Spring
The joy of Spring turns sour as Nature awakens and attacks
Despite the greenhouse effect and the holes in the ozone layer, Spring came only a week late. On the seventh of September, we woke and the season had changed.
That smell was in the air, the rich seductive scent of the plant world putting on its finery, tarting up, getting ready to come out.
Lovers who had left a window open in the night opened their eyes already touching and thoughtlessly fell into each other. The warm breeze caressed us all. It was the first day of Spring.
Outside the inner-city house we had crashed at, the ants were going crazy, swarming in thousands over a concrete letter-box. In the midst of the normal black ones were larger ones, with wings.
It was impossible to tell the reason for their frenzy. It was manic, and it was important. Maybe it had to do with a re-organisation of their nest; perhaps the winged ones had just emerged, born there, or carried there on the wind from a secret place.
Who knew, who cared, it was Spring again.
I put on my shoes, stretched, and went inside. That glimpse of energy in the sterile town environment had me itching to be in the country or maybe walking in the bush, the sounds and smells of life filling the air.
I could feel that today everybody had got the message. Spring. It would be fun to watch it happening all around. It would be fun to have bare feet.
After breakfast, sitting in the sun, we made our farewells, our jackets from the night before swung incongruously over our shoulders. We laughed to each other, ‘we must look like right dorks, carrying these!’
But then I looked at her and noticed the swell of her breast against her shirt, the tautness of her pants over her buttocks. Smiling, I unbuttoned a shirt button and began to walk, and soon the excellence of the day made us forget to be self-conscious.
As we strolled further into the heart of the city. It became apparent that we were part of an aimless descent of humans into the CBD. There were people everywhere. And we were all horny.
Knees. And shoulders. Timid white flesh forced out into the sunlight. Floral patterns! Women in white skirts and see-through dresses. Here and there patches of outrageous Day-Glo, sweeping past on a bike or skateboard.
Happy-faced people stepping aside, not bothering to curse the old woman walking so slowly.
My lover and I stopped and hugged, kissing. She told me she wanted me. I blessed the day, cursed the winter — the undergarments! We pulled each other closer, almost touching our love for each other. It felt so real that morning. I pulsed in my pants.
Then I saw another crowd of ants, beserking as the others had. Nature, I thought embarrassingly profoundly, isn’t it marvelous!
And us, celebrating the survival of another Winter. We were no Napoleonic troops whipped into submission by Jack Frost. We had made it through. Time to party down, to mate, and fall asleep, satiated.
But what was that sound?
With the onset of renewed vigor amongst us big folk came as well the stirring and buzzing of all the little bugs and insects and crawly things that thrive around us.
And as we slept off the first night of Spring, exhausted from our rutting, they gathered themselves together in darkened places, plotting, talking till the dawn.
The next morning was glorious. I opened the door to admit the day, a blow-fly sneaked past without a ticket, riding a gusset of breeze which flowed through the house. It made instantly for the kitchen.
I rushed after it, shouting in fun: ‘First Blow-fly Of The Season!’ and wondering where the map-of-Australia-shaped fly-swat had been filed away at the end of last summer.
Karate-chopping the noisy winged intruder away from the freshly-sliced fruit, which was quietly awaiting the addition of yogurt to become breakfast, I heard the front door slam in the wind.
The glass door. I might have yelled: ‘First Slamming Door Of The Season!’, but I was too anxiously awaiting the tinkle of broken glass.
Nothing happened. I breathed again, and with a badly-aimed swipe at the fly, knocked over the yogurt container.
‘Shit’, I said.
I covered the fruit, left the spilled white mess as a diversion, and raced for the laundry. The fly-swat, with Tassie still attached by a stretched thin red plastic strip, hung on the inside of the door.
Too easy. ‘Alright!’. I felt the tide turning in my favour. Foolish, really, but it was such a lovely morning, I could save it. I plucked the fly-swat off the door and returned to the fray.
Back at the bench the blowie was pigging out on dairy. I rushed in, waving my weapon like a craze banshee. It observed me with disdain, finally, reluctantly, pulling out of the spill to make a slow retreat to the fly-screen on the window above the sink.
I blinked, not sure if I had actually seen or just imagined one of its billion eyes glancing over its shoulder to arrogantly check that I understood the irony of its location: this screen is a two-way street, buddy!
That made me mad. Mad as Hell. I had about sixty shots at it with the swat, and I could tell the fly was starting to wonder why it had bothered to leave the yogurt.
Maybe it was this cockiness that made it drop its guard, maybe I just got lucky, whatever, I finally slammed it off the wire.
The mutilated mess bounced off the screen, into my coffee, and floated in slow circles around the rim. I dry-retched and poured it down the sink.
‘How’s breakfast coming?’ called my lover from our sex-rumpled sheets. I pictured her again for a moment, thrusting back at me, calling out filth, and I smiled, forgetting the fly. It was, after all, Spring!
Then she sneezed. Again. And again. Blew her nose. Sneezed. ‘First hay-fever of the season,’ she sniffled.
She had tablets left over from last year. I placed two on a saucer next to her juice, and carried a laden tray towards the bedroom. She was coming out, red eyes streaming. ‘Let’s eat on the verandah, baby, I need some fresh air’.
The temperate outside was like a balm, warmth flowing over us. ‘Isn’t this lovely?’ we smiled at each other. She looked like a grieving widow, but I began to feel good about Spring again.
I rocked back in my chair, idly contemplating a lazy Sunday. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a thin black line of movement above the door leading into the house.
I stopped rocking and had a better look. Ants. Smaller than the ones I’d been marveling at the day before, and no sign of any winged aberrations, but these ants had the same purposeful way about them.
It wasn’t clear what that purpose was, but it evidently involved our house.
I got up and followed the thin black line. Through the door, along the skirting board of the sleep-out, over the step, under the door, behind the lounge, up and over the bedroom door, into a crack between floor and wall, reappearing…next to the sideboard, then under it.
There the trail ended. No sign past the sideboard, although I checked everywhere.
Thousands of ants streaming in. None coming out. I felt the first minor tremors of fear.
‘Hon, give us a hand with this, will you?’
Together we lifted the unwieldy furniture out from the wall. This was where the trail ended.
Jesus. It was hideous, it was alien, it was a seething nightmare. It was a shitload of ants, a mass of tiny bodies, scurrying, moving, and tending an enormous batch of tiny, white eggs.
In our living-room.
We screamed.
Into the laundry again. The fly-swat was not in the contest this time. I reached for the can of surface anti-insect chemicals. There was a silhouette of an ant side. I nodded, check.
‘Stand back, baby!’
I blasted them. Emptied the can. There was no talk of relocation; this was ethnic cleansing by a terrified yet more powerful adversary. Man v Nature.
We spent the rest of the day cleaning them up, washing the carpet, getting more and more irritable with each other.
The insect spray had set off an allergic reaction around my wrists; her sneezing had left her face a wet, sand-papered mess.
Finally, we finished our mop-up operations and sat down again on the verandah with a couple of beers to appreciate the cool of the evening. Neither of us spoke. It was a quiet time.
Too quiet. The high-pitched whining reached my ears at the same time as I felt the itch on my leg. Mosquitos. In a moment we were both slapping and scratching, getting eaten alive.
We retreated inside, but they followed us in. We dropped the netting down from the ceiling light and huddled under it, cowed and beaten, prisoners on our own bed.
My hand accidentally brushed her leg.
She flinched away from me, pushing a pillow between us.
I lay on my back, awake. Fuck Spring.
