New Australian Stories 2 (45 page)

‘My old man used to take me out here when I was about your age,' my father was saying to Patrick, who was sitting beside him in the front seat.

Father didn't usually speak unless necessary, then only in a clipped manner that suggested he was keen to be done with talking as soon as he had made his point. But now I recognised in his voice the tone he reserved for speeches on The State Of The Economy, The Difference Between Men And Women or How To Tell The ABC Has Been Overrun By Lefties.

From the back seat I could see my brother's face in profile. Patrick was weirdly lit in the alien glow from the dashboard lights so that his skin appeared dusted with green phosphorescence. A crescent-shaped scar was visible on his right cheek where he had fallen during a game of chasey years earlier. Patrick inclined his head to show he was listening. I knew he hated these little homilies but endured them with the same stoicism he marshalled for the occasional strapping across the leg. He was a serious boy, introspective, given to harbouring grudges — none of which I really knew, or only dimly, on this cold morning. I loved and admired my brother even though he intimidated me because it seemed that, should it ever become necessary, he would get by very well without any of us, myself included.

My father changed down gears and slowed the car to cross a railway line. ‘You never really knew your grandfather, but he was a great man. Really, a great man.' The car bobbled over the tracks. ‘I loved those trips. Just me and him. The
men
, you know. Course we used to eat the rabbits. Take them home for Mum to cook. Make nice stews, she did.'

I listened over the thrum of the car's engine. Although directed at Patrick, I knew my father's speeches were intended for anyone in earshot. My own memories of my grandfather were vague: a grizzled muzzle; the smell of urine; a wing of grey, greasy hair pasted across his forehead. Patrick and I were both a little fearful of the late widower, who had lived nearby and visited every few days to have dinner and watch television. Although Father had often extolled his virtues and urged us to respect him, neither Patrick nor I had ever felt comfortable with our grandfather and avoided being alone with him. When he died a year earlier, Mother told us — as she told all family members and visitors — not to mention Grandfather's name in our father's presence in case we upset him.

‘When I was your age,' Father was saying, ‘we used to lay traps. Caught a wild dog once. Stupid thing. Those traps were hard to set. Always a chance of getting snagged …'

I stopped listening and wiped my bleary window clean with the sleeve of my duffel coat. My nose ran with the cold. I thought of my warm bed, and of Mother, who would by now be standing at the kitchen window in her dressing-gown, drinking tea with the serious expression she adopted for her morning ritual. Janet would be playing with her teddy on the lounge-room floor. The image prompted in me a flood of wild, helpless love, and suddenly I wished I were at home with them instead of sitting in this freezing car. A kookaburra on a wire fence watched us pass.

‘… and I guess,' my father was saying when I tuned in again, ‘I guess that the thing I would hope for us — for you boys and me — is you would respect me like I respected my father. That's why sometimes I'm hard on you. That's all. It's for your own good, you know.'

It was the most personal speech I had ever heard him make and I was amazed and almost terrified to detect a quaver of emotion in his voice. Neither Patrick nor I said anything, but my brother reached a hand over and patted our father gently on the shoulder.

‘It's okay,' he said, and turned to me in the back seat. ‘We understand, don't we, Nick?'

I mumbled agreement. For the next hour we drove in companionable silence, as if we had used all the words allocated to us for the morning.

We arrived at an isolated car park around nine a.m. and piled out of the car. We unloaded the rifles and knapsacks and set out for the campsite, which was two kilometres away through the bush. The frosty grass crunched beneath our boots and our hot exhalations billowed around us in the glinting morning sunlight. Small birds darted about in the high grass. I felt anxious, as if my guts were aware of something hidden from the more articulate parts of myself, but perhaps this is just how I remember it.

Waking in the half-light one Sunday, I slid from the couch. Richie Benaud was calling the cricket in a droning voice that sounded like a small plane perpetually losing altitude. It was hot and I had fallen asleep after the roast Mother organised every few weeks. I had by this time moved out of home and was undertaking a degree in physics, but Patrick stayed on while he tried to be a rock star. The lunches were always desultory affairs peppered with small talk, and afterwards each of us dissolved into different parts of the house.

Half asleep, I followed murmuring voices and found my mother and Patrick huddled at the study window watching my father as he limped across the lawn doing odd jobs in the garden. He didn't know he was being observed, just as Patrick and Mother were unaware of me standing in the doorway to the darkened study. As they so often did, they were giggling at a private joke.

Although only twenty-three, two years older than me, Patrick seemed to live in a whole other world, to which only our mother had access. At that moment she had a cigarette in her right hand and she turned her face away from Patrick and exhaled the grey smoke up into the study's cool corners. It reminded me of a conical plume sprayed from a can of insect repellent.

‘
Look
at him,' she was saying, referring to Father as he struggled to raise himself from where he had been kneeling to weed a garden bed. ‘An old man in a dry month.' She had been drinking wine at lunch.

Patrick didn't say anything. She offered him her cigarette. He took it casually, barely noticing, drew on it and handed it back. I had never before seen my brother smoke a cigarette. It shocked me.

‘Do you ever regret what happened?' Mother asked Patrick.

Patrick shook his head. He exhaled his cigarette smoke and looked at her as if something had occurred to him. ‘Why? Do you?'

Mother rested her head on Patrick's shoulder and laughed. ‘Hardly, darling.
Hardly
.'

And then the kiss.

My father tells Patrick the cold water is excellent for his circulation. He smiles his smile that shows no teeth. ‘It's only
three minutes
. You don't even have to put your head under, like when I had to do it.'

I watch Patrick take off his clothes. He goes about it slowly, as if memorising each movement for later use. He leaves his watch on. The watch belonged to Grandfather — he acquired it in Vietnam — and he gave it to Patrick not long before he died, much to my father's chagrin. Father said our grandfather was half blind and demented at the end.
He
only gave it to you because he thought you were me
, he would say, a comment guaranteed to rile Patrick almost more than anything else.

Finally, when my brother is naked, skin puckered, shivering, he walks down the hallway into the bathroom and steps gingerly into the bath, drawing a sharp breath as he does so.

I found it impossible to return to the family home after that kiss. Every few months my mother would ring to urge my attendance at lunch, but I always found a reason not to go: I had a report due, I was going to Wilsons Promontory with Julie, I was tired after a big night out at the pub with my mates.

‘Oh, come on, sweetie,' Mother would slur down the phone line. ‘You know your brother would love to see you. And we
always love
to have that Julie around the house.'

Only my mother could so effortlessly squeeze two lies into such a short speech. The thought of kissing her lips made me queasy. The thought of seeing Patrick made me furious. The thought of seeing my father made me feel, strangely enough, almost unbearably sad.

After we had been tramping for an hour or so through thick bush, my father stopped and threw up a hand for my brother and me to halt. My heart began thumping. My mouth dried up. Were we actually going to shoot something? Patrick hefted his rifle. I followed suit. Father crouched and peered into the undergrowth. Then he turned to us and mouthed the word
pig
. A pig? A wild pig. Now that
would
be something. He had told us how unlikely it would be to come across a pig but said rabbits would be fine for our first hunting expedition. ‘Nothing wrong with shooting little bunnies,' he said. ‘It's still hunting, after all.'

Our father shuffled backwards and indicated for us to do the same. He looked scared. Patrick smirked. Presently, I saw something move about in the thick bushes. My heart was really pounding, and my palms were moist. Again I thought of Mother and Janet, safe at home, listening to the radio. There came a grunt and my father raised his rifle, but what lumbered from the bushes was not a pig at all, but a huge wombat. Patrick cheered the creature's snuffling entrance. The wombat — which was the size of a short-legged, obese dog — looked around for a moment and waddled off into the bushes. I thought it was cute, but my father was displeased. He gave us a stern look, as if it were our fault.

We trudged all over the countryside but didn't have much luck that day. ‘It takes a while,' Father said, ‘to get your eye in, to be able to spot things moving about and realise what they might be.'

Night fell quickly and we returned to our camp. We heated a chicken stew Mother had prepared. My father hummed to himself as he ladled out the dinner and fiddled with the fire. He seemed possessed of a sense of wellbeing I didn't recall ever observing before.

Before we turned in, he got up and muttered something about going to the toilet, before picking his way into the darkness with the torch.

‘You should go that way,' Patrick said, pointing in the opposite direction. ‘There's a clearing through there. It's easier to find your way.'

Our father turned and stood still, as if Patrick had said something quite unusual. He looked at both of us and his face was strangely animated by the light from the flickering fire. At that moment he appeared wholly unfamiliar to me, like a stranger just emerged from the bush. ‘Okay,' he said at last. ‘Good man.' And he set off the way Patrick had indicated, ruffling my brother's hair as he passed.

The tree trunks trembled and twitched in the campfire light. My cheeks blazed from its heat. I was exhausted from the early-morning drive and the endless tramping through bushland. Hunting wasn't as fun as I had thought it would be, and we still had an entire day left. Patrick threw wood onto the fire.

Then an awful scream.

Even at the age of thirteen, my brother is genuinely tough. Not in a show-offish way, but you can sense it about him, and it is perhaps this quality that drives Father to devise ever more rigorous tests. With a hand on each side of the tub for balance, Patrick lowers himself into the freezing water. The ice cubes joggle about his knees and chest. I can see he is suffering, but my father won't activate the stopwatch until Patrick is fully immersed. Eventually, Patrick takes a deep breath and lies back with his hands across his chest. I feel humiliated on his behalf as his penis shrivels to the size of a witchetty grub and his nipples turn liquorice-coloured. Janet sidles away.

Our father clicks the stopwatch. ‘Okay. We are …
Go!
'

It took Patrick and me only a minute to locate Father. He was lying on his back in a ditch. His eyes were clenched shut and his mouth set in a grimace of pain. ‘Get it off!' he was saying. ‘Get it
off
! Get it
off
!' His torch was on the ground nearby. Patrick picked it up and played the light over our father's face and down the length of his body. His ankle was clamped in a steel rabbit trap. His trousers were torn. There was thick blood, a flap of purple flesh. I squatted at his side, but Patrick yanked me back so hard that I fell to the ground. Father was by this time writhing in agony, pounding at the damp earth with a fist. ‘Quick! Pull the latch, Patrick. Pull … the bloody … thing … back.
Quick! Get it off me!'

When Patrick's three minutes in the cold water are up, Father says: ‘Well done, little man. Out you get. Nick, fetch his towel.'

But Patrick doesn't move, doesn't say a word. He doesn't even open his eyes. All he does is lift a hand from the water to
scratch his nose
, as if he were on the couch in front of the TV. Again Father tells him to come out, but Patrick won't listen and he ends up staying in that bath for ages — maybe half an hour — until Mother comes back and asks what is going on. She is furious. By this time Patrick's entire body is the colour of a fresh bruise. His lips are grey. Father has stormed off, and Janet is slumped in the hallway crying. I help Mother lift Patrick out. He is shaking hard and he can barely walk, but his half-lit smile is the same one that will resurface the night of the accident, when he squatted down leisurely beside our screaming father, drew up the sleeve of his jacket to reveal his watch and said: ‘Okay. Let's see what you're made of. On my signal … Three minutes from now. We are …
Go!
'

The Trees

LESLEY JØRGENSEN

When they hit the tree it was like a bomb going off. The orderly row of saplings along the farm drive whipped upwards into a whirligig of sun and sky, as if he and Val had been lifted clean out of the farm and the land and taken someplace where the old inescapable rules, of gravity and debt and ageing, did not apply.