They only let Damien mix with the ‘sluts’, as they called them – the bush pigs and the slags. They were much better than the snob girls anyway, you could talk to them and they’d listen to music or go out into the bush and even muck around a bit. But wherever a No Trespassing sign was put up, Damien wanted to tear it down. Gerry was the best of the bush pigs. She was a good laugh, and smart as well. The snobs really hated her. She didn’t get good marks because she read sci-fi books when she should have been doing school work, but she was real sarcastic and didn’t seem to care what the snob girls said to her. And she put so much black around her eyes everybody said she looked like a zombie. But Damien didn’t think that much about her, and she didn’t seem really interested in him. She laughed at his jokes in a strange way – an almost-laugh.
Damien did have some cred with the snobs – they enjoyed him making a fool of himself and getting told off by the teachers. They laughed. They laughed a lot. Stop clowning around, Damien, you clown. The double clown carried some weight. And he did his clowning with gusto and even, sometimes, with something like wit. He made fart noises, fell off his chair, and imitated the teacher’s mannerisms. He ensured he got suitably low grades to keep in with his own crew, and picked on the odd kid in a lower grade to show that he meant business. He feigned being fascinated with blood and gore, and kept his old man happy by going rabbiting and fox-shooting whenever the opportunity arose. He hated gutting rabbits and skinning foxes, but he was proficient at it and made all the right jokes about different parts of the anatomy when around his dad and other boys – though never around the women of the house.
At school, he’d slip stuff in to shock the snobs, but he had to choose his moment in case they excommunicated him. They liked to be shocked but only on their own terms, and exactly when the moment was right – usually when some failing of their own needed to be camouflaged, especially if it involved an embarrassment of their vanity. His triumphant moment in this department came when Celia De Plant and he were at the fish aquarium in the corner of the biology classroom, on an ‘in the room’ field trip. Celia let out a stinker, and when everyone turned around and started to laugh, she started to go red under her make-up. Damien, catching her horror out the corner of his eye, ‘fessed up and yelled, ‘Top that, Sir – I let that one out from the vault!’ It got him two weeks’ scab duty at lunchtimes, but also a secret thankyou in passing from Celia, who refused to look at him again for some time after that.
The new girl’s name was Bridget, and that seemed to matter. The snob girls pronounced it with an indulgent snarl. A nice snarl. They were very nice to her and she seemed to expect it. She was only so-so nice to them. She didn’t quite help them with their homework, though she was clearly miles ahead – by second-year high, fat neat handwriting and being able to add up weren’t enough to score good marks anymore – but she did lean over their pages and point out an error in algebra or grammar every now and again. In turn, they invited her to parties where older high-school boys could be found in a corner, comparing the attributes of each girl. Bridget joked, ‘You accessorise here?’
It almost shocked Damien to discover that no amount of clowning would elicit from Bridget more than a slight smile which might not really have been a smile at all. When he farted, she looked at him with contempt and moved away without even flapping her hands or generally displaying disgust, and when he got in trouble for a witticism, she gently yawned, while the other kids laughed and drummed on their desks. Damien, who’d never really been embarrassed before, was feeling an uneasy emotion creeping into the edges of his being and he didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all.
When it came to the long weekend, Damien’s dad insisted the boy go spotlighting with him.
Aw, Dad, I wanna watch Terminator on GWN tonight!
Tape it.
Yeah, but it’s not the same.
That makes no sense, mate, replied his dad. His dad wasn’t the kind of guy you could get around, so Damien kept the class clown stuff to a minimum around him. Brothers, sisters, Mum, cousins … okay. But not Dad. He was born without a funny bone.
It turned out this was no regular spotlighting expedition. It was the annual town fox hunt. Damien had never been before – too young. But his father felt it was time and the gun club turned a blind eye, which wasn’t surprising since Damien’s dad was president. The annual fox shoot was unpopular with the more genteel folk because they could hear the shooting – the shooters worked properties right up to the edge of town. As long as the bullet lands on private property and you have permission, and ‘shoot safely’, you can shoot where you want, was the declaration of the law.
Damien knew most of the men who gathered at the shed on their farm, which was the epicentre of shooting in the district. A few of them with really expensive guns and clothes, bought for the occasion, were fathers of snob girls from school – though most were the fathers of rough boys or bush pigs. The rules of the shoot were spoken by Damien’s dad, then the utes and traytops, with spotlights cutting the dark, bristled off into the dark.
Jump in, son, said his dad, and Damien jumped in the cab. A bloke with a high-powered rifle was on the back along with a spotlighter. Damien’s dad had a bolt-action triple-two between them in the cab – the weapon he’d chosen for his son.
As they cut off a gravel road onto a sandy track that ran along where the farm bordered the outskirts of town, Damien’s father started telling that last year they’d had a protester or two – that his job would be to keep an eye out for them. Dad said it in his usual slow sarcastic way. That slowness meant trouble, Damien knew. Trouble for someone. On the one hand, it relieved him that his .222 rifle would probably go unused, but on the other hand, he really had no idea what his dad was talking about. Protester? What was that? Like those people who threw things at the cops on the telly news? He half wondered if his father planned to shoot them. His dad had a bad temper.
Damien managed to formulate a question. But how would they find us, Dad? And we’re on private property.
Maybe a little birdie will mention it.
Damien wondered suddenly if this was how kids felt when he annoyed them at school in order to top up the class humour quotient. Kind of sick and wondering where it was all going.
They bagged three foxes and a bunch of rabbits, but saw no other people. It was getting late when Damien was given a go on the spotlight, with his dad shooting. As the vehicle bumped and shuddered across the paddock, Damien could barely hold on. He kept bouncing up and landing just on his feet, the rifle barrel leaning on the bar across the back of the cabin. At the edge of the spotlight, he caught a glimpse of eyes – you always look for that glint.
There! There! yelled his father, as Damien swung the light around. In the distance, pinpricks of light, now lost in the spotlight.
Cut the light, Damien! Torches! Somebody’s out there, called his dad, banging on the roof to signal the driver to slow down. Hold the rifle, son. It’s got the safety on. Point it down.
Damien took the gun and his father swung the spotlight on two people, no, three, walking alongside the paddock, on the town side of the fence. And there she was: her, Bridget, and two older boys. Young men. His first feeling was jealousy.
What are you doing around here? snarled his dad into the flood of light swirling with darkness.
Going for a walk, mate … no law against it, is there?
As his father spat at the group, Damien felt sick to the stomach.
There’s a shoot going on and this is private property!
And this is public land and you’d better watch where you’re shooting – the bullet is not allowed to land outside your property.
Says who, you cheeky bastard?
Says the law, mate.
You better watch your lip or I’ll come over there and give you a hiding.
Then it will be a matter for the police.
The police around here won’t listen to any cheeky little bastard like you.
No, then they
might listen to my law professor … mate.
Damien tugged at his dad’s shirt and said quietly, There aren’t any foxes here now, Dad, can’t we just go somewhere else? His dad knocked his arm away and jumped down off the tray, joining the men who were now out of the ute, which throbbed and pulsed in neutral, headlights and spotties blazing. Damien could smell dead fox and the men. The barbed wire between them glistened blue in the light. He tried not to look at Bridget but couldn’t help himself. She seemed really frightened, and hung back behind the boys. He could see a resemblance. Brothers. They looked smart. The men in his pack held their rifles across their chests in cradle position – nurturing, loving them. They approached the fence with long strides. Suddenly, Damien jumped in the driver’s seat, threw the ute into first, and did an almighty burnout. He screamed, Prison break! out the window, and did the best donut ever. He stalled the engine. Before he knew what had happened, his father was at the driver’s window and wresting the wheel from him with one hand, rifle in the other.
You’re for a hiding to nothing, son!
Damien surrendered entirely, defeated.
*
Back at school, just before first class, in front of all the cool girls, Bridget came up to him and said, I don’t like you, but you’ve got balls.
It sounded weird coming out of her mouth. He stared at her, embarrassed.
Did your dad give you a hiding like he said he would?
Nah, Dad wouldn’t do that … he wouldn’t have touched you either.
I think he wanted to shoot us …
Nah, he just wanted to scare you.
Why? We weren’t doing any harm to anyone.
You were there because of the fox shoot, though? I reckon you were there to stop it.
Just going for a walk, Damien, just going for a walk with my brothers. Coincidence.
He weighed up the satisfaction of her saying his name, against the likelihood that she was telling the truth. She wasn’t there to stop the hunt, to stand in front of the rifles, to offer herself up as sacrifice to save the fox …? To help a mother fox escape the hunt … to make its way back to the den to feed hungry whelps …?
He looked at Bridget and thought of Gerry. Strange, she had cried when her cat ate a poisoned bait and swore she’d fix the guy who was killing parrots with pickled wheat. She stood up for herself and she stood up for other things as well. She had opinions. He looked across at Gerry, sitting on the bench outside their form room. She was watching him and Bridget, and had her lip curled at one side. But her eyes were smiling at him. Gee, there’s always something going on in Gerry’s head, he thought. It didn’t pain him to stare at her. It was okay.
Damien slowly started to turn away from Bridget, and said nothing else. Bridget looked surprised. No joke, no clowning. Nothing. Walking into the classroom, he muttered to himself, Better the devil you know. Or maybe it was, Can’t see the wood for the trees … Either way, something had changed in his head.
STATUE
It stuck in his craw. They’d said, So now the ol’ codger wants to see the Mother Country. Must be lookin’ for a wife … won’t find one down ’ere! It stuck in his craw, his bloody mates. He’d fought in Vietnam with one of them, he’d been a good neighbour to the others. Whenever something went wrong, he was around to lift the fallen fences, to get the seed in before it got too boggy, to get the harvest in before the summer storms wiped out the year’s gains. He was there for them and now they were taking the piss.
It wasn’t like he’d been out on the town looking for a missus. He wasn’t even in the habit of driving up to Kal to spend an hour with one of the working girls. But he could admit to himself that he was lonely. It was a long time between drinks and he was feeling it. The loneliness mainly. No kids to visit him. And just a few photographs of Val, whom he’d married and lost. He’d spread her ashes under the avocado trees. She’d planted and reticulated them herself. She’d said, Harry, you’ve got to diversify now … wheat and sheep are not the future. Avocadoes will grow a treat here.
But Val, we don’t have the water.
She’d persisted, and run water all the way from the house dam down to the saplings. Even in drought, he’d carted water to keep them alive. They were huge now. Almost tropical in their immensity. She had not lived long enough to see them bear their first fruit.
They were always at him. Not for the first decade, but after that. She’d have wanted you to move on, Harry, and It’s no good for your insides to keep it all in. They cast bets that he didn’t even wank in the long dark hours of the night when there were only the night-birds and the odd fox scream to keep him company. They never considered him weird, but just lost. A lost sheep, our ’arry.
And then he was gone overseas and his mates missed him. It’s strange not having the ol’ bastard around, they lamented. Drinking and yarning, they half realised they needed him to be just the way he was. They made wry, if slightly respectful, comments about their own domesticity and left it at that. They wondered if Harry would send them postcards. He’d never said that he would.
It took Harry a while to find his feet. He just stayed in his London hotel. He even had his meals in the hotel restaurant. He asked the waiter if it was Australian meat and the waiter looked down his nose at him. We feed the bloody world, mate, Harry said indignantly. He watched episodes of The Bill that weren’t due to be shown in Australia for another year, and that amused him. He even thought of sending his Vietnam vet mate a card outlining plots to come, just to give him the shits. Nothing worse than knowing the punchline, was his mate’s saying. Harry suppressed the urge, though sometimes it made him laugh.
Eventually he did go out to see the sights. He tried an open-top double-decker bus tour, but that didn’t work for him – he felt like a school kid. He was used to doing things his own way and making up his own mind. Big Ben and the Tower didn’t need the commentary for him to make sense of them. He’d read his history. He watched television. A lot of television, he thought, with a certain amount of guilt.
So he wandered London. The days went slowly. Too bloody long, this holiday. He’d allowed himself a month in London, then two weeks in Edinburgh, before heading back to the farm. He even thought of cutting it short.
He talked to the hotel concierge one morning about the possibilities for the day. The concierge asked which art galleries he’d visited. Why, none, he said brusquely, as if he’d been insulted. He wanted to say that galleries seemed effeminate, but as the concierge looked like a young man of the ‘other persuasion’, he kept it to himself. Harry was never one to intentionally hurt another person, whatever his personal views might be about their way of life. The concierge took the silence as a negative, and muttered the names of the big galleries before trailing off and asking Harry if he’d visited the London Zoo. Harry visited the London Zoo.
Inspired one morning, Harry decided to catch the train to Cambridge – to get out of London for the day. He wandered around the colleges, stared into the River Cam, tossed up whether to take a ride in a punt, had a pub lunch. Then he was at a loss. He wandered past King’s College … not being a song-and-dance man, he didn’t think he’d hang around for evensong. Sounds like a bunch of mewing cats, he thought. He’d heard them on television. He kept walking past Corpus Christi, though he didn’t recognise it as such – King’s stood out. Anyone would know it anywhere. Then past Peterhouse, a nondescript place, You’ve seen one you’ve seen ’em all. Then he came upon the Fitzwilliam Museum. A grand-looking structure for sure. He didn’t think about it, he just went in.
To tell the truth, he didn’t remember or care for much of what he saw. There was a vaguely rude pair of paintings – Before and After – that reminded him of a BBC period drama, but that was about it. Some of the armour and weaponry he found interesting. Then he wanted a coffee. He strolled past a white marble statue of a naked woman and vaguely registered it, as he’d vaguely registered others – similar-looking – in the gallery. He bought his coffee and again found himself
staring at the statue. She was beautiful, he had to admit, but she didn’t do much for him. He wondered why he was fixed on it, though, and turned his chair slightly away. It’s not the eyes, he said to himself … she doesn’t really have any. It’s like she’s the living dead. He was uncomfortable with that. No, she’s alive, there’s that about it. Suddenly, he took it in his head to walk over and touch her skin. It looked so cold.
He touched her arm gently. Conscious that he was being watched as he did so. You probably weren’t meant to touch the artworks, he realised. He stood back. He studied her face-on. He leant forward and touched her lips. They were so cold they were warm. Her breasts beckoned him but he knew better. His face, so gnarled and damaged by the sun, reddened. He hadn’t felt that in thirty years. It’s just art, he yelled inside himself. It has no meaning, it doesn’t feed anyone, it’s not real. He tried to escape the gallery immediately, so flustered he couldn’t find the way out until he was directed.
Harry held off for three days before catching the train back to Cambridge. But it was a Monday and the gallery was closed. He clenched his fists. He searched around town and found a hotel for the night. He slept in his clothes, and unshaven and unbreakfasted, he was at the gallery at opening time. He went straight to the statue. He approached it … her from behind, and deftly ran his fingers over her buttocks, into the cleft, down around the cleat in the skin where the flesh of her bottom became the top of her leg. He leant forward and kissed the cold-hot stone. Before anyone could say anything or do anything about it, he ran his hands up from behind and gently fondled her breasts. It was over in a heartbeat – his heartbeat against her. Then he left the building with Sir … Sir! echoing behind him.
Crow's Breath Page 9