Anyway, folks like our weed for giving a good high without paranoia (frightening ideas of being followed, time recalling itself, whispers of ghosts). Wren likes to tell the people he sells to that it’s because the plants are grown in the fresh air and sun, chemical-free. They’re organic.
Tobacco makes us sick and we don’t smoke weed often but when we do we find meaning-kinds of connections between things that we couldn’t see before or understand. Within the hours of a single evening life softens – it becomes easy and clear and everything around us is gentle, loving. We are gentle and loving with Wren, with each other.
Wren says he doesn’t smoke all that much either, only at night to calm down a bit and feel all right and forget and slide down on an easy drift into sleep – ahhyeahfeelinitnow he says, grinning, which always makes us grin too. When he arrived here unannounced six years ago he reeked of whiskey. He was pale and quite fat around the middle and his shoulders and ankles were round and lumpy and his eyes empty through to the back of his head and he said all he had to offer us were his dreams and most of those were nightmares.
The day she died, we were born.
Our lips and tongues surely look strange, stained purple from eating so many blood plums – though we can only imagine whether the look is nightmarish or silly. Wren comes out to join us in our little orchard while we pick the plums for bottling. He is wearing shorts and nothing else and we can’t help but admire the breadth of his shoulders and the lovely inward curve of his torso below his ribs – all muscle covered tight with smooth, sun-browned skin, and his arms lean and veined. We can’t help but admire the speed with which he climbs the tree to reach the upper branches and the lightness of his touch picking the plums so they don’t bruise. He’s relaxed here, humming without seeming to be aware of it and we smile to ourself and it feels good, us together, an ordinary day together, peaceful.
‘Wren!
catch!’
We throw him a plum at exactly the same time and he catches one and the other hits his chest and bursts purple and his eyes spark but he goes back to his task without saying anything. Twenty minutes later we’re showered with overripe plums and we try to duck out of the way and instead fall backwards onto the clumps of snowgrass, laughing, laughing.
‘Serves you right,’ he says.
We look up at the sun.
Lie in the grass. Bees and the crack of eucalyptus. Dress stained with plum juice. Sticky sweet. The purple on us and inside us too – the colour where our heart is.
He says, ‘Come down to the creek.’
We get up and together we walk down the hill. Wren doesn’t hesitate, straight into the water and striking out till it’s deep enough for proper swimming. Maybe it’s because of the woman lying on the floor in the living room that we are bolder than usual, maybe she is giving us a sort of courage, because we too slip off the bank of the creek, gasping from the fierce cold of it, we keep hold of the grassy edge with one hand and paddle after Wren with the other as he glides easily ahead of us, just his head showing, droplets of creek water in his darkdarkred hair. He whoops and rolls onto his back and his feet come up out of the water white like bone. He kicks hard and dives and surfaces at our side. He knows to be patient with us, to be gentle, because we love water and we are terrified of water and we’ve never learned to swim. Even if Hope Home had had a pool, by the time we were old enough to learn to swim the nurses would never have bothered to teach us. Imagine waking up and seeing that in the mirror, they said to one other as they passed us on the stairs with a sigh, a headshake, eyes half-closed as though it hurt to look at us directly. Everyone knew we might die at any time of the day or night – we were so small and thin and our skin was stretched so fine over our ribs it sometimes broke and then the doublebeat of our hearts showed through.
Climbing out of the creek, we flop on the warm grass and our hands automatically find each other and squeeze and then brush the wet-black hair from our eyes. The creek, this great gift of water. We are so lucky, so happy now.
Wren grew up like an only child with his mother and father. Framed photos of his older sister lined the mantelpiece in his parents’ living room and sat in silver frames on their bedroom chest of drawers, but Wren says no-one ever spoke her name. He wasn’t born when she died, when she hit her head on the bottom of the public pool and drowned. His mother should have been at the pool watching her swim but she couldn’t because she was sick – it was a stinking-hot day and she was pregnant with Wren and so his sister was forbidden from going to the pool but she snuck out when their mother was dozing in the afternoon heat and she walked all the way to the pool on her own and she died there.
Wren says everybody loved his sister. In the photos on the mantelpiece, he says his sister looked happy. In the biggest one, her hair was in two plaits tied with pale-blue ribbon. He likes to tell us that her mouth was smiling and her eyes saw through the photographer and beyond, far far beyond – it was as if she knew something of the world past and the world to come.
‘They thought I never knew her, but I did,’ he says. ‘I knew her better than they ever did. I talked to her, told her my secrets – and she told me hers. She listened. She was the only one I could rely on. The only one. And she was always kind.’
‘What did you tell her?’
‘About the monster in the outside toilet, about us running away – me and her together – the burns on my arms, the places I knew for climbing trees, the places for hiding, the bottle that broke, how I found out that glass cuts skin and hot water burns, how everyone loved her more than me, how I held my breath and passed out and then I closed my eyes at night and saw the stars, about the sherry bottles hidden under the house and the taste of sherry and how it made me warm up inside and how my mother wouldn’t look at me properly except when she made me take off my belt and give it to her to hit me with, where I knew to disappear at school, the first time I saw who my father really was – the day before he died.’
Now Wren with his eyes closed, head down, swaying side to side, talking in such a small voice, a young boy’s voice, whispering so we have to lean in to make out the words—
‘We’ll live in the mountains. You and me. Just you and me, forever. Easy. I know where. I know how. Shhhh. Where are you? Where are you? See the sherry bottles under the house? Shhhh. I know pain now and I know how to make it go away. I’m not a fatty-fat. I’m looking for you. Where are you? I hate you. Here, see, listen to this: I asked this boy in my class if he’d ever thought about killing a person. He said, Maybe. I said, How? He said, Easy. I said, How? He said, How what? I said, How would you do it? He said, Take your belt off, tie a padlock to it and swing it. I said, So what? He said, Well moron, the heavier the lock the better cos if you crack his skull you’ve got him.’
Wren’s face pale and shining and his front teeth gnawing at his bottom lip. We wait for him to go on but he doesn’t.
‘Still listening, Wren
mm-hmm.’
Then he says, ‘One day I sneaked a look in my mother’s purse and stole a few dollars and went to the store and bought a padlock, the heaviest one.’
For the second time in the six days she has been with us, we heat a pan of water on the wood stove and gather soap and a washcloth and towels and we roll her shirt up and lift her back a little and pull the shirt over her head. It’s one of our old cotton shirts, once pale blue and now stained yellow-brown with stiff patches of dark red and it smells bad. A trickle of pale fluid leaks from her breasts.
‘O,’ we say, and frown.
‘O.’
We trace the fluid pattern with an index finger. Sniff it. Not infection nor blood or death. No smell at all really. We wipe it away and wash her with warm, soapy water. Her belly is a little swollen but perfectly smooth. We wash and dry her arms and face and neck and ease on another of our shirts, pull it gently down her back and button it at the front. She says ahhhhhh, and her right foot swings side to side like a pendulum. We have two breasts like anyone else though ou
rs are spaced wide apart so our ribcage can accommodate our lungs – we don’t know exactly how many lungs – two or three or four?
The maggots have completed their work, they’re wriggly and fat and we pick them carefully from her wound that is clean now of the stinking pus and take them outside and drop them in the long grass. Back in the kitchen we mix half a glass of water with a heaped teaspoon of sugar and a pinch of salt and squeeze in the juice of an orange for its vitamins.
‘Hello,’ we say quietly, kneeling beside her, one mouth to her ear. ‘Are you there?’
‘Ahhhhhh.’
‘Open your eyes.’
‘I.’
‘Open your eyes.’
‘No.’
‘Open your eyes.’
‘Go awayyyyy.’
‘Open your eyes.’
‘Eyes.’
‘Open your eyes.’
She raises one forearm and her fingers reach up and find our heads and she presses those buds of fingertips into our hair and she raises the other forearm and presses those fingertips into our hair and both her hands patter over our scalps and ears and along the fine edges of our jaws and she opens her eyes and her eyes fly at us and she screams and screams.
We’re shivering but not so anyone could tell. Creep into the kitchen and call for Wren, our voices mewl-like then dying off as though there isn’t enough oxygen in the air. Wren comes in through the outhouse with a shovel in his hand and his gumboots on.
We point to the living room and follow him up the corridor and we can’t help looking in on the way past. The woman is still lying on the floor on her back, a blanket covering her torso, left leg splinted by two planks of pinewood tied with strips from one of our sheets. She turns her head at the sound of his feet.
She doesn’t say anything but her eyes are open.
‘Hi,’ Wren says. Kneeling level with her hip, not too close. ‘You’re awake.’ He tries a smile.
Her eyes close for a moment.
He says, ‘Whatsyourname?’
She looks up at him.
‘Your leg,’ he says. ‘It’s hurt pretty bad.’
‘No,’ she says. ‘Not. My name.’ Her voice is high and light, verdant. She shifts. ‘Is it broken? I have to sit up. Where’s my foot? Oh my head. Oh god. What’s my name? Help! Who are you? Who are you?’
Wren gets some cushions made from old hessian bags stuffed with chaff and eases one and then another in behind her back. She gives out a long, echo-y, primal sound of pain and panic and we will never forget it.
‘Sorry.’ His hands are shaking now, ours are too. He puts his palm under her neck and lifts it slightly till he has the whole weight of her skull in his hand – all of her life in his hand. He pulls the cushions out from under her so just her head and neck are off the floor. ‘Allrightlikethat?’
‘No. Sit me up.’
‘But—’
But her eyes are like poetry.
We are stuck to the doorframe, watching them, we shall not move from here. Whisper, ‘And if
shhhhh
but if she had died – if she dies
shhhhh
she’s not going to die
does she know
she doesn’t know anything
shhhhh d’you think she knows
listen, it’s nothing, she doesn’t mean anything to us.’
She says, ‘Help.’ Then, ‘Ohhhhshit.’
Wren offers her the glass of water and orange juice and salt and sugar that we’d left by her side.
‘Who are you?’ she asks, but he doesn’t answer, maybe he isn’t ready for that question either. Then, ‘WHERE ARE WE?’ The words shooting out, staccato.
‘Home,’ Wren says, with the weight of her skull still in his hand.
Promise, the art of having promise, of the world opening up, of chances. Longing. The taste of wine on her tongue. Birds first thing in the morning. Crying. Belovedness. All these things she will have. And we are pleased – something improbable has turned upon itself, remoulded itself, changed colour and become beautiful. Ah. This is a fine thing indeed – healing. In our room we sit on our mattress, on the blanket, lie back and look up and in the mirror we see our eyes, smiling, the light palpable on our retinas, reflected in the mirror and back in our eyes – a kind of infinite exchange. This light feeds us as we feed it, a flickering energy, a tremble of warmness, then a pulse, boo-boom.
Our mother’s name was Lilah. Wren’s mother told him that Lilah had thick auburn hair just like Wren, and that she had loved our father, but for our father, the death of his wife and a two-headed daughter were too much to bear. We broke her in two. Then we were put in a hospital for defective children called Hope Home – children who had no family or more commonly, children like us whose family didn’t want them. If the people who worked at Hope Home were indeed a direct conduit to their god and were doing their god’s work as they said, then their god is full of wrath and bewilderment, bitterness and grief – either that or he must not know when he is wrong. To love is to listen and their god does not listen.
They said we were the Child of the Devil. We were such easy prey for people always looking for the worst in children. Oh well, they said. Never mind, they said. You’ll be gone to hell before long. And then they said we were going straight to hell without a chance to redeem ourself in Purgatory – the most the other children could hope for. God did not make you, they hissed, with their eyes half-closed. There was a nurse who was sometimes nice to us, so nice she made us smile until we realised she didn’t like us either – in fact with her it was worse than with all the others – she pitied us. The other children sided with the staff because even they feared us. When we didn’t get to the toilet in time and wet our pants they hissed stinkypants from the corners of their mouths amid their drooling and terrible bright-red tongues and running noses. For bad behaviour – occasionally we hit one of our tormentors across the mouth, scratched at their eyes or kicked them on the delicate shinbone, or when we were caught whispering to each other in the chapel or double-frowning at the priest (and once we tried to pee on the girl who enjoyed banging our heads together) we were made to stand straight and still and silent in the corner of the shared bedroom, witness to the other children’s high thin screaming that began and stopped and began again all through the night.
Night fell down on us unawares when we were locked in the basement. The floor of the basement was concrete, as were the walls. There was no window. There was no furniture except a plastic mattress on the floor. There were no pillows or blankets. The door was barred. These were the days and nights we liked best of all at Hope Home – they were peaceful and we felt safe and we had time to explore the worlds in our heads where we were wild and free, where we could fly. As such we were never bored. The only problems with the basement were the lack of food and lack of a toilet. We embarked there upon a programme of exercises – touching our toes, jumping up and down, learning to hop and skip left then right, left right, right left – left right – right. Every single time we fell over, we got up again. Do we belong here? we asked ourself. Do we belong here any more or any less than all the other children? In the end, that was impossible to say, but by our fifteenth birthday there were two options left to us – die or escape.
In spite of the high brick walls and steel bars on all three rows of windows, in spite of the locked doors and long soulless corridors that echoed the suffering all round us and our own desperation, we planned carefully and practised over and over again so we could get away in the dark – we were more afraid of the people there than we ever were of the dark. This is why we look to the sun and the mountain and the water of Blindeye Creek for something to hug, albeit metaphorically – to feel loved.
Nearly all this night she’s awake, though hers is a strange kind of consciousness, so strange we’re almost scared of her and each time we offer more water she pushes our hand away with her forearm and the water spills all over us. Her fingers pick at the sheet, then she rubs her hands to
gether, then bats the air as you might trying to catch a mosquito you can hear but not see. She laughs but there’s no mirth in it or warmth, then she says, Does he know? Shhhh hush now rock you to sleep, she sings hoarsely, Bye bye baby bye bye, then she’s crying and crying and we wipe her nose and eyes with a washcloth and try to soothe her but we don’t know if we’re helping or not and we are getting drunker and drunker and the room is sweating and our lungs are clenched, hearts all over the place, but after an hour o relief! The creases in her forehead smooth out and her lips return to pink and her head tips to the side and she sleeps and we close our eyes at last and let our breath go and reach for the bottle of wine at our feet, but then she grabs our left arm, her nails biting, No don’t go, something’s wrong … terrible … my feet burning no he knows we must be very very quiet now very very quiet aww hushshhhhhhhhhhhhhh sweetie where’s the toilet ah. Her head is off the pillow, she’s looking just past us, as though addressing a person standing in the corner of the room. Too late! She grips harder and her eyes roll right up until only the whites are there and her legs are shuddering under the blanket and o god she’s dying and now we’re crying and she says, all high-pitched like a bird, No no no I’ll come to you it’s all riiiiigh! Oha aaah aaah no please no, and she mumbles more words we don’t understand and then stops as though listening to a reply we can’t hear and she mumbles some more and her head drops down and her eyes close. Then silence.
We tiptoe out to the kitchen for a glass of water and when we pad back in, Wren is sitting cross-legged on the floor by her side. We stand in the doorway and smell the room. Stand here just looking things over. After a long while, she turns her head towards him and says urgently, ‘Is he still out there?’
Wren says, ‘Who?’
She says, ‘Where the washing is that’s where we’ll be … but he knows so we must run on tiptoe hush now shhhh now love oh my love.’
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