Zac and Mia

by A. J. Betts

  I delete it and put the phone down. The time pulses: 2.59 a.m. Three a.m. It makes me wonder if he’s awake too. Zac. It’s been over three months. Long enough for him to forget me.

  I hope he’s sleeping. I hope he’s not lying awake like me, too pathetic for tears. I hope he’s sleeping so deep that not even dreams can find him.

  Fuck, I need to think. Plan A relied on my mum being a normal person. Plan B expected my boyfriend to be a man. Plan C was Shay and other girlfriends who always promised to do anything for me.

  What I need now is a Plan D. D for desperate. D for do or die.

  Before dawn I pick my way through them. The ends of my crutches find spaces between smooth limbs and curled palms. I step over long hair splashed across plump pillows. They sleep like babies. I’m not mad at them. It’s not their fault they don’t know better.

  I swing above them and into the kitchen. Near the microwave is a handbag and, in it, a red purse. There’s a cropped photo of a happy young Shay, and two hundred bucks.

  ‘Sorry,’ I whisper. Another quick escape. Another mark against my name. This time, I’ll have to go further. I’ll go east, for real. As Mum said, Sort it out or leave for good.

  I catch a bus to Central Station, then buy a ticket for as far as I can afford. It’ll have to do, for now.

  A woman vacates the front seat for me. Reserved For Disabled Passengers, the sign says. I take it.

  I hold tight to my backpack. Inside is my mobile and charger, iPod and headphones, lip gloss, mascara, foundation, two T-shirts, trackpants, five pairs of undies, deodorant, driver’s licence, $416.80, a tube of pawpaw gel, a tub of Vitamin E moisturiser, and half a pack of OxyContin.

  The bus shakes as it warms itself up and lurches us into the cold, blue city. In every street, I see the ghost of myself staring back.

  I wish I’d packed a pillow to lean against the window. I wish I had more painkillers. I wish I had more money.

  More than anything, I wish I had a better fucking plan.

  15

  ZAC

  ‘Morning, sunshine.’

  Bec hands me a bucket and a long pair of gloves. I know I’m supposed to wear them while working with animals, but do they have to be pink?

  She notices my reaction. ‘Would you prefer Dad’s blue ones?’

  ‘God, no.’ We both know where those have been—Dad’s approach to animal husbandry is disturbingly hands-on. I snatch the pink gloves, pull gumboots over my trackpants and follow her.

  Our buckets chink with bottles of warm milk as we make our way up past the pens of goats and sheep. Most are awake, munching placidly on grass.

  We get a noisier reception in the hayshed. In one cage, week-old lambs bleat and push at each other, greedy and desperate. In another, three-day-old kids jig on back legs. They’re stupidly cute, with gummy eyes and snotty nostrils. Their entire bodies shake in anticipation of a feed, making me laugh. It’s almost worth getting out of bed for.

  Bec offers bottles to the lambs so I take the others for the kids, who pull so hard at the teats I have to hold my ground. For a few minutes there’s nothing but a choir of wet sucking. Yeah, this is worth getting out of bed for. But as soon as the bottles run dry, there’s total baa-ing, bleating madness.

  The birds are even louder. I unlatch the doors and roosters hustle past, crowing insults at the world. Short-man syndrome, Bec calls it, as they strut by. In the coop, chickens flap and squawk, as if this is a rude shock rather than the usual morning ritual. They flee the cage and scatter themselves across the hayshed and out to the grass, where they peck at leftover grains, and shit like they own the place.

  I move from cage to cage, refilling containers with fresh water and scattering handfuls of hay. Even ferrets, those evil, baby-eating doorstoppers, are easily pleased with food and water.

  There have been births in the night—I find two tiny guinea pigs and four fluffy chickens. There’s been a death too—the week-old rabbit that lasted longer than anyone expected. I lift out the runt and its siblings fill the gap.

  The sound of an engine cuts through the commotion. It’s Dad who’s driving the ute, towing a trailer loaded with rakes, tubs, ladders and ground sheets. On a quad bike, Evan rumbles close to the hayshed, sending up a cloud of dust, crap and disgruntled poultry.

  ‘Nice gloves,’ he shouts, before doing a doughnut and scooting down toward the Leccinos. I give him a pink finger but I reckon the intended impact is lost. What an arse.

  ‘Ignore him,’ says Bec.

  ‘He doesn’t have to rub it in.’

  Of all the jobs on the farm, picking is the best. Picking means long days of mucking around with Dad and backpackers with nicknames like Beaker, Suni, Giraffe and Wookie. Picking means setting nets under trees and raking at branches until the nets turn black with olives. Evan will inevitably show off with the pneumatic rake, shooting olives like bullets into unsuspecting faces. Then on hands and knees, they’ll all pull out twigs, leaves and rotten olives, and share stories from around the world. I’d give anything to be down there, hearing the first squeal of whichever girl mistakes a roo pellet for an olive, and the first yelp of whichever guy gets spooked by a frill-neck lizard. I want to see the tray overflowing again and again, to look back on an empty row and see what we’ve achieved, then end the day with aching muscles and new friends made and the sound of the Oliomio processor that goes into the night, Mum and Dad at the controls, sharing a bottle of wine to celebrate the first crush of the season.

  But I’m stuck up here with fluffy animals and pink rubber gloves. I scan the sheep cages for babies or dead bodies, but see neither. Either way, they’d have to be removed: newborns need to be taken away from opportunistic foxes; corpses have to be hidden from the sight of tourists. There were complaints last year when half a lamb was discovered by hysterical children. Visitors prefer their lambs to bleat, not decompose, apparently.

  A car arrives early. Doors slam and kids squeal.

  ‘Good luck.’ I hand Bec the wheelbarrow. School holidays are tough on everyone, especially the animals, who get squeezed like toys.

  I go in the other direction, swinging the dead rabbit up to the northern end of the farm. No Entry, the gate warns, separating the farm from the bushland next door. The Sydney-based owners have left the property the way they bought it twenty years ago: a thick mess of bottle brushes, sheoaks, marris and grass trees.

  I figure if I bring dead bodies to the vixen, she won’t be so tempted by the living. I know she’ll be watching me. She would have smelled the warm runt hanging from my glove. She’ll be keen—she’s got babies of her own to feed.

  I wonder if she can smell me too, the way the girls at school can: not death, but weakness. Vulnerability. I wonder if she senses I’m not as strong as I should be, caught in limbo between sickness and health. Achtung. Fragile.

  When she comes, she’s low and smooth. She watches me carefully, even though she knows I won’t hurt her. She recognises me from before, then pads further out, dissecting me with her eyes. She knows all about me, it seems.

  I lob the runt and it hits the ground between us.

  ‘Go on, have it. But stay away from the pens.’

  She snatches the runt and scampers back through the bush. It’s a simple transaction, without sadness or guilt. It’s just the food chain made real.

  I’ve been told not to think about death but it’s not easy. The booklet advises me to Recite positive affirmations. Stay in the present. Make plans for the future. Keep yourself busy. I shake the fence just to hear it rattle.

  I’m well, I tell myself. I’m fine. And so is she.

  ‘And that one over there is a baby.’ It’s Bec’s voice that eventually finds me. ‘You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but he’s a friendly beast with a gentle nature. He’ll eat a pie right out of your hand.’

  In a huddle, tourists snicker. Children giggle, enjoying the joke.

  Bec smiles smugly. ‘Though I’d recommend keeping your distance. His breat
h can be bad in the mornings.’

  I scratch my bum theatrically and jump off the gate. I walk past them, letting myself into the emu pen to collect the three green eggs that have rolled to the fence. I hand them to Bec then leave her to supervise the feeding of the emus.

  ‘Keep your palm flat!’ I hear from the hayshed. I snap off the pink gloves, drop them in a bin and head for home, passing the shop and alpaca pen. Mum’s walking towards me with a tray of hot scones.

  ‘Feel like making twenty cups of tea?’

  ‘So tempting,’ I say, ‘but Pride and Prejudice is waiting.’ English homework has got to be useful for something.

  ‘Still?’

  ‘I can’t rush it. It’s not like your Fifty Shades of Grey.’ But Mum’s already out of earshot, the scones steaming behind her.

  Sometimes that’s all it takes—a smell—to lasso me back to Room 1. A hand curling over my shoulder and Mia curving into the back of me. Her vanilla breath in the night.

  It stops me in my tracks. Breathe, I remind myself. Stay in the present.

  A joey sidles up to me and sniffs at my fingers. I show her an empty palm and give her a scratch behind the ears, even though I’m not supposed to. When she’s bored with me, she jumps towards the old shed and sniffs inside.

  Crammed with fifteen years of useless junk, the shed is a danger-zone of outdated farm equipment and crap left over from the last owner. There’d be rats and rusty nails and other hazards best avoided by a person with a compromised immune system.

  So I go in and let my eyes adjust. A small stepladder sways when I climb it. From here, I see stacks of timber, reminding me of year 10 Woodwork. I used planks like these to build a coffee table for Mum. It took me a term and a half to finish it, and then I built another one for Bec for Christmas. There’s good timber going to waste here, but how many coffee tables do people need?

  The idea takes shape before my eyes: a baby’s cot. Bec hasn’t bought one yet, and I know she’d prefer something handmade. Best of all, a baby’s cot would be ambitious and time-consuming—exactly the kind of project I need to keep myself in the present.

  To keep my mind off her.

  16

  Mia

  I haven’t come here for scones.

  The animals are cute, granted, but I haven’t come here for them either. I’m not a child.

  Inside the store, tourists dip cubes of bread into shallow bowls while a woman describes five flavours of oils. It looks like her, a bit slimmer maybe, with dyed hair. She seems nicer than in hospital, but then, you’d expect her to be nice to customers. She nods at tourists. Makes encouraging comments about the lightness and depth of olive oil. Shit, I haven’t come here for any of this.

  Yeah, I think it’s the mum. But Zac? I’m not sure. He walked right past me before, beside the emus. I didn’t care much for them either, with their beady eyes and strong beaks. He wasn’t scared though: he went in with them and came out holding three eggs in his pink gloves.

  There’s a paved path leading down to a gate with a hand-painted sign, which says, No Entry—Residence. Just past that, the guy is standing near a shed. A small kangaroo is beside him. Is it Zac? The hair’s short and dark. I hadn’t expected that. He’s better looking than I’d thought.

  I need to get closer but No Entry reminds the sign.

  I could call out his name, couldn’t I? But what if it’s not him? I’d look like a dumbass.

  And what if it is?

  He seems too tall. Then again, I never saw him standing.

  If I call his name and he turns, what would I shout? Remember me? The one you lied to? I wouldn’t care who heard me, either. He promised I’d be fine and he was wrong.

  But he steps into the shed and out of sight.

  Behind me, the driver herds the tour group from the shop and I go too. When he attempts to help me onto the bus I shrug him off. My crutches drive mud into each carpeted step. He waits until I’m safe in the front seat then he pulls away from the car park.

  It doesn’t matter if it was or wasn’t Zac. He wasn’t a part of Plan D anyway. He was just a side-trip to break up a long day.

  ‘You can’t use that,’ says the coach driver in town.

  I thrust the ticket back at him. ‘But I bought it this morning.’

  ‘It’s for a different route,’ he says, blowing smoke away from me. Why is he smoking so close to a bus, anyway? ‘Direct. It’s not a hop-on, hop-off service.’

  I laugh at the irony. All I can do these days is hop.

  ‘You should have got the hop-on, hop-off ticket if you wanted to go sightseeing.’

  ‘I don’t,’ I say. ‘I didn’t. Look, I’m going to Adelaide, it says, via Albany. Today.’

  He drops the butt and scuffs it into the cement. I hate it when people do that. Where do they think it’s going to go? It pisses me off big-time.

  ‘You can get on board if you’re that keen, but I’m heading to Pemberton. That way.’ He points. ‘The next coach to Albany doesn’t come through till tomorrow—’

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘You should be able to re-use the ticket, but you’d want to ring ahead to see if there’s a seat. School holidays and all.’ He shrugs. ‘Unlucky.’

  Fucker. At least he’s got something right.

  ‘You are lucky,’ the young guy at the hostel tells me.

  He’s got to be kidding.

  ‘You are lucky there is a bed.’ His clipped accent is hard to understand. ‘This time of season there is many fruit pickers.’ He notices my crutches then checks my face. I should have put on make-up. ‘You are picking?’

  I hold out 25 bucks and tell him I’ll return later. I’m not in the mood to spend the afternoon in a communal lounge.

  Instead, I go to the main street where I buy a sandwich and an iced coffee and sit on a bench near a butcher shop. Women spend ages in there. When they come out they stand on the footpath and gossip, their chops and sausages sweating through plastic. Stupid fucking people in a stupid fucking town.

  Across the road is a police station, its window plastered with photos of missing people. I go and look them over, all these men and women who are dead or pretending to be. Some were last seen before I was born.

  My face isn’t there. I wonder if Mum’s told the cops, the way she’d threatened to. I wonder if they’d bother with a poster for me. If so, what would it say?

  Missing: Mia Phillips. Seventeen-year-old female, currently with blonde bob. 164 centimetres. Crutches. Needs two more rounds of chemo and immediate medical attention. Suspected of theft and deception. Potentially dangerous.

  If a poster ever finds its way down here, I’ll be long gone. I’ve learned a lesson today—no more unplanned detours. Life doesn’t favour the curious. No more hopping on or off. No more trying my luck with bus drivers or girlfriends or ex-boyfriends or mothers or doctors or random strangers who once stayed in adjoining hospital rooms and fed me bullshit lies.

  Everyone lies. So just take your backpack and go, Mia. Go direct.

  Fuck ’em all.

  17

  ZAC

  The Oliomio processor clunks to a stop and the night inflates with quiet. I hear my parents creep their way alongside the house. Shhh, whispers Dad in the dark. I hear Mum giggle. Glasses clink. They close the front door behind them.

  In the processing shed, 6000 litres of cold-pressed oil will be freshly bottled. It was a decent harvest today, so Evan boasted, with another twelve rows to be picked and crushed tomorrow. It’ll happen again in a month with the Manzanillos. I’m hoping I can talk my way into it by then.

  I sleep with my head beneath the window, the curtain wide open. Even after fourteen weeks out of hospital, this feels important.

  It baffles me how the mess of the universe knows exactly what it’s doing, like it was all agreed upon 13 billion years ago and the galaxies have been following the rules ever since. They’re all up there, keeping in tempo and making perfect sense, whereas we humans screw up everything in t
he short time we’ve got.

  I hear footsteps on the grass that shouldn’t be there—Mum and Dad are inside and the alpacas should be sleeping by now. Perhaps one’s restless from the noisy night. Or it could be Sheba, who’s due to give birth soon.

  I listen. There are more footsteps, further away, then a soft grunt and a spit.

  I get up and lean my head and chest out of the window, my arms aching from the effort of heaving things around in the shed.

  It’s Daisy, the old alpaca. ‘Go to sleep, you tool.’

  But what I hear next is more human than animal. There’s a dull clunk in the darkness, then a flash of light. I see it up by the hayshed. Blue. Twice.

  I wrap the doona around me and hoist myself through the window. My Jack Russell, J.R., is already at my shin, whacking me with his tail. He trails me as I walk barefoot up the path, opening then closing the gate, but stays behind when I go to the hayshed. The chicken.

  Under the orange glow of small heat lamps, babies sleep peacefully in their cages, safe from foxes. They snuffle and dream.

  I sneak past them to find the source of the blue flash. On top of a pile of hay, the disc looks like a small UFO, sending beams in each direction. Blink, flicker, blink. I’d forgotten about this device, which Dad drags out each cubbing season. It’s supposed to scare off vixens, tricking them into believing humans are about.

  It worked on me, at least. I gather the doona tighter, trying to hold it above the dirt as I retrace my steps between pens, through the gate, and back down to the house. Sharp stars mock me. My bare feet are freezing.

  I crawl back through my window. Outside, Daisy grunts again.

  What an idiot: scared of a blue light. I pull down the window to keep out her whines.

  But Daisy’s not the only one who’s restless. Standing in my room, the walls suddenly feel too close, the air too quiet. I keep the doona about me, my ears ringing in the vacuum. There’s not a single whir or buzz or hum. Not even a breath.