Free The Point by Marion Halligan Page A

poplars bunched bundles of sticks, the claret ash and the elms spreading their branches like nets. The lake that grey colour it nearly always is. And sailing on the choppy water, the swans, black. You couldn’t get anything more different from the sparkling blue white green of the poem – Spenser, that’s who it is. A wedding poem.
    He dozes, and when he wakes up the shallow curve of the bay is full of swans. A woman and a child in a pusher are feeding them bread. He counts forty-four swans, there’d be even more ducks, the seagulls numberless, and a solitary goose. Feral, it would be, a fat and juicy bird, safe so far from the table. And two pelicans, one at either side of the narrow bay, like statues to a portal, uninterested in bread.
    After that, he often notices black swans in faithful pairs sliding over the lake’s surface. Sometimes they sail with the current, other times they turn upstream and you can see them breasting the choppy water, rocking up and down as it streams past them. Sweet day, so calm, so fair, so bright , he thinks, and wishes he knew more. One day his eyes fix on the library. The poem would be in there. He could go to the toilets at the gallery, the ones in the garden, spruce up, brush down, go and find a book of Spenser’s poems. Sweet day … maybe he will.
    The nights are cold. You need a lot of grog to get through a cold winter night. It means you aren’t so sharp in the morning. Not exactly hungover. Not so bad you need another dose of poison before you can get on with the day. Just a bit slow and sleepy. Perhaps one night he could lay off. For a poem? Good practice perhaps. Prove that he’s not an alcoholic. Only ever red wine. For the cold. And the time passing. The good warm haziness of it. They’re all so long ago, those words he remembers. What did he read in recent years? He recalls books, on the coffee table, on the back seat of the car. Glossy pictures. One about French villages. And all those Tuscan renovations. Books you glance at idly, sipping a glass of champagne, waiting for the guests to arrive, the television program to start. Or novels people are talking about, that you mean to read, knowing you won’t, and that nobody else has either, they’re just talking about them. His wife bought them, that was her job, to furnish their lives. His to pay the credit card bills. Bestsellers, they usually were, out of the papers, the weekend book pages, the glossy magazines. He remembered one with a picture on its cover of a girl sitting starkers on a toilet, holding her ankles. He’d flicked it open and read a bit, some chick having diarrhoea in a taxi. Not so lucky as the one on the cover. Of course she’s not sitting on the toilet, his wife said, but he reckoned she was. Sweet day, so calm, so fair, so bright … there was a wedding in the silver birches one afternoon. The bride in a short white dress and a veil that the wind plucked at, she had to keep grabbing it with one hand and her dress rode up and he could see the curve of her bottom under her lace knickers. So it seemed to him, sitting on the lake wall nearby. He imagined his hand just resting there, fitting into that curve where her bottom turned into her thigh. He stared at the pale brown flesh, but somehow he could not feel it in his hand. He could not touch it, even in his head.
    Up close the swans’ feathers ruffle and frill over their rumps. Their beaks are vermilion, banded narrowly in white. The lake belongs to them. They march along it, swim across it, own it.
    He might blunder about the library a bit, without his spectacles. He’d be able to read the books all right, once he found them, or somebody found them for him. But would there be someone? He doesn’t know how libraries work any more.
    The woman with the pusher comes to the little beach and the small girl gets out. The woman gives her a plastic bag of bread. The birds know what this means and crowd round her. She throws the bread until it’s all gone.