Lane Arms & Legs

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80533-798-0
Verlag: Pushkin Vertigo
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten

A searingly intimate exploration of marriage, motherhood and desire from a bold New Zealand talent. Georgie's marriage has stagnated. But in a Florida almost claustrophobic with life, there's no room to attend to it: forests burn, termites abound, teeth break, and there's something in her husband's eye. Then she finds a body in the woods.As the repercussions of her discovery and a doomed affair come to land, Georgie is forced to confront her past, examining the often heartbreaking power of the things we witness and the scars they leave behind.

Chloe Lane is a writer and founding editor of Hue+Cry Press. She was the 2022 recipient of the Todd New Writer's Bursary and a 2021 Grimshaw Sargeson Fellow. Her debut novel The Swimmers was longlisted for the Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2021 Ockham NZ Book Awards. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband and young son.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lane, Chloe

Leseproben

2.

Over breakfast the next morning Dan offered to get a vasectomy. Neither of us wanted more children and, in the past when this topic had been half-heartedly raised, I’d expressed support for Dan’s willingness to take charge and the freedom it implied. This time it bothered me. It felt like it came out of nowhere. I think it was the result of an internal panic Dan had been stewing on since Finn’s fall, about parenthood and responsibility. His role. The breaking of Finn’s teeth had made Dan freshly vulnerable and uncertain, maybe got him picturing the breaking of other things. I didn’t want to have children with any other man, definitely not Jason, nor did I want Dan to have children with anyone else, but for some reason at this time the loose strings of that possibility were comforting to me in a way that the image of Dan, Finn and me sealed into a circle wasn’t.

So, when Dan brought up the vasectomy, I said, ‘That’s okay, you don’t have to do that.’

Dan responded by quietly folding and sealing himself up like an envelope.

I suggested we go for a family walk.

*

An hour later I found myself standing in the flat heat of the prairie with Finn awkwardly hanging from me in a front-pack he’d long outgrown, looking at a bald eagle. The binoculars were heavy and I’d been regretting bringing them. Not now. My first bald eagle. It was sitting high in a pine tree preening its breast.

‘It sounds like a squirrel,’ Dan said, indignant beside me.

I also thought the eagle would have a bigger voice. That high shriek, more like the complaint of a nothing seagull, was not how I had imagined the majestic call of America’s bird.

‘I’m looking right at it,’ I said. ‘Wow. There you are.’

I understood the sounds coming from Finn to mean this: ‘Wow.’

‘Wow,’ I said, ‘that’s right.’

‘Can I see?’ Dan said. He reached for the binoculars. I handed them over.

The first time we visited the prairie, our first winter in Florida, I’d been stunned by the tall, dry and seedy grasses, so many shades of yellow and brown, some freckled with flowers, the sky hard and blue and cloudless, and except for the birds, the only signs of animal life droppings left by wild horses, shallow and cracked gator tracks. In summer, it was a completely different scene. Much of the track was flooded and everything was lush and wet – the Florida I’d always imagined. Back in New Zealand there were the pohutukawa in December – every year it was a pleasure to see the first crimson blooms pop – otherwise, when I thought of the landscape of my homeland it was always the same, no matter what the season, though that couldn’t be right.

Finn began aggressively arching against me, while expelling a river of indecipherable sounds. I could make out one word: ‘Stuck.’

That day the prairie was somewhere in the space between winter and spring. There was a rustling in the surrounds, a feeling that things were ready to burst forth, but not yet, not quite.

‘I know you want to get out,’ I said, ‘but you can’t. It’s not safe.’

Again, Finn with his rush of noise – this time the wave cresting with: ‘Out.’

‘Would you like some water?’ I said. I clicked my fingers at Dan. ‘Bottle, please.’

Dan was standing motionless a few feet away, silently looking through the binoculars. When we first met, I was initially attracted to his tallness. He was six-three and skinny, with a presence that was close to apologetic – the result of spending his life trying to fold himself down to the level of his peers. Then he’d smiled for me and his snaggletooth had sealed it.

‘I can’t see it,’ he said. ‘It must’ve moved. You sure it was an eagle?’

‘I’m sure,’ I said. ‘Try taking off your glasses.’

Dan did as I suggested and hooked his glasses into the neck of his T-shirt. He removed his cap too. His hair had been down his back when we met, but since we’d moved to Florida he’d kept it short and floppy in a manner that betrayed his Englishness and was also not that dissimilar to the cut I regularly gave Finn – who had inherited his dad’s thick, dark and fast-growing hair – in our kitchen with the blunt craft scissors.

‘These binoculars are weird,’ Dan said.

‘Can you pass the bottle?’ I said.

‘They’re hurting my eyes,’ Dan said. ‘Now it’s all abstract.’

‘Come on with the bottle,’ I said.

‘Wait, yes,’ Dan said. He unzipped the backpack he was carrying and without looking at me he handed over Finn’s water bottle.

Dan was naturally low key, a people-pleaser. If I ever irritated him he almost never showed it. I wasn’t this way, but from the start of our relationship I’d taken his lead and learned to be less bothered by the little things, though that wasn’t the mode between us that morning.

Dan returned to the binoculars. ‘Just, why can’t I see it?’

‘It’s probably gone,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you give them back to me? You can carry Finn for a bit.’ I lowered my mouth to Finn’s ear. ‘Can I take your bottle, sweetie?’

Once Finn was secured on Dan’s front, I strolled off down the path on my own. The eagle had been sitting on the branch of a Florida pine in a wooded area at the south-eastern corner of the prairie and I went in that direction. I’d been carrying around an outdated map of documented nests in our county for nearly three years, thinking that, if there was an eagle nearby, I might at least be looking in the right direction. Just as I’d imagined the eagle’s call as powerful and haunting, I’d similarly pictured this impressive bird nesting in only the most monumental of settings – definitely not the bare branch of a ratty pine in North Central Florida.

The first time I saw a kiwi, I was standing as close to the exhibit barrier in the zoo’s dark Kiwi House as was practicable, and as my eyes adjusted, I saw a shadow shift, a slender beak, then the body of the bird as it emerged from behind a log. It was both smaller and more astounding than I’d been prepared for – that very round and fluffy body, beak thin and long like my nana’s crochet needles. I was next to two of my classmates and I could feel them vibrating with excitement too.

The bald eagle – it was a giant – had moved to a branch of a different tree. I didn’t know how Dan could have missed it. I wondered briefly if it was only an apparition, a high-pitched creature conjured from the cloudy vault of my exhausted mind. I blinked and the eagle called out again.

‘Was that it?’ Dan asked. He and Finn were standing directly behind me. Dan had put his glasses and cap back on.

‘I think it was,’ I said.

‘Can you see it?’

‘No,’ I lied. ‘I can’t.’

It was partially the thought of having to deal with Dan and the binoculars again, sensing how easily that might boil over, but that wasn’t all. I also suddenly wanted to keep the eagle for myself.

‘I want to look again,’ Dan said.

The eagle had returned to preening its broad, dark breast. I thought about how it would feel to push my fingers down through its coarse outer feathers, and wriggle my fingertips in till they reached the soft down beneath. The bird looked up then, its serious yellow eyes wide. I felt it looking directly at me. It cocked its head and said, ‘I see you.’ A lump formed in the back of my throat. I kept the binoculars to my eyes, as if they were plugs keeping something in.

‘Too late,’ I said. ‘It’s gone.’

‘I didn’t see it go,’ Dan said.

‘Believe me or don’t believe me,’ I said.

When I finally lowered the binoculars, Dan and Finn, the large and small figures of them bound together, had already begun walking back up the track and away.

The city in which we lived – and that was what it called itself: The City of – was a university town. Our neighbourhood was situated a mile from campus in the city’s historic district, which meant a lot of two-storey wooden houses, some that had been lovingly restored and were mostly lived in by professors and their families, and some that were rentals occupied by grad students or working folks and that looked as if they were begging for a sinkhole to swallow them down. On the drive home from the prairie our late-nineties-model Honda came to a not wholly unexpected spluttering stop on the side of the road. We were still several miles from our neighbourhood in a part of the wider town that reminded me of where I’d grown up in New Zealand, where the only signs of municipality were a lone bus stop, recently repainted road markers, and letterboxes pinpointing a scattering of driveways.

‘What’s going on?’ I said.

Dan was sitting silently behind the wheel.

‘I said, what’s going on?’ My tone was immediately...