The Best Australian Stories

by Black Inc.

  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 over-stuffed 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 counting 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 assert ively 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 the 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 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 mouth 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.

  ‘No, they named me Janelle.’ When she was small, she explained, her father liked to call her China, as in rhyming slang: China plate – mate, because she always hung around him, his little pal and helper. ‘Then when I was nine he went out for cigarettes, just like in a film, and never came back.’

  Leon K.’s first instinct was to pat her arm or shoulder, at least register his sympathy by meeting her steady gaze with his own. But the overt breast handling – the sudden switching of sides, both nipples simultaneously visible for a moment, then the replacement of the first breast inside the T-shirt and the complete exposure of the second one for Ayeshia’s benefit – hampered any such response. For a while there was a lot of fleshy bustling and bouncing going on, and of course no touch was possible. The breasts dominated the veranda, the way they introduced intimacy, presumed it, and at the same time forbade it. Anyway, she was a stranger. For God’s sake, he’d known her less than an hour. But despite himself he felt a sunburst of lust, instantly overshadowed by guilt. You were supposed to be favourably inclined towards the naturalness of nursing mothers yet always remain sexually detached. But he felt swamped by intense sensations, conflicted on several levels and, basically, like a pimply fourteen-year-old again. Something in his being had shifted. He tried to focus on her scar.

  ‘Dad was good with animals,’ China Mason said, very calmly, as she burped the baby on her shoulder. ‘Kind, not the shooting sort – not even rabbits. He could handle reptiles, no worries. He could get possums out of the ceiling without a scratch on him.’ Ten years later, she went on, she was working behind the bar in a Newcastle hotel when he walked in. ‘That was a shock. He saw me, too, downed his beer and walked out. I didn’t run after him. If that was his attitude, bugger him.’

  ‘Whew! ’ Genuinely moved, he was still trying to meet her eyes, and succeeded.

  ‘At least I inherited the animal thing from him,’ said China Mason. ‘The lifelong interest.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I see you’re wondering about my scar?’

  ‘Not at all,’ he lied.

  ‘Acid,’ she said.

  ‘Oh.’

  His unasked question hung burning in the air. She didn’t elaborate, but finished the breast-feeding then. What passion must she have aroused to cause the acid attack – and what sort of jealous, evil bastard would do that to her? To Leon K., the time it took her to adjust her clothing, burp the baby again and place her in the carry-cot flew by incredibly fast. His brain raced with possible delaying tactics, but he could hardly offer her a drink this early in the morning, or round up more suffering wildlife. ‘Ayeshia doesn’t much resemble me, does she?’ she remarked absently. ‘All that blonde hair. She takes after my ex-partner.’

  Why did he feel elated at that little prefix, the simple ex? And at her bringing it to his attention? His gratitude extended far beyond her ridding him of the snake. It stretched all the distance over different years and landscapes to the scar on her cheek. She was becoming more attractive and mysterious by the second, the scar adding vulnerability to her sensual intrigue. Not to mention the lyrebird tattoo on her hip and her hair like dark cascading water.

  It dawned on him suddenly that he could easily embarrass her, and himself, with an inappropriate outpouring of enthusiasm. With wild compliments and avid interest. She’d think him mad and creepy. Actually, he did wonder if he’d become completely stir-crazy lately and he was glad it was too early in the day for him to be anything but sober. Really, he should watch himself in company, especially in female company. He walked her sensibly to her van. There was a danger his feelings might show in his tight facial expression; he realised his emotions were in a precarious state but he still had some self-restraint and dignity left, and all he ended up saying to her was, ‘How much do I owe you?’

  She gave him her card. As well as her name and contact number, it said: We volunteers gratefully accept what you think is a reasonable donation towards saving our wildlife. Her eyes widened at the reckless cheque he pressed into her hands, an amount certain to perplex the investigative auditors in days to come. ‘Seriously? Are you sure? Wow! Thank you!’ She sounded like a teenager just handed prized concert tickets. ‘Call us if you have any more creature problems,’ said China Mason, Wildlife Saviour, tooting the horn and waving blithely as she drove off through the tunnel of camphor laurels and down the driveway.

  For perhaps half
an hour Leon K. sat in a patch of sun on the veranda steps, considering a cloud of gnats hanging over the pool. Vibrating, thousands of tiny wings beating in unison. Beyond the tiers of camphor laurels and over the cane fields, a thin stripe of sea stretched in a north-south rectangle between the headlands. The vista of parallel pale blues and greens was like the flag of some temperate northern country. Birds called, the filter-box lid tap-tapped, and eventually the hovering gnat mass moved on.

  So he was able to swim again – but with the obstacle removed, there seemed to be less urgency. Eventually he stood anyway, stepped out of his clothes and walked to the pool, swinging his arms to loosen up after the enforced lay-off. He dived in, turned onto his back underwater and began stroking. Striving to appreciate the streaming clouds as usual, the skittering swifts, the pelicans soaring high today over the cane fields, he swam one lap, two … It took three laps before the waves and backwash from his progress agitated the filter box enough for the snake to curl out from the air-space between the filter and the pool’s surface.

  Desperate to escape the pool, a red-bellied black, longer and sleeker than the original – or maybe this one was the original – slid up his torso, rode his panicking body to the edge and escaped into the palms. As China Mason had pointed out, black snakes, though venomous, are relatively timid. A measure of its anxiety was that it bit Leon K.’s neck on its way to freedom.

  He got inside to the telephone, even found her Wildlife Saviours card in his trouser pocket. Her number rang and rang but finally she answered. Water was puddling the carpet and a thin stream of watered blood dripped pink from his neck and down his chest. Already his throat was constricting. Finally she answered.