Hope Farm

by Peggy Frew

  ‘Yeah.’

  We looked at each other. I licked my lips. ‘So what do we …?’

  He shook his head, just slightly. ‘We say we went to tell your mum about the fire, and she wasn’t there. So then we went to look for her, and we got lost, we got confused, and we slept up here in the bush.’

  ‘But what about …?’

  ‘We don’t say anything about him. The last time we saw him was at Hope, when he was fighting with Dan.’ He stood and brushed down his shorts. ‘Just don’t say anything and it’ll be okay. Come on.’

  We were both whispering, standing close, but we didn’t make eye contact.

  ‘My shoe. It’s there. It fell off.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll get it.’

  I swallowed. ‘Thanks.’

  The voices sounded again.

  ‘Come on,’ said Ian. ‘We’d better go.’

  We went downhill, vaguely following the trails, and came out on the main one, just above the turn-off signposted by the twin trees. In silence Ian went in; in silence he came out with the shoe. He handed it to me and we continued walking.

  On and on the voices went, bouncing off the water. They had shifted along the creek’s bank, closer to Hope. They were men’s voices — I didn’t recognise them.

  ‘Should we call back?’

  Ian shook his head. ‘Let’s get a bit closer first.’

  It was strange, hearing my name shouted over and over by an unknown man. As we neared the bridge we both slowed down. A new heaviness descended. I glanced at Ian; he was barely moving, feet dragging, head down. He felt it too, I could tell — the need to wait, to spin it out a while longer, this time, this lull, before we showed ourselves, brought the reality of our secret into lasting, hardened being.

  When the bridge came into sight we stopped. Something bumped my hand. It was Ian — his fingers groped at mine, caught and held them.

  Then there were feet on the bridge, the flicker of blue uniforms, and they were there, the two policemen — they saw us and came striding over, still calling our names — and Ian let go of my hand.

  The ruin of Hope sat like a pair of jaws pulled back to the morning sky, jag-edged, heaped with ash, exhaling breaths of smoke. The ugly mud-brick building, apparently untouched, squatted in attendance. At one end of the row of parked cars was a fire truck; at the other a police car. People stood in clusters, arms folded.

  The policemen had been carrying blankets — they’d wrapped me and Ian in one each, and we wore them like cloaks as we walked. At first, as we’d crossed the road and climbed through the fence, they had tried to talk to us, saying rehearsed-sounding things about taking us to our families. They’d stayed close, guiding arms on our shoulders, helping us through the fence wires. But as we moved up the hill, they quietened and fell back, allowing us to walk together, to lead the way.

  Going downhill we fell into a rhythm, footfalls aligning, blankets swishing, and a kind of emptied feeling moved into me, a strange, clear, helplessness. Things were going to happen now and I had no control over what they might be. I could only submit.

  I suppose if I had been able to think of anything, to predict anything, I might have expected Ishtar not to be there. I might have imagined her vanished, gone at last, having left the night before while it was all happening — the fight, the fire — silently exiting the violent whirl of drama that, at its centre, in its conception, held her image.

  What I didn’t expect was for her to break from one of the groups of figures, to run up the slope towards me, to grab me in her arms and pull me so close my breath caught and my feet left the ground. I didn’t expect her to cry.

  Her ribs jumped with her sobbing. Her tears wet my scalp. I was still holding the sandshoe; wedged between us, it smelled of rubber and canvas, of school changing rooms. She hung onto me until I started to resist, and then she let me down and put her palms either side of my face and kissed me again and again and her kisses caught the morning air and slapped it against my skin.

  Behind her the smoke, as if lost, as if having forgotten its reason for being, drifted in the gaping space above the remains, the piles of black stuff, the sullen rectangle of the outer foundations, which must have been brick or some tougher, harder timber. The kitchen steps still stood, a lone grey tooth in a rotten, gummy grin; it took me a while to recognise a paler lump among the debris as the fridge, half melted, and shrouded in ash.

  ‘What happened with Jindi, and the baby?’

  ‘They’re okay.’ Her voice broke, and she wiped her face with her sleeve.

  I couldn’t stop looking at the ruin, the impossible, shocking blankness of that emptied space, the missing roof and walls. Two firemen in uniform stood at its edge, talking with a policeman. One of them pointed into the wreckage and shook his head.

  Ishtar pressed her lips to my cheek again. I barely caught her whisper: ‘I thought you were in there.’

  I looked across and saw Ian and his parents, standing in their own close huddle. I could only see the back of Ian’s head, his thin, shaking shoulders, the ridge of his spine through his clothes. But I saw his mother’s face with its undeniable, narrow likeness, and I saw the clutch of her hands at his shirt. The father was taller, his posture sagging. Ian’s leanness was there, his stork-like limbs, and also something of his removed, reined-in manner, his fastidiousness. But as I watched, the father moved closer. He put his arms around both of the others. His long face rested on the top of Ian’s head, and his eyes squeezed shut.

  A woman and a man wearing some other kind of uniform made me sit on the grass and drink sugary tea from a paper cup, and eat a sandwich. My fingers made black marks on the bread. The cheese was cut too thick, and the slices of tomato made me think of flesh.

  The helmeted, heavy-suited firemen were packing up the truck now, winding the flaccid hose back in. The second bite of sandwich wouldn’t go down; I spat it into the paper bag while no one was looking.

  ‘Ishtar.’ The word hardly came out, but she heard me. ‘Can we go?’

  She helped me up.

  ‘Oh, are you off are you? I’m not sure …’ began the sandwich and tea woman, but Ishtar ignored her.

  We went over to the cars, where Val stood. Jindi lay asleep across the back seat of the yellow station wagon.

  Val’s embrace was as unexpected as Ishtar’s, hot and close and long. ‘Thank god,’ she said in her grainy voice, letting me go and then pulling me back again. ‘Thank god.’

  Ishtar helped me in and Jindi’s dirty feet twitched and then resettled against my thigh.

  ‘We’ll go and you can get changed,’ said Ishtar. ‘Then Val’s going to drive us to see Dan.’

  ‘Dan?’

  ‘Yeah. He hurt his ankle. He’s at the hospital, in Tarrina.’

  The front door of the hut was wide open, the couch still up against the fireplace as if trying to hide. There were the torch and the single sandshoe, lying in the doorway to my room. I hurried over, put the shoe I was holding down with its mate and grabbed the torch, which I set on the table. I could feel Ishtar watching.

  My hands shook as I changed, and when I took off my shorts, their legs creased and stiff with dirt, the envelope fell out onto the floor. I put it carefully on the bed, and watched it as I finished dressing. Then I took it to Ishtar.

  It seemed to me the smell of Miller was there still, in the rooms.

  I held out the envelope. ‘I didn’t get a chance.’

  She took it, her fingers closing over mine, and when I tried to pull my hand away she caught it and held on.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘It’s okay.’ The words jumped out automatically. I tried again to draw my hand back, but she wouldn’t let go.

  ‘I shouldn’t have sent you,’ she said, ‘without explaining. I actually changed my mind, last night — I went
down, to Hope. I thought I might catch you. But I was too late. Nobody knew where you were. Nobody could say for sure you weren’t inside when the fire …’ She put her palm to her chest and breathed deeply for a few seconds. Then her eyes left my face and moved round the room, over the shoved-into couch and her own empty bed with its sullied sheet to the reunited sandshoes in the doorway. They came back, met mine. ‘Nobody knew where you were.’

  I dropped my gaze to the table, to the torch. We must have passed each other somewhere. I saw it as if on an aerial map, our trails visible, coming near but not touching, hers running down the hill and to one side of the shed, or the fallen log, or the compost heap, ours heading upwards on the other side. And, forming the other half of a crooked circle, Miller’s path, by the road.

  I heard myself rush the words, realising even as I said them how guilty they made me sound — answering a question that had not been asked. ‘We came to find you, to tell you about the fire. But you weren’t here, and then we went looking for you, and we got lost …’

  She looked again at the shoes, then turned to the kitchen bench. When she spoke again her voice was brisk. ‘You hungry?’

  ‘No.’ My stomach clenched. I didn’t understand why I felt so angry. This was what was supposed to happen. She had believed the story. She came closer to me again and reached for my hand, but I pulled it back.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ I said.

  She poured water into a dish and put it and a flannel on the table in front of me.

  ‘We need to leave.’ I gestured at the empty duffel bags folded in the bottom of her shelves, the case on its side under the end of her bed. ‘Now. Move out, I mean. Straight away.’

  She didn’t ask why. She had her head down. ‘Okay.’

  I stared at what I could see of her lowered face, her foreshortened features, the hair falling either side. This is all your fault. The words were inside me, pressing outwards, wanting to stab at her. But I didn’t let them.

  Val drove us to Tarrina. Jindi was still asleep in the car and I slept too, waking as Val pulled on the handbrake, my neck stiff, sweat beading at the backs of my knees.

  The hospital buildings were modern and tidy, their car park bordered by roses in small, circular beds. Behind the reception desk a woman frowned, eyes darting at my face, which I probably hadn’t cleaned very well.

  ‘We’re here to see Dan Cohen,’ said Ishtar. ‘Daniel.’

  The woman looked at something on her desk. ‘Cohen,’ she said, and then her face changed. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘the fire. Gosh, that must have been quite a shock.’ She leaned forward. ‘You look like you’ve been through the wringer, love,’ she said. ‘What happened? You weren’t inside —’

  ‘Can we see Dan, please?’ said Ishtar.

  ‘Oh yes, sorry.’ The woman pinched her lips together and pointed along a corridor. ‘Ward Five.’

  Dan was down the end of the row of beds. He was lying on his back, a blanket drawn up to his hips. His legs looked very long under the thin fabric, which was white, and perforated with tiny square holes; one foot stuck out the end, with a big cast on it. He had no top on.

  When he saw us approaching he put one hand across his eyes, then slid it down and looked over it like someone removing a blindfold. He shook his head, grinning. ‘Jesus, kid,’ he said. ‘We were worried about you.’ Then his expression changed. ‘And your friend?’

  ‘He’s okay.’

  His soft face, unguarded, turned up to me, the smoothness of his brown skin, flushed slightly at the throat, the sparse, dark hairs at the hollow of his breastbone and around his nipples — I shuffled my gaze from one part of him to the next, an embarrassed tenderness curling in me.

  Ishtar pulled the curtain round and she and I sat down on two plastic chairs. ‘We sure were,’ she said. She put her hand to Dan’s face, tucked it in between his cheek and the pillow. ‘And how are you?’

  ‘I’m okay. Broken ankle. Hurts.’ A quick grimace of a smile. ‘And so what about the fire? They were just getting it under control when I …’

  ‘The house burnt right down,’ said Ishtar. ‘There’s nothing left.’

  Dan raised his eyebrows and whistled between his teeth.

  There was silence for a while, then he turned to me. ‘Silver, that fight was pretty scary. I’m sorry you had to see it. Miller just — he just lost it for a moment. Adults do stupid stuff, you know that.’

  At the sound of Miller’s name my heart began to hammer so hard I was sure they must be able to hear it.

  Ishtar leaned forward. ‘I’m sorry Miller hurt you.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He put his hand over hers. ‘Everyone’s okay, that’s what matters.’

  She pulled their joined hands closer and kissed them.

  I stared down at my lap.

  ‘He’s missing,’ said Ishtar. ‘Miller.’

  My heart went into overdrive.

  ‘Shit,’ said Dan. ‘But he wasn’t inside —’

  ‘No. Somebody saw him walk up to the road. That was the last anyone saw of him.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what I thought. I was worried he was going after you, that he was …’

  I tried to make the magic shape but my fingers were shaking too much. I tucked my hands between my thighs.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Dan, ‘I was so relieved when you turned up. You only just missed him. Lucky.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘He was pretty well out of it. He probably just fell asleep somewhere. He’ll turn up.’

  Miller slamming into the hut, colliding with the couch. His grip on my arm in the darkness, his shouting face in mine. Limping up the hill in my one shoe. The black shaft. The sounds he made, as he fell.

  Ishtar was quiet, but I imagined I could feel her attention on me, like some invisible beam — radar, or sonar. When I raised my head though, it was Dan who was looking my way.

  ‘Silver?’ he said. ‘You okay?’

  I nodded and fixed my gaze on the end of the bed, the big white cast. My breathing felt strange, as if I couldn’t get enough air in.

  Ishtar took out the envelope and they argued about the money for a while, but I couldn’t pay attention. Ishtar said something about already having enough, which did trigger a blip of surprise on the far side of my panic, but I was in too much of a state to understand what she meant. In the end Dan made her keep it anyway.

  I still regret that the rest of that goodbye was so heavily obscured by my terror at the thought of being found out, by my throbbing heart and strangled breaths, by the weight that had entered the air with the mention of Miller’s name. I don’t think I was at all able to grasp the fact that this was the last time I would see Dan. He kissed me, there is a memory of that, but it’s a distant, unfeeling one. I wish now that I could go back and have that goodbye again, untainted, to be able to thank him for his kindness, his friendship, to be able to feel straight, childish sadness at such a loss.

  Val took us to the train station.

  ‘Now you take care,’ she said, as we got our things out of the boot. When Ishtar tried to give her some money for petrol she flapped her hand. ‘You just take care,’ she said again.

  ‘See you soon!’ called Jindi through her open window as they drove away.

  I didn’t think about the fact that we wouldn’t see them soon, or later — or ever again. And that the same went for Willow, Gav, and Sue. And Ian. I was still jangling so hard with paranoid guilt that I could barely think at all.

  I’d reached some kind of limit though, and when I sat on a bench to wait while Ishtar bought the tickets, my heart finally slowed, my limbs grew heavy and my mind emptied. The train came and we got on it, into a completely empty carriage, and I lay across a seat and slept and slept and slept.

  In Melbourne we went to a pub that was walking distance from the st
ation. The room, two flights up, was tiny, almost completely filled by the twin single beds, only a slim aisle of space between.

  We went straight back downstairs for dinner. Chips and some kind of meat. A wan bit of lettuce and a slice of tomato. Ishtar drank a glass of beer and I had lemonade. My hunger was there at last, and I ate until my stomach hurt. There was light still in the street outside, late and golden, but the city seemed empty, the view of the building opposite unbroken by pedestrians, only one or two passengerless trams trundling past during our meal.

  ‘Sunday night,’ said the man behind the bar.

  After dinner I went to the shared bathroom two doors down from our room. The shower tiles were dark with mould, and clots of other people’s hair sat at the edge of the shower drain like miniature, thirsty animals. The bath was clean though, and I filled it up. There was a key in the door, but I couldn’t turn it. I tried and tried until my fingers hurt and tears popped into my eyes. I gave up and sat on the wonky chair. Footsteps passed, and men’s voices sounded. I crossed my arms over my still-clothed chest.

  I went back to the room.

  ‘What happened?’ said Ishtar.

  There was a feeling now, which had been there since the morning — since the shock of her embrace and the hand-holding — of something taking up the space between us, something dense and deadening, rising from me; a mute, numb blockage.

  ‘I thought you were going to have a bath,’ said Ishtar.

  I mumbled something and flopped onto the bed.

  ‘What?’

  I spoke to the wall. ‘I can’t lock the door.’

  There was the sound of her standing up. ‘Come on.’

  Under the bathroom’s bare globe she jiggled the key. Took it out and put it back in again. Tried it with the door open. Tried from the outside, then the inside again. Eventually she shrugged and left it, took the wobbly chair and put it against the door and sat on it. ‘I’ll stand guard,’ she said.

  I looked at her.

  ‘What?’ She gave a forced laugh. ‘I’m not going to sit out in the corridor.’