Ducks
by
A.S. Patric

There’s a smell in the air that neither of them wants to mention. Two or three gnats roam the beams of sunlight pushing through the still air of the kitchen. No one opens the windows any more because no one can reach them.
	Some days there’s not much to say. They listen to the house creaking. Anais says it’s the house settling. June points out that it’s been twenty years now that she’s been living here, and forty before that it’s stood, and all that time settling without being settled. That’s a fair amount of restless energy. 
The arthritic dog next door begins barking blindly, going berserk at falling leaves or at memories of plucky paper boys cutting across fresh lawns with their bicycles. He doesn’t have the wind to keep it up for long.
“You know, I’ve been thinking,” June says. “There’s nothing special about here. This place. Who cares where you live? No one talks to anyone. It’s not like there’s any sense of community any more. It must be the same kind of thing a dog feels when you throw him in someone’s backyard for long enough. He thinks he loves it, so he defends it. Someone threw me in Elwood, and I patrol these streets like they mean something to me.” She tugs a plastic-wrapped package of cigarettes out of her handbag. “But God, I do love this place.”
Anais lifts the mug full of bourbon to her face, drinks, coughs, puts it down. “I don’t care about any of that. You’re talking just to hear yourself talk.”
June scratches through her thin white hair. Can feel her pink scalp beneath her fingers. “I think I’m going bald.” Cups her gigantic, sagging breasts and lifts them weightily, “And these things keep on growing. Why? Getting this old is like stepping off the genetic map. My earlobes are going to touch my shoulders soon.”
Anais takes another loud sip from her mug. “No wonder no one wants to talk to you any more. You should talk about sensible things. Like the Olympics. You should watch the swimming.”
“The swimming? They should have people like me swimming, and then maybe I’d watch. These young, half-naked seals all look alike. Why should I care? They’ve got people winning for Australia. I want someone to win for Elwood.” She taps the pack of cigarettes, which she just bought from the 7-Eleven on the corner of Broadway and Ormond. She taps them on the kitchen table for a few reflective seconds. She unwraps the plastic and realises she forgot to buy a lighter or matches.
“I need something to light these.” She talks around the long white cylinder of tobacco.
“You don’t smoke,” Anais tells June.
“I used to smoke. I was a chimney,” June tells Anais.
“When?” Anais asks, putting down her mug carefully. “When were you ever a chimney?”
“Forty years ago. But there’s no point now fighting the inevitable. Once a smoker, always a smoker. The Olympics make me want to smoke.”
“I’m not giving you a lighter. This is stupid.” Anais finishes her mug of bourbon. “And to tell you the truth, I’m feeling… shame-faced. That it’s come to this. Drinking with you on a Sunday morning, when I should probably be at church or the library. I should be respectable by now.”
“You should be vacuuming this floor. Look at the lino. It’s disgusting.”
“What are you talking about? It’s not disgusting. You and your giant breasts propped on my kitchen table are disgusting.” Anais refuses to look down at the kitchen floor.
“I brought over a bag of salt-and-vinegar chips last week, and I spilt some of the crumbs from the bottom of the bag. And there they are right now.”
“You didn’t come over last week.”
“Well, the week before that. Which is even worse.”
“I think they’re crumbs from something else. I had nachos the other night. It’s probably from that.”
“I want to get back to my point.” June gets up and begins hunting in the messy kitchen drawers for a lighter. She opens and closes cupboard doors, finds a half-eaten sandwich on a plate in one of them. In the oven there’s a burned bird carcass— charcoal, with a beak still on it, probably a month old. Gnats erupt from the open oven door. Anais waves at June to shut it. 
“You look like you’re about to take flight,” June tells Anais. She lifts a hand to her mouth. “What’s my point?” she asks.
“People like you competing at the Olympics, for Elwood. Ridiculous.”
“Don’t you say anything bad about Elwood. I love this neighbourhood. They don’t like to speak over the fences anymore. It doesn’t matter. It’s still Elwood.”
“You should find one of those shirts saying ‘I heart Elwood’.” She furtively shoos away a few gnats now orbiting her head like a miniature solar system. 
“I’d buy one, I’ll tell you that for nothing. But I hate it when people say I ‘heart’ anything. It’s obviously I ‘love’, something. Like it never used to be I heart N.Y. but I love New York, and now it’s I heart something. What’s going on? Are the dyslexics taking over the world?” She finds a box of matches on top of the fridge, but has to hunt through black burned out matches to get one that’s still got a red tip.
“What about ‘I heart silence?’” Anais takes the bottle of bourbon from under the table and pours herself another half-mug. “What about ‘I heart euthanasia?’”
“I want to keep the machines on. Keep them going for as long as possible. Don’t believe it when they tell you I’m brain dead. I’m in there somewhere.”
“As if anyone is going to ask me. Besides which, I don’t think they’d even bother with machines for you. Your smoking again makes it even worse. They hate smokers. It even makes your toes rot now. I’ve seen pictures. These days they’d probably pour something combustible over you. Light a match.”
“I don’t believe in cremation. You can’t put people in ovens, give someone a thingamajig full of ashes. And they expect you to take it home. I don’t want someone’s remains on the top of my fridge. They should give you a commemorative ashtray at least.” Holding up the lit cigarette, “Where do I ash this?”
Anais levers herself to semi-erect standing, and with slow crablike movements moves along the kitchen table and out of the room, returning a few moments later with a white plastic ashtray, the blue and red stripes around its radius faded, its centre embossed with the Footscray Football Club logo. A snarling bulldog looks up through old black smoulder marks. 
June looks at the bulldog and feels sorry for him. Thrown in there like that. The people who should love him putting out their cigarettes on him. Where’s the club loyalty in that? They should have used the little blue boy of Carlton Football Club for the Footscray fans. Or the magpies. The eagles and swans. The whole menagerie. But why this poor dog, who only wanted to defend something?
 	Anais says, “You look like you’re about to cry. Don’t think about cremation. Someone has to want cremation. They don’t just put you in an oven like a Sunday roast.”
“But I don’t like worms any better. I don’t like the idea of them crawling around in there with their hungry little mouths. I don’t even like gardening. If they could just think of a better way.” Her eyes follow the ribbon of cigarette smoke up to the mould-spotted ceiling. “I’d prefer just to vanish.”
“Maybe the next time they’re testing a nuclear weapon they could put you underneath it,” Anais suggests. 
“Are you losing your marbles? Australia doesn’t have nuclear weapons.”
“Well… we probably should. At least a few of them. Have you seen how many American tourists there are these days? They obviously want to take over.”
“I don’t want a nuclear explosion, in any case. That’s just like ashes, but smaller. I like the idea of evaporation. Like a dream rising from the pillows of my bed,” June smiles—she’s always thought of herself as a poetic soul.
“That’s the way it was with Henry,” says Anais. “He had a smile on his face. And an erection. It was really wonderful. He must have been thinking of me when he died. He always said I was cream, and his taste of paradise this side of the Milky Way.”
“That’s probably a quote,” an upstaged June says, though she’s not usually like that. Spiteful. She doesn’t even use the word if she can help it.
“That’s not a quote. He could be poetic,” Anais says, almost getting out of her chair in indignation.
“Probably someone good… like Hemingway.” June taps her ash into the ashtray.
Anais slams a hand down on the table—for dramatic effect—but she clips her mug and scrambles to save it from falling to the floor. She’s spluttering, “Hemingway? You can’t be serious. Hemingway didn’t even like women. He wouldn’t have known the taste of cream if you put a warm spoon of it to his lips. Didn’t know cream from bream. That’s why he needed to put some shotgun ventilation into his skull. That old man and his sea—” Anais chokes on the angry words racing from her mouth, and without a chance to breathe goes pale, her eyelids trembling. She takes another sip of the good bourbon June brought her. Because June knew how much she loved bourbon. She settles down. 
June takes a breath, and blinks. Blinks, and takes another breath. “I swim my twenty-five metre pool every week. I’m still in good condition.” 
She does breast stroke—and backstroke if she’s really feeling up for it—twice a week at the St Kilda Sea Baths. She has a red rubber cap that says ‘Elwood’ in black letters along each side of it. She keeps it on in the spa after her swims, and looks out at the flat water of Port Phillip Bay, feeling the romance of sails whenever she sees them out there; but she also likes the immense freight ships moving towards the setting sun, and the heavy promise of return they press across the lips of the horizon. Henry got the swimming cap as a secret birthday present for June many years ago. Sometimes she puts it on and walks around the neighbourhood, but she doesn’t like the looks she gets. 
Anais says, “Take that cigarette out of your mouth. You’re not even inhaling. This is ridiculous.”
“I had this dream last night,” says June. “I was walking along Addison Street and about to cross the canal when I noticed there were all these ducks floating out to sea. There were thousands of them on the smelly canal water, and all of them were wearing gold medals. They were quacking the Australian national anthem, all together. It sounded terrible. As I sat there on the edge of the canal, I realised I was an old duck, and I didn’t have a medal because I wanted to compete for Elwood, and everybody’d thought that was stupid.”
Anais waves a hand at the gnats still orbiting her head. She wonders why they don’t seem to bother with June. “This is just shameful. And ridiculous.”
“If you still had a man, shameful would still be a nice word. But you might as well be a virgin again. You probably are. You’ve grown a new hymen by now, I’d wager.”
“Virgin? Me? I’ll have you know that I got around back in my day. I was game for anything. Big Boy Joe Batty said I had ‘a healthy appetite’. That’s what he said, shaking his head in disbelief and wonder.” All Anais’ Ss are turning into slivery things her thick tongue doesn’t fancy any more. She looks into her mug and remembers Joe, with his paint-spattered overalls that could resemble the night sky in a dimly lit room, and his huge hands that could crush an empty tuna can (she’d seen him do it) but had the delicacy of touch on her body to rival a violinist’s caress. 
“Healthy appetite! He was probably referring to all the nacho eating.”
“They didn’t have nachos in those days!”
“Of course they did. Nachos! They’ve been around for… since before Elwood!”
“The pizzas were still in Italy. The souvlakia still in Greece. And all of that stuff was still in Mexico. We had fish and chips. No smelly dim sims or crappy Chico-Rolls at all.”
They fall into a silent contemplation of these changes. There are pictures of Anais’ husbands on the walls and in grimy photo frames arrayed on the dusty furniture. All of them done in by bad hearts. Something to do with the kind of love Anais put into them, June is sure. Each in their reign had exclusive rights to the walls and furniture of Anais’ house. But as the years of their absence went on, they seemed to have congregated, shoulder to shoulder, in the friendly fellowship of her ring. As though there is one happy bed made for all four of them in the hereafter. 
June looks at Henry, smiling at her from the wall, from just below the dead kitchen clock (whose hands haven’t moved in the ten years since someone could get onto a chair to replace its battery), and smiles back up at him. A sweet smile he would remember even in heaven. A smile that belonges to him alone.
Anais’ simmering silence finally breaks and she bursts out, “You have never gotten over the fact that, in the end, Henry chose me. Not you. Me!” Anais grabs the black-and-white photograph of her first husband off the wall and places it between them on the kitchen table. Henry looks up at the ceiling, a wink in his eye directed at God or the clouds above. 
“What makes you think he chose? Did he choose?” June asks, stubbing out her cigarette. “Maybe he couldn’t choose.” She feels her heart vibrating in her chest. She can almost feel Henry on the table, his big rolling laughter that made her want to drown in it.
“What are you talking about now?” Anais leans back, her last shout turning into a wheezy puff. Her eyes narrow, closing with two deep blinks. Anais and June don’t speak to each other after this violent exchange. The ominous silence lasts for almost ten minutes.
June finally lights another cigarette and says, “A real estate agent keeps telling me how good property values are now for houses in Elwood. She thinks I’m sitting on a fortune. ‘A golden egg’, she calls it.”
Anais opens her eyes wide, “But this is Elwood. Where else could you live?”
June nods, watching her cigarette smoke rise around her. “That’s what I’m saying. I tell her that, every time she calls. This is Elwood.”