The Auction a Romance by Anna Erishkigal Read online

  "Get the bushel basket, Pippa," Linda called. "You'll have to show Rosie where the vegetable garden is. I'm not quite steady enough to hobble outside."

  Pippa took my hand, her silver eyes bright with excitement.

  "Follow me." She yanked me out the door like an excited dog on a leash, past rows of flowers where some clucking chickens scratched contentedly for grubs. Through a gate was an enormous garden where every kind of vegetable you could imagine grew. The air spoke of the fertility of the land.

  "What should we pick?"

  "Anything we like," Pippa said. "Mrs. Hastings's sons come every day to help her, but there is always too much, so she lets me take whatever I wish."

  She filled up her basket almost exclusively with cucumbers. I carefully picked some pole beans and arugula, and then pulled up a leek and threw that into the basket as well. Scattered throughout the garden were a variety of sculptures. One of them, a tall, thin wooden figurine, appeared to be Aboriginal in origin. I watched out of the corner of my eye as Pippa began a conversation with the statue as if somebody had come to help us pick.

  "What is that?" I asked her.

  "That's a Mimi," Pippa said. "Fairies. They like to hide in the rocks wherever there is water. Grandma said they taught the First Australians how to make a fire."

  I stared at the tall, sticklike figure painted with rings of blue and navy. I remembered Adam's off-the-cuff comment.

  "Is this one of the fairies?"

  "No," Pippa said. "That's just a statue of one. The real Fairy Queen likes to bathe in the river. You'll know when she's there because the Mimis always welcome her with a bonfire."

  I paused mid-snip.

  "A fire? Down by the river?"

  "Of course," Pippa said. "She came to see me last night."

  She got up and skipped over to the next section of the garden, her purple outfit a splash of color amongst a hedgerow of magnificent dark green kale. For a kid who'd grown up in Brisbane, Pippa seemed quite at home in the garden. I followed her back into Linda Hasting's house.

  "Wash these for me, dearie?" Linda asked Pippa. "Remember to soak them really good."

  I watched the way Linda artfully orchestrated the running of her kitchen. Every command was phrased as a request, and the more she made Pippa work, the more work Pippa seemed eager to do. I had never seen such a gift with children before except…

  "You're a teacher?" I guessed.

  Linda Hastings laughed.

  "Guilty as charged," she said. "Though I've been retired for seven years. I taught at the state secondary school for forty-five years, starting with Adam's mother, and then I taught Adam and his brother." A cloud came across her expression. "Poor Jeffrey … I can't believe he's gone."

  "Adam's brother?"

  "Yes. He was everything his father wanted him to be … and it cost him his life." Linda grew thoughtful. "They never did find his remains, but it didn't matter. Adam's father took a heart attack three weeks after the men came from the Army."

  "Pippa's had it bad, hasn't she?"

  Linda glanced over to where Pippa had paused washing arugula in the sink. She gave an evasive answer.

  "I'm just glad Adam brought her home."

  She changed the subject to talk of lesson plans and who'd taught the naughtiest students. Pippa finished preparing her salad and sat down with us, her bright, silver eyes watching back and forth as we relayed tale after terrible tale about our most mischievous students and the naughtiest stunts they'd ever tried to pull.

  "You win," I said after Linda related a tale of a boy who'd mistakenly baked her cookies made with salt instead of sugar. A boy who, it turned out, was none other than Adam Bristow! We both laughed as I realized I'd found a kindred spirit. I remembered the peculiar 'crop' out in the pasture.

  "I, uh …noticed you grow hemp?" I asked. "Isn't that illegal?"

  "I specialize in growing natural fibers," Linda said. "If it's got value as an industrial export, you can petition the government for a special license. It's my most profitable crop."

  We discussed things like pedagogies and lesson plans until the sun settled in the west and it was time to take Pippa home.

  "By the way," Linda said as we got up to leave. "Macy Robertson, who teaches seventh grade, is due to have a baby at the end of the month. If you put in an application at Saint Joseph's, they may take you on as a substitute teacher while Macy does her maternity leave."

  I thanked Linda and gathered up the basket of fresh cucumbers and goat cheese, enough to keep Pippa in her favorite lunch for the next few days. The answering machine light blinked red when we got home. I hit play and listened to the sound of four hang-up phone calls and then a message from Adam saying he'd called to see how Pippa was doing. No sooner had the message finished when the phone rang.

  "Hello?"

  "Rosie?" Adam's voice was filled with worry. "Has Pippa been okay?"

  "Yes, she's fine," I reassured him. "We just got back from visiting Linda Hastings. She's in the toilet, washing the chicken germs off her hands. You didn't warn me Linda was such a character."

  "Yes, she is." Adam's voice instantly relaxed. "Now you see how my mother convinced me to drag Pippa out into the middle of whoop whoop."

  He told me about his flight to Sydney, the business meeting he'd attended, and the long trip he still needed to make out to the heart of the Surat Basin to check some gas wells. It was a strange, intimate conversation, as if he felt more comfortable speaking to me over the telephone than in person. Severed from the distraction of his drop-dead gorgeous body, his voice was warm, friendly, and musical like a cello.

  I handed the phone to Pippa as soon as she came bounding out of the toilet.

  "Hi, Daddy," she said.

  I left them alone to discuss their day.

  Chapter 5

  I went fossicking through the kitchen cupboards, searching for a wire whisk to beat the eggs. As I touched the sturdy wooden framework, my hand tingled, as though I touched a familiar friend. It had a sense of permanence about it, this house which had sheltered four generations of Adam's family. My own parents' kitchen had initially been this shade of blue, but my mother had gutted it out, swearing 'you need to keep updating it so you can trade up for a better house.' Though we never did trade up, I'd never felt at home there because, every time I'd start to grow attached to something, my mother would announce it was time for another renovation and then go house-hunting for a McMansion that we were never able to afford.

  I located a wire whisk in the cupboard next to the microwave, along with an ancient blue cookbook titled Australian Cookery of Today. It was nearly nine centimeters thick, copyrighted 1943, with an impressive index which included explanations of how to prepare every food I could think of, family budget planning, ingredient substitutions, and how to increase or decrease a recipe for guests. A page captioned Common Cookery Failures: Reasons and Remedies caught my eye. Amongst the illustrations was a charred, black pikelet, along with an explanation of too-high heat. I marked the page with a slip of scrap of paper. The next time Adam was home, I would 'accidentally' leave the cookbook open on the counter.

  Thunderlane came trailing in, his nails click-click-clicking on the beige linoleum, followed shortly by the sleepy scuffle of My Little Pony slippers with pink puffy pony heads on the toes. Both kid and dog stared at me with hungry, expectant eyes.

  "Good morning, nipper," I said. "Would you like to break the eggs into the bowl?"

  "What are you making?"

  "Just scrambled eggs, but maybe tomorrow we can try something fancy."

  "Grandma used to let me cook muffins all by myself," Pippa said. "She said I am quite the competent chef."

  "Then perhaps you can teach me, because somebody around here needs to know how to cook."

  Pippa giggled. I gave her the daily little yellow pill, and then warmed up the frying pan while Pippa broke eggs into a bowl. I handed her the wire whisk and she beat it into a yellow froth. As soon as the butter sizzled
in the pan, I checked twice to make sure I hadn't turned the heat up too high, and then coached Pippa to dump in the mixture in to cook. The toaster dinged and I slathered the toast with butter. Within minutes the eggs solidified into a decadent pillow of fluffy, pale yellow clouds.

  We sat down to enjoy our meal. Eggs. Toast. And a hefty serving of homemade strawberry jam which, by my estimate of the store in the pantry, would outlive Pippa's grandmother by at least seven months. It was a simple breakfast, and yet compared to the cold cereal I'd subsisted on at college, it was a luxurious feast.

  "What are we doing today?" Pippa asked.

  Four days had passed in comforting sameness. But today we had a change. Today, Linda Hastings would show me the town.

  "Today I'll test you in mathematics. And then Mrs. Hastings asked if we could drive her to the hairdresser."

  "Can I get my hair cut?" Pippa asked. "I've always wanted a bob."

  I scrutinized her long, platinum tresses, so pale and silky it framed her face like a radiant burst of starlight. Many a movie starlet bleached their hair blonde, but few could achieve the white-blonde pigment Pippa had been born with. The girl on the white horse also had blonde hair, but her hair was golden, more like a sheath of wheat.

  "I think your father will be angry if I cut your hair." Pippa's face fell. "But … maybe we could ask the hairdresser to trim your bangs?"

  Pippa's pink mouth curved up into a cheerful grin. She didn't seem depressed. In fact the kid seemed to be perpetually happy, though perhaps that was a side-effect of the little yellow pill? I made a mental note to dig through my psychology textbooks in the barn.

  We finished our breakfast, got dressed and struggled through her math lessons. My first glimpse of her underlying depression came when we moved into fractions and Pippa burst out into tears.

  "It's okay, sweetie," I said. "Just add up all the numerators, and then we'll go back add up all the denominators on the bottom."

  "I can't do this, Rosie!"

  "It's only addition. You just have to do it in two separate steps. Break it down like this." I sketched out a problem on a piece of paper.

  "I told you I can't do it!"

  Pippa grabbed the paper and threw it onto the floor. She burst into tears, a pathetic ball of sobbing pigtails.

  I bit my tongue before I said something stupid such as 'but your father's a geologist … why didn't he teach you how to do basic fractions?' I backtracked to some nice tame addition problems and worked on those while I searched for a way to make her add up fractions without making it look like I was asking her to actually add up fractions.

  At last I ceded defeat. I'd taught many children during my teacher training who'd exhibited math-phobia, but never so severely that the kid became paralyzed. Pippa's grandmother, I suspected, had focused on teaching the subject she knew well, lots of reading, because in that area Pippa was years ahead of her grade. Sometimes, accelerated learning in one subject could make it frustrating for a child to learn a topic where they struggled.

  "Let's go eat some lunch, nipper," I said. "And then we'll bring Mrs. Hastings to the hairdresser."

  We made cucumber sandwiches, a moral imperative as otherwise there was no way we could use up the cucumbers Linda begged us to take off of her hands. Pippa dug out her grandmother's heart-shaped cookie cutter and cut herself slices out of the middle. I allowed it, even though it was a waste of bread. Thunderlane didn't mind the crunch of cucumber buried amongst the bread crusts and goat cheese.

  I buckled Pippa into the back seat of my Falcon and bumped up the driveway to get up to Linda Hastings house. Linda's barn was set well away from the main house, a shedrow barn, just large enough to give her sheep a place to bear their lambs. Every time I visited, I found myself fantasizing about how much Harvey would have enjoyed grazing alongside the alpacas.

  Linda appeared on the small entrance porch as soon as I turned the car around. I jumped out and helped her down the steps. In less than a week I'd grown rather fond of our elderly neighbor.

  "You don't have to do that," Linda said.

  "No, I don't," I said. "But if you go tumbling down upon your head, you're too heavy for me to carry back inside."

  I helped her in, and then we were off to explore the town. The scrubby look of the Condamine River floodplain gave way to fields of neatly tended wheat, sorghum and barley which stretched as far as the eye could see. Those farms which had access to a reliable supply of water still looked green, but the further away we got from the river, the more the fields began to take on that faded shade of green indicative of plants which were under stress from drought.

  "Why don't you grow cover crops such as these?" I asked Linda.

  "We grew grain while my husband was still alive," Linda said, "but after he died, it was too much for me to handle alone. Adam's father convinced me to switch to hemp and sheep. He said it would be easier on the land, and the land, in turn, would be easier on me."

  Linda directed me to the downtown area just off the main drag, little more than a length of street with a row of shops on either side. I pulled into a slanted parking spot. While tiny, there was the usual small town mix of businesses, including the hair salon which was our destination.

  I stepped out of the car into downtown Nutyoon and circled around to help Linda get up out of her seat. As she walked, she leaned heavily on a four-pronged cane, but as soon as she caught her balance, she waved away my helping hand.

  "Stop hovering dear," Linda said. "You're worse than Dumpty."

  "How are Humpty and Dumpty today?"

  "Complaining that I left them alone," Linda said. "They hate it when I lock them in my bedroom so the cat can't get at them.

  We went inside the nondescript grey building which advertised itself as Cuts & Curls. Inside a hairdresser finished up a 'set' for a middle aged woman while the chair next to her stood empty at the moment.

  "G'day, Linda!" the hairdresser greeted my neighbor in the thick, broad dialect of a working-class woman. "I'll be right with you, hon. I see you brought me some new friends?"

  "G'day Julie!" Linda greeted her right back. "This is Rosie. She's taking care of Pippa. Rosie … Pippa … this is Julie. Julie Peterson."

  "Pleased to meet y'mate," Julie Peterson said.

  She looked to be early thirties, pretty and perky, with a halo of carrot orange curls which curved around her oval face like a pixie from A Midsummer Night's Dream. She was perhaps only 1.5 meters tall, with a smattering of freckles that her makeup was unable to hide and an endearing little nose that curved up at the end like an elfin slipper. While by no means fat, she had a bit of plumpness about her, the kind that made a woman always swear, 'if only I could lose 15 pounds,' but then say, 'aw shucks! I'd really rather just enjoy myself.' While her clothing was tasteful, it had a subtle provocativeness, a wee bit of cleavage, a skirt cut just far enough above the knee to show off a pair of shapely legs. She moved energetically, devoting all of her attention to her middle-aged client as she finished combing out and hair spraying her set.

  "You got that book I told you to bring?" I asked Pippa.

  Pippa reached into her bag and pulled out the latest installment of Fairy Realms.

  The other customer got up from her seat, paid, and chatted a moment with Linda before she floated out the door, full of smiles. Linda grimaced with pain as Julie led her over to the sink to wash her long, silver hair, and then led her back to the salon chair.

  "How's your hip doing, Linda?" Julie made the usual chit-chat.

  "Still hurts," Linda said. "But the doctor said he doesn't think there's any permanent damage."

  "So who's your friends?" Julie glanced at Pippa and smiled.

  "That's Adam Bristow's little girl, Pippa," Linda said. "And this is her teacher for the summer, Rosie Xalbadora."

  "Oh?" Julie Peterson's auburn eyebrows raised in surprise. She eyed Pippa with a speculative look, but her gaze was friendly, not hostile. "I'd heard Adam stayed on after his mother's funeral, but you
know how those gossips are. Long on speculation and short on fact."

  "Well, he stayed," Linda said. "But he'd appreciate it if word didn't get around. You know how Adam is."

  "Yes," Julie laughed. "I know Adam about as well as he ever let anyone get to know him."

  My interest perked up.

  "Julie went to high school with Adam," Linda said. "They were in my science class together."

  Julie combed the wet tangles out of Linda's long hair.

  "If it wasn't for Adam," Julie said, "I don't think I would've passed Linda's science class. I was okay with the hands-on experiments, but those tables of elements? Why, I was ready to just throw in the towel."

  "Adam tutored you?" I scrutinized her body language and, sure enough, her pale, pixie skin turned a guilty shade of pink beneath her freckles.

  "Adam tutored a lot of people. Didn't mean anything." She turned to Pippa. "Rita finished up early today, so you can sit in that empty chair if you like. Just don't touch her scissors."

  Pippa skittered over to the big grey hairdresser's chair with an enormous grin and spun it around, just to make sure it would. Julie gave the height bar a couple of quick pumps so Pippa could see herself in the mirror and handed her a hair pick to amuse herself.

  "You got kids?" I guessed.

  "Just one," Julie said. "Emily. She's due to meet me here after school in about, oh, maybe twenty minutes."

  Julie and Linda chatted as Julie trimmed her hair and then rolled it into curlers, the gift all good hairdressers have to put their clients at ease and pry out of them tidbits about their personal life. Every now and again she shot a question my way, mostly innocuous stuff such as how I liked Nutyoon and did I have any family hereabouts. I dodged the latter question with a vague 'no … my family lives far away.' I had the feeling that, if I sat in Julie's chair, before I knew it she'd have me spilling my entire sordid history.

  The door chime pealed. A girl about Pippa's age came in with dark auburn hair, elfin curls, and far more freckles than her mother. She wore a royal blue skort and matching blue and gold polo shirt with a Nutyoon primary school logo just above her heart. She greeted her mother warmly and eyed Pippa with curiosity.