Girl with a Monkey by Thea Astley

embroider his description with the five minutes or so he had been pinned beneath his father’s leg, both of them trampled by the cattle crowd, and feeling the blood soaking, oozing through his clothes; or that, when he reached home and saw his hands and shirt vermilion in the veranda light, he had fainted straight into his mother’s arms.
    Minutes, which heard the harsh croak of gull and marsh bird, which tempered the blue of the sky meridian with a waning sun’s indifference, slipped away while they searched the uneven planes of each other’s countenances. Sand grains sprinkled eyebrow and eyelash, sugared jawline and temple. Harry’s lower lip thrust forward and then stretched insolently into a grin.
    â€œGo on,” he said softly, about to find here thesummation of his day, “you teachers don’t know everythink.”
    Very swiftly he reached up and, pulling her head down, kissed her hair. The informality of love bound her, unexpectedly, and him, calculatedly, in each other’s arms for some time, argument propounded reasonably enough by the somnolence of the late afternoon. There was also the convention that requires male isolated with female, other things being equal, to go through the motions of passion, if not to their logical conclusion, then at least so far that each would be left with a sense of inquiry and unfulfilment. She burrowed child-like within the sun-warmed hollow of his arm. Now and again the white paper that was gull circled away in lovely geometry, drew tangents to the water, the remnant of the moon, or ran awkwardly on orange feet along the very fringe of the foam. Being not only a sentimentalist and a genuine lover of the external world, but also by a hair’s breadth adjusted to the expectancy of any situation, Elsie felt an overwhelming desire to crown this temporary ecstasy with poetry, preferably her own, for nothing filled her with such venial pleasure as the exposure of her own emotions.
    This is a day for birds to cut with arcs
Wind-shifting geometry in upper sky,
Tangent upon a dried-out shell of moon
Unsolved at four o’clock by wing or eye
.
    The mental image propelled the words. Sleepily she evoked the same landscape for him and then wondered at the tiny silence suspended between them. She wondered how he normally reacted to poetry, by “normally” meaning those occasions when sentiment might not be his undoing, for the very air between their persons seemed alive with the electricity of imagery, apprehended and enjoyed.
    â€œWho wrote that? Shakespeare?”
    The sudden upsurge of anger and hatred surprised her, but nevertheless she was incapable of repressing this impatience with an ignorance which, in the world where he moved, caused all poetry to be classed as Shakespeare, the only name known, just as all music that was not popular in the hit-parade sense was “classical”. Perhaps if she were not angry she would shed bitter tears at the hopelessness of it all. Testily she jerked her head from the shelter of his arm, hoping that by thus severing animal contact her agitation would not communicate itself through the verbose messengers of skin.
    Even as she rolled away on the dune she was startled to hear him say through unsounded, unexplored caves of sensitivity, “Go on, Elsie. Say some more. That had a sort of nice sadness about it. I could listen to you say poetry all day.”
    She said with some reluctance, “No, it wasn’t Shakespeare, Harry. It was mine.”
    â€œYou mean you wrote that?”
    â€œFive minutes ago I thought of it. Yes. Why not? It’s my one secret pleasure. Poetry or music, I can never make up my mind which I need more of, but I do know that poetry moves me far more than anything else. But then it has to be intensely personal to do that.”
    Harry, stretching across the sandy slope, across a lifetime of years to some seed previously undiscovered in his personality, across acres of