by Robert Drewe
This was because he was a potter, she explained, with ambitions to be a famous sculptor. When he’d taken up with Willow Wand he’d determined to concentrate on his sculpting. His first major work was a three-metre-high rendering of his namesake from Greek mythology. He had erected it outside their cottage. Striving for mythological authenticity, he’d tried clay at first – Prometheus being the originator of crafts and so on – but he’d ended up fashioning his ultimate Prometheus of bronze, over a skeleton of fibreglass.
The statue was of Prometheus before he ran into the strife with Zeus. The early proud Prometheus, holding the fire he’d stolen to bring to the mortals, not the later Prometheus punished for his hubris, chained to the rock with the eagle pecking his liver for eternity. This Prometheus held aloft the fennel stalk that had brought fire to human civilisation.
According to Aquamarina, ‘This was when the trouble started.’ The bronze Prometheus had stood outside his sculptor’s residence for only a few weeks before they found him one morning dressed in women’s underwear, his face garishly made up with lipstick and mascara. Underneath the statue was a sign saying, simply, Alan. Aquamarina frowned and said, ‘Not many people these days know him by that name.’
Her story continued. Days later his night-time tormentors had begun pelting the bronze Prometheus with fruit snatched from the sculptor’s own garden: mangoes, custard apples, bananas. They smeared fruit over his heroic limbs and torso. They rubbed banana paste into his joints, and the acid in the bananas soaked into his skin and after a few days he began to peel. The bronze cracked and started separating from the fibreglass. Prometheus dropped his firebrand. But even mortally wounded, he still gazed proudly over the hilly cattle paddocks and fruit orchards towards Mount Warning.
‘What vandals would do that?’ I asked her. ‘Local kids? Who’d keep going to all that trouble?’
She shrugged. ‘They’d made up Prometheus’s face again with lipstick and this time the genitals were snapped off. There was another sign underneath: You Know This is You, Alan.’
‘Jesus!’ I said. ‘Someone from schooldays.’
‘Is that so?’ She glared at me now. No spiritual eye-spark any longer, no sweet uneven smile.
‘Did he choose to become Prometheus because he was a legendary martyr?’ I asked.
She was peering around and beyond me. I could have been a piece of lawn furniture, a palm tree.
‘I don’t think you understand this,’ she said. ‘Anyway, Prometheus got free of his chains in the end.’
Aquamarina and I didn’t seem to have any more to say to each other. I felt I should approach Prometheus/Alan and reopen our contact. Perhaps I could mention that I’d recently seen his father alone in the pub, and ask him whether he ever saw him. Later, relaxed by a few more drinks, we could talk about our schooldays, maybe even discuss his shift of identity, how interesting it was for him to seek to become someone else, a mythical being, whereas Greg had so badly wanted to stay the same earthbound person forever. And Alf. Alf in his old age had had one last fanciful flight that defied the town’s gravity.
I peered around my host’s garden and tried to catch a glimpse of the troubled lovers: the mortal Prometheus and Willow Wand. It was still early evening; dinner hadn’t even been served. A four-piece band in Hawaiian shirts was tuning up under the jacaranda. Surely kindred spirits abounded in this mellow scene. But the couple had already left. I turned back to Aquamarina but she had gone, too.
I asked around town. Apparently Shauna had stayed with Alf long enough to make it financially worthwhile, then vanished. Alf Holland Motors is now a Bunnings hardware store. Alf, in his mid-eighties now, is a familiar lone, leathery figure on the north-coast beaches. He wanders the shoreline, has one beer in the Reef, and leaves. Those brown spots on him look like melanomas to me. His body hair has grown back, a grey pelt like an old wolf, but he still sports the pearl ear stud.
How to Kill a Cane Toad
AFTER THE GUNSHOTS, and the bats’ screeching and flapping, they’d lie in bed at night wondering what they’d got themselves into. The blasts, then Janine’s agitated fingers tapping on his thigh in an increasingly accusatory way while the bats panicked and stray lead shot pattered on the roof and tinkled down into the gutter: this wasn’t how they had imagined country living.
Those lifestyle magazines of hers celebrating a ‘tree change’ from the city to a simpler existence, where they’d grow organic produce, breathe blossom-scented air, perform rewarding physical tasks in rural clothing while a grazing horse or two added interest to the scenery, somehow never referred to the human element. Getting back to basics never mentioned the local inhabitants. Those first weeks, random shotgun explosions had punctuated their daylight hours of vegetable planting, fence mending and house renovation. Now, as a windy spring edged into a humid summer, the shotgun woke them at night as well.
Gunfire is more chilling at night. It came from nearby, but the squally winds and the enveloping orchards and plantations – a dense maze of trees curving and stretching up the echoing hills all the way to the western horizon – made it hard to pin down the source. Down at the general store for the morning milk, bread and newspaper, gritty-eyed from broken sleep, Dan finally asked Cliff Porteous, the proprietor, ‘Who shoots guns at night around here?’
Just like Dan’s daily presence and purchases – the city broadsheet, the high-grain bread, the low-fat milk – the question appeared to amuse Cliff. ‘Oh, old Mango Ken gets shitty with the birds in his trees. Then the fruit bats at night. After a few scotches he decides to scare them away.’ Cliff looked on the verge of laughter. ‘Don’t know when he sleeps.’
He was referring to their nearest neighbour, an orchardist named Ken Riddell. But despite this logical explanation, the day-and-night gunshots, the pellets peppering the tin roof, the shrieking fruit bats and interrupted sleep still unnerved them and soured everything. They woke tired and rattled in the morning and went to bed tired and rattled at night.
This wasn’t like a noisy-party problem in the city, where a phone call to the local cops sorted it out; where a constable knocked on the door and told the neighbours to turn it down. An old farmer’s livelihood was involved. And ‘neighbour’ meant something different in the bush. At this early stage they didn’t want to come across as arrogant city blow-ins, the sort who moved to the country and then immediately complained about cows and roosters disturbing the peace, and the smell of fertiliser and pesticides.
So their shotgun dilemma not only continued but swelled to include other irritations: Dan’s snoring and Janine’s increasing abstraction, as well as the area’s voracious mosquitoes, speeding motorists, vanishing tradesmen (whenever a good surf was running) and, as the nights warmed and electrical storms blazed and crackled over the Pacific, the sudden appearance and clamour of cane toads.
One mid-December afternoon Ken Riddell stopped his tractor by the dividing fence, introduced himself and welcomed them to the district. So characteristically rustic did he seem in his overalls and tattered straw hat drawstringed under his chin, he could have been a storybook Farmer Giles or Old MacDonald. This was their chance to bring up the night-time blasts. But how could they start whingeing to him right off the bat when the sociable old gunman was inviting them for drinks that night?
It would have seemed uncivil. And they were grateful to be asked. Apart from smirking Cliff Porteous at the store, Trent Roylance, the estate agent who’d sold them the property, and various elusive, surf-preferring electricians and plumbers, they hadn’t met any locals. As they’d watch the sun sink behind the dark corridors of nut plantations and orchards (row upon row of suddenly forbidding trees), sipping oddly unsatisfying gin and tonics, their optimism steadily ebbing with the daylight and the application of mosquito repellent, they’d begun to question, as with so much else, the myth of country hospitality.
But now, with another neighbouring couple, the Eastaughs, also guests this Saturday evening on the veranda of Ken and Elaine Riddel
l’s Federation farmhouse, at least some sort of social life was unfolding. Eagerly anticipating a beer, Dan heard himself break the ice: ‘So how do you deal with all these cane toads?’ That croaking cacophony, like 100 different telephone dial tones, was beginning to grate as much as the shotgun pellets on the roof.
‘Cane toads?’ Mango Ken declared, in the over-loud interrogative manner someone might say ‘hyenas?’ or ‘manatees?’.
‘Aren’t they disgusting?’ said Janine, a little too earnestly. ‘The way they destroy the wildlife! I hate how they’ll eat anything they can fit into their mouths.’
‘Toads?’ boomed Mango Ken again. As he passed the drinks around, his hands managed four glasses at once. His brown fingers, cracked and swollen enough to burst, looked like pork sausages in the pan. He was eighty-plus, his face the dry yellow of chamois leather, with deep crotchety lines crisscrossing his cheeks and an old-fashioned pink hearing aid like a lump of bubblegum stuck in each ear.
‘I Googled them,’ Janine went on, raising her voice. (She’d just noticed the hearing aids, too.) ‘They’re feral, venomous, a scientific import gone wrong. The females produce 35000 eggs every mating.’ Her voice seemed surprisingly shrill. ‘How do we fight those numbers?’
A twelve-gauge? Dan almost said.
‘The old three wood!’ Mango Ken yelled abruptly. His eyes lit up and he stood and teed off, miming a vigorous golf swing. His broad bony shoulders looked as if they still had a bit of toad-belting left in them. He took a swig of his scotch, coughed and cleared his throat. ‘If you could be bothered.’ He thumped his chest. ‘I’ve got enough on my plate.’
His veranda overlooked forty acres of mangoes, guavas and avocados and, on the higher slopes, ten more acres of Cavendish and ladyfinger bananas. Right now it seemed the Riddells were harvesting about an acre of cane toads as well. Attracted by the swarms of Christmas beetles battering against the louvres, a lumpy carpet of toads was inching towards the house lights.
‘No, no, no.’ His wife Elaine spoke up. ‘Toads don’t mind a wallop. It’s a waste of time to whack them. By next morning they’ve recovered and hopped away.’
The old woman put down her scotch and grabbed a plastic shopping bag from somewhere. ‘I like to avoid poison spurts!’ she shouted, thrusting her hand in the bag. The nearest toad was squatting proprietarily on the back step, calmly licking up Christmas beetles. Elaine stooped down and snatched it up. She must have been hitting eighty herself, but in three deft movements she grabbed the toad in the bag, flipped the bag inside out and tied a knot in it. Like a mouldy windfall mango, lemon-coloured, ovoid and spotty, the toad glared out through the plastic.
‘Voila!’ she said. ‘The toad is in the bag.’
‘The same way you Paddington people pick up your poodle’s poop,’ the other male guest, Macca Ken Eastaugh, offered, slyly. He was younger than Ken Riddell by about forty years, but two farmer Kens in the neighbourhood apparently made nicknames necessary. Macca Ken had sixty acres of macadamia trees stretching up the hill behind the Riddells’ orchard.
Dan almost pointed out that they’d come from Thorn-leigh, a far less trendy Sydney suburb than Paddington, and one better suited to a high-school teacher’s and librarian’s salaries. They’d retired early, taken their superannuation, bought an old farmhouse on acreage, and started – they’d fervently hoped – a serene country life. But he let it go. Country people were forever teasing newcomers. He sipped his beer and said, ‘So now you have a cane toad in a bag.’
‘Just pop him in the freezer!’ roared Elaine, and she opened the fridge and did so. ‘And Mr Toad goes quietly bye-byes.’
Dan imagined opening the freezer the next day. In their new life he did the cooking. First thing in the morning he took out the meat to thaw. He thought out loud. ‘All those warty frozen toads goggling out from the steak and ice cream.’
‘You reckon toads are bad?’ said Macca Ken. He was thickset, with an ex-footballer’s drum-like torso and a couple of basal cell carcinomas glistening on his nose like half-pearls. ‘Try fingers in the fridge.’
‘Fish fingers?’ said Janine.
‘Human,’ said Geraldine Eastaugh. ‘Human fingers, for God’s sake.’
‘God’s what?’ yelled Mango Ken.
Macca Ken rolled his eyes. ‘Fingers in the fridge!’ He leant back in his chair. ‘You tell it, Geraldine.’
‘Ken was in the force back in the ’80s. Out in the far west even the young coppers had to do a bit of forensics.’
Macca Ken broke in. ‘Big distances to cover in the boondocks. Bodies to be identified. Shotgun homicides. Highway accidents. Imaginative rural suicides. No DNA testing to make it easy back then.’ Now he had everyone’s attention he paused to take a long sip of beer. ‘Hot weather to take into account. If I wanted to finish before dawn, get any sleep at all, I’d snip off the victim’s fingers for later ID. Take ’em with me and pop ’em in the freezer at home.’
‘I’ll say this,’ said Geraldine. ‘Toad iceblocks are no big deal compared with a freezer full of fingers. Cop them first thing in the morning, they’ll wake you up in a hurry. Bitten fingernails, wedding rings, nail polish, the lot.’
For a moment the others fell silent, drinking and gazing out at the patch of toad-filled light on the lawn.
‘And I was first trimester at the time with Jade and not keeping anything down.’
‘It was easy enough to handle,’ said Macca Ken. ‘I managed pretty well. Best years of my life in some ways.’
The older Ken had been lost in reverie, nose in his scotch glass, but now he’d had an idea worth mentioning. ‘There’s always the Dettol method.’
‘Dettol?’ asked Dan.
‘Dettol antiseptic. Give the toads a squirt. Instant death.’
‘He dabs it behind his ears, too, before he goes anywhere,’ confided his wife. ‘Like perfume.’
As if guiltily caught out, Mango Ken turned on her, reddening. ‘And I haven’t died of paralysis ticks, have I? You get a paralysis tick burrowed in behind your ear and even if you cut the bastard out, your nerves go. You want a face sagging like melted wax, go right ahead.’
‘The old bloke’s full of good advice,’ Macca Ken said, grinning. He raised his voice. ‘Tell ’em your hangover cure.’
‘Hangovers?’ roared the old man. ‘Well, you’ve got your best cure in the world running right round your property. The bloody fence.’
Dan thought of the electrified fence keeping the Riddells’ cows out of his new lettuces and tomatoes. He laughed. ‘Really.’
‘There’s enough voltage to really clear the head if you grab the fence with both hands.’
Taking a rise out of the city folks again. ‘Oh, sure,’ Dan said.
‘He’s not kidding,’ shouted Elaine. ‘With a bad hangover, he even wets his hands first.’
‘I don’t know about you people,’ said Janine, ‘but I can’t stop looking at the fridge and wondering if your toad’s frozen yet.’
Although the blasts no longer seemed mysterious or frightening, the nightly hubbub had had its effect. Janine now wore earplugs to bed. They helped block out the gunshots, bats and toads, and also Dan’s snoring. The humid summer on top of the noise had pushed him into bad sleep patterns, which developed into a sleep apnoea that made him doze off at inconvenient times in the day and abruptly jerk awake in the middle of the night. When he did pass out, as if to catch up on weeks of lost sleep, he snored loud enough to drown out even the loudest toads.
In his insomniac hours Dan’s mind strayed from one anxiety to the next, most of them centred on their precipitous move to the country. His worries centred on Janine, the way her personality and moods were changing. Not only was she blocking herself off from him at night, in the daytime she’d started disappearing for long solitary drives into the hinterland.
More and more he felt cut off. The tree-change adventure had begun with a mutual wish to spend more time together in their middle years. Instead, she was drawing
away. She seemed to be seeking a sort of baffling independence. Even her speech patterns, her choice of vocabulary, had become isolating: first person singular. Everything was I and me and mine. When he asked her, ‘What happened to us and our?’ she gave him her recently acquired Mona Lisa smile.
‘We’re all on our individual journeys, Daniel,’ she said, smug as a guru.
Daniel? What happened to Dan? What bloody journey was this?
Just communing with nature, or absorbing the environment, or exploring the country lanes, or getting to know the region, she’d say enigmatically when she returned home, and briefly mention scenic mountain ridges or pretty waterfalls that she must share with him some time.
Those ridges and cascades and ferny lanes must have been exceptionally picturesque, Dan thought, to distract her for hours afterwards, right up to and including the moment she inserted her earplugs and went to bed.
She was heading to bed increasingly early. Immediately after dinner – no television, no reading, no nightcap, no conversation about the day – she’d yawn and turn in. Earplugged and nightdressed, she’d pass him outside the bathroom, peck his cheek and disappear by 8.30 or 9.00, her heavy sigh coinciding with a similar exhalation from the mattress as she flopped into bed and wound the bedclothes protectively around her.
Of course he asked her if there was another man.
‘Oh, please!’ she said.
What could he do but make a hurt, defiant stand? Faced with her departure from his presence, the brush-off, the shrouded lump on the far side of the bed (not even tropical temperatures dissuaded her from a sheet and blanket), Dan moved into the spare bedroom. Then, rather than face the room’s monkish austerity, he began staying up late. He’d finish the bottle of wine he’d opened for dinner as well as the untouched glass he’d poured for her. And as the evening cacophony intruded on his melancholy like a flotilla of approaching motorboats, he’d lurch up from the table, grab the Dettol dispenser and a torch and step outside to kill cane toads.