‘It could be a loose roof sheet. Or a rattling pole. It’s just the wind,’ she said. ‘It’s okay. Go back to sleep.’
‘I want to go and check,’ I said.
She waved the knife. ‘I’ve heard of people being sliced in half by flying corrugated iron,’ she mused. ‘Better stay inside. It’s nothing. There’s only us. It’s just the wind,’ she crooned. ‘Everyone, go back to sleep.’
The tip of the knife followed me as I lay down and covered myself.
I waited.
An hour later, Arden was asleep. Hard asleep. Her long, matted hair fanned out over her pillow, snaking onto the floor. The knife had slipped out of her grasp.
I took it. I slipped outside and crept around to the side of the church. The hatch door had been opened. The weeds surrounding it were trodden flat, oily handprints marked the edge.
I used the point of Arden’s knife to prise it up. It swung open easily.
I didn’t know what I expected to find. Most of all, I prayed that Silence would appear out of the dark. But he didn’t. There was nothing alive down there. The air was still and dead. It was sucking emptiness, a vacuum.
The torch beam moved over shadowy, twisted shapes covered with decades of dust and dirt. A steep flight of steps led down, down and the dark pressed closer. My heart raced. I started shaking and couldn’t stop.
I took a deep breath. Footprints in the dust. I stepped into them. I followed them to a corner where they stopped near a dark, huddled mass on top of a mouldering crate.
Underneath a sheet of canvas that crackled and dissolved in my hands, I found Silence’s things.
The knife was cold and certain in my fist. I leaned close enough to smell the sweetness of Arden’s breath. Everything was wrong; her breath should be foul. She should be hideous. She should be dead.
I raised the knife and ran my fingertip along the blade. I left a bloody fingerprint on her pillow.
It was like cutting through an umbilical cord. I considered leaving her dreadlock lying next to my fingerprint—but that would have been too dangerous. It wasn’t the time for petty gestures.
So I placed the knife back where I’d found it. I tucked the dreadlock into my pocket.
A talisman, to keep.
It was the longest night. An unbearably bright morning. I hadn’t slept and I staggered outside, squinting.
I went through the motions. Packed my things, chattered about returning to the city to find Silence. I accepted heartfelt hugs and goodbyes from Bree, Carrie and Joe.
Arden relaxed. She was upbeat, full of energy. She couldn’t wait to get out of there.
Finally, Arden and Malik started the car. The others stood by, ready to wave us off.
‘Let’s go. We’ll drop you in town.’
I looked at Arden and tried to remember what it was that I’d found so charismatic in the beginning. The light slanted away from her, as if repelled. She was so beautiful, and always would be, but now I could see all her shades of crazy. How off she was. How nature made its most deadly creatures alluring precisely so they could lure their victims close.
Maybe that was the thing about beginnings—they always seemed better than middles or endings. And if I only ever had beginnings and my past was so perfect, then the future would never measure up. I didn’t want to live like that.
‘There’s nothing here for you anymore,’ Arden said.
How many times had I told myself that?
I knew for sure in that instant—it was only ever what you did today that counted and I’d promised Silence I wouldn’t leave without him.
I shook my head. ‘I’m staying.’
‘What?’ She had a moment of confusion that morphed into fear. ‘Get in the car.’
I smiled. ‘I won’t make it on my own. I want to stay.’ I linked an arm through Bree’s and kept my expression blank.
The effort was too much. My nose started to drip.
‘We’ll be ready to go when you get back,’ Joe said.
With the others looking on, there wasn’t much she could do. ‘You’re bleeding,’ she said and wound up the window. The troop carrier sprayed us with dust.
Bree stared at me. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘What’s going on?’
‘I have proof,’ I said, wiping my nose. The blood was pink and thin. ‘Maybe now you’ll believe me. We have to find him.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
AiAi went lookout. Carrie wandered off into the bush. Darcy and Joe took the outbuildings, haysheds and water tanks. Bree and I scrambled under the church.
Bree went down first. I hesitated at the opening. I took slow, calming breaths as she disappeared into the murk. Could I face it again, that crypt-like deadness, the ceiling pressing down like the lid on a coffin?
‘What if we don’t find him?’ Bree called.
I thought of Silence’s things, hidden in the crawlspace. His sleeping bag, shucked and loose as a discarded sock. Clothes, a rusted razor, his toothbrush—too many things left behind. I remembered his notebook, etched with all the things he wanted to say, but couldn’t.
‘What if we do?’ I called back. I shook off my dizziness and followed her.
‘You know that Darcy or AiAi will tell her we’ve been looking, don’t you?’
‘Yes. I don’t care anymore.’
We huddled close with a single torch, crept through the labyrinth of boxy storage spaces with a ceiling so low we had to squat in places. The bobbing disc of light caught on pieces of furniture entwined like new-age sculptures, broken pews and crates of gold-leafed Bibles stacked high.
The air under the church had been used up long ago. It reeked of mildew and old things turning to dust. We had wisps of webs in our hair, dust in our lashes and cold sweat on our skin. Bree caught her leg on a rusted nail. A trickle of blood travelled from her knee to her ankle.
Each dark corner led to another. My bones ached with cramp and cold. We breathed through our mouths, shuddering relief when the rush of old air from some hidden, closed-up space proved to be just that—old air.
The shout, when it came, made me jump. It sounded far away and I couldn’t tell who it was, but the pitch was unmistakeable.
Bree grabbed my hand. I could feel the vibration of her fear. We shimmied out of the hatch door and ran blindly until we could hear voices.
Carrie and Darcy were waiting at the base of the old tank.
‘What?’ I gasped.
‘Joe is in there,’ Darcy said. She hooked her thumbs in her belt loops and rocked on her heels, looking down at the ground.
‘What?’ I said again, gagging on the word.
Carrie shook her head and bit down on her lip.
I scrambled up the ladder and shone my torch into the black hole.
Joe was standing with his back to the wall. His breaths came quick and shallow. A flickering torch was lying half-sunk in wet leaves. I traced the direction of his stare.
‘No,’ I breathed.
Silence was curled up under a blanket of leaves, like a sleeping child. He looked peaceful, as if someone had covered him over and tucked him in tight. The pale moon of his cheek was blue, blue as a fragile egg, and his forelock fringe was neatly brushed aside. His bare foot poked through the leaves; his fist was in the air; and all around him the proof that he’d died as he’d lived—without hope.
Breath left my lungs in a whoosh. The sky tilted and I grabbed the edge of the ladder to keep myself from falling.
Joe watched in horror as I lowered myself into the tank. I had to touch Silence one last time.
I passed the back of my hand across his cold cheek. I kissed his cold lips and pulled his hood over his face. All essence of him was gone.
Joe snapped out of his trance. He lurched from the muck with a rude, sucking sound. Wordlessly, he passed me his torch and a handful of sharp, cold metal. He hoisted himself onto the roof of the tank and lay there, heaving.
Above me, a piece of sky, benign and blue.
Joe pu
lled me back up. Out on the roof, where Silence and I had claimed the stars, I opened my hand and stared at Joe’s offering.
‘They were screwed in,’ he said. ‘From the outside. He couldn’t get out even if he…’ his voice broke.
‘Maybe he climbed in there. Maybe he was hiding,’ Darcy said from below, her eyes bleak.
My hand flew up. I threw the four rusted, metal screws at her.
‘Did he tighten these up, Darce?’ I yelled. ‘Did he screw them down so tight he couldn’t get out once he was done hiding? How could he do that from the inside?’
These were the images in my mind that would play forever: Silence sleeping, his raised, defiant fist, muddy claw-marks on the walls of the tank, ten thousand dings and dents. He’d tried so hard to get out. And all the while he would have screamed in his useless old man’s rasp as the knee-high muck he stood in sucked up precious oxygen.
When we’d all woken to the strange, rhythmic clanging, Arden had reassured us. She’d crooned like a den mother. Had never seemed more benevolent and human. Nothing can hurt us here. Because there’s only us. And we’re family. It’s just the wind.
Or the strike of a rock on tin. Like the one Silence had clenched in his fist.
‘They’re back,’ AiAi puffed, white-eyed, skittish as a foal. ‘They’re coming. What’s going on? Did you find anything?’
Joe slid down the ladder, mindless of daggered splinters in the palings. He folded in half and collapsed onto the ground. His face was white and slack; his hands shook as he tried to light the nub of a burnt-out cigarette.
Carrie hugged herself and rocked, her jaw juddering.
Darcy, kneeling in the dirt, her hands over her face, her fingers interlinked like a church and steeple. Praying.
Bree moaning, No, no, no.
‘Did you find him? Did you find Silence?’ AiAi’s eyes darted around to each of us, trying to piece together a picture from all those fragments of grief.
I slumped on the roof of the tank, visible for miles. I didn’t care. My limbs felt leaden, like I was getting the flu. My feet were stained dark. Everything was painfully acute: the cooling tin on the back of my legs, the slow slug of tears on my cheek, the stink of damp and death.
And something else, a quickening, white-hot in my veins.
‘We can’t let on that we’ve found him.’ My voice was flat, dead. ‘Not until we’re away from here. I’ll get us all out somehow, but she can’t know. Darcy?’
She nodded, her chin tucked into her chest. ‘I still don’t believe she could do this.’ Her fingers plucked at a matted strand of her hair. ‘She loves Silence.’
‘Loved,’ said Bree. ‘She loved him.’ She took AiAi’s hand and put a finger against his lips. ‘You’ve gotta keep a secret, mate.’
Carrie said. ‘It’s six against two. We’ve got to take the car and go.’
‘How do we do that?’ Joe asked. ‘None of us is a match for either of them.’
Darcy’s face was set in a combination of despair and disbelief. She was torn, and AiAi didn’t count. If Arden told him to do something, he would. His devotion ran that deep. It was four against four—the bases were evenly loaded.
I climbed down the ladder.
‘How did you know?’ I asked Joe. I’d been looking in all the wrong places. I should have sensed something—I should have known where to look.
Joe pointed at the tank. ‘The other side,’ he said. He hugged his knees and buried his face in the crook of his arms.
I followed his footprints in the dust and looked up. On the outside wall of the tank, Silence’s name was etched in the rust and the dirt. Seven high, chalky-white letters. He’d written big, just like I told him to.
A few kilometres away, at the edge of the desert, a plume of dust rose and settled behind the troop carrier.
I watched them come.
There was nothing else to do but seal him up again, a pale comma curled on a bed of rotting leaves. Some things aren’t meant for this world. They’re too fragile, and life breaks them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Fresh grief feels like this:
Your mind is a maze and every pathway leads to a bricked-up wall, the one where you can see the real world just on the other side, but you can’t reach it. It’s a feeling like someone’s scooped out your insides with a spoon and all that’s left is a shell that walks like you and talks like you, but your body and soul have parted ways for a time. Your senses don’t fire and you can’t connect with another human being because to string all that grief together like a strand of paper dolls would create something as powerful as an atom bomb—you’d implode. So you’re all alone. And, for a short while, at least until it sinks in, you can fake anything.
I watched the others go about their business. They didn’t look at each other. Their movements were jerky. They all seemed to have found something interesting at ground level. I knew from experience that this was normal: to divide and separate like oil droplets on water. It was instinctive, animal self-preservation.
Start packing, I told them. The sooner we get out of here the sooner we can get help for Silence.
That was stupid, of course. He was so far from saving. I meant justice. That’s what I meant.
The troop carrier pulled up. Arden and Malik had returned too soon—a round trip took three hours and they had been gone for less than one. Which meant something had made them turn the car around.
I went into the church. I erased all signs that I’d been there. I put on my boots. They were heavy and uncomfortable. I rolled my swag as tightly as I could, using my body weight to squeeze all the spaces out. I pressed so hard that the rough canvas chafed the skin off my knuckles. While I was looking around for anything I’d missed, Arden stepped through the entrance.
We took each other in.
Her: tall, imposing in her combat boots, impossibly clean.
Me: small, barefoot, filthy and scared.
My knees were knocking, my nose was blocked, my eyes ached from dust and tears—but I had hate. In that moment it was huge and whole, filling up the empty space that losing Silence and Vivienne had left inside.
‘You’re back early,’ I said. My tone was blasé. Exactly how I wanted to sound.
‘The road is flooded about twenty kilometres out,’ she said. She fingered the stump of her dreadlock. ‘We’ll have to try another way.’ She frowned at me. ‘Are you okay?’
‘I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?’
She touched her fingertip to the raw skin under my eyes. ‘You look like you’ve been crying.’
‘It’s the dust.’ I backed away.
Arden turned and stood with her back to me. She hit her forehead with the flat of her palm. ‘Think, Arden, think!’ she hissed.
My dread rose another notch.
‘We need to head for higher ground,’ I offered. Even to me, my voice sounded paper-thin.
Arden shook her head. ‘We just wasted half a tank of fuel. You don’t get it, do you? I’m responsible for lives. They depend on me.’
‘We’re not as isolated as you think. We’ll just get as far as we can. Someone will come…’
Play it out. Make her calm down. Keep her focused. We need to leave, or at least try to, before her wheels fall off altogether.
Arden grabbed my hand. She squeezed it twice, let it drop and touched her hair again.
I felt her fear and indecision and, for a split-second, I pitied her.
She got me good with her sucker punch.
‘You found him, didn’t you?’ She looked so sad.
I watched her finger that frayed end and I knew. It was my fault. I was the reason they’d turned back. I’d blown everything. Now we were all witnesses she needed to erase.
I coughed to kickstart my heart. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I whispered.
For an instant she looked confused. But she must have seen something in my eyes, my expression. I’d given myself away.
‘It was an accident
,’ she said. ‘He must have had an asthma attack. He just stopped breathing.’ Her breath caught and her eyes glazed over. ‘I didn’t want you all to be upset. It was easier to let you think…’
‘He’s been keeping his inhaler in his pocket since we’ve been here,’ I said carefully. ‘Because of the dust.’
‘Look at you,’ she said and stared down at my feet. ‘You’re filthy.’
There were muddy marks, halfway up my calf, from where my feet had sunk into the wet leaves inside the tank.
Arden shook her head again, touched the stump. ‘And this…’ she sighed. ‘I suppose the others know, too?’
‘Just me. I found him. Only me…’ I lied.
Arden started to cry. ‘Why would he get in there? I told him to hide, not commit suicide.’
‘Did you check?’
‘Did I what?’ She looked away.
‘Did you get in there and check? Did you touch him? Before you screwed down the…’
‘He was dead.’ She still wouldn’t look at me.
‘He was still alive last night. You heard him. You knew!’ I screamed. I flew at her with my fists but she batted me away.
Malik came. He stood in the doorway, saying nothing, as always. Just there.
I sat down hard on the floor. ‘You knew and you let him die,’ I cried. ‘You could have done something.’
‘Shut up,’ she hissed and put her hands over her ears. ‘Shutupshutupshutup.’
For a full minute there was nothing but the sound of our breathing. The dust I’d kicked up hovered in the air. Arden rocked herself. Malik put his hand on her shoulder and she jerked away.
She gave a tiny smile. ‘He was my first,’ she mused. ‘I found him in the station, sitting there. He’d been waiting for days, waiting for Amy to come back. He’d still be there if I hadn’t saved him.’
‘Where did you take him that night? Before you burned down the squat?’ I asked her. I needed to know why Silence had been different after that, even more lost.
‘He wanted to leave. With you.’ She gave me a look loaded with disdain. ‘So I took him to places we used to go. You know, we hung out. I reminded him of all the good things. I thought they meant something to him.’ She sneered. ‘And he said he was still leaving.’
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