We publish quality short stories, poetry, extracts from forthcoming novels, and articles and essays on topics of social, environmental and cultural significance.ISSUE NO. 115
SUMMER 2008
FICTION
Transgression
Florence had ordered two timber filing cabinets in cherry, a twodrawer and a three. They would stand side by side next to her desk, and would receive the ‘piles and piles of files’ (she enjoyed rhyme) which had gathered on her cupboard shelves, teetering in precarious towers or bundling forward threateningly, ready to tumble out into chaos and catastrophe every time the cupboard was opened.
The cabinets were delivered by two youngish louts with tattoos. They were brisk and overweight. As soon as they left, Florence stripped off the plastic sheeting, attached the five metal handles, heaved the cabinets into place beside her battered redwood desk, aligning them perfectly so that they formed an ell, primed all the drawers with the suspension separators she had bought the previous day, and commenced to ‘review, rearrange and redistribute’ her papers (she enjoyed alliteration), to sort and translate twenty years of work from the cupboard shelves to the deliciously yawning receptacles. She had looked forward to having everything in its place, ‘reorganized, alphabetized, accessibilized’ (she enjoyed zeds).
As she began to deal the work-folders, like bulging playcards, into the five drawers, Florence noticed a peculiar creak, followed by a soft but discernible clunk, whenever she pushed one of them shut. Testing the others, she discovered the same creak and clunk, always near the end of each drawer’s inward run. A perfectionist, especially with costly purchases, she quickly telephoned the store. The assistant in Office Furniture assured her that the creak-and-clunk was deliberate; a new
security feature. She retorted that it made her feel ‘insecure, unsure’, and asked to speak to the manager. He smiled audibly at her clever little joke, and put her on hold.
While waiting on the line, Florence tested and retested the cabinet drawers. She pulled them out and pushed them back many times, listening for each drawer’s creak-and-clunk, always just near the end of its home run. The travel itself was otherwise very smooth, beautifully smooth. She found the feel of the action quite pleasurable, like, well... (she enjoyed similes). Only a gentle tug was needed for each drawer to
slither noiselessly towards her; only the merest shove was required for each to glide back soundless to its nesting-place – and then, right near the end, that inevitable creak-and-clunk!
On reflection, though, perhaps the creak-and-clunk wasn’t all that bad. As she worked the cabinet drawers forth and back, fro and to, Florence found that she was growing accustomed to the sound – in fact becoming not entirely unfond of it. It was predictably penultimate, and therefore in some strange way reassuring. Actually, she decided, it wasn’t really a creak-and-clunk at all – more of a click-and-pthunk (she enjoyed onomatopoeia). Actually, she decided, she rather liked it.
Florence laid the receiver back in its cradle.
She resumed the job of distributing the folders into the five cabinet drawers, and soon noticed that she was looking forward to the reliable click-and-pthunk as each drawer was pushed back in. Florence smiled to herself while she worked. With each click-and-pthunk she nodded in satisfaction. In a sense, she thought, the click-and-pthunk now seemed indispensable to the proper operation of the drawers; it was a correct completion, a closure, a climax – yes, it was a kind of mechanical orgasm
(she enjoyed metaphors) that could be repeated over and over.
That afternoon her friend Felicity dropped by, as she often did on Fridays. She was a freckly redhead in her early forties, shapely with a swimmer’s broad shoulders and a dancer’s slender legs. Florence was always mindful, in Felicity’s presence, of her own incipient chubbiness and drab complexion; she was well aware that her long, wavy, chocolatebrown
hair was her main redeeming physical trait.She boiled the kettle and the two women sat facing one another
across the kitchen table, sipping their coffees. Felicity chatted about her new boyfriend. But Florence was eager to show off her new filing cabinets, so she conducted Felicity into the study and motioned at her latest acquisitions. Felicity remarked on how well the polished cherrywood blended with the bookcases, even with the writing desk, though the latter was a touch darker in colour. Felicity fondled the brass handle of one of the drawers. ‘Go ahead, open it,’ Florence urged. Her friend
gingerly obeyed.
‘Nice and smooth,’ she declared.
‘Now slide it back.’
Felicity gave the drawer a gentle push. It withdrew almost of its own volition; just before it reached the end of its run, it issued the familiar click-and-pthunk.
‘Nice,’ Felicity confirmed. ‘Have you filled them all?’
‘Just about,’ said Florence. ‘I’m nearly down to the final drawer. At last I can organise all my paperwork properly. All my correspondence, hundreds of letters and emails, all my notes and manuscripts and drafts.
You know, the hall cupboard was full to bursting point, smoking like an edgy volcano every time I opened it – half the time I couldn’t even find what I was looking for. Whenever I came near that cupboard I was sure that this would be the moment of the fatal eruption and I’d be buried under my own literary lava.’
‘How’s the new novel coming along?’
‘It’s not. I’ve reached a ... temporary creative impasse.’
‘Writer’s block?’
Florence grimaced. ‘I don’t believe in that. Just recharging the batteries.
Meanwhile I’ve written a couple of new poems.’
‘Cool.’
When Florence had concluded the private reading of her new poems, Felicity said ‘Wow!’ and shook her head. Then she glanced at her watch. She apologised for having to rush off but she needed to collect her daughter from crèche because her mum was busy with a charity function in town. ‘See you soon.’ ‘Take care.’ The two friends gave each other a peck on the cheek.
Florence had a few hours to kill before her own mother was due to arrive. They had arranged to go out for dinner at a local Indian restaurant, together with the latest man in her mum’s life. Florence had not met him yet and knew nothing about him, except that he was a widower and a retired architect. She decided to continue with her filing. She could finish everything easily within thirty or forty minutes, with heaps of time
left over to tidy the apartment, grab a quick shower and take in the evening news on TV. She assumed that her mother would turn up with new beau in tow – or perhaps the plan was to meet him in the restaurant.
Within forty-five minutes the filing was done. Florence stretched and stood up. Her back was a bit sore but she was glad she’d finished everything tonight, before going out, before the weekend. Tomorrow she might be in the right mood to take up the novel again – she had always found Saturdays conducive. Before heading for the bathroom, she couldn’t resist tugging at one of the drawers again (how heavy they were now), just to be able to ease it back and receive, by way of reward, that dependable click-and-pthunk.
The restaurant was practically empty when Florence and her mother walked in. Almost at once, a grey-haired gentleman in a corner by the window stood up and waved to them. The two women picked their way across the obstacle course of tables and chairs, and the introductions were promptly accomplished. The man, whose name was Judd (though Florence thought he looked nothing like a Judd), wore a dark-blue suit
and seemed quite amicable.
‘Your mum tells me you’re a writer. You’re working on a novel, and you write poems too, I believe.’
‘From time to time.’
‘Have you published any?’
‘Here and there – mostly in literary magazines.’
‘Last year Flo won a prize for one of her poems,’ her mother observed.
Judd raised his eyebrows, tilted his full head of thick ashen hair. His eyes were large and dark, with generous lashes. There was a kind of moistness – no, a mistiness – about his features, which made him appear younger than his age.
‘Very nice,’ he smiled. ‘And Florence, if I may ask you: what are some of your themes?’
Florence was uncomfortable talking about her poetry, especially with a stranger who knew nothing about it. ‘Oh, you know,’ she replied. ‘All different things – people, events. Life in general, I guess.’
‘I wrote poems too, once,’ Judd offered. ‘Years ago, when I was a student.’
After each utterance Judd would purse his lips and produce a soft plucking sound. Oddly, the mannerism reminded Florence of the cabinet drawers’ click-and-pthunk. She wasn’t sure, though, whether she found his version particularly reassuring.
‘Really?’
‘Yes. But I’m afraid they weren’t much good. Eventually I realised my talents lay in other directions.’
The dinner progressed pleasantly enough. The food was up to the restaurant’s usual middling standard, and the three diners made short work of the bottle of shiraz Judd had brought. Mercifully, the conversation had quickly moved away from Florence’s writing, for Judd seemed capable of discussing almost any subject. He had strong opinions about urban design, and even stronger ones on world affairs. There were certain
topics that Florence was reluctant to pursue, fearful that a too-frank exchange of views might grow over-vigorous and sully the ambience. But her mother kept steering the discussion to relatively safe subjects (as if she too sensed the danger). After coffee and sweets, when Judd suddenly mentioned the latest disturbances in the Middle East, Florence excused herself to go to the bathroom. When she returned, Judd and her mother were hovering above the table, half-chatting and half-waiting, ready to call it a night.
Next morning at nine o’clock Felicity phoned. Florence had been
about to settle down to some serious writing, so she was mildly irritated. Her friend didn’t usually ring on weekends.
‘Guess what!’ Felicity said.
‘You’re pregnant?’
‘Don’t be silly.’ There was a brief pause. ‘You won’t believe this!’
‘I give up – tell me.’
‘Well...’
‘Are going to tell me or not?’
‘Are you sitting down? ... Brent and I just got engaged!’
Try as she might, Florence couldn’t write that morning. It was not because she found Felicity’s happy news distracting – though it was a shock, for the two had only met a month ago. There was something else, something on which she couldn’t quite put her finger (she disliked dangling prepositions). Florence was restless, kept leaving her desk, or she fiddled absently with her cabinet drawers, seeking the reassurance of yesterday’s click-and-pthunk.It was after eleven when her mother rang. She sounded subdued.
‘Guess what?’ she said.
Florence sighed. ‘You’ve broken up with Judd.’
‘Why... how did you know?’
‘I had a feeling – just now, just as you rang. What happened?’
‘Oh well, I guess we weren’t right for each other after all. He turned out to be a bit of a bigot. I started to realise in the restaurant. When you went to the Ladies we had this stupid argument. I couldn’t sleep all night. This morning I called him up and told him a thing or two.’
Florence spent the early afternoon moping about the apartment.
Later she inspected the fruits of her filing marathon of the day before. She worked the drawers back and forth, examined the contents of the folders, altered their order here and there. The click-and-pthunk had begun to annoy her; it was sounding more like a creak-and-clunk again. She tried to recapture yesterday’s hard-won satisfaction with the noise, its sense of reassuring predictability. Why did such things obsess her? Florence wanted properly to understand (she detested split infinitives) why she was so bothered by the creak-and-clunk – and why it should
have worried her in the first place. She remembered her conversation with the sales assistant.
Tonight she would take in a movie. Tomorrow she would get up early, try to write. First thing Monday morning she would telephone the store. She would ask them to explain how on earth the creak-and-clunk was a ‘new security feature’! But this time she would ask straight off for the manager.
ALEX SKOVRON is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently The Man and the Map(2003), and a prose novella, The Poet (2005). A volume of prose-poems, Autographs, is forthcoming. He was born in Poland, arrived in Australia aged nine, grew up in Sydney, and now lives in Melbourne.
The Foxhole
The dam was dry; just a muddy little patch in the bottom of a depression. The mud buckled. Something humped up beneath it, trying to break through. Diamonded with ochre mud and dried clay, it thrashed its way out into the air, writhing and flexing, coiling and uncoiling itself, shedding flaky scales. Then it set off purposefully, heading over the crumbling dam wall and into the bush, sliding over deep, crackling leaf litter.
‘Bring your awareness back to the room.’ Yvonne’s gentle voice drew me up. Now the glittering serpent was coiling around and among the wooden bearers supporting the white weatherboard schoolhouse.
‘Open your eyes.’
Dusk had come while we meditated in the big airy room. Yvonne’s candle glimmered, animating the shadows. Beyond the tall windows, white cockatoos cavorted in great swags of red-berried cotoneaster, making the most of the last of the light.
Meditation’s like fishing – you never know what you’re going to pull up. Sometimes I feel like a hooked fish myself, a hooked fish that only stops struggling when I meditate. I never slept well after what happened at the dam. The doctor wanted me to take tablets, but Aunty said tablets make you sick. My neighbour suggested I come to Yvonne’s meditation group, and since the schoolhouse is just down the road from my place, I
thought I might as well try it. I’ve been coming for three years now. It’s still called the schoolhouse although it’s a long time since we children chanted our tables here. Three threes are nine, three fours are twelve, three fives are fifteen... We had water in a jam jar and a rag to clean our slates.I didn’t know that snake was there all the time, buried under the mud. I know what it means. It’s come to remind me of something I need to do. I’ve been putting it off for a long time. While Aunty was still alive, I told myself I had an excuse.
Up on Butterman’s Track looking over towards Sugarloaf and Kinglake, there’s a place where two hills fold into each other. Grandpa cleared those hills, and planted the two windbreaks of towering cypress that march up over their curves. The dam lies below them. Green and white arum lilies used to bloom there in spring, and golden wattle and pink and white wild plum trees scattered their blossom on the dark water. The bush embraced it and troupes of little finches and wrens chattered in the sheltering branches. Tiny orchids and daisies embroidered the earth. It was my favourite place for dreaming.On the first hot summer days electric-blue dragonflies zoomed over the surface of the water. I jumped off the wooden plank that hung out over the dam, shattering the floating clouds, plunging into murky depths. I opened my eyes and saw sunlight shining through brown translucent water like the dim light in stone cathedrals, flecks and sparks of gold and blue filtered through orbs of Venetian glass. Snoozing in the sun on the silty shore, I dreamed I was in ancient Mesopotamia. My skin was soft and a big black fish nosed in the mud and nibbled my
toes with his tiny teeth.
Reeds used to fringe the dam, but now they choke it. Now dams look like wounds in the earth to me. The bush tries to close around them, and bulrushes try to form scabs. Dams break the flow of the water that used to trickle as it liked, skeining over rocks into quiet ferny hollows, through reedy soaks into creeks and rivers. Dams are like a string of rosary beads that tell the same story over and over.
Aunty was Grandpa’s only daughter. There were four sons, but only the youngest was still around, and he wasn’t any use on the farm. Harry was what we used to call mongoloid. He was named after Grandpa’s brother who’d been killed at Pozières on the Somme the year before, but Grandpa would never have done that if he’d known what Harry was going to be like. Aunty told me that Grandpa said Harry couldn’t be his son, that Grandma must have gone with someone else. She said Harry used to try to follow her and the other kids to school, but they’d
run away from him and drag shut the heavy old wooden gate onto the track. He’d hang over it bawling and blubbering. After a while he’d wander off and find some ants to watch, or help Grandma carry in wood or look for eggs.
Harry and I felt safe with Aunty. We avoided Grandpa. Grandma was already losing her memory when I was born. When I was born my mother bled and bled, all the hessian bags in the shed weren’t enough to mop it all up, Aunty said, and the doctor couldn’t do anything. The next month the news came that my father, Grandpa’s third son, was among the first killed at Tobruk.
So Aunty raised me. She had to look after Grandma too.
‘You can’t expect me to clean her up, I’ve got the farm to run,’ Grandpa would complain. And he’d scrape his chair back from the table, pull on his boots, and go back to work.
Mrs B used to call in sometimes, her bright eyes darting all over the place.
‘How are you getting on, Lizzie? Such bad luck your family’s had. Now you know I’m just down the road if you ever need me.’
‘That old dung beetle. Don’t you ever tell her anything,’ Aunty said after she’d gone.
Aunty had a hard way of talking, although she was kind to Harry and me.
Grandpa taught her to drive over injured animals and birds on the road. She’d aim the truck straight at them and we’d go over them with a lurch and a thud. If it was too big, like a wombat or a kangaroo, she’d get out a spanner and whack them over the head and haul them to the side of the road. If she found a baby in a pouch she’d kill that too. It was a mercy, she said.
As soon as I could walk, Aunty let me roam around in the bush, so long as Harry was with me. I always called him Harry, I never called him uncle. He always smelt a bit musty, like old horse blankets. He knew the bush inside out, after thirty-odd years of sitting in it, looking at it, probing the dense fibrous bark of the stringybarks and the lichened rocks with his stubby fingers. In spring, he loved tickling the tiny pale pink flowers of the trigger plants with a twig to make them pounce. He was
like a greenhood orchid with his bent head, hidden in the kindly bush.
Harry loved foxes. They seemed to know that; they had no fear of him. Once, one morning in late winter, we’d taken shelter from a misty rain under the drooping branches of an old cherry ballart. It felt like a snug and intimate cave with the powdery earth quite dry beneath us. The air was fresh and spicy. The rain lifted, and the washed light garlanded the bush in a vast spider’s web. A young fox trotted past, propped when it saw us, and then slowly circled our tree, twice, its topaz eyes intent and observant in its neat head, raindrops shining in the flame of its brush. Curious. Free. We held our breath.
‘I wish it would play with me,’ Harry whispered, but the fox dodged off into the bush.
We knew better than to tell Aunty.
‘I’ll shoot it if I see it,’ she would have said.
Harry was lonely when I started school. He’d hang over the gate but he didn’t bawl anymore. He’d watch me out of sight as I followed the dusty track the two miles to the schoolhouse, the same schoolhouse that Aunty and her other brothers had gone to. That winter Grandpa and Grandma died of pneumonia, one after the other. Grandpa went first. I told Aunty that Grandma was cold at night without him, but Aunty just said she was used to the cold. Our house on the hill was often islanded by fog that winter, cut off from the world by grey treed seas.
Now Aunty had all the farm work to do and Harry was lonelier than ever until Mrs B’s son Andrew started to come and knock around with him. We hadn’t seen much of Mrs B since Andrew had come home maimed from the war. People said he used to be very handsome, but that was before I knew him.
Harry didn’t seem to mind the way Andrew looked, as if his face had been melted and pushed sideways. He talked in a rattling whisper out of a hole.
‘Go on, have a puff,’ he’d croak, proffering a rollie, but Harry didn’t like the smell. Andrew spent ages practising how to load and shoot his rifle using just his remaining left arm. Harry set up jam tins and bits of wood as targets for him. It was something to do during the long days.
The year I turned ten, a vixen made her home in the dam wall, where burgan obscured the entrance to the den. The first time Harry saw her, she was eating ripe blackberries from the bushes that were starting to choke the gully. The farm was starting to run down. Aunty couldn’t keep up with all the work. Harry watched the fox as she made her way into her hole; he knew she would eventually have her babies in there. It was our secret. Every morning when I left for school, he’d head
down to the dam. Andrew wouldn’t come before mid-morning and by that time Harry was back up at the house, doing little jobs for Aunty or just mooning about.
The first time the cubs appeared, he couldn’t wait to tell me.
‘Come down with me tomorrow, go on, go on!’ he stuttered.
So before I left for school the next day we sat and watched the little roly-poly balls of fur tumbling about and cuffing each other on the far dam wall in the early morning sunshine, guarded by their mother. Harry beamed and clamped his hands over his mouth so he wouldn’t laugh and scare them away. He loved his fox family. When we sat on the dark verandah at night with the moonlit hill plunging down before us, I could see by his curved mouth that he was dreaming about the cubs and their mother curled up safe and warm in the blackness of their den.
But in the end I couldn’t protect him. That day, I was about half a mile along the track to school when I saw Andrew approaching, carrying his rifle. He was never so early as a rule. We stopped to greet each other.
‘We’re doing a bit of fox-hunting today,’ he said in his broken voice.
‘Where?’ I asked.
‘Down at the dam.’
I don’t know how he found out. Maybe Harry couldn’t help himself.
Maybe Aunty saw scats and told him.
‘But Harry loves those foxes.’
‘Harry won’t know who did it.’
‘But he’ll be there now.’
‘I’ll tell him I won’t hurt them. He’ll forget soon enough.’
As soon as he’d disappeared around the bend I cut into the bush,
following the kangaroo paths, heading for the dam. But it was longer that way, and as I gasped up the gully towards it, stumbling and tripping, I could see Harry and Andrew already sitting side by side in the distance. Harry looked excited and happy. He pointed – the vixen must have emerged cautiously into the sunshine. His head was turned away from Andrew, so he didn’t see Andrew raising his rifle.
I screamed. ‘Andrew! No!’
If only I’d kept my mouth shut.
Harry lurched around. He shoved Andrew, who toppled onto his
armless side and struggled like a beetle as Harry jumped to his feet, snatched the rifle and shoved it into that ruined face. He was shouting something. The bush froze in shock as the gun discharged. I kept running until I reached Harry.
He was whimpering, ‘He promised, he promised he wouldn’t hurt it.’
We stared at Andrew’s motionless body and bloody head.
I grabbed the rifle and laboured up the hill, my head and lungs
exploding, following the deep shade of the cypresses to the house, and burst into the kitchen, crying.
‘Aunty! Aunty! Harry’s shot Andrew down at the dam.’
Aunty was washing the dishes and listening to the radio. She wiped her hands, took the rifle from me, and then took me back down to the dam while I sobbed out what had happened. She didn’t say a word. Harry was still wailing beside Andrew’s body. He didn’t look at us. Aunty bent over Andrew and saw that he was dead. Then she stepped quickly behind Harry, put the rifle to the nape of his neck and pulled the trigger. Harry’s dumpy body pitched forward onto the yellow clay that was soon
patterned with trickling red rivulets. Aunty took off her cardigan and carefully wiped the rifle. Then, with her hands wrapped in the wool, she slid the rifle under Andrew’s outstretched hand. There were no footprints on the hard dry earth. She still didn’t say a word. The bush was silent. Dumb, I followed her back up to the house. Then she made me sit down and drink a cup of sugary tea.
‘You must never tell anyone,’ she said.
‘We’ll say that we found them down there – that I found them down there. I’ll say that you were home from school because you were poorly. You were in bed. You didn’t see anything. Andrew shot Harry first and then shot himself, that’s what it will look like. It’s for the best. Harry would have a dreadful time in jail, or in an asylum. They’d never let him stay here.’
Then we got into the truck and drove to the police station twenty miles away. Aunty got me to repeat the story several times on the way, but she didn’t need to. Everyone was shocked, but no one seemed to think it was strange. Everyone seemed to understand how and why such a tragic thing had happened.
The following year Aunty and I moved into town and the farm was sold. All these years I never told anyone. Poor Mrs B died believing that her son was a murderer, but Andrew’s nieces and nephews and the rest of the family should know the truth. Aunty always said never to tell anyone. But she’s dead now. That snake came up out of the earth and down to the schoolhouse to wake me up and remind me that there was
something I needed to do.
HELEN VERITY HEWITT is a Melbourne writer and teacher. ‘The Foxhole’ won the 2007 Alan Marshall Short Story Award – Local Writers’ Section.
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