Move the Mountains

by Emily Conolan

  The skip, packed with rock, gives a bone-shaking jerk as the pipe slams into it, and shards of rock fly about like shrapnel. You hear a horrible shriek as the pipe ricochets to the side of the skip. You hold fast to Edik’s hands, and you’re still trying with all your strength to drag him to safety when the sharp edge of the metal pipe rips past the side of the skip and into your arm.

  For a split second that feels like eternity, you are thrown onto your back by a tidal wave of agony. You scream at the underside of the skip, feel Mario’s hands scrabble for you in the darkness. You throw your head from side to side, sucking air in through your clenched teeth and letting it out in throat-shredding howls. You clutch at your shoulder and feel something warm and sticky. Your heart ratchets up to a frantic staccato. Nausea and sweat flood your body. Just when you’re certain that you can’t take anymore, a sweet dark fog rolls through you. Gasping with relief, your muscles go loose and you pass out.

  Go to scene 29.

  You look at the boulders again. No, climbing up there would be too risky, you decide. You’re so exhausted you can barely keep your balance on flat ground, let alone dozens of metres above the ground.

  You shake Mario’s shoulder and he stumbles upright again. Together, you brace yourselves and pick up the stretcher once more. Edik opens his eyes with a little gasp as you lift him off the ground.

  ‘Edik, how are you going?’ you ask. ‘Be strong; not far to go now.’

  ‘Chcę, żebyś mnie pochował nad brzegiem Narwi,’ he mumbles.

  ‘Can you say it in English?’ you ask.

  ‘Bury me … Narew River …’ he murmurs. ‘My home.’

  ‘Edik, you won’t be buried anytime soon,’ says Mario, too cheerily. You exchange fearful glances.

  Where is this rescue party? you think. The one Mr Ford was going to send. Please!

  You force one foot in front of the other, praying that you interpreted the map correctly and that soon, this gully will end. In about a kilometre, you should see a break in the ridgeline where you can cross through to Cooma.

  It doesn’t come. Has it been a kilometre? Should I stop and check the map again? Doubts run through your mind. I’m such an idiot – why are we trying to carry him out at all? It would have been better to stay where we dug him out and wait for help…

  He’s not going to make it.

  I’m not going to make it.

  You stumble on a rock and bash your knee, hard. Edik nearly slides off the stretcher. You right yourself just in time, but now you’re hobbling.

  This is futile. I want to stop. I have to stop.

  ‘We have to rest,’ says Mario in a hoarse whisper behind you. ‘We’re lost … aren’t we?’

  ‘No!’ you choke. You want to cry, but there’s no moisture left for tears. ‘Cooma’s just … just …’ You’re nodding your head to the left, where you pray it is.

  ‘But if the sun goes down in the west … doesn’t that mean now we’re going … south?’ he asks.

  ‘I don’t know, Mario!’ you cry. It comes out like a bleat. ‘Why don’t you work it out yourself, like I’m trying to?’

  ‘Because I don’t have the brains,’ he says bitterly. ‘I have good luck, that’s it – or at least, I used to—’ He breaks off with a gasp and cries out: ‘Stop!’ You glance back at him. ‘Snake!’ he screams, just as your foot falls.

  You leap backwards as the snake’s head whips through the air and strikes you between the top of your sock and your trouser cuff. There’s a strong sting, like a wasp bite, and then the snake flashes like a brown ribbon through the undergrowth and is gone.

  You and Mario lower Edik to the ground, and you start to sob. You clutch at your leg, squeezing it hard, to try to stop the venom passing through your body. Mario is ripping off his singlet and binding it tightly around your lower leg, swearing under his breath in a constant stream.

  The bite now feels like a throbbing ball of flame. The pain makes you want to faint. ‘I’m going to die,’ you whisper.

  ‘No, no, it hurts, but not all snake bites are venomous,’ Mario says, hugging you to him, but there is real terror in his voice as he screams, ‘Help! Somebody … help!’

  You’re starting to shiver, and your head hurts. Mario squeezes you tight, and a few moments later you heave and vomit all over his legs. Your stomach hurts, and you taste blood.

  Mario doesn’t let you go even for a moment. ‘Don’t leave me,’ he whispers in your ear. ‘Please, don’t leave me!’

  You have a blinding headache behind your eyes, so awful that it feels like someone has crammed the sun inside your brain. You forget about Edik, and Olenka, and the children. You forget that you’re in Australia; that you came from Italy. The venom leaps from thought to thought, until you are the pain, and the pain is you, hurtling down a long black tunnel.

  You have one last sensation: arms are holding you. Your first and last friend, Mario. His name reaches your lips in a whisper. Then it’s gone.

  To return to your last choice and try again, go to the end of scene 23.

  You don’t know where you’re going to get the strength from, but you’ll have to climb those boulders. The thought of bashing on through the bush for hours in the wrong direction is too awful to contemplate.

  Come on, legs, you tell them, go!

  You scramble up the foothill, then start to climb, carefully testing each foothold and handhold before you commit to it. Sometimes the rocks wobble with a deep, hollow sound like a drum. You notice lichen and little ants all over the rocks, and wiry grasses clinging to thin wedges of dirt.

  You’re pleased with how well you’re climbing. You look back: Mario and Edik are a long way down. Not far to go, you tell yourself. You feel a little bubble of hope rise in your chest as you approach the crest of the ridge. If I’m right, you tell yourself, then down there will be… You draw a deep breath and heave yourself up the last rock … Cooma! Yes!

  The twinkle of glass and metal, and the cleared brown strips around the town, never looked so welcoming. We’re on the right track home, you congratulate yourself. Edik’s going to make it.

  ‘See, Mamma?’ you say out loud. ‘I did it!’

  Then you laugh at yourself. You can cross the world, you think ruefully, but you still just want to show off to your mamma.

  There’s no sign of the rescue party, so you clamber to your feet to try shouting for them. They could just about hear me in Cooma from here, you think. Even though you’re within striking distance of home, it would be great not to have to carry Edik any further.

  The moment you get to your feet, you realise you’ve made a mistake. There’s a scraping groan that seems to come from underground, and an ominous shifting underfoot. You try to spring sideways to a bigger boulder, but before you can push off, your rock slips. You plummet backwards and land hard, upside down. The rocks under you shift and you start to slide. Loose rocks are bouncing down the hill, cracking and smashing into others. You wrap your arms over your head but you keep sliding, faster and faster. You’re being knocked and scraped as you struggle to slow down.

  Suddenly, to your right, you see a huge jutting rock. Your arm shoots out and your shoulder wrenches, but you manage to grab the rock, and it holds fast. You scrabble for traction, and with a gasp of relief you realise you’re no longer falling.

  Then you see a boulder hurtling towards you. It’s the size of a small table. You wrap your other arm over your head and duck, still holding tightly to the rock. You hear Mario’s scream far below, and the thunderous cracks of the boulder as it ricochets off other rocks.

  The boulder smashes into the rock you’re clinging to. Pain like nothing you’ve ever felt before rips through you with the force of a hurricane. The tall rock was strong enough to halt the boulder’s progress, and your arm is pinned between them. You scream and fight, your body crackling with panic, pushing at the boulder, but you may as well be an ant.

  The pain of your crushed arm engulfs your whole body. You can’t think, can
’t speak, can only shriek and howl like an animal. A swell of dizziness rises up and swallows you. You pass out.

  Go to scene 29.

  You wake up. Blink. You’re somewhere sunny … in a bed. White sheets. Hushed sounds. You slide back into sleep.

  It’s night. Footsteps pass by your bed. You close your eyes and are dimly aware of someone checking your breathing and pulse, touching your left hand gently, and moving away again. You sleep.

  Now, the honeyed light of late afternoon, warm in a square on your thighs. You blink. ‘Hello there,’ says a voice tenderly. The room swims into focus. By your bedside is someone with messy dark hair, kind eyes, and that moustache …

  ‘Mario,’ you whisper.

  You feel him touch your face. ‘You made it,’ he murmurs.

  ‘I did?’ Where did I make it? you wonder. Where was I before this? You cast your mind back. You remember normal life in Cooma, and then … there’s nothing. A black void where memory should be.

  You notice tears on Mario’s cheeks. You haven’t seen him cry since he was a small boy. You feel worried. ‘I’m okay,’ you whisper. ‘Aren’t I?’

  ‘Yes, of course you’re okay,’ he rushes to assure you. ‘You’re … you’re great, you’re alive – that’s all that matters.’

  ‘I’m so sleepy,’ you murmur.

  Mario brushes your hair back from your brow. ‘Then rest,’ he says quietly. ‘I’ll be here when you wake up.’

  Night. You wake from a strange dream. Moonlight shines through a chink in the curtains. You try to roll over to your right side. You push with your left arm, reach out with your right – but something’s wrong. You can feel your right shoulder and upper arm, but nothing more. You look down and see a strange white shape in the moonlight. Your arm – it stops in a bandaged stump like a zucchini. There’s no elbow, no arm, no hand. Panic washes through you. This must be part of my bad dream.

  ‘Help!’ you shout in a cracked voice. Footsteps come running. You reach down to touch the end of your right arm – it’s a dense, neatly wrapped package budding from your shoulder. ‘Help!’ you scream, your voice rising to true horror. You scrabble to get out of bed. Your heart is stammering.

  A nurse grabs your shoulders and presses you back onto the bed. ‘It’s all right, calm down,’ she commands.

  Your whole body is shaking. You start screaming. Wake up, wake up, wake up! you implore yourself.

  ‘You’ll wake the others,’ the nurse hisses. You gulp for air. ‘That’s quite enough,’ she says firmly. You feel her push open your mouth and place a tablet on your tongue. She raises your head with one hand and lifts a glass of water to your lips. ‘Swallow.’ You do. She puts your head back on the pillow and tucks the sheets so tightly around you that you can barely wriggle.

  You lie quietly, sobbing in the darkness, not understanding what is going on or how to make it stop. Slowly, the pill works and a cool calmness slides through you. Your brain goes fuzzy and the room starts to swim. You sleep again.

  YOU’RE AWAKE. Is it morning? It’s cloudy today. There’s Mario.

  ‘Hug me,’ you whisper, and he does. You feel a warm rush of gratitude that he’s there, warm and solid. You let out a shaky breath. ‘I had the most horrible dream,’ you tell him. You still feel sick with the memory of it. A shudder runs through you and he squeezes you tighter. You squeeze him back, but through the haze of your doped-up groggy thoughts you begin to realise that you’re only holding him with your left arm. You try to lift your right. All you feel is pain shooting through your shoulder.

  ‘Don’t move too much,’ Mario says. ‘You’ve been out for days.’

  You know why you’re in the hospital now. Last night wasn’t a nightmare.

  ‘It’s gone … isn’t it?’ you mumble. ‘My arm.’

  You no longer feel panic, but an all-pervasive sense of doom – a certainty that nothing will ever be right again.

  Mario doesn’t say yes or no. ‘You were so brave,’ he murmurs. ‘You were amazing.’ He draws back from the hug. You look at your right arm. The bandages. The space where you end. The realisation is a kick in the guts.

  You can’t cry. You are too stunned. Three nurses swarm in for your check-up, and now that you are properly awake for the first time, they have lots of questions for you.

  ‘What do you remember about the accident?’

  ‘On a scale of one to ten, how much pain are you in?’

  ‘What year is it?’

  ‘How many fingers am I holding up?’

  Their questions are exhausting and stupid, and although your brain takes longer than usual to think and reply in English, you’re able to answer all of the questions except one: ‘What do you remember about the accident?’

  After they leave, you sit quietly, thinking about each of the events leading up to the blank hole in your memory. You follow the day’s events like a thread, getting closer and closer to the trauma, when suddenly you gasp: ‘Edik!’

  Mario’s eyes snap to your face.

  ‘That’s what I was doing – trying to save Edik!’ you exclaim. Mario doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t need to. His face is grey and wretched.

  ‘He … didn’t make it?’ you stammer. Oh God, please tell me he’s alive. Tell me it wasn’t for nothing. If he lived but I lost my arm, that’s a fair trade. Please, God, please.

  Mario shakes his head. It’s as if a trapdoor opens in your chest and you fall through into an endless black hole. You hear Mario saying, ‘His injuries … they tried but … he died. The funeral was two days ago.’

  You can’t face him. You roll away and bury your head in the pillow, your eyes shut tight, as if they could keep out the whole world. Olenka. I failed her. Lidia and Teodor don’t have a father now.

  You feel Mario’s hand on your shoulder. ‘You were a hero,’ he insists, but the word sounds hollow and ugly. You just pretend to be asleep, until finally he leaves you alone.

  You know for sure now that you were wrong all this time – the curse is real. It has always been real, and your attempts to live your life as if you were in control were ridiculous. You now understand exactly how Mamma felt: you’re in the grip of a power far greater than you are. Other people around you go on living their carefree lives, deluding themselves that they are free to make their own choices. But the curse breeds in you like black mould. It will be with you for the rest of your life, and it’s all you deserve.

  OLENKA AND THE children don’t come. You suppose they loathe you, or worse, pity you. You have weird sensations that your missing limb is still there: sometimes it aches so badly that you cry in the night; sometimes it feels like the fingers you don’t have are being pierced by burning needles. For over twelve hours, at one stage, you are bedevilled by an itch in your non-existent right elbow. You punch and scratch the space on your bed where your arm should be, but the ghost-arm doesn’t feel that. Paradoxically, the nurses give you real painkillers to combat the phantom pain, and it actually works, at least for the first hour or two.

  Mario cheers little milestones, like the first time you sit up in bed; the first time the drip comes out of your arm; the first time you stand and then walk. But life beyond the hospital is impossible to imagine. You don’t see how a one-armed person could ever work, or marry, or be anything but a burden to others. It would have been better if I had died, you think.

  ‘I haven’t told anyone at home what happened yet,’ Mario tells you. ‘Do you want me to?’

  ‘No,’ you reply. ‘Mamma was right about the curse all along.’ Mario strokes your left arm. ‘I suppose I’ll have to go home,’ you mumble. ‘Another problem for her to deal with.’

  Mario looks at you severely. ‘Now, stop that,’ he commands. ‘You’re not a problem. You’re not cursed. It’s amazingly good luck that you’re alive at all!’

  ‘I disagree.’

  You see tears well in Mario’s eyes. ‘There’s still a life for you here,’ he insists. ‘I’ll help!’ When you don’t reply, he goes on:
‘You lost your arm. Not your brain, or your heart – not any of the things that make you so special. We’ll get through this together.’

  Mario’s words, his tears, and his offers of help only confirm your worst fears. ‘I’m making you feel bad,’ you mutter. ‘Olenka can’t face me either – I’m just salt in her wound.’

  Mario is openly crying now. You roll away from him, curled up in shame. ‘I want to convince you,’ he chokes, ‘that life is still worth living.’

  ‘You can’t,’ you state. You are filled with a black, writhing guilt. You didn’t save Edik. You have wrecked the lives of all those who loved you. Your family will never be free of you: every day for the rest of your life, you will need help with the smallest things. At the root of this anguish is the knowledge that you brought it all upon yourself: you stole the golden cornetto, which was the cornerstone of your family’s fortune. You ripped it out, and everything came crashing down. Where would you all be now if you had never touched it?

  The next day, Mario comes in very early. ‘I’m starting back at work,’ he tells you, ‘so I won’t see you until dinnertime. But I think you’ll have some other visitors today.’

  Around eleven o’clock, you’re sitting up in bed when Olenka shuffles in, without her children. It’s a punch in the chest to see the state of her. She was so strong, so capable; she’d escaped the war, and started a new life in a place where she couldn’t speak the language, but she never complained, always striving towards a brighter future. Now, her hair is lank and her shoulders slope as though they’ve finally given up taking the weight of the world. When she smiles at you, it seems as though the corners of her mouth are lifted by little strings, not by any real feeling.

  You know what that’s like. You’ve been ‘smiling’ at people like that all week.

  ‘Hello,’ you say to her quietly, as she sits by your bedside. ‘You don’t need to smile. I don’t feel like it either.’