Loving, Faithful Animal (11 page)

Fuck. Watch it. A girl scowling through hair dyed the blue of a sick Siamese fighting fish.

Lani turns and apologises and tries to leave in the one action, the step vanishing beneath her, her ankle swivelling. Face striking hard against the handrail, a warm tinny taste spilling into her mouth.

The girl who
'
s lost her vodka looking down at her. Hun, she says. You're bleeding.

Lani wipes the back of a hand under her chin and it comes back slick. It's not mine, she tells the girl. Oh, it is. Ah shit. I hardly felt it.

Here. Come on, you'll muck up your dress.

I hardly felt it, she says again.

Can she stand? Will, getting her under the arms. Watch the glass there, and Lani lets herself be lifted to standing and led back into the house, like snapping back on a retractable cord, back to exactly where she doesn't want to be; limping past that still-closed bedroom door. No sound escaping from underneath its sill, now.

In the bathroom she grits her teeth at the cabinet mirror. Red tracing her gums.

Will locks the door behind them—Lemme look—and Lani turns out her lower lip to show the split there.

Uh-huh, that could be worse.
Won't need stitches, at least.

You a nurse now or something?

Might as well be. What with Dad. Siddown, can you? He drenches a handtowel with warm water.

Lani lowers herself to the edge of the bathtub, lets him dab at her chin, at her neck where the blood has snaked down. The towel smells of wet dog and petrol, and she tries not to breathe.

Don't know what you were thinking, touching his boot to her shoe. Accident waiting to happen, these; sure nothing's twisted in there?

Guess I'll find out later. If I take them off now I might never get them on again.

Tilt your head back a bit.

Lani eyes the ceiling, its map of mildew. Feeling his breath on her throat, wondering what's keeping her from wrapping her legs around him. Only that she wants to. Someone rattles the doorknob and Will yells for whoever it is to piss off.

Pass me a fucken beer then. Whoever's mouth slurring up close to the doorjamb.

I said you can fucken wait, Will tells the door. He folds the towel to find a clean corner, then goes back to his dabbing. She closes one eye to keep the fluoro tube from doubling itself.

Okay?

She nods and makes to stand to prove it.

Hold your horses, we're not done yet. He rummages in the medicine cabinet for a roll of cotton wool, tearing off a plug of it and running it under the tap.

Here. He packs the wool into Lani's lower lip. Okay, you look a bit like you're trying to start something, but the bleeding should stop pretty soon. You wanna stick around here or go?

Home?

'Less there's some place you'd rather.

She might ask him now. Could we go …? Could you take me just as far as …?

And he might say, Yeah, okay. How fast can you throw your shit together?

But all that will mean is saving on bus fare, the little money she has stretching just a little longer. And she'd owe him something more than those few stingy bucks. More than she's already made up her mind to ever owe anyone.

No, she says. Sounding dopey around the soggy gauze. Just home.

The door handle rattles again, another fist pounding the bathroom door.

Okay. Let these munters get to their precious booze. Will flings the handtowel into the icy beer water, turns back to the sink, kisses Lani on her hurt mouth. Just procedure. He unlatches the door, but whoever was out there has given up and gone away. And when they pass that bedroom, it is empty, the door left wide open. As though nothing bad has happened in there. There's even a sheet spread across the mattress now, faded but tucked tight. Hospital corners.

Her helmet is gone, somewhere. Taken or lost, she doesn't know.

Here, have this one, and Will passes her his father's old open-faced and wears nothing himself. He judders the Honda over the ravaged road, not picking the way so carefully now: hitting roots and potholes, the bike jerking around like a spooked animal. Headlamp bouncing crazily, sweeping deep into the silver trunks of the gums, signalling back to the wrecks out there,
Remember life?
Will keeps taking his hand from the grip to reach back and give a squeeze to her knee, and each time he does, she thinks, Now. We'll spill. And welcomes it almost. But it doesn't go that way. They make it out to the highway, wet-looking in the moonlight, gather speed. Now and then the headlamp picking up the white bones of makeshift crash markers planted at the side of the bitumen.

Pre-dawn gnats swat her face and she swats back at them through the front of the helmet, swiping them away from her puffy lip. Her toes are crushed past feeling, for the sake of what? Twenty bucks, if she can be bothered to ask it, or her own little languor, a few furred hours to retreat into. Lani scrapes her heels against the pillion pegs, lets the shoes and their cargo fall into the road. A calm soaks in, with the warmth from Will's back, with every k put between her and that house.

One or the other of them howls then. Then they both do. There's the moon hanging above them, looking one moment solid enough to knock on, and the next moment like a hole punched through the dark satin sky. She keeps an eye on it, to stop it from darting away. Will reaches again for her knee, and she presses closer to stop the icy morning prying in between. Whatever she feels now is only because of the warmth from his back, the metallic taste of the early morning air and the two of them knifing through it. Only momentum, only velocity; how it settles something down in her. Still. The impulse is there, persistent and useless. The need to say one good thing, bigger than thanks.
May the road rise to meet you and may the wind always be at your back.
Just words she's seen somewhere, in cross-stitch—somebody's grandmother's busywork—but it seems about right. Then all of a sudden it doesn't. Sounds instead like a kind of curse, that first part about the road rising, what with the bike and all. The patch of skin on Aiden's calf, crinkled like plastic. She'd glimpsed that, she realises. Looking in. The railway of scars along his leg where they'd stapled him back together.

She says nothing, feels herself floating out there in the dark. Beyond the reach of any of it. Hard and cool and distant as a star. It all belongs to this summer. A winter will come and roll over it, over Will and everything else, and soon enough it will belong to last summer. Then the summer before last. Three years ago, four. And after that she'll stop counting.

*

Creeping shoeless around the back of the house, she trips over the rabbit hutch, dragged up from the yard. They will outlast everything, these rabbits. Will still be there when both girls have fled, flown.

Her own bedroom window has been snibbed. No surprise.
You want to stay out all night then by all means, my girl, stay out all night.
And she's slept out in the garage before, cocooned in paint-spattered sheets. But Ru. Ru will always let her in.

She doesn't even have to knock; her sister's window has been left open a crack. Cat flap. Lani slinks in, tries to be quiet. But Ru is already sitting bolt upright, liquid-eyed, watching her.

What happened to you?

Shh. Go back to sleep.

But your face …

Shh.

I wasn't asleep.

In the dark of her own room, she peels off the dress; stiff in places, sticky in others. Blood, dried and not yet. She steps out of her underwear and kicks around until she finds this morning's towel on the floor.

In the lounge room, her mother sleeps sitting up in one of the nubbly armchairs, even though there
'
s no-one thrashing around the dark of her own bedroom.

It
'
s the infomercial hour, the ads just audible. People spruiking contour pillows, dinnerware, home-security gadgets.

Lani stands there a minute, wrapped in her towel, waiting to see what sort of free stuff they'll throw in. Waterproof shower radios, washable slip covers, one for the home and one for the office, money-back guarantee. Stuff she knows is just useless junk, more plastic for fish to choke on a few years forward.
Secure it to the bench, and a little cabbage turns into a carload of coleslaw …

It's someone's job, programming these dead hours, cramming them full. Someone's job to know who's out here, and that what they're lonely for at four a.m. is a home-beading kit or an ultrasonic pet remote, or sex chat lines, or Fred and Ginger dancing up and down stairs, up and down stairs. Crosby and Hope riding fake camels through a fake desert. Her mother loves that escapist shit, the ostrich plumes and the lit-up staircases, endings that are glamorous even when they're not happy.

The television light is not kind to her sleeping face, greying the skin, darkening the hollows. She looks drowned there, cold, in the underwater gloom thrown from the set.

Come on, you're gonna wreck your back, but Evelyn only murmurs a noise that sounds like agreement.

Lani pulls a red wool blanket from the armrest of the couch, where it's hiding a spot Belle liked to chew. Tucks it around the grey-blue ghost of her mother, while on-screen a salesman throws in free steak knives, storage containers, pocket-sized alarms. Things to make life easier, tidier, safer.

V. Madrugada

something's coming. les can
smell it like weather. Can just about hear it, like a sound pitched so low that only the blood can recognise it. The dull thuds of homemade fireworks died away around two a.m., and then came a quiet spell, a brooding stillness now punctured by what's likely rifle fire. Just the odd crack of it now and again, beyond the fibro walls of the shed. Drunken New Year's rabbiting, boys who couldn't get laid now killing just to kill, whatever they can get.
Fill yer boots.

He
'
s been out here since one or so, working to settle himself. Solder smoke and citronella smoke mingling in the dome of light thrown by an old goose-neck lamp, hooded and twisted up like a bronze cobra. Showing Les his hands and the naked radio chassis upturned on the bench between them, and the soldering iron with its coiled wick. The radio's bakelite shell stands sentinel beside the half-dozen capacitors—waxy, dead—that he's snipped out, replacing bad for good as he goes. Plugging the radio back into the socket after each exchange, monitoring his progress.
A little louder, a little bit louder now
, the call and response of some old gospel number. Good good good.

He works in singlet and shorts, mosquitoes wreaking a constellation of havoc on his undefended arms and legs, never mind the citronella coils. A pause now and then to slap or scratch, or to etch the angriest of the bites with a cross, digging in his blunt thumbnail this way then that. A trick his nieces taught him when they were little and still interested in showing him what they knew. The crosses are either meant to make the bites itch less, or they're meant to help the swelling go down. Or maybe they're only intended to shuffle the mind along; he can't remember exactly.

The radio innards give him the news—he thinks of bird entrails, of voodoo—telling him which parts of the world are just now rolling over into 1991: Hanoi, Jakarta, an hour-wide ribbon of Russia. That it'll be a fine day, thirty degrees, no chance of storm. Les turns the radio off and fits it snug into its cover, then turns it on a final time, laying his hands on the bakelite to feel the moment before sound arrives, that warm whir, as though it were a box of bees. Forty bucks, it'll fetch, maybe fifty. Or maybe Ev will like it.

He sets down the solder and rehouses the iron. Nudges the shed door and props it open for the cleaner air. Outside it's pitch, a velvet blackness.
Madrugada
, the Spanish call it. This dark stretch leading up to the dawn. English wants a word like that, something that sounds both magic and malevolent, but there isn't one. Or not one he knows of. Just
the wee small hours
, and that doesn't fit, doesn't conjure any of the right feelings, any of the wonder or the dread.

There's a stirring in the tall seeded grass beyond his fenceline, a light breeze causing shivery spoondrift. Gotta know your wind, someone told him once. Years back, this bloke on a vineyard job. Told it like Les was ignorant. He supposed he was, in some matters, philosophically and spiritually. His conversations with god amounted to little more than the transparencies of handwritten hymns looming up from the tabletop projector when he and Jack were Sunday-school kids. And still, he'd only pretended to sing, mouthing the shapes of the words and letting the other kids fill in the sound.

But the vineyard worker wasn't necessarily talking about god. Where was this? Grapes. The Swan. Pruning instead of picking, so it couldn't have been later than September. The two of them working their way down the rows, doing only the lefthand vines so that the morning sun wasn
'
t in their eyes—a system of their own devising. They'd do the right side when the sun had crossed to the west.

Look, the bloke was telling him, throwing clippings over his shoulder. It's simple enough …

There was a sort of guttering about his voice when he said certain words, an unsteadiness, the remnants of an
accent
. Les hadn
'
t asked which part of the world it had come from.

You become to learn the difference between which wind is yours, and which is not. Yes? Got it?

Les nodded, feeling all the while lost, and his workmate saw that.

Like with your hands there, he went on, gesturing with the secateurs, and they both looked at the long-healed nubs where Les's index fingers had once been.

If you knew which wind was bad news, you maybe have seen this coming. You maybe have better prepared.

Les wasn't ashamed, but he busied his hands back amongst the vine leaves.

The fella went on: Someone else perhaps won the lottery that day. Someone else, perhaps he got his dick sucked raw—hah!—by some beautiful woman. Because that wind was his, but it sure as shit was not yours. So. You know which did this? He motioned again in the direction of Les's hands, but what could Les say? It was as if they were never his to begin with, and once they were gone he'd been relieved. There was no way of explaining that to the itinerant, to anyone who made a living with their hands. To avoid having either to explain or to lie, he shrugged and grinned.

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. Huntsmen 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?