The Breeding Season

by Amanda Niehaus

  or so she will tell him.

  Belly full, she sleeps deeply, and when she wakes it’s morning, and Dan is gone from the house. She is other-womanly, as though she has given herself a one-night stand to break things off, no remorse this time. The meat and bird are hers.

  The rain has set behind it a cool wind, brisk as flapping sheets, and as she walks to the university, Elise is pleased to be outside again, to move her legs and her arms, regain momentum. She’d missed her street with its bottlebrush and tamarind trees and overgrown jasmine hedges. She read once that walking within or beside or maybe around trees is good for you, and though she’s always been surprised that people can believe in stuff like that, she does feel better for the tang of eucalyptus in her nose and throat and the riffle of breeze through the greensilver leaves. There’s appeal. The movement clarifies what she already knows: that life is not an observation—it’s an experiment.

  Campus bustles when she arrives, and though she might avoid it all and go straight to her office, Elise is enjoying the air. She skirts the central quad through the sandstone corridor to the coffee cart in the corner. The cabinet beside the till beckons with pastries, sugar-dusted shortbreads and honeyed baklavas, and little containers of chocolate fudge teeter on the counter, and though she’s hungry, it’s not for sugar. She orders an espresso and sits back in the sun in a blue plastic chair. Her legs are heavy from the walk, but her head is warm and quick in the sun.

  A noisy miner rips open a sugar packet with its sharp beak. A magpie drags a bit of discarded toast off a plate. Elise has the sensation that they’re female, both of them, recouping the energy they are always giving away to everyone else: their chicks, their colleagues, their husband, their students, their entire fucking field of research.

  Where are the males? She looks around.

  Defining territories, no doubt.

  A man from her department strides by, tall and long-legged, smart in his tight jeans and black shirt. He orders a coffee, waits and walks away with it. He is five metres from her, but does not notice, his mind on other, important things.

  Maybe it was a mistake to come in to university, Elise thinks. She’s not ready to be seen.

  Or to be invisible.

  A woman approaches the counter and orders a drink, and even from the back Elise recognises her, an undergraduate student from the first class she taught here. She’d seemed so like Elise in her own young life, her prospects for the future. The woman’s long hair is knotted messily on the top of her head, and she laughs with the barista as though they know each other.

  Elise warms, readies herself to say hello, but as the young woman turns with her coffee in hand, Elise sees the wrap

  (the baby)

  on the woman’s front, and espresso rises into the back of her throat.

  Her fingers go cold, her mind blanks, her legs tense to flee.

  But where could she possibly go? The mothers and babies are everywhere, even here, where they shouldn’t be. Prams thunk down the wide concrete steps, thunk thunk, thunk thunk, towards the lake where the dirty white ibises honk from the trees and the moorhens and ducks crowd around thrown bread. Look at the birdies, the mothers say. Look, look!

  The lake is no haven (she sees it now). It’s recycled water.

  Everywhere she goes, they are there before her. Mothers and babies devouring food from each other’s bodies and mouths and clothes and fingers and plates and cups, so gluttonous. It makes her sick like fried chicken with longing to watch it and she can’t turn away from the fleshblown blubber, the squeals, the fingers poked up into armpits and neck chub. How they twist and writhe and gorge on each other so greedily.

  She wants that, wants to know that eager (cannibalistic) hunger, and whether you get hungrier the more you eat.

  A sandstone bust of Charles Darwin looms over the main door to Biology, the first of a long series of eyes down the shoesmooth stairs to Elise’s laboratory, the glittering glass eyes of stuffed koalas, wallabies, cockatoos, a devil; males and females; offspring in pouches, on backs, beside. They watch her descend. She imagines little red lights inside their skulls, panning security lenses. How she must look to them.

  Elise moves quickly out of the open spaces and into her office, always sparse, now clinical. A wall of books, a fake-wood desk, tacky airport carpet with a large dark stain (blood, coffee) that was there when she moved in. When she works, it’s facing away from the door, into the corner, so that she isn’t distracted by the ghostly shadows of people moving past the frosted glass outside, though fewer people use this level—mostly undergrads, eyes on devices as they walk.

  She sets her bag beside her swivel chair and stands, hands on the backrest, and looks at the pictures above her desk, all reproductive. It’s her work, of course. Her hopes, her aspirations. What she dreamed before William.

  There are several photographs of sperm and eggs as seen through different kinds of microscopes. At 100x magnification, in a light microscope, they seem smooth and whole; in an electron microscope at 10,000x, they are rough-edged and brittle.

  Which is the truth?

  Beside the sperm and eggs, an illustration of the sperm-storage crypts in female antechinuses, ripped from an old book. Antechinuses, so much like mice: sweet and soft and warm. She aches to hold one in her hand, against her chest.

  How strange it is to call them crypts, she thinks, all these burrow-like coves where the sperm are held. Sperm from so many males, different males, mixed up together and waiting, and most will die but some

  (so few) will fertilise the eggs and go on.

  Elise would like to know how they do it, these females: how they keep all this sperm alive for so long inside them, and choose which will father their babies.

  There, to the right, a print of the embryonic development of echidnas. Hairless, spikeless fetuses that are too much like William—his photos, eyes closed and arms extended, at twelve and twenty and (the last) twenty-eight weeks. They are not the same as him (as he was). Yet they could be—

  Enough.

  Elise shoves the chair against her desk, and it clatters into stillness.

  She tugs the little bird from her bag and enters the research lab she shares with her friend and colleague, Vair. It’s empty. Two benches up the middle, cardboard boxes full of random equipment stacked along one wall. All she needs is in here, in plastic and glass bottles on the smooth white shelves and in the under-bench drawers. She unfurls the large green mat used for dissections, flattens it out like a silicone bath towel across the bench, lines up the instruments, chemicals, materials: borax, fine-tipped scissors, forceps, a scalpel, needle and thread, the cottony inside of a pillow used as bedding for captive antechinuses. She strokes the sparrow’s beak, the tiny feathers of its lore. She lies it on its back on the mat.

  It’s been a while, but she’s pretty sure she can do this.

  She finds the breastbone with her left hand and brushes apart the feathers, then presses her right forefinger into the back of the scalpel and inserts the tip into the skin to puncture it. It feels good to draw the blade through, make such a long, neat cut.

  Maybe she’s simply better at death than life.

  A trolley suddenly rattles outside the door, down the hall, and Elise freezes. Silly, she thinks, and expels a nervous laugh. She refocuses on the body on the mat on the bench, gently peeling the skin away from the meat beneath it, taking care with the feathers, the neck. She loosens the connective tissue with the blade as she goes. It’s so easy to detach one part from the other, nothing as firm as it seems.

  She does not remove the skin from the skull but inserts the bright silver forceps into the chest, up through the neck hole at the top, into the base of it. She would like to see the brain whole, a wrinkled nutmeat, but it won’t come out without cracking the head open, so she snips it into soft, small pieces with the forceps’ fine ends.

  Bit by bit, she pulls the brain matter out, wipes it on a paper towel. All the poor bird ever knew.

 
They used to do this to people, she thinks: damage parts of the brain to cure or numb them. Now there are pills to take, to make better, as if a person might return to what they were. Before.

  Elise slips the skin and skull off the bird like a sweater, a sweater off a child, tugging the feet and legs through it like arms, and the wings, too, down the back where the tendons strain along the spinal cord. She snips the tail feathers free from the meat that binds them.

  She sprinkles the little skin suit with borax, sets it on a tray in the fume hood to dry, and as she is washing her hands, there is a knock at the door. The metal handle wiggles.

  ‘Elise?’ The voice is deep, female.

  Elise pauses.

  ‘I know you’re in there. Don’t make me use my key.’

  At this, Elise smiles and slides off her stool to let in the tiny, wild-haired woman waiting at the door. She forces Elise into a hug so warm and maternal that Elise finds, when she emerges from it, that her eyes are wet. Vair’s thick curls snag in her mouth.

  ‘Well it’s about time,’ says Vair, reclaiming the errant strands. ‘Weeks it’s been, Elise. Weeks. I was beginning to feel like a stalker.’

  Elise smiles, wrinkles her nose. ‘Sorry.’

  Vair waves it off. ‘What are you even doing here? You know you can take all the time you want.’ She threads her arm through Elise’s and guides her to the stools at the bench.

  ‘I need to get back to things.’

  ‘Lunch?’ Vair raises her eyebrows at the mat on the bench, at the skinless bundle of meat and bone.

  Elise laughs. ‘You know, I’ve missed you. Your remarkable sense of humour.’

  ‘Really. Take your time. Go away for a while.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that, actually. But you know me, I need to work. I just can’t handle being here.’ She pauses. ‘Everybody knows, right?’

  Vair shrugs. ‘I wouldn’t be so sure. They’re academics, after all. Doing academic things.’

  Elise smiles. ‘I felt it this morning. This terrible gripping in my chest.’ She presses her fingertips, claw-like, into her sternum. ‘I need to get out of this place. I’ve been thinking maybe—maybe what I need is some fieldwork. Get out there and do some trapping. Be by myself.’

  Elise looks around the lab, clean with disuse. She’d meant to have so many students by now, microcentrifuges whirring, banter across the benches. She has a student starting soon. Vair has three, all of them in the field.

  ‘How’s Dan?’ asks Vair quietly.

  ‘He’s busy with the memoir.’

  ‘And the fieldwork?’

  ‘He’ll be okay. He’s got to finish a draft soon anyway. He’ll appreciate the time alone.’

  For a long moment, Vair is silent. ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘But maybe talk to him first. Just in case.’

  ‘He’ll be fine.’ Elise pushes down the corner of the mat, which has started to curl. She hears a rough edge in her own voice and takes a breath to smooth it. ‘Now. Are you going to watch?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The bird.’

  ‘That’s a bird?’ Vair gestures at it.

  ‘The inside of one. The skin is drying in the hood. I’m making stuffing.’

  ‘Delicious.’

  ‘My uncle taught me taxidermy when I was a kid,’ says Elise. ‘And then yesterday this sparrow flew into my window and it seemed to mean something.’

  ‘It’s only natural you would want to skin it.’ Vair raises her left eyebrow.

  The bird’s organs are still encapsulated by muscle and connective tissue, the perineal sac. Altogether, it looks like a small heart, a child’s heart, and Elise thinks of picking it up and squeezing it. Again, again.

  Thump, thump. Thump, thump.

  But instead, she leans across Vair and drags the cotton fluff and string and scissors into reach.

  ‘We have to make the stuffing,’ says Elise. ‘Something that fits inside the skin but won’t rot away. Shaped like this.’ She sets her finger, ungloved, on the fleshy bundle, and it is tacky with dried plasma. ‘But that’s all, for today. It takes a few days for the skin to dry.’

  Vair looks disappointed. ‘Boo,’ she says. ‘I was hoping to see the thing done, see if you’re any good. If it’ll be like one of those terrible ones you see online.’

  But Elise doesn’t respond, is concentrating on a handful of cotton the size of a bird, compressing it, shaping it with string wound around and around and around.

  chapter 5

  He wakes with the trace of her wrist in his skin, a feeling he can’t rub out. To see her now would make it worse, so he creeps through the house, barely breathes until he gets outside and clicks the door shut behind him and descends the stairs to the footpath. There, he pauses to button his jacket but he does not look back at the house.

  The bus into the city is full of suits, and dressed as he is, Dan blends in. He pretends he’s an accountant or solicitor, a bachelor, on his way to the office, a nine-to-five job. He invents a whole life and no one else knows it. No one suspects him, that he is what he is. At the Cultural Precinct he leaves the bus and walks the long way around to the State Library. The river is thick, languid, murky still from all the rain, the colour of the pile carpet in his old apartment in Palms. He imagines himself in it, pulled away, pulled under. Like his mother.

  How does it feel to breathe water? To drown? To never know air at all?

  But he turns away from the river, towards the day ahead. Up the stairs to the library, the meeting room. He lays the art books on the table at the front of it; a copy of each of his books, just in case; a stack of handouts he’s printed; a pile of scanned images; and then, with everything ready, he isn’t sure whether to stand or sit. He doesn’t want to give his students the wrong impression, whatever that is. Maybe the dress shirt and jeans he’s chosen are wrong. A new sort of mullet. Maybe some things just shouldn’t be put together.

  One by one they come in, all of them women. Nobody seems to know anybody else, but introductions are made, and little bits of conversation about writing and day jobs. Isolated as he’s been, he’s forgotten how pleasant this kind of quiet, enthusiastic conversation can be, and he wonders if he should be doing more of this. After the book is done.

  ‘Well,’ he says. ‘I’m Dan.’ He’s never sure how to present himself at these things. How much to tell them. ‘I’ve written a couple of books—one nonfiction and a novel—and I’m currently working on another project that’s more straight-up memoir.’

  Though, he can’t help thinking, isn’t everything he’s ever written just memoir, in one form or another?

  ‘Anyway,’ he says, pushing the thought aside, ‘in my current project, I’m working a lot with art of the body—art made of bodies and on them, shapes of the body. It’s exciting …’ This, a lie he wants to believe. ‘It takes me back to art history at college—uni,’ he corrects himself. Always forgetting how they say things here.

  He hands around a stack of images that he’s cut out of old art books. Texts he’s grown tired of lugging around. ‘Let’s get started. Choose a picture or a few that speak to you.’

  Dan stands at the head of the table and watches them pass the pictures around. He likes these one-off classes, the sensation of progress they give him. But not everyone is looking at their images. A twenty-something woman near the front stares at Dan. Her hair is braided from her crown into two long segments that hang over the front of her cardigan. ‘You know these are all women,’ she says. ‘Why don’t you have any male bodies? Or gender fluid?’

  Something inside Dan drops abruptly. ‘Really?’

  Her eyes harden, and he quickly continues. ‘I mean, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to be all women.’

  ‘Isn’t that part of the problem? How men see women without even realising.’ She holds up the images in her hand. ‘Here we are, women looking at men looking at women. I bet every one of these is a male artist.’

  Dan glances around the table. Quite possibly, he thinks
, they are. ‘Look,’ he says. ‘Let’s just use whatever pictures are here to explore just these kinds of questions, let these bodies guide your words on the page. Let’s take whatever image we’ve chosen and look closely at one part, one part of the body, and use that segment as the basis of a story. If you want this to be a man’s body instead of a woman’s, then write it that way. We’ll write for three minutes and then you can share what you’ve written. If you want.’

  The braided girl shakes her head, but opens her notebook.

  ‘I was thinking just now,’ says an attractive white-haired woman, ‘how we used to have these women at design school come in and pose for us. I don’t think I ever saw a man naked.’ She smiles, face creasing. ‘I mean, in class.’ Her laugh is light and brittle, beetle-shelled.

  ‘Men just aren’t as nice to look at,’ says another woman.

  ‘They prefer to do the looking, that’s all,’ says the braided girl, and then everyone is talking at once.

  To each other. Not him.

  Dan feels he is watching through a window, too male to come in.

  An image enters his mind—a picture from Elise’s office, of fertilisation: dozens of sperm beating their heads against a massive orb of egg.

  ‘It’s not the first that does it,’ she’d told him. ‘Or even the male at all, like they always thought. The female—the egg—decides which one to accept. We just don’t know how.’

  And now, here he is, abutting a mutiny. Dan sees himself at the head of the table and sympathises with the man there. He’s been through some real shit, that guy.

  He clears his throat. ‘I have an idea. This is going to be confronting for some of you, but I want to talk through it before we get started.’ He opens one of the art books, he knows the page. Holds it up. One woman leans forward, adjusts her glasses. Two put their hands to their mouths.

  ‘This is the vulva of a fifteen-year-old girl,’ he says. ‘It’s art. Apparently. A lot of people thought, think, this is art. And there are a lot of ways we can look at this image and what it means, but I want to hear what you think, first.’