His Illegal Self

33

The boy’s skin got dark as tree bark. He walked up the hill barefoot. Dial was left below, not knowing what to do. She was waiting, for what, for nothing. Outside the open windows the world was green, fecund, everything rotting and being born, but she did not know how to garden and she got herself trapped in the hut with its miserable yellow moisture barrier between the rustic clapboard and the inside frame. Inside the hut was worse than the place she had been born in-rickety, cobwebbed, no straight line or corner and everything made poisonous looking by the yellow shiny paper. This was the alternative architecture, its most reliable component manufactured by Dow Chemical, Monsanto, 3M.

She made herself drive the car. She had to go somewhere, but she set off along Remus Creek Road not knowing where that might be.

In Nambour she drove past the police station twice. She parked half a block away, still uncertain. Her mouth was dry; she felt sick with the smell of automotive plastics. She locked the car with the windows up, her hands trembling as she did so.

She planned to take one step, then another. She had brought her passport with her. She did not know which way led back to Brisbane.

She came upon a newsagent with a crouching dark veranda and a low doorway. She had planned to ask which way was south but instead she saw the walls were stacked with pulp fiction. She asked if they might have The Sea-Wolf, and having politely considered Sea of Troubles and Sea Babes, she was directed to a dusty lending library in the School of Arts. The library was useless but the librarian had heard there was a wonderful bookstore at Noosa Junction although she had never been there personally.

What an awful place to spend your life.

Heading back to Yandina, she began to drive more slowly as if tempting something to happen to her, slowing in front of bullying gravel trucks, daring them to destroy her. Approaching the turnoff to Remus Creek Road she found she could not do it. She headed another mile, then three. Somewhere near Eumundi she pulled off the road and sat there with the engine running.

She was parked across a rough sort of track leading into the scraggy bush. Through the smeary windshield she could make out piles of sawdust, some stacks of fresh-cut timber held in racks. There were two abandoned cars, an open-walled shed that might have been the mill and a wiry little man, maybe sixty years of age, who now came out to look at her. He wore shorts and an apron which stopped just above his leathery knees.

He stepped back then, to one side, so she might enter.

She waved that she was leaving. He stood back farther.

She thought, Is this it then? Another throw of the dice.

In a moment she was rolling down a bumpy track, splashing and slipping sideways, into the deep wheel ruts. The miller waited, between two mounds of dead gray sawdust, the gateposts of his foreign world. Behind him was a stack of sappy bright yellow planks, a gorgeous slash of yellow.

He had a mouth like a sock puppet and a short stubby clay pipe. He cocked his head at her.

This is a sawmill?

Last time I looked.

It was the yellow that drew her from the car.

That’s blackbut, he said, seeing what she was looking at.

She was close enough to smell its rich sappy odor.

You doing fencing? That’s fencing.

I want to line a wall, she decided.

Oh no, love, not suitable. It’s for fencing, cheap old fencing. It’ll shrink like billy-oh.

She was thinking the walls would be golden in the lamplight.

If I nailed it flat, she said, it couldn’t shrink.

It’ll curl up like bacon.

Well, I could pin it flat.

You’re what they call alternative?

I guess so.

He cocked a flirty eyebrow. You could use a nail and bend it over, he said, so as it shrinks it might stay flat. You’d make a kind of L with it. You could do that. You’ll be up all night with those nails.

That’s OK.

He nodded. His mouth was small and the smile was thin. Hoy! he cried.

From the shadows of the big open-sided shed there emerged a middle-aged giant with a belly and naked legs.

Urge, said the sawmiller, get your beautiful body over here.

And then the two men roped the fence palings onto the Peugeot and she paid them twenty dollars and drove home with her purchase slapping and whipping on the roof. She thought of Camus’s asthma patient moving peas from one saucepan into another. Beckett, too. More fun to build a wall.

She did not untie the ropes correctly which was why the boy would later see the yellow bruise and blood-black graze which covered her ankle and the upper part of her foot. When the pain abated she loaded up about six splintery planks in her unprotected arms, carrying them directly into the big hut and dropping them untidily onto the clearest patch of floor. Can’t go on. Must go on.

Hello, Dial.

Rebecca and a small boy had made themselves at home among the cushions.

Hello, said Dial, her heart beating violently.

Doing a bit of renovation?

Yes.

Lining the inside at last?

Yes, said Dial, or words to that effect.

You know that timber’s going to shrink?

Yes I do.

You butt them up against each other you’ll have one-inch gaps.

Who the fuck did these people think they were, walking into your apartment, scratching their hairy legs and eating your papaya? Dial did not sit down. She could not. Her behavior would not help her. Well so be it, she thought. She had never lived anywhere there was no conflict.

Soon she noticed a bad smell which she blamed on the hair sticking out beneath Rebecca’s plump arms. The visitor’s breasts were big and sweaty, staining her gray T-shirt.

So, Rebecca, this is about the cat?

Rebecca nodded toward a flour sack which had been dropped by the door to the deck. You could say that, she said.

Dial thought, My God, the bitch has killed him.

Have a look, said the stinky woman, why don’t you?

Why should I?

It’s educational.

Dial approached the bag slowly, a sort of unreal buzzing in her head. Flies crawled around her wounded ankle.

The contents slithered onto the floor like what? Flowers. Grass tussocks. Some stinky mulch. Then she understood what she was looking at: small dead birds, some bright, some dull, some filled with ants and possibly-she saw the movement like a living stomach-maggots. The Godfather, she thought. The horse’s head in bed.

What the hell are you up to, Rebecca? I never did anything to you.

Oh, you’re wrong there, Dial.

Rebecca stood up and her staring blond boy-child stood right beside her, its colorless eyes filled with blank dull righteousness.

This is what you did to me, Rebecca said. You bring your cat into the valley. This is what you do. They’re sentient beings, she said, nudging a feathered corpse with her big toe.

They’re what?

In Buddhism, began Rebecca.

I know what sentient means.

Rebecca narrowed her eyes. Then you should know that your cat is destroying our environment and you’ve got a choice. You can get rid of this cat or we will get rid of you.

Rebecca, you know I talked to Phil Warriner.

This is not America, Dial. We don’t decide ethical issues with lawyers.

And with that, she departed, walking heavily on her heels, with her boy already left three steps behind and wailing.

Beneath the vermined bodies the yellow planks lay in shadow, crisscrossed like yarrow sticks on the dusty floor.