The Anatomy of Wings (6 page)

Mum had a worried face. She put the tree away and vacuumed up all the tinsel.

“I'm not sure about this Miranda girl,” she said.

In the evenings the sun didn't set until nine o'clock. Beth and Miranda walked out of town along the riverbed. They took whatever food they could steal: bread, sugar in a jar, arrowroot biscuits. Miranda assured her she had seen the wild horses before, it was just a matter of finding them. Miranda talked about her stepmother's boyfriend, Kevin, with the David Essex eyes. He was going to buy her a horse. He'd promised it. A horse trailer too.

“What happened to your father?” Beth asked.

“He took the car,” Miranda said. “He went to the pub one afternoon and never came back and that's how we got stuck here with just a caravan and no way to tow it in this stupid town.”

“But aren't you sad he's gone?” Beth asked.

Miranda laughed at that.

“A bit, at first,” she said. “Kevin's nice, but don't you love his eyes?”

They followed the river out to where it snaked
through the new half-built suburbs. Where the bush had been bulldozed and the trees piled up into pyramids and the air rang with the sound of hammering and the clatter of aluminum sheeting hitting the earth.

Miranda had cigarettes. They were Winfield Greens because menthol cigarettes were good training cigarettes. They sat inside the burned-out shell of a ghost gum tree and practiced smoking them. Miranda was an expert. She rested her back against the blackened wood and sent plumes of smoke up through the empty innards of the tree into the sky.

After the builders went home the half-built suburbs became very still. They walked among the houses. Some had no roofs. Others had no walls. They went inside and imagined the rooms. Miranda knew exactly how she wanted her house to look. She walked and pointed: sunken lounge, shag rug, queen-size water bed.

When Beth tried to describe her dream house the words got stuck on her tongue. She felt strange. She tried hard to picture it but couldn't and instead she found herself imitating Miranda's descriptions. She preferred to look up through the framework as dusk came and the sky changed to a deeper blue. The bushland at the edges of the bulldozer scars changed too.

Everything that she saw glowing during the day
seemed tarnished beside the light that was at the heart of evening. The bleached color of things was replaced by a beauty that stole into everything. The pale yellow leaves grew golden. The white gums opened up their hearts and shone.

I DARDANELLES COURT

S
OMETIMES AT NIGHT, WHEN HIS BROTHER FINISHED YARNING AND TELLING JOKES AND STAGGERED OFF TO BED, MARSHALL REMEMBERED HER.
His memories were curiously silent, even though in those days the earth still talked to him. The background of dirt streets, tin huts, the hospital tree full of brawling cockatoos were all soundless but her face, her perfect round face, it spoke to him. He heard her eyelashes closing over her black eyes, her breath against his cheek. He liked to remember her late at night; he hoped she would appear in his dreams.

They had always lived together, Arthur and him. They'd never left the town since they arrived except once to go to war and after that they vowed never to leave again. Or at least Arthur vowed (in the same way he'd vowed that they should never love another woman) and Marshall listened. They'd lived in the
town since before the pavement roads or bridge across the river and since the mine was just a head-frame on the tallest hill.

In the beginning Marshall tried to describe it to his mother in letters, the sheer size of the sky, the sound of the bush at night, rustling and clicking and shivering in its own skin, the sight of the stars, the smallness of their canvas tent. In each letter he enclosed a bob, king faceup, between the pages.

It was Arthur who fell in love first. Arthur, who preferred the public bar, tobacco smoke and sweat, the slow unwinding of stories, the uncomplicated company of men. It was an unexpected event. The girl was Mary Price, the daughter of the publican of the Imperial Hotel. He tried very hard to ignore her but she was nearly a woman; she had red hair and wore trousers and swore. She'd been kicked out of three boarding schools and didn't care. She was forbidden by law and by her father to come into the public bar but she slouched around the door to the kitchen making eyes at Arthur.

They heard the publican telling his daughter to steer clear of him, Arthur Murray, a scalawag and a drunk who would amount to nothing but would break her heart. Marshall sat and drank his beer and watched his brother grow quieter. He watched the exchange of glances from kitchen door to bar stool and back again.

Mary Price and Arthur Murray began their love affair behind the Imperial in an alleyway lined with kegs. She smoked his cigarettes and stuck out her chest like in the movies. They kissed beneath the hotel rooms. He told her he would marry her, he'd build a house, he'd treat her like a queen before he went back inside for last drinks.

God knows Marshall could remember trying as well back then. He smiled shyly at the girls returning home from boarding school and at the ladies in their sun-faded whites lining up beside the picture theater. But he felt too large beside them, grotesque, with his chipped front tooth from a split rock and his faded hat-flattened hair. Instead he picked Arthur up from the ground more nights than he could count and lurched home with him along the dusty streets. He cooked dinner and cleaned the plates. He put Arthur to bed and woke him in the morning. He explained away his brother's absences from work. He washed away the vomit stains from the front canvas wall.

Arthur took the wild Mary Price for drives in the desert, first parking his borrowed truck down the road so her old man wouldn't see. She smoked cigarettes beside him as he drove. On the way he didn't say a word but by the brown water, beneath the noon sun winking and scribbling messages in light on the rock walls, he promised her everything. They undid their clothes and hung them from the trees.

When the war came they trained for a year beside the sea. Arthur could've returned twice but didn't.

“I should've gone home,” he said each night when he'd finished staggering the length of Flinders Street after drinking in every pub. He wrote to Mary Price telling her he'd be home soon.

“You should have married her,” said Marshall quietly. “You should have married her before you left.”

Marshall wrote to his mother. He explained what the jungle sounded like at night, so close, like someone constantly whispering in your ear, then the sudden deafening roar of rain. He described the intricacies of drinking raindrops from palm leaves, in dripping groves, above the millpond sea. He wrote when Arthur lost his right arm.

In the hospital, where the sea sighed loudly through the windows, Arthur waited daily for Mary Price's letter. He waited hourly for her letter.

When the war was over they headed west again. For a while, after the closeness of the jungle, Marshall found he was terrified by the open space. It was the flat faded land, the straight road, the towering sky. It was too full of air. He felt buoyant himself, that if he stepped from the truck his feet might not even touch the earth and he might instead drift upward and slowly away.

Mary had married another man and run away to Sydney. Her father told them at the pub door. Arthur was still in his uniform. He held his arm out to shake the publican's hand before he realized what was missing.

“I can't fathom it,” said the publican, “why she'd give up on a fine man like you?”

Arthur and Marshall took up their stools at the bar and began to drink again. They bought a block of land alongside the empty river and began to build a house.

“We are better off this way,” said Arthur. “I'm going to keep away from them from this day on. You'd do well to do the same, my brother. I don't want a woman to set foot in this house again.”

Marshall didn't disobey. That life was not for him. Women were a puzzle that could not be solved. He listened to his brother as he always had. But he fell in love. Without warning. By accident.

The woman's name was May, a nurse, five years older than him. She had long brown hair that she wore pinned back with fifty bobby pins. She had a curious squashed-in face and fierce black eyes. Arthur had fought a man on the main street and busted his nose and May had dressed it. Each week Marshall needed to find a new excuse to be near her.

He had a cough that would not go away.

“Your temperature is normal,” she said.

He had fallen and hurt his back, oh, how his back ached.

“Bend over, see if you can touch your toes, there, you see, it can't be that bad.”

He had injured his arm in a drunken football match.

“Show me, bend the wrist, can you feel me touching your fingers? It seems fine to me.”

They met first on the hospital grounds beneath the cockatoo-laden hospital tree. Then later, in the evenings, after he had taken his brother home from the pub and cooked him dinner, he walked back into town and talked to her over the nurses’ quarters fence.

They promised to meet each other in their dreams.

The matron reprimanded her for kissing in public, waving her hand at the white wards and the shining linoleum and the pale faces with the sun streaming in through the windows.

“How can you risk losing all this?” she asked.

Arthur was angry with his brother.

“You'll be left with nothing,” he said. “Trust me.”

Marshall drove May for a picnic by the water hole. When he held her he was still filled with the miracle of it. When she leaned into him. When she looked up at him. But she ruined everything when she hinted at marriage and children.

“It's not so easy as all that,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Well I have Arthur to consider. I can't just up and leave him.”

He remembered the sunlight there. How the trees had hung their heads in shame. Later they had walked a short way up the hill to the painted rock but she had been tense beside him, fighting back tears, silent.

Soon he forgot to walk by the hospital in the morning to kiss her good day. He stopped coming in the evening to kiss her sweet dreams.

“Where have you been?” she asked. “I waited all yesterday.”

“Do you think I've nothing to do with my time? I'm building a house with my own bare hands. My brother has one arm.”

“Don't you love me anymore?”

“Don't.”

“Don't what?”

“Don't try to trick me with all your questions.”

In the afternoons when she went to buy stamps or an apple or the
Women's Weekly
she looked into the dim interior of the public bars and saw Marshall's back beside his brother's. She cried into her hands at home. She cried into her starched dress, onto her brown stockings, into her small room, into her small life. She handed in her notice. She packed her brown
suitcase. She was heading farther inland, deeper inland; there seemed no other road to take.

Before she left she walked to the house the brothers had built. When she stepped onto the land Arthur sensed it. He stood up from his seat and walked to the door. Marshall came from the back, where he had been washing in a bucket.

“I came to tell you I'm leaving,” she said.

He wore a blank face.

“I'm sorry to hear it,” he said.

“And that I love you.”

He looked confused, ashamed; she saw it. He was embarrassed.

“It was nice to meet you,” he said after a long time.

Arthur stood at the door. He didn't move. He watched them both carefully. The bush waited. It was still and quiet and emptied out of everything.

“Good luck then,” Marshall said.

He did not come any closer.

When she turned she couldn't see for her tears and she stumbled and almost fell but corrected herself. She never knew a grief like it again.

All those years, there was nothing confusing about it, yet still it confused him. Each night, after Arthur had gone to bed, he remembered her. He put his head in his hands. He remembered her as she was then, a young lady, only twenty-five, turning away
from him, leaving Memorial. But now they were old, both of them, and all those years and all that land grown between them.

Each night it was the same.

That day after she had gone Marshall turned back to the house. He was made of stone. His heart did not beat. Blood did not move through his veins. The river inside of him dried up. The bush began talking again but he did not hear it. He did not hear it again after that.