A Lovely and Terrible Thing

by Chris Womersley

  From the back seat I could see my brother’s face in profile. Anthony was weirdly lit in the alien glow from the dashboard lights so that his skin appeared dusted with green phosphorescence. A crescent-shaped scar was visible on his right cheek where he had fallen during a game of chasey years earlier. Anthony inclined his head to show he was listening. I knew he hated these little homilies but endured them with the same stoicism he marshalled for the occasional strapping across the leg. He was a serious boy, introspective, given to harbouring grudges – none of which I really knew, or knew only vaguely, on this cold morning. I loved and admired my brother even though he intimidated me because it seemed that, should it ever become necessary, he would get by very well without any of us, myself included.

  Our father changed gears and slowed the car to cross a railway line. ‘You never really knew your grandfather, but he was a great man. Really, a great man.’ The car bobbled over the tracks. ‘I loved those trips. Me and him. The men, you know. Course we used to eat the rabbits. Take them home for Mum to cook. Made nice stews, she did.’

  I listened over the thrum of the car’s engine. Although directed at Anthony, I knew our father’s speeches were intended for anyone in earshot. My own memories of our grandfather were vague: a grizzled muzzle; the smell of urine; a flap of grey, greasy hair pasted across his forehead. Anthony and I were both a little fearful of the late widower, who had lived nearby and visited every few days to have dinner and watch television. Although our father had often extolled his virtues and urged us to respect him, neither Anthony nor I had ever felt comfortable with him and avoided being alone with him. When he died a year earlier, our mother told us – as she told all family members and visitors – not to mention our grandfather’s name in our father’s presence in case we upset him.

  ‘When I was your age,’ our father was saying, ‘we used to lay traps. Caught a wild dog once. Stupid thing. Those traps were hard to set. Always a chance of getting snagged . . .’

  I stopped listening and wiped my bleary window clean with the sleeve of my duffel coat. My nose ran with the cold. I thought of my warm bed, and of our mother, who would by now be standing at the kitchen window in her dressing-gown, drinking tea with the serious expression she adopted for her morning ritual. Janet would be playing with her teddy on the lounge room floor. The image prompted in me a flood of wild, helpless love and suddenly I wished I were at home with them instead of sitting in this freezing car. A kookaburra on a wire fence watched us pass.

  ‘. . . and I guess,’ our father was saying when I tuned in again, ‘I guess that the thing I would hope for us – for you boys and me – is you would respect me like I respected my father. That’s why sometimes I’m hard on you. That’s all. It’s for your own good, you know.’

  It was the most personal speech I had ever heard him make and I was amazed and almost terrified to detect a quaver of emotion in his voice. Neither Anthony nor I said anything but my brother reached a hand over and patted our father gently on the shoulder. ‘It’s okay,’ he said, and turned to me in the back seat. ‘We understand, don’t we, Nick?’ I mumbled agreement. For the next hour we drove in companionable silence, as if we had used all the words allocated us for the morning.

  We arrived at an isolated car park at around 9 am and piled out of the car. We unloaded the rifles and knapsacks and set out for the camp site, which was two kilometres across a grassy stretch of bushland. The frosty grass crunched beneath our boots and our hot exhalations billowed around us in the glinting morning sunlight. Small birds darted about in the high grass. I felt anxious, as if my body were aware of something hidden from the more articulate parts of myself, but perhaps this is just how I remember it.

  Ten years later I woke in the afternoon heat and slid from the couch. Richie Benaud was calling the cricket in a droning voice that sounded like a small plane perpetually losing altitude. It was hot and I had staggered over to the couch and fallen asleep after the Sunday roast our mother organised every few weeks. I was twenty-one that summer, in many ways still an innocent. I had started going out with a pleasant, bovine girl called Julie who did deliveries for the bike shop where I worked on weekends. I had by this time moved out of home and was undertaking a degree in physics, but Anthony stayed on while he tried to be a rock star. The lunches were always desultory affairs peppered with small talk, and afterwards each of us dissolved into different parts of the house.

  Half asleep, I followed murmuring voices and found my mother and Anthony huddled at the study window, watching our father as he limped across the lawn doing odd jobs in the garden. Our father didn’t know he was being observed, just as Anthony and Mother were unaware of me standing in the doorway to the darkened study. As they so often did, they were giggling at a private joke.

  Although he was only twenty-three, two years older than me, Anthony seemed to live in a whole other world, to which our mother had access. At that moment she had a cigarette in her right hand and she turned her face away from Anthony and exhaled the grey smoke up into the study’s cool corners. It reminded me of a conical plume sprayed from a can of insect repellent.

  ‘Look at him,’ she was saying, referring to our father as he struggled to raise himself from where he had been kneeling to weed a garden bed. ‘An old man in a dry month.’ She had been drinking wine at lunch.

  My brother didn’t say anything. She offered him her cigarette. He took it casually, barely noticing, drew on it and handed it back. I had never before seen my brother smoke a cigarette. It shocked me.

  ‘Do you ever regret what happened?’ our mother asked Anthony.

  He shook his head. He exhaled his cigarette smoke and looked at our mother as if something had occurred to him. ‘Why? Do you?’

  Mother rested her head on Anthony’s shoulder and laughed. ‘Hardly, darling. Hardly.’

  I wasn’t exactly sure what I had just witnessed, but it felt indecent. It brought to mind the dismal thrill Robert Oppenheimer must have felt when he discovered the technology for the Bomb. When I had composed myself I eased away from the study door, crept down the hallway to the lounge room, gathered my jacket and bag and left without saying goodbye to anyone. Long after the gnashing implements should have been out of earshot, I detected the snip snip snip of garden shears as our father hobbled about the backyard.

  Our father tells Anthony the cold water is excellent for his circulation. He smiles his smile that shows no teeth. ‘It’s only three minutes. You don’t even have to put your head under, like when I had to do it.’

  I watch Anthony take off his clothes. He goes about it slowly, as if memorising each movement for later use. He leaves his watch on. The watch belonged to our grandfather – he acquired it in Vietnam – and he gave it to Anthony not long before he died, much to our father’s chagrin. Our father said our grandfather was half blind and demented at the end. He only gave it to you because he thought you were me, he would say, a comment guaranteed to rile Anthony almost more than anything else.

  Finally, when my brother is naked, skin puckered, shivering, he walks down the hallway into the bathroom and steps gingerly into the bath, drawing a sharp breath as he does so.

  I found it almost impossible to return to the family home after that summer afternoon. Every few months my mother would ring to urge my attendance at lunch, but I always found a reason not to go – I had a report due, I was going to Wilsons Promontory with Julie, I was tired after a night out at the pub with my mates.

  ‘Oh, come on, sweetie,’ Mother would slur down the phone line. ‘You know your brother would love to see you. And we always love to have that Julie around the house.’

  Only my mother could so effortlessly squeeze two lies into such a short speech. The thought of kissing her lips made me queasy. The thought of seeing Anthony made me furious. The thought of seeing our father made me feel, strangely enough, almost unbearably sad.

  After we had been tramping for an hour or
so through thick bush, our father stopped and threw up a hand for my brother and me to halt. My heart began thumping. My mouth dried up. Were we actually going to shoot something? Anthony hefted his rifle. I followed suit. Our father crouched and peered into the undergrowth. Then he turned to us and mouthed the word pig. A pig? A wild pig. Now that would be something. Our father had told us how unlikely it would be to come across a pig but said rabbits would be fine for our first hunting expedition. ‘Nothing wrong with shooting little bunnies,’ he said. ‘It’s still hunting after all.’

  Our father shuffled backwards and indicated for us to do the same. He looked scared. Anthony smirked. Presently, I saw something move about in the thick bushes. My heart was really pounding and my palms were moist. Again I thought of our mother and Janet, safe at home, eating crumpets with honey. There came a snuffling noise and my father raised his rifle; what lumbered from the bushes was not a pig at all, but a huge wombat. Anthony cheered the creature’s entrance. The wombat – which was the size of a short-legged, obese dog – looked around for a moment and waddled off into the bushes. I thought it was cute, but our father was displeased. He gave us a stern look, as if it were our fault.

  We trudged all over the countryside but didn’t have much luck that day. ‘It takes a while,’ our father said, ‘to get your eye in, to be able to spot things moving about and realise what they might be.’

  Night fell quickly and we returned to our camp. We heated a chicken stew our mother had prepared. Our father hummed to himself as he ladled out the dinner and fiddled with the fire. He seemed possessed of a sense of wellbeing I didn’t recall observing before.

  Before we turned in for the night, he got up and muttered something about going to the toilet, and began picking his way into the darkness with the torch.

  ‘You should go that way,’ Anthony said, pointing in the opposite direction. ‘There’s a clearing through there. It’s easier to find your way.’

  Our father turned and stood still, as if Anthony had said something quite unusual. He looked at both of us, his face animated by the light from the flickering fire. At that moment he appeared wholly unfamiliar to me, like a stranger emerged from the bush. ‘Okay,’ he said at last. ‘Good man.’ And he set off the way Anthony had indicated, ruffling my brother’s hair as he went past.

  The tree trunks trembled and twitched in the campfire light. My cheeks blazed from its heat. I was exhausted from the early morning drive and the endless tramping through bushland. Hunting wasn’t as fun as I had thought it would be, and we still had an entire day left. Anthony threw wood onto the fire.

  Then an awful scream.

  Even at the age of thirteen, my brother is genuinely tough. Not in a show-offish way, but you can sense it about him, and it is perhaps this quality that drives our father to devise ever more rigorous tests. With a hand on each side of the tub for balance, Anthony lowers himself into the freezing water. The ice cubes joggle about his knees and chest. I can see he is suffering but my father won’t activate the stopwatch until Anthony is fully immersed. Eventually, my brother takes a deep breath and lies back with his hands across his chest. I feel humiliated on his behalf as his penis shrivels to the size of a witchetty grub and his nipples turn licorice-coloured. Janet sidles away. Our father clicks the stopwatch. ‘Okay. We are . . . Go!’

  It took Anthony and me only a minute to locate our father. He was lying on his back in a ditch. His eyes were clenched shut and his mouth set in a grimace of pain. ‘Get it off!’ he was saying. ‘Get it off! Get it off!’ His torch was on the ground nearby. Anthony picked it up and played the light over his face and down the length of his body. Our father’s ankle was clamped in a steel rabbit trap. His trousers were torn. There was thick blood, a flap of purple flesh. I squatted at his side, but my brother yanked me back so hard that I fell to the damp ground. Our father was by this time writhing in agony, pounding at the damp earth with a fist. ‘Quick! Pull the latch, Anthony. Pull . . . the bloody . . . thing . . . back. Quick! Get it off me!’

  When Anthony’s three minutes in the cold water are up, our father says: ‘Well done, little man. Out you get. Nick, fetch his towel.’

  But Anthony doesn’t move, doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t even open his eyes. All he does is lift a hand from the water to scratch his nose, as if he were on the couch in front of the TV. Again our father tells him to come out but Anthony won’t listen and he ends up staying in that bath for ages – maybe half an hour – until our mother comes back and asks what in the hell is going on. She is furious. By this time my brother’s entire body is the colour of a fresh bruise. His lips are grey. Our father has stormed off and Janet is slumped in the hallway crying. I help our mother lift Anthony out. He is shaking hard and he can barely walk, but his half-lit smile is the same one that will resurface the night of the accident, when he squats down leisurely beside our screaming father, draws up the sleeve of his jacket to reveal his watch and says: ‘Okay. Let’s see what you’re made of. On my signal . . . Three minutes from . . . Now!’

  What the Darkness Said

  When I was about five years old, still entangled in childhood, my mother fell pregnant. All through autumn she swelled, until by winter she was as big as a house and the shape of a capital B. My father laughed his toothy laugh when he touched her belly and told me she must have swallowed a pumpkin seed. My mother batted his hands away and smiled. At night she pulled me close and let me listen to her smooth, rounded belly. It sounded like outer space and I imagined my brother adrift upon its vast emptinesses, hanging on grimly until the time when he would land in our family. I waited long and hard for my little brother.

  My new brother would sleep in my room. Lying in bed at night I conjured his still-unborn face from the darkness and held lengthy conversations with him. I imagined the things we would be able to do when he was ready. We would play games and go on secret adventures in the bush with a compass and map, the way I had done with my father. I would show him where the old goanna lived and the best way to build a cubby house. There would be an entire lifetime of things to do.

  When he was finally born, I discovered his name was Martin. He was small and wrinkled. He cried a lot and snuffled in his sleep. I lugged him from room to room. Together we watched my mother pulling rhubarb and herbs from her sunny garden.

  When he was about two, Martin learned to say my name. Alex, he shrieked. Alex. Later, I took him down to the creek at the edge of our small property with our dog, Bailey. We crouched in the grass to see the bunyip that drank there late in the afternoons. We tried to catch a frog but Bailey scared him away. I showed Martin the birds and we squatted on the ground to watch the bull ants going about their business. His childish breath scattered the dry dirt and caused the ants to stop what they were doing and wave their antennae around angrily in the air like fists. He loved apples and pears. He loved the sound when I blew a raspberry.

  Because I spent so much time with him, I was often the only one who could understand Martin’s babble. My parents would call me in to translate.

  ‘Alex. What’s Martin saying?’ they would ask.

  ‘He’s saying that we saw a bunyip down at the creek.’

  ‘Oh, really. That’s lucky, sweetheart. Not everyone sees a bunyip, you know. What was he doing?’

  ‘He said the bunyip was drinking some water.’

  ‘Was he a big bunyip?’

  ‘Not really. He said it was the usual size.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Well, you be careful down there. Don’t go in the water.’

  ‘Yeah. We know.’

  ‘Are you ready for dinner? Hush, Bailey. Outside!’

  ‘Yeah. We’re ready. But Martin says he wants ice-cream.’

  ‘I see.’

  When he was four, my brother disappeared while we were at the market with my mother buying vegetables. He had been holding my hand and slipped away in the crowd. We searched everywhere. Nobody knew w
here he was for three days. I imagined him tramping through the bush on his stumpy legs, humming one of the songs I’d taught him, naming the trees in his burbling voice as he went, saying, Hello dragonflies, hello kookaburra, how are you? The police searched everywhere but he was probably in that muddy drain where that man had stuffed him the whole time.

  A few days later they put Martin in a box and lowered him into a grave. A family of cockatoos screeched in a nearby tree. The soil was hard and crumbly and I worried about how he would breathe. I thought perhaps that we should put some fruit in the grave or else he might get hungry, but no one paid me any attention.

  Nobody talked much about Martin after that. Nobody talked about anything. For a while at school the kids and teachers stayed away. My parents said it wasn’t my fault. My father used to say we lost him, as if that was the problem, but I think finding him in that drain with no clothes on was worse.

  ‘He was Wednesday’s child,’ my mother said. And she went to her room and climbed into bed, where she stayed for a long time. She said she wouldn’t come out again until they caught the sick bastard that did those things to Martin. My father stood on the verandah and rolled cigarettes, one after another, until there was a pile of them unsmoked at his feet. Sometimes at night I heard whimpering in the yard but it was only a piece of tin from the shed flapping in the hot, dark wind.

  I was in grade five. We learned about bushfires and the names of all the oceans: Pacific, Atlantic, Southern. I had never seen an ocean. It seemed impossible to me for so much water to be in the same place at the same time. The creek at the bottom of our property only ran in spring. In summer it was just a ditch of blackberry.