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Authors: Craig Sherborne
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nursery-rhyme rhythm. Tiny three-house, one-pub Speed being my favourite, just for the irony.
Our congressing habits changed. Tilda suggested we shouldn’t do it without condoms, just in case: let’s face it, we were living in a van like the poor. It might be best to get settled before any baby.
‘Fine by me,’ I shrugged.
‘If we want we can have a break from doing it at all,’ she said.
I shrugged. ‘Okay.’
She sucked her lips into a pout. I didn’t know what the expression meant, whether she was relieved or disappointed. She’d felt unwell the last few days—a belly bug or bad Chinese. I expected the last thing she wanted was congressing stirring her up inside.
Then we found Scintilla.
Welcome ,it said on the outskirts. Every town says that, but Scintilla was different. It had three signs:
Welcome, we are a Tidy Town.
Welcome, our pop: 2,200.
Welcome, our motto is Grow! Grow! Grow!
The third sign included a logo: a wool bale, a gold nugget and cow horns, all wreathed in wheat sheaves.
The main street was one minute long if you drove at 35ks. On each side there was fancy iron lacework on the bigger verandahs; rusty tin roofs on the smaller. The largest verandahs were attached to hotels, six hotels, each open for business though business was slow: I counted only ten cars the whole town long. ‘It’s Tuesday,’ said Tilda. ‘Ten’s probably normal for 11.30 Tuesday morning.’
We bought a fish-and-chip lunch from the takeaway and asked the cook, ‘Is this a nice town?’ He had a foreign accent more like gargling than talking but we understood him to say, ‘In life you make your own nice.’
We ate walking along the town park’s crunchy figure-eight path. Tilda was so taken by the park she wanted to get out her ink and pens and capture it. ‘Don’t you love weeping willows?’ she chewed. ‘What lovely tall gums. This one’s a lemon-scented. There’s a plum tree. Jacarandas too. I love the way they’ve put lilies in the duck pond. It’s a well-kempt town, I’ll say that for it.’
Historic was how the road-guide literature described Scintilla. ‘Settled in 1883 it has much to offer the curious visitor. It has its own little museum with a nineteenth-century parasol collection, primitive Aboriginal tools and native animal skulls.’ We counted only three shops boarded up, which made it a boom town. It even had back streets for housing the down-at-heel, new cement-board homes behind a billboard reading Government Welfare Project.
A ridge of ironbarks and brown-blue bush ringed the town like a wild garden. Beyond it the wheat fields spread for miles without the slightest undulation. Tilda marvelled at the vista. ‘In spring you can just imagine the whole world swaying with wheat to the sky’s edge. And rapeseed too, with such bright yellow flowering.’
She extended her arm, the entire earth now her art gallery.
The Elders window had the usual shed-sized hovels for sale, and three-bedroom ‘older-style’ dumps needing guttering and a good going-over. But it had finer dwellings too. Places called ‘renovated’ and ‘mock-Colonial’ priced above the $50,000 range. That was proper money. This was indeed a prosperous township, just as the road guide said: ‘The hub in a cartwheel of districts blessed with the rich black soil you need for grain growing.’
In the top-left corner of the window, faded from being stuck up so long, was a photo of a grand-looking two-storey building. The Old Australian Rural Bank, Main Street location, $42,500 or nearest offer.
‘We’ve just walked past that place,’ said Tilda, pointing back the way we’d come. ‘It’s very big. It’s cheap for very big.’
Chapter 24
It was grand, all right. Tilda called it decadent. Decayed was more accurate, with its wall plaster falling out, floorboards rotten in places—your foot went through if you trod heavily. The ceilings bulged down from windstorm sand in the roof space. Doors were broken off and
Our congressing habits changed. Tilda suggested we shouldn’t do it without condoms, just in case: let’s face it, we were living in a van like the poor. It might be best to get settled before any baby.
‘Fine by me,’ I shrugged.
‘If we want we can have a break from doing it at all,’ she said.
I shrugged. ‘Okay.’
She sucked her lips into a pout. I didn’t know what the expression meant, whether she was relieved or disappointed. She’d felt unwell the last few days—a belly bug or bad Chinese. I expected the last thing she wanted was congressing stirring her up inside.
Then we found Scintilla.
Welcome ,it said on the outskirts. Every town says that, but Scintilla was different. It had three signs:
Welcome, we are a Tidy Town.
Welcome, our pop: 2,200.
Welcome, our motto is Grow! Grow! Grow!
The third sign included a logo: a wool bale, a gold nugget and cow horns, all wreathed in wheat sheaves.
The main street was one minute long if you drove at 35ks. On each side there was fancy iron lacework on the bigger verandahs; rusty tin roofs on the smaller. The largest verandahs were attached to hotels, six hotels, each open for business though business was slow: I counted only ten cars the whole town long. ‘It’s Tuesday,’ said Tilda. ‘Ten’s probably normal for 11.30 Tuesday morning.’
We bought a fish-and-chip lunch from the takeaway and asked the cook, ‘Is this a nice town?’ He had a foreign accent more like gargling than talking but we understood him to say, ‘In life you make your own nice.’
We ate walking along the town park’s crunchy figure-eight path. Tilda was so taken by the park she wanted to get out her ink and pens and capture it. ‘Don’t you love weeping willows?’ she chewed. ‘What lovely tall gums. This one’s a lemon-scented. There’s a plum tree. Jacarandas too. I love the way they’ve put lilies in the duck pond. It’s a well-kempt town, I’ll say that for it.’
Historic was how the road-guide literature described Scintilla. ‘Settled in 1883 it has much to offer the curious visitor. It has its own little museum with a nineteenth-century parasol collection, primitive Aboriginal tools and native animal skulls.’ We counted only three shops boarded up, which made it a boom town. It even had back streets for housing the down-at-heel, new cement-board homes behind a billboard reading Government Welfare Project.
A ridge of ironbarks and brown-blue bush ringed the town like a wild garden. Beyond it the wheat fields spread for miles without the slightest undulation. Tilda marvelled at the vista. ‘In spring you can just imagine the whole world swaying with wheat to the sky’s edge. And rapeseed too, with such bright yellow flowering.’
She extended her arm, the entire earth now her art gallery.
The Elders window had the usual shed-sized hovels for sale, and three-bedroom ‘older-style’ dumps needing guttering and a good going-over. But it had finer dwellings too. Places called ‘renovated’ and ‘mock-Colonial’ priced above the $50,000 range. That was proper money. This was indeed a prosperous township, just as the road guide said: ‘The hub in a cartwheel of districts blessed with the rich black soil you need for grain growing.’
In the top-left corner of the window, faded from being stuck up so long, was a photo of a grand-looking two-storey building. The Old Australian Rural Bank, Main Street location, $42,500 or nearest offer.
‘We’ve just walked past that place,’ said Tilda, pointing back the way we’d come. ‘It’s very big. It’s cheap for very big.’
Chapter 24
It was grand, all right. Tilda called it decadent. Decayed was more accurate, with its wall plaster falling out, floorboards rotten in places—your foot went through if you trod heavily. The ceilings bulged down from windstorm sand in the roof space. Doors were broken off and
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