Devotion(71)

There was a time when I wandered in grief. I left the cupped palm of the new village and its familiarity because I felt myself betrayed. That time changed me. I saw things I would never have seen in my lifetime, had I lived. I saw things that I know my own parents will never see, that they may not, to this day, truly know about.

So much of what I encountered in those years was cold and broken. But sometimes I saw things that led to a deeper understanding of myself. Sometimes I stumbled across things that made bonfires of my heart.

I once encountered a love like mine. I had fled to the stringybark forest upon the ranges. It had not been by design. The Tiers, as I knew this place, surrounded the track that led, eventually, to the plains. At the time I was following any path that promised distance. The stringybarks were dense, the ground so steep in places it was impossible to walk down the hillside. A place of shadows, where foresters lived and cut lumber.

Darkness fell and I lost the path. I was not looking where I was going. I stumbled and fell, and moved from tree to tree, trunk to trunk. When I saw the glow of a small cabin in the forest, I nearly wept for the relief of light. The door was open. I stood in its gap.

Inside there were two men eating supper straight out of a cooking pot. Both were lean and wiry with muscle, and that, together with their youth and the way they ate, hunger bringing their mouths close to the pot’s rim, reminded me powerfully of Matthias. I was suddenly buckled with longing for my twin. It was never my habit to stay with strangers. Not even during that time of exodus, when loneliness made me yearn for oblivion, did I decide to linger at bedsides. I watched people, of course I did, but at a distance. But these two men, these two beautiful men, manifested Matthias in my mind in a way that compelled me to stay. I curled up by their fire and watched them finish their meal. One of them, addressed by the other as Tom, washed their cooking pot and spoons, whistling as he did so. He was shorter than his companion, who was slightly rangier, with thick scar tissue across the back of his neck, near his hairline. He had very dark, very beautiful eyes.

‘Will you have a drink, Tom?’ he asked, getting up from his seat and going to the windowsill, where a bottle stood in the corner. He picked it up. He was missing the tip of his little finger.

The shorter man nodded, turning and smiling as the other approached him, uncorking the bottle. I watched as, instead of pouring a drink in the mugs waiting on the table, the taller man gently brought the neck of the bottle to his friend’s mouth. Tom drank and something in the way they looked at each other sounded through me like a bell, so that when the bottle was pulled away and set on the table, and the two men drew closer and kissed, I did not feel anything but recognition. I had not known such things were possible in life. Even when, on the ship, I had understood my feelings for what they truly were, I had not imagined that I would ever see such a thing reflected back to me in the lives of others.

I stood. I remember that. I stood at the sight of it, and although some small part of me waited for shock or disgust, none came. Instead, I was happy. I was happy for them, these two beautiful men, who, pulling apart from one another, shared such an intense look of affection and desire that I was jealous. Tom resumed washing the cooking pot, head turning over his shoulder as the taller one undressed, bringing his shirt over his head and dropping it over the back of his chair. I had never seen a naked man before. I had never seen a naked man undress another man before, and even as I remembered myself at last and moved past them, out into the dark filled with frog sound and the silent rustling fall of bark easing away from trunk and branch, I felt my body ripple with revelation.

I had been clear-eyed about my own feelings for years by then, but I had never known there might be others.

We exist, I thought. And all that night I wondered at the mysteries of such things and, remembering the desire of the men holding each other in the light of their fire, thought of Thea and imagined us in their place.

What might have happened? I wonder this even now. What might have happened had I known of such possibilities in my living years?

It is enough to bring me to my knees.





a long-memoried place


The day we arrived dawned in perfect cerulean, sea and sky the one colour so that to look out at the horizon was to feel unsure of space, of gravity. I had spent the night listening to the ocean’s muttering and a new kind of music that occasionally threaded through it. At sunrise I followed the sound up on deck and saw that the Kristi was floating through sky. The ocean had lifted hands up around the ship and all was blue, blue, blue. The breeze was fresh, and I stepped up to the bow so that I could feel the air carve around me. I lifted my arms up and closed my eyes and I heard it clearly: a humming that floated on the water like oil, chordal and so old it seemed to hold notes long lost to music. Rock, water, salt, sun, soil, fire. The sound of a long-memoried place remembering itself to time.

We are here, I thought.

The island appeared like a vision from all that water and air. It arrived like a dream, a bruised line so that the elements divided once more. A long slick of not-water, of not-air. Mass. Darkly green and grey. Rock formations still against a backdrop of thick forest. I knew at once that the humming was coming from the island.

My skin shivered. A curious feeling of dissipation swelled in my fingers, in my feet. My hair lifted. It felt, suddenly, that the song of this place was filling me, like sheet lightning fills a sky. There – I felt a stagger of separation from myself. I let go of the mast. Another – as though something much greater than myself had pulled me from my body. The song flooded my mouth, it cracked knuckles, and the feel of it was gratifying and soul-deep.