Dan watches his uncle swim, unsure if he should break into the softness, the swishing rhythm of the laps. How much longer should he be made to, need to, wait?
But then, the man stops. He stands upright in the pool and pulls off his goggles and wipes the water off his head with his hand, walks slowly to the edge and looks up at Dan. It is so strange to see the man like this, nearly naked in the water, this man Dan knows so well, too well, yet hardly knows at all.
Dan feels exposed.
When Berlin makes no move to get out of the pool, Dan steps closer and crouches, offers his hand. ‘It’s nice to finally meet you,’ he says, and for a chilling moment he is afraid it won’t be taken.
But Berlin Warne clasps Dan’s hand in his own wet one and claps his other over it, his goggles snapping against Dan’s wrist. ‘You have no idea,’ he says, and then lets go of Dan’s hand and dips back into the water, sliding backwards across the narrow pool, to lean on his elbows on the windowed side.
‘I like it,’ says Warne.
Uncertain whether he should stand again, Dan sits down on the tiles.
‘The book,’ the man goes on. ‘It’s very good, what I’ve read.’ He paddles his feet idly at the surface.
Dan’s breath snags in his mouth.
Berlin nods at the door. ‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she? There is no woman in the world like her—trust me, I’ve looked. It’s been my life’s work, you’ll see tomorrow. I’ll show you tomorrow.’
He stretches his arms to either side, cross-like, unfairly smooth and muscular. It occurs to Dan that this man’s penis has been inside Hannah Wallace countless times, and his tongue, and his fingers, that he has probably known her better than any other man, and—at sixty-whatever—might still be fucking her.
Might have fucked her last night.
The thought turns his stomach.
‘I could talk about Hannah Wallace all night. I’m sure you could, too.’ Berlin smiles, then, abruptly, he sighs. ‘It’s Sibyl we really need to talk about.’
‘What? My mother?’
‘She’s not in the book. She needs to be in the book.’
Dan coughs. ‘But the book starts later, after your estrangement.’
‘And?’
‘I didn’t think you spoke at all, after you left.’
‘Oh, we spoke,’ Berlin says, then pushes off the opposite wall and glides to the edge nearest Dan. His eyes glare through the dim light. Dan does not move.
‘We spoke often, in fact. She didn’t tell you, she never told you, so you assumed it didn’t happen. My sister was a hateful cunt, but—’ he raises an eyebrow ‘—I think you know that.’
Dan coughs again. All this water, and none of it drinkable. ‘I can add her in, but what’s the context? Do you want to go back to childhood? Or talk through these conversations you had later?’
Berlin leans his elbows on the edge of the pool. He does not blink. ‘You know, I’m a family man. I have strong family values, and it doesn’t come across at all in the book. That disappoints me. So I want to talk about family. In particular, what we Warnes serve up to each other.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘An eye for an eye, Dan. That’s how we’ve always done it.’ Berlin fits his goggles back in place, reflecting Dan back at himself. ‘But I need to finish my swim, so we’ll have to talk about it later, tomorrow, after the party sometime.’
Berlin ducks under then and, pushing off the bottom, returns his body to anonymity.
When Dan enters the suite, a low, serpentine electronica weaves through the empty rooms, and though the lights are on, he fears she’s gone to bed.
Hopes it.
Fears it.
He finds some fancy gin in the kitchen and pours it over ice, clinks his glass to cool it, and the clinking reverberates through his bones, threatens to shatter him. Every surface is an edge. The darkness, an edge. Whiteley’s cemetery beckons, and he’d like to touch it, feel the flow towards death with his own fucking finger.
Dan moves towards the painting, then stops. Because Hannah is there in the corridor, in red silk, a Japanese robe that slips open as she approaches. Her chest, shoulders, stomach, hips are covered in tattoos—species of the wallum heath: thick banksia blooms like golden pine cones, muted green eucalyptus leaves, black cockatoos that fly and perch and pull apart seed pods, acid frogs in all their stages, fire. She is like a book he saw once, or a wallpaper, and her skin is animal, vegetable and smoke. Smoke fills the spaces, seems to move each time she breathes, seems to crawl around every image on her. She is a marvel.
‘They’re beautiful,’ he says, and touches the seed pod on her rib, just below her breast. It is like a seed made of vulvas. He traces it hesitantly.
‘Do you like it?’
‘You’re beautiful.’
She lets the robe slide onto the floor, and turns slowly so that he can see them all, front and back.
‘Which is your favourite?’
He cannot breathe, cannot see, wants this moment to pass
and last forever.
He realises he’s crying, softly.
‘This, here.’
He points to a clump of clouds or diamonds, something that quivers over the curve at her navel.
‘Really?’
Her eyebrows twist up in disbelief. She laughs, and the clump wobbles. She takes his hand and presses it against the tattoo.
‘Do you know what they are? Look closer.’
He goes to lean in, but she pushes him down, gently, onto his knees. She smells of moss and vanilla. Her vulva is pink, the nib of it swollen.
‘They’re frogs, at the stage just before they hatch, when you can see the tiny tadpoles twitching inside their eggs. Have you ever seen that? Seen them like that?’
Dan pushes gently on the clump of eggs with his fingertip, traces the jelly mass of it, kisses them.
‘Like metamorphosis.’
Hannah smiles. Her cheeks are flushed.
‘Well, that comes later.’
He stands and runs his hand down her back, rests it in the curve above her buttocks. She kisses him, then, the first first-kiss he can remember having, his mouth body burning.
‘It must have hurt to do all this,’ he says.
She looks at him then, not into his neck or his eyelashes or his ear, but straight into him.
‘The after hurt worse,’ she says.
And part of him wants to ask what she means, but he can’t. He is already inside her.
chapter 16
Elise sips a black tea from her thermal mug as they drive the red, rutted tracks to the traplines. The trees glimmer with the sheen of hung-out bedsheets—long, lean, and smooth where the bark has fallen, shed down, accumulated around the great wide dinosaur feet of them. Like bristly hairs. She admires these trees with their great wide feet that seem to have, in a lingering pause, stuck fast here, rooted.
She is in the front with Caro, Jay and Paulie in the back. The dash is caked with swirls of dust. The truck heaves over rocks, back end slipping out in the sand.
And at first, the days gleam brightly.
Caro has taken charge of her, guides her through the traplines, and Elise becomes used to the shape of the woman’s back, the firm curve of her quadriceps, calves, triceps, as she is led through the rocks and brush. A green shopping bag over her shoulder, white cotton bags inside for the quolls, when they find them. The traps are wire cages, much larger than the ones she used for the antechinuses. They are easily spotted, triggered by pressure.
In some of the traps, a hunched-up quoll. Captured, they seem somehow smaller, though now, in mid-July and so close to the breeding season, they are all fully grown. Caro has worked this site for two seasons already and recognises some of the older females by sight—those that have bred here again and again.
The males are new. She’s just getting to know them. They all die every year, of course.
Caro has shown her how to tip the quoll into its own cotton bag, clos
e up the trap, navigate the uneven ground. But Caro is confident in her experience with quolls and her young, field-muscled body, and over the first week, Elise struggles to maintain the pace. Her own legs quiver with the climbing, sweat dampens the dirt behind her knees, slides down her bare calves. She is tired, more tired than she’s ever been.
The transect runs along the gorge, so that they have to climb in and out of it repeatedly, scrambling up rocks or sliding down them to find the traps they’ve set. Near its end, though, the path flattens slightly and emerges near the water. A stand of banksia—thick pine cone banksia flowers and leaves shimmering, fish-like, as a breeze passes through them. Elise picks up a cone from the ground, last year’s flower now with empty seed pods open-mouthed across it, a chorus of them, and she remembers when she was little, out back of her motherfather’s house, how she would collect these same cones and talk to them, set them up in desk rows and teach them. No matter how she chided, they never closed their woody brown lips. They just sang and sang and sang.
She thinks of how she might slip one into the bag on her shoulder, take it home for Dan, for his desk. Tell him the story again,
but no.
She lets it fall where she found it.
*
By her second week, she is part of the collective pattern. Dawn starts and late-night finishes, too-spicy dinners, sore back and hips. Blood samples drawn from jugular veins, spun down, plasma decanted; muscle biopsies taken from quadriceps, frozen in liquid nitrogen; autopsies performed, organs weighed and slivered. The quolls snarl with sharp-toothed mouths, writhe in her hands. Their aliveness is intoxicating. Their fear. Their musk-male scent. She wants not to wear gloves when she holds them.
She is hungry all the time. The apples and carrots have been shipped from Darwin, are not fresh. Instant coffee, frozen meat. She longs for the feel of fresh muscle in her mouth. Quoll, bandicoot, Tom.
The others leave her to do her work—to sample and, when she’s finished with that, to write—but the container is shared between all of them, and theirs is noisy work. Caro and Jay and Paulie run quolls over beams and up inclines and around corners; shout and laugh as they chase escapees through the laboratory; corner them behind the fridge and pounce on them with bath towels. Sometimes she watches, but this makes her feel old, maternal. More often, she walks over to the ranger station, sits on the verandah with Sarra and Louisa, Lou for short. They wear sky-blue Land and Sea Ranger shirts over long floral skirts, thin sandals on their feet. She listens to them speak in a language like water, and they teach her words, like gujiguji, that seem to represent this world, this place, and not her own cold life. Lou is shy and speaks in whispers, but Sarra smiles so often and laughs so loud and deep that Elise’s body begins to acclimatise to the heat, the humidity, the heavy sun. She feels herself begin to unfurl.
At the end of July, a break. The quolls will soon begin to rut in earnest, the beginning of the males’ end. She’s tired of Tom’s jokes, and Paulie’s, how they marvel, say things like what a way to go, or not bad. She imagines it’s not so pleasant as that. She has not yet seen the males’ demise, but she expects them to look like the antechinuses do: festering wounds, ulcerated bowels, gangrenous testicles. The dissections will be gruesome.
She can’t wait.
One night in her tent, it occurs to her: sperm storage by female antechinuses and northern quolls, tucked-away places where sperm compete, where eggs weigh in on who will win, fertilise, succeed. Female mosquitofish giving some males (better males) better access to sex, some sperm (better sperm) better access to eggs. Females working behind the scenes.
Elise sits up.
A book about the females. The females of the species.
Caro and the others plan a four-day fishing trip with a couple of the male rangers, out through the smaller islands in the archipelago.
‘There’ll be plenty of fresh meat,’ Caro tells her. ‘Giant trevally the size of wombats for dinner every night. Maybe even some quolls to sample,’ she says. ‘Though I can imagine you’d want the break. Big days coming.’
Despite the provocation, Elise stays. The small camp is quiet, the nights dark and starry. She sleeps until the tent is too hot and then heaves herself into the sagging couch in the container, cranks the aircon and angles her laptop in her lap to write.
But she misses Dan. She can smell the coffee as it gurgles on the stovetop, hear the clink of the steel spatula against the pan, the slap and sizzle of a pancake—a puffed-up American-style pancake, how she likes them—as he flips it in the butter. He’d have music on, and she can see him in the tiny San Francisco kitchen and in their bigger Brisbane kitchen, but every kitchen blends into the other because they are all from another world, someone else’s world.
A world full of breakfasts in kitchens, around waists, around swollen bellies, swaying, all the syrup and butter and smeared mouths and laughing teeth.
The images flood the container until she can’t take it anymore—the empty chairs, the dusty silence. She was wrong to stay behind. She shouldn’t call him, not yet, not like this, but her phone is in her hand and his name under her thumb and though she wants not to need him, she does, she needs to hear his voice, and so she dials.
She sits on a plastic chair in the morningshade of the container and dials. A crack in the seat pinches the top of her thigh.
And the phone rings and rings and rings.
He does not answer.
The gravel car park at the ranger station is empty; tall grassweeds intrude on its edges. Elise stands as though in a film, a lone figure in a vast steely landscape, stoic, stump-like, elemental. Withstanding, though barely. She feels it, the loosening of her roots, the pulling of the wind at the top of her head, up up, and at moments like these she knows she will fall. Sometimes she wonders if maybe William hadn’t died at all, if it is her instead, if she is in some sort of afterlife, purgatory, made to watch how she would have been otherwise, how nearly transparent she might become.
She was wrong to call.
It’s better this way.
Because he asks too much of her, his words assail her body, his hand taking her hand, his tears on her neck; it’s all too much because he can’t know the pain, her pain, how could he? He loves her, loved her, and he wants to get through this together, to share the wedge of loss between them. But how can she make him understand that her body is no longer his, or even hers? That William was part of her, and the two miscarried bean clots and the one she threw away—that all these babies will always be part of her. He has not begun them and grown them and lost them as she has.
On her second day of couch-sag, Elise is startled by a soft knock at the door, and when she squints the thing open, Sarra is there. She isn’t wearing her uniform, but a loose cotton dress. A day off.
‘Us mob are going up to Crag,’ she says. ‘You should come.’
Though Sarra and Elise are more or less the same age, the suggestion is a gentle but firm directive, like mother to daughter, and Elise can’t say no. Soon, she’s in a large tinny with Sarra and her husband, Benj, and their youngest daughter, Jasmine. Lou is there, too.
They have what they need. Plastic tubs with tents and sheets, coffee and tea, powdered milk, flour, golden syrup, sugar, aluminium foil, cigarettes. Fresh water. Fishing line. They will catch most of what they eat.
The motor sputters in the clear water, an arrhythmic heartbeat, as Benj takes them around the topfoot of the island, skirting a shoreline striped with croc slides. The landside shifts and, like clouds, Elise shapes them in her mind as they move past. A flat, layered rock like a frog, a sphinx-like frog, quiet and thoughtful and ready to jump. Scattered mounds of moss and mussels that could be eggs, frog eggs, or the scales of some unknown giant. Mangroves, with grey-brown tree roots exposed to the water and the sand and the hot, white sun-like veins, like the branches in a human lung, like all the choices she could ever make, that might lead her down this path or another, from leaf to stem to branch to trunk to root to ea
rth.
The end, she thinks. She punctuates it in her mind.
The two-hour trip roils in her stomach. And when Benj stops the boat, finally, he throws the anchor in a good twenty-five metres from shore. The water tongues the rocks in their wake, making it difficult to see what’s in the seagrass, if anything at all.
‘I can’t pull all the way in,’ he says, chewing on his cigarette. His shiny black hair is pulled back into a low ponytail and he’s wearing his ranger shirt, darker blue than the women’s. Unbuttoned all the way, it exposes his smooth brown chest, olive green board shorts. ‘It’s too rocky.’ He shakes his head.
Twenty-five metres is not so far, she tells herself. The length of five large crocs, head to tail.
Before, she might have been afraid. What does it matter now?
One by one they slide into the water, ankles calves knees disappearing into the reflected sky.
chapter 17
The next night, the launch of Berlin’s retrospective. By the time Dan arrives, the party is well underway. The sandstone cavern is a swarm of people in gowns and jackets, indistinguishable in the dim light and a swirl of smoke that must, it occurs to him, be an illusion. At the bar, the puppy-eyed bartender shakes drinks and pours them in a motion like water, and opposite, a face-pierced DJ is absorbed in the dials and knobs on her table and in the headphone held to her ear, though the music seems to come from everywhere at once, from the walls and the concrete floors and from within his own body.
Dan orders a whisky through the crowd at the bar and then pushes his way towards the other end, towards the retrospective. People press in on him and, for a moment, he wishes Elise was there with him, imagines how the crowd might part for them, for her. But then, it’s not really Elise he’s thinking of.
He hasn’t seen Hannah all afternoon, but she is here somewhere in a long black lace gown, untethered, floating through the place like she owns it, like a celebrity, because, tonight of all nights, she is. Her body, her mind,
the man’s art, the man’s mind.
The Breeding Season Page 13
