Unedited Rainbow Serpent Poetry: personified country/while listening to ambient music on monday night

granite escarpment

        crimped

veterbrae – granite

        crown

balding scalp

trees dead trees –

wombat hole

eyes glancing – fictional

fixity over plains

the wind caresses

like a heavy-handed lover

his pliant better half –

flyaway tent fly – rubbish

squalls eddying

with tea-leaf clairvoyance

over sound

                       waves weeping wounds –

the tarpaulin

ramparts rise –

the wig at my feet the wig

whose green hairs I’ve heeled

from their caustic

         polypropylene

roots with every loose

every static stampede lies

on a dance floor white

as robes – itself a prone

escarpment –

and seems to me an ersatz

hill – hill

and escarpment and human beings

trading places –

and like an upstart

third millennium animism

up-swells after stony stillness

like water poured on sand

I feel my foothold sucked

towards the centre

of the earthen littoral

the fathomless earthen sea

clambering – crowded – crowding –

clambered over – red is what I see

hear taste foretell – red

monsters unlit unvarnished –

the gas bottle glockenspiels

still smell faintly of gas

the bouncy ball stick-ends

are marbled and smell

of deep ecology’s death –

the clasps on their backwards caps

frame scalps limpid sky bald –

if lost in the forest

walk apace toward the kick drums

or if lost in the forest

at night, go and find

the source of the lights cast

specter-like through the deadwood maze –

steer clear

of the hills

of the holes

of the escarpments

of the skulls

of the eyes

of the vertebrae.

***

a mud fleece covers my chest

like the clouds an ochre moon

too bright for all but sidewise

admiration – too big to be ours – 

balled and interwoven in the hairs

roiled in the sprinkler’s ceaseless mist

rolled out like bread dough in her hands

spread like a sacrament over burning lips –

two heads on my shoulders

eight legs cast like fishing lines

over the edge of the open canopy

mine straddling the tow bar, forming

a secret obelisk, and breaths

locked in cold suspension

lost in the humming air

as I too am lost and weary

my thoughts nothing but tired transcripts

of scant, fast-forgotten actions –

how long do we listen to the paleness

and grow paler, how long to the icy

synthetics, permafrost atmospherics –

long enough that to think of the outside

is to think of the outside ending –

of tidal upsurges of total unmaking

blue-gold shimmers of last lifecycles –

her hypnic jerks

her pins and needles

quake in me as though my fortune lines

were flagging faults

and there were naked villages inside

and endless forests –

every pine needle-carpeted canopy

a bed for eternal rest – before the nadir

the zenith described by the shapes

our freezing bodies draw –

translucent bodies – on the shapes

of the saintly space enshrouding them –

those secret etchings burnished

with

cold

with

unwashed hair

with

the him

with

dreamless sleep’s pearlescent shellac –

with

the her

with

mud-caked reflections

with

forgotten reflections

with beauty more monumental

than can be countenanced with anything

but the gravest fear –

when I am terrified of how beautiful things are

I know for certain that things are beautiful.

presidential dreaming

That afternoon I dreamt of my sisters, and Steve, and the boy. They were disparate faces among faces in a big crowd I was roving through. The crowd, dressed in old-fashioned formal and military garb, must’ve been gathered at a cemetery because I remembered gravestones when I woke up: Kitzmiller, Young, Koch rang out inside me as if some previously unsummoned voice was reciting them, a voice different, in a way I couldn’t explain, to the one that usually read the lines of books back to me. I remembered trying to flake the hard lichen off of the gravestones and cutting the skin under my fingernails. I remembered pathetically broken, dirty footwear, and paths of flattened grass that should've been brown but were so green as to look aglow. Broad fields surrounded the cemetery, and further into the distance, long nuggetty mountains covered with trees that looked like the high country around Bulla and Sterling, only I knew it wasn’t that high country but somewhere a long way away. The mountains were dim and the sky was very blue and very still, as though a great cold had set in, or was about to. It felt, upon reflection, as if the sea had been nearby. As I dreamt I was close enough to the surface of consciousness to feel my body twitching.

Although he was the same height as the other men, the boy’s face was still a boy’s. His outfit, I was fairly certain, was that of a solider. He had the same expression as he did when I saw him, and his head was tilted back, and he looked even ghastlier in the company of all those heads so solemnly bowed. My sisters were also dressed as soldiers; their long hair hidden under little infantrymen’s caps, their tits hidden under heavy overcoats I couldn’t remember the colour of. The exception was Aminath; a Playboy bunny sized chest, the absolute opposite of her chest in real life, bulged out and grazed the back of the man in front of her, Abraham Lincoln, who looked as if he was about to keel over and die. Lincoln was repeatedly mouthing something indecipherable to himself. My sisters weren’t standing together. Their heads were bowed. I wasn’t even sure they looked especially like my sisters, only that they were. Bawdy music rang out, although I couldn’t remember a band, and at the front of the assembly there was a sort of dedicatory platform, which Steve was either standing on or right beside. Clearly, something important was about to happen, or had happened already, or was in the act of happening. Meanwhile, the boy seemed to be shifting positions as I was, but more radically. In the middle of the audience at first, my memory placed him alternately at the very front and very back, then at either flank, and at some point he was even standing in the middle of one of the broad fields, miles from everybody. I remember my vision being unaffected by the jolt of footsteps, as if I was floating like a camera on a wire. During dinner I suddenly pictured the boy perched birdlike on top of a bluestone mausoleum, a mausoleum I was sure hadn’t been in the dream but which just as surely I’d laid eyes on somewhere, sometime.  

morning scene, written at midnight

Steve was late again, and the only reasonable thing for me to have done was call him. But by then even the thought of scrolling to his name in my phone seemed to put up a sort of magnetic opposition to itself, one that sent ripples of vertigo through my guts; I wasn’t going to call him. He would either show up – and I was certain he would – or call me or we’d go the rest of our lives without communicating. It was an overcast morning but, in a way, limpid as if it were cloudless. I thought vaguely about having heard that the UV index was strongest in those conditions. The footpaths were a little damp and put out a strong, elemental smell; our garden smelt of petrichor. For the first time ever I saw the streetlights shut off before my eyes. There was a lot of fresh bird shit on a section of footpath across the road where some lily pilly branches overhung.

I hadn’t slept well. The richness of the peanut sauce Sarah liked, and the Oyster and Fish sauces too, and the intensity of the kaffir lime and lemongrass and coriander, and the heat of chilli, churned in me all night. After brushing my teeth three times a salty muck returned to my tongue and cheeks, cloying, astringent, and made me feel physically unclean. In bed I kept breathing out of my mouth into a cupped hand in the dark and smelling it, and being disgusted by the smell, not knowing what, if anything, I was trying to confirm. I held in so many farts that I was bloated to point where, after finally getting up to shit, I couldn’t. Then I hit my shin on the sideboard getting back into bed. Not especially badly, but bad enough for life to seem fucked beyond repair for a few moments. I smelled the fitted sheet where my body had been lying and it stunk of sweat and shit, or at least it didn’t discredit the expectation I had of it smelling that way. I lay half awake until my alarm sounded.

“My mum had great legs when she was young,” was the second last thing Sarah said to me before falling asleep. “Do you think I’ve inherited them?” was the last, and it came so long after the earlier statement that I’d lost the thread entirely. By the time I picked it up and answered in the affirmative, that her legs were the kind “men skinned each other over”, the shallow, rhythmic breathing pattern that was inimitably hers in deep sleep had set in. I listened to it most carefully in those first moments, but was aware of it at all moments of the night. I listened for other noises she might have made too. The occasional sighs, so sexy they seemed put-on, the stomach gurgles, the squelch of her silk pyjamas against the bedding. All of them made me feel something closer to exaltation than disgust, but not that much closer.

Sleeping, Sarah had always been a kind of Albertine for me, Marcel’s Albertine, except that it wasn’t plants her stillness symbolised, or which symbolised her stillness, but humanness, if that was a real word, and the fragility that attended to it all the time. Only since meeting Sarah and observing her as she slept had I ever really thought about the efforts to which a body went in order to stay alive, had I ever really thought about what the various sounds of the body signified, had I ever considered that the stillness of a sleeping human being was an illusion unless that human being was, in fact, not sleeping but dead. And by my emotional response to those observations it seemed as though they were what split the world into the initiated, the ones who got it, and ones who didn’t know shit. But if that was the case, what did it mean to get it? After noticing impassively that Steve was now half an hour late, I looked into the grey glare and thought, as I’d thought many times in the weeks and months prior, that getting it meant getting used to the idea that people needed to find somebody to be with but that in doing so they were consigning themselves to a lifetime of pain.

The Girl in Gindarra - Ending

Wood smoke. It’s still in my clothes. None of us have changed outfits for days. It’s in my long hair, washed half a dozen times since Gindarra, hair I’d like to lop off before we pitch out of the Daintree and head inland to the doof; it’s in the sweat seeping from the veined concaves where my biceps start; it’s in my nostrils even as the air is clean. And I’m sipping on this ice water and chewing on these ice cubes, my fingers wet with condensation, and I can see five pairs of undies J-hooked with pink rope to the roof racks of the Landcruiser, hung there dripping after our swim with the Stingers at Ellis Beach, and I’m thinking that it’s time I found a girl who loves me, and I swear I can feel my boiling insides start to smoulder.

Howqua Poem 1

rainbow trout once jumped here

where the water is black with depth

and female hands, unkempt

fingernails in certain sunlit trysts

bearing pale reflections of other pale bodies,

clutch crumbs of amethyst and jade

and are cupped by the wind’s gnomic graces

as their legs, smooth as polished wood,

tread water – bleeding soot-daubed

trees inch their moribund roots down

in a last-ditch admixture

of ultimate intensity and ultimate fatigue

to silty nooks where crayfish nest –

and all the weeds are flowering

and the infinitesimal rapids

evanesce on the surface of that oblong

pool, eyes of dogs and men fixed

on their shallow point of re-emergence –

now we and not the trout are here

with dirt rutted in our fortune lines –

the rug on which she tries to sleep

laid between two cyprus stumps

on downtrodden tussock, cow pats

stinging nettles, blackberries,

rampant yellow flowers, is blazoned

with indecipherable signs – there is only

us, us in the New Years Eve gloaming.

New Years Story: On the Way to See Jangers

We come to a narrow road, narrow and serpentine, as if it were the trail of an actual snake that’s shot off, in fear of us, through the woodlands. The air blustering through my open window is cool and smells of rich, untainted earth.

Read me something, she says out of nowhere. Read me something in one of your accents. I tell her I have to watch the road; the feeling of my voice in my throat, like an engine idling weakly, catches me by surprise. Guarded by columns of snow gums and their fern and tussock understory, palled in the dust whipped up by the last car to have passed this way – probably also headed to the big New Years Party that Jangers and the others have organised – the road seems to be offering an optical illusion of some sort, only I can’t be certain what sort, can’t be certain whether the illusion is one of bringing things forwards or sending them away, because I’m concentrating on other things.

Then stop the car, she insists. Watch the road until the next straight, pull over where it’s safe for people to get by us in both directions, and read to me for a little while, a few minutes, a minute even, just put the things I’m thinking about out of my head. But the next straight, I say, is probably Sheepyard Flat. There’ll be people everywhere. They’ll think things, say things. Would you settle for a joke as we drive? 

You couldn’t save my life with a joke, not even if somebody had taken me hostage and all they wanted for me was a funny joke, you still couldn’t save me. 

I don’t really know what you mean by that, I say, but how about you tell one?

Okay, she says after a time. She’s rubbing the seat upholstery between her legs, close to the crotch of her denim shorts that’s stretched so tightly over her own crotch, like Mylar over the head of a drum. She’s thumbing the dust off the dashboard as though it were a smear of dirt on her daughter’s face.

Which weighs less –

Out of what?

Just wait, I’m remembering this as I go.

Okay.

Okay – which weighs less, a long blade of grass that’s got ants all over it, so many that it’s black, or –

The road dips very sharply; I make first eye contact with the river. I see children swimming in a beautiful stony river, and some fluorescent kayaks on its banks. There’s a parking lot, a campground, almost full, and a sign that confirms my estimates: Sheepyard Flat. But the narrow road darts upwards again, even harder into the mountain, and that idyll is quickly left behind. It smells of farts in the car – cherry and rice cracker farts – that I don’t think I did. And the lack of first gear torque and the fish-tailing backside of this borrowed Nissan Navara are making work of the ascent.

She’s making hard work of the joke and that’s all right. I have her, in a way, right where she wants to be, and that is where I want her too.

A blade of grass with ants, she repeats, apprising herself of what she’s already said, or a Norwegian?

I don’t know. The question’s funny enough on its own. Which weighs less?

A Norwegian, she answers, chuckling. Then she forgets the punch line irretrievably, and I pull over beside a big cheese wedge of granite, on the flat of which we both sit, our arses warmed by the latent heat in it, sunning ourselves like snakes in an unmanned wilderness, and I read to her out of the only book I’ve brought with me, Peter Camenzind, in a voice I feel could actually have been Hesse’s, until I crack up laughing and have to finish the chapter in my normal accent, that of a public school-educated Melbournian, and a huge coffee stain blotting out the start of the next chapter has us down and into the car again, which doesn’t smell like anything anymore, only the staleness of an old car that’s been kept well, and I tell her we’ll be around everybody soon, and there’ll be all the music and drugs and goodwill you can imagine, will you like that? She says yes and no, but then repeats the word no and simply says yes.

The Girl in Gindarra: Complete Second Draft

Gindarra is either at the top of New South Wales or the bottom of Queensland. I don’t remember exactly where it is and have no phone reception to check. As a Victorian, it’s all the same to me. What’s for certain is that there were XXXX signs on the pub, a very beautiful old pub bearing many similarities to the one I’m sitting in right now, and that the ovals weren’t ovals anymore but rectangles, with H-shaped goals at either end.

We had a problem with the leaf spring suspension on the left wheel of our trailer. Namely, the steel was about to snap in half. And the mud flaps were loose, slapping against the tyres like the bits of cardboard put-putting in a kid’s bicycle spokes. The rear axle was also fucked: at low speed it sounded like the inexorable pressure of the load we carried in combination with the thousands of kilometres we’d driven had wrenched the tyres too far forward, so that now they were rubbing against the wheel arches. I couldn’t see any smoke but the stink of burnt rubber found its way into the cabin. The trailer was moving like a boar with an arrow through its side, in torrid wobbles, with that conjunction of last-ditch intensity and ultimate fatigue. I half expected the rear axle to break away any minute and smash into the windscreen of the car behind us, and for us to keep driving for a time in a panic and a blaze of sparks.

Then we reached Gindarra, population 1763, birthplace of George Kenniworth, the three-time Olympian. The sport he competed in had been left off the sign. First to welcome us were the houses, squat and selfsame weatherboard bungalows with horse floats in the driveways, burnt-out cars and other scrap metal strewn around the front yards. Some had very symmetrical gardens, threadbare but pretty. Some had no garden at all but a lot of lawn ornaments, including one place with a flock of twenty terracotta sheep and their shepherd, which I took to be Jesus. We drove down the main street – replete with Target Country and a few bakeries – in the middle of which was a memorial park with a fountain and a barbecue and a block of toilets, and then we crossed a bridge over a river; I don’t recall the name of either. To people from the city, I thought to myself, all country towns were essentially caricatures of the same thing – the past, queer and distant and unfathomable.

·       

There was a little sunlight left. Some blokes were fishing on the banks beside it, and they had a decent campfire going. On the other side of the bridge there was a stretch of road that seemed as good as any to pull over on, and so we did and then all of us got out. By ‘we’ I mean Pete, Stuart, Dharman, Sean and me. We were on our way to an electronic music festival in Far North Queensland, or FNQ as the publican here calls it. Next to the road was a big expanse of nothing, naked earth, grassless and weedless, which slowly gave over to a few shrubs and trees closer to the river.

My being out of the Landcruiser at all was almost symbolic: I knew fuck all about cars, let alone trailers. I didn’t really know much about anything, besides books that was. But still I stood with my arms and legs crossed and nodded whenever Pete or Dharman – who by then was underneath the trailer bashing the axle forward with a sledge hammer – said something about what was wrong or how they planned to fix it. There was heat and a simmering sound coming from the engine; I was told that neither of these was abnormal. The strong smell of motor oil and coolant made me feel like a man. Then Dharman asked me to get the jack out of the checker plate box on the front of the trailer. I got it and handed it to him.  Then Dharman asked me to head towards the trees and find a big piece of wood – I wasn’t sure why, even after he’d tried to explain it to me. I started to walk along a narrow dirt byroad towards the river. I was barefoot and there were a few prickles, and the sun was nearly gone, and even trucks, normally omnipresent, had deserted the Newell at that moment. The amber streetlight on the bridge was the only one for ages. Oddly, not a trace of the fishermen’s campfire could be seen. Even the town, Gindarra, on the other side of the river, was just a bit of vague tracery in the blackening grey.

There wasn’t any wood that was of use to us. There were a lot of twigs, but they wouldn’t do. I even asked Dharman across the plain and he yelled back no, they’re useless. When looking back towards Dharman I was surprised at how far the river had ended up being from the Newell. Pete and Stuart were eating something out of a can. I could see the silver surface of the river now and the forked deadwood sticking out of it. I could see that the river was shallow and moribund, that the drought would probably unmake it before the decade was out, turn it into a place to pitch a swag, a track for bushwalkers, still blue on their big topographic maps, dotted with boar wallows. Then the rains would come and make it again: I thought that rebirths of waterways warranted new names because bad omens had been tacked to the old ones. 

At my feet there was a long, solid shadow that looked like a log. After bending down and grabbing it with a certain excitement I found that it was made of cement and wouldn’t budge. I was pondering the existence of such a strange and seemingly purposeless object when a light appeared across the river. It was a cigarette lighter, jacked to a sizeable flame, being held with both hands by the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.

·       

Her ankles, I saw as I watched her bend down – quite gracelessly, but a gracelessness that made my dick go hard – were festooned with strings, and jewels. I could see the curvature of her arse in the flickers, the way it melted into her hamstrings so lithely, her dark pleated skirt hiking right up. She made no effort to lower it. She thought she was alone. In a way she was. She must’ve been wearing tiny underpants or no underpants at all for her arse to be visible like that; looking now at the arse of the girl behind the bar I think that country girls wear tiny underwear all the time so as to emulate city girls, except that they do so in error. They suffer, I suppose, in error.

Her face was so perfect as to be almost waxen and her dark hair was like water. The eucalyptus tree that hid my body now was the widest along either bank, and like a professional peeping tom I’d gone so still and quiet that I was hardly breathing. I soon saw that the girl had a bag with her and that she’d crouched down to get something out of it. Then the flame went out. I heard some indeterminate noises and then nothing. There was nothing.

Her eyes were what I saw when it came on again, and I jumped in a sort of shamefaced panic. They were staring directly into mine, as if she’d known I was there from the outset. I was on the verge of calling out. Then the flames started to grow and the girl turned and ran into the darkness, which took her as quickly as if she’d dropped off the edge of the earth.

·     

Pete’s gangly limbs looked out of control in motion. Dharman didn’t swing his arms. Stuart had a cigarette in his mouth and lagged behind. Sean, a champion district basketball player before he discovered ice pipes, still ran like a man who’d been getting regular sleep. Despite the felt Akubra flying off his head midstride, he seemed to be at me and asking excited questions faster than I could take a breath.

There was more smoke than fire. The underbrush was twiggy as I think I mentioned – and barky, and the eucalyptus trees weren’t in any danger just yet. People are prepared to tolerate such a copious amount of smoke, aren’t they, in exchange for the succor of a pissy fire on their cold bones, and the beautiful glow of embers! I thought I could feel the temperature changing, but not necessarily getting warmer. Then the calluses on the sides of my feet began to bother me. No matter how I stood I was uncomfortable. And I shifted and slouched and straightened until the idea of having to engineer a certain stance at all left me strung out, bamboozled almost. I sat down on the ground. My hands, which were propping me up from behind, dug shallowly into the earth. The earth was damper than I’d expected, or would’ve expected, if I’d expected it to be any which way. The boys were too wrapped up in the burgeoning bushfire to notice.

That’s when I started to think about the girls. Some were watering houseplants of myriad variety and in myriad houses, others were standing in line for groceries, some were sitting with their seatbelts buckled in aeroplane cabins, some were blowing up balloons, others were so close to me that out noses would’ve touched, others were on the toilet, some were dancing, others were the possessors of noses I’d touched in real life, some were in straitjackets, some were kindergartners playing with toy animals, but most, most of the girls were protagonists in scenes so fucked up that I felt like mangling my head against the cement log on the ground to make them stop, scenes I won’t even dignify by describing or thinking too much about, especially while the publican is out here. The girls were succeeding each other so rapidly that there was a kind of flipbook singularity to it, and a sense of time accelerating towards something absolute or at least resolutely towards something unknown.

Stuart announced that the flames could only spread so far because there was a parking lot between Gindarra’s buildings and the river, and the night was dead still, that at worst a few trees were going to burn. I breathed hard and could hear my pulse and smell: two or three different kinds of men’s deodorant, wood smoke, animal shit, canned tuna, eucalyptus.

·       

What seemed like the entire population of the greater region had gathered in the parking lot. The nearby scout hall’s outside lights were turned on; soon they were swarming with moths. Everyone was coughing. Most of the people were older than fifty and overweight. It was either a Friday or Saturday night. Then a fire truck arrived sirens blazing and, moments before or after, two policemen on horseback. I wondered why the police would send the mounted unit instead of a squad car, and thought that maybe there was no squad car in Gindarra, but then trumped that thought with the thought that that was stupid, if there was a mounted unit then of course there was a fucking squad car.

At a guess we were thirty metres away from the townspeople; we were also a river and a small bushfire away from them. Ostracised by the rumble of all those conversations, all the familiar names I could hear being used to address people I didn’t know, I began to fixate on the policemen’s boots in the stirrups. The appearances of the cops themselves were of no interest to me whatsoever. I tried to figure out what brand the boots were and concluded that it was a Doc Marten knock-off, probably standard issue for both cops and the ADF. From there I panned out until I could see the whole animals – not the riders, just the horses. They were the colour of the steam that plumed into the air after you doused a fire with water, or the pall of steam that hovered over bubbling green liquids in the science labs of villains in the movies. They looked twice the age of any other horse in the world. I was looking at them while chewing the skin off my fingertips when suddenly Sean stood over me and made a gesture right in my face that was like a tiger clawing and said, I’m gonna maul you in a minute. And I said, what? And Sean said, get the fuck up, we’re crossing over to get amongst it.

Walking back over the bridge, I saw that the fishermen had left. Some coals in their fire were still weakly aglow. There was a dark object next to the fire that I thought looked like a fishing bucket. Had they forgotten it? Stuart spat over the side of the bridge, listening carefully for I don’t know what, the spit landing on the water possibly, or something else, and then pulled his pants up because they were too big for him and had fallen down so far that his entyre arse was exposed.

·       

Then we were in the thick of it, and the looks on the townspeople’s faces weren’t what I’d expected them to be. There was hardly a trace of consternation, still less of fear. It wasn’t that nobody gave a fuck though, only that the expressions on display pointed to other feelings, feelings of either annoyance or exasperation or outright rage, and it struck me that this was probably not the first incident of its kind to have happened recently in Gindarra. All the children seemed to be enjoying it though. We were getting strange, not to say menacing, looks from certain folk.

I thought differently now about the bareness of the big tracts of earth by the Newell. I could see huge territories burning to cinders, helicopters water-bombing woodlands, corrugated iron roofs melting like caramel, charred photographs, men lying facedown on grandmotherly beds. We watched the fire crew jump out, watched the hose unravel, watched the water pressure rise. We watched the motivational huddle: more than one of us said how cool it would be to do that sort of shit. The decision was made to assume a similar position when the triple-drop of acid we’d planned for the upcoming total eclipse started to kick in. When we all rip our hands away, said Pete, we have to say rules is rules.

I saw her. She was behind a very overweight family of four, holding an old woman’s hand. The old woman looked a lot like Margaret Atwood. Maybe her clothes were different, maybe they weren’t. Both smiling faces flashed with the light of the fire sirens. Then one of the cops trotted to the front of the gathering, just shy of where the firefighters had already more or less contained the blaze, and everybody fell silent. The fire’s under control, said the cop. He then added, unbelievably slowly as I remember it, that anybody with information should make themselves known to police right away, that the offender or offenders had despoiled public land and wasted taxpayer money for the last time. We’re prepared to impose a curfew if need be, said the cop. If you don’t want us to be forced to impose curfews on the whole community, if that’s not something you want on your conscience, then I urge you, if you’ve got any information at all, to come forward now. A wave of murmurs broke through the crowd, but quickly died out.

·       

For what felt like a long time I stared at her. All the willpower I had I poured into getting her head to turn towards mine. I wanted her to tell her to watch as I marched up to the cops and blamed the fire on those fishermen, which is what I was about to do. Yeah, as the publican puts a jug of ice water and a pot glass in front of me, and I thank her more profusely than is necessary, I can say for sure that I was prepared to finger those poor fucking fishermen for the crime. Why? I don’t really know. And besides, the girl never turned and so I turned and saw my mates taking silly photos in front of the fire truck.

I was getting my photo taken when there was a terrible sound. It was a hard thud and then a scream, or the same but in reverse order, and when I turned and saw that one of the police horses had given out on the bitumen and was lying flat on its side, I thought at first that the scream had been animal.

I knew that Steele, or something very much like it, was the horse’s name because the cop who’d been riding him was wailing that word over and over like a crazy person, and he had sinews of spit hanging from his mouth, and each iteration he loosed seemed to overlap the previous and be overlapped by the next. Had there not been the odd different word or two to interpose them all those Steeles would’ve sounded like a single breathless howl that was identical to the reaction of the voice box to terrible physical pain, to torture. The horse was pronounced dead after a horse doctor I heard somebody call Mick had checked a few vitals. Then the cop began to thrash around and beat the bitumen with his fists. Then he quieted right down and flung himself on Steele, then he beat the bitumen again and was screaming again. Eventually things got so bad that the other cop, the one who’d addressed the townspeople, was forced to restrain his partner in much the same way as if he’d just apprehended a crook. Even with his full bodyweight at his knees, plied into the small of the mourner’s back, he could hardly keep him down.

Across from where I’m sitting – on the verandah of the pub – there is a wooden fence painted green and then the road and then a fucking enormous tract of copper desert and then the mountains, the loveliest I think I’ve ever laid eyes on, even lovelier than the Rockies or the Andes that make furry ant hills of them, and to my right I can see the rusted razor wire and excavated ridge of an open-cut coal mine long-since shut down. Looking at that mine, I picture the poor bloke clinging by his fingertips to the lip of it, a pit not filled with foam or even with nothing, as the mine is, and as most pits inside us seem to be, but with snakes, a pit swarming with snakes that he’d been trying in secret to wrench himself away from but that the death of his horse had cast him spectacularly into.

Probably the effect on Gindarra will be just as deep, just as inerasable. There are people who, because of position or general temperament, aren't expected to break, and when those people finally break into smithereens, everybody around them feels all the more fragile, maybe even wonders why they haven't broken yet, maybe even spends more time searching, waiting for the cracks in their own veneer to show, and veneer is absolutely the right word for it. Even the firemen had stopped to watch. Smoke from the fire they’d just quelled cast an abject pall over everything. The whole of Gindarra had gone quiet and looked to me like a pack of wretches lost in a haze. Everyone except the girl, who was no longer standing where I’d seen her last and was therefore, for all intents and purposes, no longer alive either.