Free Snake by Kate Jennings Page B

man.
    Your school was easy to forget: a one-room structure in the middle of nowhere. Bare-bones arithmetic, grammar, spelling. Penmanship exercises. Little Arthur’s History of England . The teacher was nicknamed Tommy-gun because he tommy-gunned you with his saliva. Sparrow shit on the desk. The harrumphing of ponies hitched to the verandah posts.
    You have come to regret keenly your lack of education. You strain your whole being toward knowledge. If you could only concentrate long enough, you would have answers. Answers to what? That is part of the problem. The questions don’t come easily, either.
    In your family, nothing beyond the essential was named, no stories told, no future imagined, no god worshipped. Whatever had brought your parents to the present time was best ignored; it was probably only more of the same. They endured by putting one foot in front of the other, not by bending a knee.
    People who spoke in consecutive sentences were indulging themselves; they were of the same order as tipplers and gluttons. Remarks beyond those necessary to get things done passed their lips as rarely as cacti have flowers, and were as startling.
    Their wordlessness arose from frugality but was also a precaution. To describe the world was to risk admitting the inadmissible: their way of life – tilling a blighted soil under a punishing sun – was intolerable.

1
    Je Suis une Dame!
    B ILLIE WAS NOTICING how Irene, in her excitement, kept forgetting herself. She’d break into a stride, causing the silk of her wedding dress to pull tight across her thighs. Thus checked, she reverted to smaller, more ladylike steps. The next minute, though, her gait widened, and she was off again, hiking from group to group in her parents’ garden, proferring her cheek for kisses, accepting good wishes, queen for the day.
    Billie – Wilhelmina at her christening, Billie thereafter – was Irene’s bridesmaid and pal from the army. Her eyes skipped over the guests until she located the groom, whose name was Rex. He was chatting with Irene’s parents, a handsome fellow with a gentle manner and a modest row of medals pinned to his uniform, and of interest beyond his role as groom, being freshly returned from the Victory March in London. Billie found it easy to understand why Irene had fallen for him. But, poor lamb, he did look bewildered, rather like a schoolboy who’d lost his lunch money.
    With the war ended, girls were scrambling for husbands as if they were playing musical chairs, or so it seemed to Billie. And Irene was scrambling harder than most, probably because she had lost face when a fling with a Yank soldier fizzled. The relationship had progressed as far as an engagement ring, and then the young man returned from whence he came – the land of canned ham and chewing gum – and was never heard from again.
    Irene’s next boyfriend was a Maori, from a company of native New Zealanders. Misalliances were the order of the day, but gossip about that twosome ricocheted around the AWACs barracks like a bullet. Some of the women were of the opinion that Irene had taken up with him deliberately, to shock, but Billie disagreed. Irene acted on impulse, she told them, and didn’t give too much thought to things.
    These same women said Irene was ‘fast,’ and Billie supposed she was: Irene was notorious for breaking the rules, climbing out the window after lights were out, off to a movie or a dance. They said she was a man’s woman, and it was true that Irene quickened in the company of the opposite sex; she came alive as water does when invaded by schools of turning fish. Men responded in kind; no need to cajole.
    Interestingly, to Billie anyway, whose family was Methodist and practiced what was preached to them, Irene never missed Communion on Sundays. Observing Irene in her native habitat – the big house on Sydney’s North Shore, the relatives with the plummy vowels that