We Will Warm Ourselves

1

As they see me: overwhelmingly low, close to the ground, and pressing against the scrub that cradles my legs, steps stumbling as the afternoon lingers. Groaning shoulders and a sweat-slicked face, the wet branches brushing showers on my shirt with every step. My clothes dense and heavy with old rain, pools of water settling in my boots and my socks turned to sponge—perhaps my feet as well.

I am blundering through bush turned viscous and sharp, and I wonder if they shake their tails at me and laugh in the voices of a dozen different birds, their beaks held high and their wings whisking them to open fortresses in the high myrtles.

These birds are myths. They are phoenixes. I will burn you, I think. Let's see you sing yourselves to life then.

This is anger born of exhaustion, from the cold and the heat, an anger searching for an object to make it seem reasonable; these birds are responsible for my presence in these up-and-down forests full of barriers and swords, violent barricades in every street.

But there is another side to every leaf, and some of them are lighter.

If I am hunting here, I am hunting for love.

2

"Tony," my mother had said. "I'm so lonely."

She had been slumbering in a couch while I dug at the feet of her towering spuds, and I had leant forward on my long-handled shovel poking out its tongue at the dirt, stared at her on the porch in a show of concern.

"What do you mean?" I had asked, breathing the clay's sweet tang. "You've got Dad, you've got me."

"I know," she'd said, and sighed.

She was longing for Rufus, the golden retriever who had knitted us together with his warm paws and herded our family from its separate rooms to flock together by the fire, laughing at his gamboling half tricks and patting at his head.

She sat there on the bland, brown couch, miserably stroking the corner of one of her cushions.

3

It had started with tightening restrictions. Cats were forbidden from running wild—they were slicing up honeyeaters and had to be kept locked inside. Pet shops were forced to display photos of rosellas with their heads ripped from their bodies. Within months they were banned, like plastic bags. Guinea pigs and fish and the canaries and carrier pigeons and budgerigars all followed in their wake, as though swallowed whole.

Dog owners were pressed to the margins of the community, like duck shooters; their companions were subject to statutes and bylaws, a room devoted to them like a gym or a library. Age restrictions and classifications, growing pressure and dwindling numbers. We were deviants. Holdouts in the west, in the south, illicit breeders in the hills. Arrests in the newspapers, injections in sickly white rooms. We were murderers. We were rapists and pedophiles.

We had cousins with land in rural Victoria. Though we toyed with hiding Rufus in the attic, it would not be much of a life: desultory barking at the possums that cantered across the roof. We saw him off in a steel cage, and my mother could not stop crying as we returned to the car. She ran her fingers over the seat through the remnants of his fur.

4

There was quiet in the house. For a week my father had affected cheerful foolishness: running and grabbing at our shoulders, leaping around corners and dancing in the silence, but as we welcomed his attempts with flat faces and empty glares, he began keeping to his study. He was writing, he said, a slow and demanding history of mateship between the early settlers, the miners, the trappers, and the foresters who had scraped at the edges of the island.

Once, when he was out buying two-stroke for the lawn mower, I sneaked into his room and rifled through his papers. On the desk I found dozens of photographs of him and the dog, the four of us together, of Rufus and my mother curled on the couch...