by Robert Drewe
People peered out from doorways and cafes. ‘C’mon, I’ll do ya!’ The aggressor launched another childish haymaker that swiped his shoulder. Who was this lunatic? Leon K. was twice his size, with enough pent-up tension of his own to knock him back into his cave or swamp. What he did was hold him off, his pulse pounding in his ears, while he wondered what to do next. Punch him to the ground? (Self-defence, plenty of witnesses.) In another second he imagined what a delicious time the Sydney scandal sheets would have of that. (At least half of the witnesses would have camera-phones.)
Leon K. brushed him aside again as the man’s nonsensical obscenities mugged the gentle weekend air (Shithead-poofter-wog! City-dickhead-cunt!). ‘Steady, tiger. I’m a local,’ he protested, mildly enough in the circumstances. Inviting the onlookers’ sympathy, he forced out an indulgent laugh.
Suddenly he craved sympathy, just as he ached to broadcast the fact that this nutcase, the whole community, everyone, had got him wrong. ‘My mother sewed piecework in Surry Hills,’ he wanted to yell. And his father, gallant and exhausted Apam, a civil engineer back in Hungary, a respected kulturmernok, had worked two jobs round the clock in Australia – tyre re-treader in Granville, nightwatchman in Parramatta – driving his son to his daily five a.m. swimming training between shifts. ‘He never had time to swim himself. Never even had time to learn how,’ he could tell them. This is what he wanted to share with the onlookers: his family’s noble struggle and how he was absolutely his parents’ son.
But disapproval flooded the street, and it wasn’t aimed at the punchy scarecrow. ‘Now Sonny,’ a middle-aged woman murmured. ‘Don’t get yourself het up, darl.’ So this reeking Sonny was that protected species, a local character. Fizzing with adrenaline, Leon K. dodged his windmilling fists and pushed past him. Sonny was still dancing on his cracked and crusty feet like a manic flyweight. His clothes and bouncing dreadlocks gave off aggressive, pungent odours of smoke and sweat. ‘Big-city wanker! I’ll be dealing with you!’
Rather than the altercation itself, it was the unfairness of the presumption behind it that shocked him that Saturday morning. How could this feral junkie whose stink now impregnated his own clothes think he represented the city and all it stood for? He was an interloper there as well. The city – the City! – that wished not merely to punish him but to knock him out of existence.
For better or worse, he’d chosen the country. Moreover, he’d tried to experience its essence. The annual district rodeo at the showground had seemed the place to start. But if he’d expected to see Outback Australia on show he’d mistaken the event. It was more American Western. Hollywood Western. Country-and-Western Western. Everyone – men, women and tiny children – in Wrangler jeans and pearl-buttoned shirts, in boots and cowboy hats, those country-singer Stetsons that looked three sizes too big. All of them dressed to the nines in order to see cows and horses discomfiting people in a flamboyantly painful way.
While the animals took their revenge, he’d shared a bench with some rum-and-Coke-drinking rodeo wives and their squabbling children. The crowd oohed as a steer threw a rider heavily against the barrier and then trampled him. Attempting to distract the steer from the prone cowboy, the rodeo clown also caught a horn in the bum, which lifted him two metres in the air. Watching him thud to earth like a polka-dotted sack of potatoes, the smallest rodeo offspring, a boy of about five, announced grimly, ‘I’m never going to ride those cows.’
Embarrassed in this company, his mother shrieked, ‘Don’t be a girl, Chad! I’m gonna put a dress on ya!’ Her friends sniggered. Chad’s mother went on, ‘I’m gonna put a bra and panties on ya!’ Raucous laughter from the other rodeo mothers. She was on a roll now: ‘You’ll be sitting down to wee next!’
This was obviously another side to the country. He seemed doomed to be confused here. Best to keep his head down. He stayed away from potential hot spots like bars and clubs to prevent any more Sonny-type blow-ups. For serenity’s sake he even gave up the city newspapers and read only the local rag. Better its bluff mixture of shire jottings, vandalism round-ups, New Age guff and Beef Queen updates than feline financial gossip and always seeing his name maligned.
The countryside might have become his choice, but he hadn’t chosen to live there alone. While he’d submerged himself in the country and his wife and daughters had remained in the city, he still clung to the belief that he and Kate weren’t separated in the pre-divorce sense of the word. It was just that she chose not to live here – and this was where her husband had to be. She’d cited the difficulty of their daughters’ schooling, plus (he could still see her pacing up and down the kitchen as she delivered this particular body blow) she needed time to ‘adjust’ to the scandal, and so on. And so on, and so on, all the way back down the tortuous bends of the Pacific Highway in the BMW with Jessica and Madeleine to Sydney. So his family remained in the Vaucluse house transferred to Kate’s name. Her acceptably-Anglo-and-incognito maiden name, to which she’d reverted with far more readiness than he’d anticipated. Yet another knife in the gut.
Now he rarely went down to Sydney. In any case, his movements were circumscribed by his bail conditions. His only regular travel these days (he’d had to surrender his passport) was the 100-kilometre round trip twice a week to report to the nearest police station. Standing at the station counter certainly killed some more time; never less than an hour, sometimes two. All he needed to do was sign the bail-appearance form and walk out. Five minutes maximum. But in six months that had never happened, the cops being such specialists at ignoring him, acting busy and strolling about purposefully with their takeaway coffees and Big Macs. Or insisting that the relevant officer was off-duty, or that the bail-appearance forms had gone astray. Even the spottiest, most self-conscious probationary constable stared right through him. Why not? He was that most invisible of felons, the white-collar criminal. The class-loathing was palpable. Give them a local wife-basher or gang-banger any day.
In the meantime his only contact with the city and the trial was Gareth Wyntuhl. But ‘Wyntuhl of My Discontent’, as he thought of him, was definitely contact enough, bowling up in his hire car every Thursday morning after slumming it on Regional Express’s one-class 8.10 a.m. flight from Sydney. ‘A plane with propellers!’ Wyntuhl never failed to exclaim, amazed at his own crazy courage.
Did Leon K. welcome the company? Not at all. Having another man in the house was unbearable. Even such a relatively hygienic urban-middle-class specimen as Wyntuhl was an intrusion. Six months’ solitude must have oversensitised him, Leon K. thought. Before Wyntuhl’s visits he’d never noticed male breath or male hormonal whiffs, nor middle-aged male nostrils and ears, over-loud male laughter – and, whenever Wyntuhl did laugh, that superior nasal snort and white-coffee tongue.
Male habits made a disgusting list. The deep indentations their buttocks left in the sofa, the everlasting stink in the bathroom, the eggy detritus of their breakfast plates. Representing his gender, irritating and unaware Wyntuhl had a lot to answer for. Men were so rooted to the ground, over-earthed and overbearing. Like Wyntuhl, they were forever at large. They took up all the space in a room, like one overstuffed armchair too many. Christ, Leon K. wondered, how did women put up with them?
Indeed, Wyntuhl’s presence pointed up the painful absence of women. More than ever, Leon K. longed for a woman’s ministrations and company, an affectionate female touch. A sympathetic kiss. But even loneliness was preferable to another male on the premises. Each Friday evening more than the last, he counted down the minutes until Wyntuhl packed up his bag and briefcase, until his airport-bound Avis car accelerated down the driveway and was absorbed by the tunnel of verdant foliage and the gagging cries of crows.
The lawyer’s last visit had brought from the city not only his cold germs (Wyntuhl couldn’t stop sneezing and coughing) but news of recently increased penalties for corporate misconduct. ‘In your case, we’re talking maximum five years inside and a $250 000 fine,’ Wyntuhl had informed him. ‘Not co
unting the tax problems. But let’s not go there right now.’ He emptied his lungs into a Kleenex. ‘Listen, how are those pet cows of yours? I was listening to the Country Hour on the car radio. Beef prices are going through the roof. Red meat’s back in a big way. By the way, I’ve been meaning to say, do yourself a favour. Lose the beard.’
‘Five years! Only criminals get five years!’ Sometimes, nowadays, Leon K. didn’t realise he’d spoken aloud.
‘Yeah, well. Five at the most. My guess is probably less.’
Finding it hard to fall asleep, then unwilling to wake, Leon K. cursed his bladder for forcing the issue, rousing him most mornings before dawn. This was the time of day – the aftermath of lustful, anxious dreams – when he most missed a woman. He missed Kate. More precisely, Kate as she used to be, the Kate of their shared youthful struggles, dreamy summers, poverty, fun and ambition. It was hard now to recall that sensual and reckless Kate. These grey pre-mornings better suited the current cold and impassive Kate, the socially humiliated Kate. The Kate who’d sobbed just before she left, ‘They’ll all think I’m corrupt as well.’ How readily she’d fit into this landscape, where ocean and sky were often indistinguishable these autumn days and the dawn mist turned every hollow between the farm and the sea into a lake of ash. There was no horizon and the grey air was tense and heavy with frustration. But in any case she wasn’t here.
Already slick with dew, the tennis court was also sheeted with snowy egret droppings. This particular dawn he was sitting on the veranda steps watching the egrets’ court performance. The birds paced the surface for frogs and bugs, every so often interrupting their hunt to mate noisily and aggressively. In this bucking-and-dodging dance of food and sex, one male bird was more raucous and demanding than the others. And when the first rays speared across the court it was the rowdy fornicator who led the flock in obedient V-formation into the rising mist.
In the pale early sunshine, Leon K. trudged down to the ponies’ paddock to change their rugs and throw them some hay. Out of sentimental love for his daughters he bought the horses a bale of lucerne hay every week. Increasingly forlorn nevertheless, the shaggy old Shetland had taken to obsessively scratching its hindquarters against a particular fence post. The pony’s hairy rump reminded him of a fur coat, a particular woman’s garment from long ago, from the days of camphor-lined wardrobes, but whose fur, or where he saw it, he couldn’t recall. His mother’s? Grandmother’s? He remembered a real fox head peering out of a shoulder – sparkling-eyed and eerily genuine. These days he had his own resident fox. Some dawns he spotted it crossing the lawn into the lantana-bougainvillea-blackberry thicket, like a guilty teenager sneaking home late, head down, ginger pelt dishevelled from the night’s anarchy.
An air of suspense always hung over his next task: to clean the pool of its overnight denizens. What would it be this morning? The surface usually whirled with floundering creatures that had fallen in overnight, each one paddling in its own panicky circle. With the pool net he might scoop up spiders, moths, frogs, beetles, worms, cane toads; once or twice a bush rat or a half-drowned possum. Next, even more suspenseful, the check of the filter box for unwelcome occupiers. Then, the pool cleared of its bigger interlopers (only the inevitable gnats remaining), and as the sun headed higher over the first line of camphor laurels, Leon K. would step out of his clothes and mud-reddened boots and, naked and shivering, jump into the water.
However, on this late-autumn morning he was feeling off-colour (bloody Wyntuhl’s cold?) and the southerly breeze seemed to pierce his lungs. Scooping up the obvious floating creatures, and weighing up whether it was sensible to swim (he hated missing that first morning kilometre), he glimpsed a ripple of activity at the deep end. Squirming from the shadow of the wall was a darker ripple, a ripple that suddenly took the form of a torn strip of tyre on the highway verge. But only for a moment. The sliver of black rubber straightened, moved assertively forward, raised its head and surged towards the shallow end. Impressively and weightlessly at ease in this pH-controlled, salt-and-chlorine swimming pool was a black snake.
The snake was so commanding of its environment it was like a mockery of itself: a wildlife-park souvenir, a plastic toy. Recognising it as a red-bellied black, however, Leon K. jumped back from the edge. Although they were common here, it still gave him a shock. Any snake, even a harmless tree snake or diamond python, had this mythical power. In summer he’d spot a snake almost every week. Whether they were dangerous or not he always gave them a wide berth and they slid harmlessly back into the shrubbery.
Indeed, he’d long anticipated finding a snake in the pool one morning: hence the extended handle on the pool net. But his chest still tightened with nerves. He suddenly ached to cough but subdued the impulse in case he agitated the snake. Circling the pool, it looked so natural, so perfectly at home. It was at home. According to all the wildlife books, the red-bellied black preferred to live beside water, where it could catch frogs and water rats.
No doubt about it, it had to be removed – and Leon K. decided to act. The snake was about a metre and a half long; it wasn’t difficult to swing the net under it and scoop it up, tail first. It tumbled into the net surprisingly easily, a concentrated black clump. Just as easily, it immediately unravelled, paused for a second – its eyes seeking and, disconcertingly, finding the eyes of the net wielder – and sped along the pole towards him. Leon K. quickly dropped both net and snake into the pool.
Unable to concentrate on anything else, he checked regularly on the snake throughout the morning. Obviously it couldn’t climb out; nevertheless, whenever it swam towards him he stepped well back from the edge. At lunchtime, while he ate his sandwich by the pool, he studied the snake, almost mesmerised by its urgent bow-wave and faint rippling wake, noting that immersion made its skin darker and glossier and that when it rested and floated, its uppermost skin faded to dull slate. But generally it kept swimming back and forth, ever seeking escape. By now it must have swum more laps than his own daily quota. Surely it couldn’t keep going much longer and would soon weaken and drown.
By mid-afternoon it was floating only half coiled, as static and dead-looking as a comma. It hadn’t moved in two hours. Tentatively, he splashed the pool’s surface with the carefully retrieved net, whereupon the snake plunged to the bottom and rose again, its belly flashing blood red, all springy coils and searching intent. It was an angry question mark. Again he stepped back from the edge, but the snake was already floating gracefully on the surface, conserving energy, an elongated S. Who was waiting out whom? It had been in the pool now for twelve or fourteen hours. If he was ever going to swim again, Leon K. realised he needed professional help. He consulted the phone book and discovered an organisation called The Wildlife Saviours.
He was drinking his breakfast coffee at 7.30, on edge at missing yet another swim – the third lap session the snake had cost him – when a Wildlife Saviour arrived. For some reason he’d expected a man in khakis and boots, not a young woman wearing jeans and a green T-shirt, with a baby in a carry-cot. The sunlight emphasised the shine of a wide scar on her right cheek. Her straight hair fell behind her like dark water. ‘You haven’t injured the snake, have you?’ She frowned at him. ‘Some men can’t help it. They’re on a sacred mission to bash snakes to death.’
‘I haven’t harmed it.’ Seeing him glance at the sleeping baby, the young woman said, ‘We’re all volunteers. We have to fit in the wildlife rescues with our normal lives.’ She set down the carry-cot on the veranda. ‘Everyone’s sorry for the cuddly things when they’re hurt or in trouble but snakes are just as much part of the big picture as koalas and wallabies.’
She introduced herself as China Mason. He was pleased his name seemed to mean nothing to her. Indicating the pool, he said, ‘There’s my problem.’ The snake was noticeably more faded and listless this morning. It obviously hadn’t eaten for a while: as well as losing sheen and energy its body seemed to have contracted. ‘It’s stressed and exhausted,’ said China Mason
, fitting a meshed metal trap to an aluminium pole. She opened and shut the trap from a latch on the handle. Bending over the pool, revealing a tattoo of a lyrebird low on her right hip, she took only about twenty seconds to scoop up the snake from the pool and snap the trap shut, and perhaps another minute to detach the trap from the pole and place it in the back of her van. ‘We release them out in the bush,’ she told him. ‘But if you want I could let it go in your garden – its home territory, after all.’
‘No, my snake-sympathy only goes so far.’ His gratitude was almost boundless, however, and as he served her coffee on the veranda he found himself talking – and listening – more enthusiastically than he had to anyone for many months. In the beginning the conversation was of snakes, of course. Blacks, eastern browns, tigers, adders, pythons. She repeated her mantra about snakes deserving the same respect as furry marsupials. ‘For a venomous snake, that one in the trap is relatively timid. It attacks humans only as a last resort.’ His interest in the topic surprised him, as did the novel sound of his own animated voice. All this unaccustomed chatting to a woman was making his throat dry, and when the baby woke and started to yelp like some small bush animal itself, and China Mason said, ‘Do you mind if I feed her?’ his answer, ‘Of course not,’ came out as a croak.
An unanticipated bare breast was a shock. Although he politely averted his eyes when she lifted up her T-shirt – not the least self-consciously – and applied the baby to her nipple, its effect was to make him stand up and offer more coffee. ‘Thank you,’ she said, smiling slightly. ‘She’s Ayeshia, by the way. Sounds like the continent but spelled differently.’
Keeping up the China connection, he supposed. He felt a little dazed. Returning with the coffee, still a little giddy but anxious not to show it, he asked whether her parents had named her China because of their admiration for the country and Chinese things.