Little Hazel giggles. Dora closes the magazine and takes a handful of Michael’s shirtsleeve in her hand.
‘Come on, you, we’ve got homework.’ She leads Michael towards the front room.
Betty looks at Harry. ‘They’re “study-buddies”,’ she says flatly.
Harry and Betty hold each other’s eye. They don’t like the sound of this: it’s American, it’s show-offy – it’s not their way.
Harry has no idea what makes a girl like Dora tick. He hasn’t even imagined her naked. He sees her and Michael go down to the channel to catch dragonflies after school while he’s grubbing out thistles along the bottom track. There’s a lot of shenanigans with the long handle of the net and the girl’s dress. She’s a thin girl with big knees. She picks her feet up without thought. She turns her head immediately when she hears the kookaburras in the trees. She talks easily. She laughs loudly. She’s a running tap, Harry thinks, a swig of water.
Not like Betty. His Betty is heavier, more complicated. Betty meanders within herself; she’s full of quiet pockets. The girl Dora might be water, but his Betty is oil. You can’t take oil lightly. It seeps into your skin. It marks you.
Harry and his mother are staying with Aunty Bev at Kangaroo Flat. His mother and his aunt have gone shopping together in the big emporiums of Bendigo. They always come back exhausted from these trips; parched for a pot of tea and needing to soak their feet in basins of hot water. Seven-year-old Harry has been left on his own for three hours. He has the front garden to weed and two encyclopaedias he’s brought from home – J–L and S–T. Three hours is three viewings of the wooden bird that springs from his aunt’s cuckoo clock. A set of plaster ducks fly up the wall of the good room. Above the mantelpiece, its weights dangling like polished acorns, hangs the cuckoo clock. At four minutes to ten Harry wipes the grass grease from his hands on his shorts and pushes the door of the good room open. Four minutes. Harry stands to attention in front of the clock. He quickens his breathing, puffing in and out to speed things up. Time, in Harry’s understanding, is measured in the body. It has something to do with the lungs and the taking in and expelling of air. At school they march on the spot and are ordered to take long deep breaths; in one-two, out one-two. Breathing is numbers – time is numbers. Grown-ups seem to know the time within themselves. They are always announcing it – time for bed, time for dinner, time for chores. Clocks, young Harry thinks, are reminding devices for when people forget, or when they wake up from sleeping and have not been paying attention to the ins and outs of their lungs. Harry believes that by breathing faster he can make the four minutes in front of the cuckoo clock go quicker. He sniffs and sniffs, gets a little air-drunk and has to sit on the edge of one of the velvet chairs. The clock ticks on and on. Finally he hears the whirr and grind of the clock’s gears running through their pre-call machinations. Then the miniature stable doors – more suited really to a horse than a bird – jerk open and the wooden bird shoots out on its zigzagged arm.
The bird’s head is perfectly round so it looks babyish, a mere chick. Its triangular beak opens and closes. There are two wheezy blasts of sound. A pause then it starts again, the splitting beak, the two-tone call. Harry strains upwards to get a closer look at the cuckoo – but this takes him further away from the sound. He realises that the sound isn’t coming from the bird at all, but from somewhere below, inside the case of the clock, or further back even, inside the wall. He pushes one of the wicker chairs over to the mantelpiece and using all the strength in his arms lifts the heavy clock from the wall. He places it carefully on the hearth rug and opens the latch at the back of the case. There’s a bronze pendulum the size of a soup spoon and underneath it layers of interconnected cogs and springs. At the very bottom of the clock case, in each corner, is a leather bellows. Harry pushes one of them with his finger and it makes the second half of the cuckoo sound, but with a puffed sigh at the end. The lungs of the cuckoo bird are not inside the bird itself. They are just a mechanism within the clock. The cuckoo clock is an act of ventriloquism; a callous device – the mute bird skewered to the thrusting arm – forced hour after hour to repeat its trick. Harry is unable to lift the clock back up to its hook on the wall. He closes the case. The pendulum has detached and at least two springs have gotten away and bounced under the china cabinet. He turns the clock the right side up, so the bird can get out if the doors open again, but he doubts they will.
He’s not sure how much time has gone by now and how long it will be before his mother and his aunt come home. His legs are heavy as he goes out into the garden to finish the weeding. It’s getting hot. He crouches so low in the grass a swarm of rubbishy gnats fly into his face. He can feel the tears concentrating inside him, rising in a thick wad, and the smell of bleach that goes with them. He thinks he might as well cry now, the crying will have to come. There will be the disappointment on his mother’s face and his shame at that. But there’s something more, too. He feels like he has lost something. He tries to slow his breathing now, to slow everything down, to give himself more time, but the tears have made his nose run and he’s having to suck great gulps of air in. He’s the cause of the trouble and he’s bringing it on himself fast.
Harry takes Michael out behind the dairy where a few stray clumps of phalaris have self-seeded in the boosted soil. Michael’s hands are balled in his pockets; he scuffs the soil with the toe of his boot.
‘Come on in, lad. Get a look-see.’ Harry kneels down in front of a small plant. Sip darts in and licks his beard. Harry shoulders her aside. Three or four long seed heads have sprouted from within the tight mound of tangled stemlets. Harry takes his penknife, cuts the long stems and tosses them aside. The shorn plant with its even fleece instantly has the look of an animal about it.
Michael moves up behind Harry. He looks over his shoulder so he won’t have to make eye contact or get distracted by the expression on Harry’s face. Harry clips and shapes. He brushes a fly away from his mouth and clears his throat.
‘Strong and wiry, Michael, the female pubic bush. Coarse. Nothing like the soft hair of the head. I’ve always thought of it more as fur than hair. Similar colouring can be expected. Dark hair, dark bush; mousy hair, mousy bush and so on, and it’ll all go to grey in the end with senile decay. Not that you have to worry about that for a while, eh?’
Michael makes a brief noise of agreement behind his teeth. Harry pushes on.
‘Why then? Why then a thick bush of hair directly over the female genital opening? In my reckoning the answer is climate. The bush creates a protective warmth, a humid environment for the essential sexual tissues beneath it. See the plant, Michael?’ Harry motions roundly with his hands. ‘The plant is in constant conversation with the soil beneath it. The plant funnels in water and provides shade and nutrients that keep the soil moist and fertile. First rule of farming, Michael?’
Michael moves his head slightly to indicate that he doesn’t know.
‘First rule of farming, Michael, is keep your ground covered. And I’d extrapolate it is much the same with this. Remove the bush and the whole – whole … mechanism will dry out beneath it.’
Harry takes Michael’s hand in his and places it on top of the phalaris.
‘Don’t just be tempted to stay on the surface. You have to push in.’ He turns Michael’s hand sideways and uses it like a knife to chop through the leafy stems to the soil below. ‘This is where the riches are. Notice how the soil is moist beneath the plant, but not in the surrounding area?’
They stand up, Harry absentmindedly still holding Michael’s hand. A cow bellows in the paddock behind them. Harry reaches out and rests his boot on the bush.
‘The pubic bush. A bloody miracle. And it has no sense of gravity. Despite being stuck halfway up in the air most of the time, from what I can see it doesn’t droop.’
Harry favours the demonstration, the practical approach, but he finds it difficult to discuss his own experiences with Michael. Some intimate topics are better tackled in the
evening with a cup of Milo, a sharpened pencil and several sheets of Basildon Bond.
I remember this from the early days with Edna. I was making a sandwich in the kitchen and she’d just got up from a nap. It was late afternoon. She had a piece of crochet wrapped around her shoulders and just her underslip on. She propped herself up on the kitchen counter and watched me collecting the paraphernalia – knife, meat, pickles, dripping, plate, bread. Each time I walked past her she put her bare leg out and touched me with it; sort of wiped it against me. I didn’t pay much attention. Ate my sandwich, rinsed the plates. Put everything away shipshape. Then I went over to give her a friendly peck and she had me. Legs around me like a vice, pulling me in to her and her eyes – I noticed her eyes – all glassy, turned in on themselves (remember Babs when she had the staggers?). Despite the shock of it I wasn’t averse. (I can’t think, Michael, of many times in my life when I’ve been averse.) She pulled her slip up and without the hindrance of underpants I slid my fingers between her legs (under the furred pubic mound the skin clefts and splits much like the bifurcation of stone fruit, only deeper), into a slick, a drenching, of sex oil. The internal skin of the female organ is pitted with oil-producing glands that release on arousal. In my experience a slight dampening is the usual state of play, but this particular afternoon Edna was irrigated full-bore. I won’t go into the mechanics of what followed, the point of interest here is the timing and quantity of secreted oil. My reckoning is that it was the sandwich. The connection between sex oil and saliva is obvious. The role of the male in keeping the female well nourished goes back to the ancients, but over the years we’ve drifted away from the biology of it. Feeding the female prior to sexual congress triggers the secretions of saliva and of sexual oil that prepare her for the downstairs menu. This time with Edna, she wasn’t even eating. Just watching me down that sandwich was enough to turn the tap. The practical advice for you, Michael, is to keep the lass in question grubbed up. (I add that it doesn’t work in reverse. Edna eating, or drinking, produced no appreciable change in my equipment.)
Is it water? No. It is thicker than water, but thinner than oil. And it doesn’t wash away with soap. Sticks to the skin so the smell (muddy) can be carried for days – especially on the pads of the fingertips and under the nails.
Harry and Michael take a breather from spreading manure in the bottom paddock. Harry takes out his pipe and goes through the rituals of emptying it and cleaning it and filling it. He gets it ready for lighting regularly, he’s often on the verge of lighting it, but he rarely smokes. The herd stares at them intently through the fence. Pauline lifts her hind hoof and wobbles as she doubles around, attempting to scratch her neck.
‘See that cow?’ Harry says, pointing at her.
‘Yep,’ Michael says.
‘She’s a fine example. Well covered. It’s a good sign in a female too. A good question to ask yourself, Michael – is she well covered?
Michael’s eyes widen. He looks around in surprise. Harry continues, his voice in a firmer register now as he warms to the topic.
‘Modern dresses are appalling. I have a mind to write to the magazines or the pattern makers. Women are not fields of flowers, or ghosts, or clouds, or presents tied up with bows, or the low-waisted thing like a ruddy flag that droops across the hips. The dress should give a man some indication of the basic shape of the female it contains. Is she well covered? What of the rump and bosom? The thin frame is to be avoided. It’s alright in a girl because you know she’ll get over it, but never in a woman. The female was made to carry flesh. It’s shorter, closer to the ground, lower centre of gravity. Look at Pauline.’ Harry waves his pipe in her direction. ‘The hips should be capacious. They should spread. Think of how we choose a milker at the sales – lean against her and see that she isn’t going to collapse. Front on your woman needn’t take up too much space, but side on she needs some depth about her.’
Michael stamps his boots and edges off towards the tractor. Harry sucks on his pipe a few times to clear the stem.
‘Back to work is it, then?’
What is the fixative that causes one memory to congeal and set, while others dissolve? As Harry puts the tractor away the afternoon sun on the back of his neck puts him in mind of the heat of his teenage summers; a fierce, roasting heat. He remembers having just turned fifteen and riding the hay … he’s high on top of a full dray, lying on his back with his hat over his face. He’s as tall as a man, but he hasn’t found his strength yet. A day’s loading in the sun leaves him dizzy with exhaustion. Next to him one of the labourers is hitching a lift into town. His name is Vernon, but they call him Ruby. He’s a weedy redhead with a crop of old acne scars across his face like drained volcanoes. The scars get in the way of Ruby’s facial expressions so he seems slow in his reactions. Perhaps generally slow. He’s nineteen, but he looks younger. They don’t talk during the loading – it’s too hot and the work is crushing. Each man just does his job, calling out the briefest of communications and instructions to the others – up, right, left, heave, twine-up, smoko and the number of bales needed to finish a row. Harry keeps himself especially separate because he hates the work. His hands are raw, his arms ache, his eyes smart from the sweat running into them and there’s the constant threat of snakes. He figures that if he starts to talk he’ll probably cry.
Harry is nearly asleep when he feels Ruby’s boot against his leg.
‘Hey, Harry?’
Harry slides his hat off his face and looks across at Ruby.
Ruby is lying on his side, smirking. The smirk and the pressure of the hay on the side of Ruby’s face have pushed some of the scars together, forming sideways cracks between them.
‘Hey, Harry, been spending much time with Mother Palmer and her five daughters?’ Ruby puts one hand up in the air as he says this and wiggles his fingers.
‘Um?’ Harry hopes the sound he has made will pass for understanding, or that Ruby will think he’s asleep. He hears Ruby roll over onto his back and the sound of him unbuckling his belt and pushing his trousers down.
‘You don’t mind if I knock the top off this, then?’
No answer is needed. Ruby spits into his palm and starts to masturbate. Harry sleeps. When he wakes the sun has slipped down behind the dray and the heat has eased, but he still feels addled and groggy. He thinks about rolling onto his belly and crawling over to the edge of the load to see how far they have travelled and to call down to his father for the water bag, but the sun has sucked the life out of him. He wishes the summer over, wishes the work was done with forever. He makes a promise to himself. Farming isn’t out of the question, but not grains. He’ll stay closer to town, do something with animals and have regular money and regular folk to talk to. He looks over at Ruby. He’s asleep with his mouth open and his trousers still bunched around his knees, his spent cock points listlessly towards Harry and nods in time with the motion of the dray.
Harry pisses on the lemon tree just after midnight. He’s on the way home from drinking beer and playing cards under the electric light in Mues’s kitchen. It is a relief to be out in the air again. He looks up at the dark forms of the trees with the night sky showing through behind them. The eucalypts’ thin leaves are painterly on the background of mauve sky – like black lace on pale skin. An image of an old-fashioned bodice pulled tight across a woman’s bust with the skin rising puffily between the thread comes to mind. There’s an early, jerky, sense memory – a close-up of skin in between lace. A tongue, Harry’s infant tongue perhaps, reaches out to taste the skin’s oily sweetness and is disappointed that the lace has no special favour of its own. He’s not sure now if he’s remembering or imagining, but he can sense an area of stippled inflammation protruding from the lace – a nipple that’s got free. The nipple is the same rude pink he saw inside his mother’s mouth when she coughed or yawned. The memory and its associations are both alarming and exciting. He finishes pissing but doesn’t bother to button his trousers. He shakes his head, tips the image of
his mother from his mind and replaces it with Betty. Here are Betty’s large brown areolae folded under at the bottom quarter. Here are her nipples, flat now and just lightly flushed. But not for long. In Harry’s mind he licks them intently as if he’s removing cream from the bottom of a bowl, they harden and spring forwards to meet his tongue. That’s enough now. They’re hard enough to suck. He lets his trousers fall around his ankles. Things are well distended down below. One hand tugs his cock, the other reaches out into the night for balance. It occurs to him that Betty’s house is behind him – that his naked rump is pointing towards her. It doesn’t seem right – it seems impolite somehow. He shuffles around until he’s facing in her direction. And he’s grateful that her lights are out when he spills across the grass.
Harry’s mind’s-eye picture of Betty’s breast is her actual breast. The first summer she moved in next door Harry strolled over with a bucket of loquats to say hello. It was early, just after milking. Betty was sitting with her baby on the verandah. There were boxes behind her in various stages of unpacking and a tea chest overflowing with balled-up newspaper. White cabbage moths hung on the tips of the long grass of the front lawn. Betty’s face rosy with sleep, one soft breast exposed to the morning air, her bare feet dangling square and sturdy beneath her … He looked for less than a minute, just long enough to set the detail of the scene in his mind – the glorious jugged curve of the breast, a hint of wetness at the nipple, the small closed face of the baby – then he stumbled over Michael’s scooter lying partly buried in the grass. Betty looked up. He noticed her hair moved oddly around her face – in a stiff mass, like it was matted from the pillow. She looked startled. Her mouth opened and he thought she might scream. He dropped the bucket and ran.
Mateship With Birds Page 8
