The Swan Book by Alexis Wright

Author:Alexis Wright [Wright, Alexis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General
ISBN: 9781922146410
Publisher: Giramondo
Published: 2013-07-30T04:00:00+00:00

He knew her terror. It was the fear of a child that even the rats sensed and were scattering in frenzy. What was he to do with her world? This was when he realised that he would never be able to reach her. Hadn’t he given her a fair go? He had built a dream as complex and ingrained as her own, but where he knew that his would keep pushing him out in the world, she would always dig a hole to hide in. She was still the girl in the tree. Untouchable. Rolled up in a tight ball like a frightened echidna. Yes, it was easy to decide not to touch her. Perhaps he never would. What did it matter? Nobody would accuse him of being a paedophile or a rapist. Number one rule of his forefathers. What could he do? He drifted off into half-sleep like he always did, while thinking about a mountain of crises in any country that sprung to his mind, and through the wee hours of the night, he would spin by the world’s troubles, resolving crises one by one, intervening step by step in other people’s fortunes or misfortunes, in his dreams.

When the wind dropped, all she could hear was his breathing resounding through the sounds of owl fights, and screaming rats. Above them, she thought she saw spider webs being spun on fine threads that ran down from the power lines and across to the low-growing mulga trees. These enormous webs were being woven thicker and thicker and spiders were flying through the air in search of places to anchor their threads, as though setting a trap to encase them during the night. She lay flat beside him as he slept, and drifted into sleep with the thought of touching the walls inside her tree, and dreamed of a struggling swan enclosed by Warren’s icy body while Old Bella Donna sang from afar – A swan with a slither of bone in its beak.

The dawn landscape was grey and solemn as it revealed a silent vista of mostly grass and sparsely scattered scrub, until the baying of cattle echoed in a chain reaction that sallied back and forth from the distant horizons. When the sun rose, the cattle had already broken through spider webs and gathered around the two sleeping figures. She was in a cathedral of Law where marriages were always honoured but she would not honour hers. The morning air felt cold. So were her thoughts, vowing that nothing would spring from the dirt of this ground.

You will learn that you and I are going to stand for each other as the only ones we can trust, so never forget that I am your best friend, and only friend, Warren said, preparing to leave, and added – always serious – You remember that, and that will be the main thing I will want from you as a wife.

She looked at the landscape – a vista of sameness in every direction – and knew that this was why women went missing on journeys with their husbands.

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