Islands

by Peggy Frew

  There were no other customers. They were at the mercy of Jason. Off they went, him first, the pointy hipbones of his horse rising and falling. Pancho followed, and when Junie glanced over her shoulder there was Freckles, and Anna, with her clutching fingers and flapping knees, her shoulders rigid and high, her eyes full of terror and joy.

  The so-called trail was a thread of dirt across the paddocks. There were no trees and the sun burned down on them. The saddles squeaked in time with the animals’ steps. The heat, the light, the resigned trudging, Pancho’s rubbery farts, all spoke of boredom, of reticence, of time being marked.

  Junie pictured the inside of Pancho’s mind as a dimly lit hollow, its walls muffling and protective, the fish-eye lens of his vision opening onto a sepia-toned view: watery swathes of grass, blank sky, the horizon unblemished but vibrating with possibilities—weather, nightfall, predators. At the centre of this cave, like the swirl at the centre of a marble, hung the image of the yellow yard, the open-mouthed shed, the drinking trough, the rope looped around the rail, the slump of a hip and the settling of one back hoof onto its toe.

  She knew he was only going through the motions but she didn’t care. She fixed her gaze on his ears, their curved backs, marked with fine but visible veins. She tried to let her surroundings—the paddocks, the narrow buttocks of Jason’s horse, and Jason himself, fidgeting and gesticulating—slip out of focus. She tried not to hear Jason’s voice. She was riding. She let her hips slide back and forth with Pancho’s rhythm, rested one hand on her thigh. She saw herself: a girl on a horse, her movements leisurely and assured, her body attuned to the animal’s, full of grace, and ease.

  This didn’t last long. Jason was not going to be deprived of his audience. His hat and his restless back, both dotted with flies, kept bobbing into view, and the waving flags of his elbows. He twisted his neck and pointed his craggy face at Junie, jabbering relentlessly.

  ‘Racehorse, this one was. Useless. Never even ran a place. Headed for the knackers when we got ’im.’ Craning past Junie: ‘And you’re old as the hills, aren’t ya, Freckles? Always been old. Born old, and cranky.’ Directing himself her way again: ‘Where did youse girls say youse were from?’

  We didn’t. Junie stared harder at Pancho’s ears. ‘Melbourne,’ she muttered.

  ‘Big smoke, eh?’ He had hooked one leg over the front of his horse’s saddle and was nearly sitting backwards, facing her. His lips were cracked, and his tongue appeared often, wetting them. ‘Big smoke.’ This time the words had something extra, a lilting ridicule. ‘So youse girls’re on holidays, are youse?’

  ‘Yes.’ She heard herself, a city girl, uptight, restrained. She looked down at her hands, smooth, useless, the hands of a spoilt brat, a princess. But I’m not! She wasn’t—he was making her into one, crowding her into it. She tried to get the feeling of the girl rider back, easy on her horse, or of the kid who ran through the scrub in bare feet, who swam out deep by herself, but they wouldn’t come, there wasn’t space.

  ‘Youse’re sisters, right?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Thought so. Youse could be twins.’ He wasn’t even holding the reins any more; seated sideways, his leg still hooked, he was taking a package of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. He put one in his mouth and lit it. ‘So how old are ya?’

  Junie’s throat tightened. She brought her shoulders forward, trying to make her t-shirt fall loosely and not show the bottle-top shapes of her nipples. ‘Twelve.’

  ‘Twelve!’ He sucked on the cigarette and then let the smoke out, aiming it upwards, making a show of it. ‘Twelve—and ya know what’s next, don’t ya?’

  She gave a small, polite sound.

  ‘Well?’ He made a rolling gesture with his hand. ‘Come on, what comes next, after twelve? Don’t tell me ya don’t know yer numbers.’

  Freckles had drawn closer, his or her stubby head level with Junie’s knee. Junie glanced at Anna, but she had her eyes down, her face hidden under the brim of her helmet.

  Jason was not letting up. ‘E-lev-en,’ he said, as if talking to a moron. ‘Ta-welve …’ More hand-rolling.

  ‘Thirteen.’

  ‘There ya go! Thirteen. A real teenager, you’ll be. And that’s when ya move on, ya know?’

  She didn’t know. She didn’t want to know. She gritted her teeth. Shut up.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Jason, something rich and gratified in his voice. ‘They all do, all the girls.’

  But it wasn’t girls that came into Junie’s mind, it was Helen, her fingers shining with chicken fat, her lips moist, smiling across the table at him, the boyfriend. Helen’s skirt sliding up, the spill of her flesh against the chair. And the next day, when she called Junie into the bathroom to bring her a towel—him gone, but the feeling still there, a shrinking, a curling-in of disgust. Helen’s breasts in the water, moving like they had lives of their own, the fizz of dark hair between her legs, the lips down there she didn’t even try to hide.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Jason, ‘they start off with horses, can’t get enough of them, but then, sooner or later, they move on, you know? They move—gah!’ He broke off, grabbing at his throat. The cigarette dropped and both his legs went up, and then he was on the ground, the grey horse dancing away with a snort.

  Pancho and Freckles came to an immediate halt, as if their engines had been turned off.

  Jason rolled to one side and then got up on his hands and knees, gasping and spitting. ‘Jesus Christ!’ He swiped at his mouth. ‘Swallowed a fucken fly!’

  Junie pretended not to be watching. Her mother had gone, been magicked away, and now a private seed of laughter sat right in the middle of her stomach, tender and delicious. She held her face very still, to keep it hidden.

  ‘Jesus fucken Christ!’ His hat had fallen off; his hair was dingy blond, and plastered to his scalp with sweat. He looked much younger.

  ‘All right.’ He clambered to his feet and lunged for the trailing reins of the grey horse. ‘Come here, ya bastard.’ But the horse, as if in on the joke that nobody—not Junie, stone-faced and immobile, or Anna, perhaps the same, or perhaps still just busy keeping hold of Freckles—was outwardly acknowledging, frisked and skipped away.

  ‘Come here!’ Jason ran at the horse, which pivoted on its rear legs and, with a joyous plunging motion and a whisk of its raggedy tail, dodged around him and took off past Freckles and Anna and Pancho and Junie, heading back the way they had come. Its hooves thudded on the dry trail and a screen of dust rose, and within it something shifted in the atmosphere, and Pancho and Freckles started into life. Beneath her Junie felt Pancho’s nuggety hindquarters coil and then release as he made a regal, decisive about-face, pitching her askew. Freckles turned as well, and let out a squeal, his or her mane flying upwards, the whites of his or her eyes showing.

  And they were galloping. The grass, the sky, the bare ribbon of trail, all blurred and shook. The thudding of hooves, Pancho’s rhythmic snorts, Freckles’s repeated squeals, Junie’s jolting breaths—all merged into a wave that surged towards the opening in the fence, the raised tail and flashing hooves of Jason’s horse, the distant silver cube of the shed.

  ‘Ju-u-nie!’ came Anna’s voice. Junie managed to turn her head for a moment and caught sight of Freckles’s sturdy, rocking-horse gallop, Freckles’s flaring nostrils and rolling eyes, Freckles’s whiskery lips, parted in a brown-toothed grin.

  ‘Ju-u-NIE!’

  She forced her gaze higher, and there was Anna, bouncing arrhythmically, helmet tipped forward. But her shoulders had dropped, and from her wide mouth—which was all Junie could see of her face—came laughter, jolting in bright, staccato bursts. Freckles squealed again, and Pancho gave an answering bray, and something undid itself in Junie’s stomach, something broke open, and she also began, wildly, wrenchingly, to laugh.

  Side by side they hurtled through the gateway and across the next paddock, stirrups colliding, teeth rattling, fingers velvety with horse-dirt tangled in reins and manes, their laughte
r flying like streamers. The ponies did not slow when they reached the yard; it was as if, right up to the very last moment, they feared it would be snatched away from them. Round the corner of the shed they whipped, and across the packed dirt to the far fence.

  There was a sudden, gasping, stillness. The ponies stood as if rooted to the spot, as if they had never left in the first place, only the heaving of their sides giving them away. Pancho had halted so abruptly that Junie lost her stirrups and was launched forward onto his neck before slipping sideways to land on her feet beside him. She pressed her face into his mane and he gave an indifferent sigh.

  Anna let out one last laugh—breathy and slow and full of satisfaction.

  John was down at the beach when they got back, and then he was in the garden, hacking at Nan’s rose bushes in his bathers, his back and shoulders shiny and deep red-brown, the mound of his tummy folding down on itself as he bent. Junie waited for Anna to run to him, to blab about the horse ride, Jason, the fly, the gallop—but she didn’t. She lay on the concrete porch with her book, wearing a secret smile.

  Dinner was Nan’s stew: lumps of meat landmined with gristle, broth with its oily lace soaking into the mashed potato.

  ‘So how was the ride?’ John sipped from his can of beer, gave a soft, closed-mouthed burp. There were comb lines in his hair, and his skin was raw from sunburn and the shower.

  Anna kept her eyes on her plate. ‘Fine,’ she said.

  ‘How about you, Junie?’ said John. ‘Did you have fun?’

  Junie put a forkful of mash into her mouth and let it dissolve. ‘Yep.’

  ‘Pretty ordinary set-up they’ve got there,’ said Nan. ‘Horses aren’t much chop. I don’t think we’ll go back.’

  They started talking about the garden, about the rosebushes.

  Junie swirled more broth into her mash. Anna was looking at her. Anna’s eyes shone and her lips pursed with a held-in smile, and there was a ballooning in Junie’s chest, a hot, swift happiness, and she sat as still as she could, her own mouth twitching, her eyes on Anna’s. This, this, this, she thought. This, and nothing else.

  CRAZY BIRDS

  They had not had their children yet. June was pregnant with the first, young and astonished, slowed to and mired in the rhythms of her own swelling. They were on the island, at the house that still felt like it belonged to Paul only. Where she might even find signs of other, past, women—a scented candle, a suspiciously un-masculine ornament, herbal tea—but the dark streams of envy and possessiveness ran, syrupy and remote, far beneath her then; she floated, impervious, well above.

  They went to a party, not far away. They walked there, along the beach road, through night air oily with the smell of muttonbirds.

  ‘They nest in the dunes, in burrows,’ Paul said. ‘And when the babies are big enough the parents fly off and leave them. They fly all the way to Alaska, can you believe it? And then a couple of weeks later the babies come out and fly there too.’

  ‘To Alaska?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘But how do they know the way?’

  ‘They just know.’ He pointed. ‘Guess what they call that beach?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Crazy Birds.’

  A car came and they got up on the tussocky verge while it passed. She watched the headlights bump across the dune. She thought she could hear things, underground stirrings, soft cries.

  The party was someone’s fortieth, a friend of a friend of Paul’s. The house was on a deep block, walled with old cypresses—tall, heavy-limbed, fragrant in the dark. There was a fire, and people sitting on logs. Inside the house a cluster of children lay before a television.

  June drank mineral water. Paul drank beer. He introduced her to people, he sat with her; he treated her with great care and she took it as her due, sliding her hand in circles over her belly. The sky filled with the shapes of the muttonbirds coming in to land on the dunes, veering and flapping with hectic purpose.

  ‘My family had a place on the island,’ June said to an older woman. ‘My grandmother. At Red Rocks—over the other side. I spent all my holidays there. By the time I was a teenager I thought it was the most boring place on earth. I was like, “I am never coming back.” And then I met Paul, and he said, “I’ve got this house …”’ She laughed.

  ‘And now you’ll be bringing your kids here,’ said the woman.

  ‘Yeah.’

  But it didn’t seem real—actual children, an actual baby—even when she felt the movements inside, solid and forceful. She couldn’t get any kind of a grasp on the future—she was stuck in this, this heavy now.

  It was not unpleasant. She had never been generous before, to herself, had never been kind. She had, in fact, been more or less unkind to her body, had fed it thoughtlessly, joylessly, had groomed it with a haste that was almost squeamish.

  When she first met Paul, during one of their first weekends together, feeling the sting of possible cystitis, she began drinking glass after glass of water.

  ‘Wait, wait.’ Paul put his hand to her wrist as she glugged.

  ‘It’s a cure,’ she said. ‘You fill your bladder completely, and then drain it. Flushes out the infection.’

  ‘Fair enough, but surely you don’t have to slam it down like it’s some kind of torture.’

  She lowered the glass. Her stomach sloshed. She thought of the sex she’d had with others, before him. Nothing bad had happened, nothing truly debasing or shameful, but shame is what hid in her overfilled belly, at the falseness of these encounters, at her lack of actual pleasure, at the pretence, which she had held on to even when she was alone again. Sitting hungover in the kitchen of her flat, her robe undone, seeing herself from the outside as she smoked a cigarette that only made her feel sick—who was she acting for? Then, she didn’t know, but later she would think it was perhaps for other women, for her friends at work, or her old uni friends. Women who were not lost, who knew how to have fun.

  She is fifteen, lumpy and miserable. Lost, already. At Red Rocks, in the narrow dark strip of front garden.

  Anna’s too young to be getting into that sort of trouble … and Junie, what’s happened? She’s lost all her confidence.

  Her grandmother’s voice, accusing. Her grandmother and her father on the far side of the clothesline, screened by beach towels. Nan’s hands appear, undoing the pegs.

  John’s voice is thick. They’re teenagers. You can’t blame everything on me, Mum. On the divorce.

  She retreats, brushing against the geraniums that grow leggy and untended along the fence.

  You think I wanted all this to happen? He’s crying now, and she feels the familiar constriction, the weight.

  There is the sound of a towel slipping off, flopping into the basket. The marriage was a bad choice, says Nan. In the first place. I could’ve told you that.

  Whatever she was at that party—fat, slow, her nipples and veins and every bit of soft tissue sweetly and sharply hormonal—she was not lost. She was firmly anchored, there on the log with Paul’s arm around her. She sipped her mineral water. Was it just the hormones that had done this, let kindness in? Later, with the first two children born, when she launches unexpectedly into a couple of years of good work, she will say that having kids saved her from herself. I just didn’t have time to indulge in my own neuroses any more. This will be true—but it’s also true that certain things don’t go away, that certain things can and will lie dormant, biding their time.

  The log became uncomfortable and she got up and walked around the garden, in the shelter of the cypresses. She inhaled their resin, her feet sinking into drifts of dead needles.

  Nothing will grow under a cypress. Her grandmother’s voice, its flat knowingness, unbreachable. The marriage was a bad choice. It wasn’t the marriage Nan had meant—it was Helen, June’s mother. Helen had been the bad choice. Nan was long dead, and Helen far away and not—whether good or bad, whether chosen or otherwise—really a mother any more, but June could feel it still,
very deep, as if between her muscles, the innermost, unseen layers of tissue: wrongness, division, a tearing.

  Eventually she wandered inside and stood shyly in the entrance to the roomful of children. Like someone visiting a zoo she took in their slim shoulders, their sprawled limbs, the softness of their hair. They gazed, steadfast, at the screen.

  When she went out again Paul was coming towards her. ‘I was looking for you,’ he said. He put his arms around her and she felt his kiss on the top of her head.

  She leaned into him, deliciously tired. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Did you meet Cindy?’

  ‘Cindy? I’m not sure …’

  ‘That’s her over there.’ He indicated a woman on the far side of the fire—thin, long-haired, of indeterminate age. She sat leaning forward, looking into the flames, sipping from a glass.

  ‘She’s an old friend of Dave’s,’ said Paul. ‘She needs somewhere to crash and she’s got her kid with her. Little—only three years old. She got a lift with someone and thought she’d sleep here, but the kid’s tired and there aren’t any spare beds.’

  June will go back over this, years later, when jealousy floods her like a toxin. The way Paul spoke, his awkwardness. The information he gave—too much, too hastily delivered. When she can’t see straight, when she is in fact mad with envy, she will think that of course he was nervous, of course he was uncomfortable, because he had slept with this Cindy, had perhaps slept with her only recently, not long before the two of them—Paul and June—came together. That he had probably not ended things properly, and this Cindy felt she still had some kind of claim. Because when June is in this poisoned state, the things she loves about Paul—his kindness, his gentleness—become weaknesses, ripe for abuse.

  And later still, when the madness has gone, and—like all pain—become an abstract thing, shrunken and implausible, she will think that yes, perhaps Paul’s nervousness, his discomfort, was because he had slept with Cindy at some stage, in the past. Which would have been fine. Or perhaps he and Cindy had never slept together and he was nervous because he was worried that she—June—might think they had, and be jealous.