Fusion

by Kate Richards

  ‘Who is it?’ he asks again, gently.

  She opens her eyes, the blue of them like moonlight and her whole body glimmering a little, and she stares right at him and she says, ‘You.’

  ‘Stir-crazy,’ Wren whispers, looking up at us.

  ‘No such thing

  has she had some water?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Enough?’

  ‘How much is enough?’

  Wren is even drunker than us and we help him to stand up and he wavers for a moment and then staggers off to his room, mumbling about a saviour and ghosts and drowning and rum.

  She’s sleeping and her skin is cooler. In the kitchen we mash up some stewed apples, spoon them into a bowl and refill her cup of water and then go back into the living room and put down the cup and bowl and we lie down carefully next to her on the floor. We won’t leave her while she’s sleeping. We’ll be here when she wakes again.

  Dear Mother, our dear dear mother, did you have our smile? Did you like to sing? What made you laugh? Did you hope to explore the world, live to be an elder, earn an income? Have a family that loved you? Six children? What did you hear when you were falling asleep? What did you think of when you first woke? Could you see in the dark like we can? Did you like holding hands? Did the wind in a thunderstorm send you wild? Did you love autumn and wildflowers in the alpine meadows and snow gums and the silkfeel of creek water on your skin, the sun delirious in your eyes and the silence of winter mists like we do? In the dead of night was there someone to comfort you? But then, what thoughts were so precious you kept them to yourself? How did you go on when despair overcame you? Where was your fear and where was your shame – kept close to your heart, kept silent? Did you know loneliness? Wrestle with a god? Believe in heaven? Were you scared of dying? Could you keep secrets? Did you tell lies? Could you feel us inside you? Did we warn you enough? Did you want to be a mother? Did you love us? Could you have loved us? Did you cry when birds take flight in the last evening light? Did you love us? Could you have loved us? How the birds become something great all together – the silhouette-burst of wings breaking symmetry, Mother did you love us, could you have loved us? How they wind up the air and pull the sky along as they go?

  She stirs and opens her eyes. We run a damp cloth over her forehead.

  ‘Here

  here

  taste this

  stewed apples

  cool

  and smooth

  and soft

  soft to swallow.’

  She nods. We gather her head from the nape of her neck in our right palm, lift it up and wait till the muscles in her neck release, till she trusts we will hold her safe while we offer a spoonful of apple followed by some water. She smiles then, and sighs, a kind of letting-go sigh, and she finishes the whole bowl of apple. We are pleased about this, but then she continues to look at us with her head back on the cushions and we start worrying that we’re missing something – there’s something else she needs that we don’t know how to give.

  ‘Am I dead?’ she asks.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I can’t see.’

  ‘Don’t worry

  it will get better.’

  ‘Are we on a boat?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘My leg.’

  ‘Yes, it might be broken. It’s in a splint to keep it straight. Try not to move.’

  ‘Water.’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Water.’

  ‘We’re looking after you now. Everything’s all right.’

  ‘Are we on a boat?’

  ‘No. Do you feel sick?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’ll get a bucket.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s all right.’ We wipe her mouth. ‘Rest now.’

  ‘I can’t see. Where am I?’

  We stand up and Wren comes in and the woman’s hands cover her chest, then her mouth and a shiver runs through her whole body.

  He says, ‘Oh! Sorry.’

  She says, ‘Oh shit.’

  He says, ‘Do you want to be alone,’ with his face falling, voice breaking at the end where the question should be.

  She looks up at him with nothing but fear in her eyes. ‘Where is he?’ she asks.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Is he here?’

  ‘No. He’s not here.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘We know.’

  ‘Are we on a boat?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are we hiding?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Someone is tugging me, here—’ her hands feathery over her chest, over her heart.

  ‘Okaynow.’

  ‘Who?’

  Wren kneels by her head. Like a shepherd. Like a king.

  ‘What’s wrong with me?’ she asks.

  He says, ‘You were … you … lyingintheroad … in the nowhere … I mean inthemiddleofnowhere … you were … why the hell were you there? In the middle of bloodynowhere god it was awful … I thought you were dead sorry to say that but you weren’t moving and I don’t know anything about … the twins do but I don’t … so … and … I think you might have been in an accident oryouweresick. I mean you were really hurt. Whatever had happened I really thought … and also it was getting dark and the nights here are … wellitsnotsafe it’s not safe I didn’t know what to do so I put you in my truck … I mean Iaskedyou but I’m sorry … what I mean is … you couldn’t because your leg … and then and then you were sick everywhere and I didn’t know what else to do so I brought you home.’

  She’s silent for a few minutes. Our hands and feet are so cold. We try to smooth out our voices, make them smooth and soothing. We say, ‘But everything’s okay now.’

  She closes her eyes and covers her face with her hands. There are bruises on her hands. Her fingernails are torn and black.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Wren asks.

  ‘Something’s wrong. Someone’s missing. Who? Who are you? Oh god.’

  We don’t know. If only we did. If only we could say something comforting. But what is comforting for her? We whisper to ourself, say something comforting.

  We say, ‘O.’ And then, ‘What’s your name?’

  She says, ‘I don’t know.’

  For a while there’s quiet.

  ‘We’ll call you Lazarus

  yes.’

  Wren says, ‘What?’

  ‘We’ll call you Osiris

  yes.’

  Wren snorts. ‘No.’

  ‘We’ll call you Christ

  yes.’

  There’s a wombat eating an apple on the living-room floor. The woman is frowning at the wombat. She turns her head to the side and looks at us.

  ‘Wren, that wombat has snuck inside again and

  he’s stealing your apples

  and he’s too fat. Get him out.’

  She coughs, the kind where you feel you must break the silence but you can think of nothing to say that fits the moment. She frowns. The wombat munches through two whole apples without taking the slightest notice of any of us.

  ‘Christ,’ we say together, holding out our two hands, kneeling carefully beside her. ‘Christ.’ Our voices are orange and light and syrupy, harmonising around that one word, announcing her to an audience. ‘Christ.’

  ‘What?’ she says.

  ‘You

  are a resurrection.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she says.

  With our little brown-glass bottle of eucalyptus oil and tea-tree and orange and lemon we dropper the oil with one hand onto the tips of the fingers of our other hand and we anoint the woman’s forehead and temples and eyelids and lips and the palms of her hands. Wren closes his eyes and then opens them again very slowly, not looking at us, because we know him too well, because his eyes will give him away. He shakes his head, No, he shakes his head again, This is too much – we are lost to her now.

  As she falls asleep hours later, we stand up all stiff and sore and tipt
oe towards the kitchen. Look back at her closed eyes as we go and we’re smiling at last, not watching where we’re going, bring our left foot down on top of our right and fall straight into the side of the doorframe, one head hitting the wood hard. The first fire of pain and a responding fizz of adrenaline along our nerves to both our hearts so we know exactly how bad it is without seeing or speaking. We crouch low through the nausea and the bangbangbang inside our heads and then we stand up again, silent, clench-fisted and pad onwards into the kitchen.

  ‘Breathe

  in

  and out

  breathe in

  and out

  out out.’

  There are no words that we know for the majority of our feelings, the fleeting instance of them – their electricity, the movement of molecules, the fever, a whoosh of things reacting. There are no words for them that we know but they are represented in lightning and fierce wind and, of course, in fire. We look into flames like a fortune teller might and, say, there! that flame and that one – our body, our minds – that flame is where feeling meets in us. All our senses, finely tuned inward towards one another and then coarsely tuned outward towards the world. One of our eyes sees perfectly in the dark and three see everything blurry whether it is day or night. We hear each other like animals hear predators, even more acutely than they do perhaps – we hear each other thinking. It’s graceful, intuitive, rhythmic, precious – so precious that it does not bear further examination.

  With every exhalation, she moans. Back in the living room we touch her hand. The cats unfurl and leave with their ears back and their tails trailing low. Wren stands by the door watching us. We ask if she’s in pain, if her leg is bad, and she opens her eyes and looks up to the ceiling and opens her mouth wide and her lips crack and her bottom lip blooms with blood and we hunch, expecting her to shout at us or howl, but she compresses herself and says quietly, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it your leg?’

  ‘My leg.’

  ‘It is worse?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you hungry?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Thirsty?’

  ‘Thirsty.’

  We go to the kitchen and get a glass of cold tea and add a spoonful of sugar and the juice of one of our lemons and we open a jar of Wren’s dried cannabis buds and roll a joint.

  We put the glass on the floor beside her hand and lift her head so she can drink and she drinks like a woman dried out by sun and desert, without breathing, just drinking and swallowing and then she coughs and some of the tea bubbles up yellow-brown out of her mouth and drips over her chin onto her shirt.

  ‘More?’

  She nods. We give her more.

  ‘This too, for the pain?’

  She looks at the joint in our right hand. ‘Yes.’

  We light the end with a match and blow out the flame and wave it in the air till the end glows. She lies back and breathes in and sends a trail of smoke to the ceiling and she coughs again from deep in her chest, a rattly cough of the sort we know will get worse if she lies here without moving for too much longer.

  ‘Ah,’ she says after a few minutes. She peers at us and blinks. ‘I can’t see right.’

  ‘You can see fine.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  We smile our best smile.

  She frowns. Waves a hand in front of her eyes. Looks back at us. She says, ‘Oh.’

  We keep smiling. Our best smile.

  She says, ‘Are you—’

  ‘Wren,’ we say, without turning around, ‘can you get us more tea?’

  Wren doesn’t answer and we look over one shoulder and he’s gone and the woman is up on her elbows, inching away, the pain of movement enormous and black in her eyes.

  She is trying to get away from us – us as Monster, us as Fear, our enormous strangeness reflected in her face and instinctively we back away from her too – into the corner of the room.

  In the corner of the room, whispering to ourself, ‘Is all right

  shhhh

  we are

  solid like mountain

  we know pain and we know how to suffer

  in the quiet

  shhhh

  is all right now

  shhhh

  remember?

  solid like mountain

  free like sky.’

  But in the sky the light is changing

  dimming

  and dimming.

  The summer before last Wren showed us how to load the ten-shot magazine of his Browning bolt-action rifle and then for one of our left eyes to sight through the scope and still until we found a way to level the crosshairs, for our right index finger to push off the safety and rest in the curve of the trigger until all in one motion, crack! Just in case. The Browning once belonged to Jack from town. Made from black walnut and rosewood and polished steel, it is elegant, smooth and solid. Wren taught us to shoot straight by painting heads at different heights on trees through the wild at the edges of our valley. Run. Stop. Kneel and then snake to the ground. Still. Ready. Fire. Get up. Run. Run. We aren’t very good but we’re not terrible either. According to Wren we don’t understand the importance of a gun. He says a gun is power and power is important, power is being rid of the fear of fear itself and we don’t understand that because we haven’t been in the world as it really is for a long time. He says we don’t know anything about what the world is like. He says the world is unpredictable and nasty and that you never can tell what people are thinking. He says people don’t say what they’re thinking.

  Now he slides the long, flat case out from under his mattress and he squats and sets it on the woollen blanket and opens it and take out a box of .243s and loads the magazine. He puts on his boots and stands up and tucks the wooden butt into his armpit. Box Head gets up and they go out together and we follow, padding barefoot. They walk in a straight line through the apple trees, out into the dusk, the shadows of the trees stretching their limbs and following too. Currawongs, oooowhree! across the grassy plain. Oooowhree! Oooowhreeoo!

  Wren is on his stomach in the long grass, looking down over a ledge. He moves the Browning a tiny bit to the left and then a bit more and then he goes still, so he must have a clear sight through the crosshairs to the banks of Blindeye Creek. There’s no wind and the water’s running slowly.

  ‘Why are we standing out here?

  don’t know

  why are we whispering?

  don’t know either

  we should go in.’

  (Much earlier in the morning we went up the hallway on our tiptoes and when we got to the living-room doorway we stopped – some unknown spirit grounded our feet and Wren was sitting on the floor next to Christ. Her head was resting on a cushion, her right leg bent up at the knee and an empty glass in one hand. They weren’t talking and we couldn’t tell if it was a companionable silence or an awkward one or a pause before the beginning of something.)

  ‘Let’s go in

  but

  let’s go in.’

  We turn around and pad back through the apple trees, careful not to step on anything that might creak or snap underfoot and in the outhouse we unpeg some clothes now dry and just as we reach the living room, crack! crack! followed by a fuzzier rolling echo and Christ jerks up from the floor like an electrical current has run her body through and kneeling, balanced on her right leg, she screams, ‘No! No you won’t!’ and she crumples and she growls, ‘No not you don’t you dare. Get out.’

  ‘Shhh,’ we say, soothing.

  She rolls on her side, tries to rise again, pushing at us with one arm. ‘Get out!’

  ‘Hush

  hush now

  there’s nowhere to go.’

  She stills and looks at us and o she sees us o with her mouth hanging her eyes hanging and the thought flies between us swift that we are a terrible thing a terrible thing but a terrible beautiful thing yes we fly swift and true and our thoughts go to glory glory glory.

  Twenty metres from the h
ouse is an outdoor fire pit, really just a natural depression far enough from any trees to be safe to light a fire even in summer, unless the wind is blowing from the north or the creek is dry. Wren lies the first rabbit on a block of wood soon for the fire and with a meat cleaver and without seeming to breathe, he chops off the feet, the tail and the head and lifts the fur at the belly and makes a horizontal incision and pulls the skin away, working right around the still-warm body and then he slices open the stomach and pulls out all the organs and intestines. Still without seeming to breathe. Here come the cats. The smell of new blood. Blood on his hands.

  He chops off the feet and tail, skins and guts the second rabbit and goes down to the creek to wash the carcasses clean. She is starving: her body is starving all of her is starving and this is her first meal.

  Carrots and onions from the ground. Brown sugar and oil from the kitchen. Brandy. Our own quince wine, the colour of ruby. Winemaker’s yeast has a golden smell of warm things, of bread rising, and the quinces have their own particular fragrance – a soft, slight perfume, not too tart not too sweet.

  Everything now still. We kindle the fire and watch it smoke and grow and the smoke gets in our eyes and though it’s a mechanical reason to cry, other things well up unbidden from somewhere, things to do with grief. We try not to wish too much for anything. We’ve learned not to wish too much for anything. Wren too. He says there was a girl he had a crush on at school who never said his name. She either looked through him or way past him as though he wasn’t there at all.

  Wren puts the rabbit in the pot and browns it and adds onions and carrots and brown sugar and a slug of quince wine and stirs for a while and then pours in water and puts the lid on the pot and he goes inside. We hesitate – wobble, tremble, our hands tingling – the illicit thrill – and we follow him into the house as silent as we can be, then as still.

  Christ has backed herself into the edge of the couch and is trying to lever herself up on her arms. ‘Can you help me?’

  Wren says, ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘Stand.’

  He goes to her and says, ‘I’ll fix your leg first. Can you lift it straight?’