Pete twitches. Impatient. ‘A tank, for water. A fence, to separate one miserable bit of dirt from the next.’
‘A tree? Or a garden?’
‘Not really. A patch that turns green when there’s rain. That doesn’t happen much. There might be some excuse for a tree. I can’t remember.’
‘Have you been here before?’
‘Where?’
‘Here, right here. Where we’re sitting.’
‘Of course. Been past. I drove this way before. But to be honest, it all looks the same to me. Once you’re out here it’s just dirt and stones.’
‘Is there a creek or a river where we’ll be?’
‘No, Gilly. Nothing like that.’
‘We came over bridges on the way here.’
‘Yeah. But unlikely there’ll be any water under them.’
‘At all?’
‘I don’t know.’ Pete drains his cup and scoops the leaves out with his fingers. ‘Gilly, you don’t come to a desert expecting to find water.’
‘I know. I was just making sure.’
I can feel the sideways look he gives me. I drink more of the tea because I’m thirsty, and I swallow it quickly, not wanting to taste its bitterness.
‘Tell me about the house where we’ll live.’
Pete sighs audibly. ‘It’s nothing, Gilly. Not even a house. It’s a shack made of fibro. The roof is tin. It’s hot in the day and cold at night.’ He removes the last of the leaves with his finger and flicks them at the ground. Then he examines the inside of the cup. ‘I don’t know what you were hoping for, Gilly, but I don’t think it’s this.’
‘What?’
‘Living in a stinking shed in the desert.’
‘I’d live anywhere with you, Pete,’ I tell him. ‘I don’t care what it’s like. I just want you to describe it to me so I can imagine being there with you.’ I move closer to him and brush my fingers along the skin beneath the hem of his shirt but he stands up and steps away from me.
‘Christ, Gilly. Just leave it,’ he says.
‘What’s the matter? Why won’t you touch me? Why can’t I touch you?’
Pete stoops and picks up the thermos and makes sure the lid is on tight. He doesn’t look at me. ‘Isn’t this enough?’ he says in a low, clenched voice. ‘Haven’t I done enough yet?’
He begins rolling a cigarette. He does it with great care, focusing on getting each strand of tobacco in tight and I sense he is doing it to settle his anger. He moves several paces away from me, places the rollie between his lips and lights up. He says nothing and for a while he just sucks in smoke and blows it into the air. The tobacco appears to calm him. After a short time his shoulders relax and I feel a sharp wash of relief. Here, in the desert, Pete can’t leave me. Where would he go? We’ve come too far now to go back.
He throws his roll-up down, half-smoked, and stands on it. ‘Come on then,’ he says. ‘We’ve got a way to go yet. We’ll stop again in a couple of hours and eat something.’
I stand. ‘Are you okay, Pete?’ I ask.
‘Yeah.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I offer. ‘I didn’t mean to … to push things.’
He doesn’t look at me. ‘It’s alright,’ he says. His boots make loose red prints in the dirt. Following him, I stand inside one and make my own shape with my canvas shoe. All the way back to the car I do this. My stride does not match his. I have to take more steps. But each time I stand in his footprint, I tell myself it’s going to be okay, it’s going to be fine. Like casting a spell. When I reach the stony verge I turn and look at the awkward trail I have made, my small lonely path following his, disappearing intermittently into it.
‘C’mon, Gilly.’ Pete’s already in the car. He hasn’t got his belt on. The metal clasp will be too hot. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Nothing.’
He reaches over and opens the door for me and then sits back and drums his fingers on the steering wheel.
We’re going now, I whisper to myself. It’ll be fine. What can stop us?
Perhaps I shouldn’t have said it. Perhaps I broke the spell.
Pete leans in as soon as I’ve closed the door. He turns the key in the ignition and … nothing. There is no whining working sound, not even a reluctant cough. The engine doesn’t turn over at all. There is only the empty click of the key. Pete tries again and I lean forward a little in my seat, as if by doing this I can change something. I might remind the car of what it has to do. Pete’s movements are fearful; there is panic in his stabbing turns with the key and in the quick jarring way he works the clutch. But in these moments, as the reality of this new situation dawns, I realise that I’m not afraid of the desert or the heat or even of the very real possibility of being stranded here. I am only afraid of what I have left behind.
twenty-three
When he went, Pete left traces of himself everywhere. You wouldn’t have thought a man who carried so little could leave so much.
There was his toothbrush in the holder in the bathroom, and although my mother told me he was gone I kept going in to check it, as though it hinted at his return. After a while I removed it, fingering the dried bristles, and put it beneath my pillow. It felt like something substantial to me, something intimate. It held the promise of him and, like the key from the tin at the river that day, I felt certain that if I kept it close I would find him.
He had also left a glass of water on the bedside table. I drank the water and then put the glass in my room because when the sun was on it you could see where he had left a thumbprint, and the faintest mark of his lip against the rim, beside mine.
As well as the glass of water and the toothbrush, there was half a tube of shaving cream, a small lined notebook with some figures written on the first two pages, and a section of a newspaper with circles pencilled around classified advertisements. It was folded into the notebook but it was several weeks old and gave no clue as to where he had gone or why.
The only things left in his drawers were a packet of cotton buds and an unopened bar of Palmolive soap.
I lay down on his bed to see if I could smell him on the pillow, and he was there, as sure as an imprint: the shampoo he used with the blue bottle; the marbled green soap, faintly woven through with a mix of sleep and sweat. Under the covers would be more, I knew. The traces of what we had done together. But I left the bedspread on, the sheets tucked in. It seemed important to leave that untouched. I was relieved he hadn’t stripped the bed.
Nothing was in disarray. If he had made his exit swift and silent, it was not thorough, and because he did not appear to care that he had left pieces of himself for me to pick over, I thought that he had not meant to disappear.
I tried to make out what he was saying to me by leaving those things. I searched for clues as to where I might find him. But I couldn’t think. I was ill with despair. I couldn’t eat and I couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t bear to be in the house with my mother and father. I stayed in my room, coming out only to wash, to sip at a glass of diluted cordial, to cut thin slices of cucumber or melon. I lost count of the days but I made myself stay there until I knew he wasn’t coming back, and then I couldn’t bear to be there either so I went to the river, taking all those things he had left behind. I was certain they would tell me something.
Out in the middle you could see the water was barely moving. Shallow greasy puddles pocked the banks, and where the water had lapped against rocks in the hottest part of the summer, now they jutted out at lonely angles with murky caverns beneath. I walked along the bank until I came to the place beyond the weir, where we had first been together. It was different now in the daytime, and with the summer closeness gone. Soon the autumn would waste away too, and I longed for rain to moisten the light, to wash the dust from the edges of the sky and make things clear.
I laid Pete’s things out in front of me: the toothbrush, the notebook and the glass, the shaving cream. I turned the pages of the book, searching for something I might have missed, a scratch of the pencil
on the back of a page. I ran my finger over the notes he had made but nothing made any sense. I put each thing back into the drawstring bag I had carried them in and I brushed the sand away from my skin.
Close in you could see where the river stopped behind the bulkhead of the weir. It no longer even lapped at the top. Where the rapids had been were just puddles, ringed hard by the residue left as the brackish water evaporated. Clumps of moss and hanks of weed lay strewn and dried along the banks.
It was strange though how lush it seemed, despite the ailing river. From the air you’d see a fat cleft of green in the middle of the crisp dry patchwork of fields and gardens. Native trees were dotted along the steepest parts of the banks. Lower down, willows grew in a thick choke. There was lantana along the rise, away from the water, and castor oil plants sprang from the rocks. And there were all the other things that I couldn’t name: the grasses and shrubs, trees and weeds that filled up the space between. It would be the water underneath that kept them all going. The roots of these plants could reach low and deep to get what they needed. They didn’t know there was a drought.
I got closer to the water. I put my feet in and remembered swimming that very first day when I saw Pete. I tried to breathe deeply but the air was thick and saline and I doubled over, fighting a stronger sick feeling.
I knew then. That baby had been uncurling inside me for weeks, long before Pete left, since that first time we were together. I had not made any room for it, but it was strong now. It was foolish what I was doing, seeking comfort in souvenirs and memories, gripping bits of metal and plastic and paper as if they would lead me to him. I had been searching for signs when the only real thing he had left was deep inside me, where he had put himself and made something grow. That was what would lead me to him.
When I told my mother, she said, ‘Well, Gilly, you have to find him.’
‘Easy said,’ I retorted. ‘All I’ve got is a name.’
‘Yes,’ she mused. ‘It’s not going to be an easy one to solve.’ She got out a glass jug and began to mix iced tea. She squeezed a lemon and stirred in sugar. She chose tall glasses and pulled some cocktail stirrers from the back of a drawer. ‘I used to love this when I was carrying you,’ she said. ‘It was all I wanted. Iced tea with citrus fruit. Any kind of citrus, I didn’t care. Do you want one, Creighton?’
My dad sat silently at the table. ‘No.’
She cut segments from the remaining half of the lemon and dropped in some ice cubes. ‘He always paid me cash for the rent,’ she said, ‘but I’m certain he didn’t mean to vanish.’
‘Why?’
Her hands shook a little. She looked at my dad. ‘Because he left some money.’
‘Did he?’
‘In an envelope.’
‘What for?’
‘Well, I thought it must be for you, Gilly. To follow him.’
She left the room and returned a moment later, holding an envelope. The edges were soiled, the seal unbroken. She had opened it with a knife so that there was a neat frayed parting across the top.
‘Where was it?’ I asked.
‘At the back of the drawer.’
‘In his room?’
‘Yes.’
I thought of the things I had found there and wondered how I had missed it.
‘Are you sure he left it?’
She laughed. ‘Well who else would have?’
‘Did he write anything on the envelope?’
‘No. Does it matter?’
‘Of course not.’
‘I’m certain he meant you to find it, Gilly.’
‘Are you?’
‘Of course.’ Gently, she brushed her fingers against my face. ‘He’ll have been worried about your dad and me. But I don’t mind. I’m pleased. I know how you feel about him.’
‘When did you find the envelope?’
She looked down. ‘I found it the week after he left. It was propped right up against the back of the drawer. Now that I know what happened between you, I’m certain that he meant for you to find it.’
‘Why wouldn’t he write something on it?’ I was dismayed at the waste of these empty weeks, at the thought of being here when I might have been with him.
‘You know, Missy, sometimes a man won’t know how to say it. Instead he’ll do something else. Something quiet, like this. Don’t ask too many questions, darling. Just be grateful we found it.’
I breathed deeply and fixed on what she had said. Nothing else mattered apart from the bald fact of it.
‘So now we’ve only got to find out where he is and then you can tell him.’ The ice cubes clanked around the jug as she stirred. She poured us a drink. ‘Do you want one, Creighton?’
‘No.’ My dad shifted in his chair. I felt him trying to look at me but I didn’t make sense to him like this. ‘Gilly, I’m sorry this has happened,’ he said.
‘Sorry what has happened?’
‘That he’s gone and left.’
‘Sorry for me or sorry for you?’
‘Gilly,’ my mother interjected, but my father held up his hand.
‘I’m sorry he’s gone and left you like this, Gilly. I didn’t see what was happening.’
‘I don’t expect you would have,’ I said. ‘Anyway, maybe he wouldn’t have left if he’d known.’
‘Maybe,’ my dad echoed. He sat up, still looking at the table, and I thought he was ashamed. But I couldn’t tell what the shame was about. Touching me the way he had? Trying to touch Lexie? Or not seeing what was happening with Pete. Maybe it was just that there was no right way to look at me anymore.
He sought my mother’s eyes and she dropped her gaze.
‘Look here, Missy,’ my dad said. ‘I think I know what you could do to find him. Do you want to find him?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘of course.’
‘Well, okay.’ He spoke quickly and without meeting my eye so I was worried he might be about to lie to me. But I had no other means of finding Pete. I had to listen. ‘I don’t know where he is,’ my dad said, ‘but I know they don’t pay cash at McGill’s. From when I was there. They only pay by cheque. Monthly.’
I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. I tried the drink my mother had made, but there was too much lemon. It bit at my tongue and stung my lips. I pushed it away. ‘Go on,’ I said.
‘Well, they wouldn’t have settled with him when he went,’ he continued. ‘It wasn’t the end of the month. They’ll have owed him money. So he’ll have had to leave an address with them, Gilly. To get his pay.’ He scuffed at the floor with his toe, like a boy. I scrubbed my palm against my thigh, feeling a pale thrill of possibility. ‘That Pete,’ he added, ‘I could be wrong, but I don’t think he’s the sort to do something for nothing. And I know how they do things at McGill’s. They won’t have given him his money before it’s due.’
I didn’t wait for him to say anything else. I poured my drink into the sink and went to my room.
‘Gilly,’ my mother called. ‘Gilly, do you want me to come with you?’
‘No,’ I told her. ‘No, please stay here.’ I didn’t want her near me.
I changed into a dress and some proper shoes and made my way quick smart to McGill’s. I only noticed as I drew near the silo in the forecourt that the sky was a soft low grey, and in the grassy yard beside the parking lot two lizards were posed, perfectly still. They were bearded dragons, their tails were curled, chests thrust out. And it was raining, big sparse drops. They had come to wet themselves and to drink. Like sculptures, they stood, heads thrown back, mouths open, the cement colour of their skin darkening as the rain fell on them. They stayed there for a long time, letting the water run over and through them.
twenty-four
That baby begins to creep around my thoughts as I sit there in the car. How fragile she seemed. Lying wherever I put her, unable to turn or shift. They kept bringing her to me and I’d have to hold her until they left the room. Then I’d put her down.
‘Don’t leave her there,�
� a nurse said on one occasion, whispering into the ward on her rubber soles when I had laid the baby on the edge of the bed. ‘She might roll off.’ I smirked to myself. Roll off. She couldn’t do anything except make those odd stabbing movements in the air.
‘She’s weak. Look,’ I said. ‘She’ll never roll off. She can’t even move properly.’
‘She’s not weak,’ the nurse said. ‘She’s a strong one, that baby of yours. And you’d be surprised at what they can do.’
I felt a sharp chill at that. At the thought of her being strong. She’d been strong in me at the start. All the way through she made me sick, weighed me down so I was ungainly and unbalanced. But when she came out I was surprised at her helplessness. How she mouthed at the air and seemed to want something I couldn’t give. I don’t know what I expected. But I was calm around her when I thought her weak.
The nurse lifted her into the mobile cot. ‘Keep her in there,’ she said. ‘It’s the safest place.’ She crossed her arms and then looked at me closely.
‘Do you feel okay?’ she asked.
‘Of course,’ I said.
‘I mean …’ She hesitated. ‘Do you feel good about being a mother? About having a baby?’
‘Yes. She’s … she’s lovely.’
The nurse unfolded her arms and picked up an empty glass from my table.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Well, you just tell me if you’re not feeling right.’
‘Yes,’ I said. I was looking at the baby again, from beneath my lashes, so the nurse wouldn’t know. I was a little frightened. The thought of her strength unsettled me.
The sun climbs quickly until it is high in the sky. The bit of shelter provided by the interior of the car soon vanishes. The light gets in everywhere, there’s no hiding from it. Outside, Pete moves between the boot and the bonnet, unscrewing caps and loosening bolts, checking gauges and fans and points and belts. He speaks little, just keeps going until there is nothing else he can do.
Eventually he slumps in the seat beside me. ‘We’ll just have to wait until someone comes.’ He sighs and I look away from him towards the horizon, where I’ve not seen so much as a clot of dust since we stopped. Already my fingers feel swollen and fat, they cluster at the ends of my palms as if there are too many of them. I squeeze them into a ball.
Desert Fish Page 15