The Wish Kin

by Joss Hedley

  They watch through the rear window as she salutes the tail end of the truck and passes her bulk back through the faded fly strips.

  ‘My sister,’ says Will over the roar of the engine. ‘Janet. She’s wanted me to clean up the place for ages. Must be pretty happy with you lot for getting it done.’

  ‘Where did all that stuff come from, Will?’ asks Colm.

  ‘Belonged to an aunt of ours. She died about five years ago, not long before the raids started heading south.’

  ‘But you’ve not been hit?’

  ‘Nup! Been pretty lucky so far,’ says Will. ‘For some reason – so small a town, or just a little further out of the way – the raiders gave us a miss.’

  ‘What about all the boulders on the road in?’ asks Moss. ‘That must have had something to do with it.’

  ‘Sure,’ says Will. ‘More trouble than the place is worth. But they’ve only been there the last two or three years, after an earthquake we had. Us townsfolk decided against moving them, for the natural protection they offered.’

  ‘But you can still get in and out?’ asks Lydia.

  ‘Some of us can,’ grins Will. ‘Raiders – they can’t. Haven’t got the know-how. So that means at the very least our buildings are still standing. And we’ve had good contact with the outside as far as supplies are concerned. It’s only just recently that things have started to go downhill.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, communications have pretty much stopped in the last six to eight months. We were able to use the teletransmitter until recently, but not any more. And there’s been no sign of our suppliers for a few weeks now. Everything’s beginning to run pretty low. We’re all on rations now.’

  ‘Do you know much about the underground fire?’ asks Moss.

  ‘Not much,’ says Will. ‘Only that it exists. ‘Or they say it exists. Haven’t met anyone who’s actually seen it.’

  ‘You think it’s a rumour?’

  ‘Why not? You hear so many things these days and there’s no way of verifying any of them. Rumours are created all the time with the telecommunication system as it is. Half the country thinks one thing is happening, half something else. None of us really know anything at all. And rumours are strengthened over time, become mythologies. Before you know it you’re believing in fairytales, like the Wish Kin, the Rekindling!’

  ‘You don’t believe in the Wish Kin?’ asks Lydia.

  ‘The very fact that you ask it like that!’ laughs Will. ‘Like you’re asking me if I believe in Santa Claus! Or the Tooth Fairy!’

  Lydia is shocked. ‘How can you not believe in them?’ she asks, stunned. ‘Without them there is no hope.’

  Will laughs. ‘That’s right,’ he says. ‘There’s no hope. We’ve been left with a planet totally ransacked by our forefathers. Any idea of a Wish Kin is madness! All it does is take away responsibility from those who believe such a thing. It’s always been the problem: everyone keeps waiting for someone else to fix things and in the end nothing is done and this is what we are left with.’ He gestures to the exhausted land.

  ‘Perhaps you don’t properly understand the idea of the Wish Kin,’ says Moss. ‘The Wish Kin will begin to work with the land, but the bulk of what is to be done will be carried out by all of us.’

  ‘Right,’ says Will, grinning sarcastically. ‘Why would people start doing things now when there have been generations and generations before us who barely lifted a finger? Human beings are selfish.’

  ‘The Rekindling will be very powerful,’ says Lydia. ‘And the influence of the Wish Kin very strong.’

  ‘They’ve been evolving for generations,’ says Moss. ‘Their forefathers were philosophers, artists and inventors. The Wish Kin are not the first point of advancement: they are the culmination.’

  Will hardly responds. He laughs through his nose, a kind of snort. ‘Keep an eye out for somewhere we can get some fuel,’ he says. His manner is careless, offhand.

  ‘Why do you find it so difficult to believe that people can develop in this way?’ asks Lydia. But Will isn’t listening, won’t hear. He pushes his foot hard on the accelerator, attacks the open road as though it is an enemy. Dust fills the cabin of the truck, coats their nostrils, stings their eyes until they weep. Colm starts to cough. The dust thickens his phlegm and turns it red in his hand. His lungs ache.

  ‘Slow down, Will,’ says Lydia. Will hollers into the swirling dust and increases his speed. The road presses itself flat with fear.

  ‘Will!’ shouts Moss. ‘Slow down!’

  ‘I’m evolving!’ Will bellows. ‘I’m part of the evolution of Homo Sapiens into Mean Speed Freaks! Nothing can stop us! We are invincible!’ And he accelerates yet further, his teeth bared in a maniacal grin, his knuckles white on the wheel. He lets out a loud, bearlike roar and brakes suddenly, sending the truck into a spin. He releases his grip from the steering wheel, throws his hands in the air as the vehicle veers off the road and towards a steep embankment. Moss hurls himself across Lydia and grabs the wheel, swings it towards him and wrenches the vehicle back to the side of the road. They stop.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Moss shouts, furious. ‘You could’ve killed us!’

  Will is laughing. His head is thrown back against the seat and his arms are clasped about his middle.

  ‘Oh, that was good,’ he laughs. He heaves for breath through his laughter. ‘That was really good.’

  ‘You’re an idiot,’ Moss says. He opens the door and he and Lydia climb out. ‘Are you gander?’ Moss asks Lydia.

  ‘Yes,’ replies Lydia. ‘Colm, how are you?’

  Colm is coughing, he doesn’t feel well. ‘I hit my head,’ he says.

  ‘You’re bleeding,’ says Lydia. She and Moss tend his wound – a cut across the forehead – and give him water to drink. He sits up slowly, orientates himself, looks about.

  Will is leaning on the bonnet gazing along the stretch of road. His face still wears a grin. He snorts from time to time.

  Moss goes up to him. ‘What the hell was that?’ he demands.

  Will turns his grin to the boy. ‘Bit of fun,’ he says.

  ‘I want no more.’

  There is silence in the face of Moss’s firmness, rigidity. Colm watches Will blanch, kick idly at a stone on the road and climb back into the truck. Moss’s face has a look similar to Lydia’s when she was face to face with the brown snake in the tunnel, only more so: it is the look of fire and of thunder.

  Will starts the engine and they set off again. They do not speak. From time to time Colm coughs and tries to roll over. The continual movement of the truck rocks him towards sleep. He does not fight it.

  When he awakens it is night. Will is turning off the road into a service station. It looks deserted, but the sound of their engine brings a girl about Moss’s age to the door of the shop. She is barefoot, unarmed, and approaches the truck as though she has never known fear in her life.

  ‘Fill ’er up?’

  ‘Yeah, thanks,’ says Will.

  The three of them in the cabin climb out, stretch their legs. Colm picks the crust from his eyelids and sits up, coughs.

  ‘Need a room for the night?’ the girl asks. ‘We’re a motel as well.’

  The others confer. ‘A room would be great,’ says Moss. ‘If it’s not too much trouble.’

  The girl grins at him. ‘No trouble,’ she says.

  ‘There’s my brother as well,’ says Lydia. ‘He’s sick.’

  The girl peers in the back window and smiles. Colm gives a shy half-smile back.

  ‘Come on, then,’ says the girl. ‘Let’s get you all sorted out.’

  The living quarters behind the service station are sparse, bare. The fibro walls are still warm to the touch after a day of bright sunlight upon them, but are cooling quickly with the night. The children offload their bags then make their way to the kitchen where the girl, Jeune, is ladling soup into bowls.

  ‘How far have you come?’ she asks w
hen they have scraped the last of the pot.

  ‘From Kulwurra,’ says Moss.

  ‘And where are you headed?’

  ‘Hoping to get to Bennett’s Creek if we can.’

  ‘That’s nice there,’ says Jeune. ‘Or it was when I was a kid. I used to visit an aunt near there in Burren.’

  Colm, sitting bundled in blankets by a small fire, is pleased that Jeune does not question them as to the purpose of their journey but, rather, begins to talk about herself.

  ‘My father left a couple of months ago to try to get work down south,’ she says. ‘He’s setting things up for me to join him in a few weeks if all goes well. He got word to me recently that he’s found us a little house by a river. A river! Can you believe it? I’ve never seen a river.’

  ‘There was a river behind Kulwurra when I was a boy,’ says Will. He is being charming now in the presence of Jeune.

  ‘Really?’ says Jeune.

  ‘Just the remains of one,’ he continues. ‘I remember the colour of the pebbles with the water running over them. All shades of purple and orange and cream. I’d collect the pebbles by the bucket, take them home and want to keep them close to me, keep those amazing colours close to me. But they’d all go kind of greyish as they dried. I never thought to fill the bucket with water. I never thought that would keep the colours.’

  Jeune is mesmerised.

  ‘Is that what happens?’ she asks, amazed. ‘Who would have thought! Father says there are a few trees where he is, pines I think, and that on the ground grass grows prettily in small green patches.’

  ‘Will you be joining your father soon, then, Jeune?’ Lydia asks.

  Jeune becomes vague. Her eyes drift out of focus. ‘Not sure,’ she says. ‘He’ll let me know when things are ready.’

  ‘What about this place?’ asks Moss. ‘What will you do with the service station?’

  Jeune shrugs. ‘Dunno,’ she says absently. ‘Just wait and see.’

  The girl is quiet now, seems not to notice their presence. She sits and stares into the fire, flicking splinters of firewood into its orange heart. The others look at one another, unsure. Lydia gathers the bowls, the plates. Colm begins to cough.

  ‘Are you cold?’ Jeune asks, rousing herself. She places another log on the fire and wraps Colm’s blanket more closely about him. ‘How did this happen?’ she asks, indicating the wound on his forehead. Colm, uncertain how to answer, looks at Will. The blood has run from his face.

  It is Moss who speaks. ‘On the highway,’ he says. ‘We had to brake suddenly.’

  Jeune nods. ‘You look pale,’ she says to Colm. ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘All right,’ says Colm.

  ‘Not gander?’

  Colm puckers his face slightly, shakes his head.

  ‘Do well to rest.’ Jeune turns to Moss. ‘Do you have to travel tomorrow? Could you stay here for a day or two?’

  Colm feels anxious, troubled. He knows they have to keep on the move. ‘I’ll be all right,’ he says. ‘I’ll be gander in the morning.’

  But in the middle of the night he wakes, sweating, feverish. He throws off the covers, swings his feet to the floor. His head is pounding, the gash stinging. He walks tremulously through the rooms, looking for the bathroom. He opens door after door trying to find it. He did not realise there were so many doors, so many rooms. Only after he passes the kitchen for the third time does he realise through his fever that he has been going in circles. He stops, less and less sure of the layout of the place. He turns and tries to find the door out, the door to the road. He walks along the hallway, comes to a door heavier than the others, opens it, crosses the threshold.

  The night air is cold and chills his sweating body in an instant. The moon is distant, wan; the stars give little light. Colm follows a rough path around the side of the house and relieves himself against a withered tree. He is shivering, feels both cold and hot at once, and tries to finish quickly that he might be inside all the sooner. His head throbs more and more as he retraces his steps, as he looks again for the door. He feels his stomach chill and turn, and a sudden darkness passes over his eyes. The ground is not far from his fall.

  When he wakes he is back in his bed. The other beds are made, the blind drawn. Only a small chink of light finds its way into the room via the crack beneath the door. It is enough to tell him that it is day.

  Jeune stands over him. He looks at her, thinks not of his pain, his illness, but looks only at Jeune. He thinks she is the most beautiful creature he has ever seen. How she looks down at him with her strange hazel eyes, how she smiles so that he can see the little gap between her front teeth! And hear her pretty voice as she goodmornings him!

  ‘How are you?’ he hears her ask. It is like a gentle sound that emerges from a tunnel into the open world around. He lets the sound settle on him, lets it fall into his ears and powder his skin. It makes him want to smile, and smile he does on hearing so gentle, so pretty a sound.

  ‘Gander,’ he tries to say, but his voice is thick, unintelligible. He knows she does not understand, hates the fact that he sounds so sluggish.

  She strokes his hand briefly then moves away, out of his line of vision. He tries to raise himself that he might see where she has gone but, like yesterday morning, he finds he cannot lift his head at all.

  ‘He’s really sick,’ he hears her say. ‘He can’t travel.’ He hears the door close, low voices murmuring.

  His dreams are peppered now with images of Jeune, with Jeune herself, for often he does not know if he is awake or sleeping. He sees her move about him, sees her busy herself with cloths and bandages, sees her sit by his side and play with the smooth edge of the sheet. Sometimes she takes his hand and strokes his fingers with her thumb. And when she looks at him with those strange hazel eyes he cannot look away.

  Lydia comes into the room at times, and Moss. Will he does not see. None of them speak when they are with him, as though silence is best for the sick. Strange, for it is as though Jeune’s voice has only just uttered the prettiest of sounds, as though she has only just sung the song of a lark or a nightingale. But he opens his eyes, or thinks he does, and Jeune is not even in the room.

  At one point in this strange state he hears – but as though from worlds away – the sound of pieces of explosion, of bullets carving the air, of hard metal rounds cutting through wood, glancing off iron. He knows he is worried, anxious, but strangely he does not actually feel these emotions. What is happening? he wonders. He tries to ask the others, Will and Moss, when they come into the room and start to lift him onto their shoulders. But again, again, he finds he cannot, finds he is yet unable to make his mouth, his tongue, work in the way they should to form the words. He floats above the shoulders of Will and Moss, a silver haze about his eyes, and drifts back into sleep, or something that it is like sleep.

  Colm is in his small glass cube, spinning across the black bowl of sky. The stars behind him whisper and give a gentle light. He is curled up: his knees are folded against his chest, his head is quiet and bowed. He is enclosed, restrained. He curls his toes under and presses himself into each of the hard corners of the box, presses himself so that he can feel the containment of it, the tightness and the closeness of this strong, clear shell. On his quiet, sleeping face he feels a smile spread.

  He wakes. His legs are pulled up against his torso, his arms crossed over his ankles. It is as in his dream, he realises, except for the softness that cushions his head. There is a smell too. Sweet, like the oranges back at home would produce when they were hanging ripe from the branch. He shifts slightly and feels as he does so a gentle brushing against his cheek. He opens his eyes and he is looking at the world through a curtain of shining copper tresses. He moves his gaze upwards and meets Jeune’s, meets her eyes of hazel with his own of blue. She is closer now than she has been before, and he can see not only the little gap between her teeth and the sobriety of her eyebrows, but too the dappling of freckles across her nose and cheeks, and the gentle cle
ft in the ball of her chin.

  ‘You’re awake at last,’ she says, and her hair brushes again at his face. ‘It’s been a long time.’

  He smiles at her and finds his voice. It is dry and croaky, but comprehensible. ‘How long?’ he asks.

  ‘Three days.’

  Her face is so close, her lap in which his head is cradled so soft. He is blissfully, agonisingly happy.

  ‘You’ve been terribly ill. Do you feel a little better now?’

  Colm nods. He cannot bear speaking, cannot bear hearing any other sound than that of the voice of this sweet creature above and around him. But he wants her to speak again, wants to hear the silver bells peal once more from her lyrical throat so he makes some sort of answer.

  ‘My father told me that once men wrote sonnets for young maidens they loved, so that, even when the maid grew old and withered, she would always be beautiful in the words of the poet.’

  Jeune throws back her head and laughs. She leans forward once more and her hair falls again over Colm’s face. He feels that he is in a copper cocoon, scented with oranges, and that Jeune is his muse. The words assemble themselves in his mind, and the first line of a sonnet appears: Was ever there so fragrant a cocoon!

  ‘You’re a funny boy!’ she says. And her voice rings out like the purest of chimes from the highest of mountains. Colm’s limbs feel strange, feel as though he is sinking. And his heart, full of poetry, as though it is about to burst in his chest. Was ever there a voice that told so sweet!

  ‘We’re here.’

  Only now, only now when he hears Will’s rough voice from the front seat, does he realise that they are in the truck, that they have been driving, and that they have stopped. Jeune lifts her head, taking with her the fragrant copper cocoon. Colm sits up slowly and looks out the window. He sees nothing but small barren rises of earth and a few sticks where houses might once have been.

  ‘Where’s here?’ he asks.

  ‘Where I leave you,’ replies Will. ‘Burren.’

  The truck stops. Lydia and Moss in the front seat wake and stretch. They climb out of the truck and Colm sees that Lydia’s wrist is bandaged, that Moss wears a cotton patch across his previously wounded eye.