by Peggy Frew
All along, she’d just breezed right past his mother, and you had to admire it, really. Those steely glares, those comments—Girls today, any number of university certificates, but can they sew? Can they cook a dinner, or press a shirt?—their miniscule teeth simply didn’t catch on Helen, either fell short or slid off.
Once the arrangement is made parties will have to be informed. The girls. His mother. People at work. He groans at the thought of the blokes, of awkward shoulder-thumpings, averted gazes. And the women—that was worse—the gentle commiserations, the kind words, which will probably bring him undone.
He goes back to the kitchen, puts his overnight bag on the table. He opens a beer and a packet of peanuts and leans at the bench. Outside, between the shadowy mounds of garden beds—one of Helen’s fads; books on the bedside table, Landscapes for Living, Create Your Own Cottage Garden; weekend drives to specialist nurseries—the lawn aggressively flaunts its length. He turns his back on it. The beer and salt are mineral on his lips. He feels something in his body, a dense coiling. When he was a kid he and Barry Nichols cut a golf ball open with Barry’s father’s hacksaw—what was that stuff that came out? Some kind of metallic tape, erupting in flat rustling ribbons, spilling unstoppably, like guts. How had it all fitted inside there in the first place?
When he goes through the back door a ripple of air brings the smell of grass, and of something that’s flowering, something thick and sweet that sets his hay fever twitching. He bangs the gate and gets in the car, blows his nose, wipes his eyes.
Carlton Gardens, after one of their film nights, Helen on the dry grass, Helen’s hair against her neck, the secret flesh right at the tops of her thighs, the way her hand went to his crotch, so easily, so knowingly, her body meeting his without question. Get on board, said her skin, her fingers, her tongue, or get left behind.
When he turns on to the main road and passes the void of the cemetery another memory comes. A Saturday, last winter, the girls both out—a fortuitous synchrony of birthday parties. He had done the drop-offs, good old Dad, embarrassing with his stubble, his gardening jumper, his goodbye kisses glancing off an ear, a temple; the whip of hair, the smell of shampoo and the musty innocence of the scalps of children.
Returning to the house, the feeling of calm, something fierce and orange blooming in Helen’s garden, wet black branches, low, dense cloud. He could hear her in the shower. A moment, this was called, in the code of their marriage. To be said softly, with a smile: Looks like we’ve got a moment. His cock hardened.
Moments, scattered like jewels across the years; thinning, true, as time passed, but there still, and no less brilliant. Various bedrooms, various beds. Floors, couches—on the table here more than once, the kids asleep upstairs, Helen back on her elbows, her knees wide, her hips filling his hands. He pushed the bulge in his jeans gently against the lip of the bench. The beginning, of course, had blazed with moments, moments thick and fast, moments back to back. The beginning was like sunlight on glass—staring into it would dazzle you. He smiled. What they’d had—and what a thing, to have it still, when they got the chance, to reach back and pluck it, dripping handfuls of liquid gold.
He boiled the kettle and put coffee in the plunger, loaded the dishwasher, wiped the table and benches. He was twisting the lid back on a jar of marmalade when Helen came out in her dressing-gown, skin pink and damp, black smudges of yesterday’s make-up under her eyes. He gave her The Smile, but she walked past. She stood at the window. He put the jar in the fridge and went up behind her, pressed into her, kissed her neck.
I can’t, she said, but then she reached around and undid his fly, took him out and pulled up the heavy woollen gown.
She was dry and there was a soreness that brought back the feeling of boarding school, of night-time wanks, urgent, chafing, silent, the effort it took to simultaneously shut out and be wary of the shapes in other beds. He saw her hands braced on the windowsill. Her forehead bumped the glass.
Sorry, he gasped, and came.
She stayed like that, looking out, as he sagged and panted against her, and then he realised that she was crying. He put his arms around her and she turned and cried against his chest, and the more he tried to get her to say what was wrong the more she cried, until she was past talking, her face all red and swollen, her breaths jerking crazily, and he ended up leading her back to the shower and getting in with her.
They stood together under the water until she quietened. Her arms were around his waist and her ear to his breastbone, but in calming down she seemed to retreat—it was as if her thoughts were locked away, simmering, private.
He found himself mumbling like a teenager, hot with shame. Didn’t you come—was that it?
She smiled and kissed his cheek and got out and began to dry herself. It’s fine, she said. It’s just hormones. PMT.
The roads are quiet—he’s well behind all the other Friday evening traffic. At the island Junie and Anna will be reading in bed, in the haloes of bedside lamps, knees pointy under faded blue candlewick bedspreads. His mum will be making her way through her detective shows, or an episode of All Creatures Great and Small, rattling the ice in her whisky glass.
The quiet flicker of those two rooms in the darkened house, the sighing garden, the moon-pale lawn where the girls lay on rugs as fat babies, crawled and toddled and fell, bumped around on the old bike he got from a garage sale, got bitten by bull ants and ran howling, spraying tears. Where Helen came up from the beach, her damp skirt clinging to her calves, so full of life the air around her seemed to tremble.
He’s fallen in behind a truck; its tail-lights sway. He rouses himself and overtakes. What did he expect, really? She breezed in, and she’s breezed out again. How could he ever have thought he’d hold on to her?
The reflective posts curve off into slick darkness; scrappy trees stagger along the edge of the road; behind them lie open, sleeping paddocks. He’s tired. He shouldn’t have had that second beer. He turns up the radio, which is tuned to the racing station, the frenetic blare of the Friday night trots.
Something white and shining leaps into his vision, a boxy shape rearing up from the left. He brakes, swerves, recovers. It flicks past—a caravan, pulled over; a big red Land Rover squatted in front of it. He blinks and shakes his head. He must’ve been dozing off. Heart hammering, he puts the window down and scours himself with cool air, lifts his bum and resettles into the seat, jiggles his shoulders. Not far to go now, but he’d better watch it.
He covers the last ten or so kilometres to the bridge with the window still open, singing aloud to Van Morrison and Elvis on the golden oldies station. The bald hills crowd in and let go again, and he sails down the last stretch, the flat water below reflecting a half-moon. Past the clustered darkness of the San Remo shops and over the bridge with its tall lights, empty of their daytime perching gulls.
There’s only twenty-odd minutes to go but his eyes keep blurring, his brain lapsing into blankness. Bugger it, he’ll have to stop, have a quick snooze. He passes the surf shop, the bluestone house with porthole windows, takes a right at Boys Home Road.
Funny, in all his years of coming to the island he must’ve driven past this road a hundred times, but he’s never gone down it, never seen the actual boys’ home. Somewhere in his brain a few sedimentary facts and story fragments lie, all in his mother’s voice. They built it before there was a bridge; made it harder for anyone to escape. Judy Sloane’s mother found one of them hiding in her garden. Couldn’t’ve been more than eight or nine years old. Terrified, poor kid, ran a mile. All his hair’d been shaved off.
He rolls along the gravel, past vacant lots and large industrial sheds, until he reaches it. There’s no doubt about which one it is—the buildings are enormous, red brick, two spreading wings with narrow, dark windows; church-like peaked roofs, grand double doors, stained glass behind wire. What by day would show clearly as missing tiles, cracked and sagging brickwork, stains, broken glass, invasions of weeds, in the semi-dark
gives only a general sense of softness. He can almost smell the crumbling mortar, powdery and sweet.
He parks the car and turns off the headlights and everything settles into flat black shapes against the sky; the grand roof-point, the low rectangular wings. Ahead, at a blockade of scraggly bush, the road makes a right turn to run alongside the water. He puts back the seat, folds his arms across his chest. He can hear the suck and glug of small bayside waves. No beach along here, only mangroves—what must those kids have thought, waking on their first mornings to look out over swampy mud and all those bare roots, like bones, like dead things?
On the edge of dozing comes a memory: driving home for the term break, second year, before Helen—before his parents moved to the island, when they were still at Churchill, in the house of his childhood. He’d gone for a counter meal with Mugger Timms and Stewie Perkins, set off late, warm and only a bit sozzled, revving the shit out of that crappy little Austin all the way through the quiet city and out onto the highway. A cold night; his legs freezing from the wind that blasted through a hole somewhere under the dashboard. Empty roads as it got later and later. Steak-and-kidney pie heavy in his gut, and the beer, but he didn’t have far to go—here were the rows of cypress and the white timber fences of Salter’s agistment; here was the grain silo.
He’d been thinking about home, in an idle sort of way—nothing conscious, just running images through his mind. He was doing it, as he always did, with shame, with a furtive kind of tenderness. He didn’t know what was wrong with him, where it came from, this sadness, this longing. They were still there, his parents, in the house—they weren’t even old yet, in the grand scheme of things. And he didn’t want to go back in time, to be a kid again—did he? It had been such a relief to get away.
His mother in the dark kitchen with that terrible smile, her ferocious hands roaming for things to scrub and chop and stir and wipe. You never saw a woman put so much anger into chores. Turning to the window as if she couldn’t stand the sight of him for one more moment.
But an earlier time, an illness, and her there in the night, a yellow lamp, her cool touch, her dry kiss on his forehead. Had he imagined that?
Thinking this way was like picking at an impossible knot.
He drifted. He thought of waking in the sleep-out, the louvred windows that on cold mornings were laced with the condensation of his breath. His mother’s turnovers, the smell of cooked pastry, scalding bites, the plum jam steaming, sharp and sweet. The backyard, the woodpile, the shed, the dog run.
And then there was the moment between seeing the horse and hitting it, stomping on the brake, every muscle rigid, the steering wheel clamped in his hands—no time to turn. In the middle of the black, wet road, in the middle of the night, on the outskirts of a nothing town in the middle of nowhere, a chestnut horse appeared in his headlights, and then, bam, was on the bonnet of his car—skyward-raking legs, broad, upside-down belly, mane and tail and twisted neck and one huge rolling eye right in his face. Blood on the glass. Slamming forward—and if it hadn’t been for the death of Barry Nichols’s cousin the month before, thrown from a car on the Geelong road, he probably wouldn’t have had his seatbelt on—and the terrible heaving slide of the animal, the thud of it on the road. And then stillness, a fine rain in the headlights.
It wasn’t dead. When he got out and went around to look, it was lying there breathing these awful, fast breaths, and it kept lifting its head and making as if to get up. Which it couldn’t, because its legs were not okay, the front ones both out at wrong angles, the back ones tucked under. Shit, shit, shit. Trying to calm it, reaching out a hand—Hey, hey, it’s all right—then stepping back as it stirred afresh, and rocked and laboured, those sorry hooves dragging against the asphalt. Blood on the white blaze between its eyes. Blood on its teeth as it gasped.
Lights, and a rushing sound—a car, thank God. Braking, a door-slam, a presence beside him. No one he knew, some farmer driving home from the pub, most likely—there was the smell of booze. A glimpse of battered hands braced on blue-jeaned knees, a flannel shirt, grey hair. Poor bugger’s had it. Stay here, kid, I’ll go and get help.
The man driving off again, and something about being called kid ripping right into him, his legs shaking, tears running to his chin. Don’t leave me here, he thought, and put his head down on the bonnet of the car, feeling the heat of the engine. And once his head was down he couldn’t bring himself to lift it again, to face the dreadful struggle, the dreadful sounds, the blood, that red-gold coat matted and wet in the headlights.
Behind his closed eyes appeared another car—his parents’ car, with his mother alone in it, in the driver’s seat. He could see the back of her head, and her shoulders. She was wearing her old best coat, her trip-to-town coat, the chequered one. And he was standing alone, eleven years old, at the school gates with all his bags. The back of her head, the car, driving away, gone.
The farmer didn’t return, but he must’ve sent the cops. Two of them, one young, one a bit older. But not much—neither of them much older than John was.
What happened mate? Just walk out in front of you, did it?
The beam of a torch swept across the road to a fence, silvery with raindrops, the wires down between two posts. There you go. There’s your answer.
The three of them standing there, out of reach of those scrabbling hooves.
What—his voice shaking—what do we do?
You just hop back in your car, son. A hand on his shoulder. But there was something unconvincing in the cop’s touch, his voice.
Son? I’m practically your age, he thought. And then, desperately, Where’s the farmer? Bring him back, with his old-man’s hands. He’ll know what do to.
Just hop back in your car, said the cop again. Just wait there.
He did, and watched the two of them return to their car, the older one walking with false purpose, the younger half-running to keep up. The older one opened the door, reached in and took out a gun, a small, neat, cop’s gun. The two of them walked back together, then stopped a few paces away. Their white faces through the beaded windscreen, the older one wearily pushing back his hat, rubbing a hand over his eyes, the younger one speaking, his head bent.
How unprepared they all were. Look at him, strutting his way into his twenties, kicking footies, fooling around with girls, thinking this was the world—scraping through uni, your own money, your own car. As if being an adult was about striding past and over everything.
Those cops in their uniforms, with guns. What did they know? Not much more than he did. Through the misty glass he imagined he could hear the young cop’s voice, raw-edged and adolescent, full of need. How, he imagined him saying, do you shoot a horse?
RIDING
Nan took them horseriding. Which really meant that she sat in the car with the newspaper while they trundled across beige paddocks on what were not horses at all, but ponies—weary, grimy ponies with too-big saddles, and headstalls left on underneath their string-mended bridles.
It was the Easter holidays, and it was supposed to be autumn, but it felt like summer still, The Summer of The Break-up, The Summer of Helen’s Boyfriend, The Summer of John’s Crying.
Anna’s pony was called Freckles. He—or maybe she; nobody told them which it was, and it wasn’t easy to tell, Freckles being so low to the ground and heavy in the hindquarters—was like something from a museum, stuffed-looking, solid, a dusty dun with brown flecks. Freckles’s head hung low and his or her ears drooped to the sides, like handlebars.
Junie’s was Pancho, slightly bigger—a pinto, she knew from her Horses of the World book; splashes of white, tan and black. His neck was thick, his rump wide and womanish, but he had an accidental kind of beauty, his chestnut patches coppery and sleek, the chocolate lining of his ears plush, his tail proud. Junie secretly thrilled at him, wishing him hers. It didn’t matter that he stood like a bored soldier while she stroked his neck, that he moved his head evasively when she tried to rearrange his forelock or brush
the flies from his eyes, which had blobs of black stuff at their corners. Her fingers came away from his hide covered with grey, sticky dirt; furtively she smelled them.
A woman leathered by sun and dressed in a pair of men’s jeans and a flannel shirt emerged from a shed, took Nan’s money, fitted the girls with helmets, and helped them onto Freckles and Pancho. The woman gave a juicy cough and spat into the dust. ‘Jason’ll be out in a sec,’ she said.
Then Nan got back into the car and the woman re-entered the shed, and the girls waited, helplessly astride the stationary ponies.
Jason was somewhere between a teenager and a man, skinny, with a big-nosed, knobbly face, pitted with acne scars—and when he swung out of the shed, pushing back his Akubra and hitching his stone-washed jeans, Junie was overcome with a horrified, unwilling awkwardness.
‘G’day, girls.’ Jason grinned, hands on scrawny hips. ‘Ya ready for me?’
Anna, who always worried about the wrong things and never cared about what mattered, didn’t appear to be bothered by Jason’s swagger, his teasing. She seemed more concerned, despite Freckles’s steadfast immobility, with keeping a firm grasp on the front of the saddle. But Junie’s awkwardness wouldn’t go away, and was in fact worsening—she began to burn with furious embarrassment at the thought that Jason might notice, in fact probably already had, and would take her discomfort to mean that she liked him, was attracted to him.
‘Get out of it, ya bastard,’ said Jason as his horse—his was a horse, not a pony; gangly and grey, narrow across the chest—turned a skittish circle, its big pale tongue slapping at the bit.
Junie gazed off over the shimmering paddocks, willing her flushed face to cool, refusing to watch as he flamboyantly adjusted reins and stirrups.
‘Rightio, girls, let’s hit the road.’