Loving, Faithful Animal by Josephine Rowe

Author:Josephine Rowe
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Published: 2015-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

V. Madrugada

something’s coming. les can smell it like weather. Can just about hear it, like a sound pitched so low that only the blood can recognise it. The dull thuds of homemade fireworks died away around two a.m., and then came a quiet spell, a brooding stillness now punctured by what’s likely rifle fire. Just the odd crack of it now and again, beyond the fibro walls of the shed. Drunken New Year’s rabbiting, boys who couldn’t get laid now killing just to kill, whatever they can get. Fill yer boots.

He’s been out here since one or so, working to settle himself. Solder smoke and citronella smoke mingling in the dome of light thrown by an old goose-neck lamp, hooded and twisted up like a bronze cobra. Showing Les his hands and the naked radio chassis upturned on the bench between them, and the soldering iron with its coiled wick. The radio’s bakelite shell stands sentinel beside the half-dozen capacitors—waxy, dead—that he’s snipped out, replacing bad for good as he goes. Plugging the radio back into the socket after each exchange, monitoring his progress. A little louder, a little bit louder now, the call and response of some old gospel number. Good good good.

He works in singlet and shorts, mosquitoes wreaking a constellation of havoc on his undefended arms and legs, never mind the citronella coils. A pause now and then to slap or scratch, or to etch the angriest of the bites with a cross, digging in his blunt thumbnail this way then that. A trick his nieces taught him when they were little and still interested in showing him what they knew. The crosses are either meant to make the bites itch less, or they’re meant to help the swelling go down. Or maybe they’re only intended to shuffle the mind along; he can’t remember exactly.

The radio innards give him the news—he thinks of bird entrails, of voodoo—telling him which parts of the world are just now rolling over into 1991: Hanoi, Jakarta, an hour-wide ribbon of Russia. That it’ll be a fine day, thirty degrees, no chance of storm. Les turns the radio off and fits it snug into its cover, then turns it on a final time, laying his hands on the bakelite to feel the moment before sound arrives, that warm whir, as though it were a box of bees. Forty bucks, it’ll fetch, maybe fifty. Or maybe Ev will like it.

He sets down the solder and rehouses the iron. Nudges the shed door and props it open for the cleaner air. Outside it’s pitch, a velvet blackness. Madrugada, the Spanish call it. This dark stretch leading up to the dawn. English wants a word like that, something that sounds both magic and malevolent, but there isn’t one. Or not one he knows of. Just the wee small hours, and that doesn’t fit, doesn’t conjure any of the right feelings, any of the wonder or the dread.

There’s a stirring in the tall seeded grass beyond his fenceline, a light breeze causing shivery spoondrift.

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