Dark Roots by Cate Kennedy Page B

That’s what my dad says.
    I made a little fire and smoked my traps. Five more weeks and I can get a mountain bike.

Resize
    The car breaks down on the way to the jeweller’s. It hits a pothole filled with mud the colour of strong tea and Dave hears the fanbelt snap and clatter under the bonnet like the end of a spool of film. This is in his mind so that when he gets out he sees the whole scene like a kind of movie — black and white, bittersweet, European. Something on SBS. He makes an expressive Gallic face at the radiator and feels the rain drizzle down his collar.
    â€˜So what’s the story?’ Andrea shouts with her head out the window. ‘I thought you fixed the bloody thing. I thought you said this would never happen again.’ Behind the fogged windscreen, her face settles back into hard, sceptical lines of resignation. In the movie, she is the unforgiving French girlfriend, cool and intimidating. He lays the flat of his hand against the radiator cap, feeling heat, turning it and wary about the pressure release of boiling spray. What he’d fixed had been the timing chain.
    â€˜It’s freezing. How could it boil on a day like this? Bastard car.’ She slouches back against the red bench seat, a ridge of thumbnail is excised by her teeth in small, annoyed nips. She hates the Holden. He feels protective of it when he sees it parked on the street, as if it were an old dog: smelly and incontinent, losing dignity, but his .
    Andrea twists the ring on her finger, massaging circulation back in distractedly. They are going to have their wedding rings cut off and resized. Dave’s cuts into his finger with a sharp, blackened niggling; Andrea’s flesh rises up either side of her ring like bread dough left to prove too long. They can’t get them off. It has happened to both of them at the same time, like an anniversary.
    The jeweller is a friend of Andrea’s and has agreed to cut the rings off at his house and add another section of gold. They are late. The jeweller lives in a mud-brick house at the end of eight kilometres of dirt track.
    Dave searches the boot for a spare fanbelt. He shifts a roll of carpet underlay Andrea has picked up off a skip for controlling weeds and a bag of chook pellets, feeling the rain saturate his back. His ring finger itches and burns around the cut on his knuckle where he tried this morning to lever the ring off with soap and a crochet hook.
    He swears as he shifts stuff around, feels the edge of his underpants get wet just as Andrea’s left hand comes out the window holding the new fanbelt as if it were four aces. Of course — the glovebox. In the SBS movie, Dave thinks grimly, this would be a fairly comical image. He changes the belt, tops up the water, and gets back in the car, wiping his hands on an old T-shirt and feeling his wet clothes paste themselves to him.
    He blows his nose and looks sideways at his wife chewing the inside of her lip, and after a moment she looks back at him.
    â€˜Let’s just get this over with,’ she says in the long-suffering tone that annoys the crap out of him.
    Andrea has had a dream the night before that her friend the jeweller had a tiny circular saw and started cutting through the gold band, then kept going and went right through skin and bone and gristle, cutting off her whole finger. Best to amputate, he’d said, flattening the rest of her hand out on a kind of operating table. Fine, she’d thought in the morning. Whatever.
    Dave pumps the accelerator, double-clutches to find first. The Holden’s shift column protests. It’s like a metal grinder in there. Andrea jammed it between first and second once and he’d fixed it with a hammer, explaining to her about the slipping clutch until she’d suddenly leaned on the horn and he’d cracked the back of his head on the bonnet.
    â€˜A slipping clutch,’ she’d said when he’d got back in, a strainer-wire of