by Cate Kennedy
Why don’t you wear that silk dress, Lornie? I don’t know what’s got into you, young lady. What’s got into you is a nautilus, a starfish, a curled seahorse. Fingernails like tiny pink clear shells. Clamped onto the wall of you, and the suck and roar of your blood only making it cling more determinedly.
It’s Matthew you’re here to see on a grey Friday night, you can hear him there in the pub. The wind pushes clouds around, so that moon casts intermittent shadows. You lean against the palms and bend and snap pieces of frond, folding up lengths like concertinas. Breasts aching. He’ll come out sooner or later to urinate in the back garden. Don’t say piss, girls, you sound like you were brought up in the shacks. When he comes out you see he’s drunk, coming down the grass like he’s on board a pitching boat. When the men go out to catch herring they underplay the effect of the swell on them, holding casually onto the side, timing their movement. Drunk, they stagger and lurch and make more haphazard progress, unbuttoning their flies with owlish deliberation. Down on the sand you tell him and he shakes his head to clear it, looks back and sees you still there. You can see his mind shifting like a tide turning, draining backwards to leave everything looking untouched, saturated but untouched.
You better tell me all this tomorrow and we’ll think about what we’ll do to get rid of it, Lornie, you’ve caught me at a bad time here.
He slumps down next to you, hands over his face, hair in the sand. Next to you the sea pulls, searches, sighs. Had a bit to drink tonight.
Hiss and silence, hiss and silence. You hiccup your tears. After this, at home, there will be the ammonia smell of soaked hot nappies, a cot reeking of vomited milk.
Anyway, I’m out on the boat three days a week, how can I be sure it’s mine?
Your blood sings. Sand under your digging fingernails, mica glittering even in the moonlight. You turn your scalded face to him, and he is unconscious. One hand rests lovingly, caressingly, on his belly.
Out there there’s a trough, just where the water darkens and the surface ruffles like a sheet blowing on a line. Schools of tiny fish rock back and forth and there are shattered bits of kelp tumbling. In the trough, things go in rough and come out smooth, their edges worn away and polished. They are ground together and when the sea offers them back, nothing is sharp, nothing can cut.
You shake Matthew. He grunts and sleeps on. You are murderous, your mouth a black shadow of rage, sucking air in. You want to get a rock. Before you is a vision of smashed shell, drizzling water, grey salty tissue. You imagine that small sudden violence of skin tearing, blood, mucous, grit. How easy it would be, now, to flood seawater through this, let the tide rinse everything clean.
You roll him into the water, towards the trough, and the sound coming from your mouth is a growl, a hiss. Once you saw a drowned man on this beach, returned searched and worried at by the sea. He lay like someone exhausted, resigned. A shining piece of ribbon kelp had twined itself around his neck, and his face had stopped resisting — welcoming the water in, welcoming the sand into a mouth at last relieved to be vulnerable. Matthew’s body drifts easily into the shallows, unresisting. Soon waves will turn his face over and down. His lungs will breathe another element entirely.
You squat trying to rub grit from your legs for a long time before you realise it’s not sand but regrowing hair. Only eight weeks ago you placed your foot on the chalky green rim of the bath and pulled the razor up in long strokes. Soap making the skin tight, blood trickling from a nick in your shin. Only eight weeks ago, it was your hipbones protruding through the fabric of the dress, your stomach that was flat.
You crouch, rocking, waiting for the sea to taste and take its gift.
In my room now, there’s matting made of rope and a picture framed in weathered wood like old palings with the paint flaking off. How my mother would have laughed — or would she have wept? — to see these signs of poverty, which she worked to rise above, turned into this desirable high art. Perhaps these palings came from the shacks themselves, perhaps the collection of old bottles and driftwood fragments on the high shelf behind the bar came off one of those windowsills. I have no doubt they bulldozed the shacks, set a match to them. I can see the idle drinkers from the pub, standing outside and shifting their weight on the lawn, watching the orange flame and roiling black smoke, as clearly as if I witnessed it myself.
Not daring to put a foot on his neck, or kick him further into the trough. As you stand, you think you feel the thing in there fluttering and somersaulting, kicking and twisting. Good, you think. You die, too. And dig a fist in, praying for the ooze of warm blood and water, its salty mollusc slide down and away. Die. But it arches and bucks, tosses and hangs on. Breathes when you breathe. Clings and waits.
And God help you, you roll him out. Pull the body like a moonlit fish up over the tidemark. See seawater drizzle from his mouth, and soak into the sand. Dark hair plastered to a skull crowning like a keel onto a shore. A shuddering, hiccupping breath. A hand opening and closing, wonderingly, on the miracle of air.
I breathe in the new perfumes in their sachets, and their opulence makes me feel slightly sick. What an indecent amount I’m paying for this room here, when you think about it. I can see where they’ve knocked the wall down to give it these majestic proportions, my own balcony and clacking palms. When the salesmen stayed here back then, playing darts with the fishermen and chewing through platefuls of sausages and eggs, they probably paid less for a week than I’m paying each night. But money seemed to mean more in those days. It bought more.
My mother watched me coming up the path that night, the baby twisting and puking on her shoulder, and it must have been the way I walked. Or the way I stopped on the verandah and rested my hand on my hip. I’ve watched pregnant young women do it myself, before anything shows. It’s the moment the idea has taken root, the shift in centre from the head to the belly, the careful movements. My mother watched me, her hand over her mouth, her eyes puffy from lack of sleep. As I stepped on the floorboards that didn’t creak to catch the 6.00 a.m. bus, she was standing in the doorway and gave me her good purse that had been wrapped in tissue paper in the trunk with her money inside folded in a white hanky. As I took it she made a sound in her throat that I thought was out somewhere on the very edge of human, until my daughter was born, and I heard it again.
Where did that money come from, and what was it for? When my mother died my brother sent me some of her things, some embroidered linen and personal items packed in a box, and I imagined her making stitch after tiny stitch while we were at school, selling starched pieces to the women in the city. But it was not the thought of this that cut me most deeply, but her preserved wedding presents: the rolled white gloves, her empty ‘Evening in Paris’ perfume bottle, her foolish proud hope as she tucked the silk more perfectly into the waistband and smiled, getting up off her stiff knees with slow weary care. This, and the thought of whose escape the money was meant to buy.
My daughter wore the gloves one time, to a graduation party. Nineteen-twenties clothes were all the rage at the time and she and all her friends took photos of each other on the tiny front porch of my house in the city, each working the gloves up to her elbows and swooning across the doorway. My daughter’s hands were slightly too big for those gloves. When she brought them home the next morning they were split along their fragile seams where her eager, careless fingers had forced them. Which is as it should be.
The first night I was here I requested a room at the back, facing the town. The rattle of the palm trees kept me awake, I said to the girl who’s so pleasant, so accommodating. Of course, she said, humouring an old lady. They can’t work me out, the staff. Their clientele are couples with late-model shining cars, who leave on Sunday night with rustic frames and squares of homemade soap from the craft shop, tied up with little bits of raffia twine. From the back-room window, I could look towards the main street. It’s all restaurants and knick-knacks
now, all baskets of painted flowerpots and doorstops and wind chimes as long as your arm which sound like distant church bells.
On the second day I walked past my own house. Children’s bikes were slung around the front step and the hydrangeas needed cutting back. I had visualised myself walking up to the front door with a tidy little speech. I had imagined myself invited in by strangers who kept a respectful distance, stepping into that front room and turning the handle of the door into the bedroom, moving onto the flecked lino with the rag rugs, running my hand along the window sill. I imagined that if I opened the lid of the trunk that could not possibly still be there I would smell folded silk, dusty tulle of a yellowed wedding veil she let us wear occasionally for dress-ups, and the cologne scent of the Christmas tablecloth and matching napkins at the bottom. This was the scene I had plotted for myself, but when the moment came I just looked. I was conscious of myself, standing there at the gate, and the shape of my shadow bent up the path. An old woman. I walked on, trying to get as tired as I could, but still tossed and turned, dreaming of picking things up and putting them down again. When Monday came and the other guests left, I approached the girl again. I’ve changed my mind, I said. I want to have a view of the sea after all.
Over the wind and piles of seaweed, I can smell now that someone in the hotel kitchen is making an orange cake. I’ll look like a wild woman with my hair blown about when I go in for afternoon tea. They think I’m dignified. Wealthy. A little mysterious. I grip the white arms of the plastic chair and breathe in, breathe out. The ocean rolls, yawns, tosses. There’s that little line of dark objects thrown up on the sand, the brown trails of weed and crushed carapace, claw, broken purple and black mussel shells. Everything equally offered, everything its own kind of treasure, all exquisitely and abundantly wasted. Life story or death story, the tide still wrenches and smooths. Just wait, and the sea returns everything to you.
Cold Snap
When I go down to check my traps, I see the porch lights at that lady’s place are still on, even though it’s the morning now. That’s an atrocious waste of power, my dad says when I tell him. His breath huffs in the air like he’s smoking a cigar. The rabbit carcasses steam when we rip the skin off and it comes away like a glove.
Skin the rabbit — that’s what my mum used to say when she pulled off my shirt and singlet for a bath. Mr Bailey gives me $3 for every rabbit to feed his dogs. I take them down in the wooden box with a picture of an apple on it. In the butcher’s, rabbits are $2.50 but Mr Bailey says he likes mine better. I’ve got $58 saved. I want to get a bike.
Dad reckons it’s good to save up your money. The tourists who stand around the real-estate agent’s window looking serious, pointing, touching each other on the arm, he reckons they’re loonies. When the lady up the road bought that house, my dad went over after the sold sign got stuck on and everybody had gone, and he took one of the palings off the side of the house and looked under at the stumps and made a noise like he was holding back a sneeze. That lady’s a bloody wacker, my dad said. Those stumps are bloody atrocious.
He stood there looking at the house and rolled a cigarette. Throwing good money after bad, he said, and kicked the paling. I kicked it, too.
After she moved in I didn’t set no more snares up there on the hill. I walked on the tracks round the lake, the tracks the rabbits make. I made myself small as a rabbit and moved through them on my soft scrabbly claws. I saw everything different then. Saw the places they sat and rested, the spots where they reached up with their soft noses and ate tiny strips of bark from the bottoms of the river willows. You’ve got to set a trap so that it kills the rabbit straight off. On the leg is no good. All night the rabbit will cry and twist, then you have to kill them in the morning when their eyes are looking at you, wondering why you did it. Mr Bailey, he tells me he can’t believe I can catch them so near the town. I say you just have to watch things and work out where to put the trap, that’s all. He nods so small you can only just see his chin moving up and down. You’ve got it there, Billy, he says.
After he gives me the money we look at the dogs and have a cup of tea. His dogs know me and why I come. Their eyes get different when they see me.
In the morning, everything is frozen. All up the hill are the trees, and every time I look at them I think of the time in school when I was right and Mr Fry was wrong. He showed us a picture and said trees lose their leaves in autumn and the other kids started writing it down but I felt the words come up, and I said they didn’t, they lost their bark.
Mr Fry said how typical that the one time I’d opened my mouth in class I’d come up with a wrong answer. I looked at the trees standing bare in the mist and thought about how I’d kept shaking my head when he told me to say I was wrong, and the other kids sitting smiling, staring down at their hands, waiting for after school like the dogs wait for the rabbits.
When you smell the leaves, they’re like cough lollies, and the bark goes all colours when it’s wet. One day I was looking up at them and my eyes went funny and I flew up high and looked down at the tops of the trees all bunched together and they looked like the bumpy green material on the armchairs at my Aunty Lorna’s place. I never told no one about that, not even my dad. The trees talk loud when it’s windy and soft when it’s quiet. I don’t know what they talk about, probably about rain. When they get new gum tips, they’re so full of sap they shiver in the air. Maybe they’re excited. Or frightened.
But now that it’s winter, the trees just look dark and sunken in, as if they’re just hanging on by shutting off their minds, like my grandpop when he had the stroke and Dad said his body was just closing down slowly like something in the winter. And on the track, there’s ice crystals on the clay, and when you look real close you can see the crystals are long, growing into lines, and the more mushy the clay the tighter the crystals pack in. They do it in the night, in the cold snap. You can put your foot at the edge of a puddle and just press real gently, and all these little cracks come into it, rushing outwards like tiny creeks.
Sometimes there’s frost on the rabbits’ fur. I brush it off with my hand. Rabbit fur smells nice, like lichen or dry moss. My mum left behind some leather gloves with rabbit fur inside, and when I put them on once I pulled my hot hands out and smelled her smell. What are you bawling for? my dad said. I hid the gloves just under my mattress. When I touch them they feel like a green leaf, just soft and dry and bendy and not knowing autumn’s coming.
I looked up at the lady’s porch lights the morning I got my new hat for my chilblains. Dad made it for me with rabbit skins. He rubbed my ears hard with his jumper and my mouth ached with holding it shut then he pulled the rabbit fur flaps down and tied them.
See you back here with the bunnies, he said, squeezing his hands under his arms before he stoked up the chip heater. One day a boy at my school who works at the feed supply told the other kids we were so backward we didn’t even have hot and cold running water at our place. He said, It’s like Deliverance down there with you-know-who. I asked Dad what deliverance was and he rolled a cigarette and said why. The next time he wanted chook pellets he asked for them to be delivered that day and then he stoked up the chip heater so high that a spray of boiling water gushed up and hit the roof like rain and it sounded like the fancy coffee machine at the milk bar. When this boy came around with the pellets, Dad told him to empty them into the bin and then said would he like to wash the dust off his hands in the kitchen. The boy went in. I stood looking at the chooks and made myself small like them and felt the straw under my claws as I scratched around, and felt how the wheat powdered as I cracked it in my beak, and then there was a scream and the boy came running outside holding his hands out in front of him. And they were bright pink like plastic. As the boy ran past, my dad called, Don’t forget to tell your friends.
I pushed the rabbits into a hessian bag and heard music coming out of the house with the lights on. It was violin stuff.
I saw the lady who’d bought the house come out onto her porch as I cut across the ridge. She was wearing King Gees and you could see the new fold marks in them. She had hair the colour of a fox. When she saw me her face went all bright and excited even though she didn’t know me, like the lady doctor who did all those stupid tests on me at school just saying stupid words and expecting me to make up more words and say them straight away and not giving me any time to think it over.
She said, Well, hello there, has the cat got your tongue? She had lipstick on. I thought maybe she was on her way to church.
I said I didn’t have a cat and her eyebrows went up.
You’re up very early on this wintry morning. What’s that you’ve got in your bag? she said, like we were going to play a joke on someone. I showed her the top rabbit’s head and her mouth went funny and she said, Oh dear, oh the poor little things. What did you want to kill them for?
I said for Mr Bailey. I said they died very quickly and always got the traps right around their necks. She hugged herself with her arms and shook her head and said goodness me, looking at my rabbit-skin hat. I turned my head slowly round so she could see better.
She asked me suddenly if I lived in the house down the hill and I said yes. Then she said what a marvellous location and what a shame the power would cost an arm and a leg to put through, otherwise she would have made an offer, and that this little place she’d picked up was such fun and a goldmine. She said all her friends from the city thought she was quite mad but she’d be the one laughing when property values went up and she’d done all the extensions. I was waiting for her to finish so I could go. I could feel the rabbits stiffening up inside their bag; I could smell them.
What’s your name? she asked me finally and I said Billy.
And do you go to school, Billy?
I looked at her and said you have to. Her eyes went all crinkly and happy again.