The Breeding Season

by Amanda Niehaus

  Who can say where one begins and the other ends? Dan has never been to anything like this, the launch of any major art event, much less his own uncle’s. Subject’s. He has no idea how the night will go.

  But in the long corridor before the gallery, there is food.

  The gluttony of it is overwhelming. His mother’s conventions were different—extravagant health-food functions, really—and these tables of food and the people around them gush with the sensuality of eating, licking, dripping. A table of cheese and preserved meats and set-down drinks, wheels of imported brie bigger than his laptop, cut open, fragrant centres oozing, blocks and wedges, ash, seeds, oblong cracker breads to snap apart. Grapes to pop open with tongue and teeth, grapes that aren’t grapes but made to look it, with juicy centres that leak down chins. The whole of it ambitious and feastly.

  He recognises faces but can’t place names.

  That guy from the movie.

  That woman from the brother–sister band.

  A body ornamented like a bird, feathers, black along the arms and mask, scant royal blue over breasts and genitals, a young, slender, male-female body, suspended above the doorway, trapped in a web of crisscross white ribbons, spinning, ravelling and unravelling. They slowly move through the fabric web and do not snag their feathers.

  Dan stops and watches. He cannot tell whether the performer is man or woman, or both, or neither, cannot fathom that it shouldn’t matter.

  And yet. He, too, wants to be suspended in a place where anything can happen, where art and progress seem effortless, despite the practice, and he, too, might shatter his own mould.

  He passes under the bird and into the gallery.

  The images, hundreds of them together, are too much. He has seen many of the pieces in the writing of the memoir, but never so many at once, so close, in person. Among the familiar tissues and paint are others he has not seen, hybrid men and women, with genitals where they are not, should not be, and mottled pink brown cream skin that seems to crumble away into nothing, into dust or ash, or flakes of salt. A pubis that erupts not in hair but in vessels. A tumour made of skin. And a man.

  Dan’s heart stops.

  It is the largest piece, the size of a dining table, and centred in the room so that everyone must walk around it. A supine, skin-fabric man, no head no legs, penis hanging off to the left; the body is agitated, restrained and powerless, as two hands tug a paper baby from it, a boy, the child’s edges already dissolving, burned away, where it is furthest from the womb.

  The child is not William, but

  it’s perfect.

  It says everything Dan has tried to put into words.

  Words, he sees now, were not the right way at all. William and Elise, his experience captured in these strange, human-unhuman bodies.

  Where did it come from? How does he know?

  Dan shivers and, pulling his eyes away from the sculpture, meets his uncle’s stare. From across the room, Berlin Warne does not blink. He drinks the rest of whatever’s in his tumbler and, eyes on Dan, leans to his right to say something to the man beside him.

  The man nods and moves away, and, suddenly, the music is gone and in its place a strange, low bell tolls. People begin to move into the room and, not waiting for them, Berlin steps onto a small platform at the front.

  ‘Thank you to my dear friend David,’ he says, ‘for the opportunity to bring so much of my life together in one place.’ He motions to a man with long grey hair at the front of the crowd and bows slightly towards him, then waits for the applause to fade.

  Dan pushes to the side of the stage, where Hannah shifts to make space for him. He takes a deep breath, wants so much to take her hand, but does not. He waits.

  ‘If there’s one thing that I know, other than how to fucking paint,’ says Berlin, and smiles, pauses for the crowd to laugh. But then, abruptly, his face and tone change. ‘You think I’m done, don’t you? You think this is it for Berlin Warne, last big show, I’ll write my memoirs now and lie back and enjoy it all for whatever I’ve got left. Well. You know me.’ He shrugs, smirks. ‘Once, I thought it was all about me. I was a bit of a narcissistic prick, and don’t worry, I know which of you has said that and which hasn’t.’

  His eyes aren’t smiling.

  ‘What I get off on is getting under your skin, showing you the truth about yourselves, whether you want to see it or not.’

  He turns his head and looks at Dan to his left, then back at the crowd.

  ‘I’m writing my artistic memoirs, did I tell you?’ he continues. ‘It’s going to be amazing. Everything you ever wanted to know about me and Hannah and how it all started. Hannah’s a big part of the book, of course.’ He motions to her to join him onstage, and slips his arm around her waist. He kisses her on the neck as though, Dan thinks, he owns her.

  ‘Isn’t she wonderful?’ he says, and Hannah, with Nicole Kidman poise, flicks her hip to one side and curtseys to the applause.

  ‘I can make all kinds of art. I’m great at all of it. And this book? Well, I’m almost done, and it’s good. Excellent. All these years I’ve painted everybody else and now it’s going to be about me: I’m going to show you under my skin. Our skin.’

  He and Hannah are one body on stage, two halves of a whole. Berlin Warne’s eyes sweep the silent room, and land again on Dan.

  ‘Because you want to know who I really am,’ he says, straight to him, then laughs. ‘Have you had a look around?’ He sweeps his arms, grandly, across the room. ‘Maybe I’ve already told you, and you just don’t know it.’

  Dan is almost done packing when Hannah bursts into the suite, cheeks flushed. The wide hem of her dress swirls through the door behind her, and though black, it reminds him of snow. When’s the last time he saw snow? Felt it? That trip to Vancouver, maybe. Snowshoeing out to some hut in the mountains.

  With Elise.

  Cold air blows through the open door behind her and into his room, over his bed and his bag. She does not move.

  ‘You’re his, aren’t you? You always will be,’ he says.

  The outer door clicks shut.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, he seems to think you are.’ Dan slips the tuxedo jacket onto a hanger and slides it into the plastic bag it came in.

  ‘So what? Am I yours?’

  Her eyes are not soft, but they are curious.

  Dan wants to sting. ‘Why did you say the tattoos hurt after? What does it take to hurt someone like you?’

  She glides towards him, moving so close he can feel her warmth on his skin, and sits on the bed.

  ‘Because he left.’

  ‘Berlin?’

  She shakes her head. ‘Matthew. I was his canvas, for a project he was doing. I was meant to be his art, perform it in all the major galleries. You know—’ she pauses. ‘I didn’t get to decide what I was. Not in his world, anyway.’ She looks down at her chest, though all her tattoos are covered by the dress. ‘I love them, now. For a while they were mistakes I couldn’t erase, but there’s something that happens with time. The ink is my skin. I am who I am. I can be art and something else, too.’

  ‘What else?’ This seems to Dan the answer for his whole life.

  ‘It’s all perspective,’ she says. ‘Like a microscope with two different lenses. You teach yourself to look into one field with the lens of the other. People say you can’t do that, but fuck what people say. Everyone’s afraid of pushing out, and I’m afraid too, I’m always scared I’m going to fuck everything up, but I can’t stop what I want.’

  Dan sits on the bed beside her.

  ‘I’m there,’ he says. ‘I’m at that place where I need things to change. I’m tired of living for other people.’

  He means Elise. Right then, he knows it.

  ‘You can’t,’ she says. ‘There’s only you.’

  Dan takes her hand in his hand, draws lines up the back of it, along the tendons and fingers and shiny, unpolished nails.

  ‘Why does he hate me?’

&n
bsp; Hannah sighs. ‘He doesn’t. He’s emotional.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Will you stay?’

  Dan shakes his head. ‘It’s all too much, I need some space. I got a room in town, an early flight. But,’ he says, and coughs lightly, ‘can I come and see you again? In Sydney?’

  ‘I would really like that,’ she says, and means it, he can tell.

  But then she pauses. The air goes heavy.

  ‘Can I show you something? Before you go?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘It’s awkward.’

  ‘Go ahead.’ He smiles.

  ‘Okay. I’m so sorry, this is going to be weird.’

  Suddenly it’s not fun anymore. He’s worried.

  ‘Okay,’ she says again. ‘Pull down your pants for a sec. Those, too. And sit back down.’

  Dan’s stomach jolts, but he does as she asks. His penis hangs limp. She gently lifts up his genitals in her hand, moves them a bit to the side, and touches a patch of skin below them with the forefinger of her other hand. In his groin or buttock or between them.

  ‘Do you feel this?’

  He clears his throat and nods.

  ‘There’s a spot there,’ she says. ‘You need to get it checked out.’ She removes her hands and his body falls back into place.

  ‘What is it?’ he asks. His voice cracks. He has never felt so humiliated, so terrified, so grotesque.

  She crouches in front of him, in her lovely dress, puts her hands softly on his knees. ‘It could be nothing,’ she says, ‘but—it could be a skin cancer. Berl had one once.’

  ‘What the fuck?’ says Dan. ‘There? In my fucking crotch?’ He almost laughs. She can’t be serious.

  But she nods. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m so fucking sorry. Maybe I’m an idiot. I probably am. Maybe it’s nothing. But just in case, you know?’

  Her eyes are full of too many things, and she leans up and kisses him lightly on the mouth and says, with terrible understanding, ‘I’d better get back,’ and grabs her keys and goes.

  chapter 18

  Fire in the sand, fish in the sand, Sarra kneads the flour and water and milk powder for damper, a loaf so smooth it might be skin, will shed the sand that it’s baked in. A walk to the eastern side of the headland, where Lou chips an oyster off the tall dark rocks, a fresh, damp oyster, and Elise holds it in her mouth (tongue on tongue) before she swallows.

  Fire in the sand, tea in the billycan, sweet with white sugar. A tug on the handline, loop the fish in, scrape off the scales and bake it in the sand. Elise peels back the blackened skin, eats the soft meat with her fingers. A boat to the mangroves, where Benj hacks a knobbled root from a tree, an exposed mangrove root covered in oysters. Fire stoked to flames, and the shells sizzle open.

  Elise sits with Sarra and Benj and tends the fire, pokes the thick (empty) carapace of a lobster with a stick. Listens to them tease each other, in words she understands and words she doesn’t. Sarra giggles. The sand, the fire, the meat, the laughter. So much laughter.

  Dan would love this, she thinks. We would love this together.

  Two nights, too fast, and it’s time to go back. Elise packs up her tent and her small bag, and carries them out to the boat, carries out the boxes Benj has packed, watches the water for shadows. The sun is hot on her neck and her cheeks, and already the days ahead slide into her mind. Long days, but simple. She will walk the rocky transect, find the quolls, take only what she needs.

  Maybe she has found what she needs. What she and Dan need.

  But as she thinks it, feels it, she hears her father’s footsteps in the hall, thumpthump thumpthump, and the water pulls up around her like bedsheets.

  Under the bedsheets, quiet and dark, she sleeps.

  Elise opens her eyes, and she is in the boat, her head in Sarra’s soft lap. The bright sky stings her eyes, like cold, like autumn. There are no birds up there, no clouds, only Sarra stroking her hair and saying something to her or Benj or Lou or Jasmine in language, something that feels warm through Elise’s skin, caring words, mother-words. Sarra is a woman who knows who she is and where she comes from. Elise is loose-bodied, unhitched from the earth and her place in it.

  The boat pushes over the surface of the too-wide gulf. She wants to sit up, regain her solidity, but Sarra restrains her gently.

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘lie down. You had a fall, and we’re taking you home.’

  Elise is wet, her whole body soaked, her clothes, her shoes, and she wonders if she fell into the water and why she can’t remember. Her hands are cool, and she presses her skin towards the sun, wills it to soak in the sun, imagines her cells turning to scales.

  Sarra pulls a towel over her, tucks it under her armpits.

  Elise remembers being tucked in, but not by her mother. Her mother was a balloon in the sky, as light as she feels now, beautiful and sad, the kind of thing you watch float away knowing (not wanting to know) that it will pop.

  Here in the gulf there are no balloons. They are, she imagines, eaten by the turtles before they make landfall. What washes up here is larger, nets and ropes off the ships in the strait. Rubber sandals from Indonesia tumble onto the beaches and break, smaller and smaller and smaller with each season, the sand and the wind and the sun shrinking them into fragments that will never disappear entirely, will be part of the sand, indistinguishable, a reminder to the future that someone, some other kind of creature was here.

  Elise is nauseous from the movement of the boat and the dizziness in her head, needs the horizon, so after a moment or two she pushes up onto her arms and then sits up entirely.

  ‘What happened?’ she asks.

  Sarra hands her a bottle of water. ‘You went right down. When Benj pulled you up you weren’t awake at all, just wet and …’ She pauses, says a word Elise doesn’t understand. ‘Are you sick, Elise? Have you been feeling okay?’

  Elise feels like throwing up.

  ‘If you need to chuck just lean over the side,’ says Sarra, and Elise is suddenly aware of her frailty, the vulnerability of her body in this environment. When did she become so delicate?

  She closes her eyes and, in the darkness, stretches her mind out towards Dan, wherever he is and whatever he’s doing, and she hopes he’s less of whatever she is, that he’s getting on with things, with the book and,

  she remembers, suddenly,

  his uncle’s retrospective. He is in Tasmania. So far, too far, away.

  Her stomach lurches.

  *

  When they get back to town, the clinic is closed. The doctor’s out on home visits, who knows where.

  ‘I’ll be okay,’ says Elise, and wants to mean it. But for once, she’s not sure. ‘Just drive me back to the lab and I’ll lie down there.’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ says Sarra, shaking her head, but Benj drops them at the shipping container, as requested. He and the others wave goodbye from the car park and drive away, but Sarra stays. She comes in and boils the kettle, makes Elise a cup of white tea with powdered milk from a repurposed coffee tin.

  The couch is dusty, but it feels good to sink into an unmoving thing, to stretch out her legs, close her eyes. Elise is tired, but it’s not the same as Brisbane, those weeks in her bed (their bed). How empty it was in that rain. How empty the window, the bed, the bird.

  Now, she has a little something building up inside her.

  She opens her eyes.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ Elise says. ‘Go. I probably got dehydrated. Too much sun.’

  But, again, Sarra shakes her head. ‘I’ll sit out front, but I’m not going further. Not until Benj finds that doctor.’ She braces the door ajar with a rock, and Elise hears a plastic chair scrape across the dirt outside.

  When Elise opens her eyes again, there are shadows on the wall, and Tom is sitting beside her.

  ‘Sarra told me what happened. Three minutes is a bloody long time to pass out.’

  Elise sits up, wipes her mouth. ‘I’m fine. When did you get back?’r />
  He shrugs. ‘Not long ago. Benj was just here, and the clinic’s open. We all think you should get checked out.’

  She’s annoyed at the attention, this kind of attention. I’m not an invalid, she wants to say. I’m strong—can’t you see it? Why don’t you see it?

  If only, she thinks, he could see her as she used to be, firm and taut, open to the world. She would laugh this off, and they would agree.

  She’s fine, they would say. Smart and beautiful and totally fine.

  The clinic, like most other buildings in the mining town of Alyangula, is raised on stilts. Like the house she grew up in, a small square cyclone shelter centred underneath it.

  ‘They’re building a new clinic,’ says Tom, pulling open the door for her. ‘So this is what we’ve got for now.’

  The waiting room is already occupied by a man hunched over a gauze-wrapped hand. Tom gestures across the room, seats of red, blue and green and smiles. ‘Pick your colour.’

  She checks herself in and picks a royal blue one. His chair, beside her, is green. His proximity prickles her skin; he smells good, like sun and caramel. He leans forward, elbows on knees, staring off over the bright chairs. If she were to kiss him, she thinks, would he taste like John did? Would his tongue feel the same in her mouth, on her skin?

  ‘Do you have brothers and sisters?’ she asks, without knowing why.

  He looks at her. ‘Six—four brothers, two sisters, but one of my sisters died at birth.’

  A flutter. ‘Did you know her? I mean, meet her?’

  Tom shakes his head. ‘She was the oldest. We all came after—my brothers, then sister, then me.’

  ‘It must have been hard for your parents. Did they—do they ever talk about it? Your sister?’

  ‘She’s always had a Christmas stocking.’

  Elise looks down at her hands, rubs a small fray in the cuticle of her thumbnail. Could she do it? Put up a stocking for William?

  ‘How about you?’ he asks.

  ‘No,’ says Elise. ‘Just me. I grew up with my cousins, though. So I kind of have three brothers. But not really.’

  Do they count as family, she wonders, if you haven’t seen them in almost twenty years? How long has it been since she saw Aunt Rosie or Uncle Bob? Longer still, her mother?