Friday Brown

by Vikki Wakefield

  We stayed like that for what seemed like forever. The sun came up, a huge burning orb. A golden shaft of light poured through the window and cut like a laser across the floor.

  Still Vivienne waited.

  The burning beam crept onwards, across the dusty floor and over my leg, my arm, my face. It hit the snake full on. In slow motion, it blinked, and Vivienne struck. She clamped down on its tail, dragged the snake backwards and summoned her yellow-eyed dog.

  Croc had the final say. He’d die by snakebite—but not that day.

  Croc crushed the snake’s head between his teeth. He carried it to Vivienne and, when he dropped it at her feet, Vivienne picked up the carcass with her stick and threw it onto the fire.

  ‘We sat together, the three of us, and watched the snake burn until there was nothing left,’ I finished.

  It was Vivienne’s story, but now I’d made it my own. Vivienne had never been able to say with any surety what had happened in that room while she was gone, and the truth is, I couldn’t remember any of it. By making the story complete, it left me feeling like I’d finally taken ownership of my own memories. With her gone.

  Darcy and Carrie were speechless, gripping each other’s arms.

  Malik’s perpetually bored expression had softened into something like mild interest.

  Silence was staring at me like I was the new Messiah and AiAi was wide-eyed, his beer tipped over and soaked into the dust.

  Arden sighed. ‘That’s a great story.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. I waited for her smile to tell me she meant it.

  ‘What happened to the dog?’ AiAi asked.

  ‘I…I can’t remember. He died, I guess.’

  ‘And it’s a true story?’ Arden shifted in her deckchair until she was leaning forwards, her elbows pinned together on her knees, her chin in her hands. Watching me with an expression that was far too intent. ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘My mother told it to me. Many times.’ I hated the bubble in my throat. I hated that my voice had to squeeze past it to get out.

  ‘Did she really?’

  ‘Yes, she really did,’ I said, puzzled.

  ‘Fascinating, don’t you think,’ she said, ‘that the snake blinked. Snakes don’t have eyelids.’

  Malik barked a laugh.

  ‘What?’ In the back of my mind I knew this was fact. A fact that bored a hole through the middle of Vivienne’s story—and my memory.

  ‘I meant that the snake was blinded,’ I stammered.

  It didn’t matter anyway. The moment was gone. The memory was flawed. I was left with a sense of loss.

  Arden wasn’t finished.

  ‘I’ve heard that story before,’ she said. ‘I can even tell you who wrote it and what it’s called. It’s called The Drover’s Wife and Henry Lawson wrote it and if your mother told it to you and said it happened, that makes her a liar. And a thief.’

  Darcy snickered and put her hand over her mouth. ‘I knew she was full of shit.’

  Joe said, ‘Shut up, Darce,’ and wouldn’t look at me.

  Arden smiled. ‘Sorry to be the one to burst your bubble. Hey, like I said, it was a good story.’

  I was suddenly light-headed. I felt sick.

  In the quiet that followed, I saw my life in flashes. Every campfire tale that Vivienne had told, every edge of me that was defined by a memory, all the glittering recollections that stacked up to make me who I am—they were revisited. Not in a fast-forward, ‘you’re about to die’, flickering-vignette kind of way. It was more like seeing a magician’s act, exposed. I wasn’t a kid anymore, the one who believed without question. If I was honest, I hadn’t been for a long time.

  In that moment, doubt finally extinguished belief.

  I saw Vivienne’s invisible wires, the smoke and mirrors, her sleight of hand. It sounded like a good story. Why didn’t she just tell me the real version? I hated her. I hated her for leaving me, for leaving me half-done, for leaving me out of the joke. I was nothing, and it was her fault.

  I tried to stand but my legs had no substance. I blinked away tears but my chin wobbled. For something to do I grabbed a beer, opened it and slugged a mouthful. It was warm and gassy, unpleasant.

  Bree watched me, her eyes dark and shimmery. ‘AiAi, pass me a beer.’

  Joe said, ‘You know, you could say the same about every staunch little Christian. Doesn’t make them any less a Christian just because the Bible is a bunch of far-fetched stories that lasted more than one generation.’

  Carrie nodded. ‘What about the Dreamtime?’ She glanced at Bree. ‘Sorry. No offence.’

  Bree just shook her head.

  Silence’s features twisted into such intense fury he looked ten years older, a whole lot taller. He walked over to Arden and pointed his finger at her. ‘You’re mean,’ he rasped. ‘I hate you.’ He broke into a fit of coughing that doubled him over, but his finger stayed there.

  Arden flinched, recovered. She grabbed his finger and curled it under, then threw his hand away. ‘I’m just being honest. Get that out of my face.’

  Malik stood and shoved Silence hard in the chest.

  Silence landed on his back. He propped himself up on an elbow. His jeans were stained red with dust.

  Carrie and I moved to help him up but he pushed us away.

  He smiled at Arden, pointed his index finger again, and drew a line across his throat.

  ‘I hate you,’ he hissed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  We needed something good to happen.

  Sleep was restless, tangled. It turned out the church didn’t really count as shelter, not with so many gaps and missing windows. The wind started at around midnight; it sucked and blew and played the old church like a woodwind instrument. I woke often. So did the others. We staggered into a washed-out morning and a fine, misty rain.

  Arden and Malik left early to get supplies.

  ‘Looks like we’re stuck here for a few more days.’ Bree watched them leave. ‘Imagine if they didn’t come back? We’d probably die out here and nobody would even know where to look.’

  ‘Nah,’ said Joe. He looked up. ‘Don’t forget the eye in the sky.’

  AiAi took him literally and scanned the clouds.

  ‘People probably come here all the time,’ I said. ‘Photographers. History buffs. I don’t think we’re truly isolated.’

  ‘Not like your hut, huh?’ Darcy sniped. ‘Bet that was a long way from anywhere.’

  ‘Hey, Darcy. Something for you.’ Carrie pretended to reach into her back pocket, then flipped out her middle finger.

  Joe laughed.

  Silence mooched past us without a glance, his hands in his pockets, hood pulled tight around his face.

  ‘I’ll see if he’s okay,’ I said and went after him.

  I followed him all the way down to the dry riverbed. Except it wasn’t dry anymore.

  ‘It’s flowing!’ I said. Fresh water—here was our good thing. ‘It could be melting snow from far away. Or maybe there’s an underground spring somewhere.’

  The tea-coloured puddles were gone, washed away by a trickle that skipped over rocks and carried on.

  Silence nodded and prodded the surface with a stick. It was clear and only a few centimetres deep. We could wash properly and the water would be safer for drinking than the stuff in the rusting tanks.

  ‘Hey, Silence. We could build a dam. Then it’ll be deep enough for a bath.’

  I took off my shoes. Rolled my jeans up to my knees. The water was icy and tickled my feet. I carried pile after pile of round, smooth stones in my T-shirt and started stacking them to build a wall across the river.

  At first, not much happened. The water found its way between the stones and trickled away. Then, as the wall grew wider and the stones settled into each other, a small lagoon of calm water pooled around my feet.

  Silence watched from the bank, his arms looped around his knees.

  ‘Are you going to help me, or what?’

  Reluct
antly, he started to untie his laces. He skidded down the bank and inched into the water.

  I wondered if he’d ever paddled his feet before, the way he was looking at them, as if they were alien parasites attached to his body.

  Suddenly he sat in the pool, soaking his clothes. His teeth clacked together, but he was smiling. He washed his clothes while he was still in them, kneading and squeezing, until the pool was clouded with dirt.

  ‘Good idea. But wouldn’t it be better if we took them off?’

  Silence looked up at me. He mouthed a challenge.

  My teeth were chattering too, but I wanted so badly to be clean.

  I took off my T-shirt, leaving my skin-coloured bra. It had been white, once. I pulled down my jeans and threw them over the other side of the wall where the water rushed through. I sat next to Silence in the pool and drew my knees up to my chest.

  ‘Strip,’ I told him. ‘I am not going to be the only blue person in this river.’

  He hesitated, then pulled his hoodie up slowly over his shoulders. He struggled—it was waterlogged and got stuck.

  I reached over and peeled it gently over his face. I tried not to look. We were shy with each other. He turned his face away. I looked elsewhere, anywhere but at him. I tossed the hoodie onto my pile of clothes and sat back down. It was inevitable that we did look at each other, eventually.

  What I saw. Oh, what I saw.

  Silence’s pale, boyish arms and body were marked with vicious, red circles, raised, knotty scars that formed a map of pain. His chest was white and slightly concave. A couple of ribs protruded so sharply they seemed ready to burst through his skin. On both inner forearms, matching vertical scars ran from his wrists almost halfway to his elbows.

  I reached out my hand and ran a fingertip over one of the circles. They were all small and round, exactly the same size, randomly scattered, like he’d faced a firing squad and lived to walk away.

  ‘Did you do this to yourself?’

  He shook his head, No.

  I released the pent-up pressure in my throat by clearing it. I was relieved, but it didn’t last.

  Silence claimed the scars on his wrists as his own. I did this.

  But I knew that, even then. Those scars were personal, by a person who had nowhere else to go but oblivion.

  ‘I…’ I couldn’t speak. My eyes were filling up and my vision was blurred.

  It’s okay.

  This kid, with scars and a history that sickened me, was looking at me with compassion. He’d lived a life of terror and come through it with his heart open. His blue eyes were welling up too, but it was me he was upset for. A faint blue hue outlined his lips. He reached out with a cold hand and clamped it over mine.

  It’s okay.

  But it wasn’t. It was pretty far from okay.

  ‘Vivienne used to say that sometimes the best you can do is try not to be one of the bastards,’ I said.

  I wished it was that simple. I used to believe in karma. If it existed, the innocents would be safe in palaces and the bastards would be picking each other off in the streets. Silence wouldn’t have been stealing and his ribs would be in the right place. AiAi wouldn’t rattle when he walked and Joe could kiss whoever he liked.

  ‘We can start over, somewhere. I won’t leave without you. But I can’t stay here. That’s what we were going to do, anyway. Weren’t we? The night before the squat burned down?’

  Silence looked sharply over his shoulder. He withdrew his hand and dragged it to and fro under the water as if he was conducting a symphony.

  ‘What happened? Why can’t you tell me?’

  He shook his head and, in the shadows, his cheeks looked hollow.

  The water was too cold to stay there for much longer. We wrung out our clothes and hung them over a branch. Where the pool overflowed we bowed our heads and rinsed our hair, then climbed up onto the bank. Sunlight made camouflage patterns on our chilled skin and soon my blood was flowing again.

  Out of the shade, the heat was intense.

  ‘Where have you two been? Why are you all wet?’ Darcy asked.

  ‘Take me there,’ Carrie said and held her filthy shirt away from her body. ‘I don’t care if cows have shat in it or fish have fucked in it—wherever it is, take me there. Oh my God, you’re so clean.’

  Within a few hours, despite everyone having a bath in the pool, we were dusty again. The trees along the river were draped with dripping clothes. With Carrie and Joe’s help, we raised the dam wall high enough to hold back a metre of water. I boiled litres and litres of the stuff and refilled both water containers while Darcy sat and watched.

  A box of muesli bars and a few packets of chips were the only edible food left. Everything else had been mauled by bull ants, thousands of them, in our clothes, our beds—everywhere. I poured petrol down into the nests but they were relentless.

  ‘Jesus, it’s hot,’ Carrie complained. ‘We seriously need to get out of this hellhole.’

  ‘I concur,’ Joe said. ‘On both points.’

  We’d been lucky. It hadn’t been that hot yet, but that day there was a taste of the summer to come. There was nothing to do but chase the shade. Darcy’s nose and shoulders were pink and raw. Joe had a wet T-shirt tied around his head. I’d forgotten how changeable the land was; one minute, it was green, and the next, brown. If you listened, you could hear the bush crackle and retreat.

  When Arden and Malik finally got back in the late afternoon, they were mobbed. The one thing I asked for—deodorant—they managed not to get.

  Arden eyed the refilled water containers and raised an eyebrow.

  ‘We have a creek now,’ Carrie said.

  Arden reached in the back of the troop carrier and hauled out a box of spring water. ‘Here. You wanted water, you got water,’ she said, and heaved it in my direction. The cardboard split, the bladder inside burst, and litres drained away into the thirsty ground.

  Mud spattered up my legs.

  ‘We need more water,’ Arden mimicked me. ‘Bloody drama queen.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  That night we cooked our first real dinner.

  Arden had bought two chickens, which we roasted in a cast-iron camp oven. It was too new, nothing like the battered old pot Vivienne and I carted from place to place. Malik didn’t season it properly and wouldn’t listen when I tried to tell him how to do it. Half the meat burned and stuck to the bottom. We wrapped potatoes in foil and cooked them slowly, buried in hot coals. I mixed flour, salt and water and kneaded a lump of damper dough. It rose like it was supposed to and even tasted a bit like heaven. If everything had a slight charcoal flavour, no one complained. Dessert was toasted marshmallows and vodka and cranberry from a cask and, for the first time since we’d left the city, we were halfway to thinking that life was good.

  Arden was trying too hard with Silence. She served him extra food and topped up his drink after every mouthful. She put her hand on his shoulder like she was dipping a toe in water, testing—and he shrugged her off. She asked him a question and he ignored her.

  I watched them circling each other and wondered exactly when she had lost his devotion. It ran deep in him, as it did with the others, but he’d turned hard and unforgiving. It hurt her, I could tell.

  ‘Want to go for a walk?’ I asked him after we’d cleaned up. I was at that point where alcohol makes you feel like everything’s right with the world. ‘Come on.’ I picked up a torch and trained the beam on a distant clump of bushes. Something flapped and skittered away into the night.

  No way. Silence made a spider with his hand and walked it along his arm. He shook his head again.

  ‘Chicken,’ I nudged him.

  When I set off along the winding track that ran past the pub, he followed.

  Near the edge of the bush, where the trees started to thicken, there was an old water tank perched on a lopsided framework of stilts. A ladder was propped up against it. The tank seemed sound enough, but when I tapped on the outside it rang holl
ow.

  ‘It’s not connected to anything,’ I said. ‘I’m going up.’

  Silence shrugged and held the torch when I handed it to him. He heard a noise in the space under the tank and bolted up the ladder after me.

  The roof of the tank was about four metres above the ground. It was covered in a layer of eucalyptus leaves and twigs. There was a square opening with a screwed-down lid on the far side.

  I used a leafy branch to sweep a space for us to sit.

  ‘Look. You can see for miles from up here.’

  We could see the warm halo of the campfire, the shadowy mounds of distant hills and brilliant, scattered stars above. The tin was still warm against my back when I stretched out, my hands cupped behind my head.

  Silence looked over the edge and sighed. He dropped down next to me.

  ‘It’s okay. It’s perfectly safe,’ I reassured him.

  A far-away creature called a long, plaintive moan. A rogue current of air parted the trees like an invisible serpent.

  Silence was rigid beside me.

  ‘Silence?’

  Yeah.

  ‘That stuff you wrote. About being nothing.’

  Yeah.

  ‘I don’t think you’re nothing.’

  He grabbed my hand and held it.

  ‘You know, since my mother died, I’ve been trying to figure out who I am and where I belong,’ I confessed. ‘All I have is a bunch of stories and memories that aren’t even real. And that kind of leaves me feeling like nothing, too. So, I get it—why you would feel like that.’

  Silence squeezed my hand.

  He was looking up at the stars, but not, I think, because they were so close they seemed suspended between earth and space. He was still, not blinking, because his eyes were filling up like that dammed pool and he was trying to hold back his tears. But the water always finds a way through, even when you pile those stones high and deep—eventually it finds a way.

  Silence pointed his finger and drew lines between the stars, one by one.

  ‘They’re ours tonight,’ I told him. ‘If someone like you can come from this,’ I touched his hidden scars, ‘then there’s hope for all of us.’ I let my hand fall away. ‘But not Darcy. She’s beyond hope.’