She looks at him quickly. ‘I mean, my parents.’ Then her voice softens. ‘But it’s not like that for you, is it?’
Dan looks out over the water, all that water, and it is like he is floating in it, again unmoored, shoreline afire. California somewhere out there over the Pacific, twelve thousand kilometres and a lifetime away.
He shakes his head, but doesn’t say what he really thinks: that this place, for him, was set gently into a small white box and pressed into the ground.
Dan lets himself drift, but he doesn’t see Queensland. He sees instead the backyard in the house in sunny Orange, single-storeyed, blue paint. The best of southern California, with a small white porch out front and a bright orange door. Behind the house, a sweeping jacaranda that shook off purple flowers every spring.
Blue House.
It was home, once.
And his mother in a blue dress with a slim belt, white woolly slippers. A kind-faced woman. A natural beauty.
‘All right,’ she says, soft smile trickling into her mouth. ‘I’ll tell you the story.’ And she puts down her book and pulls him up into her lap. She is warm from the sun and her hair is the colour of cherry wood. It tickles his small grimy neck as he squirms into comfort.
‘Once upon a time,’ she says, ‘there was a young woman. She wasn’t a princess or anything like that, she didn’t live in a castle. But she was very happy because she had a beautiful baby boy named Danny.’ She pauses, and smiles. ‘Oh, you should have seen this baby!’
‘Me! Right? Me!’
‘Yes, you, sweetie. Of course, it was you! But this baby was so sweet and lovely that people would just walk up to touch his skin—his round pink cheeks or his chubby little legs.’
‘Did he cry much?’
‘Every single night! Baby Danny didn’t like to be alone. But that was all right, because I didn’t either, so I would pull him out of his cot and bring him in with me and we would fall asleep happy together. Just like we are now.’
He readies himself for the grisly wolf, the bear, the shark. He knows the story well.
‘And then, one day, I got sick. It was like a snake came out of the forest and into my body. Imagine that! A snake as long as our little street, with fangs like knives.’
A snake, this time. He imagines it coiled inside her, and shivers.
‘I got very sick and the doctors wanted to take me into the hospital and give me poison to get the sickness out, to kill the snake. But I didn’t want poison. Poison would kill part of me, too! Besides, I couldn’t leave you on your own, could I?’
‘You mean Baby Danny.’
‘Oops! I always forget, don’t I?’ Her laugh is deep for her size, and makes him tingle. ‘Of course—Baby Danny. I couldn’t leave him on his own and go to the hospital. So I read lots of books and taught myself lots of things and made myself better all on my own!’
‘You didn’t have to go.’
‘Nope!’
‘You got better because you ate your vegies!’
‘Because I ate lots and lots of vegies.’
‘And then we came to Blue House.’
‘And when I was all better, Baby Danny and I came to Blue House and lived happily ever after. The End.’
‘Mommy, I don’t want you to die. Never, ever.’ He tries not to cry. Buries his face in her chest.
She holds him close, and he is her everything. ‘Oh, sweetie, I won’t die. I promise I won’t die.’
And so, Dan thinks, looking back on that moment, he should have known what he’d lose. His mother had taught him so well how to believe in a thing, and love and trust in it, and watch it melt away to nothing.
Elise leans against him. ‘Hey, I’m sorry about the other night,’ she says, and though he isn’t sure which night she means, he puts his arm around her, takes her head into the space between his shoulder and chest.
‘Things’ll get better,’ he says, and stops before he says more. After a moment, he removes his arm. ‘Will you come home? The house is too empty. It’s like a mausoleum.’
‘That’s not fair.’
‘I’m fucked, Elise. Totally fucked.’ Will not cry will not cry will not cry. ‘I can’t work right, or sleep.’
Elise turns away from him to look out towards the horizon. ‘I don’t want to talk about moving his things.’
For a moment, Dan considers the opportunity to thrust it all out in the open—his anger, his frustration, everything he has folded up and tucked away like laundry. Ready to tumble down and smother them both.
But he doesn’t answer. He picks up a shaggy scab of paperbark from the sand and begins to peel it gently, first in half and then into longer, finer strings, unravelling the thing into its threads. In a past life, he thinks, he and Elise would have discussed what they could make, what could be made, from the bendy strands of bark: clothing, bags, a cocoon. They would have woven a story around themselves and sat inside it, imagined their own island, a world made of two.
All that’s gone, now. There will never just be the two of them.
Would he want it that way, if it could be?
He thinks of standing, brushing off the sand and running into the water. He might go out as far as he could, to see if she might save him.
Would you save me? he wants to ask,
but, of course, he knows she would.
She’s always been good at the body, at healing bodies and saving them. Dissection, experimentation. She’s saved him before. But now, a part of him has been cut away and he can’t find from where; he needs her to help him find where, put her hands across it. Tell him he’ll survive.
‘I need to go to Sydney,’ he says. ‘Come with me. Come for a weekend or something and we’ll eat too much and get drunk and lie in bed and look at the harbour.’
Elise doesn’t answer.
‘What are we doing?’ he asks. ‘I need to know.’
He watches her face.
I’m meeting Hannah Wallace, and she’s beautiful, he wants to say. Her voice, her mouth, her eyes, her words.
I’m afraid of what I am, he wants to say. What I’m not.
A pair of surfers climbs over and down the rocks behind them, a man and a woman, skin and clothes dry and long green boards under their arms. The man’s body ripples as he moves past, his bare torso working with the oiled tension of good muscles. He is like Berlin Warne, Dan thinks. And his lovers. And in this moment Dan realises that he has not properly seen the man’s lovers through the man’s own eyes—the man’s own eyes in his lean, strong body with its grotesque, long penis and ink-stained nails. He has been seeing the women and their bodies through his own eyes.
All of it wrong.
He has not taken them for granted.
‘What the fuck is that woman doing?’ asks Elise abruptly. Her voice is tight with alarm, and she leans forward off the rock.
Dan follows her gaze to the man and woman, now wading into the water. He cannot fathom what Elise might be talking about, but then the woman turns against a breaking wave and he sees it. The swollen curve of her belly under her rash vest, through the front of her shorts, exposed in a sliver of brown skin.
Something catches in his throat.
Maybe even many things.
Beside him, Elise is getting up, adjusting her shoe.
‘I can’t watch this,’ she says. ‘All these rocks, and a baby. It’s not right, she shouldn’t be here. She shouldn’t be doing this.’ Her voice cracks.
But Elise does not approach the woman like Dan fears she will. Instead she turns and runs up the steps two at a time back to the path above and disappears among the trees there.
Dan stays for a moment longer, back against the rock, toes in the sand. Two heads bob just beyond the break, and from this distance he cannot tell them apart. But he stays and watches until the woman in the water paddles a wave, pulls herself to standing and, with enviable grace, coasts in to shore.
chapter 11
The middle of June. It’s too early to be up, too d
ark, too cold. Something has perforated her sleep: a sound above the rush of ocean, an intermittent squeak too close. A door in the wind, a rocking chair, a foot on the stairs, and though the cottage has no stairs, Elise sits up, tense, and holds her breath against the unknown. Listens with her whole body. Clasps her phone in her hand. Thinks of every episode she ever saw of every show with two male cops and a woman’s body, but this
is not that.
This is a quiet street in Rainbow Beach. The doors (her doors) are locked.
Elise slides from under the covers and, with her phone as a torch, peers through the doorway into the short hall. Her light reflects in the dining room windows, as if she were outside looking in, two places at once, but shows nothing. The squeaking and grating continues from her left, on and on and stop and on and on and on, symphonic, and when she opens the door to the other bedroom and shines her light in, she sees them. Two antechinuses pause in their running wheels to stare at her with dark wet eyes, long twitching noses. They look at her as though they’ve been caught in the act, and they have. She has seen them feeding their compulsion to run, to move up a wheel that falls out below them.
After a minute they forget that she’s there, ignore the light, and begin again. Elise balances the light on the little chair by the door and sits on the floor in the doorway, hugs her knees into her chest, and watches as they pull themselves along, rung by rung by rung, going nowhere. She watches because she will not sleep again, and because she needs to consider the spike of fear she felt, not the noise or the dark, but the big, bad question:
What are you really afraid of?
It’s not fair, she thinks, the fear that women carry, are made to bear inside their bodies and outside their bodies and in their clothes and hair and faces and words. Fear isn’t a thing that Dan or any other man can fathom—not real fear anyway, middle-of-the-night dark-street fear—because control is in their blood, in their muscles and their jaws.
During the mating season, the male antechinuses will seek out females for mating, will grip and plug them for twelve hours at a time. This will happen again and again, until the males die.
Do the females run, or bite, or choose?
Elise finds one more antechinus on the last day of trapping, and sets it in its little bag in the truck while she collects all the traps and the flagging tape that marked their positions. When she’s finished, it’s as though none of them—her or the traps or the antechinuses—were ever there at all. That’s the point, she thinks, looking into the forest from the track. That’s life. But the thought grips like grief down the length of her throat, and she shakes it away with the rest.
Much of Rainbow Beach is still closed up, though it’s late morning when she pulls into town. The main street leans towards its western end, trucks in a row at the bait-and-tackle and orange-faced grocery—tent-stuffed Land Rovers and LandCruisers and HiLuxes with long white tubes on racks on top and tongue-lolling dogs.
Elise parks further along and walks back to the cafe for a takeaway coffee and, impulsively, a bacon-and-egg roll. She sits at a shabby bistro table out front and observes the town from a strange distance, like television, where she can be invisible to the dramas already in motion. Little places fester with drama.
Back in Iowa, Aunt Rosie had detested drama. Those people, she’d say, just live for drama, and it’s disgusting. And then she’d settle herself like a Rhode Island Red into church gossip and talk shows, through snow season and hay fever season and mosquito season and autumn, too, when the falling leaves were just one more nuisance she had to bear.
Elise pulls the bacon from the roll and wraps it around the egg and eats it that way, without the bread. A pleasant bead of warm wet yolk runs down the side of her hand, and she is just catching it with her tongue when she senses that someone has come up beside her.
‘Sorry for the timing,’ he says, laughing softly. ‘How are your animals going?’
Elise turns and recognises the park ranger, Will, though he’s out of uniform and casual in a long-sleeved blue shirt, board shorts and thongs.
‘I’m all done, actually. Packing up today.’
‘Oh,’ he says, disappointed. ‘That’s too bad.’
Elise smiles. ‘There’s good numbers of antechinuses out there, you know. It always surprises me how a species like that can keep going—most of the individuals dying every year, almost the whole population turning over.’
‘Like us.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Like our bodies, how we regenerate every seven years or something. That blows my mind.’
‘It varies, you know. Bones take ten years. Skin a couple of weeks—or less, if you forget your sunscreen.’ She hears herself, so didactic.
He smiles and takes a long drink of a green liquid from a plastic bottle. ‘Do you teach at the uni?’
So he’s noticed too. Elise blushes, sips her coffee to hide it.
‘I run the reproduction part of Ecophysiology, teach into Anatomy and Animal Behaviour. I try to focus on research, though. It’s not teaching that gets you promoted.’
‘I almost went down that track,’ he says. ‘But in the end, I wanted to have a life, too. No matter what your cells do, you only get one.’
She should ask him to sit, maybe get another coffee, but then what? Instead, she stands, but when she does, he is too close, right beside her, tall and strong and far too interesting. She quickly moves to the side, tosses her empty cup into the bin. ‘Well,’ she says. ‘I’d better go. Lots to organise before I head out.’
‘Okay. See you next time, then.’ He smiles with his eyes.
‘Next time.’
She catches sight of him as she backs the truck out, right where she left him, still watching her with those smiling eyes. And all the way back to the cottage, Elise imagines she’s bringing him with her.
It takes her the afternoon to unfold and wash all the traps and dry them in the sun and put them away, reassemble the cottage to what it was before her stay. When everything else is packed up, she hefts the cages of antechinuses out to the truck and piles them in the back seat, drapes old towels over them to keep it dark, and straps them in with the seatbelts, just in case. Wheels spin under anxious feet.
She likes the solitude of night roads. She’ll stop for a snack and coffee on the drive, and the campus will be deserted when she gets there. In the quiet, she will do what needs to be done. Unload the truck and settle the animals in the lab. Then home, and Dan.
She’s already planned another field trip, longer and further away, and she will have to tell him.
Won’t she?
Won’t she have to tell him?
She remembers the road trips they used to take, when they first moved to Brisbane: drives into the hinterland with no real aim other than to take the long way, the smaller, winding roads through Mount Mee and Conondale. They’d look for red-bellied blacks or pink-tongued skinks or echidnas on the warm asphalt. Stay at a pub in the centre of town in a room with floral curtains and age-dusted carpet, a metal-framed bed that sagged and creaked when they moved. And giggled. And then moved some more.
Now, everything they’ve been through.
(Don’t look back).
Though she’s driving home, she feels her life moving away from it, along a straight line towards whatever happens next, and after. What happens at the end.
Her end, hers and Dan’s.
Like an antechinus, she thinks. In another month or two, the next generation will ascend from cloaca to pouch, from pouch to den, from den to world; will grow into warm, fast little creatures with deep black eyes; will eat and run and hide until June. Next June. Then, they will fuck for two or three weeks and the males will die. All of them, every year.
So many little deaths. Dying all the time. Her dreams, her genes,
her cells.
It occurs to Elise that she is not the male or the female, but the species. She’d dismissed Will so quickly and now, now she would like to go back in time, invite him t
o sit and talk and open her mind in a whole new way, discuss cells and growth and regeneration and starting again. Because this line she’s on, it’s clear, is dashed.
And she’s lonely in the gaps.
But even as she thinks it, Elise rounds a bend and there it is, a car that seems, at first glance, simply smaller than it should be. Her eyes take it in as she presses the brake: a large kangaroo in the dark grass of the shoulder, a crumpled-up shell where the car hit and swerved and a pole seized it hard.
The roo is beside, in front of the car. Did not fly through it, this time.
Elise circles the truck around and pulls up behind the car so that her headlights illuminate the scene, museum lighting, a diorama. She takes her phone in her hand, should call for help, but the whole situation is terribly urgent, with the woman standing there like she is, eyes wide and deer-stunned, mouth agape. A great wide smear of blood slides down her cheekbone from a gash in her scalp. She does not see Elise approach.
Elise touches her arm, and she startles.
‘Are you okay?’
The woman does not answer, and Elise wonders if she should encourage her to sit, so that she doesn’t faint instead, hit her head on the gravel, roll down the little slope and die. The scenario is absurd, but Elise can’t stop thinking it, so she guides the woman around the back of the crashed car and says, ‘Sit down. Sit here.’
She presses her gently into a bit of short, soft grass and kneels beside her.
‘Are you okay?’ she asks, again, but this time sees not the woman but herself, the little girl she was and can’t remember, on the day she lost everything
(almost everything)
was pulled from the wreckage, alone, lone survivor.
The woman’s head turns, then, and her eyes focus on Elise’s. She is in her fifties maybe. Not old, not young. Still dyes her hair dark. Her eyes are sharp and searching.
‘Elise?’ she says.
A quick pain stabs through Elise’s chest. ‘What?’
The woman reaches out, claws into her arm. ‘Eloise?’
The Breeding Season Page 9