Snake (2 page)
Your school was easy to forget: a one-room structure in the middle of nowhere. Bare-bones arithmetic, grammar, spelling. Penmanship exercises.
Little Arthur's History of England
. The teacher was nicknamed Tommy-gun because he tommy-gunned you with his saliva. Sparrow shit on the desk. The harrumphing of ponies hitched to the verandah posts.
You have come to regret keenly your lack of education. You strain your whole being toward knowledge. If you could only concentrate long enough, you would have answers. Answers to what? That is part of the problem. The questions don't come easily, either.
In your family, nothing beyond the essential was named, no stories told, no future imagined, no god worshipped. Whatever had brought your parents to the present time was best ignored; it was probably only more of the same. They endured by putting one foot in front of the other, not by bending a knee.
People who spoke in consecutive sentences were indulging themselves; they were of the same order as tipplers and gluttons. Remarks beyond those necessary to get things done passed their lips as rarely as cacti have flowers, and were as startling.
Their wordlessness arose from frugality but was also a precaution. To describe the world was to risk admitting the inadmissible: their way of life â tilling a blighted soil under a punishing sun â was intolerable.
In the Stream the Shadowy Fish
M
IDDAY.
T
HE SUN
presses down. In the dust of the yard, dogs scuffle over a bone crawling with ants. Inside, your parents, your brother, and you are eating lunch. There is no conversation, but the radio is on, tuned to the livestock and grain report. An oilskin tablecloth, pickles, fatty mutton, celery salad, white bread, milky tea.
Presiding over this scene is an elaborately framed photograph of your father. The studio flash has given him a glassy-eyed expression, and he is wearing an ill-fitting Light Brigade uniform: cockaded hat, jodhpur pants, riding whip. After the meal, your mother does the dishes while your father sleeps slack-mouthed on a red-leather chaise placed in the hallway to take advantage of any movement in the air.
T
HERE WERE WINTERS,
of course, with frost that crackled underfoot and wind that blew through the floorboards of the house. Boots were stamped in the morning, bottoms toasted at the fireplace in the evenings, and, on getting into bed, legs bicycled to warm up icy sheets. But the cold was brief, an annoyance; heat was the element that shaped your lives. Good days, ninety degrees, ninety-five, one hundred. Bad days, one hundred and fifteen in the shade. Heat of that order is a brutish master: truth, fact, circumstance, all in one.
You never minded the physical world into which you were born. Drought, dust storms, erosion, this you accepted. What you have always found terrible is the region your heart inhabits, where your imagination dwells. It is always dusk in this place; darkness is not far off. It is cool rather than cold. With a hint of damp. You are not aware of the moisture in the air until you touch your cheek and feel it lying lightly there. Over to one side, a tree, not in silhouette, more of a smudge. You stand alone, in the cool, the dampness spreading its invisible film, the blackness advancing.
Of course you are disappointed. How could you not be? But more than that, you are lonely. You are imprisoned in loneliness.
B
ILLIE WAS NOTICING
how Irene, in her excitement, kept forgetting herself. She'd break into a stride, causing the silk of her wedding dress to pull tight across her thighs. Thus checked, she reverted to smaller, more ladylike steps. The next minute, though, her gait widened, and she was off again, hiking from group to group in her parents' garden, proferring her cheek for kisses, accepting good wishes, queen for the day.
Billie â Wilhelmina at her christening, Billie thereafter â was Irene's bridesmaid and pal from the army. Her eyes skipped over the guests until she located the groom, whose name was Rex. He was chatting with Irene's parents, a handsome fellow with a gentle manner and a modest row of medals pinned to his uniform, and of interest beyond his role as groom, being freshly returned from the Victory March in London. Billie found it easy to understand why Irene had fallen for him. But, poor lamb, he did look bewildered, rather like a schoolboy who'd lost his lunch money.
With the war ended, girls were scrambling for husbands as if they were playing musical chairs, or so it seemed to Billie. And Irene was scrambling harder than most, probably because she had lost face when a fling with a Yank soldier fizzled. The relationship had progressed as far as an engagement ring, and then the young man returned from whence he came â the land of canned ham and chewing gum â and was never heard from again.
Irene's next boyfriend was a Maori, from a company of native New Zealanders. Misalliances were the order of the day, but gossip about that twosome ricocheted around the AWACs barracks like a bullet. Some of the women were of the opinion that Irene had taken up with him deliberately, to shock, but Billie disagreed. Irene acted on impulse, she told them, and didn't give too much thought to things.
These same women said Irene was âfast,' and Billie supposed she was: Irene was notorious for breaking the rules, climbing out the window after lights were out, off to a movie or a dance. They said she was a man's woman, and it was true that Irene quickened in the company of the opposite sex; she came alive as water does when invaded by schools of turning fish. Men responded in kind; no need to cajole.
Interestingly, to Billie anyway, whose family was Methodist and practiced what was preached to them, Irene never missed Communion on Sundays. Observing Irene in her native habitat â the big house on Sydney's North Shore, the relatives with the plummy vowels that disguised the heartlessness of their remarks â Billie wondered if Irene's kind weren't born knowing the way to the nearest Anglican church. In her mind's eye, Billie saw the translucent body of an infant kangaroo, eyelids squeezed shut, groping through its mother's fur in the direction of the pouch, and then Irene and her siblings and cousins, similarly reduced, making for St. James.
Billie turned her attention to Irene's parents. They were still engaged in conversation with Rex. Irene's mother was adjusting the spray of orchids she was wearing on her shoulder, and her father was replying to something Rex had said and nodding at guests as they walked by. Her mother was tall and thin and had an ungenerous set to her mouth, in contrast to her father, who was small and round, with a self-effacing air.
â
Mère et père
,' said Billie, showing off her schoolgirl French. Next, she cast around for Daphne, Irene's older sister and the matron of honor. But Daphne had disappeared.
D
APHNE WAS AT
the bottom of the garden, where there was a swing seat with a canvas awning. She was pushing hard with her heels â the seat was fairly rattling with effort! â and deciding that Irene was in for a comeuppance. Rex was a nice enough chap but about as interesting as a month of rainy Sundays. Irene will be bored with him before they arrive at the Blue Mountains guesthouse for their honeymoon.
Daphne based her estimation of Rex on the answer she had received when she questioned him about the Victory March. She had expected a vivid picture of the celebrations â the water cannon and fireworks, the Royal Family â but Rex declined to describe anything, saying he had been marching and the only view he'd had was of the neck of the man in front of him. And, he'd confided, it was a dirty neck. Uncertain how that last observation would be received, he punctuated it with a bleat of nervous laughter.
I Will Walk Within My House with a
Perfect Heart
I
RENE'S MOTHER'S DOMINANT
emotion on the day of the wedding was relief: Rex was white, Protestant, presentable. With Irene, one never knew. She viewed Irene as a changeling in the nest. From early on her daughter's guile had been a source of dismay. And then the war came, and Irene went â what was the phrase people used? â man-crazy.
Irene's mother was wearing a hat with a veil that superimposed black dots on everything she inspected, which at that moment was Irene, come to a halt by her new husband's side. Irene and Rex were dewy with youth and sensuality. Irene's mother felt one should avert one's head at private intentions made so public.
Like many women of her class, Irene's mother maintained a separate bedroom from her husband; he could make his own arrangements. On the rare occasions she thought about sex, it was to envisage the gully at the bottom of the hill near her house â gloomy, vine-tangled, rank with the smell of still water and furtive animals.
Irene's mother was a punctilious woman. She was like a toy electric train whizzing along its track, under the pass, over a trestle, by the signal box, and back round again. Every night she smoothed on face cream and slipped between starched sheets, where she read a psalm before switching off the light â âI will sing of mercy and judgment: unto thee, O Lord, will I sing' was a favorite â and falling almost immediately asleep. On rising, she flexed her limbs in a series of exercises that never varied. Erect posture and a firm bosom â shopgirls say bustline, we say bosom â were a creed with her.
She gave the impression of being stone-hearted, concerned with her own comfort, the pot of tea stewed for exactly five minutes, shortbread biscuits that were neither moist nor dry, steak-and-kidney pie with a quarter-inch crust, a thimbleful or two of Madeira wine. The best brocade curtains, damask table linen, broad-loom carpet, vitreous china fixtures. Yet she'd had her share of sadnesses: twins who had died at birth, a self-sufficient husband, an ambition to enter a profession.
That last item would have come as a shock to anyone who knew her. They would have fallen off their chairs in surprise! Not only that, she knew which profession: she had shown an aptitude for arithmetic when she was young, so she had always thought she would make an excellent engineer. Specifically, Irene's mother wanted to be the sort of engineer who built roads and bridges.
I
RENE CAME TO
a halt by her husband, but her feet did not stay still; they jiggled. Her father saw this and thought, as he often had, she dances to a tune no one else hears. He glanced at his watch, wondering how long it would be before the guests departed and he could disappear into his greenhouse, where there was a
Gloriosa superba
in bloom. He had a passion for the Liliaceae family, which he much preferred to his human one, being the kind of man who recoiled from clamor.
Despite his solitary habits, Irene's father was liked by everyone. Mildness was his chief characteristic, although he was far from being without blemish, having prejudices with prodigious taproots. These prejudices originated in the antimacassar-draped drawing-rooms of his English forebears and concerned, predictably, Asians, Jews, and Catholics. âGood stock' was a phrase he often used, but it was judged a harmless preoccupation, the product of the plantsman in him.
He and his wife regarded Rex's parents â they were there, well scrubbed, liberally talcumed, decked in their Sunday best, unhappily clutching plates with slices of half-eaten wedding cake on them â as being lower down the evolutionary line. Yet they themselves had no books in the house, excepting gardening manuals and Georgette Heyer romances. They had no interest in any of the other arts, either. They had never caught the train to the Town Hall for a concert; their walls were decorated with autumnal-hued prints depicting maidens in Roman costume disporting themselves around wading pools and cows wending their way through bosky English countryside. These were people so certain of their own superiority they need not remark on it; in their complacency, they resembled well-stuffed sofas.
R
EX KNEW
I
RENE'S
family's opinion of him. Snobs, he said to himself, the first time he met them. It hadn't mattered; he was marrying Irene and not them. But now that the deed was done, he was filled with foreboding. He imagined leaving the wedding breakfast, the cake with its little pillars and artificial flowers and net bows, the guests chittering like starlings in a tree, closing the front gate after him with a click, and walking down the suburban street, past the high hedges and tennis courts and the houses with their circular driveways, as if he were Gulliver in Lilliput, past Parramatta, over the Blue Mountains, coastal green turning to desiccated brown, until he was far away, until he was home.
He stifled the urge to cry. He had cried only once in his adult life, and that was the day he went to the Royal Sydney Showground to enlist. It was his first time in a city, and he had not known how to do the simplest things, such as purchase a ticket for a bus, and was too proud, too shy, to ask for assistance.
He somehow found his way by foot from Central Station to the showground at Randwick, where he was told to take off his clothes and line up with other enlistees, also naked, to be scrutinized by boot-clicking officers with moustaches that framed mouths that seemed unnaturally small and red-lipped.
Being fastidious in his personal habits â his family never intruded on one another â and never having had communal contact with boys other than his brother, he was humiliated by the order to strip down and stand âin the nuddy.' In truth, he found this more shocking than the horrors of war, men split open like pomegranates left on the branch. He was a farm boy and refused to be sentimental; innards were innards, men or sheep.
He went from the showground to his Aunt Em's, to spend the night. She was a spinster who lived at Coogee and worked behind the stocking counter at Anthony Hordern's. He stood on her doormat, under a weak porch light, and before she could say a word of welcome, he began to cry, not silently but with racking sobs, venting his anguish about all that had gone before, all that was in front of him.
