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

The tree needs to wait. It will all come back if it waits. But it’s a long, long time. Longer than it wants. Longer than anyone feels is natural.

She will take Jennifer’s mother by the hands, and the mother will nod and say she understands that it might take years or decades, but yes, one day her fruit will come back, her leaves, her flowers. She will nod again and wipe her face. I get it, she’ll say. I really get it.

I asked my mother once how long she thought it would take. Lifetimes, she said, but deep down they already know.

By the time I can leave Jennifer it’s an hour before the service and people have already eaten the marzipan and filled the foyer. As I exit the prep room, I pass Judy, who is still humming the song, and I join in on a long, low note with her. As usual, Vincent and my mother are working the room expertly, handing out pamphlets and greeting new guests. I make eye contact with Vincent and give him a subtle nod, and he winks back at me. I pick up my bag from behind Judy’s desk, as well as the spare car keys, and keep my head down as I walk through the crowd to the car park. People know my role here and often feel compelled to speak to me, I think in part because they can’t imagine doing this job themselves and want to break the social barrier between us by being fine with it. I prefer the barrier up. I love my job. The general public tends to squirm around death and anyone associated with the industry, but that reveals more about their own Victorian standards of cleanliness than it does ours. I wish I could tell everyone who approaches me that they absolutely do not have to shake my hand, but they always try. They want to get those barriers down.

Before I start the engine of the Camry, I swipe sweat from my forehead and rummage through the compartment and map pockets looking for a stray water bottle. The interior has absorbed the heat, and the flesh of my thighs stick together, making me feel slightly hysterical. Sweat dots my upper lip and I wipe it away with the back of my hand before unwinding the windows. I’m about to pull out of the car park when I see my mother jogging towards me.

She leans through the window, panting. ‘You heading to the lookout?’

‘Yeah, just for a bit,’ I say, hand on the steering wheel, ready to go.

‘Need to commune with nature?’

‘Always,’ I say.

‘Do you ever feel his presence there?’

‘Nope. Just a good view.’

CHAPTER THREE

The lookout is at the highest point of one of the largest subtropical banana plantations in the area. I drive fast up the winding road with both windows down, letting the smell of rotting bananas fill my nostrils and the harsh screech of cicadas invade my ears.

The plantation belongs to Floyd, a hinterland council representative. You can find him on a Thursday night hosting the RSL meat raffle, and in between calling out numbers he talks about his life. Settling down with a Scottish tourist in the eighties hadn’t agreed with him, we all know that. She lasted about a year, which was long enough for her to have a baby and to frighten Floyd away from any further relationships. Women, he would say, speaking too closely into the microphone, while the meat turned warm under the cling film in front of him, are pure madness.

The tail end of summer has turned some of the bananas black on their stems, and the demented hiss of insects wraps around the mountain like a girdle, creating an irregular vibration that rises and falls with the wind. Sometimes, when I’ve come here after it’s rained heavily, the mountain looks like a tower of white deluge, racing down to the highway below. Other times, I’ve seen thin tornadoes out at sea, swirling across the horizon, as the palms flap their wide, flat leaves to the sky, beckoning them to shore.

The lookout is flanked by two giant camphor laurel trees, and when I turn off the ignition, a flock of screeching black cockatoos erupts from the low branches. There’s a crankiness to the landscape up here. Everything is too tightly packed in. The understorey is compacted by Range Rovers that are occasionally crushed by boulders rolling down from the cliffs, which are crumbling under the pressure of too many new-build apartments. My mother says the whole coastline is cursed from the violence of colonisation. She says that this land doesn’t want us on it, and like a bucking horse it will try to throw us off.

I walk down the dirt path to the rickety platform, looking over the town and all the way out to the container ships at sea. It’s so close to the ocean that, by the time I leave, I will be able to trace a finger over one eyebrow and wipe away a sticky film of salt.

The lookout is where Floyd’s son, Daniel, decided to jump last year, and I have come here most days since then. There is something very decisive about throwing your body from a cliff because you’ve written an ending in which you will either be very hurt or gone completely. People throw rubbish from car windows, toss broken toys over the back fence, fling apple cores and olive pits out of windows—generally people discard things that are not needed. Daniel threw his body like it was nothing, and it has stuck inside me ever since. And maybe it is because he could have been any of the men I met online. Or that the shirt he wore was the same brand as the ones Simon liked to wear. Or the note he left, scrawled on the back of a receipt like an afterthought—This is nobody’s