Tarcutta Wake (8 page)

I remember how he laughed when he met me. I asked what was funny and he said he'd tell me one day. He never did.

*

Ruth slumps into the passenger seat, graceless with exhaustion. She waves a bird-boned hand at me. ‘Go on and drive then, Es. But it'll be your fine if they stop us.'

Further down the Hume I speed up to overtake a white station wagon, and we are flying then, down the right-hand lane. This is perhaps how it happens: something crashing through the line of trees, a roo or a loose horse, my sister asleep at my shoulder. There are worse ways.

Outside the windows the world has grown bleary. A confusion of native and European trees borders the highway, and beyond that the paddocks are a thin wash of grey-green. Poor man's colours, I decide. Beautiful all the same, like the grey that Gamblin makes from all the leftover pigment and gives away each April. Scraped-up flakes of all the other colours mixed together, so that it's different every year; some years more blue, some years more green, though you can't tell without comparing them side by side – this year and last year and the year before. How little it takes to be changed, and how difficult to know of it. How little we can see, even from here.

Acknowledgments

My sincere thanks to John Hunter, for his ongoing encouragement, and for lighting a spark under this collection. Thank you to Madonna Duffy and Rebecca Roberts, and to UQP, for continuing to champion short stories.

Thank you, Christopher Merrill, the University of Iowa, and all the staff and writers involved in the 2011 International Writing Program: it was a surreal and enriching experience. Thank you, Gabrielle Connellan and the
us
Consulate General for all your help on this side of the equator.

Thank you, Chris Flynn, John Skibinski, and Boyacks for years of friendship, love and support (editorial, familial and illustrative).

Thank you, Patrick Pittman, for everything.

I am deeply grateful to the following publications for their support, and to those editors who worked closely with me to refine earlier versions. I would especially like to thank Melissa Cranenburgh from
The Big Issue
and David Winter from
Griffith Review
for their time and expertise.

‘Suitable for a lampshade' in
Australian Book Review
and
Award Winning Australian Writing
(Melbourne Books, 2011).

‘Brisbane' in
Small Room
and
The Best Australian Stories 2010
(Black Inc., 2010), edited by Cate Kennedy.

‘In the mornings we would sometimes hear him singing' and ‘View' in
The Big Issue.

‘Repairs' in
Escape: An anthology of short stories
(Spineless Wonders, 2011), edited by Bronwyn Mehan.

‘The tank' in
Griffith Review.

‘Dixieland', ‘The taxidermist's wife' and ‘Vending machine at the end of the world' in
The Iowa Review.

‘Hotels' in
Meanjin.

‘Scar from a trick with a knife' in
Wet Ink.

In ‘The tank', the line ‘Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror' is taken from Rainer Maria Rilke's poem ‘God speaks'.

In ‘Raising the wreck', the line ‘the thing itself, and not the myth' is taken from the Adrienne Rich poem ‘Diving into the wreck'.

First published 2012 by University of Queensland Press
PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia

www.uqp.com.au

© Josephine Rowe

This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any foram or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

Cover design by Design by Committee
Cover artwork © Josh Durham
Author illustration by John Skibinski
Typeset in 12/18pt Bembo by Post Pre-press group, Brisbane

Cataloguing in Publication Data
National Library of Australia

Rowe, Josephine
Tarcutta Wake

i. Title.

ISBN 978 0 7022 4930 3 (pbk)
ISBN 978 0 7022 4838 2 (pdf)
ISBN 978 0 7022 4839 9 (epub)
ISBN 978 0 7022 4840 5 (kindle)