Just Relations

by Rodney Hall

  Vivien had sacrificed the initiative. And this is the first night, she despaired. She caressed herself with disgust, her hands carried his smell when she clapped them over her trembling mouth. She should go out and kick him in the face as he deserved. She wallowed in bed, weeping, smothered by the pillow, her past cancelled, her future a hole of night. He was so deliberately in command.

  Excitement settled among the company on the mountainside: the old man dead, the shot, the police, and now the engine temperature rising beyond the safe limit. A few grim smiles were exchanged in the bright morning sunshine. The forest closed behind them, trees bounding away like camouflaged guerrillas, the clayey slopes heaved ominously, outcrops of granite observed them from antiquity. The twins hummed a tune, gradually clarifying it into words and a definite rhythm.

  For day and night the irons clang and like poor galley-slaves, We toil and toil and when we die we shall fill dishonoured graves. But by and by I’ll break my chain and into the bush I’ll go To join the brave bushrangers there, Jack Donahue & Co.

  – Another of their mad colonial raves, Lance complained.

  Maggot, beating time with his free hand (clinging to the truck with the other to save his life), leaned across to yell in Billy’s ear.

  – Give her the gun, mate.

  The cut-away hood shuddered, the motor whined, the gears grabbed. Soon they would have to stop to let the truck cool down. But every man was impatient to get ahead that morning, to crawl up as high as the Bedford could, short of actually exploding.

  The difficulty of holding to a sense of scale stimulated them. The mountain, as they now saw it, so enormous and their collective insignificance an insect. Huge treeferns met overhead forming a bower for their rowdy smelly passage, a pale green tunnel with a larva nosing up towards the sun. In every direction spread generations of trees, ridge after ridge dense with them, trees unerly untouchable the panorama held so many of this dinosaur of plants, so that the truck’s progress was not only as ridiculous as a ship at sea, but equally meaningless. Yet the will was strong.

  – What we need is my grandfather, said Tony. The plants talk to him, so he says.

  – Strange things happen, Bill conceded.

  – He was in his garden talking to the cauliflowers. He woke up I was there but he didn’t mind. I tell them they’re beauties, he said, and they tell me things.

  – What things?

  – Their sort a things, was all he’d say. You can even catch him kissing flowers.

  – Sooner them than me!

  – He grabs hold of trees to save his life.

  – I believe it.

  – I once went to chop down a stump for firewood, nice wood, grey and dry, you know, just asking to be burnt. I swung me axe up in the air, ready, when the stump turned round. It was him, grandpa. How would you feel? He didn’t say a thing, only smiled with what he knew.

  Billy spared a glance for the rearvision mirror where the track slunk away behind them into a wilderness of vegetation. He could hear Lance’s voice.

  – Bet me this is the largest vehicle ever to get this far up? Who’s game? She’s a bloody beauty this Bedford, Lance added by way of making his peace with the driver, this time getting it right.

  – She is too, Bill muttered happily.

  Once they wheezed to a standstill. The party in the back leapt over the side and, in the competitive way of young men, jogged up ahead, eyes everywhere, but soon returned with nothing to report. The motor cooled off in the shade. The forest moved, dense with life, cicadas throwing up arches of song, sudden peaks and towers, a whole cathedral of sound bewildering in its detail.

  Bill took himself off to a secluded spot, squatted on his hams and quietly emptied his bowels among pebbles that possibly bore gold. He took note of his surroundings, grunted, sighed with the pleasure of it, remaining there a while to make the most of his comfort. Then he recalled Kel McAloon’s diary in his pocket. Stolen goods. Here was the seclusion he’d been waiting for. He opened it:

  kept clear of the filthy basterds from the day they come. Now there gone the place still stinks fair horrible. Nothing here anyhow, nothing left but rubbish. They go through every last shovel full twice over AS WE KNOW. Rubbish is all they’d leave us of Australia if we let them. Dirty little pooftas youd want to ring there necks like a roosters.

  Billy shut the book. He put it away, his mind uneasy, shown some ugly angers in himself. The scrub had grown denser since last he looked. He heard a shout. He scrambled up, kicked some dirt into the hole he’d made, zipped his jeans and yelled a reply. Others could be heard crashing through the bush converging on a creek where the Maggot stood cupping his hands for a megaphone. He and Peter had filled the watercans ready to carry back, then they’d had a dip in the icy water. But why call out? Bill, Tony, Dave and Lance watched their clean damp faces, questioned the sunshine glistening in their lashes. Was it gold? Was this what they’d come for already?

  – Look, Maggot ordered as he led the way to a shallow cave in the cliff. An iron camp-oven stood at the back. He removed the lid with a flourish. Dinner’s up! he announced, reached in and drew out a woman’s dress.

  The dress had been folded for so long a grid of creases squared the cloth as he held it up: a pink cotton frock of a long forgotten fashion. Lance whistled. Maggot bunched his fists and inserted them in the bosom of the dress while the others tittered. He held it against himself and modelled it, pirouetting in the narrow space, pursed his lips, crossed his legs and vamped over his left shoulder. Doing well.

  – Next! he called as he tossed the dress to Peter and produced a petticoat. Next! he called again throwing the petticoat at Lance’s head and taking out a pair of white bloomers. These he unfolded gingerly and displayed. They were disfigured by a florid brown stain.

  – What’s happened? asked Tony in fear.

  Lance turned away, disgusted.

  – Looks like someone got raped, Dave suggested.

  – No, Maggot pointed out. No, she folded the clothes herself.

  – That’s her period, Lance taunted them, his mouth full of wolverine teeth.

  The young men gaped at the bloodstain, that huge dark blot. So this was the period, this was what they’d heard about in Yalgoona.

  – Such a lot of blood, Maggot marvelled.

  Not to be hurried, Billy examined the bloomers till sure he had missed nothing. It didn’t appear puzzling to him that the clothes were left and never claimed. Satisfied, he passed the evidence to Dave who hastily dropped it back where it belonged.

  – That’s been a long time, Tony observed of religion as a whole.

  Peter folded the dress and Maggot folded the petticoat. The iron lid clanged a loud bell when they replaced it.

  Unexpectedly he was there, he had come into the room, yes, to be part of its dark angles. She could hear him breathing, then slipping off his clothes and leaving them where they dropped. She heard him go back and pick them up, surely not folding them? His belt-buckle clinked against a chair. He opened her bed, peeling it back gently. His warm rough body beside her, her own treacherous warmth flowed out to him. But she volunteered no response to his invasion. Bill propped himself on his side to see her, chromium-plated in the moonlight from the window. Eyes bright and dark, nose defined with exquisite sharpness, she did not move. Fully clothed, she lay silent. So he was horrified at what he had done, and done without motive. Once at that first meeting climbing down the cliff he asked what she’d think if he pushed her off. Now he had. No reason then, none now. Couldn’t she guess he was ready to offer any apology if only she’d turn and forgive him? Even a sigh would grant him leave to comfort her. He saw she was beautiful. Recumbency hollowed her cheeks, suffering gave depth to her eyes, the oblique light picking out explicit details. Previously he had seen her body as a body of actions rather than shapes. The hair massed round her brow with such life its very stillness appeared astonishing. He was not skilled in these matters and, since he was also inexperienced, continued su
pine and helpless, embarrassed by nakedness. Ready to do the right thing, also a little petulant at her refusal to resolve the deadlock. With a start of surprise it occurred to him he might appear to her much as his father appeared to him: a stocky, mulish, dissatisfied and baffling being.

  Vivien was back in the Berkshire countryside, a village child scooping handfuls of snow and pelting them at a rumpled assembly of other village children; then came a sharp pain in the side of her head and at the touch of that one gross superthumb of a mitten, the knitted wool blotting up blood, her cry of anguish that it was at her somebody chose to throw a snowball loaded with a stone, that she should be the one to excite malice, that it should be her pain affording them triumphant amusement; that the butcher now saw fit to come waddling out of his shop, stomach tightly strapped in a hideously bloodied apron, and shake his sharpening-steel at his nephews and nieces, chasing them off and referring to her as a sweet charming little thing. He had led her into his shop for protection, so she stood, an utter stranger and outcast, shoes scuffing in the sawdust, rolling the occasional bloodball, her head filled with the obnoxious odour of fresh carcasses, eyes fascinated by forms of death and dissection. In addition to which there was no way out. How was she to get home? The time must come for her to confront those children the kindly beastly butcher had declared to be her enemies and inferiors. Proper gentleman your father, he’d said by way of consolation; so that now she knew what she must do.

  Lying in her own bed stiff as a wax figure in the Chamber of Horrors, again being an outsider foisting herself on a community too small and insular to cope with her foreignness, Vivien relived her reply to the butcher, the words having seemed through all the years important. Thank you for helping me Mr Chap but I think I must go back to my friends now, she’d said and squared her eight-year-old shoulders, set her face against crying, refused her mittened hand permission to check the wound again, walked as steadily as she was able to the door, pulled it, dragged at its handle, struggled against stiff hinges and the spring holding it shut against flies, staggered outside and called in that high precious voice she now heard for the first time as hateful as it must sound to others – Where are you? Please come and play. It doesn’t hurt. I don’t mind. And when the first snowball whizzed out of nowhere to splatter on the shoulder of her red coat with the black velvet collar, she found the knowledge to laugh. Ya boo! she laughed with hysterical derision as two more surprise snowballs narrowly missed their mark. Then came a silence. A robin danced prettily out of the hedge between the butcher’s and the grocer’s. Nothing but her laugh, now a laugh of scorn, and the unconcerned robin busy about the necessities of worm spotting. Then they emerged from hiding, surrendered all together, sidling from behind gates, facing her from doorways. Are you the new kid then? they asked. And she said she was, gladly yes, she was an identity, the new kid in person. So one girl came and put her arm round her neck. You’re on my side, she announced.

  – My father, Vivien had informed them, beats me. Though not true, this was inspired.

  Billy didn’t arrive at a decision, he simply acted when he felt released to act. His hand hovered. His face close to Vivien’s, but with a natural delicacy not actually touching.

  – This is the first time for me, he said healing the rift instantly, when it has meant anything. His hand curving to her shape, adventuring.

  Mrs Ping once read from a book that if matter could be stilled, the molecules arrested in their perpetual movement, two solid bodies would pass through one another, whole and unharmed. His hand swept through her, oaring down, as, in the same manner, her head rose, teeth and nose spearing up through his jaw, already past his ears and eventually breaking free of the skull so she could take a deep breath at last and feel it serving both pairs of lungs. Her thighs rising from the back of his legs lazarus-like, pallid and cold. So now she levitated above the bed and surely her clothes had been lost somewhere along the way. For his part, he experienced a crimping of the scalp, a slight draught as she floated out from his back, and a tingling when she re-entered in the same way. Their eyes saw the act of seeing. Their double tongue unravelled coupling snakes, licking through and back through each other. They were instantly inheritors of two worlds of knowledge; he thought and she thought together:

  the speckled feather, a treasure of generations unchanged

  axes different trees different tunes rhythms

  the great ship lurching into a beggar-filled port

  laughing rabbit nice in the gunsight

  the first day lived in the swank of stolen lipstick

  steam from a frog’s back December

  the emergence from fire of a porcelain figure of repose

  transparent roof of a fish’s mouth

  the hunt for pussywillows on a hill that smells of fox

  blaze of blood the motorcycle perfect cornering

  the fear of not knowing what a cow’s eyes see

  knowing what a cow’s eyes see afraid

  the strowing of leaves on Palm Sunday, the plaited grass cross

  last bird of a migration hasn’t led at any stage

  the mystery of greed and the odour of loneliness

  simple sparkplug

  the candle going out and the canary keeling over

  toenails of an old lady her fingernail picking them

  the loss of one leg by a three-legged stool

  a horse’s shit cloud shape

  the sadness of an addled egg

  water frozen in a boot left out all night

  the one tuft of boy’s hair that won’t lie flat

  someone falling down joke

  the blindman beating his seeing-eye dog

  waterdiviner’s fingertips trembling

  the nose and teeth spearing effortlessly through another skull

  still body swimming down

  Not yet daylight. Trees dipped into mist and branched up from it. Despite the damp air you couldn’t say it was cold. Boots glossy wet, Bill Swan and Vivien sauntered uphill with all the time before them. Already well above the house and at the verge of the forest they wandered, thoughful. Outcrops of granite hunched, speckled with lilies. The mountain could be seen best reflected in their eyes. They were listening to the rustle of their own progress, inattentive to the birds who now sang, casting each note singly like a fishing line. The sky clean glass filled up with water. Neither spoke. There was no plan. The flies had not yet woken. All night the wind stayed gentle. Branches veiled in mist signalled to them. Soaked to the knees, the lovers climbed the mountain slope, in among treetrunks too ancient to bear scars. Glass chips fell starlike from the leaves far up out of reach. Wisps of steam began to form on their clothing, the incline rose steeply ahead. They stopped and listened. Nearby they could hear the chirruping of a kangaroo grinding its teeth. Bill Swan’s world was filled with Vivien and Vivien’s eyes. They let each other’s hand go, then joined them together tighter.

  – Are you cold love? he asked hoarsely, feeling her coldness as deliciously fresh and unfamiliar.

  – No, she lied so he’d be told she loved him.

  They climbed till they were met by two massive rocks, tall presences carved to the sweeping shapes of wind, gouged and smoothed, loud with birdsong, standing with the absolute stillness of time itself. Mist played tricks of substance and illusion. But Vivien pushed through the bracken to the foot of one rock and placed her hand there, palm chilled by the shock of stone. William Swan of Dead Reef placed his hand on the companion rock and they were joined then by the mountain itself, the mist vanishing from around them. All colour being leached from the sky, the foliage jutted black and sharp silhouettes with white outlines. Somewhere water gurgled. The cold cut at them. Together they willed the sun to rise. The horizon gathered its remembered resources of blue into wings and swooped towards them. Then the first shaft of light blinded them. Insects swarmed through the air, a plague of mosquitoes drifting down, flies whirling up, grasshoppers launching themselves with the trajectory of bullets, floc
ks of white moths escaped from dark hollows and disappeared into the sun. The ground underfoot showed as four crescents of rainbow moisture while beneath the grass shadows ants patrolled the hard soil. Leaves flickered and sparkled in the wind. The distant petrol motor at the cheese factory stammered to life and settled to its heartbeat.

  The full company once more aboard, the Bedford rasped into action, crawling up the steep slope. Bill drove, attentive to the revs, considering the question of coincidences. Each detail of his life revealed as strange if you got close enough to it. His own name Swan, for example. Who could have thought of the letter W, let alone an S? The rattletrap corkscrewed into a grassy clearing where two treeferns had placed their strange symmetrical forms as if in a plot of parkland. Behind them the sky blossomed with thundercloud. The last short climb lay ahead, then from a saddle in the horizon you had to explore on foot; leaving the return journey winding eastward round the mountain, downhill to Whitey’s Fall.

  – Come on Bill, shouted the Maggot. Before the rain hits, mate.

  They accelerated, bounced crazily across the turf and rumbled up the steep incline. The first drops starred the windscreen. The men in the back huddled into waterproof jackets, one-handedly stowing their dry gear under a tarpaulin, clutching the vehicle’s lurching sidewalls with their other hands. Rain fell in brief cold gusts. Then they were there. The Bedford had made it to the top of the track, and only just in time. A wet surface might have meant disaster. The east wind struck in from the sea with a message.

  The party sprang out and began walking, heading for the southern peak. The silent slopes of forested gullies immediately filled with a theatrical crash of thunder, massive as the mountain itself, re-echoing round ridges and valleys, a gorgeous sound rolling solidly this way and that, a colossal glossy boom heard in glass caverns. The view below took their breath, superb assemblages of rockfaces and ravines plunging to a fan of valleys filled with treeferns and threaded on sparkling wires of creeks.