Smokehouse by Melissa Manning

Author:Melissa Manning
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Published: 2021-01-26T23:46:58+00:00

Faal

Gurj stopped at the edge of the road, wound down his window and tried to read the grooves on the weatherworn letterbox. Looked down the hill to the enormous willow tree that obscured the house, its long sweeping branches that could be hiding everything or nothing at all.

They’d only been there once, on the way to the Woodbridge District School fete. Graham had just been appointed principal at Kingston High and he’d been keen to check out local feeder schools.

Gurj turned Graham’s old Mercedes into the driveway, drove through the curtain of the vast willow, its leaves softly brushing the car like Graham’s memories painting themselves across his mind. It was like being in one of those giant car washes, only this was all supple dancing limbs caressing the earth in time with the wind. This was all Graham, Graham, Graham.

Beyond the willow, a squat weatherboard with a deep verandah the length of two sides; their retirement fixer-upper looked smaller than Gurj remembered, but then everything looked different these days.

The verandah squeaked under his feet, sent soundwaves into the space beneath the floorboards where Graham used to hide as a boy when his father came to collect him. Not because he hadn’t liked his father, Graham had said, but because he’d loved his great-aunt more.

Gurj went into the house, sat on one of the vinyl-covered kitchen chairs where, decades earlier, Graham’s great-aunt had made tea, where Graham had sat doing homework, been rewarded with extra biscuits if he got everything right.

Gurj had met Graham on a blind date. For the entirety of a five-hour shift at the bookshop, Tara and Alex had worked on him. They were adamant he needed a distraction and there was a new man working in the education department with Tara’s father.

‘He’s very good-looking. Unmissable actually,’ Tara said.

‘Not interested.’ Gurj ran a Stanley knife down the tape on a box and started to unpack the books onto the bench.

‘Yeah, and he’s just moved back from overseas.’

‘So?’

‘He’s here to stay.’

‘You haven’t even met him. Have you even met him, Alex?’

Alex laughed. ‘I don’t need to. I trust Tara’s impeccable taste.’

‘Did you meet Scott?’ Gurj asked. ‘Tara introduced me to Scott.’

‘Oh, fuck off,’ Alex said.

After that, Tara told Gurj that he might ruin his life if he didn’t take the opportunities thrown at him, and that he would also ruin her life because if he was going to give up on love then she might as well too.

He leant on the new-release bookshelf and knocked several books onto the floor.

‘I’ll pick them up if you agree to meet him,’ Tara said.

‘Fine.’

Tara and Alex held hands and jumped up and down like teenagers.

‘Is this really what you’re like?’ Gurj loaded the pricing gun with fresh tape, priced the new books and began to worry about what he’d agreed to.

Tara and Alex were notorious for stretching the meaning of adjectives, so the idea that this new man was ‘unmissable’ was wildly unlikely. More likely he was eminently missable. But Gurj didn’t have the energy to argue, let the refusal sit behind his teeth and get stuck there.

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