Her knees came slowly to rest; her nightie fell, like a slow curtain at the end of an entrancing tragedy. We stared at the rat. We stared at each other. She looked down at her knees and waggled them, as if noticing them for the first time; as though they’d come back to her like some bold, teenage workings from the forgotten depths of a school days cupboard. She put a hand on her heart, to calm its wild inner dance. And she began to laugh.
Laughter was a sound I hadn’t known she could make, but it came, high and fresh and girlish. It drew me along, like a cart bobbing behind a pony, until we both had to sit down, tearful and sore, groaning with hilarity. Somehow, she came back into the world that night and began to live again.
We shared a beer on the front step, under the ever renewable moon, relating the hunt to one another and cackling into the quiet street. The rat was dead, like Jimmy, and soon it too would be gone, when I carried it by its spiky tail to bury in the garden. The anguish it had caused would be forgotten, but the hunt and the dance would live on. And the mirth they had inspired would come back at the most unexpected times.
Party-Arty and Eve (first published ‘Oz-Wide Tales’, No. 11, 1990)
There is little to understand, thought Eve; except that life can be marvellously surprising, unexpected and accommodating.
Take the snake, for instance. It certainly hadn’t been her idea. Oh no! That was God’s own little snake, placed there by that diviner and so much more mysterious intelligence even than her own. It would not have been right, she told herself, to have questioned or interfered.
And anyhow, looking back on what she had seen, she wasn’t truly certain that she had actually seen anything. A feeling was all it had been. A feminine intuition. And wasn’t Arty always telling her to get her story right before opening her mouth?
The minister droned on, praising Arty for his devotion to his family, his commitment to his work, his popularity and fine reputation until, finally he ended and the casket was lowered into the dark, seeping earth.
Such a tragic loss! So sudden. Bless you, Eve. You will take care of yourself? Yes, of course. I always do.
There was a wake, of course. Comfort and commiseration were in order. The closest friends gathered at the little farm house where Eve now lived alone, with her fatherless children. In the house the women, while the sausage rolls heated, put their heads together, whispering, nodding and peeping out at their men. In their dry eyes there was sense of wonder and promise and impending renewal. They touched hands lightly. The world revolves, they nodded. Love is a battlefield, they agreed. The Lord helps those, they winked.
Take care of yourself, won’t you Eve. Oh my, yes! We all must, mustn’t we? I’m sure it’s the right thing to do. They smiled. In the yard, the children rolled cricket balls and the men bawled into their beer until they nearly forgot that Arty was dead.
It wasn’t the same without him, though. Party-Arty, they’d called him. Remember how he laughed? Remember how he stirred up the women-folk? A bloody rogue, that man! Mad as a cut snake! (A pretty good joke, considering.) You just never know, do you? Only last week he was the life of the party, poor bugger!
* * *
That party. It was, in Eve’s eyes, a party with not much life at all; the last in a long line, it seemed to her, of gatherings at which the women grafted themselves to the kids and kitchen, the men immersed themselves in the bottle and an ever-widening no-man’s land yawned between them. The same four couples, the same eight people; the same old touchstones leading to the same old quarrels.
* * *
That night she was the first to break ranks.
“Come on, Arty. Time to go.”
Without looking up, he’d leaned in and begun topping up glasses.
“C’mon, mate. The kids have school in the morning. And it’s late.”
He’d continued to pour, winking conspiratorially at his mates, until thin layers of froth dribbled down the sides of each glass. Then, with exaggerated care, he’d leaned to one side and emitted a resonant fart.
“Arty!” Maria, the hostess, had snapped with familiarly sudden impatience. “You can be the most obnoxious man! Does everything you eat turn directly to gas?”
“It’s a talent, Mare! What can I tell ya? Why? Is it a problem?”
“Drawing attention to your bum hole every two minutes is a problem, yes! Especially when it’s in lieu of speaking sensibly to your wife!”
“Well, ‘in loo’ of your complaint, Sweet-Cheeks . . . I’d like to remind you that, as science has proven, a good fart does wonders for the average bum hole - and for the temper! Which means, obviously, that the odd gasper’d do you in particular a world o’ good, Mare! Or is it something else missin’ in your life?” And, slyly, “This husband o’ yours makin’ you do without, mate? Bart? You bin holdin’ your own again, mate?”
“What can I say? I’m the only one strong enough!”
“That a fact? And her such a sturdy lookin’ heifer!”
“Ha ha!” Maria’d answered dryly. “Very comical. And on that low note, I’m with Eve. It’s time to call it a night.”
“Yeah, me too,” chipped in Ailsa. “Leave that one, Kersh. It’s past midnight and everyone’s tired.”
“Whoa, now!” Arty’d crowed. “Hold that friggin’ donkey there, woman! What’s this ‘everyone’s so tired’ bullshit? I’m not tired! Kersh isn’t tired! Bunny’s not tired! I mean, Bart might be a little bit tired, from holding up this weighty ‘end’ o’ his. That the case, mate? You want us gone so’s you and Mare can . . . ?”
“I wish you wouldn’t call her ‘Mare’,” Eve had interrupted. “You make her sound like a horse.”
“Ah, sorry! . . . so you and ‘Horse’ can work on erectin’ this bloody tonnage o’ tackle you’re carryin’?” And without waiting for an answer, “Nuh! On second thought, do it on your own time! This here’s drinkin’ time an’ no one’s leavin’ ‘til we’ve processed the lot! An’ that’s an order!”
* * *
The taunting sense of non-cooperation, non-consideration, between these husbands and wives had become an old complaint. Sometimes it was like a tickle or an itch, just on the edge of the consciousness. Sometimes it was like a splinter under a festering sore and sometimes it was a raging nightmare, a boil on the belly, a purulent ulceration of the emotions. It changed from day to day, from hour to hour. None of them could remember its beginning and none could foresee its end. Perhaps it was simply part of their lot to bear in life. What could they do?
Two of the four women had tried to speak to their husbands about emptiness and aloneness.
“Let’s leave this place! Go somewhere bigger. These small towns . . . I don’t know . . . there’s nothing for the two of us here. We’re drifting apart.”
The husbands had told them to get out of the house, to do something, to stop complaining, to see a doctor. When they’d spoken to their doctors, the doctors had been kindly but mystified.
“Where does it hurt? When does it hurt? What does it feel like?”
“Sometimes everywhere and sometimes nowhere. I can’t say. It depends.”
“Depends on what?”
And none of them could answer that. They’d look at the floor or into the distance and sometimes they’d cry, trembling with fury at where that question seemed to lead.
Then the doctor would say, “It’s nervous tension,” or “It’s inactivity,” or “You just need to get away for a bit,” and the women would go away with prescriptions for sleeping pills or sedatives and they’d carry gentle admonishments to, “Come back in a few weeks if there’s no change.” There was never any change.
The only time there was anything even resembling relief was when the women gathered for their, first monthly, then bi-monthly, then weekly chat sessions. They took it turn about at each other’s houses. They brought muffins and they made tea and they talked about their lives. There was too much to say fully, but what did get said was a comfort.
Only one, Joanne,
had been born and raised there on the tropical coast of Queensland. She was thirty-four and had been to Brisbane a dozen or more times, but she’d never been out of the state.
“Home is in my own back pocket,” she’d sigh. “But I admit it would be exciting to travel. We just can’t seem to get the time or the money. Bunny seems to . . . I don’t know . . . it just doesn’t seem to . . . come together.”
In truth, it was simply not a priority shared by her husband whose trucking business took him away a lot anyhow.
Ailsa had come with Kershaw, who was handsome and could sing and worked in the sugar mill. She was dutiful and shy and devout and found her husband’s extroversion awesome in the extreme. Childless, she filled her days with community service – Meals on Wheels and church fetes – until, by common consent, she’d become recognised as a community stalwart. But it wasn’t home.
Maria had also come with her husband, following his trail of upward mobility in the teaching profession. Bart had volunteered for ‘country service’ in the north in order to secure his future tenancy in Brisbane. However, the north had suited him well with its unhurried opportunities to fish and laze. He’d grown fonder and fatter and had settled like a rock in the monsoonal mud, until Maria could see no way of moving him. Her soul, though, had tightened within her and her voice had shrivelled to a wheedling whine that grated as much on her as it did on him.
And finally, there was Eve, another ‘outsider’, an import, come north as a young teacher on her first posting when she was fresh, keen, intelligent and twenty-one. In Arty, she’d made a fine ‘catch’, a prosperous cane farmer, and she’d quit teaching within two years to bear children.
Eleven years had passed, both kids were in school and Eve’s rampant enthusiasm to be doing something – anything – was now being burnt out in P and C meetings. A sense of impending fracture had slowly grown in her, like an osteoporotic bone.
* * *
“You know what I’ve decided?” she one day demanded of the others over tea. And, thrusting her cup down, crack! against the saucer, “I’ve decided that opportunity better stay well out of my way! Because, if it ever comes near, I’m going to grab it and wring its bloody neck! That’s how ready I am for a break!”
“What are you saying, Eve?” they’d chorused. “What are you thinking? Are you talking about Arty?”
“I’m just saying: an opportunity not taken is a promise not heard. That’s all I’m saying.”
They had laughed. Of course they had, and they’d gone on to speak, as they nearly always did, of the foibles and idiosyncrasies of their men. And they’d assured one another uncertainly that things were never so bad that they couldn’t be fixed . . . somehow! Eve alone, in the deepest, most secret corner of her life, harboured a glowing little ember of a different possibility. Not a plan! Not really even an impulse! Only a fleeting image that had an air about it - an air of independence.
“Imagine being free again! Starting over! With money, of course! Knowing what we know now! Wouldn’t that be something?”
And they had all gone quiet with the dream of it. What an excruciating idea! What a pip! Pass the muffins, please, while I stifle the stillness behind my eyes.
* * *
And so Eve spoke to the men at the table in a room that was empty of patience, at a party that was a burgeoning sadness.
“Why the bloody hell can’t all of you just finish the evening gracefully? Would it be so bad to leave some of that beer for another day? There’s no law saying you have to be blind and rotten before you go home, you know!”
They had looked at her in silence before casting their eyes back to one another, to their glasses, to the bottle. They’d fidgeted, they’d wiped at crumbs, they’d poked at bubbles of condensation until finally Arty had turned back to say, “Sorry, Evey. What were we talking about?”
And they’d laughed uproariously, refilling their glasses and bobbing their heads appreciatively. Party-Arty knew how to get them going!
* * *
Shortly thereafter though, tempers had snapped, abuse had been hurled and finally they’d gone their ways, into a night crackling with vitriol and bad humour. It was all too familiar. And somehow it was, ultimately, too much.
On the homeward journey, Kershaw lost control of the car and slammed it into a ditch. Ailsa, with a bleeding lump on her brow and her Christian forbearance worn as thin as ash, left her bearish mate sleeping against the steering wheel and set off walking. If the car sank and he drowned, she would not be there.
Bunny felt a sudden need to check his trucks and dropped Joanne at the door. His late night ‘checks’ of his trucks, she knew, meant a prowl in the haunts of the younger folk, where he might find a companionable young woman to park with. Joanne slept and dreamed of cankerous poisons.
Bart circled the house once with a torch and his favourite golf club, chipping cane toads over the fences and against the walls of the house.
“My name is Samuel Hall,” he sang as he went, “and I hate you, one and all.”
After he’d reeled into bed without a word, Maria, as she lethargically tidied in the kitchen, found herself hefting the weight of various large knives.
“To know what we know,” Eve had said. “And to be free.”
The night seemed unusually cold.
* * *
Eve and Arty, for their part, made it all the way home in silence. Eve got the children into bed. By the time she finished, Arty had passed out on his back, his mouth open, his socks still on and a staleness rising from him like swamp-mist to fill the room.
She stood looking at him for some time, at the pulse that beat visibly in his neck. The grizzle and the smell and the noise of him washed over her and she tried – she really tried – to recall the tenderness, the consideration, the boyish enthusiasm she’d loved in him in by-gone years.
In the kitchen, from the back of a dark cupboard, she fetched the electric sandwich maker with which, sometimes, late at night or early in the morning, Arty would make himself a jaffle, if he thought of it. Eve yanked and stressed at the cord, unscrewing the plug, fiddling the wires and re-assembling the frazzled works before setting it carefully in the middle of the counter. Outside the window, the flying foxes chuckled and groped amongst the ripening pawpaws and over the whole town, high in the sky, dark shadows swirled.
Next morning, yes, the world still revolved and love was still a battlefield. And there was an icy stillness in more than one breast. Arty rose, beery and filthy and glassy-eyed, to vomit richly and hugely half-way across the toilet floor.
“Shaddup!” was his first word of the day, the first to pass between them. “Don’t talk to me.”
She was a dutiful wife. She rose from her couch, her refuge, and went to the shower. He had dry toast for breakfast.
Just as well, she thought. The father of my children. What was I thinking? Surely I can try it little harder. To find the point to it all. Surely.
She packed him a lunch and took it out into the new dawn to stow for him. The cabin of the tractor – high, enclosed and air-conditioned – was probably Arty’s favourite place in all the world. His mark was on it, his stamp: the pin-up of the hugely breasted girl, smiling like an outback rain storm; the cartoon of a rat with an enormous caricature of an erection and the words, ‘Here, Kitty, Kitty!’ ballooning from its teeth; the empty stubbies, the old People magazines, the Slim Dusty CD’s. They were what Arty was. Soft, somehow. Removed. Unfitted. Anything could happen to him.
She was thinking these thoughts as she slipped the lunch box under the seat, amongst the heavy gloves and the tools and the . . . ! Well, perhaps she had seen some movement. She’d certainly leapt back rapidly enough and slammed the door and the hair had definitely prickled up on the back of her neck. And ‘Snake!’ was precisely the image that had flashed through her mind. But it could have been a shadow! The new light of dawn was very tricky.
Arty grumbled past her as she stood, pale and trembling, clutching her thin nighti
e about her. Through the amazing crescendo of sound as the blood cascaded through her veins, she heard her own voice: ‘an opportunity not taken . . .!’ The earth spun dizzyingly.
Still, if he had spoken to her, petted her, kissed her – asked after her or apologised for the night – she probably would’ve relented. ‘Careful, Arty,’ she might’ve said, or ‘Better check under the seat, mate.’ But he didn’t speak. Of course not. He rarely spoke to her except to say, ‘Shaddup!’ or ‘You’re just a silly bloody woman!’ or ‘Get us a stubby, Eve.’ She was thirty-two, with two kids and a husband who liked the sound of his tractor more than the sound of her voice. So she said nothing.
He climbed into the cab, switched on the engine and bumped off through the headlands of the sugar cane. Ordinarily, unless there was breakdown or he got bogged, the machine would come rattling back into the yard at four or five in the afternoon. Then Arty would unfold himself and head for the pub or for a neighbour’s shed for a ‘few quick ones’. He might get home in time for dinner; he might get to see the kids. And he might not.
Eve went back into the house to clean the toilet, make coffee and wake the kids. At the end of the long drive, she saw them onto the school bus. It was nearly noon when the neighbour’s tilly came shrieking into the yard. Eve hummed absently to herself and folded the insurance policy back into its envelope.
Arty was stretched out on the tray. Through his clenched teeth, a faint ooze of blood peeped, and around his eyes. A taipan then. They bled like that from a taipan. Already a film of gauze had drawn behind the eyes and there was a sort of rigidity apparent in the angle of the neck. The pulse she’d watched so few hours ago was gone.
The neighbour had heard the tractor roaring and found it, capsized, in the stream bed. Arty he’d found half a kilometre away, not far from where he’d jumped, but already too close to death to be struggling.
“Snake’s got ‘im, Eve!” the man cried. “Jesus-God! Must’ve bin in the cab!”
The neighbour held his soft cap in his two hands and rolled his head from left to right. He gripped the side of the tilly and rocked against it. He wept and called Arty’s name and bumped his forehead against the vehicle. Party-Arty was dead. Eve put an arm lightly on his shoulder to comfort him but she didn’t speak.