As the house neared completion, my father dreamed more and worked less. A qualified carpenter and builder, he refused most employment, quarrelled with contractors, squandered what little money we had on projects that did nothing to improve the house, but rather seemed aimed at deferring its being finished and the reckoning — with the land, his life, himself — that would come with such an ending. Missing the ocean, he decided we must have a dam to swim in. Scorning the muddy oblongs of our farming neighbours, he conjured visions of a crystal pool, artfully landscaped with boulders and tree ferns, its banks free from the unholy traffic of hooves, a pure vehicle of leisure untainted by practicality or primary production, waters sparkling with windfall light. An excavator came, a dam was dug. Water was pumped in and quickly drained away. The bottom was unsound. My father lost interest, returning to his armchair, the television, smoke. I would join him there, sometimes, climbing into his lap, taking comfort in his momentary peace, blinking away the cloying scent of dope.
Sometimes my father would take me on walks to the west, beyond the boundary of our land. Down a slope, across a narrow paddock owned by the farmer, through barbed wire fences and fields of paper daisies, we would reach the skirt of a gently sloping hill, heavily wooded. The trees were different here — sassafras, coachwood, black wattle, white beech — remnants of the cool rainforests that had covered the region before they were stripped for rare timbers, ringbarked, torched for pasture. Under the canopy the light was green. Sprays of epiphytes lit up dark trunks like fanlights. Moss fell and hung in ropes and curtains. Tree ferns, the tallest I’d seen, grew in paired lines following the slope, a processional of woolly columns splendid with palmy capitals and curlicued shoots. Orchids bloomed strangely, feeding on the moist air. Turquoise butterflies courted pale flowers. Birdsong was varied, rapturous, constant. My father called it The Wilderness, and seemed to need it as a place beyond his interventions. When we came here, we spoke of making burrows, treehouses, nests.
On our hill, the garden fell increasingly into neglect. The macadamias and fruit trees planted in the cleared land along the steep drive were overwhelmed with bracken and wire-vine, pulled down or choked by weeds. The tree fern my father had poached from the bank of the brawling river to the east to mark the path to the front door was dead or dormant. The house’s inner walls remained unpainted or unpanelled, showing bare gyprock or rough hardwood frames. The internal stairs had no banister; my brother and I raced up and down on all-fours. The front steps were uneven, a rush-job, jerry rigged with stumps and boards that flexed and shifted underfoot. The verandah that stretched the length of the façade and partway round both sides had solid rails but was unfinished — a single line of rope stretched across the gaps. Riding my cheap plastic tricycle one morning, I saw a flash of something just beyond the rails — a rufous fantail, flitting between a sapling and the trunk of a tallowwood. Pushing closer on bare feet, I stretched out against the safety rope until the front wheel of the trike went over the edge. I remember it perfectly — the sudden lack of resistance as I passed between rail and rope; the ground rising towards me, tufts of grass and lichen-flecked rock; the stunning impact; the after-vacancy; the mineral taste of my concussion — how it made me think for a moment that I had eaten the rock. I remember the vividness of the sky when I rolled over; the colours I saw when the pain arrived; the way it made me shout rather than cry. I’d fallen two metres and landed face-first on a small basalt boulder, almost losing my right eye. My father stretched a second line of rope.
Somehow the beauty of the place made it all worse. Waking early, my brother and I could watch the winter sun illumine the gum, watch the bark glow, see the dew fall from the leaves, hear the chiming notes of crimson rosellas, the confident descant of the magpies. Perhaps once a year it snowed, white flakes falling in flurries and circles, slanting in from the southwest on a stern wind. One cold morning we saw three foxes, a mother and two cubs, pick a watchful path across the lawn, quiet breaths pluming in the frigid air, until the cubs found a deflated football my brother had left out. Some inner spring released, they dropped all caution and fell to playing with the football, nosing and pouncing on it over and over, wrestling, yipping, barking — until some noise from the house set them instantly on guard and they ghosted off to the west.
In spring the creeks and gullies creaked and droned with frogs. Mist and low clouds set jewels on every leaf. Clear water ran across grass. Cress grew. Swallows nested in culverts. Flocks of straw-necked ibis spiralled under heavy rainclouds. Ducks floated on every dam, rested on every riverbank, dabbled in every stream. Herons stalked the edges, eating frogs. Calves frisked at every fence, hid behind their mothers, screamed as they were loaded into trucks. Snakes came out, found sun, coiled up, basked. The bowerbird stole our blue pegs. Swamp wallabies haunted the tree line around the house, hoping to graze the lawn. Mobs of eastern greys drew up in sunny paddocks, flipped ears against the flies, scratched, cuffed joeys, sighed. Sometimes at night or very early, we heard the thin howls of dingoes.
In summer, there were doves — wonga pigeons, fruit doves, brown cuckoo-doves, white-headed pigeons — and raptors — grey goshawks nesting leggily in a gum, nankeen kestrels perched on fenceposts or floating motionless overhead, black-shouldered kites hovering tirelessly, pausing, plunging, stooping. Wedge-tailed eagles passed over from the east at speed, raising their high, fluting cries. My father and I disturbed one over a kill — a frightening angel, scaled and taloned, clumsy on the ground — the strange, jumbled form of a hare coming apart beneath it as it struggled to take off.
The grass yellowed, the heat peaked, the mirror hills turned sere, cars and cattle trailed dust, and then autumn brought storms, rising wind, unspeakable sunsets, and the high, funereal voices of yellow-tailed black cockatoos, ghost singers calling down rain. We were failing all of it — all the beauty, the superflux, the mixed economies of nature, the traditional horrors and felicities of pastoral life. None of it helped.
The unfinished house was falling into silence, absorbing effort, pleasure, cheer, darkening despite its windows. In these years I dreamed consistently of snakes — long, black, and undulating, segmented like centipedes and worms, tined with protruding ribs, winding down into the soil, into a thin and sandy hole that compelled my hand then dragged at my fingers, pulling me into some thinner, darker place. Waking up before dawn, the long, lightless hours seemed similarly to stretch. I became afraid of the dark, then bored, then afraid again. I waited for some sound below the wind, some stuttered footstep on the stairs, the rasp and tick of claws, a pair of yellow eyes in the limbs of the gum. This dark trailed me as the house woke up, spread its tendrils through the day, gave the shadows of the house a colder, blacker cast.
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