He picked up a long copper-colored snake, the size of a woman’s ankle. He held it so that its mouth gaped open. See, he said, pointing at its teeth. When they bite it’s nearly always self-defense. And they inject venom only about half the time.
He pointed to the fangs from which the venom would come. The fangs that would fold flat down against the roof of the mouth until the sensor under the nose detected the presence of a hot body, until a footfall caused the earth beneath its belly to tremble. All these sensations might impinge upon the creature’s safety and cause its fangs to come out.
Snakes are not cruel, the Snake Man insisted. They never attack their own kind. But such a thought was not helpful. Because what do you do once the venom enters the bloodstream? Apply ice, or don’t. Compress, or don’t. Clutch a rosary, employ sacred herbs, recite a prayer. While the venom spreads and the pain comes and the muscles begin to spasm and the tissue breaks down and there is nothing you can do to halt it. What then does it matter whether it was an act of cruelty or otherwise?
Now, these ones here are dangerous, very, very deadly, the Snake Man noted as he emptied a brown snake onto the yellow grass. The snake made towards me at the edge of the corrugated-iron fence, its body rippling and rolling across the dead grass. Come here, you, the man said, and drew its body back with the hook on the long metal pole. The snake reared up as though it were about to strike. The Snake Man continued to commentate: This one’s pretty quiet. Now, a fierce snake wouldn’t be standing up like that. If he was fierce he’d be straight on my leg before I knew what was going on, and when they strike they strike with their mouths open.
I stared at the open mouth of the snake. The horror was all so simple, even then. The eroticism of snakebite, the act of penetration, all those Freudian fears of the phallus, of being swallowed whole, the uncanniness of a creature that can shed its skin when we so often long to be able to escape our own. We are scared to death not of actual snakes but the snakes that live in our minds.
But understanding the fear doesn’t make it any less real. If the snake show at La Perouse was meant to convince me of the hollowness of our fears, it failed. From that afternoon I was afraid of snakes more than just about anything else. Snakes in the long grass by the highway. Snakes hidden in the woodpile. Snakes in the water, the worst kind, because the water was where I felt safe.
When the show was over my mother led me across the grass to look out at the water and the old military fortifications on the edge of the headland. That man, she said, has been there since I was a little girl. And it was his father before him. Your nana brought me here to see the same show when I was small.
What happened to the man’s dad?
Died of snakebite, the idiot. They’re a pack of idiots, those men. Think they’re immune to all the venom because they’ve been bitten so many times. But it’ll be snakes that kill every single one of them.
I stood there looking at the waves coming in across Botany Bay. The thorny bushes below pushed up against the shore. When they strike they strike with their mouths open. I asked my mother whether there were snakes down there, along the water’s edge. Maybe, she said, but they don’t want to hurt you. And then reached for my hair to smooth a curl, because my hair, she said, was my most important feature.
My mother was always playing with my hair. Always trying to smooth it down. She was always coming at me with her hands to try to “fix” whatever she found unruly about it, in much the same way that she would observe the things I did that, she was quick to inform me, she would never do.
The summer carried on. There were fires in Tasmania, and along the eastern seaboard the heat did not abate so much as level out at a temperature just below unbearable. By the end of February only $6 million had been raised for the Queensland flood appeal. Emergency costs alone were expected to exceed $25 million.
By then, the three women with whom I had been hired with in that office on Market Street had all been fired. They couldn’t, in the end, spell the names of the tricky towns. Couldn’t reliably answer the phone within three seconds. The girl with the dark roots cried at her desk. But I stuck it out. I looked like I could hack it. I wrote things down in the notebook when I felt overwhelmed.
For instance:
St. Augustine believed a flood was warranted every once in a while. God would always save the good. Only the wicked would be hurt. By Augustine’s logic, in the story of the Flood, it was the people who were killed in the deluge, not God, who were responsible for the catastrophe. They fucked up, accumulated an unseemly number of sins, and so they were punished. Augustine called the thousand-year storms of climate disaster “natural evils.”
After months at sea, Noah released a bird from the ark, which flew out across the floodwaters to see if they had abated. The bird did not return. And so they knew the worst had passed and the world could be rebuilt. This single act has led a great number of people, including my great-great-great-great-grandfather, to put their faith in the questionable symbolism of birds.
____________
When I was at work, the hours seemed to spread outwards, shifts taking on the weight of weeks as I watched the overhead clock blink down the minutes remaining until I could leave. I watched the midday movie in silence and the six o’clock news on Channel Nine. When a call appeared on the screen, I pressed ENTER and listened—to a man whose friend had been pulled out of their car at the traffic lights and was being beaten on the side of the road. To a girl who was so drunk that she didn’t know how to get home. To a woman, in a town so distant that there was no phone reception, explain that she had happened upon a little boy on the highway in the middle of the desert, whose father had left him out there to die, and driven away in the high-noon heat. In the notebook beside me I wrote down “heat.” I wrote down “desert.” I wrote down “crying.”
In this manner the days arranged themselves into something like routine. I worked four days a week, sometimes three. I had money enough to pay my rent. If it sometimes felt like the emergencies of those on the phones were leaking through the borders of my own personal emergencies, I had at least developed reliable habits. I took to wearing flowers in my hair. I swam when I could. I kept the windows open at night so that the bedroom sometimes seemed a mere extension of the mulberry, fig, and mango trees that grew on the ledge between the houses and the street.
When I returned home the most I could usually do was lie in bed, reading. I had taken to keeping bottles of wine atop one of the bookcases, as well as a glass, and there were few nights when I did not fall asleep with a purple stain on my lips. If I had time in the mornings I wrote, although I did that in bed as well, for I had not thought to buy a desk. I had some writing assignments coming through, and in one month I managed to write four long pieces for a website. The editor of the literary magazine had emailed asking if I was interested in some unpaid editorial work on top of the interviews I had agreed to conduct. I accepted. The website paid me one hundred dollars per submission, sometimes double, and even with the unpaid writing work at the literary magazine I was beginning to slowly save up money, enough money for a plane ticket.
Lachlan lived in a terrace house in Erskineville with two other men. The paint peeled away from the plaster walls, mold grew in their bathroom as it did in mine, and Women’s Weekly cookbooks from the 1960s were piled on top of the kitchen cabinets, although nobody was sure where they’d come from. The rent was cheap because the toilet was still at the back of the garden. Walking down the path I tried not to brush against the oleander overgrowing the backyard. When I sat down to pee in the middle of the night I could see the stars through the gap between the roof and the corrugated-iron door. Spiders lived in there.