Skyglow

by Leslie Thiele

  Skyglow

  Skyglow

  Leslie Thiele

  First published in Australia in 2020

  by Margaret River Press

  PO Box 47

  Witchcliffe WA 6286

  www.margaretriverpress.com

  email: info@margaretriverpress.com

  Copyright © Leslie Thiele

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry data is available from the

  National Library of Australia

  ISBN Print: 9780648652168

  ISBN EPUB: 9780648652144

  ISBN iBook: 9780648652151

  Cover design by Debra Billson

  Cover photos by Meghan Pinsonneault and Evan Dalen/Stocksy

  Edited by Donna Mazza and Camha Pham

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  Published by Margaret River Press

  This publication has been made possible with funding from the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries, Western Australia.

  For my mother, for love; my father, for books; and for Ken, who knew what I should be doing when I couldn’t see it for myself.

  Contents

  Light Pollution

  Magpie Season

  Wilding

  The Slaughterman

  Inshallah

  The Recipe for Jam

  Air That I Breathe

  The Gingerbread Man

  Conversation

  Where I Can See You

  The Bough Shed

  No Trouble

  The Blow-In

  Horses

  Harbour Lights

  The Boat

  Ashore

  French Linen

  Two-Four Time

  Yours Alone

  Catching Trains to Frankston

  Coming Clean

  The Medal

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Light Pollution

  Iwake in the night and don’t know where I am. The swish of passing tyres on wet bitumen still sounds unfamiliar, as does the wind rushing in the tall trees. Experience tells me sleep will be impossible now. I lie a moment longer, before sliding out from the warm bed, careful not to wake Robert; lift my heavy gown from the hook on the bedroom door, shrugging it on over the first sharp bite of cold air.

  In the kitchen, the kettle glows enough light to spoon coffee and sugar, and I shuffle from foot to foot on the freezing tiles, take the steaming cup and settle myself in the chair by the window, staring out into the night quiet. I don’t turn on a light, I don’t need to. If there is one great divide between then and now, and there are many, it’s the strange truth that here in the city, it is never truly dark.

  Such a whiny thing to say. I miss the dark.

  From the window, a line of street lamps march towards the river crossing and onward to town. An article I once read comes to mind, explaining how the increasing light pollution from industry and our clustered high-rise monoliths disrupt the patterns of migratory birds and other nocturnal creatures. Their navigational systems blown awry by the ambient light in our night skies, so they fly at the wrong time of year, in the wrong direction. I puzzled over it in another place and time, but understand it now.

  My reflection in the cold glass is blue and ghostlike, as though I am barely here at all. Much of my substance feels worn away, like I too have flown to the wrong place, in the wrong season. A dusty jar crowded with faded glass fragments and broken china sits on the windowsill. I look away. I dread this late-night solitude and long for it in equal measure.

  When my thoughts turn towards Stillwater, the memories weigh heavily on my chest. How easy it is to be buried alive without ever knowing what is happening. How stealthily time beats at the metal of us, changes our texture. There was a time when I thought with a steadfast joy that I would never leave that place, and a time when the same thought filled me with a bleak despair.

  Somewhere in my mind, a curlew cries into the dark, a sound of loneliness hollow to the bone. I shiver the memories away, lighting a furtive cigarette, which may or may not be the death of me. No matter, there are worse ways to die and harder ways to go on living.

  They say, the old people, the country gets into your blood.

  While skin is seeping salt and sweat, lungs are drawing in the dust of the place. It settles somewhere deep until you are still partly you, but partly country too. Lines blur between who you were and what you are, between when you came and how you came to be at all. If I die tomorrow, how much of the dust I become will be desert dust? And how much will be me? Or does it, in the long run, all mean the same thing anyway?

  The further away in time Stillwater slides, the closer I come to its mystery, the hold it has. As time moves me forward in other directions, the pull of those desert whispers grows ever stronger.

  Come back, come back.

  I can’t, I won’t. I want to.

  Like a lover it draws me, and like a spurned woman, I turn away. Busy myself with the minutiae of the day. Mourning the gathering distance, grasping at the memories.

  Come back, come back.

  I can’t, I won’t.

  A long time ago, I waited in the dried-out swale of a billabong, watching the cattle feed out onto the plain, their ridiculous ears flapping at the flies, knee-high in buffel grass. Their coats, tan, red and grey, soft upon the landscape. A great ball of orange sun sat on the cusp of the ocean, flaming the seed heads bright purple, rimming the herd molten. In the hush, a wild dog, golden in its own right, meandered through the tea trees and sat like a domestic at my side. A single frozen moment when my breath caught in my throat and ants walked unmolested across my trembling hand. He scratched himself lazily, as dogs will after a working day, rose up and wandered off towards the coast.

  Only here, I knew even then, only now.

  I wasn’t born to that country, but lived there long. A strange seed refusing to believe I could not thrive in such alien landscape. I grew up everywhere and nowhere, so much moving around, I never had the chance to grow up. Always too busy trying to cling to the solid edges of wherever we’d washed up to look for who I was, what I might become.

  I arrived at Stillwater already scared and wanting, the last pick of the team, the one you hoped you didn’t get in the game. Because everyone would know what you had in your hand. Because everyone might see it was nothing. It was Stillwater, that magical landscape, that grew me up.

  The drumbeat of hooves on that flat dusted land sounded like the beginning and the end of the world. Made you hold your breath deep. The sound came first, beating closer, shuddering the air. Then the blur of them; bay, black, buckskin, grey. Manes and tails flying, shoulder to flank to nose, the grunt of air and effort. A thousand corellas rose, screeching to the sky, wheeling and joking their way back to the shade trees as the horses took turns gulping at the trough, diamonds dripping from their soft muzzles in the breaking light. Kicking and running as one, back out the way they came.

  Even now in this otherplace, I feel the shadow of a smile stretching unbidden across my face. The blooming in my chest of a single silent, triumphant shout. Just for the fact of them, for their defiant freedom.

  As they chased each other to water, I saw the gate shut behind them, their frantic milling to be out on the plains pitiful. I would learn later that cattle go on to their death with moans of despair. Horses were different. Horses screamed. They buckled gracelessly to the hard ground and looked
you in the eye as they cried out, high-pitched as women, innocent as children. One after another after another, until the ragged remnants were set free, heads bowed and broken, the corellas shouting protests and shame from the branches as chains were hooked around the necks of the dead, ready to be dragged to the pit.

  I stood, silent, running my hand over and over on the place on the timber trough guard worn smooth by their silken necks, feeling something in me turn to stone.

  I never saw them run to water again.

  *

  In this new place, the water never runs out. It runs clean from the tap in an endless stream. Hot or cold, anytime of the day or night. No need to fire up the chip heater, no need to collect the wood at the cold end of a dry season day. The tarnished strainer I used to catch the bones of reptiles drowned in the water tank has no use here. No tiny jawbones, no teeth, no claws. Where is the water bag? Where is the flask? Where are the fencing pliers and wire? They gather dust with the bridles and surcingles and saddle blankets hanging in the shed on rafters for ghostly horses who no longer run.

  I struggle with ordinary things, needless things, and my heart cries out for the tools of survival. The tucker box and hat, the mud map, directions true north. Follow the fence lines and you’ll always find your way. The birds always fly towards water as the sun goes down. You can stuff a flat tyre with spinifex, enough to get you home safe.

  Up there, I could ride out across the flat plains towards the ocean. If we went far enough, the homestead would almost disappear, marked only by the furred outline of the great old trees, mounded curves softened by the shimmer of heat. At the start of the dry season, the grasses grew thigh-high and bent in the breeze with the grace of waves. The horses’ hooves swished their way over the hard ground, speckled quail scuttling aside from the intrusion. Bronze kites flew steady at my shoulder, diving occasionally to sweep the disturbed insects into their beaks.

  I loved it so. I told them so.

  It’s not like you were born here.

  Such bland distaste, the driest of earth suddenly slippery underneath my feet. My overtures met with the cold slide of cutlery on plates at dinner time and a deep humming silence where only night crickets sang. I would stare at my half-eaten food through a sting of tears I refused to let fall and curse again my eagerness. Why couldn’t I learn to be quiet?

  When I tried to explain to Robert how I felt, he shook his head and stared out towards the bend where a dusty track ran up towards the access gate. ‘Maybe you need a day in town.’

  I grew accustomed to the loneliness. This was his home place, and there was no common language. I drove the gravel access road at hurtling speeds, not to have a day in town, but to stand at the front gate staring out at the highway. Opening and shutting the rusted gate mindlessly, the squeak and squeal of the hinges sighing above the rustling wind. The raw places in me soothed at how easy it might be to walk in… and walk out.

  As a child, I was desperately afraid of the dark, would lie still as a corpse beneath the unreliable protection of blankets, wide-eyed through the night and into the morning when the peculiar shadows thrown by the street light finally faded to sunlight. At Stillwater, the darkness was palpable once the generator was turned off in the evenings. The velvet blackness thick like yarn in my hands, cool on my face. I would scale the ladder propped against the sleepout and stretch out face up on the roof. Pressed down and grinning at the weight of the stars as they spun their slow arc through the skies. The Milky Way, a spill of jewels in a silence disturbed only by the cheeping arguments of small night creatures.

  In true darkness, navigation by the stars becomes a simple skill. Is it any wonder that now, in this place so busy with light, I have lost my way?

  Stillwater had been built over the site of an old homestead dump, each day revealing a new treasure to add to my collection. Shards of bottle porcelain worn smooth as sea glass by the action of wind and dust and time, ancient slivers of stone. The people who discarded them had lived here, and now they are gone. Their stories and dreams whispered in the thrown dust of a high wind. I would cradle the pieces between my palms and fill the pockets of my shorts, placing them into tall jars back at the house. The patterns they made, piled one atop the other, pleased me.

  Every now and again, I would spill all the pieces out onto the table and clean them, before rearranging them back into the jars. I was doing just that, in a state of distant meditation, the day Robert came in and leant on the doorway, face tilted and vague beneath his hat.

  ‘Are you happy here?’ he asked, as he had a thousand times.

  My fingers worked busily at their task, my mind floating through the opaque green glass.

  ‘No,’ I said, before I could still the words in my throat, before I could think of the implications. ‘No. I don’t want to live here anymore.’

  And so, quietly and painfully, began the thousand small decisions necessary to uproot from one place and find a comfortable other.

  *

  Now, late in the night, I seek out the comfort of a darkness no longer mine to discover. My coffee grows cold and the chill works its way into my bones. I think of the warmth of the bed and Robert sleeping there, of the things he has walked away from, the things he has left behind. He has never spoken a word of recrimination, never let me own the blame. We rarely speak of Stillwater.

  He comes across me now, sitting in the quiet as daybreak begins to wash across the tiles; sighs and ruffles my hair, worries that I don’t sleep.

  I am shamed at his concern. I unclench myself from the chair and put the kettle on again, busy myself with the making of tea.

  ‘Have you been up long?’

  ‘No,’ I lie. My hair falls forward to hide my face as I pour. ‘Not long.’

  He looks at me sideways, readies his face for the asking.

  I know what is coming, tense my shoulders.

  ‘Are you happy here?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, handing him a cup. I look at him standing there, raw and hopeful. ‘Yes, I am.’

  Magpie Season

  At the back, the early sun lingered, warm as a bowl of oranges. Even after four years in a house purpose-built to take in the expansive view of the estuary, waterbirds and silver tides, Theresa still gravitated to the small rear-facing deck. She liked to look out over the other houses, sipping her tea and watching the sleepy suburb come to life; newspapers brought in, bins wheeled back from the kerb, students lugging too-heavy backpacks with dispirited adolescence. Hugh couldn’t understand her reluctance to enjoy the big front room, but all that plate glass left her feeling exposed. It always felt cold in the winter, no matter the stunning view.

  Tea drained, she walked inside to the kitchen, the sound of the door closing bringing a flurry of wings and the tinny click of claws grabbing at the iron railing. Taking a small handful of mince from the fridge, she came back out. The magpie stood waiting for her, head to one side. He sidestepped along the railing and back again, head bobbing up and down with impatience, the bright sunlight illuminating his white wing feathers against the black.

  Once the mince lay on the table, he swung a quick look in both directions as a nervous pedestrian might, before jumping across and snatching it up in his beak. Breakfast over, he danced a slippery two-step on the glass before throwing back his head and breaking into glorious song. Payment in kind for his easy meal. Performance done, the magpie shook out his glossy plumage and lifted his tail feathers to defecate before flying towards the scraggy gums across the road.

  Hugh despised the magpie with a depth of feeling Theresa found absurd, ranting endlessly about the mess of bird droppings on the deck. He had a way of puffing himself up and working himself into a tight-jawed fury. If he were particularly annoyed, he would jab his index finger towards her, speaking in broken sentences as though she were stupid.

  ‘Do not encourage, that bloody…Look at the shit, it’s gone and…Are you completely ignorant? How many bloody times?’

  At his slam of the sliding door
, she would find herself standing alone, one hand still raised in feeble defence, as though a strong wind had whirled her about, leaving her stunned and dishevelled. Sometimes, Theresa and the magpie would look on silently from their respective positions as Hugh scrubbed at the guano on the tabletop with unwarranted vigour.

  Life was better when Hugh went fishing. That was, after all, the reason they’d moved on his retirement from the home she’d tended for so many years. When he would mention the night before that he might make an early start, she found it encouraged him if she looked slightly mournful at the prospect, as though she would miss him terribly, giving him the double satisfaction of taking time out for himself while leaving her disappointed. On those mornings, Theresa lingered on the back porch, trimming the red geraniums in their blue glazed pots and enjoying the peace.

  The magpie stayed longer then too, long after the mince was gone. He would serenade her with fluting tones, watching curiously as she pottered about. He was good company, gentle and interested, and she found herself conversing with him as one would an old friend. She did not have to make an effort. She had made an effort when she married Hugh, whose family never approved. She had done it again when the children were born, and it was bloodier and more painful than she had expected. She had done it for years, making sure everyone had everything they needed for the day ahead. Now, she had little interest in making an effort for anyone, or anything; something Hugh found endlessly frustrating.

  On moving to the coast, Hugh had joined the bowls club, the fishing club, and learnt to play golf on the local course. He became a member of the district orchestra, finding his role as conductor immensely pleasing. It seemed to bring out the worst in him, and Theresa came to dread each production. As rehearsals went on and opening night drew near, Hugh would reveal himself to be an impresario of the worst order. She was expected to listen endlessly to the score of the show while he furiously conducted, using his pointer finger as a baton.