Ironbark

by Jay Carmichael

  Try again.

  There’s a smudgeable layer of oil or grease on the table top. He rubs hard. It relocates itself on the pad of his finger. He makes another cuppa. Tea this time, and the bag’s left in, and the water goes this crazy peachy colour that reminds him of the sunrise. Cold War Kids plays from the dock sitting underneath the telly. He can’t name the tune. There’s afternoon coming in, shining across the iPod’s screen and blocking the song’s title. Saying it aloud, a whisper will do. Y’know. The tongue’s rebellious, and the words it flicks are futile and never come out to mean what is intended. What could I say? He bangs his fist into his thigh, alternating hard and soft. He can never speak aloud what’s inside. A paralysis.

  Markus winces.

  He loves Grayson.

  Tea spills down the side of the cup.

  Markus hates that he loves Grayson, because he tells himself he hates men. He finds people repulsive. People and their relationships. Especially men. Repulsive. Rene: drove his first wife away with a glass of gin and a well-aimed fist. Buff: billowing with maleness he hasn’t a hold on. Georges: dirty sanchez.

  Men are repulsive. With their sex. With their hair. Their physicality. With their laughs and deep voices and motives and desires and kisses and hands, searching-seeking hands searching and seeking minds and fingers and tongues and lips and beards and stubble. Men. Cocks and balls and fucks and butts and ribs and thighs and ears. Their eyes, deep blue or the-always-loveliest brown eyes, and wrinkled faces when the sun’s shining in their brown eyes. Like earth. Like death. Regeneration. Life. Growth. Nutrition. Men with their thoughts. Men with their minds again and again. Their hearts and wanting to fill their hearts with love. Selfish love. Fuck their love. He shouldn’t have a life he never asked for and be expected to love men. With their problems never spoken outward. And childhood trauma and family issues. Men wanting to be held or hold. Markus laughs or sniffs or huffs. Perhaps growls.

  To let someone love him: they say you shouldn’t use the word ‘love’ — you should show it. Yet when the person he loves lies six feet beneath the surface, there’s little except the abstract nature of words to describe, or not, what he feels inside.

  Outside him, out there in the small microcosm his father’s creating, the veggies Rene hand-pollinated fatten in the warming months, engorging themselves with sunlight and becoming rosy in the cheeks. Around them the cicadas sing, above them cockatoos screak, and between the full pumpkins and bundles of cherry tomatoes the cabbage butterflies flick and whisk. Inside, away from all this, Markus’s nineteenth birthday passes. Onward and upward. The charity footy match is never spoken of again, the money raised never quoted. Buff reports that his dad said it was a huge success. A thank-you note in the mail and all. And Elmyra’s doing whatever she’s doing, her Marilyn unseen since before Grayson died. Markus begins work for his father, because Brute said he wasn’t fit for the apprenticeship. So, Markus works on the farm’s books, the paperwork, the finances, that drib-drab correspondence with the bank manager. Rene’s in a bit of money trouble. Markus doesn’t say; instead, he tries to find the money where he can and sweet-talk the bank some more.

  Elba says, You’re talking more quietly than usual.

  He says, I’m not — you’re not listening at your usual.

  She laughs.

  He turns the muscles in his face into the shape of an orange quarter.

  She asks him, How’re you doing?

  And he says, Fine.

  And she says, How are you, really?

  And he says, Really, I’m fine.

  And she goes to speak again, stops. With tight lips she smiles once more. She mostly leaves him be, continuing to sell Herbalife in town five days a week. Leaving Markus each day to begin the farm’s books, leaving him to wait for the mail. He peeks through the lace at every car that passes. The tyres hush over the crumbling bitumen at the end of the driveway. He makes sure his mind doesn’t forget about the stars, the night, the long-gone rain and wind and the cold, the shivering on the ground and the headlights flickering on, off, on, off, and the nothing, the calling out, the out calling, the crying out and the crying and the rain. The unfound. One morning, he gives up waiting earlier than usual. He turns from the window and drinks his coffee. None left. Makes a fourth and sits at the table, his back to the lounge and its window and to the mailbox, turned away from the road and remembrances. He drinks the coffee and in between sips, he bites his top lip. Peels its skin away. With each coffee sip and each intermittent bite, his lip becomes more sensitive. The steaming liquid burns his exposed lip and makes it bleed. When he pulls back the cup, he sees a tiny swirl of blood in the liquid. Tie-dye. Behind him, he hears a car slow down. The mailperson.

  The Leader says they’ve restarted rail work, begun installing the actual railway. Markus looks at the images in the wrap-around special. Flat, long, and endless, a foundation of ballasts and sleepers ready to have rails laid. A few sleepers have been stolen and others turned over or misplaced.

  Buff says that he wants to come around and tinker with Rene’s muscle car. Markus didn’t know that Rene had a muscle car. While he waits for Buff, Markus stands near the shed. He eats a banana and watches mud-dauber wasps (Sceliphron sp.) skirt across the dirt. Supposes they mustn’t do pollination, then.

  Buff’s car speeds up the drive, trailing dust. He brakes and slams the door shut as he exits.

  Cicadas fill the pause.

  Ya didn’t show up at footy pre-season.

  Markus says, I had work.

  Coach asked for ya.

  Yair.

  Right. Look, I shoulda bin around after ya.

  Markus says, It’s alright, and the convo dies.

  The muscle car is kept under a black sheet; beneath, its duco is east sky at twilight. The chassis hugs the shed’s floor, looking clever.

  Straight from the showroom, Buff says. He hovers his fingers over the bonnet. Imagine how fast it’d go.

  Tracey Chapman comes to mind. Markus looks around for his father. Guess the shed’s too dark, I didn’t see it, he says.

  Or Ren didn’t want you to know about it. Buff’s done a full circle around the vehicle, checked every window and even smelled it. Dad an’ I are goin’ pig huntin’, he finally says.

  Markus nods.

  You should come.

  Markus shakes his head.

  Dad didn’t give a choice, Buff says, replacing the sheet over the car. Said y’need t’ get off this property.

  I work here.

  He said y’shouldn’t work where ya live.

  What else am I supposed to do here? Markus gestures with his hand to the purlieus, the paddocks that he cannot see through the shed’s walls of tin.

  Buff shrugs.

  I always do shit for people, Markus says.

  Dad’s just lookin’ out for ya. Buff’s weighing the sheet down on the ground with bricks, readjusting it not-too-tight, so as not to damage the car.

  The next day, before the Burrows are to pick up Markus for the pig-hunting trip, a letter with legal insignia arrives addressed to a Mr M. W. Bello. A court summons for a hearing in some months’ time.

  Rene says, She’ll be right — yer haven’t driven for a year, got no priors, yer young. And remorseful, yair?

  Markus sits in the back seat of Brute’s car. Buff’s driving. They head to the bush around the Lake. Buff rests two shotguns against a sapling. By mid-arvo, they’re hunting.

  It’s not the killing of the pig that creeps Markus out the most; he supports removal of pests from where they don’t belong. Rene taught him that. Someone, maybe Cecily, once said that humans should be removed then, too: we don’t belong here. The feral pig is smaller and leaner and more muscular than a domestic pig. It’s got sinewy shoulders and neck, which remind him of an animal far grander — i.e. a wildebeest, though this pig, this mangy thing, is more thin
and coarse. It has a long snout and tusks. Its tail is straight, with a bushy tip. Markus had been expecting a curly tail. It’s disturbing, never mind the coughing gurgle it’s making as the leftover air escapes its lungs. The blood: fine, bright, syrupy blood creeping through the boar’s hair. It makes him shiver.

  Brute calls Markus a pussy.

  Buff bends down beside his father, who’s wrestling the pig’s head into a position. Blood oozes out the pig’s left nostril. The Burrows look up from under their wide-brimmed hats. The sun brightens the scene, makes them squint, and Buff tilts his head toward his father.

  Markus lines them up in the phone’s screen, because they’ve asked him to take a photo. It’s unbalanced. Too much weight. Too much emphasis on the people and not the pig — not enough emphasis on the pig’s wounds, which their friends in Narioka will admire when they look at this picture on Facebook. Markus moves toward the pig, grabs its ear. Warm. Perhaps not quite dead. Warm, and disgusting for being warm. It’s meant to be dead. Should be cold and vacant. Yet the glint of its eye hasn’t vacated. Markus pushes the limp pig’s head toward Brute and Buff, and the shotgun wound settles between them to show off torn ligament and shattered flesh. Brute was close when he was demonstrating to Buff how to shoot proper-point-blank in the neck. After readjusting the carcass, Markus steps back and realigns the men and the pig in the frame of Buff’s smartphone.

  Back at the campsite, Brute drags the boar from the ute’s tray and then some distance away from their camp. Buff takes off his hat. He fills a plastic tub with water and rubs his hands in the liquid. Dirt and blood from the boar wash away. When he’s done, he walks to a nearby ironbark and pours the pink-tinted water at its base. Markus sits in a camp chair beside the fire, somewhat aware of Buff’s father hacking into the dirty flesh of a gigantic pig. He draws a random pattern in the dirt with the end of a stick he’s holding.

  Buff sits beside him. Says, What d’you think?

  About?

  The hunt, he chuckles.

  Markus shrugs.

  Yer reckon it felt much?

  What?

  The pig.

  Maybe at the start.

  Yair. Buff’s picking stuff out from under his fingernails.

  Markus says, It’s for the best. He’s thinking of the time this very situation had been reversed, when Buff had dropped a live mouse into Snake’s tank to be killed. He’s thinking how one event can flip over on its head.

  Buff nods. Course, didn’t say otherwise, did I.

  Nah, says Markus. He tosses the stick into the fire.

  When the Burrows first moved into the region — father, mother, son — they bought the most expensive farm out the other side of Narioka. Prime real estate.

  The Burrows family enjoyed aloneness in this arrangement, away from the goings-on of Narioka, eating dinner each night illuminated by the TV screen. Brute brought with him a mythology of rebellion — a bikie from a city club or some shit — though Markus never bought into it. At the first footy training Brute attended, Markus watched him drop a punt and then grab his hamstring as the ball fell wide of the goalposts. Despite this inaccuracy, the Burrows, from what Markus has seen over the years, are outward, upfront, and would rather chip-in to the community before they chipped in for each other. Buff’s mother is the chair of the PTA and president at the local netball club — always in the pub with a raffle board for one or the other. Brute, as the local mechanic, kept the town in motion and, in turn, the town kept him as both ruck rover and captain of the first eighteen. Their son, Buff, left to his own devices, pinged back and forth across the Depression. He vaunted his muscles, such as at the school swimming carnivals and even athletics day, though he insisted he went shirtless because of tags. In those sunglasses, shielding his eyes from the world, he spat out his hatred of any tag that scratched his neck: size tags, brand tags, name tags. He’d kick a shirt he tossed on the ground and complain, Companies fucken stitch tags into material so I can’t cut ’em away.

  After the hunting trip, Rene’s asked him to put out a load of washing. Markus, the kitchen’s cool slate tile underfoot, instead fills a glass with boiling water and bi-carb soda and into it drops his top and bottom retainers. The bubbles fizz about the blue plastic moulds. With the glass in hand, he goes to the lounge and switches the AC on. He goes to his room, sits the glass on his bedside table. He falls onto his bed and covers himself with the doona. Throws it back because it’s far too hot for that. The heat irritates and makes him want to flick the taut skin covering his stomach.

  Elba will be home soon. Maybe she’ll be hungry. He should cook. Pfft. He’s not her mother nor is she his mother. And she’s damn well not Elba. She’s Samantha, and everyone in town knows that Samantha became Elba. ¡Hola! Me llamo. Me nombré es Elba. May YAH-moh. Soy Elba. She’d taken a retreat trip to Spain three or four years back, which she maintains was paid for and run by Herbalife. Gone a week, two, maybe three. Upon her impending return, she’d phoned ahead. Gather in the lounge, she informed Rene over the phone. I’ve some news. Perhaps she’d said it in Spanish. On the day when Samantha was to arrive, Markus’d grabbed Cat and sat beside Rene on the couch. They hadn’t yet got an AC, so they were sticky-hot. Markus’d been in his undies prior to Samantha’s arrival, at least until his father thundered, Y’ain’t a Hilfiger model, now get in ya fucken clothes. Rene flicked over the pages of the Leader until he heard a car horn toot twice and jolted to his feet. Cat crouched low at this, eyes wide, ears back, claws dug deeper into Markus’s bare skin: needles piercing his thigh. Samantha came in, wearing a flowy orange flamenco-type skirt and a white sleeveless calico shirt, along with clunky jewellery. The top two buttons of her shirt were undone. Her hair was loose, wavy, darker, and it somehow made her green eyes illuminate.

  From that day to this, and into the coming days, she is called Elba. Sometimes he wants to tear the clothes, tear the Spanish, from Elba. She’s more than that. She’s like Elmyra — both trying to forge identities in the confines of this small town. That’s what makes the men in the pub point them out. But he can’t tear their clothes away, because perhaps they’d tear his away in return … He hears the sound of a car in the distance. He shifts to the end of the mattress and reaches to close his bedroom door. It slams. He presses play on his music dock and the sound comes loud enough to signal don’t disturb. He tosses around a bit. The mattress holds the warmth from his body and intensifies it. He flops onto the floor. Even the floor, raised as it is off the ground by stilts, cannot escape the heat coming inside and making itself comfortable. The carpet bites into his back. A gap in the curtains releases a shaft of sunlight diagonally over his chest. Sweat pricking on his forehead.

  The last two editions of the Leader have said that there might not be enough water to fill the public swimming pool this summer. The picture accompanying the articles both times was the Mayor and the lifeguard, that Youarang kid. The picture showed the Mayor standing on the pavement outside the pool’s cyclone-wire fence and Youarang inside the fence. Golden grass abounded. Youarang insisted that they make the pool full for summer to keep wayward youth off the street. The Mayor says, We’re here to do what’s best for the community, and if that means withholding water from the public pool for water on the farms, so be it.

  Markus heads into the lounge, where Elba’s laying on the couch in the cool and dark; one forearm rests against her forehead, the other hand on her belly.

  He announces that he’s going for a swim.

  She lifts her head to say, Don’t drown.

  He pokes his tongue out at her and exits through the front. He makes his way into town, doesn’t pay attention to which way he’s going. This place is familiar and his feet know their way. Besides, the pool is his focus, not how he gets there. The sudden need for water, for cool-blue, is possessing.

  When he arrives, the pool is waterless. Was he expecting a fairy-tale ending? What, because he’s had
a hard time? Yair. Right. Through the cyclone fence, Markus sees a dark crusty line against the side of the pool from where the water used to rest. On the front gate is a paper sign. There’ll be no swimming this summer. He pulls the pen out from his pocket and writes beneath you can if you like, mind your head on the bottom. When he turns away, his vision is obstructed: the bright sunlight reflecting off the white-paper note burnt into his pupils. A few moments, his eyes have readjusted. Clear. Turning away from the locked gates, he is paying attention to the scratchings in the pavement and the trodden-down chewing gum when he bumps into another person out here on the quiet street.

  It’s Cecily. Her skin paler than the last time he saw her — which was in her togs, sitting beside Grayson at the pool. Her lips thinner than when they had maneuvered cherry-flavoured ice cream into her mouth; today, they’re ajar as if she’s breathless. She puts her hand on her stomach.

  Without any witnesses, he speaks to her directly: What are you doing here?

  I live here. She hitches her duffle bag up on her shoulder. And I could ask you the same. She’s not looking at him; she’s wearing sunglasses, though, so could be casting side glances.

  I came to see if the newspaper article about the pool was true, he says.

  She nods. Same.

  He wants her to hold him responsible, to smash his face into the contorted cyclone wire. He peers at her, pleading her to place it all on him. To make it known he’s solely responsible.

  Yet she says, I tried to call you heaps of times.

  I know.

  To no answer.

  I know.

  All I wanted was to … I dunno, she says and shrugs at the same time.

  He finally looks away, across to the empty creek. He’s certain this is the end. He says, We could get a coffee? The words as bitter in his mouth as the burnt coffee he’s just suggested they should get.