The Breeding Season Read online

  Grateful acknowledgement is given for permission to reprint p. vi excerpt from ‘love is more thicker than forget’. Copyright 1939, © 1967, 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust, from Complete Poems: 1904–1962 by E.E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

  P. 4 excerpt from Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Clement Hurd, © Harper & Row Publishers, New York, 1947.

  First published in 2019

  Copyright © Amanda Niehaus 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  ISBN 978 1 76052 953 6

  eISBN 978 1 76087 204 5

  Internal design by Lisa White

  Set by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Cover design: Lisa White

  Cover photography: Shutterstock

  This book is dedicated to my mom and dad, Bonnie and Gary Niehaus, with love

  —A.N.

  love is less always than to win

  less never than alive

  less bigger than the least begin

  less littler than forgive

  it is most sane and sunly

  and more it cannot die

  than all the sky which only

  is higher than the sky

  —from [love is more thicker than forget]

  E.E. Cummings

  Contents

  prologue

  part one

  chapter 1

  chapter 2

  chapter 3

  chapter 4

  chapter 5

  chapter 6

  part two

  chapter 7

  chapter 8

  chapter 9

  chapter 10

  chapter 11

  chapter 12

  part three

  chapter 13

  chapter 14

  chapter 15

  chapter 16

  chapter 17

  chapter 18

  part four

  chapter 19

  chapter 20

  chapter 21

  chapter 22

  chapter 23

  chapter 24

  part five

  chapter 25

  chapter 26

  chapter 27

  chapter 28

  chapter 29

  chapter 30

  acknowledgements

  prologue

  Elise picks her way through the bush where the scrub rises up at the end of the trapline, towards a small peninsula made of high rock. After setting the last of the small-mammal traps, she will take her daughter from the carrier on her back and set her on her lap and gaze from the cliffbrink over the ocean, the blue-green gulf, placid and deadly. She will tell her child a story, as she does each afternoon around this time—about the seabirds that wheel over the crystalline water, or the quolls that scamper through the forest at dusk, or Dan.

  The world is not as quiet as it used to be. There is no real quiet anymore, but a constant chatter of words, not-words; the flow of sentences with no true meaning but which convey, in the process, everything there is to say. The kick of feet against her back as she walks. Fingers tangled in her hair. To have the weight behind is strange, Elise thinks, how mass shifts around the body, internal to external, and how the body adjusts to these changes, remembers what was there before. How impermanent the human form, its scars growing fainter with time. Like the new pink stretch marks on her abdomen, already paling, or the chafe on her hip where the carrier rubbed in those first days, before the skin grew over, smooth and shiny.

  part one

  chapter 1

  They’re on a street called Boundary when the rain hits, flops onto the car with a cold, hard tapping that reminds him of fish, a shoal of hard-bodied fish throwing themselves against the metal shell of the car. Headlights double through the windscreen. The wipers pulse and cannot clear the slick of water, rush of water, it’s too much at once, he can hardly breathe.

  Breathe.

  He eases the car to the side of the road, into a small gravel patch overhung by a low, green tree. Rolls down his window and sucks in the air. Gasps it into his lungs like a trout. Out of water.

  There, a park, wide and green, a park without cover. How odd, he thinks, that there is no shade. Nothing to protect the people or the picnic table or the barbecue or the swings or the climbing frame from the harsh Queensland sun. Storm.

  There, a party, balloons and table decorations, bags of lollies and colourful boxes, a white-iced cake. Children are shrieking, crying, laughing, running. Just get in the car! someone shouts, muffled by rain.

  No one, it seems, has prepared for this.

  He doesn’t want to be here with all these children, growing-up children. But he doesn’t want to go home, either. The house will be damp and empty. A cottage built for workmen or families, young happy families.

  Dan would like to have his son in his arms, to hold to his chest, skin on skin, like it’s supposed to be. He would like a cosy chair, worn and deep, a blanket; a place to warm him back to life. But his son is far away now, farther even than before, when he was inside her body. Gone.

  The smack of the rain is a hollow, erratic sound. Dan reaches across and puts his hand on her leg, but she does not move. Elise, long-limbed and ghostly in a tidy black dress. Her head is swivelled towards the window beside her so that all he can see of her are her fine pale arms, hands in lap, strawberry hair pulled back into a low, smooth knot. She is facing the outside, but does not seem to be looking out.

  He wonders if she’s cold. What she’s thinking.

  ‘I think the book was good,’ he says to her. He had read Goodnight Moon to the small white coffin, placed it on top before it was lowered. What else was there to say, but

  Goodnight stars. Goodnight air. Goodnight noises everywhere.

  He’d hoped the landscape might have made it easier, the cemetery full of jacarandas and great, top-sprawling eucalypts that surely had koalas in them, though he hadn’t seen any. He’d hoped it might hurt less with all the fine-faced wallabies clustered at the property’s edge, tipping down into the long grass and upright again, forepaws tucked close against their chests.

  But, no. It was stupid to think any of it would help.

  The box made everything worse. Dan was set apart from his child by a winding drive out of the city, and a volume of dirt and turf and flowers. But it was the box he hated. The coffin that would never disintegrate, not in a hundred years, that would keep his boy apart from all the beautiful, terrible wildness in the world. He’d rather he was ashes. He would have liked to imagine William as a tree or a marsupial, atoms or cells bounding across the open spaces.

  But he didn’t get to make that choice.

  He stares at her neck, wills her to speak.

  ‘Where are we,’ she says, after a few moments. Her voice is flat. It isn’t a question. He can’t tell if she really wants to know, but it doesn’t matter anyway. He has no answer.

&n
bsp; When the rain pauses, he guides them back onto the road, but the too-early dusk and the unfamiliar streets disorient him, and without her to navigate, he gets lost. They’ve lived in this city for two or three years now, long years in which he can’t get his bearing east or west, north or south, for the river that snakes up the middle. He has the sense he’s driving in a wide undulating circle, Mount Coot-tha at the centre. A cemetery on every side.

  He drives and drives, and she doesn’t move.

  But he gets them home, and into the house, where he pulls off her flats and her dress and guides her into the bedsheets in her underwear. It’s only April, but he tugs the winter quilt from the top shelf of the wardrobe and drapes it over the lump of her body. It occurs to him that she might need to change her pad, but she is so still and quiet that he doesn’t want to move her. She’s like something in a museum, a mechanised doll, a sculpture of a human.

  One of his uncle’s artworks.

  Somehow she has slipped beyond blood and discomfort, beyond her body even. He envies her emptiness. Resents it. Because in his own body, every ache or stab or itch is amplified. A blister on his heel, rash on his chest. Something pulses at the back of his eyes.

  Though it’s dinnertime, he’s not hungry. He changes into flannel pants and a t-shirt, pours a glass of single malt and takes it into the spare room to work.

  The spare room. Not-spare. Spare again.

  The cot now disassembled in the corner.

  Dan sits at his desk and does not look at the cot or the pile of washcloths and blankets and onesies on the floor beside it. He’s avoided this room since he tore the cot apart. Avoided as much as he can.

  The low rumble of thunder.

  They used to make love when the storms came, he and Elise—curtains open, doors wide, the cool breath of rain pouring into the room and over the bed and into their skin.

  Skin, he thinks. Singular.

  They used to slide into one body and move it together through a dark world, brush the thorns off like flies.

  Now, on his own, the thorns stick.

  Like the art above his desk, where so much skin is pinned up like a crime scene. Not Elise’s skin or his or the baby’s (too soft)—this is art with a capital A. Dismembered bodies clipped from magazines, printed, sketched. Women, mostly, or parts of women. The images sicken him, like a car crash, a murder-suicide. But he can’t stop looking.

  Art.

  Made by his uncle, a man who barely needs a name to be known, a man Dan has never met.

  Dan leans over his desk and pulls the man’s photo off the wall: Berlin Warne. He is tall and muscular, bald, clean-shaven, thick-faced in a sort of Bruce Willis way but with heavy eyebrows and sixties-style glasses with black frames that wing out to either side. His mother’s brother. They share the same eyes.

  Though he carries the same last name, Dan sees little of himself in the man. He has inherited his unknown father’s face. A softer, academic sort of jawline that’s better with a beard.

  In the picture, his uncle stands in profile in a well-lit warehouse, bank of windows at the top, and holds a brush up to a canvas that’s as big as Dan’s patio. He has no clothes on. His body is lean and strong and, though he is at least fifty in the photo and grey-hair-chested, he stands with a careless certainty that draws the eye. He is a man who inhabits his own skin, and does it well.

  Dan sets the photo down and opens a drawer, pulls out a small notebook but does not write. This is not his journal; these are not his words but his uncle’s. The paper is creamy and thick. The letters and line drawings and splashes of watercolour give him nothing—no feeling for the man, or his Art, or his life. They are unintelligible. Dan can’t separate fact from fiction, can’t find the threads of the man’s story to pull on. Something’s missing.

  It’s me, Dan thinks, and slams the journal back into the drawer. It’s my art.

  Ghostwriting was a mistake. The more he works on this other man’s book, the more Dan loses his own ideas, stories, craft—whatever he was before. He imagines seeing himself from across the room, a photo on someone else’s wall. How limp and pallid he would look in comparison with his uncle, his own body and words too fleshy and yet, at the same time, full of nothing.

  The bed sinks with the weight of the tray, but Elise doesn’t open her eyes or turn or sit. He’s used the nice ceramics—pebbly bottoms and smooth, cream-glazed tops—but the food itself is plain. Lightly buttered penne, ginger biscuits. A cup of tea.

  Not so different from what she ate when she had morning sickness.

  Morning.

  Mourning.

  It’s wrong, he thinks, that the words should sound the same. Attach themselves to her body like this, his body. He would like to compare scars, open them up again.

  ‘Do you think,’ he starts, but does not go on.

  In his mind, they’re the same—the two kinds of sickness. His grief is a nausea that doesn’t subside; there’s no point asking her to explain it to him. They are two ends of the same leech, feeding on a wound. Moving apart incrementally as they swell up with blood.

  He coughs gently. ‘You have to drink something,’ he says. She is on her side, facing away. He tucks her lank hair behind her ear. Her cheek is freckled and dry. He strengthens his voice. ‘Sit up.’

  At this, an order, she pulls herself into a half-lean on her elbow, shuffles up against the pillows. The tea has cooled just enough that it won’t burn her, but he blows on it anyway. Chamomile. The smell reminds him of old ladies, grandmothers. Wrinkled, salt-softened.

  She makes no move to raise her arms, so he puts the thin-rimmed cup to her parted lips and wets them, more and more, until she drinks. Then he pulls the covers back from her body. Her legskin is warm, but the tiny hairs prickle at the open air. Her belly slumps through her cotton nightdress, and the sight of it startles him,

  again,

  again he’s forgotten that it would not—like the child—simply disappear. Or maybe he never knew. Maybe these are things that people try not to know, because, then, what’s the point?

  ‘Come on,’ he says, and he looks away from her belly, swings her feet to the floor, pulls her to standing.

  She’s bled through the pad in her underwear, through her clothes and the sheets, a dark stain that’s probably soaked the mattress, that he’ll clean when she’s in the shower. Under the covers, she smelled of nothing, and now, moving, she’s thick with wet and clot, meaty but not unpleasant. A new element of herself.

  He guides her to the bathroom, pulls off her clothes, uparm, downleg, holds the sharp point of her elbow as she steps foot by foot into the stream of hot water. Her compliance is strange, discomfiting. She wears her pain on her skin, uncovered,

  and because he loves her, he absorbs it.

  Later, in the darkness, the phone rings. At first, he loses himself, can’t place where he is, only that streetlights shimmer through the window, the curtains open, that this is a place with curtains. He is in the recliner beside his desk. He knocks his phone onto the floor as he tries to answer it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, but a smooth low voice interrupts him.

  A woman. ‘Daniel Warne.’ She pours his name into his ear.

  And though he has never spoken to her before, Dan knows immediately who it is. This is Hannah Wallace, his uncle’s muse, the subject of the artist’s breakout work.

  ‘I hope I haven’t woken you,’ she says. ‘Your editor said to call.’ Her words are slightly slurred, as though she’s been drinking.

  Has she been drinking? Dan wonders. Does it matter?

  His body feels suddenly cumbersome, extraneous, and he isn’t sure whether to get out of the chair or not. He pulls it upright, leans forward, lets the wooden floor shock his soles with cold.

  She goes on. ‘Joan. It was a while ago, I’ve been slow. But she said we should talk.’

  In the corner, the cot pieces loom, clownish, as if the thing has re-formed in the darkness.

  Hannah Wallace laughs,
a deep throaty sound that reverberates through his phone

  jaw

  tongue.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I’ve shocked you.’

  ‘A little,’ he says. She doesn’t know, couldn’t know, about the baby. Surely.

  ‘I’m yours. Ask me anything,’ she says.

  For a moment, Dan cannot think. This whole thing, like a dream. He should ask her to call back. He wonders if Elise can hear him through the wall—if to talk to this woman, to think about work, is to cheat on their sadness.

  But he has been waiting for Hannah Wallace, and now she is here.

  ‘All right,’ he says slowly. ‘There’s something missing.’

  A flutter of laughter, surprised. ‘Is there?’ she replies.

  ‘I can’t get at why he does it,’ says Dan. ‘The art. His motivations, what drives him.’

  ‘That, I’m afraid, you’ll have to figure out for yourself. But it’s complicated. He’s complicated. Maybe the complexity is what you’re supposed to see. Maybe it doesn’t really matter why he does it.’

  ‘No,’ says Dan. ‘It matters to me.’

  ‘Why? Is it your story you’re telling?’ She says it softly. ‘Trust me, I know how hard it is to be part of something like this, put your head and heart and guts all in, and in the end it’s his, right? Wrong. It’s never just his. It’s never just yours. It’s always a mix, always up to whoever sees or reads it or shits on it. You’ve got to let that go.’

  ‘I see why Joan wanted us to talk.’

  ‘I’ve always been good at getting people off the ledge.’

  ‘Was Berlin ever up there?’

  ‘What, on the ledge?’ Dan hears the smile in her voice. ‘He’s not like that. His thing is to push everyone else out there, see what happens.’

  ‘That’s why it’s so crowded out here.’

  ‘Provocation is his favourite kind of art.’

  ‘So you’re okay with this? Talking about everything?’

  ‘What you call “everything” is my body. Open me up.’