Australian Love Stories by Cate Kennedy Read Free Book Online Page B

turned up at the midwinter party, she saw Karl with his guitar among the others by the fire. His whiskers looked positively Dickensian, but raying out from his eyes was that rare intelligence, that radiant curiosity. Within her was some muted, anticipatory trembling. When she checked in with it, she found its quality was not obsessive or manic like before.
    She greeted Karl with a smile, and sat on the space on the wooden bench beside him, and felt the usual awkwardness. He cleared his throat and she thought he was going to say something to her. Of course not. He was singing. Oh well, if there was no conversation, no connection, then so be it. She might as well sing along with the people. Their voices rose on old folk songs and Beatles tunes, which were becoming old folk songs, and Mallory surprised herself with how many lyrics she knew. At midnight, Emily brought out a warm loaf of bread from the oven, and people passed it around. Karl put down his guitar to take a piece. He offered it to her.
    â€˜Who mixed the dough, and who set it to bake?’ he said. ‘I like this question.’
    Mallory’s stomach turned over.
    â€˜Oh—’
    Karl’s eyes were both soft and bright under the extrusive brows, like a winter sea. Mallory felt the pressure of that same laugh she’d made when dancing with him, bubbling upwards, irrepressible and also called joy.

Lover like a Tree
    J ANNE DE S TAIC

    Rain runs the gutters, gathering leaves and plastic bottles, dumping them at the mouth of the pipe under the driveway. His tyres jolt over the pipe’s edge and the crack tells him that the weight of the car, its angle and speed, has broken off more concrete, made more rubbish to block the flow and send storm water billowing onto the road like liquid marrow from a cracked bone. His own bones ache for a storm runs through them too.
    He turns off the engine, sits in the car with the radio singing, hears her voice in his head:
    The battery will run down, don’t you know?
    I know, he says. I know.
    He takes the syringe out of his bag, flicks the tip, ejects a bubble of air, takes the butterfly needle from its packet and screws the two together. With a careful slow push the morphine reaches the needle’s tip and a round clear pearl bulges from its core. He winds the tourniquet around his arm, pulls it tight, wipes the side of his wrist with an alcohol swab and its fragrance hits him quickly as his veins draw like a map up his arm, wide highways painted blue, picked out against the flat plain skin.
    At the hospital they say he can find veins in his sleep. Deep veins buried under fat, thin-walled veins ruined by heroin and chalk, all these are easy for him. On buses and trains the first thing he notices about people is their veins, rivers with tributaries blue under the skin, red when his needles puncture.
    She has beautiful veins. When he licks the line of them drawn up her neck, her sigh is the sound of wind through a eucalypt canopy trunks and branches, his lover’s veins more tree than river, more intricate than these roads running along his arm. He slides the needle in expecting asphalt, expecting dust from tires and maybe gravel, but blood, red as the sunset burning over the roof, trails into the syringe. He pops the catch on the tourniquet, pushes the plunger, lets the drug run his veins, pump through his heart, speed arterial routes. He is the tiny man in a snow dome, picked up, shaken. Cool flakes swirl everywhere in gentle confusion and when they settle a wondrous light follows on, filling up his bones this time with the best of marrow.

    The afternoon is late, the sky full of rain yet to fall. She leaves work early, drives straight and hard up the motorway, swearing softly as her car crunches over the stormwater pipe. He is asleep in his car with the door open and the radio playing out to the new night. She opens her door quietly, walks lightly on the gravel to come and stand by his door; to see how