If Tilda’s count was over forty, reporting on flies climbing up a wall was preferable to staying at home with her. She would ask me to do a scalp check. It is not possible to add up every hair on someone’s head. Tilda pleaded for me to do it, and I agreed after reaching a compromise that I would only count the crown. The act itself, picking and poking my fingers about, seemed to pacify her. I always lost count and made up numbers. The very fact that there were hairs to count and no bald patches gave her heart. When she asked, ‘Does it feel thin?’ and I answered, ‘No. Feels like your usual mane,’ she breathed easy and let me stop. I touched wood, grateful there’d been no rifle and weedkiller talk. To put time in on her scalp was worth the effort.
The trick was to be involved in the task without betraying a sense of duty, without sighing and appearing bored or put upon. If Tilda sensed dutifulness she would ask me to leave the bathroom immediately. She didn’t really want me to leave. What she wanted was her desirability demonstrated. Asking me to leave the bathroom was supposed to prompt me into demonstrating her desirability. She wanted congressing, proper congressing in the way we hadn’t done much of since the wound-kissing occasion. I felt like saying, ‘This counting-hair nonsense hardly makes you attractive. I feel like an ape checking for lice.’ I would never have heard the end of that. So I learned to count her hair and not make a complaining sound. I learned to escape congressing.
Chapter 44
I got into the habit of running, long-distance running, around the hair-counting period. I laced on my Dunlops and jogged the forest paths. Not for fitness, not for self-preservation. I ran to be alone. You could say I ran from Tilda.
Two hours, seven days a week, from 5 to 7pm, regardless of weather, I ran. I carried a torch for when the winter moon wasn’t working. For the record, I never saw a puma: they are the myth of simple men. But I did learn to tell dead sticks from live snakes. I learned that kangaroos don’t come when you call them, even if you hold out grass or sugar cubes.
When running, I was temporarily free of Tilda, and the touchings and the hair-counting. I was sometimes tempted to reach out and touch tree bark as I scooted by but it wasn’t until I got onto my home street that I stopped and touched telegraph poles—‘Touch wood the drug of running never fails to get me high.’ I worried that it would cease one day: the chemical that running released in me would dry up its supply. This chemical had been my main entertainment in Scintilla. I had others, but the chemical was precious.
Earthquakes were an entertainment. They still are. Minor earthquakes caused by cattle trucks rattling and rumbling down the main street at night. In the very dead of night when I can’t sleep those earthquakes entertain me. I ask the dark, ‘How strong can quakes be before the bricks-and-mortar world of buildings tumbles?’ There is no figure, going by my count. ‘How many quakes can there be in one minute before Tilda wakes to reach her arm around me for reassurance that they’re only cattle trucks?’ Six so far in these past eight years. Most of the time Tilda stirs but doesn’t panic.
I listen for quakes arriving as far off as I can. It distracts me from the click in Tilda’s sleepy breathing, the annoying mechanics of her throat. When love has worked its way up through all the mores and reversed back down towards zero, a click in the throat becomes a revolting feature.
Galahs were an entertainment. Flocks of them, pink-feathered on phone wires. I hold their flight dear to me. The speed they go turns them silver as they swerve. They fly like one aeroplane made of a hundred little planes. In a blink they explode, regroup, change shape from a plane into an arrowhead. I don’t care if they do eat the farmers’ seed, you have to envy a creature born not to think, just thrive. No ambition, no dos and don’ts. No knowledge except appetite.
Because, from that hair-counting period forward, ambition led me on. Freelance Gazette work was all very well, but a year of it and I had the pull of wanting something better. A city newspaper was the logical step but I needed more experience to go from Scintilla to there. I set myself a schedule to freelance at the Gazette another six months and then send off applications to Sydney and Melbourne. I didn’t expect to sail in on my first try but I did expect a little interest, a phone call saying we’ll keep you in mind or friendly letter of that nature. I sent my best Gazette pieces to prove my worth:
Meryl Furner isn’t considered a prickly person, unless you criticise her cacti…
All I got were reject notes: two paragraphs that amounted to sorry, not hiring. Your resumé is paltry. Sincere regrets. Six months later I tried again. The same thing happened. Throughout the next year, rejection, rejection. I rang four editors but didn’t get past their secretaries.
Who can blame them—cactus stories! Only hicks from the back of nowhere call that news.
My ambition didn’t go away; it slowly fizzled into failure. I never let the failure show. I used my running chemical to dull it. It was my cure for everything. It kept me going for another three years, like a blank man.
Then the great mouse plague blessed me.
If I had to choose the best two weeks of my life I could not do better than the Scintilla mouse plague.
It was the mild autumn that did it. The right amount of sunshine, the humid drizzly rain. They bred in the stubble of the previous year’s harvest and feasted on leftover grain. Billions of them, fat as small rats. Like an Old Testament curse they flowed over the ground, grey as living water. They ate green stalks, root and all, and left the soil like colander holes for miles.
My brief from the Gazette was ‘the human angle. How does it feel to have your paddocks overrun, your home invaded by vermin?’
Holly, the paper’s cadet, the only in-house reporter, was assigned the economic impact: the estimated loss in dollar terms; the tonnes of plant matter eaten; the cost of ploughing up the damage and sowing life back into the land.
We worked well together, Holly and I. I drove while she scouted for photo opportunities. I interviewed housewives about the mouse-flood that scuttled through their kitchens, swept through their bedrooms, crawled over babies in cots. Holly took totals from their husbands about destruction per hectare. She jotted quotes about their budgets being buggered and how the government better get off its arse with financial assistance.
She was twenty-one but looked fifteen, with her boy-short hair, military trousers cut off at the shins, Doc Martens boots and saggy socks she kept bending down to hitch higher. A crush on someone is merely a nice way of saying lust. Lust implies you intend acting on your feelings. I was professional with Holly. There were moments when I was close to sending explicit signals but I didn’t have a hint she had similar ideas. There could have been ideas but I played it safe. The point is, I was being unfaithful. Not in body terms: in mind. Holly was the first time I developed those symptoms. I wanted the mouse plague to last until my crush ran out of fantasies.
‘You’re a really hard worker,’ Holly said.
I wasn’t working hard. I was pretending to need more interviews with people. That way I could have Holly in the car with me longer, her bare calves and cleavage. A real cleavage that split into two proper breasts for a few inches down her shirt.
Another reason I wanted the plague to keep going was the gift it gave me of a disaster: I was a proper reporter now. Helicopters flew in bringing dolled-up TV journos but I was the one who could boast of being a local. This was my plague. I had been here with my notebook from scratch. I hate a mouse plague as much as the next person, I told them. But when they’re in such vast numbers they’re not mice anymore. When you stand in the current of them they’re a force of nature. I was only big-noting myself but a tall shiny woman from Channel Nine liked my ‘force of nature’ imagery. Her brown fringe was frizzed so high, like a hedgerow of hair, she made me seem one foot shorter. She scrambled onto the roof of the Gazette car batting mice with her microphone and shoe heels. She wiggled her flick-knife fingernails in revulsion and said, ‘Could you wade in amongst them all, Con?’