Snake (9 page)
Rex didn't fare any better. He would bring her whatever she had requested â books, magazines, chocolate biscuits, flowers from the garden â and then drift off to other patients to talk crops and the weather.
Boy stayed away from the hospital. He was preoccupied. He had a steady girlfriend, and they were âdoing it' at every opportunity.
I
RENE CAME HOME
on crutches. Rex had prepared a nourishing soup for her in a large iron pot.
âDelicious,' she said.
The second time he served it, she asked what it was.
âSheep's head soup,' he told her. His mother had made it in the Depression years. The recipe was simple: a sheep's head, carrots and onions or whatever was at hand, seasoning, simmer for several days. The head had to be cleaned thoroughly, of course.
Irene fumbled for her crutches, jerked across the kitchen to the stove, where she jabbed at the contents of the pot with a fork. The head hadn't yet boiled to a skull; it had ears, skin, tufts of wool.
Irene's eyes swiveled, mad and enflamed.
I
KENE HAD INHERITED
at least one of her father's prejudices. She was always sounding off about the Catholic church, its large families, scheming clergy. Whenever they saw a church on a hill, Irene predicted it would be Catholic. She and the children then looked for the telltale signs of Catholicism â heavy wrought-iron door hinges, bricks the color of liver, an institutional air â and invariably found them. Just as invariably, Irene would remark, âTrust the Micks to grab the highest spot.'
With this kind of practice, Girlie knew right away when Graham Trethewey joined her class that he was Catholic. Graham was a fleshy, downy, handsome boy, seventeen years old, ripe as a peach. He had been expelled from Riverview College in Sydney for taking a skiff and stealing provisions â booze, mainly â from pleasure boats. His parents had sent him to Girlie's school to sit for the Leaving Certificate.
Graham â Catholic, bad â exerted the same pull on Girlie as her mother's books. And Graham quite liked Girlie. Actually, he didn't differentiate among females: he was magnanimous in that respect. Plain or beautiful, smart or dumb, they were all potential conquests to him. If they didn't oblige, he moved on, no hurt feelings.
Graham discovered Girlie had access to her mother's car, and they started going to movies together. Driving home, Graham would turn up the radio, take Girlie's hand, place it on his crotch. Kathy Kirby was filling the airwaves that year, shouting about love and daffodils. Girlie didn't want to displease him, so she sat there, sweaty, rigid, her arm and eardrums aching, enjoying none of it.
One weekend they went to the river. Graham led Girlie along the bank, solicitously holding back branches to ease her passage. When they had gone a distance, Graham took a towel from the canvas satchel he was carrying and laid it on the ground, then gave Girlie a long, imploring look. Take pity on me! he signaled. His eyes traveled to the towel, in case she hadn't caught his meaning. Girlie turned on her heel, backtracking through the scrub to the car, not waiting for Graham to catch up. She thought she would like to plunge into the river, into the opaque green water, and swim without stopping, swim forever.
B
OY'S GIRLFRIEND
, A
PRIL
, was pregnant. Boy was out of his mind with worry. He lay awake at night, sobbing. He was seventeen, and his life was over. He would have to marry, stay on the farm. Bawling kids, dirty nappies, fly-blown sheep, bone-shaking tractors, hot sun. All his mother's warnings came back to him.
His girlfriend, who wanted to be a school-teacher, was as horrified as he was. They put their heads together, plotted. She obtained the address of a doctor in Sydney from a knowledgeable cousin; he used his savings to buy tickets for the plane that went daily to the city. On the appointed day, instead of going to school, the couple hitchhiked to the airport.
To their embarrassment, the airline hostess was a girl they knew; she had left school only the year before. When she came around with sandwiches on little plastic trays, April pressed her face up against the window and exclaimed over the patchwork of paddocks, managing to forestall questions about the purpose of their trip.
April, understandably, wasn't hungry. Boy un-wrapped the cellophane and ate both sandwiches: ham, cheese, gherkin, layered between thin slices of white bread. The sandwiches came with a cocktail onion apiece, and he popped those in his mouth as well.
Stiff-legged, they caught a taxi to the doctor's office, where the deed was done. April cried all the way home. She made no sound, but tears slipped down her face. Boy tried to comfort her, making jokes about her red nose. He was feeling as if he had been released from prison.
Outside the plane, clouds had collected in disorderly heaps: wool waiting to be sorted, graded, baled.
F
IRST
G
IRLIE WENT,
then Boy, into the world. As a leave-taking present, Irene sewed Girlie a low-cut, lolly-pink ballgown and then took her shopping at Fossey's for a push-up brassiere. When it was Boy's turn, Irene and Boy stayed up late singing at the piano, finishing with âGoodnight, Sweetheart.'
R
EX AND
I
RENE
had given up arguing. He no longer bothered to tell her that he wasn't asking much â harvest his crops, care for his animals, share it all with a good woman, tra-la â and Irene didn't reply that far from not asking much, he was asking everything.
Rex went about his work, unchaining his dogs at first light, going from paddock to paddock to check on the livestock, tipping bales of hay from the tailboard of his utility, and then crouching in its lee to drink tea from a thermos flask and watch the sheep converge on the feed. They came running, bouncing, vaulting, on short legs.
Irene did whatever she pleased, sometimes returning home quite late in the evening.
I
RENE WALKED OUT
on Rex on a hot day in early January. Rex was in the kitchen eating his lunch â lamb-shank stew, plum pudding and custard, the plum pudding left over from Christmas â when she came in, dressed to go to town, carrying the larger of the family's two suitcases. She turned toward him, her face blank.
The dogs were asleep on the verandah, twitching in the heat, groaning in the backs of their throats. Irene said nothing, blinked as if drugged, kicked the screen door open, exited. Rex thought, almost idly, about running after her, pleading with her to stay. He thought about picking up his shotgun, shooting her, turning the gun on himself. He stayed where he was, in his seat.
He heard her car cough into life, putter past the meathouse, the petrol tank, the shearers' quarters. He went out to the garden to watch her progress. The car disappeared behind the stand of black box trees. Minutes later it reappeared on the road that led straight to the front gate. Irene slowed down for the ramp, bumped across it, made the right-hand turn onto the main road.
The view from where Rex stood was panoramic: an immense blue sky, green rice fields, shimmering heat. The car traversed his entire field of vision; he moved his eyes, tracking it. Finally, the car vanished behind the box trees at the far corner of the property, materialized on the other side, was on the bridge, was gone.
F
OR THE NEXT
week, Rex was a man out of his skin. He couldn't eat or sleep or sit still. He walked. He walked the circumference of the farm, clockwise and then anticlockwise. He crisscrossed it, bisecting the paddocks one day, following the fence line the next. He walked all day and through the night. Sometimes it seemed to him as if there were no sound; he was under water. At other times, his hearing was hypersensitive, and he picked up every scrape, scurry, murmur. It was a week leading to a full moon, and his nighttime wanderings were bathed in phosphorescence.
After five days of no sleep and no food, he decided that God was walking with him. He was mildly surprised, never before having experienced even the slightest stirring of religious feeling, but he accepted it without question and rather enjoyed the company. On the seventh day, he found himself alone again. That night he slept, and when he woke his hair had turned white. But he was no longer numb; he was angry. He was a volcano of anger.
Irene had left almost everything behind: clothes, books, magazines, records, photographs, some crested china that had belonged to her mother, a silver cruet, a wooden Buddha brought back from China by an adventurous great-uncle. Rex threw it all into the incinerator, where it made a merry fire. The records congealed into a black lump:
Carousel, Kismet, The Pajama Game, Harry Belafonte at Carnegie Hall, Liszt Piano Concertos
became one.
Next, in a gesture of symbolic spite, he bought two hundred pigs. They were not prize pigs. They were runty and unappealing, with long skinny bodies and splotchy pinkish-white skin and shifty pink-rimmed eyes. Rex thought they were unique.
To shelter the pigs, he acquired six corrugated-iron water tanks, cut them in half, and laid them in rows. The paddock where he did this took on the aspect of a World War II army barracks. He also purchased a quantity of tractor tires and cut them in half, and into the halves he put spoiled vegetables, which he would fetch from the market gardens in his utility.
He opened up every gate on the farm, and the pigs mapped the farm as thoroughly as he had done, but with their snouts. He also left open the gate to the yard of the house, and soon none of Irene's garden was left. They rooted up the irises and the cannas, pulled down the passion-fruit vine, demolished the red-hot poker, sheared the shrubs â the broom, the bottlebrush, the crepe myrtle, the Chinese lantern â to nubs. The only plants left standing were oleanders; even pigs can't digest their leaves.
He sold them a month later for a tidy profit. Never a big drinker, he started going to the pub in the evening. He liked best to talk about pigs. âIf a man lay down to sleep and pigs came along, there would be nothing left of him but his shoelaces,' he would say admiringly while tracing a pattern in a puddle of beer with an index finger.
He would sit at the bar until closing time and seem perfectly sober, if a little careful, until he stood up to leave, when he would list alarmingly and have to be helped. One time he got off his bar stool and fell over, poleaxed, face down on the floor, amongst the cigarette stubs and discarded betting tickets.
S
IX MONTHS TO
the day after Irene left, Rex drove his car into the Murrumbidgee River, which was in the early stages of flooding. The water was muddy, swift, visibly rising. He went to a bluff he knew from a duck-shooting expedition, down a rutted track near a sawmill, and pressed the accelerator flat. Twenty-four hours later, and the water would have been too high; it would have broken its banks, spilling into paddocks like a woman in evening dress settling her skirts.
The car sank slowly and lopsidedly, the passenger side becoming immersed first. If there had been anyone watching, they would have seen Rex sitting in the driver's seat, as erect as could be in the circumstance, holding onto the steering wheel, staring ahead, the brown water up to his chest, his shoulders, his chin.
The car became caught in the burly current. By this time, only the roof and a few inches of window were visible, and if one looked very closely, the top of Rex's head, for he was still clinging determinedly to the wheel, as if this were a mad carnival ride. The car corkscrewed three times and disappeared.
He left no note for Girlie and Boy. For years he had felt that they were passengers on a train going God knows where, and he was a solitary figure by the railway line, waving, at first cordially, but then like a man possessed, until he was waving at nothing. Writing a note to them would be the same as addressing the blurred faces on just such a passing train. Faces that never gained definition no matter how hard he stared. For one thing, the train was going too fast. For another, the sun was shining low in the afternoon sky, its rays glancing off the glass of the windows.
The New Life I Demand of My Bones
T
HE DAY YOU
left Rex, your hands were trembling. To calm yourself, you adjusted the side window of the car so that air streamed over your face, parting your hair, flattening it against your skull. Next, you recited species of wattle tree:
Acacia baileyana, Acacia decurrens, Acacia longifolia, Acacia pycnantha, Acacia saligna
⦠You pictured each one: blossoms, foliage, bark. Thus steadied, you began to sing. You always sang when you were alone in a car. Broadway show tunes.
Oh, I Could Live with Thee
in the Wildwood
Y
OU DIDN'T STRIKE
out on your own. You were intelligent, curious, energetic, but you needed a man, or so you thought. It wasn't Freddie. He had become a politician as he planned. The Honorable Frederick Garlick. Nor was it Nick. He had returned to Sydney, summoned by his mother. No, it was someone new, and, following the migratory pattern of Australian adulterers, the two of you went north, to monsoons and mangrove swamps, water buffalo and brolgas, whip snakes and crocodiles.
A
RE YOU HAPPY?
On and off. Inside you, dissatisfaction still caws like a crow. You like to quote Hippocrates: âLife is short, the occasion fleeting, experience deceitful, and judgment difficult.' The literary figure with whom you most identify is Oscar Wilde. You keep
De Profundis
beside your bed. As unlikely as the parallel might seem â witty fop, farmer's wife â you feel as he did: pilloried by the ungenerous, exiled.