The Idea of Perfection (13 page)

Up on the road, they did not look at each other. The woman looked away down at the cows.

He could hear himself panting.

Thanks, he said.

He laughed, although nothing was particularly funny.

He felt a hollowness like hunger around his middle, just where the horn would have gone in.

His knees were shaking so much he could feel the fabric of his pants flapping against the backs of his legs. He hoped she was not looking at them.

The woman was not looking at him. She was looking away down the road as if waiting for a bus. She seemed embarrassed.

Buggers, aren’t they! she said.

She looked at him quickly, smiled suddenly, a big frank smile that lit up her face, then looked away again, at the cows.

He wanted to explain about the horns and how he thought the fence would kill him. He still did not understand what had happened, what she had done to make it safe. Was there a switch?

The cattle were away down there in the paddock, still staring up at them, but the ones at the back were starting to lose interest, turn away, rip at grass.

He was still holding his bit of branch, and suddenly laughed again, seeing himself waving the branch around. He could not be bothered feeling foolish or trying to explain. He was too happy feeling not impaled.

Thank you, he said.

It sounded insincere.

Really, thanks.

That sounded worse.

He flung his branch away down the bank. The cows stared at it in an astonished way. He stood staring too, and had to remind himself to close his mouth.

Thought they were going to win that round.

He glanced down at them now spread out peacefully across the paddock tearing at grass.

The cows. Cattle, that is.

He looked at her.

What are they, bulls? Or what?

He laughed before she could say anything.

I don’t have a grasp, really, of the cattle scene.

He smiled his uncertain smile, although not at her, and smoothed his palms against the front of his shirt as if drying them. He told himself to stop and pushed them into his pockets. Then he felt hunched and falsely over-casual.

There was a silence. With one toe he scraped a line in the dirt of the road. It was pretty much what the cow had done, he thought, and stopped. They both seemed to be looking down at the blunt line in the dust.

That yours, the ute back there?

Yes! he said quickly, over-enthusiastically, too loudly. He tried again more quietly.

Yes.

She said nothing. Now she was doing it too, drawing in the dust with the toe of her worn runner. She did a sort of half-circle. Next to each other, the line and the half-circle looked like some kind of message.

Together they looked back at the ute, small at this distance and sharp-edged in the landscape of woolly trees. It looked like a country ute, brown with dust around the bottom, and a long streak of something along the side panel. If you didn’t know, you could almost think it belonged to a farmer.

As if in scorn at this idea, one of the cows, or bulls, lifted its nose and from deep in its belly let out a long melancholy trumpeting on several pitches, a kind of indignant yodel. They looked at each other and laughed. Her laugh was high and harsh, his a rumble and wheeze.

Look! he cried. They’re laughing at me!

He thought it would make her laugh again, but her smile faded, and he saw that it might have sounded as if he was saying
You’re laughing at me.
He said quickly, Not that I’d blame them!

He was almost shouting, trying to get it right.

She looked away, down at the cows. A frown like disapproval was clouding her face.

He could see she was a real country sort of woman, in her battered old shoes and the baggy tracksuit. Her face was brown from the sun, her cheeks coarsened by years of weather, but the blood flowed vigorously under the skin. Under the old track-pants, he thought she would have powerful legs, getting her along the miles of country back roads and over the paddocks.

He caught himself wishing she would invite him home. He could just sit in a corner of her kitchen while she got on with her life: people dropping in, the tea-pot never running cold, grandchildren being fed biscuits, dogs underfoot, the Country Hour going on the radio.

He would not be in anyone’s way, just watching.

A brindle sort of dog with a big feathery tail was nosing around them. While she frowned at the dust, and he thought about how much he would like it in her kitchen, it came over and sniffed at him, its nose cold on the back of his hand, then stood panting up at him, took time out from panting to lick his wrist as if to taste him, then panted some more.

Look! she said.

Bunched together against the fence where the two of them had climbed through, the cows were now staring over. The grass in the next paddock looked just the same as the grass in the one they were in, but as he watched, one of the group lumbered up to the fence and stuck a foot through. The foot fumbled, its body lurched upwards against the fence, all four feet scrabbled at the wires as if the fence was a staircase. The fence swayed and sagged as the cow fought with it, dewlaps swinging, hindquarters jerking. A watching human could see that it would get stuck if it went forward. Go back, he thought.
Quick! Back!
His heart sank at the idea of having to try to free it and look foolish in a whole new way in front of this woman.

Finally the cow burst backwards out of the fence and turned away, then twisted its big head round to stare at the fence with a look of deep reproach.

When the humans laughed, it turned its head towards them and funnelled out a long sad
moo.
They both went
moo
back at the same moment and turned to each other, laughing. Between them the dog looked eagerly from face to face as if waiting to have the joke explained.

 

 

It was only when he was back in Room 8, standing in the middle of the room listening to a swell of lunchtime noise from the bar, that he realised he should have offered her a lift.

Idiot, idiot, idiot, he whispered.

He turned and turned in the room as if looking for a way out. It was just as Marjorie had often said. He was good with figures and could tell you more than you’d ever want to know about bridges. But he
had no commonsense.

At the window he gripped the frame with both hands and leaned out a little way. A car with a furry thing swinging from the top of its aerial came down Parnassus Road and when it had passed, an old man with hunched shoulders stepped cautiously out from under the awning of the Mini-Mart and headed across towards the Caledonian.

There was no woman with worn track-pants, no brindle dog. No way to be back on the road with her, thinking in time to offer her a lift.

Looking, regretting, not thinking, he glanced down into the alley between the Caledonian and the blue wall. Straight away the giddiness started to come at him from behind his eyes. There was an impression of a brick wall falling away from under him, of awful tapering height. The backs of his knees tingled and his feet were cold with the sucked-away emptied-out feeling. The frame of the window cut into his palms where he was gripping it.
Do not look down,
he told himself, and by force of will he made his head come up so that he faced the window in the wall opposite. Today the curtains were pushed back, and, from his high angle, he could see a piece of wooden floor, with a big white square like a sheet spread out, and what looked like a shirt stretched out in the middle of it. All around were stalky things that looked like the bottom of music-stands.

To help the giddy sickness retreat, he concentrated on the things that looked like music-stands. The Karakarook and District Musical Society? The Salvation Army, Karakarook Branch?

Sometimes being in the country felt like one long intelligence test he was failing.

Out on Parnassus Road, the brown dog that was always stretched on the mat outside the Mini-Mart sat up, snapped at a fly, and lay back down again. He watched, but nothing more interesting than that was going to happen on Parnassus Road for the time being.

Tomorrow, work on the bridge would start. He had all afternoon to wish he had not got into that situation with the cows, and to regret not being quick enough to offer the woman a lift. She could well have saved his life. Some kind of gratitude would have been in order.

He sat down on the side of the bed and picked up the
Engineering Digest.
It was turning into a long hot afternoon, and it would not end for hours.

DARLING, HUGH SAID in a neutral way. He was tightening his mouth in the way he did, that was not frowning but not smiling either.

Darling, I think we’ve got too much citrus here.

He stood peering into the worm farm, holding one hand in a fist behind his back. Felicity thought he looked ridiculous, like someone dancing with himself, but he was the kind of man who never seemed to realise when he looked ridiculous.

Wouldn’t you say?

He did not look at her, but went on inspecting the old orange peels.

The ratio has to be pretty much exact, he said.

He was looking at her now. He had always been good on
eye contact.
They had had workshops about it, during his Land & Pastoral training:
Eye Contact
and
Body Language.
It was for when you had to refuse someone a loan, mainly, but it had always come naturally to Hugh.

It meant he had nothing to hide, she supposed, but she had found the more he did the
eye contact
thing, the more shifty-eyed she herself became. Now, for example, she felt skewered to the landscape by the twin drills of his eyes.

In the first place, it’s too acidic.

Her eyes were starting to go dry, keeping up the
eye contact.

Then in the second place, it’s too wet.

He had always liked having something to explain. He was a good explainer, and they had seemed a good match, because she was a good listener.

That’s the second thing.

He paused. His eyes glanced away for a moment. It was as if he was checking the script, she thought.

The third thing is, there aren’t enough worms yet. It might take a year, the instructions said. To build up to full... effectiveness.

He looked at her again. She felt blinded by the words. Time did not seem to be moving, but it must surely be time for him to go to work. Or was he going to stay home today, and tell her about citrus?

He meant well. She knew he meant well. And was good to her. He was a good husband. She could not complain.

Sometimes she caught herself wishing he was not such a good husband. Then she would be able to complain.

Compost was the closest thing he had to a hobby. He spent a lot of time setting up complicated new compost containers of various kinds, or forking the compost out to aerate it and then putting it all back in again, or simply standing, admiring his worms. She would go out in the twilight and let him show her what he had done, and she admired and praised. But for herself, she hated the secretive vigour of the worms, and the feel of dirt on her hands.

Their Nature Strip was the best in Karakarook. Even by the generous standards of Karakarook South, theirs was a nice wide one. It had been one of the things she had liked in the beginning, the Nature Strip. But they had not been there long before they had realised that because it was wide it was the place where the children in the street liked to play cricket.

William had wanted to join in with them, but they had not been a nice type of child for him to associate with. The peer group was so important, especially for that age group. Ten was a very impressionable age, and William was such a sensitive boy.

She had had to ask Hugh to speak to them once or twice, just in a friendly way. The problem was the noise, which was upsetting, and it made it so hard for William to concentrate on his homework. And when they went home, they often left behind the dented old rubbish-bin that they used for a wicket.

She had told him to suggest that they play on someone else’s Nature Strip. Their own, for instance. But of course their own Nature Strips were bumpy and overgrown and littered with dog excrement, and with the old lemonade bottles full of water that were supposed to stop the dog excrement.

Finally she had got him to plant a row of tea-trees down the middle of the strip. They had grown quickly, although they looked untidy, the way natives always seemed to, and they had certainly done the trick with the cricket. She had got Hugh to prune them last week, back to neat bush-shapes. She’d imagined how the spindly growth would thicken up into a row of nice dense bushes. She had even toyed with the idea of getting him to try some topiary. But this morning she had noticed that the wretched things had up and died on her.

We’d better go easy on the orange peels, Hugh said. Don’t you think, darling?

She could see the back of his neck, where he could not. A crease was starting to develop there. As he bent to look at the offending orange peels, the crease disappeared. But when he tilted his head back up, she could see the skin fold itself back into the little crease.

The thing was, it must be happening to her, too.

Every time she nodded or looked up, the cracks on the back of her own neck cut in deeper. A person needed to nod, of course, to show they were paying attention. Now and then a person had to turn their head up, to unpeg the washing from the line, for example. But the less of that kind of thing there was, the better.

There was no real need to have your washing up above you. The thing would be to wind the Hill’s Hoist right down, and stand on a box. Then the washing would be at face level. No crack-forming tilting of the head would be necessary. There was a box under the house that would do perfectly well, and when Hugh left she would get it out, taking care, of course, not to bend her neck any more than absolutely necessary as she did so.