Thirty Thousand Bottles of Wine and a Pig Called Helga Read online

  In many respects, Jeff and I were right back where we’d started almost a year previously, living in an unfinished villa (though this time it was one of the new sheds, which we named Barrington View) with no running water, no toilet and only a handful of electrical outlets. While the redundancy package would help us get this villa finished, we still needed the income from the house and Orchard View so we had no other choice but to live through the renovation. As winter 2015 approached we rugged up in three layers of clothing to keep ourselves warm.

  ‘Are you cold, Toddy?’ Jeff asked while we were watching a DVD.

  I breathed out vapour. ‘Is it normal for my balls to be sitting at the back of my throat?’

  *

  Jeff had developed a new love affair as he’d finalised the designs for the villas: recycling wooden fences. Jeff took the palings and nailed them wherever there was a spare wall, so he was constantly on the lookout for free palings. No wall on the property was safe from Jeff and his nails. If Leroy hadn’t moved for more than an hour I gave him a little shove just in case Jeff thought he’d look better dressed in recycled hardwood. If someone was pulling down a fence on any road we drove down, Jeff would swerve the car over and ask to remove their palings for them. There was an almost constant scouring of Gumtree and, if he made a find, the next day we’d be on our way to the other side of Newcastle in a hire truck to stack palings dumped in someone’s front yard, a new Colourbond fence gleaming behind us as we worked. According to Jeff, Colourbond was the outdoor equivalent of net curtains. Our friend Merv seemed to spend his spare time patrolling the streets of his suburb looking for palings for Jeff too – in fact, it felt like Jeff had a whole army of people on the lookout for fence palings. But then one day in spring Jeff found the mother lode. A guy in Singleton wanted someone to pull down an entire yard full of wooden fence.

  ‘He wants a quote,’ Jeff said like Darryl Kerrigan from The Castle.

  ‘I reckon a grand is fair,’ I offered.

  Jeff went off to make his call and returned a few minutes later. I was practically rubbing my hands together in his absence – that grand was sure going to come in handy for two destitute farmers.

  ‘The fence is ours,’ he said, all chipper and proud of himself.

  ‘Did you ask for a grand? Or more?’ I thought he might have been cheeky and try to hide a bit of cash from me just in case I hadn’t let go of the liposuction dream.

  ‘I didn’t . . . I told him we would remove it for free.’

  ‘Ha, ha, yeah, sure you did!’

  ‘I did, honestly. It’s just that we’re getting all those palings for free, it didn’t feel right to ask for money as well. Can you hire a truck for next week?’

  To say I was against doing it for free from the outset would be a little misleading. There were a lot of things I was prepared to do for free but chopping down some guy’s fence was not one of them. I hired the truck as requested, not even flinching at the two-hundred-dollar-per-day charge, nor the knowledge that I would need to put in about eighty dollars’ worth of diesel. We got to the guy’s yard and were shown the side gate.

  ‘There she is, fellas.’

  That was no suburban backyard, let me tell you. There must have been about five hundred metres of fencing. And no, it was no cricket pitch either. The backyard must have been at about a sixty-degree slope and it was bordered on three sides by dense bushland, lovely snake-hidey, thorn-wieldy, slippery-from-recent-rain bush. I took a deep breath. I couldn’t look at Jeff. I took another deep breath. I would not look at him for the rest of the day if I could help it.

  Within minutes it was obvious the two hammers we’d brought were not sufficient tools for the job. Jeff left me to dismantle the fence by hand and went to fetch himself a new chainsaw, and three new chainsaw blades. More money out of our thousand-dollar payment. Oh wait, that’s right! We weren’t getting paid . . . we were doing this for free.

  Sweat ran off me in torrents. My back broke in seven different places. My shorts ripped up the middle and I wasn’t wearing any underwear so had to tie a shirt around my waist. Jeff took more than two hours to return. I not only couldn’t look at him, I couldn’t bear the thought of him.

  We worked from 7am until sunset at 6pm. We hadn’t thought to bring sunscreen so I was burnt to a crisp.

  ‘Gee, we’ve got a lot done today,’ Jeff said as we drove home.

  By my calculations, we’d done barely a third and the worst terrain was yet to come.

  We returned the next day. And the next. And we finished the job after four days, two pairs of shorts, one thousand dollars in trunk rental, one hundred and thirty in diesel, forty in takeaway food, two hundred on a chainsaw and sixty for blades and, though we were yet to know it was coming, three hundred dollars in massages for my never-the-same-again back.

  ‘I really can’t believe we got all those palings for free!’ Jeff said, as if he’d just got all those palings for free. ‘Whenever you get the chance would you mind de-nailing them for me?’

  There were so many palings dumped at the back of our villa that you could not see over them from the back deck. I reckon the pile was three metres high and ten metres wide. We was hay-chewin’ country hicks with a junkyard to call home.

  I smiled through gritted teeth.

  The next day, the guy massaging me asked, ‘Have you damaged your right hand?’

  And don’t you know, four months after my arm wrestle with the counterweight at the back of the tractor my right hand was fifty per cent bigger than my left. It was puffed up like a pink rubber glove stuck to a schoolkid’s head to play Foghorn Leghorn in the Book Week parade. I’d got myself my very first farming battle scar.

  *

  As spring 2015 got into full swing to mark the beginning of another grape vintage, reviews for our 2014 wine started coming in. Miraculously, James Halliday in his industry bible The Wine Companion gave our Reserve Semillon 96 points and voted it one of the best twenty Semillons in the country! Our Shiraz was awarded 96 points too, and the Estate Semillon 93 points. To boot, our winery was awarded four and a half stars and marked as one to watch. So much for Jenny saying the Shiraz was shit quality! All three of those wines went on to win medals at local wine shows – we never sent the Chardonnay out for assessment because, given its rustic edge, the judges would have been unlikely to appreciate it – but on the back of our reviews I managed to sell the vast majority of the 2014 vintage to a selection of wholesalers and internet clubs that embraced our wine wholeheartedly (though at much lower margins than we would have ideally liked). Still it was income! And it was better than break even (though only slightly, Jeff kept reminding me), and we were beginning to establish a name for ourselves. It tasted like enormous success.

  Things at Block Eight stabilised to a degree after I’d left the corporate world and got used to being Jeff’s chief labourer. We’d worked out a division of chores and it surprised me just how much there was to do, and that Jeff had been doing it alone for so long while I commuted to work in the city. Massaging results for a weekly report was so damn easy compared to work that left your body feeling ravaged. While it was true we needed whatever money we could get, it was my turn to sit Jeff down and talk about actuals versus inflated profits . . . when we took into account fuel, travelling time, lunch and other ancillary costs, Jeff’s Newcastle job simply wasn’t worth it. He was much better off staying put on the property as another full-time resource to help get our next villa finished as fast as we could. The longer those villas sat unopened, the longer we went without money and it made no sense at all to me that we should delay a good income in favour of a much paltrier amount in the interim.

  ‘Get excited, Jeffy,’ I said, ‘we’re about to live, work and sleep together. It’s going to be 24/7, 365-day madness and you’re going to love every single second of it! Nobody’s spent this much time with me since I was in Mum’s womb – and at least she had beer and cigarettes to get her through!’

  The Arrival of Rodney and Bou
logne

  If financial stresses and bloody hard work weren’t enough to fill our days, I’d been toying with the idea of expanding our menagerie. You know, just for something extra to do. We had the chooks, of course, but they weren’t much of a challenge – though chasing one if it jumped the fence was never a pleasure!

  I had long respected farmers who employed a nose-to-tail philosophy when it came to rearing livestock. If an animal was to die for our eating pleasure then the very least we could do to honour that sacrifice was to make use of every conceivable piece of meat the animal provided. The idea was really cemented one night when I took Cheryl to a funky little alleyway restaurant I’d discovered called Berta. Never listen to Cheryl when she tells you she discovered it first; according to her she’s been to every single restaurant in the world before you have. At Berta they were hosting a special menu, a pork fest – every dish included some part of their hand-raised pig, including dessert. While accommodation was always going to be our primary income source, I also thought it’d be challenging and rewarding to share our own nose-to-tail approach with the world. This had prompted my initial desire for pigs – to breed them for meat.

  Each year, our friend Sheena visited us from the UK and while she was in Australia on business in July 2015, I told her I’d been toying with the idea of getting some pigs.

  ‘I never knew you wanted pigs,’ she said, as we sat sharing a bottle of wine. ‘I think we should go and get one tomorrow, and I’d like to pay for it.’

  Sometimes an actual conversation forced our hands. Over the years we’d shared about a gazillion ideas for Block Eight and few of them had actually stuck. My friend Scott wanted to install a horizontal bungee ride, for example, and we’d toyed with building hidden gardens, a wedding venue, kilometres of raised boardwalks for bushwalking, kangaroo-spotting safaris for foreign tourists, a caper farm (the vegetable, not a circus car full of clowns), a writer’s retreat, a writer’s festival, a monkey sanctuary (I’d even forego liposuction if I had enough money for that), a water theme-park, a corporate obstacle course, a cactus garden, a pomegranate farm, a small concert venue, an outdoor cinema . . . I could seriously fill this whole book with the ideas we’ve floated at one time or another. So sure, I’d mentioned I wanted pigs, but did I really want them right now?

  ‘We’re not ready for a pig yet, we haven’t prepared, we haven’t done our research . . .’ and the list of reasons (excuses) not to get one went on and on, but Sheena wasn’t so easily dissuaded and she insisted on paying for our first real farm animal.

  Over more wine, lots of internet research and classifieds browsing (and a new drunken song ‘Everybody’s talking ’bout my piggy, ’bout my piggy . . .’), a plan was hatched to get a pig the following day from a family raising them in Kurri Kurri, only about thirty minutes from us. A sow. One. Female. Pig. That was the carefully considered plan.

  We got to the pig farm full of excitement.

  ‘So you’re here for just one sow, are you?’ the farmer asked us.

  ‘Yep!’ I said confidently.

  Her face dropped and she shook her head. ‘Oh that’s such a shame, that is. You know, it’s always much easier to sell the females. It’s the males we have problems getting rid of. Nobody ever wants them.’

  ‘What happens to them?’ Sheena asked and had she been looking at me she would have seen me waving frantically to not ask the question.

  ‘Hmm,’ the farmer said grimly. ‘Hmm. Well they . . . people just . . . you know, eat them. They get slaughtered at about three months, so in a few more weeks for this lot,’ and here she motioned to the adorable little piglets running around the pen and more suckling away at their mother’s teat.

  ‘What, no one wants a boy?’ I asked incredulously.

  ‘Hmm . . . Hmm . . .’ she said again. ‘And we’ve got so many of them too. Just last week we found one had drowned in the water trough so at least he died that way. Anyway, Jimmy,’ she called her son over, ‘these nice folk are here for a sow so would you jump in and grab them one?’

  The boy, about ten, climbed over the fence and into the pigpen. As if they knew exactly what was to come the piglets ran about frantically squealing and the mother grunted out of fear and desperation: please don’t take one of my babies.

  ‘Which one do you want?’ the boy asked.

  ‘That one there,’ I said, pointing to a little dark brown one.

  The kid picked up the piglet and it squealed harrowingly, its pitch piercing my ears. The mother pig grunted pleadingly. ‘It’s a boy,’ he said with a shrug and threw the piglet back down on the ground.

  ‘What about that one?’ I pointed to a tiny caramel and white one.

  ‘That’s the runt,’ the woman said over my shoulder, ‘Don’t get that one Jimmy, he’s a boy and he’s weak and we’ll have to send that off next week anyway.’

  ‘I’ll take it!’ I yelled desperately. ‘That one! The runt! Get that one for me Jimmy! Thank you!’

  Jimmy reefed the caramel one off its mum’s teat and piglet cries again pierced the air. He threw it into Leroy’s cat carrier that we’d brought for the purpose and quickly zipped up the flyscreen. The sow grunted and searched about her pen, looking everywhere for her missing baby, hearing its cries.

  ‘Hmm . . . hmm . . .’ the woman muttered.

  Here we fucking go! I thought.

  ‘You took the runt,’ she said, her mouth turned down. ‘He’s small for his age and he’ll struggle so you’ll need to keep a close eye on him because he’ll get very cold and lonely. They like to snuggle, those runts . . .’

  ‘Jimmy, give me that one too! That brown one you first picked up! Put him in the carrier too, please Jimmy!’ I barely even remember saying the words.

  The boys, my boys, were squealing with so much terror and fear inside the cat carrier that I really needed to get out of there. I could see Jeff and Sheena were distressed too. I just needed to bring those piglets home and show them they would be safe and well-cared-for by us. The squealing of the piglets was shattering and the frets of their mother heartbreaking. This Clarice really wanted the frigging silencing of the lambs, thank you Dr Lecter. I may as well have been in an abattoir. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for the practicalities of animal-rearing when my heart constantly overrules my head. I wanted to rescue all those piglets from their uncertain futures – and take their mother with me as well.

  ‘What the fuck happened there?’ Jeff asked as he turned the key in the car’s ignition.

  ‘Just drive, Jeff, please. Let’s just get out of here.’

  In the rush to evacuate, and using Sheena’s money, I accidentally paid the higher female price instead of the male, but that didn’t really matter. It was only the first mistake of many when it came to those two lovely little piggies.

  The bigger, more outgoing piglet I named Rodney just as Uncle Rod wanted, and his little stripy runt of a brother was christened Boulogne, later shortened to ‘Billy’ by Jeff’s mum, Millie, when she returned for another visit. With no time to build them their own pen, Billy and Rodney moved in with the chooks.

  They were so small they could squeeze into the tiny space beneath the chookhouse, just twenty centimetres high. They were clearly scared to be away from their mother but at least they had each other and they enjoyed chasing the chooks around. Almost immediately I realised there was no chance I was capable of sending a piglet away for slaughter. Even though we had two boys, I tried to convince myself that the next step would be to get a female and start mating them right away but looking into their inquisitive, intelligent and human-like sensitive eyes, I could no sooner eat their youngsters, I realised, than cut off their heads myself.

  Pigs have a very particular scent. The only way I can describe it is like sweet plasticine. It’s earthy and kind of rubbery and if you happen to get your nose close to the back of their ears, that’s where the real essence lies. The boys’ urine also had quite a distinct odour, a sour, yeasty kind of smell. It is the exact smell of a cooked
pork bone and from the day I connected the two, I could no longer bring myself to eat any cut of pork on the bone. Raising a fork of that meat towards my mouth would inevitably evoke the trusting eyes of my innocent little pigs.

  While it was great they had each other for company, I didn’t then realise that getting two male pigs from the same litter would have two significant repercussions in the future: they would never be close to me and inherently lack respect and a sense of hierarchy (kind of like most of the people who ever worked for me, come to think of it), and there would forever be a sibling rivalry between them; the need for one (Rodney) to show continual dominance over the other – just as my eldest brother Grant would always remind me that he was the first in our family to get published – with his poem ‘The Hitman’, about footballer Brian Battese, being printed in Rugby League Week under his pseudonym Jeff Hunt. (I asked him if I could reproduce it here so the world could marvel at his literary prowess, but for some reason he declined.)

  When pigs are small they are as playful, malleable and delightful as a pet dog. They play chasings, jump up on you, wrestle with you and give you lots of licks and sniffs. If you take them for walks they will stay by your side, more or less, and never let you out of their sight. When they’re small you find yourself (well, I found myself, at least) cutting various fruits and vegetables into bite-sized chunks and their faeces and urine are in such small quantities that you barely have to worry about cleaning up after them.