Read Online Rose Leopard by Richard Yaxley - Free Book Online Page A

soft shitty river twinkling each afternoon as sunlight fractured the smog. We took a ride across the river then walked home in spangled moonlight, made love in a hotel room on snow-white sheets so crisp they smashed when we fell on them, called room service and ate a fruit platter at two in the morning: grapes, strawberries cut into flowers, a wedge of golden rockmelon. The juices mingled and ran over our skin.
    Garten taps my shoulder.
    â€˜Mr Daley,’ he urges. ‘Your children? Where are your children?’
    But I am thinking: Doctor, people don’t fall apart. Not people. Does our skin peel away, sloughing like the skin of a snake? Are our flaky scales left to rot in the undergrowth, there to feed the earth, nourish the seeds, decompose and slide quietly into soil? Do plants suck our nutrients and grow? Do our limbs fall off too? Pieces of our faces, soft pink flesh?
    â€˜Kaz … where is she?’ I ask, then I can hear the helicopter, a thrubbing sound, deep and ominous. But Garten is still holding me, talking insistently, being functional with his ugly words, words that I would never use, like ‘brain damage’, words that are too clinical, too final. No, I tell him, you don’t contract brain damage from sheep shears. You don’t go into a barn, trip and contract brain damage.
    â€˜Mr Daley — stop!’ calls Garten but I am well past him, past him because I want to hold her and her hands, hold her hands, say to her, ‘Oh my love, oh hello my love, oh look at you … so grey … oh my love.’
    * *
    Now they’re everywhere, holding and shouting, filling her with electricity then someone is stroking her eyes and this room is too bright, like staring into the centre pinpoint of a twisting twirling kaleidoscope. I want to shake the crimson energy back into her (oh my love, your hands) or cry at Garten: ‘Ever seen the air go out of bellows? Ever seen the tide sink into sand?’ but I don’t because they have stopped and withdrawn into a small despondent circle and I need to know what’s going on.
    â€˜Doctor,’ I ask, ‘what is it?’
    Why do you look like that?
    Why do you all look like that?
    What’s that you whisper?
    What’s that?
    No … oh no … not Kaz.
    Not Kaz, Jesus no.
    Not Kaz. oh no no no .
    It can never, was never, going to be like this.

Six
    T he window overlooks a carpark. Rain squalls have left beads of water on the car bonnets and rooves. A light drift of steam rises from the bitumen. Most of the cars are either white or metallic. One is parked at an odd angle; it is metallic orange. Glossy-leaved lilli-pilli trees grow in formation along the perimeter of the car-park. They enjoy all soil and weather conditions and their berries attract native birds. There are wheel-marks on the kerbing. The road out is framed by new traffic lights. There is a roundabout and steel barriers. Other buildings are visible; a civic centre, travel agency, small discount supermarket. A young couple goes into the supermarket. They are tanned, low-slung, probably backpackers. The sky above the supermarket is strange. Parts of it are smoke-coloured, others are so white that it hurts to look. Further on, the weakening curve of a rainbow stretches towards the sea. Out there, beyond the light, are dolphins and fish. Big fish, little fish, carnivores, cannibals, lovers of plankton. Some of them stay close to shore and some swim into the deep. Some hover in schools while others prefer to be alone. It’s all a matter of where they best belong.
    Once, from birth until now, time was linear. We were bound by lines: consequence followed action, daylight preceded darkness and we were governed by the familiar structure of second, minute, hour, month, year. Now I see that we were wronged, duped by time. Now I see that it is a bastardry, this time, an uncaring mockery of the life-patterns that we have always accepted. Now I see that that