Leschenaultia

“Hah! You drag me all the way out here and expect me to grok this? What am I, a naturalist? I’m a fucking arts students, all I’m supposed to do is take drugs and read Kerouac. You can’t expected me to get this. It’s outside my limits. Beyond me,” he crows as he adjusts the peaked cap and reframes his hair. Leans back on the paddle. They coast to a slow halt, blurry stars reflected off the ripples and the brown water silver in the moonlight. He laughs then, a short bark that echoes off the water. “Fuck, if they catch us now, we’re so fucking fucked.”

“Eloquent Leigh. Eloquent. You sure it’s F.A. you’re taking and not Law?”

The sun has long gone. Sky clear and the moon shining through the gums that line the lake. The kitschy tourist train that runs up and down the shore finished hours ago, the Japanese headed back to the big city and the single room cafeteria closed for the night. She remembers swimming here as a child, brother splashing and taunting from the deeper water. Bombie competitions from the jetty, before they put up the signs about amoebic meningitis. Cartoon stick man holding his nose. Half a rusty 44-gallon drum as a barbeque. Sausages spitting fat and the smell of onions. Before the paved road. Before the postcards and souvenir stubby holders.

She knew they hired canoes out here, knew where they kept them, but didn’t think it would be so easy to gently force the lock and walk one down to the waterside. Thought that in this day and age there would be someone, anyone, to stop them. She realised, then, that she’d been in the city too long. Worrying about alarms and home-security. 24 hour call-out. Now. Now, the alcohol beat a fiery tattoo in her veins and Leigh pranced up and down the shore, skipping stones and dancing a strange little jig. He seemed genuinely excited. City boy in the country. Styled hair and fashionable shoes so wildly out of place she wanted to laugh at him. Sock him one in the stomach and call him a sissy. Instead, she flicked the hair out of her eyes and yelled.

“Oi. Leigh. Quit dicking around and help me with this for a second, willya.”

She knows he’ll make jokes when they’re out there, knows how uncomfortable he’ll feel, but fuck it, he’d inflicted enough social nights and bloody weekend brunches on her. Still laughed at her accent. Her clothes. She grins as she thinks how he’d take it if she took him back up north. Back home. Her brother would eat him alive. Mirrored shades and knowledge of Plath, Burrows, and The Unicorns holding no social currency any longer. The red dust working its way into everything. Dog in the back, rifle on the floor. Spotties for the Roos and tinnies for later. No Mojitos. No Mid-strength. Metrosexual as foreign as Molvania.

She’d do that later though. Force him out of the city, and out of his comfort zone. For now, this was good. Drunk and floating in a stolen canoe, in a lake they said would have dried up years ago.

She leant back then, against his chest, and looked at the stars.

Posted in Textism on Sunday November 5, 2006.