She remembered Christmas in Avalon. She hadn’t cried because she didn’t want to watch the slaughter, but because she did. She was ashamed of her fascination, the distant thwack of Win’s hatchet through bone, the bright red blood splashing onto the ground, the vital sense of ritual and how casual Win was with this momentous responsibility. It wasn’t how a little girl was supposed to feel. Animals were being murdered, but their pain to Marie seemed subservient to a bigger force, beyond Win and herself: it was the force of human appetite stretching back through infinity.
Clark didn’t want to move until he had digested so Marie and Leon set out on a bushwalk. It was low tide and the sand on the beach was laced with coal run-off. Marie took a bag with her, filling it with weeds as they walked.
‘So you actually saw the moth laying her eggs?’
‘Yes.’
‘Moths and butterflies don’t live very long, do they? Long enough to reproduce, and become another animal’s dinner.’
‘They’re more useful as grubs. Splendid Ghost Moths are underground for years. They eat fungus from root systems. I’m always blown away by how beautiful these animals are when they hatch. I mean it’s the shortest and least important phase of their life.’
‘Why does everything have to be measured in terms of usefulness? Why can’t we just have pleasure and beauty to know how good life is?’
‘I’m not saying there’s no point to beauty. If there was, it wouldn’t exist. It’s the Darwinian thing, Mum. Beauty attracts mates.’
‘I didn’t think you would say everything boiled down to procreation.’
There was a crowd milling at the entrance to the zoo. Leon made his way through it, ahead of his mother, and waited for her on the footpath beyond.
‘I know you hate my irises,’ Marie said. ‘But I keep them because they’re beautiful.’
‘They’re weeds. They get into the national parks and take over.’
‘I don’t let them anywhere near the bush. And there’s no point to their beauty. The nectar they give to birds and insects could be given in a much plainer package.’
‘We need variety. Nature’s the best artist.’
Past the wharf they arrived at the relief of bush. The track curled into a gully then rose up the ridge and entered a tall angophora forest whose canopy was shot with the nerve endings of dead trees.
‘I wonder what sort of larvae would eat the fungus from the root systems of angophoras.’
‘Poor things.’
‘Would fire be a solution? A layer of carbon?’
‘Probably help. This sort of bush needs a burn every fifteen years or so I think. But I can’t see how they’ll ever manage it now with all the houses.’
‘Have you seen the mausoleums going up around Taylors Bay? I wouldn’t mind if they burnt the lot.’
The harbour unfurled below like rippled silk, cut by the white streak of a boat’s wake. They stepped to one side to let a family past. Marie felt reassured by this path worn over millennia with the passage of human feet. How many had walked it in the same state, bellies full, sweating in the afternoon sun. Cold and rain, exposure and famine, seemed impossible today, with the sea all the way to the city speckled by yachts, and one vivid yellow and green ferry. And on all of those vessels, parties, feasts, enough food and water and diesel for an army.
The path widened to nineteenth-century luxury with sandstone borders and an even gradient above a jetty. All that remained of the dancing pavilion was a foundation wall edging the lawn of the old hotel. A couple of groups were gathering their things and walking up to the car park. Marie and Leon sat on the wall. Across the water, the CBD shimmered in the sun. Marie’s weeding bag was full. She looked around for a bin. At the far end of the lawn was one overflowing. She got up and walked towards it. The pile of rubbish was moving. How bizarre. Closer, she saw it was rabbits, scores of them, a twitching blanket of vermin rifling through picnic remains. She turned back with a look of distress. ‘Leon!’
Leon started towards her. ‘Jesus. When did it get this bad?’
‘I don’t know. I should dispose of these at home anyway. I’m exhausted.’
‘Give it to me. I’ll take care of it. I want to walk a bit more, okay? Maybe have a swim.’
‘Thank you.’
How small she looked walking away from him, how frail.
Alone at last. Leon went over to a tap and gulped down warm rusty water, then continued up the road. What he really wanted was to have sex. If he didn’t dawdle, in about an hour he could get lucky in the bushes above Obelisk Beach. He could exhaust his stuffed body, cool off in the ocean and finally be rewarded with the eager mouth of a father escaping family Christmas. Afterwards, he could ring home to be picked up. Yep, great idea. Excited, Leon peeled off his t-shirt, tucked it into his shorts, and walked up the path, the bag of weeds dangling off a belt loop.
He had found the moth, which he initially thought was a butterfly, in his room one night a month earlier. It was flapping between his bed and the wall, and from the weight of the sound he guessed it was a creature of substantial size. He lifted his pillow to find the biggest insect he had ever seen.
He had shown it to his housemate, a local, who hadn’t recognised it. Leon had been surprised to see a butterfly active at night, but it was barely ten o’clock and this was the tropics and everything up here was still slightly foreign to him. He walked out to the garden holding the insect, large, bright and heavy as fruit on his palm. He tried to put it onto a leaf, but it was raining and it wouldn’t leave his hand. It had grown completely still.
He went back inside and looked through every nature book in the house. Sat at the computer googling, insect hand steadily palm up. He couldn’t find anything. An hour and a half had passed, and Leon had fallen in love.
Then its body began to pulsate and it turned onto its side and started ejecting eggs from its tail. For almost an hour a stream of white sand fell across Leon’s palm while he watched in awe. So fine and copious, there must have been thousands of eggs. He didn’t know what to do so went back out to the garden to release them, but everything was waterlogged. The moth had hooked one of her forelegs into his skin so she didn’t fall off. He knew now it was a she.
When she stopped laying she looked exhausted. Leon thought she would die and felt devastated. He went into the kitchen and made a nest for her with a cereal carton. No sooner inside, she began to lay again, and Leon to panic. He took the carton out to the garden and tipped eggs everywhere. Then the moth went quiet and he took her inside. He noticed she had lost a foreleg and the possibility he had ripped it off made him feel desperate. Three hours had passed and he was worn out. He placed the carton on his bedside table and fell asleep almost immediately.
Deeper along the path now, the bush rose around him like a cathedral. In this interval of leaves and ocean, devoid of people, Leon loved the place more than anywhere in the world. It was the driest he had ever seen it, and this dejected him terribly. He passed an entire gully of brown ferns, the path slippery with sand and fuel. It must have been after five o’clock and it occurred to him that people would be leaving Obelisk. He walked faster, entering Taylors Bay. His mother was right: the new houses were awful, just slabs of cement plonked in the middle of the bush. The thought of another two days in her house made him feel edgy and suffocated. The shock of her plan to tattoo the moth on her back was only just beginning to sink in. He realised he was insulted — more than disconcerted — and also resentful at being implicated in this decision. She was going to take his gift and advertise it to the world, on her body. My son this and my son that. It took all his energy to resist her and the last thing he could do was rescue Clark with some spurious act of solidarity. He felt sorry for his mother and wanted to do the right thing, but every gesture, like the gift of the Splendid Ghost Moth, seemed to propel her deeper into this clinginess, which only made him want to run. Where to? He had stayed in Brisbane last summer and it depressed him with everyone else in the company
of loved ones while he drifted. He could probably find a New Year’s Eve party in Sydney, but the longer he stayed here the more likely he was to look up George, and he wouldn’t allow himself to do that. A couple of sinewy old ladies in floppy hats passed him with a cheery, ‘Happy Christmas!’ Then, suddenly, a party of five. G’day. G’day ... Christmas. The cloud cover broke and the cicadas swelled and, his sanctuary compromised, Leon walked quicker, longing for escape, his favourite porno close-ups sliding through his mind.
He had been woken at two a.m. by the sound of the moth rattling the carton. He knew she would die and he wanted to keep her so he left the lid on and tried to go back to sleep. The moth bashed furiously against her prison walls, keeping him awake. The sight of those eggs pouring from her phallic tail had fascinated and repelled him. Like sperm, but female, it was eggs emerging from an orifice, and a feeling washed over him like that feeling he got from his mother — from so many women — of cloying, soft demand. He lay there in the darkness listening to her die, finally falling asleep at dawn. He identified the moth in a book at the museum two weeks later.
‘So,’ said Clark to Leon in the rumpus room the next day, ‘to what do we owe the honour? Twice in three months after not seeing you for over a year.’
‘Mum’s frequent flyers.’
‘How’s the business going?’
‘Still struggling. But it’s always slow in summer.’
‘Is the drought bad up there?’
‘Not as bad as here.’
‘How’s Blanche about the loan?’
Leon slid his eyes over. ‘She hasn’t sent the debt collectors up, if that’s what you mean.’
They were watching the cricket. It was tea break, and a vox pop came on. My dad got a pig, said a guy with the stringy blond hair of a sea-sider. Like a whole pig, and cooked like the whole thing. I’ve never seen a whole pig before. Yair, it was great, we just ate like stacks, me and my family, and drank heaps-a-beer. We had a great time.
‘To tell you the truth, Clark, I’m a crap businessman. I can’t blame it all on the drought.’
‘You really spent all the money from Dad?’
‘We won’t go there.’
Clark felt a pang of hunger although they had only eaten an hour ago. He watched the players file back onto the field. He wanted another beer, but the kitchen seemed miles away. He decided to wait till Leon got one. He could hear his mother in the kitchen. ‘Did you know Mum’s in debt?’
‘But how could she be? Dad was loaded when they divorced.’
‘He was mean in the settlement. She got the house but not much alimony so she’s been burning through credit. That’s why the sale’s so necessary.’
‘Such an arsehole,’ Leon muttered.
‘He rang yesterday when you two were bushwalking.’
‘You pick up?’
‘Nope. Just let him leave his perfunctory Christmas greeting.’
‘He’d be proud of you doing a PhD.’
‘No, he wouldn’t. He’s threatened by anything vaguely intellectual. All that stuff about being a Bankstown boy who didn’t even get his HSC and made it big.’
‘He hated me gardening too.’
‘Let’s face it: he wouldn’t have been happy with anything except advertising. Or some sort of business venture. Money. Blanche says he’s threatened by her though. Because she’s a woman.’
‘That old chestnut.’ Leon sounded unconvinced.
Clark chewed his nails, looking at the TV. ‘Hugh!’ he said after a while. ‘Can you believe it? Hugh.’
‘Yes.’
The tourists were being bowled out in quick succession, the Australians throwing their hats into the air and slapping each other on the back.
‘Jesus,’ said Clark. ‘They’re the only country who can beat us. Come on.’
‘Why do you want them to beat us? I mean, you wouldn’t cheer England against us, would you?’
‘I’d cheer the Third bloody Reich against the Australian cricket team, mate.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we need our arses kicked, that’s why. We’re too complacent. We think we’re hot shit but we’re just a bunch of fat, rich, beer-swilling pigs.’
The click of Marie’s sandals came down the stairs. ‘It’s Boxing Day,’ she said brightly to her sons sprawled on the couch in front of the barking television.
Clark and Leon looked at her without expression.
‘And I wanted to take those boxes and things to St Vincent de Paul.’
‘It’s closed, Mum,’ said Leon.
‘That doesn’t matter. You leave it all in the loading bay.’
‘They hate it when you do that,’ Clark cautioned.
‘Please, Clark. I can’t do it on my own.’
Clark touched his chest and looked at his mother then his brother in perplexed outrage.
‘Don’t worry. I’m putting Leon to work in the garden. He’s going to mow the lawns, and help us load up the car.’
Leon sent Clark a smarmy smile.
An hour later, Marie stood by the car as Clark unloaded. She had packed the boxes in a hurry for fear of the backslide of memory or a spurious utilitarianism that would insinuate the things back into her life, so she kept her eyes averted. As the car emptied, she felt her skin peeling away.
‘Wow,’ said Clark as he came back to the car. ‘This is a big gouge. What happened?’
‘Oh, I was parked in a narrow street and some idiot sideswiped me.’
‘Don’t you need to get it fixed so it doesn’t rust?’
‘When I sell the house.’
Driving along Military Road was a shock for Clark, who always took the back roads. He exclaimed at the boutiques and smart cafés under their pretty awnings.
‘I was excited when the first café opened here,’ said his mother. ‘Cappuccino in Mosman. It was quite an event. Everybody drinks it now.’
‘Which one do you go to?’
‘That one occasionally when I get my hair cut. But I’ve gone off coffee. It gives me indigestion.’
‘Bonza Brats,’ Clark read acidly as they passed the shop. ‘God, they’re making a mint out of children these days, aren’t they?’
And all the way home, the cavity of the boot behind her, the yawning double garage, the walls now free of clutter. Marie alighted mournful, cleansed and dispossessed. She pointed to the couch on the patio, splashed with faded orange and yellow designs. ‘We should have taken that.’
‘It wouldn’t have fit, Mum.’
‘Next time then.’
Marie remembered opening the front door one Sunday morning almost twenty years earlier to find Clark passed out in his vomit on the new orange and yellow couch.
‘Clark! It’s brand new!’ She stood over him trembling. ‘I was just about to ring the police.’
Clark eased himself into a sitting position. ‘Gonna have a shower.’
‘No, the laundry.’ Marie directed him down the side path and stood in the doorway while he took off his shoes and socks. ‘Who brought you home?’
‘Louise.’
‘Jones? I didn’t know you were seeing her.’
‘I’m not seeing her, Mum. She’s just a friend of a friend.’ Clark manoeuvred himself behind the ironing board to strip off his t-shirt. ‘God,’ he muttered to his feet, ‘as if I’d be seeing Louise Jones.’
‘I didn’t know you were at the Joneses’.’
‘We weren’t at the Joneses’. Well, not really.’ Clark leant against the wall not looking at his mother, hunching self-consciously around his thin white torso.
Marie found it repugnantly delicate, almost feminine. She decided that once Clark had showered she would make him clean the couch. ‘If you want to go out all night and make us sick with worry then you can at least do me the credit of telling the truth about where you were.’
‘We went down to the boatshed, Mum. Quakers Hat Bay.’ Clark glared at her through puffy red eyes. ‘You know the place.’
Marie wen
t back up and cleaned the vomit off the couch. From the kitchen she could hear Leon coming up from the beach. Of course she wouldn’t have called the police. Clark wasn’t a minor. She had been trembling not just with relief, but also a hangover. She poured two Beroccas, and cooked an enormous breakfast for the boys.
Leon didn’t mow the lawns in the end, so two days after he left Marie hired her usual man. She used to do the lawns herself, hefting the mower across the slopes above and below the house. She had taught herself to use it at the age of forty-seven, when Leon moved out of home.
‘Why don’t we get someone in to do them?’ said Ross, who had taken up golf. He was fiddling with the gloves from his new kit. He didn’t look at her when he spoke to her, but she was used to that now. In response — she told herself — she had retreated into reserve, and a sort of convivial irony.
‘I like doing them. You have your golf, I have my mowing.’
What she liked was the cacophonous lapping meditation, the sense of control, even if just of a little machine. It was good having something to do on the long slow Sundays when Ross was playing golf and her adult children were going about their adult lives. The reward was having a drink on the deck at sunset, with the smell of freshly cut grass as trace of her toil.
But the effort with the mower defeated her now and she looked back with amazement at her strength and zeal. From this distance, she could also see for the first time the flinty reserve and irony as others must have. She realised her solitude had begun before Ross left. She had walked away as well. She had made herself completely impenetrable.
In spite of the drought, the yellowing lawns had struggled up a few inches. From her balcony, Marie watched Scott unclip the catcher and take it down to the compost. Behind her sat two garbage bags full of unwanted clothes. The desolation of space where her husband’s suits once hung now extended to her side as well. Corpses of bogong moths lined the edge of the ensuite. Marie shut the door on the chasm of her past.
Standing at the bowser, feeling fluid pulse through the hose in her hand, Marie imagined the tanks beneath directly connected to seams of oil in the earth. Her car was a tick sucking up its weekly supply, injecting its host with poison simultaneously. Inhaling the intoxicating scent of petrol, she imagined the vast seams of black blood running dry, the earth’s crust collapsing in on these voids, the entire planet shrivelling like a raisin.
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