The Planet Terrarium - by Philomena van Rijswijk
This story appeared in Island 99 in 2004. An extract of it also appears in Island 167 as part of the ‘Island Conversations’ project, with a companion piece written in response: ‘Planet Mycelium’ by Matthew J Carr.
The big Cat woman wakes at six every morning with enough time for half-a-dozen fatalistic breaths before dragging herself crooked across the mattress and somehow standing, her tie-dyed nightie bunched around big bluish thighs, her breasts pulled askew by the twists and suns. Those old boots that she fumbles into are stained and split from too many wet and dark winters in this wet and dark place ... a grey hollow where the frost lies all day in winter, making impressions on the grass of towels hanging stiff from the line. Sometimes she can smell the very moulds of the place exhaling from her skin. But it is not winter yet. It’s still trying to be autumn, though none of the beauty has come.
– How weird that being dead might make a leaf beautiful, Cat says to her feline daughters. She has spent the summer waiting for the grape vine on the blue shed across the river to turn scarlet. By then, she knows, she will feel winter biting at her corrugated nipples.
But now it is April. The family has slept for weeks with the violence of the creek at the back of their sleep. The dense-bodied possums and the silent wallabies have gone into hiding somewhere dry. Every morning the couple make tea and wait for some light to come. The damp newspapers are saying that these weeks are the wettest recorded since 1958. In the gully the three goats stand hip-to-hip in the shed all day long, their hooves translucent and splayed, their hindquarters stained. They goose-step the clay like parodies of German soldiers, to grind sideways at damp hay tossed into the corner of the paddock inbetween downpours. Pools of stinking water overflow under the house, rotting the celery-top pine poles that hold the place upright. The fire in the middle of the house won’t light, so damp and sullen is the wood; and washing hangs, forgotten and irrelevant, from lines strung between woodshed and gums.
It was on the fourteenth day of that April that the woman, Cat, stood in the kitchen waiting for the water to boil, and said to her husband:
– The hills are coming closer.
Quentin, her husband, continued absent-mindedly chewing on his toast, his jaws ferocious without the subtle influence of consciousness. He stood and then bent to twist pieces of the Saturday Mercury into the stove.
– It won’t burn if you don’t open the pages first, Cat cautioned, but he continued.
Cat was not a literal person. The night after she was born her mother woke from the chloroform to see an angel leaning over her bed. From feeding at her mother’s anxious breast, Cat had grown up with a longing in her, somewhere. In a suburb far west of Sydney Harbour, her mother had held her hand tight as they crossed the old railway overpass. They swung and shuddered inside the stink of steam-train smoke, while her mother pointed to the line of blue in the distance.
– The mountains, her mother said ... they are blue.
When Cat was five, the family went away to Coffs Harbour, and there she experienced a new kind of distance. A flat grey one. A straight, straight line from which all other straight lines must originate. She couldn’t sleep until she was back home, with that rugged blue coif on the edge of her world. And sometimes, in the school holidays, they would go up on the train and walk to the Three Sisters. One year Cat’s mother took the three children walking down a bush track and filled her Irish linen hanky with bits of moss and fern. When they got back to the suburbs, she arranged them in an Andronicus coffee jar, making a tiny rainforest to sit on the unused green slow-combustion stove in the dark dining room.
*
Cat and Quentin sit opposite each other, sipping tea. He picks up a newspaper. She stares into the distance, and wonders why it is that she has spent each day of her life preparing for some reprieve that never takes place, as if the whole business might have some eventual end-point. The children are called down. They come, either grateful or resentful, from their beds. Cat has learned that loving is like housework: the only solution to it is to just do it. When Cat’s mother’s generation had children, they said that they already felt that they were something. Cat’s generation, on the other hand, spends the whole time wondering what they will eventually be.
When Cat was a tall thin child, the backyard in Blacktown was spiked with bindi-eyes. It seemed wrong, to have grass you couldn’t walk on. When you tight-roped across the clothesline in your thongs, you came back with the rubber soles star-studded with burrs. You sat on the path in a half-lotus position to pinch a spike out and to spit on your finger and rub on the spot under your foot, which was already red and hot.
Quentin, as a young man, had been the one to sit on the lounge-room floor in a nylon shirt and proceed to take Cat’s slippers off so that he could rub her feet. Through her tough toes she could feel the intelligence in those short blunt fingers. They married in the distant mountains and the relationship was sealed when they swapped thongs in the front of a Combi van at Berrima. In the early days, they had lived in a hot, dry place. They invited their friends to dinner. The sun would still be high over the poplars when they sat on a blanket on the grass to eat lumps of camembert and glossy dates, milky-fleshed almonds with greenish wine. Later, they would scoop ladles full of pumpkin softened in cream, green beans slippery with oil. The soles of Cat’s feet would slide against sea-grass matting, her hair making sickles over one shoulder.
For her first child, Cat made a pair of velvet patchwork trousers patterned in the colours of stained glass, and calfskin moccasins. She started a vegetable garden – just one long bed at first, with too many rows of seeds squashed in together. Carting grey water from the big round washing machine, she grew a coriander bush, its leaves sickly sweet, and bottled the seeds. She asked Quentin to dig up the dandelion roots in the horse-paddocks, and begged the Maltese farmer next door for some mutton fat, rendering the bucket of rancid chunks to make soap. She pushed the old pram down the driveway to collect the bits of dry scrub and twig that she arranged in green wine bottles.
– Why have you got that rubbish? the landlady asked, searching the young couple’s small flat, her bottom teeth sucking in and out.
When they first moved the HQ Holden and the chooks across Bass Strait, to the gully down south, Quentin would go out in the dark to rattle chains and buckets and breathe steam into the air and would return with a billy of warm milk. At twenty months the baby boy was weaned onto goat’s milk and clover honey. Huge pickle jars of yoghurt fermented on the back of the slow-combustion stove. An old pillowcase full of curds hung from a rafter. That white curd would make a cheese, crumbly and salted, to be sliced thin with glasses of red wine.
There was one year when Cat went out each evening with her youngest daughter to pick celery leaves, lemon thyme, summer savoury, yellow zucchini, pale scallopini, long white radishes and sweet flat peas. Her mouth watered while she picked. Her toes curved at the ground. What if your soul, after all, was in your feet? Not in your heart or your head?
*
Then the wet year came. All the children were, finally, at school and Cat found herself a job. She got up early each morning and had a cup of weak tea. She made lunches and ironed uniforms and pressed the children out the door into the mud. She was paid for her work at last, and got to wear an ID badge and shoulder pads, and to drive past women in tracksuits pushing strollers, and to feel superior. She let the goats into the flower garden to keep the grass down, while the holes made in the sagging fence by the wallabies got bigger and bigger. There were rabbit burrows in the empty potato patch.
But she couldn’t stop her queer moods. After work one evening she spent an hour making a rain-proof home for the pet rabbit. Before bed, she made sure the dog was tucked away warmly. On the weekend, she took the children walking, and scanned the bush, subconsciously watching for shelter. She’d driven up to the Hartz Mountains, that day, with the three oldest children. The wind up there was so cold. They walked to Lake Osborne and it felt like the elliptical sea at the centre of the Earth, with strange waves bashing on the basalt at its perimeter. They found a warm place between some bushes and ate Mersey Valley cheese and French bread, while rain like fine powder sifted over the top of a semicircular ridge. Everywhere, a rust-stained orange seeped out of the ground. You could hear it bubbling under the Alpine flax and tiny-leaved shrubs. Alinta found wombat scat on the duck-boarding – It’s wombat’s, because it’s square, she explained.
As she walked along the boards with the cold in her face, Cat started to wonder what she’d been doing with her life. Half of it already gone, spent inside four walls, coping day after day with an angry claustrophobia. Half already gone in a half-dead way, as though she was just sitting it out.
The oldest boy turned to Cat and said – What if life is like Christmas ... you open all your presents straight away and then you’re sorry that it’s all over?
*
The house is a dark house. Even the electric lighting doesn’t seem to fill the corners or the cracks. And at the back of it all, the creek, a brown torrent when it rains, a bluish slurry when it snows. Brackets of fungus form on fallen branches, tiny phalluses spike up under slimy ferns. Around the house, buttercup and more buttercup, strangling the sunshine out of the soil, sending it sour. Until the frosts begin, Cat likes to walk barefoot out the back to the dunny every morning. In the evening she lights candles and plays Gregorian chants, waiting for the night to rest its belly down on the house. (If you have to go out at night in that valley where Cat lives with her family, you look up and the stars whistle and they almost jump down your throat. You sit up there on the cold bench and the house looks like a big square lantern, lit orange, sailing silently on a sea of napped black. You hear the footsteps of the children in the house. And you think ... if I did not belong to this place I would die of the lonely feeling of it.)
That autumn it rained and rained. For fifteen days. More. Over and over again the creeks broke their banks, swirling torrents down under culverts, smearing roads, bulging under willows bared of their yellowed leaves. The roads slumped and the ridges crumbled. New orchards that had been planted with young trees flooded. Again and again, the owners bent down in gumboots and coats to secure the trees, and you could see the heartbreak of it in the bend of their backs.
Cat came home from work and tried to light the fire with wood that was wet and corky. The goat in the flower garden was scouring badly and limping. The floor of the shed was slippery with filth, but there were still some spores of comfort in all that dank. The onions and meat on the stove turned into a curry, salted and sweet. The eggs in the fridge became pancakes layered with sugar and cinnamon, topped with mangoes from a tin. The washing had piled up over the days that Cat had been at work. She called the oldest children to help with the folding. They folded and folded. The piles were so high.
– Where is your pile? Shasta asked.
– I wash mine separately, Cat replied ... so they are together for work.
– Sometimes ... the girl said, sometimes it is like you don’t exist.
From the top window Cat could see the mountain at the head of the gully.
– Do you think it is getting closer? she asked her children. As usual, they didn’t hear the question.
*
That autumn, Cat was invited to share a chicken curry at a house in the city with four of the people from work. Sitting on the lounge opposite those other women, with a good fire dancing behind a window and performing the Southern Lights, and a tall candelabrum arching neat tongues of flame in the corner, she felt as if she might be a deaf-mute, tongue-tied and distanced by a cave of silence. One of those women had spent summers of blue sky and white stone in Greece, another had fitted Nana Mouskouri spectacles over the broad bridges of African noses. One had felt a column of psychic energy in the corner of a room in Sydney, and another had met a new man in her search for an antique red phone-box that screamed red, now, outside her front door.
At eleven, Cat glanced anxiously at her watch and announced that she had to go. The hills, the gully, the flooded brown creek were crying for her. Like a mother letting down milk for a distant baby, she felt the pull. It was almost as though she didn’t breathe all the way back along sugared roads smeared with less and less frequent lights, a subterranean tunnel in the middle of night with, occasionally, a stooped possum hunching along the verge, or a mash of flesh on the tar.
The creek roared that night. Rocks banged and rolled in the racket made by the floodwaters. The hills bulked around the gully. Even when you couldn’t see them, you felt them there. In the morning Cat would wake and the willows, shagged with yellow now, would be leaning close to the goat fences. The shed up the back might have slipped some distance down the slope and perhaps you would notice that there was less sky to be seen overhead.
– Did you have a good time? Alinta asked, the next morning.
– Why didn’t anyone tell me that I was dead? Cat wondered. (Is it even the language of the dead that I speak? Have I ever learnt the language of Alive?)
That Saturday in April, Cat made a terrarium in a big pickle jar, the way her mother had made one so many years before. She took the children down to the creek in the rain. They carried plastic bags and camping spoons, and they collected cushions of deep green moss, fronds like lacy vertebrae, slimy brown toadstools. They separated tiny crablike ferns clinging to the backs of older ones, and snapped whips of wild fuchsia from under the bridge. In among the heath and tree ferns, one of the boys discovered parts of an old tractor, the tyres still in one piece. So strange – to think of those farmers who had lived and died in the gully, struggling to grow apples, battling against the possums and wallabies, against the cold and wet, the mildew, the lichen, the moss. Against the creeping growth of yeasts and moulds. Did they ever sense, on mornings of lazy smoke and stolid fires ... did they ever feel those hills getting closer?
When they got back home, Cat and the youngest child tipped the big jar on its side and filled the bottom with leaf litter from under the gums. It smelt so sweet, you could have licked your fingers. They planted the jar with the mosses and ferns, and it became a small world. You could stand over it and look into it and it was a microcosm of detail and perfection and complexity. It breathed in there. You could feel it breathing. You could see the drops of condensation made by the breath of the tiny forest.
Before she had even left the driveway, that Saturday afternoon, Cat knew she would get a flat tyre, but it was a subliminal knowledge, like the awareness of your heart beating, or your movements slowing down with age. Nevertheless, sometimes the need comes to leave a house and to go. To drive along roads already known, and sometimes others – unknown dirt roads that end in narrow-eyed gates or grey sheds. The need to taste the strangeness of undiscovered territory became an appetite in Cat, that day.
She felt so high up, driving the van from behind its big window, the sides of the road falling away under barbed-wire fences, sweeping downward to dams as still and round as coins on the eyelids of the dead. From up there, you saw thickets of pine that you’d never noticed before, grey houses on stilts set back from the road, abandoned trucks in ditches. You throttled the unfamiliar motor and sang How Bad Could It Be ... Sexuality ... with kd lang, and sucked Kings Extra Strong peppermints. The way Cat changed gears, leaning over the wheel ... they were the movements of a woman who knew where she was going. She drove down along the oily river that had malevolent things bunched up just under the surface. She crossed the bridge and continued past apple stalls, cases of kennebecs on the side of the toad, deer fences, and turned onto the road to Crazy Jack’s Creek.
There was dry bush on either side of that dirt road, occasionally a house with a name painted on a piece of ply-board, huge walls of firewood, animal coops. Two cars passed, one towing the other. Sometimes you could see the river where it scraped across slabs of basalt, cutting at the edges of the gully. And two wide green paddocks on the flood plain bordered with timber, here and there a big gum or a fat sleek bull with glossy balls. Then thud thud thud. Cat pulled over and wasn’t surprised to see that the back left-side tyre was as collapsed as a lung.
– I knew it I knew it fuck, she said, leaning her face down into her hands, not to sob but to somehow steady the spinning of open-ended questions around outside her head, like cartoon vultures. Remembering those shadowed faces in an orange car that afternoon. Lank hair.
Beyond a home-made bridge, there was a house with water tanks and agapanthus. Cat could hear the grunting of the cows across the river and see a fine fibre of smoke unplying from a chimney. She waited. When you stopped, you realised how far away from the rest of the world you had voluntarily come. You realised that there was a yellow stain in the clouds beyond the hills, meaning snow ahead, and you realised that you didn’t know how to get the spare tyre down out of the underside of the van. Cat listened for farm dogs, crossed the bridge, and listened again.
The back door was slightly ajar. She knocked on the door jamb. Waited. Knocked again. Pushed the door open and looked inside. There was an open fire, almost out, with two vinyl chairs pulled up to it. Hello? she questioned, stepping into the room and quickly retreating. She heard a sound from up the hill, beyond a tumble of sheds. Under a crooked rotary clothesline, she found an old woman slumped in the long grass.
– The wind come up and nearly blew me away so I grabbed onto a sheet and it spun me round and round and fair dumped me head first in the grass, she panted ... You’d be the Sister?
Cat sat old Brighty in one of the armchairs and piled the fire up.
– Jim’ll be home soon for his dinner, she said ... he’ll help.
– I came out here once, a few years ago now, Cat explained, stirring the old woman’s tea ... We turned around. We got scared. Isn’t there a river?
– The river, she shrugged ... yep. I’ve been there, but only once. Before my husband died I asked him to take me there again, but we turned back. He had a heart condition. I thought what if something happens to him way out here. They’re all new people along this stretch now. Last year a young woman came and knocked on my front door and said Do you know you’re the only one left from 39? I said no. I used to drive a Landrover once.
Cat leaned towards a wedding photo that hung over the mantelpiece. It showed a wickedly handsome dark-eyed man, sitting on a chair. Beside him, a small woman with deep-set eyes and a biggish nose held onto a large bunch of gum flowers and berries. The backdrop was a curtain of real gum trees and a clear sky.
– My mother and father, Brighty said ... There are twins under those flowers. Sometimes, when I was younger, I wanted to see other places. If I was young these days I suppose for one thing I’d have a couple of children, but in those days you had to have a husband. Now I think you shouldn’t just scratch around on the surface as far as you can. What you need is burrow down as deep as you can.
Jim finally arrived. Cat was surprised to see that he looked almost as old as Brighty.
Puncture! he said, after studying the tyre.
*
On the way back, that afternoon, home seemed so far away, as though you might never get back. Every ten minutes on that road seemed like an hour.
When she arrived home, everyone was watching television. Quentin was snoring with his glasses on. She made a hot drink and studied the old BP map that had been on the bookshelf since they’d first arrived in Tasmania. She followed Crazy Jack’s Creek Road with her index finger, again and again. The map gave her a feeling of loss. She thought of those scattered houses along that long road where old women sat in front of blazing fires absorbing the vitality out of the wood to stay alive. Sitting in front of those open fires all day, trying to warm blood made sluggish with the debris of years, it was the sons that those old women spoke of to strangers, leaning a little closer, savouring the manly names as if they couldn’t yet believe that such men should populate their lives. You wondered how those tiny women gave birth to anyone in those dank dark bedrooms. Bedrooms still dank and dark but now with commodes beside the beds and sad thin cardigans left in piles on the musty carpet. Cat traced the road one last time. The map was soft and threadbare with age. If I were a God-thing, she thought, of all the people in the world, it would be the lonely ones that I’d love best.
That night, Cat woke to the sound of a screaming. It sounded like a demonic cat skewered under the house. The noise came again and again. She went out with the torch to search. Nothing. In the morning, one of the goats was dead, its head twisted back against its side. The other goats stood by and wondered.
That Monday morning in April, Cat haphazardly tidied the house, returning occasionally to check whether those tiny plants were truly alive. The minute features of the ferns curled against the underside of the glass, and some of the reproductive parts of the mosses had lengthened and were reaching up toward the light. With silent precision she organised a backpack, and headed off up the gully.
In all those years, she had never been up the gully by herself. She felt conspicuous in her beanie and long coat, as though someone might come up behind her and ask what she was up to, even though she was still on her own land. It was a feeling of threat. The fear of a big dog coming from across the creek, or an unshaven rapist from the hills. The creek was still brown and much louder than usual, or was that a Council truck coming up from behind? She stopped to listen.
Right up the gully, she found a place off the road. A mossy mound and a patch of sand beside the creek. She built a fire on the sand and stuck four candles under the bracken. Blissful, blissful solitude. Smoke scalding eyes, four squat candles spending themselves on the wet sand, and the creek skidding on and on, turning back over itself in its haste to be somewhere else. She had never spent a day like that … taking photographs, poking at the fire, drinking tea, eating chocolates. The smoke was blue and sometimes spiralled when a breeze caught it. She started to forget some of the fear of being out there alone, and it surprised her that she carried so many pointless fears around with her, like taloned parasites clinging to her back.
Cat chewed over the problem of making a log bridge across the creek, so that she could get to the other side when the creek was up. There was still an old sod hut on the far side. It would be good to store dry firewood in there. She squatted down to blow her guts out into the fire. It seemed the most essential ritual of shelter ... to light a fire. She considered love and how it is supposed to be who you sleep with, skin-to-skin. But what about when you carry dry wattle to the end of a gully and coddle a fire and sit so long that the spiralling smoke is bluer than the sky or the sea?
You sip three scalding cups of tea from a broken mug and think of someone on the other side of the fire with the hissing flames and the blue smoke in between and you think that that might be called love, too. Not skin-to-skin, but with smoke between. And that perhaps that other on the far side of the smoke is yourself, at last.
She thought, too, about happiness, how it is like a stream of water that you dip your hand into. How your hand doesn’t become water, but is wet for a time, then dries out. Dries out. The way the remaining big-boned goats were shredding the paddocks, their pink bags now shrunken and empty.
The afternoon had started to make diagonals of orange light between the wattles and had turned the grass under the fence to a coppery pink. On the long walk back home, Cat collected some of the lichened sticks for kindling. The sky had become a motionless cool, with clouds combed like fence-scraps. The wonder of it. A sky made personally for her. She snapped branches and recalled the jar, the microcosmic forest. It was almost like another planet. An encapsulated life. A tiny world of perfection, detail and complexity. The planet Terrarium. A place inhabited by those who had stories such as her own. Encapsulated stories, but stories nonetheless. It breathed in there.
– Go on and ask me the question, young Alinta demanded, that evening.
– Okay then, Cat laughed ... Are the hills getting closer?
No ... the gully is just getting deeper. ▼