by Clare Moleta
If Val was here now, he could tell her what was wrong with the fish. He’d like it here. It wasn’t North, but it was closer. He used to tell her that one day when she didn’t need him anymore, he was going to save up a whole season, two seasons, and just go, head all the way up. See for himself. One night at a circuit camp she lay in her blankets by the fire and listened to him swapping stories about people who’d been to the sacrifice zone, or tried. No one had a story about anyone coming back, but Val said that didn’t prove anything. He reckoned it wasn’t as bad up there as government wanted them to believe.
Li said, What about your check-ups?
Thought you were asleep, young one.
I bet they don’t have the hospital up there.
Val had a thyroid condition and his liver was shot. Once every season, a free hospital set up camp on the circuit.
True enough, Val said. I wouldn’t be much good without my pills.
I bet it’s not even like that anymore, Li told him, like what Eddie said.
Val nodded and fished a thread of tobacco off his tongue. Nobody’s home is what it used to be, Li-Li.
* * *
The sun’s heat thinner again. Time to start back. Nerredin was flat country too, big fast sky. Matti liked cumulus clouds the best; they lay on their backs on the dirt behind the house and she said the sky looked like a pop-up book. The memory felt dusty and generalised. Li tried to imagine Matti seeing this sky, these clouds, but she couldn’t, she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t do it anymore.
The bottle was full. And the hole had filled with saltwater again – the edge of the lake had moved a metre south while she slept. She drank and decanted and then packed up the still. It’d be under water soon.
Before she put the compression bandage back on, she tried moving her foot a little, testing her weight carefully. It felt better. She should leave tomorrow, even if she couldn’t get far. She had some water now, some food, and there were towns east of here where she could resupply. But there was a heaviness on her. She was barely going through the motions in her head.
Walking back, she kept her eyes on the ground and concentrated on each step, on the new effort of carrying wood under one arm, because that seemed to be about all she was good for. When her stick knocked against a small piece of wood, she stood staring at it for a long time. Knew she was seeing something that wasn’t there, and knew that was dangerous. The smooth surface, all that compressed movement, the wild grain in the wood. Matti’s horse.
Li got down clumsily and caught it up in both hands. Brushed salt from the creases of its limbs and mane, put it to her lips and traced Matti’s scowl, Frank’s promise. The fastest horse in the West. She shuddered with tenderness. Couldn’t believe it but she held it, and it fit neatly in her palm, all action, mane flying back, legs a blur somehow. It was real. Real. She wiped snot and tears, tasted the salt on her arm. Remembered Frank at the bar with that long-distance look as he worked the horse out of the wood. She missed him so much. They should be doing this together. I promise you, she told him. I swear.
* * *
She drank again when she got back, drank her fill and there was still water. Leaving felt real now. Tomorrow.
The four-wheel drive’s bonnet had rusted through in places. The engine was gone but the bonnet prop was still there. She dug a fire pit and roasted the rabbit on the prop. The smell made her weak, carnivorous. Her stomach growled and her mouth filled up with spit, but when the meat was ready, it was too rich for her to eat more than a few mouthfuls.
Dark fell down all over the lakebed. She stayed by the fire, with the heat easing deep into her bones. Somewhere out there, the sound of howling. She unbuttoned her pocket and held the horse, remembering Matti asleep in the tent, gripping its wooden head. For the first time she let herself see the fragility of the thread she’d been following – rumours and reported sightings, maybes. But the horse was real. Impossible but real. Out there, in all that salt, Matti had led her right to it. So, it was true. Sooner or later anyone could roll a six.
Tomorrow she would walk back to the highway with both feet on the ground. And there would be another truck, a driver who was persuadable. She would sit up in the cab and watch the road going under the wheels until they were there, right there ahead of her on the roadside. And Matti would turn around and see that she had come.
Gulls woke her. She lay in the four-wheel drive, disoriented for a minute. Then she remembered: this was the day she was leaving.
It was barely light but somehow the light was different – softer, more diffuse. Had she dreamed the birds? The sound pulled her back to Valiant and the enormous blue of the Gulf and Frank in the container and the seabirds curling and crying way above it all.
But when she opened her eyes again, she could still hear them. What were they doing here?
Li cracked the door and the smell hit her. Fresh and salty, and wet like the beaches where she and Val had camped for a couple of summers, back when the west coast was still on the circuit and there was work on the kelp farms. She breathed it in and caught something rotten underneath. The air was thick with bird cries now. She didn’t understand until she limped out of the dunes and saw the water. It lapped twenty metres from where she stood, reaching back and out beyond the edges of her sight.
Through the night those northern rivers had kept running down, flooding the lakebed. And while she slept, life had come back, too. The water was livid with birds. Gulls, herons, ducks, black swans, birds she’d never seen and couldn’t name, all calling and landing and jostling and taking off in spurts across the water, reaching down and pulling up fish. The stink of dead fish along the shoreline rose to meet her, but the birds ignored them because the water was heaving with life. Reeds shivered and flowers bloomed pale and wide-cut on the surface. On the shore and even in the dunes, life showed green through the sand. What she thought of was Matti’s Best Place.
Li left her stick on the shore and walked into the water to convince herself that it was real. It was cold and shallow, deepening to a metre when she waded out. A pod of pelicans announced their descent with low honks – astonishing in their grace and power until they hit the water in a series of lumbering jolts.
She sank into the water up to her neck, shivering, feeling it touch her everywhere. The plenty of it. Scooped it up and let it run over her face, soothing the itch. She stripped, threw her clothes back on the shore, and rolled naked. Let the salt lift and hold her, taking the heaviness from her legs, her ankle. She scrubbed her skin with mud. Waded back to the edge and washed her filthy clothes and her stiff sour underwear. Stood up under the first thin heat of the sun and looked down at her cleaner self, muscle and sinew, the sharp angles of ribs and hips, her breasts gone slack, everything reduced.
It jolted her into a decision. She wouldn’t leave today, she would take this gift and carry it out with her tomorrow.
Naked, she dug out a large still at the water’s edge, deep enough to hold the thirty-litre jerry can. By the time she finished digging she wasn’t cold anymore. Then she made fish traps. On her hands and knees, scooping up the wet mud, it was a childhood feeling. She had always meant to take Matti to the beach in Valiant.
By the time she was done, her clothes were salt-stiff and dry enough to put back on, and the first trap was already full of yellow and silver fish. She worked in a steady frenzy, cleaning and filleting the fish, rubbing salt in and covering them in saltbush leaves. Skewered other fish whole and roasted them on the bonnet prop. She dug another, deeper fire pit, roped driftwood into a rough tripod and hung the salted fish in the smoke, hoping her wood supply would last long enough to do the job.
By midmorning the flies were coming, drawn to the rotting fish. There had hardly been any flies before now. She worked to keep them off the drying meat but gave up trying to keep them off her face. There were toads, too, a kind she’d never seen in West. Bloated and yellow, emitting a stop-start engine rumble under all the other noises. They were slow but she wasn’t tem
pted to catch them. Most of the birds ignored them too but the gulls dive-bombed them along the water’s edge, flipping them onto their backs and ripping their bellies open to feed.
All day the birds kept coming, preening, feeding, jostling on the water. The sky was solid with them, their shrieks and their shit and feathers falling. Where were they coming from? She hadn’t known there were this many birds anywhere. All day grasses and small plants grew up and covered the shore and the dunes, and smaller flowers emerged from them. It made her feel like a child.
When Li turned nine, Val bought her a magic garden. They set it up in the tent; the small tricky cardboard landscape on its plastic base, and poured the liquid into the channels that fed it, and then waited. She had fallen asleep waiting and missed the first bloom of colour on a fir tree, the first snow on the mountain. This was like that. She had fallen asleep with the outline of life and woken to life itself exploding around her, the chemical transformation so rapid it clambered over itself, multiplying at fantastic speed.
She tasted the flowers and they were sweet and nutty, so she picked armfuls, leaving some to dry on the roof of the four-wheel drive. Ate and ate, feeding herself up for the walk ahead. Her new still was working so fast that she could fill her waterbag and what extra bottles she could carry, and have plenty left to drink.
When feral pigs came in the afternoon, they ignored her and she kept her distance. There was enough here for everyone, more than enough.
* * *
After Nerredin’s school closed, when they were running classes in their kitchens and sheds and paddocks, Li made Matti her own magic garden. Not from a packet – Wars had put an end to the flow of cheap goods. She and Angie had done it as a science experiment with the kids. It turned out the main ingredient was salt.
One by one the kids had got bored and drifted off but Matti stayed, hardly blinking while the liquid soaked into the crystals because she wanted to be the first one to see it. But it had taken too long, or they got the ratio wrong, or the temperature. In the end even Matti ran off. Then Angie said, casually, like it was nothing, Why don’t you hang onto it? Take it home, just in case.
And in the morning there was a green crystal forest in the fridge. Matti wrapped her arms around the bowl and hung over it, staring. Touch it, Frank said. But she shook her head. I don’t want to wreck it.
* * *
People arrived at the end of the day. Three adults and two kids. They were pushing bikes with panniers and hauling a small, heavily loaded trailer. Their faces, hair and clothes, the bikes, everything was caked in red dust. They stood, staring, taking it all in. Then they whooped and hollered and ran down to the water. Li looked away, went back to her drying fish.
When she looked again, the woman and the two men were setting up tents at the foot of the dunes about a hundred metres down the beach, while the kids hauled up water in collapsible containers. Then they all sat down to eat. Later, the kids chased birds, making shrill sounds as they explored the shoreline. They stared over at her from time to time, but they didn’t approach. Li stopped paying attention when one of the men waded in with some kind of speargun.
There were so many things she might have got wrong with her fish. Not enough salt, not enough drying time, too many flies. The strips she’d left to dry had a brittle jerky texture that seemed right but the smoked fish needed longer. She couldn’t afford to get sick. She would keep the fire going tonight as long as her wood lasted.
She did a stocktake. There was food to last a week, a little more if she was careful, and all the water she could carry. She envied the shop family their wheels.
What are you doing?
The older boy was standing behind her. She hadn’t heard him come. Her pulse sped up with the shock of proximity, of speech.
Smoking fish, she said.
He pointed downshore at her still, the jerry can sitting beside it. What’s that for?
So I can drink the water.
He looked sceptical. We use pills.
Huh. You got many of them left?
Yep. We got everything. We had the shop in Lawrence but there were too many dusters and then everyone went away.
Lawrence. She thought briefly of the couple with the baby. A breeze came up off the water, shifting the direction of the smoke. She made adjustments. The boy was still there, staring.
Are you on your own? he asked.
Yeah.
Why?
Nalanjin! The woman was walking fast down the beach towards them. Get back here!
The boy said, You could camp with us. That’s my mum and my dad and my uncle and my cousin Laz. His mum’s dead. He said this with the ease of a child who knew themselves personally immune to loss. We’re going down to the big camp. Mum says we can stay there till they let us in.
Did he mean makecamp? She cleared her throat. You see any other kids on the way here?
He looked at her blankly.
Maybe a group of them? Without any grown-ups?
The boy shook his head, backing away a little at her tone. His mother called again, getting closer. Nalanjin! Leave the woman alone! Li heard her fear and felt no answering tug of feeling. She would get her child back.
His face cleared suddenly. There was this one boy, just with his dad? They tried to steal our bikes at night but my dad shot at them and they ran away. He paused, satisfied. My dad says people like that are how come there are walls.
She didn’t want this boy with two parents and a bicycle. Didn’t want his voice, his skinny child’s body, his dumb certainty anywhere near her.
Here. She scooped up four fish she’d left salting. You want to rinse these and cook them straight away.
I don’t really like fish.
She stared at him. Don’t eat them, then. Give them to your parents. And tell them they can have whatever water’s left in that jerry can.
He stood back, unwilling. The same look on Matti’s face when she was, how old? In the highchair, still. They’d collected the eggs together, laughing at the weird places the chooks hid them, and Li was flush with good parenting. But in the kitchen Matti scowled and pushed her plate away.
You need to eat your dinner.
No. Yuk.
Come on, Matti, just try it.
Matti picked up the egg by its oily fringe and dropped it onto the ground. Li scooped it up and put it back on the plate. Yolk seeped out. You’re not getting down till you eat it, she said.
Matti sat in the chair until it was dark. Halfway through, she wet herself. She didn’t cry and she didn’t eat the egg. Li was trapped in the kitchen, unable to leave her alone in the chair, hostage to the lesson of not wasting food. Matti watched her and her eyes were murderous. They held their breath, waiting for Frank to come home and break the spell.
Will they still be so smelly when they’re cooked? the boy asked.
No. She was desperate for him to be gone. You got wood, right?
We got pellets. They burn better than wood.
Okay then.
He took the fish reluctantly, kept staring. Then his mother was there. These four fish are for you, he said, and started gabbling Li’s instructions. The woman put her hand on his head and her face softened into security. She nodded her thanks.
Li said, If you’re going to Port Howard, the makecamp got cleared out two weeks ago.
The woman stared at her. Are you sure? There’s a lot of people heading down that way.
Li shrugged. There’s Source in Kutha. Check for yourself.
The woman looked stunned. She nodded again and turned back, tugging the boy with her. Li couldn’t work out how they hadn’t heard yet, the way people talked on the road.
Mum, she heard the boy saying, what’s wrong with her face?
She went and got out the ghost map from the four-wheel drive. Lawrence was about eighty k north-east. It had been a decent-sized town when the map was made and the highway went right through it. There was no way the family would have missed the kids unless the kids were furt
her ahead than she’d figured. Then she remembered the bikes. Travelling like that they would have covered the distance in less than half the time, probably only camped one night. Matti could have been well past Lawrence before they even left.
Not long after sunset, Li banked up the firepit and bedded down beside it. She lurched awake in the dark to snarling and birds screaming. Reached for her knife. A child cried out in fear and there were shouts from the beach, then gunshots. She got into the four-wheel drive, ripped the Saint Anthony medallion from its rusted chain and held it in her fist but the child cried on and on, a thin, jarring sound. Matti had cried like that all through the first year of her life, cried until Li was drowning, until she wanted only to be lifted clear of this devastating error. Threw the chair across the room, smashed the bowl. Ange found her shaking Matti, shouting at her to stop. Said she wouldn’t tell Frank if Li swore never to do it again.
She didn’t have the thing you had to have to do this, didn’t even know what it was. Wanted to walk away from it to somewhere quiet, but she couldn’t because they existed – both of them. And she couldn’t give them up.
* * *
In the morning, the beach was a killing field of blood and feathers. Streams of birds flew in to replace the dead.
The family left while Li was still cooling the last of her smoked fish. The older boy stared as they passed and the adults nodded soberly. She understood that he must have relayed her question from the way the woman caught him by the hand in some kind of demonstration of how not to lose your child. As if it might be contagious.
One of the men dropped back and laid something on the sand ten metres from her. Thanks for the water and the fish, he said.
Li waited till he’d almost caught up with the others before she went to look. It was a dust mask. She brushed off the salt and held it, dangling by its elastic. Wondered where they would go when they found out she was right. Not back where they’d come from. Anyway, with all the unsheltered heading south, there would be another makecamp soon enough.