by Tracy Farr
‘Doesn’t matter. Just – it ran away. The cat. It was weird –’
‘Fuck the fucking cat! The snake belongs here, the cat doesn’t. The snake should win, not the fucking cat. Or the fucking shovel!’
‘Yeah, but –’
‘Close the door when you go.’ She lifts the whining earbuds, sticks one in each ear. The tinny music goes away.
As he closes the door to Luce’s room he hears the creak, bang of the kitchen door, hears cups, hears voices. He heads back to the kitchen. Kristin is sitting at the table with the baby. Iris is making the tea.
‘Luce alright?’
‘She’ll live.’
Iris sighs, puts mugs of tea on the table, sits down opposite Kurt. ‘So, have you thought any more about doing something for your twenty-first?’
He shakes his head, pokes his glasses. ‘Ah, it’s just not important, Mum.’ He’s ready to start the argument again. ‘It doesn’t mean anything. Twenty-one; it’s outdated. I’ve been legal to drink for years. To vote, to drive. There’s nothing that kicks in at twenty-one any more.’
‘I gave you a key to the door when you were twelve.’
‘You did.’
‘Even in my day it was a bit meaningless.’
‘Well, then.’
‘But I still think we should mark it. We don’t have to have a party.’
‘Good.’
‘But I want to celebrate it. Your dad does, too. Doesn’t he, Kristin?’
‘Yeah, yeah, sure.’ Kristin nods, stays neutral.
‘So we agree.’
Kurt shakes his head, rolls his eyes. Iris ploughs on.
‘Look, I know you don’t want a celebration, but is it okay if we roll your twenty-first in with Rosa’s one hundredth? Just family. Just – I dunno. Just. A quiet little thing. For us. Before you go back to uni.’
‘Yeah. Sure.’
‘Thanks, love. Really. Thanks. You know we miss you, now you’re away.’
‘It’s eleven elevens.’
‘What?’
‘A hundred and twenty-one. Me plus Rosa. Our ages. Eleven elevens. Eleven squared.’
‘So it is. And a palindrome, one-two-one. Symmetrical.’ Iris lifts her mug of tea, raises it towards Kurt. ‘I’ll drink to that.’
Kurt clinks his mug against hers. They lean back into their chairs, distance bridged by their shared, nerdy love of numbers and patterns and order.
Kristin sits across from him. The baby is sleeping on her, its hand the only part of it visible, reaching up to rest palmdown, fingers splayed, flat on the bare skin above the neckline of Kristin’s t-shirt. Maybe it feels her heartbeat, or her breathing, with its pink starfish hand, its little fat fingers.
Kurt raises his own hand to the same position on his chest. It rises and falls with his breath, but he can’t – he doesn’t think – feel his heart beat. At the edge of his sleeve, he can see that the line of blood where the cat scratched him has smeared, blotted, hardened in places to little lumps of dark red enamel. It has blotted through the fabric of his shirt, making unreadable patterns, like a badly applied stamp.
‘That’s nasty,’ Kristin says. ‘Cats can have that disease. Cat scratch fever. Dirt bacteria, or something. From digging when they crap. You should clean it with disinfectant. Maybe you need antibiotics.’
‘It’s fine. Hey, should we do anything about the cat? Look for it, or something? Make sure it’s alright?’
‘I think it’s feral.’
‘You should definitely clean that scratch.’
‘I might look for it. The cat.’
‘Just don’t bring it home.’
‘I won’t! I won’t. I just –’
‘There’s a first-aid kit in our car. I’ll get it when the rain stops.’
‘– if it’s out there, with a snake bite –’
‘It’s not your problem, love.’
‘I know. I just – yeah, I know.’
His index finger traces the bracelet of blood at his wrist, the skin tightening around it. He imagines himself tiny, under his own skin’s surface; he closes his eyes and sees cartoon cells, mobilising, flaming, flaring, healing.
Stitch the snake
Will they ever find out what happened to the cat? Whether it survived or whether – snakebitten, or simply neglected, unfed – it died, the winner becoming the loser: a circularity of killing? In Iris’s mind the real snake becomes a mythic serpent, tail tucked under tongue, forming a circle without end, looping infinitely. There’s no top, no bottom; no beginning, no end.
That’s how Iris stitches it, in bronze thread for the snake’s body. She stitches the snake, makes it whole, in a continuous line that describes the edges of the blanket. The straight line curves and snakes (yes: snakes) to loop in on itself, to connect, to make a frame. She stitches in parallel to this the looping line, the train-track double, a mirror, a twin, then she spaces the stitches wider apart at the end – in the centre of what will be the foot of the blanket – and makes the bulge a head. Then she makes the head (the unseen, unstitched mouth) consume the tail, where those train-tracks V together to a point. The bite forms the loop, the circularity, the continuity. It makes the whole. It’s an illusion, of course. There’s no snake; no head, no tail, no nothing but stitches, tiny lines pointing in and out of the wool of the blanket, roughly representing the snake, cartooning it, lacking realism. Iris moves her head close to the blanket, to the stitching, until the stitches blur. She moves her face closer still, puts her head on her hand, looks across the pale surface of the blanket, into nothing, into everything. The snake-shape frames the page, the canvas of the blanket, ready to be filled.
Remind me whose bright idea this was
Everyone’s busy and fussy and loud, as if they’re retaking the house with their noise; one long, last hurrah before they leave. They’re not just packing up, this weekend, packing boxes, packing the house; they’re getting ready for a party.
Paul dubbed it a housecooling party, put the word out to friends, to everyone at work.
‘If you’re down south for the weekend, just drop in. Open house. Bring a bottle or three. Bring anyone.’
People accepted the invitation, said they’ d bring the kids, a friend, the whole family. And more and more people have said they’ll come. Over the last few weeks, Iris and Paul have both bumped into colleagues and ex-colleagues, neighbours, old friends, all of them heading down south, all of them keen to converge on the house. It’s as if the whole city’s moved south for the holidays.
They’ d planned – in the usual way of this place, even at midwinter, expecting the weather to be fine – for the party, big or small, to drift outside, for food on the barbecue, dancing on the deck, smokers on the lawn. But the rain will keep them inside, tonight. So they will fill the house with people, with sound, with all of them. They’ll fill it with kids underfoot, with beer, with wine, with food, with music. This is how it used to be, this house of theirs. And they’re here, now, to make it that way again, then to unmake it; to give the house a good send-off, before they move themselves on.
And so: glasses remain unpacked, and bowls and plates stay out, for food. The fridge is not emptied, but filled, in anticipation.
‘Why don’t I go and buy plastic cups instead?’
‘Oh, Paul. No.’
‘No! Such a waste, when there’s everything we need here. It’s fine. We’ll pack the kitchen tomorrow. Or Monday.’
‘The movers aren’t coming til Tuesday. There’s plenty of time.’
‘Honestly, who has a party when they’re trying to move out of a house?’
‘It’s the perfect time. Everything’s disrupted anyway. Why not celebrate?’
‘Remind me whose bright idea this was.’
Paul puts his hands in the air, palms forward, surrendering. ‘Mea culpa, baby. But you’ll love it.’
‘I won’t love it. But I’ll cope with it.’
Paul scoops his arms around Iris, waltzes her around the kitchen tab
le.
‘But Iris, there’ll be dancing! Tonight we’ll dance the night away. For tomorrow, we pack.’
At the bay
Kurt stands outside, under cover of the back verandah, out of the rain. Through the window he watches his parents dancing together in the kitchen, his mother laughing. He wishes he smoked, for something to do with his hands. He picks up his pencil, balances it between his index finger and middle finger, touches it to his lips. There, round his wrist, there’s the track of the cat’s scratch, already fading.
The rain has eased – it’s no longer overflowing the gutters – but it’s still steady. He has made tea, brought it outside to get some peace, some space, before they all start packing. He’s lost count of the cups of tea that have already been made in the house this morning. After living through twenty years of his mother’s endless cups of tea, he’s managed to forget it in the six months since he moved out. It annoys him – her endless tea, and his forgetting – though he doesn’t know why.
He opens the sketchbook on his knees, puts the pencil to the page and lets it move; just doodling, nothing forced, nothing in mind. He finds himself making vertical lines, darkening the page with rain. A shape, not quite discernible, almost emerges. He keeps the pencil moving, but the shape remains hidden, behind the lines of rain on the page.
The rain has eased to mist, now. He closes the sketchbook, puts it in the big pocket of his jacket, zips the jacket to the neck, flips the hood over his head, and goes through the gate at the side of the house, to follow the path by the river to the bay.
The river’s running faster, fuller, deeper than he ever remembers it running. The riverbank path is fine grey sand, becoming more and more rocky the closer it gets to the beach, where the river widens and flows into the bay. In summer you can’t walk with bare feet down the rocky beach without burning your soles. But today at the bay it’s cold, the wind coming in off the ocean, whipping salt at him, so he can smell it, taste it. The hood of his jacket flips backwards, exposes his face, his hair. He flicks the hood back up, hunches his shoulders to keep it in place, tucks his hands back in his pockets.
No one should be swimming today – you wouldn’t expect it – and it’s not the hour or weather for fishing, so he thought he’ d have the bay to himself. But there’s a mob of kids with a couple of dogs, local kids with nothing better to do. He feels conspicuous, in his towny black, like a black swan wandering strange, out of place, on the beach. His boots scrutch the pebbles underfoot, and one of the kids turns, then they all turn, to watch him for a long moment; then they turn away, back to their business. He walks to the big flat rock close to the river, where the beach starts to angle down to the water. It’s a gently sloping surface the size of a large bed, crisscrossed with patterns, crevices, cracks, slick with wet from the rain. He lowers himself to sit on the rock, hunches in over his bent knees, feels the long-ago-familiar face of the rock under him, pressing into him. He puts his hands by his sides, presses the palms flat onto the rock. Fingertips flex, and his right hand finds the curve at the edge of the big flat stone, fits it, grabs it like a handle, holds on tight. He feels the wetness start to seep into his jeans, feels wet turn to cold at the points where flesh touches denim.
The kids are busy at the river mouth. They’re all drenched, soaking wet. They’re wearing shiny basketball shirts and hoodies; clothes that aren’t right for the weather, thin, quickly soaked through. There’s one black dog right in there with them, a mad barker, lolling and lolloping. Another dog, black and white, more serious, is hanging back, watching, crouched up the beach on its haunches, front paws out, ears up, attentive, as if it’s watching skittish sheep. The dog glances up at Kurt, then back, up, then back at the kids, its flock; seven of them? Eight? Count the legs and divide by two. His dad always made the same joke when they drove down here, when he – Kurt – was a kid, when they passed sheep in a paddock.
‘How many sheep are there? In the paddock, Dad. How many?’
‘Count the legs and divide by four.’
It was their call and response, one of their silly rituals.
The kids are running in and out of the water – the darkened, murky water, where the river meets the ocean – in and out, up and down, over and across, up the beach to forage for wood, carrying big branches and whole bushes back to the water. One of them has a tyre, splaying black fibre, and he drags it, backwards, bent in two with its weight and density. They’ve got some rope, they’re tying bits of wood together to make a terrible bastard of a raft. They’re standing on the tyre, pushing each other off. All that stuff kids do. All that stuff he’s watched kids do. All that stuff. He presses his palms onto the rock, his fingertips seeking clefts, lines, something to hold onto. It feels good to have something solid to grip. He spends too much time seeking metaphoric purchase, holding it together, not letting the cracks show. Not letting people know there are cracks.
The kids have gathered around now, looking at something, he can’t tell what. They’ve lined up, curved in an arc, all facing the water. They’re mostly the same height, the same whip-thin, stick-thin – he can see that now, with them all together – except one bigger kid who’s tall, stocky, built like a fridge. And there’s one small kid, a head shorter than the others, maybe someone’s little brother, or just a runty short-arse. The kids’re standing, contemplating, their heads all bent. The noisy black dog is snuffling the backs of their knees, trying to break past the line, trying to see what they’re all looking at. The runty kid kicks his leg backwards at the dog, and the kid next to him pushes the runty kid in the back. Not hard though. Just a don’t-do-that shove. The watchful dog still watches.
One of the kids is talking. One of the middle-sized ones. Then one of them bends over. Two of them have sticks, and they poke them out towards the water.
A car pulls into the carpark then, a shiny metallic green ute. It pulls up and parks at an angle, dee-da-doo-doo tooting the horn. A black wool beanie leans out of the car window – Carn youse! – and the kids pelt up the rocky slope of the beach, and up the wooden steps to the carpark. Kurt watches four kids and the noisy dog pile in the tray of the ute as it reverses out, then takes off. Two other boys follow the car, running at first, as if they might catch it, then walking as it speeds off, unreachable.
One of the kids stays where he is by the water, watching the others go, then glancing up at Kurt, then turning back to the water, to what Kurt can now see is a dark shape – something – floating just below the surface. The watchful dog crawls on its belly, closer to the water, closer to the boy. The boy pats its head, and the dog raises its nose, nuzzles then licks the patting hand. Both of them, the kid and the dog, look out to the thing in the water. The kid has a stick, he uses it to poke, to reach out.
Then the dog barks – at a sound Kurt can’t hear? At nothing? – and takes off, sprinting up the beach, close enough to Kurt to spray pebbles up with its long lurching legs. Kurt turns to watch the dog disappear into the scrub fringing the top of the beach.
When he looks back, the kid’s not there. There’s just the dark shape in the water.
Kurt jumps off the platform rock onto the pebbles and sand, and starts walking. His feet are almost deciding to run, to panic. Just as he gets to the steps at the far edge of the beach, the dog pelts down through the scrub and appears ahead of him, bursting out onto the gravel of the carpark, and – somehow – the kid is there, to meet the dog. The kid looks at Kurt, lifts his chin slowly, holds it a moment – in a challenge – then lowers it, then he turns away, and he and the dog head off up a track, disappearing into the scrub.
Kurt turns at the top of the steps, looks back down to the empty beach. The long stick the kid was using rests on the rocky bank, parallel with the river’s flow, pointing the tea-brown dark of the river towards where it empties into the grey-green sea.
In the washhouse
When the rain falls like this, misty in between showers of proper dumping rain, everything is soft, feels and looks soft, smell
s soft. Even colours soften. Intentions soften, too. Luce sits under cover, just inside the door of the old washhouse, and listens to the rain, watches it fall and pool and wet, just a metre from her feet, while she’s dry and warm. She sits in an old plastic garden chair, with her legs drawn up in front of her, feet on the chair, chin resting on her knees. From the shaded dark of the washhouse, she looks out into the daylight (the soft light, the soft light rain). She holds in her hand one of the stones she picked up and pocketed at the bay yesterday, when she and Kurt ran down there before the rain started. Before all this rain. She thinks about the cat (that murdering cat), and how – even though it deserves punishment – she couldn’t bring herself to do it, to throw this solid stone at that soft, grey head. Her finger remembers the feel of the snake’s skin, its sleek, dry cool; its stillness. But she doesn’t think she could punish the cat for what it did. If she ever even sees it again.
Her hand is heavy with the stone. It’s smooth, a dark brown that’s almost purple – like the colour of dried blood – with freckles of caramel in it. It fits in the cup her hand makes when the fingers curve up, and the thumb curves around. She lifts her hand with the stone to her face, holds it against her cheek, presses it there, until its smooth cold makes her shiver.
The side gate creaks. She watches Kurt move through it, close it, walk across the yard towards the back verandah. He is hunched deep into his jacket, head down, hood flipped up, so she can’t see his face, just his hair hanging down at the front, like a scarf, or a dark decoration. He opens the back door to the kitchen. For the moment that the door is open, Luce hears a voice, then another, then laughter, then – creak, bang – Kurt disappears into it, and takes the sounds with him.
She stands up, puts the stone in the pocket of her jeans. It makes a bulge, low in the front. She cups her hand around the fabric over the stone, presses it against her. Her phone buzzes in her hoody. She reaches into the pocket of her jeans, removes the stone, squeezes it in her hand. She swaps the stone for the phone, pushes the button, swipes, hunches her head over the screen.