Scission

  This one is for Gonzo

  Then Job answered and said,

  How long will ye vex my soul, and

  break me in pieces with words?

  The Book of Job

  The wounded surgeon plies the steel

  That questions the distempered part;

  T.S. Eliot, East Coker

  CONTENTS

  Secrets

  A Blow, A Kiss

  Getting Ahead

  My Father’s Axe

  Wake

  Lantern Stalk

  Thomas Awkner Floats

  Wilderness

  Neighbours

  A Measure of Eloquence

  The Oppressed

  The Woman at the Well

  Scission

  Secrets

  OUT THE back of the new house, between the picket fence and a sheet of tin, Kylie found an egg. Her mother and Philip were inside. She heard them arguing and wished she still lived with her father. The yard was long and excitingly littered with fallen grapevines, a shed, lengths of timber and wire, and twitching shadows from big trees. It wasn’t a new house, but it was new to her. She had been exploring the yard. The egg was white and warm-looking in its nest of dirt and down. Reaching in, she picked it up and found that it was warm. She looked back at the house. No one was watching. Something rose in her chest: now she knew what it was to have a secret.

  At dinner her mother and Philip spoke quietly to one another and drank from the bottle she was only allowed to look at. Her mother was a tall woman with short hair like a boy. One of her front teeth had gone brown and it made Kylie wonder. She knew that Philip was Mum’s new husband, only they weren’t married. He smelt of cigarettes and moustache hairs. Kylie thought his feet were the shape of pasties.

  When everything on her plate was gone, Kylie left the table. Because the loungeroom was a jungle of boxes and crates inside one of which was the TV, she went straight to her new room. She thought about the egg as she lay in bed. She was thinking about it when she fell asleep.

  Next day, Kylie got up onto the fence and crabbed all around it looking into the neighbours’ yards. The people behind had a little tin shed and a wired-up run against the fence in which hens and a puff-chested little rooster pecked and picked and scruffled. So, she thought, balanced on the splintery grey fence, that’s where the egg comes from. She climbed down and checked behind the sheet of tin and found the egg safe but cold.

  Later, she climbed one of the big trees in the yard, right up, from where she could observe the hens and the rooster next door. They were fat, white birds with big red combs and bright eyes. They clucked and preened and ruffled and Kylie grew to like them. She was angry when the piebald rooster beat them down to the ground and jumped on their backs, pecking and twisting their necks. All his colours were angry colours; he looked mean.

  Inside the house Mum and Philip laughed or shouted and reminded her that Dad didn’t live with them any more. It was good to have a secret from them, good to be the owner of something precious. Philip laughed at the things she said. Her mother only listened to her with a smile that said you don’t know a single true thing.

  Sometime in the afternoon, after shopping with her mother, Kylie found a second egg in the place between the fence and the tin. She saw, too, a flash of white beneath a mound of vine cuttings in the corner of the yard. She climbed her tree and waited. A hen, thinner and more raggedy than the others, emerged. She had a bloody comb and a furtive way of pecking the ground alertly and moving in nervous bursts. For some time, she poked and scratched about, fossicking snails and slugs out of the long grass, until Kylie saw her move across to the piece of tin and disappear.

  Each day Kylie saw another egg added to the nest up the back. She saw the raggedy hen pecked and chased and kicked by the others next door, saw her slip between the pickets to escape. The secret became bigger every day. The holidays stretched on. Philip and her mother left her alone. She was happy. She sat on the fence, sharing the secret with the hen.

  When they had first moved into this house on the leafy, quiet street, Philip had shown Kylie and her mother the round, galvanized tin cover of the bore well in the back of the yard. The sun winked off it in the mornings. Philip said it was thirty-six feet deep and very dangerous. Kylie was forbidden to lift the lid. It was off-limits. She was fascinated by it. Some afternoons she sat out under the grapevines with her photo album, turning pages and looking across every now and then at that glinting lid. It couldn’t be seen from the back verandah; it was obscured by a banana tree and a leaning brick wall.

  In all her photographs, there was not one of her father. He had been the photographer in the family; he took photos of Kylie and her mother, Kylie and her friends, but he was always out of the picture, behind the camera. Sometimes she found herself looking for him in the pictures. Sometimes it was a game for her; at others she didn’t realize she was doing it.

  Two weeks passed. It was a sunny, quiet time. Ten eggs came to be secreted behind the piece of tin against the back fence. The hen began sitting on them. Kylie suspected something new would happen. She visited the scraggy, white hen every day to see her bright eyes, to smell her musty warmth. It was an important secret now. She snuck kitchen scraps and canary food up the back each evening and lay awake in bed wondering what would happen.

  It was at this time that Kylie began to lift the lid of the well. It was not heavy and it moved easily. Carefully, those mornings, shielded by the banana tree, she peered down into the cylindrical pit which smelt sweaty and dank. Right down at the bottom was something that looked like an engine with pipes leading from it. A narrow, rusty ladder went down the wall of the well. Slugs and spiderwebs clung to it.

  One afternoon when Philip and her mother were locked in the big bedroom, laughing and making the bed bark on the boards, Kylie took her photo album outside to the well, opened the lid and, with the book stuffed into the waistband of her shorts, went down the ladder with slow, deliberate movements. Flecks of rust came away under her hands and fell whispering a long way down. The ladder quivered. The sky was a blue disc above growing smaller and paler. She climbed down past the engine to the moist sand and sat with her back to the curving wall. She looked up. It was like being a drop of water in a straw or a piece of rice in a blowpipe – the kind boys stung her with at school. She heard the neighbours’ rooster crowing, and the sound of the wind. She looked through her album. Pictures of her mother showed her looking away into the distance. Her long, wheaten hair blew in the wind or hung still and beautiful. It had been so long. Her mother never looked at the camera. Kylie saw herself, ugly and short and dark beside her. She grew cold and climbed out of the well.

  It seemed a bit of an ordinary thing to have done when she got out. Nevertheless, she went down every day to sit and think or to flick through the album.

  The hen sat on her eggs for three weeks. Kylie sat on the fence and gloated, looking into the chook house next door at the rooster and his scrabbling hens who did not know what was happening her side of the fence. She knew now that there would be chicks. The encyclopaedia said so.

  On nights when Philip and her mother had friends over, Kylie listened from the darkened hallway to their jokes that made no sense. Through the crack between door and jamb she saw them touching each other beneath the table, and she wanted to know – right then – why her father and mother did not live together with her. It was something she was not allowed to know. She went back to her room and looked at the only picture in her album where her smile told her that there was something she knew that the photographer

  didn’t. She couldn’t remember what it was; it was a whole year ago. The photo was a shot from way back in kindergarten. She was small, dark-haired, with her hands propping up her face. She held the picture close to her face. It made
her confident. It made her think Philip and her mother were stupid. It stopped her from feeling lonely.

  Philip caught her down the well on a Sunday afternoon. He had decided to weed the garden at last; she wasn’t prepared for it. One moment she was alone with the must, the next, the well was full of Philip’s shout. He came down and dragged her out. He hit her. He told her he was buying a padlock in the morning.

  That evening the chicks hatched in the space between the sheet of tin and the back fence – ten of them. At dusk, Kylie put them into a cardboard box and dropped them down the well. The hen squawked insanely around the yard, throwing itself about, knocking things over, creating such a frightening noise that Kylie chased it and hit it with a piece of wood and, while it was still stunned, dropped it, too, down the dry well. She slumped down on the lid and began to cry. The back light came on. Philip came out to get her.

  Before bed, Kylie took her photograph – the knowing one – from its place in the album, and with a pair of scissors, cut off her head and poked it through a hole in the flyscreen of the window.

  A Blow, A Kiss

  DESPITE their bad luck, Albie had enjoyed the night. Just the pipe smell of his father and the warmth of him in the truck’s cab beside him was enough. It did not matter that they had caught ten salmon and buried them in the sand for safekeeping and not found them again. The Tilley lamp tinkled, cooling between his feet on the floor of the cab. Ahead, the unlit road rolled out.

  A motorcycle whipped past, going their way. Albie saw the small red light for a moment and then it was gone.

  ‘He’s flying,’ his father murmured.

  ‘Yeah.’ Albie felt his chin on his chest. He heard the lamp tinkle. His eyes closed. He looked up again, felt himself plummeting forward, heard his father pumping the brakes.

  ‘He’s down!’ bellowed his father.

  Albie pulled himself away from the windscreen. His father was already out of the cab and in the vortex of the headlights. On the road, the motorcycle was sprawled, intertwined with the rider, an ugly spillage. Against the blackness of machine and leather, Albie saw blood. He did not move on the seat. He held the Tilley lamp hard between his feet; he had not let it fall and break.

  His father pulled the machine from the man who groaned. He took the helmet off. He held up the man’s hands. They were the colour of bleeding pork. Albie had never seen so much human blood, though he had seen cut pigs and the jugulars of salmon cannoning red on white sand. Groans became shouts. Without warning, the fallen man lashed out at Albie’s father and pulled him down to the ground by the ears and the two men locked limbs, and rolled on the bloody bitumen in the headlights of the truck. Albie did not move. He held the Tilley lamp tight until his thighs ached. He heard the wet sound of fists connecting. Crickets and the quiet idle of the engine underlay this noise. Beyond the grovelling men, past the point of the truck’s headlights, there was only darkness. In a moment there was quiet. Crickets chanted. The engine idled.

  ‘Albee!’

  Albie slid out of the cab as soon as he heard his father’s voice. Every line and feature was stark in the glare. Blood ran from his father’s lips. The fallen rider lay, gored jaws apart, beneath him.

  ‘Come here, Albie.’ His father motioned with a free hand. Albie smelt blood, and beer and petrol and hot metal. He saw a translucent disc on his father’s cheek and for a moment he thought it was a tear but it was a fish scale. ‘He’s unconscious. We shouldn’t move him. I’ll have to call for help. Come over further. Now get on him.’ Albie was astride the bleeding, still man. ‘Put your feet on his hands. He won’t move. He’s out.’ Albie wondered why it was necessary to sit on a man who was not going to move. He looked at the blood streaming from his father’s lips. ‘He’s in shock – he didn’t know what he was doing,’ his father said. ‘I won’t be long – stay put.’

  Albie felt his shoulder briefly squeezed and heard his father’s boots mashing back to the truck. The lights veered from him and the truck passed and the tail-lights became tiny red points, eyes that closed and left him with the dark. He heard the man’s breathing, felt the rise and fall of leather, listened to the cricket hymns, wondering what should be done, how he should behave towards this man who had struck his father. In the dark, he could not see the places where skin had been pared away. He saw no human blood, but he could smell it.

  ‘He was only helping you,’ he said to the man. The leather jacket groaned beneath him. Albie wondered what his mother would be doing. Probably ringing Sergeant Fobles, he thought; she’ll be angry and blame Dad, kiss us. Albie knew she would use her kisses like blows: punishment for them.

  The leather jacket was wet in parts and torn. It shocked him that leather should rip like that; it was the strongest stuff there was, and only time and sweat and constant fatigue could waste it, not those few seconds when that single tail-light disappeared and this man skittered along the road like a moist piece of moss.

  ‘You’re lucky we were here,’ he said, shifting position on the mount. ‘You’re lucky my Dad’s going for help.’

  Town was only twenty minutes’ drive from the coast. Farmland stretched right to the high water mark. Albie had seen cattle on the beaches, wallowing in the surf. He hoped his father found a farm with a phone.

  ‘Come on, Dad. Come on, Dad. Come on, Dad.’ He often prayed to his father in his absence. God, he decided, was just like his Dad, only bigger. It was easier to pray to him and hope God got the message on relay.

  ‘Dad?’

  Albie flinched. The injured man had spoken.

  ‘Dad?’

  Albie’s body shrank into itself. He waited for the man to move, to attack.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Yes?’ Albie whispered. His throat was full of heart.

  ‘Oh. Oh, Dad, I’m sorry. Was coming back.’

  Albie listened as the man began to weep; he rode the man’s sobs, high on his chest, and it hurt him to hear. Like the sound of a tractor engine turning over on a dying battery.

  ‘It’s alright,’ Albie said to him, ‘it’s alright.’ The sobbing continued, jogging him, making the leather groan and the seat of his pants hot until Albie thought he might be sick or get up and run away into the bush at the side of the road.

  But he did not run. He bent down and kissed the wet, prickled face. The sobbing stopped. Even the crickets paused. Albie tasted salt, felt a jumble of things lurching in him; he felt not sick, just full.

  It was that moment when Albie began to worry that the man might die.

  The lights forking out over the crown of the hill took him by surprise. He watched them dip and sweep, disappear and reappear until he could hear the sound of the truck’s engine.

  In the piercing white light of the truck’s lamps, as it stopped dead with a shriek of brakes, Albie knew what it must be to be a rabbit, powerless, snowblind, vulnerable to atrocity. The light seemed to ricochet inside his head, confounding him. He heard his father’s boots.

  ‘You alright? There’s blood on your face!’

  Albie felt himself swept up into his father’s arms; he yielded to it. His father hugged him, touched his cheeks with his fingers and his tobacco breath. On his own feet again, Albie found his voice and asked, ‘Is he going to die?’

  ‘Dunno,’ his father said, ‘I don’t know enough about it.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘There’s no phones. I should’ve known in the first place. Man’d have to be an idiot. We’ll take him in ourselves like we should’ve anyhow.’

  ‘We didn’t want to move him.’

  ‘Yeah.’ His father seemed to take comfort in this.

  Albie tried to stay awake in the warm cab, seduced by the smell of his father and the crooning note of the engine. The sweat had dried on him. His arms still ached. He had never lifted anything so heavy, so awkward as that fallen motorcyclist. They had tried to get his contorted, cold machine in too, but had to leave it at the roadside. Every few minutes, Albie turned to see through the window the shape
of the injured man beneath the tarpaulin on the tray beside the rods and sacks and engine parts.

  He held the Tilley lamp hard between his heels. It kept him awake, a duty.

  ‘Should’ve known better,’ his father muttered. The featureless road wandered left and right, studded with the eyes of beer cans, mile pegs, rabbits.

  Somewhere in his fog of fatigue, Albie hoped his mother would understand. She loved them; she didn’t like them to be late.

  Town was mostly asleep at this time of night. Only the pub and the petrol station were open. It was a fuel town at night, a farm town by day. As they pulled into the sudden brilliance of the petrol station tarmac, Albie saw Mr Stevens wave to his father; a wave without hands. His father got out. After a moment, Mr Stevens came over. Albie listened.

  ‘That’s Wilf Beacon’s boy, ‘Mr Stevens said, peering in the back at the man on the tray beneath the tarp. ‘Dead?’

  ‘No.’

  Albie wished his father would check. He was afraid. But he saw the tarp rising and falling.

  ‘Where’s Beacon, then?’

  ‘Across the road.’

  Albie knew that in this town ‘across the road’ meant in the pub. The pub frightened Albie. From out on the verandah, it was a roar, a sour smell, unknown.

  His father poked his head in the window. ‘Stay here, son.’

  Not long after, Albie saw two men stumble out onto the pub verandah. One was his father. The other man had him by the throat and his father had the man’s forelock in his fist. Shouting. Albie saw his father hit the man in the chest. The man fell to his knees. His father helped him up and they came across the road to Stevens’ Garage.

  ‘Just pull yourself together,’ he heard his father say with a harshness that made his skin prickle.

  ‘Where’s his suitcase? He had a sleeping bag! You’ve done ’im over! What’ve you been doin’ to my boy?’