Rose Leopard Read online

‘Briefs?’

  ‘What my Year 9 Phys.Ed. teacher said — and I have too many bad memories of sweaty briefs.’

  By the time we had decided that undies was an okay-word, if a bit Westie, her nutty mother had returned and my hands were safely together in the still-moving warmth of my own lap.

  * *

  So, words fascinate me. Story-telling fascinates me. I think it was Calvino who identified a saturation of other stories around the story, the idea that, as we move through the spaces and times of our lives, everything we do and touch and feel is part of a story, which in turn is part of another story, and another again. I like the idea that stories are so powerful, so defining — and I’d like to write a story about stories, but I can’t seem to. Not yet. Not until I’m ready, says Stu, whatever the hell that means.

  ‘Vince,’ he told me over coffee, ‘you’re a good writer — but at the moment you’re also a lousy story-teller.’

  ‘Ignore him,’ said Kaz breezily. ‘Write what you feel, not what he wants you to feel. If you can’t write crash-bang every-page-a-breathless-climax — then don’t. Write about love and smells and being alive. Good writing usually feels more comfortable than orgasmic. ’

  ‘No more napalm in the morning?’

  ‘Whatever. The point is — write from the inside, not the outside. We can all see the outside and appraise it mercilessly, but the inside? That’s much harder. That’s where we need help. We need stories for the inside.’

  I had more coffee with Stu, mentioned the inside, outside and crash-bang.

  ‘Claptrap,’ he grinned. ‘And most unlike Kaz. Fuzzy and idealistic but a market no-go zone. Definitely.’

  ‘You’ve got better advice?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, stirring a flat white pensively. ‘Join a writers’ group. Get some feedback, walk the walk, talk the talk.’

  I woke Kaz up at five o’clock in the morning. The early sun had cast some feeble rays but it was so cold that even the birds were silent.

  ‘Geriatrics and failed Arts students,’ she told me, ‘go to writers’ groups. Oh, and lesbians who think that being lesbian is enough to get them published. And they all sit around blinking and saying ‘Yeeeeessss’ periodically and scribbling notes about ‘point of view’ and trying to look meaningful and listening to each other’s weekly assignments, and it’s always tawdry stuff like — write a poem which links the words perspicacious and genitalia, or write your Personal Action Plan for the next ten years. Yawn yawn. You’d hate it, Vince.’

  I agreed.

  Although I have always written things, I’m not sure when I made the transition from person-who-writes-for-a-hobby to actual writer. Probably the first time I filled in a Tax Return and didn’t have a discernible occupation or income.

  ‘What do I put here?’ I asked the accountant.

  He peered at the form. Number 2a instructed: Write your occupation .

  ‘Your occupation,’ he said evenly.

  I must have looked blank because he placed his pen carefully on a blotter, sighed quietly and said, ‘Your job, Mr Daley.’

  ‘I don’t have a job,’ I told him earnestly.

  He nodded and I could see what he was thinking: No job, eh? No hope, good-for-nothing. Can this loser pay my bill?

  ‘My wife works,’ I said. Then, suddenly inspired, ‘She’s the CEO of a Saudi oil company. We do okay.’

  He nodded and I could see what he was thinking: Sponger, eh? Toy-boy and leech. Sexual gratifier.

  ‘Just write — unemployed.’ He smiled, revealing surprisingly imperfect teeth.

  ‘But I’m not.’

  He eyed me for a moment.

  ‘Mr Daley’ he said, ‘if you don’t have a job …’

  I leaned across the table, locked our eyes.

  ‘I don’t have a job that you can label,’ I said. ‘I’m not a nurse or a boiler-maker or a zoologist but I am employed.’

  He nodded, picked up the pen and toyed with it, turning it over and over in his clean white hands.

  ‘So,’ he said, aiming for a short snapping smile and not quite bringing it off, ‘what do you do?’

  ‘Lots of things,’ I told him. ‘Most of the housework, for example. Take the kids to school. Some Wednesdays I read to the Grade Threes. Garden. Wash the windows every third Monday. See, I’m employed. Oh, and another thing. I write.’

  ‘You write?’

  ‘Mm. Poems and stories and things. Books. Chapters. Good and bad sentences. The inspirational and the banal. No day is ever the same.’

  ‘And do you … sell this writing?’

  I hesitated. Discussions about money have always induced discomfort, mainly because I’ve never really had any.

  ‘I’m going to,’ I tell him. ‘But you have to write it before you sell it. People don’t buy stuff that’s unfinished.’

  He nodded carefully, chewed his bottom lip, then pointed to number 2a.

  ‘Put down — writer, he instructed. ‘If that’s your major occupation.’

  I did as he asked.

  ‘So that’s it?’ I raised my eyebrows quizzically. ‘I am now officially, in the eyes of the Australian Tax Office, a writer?’ ‘Yes,’ he said but tightly, like there was a pain constricting his chest.

  We shook hands sombrely; it was, for me, a shining, an empowering moment of professional recognition. I was a writer — it said so on my Tax Return. And everyone knows that Tax Returns never lie.

  A writer who can’t think of anything, Kaz said to me a while back, is still more interesting than an everyday, run-of-the-mill, Johnny-come-lately who can’t think of anything. ‘Besides,’ she continued after a lengthy pause, ‘I’ve never met a real ATO-sanctioned writer before. Let alone slept with one.’

  The sun is fully risen, a perfect shimmering disc in a painter’s sky, a sky that looks like it has been brushed with oil. I trudge inside, hear Milo and Otis clamouring. Cornflakes for both followed by a slice of raisin toast. Jug on, coffee in two cups, sugar in mine. Contemplate boiling an egg, settle for a jam sandwich instead. Clear last night’s debris, put the bottles in the bin carefully so they don’t smash. Water and detergent in the sink, open the blinds, watch the morning light slice into our lives. Think about Kaz and Sunday-morning snuggling, the soft heat of pressed flesh.

  Hear a cry from the bedroom, sharp and anguished.

  Kaz is sitting up, a night-shirt clinging to her long thin body.

  She is staring at her hand.

  The bandage is off and she is staring, horrified, her mouth moving mutely, her shoulders shaking, breath coming from her in small sporadic bursts.

  ‘Kaz?’

  ‘My hand,’ she gasps. ‘Look … my hand …’

  There is swelling, skin pulled tight as a drum and an angry redness, then she turns to me and I see long streaks of crimson snaking up her pallid arm, smell the pungent odour of infected flesh.

  ‘What’s happening?’ she cries but I am already gone, warming the car, bundling our protesting children into the front seat, grabbing my wallet, trying to remember the quickest, most dependable route to the hospital as I pick her up softly, imagine her to be an injured bird, bear her forth and then, incongruously, slam the door violently behind us.

  Three

  There is this dream, as habitual as my bed-going, where I am running. I am running like no other man has ever run, crunching sand with my flying feet, speeding relentlessly along the clean hard flat beach. It is the earliest part of morning; the skies are sheer and crisp, the sun still cold and perfectly circular, the water a lazy drudge that barely swishes then settles. I continue to run, skipping barefoot across shell fragments and cuttlefish bone and mops of stinking tangled seaweed, passing hauled boats and barnacle-coated stormwater pipes, until my lungs heave and my breath catches in gulps. But I cannot stop because the run goes on forever. My legs are trapped within a cycle of pain and motion, the sand stretches like a mirage further ahead, the air above me becomes hot and blue. I keep going, now without purpose or i
magination, my body maintaining the movements but my mind becoming a space, a colourless nothing. I gasp, I heave and as I spiral slowly towards consciousness, I continue to run along this pristine, tide-washed strip of sand, unable to stop or turn or deflect, unable to make sense of what I am doing, in such a confused state that the simple biomechanics of running are all that I can hope to achieve.

  The car bumps over impossible country roads. Kaz is slumped along the length of the back seat, Milo and Otis jammed alongside me in the front. I have a vision of us from the outside: small blue car buzzing like an angry insect, plumes of dust spewing from the wheels, clumps of dying grass falling from the roadside, a panorama of grey sap-smelling bush all around us, corralling us. I try to concentrate on nothing but the simple mechanics of driving — touch the clutch, ease the brake, play the steering wheel like a violinist delivering an adagio — but I cannot. Instead I hear the children breathing, see early-morning shadows that cast long and thin, a sharp wind cutting across the open window, Kaz lying quietly behind me: prone, murmuring, blotched.

  ‘What’s wrong with Mum?’ asks Milo.

  ‘She’s sick, idiot.’ Otis is always terse in the morning. Some days I have stopped by her bedroom door, seen her brooding, every angle of her small body abrupt and disdainful.

  ‘It’s a chick thing,’ I told Kaz once, perhaps pompously. ‘Every female I have ever … um, known … has invariably awoken in a pissed-off state. It’s a fait accompli. We chappies should all be thankful that they then embark upon a daily ritual of emotional cleansing and self-improvement.’

  ‘I’m choosing to ignore that.’

  ‘It’s PMT,’ I insisted, still pompous. ‘Otis has it in spades.’

  ‘Vince, she’s eight years old!’

  ‘PMT. Perpetual Morning Trauma. Doesn’t matter how old you are — eight or ninety-eight. It’s a chick thing. Definitively.’

  Now, in the front of the bouncing car, my two children stare at each other then snarl, teeth bared, saliva dripping. Wolves , I think, tiny wolves with soft wet eyes that are shimmering with confusion.

  ‘She’s got a sore hand,’ I tell them, as calmly as I can. ‘I tried to fix it but now the doctor needs to have a look.’

  Milo nods, apparently satisfied. His sister fixes her gaze on the valley ahead. It is spectacular, so much so that we don’t always remember to appreciate its beauty. Since we have lived here I have loved the steepling drop of our valley, the way its gently sloping top plunges dangerously towards a bleak unknown. Such a gradient must be a metaphor of sorts; the valley itself must hold a story within its deep green interior.

  One day, I have promised myself on numerous occasions, I will write that story. I’ll write it for Kaz.

  Otis turns her elfin face in my direction.

  ‘Will this take long?’ she asks. ‘It’s Sunday. Hortense and I have got things to do.’

  ‘Enough of your early-morning argey-bargey,’ I tell her sternly. ‘We’ll take as long as we need.’

  ‘It’ll be an injection,’ Milo says wisely. I notice that he has brought a comic; his small hands are busy tracing the ‘p’ in Simpsons. ‘That’s what they always do in hospitals. Fuss around for ages then give an injection.’

  ‘I hate injections.’ Otis leans against the car door, one rubicund cheek squashed against the window. ‘They hurt. The needles are too big.’

  ‘Bigger than straws,’ her brother agrees gloomily.

  ‘Or spaghetti,’ says Otis.

  They are silent for a moment. Milo rolls the comic, puts it in his jacket pocket, turns his head around.

  Eventually he asks, ‘Why is Mum a funny colour?’

  I sneak a look in the rear-vision mirror. What I see shocks me — Kaz is very pale, almost grey, like a seagull’s feather. Her lips are colourless; she is sweating profusely, breathing heavily. Everything of her face — her jowls, cheeks, beneath her eyes, their lids — sags despondently.

  We are nearly into the darkness of the valley. I give the accelerator a more urgent push. Around us the rushing light becomes dappled then, as we descend further, it is a night-sky fused with emeralds and onyx.

  ‘All in the valley of Death, rode the six hundred ,’ I hear.

  ‘What?’

  It must have come out of my mouth.

  ‘It’s a poem,’ I explain. ‘By a man called Tennyson. Soldiers and horses and war and stuff. Cannon to the right of them, cannon to the left of them, cannon in front of them, volley’d and thunder’d!’

  Pause for reflection. The road flattens then rises beneath us.

  ‘When can their glory fade?’ I whisper, wondering why there are small sharp tears stinging behind my eyes.

  ‘You’d better hurry,’ Milo advises me. ‘Before you go completely crazy.’

  ‘Are we there yet?’ Otis whines.

  I have never liked hospitals. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t born in one. Missing out on such a seminal experience has obviously influenced the ebb and flow of my life. In some ways it has been advantageous: I have a better story to tell than most people, who can bleat only of maternity wards, brusque midwives and menacing forceps.

  ‘Somehow,’ Kaz told me during our early days together, ‘this is unsurprising. To find out that you were not born in a hospital is not at all surprising.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, there are some people in this strange world who should never list a white wall and the smell of super-strength disinfectant as their first sensory experience. And you’re one of them.’

  ‘I am?’

  ‘Definitely. You’re so … unconfined. Beginning life in a hospital prepares most of us for seventy-eight point something years of hopping from one institution to another. Hospital, home, crèche, school, university, work building, pension office, retirement home then morgue — in hospital again.’

  ‘Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans everything.’

  ‘Exactly. You’re not like that. You flit between spaces, not institutions.’

  ‘Are you always this philosophical?’

  ‘Only when freshly in love. So, where were you born?’

  I grin wickedly, run a finger down the camber of her spine.

  ‘Guess.’

  ‘Typical. Okay, let’s begin with the conventional. Back seat of your Dad’s EH?’

  ‘We owned a beige Morris Minor.’

  ‘Ouch! Um … in a meadow, besmirched by wildflowers and butterflies?’

  ‘Giving birth, I am led to believe, is about blood, gunk and screaming. It’s Macbeth played inside the womb. It is not romantic.’

  ‘Agreed. On a beach, the crashing of waves carefully synchronised to each contraction?’

  ‘How very New Age. Kaz, my mother spent her married life baking sponge cakes and spraying home-made insecticide on her tomatoes. Beach birth would never have been her style.’

  ‘Beneath a bridge?’

  ‘Delivered by a troll? You can do better than that.’

  She paused then, crinkled her eyes and for a moment made me love her even more fiercely.

  ‘I can’t actually,’ she told me. ‘I’ve run out of ideas.’

  I kissed her on the cheek, lightly, possessively.

  ‘On a bus,’ I said smugly. ‘Halfway between Brisbane and Charleville, where my aunt used to live. Near a place called Muckadilla.’

  ‘You’re making this up!’

  ‘Not at all. My father was working for the Lismore Council at the time so Mum decided to visit her sister in Charleville. On the way back, I declared my magnificent presence — about four weeks early. Mum always said it was the rough road and the fact that the bus had bugger-all suspension. I was tossed around the amniotic sac like a cork in the ocean. Anyway, they stopped the bus and I was delivered by the driver and someone called Harry, two-thirty in the afternoon between seats 14B and 16C.’

  ‘That’s amazing.’

  ‘Mm. Still, I’m not sure about the quality of my first sensory experience. It was probably an old r
ubber floor and slashed green vinyl.’

  ‘No, graffiti. Jake luvs Kylie 4 eva’.

  ‘Want a blow job? Ring 5876021 … ask for Kevvy.’

  She laughed then snuggled in.

  ‘Unconfined,’ she said happily. ‘Now give us a kiss, bus-boy.’

  This hospital is small, a network of orange-brick bungalows. The car-park is separated from Casualty by a series of footbridges and clipped puddles of wet lawn. In the back of our blue car, my wife is slumped, dysfunctional, as pallid as a pre-dawn fog.

  I stop the car, rip the hand-brake.

  Clatter around the back, extract her limp sweaty body.

  Register her murmur: ‘Sick, feel sick …’ and all of a sudden, incongruously, ridiculously, I am thinking of Blake:

  O Rose, thou art sick.

  The invisible worm …

  Has found out thy bed …

  ‘Dad,’ says Milo impatiently, ‘is there a toilet? I need to pee.’

  Feel her lightness in my arms, her frightening fragility, a stink of sour morning breath on my cheeks.

  Carry Kaz towards the first bridge, cold air scolding our faces.

  ‘Dad,’ Otis tells me, ‘you left the car-door open.’

  ‘Well — shut it!’

  Rush on headlong, lurching, staggering, trying to suppress that churning feeling that pre-empts any journey into an unknown.

  Lawns, azaleas, snapdragons with closed buds, the children being dragged like porpoises in my wake, someone hosing down the grill of an ambulance, dirty neon lights, orange bricks circa 1960s, scrubbed linoleum, rows of cool-blue plastic chairs, a nurse with brightly framed glasses smiling from within a glass cubicle, her mouth as well-dentured as that of a TV game-show host.

  ‘Can I —’

  ‘My wife, sick, she’s sick!’ The words stumble from me, each one a small bubble of panic. ‘Her hand, it’s poisoned, she’s sick!’

  The briefest moment — my befuddlement, the nurse’s changing expression, the children staring at their mother’s drooling face — then a button is pressed quickly, decisively.

  Buttons. Invariably they initiate a chain of actions and reactions. Press a button and the traffic light changes, cars stop, drivers groan, people walk triumphantly, liaisons and appointments are kept. Press another button and an air-force is activated, bombs are dropped, buildings and humans are pulped together into a mish-mash of blood and bone powder and brick-dust, someone in a suit justifies the button-pressing in the name of world peace. Press a different button and a phone rings, the world suddenly shrinks, spatial connections are made, a conversation hums across the mountains and seas, soundscapes are created that are cyclical, never-ending.