The Whole Bright Year

by Debra Oswald

  Kieran moved backwards, towards the road. ‘Okay. I’ll stay off your property. But I can’t go away. She’ll come back here. I’m sorry to be a shit. But I’ll do whatever I have to do to see her. You can’t make me go away.’

  Celia roared at him and he turned, running through the orchard, over the fence and off the property.

  Once Kieran was out of her line of sight, Celia dropped the lump of wood. ‘I should go to Sydney. Find her.’

  ‘Where? The boy can’t give you any useful information,’ Roza pointed out. ‘You saw how he was. And what if he’s right? What if Zoe comes back here?’

  ‘He seems so sure she’s coming home.’

  ‘He does.’

  Later in the afternoon, when the sun was almost gone and the cold was seeping through the ground, Roza walked from her cottage along the public roadway to where the boy was waiting. From the spot he’d chosen, he would see any person driving through Celia’s farm gate and could see the very edge of the garden around the house.

  ‘Are you planning to stay out here all night?’ Roza asked. ‘This is a stupid thing. There is a bed for you in my house and hot food too.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘but no thanks.’

  For the next two nights and days, Kieran waited in his spot on the roadside near Celia’s front gate. There was some rain during this time, enough to soak the boy’s clothes through to the skin. And in the mornings, there was frost over the ground that must have bitten through to his bones. But he did not budge himself.

  Celia patrolled the orchard and the driveway to make sure the boy stayed off the place. She yelled ‘Piss off!’ like someone snarling at a stray dog. Kieran did not budge himself. He was afraid that if he moved from his watching spot, he would miss Zoe coming home. Roza could also see that the bitter conditions, his poor battered face, Celia’s vicious shouting – the young man thought he deserved such punishment.

  Late on the third day, Roza walked up to find Celia in the yard of the packing shed.

  ‘I think you need to talk to the boy,’ said Roza. ‘Two nights he’s been out there.’

  Celia shrugged. ‘If I could get the police to drag him away, I would.’

  ‘But all he wants —’

  ‘If he can’t help me find her, he’s no use to me,’ snapped Celia and walked inside the shed.

  Some people might consider Roza was being an interfering mad old lady when she walked down the driveway and signalled to Kieran, beckoning him towards her. But it was Roza’s opinion that sometimes mad old ladies should interfere.

  A few moments later, when Celia emerged from the shed, the young man was standing right in front of her. Taken by surprise, Celia stopped, silent. Kieran, too, was speechless, unsure he had any right to request anything from this woman. Roza had to gesture to him – Speak.

  ‘I was wondering if . . . Has Zoe called you? You don’t have to tell me if she’s called. I mean, that’s your right.’

  ‘She hasn’t called.’

  ‘I tried to get her to ring you heaps of times. I should’ve tried harder. I should’ve made her do it. I’m really sorry.’

  ‘Are you?’ Celia’s stared at him, harsh.

  ‘Yes. Yes. I’m so sorry. I messed everything up. I know that.’

  She watched him, her body rigid, determined to feel nothing for this boy.

  Kieran was shaking, from hunger or injury or distress – probably from all of these. He rubbed both his hands over his face, as if he could clear his mind that way. ‘I don’t mean to, but I make dumb, dumb, dumb mistakes and . . . everything gets stuffed up.’

  The roughness of his hands was tearing off the scabs.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ said Celia, firmly. ‘You’re making yourself bleed.’

  Kieran didn’t seem to notice and kept rubbing his hand back and forth across his ravaged skin. ‘I want you to know . . . please know I’m sorry . . . I’m really sorry.’

  ‘Hey. Look what you’re doing.’ Celia took a step towards him and grabbed one of his wrists to pull it away from his face. ‘Don’t do that to yourself.’

  Kieran looked down at his hands, the palms bloody from the reopened cuts.

  ‘What happened to your face?’ she asked him.

  ‘Oh . . . uh . . . I fell.’

  ‘Your shoulder should have had stitches.’

  Kieran swayed a little, groggy on his feet.

  ‘Sit down a minute. Don’t fall over.’ Celia kept her tone hard and unyielding, as if her main concern was not wanting him to bleed inconveniently on her property.

  Roza ducked into the shed and by the time she came back out, Kieran had managed to stumble across a few steps to sit on a pile of wooden pallets.

  Roza held out the first-aid box she’d fetched from inside. ‘My old-lady hands are too shaky for this job.’

  Celia flashed a dirty look at Roza but then she took the first-aid kit and propped it open on the pallets. Steadfastly avoiding eye contact with Kieran, she began to methodically clean up the wounds on his face and shoulder.

  ‘Keep still,’ she said and the boy obeyed. She soaked cotton wool in antiseptic to dab on the broken skin. ‘This will sting.’

  ‘No worries. Thanks. Already hurts anyway. Thanks.’

  Maybe Celia enjoyed inflicting the little stabs of pain on him, but she was also doing a careful job of cleaning the cuts and taping gauze over the worst ones. Roza was of the belief that it was possible for a person to sustain two strong and apparently conflicting impulses at the same time – a desire, for example, to slice this young man into small agonised pieces and an inclination to care for the injured creature in front of her.

  ‘When you last saw Zoe, how was she?’ Celia asked him.

  ‘I want you to know, things were great. I mean, to begin with, things were great. Me and Zoe looked after each other. And I was trying to fix things. But then everything got messed around. We ended up getting separated.’

  Celia stepped away from Kieran in order to throw the used cotton wool in an empty box but also, Roza suspected, in order to move away from this boy she was tempted to smash.

  Kieran was full of tears now, too distressed to speak clearly. ‘You’ve gotta believe I would never do anything to hurt Zoe. I thought we could look after each other. Please believe me. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’

  When Celia turned round, she was startled to see the boy had slid himself off the pallets and onto the ground right at her feet. He grabbed onto her legs, like a small child in the supermarket mistaking a stranger’s legs for their mother’s. But this wasn’t a confused toddler. This was the young man who had stolen away her daughter.

  Kieran wept, big sobs tearing out from his belly. Celia stood there, paralysed. Eventually, she lifted her hand and Roza wondered if she was going to punch him in the head. But, in fact, she just touched his hair. The boy cried for a long time, and Celia realised she couldn’t ask him any more questions in this state.

  Finally, she extricated herself from Kieran and walked away, speaking to Roza in a voice as dry and flat as she could manage. ‘I suppose he can sleep in the cabin tonight.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Roza. ‘Yes. I’ll bring blankets and food from my house. Don’t you worry about it, Celia.’

  In the morning, Celia stirred several teaspoons of sugar into a thermos of milky tea, knowing that Kieran liked to drink things sweet. She put the thermos in a string bag, along with a cheese sandwich, an apple, a clean shirt and a warm sweater.

  Walking down through the orchard, she was surprised to see the cabin door wide open. Maybe he had scarpered during the night. Celia wasn’t sure whether she would be relieved or disappointed to find Kieran gone. His appearance on the property was maddening, but he was also, in his frustrating, hopeless way, the only connection she had to her daughter.

  Closer, she could see he was still inside the cabin, asleep on one of the lower bunks. He must have wedged the door open to get rid of the fusty smell inside, left to go mouldy during that damp winter with no
one around to air the place out.

  Celia stood outside for a moment and watched the sleeping young man tucked inside a nest of blankets and eiderdowns Roza had brought him. The small cuts on his face were scabbed over again and the deeper ones had only bled through the gauze a little. The wounds looked okay, not infected. Apart from the injuries, Kieran’s face looked different, possibly transforming into his adult face, or maybe just temporarily showing the strain of recent ordeals.

  When he eventually woke and saw Celia watching him through the doorway, he jerked his body upright as far as he could in the limited space of the bunk. ‘Oh . . . Sorry, sorry.’

  Was he sorry for waking up, or for not waking up sooner? Maybe he was stung with remorse simply for being in Celia’s field of vision, apologising for his very existence. And so he should, the little shit.

  ‘I brought you some food, clothes,’ she said, and slid the string bag through the door of the cabin without stepping inside.

  ‘Thanks. Sorry. Far out, you don’t need to do anything for me. Sorry you have to put up with – fuck – sorry . . . Thanks. Thank you.’

  To stop him blathering out thanks and apologies, Celia nodded briskly and left.

  At the house, she made phone calls – the police, hospitals, the private investigator she was still paying too much money – but without mentioning Kieran. Several times, she lifted the phone to ring the cops back and dob him in, have the bastard arrested. Each time, as she listened to the dial tone, a flare of anger burned along her sternum. But each time, she hesitated, then dropped the receiver back in the cradle. She didn’t want to cause trouble for Zoe.

  Later in the morning, Celia headed back to the cabin with a new plan. She would stay calm, quiz Kieran further, extract whatever useful information she could and then demand he leave. His injuries were healing, he had been fed and then slept the night in a warm bed, so it would not be too callous to ask him to move on now.

  When Celia reached the yard and looked out into the orchard, she couldn’t miss the vivid shape of Roza in her red jumper and gaudy mirrored skirt. Roza was strolling between the rows of peach trees, supervising Kieran, putting him to work clearing the ground around the trunks.

  ‘Something is better than nothing, don’t you think?’ Roza called out to Celia, flapping her hands at the straggly trees, choked with weeds.

  Kieran kept his head down, intent on the task, as if dealing with an emergency. He was throwing his body at the work, so vigorous and relentless he must surely have been hurting his injured shoulder.

  Celia spent an hour in the shed working on the tractor, to coax the thing into running again after its long hibernation. She enjoyed the methodical sequence of chores – changing the oil, cleaning the spark plugs and carburettor – and when the engine rumbled into life, there was an unexpectedly intense level of satisfaction.

  She drove the tractor along the track between the fruit trees, pushing the jumble of slashed grass, weeds and brittle branches down the slope, into a huge pile outside the orchard. As she chugged through, Kieran avoided eye contact with her. Maybe he could sense the fantasy that was dancing across Celia’s mind as she passed him: it would just take a swing of the steering wheel to slam Kieran against the trunk of a tree with the tractor blade, squelching him. She allowed herself to relish that image – satisfying in a dumb, childish way. And then, as she repeated the brutal images in her mind, there was a purgative effect, draining away some of her anger towards the boy, like drawing pus from an abscess.

  At midday, Roza spread a rug on top of the stack of pallets in the yard and laid out lunch, including small chicken pies she’d baked. Celia had not had an appetite for months. She’d taken enough sustenance to keep herself functioning, but any food had been flavourless, like a mouthful of nothing or sometimes, worse, like a mouthful of sandy nothing that she had to chew in her dry mouth and force her throat to swallow. But the smell of those pies, still warm from the oven, made her feel a twinge of hunger.

  ‘Thank you, Roza. They look delicious,’ Celia said, and sat on the edge of the pallets to eat. ‘This is very kind.’

  ‘It’s always a good idea to eat,’ said Roza, then signalled to Kieran to come and get himself some of the food.

  He walked up to the yard from the orchard and ventured close enough to take one of the pies, and then, with a nod of thanks, retreated a few steps. He reminded Celia of her old kelpie-collie cross who would snatch meat scraps out of his food bowl and take them away to eat in a corner.

  Celia reckoned the boy wasn’t afraid of her exactly. If he was submissive, careful not to get in her face too much, it was out of fear she would send him away. He still hoped Zoe would show up here and didn’t want to risk missing her.

  Roza was muttering to herself in Hungarian and then, indicating that she’d forgotten something, she headed down towards her own house, leaving Celia and Kieran alone in the yard.

  The boy was uneasy, sitting close to her, without Roza or work or any other distractions in between. He stayed very still, tackling the pie with small apologetic bites.

  Eventually, Celia broke the silence. ‘When you and Zoe first left here, where did you go?’

  Kieran jerked, surprised she was addressing him.

  ‘I know you didn’t go straight to Sydney,’ Celia added.

  ‘Okay, look, the thing is, when me and Zoe left, we stayed away from trouble. I want you to know that. No trouble.’

  Celia set her face hard. She didn’t want to listen to snivelling or excuses from Kieran. She just wanted to hear what had happened to her daughter. ‘You needed to find work, I suppose.’

  ‘To start with, we had some money for food and petrol and stuff,’ he explained. ‘I mean, money Zoe brought with her.’

  Celia already knew that. On her dressing table, Zoe had kept a moneybox – a little china cottage with a pixie perched on the roof in a jaunty pose – which held the cash she was saving for a car. The pixie was face down now, with the black rubber plug on the underside of the cottage removed when Zoe had hooked out the cash.

  ‘And Zoe was dead-set to chew up some miles, y’know . . .’

  ‘A road trip.’

  ‘Exactly, yeah. And she wanted to do half the driving. I said no way, because she doesn’t have a licence. I mean, I know she drives the vehicles on this farm but that’s not the same as driving on the highway. I went, “What if we get pulled over by the cops?” And she went, “If the cops pull us over, me not having a licence is the least of our worries.” But I said, “How about you just drive on the side roads, not the main ones.” And she went along with that until she worked out – sorry, you won’t like this part . . .’

  Why would the boy imagine she ‘liked’ any part of this story?

  ‘Me and Zoe tell each other everything, okay, so I had to tell her I didn’t have a licence either. I mean, I used to have one. Got cancelled. Speeding fines.’ He flinched as he looked over at Celia. ‘I thought Zoe would crack the shits, but she laughed. I mean, she whacked me around the head a bit but she was laughing when she did it. She reckoned, “My mum would go berserk if she knew that.”’

  Celia wasn’t delighted to know that her daughter had been driven around the country by an unlicensed speeding idiot. But much more than that, she was stung by the image of those two sharing laughter about her.

  Kieran started to yabber with a trace of his old enthusiastic energy. ‘But yeah, anyway, then we went after the picking work. Zoe knew the places we should try. Like, she worked out the circuit we could go on. No matter where we went, Zoe could suss people out really quick. She’s excellent at dealing with people, isn’t she. She’s so fucking smart.’

  Talking about Zoe made the boy happy and he smiled at Celia.

  Celia didn’t smile back.

  ‘So, you found picking work?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah, heaps. Enough for what we needed.’

  ‘And, what, you two stayed in pubs or bunkhouses on the properties?’

  ‘No, she
didn’t want to do that.’

  No, thought Celia, because Zoe would have known her mother could more easily find them if they stayed on the farms.

  ‘We bought camping stuff from a disposal store,’ Kieran explained.

  He seemed proud of their self-reliant purchases. And he grinned as he went on to describe their routine. At the end of each work day, he and Zoe would buy food and then drive around until they found a pretty spot by a creek or a river to set up camp. That way, they could wash their clothes in the creek and wash the sweat off themselves. They’d make a fire to cook on or just because it was lovely to have a fire. The evening light lasted long enough for them to eat a meal and stay up a while, with the car windows wound down so they could hear music from the radio. It was warm enough, at least in the early weeks, for the two of them to sleep outside in their swags. Zoe had brought a small alarm clock to wake them up early enough to have a swim before another day of picking.

  ‘You could’ve kept going like that,’ said Celia.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, we could’ve. But Zoe said we should go to Sydney. I went, “Why? This is good. Let’s keep doing this for a bit longer.” But she really wanted to go to Sydney and I wanted her to be happy, so you know . . . Oh, but I’m not making excuses. I should’ve known it was a bad idea.’

  ‘Why a bad idea?’

  Kieran kept talking as if he hadn’t heard that. ‘Sydney can be a top place. We stayed with mates of mine and that was, most of the time, that was – I mean, to start with, things were good. I tried to make everything good for Zoe. I want you to know that.’

  Celia said nothing and waited until Kieran felt obliged to fill the silence.

  ‘Zoe started getting really down sometimes. Not all the time. But some days. I should’ve worked out what to do so she’d never ever have to feel so – but oh, man . . . she could get dark. “Everything is stuffed. I’m a bad person. Everyone dies, so what’s the point. I deserve to die because I’m a bad person.” I’d go, “Come on, Zoe, don’t be so down, baby. We’re the lucky ones.” I’ve seen people be slack or straight-out cruel to the exact people they’re supposed to be looking after. I knew what me and Zoe had was good, because I’ve seen the other ways it can be. And most of the time I could goof around, make her laugh, or we’d have some fun and she’d cheer up. But some days, far out, she’d sink into a hole so deep you couldn’t even yell down to her.’