Ironbark

by Jay Carmichael

  Don’t be silly, the creek has nothin’ in it. The fish come down from upstream, he says. You two don’t know nothin’.

  We take two rods and an esky, with beer for me and Coke for Rene.

  Elba worries about me drinking young.

  Rene says, You have to learn how to handle yer grog.

  Sky-blue space above us, and a slight breeze. A radio sings. Underneath this sound is the splashing of the waterfall to the south, where what the Plain above doesn’t want pours down into the Depression. Bird life joins it: pelicans (Pelecanus conspicillatus) shift across the surface, spoonbills (Platalea regia) and cormorants (Phalacrocorax sulcirostris).

  As I finish placing my fold-out chair, I turn and see Elmyra running toward us.

  She’s bikinied and has a large-brimmed floppy sunhat and wide Monroe shades. She hugs me, and I smell an earthen scent and sunscreen. Letting her go, I ask where she’s set up. She points back to the way she’d run from.

  It smells like sewage, she says. She gestures to the waterfall.

  Smaller kids play under its crashing wall, the curtain breaking and splintering off their bodies. Rene, Elmyra, and I stare at the water. A speedboat zips past near the middle, its spray like mercury. The boat recedes, and the sound following it is the distant hush of the waterfall.

  Rene says, Goin’ in?

  I swish some flies from my face.

  Ya better, he says. Doesn’t fill often. Not even ya granddad ever saw any in it.

  Elba calls out.

  Rene heads up shore and Elmyra runs away, shouting over her shoulder that she’ll come back after lunch.

  I assess the depth I could plunge to. The streaks of white between the grey will rip open and swallow the sky; those streaks are just ripples on the surface with sunlight reflecting at different angles. Whatever. The heat’s settled into my bones and my legs. I look back to Rene and Elba. She has a hand on her hip and the other flipping around in front of her. I remove my thongs. Sandy dirt burns my feet. I try to stand for as long as I can, to withstand the pain. I run down to the water after no more than ten or twelve seconds. Knee-deep, not waist, I stand in the cold water. Crossing my arms over my chest as if the day’s freezing and not 43°C, I establish a perfect footy pose. Season’s training starts soon; Rene’s signed me up, says he reckons I’ll make a ripping forward pocket. It’s not my thing, but no one listens. I stare past the flotilla with the other boys my age jumping from its edge. Through the boys’ laughter and the shouts of fucken faggot, pussy, and sunken cunt, I hear a constant hush. At this year’s camp, back in early April, you were some other kind of island on your knees. Today, I look back at the nearby water tower that everyone pretends is the lighthouse from Round The Twist. I wish I’d never sighted you.

  The Lake continues filling, and the sewage-smelling water swells. Overnight, water lifts debris and fills the Depression. The water spreads dark and cold under the moonlight and bursts from the tributary creek, which cuts Narioka in two, and rises between the buildings, deadening any light. Puts out what’s been put up. By dawn, there is nothing except water and debris. When the flood recedes from the useless sandbag walls, which let most of the water through, it leaves a dirty watermark, and mould, and other icky things that the SES clear. The roads are muck. A car speeding at midnight slips into a table drain. Single fatality. Many sick with what Doctor says is stress. They lie in bed awaiting safety. In time, the flood becomes a memory instead of a presence. The Lake retracts to a manageable level. Its source, the waterfall, is gone.

  I wasn’t in town at the time, and the flood that swelled submerged Narioka alone. It so happens that within the Depression there’s a smaller geographical depression, a ‘ditch’ if you will, inside which Narioka’s built. When the water rose, the water, naturally, flowed and filled the ditch. When they decided to build the town there, a woman engineer had said not to because of this geographical flaw. A bunch of unqualified people said one thing, and she alone said another thing. She had her right to have her view expressed, but, based on majority, did not have the right to be given the same amount of time or space as the unqualified bunch. All she had built at her initial town-site, as if to please her, was a small, steeple-less and stained-glassless church. And I didn’t quite understand how frustrated she might have been until I saw the town underwater, which is why I enjoyed it when Rene drove me to the edge of town to see it.

  Soon after, it changes season. Colder, greener. They’ve cleaned up town enough in time for us to go back to school.

  Teacher says, When you kick a football, the ball accelerates toward the ground at a constant speed. The ball seems to speed as it leaves your foot and seems to slow when it’s in the air, before it seems to speed again as it drops back to the Earth.

  To prove the point, I have to plot on a graph the football that Buff’ll kick. The y-axis is to be vertical speed, and the x-axis is to be time.

  I sit at the back of the class as Teacher speaks. I jab a compass into my thigh, like on a sewing machine.

  Teacher says, Mark, are you going to do it?

  It’s pointless, I say. It proves that you never make progress.

  Ah, Teacher says, there’s something to describe that. Teacher introduces us to imaginary numbers. They call imaginary numbers ‘i’. Calculating with i is the mathematical equivalent of believing in fairies or God. i is abstract and useful in concrete ways: it can be used to work out living things like the nautilus or eucalypts, or working things like bridges and towers and noises, or invisible things like radio waves and dark matter drifting about, otherwise unknown.

  Whatever.

  Night falls. Silent darkness.

  From the clouds that were pointed at during the day, a light snow falls: champagne powder on the fields and houses and streets and cows and sheep and cars. The Lake begins to freeze from the edges. The brown-green water crystallises and solidifies into a thick bed of ice.

  I don’t see the snowfall, only the snow.

  The methane-sewage smell dissipates. Everything — well, the atmosphere at least — becomes crisp and clean. Almost pure.

  When I wake, I walk down to the open-plan area.

  Rene, with a coffee in his hand and toast crumbs at the corners of his lips, calls me over.

  We have a new prime minister. Went to bed with one and wake to have another: the killing season executed in the dead of night. Those tremors of the capital won’t reach us here. We’re over the Great Divide and exist only theoretically.

  We’re a safe seat, Rene says. Always have and always will be. Everyone knows safe seats don’t get funding.

  The next news story is about same-sex marriage: the new overlord declares that any member who doesn’t toe the party line will be sacked.

  Rene says, That’s unconstitutional, undemocratic.

  What is?

  Sackin’ someone f’not believin’ what y’tell ’em to.

  But can’t the prime minister do whatever?

  No, Markus, god no. We’re not America.

  I keep quiet because I don’t quite understand; I think of ‘gotten’. And of hypocrisy.

  Elba says, In Australia we vote for a party, not for a leader. The party choose their leader and, as we’ve seen, the party can also change leaders.

  Rene says, The party doesn’t care what voters will think of it.

  They’ve their cushy jobs and nice retirement funds, Elba says.

  I ask, Why can’t the party believe what they want?

  Neither of them answer me.

  Elmyra calls and says she’s going ice-skating. Want to come? She says she’s sitting beside the Lake’s edge and can see there’s a sprinkling over the diamond-hard crust, which, under the impromptu lighting, looks like golden fairy dust.

  I say, I don’t have ice skates. She laughs. Silly, she says, Mr Burrows is renting them out to people.

 
; I can see her wearing her indigo-coloured fluffy-puffy winter jacket and pale-denim skinny jeans, sitting idle on a seat with black ice skates laced to her feet. Cecily, she says, left moments before I arrived. It’s sometime after twilight: après-ski. She skates anyway, alone: the Lady of the Lake. I sit on the edge, and she looks like a cabbage butterfly (Pieris rapae), but more graceful because she’s conscious of her aim. We get hot chocolate and she, with a pastel-orange tipped finger, puts a bit of froth on my nose. I try to lick it off. We laugh.

  She says, as I’m walking her back to her house, Did you hear what happened to Georges after school?

  I shake my head.

  Those boys jumped him.

  What?

  Black eyes, blood all over the road — or so Buff told me. She nods long and slow, deep in her hot chocolate. He’s okay, if you’re wondering.

  I shake my head. Why’d they do it?

  She doesn’t reply.

  Despite this, despite everything, so many of us rarely reply with the reply someone needs the most. Or perhaps our replies escape us, or come to us after the fact, so neither of us is at fault. A fault like the Depression our shire’s built in. At the time, I didn’t consider faults to be character weaknesses or impairing physical perfection. It’s your fault, Elba used to screech at Rene. I.e., you are being discontinuous, you are impairing physical perfection, you are my weakness. I wonder if she’s given as much thought to the creation of the Depression as I have. Because actions can’t be right or wrong; the morality of them lies in the outcome, which depends on how each action is taken.

  Like Elmyra, when we looked at her mother’s atlas, would say, It’s not fixed and doesn’t determine the direction we should take. She’d be following the lines of some mountainous ridge, trying to find a pathway through. I think she knew how I felt about you and that was her way of saying something, of navigating the subject, so to speak. But her silence, her saying nothing now, is worse than her saying everything I ever wanted to hear from her. Specifically I know and it’s okay.

  I get on my motorbike. I could drop by yours and chill. When I come to the turn for your place, the motorbike keeps going, heading back to Rene’s.

  Elba’s at the table in the dining room. The telly in the lounge has a repeat of The Great Outdoors episode dedicated to Spain.

  I nod at her.

  She giggles. How was skating? Bet you only do that once in a lifetime.

  I say, It was fine. I look at the pamphlets for Barcelona and maps for Santiago. I ask her about her day.

  She looks away from me, saying something about great things are coming.

  Rene’s growing hemlock at the same time as he grows root vegetables. He wakes me early one morning on the weekend, telling me to come and help.

  I always help, I growl.

  That’s ’cause yer me son, he chuckles.

  But it’s five in the morning, I moan, pulling the doona back over my head.

  Early bird, he says and rips the doona away.

  So I dress in some old clothes and meet him in the veggie patches just outside the back door.

  Out back, he hands me a seedling tray and says, Be careful.

  Why?

  Hemlock — Conium maculatum, he says, family Umbelliferae. He flicks his free hand backward to one of the nearby garden beds. Says, Same as parsley, fennel, parsnip an’ carrot. Umbelliferous plants have an acrid juice, a narcotic. Rene drags the final word out as if he’s enjoying it. He snaps the stem of one of the seedlings and shows me the sap seeping out and bulging, waiting to burst at the tip. Sticky-white.

  I think of the border of a shore, like the edge of a mind. An invisibly stitched shoreline where water washes up, lapping at the edge, inviting yet indifferent. Its white foam pushing up the shore, left there when the body of liquid retreats.

  Every part of hemlock, Rene says, ’specially the leaves, have oily alkaloids, poison. A few drops kill an animal.

  I place the tray of seedlings down on the ground and wipe my hands on my trackies. When I speak, a plume of white escapes from my mouth. I say, Why are you growing it then?

  Might not be a native, Rene says, but some say it keeps the pests away. He goes on digging holes, making me take out a seedling at a time from the tray for him to put into the holes.

  When we’re done, he tells me we need firewood.

  I tell him Elmyra’s coming. She’d said on the phone, I’m trying to be caring. It has something to do with her thinking I’m not myself. I am confusion. And I’m not just talking about sexual, identity, hormonal or teenage confusion. That shit’s normal. Angst. Everyone has it. I mean confusion about you. Where are you; what are you; who are you? And why do I feel like you are my anchor? I hear you inside me, like taking a seashell to my ear.

  Rene shrugs and says, Do it before she gets here.

  I get on my motorbike, rev and ride out and along the track to a far paddock. My bike zips through the sweeping plains grass. I come up to the fallen tree. I’d felled it back in the midsummer, and now, as I approach its remains, it is a bare black streak swarmed by yellow grass. Get some more wood, I tell myself, keep the fires burning, it’s getting cold, winter’s coming. These are excuses.

  Thunk.

  I lift the maul, hack the hollow-sounding bark again, and work through to the trunk, working from where I’d last cut. The arching, twisted limb creaks. It’s as if I’ve known this tree my entire life; as if I’ve helped plant it, as if I’ve watched it grow over the years and as if, because of my involvement, I’ve been made to clean up its leftovers. This tree is another of the thousands dotted through the shire. The maul’s sound makes me remember. I don’t want to. I can’t help it. Images I’ve suppressed shift around inside my head and allow a perspective to arrive.

  Thunk.

  It was April.

  Elmyra chooses a classroom at school. We’ll do silent study, she giggles, rolls her eyes and leads into a vacant room along the veranda. She speaks about nothing I find interesting. I follow her because I have yet to find someone closer to follow. After Elmyra settles into her chair, a group of boys my age come along and stand out on the veranda.

  Thunk.

  I can’t name them except one. I know your name, for sure. Can-could-will-had always put a face and a body and a smile and voice to your name. To you. Even when you’re not near. It’s not that I do not know the other boys. I do. I’ve never been interested in the other boys. I remember Elmyra. I say to her, What d’you think they’ve planned?

  She turns around. Remains quiet.

  Thunk.

  From within the art room, the window captures you like a frame from a movie — a silent movie. What proves you’re alive are your actions. The sun lines your body and beams brighter in the scruffy, dark-honey hair wisping across your forehead and up to the right. The rest of your hair, on top, uncurls in delicate tufts. Both your hands clutch your school shirt at your hips; the material stretches taut across your back. You flex your elbows as if trying to meet them behind you, not too extreme, gentle-like, and this makes your shirt tight over your stomach and chest. It defines your torso, as if no shirt is clothing your body at all. You squint when you laugh and bend forward, lifting one leg about a foot off the ground. You keep the rest intact.

  Thunk.

  He’s wanting a party, Elmyra’s quiet voice says in a steady tone.

  Thunk.

  I’ve often contemplated the image of Elmyra as she sat upon her hands when I said, I’ll always go to a party of his.

  IV.

  Eighteen

  On the night of Markus’s eighteenth birthday, Grayson rolls his eyes when Buff arrives. It’s nine o’clock and hot, and Buff’s only wearing a pair of yellow shorts. He says he’s meant to be a lifeguard. The shorts are tight and stick to his thighs: he looks more like Rocky Horror. It was Elmyra’s idea to have it dress up
, because her party’s out on a farm tomorrow night, and they can’t wear costumes then because they’ll get dirty. She’s Marilyn from when she sang (i.e., the real Marilyn) ‘Happy Birthday’ to Mr President. Markus takes her white-fur coat and hangs it up for her. Grayson’s a Greek god. He says, It was my mother’s idea, I forget who the god is. The toga he’s wearing seems breezy. He has what Markus guesses is a wreath of leaves on his head, which is made of mistletoe he’s probably stripped out of a eucalypt tree. Mistletoe — a parasitic plant — spreads when a bird eats its seeds and shits them out on the branches of other trees. It looks more like a thorny tangle of weeds.

  Rene comes over with a cake. Markus laughs out his nose and snuffs the candles prematurely. Markus sees Gray’s face across the table, somewhat more distant than he’d like him to be. Distant and dramatic in the dim light that the now re-lit candles are casting. They’re singing happy birthday. Elmyra uses a stubby in place of a microphone. Grayson breaks the tune when he sneezes.

  After, everyone starts the piss-up.

  Markus is standing around the side of the house, taking a leak.

  Grayson slaps him on his shoulder.

  Markus pisses on his own feet and feels it, because he’s dressed as Aquaman and wearing green thongs.

  Carn, Gray says.

  They slip further around the corner of the house toward the front. There are no obvious party-ers. Grayson pulls him down behind the bonnet of someone’s car. Points across it. Underneath the orange geraniums Rene’s bordered with red bricks, there are two figures. Markus turns to Gray, who, with a rounded and warm palm, turns Markus’s head back to the figures. The moon’s light is broken by the trees overhead. Maybe one of the figures is a shirtless man, maybe the other a blonde-haired woman.

  What are they doing? Markus whispers.

  Grayson flicks his hand against Markus’s shoulder and says, Gardening. He laughs quietly. Carn. He ducks and weaves between the cars and Markus follows, trying to keep up.

  Markus wants to say, Slow down so I can follow. Out on the road into town, the sky is unimpeded by the leaves of trees. The moonlight sprinkles. Grayson’s marble-white toga is bold as he walks. Markus ditches his thongs in a table drain because they’re giving him blisters between his toes. Cool dirt on his bare feet. Markus pulls up the Aquaman mask he made and lets it rest against the top of his head.