Snake (5 page)

Rex hauled her off the bed. He rarely cuffed his children, but he had been out of his mind with worry. He yelled at her until she howled; he shook her so hard her head wobbled on her shoulders.

Rex decided that what would cure Girlie of her rebelliousness was a dose of Epsom salts. He was a great believer in Epsom salts, to cleanse the bowel but also to spruce up the spirit. With a large enough dose, a morose person could be made sunny overnight. He mixed a tablespoon of the stuff in warm water, and Girlie scrunched up her face to swallow it.

‘You're as ugly as a goanna when you do that,' said Rex, to check tears.

The Epsom salts had the desired effect: Girlie's feces turned to water and gushed from her. Mortified, she positioned a chair outside the toilet and stubbornly sat there until her stomach stopped cramping, ignoring her family, who ribbed her: ‘Got the trots, have you, Girlie?'

Later, Girlie, with the odor of excrement still in her nose, examined her face in a mirror and had no trouble at all making out the boiled, folded features of a goanna.

20

Sock It to Me

R
EX HAD A
soft spot for pigs. He appreciated their intelligence and thoroughness. He had in mind to buy a dozen or so. Fatten 'em up, sell 'em. Easy money. He needed, however, to confine them; otherwise they would turn the farm into a dust bowl. To do this, he erected an electric fence, which had only three strands of wire. The outer two were harmless, but the middle one delivered a kick.

Despite graphic descriptions of what would happen if he touched the middle wire – char like a chop! – Boy could not stay away from the fence. At every opportunity, he set out for it, always by an indirect route but ending up in its vicinity. Once there, he played a form of Russian roulette by touching first the top wire and then the bottom, the top, the bottom. Eventually, it happened: In a moment of inattention, he touched the middle wire. When he opened his eyes, he was lying on his back, looking at white sky.

The pigs never materialized. Rex had kept his pig-farming plans from Irene, and when she found out, she put her foot down.

21

Secret to the Earth, Sowed by No One

A
NOTHER FAVORITE FOOD
of Irene's was mushrooms, which she sautéed slowly in flour and butter until they swam in a thick grey gravy. The mushrooms could be found in the winter months in a low-lying pocket of unploughed land. The trees that grew there had black bark and threw a deep shade, and the grass under them was always a delicate mint-green. The mushrooms were white on top, velvety brown underneath, and sometimes as large as saucers. Finding one never failed to elicit surprise; several paces away the soil turned unwilling and had to be coaxed to germinate anything other than burrs and thistles.

As soon as the children were old enough for such expeditions, Irene buttoned their cardigans, gave them a basket, and sent them across the paddocks. Girlie strode purposefully, gumboots slapping against her legs, determined to acquit herself, while Boy trailed behind, distracted by everything. He swung on gates, took imaginary aim at birds, kicked ant nests to smithereens, pelted paddy-melons at fence posts.

One cloudy day in May, proceeding in this fashion, the children arrived at the edge of the depression. The trees murmured, faint and low. Before they could find any mushrooms, they came across the remains of a dead sheep. The head and hooves were gone, only the fleece lay there, spread out invitingly, like a rug before a fireplace. Sun had bleached the wool, rain had washed it clean; it dazzled as if in an advertisement.

‘Let's take it home and give it to Mum,' said Girlie.

Boy did not say anything. He took a stick and poked experimentally at the fleece, as if expecting the sheep to reconstruct itself and run off. He lifted an edge, revealing something that resembled the padding placed under carpet to give it spring. The padding moved, swarmed. Maggots.

22

The Bravest Thing God Ever Made!

G
IRLIE WROTE A
composition on Simpson and his donkey, and it won first prize in a Returned Services League competition. She painted a vivid picture of the sea at Gallipoli streaked with the blood of Australian soldiers, the cliffs strewn with their broken bodies. Behind tangles of barbed wire, she placed the enemy: black-eyed Turks. And in the middle of the mayhem, the doughty Simpson carrying the wounded on his donkey, shells bursting around them. She used words like ‘intrepid,' ‘tenacious,' and ‘selfless,' and imagined herself to have some of these virtues.

A ceremony was held at school where she was presented with an oversized book of photographs of the Royal Family: crowns, scepters, sashes, ermine-trimmed robes, gold-encrusted coaches, ladies-in-waiting, but also ‘casual' shots of Charles in a kilt playing with the corgis and Anne in a sprigged frock bending to smell a rose.

Girlie was invited to read her prize-winning composition on the radio as part of the Anzac Day observances. Irene accompanied her. Freddie Garlick, who ran the radio station, tried to put Girlie at her ease. He adjusted the microphone, pushed the chair close. She read with a reedy voice, lisping slightly, the paper shaking in her hands.

When the program was over, Freddie accompanied them to the front door. ‘Keep up the good work,' he said to Girlie. His tone of voice was such that Girlie thought it quite possible he didn't mean either that it was good work or that she should keep doing it. Then he said, ‘Your socks are falling down.' Girlie hurriedly bent to attend to them, pitching forward in the process. Freddie said to Irene, ‘I like your style. You wear your dresses as if they were Paris couture.' And it was true that Irene had a proud walk.

23

Send My Roots Rain

A
T NIGHT
, R
EX
tossing beside her, skewing the bedclothes, Irene thought of fleeing. It should be easy, a ‘cinch,' as Americans might say: a suitcase of clothes, a train to Sydney. She pictured herself boarding the train, stowing her suitcase in the rack, placing her feet on a tin footwarmer, closing the window against cinders. Irene loved to travel. To be going somewhere. Anywhere. Recklessness stirred in her.

As the train neared Sydney, though, her imagination failed. Instead of the platform at Central Station, solid under weary legs, there was a chasm. Instead of a new life, instead of possibilities – nothing. In her frustration, another image filled her mind: a penned heifer. Irene's heifer was in the pink of health, with gleaming flanks, strong teeth, pointy hooves, but its muzzle was flecked with foam, and its eyes swiveled to the side, to the back of its head. Irene wept for herself.

She cast around for a solution closer to home. A job, perhaps. In Progress, women worked in the banks, post office, library, hospital, and schools, although they gave it up once they had children. Irene particularly envied the women scientists posted to the agricultural research laboratories near Progress, but they were unmarried and had university degrees; another species, as far as she was concerned. No one would employ her.

Still, the idea of working stayed with her, so when Freddie Garlick offered her a dogsbody position – typing, filing, answering the phone – she jumped at the chance. Rex approved; anything to make her happy. He bought her a Volkswagen – white, with baby-blue upholstery – and the eagerness with which she put on her lipstick and climbed into the little car to go to work every morning was pitiful. The neighbors thought it was one more example of Irene getting above herself.

24

And You Alone Can Hear the
Invisible Starfall

F
REDERICK
G
ARLICK WAS
an ugly man – small, swarthy, jug-eared – with a resonant voice and boundless energy. A mongrel, he said, to forestall questions about his looks. A bit of everything: Scottish, Portuguese, Polish, even some gypsy blood. He was a type occasionally found in rural towns: well-educated, lacking not in ideas but direction. Or, rather, he had gone in too many directions, to find himself the manager of a country radio station. All the same, he was making the best of it.

After Irene had been at the radio station several days, Freddie invited her into the second of the station's two studios, a tiny cork-lined windowless room. Although Freddie's sexuality was as indeterminate as his parentage – a born bachelor was the general consensus – Irene hoped for seduction. Instead, he asked her to sit.

‘Listen,' he said.

With infinite care, he lowered the arm of the turntable onto a record, and the opening bars of Beethoven's ‘Emperor' Concerto crashed from the speakers. He handed her the sleeve of the record, which was decorated with a large gold crown on a red background, and she sat holding it and listening.

The pianist was Arthur Rubinstein, with the orchestra conducted by Josef Krips. By the end of the second movement, she was in tears. Here was something that expressed exactly her own feelings of yearning and dread. Here was something to which she could tie her turbulence.

Freddie hated Bach, Handel, and Mozart, loved Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovitch, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Liszt, and these became Irene's favorite composers; his tastes suited her perfectly. He didn't restrict his instruction to music; he played her a recording of
Under Milk Wood
, and again doors opened for Irene. She exulted in the tumble of Dylan Thomas's words, relished his bawdy puns. He gave her volumes of poetry by Constantine Cavafy and George Seferis, and she dreamed of visiting Greece.

Culture did not sweeten Irene, or make her wise. Instead, the more she was exposed to it, the more crabbed her spirit became. She had always felt superior; now she had reason. Fate had been cruel to marry her to a farmer. Such a dull, mean, ordinary existence! She chewed on the injustice of it like a dog with a piece of hide.

25

The Pleasant Place of All Festivity

T
HE EVENT THAT
confirmed Boy once and for all in the view that it was best not to show enthusiasm was a carnival Freddie organized. He had the bright idea that Progress, instead of parading floats down the main street like every other town, should have a water carnival. There was a stretch of cement-lined canal between the showground and municipal offices that was perfect for such an occasion. Freddie had political ambitions.

When told of this, Boy hatched a plan to make a gondola. He labored on the project for months, mounting a gondola-shaped plywood frame on an old beat-up rowboat that his father used on duck-shooting expeditions; the contraption then received a coat of silver paint. The finishing touch: a canopy decorated with purple crepe-paper flowers.

Every boat, no matter how modest, needs a name. Freddie suggested ‘Bella.' Beautiful, like your mother, he explained. And that was what Boy painted on its side.

When the big day arrived, Rex loaded Boy's creation onto the tray of his Bedford truck and drove the whole family into Progress. After breaking a bottle of pilsner on its prow, they all helped push the gondola into the water, then stood back and held their breaths. It floated!

Freddie, in a red waistcoat and tasseled cap, stood in the back of the gondola, poling it along. Irene sat under the canopy and assumed a royal pose. Don't we look proper idiots, they had said, as they set off, giggling like maniacs and setting the boat wobbling. They told each other they were doing it for Boy, who had put so much effort into building the thing.

Boy had positioned himself in front of the crowd on the canal bank, the better to enjoy his triumph. As the gondola drew near, he began to wave. Then he saw himself as if from a distance: a boy waving like a
dickhead
at his mother in a
pretend
gondola. He pushed his way through the crowd and sat in the cab of the Bedford until it was time to go home.

26

Alive As Fire, and Evilly Aware

A
SMALL BOY
was walking along a bush track, hands stuck in his pockets, lips puckered in a whistle. Sunlight streamed through the leaves, dappling his path. His presence disturbed a flock of corellas, and they burst into the air, wheeling and whirring. The boy watched appreciatively, canting his head, shading his eyes, and then continued on his way, until he came to a log. He stepped over it, taking his hands out of his pockets, angling his body, for it was a large log. The snake struck with impersonal dispatch.

Exclamations of horror rose from the class. The boys started in their seats, the girls covered their eyes or wrung their handkerchiefs. The teacher, who was standing by the projector, hushed them, and they settled down to watch the rest of the film. The boy's whistling, the sounds of the bush, had been replaced by the voice of a narrator – male, grave, pedantic, the voice that ran the world. ‘Stuart was careless,' the voice intoned. ‘He risked certain death.'

Fortunately for Stuart, he had in his pocket what he needed to save himself: a razor blade. He also had presence of mind, which was the quality one needed above all others to survive the perils of the Australian bush, or so the narrator instructed the class. Using what remained of his strength – with every beat of his heart, the poison was coursing through his bloodstream, a fact borne home by the soundtrack, which thumped intimately – the boy tore a strip off his shirt and tied it around his thigh. He scrabbled in the dry leaves and found a stick, inserted it in the bandage on his leg and twisted until the cloth tightened into a tourniquet. Grimacing at the pain, he made a cut where the wound was and bent to suck out the poison.

The class gagged. Like all country children, they had learned from an early age to be watchful. There were no leopards, tigers, or bears in their surroundings, noble animals that rushed and growled and gave their victims a sporting chance, only stealthy, circumspect creatures like spiders, scorpions, and snakes.

The film was over, the blinds raised. The teacher read to her class from a natural-science textbook: ‘Australia has a larger proportion of venomous snakes than any other continent in the world, over seventy varieties. The species that kill include the death adder, the brown snake, the black snake, and the tiger snake. When milked, a single tiger snake produces enough poison to kill 118 sheep.'