Rose Leopard

soft-winged

ONE

‘They’re not normal, are they?’ Kaz peers at me across a shopping trolley that is loaded with Cornflakes, gluten-free sausages, tampons, Sustagen (big tin), Dunkaroos, Chicken Crimpies, Barbecue Shapes, two packets of Tim-Tams, salsa (medium-hot), blocks of pizza noodles and four green bananas.

I bestow a weak smile but she is clearly exasperated.

‘Look at them,’ she complains. ‘This is a supermarket, for Chrissakes. Normal people don’t sneak through the aisles beating off alien marauders and going p-shoo, p-shoo!’

I follow her gaze and discover our two children; funny little puppets dressed in checked shirts and too-big jeans.

‘P-shoo p-shoo!’

Kaz shakes her head, despairing.

Our two children are named Alex and Sara. I wanted to call them something more distinctive, like Milo and Otis, or Tom and Jerry.

‘Tom and Jerry are boys,’ Kaz told me. ‘Sara, you might like to know, is a girl.’

‘So’s Jerry Hall,’ I countered quickly. ‘And she’s about as girly-gorgeous as girls get.’

‘And then, we have — Milo and Otis.’ Kaz fixed me hard with her eyes. I remember feeling like an ice-cream, a soft and creamy drip, a dropped cone circa 1950s, left stranded beneath the summer sun.

‘A cat and a dog,’ she continued. ‘You can’t be serious.’

‘Sweet, inoffensive creatures,’ I told her. ‘Two of your God’s finest creations. Companions, soul-mates, pets to millions.’

‘Killers and morons. Why not go the whole hog — call them Bonnie and Clyde?’

‘Laurel and Hardy?’

‘Vince, sometimes I wonder ...’

‘Why you married me? I know, I know. Sometimes I wonder too. Actually, not sometimes. Frequently. Always. Incessantly.’

Pause for reflection then Kaz leaned across, smothered me in mint breath and eau-de-something-or-other, kissed my forehead lightly.

‘A for Alex, S for Sara,’ she reminded me. ‘Simple, unassuming, uncluttered. Perfect.’

Of course I nodded, impressed as always by her sagacity. Besides, she was tweaking my nipples at the time. She often does that: it’s a power thing. Kaz the control freak, my senator of sensuality, nipple-tweaking, tummy-patting, bum-hugging, forever persuading me.

‘It’s not normal,’ she insists, pulling cans of Traditional Irish Stew from the shelves.

‘It’s not,’ I agree. ‘No one should eat anything called Stew. Stew is anathema. The word is sick-making. If English had developed logically as a language, Stew would rhyme with soulless. And arsehole’.

Stu Meyers, you see, is my agent — needed, admired and detested, usually within the breadth of the same nanosecond.

Kaz gives me The Look. Briefly, I am an insect, suspended in formaldehyde.

‘Other people’s children do not do this,’ she says as ten-year-old Alex trots past, bleating something about ‘Beware, O Instruments of Darkness!’

‘Do they?’ Kaz stops the trolley, faces me. ‘Why is it that other people’s children can walk steadily alongside their parents, answer questions politely and offer to help where necessary?’

‘Whereas?’

‘Whereas ours buzz around like bees on Ecstasy, zapping imaginary beings with their imaginary stun-guns —’

‘Then leaping into their super-duper interplanetary spaceship —’

‘And flying off to Colony X —’

‘On Planet Y —’

‘In Galaxy Z!’

We stare at each other. I see her curls, the bold blue plastic of her glasses, a thin white neck arrowing towards the promise of her breasts. She sees a man, unshaven, eyes a little milky from last night’s Cab Sav, giddy smile, vaguely aroused.

‘Jesus!’ The laughter explodes from her, a rich tumble of ocean waves rollicking onto the beach.

She moves into my arms and we kiss, all lips and tongues and warm sweet saliva, there in the middle of aisle 9 (Asian, Eggs, Snacks, Vegetarian).

‘Lucky, aren’t we?’ I murmur into her hair. ‘Lucky our kids are insane.’

‘Yeah,’ says Kaz, snuggling. Her eyes are strangely wet. ‘You smell like a country pub. Give us another kiss.’

So I do, for quite some time — or at least until Milo and Otis re-enter the stratosphere.

* *

‘Does it bother you?’ I asked her once.

‘What? Does what bother me?’

I took a deep breath.

‘That I’m so… so… ’

She held up her hand, let me ogle her slender fingers.

‘Individualised?’ she asked archly.

‘Groin-driven,’ I whispered but softly-softly, like I was in a church and hoping that Kaz, the Holy Trinity and the world’s population, past and present, might not hear and therefore have to forgive me.

She considered for a moment. She had been pressing flower petals when I interrupted. Sitting by the window, haloed in that gentle, translucent light that only late-afternoon in country Australia can achieve, arranging bowl-shaped fragments of velvety rose and white carnation, sliding in sheets of paper, closing the old books with the same graceful intelligence that always draws me to her, immersed in the tradition and serenity of the art.

‘I don’t think you’re groin-driven,’ she told me seriously.

‘But I am,’ I confessed. I hung my head like a criminal in the dock, awaiting the condemnation of the axe. ‘I am so groin-driven. Obsessive compulsive. A goddamned conjugal nympho — call it what you like, it amounts to the same thing.’

‘Is this some sort of elaborate pick-up line?’ Kaz asked me. ‘Are you trying to make me feel sorry for you, so that I’ll have sex with you?’

I shook my head vigorously then turned away.

‘I just thought you should know’ I told her.

The rustle of pages told me that Kaz had returned to her books and roses. Still, I hesitated, hoping for more.

‘Groin-driven,’ she said eventually. ‘Sounds painful. What does it mean?’

I leaned against the door jamb, hands crammed into trouser pockets.

‘It means,’ I told her carefully, ‘that every time I see you, I want to make love to you.’

‘Every time?’

‘Every time.’

‘When I’m covered in muck from the garden?’

‘Yep. Mucked or muckless — it doesn’t matter.’

‘When I’m tired and bitchy after work, and all I want to do is be alone with a trashy novel and a bucket of cheap moselle?’

‘Definitely.’

‘When we’ve had an argument and, as usual, I’ve won?’

‘More than ever.’

Pause for reflection, then …

‘Come here,’ she said.

I stayed by the door, quivering slightly, all the juices swishing inside my body, mingling and swirling, tangy, bubbling.

‘It wasn’t a pick-up line,’ I insisted. ‘I just thought you should know.’

‘Every time I see you,’ she repeated in a mock-deep voice, ‘I want to make love to you. That’s dreadful, Vince … cliched, corny, straight from the derring-do scripts of The Bold and the Beautiful.’.

‘Oh. Sorry.’

But I watched, transfixed, as she slid her knickers to the floor and hoisted her skirt until it bunched around her hips.

‘Hackneyed and trashy … but it works for me. Now, come here.’

So I did.

* *

‘Are you working today?’ Kaz asks.

‘Mm. Maybe.’

She nods, stirs lo-cal sugar into her coffee. There is a cut on her hand, heavily bandaged, that momentarily draws my eye. From a distant room we can hear thumping, squealing, a single hawking bray of discontent. Next-door’s children, the neighbourhood elves, have arrived for their weekly romp.

‘I’m going to lie down for a while,’ Kaz tells me. ‘Escape from Planet Y was too much for this little astro-chick.’

She shuffles away, looking pale and maybe irritated. Tired around the eyes, I think. She works hard, my wife: mother-lover-keeper-consoler-salve. She’s a part-time journo, scribbles a couple of columns — one about the local theatre scene, one about anything (state of the nation, Norwegian environmental statutes, why men prefer to piss standing up) — and she freelances as an editor. Once, earlier in our courtship, we even worked together: me, a going-nowhere teacher who had been persuaded to write units for crappy high-school textbooks; her, temporarily employed in Editorial to revive the publisher’s market-defining concept from my market-resistant crap.

I wander into my study, look at the piles of folders, papers, notebooks, bills, all rising like crinkled skyscrapers in a city of madness. I find it manically depressing; any pile of something is depressing. Piles of bricks, piles of beans, piles of horse-shit: it doesn’t really matter. Piles imply unfinished labour. Jobs to do. Industry. Functionality. And I detest functionality.

Fuck it. I sit at my computer, check the email (anything happening? Call me, Stu), play Internet solitaire, check my web-site for hits (stable at 000012; thank heavens for the children), play Minesweeper, listen to some up-tempo complexity called the Slavonic Dance Opus 46, doze a while. Wonder at the irony; why my head is such a vacuum, while my desk is full of untouched piles. Finger a photograph, twirl my pen, stare at the walls.

‘I might cook tea tonight,’ I say to no one in particular.

Biscuits for Milo. Cordial for Otis. Biscuits and cordial for Daniel, Samantha, Jamie and Hortense. (What were Errol and Delphine thinking?) Check on Kaz, find her sleeping, comfortably curled and scrunched, crease-lines on her face and the sun blessing her legs. Watch the footy, sweep the kitchen at half-time, hit the garden and disembowel a few weeds, feel like an Earth Dad who navel-gazes midway through the third quarter. Pause for reflection, contemplate making banana muffins, dismiss that as the sort of stupid pedagogy brought on by watching too many lifestyle shows, referee a game of something the kids call ‘Bang-Bang’.

‘Otis, please don’t hit Hortense. She’s your friend, remember. We don’t hit friends’

‘Otis, please don’t hit Milo. He’s your brother, remember. We don’t hit brothers either.’

Ruminate on the senseless shit of parenting: please don’t … I’d rather you didn’t … no you can’t … no I don’t care any more. Yes darling, of course I’m mean and inflexible and yes it’s true, everyone else does have a dad who’ll not only let them get away with blue murder but also encourage some larceny, extortion and intravenous drug-taking on the side.

Please don’t … I’d rather you didn’t … as if they’ll remember!

Or care. I fossick in the pantry, find a Maggi curry-mix. Korma; it’s a great word. Sexy, as round and inviting as pudenda, as warm as the fug of a fire.

* *

‘Just a sandwich, I think.’ Hours later, Kaz has resurfaced, resplendent in the green velour dressing-gown that her nutty mother provided for her last birthday.

‘Kaz,’ I tell her, ‘I love you dearly but when you wear that … thing, you look like a billiard table on steroids.’

‘Not sexy?’ she asks, slicing a tomato then rubbing at her sore hand vigorously.

‘Not at all.’

‘Good. Can’t have you champing at the bit twenty-four hours a day. That would be decidedly unhealthy.’

‘So, I’ll settle for twenty-three and three-quarters. Listen, lover, I made Lamb Korma.’

‘Just a sandwich,’ she repeats. ‘I’m not that hungry.’

‘I didn’t burn it,’ I tell her in my best cutesy-cajole. ‘I did just make it for my baby snookums, peachy-pie.’

‘Vince, I’m tired and I feel like crap. Just a sandwich, please.’

‘Okay, okay.’ Occasionally, even I can recognise a moment when the politics of appeasement needs to kick in. ‘Drink?’

‘No. Where are the kids?’

‘Milo is digesting the Nintendo and Otis is catching cockroaches.’

Once again, I am privy to The Look.

‘True,’ I confirm. ‘Someone told her that the humble cockroach is the only creature able to survive a nuclear holocaust.’

‘Someone?’

‘Kaz, she was interested. I’m her weirdo father remember; we don’t always find it easy to connect. Cockroaches, however, are mutually intriguing — so they seemed like a good starting-point. Not the norm I know, but for me this represents pro-active parenting.’

‘Honestly,Vince …’

‘Come on, Kaz, it’s harmless enough. A few innocent dissections —’

‘What?’

‘Well, I mean, how else is she supposed to discover the secret of total anti-nuclear invincibility? And it wasn’t like … inconvenient. I already had the knife out — and the chopping board.’

‘Oh God,’ says Kaz; it is a gush of breath and frustration. She is swaying a little, pinching the skin between her eyes. ‘Don’t … don’t — no more, Vince. I don’t want to hear another —’

‘Kaz?’

‘No more!’ This time she has screamed and it peals and reverberates, shocking in its intensity and suddenness. I stand and let the noise subside around me, feel it slide off the lampshades, somersault down the walls.

‘Sorry,’ she says eventually. She holds out her hand dolefully. ‘This is ridiculously sore and I’ve got a shocking headache and I just don’t feel on top of things.’

‘Cuddle?’

‘Please.’

We merge, long thin arms folding like fairy wings.

‘I might go back to bed,’ she says quietly.

‘Rest is therapy,’ I tell her. ‘But, Kaz, you stress out too much. You’ve got to learn to take life as it comes.’

Of course, this is a basic difference between us. She has always been as taut as fence-wire. And she tightens: every time she perceives an injustice, every time her structured world picks up an imperfection, every time she lets herself speculate on the future and what it will hold for our children, she tightens. I often think that, of all human activities, speculation is the most potentially destructive. Experience should tell us that if we screw up the present, our errant ways will soon become hidden in the murk of the past — so why bother to plan for the future? History, time, the steady scrolling of years and centuries; all but the most major of indiscretions are papered over, plastered then buried beneath the rubble and dust of each flimsily recorded life. I regularly tell Kaz: you are the tiniest speck on time’s panorama. You and I being together is a sub-set of that speck, and our moments of utter happiness are another sub-set again. So, put things in perspective and relax. It doesn’t matter if interest rates rise point-two-five per cent. It doesn’t matter if the children fart in the presence of your nutty mother then talk about ‘brown bombers’. It doesn’t matter if the barn is filthy, the government fascist or the nation farcical. None of these things matter because they will all inevitably be sucked beneath the beautifully pragmatic march of time. So, I tell Kaz, relax. Read a newspaper. Drink cappuccinos in the winter sun. Enjoy your garden turning from lime to russet. Buy a red-breasted finch and watch it in a cage. Sit on my face. Put big woolly socks on your feet. Ring 1234567 in Argentina and see if anyone answers. Relax, my pixie, relax, relax.

But she doesn’t.

Brilliant, brittle, translucent people like Kaz can often be latent hypochondriacs. When we were first together, she was always rushing off to see Doctor So-and-so for advice about such-and-such: a sniffle, a flush, a calloused digit, a cut hand. It took a lot of re-educating on my part to stop her. Health, I trumpeted, is a state of mind. Think positively — there is no sniffle! — and your nose will take the hint and self-dry. Alternatively, think negatively — hmm, irregularity? — and your bowels will grin wickedly, flex their collective muscle and keep you back-filled for weeks. In those early days, Kaz always had a sore this or an aching that, she was always teetering on the verge of a virus or a rare strain of Mongolian flu or a publicly unmentionable plumbing issue. So I have had to work hard to keep her from doctors, clinics, hospitals; I have had to counsel her to think healthy.

Delphine is on the door-step, looking for her tribe. I pass them over, hear the steady rattle of her truck as she treks down the valley road. Lights on, darkness encroaching. In the distance the shadows of our land deepen. I can stand for a while, gaze over this dipping rising patch of the world, wonder how artists can ever capture that curious, transitory shift of light — the never-time between day and night. It’s an awareness thing that amazes me; what skill there must be in mixing the exact quantities of colour and non-colour to fashion a wintry five o’clock in the countryside, or a sharp summer’s evening in the city. I hope that someone will one day paint the familiar silhouette of the mountains before me, the faint orange lining the horizon like fruit-rime, the dullish glint of a scattering of early stars, the softness of the smoke that gathers like tulle over the town. And because a good painting, I think, will always project a sound of its own, then I hope also that they can snare this sudden onset of silence that engulfs me, that bewitching time between the sleep of the day-insects and the waking of their night colleagues. As a moment, it is both miniscule — and possessed of a totality that is overwhelming.

Back inside to microwave baked beans for Milo. Bang on the griller; ham-and-cheese toasted sandwich for Otis. Two big mugs of cold milk with Nesquik floaties.

‘They’re crocodiles,’ says Milo.

‘Dog turds,’ counters Otis, making me feel inordinately proud.

Bath-time so I bung them in together and use a hose and nozzle to wash their hair. Pyjamas that smell like lavender and lost dreams, Otis’s hair that combs long and straight in furrows like a ready-to-harvest paddock of gold, then I light the fire and switch on the TV we fall back, be-curved, watch cartoons. Angry beavers, funny little Dexter with the robotic voice, snickering scheming Rug-rats, re-runs of Bart’s sweet inferiority complex and Marge’s leaning-tower-of-Pisa hair-do. For an hour we remain motionless then I feel my children asleep against me, relish the warm heaviness of their bodies and their tiny o-shaped mouths sending out gentle coils of life. When I carry them to bed they nestle and roll; when I look in later, they are liquid beneath the doonas, limbs flung apart, soft and spongy-looking, eyelids like cusps of silk. I smile, close their bedroom doors gently, clamber to my own bed, slide in naked and feel Kaz’s too-cold feet, adjust her pillows to help even her breathing, drop my arm over her waist and hug her smell to me.

Now, I think, I am perfectly happy. Nothing can intrude on the circle of our world.

Nothing can infect our cocoon.

And so it is odd then that the last thing I remember is beginning a dream in whiteness, like a mist that whirls about me — so maybe I am caught in a snowstorm; maybe frostbitten and blue-lipped, maybe alone, oddly vulnerable, nowhere near the home that I cherish.

Two

The house we live in is vast and airy. Once, it was 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