‘She looks like you,’ breathed Martha.
It suddenly struck Gilda just how similar they were. Someone had touched the photo up: a dab of white paint on the eyeballs, a streak of colour in the hair, cerise lips. After a beat Gilda said, ‘Her name is Eve. She’s who I dream about.’
Martha was struck by how beautiful, how utterly beautiful her cousin appeared in that moment. She spoke slowly. ‘So she did exist.’
‘Do you believe in fate, Martha?’
‘Do you?’
20.
Singing: Dreaming
Gilda:
I fly, float and fly as if the sky is water. I have no body. I follow them. For now they are undisturbed. It is not linear, this dreaming. I worry they are about to fall. It all seems a memory to which I know the ending but I can’t remember the rest. For now, in this space, it is sunshine.
They are in petticoats. Faith wears her mother’s and it hangs far too big on her slight body; the pleated satin of the bodice gapes at her armpits and rustles like cellophane. Faith is cartwheeling along the beach like a rolling star, her russet hair flying. She is all petticoats and curly locks, like a blur of autumn leaves, and she sings all the time and it sounds like a choir and it’s just her and I feel as she does, full of joy and something else. A fierce independence: a readiness to scrap if need be.
Faith is always singing. Singing and swimming and love.
Faith sells the fish. She sings, pushing her wheelbarrow along the filthy makeshift streets. Amid the mayhem and the chaos of men with their missing teeth and ink scars on their bodies, even though they are the nicest to her, an innocent among them. She is not afraid of them; Faith knows her own power. They give her honeycomb to suck, or vanilla sticks, and they follow her, charming her with ballads in funny accents.
I see her through Eve’s eyes and she is proud. Always in the dream there is singing. The dream is about song. And now that I am older I can put words to the feeling but I think then, when I had no name for it, when I dreamed it as a child, then I believed it more fully. I trusted. Yet her voice, for all its charm, is still ordinary, as ordinary as water. Not like Eve’s.
And now we are alone among the trees. Eve only sings when she is alone. She is ashamed of it, as if her voice has been suppressed, stilled. Stolen or forbidden. Way up in the mountains, up into the muffling folds of the ferns and tangled bush, far up where the only noise is the river and birds she sings, but she sings barely above a whisper, and I am her and it feels like all the colours of a rainbow swirling over me, a sound more than a sound, like the fifth element, which continues on through death and birth as if it always had and always would: a resonance that I taste and touch and swallow and wrap myself in. Warm as fire.
That’s what it feels like to hear Eve sing. There is nothing and everything like a place where all inspiration stems. It changes my chemistry, like a door to another realm. It is what it is. I don’t know why she hides. You ask me what it means, that I dream of singing; you ask as though you know, and I wish you’d tell me.
21.
Intimacy
It was a still night. The moon held her roundness proudly like an all-seeing eye. The Qualm’s Arms was chunky with meaty men, seven to each woman. The sweat of so many people was mucus musky in the room. Tobacco smoke hung low and seedy. The door kept flying open and more sailors staggered in.
The whalers were celebrating their successes and their survival, and with the remaining herd moving onward up the northern coast the crews were preparing to sail after them, leaving Jacob’s River bruised and exhausted, like a bride on her wedding night.
Angelo’s limbs jigged and jittered of their own accord, his crystal blue eyes feverish. His skin was sun-and windburnt red, rashed where he’d scrubbed himself with sand. His mad hair rose high on his forehead, as if it, too, were infected with the peak of his excitement. He wore leather trousers laced at the crotch and tucked into his jackboots, and a linen shirt open to his torso. His clothes itched and he felt hot and sweaty. The minutes dragged — a voyage away from midnight, when he would have the mermaid of his fantasy alive in his arms.
Davy and Angus stood with him, false smiles plastered on their faces. Each wished the other would go away so he could enact his individual agenda. Davy checked the room for Angie and poured more alcohol into Angelo’s mug.
‘Drink, drink,’ he kept saying, and each time he said it Angelo swallowed mindlessly, already drunker than he had been for a while, and each time he gulped Captain Angus saw Angelo’s Adam’s apple rise and fall and speculated about what Angelo might know of the mermaid.
‘Have you found your precious lady yet?’ asked Angus in a too jolly voice.
Angelo choked on his beer; coughed so hard that both Angus and Davy had to thump him on the back.
Aha! thought Captain Angus.
And Davy, in a fever of his own, reasoned bitterly, that yes, Angelo had found a lady. A surge of resentment went through him with a rage he could barely control.
The captain caught the heat of Davy and thought: He knows too.
Angelo saw the glint in Davy’s eye, yet he had no prior information with which to interpret it correctly and so dismissed it. However, he was uneasy and desperately wanted the time to rush forward to midnight. He turned around on the spot and faced the bar.
Davy refilled Angelo’s mug.
Jake lounged nonchalantly at the bar. He raised his beer mug with his left hand and with his right put his thumb behind his top teeth and flicked it out in a gesture of crude challenge. He sneered and Angelo turned from him, back to the weird faces of Angus and Davy. Angelo felt hot, bemused, trapped. Something was going on underneath everything, a shark in a shallow pool. He had to get out. He lurched drunkenly towards the entrance.
The door swung open dramatically and framed within it, pausing for effect, stood Miss Angela Swan in her gleaming yellow dress. A cheer went up, whereupon the pianist played a bawdy tune and the centre of the room erupted in a spontaneous jig.
Angelo’s eyes met Angie’s. With his heightened senses, with the erotic charge of his mermaid rendezvous in his mind, with the joy and the sensuous promise it represented, he could not help it: his penis stiffened. And, as if there were a wire cord from him to her, his pupils grew large and a flutter like fright stirred in his chest. Angie, for her part, felt a tightening of her womb and a pulse between her legs. His virile air was a stench to her: pungent and fungal and irresistible. She tossed her head and sent him, with all her force, a mesmerising smile.
Time stood still.
Davy, witnessing the exchange, almost burst into tears. Eggs once broken are impossible to repair.
Then Angie winked lasciviously. Simply closed one lid. Angelo’s knees buckled as though someone had kicked one in from behind.
Davy, in a panic now, threw up his hands as if to ward off locusts. Then he manoeuvred himself in front of Angelo and shook him violently about the shoulders. Angelo was like a puppy until he came to his senses and shrugged Davy off, straining his face back towards Angie.
Captain Angus, alarmed, held Davy’s wrists at his side and stood between the men.
Angie moved through the crowd to the bar, exaggerating the sway of her hips. Jake opened his arm wide and drew her along on its current, positioning her beside him. The possessiveness of the movement perturbed Angelo out of all proportion; his face sank into an expression of worry. He gulped from his beer and it frothed over his chin while he tried to still the beat of his body. He was sickened by his response to her and wondered what black magic the girl possessed. He adjusted his crotch and tried to focus his mind on the mermaid. But with rising dread he discovered he could not find his vision of her. His beloved mermaid, the only creature he would die for … He reached for her like a forgotten name.
‘Why?’ Davy moaned. ‘Why her? Why not anyone else?’
‘What?’ Angelo blinked.
‘Choose someone else,’ Davy begged.
‘There is no one else! There
never was and never will be.’ Angelo lashed Davy with a look of incredulity, a deep furrow in his brow as he desperately searched for the sense of his mermaid. Only the mermaid was real. He stumbled and his hand went to his throat; he could not breathe. The fever he’d caught from his ordeal at sea made him dizzy: he gripped at his hair, pulling at the roots.
Davy, his mouth slack in horror, began to weep in earnest.
Angelo peered at him, confused. His empathy went out to his friend, prompting him to put his arms around him, patting him ineffectually. ‘Why are you crying?’
‘I love her — don’t you see?’ sobbed Davy.
‘You love the mermaid?’ intoned Angelo and Angus together.
Angelo, stricken, gaped at Angus. How could he know about the mermaid? The captain’s mouth worked and chewed on all the words he had to say that had so long been stoppered inside him, gas in a bottle, but he could not make a sound. Davy held his breath. The three men stared at one another.
Sparks of light floated in Angelo’s vision; he needed to sit. But there were no free seats so instead he leant his weight on Davy. Everything seemed irrelevant except his need to sit down. The captain was talking but Angelo could not make it out. He wished he’d shut up — too loud. And then, he felt nothing but a puppet, his attention pulled in Angie’s direction.
Davy’s face went pale as he pushed Angelo off and staggered towards the door.
Jake was leaning intimately into Angie’s body. Angelo wished his own face was in her neck. Heat flared under his sunburn as he plunged through the crowd, pushing and shoving all out of his way until he found himself gripping Angie’s arm, the satin a surprise to his touch. Angie had felt his advance as a rising thrill in her belly and looked up at his shocked face, her brown eyes glazed. Angelo registered the sprinkle of freckles on her nose, the simple prettiness of her; he wanted to rip her clothes off then and there.
Suddenly he felt he was going to be sick. He blinked as his body swayed forward into Jake, pulling Angie with him.
‘Tut tut,’ said Jake, shoving Angelo off. ‘Play nice and let go of the lady.’ He forced Angelo’s fingers to splay apart and release her.
My lady, thought Angelo deliriously. ‘I don’t like you,’ he slurred to Angie, and glanced longingly at the door, which seemed so far away. The floor undulated.
Angie, with mock hurt, pouted and rubbed her arm. ‘You are a beast,’ she purred, making Jake smirk and thrust his pelvis at her. She laughed, her head coquettishly to one side, but her eyes never left Angelo.
Angelo gaped about him. His arms flayed about, knocking the men on either side, spilling their drinks. A cry of protest went up and peeved faces turned on him like gargoyles. Angelo let out an emotional bellow: he threw his head back and roared. It briefly silenced the room. Then he lurched for the door, followed by Captain Angus.
Horribly drunk, Angelo stumbled to the beach. Whale skeletons loomed in the night and with the large, angular lumps of driftwood gave the appearance of a land of monsters. Angelo’s penis was still hard; he was overwhelmed by its insistence. His sense of smell was acute and the reek of the rotting whales assailed him. Vomit rose in his throat, acidic and pulpy; he gulped it down, gagged and swallowed some more.
He stretched his arms out before him like a blind man and the black sand rose up and dipped away, as if he had ingested wormwood. He tripped over a whale skull and fell, scraping his face on the salty sand. The pain of it stung him. He rolled on his back, sand in mouth, his breathing high and shallow in his chest. He scratched at his face in a lunacy of shame and began to sob.
The captain bent over him, at a loss. He spoke words that did not reach Angelo, and, after some deliberating, decided to fetch help.
Angelo closed his eyes to the moon and tried to steady his senses, but it was worse with his eyes closed: the spinning increased. He got to his knees and began to crawl in circles. As the circles grew wider and wider his erection lessened, lending more blood to his brain. He began to reorient himself. He could see the lights of the Qualm’s Arms and he knew he had to get away from them. He crawled along the beach in the direction of the lagoon.
The incoming tide dowsed him with its licks, and still he crawled, each small wave splashing him. He was soaked, thirsty and exhausted, but he knew it was imperative that he get to her. Reaching the rocks, he stood shakily and began to climb. Like the sour shock of a mouthful of vinegar his purpose became clear, strengthening him, powering his arms: mermaid, mermaid, mermaid. Masses of tangled kelp surged like Medusa’s snakes around his limbs, trying to suck him down. Seawater stampeded him, filling his mouth with its brine. His stomach clenched and spasmed and he vomited.
The mermaid bobbed in the water just over the next mound of rock, her locks bejewelled with sea snails of festive colours. Her fish tail swirled and, at full length, she could just touch the bottom. She felt like singing.
Angie Swan in her elegant yellow gown excused herself from Jake and stood outside the Qualm’s Arms, looking left and right. She called out Angelo’s name. She saw the captain walking towards the village, and then spied Angelo on the rocks. She ran towards him, breasts bouncing, feet shifting in the sand, cool air gusting up her legs. A surprise wind blew up, tangling its passion in her gown and hair and thrilling her like prophecy.
She reached Angelo and positioned herself above him with the intention of being saucy but, observing the state of him, instead hooked him under the arms and pulled him off the rocks and onto the sand, falling on him as she pushed him back.
‘Is it you?’ whispered Angelo, blinded by skin, scent and hair. He raised a heavy hand and plonked it down on Angie’s shoulder, dragging her gown off its slope. Her flesh glowed white in the moonlight.
Angie saw her moment. She dived in for a kiss. The lubrication of her mouth was like water to Angelo and he lapped at it. She untied the lacing at his crotch and he sprang out engorged and purple. She whispered soothing sounds, hoisted her skirt and staked her self on him.
Her hot wetness flummoxed Angelo, whose eyes bulged in incredulity, then awe. Then suddenly he realised it was Angie and tried to push her off, and yet he was irresistibly drawn … He began to sob, to bawl, overwhelmed. He was in the wrong place! He pushed her off, then lustily pulled her back; off then back, groaning. He shook his head in frustration and cried, ‘Get off! Not you! I don’t like you!’
But Angie ground herself down harder, and so they struggled. He rolled her on her back and partly withdrew; she wrapped her legs around his back and he made an anguished sound, then instinct bade him push with his feet in an effort to get deeper into her, shoving her around in an arc, her hair floating in the lapping water.
Angelo was mindless, eyes vacant, face set in concentration as he rocked from his hips, pivoting in and out, in and out, in and out, in and out, a steady rhythmic rut, his back rounded like a hunchback’s, his forearms rigid, pounding the virginity out of him, head bent down, breathing ragged. His eyeballs quivered and rolled with pleasure; a vein in his neck thickened.
Angie’s arms twined around his neck while she shoved up with her pelvis. The wind swirled the black sand in a tornado around them and stung as hard as thrown rice. With eyes squeezed tight she pulled his mouth to hers and made her own loose and slack. He sucked on her lips, tongue thrashing, grunting sounds of gratification, of exertion. Propped on one arm Angelo increased his tempo.
The mermaid slithered towards the enticing grunts and moans. She saw bodies stuck together on the beach. Curious, she came a little closer and cocked her head to one side, inquisitive. The physical act of lovemaking was as foreign to her as pepper and salt.
She liked the resonance. Ah, ah, err. She mimicked, first quietly and then louder. She enjoyed the vibration in her throat — it entranced her, like a drumbeat — and she matched the timing of Angie’s grunts. Ah, ah, err.
Engrossed, the mermaid wiggled closer still towards the slapping flesh, until her upper body was on the sand and the upper part of her tail was visible.
Her scales shimmered like taffeta, only a body length away from the rutting couple.
The mermaid looked at the top of Angelo’s bobbing head and suddenly she recognised him. He’s here! she thought euphorically, and impulsively she emerged further out of the water and extended her arms towards Angelo.
Angelo banged Angie, shunting her further into the water, his whitish grey hair suffused silver with the moon’s beam. Inside him the intensity of his orgasm gathered like clouds before a deluge and his body stiffened.
Then he heard the mermaid’s echo and raised his head and there she was. Perfection before him, arms outstretched. He experienced the most blissful ecstasy and as his body gave one last thrust and he yelled his release like a freed murderer.
The sound frightened the mermaid, brought back all her fears, all the near captures, and she flipped swiftly with a splash and swam away.
Angelo fainted.
Miss Angela Swan smiled, legs spread in triumph.
Angelo’s white sperm flushed up her scarlet channel, with one pointed intention, with a one-track mind, towards the one shining, opalescent egg, burrowing, burrowing, burrowing.
22.
Hunches
Maggie drove the red ute. Dust blew in through the holes in the floor and kicked up behind them, obscuring the mountain. The sculpture of the lily was secured with bungy cords on the flat deck. It rocked slightly but was well cushioned with blankets.
‘Yee ha!’ yelled Sophia in the passenger seat, blowing smoke from her cigar out the window, spilling ash everywhere. Maggie changed gear and the engine grunted, then sped along the straight. After a while she braked dramatically, skidded over a cattle stop and came to a shuddering stop at the building site on the cliff.
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