raises her eyebrows in challenge. ‘In what way?’
‘So sure of yourself.’
* * *
She leaves the car idling at the gate while she gets out, the crushed rock crunching under her feet.
‘Can you two help me with this?’
Neither of them answers.
She could do this with her eyes closed, in the dark, the smell of the paddocks, the scatter of stars across the distant ranges, the way they seem to pool in the valley, the dense dark of the gums and the knotted green of the blackberries around the creek at the bottom of the track. They’d tried every year to get on top of them. Never worked. In daylight, she will look across the valley and see the great hunk of the landscape they took out. The bare wound of it. Even now. Despite all their platitudes and saplings and community consultations. In the end it went ahead anyway, cracking earth and family in its wake. She remembers Michael, standing astride the front gate in front of the cameras, his face defiant, his sign, DON’T FRACK OUR LAND, painted on the back of a real estate sign he’d nicked. Dad’s humiliation, that his own kids, his two tearaways, not his eldest, would embarrass him like this. Mim was fifteen when she went to her first protest. An age that had shocked her, seemed to come upon her all of a sudden. The thrumming energy that infuses the blood, a kind of violence almost, in thoughts and sensation, all the ways in which the body betrays you. Anger and desire and a concrete belief that the world began at your own birth, that you alone are the keeper of all wisdom.
She had blood in the game, or property at least. It felt like blood. Felt entitled to her indignation, furious at the thought that anyone could just waltz through the front gate and dig in the earth her own family had worked for three generations and take something from under it. She extended her righteous fury on behalf of the traditional owners of course, the nuances of the politics of her own entitlement not yet making her ashamed.
She and Michael joined other unhappy locals. Tree-changers, the hobby farmers – outsiders who weren’t even welcome at the pub anymore – who had formed an unlikely alliance with some of the farmers. During that time a lot of farms had No Trespassing signs that warned you’d be shot on sight if you entered, and everyone understood that to be true. There were A4 flyers up around town, and a group you could join online. They had plenty of information to serve at her dad across the dinner table while Steve sneered and Mum tried to keep the peace.
Dad listened. She had to give him that. He had all the paperwork from the fracking company, plus the stuff the Gate Closers group had dropped off. And then he had the bank. And the cumulative years of drying. Of seasons where the earth scorched and then, if rain came at all, it came in deluges that washed the topsoil into what was left of the river and deposited it on some other lucky bastard’s farm. Mim heard the conversations at night. Him and Mum, even him and Steve – because, of course, by then he was already at ag college, reckoned he knew everything there was to know, primed to take over. Mum made half-hearted attempts to get Dad and Steve to take it all more seriously, but apparently you don’t get more serious than the bank.
There is a roar that still vibrates in her chest, all the things she’d like to say, to have said before Dad was gone. She will not call it grief, even if it is. It’s like a hunk of gristle she can’t swallow. It won’t go down, won’t come back up.
* * *
She unhooks the chain. No swiping palms against panels for auto-entry here. She relishes the work of it, the muscle pull as she guides the gate back, jumps back in and drives through.
‘You two. Remember this? Look at it. It’s beautiful.’
‘It’s dark, Mum.’
‘You can still see.’
‘I’m hungry.’
‘Grandma will have cooked something. Ess, can you jump out and do the gate?’
Mim sees the roll of her daughter’s eyes in the blue light of her screen, but she shuts it off and opens the door. Closes the gate behind them.
‘Geez, cold here,’ Essie says at the window. ‘Can I run down?’
‘It’s a bit dark.’
‘I’ll run in the headlights.’
Her daughter’s legs are long as she swerves potholes and rabbits crisscrossing the track. She slows for a startled kangaroo which bounds across in front. There used to be hundreds of them, and then, at their peak, thousands. They stopped needing to cull in the end. The dry did it for them.
‘Look!’ Sam hangs his head out the window.
She would have laughed at her own kids if they had rocked up in town when she was young. City kids. Wouldn’t have a clue. She would have felt the strange seesaw of power, knowing she could drive a ute across the paddocks by the time she was thirteen, but didn’t know how to get on a tram. Things change.
It’s a mistake to come back here, she thinks, even as they pull into the house paddock, as the floodlights come on, as she sees her mother, grown smaller still, come through the screen door of her new unit and wave them in to park.
* * *
There’s a white ute pulled up at the front of the sheds. Her brother is there, leaning against it, and another figure in the pool of light off the shed.
Sam yells out ‘Grandma!’ and jumps from the car, running over the grass already gathering dew as the night falls.
Essie is leaned over, breathing steadily, stretching out her quads.
Mim offers her a bag. ‘Take this in?’
‘I can take another one, too,’ Essie says and hoists the bag to her shoulder.
The figures at the shed are moving towards the front of the unit where her mother is already bent down to hug Sam.
‘Hello,’ Mim says, reaching to put her arms around her. Mim holds her close, chin on her mother’s shoulder because suddenly, God, no, not now, she thinks she will cry. She squeezes her mother’s shoulder, brusque, business-like. ‘How’re you going, Mum?’
‘Oh, you’re a sight for sore eyes, the three of you. Come in, come on now, you hungry?’
‘Yes!’
‘G’day.’ Steve steps fully into the light now. Something in his face has grown harder, older. He could be her father, shirt buttoned down, the slight paunch beginning over his belt, work jeans, hair cropped close because she’ll bet it’s thinning at the temples, just like Dad’s had.