Tarcutta Wake Read Online Free

the bent man near the railway bridge, his tattered woollen cardigan with splinters and sawdust caught in the weave. We lit fires under blocked chimneys and all our clothes smelled of smoke. Grown men fell asleep on our doorsteps, curled up like children, and we stepped around them to unlock our doors, saying just this once while riding high on the shoulders of our own benevolence. Working girls redid their make-up in the yellow light of our stairwells, in the brief interludes between blown or stolen bulbs. Our bicycles disappeared from the railing we chained them to and an anonymous hand scrawled One day soon I will be waiting inside for you above the door of No. 8.
    But in the mornings we would sometimes hear him singing, and his voice thrummed through all the busted hot water systems and dirty sheets and disconnection notices, through the discarded needles and the places where our bicycles used to be. His voice touched these things the way a small child touches the fur of an unfamiliar dog, not conceiving of the possibility of being bitten. His voice made these things better than they were, lifting them above the seedy and the broken and the dangerous so that they became something else; a bronze cast of something seedy and broken, a collodion photograph of something broken and dangerous. He did this without knowing it, and although we could not understand the language he sang in, we understood what it meant to keep your voice – if only your voice – and to use it whenever you could in an ugly apartment where you went for weeks without anyone saying your name. Where basil and coriander struggled from plastic pots along the kitchen window sill, growing in the three-hour blade of sunlight that cut between the two buildings like they were two halves of a failed cake.
    Some days we saw him in the fresh produce section of the supermarket, and did not understand how such a voice came from such a man. We would feign distraction, turning away from his rum-blossomed face in our sudden desperation for artichokes, for tamarillos. Or we would exchange awkward pleasantries while he selected ripe apricots from the display and broke them open with his knotty hands. He would bite into one half of the fruit, then spit it right back out onto the green linoleum floor. Pah, he said. No good. Taste of nothing, you see. Then he would offer the other half to us for confirmation. Nothing at all, we would agree, awed by his disregard for supermarket conduct.
    When the development notices arrived, addressed to The Occupant instead of to our names, some of us had already cottoned on, spooked by men with retractable tapes measuring the low brick wall that housed our letterboxes, and which the working girls would sit along in a fleshy row, like birds or cats or cabs, when business was bad and their feet had started to ache. Some of us had already started packing. Some of us knew the signs.
    We are gone now, all of us. And the corner stores are clothing stores, and the arts supply is closed. The pubs where we shot pool and slouch-danced to Red Right Hand on the jukebox, those pubs do not have pool tables or jukeboxes anymore.
    In the mornings I get up, I make coffee, the cat asks to be fed. I share no walls, no roof, no backyard. I can go naked into the backyard if I want to, and I do sometimes, to remind myself I can. The only radio I hear is my own, reiterating the small issues in the hope they will distract from the real issues. And yes, people still sing – there will always be singing – but it’s never the kind that makes something better than it is. My disconnection notices are just disconnection notices. My dirty sheets, they’re just that.

The taxidermist’s wife
    The Museum of Taxidermy was nothing like the natural history section of the State Museum. The bear at the mot had a shiny coat and its glass eyes looked like real bear eyes. The fur was not coming off the viscacha in tufts, all the zebra’s stripes