A Constant Hum by Alice Bishop

Author:Alice Bishop
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2019-05-15T16:00:00+00:00

Maps

It takes the satellites a while to catch up; our place is still there on Google Earth—months after. Every morning I reload the page, and there’s something calming when I still see—no blackened scar through green.

Valley Haze

We started eating at a restaurant I mostly remembered by the bill—spending our house-insurance payout as if it was a burden that needed lifting. La Vallee served all the things I should have liked—smoked hen eggs, hay-baked carrots and tiny honey-glazed quails—but, back then, I was always focused on your mouth. ‘Cigar box tones and cranberries,’ you’d note after swilling and smiling at me with cabernet-stained teeth, your lip gloss long dabbed off onto serviettes, yours and mine. ‘This is the life,’ you’d say, winking, then mentioning tomorrow’s work before insinuating that we should order a nightcap: something sugary, perhaps just coffee—lukewarm and milky.

Harvey Green—the valley restaurant’s silk-shirted manager—knew we were from the ridge, that we’d lost the house in the fire. ‘Ladies,’ he would acknowledge, as we passed through the foyer. Often he would kiss you on the cheek, hesitate, then reach out a soft damp hand to shake mine. Sometimes I would make an effort to look him in the eye—to lean in close enough to smell the cologne and sweat of his collar, kissing him, just lightly, on a freshly shaven cheek. Harvey wasn’t sure how to take my short-clipped curls, my boyish windcheaters the colour of clay. He could be certain, however, about our regularity. We began eating at the restaurant on what you called the odd days: Mondays, Wednesdays, Saturdays too.

‘D’you mind driving?’ you asked over our last dinner, though you always drove. I had to look down at my unfinished plate of a La Vallee special—buttered prawns and ricotta croquettes—for a second. I remember something in me softening, as I thought of the comfort of the gravel-road dust in our headlights, a gentler light, along with the possibility of you sleeping beside me on the way home—your powdered cheek pressed into car-seat cloth. I would take the long way round to our IKEA-curtained caravan—avoiding tape, the council kind, that marked the place where all the trunks lost their colour, where all the birds were disappeared.

Sunday mornings I’d started hosing down the wasp nests that appeared during the week—under the caravan awnings, and along the crumbled brickwork of the fence that used to be. You’d go out to Doncaster, buying new cutlery and avocado-mint moisturiser which, when I kissed you, tasted unlike the plain sorbolene soap I was used to you using. ‘Love you,’ you stated with a new matter-of-factness that scared me—later coming home to unload ribbon-lidded jars of marmalade, boxes of macadamia nuts, silver pouches of dried figs. But when I went to hug you, you just pointed out of the dusty window. ‘Look,’ you said, ‘the currawongs are back.’ And I spent the rest of the afternoon watching for birds for you, the new binoculars we bought (another splurge) heavy around my neck.

A foggy-eyed waiter came over for coffee orders, that last night at La Vallee.

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