She tries. ‘No.’
‘That’s okay. If you stand up first, I’ll fix it then.’
‘What’s your name?’ she asks.
‘You called me by my name.’
‘What?’
‘Never mind. Here, let me help.’ He kneels behind her on one leg and hooks his arms under hers and around her front and steadies himself.
‘Ready?’
‘Yes.’
They stand up together, slowly. We suck in our breath, watching from the doorway in the shadows. Her breath whistles through her mouth like she’s been running hard. They stay standing like that, Wren behind with his arms wrapped around her, one body and two heads, her skin so alive on his. O. One of our hearts is running and skipping, all the heat, the thudding, blood coming up in waves, her face blurred against his shoulder.
‘Okay,’ she says, and shakes herself away and lowers herself onto the couch, left leg out straight, eyes closed, grimacing, and Wren kneels on the floor in front of her with a bandage in his hand. The whole outer side of her injured leg is dusky yellow with a central patch the colour of blood plums below her hip. It still looks a bit swollen even though we have been lining the layers of bandages with salt to draw out the clear, yellowish fluid. He is so careful – starting at her ankle and winding the bandage around and around slow and firm. He hesitates when he gets higher up her thigh – pauses like a breath – but she lets him keep going till the bandage runs out and he clips it with a safety pin and his hands hardly shake.
She rouses herself after a minute. ‘What – who – are they? Is it they? How long? How long have I been like this?’ Her questions fall out one after another, jostling. Wren looks up at her ready to answer and then he sees us standing in the doorway – silent, watching. He says nothing.
She says, ‘Who else is here? Is it summer? Where? Where are we?’ Her voice thins, she frowns. ‘Is he here too? I’m so tired. Gonna stop. Spinning soon, isn’t it?’ Her eyes close.
‘What is spinning?’ Wren asks, gently.
‘The world,’ she says.
‘Wren, let her rest
come and have dinner.’
‘Yes,’ says Wren, still kneeling, his eyes all full up of her.
‘Wren!
have you checked on dinner?
is it burning?’
We hold hands and wait for Wren to go out. Christ is lying back on the sofa waiting for answers.
‘You’ll be better soon
we’re here for you.’
‘But where are we?’
‘A fair way out of Swiggin.’
‘Swiggin?’
‘The nearest town. Do you know it?’
‘No.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘How long?’
‘Ten days. Ten days all up.’
‘Oh god.’
‘When Wren found you on the road, he thought you—
where are you from?’
‘I don’t know.’ She looks at us again, right into our faces – one and then the other. Our eyes shrink back in their sockets. She says, ‘You – but – you are, hold on – what are you?’
Here it is again, the question we hate more than any other. What are you? We don’t know the right answer, if there is one. We try to be calm but an invisible fraying is inside us, in our hearts, and we stare at the ground, still as still and silent.
‘Well
who are you?’
She says, ‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t remember?’
‘I remember running. Looking back and running. That’s what I’ve been doing all this time, running and running.’
She looks at her poor, cut feet and winces.
‘Or maybe I’ve been half asleep. I don’t know. Fading in and out and falling a few times and running and then someone – I think – I think there was a rope around my neck.’
She rubs her neck and winces again.
We don’t know if her words are the truth, if her memory is the truth, if her dreams are the truth or if none of them are the truth.
‘Why?’ she says. ‘God. Why?’ She’s frantic for a moment, wildlooking, pulsing, glaring – we flinch because she’s surely going to hit us – instead she starts to cry and we don’t know how to help her or what to say. We never cry. Neither does Wren. We turn to look for him but he isn’t here.
‘Don’t cry.’ Part of us shudders because it’s a silly phrase, meaningless and feeble and not what we want to say at all.
She sobs and then stops and looks up at us and says, ‘How can I not know my name?’
‘When a bird hits a window and is stunned, it must rest awhile
yes, to recover from the shock
to find itself again
find itself
your lovely body—
well, we mean—
needs rest
and time – to heal
and then when your mind is ready, you’ll remember
remember who you are
rest now
rest.’
She smiles – for just a second her face burns – a sun for just a second.
Silence in the room now like thick snow. We look at the familiar things around us, the books in piles making their own wall and the wooden clock with the pennies inside it and the darkly red couch, mended and faded and sagged so long to the shape of our body that it holds us in its embrace even after we leave the room. Now it is accommodating us on one end and Christ on the other. Silence thicker and thicker. At Hope Home we were awkward at everything – everything – but here – in our home – we are not at all awkward, there is no-one to unsettle us or instil us with unease or hurt or fright. No-one here to knock us down. Ours is a simple life. We have us and we have Wren and we think more than we speak and we don’t necessarily think or speak in words and before today we did not know that conversation is perhaps an art. This now needs a voice, this silence is cool and cooling and inside us it feels like one of the moments that can change things, a fulcrum, an opening in time when a connection is made – or is not. Here she is, a life we have saved. What now?
‘Are you bleeding?’ we ask together, soft and low and deep.
Christ says, ‘What?’
‘Here,’ we say, two palms over our two hearts.
‘No.’
‘Only – we mean metaphorically
only metaphorically.’
‘No.’ Then she says, ‘My eyes aren’t right.’
We wait.
‘I mean, you’re—’ She shifts, her fingers flicker, her eyes – their enormous blue coats us all over – and then they drift away. She tries again. ‘Are you – two I mean, people or – or?’
‘No.’
‘Then what can I call you?’
We search her eyes for fear and we search her face for disgust and we find neither, instead we find curiosity and now she’s smiling too and we are so surprised by this that our legs lose all their strength and we slide off the couch to the floor in the corner where our heads touch and knees shiver and our toes curl under the balls of our feet. Then a burst of adrenaline runs through, the body’s alchemy responding, saying, Is this—? Can it be true? That she—? Might she—? O! Imagine.
Here is everything we have to give, here are our small hearts, our small voices, our small life, here is our world. Is it enough?
The rabbit is ready, hot and tender and flavoured, the fire with a slow coal life of its own. This is her first meal and we’ll give her something to savour and remember. A stick through the hand-holder loops either side of the pot, lift it off the coals onto the grass. Our mouths already full of saliva. Stir the stew and a swig of the quince wine. This is her first meal and we will give her something to love. The sky winking bright saying yes. Stir and then spoon the stew into three bowls, an equal amount in each, carrots and onions. Meat and bones. All the flavour. A sprig of pepperbush on hers and an extra spoonful and the sky bright and winking.
But Wren comes along and picks u
p two of the bowls of stew from the ground and walks right past us and goes inside and we stiffen, then tip our heads sideways, confused, and follow him in and he gives one of the bowls to Christ and he says to her, ‘I hope you like it – it’s my own recipe,’ and he smiles and she says, ‘Thanks, what is it?’ And he says, ‘It’s rabbit cooked slow with um carrots and leeks and wine and onions and things like that – ah, y’know flavourings wine and onions and that um, stuff we grow, herbs, and we grow the carrots too and salt except we don’t grow salt uh-ha ha um or pepper but a slosh of just to uh y’know give it a kick.’ She blinks and says, ‘Thanks, it’s been a while, can’t remember what I had to eat last,’ and she half-laughs and looks lost again, and he says, ‘Oh, and yes and it must be—’ and his voice trails away. He sits on the couch close, close to her. The other bowl and a spoon in his hand. Our hearts thu-dthud-thud-d-thu- in their stretched, bony cage.
Christ says, ‘Thank you.’
Wren says, ‘It’s not much, but—’
Christ tips her head closer to his and says, ‘But it is.’
We say, ‘Well
actually—
we actually—’
Christ puts her hand on Wren’s knee, the lightest touch. She pauses like that for a moment, then says, ‘Really – thank you for – I don’t know what – for everything.’ Her birdsong voice is deeper than we’ve heard it before, like very deep water, and Wren gives her his best smile and they begin to eat.
A breathing weight enveloped us in our bed at Hope Home. Someone lay on top of us, smothering us in the fold of his flesh. Lying there, still as still, we waited for his hands to move towards our throats. This dream was always the same – if we struggled, he’d throttle us. If we didn’t struggle we’d die under his weight. Faced with these circumstances at night and our fear of the staff and other children alike, we adopted a code of silence, walking everywhere close to the walls with our heads lowered to the floor, speaking only to each other in sped-up staccato whispers – one word or two or three, slithering words, but they were enough. We had nothing else in the world.
It wasn’t easy to tell what the other children were thinking or feeling – of course, that didn’t mean they didn’t think or feel. All of us were assumed to possess an equal capacity for understanding and learning – somewhere between none and dim. The weight of the sameness of every day was equal to the weight of the man who on occasion lay on top of us at night, and under it and under him our hearts beat out a thready yet determined cry for help that no-one ever answered.
Wren goes off to bed without offering us dinner so we eat on our own in the kitchen. The rabbit stew is cold. Our surprise at this turn of events is a painful kind of surprise and we press the pain down as hard as we can because other things are also floating around in us – unease, resentment, desire – and we’re not keen to face any of them.
When we go back into the living room, Christ says, ‘I think someone I love has died.’
‘Someone has died?’
‘Yes. Someone I love. I feel it. It hurts. Here.’
‘Odd isn’t it. How you remember things
some things and not others
and why
and why.’
‘Something, no, someone is pulling at me. Tugging. It hurts.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well then. Is memory belief or knowledge or imagining or truth?
is it made-up or real?
wanting so very much or running away?
can we know for sure?’
Christ frowns at us, sighs and closes her eyes and seems to sleep for a while. We press our hands together in our lap to stop the trembling. Then she clenches her fists, and now her voice is a little girl’s voice, and she says, ‘My head hurts the light’s in my eyes no don’t please I’ll run where you can’t oh go to hell you won’t ever touch him not like that don’t leave me here you dumb whore no don’t say that quick quick shhhh turn off the lights sweetie shhhh a bit further nearly there tiptoe don’t look behind shhhh run now run sweetie run—’
‘Hush
you must be very tired
rest now
rest.’
She is an earthquake as well as a bird. We shall be mindful of this. Healing is more than the absence of injury and she has many injuries. We take her left hand in our right hand and stroke her left hand with our left hand – art in the touch of our fingers, and strength too, and shelter and safety and hope – remoulding the body and all its spirits. Her shirt is damp again over her breasts and armpits. Three perfectly round scars are pearlescent on the inside of her wrist. Our stroking slows over them, feeling out their shape and texture, feeling out their pain. She has others like these on her back between her shoulderblades and on her breasts and the sides of her neck.
‘Turn off the lights keep still,’ she says hoarsely, eyes closed, caught up in some uneasy land of half-sleep.
‘Shhhh,’ we whisper. ‘Hush now
you are safe now.’
‘Wait for the morning? Oh help help.’ Her laugh is a bark and we shiver and stand up and ease her legs onto the couch and cover her with a blanket. We stand still as still watching her breathe. No moon.
Late in the quiet, in the depths of the night.
And now we are not sleeping, not breathing in time, one lung filling with air while another is deflating and one heart skipping all over the place and a precise kind of pain in our chest that makes us shiver again and hold very still – here on the mattress on our back as always but we are not breathing.
‘Nearly bloody well wet the bed,’ Wren says first thing, making coffee. ‘I did that a couple of times as a kid. Jesus.’ His face is red and blotchy, the rash on his chest runs right up to his chin and his eyes have lost all their blue. He slumps in a chair at the kitchen table. We stay still as still and wait for him.
‘The walls in my room fell in. They were these really blinding white walls and they had teeth. I didn’t see the teeth to begin with but once the walls began to tip forward, there’s teeth coming through the white plaster – all bloody and broken-off. Teeth! I stuck my arms out, I locked them at the elbows to hold up the walls and hold them and hold them and my mother’s sitting right there on a chair in a corner of the room with her legs crossed and she’s wearing this pale-blue dress with pink violets on it that she used to wear on special occasions and she’s got this huge brown belt around her waist and beige stockings and high-heel shoes, I can’t ever remember her wearing high-heel shoes, and pink lipstick all over her lips and her own teeth are falling out of her mouth and they’re dropping on her high-heel shoes.’
We nod and wait for him.
‘So she says, what are you doing and I say, this is my home now and she says the walls are falling in and I say, but I’m holding them up for you and she says something like, don’t give up then, you’re a giver-upper. And then all these people are there, her friends. And she starts saying all this stuff even though her teeth have fallen out, like, terrible I know. He did yes. He surely did. So sudden. I know. Terrible. No no please don’t trouble yourselves. Thank you again. Sorry about this place, it’s filthy, it smells bad in here and yes, Angus is holding the walls up for us. He’s over there. Dreadful. I know. I know. Exactly right. No. No hope. Be careful – he’s a fatty-fat little liar. Don’t get too close. He’s lucky not to have got us all killed. I’ve tried everything. Honestly. No. Exactly. Me with pains in the chest like his father had. And look what happened. After all I’ve been through. No. No hope. All the stories. All made up. I starve him apparently. Look at him! Fatty-fat-fat. And I lock him out of the house. Lies! Best thing is out of sight out of you know what. I’m going to have a heart attack just like his father. Any day now. And there’s this cluster of people in the other corner, standing there all crushed up, staring – leering – staining everything, frowning, all red, sneering red, I yell at them get out! But they don’t see the danger. They stare at it but they don’t see it. I’m
screaming get out! but they don’t hear me and all night I hold up the walls of the room and I roar at them get out! cos my arms are shaking so bad and they stare and they stare and they don’t hear me and then they’re all smiling but their eyes aren’t smiling and in the end I think, fuck this, and I just let go and the walls fall in and the room collapses and everyone is all heaving on top of everyone else and the air gets less and less and it hurts and then there’s no air.’
He glares at us hard with his charred eyes and then coughs and then retches.
‘Guess what?’ he says, his gaze not at us now but on his feet. ‘I don’t save no-one after all and there’s no salvation no redemption no bravery no answers no celebrations no reunions no forgiveness no virgins no bright light no holiness no angels with halos we fight each other for air and then there’s no air and we all die.’
‘And what happens then?’
‘When?’
‘After you’re dead.’
‘Nothing.’
The magpies are calling the morning and he leans over the edge of the table and retches again. The house is quiet. When the light finds its way in through the muscat vine we get up and pour Wren a glass of water and sit back down at the kitchen table and watch him drink it.
‘How dumb can you be to dream shit like that,’ he says, rolling his eyes at his feet.
‘No dreams are dumb
no dreams are stupid.’
‘Yeah well. I don’t reckon I know about that one way or the other.’
‘Sit here and rest a minute.’
‘I guess.’
Squeezing Wren’s shoulder on the way out, we pad in our thick wool socks up the hallway from the kitchen into the living room. Christ is stretched on the couch with her pale hair falling to the floor, falling like Blindeye Creek water, sounding – if hair could sound – like a bird trilling. We imagine holding her hands as the day passes by and trailing our fingers through her hair. O. Her skin like music. Her – because never – we haven’t – no.
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