by Bruce Pascoe
And so, some time later, when my favourite aunt invited me to watch two entire André Rieu concerts on a double DVD Easter special, I swallowed my pride and did as I was bid. Yes, I did as I was bid.
I loved my aunt – loved her for her goodness and wicked humour and because I couldn’t look at her without remembering my father and how they used to clown in pantomime together. So at what point did she lose Roy Rene and Groucho Marx and find André Rieu?
I was struggling with my face. My eyes were trying to snuggle up in my beard and then I heard, I love him, I love him, I love him, and where he goes …
Wide awake, eyes rescued from the thickets, staring at the screen, confused by the reluctant resurrection from sleep and panicked by my cue music. André Bloody Rieu.
I survived the double DVD. Only just. Touch and go. Heroic.
I was named to honour my uncle who died in the Coral Sea so that General McArthur could return. I measured my valour in surviving the strings against my uncle’s drowning beneath a toppled refrigerator. I thought I was in the same tent. But I would only win the Pacific Star because I loved my aunt.
And then it was a stream of cousins and children of cousins because vaudeville aunt had died. Only so often you can trapeze without the safety net.
It’s a lie about the stream of cousins because there were several childless aunts, she being one of them, too busy in the footlights, and there was my uncle underneath the frij in the Coral Sea so that General Mc …
They’d burnt her into dust because that’s what she wanted, a bit of flame and smoke, a bit of theatre, good lights, props.
I loved her, so I stood up and said I loved her and told the story of the big family who lived in a shoe and their mother who didn’t know what to do. Perhaps because she knew she was a bit black. Or maybe she didn’t; maybe I just expected her to activate curiosity. But she probably thought the world wasn’t ready for slapstick magic. She was right.
Uncle was crying, as he should, because he loved the clown aunt with all his soul, and like his beloved’s mother didn’t know what to do.
And after all the PowerPoint of my aunt in pantomime drag – drover, Mother Christmas, Easter bunny, showgirl, Peter Pan – I was in tears and desperately trying to repair myself in time to help my cousin from the pew because she’d developed a crook knee somewhere in the last thirty years. I was flicking tears off my cheeks as if combing a troublesome beard, but a beard never really gives trouble, except to those who have to look at bread and soup trapped in its maze.
I was thinking, Lift cousin Judy by the elbow, amazing that no one thought to call a son Punch, and ease her around …
And there it was: the music. André Bloody Rieu. They were going to finish with André. I was expected to guide a toppling cousin as a thousand strings shrieked and a million voices yodelled, I love him, I love him, I love him …
Funny woman, my aunt. Saved the best joke for the end.
DAWN
You are perfect for this story. I will never meet you.
When I wake at night I am almost always turned to the right, turned to the night, a great field of stars before me. At this time of the year there is Corona Australis and another constellation arranged in a deep V. I don’t know its name. I could look up what the Greeks or British decided to call it but I am neither Greek nor British, so I am happy to watch it rise away from me until, on my last observation, just before dawn, it has gone.
Yambulla rests his jaw on the bed and begs me to acknowledge that it is almost a new day and he is here. I rub the skin and fur of his eyebrows, jaw and ears to feel the bone beneath. This tells us that we are both alive and he can return to his bed until the sun has truly risen.
I turn away from the sky to watch her. She is just a nest of hair, a gorgeous silver scramble. The cover is drawn up so far as to hide her almost completely. I sneak the cover down so I can see her sleeping eyes. She murmurs, so I stop and watch. Her hair never went grey but sedately transmuted into a silver-gold. I lift a strand away from her eyes and she murmurs again, so again I watch and wait like a thief.
She moves, curving in closer to my chest. I feel her breast slip against me. Do you see why I am telling you this? It would be impossible to tell anyone else. Something deep within me caves as if a vacuum has been created every time I feel the slip of that sensuous weight.
When she makes the small animal alignments to bring her flesh more roundly to mine I restrain the doona so that it slips from her shoulder. She murmurs an objection. Always. But as always I put my hand there to cup the round of her shoulder, and she sighs, satisfied by the return of warmth. Her breath is warm and bodily.
I can see her throat now, and her lips, and if I am careful I can pass a hand across her brow and she will allow it, turn her face to the plane of my hand. This is illicit, salacious. I might look at her lips in the beige light of creeping dawn, but I cannot touch. One finger there and she will squirm and bring an irritated hand to her mouth, rubbing fractiously. I must not touch if my sin is to advance. I can look and linger, but that is all.
Her cheekbone is high and beautiful. My finger can ride that blade and a smile might crimp the edges of her lips. That is permitted so long as I return to the shoulder frequently enough to keep it warm. Otherwise she will draw the covers over herself and it will be over. Carefully, slowly, indecently, is the rule.
The wattlebirds have heard the kookaburra and so it is deemed to be dawn. The nightjar might be allowed one or two more freakish ululations, but the night heron leaves after one final kwok. The frog in the ferns has more loosely defined rules and will continue at his leisure or pleasure. It’s hard to know about frogs, especially those so ridiculously named as the pobblebonk.
But in this light, a pinkish yellow like a new peach where it is caught by the sun, I can clearly see the skin of her face, and I don’t know when I first noticed the new splashes of colour. They are uneven blurs, the colour of spilt tea on a napkin. She is tawny beneath my fingers. I press with the ball of muscle above my thumb and she mumbles, reassured. I may continue to stroke and smooth and stare.
I might slide a curved hand over her shoulder and down the gorgeous rise of her arm, and this action can cause the cover to slip a fraction and reveal the wonderful bulb of her breast. She would allow me to slip my fingers beneath it and cup, but then it would be over. The grey eyes would flick open and she would smile, but it would be over. Too soon.
I bring the doona higher on her shoulder and she turns into its warmth, murmuring again, but I wait until the breath puffs evenly from her lips in this sleep so girlishly simple.
I may let a finger slide into the cup below the shoulder blade and smooth the skin as it rises to her throat. I am allowed many liberties, but I must not touch the piece of bone that now lies across the rest of the blade where Mrs Whitlam broke it. Mrs Whitlam is a horse. Big and brave and beautiful, but scared of sudden wallabies and suspicious fence posts. Makes her shy.
So don’t touch that bone. It would be over. She presses in closer to me and her breasts slide heavily against me. A thigh rises over mine and she squirms again, adjusting, moulding herself to me, fidgeting this limb and that, this foot against that, settling. It is not over yet. Her breath puffs evenly and I can see her lips pout at each slight eruption of air that forces between them. This is something only a wanton boy would admit to watching.
The lyrebird thinks that it is now time. To sing. Other people’s songs. The silver-blonde woman is responsive to the bird and she opens her eyes, as grey and warm as the breast of a shrike-thrush, and asks me for the time. Not to know the time, but to know if she has another half-hour. I tell her whatever time it is that would assure her she has another half-hour to sleep, to merge. Her arm circles my waist and she presses her face to my neck. It is scandalous, the liberties I take with the truth to ensure this happens.
Now I can stroke her more boldly, rub the skin of her forehead, smoothing the wrinkles there. This is a beautifully moulded bone, and tawny
with the new dabs of fawn.
I do not cry at my good fortune. I am used to it. Resigned. To the glory of her.
I draw a finger across the rise of her cheek, and at this late hour may smooth a line to the corner of her mouth. My hand slips down and cups her breast. The brow creases but I am out of control and caress the curve of her waist and the sweep where it careens across the smooth arch of her hip.
I remember the night before, when we watched a film. She was wearing shorts and she swung her legs imperiously into my lap. No words. It was expected I would stroke her feet. Some buckled toes, a craggy nail or two, but smooth, curved feet, strokeable feet. Yambulla grunted and moved to the end of the couch, resigned to the fact that all the affection tonight would be for her, not him.
And I found myself holding the long, loose muscle of her calf and then releasing, to let it fall into the curve of my palm. I couldn’t remember doing this before, but it was delicious. Another illicit activity to savour. In this golden light my hand rests on the outside of her thigh, remembering the gentle slap of that calf muscle but unable to reach it now without terminal ruction of the dawn ceremony. The hand muses there, thrall to memory.
Now that the wattlebird is catcher-catcher-catchering and the wonga pigeons are ratcheting around on the verandah like clockwork toys, it is truly day, and she stirs and flings the doona from her, rising on one elbow to survey the day, and I am finally, corruptly, allowed her full survey. She will permit me to press my face into her breasts, though not to take the nipple between my lips. Too early. Too licentious. But I do allow my hand the full liberty of swimming across her body, her curves, and finally to joggle to that calf muscle, to feel the loose slap of it.
So there you are, stranger; it is dawn and you are the only person who will hear this story, for it is forbidden. Witness this slow dawn service.
HERE IS A STORY I’D LIKE YOU TO TELL TO THAT OLD MAN
Here is a story I’d like you to tell to that old man.
One day I cleaned a fish at the jetty on the Jinnoor River (Genoa if you believe white men) and I looked around for my brother the pelican, but he must have been fishing somewhere else or snoozing on a tree trunk washed up by the last flood.
It wasn’t a big flood, but because there hadn’t been one for over a year there was plenty of fallen timber to wash into the stream and deposit on a sandbank.
He might be camped on one of those limed limbs, his beak swivelled over his shoulder and tucked into the feathers of his back. We are a similar age, the two of us, and he sees us as cousins, and if I’m drinking beer on the jetty at dusk he will often land on the old timber deck and walk up to me, speaking in his guttural way and settling beside me.
He’s not looking for food because he knows I fish at dawn, and at this hour I rarely have rods or nets. No, he’s not completely craven, he’s simply after conversation and companionship with an equal, although the idea of equality may be mine. I talk to Karoongooba in the old language about the beauty of the sunset and the day’s activity along the river. His eye, rimmed with a cere exactly the same colour as a vibrant yolk, hardly leaves my face when I speak and mine, even more rarely, leaves his.
But on this day he was somewhere else, dozing on a sandbar like an old marooned galleon awaiting the ship breakers, or perhaps his family of five were engaged in a tactical fishing operation with the little black cormorants. I imagined them working in strategic synchrony. Napoleon would have admired the inevitability of their success.
One day last autumn I was looking for orchids with my wife. We left the boat tied to a log and climbed the ridge to find the spider orchids that grow in the shallow, shaley soil on its crest. As we returned to the boat a small armada of pelicans landed at the entrance of the muddy inlet and sailed serenely into the embayment. There was nothing casual about their deliberation.
They fanned out in a line fifteen metres apart, and when fifty metres from the far bank, they waited and took up position like a platoon of panzers. Karoongooba, the pelican, looked at me briefly as if to say, Watch this, and then he tilted his head to look at the sky before turning his attention back to the far shore.
Suddenly there was a noise like a hundred scarves being waved. It wasn’t loud but you noticed it because it was so distinctive, and it got closer and closer, and then a squadron of the little black cormorants veered into the bay in tight formation perhaps ten metres from the surface. It surprised us because they were almost at our eye level as we climbed back onto the boat.
We were like generals on a safe and distant hill overlooking the battle because that is in fact what it was. The cormorants planed in across the heads of the pelicans and in perfect series from the right they plunged into the water like missiles. The effect was like a well-aimed cannonade, and the noise echoed off the wall of trees. The cormorants rose and swam in terrible pincer towards the shore, the thirty-four of them sufficient to cordon one entire end of the inlet.
The pelicans resumed their serene approach, and when the cormorants had tightened the arc to within a metre of the shore they dived together and began to feed. Suddenly the air above the water was full of leaping mullet and skipjack, and the pelicans sailed in and scooped those breaking through the cordon.
As if on an agreed signal the pelicans retreated and the cormorants followed, and they all swam to the other side of the inlet, some still swallowing fish. The line of cormorants reformed, and they redirected their approach further up the inlet, but just as before they drew the string of their net and the pelicans kept sentry behind them. The fishing signal was given, and just as before there was synchronous diving followed by the chaos of thrashing and leaping fish trying to avoid the forty beaks hunting them.
This movement was conducted three times and then the birds left the field of battle. None flew because they were too full of fish. The cormorants swam to a tangle of marooned branches and waddled and scrabbled on to them with the cackles and mutterings of a company returning to barracks. The pelicans merely paddled into open water and began to preen or tuck their necks onto their backs and close their eyes. Karoongooba gave me the briefest glance of triumph and sailed by, the conquering general.
I’m not sure what campaign the squadron was involved in on the day when I stood irresolutely with a fish in my hand but, after scanning the river, it was clear that they were elsewhere, and so I tossed the filleted fish into the river. In winter I would save any fish scraps and dig them into the yam and pumpkin garden, but it was spring and the vegetables were planted and already showing their first leaves, the creases of their unfolding still visible.
I watched the fish float and turn with the movement of the river and, as it was close to full tide, the flow was sluggish and the fish barely moved downstream. I had taken fillets from both sides but left the stomach intact so that the air in the intestines allowed it to remain afloat, flat on the surface, one eye peeping at the sky; not a position a fish craves.
Small fingerling mullet gathered about the fish frame and began to fret and fray the skeleton. They were busy little animals, and their communal effort caused the carcass to jig and pitch despite the tiny size of the tugboats tending their big dead cousin.
Then the eel arrived, because she was covetous of any food on this part of the river. She had a small world of perhaps seventy metres at this time of her life, but it was hers and she guarded it with sinuous authority, supported by teeth like the needles of a nit comb.
She toook hold of the fish’s tail and jostled it against the wattle trunk that dropped into the river during the flood before last. She nudged and pushed in an attempt to loosen flesh from the frame and then she wrenched and lashed with her long body. The little mullet were not too alarmed; they’d been expecting as much and continued to work around the eel in relative safety because the amount of small fry consumed was of a quantity a proud eel scorns.
The mullets’ greater concern was for the kingfisher, which was in the habit of watching such river cameos and darting in to snip a slip
of silver from the water and return to its perch with the little fish flipping ineffectually. The kingfisher’s beauty belied its murders.
But the kingfisher had flown upstream fifteen minutes ago and probably would not return before dark. Did the mullet know this? Had they seen the image of the disappearing bird blurred by the water between them and felt emboldened to feed on the bream carcass dandling so temptingly on the surface?
In ponderous flight, a stingray slid beneath the jetty and rose to inspect the activity on the surface. I expected the eel to turn on the stingray and gnash at it with its fearsome teeth but the ray slid across the dead fish and the eel writhed across its back but seemed strangely cautious and deferential, perhaps nervous of the blade on the ray’s tail.
The stingray repeated this manoeuvre, and each time the eel slid and coiled across its back while the fry remained unconcerned, continuing their fretting at the edges of the fish frame.
Finally the eel curved away to the murky light at the bottom of the river and disappeared. The stingray continued making passes across the fish and I could see no reason for it until I realised that it was feeding on the mullet, positioning its mouth to snip them up while they concentrated on their own meal.
The river was slow enough that I could still see the entire drama as if staged just for me. The eel, in having bunted the bream carcass to the bank, had slowed its progress even further.
Still the ray flew its solemn passage and still the mullet scattered only to reform their frittering cloud like machinists in a sweatshop.
The sky turned from lemon to rose and then brick red, with clumps of dark cloud looming like gouts of bad humour.
I couldn’t take myself from the river even after the ray had left and the eel snuck back in sinuous and sullen curves to wrestle the dead fish, the water’s surface darkening to the colour of gunmetal, with swatches of light like dirty silver spoons.
In this dimness I heard the first whooping and weirdly rollicking call of the nightjar. He must have roused himself from his hide among the gold and russet carpet of round-leaf box leaves where he always sleeps, invisible among the tawny doubloons.