Absolutely overwhelmed, I couldn’t speak. Ishra turned away. He killed the lights, plunging the room back into darkness. Outside, the light reflecting off the concrete plain was almost enough to burn away the horror I had just seen.
I tottered, the pain in my thigh flaring suddenly. I was glad for the distraction.
‘Are you okay?’
I nodded, gripping my walking stick tighter.
‘Very good. Come along, then, we don’t want to be late.’
I looked at him stupidly. ‘Late for what?’
‘Ah, yes, of course. You must forgive me, age has taken its toll. The train, William, we don’t want to miss the train. After all, it’s the only reason this place is here.’
‘What train?’
‘The train to the camp, of course. There’s only one train nowadays.’
He fell silent and shuffled on. I let him be, let his lonely old-man mind take him where it needed. All I could think about was the camp.
The camp, after all this time. I hoped Tobe had a plan.
Ishra and I kept following the wall of derelict buildings, slowly approaching a grandiose townhouse that seemed in better repair than all the others in the complex. Standing at a right angle to the derelict wall, it marked one end of the semicircular jumble of ruined houses that enclosed the concrete plain.
I whistled low and limped ahead. My thigh ached, my chest burned; when I stopped by the townhouse, I almost collapsed. I rested, drank some water, and caught my breath. I had to stand on tiptoe to look through a window.
That hurt, considering the state of my leg.
The little of the room that I could see twinkled, thanks to candlelit lamps and ornate lanterns. It was also stuffed full of treasure—overstuffed leather couches, statues and sculptures, gilded sideboards, heavy-framed paintings, even a gramophone, its brass horn dull. The bookshelves groaned they were packed so full; glass cabinets held jewellery; the mantelpiece above the wrought-iron fireplace was crowded with knick-knacks. Everything was immaculate.
Precious frivolities from a time I had never known. Treasure really was the only word for it.
‘My home,’ Ishra said, catching up to me.
‘Nice,’ I replied, trying to play it cool.
‘Thank you. It’s been my life’s work.’
I didn’t bother to ask how much blood had been spilled in its name.
‘Now, please, the others will be waiting.’
He turned away, started shuffling down an alley-like gap between his home and a collapsing lean-to that capped off the derelict wall.
‘Tell me, Doc, why are you still here?’
I figured that by letting him ramble on about himself—as old men are wont to do—I might get a straight answer.
‘I’d been here almost twenty years when the flood of people slowed to a trickle,’ he said. ‘But the trickle didn’t stop—Creeps still turn up sometimes, herding the odd holdouts. Others come with the monthly train and cart them away.’ He smiled sadly. ‘Someone has to look after all those ragged stragglers.’
We entered an alley-like gap that quickly stopped dead. Ishra took a step to the left. I limped after him. We stood side by side on a narrow concrete ledge, the collapsing lean-to and a squat brick shed rising up behind us, a sheer drop in front of us. Lying at the bottom, arrow-straight railway tracks. The ledge followed the tracks in both directions; to our left, the backside of the wall cast it in shadow, while another empty concrete plain bordered it to our right.
‘What’s not to love about this place?’ Ishra asked with a laugh.
I shivered—across the tracks lay a debris-strewn wasteland.
Dozens of trenches ran higgledy-piggledy across a stretch of bare earth. Wrecked vehicles formed sturdy barricades; barbed wire formed deadly fences; deep craters revealed the existence of mines, their earthen maws hinting at the deadly potential still lying elsewhere in wait.
‘I can see why you’d want to stay.’
Ishra didn’t laugh. ‘I’m a doctor, William. I help people. I wouldn’t want to hand this place over to some unwilling conscript whose boredom and loneliness would eventually cruel him.’ His face twisted. ‘There’s been enough of that here …’
I didn’t ask, didn’t need to.
We followed the ledge, walking in single file, heading back towards the sickbay. I couldn’t catch my breath, exhausted by fatigue and pain. The backside of the wall continued; far ahead, it gave way to an open space occupied by a pair of blurry figures.
One of them waved. I heard a ‘coo-ee’ on the wind. I picked up my pace as best I could, forcing Ishra to do the same.
‘I think your friends can answer the rest of your questions, don’t you?’
He looked over his shoulder and smiled.
‘Tobias is good to you. He cares. The whole time you were asleep, all those days and nights, he didn’t leave your side. I didn’t understand why. But after a while, when he started to trust me, he told me what happened. It all made sense—such a debt cannot be repaid, all one can do is try.’
Ishra walked on. I swear that the Tobe-shaped figure in the distance threw me a mock-salute.
I muttered under my breath: ‘You bastard.’
Sixteen
Tobe and Ruby sat next to each other on a worn park bench. They were deep in conversation, as thick as thieves, as buddied as bushrangers. Two unfamiliar backpacks sat at their feet. I hobbled along as quickly as I could, the pain in my side getting worse with each step.
‘G’day,’ Tobe said.
‘Yeah, g’day,’ Ruby mimicked.
I faked a smile. I needed a sit down more than I needed to stick it to Tobe straightaway.
‘Hello Tobias, hello Ruby. How are you both?’ Ishra asked.
I collapsed on the bench. For a brief moment, the world blurred. Someone passed me a canteen. I drank deep, slopping some water down my front. The ragged tear of my breath was all I could hear.
‘Bill, are you okay?’ Tobe asked.
Ruby took my hand and took my pulse. ‘He’ll be all right, but he’ll have to take it easy for a while.’
‘Very good, Ruby. Well done.’
Ishra’s voice was full of pride, exactly as Louise’s had been. I smiled a sad smile. Tobe beamed at me. Did he even remember what he had done? Did he remember what he had told Ishra?
I weathered my storm—what I had to say was only for Tobe. The bastard.
He fidgeted in his seat. Ishra seemed happy to amuse himself by looking out at the wasteland. Ruby kept still and quiet. An awkward silence fell.
The silence steadily grew heavier.
‘Right, then,’ Tobe said.
Ishra smiled at him. I looked on, bemused.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Ishra said to him. ‘If you need anything, I’ll be gathering your fellow patient and sorting out your transfer papers.’
Ruby looked at him strangely. I understood why—his last few words were alien; they had no meaning out in that scorched, dying land.
‘I’ll see you all when Old Reliable arrives,’ he said as he shuffled away.
It was only then that I caught on to where we were: an old train platform, kept in good repair despite the ravages of time and the dry, protected from the sun by a heavy roof. A bluestone ticket-office-cum-waiting-room stood behind it, its wrought-iron fixtures and handrails dull.
‘So, here we are again,’ Tobe said.
I didn’t reply. I wondered if he understood why. The awkward silence returned.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said after the silence had stretched out and become uncomfortable.
A soft breath escaped me, a deflated sigh of relief.
‘Look, give me a sec,’ he continued. ‘Ruby?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Would you mind, ah, lending the Doc a hand?’
She looked me in the eye. ‘No worries, boss,’ she said. And then she winked at me.
‘Cheers.’
She dragged herself away and followed after Ishra. T
obe and I sat there for a moment, saying nothing. He wouldn’t look at me, staring a hole into the ground instead.
‘Fuck it,’ I finally said.
‘Hang on,’ Tobe interrupted.
We looked at each other. Despite everything, we laughed.
‘After you …’
Tobe didn’t dare decline my invitation. ‘I’m sorry, Bill,’ he began. ‘Sorry I dragged you into this mess, sorry you got hurt so bad.’ His voice was unsteady. ‘I never meant for things to go to shit. That’s happened too many times, thanks to me.’
I swear he started to cry.
‘I’m sorry.’
I knew that his apology was sincere. But it wasn’t the apology I wanted to hear.
‘No worries, mate.’
‘No worries’, because there were none; that’s just how it goes out on the road. And ‘mate’ because that’s what he always would be.
‘Well, cheers.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘I’ve been sweating it, you know? I wasn’t sure you’d say that. Bloody hell, I’m glad you did.’ He looked up, looked me in the eye. ‘Thank you.’ He lowered his gaze back to the ground. ‘I know nothing I can do can …’
‘Fuck you.’
He shut his trap mid-sentence.
‘How could you?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘Don’t give me that—you know what I’m talking about.’
I waited for a reply but none came. He was either being exceptionally dim or extremely stubborn. Well, it had been a long time since we had dredged up such bitter memories.
I stared at him, waiting-waiting-waiting.
‘Oh, that,’ he said after a while. ‘Bill, mate, what does it matter?’
I sighed. Last time we had talked about it, when Tobe had returned after all those years away, we spent a long time arguing over what mattered and what didn’t and whose fault was whose and who should have done what. We had talked ourselves in circles, gotten nowhere, eventually come to blows.
I knew who should have done what.
‘It matters because you weren’t fucking there,’ I spat. ‘And because it should have been you, not me. You said until death but you didn’t mean it. The least you can do is keep it to yourself, like you promised.’
Venomous rage poured out of me. It felt good. I couldn’t have stopped it, even if I had wanted to.
‘But …’
‘Don’t even think about it,’ I said.
He was on his feet in an instant. ‘You don’t know what it was like.’
I followed him up, leaning on my stick. ‘How can you say that? She was my sister, and I loved her until the end. Unlike you, you coward piece of shit.’
Years of repressed anger spilled out. The memories hurt, but venting my pain at Tobe made it all worthwhile. He held his good arm at his side, his hand clenched in a fist.
I was suddenly glad that I was near enough to crippled.
‘It wasn’t your fault, Bill. You’ve never got that. It’s my fault, I did it.’
‘Pull the other one.’
It was only Tobe’s fault in the most elasticated philosophical sense of the word. The night my parents chose not to play further witness to nature’s cruel ways—the night they harrowingly tried to lighten the load for my sister and me—lived as a panicked memory somewhere on the border of nightmare. But the memory of what happened to my sister over the following days stayed as sharp as a dead tree on a windless day.
That memory visited me every other night, dulling my spirit, deadening my heart.
‘It wasn’t your fault, Tobe. It was no one’s fault—these things happen.’
I said it reluctantly. I didn’t want to indulge Tobe’s guilt or soothe his shattered ego—I had my own grudge to offload.
‘How can you say that?’
He was screaming it, his face red. It dawned on me that we should have tried to thrash this out a long time ago, after the flared tempers of our tumultuous reunion had settled.
‘I was there, remember? I know what happened.’
‘Then you know it’s my fault.’
‘For fuck’s sake!’
Tobe shut up.
That night, after Tobe and I had managed to detach ourselves enough to begin carefully cutting down my parents’ bodies, my sister surprised us by throwing open the barn doors without a knock or a warning.
She saw us. She saw our parents. She made a tiny animal sound.
Tobe called out to her. She looked her husband in the eye. She looked back to our dead parents. She turned on her heel and ran blindly into the night. We gave chase, running through the darkness. She was quick. So was Tobe.
I lumbered after them, soon lost sight of them.
The memories flicked past, scenes of horror and sorrow. I began to cry and barely realised it.
‘Bill?’
I didn’t respond.
‘Bill?’
That night, that’s what Tobe had been calling out, screaming it at the sky. That’s how I found them. Tobe was sobbing, curled up in a ball. My sister was barely conscious, tangled up in rusty barbed wire, covered in blood. I slapped Tobe together. We untangled my sister, being as gentle as we could. We carried her home. We dressed her wounds. We tried to make her comfortable.
And then we buried my parents.
Tobe disappeared later that night. He told me that he was going outside to take a piss, and he never came back.
‘Bill?’
‘You should have stayed.’
Tobe looked confused. I became aware of how lost I had gotten chasing memories down the rabbit hole. The pent up bile of years past took control, forcing me to tell him what I swore I never would.
‘How could you leave? You know that she called out for you? The last thing she said, before I killed her, was your name. Even then, she still loved you.’
A little piece of me died as I told Tobe the truth I had withheld for so long. He looked at me, a pathetic sadness hollowing his eyes, all his bluster draining away.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘That doesn’t fucking cut it. You didn’t see the look in her eyes as she grasped what was happening to her. But even as the gangrene and infection set in, she still hoped that you’d come back. She wanted you to be there, to hold her hand when it happened, to be the one to do it.’
‘But …’
‘Don’t. Nothing you can say will make up for not being there.’
He seemed to deflate further. I was happy for that. He cried, his chest heaving. His cracked ribs made him wince with every breath, and still he cried.
My anger started draining away. I didn’t have the energy to maintain the rage.
‘I’m truly sorry.’
He whispered it. I ignored him.
‘And anyway, it looks like we’ve got more pressing problems,’ he said.
He pointed at the wasteland. I saw nothing different.
‘Look harder,’ he said.
‘Piss off.’
‘Between the burnt-out tank and the fallen-down guard tower,’ he suggested.
I squinted. Far in the distance was a feather-thin plume of smoke, almost invisible against the all-encompassing blue of the sky.
Tobe’s eagle-eye had done it again.
‘Shit,’ I said.
The last thing I wanted was an interruption. I couldn’t relive that horror again; we needed to sort it out there and then. But after a lifetime on the land, it had been drummed into me that you barely ever get what you want.
A rhythmic squeak broke the wasteland’s ghostly quiet. I turned, saw Ishra and Ruby wheeling out the bandaged bull-roo who had occupied the trolley next to mine. He moaned steadily. Ruby stroked his head without affection. Ishra focused on the burden of the trolley, his old-man body looking like it might give way any minute. Appreciating the fact that I knew nothing about the bull-roo, I turned back to Tobe, hoping that he could answer my questions. But his eyes were fixed on the distance.
There was nothing behind them—he was lost somewhere in hi
s head, silently mulling over words he never should have heard.
‘G’day,’ I said to Ruby and Ishra, giving up on Tobe.
Ishra stopped the trolley and its squeaky wheel; in the quiet, I noticed the rumble of the approaching train, more a feeling than a sound.
‘Hello, William.’
‘Bill, nice to see you back on your feet,’ Ruby said, smiling cheekily.
I didn’t return her smile. The bull-roo moaned again and then started to twitch. Ishra halted the trolley and passed a small plastic case to Ruby.
‘If you will.’
‘Cheers, Doc.’
She took the case, cracked it open. A gleaming hypodermic needle sat inside. She deftly plucked it out, rolled up the hulk’s sleeve, swabbed his forearm with something, and injected him with something else. Her hand didn’t shake as she administered the sedative.
‘Well, that’s that,’ Ishra muttered.
Ruby passed back the needle and then sprinted to Tobe, somehow feeling his distress.
‘You okay?’ she asked.
The dead embers of his eyes briefly flickered with some kind of life. ‘No worries.’
The fire died out again. He stooped slightly, reached for Ruby. She stared at him quizzically; he looked like he was about to cry.
‘Please …’ he said.
Ruby hugged him, comforting him in a way that I don’t think anyone else could. Theirs wasn’t the knock-about familiarity of old mates or the unbreakable bond that comes from sharing a life in drear and seared desolation. It was the silent understanding of a fellow soldier, a fellow survivor.
I looked away. I wasn’t meant to witness their moment.
I waited. The plume of smoke became more a thumb than a finger. The rumble steadily grew louder.
‘Right, folks, sorry that you had to see that.’
I looked back at Tobe. He was standing a little straighter, seemed a little more together.
‘You okay?’ I asked, unable to help myself.
‘Yeah, mate, cheers. Anyway, we’ve got more important things to worry about.’
‘My thoughts exactly,’ Ishra said. ‘Now, remember what I said earlier, don’t give them a reason to …’
His words were drowned out as the train sounded its horn to warn us of its approach. Its blare echoed across the wasteland, scaring into flight a flock of magpies.
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