Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 11, Issue 3

by Chris Womersley

  Review of Australian Fiction

  Volume Eleven: Issue Three

  Zutiste, Inc.

  Review of Australian Fiction Copyright © 2014 by Authors.

  Contents

  Imprint

  The Mare’s Nest Chris Womersley

  A Rope Stretched Between Christopher Przewloka

  Published by Review of Australian Fiction

  “The Mare’s Nest” Copyright © 2014 by Chris Womersley

  “A Rope Stretched Between” Copyright © 2014 by Christopher Przewloka

  www.reviewofaustralianfiction.com

  The Mare’s Nest

  Chris Womersley

  ‘Don’t tell anyone what happened here,’ were my father’s last words to me—to any other human being, as far as I know. ‘Do you promise?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They won’t believe you and then they’ll lock you up. Never tell a soul.’

  And then he let go of my hand.

  One long-ago dusk my father and I sat on a low hill overlooking a sports field. The air was raw and cold. I became aware, all of a sudden, that my father would die one day, that it would be before I ever really got to know him, and that his death would be akin to something unravelling after being held together with sticky tape and paper clips. I felt an immense sadness, as if my twelve-year-old self were already casting ahead to the moment when I would recall the evening with fondness, with amazement and with regret.

  The soccer nets sagged and the white lines marked on the grass were faded to near invisibility. As it darkened, the grass would come to resemble a square lake, an impression intensified by the muddy smell that blew up amid the susurrations of trees that were easily mistaken for the lapping of water. My father brought me here often, because it was from hereabouts that his own father was taken fifteen years ago.

  Although the police never solved the mystery of what happened to my grandfather, this was the word my father always employed, so it became the one we used in the family. Taken. The word was now an heirloom, much handled, its value and use uncertain.

  But on that night my father was talking in his quiet voice about a workshop near our house that cast medals and statues, the kinds of awards given out at local tennis carnivals and flower shows and the like. This was an old theme of his; he believed the failure of so many marriages in the suburb—not to mention the suicide of old Mr Granger and the alcoholic tendencies of Marie Talbot at Number 16—could be attributed to the workshop.

  ‘I know people think I am foolish,’ he said, brushing dried mud from his trousers, ‘but I have been there at night. I have wandered down there and there is often a strange smell. Toxic. Toxic smoke comes out of that chimney at night and I believe there is something evil in it, some sort of—you know, some sort of poison. We should get it investigated. Get the authorities onto it.’

  The authorities. This was another theme of his. He talked often of alerting the authorities to some indiscretion or other but, as far as we knew, he never actually approached anyone. His complaints were regular but deeply regretful, as if in the very process of making them, he were already only too aware of everyone’s idiotic unwillingness to take them seriously, a misjudgement for which we all would dearly pay.

  ‘There are things, you know, that just… defy description,’ he continued as he plucked blades of grass and rolled them between his fingers. ‘The afternoon that my father was taken was much like this, actually. The trees, the sky. Before it happened I had an odd feeling that only later I realised was a… premonition, I guess you’d call it. I thought at first they would bring him home again. I was certain. And I thought they would come back for me. But it’s been so long now. My own father held out far longer than me.’

  For many years afterwards, when I was playing with my sister Peggy in the garden I would glance up and see my mother observing us from the kitchen window, watching us for nascent signs of our father’s madness, as if it were a weed she might pluck before it spread. She would come into my room late at night and stroke my hair, for what sometimes seemed like hours. She made sure the bedroom windows were always locked. On these occasions I pretended to be asleep, but could sense her tears. Checking I had not yet followed my father, wherever it was he went.

  He was convinced there were scraps of meaning to be found between the cracks of consciousness, the way one might find tiny pieces of paper—on which would be scrawled secret messages, codes, formulae—rolled into balls and stuffed into the fissures of a brick wall. He listened out for distant voices and would spend interminable hours slowly rotating the radio dial in the hope of finding transmissions intended for him alone.

  After he had gone, my mother and I found dozens of small notebooks in which he had written the meanings of obscure words that interested him, along with recondite facts he gleaned from god knows where. None of us had ever seen these books before or indeed seen him writing in them. We could only guess that he did it late at night when the rest of the household was asleep. I imagined him slouched over our kitchen table, eyeglasses perched on his nose in an approximation of a professorial attitude, laboriously writing out words he had looked up in the dictionary or asked someone the meaning of. It was an image that made me weak with sorrow.

  Occluded–closed off. Beans can be used as a homeopathic charm against witches and spectres. The word ‘panic’ comes from the god Pan. A mare’s nest is an extraordinary discovery. Obligato–a persistent but subordinate motif.

  My father was an ordinary man but aspired to be something more. In this he was un-Australian, where ordinariness is esteemed.

  Each time I visited him in hospital he regaled me with a new fantasy. He claimed to have invented clothes pegs, to have somehow caused the space shuttle to explode in 1986, to have memorised Pi to three hundred and twenty-two places. The chasm that exists in all of us—between who we imagine ourselves to be, and the person we truly are—was to prove disastrous for him. Several times he calculated—by what means we never knew—the date for the end of the world and, when proven wrong, would lament the planet’s failure to accord with his version of its end. ‘I don’t understand it,’ he would say. ‘I just don’t get it. I guess I’ll have to, you know, get my shoes fixed for winter after all, eh?’

  Then a nurse entered and gave him some pills which he swallowed without demur, without fear, like a child. From outside, on the wet lawn, I could hear the chatter of other patients and their relatives, the occasional hoot of wild laughter.

  One of these nights by the sports field, I heard a tinkling of tiny bells. Someone in one of the nearby houses must have had one of those wind chimes hanging from a tree.

  I sensed, rather than saw, my father look up. ‘I think you should go home now,’ he said after a long pause.

  Now comes the hardest part, the least believable part; which is why the official police incident report ends here.

  When I was about ten I asked my mother what had happened to my grandfather. I had, of course, heard much talk about him but I struggled to untangle the various strands and theories into anything coherent, a narrative I might be able to tell anyone.

  She sighed and pulled me to her. A long silence. For a minute we listened to a pot bubble on the stove. ‘Your grandfather vanished a long time ago. Your own father was there and he claims he was taken by some strange… people one evening.’ Here she paused, tearful, shaking her head. ‘That’s when it all began, really. Your father’s problems. He wasn’t like this when we were married. It all started later.’

  She showed me several photos stored in a box in her bedroom. My grandfather looked a lot like my father—the same slightly stooped st
ance, a way of looking sideways as if expecting to detect something from the tail of his eye.

  ‘Something bad might have happened to your grandfather,’ my mother went on, ‘but we’ll probably never know. I think he’d just had enough. He had a few problems of his own. It’s very sad.’ No sign of him, she said, was ever found.

  ‘Maybe someone did take him?’ I said. ‘Like gangsters or something.’

  She looked at me long and hard. ‘I think that’s unlikely. You know that part of the creek down behind the oval? He fell in there and drowned. He was quite old.’

  ‘Why didn’t they find him, then?’

  She paused. ‘Sometimes people aren’t found when they drown. They get washed away and are lost forever.’

  Even in mid-winter that part of the creek was so shallow that it was difficult to imagine anyone drowning in there, let alone being washed away. My mother knew that as well as I did, but I decided against contradicting her. She must have sensed my scepticism, however, because she held me out at arm’s length to regard me the way she did when she was trying to be serious and treat me like an adult. ‘So just stay away from there, OK?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Do you promise?’

  ‘Yes.’

  My father stood and peered out over the sports field, which had by now become almost totally subsumed in darkness. He gave a short cry, strangely triumphant. ‘At long last,’ he said, and skidded down the dewy incline. He paused at the bottom and turned to face me. ‘You should go home now,’ he said again.

  I was terrified of leaving him there alone. Even then I probably had an inkling of what was going to happen. I shook my head.

  ‘Are you quite sure?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There might be no turning back.’

  I nodded.

  My father was torn. He looked over his shoulder into the darkness, then back to me. He held out one hand. A strange expression took hold of his features. ‘Then would you mind holding my hand? I am afraid.’

  Hand in hand we walked across the field towards the creek on the far side. I sensed an urgency in my father, but we walked slowly and deliberately, as if he were keen to prolong the moment for as long as possible. We didn’t speak. Our shoes squelched through the mud in the centre of the field. Although there was no wind to speak of, I heard more clearly and more often the tinkling of the wind chime I had detected earlier.

  He squeezed my hand. ‘I love you, my son, but I can’t resist any longer. I don’t really want you to see what I am about to show you, but I don’t want you to think that I was merely mad.’

  I squeezed back to let him know that I knew he loved me and that I also knew he had done his best, but couldn’t stay with us. This was not really knowledge but, rather, something more profound, like instinct, encoded in my very DNA.

  ‘Will you be able to find your way home by yourself?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  At the far end of the field, beyond a tattered wire fence, the ground sloped down steeply and the grass gave way to a mess of blackberry and thistle. A vague track carved by dog-walkers and neighbourhood children over the years led through these bushes to the dirty creek at the bottom. There were no houses on this side of the field.

  And there we paused, my father and I, hand in hand for the final time. My heart hammered in my breast.

  Despite his flaws, perhaps even because of them, I loved my father deeply. He was wayward, but exceedingly kind. Even when I was a child he always treated me with great courtesy, as if I were a small but noble monarch from a foreign land. To every question great and trivial he addressed himself with equal gravity. He explained as best he could the laws of physics to his children and drew detailed diagrams of the solar system. He told us of the songlines, of Leichhardt, of the offside rule. He made me a pinhole camera and came up with a plausible explanation as to why Peter Rabbit wore a cardigan, but no trousers. My father was not all conspiracies and madness, and in that moment, when we waited at the edge of the bushland, all my love for him coalesced in what I can only describe as a warm ball of feeling high in my boyish chest.

  After several minutes I became aware—by what precise means I couldn’t say—that we were being observed. There was a twitch in the bushes, followed by an intimation of snuffling. Again the sound of small bells. My father breathed heavily. His hand was warm and dry. I made out smudges of light coming along the path. I gasped and my father gave a simultaneous cry, his not of shock, but of recognition—as if a problem that had long vexed him were suddenly solved.

  Later, I told the police he left me on the low hill and vanished into the darkness.

  ‘It was dark by then?’ the nice police-woman asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you didn’t see where he went?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you see any other people?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you quite sure?’

  ‘No. Yes, I mean. I’m sure.’

  And then he let go of my hand and he was gone, those last words lingering on the night air and I remembered what he’d told me once about the problem of admitting the possibility of one extraordinary thing: it meant you must admit the possibility of them all.

  A Rope Stretched Between

  Christopher Przewloka

  Bishop left town at first light. He kept to the unmarked back roads, following forgotten trails that cut through foothills and sheer vales of red soil. When he finally reached the fields of freshly planted sugarcane, he sat and rested in the shadow of the brake. Here, amongst the stalks, he found the hare: neck snapped, almond eyes weeping and milky.

  What kind of animal, he wondered, would leave the body.

  Around him the wind skirled through the cane. Bishop unshouldered his rucksack and took out his knife. He went to work on the hare with his good hand, throwing the viscera out into the dust. The days were growing longer now, and he was beginning to feel the heat. When the summer storms finally arrived down South, the weeds would grow wild and long in the mountainous places he once called home—patches of foxtail grass flowering like bruises upon earthen flesh.

  He washed his face and beard in the bathroom of a truck-stop restaurant. In the mirror above the sink he could see how skinny he had become: his surplus jacket hung formless from his bony shoulders, and the dark flesh of his face was ashen and gaunt. It had been a long time since Bishop had confronted his reflection.

  He dropped onto all fours and crawled along the tiled floor, searching for shoes within the closed stalls. After checking he was alone, he took the leather billfold from his pocket, and removed the cash and coins. He thought about cutting up the licence with his knife, but feared slipping.

  Before leaving, Bishop locked himself in one of the stalls. He opened the cistern lid, and submerged the billfold within the water.

  Back inside the restaurant, he sat by the window and ordered breakfast.

  ‘I’m gonna have to get you to pay up front,’ said the waitress. She was thick-legged, ringlets of hair framing a face without expression.

  ‘The sign,’ Bishop said. He pointed towards the square of cardboard tacked above the counter: PAY AT REGISTER was scrawled across it in a slanted cursive.

  The waitress looked around the room. ‘I just gotta, okay?’

  Bishop paid in cash, and the waitress left.

  Across the way, past the island counter surrounded by stools, a man and woman drank coffee at a squat table. They leant closer to each other and began to whisper, eyeing him the whole time.

  When his food arrived, Bishop salted the meal heavily, then slipped the shaker into his pocket. The dead hare had turned too fast. If he had salt, he could preserve anything he found or killed.

  As he forked egg into his mouth, the watching couple rose and started towards him. Both were dressed in cotton shirts of uneven colour—the woman in flared fisherman pants. They sat down opposite.

  ‘Need a lift?’ the man asked him. His face was pale, pocke
d with acne scars.

  Bishop shook his head. ‘Fine.’

  ‘You don’t look fine,’ he said. ‘Does he Aanja?’

  The woman agreed. She spoke with a Slavic accent.

  ‘Where you headed?’ the man said. ‘We’re driving down to Gympie, can drop you somewhere along the way if you like.’

  Bishop sipped his bitter tea. ‘I don’t have any money.’

  The man raised a hand, and shook his head. ‘Mate, you don’t have to pay us. Just being charitable is all. So what do you say?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Bishop told them.

  But neither man nor woman moved from their seat.

  They drove the coastal roads, Bishop in the passenger side of the van and the woman dozing in the seat behind. The radio was on softly and a male voice ticked away in a monotone:

  …to combat growing tension on the picket lines, state parliament has approved the recently proposed Electricity Act. With these changes, electricity workers are now forbidden to strike or picket and, if caught doing so, may lose their property or even their homes. Electrical Trade Union officials have indicated that these changes will lead to the deregistration of organised unions, and the possible seizure of assets. Premier Bjelke-Petersen has gone on record as saying…

  The man fiddled with the radio until the station changed. An old ballad, undercut by static, began to play from the console speakers. As he turned the wheel, he would hum along tunelessly with the melody.

  In the divot of the dashboard there sat a leather-bound bible. The man caught Bishop staring at it.

  ‘Ever read it?’ he asked.