Natural History...

*new year, old story

Jan 03, 2024

Photo: me (centre) in Tasmania, Australia (2009).

Hello dear readers,

thank you for continuing to read, support and share After the Fact in 2024. My last post was on Dec 21st, a long gap between posts owing to the inevitable distractions that the celebration of J.C. himself involves! Anyhow, to kick off the New Year I wanted to share an old story, I’m not really into the ideology of New Year, New You and resonate much more with this Anais Nin quote below, (which I found via the Poetic Outlaws Substack):

“I made no resolutions for the New year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning, and moulding my life is too much of a daily event for me."

Plus, like many, I tend to find winter time to be more about reflection than change so with that in mind it does feel like the right time to post an older story. I wrote this one seventeen years ago, which actually feels quite shocking and makes me feel somewhat up in years. (When I wrote this I was attending the wonderful Creative and Life Writing Masters program at Goldsmiths University.) Over these almost two decades since writing this story, Natural History, I feel that my fiction writing style has developed a great deal-here’s a collection of some of my more recent writing, so see if you agree- yet in the spirit of creative contemplation here goes….

Fin and Dawson roast like Sunday lunch in the tin oven of the car. A snake of red-brown dust hovers in the air where the ute has passed. Dawson turns the volume to max on the car-radio, the thrashing of angry drums and guitar veiling their silence. Streaks of sweat travel down Fin’s bare shoulders as he figures of eight around a line of sun-charred bushes. A smell like his father comes off him. When she hugged him goodbye half a year ago she noticed too. ‘You’ve grown up, you smell like Dad now’. It always made Fin feel strangely guilty to think about his mother’s parting words.

He and his father were staying with his cousin Dawson and his aunt Kathy for the school holidays. His aunt insisted it would do him and Dawson good to spend time together after the ‘tough year’ they’d both had. They spent the past week drinking one-dollar beers in the local bar, catching large, umber-coloured trout and driving off-road. Whatever time of day or night they came in Fin would find his father alone in his aunt’s house apparently doing nothing.

‘I know you had to witness a lot of unpleasantness before she left,’ Kathy said to Fin last night, over the top of Hey, Hey! It’s Saturday! And after his father had gone to bed. The unpleasantness involved his mother’s tense taut words and his father’s silence.

‘Your mum’s a disappointed woman.’ His aunt’s conversation was constant and unguarded. ‘A teenage bride, she always felt hard done by.’ He said nothing. ‘Oh, oh, not that she doesn’t adore you…goes without saying.’

He takes a cold tin out of the Eskie with one hand, resting the other on the wheel, ‘Another mate?’ There is a satisfying fizz as the tabs pull in synchronization. There were no cops out here and the only thing they were likely to hit was a myxomatosis rabbit. Dawson claimed he used his father’s rifle on the rabbits anyway, as well as on feral wallabies and potterroos’ but Fin hadn’t seen it. All they’d done with the gun was act like they were in a Western, shooting at cans and into the air, once for some reason into the trunk of a gum tree. Uncle Travis, Dawson’s father, had died of lung cancer a year before; Dawson’s inheritance was the ute, a Stihl chainsaw and the .303. Fin could hear his cousins’ heirloom now getting knocked about in the tray.

The three of them came over for the funeral he, his brother Jake, and their father. His mother hadn’t. He overheard her say on the phone that, though she felt guilty, ‘Greg and the boys being away for the service,’ would be ‘a welcome break.’ From the top of the stairs he looked at the back of her, she was hugging her knees to herself and twisting the phone cord into knots.

Six months later his parents split up and his mother moved to Darwin with Jake. ‘One each, so it’s fair,’ he told Dawson when his cousin asked why he’d stayed in Lonny and Jake hadn’t. It was fine just him and his dad anyhow. After school there was basketball, after that band. He’d come in late to find his old man in the lounge-room reading the paper or in the hothouse watering tomatoes. One of them would cook, enchiladas or chilli. They’d drink a cold beer. Eat in front of the TV, with burning-hot mouths. Exhausted, he’d sleep uneventfully. They both had lives to lead; it was only the holiday that had put his father into this funk. There was a reassuring pitter-patter of time at home, work and purpose, a form of contentment. It was unsettling to have no structure. He was feeling it too.

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Now Fin speeds toward a bunch of small knolls, he drives up and down, coating the windscreen in smutty earth as he goes. He flicks on the wiper and imagines clearing his mind like this with quick, clean swabs back and forth until it’s spotless.

‘Man, let’s go down to the creek?’ says Dawson.

They drive for ten minutes into what seems like never-ending nothingness. The desert-heat hysterical and pervasive, the land open and empty, sky the artificial-blue of mouthwash. The town, with its Jacaranda lined streets, flower displays and antique stores, is just a twenty minutes drive away but it doesn’t feel like it. They reach the creek from the distance just a muddy patch of waterlogged land. Fin brakes and they jump out, Dawson taking the gun from the back of the tub. They hadn’t been allowed them, not even the toy kind. One Christmas his grandparents gave them each plastic AK 47’s, all day they played the game gangsters and cowboys, mixing up timelines are criminal groups. After dropping his grandparent’s home their mother told them they could not keep their presents. She threw them on top of the trash amongst the coffee grits, banana skins and spent wrapping paper. He cried and Jake punched a cushion but she mollified them both with Scalextrix Ferraris’ for their new set.

When they reach the creek they sit down on the bank, legs sprawled, the dip of the water below, a tangy smell of algae rising off it in the heat. Fin stares into the water, the colour of olives and perfectly static, baby mangroves push them selves up struggling to hit air. On the opposite bank there is a clump of gums, shedding their bark. Below the grey bark there is coco, below that scarlet.

They swig back beer and stare outward. Dawson talks about how fucking hot it is, drinks the rest of his can fast and then crushes it with his hands. Fin pulls his singlet off. His torso is adolescent flat. He can’t imagine that he’ll ever acquire his fathers’ barrel chest and belly-paunch. But he has his dad’s odour and chest-hair already, thick, dark wires that embarrass, showing them self round the neck of his T-shirts. He has his father’s temperament too, softly-spoken and reticent, ‘You’re your father’s son,’ his aunt says and then, ‘Jake’s such a hot-head, extroverted like your mother.’ It’s crossed his mind that maybe he’d been left with his dad because of their likeness.

Dawson digs into his short’s pocket and pulls out a transparent bag full of buds and a packet of Rizlas. He rolls a number and after a few drags tells Fin his plan to go work at the uranium mines as soon as he’s finished his GCE’s, how you can live like a king, making ninety thousand dollars a year. After a few tokes Fin encourages Dawson with flowerpot-man nods and Fucking yeah mates! They pass it back and forth till Fin wants to talk too, to tell Dawson his plans after year twelve. But he’s thinking of studying horticulture or eco-science at Swinburne in Melbourne and he doesn’t want to tell Dawson that. His father says the most important thing is to start earning; his mother, when she calls, encourages higher education. But she hasn’t called since his birthday, over two months ago.

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Dawson talks on the mix of beer and weed animating him, his voice loud and confrontational. He opens up like a fresh graze in water, stating how shit it is living with his mother, what a great bloke his father was, how she’s wants to make him see some bullshit grief counsellor. Fin considers telling Dawson that he’s okay living with his dad but also about the odd sense of banishment he feels whenever he thinks about his mum.

But before Fin says anything they spot it, something black and low moving through the gums. They squint through the branches and listen to the whisper of leaves being disturbed. A large black boar galumphs out of a clearing in the trees. It trots along the bank, sniffs the air; dust billows off its shoeshine-brush bristles. A few seconds later three piglets emerge from the foliage. They canter behind; the four of them stop and snuffle a patch of weedy ground. Something about the primordial look of the animals makes Fin think of being a kid, going on trips to the Natural History Museum.

The first time he’d gone was with his mum. Jake had a fever all weekend and he was sick with boredom, she found him in the garden poking a jack-jumper nest with a stick. ‘Dad can look after Jacob I’m taking you out’. At the sight of all those pre-historic skeletons and taxidermy animals his Sunday apathy died; there were Tasmanian tigers and devils, oversized wombats, potteroos’ and kangaroos. The two of them stood gawping at the milky-bone structures and the stiff, glassy eyed creatures. Afterwards she took him to Hungry Jacks for a burger and chocolate milkshake. The move from the dull, clinical echo of the museum to the neon-glow of the greasy chain caused them to laugh inanely through the meal.

‘The mum’s an ugly fucker,’ says Dawson staring at the boar and flicking the burnt-out joint into the water. He picks up the gun and aims it at her Pow! he says jilting his shoulder backwards. Pow! Pow!

‘You idiot.’

Dawson cocks it, pulls the trigger in, his body jerks; the shot blends with the animals piercing squeals. He’s missed, she’s still alive; her stumpy legs gallop back towards the bush, the piglets behind. Dawson re-loads fast, looks through the scope.

‘Bloody hell! Don’t mate.’

He fires again. Bang! The bullet hits. It smacks the boars’ thick skin; the animal stumbles and falls to the ground. There is a moment of silence inside Fin as the second shot blocks his ears.

‘Why’d you…? What the fuck? That’s fucked up man,’ Fin swoops across and pulls the gun out of Dawson’s hand.

‘Jeeeez! What’s wrong with you? Huh! You gone fucking vegetarian or something?’

Fin looks over to the other side of the bank; already the piglets circle the fallen body. He stares, the largest one pushes its snout against its mother’s stomach. Sticky maroon oozes down her body onto the earth.

‘They’re all going to die now. They’re still bloody suckling, look.’

‘So…. All right, we’ll go catch ‘em take ‘em home and keep them as pets aye.’ Fin looks at Dawson like he’s the village idiot. Dawson stands up and brushes the dust off the back of his shorts; the pigs’ scatter at the sound and head for the trees.

‘I’m serious man. Keep it in the yard. That fuck-off big mango tree’s dropping more than me and mum can eat, it can live under it, it’ll think it’s in piggy heaven and if we get hungry...well, Bacon! Kidding. Jeez. Come on you bloody hippie.’

From somewhere in the bush comes the sound of muted screams. Dawson walks fast to the other side, almost dancing with the novelty of it. Fin follows behind his thongs spraying out clouds of mustard temporarily marking his journey in dust. As he walks the dead boar stays constantly in his vision, like one of those portraits that follows you round the room. A black shape, a smudge of red. He wants to be away from Dawson and his anger, out of this desert, back in their home with his father, to chat to him about his day at work, whatever’s on the News, even the bloody footy. For his mother and Jake to visit, he’s not a fucking kid he doesn’t need them to get back together, to play happy families, just to all have dinner out, go to the movies or bowling, something normal. By the time he reaches the other side Dawson is already in the trees barrelling towards them, fingers outstretched.

‘Help me out!’

Fin puts down the gun, he thinks about the pigs motherless in the desert, runs at them; Dawson comes from the other direction. Two manage to slip away into thicker bush, the last one falters in the middle. Dawson’s fingers reach out, he grabs the pig round the belly, gets it; lifts it up like a trophy, ‘yes!’

‘Noisy little bastard,’ he says grappling the animal away from himself with both hands.

‘The other two?’

‘Fuck man I’m not starting an animal sanctuary. You get them if you want them, take them back to Tas.’

‘Ha. Ha.’

‘They’re gone chief. Let’s go.’

He stares into the lattice of tree branches, nothing stirs. Dawson walks back to the ute with the pig at arms length. Fin grabs the gun off the ground the top metal momentarily scorches his fingers; he adjusts his grip and walks out of the wood. He looks at the dead boar. Frozen on its side, its stomach large and swollen, as if it were still carrying its’ offspring inside. He thinks about his mum taking the tips of his fingers as they crossed the road from Hungry Jacks, how for once he hadn’t felt embarrassed by this. He feels the weight of the gun in his hand now; he pictures throwing it in the trash as she had done all those years ago, calling her up and telling her what he’s done. Asking her what she thinks about the course at Swinburne. Asking how she is, if he can come visit sometime soon.

After the Fact

Natural History...

*new year, old story

Photo: me (centre) in Tasmania, Australia (2009).

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