Something Special, Something Rare

by Black Inc.

  She picks her way down through the prickly bush garden to the water and hoists the white and yellow kayak off the grass, holding it across her hips, tilting herself backwards to balance the weight. She steps over the stones, and then lowers it – plop – into the water. With her fingertips she directs it between some rocks so it won’t float away in the mild slapping of the water. Then she wades ankle-deep to the furthest rock and sets down her coffee cup on its flattest part. She wades back and lowers herself into the kayak seat, making the boat rock wonkily. She shunts her bum forward and uses the white plastic oar to push off from the stones, feeling the kayak grazing the underwater pebbles. She reaches for the cup and then, holding it aloft in one hand, digs a few one-handed strokes with the other, out into the deeper water. Then she lays the bar of the paddle across her lap and sips from the cup, letting the kayak drift out into the vast grey sheet of the lake. Almost as far as she can see ahead and to each side, is the metallic water.

  She sits back, closing her eyes against the sunlight, knees bent. The water shrugs beneath her. Then she drains the cup and sets it on the floor, and paddles a few neat strokes with the sun at her back. She drifts over to where she has seen some fish jumping and sits very still, listening for the tiny splash, scanning for the movement. Then there it is, the plish, the glimpse of small white fish arched in the air above the silver water.

  Every morning she does this, paddling and drifting for an hour on the silent lake, before Matthew wakes.

  *

  The wedding had been the usual thing for her home town. Ceremony in the park by the river (not Saint Mark’s, after several arguments with her mother). The celebrant was a woman in a cream nylon suit and an aqua blouse, they’d read something from Kahlil Gibran. Afterwards, at the reception in the Corroboree Room behind the civic hall, Mandy sat at the round bridal table with Matthew, her parents, and her sister Cathy.

  The smell of the wood panelling in the Corroboree Room reminded her of their afternoons there as children when their father had supplied the sound system for football club functions. In his youth, he had wanted to be a sound engineer. So he owned a mixing board and many long extension cords, he owned big stippled silver cases with snap locks, amps and various players, folding stands, large black speakers in scratched black chipboard casings and three microphones with stands of varying heights. He didn’t need these things for his job at the gas company, but he liked to have them. While he spent Saturday afternoons of their childhood laying out cables and saying ‘check, check’ into the microphones, Mandy and Cathy had the Corroboree Room to themselves, sliding on the polished green lino and sitting in the crook of the one wooden step up to the stage.

  At the wedding Mandy wore a dress made by her university friends and her mother sat next to Matthew. Her mum had secretly liked Matthew from the start. He played up to her, teased her in a way that made Mandy wonder if her father had ever done this, because her mother flushed and looked younger whenever she and Matthew bantered. Mandy imagined her dad – young, slim, broad-shouldered – teasing her mother about her hips, or her tea towels, the way Matthew did.

  *

  The second night at the lake they set the outdoor table on the deck for dinner, sticking candles into wine bottles, the candle-light making the trees flicker. Matthew has made a big bowl of spaghetti and stands over Mandy like a waiter, using tongs to lift the pasta on to her plate. Then there’s a noise, and they look up to see the big possum angling its way down the tree again, one side of its body moving forward then the other, its snout lifting in purposeful, rhythmic nods.

  ‘Shit,’ Mandy says.

  ‘It’s OK, it won’t come near us,’ says Matthew.

  But the possum leaps on to the railing and stalks towards them. The smaller one has appeared now too, waddling behind its mother.

  Mandy stands, scraping her chair loudly and shoving it in the animals’ direction. ‘Shoo!’

  The candle flames wobble. The possums stop. They stare at her, their dingy feather-duster tails held up in the air.

  Mandy drags the chair again, looks around for Matthew, who has disappeared. She feels stupid. The dinner is getting cold. But the mother possum begins to walk again, delicately, along the railing, stretching her face towards the table. Mandy steps back, thinks of the possum’s mean little teeth, the tiny fleas and bacteria in its fur.

  Matt appears with a long, spindly piece of eucalypt branch. He steps forward and whacks the stick down, hard, on the decking. The possums straighten, staring. He cracks the stick down again, harder, and the noise echoes up into the dark around the house. The possums turn and amble along the railing towards the bedroom at the end of the house, into the darkness.

  Mandy pulls her chair back towards the table. ‘Thanks,’ she mumbles, glancing past Matthew into the gloom. She can’t see them.

  Matt grins and says, ‘I’ll put some music on.’

  On the nights after this they each sit with a thin branch leaned against their chair. Every night the possums come, then retreat into the shadows at the cracking of the sticks.

  Sometimes Mandy looks up from the table to see their eyes shining out of the dark.

  *

  Matthew was a city boy when they met at a party in her first weeks at university. ‘Never been west of the Blue Mountains,’ he’d said airily, lighting a cigarette.

  He wore a black suit jacket with his black jeans, listened to The Cruel Sea. When she said she didn’t know who The Cruel Sea were he was incredulous. ‘Tex Perkins. The Cruel Sea.’

  She was blank. ‘Sorry.’

  He took the cigarette from his mouth and blew a long stream of smoke. ‘You really are a country girl,’ he said, and then he smiled, a wide, city-boy smile. Later they had sex in his room in the dark, the party babbling outside his bedroom door, beneath the mournful music coming from his battered CD player.

  ‘I like your body,’ he whispered, propped on his elbow in the gloom. He said breasts, as though it were not a foreign word for a boy. He drew a sharp line down her breastbone with his fingernail. She liked his spiky confidence. He switched on a lamp with a sarong covering it – he had been to Asia – and low orange light washed the room. He sat up in bed and began rolling a joint.

  She lay naked on top of the sheets, feeling on her skin an echo of the line he had traced down her sternum. A corner of her future was opening up.

  *

  Long before the wedding, the first time she brought Matthew home, her mother made up Cathy’s room for him, with the good sheets, the new pillowcases. Mandy had snuck into the room after they’d all gone to bed, squeezed in beside him, snickering at his clump of black clothes and his motorbike boots heaped on the floor next to Cathy’s pale pink chest of drawers. She touched his nipple.

  ‘Don’t,’ he whispered. ‘Your parents.’

  She laughed again, bent to lick it.

  ‘It’s not fair on them,’ he murmured, gently pushing her away. ‘They’re nice people.’

  She stared at him in the dark, and then she stood up and padded back through the silent house to lie in her childhood bed, listening to her sister asleep, breathing slow and heavy on a mattress on the floor.

  *

  At the lake they spend the days sitting on the deck, looking out at the water through the trees, newspapers strewn about them, listening to seed pods dropping onto the corrugated iron roof. The house is full of ugly, comfortable furniture they sink into. Prehistoric-looking couches with the nap worn off the fake suede, with seat cushions so deep their feet don’t touch the floor. There is a smoked-glass coffee table with battered board games on a shelf beneath. Scattegories and Monopoly and obscure, failed board games: Payday, and How to Be a Complete Bastard with Adrian Edmonson’s face all over the box.

  The maroon milk crate filled with their uni textbooks and foolscap notebooks stays by the front door, untouched.

  Sometimes they have sex, quietly, on the clean white sheets with the sun falling into the room, only the screen door betwee
n them and the cicadas and the chittering of the lorikeets.

  *

  The next time he had gone home with her was for Easter.

  ‘Do you want to go with them?’ Matthew had asked her at breakfast, while her mother scurried around the house before Mass, checking her handbag, putting on lipstick at the hallway mirror.

  Mandy had only snorted, and poured another coffee. ‘Have you got any cigarettes?’ she asked him.

  ‘Shhh,’ he whispered, angling his head towards her mother, who was now in the kitchen prodding at a solid white-plasticked chicken defrosting on the sink.

  Cathy grinned at Matthew over her Weet-Bix. ‘Wuss,’ she said with her mouth full, spoon aloft.

  ‘Come on Cathy,’ called their mother. ‘And you shouldn’t be eating breakfast so late.’ Their parents never ate before Communion.

  They went to buy Easter eggs and hot cross buns after collecting her parents from Mass. At the supermarket checkout they watched the coloured eggs and the plastic bags of buns moving along the conveyor belt.

  Cathy said, ‘There’s Sue McInerney.’

  At the next counter a thin girl from Cathy’s year stood with a lanky, slightly older boy, lifting things from a trolley; frozen food boxes and bags of corn chips and sheets of pale sausages.

  ‘I remember her,’ Mandy said. ‘Brainy.’

  Cathy flicked a red egg, sending it spinning in circles on the conveyor belt. ‘Pregnant, apparently.’

  The sisters raised their eyebrows at each other.

  Matthew took out his wallet, but Mandy’s father was standing ahead of them, a fifty dollar note ready in his hand. He was watching Sue McInerney too, until Cathy nudged his elbow for the waiting checkout girl.

  As they were driving home Matthew looked out of the window at the yellowing trees. He said, ‘It’s quite beautiful here really. I could live here.’ He didn’t look at Mandy, but was watching the back of her father’s head. ‘When we finish uni,’ he added.

  Dad looked only at the road.

  After lunch that day the family drifted into silence. Dad was slouched in his armchair, reading a Thomas Keneally book with his glasses halfway down his nose. Cathy was at the end of the couch, with a little collection of nail polish remover and enamels and cuticle-softener bottles arranged before her on the coffee table. She had a foot up on the table, rubbing a nail with a cotton ball. Their mother had put on Handel’s Messiah, as she did at every family occasion. Mandy lay on the carpet reading a magazine, propped up on her elbow. In quiet parts of the music she could hear her mother and Matthew chatting in the kitchen over the washing up. He was saying something about the local council and town planning jobs.

  *

  One morning out in the kayak she sees one of the enormous pale jellyfish they’d noticed much further out in the deeper water, from the boat. Now it glides alongside her. She wants to touch its fleshy, globular tentacles, the huge thickened dome of its head. She strokes the water once with the paddle to keep up, following its slow-motion dipping and surfacing. But after a while the jellyfish sinks deeper, and though she stares hard into the dark water as it lowers, it disappears.

  The sun is hotter now. She turns to see the house in the distance, the shape of Matthew hunched over the railing of the deck, looking out across the lake towards her.

  She waves, then dips the paddle straight down, feels the boat rotate, graceful as a dancer.

  *

  At the wedding her father talked into one of his microphones, huskily welcoming Matthew into the family, but looking at Mandy. She smiled back at him. Later, father and daughter danced awkwardly together. She was a little drunk. She called, through a space in the song, into her father’s ear, ‘You’ve been happy, haven’t you Dad?’ He grunted, ‘Oh, love. Course I have.’ Then he said, ‘I’m sorry about before.’ And she put her head into his shoulder to stop herself from crying.

  *

  Over the week she teaches herself how to control the kayak, experimenting by keeping her elbows at her sides or lifting them, or by shifting her grip along the paddle. Sometimes she moves through the water smooth and fast, as though propelled by some force beyond herself. At other times she can’t wield the paddle; it smacks at the water or bangs down on the side of the boat, causing it to wobble and rock. But on each outing she spends much of the time simply drifting, gazing into the water. Sometimes she comes across a single patch of bubbles. She tries to stare into the depths, but once again there’s nothing to be seen except the sliding, bulbous surface of the water itself.

  One morning she sees the small red swatch of a kite high in the air.

  When she and Cathy were small their father had had a brief kite-flying craze, driving his reluctant girls to the highest of the bare hills near the town. He would lift his kites, delicate creations of dowel and bright tissue paper, from the boot of the car. Mandy would huddle in her nylon parka, hair whipping her face in the freezing wind. ‘I told you to wear something warmer,’ her father growled while he untangled a cord. But Mandy had insisted on her pink tartan skirt and bare legs, and the wind was icy. The girls had to stand, each holding a skein of nylon line in both hands, while their father strode up the hill ahead of them. Then he would throw up each of the kites and shout, ‘Run!’, and they had to run over the knobbly tussocky ground, holding the lines high above their heads. The kite would mostly swirl once or twice and arrow straight towards the stony ground. But sometimes, sometimes, it would lift, and the spool would whirl and tumble in her hands, the purple kite lifting higher and higher, and Mandy would begin to smile, and Cathy’s green box kite would lift and she would shriek, her head thrown back and mouth wide open, and their father would stand and watch his children falling in love with the high space beyond that small town, with the possibilities of flight.

  Now Mandy looks up at the distant red kite in the blue sky above the lake, anchored to somewhere on the distant shore. She remembers the rhythmic tug on the line, calibrating its pull against the weight of her own body, the pleasure of letting out the line, then resisting. She turns from it then, and paddles towards the centre of the lake. But all morning, it seems the kite stays with her, always above her, there in the outer corner of her sight.

  The wind rises. She churns back through the water towards the house, breathing deep and rhythmically, pushing the high end of the paddle forward with all the strength of one arm as she dips deep and pulls the low end through the water with the other hand, the choppy little waves slapping over the prow of the kayak.

  Afterwards she walks up the garden, her arms and legs pleasantly jittery from the last long stretch of effort.

  When she slides open the glass door Matthew is reading the paper at the table.

  ‘I said I was going to come with you,’ he says crossly. ‘But you didn’t wake me up.’

  The room feels small and airless after the wide gusty space of the lake, the red star of the kite stamped in the sky.

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ she says, as she passes his chair. ‘I forgot.’

  *

  At noon they gather provisions to go out in the boat for the afternoon. Matthew waits on the deck, hands full with a fishing rod and one plastic shopping bag of bait, and another holding lunch things – a half-bottle of wine with a cork jammed into it, some bread and cheese. His straw hat dangles, sunglasses glint on his head.

  Mandy puts a hand to the bench for the door keys, but they aren’t there. Matthew watches her from outside, shifting his weight while she scrabbles through the things on the bench: coins, unopened envelopes, a banana, a bottle of sunscreen, three pens, some national park brochures.

  ‘Hang on,’ she calls, moving to the other end of the bench where the owners keep a basket full of miscellaneous stuff. She peers into it. Fishing lures, magnets, pens, more sunscreen, a computer disk, some cassettes with the brown tape knotted in loops, a plastic tub of moisturiser.

  ‘Come on,’ calls Matthew, irritated.

  She straightens. ‘I can’t find the keys.’ She walk
s to the door. ‘Did you have them or did I?’

  Matthew groans. ‘You did, because when we got home you opened the door and I carried in the shopping.’

  This is true. She turns back, hands on her hips, thinking, scanning the room. The keys have an enormous plastic Bananas in Pyjamas key ring. Impossible to lose. Suddenly she feels a wave of dislike for Matthew, standing there ready for a picnic.

  ‘Are you going to help me look?’ she asks, hands still on her hips.

  He sighs, puts down the fishing rod and the bags, jostling them into a corner of shade by the door. She thinks she sees his eyebrows lift as he bends, pushing the things about noisily, but when he stands again he is smiling tightly. She wants, suddenly, to smack him on his smooth, shaven face.

  ‘I don’t know where the fucking things are,’ she says viciously, and begins striding about the room, flipping cushions and snapping pieces of paper.

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll find them,’ he says. But making it clear, in his tone, that the delay is her fault.

  They each begin to wander round the house, bending and straightening as they search, and he calls out questions. ‘Did you take them out of the front door?’

  ‘Yes.’ She hurries to check. Not there.

  ‘What did you do then?’

  From the hallway she can see him now in the bedroom, lifting shorts and shirts to shoulder height, listening for keys in pockets.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He keeps yelling out questions, which she doesn’t answer.

  She moves, her body bent, through the rooms, lifting every cushion again, running a hand beneath each one. When she comes back to the kitchen he’s standing in front of the rubbish bin below the bench. ‘I guess we should empty it. They could have fallen in.’

  She does not think the keys could have fallen in. They would need to fall at a 45-degree angle, backwards and under the lip of the bench top. But she has nothing better to offer. ‘Mmmm,’ she says.