P. O’Reilly - The Fine Colour of Rust

Days like this I think about picking up Melissa and Jake from school and I can see everything before it happens. They’ll fall into the car and yelp at the heat on the vinyl seats. They’ll ask for icy poles from the shop, or ice creams, or they’ll want to go down to the waterhole for a swim. The council swimming pool’s shut for renovations. All winter it was open, the heated pool empty except for five or six people who have moved here from the city and who put on their designer goggles and churn up and down the pool thirty or forty times every morning before they purr back to their farmlets in huge recreational vehicles.

One time I decided to get fit and I went along at six thirty in the dark with the kids. After they got tired of messing around in the free lane, the kids sat on the edge of the pool dangling their feet in the water and shouting, ‘Go Mum!’ as if I was in the Olympics. The other swimmers lapped me four times to my one and by lap five I was dangerously close to going under for the third time.

‘Never mind, Mum,’ Melissa reassured me. ‘We love you even if you are fat.’

Then during the third month of spring this year, the council announces the swimming pool will close for renovations. Right over summer. What renovations? we ask. What can you do to a swimming pool? It either holds the water or it doesn’t. And in summer, after years of drought, when we save the water we use to wash vegetables and time our showers, the pool is our one indulgence in this town. No, they say, we’re putting in a sauna and a spa and we’re building a café. You’ll be glad when it’s done, they tell us. We’ve tendered it out. It will only take five months. Why? we ask again, but no one answers. Truly something stinks at that council.

‘Don’t say a word,’ I tell the kids when they stagger past the wilted gum trees of the schoolyard and into the car. ‘We’re going to buy icy poles and we’re going to the waterhole.’

If they had any energy left they’d cheer, I’m sure, but Jake has dark circles under his eyes from not sleeping in the heat and Melissa turns and looks out through the open window, lifting her face to catch the breeze.

‘Mrs Herbert said we don’t have to do any homework tonight because it’s too hot and I got a gold star for reading,’ Jake shouts above the hurricane of the wind rushing through the car.

I never bother locking the house in this kind of heat. If we shut the windows we’ll never sleep. It’s become a habit to walk through each room when I come home, counting off the valuables. While Jake and Melissa head off to their bedrooms I mentally mark off the computer, the DVD player, the change jar. The telly’s not worth stealing. Melissa shuts her door while she changes. She’s eleven now, but she reminds me of me when I was fifteen. One night not long ago she shaved her legs in the shower. I saw the blood from a cut seeping through her pyjama leg.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ I sounded louder than I’d meant to. ‘Once you start you can’t stop. The hair grows back all thick and black and soon you’ll look like an orang-utan. Then you’ll have to shave all the time.’

‘You do it! Anyway, the other girls were laughing at me.’ She was looking down at her hands and sitting rigidly still, the way she does when she lies.

‘They were not. I bet you saw it in a magazine. Or on TV.’

Melissa arched her head in the kind of movie star huff it took me years to master and stamped off to her room.

Now Jake and I wait ten minutes, fifteen, while she changes into her bathers.

‘Come on, Liss,’ Jake calls, ‘we’re boiling. Let’s go.’

Melissa’s room is silent. I knock on the door.

‘Sweetie, don’t you want to cool down?’

‘I’m not going.’ The door stays firmly shut.

Jake does an exaggerated sigh and collapses on to a chair. I can feel the sweat on my face, running down between my breasts, soaking into my bathers under my dress. Three flies are circling me, landing whenever I let my attention drift.

‘You go.’ Her voice is muffled behind the door. ‘I’ll have a shower.’

‘Please, let’s go, Mum.’ Jake reaches out to take my hand and pull me towards the front door.

Melissa’s a mature eleven-year-old, but I am convinced that if I leave her alone in the house for more than twenty minutes a spectacular disaster will happen and she’ll die and I’ll be tortured by guilt for the rest of my life. I’ve pictured the LP gas tanks exploding, the blue gum tree in the yard toppling on to the house, a brown snake slithering out of a kitchen cupboard. Of course, any of those things could happen while I’m at home too, but I would have no guilt factor. The guilt factor means I may never have sex again, because attractive men looking for a good time rarely drop in spontaneously at my house. On the other hand, it has saved me from many of Helen’s girls’ nights, involving outings to pubs that the same attractive men looking for a good time never visit. I was also lucky enough to miss Helen’s ladies-only party where an enthusiastic twenty-year-old tried to sell dildoes and crotchless panties to astonished Gunapan farm wives.

‘Melissa, either you come or we don’t go at all, you know that.’

‘Noooooo!’ Jake’s cry of anguish echoes on and on in a yodelling crow call.

Finally Melissa agrees to come and wait on the bank while we take a dip. I tell her that I’m going in even though I have thighs as thick as tree stumps.

‘It doesn’t worry me.’ My bright voice makes my lie obvious.

‘That’d be right,’ Melissa mutters from the back seat.

‘Young lady,’ I start, but it’s too hot to argue so I swing the car backwards out of the driveway and set off.

It’s been three years since Tony left us. Three years in real time, and more like thirty years in looking-after-children time. I’m sure mothering years go even faster than dog years. I can feel my back turning into a question mark. Sometimes I catch myself hunched over the steering wheel or sagging in a kitchen chair, and I can imagine myself after a few more mothering years, drooling into my porridge in the retirement home. Come on luvvie, they’ll say to me, sit up straight now, after all, you’re only forty.

The road leading into the gully swings around the bend and we can see the whole town, or at least as many people as would normally be at the swimming pool, clustered around the small waterhole like ants at a droplet of sugar water. Bush pigs at a billabong, maybe. The waterhole’s half the size it used to be because we get no rain, but it’s still deep enough to swim.

‘What were you two talking about this morning? Bush pigs was it?’

‘Yeah.’

‘No.’

With the ground near the edge of the water trampled to mud, we find a spot further back underneath a stringybark tree and lay down our towels and unpack the iced cordial and biscuits. Melissa goes off to sit next to her friend Taylah. Jake and I make our way down to the water, saying hello to everyone on the way. Some of the mothers who have caught sight of me pretend to be reading the messages on their children’s T-shirts or searching for something in their bags. I know they’re afraid I’m going to ask them to do something for the Save Our School Committee, but I don’t have to now because the minister’s coming to Gunapan.

‘The minister’s coming to Gunapan,’ I call out cheerily, making a fist of victory, and they nod and smile anxiously as you do when a lunatic has decided to talk to you.

Further up on the hill I can see a family sitting apart from everyone else. Four children and a woman. They lean in together, talking.

‘Who’s that up there?’ I ask Jake.

‘Dunno.’ He doesn’t even glance up, as if he knows without looking who I’m talking about.