Snake Read Free

and net bows, the guests chittering like starlings in a tree, closing the front gate after him with a click, and walking down the suburban street, past the high hedges and tennis courts and the houses with their circular driveways, as if he were Gulliver in Lilliput, past Parramatta, over the Blue Mountains, coastal green turning to desiccated brown, until he was far away, until he was home.
    He stifled the urge to cry. He had cried only once in his adult life, and that was the day he went to the Royal Sydney Showground to enlist. It was his first time in a city, and he had not known how to do the simplest things, such as purchase a ticket for a bus, and was too proud, too shy, to ask for assistance.
    He somehow found his way by foot from Central Station to the showground at Randwick, where he was told to take off his clothes and line up with other enlistees, also naked, to be scrutinized by boot-clicking officers with moustaches that framed mouths that seemed unnaturally small and red-lipped.
    Being fastidious in his personal habits – his family never intruded on one another – and never having had communal contact with boys other than his brother, he was humiliated by the order to strip down and stand ‘in the nuddy.’ In truth, he found this more shocking than the horrors of war, men split open like pomegranates left on the branch. He was a farm boy and refused to be sentimental; innards were innards, men or sheep.
    He went from the showground to his Aunt Em’s, to spend the night. She was a spinster who lived at Coogee and worked behind the stocking counter at Anthony Hordern’s. He stood on her doormat, under a weak porch light, and before she could say a word of welcome, he began to cry, not silently but with racking sobs, venting his anguish about all that had gone before, all that was in front of him.
    Aunt Em was a hard case – as hard as the boiled lollies she sucked all day long and made her breath smell sickly sweet. In her book, a boy on the verge of manhood had no business with tears. She took in the too-short pant legs, the fresh haircut, the out-of-control Adam’s apple, and felt only one emotion: embarrassment.
    Rex glanced at Irene. She was glowing with happiness. The sight of her caused his nature – practical, honorable – to assert itself. He put his misgivings aside, hid them under a pile of other thoughts, as if they were shirts without buttons or bills that needed paying. What was done was done. Without being conscious of it, he coughed self-importantly – I am a man, I have a wife – and squirmed inside the jacket of his uniform until it sat better on his shoulders.

1
    Far-flung Empire
    T HE HOUSE WAS wooden and raised on posts a foot above the ground, and had a verandah on two sides, a pantry off the kitchen, a lean-to laundry, a chip heater in the bathroom, a toilet over a pit out the back. It was not without decorative elements: a fireplace with a mantel in the sitting room, and in the main bedroom, a set of windows that had pressed glass in three colors – yellow, purple, green – in the upper sashes. The floors were covered with linoleum, except for the bathroom, where the concrete had been left bare.
    There was no garden to speak of, unless you counted the stumps of four palm trees, which had been hollowed out, filled with earth, and planted with pigface. The pigface was in bloom the day the newlyweds arrived, its circus colors spilling down the sides.
    Irene and Rex walked up the path and stopped at the steps to the verandah. One of the steps hung loose. ‘I’ll have that fixed in a jiffy,’ said Rex, asserting himself in a voice thick with responsibility.
    His tone annoyed Irene. She brushed the feeling away, but it re-formed, hovered, settled, like a mantle of flies on a hot day.

2
    The Moral Is the Universal One:
‘Let Us Irrigate’
    T HE HOUSE BELONGED to Irene’s father, as did the farm on which it sat: eight