Mateship With Birds

by Carrie Tiffany

  A song finishes, another is about to start, when one of the boys makes his way across the floor. He is a tall boy with curly hair and a long, slightly crooked mouth. He walks over to Mavis Fehring – the prettiest girl. She toys with her gloves and pretends to be looking in the other direction. The boy touches her on the shoulder and she stands up and smiles in a bored, tired way as if dancing with this boy is another chore such a popular girl as her will have to endure. Mavis follows the tall boy as he walks around the outside of the dance floor looking for a place for them to dance. He’s a very tall boy – probably six foot – so Mavis is almost trotting behind him on the toes of her painted green sandals to keep up. He’s taking a long time to find a place; Mavis has followed him now for one whole lap around the hall. The boy passes Michael and his other friend and grins at them. Mavis is still trotting behind him. The song is well underway. Some of the couples who are dancing have slowed down to watch as Mavis follows the boy. She’s done three laps now behind him, she’s starting to cut the corners and her mouth has fallen open with the effort. On the fourth lap, the song half over, Mavis takes her eyes off the boy’s back. She looks giddily around the hall. When she reaches the girls’ wall she grabs for her chair and throws herself onto it. The boy knows straight away that she’s stopped following him. He slackens his pace and saunters back to his friends. Michael offers him the mug and he takes a swig. There is some confusion about what has just happened. Mrs Collins bustles up and bends over Mavis sympathetically, but Mavis shakes her head and motions her away. Mavis sits for a while, then she stands and walks slowly and deliberately past the line of girls in the direction of the toilet. The colour on her shoes is lifting and she leaves a faint trail of green house paint in her wake. She doesn’t come back.

  For the next hour Michael’s friends – the tall boy and the other boy, who has snow-white hair and pimples around his neck – ask several of the girls to dance. Sometimes they actually dance. Tall dances with Noreen Bird, Snow dances with Mary Carton and Sissy MacAdam, but other times they make the girl follow them around and around and around the dance floor, without ever turning towards her and opening their arms. After Mavis the girls are wary, but none of them refuse the offer to dance. They follow less doggedly though. Most of the girls only follow for a lap before they sit down again. Except for freckly Eunice. Snow asks Eunice to dance and she follows him around the dance floor for eight laps, for the whole song, and when the music is over she hovers nearby in confusion as he rejoins his friends and they laugh loudly.

  Dora watches. Nobody has asked her to dance. When Mavis left, Dora tried to catch Michael’s eye to show him her disgust, but he looked away. Mrs Collins bangs a spoon against a tin mug to gather their attention and announce the last dance. The band launches into a wheezy rendition of ‘Blue Skies’. There is a scramble now, boys coming across the floor towards the girls, elbowing each other to get in first. Michael is standing in front of Dora. He’s bending over a little at the waist and has his hand out with the palm up. Dora is angry, but she wants to dance, too. She stands up. Michael turns to claim a space for them on the crowded floor, it’s the last dance after all, and it will all be over soon. Dora looks at his back receding in front of her, but she is so angry she can’t follow him. She’s getting jostled on the sidelines. Michael has been sucked in by the crowd. He looks back over his shoulder for her. He calls her name.

  Dora returns her tin mug to the ticket table near the door and leaves. She runs down the steps and into the road and turns towards the creek. The sound of her sandals slapping against the road is comforting. The music from the hall reaches her in bursts, thinned out by the air – one long elongated note loud then faint, loud then faint. An owl hoots from one of the red gums. Michael catches her up on the bridge. She walks faster as he gets close. He follows her past the water tower, past the picnic ground, past some of the neater town houses with their flower beds and garden paths. It’s darker on the outskirts of town. They leave the footpath and walk on the rough shoulder of the road. Michael puts in an extra step and catches up to her. He reaches out for the scarf around her waist and hooks his hand through it.

  ‘Will you stop now?’

  Dora keeps walking, pulling Michael along with her.

  ‘You’ll rip your mum’s scarf.’

  ‘Stop trying to get away then.’

  He drags her back to him. He pulls at the thick material of the suit, feeling her stomach and her back and forcing his hands through the waistband of her skirt. His mouth is on her temple. He kisses her, almost on the eye, and says, ‘I’m sorry, Dor. I’m sorry.’

  She can feel the tendons working in his hands as he grabs at her belly and buttocks. She arches her back and moves his hands up to her breasts. She moans and unbuttons her blouse, pushing his head down to her nipples. They stumble away from the road into a stand of sugar gums that back on to Mues’s place. Michael strips a few branches and makes a rough bed of leaves. She lets him remove his mother’s jacket and untie the scarf around her waist. They find an elbowed branch to use as a coathanger. At the moment when she opens her legs and curls her hips up to meet the jab of his cock she turns her head and looks at Betty’s empty suit hanging overhead. The material is soaked in moonlight – the buttons throw off chipped beams of light.

  So this is how you do it, Dora thinks. You do it by imagining you are somebody else.

  Slashing gorse in the shelterbelt Harry finds the nest of a striped honeyeater underneath the trees. It’s a lovely article – a deep hairy cup of woven grasses bound with spider web and beak spittle. The outside of the nest is patterned; tawny and pale like the bird herself. Harry eases the nest into his pocket and forgets about it until later, until teatime when he’s slicing his sausages and smearing them with chutney. He coaxes the nest from his trousers and places it on the table next to his plate; watching, as he chews, the suppleness of it as the flattened grass stems unfurl, little by little, to form the circular lip of the cup again. The expansion completed, the nest rolls softly onto its side and touches the back of Harry’s hand. ‘Whoa there,’ he says to it, and his throat catches tight. As he rights the nest and wedges it between the salt and pepper shakers he realises that he knows too much. When you look at things for long enough they reveal themselves to you, and then they reveal some more. Harry with his four sausages; ‘One for each limb,’ his mother used to say. Harry at the kitchen table with his empty nest.

  I’m going to share this with you, Michael. I can’t make it out myself, but it happened and it might be useful and that’s that. When I was twelve years of age Mum took me along to a wedding breakfast for an aunty from Bendigo. We went down on the train. I was all gingered up in a cut-down suit of Dad’s (away for the hay cutting). The wedding was a big fancy do. Mum had a new dress – peach lace. You’d think it was olden days because it went to the ground. There was something very sombre and mysterious about the shape of her in that dress. The breakfast was in an orchard at Eaglehawk. (Ate my first sugared almond and a peppery sausage brought in from somewhere foreign – Italy? Greece? Queensland?) Mum had a glass of sherry.

  When the speeches were done Mum got up from her chair and wandered off a little way between the trees. She waved over to me and we went for a stroll together. All good enough fun. When we were a bit of a distance away she stopped and took up a stooped stance and cocked her head to one side. I was still holding her arm. I thought she was listening to something in the distance. Then I heard a distinct gushing sound. She smiled at me shyly and when we walked on I noticed a small puddle on the grass and the distinct smell of urine. Nothing was said. We just kept walking. I didn’t know what to think. (But I’ll admit that afterwards I thought about it a great deal.) Mum had always been very private in her doings before this. ‘Facilities’ were available not far away had she wanted to use them, and even if she had fixed on using the orchard it would have been easy for her to send me away on some errand or another. I got the feeling that she wanted me to know what she had done
and, more than that, she wanted me to enjoy it and know she had enjoyed it too. I deduce from this that the female act of passing water might be pleasurable – that, similar to the male organ, the location of the urinary equipment has proximity to the sexual equipment. It occurs to me that the female passing water when standing (rather than in the seated or crouching position we are familiar with) might also experience a stronger stream (gravity) and therefore increased pleasure. Don’t be fey about the female water, Michael. On one (morning) coupling with Edna (first year of marriage) I noticed a fair wash of liquid over my thighs and member. My first thoughts were of an extra-copious ejaculation, but by the smell of the sheets later in the week I deduced that her bladder must have been engaged. It wasn’t unpleasant, Michael. My memory is that it wasn’t unpleasant at all. I’ve also read (but I can’t for the life of me think where) about a fellow training to be a doctor. He had to assist at many births in the course of his studies and while down the business end of things he was often showered with great streams of urine – usually across the face – and he found it in no way distasteful.

  Don’t go too easy with touch, Michael. Skin thickness will be different in different women. (Some udders are upholstered in canvas, others in tissue paper.) The nodes and receptors that sense touch are buried in the skin. They are a mixed lot – some nodes are in the outer layers, some are right on the top. You’re aiming to touch her firm and sharp. The touch that elicits the strongest pleasurable feeling is just a few calibrations short of the touch that produces pain. And cut your toenails, Michael. When you are prostrate touch isn’t just about the hands. A foot can be used to stroke the lower limbs of the female. (Asiatics consider the female foot an alternative sexual organ.) I once took a fair-sized piece of skin off Edna’s shin with a hangnail and she went off the boil for weeks. Your mother will have a fancy file in her purse. Amery rub or board?

  The male and female kissing equipment – mouth, tongue, mechanisms of salivation – are strikingly similar, excepting scale. Don’t be influenced by the motion pictures. The kiss is not a romantic condiment, but the first and essential course of the full sexual act. In mechanical terms there are two locks between the male and female: the genital lock and the oral lock. The oral lock – the male placing his firm and extended tongue into the mouth of the female where it prods and scrapes her soft, bowl-like receiving palate, gums and surprisingly muscular tongue – serves as a foreshadowing for the female brain, increasing lubrication in preparation of the genital lock.

  It might seem I’ve underdone this. But I’m confident of a fair degree of natural canniness on kissing. The baby at suckle on its mother’s breast – the erect and dripping nipple providing an early model for the tongue – creates a brain and mouth memory that can be called upon in sexual maturity, or on cusp of same.

  Keep your lips, teeth, gums and tongue in good nick, Michael. Not just for now, but for the future.

  P.S. Lipsticks and pastes should be removed.

  On the pin board in Betty’s kitchen:

  One of Louie’s whiskers glued onto a piece of paper. Underneath in Betty’s handwriting it says: ‘1 x cat’s whisker for reattachment.’

  A postcard showing a line of kookaburras on a branch all looking in the same direction with the caption, WHO SAID SNAKE?

  A drawing that Michael did of his mother at age three. It could be mistaken for a potato, except for the rays of hair or sunlight that branch out all around her being. The drawing is grubby now and has many pin holes in it.

  Little Hazel’s immunisation card.

  A no-fail pikelet recipe.

  A library card.

  Betty doesn’t say something is broken, she says it has ‘come from together’ and she likes in the first instance to try and fix it herself. The crack in the back step widens over time. Every now and then a lump of concrete breaks off and gets walked across the kitchen lino. At the first hint of rain regiments of ants march along the crack and up under the back door on sugar raids. Enough is enough. Betty mixes a batch of cement in the wheelbarrow. It’s a dull Saturday afternoon; a milk-and-water sky. Her hair is tucked under a scarf; she’s wearing her oldest apron, the blue with the yellow ric rac that’s coming loose. She walks across to Harry’s to borrow a trowel. A scruffy young kookaburra is dozing on the fencepost as she separates the wires and doesn’t wake when they wobble back into place. Harry, too, has plainly been napping when he comes to the door. One side of his face is a rumpled pink and his hair is sticking up. They have a cup of tea together while waiting for the butter to soften against the kettle. Then he stands behind her at the kitchen table and teaches her to trowel.

  ‘Use your whole arm,’ he says. ‘Not just your hand. It’s a bit like swimming.’

  He guides her hand over the bread. She watches the golden curve of it as she makes the figure of eight. His fingers are firm around her wrist; the longest hairs of his beard just touch her cheek.

  ‘You’re getting it,’ he says.

  She picks up another slice of bread. The butter is soft behind the knife, a little sweaty. Harry is shorter with just his socks on and stands with his feet wide apart as if the flatness of the floor is unfamiliar to him. His stomach is making creaking sounds like a cupboard door opening and closing. Betty concentrates on the butter – transferring the glow of it smoothly and evenly across the bread. She leans back a little to steady herself. The buckle of his belt presses into her hip. He smells of pipe smoke and Ammolene. She holds the slice up proudly.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Lovely. Cement is heavier, but it’s the same principle; steadiness and restraint.’

  He steps back from her and clears his throat. He reaches into a drawer for a clean tea towel, wraps the bread and butter, and places it in the pocket of her apron.

  ‘There you go,’ he says. ‘A new skill and a bit of supper for later: all in one.’

  Harry can’t sleep. He can’t get comfortable. He rereads his Woman and Homes late into the night, but once the light is off his feet start to twitch; the sheets are tangled around his legs, the bed feels tilted at an angle. His fitful sleep is infected with women. Edna and Betty appear alongside Vera the little secretary. He wakes and reaches for his pencil and an old envelope, scratching out notes by the moonlight that slants in the window. He draws a rough sketch with arrows to Vera’s points of interest: ‘Breasts: small but steeply pointed towards the nipple. Fleshy field around nipple shaped with great delicacy. Nipple bud of small width, but highish when erect. Nipple colour: pink rose. Thighs: white, with some vein show-through. Bush sitting at slight recession to hips when standing. Bush thick, gingery, with tufting around upper thigh. Rope line of fine ginger hairs tracking from bellybutton down abdomen and joining with bush. Buttocks creamy and lightly dimpled.’ The envelope shakes in his hands. A few weeks ago it contained a letter from the Water Commission about his irrigation licence.

  Harry gets up and pads around the kitchen. He opens drawers and cupboards, searching for something, but barely aware of what it is. He finds Edna’s sewing box. When Harry was a boy his father locked him and his mother in the laundry when he went out in the evening. The laundry had no windows and a dirt floor. They made themselves comfortable enough – his mother in an old string hammock, Harry in the copper – but often he couldn’t sleep and would whimper in the dark. His mother tipped six sewing pins into his palm and showed him how to toss them lightly onto the dirt and then feel for them with his fingertips and pick them up again. Hours would go by with Harry throwing out the pins and picking them up again. He had to concentrate and be gentle; he had to count in his mind to make sure all of the pins were back in his hand before he tipped them out again. Edna’s pins are in a Dr Scholl’s foot treatment tin. Harry counts out six – surprised at how small and light they are in his hands. He gets into bed again with one arm dangling near the floor. He shakes the pins lightly in his hand like he is throwing dice, tosses them on the floor and starts to feel for them with his fingertips. Eventually he falls asleep.
Half of the pins are in his hand, half on the floor – one has gently pierced the waxy outer skin of his thumb. It stands erect, a silver spine quivering in the dark.

  The pierced skin on Harry’s fingers is still rough in the morning. He can feel it as he stands at the trough washing his hands before milking. Any breaks in the skin are dangerous. There’s a risk of infection and of transferring it through the herd. The cows call out wetly behind him, impatient at the delay. Pineapple is first at the gate. When he lets her into the bail she blows a wad of spittle out of her nostrils. One of her teats is already dripping. Babs pushes in next. The morning is upon him.

  Later, Harry walks through the bottom paddock with an envelope in his hand for Michael. Always the worry over the bottom paddock. How to control the prickly pear? How to tackle winter bogs and the summer scalds? Harry aims to keep his head up when he walks through the paddock to Betty’s, but it rarely works. He finds himself stopping and noticing how the prickly pear has extended its range, how hard and pale the soil is, how without give. Soil, he knows, is not a substance in and of itself; it is a layer, a transitional space. The farmer needs to keep his soil soft and friable, in a constant state of openness. Harry makes plans for the bottom paddock. He’s considered ambercane, mangolds and possibly swedes. Root crops provide high yields of fodder of a relatively low food value, but they are good appetisers and good keepers. He’s considered more exotic fodder crops, Japanese millet or Sudan grass: bigger rewards and bigger risks, too, with their build-ups of prussic acid. But he can’t quite bring himself to act on these plans. The prickly pear has taken hold. It is encroaching on the path his boots have cut through constant traffic. Perhaps it’s time to get the tractor out, he thinks. Perhaps it’s time to clear this mess away.