True Stories (14 page)

The leafy plumes of the dead branches bounce lightly behind me on the uneven ground, out of sync with the rhythm of my walking, and the whispering they utter, full of agitation and pauses, steadies me with a sense of responsibility, as if I were a teacher in charge of a crocodile of small, serious girls. Though the fence on either side of it has long since collapsed into the soft grass, I close the gate carefully and force the rusty metal loop over its hook, meaning this for a sign.

From the sawhorse close to the gate, arranging the first branch across its double V, I glance down the slope and try to surprise myself with the familiar. How visible is the house? Would I notice it if I didn't know it was there? Would I respect the token gate, or would I take it into my head either to wrestle with its clumsy catch or to step round it? Would I have the nerve, the energy, the curiosity to walk all the way down the sloping track, seeing the small car there, and would I assume it was a woman's car, if I were a man? How do men think, at night, now, for example, when the light has been lifted clear of the gully and the house hunches itself in the deepening dark with its back to the track that leads down from the gate? (But I know that outside this gully there must be a beam of sun still in the sky, for the kookaburras have not quite finished their paroxysms, which tail off weakly as if they were exhausted by their own hilarity: Oh, stop! Don't say another word! I'll die!)

How
do
men think? I unhook the bow saw from the shed wall and as I begin to cut, quickly working up a sweat and having to strip off my jumper and tie it round my waist, I remember the body that was found last month in the bush along this road. It was a man's body, a long time dead, rotting and half-devoured in a plastic bag; the body of someone that no one missed; never identified, claimed or explained away. At the time I said to my father, ‘Wouldn't you think a murderer would bury a body? Wouldn't you think they'd hide it properly?'

‘They'd be in a hurry,' said my father. ‘I imagine they'd just chuck the body into the scrub and go for their lives—but I don't know how to think like a murderer.'

I don't know how to think like a man. The poor wood crumbles and drops into ragged hunks beside the sawhorse, and I carry an armload of it, barely enough for the night, down the cleared slope to the house. I am still sweating from the work, and the dark air slides past my cheeks and my bare arms with the suaveness of a blade. The clammy breath of the bottom dam rushes up the gully side and surrounds me: the air consists (like water when you wade deeper) of waves of chill, bone chill, then stone chill: chill and chill again. This is the true arrival of night.

Both doors of the house are wide open and when I enter it the small room feels abandoned, hollow, only a tunnel through which night floods to join itself on the other side. I put my jumper back on, roll the sleeves down over my knuckles, and loop a woollen scarf twice around my neck. I have read that water is always the last thing to get dark, and notice with gratitude that the bottom dam holds on its black surface the reflection of a tiny, high streak of light, perhaps the one that has overstrained the kookaburras which now are silent, though frogs and crickets persevere.

The box of the fuel stove is small but fire grows in it quickly and I heat the remains of the soup and eat it standing up, straight from the saucepan, as people eat who have not yet arranged the habits of their solitude to suit an abstract ideal. I fill the lamps with kero and light them, and by the time I have got the enamel kero heater going at the other end of the room I have four combustion sites to keep guard over, so my eyes flick constantly from one to the next. The cold begins to crack in the roof iron of the house, making its mettle felt through the uncovered windows and unlined walls. It is barely seven o'clock.

If I sit still, the fuel stove burns with occasional crackles and soft,
ashen collapses, and the kero heater sings a long breathing note.

What will I do now?

I will turn on my radio.

On ABC-FM they are playing a sonata by Ravel for violin and cello, and although I listen with pleasure, I am uncertain as to how I should dispose my limbs while listening: there is no immediate furniture between straight-backed chair, on which I feel foolishly formal, and bed, which can lead only to sleep and thus, so early, to an interminable night of dreams, or worse still, of no dreams at all. After each movement of the sonata the humble, persistent frog-music from the bottom dam reasserts itself, rising powerfully on cold washes of air. It makes me understand, as I hesitate on my feet between chair and bed, that not only shall the meek inherit the earth: they are in charge of it already.

I put out my hand to the kettle, and a hoarse gargling erupts outside the back door. My neck sprouts hackles, and my heart lurches into my skull and swells there to block my ears: yet when the radio on the table bursts into shrieks and whines, then fades to a dull buzz, I hear everything through these same ears, and I know it is the men in the ute, that they've joined forces with others in four-wheel drives with guns and spotlights and a CB radio which they're using to scramble the feeble intellectual signal of my transistor, that they're blazing down the hill to smash open my cardboard house, my pathetic little shelter. Though my hands are trembling and my head is deaf with panic I seize the radio and squeeze the button. It dies. Outside, the gargling sinks to a rattling growl, and ceases.

The frogs, unperturbed, cricket on.

Listen. Walk to the back door. Open it on to the blackness. The night consists of this blackness, and of a heavy, cold smell of eucalypts, grass and smoke. Something shifts in a tree. Pick up the axe. The tree gives a shudder: something in its central form groans and gargles. The lamplight works past my shoulder, diluting the night's absolute, and the lump in the tree fork throws back its blunt head and lets out an appalling cry of love or challenge: it is the bear, shaken in its sapling by a terrible passion, and the answering roar from the ridge is so urgent that, ignoring me and my weapon and barely using its braking claws, the animal skids down the tree and takes off at a clumsy trot up the track and into the dark.

When I lay the axe on the table and examine the radio, I realise that its batteries, by cosmic coincidence, had chosen that moment to give up the last of their power. The kero lamp nearest the open door suddenly flares, emitting a column of fine, sooty smoke which pours straight up out of the glass chimney and folds itself, on air, into smooth crinkles like pushed cloth. I rush to turn down the wick, then to shut the door, the click of whose latch sounds only half a beat before the crack of the first shot.

Its echo bounds away—
wah waah waaah
—across the cold ridges.

The woman who grabs the axe is me. Its handle has already lost the shallow warmth of my earlier grip and become cold wood, yellow, shaped and weighted for a hand much bigger than mine.

I am ashamed of what it means that I have grabbed an axe at the sound of a rifle shot in the dark.

Why is it so shameful to be afraid?

I wind the wicks right down, kick the stove door shut on a fresh hunk of wood, and step out my back door with the axe in one hand and the torch in the other.

Now the night odours are overpowering, and the frogs are very loud; but since they are able to increase the volume of their lacework without any alteration to its stubborn and yet endlessly submissive tone, nothing out here is different except the cold, which finds the joins between garments and touches me there with the unpleasant intimacy of a stethoscope. I move a few steps away from the building. A night-seeing bird would spot the anxiety I am leaving like phosphorescence in every footprint. A solo frog strikes a sudden ringing note in the bottom dam, then returns modestly to the chorus. No moon, no stars, and my torch makes so little impression that it's as if the air had drastically thickened. The totality of the dark disrupts my senses: my ears feel padded, and my skin has lost its elastic ability to report to me the whereabouts and nature of physical objects. I place the torch on the short grass: its beam clots like custard in the forest of blades. The air is thick, cold and utterly motionless. It strikes me with force that this thickness is the result of some kind of presence; that something is waiting all round me, round the house; that far from wishing me well or including me in its design and purpose, the universe is without meaning: stupid, askew, morally inert. Again my hackles tickle and stretch the skin of my neck.

The second shot comes as a relief. Its distortion, leisurely and attenuated, restores the perspective of the night: the gun must be at least a mile away, and so must the man holding it. The shot is not, after all, personal to me; and yet it was set in motion by another human creature for whose physical being, warm, muscular and engaged in purposeful activity, I experience a pang of comradely feeling, almost of gratitude. The balloon of awareness around me slowly inflates until I perceive that the sky has covered itself with clouds, that this explains the thick stillness of the air.

What was I afraid of? Was I afraid of the dark?

The house I stumble back into has no window coverings of any kind. I relight the lamps calmly, almost laughing, though my heart seems larger than it should be, and palpable in its beating.

On the high shelves the books I have chosen at a distance from the moment and mood of wanting to read look sober, selected according to criteria more severe than those of every day, as if I imagined taking myself very seriously here, freeing my mind for the bouts of extended concentration required to follow famous arguments. Instead, however, when I settle myself to read by the soft light of the lamps, though I force myself to continue for a good hour, I can barely concentrate at all. The dark outside turns every window into a black mirror, and me into a bad actor. I am
Reading Goethe
; I am a
Reading
Woman
; I am self-conscious, exaggeratedly casual, and every movement of head, hand or torso, every clearing of the throat or rubbing of the forehead, every raising of the eyes from the page or pursing of the lips in thought rings false, a charade of nonchalance performed against the hostility of countless imaginary witnesses, all of them, naturally, men: for what woman would go out at night, with or without firearms, to trespass, to broach private property despite locked gates, to loiter outside lit windows, to confound the thoughts of those observed by entangling them in aggressive, scornful eyebeams? She's reading
Goethe
! She thinks she
understands
it! She believes it
means
something!
Here!
Each time I catch my own reflection my face is an inhuman white dish, without marks of experience or age, expressionless, a drowned girl's, surfacing in one or another of the treacherous panes.

In this public cube of light and warmth even breathing takes on a flamboyant quality. There is no point in prolonging the agony. I close the book and push it away, then I turn down the wicks, blow into the glass chimneys, and sit still.

I acknowledge the dark.

In one stroke the windows lose their power. The house lays down its weapons and surrenders. Its box of defiance collapses, gently and with relief, and darkness passes through it again and perfects itself on the other side. No longer held at bay by the lamps' hiss, and having known forever the pointlessness of argument, the folly of persuasion, the frogs flood the night with their patient, stupid cricketing, their endless embroidery round the borders of the black pool.

If I sit still, I feel the irregularity of my heartbeat, very close inside
my ribs. I wonder what it is that powers the heart, what force drives
it, and what for.

In this darkness it is possible to undress without modesty, to drag off my clothes and throw them on to a dark chair and fumble under the pillow for my thick nightie, to crawl into the blankets and lie there shivering with stiffening eyelids and feet solidifying in the cold. The frogs work: they labour without looking for any reward; the shooting continues, sporadic cracks and splinterings that echo till they disintegrate between the ridges; and just as a rat begins to delve among the dirty dishes outside the back door, sleep comes suddenly to me in the form of an inversion of logic: rain flies upwards into maternal clouds, flowers shrink into soil and are swallowed up by their own roots.

When I wake, with a full bladder, it is still deep night and the frogs are stitching tirelessly. The guns are silent. A wild scampering outside the back door when I open it sends me back for my boots, in which I tramp with feet apart to avoid the dragging laces. On the first gulp of cold breath I know that something has changed. The lid has been lifted off everything while I slept: the clouds have slid away and now there arches over me and my house a tremendous emptiness which can only be called
firmament
, in which hang vast, tilting constellations. Squatting with my nightie up round my haunches, my mouth agape and my head craning backward, I feel the curve of the planet. I am aware of earth's roundness against this immense powdered screen of starlight whose patterns, nameless to me except ‘Southern Cross' and ‘saucepan', crackle with meaning: the starry sky is throbbing with form.

I squat here, unimaginably tiny, breathing out slow clouds, protected, forgiven, forgotten. I am no longer waiting for anything—or rather, waiting now for things so large and leisurely that they are beyond ordinary waiting: for my parents to die as they must, for my daughter to have children, for a god to come to me and bless me. The small heat off my stream of piss rises to touch the skin of my thigh, then disperses in cold.

The warmth hiding in the blanket folds is of my own making, even if I do not understand what for, and the dream I have is one that patiently unpicks all the knots in me and leaves without demanding to be remembered.

There may be no ocean here, nor even a river worthy of the name, and this morning the gully holds its mist veil over the surface of the bottom dam; but the sky turns a deep and secret pink, wrens spring about under the bare lilac bushes, and down in the hollow of the top dam, pushing my jumper sleeves back off my red knuckles, I yank and yank at the cord of the pump. It turns over, dies, turns, flares again, takes, and begins to chug.