Peter Temple - Shooting Star

‘The bathroom’s through the kitchen,’ said Corin. ‘You’ll be pleased to know there is one, complete with Scandinavian composting toilet.’

She’d been strained on the trip, arriving three-quarters of an hour late to pick me up, taking four long calls and making two in the ninety-minute drive. At one point, she said to a caller in a calm voice, ‘David, I understand your concerns but I assure you that I’ll meet the deadline.’ Pause. ‘Yes, the start has been slow.’ Pause. ‘No, I cannot bring them in over the weekend.’ Pause. ‘I’m sorry your client won’t be impressed.’ Pause. ‘No, I did not give any commitments on progress. My commitment is to a finishing date, that’s not going to be broken.’ Long pause. ‘David, for fuck’s sake, the job’ll be done on time if I have to build the fucking walls myself and lay the turf by fucking moonlight.’

‘Sorry about that,’ she’d said to me. ‘Losing control. Two big jobs and three smaller ones on the go. Been flat out for weeks, six days a week. I promised myself this afternoon off, got on the road at seven this morning to do it.’

Now she said, ‘The bedrooms are upstairs. Well, put it this way, upstairs is where you sleep.’

I carried my bottles of wine and the food crate down the room and put it on the kitchen counter.

‘There’s a bit of light left,’ she said. ‘Come and look at the vineyard.’

We went out of the north wall door onto a terrace. The day had been clear and to our left there was still a glow in the sky, like a fire burning on a long front, far away. Close-planted rows of small leafless vines began a few metres from the barn, ran down the slope away from us towards a dense line of bare trees. The sound of water moving came up the hill.

‘There’s a winter creek down there,’ said Corin. ‘Some years it runs well into summer. You can swim in the pools.’

I hadn’t stood next to her before. She was tall, straight-backed and I could see her profile against the light. She looked at me, I looked away, caught.

‘I picked grapes when I was a kid,’ I said. ‘The rows were further apart. And the vines.’

‘You’re an observant student,’ she said. ‘What my brother is attempting to do here has nothing to do with conventional viticultural practice. It has to do with viticultural stupidity. He found shiraz vines with the smallest fruit in the world and planted them close together. The idea is to put them under stress. Benign stress, they call it. Then you only allow the vines to produce small amounts of fruit. And, by hand, you pluck off half the leaves. With me to this point?’

‘No. Then what happens?’

‘If the theory’s correct and your site aspect’s perfect and the soils are right and the temperatures are optimal and the rainfall is what you need, and the birds haven’t eaten all your mini-berries, then you get small amounts of highly-concentrated fruit. You crush it and let it ferment with the wild yeasts. That’s like sending your precious children out to play with wild dogs.’

‘I’m beginning to see the charm of this,’ I said.

She looked at me and smiled, nodded.

We stood in silence, looking out on a world leaving our sight, just touching, feeling through the fabrics that enclosed us that we were touching.

Suddenly, it was dark, black, the far line of fire gone, extinguished, the world constricted, stopping where the tongues of light from the windows ended. No sound but the generator’s pulse and the moving water, winter water, urgent, going somewhere, irritated by banks and rocks and roots and trailing branches.

‘A fire and a drink,’ Corin said, all the tightness gone from her voice. ‘A cross-trained person like you could light the fire. It’s stacked, I do it before I leave. Obsessive-compulsive.’

We went inside. I knelt, scratched a kitchen match, put it to the Ned Kelly. It sniffed at the flame, drew breath, exploded, sucked oxygen out of the room.

‘First fire, then drink, then art,’ she said. ‘That’s evolution. In shorthand. I’ve brought this frozen stew thing. Make no claims for it, emergency rations, meat and veg. I cook a huge amount of it so that I can forget about cooking. Come home and be a vegetable.’

She fetched a red cast-iron pot, put it on the Kelly. I opened a bottle of white and we sat in the old armchairs, deep in the sag, generator thumping softly, fire making throaty noises, both comforting sounds.

‘Seeing you on television, that was awful,’ she said. ‘I wanted to ring but I couldn’t bring myself to. Have they found…’

‘No, not yet.’

‘The job, it seemed to have gone beyond mediation.’

‘Well beyond, into the wild blue yonder, in fact. I don’t want any more jobs like that. I’m better at dealing with hundred-kilogram men trying to strangle me. That’s straightforward, not a lot of ambiguity.’

‘You have a turn of phrase for a man of action,’ Corin said.

‘I read a lot, books on propagation, soil structure, that sort of thing. Tell me why you’re in a position to take your students away for the weekend.’

‘Why?’

‘Why you aren’t married to some restaurant designer.’

She laughed. ‘Married to the job, that’s why. The moving of the earth, the transforming of nature.’

I waited.

‘I had a long relationship, I hate that bloody word, I had an affair with a married man that went on for seven years. Hard to believe anyone can be that stupid.’ She got up and lifted the lid on the pot, stirred the contents. ‘He was always on the verge of leaving his wife and kids. It was just months away, just some final thing that had to be done. In the school holidays, his wife and kids would go to the house on the Peninsula and I’d see him every day except weekends. I think it was those times that kept me in a state of stupidity. It was like being married to him.’

She sat down again, drank wine, met my eyes. ‘You don’t want to hear this kind of stuff,’ she said. ‘Let’s talk football.’

‘What happened?’

‘I’ll give you the closing scene,’ she said. ‘We sometimes went out to dinner with another couple, she was a friend of Don’s, that was his name, Don. I think he’d slept with her in the distant past. The guy was also a married man, also an architect. One night, we ate in a hotel in Collins Street, it was always hotel restaurants for some reason, less likely to bump into people you knew, I suppose. The other couple had had a fight before they got there, the air was crackling. The guy got smashed in about half an hour, Don was keeping pace with him. Then the woman just got up and left.’

Corin paused for breath. ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this,’ she said. ‘It must be the mediator in you.’

‘Go on. The woman left.’

‘Yes. More drink, they were both pissed. And then, and this is it, the bloke took out his wallet and showed Don a picture of his kids. He was misty with pride and love. And Don, he got misty too and he took out his wallet and found a picture of his kids. They sat there looking at the pictures of each other’s families. Two proud family men. I had an overdue moment of blinding clarity, got up and left and I never, never saw him again. Put the phone down on him twenty times, wouldn’t open the door to him. That was that.’

‘Then you married the job?’

She smiled. ‘I had a few toyboys first, dabbled in boytoys, but they’re ultimately unsatisfying. Now I’m happy just rearranging things. The surface of the earth. Your turn. What happened to you?’

I thought about it, tried to sum it up. ‘I had an army marriage first. It lasted fifteen months, of which I was home for about fifteen minutes, not all that time at once. Then when I was a cop, I married an accountant, I met her when she did my tax return. I was home a bit more for that marriage but not much and I wasn’t wonderful fun when I was.’