by Tony Birch
For fifteen years she hadn’t walked in the bushland behind her place. She hadn’t thought there was too much of it after the shopping centre expansion, but she was pleasantly surprised. She walked the sooky puppy, stopping every few minutes to untangle the lead from her legs for an hour or so without seeing road. There were parrots, kookaburras and a variety of water birds. There’d been an effort made to nurture native plants. Serene liked the sunsets the most, the spectacular red streaks through the gaps in the trees. There were plenty of people about but not too many to disrupt the puppy or the rhythm of her thoughts. She watched the dog-off-leash area with interest. Monique didn’t want the puppy to socialise with other dogs before she’d had her needles. But Serene was tempted to walk closer when one day she saw a jogger with a lab. This was Nelson Feather, and she would see him every afternoon for a week before they acknowledged each other. One time he had bent down to release the dog while she walked past. He’d smiled and said hello, and she’d felt his eyes on her while moving away.
She told Monique about him while they were on the couch. The wind pushed against the windows.
‘You need to seriously come on to his dog,’ Monique said. ‘Win the dog over first, and then you’ll win over the man.’
‘I don’t know if I can even talk to him. I’m going to scare him off.’
‘You’re being ridiculous,’ Monique said. She got off Serene’s breast and started sorting through a stack of mail.
Serene caught a glimpse of an envelope. ‘Oh,’ she got up and stood staring outside.
‘What?’
‘You’re Monique van Vliet?’
‘Yes! You didn’t know my last name? My father’s Dutch.’
‘You’re my sister.’ Serene picked up her bag, hating that she couldn’t look Monique in the eye. ‘I’m sorry. I should go.’
The afternoon air was cool on her feet. She watched the ducks waddle down the slope, red arses up.
‘Just you today?’ It was Nel Feather and his dog.
‘Yes,’ she said. She took a deep breath. ‘I just found out my half-sister is someone I’ve known for months.’
‘Really?’ he sat down on the grass next to her.
‘I knew her when she was younger but nowadays she’s a butch dyke. Her hair’s short and she’s thin and tatted up. Can’t blame me for not recognising her. She certainly doesn’t look like me.’
‘Does it run in the family?’
‘Hey?’
‘Are you gay too?’ he looked down. ‘Sorry. That was my stupid way of wanting to…’ he trailed off.
‘Yes.’
‘Yes?’
‘Yes. No dogs, no sweaty clothes, want to see you.’
Slapping the dog’s belly with enthusiasm, he smiled and leaned closer to her.
The next week she went to Monique’s house. They sat at the table with a distance in between them, and a pressing silence, no Cure.
‘I’m sorry that you found out like that. It must have been a shock that your father was in a relationship with another woman.’
‘I knew there’d been another child,’ Monique said.
Serene looked at her in surprise. She rushed out a reply. ‘Lucky you met me then.’
‘Yes,’ Monique said, and then more quietly, ‘I’m glad.’
Serene looked down.
Monique cracked open a beer. ‘How come you weren’t at Dad’s funeral?’
‘I was going to go. I thought about it. I didn’t know how I’d feel.’
‘Yeah, tricky one, if you were going to go and start talking about it. Mum didn’t know, I’m pretty sure.’
‘How did you know?’
‘Dad slipped up when he was losing it.’
‘How was he—’
‘When he was dying? Was good about my sexuality, finally. And talked about you.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He would sing ‘Brown Eyed Girl’, you know, the Van Morrison song. Me and Mum have blue eyes. And said, ‘she held my legs when I said I couldn’t see her anymore.’’
Serene saw her father. The bread puffy on the shelf behind him. His pride. The old windows, and the painted doors. ‘Your house—’
‘We lived here together for twenty years.’
Serene nodded. After a silence, Monique said, looking over at the lounge, ‘You know, I can’t… anymore…’
Serene let out a laugh. ‘Oh, no…’ she squirmed.
Monique opened another beer and handed it to her. ‘Let’s both not apologise, hey.’
Feather took Serene to his favourite Mexican restaurant down the road. They walked the dogs together in the afternoons. He was quite taller than her, with red-blonde hair, flushed cheeks, and light eyes. There was something old-fashioned about him that she enjoyed. He had a government job in town, and she thought his grey trousers and plaid shirts he’d stay in after work suited him. He spent the night at her place first, admiring her grandmother’s ornaments, and hanging his jacket on the bedroom door knob. Not to be parted, his dog found a lying place underneath the house. Over dinner, Serene and Feather talked affectionately, and as soon as they’d eaten their mouths and hands were on each other, Feather picking her up and carrying her to the sofa bed and removing her stockings. The sex was confirming of the connection they shared. The first time was nervy and graceless, but the following times better. In the mornings after he stayed the night, Serene loitered around the house sleepily, wondering how to talk to him, she felt dishonest. It had been a week now, and she needed her nipples suckled. Now she’d met him, she was anxious about the Kedron Pub, she couldn’t do it anymore. But she needed to tell him this part of her. During sex she noticed he’d been very attentive to her breasts with his mouth and his hands. She started shaking thinking of asking him to do it to her non-sexually.
They spent Easter together at the coast, Serene and Feather, Monique and her new girlfriend Lise. After a horrible run back down the highway, she got home with Feather in the late afternoon, and they sunk into the sofa bed without turning the lights on. She got up and made them tea, Black Adder. He had curled up into a ball when she brought him over his mug. The corner of sweetness in the tea brought the cheap Easter chocolate in her mouth to life, and she remembered her father saying there was no better combination than chocolate and liquorice.
‘So glad we have the day off tomorrow,’ Feather yawned.
‘Would you like to stay tonight?’
‘Yeah,’ he kissed her cheek.
Monique had gave Serene a photo of their father, taken twenty years ago at the Mt Coot-tha lookout. She stared at it now, still sipping the tea. Feather put his arms around her and his head on her shoulder. ‘When did he end things with your Mum?’
‘Before I started school.’
‘Just left you?’ Feather said. ‘Bastard. I’m sorry, but I reckon he was. A coward.’
‘I don’t blame him for putting his wife and kid first. Mum and I were never going to get anything better from him. I remember the argument. Mum pleading with him, begging. I thought it was me. I thought it was something I did.’
‘No, honey,’ Feather said, snuggling into her, breath warm.
‘Hey, Feather?’ she said. He shifted his position and looked at her. She unbuttoned her blouse and took out her breasts. He looked at her cautiously and then put his mouth over the right one. He kissed first, then made the surface moist with his tongue. He sucked hard. After a few minutes, she rolled her head back, feeling her whole body relax. The minutes turned into hours. He stopped once to take a deep breath, and he looked up at her with tears in his eyes. He returned to her breast, and after a while switched to the left. He fell asleep with her nipple in his mouth, making sounds, and she fingered his morning-washed hair until she was also asleep.
When she woke up he’d already left for work, with a hastily scribbled note and two boiled eggs in a bowl on the table. She was anxious the whole day before seeing him. Scared of the wholeness she’d felt. As soon as he walked in the door, s
he felt his desperation in the embrace. The understanding blew her away.
In a couple of weeks he’d moved in. She told Monique she never imagined she could live a conventional life, but it was happening. Her employer gave her the higher position of looking after the professional dancers, no longer the kids and amateurs. She developed strong relationships with these dancers, mostly women, got a kick out of seeing them improve. She often spent nights watching their rehearsals, or performances in the theatre. Feather always had dinner when she got home. He had coupled with the house, using any spare time fixing the stairs, painting the walls, digging up the carpet. He still took the dog for a run in the park every afternoon, and sometimes, as she crept in guiltily late, she wondered if he’d have another woman’s attention there, or at the office. But he remained wonderful, and they bonded at night and morning with his mouth on her breast.
‘Never get enough of this,’ he sighed.
She didn’t have to tell him that. Late those nights, he talked about having children.
‘Might be jealous, though,’ he mumbled.
Her mother loved him, maybe even more outwardly than she loved her. A couple of times a year they got together in Sydney. Her mother fussed over Feather, giving him gifts: a second-hand plaid shirt, new aftershave, two pairs of running socks, while Serene and her mother’s husband talked politics, the new Aboriginal Affairs Minister.
‘That reminds me,’ her mother said. ‘I met someone who wants to talk to you.’ She gave Serene a number.
Serene called at the café in the Art Gallery of NSW, waiting for her mother and Feather to come out of an exhibition of American impressionism. It was the creative director of Bangarra dance company. They’d heard of her from the east coast grapevine and wanted Serene to work for the company during a three-month tour to Germany.
‘What do you say, sis?’ the woman asked.
When Feather and her mother came to the café and she told them, they flushed with genuine pride.
‘I’m so glad you’re doing something with your life,’ said her mother, who dropped out of school in year nine, had never been overseas.
Feather kissed her, hard. She was swimming with surprise and pleasure.
The few remaining nights in Sydney she slept restlessly beside Feather; thinking three months. How would she survive? In the end, she’d admit fear took her. When they got home she wrote Feather a long letter, and left it under his pillow, walking into the bushland into the night. With the torch on her key ring she spotlighted possums, bats and a koala. She felt a thumping in her head as she walked faster, deeper. Rain came, and her torch fluttered out.
Ever since she got back from the Germany tour she wondered if she’d made the right decision. She hoped he had found someone else. She’d seen the world, met astounding people, felt cultural pride at the showcase of the dancers to Europe, and the reception they got. It was huge. To her dancers she played a counsel role. They came to her for everything, whispering their concerns of pressure, family business, lost love. To them, she was a pillar. But she was dying inside. German hands felt like farm bread, warm custard. German mouths were cool, gusty, fleshy. She negotiated on the street, and in the smoky bars most people went just to get warm. She was nothing but cold weather inside.
When she had come home after she left the letter, Feather was at the door in his pyjamas, red-faced.
‘What’s this?’ he hissed.
‘You read it.’
‘You expect me to just pack up and leave? I won’t do it.’ He put a hand on her chest. The gentleness in his touch quivering, wavering.
‘Leave or go, I don’t care. I’m flying out Monday.’
‘You don’t care? What’s this—“it was merely a strong attraction”? What is that, Serene?’
She moved away from his hands. ‘I’ve made things clear.’
‘And…“I want more?”’
‘You will, too.’ She stared at his expression, waiting. Her breasts heaving. He cried out and turned from her.
Back in Brisbane she had recently done what she’d never done, gone to the doctors, gone to a physiatrist, gone to a surgeon and talked about removing her breasts. She hadn’t seen Feather. She’d thought about looking him up, but she felt shame. It was another weekend and all she did on the weekend was watch DVDs, series of them; The Lord of the Rings would take most of the day. There was no one to share a meal with. There was no one to say you should call your mother. Last week, she had been booked in to have the operation. She’d told no one, not even Monique. In the waiting room, she had a powerful image of her father, and the shapes of the paperbarks in the dark. By the time the doctor had come out she had left.
She rinsed out the rice pudding tub and stared for a few moments. She got up and walked to the Kedron hotel. She went in the familiar front room of the hotel and chose the first person she saw. The t-shirt dress was a bad choice. She tore the neck on the thing. His stubble pinched her skin. His etching of her breast wasn’t permanent, only pencilling, drawing oestrogen as he moved his lips, tongue and teeth around her areola. Too slow. Too weak. Not understanding. Before he reached his full stop on her right breast, she already wanted the next mouth.
Dizzy with alcohol, she caught a cab the couple of blocks to Monique’s tattoo shop.
Monique raised her eyebrows at the sight of her sister. She didn’t look impressed.
‘I want you to give me the tattoo I asked you for,’ Serene said.
Monique started to say something. Serene put four hundred-dollar bills down flat on the counter, and the ripped picture of their father. She was aware that there were other people in the room, but she didn’t care.
She shook as she took off her dress. Monique didn’t say anything as she lay down on the table. Monique held the drawing Serene had done. The paper had lined her underwear drawer for years. As she stared at the ceiling with a numbed feeling, Monique mapping her worn-out breasts, objects of battle, she thought of the conversation she’d had with her mother that morning.
‘I remember standing behind the door, watching you fight with Mr van Vliet… Dad. You were begging him. There were things thrown around. Noises. I didn’t know what was happening. I think I peed my pants. What were you saying?’
‘I told him I understood he didn’t love me anymore and wanted to leave. I was older. Who wanted an old, dumb, black bitch? But not to leave you. That you were his and he couldn’t leave you.’ Her mother’s voice was bitter, and in it Serene felt like she understood her finally.
Monique squeezed her hand and she felt the pain. She thought an urgent thought, of what Nel Feather would think of the scales across her breasts, how they’d been carved apart. How would he feel when he saw them? But she shivered the thought away. Nel Feather would never see her breasts again.
When they were together, she hadn’t asked him. What had he felt? She saw his life, his Irish footballer father, his librarian mother, his younger mechanic brother. He was born in Singapore and came to Australia as a young boy, saw the country, felt overwhelmed. From then on felt overwhelmed at any change in his life. Had a few girlfriends, was easy with women, especially when he was younger. These relationships had been mainly sexual. He didn’t like how these women didn’t see there was more to him. The dog had been his brother’s. His brother had died before he turned twenty-one, after a motorbike accident. He liked beef tacos, and he liked tequila. He’d gone with the family to the Mexican restaurant for the first time after his last day at high school. Feather had been in the same job since finishing uni, and it wasn’t more than spreadsheets and emails and reports. He ran to test himself, and for his brother, who had spent a few months as a quadriplegic before he’d got his girlfriend to switch him off without telling anyone. He enjoyed his route in the park, the sound of his heavy runners on the grass. He met a woman with dark skin, shiny, wavy hair, and crooked teeth. One day he’d sucked her breasts and hadn’t stopped after a few minutes, and she hadn’t wanted him to. There was a softening of the room, he fel
t light-headed and impossibly earnest. Just like her, he felt everything open up.
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