The World Without Us

by Mireille Juchau

  Even before she started forgetting, his mother had always been vague about the details, getting strident whenever he asked about his birth. It was natural was all she’d say. You came out smooth, without a squeak. She’d arrived at the commune with three-year-old Tom, this single mum from two towns away, and soon got devoted making candles, sewing calico bags. She was deft with wicker, and weaving. I love you, she’d say, isn’t that enough? He ought to be grateful, she wasn’t always sure she’d make it up here, a woman alone, she’d say, trembling and marring the wax or breaking a line of cane, so he’d stop himself asking. Who is he then, my father? Where does he live?

  Occasional men had come to The Hive and paid Tom small, thrilling attentions, teaching him to whittle a stick into an arrow, build the ziggurat shape for more powerful fires, or how to catch cod in Repentance River, ravelling the guts and cleavering the head. And there was Jackson Hodgins. Good as any father, always there for you, said his mother, biological or not. But asked to play football, or to join the kids on a bush quest, Jack would say he didn’t have time for small details, so Tom, pale-faced, whey-haired stutterer with rope to hold his shorts up, started to believe he was one of them.

  When he was eleven Tom was sent up the escarpment with a new resident, Evan. Gather rocks for the frog pond – that was Hodgins’s mission, his morning koan, whatever. Evan Perske had been detoxing since drifting into The Hive two weeks before. He staggered from the Calming Cell, blinking at the sunlight like a wintering mammal. A twenty year old going on fifty. Beside him Tom, stalky, fine-boned, looked newly born.

  At the summit Tom surveyed the great silver bales of mist that covered the poky towns and settlements. He could not even glimpse the treetops. This plane of white air had a tension, like the surface of a lake.

  The fucken view! Evan flopped down wheezing, and rolled a joint. Where the bloody hell is it?

  Tom squatted, stuck out a hand, his eyes fixed on mist. He took a long draw, blew two expert smoke rings into menthol air.

  Then Evan’s hand was on his shoulder, his gravelled voice inside his ear. Forget the rocks, man. Let’s just enjoy the day.

  But Jack said …

  … He ain’t your dad, Tommy, Evan said. Why take orders from him?

  Tom shrugged.

  Which one’s your father anyway?

  Tom turned slowly and scrubbed his head, realising. How would they get the rocks down? They couldn’t carry more than two at once!

  It’s going to take us all day, he said dully.

  You think Hodgins didn’t consider that? said Evan.

  He likes to set challenges, Tom said, thinking hard. It’s character-building.

  Evan wheezed, hawed, burped. Tom realised this was laughter.

  Once Hodgins had said, go collect sticks for the fire, but only a certain type of wood. It had taken Tom and Juno all afternoon to come back with five branches. Cedar. Hodgins liked the scent it gave to evening festivities. That night, Lute had told Tom those trees were almost entirely gone since the cedar cutters cleared the land. But how Lute told it, Hodgins’s challenges were still important. What they tested, Lute said, was your doubt; they were supposed to awaken you. Rare timber. Juno had only been six years old. How was he supposed to know box gum from beech?

  Tom felt the grass take effect, his limbs drifting from his body. The clouds were looking fully impressive, super awesome in fact. It was tempting to step out on to that white plane of nothingland. He did a little mountain dance. One leg in the air, weaving his hands over his head, his hips jerking left and right.

  My theory about Hodgins, Evan continued, the less fathers in this place, the more he’s admired. Women love that commitment. He’s all Mr Reliable and shit.

  But Tom didn’t want to think about Jack. He was swaying in the soft breeze. All the living things from the forest floor sounded amplified, as if whispering to him.

  You don’t know who he is, do you? said Evan. How about your brother?

  Tom inhaled sharply. What brother? What could Evan know with a brain fritzed by chemicals? Tom felt his limbs turn hot and cold. He jammed his fists in his pockets and took air through the nose like he’d been taught, to settle anger in a peaceable way. Then reached for the joint and sucked it direct to ash. Sometimes, he had an urge to destroy. When he was rostered to work in the Laundry Cell he’d snipped nicks in Hodgins’s jeans and T-shirts. Just small enough so no one could say if it were man or moth that’d damaged them. Some weeks later they appeared in his mother’s sewing basket; she’d been tasked to darn them with her beautiful, invisible stitches. Tom had watched her bent over, tying off thread and biting it clean. He’d stayed in the corner where she could not see his tiny torrid misery. Hodgins’s jeans, in her hands.

  Had Hodgins chosen her for mending because he knew what Tom had done to his clothes, or because she was handiest with the needle?

  If he hated Hodgins so much, then why come here? Tom asked Evan. Why not The Ferns where they had naltrexone and an actual doctor who oversaw your withdrawal?

  I’m neutral about Jack, said Evan. He’s letting me doss down, that’s ace. And, the benefits! Up here Jack Hodgins is a king. If he lived in the town, I’m telling you, he’d be just a man.

  Tom clenched his back teeth. There was something intrinsically lacking about being just a man. You ought to be a god, or a fucking foam-flanked stallion, as the women called certain men in The Hive, heads bowed in the Weaving Circle. Evan was right, you had to be so much more than yourself. How else to get noticed?

  Tom looked at Evan’s sepia skin, his nails so deeply bitten there was a line of dried blood above each one. Evan smelled sharp and sour, like the sap from an injured plant.

  People in town think you’re all nuts, Evan said. The Hive’s a great place to offload some grass, grab a quick fuck. Probably what happened to your mother. But why stick around? Mountain rocks! I did less work in juvie.

  Tom stood. A dank taste coated his tongue. A mean shrunken feeling inside.

  Sunlight winnowed out above the clouds. Then shoaled down very hard and bright. Once his dizziness subsided, he saw – across the milky lake of mist a great elongated man.

  Check it out, he said. And as he pointed, the giant’s arm ascended in greeting.

  Evan stood. Man, what the fuck?

  Tom, reeling his awe back inside himself, flicked hair from his face, and said casually, No one told you about him?

  Tom lifted his arms and the figure responded, its great limbs waving in the warming air. The boy stood on the cliff edge, swaying and gesturing, as if engaged in some grave rite, his arms outstretched, head thrown back. The shadow responded, rippling and sinuous, backlit by the sun.

  Rare phenomena, son, Hodgins told him that night when Tom described the figure. Tom hadn’t said how Evan had fled, or about the abandoned stones which didn’t seem to be required any more.

  But that was just yourself you saw, said Hodgins. Your shadow projected on to a cloud. A Brocken Spectre.

  He sounded almost impressed.

  The next week Hodgins knelt and folded Tom’s fingers around a gift, his large hands swallowing the boy’s. A storm glass. A lidded jar filled with boiling steam and crystals to predict the coming weather. Hodgins knew a guy in the valley who made them, he said. Camphor, ammonium chloride, potassium nitrate, rectified spirit, distilled water.

  Tom went speechless with gratitude. He clutched the jar against his chest and scampered across the native garden. He kept it on a high shelf in his cabin, and at night watched the vapours swirl into new formations. Each morning he warned his mother of coming winds or rain. He took the jar into the Nursery Cell and showed the infants what these swirls and flares could mean. Overnight, he’d become a kind of diviner.

  Clear liquid – bright weather.

  Crystals at base – thick air, frost in winter.

  Dim liquid with small stars – thunderstorms.

  Large flakes – heavy air, overcast sky.

  Large flakes –
heavy air, overcast sky.

  One morning, Tom woke to find Hodgins standing over him, shirt off, towel around his hips. He was holding the jar up to the light, his loosened hair muzzy from sleep. Tom could hear a distant sound. A minute before he worked it out. It was his mother, singing.

  Some weeks after the day of the rocks, Evan drifted back into a neighbouring town. Tom would see him on the main street with his paltry collection of broken things and his GOODES FOR SALE sign. With his afflicted skin and hollow cheeks Evan seemed in the grip of drugs again. Tom would give him honey, some sourdough from The Hive. But Evan didn’t care for food; though he looked like the hungriest person alive, he’d rather you gave him dope, or the cold hard ducats.

  Once he was with a young girl, playing a cracked guitar. As Tom passed the honey to Evan, she grabbed it. Stuck her whole fist in the jar of Raw Redgum, then let the syrup run into her mouth. After fastidiously sucking each finger clean she began to strum and sing in a heavy accent. Her voice soared, breaking on the high notes. Tom stood spellbound as she stopped and started, over and over. Then he sang along in perfect, unstuttering harmony, his good ear cocked towards her.

  How’s your father? Evan interrupted. Tommy? You find him yet?

  Tom ignored him. What’s your name? Tom asked the girl.

  She glanced from one to the other. Then gave Tom a wide, solar smile.

  Marta, she said, and began singing again.

  This kid, Evan interrupted, if he’s real lucky, he’s going to grow up to be just like me.

  As he heads out to protest at Clear Energy Tom considers Evan’s prediction. It’s true he’s become ruled by chemicals not of his own making. And in this has violated his own Tenets for Natural Survival. He swears that when he finds his father, he’ll come off the antidepressants. They’re merely a prop, he thinks, an adjunct for some primal thing missing in his life. A father will round out starveling parts, a father will nourish enough to shake off dream dads, world-ruining phantoms, any nightly visitants. Now from a treetop, the yark yark of a cockatoo, a sign of assent, though he’d have preferred a less jesterly messenger; a stately swamp harrier perhaps or falcon.

  10

  Today, on his way to the two pm meeting, Jim is overtaken by a powerful, leaden tiredness. As he crosses the barren playground he recalls the wonder tamped by the monotony of teaching. Phrases feather down from mezzanine rooms, big elephants can always understand small elephants, il pecola rosso, five sixes are thirty, is Jupiter a planet?, and now a listless child, shepherded across tundras of field and concrete to sickbay, and a mother, ferrying some vital item – lunchbox, library bag, mulberry leaves for 3P’s ailing silkworms.

  And here comes memory. Jim’s schoolboy self, loitering by a playground paperbark. A hot Monday morning waiting for his best friend to arrive and wondering how he’ll say to Matthias, my mother is gone – no, not back to hospital – gone for ever. How to say dead in a place where the word was traded daily, denatured, detached, dehumanised, you’re dead, Jamie Rogers, dead right, dead wrong, that’s deadly, dead heat, it’s a dead cert. His mother’s illness had distinguished him – for months at school he’d become arrayed in sombre light. He’d always been popular but after her death deigned not to be, turning aloof and scorny and superior. He realised now that losing her had realigned him – he’d drawn much closer then to the teachers.

  All this rises up on his afternoon journey from Block C to the staffroom to discuss with Jordana Blastic the Patterns of Place and Location lesson plan. Specifically, how religious and other belief systems affect the way groups interact with the environment, his mind circling back to Evangeline and that tree she’d festooned, to her daughter’s unbending silence in class and then to his favourite professor who used to rock on orthopaedic shoes at the rostrum as he said, ignorance is a kind of forgetting.

  Was Tess’s silence another way to forget?

  A teacher with unexamined beliefs, the professor had said, must be broken down to blankness.

  Jim sinks on to a cold silver bench and thinks of what he’s doing and what he’s done. I bless the rains down in Africa-a-a-a-a, seven sixes are forty-two, you will die, 3.10 pm at the back gate. From the music rooms he hears a single violinist saw some unearthly tone from rosined gut and oiled wood, violin makers prefer wood from old-growth trees cut during the cooler months and left to season for a decade or more, and he listens, fingers splayed on his knees. He stays very still in a long current of dappled shadow, chills along his forearms. He swallows hard. And what have you refused, the music seems to ask, what parts of yourself were discarded in grief ? And then, it’s just music again, suffused with effort, more touching in this raw form than any practised sound.

  Wasn’t it for all of this that he became a teacher? The distillation of effort, the bright hope for each child’s potential before it hardened into myth. He pictures his students’ faces and tries to summon that rare feeling of a class expertly flowing; a pure love for each kid in his or her incomparable glory. In a school, after Veronica’s death, two teachers had rescued him through their steady, abiding attention. They’d not turned from his grief. They’d neither rushed him nor lingered over it. They’d simply named it with the correct degree of consternation and more than his father had managed. It’s this getting at the fundamentals that he works at in the classroom. But how much must he know of his own self, before he can possibly enlighten another?

  As he thinks hard about Tess and her mother, he grows radiant with regret. Then has a mighty hunger for a generous spliff, a ride by the lake, a run. What kind of a teacher are you now? Can you really hope to help or save anyone but yourself ?

  11

  In Tess’s notebook there’s part of a poem her teacher had read aloud. Listen, he’d said.

  … When we love

  A sap

  Older than time

  Rises through our arms

  …

  we love inside ourselves …

  the fathers who lie at rest

  in our depths

  like ruined mountains

  and the dry riverbeds

  of earlier mothers …

  Tess had copied it out. And then, when she read it over, her mind went straight to The Hive.

  Now, as she climbs the Ghost Mountains trail, she thinks of her family growing smaller below; her father castrating the bulls, her mother reading, or wandering, Meg finishing her farm diorama. She’d begun it a week ago and it had taken rapid shape; it had trees, hives, animals. Best of all, said Meg, gluing matches to build a fence, the weather here’s always the same. Today’s forecast: fine, dry, an occasional breeze. Tess thought that sounded deathly, life in such a static atmosphere.

  It’s maybe why her mother took to walking, Tess thinks as she clambers through thickets of ash, brown kurrajong, weeping fig. When you’re walking the view shifts and changes. Walking’s a form of hope.

  Tess peers through the lean, dark trunks, the snarls of strangler fig and bower vine. She hurdles the plank buttresses of huge trees, past ferns and orchids, the sun much lower than she’d thought. About an hour left of daylight. She speeds up, leaning forward on the slope, parting knitted branches, this old track nearly overgrown now no one has much use for it. Her chest is tight, the air colder inside as she climbs.

  As Tess rounds the first burnt building she sees a white horse tearing grass by a stone wall. It turns one glossy eye, folds an ear in her direction. Beyond it, the hexagonal footings of the old hall, its leftover walls overgrown with woody lianas and saplings. In the dwindling sunlight, against these blackened ruins, the horse is like something dreamed. It meets her gaze then continues tearing tussocks.

  It’s oddly quiet – no – it’s just still. There is a sound, an almost inaudible hum. She tries imagining her mother here, learning to cook and sew and birth a baby goat. She knew how to build fences and put out spot fires with The Hive teams that were called on in emergencies. She’d learned piecemeal about the world beyond the community, a place
of wars, hypocrisy, ecotoxins, corruption. From Jack Hodgins she learned to shun man-made things that poisoned the good green earth and the wide, amazing, innocent sky. Electricals, battery-operated items whose guts did not decay for aeons, computers that revealed the world in random ways with impure consequence. But inside, she’d struggled. If the commune was Pureland, as Hodgins said, why had she felt so suffocated there? She’d run to other hamlets, in search of new friends. You’re better off, she told the girls, having lived your lives in the valley. Some nights the sisters will catch their mother in the green glow of the Acer laptop, poking inexpertly at the keyboard, her neck craned forward like a species of bird they’ve seen, her lips silently moving. The excitement on her face, the way she shifts and rocks on her chair like a kid in class, keeps them up, speculating. She will say she is a backwoods girl badly needing teaching. At the Ghost Mountains school her periodic lessons were accompanied by stamping and clapping. This way they’d arrive at their deskwork for Gratitude and Nature Stories with hearts and hands enlivened.

  She’ll read their schoolbooks hungrily and copy some parts in her own spiral notebook. She’ll carry the radio out to her studio, wholly immersed in news of elsewhere. In the morning they search the laptop browser but its history is always erased.

  Tess wanders deeper into the commune ruins, hearing the horse snuffling as she passes. Which cabin had her mother slept in? And where had she tended the hives? To the right, a makeshift graveyard. By one of the larger headstones, fresh flowers and leaves. Tess listens hard again to that sound. Insects? She turns to the horse, and sees it’s tethered. Then straightens, feeling a cold intimation. Where has she seen that particular horse before? Snowcap Appaloosa.