walking home opposite a beautiful girl

I’m walking home, overheated,

and it’s hard to ignore the girl

on the other side of the road

waving around a dead lacrosse-stick-

-palm-frond-tribal-prodder-thing –

there are no palm trees on this road –

that says look at me to the press of traffic,

and picking up rubbish, and being pretty –

I wonder if the paper bags she carries

and deposits the rubbish into

are as full of books as mine, and if

she uses the same hair ties as I do –

I wonder how many years younger

than my little brother she must be –

I wonder if she is going on that walk

for solar energy this coming Sunday –

I feel sure for a second that she’ll switch

sides because my wonderment

has willed her to, and my haircut,

and my rolled-up left sleeve,

and the meeting of our eyes a few times,

and the likelihood that my heart

will eat itself if she doesn’t, but now the tasseled

tip of her scepter graces the close-cropped grass,

rakes gum nuts that bobble in its dusty wake,

and she is as raucously disinterested in me

as the fucking gorgeous parrots in the brambles –

and I don’t cry then because my screwtight

solitude springs leaks when any girl

prompts my mind to ask ill-tempered questions

of them, or compare them to birds, or often

incorporeal matter, mist, even though it’s true –

no – I cry because she drops her bag and it spills

and inside there is only more rubbish.

an early morning walk, a very horrible sight

I was standing on the footpath outside my house at twenty to six in the morning. Steve – the boss of the landscaping company I had recently quit university and moved to Watsonia to work for – was late. A few wattlebirds were trilling and the sky was so clear and white that it looked to have had a curtain of muslin thrown over it, the sort scattered around our bedroom (Sarah bought muslin at op shops to make baby clothes with). The lemon and apricot saplings in our front yard, which must’ve been planted by the previous tenants, had begun to flower. I was disheartened to see that there were weeds in the saplings’ planter boxes and stinging nettles all over the rest of the garden, and so I resolved to do some upkeep that Sunday. I was feeling poetic and noticed within myself that combination of power and impotence that came with waiting for things while being half asleep. It was nice. You could loll your body around like a slinky while your legs stayed anchored to the spot, every movement, every perception so unfocused and meaningless. You didn’t give two shits whether the thing it was that you were waiting for ever came or not.

My mouth still felt coated by the filmy residue of Sarah’s cornmint oil mouthwash, which I hated but had used in a rush instead of doing my teeth. On my work clothes I could smell the shavings of the Mirbau deck we had been building at a house on Zig-Zag Road the day before, and could feel the shavings in my pockets and at the heels of my Blundstones. A couple of cars went past and with them another ten or twenty minutes. The exhaust fumes the cars put out hung in the cold air a long time. I was on the lookout for either Steve’s work van – one of those turbo diesel Mercedes rigs that all the rich young tradies like him got around in – or the Nissan Patrol, on springs as jacked as a monster truck, that he took pig hunting on weekends. He was never late picking me up because time was money; I was in no hurry to call him because I didn’t need the money that much and I was feeling all right where I was. Before too long, though, the sky had been uncurtained to its full sunlit blue and I was awake enough to realise that something must’ve happened and that neither the Mercedes nor the Patrol would be coming that day.

I went inside. The house still had the mood of sleep; I could hear the fridge motor and the bedroom door was closed. Awake and washed and fed as I already was, I felt that I was interrupting something, and left again after having a drink of water. I decided to go for a walk. I didn’t have a regular walking route – we weren’t dog people and I was usually buggered after work – but headed downhill for a block and then cut through the biggest park in the shire, called McKinley. Sarah and I had picnicked there on the Sunday of our move, that is to say we had sat on a small embankment of grass eating fish and chips. In the park I saw a few people out walking their dogs, and a very skinny elderly bloke plodding along the path in clothes that seemed too young for him and too brisk for the spring air. I saw that the footy oval was glazed with dew and that the cricket pitch was fenced off and being readied for competition. The smell of the wet, close-cropped grass sort of rushed at me on a gust of wind, which I drank in and then gave back out as reluctantly as possible. I did the same thing with the smell of wet tanbark. I saw that along the path a lot of the bins were stuffed to the brim with beer bottles, but didn’t venture as far as the dams at the other end of the park, which was where most of the teenagers went to get pissed.

*

Pretty soon I had left McKinley; some time after that I found myself on Lincoln.

It was deserted as usual.  My pulse was eager, endorphins were flowing, I was darting my eyes here and there like a child making its first index of things, the weather was beautiful – but still the head of my anxiety reared, fanned, struck. It was a shame that in adulthood I had managed to retain the enthralling part of being in an empty place but not the enjoyable part. I quickened my steps and looked ahead. I thought that I would pick a bunch of flowers from the firewheel tree and then turn left onto Grant and then return to my street via Madison Parade. I would be going to bed with Sarah within fifteen minutes because that was what other young couples did, and it would have been opportune, considering the steps I’d just taken to summarily turn my life on its head, if we were a little bit more like other young couples. I was interested in the way she smelt and how profusely she sweated, and in the way I could fit my fingers in the folds between her hamstrings and her arse cheeks, or cup her demure pussy in my hand from pubic pone to perineum as if I was its custodian, and in the way she would put my hand around her throat and roll her eyes back, and in the way I felt like more of a man when we were fucking than I felt myself to be at any other time in my life. I was genuinely interested in all of that. The problem was that I was even more interested in the reasons, still unclear to me, why we were fucking less and less and why I was all right about it.

When I got to the yard with the firewheel tree, I realised that my footsteps and maybe my thoughts had been covering the sound of a child, or possibly a woman, crying. It seemed to be coming from a few houses up or down from my position – I couldn’t tell which way. It startled me at first, before the thought of asking what was wrong, and of saying good morning, and of breaking my Lincoln hoodoo, filled me with intent. I walked apace towards Grant but then stopped because the noise was weakening, turned around and walked back to the tree, where I stopped again. I listened more carefully to the crying. It wasn’t the acute sort brought on by physical pain, but more of a low, plaintive moan, a sob. It soon became clear to me that what I was hearing were sobs, and that they weren’t actually coming from a house on Lincoln but from someplace on little Wilson Court.

I rushed towards the turnoff. I could see all the houses in the court fanned around the wheel of asphalt, and close to a dozen coloured tennis balls stuck in a mat of leaves that was blocking a drain. A set of metal wickets lay on the nature strip. One of the houses had quite a high box hedge around its front and sides and a wrought iron gate that was shut, and I was sure that whoever was making the noise was in there, in that compound. I thought I wouldn’t be able to see in and was frustrated – almost distraught, as I remember – until I noticed a section of hedge in the bottom right-hand corner that was browning and patchy. It was in the largest space between the foliage that I positioned my head, and saw a boy.

He was squatting on his front porch, wearing a facial expression of such awful intensity that it made me grit my teeth and brace my mouth with my hands. His cheeks were bright red and wet with tears, his hair was matted to his forehead in dark shards. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or throw up at what he was doing, or at the sounds he was making while doing it, because the hopelessness it all signified seemed to be almost calculated, numb, as if this person of less than ten years old had already seen what the world had in store for him and found that it was nothing but despair. Or maybe it was a sickness, one of the obsessive compulsions, a sick sickness. I was numbed. At that moment I couldn’t specify what physical position I was in, how agape my eyes were or my mouth was, because I don’t remember anything but the senses which attended to that very unbelievable and very fucked up spectacle. The reason I’ve written his front porch is that after he had pulled up his little green corduroy pants and had spent a further few minutes with his head in his hands, pulling at his fine blonde hair so hard that blood must have come up on the scalp, the boy opened the door with great care and went back inside.

cold, lonely day, talking to a girl and listening to sacred spirit and rewriting brother scene in 'the car'

When I arrived Joseph was leaning on the green chicken wire fence around the chook pen, looking at the chooks. This was strange, because all my life he’d never just looked at shit unless it was in conjunction with doing. He could shear sheep for hours on end but got fidgety watching them for two minutes grazing in the paddock. I parked my car and got out. He saw me and seemed embarrassed, almost surprised, and kept saying sorry for putting me out. I told him it was okay and we went inside.

All the blinds in the house were drawn and it was cold enough for me to notice that it was cold. We walked through the kitchen to get to the lounge room, emerging with a couple of cold beers each from the slate archway dividing them. My old man and I had helped Joseph build that archway. I noticed a slab box full of empties on the kitchen table, and lot of dirty dishes in and around the sink. There were more stubbies and cans on the coffee table, and also a Coke bottle bong. I’d never known my brother to smoke weed at all, not even as a teenager. His place smelt of weed and stale food and I sat down and pulled out all the stubby tops I could see sandwiched between the couch cushions. I was going to read the quiz questions on the stubby tops but couldn’t because they’d had been folded in half really tightly. Next to me on the couch was a bag of peanuts. I stuck my hand inside but there was nothing left but the chaff at the bottom.

Joseph sat on the one-seater and cracked his beer. He wasn’t apologising anymore. He wasn’t really saying anything. I kept expecting him to launch into an explanation of why I’d come round, but instead he just put the occasional small-talk type question to me in that affected tone of voice he got when he was on the piss. As the afternoon wore on I thought that maybe he was waiting for me to ask what was wrong; a few times I even sort of sensed that he’d gone quiet for that reason. The problem was that I was no good at broaching sensitive stuff and neither was he and so I answered his nothing questions as if nothing was all we had to talk about. The TV got turned on. I started to think about the car. For the rest of the night we sat around sinking beers, which I guess was all right. After I’d gone to bed I could still hear him in the lounge room a while, hear the ping of glass and the sound of breathing and of a body moving around under clothes.

I stayed with my brother for three days. I helped him with some of the farm work and told him a few untruths about how well Rachel and me were getting on. There was never any Optus reception at Joseph’s and so I didn’t talk to Rachel once, but thought about her a lot. I told Joseph about the tit incident with mum and he laughed and said that’d be right. Then, as I was about to leave, he told me not to tell mum that I’d been round. I finally worked up the courage to ask if he was okay, despite not being able to look into his eyes as I asked.

“Yeah, mate,” he said. “Always fine, always fine.”

“Okay.”

“You’re a legend, Andy.”

I didn’t know what to say to that and just turned and got into my car. I was reversing and had my head out the window of my car to mind the ditch on the side of the driveway when Joseph yelled, watch out for that fucking T-Rex, because Jurassic Park was what he called the greenhouse. 

Boy Story (Continued)

The Boy I Saw on Lincoln

Lincoln was one of those incidental neighbourhood roads you only walked down on the odd occasion, out of caprice or boredom, or when the idea of taking your regular route home from the train station or the shops had come to be degrading somehow. Very short and straight, you could have rallied a tennis ball – with a few bounces – from end to end. The streets it ran between were called Grant and Calvin and there was also a Wilson Court in the middle – a handful of houses backing sleepily onto an old wooden playground. I think that the boy who I am going to write about was the first person I ever saw on Lincoln. He is certainly the first (and only) one I remember.

*

I was standing on the footpath outside my house at twenty to six in the morning. Steve – the boss of the landscaping company I had recently moved to Watsonia to work for – was ten minutes late. The street was quiet except for the birds and the sky was so clear and white that it looked to have had a curtain of muslin thrown over it, the sort scattered around our bedroom because Sarah bought it at op shops to make baby clothes with. Almost overcast at first glance, it had the kind of crystal pallour you saw from the windows of an aeroplane that was above the clouds. While staring at the sky I noticed within myself that combined feeling of power and impotence that came with waiting for things while being half asleep. It was nice. You could loll your body around like a slinky while your legs stayed anchored to the spot; every movement, every perception so unfocused and guiltless – without giving two shits whether the thing it was that you were waiting for ever came or not.

My mouth still felt coated by the filmy residue of Sarah’s cornmint oil mouthwash, which I hated but had used in a rush instead of doing my teeth. On my work clothes I could smell the shavings of the Mirbau deck we had been building at a house on Zig-Zag Road the day before, and could feel the shavings in my pockets and at the heels of my Blundstones. A couple of cars went past and with them another ten or twenty minutes. The exhaust fumes the cars put out hung in the cold air a long time. I was on the lookout for either Steve’s work van – one of those turbo Mercedes rigs that all the rich young tradies like him got around in – or the Nissan Patrol he took pig hunting on weekends. He was never late picking me up because time was money; I was in no hurry to call him because I didn’t need the money that much and I was feeling all right where I was. But after the sky had been uncurtained to its full sunlit blue, I was awake enough to realise that something must’ve happened and that neither the Mercedes nor the Patrol would be coming that day.

*

Sarah would be another two or three hours getting up. Awake and washed and fed as I already was, I saw little reason to go back inside and decided to take a walk. I didn’t have a regular route, but headed downhill for a block and then cut through the big park, called McKinley, where Sarah and I had picnicked on the Sunday of our move. In the park I saw a few people out walking their dogs, and a very skinny elderly bloke plodding along the path in clothes that seemed too young for him and too brisk for the spring air. I saw that the footy oval was glistening with dew and that the cricket pitch was being readied. The smell of the wet grass sort of rushed at me on a gust of wind, which I drank in and then gave back out as reluctantly as possible. I saw that a lot of the bins were stuffed to the brim with beer bottles, but didn’t venture as far as the dams at the other end of the park, which was where most of the teenagers went to get pissed.

Pretty soon I had left McKinley; some time after that I found myself on Lincoln. It was a road built to the same suburban blueprint; the squat yellow brick houses, cement porches, brown-tiled rooves; the crooked letterboxes stuffed with junk mail; the kerbside trees with burnt flaking trunks and ‘V’s taken out of the top of them so as to thread the powerlines through; the surprisingly lush kerbside grass; the presidential namesake.

I was just passing, or had just passed, the huge firewheel tree when I first heard him. There were no firewheel trees anywhere else in the area as far as I knew, and I admit that on a few occasions I had picked some of the spidery red flowers on that one, which was some way into somebody’s front garden, for Sarah. They were like the little scentless skeletons of umbrellas upturned in a storm. Sarah was a girl who still got a kick out of receiving flowers, or pretended that she did, and I liked to think that the kick I got out of giving them to her was grounded in something more edifying than the link between flowers and getting to fuck her. I suppose this was confirmed by the fact that I didn’t pick them very often. 

what my hand finds as she sleeps

My hand wades out of the dampness

of your knee pit

and onto the mattress

and then the cold floor where it treads

so flinchingly – finds the spout of your

carafe, used yesterday to overwater

the little cacti

spaced across the grimy sill

with the view of the best hotel

in Montreal – finds a lathed

leg, grabs hold and blindly scrawls

the name

I have awoken with as well

as sketches all the high jinks

I want to enliven your body for – finds 

the mole on its callused palm,

gently kneads it

with insouciance and then with angst –

I am tiring of rest –

but when it sets upon the coarse 

bristles of a hair brush I am sure

if it can untangle the covetous

frond of Indian hair at your back

with care enough, then I might keep 

you asleep for hours more, or days.

the boy on lincoln street

I can’t recall ever seeing anybody on Lincoln Street before I saw the boy, although it may be that the sight of him has blinded me to the others in my memory. There must have been others. But what I know for sure is that I used to feel the same uneasiness walking along Lincoln as I did in deserted places. Absurdly, the fewer people there were around, the more I felt that I was being watched. I think this was because desertedness forced me to observe shit more carefully than I would have otherwise, and by concentrating on anything too hard there tended to be a build-up of a sort of vague fear in my mind, what the footy commentators would have called perceived pressure.

It was one of those neighbourhood streets you only walked down on the odd occasion, out of caprice or boredom, when you seemed to have developed a temporary intolerance to your regular route home from work or to the shops and back and didn’t mind taking the extra time. Were it not for the hill, you could have seen from one end to the other because it was very short and straight as an arrow. The streets it ran between were called Grant and Calvin and there was also a Wilson Court about halfway up the hill, backing sleepily onto an old wooden playground.

I’ll say that one remarkable thing about Lincoln Street was that there was a huge firewheel tree in someone’s front yard. There were no firewheel trees anywhere else in Greensborough as far as I knew, and I admit that on a few occasions I picked some of its spidery red flowers for Sarah, who was my girlfriend at the time I saw the boy. They were like the little scentless skeletons of umbrellas wrecked in a storm. Sarah was the type of girl who still got a kick out of receiving flowers, or pretended that she did, and I liked to think that the kick I got out of giving them to her was grounded in something more edifying than the link between flowers and fucking. This, I guess, was confirmed by the fact that I didn’t pick them very often.

Firewheel tree aside, Lincoln was a street built to the same blueprints as every other in the area; the squat yellow brick houses, the cement porches; the crooked letterboxes stuffed with junk mail; the kerbside trees with burnt flaking trunks and a V taken out of the top of them so as to thread the powerlines through; the name of a dead President. That what I am about to describe but don’t feel capable of describing happened on such a nondescript street is typical, in a way. For most people the past means certainty and the future doubt, but after my encounter with the boy I have decided that I think the opposite.