Mateship With Birds - By Carrie Tiffany Page 0,38
and smoked under the shop awnings before work in the morning. They leaned their smooth heads together and puckered their lips as they lit each other’s cigarettes. Betty had a green felt hat the shape of a melon with an egret feather on the side and no brim. The hats suited the women who had long necks; they looked like tulips. Women with short necks and square shoulders looked like they were wearing a bucket.
Michael’s father liked soft cheeses that had to be cut with a wire. The first time he waited for her after work and saw her without her hairnet on, he said, ‘Thank God for that.’ They went to the pictures and ate spaghetti sitting on high stools at a bar on Bourke Street. They walked through the Fitzroy Gardens in the dark, the possums scattering away from their footfalls. He settled her at the base of a giant fig tree and removed her bra and placed his head and hands inside her blouse. He kneaded her breasts between his fingers, then rubbed his face against them, leaving the mark of his stubble against her where the skin was paper thin, almost transparent, where the blue veins twisted through the flesh towards the nipple like strings of ivy. She looked down at the dark silhouette of his face between her breasts. She heard his lips ping as they parted, as he opened his mouth and reached out for her nipple with the pointed tip of his tongue. He turned the nipple in his mouth, rolling it backwards and forwards. She whimpered. She looked up at the dark folds of the tree and then back again at his face. He wasn’t so young. The skin around his eyes was crisscrossed with lines; she traced them with her fingertips. She wondered how people resisted. How was it possible to resist?
He held her hand on the tram, behind her handbag. She stroked his fingers. She found herself telling him about a puppy her father had brought home for her tenth birthday: a black spaniel. The puppy didn’t grow and had to be coaxed, stiff and costive, out of its kennel in the morning. When she gave the dog its first bath in the copper the water pooled around his neck. Running her hand over the humid curls she had felt the tufted fur where a collar had been. They made another collar for the dog – out of a cut-down belt – and Betty remembered being relieved when the worn-down place on the dog’s neck was covered again. She swallowed to show that the story was finished. The man nodded and drew his lips back in a smile; he had nothing to say about this.
It wasn’t the story Betty had meant to tell the man; she meant to tell him the funny thing about the dog – that when it was asleep it would start growling under its breath, then barking and then, while still fully asleep, it would jump up and run head first into the nearest wall and wake up shocked and affronted that they were laughing at it.
Later, in her bed, Betty remembered the man’s hands on her. She remembered stroking his fingers on the tram and she knew why she’d told him the story about the black spaniel. A long-worn ring leaves the same braided indent on the skin after it has been removed as a collar. The mark isn’t visible to the eye, but it gives itself up to touch.
When he was gone and she was pregnant with Michael and made the first of her moves away, she forgot exactly how it had felt; the unstoppable desire. Later still, when she was working nights in the hospital laundry at Bendigo and watching Michael play on his own, she was the one who took control. Every Tuesday and Thursday night for a month she made a bed on the floor of the storeroom and lay with the nightwatchman there. The humid smell of bleach rose from the clean sheets and from his spill, white too and milky like an expensive cleaning fluid. Bolder now, she drank it, she smeared it over her breasts, she felt it sticky between her thighs as she bicycled home from work. And stripping for her bath she noticed how it formed a coating as it dried and could be peeled like sunburn – like it was already becoming a type of skin.
When Little Hazel was born Betty told Michael that his