Rose Leopard Read Free Page A

a farmhouse. There are imperial gum-trees, a wind that is often blue and furious, lemon grass that whispers and genuflects. We wake to a cacophony of noise; lorikeets sucking the scarlet bejesus out of our bottlebrush, Delphine and Errol’s barking scraping back-scratching dog, king parrots who drop from the clouds and clack the grain that Kaz faithfully leaves. The pleasure of a thousand insects drills each dawn moment. The sun’s creaminess seeps between our curtains. In the distance, a glimpse of sea beckons. I watch my wife, my Kaz, my unfurling-stretching Siamese cat, as she welcomes the day, murmurs then rolls back to sleep some more.
    I dress, paddle down the hallway, enjoy the half-light and stillness, listen to the house creaking like old joints and bones. When we first saw this house we both felt an immediate pull, as strong as the earth tugging tree roots. We stood tentatively outside, wondering whether it would rain much and whether the mountains behind us would change colour in autumn, then Kaz turned to me and said, ‘I love it. I have to live here.’
    â€˜Me too,’ I told her. ‘I wonder why?’
    â€˜I think it’s really grounded,’ she said, after a moment’s consideration. ‘It makes me think of wood and stone and air, all becoming something beautiful.’
    â€˜It’s warm.’ I sought her eyes. ‘This house is warm. I don’t mean warm as in pullover-warm — although it probably is that too — I mean spiritually.’
    I suppose I expected mockery, but she nodded.
    â€˜It’s the colours,’ she said decisively.
    â€˜Mm. Like all the soils of the world have been drawn together and polished clean.’
    â€˜That’s lovely,’ she whispered, hanging onto my arm. ‘I love it when you say things like that.’
    We wandered the perimeter, found a chimney-stack, an old rusting plough jammed into the earth, a barn at the end of a track.
    â€˜Will it be too lonely?’ Kaz asked. A note of doubt had crept into her voice.
    â€˜Splendid isolation.’ I was at my reassuring best. ‘So lonely ’twas, that God himself scarce seemèd there to be.’
    â€˜Bloody Coleridge.’ She half-smiled, half-grimaced. ‘Thought you didn’t believe in God, anyway.’
    â€˜I don’t. Sorry, it was shameless romanticism.’ I grinned and held her to me until there was a glow between us that could have been caressed within the palms of our hands.
    We moved in a month later. There were no curtains but we didn’t care because the view was compelling and led me to understand how stark the Australian bush can be, how its beauty relies on shades of purple and olive, a thin haze and the suffusion of breezes and scents. Kaz was pregnant and the kitchen was full of scone-smells and I was happily building garden beds and we knew it all came from the house: sandstone, bluestone, box-brush, sandalwood, our temple of togetherness.
    * *
    Outside, there are fingers of new light stretching through the branches of eucalypts. Our house sits on top of a small, flattish hill. The gardens are surrounded by wild grass that is flecked with dew, an eruption of liquid diamonds. To the west are the mountains, still bleak in the early morning, lightly iced with fog. Eastwards the land pancakes as the coast beckons — from certain vantage points, we can see Barilba Bay and the bustling, burgeoning township that has grown up alongside its beaches. Several hundred metres away I can see smoke curling from the chimney of Errol and Delphine’s modernist pole-home. They are our nearest neighbours, a pigeon-pair of semi-retired IT consultants. Delphine wears suits with shoulder-pads, even when she is mulching. Errol drives a late model Commodore with foils and mags. He’s shiny-bald and sinewy, one of those my-car-is-an-extension-of-my-penis types. He has lots of unused electric tools, a wardrobe full of