Refuge

by Richard Rossiter

  Three weeks later and Tinny said they should give the heaps a go, even if it was only to burn all the leaves; it might make things a bit safer. ‘Pour a bit of diesel on them. You can’t do any harm at this time of the year. The fire won’t go anywhere.’

  So they took a jerry can from the shed—the real shed—and walked up to the firebreak where it began at the gateway without a gate. Rock poured some fuel on the first heap, while Skel stood by with the matches. ‘Put some more on,’ he said, ‘otherwise it won’t burn.’ The first match blew out, so Skel crouched down and protected the flame in his hands. When he dropped the match, flames exploded out of the heap, into his face and hands. Rock screamed and took off his jacket and tried to cover his brother and the flames. But Skel was not alight, only the heap. His hair and eyebrows were singed and his face was hot. His eyes felt burned.

  They made their way home and Tinny was horrified. ‘Get in the ute, quick. What have you done? Don’t tell me. You tipped petrol on the heap.’ He wrapped a wet towel around Skel’s head and face and drove like a madman. ‘You took the wrong can.’

  Skel was in hospital for a week. They said he was lucky.

  Thirty-seven

  In Hamburg, Greta, without any clear plans for the future, had rented a room in an old hotel near the harbour. It had decorated ceilings and chandeliers with white tablecloths in the dining room. Her bed was large, wooden and comfortable, covered with a thick, soft duvet. There were four pillows. She used only one, unless she was reading. There were paintings on the walls, mostly seascapes and reproductions.

  Life tracked back forever in this port city, over a thousand years. How many footsteps do I walk in, she wondered. Along this cobbled laneway, through this doorway, the lintel worn thin, curved like the dip between two waves. In a small cafe near the wharf, she sat and drank her coffee, ate cake. She was beset by fragments of talk, her grandfathers, great-grandfathers. One who may have killed the other. In the war. She didn’t know. Eve said they were the inheritors of old and bitter arguments, a divided family. Her grandmother, whose husband died when she was a young woman with three children, lived in their house, with her daughter, Greta’s mother. All day she would work in the vegetable garden, back bent, or kneel on her cushion, black as the earth. She did not talk, but would scold her granddaughters for what they failed to do. Then she said they had to help her in the garden for an hour. Eve, the youngest, refused, and ran away, knowing her grandmother couldn’t catch her. The eldest, Katrin, was never around, always out somewhere with her friends. So the garden tasks fell to Greta. She had to pull up weeds, and if she made a mistake and pulled up a newly emerged broccoli plant or lettuce, she would be screamed at and just as likely hit around the head with a dirty hand. Her grandmother never wore gloves.

  Now, sitting in the cafe and staring at the slate-coloured water, Greta wondered why the old woman was so angry. This woman who would never talk about the past, who would start shouting if you asked questions about her husband or father. Living with her daughter and her family did not make her happy. For years, bringing up a young family by herself, life had been a struggle in every way. Then, when she no longer needed to worry about food and shelter and debts, how the lives of her daughters would work out, she didn’t know what to do. So she worked all day in the garden, providing all the family’s vegetables, and more, and stayed angry with the world. Her mother said that once Oma had met someone else, a man, whom she would go to meet one day a week for coffee and talk. Then he drowned in the floods when the Elbe broke its banks. After that time she talked even less, became more angry and never went out. When she died they were surprised at how much money was in her bank account. Money that eventually passed to her granddaughters.

  In Hamburg, Greta felt secure in her sense of belonging. Here she had an identity that she could believe in. She was part of a long march of lives, generation after generation. She felt safe, but then you were safe in a bunker, if you never went outside. Safe, so long as she didn’t think about her life at the university, and about that man, her lecturer, who had turned her life upside down. Fearful that she might become like her grandmother, unable to live in the present, angry and trapped by the past, she made a vow.

  She thought of her other life, in a tin shed on ground that showed no evidence of anyone’s footsteps. Or none that she was aware of. There, no one was in front of her, no one behind. Although to arrive there, there had been a precursor: a German explorer, and a literary hero, both dead.

  It was a lonely and dangerous life. There, she was not trapped by history, or so she believed, but this was not really true. History in Australia was more elusive. What she did believe was that she was trapped by a single being, Clive, a madman whose mind had collapsed. He had followed her, believed a story he wanted to believe, and attacked her. And he would do it again if she reported him. She wondered whose footsteps Clive walked in. She was tempted to see Clive and Maia as part of a larger story—a story of damaged people, unresolved conflict, exploitation—so how could they possibly stay together, happily? Greta was not convinced. What did she know about it? And where did she fit in Clive’s story? At first she thought she was no more than an accidental traveller caught up in something not of her own making. But then she began to wonder. Perhaps she was not being entirely honest; perhaps she was being deliberately blind to the connections and was not a mere innocent. Complicity took many forms. The obsessive loop of her thoughts returned. A fire, an accident, revenge. Both she and Oliver—and Hetty—caught up in random, and intentional, events that they could not control. Oliver was never quite the same afterwards, more tentative, fearful even, about everything. What a low moment that was for him; as he recounted that period of the afternoon when he failed to act, he could scarcely speak the words. The words she could not speak concerned a man alone in his suffering, red dirt, a cold wind and a small fire that struggled to keep them warm. And beyond words, beyond thought even, was that man in Hamburg and her flight to Sydney. He was still here, as far as she knew.

  Everyone in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s what people said about the personal dimensions of modern tragedies. And not so modern. It was the past, her grandmother, her grandmother’s father. She realised that story was integral to herself; there was no avoiding it. You had to take responsibility, even though you exercised no choice in the matter of your forebears and their history. But nor were you damned.

  She realised that responsibility was not fashionable in some quarters. There was a prevailing sense of helplessness, where no one was responsible for their actions. Now therapy was the answer to moral transgression. No one was guilty, everyone had suffered, sin had disappeared. Clive could not be held to account for the death of his wife and child—which was reasonable—or for putting his hands around her throat and trying to strangle her—which was not. There were circumstances. He wore gloves. Her sister, Eve, needed to have a child. She loved Katrin’s husband, so why not share him between the two sisters? Where was the harm? In the future lives of the two little girls, how could anyone tell? Mass murder or killing your girlfriend could be explained by temporary madness, poverty, vulnerability to ideology and so on. And, most difficult—impossible, really—the deaths that she was responsible for. Murder, even.

  Such convoluted thought made Greta feel weak. For hours she had been wandering around the city, taking little account of her surroundings. Now, unsteadily, she walked back to the hotel, crawled into the large wooden bed and snuggled under the fluffy duvet, into the soft pillows, and closed her eyes. In the background were the sounds of late-afternoon traffic, voices but not words. People preparing for the end of the day, as they always had done, one way or another. There was a stillness in the room. It had been there for decades. The building stood, steadfast. She vowed she would live in the present, knowing that it could not be cleaved from the past, from her family history. She drifted.

  And beyond the personal, there was that other world, which she could not keep at bay. What the connecti
ons were between them she was unsure, but she did know she was permeable, a fragile membrane. Everywhere, there were reports of unrest. Neo-Nazi groups were once again prominent, freely boasting of their growing appeal. Asylum seekers, briefly welcomed, were now seen as a threat to the wellbeing of German citizens. There were too many of them in small, traditional towns, and too much secrecy. The dream or nightmare of Brexit was a reality. What would happen to the Eurozone? There had been another mass shooting of random citizens, again in Norway. Again some claimed the gunman was not responsible. The world had sent him mad. There was the strutting Mr Putin and the suffering citizens of Ukraine. And in America every day, ninety-three people could expect to die from a gunshot.

  She thought of Marvyn’s brother, Corey, and his declaration of war because he thought there was no other way to change the world, his world. At the time she felt it was naive, foolish talk. And then he’d died and Marvyn held him in his arms. Corey had changed from alive to dead. She couldn’t see what else he had achieved.

  Watching and thinking brought tears to her eyes. She was embarrassed and felt she should do more than be an onlooker, a voyeur of others’ misery. And then she wondered whether, underneath, she was thinking of herself under attack from Clive—and helpless to do anything about it.

  She needed to hold herself together. She would leave.

  Thirty-eight

  He rushed along by the side of the river. His green shorts were hitched up high on his belly, and his blue singlet stretched to meet them. It was hot and Clive was sweating; perspiration ran down his forehead and into his eyes, making them sting. His hands swam inside the damp gloves. He stumbled along, tripping every now and then over the exposed roots of trees; he knew he must not slow down. His big toe was bleeding where he’d stubbed it on a rock. Thongs provide little protection and his feet were black. He could see himself, red in the face, an awkward, bustling gait. He looked like a madman, in such a hurry to arrive, or depart—he didn’t know. But if he stopped moving, he would sit down in the dirt and put his hands to his ears and still the sounds would be there, rising to a scream.

  Hours later, Clive was miles away from home. He was not lost. His walk had slowed and he was exhausted. The sound was no more than a low hum. He had pictures, too. He stared at the trees, at the ground, at his dirty feet. His hands were awash.

  Two weeks later, Chris Johnston paid him a visit. He grew up in the town and Clive knew his dad from school days. Ken was a couple of years older, quiet, no one’s enemy as far as he could recall. Disappeared one day while fishing at the coast. There was a big swell, but people wondered.

  The blue and white car was in his driveway when he came home with the shopping. Chris was sitting in the car with the door open, listening to the radio. ‘Thought you mightn’t be long, so decided to wait.’ Clive always left his radio turned on, so any visitor would think he wasn’t far away. As soon as he saw the car, he felt tense, his heart beating faster. The coppers had done all they could when the accident happened; he had nothing against them, but he knew this wasn’t a social visit, not out of the blue in the middle of the day.

  ‘Nice and peaceful out here, Clive. No one around to bother you.’

  ‘Come inside,’ he said. ‘I’ll just put this shopping in the fridge.’

  ‘Is this the caretaker’s van, then?’

  ‘It’s where I live. I’m not a caretaker, I’m the owner. Anyway, it’s the one I chose. A bit bigger than the others. Nice view.’

  Chris didn’t mess around. As soon as he sat down, he said, ‘I’ve come to talk to you about an incident down at the coast a while back, maybe two years ago now. Do you know what I’m talking about?’

  He wouldn’t say who told him, just that it had come to his attention that Clive might know something about it—have some information that would help.

  Clive said he couldn’t help him—he didn’t go to the coast very often, and he had no reason to go to that spot, anyway.

  ‘So you know what I’m talking about—where it happened?’

  ‘Everybody knows. It’s a country town. You should know that.’

  After a while Chris left, and Clive didn’t think he would hear from him again. At least not for a while. He clasped his hands together until his knuckles showed white, the tips of his fingers red. This would not be the end of it.

  Thirty-nine

  Before and after his surgery for bowel cancer, Tinny discovered a world he had never dreamed about. In the bed next to him, when he was first admitted, was a man driven by a single desire. To get out. In time he realised that man was himself, or someone very like him. But not immediately after having a fit for the first time in his life.

  They said he was having a panic attack and gave him something to calm him down. Maybe too much, because he felt as if he was asleep but had his eyes open and could do things. He could see all that was going on around him, but they couldn’t see him—not properly.

  He levered himself up and sat on the edge of his bed. No one took any notice. If they did, he’d say he was going to the toilet. He moved past people lying in beds, some with drips, others stretched out with their eyes closed. Maybe they were dead; he couldn’t tell. He thought that was what might happen if he stayed there—that was what did happen: people died in hospitals. He pushed open the swinging glass doors of the ward, which led out to a long corridor. He turned around and stared at the sign above the doors. Emergency Department. Yes, that was right—he was an emergency; he had emerged unforeseen, unexpected. He knew the origins of the word and felt that he was a good fit. He had emerged from the ocean, where he belonged. He walked along the corridor and followed a sign that said Exit. He arrived at the lifts and waited. It seemed a long time and no lift came. He pressed the arrow that pointed down. Then the doors creaked open and two Asian women stepped out, neatly dressed, with name tags. Their faces were calm and elegant and they were not speaking. Doctors, he thought. Inside the lift there was a woman with a red face. She was in charge of a patient in a bed, so there was not much room.

  ‘Stuck-up bitches,’ she said. ‘They come here and think they own the place. Wouldn’t give you the time of day. I could slap their faces.’

  He didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing.

  ‘What floor, love?’

  ‘Ground,’ he said. ‘The way out.’

  She looked him up and down. He thought maybe his boxers looked like shorts. But his feet were bare. ‘They brought me in like this, you know. No time to change, or anything. I was in the sea.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘It can happen like that. What’s your name, then?’

  ‘Tinny,’ he said.

  ‘Tinny …?’

  ‘Thompson.’

  ‘What ward were you in, Thompson?’

  ‘I think it was called Emergency.’

  ‘And they’ve discharged you?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘They’ve finished with me.’

  The doors of the lift opened and he stepped out.

  She called after him: ‘This is not the ground floor. It’s not the way out.’

  He raised his hand in salute and walked off down the corridor.

  He was back in the ward. Two friendly security guards had stopped him just as he was stepping out into the sunlight. A man and a woman—they smiled at him and called him Quentin. ‘You won’t be able to go very far like that. You’re disoriented. You need to come back inside, back to the ward, and lie down for a while. Have a rest until you feel better.’

  ‘I’ve got work to do,’ he told them.

  ‘Not today, matey,’ said the woman, whose clothes were very tight.

  He said, ‘Can you breathe alright?’

  She didn’t say anything and then the two of them took hold of him.

  Near the bed, he felt funny. His body started to go all tight, he could feel the rush, and his legs and arms moved everywhere. Suddenly they were all there, and somewhere a bell was ringing. They were strong and then he was lying in the bed a
gain.

  A man was speaking to him. ‘You’ve had another fit, Quentin, but you’ll be alright. You lie down here, but don’t get out of bed again. Not until we tell you. We didn’t know where you were. You’re disoriented.’

  He could hear the man, then he began his slow rise to the surface, swimming his way towards the light, drawing in air. He lay there for a while, then his phone rang. A loan from the boys’ mother. He looked at the screen and thought he knew the number.

  ‘Peaches,’ he said. ‘I’m fine. Just a little episode … Tomorrow, definitely. Or this afternoon. I’m feeling good … No, nothing to worry about. They’ve got it all sorted. How are the boys? … Yeah … no, they said no problem … Sure thing, it’s all under control. I’ll see you later. Thank you. Thank you for …’ But he couldn’t complete the sentence. He put the phone down.

  For a little while he lay there, staring at the ceiling, listening to the noises around him. Nearby, a young doctor, or nurse, asked for some help to put in a cannula. ‘The veins disappear,’ she said. Then he could hear ringing, but this time it wasn’t his phone.

  He sat on the side of his bed, spying his pants lying on the floor. He reached for them and eased his legs into the opening. But then he got stuck; he couldn’t seem to pull them up. He grabbed the waistband and pushed harder. He was in a hurry now. Once again he strained to pull on his pants.

  Then he heard a voice, close by—a man who helped patients. ‘Quentin, what are you doing, mate?’

  ‘I’ve got to go.’

  ‘Do you know what you’re doing? You’re trying to put your legs into the carry bag you brought in. It’s a bag, not your pants. Is that what you thought?’

  He did not reply. He could see now. His feet stuck in a bag.