Mateship With Birds - By Carrie Tiffany Page 0,34
air as he says this and wiggles his fingers.
‘Um?’ Harry hopes the sound he has made will pass for understanding, or that Ruby will think he’s asleep. He hears Ruby roll over onto his back and the sound of him unbuckling his belt and pushing his trousers down.
‘You don’t mind if I knock the top off this, then?’
No answer is needed. Ruby spits into his palm and starts to masturbate. Harry sleeps. When he wakes the sun has slipped down behind the dray and the heat has eased, but he still feels addled and groggy. He thinks about rolling onto his belly and crawling over to the edge of the load to see how far they have travelled and to call down to his father for the water bag, but the sun has sucked the life out of him. He wishes the summer over, wishes the work was done with forever. He makes a promise to himself. Farming isn’t out of the question, but not grains. He’ll stay closer to town, do something with animals and have regular money and regular folk to talk to. He looks over at Ruby. He’s asleep with his mouth open and his trousers still bunched around his knees, his spent cock points listlessly towards Harry and nods in time with the motion of the dray.
Harry pisses on the lemon tree just after midnight. He’s on the way home from drinking beer and playing cards under the electric light in Mues’s kitchen. It is a relief to be out in the air again. He looks up at the dark forms of the trees with the night sky showing through behind them. The eucalypts’ thin leaves are painterly on the background of mauve sky – like black lace on pale skin. An image of an old-fashioned bodice pulled tight across a woman’s bust with the skin rising puffily between the thread comes to mind. There’s an early, jerky, sense memory – a close-up of skin in between lace. A tongue, Harry’s infant tongue perhaps, reaches out to taste the skin’s oily sweetness and is disappointed that the lace has no special favour of its own. He’s not sure now if he’s remembering or imagining, but he can sense an area of stippled inflammation protruding from the lace – a nipple that’s got free. The nipple is the same rude pink he saw inside his mother’s mouth when she coughed or yawned. The memory and its associations are both alarming and exciting. He finishes pissing but doesn’t bother to button his trousers. He shakes his head, tips the image of his mother from his mind and replaces it with Betty. Here are Betty’s large brown areolae folded under at the bottom quarter. Here are her nipples, flat now and just lightly flushed. But not for long. In Harry’s mind he licks them intently as if he’s removing cream from the bottom of a bowl, they harden and spring forwards to meet his tongue. That’s enough now. They’re hard enough to suck. He lets his trousers fall around his ankles. Things are well distended down below. One hand tugs his cock, the other reaches out into the night for balance. It occurs to him that Betty’s house is behind him – that his naked rump is pointing towards her. It doesn’t seem right – it seems impolite somehow. He shuffles around until he’s facing in her direction. And he’s grateful that her lights are out when he spills across the grass.
Harry’s mind’s-eye picture of Betty’s breast is her actual breast. The first summer she moved in next door Harry strolled over with a bucket of loquats to say hello. It was early, just after milking. Betty was sitting with her baby on the verandah. There were boxes behind her in various stages of unpacking and a tea chest overflowing with balled-up newspaper. White cabbage moths hung on the tips of the long grass of the front lawn. Betty’s face rosy with sleep, one soft breast exposed to the morning air, her bare feet dangling square and sturdy beneath her … He looked for less than a minute, just long enough to set the detail of the scene in his mind – the glorious jugged curve of the breast, a hint of wetness at the nipple, the small closed face of the baby – then he stumbled over Michael’s scooter lying partly buried in the grass. Betty looked up. He noticed her hair moved oddly around her face –