Dark Roots Read Free Page B

parties, or silently flicking through the channels with the remote as I wracked my brain for something to say that would make her talk again. How can you just stand there? Vicki said now, sawing the sandwiches with the knife. I don’t know , I answered, which was the honest truth.
    Twelve years of night running, working the bolt open silently on the back gate, watching Kelly let rip.
    When we started the oval had opened out to empty land, now there was a maze of clothes lines, fences, paved patios. When the dog disappeared up the incline on the other side, he’d pause and turn, waiting for me. I could whistle so softly it was barely audible and he’d instantly race back like a rocket. Incredible hearing, turning towards the sound like a dish picking up radar. Outside the back door, ears straining through the glass, he’d hear his name and start shaking with excitement, picking up his front feet like they were hot, trying to sit up straight like a kid waiting to be let out of school . Oh please, Mum , Louise would plead. Please let him . My soft-hearted Lou.
    I got promoted. Matthew got taller and sat hunched over his Nintendo GameBoy instead of practising soccer. Vicki did two nights a week at TAFE: Write Your Life Story, Crystal Healing, Thai Cooking, Start Your Own Small Business, The Tarot and You, Stretch Sewing.
    One year I was opening and unfolding the Christmas tree and remembered that I’d meant to fix the two broken branches with fishing line a few months before. No — it had been a year ago. It couldn’t be a year since Christmas but it was; the same jammed aisles of $2 crap, worrying what Vicki would like, thirty-six shopping hours to go, going crazy with the muzak. If you’d have asked me what I’d wanted, I couldn’t have said.
    It had been different — I was sure it had been — when the kids believed in Santa. Vicki and I had drunk port together and eaten the shortbread, scattered the grass clippings Louise had arranged in little piles for the reindeer, listened to the carols on TV, gone into the bedrooms and looked at our kids sleeping, feeling sentimental and exhausted from setting up train sets and fairy outfits in the lounge room. Kids believe in Santa; adults believe in childhood.
    Then it was January the second of a New Year we didn’t stay up for, and I was back to work on the twelfth, and in that time would be a week at the coast, and in the middle of the night I’m watching the digital numbers shift like blinking and I get up and get my runners. Kelly’s curled up on the back mat, and wakes up from a deep sleep when I touch him and looks surprised. He stands and stretches, runs a bit stiffly down to the gate to wait, and it seems like the same kind of strange joke that only such a short time ago you couldn’t keep him down; he leapt from that guy’s car into our front yard with so much energy. Now he takes off down the street and I stop at the end to rest a stitch that feels like a deep knot in my gut pulling upwards, and I jog to the oval and see Kelly trotting slowly to the incline on the far side. I am forty-two years old and the kind of guy who once scored 174 baskets in a season but now gives his wife a StaySharp knife for Christmas, who can barely jog two kilometres, who can never think of what to say, and none of it really hits me until I whistle to watch Kelly bolting back down across the grass and he doesn’t come. He is turned towards me and seems to be waiting, he seems to pick me out in the darkness and know what has always happened before, but he shakes his head, gives a nervous yawn and I realise he can’t hear me; he’s deaf.
    It seems a little extreme , the vet said to me. Lots of dogs with impaired hearing continue to enjoy a good quality of life . Kelly lying there, looking at nothing. Not impaired, silent. I watched the vet click his fingers behind the dog, clap, whistle. Sometimes , he said, this kind of