by Carmel Bird
The works.
Cockatrice, hedgehog, bunch-back toad.
What a psycho.
And who can imagine how many insects, spiders, mice, snails, lizards, grubs may shelter, burrow, nestle, feed and multiply within the crevices of the fig tree’s ghostly fingers? This is a hiding place for children who seek the door to some bright other reality where things are both more beautiful and more dangerous than the things of everyday. And the cockatrice is sometimes confused with the crocodile.
Shooting the Fox
Introduced into Australia in the 1850s, and listed as a National Threat to Agriculture and Wildlife in 1992, the European Red Fox is now widespread across the country except for the tropical far north and Tasmania.
Luke Lacey and Clementine Maloney were high-school sweethearts—and they married just as the apple blossom was coming out, when they were both nineteen. They called the baby Grace. It was 1998, characterised in the district as the year the fox got off the boat at Burnie and headed into the Tasmanian bush. It was the island’s first fox.
Shotgun weddings were not unusual at the small brick church of St Francis, which had stood in the hollow of a stony hillside for over a century. What really excited the locals was the fact that at last a Maloney was marrying a Lacey, for the families had been feuding for generations. It had been in the first place a question of land ownership and boundaries, and although all this had long since been resolved, the bad blood lived on. So there was a certain daring in what Luke and Clementine were doing. Would they finally bring the two families together? The orchardist Laceys and the publican Maloneys.
There were lots of Maloney sisters—all older than Clementine, some married, some not, and their bridesmaid dresses were green and white, their bouquets lily-of-the-valley. All the girls except Clementine had been sent away to board at the convent in town when they were twelve, but the family couldn’t bear to part with Clementine, so she had gone to the local high school. Perhaps this was a fatal mistake—the affair, pregnancy, marriage a punishment for not sending her away to school. Her widowed grandmother, Maeve Maloney, said as much. ‘If only you had sent her to board at the convent when you should’ve, Gretta, she wouldn’t be where she is today.’ There could be something in that. The older sisters only looked sideways at each other, knowing that if Clementine had gone to the convent she would at least have learnt (paradoxically perhaps) about the pill in the whispering shadowy pink-flesh dormitory nights. Maeve, nevertheless, gave the couple the old pipe organ from her parlour as a wedding present. It was something Clementine (a romantic and musical girl) had always longed to own. All slim blue pipes decorated with golden stars and softly yellowed keys, real ivory from real elephants in India or Africa or far far away. There had been talk of sending Clementine to Hobart to study music at the university, but that was never going to happen now, not after everything.
Peter was the brother closest in age to Clementine, and he wanted to go round and shoot Luke Lacey, had bright and excited visions of throwing Luke’s lifeless body in the dam in the dead of night. Such things had happened before. But Peter calmed down, people settled down, and Clementine went to Goldie Flanagan and her daughter Bethany for a wedding dress. Goldie’s shopfront had stood on the main street of the little town, three doors down from Maloney’s pub, as long as living memory was living memory. The shop was once called Goldie’s Gowns, but in the nineties, when nostalgic tourists began to trickle and then to surge into sleepy little villages, seeking quaintness and old values, Goldie’s Gowns became Golden Memories, specialising in wedding dresses of old-time-yesteryear, smocked christening gowns, and Edwardian silken slips and knickers filled and frothing with lace. Frill and froth and lace and satin ribbons and velvet bows. Peachy and scarlety. Everything rickety and ancient about Goldie’s became charming and endearing, and she employed girls from the high school to come in and polish the honey-coloured woodwork and the brass knobs. They also did some of the smocking, some of the grub roses and some of the cross-stitch. Clementine had been one of these girls, and had dreamed of one day walking down the aisle in Goldie’s speciality—the Primavera.
So on the day, Clementine drifted down the old frayed red carpet of St Francis’s church looking like a dreamy darling goddess of the spring, a Botticelli girl in filmy white just tinged with green, embroidered flowers scattered carelessly across the folds and flutters and silky shadows of the gown. Her limbs were fine and smooth and rounded, lit by a golden apricot glow, soft as butter and cream. Beneath the fine lace veil—it was Carrickmacross—which had been worn by her mother, by her grandmother, her great-grandmother, her hair was long and fluent, was softest autumn russet shimmer gold. Luke was a handsome boy, shining and shy in his best grey suit, shining with soap and embarrassment and desire. Flanked by his brothers. Yes, it was a historic day when the Laceys and the Maloneys sat peacably on either side of the church in their best clothes, perfumes and anti-perspirants, and the families, all aware of the tucked-away presence in utero of Gracey Lacey, rejoiced to see Clementine and Luke joined in Holy Matrimony.
‘Way cool,’ was what Luke’s friends said. Clementine’s said: ‘Wicked. Divine. Random.’ It was an event.
The reception at the pub was a joyful rowdy affair with two bands—one made up of Maloney boys, one made up of Laceys. Father Pirandello played his violin—‘Oh my darling Clementine’. Champagne for the ladies and whisky and barrels of beer for the men. A whole sheep and a suckling pig and the world’s largest apple pie, with cream from Morgans’ cows. When Clementine and Luke got up to do the bridal waltz they resembled, everybody agreed, a prince and his princess. It was something of a miracle in this day and age that two such children could waltz at all. Grandmother Maeve played the piano and she also caught the bridal bouquet of opulent stephanotis and lily-of-the-valley, causing great joyous roars of approval and suggestions of the names of bachelors she might like to wed. Old Bill Foster got incredibly drunk and said he’d seen a fox near his henhouse. Nobody took much notice.
The couple went to Magnetic Island for their honeymoon, the trip a gift from Luke’s parents, then they came home and went to live in the caravan and annex at the far end of the orchard, high up and deep in among the tall tall dogwoods, beside the cold clear waters of the Round Pond, where the tiniest brown frogs hopped their tiny hops and hid in the mossy clefts of rocks and could sometimes be seen crouched on the rubbery leaves of the waterlilies. There were yabbies in the creek. Fat grey pademelons would come to feed on the weeping grass right in front of the caravan door. Luke’s lazy old dog watched them benignly from behind the water tank. The pipe organ went into the annex, waiting for Luke to begin building the house in which he planned to have a special place for it. He started building soon after Gracey was born.
Clementine was romantic, and so was her new husband. A couple of romantic children with their baby in the forest. The first thing Luke built was a tall slender timber structure on three levels, a tower in fact, from which he could look out over the treetops for signs of bushfires. Signs of life. With a kind of fierce and miraculous speed he had the whole thing up within six months. Everyone was amazed; Clemetine was delighted. The kitchen was on the ground floor, the bedroom on the second floor, and the lookout on the top one. A hollow stone that jutted from the ground formed the kitchen fireplace. The bath was deep and white with the claws of a lion for feet, and it stood by the broad kitchen window so that Clementine, glistening in the firelight, could drift in the water and stare out into the darkness of the trees. The pipe organ nestled in the corner of the bedroom, next to Gracey’s cradle. Part of a side of the whole building was the sheared-off trunk of a tough old she-oak. One evening, as Luke was gazing into the blue-green mist of leaves below him, he fancied he saw a fox.
Luke felt his body tighten, he squinted into the binoculars. The flash of red was gone in an instant, quick as the un-remembered lightning of a long-forgotten dream, ephemeral as snow melting on warm rocks. A snarl, a smudge, a glance of russet life ruffling the thick
ness of the leafy landscape. He stayed up there a long, long time attempting to pierce the growing gloom of the forest with his sharp and longing sight. If he could catch the fox! His heart beat faster. What have you been doing, Clementine asked him when he came downstairs. You’ve been up there for hours. And somehow the memory of the living jagged jolt of the animal gripped Luke’s whole imagination and something shifted within him, within the little world in the tower in the forest on the edge of the orchard.
But he didn’t say anything, didn’t tell Clementine what he thought he had seen, what he had begun to desire. It was a huge thing, seeing that animal, and the more he thought about it, the more he longed to sight it, hunt it, shoot it, spoil its perfect sharp-eyed predatory flight. Stop it in its wily tracks. Kill the glint in its black glinting eye. He went round to old Bill Foster’s place with a box of windfalls. You want a few windfalls, Bill? And Bill said yes and asked him in for a cup of tea and they sat in the kitchen, where there were fishing lines and guns and knives and a flitch of bacon hanging from a hook. They drank strong tea out of thin white cups with delicate green bands along the rim. Bill smoked a pipe, the tobacco smelling rich and sweet and honeyed in the dark little room. So what’s happening up in your neck of the woods, Bill said, and Luke told him about building the tower, and Bill said he’d heard about it, and he thought that was a damned good idea. Keep your princess locked up safe and sound—and he laughed and showed the gaps in his teeth. Luke was startled when Bill said that. He had never thought of things in that way at all. No, not at all.
It didn’t take much to get Bill talking about the fox. He’d seen it three times near the henhouse underneath the plum tree. Hadn’t reported it. Nobody listens. If I see it again I’ll shoot the bugger and then they’ll have to believe me. But I’m not reporting it and having a whole lot of government bastards in jackboots crawling all over the damn place, poking their noses in where they’re not wanted. No, if I see it I’ll shoot it, and that’s that. Next thing you know the papers’ll be out here taking pictures and making up stories and your life’s not your own. The missus skedaddled off to Hobart as you probably know, long time ago, and I don’t want her running back here when she finds out I’m a famous fox-hunter. Then he roared with laughter again. Mind you, he said when he had stopped laughing, I heard the bloody woman died the other year. The Asian flu.
And Bill went quiet, suddenly.
Luke was convinced the fox was in the area. He was convinced he had sighted it from the tower. The pademelons had stopped coming to the door, were nowhere to be seen, concealed in their fear, or already killed. Luke spent more and more time up on the top of the tower with his binoculars. And Clementine, feeling, perhaps, a little like the princess isolated in her tower room downstairs, began to grow restless. What’s got into you, Luke? Silence. Brooding fox-filled heart-breathing silence. She would play the pipe organ in the afternoons, when she had done all the chores and got the dinner on and Gracey was asleep. It was lovely, playing tunes for drowsy Gracey, and she made up a song about how Gracey Lacey ran away to London. She went more and more frequently into the village to see her family and her girlfriends. She took Gracey to Goldie’s for a christening robe—shocking waste of money, Luke’s mother said, and why not use the parachute-silk dress from the war, worn by all the Lacey war-babies and all Lacey babies since? Deaf ears. Clementine did the smocking herself, and got a good price. There were tight white grub roses spilling all down the front in a zigzag profusion of embryo-flowers just waiting to bloom in the spring.
It was one dark chilly April Saturday afternoon when Gracey was lying in her basket by the fire out the back of Golden Memories, and Clementine was sitting in the shop, smocking the creamy silk, when a woman ‘from the papers’, as Bill might have said, drove up and came in and started asking questions. Questions about the shop and the smocking and the whole new wave in country crafts. She was doing an article on the latest fashion in spinning and weaving and knitting and embroidery and so forth—might she come back and interview Goldie and Bethany and some of the girls? She might. She gazed in adoration at Gracey asleep in her basket by the fire; she drank tea from a thin white cup with a fine green band around the rim. She marvelled at the cups and saucers, so old-fashioned, charming, country-sweet. Everybody round here has them, nothing special, Goldie told her. They came from an Afghan pedlar who used to go about here in the thirties. The woman from the paper let out a little scream of pleasure and spoke in round-eyed capital letters and exclamation marks. An Afghan peddlar! And you’ve had them since the thirties! She was whispering in asterisks.
Three weeks later, she came back and did the interview, marvelling at the Primavera, the christening robes, the spidery naughty Edwardian camisoles and knickers, and bought a pale-blue lace suspender belt. She had a man with her this time, Jason the photographer, a young man who took hundreds and hundreds of shots of everything including the old redgum slab that was the doorstep and the green-and-white china on the dresser out the back. Gracey in her basket and the sleepy marmalade cat also featured. Clementine’s girlish smile and silken rippling hair as she laboured over a wriggling row of miniature grub roses. Goldie was pretty happy, since it was advertising for the shop.
In a funny kind of way, all this would have (might have) been harmless and diverting. If it had not been for the fox. Although Luke was a husband and father, he was not yet much more than a boy, a boy with a strong spirit of adventure and a dream to prove himself, perhaps to save his country from the ravages of the ‘National Threat’. Something like that. Crusader.
Bill Foster talked to Luke more and more, as time went on, about the fox. And in due course Luke told him what he thought he had seen. Clementine and Gracey saw less and less and less of Luke, as he went out shooting rabbits with Bill day in and day out, and sat in Bill’s kitchen working out a plan, a plan to hunt the fox down and kill it. They might be gone for a month. The day Luke finally set off on the expedition with Bill Foster was the day, as it happened, Jason arrived at the tower with his camera, planning a story on strange and interesting living spaces in rural Tasmania. There is sometimes a gracious symmetry to fate which plots its way about the place, criss-crossing country roads and stony hillsides in its search for the elegance and balance between happiness and sorrow, between love and hate, light and dark, life and death. Its intricate construction of life’s narratives, the ins and outs, the upheavals and the little ups and downs. The cataclysms and the jests. Just when Clementine was wondering what to do in the curious space left in her kitchen, in her bedroom, on her doorstep, on her weeping grass, the space left by the absence of Luke the fox-hunter, Luke the Saviour of the Country, Jason Mariner’s four-wheel drive sailed slowly up the track between the spindly spotty trunks of the dogwoods, disturbing the dark feathers of the ferns, squashing bright yellow fan-vaulted toadstools, nosing along, insolent on the scent of a story, gleaming, glaring, splashing glints of bright metal through the gaps in barren rocks, alarming slimy frogs, rousing for once the lazy dog.
The tower house was perfect; Clementine was perfect, the pipe organ was—breath-taking. The fireplace in the rock, the tree-trunk wall. Gracey Lacey in her duck-feather nest by the basket of fire-irons. The old white elegant bath beside the big window—solar-powered rustic nostalgia, languid in a twilight of firelight and leaflight. He persuaded Clementine to play for him the song she had written about Gracey Lacey. He persuaded her to put on her Primavera, to drape herself by the smooth cold water of the Round Pond, to smile at him in a broken mirror, to gaze into the distance, across the treetops, out the window of the tower to where the bushfires might be, where the fox might be.
My husband thought he saw a fox. A what? You know, the fox that got off the container ship at Burnie. That’s just a story invented by the media. Is it? Of course.
Jason Mariner’s eyes glancing with city laughter in the light of the glowing embers of the snug, bug, rug fire in the old stone fireplace. Ggggracey Lacey saw a fox, in her sox, early in t
he morning. Ggggracey Lacey got a box, caught the fox, early in the morning. Ggggracey Lacey said good-day and ate that fox for breakfast. Yum te tum te yum yum yum. Fox! Arpeggio.
Luke and Bill did not find the fox.
And Luke was bitterly sad, heart-sore that he had failed, angry with himself, with Bill, with the fox, with the world. With Clementine. Even with Gracey. A black frown laced his forehead and he muttered, saying he would do better next time, he would show the bastard.
Jason Mariner published the story about the tower house in a weekend paper, complete with glorious pictures of Clementine-Primavera at the pipe organ, Clementine by the she-oak wall, Princess Clementine with the frogs on the lily pads, Clementine looking for foxes across the blue and misty treetops. Her golden hair rippled in the light of the flames; her large pale eyes dreamed dreamily out over the leafy world. The mist was in her eyes, stars glittered in her innocence. Jason sent her a copy of the paper, hoping perhaps to continue the connection, perhaps to entice her into town, into his life, his flat at the beach, his bed.
These are the photos the photographer took of the house that day. She placed the article with its radiant portraits of her on the breakfast table, and Luke stared at the pictures for a long time in a strange thick silence. Outside the window a pademelon was sniffing about on the weeping grass. They’re quite good, don’t you think, Luke? Good—what’re they for? They’re disgusting. Pornography or something? Since when did you start wearing your wedding dress? What the hell do you think you’re doing? Who the fuck is Jason Mariner when he’s at home? Then he went silent and left the kitchen, going up to the tower to stare out out out across the treetops, misty lilac and grey and drifting green, scanning as always the impenetrable leaves for hints and hopes of russet-flashing fur. Something dreadful had happened to the marriage of Clementine Maloney and Luke Lacey. Tarnish. Mould. Deep stirrings of dis-ease. It had happened gradually, yet it had happened swiftly, and a dismal bilge of doubt and disharmony hung over their days, their nights, their destiny.