New Animal by Ella Baxter (speed reading book .TXT) 📕

He raises his shoulders up to his ears and looks out the window. ‘I’m not going to stop you, but I really want you to meet with Shell as well.’

‘I’m not against the idea,’ I say. ‘But only when I feel up to it.’

He nods, and walks back to the sink to continue scrubbing at the tongs. It’s too intimate, eating bacon and listening to him clean, so I start talking again.

‘I had a bad dream about wrapping myself up as a baby in banana leaves. I don’t know what it means.’

I roll another piece of bacon up, and chomp down on it in the same way I’ve seen guinea pigs eat carrots.

‘Well,’ he says, ‘there are some shrubs down by the river. You could go sit under one of them and ask the land for wisdom. You know how healing that place is. It might be good for you to reacquaint yourself with it.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Great idea.’

I walk along the river, matching my pace to the bubbling rapids. The sun has warmed the rocks on the bank, and there is the herbaceous smell of leaf humus drying. Jack had told me it flooded a few weeks ago in a lightning storm that split a tree a kilometre away. I curl my toes in my boots as I step on granules of quartz that have erupted from the river bed onto the path. Ancient sediment. Dinosaur bits. Slivers of granite and obsidian. Fossils and space ships in rubble beneath me.

Years ago, when Simon and I were teenagers here on holiday, it had rained for a full week. We were bored, so Jack led us down to this spot to pull clumps of clay from the bank, collecting big chunks of it into metal buckets that we then carried back to the deck. He showed us how to make cups with the clay by holding a lump in your hand and sticking a thumb inside it, then winding it around until a vessel opened in your hand like a flower. They were the colour of mustard streaked with grey sediment. These are spectacular, Jack said, when I placed my cups along the balcony rail to dry. They crumbled during a thunderstorm the following week, dissolving under heavy drops of rain, but even after the clay was washed away there were evenly spaced starbursts along the plank of wood where they had stood.

I sit down in the shade with my back to the trunk of a tree and ants immediately begin crawling in frenzied zigzags over my shoes and legs. Still guilty about the moth, I brush them off gently into the nearby grass. My wounds from Leo still feel sore and I lean further back to be more comfortable. I pick up some dried leaves and sprinkle them over my lap just like in the dream; I want the river to heal me. Here I am, ready and waiting for the epiphanies to occur. I look around. The view is not bad.

I hear some sticks cracking along the path and look up to see Jack wandering along the embankment, sliding down every so often due to the lack of purchase in his rubber thongs.

‘Oh Lia, honey, hi,’ he says as he falls sideways slowly. ‘I didn’t want to intrude, but I wasn’t sure if you still knew the track.’ He pauses and puts both hands on his hips to catch his breath. ‘I didn’t want you getting lost.’

‘I’m not lost, just waiting for some kind of healing to take place.’

He begins to sob. ‘She haunts me, honey. It’s like I can hear her voice in my head asking me to check on you. Has she eaten? Is she happy? Is she washing? Is she depressed?’ He wipes his nose on his sleeve. ‘Mothers never leave, you know.’

He sits on the trunk of a fallen tree. ‘When she was pregnant with you, we did those bloody classes at the hospital, the ones where they tell the women that they’re going to be torn apart, and also kind of let the blokes know too, so they can be prepared for it.’ He watches the river. ‘And I mean, you do need forewarning, because no one has ever really seen someone split to their arse under fluorescent lighting before. It’s quite new and you can forgive first-time fathers for feeling a little …’ He waves his hand around as if searching for the right word.

‘Stressed?’ I offer.

‘Fucking terrified,’ he says.

I shuffle across the grass and pat the spot next to me, but he remains sitting on the trunk.

‘But fuck, Lia’—tears are streaming down his face now—‘they told us that the mother’s heart changes when she has a baby inside her. It gets bigger and kind of collapses to one side, and there’s this tube that runs from her heart to the baby’s and they share blood. A woman is changed after that, isn’t she? How could she not be?’

He looks at me, hands open to the sky.

‘I mean a woman stays connected to her children forever. Death can’t negate that. She’s in you and you’re in her.’

‘And you came here to tell me that?’ I say.

‘No, I came here to make sure you’re safe, and to tell you to ask if you need anything—like money, for example—and also to take a shit. I always shit outside. It’s part of giving back to the earth.’

‘Every day?’

‘Most days. You are totally one with the land then—you should try it.’ He walks away from the riverbank and into the scrubby bush.

‘Just go and enjoy your shit,’ I say, standing and brushing any remaining ants and twigs from my body before heading back to the house.

‘Can I borrow the car?’ I yell into the trees, and wait for his reply.

‘Of course!’ I hear some more sticks breaking, and some rustling. ‘The keys are on the hook near the door. Just ignore the petrol light—it’s broken.’

As I begin