by Tim Winton
Down at the lower end of the clearing, the undergrowth rattled and snapped and screeched against the metal of the barrow. Each expiration was a distinct groan: ‘Ugh, ugh, ugh.’ It was like the sound of a labouring locomotive. The moonlight caught first the slick of sweat on his back, and then the metal sides of the barrow, and the man and woman, close to the ground in their hiding place, saw at once how fiercely his limbs trembled. His shoulders jerked, his legs danced beneath him. His mechanical breathing underwent a change as the laden barrow tipped suddenly on its side and then he was down on the ground, beating feebly at the earth, weeping. The sound became more and more animal, more shocking in the quiet of the wilderness. His body sent out a vibrato distress call like that of a wounded ram. They listened for a few minutes until it became obvious that he would not get up and the bleating would not stop.
Everything in him hurt. Everything. His soul ached like a tourniqueted limb. His body jangled him, smothered him, refused to move, refused to stop, refused. Stars closed in upon him, shining drops of sweat. He tasted salt. Remember, he thought, you are salt. He wedged his tongue between his teeth to stop them battering. He felt himself looking outside his body to the night above, as though he had scratched two holes in the lid of his own coffin. And that strange mewling sound in his head that disgusted him slightly would not cease. Beneath the sound, something in him said: ‘I am trying, I am trying’ in a mellow, patient tone. Shivers rolled over him, end to end, faster, until there was no calm between swells. The black bowl of sky glittered benevolently.
I have to mix cement, he thought. I have to build, to measure, to carry, to make. I have to establish here to wait. I have to be here. I have to be here. Then his body stopped for a moment and he heard in the calm the sound of his heart punching, working, building, carrying, and his body relaxed as his soul’s voice said, ‘Then I’m here?’ and there was only the bleating sound far away and the mild heat in his throat.
He was not surprised to see the two angels hovering above him, pinned against the velvet bowl of black sky. Their faces were clean and well-fed. They were decent-looking angels; he was not disappointed. There was concern and innocence in their decent-looking faces and he was touched. Warm hands on his chest. A woman angel with black hair that fell over him, a warm ear to his swampy breast. Then they were looking at one another with worried angel faces. Although their lips moved, he could not hear their words for the mewling in his ear. This is it, he thought, this is truly it.
Their decision was reluctant but inevitable. There was only one reasonable path of action: the man had to be carried out of the wilderness. He was gravely ill. The husband and wife were grateful in a way that the situation and commonsense itself left them with so few options. There was no argument; it took only a few moments. She stayed with the trembling, wailing, sick man while her husband went up to get their packs. His eyes were open, following her in an odd, unalert way, and sweat continued to appear on his bare chest and on his blackened, unshaven cheeks. She prised open one of his fists and saw nests of white blisters in his palm. Crazy, she thought; this is absolutely crazy. His jeans were tight and heavy with sweat. From one of his pockets she extracted a leather wallet, fat with money and an identity photo she could not see clearly in the moonlight. The money was a surprise to her. She wondered if perhaps he had stolen it.
At her side again, her husband, panting slightly, began sorting the contents of the packs.
‘We’ll have to go absolutely light,’ he said. ‘Anything superfluous has to go. Anything that’ll weigh us down that we don’t need in order to get him out.’
The spare changes of clothing spilled onto the ground. A pair of carnival-coloured underpants made him wince momentarily before they were obscured by the roll of the tent, the billy, the birdwatching manual, spare maps, excess food, and tiny items that looked anonymous and useless in the moonlight.
‘Can we do it?’ she asked. She watched him stuff the essentials into one pack.
‘We’ll have to. Besides, can a man do all this?’ he said, with a gesture taking in the clearing and the partially built dwelling.
The woman pursed her lips and looked at the sick madman whose cries had begun to subside. ‘Who knows?’ she murmured. ‘Does he look successful to you?’
The man zipped and sealed the pack and turned to the prostrate body. ‘Let’s get him into the bag.’
After they dragged his heavy boots off and shunted him feet-first into the sleeping bag and had him zipped up and hooded, they began the arduous task of lifting him into the barrow. It took ten minutes. His body bent and sagged awkwardly. The nylon exterior of the bag slipped between their fingers. His body was like a bag half full of stones. And all the time, as they heaved and dropped and cursed and staggered, his eyes passed from one to the other of them, infuriating them with a lack of expression. When he was in, feet out between the handles, buttocks in the hollow of the tray, head out over the front lip of the barrow, they wedged him tight with the spare clothing and rested for a moment.
He saw their earnest faces moving above, and the sky still benevolent over their shoulders as he felt himself levitating and moving away, the earth turbulent under his back. He wondered if his mother would miss him. She, even this past year, had never suspected, never known where he had been coming every weekend, never even understood or detected his sudden and vast dissatisfaction with his life, with her, with his useless job. Never, as they sat at dinner with the A.B.C. news gently whispering to them across the room, had she suspected that he raged inside. But he ate his chops or his meatloaf and the cabbage that tasted like wet newsprint without letting go his secrets. Yes, he thought, she’ll miss the company at the table. But she’ll get in a boarder. And I forgive her. I forgive it all. These thoughts saddened him. His mother had, after all, given him a home, a room of his own, the chair at the end of the table after his father left them. But he had never known much feeling for her. The day he saw her in X-ray vision he knew why: she was an empty vessel. The white light of her soul, that radioactive ball, was deep in her large intestine, lodged firm, unable to be shunted through her bowels. He understood then.
Now he felt himself floating downhill, saw the pale biscuit moon running along the tops of the faraway trees, and felt himself at a so-long-awaited peace. But it puzzled him that things proceeded so slowly. He had imagined death and ascent into Heaven as more or less instantaneous.
The night seemed determined to last forever. There was nothing to mark its passage but the endless punctuation of jolts, curses, near-spills and the occasional soft bleats from the invalid in the wheelbarrow. The husband and wife did not speak; there was no room in their lungs. The husband felt the gradual lengthening of his arms and sagging of his burning shoulders as he held fast to the handles, forbidding himself to let go. The woman at the front expected at any moment to have her heels fall away. Walking by turns backwards and sideways, she struck rocks and stumps on the tenderest parts of her feet. She sensed the track. She guessed. She could rarely see where the barrow bade her walk.
This is not impossible, she thought, catching a glimpse of the long cocoon in the barrow and the wild-eyed face of her husband and the featureless shadow of the bush all about. Her husband’s beard glittered with sweat each time the moonlight touched it. His breathing was mechanical, hurtful to hear. She found herself avoiding the sight of him. In his fatigue he looked as mad as the man they were carrying.
Every few minutes, after each passage of near-spills and slips, the husband found himself thinking: this can’t happen, people can’t do this, people don’t even imagine this. But not for one moment did he hesitate. Even when they stopped to rest a moment and taste the PVC-tainted water from the canteen, there was no doubt in any part of him that he would continue.
The invalid settled back inside the coffin of himself, feeling nothing but slight puzzlement. In an effort to orient himself, he went back to the start, that lunch hour twelve months ago in the staff room when he saw the ragged noticebo
ard on the wall opposite become a window. It frightened him. His coffee went cold as he watched. There was bush, just bush and sky through that window, the kind of bush he had never entered before. It was lonely, untouched, risky-looking bush and it gave him an inflated feeling in his chest. When the siren sounded the end of the lunch hour, the bush and the window were gone and there was only the scabby pin-up board and the everpresent haze of cigarette smoke. Then in the first class after, whilst chalking up the current facts on the Russian revolution, he saw his thirty-six students lose their heads. He stopped chalking. Their hands continued to copy down his scrawl, their torsos squirmed, shins were still kicked; he saw a note being passed, but for a full minute there was not one child with a head. He turned, shaken, back to the blackboard. He sneaked a glance. They had their heads on and they were giggling at him.
It was that evening when he saw his mother’s skeleton inside her. His chops actually became live coals. The A.B.C. newsreader’s jaw swung like a garden gate. He went to bed early. Every evening that week he went to bed early. That weekend, he decided to drive out of the city to the hills to think. I’m having a nervous breakdown, he thought driving up. I’m off the edge. But the moment he got out of the car a few miles off the main road overlooking a valley and a series of uncleared ridges, his body ticked like a geiger counter. Bush. He experienced the same sensation as that first day in the staff room. His blood went mad. He began to walk. He half galloped down a ravine to where pools of water and reeds and shady trees were all about, huddling in secretively. And it was there that he heard the voice coming up out of the ground.
‘Go into the wilderness and wait,’ it said, and the logic of it made him nauseous with excitement and apprehension. He had no doubts as to whom had spoken.
All in a rush he bought Forestry maps, tourist maps, bushwalking glossies, visited the state library, drove hundreds of kilometres on weekends to find a wilderness. I’ll have to build a house, he thought, I’ll need a house to wait in. He began to hike and search, feeling his whole being jangle like an alarm bell as he stood on isolated crags where nothing human was visible, where the sky seemed close enough to whisper to, until he found a place that sent his blood ricocheting about in him enough to tell him here, begin. A white cord of light or heat rolled out before him and he stumbled in and along it until an impenetrable clump of shrivelled trees came into his vision and he saw that nothing was impossible, that all things could be done and had been done.
Here, he thought, I’ll wait here. But first I have to build a house. Not even God would make a man wait out here without a roof over his head.
Every night for a year he dreamed foreign dreams in strange languages. The last few weeks, a phrase coiled through him like a loop-tape in the darkness. Ich kann nicht anders . . .
And now, as he saw the moon rise like an aura above the angel’s head, he understood, was content, and he glided, weightless.
For a moment, the husband had the gut-sinking feeling that they were lost. The moon, behind them all along, now seemed diffuse on the horizon ahead. He called a halt. The woman, afraid to lie down for fear of never getting up again, slumped across the cocoon in the barrow, her sweat running down past her ears and into her eyes. From his pocket the husband took the flat, tiny compass and was surprised to see that he could read it without the light of the torch. East. They were still heading east. They were not off course at all. He peered at the pale light in the distance. East, he thought. East. Light. He glanced back over his shoulder to see the faded moon. East. It was the sun. He pulled a sleeve back and saw that it was five-twenty.
‘Dawn’, he said. His voice sounded close and alien in the bush.
‘Far?’ she whispered, not looking up. She could see the barrow wheel with its tread full of little stones and burrs.
‘No,’ he wheezed.
But it was no comfort to them. They were appalled at the thought of willing themselves to move again. They knew such a thing could not be done. Ahead of them the earth curved upwards to a point, a ridge against which the eastern sky had begun to blanch.
A minute later, stone by stone, bush by bush, they were climbing it, the woman backwards, pulling, digging in with her raw heels, her husband hard behind with the ends of the handles almost piercing his palms as he pushed and steadied and made ground barely off his knees. Birds had begun to blur by. Their hesitant songs were lost on the man and woman who heard only the blood in their ears and the infinitely slow creak-creak of the wheel’s revolution. They had forgotten the man in the barrow. Since his bleating had ceased hours before, there was only his impossible weight to remind them of his presence, and even that, after a time, became an anonymous, abstract thing that only their bodies sensed.
Once or twice during the night, the woman had thought of the warm, sensible staffroom at her school: the lively, decorous chatter, the tobacco smoke, the yarns, the certainty of it all, but now such things did not exist for her. There was only the stone-by-stone impossible certainty that she was making ground. Her husband saw the mask of her face. It had begun to remind him of the mummified monster he saw in a film as a child. The image had terrified him and his father had laughed coming out of the cinema. His laugh had sounded so confident, so matter-of-fact, and as he grew he came to remember his unreasonable fear with disdain. But he felt it again now when his wife’s tortured face came into his vision, stronger with each step as the light grew on the crest of the ridge and the crest itself became close enough to seem attainable. He heard his breaths become sobs. He bent and pushed and heard the wheel creak and turn.
Through the holes in his body, the man in the barrow saw the light coming and heard the sounds of birds stirring in the scrub all about. The steady labour of his heart was still with him, racing a little as mind and soul reacted to the intensified sensations of ascent. Excitement coursed through his tiny, warm core.
The moment they reached the razor spine of the ridge and took the fresh yellow sun in their surprised faces, the man and the woman lost their grip on the barrow. It tipped their passenger into a nest of pigface. They gazed like animals at the Land Rover.
‘It’s impossible,’ the woman said.
‘No,’ murmured the man in the sleeping bag, hearing the final blow of his heart and the comforting silence that succeeded it. He felt himself slipping, curving, lifting away, rising up through the orifices of his body with a silent hiss that sent his warm core out and away into the impossible, colourless light. He did not look back to the figures embracing on the ridge with his body shrouded beside them; there was no time and no need.
Neighbours
WHEN they first moved in, the young couple were wary of the neighbourhood. The street was full of European migrants. It made the newlyweds feel like sojourners in a foreign land. Next door on the left lived a Macedonian family. On the right, a widower from Poland.
The newcomers’ house was small, but its high ceilings and paned windows gave it the feel of an elegant cottage. From his study window, the young man could see out over the rooftops and used-car yards the Moreton Bay figs in the park where they walked their dog. The neighbours seemed cautious about the dog, a docile, moulting collie.
The young man and woman had lived all their lives in the expansive outer suburbs where good neighbours were seldom seen and never heard. The sounds of spitting and washing and daybreak watering came as a shock. The Macedonian family shouted, ranted, screamed. It took six months for the newcomers to comprehend the fact that their neighbours were not murdering each other, merely talking. The old Polish man spent most of his day hammering nails into wood only to pull them out again. His yard was stacked with salvaged lumber. He added to it, but he did not build with it.
Relations were uncomfortable for many months. The Macedonians raised eyebrows at the late hour at which the newcomers rose in the mornings. The young man sensed their disapproval at his staying home to write his thesis while his wife worked. He watched in disgust as the little boy next door urinated in the street. He o
nce saw him spraying the cat from the back step. The child’s head was shaved regularly, he assumed, in order to make his hair grow thick. The little boy stood at the fence with only his cobalt eyes showing; it made the young man nervous.
In the autumn, the young couple cleared rubbish from their backyard and turned and manured the soil under the open and measured gaze of the neighbours. They planted leeks, onions, cabbage, brussels sprouts and broad beans and this caused the neighbours to come to the fence and offer advice about spacing, hilling, mulching. The young man resented the interference, but he took careful note of what was said. His wife was bold enough to run a hand over the child’s stubble and the big woman with black eyes and butcher’s arms gave her a bagful of garlic cloves to plant.
Not long after, the young man and woman built a henhouse. The neighbours watched it fall down. The Polish widower slid through the fence uninvited and rebuilt it for them. They could not understand a word he said.
As autumn merged into winter and the vermilion sunsets were followed by sudden, dark dusks touched with the smell of woodsmoke and the sound of roosters crowing day’s end, the young couple found themselves smiling back at the neighbours. They offered heads of cabbage and took gifts of grappa and firewood. The young man worked steadily at his thesis on the development of the twentieth-century novel. He cooked dinners for his wife and listened to her tales of eccentric patients and hospital incompetence. In the street they no longer walked with their eyes lowered. They felt superior and proud when their parents came to visit and to cast shocked glances across the fence.
In the winter they kept ducks, big, silent muscovies that stood about in the rain growing fat. In the spring the Macedonian family showed them how to slaughter and to pluck and to dress. They all sat around on blocks and upturned buckets and told barely understood stories – the men butchering, the women plucking, as was demanded. In the haze of down and steam and fractured dialogue, the young man and woman felt intoxicated. The cat toyed with severed heads. The child pulled the cat’s tail. The newcomers found themselves shouting.
