Snake Read Free Page B

you.’
    â€˜Bloody Ovaltine,’ said Irene, after the sister had disappeared from view. ‘Bloody baby, bloody everything.’ She relieved herself of her frustration in low tones, but the woman in the next bed overheard, and soon the whole town knew about Irene’s rebellion.

6
    Crown’d with Snakes
    T HERE WAS NEVER any one day when Irene took in the details of her life and formulated the thought, I want to be someone else, I want to be somewhere else. Instead, the irritation she felt when Rex offered to fix the step grew in her like an iris rhizome, bulbous and knotted, to be divided and planted elsewhere, time and again.
    She hardly understood what was happening. She woke determined to be cheerful, but by the middle of the day some small thing plunged her into a fury. She knitted her lips, pained by everyone and everything, except for her beautiful blue-eyed Boy-o.
    Irene’s moods filled the house; there was no escaping. Rex was pinned by them to the walls, pushed into corners. Leaving the house did not make it any better; everywhere, sweeping blue sky, an horizon that stretched to the back of beyond, and yet he was suffocating.
    Irene could go for days without speaking, sleeping with her back to him, doing her chores with tears in her eyes, biting on her lip, turning so he could only see her profile. Then, in the bedroom, the children asleep, she unknitted her lips and words poured from her, black as pitch.

9
    I Am Not a Slut, Though I Thank
the Gods I Am Foul
    T HE FIRST TIME Irene was unfaithful, it was by proxy. She wrote a letter to the American soldier – her Yank from the war – informing him of the birth of her boy and declaring that she wished it was his. She wished it so much that she had given the baby his name. And when she was finished, she left the letter in an unsealed envelope on top of the desk in the sitting room where Rex could not help but find it.
    He read the letter in an agony of disbelief, yet without surprise; so altered was his world, he could not remember ever being innocent of its contents. That day, he went about his work without knowing what he was doing, blood roaring in his head.
    He thought about leaving her. He knew men who had done that, left their wives and gone north, to Queensland or the Northern Territory, where they became shearers, roustabouts, boundary riders, kangaroo shooters – cranky characters spouting bush philosophy, eloquent on the subject of the female sex and their treacherous ways. Some tried their luck again and started new families, but they were never to be trusted: they knew how to padlock their consciences and make for the horizon.
    He decided to stay.

10
    In Sicily, the Black, Black Snakes Are
Innocent, the Gold Are Venomous
    W ITH AMPLE WATER and sun, not to mention a steady supply of cow manure, Irene’s irises thrived. They were mostly the tall bearded variety, with generous, full-lipped flowers: white with yellow veining; delicate lilac; deepest purple.
    Irene lined the children up and explained the botany of irises to them. The children, tiny and obedient, listened hard. The lesson over, she gave them another one on life.
    â€˜Unlike people, flowers never disappoint,’ she said, fixing on something in the middle distance.
    An adult hearing this might have snorted with laughter, but the children only grew more solemn, pursing their lips and squinting up at her. Her meaning was beyond them. Flowers? Disappointment? All they knew was that she was their sun. If only she would stop radiating unhappiness!
    At such moments, they tugged at her skirts, patted her. Sometimes, in the confusion of emotions that her shifting moods induced in them, they whimpered.

11
    Wonderful! Wonderful!
    I RENE’S NEXT INFIDELITY was at a Saturday night dance at the Catholic Club in Yoogali that she and Rex attended with a party of friends: Gladys and Reggie, Winifred and Charlie, Dulcie and George, Avis and Hans. With the exception