The Breeding Season

by Amanda Niehaus

  Elise exhales.

  ‘Is Eloise with you?’ she asks the woman. ‘Is she in the car?’

  ‘Eloise,’ the woman says. ‘Where’s Eloise?’

  Elise leaves the woman and runs back to the car, afraid to look inside, see a woman half dead, a ripped-apart dog, but the front is too crushed, so she yanks wide the back passenger door, can’t breathe, and

  there is no one inside.

  Only a carton of soft drink that tumbles out and smashes open, cans of Lift rolling down the little hill one by one by one. Lift, her first soft drink, a school fair, bubbles in her nose, two best friends and a spider-like ride. Now the yellow is faded by impending darkness. Now she has intruded, disturbed the scene.

  Elise scrambles down the gully and gathers the cans in her hands and her arms, all the while waiting for the woman to see her, shout at her, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  But it’s not the woman who catches her in the act, but a pair of headlights in slow motion, a man who leaps out, hunches over the woman, runs to Elise.

  It’s Will, of course. In a movie, she thinks, he’d kiss her.

  In a novel.

  He grabs her by both shoulders, and she drops the last can.

  ‘Are you okay? Are you hurt? What happened?’

  Elise’s face is wet. Is it blood? she wonders.

  But no: ‘It’s not me,’ she says. ‘It’s her, and Eloise, they hit the kangaroo.’ She points a shaking finger at the woman, still sitting behind the car.

  ‘Where is Eloise?’ he asks.

  They are tears, she realises. On her face.

  ‘Where’s the kangaroo?’

  Elise leads him to the front of the car, points down the slope to the roo, the body in the grass,

  only it’s not a kangaroo.

  It’s a woman.

  ‘Eloise,’ the woman says from behind them. ‘Where’s Eloise?’

  Elise sits in the front passenger seat of her truck, door open, and looks out into the dark forest beside the road. Looks at nothing, really. Lights flicker into the corners of her eyes, red and blue, like a pulse, like an ultrasound.

  How, in the midst of so much noise, there can be nothing.

  Will appears, and holds out his hand to pull her to standing. ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘They say we can go.’

  She lets him guide her to his truck, sit her on the seat, not unfamiliar, but when the tongue of the buckle clicks into place she snaps from her daze and looks up at him.

  ‘The antechinuses.’

  ‘They’ll be fine,’ he says, and presses the door closed between them.

  He drives her to the Parks office, to the back entrance that does not buzz or clang or jingle when he unlocks it,

  when he opens it,

  and in the darkness, the place is like a church, their heavy soles on the wooden floors too loud, and the click of the light into brightness and the scrape of the metal folding chair at the little pine table where she sits and the clink of his keys on the hook by the door. They are intrusions in the dusty silence.

  Will crouches at the stove and feeds slivers of wood into the embers and ash inside it. He blows gently over the warm coals, and his breath pulls licks of flame up and over the sticks, where they catch on the splintered edges and burn themselves out. Some, a few, persist. Grow. Soon the wood crackles, dry and crisp.

  He watches the fire, does not move from where he is. The light glows against his skin, his warm, familiar skin, and Elise feels a kind of momentum build in her belly and her chest, and she slips off the chair onto the floor on her knees and edges towards him, drawn, awkwardly, into the space beside him where he kneels, knees pressed onto the dark stone around the base of the stove.

  She is too close now to study him.

  So she feels him instead, watches the fire and absorbs him, the faint lean of his shoulder when he inhales, the curl of the hairs on his arm, and through all her clothes and his clothes, she considers everything she will not do.

  He looks at her then, and smiles, and she knows he senses it too, like smoke or ghosts or mist in the trees, this thing, unformed and untimely, that shimmers between them.

  ‘I’ll put on the kettle,’ he says, and stands, slowly, and the warmth of the stove eases into the space he leaves behind.

  chapter 12

  Dan takes the train from the airport straight to Circular Quay, pushes through the tourists towards the Opera House, white sails blazing into blue sky. Water chops against the docks as the ferries push out, slip in. He sits and sips a flat white, leather duffel beside him on the bench. He hasn’t brought much with him. He doesn’t need it.

  He’s got a nice room by the water, a room for two.

  A room for just him.

  A spare room.

  She’d arrived home late, truck outside; came in and kneeled on the bed beside him and leaned her forehead, eyes, nose into his chest.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘are you okay? Hey? What happened?’

  But she shook her head and did not answer, and he twisted his hand into her hair and held her until she was done. Tears run out.

  Until she left again.

  Near the water, a man plays a small guitar and sings into a microphone through a white, hang-down moustache. His akubra sags with age, his leather vest a carryover from the seventies, eighties maybe, and he’s not very good. Though his Dylan-whine voice pierces through the clanking and boat pumps and horns, the laughing gulls, every conversation, no one but Dan seems to notice he’s there. Dan fingers the coins in his pocket but does not stand.

  He imagines his mother in these places, peddling snake oil, gather round, gather round. He can see her on a portable stage, microphone in hand, eyes bright. Her excitement was always infectious.

  But her platforms were massive; her crowds were unreal. After the second book, her conferences sold out—two thousand people, a thousand dollars a head.

  He used to be proud, when he was a kid. But what did he know, then?

  Nothing.

  Home-schooled, coddled, shoved into nice shirts and bow ties and out onto the wide clean stage, and he’d lapped it up—the applause, the cheers, his mother’s smile.

  He was stupid to think it was real.

  That his mother was honest.

  That Elise would stay.

  That Tess might live.

  His mother had done it from time to time: brought home a young woman from one of her conferences, like a scholarship you couldn’t apply for, like a gift straight from God, whatever that was. They were similar, these women, these makeshift sisters who came to stay for a week or month or two. They had an easy kind of beauty, long hair and wide smiles.

  Why did she do it?

  He tries not to think of Tess.

  The drive into Joshua Tree, Tess at the wheel. She’d been living with them for six weeks, the new sister. Not-sister. His mother’s Own Your Cure convention in Palm Springs was too big, too loud, so they’d taken the jeep and sought out the desert. The quiet of it, where time seemed to stretch some great distance ahead of them, like the white plane-trails that crisscrossed the sky.

  Dan felt the space between them, tangible space; felt the precise shape of the distance from his body to hers, the two or three feet too far then,

  an impossible distance now.

  He was seventeen. She was twenty, and he loved her.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘there used to be giant sloths here the size of bears.’ Her face was in profile, morning light coming in her window and illuminating the fine hairs of her cheeks. Looking forward, he could see the creatures as they crawled over the crusty ground on huge, awkward claws.

  She looked at him, though she was driving. ‘The Joshua trees can’t cope without them.’

  And he’d thought in that moment that he was the sloth, ungainly in his too-hairy, too-hungry teenage body. But in the end, it was Tess who left him behind, left him to adapt to forever without her.

  He drops his duffel at the hotel and takes the trai
n to Redfern, walks along the tidy terrace rows to the little pub where he’s to meet Hannah Wallace. Each door, facade and fence is painted a different colour, and though some walls are crumbling, on the whole the street has a friendly, elderly feel.

  It’s sad, he thinks, that he never knew either of his own grandmothers. Grandfathers. Father.

  He never even knew his mother.

  Bits of paper and plastic and used-up cigarettes have snagged in the grass and the gutter, but only add to the sensation that Dan is going back in time, or entering a space parallel to his own. A world where he might know his life for what it really was, or is, rather than what it’s been crafted to seem.

  The door is hidden between a thick hedge and what appears to be an old bank on the corner, with marble stairs and ivy-draped windows, and when he can’t find any other place it could be, he pushes it open and steps in. Brick walls, long hardwood bar, velvet-lined booths and there, Hannah Wallace in the last of them.

  She has not seen him, is engrossed in a book. A blue coffee mug beside her. Her hair short like she’s just finished chemo, but she hasn’t, of course. He would have read about it. No, she wears it like this because it suits her—the hair, the all-black clothes, the large silver hoops in her ears. It suits her because she doesn’t need to stand out to be seen.

  He walks towards her, and his hard-soled shoes slide a little on the varnished floorboards. She looks up, sees him seeing her, and smiles.

  Slips the book into her bag.

  ‘Well, hello,’ she says, standing. Her black dress is short, hem frayed, and down her long legs her boots are black too—not fuck-me leather ones but heavy thermal boots with laced-up fronts. Her long sweater sways open at the front. She stretches up to kiss him hello, once on each cheek, flicks two fingers at the bartender who, in his stillness, Dan had not seen before. The bartender smiles through his beard, wipes his hands on his apron, and sets to work making something.

  ‘You look so much like him, in person,’ she says.

  ‘Who?’ Dan doesn’t mean to play dumb. ‘Sorry,’ he goes on, and hopes she can’t see the red in his cheeks. ‘I guess I haven’t seen him yet. It makes a difference. And anyway, I always thought I took after my father.’

  Hannah shrugs. ‘It’s nice. You’re softer.’

  The bartender’s arms appear between them with two espresso martinis, the surfaces thick with foam.

  ‘Thanks, Pete,’ says Hannah, and lifts her glass to Dan. ‘Here’s to—what should we cheers to? Art? Insight? The great Berlin Warne?’

  Dan’s head spins. ‘To serendipity,’ he says after a moment, and because he doesn’t really know what he means, he blushes again. But Hannah does not seem to see his awkwardness, only smiles and nods her head and drinks.

  The talk is easy,

  she is easy to talk to.

  He makes notes in a little book but mostly absorbs what she tells him. What she reflects back to him.

  ‘I loved him from the first moment,’ Hannah is saying, ‘because he was like me, or I was like him. Have you ever met anyone who made you feel like that, like blood, like DNA, or like that virus that slips into your DNA?’ She leans back against the dark olive velvet and watches him. ‘Epstein–Barr. You get the illness and it never leaves you.’

  Dan looks into the swirl of his drink and cannot answer. It was like something Elise had said, once. ‘You know,’ he says, because she is waiting for him, because he had always thought he felt things deeply, but now, with Hannah Wallace, he sees that nothing he’s lived compares with her experience. He might say, I’ve been in love. But is that the same?

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says, and then it occurs to him: ‘We lost a baby recently.’ He stops. It’s too much.

  ‘Oh,’ she says softly. She reaches across to touch his arm with her fingertips.

  ‘I have this feeling like he’ll always be there, wherever I am. Even when he’s … not. His DNA is inside Elise’s body. So, physically, he’s still there inside her. It’s not like that, for me, I guess. I don’t have him like that.’

  Saying her name feels strange here, now, with this woman. Elise.

  ‘It is like that,’ says Hannah. ‘Exactly like that. Is a painting just paint?’

  Her dark eyes glitter, but he can’t sustain her gaze and looks down at his drink, nearly empty, and the drink itself feels like an ending, maybe, or a beginning. There is so much more to talk about.

  She smiles. ‘Let’s order the next.’

  After another hour or two, drink or two or three, they order some food, some meat and dips and flatbreads mounded on a heavy wooden plank. Dan is intoxicated by the company of this woman, her ideas, words, mouth, eyes.

  Her attention.

  ‘I always wanted to know about things my family was uncomfortable with,’ she says. ‘I used to catch and dissect little animals, because you have to pull apart a thing to really understand it, and the inside is beautiful too. Maybe even more so. But hidden and private, a person’s real only own. Because everything else, people see and think they know.’

  It’s funny, he thinks, how like Elise she is, in so many ways. But wider-, wilder-minded.

  She goes on. ‘I was always different, in school and before and now; I was never just a regular kid. And puberty hit me hard, amplified whatever distance there was already between me and the rest. The way I felt was wrongwrongwrong and the things I did were wrongwrongwrong and the only person who seemed to understand, who would tell me I was okay, things would be okay, was Berlin. Your body is a fire, he said, every cell full of engines making fire, he said.’

  ‘It’s natural how you felt.’

  ‘In the end, we’re all just animals.’

  He thinks of Elise’s work, all her little animals fucking themselves to death year after year, and though it is topical, though Hannah would be interested, he does not mention it.

  ‘So is that what he wanted to say?’ he asks. ‘Berlin, with your picture? That we’re all the same underneath, that we all live by the same fundamental urges?’

  ‘Sex was an opening for me. I became myself more than ever. Because it was my own sex, and he made the picture to commemorate my understanding of myself, but also my changing, my opening, my real body emerging to the world.’

  She goes on. ‘It’s one of his best, and not just because it’s me, of course.’ Hannah smiles. ‘But the skin he used and the paint, the colours are gentle and brilliant at once, intensely female, feminine. It’s who I am. So rarely is a person seen, really seen, in that way. Do you know what it is to be seen?’

  Dan shreds the corner of his napkin. ‘I don’t know if I even see myself.’

  ‘Does your wife see you?’

  He looks up and her gaze is on him, such a strong gaze, full of everything.

  ‘Does she make you more than you are?’ Hannah asks, and tilts her head. ‘Berlin helped me understand who I could be, see all my capacities.’ She moves her hands in a large halo between them. ‘It has nothing to do with love, you know. Though when it does, when the two things align, that’s where the real magic happens.’

  Dan feels a sudden, intangible gloom sweep through the room and into his body.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says.

  ‘That’s okay.’ She reaches across and slides his glass to the side. There is nothing but table between them. ‘It’s not meant to be easy.’

  ‘You want another drink?’ he asks, looking up at the bar. Several people are sitting there now; the place has filled up around them.

  ‘Let’s go for a walk.’

  Dan follows her through the narrow passage and out the back door into an overgrown alley. The night is warmer than usual for June, late June, has a balmy humid feel, and the smell of rain electrifies him. They walk, not talking, and Dan imagines her home, her rooms, her skin. She guides him, without seeming to.

  At Lawson Street, they pause. A man sits on a stoop, head down, taps a cane on the step below, left and right stair sides, in a perpetual triangle.
One two three, one two three, again and again and again. A suitcase leans against the wall beside him. A suitcase made of animal skin.

  A breeze blows over Dan, shivers his neck hairs, and he hangs back.

  ‘Hi, Robert,’ says Hannah to the man. ‘Did you have dinner tonight?’

  The man looks up, but continues tapping. His face is thick with age, has the feel of a black-and-white photograph, wrinkles and scars and scabs tumbling down his cheeks nose chin into the wool of his scarf.

  ‘Hannah,’ says the man. ‘Dear, dear Hannah. My sweet palindrome. I once had an aunty named Hannah.’ And his marblejar voice drops into a song or a poem that Dan cannot discern.

  The man stares at Dan, tap tap tap. His eyes are a spotlight, and Dan is exposed. What is he doing here, with Hannah Wallace? Where is he going?

  Hannah opens her bag on one leg and, balanced on the other, she digs around in it, exposing glimpses of normal things: book, pens, notepad, wallet. Dan is relieved,

  and disappointed.

  He feels the need to leave her in this moment, so private and public at the same time. He glances at the people walking by, but they are like bubbles, absorbed in themselves or their phones or each other.

  Hannah pulls out a biscuit, a healthy date ball thing in a plastic wrapper.

  ‘I know,’ she says to the man. ‘She looked after you, didn’t she, when you were little? Pause a second, Robert. I have something for you.’

  The man stops the stick. His hands twitch. He watches Dan.

  Hannah ascends the steps, reaches out to him, lightly touches the back of his hand. Turns it over, sets the ball into his palm.

  ‘It’s almond. One of your favourites.’

  The man grasps it in his fingers. The wrapper crinkles.

  ‘My dear Hannah. Thank you.’

  He presses the wrapped ball to his mouth, as though to sniff it. Begins to tap with his cane again. Watches Dan.

  ‘Is that Matthew with you?’ he asks.

  Hannah glances at Dan, turns back towards the man.

  ‘Of course it is. Always my Matthew.’ For the first time, her laugh is forced. ‘I’m afraid we have to get home now, Robert. Have a good night.’