‘How far along are you?’
This time she gets it. ‘Oh. A few kilometres, I think. I made it up the hill, but got stuck at the top. Last night.’
‘Last night?’
‘After I put out the traps.’
He shakes his head and smiles. ‘You know it was single digits last night. Here,’ he says, handing her a black flask. ‘There’s hot coffee in there. Get yourself warm.’
Though the whole situation is terribly surreal—the fetus, the name, the coffee, all of it—Elise is just cold enough to accept.
It seems so strange to dislodge the truck and turn it right around again, go back the way she came. As if in driving in the other direction, she will erase the night and the dream. Dan.
She finds she has caught something in the very first trap—but it is not an antechinus. It’s a small bush rat, cute as a large brown mouse, a mouse she saw once in Uncle Bob’s hayloft, with swivelling whiskers and dark bulging eyes. Elise would like to reach in and take it in her hand, feel it tremble there, bird-like, but she knows the teeth of bush rats, teeth sharp enough to gnaw through aluminium, teeth that grow indefinitely, push out and out, are filed off against wood or metal
(or bone).
Elise has read the stories online, of people and rats and gnawed-off faces.
She clicks the door open and sets the trap on the ground, stands back from it. The rat, small as it is, quickly emerges and bounds away through the dry brown leaves. It does not look back. Elise folds up the trap and slides it into the black plastic bin bag beside her, where she hears it unfold again. She ought to have secured it.
The second rat is much larger, a male probably, and smells of musk. Faeces is smeared through the trap and across the damp rat fur. Urine drips from the back corner of the trap when she lifts it. This rat refuses to come out when prompted and clings to the trip-plate inside the trap. Elise shakes the trap to dislodge it, and its nails shriek along the steel trap sides as it slides out and drops onto the ground. Looks at her and does not move.
She steps away.
The eyes too much like her father’s eyes, her father’s gaze, all that hate and fear. Its whiskers swivel, and she backs away. Turns away.
Will not look to see if it follows. Of course, it will not follow. She will not look.
The traps accumulate until the bag is heavy and bulky with them and she can hardly navigate it through the vines and the figs and she begins to leave it on the edge of the track and walk dirty traps back to it. There are so many bush rats now: they spring at each trap door when she peeks inside it, urinate on her, run over her boots when she releases them. She’s tired of searching for traps she can’t find, along logs and within buttresses where they should be, where she knows she put them. She’s tired of bush rats and the smell of bush rats, and tired in general of everything being so fucking hard, and by the time she’s done, three aching hours later, she despises every rat in the forest for their ugly bristly rattiness and their rot-meat stench and for taking advantage of the free meat and shelter. Seventeen bush rats and not a single antechinus.
And then, ten metres from the end of the transect: a pointed snout, double-lobed ears. Mouse-sized, but it’s not a mouse: it’s marsupial, an antechinus. She knows it instantly, and her pulse jumps like Christmas morning.
Like two pink lines.
Tiny claws scrape the walls of the trap. Blood rushes in Elise’s ears as she stands, and she tips the antechinus into one of the cotton bags in her pocket, knots the top closed, tucks the bundle under her fleece. Next to her body, the animal struggles for a moment, then stills.
After two weeks of fieldwork, two weeks alone, she finds that she craves him: his arms, his mouth, the smell of his skin. She is repulsed by her neediness and by his quick acquiescence, how he lets her push him around, won’t stand up and tell her what a shit she is and was, and how she ruined everything.
She tells herself these things, sometimes.
How she ruins it all.
But another, softer, part of her wants the water and the gelato shop, two scoops in a cup, wants things to be better again, so the next Saturday, the first of June, she drives the long road out from Rainbow Beach and down the Bruce Highway and around Great Sandy National Park. She can’t get the music to play right. Has too much time to think.
The streets into Noosa are crowded with traffic and tourists, but she finds a place to park and makes her way up Hastings Street. The cafes and surf and clothing shops all seem the same to her, same as the first time she saw them, same as each other, only now they’re interspersed with newer, greener places. Acai bowls, fresh juices. Sprouted up like grass between the bricks.
She sees him before he sees her, sees him as she hasn’t for years. Through the salt breeze and his clothes and shampoo and sunscreen, she breathes him in. Admires him: his George Michael stubble, baseball cap and jeans, collared shirt under a grey sweatshirt with something about Muhammad Ali on it. The fabric is soft, expensive. He has good taste. And his hair spills out over his ears in tiny brown curls, so that she wants to lift the cap and see the rest of it, let it fall over his forehead towards those sweetbrown eyes.
Something like sandalwood.
His nose curves slightly to the left, not unkindly, and she thinks of a boyfriend she had once whose penis was like that when it hardened, a frat boy (of course), and she’d cried out when she came so that all his friends would hear them. But that was a long time ago, and she hasn’t really thought of anyone but Dan in so long, except in dreams, a few daydreams, and these thoughts make her feel shy, and shameful, and she pushes them down.
She comes up beside him and wants to hug him but can’t, she has been so far in her mind from him (from them) that it seems wrong, too soon to pretend that nothing’s the matter, though she doesn’t want to be awkward, either. Doesn’t want to get his hopes up, or crush them. In the end, she can’t avoid it, her arms around this man, her husband.
He smells so good.
Like oranges.
‘I’m happy you came,’ she says into his neck, warm where he has been standing in the sun and from the blood pulsing up the side of it.
‘Me too,’ he says.
But she will not kiss him.
She pulls away and looks quickly towards the gelato shop. ‘I’ve been looking forward to this all week.’
‘Vanilla?’
She laughs. ‘Anything but rat faeces, thank you.’
And when he comes back, he hands her a scoop of vanilla in a paper cup. Licks the cone in his other hand, where dark chocolate drips down the side.
‘You might like bubblegum,’ he says. ‘Or pistachio. You should try it.’
Elise wrinkles her nose.
They walk to the end of the street where the beach angles into the rocky hillside and sit on a bench there. Though it’s winter, the day is warm and the sand is full of families. Someone has buried a purple beach ball, and a line of kids take turns trampolining off it, launching into the air to flip or split or tumble forward. Their bodies are strong, flexible; they bend and fall as though they are still soft-boned, too light to break.
Further down the beach, near the water’s edge, two brown-chested men throw a frisbee with a girl and a boy, both awkwardly pre-teen and pale, and another, older girl. Woman. Girlwoman, with goldensmooth skin and a small bandeau top. Eighteen? Twenty? Her body like glass, for eyes to slide along, bikini bottoms gripping the round curve of her buttocks. She leans and stretches, moves with the watching, the knowing that she’s being watched. Her body loose and supple, fawn-like.
‘I can’t help watching her,’ says Elise and, beside her, he nods.
‘Someone should paint her.’
This, a surprise. ‘You’re still not over that, are you? It was one bad class, that’s all.’
Dan shrugs. ‘You know me. I like approval.’
‘You’re good at what you do,’ says Elise, turning to look at him. ‘Really fucking good. You need to finish this book and move on to so
mething for yourself, that makes you happy.’
But she can tell he’s not really listening.
‘Do you know,’ she goes on to break the silence, ‘how mosquitofish mate?’
‘What?’
‘Mosquitofish. I was reading about them. They’re small, like guppies, and they live everywhere. An introduced species.’ She pauses. ‘Well, the male sneaks up behind a female and—quick!—inserts his little penis-fin and ejaculates in her. Then he gets the hell out of there.’ She sets the cup to the side and uses her fingers to demonstrate—one finger a female fish and one a male.
‘Lovely,’ says Dan. ‘Very helpful right now.’
‘Well, that’s what people thought, anyway.’ She lets her hands fall. ‘It turns out the females are really good at avoiding males except when they’ve been deprived of them for a while. Then they hang around, let the good ones get closer, have a better shot. All along, people thought the males were raping the females, the females had no control at all. But really they do. They have some control.’
‘So you’re saying they ask for it. The horny ones.’ Dan smirks. ‘You should tweet that.’
‘No! It’s just how their mating system works. The really important thing, I think, is that no one ever expected the females to have any power at all. Females are expected to be so passive—female eggs, female bodies. The really cool thing about mosquitofish, though, is that as males have evolved larger penis-fins, for better insertion, the females have evolved larger brains to outwit them.’ She nudges him. ‘You’re like that. You’re not passive, you have agency.’
Dan’s eyes crinkle into a smile. ‘Right. There we are. I love that you’re trying to cheer me up by comparing me to a female mosquitofish. Thank you.’ And he laughs, his laugh like the Count from Sesame Street, and makes her laugh with it. ‘Scientists. Honestly.’
The frisbee game is over, and the girlwoman leads the children up to the ice cream truck at the side of the road for soft serves. Her hips sway, dainty feet glide over the sand.
‘I used to use my body like that,’ Elise says. ‘Carry all those looks, know people were watching me, wanting me. I wanted them to want me.’ She sighs. ‘Maybe sometimes I even gave it to them.’
Dan puts his hand over hers, and though it isn’t what she wants, she doesn’t move away.
‘I used to hate myself in so many ways, and now I look at women that age and they’re so beautiful. Even pretending to know it, walking around like that, they don’t really know it for themselves. They need someone to tell them. They live outside their bodies. They don’t even know what’s going to happen to them, how old they’ll suddenly be. How trapped inside.’
‘You’re hardly old,’ he says.
‘That’s not the point.’ She moves her hand, shifts her position to cross her legs on the bench. Her knee rests on his thigh. ‘I’m inside my body now. I’m stuck in there with all the microplastics and nanoparticles. The DNA of every baby I’ve ever carried or … lost.’
She stops, has said too much.
‘Wait. You’ve got William’s DNA in you?’ His voice feathers.
She nods. ‘During pregnancy, the baby’s DNA moves into the mother’s body. They find it in all kinds of organs, even the brain. It’s called microchimerism.’
Dan looks away from her, towards the water. ‘How is that a bad thing?’ he asks. ‘Think about it. You’re carrying around all there is of him.’ He takes a deep breath. ‘I wish I could. Know he was inside me.’
‘It’s not the DNA, though. It’s the guilt. Everything is something done wrong. She doesn’t realise it yet, but someday she will.’ Elise nods at the girlwoman. ‘It’s the guilt that will build up on her, in her. And then what’s left? Then she’ll be invisible, stuck inside a body looking out.’
‘You know it wasn’t your fault.’
‘Maybe.’
The children have finished their ice creams and the girlwoman stands with them at the frill of the surf, kicking water at them and laughing.
She’d always meant to tell him. But how could she, now? It would have to be her secret—the first one, John’s, aborted, thrown away.
The doctor had been a woman, probably the same age as she is now. The little bed, baby blue. Shelves and walls showing the insides of people like her—a uterus on a metal rod, a map of fetal development. She was informed, orally and in writing, of the risk of haemorrhage, danger of infertility. The potential danger to subsequent pregnancy. She was given the probable gestational age of the fetus, shown a picture of a fetus, its dimensions, given relevant information on its potential survival.
At that stage of development, there was no chance.
She was informed of the risk of the procedure, and did it anyway. Now, it’s almost too much to bear.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ she says.
‘We could walk the headland?’
But that’s not what she means.
chapter 10
A small crowd of people has gathered near the information hut at the start of the headland track. Children press into parents’ legs, men in floppy fishing hats or with thick crowns of hair shade their eyes with their hands, look up at the trees. Women with iPhones capture the moment, read aloud from maps or guidebooks. Dan and Elise push up to the edges, guide their eyes up the eucalypt and there, where the largest branch arms into the trunk, a round furry lump, unmoving. Dan leans into Elise’s ear.
‘And here we have the koala,’ he says, voice low, in his best Attenborough imitation. ‘Each night, the beast moves restless through the villages, foraging, but—’ he pauses dramatically, ‘—not for food.’
Elise giggles.
‘Exhausted, the male sleeps. He must. He has no choice. He has chlamydia.’
He draws out the word, spreads it across the air between them.
‘You would know.’ Elise laughs, and glances around.
‘Do I make you nervous?’ Dan asks. He means to.
‘Whatever.’
‘Don’t want me to mention the chlamydia? In some parts of Australia, ninety percent of the little buggers have it. Disgusting.’
And he says this louder, and laughs, and at this people do turn, and Elise’s eyes widen with horror—though whether it’s real or pretend, he can’t tell. But he’s having fun, so he goes on.
‘Besides, you can talk,’ he says. ‘You of the famous San Diego Zoo incident of 2014.’
The zoo. They had sat on the shaded bench in front of the exhibit and watched the bonobos, the pygmy chimpanzees. The animals had intelligent eyes, too close to human, and their bodies were graceful and repulsive. Bony thickskin brows, pressed lips, strange long arms. Hairyflop breasts.
‘No way,’ she says. ‘I’d almost managed to forget that.’
‘Suppressed it, more like.’
She twists her mouth at him, her eyes gleaming.
‘Because every bonobo watcher must know the capital-T truth,’ he goes on. ‘Couldn’t possibly make assumptions.’
‘But it was two females.’
Dan raises his eyebrows. ‘I believe the words you said to that poor old couple were—’
‘No! Don’t you dare!’ She shoves him.
‘—what was it now … mutual clitoral stimulation?’
Elise closes her eyes, shakes her head. ‘They were absolutely mortified.’ She laughs. ‘I do get it wrong, sometimes, don’t I?’
Dan smiles, puts his arm over her shoulder and kisses her temple, where her hair is soft and downy.
‘Sometimes you just have to say a thing how it is,’ he says.
*
The water glows turquoise or teal, some shade of blue and green that is not simply sea creatures and algae as he once thought, but the absorption of long wavelengths, reflectance of short. The passage of vertical light through his polarised sunglasses to his eyes. He will never see the blue the same way as he does in this particular moment.
He will never see it as Elise does.
But, when his mind is
clear, he can re-create the colour on the page—the darkening as it deepens, the bubbled froth as the water pushes onto shore, again and again, now, but also through time. How it has shaped the beach and the headland itself. The puckered taste of salt in his mouth.
He does it through words. Through words he feels these things and can re-create them.
The trees and path are dust-coloured, muted, and he craves the sunspread plane of water below. So, when they come to Tea Tree Bay, they descend the cobbled steps down to the rocky beach and find a place, slightly elevated, to sit and watch the surfers slip along the curltops.
‘I was in Baja once,’ says Elise, ‘in the Sea of Cortez, and the water was blue like this, and we went out in kayaks … There were so many dolphins, and little rays, and a dog that would swim out from the beach after you and try to climb up on your boat.’
They lean into the warm rocks.
‘Did you?’
‘What?’
‘Let it onto your boat?’
Elise laughs. ‘It was like a game. You tried to out-paddle it, and if it got too close you could push your oar out, try to keep it away, and it would grab the end with its teeth and hold on. Then you were really stuck.’
‘So mean.’
‘It was gross, that dog. It had fleas and sores and stuff. It oooooozed.’
‘I rest my case.’
She scrunches her nose at him.
‘Do you ever miss it?’ he asks.
She is looking out intently at something he can’t see.
‘What?’ she asks, coming back to where they are.
‘The States.’
‘No.’
‘Not even California?’
‘This is home. It always was, I guess.’
He doesn’t say anything, and she goes on. ‘This is it; I knew it as soon as I stepped off that plane.’
Her cheeks glow, like when she was pregnant.
‘All those years I let Aunt Rosie tell me I belonged there with her, with them, in Iowa. That I was better off there. Had a brighter future. When all I had to do was come back here and I’d feel it. The water, the sun, the river. The trees. It’s different somehow. It’s not like anywhere but here. Even with no one else but me to feel it.’
The Breeding Season Page 8