Mateship With Birds - By Carrie Tiffany Page 0,27
road. She thinks about what they’ll have for tea and about getting her dress in to soak quickly so that it doesn’t stain.
Harry likes to use the word ‘nippy’ in Betty’s company. Betty estimates that between 1951 and 1953 Harry says ‘nippy’ to her on over a hundred occasions – many of them not even during the winter. He says that the wind is nippy, the air is nippy, it is nippy in the shed, paddock, garage, kitchen, main street, post office and butcher’s. Various places other than Cohuna are nippy, or so he’s heard – London, for instance; Iceland, Latvia, the Sahara Desert at night. Even Bendigo, Harry says, can be a bit nippy for his liking. Some of the cows get fractious when the weather is nippy. Milk yields drop in nippy conditions. His dermatitis is always worse when it’s nippy. Betty knows it’s coming, she’s used to it now. In the early days she dropped her eyes and crossed her arms over her chest. Now she looks at him dead-set. She puts her shoulders back and hoists them up a little higher. She imagines herself as Mae West. Mae-West-Betty would say to Harry, ‘Don’t beat around the bush, Harry. This is what you want. Come over here and get it.’ And she would lean forwards and tip her breasts out of her bra, the nipples linty and crumpled, but pointing straight at him.
Podiatry or office work. Little Hazel pulls a face. The verdict of the vocational guidance officer has been sent home to Betty on a slip of pink paper. Little Hazel doesn’t like feet. Old people’s feet are disgusting. She’d been hoping for jockey, or explorer. Her breasts are coming in. She checks them each morning when she gets dressed. She wears two singlets to push the nipples flat. Last week a mouse ate the crotch out of the knickers she left on the floor.
In the winter school holidays some of the children in Little Hazel’s class are going on a bus trip with their mothers and fathers to see the snow at Mount Baw Baw. Little Hazel has never seen the snow. On the school holidays Little Hazel stays home with Michael or goes to Acacia Court with Betty.
Walking through the back door of Betty’s house, Little Hazel’s sleep-out is on the left, Michael’s is on the right. The sleep-outs are a closed-in section of the verandah with unlined timber boards halfway up the walls and louvred aluminium windows above them. Green paint has been slapped on top of the boards, but many tufty, barky bits show through. In the summer it is good enough. In the winter Little Hazel buries her head under the blankets to get to sleep and often wakes in the morning with an earache from the draught.
Harry is wary going into Little Hazel’s sleep-out. He is anxious about being confronted with ‘girl’s things’. But there is only the messy bed, a pile of clothes on a chair, a little table with her drawing pencils, some pictures of mudlarks thumbtacked to the wall, a doll, a rabbit knitted out of grey wool, and a diorama of the forest at night made from painted Cornflakes boxes. Harry does his work carefully, starting from the ceiling. He uses binder twine to construct a hammock for the silky fibres of the kapok and then spends a long time winding more kapok around the twine so it doesn’t show. He tries to imagine how the kapok-snow might have landed on the windowsill and bed and table and floor if it had really fallen from the sky. He takes care to ‘snow’ the diorama; the white looks very striking against the black paint. As a finishing touch he gently snows the ears of the rabbit and even places a wisp on its tiny snubbed nose.
When Little Hazel returns from taking Foot Foot for her afternoon walk Harry is already back at home and setting up for the milking. She opens her bedroom door to throw her jumper in so she won’t be in trouble when her mother gets home. Everything is white; the ceiling is a hummocky white mass, the floor, the bed, the table. The room is covered in a soft, quiet, spidery whiteness. Little Hazel put her hands to her face in surprise. She notices how the whiteness muffles the sharp shapes and edges of everything it covers. The objects in her room seem more important, more symbolic and statuesque, in their blank pallor.