Paddock Dreaming (an extract from a short story)
an extract from a longer (yet to be completed) story
It was the kind of day that made you want to give up.
When sweat is like a second skin and your eyeballs clench themselves in defiance apon stepping outside. Language becomes reduced, almost redundant. Words give way to staccato grunts of agreement, as if every breath or wasted movement is something precious. Animals find ways to slink into cool recesses low to the walls, to the ground, and hide from the sun.
He twisted the last piece of wire onto the fence and stood back, his shirt holding to his back like a wet vice. A hole at the bottom of the rusting lines, the cause of which he was unsure (some animal, a wombat maybe) now mended. There was a small element of satisfaction as he stood back to look at his work. A tiny victory. The new silver against the brown rust of the fence reminded him of a stitched up wound.
He grimaced at the thought and wiped his brow. Walked to where his things lay in the cooler shadow of a bluegum.
He shuffled himself down into the dirt in the shade of the limp tree and, using his sack as a lumpy makeshift pillow, placed his hat over his face and shut his eyes. The air pressed down and covered him. There was a distant buzz off beyond the tree line but nothing stirred nearby save for his breath inside the close dark of the hat. He listened to it; dense and regular. This calm wasn’t the kind to sink into, he thought, there was nothing comfortable about the silence. The heat demanded attention. Like someone’s glove in your face.
And something else. A faint tugging in his stomach. In the black and sparking field behind his eyelids figures and ghosts reared and then, before he could make out their exact form, vanished. Some kind of strange violence just beyond the edges of vision.
The morning before, they’d found the McDowell kid scrambling his feet off a wooden crate in their hay shed with a belt around his neck. Face swollen and twisted like a balloon. They got him off and into a cold bath. Called for the doctor. The boy eventually fell into sleep but everyone was shaken up. His ma pulled at her hair and knelt down in the middle of the verandah to pray to someone, or something, up there in the white-hot sky.
He’d kept clear.
Later, in the pub, he couldn’t meet their eyes. Paddy McDowell had spent all afternoon there striking matches and drinking cheap irish whiskey. Burnt a whole packet (and a hole in the pine bar). There was strange, tense distance as they sat and looked out the dirty windows to the shimmering heat. Not saying much. Bits of talk about wheat prices floating around, then stopping altogether. It was like the hills had come in from outside and had shuffled between them, making uneasy company.
A fly, managing to find a gap in the seal of his hat over his head, vibrated suddenly in his earlobe. He emerged from the sweaty black and swatted it away. He put his hat back on and stood up.
The sun cracked and throbbed over the expanse of paddock that stretched itself in slight, undulating mounds, merging finally, at its end, into scrubby bush. A dozen skinny sheep stared at the ground under the few scrappy trees that dotted the expanse, a couple dug hopefully at the copper brown soil for grass.
He wiped the sweat from his eyes and gathered up his things.
There was a ship. A gleaming, pregnant ocean liner steaming and frothing with smoke. He could feel the length of it, it’s girth and weight shifting with the swell underfoot. It’s rudders chewed up the ocean and spat the spray onto the crowd waving below from the wharf . He was looking back at them from high on the deck, laughing at their wet faces in the sunlight as the ship’s horn thundered underneath. Receding in the mist and the bracing salt air.
His heart swelled; he could feel his breath in his chest.
This was all, of course, nothing but a second; the second it took for the strand of spit hanging from his mouth to hit the top of his fingers.. He jerked awake and looked around at the empty desks on either side. He must have said something aloud in his half-sleep. He wiped his hand on the leg of his trousers.
Mr Ramsay looked up from marking his papers, shot a narrow-eyed stare to him across the room, and snorted briefly. Sam waited until he’d returned to the marking, then lifted his head off the cool wood of the desk until his eyes found outside. Heat lifted in waves off the dirt field outside the window. Orange iron soil like someone had spilled paint. Out of sight, he could hear the shrieks and muffled yelling of a football game around the other side of the school building. Small and faint in the vacant space.
He turned back to the blank piece of paper in front of him. Still empty of the lines he was meant to be doing. I will not disturb other student’s learning. He fiddled with the rough-hewn edges of his pencil. He couldn’t think; couldn’t focus. The last two day’s events returned to wash through his head, and his stomach crawled with fear and shame. The hot fatigue of the empty classroom seemed to get denser.
He saw again the cold distance in Cam’s eyes as he left him by the river, sandflies crawling on his feet and wet rivets down his face. Arrow, the kelpie, licking at the salt on his fingers. A flush of red anger and embarrassment churning in his gut, something harsh; a momentum pushing him as he climbed the crumbling rock bank, away from Cam’s sobs. The feeling that something had broken between them. Wiping the sweat off his forehead and fighting off a strange compulsion to turn back, run back to him and say something, sorry, anything.
But, of course, he’d kept going. Out onto the road scorching his bare feet and past their rusted bikes lying in the grass. Later in the sunken cool of dusk he’d walked back to where his remained and wheeled it home under a gaping sky that swam as far and as wide as his thoughts.
It was definitely smoke. Curling itself – delicately, it seemed from that distance – into the yellow afternoon at the far reaches of vision. He shaded his eyes and squinted in the hazy half-light. It was hard to distinguish between where the blue hills stopped and the wispy plumes began. They merged and danced at the edge of his eyesight. He could see it now, though, as the sun escaped behind the horizon; a slow billowing like a deep breath. Brilliantly lit with the the last fingers of light. Due west.
A faint prickle of fear ran up his back and came to rest on his cheek. Lilly was in the kitchen, and Sam was still with the McDowell kid somewhere. The yard was falling into quiet, cool shadow. Looking out to the smoke on the horizon, he felt he was somehow privilege to an intimate moment; Like he had been drawn into the earth and the smell of the trees with a weight of knowledge and awareness that escaped his lifetime. There was a strange familiarity in what was playing out before him, and for a second he could feel the endless repeating memory of the dirt and the rocks underfoot. Ageless and dreaming.
A bird croaked low and soft behind him. He brushed the dirt off his hands, and turned back to the house, where he could smell bacon on the stove and Lilly’s high, sweet voice carried over to him across the verandah. Singing some old Irish hymn he’d long ago forgotten.
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