Loving, Faithful Animal

by Josephine Rowe

  A nor’-wester?

  Shit, if it were so easy.

  You said it was simple.

  A boy came down the line with a barrow to collect the cuttings, and the man lowered his voice as though his information was illicit, dangerous to too young a mind.

  I mean, simple concept, he said, rapping his grimy glove against his temple. A simple idea. Yes now?

  Then a bell had clanged, up at the homestead, for lunch. Doorstop slices of bread heaped with slabs cut off last night’s roast, the meat sticky with mint jelly. The men pulled their shirts back over the shoulders and stalked up silent between the green aisles of vines.

  Les doesn’t know if it’s true, about the wind, but it’s something that has stayed with him. Like the crosses in mozzie bites. Like tapping the top of a drink can before lifting the ringpull. Superstition, mostly. Habit.

  This morning’s wind is neither that which he supposes is his, nor its nemesis. Just a skerrick of huff that has nothing to do with him. But it’s carrying something along on it, sinister maybe. He turns back a corner of damp hessian shrouding a crate of homebrew, cracks one of the taller bottles and swallows. Warm, over-carbonated. The heat over Christmas having brought it around too fast. For the past few weeks he’s been heading out to the shed in the hottest arc of the day to swaddle the bottles with cool wet towels, trying to slow things down. Tended to them like crook little children, this batch of bottles (get your own fucken family), but now here they are anyway, not too flash but not poison. He raises the bottle in the direction of the rifle shots, then fills his mouth again with the failed lager. To the new year. Waste not want not, chin chin.

  Yesterday Ev had come to him. At the burnt-down end of the day, like fever dreaming. Appearing at the fenceline close to dark, as one of his strays might, looking for he did not know what. From the kitchen window he’d watched her climbing under the top wire, stepping careful in her canvas sandals between the staked tomatoes and cucumbers as though she were trying not to wake them, and he wondered if she was onto him. He went out to meet her—sweat across her lip, her hair glowing white hot, angelfire—then he’d brought her into the cool and sat her down at his table and lied to her. Said no, nothing from Jack, when she asked him. She was apologising to him in the same breath, saying she knew it wasn’t a fair question, and he’d answered that it was a fair enough question given the circumstances, and they’d spoken of other things for a while until she’d left.

  There was more there, more to it than that, something stretching out languid and musky between the said and not-said things, so that he felt a traitor to both of them.

  He’d taken Jack’s call early that same morning, stalking in from the backyard with the smell of oniongrass and fennel and mower diesel haunting his nostrils. And maybe it was the diesel or maybe sheer coincidence that had him already thinking of orange season when he picked up the bleating phone and there was Jack’s voice. Accusatory at first.

  Where the hell’ve you been? That’s the seventh bloody try.

  Les just about saw him there: an Acland Street phone box with filthy words etched into the glass and the stink of wino piss. Jack lighting each smoke off the last, feeding in his change again and again as the line rang out, the poker-machine clatter in the refund slot that would make him flinch, each failure winding him tighter and tighter.

  Doing the lawns, Les told him.

  Mine?

  Mine.

  You been going over there much or what?

  Just the usual. That seemed to satisfy him, though Les couldn’t say why.

  Christmas go okay?

  Yeah, a real corker—what do you think? Les waited as the space at the other end of the line expanded to fill with sirens, tram bells, Jack’s breathing.

  Look, Jack said, I’m thinking of going up north for a bit.

  What’s north?

  Oh, y’know. It’s a bit like south but your hat stays on.

  Jack.

  Mm. Yep?

  And Les knew there was no point trying to talk anything like sense or responsibility into him.

  Why even tell me? he asked. If you’re not going to go where you’re needed, you can go where you damned well like. Don’t need my permission.

  He waited—he’d a sense they were both waiting—for Jack to slam the phone down on him. But instead his brother cleared his throat and spoke: Thing is, I got a favour to ask.

  Les was silent, waiting for the rest of it.

  Listen, my passport? Thought I had it on me but it must be in the trunk. You can send it to a mate in—

  And Les told him to get stuffed, but he was already reaching for a biro and a scrap of newsprint to take down the address.

  Passport. So, that far north?

  I haven’t really got it figured yet. Maybe just across the ditch. They’ve got boats you can take. And no snakes there, y’know?

  Sea snakes.

  Won’t go swimming then. You’ll probably have to chew the lock off it, the trunk. Can’t remember where I stashed the key. Don’t break a tooth.

  Right. Anything else, while I’m in there, your lordship? Really he wanted to state in no uncertain terms that this would be the last thing, the very last time he’d let himself be dragged into his brother’s mess. But somehow the call ended with the two of them talking about Mildura, and the Goulburn, and an old joke about the Big Prawn, the Big Merino and the Big Pineapple walking into a bar looking for the Big Banana—a kind of nonsense giggle their old man had told and retold, sometimes swapping out the Big things for other Big things—so that when they hung up it was cheery enough, and Les stood there smirking for a moment afterwards, before the fact of his idiocy caught him up.

  He went, as he’d promised Evelyn he would, to haul the expired Christmas tree out to the roadside, and when that was taken care of he let himself into the garage, tidying up a bit, knowing Jack would not be reappearing to berate him for doing so, then tinkering awhile with the bell on Ru’s bike.

  There’s redbacks galore in there, Ru warned him, backlit by glare, the roller door lifted to kid height. She swiped her sweaty fringe out of her eyes and peered in at him.

  I know, he said, demonstrating the bell while wheeling the bike over to her.

  Dad’ll get them when he gets back.

  I know, he said again, feeling chickenshit. He watched her beat away, spindly legs whirring around lowest gear, then he pulled the door back down. On one of the shelves was an old vinyl suitcase—crammed now with tangled bundles of Christmas lights—that he recognised from the summer after the war. Was that a good summer? If there could have been a good summer, so soon after Vietnam. And if it was even his brother who’d climbed up, plastered of course, onto the sleephouse roof and sang, crowed really, that ridiculous song about frozen orange juice, till one of the other labourers threatened to throttle him.

  Oranges! he’d bellowed once more, before clambering back down. God help me. Who knew you could get so bloody fucking sick of the little bastards?

  Les felt differently though, then and now; still sometimes eats them the way he had in Mildura, where he’d made an art of it. He’d bang and roll them methodically against a tree trunk or the side of a barrel, careful not to split the skin, so that the insides were turned to pulp. Then he’d pierce the rind with a thumbnail (sting of citric acid on split cuticle), and suck the sun-warmed juice through the hole he’d made.

  Like a mongoose with an egg, you are, Jack had said, his face screwed up sour. Jack always massacred his oranges, too resentful of them to give them any more of his time than he could help. Meaning he often just bit right in through the bitter skin and churned it all up together like a machine, hating every moment of it.

  That season they slept on camp beds in the same long, low shed, partially shaded at their end by almond trees whose pink drift of blossoms covered the dirt, clogged the rain guttering. Hunt
smen with the legspans of railway clocks rested motionless on the fibreboard walls. Or motionless until Jack threw a boot at them, and they danced up to the ceiling or fell maimed to the concrete floor, where Jack would proceed to stomp them flat.

  They’re harmless, y’know.

  Bugger that, nothing’s harmless. Jack gave his sleeping bag a few violent shakes to unhouse whatever might be lurking there.

  Each night they fell onto their beds, sagging with muscle ache and with beer from the Worker’s Club, a few words volleyed into the dark and returned across the four feet of empty space between them.

  Hey, ’member the house in Doncaster?

  Doncaster. With Vin Frisk?

  Uh-huh. Frisky Vin … those magazines.

  So what about that house?

  Nothing, really. Just thinking aloud I s’pose.

  Then silence, or what passed for silence in shared quarters. But Les could count on one hand, not even requiring the index nubs, the number of times he actually caught his brother asleep in that shed. Sometimes he thought so, with Jack lying still as death itself, breathing inaudibly. Then the glint of his eyes would give him away. More often he’d wake to Jack sitting upright, watchful, staring out the one grimy window or else on the other side of it, standing under the almond trees and cupping the glow of his cigarette. Keeping it hidden although there was no longer reasonable cause to. Not as if this were high school and old Mr Barnard was going to come juggernauting around the side of the shelter sheds to scruff him. But Les understood why, and he saw his brother, his half-brother, standing there under the dripping pink trees and knew he’d be cupping the glow for the rest of his life. For the rest of his long watchful nights and even the bright days strung between them. Hiding the light of his smoke from men who may well be dead by now, or were in any case thousands of miles away, across land and sea both, and more land again.

  He’d heard it said—of men their father’s age, of men from other wars—how so-and-so never made it back. Not to mean that so-and-so had died over there, or even that he’d left pieces of himself behind in the gangrenous pits dug by makeshift hospitals. Rather that a different man had come back in so-and-so’s place, riding in his body and speaking in his voice, but staring out through the mask of his face as if with a different set of eyes.

  Not so with his brother. Jack had come back home as himself but with the war in him like some dormant, cancerlike sickness, busy at some cellular level. Perhaps blooming there in the soft tissue the whole time, all the while they were tipping back schooners at the longest bar in the world, only ever giving itself away in the smallest of actions; in the clench of his jaw when the bell clanged for last drinks, in his watchfulness and his cupping the glow.

  Boys came home from that war and took a test as if for drunk driving. Got a penlight shone in their eyes, got asked to locate their nose on their face—Close enough, son—and were sent on their merry way.

  Les watched him out there, blowing smoke into the almond tree branches like maybe there was something up in the leaves he meant to flush out. He may’ve been thinking about the war, or he may’ve been thinking about Evelyn, the reason he’d come along. He’d said he wanted fast money from work he could just as soon walk away from, said that was the only kind of work he ever wanted again.

  I thought girls found it sexy, the projectionist gig.

  I’ll tell you what’s not sexy. Earning bob-fifty an hour and kipping in a sleep-out.

  You won’t make much more than that picking citrus.

  Yeah, but I’ll make it faster. And the taxman won’t get a greedy bite of it.

  He didn’t talk much of Ev that season, or of the plans he had rattling about in his head, but every few nights he’d try calling her from town. Leaning at the payphone outside the pub, toeing the mica-flecked footpath like a kid. Scratching her name into the booth with a shard of bottleglass while he waited to see who picked up in that big old house on the central coast. If it was Mr or Mrs Morgan he’d hang up right away. But that early on he couldn’t tell between Ev’s voice and her sister’s, on the phone at least, so sometimes he’d get in a Hullo, stranger, before Stell brought the receiver down on him in the way she’d been instructed. He’d come moping back inside then, for another tall glass of fuck-it-all, staring down into his beer like it was a hole to the centre of the earth. It was only a couple of times that he got the right girl on the line, and on one of these rare occasions the two of them nutted out a code. He’d give three rings then hang up, and she’d know it was him, and that he was thinking of her, and that would be enough.

  Les had wondered then, What if someone picks up before three?

  I told you. It’s a big frigging house.

  What was it about her? Les remembered the last girl, Jody, how he’d had to listen to all Jack’s elated raving. Knew even the useless bits: how she stomped on her lacy things in the shower, called everyone she didn’t like Francis, and was shadowed relentlessly by a red spaniel, once her grandmother’s, who would only obey commands levelled at it in Welsh.

  But Evelyn was a blank card. Hardly any point asking outright, though, curious as he might be. Jack just pushed his hand through his sweat-stiff hair, long grown out of its army crewcut. Said, She doesn’t want too much from me. Les thought maybe he knew what that meant, though years later he’d gone over and caught them in the midst of a row, Ev backed up tight against the bathroom door, Jack’s fist knuckling her chin as he frothed over with the filthiest words he could think to call her by. Her eyes were closed, and although her lips were motionless, it still looked to him something like prayer, the way she was. Something almost serene about it, unearthly, as Jack pulled his fist back and pounded the door beside her head—What do you people want from me? What do you people want from me?—and the plywood splintered at the third blow. Les could’ve walked in on a dozen worse scenes, he knew (there was evidence enough of those, in the house, in Ev’s face) but this was the one he’d stumbled into. Neither one of them had noticed him there, one hand still stupidly clutching the bunch of beetroot he’d pulled up from his garden to make a present of, to trade for company. Then Ev opened her eyes and saw him there, and Jack turned, and Les didn’t know the strength in himself. He got his arms around his brother and the smell of the man was fearful. Not a work sweat or even a brawling sweat but an acrid, cat-piss panic, ammoniacal, as though he truly believed he might die there, in that dim hallway, where there was not a thing wished him harm. They fell together onto the mottled carpet, Jack twisting like a possessed thing inside the poisonous slick of his skin, as Ev stepped to the other side of the smashed bathroom door and locked it behind herself. He let go of his brother then, holding his palms out even as he staggered to standing, but Jack, quicker to his feet, only looked at him and spat, disgusted, onto his own floor.

  Get your own fucken family. Then he’d left, taking nothing, and Les knew better than to follow.

  Ev? He spoke with his mouth close to the splintered plywood. You okay?

  No sound came from the other side. No answer, no sobbing. Then the running of the shower. She came out ten minutes later wrapped up in a towel, and looked surprised to see him still leaning there, the beets propped patiently by the skirting board. She brought a hand up to where the towel tucked in between her breasts, and kept it there. All her makeup had been rinsed away, and she looked at once old and childlike, her hair damp and pasted to her skull, smelling of kids’ fruity shampoo.

  Go home, Les, she told him, and moved past him down the hallway, into the dusky gloom of the bedroom.

  Certain moments would lose substance in their revisiting, memories he’d meant to preserve instead rubbed back to the oily sheen of over-handled suede. Les sometimes struggles to hold true, for instance, the lightning-struck tree flaring up like a torch, spectacular, burning alone on a dark hill outside Bendigo. Or the baby shark he and Jack had caught for a pet, shepherding it towards a rockpool wher
e it would be stranded when the tide pulled back, so that they could simply come back later in the afternoon and shoo it into a bucket (Mim had said no way, obviously, when they marched it proudly up the beach).

  Or how, not long before she tried to drive them into it, his mother had called him to the bank of the river (when he remembers it, it’s the Tarwin, though he cannot say for certain) and pointed to the water, to glinting flecks amidst the silt, and they had worked for some minutes to scoop them up in their hands, the flecks always evading them, swimming between their fingers until finally she realised—or was it himself who saw it?—that they were grabbing after the reflections of stars.

  That, too, is murked and shifting, deteriorated like overplayed video.

  But this is something else, this blue in the hallway. This has held clear and sharp, unwavering, years after the fact. And he believes it’s owed to this: how when Jack’s fist slammed again and again into the hollow door, and then through it, an inch from Evelyn’s face, she had not flinched. As in a side-alley show, some knife-throwing act, she had not flinched. And in a way Les understands this to be worse than all the violences he did not witness, than things he only ever saw in aftermath.

  *

  If he’s honest with himself, Les is afraid of the trunk, of what he might find in it. Though his curiosity nearly won out, months ago, when Jack first brought it around. (He’d seen it coming then, had been planning this disappearing act at least that long. Since August? September?)

  The girls are getting arsey, he’d explained, looking everywhere but Les. They’re into everything, the both of them. I had it stashed up in the roof of the garage but nowhere’s good enough now. And these dropkick mates Lani brings around …