Ironbark

by Jay Carmichael

  More buses return from the farmlands and pull up on the bus road, which runs beside the football oval. Georges will be on one of them, drawn out from his family’s cherry orchard. He’ll be coming into the bay soon.

  First, you.

  I say, You weren’t on the bus this morning?

  Nah, you say, I got a ride in with me ma.

  You’ve been in town for a few years, moved from some other part of the countryside. Your presence is a lifetime; the first time I laid eyes on you was as if I was seeing a lost friend returned. We’d met at a drought fundraiser in the skate park; your mother took a picture of us sharing a skateboard down a ramp. The drought lasted a few more years and then the people in the city declared it ‘broken’. The drought never broke here.

  I hadn’t seen you coming across the courtyard because the thick fog is bearing down as low as it can get, so you gathered quickly into a whole at the corner of my vision. I hear familiar music flicker my attention. In the misty-grey, your iPod plays a Cold War Kids song, ‘Out Of The Wilderness’.

  Your locker is above mine. I step aside. Pretending the Cold War Kids is what we first found in common is easier for me than to put words to what it is that keeps me attached to you. I say, They’re having a concert in the city.

  A gig, yair.

  On the 21st.

  I was gunna say the 19th.

  Dew on the edge of the veranda has frozen as it has come to drip. Underneath these frozen drips, Georges walks into the bay. His locker is beneath mine, so we step aside to allow him to kick his bag into the locker. Georges has been working on a spacer in his left ear. For the last six weeks, he’s had three tapered plugs that, incrementally, have grown the hole in his lobe to a certain width. It’s such a mechanical process.

  I say, How big’s the spacer now?

  The piercist said six. I had to stretch the lobe again to get this in. Eight, I reckon. If I face the right way the wind whistles through like standing on a cliff top, he says. He keeps his voice nearly exclusive to his mouth, and I have to strain to hear him. The tunnel’s made of stainless steel and, though hollow, the front has a small marine symbol: an anchor.

  This is when you step onto the garden-bed curb beside him and say, Hmm, not for me.

  It’s a form of self-harm, says Georges with a smirk.

  Pretty clichéd compared to others, I say.

  You reach out and touch the tunnel.

  Georges’s head leans into that touch.

  You let go of the spacer.

  I watch you fiddle with a piece of chewing gum — your solid finger sliding around as you try easing a piece from the new Wrigley’s wrap. You slip off the curb as you place the gum between your teeth. Your foot falls into some mud in the gutter.

  Before we have to go to homeroom, we leave the locker bay and head around to the Art Wing veranda: a once-polished-but-now-faded scuffed stretch of decking about a half-metre off the ground. Apparently, raising a building up on stilts helps to keep it cool, but the most use we have for that space underneath is sliding our empty chip packets between the slats when we can’t be arsed going to the bin. We sit on the Art Wing — morning, recess, and at lunch — because it’s near a line of liquidambar (styraciflua) and close to where our homeroom is, but, between us, I think it’s more to do with it being further away from where Teacher wanders on a routine yard-duty round. We sit to one end near the bubbler taps and, on the other side of them, the boys’ toilets.

  This morning we sit on the edge of the veranda, and you light up a cigarette; the fog is enough to cover your illicit action.

  You boys going to the show? Georges says. He takes a puff on your cigarette.

  You shrug.

  I say, Probably not. And refuse a drag on the cigarette.

  Shame, says Georges.

  Conscious of the smell, I say, I don’t wanna get caught in homeroom.

  Georges laughs. Says, You take things so literally.

  I don’t know what he means, so, like a child, I slide back on the deck to where the wood meets the brick wall.

  You continue smoking at the edge of the veranda, looking out into the fog to god knows what.

  Georges says over his shoulder, I meant shame about not going to the show. He exhales a lungful of smoke as he slides back to the wall, too. He rests his head against the bricks and closes his eyes.

  The boys’ toilet door breaks open and, like a flock of squawking cockatoos, several boys burst out — some run past us along the Art Wing, another jumps past you, scruffing up your hair as he does. They disappear into the fog. One of the last boys out of the loo comes cackling, sliding out the door. He looks at Georges sitting beside me. He finds his feet and skips over. He puts his feet either side of Georges’s tranquil body and, turning to me to give me the gnarly sign, he pumps his junk into Georges’s face. After a few quick jabs, he dashes off to rejoin his mates.

  Georges’s eyes remain closed, perhaps a little tighter. I have some paintings going in the show, he says.

  I think I should ask him if he’s okay, but I don’t. The boy that did it to him is captain of the first eighteen, and I, captain of the thirds.

  First class of the day after homeroom: geography. For a teacher who teaches everything we should have a special nickname. A clever nickname. We call the teacher, simply, Teacher. You are sitting beside me, singing. We two, along with the eighteen other students, have our writing books out — my 96 pages, your 128 — and hand-me-down Jacaranda atlases. The sun’s midway through the morning sky, the classroom too cool.

  Over the cliffs is the Plain — an expanse of swaying grass. Teacher moves a finger on the wall map from the dot indicating Narioka, over the hachured contour line indicating the escarpment, and stops somewhere out on the Plain. Here is nothingness. Then, moving a finger back to and circling around Narioka, Teacher says, Here, everything. But, Teacher says, it’s not quite certain how the Depression was created. We know the Depression is over a million years old. And, prior to Europeans, was occupied by an Indigenous nation. Being river people, fishing occupied most of their time, and a rich network of rivers, lagoons, creeks, and wetlands kept them strong and healthy with fish and wildlife. Water is now so regulated, though, as an irrigation system upstream that the natural waterways have become ephemeral: they only run if the authorities let water down or there’s excess surface run-off. Despite this, the Narioka township was founded inside the Depression and on the edge of the creek running out of the Lake. And, subsequently, within the first generation of European arrival, the Indigenous population of this area was reduced by eighty-five per cent. Teacher’s hands rub together, preparing their gestures for an announcement.

  But I choose to look out the window as Teacher dictates the task for the lesson. A tickle at my elbow. You, looking straight ahead with fake attention, have slid a torn piece of paper toward me. I unfold it. It has your mobile number. When Elmyra first got a phone, she thrust the device at me and said, What’re your deets? I pull out my phone and add your number.

  After class, we dump our books in our lockers and head for the tuck shop. Elmyra waves us down. She’s at the table in the corner, in front of the caged wall-heater. You push past the humans, all at various stages of pubescence. Chairs screak on the lino, and the wall clock falls to the floor. Nobody picks it up, even though the tuck shop lady yells, I won’t know the bloody time. Elmyra’s tapping on the lit screen of her smartphone.

  When she looks up, I can see movement behind her irises. Perhaps it’s the hearsay: her father ran away with his best mate last Tuesday. Elmyra’s nails are clear and shiny, diamond-like, except at their tips, where the nails overhang her fingers by a millimetre or two. Their tips are painted pastel-orange. In her sky-blue cotton dress, her tanned skin looks deeper. She’s altered her uniform: scooped out the décolletage, heightened the waist. Her eye make-up is faultless: pointed and neat. She’s Mar
ilyn today, and, as always, her hair is done likewise. She’s beautiful, and perhaps I’m in love with her.

  I turn away to see that you’re looking at me oddly. What you say — i.e., Do you want a sausage roll in a roll — doesn’t match your expression.

  You meet Cecily in the line at the counter, kissing her on the neck. You’ve been going out for a few months, and last week told me you two ‘did it’. I asked what it was like and you fobbed me off with a laugh, followed by quickly licking your top lip.

  We eat lunch and then have PE class. Georges skips ahead of us, and when we get inside the change room, he slinks into a cubicle away from the communal changing area.

  One of the boys says, He needs to hide his boner.

  Another boy says, Go and suck ’im off, gesturing with his hand in front of his mouth.

  Nah, the first boy says, did him this morning — wasn’t worth the pain.

  The second boys scoffs, You wouldn’t be the one in pain, mate. He winks on the sly.

  The entire change room seems to laugh.

  And I turn my back on them to quietly change into my PE kit. Left out, distant like an island afloat at sea.

  You ask if I’m okay.

  Why wouldn’t I be?

  All you do is shrug; I could rip your shoulders from you. When the class is assembled out on the oval where Teacher takes us, I try to kick the footy into the afterlife.

  After school, Rene’s waiting in his beat-up ute beside the old derelict church. Because it’s winter, the sun’s dipped below the edge of the cliffs to make the Depression murky and shaded, as if a grand-scale Caravaggio. There’s a tree beside the church. It must’ve been ring-barked some time ago, for the limbs are bare and greyish. Through the empty canopy, the sky, way up overhead and beyond, is greeny-yellow.

  This is unusual: Rene waiting by the church. Someone’s died, I’m sure of it. Rene nods, indicating for me to put my school bag in the rusty tray of the ute.

  I, without saying a word, decline. I take the passenger seat and nestle my bag between my feet on the floor of the cabin.

  He tells me we’re on our way to Brute’s, whose property is right across the other side of the Depression.

  The sky’s grey now, with white dashes of cloud. Smoke haze around us from the wood fires and campfires and bonfires, and from people burning whatever else they don’t want or what’ll keep them warm. The paddocks are green, and some have purple streaks.

  Weeds, Rene says. That’s what happens when y’put somethin’ that doesn’t belong.

  You send me a text that says: let’s play connect four. Because I have a Samsung, the little images you’ve sent appear as tiny rectangular boxes. I don’t want to reply saying I can’t see the images. I reply saying: I’m busy with Ren. You send back: Thats okay man, I get to see you soone! You put another of those little images at the end of the text. The rectangle indecipherable — what do you mean?

  I look up. We’re driving past the matchstick tree farm. The trees in it don’t look healthy, because they grow too tall too fast and thin and they drop branches, which Rene says means they’re stressed. They chop ’em down each year and plant new saplings around the leftover stumps. Chop ’em down, cut ’em up, and make ’em into matchsticks.

  Rene’s ute doors are ajar. We’ve arrived. Because of the receding sunlight de-illuminating the Depression, the ute’s weak headlights are turned onto the scene: a single ironbark tree and the two men, Rene and Brute, deciding the way the tree’ll fall. Rene’s shadow’s long, stretches quite some way over the grassless ground under the ironbark’s canopy. Brute’s shadow, because of the angle he’s standing at, is hugging his feet. Music comes out of the ute’s cabin. From on the highest branch of the ironbark, a galah squawks and fissures the lyrics. It rustles its feathers — dishwater-grey and sunset-pink — as if scraps of cloth on a clothesline.

  Buff and I lean against the ute’s bonnet, between the headlights, so we don’t disrupt the shining columns.

  Where you, and even I, most of the time, scrounge money from home to buy lunch from the tuck shop at school, Buff Burrows always brings two salad and cold-meat sangas, minus beets and tomatoes because they make the bread soggy. He’s the newer kid in town. His lunch is wrapped by his mother in cling wrap and accompanied by a Tupperware bottle with chocolate-flavoured protein powder, to which he adds water from the bubbler taps. He has a way of letting the hair above his top lip stay at a short length, allowing a few crumbs from his sangas to be suspended in his fine blonde fur. In the darkness, now, his skin is smooth, his muscle flatter, his stature more secret, quieter, insular than how he is at school. He puts one boot against the ute’s grille; his foot slips and thuds back onto the earth. Buff’s mouth’s held how some people do when they’re trying to extricate a piece of food, like a sharp piece of popcorn slicing delicate gum flesh.

  I miss footy, he says.

  It starts soon-ish.

  Ish. Exactly, Bellos.

  In this unspectacular evening, Rene Bello, a few paces away, begins hacking into the rough black trunk of the ironbark.

  Between chops, Brute says he’s sorry he can’t help. It’s a bad back an’ the doc says I shouldn’ do it.

  I check my phone. No message from you.

  Music’s breaking inside me again: a lyric sparks a memory, like a votive candle. The flame casts light across Buff in cookery class at school last week. He’d sliced open his finger. The red blood mixed with the onion juice on the stainless blade, becoming iridescent, dripping down and soaking between the lines of the half-chopped onion on the bench. When Teacher got over to him, Buff said, It’ll be right, with his finger in his mouth, sucking out his blood. His lips had smiled around the wound.

  I walk to turn the radio off.

  The only shire-wide public holiday rolls round — the Narioka Pastoral and Agricultural Show. Farmers from across the Depression come out of their fields to demonstrate their best wool, cattle, horses, produce. Woodcutters reveal the delicate furniture and feature pieces their rough hands have turned throughout the year. People of Narioka eat cake, sip tea, and gossip about the ‘friends’ they’ve not seen since last show. We go because we don’t want to miss something. We sneak in through the back entrance so we don’t have to pay the entry fee. We slip through the cattle pens and break out into sideshow alley.

  Cecily’s here, you say.

  Right.

  You mind if I catch up with her?

  I do, but I say I don’t; the sun strikes my eyes, and I can’t really see where I’m going. I walk by myself. The eldest Drumanure kid is t-boning smaller kids on the bumper cars, Youarang across the way is trying to recruit people to be lifesavers, and those boys dart between the other rides, chasing each other, dacking unsuspecting passers-by and yelling, Faggot, between the tinny tunes of the Ferris wheel. A carny on a sideshow game waves me over. He’s mid-teens, patchy facial hair, wears a red cap with the peak at the back; it’s stained with sweat around the brim. His white t-shirt is grey, and his jeans stained, too. Tied round his waist is a leather money apron. As I get closer, he shoves his hands deep in the front pocket, as if plunging them down the front of his pants.

  You here alone? the carny says.

  I nod.

  That’s no good, he says as he moves his hand in his money apron. The coins jangle. Not even a mate?

  I shake my head. He’s meeting up with his girlfriend, I say.

  Shit, the carny laughs. Don’t blame yer, he says, leaning his elbows on the counter of his stall. Third wheelin’s shitehouse. He rubs his chin. He shoves one hand deep into the leather money apron and pulls out a worn softball. He hands it to me as he says, Have a shot, it might change yer luck.

  I’ve run out of coin, I lie to him. My pocket’s clinging with coin. But he’s squinting just as I am, and I don’t know what he wants.

  The carny looks despondent
. He retracts the balls, dropping it back in his money apron, and puts his hands on his hips. He says, Ah, that’s too bad. Tell yer what, he says, leaning forward, come back to me next year an’ have a shot at me. He winks.

  I leave, heading toward the exhibition sheds: Georges has entered some paintings, and Elmyra has entered her couture dresses. The exhibition sheds are two long barns clad in aluminium sheets. It’s hot inside the first shed, a stale heat that I have to move through. In the first section, before the fashion displays, are cabinets with boiled fruitcakes and yo-yos and sponges I couldn’t even get my mouth round. All the baked goods are sweating. Past these are flowers and then the handmade goods. In the back corner, propped up on a pedestal, is a mannequin draped with both the blue ‘Champion Exhibit’ and red ‘Best Exhibit’ sashes. Underneath these sashes is one of Elmyra’s dresses: not made from a cookie-cutter pattern, the dress is constructed of two cuts of burgundy chiffon. There are no hard angles, only organic lines. The top sheath of chiffon is separated from the bottom section, which takes on its own personality, fulfilling the hips and flaring the hemline. I think it’s made of chiffon and lace, but when I step closer I see that darker-burgundy, almost black, iridescent beads are set in the material and pull off the appearance of lace. Clusters of beads line the modestly cut neck, as well as the waist, where the seams have been sewn in a curved line to complement the overall design of the dress. She’s called it ‘Daisy’, after The Great Gatsby.

  You want to try it on?

  I turn and find Elmyra standing behind me. I say, I don’t think I have the hips.

  She dismisses me with a pawing of her hand. You alone? she says, coming to stand beside me. She’s facing her dress, looking at it as she speaks. There’s a chicken-wire barrier in front of all the exhibits to stop the unwanted hands of children, or worse, adults touching the fine creations. It’s through a few of these loops of chicken wire that Elmyra enlaces her fingers.

  I say, Yair.