We publish quality short stories, poetry, extracts from forthcoming novels, and articles and essays on topics of social, environmental and cultural significance.ISSUE NO. 119
SUMMER 2009/2010
FICTION
The Sea Lovers
‘I love Ewan McGregor!’ Hannah cried as the Elephant Love Medley from Moulin Rouge began. ‘I wish he’d leave his wife and marry me!’
No one spoke. No one had said anything much for days. Hannah turned up the volume.
Evelyn sat in the back, staring at Rick’s neck as he drove. She
concentrated on her breathing and on not feeling anything.
It was windy when they pulled up in the carpark at Suicides Beach.
Behind the open boot of the station wagon, they pulled on their wetsuits. The cold air snapped at their bare skin.
Hannah was chatty with tension. ‘My God, check out those waves! I hope they don’t cancel it.’
Rick nodded, scarcely looking at her.
Evelyn waited for him to zip up her suit, facing the wind so it blew her hair away from her face. She wiped sunscreen over her cheeks, reading the numberplates of the cars around them. Most were from Western Australia, but there were a few from New South Wales. She figured most interstate competitors would have flown instead of driving a beaten-up Ford across the country.
‘How’re you feeling, Ev?’ Hannah asked. ‘Nervous?’
Evelyn ignored her.
‘For God’s sake, Evelyn!’
She picked up her board and strode down to the sand.
It was the end of their three-week drive from the Pacific to the Indian, a holiday to celebrate the end of uni. In the few days left before the competition, they drove around the southwest, surfing and sightseeing. At Elephant Rocks near Denmark, Hannah clambered down to the rocks surging from the sea. She sat on a formation shaped like an elephant, so that she seemed to be riding on its neck. She slapped her backside, bouncing up and down, and Rick snorted with laughter. Evelyn wandered away. There was a pungent smell wafting about; she traced it to a white, star-shaped flower.
‘What is it?’ she asked Rick as he came to stand beside her. His parents owned a nursery in Byron Bay and he worked there during the holidays, on long weekends, and while studying for his exams. He stepped closer, breathing in Evelyn’s scent of sandalwood and sweat. The wind had parted her chestnut hair at the neck, exposing her skin. He wanted to touch the vulnerable spot, but stopped himself.
‘It’s a sticky tailflower. See, the leaves are sticky.’
Hannah bounded up behind them, her blue eyes sharp and alert. ‘What’s going on?’
‘We’re having a look at this flower.’
‘Pong! It smells like my twat!’
Rick and Evelyn walked along the sandy trail back to the car, Hannah following. It was the formation they used when they swam out to the waves: an inverted isosceles triangle with Rick and Evelyn in front, Hannah behind.
In Busselton they checked into a youth hostel, then drove to Wonnerup House where some Europeans, the Laymans, had settled in the 1830s. It was a sunny day, the lawns surrounding the buildings smooth and glossy. They read the laminated information brochure. There had been a massacre of Aborigines, it said, in retaliation for the landowner’s murder.
‘Poachers,’ Evelyn said absently.
‘Who? The Aborigines or the whites?’ asked Hannah.
‘The Laymans, of course.’ Irritated, Evelyn headed across the paddock to the stables.
At lunch they sat on the soft green lawn and unpacked baguettes. Rick joked and laughed with Hannah. Evelyn felt unsettled and wondered if she was getting her period.
When they’d eaten the baguettes, they climbed back into the car. They drove past stands of big, gnarled eucalypts.
‘They’re called tuarts,’ Rick said. ‘Aren’t they grand?’
‘Oh, they are grand,’ Hannah mimicked with a posh accent. Rick smiled and Evelyn noticed the tension at the sides of his mouth. She wasn’t surprised; it wasn’t his kind of humour.
‘What’s with all the lilies?’ Evelyn asked. The white flowers dotted the grass beneath the trees, stretching for kilometres.
‘They’re arum lilies, and they’re impossible to get rid of. If you pull them out of the ground, it disturbs the mother bulb and they proliferate. It’s a weird mechanism, all this activity in response to stress.’
He stopped the car and they clambered out. A breeze stroked the long grass and the lilies nodded heavily. Evelyn felt chilly in the tuarts’ shadows. She wanted to leave immediately, but Hannah was posing for Rick’s camera, a lily stem between her teeth. Evelyn sought the small patches of sunlight, trying to remember if she’d packed tampons.
The waves were high and savage, like mouths opening and closing. Hannah and Evelyn were among the first competitors. Evelyn watched as Hannah twisted her board up and down the waves, outwitting them for a long time, until one gracefully closed over her.
Rick stood further back on the shore, when ordinarily he would have been at Evelyn’s side. She resisted the urge to turn and seek him among the crowd. She was sick of love throbbing inside her like a clot.
They drove to Margaret River and found a café in the main street. Evelyn ordered the coffee while Rick and Hannah found a seat. The stocky man behind the counter had laughter lines around his eyes. As he took her money, Evelyn asked, ‘That place Wonnerup, that’s near here –what’s the name mean?’
‘Wonnerup?’ He punched the keys of the cash register. ‘It’s Aboriginal. Means “place of the wonna”, I think.’
‘What’s a wonna?’
‘An Aboriginal woman’s digging stick. They found a whole lot of skulls there once. The ladies must’ve had it in for each other.’ He smiled, tipping change into her hand.
She turned back to the table, wondering if it had been ghosts in the grass that caused her discomfort. Rick was by the window, watching people pass by in the street; she loved his distant, crumpled look. Hannah had opened a newspaper, but her eyes were on Rick. She was wired again. Evelyn saw it in the tautness of her body and in her thin-lipped smile.
‘Look at this,’ Hannah said as Evelyn slid into the seat beside Rick. For emphasis, she shook the paper, a week-old copy of The Sydney Morning Herald with the crumbling World Trade Centre spread across the front. ‘The American President can’t understand why anyone would want to attack America. What a dope.’
Hannah hadn’t noticed that her voice was too loud for the small café. At any other time, Evelyn would have told Hannah to shut up, but she didn’t feel like a fight. Their coffees arrived. She stirred sugar into her latte and drank it too quickly. It made her nauseous. She laid her head on the table and closed her eyes. Rick reached across and stroked her hair. She sighed, feeling better immediately.
Rick and Hannah stood on the shore, their arms touching. They watched Evelyn watching the wave.
‘Christ, she can’t manage that, can she?’ Hannah asked.
Rick didn’t answer. The wave was huge, gathering handfuls of water to itself. His stomach turned. Of the three of them, Evelyn was the most skilful, the most daring.
Hannah felt Rick’s muscles flex as he folded his arms. She’d met him through their mathematics course at uni. They always seemed to end up sitting next to one another in the lecture hall, so Rick invited her to lunch. For an hour, Hannah had delighted in his humour, intelligence and large brown eyes. She was starting to think she’d found the other half of her life’s equation, when Evelyn arrived. The same height as Rick, Evelyn was tanned, her body hard and lean. She held herself with a composure that came, Hannah was to find, in her effortless confidence.
‘Hannah, this is my girlfriend, Evelyn. She’s studying Arts.’
‘The degree’s for mum and dad,’ Evelyn said. ‘I only want to surf.’
Hannah couldn’t tell if she was joking or not. She shook Evelyn’s hand and found her grip firm, her gaze steady.
Then Rick’s arm circled Evelyn’s waist and the numbers jumbled. Ever since that day, Hannah had been figuring out how to make them work.
Evelyn kicked towards the wave. The wind was ferocious, but she beat against it steadily and strongly. Her head was no longer crammed with thoughts of Rick; there was only the coldness of her bare feet, her hands slicing through the water, the salt stinging her bitten lip. She pushed herself up, her toes gripping the board, her body poised. She tipped the board down the throat of the wave.
Rick watched sunlight hit the arc of water. It was turquoise, magnificent, glinting with fish. Despite his fear, he was envious. He knew that she’d win and want to go to America, just as he knew she wouldn’t want to leave him behind.
There had been long summer evenings on her verandah smoking dope, giggling, and holding hands lightly while their parents played tennis on the town courts. Often, he’d pluck a passionfruit flower from the vine hanging over the railing and push it behind her ear, then kiss her delicately on the lips. In the morning her bedroom reeked of marijuana and mint air-freshener. They made love slowly and sleepily, until Evelyn woke up properly and bit him sharply on the shoulder. He was saturated with love for her; he always had been.
They’d grown up a street apart in Byron Bay. Their parents were friends and, whenever they met for barbecues, he and Evelyn would kick a football, the air laden with heat and scents of frangipani and frying meat. They’d begun surfing seriously when they were ten. First it was every weekend with the Surf Club, then every afternoon in summer and, zippered into wetsuits, in winter.
Their first kiss had been in the dunes. The wind was frisky, whipping up the sand and making the wiregrass bristle. They were clumsy, sand and hair getting into their mouths. It made them laugh until Evelyn, suddenly serious, pulled Rick down. Her hands searched and explored him with an intensity that was surprising, but which, later, he always keenly anticipated.
They hadn’t intended to go to the same university in Sydney, but when they found their offers in the newspaper, they laughed. It wasn’t unexpected; they’d started finishing each other’s sentences.
In Sydney they rented a flat in Maroubra. Mornings came to mean the smell of salt, the slap of cold water and Evelyn floating on a board beside him, smiling.
Evelyn’s pulse rushed as she felt the strength of the wave in the sliding, pulling water. The sea clawed, longing to get her under, but she resisted. Evelyn liked this kind of anger – it was something to contend with – unlike Hannah’s, which you had to learn to bear.
‘You’ll win, all right,’ Rick said as they walked out of the sea at Maroubra, the morning before they left to drive across the country. ‘You’ll make it to the States soon.’
‘I’m that good, am I?’ she replied cheekily, turning to him.
‘Yeah.’ He dropped his board, cupped her cheeks with his wet hands, and kissed her.
Evelyn pushed away the memory of his tongue touching the inside of her mouth. She crouched lower on the board, the wind thrusting her through the tunnel of water.
There were cheers when she waded into the shore. She smiled, expecting Rick to rush from the crowd to embrace her, as he always did. When he didn’t appear, she remembered Hannah, and her shoulders sagged.
Hannah, who had a thing for lighthouses, had wanted to visit the model at Cape Naturaliste. By the time they’d climbed to the top of the lighthouse and down again, Evelyn was too tired to move. She collapsed on a piece of grass by the entrance while Rick and Hannah set off on a walk around the Cape.
‘We won’t be long,’ Rick said. ‘Maybe an hour or so.’
‘We might see whales!’ Hannah cried.
Evelyn smiled and lay back in the sun. She slept for a while, then sat up, waiting for them. The sun dropped towards the sea and it became cold. When they appeared from the bushes smothering the track, they were holding hands.
They saw her face and their fingers untangled. Hannah looked embarrassed. Rick’s expression was blank.
Evelyn realised her restlessness hadn’t been premenstrual at all. She pushed herself up, brushed grass from her palms and walked back to the car. She sensed Rick and Hannah draw together as she walked away, like water closing in the wake of a ship.
The sea was furious as Rick paddled out. Ordinarily, he relished the vagaries of its tricks and temper, but today it irritated him. Even as he listened to the sloshing and sucking around him and watched the waves arching ahead, Hannah and Evelyn intruded.
Hannah, small and compact, with her short tufty hair and quick movements, had a sharp wit, but a terrible temper. She got angry about a lot of things and went off like a firecracker.
He’d never known Evelyn to ignite. Hannah had once half-jokingly referred to her as an integer, so whole and self-contained that she never needed anyone else, but Rick disagreed. It was more that she was so deep she was impossible to define, even though separate elements of her personality were clear to him.
Her endurance impressed him most. She’d always lasted longer in the water, so that when he waded out to the shore, his limbs aching, he’d turn to watch her. It was then that he imagined tidying up at the end of the day at the nursery in Byron, watering the palms, wheeling the display pots back inside, misting the orchids and picking dead leaves from the ferns, then driving to the beach to join her in the surf. When the light faded they would rinse their boards and head home, languid with exhaustion and contentment.
He never mentioned these reveries to her; he sensed they would be received with a tender, but bemused, smile. All she could think of was America. Yet he knew that if he followed her, he’d lose himself. He wanted to go back to his family’s nursery, not serve in an American burger joint while she surfed.
He blinked, realising he’d been on autopilot. A wave was rearing before him. His mouth dried as he struggled to turn his board, but it was too late.
Evelyn glanced at the officials behind her. The wind brought snatches of their conversation. ‘Cancel... getting too dangerous,’ she heard. She watched Rick swimming out to meet the waves. There was too much force whirling about him. She dug her feet into the sand, sensing he wasn’t strong enough to master it.
When the sea pulled the board out from under his feet, Evelyn stared so hard her eyes dried. After a few minutes, she saw the leaf shape of his board, but he didn’t come up with it.
‘Get the ambos!’ she screamed, sprinting into the water.
Evelyn had woken from this dream on thousands of nights. She fought with the sea as she swam, terror pouring adrenaline into her muscles. She dived beneath white, snarling foam, waiting for bleary light to shine through the surface and signal an all-clear.
She’d forgotten the sea could be malicious; it had been a lover for so long. She’d always relished the shock of water against her shins, the way it made her nipples erect, the crackle of foam rushing out of her ears and the surprise of rough kelp wrapping about her ankles.
At last she saw the sea rolling his limp figure. She propelled through the water, her heart about to burst.
The board was still attached to his wrist. She tried to pull it closer so she could manoeuvre him onto it, but the sea was too rough, slapping about them. A wave slammed into the back of her head. She held onto Rick’s arm, but sea’s grip was tighter. It squeezed the air from her lungs and forced her down to the sea floor. The sides of her vision grew dark; she couldn’t see where the surface was.
She’d had a dream, once, that Rick was Jesus. It was true: no one could get enough of him, least of all her, even though she was with him all the time. Perhaps she should have done more, said more, been more passionate, but there hadn’t seemed to be any need.
The sea pushed another fistful of water down her throat. It was time to let go.
‘What the hell did you think you were doing?’ Evelyn spluttered into consciousness. She rubbed her stinging eyes, her chest a cavity of pain. They were on a lifeboat, the sea chucking itself at them in fury.
‘We could’ve had two dead bodies!’ A bald man in a lifejacket glared at her.
‘Shut up, Tom!’ shouted a woman at the rudder.
Evelyn sat up, sparks shooting along her spine. She saw Rick next to her, another man in a lifejacket pumping at his lungs.
‘Is he all right?’
‘Not yet, he isn’t.’
Evelyn struggled towards him, but the bald man held her back. His face softened with concern.
‘Lie down, love, you’ve gone green.’
‘Rick!’ Evelyn called, and vomited.
After a few days, the doctor moved Rick from intensive care to the general ward. It was the first time Evelyn was allowed to be close to him after they’d been taken from the ambulance. The ward was dark but for the lamps above each bed, glowing like tiny halos. One patient, at the far end of the ward, was reading through her insomnia.
Rick slept with his back turned to her. Evelyn watched his shoulders rising and falling. She’d loved walking behind him, admiring the wedge shape made by those shoulders and his torso. Apparently this was to be Hannah’s privilege now.
Evelyn had done nothing but think, for these past few days and nights as she waited for Rick to mend, about why he had pulled away from her.
No satisfactory answer had presented itself, other than the appeal of Hannah’s mediocrity.
Rick rolled onto his back, flinging out his hand. Evelyn took it and stroked his arm, her thumb brushing against the grain of his hairs. There was no point in asking him, she thought sadly. She had not been enough, and that was all there was to it. She touched his strong fingers with their neat, clipped nails. Or perhaps she had been too much.
Evelyn gazed at Rick’s face, noticing tears seeping from beneath his lids. She brought his hand to her lips, and kissed it.
Rick leaned against the bonnet of the car, waiting for Hannah to come in from the surf so they could begin the drive back to Sydney. She was a nimble thing – not as strong as himself or Evelyn, they’d always agreed – but quick to find the right waves and ride them. Rick banged the heel of his hand against the worn, dented bonnet. He had to stop thinking of the word ‘they’.
Hannah floated on her board, watching the waves form. It was the mathematics of surfing that she liked most; the shapes made by the breakers, the speed at which she was travelling, the point at which a wave crested. The sea was full of algorithms.
She twisted around to see Rick. He stared at the ground, his head lowered. Evelyn had left a week ago, refusing to travel back across the country with them. Rick called her a taxi for the airport and walked her to the road. When he came back his face was white, and he didn’t respond when Hannah kissed his cheek.
‘Have we got time for one last surf?’ she asked as they packed their things at the hostel.
He nodded distantly.
When they rolled into the empty carpark and Hannah skipped down to the shore, he gazed steadfastly at the horizon.
Hannah flattened herself on her board; a fine wave was curving out of the sea. She began paddling towards it.
Rick had told her, as they walked around the rocky headland of Cape Naturaliste, that things were finished with Evelyn. ‘She loves surfing more than she loves me,’ he’d said.
Hannah studied him, calculating. She adored his brown eyes, his dirty blonde hair, the way he often stared into the distance, thinking. She had thought that you couldn’t interrupt a relationship that had started in childhood, but perhaps all it took was rearrangement. Like shifting the sides of a triangle.
The wave was almost perfect. Hannah stood up and caught it, delighting in the equations of velocity that whirled about her.
A fortnight later, Evelyn, who’d been staying with a friend, met Rick in a Thai restaurant in Kingsford. They sat silently, without appetite, picking at their tofu and noodles.
‘Rick?’
‘Mmmm?’
‘I’m moving my stuff out. I’ve found somewhere to live.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t be dumb.’ She twisted noodles around her chopsticks, sucked them up and wiped sauce from her lips. ‘Hannah will move in.’
‘Have you asked her?’
‘No, but I’m sure she’d like to.’ Evelyn stabbed at her tofu.
‘Where’s your place?’
‘Not in Maroubra. A different beach.’
‘Will we still surf together?’
‘No. Hannah can do that with you.’
He sighed. ‘Why don’t you ever get angry?’
‘I do. I just don’t show it.’
‘Are you angry now?’
‘You bet.’
He stared at her. Even Hannah’s little explosions, which scattered words like shrapnel, were easier to understand than this.
‘I thought I knew everything about you,’ he said. He poked at his food, frowning. The white paper tablecloth was stained with florets of sauce. It occurred to him that Evelyn’s fury, like the lilies under the trees at Wonnerup, would help her thrive and flourish for years. He glanced up and found her regarding him.
‘Likewise,’ she replied softly. ‘I thought you loved me.’
Rick grabbed his wallet, a flush breaking across his collarbones. He left too much money for the bill.
A gust of evening air brushed Evelyn’s face as he stepped out the door. She watched him cross the street and turn the corner, leaving her sight. For a moment she felt bereft, but then her anger resurged, as steady and persistent as an incoming tide.
JESSICA WHITE grew up in northwest NSW. In 2008 she was named Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist for her first novel, A Curious Intimacy. At the London Consortium, she recently completed her Phd, a fictocritical exploration of writing and loss. She is working on her second novel, Entitlement.
A Short History of the Boy
Prologue
There is a corner in the world, a place that is just a bend in the river that swings out deep and slow and returns shallow and fast and sleek over the oily stones on the river bed. It is a small place suited for a small boy.
In summer when they shut the dam gates further up the valley and the water level drops, half the river bed on the inside of the bend is a beach of flat stones excellent for throwing at the flowing water. Watching them skip across the surface of the water is a source of joy for him, so that sometimes he stands for half an hour and throws stones at the river.
He comes down to the river with his fishing rod, a good supply of earthworms in an old tin can and the transistor radio, the dog and sometimes the horse. As he walks, the light green Jarvis Walker rod flexes with every step under the weight of the sinkers on the line near the tip and from the motion imparted by the swaying of his arm.
According to his father, who knows these things, the paddock he is crossing is rich river soil, some of the best tobacco-growing soil in the district. The thought of his father awakens a wave of affection in him. His heart always skips at the sound of his father’s car slowing down at the gate, then of rubber tyres on gravel. His father is often tired and dirty with tobacco tar and plant debris and dried mud on his arms and legs. His mother looks young, is nine years younger than his father. She looks much younger and he feels sorry for the older man.
One
Early in the morning he digs for earthworms around behind the outdoor dunny then heads off on foot, quietly determined, patient at the slog of walking, anticipating the arrival at the river bank and the tense slab of slippery muscle wound up and ready to spring that is a live trout in your hand.
On the river bank he lies in the sun and stares at the clouds as they drift secretly across the sky. They move so slowly it’s only because he watches them for a long time that he knows they’re changing shape. He stares at the clouds entirely and forever. The horse is tethered in the shade of a nearby tree and sleeps with one fetlock poised at rest. The dog is running around, flitting between bushes, nose to the ground, smelling rabbit and people and bird, as well as fish where others have caught and gutted trout and redfin on the bank.
The fishing line is in the river and he watches it intently. The tip of the rod dips occasionally.
When he tires of the rod he lies back and lets the inside of him leave the earth and float up into the sky to be among the clouds. On hot days his head hums with the sun and the silence, and the occasional green March fly that stings if given a chance. Sometimes he sees a brown snake in the grass or swimming in the river. March flies, snakes, a dog, a horse, a fishing line.
Two
He learns to swim at this river bend by rolling his arms over like the swimmers he has seen on television, but touching the gravel bottom on the way through for reassurance, until one day he goes one stroke too far and the bottom isn’t there and his arm swings around again as he gulps air and finds he is afloat and he has one more stroke and then turns his body back towards the bank. A tentative two swimming strokes without touching and he is suspended in the water. Then he tries again, three strokes a few times, then four. Then following the line of the shore, a dozen strokes or so. One day he swims out to the pointy rock in the middle of the deep part of the river and hangs on with one hand while moving his free arm to tread water.
He also swims at the Sicilian Pump. The river near the Sicilian Pump is wide and just deep enough, accessible down a muddy path. He puts on goggles, snorkel and flippers and scoots along the river bed, scraping his stomach along the bottom. After the dam is built the river bed grows green slime that he slips on and the rocks cut his feet.
Three
The boy sits on the river bank and thinks about the Australians, cricket and footy, pale freckly skin, sunken mouths and small chins (an ugly
race according to his mother), names like Mick and Geoff, beer in cans drunk in the shade while leaning against corrugated iron sheds, vomiting. When the tobacco-picking time comes and his father needs workers they drive to the Bonegilla migrant hostel to hire young men recently arrived from Europe. No one in the district ever hires Australian workers.
Australian children run around unwashed and barefoot. Australians eat sheep meat that they also feed to migrants who never forget the smell.
One night he stands outside the town cinema after the picture has finished and everyone has gone home. As he waits for his father to drive into town to pick him up he watches a car drive past. On the back seat is an Australian girl from his school he is in love with. The car stops and an Australian man gets in the back. Twenty minutes later the car returns. The man gets out and another man climbs in.
He thinks about the Catholic nuns who teach him to be wary of happiness and that God might decide to punish him for being less than perfect by taking away his happiness. So when the television guide shows that a film about the life of Jim Bowie will screen he is so happy that he suspects God will not allow him to live to see it. At night, nevertheless, when he turns off the light and rolls over onto his side he sighs as he closes his eyes and says a prayer: Our Father who art in Heaven ...
Four
In an earlier time on some days the boy does not go to school but accompanies his mother to work at Calvert’s Farm in the Dark Woods of Dandongadale. A man in a magic truck collects them and they drive far from home, deeper and deeper into the Dark Woods, along avenues of horned trees that join arms overhead to form a roof. He asks his mother if this is for protection or a trap and she smiles reassuringly. The daylight is dim. He is afraid to look at the sky lest he should see the two weak suns hanging there, the world askew.
At Calvert’s Farm he avoids the witches’ houses and the dilapidated sheds, the snakes that live in the piles of rusty metal, the broken timber fences and bloody nails that whisper to him: Get out get out, the poles strewn on the ground hiding fat white blind larvae, witches’ grubs. He plays within sight of his mother, glancing back nervously at her for reassurance from time to time.
In the paddock next to the working sheds lives Darky, the black Shetland pony. The small boy brings the small horse sugar and carrots and they talk for hours under the weak suns until in the late afternoon the coolness comes with the impending darkness as the witches return home after a day out in the wider world. Then he pats Darky on the neck, caressing his ropey mane, and runs to his mother without looking back. On the ride home in the truck, which he reasons must be witch-proof as they have never been attacked, he falls asleep and dreams of having his own horse one day.
There is mystery and wonder, horses and Brahman bulls, at the annual rodeo too, where a clown in a proper red and white and yellow patchwork clown suit, with a red nose and sad clown eyes, amuses the crowd. His antics also serve to distract the bull and protect the rider who is spreadeagled or stumbling around in the dust getting his bearings after being thrown. The boy sits behind the bottom rail of the fence and asks his mother who the clown is and where he comes from. She says the clown is a poor man who cannot afford proper clothes and lives with his old sick mother in a tiny hut in the hills. She works very hard, long lonely hours, to make him his clothes from pieces of brightly coloured fabric donated by the nuns. This breaks the boy’s heart.
Five
Before the bike he walks everywhere: along the Buffalo River Road, across paddocks, through barbed-wire fences, up and down and over hills, to neighbouring farms, through bush, across the river, along river banks and creek beds, into evil woods and past abandoned sheds.
But right now he’s flying down the hill on the red Malvern Star towards the bridge when he sees the dead thing in the middle of the road. He stops, gets down on his hands and knees and smells the familiar sweetness of freshly killed rabbit. The large semis carrying the huge pine logs on their giant rolling rubber tyres keep coming and as each day passes there is less and less rabbit until finally all that is left is a tiny tuft of grey fur sticking up out of the bitumen, like some weed refusing to die in a desert. The battered bitumen bunny.
He repeats the phrase over and over as he rips along from Dead Rabbit Hill to Johnson’s Bridge. The wheels of the bike zing as he flashes past the Cement Shed where Eugenio and Natalina live, past Bill and Estelle Feldman’s, Gasperotti’s farm and their old house with the rickety bridge over the swollen creek in the back yard, the dirt road to Slaviero’s on the right, the yard where his horse Tinker Bell lived next to Colin’s place, over the creek drain that passes under the road, along the straight now with its Santa Gertrudis cattle-yards, the quarter horse stud, the first houses that he and his parents and brother lived in, with the apricot and plum orchard next door and the horses grazing under the trees, where he sat, high over their heads and fed them as they reached their twitchy chunky spongy lips into the branches looking for the fruit and nuzzling it gently from his hands.
The road rises a little as it curves to the right. He used to run down the hill here dressed as Zorro wearing a black plastic sheet for a cloak and a proper Zorro mask that he bought at the newsagent’s. In a blue Superman cloak the wind against his skin was electric and when he reached top speed he leapt into the air and flew.
Johnson’s bridge is still half a mile away and he pumps his legs hard, stretching to reach the bottom point on each turn of the pedals until the effort makes his thighs burn and go numb and heavy as wooden logs. He reaches the top of the rise and coasts, feeling the brief pain of relief as his legs start to recover, freewheeling so fast down and around the corner that he almost loses control. The front wheel slips off the bitumen and down a couple of inches onto the gravel shoulder. When he tries to steer it back onto the road the wheel refuses, hits the side of the raised surface and rebounds back into the loose dirt. He slows to a wobbly stop.
He fell and badly hurt himself on Dead Rabbit Hill once. He was on the big bike when the front tyre came off the bitumen like it did just now, twisted sideways and threw him arse-over-tit. He landed on the road and skidded on his bare stomach, on the palms of his hands, on forearms, knees and thighs and ripped the nail off his big toe. The bitumen rash burned for days.
The bridge is in sight. He lifts the wheel back onto the bitumen and is back on the bike and back on the road and coasting down and leaning left into the corner before pulling up.
He’s there.
The river rushes between rocks to form a water slide and he rides it. Under the bridge, in very deep water, slow and black, the green grandfather trout of his bad dreams swims past and caresses his leg with the ghostly brush of gentle slime.
On the river bank he watches and lets things happen. He spends four thousand three hundred and twenty-seven hours of his childhood on the river bank.
Epilogue
Night has come on this long fishing day. At the top of the hill a tiny figure stands calling out to him and waving. Behind the figure, yellow light seeps from the house into the dark. The boy is trudging through the paddock and calls back to his father:
Arrivo!
The distant figure, as an instant response to that cry, turns and walks back towards the house.
The boy climbs the hill behind the house. It is steep and he needs to push himself and work hard to keep his balance, juggling fishing rod and tin can and a plastic bag full of hooks and sinkers, a spare reel of line and two small redfin. He sometimes has dreams about falling down this hill which is then always much steeper. The grass is dry and slippery and he zigzags his way up but it is faster than taking the rough paddock road that has been cut diagonally into the hillside two hundred yards away. He arrives at the top and skips past the horse’s corral, the large chook pen, the vegetable garden and the outdoor toilet and heads towards the back verandah. The yellow glow has turned into solid rectangles that illuminate the soft blanket of night wrapping up the house. The dog trots over to the bucket of water under the garden tap for a drink. Clambering onto the verandah the boy can smell his mother’s cooking. She’s heard him and calls out to him to take his shoes off. The boy washes his hands and feet at the tap in the halo of the kitchen light. Inside while his mother is preparing crumbed veal in tomato, with a first course of scrambled egg soup, his brother is watching television. The boy walks into the brightly lit kitchen and shows her the fish which she says she will cook tomorrow if he removes all the bones. His mum looks and smells fresh from her bath.
He can hear the tap running in the laundry where his father is washing mud and tobacco tar from his arms and legs. The scattered drumming sound of running water hitting the stainless steel trough stops. He hears his father walking down the corridor as his mother serves the soup and his brother stands up, moves towards the television, switches it off and sits at the table. It is like a slow dance. His father walks in, his brother sits down, his mother serves soup. The family is there, on a warm summer evening in the house on the hill, now and forever.
MORENO GIOVANNONI is a translator living in Melbourne who likes listening to, reading, telling and writing stories. Moreno was born in Tuscany and grew up in northeast Victoria, so these places and their people figure prominently in his stories, but not always.
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