Fauna

by Donna Mazza

  ‘I can’t go and see my family but you don’t hear me moaning about it.’ Though he moans about it now. ‘I’ve lost you for who knows how long and the kids feel like you love her more than them. I rush to your defence all the time and never tell them that it’s true, even though I believe it is.’ His words are arrows and I return once more to that open wound.

  I would understand, I tell him. ‘Go if you want to—I mean it. I’ll be okay.’ I don’t say it—please don’t take the children. It sits there unuttered, the only thing that anchors me. I worry that once they are gone they will realise how awful it is to live with me, how I am holed up here in a siege of my own creation.

  ‘It’s not that simple.’ He resolves to send them some money so she can hire help for a while.

  I fall into a grey place, each day feeling the darkness of it spread and deepen. I walk with her along our usual paths; she collects small fish, which live and die and we stop to watch kangaroos under the trees in a nearby paddock. Their twitching faces and knitting claws seem to tie it all together, winding around my thoughts, which spin and spin and spin.

  EIGHT

  I have insisted Isak go and see his mother. It has been eight years and, after many refusals, he has booked tickets for the winter holidays for himself, Jake and Emmy. I could bear the guilt of it no longer. His outbursts of anger. Since my mother’s visit I have felt the hostility build— envy, although my relationship with her has always been fraught with drama. He sees me reconnect with her and the way the kids mention her in conversation. I have sent her a birthday card. If he goes now, I tell him, things are stable. I will be fine. I can speak to Mum anytime and if I’m desperate I can always call on Milly’s family for help. I’d have to be really desperate. ‘Don’t worry.’ Even as I say it, something sulphuric and volatile rises up in me. I know he detects it, but his need to see his family is greater than his instinct and he does not heed that toxic energy, doesn’t feel the burn of it. I kiss them all goodbye and can’t meet his eyes.

  I have studied Mum’s list and as soon as they leave I go to the shed and find some white electrical tape, blank out part of the B on his numberplate so it reads as P, turn the 44 into 11; I remember her doing this, all those years ago. Escaping domestic violence, she said. I feel I have abused Isak, he is not to blame for this. It is me that has broken our lives.

  I clear out all of the takeaway rubbish, and wet weather gear from soccer. I leave it all in a big heap in the middle of the shed, don’t try to hide it, and drive the car close to the house. I can do this, I know I can.

  On the second day, while Asta is asleep, I drag out the spare double mattress and force it through the back doors of Isak’s LandCruiser, cover it in the batik bedspread and set it up like a gypsy caravan. It looks cosy, long-term cosy, and I sit for a moment in the back of the car, checking her list.

  I spend some time cooking in the middle of the night, pack it all in the portable fridge and collect together some of the camping equipment, a first-aid kit, some things for the dog, clothes, Asta’s troll and rag doll. Fold Jake’s socks into rolls. Inhale the smell of the shin-pads. The clean clothes in a pile. I leave our bed made and, when I am done, I drop into Emmy’s bed and cry, cry, cry.

  When I wake I have second thoughts. Spend the day waiting. I set Asta up with glue and scissors and let her stick paper all over the coffee table. Tayto watches me as if he knows and the house feels poised and empty as a cave. Ready to expel me. I wander through it looking at all of their things—their strewn clothes and schoolbags. I smell Isak’s shirts. He messages me that they have arrived safely and they are tired. ‘Glad to hear it.’ I wonder what he will say to me if I do this. I have neglected Asta and she lies on the floor beside the gluing, asleep with her arms above her head. The armpit hair grown bushier in the past few months. There will only be regret, each choice has its own and I have chosen her now, as I did from the start, when she was just a gathering of cells.

  In the morning I wash the dog and our hair, shave her armpits and clasp the mammoth hair necklace around my neck. I make a big breakfast. ‘We’re going on a holiday too,’ I tell her. ‘Taking Tayto with us.’ I am so anxious my hands are shaking.

  She looks at me, not really understanding what it means. ‘Go in car?’

  ‘Yes, sweetie, in the car. Like the day we got Tayto but to sleep over too.’

  She waits, looking at me intensely and touches my cheek. She has grown tall for her age, almost to my shoulder. I know that she will be a small adult, so it is all the more difficult for me to see her grow.

  ‘Ma, Emmy come back soon.’ There is a rip in me, one that has frayed and can’t be repaired. It lashes back and forth in the wind, threads of it leave welts on my skin. I am unravelling into warp and weft and knotted strands—soon nothing will hold me together but her cells, her solidity and strength. I am tatty and soiled and there’s not much of me left, yet I gather together the pieces for her, to shield her.

  I fold her warm, strong hand in my own, reduced to bones and sinew, and lead her to the car. Tayto comes at the jangle of his lead and hops up on her lap. I am too tired to drive but I start the car.

  ‘Ma, feed-a chooks,’ she calls, urgently. I had forgotten them, shame again—so I pour out the whole food bin onto the floor of their house, fill three buckets of water and leave the gate of the pen open so they can free range. He will be back in two weeks and I’m sure there is enough foraging around for them.

  Impatient now, I barrel down the driveway too fast, throw a spray of gravel at the end as I corner onto the road and tear through the cathedral of twisted paperbark trees, slowly dying and desiccating. Each year they have declined, it seems unstoppable. This is my home, what little of me is left belongs here, yet I flee like a fugitive and plot a course east through narrow roads into the hills. I fill the tank and a jerry can with fuel, buy as much water as I can and leave my card in the service station as a final clue. It would have been easier with cash but those days are gone. We will go far on this anyway, but I don’t know how far is enough.

  Within an hour, we have crossed the scarp, which divides the coastal plain and its remnant forest and pastures from the great inland. Descending from the hills, a sigh of relief spreads through me. It is so sparse here, with rare towns and wide expanses of paddock, some arid with salinity and others revegetated, garnished with crops and olive trees, huddles of sheep like mounds of stone. The landscape and the towns are in advanced states of decay, many abandoned, and nature is slowly reclaiming them. There are strongholds, resplendent towns down on their luck but still breathing. Facades of federation pubs, churches and civic buildings are sometimes fine and sometimes not. Loosened from civilisation, I am buoyed by the hope that we can hide somewhere and I sing to Asta, who hums along but can never remember the words.

  Soon the earth turns to red and wide pink lakes of salt, rimmed by tufts of grey-green plants, shimmer on the horizon. The forest has lowered, shifted to curling salmon-tinted eucalypts. It smells different from the coast, with a drier, less pungent atmosphere. Still, life is abundant, despite its reputation as the middle-of-nowhere.

  I am tired and start to drift so Asta and I pull into Lake Grace for a lunch stop and look for a park or some trees. The long, straight railway line passes directly through town and we pull up beside the old train station to use the toilet. A green patch of lawn looks like a nice place to sit for a picnic but when we get closer I realise it is synthetic grass. There are wide, empty streets and few signs of life. I keep driving and we eat our lunch, wary of being spotted along the way. I imagine my face out on social media—missing with red-haired child, who shall remain unphotographed, unidentified. We just keep going, although my eyes are heavy. Tayto sleeps in the footwell and Asta is cross-legged on the front seat, watching the landscape. Quiet, as she often is when we do our day-drives.

  ‘Home, Ma?’ she asks, as the day fades. I tell her okay and follow my mother’s directions up a slight side road, which narrows to gravel, s
tretching long and straight between gold crops. Out among it, high on a hill, is a living farmhouse. Often, I know, an older and decrepit one on the same property will be empty, cast aside in times of plenty, so I drive on.

  The sun is a golden ball, lowering on the horizon when I spot the rusted tin and dropped weatherboards that I had hoped to find where she said it would be. The farm gate is hooked with rusty wire, which I prise off carefully, scraping the gate across the gravel in a wide arc. The sprawling branches of an abandoned fig tree fill the front yard and three very large palm trees droop dead fronds onto the driveway. I park amid them, camouflaged, and survey the house. It is clear that the property is sown with canola crops all the way up to the house and the marks of last year’s harvest show on the pushed-over pickets of the fence.

  Tayto is desperate to get out so I lead him up to the back door, hanging askew. The flyscreen judders backwards and I push the door, which opens easily, rustling across the grit of rodents. The dog pulls on his lead, nose wet with glee. Asta stays on the faded concrete porch, peering around the corner with large and fearful eyes. Through the wet area at the back are rusted stains on the lino, and it leads into a kitchen devoid of everything except an old gas stove, door gone, and a sink. I try but can’t remember being in this house, though it may have been one where we rested on a journey years ago. Smells of animals and glue. Particle board cupboards hang at odd angles, doors jammed shut or open onto sagging shelves, one shoved full with old spray cans.

  I enter the hallway, hoping to find something less trashed, Tayto sniffing wildly and Asta now shuffling up to grab my hand. The door is closed on the left and I force it free. A grey floral carpet and wide old fireplace show the former opulence of the house. Long spiderwebs hang from the ceiling, thick with red dust. This will be fine for the night. It has been kept closed and sealed, for people such as we, I think.

  Asta helps me carry in the mattress and our things and we lock in there for the night—dog, child and me curled up together. I barely sleep, just rise and fall with her breath and the dog’s scratching. Things roil about in my head—where to go and how to get there, my plans veer off like shrapnel, each ending in a corner, where I can’t escape. Tayto whines at the door and I take him out on his lead. This wide sky is glorious, despite the frenzy inside me.

  We ventured into the interior landscape when I was young and my mother came to help a friend who had married a much older man and was stuck out there, somewhere. I don’t know exactly where, perhaps in the Pilbara. Her kids ripped around the property all day on dirt bikes, marking a deep ellipse surrounding the house. They had a pet joey, but nobody answered when I asked what happened to its mother. These things emerge from calcified parts of me, places where I have never returned. I sleep.

  In the distance, a gunshot. Isak, Isak—the thought of his return makes my breath short. I wake with a fast pulse. The urge to turn around and pretend this never happened.

  In the night, things claw at the windows, closing in on us as they circle around and test out all the openings. In the morning I tidy a place for breakfast. I am too tired and I don’t think I can drive a full day so I test my ability to shrink into the landscape. We stay for two nights. Asta is wide-eyed and jumpy, sits on the bed and whispers to the dog, who licks her fingers, her face. He is glued to her. She will not leave the room without me and runs through the kitchen as if it were haunted, to wee under the wild lemon tree in the backyard. ‘Ma,’ she says to me, ‘go home.’ But she doesn’t know that I do this for her. Only for her.

  They will be there now, reuniting with their oma. She will barely recognise them after so long. Emmy won’t know how to occupy herself on the farm but Jake will take to it like his birthright.

  A slow white ute drives past early on the second morning, turns around again and leaves a cloud of red dirt in its wake. I panic, try to slow myself but pack up anyway and return to the highway. The choice is in front of me—left is home and I have fuel enough to just get there; right is the Eyre Highway and the huge expanse of country where, without money or a phone, we could easily dry out by the roadside like crushed wildlife. Blow away into the desert. She looks each way with me, her esoteric eyes looking into mine for a moment, darkened by worry. I turn right.

  By the time we reach Norseman I have built up my courage to continue and pull into the wide roadhouse on the edge of town, inching up to the fuel tank and fill it right to the top, clicking it several times. I lock Asta and Tayto in the car, windows slightly opened and rush inside, frantic without even trying. I tell the squat woman behind the pie warmer, ‘Someone stole my handbag off the back seat and I don’t have a phone or cards.’

  ‘Cops are in town, love, you can drive around there.’

  I nod, of course I will go there next.

  Outside, my car is in the sun. ‘Could I please just use your phone, my kid is in the sun? I’ll get a credit card number to pay for that fuel.’ She nods. I order coffee too and she hands over the handset, printed with oily fingers and deals with the next customer. I stand with my back against the cool glass refrigerators and call her number from memory.

  ‘Thanks for the birthday card. I wondered if you would really go through with it,’ is all she says and she reads the numbers to the woman who hands the phone back to me when the transaction goes through. I add some water and chocolate, two plastic-wrapped rolls onto the counter.

  ‘I’ll probably call you tomorrow, same again.’

  She laughs, tells me she’ll get a safe house ready, to look after that beautiful child and I hand the phone back, thanking the squat woman effusively.

  Asta is red and hot, silent tears leaking from her. The dog pants like mad, eyes dark. I pull the car forward a little and crank up the air-conditioning. There are long trucks parked up in the broad grounds of the service station. With a bit of food we all cheer up—I pull the meat from my roll for the dog and pour water into a bowl on the ground by the car. The thrill of the plan lifts me and I play some music as we drive through the highway intersection and out of town, in the opposite direction to the police station.

  The road descends into a long plain, surprisingly green with low savannah trees and mounds of grey grasses, a few early flowers. There are no farms here. We round a bend and come to the ninety-mile straight. I finish the cold dreg of coffee and pull over for a moment on the shoulder of the road. Asta and Tayto and I walk a few minutes, the dog pulls desperately on his lead. She wears her hat.

  ‘Ma, go home.’ I can see the tension in her; body stiff, brow desperate.

  ‘We’re going to see Nanna.’ Her face lightens, the tension releases a little. ‘You love Nanna. Dad took the other kids to see his mum and I’m taking you to see my mum.’ I don’t think I’d really decided this for sure until the call and a little peace comes to me. It feels right. We return to the drive. Great black eagles swirl overhead, hunch over dead kangaroos, tearing ragged flesh. The landscape is low and there is little variation except the grey mounds on the roadside, their angled legs skewed strangely, long tails flat against the bitumen. She soon sleeps beside me, her stomach groaning from the bread. The earth changes from rust to peach. It goes on and on until it bends a little. Signs remind me to watch for kangaroos, camels, emus, wombats but I see no life at all except the eagles and the scrappy crows cleaning up what they have not.

  I drive through skin-and-bone towns, just truck stops with funny names— Caiguna, Cocklebiddy—places low and spiky but busy with passing traffic. I weave the car around two oversized trucks carrying dusty yellow haul packs headed for the mines, spray stones through the shoulder of the road. I am busy with this but sometimes I forage through my own raw flesh, unpicking and reliving time that is spent. Conversations with Emmy; watching her with Asta and knowing what I am taking away with me. Slippery fragments of closeness with Jake. Moments of silence and blame. Spare towns, low trees interspersed with wide expanses of tufty grasses and lakebeds devoid of moisture.

  When she wakes, I pull into the next
wide parking bay, high and picturesque. There are people there— a dirty white campervan in the sun, folding chairs visible at the edge. A man with a shaved head capturing his image on a phone, speaking loudly. I drive through and back onto the highway. ‘Poo,’ she tells me and I drive a little more until the shoulder of the road is wide enough and I can pull into the bush, crushing clumps of grasses. I walk Tayto while she stays close to the car. His nose is wild with scents, and spangles of rubbish glitter between the bushes.

  At Madura we stop for fuel, pass a long queue of road trains and I brace myself for the encore phone call. It is not difficult to summon the feeling of panic and I am convincing, because it is my truth. I return to the car with a range of hot roadhouse food and more coffee. Mum said to be careful at the border and I want to sleep before we get there, in case we can’t pass. We drive on into the red landscape, becoming even more sparse.

  As evening lowers, I pull in to a rest stop. A road train and some campervans are also stopped here but I find a spare place away from them and reverse in so we can lay with the back doors open. Asta and Tayto walk among the grasses. The sun sets and we curl up together to sleep. It is very cold but she doesn’t suffer it like I do so I snuggle close to her, draw the cloud of dog close to my feet, his fur and claw a damp comfort of home. Outside, the clink of bottles, voices, laughter. He wakes and growls. The glow of fire then silence. Though I am exhausted, I sleep cautiously.

  At dawn the truck starts, crackling on the gravelly ground, a kettle whistles. I tie the dog to the tow ball of the car with his breakfast and set up a picnic on the bed. Brush her rusty hair and think of my Emmy. The grief is a veil, its surface like worked wax; solid as stone though it appears to flow.

  Soon we reach the border— a large sign, warning about quarantine, permits for importing fauna. My skin prickles. A short queue of cars and a line of trucks wait for inspection. I get out the leftover fruit and prepare a bag to hand over. It might be enough to deter them from looking further at us. My chest purrs. A woman in an orange fluoro vest takes the bag, peers into the car at Asta, who is in her hat and glasses. She looks straight ahead silently, picking up on my terror. Tayto bounds up to the window and she pats his head.