by Clare Moleta
In the late afternoon she woke and drank the water she’d harvested, finished the ready and got back on the road. In the last light she saw that the country west of the highway was cropped with millet and murnong, beans and chickpea and kangaroo grass. On the other side, a little way off to the east, was the perimiter fence, and then bush and low brown hills, and somewhere beyond them, the wall. XB Force patrol vehicles a long way way off in the No Go.
Between the highway and the fence was mostly scrub. She passed people setting up camp for the night, spoke to a few of them. They were coming from further north, heading for Port Howell. A family remembered a bus with Agency branding going the other way. There were kids, their son told her. I was waving and waving at them. They invited her to share their camp but as long as there was a clear sky she preferred to keep moving through the coldest hours. It was safer, quieter. The trucks were like clouds blowing past, nothing to do with her.
Walking came easy. Li had walked through her childhood with Val, town to town on the circuit, and after Val she’d just kept walking. The settled years in Nerredin had softened her a bit but she’d got all the blisters she was going to get on the road to Valiant. It was Matti who’d slowed her down. Frank too, if she was truthful. Her makecamp boots had some wearing in to do but that just meant they’d last longer.
When she couldn’t walk any more she slept in the scrub. Broke camp early afternoon on the sixth day and got to Kutha two hours later.
* * *
North of Kutha was Kutha’s dump. Plenty of people must have picked through the pile but it seemed like none of them had had a magnet. In under ten minutes she dug out an iron. It was scorched black and the power cord was half melted off but still attached. She stripped the wire for patching supplies. Left the iron on top of the heap for someone who could carry it and kept walking.
More croplands. More greenhouses. Roadside stalls for the passing foot traffic. Close to dusk she came to the bore Rich had told her about, fenced off and guarded by Kutha militia. Trucks had priority. Li joined the foot queue waiting for their turn at the pump. Her waterbag was still almost full from the top-up at Kutha but she drank deep, peeled off the filthy gloves and ran water over her hands, soothing the tight, itchy skin. Rinsed her face carefully, trying not to wet the bandage. Rich had told her to leave it on as long as possible after the blisters cracked, to stop dirt getting in, keep the sun and the flies off. She couldn’t afford to let it get infected.
That night was clear and bright again, but she was moving more slowly; it was getting harder to walk through. She rested periodically but didn’t let herself fall asleep. Looked into the darkness beyond the fence, trying to picture the wall and all those sheltered people sleeping behind it. What was in their nightmares? People like her?
Footsore, before light on the seventh day, she passed another empty farmhouse. Remnant fencelines and then the hulking ruin of a cattle container. Dry bores and collapsing windmills, a skeleton ute with all the useable parts salvaged. It reminded her of West. She needed to stop but the empty houses didn’t tempt her, too much risk of ambush. She made camp. Singed the skin of a sawn-off roo tail and laid it in the ashes of her fire. While it cooked she cleaned her knife and stropped it on her belt. There was plenty of fresh roadkill along the highway at night, feral dogs and rabbits as well as roos. Quicker than trapping. She and Val used to get a feed of roo or wallaby pretty regularly. She hadn’t seen a wallaby in a long time.
The sense of time passing intensified when she lay down. There was the work of not imagining what Matti was thinking, whether she thought Li was coming for her. Sooner or later her body’s need for sleep would keep her brain quiet, but first she had to run back over everything she’d heard in Kutha, everything that told her she was on the right track, that Matti was safe at the barracks by now. Safer. But even in Kutha there were things to trip her up. Couldn’t swear they did a headcount getting them back on the bus.
The trick was to slide slideways into other memories. But they didn’t always help either. Like the revolving rack outside the newsagent, the other one, in Nerredin. It was chained to a pillar – you didn’t leave metal unsecured, not in country towns, not anywhere. Matti had run ahead to look at the picture books. She spun the rack slowly until she found the book she wanted and stood on tiptoe to lift it down. By the time Li caught up she was cross-legged on the footpath, pretending she could read. Li was late for work, still had to drop Matti off on the way. When she pulled her to her feet, Matti grabbed the rack with one hand and hung on. Four and a half and so skinny it was hard to believe the strength of her.
She looked at Li in triumph. You can’t make me let go.
In the second after it happened they were both silent, Matti still holding onto the rack and Li holding her other arm like a separate thing. Then Matti’s mouth opened and the sound that came out brought Faysal running from the shop, stopped people across the road. But all Li heard, and kept hearing, was the deep, private click as Matti’s shoulder came out of its socket.
Frank met them on their way out of the clinic. He was still wearing his knee pads and workboots. Matti turned her back on Li and showed him the sling. He lifted her carefully and carried her out to where Carl was waiting with the ute. That meant Angie knew what had happened too. Carl was polite with her, reserved. She wondered if he was counting the times Robbie had been alone in her care.
When Matti had cried herself to sleep at home, Frank said, What the fuck, Li? She tried to tell him but he stopped her. I don’t need to know what happened. I need to know why you dislocated our daughter’s shoulder.
She wouldn’t come.
He stared at her like he was trying to remember how he knew her. You’re not the child. You know that, don’t you?
She did know that, how it sounded. How it was, maybe. She was thick with guilt and grief. But she’s so goddamn stubborn.
Frank breathed out slowly, rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. She’s stubborn, yeah. You don’t recognise it?
* * *
Walking again, at dusk on the seventh day, she could feel the eastern drift of the highway in her body, how it pulled even closer to the fence. Fifty metres, thirty, nearer. An armoured four-wheel drive on the other side turned and accelerated bumpily across the No Go towards her. Too late to do anything except keep walking, look straight ahead. When the vehicle reached the fence, it slowed and kept pace with her. She waited for an order, an interrogation by megaphone. Her whole body was rigid with the effort of not looking. When she finally turned her head she saw two XB Force in blue body armour through the open passenger window. Their eyes were hidden behind reflective visors that had earpieces attached. They gave no instructions, made no demands, just watched her. She knew they carried precision rifles and batons, limb restraints and handcuffs. Studded gloves that they put on first.
She looked away and kept moving. What were they waiting for? Did they want her to show fear? Aggression? Something that might justify a response, justify these endless kays of wire and spikes and military hardware? And then she thought, No, they’re just bored. But, bored, they could still stop her, question her, detain her somewhere, come between her and Matti just to pass the time.
The vehicle swung away, back towards the foothills. She watched the headlights until she was sure they weren’t coming back.
When she was eight or nine Val had shown her how to tell the uniforms apart. Kahki was the old army, what he called real soldiers. XB Force was sky blue. The precincts’ own armed forces used to be grey or black but at some point one of the companies started supplying all the uniforms. Mostly, now, they all looked like XB Force.
* * *
Through the night, the blacktop started fading in and out of unsealed corrugation. She slept for a couple of hours in some bushes and then made herself keep moving, but slowly. She couldn’t keep walking so many hours, night after night. Her feet ached, her back ached. The pack weighed her down even though it weighed less. The sky lightened on the eight
h day over flat, sandy country with fewer and fewer trees. Emu bush and buffel grass and prickly wattle. Stretches of salt flats. She picked samphire and tried to eat it raw but it made her too thirsty.
Up ahead in the scrub there was a circle of vehicles and caravans around a campfire. Rusted but not abandoned. Rich had said there was a waterhole somewhere around here. She approached slowly, but without trying to be quiet. A dog barked and figures moved out from behind the vehicles. Someone started bashing something, wood against metal, in a slow rhythm.
She called out, Is there water? I just want to refill.
The barking became frenzied and a rock thudded past her into the dirt. She turned back to the road.
* * *
Sometimes she had a sense of afterlife – that everyone but her had walked away from an unspeakable disaster. All they’d left was their rubbish. She pushed thoughts like that away. What was happening here was still playing out, slowly slowly like a car crash, and there was nowhere for anyone to go.
* * *
Before she slept a different memory came, and kept coming, until she stopped fighting it. Just lay there and listened to Matti calling for water, saw her face, flushed and turning in sleep. Flu had gone through makecamp like a truck. Headache, bone ache, sweats, then a fever. By the time Li understood what was happening and tried to quarantine Matti from the other kids, it was too late. For the first twenty-four hours she thrashed in her sleeping bag, panting and crying out. She held onto the horse and made high whimpering sounds. Li gave her the last of the antivirals, tried to regulate her temperature, make her drink. Matti cried out that the fire was coming and Goldie was on fire. She asked for ice blocks and watermelon. For Frank. Frank.
People left Li food, refilled the water bottles she left outside the tent – Sanaa and Amin, Abraham, a few others she’d shared kill with or patched for on the quiet, building up credit against exactly this kind of contingency.
Sanaa stayed to give her news through the nylon shell – her family had survived the flu already. She said bodies had been removed from the camp and burned within sight in the No Go. The people who did it weren’t relief, they were outsiders in hazard suits and masks. They agreed that wasn’t good. It meant makecamp was on someone’s radar, Sumud or Port Howell authorities getting nervous about an epidemic on their doorstep.
The Med Tent had run out of antivirals and disposable masks, they were waiting on a new aid dump. Li breathed Matti’s air and willed herself not to get sick until Matti got through it.
Now her daughter lay still and glassy, and Li watched the work of her breathing. Counted through the pauses to the restarts, held her own breath, watching that thin chest as if the act of witness alone could keep Matti’s lungs working. The first time Li knew she was pregnant what she’d thought was, I’m going to fuck it up. And she did, her body did, over and over. The surprising part came later. Inside her another heart started pumping fluid, exchanges were made across the border between her blood and the blood of this creature taking form. She churned and swelled up again, aching to the touch. Lead in her bones. But this time it kept happening instead of tearing up and bleeding out of her piece by piece. And she didn’t know if she wanted it, she just knew that Frank did. Week after week, she watched his happiness as a kind of certainty settled on this thing she hadn’t decided not to do. Carefully, then recklessly, Frank expanded.
Matti’s hair was even shorter since the last outbreak of lice, and streaky with sweat, making her unfamiliar. She’d lost another tooth and a big one was already coming, it had changed her face again. She kept changing. Li saw how beautiful she was. She looked and looked. It was so easy to love Matti when she was still like this, when the furious concentration of her self made no demands, resisted nothing, insisted on nothing.
On the third morning she cooled and her breathing became easier. She drank, then slept again but quietly. The heaviness Li felt was barely recognisable as relief. She let it pull her down beside her child and slept with her.
Late in the day, Matti sat up and asked for food. There was almost nothing left. Whatever Li had caught would be rotting in the snares – she needed to get out there to empty and reset them, so they would have something to trade in the coming days. If she left now she could be back soon after dark.
She explained this to Matti while she lined up the water bottles and the two cans of beans within reach.
Matti said, Don’t go tonight, Mum.
I won’t be long. You just need to drink water and go to sleep. I’ll ask Sanaa to check on you.
What if you are long?
Then you wait for me at the Kids’ Tent.
Matti kept shaking her head. Li could feel a kind of lethargy coming on that would make it too hard to do anything but lie down beside her, and so she was hard on Matti. Her strong child who had survived. She thought it would make her angry and the anger would make her turn away, make leaving easy. But Matti followed her all the way to the fence.
The duster came up fast, late afternoon of the eight day. Li had only just started walking. She’d seen dust inland in West but nothing like this. Wasn’t prepared for the ferocity, the sting, the way it snuck into her lungs. She tied the thermal leggings around her nose and mouth, pulled her cap down low, but there was nothing she could do about her eyes. Dust masked the sun and shrank the world to a swirling red mass that she moved through as good as blind.
Within minutes she’d lost the road. She blundered through choking, whistling air with her arms out in front of her. Her eyes wept and burned. Then she was on her hands and knees, with the idea of finding some bushes to shelter in, turning her back to the wind until this passed. But already she was losing the idea of time.
The railing reared up so suddenly she almost crashed into it. Ran her hands along the rough, gappy wood and stood up. It was a porch. She felt her way over missing planks to the door. The effort of breathing made her desperate, uncaring of the risks.
She pulled it shut behind her and got her back to it, knife in one hand, fumbling for the gun with the other. In the dim light she saw a hall with doorways either side and another one at the end. A layout like hundreds of farmhouses she’d been in, except in this one all the doors had been salvaged, along with some of the floorboards in the hall. She pulled the leggings from her face to breathe more easily, listened, heard nothing.
Li moved through the house, stepping over gaps, checking the rooms. All empty and stripped bare, but someone had been in the middle bedroom recently; the air felt disturbed and there were scuffmarks on the dusty floor. It was the room she would have chosen, midway between the front and back doors. The window was boarded up and stuffed with plastic, like all the others, but light and dustmotes seeped through the cracks.
Listening to the the duster beating gently at the walls, she felt the desire to fall asleep in a house, in a room where people had been, where she could trick herself, in the moment before she fell, that her own breathing was multiplied by three.
She went out to the hallway and brushed the dust from herself and her pack as best she could. Back in the bedroom, she pulled off her rust-coloured gloves and bathed her eyes with gauze dipped in a capful of water. Rolled out the mat and sleeping bag on a solid patch of floor under the window and lay down with her boots on, with the gun and the knife and the torch at her side. She closed and opened her swollen eyes, her tearducts working to expel the grit. After a while she noticed a patch of wallpaper. Great tangled cups of flowers, creamy and tentacled. Magnolias. A flower of temperate climates. Did they still grow anywhere? There had been a painting of the same flowers in a pub where she and Val had stayed for a night somewhere on the circuit. Val had told her their name. He said they grew on trees in the place across the oceans where he grew up. Told her about their sweet cloudy smell and how the flowers would drop and bruise on the ground.
She remembered the pub because they almost never stayed in them. Val was still dry then. A room above the bar with two small squeaky beds and green bedspre
ads with tiny lumps that she ran under her fingers. The painting was on the wall facing her bed. In the drawer where the Bible should have been she found a paperback with an angry man holding a woman, her dress coming off her shoulders.
Romance, Val said when she showed him. You want to stay well clear of that shite, young one.
A deep verandah ran the length of the upstairs rooms. They could climb out onto it through their window. Val smoked out there and she watched the trucks appear as grey specks of dust that grew into shapes and noise.
She and Val didn’t eat dinner at the pub, they went to the cafe down the road, even though it cost more, but they did eat the free breakfast in the room for guests downstairs. Three kinds of cereal in plastic containers, and milk, and a big curving staircase that she went up and down, holding the bannister like a queen.
But the night before, the shouting and laughter from downstairs kept waking her up and Val was awake every time. She didn’t mind, it wasn’t that different from the circuit camps, but Val minded somehow. When a fight started and spilled out onto the road, he got up and stood at the window. After a while he sang to her, slow and tenderly in his smoker’s voice, a song called ‘The Parting Glass’, and she looked at the magnolia in the moonlight and heard his longing but didn’t understand it, and fell asleep.
Li opened her eyes into darkness. Someone was there. She swung up the torch and the gun in one movement and saw a woman in the doorway, holding an axe. Li got to her feet fast. They stood and watched each other.
There’s just three of us, the woman said.
That sound again, the one that had woken her. She looked past the woman and saw a man holding a baby in the doorway across the hall. It started crying properly, an aggrieved sound that carried. The man lifted it up to his shoulder, keeping his eyes on Li. His palm made circles on its back.