COUNTRY LIFE CONT

I hope you enjoyed the story so far. This one is true; it happened in 1965, when I was twenty four. My husband was the surveyor for the Waroona dam. The only accommodation within miles of the place was a farm house that had been left empty for several years.

COUNTRY LIFE CONT:

“It’s only possums.” Robert’s voice was sleepy but not concerned.

“Are you sure?” I whispered, conscious of our baby son sleeping in the corner.

“Yes. Go to sleep, love.” He rolled over and was snoring in minutes.

Thump, thump. Wham. Scuttle, scratch. The noise continued. Bloody army of possums, I thought, trying to switch my mind off, desperately wanting to sleep before Stuart woke for his next feed.

“Darling, can’t you do something about them?” I shook my husband awake. “Stop them making that racket?”

“No. Just go to sleep, love. I’ll sort it out in the morning.”

Sure that I had been asleep for only minutes, I woke to our son’s hungry cries. The first rays of sunlight poured in through the uncovered windows. I slid out of bed and tiptoed across the lounge room floor, nearly stepping on an enormous cockroach, at least ten centimetres long. My screams woke husband and daughter.

Robert killed it with his shoe. “Don’t worry, love. I’ll get some bait today. What time is it?” He walked back into the bedroom as Jane wandered out from her room, rubbing sleepy eyes.

“Where are we, Mummy?”

“This is our new home, darling.  You go back to sleep.  I’m just going to feed Stuart.”

At eight o’clock, with baby asleep and husband gone for the day, I made it a game. “Let’s see how many of the beetles you can find.”

Almost gagging at the stench of each one as I stomped and whacked, I killed forty two cockroaches, following an excited, three year old daughter around the house. Empty cupboards, left untouched for seven months, provided the largest horde. In the bathroom, on the enclosed back verandah, crackly brown creatures scurried into crevices in the walls and floor. Shutting the door on them, I burst into tears and picked up my daughter.

“Clever girl,” I said, burying my wet face in her pink frilly dress.

“More, Mummy.” She wriggled from my grasp and ran back to the kitchen, opening cupboards and peering inside. “All gone.”

The disappointment in her voice made me smile. When she grows up I’ll tell her about this day, I thought. I wonder how she’ll respond then.

That night, having beaten the ceiling with a broom in the hope of chasing away the thundering hordes, we were about to get into bed.

“Are cockroaches carnivorous?” I asked the man who had spent half an hour putting baits in places where our adventurous daughter would hopefully not find them.

“I don’t know, love. Why?”

I looked at the cane basket where our baby lay sleeping: at the four wooden legs that held the frame up off the floor.

“They can climb up the legs.” Tears poured down my cheeks. “They might eat him.”

“Well, let’s put him next to our bed for tonight and tomorrow I’ll fix something.”

In bed he held me, kissed my lips, ran a finger lightly over my nipples. I wanted to respond in the way he wanted me to. My back stiffened. Images of cockroaches everywhere, scurrying, splattered, stinking, attacking my children like a rampaging army.

“I can’t,” I whispered. “Sorry, I can’t.”

He turned over and was soon asleep.

I lay on the other side of the bed, unable to shut out the sight and smell of the disease ridden vermin that inhabited the house.

A week later, with electricity restored, house scrubbed and disinfected, I started to feel that perhaps the six months that we’d committed to—his new job and renting this neglected farm house—might be bearable, despite the lack of phone, transport or any other means of communicating with family and friends.

“The possums seem to have moved out,” I said as the three of us sat around the kitchen table on Sunday morning.

“Really?” Robert continued to concentrate on his bowl of cornflakes.

“Yes. Haven’t you noticed?”

“Um. There’s something I should tell you.” He spoke slowly, hesitantly.

We had dealt with the kitten dying from snake bite and the cattle breaking through the fence around the house, making the journey to the outside dunny hazardous.

“What now?” I asked.

“I think I’ve killed all of them. I’ve been setting traps at night and getting up before you were awake in the morning. I couldn’t put baits out for them because they’d head for the water in the tank and pollute it.”

“But you’re not supposed to kill possums.” Suddenly I felt guilty for causing the death of our native animals, despite the problems they had caused.

“No, they weren’t possums.” He had a worried, guilty look on his face. “I couldn’t tell you because I knew you’d freak out. They were rats.”

Love in the Time of Corona

I have just read my last blog, written over a year ago. I had intended to finish the story, including the effects of the chemotherapy and my eventual recovery. Maybe one day. In the meantime, I’ve also had a hip replacement just before everything shut down in WA and I was isolated for two months – Covid 19, plus not being able to drive until my new hip healed.

I expected to do lots of creative writing in that time, but my Muse went on strike. I was told by other creatives in the family that they had the same problem. Artists and writers enjoy the silence of their own space, but it seems we also crave human interaction.

Once the worst was over, for us in WA, I started writing again, initially inspired by that isolation. My partner and I couldn’t get together for several months. This was my response, written for a poetry competition with ‘Love’ as the theme.

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CORONA

Now I wake to an empty space beside me

to the absence of your smile

your eyes alight with love

the gentle caress of your hand

on my thigh, my breast

the touch of your lips on mine.

I miss your greeting,

‘Good morning my darling

I love you my darling.’

Will I ever hear your voice again

so close beside me,

and know that for you

I am the most beautiful

most treasured woman in the world?

Spinifex and Snakes

Gone before the heat each day

the partner I had followed to this land of Spinifex and snakes

leaving me alone

My daughter painted this picture from her memories of our life in north-west WA

My daughter, Stephanie Burns, painted this picture from her memories of our life in north-west WA. To see more of her art and fabrics go to http://artasfabric.com

with my babies

aged one and three.

No friends

the town not yet reality

no shop, no school

an alcoholic doctor

the airport down the track—an hour’s drive.

I had no car but where could I go

even if that wasn’t so?

To shark infested waters, holding two little hands?

Across a wasteland of bushes uniformly stunted?

To the caravan park

where filth, depression

and language hurled at children made me shrink.

 

Word from the south was flown up

with grader parts and other vital stuff.

Food and clothes came fortnightly by truck.

Radio was rarely heard

television never seen

no books

no strains of Mozart

no scent of flowers, twitter of birds

trees or shade or anything to feed the soul.

In that pindan-covered camp

no-one felt or thought like me.

 

Afraid of losing little ones

curious to explore that never ending sameness

each day confined within my arms-width space

sheltering from flies and sun that fried the brain

I lived inside my head.

 

 

 

Victoria Mizen