The Breeding Season by Amanda Niehaus

Author:Amanda Niehaus [Niehaus, Amanda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2019-09-02T16:00:00+00:00

part three

chapter 13

Dan sits at his desk and closes the door to the hall, to the world. Winter unfolds around the cottage, June to July, and time flutters to the ground like pages. Too few pages. Never enough.

Elise is gone, north to the quolls, and maybe it’s better without her. Maybe he can concentrate, make progress on the book.

Elise is gone, and now, so is he.

The Museum of Old and New Art, Mona, is holding a career retrospective for Berlin Warne, and Dan will be there for the launch. He will take in the art and the artist in the flesh. He will see Hannah Wallace.

The flight to Tasmania is a cheap one, no meal, so he buys a slice of quiche from the bookstore-cafe in the terminal, and a flat white with an extra shot. His head aches with wine, with Elise, with the prospect of acceleration, the shell rattle lift, then up up up. He grips the flimsy cup, his own arm. His hands are bloodless. He’d sleep if he could, but he can’t get comfortable in his faux leather seat, and besides, his mind is a raft ready to blow open. What might happen if he pulled the red handle.

Elise. Like a shimmer of sun on the ocean below, there and not there, a trick of light, the distance between them increasing. They will do their work apart, her science, his art, from the opposite poles of Australia.

Dan needs a drink to loosen him up, whatever it is all coiled up inside, ready to spring him wide in a pile of his own guts. In a few hours, maybe, he’ll meet his uncle, will finally know him for what he really is instead of what he seems to be. Burn the manuscript into reality.

Hannah.

But there are no drinks, not the kind he needs, at this time of day. His stomach rumbles, and he thinks of Elise, how she once described the baby as gas, a shift in her intestines. He imagines that’s what he feels, the wheeling of a tiny body inside his own.

He’ll never know how it is to grow a baby, how it is to become more than you are. Child changing every moment, pushing into newly made spaces, testing newly grown muscles and nerves and soft, creamy fingernails. The lightness of it. If only Dan could remember the feel of floating.

His own, grown-up body is heavy.

Dan sets the plastic takeaway container on the empty centre seat. His guts are congealing, and he imagines the length of them as a string of sausages, pinchpuckered links, and the thought repulses him but he can’t stop thinking it, always so sensitive, too fucking obsessive, but this is not his mind but his body, and too much wine. He’s done a good one on himself, fucked up his guts, and now he’ll suffer all the way to Hobart, one giant sphincter, clenched to breaking point.

He pulls down the tray table and flicks through his notes, his questions, things he means to ask Berlin Warne in their short time together.

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