Fiction — Highly Commended, Kathryn Lister
Kathryn Lyster is a MA Creative Writing student at The University of Sydney. She is a published poet and writer and is currently working on her second novel.
Kathryn lives in Sydney and is currently obsessed with True Crime podcasts.
Kathryn lives in Sydney and is currently obsessed with True Crime podcasts.
The Kitchen Table
Julian wakes early on the day he is to kill his wife. His eyes open before the sun and chorus of birds. First it will be kookaburras, heralding the dawn with raucous laughter. Ten years on and he still wonders what about life is so damn funny; daily he suffers through a sense of waking up in Jurassic Park. Even the smaller, lesser birds here are not the sweet chirpers of London, or say, Berlin in the summer. Australian birds don’t sing – they shout. Their melodies don’t float gently through air, they punch the fuck out of it. Julian thinks of hole-punches pushing through A4 sheets of paper, his teenage scrawl. Punch punch punch. Snap. Like his fist into a wall.
Angie moans in her sleep, face covered with springy auburn curls. She smells of the herbal balm she rubbed into her chest before sleep, and the soles of her feet before rolling on thick itchy socks. The balm – comfrey, eucalyptus, mint, lavender, tea tree maybe – is the only form of medical intervention Angie would accept for her chest infection; the sheets reek of it, the same way they once stank of sweat and summer sex. Fluids, cigarette smoke, the small handmade chocolates she would eat after midnight. She’s been sick for weeks now, her bogged lungs are coastal wetlands.
Julian swears. Bites the nail on his right thumb. There’s a feeling to this day he thought he could outrun, but his guts are churning. He drops out of bed, sprints to their ensuite. The sound is excessive, too obscene. Julian winces, doubles over, elbows digging into his tanned thighs. Holds his breath at the stench. The kookaburras start up, the family that hatched three young last year. He should have shot them, but Angie doesn’t like guns. He hears her groan, yawn in the bedroom. He wipes his ass. Flushes the toilet, disgusted, still wracked with cramps, guts twisted by fists.
In the kitchen, Julian makes coffee with the small Italian press that came as a wedding present, the only one that had no card. They’d called the hotel, searched the back of her sister’s car, and since that day it’s the mystery gift from ‘The Jenkins’, a private joke, a couple most likely a friend of his parents, sometimes – singular, usually female, an old lover of his who hid at the back of the ceremony, weeping. Julian fumbles with the ground coffee, spilling it over the edge of the metal rim and onto the counter. He flinches at the sound of Angie coming in from the bedroom.
Her auburn hair is mussed, like it used to be from his hands tangling in it. That time in Melbourne he came right into it. They’d laughed, smoked a spliff and nestled into each other, falling asleep early and when she’d woken, they’d laughed some more at her congealed fringe.
‘How did you sleep, babe?’
Julian steps away from her reaching fingertips. He grabs a cloth, cleans up the spilled coffee and lights the stove, settles the press onto the burner. ‘Toast?’
Angie nods, slips into a wooden chair at the table. She pulls her knitted cardigan around herself, the one he bought her last year for her birthday. Angie coughs, both hands cupped around her mouth.
The coffee boils over and hisses into the blue flame. Angie jumps up, wraps the cardigan around her hand and pulls the coffee off the stove.
‘Well that’s burned.’ A crimson rosella lands on the fence, a flash of colour against the winter garden. ‘I wonder where her friend is?’
Julian joins his wife at the window. ‘How do you know that’s the female? They’re monomorphic.’
‘They’re what?’
Julian clears his throat. ‘Monomorphic. The same.’
‘Is it just a bird word?’
‘No, it’s a word-word, Angie.’
She looks away from the bird. ‘Well she’s the girl. I just know it.’
‘Maybe they’re gay,’ Julian says.
The bird fluffs up its feathers and doubles in size. Angie points to a planter box next to the garden furniture. The heads of succulents are discarded on the bricks.
‘The bastards. They ripped them to shreds.’
‘I told you it would happen if we stopped feeding them,’ Angie says.
‘They are destructive because we fed them. They’re cockatoos for god’s sake, holding us to ransom.’
‘I like them. They’re cocky.’
Julian rolls his eyes at her joke. ‘I liked my flapjack cactuses. They’re ruined.’
‘They’ll grow.’
‘I should get a gun. Shoot the bloody things.’
Angie watches the red and blue bird turn its back to the rain. She wonders about birds and bad weather. Do animals feel it, like people do? In the far paddock she sees the cows, flanks turned in unison, heads low. They are waiting it out. Silent. Still.
‘It’s a grey day. How about we go out for coffee?’
Julian sighs. Scratches his head. Pushes his glasses further up his nose.
They leave the house at 8:12am. Julian eyes the clock in the hallway as they walk out the front door. He is wearing his red Patagonia jacket; Angie has her mustard cardigan pulled over her head. They run to the car, argue about who will drive, Angie relents and chucks her husband the keys.
There is a fire in the grate at the café. The room is warm and noisy. Angie smiles as they enter. Julian frowns. They find a small table near a window, now being lashed with heavy rain. Angie gushes over a small pink wildflower in a glass bottle on the table. Julian humphs about the wobble, shoves a folded napkin under a leg.
‘What’s with you today?’ Angie asks, counting petals on the flower. Julian purses his lips. Folds his hands in his lap.
‘Huh?’
‘Nothing. Jesus. It’s raining. I’m cold. Can we just skip the third degree?’ He waves over a waiter and orders for them both.
‘We live in the rainshadow, it doesn’t always send you into morose.’
A woman, not the waiter, appears at the table. She squeezes Angie’s shoulder. ‘Wouldn’t want to get married on a day like this, would you?’
Angie laughs. ‘It rained on our wedding day. I’ve heard it’s a good omen.’ Julian folds his arms, crosses then uncrosses his legs.
‘How’s business?’ Angie asks.
The woman nods. ‘The world’s on fire, look around, no matter what shit goes down, everyone still needs coffee.’
‘The world’s not on fire Yvette. It’s just a forest fire.’
‘Excuse me, it’s the Amazon, not some parochial piece of bush, okay?’ Angie looks to Yvette. ‘Just a forest fire. Can you even?’
‘I read it’s not arson. Ranchers or the government are burning the rainforest on purpose.’
‘For agriculture. Beef, to be precise,’ Angie says.
‘It’s been going on for years. Just because Leonardo-f’ing-Dicaprio puts it on twitter, doesn’t mean it’s anything new.’
Yvette shrugs. ‘I wish we could send some of this over to Mexico. That’s all I’m saying.’
Julian leans against the cold glass. ‘The Amazon is not in Mexico, but good luck with that.’
The woman leaves, sing-songing a hello to a man who just came, windswept, through the door.
‘Do you have to be like that? She’s just being friendly.’
Julian cracks his knuckles. ‘I don’t need her as my friend. She’s your friend.’
‘So there’s a line down the middle now?’
The coffees come to the table.
‘They’re using your cups,’ Julian says, sipping from the black ceramic rim.
‘They bought the whole lot. I’m happy.’
‘Yes. Something like that would make you happy.’
Angie lifts a spoonful of sugar into her latte and stirs it into the shining beige foam. ‘You’re a pain in the ass today.’
Rain gathers force outside, drowning out the sounds of forks scraping plates and breakfast conversations. It grows into a monster, a weather beast forging a river down the main street. Angie and Julian sit in silence. It has been one of those weeks. One of those months. This morning is nothing new. Except to Julian, who is watching the rain and wondering. Will her blood run like that?
He assesses her pale neck, twisted right to see the rain. Two small moles near the chin. A thick mauve vein. He imagines taking a fork from the ridiculous tin bucket on the table, and prodding it prongs-first into the vein. Is that a jugular? He thinks a jugular is thicker, bigger, a muscle almost. Surely, not this tiny spiderweb thing. Jugular sounds like jaguar. All thoughts today lead back to the goddam Amazon. When did it stop being acceptable to hit your wife?
When did they get to say no to sex? When did the world get so out of whack that he has to sit here and listen to a woman who thinks the Amazon is in Mexico and that rain can somehow be transported from Australia across the ocean? What, in giant swimming pools? Forgodsake.
‘What are you thinking?’
‘What?’
Angie opens her mouth wider than the rain, ‘What are you thinking?’
‘You really don’t want to know.’
She leans in closer. ‘Try me.’
Julian inspects the table closest to them. They are sharing a newspaper. How quaint. ‘I am thinking, dear wife, of what it would feel like – to kill you.’
Angie smiles. ‘And?’
He takes the fork, one of those terrible vintage ones, meaning it’s bric-a-brac came from a charity shop, meaning someone else used it for years, all that spit, the wet greasy molars. Lamb chops on Sundays.
‘These prongs,’ he pauses, points to her neck, ‘right there.’ Julian makes a stabbing motion. Inches from her skin.
‘Is that every man’s dream then, to do away with his wife? How very predictable.’
‘I don’t know about every man.’
‘But this man?’ A hiccup. ‘My man?’
‘Jesus. Angela.’ Julian says. ‘We should have had children.’
He watches the words hit her. Right between the eyes. They mist over. This is how he wants her. Undone. Unhinged. On their last day together, he wants to make her suffer. He picks the flower off the stem. Shoves it into her mouth. Jams her lips closed. Until she swallows.
The lights of the car streak through the deluge and dip as Julian drives over the cattle grid. The house looks closed in by the low-slung clouds, the slant of the corrugated roof is a sharp metal line against the eggplant skin sky. Something more than rain is coming. Angela and Julian built the house themselves. Julian drew up the plans, Angela consulted a library of books. They mulled it over way past midnight, a hundred midnights spent bent at the table or on the rug by the gas fire of their small fibro rental in the middle of town. This would be a house that had never been seen before, an amalgamation of reclaimed materials and the earth and felled trees from their land.
‘Park in the garage,’ Angie says, gesturing to the barn where a harem of hens have taken cover and are peering, wide-eyed, from the gloom.
Julian turns off the car.
‘It’s going to hail.’
Julian scoffs. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. We haven’t had hail in years.’
Angie runs towards the house. Her clogs slip on the stone paving and she skids out, hard, her palms scrape as she tries to save the bouquet of proteas she bought at the café. The dust pink flowers scatter. Julian comes up behind, stands over his wife. She reaches her left hand up to him. He stares. Gathers up the proteas and steps around her.
Angie scrambles to her feet. She holds out her aching hands, bends her wrists and wipes the grit and blood on her shirt. Julian is in the house, the door’s partly open. She watches water gather in her wounds, thinning the bright red blood.
‘Julian!’ she calls out, through driving rain.
A light comes on in the house, she sees it fall out the kitchen window onto the budding gardenias below. This is too much rain for them to open in the spring. Angie clutches her sore hands to her chest. All those tiny luminous cocoons cooking up the satin white petals she adores. How Julian used to leave them for her in the mornings, with coffee. The front door slams in the wind; the panel of leadlight glass – a single hysterical 1920s kookaburra, beak open, head thrown back – threatens to shatter.
Angie makes a dash for the old barn. She comes in sopping, scattering clucking chickens into the clutter of ancient farm machinery. The barn is disorganized, a cutlery drawer, the place for chucking misfit things. She clears a bag of snail bait, paintbrushes, stack of burlap sacks from the chaise lounge she salvaged from the store in town. She flops down onto the once-turquoise velvet, no longer vibrant.
Music floods from the main house and swims through the rain. Something hard, lots of drums, like butterfly stroke arms in a pool. Angie imagines Julian thrashing around, trashing the place, smashing plates, her ceramics, belting the proteas she bought into the floor. His skin’s sticky, fringe stuck to forehead, spit at the corner of his chapped lips. Music drowning out his shrieks. Can a man shriek? Or is that only a woman thing? A dying cat thing? A horror movie? Angie doesn’t know. Her head is a windscreen fogged over.
Yvette. In the barn. Standing over Angie, asleep on the old velvet lounge. The chickens have fled to sunlight and worms drowned from soil to air. They are pecking around the exposed roots of a fig tree when Angie wakes. They come vaguely into focus. A bleary figure looming over her.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ she says. ‘I thought it was Julian.’
Yvette sits next to her friend. Angie folds her feet under herself. ‘You slept out here all night?’
Angie rubs her eyes, points vaguely towards the day. ‘I was out in the storm, Julian was cross. It was quite fine in here.’ She coughs, the sound of bronchioles underwater.
Yvette squeezes Angie’s knee. ‘Where is he, is he home?’
Yvette makes an unusual sound through pursed lips, her tongue on the back of her front teeth. ‘Honey.’
Angie fishes around on the floor for her glasses. She puts them on. ‘What time is it? How long have I slept?’
Yvette takes Angie’s hand and holds onto it.
‘Shit. I had a meeting.’ Angie coughs, thumps a fist against her chest. ‘Did your place flood?’
Yvette shakes her head. Walks towards the door and beckons for Angie. They walk out across slushy wet ground, sinking under their shoes. Angie grabs onto her friend, they balance and make it over the lawn to the house.
A ginger cat darts past them, a small wagtail in its mouth. Angie tries to get hold of it, it runs too fast.
‘Milo! No! Drop it. Come here!’
She’s off, after the cat, into a swathe of redgums on the side of the dam. She chases the cat, reaching for its thick bushy tail, shouting for the feline to stop, to drop the prey. The cat climbs up a tree, dragging the small bird to high branches. Angie watches the black and white tail feathers, sticking out like a fishbone in cartoons, it flitters until it stops. ‘You beast!’ Angie shouts, tears in her eyes.
‘I’m so mad, he’s meant to be locked inside. Julian must have let him out on purpose.’
‘I suppose it’s their instinct. To kill.’
Angie pulls her hair back. ‘He did this on purpose.’ ‘He’s just a cat.’
‘No, him. Julian. He hates the birds.’
Angie storms past Yvette towards the house. Her eyes scan across the dam to see how far it has risen. Her eyes stop dead. Yvette comes up next to her. Holds her left hand.
‘I wanted to tell you,’ Yvette says.
‘You wanted to tell me? You what? I, this – ‘ Angie pulls her hand free, heads into the reeds, her boots sucking in the black mud. ‘Julian! Julian!’ she has to kick her feet free of the boots and walk, barefoot to the side of the dam, water rushes up to her knees, it’s like walking through molasses, Angie takes handfuls of reeds for leverage to pull her body forward. At the water’s edge, she holds a hand up to her eyes. Squints. ‘Julian!’ she looks back to Yvette, on dry land. ‘Get over here!’
‘It’s too late! Come back!’
Angie wades forward, frantic, slapping the brown murk, deeper until she’s weightless, floating, arms a windmill through water till she gets to the thing near the middle, the long log face-down. She tears at clothes, rolls the body over.
Yvette is squelching through the wet to get to the water. Calling for Angie to stop, for her to come back, calm down. Stop.
On her back, Angie holds under the chin and swims the body to shore. She’s swallowing water, taking in silt, weed dregs, floaters, the taste of bottom-scum.
When she can walk, Angie pulls Julian behind her. On her knees, she drags him over smooth rocks to the grey sand on the bank of the dam his grandfather built for cattle. She is gasping, spluttering, spitting the dam, wiping her eyes, coughing.
Yvette rubs her friends back. Angie smacks her hand away. ‘Did you see him?’
‘We both saw him.’
‘Yvette!’ Angie heaves to catch her breath. Savage coughs. ‘Did you see him, before you woke me?’
Yvette walks away from Julian, disheveled and dead on the sand.
‘Did you see him? Did you see him?’ Angie lunges at her friend. Pushes her back.
‘You’re upset, just breathe. Breathe.’
‘Don’t tell me to breathe!’ Angie squats, wheezing now.
Julian’s eyes are open. Dead fish eyes. His skin is chalk. His lips – the saddest kind of blue.
Yvette walks up from the dam, the damage, her friend crawling in the mud, struggling to gain traction. To free herself. When she reaches the house, Yvette sits on the verandah in a white cane rocking chair. The rain has washed her free of mud, of blood. She sat at dawn, shivering, watching the sun rise. Angela hasn’t noticed that the skirt and red jersey she’s wearing aren’t hers. She took them calmly from the couples’ wardrobe as the kookaburras were starting. She wanted Angela to sleep, to rest deeply, before everything that would come next. Before she told her that she had come over in the storm to check on the dam, to rescue them if they needed it, from rising water, from the inevitable flood that somehow did not come. She wanted also, to gather herself, like doing up a zip, before she told Angela what she saw: Julian, in the kitchen, sharpening a knife at the table. The red cattle dog lying next to him, blood slipping from her neck. His wife doesn’t like guns. She had fought him, stolen the knife. Women only win when they are built like a man. Yvette crosses her left leg over right. A man once called her a goddess. Amazonian. She’d liked it.
From the verandah, drag marks snaking across grass to the rising water, anaconda- writhing into the reeds. Angie collapses on the wood. She can smell her husband all over her, in every orifice, with every sense she tastes him, like fucking in the early days, for hours after, how his musk oozed out of her. She smells the water, wet earth, the rain-sodden world. She holds out her arms. Thin skin, a lattice of deep purple bruises from him. Julian. Her best-ever-fuck. Yvette nods. She knows. Pulls Angie’s head to her lap. Strokes her hair. The cat slinks from the lush undergrowth, lick of blood on its muzzle.
‘He was going to kill you next,’ Yvette says, to her friend.
Angie nods. Perhaps it was always lurking at the back of her mind.
The rain comes again. It will last all day. And the next. It will burst the banks of the dam.
Carry the body on a river to the woods. Where it will rot. Decompose to bones. The sun will strip the bones to the colour of a ghost gum under moonlight. And like this, the man who planned to kill his wife, slowly slips to dust. The women will never tell. Women are like that. They are secret-keepers. Rain-makers. Life-savers. They know how to bury a dog under a banksia. They know how to leave a knife out until the blade turns to rust.
Angie moans in her sleep, face covered with springy auburn curls. She smells of the herbal balm she rubbed into her chest before sleep, and the soles of her feet before rolling on thick itchy socks. The balm – comfrey, eucalyptus, mint, lavender, tea tree maybe – is the only form of medical intervention Angie would accept for her chest infection; the sheets reek of it, the same way they once stank of sweat and summer sex. Fluids, cigarette smoke, the small handmade chocolates she would eat after midnight. She’s been sick for weeks now, her bogged lungs are coastal wetlands.
Julian swears. Bites the nail on his right thumb. There’s a feeling to this day he thought he could outrun, but his guts are churning. He drops out of bed, sprints to their ensuite. The sound is excessive, too obscene. Julian winces, doubles over, elbows digging into his tanned thighs. Holds his breath at the stench. The kookaburras start up, the family that hatched three young last year. He should have shot them, but Angie doesn’t like guns. He hears her groan, yawn in the bedroom. He wipes his ass. Flushes the toilet, disgusted, still wracked with cramps, guts twisted by fists.
In the kitchen, Julian makes coffee with the small Italian press that came as a wedding present, the only one that had no card. They’d called the hotel, searched the back of her sister’s car, and since that day it’s the mystery gift from ‘The Jenkins’, a private joke, a couple most likely a friend of his parents, sometimes – singular, usually female, an old lover of his who hid at the back of the ceremony, weeping. Julian fumbles with the ground coffee, spilling it over the edge of the metal rim and onto the counter. He flinches at the sound of Angie coming in from the bedroom.
Her auburn hair is mussed, like it used to be from his hands tangling in it. That time in Melbourne he came right into it. They’d laughed, smoked a spliff and nestled into each other, falling asleep early and when she’d woken, they’d laughed some more at her congealed fringe.
‘How did you sleep, babe?’
Julian steps away from her reaching fingertips. He grabs a cloth, cleans up the spilled coffee and lights the stove, settles the press onto the burner. ‘Toast?’
Angie nods, slips into a wooden chair at the table. She pulls her knitted cardigan around herself, the one he bought her last year for her birthday. Angie coughs, both hands cupped around her mouth.
The coffee boils over and hisses into the blue flame. Angie jumps up, wraps the cardigan around her hand and pulls the coffee off the stove.
‘Well that’s burned.’ A crimson rosella lands on the fence, a flash of colour against the winter garden. ‘I wonder where her friend is?’
Julian joins his wife at the window. ‘How do you know that’s the female? They’re monomorphic.’
‘They’re what?’
Julian clears his throat. ‘Monomorphic. The same.’
‘Is it just a bird word?’
‘No, it’s a word-word, Angie.’
She looks away from the bird. ‘Well she’s the girl. I just know it.’
‘Maybe they’re gay,’ Julian says.
The bird fluffs up its feathers and doubles in size. Angie points to a planter box next to the garden furniture. The heads of succulents are discarded on the bricks.
‘The bastards. They ripped them to shreds.’
‘I told you it would happen if we stopped feeding them,’ Angie says.
‘They are destructive because we fed them. They’re cockatoos for god’s sake, holding us to ransom.’
‘I like them. They’re cocky.’
Julian rolls his eyes at her joke. ‘I liked my flapjack cactuses. They’re ruined.’
‘They’ll grow.’
‘I should get a gun. Shoot the bloody things.’
Angie watches the red and blue bird turn its back to the rain. She wonders about birds and bad weather. Do animals feel it, like people do? In the far paddock she sees the cows, flanks turned in unison, heads low. They are waiting it out. Silent. Still.
‘It’s a grey day. How about we go out for coffee?’
Julian sighs. Scratches his head. Pushes his glasses further up his nose.
They leave the house at 8:12am. Julian eyes the clock in the hallway as they walk out the front door. He is wearing his red Patagonia jacket; Angie has her mustard cardigan pulled over her head. They run to the car, argue about who will drive, Angie relents and chucks her husband the keys.
There is a fire in the grate at the café. The room is warm and noisy. Angie smiles as they enter. Julian frowns. They find a small table near a window, now being lashed with heavy rain. Angie gushes over a small pink wildflower in a glass bottle on the table. Julian humphs about the wobble, shoves a folded napkin under a leg.
‘What’s with you today?’ Angie asks, counting petals on the flower. Julian purses his lips. Folds his hands in his lap.
‘Huh?’
‘Nothing. Jesus. It’s raining. I’m cold. Can we just skip the third degree?’ He waves over a waiter and orders for them both.
‘We live in the rainshadow, it doesn’t always send you into morose.’
A woman, not the waiter, appears at the table. She squeezes Angie’s shoulder. ‘Wouldn’t want to get married on a day like this, would you?’
Angie laughs. ‘It rained on our wedding day. I’ve heard it’s a good omen.’ Julian folds his arms, crosses then uncrosses his legs.
‘How’s business?’ Angie asks.
The woman nods. ‘The world’s on fire, look around, no matter what shit goes down, everyone still needs coffee.’
‘The world’s not on fire Yvette. It’s just a forest fire.’
‘Excuse me, it’s the Amazon, not some parochial piece of bush, okay?’ Angie looks to Yvette. ‘Just a forest fire. Can you even?’
‘I read it’s not arson. Ranchers or the government are burning the rainforest on purpose.’
‘For agriculture. Beef, to be precise,’ Angie says.
‘It’s been going on for years. Just because Leonardo-f’ing-Dicaprio puts it on twitter, doesn’t mean it’s anything new.’
Yvette shrugs. ‘I wish we could send some of this over to Mexico. That’s all I’m saying.’
Julian leans against the cold glass. ‘The Amazon is not in Mexico, but good luck with that.’
The woman leaves, sing-songing a hello to a man who just came, windswept, through the door.
‘Do you have to be like that? She’s just being friendly.’
Julian cracks his knuckles. ‘I don’t need her as my friend. She’s your friend.’
‘So there’s a line down the middle now?’
The coffees come to the table.
‘They’re using your cups,’ Julian says, sipping from the black ceramic rim.
‘They bought the whole lot. I’m happy.’
‘Yes. Something like that would make you happy.’
Angie lifts a spoonful of sugar into her latte and stirs it into the shining beige foam. ‘You’re a pain in the ass today.’
Rain gathers force outside, drowning out the sounds of forks scraping plates and breakfast conversations. It grows into a monster, a weather beast forging a river down the main street. Angie and Julian sit in silence. It has been one of those weeks. One of those months. This morning is nothing new. Except to Julian, who is watching the rain and wondering. Will her blood run like that?
He assesses her pale neck, twisted right to see the rain. Two small moles near the chin. A thick mauve vein. He imagines taking a fork from the ridiculous tin bucket on the table, and prodding it prongs-first into the vein. Is that a jugular? He thinks a jugular is thicker, bigger, a muscle almost. Surely, not this tiny spiderweb thing. Jugular sounds like jaguar. All thoughts today lead back to the goddam Amazon. When did it stop being acceptable to hit your wife?
When did they get to say no to sex? When did the world get so out of whack that he has to sit here and listen to a woman who thinks the Amazon is in Mexico and that rain can somehow be transported from Australia across the ocean? What, in giant swimming pools? Forgodsake.
‘What are you thinking?’
‘What?’
Angie opens her mouth wider than the rain, ‘What are you thinking?’
‘You really don’t want to know.’
She leans in closer. ‘Try me.’
Julian inspects the table closest to them. They are sharing a newspaper. How quaint. ‘I am thinking, dear wife, of what it would feel like – to kill you.’
Angie smiles. ‘And?’
He takes the fork, one of those terrible vintage ones, meaning it’s bric-a-brac came from a charity shop, meaning someone else used it for years, all that spit, the wet greasy molars. Lamb chops on Sundays.
‘These prongs,’ he pauses, points to her neck, ‘right there.’ Julian makes a stabbing motion. Inches from her skin.
‘Is that every man’s dream then, to do away with his wife? How very predictable.’
‘I don’t know about every man.’
‘But this man?’ A hiccup. ‘My man?’
‘Jesus. Angela.’ Julian says. ‘We should have had children.’
He watches the words hit her. Right between the eyes. They mist over. This is how he wants her. Undone. Unhinged. On their last day together, he wants to make her suffer. He picks the flower off the stem. Shoves it into her mouth. Jams her lips closed. Until she swallows.
The lights of the car streak through the deluge and dip as Julian drives over the cattle grid. The house looks closed in by the low-slung clouds, the slant of the corrugated roof is a sharp metal line against the eggplant skin sky. Something more than rain is coming. Angela and Julian built the house themselves. Julian drew up the plans, Angela consulted a library of books. They mulled it over way past midnight, a hundred midnights spent bent at the table or on the rug by the gas fire of their small fibro rental in the middle of town. This would be a house that had never been seen before, an amalgamation of reclaimed materials and the earth and felled trees from their land.
‘Park in the garage,’ Angie says, gesturing to the barn where a harem of hens have taken cover and are peering, wide-eyed, from the gloom.
Julian turns off the car.
‘It’s going to hail.’
Julian scoffs. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. We haven’t had hail in years.’
Angie runs towards the house. Her clogs slip on the stone paving and she skids out, hard, her palms scrape as she tries to save the bouquet of proteas she bought at the café. The dust pink flowers scatter. Julian comes up behind, stands over his wife. She reaches her left hand up to him. He stares. Gathers up the proteas and steps around her.
Angie scrambles to her feet. She holds out her aching hands, bends her wrists and wipes the grit and blood on her shirt. Julian is in the house, the door’s partly open. She watches water gather in her wounds, thinning the bright red blood.
‘Julian!’ she calls out, through driving rain.
A light comes on in the house, she sees it fall out the kitchen window onto the budding gardenias below. This is too much rain for them to open in the spring. Angie clutches her sore hands to her chest. All those tiny luminous cocoons cooking up the satin white petals she adores. How Julian used to leave them for her in the mornings, with coffee. The front door slams in the wind; the panel of leadlight glass – a single hysterical 1920s kookaburra, beak open, head thrown back – threatens to shatter.
Angie makes a dash for the old barn. She comes in sopping, scattering clucking chickens into the clutter of ancient farm machinery. The barn is disorganized, a cutlery drawer, the place for chucking misfit things. She clears a bag of snail bait, paintbrushes, stack of burlap sacks from the chaise lounge she salvaged from the store in town. She flops down onto the once-turquoise velvet, no longer vibrant.
Music floods from the main house and swims through the rain. Something hard, lots of drums, like butterfly stroke arms in a pool. Angie imagines Julian thrashing around, trashing the place, smashing plates, her ceramics, belting the proteas she bought into the floor. His skin’s sticky, fringe stuck to forehead, spit at the corner of his chapped lips. Music drowning out his shrieks. Can a man shriek? Or is that only a woman thing? A dying cat thing? A horror movie? Angie doesn’t know. Her head is a windscreen fogged over.
Yvette. In the barn. Standing over Angie, asleep on the old velvet lounge. The chickens have fled to sunlight and worms drowned from soil to air. They are pecking around the exposed roots of a fig tree when Angie wakes. They come vaguely into focus. A bleary figure looming over her.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ she says. ‘I thought it was Julian.’
Yvette sits next to her friend. Angie folds her feet under herself. ‘You slept out here all night?’
Angie rubs her eyes, points vaguely towards the day. ‘I was out in the storm, Julian was cross. It was quite fine in here.’ She coughs, the sound of bronchioles underwater.
Yvette squeezes Angie’s knee. ‘Where is he, is he home?’
Yvette makes an unusual sound through pursed lips, her tongue on the back of her front teeth. ‘Honey.’
Angie fishes around on the floor for her glasses. She puts them on. ‘What time is it? How long have I slept?’
Yvette takes Angie’s hand and holds onto it.
‘Shit. I had a meeting.’ Angie coughs, thumps a fist against her chest. ‘Did your place flood?’
Yvette shakes her head. Walks towards the door and beckons for Angie. They walk out across slushy wet ground, sinking under their shoes. Angie grabs onto her friend, they balance and make it over the lawn to the house.
A ginger cat darts past them, a small wagtail in its mouth. Angie tries to get hold of it, it runs too fast.
‘Milo! No! Drop it. Come here!’
She’s off, after the cat, into a swathe of redgums on the side of the dam. She chases the cat, reaching for its thick bushy tail, shouting for the feline to stop, to drop the prey. The cat climbs up a tree, dragging the small bird to high branches. Angie watches the black and white tail feathers, sticking out like a fishbone in cartoons, it flitters until it stops. ‘You beast!’ Angie shouts, tears in her eyes.
‘I’m so mad, he’s meant to be locked inside. Julian must have let him out on purpose.’
‘I suppose it’s their instinct. To kill.’
Angie pulls her hair back. ‘He did this on purpose.’ ‘He’s just a cat.’
‘No, him. Julian. He hates the birds.’
Angie storms past Yvette towards the house. Her eyes scan across the dam to see how far it has risen. Her eyes stop dead. Yvette comes up next to her. Holds her left hand.
‘I wanted to tell you,’ Yvette says.
‘You wanted to tell me? You what? I, this – ‘ Angie pulls her hand free, heads into the reeds, her boots sucking in the black mud. ‘Julian! Julian!’ she has to kick her feet free of the boots and walk, barefoot to the side of the dam, water rushes up to her knees, it’s like walking through molasses, Angie takes handfuls of reeds for leverage to pull her body forward. At the water’s edge, she holds a hand up to her eyes. Squints. ‘Julian!’ she looks back to Yvette, on dry land. ‘Get over here!’
‘It’s too late! Come back!’
Angie wades forward, frantic, slapping the brown murk, deeper until she’s weightless, floating, arms a windmill through water till she gets to the thing near the middle, the long log face-down. She tears at clothes, rolls the body over.
Yvette is squelching through the wet to get to the water. Calling for Angie to stop, for her to come back, calm down. Stop.
On her back, Angie holds under the chin and swims the body to shore. She’s swallowing water, taking in silt, weed dregs, floaters, the taste of bottom-scum.
When she can walk, Angie pulls Julian behind her. On her knees, she drags him over smooth rocks to the grey sand on the bank of the dam his grandfather built for cattle. She is gasping, spluttering, spitting the dam, wiping her eyes, coughing.
Yvette rubs her friends back. Angie smacks her hand away. ‘Did you see him?’
‘We both saw him.’
‘Yvette!’ Angie heaves to catch her breath. Savage coughs. ‘Did you see him, before you woke me?’
Yvette walks away from Julian, disheveled and dead on the sand.
‘Did you see him? Did you see him?’ Angie lunges at her friend. Pushes her back.
‘You’re upset, just breathe. Breathe.’
‘Don’t tell me to breathe!’ Angie squats, wheezing now.
Julian’s eyes are open. Dead fish eyes. His skin is chalk. His lips – the saddest kind of blue.
Yvette walks up from the dam, the damage, her friend crawling in the mud, struggling to gain traction. To free herself. When she reaches the house, Yvette sits on the verandah in a white cane rocking chair. The rain has washed her free of mud, of blood. She sat at dawn, shivering, watching the sun rise. Angela hasn’t noticed that the skirt and red jersey she’s wearing aren’t hers. She took them calmly from the couples’ wardrobe as the kookaburras were starting. She wanted Angela to sleep, to rest deeply, before everything that would come next. Before she told her that she had come over in the storm to check on the dam, to rescue them if they needed it, from rising water, from the inevitable flood that somehow did not come. She wanted also, to gather herself, like doing up a zip, before she told Angela what she saw: Julian, in the kitchen, sharpening a knife at the table. The red cattle dog lying next to him, blood slipping from her neck. His wife doesn’t like guns. She had fought him, stolen the knife. Women only win when they are built like a man. Yvette crosses her left leg over right. A man once called her a goddess. Amazonian. She’d liked it.
From the verandah, drag marks snaking across grass to the rising water, anaconda- writhing into the reeds. Angie collapses on the wood. She can smell her husband all over her, in every orifice, with every sense she tastes him, like fucking in the early days, for hours after, how his musk oozed out of her. She smells the water, wet earth, the rain-sodden world. She holds out her arms. Thin skin, a lattice of deep purple bruises from him. Julian. Her best-ever-fuck. Yvette nods. She knows. Pulls Angie’s head to her lap. Strokes her hair. The cat slinks from the lush undergrowth, lick of blood on its muzzle.
‘He was going to kill you next,’ Yvette says, to her friend.
Angie nods. Perhaps it was always lurking at the back of her mind.
The rain comes again. It will last all day. And the next. It will burst the banks of the dam.
Carry the body on a river to the woods. Where it will rot. Decompose to bones. The sun will strip the bones to the colour of a ghost gum under moonlight. And like this, the man who planned to kill his wife, slowly slips to dust. The women will never tell. Women are like that. They are secret-keepers. Rain-makers. Life-savers. They know how to bury a dog under a banksia. They know how to leave a knife out until the blade turns to rust.
