Beautiful Like An Animal

The house was on the corner. A dead motorbike bike swung on a cable from the tree out the front. There was a six foot high timber fence that ran around the property. A rope thick as an anaconda hung in loops across the top.

When I walked past, links of chain clanked and a dog crashed towards me. It barked like it was insane. Its face slathered, all teeth and red gums, in the gaps between the fence posts. A pit-bull.

I would stand on the block that might become my block and touch the rough trunk of the ironbark at the centre and wonder what I was doing.

I thought about my child walking past that house on her way to school. I thought about that dog lunging at her. What kind of person owns a dog like that? Hangs a bike in a tree like a warning.

“A dealer,” said Isabel who gave us lifts to the ferry and back.

“What does he deal?”

“Ice,” she said, glancing across at me. “My sister got caught up in it for a while.”

I’d met her sister. She worked at the club. She was blond and smiley. She leant towards you when you spoke.

“Did you notice her skin?” said Isabel and I tried to remember. “The scars on her face.”

“Oh,” I said. “I thought that was acne.”

“No,” said Isabel. “It’s ice. It ages people. Screws up their skin. Rots their teeth.”

A picture of Evie with scars on her forehead rose. I pushed it away hard. Not that. Not my child.

“You Natly?” A cigarette voice called and I turned. A woman on the balcony of the house opposite was watching me. “You thinking of buying that land?”

“Thinking about it.”

“You betta come up,” she said.

I went up and stood her balcony. I could see the whole block. It was a good block. Level, waterfront, but high set.

“I’m Audrey,” she said. She brought me tea in a flowered cup. A can of lemonade for Evie.

“How’d you know my name?” I asked her.

“I know everything,” she said and laughed, showed me strong teeth.

I asked her about the house on the corner. “Don’t worry about him,” she said, lighting up a Longbeach. “He won’t bother you. They only hurt each other. Stay out of their circle and you’ll be fine.”

We drank our tea. “What’s the island like? As a place to live?”

“Quiet.”

“Even him?” I nodded towards the motorbike.

“Especially him. Never hear a peep. Except for the occasional car at three am. But they only stay for five minutes.”

*

In the afternoon, Evie and I collected flowers. The island was wild with them. Jonquils in the grass and fences drenched with jasmine. Bougainvillea that covered a tall tree so it stood like a skyscraper of hot pink blossoms.

We lifted the hems of our skirts to make bowls for all that bright petal softness. At the house, Evie filled jars and vases and round white bowls with colour. Outside the ocean sparkled and rolled. I sat in an armchair on the balcony and let the space and light soak into me.

When the darkness came in, Evie and I cooked tuna pasta together. As we ate, Evie said, “If we lived here, we could have a garden.”

“Yeah, we could.” I thought of our tiny flat in Darwin. How my daughter was growing up without trees. Or even grass. Just a concrete balcony one metre by three. I thought about how much money it cost to live in that tiny flat. How hard I had to work and how the work took me away from Evie, who was growing up with heart-breaking speed.

After dinner, we turned the music up loud and danced in the kitchen with our hands in the air.

And all night, I kept thinking, I want this. I want more of this.

*

The agent’s name was John. I was on the block when he rang.

“He’ll take $52,000.”

The block was flat and grassy like a lawn, with one large tree in the centre and a three-metre drop off at the front down to the mangroves. When I stood on the grass, I could only see the mangroves. But when I stood on the back of John’s ute, I could see the sea. It was everywhere, it was a grey and smooth. The headlands on either side were wild with trees.

“Okay,” I said, “Fifty-two.”

I hung up and shook with what I had just done.

The dealer’s name was Loopy. His wife was Lippy. This made it hard to be afraid of them. Loopy and Lippy. I imagined small painted dolls made out of timber with bases that rocked.

“They’re leaving anyway,” John said

“Oh that’s good.” I felt washed by relief.

“Yeah, somebody took to them with an axe.”

“An axe?” My voice went squeaky, the relief abruptly gone.

“A deal gone wrong. The axe was meant for Loopy, but Lippy stepped in front and copped it instead.” He lifted one arm. “Cut right through the tendons.”

I felt chilled.

But it was done by then. I’d already bought the block.

Never mind, I thought. I don’t have to build on it. I’ll can always just sell it.

I packed up my things and took my daughter back to Darwin. Away from the sparkling water and the blossoms and the ice-dealer with the pit-bull on the corner.

*

The lump was in my left breast. Hard as a frozen pea, it sat at two o’clock from the nipple.

What I remember most is the waiting. Days spent sitting in grey painted hospital rooms on a chair bolted to the floor. The television always on with the sound turned up loud.

The nurse who gave me the mammogram had long, slim feet. The room was beige without windows. The mammogram machine took up most of the room.

The nurse was narrow in the shoulders and hips, dark-skinned and young. She had a long straight nose and serious eyes. She lay my breast on a cold plate and brought another plate down on top. My flesh squashed strange and flat as play dough.

She ran to the other side of the room and pressed a button on the wall. Then she ran back to me and released my breast.

“Why do you run?” I asked the third time she did this.

“It is not comfortable for you to have your breast like this.” She waved at the plate, which was once again descending onto my flesh. “I don’t want you hurting any longer than you have to.”

She ran back to the button. She wore white volleys and the sound of them slapping the floor was the largest sound in the room.

The day I found out that I did not have cancer, I walked out of the hospital into sunshine. I sat in my car but didn’t leave the car park. I closed my eyes. I felt the warmth coming through the glass and onto my arm. Whatever you might believe happens after death, there is no sensation of sunlight warming skin. This is a thing purely for the body. I fell in love with my own life then.

I picked Evie up from school and drove to the pool. I remember standing breast deep in light-spangled water holding her in my arms. I could feel the line where the water ended and the air began. I could feel the slippery warmth of my daughter’s body against my breathing chest. I felt my own intimate aliveness and I understood how cavalier I had been with my moments. And that I couldn’t do that anymore. I needed to live closer to my own truth. I wasn’t sure what this meant yet. I could only see the next step. A home. I needed to make a home for me and Evie.

I grew up on an island. From the age of two until eight, I lived with my family on Scotland Island in Pittwater. The house was a fibro shack on the side of a hill. You could see the water from the kitchen.

I don’t remember winter. Only blue days full of light. The sparkle of summer on the water. My parents still in love. They held parties where they danced with the neighbours but mostly with each other.

When their marriage had started to crack, they tried to outrun the damage. I was eight years old when we moved to Tasmania. There was a new house every year and new schools too. The rain came down in hard sharp lines. The wind blew straight in from Antarctica.

I’d missed my friends. I’d missed my dog. But underneath all this was a heartsick longing for water and sunlight. For the island.

*

We rented a disheveled Queenslander on the edge of the sea.

There were no police on the island. Or doctors or shops. Not really. There was a room in the front of an old house near the jetty, where you could buy bait or milk. The walls were lined with dark timber shelving. At regular intervals sat small piles of dry goods. Three cans of baked beans. A pyramid of individually wrapped toilet rolls. Neat stacks of mosquito coils. The bread came every morning on the ferry, except Sunday, and all of it was white.

The builder’s name was Ben. He was a tall solid man, with wide shoulders, leathered by sun. He wore a blue singlet and small blue shorts. On his big feet were scuffed boots with thick socks pushed down.

He looked at the ironbark in the centre of my block. “You’ll need to get rid of that, before you do anything.”

We walked around the block, pacing out the house. Ken said there’d always been drugs on the island. They used to send dinghies out to meet the big boats coming in from Asia. Slabs of hash dropped into the floor of a tinny on a moonless night.

“But it’s different now,” he said, with a nod to the motorbike hanging from the tree on the corner. “The drugs are different.”

*

Dave was about as handsome as a man can be. Olive skinned and square jawed with a movie-star cleft in the middle of his chin.

I didn’t notice he was handsome. Not at first, anyway. I saw only the curve in his spine. He stood like a man who’d been hit about the shoulders with a metal pole.

He was here to look at my tree. When I picked him up from the jetty, he sat in the passenger seat with his head skimming the roof of the car, his big kneecaps close to his chin. He didn’t talk.

I have spent my life working in the arts, mostly with women. The few men I have worked with were all fine boned and soft bellied. And chatty. Nothing like this. Dave was a different animal altogether, something closer to a horse or a lion.

At my block, he rubbed his jaw and studied the tree. His body was hard with muscle. The muscle pushed against his clothes.

I wanted to touch him. To see what his skin felt like. Skin stretched taut over so much muscle. He smelt of soap. He was shaved. And yet there was something very raw about him.

He talked about angles and ropes and climbing, how to safely bring the tree down. We talked money for a bit and then I drove him back to the Queenslander and made him coffee. We sat at the kitchen table and looked at the water.

Dave drank my coffee and his story fell out. There was a problem with his sons. “The 23 year old is just a bit young in his ways. He doesn’t think. But the older one. He’s gone, I reckon.” He put down his cup.

“Ice?” I felt self-conscious. The word felt fake in my mouth.

But Dave just nodded. “They took my credit cards. I always left my wallet on the table. It never occurred to me not to trust my boys.” He looked at his hands and was quiet for a while, then he said, “I kicked them out of the house, but only for a couple of days. They’re back now. They didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

I told him the little I know about addiction, how sometimes people have to hit rock bottom before they can change.

He lifted his huge hands from the table and then dropped them again. “They’re my boys.”

I looked at him, saw the parent. Saw myself. And Evie. I would give anything, of course. I would give everything.

After he left, Evie and I walked back to the block. She dug a hole at the base of the tree and put a note inside, then she put her arms around the trunk. Her skin was pale against the bark. She could only reach a third of the way around. She put her face sideways and closed her eyes.

I waited, not wanting to disturb whatever she was feeling. But then the mosquitoes came out. Swarms of them. Biting.

Evie stayed against the tree, not moving.

It was getting dark. There were lights on in the houses either side of us and the sound of a television coming from further up the hill, but through all this, I could feel the quiet of the earth and the way it ran up my legs and cooled my heart.

A mosquito whined close to my face. I flapped my hand. There was a bite on my arm and two on my ankle. I wanted to say to Evie, “Come on, honey. Time to go.” But I didn’t. I waited and finally, she released the tree and turned to face me.

“Ready?”

“Yep.” She put her hand in mine and we started walking back.

“I’m getting bitten.”

“Me too.”

She didn’t have any shoes on, and her tread on the gravel road was careful. She looked at me. “I asked the tree what its name was.”

“What did it say?”

“Robert,” she said.

I felt laughter bubble up in me but I swallowed it down. She was so earnest. She said, “As soon as I asked, the name came. I think that must be the tree’s name. I asked if I could take some bark, too, and he said yes.” She paused in the middle of the road under the street light, and from her pocket pulled a small chunk of thick black bark.

“What was on the note?”

“I said we were sorry. And I drew a picture of you and me. I said we needed a home. I said we were sad he was going to be cut down.”

There was a tenant in the house on the corner now, an addict. The motorbike was gone, but the dog was still there, or a similar one.

I saw him once, a man in his thirties with his hair cut prison short. He had the grey skin of a smoker. He kept his eyes on the ground.

I raised my hand in greeting, but he didn’t look up. There was such hopelessness about him. He turned and went back through the huge grey fence, past the barking dog and into the broken house.

I stood there for a moment. The dog stopped barked. The street settled into quiet. A tiny bird flew overhead, opening and closing its wings, a tiny silhouette against the massive blue sky.

In the morning, Evie went for a walk and came back with a bird’s nest as big as a hat. “I found it on the road.” She said holding it up, “Did a person make it?”

“A bird. It must have blown out of the tree in the wind.”

The wind was strong and coming from the north straight off the sea, it tasted wild and salty and blew my hair around.

Evie held it lightly in both hands. “I thought it must be a bird, it’s too lovely to be made by a person.”

She put it down by the back door and we went together out into the wind. Evie rode her bike. I watched her in her bright red dress. There were trees all around her. She was singing. The sound of it came rushing at me, carried on that wild wind.

When we got to the top of the hill the wind was electric. It was the kind of wind that makes you want to laugh or whoop. A crazy joy inside it.

Evie did loops on her bike, riding ahead and then circling back to keep me always in view. Her red dress a flag in the wind.

I walked and walked and Evie rode her bike and neither of us got tired. We went all over the island and ended up at the block. We climbed the low branches of the tree until we could see the sea. The tide was high. Air rushed at us. There was nothing to see but trees and ocean. The water was grey and wind-whipped and beautiful like an animal is beautiful. Savage and full of grace. The beauty rose up and over me, it pushed right through me, carried on that ferocious wind. It made me know, somewhere deep inside myself, that we would be okay.

That night I could feel the deep quiet of the island. There were the curlews and lapping waves, but under this, I had a sense of the earth breathing. It restored me to myself in some profound way. A stillness crept into my muscles. Thank you, I thought, all through my sleep. And then again, when I woke. Thank you.