The Best Australian Stories (46 page)

He looked out the window at the moonlight. I could just tell he was thinking of boarding up the window, but whether to keep folks out or keep me in, I couldn't tell. Then I backed up a step and realised he'd called the ham
her
.

Kind of lost it. ‘JIMMY!' I screamed. ‘THAT HAM … IT'S NOT A SHE, ALL RIGHT? NOT A SHE.' It was all I could think to say. For a second it looked like I'd got him stirred, cause he reached in his pocket and pulled out a knife – by God – and a fork. Still looking out the window, he laid them across my sheets where my belly was, and without a word stood and made a ‘follow me' sign with his hands, all solemn like. It was like we were at a funeral. So I follow him down the hall, out to the kitchen where the meat pile was starting to stink the place up. There was a chunk missing from around the top, looked like it'd been gouged out with fingers. He'd eaten some then, which seemed fine to me – that's how people and ham are supposed to get along.

‘So what do you want me to do?' I says, though I reckoned I knew: he wanted me to eat it for him, God knows why, only he couldn't bring himself to say it. Next thing he's crying like a baby, sitting on the kitchen floor bawling, whole body lurching around like he was being kicked. Didn't know what to tell him – what was making him sad? He wasn't even drunk.

Enough's enough, I reckoned again, and said, ‘I'm throwing this out, you watch me.'

He says: ‘NO.' I says: ‘YEAH, FUCK YOU. IT'S GONE ON LONG ENOUGH.' He says: ‘SHE CAN'T BE NOTHING BUT WHAT GOD MADE HER.' I says: ‘WHAT'S GOD GOT TO DO WITH IT? AND IT'S NOT A SHE, JIMMY.' He called me insensitive or some such, so I did what I had to: popped him in the mouth. Thought he'd fight but he broke down again and cried and said: ‘TAKE IT, TAKE IT AWAY, I CAN'T DO IT BY MYSELF, I'M LEANING ON IT LIKE A MAN WITH A CRUTCH, AIN'T SPOZZA BE LIKE THIS, HELP ME BORIS FOR GOD SAKES HELP ME.'

So I grabbed the ham and went to the door, but the damn thing's barred up and I couldn't get the boards loose. I set the meat down and Jimmy's had a change of heart all of a sudden, and he's running at me with murder in his eyes, yelling about me taking her away from him, and how everyone always took everything away from him, and how he wasn't gonna let it happen no more. I said fine, take the fucking meat and do what you gotta do, just leave me out of it OK?

Back in my room I could hear him blubbering, then an electric carving knife started up. Next thing there's a quiet tap on my door and I open it, and Jimmy's left a plate of ham slices out there on the floor. He'd cut 'em into the shape of tears, probably trying to make me feel guilty for something I couldn't quite understand, but they might've been quotation marks, I never really found out. You know what people are like. Some of 'em are lonely, I guess, and some of 'em had too much taken away and they get attached to things they probably shouldn't. Guess it makes you think.

In the morning the meat was all gone and Jimmy seemed to have pulled the boards loose from the doors and his coat wasn't hung up. There was meat slime all over the damn kitchen … I never knew ham could be so wet. Around then I thought I heard digging in the yard. I went to the kitchen window and saw someone had spit up some ham in the sink and left it there. Wasn't me, is all I know.

Out in the yard, there was Jimmy. He'd dug a hole with a shovel and the ham was lying in the dirt. Felt kind of sorry for it, and for Jimmy, who just stood there with his head down. Wondered what the neighbours would think. I watched him for a bit, whispering to myself, ‘Come on Jimmy, you can do it.'

He stayed completely still for a while longer. I was rooting for the guy, you know, saying: ‘Come on Jimmy, do what you gotta.' Must've been an hour before he gets down on his haunches and pushes the meat into the hole he dug, and starts raking dirt back over there. Made a big old lump in the yard, it did. He looked up at me through the window, and we met eyes for a sec, and he nodded his head. I nodded back to him – he did what he had to do and I was proud.

*

Few years later we were having a beer and I saw fit to mention the ham. Been anxious to talk about it, you know what people are like when they got wounds. But you just got to clear the air sometimes, you know?

‘Hey, Jimmy.'

Jim looked at me. ‘Yeah?'

‘Remember that ham?'

Jim nodded. ‘Yeah.'

‘Where'd you get that ham, anyway?'

Jimmy shrugged. ‘Found it,' he said, and as far as
that
conversation went, it seemed to be the end.

Aquifer

Tim Winton

One evening not long ago I stirred from a television stupor at the sound of a familiar street name and saw a police forensic team in waders carry bones from the edge of a lake. Four femurs and a skull, to be precise. The view widened and I saw a shabby clique of melaleucas and knew exactly where it was that this macabre discovery had taken place. Through my open window I smelt dead lupin and for a long time forgot my age. Life moves on, people say, but I doubt it. Moves in, more like it.

Cast adrift again from middle age, I lay awake all night and travelled in loops and ellipses while an old song from school rang in my head.

I love her far horizons,
I love her jewelled sea,
Her beauty and her terror,
The wide brown land for me.

Before dawn and without explanation, I rose, made myself coffee and began the long drive back to where I come from.

The battlers' blocks, that's what they called the meagre grid of limestone streets of my childhood. Suburban lots scoured from bush land for an outpost of progress so that emigrants from Holland, England and the Balkans and freckly types like us, barely a generation off the farm, could participate in the Antipodean prize of home ownership. Our street wound down a long gully that gave on to a swamp. A few fences away the grey haze of banksia scrub and tuart trees resumed with its hiss of cicadas and crow song. Houses were of three basic designs and randomly jumbled along the way to lend an air of natural progression rather than reveal the entire suburb's origins in the smoky, fly-buzzing office of some bored government architect. But our houses were new; no one had ever lived in them before. They were as fresh as we imagined the country itself to be.

As they moved in, people planted buffalo grass and roses and put in rubber trees which brought havoc to the septics a decade later. From high on the ridge the city could be seen forming itself into a spearhead. It was coming our way and it travelled inexorably but honestly in straight lines. The bush rolled and twisted like an unmade bed. It was, in the beginning, only a fence away.

The men of our street went to work and left the driveways empty. They came home from the city tired, often silent. They scattered blood and bone on their garden beds and retired to their sheds. All day the women of the street cleaned and cooked and moved sprinklers around the garden to keep things alive. Late in the morning the baker arrived in his van, red-cheeked from civilisation, and after him the man with the veggie truck. At the sound of their bells kids spilled out into the dusty street and their mothers emerged in housecoats and pedal pushers with rollers in their hair. Everyone was working class, even the Aborigines around the corner whose name was Jones, though it seemed that these were Joneses who didn't need much keeping up with. We were new. It was all new.

At night when I was a baby my parents went walking to get me to sleep and while they were out they foraged for building materials in the streets beyond where raw sandy lots lay pegged out between brickies' sheds and piles of rough-sawn jarrah.

The old man built a retaining wall from bricks he loaded into the pram that first summer. A lot of sheds went up quickly in our street. All those jarrah planks, all that asbestos sheeting, those bags of Portland cement. It was all taxpayers' property anyway. Great evening strollers, the locals.

I grew up in a boxy double-brick house with roses and a letter box, like anyone else. My parents were always struggling to get me inside something, into shirts and shoes, inside the fence, the neighbourhood, the house, out of the sun or the rain, out of the world itself it often seemed to me. I climbed the jacaranda and played with the kids across the street and came in ghosted with limestone dust. I sat on the fence and stared at the noisy blue bush and in time I was allowed to roam there.

When the road crew arrived and the lumpy limestone was tarred the street seemed subdued. The easterly wind was no longer chalky. In July and August when it finally rained the water ran down the hill towards the reedy recess of the swamp. Down the way a little from our place, outside the Dutchies' house with its window full of ornaments, a broad puddle formed and drew small children to its ochre sheen. The swamp was where we wanted to be, down there where the melaleucas seemed to stumble and the ducks skated, but our parents forbade it; they talked of quicksand and tiger snakes, wild roots and submerged logs and we made do with the winter puddle outside the van Gelders'. I remember my mother standing exasperated in the rain with the brolly over her head at dusk while I frog-kicked around in my speedos.

Eventually the road crew returned to put a drain in and my puddle became less impressive. Then a red telephone box appeared beside it. I suppose I was five or six when I learned to go in and stand on tiptoe to reach up and dial 1194 to hear a man with a BBC voice announce the exact time. I did that for years, alone and in company, listening to the authority in the man's voice. He sounded like he knew what he was on about, that at the stroke it would indeed be the time he said it was. It was a delicious thing to know, that at any time of the day, when adults weren't about, you could dial yourself something worth knowing, something irrefutable, and not need to pay.

When I was old enough I walked to school with the ragged column that worked its way up the hill for the mile or so it took. From high ground you could see the city and the real suburbs in the distance. You could even smell the sea. In the afternoons the blue bush plain was hazy with smoke and the dust churned up by bulldozers. On winter nights great bonfires of trees scraped into windrows flickered in the sky above the yard. Beyond the splintery fence cicadas and birds whirred. Now and then the hard laughter of ducks washed up the street; they sounded like mechanical clowns in a sideshow. When summer came and the windows lay open all night a noise of frogs and crickets and mosquitoes pressed in as though the swamp had swelled in the dark.

The smallest of us talked about the swamp. Down at the turnaround where the lupins took over, we climbed the peppermint to look out across that wild expanse, but for the longest time we didn't dare go further.

Bruno the Yugo went to the swamp. He had a flat head and he was twelve. He ranged down through the reeds until dark, even though his oldies flogged him for it. Across from Bruno lived the Mannerings. They were Poms with moany Midlands accents. I could never tell when they were happy. Their house smelt of fag smoke and kero and they didn't like open windows. George the father had very long feet. He wore socks and plastic sandals. His son Alan waited for me after school some days to walk behind me and nudge me wordlessly with a knuckle for the full mile. He was twelve and scared of Bruno the Yugo. I never knew why he picked me from all the kids in our street. He never said a thing, just poked and prodded and shoved until we came down the hill to within sight of our homes. He was tall and fair, Alan Mannering, and though I dreaded him I don't think I ever hated him. When he spoke to someone else beyond me his voice was soft and full of menace, his accent broadly local as my own. Some days he threw his schoolbag up on to the veranda of his place and headed on down to the swamp without even stopping in and I watched him go in relief and envy. Mostly I played with the Box kids across the road. There were seven or eight of them. They were Catholics and most of them wet the bed though it was hard to say which ones because they all had the same ammonia and milk smell. I liked them, though they fought and cried a lot. We slipped through the bush together where there were no straight lines. Beyond the fence there were snarls and matted tangles. We hid behind grass trees and twisted logs and gathered burrs in our shirts and seeds in our hair. Eventually the Boxes began to slip off to the swamp. I always pulled up short, though, and went back to dial 1194 for reassurance.

Another Pom moved in next door. I saw him digging and stood to watch, my shadow the only greeting. I watched him dig until only his balding head showed. He winked and pointed down until I shuffled over to the lip and saw the damp earth beneath my sandals.

‘The water table,' he said in a chirpy accent, ‘it's high here, see. Half these fence posts are in it, you know.'

The rank, dark stink of blood and bone rose up from his side of the fence. I climbed back over the fence doubtfully.

‘Looks dry this country, it does, but underground there's water. Caves of it. Drilling, that's what this country needs.'

I went indoors.

Someone hung a snake from our jacaranda out front. It was a dugite, headless and oozing. My mother went spare.

Across the road one night, Mr Box left his kids asleep in the Holden and went indoors with his wife. It was for a moment's peace, my oldies said, but a moment was all they had. The station wagon rolled across the road, bulldozed the letter box and mowed down our roses.

George Mannering with the long feet mowed his buffalo grass every week with a push mower. He liked grass; it was the one thing he'd not had in England though he reminded us that English grass was finer. My mother rolled her eyes. George Mannering bought a Victa power mower and I stood out front to watch his first cut. I was there when two-year-old Charlie lurched up between his father's legs and lost some toes in a bright pink blue. All the way back inside to my room I heard his voice above the whine of the two-stroke which sputtered alone out there until the ambulance came.