The Piano

The Piano

         "We can't do it June. We don’t have enough money."
         “I know that Bill. I'm just saying is all."
         "Well there's no point in bringing it up if we can't afford it, don't be stupid."
         "Bill? I can dream can't I?"
         "You can do whatever you want, I just get sick of hearing about it that’s all. What's the point of bringing it up if we can't do anything about it? I'd like a boat and trailer so I could go fishing but you don't hear me complaining about it…"
         "I wasn't complaining."
         "…because if you can't afford something then you can't bloody afford it so what's the point in talking about it? The only spare cash we've got is for my bloody knee and that wouldn't even cover the deposit."
         "Alright Bill."
         Silence.
         "What? Do you want me to bloody hobble around till I die? A man can't even get a fucking knee operation now."
         ‘Here we go again,’ thought June. ‘Melodramatic Bill, putting words into my mouth. Sometimes you can't even talk to the bastard. It's not worth mentioning anything even for the sake of conversation. And there's nobody else to talk to living out here on our own. It's times like these I wish we had kids.’

         Bill was sitting in the armchair with a book in his hands and his feet propped up. June stood in the doorway to his left. Bill wasn't even looking at her; his eyes were still focused on the book. That was the problem, trying to talk to him while his attention was elsewhere. He hated being interrupted, even when he was only reading a TV schedule or just picking his bloody toenails. After twenty years he hadn't changed. June should have known better.
         ‘Should have known better?’ she thought. ‘Fuck him the self-absorbed bastard. The least he could do is give me one minute of his attention. When he wants to talk every body else has to listen. I know we can't afford it, I was just saying that it would be nice if we could.’
         June sighed, stood there for a bit, and then went to dauble with her paints before going to bed.

         ‘Bloody hell,’ thought Bill. ‘I can't even read a book in peace without being hassled about something.’ He furrowed his brow, set his mouth in a frown and tried to concentrate on his book.
         ‘It's not my fault we haven't got any bloody money.’ He looked over the open pages, trying to find where he was up to. ‘I know she wasn't having a go at me. I know she was just mentioning it in passing but you'd think she'd know not to. She knows it pisses me off being reminded about what we can't have.’ Bill sighed.
         ‘She only wanted to natter for a bit I 'spose. There's not much else to do out here on our own. If we lived in town she could visit someone but we don’t bloody live in town.’ He sighed again and shifted in his chair.
         ‘She can't keep quiet. Should have had bloody kids I 'spose. Never bloody wanted 'em though and June never forced the issue. Shit I was always available for breeding, she only had to say don't use a condom and I wouldn't have. Anyway we know all that and it was our decision not to breed.’
         Bill looked for his place in the book but his mind kept wandering to thoughts of sex. He sighed and tried to ignore his dick hardening in his pants. He reached down with one hand to move it to a more comfortable position and then tried again to focus on his book.
         ‘Where is she now? Gone to sulk in her room I guess.’ Bill sighed, put down the book and stood up. ‘That’s not right, as usual I'm the bloody one sulking,’ he thought, as he wandered into the kitchen and looked in the fridge. He shut the fridge door and moved to the cupboards above the bench. He had built them when they first moved in. He noticed that she had sanded them back ready for a new coat of paint, something he kept telling her that he would do later, tomorrow or another day. ‘And she's scrubbed the bloody floor too,’ he thought to himself. Bill sighed and opened the cupboard. ‘I'm a bastard sometimes.’ He shut the cupboard door and wandered outside.
         There were no clouds, which gave the autumn night a fresh chill. He walked past the timber dunny he'd built and looked up at the Milky Way. He unzipped and pissed on the lawn, as he wondered at the coruscating beauty above. Even knowing most of the constellations, the night sky always seemed slightly different each time he looked. Without street lighting to interfere with the orbit, subtleties unseen before were exposed each cloudless night. In town, on a good night, you could only see the brightest stars. Out here, when it was clear, there was always an area of sky that looked new, as though the stars were arranged in a slightly different pattern than the last time you looked. You could see right past the major constellations to little faraway dots of light and clouds of gas.
         “Fucking beautiful. Bloody knees feeling the cold though,” he muttered. Bill lifted his leg, stretched it, and then did it again before wandering back inside.

         Welcome to Condamine. Population 10,500. ‘Ten thousand five hundred boring dicks,’ thought Bill, as he drove past the sign in his ute. He was on his way to the doctors to discuss his knee operation.
         As he approached the edge of town he passed the chainsaw and small motor repair service on his right. Next was the ride on mower store, followed by a small paddock, then the John Deere dealer, a line of houses and a milk bar. To his left were paddocks full of shit and weeds, with cattle on some and earth moving equipment on others.
         As he kept going he passed a block of houses; a Caltex; a bottle shop; a couple more blocks of houses; a motorbike, lawn mower and chainsaw dealer; Repco; a corner pub; and then he turned right at the roundabout and went up the main drag, past the bank where his mate Tim Mahoney now worked as a teller.

         Every time he passed the bank he laughed at the thought of Tim handling all that cash. Bill was the one who had done the extra time when he refused to dob in his mate all those years ago. By saving him from a conviction Bill had probably helped him to get that bank job. “Bastard owes me two favours then”, he muttered to himself.
         He drove past the new Harvey Norman store, where a painted ad in three-foot high lettering said, No Deposit and No Interest for Twelve Months. Further down the street he could see Ray Wallis’ furniture store with the same proclamation on his window. “Good bloody luck Ray,” he muttered. Ray had been there for eighteen years and was now trying to fight fire with fire. Bill parked his ute near the surgery and clumped inside.

         The piano was blocking the hall and the doorway into the room they called June’s studio. She was thrilled. A piano in the house was the last thing she expected to see. Bill wasn’t home. He had taken the ute to the forest to cut firewood for the coming winter, and now two blokes, one at either end, were trying to manoeuvre a piano into her studio.
         They had to negotiate what was a common design flaw in many houses, one of those particularly tight and awkward turning spaces, that required the use of all its adjacent doorways, to shunt and coax heavy, odd shaped pieces through.
         “Don’t worry, we’ve never been stuck yet,” said the short blond fella in jeans and flanny. The taller bloke, wearing all green King Gee, was measuring the doorway with a tape measure. “Yeah that’s right,” he smiled, agreeing with his shorter mate. “The tape says it’ll fit so we’ll make it fit. Try tilting it that way a bit Gary. Hang on, back it out a bit first.” They pulled and pushed a little, tilted it up one end and tried to drag it through. “Nup. Stop. Looks like it’s putting too much stress on the castors this end mate. Umm…”
         The angles were tight and June thought it wouldn't fit. The boys laughed and said no, they would get it in there one way or another. And they did. They had to take it right out of the house so they could turn it around, then bring it back in, back it halfway through the living room door opposite, tilt it onto its edge, and then squeeze it carefully around the corner into her studio. They put it against the east wall next to the window, right where June said to.
         “Well done”.
         “No worries. I told you we’d get it in,” Gary said with a smile, thinking what a pain in the bum that was. June thanked them and the boys left.

         Later on, Bill came home with a load of wood under a groaning chassis.
         June looked up when she heard him say from her doorway, “shit that was quick. I didn’t expect it till after the weekend”. He was standing, stiff legged, flushed and sweaty, from cutting and hauling wood, with a stupid grin on his face. ‘You cheeky bastard,’ thought June.
         “How did we get it, we can’t afford this? What have you been up to?”
         “Ah, don’t you worry about that my dear, everything’s under control.”
         “That’s what I’m worried about.”
         ”Don’t worry, you’ve got your piano.”
         “Yes I have,” she jumped up and hugged him, breathing in the smell of cut gum and dirt.
         “I just don’t get you Bill, you’re an enigma. I don’t want you to permanently wreck your knee though, or get into any other trouble. We can’t afford this can we?” she questioned him.
         “Don’t worry alright,” he reproached. He was getting that irritated look. June decided to keep quiet.
         “Thanks Bill,” is all she said.
         What she wanted to say was: 'don’t get put back inside for a stupid piano, just get ya knee fixed and keep workin’. I’ll be able to save for a piano myself. And if not? Well I can keep living without one, but I can’t live without you Bill. The looks of pity and disdain in town I can handle and I’m used to ignoring idle gossip, but the loneliness Bill! I don’t want to be alone again.' But she didn’t say that to him.
         She went outside to dig over the old veggie patch so it could rest and the soil rejuvenate by spring. She wanted to get an early start on the winter crops too.
         While she used the hoe to rake and dig she could here the sounds of a hammer and saw coming from the house. ‘What’s he doing now?’ she wondered. ‘Making alterations to the piano? I don’t even want to know.’ June sighed and continued hoeing.

         It was now springtime and Bill was standing in the kitchen marvelling at all the vegies in the fridge and on the kitchen table. “June sure knows how to grow ‘em, I‘ll give her that,” he said to himself.
         Coarse words, sworn with bemusement and rising frustration, floated down the hallway and into the kitchen. ‘It’s been twenty-five minutes and they still don't know what I've done,’ Bill thought. He chuckled to himself as he pulled up a chair by the faded pink, laminex table and sat down.
         ‘Look at the length of those zucchinis and how many there are!’ he thought with glee. ‘You could build a picket fence out of ‘em, a green wobbly wavy fence, heh, heh.’ Bill hadn’t felt this good for a long time. ‘There’s enough here to swap for some of Shirl’s pears,’ he thought and then he said, “mmmmm… peaarrrs” in his best Homer voice.
         “Shit Gary! You’re jambing my hand!” echoed down the hall.
         ‘Ha,ha,har.’ Bill’s countenance grew merrier with each curse.
         Outside her studio, as Gary finished measuring the doorway for the umpteenth and last time, June thought to herself for the umpteenth time that Bill was pretty good with his hands. The removalists were trying to recover the piano they had delivered on what Bill called his ‘No Deposit and No Payments’ plan.
         After half an hour Gary still hadn’t noticed that the doorways had shrunk by thirty millimetres, which left just enough space to squeeze the piano halfway through the door, but not enough room to turn it out into the hallway.

         Bill caressed a red heap, searching out the juiciest capsicum he could find. ‘Awesome veg, it’s gotta be June’s love and the fresh country air.’ He pondered this while he stroked the curves and russets of the rosy fruit. As he did so, he was accompanied by the reverb of a piano dropping onto its castors for the last time, settling back into its position by the window on the east wall.