Snake (3 page)

Aunt Em was a hard case – as hard as the boiled lollies she sucked all day long and made her breath smell sickly sweet. In her book, a boy on the verge of manhood had no business with tears. She took in the too-short pant legs, the fresh haircut, the out-of-control Adam's apple, and felt only one emotion: embarrassment.

Rex glanced at Irene. She was glowing with happiness. The sight of her caused his nature – practical, honorable – to assert itself. He put his misgivings aside, hid them under a pile of other thoughts, as if they were shirts without buttons or bills that needed paying. What was done was done. Without being conscious of it, he coughed self-importantly – I am a man, I have a wife – and squirmed inside the jacket of his uniform until it sat better on his shoulders.

6

Oh Such a Hungry Yearning

I
RENE'S FATHER WAS
wrong: the tunes in Irene's head were not her exclusive property. They were known to millions, big band tunes for the most part: insistent trumpets, urgent saxophones, persuasive clarinets. Irene was under the spell of music that was strutting, silky, optimistic, in thrall to smoky-voiced singers and innuendo-laced lyrics. Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee, they were the snake charmers and Irene the snake.

Billie was closer to being right about Irene than any who toasted her on the occasion of her marriage to Rex: Irene's motives were not complicated or deep. She was only twenty years old, her getting of wisdom had been in the precipitous, snuggle-and-kiss years of World War II. She had only one thought in her head the day of her wedding:
My life is about to begin
.

PART THREE

1

Far-flung Empire

T
HE HOUSE WAS
wooden and raised on posts a foot above the ground, and had a verandah on two sides, a pantry off the kitchen, a lean-to laundry, a chip heater in the bathroom, a toilet over a pit out the back. It was not without decorative elements: a fireplace with a mantel in the sitting room, and in the main bedroom, a set of windows that had pressed glass in three colors – yellow, purple, green – in the upper sashes. The floors were covered with linoleum, except for the bathroom, where the concrete had been left bare.

There was no garden to speak of, unless you counted the stumps of four palm trees, which had been hollowed out, filled with earth, and planted with pigface. The pigface was in bloom the day the newlyweds arrived, its circus colors spilling down the sides.

Irene and Rex walked up the path and stopped at the steps to the verandah. One of the steps hung loose. ‘I'll have that fixed in a jiffy,' said Rex, asserting himself in a voice thick with responsibility.

His tone annoyed Irene. She brushed the feeling away, but it re-formed, hovered, settled, like a mantle of flies on a hot day.

2

The Moral Is the Universal One:
‘Let Us Irrigate'

T
HE HOUSE BELONGED
to Irene's father, as did the farm on which it sat: eight hundred irrigated acres, five hundred miles from the nearest city, nine miles from the nearest town. Rex went as a share farmer, a status he had been brought up to view as ignominious – better to own one acre than manage ten thousand – but he was thankful for the opportunity of a new start.

The fact that it was an irrigation farm helped his decision. No anxious scanning of the skies, no tightening of the gut as the days without rain became months and then years; instead, he would order water from the water bailiff in the same way he bought seed and fertilizer from the stock and station agent.

He felt, too, a connection to the area: his grandfather, forced off his land near the Victorian border by drought, had found work there, hauling sand on a bullock wagon. It seemed to Rex that Irene's family could easily have been his, scraping to make a living, if misfortune had chosen to dog them. Whenever he was told stories to do with success or failure, Rex always intoned with the regularity of a clock striking the hour, ‘It's the luck of the game.'

Because of the war, the farm had been neglected. Channels needed to be cleared of weed, banks recontoured, paddocks graded. Rex thought of his years in the service as a long, tedious round of setting up camp only to pull it down again; in contrast, this work was deeply satisfying. Soon he was flushing the paddocks with water; ibis came, and spoonbill. Rex grew wheat with full, firm ears and grazed wethers with rounded sides.

He took childish pleasure in watching water flow down a freshly delved furrow, filling the depressions, turning clods into islands, enveloping them. Once, he pulled off his thick-soled work boots and scratchy woolen socks, rolled up the pant legs of his overalls, and waded into a half-filled channel. Mud squeezed between his toes; it was not an unpleasant sensation.

His feet were magnified by the rippling water; they were as white as wall plaster and traced with prominent ink-blue veins, in contrast to his face and forearms, which were weathered to a uniform reddish-brown. The world burned, but he was up to his ankles in cold water. If he had been an expressive man, he would have shaken his fist at the sun.

3

Who Would Live in a Country Town?

I
RENE LOOKED DOWN
at the baby girl clamped to her nipple, the screwed-up purplish-red face, balled fists, jerking legs, and remembered the cat in the woodpile. She had pulled away a log to reveal a cranny in which a cat was at that moment giving birth to a kitten. The cat was a fine specimen, black and white, with a queenly set of whiskers. Irene crouched down, and before her very eyes, the cat, seemingly without effort, expelled a kitten from her vagina, a tiny thing wrapped in white membrane, the umbilical cord securing it to its mother like a ship to a dock.

What the cat should then have done, after an initial moment of puzzlement at finding an alien object attached to her, was free the kitten from its caul, lick its nose and mouth clean, bite through the cord. But something was wrong with the cat's instincts. Instead of turning maternal, she had become angry. She swatted at the kitten as if it were a mouse, swatted again, and realizing it wasn't about to run away, devoured it. After, she cleaned her whiskers.

‘Your baby, ma'am. Pay attention.' The baby had come unattached from Irene's nipple and was butting blindly at her chest. It was the ward sister, a small woman with large shoulders. ‘You must try harder. After all, you can't return your baby to the baby shop.' The sister chuckled at her own joke.

‘What happens now?' asked Irene of no one in particular. She was on the edge of hysteria.

The sister ignored her. Instead, she came over and peered at the baby. ‘I think she's had enough,' she said, and took the bundle from Irene. ‘I'll get the nurse to bring you some Ovaltine. That'll settle you.'

‘Bloody Ovaltine,' said Irene, after the sister had disappeared from view. ‘Bloody baby, bloody everything.' She relieved herself of her frustration in low tones, but the woman in the next bed overheard, and soon the whole town knew about Irene's rebellion.

4

Pseudonaja Textilis Textilis

I
RENE'S FAVORITE DISH
was corned beef and asparagus with white sauce. She bought a slab of cured silverside, trimmed the fat, boiled it for three hours with peppercorns, vinegar, and a bay leaf. As for the asparagus, it grew on the channel banks, pale tips pushing plumply through the loam. If the day were cool, she strapped the baby – they had given her Irene's mother's name but called her Girlie – into a wicker seat on the back of her bicycle and pedaled to a bridge over a fast-running feeder channel.

She leaned the bike against the railing and, with the baby on her hip, threaded her way along the bank, stepping carefully between clumps of sticky paspalum, on the lookout for the telltale bright green feathery foliage of the asparagus plants but also for snakes, the brown variety: long, fast, deadly. All you saw of them was the dull glitter of scales or a tail section soundlessly exiting, unless you were unlucky enough to step on one, in which case the snake formed an S-shape with its forebody and, jaws fixed in a hideous rictus, struck repeatedly.

Irene was bumping over a rut in the road when Girlie's heel jammed in the spokes of the bike. Her shoe was wrenched off, the skin of her heel peeled back. Girlie shrieked; Irene felt only irritation. She was pregnant again. It was a boy. She was certain of that.

5

The Genus Iris

G
IRLIE'S HEEL MENDED,
and Boy was born. For a time, Irene was happy. Rex bought her a Hoover twin-tub washing machine, and into it she fed his mud-encrusted overalls. He also bought her a Singer sewing machine, and she bent her head to make clothes for herself and the children, decorating them with zigzag stitching, courtesy of a novel attachment that also made buttonholes.

She learned to bottle fruit. From the orchardists on the other side of Progress, she bought cases of apricots, peaches, pears, and plums, halved and de-stoned the fruit, layered it in jars. Then she added syrup, sealed the jars with rubber rings, clamped on the metal tops, and cooked the fruit on the top of the stove, a vigilant eye on the thermometer. The pantry took on the appearance of a cave heaped with treasure: amber, amethyst, glints of gold. Sometimes Irene went in there for no other reason than to admire her handiwork.

Whenever she could, she gardened. Ahead of her time, she planted natives: banksia, bottlebrush, grevillea, wattle. Following her father's example with lilies, she conceived a plan to cultivate irises in a large square bed, each rivaling the next, as she had seen at the Botanical Gardens in Sydney. Rex dug the bed to her specifications, his rotary hoe belching blue smoke. She sent away to a nursery for rhizomes and planted them in a grid. Beside each one, she placed a stake with the relevant botanical name.

6

Crown'd with Snakes

T
HERE WAS NEVER
any one day when Irene took in the details of her life and formulated the thought, I want to be someone else, I want to be somewhere else. Instead, the irritation she felt when Rex offered to fix the step grew in her like an iris rhizome, bulbous and knotted, to be divided and planted elsewhere, time and again.

She hardly understood what was happening. She woke determined to be cheerful, but by the middle of the day some small thing plunged her into a fury. She knitted her lips, pained by everyone and everything, except for her beautiful blue-eyed Boy-o.

Irene's moods filled the house; there was no escaping. Rex was pinned by them to the walls, pushed into corners. Leaving the house did not make it any better; everywhere, sweeping blue sky, an horizon that stretched to the back of beyond, and yet he was suffocating.

Irene could go for days without speaking, sleeping with her back to him, doing her chores with tears in her eyes, biting on her lip, turning so he could only see her profile. Then, in the bedroom, the children asleep, she unknitted her lips and words poured from her, black as pitch.

7

You Know Bert I Sometimes Marvel
Women Can Go Sour Like That

R
EX WONDERED IF
there were not something terribly wrong with Irene. He'd heard of women who went mental when they had babies. There was that woman from Ardlethan who took her toddlers aged three and five out the back of her house to a dam and drowned them. Held 'em under. It was on the radio for weeks. The strange part was she expressed no remorse; they hanged her in the Bathurst Gaol. Good riddance, said everyone.

Rex knew so little about the female sex. He searched his mind. His dominant memory of his mother was her corsets, which she wore even on the hottest days. And the sloshing chamber pot that she emptied every morning, always taking care to hide the offending liquid with a piece of newspaper before beginning the journey from the bedroom to the yard.

8

Home Is the First and Final Poem

I
T WAS NOT
in Rex to exhibit temper, but sometimes, goaded by Irene's taunts, he saw red. At the top of his voice, he informed her that he was not asking much. All he wanted was to harvest his crops, care for his animals, share it all with a good woman.

Mostly, though, he just stood there, arms dangling. ‘Have a heart, Irene,' he would say. ‘Have a heart.'

9

I Am Not a Slut, Though I Thank
the Gods I Am Foul

T
HE FIRST TIME
Irene was unfaithful, it was by proxy. She wrote a letter to the American soldier – her Yank from the war – informing him of the birth of her boy and declaring that she wished it was his. She wished it so much that she had given the baby his name. And when she was finished, she left the letter in an unsealed envelope on top of the desk in the sitting room where Rex could not help but find it.

He read the letter in an agony of disbelief, yet without surprise; so altered was his world, he could not remember ever being innocent of its contents. That day, he went about his work without knowing what he was doing, blood roaring in his head.

He thought about leaving her. He knew men who had done that, left their wives and gone north, to Queensland or the Northern Territory, where they became shearers, roustabouts, boundary riders, kangaroo shooters – cranky characters spouting bush philosophy, eloquent on the subject of the female sex and their treacherous ways. Some tried their luck again and started new families, but they were never to be trusted: they knew how to padlock their consciences and make for the horizon.

He decided to stay.

10

In Sicily, the Black, Black Snakes Are
Innocent, the Gold Are Venomous

W
ITH AMPLE WATER
and sun, not to mention a steady supply of cow manure, Irene's irises thrived. They were mostly the tall bearded variety, with generous, full-lipped flowers: white with yellow veining; delicate lilac; deepest purple.