Start where you are – by Jenny Sinclair
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Start where you are, Uncle Vance says. Said.
The which I never, you know, got before, even though I’d heard it seven thousand, nine hundred and fifty-two times.
Start where you are, he said, when I had to change schools that time because of nothing I did wrong. It was Luke and his fighting, but Mum couldn’t do two schools in opposite directions, could she? So I started – all over again.
Start where you are, he said, when I got my first job and the pay was shit and they docked me for breaking a glass. So I did, with ten bucks a week shoved down my bra to make up the difference, and two years later I had a deposit on this car.
Start where you are, he’d say, standing in the shed looking over the latest bit of hard-rubbish-garage-sale-clearance-auction-neighbour’s-spring-clean junk he’d dragged home. And half the time that meant months of clanking and drilling and painting and a successful sale on eBay at a $20 profit, and the other half it meant the thing – farm machinery, kitchen dresser, entire car – migrated to the hayshed, then out the back of the block under a tarp that the weather shredded off it day by day.
He’d even say it about the housework on those rare spring or autumn days when it wasn’t too cold or too hot to open the doors and windows and Mum was out of bed and we’d stand back and take a good hard look at the place in daylight and Mum’d want to go for a walk instead but Vance would pick up a pile of newspapers or start wandering around the house collecting dishes or dirty socks and for a few days afterwards the house would look almost normal.
Vance wasn’t my uncle. He was Mum’s uncle, which I guess made him more like my grandfather. But he was only ten years older than her and she was 19 when she had Luke, 20 with me, so sort of a second dad? But to have a second dad, you’d need a first?
Anyway, it’s Vance’s voice more than Mum’s I hear in my head, probably because he talked a lot more than she did. Donkey; hind leg; walk afterwards.
Jesus, you know, that reminds me of this story he used to tell about a donkey he had. It was sick, vet had no idea and the tests cost too much. Got so sick it wouldn’t get up. So Vance got Ken, who owed him a favour, to dig a hole down the back near where it was lying. You know what for. So did the donkey. As soon as Ken drove out the gate, the donkey stood up again, Vance said, and walked right up the other end of the paddock.
I’d believe it, too. He still had that donkey when we moved in. First thing I remember about arriving was the dogs yap yap yapping and the donkey’s fat whiskered nose and its snuffly hay breath. Funny but I can’t remember when the donkey left. Anyway, it’s gone now.
Sometimes when I talk to people I can hear Vance’s voice coming out of my mouth. The things he said. The little pauses. To check they’re listening.
He got old fast. Smoking too much – both kinds – working in the sun, drinking in the sun. Hay carting, roo shooting, shearing, fencing, digger operating. Drug cultivation and dealing of course, but he wasn’t serious about that and the small fish don’t get the big bucks.
And properties like his cost money to run. Taxes, supplies, fuel. Every now and again he’d get ahead and fix the ute or whack up a few solar panels, then a dog’d get sick or Mum’d need surgery and back to square one.
I don’t blame him there’s no money. Never owed me anything. Gave me everything he could. I know he loved that place like a woman; never happier than walking around the boundary, poking along the creek, hauling bits of rusty fucking stuff from one corner to another. Sometimes I think he only smoked so he could sit out the back on the Falcon bench seat every night and watch the sun set over the hill.
See, Vance wasn’t trash. He might’ve looked it if you drove past on your way from Melbourne to the Airbnb or whatever: always at least three dogs lying about, roof rusting, grass growing up around the cars in the drive. But he appreciated beauty: the uncoiling of a fern frond in the soak under the basalt outcrop near the creek; the way the cypress windbreak he planted the year I was born grew straight and all the trees exactly the same height like they knew what to do; the skill needed to send a newly shorn fleece flying through the air half-twisted so it would fall flat on the classing table; the slow shifting of the sunset from north to south again over the hill as the year rolled round.
Not just any hill, he’d tell me. A 100% genuine volcano, round and smooth as a baby’s bottom, green and innocent looking. But only a few thousand years ago it was spitting fire, and he said he’d heard stories from shearers who said their grandpas or uncles were Aboriginal, about the volcanoes around here throwing rocks at each other in fights over something or other.
The hill isn’t on our land, but; it’s grazing land. Someone over the back owns it. Some rich squatter.
They’ll probably buy his land too, now. It’s up for sale, or will be. They’ll have to clear off the car bodies and the chook run and it’ll be lineball if they do up the house for an Airbnb or bulldoze it, I reckon.
I won’t see it. Nor will Vance, but he’ll be there.
Can’t say I won’t miss the place, but it never was mine like it was his, and the old fucker didn’t write a will, and the rates, apparently, hadn’t been paid in 20 years, along with some other matters I can’t get my head around. Can’t abide paperwork, it’s never been my strong point, so here I am, in the car, with the very last dog and Vance’s box of treasures, which is locked and will probably turn out to contain either really fucking rare coins worth squillions or bad love poetry from when he was 15.
I thought about bringing Vance with me: woke up yesterday with this picture in my head – me driving, my hair flying red like a flag in the wind from the open window, Buster sitting up front, tongue hanging out, and Vance like a black-and-white photo in the passenger seat, long beard and shaggy hair and op shop suit jacket and all.
But nah. He’d hate it out there. So I got out the shovel and found the soft spot where Ken dug the hole for the donkey and got to work. It’s a bloody deep hole and now it has 25 packing crates, an EJ Holden and a dozen boxes of jars pretty much full of redback spiders on top of it. It’ll be a while till they get to clearing that, and no reason at all to dig there.
I give it a few weeks before anyone comes looking for him; six months before they give up; a year after that before the council’s lawyers finish taking the land off the estate.
Least I could do for him. Thanks to Vance I’ll never smoke a single cancer stick, I can change a tyre and pull a beer, and even doing 110 up the Hume at dawn I know two things: where I am, and where to start. ▼
Image: Christopher Windus - Unsplash
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