Back inside to microwave baked beans for Milo. Bang on the griller; ham-and-cheese toasted sandwich for Otis. Two big mugs of cold milk with Nesquik floaties.
‘They’re crocodiles,’ says Milo.
‘Dog turds,’ counters Otis, making me feel inordinately proud.
Bath-time so I bung them in together and use a hose and nozzle to wash their hair. Pyjamas that smell like lavender and lost dreams, Otis’s hair that combs long and straight in furrows like a ready-to-harvest paddock of gold, then I light the fire and switch on the TV we fall back, be-curved, watch cartoons. Angry beavers, funny little Dexter with the robotic voice, snickering scheming Rug-rats, re-runs of Bart’s sweet inferiority complex and Marge’s leaning-tower-of-Pisa hair-do. For an hour we remain motionless then I feel my children asleep against me, relish the warm heaviness of their bodies and their tiny o-shaped mouths sending out gentle coils of life. When I carry them to bed they nestle and roll; when I look in later, they are liquid beneath the doonas, limbs flung apart, soft and spongy-looking, eyelids like cusps of silk. I smile, close their bedroom doors gently, clamber to my own bed, slide in naked and feel Kaz’s too-cold feet, adjust her pillows to help even her breathing, drop my arm over her waist and hug her smell to me.
Now, I think, I am perfectly happy. Nothing can intrude on the circle of our world.
Nothing can infect our cocoon.
And so it is odd then that the last thing I remember is beginning a dream in whiteness, like a mist that whirls about me — so maybe I am caught in a snowstorm; maybe frostbitten and blue-lipped, maybe alone, oddly vulnerable, nowhere near the home that I cherish.
Two
The house we live in is vast and airy. Once, it was a farmhouse. There are imperial gum-trees, a wind that is often blue and furious, lemon grass that whispers and genuflects. We wake to a cacophony of noise; lorikeets sucking the scarlet bejesus out of our bottlebrush, Delphine and Errol’s barking scraping back-scratching dog, king parrots who drop from the clouds and clack the grain that Kaz faithfully leaves. The pleasure of a thousand insects drills each dawn moment. The sun’s creaminess seeps between our curtains. In the distance, a glimpse of sea beckons. I watch my wife, my Kaz, my unfurling-stretching Siamese cat, as she welcomes the day, murmurs then rolls back to sleep some more.
I dress, paddle down the hallway, enjoy the half-light and stillness, listen to the house creaking like old joints and bones. When we first saw this house we both felt an immediate pull, as strong as the earth tugging tree roots. We stood tentatively outside, wondering whether it would rain much and whether the mountains behind us would change colour in autumn, then Kaz turned to me and said, ‘I love it. I have to live here.’
‘Me too,’ I told her. ‘I wonder why?’
‘I think it’s really grounded,’ she said, after a moment’s consideration. ‘It makes me think of wood and stone and air, all becoming something beautiful.’
‘It’s warm.’ I sought her eyes. ‘This house is warm. I don’t mean warm as in pullover-warm — although it probably is that too — I mean spiritually.’
I suppose I expected mockery, but she nodded.
‘It’s the colours,’ she said decisively.
‘Mm. Like all the soils of the world have been drawn together and polished clean.’
‘That’s lovely,’ she whispered, hanging onto my arm. ‘I love it when you say things like that.’
We wandered the perimeter, found a chimney-stack, an old rusting plough jammed into the earth, a barn at the end of a track.
‘Will it be too lonely?’ Kaz asked. A note of doubt had crept into her voice.
‘Splendid isolation.’ I was at my reassuring best. ‘So lonely ’twas, that God himself scarce seemèd there to be.’
‘Bloody Coleridge.’ She half-smiled, half-grimaced. ‘Thought you didn’t believe in God, anyway.’
‘I don’t. Sorry, it was shameless romanticism.’ I grinned and held her to me until there was a glow between us that could have been caressed within the palms of our hands.
We moved in a month later. There were no curtains but we didn’t care because the view was compelling and led me to understand how stark the Australian bush can be, how its beauty relies on shades of purple and olive, a thin haze and the suffusion of breezes and scents. Kaz was pregnant and the kitchen was full of scone-smells and I was happily building garden beds and we knew it all came from the house: sandstone, bluestone, box-brush, sandalwood, our temple of togetherness.
* *
Outside, there are fingers of new light stretching through the branches of eucalypts. Our house sits on top of a small, flattish hill. The gardens are surrounded by wild grass that is flecked with dew, an eruption of liquid diamonds. To the west are the mountains, still bleak in the early morning, lightly iced with fog. Eastwards the land pancakes as the coast beckons — from certain vantage points, we can see Barilba Bay and the bustling, burgeoning township that has grown up alongside its beaches. Several hundred metres away I can see smoke curling from the chimney of Errol and Delphine’s modernist pole-home. They are our nearest neighbours, a pigeon-pair of semi-retired IT consultants. Delphine wears suits with shoulder-pads, even when she is mulching. Errol drives a late model Commodore with foils and mags. He’s shiny-bald and sinewy, one of those my-car-is-an-extension-of-my-penis types. He has lots of unused electric tools, a wardrobe full of muscle-shirts with Outback Pub slogans and a NASA-sanctioned telescope. He is so pretentious that it is difficult not to like him.
The air is crisp and the day has a certain promise; already it smells clean and expectant. I wander into our barn, a ramshackle building full of old bits of machinery, boxes, rusting tools, fat contented spiders, crumpled biscuit tins half-filled with oils and screws. We have never worried too much about the barn — it just exists, in the same way that shells and stars and germs exist. But Milo and Otis have taken to playing in here, so Kaz decided that we should spend this weekend cleaning it out, discarding the rubbish, scrubbing then maybe even painting the walls.
‘Sanitise the barn?’ I asked. ‘Why?’
‘They play in it,’ she told me patiently. ‘We should make it safe.’
‘They play in it because it’s not safe. That’s the attraction.’
‘Your point being?’
‘Make it safe and they won’t play in it. It’s self-defeating.’
‘So, your solution is to leave it unsafe so they’ll keep playing there?’
‘Yes. Yes, exactly.’
‘Vince, that’s ridiculous. They might hurt themselves.’
‘Okay, Kaz, listen to this. If a kid bashes their head against a wall, does it matter that the wall is painted?’
‘Now you’re being stupid —’
‘Come on, Kaz, answer me. Does a painted wall hurt less than an unpainted wall? Is it more dangerous to fall onto a dirty floor than a clean floor?’
‘Yes, if you happen to cut yourself …’
‘Is the gash made by an old nail more painful than the gash made by a new nail?’
‘Why do you have to turn everything into a stupid word game? Honestly, Vince —’
‘Is it?’ I insisted. ‘Is it?’
‘Yes!’ she exploded. ‘Yes, it is! A rusty nail is worse than a new nail! Don’t you know anything about hygiene?’
‘Kaz, I’m not talking about hygiene here —’
‘Well, you should be! Because that’s the issue, Vince — that’s the reality! Now be useful for once in your life and find a broom!’
‘Kaz?’
‘A broom, Vince!’
We began cleaning the barn early yesterday morning. Impressed by her energy, I took a photograph of Kaz as she picked up, threw out, re-ordered and re-organised. Ironically it was she, not the children, who hurt herself, stumbling forward, tripping, falling hard and slashing the palm of her hand on the open blade of an ancient pair of shears.
‘Nasty,’ I told her. ‘Those things were used for crutching sheep, weren’t they?
’
‘Shut up and get me a bandage,’ she said irritably. I took a closer look. There was blood seeping into the creases of her wrist.
‘When was your last tetanus shot?’ I asked.
‘Recent.’ She grimaced and held her arm at an angle to slow the blood. ‘I’m sure it’ll be fine.’
We stopped cleaning then, wrapped a bandage, drank some coffee, went to the supermarket, lived a more logical, ordered life.
There is a bird trapped inside the barn, a wagtail, swooping madly through the trusses and beams, cheeping distress signals. I pull the main doors open, watch as the rush of light draws the bird like a magnet. When it flutters through and lifts to the sky, I silently applaud its freedom.
Good start to the day, I am thinking. Symbolically promising; the ascent of nature. Maybe today … maybe there’ll be something for me to write. Perhaps a nice little description or two, a couple of couplets, dialogue that is shot through with satire, clauses to joust with. Maybe today I will finally create prose that will make people’s vertebrae click and clatter, or verse that will shatter their world. I hope so, because it’s been a while now, nothing coming, no clever phrases or silver sentences rattling down the conduits. I’ve always seen the mind as neatly compartmentalised, a bunch of different-coloured rooms jammed together. Green for my dreams, red for the work-room, lemon for love. And my ideas-room? Kaleidoscopic, I suppose, all shape and blur and moments of extraordinary brightness.
Which sounds nice, very comforting. Trouble is, at the moment, the ideas-room is cold and grey-white — the noncolour of negatives — and I feel like I should follow my mother-in-law’s tart advice to ‘go get a real job’. Emphasise real.
Nevertheless, today is broad and bright and the air sears my lungs. Maybe I will ring Stu later and say to him, ‘We’re on, O Agent Fair Foul. We’re back! We’re live! We’re happening, baby!’
I can imagine the conversation. Stu, poor unfortunate Stu, has this habit of introducing LA trash-talk into his business dealings. People become ‘commodities’ (‘And you are a commode,’ I told him once, angry about some rather pertinent criticism of my work. ‘I’d like to shit in you.’) Books transform into ‘units’ and the idea that has left me sleep-deprived and emotionally rabid for months is a ‘product’. People who read books are ‘the market-face’. And — I swear this is true — for a while he did develop the grating habit of calling everyone ‘baby’. It coincided with his Bret Easton Ellis phase. He wangled an invite to a publishing junket in NY and met BEE at a CP where the cocktails were gratis and the chicks all had BTs and QT asses.
‘Arses, Stu — not asses. In Australia, we cleverly broaden the pronunciation to reflect the shape of the noun.’
He wasn’t listening.
‘Bret E.E. was a great guy, baby’ he told me, arching his eyebrows impressively. ‘Very feet-on-the-ground. Definitely in-for-the-long-haul. Not at all what I expected.’
‘Stu,’ I said, ‘is that mascara on your eyebrows?’
He looked momentarily hurt.
‘Um … no. Actually it’s kohl. Look, everybody’s doing it. It’s the major vibe in the States.’
I shrank in disgust. Everybody’s doing it — the ultimate cop-out justification. Stu would try ovine necrophilia if he thought that everybody was doing it.
If I write something today, if I ring Stu and tell him that the dam is broken, the Muse smiling and the words flowing like shit from a Bondi drain-pipe, he’ll say, ‘What sort of product are we talking here? How many units do we envisage? How’s the market-face going to react?’ Whereas I want someone who’ll say, ‘Cool bananas, Vincey boy. You write anything you like, anything at all — and I’ll get it published for you. That’s my faith in you, man, that’s my promise to your talent.’
All of which begs the question: Why do I keep Stu?
He’s cheap, that’s why. A meagre ten per cent of any royalties and free representation until we crack another contract. Can’t ask for cheaper than that — and I can’t get near a publisher without an agent. Especially when the only book I’ve ever published is called Pears Amid Paradisio: An Allegory By Vincent Daley and no one I know has read it, and people I don’t know who have read it haven’t liked it, and the one critical review it received, courtesy of the Coastal Daily, denounced it as unintentionally hilarious and pretentiously stylised (thank you J.S.Cooper of ‘Weekly Book Review’ fame).
Which begs another, more fundamental question: Why be a writer? Why not something simpler, like President of an African nation, or something more profitable, like insider trading? Well, truth be known, in former lives I was, albeit briefly:
i) a public servant
ii) a shoe salesman
iii) and a teacher.
Or, as I like to think of them:
i) alone and bored shitless amidst hordes of calorie-challenged troglodytes
ii) occupying the same evolutionary rung as an amoeba
iii) professionally emasculated and emotionally disembowelled.
Tedium, insignificance, no nuts or guts. You can’t ask for more than that. Demented goldfish led more exciting lives than I.
It was Kaz who changed me.
‘You want to write?’ she asked. ‘So resign. Resign, and write.’
‘The money?’ I remember protesting weakly. ‘Mortgage, expenses, bills, insecurity … ?’
‘Sadness,’ she sniffed. ‘A complete lack of fulfilment. Vince, most people work for around forty years and that is far too long to be unhappy. Jesus, what’s the point in spending the most productive years of life in a state of catatonic misery? Piss the job off now, or I’ll leave you. Oh, and make sure you dedicate the first book to me, okay?’
All her best qualities, I thought, rolled into one — care for others, empathy for their desires, decisiveness, perception, the ability to swear freely and with panache. How can you not love someone like that?
Love Kaz, love words, always have. Words are enticing: playthings, challenges, mysteries. Once, when we were courting, I was wrestling with her on the floor of her parents’ lounge-room. I was twenty-two and horny; I reached beneath her skirt and touched silk.
‘Hm,’ I muttered. ‘What secrets lie within?’
‘New undies’ she told me, closing her eyes and smiling. ‘Do you like them?’
But my mind, ridiculously undisciplined thing that it is, was darting elsewhere.
‘Undies,’ I told her, ‘is such a Westie kind of word. Totally blue-collar. Saying or wearing undies is like kicking a beer can along a gutter. I mean, only people from the poorer suburbs wear undies. Drive an old Toyota with bog-marks, drink VB long-necks, wear undies.’
‘Such a snob! Okay, if they’re not undies, what are they?’
I paused, rubbed my nose, took in the faint whiff of her.
‘Not panties,’ I said. ‘Too delicate. Virginal. Abandon hope all ye who enter, for ye shall be stuck here unto eternity.’
‘I agree. Panties is such a numbing word. Linguistic anaesthesia. Mothers buy panties for their daughters.’
‘And for their sons, occasionally. How about knickers?’
She shook her head vigorously.
‘Don’t ask me why, but knickers always sounds sort of dirty to me’
‘I agree. It’s the double K. Most words with a double K are dirty. Kacky, kookaburra, kink.’
‘Kiosk?’
‘A filthy café. What about underwear?’
‘Too much like a K-Mart catalogue. Jocks?’
‘Male and macho. Jocks point out at the front — yours don’t. I know … pantalettes’.
‘Be serious!’
‘It was a very popular word a couple of centuries ago! Coy and classy. Like bloomers.’
‘I do not wear bloomers.’
‘Drawers?’
‘Do they open and shut? Do they have handles?’
‘Duds?’
‘Too Army. GI Joe puts on his duds.’
‘ Underclothes?’
�
��What my grandmother would say. God, I can hear it now: Katherine, have you finished ironing your underclothes? Katherine, fold your underclothes before your grandfather sees them.’
‘You iron them?’
‘No, she thinks I iron them. Anything for the sake of peace.’
‘Smalls?’
‘Ah, the blessed 1950s. Holdens, pig-iron Bob … and smalls.’
We stopped then, reconsidered.
‘You know’ I told her eventually, ‘this is good. It’s good — comforting — that we can talk about my fetishes like this.’
‘Fetishes?’
‘I have a fetish for women’s … undergarments. They fascinate me. It’s the promise thing, I think. The lure of what lies beneath — like seeing a freshly cooked burger still in its wrapping, imagining all that warmth and taste, those succulent juices coating my lips … ’
‘You’re verging on crassness, you know that?’
‘Kaz, the line between crass and titillating is finer than gossamer thread, and I walk that line. So — undergarments?’
‘Horrid word — sounds like you should hold them at arm’s length and drop them in a bucket of Domestos.’
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