by Claire Zorn
Thirty-three
I draw Alan floating on the sea sitting in a bookshelf, pages scattered on the surface of the water. I draw the scene I remember from the supermarket, with the doors smashed and the shelves nearly bare. It occurs to me that drawings may be the only lasting record of what is happening.
Dinner: dried apricots, canned baby carrots and sweet corn, rice crackers: ‘Now 92 per cent fat-free!’
‘Is there anywhere else you can think of where we might be able to find your mum?’ Noll asks.
I stab a baby carrot with my fork. ‘She left with army officers. Government House maybe, army barracks. Nowhere we can go looking without getting caught.’
‘But if you gave her name, said you were her son?’
‘I don’t have any proof.’
‘She would know the situation on the other side of the border. You’d think she would have tried to get you out.’
‘Well, it didn’t work, did it?’
‘Should we have stayed there?’ asks Max. ‘What if she goes back for us?’
‘It’s too late now.’
‘But what if she goes back for us, Fin, and we’re not there?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t fucking know.’ I throw the empty tin can into the fire, stand up and walk away from our camp. I head up the ramp onto the darkened street. It’s colder up here away from the collective warmth of the campfires. It’s also pitch black. I pull my hood up over my head. There are footsteps and a torch beam behind me, I turn around to see Lucy jogging to catch up to me.
‘Fin, slow down.’
‘You shouldn’t have followed me.’
She falls into step beside me. ‘Well, I don’t want you to fall over in the dark and break your neck. I like you, you see.’
‘I don’t know what to do.’
‘I know. Me neither. But for now we just bide our time, enjoy the serenity of the car park.’
I kick at the snow, harder and harder, it flies up, a shower of white flecks in torchlight. ‘And I’m sick of being asked. I don’t want to make any more fucking decisions.’
‘I get that. Do you want to walk for a bit? It’s probably ridiculously dangerous, but YOLO and what not.’
‘I like to live on the edge.’
‘Yes, I’ve noticed you’re the risk-taking type.’ She takes my arm.
We drift along the streets past houses and a crippled petrol station, shops and a school. The night sky is a void, no light, no stars. We are lost to the universe. We can’t see out. I wonder if anyone can see in.
We pause and gaze up into the void. Lucy brushes my cheek with her fingers. I look down at her, take her face in my hands and kiss her gently on the mouth. A ball of heat wells in my stomach, and other places if I’m honest. I pull away and lean my back against a telegraph pole, raising my face to the cold sky and trying to breathe like a normal person. Lucy watches me and I don’t know how she isn’t embarrassed. She traces her fingertip down the line of my jaw.
A collective decision is made that a trip to the shops is needed; firewood is getting low and we could do with more soap and toilet paper. The four of us climb the concrete stairs, around and around. Then we hit a fire door and when we push it open we find ourselves in the darkened shopping centre. The dull light that filters through the skylights reveals polished floors, high ceilings and frozen escalators. The glass façades of most shops have been cracked or smashed right through. Random objects are strewn along the walkways: bits of clothing, papers, bottles, broken EFTPOS consoles, coathangers. Our footsteps echo eerily through the silence. And I can’t help but think of a zombie movie I once saw that was set in a shopping mall. I grip the heavy handle of the axe, and look around for anything wooden, but everything is stainless steel or plastic. We roam past clothing shops and mobile phone vendors, all four of us taking in the place as if it’s an ancient ruin.
‘Why not stay in here instead of the car park?’ asks Max. ‘Way comfier.’
‘I think it’s because there’s more exits from the car park, more places to hide,’ Noll answers. ‘Also, it’s not well ventilated enough for campfires. The place would fill with smoke.’
In the centre of one of the walkways is a piano. It stands like some sort of regal animal among the chaos. Lucy pauses before it, then sits down. She begins to play the first music any of us have heard for months. The notes fill the cavernous space, the sound is luminous. My skin prickles with goosebumps. She finishes the piece and gently closes the lid over the keys. Then she stands and we all just pause there for a minute looking at the piano. It’s made of wood. Lucy’s expression is like she’s watching a beloved animal that has to be put down.
‘We should keep moving,’ I say.
We come to a department store, its roller security doors long since kicked in. We take a trolley and light our way with torches, there’s no skylights inside the store. The electronics section has been gutted: phones, cameras, televisions all gone; bet those people are rethinking their priorities. We go through to the clothing department and pull new clothes from the racks, changing out of our dirty layers on the spot. Then it’s to manchester where there are no blankets left, but plenty of towels. We stock up on fancy soaps and, surprisingly, gift-packaged herbal teas. Finally we find the home furniture department. The ‘Livingstone Nine-Piece’ dining suite is on sale for nine-hundred and ninety-eight dollars. We take turns hacking into it with the axe and then throw its parts into the trolley.
In the evening we sit by our newly fed fire. We have moved our camp closer to Alan so we can share our fire with him. He and Lucy read novels. I draw the scene from the shopping centre. Noll reads his bible.
‘Is this the end of the world?’ Max asks him.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Why not?’
‘Jesus hasn’t come back.’
‘Serious?’
‘Serious.’
‘You really believe that?’
‘Max,’ I warn him.
‘It’s okay,’ says Noll. ‘I really believe that.’
‘Are you mad at God? I’m mad at God, you know, if He’s real.’
‘I don’t think God did this. People did this. People suck.’
‘Not all people suck.’
‘You don’t think?’
‘Do you think I suck?’
‘Well, we all robbed a guy of food that was rightfully his.’
Alan glances up from his book. I desperately want Noll to shut up.
‘But he had heaps!’ says Max.
‘Doesn’t change the fact.’
‘So you’re saying we deserve this?’ I ask.
‘No. I’m just saying that we’re all flawed. Like I said before, I cling to the knowledge that God is not.’
‘That’s crazy,’ says Max.
‘Perhaps. But do you have an alternative?’ Noll asks.
‘I dunno. I just reckon the idea that everyone is bad deep down is really depressing.’
‘I just . . . I mean that we have choices. We chose to rob a guy of food that wasn’t ours.’
‘You think we made the wrong choice,’ I say.
‘I’m not some moral arbitrator here just because I read the bible.’
‘You’re the one saying this shit. You were there too, you did it as well.’
‘All I’m saying, Fin, is what you already know.’
‘So, what’s your alternative then, Noll? We should have done the right thing and not stolen – and what? Died noble deaths from starvation? What would that achieve? Would that make the world a better place?’
‘I’m going to use your mantra, Fin: I don’t know . . . I really don’t. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to . . . aggravate things. It’s too late anyway, we did what we did,’ he says it so gently that I can’t come back at him. Anyway, I know he’s right, about us.
Thirty-four
I leave at first light again, carrying my old friend, the axe, with me. I walk a few blocks beyond the shopping centre. The ground is slick with melted snow. Already there are people around. On one corner a man trades soft-drink bottles full of kerosene for food. He calls out to me, holding a Fanta bottle outstretched.
I round a corner and am confronted by a row of about six houses that have been incinerated. All that is left are blackened frames and piles of charcoal. I walk along the street and see that the fire has partially destroyed two apartment blocks as well. I guess that with no working fire brigade a fire could get big enough to consume everything in its path. A figure stands among the rubble, prodding at the debris with a long stick. Further along, outside one of the unit blocks is an army truck. An officer emerges from the building with a dark shape carried over his shoulder. He dumps it in the back of the truck with others. It’s then that I realise he was carrying a body. Bile rises in my throat and I vomit onto the pavement. The army officer barely gives me or my axe a glance.
The heap of rubbish outside my mother’s apartment building now spills across the footpath and onto the street. A few metres further up the road a woman emerges from a house and dumps a bucket of raw sewage into the gutter. I go into the building, up the stairs. I pound on the door, already resigned to the fact that it is a waste of energy. Then I raise the axe over my shoulder and slug it into the door.
The chaos of the place is so typical of my mother it is reassuring. It’s hard to say if it has been exacerbated in the last few months. I scan the mess for anything that might indicate where she has gone, letters, papers, anything. The lounge and adjoining kitchen offer no clues. I go through to the bedroom. The bed is unmade. Clothes lie discarded on the floor. Her nightstand is cluttered with books and then there, beneath a Stephen King thriller, a pile of papers. I clutch at them, knocking the stack of books to the floor. There are minutes from a university faculty meeting six months ago, car rego papers, travel itinerary for a conference, a library fine. Nothing useful. And then, as I drop the papers onto the bed, one of them slips off onto the floor, landing face down. On the back is scrawled a note: ‘Crisis Response Headquarters, Sydney Town Hall’.
It’s all I have.
Before I leave I go through her kitchen. There isn’t much, but there’s enough food to fill my backpack: Weet-Bix, dried fruit, rice cakes.
I have to walk for a while before I see a bike. It’s chained up (push bikes have become quite the commodity) but I still have the axe and I’m more accurate with it than ever before. The ride into the CBD is surreal. The roads are cluttered with abandoned cars, signs of failed attempts at navigating the icy bitumen. The CBD feels like the empty set of a disaster movie, as if you could push against a wall and have it topple over, nothing more than plywood and styrofoam. Then I come to George Street, where office buildings merge with the main retail district of the city. I pass the Queen Victoria Building, a four-level shopping complex of sandstone, stained glass and nineteenth-century opulence. Nearly all of the large glass store-fronts that line the ground floor have been smashed. You can see where opportunism has gone from the initial smash and grab of luxury handbags and designer clothes to the desperate raiding of cafes for food and wooden chairs to burn.
Across the intersection from the Queen Victoria Building stands Sydney Town Hall. It looks gothic in the half-light; the same sandstone style as the Queen Victoria Building. The paved square between it and St Andrew’s Cathedral further along is crowded with military vehicles, surrounding the escalators that lead from street level down below to what used to be a food court and entrance to the railway. The entire area is enclosed by a high razor-wire fence. Two army officers stand at the gates of the barrier. Another stands at the top of Town Hall’s marble steps, in front of the doors.
I have nothing to lose.
I choose an officer, the one whose eyes are slightly more glazed than his companion’s. He raises his chin defensively as I approach.
‘Morning,’ I say. He doesn’t respond. ‘Can you help me? I’m looking for my mother. I think she might be working here.’ His grip on his weapon shifts. ‘Her name is Libby Streeton, could you find out if she’s inside? This is the Disaster Response Headquarters, isn’t it?’
‘I can’t do that.’
‘Why not? Could you just ask?’
‘No. You need to vacate this area.’
‘Why? Please, couldn’t you just—’
He raises the rifle, points it directly at my chest. ‘Piss off.’
‘Would a bottle of whisky make it easier?’ I ask. He narrows his eyes, prods the rifle into my ribs.
‘I will fucking kill you,’ he says. ‘Piss off and don’t come back.’
I back away, pick up my bike and ride back to the car park.
Max runs toward me as I enter the car park.
‘Did you find her?’ He is like an over-excited labrador.
‘No. But I got a bit closer. I think. She might be at Town Hall. There’s a crisis response headquarters set up there or something. I couldn’t get in.’
‘Why not?’
‘It was barricaded off. I couldn’t get in.’ The hope drains from his eyes. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll keep trying, yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
Thirty-five
Alan makes me a cup of strong black tea.
‘You go to your mum’s by yourself?’ he asks.
‘Yeah.’
‘I’m not sure that’s the wisest idea, mate. You should take Noll with you. I’ve heard of some very ugly things going on out there. Just the other day someone was attacked coming back from the ration handout. Stabbed. Food taken.’
‘It’s cool, I didn’t have any food.’
‘Even so. Do me a favour and take Noll with you next time.’
‘Not sure he’d want to. We’re not exactly best mates.’
‘Is that right?’ Alan eases himself down onto the floor next to me. He sips his tea and I notice his hand trembling.
‘You eaten today, Alan?’
He shakes his head. ‘Can’t keep anything down. Stomach’s crook.’
I feel my chest tighten when he says that.
‘Aw, don’t look at me like that, Fin. You’ll break my bloody heart.’
‘Alan, you know—’
He holds up a hand. ‘I don’t want to know. Knowin’ ain’t going to make any difference. Now, let’s have a talk about your mate Noll.’
‘Don’t think he’s ever really thought of me that way.’
‘He’s here with you, though. And would I be right in saying you wouldn’t have got here if it weren’t for each other?’
‘Maybe.’
‘You know what I think? I think he makes you see yourself a little clearer than you would like to. And that gives you the shits. No one wants to see themselves for what they really are.’
‘Do you think it’s alright to do whatever you need to do to survive?’
‘No. No, I don’t. But let’s put it in a bit of perspective, you took some food from another man. You didn’t kill him.’
I don’t say anything.
‘Did you?’ asks Alan.
‘No. I don’t think so. Lucy hit him over the head with a cricket bat. He was going to shoot me in the head.’
Alan laughs, a generous, cracking sound. ‘Jeez. Doesn’t sound like a very nice bloke.’
‘It’s weird, ’cause, you know before all this, he was. I liked him. I’d known him since I was a kid.’
‘Well, I’ve said it before: wars makes us all bastards. Or maybe Shakespeare said that.’
‘You think this is a war?’
‘Oh, it’s a war, son. Only we don’t know who the enemy is.’
Later I draw my mother’s apartment building from memory. I draw it as if it’s full of water, like a fish tank. Through
the windows seaweed grows and fish swim. I don’t know why I’m drawing water all the time. But I know that if you breathe in underwater you die.
Lucy knows everybody in the car park by name. She goes around talking to people and joins in with a group of women who sit together and knit. There are thirteen little camps like ours, some are families, some are friends. One group are retirees from the same retirement village. They bribed their way across the border in the village’s minivan. Some families have children. We are the only group of teenagers.
Sometimes in the afternoons there is a soccer match. The four of us play and Max is better at it than I remember. Sometimes there is an argument over a foul and Alan has to step in to break it up. Sometimes things get so heated the game has to be stopped. We lie on our backs after each game, sweaty and panting and looking up at the concrete ceiling as if it were a blue sky.
Noll approaches me after lunch. I am swilling detergent in a saucepan when he comes up beside me.
‘I want to apologise about the other night. I didn’t mean to cause . . . unease. I know you’re stressed out about your mum. You don’t need to hear me going on about the frailties of the human condition.’
And I feel pissed off again because he has been the one adult enough to apologise and now I feel like a petty kid.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I say. I want to add that I’m sorry for being a tool, but the words don’t come.
Lucy isn’t around in the afternoon. I ask Noll and Max if they have seen her, but they haven’t. I wander around the car park, thinking maybe she is talking with Rosa somewhere, but I don’t find her. Then I remember and I go up the concrete stairs to the shopping centre. As soon as I push open the door I can hear it: the beautiful, delicate notes humming on the air. I walk through the cavern of the shopping centre to the piano. She sits, back straight as a dancer’s, moving her head gently with the undulation of the music. I sit next to her while she plays and when the song is finished she rests her hands on her lap, head bowed.
‘Do you think they’re dead?’ she asks.