Devil's Trumpet

by Tracey Slaughter

  The beach house was ramshackle, bulwarked with long grass. It looked to us like a giant kids’ hut. It sat in an infinity of seedpods and it creaked on its nails, sun-parched till its white paint scaled and the wood beneath turned blue. Inside it was crooked and gritty and cradling, its dark core a kitchen, with a muddle of tacked-on rooms. There were faces in the boards and beams, but we just slid into our shared bed and crowed at them – nothing could scare us here. It was a summer without nightmares (or almost). Not even work could get us. Like home, the air of the place was tinted with dung: there were stock in the steep back paddock that wandered down towards the tilted out-sheds, and bobbed at our hands across low-slung thorns of wire. But they were not our job. This was not the farm. The difference was the ocean – and the hard ground the salt air had baked white, so our tough feet flaked it. We loved our feet bare, not trudging round booted, sinking. We loved the bang of them, skidding up dust as we hightailed into endless play. We’d never been on holiday, never heard of such a thing, but we arrived at that broken-down bach and it took us less than a second to split into the distance, get the knack. The sun had cooked off the need for chores. The grass was made for conspiracy, knitted into shady places to whisper and escape.

  Our mothers must have felt it too. I remember the lazy mornings of our stay had the feel of a shrug, of a low voice murmuring someday. ‘We’ve got time,’ I remember your mother said, curled into the slump of the wingback, tossing her sandals under the table with a carefree slap that halted my mother from whatever task she was ploughing through with her usual brisk fuss. The coil of your mother in that chair: I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone loaf before, but that summer her ongoing pose of lounge and mosey glazed her for me with a kind of glory. Can someone be that golden? That chair was a spring-blown hulk in faded red, but once she was drooping there, I couldn’t help but worship the so-what dangle of her legs, her sultry attitude of fritter and sprawl. The most she would move was to pick at the arms of shredded brocade with an absent finger, half-close her eyes as she traced the dappled grooves. ‘Ease up. You’ve got the time.’

  At first my mother kept lumbering around at dawn, her routine too long-term to quit. But slowly I watched the sun displace it. And then my mother became another woman. My mother without irritation creased into her face, without haste twisting the seams of her clothes, without her make-do hair sweating out of its grips, without a quick-smart, get-on-with-it, not-a-second-to-waste tone in her voice, without the swat and shoo of flustered hands, the thud of preoccupied footsteps. My mother with no daylight-is-running-out swish, no huffy don’t-bother-me edge. My mother with almost, nearly, nothing to do. You could waste her time here. And she loved it. The order of the house fell apart. No times, no tasks. No shoulds. The rickety washline trilled in the offshore. The black gutted woodstove stayed unlit. We ate offhand grabs of bread, or mismatched picnics, our mothers suddenly flicking the lawn with old scout blankets, upending leftovers onto our laps. We’d dash in from our games, where we were cannibals or princesses, and dive down for a swift feast that suited our wildness. Rush off guzzling worm-eaten ground-fall fruit. They must have felt the same kick, dismissed from duty, no summons to the muck, to the yards and the troughs, to the quarts and gates and offal and hosedowns. The strict parts just dissolved from our days, and our mothers’ voices mellowed with them, hazy trails of singsong hello, smiled half-reminders to take care as we rushed beachwards, happy and diluted. No I’ve-got-a-job-for-yous, no don’t-be-lates and make-sures.

  Somewhere about the third day, my mother appeared in the shimmy of your mother’s frock. I can see its rose print, shivery and damask, as it slithered along her flanks, the thick curve of her spine in its trickery of buttons, her ample arse blooming at the base of them. Her near-beauty came as a shock. Perhaps it did to her too. She took sudden delight in it. The bodice with its overflow of brown dewy bust. The improvised tumble of her silver-skewered hair. Her pulling a klutzy pirouette in the kitchen, then almost a leap through the door to twirl in a borrowed breezy dance out on the lawn. Skipping the toetoe, pointy-toed and electric. How all her petals jiggled as she laughed and laughed. A share-milker’s wife in the boss-woman’s get-up – what a lark! Then she tripped herself up.

  The fathers had to come some time, we knew that. They were due, and we sometimes used our fingers to count off the dates. But we’d learned to cram lifetimes of play into our free hours, seized with story and wide-awake. We were busy. With no one to interfere, our games built for days, whole sagas of crescendo and doublecross, hearty deeds and clashes and acts of God, as many gods as we felt like pretending into being. The sky was full of their antics and falls, and us masquerading as them. And there was the clay track to rush our descent, a cutty-grass tunnel, tree roots to shin and twine, then the tideline of weed-junked sand, and crunching past that, kicking driftwood and dead fish and sticky green pods, the planed shine where shore met sea. Ankle-deep games played in its cool hiss. Corners of rockpool to fossick in with dribbly fingers, prodding at hairy tufts of light, wavy stamens that prickled away from our splashy wading, our curious bunts. The bubble of a dead sheep reeking in the creek, a woolly cloven stink bomb ready to pop. Eels to yelp at, sure they’d slimed our thighs. Mussels and pipi to slunk in big buckets, shovelling for them with deep gluey paws. Driftwood to gather – which wasn’t work, because we were jumbling it up the sand for nothing, just for the clattery joy of dragging it round and slinging it into a pile, a crackle of limbs sticking every mad which way – and we were going to be allowed to light it on bonfire night. The night before we had to go. But before that: a life of paddle. A sun-flushed life. A life of fronds. A life our mothers would sometimes visit, chopping down the track with their costumes on, then ouch-ouch sprinting like hell for the water’s edge. Sometimes they made the whole race holding hands. Your mother’s hair was up in a tawny overkill of rolls. My mother’s doughy face was stretched by the violet suckle of her pansy-trimmed swimcap. Once, I remember, she even teased yours for never dunking her face in the salt – she duckdove then arched up, spurting a mouthful in your mother’s direction. Who spritzed it away with one of her posh little waves. Then gentleness, all ambling home. A life of late cocoa, tepid and mottled with skin, a life of flops into bed. Our skins still needled with juicy grasses, suits still storing specks of beach, clips of shell, pricks of stubbly weed. Even feathers. We’d fish them out, use them for a final tickle. And then the bed let us slip.

  Our mothers didn’t need to share a bed. But why wouldn’t they want to? We thought it was bliss to be huddled to each other, humming our little tales, naughty hushed disclosures that made us pinch a belly, flap out a shin. We liked the feel of each other’s disintegrating plaits, our squeaky suits and dirty toenails. We liked the clink of elbows, grubby and tranquil, the bony wrap of knees, we liked to snooze that way. We liked to trade memories, even if we’d just made them that day, to murmur them over, fresh. We liked to clip our warmth together, hinge ourselves, to sleep hooked in place. Wake scrabbling, soft, at shared limbs. And some nights our voices were joined by our mothers’, through the flayed rose-papered scrim of the wall, the same kind of gentle prattle as they lay and napped, sighs dipping and little gasps whistling. Why shouldn’t they? I wondered why they still bothered changing into the formality of floral nightgowns, didn’t just kip in the stains and tang of their suits.

  Your mother had hijacked your father’s cigars, a whole carton. She broke it open on the back lawn, rummaged their musty chocolate stack. ‘Time to try out his disgusting habit.’ She shucked one off, made a cartoon mouth with googly eyes above. Awkwardly lit up with sputtering matches, lay back and honked in a reckless puff. Her lungs went straightaway into battle. But she still tried to out-glam her guffawing. We cackled at her till our sides hurt. But she kept on smoking, her intake getting serious. My mother quiet, watching her, said, ‘So why do you put up with it?’ Your mother’s stare aimed at mine for a long time, before it over-blinked and slid away, skyward. �
�That is the burning question,’ she answered. She pretended to be all Hollywood again, shammed a film-star posture, lobbed a cigar at my mother. It hit her in the chest, and eventually my mother scooped it up, scorched the end of it smoothly, took a long, even breath. But for a while she just crouched there, and never touched it.

  In the end we didn’t know whose murmurs we listened to – their talking spilt our sleep. Until the night we were bumped aware by their shrieks, the rumbling as my mother drubbed at the mattress, clobbering at the flames their sleep had lit. Your mother was a goner for those cigars by then, dozed with one paring ash along the sheet, too lazy with its stub. Woke with my mother pummelling her, clouting at sparks in the horsehair for all she was worth. We fluttered the hallway to get to them. Stood with our eyes full of fire, while she flogged it out. Single-handed. A working woman. When it fizzled I waited for your mother to say something witty, to give a cheeky signal, encourage us all to bounce back into the blackened bed, do something frisky with the cinders. I could somehow see that happening, but it didn’t. Your mother just stood aside, watching, like she had lockjaw.

  Then the gods came in the shape of our fathers. We could never have invented them. The bach was a castaway, so your father had to park his Bedford truck far up on the roadside, its door a slam that buckled down the hill. His descent was blank-faced. He didn’t pet you, didn’t scrub you at the crown, ask how you were. He strode past you into the house. We hovered wary steps back from the door. His prowl made the kitchen look dollhouse tight. And both our mothers sat at the table, feigning some chore, some drill with dishes they hadn’t carried out in weeks. They kept their eyes on their tools, on their fingers. His voice paced around, big chested, and his boots struck after, a thick, resounding follow-up. My mother spotted us, and skedaddled us out. We went and dawdled out by the stock, who munched along after us so we could stroke their scaly coats, sending up gnats and dust. Even the cows here were not just supply, not yield, not cuts of rib and shank. They weren’t just what could be done to them, they were the thing itself, and they strayed to our palms, warm and tousled. Their wirebrush lashes were sun-tipped. We stared down into the sad brown dreams of their eyes. Your father raised his voice, until it peaked on ‘reputation’. We heard the kitchen table jolt as he spoke, brought the word down on its surface like an axe.

  But after his visit, we still didn’t go. There’d been a pounding in the kitchen while we’d stayed outside last night, the knock of household thunder. Things flung, an oaken struggle of chair legs, the blow of an object at the door. We’d scurried, too scared to wait for details. And then we were fetched by my mother, shoved to bed, her lips crossed with an index, a do-as-I-say hiss. We made ourselves sleep, deep and blinking and soundless. But in the morning, your father was gone. We sortied to the beach, planned to hit the water with a kick of celebration. But the sand was streaked with jellyfish. A swarm of glass bubbles with fanned blue bags, the crenulations of tentacle screwed up behind them, a scintillating blue. We knew about them. There was a legend in your family your uncle had nearly died getting stung, an off-patrol soldier who’d dived through a tropical lagoon, felt the stab of a different man o’war. We kept a tiptoed distance, turned back up the track. And when we got to the kitchen, the mark round your mother’s right eye was another bluebottle, a swollen tremble of sightlessness, the pouch of its iris finned with blood. My mother dabbed it gently with a lukewarm cloth. The long sting of tears leaked from her.

  But we stayed on. There was a set to our mothers’ faces. Their tread in the humid rooms felt grim. My mother started fixing things, tidying, straightening again. She struck a washroom fire, and boiled a tub of clothes that she staked out, flapping. Yours rested her head on surfaces, her neck making delicate calibrations, like the globe of her mind was a dead weight. The lashes of her bloated eye were slowly unsticking. We watched its contusions when we could, like coloured smears in a rockpool, until she moaned us away. But they both tried. The beach was off limits, with its bulge of debris, its trim of glittering indigo bulbs. So our mothers tried to entertain us. Once your mother was walking they wax-papered up a packed lunch and we hiked up a nearby road. The only house on it was said to be haunted, a jagged villa with a wide frilled porch. Your mother knew the legend: an old woman perished here, locked herself away for love, solo and withering. It sounded to me like a fable she’d nicked from a book. But it was spooky, told with her grape-jam eye. And the house did give off jilted sounds. Its spires looked ladylike and supernatural. We broke in and crept around the rotted halls, putting our feet down careful round the bruises in the boards. It was dazzled with bird shit, and the curtains swung in dregs. Wings threshed as we chose our path, giving us gooseflesh. And giggles. We gasped at china tiles and fancy porticos. In the tall loft cupboard of one grand room we startled something stashed away with wide shining eyes. A ghost! My mother made a clamber on some chairs, undaunted. It was just a possum, nested and stunned in its posh wreck. It stared at us with quivering breath. Like the boxed-in bearer of a too-sad story.

  I would like to say my father was different. He was, in that they didn’t need to ward him off. He repeated a fair match of all the words your father had – they’d had enough of a getaway, what did they think they were playing at, by now the whole district knew what they were up to – but they sounded toned-down in his mouth, as he sipped, and issued statements, from the edge of the cup they’d planted, china-white and far too dinky, in his grip. They were comments he seemed to have borrowed, rote, from his boss. He spoke them, firm but empty, like mottos. No doubt he was on orders. He looked very tired, his Adam’s apple scraped strangely clean. He didn’t throw his weight. And when his dog rocketed away to the beach, and turned back up welted, belly-crawling, my father cradled its simper of black and white, and used a forearm to smudge its foaming jaw. He let it retch venom on the tightly appointed buttons of his torso, while my mother murmured sorry. I think he did have a softness for her. Although I remember in the yard once we did get back, when he was due to slaughter an animal, he shot clear through the throat of the target and downed the beast the other side of it, so the two of them staggered, their wounds unfinished, through the wet grey yard while all of us watched. A keening and dumbfounded crumple. Prolonged. A pitiful ungulate circling. My father never missed.

  In those parts, a holiday was unheard of. We never had another one. So I remember: still running in the dark bowl of night, a game of catch triggered by stars. The burps we made with our lips clamped down on clues as we donkeyed round playing charades. Your mother curled in her riven chair, her habit extinguished, her faint smile leaving mauve furrows. Days we were pirates, thirsty to be out raiding, roguish and bawdy and gallant – always ready to slip off our pronouns and roar. A life of sheen, with quick soles silty. Your chalky curls where they pinged out your fishtail. My mother having us in stitches by whisking her tea leaves, pretending to pick out bogus fates from their sprinklings. Riddled with salt, your warm skin’s night-night squirm. Two carcasses, hung in the shed, the sway of their ribs like a meat-roped ladder. My husband said he saw yours at the stock sales yesterday, and you were in trail alongside him, a stolid red-cheeked infant wedged on one hip, a toddler whining beyond. A life of float. The hands-clasped stroll of our mothers toeing the tide line. A bonfire of limbs never torched.

  eleven love stories you paint blue

  Waist deep, only your lower half in love with him, those early days. Only your knees loose and hazy with warmth when you see him, and up in the core, in the muscle, the laze of his far-off hello-smile leaves an easy thrum. But he’s at a distance, safe, with fields and roads and rooms still yet to cross, cars to dance through at laidback 3pm speed. You’re okay, in the presence of others, the press: what could you do? So you’re just in love low along the autumn length of your legs under a thoughtless dress, a weightless old dress between breath and cloth, wearing a drizzle of long-ago flowers on blue, the kind of blossoms history is made of, petals adrift in sweet vintage ticks. You
r drifty legs, with the slope of love ending in sandals full of schoolyard dust, that get you to kerbs, that get you to corners, the road-patrol kids with their wide signs slowing and halting you, that get you to a vista of trees arched low with the park cool under them in long clay ribs, your ankles aimless and soaked in leaves and shade, the falling of edges and yesterdays that old trees always speak. There’s the sound of his shoes on their shovel through leaves, off-time with your longing and your blink through fresh-washed fringe and your too-loud scuff. Hello. Oh. Hi. Yeah, hi again. Half wordless, still paces apart. And only your lower half, cut across the dark grass, doped at the soles and lonely to the thighs, just getting to the place you have to go, to pick up kids, his kid, your kid, but in the hipline want is making you tense and sway with a non-committal rock. Just a hemisphere of muscles in love you can’t be held accountable for. Keep eight paces, keep five, even three, between you, an easy border in the dry blond leaves and nothing bad will come. So you can’t stop wanting a skinful of his fingers, so you want to hold him lodged, locked at shoulder, knucklebone, cock. So what? So what.