Demons (20 page)

They became not just a childless couple but a couple who enjoyed their childlessness.
Instead of the teetotal and high-protein diet they had punished themselves with for
so long they became gourmands: even a weekday dinner for two was prepared to a recipe
from a glossy book, shopped for separately with a detailed list and accompanied by
a rare wine. Dale had become a collector; tasting obscure vintages was now his obsession.
He’d scour the wine shops and the internet and keep the bottles he bought in racks
in Oscar’s room. Every night before eating he and Cass would taste that evening’s
chosen vintage and have a short conversation about it and Dale would make tasting
notes in his little cloth-bound book.

Financially, they were doing fine. The quest to get Cass pregnant had not in any
way interfered with their nine-to-five lives. The constant round of tests and consultations
had been done out of hours or on coordinated sick days or RDOs. Dale was now IT manager
for a big supermarket chain (and was being head-hunted by others); Cass was a change
management consultant for hire with her own website and business card, specialising
in redundancy and redeployment. They both earned good money, and, cut loose from
their roles as would-be parents, were now determined to spend it. They put on a few
kilos, but neither cared. If they weren’t eating expensively at home they were eating
even more expensively out; they went to the theatre, the cinema or a concert five
out of seven nights a week. They outgrew their home, not with family but possessions.
Cass had become a devoted online shopper—clothes, shoes, bags, homewares—while Dale’s
wine collection now numbered hundreds of bottles. They sold their house and bought
a bigger one, a few streets away, but pretty soon all of its rooms were full too.

Dale’s next hobby was cars. He’d never had any interest in them, other than as a
practical method of getting to work and the shops, but now the idea of owning as
many cars as he could became an obsession. His main thing was 1950s American convertibles.
Every night after dinner he’d roam the net and sit in chat rooms, refining his knowledge,
and then like a hunter track down and corner his prey. When Dale got notice that
his latest purchase was waiting for him down at the docks Cass knew that the next
weekend would be devoted exclusively to reading the manual, polishing it up and taking
it out on its first drive.

Cass didn’t mind Dale’s obsession—she had obsessions of her own, currently for collecting
fashion eyeware—and the upside was that every weekend when the weather was warm they
would take one of Dale’s cars out of the enormous garage he’d had specially built
and go for a drive in the country. No child, fit or flawed, could ever outdo the
satisfaction to be got from seeing the envy on the faces of the people they passed.
They did the gourmet trails mostly—east, north, south-west, wherever—and arranged
the day around morning tea at a café, bakery or tearooms, lunch at a winery, some
more wineries and tastings in the afternoon, then a farmgate stop for fresh produce
on the way home. Pretty soon this weekend ritual marked the passage of their lives.
The garage filled with cars, the cellar with wine, the pantry with produce, the spare
rooms with stuff. They began to wonder—separately at first, then quietly, by small
steps, together—if this was it, their lives? Professionally they were both at the
top of the tree, materially they had everything they could want.

But spiritually? said Hannah. Everyone sort of rocked back in their chairs. Yes,
said Adam, exactly. He took a sip of wine.

Then, he continued, coming back one day from a drive to the Yarra Valley in their
new vintage Chevrolet convertible, Dale slowed down on a straight stretch of road
near Coldstream and pulled onto the verge. What are you doing? asked Cass. Dale pointed
at the paddock to their left.

It was a Sunday in autumn, about four o’clock in the afternoon, the sun was low
and the light was starting to change. It was doing that thing it does where it fades
from the sky but picks out the things on the ground until they seem almost to glow—it’s
a beautiful time that, isn’t it?

The verge was wide, beside it a grassy culvert then a barbed-wire fence. There were
plenty of new wineries dotted along that road but this part was still old farmland
and now, at milking time, what Dale was pointing at was a herd of black-and-white
cows making their way up the rise towards the milking shed next to an old farmhouse
tucked in behind some trees.

Dale and Cass got out of the car, leaned on it and watched. There was something unearthly
about the scene. Time had slowed, they were on the moon and those cows were weightless,
floating towards the shed on a gentle solar breeze. They could see the farmer standing
up there, the cows floating towards him; behind the herd a dog swept back and forth
across the grass like a scythe. There was nothing sharp or violent about it, the
dog didn’t even bark, it too was gliding, like on the moon, or underwater. There
was a golden sheen on everything, the black hides of the cows, the clear earth around
the shed, the shed itself, the farmer’s shoulders. Clouds of golden insects rose
up out of the grass as the cows passed and in the wake of the scything dog.

As Dale and Cass watched all this an otherworldly calm descended on them. Their lives
seemed concentrated and distilled. Cass moved her hand to his and held it like she
was saying: Do you feel it too? He squeezed it lightly like he was saying: Yes. Ahead
of them, along the road, on top of the wire fence, three ravens sat watching. They
too felt the calm. I want that, said Dale. Cass knew exactly what he meant. Dale
thought he saw the farmer wave his hand and he raised his hand too. Let’s go up,
he said.

It was the sort of road—more a track, really—on which Dale, under any other circumstances,
wouldn’t be seen dead driving his new Chevrolet convertible. It was rutted with tractor
tyres and the chassis scraping along the rise in the middle. But an idea or a feeling
towards an idea had taken hold of Cass and Dale and silently they both agreed that
a few scrapes on the undercarriage were a small price to pay to discover where this
feeling might take them.

When they got to the top of the track the farmer wasn’t there but they could hear
the mooing and bellowing and the clatter of hooves inside the shed. The milking had
started. Dale closed the Chevrolet’s roof. They got out and went to the door—not
a door, really, more an opening through which the cows had trooped. Everything in
there was the opposite of what they’d felt outside; it was busy, noisy, cows lurching
and moaning, metal gates clanking, the farmer whistling and shouting, the dog barking
and music blaring from a tinny radio hanging above on a wire. The farmer was getting
what must have been about twenty of the herd individually into the corrals on the
big milking carousel—the others were penned in a concrete yard at the far end, waiting
their turn. While the dog barked—routinely, and less frequently now—the farmer, an
old guy in his seventies, went around to each cow and attached the milking cups to
their udders, oblivious to the two well-dressed professionals from the city standing
in the doorway of his shed. Or so it seemed. Hello there! he said, from the other
side of the carousel, and he walked around towards them. Can I help you with something?

It was an odd sight, said Adam, the two city types standing either side of a cow
pat, their flash car in the yard, while the farmer approached in his gumboots and
waterproof pants and filthy flannel shirt. The dog came round the other side, its
ears up, curious.

We were watching from the road, said Dale—I saw you, said the farmer—and we couldn’t
help coming up for a look. They’re so beautiful, said Cass, and they look so calm
and peaceful from a distance. Mostly they are, said the farmer, but they get a bit
cranky sometimes—don’t we all? Everyone smiled. My name’s Gus, said the farmer. Dale
and Cass, said Dale. That’s a beautiful-looking vehicle, said Gus, pointing at the
Chevrolet. I collect them, said Dale. The farmer let out a breathy whistle. It’s
a hobby, said Dale. An expensive hobby, said Cass. They all smiled again. Does it
hurt the cows? asked Cass. The farmer looked around. No, he said, it becomes habit
after a while. Do you ever milk them by hand? asked Cass. Oh no, said the farmer,
we haven’t done that in a long time, but you can, sure, with the placid ones. Bess
there is as gentle as a kitten. Can I try? asked Cass. Both Dale and the farmer looked
at her, surprised. Sure, said the farmer: why not?

With the dog at his heels, Gus moved to the pen, opened the gate and pushed a couple
of cows aside until he got a hand on what even Cass and Dale, urban amateurs, could
see was the most placid of the group. Pushing her gently by the back of the head
(Dale remembered the principal at school doing this, when he was taking kids to the
office), Gus guided Bess onto the open concrete area. Just hang on to her for a couple
of minutes, said Gus, while I get the next lot in. He parked Bess beside Cass and
showed her how to put a hand on the cow’s neck to steady her, then he went back to
the carousel and started unhooking the others and shooing them into the paddock.
Then one by one he hooked the next lot up.

Bess didn’t move. Cass could feel the warmth of her body through the hide and the
occasional twitch of a muscle deep under the skin. The odour coming off her—of grass
and straw and milk and piss and shit and something else that she couldn’t help somehow
thinking was old timber—made her reel at first but soon became a pleasant thing,
like nature talking, the same as the picture from the roadside of the herd making
their way up the paddock in the gloaming. Subtly Cass patted Bess’s hide, but so
subtly that if you weren’t looking for it you wouldn’t have seen it. Bess turned
her head, one big eye bulging.

All right, said Gus, wiping his hands on his shirt and picking up an old milk crate
on the way over, so what brings you people out here today? He put the crate down.
Bess shuffled on the concrete. Are you sightseeing? We had lunch in a winery up
near Healesville, said Dale, and now we’re on our way home. You live in the city?
said Gus, kicking the milk crate into place. In the city, yeah, said Dale. And what
do you do for a crust? asked Gus. Well, said Dale, I’m in information technology,
Cass does human resources. Stressful work, yeah? said Gus. Most times, said Dale.
Sometimes the city looks like one big ball of stress to me, said Gus. Whenever I
go there—and I try to avoid it if I can—I feel like a hundred strangers are whacking
me with sticks. No, I couldn’t live in the city, he said, but hats off to those who
can.

The whole time Gus was talking he was tapping the milk crate with his foot, this
way and that, nudging it into position. Bess seemed to know what was coming, a memory
somewhere deep in her genes, and she grew a little skittish. Cass said nothing, but
gave all her concentration to the hand stroking Bess’s neck. She was calming the
cow down, but also herself. Little by little Bess’s hooves stopped shuffling and
Cass’s excitement—where did that come from? what was its source?—began to subside.

All right, said Gus, sit down, let her get used to you first, I’ll get a bucket,
wait a sec. Cass sat on the milk crate, spread her knees and put her hands on Bess’s
side. Dale stood above her. Cass let him take in the picture of her like that, sitting
on the milk crate, her legs spread, her hands on the cow, before she looked up and
smiled. They smiled at each other, and both knew it was the kind of smile they’d
not felt in a very long time.

Gus put a blue plastic bucket under the cow. All right, he said, you’ve probably
seen how they do it in the movies—I mean, it’s not rocket science. You get a teat
in each hand, aim at the bucket, then squeeze and pull down. Cass did what Gus said.
That’s right, he said, squeeze and pull, keep going, it’ll start in a minute, I need
to get this other lot off the machine, keep going, it’ll start soon. Gus left them
there—Cass squeezing and pulling Bess’s teats, Dale watching—while he disconnected
the cows already milked, herded them out into the paddock and brought the new ones
in. Cass and Dale were left alone. The background sounds seemed to fade—the clatter
of hooves, the clanking of gates, the cows moaning, the machine humming, Gus whistling
and calling, the radio on the wire—until all Cass could hear were Bess’s hooves shifting,
her tail flapping, the squeezing, like when you wring your hands together, flesh
on flesh, her own breathing, and now, finally, the sound of a squirt of milk hitting
the bottom of the bucket.

It felt miraculous at first, then somehow ordinary. Once Bess had let the milk down—and
Cass could actually feel her relax—the milking seemed to manage itself. The tiniest
squeeze, the slightest movement of the wrist, and out shot the stream of white liquid.
Cass glanced up once at Dale and smiled—a girlish smile of the kind he’d not seen
since they were, in fact, boy and girl—then gave herself over to it. She leaned her
forehead against Bess’s side, for a while she even closed her eyes so she could listen
more closely to the sound as it now was of liquid squirting into liquid. She aimed
one teat slightly sideways so that it squirted at her hand. She did the same to the
other, so that now as she milked she felt the milk softening her skin, letting her
fingers slip easily up and down over the teats. This seemed to relax Bess even more.
The bucket now had a couple of centimetres of milk in the bottom, the squirting sound
had gone from high to low, the milk seemed to be pouring out of Bess with Cass barely
moving her hands.

That’s the way, said Gus, coming over. Look at you, you’re an old hand. And to Dale:
She looks like she’s been doing it for years. Good girl, he said, to Bess, stroking
her rump, good girl. Cass looked up at the farmer and in that moment Gus saw like
Dale not a woman but a girl. Good on you, he said, that’s a good litre or more there
now. Let me get you something to put it in.