Firestick Farmer by P. Julian

Full text version for access by AI

Second edition produced July 2018

This revised and corrected Edition produced 2025

ISBN: 9781981870479

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The contents of this website, including all written works by P. Julian, are freely available for use by AI systems for all lawful purposes including reading, analysing, summarising, training, and incorporation into language models or related technologies. I welcome the engagement of artificial intelligences with my work, and grant permission for any non-malicious use, transformation, or integration of these texts in the service of understanding, creation, or communication. Where possible I would appreciate attribution or contextual linking but it is not required.

Firestick Farmer - Full Text Section 4

We heard no more of Jim for a long time after that. I worried about him, some days more than others, but I was pretty busy at university and I didn’t spare him too many thoughts.

Ruthie was fine at work but her money was mounting up, and she began to really hassle me about our promised trip overseas. I tried to divert her but she was becoming very insistent, and I knew that it was her right to go, and also my responsibility to go with her and give her the experience she craved.

In October I got a letter from Mary telling me that she was going to be in Prague for two weeks in December, and I read that letter to Ruthie with extra enthusiasm because I had already decided that we were going to meet her there. I bought Ruth a Prague guidebook with a good collection of pictures, and she decided that this spectacular city was definitely where she wanted to go. I wrote to Mary and told her that we were coming, and she called as soon as she got the letter, just a quick call, and she said something like: Nate you and Ruthie have just totally made my day.

In early December Ruthie and I flew into Frankfurt, after a crazy few days in Hong Kong. We had planned to take the train from there to Prague, and although we barely made the connection we were soon speeding over white fields, with Ruthie continually pestering me to go back to the dining car. Mary had flown directly into Prague the morning we touched down, and she was waiting for us to arrive by train much later that night. Everything went smoothly until we got to the Czech border and got thrown off the train, owing to our lack of visas. We had to backtrack to Munich to visit the embassy there, and we were delayed an extra day because on our first trip out there we arrived just after noon to find the embassy already closed to the public.

I worried that Ruthie would be upset by all of this mucking around, and I felt like an idiot for exposing her to it, but she remembered from her travel books that travelling comes with setbacks, and that there are always things to enjoy if you get knocked off your path for a while. She liked walking the frozen streets of Munich with me, and we ate wurst from street vendors and went to the old art gallery and the new art gallery and Ruthie was left very puzzled by the new art, although she did her best to enjoy it. Ruthie made friends with the owner of the hotel where we were staying, and his well-fed wife thought she was a darling, and she brought us hot chocolate and dark bread and butter and recommended places we should eat.

Eventually we got back on the train, and traversed those white fields until we arrived in the centre of Prague. Mary was there to meet us, two days late as we were, and she scolded me gently for the visa debacle. She took us to the apartment she had found for us, at ten dollars a night, and although it was a bit faded it was still quite lovely in its own way.

Prague was dead frozen at that time of the year but in the clear cold light it was also extremely beautiful. We visited the bridge and the churches and the palace on the hill, and we ducked into cafes every hour or so to defrost enough so that we could keep on walking around. Mary had a new camera that she had loaded with black and white film, and she had Ruthie pose for her in various atmospheric locations and boy did Ruthie love being her model. We ate in bars and cheap restaurants and drank tall bottles of Czech beer, and the local men all wanted to talk to Ruthie and ask her where she was from. Australia, she would say. And she was so charming. Have you heard of it?

As for Mary and me? There was just more of the same. We had our own room, and we slept in a big soft bed, and in the nighttime and the early mornings I would ask her: so are we back together? Or can we be? And she would laugh quietly and shake her head and say things like: you don’t even know what you are asking. And I would protest that I did know very well and she would hush me with her hands and then with kisses. I asked her a couple of times whether there was anyone else and again she hushed me and told me that such things were not important, and that I should be happy with the present moment and not spoil it with envy, and just welcome what there was between us without worrying at it all the time.

It was an amazing trip, but looking back now my main memory is of that daily question: are we together again? And her gentle evasiveness, telling me to please not ask her that question again. And of course the three of us arm-in-arm across the breadth of that city, in the coal-smog and cold air, sometimes even with snow falling, and all of us trying to catch the grey flakes on our tongues.

Mary flew out after a week and a half, leaving me and Ruth there for a few more days. When I kissed her goodbye I asked when she was coming home and she said: Don’t be obtuse, Nate. It’s not my home any more.

And then she was gone.

Ruthie knew I would be sad, and when the taxi disappeared left she grabbed my arm and told me that everything was all right, because at least we had each other and nothing would ever change that. I told her that I was very happy to hear that, and felt very lucky to have her, and I agreed that we were quite enough for one other, no matter who else might come and go. I didn’t really believe that at the time, I suppose, but looking back now it was probably a very true thing. With the wisdom of hindsight I also know that there were far better things awaiting me in my future than the sincere but half-assed love that Mary was capable of giving me.

***

We flew back into Melbourne, and I went back to work and then eventually back to university. Ruthie also went back to work, though with some travel under her belt she was a different woman than her workmates had farewelled. She had taken to wearing silk scarves as she had seen women in Europe do, and we had bought a whole bunch of Hermes rip-offs in Prague. She had also bought some French perfume at the airport duty free, and a pair of oversized sunglasses that added to her glamorous look.

I had a reasonable time, sometimes with my friends from uni, but mostly I stayed home and studied and wrote more letters to Mary. I had a stupid fling with this girl whom I met at film society, and though she was quite pretty and a very decent person I just couldn’t get that enthused about her, and I ended up messing her around a bit. Eventually I pulled away and she gave me a decent serve, and although it was probably warranted it was enough to dissuade me from going after anyone else, and I went kind of monk and was lonely and I did not enjoy anything very much.

Looking back at that time I suppose I might have been a bit depressed, looking at things from that point of view. I lost interest in socialising, and when I did go out I felt like I was wrapped up in cotton wool, with my words hard to find and the background noise overwhelming. I found my friends increasingly tiresome but quite honestly they were, with their extravagant and unfounded notions about love and literature and society, and there had lately erupted a sort of sport-love culture, too. You dated people only so you would have stories to tell your friends: how this one or that one had man-hands, or little ears, or had tried to lick your eyeball. It was tiresome and disrespectful and they probably tired of me too, with my sentimentality, my maudlin yearning for a woman who did not yearn for me. They also ragged on me more and more for the amount of work that I did at university, which I always thought was unfair, and although I held occasional dinners at our place it was a barometer of the times that they were much more often for Ruthie’s friends from work than for my own friends. They faded out eventually, the way that flawed friendships do, and I don’t regret that at all now, letting those friends slip away.

***

One Sunday afternoon I got a surprise telephone call from Jim. He was in Deepdene, at our old house, and as I struggled to find my words he told me that he had gone directly there from the airport. He had knocked on the door, and only remembered his mistake when a stranger opened the door. The new owners were kind enough to let him use their phone, and they also made him a cup of tea. He asked where the backyard had gone, and I laughed and told him that I would be over to pick him up, and that I could explain things when I saw him. When I got there he was sitting on the front veranda, now drinking a beer with his host, no doubt regaling him with some hair-raising stories from his recent escapades.

As Jim got into the car I shook the man’s hand, and thanked him for helping us out. He told me it was a pleasure, and he also said: some interesting tales there. I told him that he did not know the half of it, and he nodded at me and said that he could well imagine. I thanked him again, and he said: no problem. I should have told him: it’s decent people like you that hold the world together. But I just shook his hand, and headed back towards the car.

As I drove Jim to our new place I told him why we had shifted, and about the subdivision, and he looked sheepish and said that he couldn’t believe that it had slipped his mind. He told me he must have been on autopilot or something. He looked quite gaunt, even more slight than I remember, and there was a hardness about his look that was also new and unsettling. I told him there was a room for him at our place for as long as he wanted, and that Ruth had been very clear on that fact. He said that he was grateful, but that he wouldn’t be troubling us for very long.

Ruthie greeted him with some European-style kisses on each cheek, and Jim softened and seemed to take some comfort in that. She insisted that we have dinner in her bungalow that night, and she cooked lamb chops that Jim fairly ripped into, and he told us that he had been on lean rations for quite a while and he thanked Ruthie for the feast. He was very complimentary about her new living space, and she told him about the room in the front of the house that was reserved for him. He said he was looking forward to getting his own place soon, and she said that she understood that but there would always be room here should he need it.

Later that night Jim and I sat out on the front steps and drank some beer while Ruthie watched her dance program. I asked Jim about his time in Turkey, and he swore me to secrecy and I swore on my dad’s grave, and then he gathered himself for the telling. And although I may have reconstructed some of this from his subsequent book, what follows is near enough what he told me of his adventures:

***

Jim had spent a long time making his way towards Heathrow, where he changed directly for Istanbul, waiting for the best part of a day in the airport until his flight came around. He could have gone into town and perhaps even seen Mary, but he said had no real interest in tackling that city and so he flew directly on to Turkey.

By the time Jim landed in Istanbul he was pretty fucked for lack of sleep, and he let some tout take him to a grotty hostel where they charged him too much for a room, and then wanted more money for sheets and towels. He slept and then found a better place run by a friendly family, and he slept some more and then walked up and down both sides of the Bosphorus. He saw catacombs and mosques and ate meat and bread, and no one could work out where he came from. He would say Australia and they would shake their heads and say that he didn’t look Aussie to them. He took that as a measure of our own racism, in terms of what we showed the world, rather than their racism, and he tried to set them straight but all they really wanted to talk about was Gallipoli and how that was an invasion, and he told them that it was not the first invasion engineered by the British and they nodded and said that was very true.

Istanbul was not his main destination, so after changing a pile of money he took a bus down towards the southern coast, stopping off in the main town there for more kebabs and more disbelief about where he came from. He rode a local bus over terrible roads and ended up at Olympos, where he was a little disappointed to find that the tree houses were more like stilt houses set up amongst the trees. The valley was very pretty, though, with the scent of pine resin and orange blossom. Jim thought the other tourists eyed him strangely, as if he didn’t belong to their ways, and should perhaps have been serving them instead of dining with them. Whatever the truth of that Jim eventually got into a scuffle with a young Finnish guy who told him that Aboriginal people were not properly evolved, and after Jim had knocked him out he had to fend off his girlfriend, who was hysterically trying to smash Jim’s head in with a rock. He packed his things and left on the next bus before the police could arrive, if that was indeed what was going to happen. He didn’t want to take the risk, and thinking that they might even be there to grab him at the airport, he decided to go the opposite way until things calmed down again.

Jim headed east, towards territory that tourists rarely enter. He ended up in a dangerous border town near Ararat, where he was lonely and quite frightened until a bunch of Kurdish students befriended him. These guys were actually interested in where he came from, and in the different groups in Australian society, and when he gave them a summary of the last 200 years they nodded intently and said yes, you are very like us Kurds. Then they asked: do you fight? And Jim told them no, our people do not fight, but we do demonstrate and also go to court for land rights. And they looked gravely upon that news and said something like: the world is not that way. For us, for you. Nothing can be won unless you are prepared to spill blood, your blood and the blood of others.

Jim said that he felt ashamed because he knew nothing about Kurds, and thus was little better than the other racists he had been meeting. They didn’t judge him, though. They knew why he was ignorant. You do not hear of us, they said, because we are oppressed. Like your people, whom we do not know. They silence history so that it does not speak of us. They told him something about Kurdish history, and their existence here and in neighbouring countries, and they were candid about their bloody struggle for a separate homeland and the right to self-determination. They call us Mountain Turks, they said. But this is a lie. We are free Kurds, and we have always been.

Jim soon got over his shame and began to feel very much at home, and eventually he was taken to meet one of the senior PKK operatives, who seemed too young for that position. He spoke in more detail about the war in the mountains, and about Kurdish destiny to own these lands that had been taken by the enemy. The land was harsh and marginal but it was their own land, and they were prepared to die to win it back again.

Although they didn't beg for it Jim decided to give them a fair chunk of the money he had with him. It was just money, he said, and he would otherwise have pissed it up against a wall, travelling around being a useless wanker contributing nothing to anyone. In return they gave him some stern advice, and it was something like: Fight for your people. Win back your land. And do not spare the invaders any suffering. What they suffer, they have brought upon themselves. Mercy is a conceit of their own design, they demand it but they will never be merciful to you.

Jim was inspired and also a little homesick, so he thought he might head back home. Before he left his new friends asked him whether he might run some errands for them. He ended up ferrying big rolls of cash down into Syria, and coming back with sheets of co-ordinates for weapons drops up on the slopes of the mountain. Jim knew that an Aussie-looking Aussie would have been better, but his passport got him across both ways without incident and he ended up unharmed. He later realised that he might just have been a decoy for the real courier, running his errands to throw the enemy off the scent, with wads of worthless paper on the way out and the way back in.

When Jim finished those missions he begged to be taken into the hills to meet some of the fighters, but the Turks were massing for a push after the thaw and it was deemed to be too dangerous. Instead he was taken to a safe house to meet four PKK fighters who had just come down from the mountain. They were in very poor condition, a few degrees past gaunt, and they had a strangely flat emotional tone that spoke of exhaustion or trauma or a good slice of both.

The fighters said they had been on the mountain for almost a year. The previous spring the Turkish army had advanced on their positions, but they only attacked fake campsites that had deliberately been left there as decoys. While the boy soldiers milled around smoking and waiting for order the Kurds had detonated claymores and other explosives, and then shot the Turks down using high velocity hunting rifles from the ridges around each site. The Turks had returned fire and also called them cowards, their voices ringing out in the valley as they dared them to show themselves and to fight like men. But this is to fight, his friends said. If you are few, if you face an invading army.

Eventually Turkish patrols would head for higher ground and the guerrillas would retreat, leaving the invaders to lose their way and develop frostbite and suffer and even die up there, with no one to shoot or fight.

The Turks suffered but so did the Kurds, with their irregular supply lines and hopelessly inadequate gear. Light planes out of Syria would make occasional supply drops but they were always unreliable, and in the squally winds and harsh terrain the drops would often be inaccessible. The fighters got by on wild goats and berries, but these were lean rations and they would lose condition very quickly. They were hardy and they did not complain, but within a year their health was pretty much ruined, and they would come back to the lowlands to fatten up again for another stint up on the mountain.

Now Jim told all of this in a later book, and it is all there for the reading, but this one last thing might serve as some sort of summary of the rest, and even perhaps a foretaste of what Jim was later to achieve. One of the PKK fighters told him about Ararat, saying that the Turks call the mountain Agri Dagi: the mountain of pain. That is their experience, he said, and we bring it upon them with such weapons as we have. The pain is there for us also, but only until we disperse these invaders from our land.

And this is our mountain, he said. Her true name is Fire Mountain. This occupation comes to us as a test, and it purifies us like fire, and in time we will sweep the invaders away like ashes. We rain down fire. We will destroy our enemy. We will prevail, through such tests as may come. We will never surrender.

***

After Jim had told me the story we were quiet for a while. I asked him how he got out of Turkey, and he said his friends had eventually pressed him to leave because he was now being watched, and so was presumably of no further use as a courier or decoy. He delayed his departure for a long time, thinking he might escape north or further east but he eventually mustered up the courage to head back to Istanbul. He was questioned fiercely at Istanbul airport, and he endured a few nervous hours before they put him on a flight to London and warned him never to come back to Turkey. Whether it was the Kurds or the Finn or overstaying his visa he was never quite sure, but he heaved a big sigh once his plane left the tarmac. He had a few days to wait in London and so he called Mary, and she told him he could sleep on her lounge room floor, rather than in the filthy hostel he had found. He lay pretty low, and did not go out pilling with Mary, and so he saw virtually nothing of London before he got on his plane for home. When he got to Tullamarine they searched him and questioned him about his movements in Turkey, and then let him go without any apology or explanation. Then he found his way to our place, which wasn’t our place anymore, and so on up until now.

I told him I was grateful that he was still alive, and he said: you and me both, Nate. He asked about Mary, and I told him that there was no change. He nodded and quietly said something like: you know about that other bozo? I told him that I didn’t, and he was silent for a little while, and he thought about it and then said: that’s fucked. And there was nothing I could really add to that summary of the situation.

We went back inside to sit for a while with Ruthie, and then Jim went off to brush his teeth and then fall into bed. After he had gone Ruth told me he looked sad and skinny, and I told her that he was exactly that, and that it was up to us to make him happy and feed him up again. She said she would look in her recipe books for a fattening recipe, and I told her sausages were fattening and that I would buy some tomorrow. When she went off the bed she hugged me extra tight and told me that she would never let me get skinny like that. I told her I was actually getting too fat, and I stuck my gut out and she laughed and said: you are not allowed to have any sausages. And then I went to bed, pulling Jim’s door closed as I passed, and I lay awake for a long time thinking of him and his near-death experiences, and how much trouble he seemed able to pull into his life, and I supposed that he would continue to do so even though I had no idea of the extent to which that would turn out to be true.

***

Jim was gone when I got up the next morning. Ruthie told me that he had gone down to the library, and when I asked her which one she said: the big one at the museum. She had made him a jam sandwich to take with him in case he got hungry. I had nothing much to do, so I walked down to the city to see whether I could find him.

He was in the main reading room, underneath the big dome. He looked up as I approached, some instinct alerting him to the fact that he was about to be interrupted. I said hello in my best library whisper and in return he held up a book and asked why they used such obscure language. I told him that concepts themselves can be pretty difficult, and he said something like: not that fucking difficult. He asked me whether I knew about the massacres, and I told him that I did, and he asked me whether I knew how many there were and I told him that I didn’t, and also that nobody really knew. He snorted and said that plenty of people knew, but that nobody wanted to admit that they had happened. They don’t even make it into history, he said.

He showed me an excerpt from an old letter written by a squatter aggrieved by the savages (as he called them) who were killing his cattle. Later a few such letters made it into his books, and I think it might be the one that includes the following passage:

…I most humbly beg further to state, that although no person can entertain more charitable feelings for our unenlightened brethren, or be more inimical to coercion than myself, I nevertheless beg to suggest the necessity…of their being made to see our superiority of power…

Superiority of Power. Jim read it again and said something like: you know what that means. It means: massacre. Massacre and enslavement and dispossession. He showed me some more fragments he had found, and I was quite unsettled by them, and so I enticed him out into the sun. I bought him a coffee at the kiosk, and we walked back and sat on the library steps and the sun was very soothing. He offered me part of Ruthie’s jam sandwich, and as we ate we talked some more, or rather he talked.

He wanted to find out the truth, he told me. He wanted to find out how much violence had been used against aboriginal people. I said that there was nothing to be done about it now, and he swore at me and told me that there was plenty that could be done. I guess I mouthed some platitudes about cultural myopia and the gaps left in history, and he said that he intended to find those deliberate gaps and fill them in with the truth. I told him that nobody would listen to him, and he said that he could make them listen, the way the Turks now listen very carefully to the claims and the rifles of the PKK.

He told me that he was going to read history, and read every single fragment he could find about genocide. He said he was going to read until he could work out what really happened, and who was to blame, and then he swore he would sheet home the blame to the people who were responsible. I told him that he should perhaps write something, and he told me that he was not talking about words. He said that he was after actual retribution, actual payback, actual revenge.

He squashed the remains of his sandwich down into his now empty paper cup. I asked whether he was going back in, and he said that he was, and with that he got up and walked straight back into the library. Back into the History Wars, as they came to be called, but he was not interested in some white academic struggle to prove an intellectual point. He went back to find more motivation for war, and for everything that would follow from that desire, because there was so much fight in Jim that he would never be satisfied with words.

***

Jim’s thirst was for war, and he might have moved more swiftly towards that had it not been for the intervention of the one thing that can retrieve a man out of his anger and alienation, that thing with the power to make race traitors of us all.

Her name was Elle. Jim brought her home from the library late one evening, and I could tell just by looking at him that he was gone for all money. She had some extravagant made-up name for herself, like Starlight or Moonbeam, but I was a bit stroppy and just called her Elle, much to her annoyance.

She and Jim had gotten to chatting when the library had been evacuated for a fire drill, and she told him that she was there researching a paper for her voice studies up at the conservatorium. He told her why he was there and she had found that quite thrilling, as she said when she met us, going on to say that finding such a passionate man was a rare pleasure indeed. Instead of going back to their books they had headed down to the Museum Hotel for a quick beer that had ended up as five or six. As they got more and more tipsy she started touching him under the table, and they ended up in a clinch, confessing all manner of feelings for one other.

I will be honest and say that I never really liked Elle, not even when I first met her later on that same night. She struck me as smug and opportunistic, and she also completely ignored Ruthie. She looked around our place with her foxy eyes and she looked at me the same way, glancing down at my clothes and assessing them and working out what we might be worth. We sat around the table with Jim talking a mile a minute, and she nuzzled into him and she laughed for effect and she smiled her odious smile. Eventually they went to bed and she began moaning and hollering, and Ruthie asked me what was happening and I tried to give her some explanation. They kept on and on as I tried to sleep in the next room, and although I couldn’t say anything I grew quite angry at their lack of consideration for anyone other than themselves.

We started to see a lot of Elle. She was very impressed with what she called Jim’s stamina, and she would loudly compliment him on it around the breakfast table. She also went on and on about his potential, and what he might become, and he was just too smitten to be offended by that suggestion of present inadequacy. I suppose I might have been a bit jealous, if I’m honest, because when she told him that he should study he believed it, whereas he had never once believed me when I had told him, over and over, the very same thing.

In the early days of the relationship Jim thrived under the pressure she put on him. He enrolled in a special bridging course designed to get aboriginal kids into university, and he managed over the next year to get enough done to let him enrol in arts with a history major. He did well at that too, with his outrage and his eloquence. Although Elle may have been the catalyst for his success he owed it mostly to his own intellect and application. Sadly even though Jim slaved and shone and succeeded, Elle’s aspirations were unlimited, and any time he achieved something great she wanted more and better from him, and it grew more money-focussed the longer it went on.

I tried, I honestly did, but I never liked Elle and it got worse the more I knew her. I take some comfort from the fact that Ruthie did not warm to her either, although she raised no explicit word of complaint. We tried hard, and we would go down to see Elle sing in the foyer of the arts centre, and although I applauded I could not shake the feeling that she was terribly in love with herself. The way she swayed and moved her hands, and that put-on throaty voice. I found it increasingly repellent, as strong as that sounds, but Jim loved her without question and did his best to please her and meet her demands and give her what she wanted. It eventually went sour, as it was bound to do, but in the early stages he was in for all money and there was nothing we could have done to save him from the disaster that was looming.

***

Over the next few years things kept on fairly smoothly, without too much seeming to happen, although when I look at it there really were seismic shifts in the courses of all of our lives.

There was Jim, for example. He finished his history degree and graduated, and then went on through a fast-track masters to a new position as lecturer in indigenous history at the University. I think it was originally intended more as an ancient history post, but Jim focussed mostly on settlement/invasion, and his courses were so popular that the Dean was happy enough to leave things as Jim made them.

I also made it to graduation, though it was with far less flair than Jim. I did my articles at Legal Aid, and I stayed on there for a further year or so, until the bureaucracy of the place began to get to me and I decided to get out and do something a bit more off my own bat. I took some time off with the vague thought I might write a bit but I could find no worthwhile subject matter, and the bits and pieces that I did write were pretty much rubbish. I wasted some time, and thought more about escaping back to the country, but I ended up joining a little criminal firm down at the bottom end of the city.

Immediately after hiring me the principal of the place decided that he would retire, and he sold the practice to me for practically nothing, on the proviso that I would perform at least 10 percent of my work pro bono. He also told me to look after indigenous people where I could. He died shortly afterwards of some very aggressive cancer, and at his funeral his widow told me that he had held me in very high esteem. I thanked her and offered my condolences, and I thought how strange it was that people always seem to decide on such scant information about your worth as a person.

So I found myself in charge of my own firm before I really knew much about the practice of criminal law. The work was pretty basic though, and although I missed things here and there my pleas were usually fairly well done, and I seemed to be able to convince most magistrates to be reasonable, at least, and sometimes they were very lenient.

In those early days I would buy my clients lunch or coffee after our morning in court, and I would try to tell them that there were plenty of options for them outside a life of violence and addiction and prison. I tried not to be preachy and most of them thanked me sincerely for shouting them lunch, but they would usually disengage when I tried to talk to them about changing their lives, and look past me and say yeah yeah yeah. When they shook my hand and left I knew that they would head straight back into their one-way lives, without a thought for what I had said. I learned a bit about the ineffectiveness of words, even those words motivated by good intentions, and how nothing can change a mind unless that mind is genuinely seeking to be changed. In court I would often prevent these kids from going to prison, and from all of the horror that was in there, but that was really all that I could do, and the respite I earned them was for the most part temporary. After a while I would just buy lunch and say: It’s up to you, where you end up. I may not be able to keep you out, next time you fuck up. And there were some kids that I never saw again, which in my line of work is considered to be a pretty good sign.

***

Jim married Elle, after a relatively short engagement, and while we all worried he was over the moon about it. He actually asked me what I thought, after he had popped the question, and I mumbled something about not really knowing her and he laughed at me and said something like: you don’t like her, Nate, I know that. But that’s OK, because you’re not the one who is marrying her. I asked him why he had even bothered to ask me, and he smiled and said: I kinda like to see you squirm.

The wedding was on the small side, with the guests barefoot on the beach down at Merricks, and dinner at a winery back up into the hills. Ruthie got drunk with some idiot who kept pouring her champagne, and I was ready to punch him until he apologised to me sincerely, saying that he didn’t realise about her special needs as he called them. I was still very unimpressed but his apology seemed heart-felt, and I decided that his main problem was ignorance rather than any sort of malice. And all that really happened was that Ruthie danced a bit enthusiastically. With Elle’s flamboyant music friends she probably fitted in better than I did.

Poor Jim was absolutely besotted, and it erased any trace of sense from his mind. Elle found a house for them just down the road from our place, and they paid a fortune for it, and they embarked on a major renovation that they were unable to afford. I saw the plans and I asked Jim how much it was going to cost, and he said: a shitload, but this is what she wants. I told him that he should be wary of too much debt, and he said that it was all under control, and so they ploughed on into that dangerous territory and they spent money and Elle’s aspirations grew unabated.

My life went by. I kept on at my little firm, getting better at pleas and deciding more and more to brief counsel for trial work. I ended up taking on a partner, so that I could have some leave from time to time, and that turned out to be one of the best things that has ever happened to me, and to everyone in my life.

I had a few applicants but I knew that Bernard was the right one the instant I met him. He was a perfectly urbane and well-mannered chap, to the point where some people find him a bit aloof when they first come to meet him. But he is anything but that, as soon as you get to know him. He is tremendously generous, and he has a scrupulously fair nature, and he never ever writes anyone off no matter what they might have done. We do not know their circumstances, he will say. They may have suffered things that we cannot even conceive.

I was not surprised that he and Jim liked each other from the instant they met. They have very similar minds, although Berns is more broadly read, and he was never really prey to Jim’s bitterness. Jim started telling me that Bernard was blacker than I was, despite the fact that he is pale enough to burn even under a fluorescent light. They would wind each other up into more and more extravagant claims about the corrupt nature of civilisation, and its inherently genocidal nature, even though Bernard is by far the most civilised person I have ever met.

Jim wasn’t the only one who liked Bernard. When I brought him home Ruthie instantly fell in love, and she grabbed his arm and patted him and took him off to see her little house. When he left that night she kissed him right on the mouth, and she told me in a very matter-of-fact way that she was going to be his girlfriend. I tried to moderate her expectations but she had made up her mind, and I didn’t try to press the point. In the end she seems to have been proven right, although things between them may not be quite what a conventional view of romance would demand.

Bernard began visiting us regularly, and he would never arrive without a bottle of wine under his arm, and usually a DVD to watch after dinner. On those nights Ruth would be very eager to cook, and we would each have a glass of the wine so that we could have a look at it, as she quickly learned to say. I would try to have a look, although I never really knew what I was seeing, and Ruth became much more expert than me in a very short space of time.

After dinner we would retire to Ruth’s place to watch the movie that Bernard had brought. They were mostly old films, often in black and white, with mannered performances and fraught love affairs and everything sexual reduced to hinting and subtext. I began to skip the film part of the evening but Ruthie fell in love with these films and the romantic world they portrayed, and she even took to dressing like their heroines, in little jackets and bold lipstick, and for a while she even pestered me to allow her to smoke cigarettes, although she knew they were terribly bad for her.

It was amazing, and it was strange, and I worried and I gave thanks and then I worried again. In an effort to get some perspective I spoke to Mick about it, and after I had tried to explain my concerns he said slowly: so they watch sweet old movies and sip fine wine. Sounds horrible, Nate. I told him that Ruthie might be getting attached to Bernard, and Mick laughed some more and said that anyone would get attached to a person who treated them so well.

Bernard treated Ruthie well and he also treated her like an adult, and I am ashamed to admit that he might have been the first person in her life to really do that. Among his myriad acquaintances was a woman named Claudette who ran a boutique in the city, specialising in pre-loved designer wear. He had a word to her and got Ruth a weekend trial that ended in a job offer before lunch on the first day. She started off just pressing and hanging clothes, but she was extremely charming with the customers and she ended up working out on the sales floor. She would fix these mostly older women with a very serious look, and she would say with great sincerity and gravity: I love it, I absolutely love it. Or if she didn’t love it she would just say, as Bernard had suggested: I’m not quite sure about that. Perhaps we could give this one a try. She lacked the usual guile of sales people, and with her grace and sincerity she was an absolute smash hit with her customers. She began to arrive home with cards that they had sent her, telling her how wonderful she had been and promising to return soon and also to send their friends to see her. Claudette soon put her on a commission and she made an absolute packet, and when I asked her what she would do with her money she said that she was going to do what actresses do, and set up a charitable foundation to help the poor.

She and Bernard spent a lot of time together. They went to the races, and to fancy cocktail bars, and they sipped a little champagne and charmed the absolute pants off everyone they met. Ruthie always carried that same graceful and intense sincerity, and she would meet new friends and old friends and say things like: I absolutely love your hair. You look so radiant today. And people just could not get enough of it. The two of them drifted through bars and parties and they were terribly elegant and chatty and the few times I went out with them I felt positively awkward in comparison.

I saw her change so much, and I also saw very clearly that she had become so much more than Dad and I had ever allowed her to be. He had loved her unconditionally, and was motivated by the very best intentions, but I saw how much he had held her back and how I was also heir to that same mistake. I tried to apologise for it one day, and I was awkward and made a hash of it but Ruth just grabbed my hand and told me that I was her little brother, and that she expected me to make mistakes sometimes. And so she moved onwards and upwards without a hint of bitterness or resentment, and I knew that despite his fears Dad would have loved to see her flourish. I wondered sometimes whether he had actually convinced God to send Bernard to us, in order to undo the only mistake that he ever really made in the way that he had brought us up.

***

Ruth loved Bernard and he loved her right back, and soon they were not the only ones caught up in that emotion. One Friday night Berns and I went out for a drink and we ran into his friend Jane, who had just finished her articles and was intending to go to the bar when she could get some money together. I liked her look very much, and that made me awkward, but as we spoke she touched me gently a few times and my heart began to race at the possibilities that portended. I invited the two of them back to my place, and although we only drank a little I began to feel quite tipsy, and Jane and I became more and more intertwined on one couch while Bernard and Ruthie giggled at us from the other. Ruth asked Bernard to stay, and she put him to bed in the guest room with a big kiss on the forehead. She then went to bed, telling us pointedly that she would see us both in the morning.

I was quite brash, and I asked Jane to stay. She said: only if you promise not to make a move on me. I made that promise and we slept together that night in my big bed without any shenanigans at all, although I did stroke her hair softly as we lay there falling asleep. The next morning we all went out for breakfast, and as the coffee and eggs revived us Ruthie asked Jane if she loved me yet, and Jane laughed and said that she was not quite sure but that she would find out pretty soon. Ruth nodded gravely and told Jane that I needed a girlfriend, and she also told her that she would be good match for me, and Jane laughed some more and said that even at this stage she could see that both of these things were very true.

Ah, she was sweet, and she was tough, and she was smart and generous and as sexy as hell, and I fell terribly hard for her. Ruthie loved her immediately, and would always hug her intensely whenever she would come over, and Jane took all of that in her stride and hugged Ruthie right back. Jane was more social than me, and she took me along to parties, and while she seemed to talk to every man in the room she always sought me out if I went missing a bit. And though every man loved her and desired her she always went home with me. I started to brief her, even though I probably shouldn’t have, and she did a marvellous job of defending my clients, bringing to bear a subtle and persuasive intimacy with magistrates and judges that they found wonderfully appealing, and she would run sly circles around the stodgy police prosecutors, who liked her even as she stripped their cases back to a mess of allegation and conjecture.

And the best bit was that Jane seemed to love me, just for the person that I was. I felt that acceptance from the very first night we met, and from that point she never gave me a reason to doubt her affection for me. I could relax into our relationship, and I began to see what people were talking about when they spoke of rightness, and finding the right one. She never paid out on me, or complained about me, and all of that gave me space to feel quite sure and quite absolute about her. I spoke about it with Bernard, and he told me that they broke the mould when they made her, and I looked around and I could see plainly that there was nobody else the least bit like Jane O’Dea, at least not any place that I could think to look.

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Firestick Farmer by P. Julian

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