Australian Love Stories (15 page)

Claud's place has just the one bedroom. Plugs everywhere, wires running along the carpet. A fish tank. You never know what a kid will get up to. You'll never be able to leave him alone in the room the way you have things set up, Claudia. And the gap between houses becomes longer, wider than that suburb. Like the mould, it seems worse the longer you look at it.

Carnival, then. The mass picnic is close to spilling over the edge of the Alexandra Gardens. Families are yanked forward by little hands and sweat builds on your hairline. Flushed faces and laughs, beer bottles hissing and then clicking, the bottle caps dropped to the grass. The sun is insistent and there's no shade. The kid has a sunhat, sunnies the colour of rainbows and sunscreen smeared everywhere. Ashley frowns because it's been one of those weeks. The hum and cackling of all these people at once sounds like ten kinds of birds. The side of her neck, her temple, the palm of her hand—Claud is getting to know the importance of these places. Ash lets her. It is less a kiss than the feeling of Claud's lips against her skin, like Ash is the kind of human you can breathe in and out. Like she is a place of rest. It's a small moment. There's a squeal from somewhere across the park and Ashley's eyes dart to attention, body stiffening as she reaches and remembers. Her hand clasps around the kid's
arm. He doesn't look up from his toys. The noise, the chatter and laughing and wailing, rushes back at them sharp as a clap.

It'll just be simpler. Ash has to move anyway, and you can't stay where you are forever Claudia. So they look, or Ashley looks. Real estate finds popping up in Claud's email with little pings all throughout the day. Have you seen this one? I like the backyard in this but the kitchen, you know? And I know you don't like Brunswick but I want to get the school stuff sorted, and his playgroup meets here. You can help us, just a little.

It happens at a petting zoo. The rabbits are in danger of being trampled and the sun has turned the water troughs into something hot and murky. Ashley hands everything off to her, running to take a call. The bags are heavy—little plastic tubs with cutup fruit, sultanas and nuts and sandwich squares, wet wipes, pull-ups. A change of clothes, sized down. Hefting it onto one shoulder, Claud teaches the kid to hold out pellets to goats, to lambs. His little hands curl. No, make it flat. Not like that. Ben shakes his head and makes a noise as the animal teeth connect with his skin. The pellets drop. He slumps down in the middle of it all, on straw drenched in goat pee. The bags cut into her skin and she can't get him to stand. She wants to pull him by his little arm, drag him. Wants to shut the little gate and let the animals have him. She spots Ashley, who walks with what seems like a practiced slowness. They are not seeing the same thing, not with the way Ashley smiles. Looks like today's been too much for you, hey little guy? But Claud barely listens. She breathes instead, and
the effort not to say something hurts her throat. She places the bags down on the straw and ignores the way Ash looks at her, like she is only just noticing something. Claud walks, slow then fast. Out of the petting zoo, then to the car park. Passing people who seem to find happiness easy, the way they nod and chat and share bags of food. When she starts the car she can barely feel her own fingers.

Ben's dad comes round. Claud hadn't called. He looks at her like she proved something he wanted to be wrong about. He invites himself in, makes her get him a beer from the fridge. They sit on the couch, the
TV
flashing ads and the hiss of white noise when he reaches over and mutes it.

You're gonna go over there, and you're gonna say you're sorry.

She doesn't know what to be sorry for. She wipes her nose with the back of her hand and swallows another mouthful of beer.

Grow a couple, Claudia. Jesus Christ.

Fuck you.

You're not gonna just sit here like a pathetic shit until she's given up on you.

You've got me. That's the plan.

Stop it.

She drinks her beer. He finishes his, but she doesn't offer him another. She waits for him to get the hint and he stands up. She turns the sound of the
TV
back on before he's out the door. Another half hour. An hour.

Dialling, it rings and rings until there's a click. Breathing. No hello and the receiver is muffled, crackling with sound. Is that you
Bennie? It is, she can tell by the mumbled hum. By the shyness that only comes out when a kid is stuck on the end of a line, or made to be polite to a stranger. Ben. She doesn't ask him to get his mother, only listens to him breathe in and out. To the sounds of the
TV
in the background. A voice calling for him. There's a clatter and she knows the phone has been left behind. It isn't a hang-up. She listens for a little while longer to what she can only assume is the bedtime routine. Ash gathering him up—no you've had dinner already. It's time to brush your teeth. Then the book, settling under the covers. A hand resting on his head as he finally sleeps. Backing out of the room, the door giving a gentle click. And then it's that moment of quiet, right before the day ends, where Ashley has a chance to breathe. To take everything in.

THERE ARE TEARS, THERE IS HUBRIS, THERE IS A DAMNATION AND REGRET

Swallow

JON BAUER

It was one of those perfect washing days, the clouds idle-shaped but moving at speed in the wind, pullovers up in arms on washing lines. The boy resting his chin on his hands on the bedroom window sill. The frenetic outdoors almost peaceful through the dirty soundproofing of the double glazing. He only heard the bluster of the argument downstairs.

He focused on the swallows picking insects from the air, their pitchfork tails and honest heads, wings pointing back like ski jumpers, other swallows cheering the hunting spree from power lines. The kitchen argument going up a notch on the Beaufort Scale, the parental vitriol bending the spruce trees over in the wind.

Something porcelain broke downstairs and a swallow dipped in the air as if at the noise, the boy's hands changing to fists, still propping the heaviness of his disappointed head.

He went to his floordrobe and put on three t-shirts and two sweaters, imagining the colour his top layer would be if this were paint not clothes he were mixing. Purple, he decided. It was always purple at school, no matter what paints he added. It all ended in the violence of purple—Mr Silva never pausing his penguin-parade round the room at the boy's work, like he did to the others.

The boy painted like that on purpose. His step-father had taught him to bury his skills. Around Tony the boy had to bury a lot of things: his vocabulary, his retorts, his knowledge. He let
Tony attempt the questions mum pretended to not know the answer to. Both of them holding Tony together with the clearest sticky tape.

He crept downstairs to the back door and slipped out into the gale—wandering across the garden to the row of spruces bent in prayer. The first dead leaves aloft in the sky like the spirits of birds.

He leant on the wind, his coat and trousers taut against his front—flapping out behind him like he was skydiving. He shut his eyes and imagined he was. A t-shirt hit him in the face, stayed there like a pancake and he laughed into it. Took it off and looked first at the washing line, then to the house to see if they were laughing too, but he could only catch their silent movie amid the window's reflection of outside, his mum's finger pointing, Tony grabbing it and twisting.

The boy ran into the spruces and began to climb, pretending to himself the jostling bending action of the tree was funny, even if it tingled his body with the static charge of adrenalin.

He held on, eight feet up, a view across the neighbouring gardens—the feel of the narrow trunk yawning over in the gale. He waited out the gusts, climbed in the gaps between them. Imagining the adults taking breaths between screaming inside the house too. Surely wind was made of the same stuff as feelings? Wind came from thin air and went to thin air. You couldn't see it. Could only feel it. It was obvious to him that it should come from feelings. Their argument responsible for what had most of the swallows clinging to tossing and buffeting power lines.

He climbed, a wooze surging up in him as the gusts took the tree impossibly low, the tap, tap of the creaking trunks. The world threatening. The boy awaiting the splitting sound, and for
that colour under the bark to show. The crunch synchronising with Tony's hand on his mother. He'd not done it yet, but it lurked at all times. It lurked in the fragile ignorance Mum feigned for him. It lurked in the lay-offs at work. It lurked in Mum's promotion, and the care and kindness her boss showed her. It lurked in the likeness the boy had to his father.

The swallows sat out the gale, or darted into it, and all those sleeves waved frantically from the washing line, turning the mechanism round and round in a colourful panic.

There was a small bang against the window and the boy saw something fall.

He climbed down as fast as he could on the rodeo movement of the tree, jumped to the ground and clapped his hands, ran around the washing debris on the lawn. A few metres from the door he stopped. A swallow was on the ground by the glass door, one wing slightly out. It was clambering unsteadily forward, twigs and debris bombarding the shed roof.

He watched the bird, and hated the argument for the hurt it had caused. He'd never seen a swallow like this before—on the ground, wings haphazardly out, doddering, silent, defeated. Such an opposite to marvelling at them in the darting dusk.

Another swallow landed beside the injured bird, its head twitching at the sky, checking. The hurt bird, its wings out, not checking. Its head down.

The boy wandered slowly forward with his jacket and the healthy swallow flew chirruping up to the others watching from the eaves, bird scree down the wall. Tony was always threatening to dislodge the nests, as if he enjoyed the boy pleading with him. The boy promising himself that if Tony ever hurt his mum or the birds he'd take to the only thing that mattered to Tony.

The boy held his jacket as if the bird were already inside it. He chewed his lip, watching its outstretched wings topple it over in the gusts. Watching the concern from the other swallows— reassuring him of what he already believed about birds.