Best Summer Stories by Aviva Tuffield

Author:Aviva Tuffield [Tuffield, Aviva]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Books Pty. Ltd.
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

UNBURY ME

Ben Walter

Gary Wilson is a garden of aches; there are shoots blooming in his elbows and flowers unfolding in his shoulders and the palms of his hands are bleeding out so much dirt. It is mid-morning and the rain is pouring down with many cool and dispiriting notions catching a lift on each drop, but still he works on, pruning with oversized hands, snipping away at the fruit trees to sculpt them into vases and fans and elegant furniture in the corners and fence lines of the yard. Come and sit among these branches, he thinks to himself. I will build you a bench from their offcuts.

But Nicole has picked up Lachie in the morning’s haze and taken him to school; his small glow has left Gary alone once again, and he thinks it’s a wonder that any vegetables grow when they could be slumped indoors all day, staring at the television’s blank, unhappy screen. Outside, the air rises up to great heights above the ground, and Gary finds that if he makes an effort to join it, the air will sometimes carry him along as though he is an enormous balloon, softer and more sensitive and capable of carrying so much weight; and it is much better letting the clouds whisper to his skin than it is to bob against the mouldering ceiling of his living room.

When he is outside, he has visions of the whole landscape opening up before him, the valleys that stretch and contract like muscles, hills and higher hills with cresting waves of rocks that are ready to break, crash and tumble down the slopes. Closer in, he follows the main road as it drives through the centre of town with the general store sitting to the side and whittling at bark. The small church that summons up sermons once a month when the pastor can remember to make the journey from the city, and the loose arrangement of houses, thrown like dice from a cup.

As his mind strolls on, the density of housing thins till the grid of dwellings next to the school takes over: the company town standing smartly on the side of the hill like a regiment. The mine, with its heaps of waste. The wail of an alarm smoking up the air. Gary’s vision shifts back sharply, like he has missed something, to the road leading to the town in the next valley where Nicole lives with his son. He can see it for real from his back fence; so close that they seem to occupy the same world, a world where he isn’t constantly reminded of how empty the rooms have become.

*

Every day Gary slams the back door, the flyscreen rattling its bars as though the whole house has been jailed and confined. He strides down the split concrete path with its audience of lawn crowding at the edges and the weeds volunteering from the cracks, and he pours his hands into the soil, ripping the dock and thistles

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