bed, and when the tears subside begins to feel the heat and weight of herself keenly against the mattress. She rolls onto her back and wipes her hands across her breasts. She brings her palms to her face and breathes in the mix of sweat and glycerin. Her fingers separate the sticky curls of her bush. It is never the same. Some nights it is all she can do to stroke herself slowly up and over the wave. Other nights she thrashes, climbs steeply, stops, spits on her fingers, starts again and has to beg someone – someone who isn’t there – before she can reach release.
By daybreak her bladder is aching and she gets up to piss. Around four each morning she pads down the path to the outhouse and takes the temperature of the day ahead. Sometimes the winking owl is perched on the post of the washing line. Its bulging eyes and flattened face seem mongoloid – both innocent and evil. The beak is worn; stained and twisted like the dew claw on an old dog. They look at each other seriously. The owl is gone when she returns. She never sees it on the wing.
And then, just after dawn, nobody sees Betty Reynolds as she dresses and sets the fire and makes the tea. As she calls out for Michael and Little Hazel and stands at the window pulling her cardigan tight, looking out at the frost on the pasture and getting on with the day for there is nothing else to be done with it.
Betty can hardly remember back to the time when Harry was a stranger to them. But he rarely came to the house when they first arrived. It was more usual for them to meet in town. Harry offered to hold baby Hazel while Betty got a prescription filled at the chemist. When she returned they sat together on the bench outside the post office. A crow called lazily from the top of the water tower. It was warming up and still early in the day. Betty remembers the condensed blue of the sky – she wasn’t used to it then, the tinted Cohuna sky.
‘Are you going to give her back then?’
Harry looked down at the sleeping baby. A circle of milk-flecked saliva cooled on the inside of his arm. ‘Yes, of course.’ He handed her back to Betty. ‘Very nice, babies – aren’t they?’
‘Much like adults really, only smaller.’
‘That’s right.’ Harry perked up. ‘Much like regular folk, only a different shape. It’s the shape that confuses – and there’s so much wrapping you never know which end you’re talking to.’
Betty cuffed him across the shoulder and stood up to leave. She smiled. He smiled back.
Even after that Harry was hesitant about coming inside Betty’s house. He’d hold the fly-wire door open and stand stiffly in the doorframe – a portrait of a man unsure of his welcome. Or he’d stay out on the verandah.
Michael reads to Betty as she peels potatoes in the sink. The white flesh turns around and around under the knife in her hand. Michael rocks on his chair at the kitchen table, shadowing the lines in Science for Young Australians with his finger. Harry listens from the verandah.
‘The Laughing Kookaburra, or Laughing Jack, or Alarmbird, or Breakfastbird, or Shepherd’s Clock, or Woop Woop Pigeon is a boisterous bird of the Australian bush known for its raucous laugh.’ Michael stumbles on ‘raucous’. Betty corrects him.
‘Raw-cous,’ he says. ‘Laughing Jack spends his days hunting throughout this territory and comes home of an evening to lead the family chor-us. These birds, from the kingfisher family, have an unusual family structure. Groups of adult males and females live in celibacy with one central couple and assist them in hunting and raising their young.’ Michael’s finger has halted under ‘celibacy’ – he looks up at his mother.
‘Go on, Michael, love,’ Betty says, her voice high and formal. She turns back to the sink, her curls joggle against her neck as she reaches for another potato.
Harry knows all this, of course; he knows everything about birds.
After a few years they have the impression that Harry is always there, but in fact he is only ever there in small snatches – a meal, the delivery of a particular item, collecting Michael to help with the cows. The operations of the family are attractive to him, but also unsettling. When he’s invited to tea he leaves immediately the meal is finished, as if unsure of