LA MOUSTIQUAIRE

GILLIAN MEARS

The girl crouches in front of a fire about the size and circular width of the leaf she intends to wrap around some of the beans that she has stolen from the man. She has his little silver flask too. The veins of the leaf seem to glow with a green fire that’s nothing to do with the burning twigs. If I could become very thin, she thinks, thinner even than the man, then I’d slip through this leaf to become its sap. The beans are on a metal spoon, smoothed by the innumerable tongues and fingers of girls who’ve accompanied the stockman.

This girl has been with the stockman for nearly five years but sometimes they are still such strangers the girl thinks it’s as if they’ve been sealed off from each other in candlewax. On other occasions, there’s no separation between them. Being with the man then is like cantering on the smoothest horse imaginable. The man puts his nose against the girl’s and holding only one nostril shut breathes out and in so that their breath becomes the breath of one creature – neither girl nor man but the animal whose shape she has seen only in dreams, or in the moving leaves of a tree against the stars. It has a horse’s head but its ears are soft and round in a way that reminds the girl of the love poem the stockman once wrote. ‘La moustiquaire’, the man said it was called. ‘For you,’ he said, reciting, but the girl could understand nothing of it, as it was in the language he’d learned when he went away to the long ago war. Mosquito net girl, he says it means. Mozzie, he calls her or Ginny, the name he called the other girls.

Yet not even the night with the rodeo boy on the last full moon in town can equal what the girl feels for the old stockman. The man can’t live much longer and although she hates the man more than she has ever hated anything, she also loves the man more than she has ever loved. With the boy she’d pretended to laugh at his jokes about old men but even as his hands were finding her again, she’d felt the pang of her betrayal. Wondering if the stockman was over his sudden sickness, she’d suddenly lost all interest in doing anything more with that rodeo boy. Even as he was throwing his leg over like she was another of his rides for the day, she was wishing she was inside a mosquito net with the stockman, listening to him reading.

*

The girl sighs. Already it’s light enough to see a line of trees about fifty horse lengths to the right. Hovering in this way between day and night, the land looks downy, as if old stockmen have multiplied out there and lain down with their finely haired shoulders turned towards the sky. The three horses are tethered near another tree and look over. She takes a biscuit of hay over to them and, deftly, between her own knees, she picks up the hoof of the one who seemed yesterday to have a stone bruise.

At least there are no mosquitoes here. The girl puts the horse’s hoof back on the ground. It isn’t often when they travel away from the town that she doesn’t have to stay up all night with the switch made of wild grass, waving mosquitoes off the man.

The old travelling net rotted about a year ago and although it could’ve easily been replaced, now the man prefers to call the girl, La Moustiquaire. Or ‘Ginny,’ he calls, stretching her out over him as if her skinny limbs are cotton net. He jokes that girls like her are more beautiful when tired, with the purple skin under the eyes deepening in the way of the coast at dusk. ‘Your father must’ve been one of those really black black-fellas,’ he speculates, but she won’t ever say who that father might have been or where he got to or if she even remembers him.

*

She mashes the beans into a paste and pinches some salt out. Her hands come together. ‘Thankyou beans. Thankyou leaf who is a little like me. Thankyou God.’ She wraps the leaf into a parcel and eats.

For a moment the girl’s jaw stops chewing and with alarm she listens. The air has filled with the moaning noise of insects. Then she looks up and grins. For it isn’t mosquitoes after all. She’s sitting under a tree full of flowers and it’s just bees, floating around the yellow blossoms.

Everything seems to be playing with me! she laughs. In a spiderweb there seems to be a heart shape on a string. And look at the sun! The more she stares, the more the sun pokes out its tongue. Even the sun wants a go at me, she thinks. Then, worried by this thought, she picks up the hip flask.

The rum almost instantly dries out all extraneous thoughts. So that’s why the man has never allowed her any. She tips it into her mouth again and rocks back on her heels. Selfish, selfish, she thinks. Crazy old slutfish. She utters a few more obscene words and suddenly hopes that when she returns to the tent, the man will not want to get up immediately but will order her to take off her clothes and lie down on the square of blue cloth. I will pretend I’m with the boy. I will suck his old so-and-so until it goes foamy like the sea. Although she hasn’t seen the boy for a while, she feels he isn’t far away and that his face, smiling this way, contains all the haziness of a summer.

As the vision of the boy fades, she drinks all the rum and lies down. Suddenly she feels the mixed animal whose name she doesn’t know is very close. It half hops, half runs but no, it is clearly a young bridal veil wallaby, she sees that now. White people are killing wallabies with knives and clubs. It’s the time of blood and in the distance she can hear human babies crying. She knows they are babies with skin as black as her own and that like the wallabies, they’re going to be harmed.

Oh, but it’s too much. White women laugh and show their teeth. Even though they are only watching their men, the girl sees the power that the killing bestows. Under their dresses, she senses their breasts becoming even whiter, like huge dampers rising, threatening to smother the land altogether.

She sees that the killing makes them powerful in the same way she feels power over all the mosquitoes she’s destined to kill, or the mice in the horse’s oats whose tails she sometimes seizes, swinging their heads against a stone with a sharp crack.

When she kills mice the stockman smiles and loves her and says she’s like a bloody good dog. Good at anything. His best Ginny ever. And he tousles her hair like it is indeed the ruff of a dog.

The girl sits up and spits. The twig fire’s gone out. It’s time to creep back to the old man’s tent. First she goes across to the horses who prick their ears hopeful of an early feed. She scratches their tails instead and the favourite spot behind the wither and tells them that probably by this time tomorrow, they’ll be back in town. ‘There,’ she says, pulling off two bottle ticks, ‘that must feel better.’ She licks her horse’s neck where the salt from yesterday’s sweat has gathered, in the hope that it’ll hide the taste of her mouth.

When the girl ducks down into the tent, she sees with horror that the stockman is as if carpeted in mosquitoes. He has come out from his cover, the better it seems to feed the numerous mosquitoes that have been feasting in the tent. Panic-struck, she picks up her switch but it’s of utterly no use. It’s simply a miracle that the man sleeps on through such moaning. Surely there can only be one explanation. The man has fallen into that which he has always most dreaded. He’s in the mosquito fever from which there is no return.

The mosquitoes, at the presence of the girl, rise for a moment like little blood suns, like a multitude of demon spirits with fiery gold wings and red bellies. ‘But I am to die first,’ she says. The stockman has always said this. That it’s the fate of her race. That if she leaves him she’ll end up buried young in a shallow reserve grave the dogs’ll dig up. She utters the man’s name which even though it is ridiculous and ill-suited is the only one she has to use.

The girl puts her mouth onto the man’s but there is no response. The girl slaps the man and shouts that at the very least he could’ve fallen into a normal fever first. ‘They’ll think I killed you and stole your booze and bible.’ The girl lets forth a volley of violent words. The man seems deep in his own breath and has tucked his hands into his armpits in the way of a sick bird.

Now she holds the man in her arms, the way the man has never allowed. He is just a tiny little fella really. Without his boots on, not much more than her size. She cradles the face. She forces open the stockman’s mouth, trying to induce him to take a nipple. At the touch of the old man’s lips, one nipple forms a drop of whitish dew. She looks deeply and sees the face his mother must once have seen, when he was just a baby. For a moment it seems that the man’s going to suck but his lips loosen and, skinny though he is, he’s too heavy to hold up anymore. Then she wipes the brylcreem from his hair off her breasts with sudden disdain. ‘Funny, seeing you without your hat on,’ she comments but he doesn’t reply.

The day inches along. Now the girl grows impatient, wishing that the man would hurry up in the taking of his last breath. And what a rotten breath it has become. If God is breath as the man has said, then God is surely rotten. The girl feels the familiar revulsion. A wasp flies down towards them and then out of the flap to the outside. Then another.

‘The bible’s hatching!’ The girl in one leap is at the book, sealed up last visit to town by a pottery wasp building her nest along the pages. The man had taken it as a sign. That not until the wasplings had hatched and flown safely away would it be time to resume his readings.

Two perfect holes now pierce the mud and from within comes the humming noise. The girl goes back and leans down to the man’s ear to convey her excitement. The hair of the man’s ear shimmers as if traced in late evening water seen from a track, but he doesn’t appear able to hear. The girl feels bitter. Her shoulders slump down in the most downcast of ways. After all their waiting, for the book to be released but for the reader to be dying.

Throughout the day, more wasps hatch and many memories come and go. Then, when the sun’s right overhead, the man grows suddenly much older, before, just like that, just bloody like that, the little bay filly that got the lockjaw dies right before her very eyes. The girl spits at the man’s feet because not once during the entire length of the day has the man so much as acknowledged her presence or joined in the excitement over the wasps.

‘What do you do anyway, with such an old man?’ the rodeo boy had wanted to know.

‘We’re waiting for a book to hatch,’ she’d replied, completely sick of the boy and his fingers.

*

When she cries it’s because she always knew much more than the man. She, not the man, has lain on the earth and felt the strong lines moving through her like God and the waterbird with wings as outspread as the big altar, flying through darkness to enter through her hands.

Now it’s too late. She can never tell the man about this or look directly into his eyes. Cautiously, the girl pushes her thumbs over the lids and pulls them down. As soon as she lifts her fingers, though, the eyes come open again.

Remembering how the man once seeled the eyes of a brown hawk, she thinks that this is what’ll have to be done. He’d found the book on French hunting birds in that green bedroom above the pub and for weeks had been determined to get a brown hawk to catch rabbits for them. The baby hawk he got out of a nest never did any hunting. ‘It died didn’t hit,’ utters the girl sadly, not bothering to correct her pronunciation the way he’d liked. She searches around in the saddlebag for the mosquito-net mending needle and thread, hoping that the man has thrown it away, but it is more or less in the place where it always was. Grave now, she threads the needle. There’s not much light left. Old man skin must be tougher than hawk lids. She cries. For the man. For that poor hawk and how its eyes got full of pus.

Another wasp finds its freedom and hangs low beside them. The girl wishes that she could read something from the book for the man. ‘Well, you were quite a nice man,’ she says instead but the words come out sounding like an accusation.

The bird the stockman used to call The Cup Overfloweth Bird begins to call and there comes the feeling of bright uncontained liquid running in every direction. It calls and calls like liquid and seems to belong to no specific time at all. It could be two thousand years ago or two thousand years ahead. The bird leaps out of the purple tree and its wings look to her like the rodeo boy’s dark red shirt when he’s in the shute for the last ride of the day. She drinks all the rum in the big bottle and feels so sick she thinks she too will lie down and die for a while.

Later, gulping down water at the tent’s opening, trying to dissolve her uncertainty, she claps her hands and clicks her tongue. ‘By and by,’ she tells the man, ‘we’ll come back for you,’ knowing that no such thing will happen and that after this night she’ll never see the stockman again. ‘I know,’ she says, and finds his stash of black jellybeans. ‘We’ll leave you these.’ But then one by one she eats them. ‘I’ll ride your horse,’ she says, ‘and you’ll see how smoothly she travels for me.’ She makes a dismissive gesture with her hand. ‘I was always a better rider than you.’ In the town she can sense it’s that time when the dust is hanging in the air and the mandarins the man likes to eat from the tree by the travelling stock route would probably still be too green.

In the last light left she takes the bible into her hands and examines how perfect and round are the leave-taking holes of the insects. Nothing has ever looked so simultaneously complete but empty, so full of potential but so spent. One chamber was never filled and sealed and she pokes her finger into it before tapping the whole nest off the book. On the underneath of the nest she can see where the mud the wasp collected was dark and where it gleams with silvery river sand. She has covered the man in the blue blanket. When she looks underneath she jumps backwards, for the man’s feet have taken a different position. Even when dead the man tries to keep his feet in the stirrups, thinks the girl and feels a grudging kind of admiration. The man’s face looks like a rock now, blank but vast and excessively salty. She drops the bible that as much as it brought them violently together, helped shamefully to hold them apart.

In the light of the fire she builds, the horses look like they’re preparing for an end of show parade, dancing at the end of their ropes. Below his forelock, Boney the white gelding’s face looks rosy, as if his cheekbones have been rouged. Big horse yawns seize the girl. She hopes the fire will last until morning.

The mosquito when it comes towards the skin of the girl’s arm comes tentatively at first, then more surely. I can feel the wings, she marvels. Like a small mouth blowing. Like a little breeze.

She watches the mosquito’s beak tapping, then experiences a small sting. Gradually the abdomen of the insect fills with blood. When the girl sneezes in response, she feels every particle of moisture as it lands on her body and the mosquito flies off, only half full. If the stockman was alive the girl would have to hide that she’s no longer the extraordinary black girl from the coast that mosquitoes won’t touch. Now, like any other girl, the mosquitoes form in a spiral above her head. Now she just watches.

The unknown animal hops across the night without moving, formed of stars. The girl waits for morning which seems longer away than ever before. On the caps of her elbows, on the edges of her ears and toes, the welts of the mosquitoes are already rising and beginning to itch. More mosquitoes arrive. When she chucks the bible into the fire she is sad all over again. One day, she’d thought, like a perfect leap on old Boney over a fallen tree, their separation would be severed. Now all the possible moments have passed. Now the bible burns like a grey fan; the colour plate of Jesus in the Lily of the Fields going into ashes; red coals taking away all those little words in the way of ants taking eggs.