We See the Stars
Page 22
‘We can’t stop here,’ I tell him, but my words are all jumbled coming out of my mouth, and one or two of them get stuck behind my teeth on the way out, so that I’m not sure if I’ve said them in the right order.
My face is too hot, and I feel the burn from the sun on my cheeks and down my neck. Superman pulls me up by the hand and I get to my feet, but I stumble and my legs aren’t strong enough anymore, and he’s not quick enough to catch me. I fall onto my knees, and the pain shocks up through my legs and down into my shoes. I gasp so hard that I feel a rattle when I breathe in, and there’s a wheeze hiding behind the breath coming up my throat. I try to pull some of the pain off my knees, but it’s sticky and the strands are longer than the ones from my face, and I have to pull my arm all the way back to try to get to the ends of them. The strands stick to my skin, and go slimy between my fingers so that I can’t get them dry, but I pull some of it off with my teeth and lay it on a rock.
I roll onto my back and there’s sun burning my skin. I’m starting to have trouble getting air out, and my throat is so dry that I can hardly swallow. When I try to sit up a bolt of lightning shoots straight along my back to the top of my head, and the thunder is loud enough that for a second I can’t hear my own thoughts. Ms Hilcombe is tied up on the farm, and she’s waiting for us to come and save her. Ms Hilcombe is blindfolded so she can’t tell what time it is, but she’s listening for us at the door.
‘Please,’ I say, and I reach out to Superman with my arms over my head, and I feel his cape brush over my chest when he leans over me.
‘You have to get her,’ I tell him, but he’s shaking his head. ‘You can do it,’ I say, and I point to the bag. ‘Just fly, you don’t even need the map.’
The squeeze over my chest gets tighter and I have to think hard about getting in enough breath. I can feel my legs squirming out from under me. I think about my puffer, hidden in Davey’s drawer in the wardrobe.
‘Bring her back to the orange cupboards,’ I say, and I’m so dizzy that if I turn my head to the side I can feel the rush and the pull of it making my eyes water.
I watch from the ground as Superman looks at the bag then back down at me.
‘I’ve got him,’ Arnold says from over my shoulder, and there’s darkness over my face when he bends down to look at me and blocks out the sun. ‘Go on,’ he says to Superman, and I feel Arnold lifting me up as I drop my head onto his shoulder. Just as I close my eyes I feel the air move around us as Superman launches off into the sky.
‘There now,’ Arnold says, and he’s carrying me up into the shade. ‘We’ll find somewhere to camp until he gets back.’
‘Not too far,’ I say, and my nose is pushed up against his shoulder, and I can smell mothballs and dirt in the cotton of his pyjamas.
‘No, not too far,’ Arnold says. ‘Quite right, lad.’
He carries me over to a rock wall. We sit in the shade but the sun is still so bright that I have to keep my eyes closed, and he lets me rest my head in his lap. I feel my heart beating hard in my chest, and there’s little bits of dried-out honeycomb coming unstuck and floating around in my veins.
‘Will he be long, do you reckon?’ Arnold asks.
I shake my head.
He puts his head back against the rock wall and I hear him sigh. ‘A fire would gut all this, of course,’ he says, and I can feel the rumble of his voice through his chest when he speaks. ‘The scrub’d keep it going for days, and kindling? You’d have no chance.’
I stretch my legs out in front of me, and my knees burn from the cuts, and when I look down I realise there’s blood covering my pants from my legs and onto the ground.
‘Here, you smell that?’Arnold says. He picks up a branch from beside me and clicks his fingers to make it catch on fire. The wood is wet from sitting on the ground, and it hisses and sparks under his skin. The smoke goes blue for a while and then white again, and it curls up under my nose so that my eyes start to water, and I feel like I want to sneeze.
‘You smell that out by the paddocks, you know you’ve got half an hour at best to clear out,’ Arnold says, and he shakes his head. ‘Back when I was a lad we didn’t have any signals coming in from the local fire station; you just had to use your nose.’
I take another breath in but the smoke catches in my throat and I feel the rattle starting up again, and it’s white and blue and hissing underneath my eyes, and I try to push up with my hands to get it away from me, but Arnold’s not paying attention so he doesn’t know that I’m trying to move. When I cough there’s a burn in it right through into my back, and I can feel the roll of my stomach as I try to sit up.
‘You right, lad?’ Arnold says, and he’s helping me sit up so that I’m doubled over, and my head is hanging loose off my neck down over my knees. ‘Here, look at this,’ he says, and he leans back against the rock to show me where there’s a gap big enough to fit if I lie straight on my back. ‘Reckon you can crawl in, lad? Get yourself out of the sun?’
I get down on my knees and crawl into it. Arnold’s already in there, and he helps pull me into the dark. The air is cooler, and there’s the sound of running water coming from inside the rock. I try to keep breathing, but my ribs are still creaking from trying to fit all the air in, and when I breathe out there’s nowhere for it to go, so that it just gets jammed up inside my chest.
‘I’m sorry, son,’ Arnold says from beside me, and he’s lying on his back with his nose nearly touching the rock of the roof. ‘We’re so close, too.’ There’s an echo when he speaks, and when I wheeze I hear the sound of it bounce up against the wall in front of me and down around the back of our necks. If I put my hands up in front of me I can feel the sharp of it underneath my fingertips, and the cold on the end of my nose.
I try to count breaths but I can’t get the numbers to line up properly in my head, and I’m so dizzy that I have to keep my fingers on the rock in front of me to remember which way is up. There’s more sounds of rushing water, but it’s hard to hear over the sound of the blood in my ears, and when I breathe in I can feel the bones in my chest pushing outwards, and the creak of them all rusted over and powdery against the black inside my chest. It’s getting harder to see for all the grey fuzz in the corners of my eyes, and there are tiny lights fizzing behind my eyelids, and when I open them the lights swim around against the rock wall as I look out into the dark.
I think about Ms Hilcombe. I think about folding the roof back onto itself for Mum so that she can see better from bed, and lying next to her and looking up at the stars. The rock is heavier than our roof, and when I put my arms up to fold it back I can’t shift it. It’s sharp and it cuts my hands, and even though I’m so full of breath, the cuts aren’t big enough to let any air out, and I can feel a crack in my ribs when I drop my hands back down to my sides.
Ms Hilcombe is cut through to the bone and her blood is making a mess of the carpet. Ms Hilcombe is sitting at the bottom of a well with water up to her neck, and she’s looking up at the sky, and she’s waiting for us.
‘I’m sorry, son,’ Arnold says again, and my heart’s going so fast I can feel it all the way down to my toes, and there’s an ache in my tummy that I can’t swallow down for the dry on the back of my throat, and if I had the breath I think I might start to cry.
‘Will you stay with me?’ I ask, and my voice is full of air.
‘Yes, lad,’ Arnold says, and I feel him grab my hand and squeeze my fingers hard up against his rough skin. ‘I’ll stay until the end.’
When I puff my chest out, it’s heavy but there’s warm in it, and I can feel it spreading out along my arms and into my legs. The little fizzing lights are still inside my eyes, and when I blink I can feel them banging up against the inside of my eyelashes. I reach up and pinch them between my fingers, so I can pull them into the air in front of my face. They burn and tingle on my skin when I squeeze them, and I have to be careful not to push on them too hard in case they burst. I pull them from my eyes one by one, and I poke them
into the rock wall so that they’re twinkling in the darkness for Arnold and me to see. There’s warmth on our skin from the bright of them, and I make sure that there are three lined up in a row.
‘Mum’, I say, and I think about her hair wrapped tight around my finger.
‘Sssh,’ Arnold says, and in the echo inside the rock it sounds different, like it’s not even his voice at all. ‘Close your eyes, Simon. Close your eyes.’
‘Simon!’ someone yells, and I jolt awake so fast I hit my forehead on the rock. I look beside me but Arnold’s gone, and there’s so much daylight coming through from the outside that I have to put my hands over my eyes to see.
‘Simon!’ they yell again.
I try to roll out of the rock but my foot gets stuck on something sharp, so I have to roll out sideways, and I can feel the skin on the top of my nose getting shredded. My foot gets out first, then my knee. There’s enough room to twist, and if I pull my body along with my left leg I can inch out towards the air. I feel the ache in my jaw, and the click of it, when I open it wide enough to call out.
For a second there’s nothing. The birds look down at me from the tops of the trees, but the light is so bright I have to shield my eyes to see them. One of them opens its beak.
‘Simon!’ it yells.
I turn around then and I see them, standing over by the clearing we were in when Superman left to get her, and even though his cape is covered with mud and dust, Ms Hilcombe is clean, and her skirt is long enough to drag along the ground but there’s no dirt on it, and her hair is still frizzy but it’s dry, and not covered in leaves.
There’s no pain in my knees when I run, and she stretches her arms out to me so that I can fall into them, and she’s laughing into my face when I put a wet kiss on her cheek.
‘You found me!’ Ms Hilcombe says, and she lifts me up so she can hug me, and I twist my fingers into her hair. ‘Oh, Simon,’ she says, and her skin smells like chalk and blackboards, and it sounds like wind blowing through long grass.
She puts me down on the ground again, and she’s got a blanket that she puts around my shoulders, and I feel the warmth of it spread out into my bones.
‘Thank you, my friend,’ she says, and she looks like she wants to keep talking but there’s a cough and she looks over to her side. ‘Look who I found for you,’ she says, and she puts her hand between my shoulders and turns me to face the trees. There’s enough breath in my chest that I can cry out when I see her, and then I’m running at her so fast that all the muscles in my legs start to scream, but she has her arms open wide to catch me, and when she wraps them around me there’s not even a single burn.
‘Oh, Simon,’ Mum says, and there’s an echo in it that bounces up underneath her hair, and she holds me, right there in the bush and the mud. Mum pulls Ms Hilcombe’s blanket tighter around me, and everything goes soft from the warmth of it. I close my eyes and feel her bones dragging across my face. I lift my fingers and I wind some of her hair around them. She’s got tears on her face and they’re sinking into the blanket, deep down in the cotton and the wool.
I tap out M-U-M on her shoulder, and the sound sends out ripples in the air that make it thunder, and the noise bounces back onto the trees and up against the rocks, and it keeps rippling so that it travels around and into the dust and the dirt underneath us, and then up and fast enough to turn into a wave, and the noise of it pushes all the trees back and takes all the water out of the rivers, and the air turns into funnels that clear away all the mud, and down on the ground it’s just us in the middle of it, just Mum and me with my head on her shoulder and my fingers in her hair, and the rest of the world blown away into nowhere, and we’re alone and together and warm from the cold.
Acknowledgements
Here is a list of people I will never be able to thank enough:
1. Gaby Naher
2. Jane Palfreyman, Siobhán Cantrill, Ali Lavau and the incredible Allen & Unwin crew
3. Stephen Rae
4. Heather Underwood, Judith Hammond and Dr Ed
5. Kate Bartlett and Wendy Larcombe
6. Mum, Dad and Chrissie
7. Paulie, Winston and Napoleon. Always.
8. Haigh’s Chocolates (esp. peppermint chocolate frog, super and midi size)
I acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, the Traditional Custodians of the Land on which I based and wrote this book. I pay respect to Elders past and present.