by Cate Kennedy
And is it a special school, just for special children?
I couldn’t work her out. Maybe she didn’t understand about school. I said not really then my mouth blurted out: You got hair like a fox.
She laughed like someone in a movie. Good heavens, she said. You are a character, aren’t you?
A man in a red dressing-gown came out onto the verandah and the lady said, Look darling, some local colour.
Love the hat, said the man to me. I waited for them to tell me their names, but the man just complained that it was bloody freezing, and thank Christ they’d got the central heating in. The lady said yes, the whole place was shaping up well, then she looked out down the track and said, The only problem is there’s no bloody view of the lake. Then she said, Billy, show Roger your bunnies, darling, and I pulled one out and Roger said, Good God.
They both laughed and laughed and Roger said, Well it looks like the light’s on but there’s no one home. Which was wrong. They were both there and they’d turned the light off by now.
When I walked down the track past the sharp turn and through the cutting my boots cracked on the black ice. You can easy go for a sixer on that. People say it’s invisible but it’s not really. You have to get down real close to see where the water’s froze then melted a bit then froze again, all through the night, till it’s like a piece of glass from an old bottle.
Dad had had his shower by the time I got home. The rabbits were harder to skin because more time had passed. The skins ripped off with the sound of a bandaid like they put on your knees in the school sickroom. Get them off, my dad said when I came home one time with the bandaids on. He was watching me so I pulled both of them off fast and they bled again. Call that first aid? That’s bloody atrocious, said my dad. Get some air onto them. I looked at my knees. They felt like the hinges inside had got stiff and rusty, like the oil in them had leaked out.
Every day for the next few weeks, people drove up the hill to fix things in the house. You could hear banging and machines and then a pointy bit of new roof pushed up over the trees. The lady’s friends, the ones who thought she was quite mad, came up a lot at first but then it got colder and they stopped. The lake froze over at the edges and the ducks had frost on their feathers. One day I crept up and saw the lady standing with her arms folded on the new verandah, which was covered in pink paint, just staring out at the trees. All around her garden were piles of rocks and I saw a duck standing still as anything under a tree. I went closer and she saw me.
Well, Billy, she called, and I went over and saw the duck was a pretend one.
Look at all these bloody trees, she said, sighing. I’m sick of the sight of them.
She had on the overalls again but they didn’t look so new now. The digger had left big piles of dirt everywhere.
What are those trees anyway, Billy? she said suddenly, and I said they were gum trees and she laughed and said she might have guessed that would be my answer, even though I hadn’t finished and was only sorting out what I was going to say next.
I said it was going to be another cold snap that night and more hard weather. And she said how did I know and I started explaining but she wasn’t really listening, she was still looking down the gully towards the lake, turning her head like the ladies in the shop when they’re buying dresses and looking at themselves in the mirror, deciding.
Three weeks after that time I was up in the trees, just listening to them and looking for good spots for snares, when I found the first sick one. When I touched its leaves I knew it was dying, like when I touched my grandpop’s hand. It was a big old tree and used to have a big voice but now it was just breathing out. And it was bleeding. All around the trunk there was a circle somebody had cut and sap dripped out which is the tree’s blood, my dad says. It was a rough chopping job and the person had used a little saw then a hatchet and I could see how they didn’t know how to use the saw properly and had scratched all up and down around the cut. There was nothing I could do for that tree. I wanted to kill it properly so it wouldn’t just stand there looking at me trying its hardest to stay alive.
The week after that one I found another tree that was the same and then it just kept on happening, seven of the biggest trees got cut. When I looked real hard I flew up again and saw them from the top and the dying ones made a kind of line down to the lake all the way from the lady’s house on the hill to the shore. Then I came back down onto the ground, and I saw how it was.
You’ve done it again, Billy, said Mr Bailey when I came past. I don’t know what I’d do without you, two big fat ones today.
I got my money and walked up the hill towards the lady’s house and I saw her through the trees planting something in the garden. Dad said she kept the whole nursery in business.
Now I got quite close to her and the pretend duck before she saw me and she jumped backwards.
Jesus, kid, just give it a break, will you? she said in an angry voice. I stood there holding the empty box from the rabbits.
Just don’t creep around so much, Billy, okay? she said, getting up. I saw she had a special little cushion for kneeling on and I was looking at that cushion when she said something else.
Where did you get that box, Billy?
I said out of the shed. She laughed and looked up at the sky. I looked down at the box with the picture of the apple on it.
Out of your shed? That’s a finger-joint colonial box, Billy. Do you know how much some of them are worth?
Her voice was all excited, like that lady at the school who pretended boring things were interesting on that test.
What about selling it to me, she said.
I said it was my rabbit box and she said did I have any others in the shed. I said I would have a look. She was a loony. My dad sometimes split up old boxes for the chip heater. He kept nails and bolts in them.
I know where there’ll be a lot, I said. At the Franklin’s garage sale.
Her eyes looked a little bit like Mr Bailey’s dogs’ eyes inside the netting.
When is it? she asked.
On Sunday. They got lots of stuff.
Like what? she said, and then said a whole list of things like fire pokers? ironwork? cupboards? and I just kept nodding.
Lots of that kind of thing, I said. Lots of these little boxes with writing and maps of Australia and animals like emus.
She folded her arms and looked at me harder. Boxes with emus and kangaroos on them? With joints like this one?
Yep, I said, but you got to get there real early in the morning. Like 6.30 or something. ’Cos other people come up from the city.
She asked me where Franklin’s was, and I told her.
I can get there earlier than the dealers, she said, looking down the hill at the row of trees, all secretly dying.
On Saturday I set a snare just inside a little tunnel of grass by the lake. Dad says it’s bad to kill something without a good reason but I knew the rabbit wouldn’t mind. The trees were very quiet now. It was going to be a black frost. When the moon came up there was a yellow ring around it like around a Tilley lamp when you take it out on a frosty night.
I couldn’t hardly get to sleep with thinking. I thought of her going out there with her new saw from the hardware shop and cutting open their skin. In the night, while the rabbits nosed around with their soft whiskery mouths and Mr Bailey’s dogs cried and choked on their chains over and over.
When I got up it was still dark, as dark as the steel on the monkey bars, cold metal that hurts your chest. I felt a still, cold rabbit’s body in the trap and I felt sorry for it. I knew she would, too. Because in the lady’s head you can feel sorry and worried for rabbits but not for trees.
It looked like it was sitting up there by itself on the track, alive. All the crystals had grown in the night and now the black ice was smooth as glass all round that turn.
My dad knew I’d got up early when he came to wake me up again. I don’t know how.
You’d better go out and check your traps, he said as he split the kindling.
Up the road Farrelly’s tractor was pulling her car out of the ditch. It had crumpled into one of the big gums, and leaves and sticks had been shaken all over it. Mr Farrelly said the ambulance blokes had nearly skidded over themselves on the bloody ice, trying to get in to help. What’s a sheila like her doing getting up in the bloody dark on a Sunday morning anyway, Mr Farrelly said as he put the hooks on. Bloody loonies.
Under the front wheel I saw white fur, turned inside out like a glove, like my hat. I went down through the trees, touching the sick ones. On the way I stepped in a big patch of nettles. No use crying if you weren’t looking out for yourself, my dad says. I looked around and found some dock and rubbed it on and it stopped hurting like magic. That’s what nature’s like, for everything poisonous there’s something nearby to cure it if you just look around. That’s what my dad says.
I made a little fire and smoked my traps. Five more weeks and I can get a mountain bike.
Resize
The car breaks down on the way to the jeweller’s. It hits a pothole filled with mud the colour of strong tea and Dave hears the fanbelt snap and clatter under the bonnet like the end of a spool of film. This is in his mind so that when he gets out he sees the whole scene like a kind of movie — black and white, bittersweet, European. Something on SBS. He makes an expressive Gallic face at the radiator and feels the rain drizzle down his collar.
‘So what’s the story?’ Andrea shouts with her head out the window. ‘I thought you fixed the bloody thing. I thought you said this would never happen again.’ Behind the fogged windscreen, her face settles back into hard, sceptical lines of resignation. In the movie, she is the unforgiving French girlfriend, cool and intimidating. He lays the flat of his hand against the radiator cap, feeling heat, turning it and wary about the pressure release of boiling spray. What he’d fixed had been the timing chain.
‘It’s freezing. How could it boil on a day like this? Bastard car.’ She slouches back against the red bench seat, a ridge of thumbnail is excised by her teeth in small, annoyed nips. She hates the Holden. He feels protective of it when he sees it parked on the street, as if it were an old dog: smelly and incontinent, losing dignity, but his.
Andrea twists the ring on her finger, massaging circulation back in distractedly. They are going to have their wedding rings cut off and resized. Dave’s cuts into his finger with a sharp, blackened niggling; Andrea’s flesh rises up either side of her ring like bread dough left to prove too long. They can’t get them off. It has happened to both of them at the same time, like an anniversary.
The jeweller is a friend of Andrea’s and has agreed to cut the rings off at his house and add another section of gold. They are late. The jeweller lives in a mud-brick house at the end of eight kilometres of dirt track.
Dave searches the boot for a spare fanbelt. He shifts a roll of carpet underlay Andrea has picked up off a skip for controlling weeds and a bag of chook pellets, feeling the rain saturate his back. His ring finger itches and burns around the cut on his knuckle where he tried this morning to lever the ring off with soap and a crochet hook.
He swears as he shifts stuff around, feels the edge of his underpants get wet just as Andrea’s left hand comes out the window holding the new fanbelt as if it were four aces. Of course — the glovebox. In the SBS movie, Dave thinks grimly, this would be a fairly comical image. He changes the belt, tops up the water, and gets back in the car, wiping his hands on an old T-shirt and feeling his wet clothes paste themselves to him.
He blows his nose and looks sideways at his wife chewing the inside of her lip, and after a moment she looks back at him.
‘Let’s just get this over with,’ she says in the long-suffering tone that annoys the crap out of him.
Andrea has had a dream the night before that her friend the jeweller had a tiny circular saw and started cutting through the gold band, then kept going and went right through skin and bone and gristle, cutting off her whole finger. Best to amputate, he’d said, flattening the rest of her hand out on a kind of operating table. Fine, she’d thought in the morning. Whatever.
Dave pumps the accelerator, double-clutches to find first. The Holden’s shift column protests. It’s like a metal grinder in there. Andrea jammed it between first and second once and he’d fixed it with a hammer, explaining to her about the slipping clutch until she’d suddenly leaned on the horn and he’d cracked the back of his head on the bonnet.
‘A slipping clutch,’ she’d said when he’d got back in, a strainer-wire of tension between them. Her voice had been heavy with sarcasm, and something else. ‘Yeah, right.’ And she’d smirked — a private joke with herself she didn’t think he’d get.
He’d driven the car on their first date. She’d liked it then, said it was like being in an ad, an old romantic 1950s ad, searched the dial on the big, old radio for something atmospheric. He was in awe of her. There was no bullshit about Andrea. She wore those op-shop dresses with aplomb, bossed people round when they wouldn’t give her student concession. Making love in the back, his first euphoric inhalations of her had swirled with old leather, petrol, oily rags. Herbal shampoo. He inhales now — nothing but wet jumper.
Down the dirt track it’s like Andrea blames him personally for every rut, as if he’s providing suspension with his own body. Dave winces, thinks of the time he pranged the car and felt something in the driveshaft crack with a terrible finality, like a spine.
It’s welded back together now. Patchily.
Andrea’s gearing up for some tight-lipped blame, but the jeweller’s forgotten they were coming anyway. Her marshalled energy hangs awkwardly in the calm. The jeweller makes coffee, and to cut the rings off they sit at a work table slung with an apron of leather. In the leather, Dave sees a dust, a sifting of gold specks and filings. A deep, exhausting sadness fills him. He can’t explain it; it’s the filings and Andrea’s proferred finger, swollen with the ring’s confinement, the others so fine and tapered. The jeweller holds her hand as he cuts as if he’s fashioned it himself, as familiar as a lover.
‘Thank God for that,’ Andrea says, flexing. Dave’s cut burns as his ring gets filed off; the relief and release are draining. He sifts through the gold filings and they powder his fingers. He compares this table with their own, a wedding present from a carpenter friend seven years ago, littered with bills and notes and lists, a bowl of brown-flecked bananas, cups rimmed with tidemarks of coffee.
Andrea is talking to the jeweller as she never talks to him; he hears news and opinions from her he wasn’t aware of. At home she sits mired in long bouts of silence, sometimes glaring at the TV with something else, some other narrative entirely, racing away behind her eyes. He’s given up trying to find out what; he’s sick to death of being cast as the one meant to guess.
Dave follows the conversation now, baffled, hearing only enthusiasm and laughter. He stares at the tiny files and awls on the workbench. A screwdriver with an end no larger than a needle, some microscopic precision-clamping device that looks like it could clench together two single synapses in the human brain. Dave listens to his wife’s vivacity and the jeweller coming awake under her wit and energy, listens to the movie unspooling. He’s missed a connection somewhere, he thinks, some subplot, some richer underlying symbol that would throw light on the whole. With a sort of horror he realises he’s close to tears and turns and stares out the window, feels himself floundering, fighting off a heavy pointlessness with revulsion, as if it were a jellyfish or a piece of looming dead flotsam.
The jeweller finds a device bored with holes of different sizes and Dave and Andrea both push their ring fingers through. As they stand — th
e jeweller jotting down a figure and explaining how he will rejoin the rings and repolish the surfaces — Dave finds he has to stare out the window again. Their hands are so close, making room for each other, not touching. He feels numb.
As they are leaving, Andrea puts her hand on his arm and mechanically he gets out his wallet.
‘Oh, pay me when you come and pick them up,’ says the jeweller. The moment stumbles, then rebalances. Andrea looks at Dave. She has only meant to touch him, he realises, not command obedience. It makes him catch sight of himself, shake himself awake. There is recognition in her eyes, shame, a stricken glimpse of something emptied, a gulf of ragged edges and constriction.
‘Sorry,’ she says.
He feels the moment heat up, become molten.
Andrea struggles with the car door, gets in and manoeuvres it closed, for once not swearing at it. The jeweller disappears back inside; his garden blurs and runs through the streaming windscreen.
The heat is in Dave’s chest now. They sit there, breathing. He knows as soon as he starts the car there will be a cooling again, a loss of this strange fluidity, so he floats in it, feeling it rearrange him, before turning to look at his wife.
There is her, and there is everything after this; her transforming face, her naked fingers, her precise choreography. He can no sooner think of not having her as pulling a layer out from under his own skin.
She leans over and kisses him on the mouth, pulls back and grins. The heat spreads, stretches. He fears for a moment the join may not hold. There aren’t tools small enough for this. There aren’t subtitles.
‘How’s the swelling?’ he croaks. On her cheek there’s a glitter of metal where his fingers must have brushed her. He can smell her hair.
‘Going down,’ she says.
He steps on the clutch and finds first gear, feeling the calibrations gnash like teeth momentarily then drop into place, lubricated, fitted together like bones in a hand.
