The Breeding Season

by Amanda Niehaus

  She turns up the street, walking away so quickly that Dan has to jog a few steps to catch up.

  ‘Hey,’ says Dan quietly, catching her by the arm. ‘He’s blind.’

  Hannah stops and turns, and in the streetlight he sees her face is wet, but she’s smiling.

  ‘Yes. He’s blind.’

  ‘Are you okay?’

  Hannah looks back along the street to where Robert has resumed taptaptapping his cane, and Dan breathes into the darkness as if he is freefalling, as if he’s just leaped off some vast edge. His shoes legs hips vibrate with unseen motion.

  ‘The train,’ she says, and Dan realises she has walked him back to the station.

  ‘You live close by?’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ she says. ‘I’ve got Robert to protect me.’

  And though Dan would like to push just a little into her smile, to see what it means, where it comes from, he senses that the night is over and says goodbye.

  All along the train line to Town Hall, the windows flash by, curtains lit from behind, hiding so many unknown lives.

  part three

  chapter 13

  Dan sits at his desk and closes the door to the hall, to the world. Winter unfolds around the cottage, June to July, and time flutters to the ground like pages. Too few pages. Never enough.

  Elise is gone, north to the quolls, and maybe it’s better without her. Maybe he can concentrate, make progress on the book.

  Elise is gone, and now, so is he.

  The Museum of Old and New Art, Mona, is holding a career retrospective for Berlin Warne, and Dan will be there for the launch. He will take in the art and the artist in the flesh. He will see Hannah Wallace.

  The flight to Tasmania is a cheap one, no meal, so he buys a slice of quiche from the bookstore-cafe in the terminal, and a flat white with an extra shot. His head aches with wine, with Elise, with the prospect of acceleration, the shell rattle lift, then up up up. He grips the flimsy cup, his own arm. His hands are bloodless. He’d sleep if he could, but he can’t get comfortable in his faux leather seat, and besides, his mind is a raft ready to blow open. What might happen if he pulled the red handle.

  Elise. Like a shimmer of sun on the ocean below, there and not there, a trick of light, the distance between them increasing. They will do their work apart, her science, his art, from the opposite poles of Australia.

  Dan needs a drink to loosen him up, whatever it is all coiled up inside, ready to spring him wide in a pile of his own guts. In a few hours, maybe, he’ll meet his uncle, will finally know him for what he really is instead of what he seems to be. Burn the manuscript into reality.

  Hannah.

  But there are no drinks, not the kind he needs, at this time of day. His stomach rumbles, and he thinks of Elise, how she once described the baby as gas, a shift in her intestines. He imagines that’s what he feels, the wheeling of a tiny body inside his own.

  He’ll never know how it is to grow a baby, how it is to become more than you are. Child changing every moment, pushing into newly made spaces, testing newly grown muscles and nerves and soft, creamy fingernails. The lightness of it. If only Dan could remember the feel of floating.

  His own, grown-up body is heavy.

  Dan sets the plastic takeaway container on the empty centre seat. His guts are congealing, and he imagines the length of them as a string of sausages, pinchpuckered links, and the thought repulses him but he can’t stop thinking it, always so sensitive, too fucking obsessive, but this is not his mind but his body, and too much wine. He’s done a good one on himself, fucked up his guts, and now he’ll suffer all the way to Hobart, one giant sphincter, clenched to breaking point.

  He pulls down the tray table and flicks through his notes, his questions, things he means to ask Berlin Warne in their short time together. Hannah has given him so much to work with; the gaps are closing. The book will happen after all, despite the doubt and the timing, and maybe when it’s done he can focus on fixing the rest.

  Elise.

  But at some point in the flight, after the drinks trolley has rattled by in both directions, he can’t hold himself in any longer and he squeezes himself up towards the front lavatory, into an unoccupied seat in the first row, to wait for it to empty. Against the window to his left, a striking red-haired woman with a long linen dress and thick crimson tights and leather shoes is curled up against the hull, immersed in a book, terribly familiar.

  His novel.

  His mother, and Tess, the cancer, the end, The End.

  The woman looks up at him and smiles, eyes wide, and Dan blushes. Should he tell her it’s true? Maybe she already knows, has guessed it. But does she know the pain doesn’t go away, even when you write it out? He lost Tess, the world lost Tess, and words don’t make any difference except

  to mothers, his mother,

  who absorbed them like dye.

  But he says nothing, and when the lavatory empties, he stands and folds into it like origami, lets his body spill into the flat grey toilet in one great sloppy heft that leaves him with a momentary gratefulness, too brief, because what he has created is a pile of shit that will not flush,

  not flush,

  not flush,

  that will humiliate him. Show what he is really made of.

  There is nothing to cover the smell of what he has done, and he would like to disappear down the hole with it, does not want to have to walk past the woman, his book, the rows and rows of passengers, does not want the world to know what he is inside, really. And when he unlatches the door and slips through its gap, the red-haired reader is already getting up from her seat, moving towards him with a question in her eyes. The book held out in her hand.

  He freezes. Alarmed. Of all moments, he thinks, of all the moments she would ask. His smell will taint everything, every last word he’s put into the world.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she says, pausing near the aisle, ‘can I ask you a favour?’ Her eyes are bright, striking.

  He coughs, coerces a smile onto his mouth.

  ‘Sure.’ He reaches for the book.

  But she does not give it to him, this is not what she’s asking. She glances down the aisle and back.

  ‘Will you ask the lady with the drinks to bring me a ginger beer?’

  And so he is no one, after all.

  His first impression of Hobart is of the Pacific Northwest, the hillwatertrees of the small coastal towns, the sunslant dinginess of places that freeze and thaw and freeze in sequence, crack open. Small, flat houses push up the hills like cold wave breaks, and none of it is what he’d expected. He’d hoped this place would fill him with whatever he lost on the flight down—and he’s ready to be filled again, feels a kind of energetic hunger that has nothing to do with his guts but his nerves.

  As soon as they exit the highway, his taxi is caught behind a minibus, reluctant through the intersections, and his arrival at the gallery feels touristic—his bag, jacket, brown leather shoes not enough to signify that he is different, he is a writer, he is the writer, wink wink, the nephew. So he quickly moves around the huddled group and along the footpath away from the museum towards the tall, glass-fronted pavilions perched over the riverbank. A museum with its own hotel. A capital-D Destination for a capital-A Artist. He presents himself to the tall dark-haired woman at reception.

  ‘Dan Warne,’ he says. ‘I have a reservation.’

  Behind the high desk, her fingers click on keys, the sounds of waiting, a dozen ballpoint pens. The ceiling is buttercream gold, swirls of red and orange, an obvious sort of decor he does not like, that flaunts its worth. Yet he allows his mind to drop the image onto its side, set it against a wall, and it veers into the west, takes on the cast of burning prairie, fire licks rising with displaced luminosity.

  The fire.

  The water.

  He stares out between the glass louvres at the smooth cold Derwent, the whole of it still like a dead animal, dead child, a living thing now unmoving.

  He never felt Will
iam move, not in his own body.

  Yet he feels things moving inside him, responding to the water, to the coolness of the room, to the time passing passing passing while he stands here doing nothing. All these unknown things are moving, unseen beneath the surface of him, as they do in the water. The feel of falling, of vertigo. A nauseating weightless buoyancy like looking into the stars, a woman’s eyes, a blank page. And what does all his waiting come to?

  ‘Not a bad view.’

  He recognises her voice instantly, and like a hook she pulls him out of wherever he is and into her immediate company.

  ‘Hannah,’ he says. A wash of pleasant, genuine relief, and he leans to kiss her on the cheek, right on right, wishes he might have showered before seeing her.

  ‘I booked you in with me,’ she says, with a small gesture to the receptionist. ‘My suite is huge,’ she says, drawing out the ‘you’ of the word. ‘Two rooms. And it’ll be better for us to talk.’

  Dan considers the implications. How could he say no?

  She leads him out of the steel-glass reception building and down a narrow path through head-high trees. The structures are charcoal, aluminium, designed for a kind of open airiness favoured, he thinks, by those who can afford to commune with nature on their own terms.

  Each suite, pavilion, has a name. Hers—theirs—is called Brett, after Brett Whiteley, her favourite painter and an old friend of Berlin’s.

  ‘The way he does curves,’ she says, and sighs. ‘There’s just something about the female body, and he gets it.’ She pulls a card from her pocket and the door clicks open.

  ‘I think so too.’ But because he doesn’t want to sound creepy, he quickly goes on, ‘But not everyone does. I did a class on that recently, and got in trouble for using female bodies as a prompt.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. So many people can’t get past bodies. They see them through their own experiences and society’s rules and somehow that’s fine, that’s the right way to be, when simply appreciating beauty isn’t. Every body shows us something new about ourselves, but we have to be open to it. Not weigh the experience down with how we were chubby in high school or had a big nose or veiny hands or whatever. It’s not always about us.’

  They are inside the suite now, and he drops his bag and lets her lead him past the Whiteley and out onto the balcony. They stand at the glass edge, look over the trees to the water.

  There she is, next to him.

  Perhaps the most natural person he has ever met, even in all-black, even in this carefully curated environment.

  ‘So you think a man can look at a woman for her beauty and not objectify her?’ asks Dan. He understands and does not understand the gaze or how it works. How a man is meant to look at a woman as no more than her mind, when the mind is housed in a body, when the body defines the mind’s workings. ‘This is the drama about Berlin’s work. Whether he should be allowed to tell a woman’s story using her own body.’

  She looks straight at him, then. ‘You know, you have a lot in common with him. Really. The way you see the world, the way it strikes you. The way you move through it. It’s so clear why he chose you for this; it’s not just because you can write him, but because you can inhabit him.’

  ‘But I don’t want to inhabit him. I want to see things as they really are.’

  ‘Can you do that? Pull yourself out of your own head enough to do that? Because even if you’re not in his, you have your own to contend with. Your own imperfections. Why do you dislike him so much?’

  He hasn’t said so, yet she’s seen it in him. ‘Because he takes things that aren’t his.’

  ‘You do too. It’s fiction.’

  ‘But he lives it.’

  ‘We all live it. Nothing we do is totally our own, totally for ourselves. There’s always more. So what’s the real deal here? What are you really scared of?’

  ‘I don’t want to be like him.’

  ‘But he’s so successful! I don’t buy that.’

  ‘I don’t want to be known for lies.’

  ‘He isn’t.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He isn’t. He always believes what he says, even if it isn’t true. And these things he says let him see the truth more clearly. He paints the truth. The lies are the things he pulls away. Take my picture. The lies are the skin. The truth is inside and sometimes those lies are so built up that you end up damaging the skin to get beneath it. Not everyone’s so open, so vulnerable. You’re not.’

  ‘I feel everything.’

  ‘Yet you aren’t vulnerable. Sensitive, vulnerable—they aren’t the same thing. Vulnerable is being ready to peel yourself back and see what’s inside. You just absorb the blows and call it life.’

  ‘You obviously didn’t read my novel.’

  ‘I did, actually. And it broke my heart when I read it, and it breaks my heart now because you are still that same man. You cut yourself again and again but only superficially. I don’t mean to keep using these metaphors, but it’s how I think of it now. He gave me the images, and now they’re mine, too.’

  ‘Maybe I should have him paint me.’

  ‘Maybe.’ She smiles softly. ‘Maybe you’re not getting the point. This isn’t about anyone else but you. What you do with the chance to look deeper. What you are afraid of becoming.’

  Dan pictures a man, a well-muscled beast of a man, wings tattooed across his back. ‘Like that movie. Red Dragon.’

  She gets the reference, and laughs. ‘All the better to bite you with,’ she says. ‘You know that’s not what I mean.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Do you know what you’re afraid of?’

  ‘I think so,’ he says. But what will he say? Her warm brown eyes penetrate straight into his middle, into a section of his body he didn’t even know he had. ‘What if I choose the wrong thing to believe in? Or get it all wrong?’

  ‘We all make mistakes,’ she says. She smiles. ‘Just call it art.’

  chapter 14

  She leaves him again. A plane north to Darwin, another to Groote Eylandt. She knows it hurts him, and she does it anyway because this is for her—her work, her life, her getting by. This far north, this remote, maybe she can slice apart the past from the now, move on without the weight of it.

  Reinvent herself.

  Leaving home is a kind of blade, she thinks. A severance. Severing. The terrible freedom of ending it all.

  Her father’s car, the kangaroo.

  John, the abortion, Aunt Rosie’s wrath.

  The dark roadside, walking, waiting, wanting to be crushed by a too-big truck, a drunk, or taken, and then—Uncle Bob pulling up beside her. Window down. Light soft over the dash.

  Get in, sweetheart. Come on back now. It’s gonna be all right.

  Was it? All right? She’d left them behind her—no visits, no cards. A kind of blade.

  William is gone, and Dan now, too. Again and again she survives them. Survival, the question and the answer.

  This time, it’s different, these animals different. She’s not sure yet what it means. The northern quolls are related to the antechinuses, like cousins but larger, more like small cats than mice—small marsupial cats with slender slit pouches and teeth made for meat.

  They are different, too, in how they breed. The males fuck and fuck and die, but the females do not. Their bodies hold back, keep something in reserve, live for two or three years, birth two or three litters—

  there’s the difference, she thinks.

  She holds back too much. Her body betrays her. Betrayed her (once) in getting pregnant and, ever since, in loss. One, two, three babies wanted, and hoped for, and lost. Two so early she barely imagined them. William the only one she felt, and named, and loved.

  The male quolls, feeble like Dan, falling apart like they do, after what? Making sperm? They don’t carry the young or feed or protect them.

  He’s a mess, a mess like a post-breeding quoll, and she can’t take it anymore. Grief, a kind of death you can (she will) move on fr
om.

  Elise will show the difference between them—the bodies of the male quolls and the females, the factors that kill them (or don’t). Physiology like a row of dominoes, each enzyme, hormone, marker in the bloodstream tipping into another,

  tip tip tip,

  boom.

  All she has to do is find and isolate whatever triggers the beginning of the end for these quolls, these male quolls. Extract it from their blood or their organs. Because this is the answer to everything. Her whole life, all its deaths and births, encapsulated in one species in which the male dies and the female lives. Simple facts she can take for herself, with blood and tissue samples. Take for herself without having to rely on others—obstetricians or pathologists—who have no answers, anyway.

  On the maps she perused before the trip, Groote Eylandt seemed playful, a buoyant animal somersaulting through the warm water of the Gulf of Carpentaria, head forward and legs askew. But when Elise first sees it, the island has settled into a position of quiet acquiescence, splayed across a smooth steel table, smoke trailing from its treed torso. Great squares of clean-shaven skin, as if in preparation for surgery, demarcate the open mining sites.

  Groote Eylandt and its surrounds, an Indigenous Protected Area, she has read, and a site of ‘International Conservation Significance’, with nine hundred species of plants and three hundred and thirty species of vertebrate animals. A place where northern quolls—endangered now across the tropical north of Australia—are still abundant, can still be studied.

  Vast natural stores of manganese, needed for steel. More than ten thousand tonnes of it extracted each day. Scraped from the body with machines made by men.

  Her eardrums strain with the pressure of the descent, too fast, into a dirt scratch among the eucalypts.

  She is one of two dozen or so to disembark the plane, most of them men, miners likely, with cracked knuckles and sunburned skin, pale around the eyes. Two or three of them light cigarettes as they descend the stairs onto the tarmac. One or two Indigenous families, women with long floral skirts and cotton shirts, thin arms and wide smiles. Children in branded t-shirts, basketball shorts, flat-brimmed hats.