‘Thirsty, eh?’ says John.
But the baby. The baby. If only. I try to stay but everything is fuzzy. Her voice, her words have caught under my skin. What does she mean? All I’ve imagined to be true. Everything’s gone wrong. Her secrets and my secrets. I want to slap her I want to slap her hard I want to slap her damnhard. I want to stand and haul her up and yell in her face—whatthehelliswrongwithyou? YouletmethinkIdkilledababy.
Silence.
Then sickness and relief. Skeins of fire and the air above crumbling, decaying. Then sickness because of the relief, the kind of sickness that comes from shame because oh god whatever is going on isn’t actually about me at all. Stand up but my knees won’t hold. Everything fuzzy floating away, edges soften then there are no edges, floating I don’t know where, beyond it all and I don’t care. I do. I can’t lose her please please.
Ellen is whispering to me. ‘We like strangers. Me and John. We like you – and your girlfriend.’
I stumble on words. Worse than ever.
‘Shhhh, I’m telling you something. Sit back down. Sit here. Just listen.’ She leans over in the dark, her face to mine and she kisses me. Her smokebreath and bourbon in my mouth and the very tip of her tongue and her lips like clouds. And now my whole body, because nothing makes sense, nothing, and the harder I try, the further away I am from the truth. Sky whirling. No fear. Nothing matters. Just this – this moment. Not even this moment. I am pieces. I see the pieces of me fall in the dirt. The wind – its breath.
Oh.
The pieces fly away.
‘Ah, look at you,’ Ellen says. She smiles right in my eyes, runs a finger along my stubbly jawbone and then over my lips so lightly I shiver, opens my jacket, and her fingers like rain on my chest, ribs, muscle, curve of my waist, all the way down inside my jeans, I ease back, she pulls the zipper all the way down and I find her breasts and she grins and the fire flies up in her eyes.
And in mine.
‘Should we—’
‘Shhhh. Come closer.’
I do.
‘Kiss me.’
I do.
The world folds upon itself.
She pulls back and whispers, ‘Angus.’
‘Mmmmm.’
‘So young, aren’t you – and a bit – anabit – very—’ Gripping my lower back, my butt. ‘Yes. Damn fine.’
She shakes her head at me slowly, grinning, sighing. I never knew but I dreamed. I whisper things back to her, words, trembling words. The fire spits and cracks. Her lips and mine, her mouth.
Damnfine
I close my eyes and I see Christ. Her lips and mine, her mouth. And.
No-one else is around when I wake up in the caravan. Sit up slowly, rub my eyes and they’re gritty and my clothes are damp and dirty and they smell of sweat. Our backpack isn’t here. Nor my boots and socks. I crawl off the mattress, out of the caravan, down the ladder. Two crows alight on a branch above, tilt their heads and fix me with their eyes, wild and severe and disdainful. The drum fire has gone out, the grass is white and kangaroos have left precise footmarks in the frost. I’m wretchedly thirsty. I frown at the crows but they do not blink or move. Stagger away from the truck, lean forward, woozy, hands on knees, let my head drop down until the rush of blood comes and I vomit and breathe, breathe and vomit and I stay that way until my breathing slows and stills.
Plastic cups are lying about on the dirt along with a jumper and my map caught under the feet of a camp chair. I pick it up and look for our pack but I can’t find it. My boots are by one of the truck’s wheels. I sit in the dirt and put them on.
‘Wren.’ It’s Christ, standing behind me with the sun turning the outline of her head into a halo. ‘Where’d you go?’
‘Nowhere. I remember the fire. Kissing Ellen. The thudbang of my heart and all of my body rushing out like it was the last day of the earth and nothing from then on felt the same, nor will it ever. I remember the fire.’
‘Mmmm.’
John says, ‘It’s warm still.’
‘Right. Well.’
‘Siddown and I’ll get her going.’
I look at Christ and I stand up, stiff, and take her hand. ‘We best get on.’
‘You two’ll be lost again before nightfall.’ He gets out a pack of Winston Blues and feels around the pockets of his jeans for matches and lights a cigarette. He sits on the steps of the caravan and adds, ‘I’ve got some good stuff in the truck for that ear, come take a look.’
‘No, really,’ I say. ‘We need to get on home.’
‘Do you?’ he says.
‘Yeah.’
‘Don’t look like you have a home.’
Christ says, ‘Thanks for—’ and her voice dies.
John says, ‘You scared or what?’
I shrug. I’m always scared.
Christ says, ‘No.’
I don’t believe her.
‘Frost’ll come for you pretty quick,’ says John, waving his cigarette in the air so the end of it glows and I can’t help following it with my eyes like a man hungry for that fire and that surety, that gold. ‘An’ who knows what else.’
I nod.
‘We’ll feed you up and drive you out in a few days.’
‘No, really, it’s okay.’
‘Got a death wish? Or you just daft?’ His strange eyes, bled of colour. Saliva wetting his lower lip, a slash of red. Those enormous hands.
I nod again and we turn and walk away from the clearing, melt into the scrubby wattles and eucalypts, walk so fast we’re gasping and we look back once or twice but no-one’s there and we listen but the land and the trees are silent.
Christ says, ‘How do you feel?’
‘Ughhh.’
‘Yeah.’
‘You?’
‘Same.’
After some time, I stop and squat down and open out the map. Christ says, ‘Where’s your pack?’
‘Don’t know.’
She takes the map from my hands and lays it on the ground. ‘John showed me while you and whatsername were off – wherever.’ She stares at the map for a while, moving her fingers over the mountains and rivers and valleys and roads and plains. ‘Where did we start from?’
‘Around here.’
‘There!’ She points to a spot, triumphant. ‘That’s where we are.’
‘John said?’
‘Do your bearing thing.’
I pull the compass from my pocket and put it down on the map and line it up, pointing from where we are now to the road that will take us home. Then I spin the compass dial until north on the compass matches north on the map and read off our bearing. ‘One hundred and twenty-six degrees.’
‘I believe you.’
We stand up, both grinning, and Christ folds the map and I hold the compass out flat in front of me on one hundred and twenty-six degrees and then turn my body until the compass’s magnetic needle lines up with its north arrow and now we have our direction. The crows wheel in a great black circle sounding a kind of agony raw raw raw raining on the burnt skin of our faces. I don’t know how to ask or what exactly the question should be and the strangeness and awkwardness of this rests with me rather than with Christ or with both of us together, how we are with each other.
Down into a valley of herbs and through a sphagnum bog, squelching beside a stream until we spot the shallowest place to cross. I check and recheck our bearing, air coming out of my lungs all jerky and shallow, wildness and strangeness all round us and wildness and strangeness inside us too. The crows wheel, sounding agony, raw aw aw aw falling like hail and death and their shadows echoing us through the scrub.
Can I ask her, are you lost like me?
No, this is greater than me
Much greater
We go on.
Christ says, ‘Will the twins be okay?’
‘I’ve been thinking about them. They’ll be fine.’
‘They don’t know where we are.’
‘Neither do we.’
We laugh a
nd there’s a wild hilarity in it and something breaking.
‘At least now we can see.’
‘Yeah but I’m so tired, Wren. I’m so tired.’
Home
Home
‘We’ll go as slow as you like but we keep going. Slow as you like but we keep going and if you can’t walk anymore, I’ll carry you.’
She gives me a look which to me says, I’m sorry and also I see the courage in you and also I will try to keep going for you as you have done for me and there is something even heavier in her face and her body and it is sorrow and I want to be the one to make the sorrow go away and the one to replace it with hope, with happiness, with love. But I don’t know if I am the one and if I am not then it’s my own fault. So we go on without speaking, shuffling along the bearing till the crows leave us and the sun is overhead and then we walk into the afternoon, picking our way through scrubby wattle, clambering over dead trees, skirting the rocky crags and low marshes, tripping, stopping for water to drink from the running springs, dunking our heads in the water to feel something electric on our skin. We climb onto a spur above the tree line and the sky is pearl and blue. Best sky I’ve ever seen. We sit down to rest on a flat rock.
‘How’s your leg?’
‘Not bad.’
‘How is it?’
‘Not good.’
‘We’ll be home soon.’
She doesn’t say anything, so we sit on the rock in silence, and a wedgetail eagle rides a high current of wind above us.
I say, ‘I don’t understand.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘No.’
‘Is that fair? To just say no.’
She doesn’t answer.
My fingernails are torn and black.
She says, ‘You don’t know what it was like.’
‘Can you tell me?’
‘No.’
‘Tell me.’
‘No.’
‘Please.’
‘I can’t.’
I look at her but she turns her face away.
She says, ‘I can’t because I don’t understand. I don’t know what happened.’ And here she holds her hands flat on her thighs, palms up, and says, quietly and firmly and without a hint of rhetoric, ‘except to tell you it’s how I survived.’
‘You said you had a baby.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you called him Angus.’
‘Yes.’
‘But—’
‘I loved him.’
‘How could you?’
‘I don’t know where he came from. He came like a dream that grew and grew inside me, and my body kind of followed – kind of in sympathy. I mean, I got sick and and I got fatter and my belly—even my tits hurt. I don’t know. Maybe I believed him alive. Do you see?’
‘No.’
‘Yes, I believed him alive, and I loved him so much. That is how I survived.’
I look at her and she looks at me and she smiles as if now she is beyond fate, beyond will, beyond judgement.
‘Then you can’t go back,’ I say, soft and low.
She doesn’t reply.
‘Come and live with us. Will you think about it?’
She doesn’t reply.
Weariness hits me sudden and hard, a dying kind of weariness in my bones as if I’m leaking, dissolving down from head to foot and running off the rock face like blood. What I’d like is a bath – in a real bathtub with gold taps and four gold feet – brimful of hot water. And maybe a crackingly cold beer and a smoke in a great big bed with clean sheets and three pillows and the surety of shelter all night, a chance to lie still and sleep and sleep and sleep and then breakfast in bed with bread and eggs in the morning and a cup of coffee and clean hands and a clean-shaven face and someone to hold forever beside me, someone the twins call Christ.
Are you lost like me?
But this is much greater than me
Her life
Oh god, have I mistaken kindness for love?
To survive we must walk out of here together, one foot forward, one foot after the other for as long as it takes to find home – though who knows how home will be when we find it.
‘Let’s go on now.’
But she doesn’t move. She says, ‘D’you reckon there’s such a thing as Judgement Day?’
I think about this for a bit. ‘I reckon there’s a Judgement Day for everyone – on a different day for everyone.’
‘On the day we die?’
‘No. Well maybe. I guess it depends. If you’re lucky it’s before you die. I reckon mine came six years ago but I didn’t know it and I didn’t understand, not until now. I see it now.’
‘What day was it?’
‘D’you think – well – that it’s possible to commit a crime against a person’s soul?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe.’
‘D’you think it’ll ever go away? The wishing to go back in time and make it right?’
‘Probably not, no.’
The road, when Christ and I come out of the wild, is blindingly flat and clean, a scar through the forest and for once a very welcome one. We sit on the verge in our filthy clothes and grin at each other.
‘All right.’
‘Made it.’
‘This far at least.’
‘Yeah.’
‘You okay?’
‘I’m okay.’
We turn east and walk down the centre of the road for what seems like forever and then some more and the sun is low behind us in the west and our shadows long on the road and I stop and take my boots off because my feet are covered in blood and blisters and I walk in my socks until we see the spearmint-green truck up ahead on the verge. Here I stop myself from running. We walk slow and steady on the flat clean road. When we get to the truck I unpin the key from inside my shirt and unlock the driver’s door and get in and lean over to unlock the passenger door and then I get out again and go round to help Christ.
We’re filthy but we’ve made it back.
We’ve made it back without a baby swaddled in a blanket.
Inside the truck we sit still for a while and then I put the key in the ignition. Turn the key and the truck starts in its usual wobbly way. Three-point, four-point turn and we rumble along without talking for some time until we stop at the crossroad – one way to Swiggin, the other towards home.
‘You can’t go back,’ I say.
She sits very still with her head bowed.
‘You can’t go back.’
She sits very still with her head bowed.
‘Will you stay with us?’
She doesn’t say yes, she doesn’t say no.
‘Please.’
‘Wren.’
‘I’m not going home without you.’
She doesn’t answer.
‘Lonely is heavy.’
‘I know.’
‘I don’t know anything, not a goddamn thing.’
‘You do, Wren. You won’t be alone for always. You’re smart and brave and kind. And, hey. Look at you! I mean – seriously. Damn fine.’ She grins and I can’t not grin back but it is bitter.
She says, ‘I like you. I like being with you. That means other people will too – if you let them.’
‘I dunno.’
‘You’re stronger than you think.’
‘Huh.’
‘Do you want to find where you belong?’
‘Maybe.’
‘You will.’
‘And what if I find it and it’s nothing like I thought it’d be?’
She is quiet.
Then she says, ‘You have to take the risk. Some folks don’t get the chance to think about it or even imagine it. So in a way you’re lucky no matter what happens.’
‘My mother said I didn’t know how lucky I was.’
‘Was she right?’
‘No. Not when she knew me. Maybe now.’
‘Maybe she gave you all she had.’
‘She said that one d
ay I would kill her.’
‘Don’t say that. I bet she loved you.’
‘She said what’s wrong with me is wrong all the way through.’
‘Did she say that?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Did you believe her?’
‘Yeah. Anyhow, even if I didn’t, the kids at school said I was a liar and a stealer. They gave me a lot of dunkings and wedgies. Called me Piglet.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t?’
‘Maybe I had an idea but I didn’t want to find out if it was true.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t be sorry.’
‘Did you fight back?’
‘I did. I fought myself. I fought myself hard.’
‘And?’
‘Didn’t do any good. But you learn, don’t you? I was always running away. I never stood still. I had to learn it for myself.’
‘Learn what?’
‘Wherever you go, there you are.’
‘Is she still alive – your mother?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Gee Wren. That’s harsh.’
‘I did some things that can’t be put right.’
‘I bet she loves you.’
‘No. I made a promise and it was a mistake.’
‘I bet she loves you so much she’s afraid of it.’
‘No.’
‘Maybe she had her reasons for not telling you that she loves you.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Here’s one thing I’ve learned – there’s always reasons. My husband had reasons for what he did even though I don’t know what his reasons were.’
‘I guess so.’
‘Did you ever think about her reasons?’
‘Not enough, no.’
‘Mmm.’
‘D’you miss her at all?’
In the silence I ease my boots back on, tie the laces. We sit in the truck for a long time looking out at the road and our shadows side by side and the wild on either side of them.
‘Christ?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What if you’ve done something terrible and a part of you died and the part that’s died is in your heart.’
‘Go on.’
‘What if you deserved it?’
She closes her eyes and rubs her forehead and she looks thin and exhausted and she opens her eyes, her eyes full of sorrow, and she looks into mine. ‘No-one can give you those answers. No-one else is living your life. You have to figure it out for yourself and find a way to make it right.’
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