At times the heat from the piles of scrub was so intense that no one could get within ten yards of the fires without having to cover their heads with their shirt.
The crops were content for the time being to; not fussy for any attention, merely content to pass the time wading through the mud until they became waterlogged and difficult. Months earlier, the refreshing autumn rain had plopped onto the exposed earth and had sat in insolent pools atop the surface refusing to penetrate the soil. However the irresistible inertia of consistent showers had forced the earth to yield its unseen forces, and allow the soaking into its lower layers. The raw dust and sand turned into loam and released its musty smell to the wind. As soon as this happened, the crops were sown and the men retreated to the hills.
The jubilant cheers of the men would slalom between the trees towards us. They were changing and shaping the earth to satisfy their means, and were overjoyed by the strides they were making.
If she sprung him raiding the biscuits, he figured that he could come up with something clever on the spot to put her off the trail. We didn’t dare think about the likelihood of her intercepting me instead. As the youngest, I would be the easiest to get to crack. If need be, I figured that I would just go along with the same lie that I was going to tell Mum- that I had a tummy ache.
At the time neither Albert nor I understood the significance of this curious act, a precursor to terror. It would be revealed to us in our own time and in our own special ways. The men had come through at an earlier time and ringbarked these trees as a way of killing them off, drying out the wood and making it easier for them to come through at a later date and chop them down when the time came. Even now, if one looked hard enough, one could see the browning of the leaves at the tips of branches; evidence of the devastating but necessary effect of the ringbarking. Branches weakened by the lack of water reaching their heights lay strewn across the floor like the abstract lines of a Pollack piece.
Besides which, we knew there was every chance they would be agitated by our presence.
We couldn’t retreat to the relative safety of home, but by now Mum, or at least Margie, would have realised we were gone. We would cop it if we went home, making the shame of not achieving what we had set out to achieve all the more difficult to swallow.. If we emerged from our hidey-hole and into the clearing we were likely to be roundly flogged for our disobedience and escorted home, but at least we would have the satisfaction of completing our mission. The only other option would have been to run away into the bush, but neither of us had the stomach for that.
I wanted to take the memory of my father, the memory of my being a man, with me.
He figured that if he stayed quiet Alby would be distracted by the activity of the others and leave him and Donna to themselves.
True to form, Alby was eventually sidetracked by the action going on around him. Pilar sidled up to him and with a tilt of her hip drew Alby into his bedroom. Zach could breathe again and Donna returned to bed.
Laughs were wild and uninhibited and enlightenment was within reach. Still, nobody broached the topic that was foremost in all their minds, the source of irrevocable and catastrophic tension. Alby directed the car through back streets to Vincent, then settled into his groove towards the scent of the ocean.
He wasn’t used to being in such a situation, amongst people so completely uninhibited in their actions, not caring whether they looked or sounded foolish. But he was genuinely excited to be involved.
And the moment was lost.
And right at that moment the inevitable course of action and consequences were placed in motion. There would be resolution.
He knelt in the sand in front of her so that her face was above his. He kissed her mouth again, and began his descent down the elegant slope of her neck, undoing the top two buttons on the way. His lips touched upon her clavicle and into her cleavage. They stopped kissing and focused their attention on their touch. They watched the flinching of his stomach as she lightly touched him with her fingertips and she giggled when he grabbed at her wrist. He placed her arms back around him but she went in search of more. Her fingers coyly traced the shape of his belt buckle. Marshall raised a hand to her face and pulled hers towards his, this time with assured intent. They kissed long and hard, forgetting everything beyond.
He wanted nothing more than to ignore the rest of the world and engage in some serious heavy petting and grinding of flesh against flesh. And from the glimmer in her eye he gathered that she did too. But that would have to wait. They had friends to entertain and a sunrise to watch.
Marshall wasn’t yet aware of this ritual, that Hazel too would be forced to spill the beans on their night; that secrets would be divulged and judgements would be made. Foreknowledge may have made him more wary, but may also have made him more aroused.
Committing to anything more would be to confront all sorts of risks- not least of which their friendship. Zach, Donna and Hazel couldn’t have counted the hours they had spent with their respective allies trying to get the two of them together. She felt manipulated and oppressed. It was completely irrational to feel this way, but the stress of it all got to her and forced her to clam up.
He was used to others playing by his rules. He didn’t know how to deal with such forthrightness from another. He wasn’t awkward around women until he found himself in a position such as this. It wasn’t until then that his hands would become clammy and his voice would break. He was a giant ball of jangled nerves; a confused cocktail of apprehension and eagerness.
their voyeuristic tendencies omnipresent, and wondering ‘what if’ into the corners of the others eyes. casting furtive glimpses over their shoulders under the pretence of keeping an eye on their belongings.
Do you know how long it takes for the tap-root of a Karri to descend 5-and-a-half feet? I’m fairly certain that I have a better idea than most.
I felt like a slowly leaking bag of grain- my contents leaching out of me. Ah, the sweet, sweet sun.
You should know that we plants are the worst gossips of any of the kingdoms of earth. We clutch on to any piece of information we can and spread word of it far and wide.
Being rooted to a single spot for year after infernal year lends itself to a certain restlessness and an unquenchable thirst for information, no matter how obscure or insignificant. We are horrendous gossips. Titbits are conflated and ascribed purpose and importance far beyond their measure. We have to amuse ourselves somehow and the mythologies of the ages can only stretch so far.
Avoiding their own thoughts and faggy matters of philosophy.
She felt that I should be kept abreast of what transpired. She felt that just because my form had been lost didn’t mean that my spirit didn’t linger in the mists. In moments of stillness and solitude she could feel my presence. And in part I guess she, like so many others, felt responsible for my death. Her words were her tribute, her dedication. And she bequeathed them to me. I didn’t know the wherewithal of the events that transpired immediately after my death until many years later when Margie, in her last act before leaving our valley, buried her collection of unaddressed letters and stories of our history amongst my tangled roots. Most of what she had written I already knew from my years of observance, albeit from a slightly different and more focussed perspective. I had witnessed it all from my passive position on the hill. But what really captured my attention were the certain fragments dealing with my death: what had happened; the aftermath; how I returned to being.
Only Mr Craig has had the heart to talk me through what happened. I think the others are still finding it hard to cope with what happened and prefer to pretend it never happened.
Despite their tender ages they could appreciate the solemnity of the occasion.
They reached my grave without a word being uttered.
No one cried. No tears were shed. They had all been paid forth at the funeral.
There wasn’t much to take in but they would take their time doing it.
He was usually meek and conscientious, but here he was taking control.
They both wanted to fuck- hard and fast.
He rued the lot of a scientist- decidedly unsexy, eternally awkward in society.
adagio, vivace, staccato, legato.
On the flats on either side of the creek it wasn’t that tough. The soil was pretty sandy, the scraggly tee-tree roots of which could be comfortably prized from its clutches with a modest straining of the back. And the Karri gullies over the back had some decent quality clay loam if you could just pull the enormous roots from the suckling soil. But at least there weren’t those damned ironstones of the ridge. Sometimes it was felt to be better to cut their losses, remove what they could now and wait for the advent of the plough to finish off the job.
Stumps were hauled away one by one by teams of lashed horses. The clutching arms of the roots clung firmly before jarring free with a jolt sending both horses and men slipping over the orange ball bearings under foot. The perpendicular roots raised their arms to the heavens in horror at their new surroundings as they were dragged away from their homes into great windrows, to be dried out over summer in preparation for bonfire season when the rains returned.
They couldn’t walk across the scorching dirt without blistering their soles and having to endure the torture of sizzling dust entering their clothing to hiss against skin.
Nothing was wasted however, industry being the mother of invention and all. In that climate nothing could be surplus to requirements. Potato and onion scraps became cuttings for future seedlings; tomato seeds were planted and lovingly tended to by the men’s morning piss. It was amazing just how far supplies can be stretched when situations turn dire.
And as the watertable rose in response to the loss of its greatest client, the shallow rooted and rapid growing bracken now grew as the ascendant species up the Karri-loam ridges. It competed with the natural grasses and foreign crops and came out on top every single time. which also found the native bracken to be impossible to digest.
As they became comfortable with each other’s words their body language became more languid and subtle. reasoning that on a first date they probably wanted to be left alone without a judging eye cast over their shoulders. Unless you already knew their ways there was no way you could be fully prepared for the onslaught of questions, innuendo and downright filthiness.
I cannot help but fear them, that I hold some degree of responsibility for their common plight. But this has not halted them from displaying their almighty empathy, schooling me in their culture and the history of their land.
Obviously, I have had to teach myself to record these stories for posterity. When I died I knew the alphabet, how to write my name and a few basic words. I knew nothing of spelling, grammar or sentence construction, so you will have to forgive the occasional lapse. But wherever I’m unsure, phonetics can often help me translate what I hear into words. Luckily I’ve had time to learn and work on these from those around me living and departed.
From my station to their left looking down into the valley my tentacles spread. I was growing into a sturdy young tree, a good hug in girth and branches starting 10 feet off the ground and canopy reaching a further 30 above that. By any estimation, a strong sapling. As my neighbours were removed I laid claim to a broad selection, and made use of the annual winter rains by spreading my roots shallow in a 30 foot radius to compliment my thickening taproot burying into an underground river 30 feet down. My domain was claimed. My finer roots extended as far as my siblings dugout even as they started digging. They winced from the pain of being pierced, and withdrew at first, but finally reached out to them, to be close, to touch their skin and convince myself that I was still a vital part of their world.
You will have to forgive me should my prose become too flowery. It is against this backdrop of emotion and angst that I learned the conventions of language.
Much of what I have learned has been through simple observation- watching and listening. My world- this valley- has changed incredibly over the years. At the start there was nothing here but bush covering these two hills and the valley at its base. Now there is a lake where the creek used to run and gentle slopes covered with crops that have rotated from season to season according to the whims of the market, and from paddock to paddock to ensure the continual sustainability of the soil. Where once kangaroos and lizards crawled across the ironstone ridges, now cattle and sheep graze contentedly on lush grasses gown in fertilized loams. It is almost as if the world we entered has been transformed into a new world. Whether it is better I will not be so mendacious as to imply.
Before I had even re-awakened, Most of the slopes had been cleared and where now covered with a poisonous carpet of green and brown bracken ferns that needed to be slashed down and burned every year to allow crops to be sown and stock to be run.
The only reason I could survive was on account of my deep, penetrating roots. Well, that and the space I had been given in which to grow. It was lonely, but I was alive.
When they reached a part of the wall non-descript enough to be certain that no one would ever notice, they would dig their nails into the compact earth and fashion a small hole. The loosened dirt fell to the floor at their knees. Slipping the folded note into the hole they would build a wall across the opening, protecting the paper from the external world. I would like to think they recognised my spirit there with them in their hidden place, but I fear they were too caught up in their own emotions to notice anything else.
I ran these symbols against my rudimentary memory of words. I learned how to use punctuation and spell all kinds of words such as ‘yearn’, and ‘ache’, and ‘pain’. Through these letters and poems to love just out of reach I learned of the tribulations of adolescence. Words written but never uttered to those that would be target.
As my siblings wrote those notes under the cloak of complete anonymity and under the auspices that no other pair of eyes would ever run across the pages, I will not recount them verbatim here. But I have committed every word to memory. And it is now part of the collective memory of the bush, for nothing is secret here. But I will not betray their confidences to anybody still living.
With my preoccupation with restoring myself to some form of halting conciousness, I missed several years of the life and goings on amongst the community. However
A summer storm had passed over one evening and ruined a couple of concrete bases that had not yet been set, so they had to rip it all up with crowbars and picks before starting again.
Mr Monroe lumbered up the hill to join the waiting crowd in anticipation.
frame was made within the concrete and a plate of iron was slid into the slots to form the trapdoor barrier. A pulley mechanism was constructed above the trapdoor to enable it to be winched up and down as needed.
The men trudged wearily through the fine brown dust.
There were some calls for optimism though with the birth of a set of twin boys for one of the new families to the valley, and the promise of a railway siding being delivered into the bush downstream and the electricity that would accompany such a scheme. But the locals staunchly took the opinion of ‘we’ll believe it when we see it’, having been let down by the authorities numerous times before.
particularly when you considered that each such community only had maybe a half dozen students, and all over varying ages to boot.
stacked eight-high into rotating columns. Fresh air was piped through a central duct and through micron filters into each individual box; each a self-contained unit keeping the mice as sterile as feasibly possible.
Besides, if you use anaesthetics or gases you never know whether they’ll interfere with the signaling pathways.
True. And if they’ve got to die, it might as well be as quick as possible.”
It’s all about the animals, really.
She would return to visit every now and then to maintain her roots, but it was evident that her life was now elsewhere.
They revelled in the worlds of words and numbers and looked on school as a pleasure rather than a chore.
So Albert wasn’t a great loss to the ivory towers of academia, but he was talismanic to the farm and to Karabup.
And believe me I had all the time in the world to observe the goings-on in the valley and beyond either through my own perception or through reliable sources spread throughout the area.
All the while whispering behind his back about how he had changed from how he was before the war.
Their daughter Felicity stayed behind with her husband and brood at the Monroe’s.
They all worked hard, but it was as if Dad and Albert worked harder.
Together during the late winters, father and son would round up the herd and separate the mothers from their calves; inject and ear-tag the new additions and sterilise the young males.
As barbaric as it sounds- and the instinctual reaction of any rational man to the description is a wince of pain and a sickness at the base of the stomach- it is preferable than the other methods around like cutting out the bollocks and feeding them to the dogs, or rubber rings which take a week to do the job. At least with Burdizzo’s it is all over within a few minutes, and short of anaesthetising and performing surgery on each individual steer it is probably the most humane method of doing the job.
Anyway, you’re not hear to read my rantings about the ethic of animal husbandry, you’re here for the story.
The scene is a devastating palette of whites and greens. All is shrouded in an iridescent white.
And that are often confused as a soul by those who cannot bear to contemplate their own utter unimportance.
He was comforted and strangely elated in this knowledge.
