The World Without Us

by Mireille Juchau

  He rolls four more bottles from under the bench. Incredible! How they’ve genied out of floor dust. Whips the cork from one, decants wine into a mug. His face is flushed, his eyes are veiny, the knife in his head starts cranking again, then suddenly the whole thing seems hilarious. Why struggle so hard against nature? What’s the point? A bee in the hand will bite you then die. Pests will spread on the wind despite your companion planting. GM crops will contaminate your biodynamic paddock. Certain men in the pub will always turn when a woman passes. Those who are fatherless, think of me. Men will spread themselves around, Hodgins would say, it’s natural. But what is natural anyway? There are sicknesses that no substance on this good green earth can remedy.

  He glances at his wife, at the table with something under a tea towel. Very still. Knitted fingers. Serene, desolate face.

  And what are you doing, up so late? he says. Is a mystery.

  I have some unmysterious sourdough, proving.

  Such a woman, she makes bread at midnight!

  He takes another swig, says, Or maybe you just got home?

  Because, you’re allowed to stay out all hours, but I’m forbidden.

  He picks up a hank of her hair, sniffs it. But where do you wander, Lina? Pretty risky, mountain climbing at night?

  More than Imigran, beer and Nora Roberts?

  And how you get such a bruise, right here, another whodunnit. He lays a finger against her neck.

  She whips her head out of reach.

  It’s not just the bees in town, I hear, he leans very close, travelling far from home for honey.

  She stands fast, pushing him backward with her chair. He grabs her shoulder, tight.

  Some of us just can’t forget how we were raised. Sharing everything. Isn’t that right? Isn’t that actually what Hodgins taught? Love thy neighbour.

  You’re the one who thought the commune was Paradies, she says. Shall we pretend I was the first woman you slept with up there?

  Pretty clear that I wasn’t your first, Stefan says.

  So what does that make me? Come on, say it. A commune whore?

  I have never said …

  … No you’re nothing like the others. They will say it aloud if they think it, she says. Then she pulls the tea towel from the bowl and plunges her fist in the leavened dough.

  Who are you comparing me to? Peter? Hodgins? Your mother? he asks. Suddenly these schemers are all so much better than me?

  You’re drunk, go to bed.

  He tips the mug back, his tongue recoiling. Ugh, the Merlot, balsamic, fit for salad.

  Lina, he says, I stopped all that when we met and you know it. I thought you had too …

  … How is Nora? Can she still keep up with you at the pub?

  Am I holding your history against you? he asks. Don’t forget that you were already … that when we met you were …

  … My history? You mean a child? she says.

  And he instantly wishes his tongue had been knifed from his mouth. He longs to reverse the past twelve hours, the hazy morning, the nasal spray, the topping up at the pub. He wishes away fresh bees, fallen cedar, Nora running her cold hands over his neck at the pub, saying reiki.

  You are the only one for me. And the girls, he says, quietly now.

  Right, her voice very tight in the teeth.

  Then she walks down the hall. The bare, regal back of her neck more reproachful than anything she can say.

  Later, in his study, he tries switching off. Turns on the lamp, opens his notebook. How is it that a one-night stand he barely recalls means so much more to his wife?

  Drones often maligned as being lazy … But they don’t have the body structures possible for work – no wax glands, no stingers and their proboscis so short they can’t reach nectar. But they are very efficient sperm machines. Isn’t that enough?

  In the morning Meg slices the warm bread as Stefan drinks coffee and turns the newspaper. Snap, thwack, snap. The loaf is dry and overcooked. Their mother had put it in the oven and then gone out, leaving the girls to guess when it was done. Meg had knocked on the loaf, then held it against her ear.

  Daddy, were they our bees? She passes him slices, a knife, butter.

  His cracked palms, his nails chipped. Farmer’s hands. Except for the morning shaking. They still surprise him.

  I can’t say I know what belongs to who any more, Margaret, Stefan says. The bees are belonging to the earth and then came the interfering of man. We should give up trying to control them.

  And everything that I created, I created for you. Be careful not to spoil or destroy my world – if you do, there will be nobody after you to repair it. He can recall the whole Midrash now, and how his grandfather told it, lightly, and often, but mostly when they were strolling about his Neukölln allotment.

  In the forest Meg and Tess had stood far back, because they weren’t equipped. Their legs were bare and their arms exposed, but they were not afraid and did not hold their breath like their mother around bees. They had such trust that came from … he could not say where, a self-containment he could credit neither parent for. They’d seen him lift a swarm from the eaves one summer with bare hands, carrying the weight of some twenty thousand bees and wiping them off his arms like mud. When he came into the kitchen after, bees in his hair, Pip had started laughing. It’s the latest supercool look, haven’t you heard? he’d told her. Everyone’s all abuzz, he said, and he danced around Pip’s chair, trying to keep her laughter going while her thin hands pawed the air, in case a bee was heading her way.

  Now Tess comes in gesturing, goes out again with Meg. When they return, Meg leans towards their father.

  Papa, she says, there are sheets on the couch.

  Ich war kalt.

  You slept there? Meg purses her lips.

  Meg, the little mother, always neatening the world around her.

  How does it looks like? Stefan frowns, then pretend-reads the business pages.

  He catches Meg and Tess eye-rolling. Their colluding makes him briefly content. He’d encouraged this sibling camaraderie, and they’d maintained it despite, or perhaps because of, the fracturing opposition.

  Stefan squints at the kitchen window as if he might see, from here, the mahogany krasnozem soils on the mountains. Nutrient-rich with a deep profile, and clay minerals. Or he might spy beech, black bean and coachwood where lava once flowed. From all that heat, fertility.

  Where’s his wife? Which field, which road, which mountain path? Whose home? When he’d come into the bedroom that morning the sheets were cool and empty. He’d plunged his face inside them, inhaled her woody scent, then retreated to the couch. What kind of a man ignores rumour and fact, so as not to create more disturbance in his house? Cuckold, a word he’d heard in the back bar one afternoon. He’d had to look it up later, thinking it a type of rooster, and will still picture lurid tail feathers, the word cock, when he hears it.

  In the corner the girls are bent over the computer.

  Meg laughs, and says, Dad’s reading cow porn again!

  But he’s engrossed now, smoothing the paper across the table. An arsonist has struck again, destroying forest near the Beauforts’ place. Stefan thinks of Heidi Tucker beneath the goalpost crossbar, mistaking him for Peter. Peter, rumoured to have burned three properties years back – drug labs or warehouses for stolen goods. And what had become of his forest crops, sown not far, Nora claimed, from the farm? Stefan thinks of those bones, what they could mean. He must try harder to right everything that’s gone askew.

  The Charolais Online Semen Catalogue, Meg says, very poshly, reading aloud from the screen.

  Tess beside her, laughing without sound. Tess, slight and lean, olive-skinned; her dark hair and eyes, her judicious expression, reminding him of how she’d come into the world. You are mine and not mine. It’s never mattered to him. But does it matter to her, even if she doesn’t know it?

  Classy, Dad, really nice, Meg’s saying.

  Later, she’ll draw a spectacled cow in
an armchair. It holds the semen catalogue between its front legs. She’ll sketch a pool of lamplight on florid carpet, and inside this the cow’s hoofs crossed tidily at the ankle. It’s these feet that will floor him when he finds the sketch. Those hoofs, so humanised. An anthropomorphism so totally Meg, who cried and cried when the calves were separated from their heifers, the time the mothers trampled three fences and the new deck in a desperate search for their newborns.

  The phone. It’s Stan, in chipper morning mode.

  The bees are safe, Stan says, don’t worry. You should have seen Marjorie when I got home. Incog-bloody-nito in trenchcoat and hat! Stan chuckles. Stuffed her back, though, lifting those bees off that ute.

  They seem to be disease free, he tells Stefan. Come get them anytime.

  Stefan hangs up, feels himself relax. He has a project. And he thinks of his wild bees, how calm he becomes among them, his ears attuned to their resonant droning. His thronging insect communion.

  5

  James Parker is standing by the chai tent, chewing a currant bun. Long-limbed, broad-chested with a suspiciously even tan. A straight-toothed movie smile, his head tilted left.

  James offers a hand as Tom approaches.

  I know your type, Tom thinks, as he slows. The sort his mother calls a charmer.

  Thomas? he asks. Aren’t you the lollipop man? At the school?

  Name’s Tucker, Tom says. Then salutes him, ignoring the hand. And I prefer crossing guard.

  It’s market day, the whole town’s come out in the coppery light.

  James, also known as Jim, had arrived from the city months back with only two bags. One full of women’s clothes. A fact gleaned from the excellent sleuthing of June Peterson. On her shifts at the Red Lodge, June will spy on the blow-ins. Then, when she comes to look after Tom’s mother, she spills:

  • James Matthew Parker, formerly of Kings Cross, Sydney.

  • Receives postcards from a person called Sylvie. Girlfriend, former wife?

  • Reads small-print books about Early Australian Man. Plus somebody Solnit, The Wild and the Domestic, someone Lorca and Thoreau. Poetry and anthropology.

  Jim also has a bike. Rusted and secondhand. Rides in the dark without helmet, reflective vest or headlight, does not seem in the least Prepared, though anyone from the city’s a likely Climate Pilgrim because when the End Days come, the cities will fall first. Frequents the southside chemist, probably for prophylactics, snugger fit. The women look at him, sometimes even mothers at the market with babies in tow. Hungry. People think the women round here are loose because they wear tie-dye, because some were raised in a commune with its fluid midnight community. But Tom knows they’re reluctant.

  Tom, surveying the market, turns back to see Jim’s left swinging towards his face. He intercepts with an open high karate block and Jim backs off, hands in the air, a spasm of terror marring his face.

  Hey man, relax! Jim’s saying. You had a bug on you, that’s all!

  I’m the type of person, insects just don’t bother me, says Tom, giving silent thanks to Sensei Jeff of Wednesday night dojo. Sometimes during classes Tom is floored by students he must greet the next morning at the school gate. Teenagers, chucking a zenkutsu stance on the zebra crossing.

  I see you two have already met.

  It’s an umbrella, talking. No – it’s Evangeline, magicked up from behind a tree. She tips her brolly back, revealing a flushed and eager face.

  James, she says, breathless.

  Tom inserts himself between them. We’ve known each other since we were kids, he tells Jim.

  Evangeline flashes him a look, says, James is one of Tess’s teachers.

  I thought you didn’t like it in town? Jim says as if he actually knows her.

  She looks into the distance, touches his arm.

  Are you keeping tabs on me? she asks.

  And she’s laughing again, which is notable. She’d once been the liveliest kid at The Hive, the only one to challenge Hodgins’s pronouncements, to outright scoff at what she did not believe. She’d disappear for days, then come striding back up the Summit Road in the same clothes, a new woman, as she said, though she was really just a girl. Everyone grew up faster in the commune, though Tom has come to think they were in so many other ways stunted.

  We’ve come to get our new queen bees. Evangeline gestures towards the post office.

  You’re importing queens? Tom asks. Better to get yourself a wild swarm. Mite-resistant, hardy.

  Hard to come by, though, says Evangeline vaguely.

  That depends, says Tom, on your connections, right?

  Then he rolls his sleeves down because of how Jim is staring at his burns.

  If the bee disappears from the earth, man would have no more than four years to live, Tom says.

  Evangeline sighs. How depressing.

  That’s Einstein. Tom rushes in to distribute the blame.

  Tess appears, holding a large cardboard box. Tom feels his breath change, he forgets to swallow. He remembers her as a newborn – dark-eyed, beautiful. She probably has no idea how well he’s known her. Used to sing her to sleep, had maybe even saved her. He’s done nothing quite as majestic since that fire, and probably never will. Then, an odd thought drifts in – that she has survived, and he hasn’t.

  Come and look, Jim. Stefan ordered them online, says Evangeline.

  Tess unwraps the small three-chambered box.

  There’s the queen with the yellow mark. And that’s the queen candy, says Evangeline.

  Jim starts walking slowly backwards, saying, You’ve already named her?

  Evangeline laughs, winking at Tess.

  No, Jim, candy’s what the queen eats while she’s in the post.

  He takes another step away.

  Tom examines him. James Parker, apiphobic?

  Jim’s changed his mind about the market. Claims to have forgotten something. He says his goodbyes, lopes off.

  Evangeline, watching him leave, has a pinched look on her face. Tom supposes he’s considered handsome, cycling in his languid, unsweating way around town, slowing and throwing one leg nonchalantly over the still-moving bike. The way he leans it so trustingly against a lamppost when he enters a shop. As if this is a town where you don’t even need to lock up your treasures. A town small enough for trust. Tom supposes he has assignations; he’s seen him riding late one night when he was searching for his mother. A person who reads poetry in the rain at a bus stop. He has seen him sometimes, outside the school gate, a minor rock star, mobbed by mums, high-fiving tweens with his clean, bookish hands.

  Later, at the market, Tom tries remembering what his mother has asked him to buy. Everything jumbled, her nouns unintelligible. Turn on the people box, Tom, go check the wall-watch will you? Asks him to tuck in the tablecloth after he helps her to bed. She’s unlearning and he’s supposed to – what – teach her again? Sometimes, sponging her face after dinner, her eyes so trustingly fixed on his, he has a surge of pre-emptive grief. He will rub her face harder then, to remove the expression.

  Appleberries, was that what she’d wanted? But did she mean apples, berries, or some other mutant fruit? He’ll choose her favourite; perhaps the mouth will recognise what the eyes regard with doubt.

  Three kids skate past in a dusty whoosh of urgent air and he envies their brand of childhood – knowing, cool, bent on intensity. Full of possibilities. Once at the commune, a Polish woman had appeared. A scar on her neck from where her thyroid had been removed. After the winds blew from Chernobyl, all the young girls in her village grew ill. She was his first brush with noteworthy environmental disaster. She’d hiked to the commune with a backpack full of white bread and Nutella and each day made him a slice. White flour and sugar – outlawed at The Hive. She helped out in the crèche. I can’t have kids, she said, tapping the scar at her throat. He must have been … twelve? Gone weak-kneed at Eastern European girls ever since. Irina was tender and poked fun at the residents. You notice, she’d say, how Nico always
goes missing when is sewage-pump time? Help! I want to flee to forest when Starr gets out his pan pipes! My Gott, when I see Rainbow dancing I nearly phone for paramedics. When you grow up, Thomas, leave! Travel, then you decide for yourself.

  But what was he supposed to decide? Since his mother’s illness, he doesn’t have to know any more. There’s only one place he can be.

  Now the high, broken voice of the market busker, Peony Skelton, who holds the mic against her chest between verses, as if to amplify through beaded muslin, the sound of her young and desperate heart.

  6

  Meg flexes her fingers around the Staedtler Triplus Jumbo. She’s bent over the page, tongue out, kneeling on a kitchen chair. She’s attempting a tree recalled from two years back, a tree that captivated at her sister’s funeral. She takes her line from the base of the page, turns it smoothly right. But when she looks it over, her drawing arm frozen in the air, she sees a line flawed by tremors, wavers, uneven camber. She sighs, sinks on to her shins, blows her fringe from her eyes. Probably her faulty grip – she’d never mastered the Tripod despite a sheet covered in fingers sent home by Ms Myers. She had not been granted the Pen Licence given to every other girl in her class. And ever since her pencilled marks grow fainter by the day. Perhaps tomorrow she’ll complete her homework in lemon juice.

  At school today her friends decided which singer they loved. Then said, you can’t love her also. Gizelle Lee Powers. A tawny-haired wailer who stalks the stage in spike heels and prairie skirts. Her YouTube clip features a nervy fawn in a forest and Gizelle in lace corset, silhouetted against a lightning sky. Meg’s father, nursing a mug of whisky, had a laughing fit when he watched it. But the sisters leaned into the screen, enraptured, their cheeks pressed together, their breathing shallow, till Gizelle, among toadstools and moss, vibratoed her final note. Stefan banned the CD, blaming it for a vomiting migraine. So now the girls listen with dual headphones, lip syncing and knowing more than Gizelle possibly could when she sang, I’m losing you, their eyes bright, their faces afire with memory.