Dark Roots Read Free

“I love you.” Didn’t she?’
    â€˜Yes,’ I say. ‘Take that soup with you. Please. Help yourself.’
    So I am left alone with you again, out of visiting hours, three days until our deadline, as you slumber in this cave, this room that is an everywhere. What did we do, till we loved, Beth, and what will we do now? Maybe when I was nineteen I would have believed that if the power of speech could be mustered with such effort, it could be squandered on declarations of love, but I know you, and so I know better now.
    Take out this tube is what you said to me. Take out this tube .
    How is it that I can want to sleep, as I walk through my kitchen at 2.00 a.m? Here is the wreckage of preparation, of dishes piled and unwashed, of a red light flashing on an answering machine like an abandoned satellite signalling for re-entry somewhere, anywhere. Here are debts in unopened envelopes, the slow drifting swansong of resignation. And here is a plane and a set of drill bits, a piece of timber leaning against the back door, a small pile of wood shavings I scoop into my hand before stepping carefully over that dark gap and sitting down.
    I raise them to my face and inhale as I sit there, smelling forest which is gone now, a breathing tree turned mute and felled and unrecognisable, nothing but lumber.

A Pitch Too High for the Human Ear
    If I signed off at 4.50 I could take the 5.00 p.m. bus and be home in time to help Matthew with his maths and peel the potatoes while Vicki moved around the kitchen doing everything else. We’d turn the TV round on its console, like one of those things in a Chinese restaurant, and watch the six o’clock news together, hardly ever commenting on it. Baths and a story. Another beer at 9.00 and I’d already be thinking of tomorrow. It was that kind of tiredness you get from doing nothing all day, the exhaustion of sitting. When I married I was a fairly handy forward with the Cougars — B Grade, scored 174 baskets one season. Now I drove my kids to sports, stood on windy sidelines hearing parents scream at their eight-year-olds to get in and kill him. Sometimes I’d still be awake at 3.00 a.m. or so, usually Sunday nights, lying there unstretched, cramped up and watching the smooth outline of my wife dreaming something else nearby.
    This is how you slide from a bed: move your foot out and over the edge, find the floor, slide sideways supporting yourself on the bedside table, your fingers touching the fake antique lamp your parents gave you a pair of for a wedding present. Haul out from under the doona. Carry your runners and put them on outside the back door, with your dog already leaping at the thought of what’s ahead, way down at the gate. You can just see, in the moonlight, that strange red-gold glint, like road reflectors, from the dog’s eyes. Ecstatic to be out, to be marauding, to be running.
    When I was in training, before I was married, I used to run four or five kilometres a night sometimes, around the deserted cul-de-sacs in the suburbs when they were so new there were no streetlights. I’d learned to drive in the same streets, reverse parking down battleaxe driveways of barely finished houses, doing hill starts up in the high parts of the new residential zone. Look out beyond the landscaping of roads then, and there were paddocks full of agisted horses. Now the shrubs were higher than your head, there were cars in every drive, ten buses a day, a new health centre. Five kilometres then, with a sense I could have kept going out past the cleared blocks and sewer trenches and run straight into the hills. Now I was flagging after three, barely making it to the service station on the corner of the expressway, looking at the yellow neon of the 24-hour drive-through McDonalds where the horses used to be. Fourteen years — what’s that? Two kids, a wedding photo where you can’t believe the suit you wore, and the golden arches.
    We’d