Wild Gestures

  Wild Gestures

  Wild Gestures

  STORIES

  by

  LUCY DURNEEN

  First published 2017 by MidnightSun Publishing Pty Ltd

  PO Box 3647, Rundle Mall, SA 5000, Australia.

  www.midnightsunpublishing.com

  Copyright © Lucy Durneen 2017

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers (including, but not restricted to, Google and Amazon), in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of MidnightSun Publishing.

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the

  National Library of Australia.

  http://catalogue.nla.gov.au

  Cover design by Kim Lock

  Internal design by Zena Shapter

  Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press. The papers used by MidnightSun in the manufacture of this book are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable plantation forests.

  For Sam, Charlie, Oliver and Eliza,

  for Freeborn,

  and

  the great (and wild) G.P.

  Contents

  Icarus’ Daughter

  Time is a river without banks

  Noli me tangere

  Everything beautiful is far away

  The smallest of things

  The old madness and the sea

  Countdown

  Let it out

  In response to your call

  They dedicated the mass for the soul of Paolo Alonso

  All the things

  It wasn’t Stockhausen’s

  The path of least resistance

  And what if it isn’t?

  To the men I have tried to seduce with prose

  This is Eden

  What we talk about when we talk about rockets in the night

  Icarus’ Daughter

  I was the child who took to the sky

  with wax paper wings to carry her by,

  and lift her as she learned to fly.

  I was the girl who harnessed the air,

  and spoke the love-language of despair,

  to find there was no-one to hold her there.

  I am the woman who fell to the sea

  Its sounds replace the rhythms of me,

  which leaves me drowning, constantly.

  Time is a river without banks

  Not even the so-called elements are constant.

  Listen, and I will tell you of their changes.

  Ovid; Metamorphoses.

  The beauty of the house was not in any doubt. It was small compared to the last place, but it had views. Some renovation was needed, which the agent said meant it had potential to add value: interested parties should try to see beyond the flock and the linoleum, and certainly ought not to be afraid of damp. Damp was something you just had to live with in this part of the country. If you couldn’t live with damp, the agent wanted to say, there would be other, more fundamental things you would not be able to live with around here.

  The couple that came to view the house had been married a long time but they had only just now had a baby. It had been a struggle, that was what the mother told people, and she meant more than just the fight to conceive. The father told people that now they were looking to settle, it was time to put down roots. Every time he said it the mother felt she was living in a way that was nothing like the conscious way in which human beings are alive, as if she had no choice but to simply grow and flower, and so putting down roots, gripping hold of the ground, was simply an effort not to die.

  The agent was right about the house needing work but the father felt it was an appropriate amount according to his equation, which was based on ten per cent returns, and good enough in this market. The walls were silver and damp, and the mother looked beyond them and imagined how the baby would sit on the kitchen floor banging pots and pans together. In some rooms the walls were mottled as fish skin. But they kept on walking round the house and the mother kept saying how good it was that they could add value. The father tickled the baby under the chin and the mother went back and ran her hands over the wallpaper, asking herself if she could live with it for as long as it took and deciding that she could, she probably could.

  The couple were impressed by the garden and the French windows in the sitting room, which let in a glut of light and made the mother feel heavy just to stand there, as if the weight of the light had compressed her in some way. There were only two bedrooms, but this was okay because it had taken so long for the baby that the mother in particular did not want to go through all that again. But when she walked into what would be the baby’s bedroom, the mother saw something that she didn’t like quite so much.

  ‘Did this used to be an entrance?’ she asked the agent. ‘It looks like it might have been an old entrance to the house.’

  ‘It’s got steps down to the garden,’ the agent said, throwing open the door onto a wooden balcony. The balcony spread the length of the first floor and there were woods in the distance, a dark mineral green, a dimness of mist, then sky. The sky was strapped to the land by a flash of water. Then the mother could see that it was not water but in fact more sky, deep and flooding above the tops of the trees.

  ‘It could be a real feature,’ the agent said. ‘If you did it up, this balcony would definitely add value.’

  ‘What are we talking?’ the father said. ‘Five, ten thousand?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said the mother. ‘No, we couldn’t have that. I just can’t help but think, “what if someone climbed up those steps and got in during the night?” Into the baby’s room. I don’t think I could sleep worrying someone might get in.’

  The father said, ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘It’s a safe neighbourhood,’ the agent said. ‘You just don’t hear of things like that happening here.’

  ‘Maybe not round here,’ said the mother, and her husband knew she was thinking of the two girls in the town where she grew up. But still he said, ‘See, it’s not a problem.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the mother said and you could tell by the way she went over to the door and touched the handle that she really didn’t. ‘I just can’t help but think of it. It’s all I would think of.’ She slipped her little finger inside the key hole, felt how it could turn or hold fast if there was someone on the other side. She said, ‘What if the baby opens the door herself when she gets bigger? Can you imagine if she fell?’

  ‘It’s okay,’ the father said. ‘We can nail it shut or something. We could, right?’ he said, looking at the agent. The agent, who was young and indifferent, said probably they could. They would lose the feature, but yes they could do that. She said this in such a way that made it sound obscene and the mother felt a quiet rage against all the people of the world who had no fear except for the loss of features and value. The mother didn’t look at the agent. She inspected the frame of the door, how it would give way, understood the urgent desire its opening would invite in. She knew she probably ought to, but the mother would not look at the estate agent.

  ‘Wouldn’t you prefer to put a table and chairs out here?’ the agent said. ‘It would be an incredible feature.’

  They all stood for a moment, looking at the woods far off at the edge of the moorland that touched the back garden, which you would be able to see if the door was open and there were a table and chairs on the balcony. The mother felt a pulling sensation, as if she needed to swim or as if the next s
tep would take her ten feet in the air. Then the baby gurgled and it was as if the memory of the earth had never left her. She was thinking of other things now. ‘Since when could you tell a shovel from a tyre iron?’ the mother asked, because she knew her husband, and she hadn’t married him for his practical skills.

  ‘I’ll get someone in,’ he said. ‘I want this house. I think it’s going to make a damn fine investment.’

  ‘But what about a damn fine home?’

  ‘Sure. That too.’

  They had two vans deliver the furniture from their rented house and still the father had to go back for odds and ends, boxes of things that were his wife’s alone, a microscopic version of her childhood that she kept sealed up and protected. He asked himself more than once if all women did this. Of the women he had loved, she was the only one with such nostalgia. He put the boxes straight up into the attic and he didn’t look in them. He didn’t think she ever looked in the boxes. But it was important they knew everything was there, that the things inside were like an anchor, grounding her.

  The father got a man in to fix the door straight away. As time went on his wife would begin to think of other, necessary things for the future, such as home-schooling and a reliable internet connection, but for now it was just the door and the father wanted to get on with it, to show her he meant what he said. He watched how the handyman first battened across the architraves with lengths of 2x4 and then boarded the doorway with sheets of Gyprock. It was as if the door to the balcony had never been there. The father had no idea if it was the correct way to do it but the man had all the right tools and he worked fast, and that had to count for something. ‘Good job, Roberto,’ he said, hardly knowing what he was thanking the handyman for. You couldn’t see the door and you couldn’t open the door, which was what he had paid him to do when it came to it. But if you looked up at the house from the outside you could see the sealed shadow of where the door had been, and ghoulishly it reminded the handyman, who was from Umbria, of the doors of the dead that were found in old Italian houses.

  ‘You know I love you,’ the mother said to her husband when she came up to the room to put the baby to bed. ‘You do, don’t you?’

  ‘You can’t see the door any more,’ the father said, touching the wall with a professional sweep as if he had done the work himself.

  ‘What about window locks?’ the mother said. ‘Do you think we should have some of those too?’ She looked out across the moor to the woods where the trees had disappeared, evening out the landscape as though the dark had simply pressed down into the shape of the world and removed them. Always she felt the need to keep the woods out. It seemed that in the dark there was no way of telling anything that might happen in the world and if everything that was solid and ancient outside could dissolve, then so might she. The mother thought it couldn’t be a coincidence so many deaths and births occur at night. She put the baby in the cot and pulled the blankets snug. The baby moved in a slow arc towards the top of the cot and the mother put out her hand, felt the curve of her daughter’s head like an egg cupped into her palm.

  ‘He’s done a grand job,’ she said to her husband. ‘There’s not a chance anyone’s getting in or out now.’

  But the father said nothing. He pushed her against the wall where there was no longer a door; gently, so he could kiss her. But he did not then kiss in a gentle way. It was nice to kiss like that, for a change. The mother didn’t say it, but surprise was the only way to describe it, yes. She could still see out of the window, towards the stillness of the woods where there were no lights and no people. Everything outside the window was the colour of indigo and bone. She felt the stillness like a fluid substance. Like water it seeped through the snag of roots, from branch to branch; it found a gap into the open air, pushed through a suffocation of pine limbs. The stillness rushed across the moor and the garden, licking the footings of the house and the balcony, as if they might be afloat. Little, buoyant airs nudged around the mother’s arms and beneath her feet. ‘Did you hear that noise?’ she said. ‘The baby.’ Her husband’s voice came as if it were inside her, swimming like a cell in her blood, pushing through muscle and bone. She felt it deep in the savage hollow of her belly. Every beat of her heart was a word. ‘There’s no noise,’ he was saying. ‘No noise.’

  When the morning came the mother realised they must have fallen asleep right there on the floor. The sunrise felt like the surprise of the Earth at finding itself still here in the solar system. The red of the sun was ancient and the shock was stratospheric, pushing out through the whole sky.

  ‘The windows,’ the mother said. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I can ask Roberto to board them out,’ the father said into her neck. ‘If you want me to, I can do that.’

  They had been in the house a while and the baby was about ten, although sometimes the mother felt she wasn’t quite sure that so many years had passed. The market had changed somewhat and the potential to add value to the house was not what it had been, but nothing remains the same, and the mother was glad somehow that the world had woken up to that. Yet in other ways everything remained as it had been. They continued to do all the same things they had done in their rented house but it turned out that putting down roots meant those things now seemed real, as if they had just been rehearsing before. Sometimes the mother wanted to shout: ‘this lasagne is fabulous!’ Or, ‘look how clean the floor is!’ as if those were lines she had only been practising in that earlier time, holding them in until the right time came. There were whole days when the mother wondered exactly what it was they had been doing before, as if it had all been about waiting, like ancient fish just biding their time until fins became legs and they could walk or run.

  To make up for the fact there were no longer any views from the baby’s bedroom the mother, who had been to art college, pinned up bunting cut from triangles of rainbow cotton and covered the walls with prints of famous paintings; mainly Chagall, some Kahlo; there had been a Picasso that gave the daughter nightmares. Every morning the mother would come into her daughter’s room and say, ‘I love you, what do you need? More toast? Something to read?’

  ‘I’m okay,’ her daughter said more often than not, because it was just a routine; there was no real requirement for her to want more toast or have a desire to read anything. The daughter was dark-haired, which was the way of all the women on the father’s side of the family, and her head looked too heavy for her shoulders, which was also like her father from some angles. Of her mother’s heritage there was really very little visible sign, which the mother found hard at times, as if she had failed to assert her own biology, which should have been such a simple thing.

  ‘Always my baby girl,’ the mother said, tidying shelves, straightening a book. It felt like a question, sometimes. Sometimes her daughter answered, yes; sometimes she didn’t.

  The mother liked to look at the paintings with her daughter. It didn’t matter that they were just copies and you could only guess at the passion of the brushstrokes or how the artist had pushed the paint around the canvas. It became a way to pass time that felt more truthful than hands moving around a clock face. The father especially was proud that his daughter’s first word had been impasto.

  ‘This one is my favourite,’ the mother said. ‘It’s called The Birthday. See how much the man and woman adore each other? Even the room is too small for them. It’s like the city outside is calling to them. It’s like the sky is asking them to come and explore.’ She wanted to say something more. This one is about love, she wanted to say. I love you this way, baby girl. In another picture a fish swam amongst the stars. In another, a cat transformed into a woman, a cockerel carried a bride towards the Garden of Eden. It was hard to know how to explain that. She was almost surprised to learn that her daughter had her own words for the paintings. She watched her daughter walk from one picture to another and say things like, ‘It’s sad, though, that even on their birthday the man and woman don’t belong in the room.’ The mother though
t about this. ‘But see how they’re looking at each other,’ she said. ‘They belong together. That’s what counts.’

  ‘Can I play outside?’ the daughter asked, bored.

  ‘We talked about this,’ the mother said, remembering how they needed to fix the gate after storms had blown in the posts. ‘We already said no.’

  Suddenly the mother could see her daughter walking down their driveway onto the lane joining the main road into town. She heard cars. She could feel the darkness of the space under the cars, the darkness of bruises, and blood, so much blood. She felt euphoric in her refusal. ‘No’, she said again. Then she said, ‘Would you like to use the computer? We could look up something.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like anything in the world.’

  Two clicks and they were there. Anywhere. Click, click.

  The mother clicked through radiant pages of blue buildings and white mountains, and it seemed that life was wild and a dream and a blaze; she was wild, she herself was a dream. She was dizzy under the crash of distant waves and for a moment she was not a mother but an ordinary girl, not even a girl, a child, something yet to be, a spray of atoms. Less than that. She was just a single atom. Less than that. Her existence was merely potential. The feeling of being such a trivial part of the universe was like being caught in the eye of a strong wind. Then a sudden nausea hit. The nausea made it difficult to stand or even sit straight, as if she was filling up with air, and the mother put her arms around her daughter and felt how light she was, how she felt like crumpled paper, or a balloon. The lightness of her daughter did not make it any easier. She wanted to call out for her husband. Her husband, she guessed, would be outside. In one of the gardens along the lane a dog barked. The mother did not move. She thought fiercely of the boxes in the attic. She went through the contents one by one, a mental audit of books, photographs, train tickets, until the nausea began to subside. She felt her daughter put out her hand and reach for the keys of the computer, how she carried on clicking and searching, but just out of view. As if the mother did not know her, or as if her daughter did not want to be known.