The Shark Net

by Robert Drewe

  When I race to fetch the barbecue spatula, the snake finds the doll-house too cramped, slithers toward the sofa and endeavours to creep under it. This makes my task a fraction less dangerous. I’m able to kneel on the sofa so the padded armrest is between me and the snake – as long as it doesn’t rear up.

  I carefully bend down, and then thrust the leading edge of the spatula down hard onto the snake’s neck. I hold on, and press down, and keep holding on. There is a lot of thrashing.

  Amid the thrashing and shedding and cadaver-stink, and my growing nausea and fear of the snake, Anna wakes up. Sleepy and fuzzy-haired, she pads past me to the toilet, comes back, passes by the spatula and snake activity again, then turns from the bedroom door and asks, with a frown, ‘Why are you kneeling on the couch with your bum in the air?’ She is carrying a teddy bear with a concertina stomach that plays Brahms’ Lullaby when you stretch the bear out to its full length. She does so.

  I’m nonchalant. ‘I’m just getting rid of a snake. Why don’t you pop into my bed and turn the light on.’

  The barbecue spatula isn’t as sharp, weighty or deadly as I’d hoped. I have to press down for a long while – years, decades, it seems – as the snake whips about. My right side is stiff and cramping but if I relax for a second the enraged and desperate snake will lurch up and bite me. It takes about twenty minutes to die. As the requiem of Brahms’ Lullaby issues impatiently from a bear’s belly in the bedroom, it seems much longer than that.

  . . .

  The snake episode is a turning point. It’s not an Aust Lit snake. It’s not the Snake of Capitalist Greed of Henry Lawson’s poetry, or hardly even the Snake of the Threat of Female Otherness of Lawson’s The Drover’s Wife and The Bush Undertaker. If anything, it’s the Snake of Male Dazedness and Foggy Indecision.

  At least I’ve acted, taken control of events. And in the way of north-coast weather patterns, the cyclone storm cell spins out into the South Pacific by morning. Sun glistens on the wet palms and, one by one, the bougainvillea blood-gouts on the window panes dry and blow away in the breeze. The sky, the foliage and the fauna appear sharply etched and the whole passage of the day seems more optimistic.

  I force myself to function. I start by writing a regular column for The Age newspaper. I manage to concentrate and narrow my focus by writing the column in longhand and then transcribing it onto the computer. Once I’ve accomplished that I find the creative and deadline discipline involved is hugely helpful. After three columns, I’m able to give up the handwriting and return to the laptop. I knuckle down further and write a couple of short stories. I write more stories. They start coming reasonably easily. I write a dozen of them, and submit them for publication, four of them to Meanjin magazine. (Frank Moorhouse says Meanjin is Aboriginal for ‘Rejected by the New Yorker ’ but at this point their acceptance of the stories gives me a huge lift.) Then I publish them all in a collection, The Rip. The title says it all.

  I also begin seeing women. Seeing is a strange euphemism for dating; I don’t really see them at all. Or really feel them, or hear them, for that matter. I’m pleased to meet attractive new women (why not?), and happy in their intimate company (how pleasant) but only vaguely disappointed when we break up (too bad). If I were to estimate my capacity to wholeheartedly love anyone other than my children (for whom my love is prodigious), or my ability to create another large work of the imagination, a big novel like The Drowner , I’d put it at around fifty per cent. Nevertheless, this is an improvement.

  Time passes, time passes, and I find myself absorbed by the countryside, the elements, the exotic flora and fauna of the northern rainforest. Several times a day I check the weather radar online; then I stand outside and marvel at the clouds building up just as they are on the screen. I can stare for hours at brush turkeys nesting in the shrubbery and water-dragons sunbaking on the septic tank. One day there is a strong tsunami warning following an earthquake out in the Pacific; I stand on a cliff and wait at the appointed time of impact for the engulfing wave. Once my children are on high ground I relish the idea. Go on, sweep everything away. Nothing happens.

  To use up the constant adrenaline surges of anxiety, I impulsively take long, fast walks along the beach and country lanes. Snakes rustle away from me; a nervy nesting swamp-hen darts out of Emigrant Creek and bites my shin. I swim and gym for the same adrenaline reason (I can’t stop myself frenetically exercising), and quickly lose seven kilos without dieting. Waiting for my daughter at the school gate, tension momentarily flattened by lifting weights, I’m strangely, calmly, impressed by the smell of camphor laurels, the way palm fronds bisect the sky, and the high altitude attained by soaring pelicans. My new columns and stories throng with lizards and swamp-hens and silky-oaks and palm trees and relationship breakups. Obviously, I’m not yet out of the woods.

  Those friends close to me professionally, my publisher, Julie Gibbs, and my agent, Fiona Inglis, start asking, ‘What’s next?’

  Good question.