by Clare Moleta
There were women in the sleepbox that night, women with red eyes and bruises, who talked like they hated Susanna more than ever. At the next shift search, Megan told Li she felt sorry for Susanna but it was an oversight that was always going to be picked up.
There’s fertile women in Charlie, she said. Management couldn’t take the risk.
After that, Li mostly saw Susanna through the fence, looking into their compound from Delta. Same clothes, same hair, just the other side. It had never occurred to her that being a woman was something you might long for.
* * *
Trish asked them to count their blessings. Some of the women had men in Delta, partners or sons or brothers. They spent the time between shifts and meals and sleep pressed up against the fence.
But you’re lucky too, Camila said, Jun said, Lumena said. You never had a baby.
Yes, Li said. That was lucky. I never wanted to take the risk.
* * *
Sometimes she prayed to Frank. Was it praying? She told him she was sorry. And she grieved for him. While Matti had been alive, while she’d hoped for that, there hadn’t been room, but now there was so much time.
There were things Li was forgetting – she reached for them and they receded. But she remembered Frank. The way he slept after a twelve-hour shift in Valiant, on his back, palms open. Those strange chess pieces he carved for her their first cold season together in Nerredin, to replace the lost rook and knight in Val’s old chess set – the one with stubby little wings and the one with the long tongue. His eyes on her and his hands. He couldn’t sing, not at all, but when he was concentrating on something he would whistle in perfect tune.
* * *
Trish said they should think of someone they’d wronged and ask to be forgiven.
You were the one who was right, she told him. We just should have stayed.
* * *
She saw him the first time at a Weather meeting in the Nerredin school hall. She’d only been in town a couple of days, had picked up some patching at an equipment-hire business and they’d recommended her to the printing press. She was only there to hand out some flyers. Weather meetings were good for trade.
Frank got up and spoke. He wanted the local growers’ association to approach the government again about turning up the water supply. It hadn’t rained in four years by then and groundwater salinity was off the charts. She liked his voice but she was thinking about how towns like this were a joke. The people who lived in them just couldn’t see the punchline yet.
* * *
The first time they went to the pub, people kept coming past to say hello. Women. But he had a way of keeping his eyes on her while they talked, laughing silently at the things she said.
You move around, he said, you see a lot of places. You look at a town like this and you reckon it’s dying. But there’s all kinds of stuff going on here. Stuff you miss if you’re just passing through.
Li told him how every year now on her circuit she arrived in dead towns that had been up and running the year before, never saw it coming. She didn’t normally talk this much. He listened but she couldn’t puncture his optimism. It pissed her off, but something in it pulled at her too. Not blind hope but not blind hopelessness either. And the whole time, she could feel another conversation running underneath, too fluid for her to catch. His hands were long and lean-fingered, capable.
Nerredin’s not going anywhere, he said. He nudged the leg of her barstool gently with his boot. You should stick around.
* * *
They faced each other in the doorway of his shed, not quite touching. I’m glad you’re here, he said. I’ve got things to show you.
She moved around the space, looking at what he’d made out of lightning-strike wood, out of drought wood. Strange hybrid creatures, work in progress, sweet dust rising from the wood shavings curled across the floor. There was a loft with a mattress and a window that opened out to the olive grove. She kept paying for the room at the pub, though.
* * *
He said, I knew her since school. We were gunna get married. Lived in town for a while. But she didn’t want to stay here.
Li told him she wasn’t interested in marriage. Or a kid. He needed to be clear about that. He nodded, his eyes on her.
* * *
The trees were pruned hollow in the centre and the branches hung down in a flickering grey curtain all the way around the trunk. It was like being underwater in there. He pressed her back against the wood, ran his hands over her, knelt in front of her. She pulled him up by his hair, pulled him inside her.
* * *
Stay, he said. You can be here. You can live here.
The stillness felt like falling. Nothing had prepared her for it.
* * *
In the dark, Camila said, You never wanted a kid?
The others listening or asleep. Rain on the roof, coming in through the vents. Li ached. Her head, stomach, muscles, each ligament. Worse at night.
She said, We fought about it. Why you’d do it. Especially after the ballot started.
Everyone wonders why they’d do it, Camila said. They still do it. Otherwise, why do anything?
That’s what he said. Li felt Cami’s hand against her hand under the blanket and her fingers closed briefly around it. Camila, who had the baby anyway.
Li said, He was so goddamn hopeful about everything.
* * *
Salia lay on her back and rocked her head from side to side. She said, Refuse shift starts at 7. Area A van departs 6.45, B van 6.30. Scheduled rest breaks, 11 to 11.15 and 3 to 3.15. Sunset 5.45. Shift finishes at 6, all vans depart by 6.15. Dinner shift 6.30 don’t be late or miss out.
Tammy said, Shut up. Shut up shut up shut up.
It was quiet in the container for a moment. Just breathing, coughing, cots squeaking.
Salia said, Don’t be late or miss out. Day seven is rest day. Day twenty-eight is Medical.
Li queued for two hours on her crutches and then went into the container and the door was shut behind her from the outside and the medic looked up from a screen and it was him.
Wild woman, he said. I been waiting for you to show up.
Li said, Where’s the other medic?
Tropical island. Don’t worry, I’m fully qualified.
Li stayed where she was with her back to the door. She didn’t want to see him or talk to him, but medical wasn’t a choice.
You remember me, right? Rich, from Port Howell?
She nodded. You looked after me. She heard how flat it sounded but she couldn’t make it mean more than it did. And she hoped he would leave it there, not bring up other things.
I done a bloody good job, too, and then you tried to break my ribs. He looked tired, and hemmed in by his surgical mask, by the clutter of equipment, the strip lighting. The other medic had always looked tired and sick. Too many patients, too much exposure. Right, he said. You better give me your number.
She went over and held out her wrist, leaning onto the other crutch. Her attention was briefly caught by the bright screen – the novelty of a working computer. He typed her status number in and sat waiting on the timer.
She said, They give you Source access? She didn’t care, it was just strange.
Nah, this is all internal. Look. He opened a new window and typed in explosives/prison break. Got a pop-up requiring an administrator password. He closed the window, kept waiting. They give me access to three pre-approved medical sites. Otherwise this is basically a filing cabinet. Her record opened and he saw the date at the top. Whistled. Thought I was hard done by. You been in here two months already?
It felt longer but she couldn’t think of a reason why they’d lie.
Rich was scanning her record. So, we need to see if your BLL’s come down. And I’ll have a look at that ankle. What happened there?
Steel-cap boot.
His eyebrows went up. Still pissing people off, yeah?
She sat on the examination table while he took blood. He to
ld her he had a backlog of tests but he should have the results in a week or so.
Press down on that, he said. You get headaches? Or cramps, muscle ache, anything like that?
Li said, So this is your job now.
Yeah. Living the dream. How you going with the crutches? Any shoulder pain, wrist pain?
It’s okay.
He lifted her leg onto the table. What about this, how’s the pain now?
It’s okay.
Okay, he said. Well, I’m taking this off, it fucking stinks.
He was quiet while he sawed off the cast. She was used to the smell, but the rotting ditch stench when it cracked open seemed like a separate thing, coming down on both of them from somewhere else. Rich coughed forcefully, then looked up and grinned, sharing his disgust. And Li surprised herself with a half-laugh of apology. The skin on her foot and ankle was deteriorating, like something that had been forced to live underwater. He cleaned it with alcohol wipes, examined it, and then rubbed in a cream and dusted it with antifungal powder. Then he got her to stand on the other foot and place the damaged one lightly on the ground. Her foot angled inwards beyond her control.
It’d heal better if you kept it elevated more.
It doesn’t matter, Li said. It’s good enough.
He went over and unlocked the supply cupboard, pulled stuff out. Came back with a rigid walking boot and a long sock. He knelt down in front of her. You can take this off to wash and dry your skin. Wash the sock too, I’ll get you a spare. Keep it on the rest of the time, you can loosen the straps when you’re lying down, but. And don’t put weight on it yet.
The other medic hadn’t offered this. Li wondered how many points it would set her back but it didn’t seem worth arguing about.
Kneeling there, fitting the straps, he said, You didn’t find your kid?
She didn’t answer.
He said, I am sorry about that. True.
Li had a flash of his eyelashes up close, back in the factory, when he took off the bandages. Then Safia’s voice in the dark and that seething mess of panic busting open in her chest. That was far enough.
Hey Li, he said when she was at the door.
She paused, reluctant.
I’m glad you didn’t get yourself killed yet.
Outside it was starting to rain, heavy and straight. She went back to the sleepbox. The rain on the metal roof turned the container into a drum. She lay on a cot and let it beat everything down.
* * *
There were ways to get through rest day. Sleeping was one. You could do food prep or laundry or cleaning for extra points. Now that the rain had set in, they always needed people on sandbagging, or hosing out the sleepboxes after a gut bug went through. Or you could do the activities. Most of these were in the rec tent in Central compound where the food shed was, too. Rest days were staggered but there were usually thirty or forty people off at the same time, plus the under-twelves. Apart from Family compound, Central was the one place women and men were allowed in the same fenced areas. Sometimes a woman from Charlie got the same rest day as her brother or son or partner, or a man she’d been talking to through the fence. There were male and female Essos in Central, too, monitoring things. Management had zero tolerance for any behaviour that might lead to unnecessary medical procedures.
There was a choir, a dance group, talks, storytelling for the kids. Things that didn’t use a lot of materials. Sometimes they organised crafts – colouring in, or weaving with strips of packaging. Management supplied pens and scrap paper. No scissors. If you didn’t want to join in, you could watch. Li watched everything except the dogs. The dogs got fed every couple of days, mostly rabbits. Sometimes trappers came to the fence to trade, or security would do a run. At feeding time the dogs ripped each other apart over the carcasses and people bet points for gum, or cigarettes. The dogs reminded Li of every mongrel in every town she’d ever passed through, just hungrier.
There were thirteen books in the rec tent. Most of them were torn picture books, the rest were romances and Serkel catalogues. Li sat at the table and read them all. Sometimes Management gave access to the runway and supplied a football. Some of the Essos played too. She would have joined in if she had two good legs. There was one man who moved like Frank, the same head-up alertness and sudden bursts of speed. Frank could take the ball off another player and score before they knew it was gone. He’d been vice-president of the Nerredin football club and he never gave up on the Mynas making it to Regionals. They went to home games together, kicked a footy with Carl and Angie, but Li didn’t have a team – not the Mynas or anyone else. Frank said it was because she’d moved around too much, never got loyal, but it was more than that. She didn’t understand why you’d let yourself care so much about something you had no control over.
She liked the talks best. The speaker and topic were set in advance and written on a sign outside the tent. Folding chairs were provided. People talked about anything, about what they knew. Pig hunting, jewellery making, genealogy, astronomy, the Hadith, container farming, old movie stars. Sometimes there were questions or arguments but mostly people were happy to just listen. Sometimes people talked about politics, or Weather, or Wars, or life inside the XB. You could do that as long as you didn’t cause a disturbance, but Li felt that these weren’t really the things people wanted to hear about. She thought they wanted something close to what she did – stories that took her outside the fence, that filled her head without touching her. Essos came on their breaks, and some of the supervisors did too. Li went to all of them. She’d never been so hungry to hear other people talk.
One rest day she was in the rec tent with Camila and Trish and a handful of other people waiting. The talk was supposed to be about dog breeding, but the speaker hadn’t turned up. A coughing sickness was working through the camp and a lot of people were too sick to leave the sleepboxes or nervous about contagion. The people who were there sat apart from each other, and some of them wore rags over their mouths and noses. The ones she recognised looked different, vulnerable, with their heads all freshly shaved from the last lice outbreak. Li knew they would wait the full hour, just in case.
Then she turned around and saw that Angie had come in. She was sitting near the back with her hands folded in her lap, looking down. The stubble on her head was fully grey. Li had never seen her in the rec tent, had only seen her once since the food queue – through a fence on the way back from Medical. Her heart beat faster. She didn’t know if Angie had seen her yet, if she would have recognised her from behind with her own head shaved. She wanted to tell her she was sorry. Tell her something. Thought about going back and sitting beside her but she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to speak, or say it right.
A man along the row from her coughed into his arm and people stirred and sighed and someone got up and left. Li was gripped with a fear that Angie would leave too, and so before that could happen she got up herself, not making eye contact with Camila or Trish, and walked to the front. She faced them, and the seven other people and the empty seats and Angie, and she didn’t know what she was going to say, but then Angie looked up, and she did.
She said, I’m Li. I’m going to talk about dryland farming in West.
A few noises of surprise, relief, Camila’s startled attention, people getting comfortable.
Angie saw her now. She was watching Li like something wild that had got out. Li remembered the speech Frank made for Angie’s thirtieth, how he’d told the story about her chasing him around the playground with poo on a stick their first day at primary school, and Angie had laughed so hard she knocked her drink over. Frank was good in front of people, knew how to put them at ease. Cup night, Weather meetings, that presentation to the CBP delegation from Sumud that re-secured their import licence. She’d always avoided it. But standing up here now she wasn’t talking to people. Just Ange.
We lived in Nerredin, about three hundred and fifty k inland of Valiant. Good-size town, nearly a thousand people when I first got there. Used t
o be sheep and wheat country. We had an olive grove. A hundred and twenty trees, small-scale production, mostly selling into Sumud. It wasn’t a normal crop for the region but they were established trees and they stood up against the drought and the salt. Olive trees have got a really extensive root system so they can tap into deep groundwater. They can tolerate the cold and if it gets too hot they sort of shut down their system in the hottest part of the day. They’re really tough trees. They do need some water to fruit but we had an allowance, and we had these plastic skirts around the trunks that trapped condensation and fed it down to the root line, so they got enough. They’ll even grow back after a fire. Most of the time it’s wildstock, though, it’ll bush out but it won’t bear fruit.
She paused. Couldn’t remember the last time she’d talked that much in one go. She was out of breath but there was more she wanted to say. The audience sat quietly. Camila was watching her, a few people were looking down or away into the distance. Trish had her eyes shut and she was nodding. Angie waited.