Loving, Faithful Animal Read Free Page A

her comforting was something you had to trade for, something to buy with money or favours, her share of the dishes. Then there was nothing you had that she wanted ( I don’t even read those stupid vampire books anymore, dumb-arse ) and she said she was tired of waking up with your fricken feet in her fricken face. Eventually you became too old for that kind of thing anyway and, at twelve, too proud. That’s how it went.
    There is a picture you have in your mind, though you’re not certain how it got there. Another photograph from the green Corvette years, maybe, but this one is in black and white: a semicircle of scraggly men standing around a large pit. From outside the photograph, you cannot see the men’s faces. Only their backs, their arms loose around each other’s shoulders. You cannot see what is in the pit. But somehow you know what is in there, and wish you did not. In the foreground, a pair of rifles are crossed, jabbed barrel-down into the dirt, making an X. One of these rifles is your father’s. This is all you know about the war; this and the panther and your mother’s face.
    After three fat cigarettes your brain feels padded with smoke, the afternoon humming with a loud, high-pitched heat. You scuff the fallen pine needles into little heaps with the heel of your shoe. Sometimes there are things left up here—beer bottles, bones, burnt pieces of hose, once a pair of grubby cotton knickers tangled in a chequered blanket—so you know it isn’t only yours, this place. But today there are just the shells from the cicadas, who have six weeks to fly around, make noise and have sex before they die—a rotten deal after spending seven years underground, doing nothing.
    Mum has a collection of them lined up along the kitchen windowsill, which Lani thinks is creepy as hell. Aunt Stell agrees, says she can’t stand to look at them, marching along with their slit-open backs. They make her feel itchy. But Mum thinks they’re lucky. For her, the entire world is split into lucky and unlucky, you and your sister included. Lani’s birthday is the fourth (unlucky) and yours is the twenty-first (lucky). It’s a certain amount of responsibility, this luckiness, looking after it as though it might wear away or stretch thin with growing.
    There are more cicada husks up in the higher branches, an easy climb even with the headful of smoke. Seven is a good number. They don’t give up their hold of the tree bark without a fight, and some of them lose a leg or two. But their remaining hook-feet catch in your T-shirt’s soft cotton and they cling there as if they know and trust you anyway.
    Riding in the bent green arms of the pine you want to find a way to keep it all, to press it flat like a gum blossom between the pages of a heavy book; the paddocks and huge sky with the final hours of December dissolving into it. When you close your eyes it’s there for a moment, perfect, but then the edges go fuzzy and it drifts away. After a while it all hurts to look at, too glaring and too empty, and no way to stop the afternoon from running out.
    You light another smoke and let the match burn down to make a midget charcoal pencil. Inside of the matchbook for a canvas.
    In art class you draw habitats. Not landscapes; habitats. Places that are waiting. Places where people or animals might eventually wander into if you can make them seem inviting enough.
    Very elegant, those trees, those hills, says Miss Dawes. But don’t you think it would all look nicer with some sheep or something?
    They’ll come later, you tell her. Something, but not sheep. Sheep always look like parasites from far away.
    Parasites?
    Yeah, like ticks. Or fleecy lice.
    I’ve never noticed that. But you’re allowed to use the whole page, you know? There’s stacks of paper back there, you don’t have to crush it all into a corner.
    Okay, you tell her, though you like to keep things small