Mateship With Birds - By Carrie Tiffany Page 0,52
The handwriting isn’t young – a careful copperplate – it looks like Harry’s. She thinks she might tease him about it. ‘Harry,’ she could say, ‘Harry, you have lovely hooks and hangers.’ She puts the envelope in her pocket. On the way back to the house she dawdles, her arms hugging her cardigan across her breasts. Without much thought she returns to the woodpile and mounts the chopping block again. She’s steadying herself on the rough surface, worrying about splinters in her slippers, when the light from Harry’s house snaps off. The window, the whole house, disappears instantly. She clutches her throat in surprise and blinks into the darkness. Cows are moving in the distance. She can hear the lazy stumble of hoof against dirt and can just make out their massed shapes floating behind the fence. The herd is heading for the trees and for sleep. She realises the cows have been watching him, too.
Harry doesn’t blame her for being angry. People can’t help but make associations. The difficulty is the two events coming together – Mues’s trouble with the police and the discovery of his letters for Michael. One somehow makes the other worse. He understands when she closes the door against his explanations. It’s the disgust around her mouth that turns his stomach. As he’s walking away he hears the door open again behind him. He turns back smartly, his hands raised in a gesture of apology, of regret. Sip is pushed out of the narrow opening and the door is banged shut behind her.
Harry cries on the ground then. He doesn’t even wait until he is on his side of the fence. It hardly seems to matter anymore; all of the old lines are broken.
If she’d asked him why he did it, he would have said because ignorance is cruel, and perhaps because it is what a father should do.
At thirteen Harry knew nothing. None of what he had seen in the paddocks and the bush seemed applicable to men and women – or at least not the buttoned-up and smoothed-down men and women of his acquaintance. One morning the teacher sends the older boys up to the vicar’s house for a special talk. There are four boys. They walk up the hill to the manse kicking pine cones out from under the dark trees that line the driveway. The vicar doesn’t dilly-dally after service; he’s already home and back in his civvies. They are only admitted to the hallway, but they can hear a kettle steaming and the sound of the races on the wireless. The vicar stands in the doorway to the kitchen and thrusts his hands into the pockets of his trousers. He clears his throat and smiles vaguely at the pattern on the hall rug.
‘It’s common to have a build-up. Best thing is to rub the stuff out of the erect organ. You can do it for yourself. Your wife can most likely assist. The cleaning lady helps out here if the wife’s away at her mother’s. Make it regular or you’re likely to go off your head for a bit.’ The kettle starts to whistle. The vicar turns towards the kitchen and then looks back over his shoulder at Harry. ‘Close the door behind you, lad.’
And that’s what Harry remembers. He’s thirty-three, for Christ’s sake. It’s his wedding night. He’s thirty-three and unbuttoning Edna’s blouse, fiddling with the awkward canvas harness of her bra, his cock buckled painfully in his underpants. The pressure on the tip of it is almost unbearable. And in his head over and over again, ‘Close the door behind you, close the door behind you,’ and the nasal drone of a maiden stakes at Moonee Valley as they come around the turn.
Harry dreams he is conducting surgery on himself. He’s cut himself open with one incision from neck to groin and peeled back the twin flaps of skin and meat. The triangular bones of his pelvis are now exposed. They are chalky and dry and unconnected to any of the surrounding muscle and flesh. The pelvic bones have two wounds in them – circular with ragged edges – one on either side of the triangle. You would guess they had been made with a hand-held drill. Harry is aware of himself looking down at the wounds and thinking, ‘Well that isn’t good. That will need fixing.’
Betty will not speak to him. He has spent all afternoon under the mulberry tree on the front lawn at Acacia Court,