Rose Leopard Read Free

doesn’t.
    Brilliant, brittle, translucent people like Kaz can often be latent hypochondriacs. When we were first together, she was always rushing off to see Doctor So-and-so for advice about such-and-such: a sniffle, a flush, a calloused digit, a cut hand. It took a lot of re-educating on my part to stop her. Health, I trumpeted, is a state of mind. Think positively — there is no sniffle! — and your nose will take the hint and self-dry. Alternatively, think negatively — hmm, irregularity? — and your bowels will grin wickedly, flex their collective muscle and keep you back-filled for weeks. In those early days, Kaz always had a sore this or an aching that, she was always teetering on the verge of a virus or a rare strain of Mongolian flu or a publicly unmentionable plumbing issue. So I have had to work hard to keep her from doctors, clinics, hospitals; I have had to counsel her to think healthy.
    Delphine is on the door-step, looking for her tribe. I pass them over, hear the steady rattle of her truck as she treks down the valley road. Lights on, darkness encroaching. In the distance the shadows of our land deepen. I can stand for a while, gaze over this dipping rising patch of the world, wonder how artists can ever capture that curious, transitory shift of light — the never-time between day and night. It’s an awareness thing that amazes me; what skill there must be in mixing the exact quantities of colour and non-colour to fashion a wintry five o’clock in the countryside, or a sharp summer’s evening in the city. I hope that someone will one day paint the familiar silhouette of the mountains before me, the faint orange lining the horizon like fruit-rime, the dullish glint of a scattering of early stars, the softness of the smoke that gathers like tulle over the town. And because a good painting, I think, will always project a sound of its own, then I hope also that they can snare this sudden onset of silence that engulfs me, that bewitching time between the sleep of the day-insects and the waking of their night colleagues. As a moment, it is both miniscule — and possessed of a totality that is overwhelming.
    Back inside to microwave baked beans for Milo. Bang on the griller; ham-and-cheese toasted sandwich for Otis. Two big mugs of cold milk with Nesquik floaties.
    â€˜They’re crocodiles,’ says Milo.
    â€˜Dog turds,’ counters Otis, making me feel inordinately proud.
    Bath-time so I bung them in together and use a hose and nozzle to wash their hair. Pyjamas that smell like lavender and lost dreams, Otis’s hair that combs long and straight in furrows like a ready-to-harvest paddock of gold, then I light the fire and switch on the TV we fall back, be-curved, watch cartoons. Angry beavers, funny little Dexter with the robotic voice, snickering scheming Rug-rats, re-runs of Bart’s sweet inferiority complex and Marge’s leaning-tower-of-Pisa hair-do. For an hour we remain motionless then I feel my children asleep against me, relish the warm heaviness of their bodies and their tiny o-shaped mouths sending out gentle coils of life. When I carry them to bed they nestle and roll; when I look in later, they are liquid beneath the doonas, limbs flung apart, soft and spongy-looking, eyelids like cusps of silk. I smile, close their bedroom doors gently, clamber to my own bed, slide in naked and feel Kaz’s too-cold feet, adjust her pillows to help even her breathing, drop my arm over her waist and hug her smell to me.
    Now, I think, I am perfectly happy. Nothing can intrude on the circle of our world.
    Nothing can infect our cocoon.
    And so it is odd then that the last thing I remember is beginning a dream in whiteness, like a mist that whirls about me — so maybe I am caught in a snowstorm; maybe frostbitten and blue-lipped, maybe alone, oddly vulnerable, nowhere near the home that I cherish.

Two
    T he house we live in is vast and airy. Once, it was