Snake (6 page)

The phrase ‘certain death' lodged in Girlie's brain, as did the statistic of 118 sheep. She lay in bed at night and imagined snakes, silent and purposeful, slithering up drainpipes, sliding through knotholes, into the house.

27

Tighter Breathing

I
RENE WAS KEEN
on the natural sciences. She gave the children a Jacques Cousteau book featuring a photograph of a scuba-diver banging a shark on the snout with his camera, if you could believe that. She bought them another book on Australian fauna: lyrebirds, bandicoots, emus, platypuses, Tasmanian devils, and, of course, snakes.

Girlie had only to open the book on Australian fauna and her heart began to skip. As she approached the section on snakes, she turned the pages slower and slower, finally barely able to touch them. She forced herself to look. There they were, singly or in nests, coiled or grappling, some in camouflage colors, others banded like football players. Fanged, flickering, unblinking. She convinced herself that the glossy pages felt as the scales of a snake might.

28

Zero at the Bone

R
EX WAS ADEPT
at decapitating snakes with his shovel. The body would He in the milkweed and thistle at the side of a road or draped on the dirt shoulder of an irrigation channel, singing with insect life, guts slickly iridescent, scales dimming, until only flimsy skin remained, to be snagged by the wind on fencing or grass stalks, where it flapped for a time, bleaching to tissue, and disintegrated.

29

I Wish You Bluebirds

I
N
1959, J
ACK
Davy, popular radio quiz master and host of the ‘Give It a Go' and ‘Ask Me Another' shows, died of a heart attack. That same year, Hildegarde Hochschwender arrived in Progress on a Harley Davidson motorbike, clear rubber-framed goggles covering her eyes and a windcheater zipped up to her chin. Attached to the motorbike was a sidecar carrying Audrey Jones, Hildegarde's friend of many years, also in goggles and windcheater.

Hildegarde was solidly built, with brown eyes and straight blunt-cut hair. Her voice, raspy and heavily accented, was disarmingly similar to Marlene Dietrich's. Audrey was Hildegarde's opposite: sharp features, freckles as large as threepenny bits on her face and arms, and an expression that was permanently suspicious. It was as if an otter and a crow had struck up a partnership. Hildegarde and Audrey sometimes walked with a small swagger, but usually only after dismounting from the motorbike.

Strangely enough, the couple did not attract comment. Not immediately. At that time the ‘hot' topic in Progress was the jeweler's son, apprehended for repeatedly trying to burn down St. Clement's. The fires had been set against the wall of the nave, an orderly arrangement of kindling and crunched-up pages from a hymnal; it was the neatness that made the police suspect the jeweler's son, who was the scout leader.

Rumors were also flying about a Russian family who lived on the edge of town. Black magic and strange sexual practices were hinted at, although the evidence was flimsy: the father had a goatee beard and read books printed in the Cyrillic alphabet, and there was a nubile daughter. The good people of Progress were careless with their slander.

The truth was that Hildegarde and Audrey were outside their ken. When the couple described themselves as old friends seeing the world, the response was, How adventurous! Privately, the two women were thought to be plain janes. Couldn't they do something to make themselves more attractive to men? A little lipstick – ‘lippie' – or a chiffon scarf knotted at the neck was prescribed.

Hildegarde and Audrey were tired of traveling and Progress seemed a likely place; they rented a flat above a shop, and Hildegarde found a job at the town newspaper, Audrey at the hospital. The newspaper office was next door to the radio station, so it wasn't long before Hildegarde and Irene met.

Irene was immediately attracted to Hildegarde, to her foreignness. Irene had no women friends. Even Billie had been dropped after the wedding, her letters unanswered. ‘You have to prune friendships,' Irene told Girlie. Irene, notoriously savage with a pair of secateurs, pruned her tree of friendship within an inch of its life.

30

I Love My Love with a Dress and a Hat

‘L
OVERS UNDER THE
lap,' said Freddie to Irene, who had brought him a cup of tea. He was on air, waiting for a song – ‘Purple People Eater,' as it happened – to finish. They were discussing Hildegarde and Audrey.

‘Lovers under the what?' asked Irene, startled.

‘Diesels.'

Irene stared at him hard.

‘Lezzos.'

‘Oh.'

‘Need a diagram?'

‘No.'

‘Johnny Mathis is a homo,' said Freddie, one thing reminding him of another. What Freddie did when he went to Sydney was anybody's guess.

‘I knew that,' said Irene, who hadn't, and withdrew into thought.

31

Titan

R
EX WAS HAPPY
that Irene had a friend. Hildegarde came around mostly on Saturday afternoons – Audrey was somehow always on duty at the hospital – and Hildegarde and Irene would sit leaning against the verandah posts listening to records: Beethoven, Liszt, Sibelius. In throaty tones, Hildegarde described the concert houses of Europe and conifer forests where the sun never shone; Irene was transfixed.

When it was Irene's birthday, Rex asked Hildegarde for advice as to what to give her, and she suggested Mahler's First Symphony, conducted by Bruno Walter. Rex ordered it from Rangott's Records on the main street of Progress, where Irene had purchased her record player, a portable model, grey with pink trim. When Irene took off the wrapping and saw the handsome boxed set, her smile was forgiving. For a time, Rex felt less useless.

Irene gathered Girlie and Boy around the record player and made them listen. In certain sections, if you concentrated, you could hear the conductor stamp his foot and grunt. Irene could barely contain her excitement as she waited for these moments. She did not view the extraneous noises as flaws. Instead, she was reassured by them. The music had not been handed down from Olympus; humans like herself had created it.

32

Fantasia

G
IRLIE WAS NOT SO
sure about Bruno Walter's grunts. She'd had a disillusioning experience when the Arts Council ballet company came to town and performed for her school in the church hall. The taped music was tinny and piping, and dust rose with every pirouette, but to Girlie's eyes, the ballerinas were gossamer creatures. One in particular she thought ineffably beautiful, with doe eyes and a long neck.

After the performance, the audience was invited ‘backstage' to meet the ‘corps de ballet.' Girlie went as if into the company of goddesses. The ballerina she had admired was taking off her pancake make-up with Pond's cold cream. Wads of cotton wool smeared with brown muck lay on a trestle table that normally held church suppers. To Girlie's distress, the ballerina had freckles and a prominent fleshy nose. Worse, she smelled strongly of sweat, like a horse after a workout. Girlie bowed her head. ‘Don't be shy,' said the ballerina. Girlie blushed; she was feeling disgust.

33

She and I

M
YSTERIOUSLY
, H
ILDEGARDE HAD
no interest in Boy. She would pinch his cheek and ask about his model airplanes, and then turn to Girlie and ask if she wanted to go for a ride – ‘a burn' – on the bike. And Girlie would climb onto the pillion seat, carefully avoiding the exhaust pipe, and off they would go, Girlie's arms around the reassuring thickness of Hildegarde's waist, fences, houses, trees, telephone poles joining in a blur, until they reached bitumen, where Hildegarde cranked up the speed and Girlie's eyes began to water. Then she would turn her head to the side and place her cheek against Hildegarde's back.

34

Hist! Hark!

T
HE NEAREST RIVER
to Progress was the Murrumbidgee, some seventy-five miles away. In winter, it was sulky, brown, and wide. In summer, the mud settled, and it became the same shade of green – soft, silvery – as the leaves of the tall, angular gums that jostled for room on its banks, dipping branches over the water like men doffing hats.

Irene and Hildegarde had been told of an isolated part of the river where there was a spit of sand and excellent swimming. Ready for adventure, they loaded a couple of old kapok mattresses into the car, along with mosquito nets, cooking utensils, and a canvas water bag, and set off with the children, planning to camp out for two nights. Rex stayed behind to play cricket.

They found the spot after a few wrong turnings. The river was low and lazy, its steep chalky banks exposed. Water swirled silently around the trunks of upended trees, victims of attrition and winter floods. The air smelled of wet clay and eucalyptus leaves; flies formed clouds.

They swam and then prepared for the night, hanging the mosquito nets from the branches of trees at the sand's edge, placing the mattresses under them. Kindling was collected, a fire lit in a scooped-out hole on the beach. They ate sausages and drank billy tea, and then the children were sent to bed, where they lay wide-awake, watching Irene and Hildegarde, who sat on a log and talked as the fire burned to coals.

Irene and Hildegarde's voices echoed in the stillness. Girlie and Boy strained to make sense of their conversation; they could tell who was speaking but not what was said. After a bit – the children sat up, sensing that something unusual was about to happen – Irene and Hildegarde left the fire and went down to the water's edge, where they undressed. Their naked bodies shone against the dark river, luminous and indefinite as ghosts.

Splashing, laughter. One of them – their mother, from the pitch of the voice – did a war dance in the shallow water, whooping, lifting her legs up, running in circles. Her cries bounced off the river, into the tops of the trees, startling roosting birds. Then the two women went out deeper, gliding into blackness, making no sound at all; the only thing the children could see were the trees on the opposite bank, hulked against a pearly night sky.

Boy filed the event under ‘interesting,' to be thought about at a later date, and went to sleep. Girlie tossed and turned, ears alert. Leaves rustled. A bird flapped. She dozed, to wake with a start. Something was pushing against the mosquito net. Girlie screamed, and Irene and Hildegarde, pulling on clothes, came running.

It was a cow, one of a herd drifting to the river to drink.

35

Love's Always Been My Game

A S
ATURDAY AFTERNOON,
Hildegarde was visiting. Boy came through the gate from the home paddock, a magpie chick in his cupped hands. He had found it in the grass underneath an ancient cypress pine, its beak wide open, but no noise issuing. He showed the creature to his father, who was on his way to the garage to soak a cricket bat in linseed oil, and asked him if the chick could be returned to its nest.

‘Waste of time,' said Rex.

‘I will climb,' said Hildegarde.

Irene, Hildegarde, and Boy trooped to the paddock. This was fun, such good fun! Hildegarde zipped her windcheater part way up, nestled the bird next to her chest. She shinnied up the trunk, hoisted herself into the lower branches.

‘Careful, Hildegarde.'

‘In Germany, as children, we played in trees like this.'

Unlike the trees of her youth, the bark of the Australian cypress pine was rough and furrowed. It bit into her hands. The tree was also higher than she had estimated. Hildegarde would have liked to have beat a retreat, but her honor was at stake.

The bird was eventually installed in its nest. Back on the ground, a fuss was made over Hildegarde's scratches.

Wiping his hands on a rag, Rex emerged from the garage, next to which was an almond tree flounced with blossoms. He happened to look up just as the women leaned their heads together. Hildegarde said something, Irene laughed in reply. From the kitchen window, that damn music.

Rex strode over and stood in front of Hildegarde, who knew in a flash what was coming.

‘Get out of here,' he yelled, veins bulging, spit flying. ‘I don't want to see you in my house again.'

The next day, Boy found the magpie chick again lying in the grass at the bottom of the old cypress pine, but this time it was dead, its papery corpse covered with ants. Boy was obscurely pleased. He picked the bird up by a claw, hurled it into the air.

36

Vengeance Is Mine

R
EX RANTED FROM
time to time about how Girlie was ruining her eyes from reading. ‘Go outside, lassie. Enjoy life while you're young,' he'd exhort.

Girlie read books like a caterpillar eating its way through the leaves on a tree. For some time she had been hungrily eyeing her mother's bookshelf, but Irene had declared it out of bounds. The attraction grew stronger, and one morning before school Girlie stole
Anna Karenina
off the shelf. It was either that or
Peyton Place
. Her daring turned her legs to jelly. She hid the book – a Penguin Classic, with an orange spine – in her case. On the school bus she made a great show of reading it while the others leafed through comic books and
True Confession
magazines or studied for tests.

She continued reading it through the day, concealing it in her lap during classes. It made little sense to her, the antlike words, the explosive Russian names, the to-ings and fro-ings, the convoluted declarations of love. The train journeys, however, were familiar from the long trips Irene, Boy, and herself had made to Sydney to visit relatives. The thrill of journeying – cold railway platforms, sooty smoke, shuntings and clangings – this she could grasp.

Girlie was called on to answer a question in a mathematics class, and she shoved the book into the ink-stained, paper-littered interior of the desk. She remembered it as she sat down for the next class. When she went to retrieve the book, it was gone. Every day for months she expected Irene to remark on the book's absence; her guilt became a brace that bit into her whenever she relaxed. Irene never said a word.