Xanthorrhoea's Shorts

The river died on Christmas Day. We had a few hours warning because that afternoon Jase showed up on our verandah with a bucketful of dead fish, mostly mullet. His freckles are even worse than usual this summer, big orangey blemishes like cornflakes. ‘Grandad’s place, all along the riverbank, is covered in fish; some’re still flopping about.’ He made a goggle-eyed, asphyxiating-to-death face. His nose was sunburnt already. There was a noise in the hallway behind us. ‘Merry Christmas, Mrs Lyle.’ Jase is in love with my mother. His neck goes red in large, continent-shaped blotches when he has to look at her. He stopped gasping like a fish. ‘Brung you some bream and stuff, Mrs Lyle.’ Jase never calls her Mira. Some of her men do. My mother stood behind the screen door with a jar of sprouts in her hand. I waited to see if she’d come out, but she didn’t. ‘No thank you, Jason,’ she said, turning away. ‘We’re being vegans at the moment,’ I said, to cover up his embarrassment. ‘Anyway, you can’t eat that shit. They probably got poisoned. DDT or something.’ Jase put his bucket down and poked one of the rejected fish, a moustachioed catfish lying in a stiff curve. ‘Nah, they’re good,’ he said, hurt. ‘Grandad said they suffocated, is all. It’s from the floods. The dickhead farmers planted this piss-weak grass from … I dunno, Cuba or somewhere, for the cows, but the floodwaters washed most of it into the river and now it’s taken all the air out of the water. Pete Yarding’s got islands of it down at his place so thick you can walk on them. Covered in dead fish, but.’

I was lying in the swing chair feeling farty and unsatisfied after a Christmas lunch of nutloaf and steamed warrigal greens, collected fresh from Three Mile Beach by yours truly after a crap surf Christmas morning. Santa had given us a northerly: a hot, surf-killing wind from the tropics that brings stingers, flat seas and bad tempers. A blue bottle had wrapped itself around my neck and my balls’d got chafed from having to surf in cotton shorts. Mum read some article about designer surf wear the other day, sweat shops or child labour or something, and took all my boardies to the op shop while I was at school, even my red ones, brand new from Gran. ‘Take them to the chooks,’ I said to Jase. ‘The smell’s making me sick.’

Jase sat down and leaned against the verandah post. He’d get splinters doing that, even through a shirt. ‘Nah, that’s just the air. See?’ he sniffed luxuriously, eyes closed, like someone in a bakery. ‘Them fish, lying in the mud all day in this weather. Zanthy, mate, it’s going to stink to kingdom effing come by dinner time.’ He spat into the hibiscus bush, a big glob that glazed a leaf and left it bouncing up and down like a recently vacated diving board.

My name is Xanthorrhoea. My mother named me after a slow-growing kind of grass. At school I sign my name ‘Zanth’, but everybody knows the unabridged version. When she’s feeling cute or happy or mean, my mother uses my name in public. That night the smell warmed up and became a colour, a mustardy fog that wafted into my sleep and delivered me nasty dreams about finding corpses in the town dump and being trapped in a long-drop. By morning the smell was rank and everywhere, overpowering the sandalwood incense that burns in our lounge room round the clock, more putrid than the chook run in the banana patch, and far stronger than the old-man smell of our ninety-year-old house. My mother looked pale when she emerged from her bedroom at breakfast time, pushed away the cereal I’d made her, and sat on the back verandah out of the wind, drinking aniseed tea. She washed her hair in tank water twice a day and changed sarongs every five minutes. On Boxing Day, after I’d ground four kilos of soybeans and set them to drain, I was allowed an hour off, and me and Jase rode our bikes down to the inlet to have a look. You couldn’t live with that kind of smell without wanting to see the source, even if you knew it’d be worse up close. We crossed the highway—already bumper to bumper with luckier people than us heading north or south to places that didn’t smell—and bounced down the dirt track to the rivermouth. A few cars were parked on the grass under the banksias, engines idling with people inside, windows up, air conditioners on. Even safely shut up in their cars people were making the Smell Face, which got to be a familiar sight over the next few weeks. A down-turned mouth, pinched nostrils, faint frown, narrowed eyes. A cranky, suspicious, I-just-stepped-in-vomit face. Nobody looked prettier wearing the Smell Face. The fish lay in iridescent brown heaps on both sides of the river: big ones, little ones, stingrays, sharks; good eating, bad eating. More lay just under the surface like leaves floating in an eddy. Pelicans stood on the grass, stomachs distended, but seagulls gouged insatiably at the carcasses on the sand, or flapped off with scraps in their red beaks. The river was as clear as a cappuccino, but I knew what was below the surface. Nothing. Water and mud. Everything was dead. ‘Bugger,’ muttered Jase beside me. We watched a white ute roar down the track towards us and park next to the sand. Two men and a boy got out. The boy was a schoolmate of ours, two grades up, Leo Ryder. As well as being a weird, mean bastard, he was also wearing my new red boardies, or some very like them. The men walked to the shore, kicking at seagulls. They didn’t need the Smell Face to look ugly. Leo’s dad glanced at Jase as he spat on the ground, but he didn’t meet my eyes. He wouldn’t, would he. When we met in the hallway last Friday night he was still buckling up his belt, two hundred dollars poorer. The other man looked familiar. One of Leo’s cousins or something. ‘This smell remind you of anything?’ said Leo loudly, walking up to stand between the two men. He thrust his hips forwards and backwards a few times, hands out in front grasping the woman-shaped air. He turned and grinned at us over his shoulder. The cousin spurted hard laughter. Beside me Jase flushed. Tough on him, being friends with me. If the boardies Leo was wearing were mine, they’d have ZANTH penned on the label in Gran’s neat capital letters. ‘Fuck off,’ said the cousin, kicking at a gasping mullet. ‘Fucking farmers. That’s it for fucking fishing.’ Leo’s dad said nothing. His back was to me but he knew where I was. Leo was shirtless. His slim brown hips only just held the shorts up, touch and go. Those boardies. They looked like a size 31, same as mine. And there’s no surf shop in our town. ‘Some of these are all right,’ called the cousin. ‘Cleaned up.’ Leo’s dad ran the fisho down at the jetty. Worst fish and chips in town, and apparently just about to get worse. ‘Nobody’s going to want to eat fish with this stink around,’ said Leo, leaning against a banksia trunk. If he wasn’t careful, he was going to scratch the material. ‘Plus, all the tourists have buggered off. Freeze some maybe.’ ‘All right,’ said his dad, turning back to the ute. ‘But only the live ones, right? I don’t need a fucking law suit.’

He reached into the ute tray and took out three white buckets, the kind used to hold lard. He and the other man started to walk along the water’s edge, bending down to pick up fish. Leo came over to Jase and rested one bare foot on his front tyre.

‘Hard times ahead, Ryder?’ Jase asked cheerfully. Brave or stupid, I never know. Leo pushed on the wheel, and Jase, straddling the frame, braced back with his feet on the ground and his arms out straight. If he wasn’t careful he was going to get nadded.

There’s a story at our school about Leo Ryder. About what he did to Marcus Bresham, the autistic kid, in between classes in the school toilets. Nobody really believes that story, but everybody knows it. Leo Ryder got expelled from primary school for punching a woman teacher in the face, that’s a fact. The fisho smell hangs off him like an old bin liner: grease, cigarette stubs, detergent, fish. His dad has it too. A smell that hangs around for days.

Leo relaxed his foot on the wheel and flicked his gaze at me. ‘Friends with benefits, eh, Reilly?’ he said to Jase. Jase reddened, more than I liked. ‘Nice boardies,’ I said. I had a pain in my stomach. Leo doesn’t even surf. What does he need boardies for? Leo smiled, a calculated smirk that only involved one side of his mouth. They were my shorts. He gave a sudden vicious thrust with his foot and sent Jase sprawling backwards onto the dirt under his bike.

Leo’s taller than me, almost a foot, but I’m stockier. I got off my bike and dropped it on the road. Jase was curled up in the foetal position, clutching his groin. Nadded. Leo turned to face me. ‘You want them back, Diarrhoea, Gonorrhoea, whatever the fuck she calls you?’ His voice plunged. ‘I came in them this morning, thinking about your whore mother. You want them back now, you bastard son of a whore?’ I could tell how much he liked saying that word, whore. His lips pouted, his nostrils flared, his chin thrust forwards. His whole body looked hard, tensed as a greyhound, except for the fleshy lips. ‘Yes please,’ I said. Jase managed to get up on one elbow. ‘Zanth,’ he panted. Something was up with Leo, some internal struggle. It wasn’t altogether unfamiliar, that doubting look. I look too much like my mother for people not to be unnerved by me. Round the eyes. ‘Leo!’ His dad was right there suddenly, a bulky shape on the edge of my vision, voice like a bulldozer. ‘I didn’t bring you here to socialise.’ Jase was already up, scrambling onto his bike and mouthing lots of things at me, his whole body leaning towards the highway. What I really wanted to do was punch Leo Ryder in his pretty mouth. Then his old man would have to get involved. ‘Move it, kid,’ he said from behind me, lower now, plaintive. We all paused, even Jase. Leo wasn’t looking at me any more, but over my shoulder, at his dad. He was making the Smell Face. Whatever he’d just figured out looked as bad as a slug in the guts, and meant trouble for his dad and no split lip for me, so I got on my bike and followed Jase up the track.

I had stayed out too long. When I got home I found Mum at the kitchen table turning the pages of a photograph album. My mother has black hair that reaches past her backside, so she often sits on it by accident and only realises when she tries to move her head. A few years ago she started dyeing the roots with henna, but I’m the only other person who knows about that. ‘You were such a honey,’ she said. She slid a photo out of its sleeve and passed it to me: my mother looking much the same as now, and a fat baby with black hair, me. I’m familiar with every photo in the book. She had been crying, her eyes were syrupy and pink. ‘I named you after the slowest-growing plant I knew, so you’d stay with me forever.’ She had put a branch of frangipanis in a jam jar on the table, but the mixed scent of fish and flowers was somehow worse than fish alone. She put the photo back in its place and closed the album. I waited to hear whatever she wanted to say. ‘I don’t want that boy coming around here any more.’ Outside the clothes were flapping on the Hills hoist, dancing to a breeze that was coming in straight from the river. They’d need washing again, a big job in the twin tub. ‘Jason,’ she said, to clarify. ‘Mum,’ I started. ‘He frightens me,’ she added quickly. ‘I think he wants to hurt me.’ Jase is scrawny and fifteen. Jase is the least frightening person I have ever met. My stomach was hurting again. When I started surfing, a few years back, my mother got rid of my surfboard. She always says it must have been stolen, but I know it was her. It was just an old thruster that some rich bastard had left behind at the Three Mile Beach campsite at the end of summer, dented and cracked. So I didn’t mind too much. But I hide my new board in the bitou bush behind the dunes. A swallowtail quadfin fish. Just in case. Because I know what happens when I start liking something or someone too much. Jase is not my only friend at school, but he’s the only one brave enough to come over to my house. ‘Jase’s fine, Mum. Really,’ I said. My mother hugged her arms tightly around her stomach and gazed at me through charcoal lashes. My mum’s dad was born in Sri Lanka. Her mum, my gran, is plain old Caucasian, skinny and freckled, but my mother ended up with soft black hair and enormous eyes, like the heroine in a Japanese comic strip. My mother makes the other women in our town look weathered and beige. ‘Will you brush my hair for me?’ she asked in her little-lost-girl voice. I went and got the brush. I remembered a time, not too long ago, when I liked brushing her hair.

I work at the Night Owl with Jase on Friday nights. Six to eleven, home by midnight, $58.27. But as I pulled on my green polo shirt, still dirty from last Friday night, and thought about Jase, flushing scarlet in front of Leo boardshorts-stealing Ryder, as if what Leo had said was true, I knew I was going to go to the beach instead. The stink of rotting fish was doing my head in and at least out there the wind would be onshore. Mum was in the bathroom with the door open, sitting on the toilet seat and waxing her legs. She didn’t answer when I said goodbye. By the time I got out to Three Mile on my bike there was no-one around, so I surfed in my jocks. The state government issued a warning last week, when the floodwaters spilled out of the river in a brown mushroom cloud that ended two kilometres out to sea: don’t swim in the river, it said, or in the sea near the rivermouth, too many bull sharks. But I figured any sharks in these parts would be too busy cleaning up the busted foodchain or dying of suffocation to worry about little old me. I got one average wave and a whole lot of sitting around out the back, but just being in the water calmed me down. I had no towel when I got out, but rubbed myself down with my shirt and jeans, dressed in the damp clothes, cold in the breeze, and gulped down the sweet smell of salt and seaweed. Then I lay in the dunes smacking sandflies and watching the stars come out. I thought, for the nine hundredth time, about hitching to the city to live with Gran. But not seriously. In her pale-green worker’s cottage, with her sherry and old-lady flowers, her million surf, two hours absolute minimum. ‘I’d do you wrong, Zanth,’ she’d said once. ‘I make a great gran, but I was a bad mother.’

When I was sure it was past midnight I started home. About a kilometre away from our house the smell hit me like a wall. By the time I pedalled into our driveway, I was ready to hurl, and that was before I saw the white ute parked under our mango tree. On the verandah, where they had fallen from the hips of Leo Ryder, still stiffly holding the rounded shape of his buttocks, were my red boardies. I didn’t need a torch to see the label, ZANTH. The house was silent, completely still. I waited with my foot on the top step, my hand on the railing, breathing through my mouth. They must’ve fallen asleep. This had happened once before, not long ago. I got home from work to find a brown sedan in the driveway and a quiet house, my mother lying under a man I had never seen before, both of them fast asleep. For years my mother was fantastically discreet. I picked up the boardies in thumb and forefinger, and walked back down the stairs, around to the laundry. I filled the sink with hot water, slooshing the wire cage of the soap saver to make a few curdled suds. When I sank the boardies into the steaming water, a smell rose from them: the stink of the fisho, mixed with the stench of rotting fish, unwashed boy, sweat and piss. I changed the water three times, until I was satisfied that my shorts just smelled like shorts.

Copyright Melissa Beit 2011