Wedding Bush Road Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by David Francis

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Francis, David, 1958- author.

  Title: Wedding Bush Road: a novel / David Francis.

  Description: Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016020224

  Subjects: LCSH: Families—Australia—Fiction. | Interpersonal relations—Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary.

  Classification: LCC PR9619.4.F73 W43 2016 | DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016020224

  Cover design by Kelly Winton

  Interior design by Domini Dragoone

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10987654321

  ebook ISBN 9781619028746

  For Judy Francis

  (1923–2008)

  And I hear the far-off fields say things I cannot bear without a friend.

  —Rilke

  Contents

  Friday

  Sunday

  Monday

  Tuesday

  Wednesday

  Christmas Day (Thursday)

  Boxing Day (Friday)

  Saturday

  Sunday

  Monday

  Tuesday

  Wednesday

  Thursday

  Friday

  FRIDAY

  What are you humming, my love?

  Water pours down the louvers, blurring the last of the afternoon. The bridge at the bottom of this wild ivy garden, the creek that flows down Wonderland. A street that morphs into the riverbed it once was; the paved-over streams of the Hollywood Hills unfurling down the blacktop. This rain will disappear and it’ll be dripping and dark, silent but for the sound of water on leaves and the whisper of raccoons. And you’ll be alone here, Isabel.

  You kneel on the hearth with your lips slightly parted, sewing popcorn on a string to loop around our homemade Christmas tree. Fashioned from wire and tape, elegant and fine-boned as you. Four months since you flew across country to study reflexology when I knew it was really for us. The way the amber refracts in your eyes, the dark caterpillars of your Venezuelan brows.

  As I pack this pile of clothes you’ve folded on the bed, you turn the switch and the branches illuminate. Fairy lights wreathed with white blossoms. “What do you reckon?” you ask, imitating my accent, yours still laced with your mother’s singsong.

  It could be a garland of miniature gardenias but for the smell of popcorn in the air, dancing with smoke as it curls from your incense. Those kundalini yoga classes you take every morning, down the hill at Golden Bridge.

  “Will you be safe from those guys in linen and scarves?” I ask.

  You touch the opal I bought for a pendant, now set in a big hoop earring. It’s supposed to change color with your mood but it always stays that peacock feather blue-green. “We’ll see,” you say and smile, your bleached teeth glistening, the one in the front that wants to overlap. Your hair in the firelight, you crouching barefoot in your low-cut jersey dress, almost molten. It drapes without clinging as you hang those tiny wooden ornaments. I’ve only managed to toss in my shaver and toothbrush; my body has the handbrake on. Images of the ornate bathrooms back on the farm, cobwebbed and paint-peeling, Victorian.

  You come over and rest your face in the nape of my neck. “Come on,” you whisper, “we can do this.” Pairing socks from the heap, you roll them, taking care of me in ways I’m not used to. Coming out here to master the vagaries of the nervous system at some shonky-looking woo-woo school. I want to tell you not to worry, there’ll be socks stashed in my wardrobe in the Senator’s Room, but you’re already folding short-sleeved shirts, the pink and green with the Penguin insignia. I wouldn’t be seen in that down there.

  “I’ll be back by New Year’s,” I say.

  EIGHT THOUSAND MILES and two days lost to the blazing Australian summer, when I’d promised myself I’d ask her to marry me before year’s end. A promise eclipsed by last week’s telephone call. “Family’s first,” said Isabel. But why is that? Why not this? She folds my boxer shorts with strange precision, too many pairs, like origami, packing for who I am when I’m here. I’ll miss her rose perfume. A six-foot tree made from nothing but coat-hanger wire and tape, lit up as if it’s real. The glow of occasional car lights, the dull squish of tires. This guesthouse attached to the slope with rogue ivy, the great shadow of the stringy-bark outside the window, perpetually shedding. The water pulling at everything. Isabel rolling my seersucker shorts—imagine what Old Nev would say if I donned those, if the Genoni brothers saw me in the town.

  “We need to hit the road,” I say. My mother told me she thought she was dying. Dead as Dickens by the end of the year, she forecast, pretending not to be scared. “So much for Christmas,” I say, clasping my Samsonite case. Lunch reservations at Providence, our plan to drive up the coast to Santa Barbara, a night at the San Ysidro Ranch. My plan to be all romantic, kneel with a ring and ask her. A dream swept aside by a phone conversation. “We’ll have a lifetime of Christmases,” says Isabel, but her tone feels tenuous.

  We both stare up at the collage of photos arranged on the wall she painted blue to surprise me. Me on a small white pony by the pond. The house through the long angular shadows of the cypress trunks. My mother playing polo as a girl.

  “What if I don’t go?” I say.

  If I leave this new life, even for a short while, will it keep and still be waiting?

  Isabel pushes a sheaf of dark hair from her eyes, secures it back with a band. The light timpani of rain on the roof now, softening. “You’d never forgive yourself,” she says.

  “What if the plane gets hijacked?”

  She ties a tartan hair ribbon to the suitcase handle. “You’ve already been hijacked.”

  THE TOO-LOUD SOUND of my suitcase wheeling across the wet bricks drowns out the hum of chanting, our landlady’s group in her drawing room. The candlelit shapes of them fondling their beads, raising their eyes to the new-fallen dark.

  “You’re not driving in this weather,” I tell Isabel, but still she puts on her tortoiseshell glasses as if I need a copilot. I reach across and slam her in.

  The Jeep hydroplanes down Lookout. “Must we go so fast?” she asks. I try to slow down, don’t mean to scare her, but LAX will be a nightmare this time of year.

  The marquee at the Sunset 5 and the avenue of lights all the way down Crescent Heights, shimmering south forever. Green lights, all of them. What does it mean? “It’s amazing after the rain,” I say, but my smile feels forced. The knot in my gut releases then tightens at the prospect, maybe the longest flight there is, and my mother’s voice so frail on the phone. My mother who avoids telephones, slurring the “D” in my name, more concerned about some old car on the farm set on fire than the fact that her left side isn’t working right. Maybe you had a stroke, I said.

  Maybe I’ve had a few, she answered, but I’m not going to that hospital.

  Alone with her dog in that big old house, not answering the gong at the door. I need you here, she said,
and she never says things like that. The fear of duty and losing her coursed through me all night. I’d cashed in all in my Qantas miles by morning.

  Turning right at Beverly, Isabel smiles over at me, calm and cautious. “We should take La Cienega all the way.” Her new command of the city amazes me, how proud she is, her chin raised high.

  “Name dropper,” I say. She tries to temper me, make me notice things—another avenue of lanterns unfolds, the streets gleaming, pristine, the miracle of rain these days, but I run another amber light and feel her cinch. She learned to drive out here in a week, the same way she lives, in rhythm with time. I’m the one always pressing the edges. I can’t seem to help it, the image of LAX on the last Friday before Christmas.

  I reach for her hand. “Speaking of all the way,” I say. “When I get back can we talk about . . . you know? Getting hitched?”

  “Hitched?” She stifles a laugh. “Is that your Australian way of asking?”

  I stare at the taillights. Now would not be the time. “I’m just saying let’s have the conversation when I get back.”

  “If I’m still here,” she says.

  Traffic slows. The city south of Pico seems suddenly nondescript. Another red light. The hunger in the men’s eyes as they look at her from other cars and I’m heading away and back in time, the known world slipping out behind me like the clothes I should have left. I parp the horn to get things moving, make the light at Washington.

  “You should come with me,” I say as if that’s even possible now. My disingenuousness laid between us like the grease-slicked water pooled on the road.

  “Next time,” she says. She wasn’t ashamed of her mother’s place in Queens. The pale sculpture of Jesus on crutches with rolled-up dollar bills around his hands, spotted plaster dogs licking at his feet.

  Random oil derricks planted on the bare hills in the middle of the city shine in the dark like enormous praying mantises. “Make sure and call me when you land,” she says.

  Traffic backing up, a bottleneck all the way to La Tijera. “I will,” I say, but I forgot to get roaming on my phone. “I may go with Mona to Esalen,” she adds. Her new friend from those kundalini classes, my hands bunch on the wheel. “There’s a Rumi and ecstatic dance retreat.” She’s looking out the window, into other cars. “It won’t be the same as being with you, but it’s something.”

  I’m not even sure what that means. “Be careful on that road,” I say. “There are rock slides this time of year. Don’t drive up at night.” The idea of her smashed on the cliffs of the Pacific Coast Highway makes me want to turn this car around. And Mona, the heavily tattooed photographer she met at yoga. Nice enough but now I’ve suddenly gone off her, the idea of them on a trip of their own to some woo-woo retreat in Big Sur, while I’m taking care of what’s left at the farm. It has me spinning the wheel and making my own lane, splashing along the rain-filled edge to pass the line of idling cars.

  Isabel from the corner of my eye, her hands on the dash. “You can just let me out here.”

  I veer back into the flow without any indication, right before the light. Honking from behind, someone flashing high beams. “You know I love you but I really need to get there,” I say.

  She turns away. The opal dangling, reflecting in the red of the taillights, now somehow gray, not aquamarine. “No need to kill us,” she says, “It’s only a plane.” She stares over at me, the amber alive in her eyes. “I bet your mother’s a tough old bird,” she says.

  THE QANTAS A380 is silent through the air, especially with Isabel’s plush earphones, the drinks trolley a mirage appearing down the aisle, an Australian film without the sound on—two pretty mothers falling in love in a beach town somewhere, maybe Queensland, the coast windswept with palm trees blowing. It makes me think of photos of New Guinea. My father in a safari suit. Now the chance of my mother dead, Isabel so Zen about the possibility when she doesn’t know my mother at all. I told her my mother might be circling the drain, but she wouldn’t go down it so easily.

  Isabel didn’t want to come inside the terminal, just asked that I park at the curb outside Departures. She came around to the driver’s side and kissed me full on, but she didn’t look back when she got in the car. She just drove away.

  I settle in with a pillow and cover my head with the blanket for the long haul, enter the fugue state for traveling. But my mother’s phone call keeps reconstructing itself in my mind, some need to make more sense of it. She’s deaf as the night but an explosion woke her. I see her out of bed and on the veranda, a flicker of orange against the dark. “I thought it was the cottage,” she said, a flame roping up at the edge of the bush. The field where she said those three big horses live. She knows how things begin and end in flames. The fire along Station Road all those years ago, the night my father was nowhere and I slipped inside that unlocked cottage somehow knowing, straight down the blackened hall. The childlike panic on his face as he sat up in bed beside his tenant, Elsie. In his dead mother’s bed, uncovered by his teenage son, his hayfield burning like broom straw. My mother out fighting the flames alongside the firemen. The New Year’s night she threw my father off his own farm.

  This time my mother said she dialed the CFA even though she doesn’t approve of involving outsiders. “A fire at the cottage on Wedding Bush Road.” I imagine her moving through the paddocks in the dark, the way she knows the land by heart, the shapes of the concrete water troughs, the shadows of the rabbit warrens, the cattle as they balk. The distant flicker and a hint of smoke, a far-off siren wailing. I imagined it from above, the fire truck already on the highway and my mother breathless down by the windmill. I asked if she’d been okay before the fire but she ignored me, wanted me to hear the story. She didn’t seem to know her speech was strange.

  “It wasn’t the cottage but a car in the back paddock up in flames.” She talked about the shadows of the heavy horses circling, arched up with fear. She left the gate open as the cattle shuffled through it and away but the three big horses retreated and advanced, snorting as she flapped her coat. She told me how the car was furled in flames and the cottage on the rise a dark spectator. My mother who’s too old for fighting fires in the dark the way she did the night she threw my father out.

  On the phone she said she gave up swinging her coat at the burning grass when she noticed a piece of my grandmother’s sideboard from the cottage, an ornate hacked-off corner, and then at the base of the flames a dining room chair, a bridge table tossed on the hood, sending sparks. My grandmother’s furniture that had survived the passage from England eighty years ago, used as kindling.

  She allowed as how the flames were blue and orange, wrapping round a mahogany headboard, chopped in strips. The bed where my grandmother died with The Book of Shrubs on the pillow beside her, her small round specs on the still-open page.

  I cover my head again with the blanket, try to get my feet warm, pulling on those awful nylon airline socks. I imagine my mother out in the night, wonder if she had on more than slippers. The fire engine rattling in over the cattle grid toward the burning furniture and car and my mother in a sweep of yellow headlights. “It was Bobby Genoni,” she told me, shouting. Bobby Genoni who I played tennis with as a kid, when I was back from boarding school and hung out with the townies. Now they were unwinding canvas hoses. Gusts of high-pressure water on the windshield, a burning chair sent flying, charcoaled pieces of French-polished wood.

  “Sharen,” my mother shouting, pointing to the cottage, her voice no doubt trailing off in the wind, firemen yelling. The hissing of car seats and my absent father’s burning heirlooms, sprung from the house he rented out regardless of my mother’s warnings. He promised he’d keep an eye on them. “An eye on his new tenant,” said my mother, rather than his valuables.

  “Then I saw your rocking horse,” my mother told me. “That was the last straw.” I imagine its silver mane and leather bridle incinerated. My grandmother rocked me on it as a boy; hers as a child in England, the country she called the �
��Frightful Antipodes.” The wooden horse now blackened, its paint blistered in the rubble. From under this blanket I see Granny Rawson’s delicate English face, her blue eye shadow. How she lay in the bed beside me.

  My mother told me how she had wet soot on her hands, treading through the dark toward the cottage. She climbed the chicken-wire fence. “Your father cares less for his family treasures than a chance at a woman like Sharen.” My mother pounding on the green-paneled door but the door wasn’t locked. Sharen’s outline through the frosted glass into the sitting room. I’d already heard about the smell of pot, adulterating rubbish, and now the fresh-split mahogany. There alone in bra and panties slouched in a modern rocker-recliner, a room bereft of my grandmother’s things, the axe leaning up against the wall. My mother said she found Sharen in a kind of trance, staring out at the waning bonfire in the night, firemen in their yellow coats ranging about in the beams of the truck lights, the steaming remains framed by the window in the dark.

  “I wanted to drag her out by her stringy blond hair.”

  But when Sharen Wells turned away from the window she was sobbing. “I’m so sorry, Ruthie,” she said. “I couldn’t help it.” She got up from the recliner and hugged my mother. “It’s not you, it’s Earley. He’s really got to me.”

  My father’s name is Earley, a family name. My mother used to say “Better Earley than not at all,” but she doesn’t say that anymore. His middle name is Derrick, which she says is short for Derelict, of duty. She also calls him Gates sometimes, just as a reminder, so he might be more reliable and close the gates behind him. He lives five miles away in a sad-looking brick veneer in a coastal subdivision my mother christened Bitter Snug when it’s really Blind Bight. Still, he attends the farm every morning as if he’s a day laborer, lighting the wood boiler in time for my mother’s shower, for hot water to groan through the pipes, to go out and feed wheelbarrowed hay to sixty horses. And though I transferred the title to the farm into my mother’s name before I left, to shield it from his de factos, he believes he still owns the cottage at the edge of the bush because his little English mother died there. He’s not much for legal concepts or fidelity. At seventy-six he still has his cheeky smile, his charms. Cocooning myself in this thin airline blanket, struggling for comfort, spearing through the sky toward him too.