Yellowcake Summer

by Guy Salvidge

  Then he fell and began the term of his latest incarceration.

  It was cooler though not remotely cool and he had no way of closing the hatch. A patch of sunlit floor revealed the many spiders and other creatures that resided here. On his haunches, he scoured a section of floor next to the illuminated square with his pack, hoping to rid the area of spiders, many of which would no doubt be poisonous. Then he reached into the pack for the canteen, unscrewed it and drank.

  His eyes adjusted as the passage of the sun moved the lit patch further away from him. He sat listening to the noises from outside. A breeze had picked up and the branches of a nearby tree swished against the side of the tank.

  He sat, slowly sinking into a stupor from which he might never wake. Things were crawling on him and he batted at them feebly. The sun had sunk lower, moving the portal of light nearer to the tank’s edge. He thought he heard voices. There was a gunshot, followed quickly by two more. Then distant voices and eventually silence. No one came near the tank and slowly the light began to fade. He lay with his head on the pack, not thinking of how he might escape, not caring what crawled on him or whether it would bite. By the time night fell, his thoughts had turned to the shotgun and how he might use it on himself when his water ran out.

  It did not seem likely that he would sleep, but he must have done, for in his dream someone called his name. Rion, the voice called. Rion, where are you? And he wanted to say, Down here in the tank. Come save me, but he could not. No words escaped his throat and he sank further down into the uncomprehending earth. Down to where his bones could rest with those of the people who’d come before. Down to where his mother lay and the father he’d never known. Tears rolled down his face and he had a notion that if he cried enough it would fill the tank and he would bob to the surface on a salty wave and make his escape that way. He moaned, not knowing whether he slept, not knowing whether he lived, and the voice called to him, imploring him to reply.

  “Rion!” it said. “Are you hurt? It’s all right.”

  And in the moonlight he saw a face high above him, looking down.

  “Vanya!” Rion said, matching the name to the face.

  “Nice hiding spot,” Vanya said. “But how the fuck did you plan on getting out of there? I’ll see if I can find a rope.”

  Vanya departed and Rion thought about calling out again but resolved that he would wait. He imagined that the tank itself had taken flight and now voyaged across the summer sky.

  “Pass me your stuff,” a voice said, waking him. He felt a stab of annoyance. “Rion? Pass it up.”

  He passed up the bag and then the shotgun. The fog in his mind began to clear and he understood that Vanya was his saviour. He was thrown a rope. Vanya pulled him up and they lay panting on the tank’s roof, their strength spent, looking up at the crescent moon.

  “Dude, you’re covered in bites!” Vanya said. “Your face is all puffy. Man, you must be delirious. Far out.”

  Poisoned. Dimly, he understood.

  Vanya made him drink from the canteen and after a while his head felt clearer. “Yeah, I’ve been bitten,” he said, continuing the conversation from several minutes ago.

  “You’re fucking lucky that you were carrying on like that or I’d never have found you. Thought I was going mad. Then I thought you’d been shot or broken your back falling or something.”

  “What happened with the cops?” Rion asked.

  “Not sure, I panicked and split,” Vanya said. “Fuckers shot at me too. I ran down to the river and hid. Nearly croaked from the heat down there.”

  “What about Marcel?”

  “Dunno, but he’s not in the house now. They must have taken him in.”

  “You saved my life,” Rion said.

  “Yeah, but you’ll have my back when the time comes. Do you think you can walk?” Vanya asked. “We need to get somewhere while it’s still dark.”

  “I guess,” Rion said. His face still felt swollen but the fever had passed. “Feds must have cleaned out our stuff, hey?”

  “Yeah, they took all the cans and shit. Hardly anything left.”

  Rion sat up and felt dizzy. It was the first step. The next was getting down from the tank. “We can’t take the road,” Rion said. “They’ll be looking for us there.”

  “I figured.” They threw their things down from the tank and descended the ladder.

  “But we can follow the river all the way to Yew,” Rion said.

  “Think we can get there by morning?”

  Rion put his arm around his friend’s shoulder. “I reckon.”

  3. The Cause

  Sylvia ran a finger around the inside of her cup, scooping up macchiato froth. Denied a decent coffee for so long, she had made up for lost time in recent weeks, spending hours at Bo’s in Quindalup talking to students and activists from the nearby university. It was stimulating and yet unreal. The world was ending but it was always ending, and if it did end she wouldn’t be there to feel aggrieved about it after the fact.

  Eli watched her and his whole body seemed to frown. “What are you thinking about?” he asked, pushing his own empty cup to one side. He squeezed her hand.

  She pulled away from his soft but insistent grasp. “You just want to pick up where David left off. You aren’t interested in me.”

  “Not true. I’ve always been fascinated by both of you.”

  She knew what he was trying to do, that this flattery was a part of his slow seduction. She knew that at some point he’d proposition her but what she didn’t know was whether she’d rebuff him. He wasn’t the kind of man she’d normally be interested in and yet she knew she was thawing. He was earnest and never joked and you could see that he meant every word he said, which was more than you could say for almost anyone else.

  “How’s your mother holding up?” he asked.

  “It’s like she’s a robot,” she said. “She just carries on exactly the same.” Her mother had had the death of her husband and her daughter subsequently moving away to contend with, and yet when Sylvia had last seen her she’d seemed unperturbed. Now that he had died there was nothing to hold them together. Sylvia had felt obliged to move out once the funeral arrangements had been concluded. She suspected that her mother had been relieved. “She leaves for work before dawn and doesn’t get home until after dusk, and when she does she doesn’t have time for anything,” she explained.

  “She’s not at all interested in our work?” Eli asked.

  “She just says that life is hard all around. She isn’t interested in politics.”

  “Life is politics,” Eli said. He pushed his chair back. “Come on, it’s time.”

  She drank the dregs of her coffee and followed him out onto the boulevard, where thousands of people moved beneath shaded plastic parasols that did little to shield them from the sun’s oppression. It wasn’t far to the university but each step was a labour and by the time they retreated into the cool of the lecture theatre they were parched. Sylvia bent over a water fountain in the foyer, forgetting that new restrictions had come in, the harshest yet. If you wanted water you had to pay, so they paid, swiping their Hub-Nexus cards through the reader on the fountain.

  “Eli, Sylvia, you made it,” said a smiling student in a tank top emblazoned with some obscure slogan. “We’ve got a big crowd today. Come straight through when you’re ready.”

  The student wasn’t kidding. The theatre was two-thirds full, where before their seminars had only attracted a handful of listeners. Sylvia felt under-prepared, her thoughts jumbled, as she glanced up at the expectant throng.

  “I knew it, it’s because of David,” Eli whispered, his eyes gleaming. As they took the podium, the lights dimmed and their presentation appeared on the 3V.

  “First of all,” Eli began in his stage voice, “can I say what a thrill it is to see so many young activists here today, and what a time it is to become involved. The hour of action is at hand. One week from today, we board the buses for Yellowcake Springs and take the fight
to CIQ Sinocorp’s doorstep. Tell your friends, your family, and your neighbours. We’ll put on as many buses as there are people to board them. We want to put the pressure squarely on Sinocorp and on the governments that continue to allow these foreign companies to exploit Australian workers and to pollute Australian waterways and airways with deadly, radioactive toxins. It’s time to tell them that enough is enough.” Applause.

  Sylvia’s turn. Her hands trembled but she stilled them. “No doubt by now you’ve heard about the supreme sacrifice David Baron has made for our cause. Rather than allowing himself to be murdered by the quisling dogs in Canberra, he chose to take his own life. Unfazed by the treacherous actions of Clyde Owen and Patrick Crews, David demonstrated the courage of his convictions and he showed us the way forward. Now we continue the fight he started for... the cause.” Not Misanthropos. Never Misanthropos. She had to remind herself not to utter that word.

  Eli took it from there, soon whipping the students into a fervour. Sylvia stood back, entranced by his rhetoric. He implored them with his hands, he beseeched them with his words, and they melted to him. The crowd roared their approval as Eli outlined their glorious future: “A future free of foreign owners who care nothing for this country and its people. A future free of traitorous politicians only interested in their own material gain. A future free for its people to determine their own destiny. Call me a ‘mental. I am a ‘mental, and so are you. Your donations are critical and I urge you to give generously to the cause, but more than that, I urge you to join us on our journey to Yellowcake Springs next Thursday. David Baron died for you. Let not his sacrifice have been in vain.”

  The standing ovation rang on and on. Eli bowed his head and Sylvia bowed too.

  After the presentation, the queue at the registration table stretched out the door. For what seemed like hours, she took completed forms, accepted donations and handed out packs of merchandise and promotional material. When the last of the students filed out, she collapsed into a chair next to Eli, who was furiously counting the forms they’d collected. Bits of paper and scraps of merchandise were strewn across the room.

  “Eighty-six!” Eli declared in triumph, coming to the end of the sheaf of forms. “And another thirty-two without bank details.” Even he seemed stunned by this. Their best day before today had netted eighteen members and not all of those had been financial. He looked up at her and grinned.

  After loading their gear into the van, including the precious cargo of membership forms, they crawled through hellish afternoon traffic in the direction of their campaign headquarters on the other side of Quindalup. Eli’s old van had air-conditioning but the air that blew from its vents on a day like today was barely cooler than the air outside. It wasn’t yet rush hour on the Eastern Freeway and yet the big queue in the Big Q never ended. It beat walking, but only because it would be suicide to walk anywhere in this heat. The van finally began to crawl up the ramp at their exit, and from her passenger seat Sylvia saw the traffic stretching to the horizon: a gleaming, metal python baking in the sun.

  “You’d better book some more buses,” she said as they pulled into a street near their building.

  “We’ll have to process these forms first,” Eli replied, meaning that he didn’t yet have the money for more buses. One of Eli’s more endearing qualities was that he genuinely didn’t have any capital he could draw on; in that respect he reminded her a little of another pauper she had known: Rion. But where Rion had only been concerned with his immediate survival, Eli saw his poverty as a political issue. She wondered what had become of Rion now. She still thought of him, usually at inconvenient times. He was like a splinter that could not be prised from her flesh.

  They spent the afternoon processing forms and debiting funds from member accounts. Their office, if you could call it that, was a drab room in a rundown building. The space was rented through a third party and she could not bear to tell him that he might as well hang a sign saying SECRET MISANTHROPOS HEADQUARTERS out the front for all the secrecy he really had. She knew this and yet she seemed to forget all about it for hours at a time, seeing herself as a true conspirator and not the police informer she truly was. In this sense she was the ideal person for the job: the forgetful mole.

  Finally it was done and their campaign account looked altogether healthier for it. Eli had been sure that they’d get a boost out of David’s death and today he’d been proven correct. He dropped her off at the entrance to her apartment complex just before five, promising dinner later. She wondered whether he wanted a kiss from her but she was too sweaty and tired for that and she hurried away. Then she was alone in the few square metres that were her own, courtesy of the Federal Government and the handsome salary they were paying her. The air-conditioner pumped out cool air and the fridge hummed at her in greeting. She had a quick shower – two minutes on half spray, which was still expensive – and lay on the bed in her towel. She didn’t think she would fall asleep, but when she opened her eyes again it was dark outside and the only lights came from the kitchen and from the street below. She reached over and picked up the fliptop, its battery nearly empty as she’d forgotten to charge it. A message from Eli asked her to call him, and there was a second from him telling her to call him urgently. She put on her dressing gown and rang.

  “You had a rest?” Eli asked. “I called a while ago.” He wore a tuxedo, which looked wrong on him.

  “I fell asleep,” she said. “Why the suit?”

  “We’ve got that fundraiser, remember? I thought I mentioned it earlier.”

  Her mind went blank. “Maybe you did.”

  Eli sighed, starting to say something and then seemingly thinking better of it. “Look, I’d love for you to come if you can,” he finally said. “I’ll give you the address. It isn’t far from your place.”

  “I’ve just got to get dressed. Where is it again?”

  Like Eli said, it wasn’t far, and she needed the exercise. Six weeks out of prison and she could already feel herself starting to slip into her old ways. It wasn’t safe for a woman or indeed anyone to be out alone after dark, but if she kept to the main streets she felt sure she’d be all right. She wore a thin coat over her dress and kept her head down, but she’d barely reached her stride when she heard someone calling her name.

  “Sylvia, a word,” the voice said, and she made the mistake of turning toward the voice. The street was well-lit and she saw a familiar face, that of Lyncoln Rose.

  “I’m busy right now,” Sylvia said, but now the Superintendent was alongside her and a couple of men stood by an unmarked cruiser on the verge.

  “We’ll give you a lift,” Lyncoln Rose said, ushering her into the back seat. “It isn’t safe for you to be wandering around by yourself at night.”

  “You wouldn’t want your precious hardware damaged, would you?” Sylvia replied, but she got into the cruiser.

  4. Yew

  The eastern sky began to lighten as Rion and Vanya approached the town of Yew, which sat in a valley beneath Mount Cookson. They saw no lights or other sign of human activity on their journey and the only thing that threatened to impede them were the occasional pools of stagnant water in the otherwise dry riverbed. Rion used his shotgun like a walking stick, poking its barrel into the sand, and they walked at a brisk pace. They lapsed into silence as the riverbed meandered toward the first of the town’s crumbling road bridges, fearing that their voices might carry in the still air. Deserters by inclination and by circumstance, they had discarded their CPF uniforms, hoping to become indistinguishable from the ordinary drifters that roamed the Belt. The only person who could connect Rion with the CPF was the boy Chris and he was in Turley’s custody, his sick sister receiving treatment at the CPF base outside East Hills. And Vanya wasn’t anybody’s idea of a policeman: thin, lank and furtive, he had the sly air of criminality about him.

  Vanya halted just short of the road bridge, tapping Rion on the shoulder. He pointed up the embankment in an easterly direction and cupped his ear. R
ion listened through the trill of cicadas for a meaningful sound. There: the roar of an engine, the distant screech of tyres. Rion nodded and pointed west, then gave a thumbs up sign. Vanya nodded and they scrambled up the bank. A line of trees provided cover and nothing moved at street level. Many of the houses had fallen roofs, appearing ruinous even in this dim light, but a couple displayed signs of habitation. They trod carefully and in silence. Dawn was near and so Rion chose a nearby house and indicated that they should bed down inside. Vanya followed him across the sandpit that had once been a garden to the front door.

  Rion turned the handle and the door opened in a swirl of dust. It was dark inside and the air smelt dank and unpleasant, like something had died here years before but had long since been picked clean by scavengers. Shards of glass lay everywhere and their boots crunched them into smaller fragments. The house had been entirely stripped of furniture, so they picked a relatively clear corner of a darkened room and lay down on the hard floor on their packs. Neither could sleep and the room soon filled with unwelcome light.

  “This is fucked,” Vanya whispered. “What are we doing?”

  “Waiting for people to get up,” Rion said. “It’s way too early.”

  “For what?”

  “Introducing ourselves.”

  Vanya gripped Rion’s shoulder. “Dude, I didn’t come with you to get shot.”

  “No one’s going to shoot you,” Rion said.

  Vanya muttered something about having made a mistake, but would not repeat the comment for Rion’s benefit. Waves of tiredness washed over Rion but sleep would not take him and it soon started to warm up. Within a couple of hours, it’d be too hot to sleep at all.

  “Maybe we should go back,” Vanya said.

  “To Ley Farm? It’s too late for that.”