New Australian Stories 2 (13 page)

When I first came here I used to get up at dawn to watch the harvest, but there's not a lot to see. The snakes begin to stir in the grey morning twilight, and the men suddenly sinuous as ghosts disappear into the scrub and come out with hessian sacks with the creatures inside. They keep them in boxes under the wharf, for coolness, and then just before the launch is due they milk the venom. It's a skill these people have. The money's okay, not a lot but not bad for the amount of effort involved. They'd say it was dangerous work, but they make it look easy. Not that you'd catch me trying.

Slide told me that at one time, when there were a lot more snake catchers on the river, they'd make dry ice with carbondioxide cylinders so they could milk them straightaway and freeze the venom. But they decided they didn't need that much effort; the launch just brings a sackful of the stuff, and they put the newly harvested venom in that. I said to Slide that some entrepreneurial person could probably get them a much better price, organise a market that would make them a lot richer.

Entrepreneurial, said Slide, pronouncing the word in a set of small bites as though he'd never heard it before, let alone pronounced it, and wasn't sure he could manage it now. He squinted. What would be the point of that? he asked.

More money, I said.

What would be the point of that? What would they spend it on, here?

They could use it to get away.

Then they wouldn't be venom hunters. Logic, he said, logic, Ken.

I've given up getting out of bed at dawn to see the snake catchers melt away into the scrub, I've kept my old habits of late to bed and late to rise even though it means buying a lot of paraffin, but I do sometimes still watch the milking. Spangle is the best at it, the forked stick, the grasp of the head, the opening of the mouth. Tarantin's mother is the next best. She smiles so widely her teeth nearly fall out and she makes a strange violent action with her arms, but she gets the job done slickly, in the end.

There seem to be certain days for the opium-smoking: they happen in their own time, people know though it never seems to be discussed. I wonder where it comes from. I guess the Chinese grow it, in the hinterland somewhere; they'd be the ones you'd expect to have the skills. I don't know, and I don't ask. I don't smoke it either. I thought of what Slide said, about me not leaving. He's wrong there. I'll go, when the time's right. It isn't yet.

Once he said to me, Ever think you'd like to find Xanadu. Staring into a glass.

Xanadu, I said, my voice a bit husky from the drink; it was moonshine that night, I remember thinking they should colour it pale blue, as a warning.

Not just a fragment, the whole thing, Slide went on. No interruptions here.

It was then I realised he was talking about the Coleridge poem. I had thought about opium, what it might do for me, but there were too many bad warnings. No happy endings. As Slide said, the poem was only a fragment. And anyway I'm not a poet. Doesn't it take more than it gives, I said.

Maybe, replied Slide.

I'd learned that conversations with Slide didn't have ends. All my time in this place, I realised, would be just the one dialogue. It was like a piece of music, with themes uttered, dropped, reiterated, not always articulated but never lost. There was never any hurry to move it along. Another day Xanadu, or opium, would come up. Afterwards I wondered if he'd had thoughts along those lines, himself. I thought I should have said, What about you? It might have been polite.

I supposed the venom hunters spent their profits on opium. The food wouldn't cost much. Sometimes the hippies brought in fresh vegetables that they'd grown, and fine green stalks of marijuana, but people didn't have the habit of fresh much, around here. The grass was good, healthy, out of the ground; I sometimes took on a bit of that. Opium. If I took up opium I'd have to become a venom hunter.

The day after the launch left it came back again. We were sitting by the wharf, on Slide's terrace, playing cards. Spangle was winning. The launch turned the corner of the river and its melancholy horn sounded. I nearly said, How sad is the sound of the horn in the mangroves, but I thought, I'm not that silly. I might have, to Slide.

We all looked at the launch, it never comes except once a week, and for a moment I wondered if it was yesterday, if somehow the intervening events had been a moment of hallucination, and here was the launch arriving, and Andrea would step off in his high-heeled shoes and his flirty red jacket and tell us, The cheroot is the clue. But if it hadn't happened yet, how did I know it.

Andrea did step off, but today he was wearing jeans like a second skin and a silk shirt the colour of cream, with little red shoes like ballet slippers on his feet. He skipped down the steps and sat with us. Lizard said, Back already. Andrea said, Alas, and Slide came out of the emporium, pulled a chair from the other table and sat on it, back to front. We finished the game. Slide said, Deal you in? Andrea shook his head. Nobody said, Why are you back here so soon? I suppose they knew. Slide got up, in his ponderous yet efficient manner and got a bottle of whisky. The good stuff.

Slide brought a bunch of shot glasses, spread them out, and filled them, pushing them in front of us. Andrea smiled. On duty? Picking it up and taking a mouthful. Spangle shuffled the cards, neatened them, and put them on the table. The launch gave a cough of steam.

Spangle's wife came along the road from their shack, in her short shorts and tied-up shirt, her high-heeled sandals quiet on the dusty track, her long brown legs forced into small steps. She came up to the table and looked at Spangle. He didn't catch her eye. No woman has ever looked at me like that, and I don't think I would want one to. It was a naked look, raw, full of longing, love, desire, all moiling together, and with utterly no hope. She dropped her heavy dark lids over the splendid brown and bluish white of her eyes, but she couldn't hide the tremble of pain in her mouth. She bent her head so her swags of dark hair fell forward beside her face. Andrea stood up swiftly and brought a chair, placing it with a kind of gallantry at the table, filling one of the little glasses with the good whisky for her.

Slide filled the glasses again. Everybody drank, not tipping it down as you do with a shot glass but slowly, even contemplatively. Andrea's face was sorrowful. No venom today, he said. That can follow the usual timetable. We all sat and drank. It was like a very dull party, where there is nothing to say, except it wasn't, because there was so much tension in the air; I imagined everybody felt as strung up as I did.

Andrea leaned back in his chair, his body a fluid curve across its round metal back. Still got those cheroots, Slide, he asked. Slide nodded. And you're still smoking them, Andrea said to Spangle. He nodded. But not you, Mrs Spangle. She shook her head. People didn't smoke much tobacco here. Their rations of opium, that seemed to do them.

Mrs Spangle. I supposed she had a name, but I didn't know it. She looked at Andrea. I'd like to put a dress on, she said. He nodded, and she walked off; we watched the taut movement of her calf muscles as she picked her small steps down the track.

She came back after a while, wearing a dress of some stiff shiny material that creaked as she walked, in a bright purplish pink colour, the colour of hibiscus, if there had been any about. It was strapless, in a boned heart shape that fitted against her chest. She wore the same sandals, and it occurred to me that her walk was as though her body was shackled, that chains prevented the free long steps that her legs were made for. She carried a white plastic handbag, very shiny and cheap-looking, and when she sat down she put it carefully in her lap and held it tightly between her two hands. It had an orange plastic buckle that clashed with the dress. I don't think I've ever seen a sadder object than that clumsy white plastic handbag, so big, so shiny, so ugly. Andrea put more whisky in her glass and she took a long sip.

Everybody seemed to know what was happening. Well, up to that point. I wondered that nobody needed to speak of it, but there was evidently an understanding. She held the handbag tightly in one hand and undid the buckle, sliding the other inside the bag. She felt for a moment, and brought out a tarnished brass compact. I'd never seen her wear make-up; powder in that climate would set like mud after rain with creeks of sweat running through it. Andrea's fine dark skin was never touched by it.

She put the compact on the table, and her hand back in the bag, felt around, and pulled out a snake, a small and, I knew, particularly poisonous one. People took breaths and drew back. Her other hand pushed the bag away, and with a quick movement pulled the boned top of her dress down, marion halligan so her round brown breast popped up over the top of it, and in the same moment she applied the snake to it. All the men stood up, chairs fell over, and then they remained where they were as she dropped the snake and fell back in her chair. She looked up at Spangle, that look of love, and longing, and no hope at all, then slid down into the dust. He kneeled and held her, and after a while she was dead. Not an easy death, or a pretty one, but at least Spangle held her tight through all the indignities of it.

Andrea and Slide and the rest of us walked down to the end of the wharf and looked at the boat. Nobody seemed to think of trying to save her.

Of course not, said Slide. Not a hope.

Don't you have antivenene in the fridge, I asked. After all, this was a community of poison hunters. They must be prepared for accidents.

His gaze shifted to the bend in the river where the launch had disappeared, taking Andrea and the stretcher that had appeared out of its depths and carried off the shrouded body of Spangle's wife. We'd laid her on it and wrapped a worn white sheet around her, the creaking hibiscus-coloured dress springing out as we tried to enfold it. Slide shrugged.

It bit her fingers, he said, in the bag. That would have been it, she wouldn't have needed to apply it to her breast.

Did she have a name, of her own?

Aurora.

Aurora. I wondered if anybody had ever called her that. Had Spangle? I'd never heard it, all the time I'd been here.

I wanted things spelled out. So you all knew, I said.

What?

That she'd done it.

Again Slide shrugged.

I spoke again, mainly to myself. That she, that Aurora, murdered the girl. I thought Slide's look meant yes. I went on, Why?

Slide still gazed at the bend in the river.

Because, I said, Spangle had been on with the fisherman's daughter, and that was the clue of the cheroot. And everybody knew Andrea had come to take her away. But he didn't know she was going to kill herself.

Well, said Slide. And I suddenly thought, he is disagreeing with me. Andrea did know. That was his kindness. And why nobody had run and got antivenene.

So, I said, justice is done. Slide raised his eyebrows. I went on, softly, to myself, Aurora has paid, and Spangle is okay, except that he has lost his wife and his lover. And maybe his luck.

Ah, said Slide, you think that possibly he will lose at cards now.

Parting Glances

SUSAN MIDALIA

She knew it would be the middle of summer, but Moscow was meant to be swirling snow, luxurious furs, huddling by a fire with smoky tea from a gleaming samovar. Even the forecast she'd read at home, thirty degrees and humid, had failed to convince her: so she'd packed three jumpers, five pairs of fleecy socks and a hot water bottle. When she stepped off the plane, the heat rushed maliciously towards her. And then the stifling terminal, packed tight with prowling men straight out of gangster movies, and busty young women with peroxide hair and 1980s platform shoes. There was concrete everywhere and not a word of English on the multitude of signs. Twenty sleepless hours in the air to get here, and a four-hour wait in Dubai, where fat westerners had swarmed along rows of duty-free whisky, diamonds and Chanel. Petra had sat in a café and watched them, these waddling lords of the earth, coming at her like prehistoric beasts in logo-ed shirts. Now they waited with her in the terminal, their faces unsure, uneasy, in the relentless crowd.

The immigration official was a stout young blonde with gold braid on her shoulder pads, a red star on her cap and a brittle expression. Petra tried one of the few Russian words she'd been able to learn,
zdrahstvooytee
,
hello
, in what she hoped was a friendly tone. She made a point of looking blank, remembering the advice of her translator friend, Marie.
Don't
smile,
she'd said.
Muscovites think you're simple
,
you know,
a little retarded, if you smile at them.
Petra handed over her passport, her official letter of introduction, her confirmation of hotel bookings for every night of her ten-day visit, her holiday with a difference. The official glared at her and then looked down at her papers, up again at her face, down again, up again, wordless and stiff, as if I'm a criminal, thought Petra. She's taking her time, making me wait, shuffling my papers grimly. The woman glared at her again, held up a rubber stamp for ten, fifteen seconds, and then thumped it down on the passport. Petra felt her legs untighten. Ah, welcome to Moscow, she thought: mindless bureaucracy, state-sanctioned surliness. Two cultural stereotypes before she'd even left the airport; four if you counted the gangster men and the vaguely whorish girls. It was a relief to be dismissed with a toss of a head and a parting glance of official contempt.