Brothers and Sisters

by Wood, Charlotte

  ‘The story is true. I read it in a magazine.’

  ‘Makes no difference where you read it—it’s bullshit.’ She took another drag on the cigarette. ‘Why you reading science magazines, anyway? Since when have you been interested in science? What did you get for the subject at that last school you were at? What was it? An F?’

  ‘I wasn’t there long enough to get a school report. Don’t you remember?’

  She wouldn’t answer me, and only wound down her window and threw the lit cigarette from the car into the dry scrub when Nez started calling out from the back seat that we were all going to die of ‘pastel smoking’.

  ‘You’ll start a bushfire doing that,’ I complained, as I turned and looked out of the back window to the spot where she had just thrown the cigarette butt.

  ‘Thank you, Fireman fucking Sam,’ she screamed as she held the empty cigarette packet in her hand, crushed it into a ball and threw it out of the window as well.

  ‘That should make the both of you happy. I’m all out of cigarettes now, and I’ve no money for another packet. So, it looks like we’ll all have to live a bit longer.’

  I tapped her on the shoulder again. ‘You shouldn’t litter. You can get a fine for that. I think it’s thousands of dollars or something.’

  It was dark before Gwen realised we had not much more than a drop of petrol in the tank. Her solution was to tap the petrol gauge in the hope that it might shift the needle. It didn’t budge, of course. She pulled over to the side of the road, turned the engine off and rested her head on the steering wheel as she muttered and swore to herself.

  When she finally lifted her head she told us we would have to stop when we got to the next town or the car might die on us on the side of the highway.

  We drove back onto the road, took the next exit and headed for the lights of a small town not far off the highway. I wound down my window and looked out into the night. As far as I could see we’d arrived in the middle of nowhere anyway.

  After doing a lap of the town Gwen pulled into a yard beside a wheat silo and railway siding. She got out of the car, went to the boot and grabbed the blankets and pillows that we’d nicked from the motel. She handed one of the blankets across the seat for Nez and me to share along with two packets of the sweet biscuits and a bottle of water each.

  As soon as Gwen lay down across the front seat of the car, manoeuvring her arse around the floor shift, Nez started to cough and splutter. She had never got used to sleeping on the road and was afraid of the dark. It wouldn’t take much for Nez to convince herself that a madman might come along in the night and kidnap her. Or cut our throats as we slept.

  Nez pulled more than her share of our blanket over her head as she continued snivelling. Gwen tried to ignore her, pulling her own blanket over her head. Nez responded by crying a little louder, so Gwen told her to shut up. Nez didn’t stop. Gwen eventually sat up, threw her blanket to the floor and climbed across into the back seat with us. She looked angry, like maybe she was about to slap Nez in the face. But she didn’t. She squeezed in between us, put her arm around Nez and told her we were going to be okay.

  We weren’t going to be stuck here for too long, she explained. Although we hadn’t seen one when we drove through the town, she was sure there’d be a pub around, and she’d get some work behind the bar for a couple of days. Then we’d be back out on the highway and heading for home, wherever that might be.

  She was still going on about how things were going to pick up for us when I fell asleep.

  Early the next morning the hackling grate of a bird and a dull tapping sound woke me. I sat up and looked out through the windscreen at a large blackbird perched on the end of the car bonnet, pecking at the duco. The bird tilted its head to one side to get a better look at me before lifting its wings and vanishing into the sky.

  I looked over at Nez. She was still asleep.

  I got out of the car, hobbled across the gravel yard in my bare feet and took a piss behind a tree. When I came back Gwen was sitting in the driver’s seat with the car window wound down, puffing on a butt that she must have retrieved from the ashtray.

  She looked out through the cracked windscreen at me as I walked by the car. Smoke hissed between a gap in her front teeth as she spoke. ‘I’ve stuffed up this time, haven’t I, Jesse?’ She tried laughing.

  I said nothing as I shrugged my shoulders. There’d been so many other times she’d got us into trouble there didn’t seem to be a lot of difference this time.

  Nez was awake. She rolled around inside her blanket a couple of times, sat up and looked around the car as she rubbed sleep from her eyes. She didn’t have much of an idea about where she was. She complained that she had to go to the toilet. When Gwen told her she would have to do it behind the tree like I had, Nez looked at her in horror, which surprised me. Both Nez and me had been forced to take a piss in plenty of places worse than this one.

  ‘The tree? I’m not going over there.’

  ‘Yes you are, Nez. You’ll go where I tell you to go.’

  Nez screwed her face up. ‘Well, I’m only going to pee then. That’s all I’m going to do.’

  Gwen held up her miserly butt and stared at it. ‘Piss or don’t piss then. See if I care.’

  Nez got out of the car and slammed the door in protest. After she’d finished squatting behind the tree she ran back just as Gwen got out of the car herself and went to the boot. It sounded like she was rustling around in the garbage bags. After a couple of minutes she closed the boot and walked around to the side of the car.

  Gwen had changed into what she liked to call her ‘lucky dress’. It was sleeveless and a deep red colour with a low neckline. She smiled at us as she smoothed the creases of the dress with the palms of her hands. ‘How do I look?’

  Neither of us said a word. Me because I didn’t care how she looked, and Nez because I could see that she was already worrying herself with the thought that Gwen might be about to shoot through on us. Gwen had done it before, and more than once—left us behind when things got so tight for her that all she could think to do was run away.

  I looked along the stretch of highway leading away from the car. It would not have surprised me at all if Gwen walked away from the car and didn’t come back. I also knew that if I didn’t have Nez to look after I’d go too, as far away from Gwen as I could get.

  Gwen told us we weren’t to stray from the car, and if anyone came snooping around asking questions I was to tell them we’d broken down and that our father would be back soon with a mechanic from the town.

  ‘What about the toilet?’ Nez asked. ‘What if I need to go? If I have to . . .’

  Gwen ignored her. She was busy doing her lipstick in the side mirror. She then stood up, pointed the lipstick at Nez and jabbed the air with it as she spoke.

  ‘Use your brains, Nez. Go where you have to. There’s a toilet roll in the boot.’

  As Nez got out to search through the boot Gwen took a final look at herself in the mirror, stood up and grabbed her bag from the floor of the car. She was about to walk off when Nez called out to her.

  ‘Wait. I want to take your photo.’

  Nez was holding the disposable camera in her hand. She walked towards Gwen, stopped about a metre in front of her, lifted the camera to her eye and looked through the lens.

  ‘Smile.’

  Gwen could never resist a photo opportunity. She draped the bag over her shoulder with one hand, rested the other on her hip and pouted her lips. She held her pose until Nez had taken the picture.

  Before I knew what she was doing Gwen had grabbed hold of me and wrapped an arm tightly around my waist. ‘Take this one, Nezzie, with my toy boy.’

  Nez took the picture before I had wriggled free by elbowing Gwen in the ribs.

  ‘Take it easy, Jesse, take it easy,’ she yelled at me before posing again. ‘Come on, love, another one of me.’

  Nez examined the camera. ‘No. There’s only two pictures left—I’m saving them.’<
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  Gwen appeared a little insulted. ‘Suit yourself then. See you two later.’ She dropped the bag to her side, turned around and walked off.

  I strolled onto the road and watched as the red triangle of Gwen’s dress grew smaller and smaller. It stopped for a moment and drifted in a haze coming off the hot tar on the road. While I could not make out her face I imagined that Gwen might be looking back at us and thinking about what she might do next.

  The dress then moved forward and vanished.

  I told Nez to stay with the car while I took a look around the yard, but I’d taken only a few steps when I heard the car door creak open, followed by Nez’s footsteps scraping behind me in the gravel.

  After circling the yard a couple of times I headed for a tin shed on one side of the wheat silo. When I opened the shed door I could hardly believe my luck: there was a toilet in one corner.

  Nez waited in the doorway as I walked over to the toilet. What looked like the remains of a dead rat sat in the bowl. I would have to get rid of it before Nez saw it and started screaming. I pressed the button. Luckily the water was connected. After a few flushes the rat was gone and the bowl was clean enough.

  I collected the toilet roll from the boot, then I wiped down the toilet seat with a few sheets of the roll before handing it to Nez.

  She looked up at a cobweb in the corner of the corrugated-iron roof above the toilet seat and begged me to stay with her while she went.

  ‘No, Nez. Jesus. I’m not going to wait here while you go to the toilet.’

  Maybe it was because she was frightened, or just tired and hungry—I’m not sure—but she started to bawl and wouldn’t stop until I promised I would stay with her while she sat on the toilet and that I would look out for any spiders that might come down from the roof.

  After she’d finished I got her to scrub her hands as best she could in the murky water that came out of a tap on the wall across from the toilet.

  We then left the shed and started to explore the paddocks beyond the silo.

  We found a lot of junk lying around, bits and pieces of machinery mostly, and beer cans with what looked like bullet holes through them. Next to the hollow of a shallow dam in a paddock below the silo, we saw the flyblown carcass of a dead sheep. It reminded me of a story I’d seen on TV about the drought, and the pictures of dead sheep and cattle being pushed into a ditch by machines and then buried.

  Shotgun shells lay on the ground near the sheep, so I guessed it had most likely been blasted to death rather than died of starvation. Nez eventually got bored of trailing behind me. She complained that her feet were sore, that she was getting blisters, that she was hot, and she was thirsty. She sat down on the ground and wouldn’t move.

  I left her where she was and headed back to the car for a bottle of water. I closed the boot, opened the bottle and took a long drink as I looked across the yard to the railway siding. I could see a dirt road led away from the siding. It narrowed before disappearing into bushes.

  I took another drink, put the top back on the bottle and walked across the yard to the track. I followed it into the bushes, where it ended suddenly. I was about to turn back when I heard a sound. It was running water. I forced my way through the bushes to a clearing on the other side. I could see a river below me.

  ‘Nez. Nez! Come over here. Quick.’

  The river water was the colour of weak tea and shimmered in the light. I stripped down to my underpants, ran across a muddy bank and plunged in. Nez wouldn’t come all the way in. She took off her jeans and T-shirt, folded them neatly into a ball and sat them on a rock along with her camera. She walked slowly down to the water’s edge and splashed around in the shallows in her undies and singlet while I swam.

  Between swims I skipped stones across the surface of the water while Nez watched me from a rock she was perched on. Her job was to count the skips of the stones I threw in my attempt to break what I’d announced to her as the ‘World Freshwater Tor Skipping Championship’.

  ‘What’s a tor, Jesse?’ she asked, scratching the tip of her nose.

  ‘It’s a killer marble. An assassin. It’s the prize you’ve got to capture if you’re to have any chance of winning the game. Otherwise it will take you out. It’s like the king in chess.’

  She looked at the stone gripped between my fingers. ‘A marble is round,’ she said. ‘The ones you’re throwing are flat. They’re not tors.’

  ‘They are. At least this one will be. When I break the record, it will be this stone that clinches it for me.’

  ‘But it won’t be yours, Jesse. The stone will be at the bottom of the river somewhere.’

  ‘Well, Nez, when you want something bad enough, there’s a price to pay. Always.’

  I threw my arm back, pitched the stone and watched as it skimmed across the water.

  ‘Seven . . . eight . . . nine . . . ten . . . that’s a new record, Jesse,’ Nez squealed, clapping her hands together.

  She picked up the camera and pointed it at me. ‘Let me take a picture of the world champion.’

  Although I wouldn’t pose for her she took the picture anyway.

  My arm was sore from all the throwing. I sat down next to Nez and poked at the bed of mud beneath my feet with the sharp end of a twig as our bodies dried in the sun. She’d taken her shoes off. I could see that she had mud caked between her toes.

  I tapped her on the calf with my big toe. ‘You’d better clean those feet before Gwen gets back. She won’t want you putting that mud all over the back seat of the car.’

  She wiggled her toes. One or two clumps of mud fell to the ground. She took the twig from me and started drawing something in the mud. It was a house.

  ‘When will she, when will . . . Mum be back?’

  I shrugged my shoulders. ‘I don’t know. Soon I hope. I’m starving. She’d better have something for us to eat.’

  I dragged my foot across the rock and again tapped her on the side of the leg. ‘And don’t call her Mum, Nez. You know she don’t like it.’

  ‘But she is my mum. And she’s your mum too, stupid.’

  She finished drawing the house. She was now onto a girl, maybe a self-portrait?

  ‘Yeah, I know she is. But you’re wasting your time calling her that. She’ll just ignore you. You know that. You might as well whistle her like a dog that doesn’t want to come home.’

  ‘But I like it, calling her Mum.’

  ‘Well, she don’t. Makes her feel old, she says. Makes her angry too. So don’t do it. She’ll be in a shitty mood already, and I don’t want her starting on us.’

  Nez ignored me as she busied herself with another drawing and whispered, ‘Mum, Mum, Mum’ under her breath. She drew another person, standing next to the house. I had no idea who it was.

  When she had finished drawing Nez tossed the twig away and climbed up onto the rock. ‘There’s just one shot left in the camera. Will you take a picture of me?’

  All the snooping around and swimming had made us hungry. We got dressed and walked back to the car, where we ate about six packets of biscuits each. My favourites were the Scotch Fingers, while Nez liked the Monte Carlos, so we did some swapping.

  I munched on my last biscuit and looked across to the wheat silo. It had a metal staircase wrapped around the outside. I looked up at the sky and back down to the base of the silo. I decided to climb it. I walked across the yard towards the silo with Nez calling after me, ‘What are you doing, Jesse?’ as she stood up and followed.

  I put my foot on the bottom step of the staircase. It shook from side to side and knocked against the silo, sending an echo across the yard. Some cockatoos perched high in the gum tree we had pissed against earlier in the day squawked and flew into the sky.

  I began to climb the stairs.

  ‘Are you sure it’s safe?’ Nez called out to me as she gripped the metal rail of the staircase while keeping both feet planted firmly on the bottom step.

  ‘Probably not,’ I called out as I kept on climbing, witho
ut looking back to see where she was.

  As I moved quickly around the outside of the silo I could hear Nez calling, ‘Jesse, hang on, will you? Hang on.’

  I knew that if I didn’t wait for her I would eventually have to go back anyway. I sat on a step and looked down at the ground, about fifty feet below me. When Nez finally reached me she was wheezing badly and her cheeks were the colour of beetroot. She had the camera around her neck.

  I got her to sit down next to me and do the breathing exercises taught to her by a welfare nurse when we were in care together one time. As I counted each breath for her Nez looked across at the ugly scar on the side of my arm, just below my elbow.

  ‘Tell me how you got that, Jesse.’

  ‘What, now? We’re supposed to be climbing. Anyway, you know how I got it. I’ve told you a thousand times already.’

  ‘I know you have, lots of times. But tell me again, please. I’ll count my breaths if you tell me the story about the scar. Please?’

  The story was about how I’d fought off a vicious dog that had attacked me in the street one day, when I was about six or seven. As I’d done each time I’d gone over the story, I acted the scene where I’d poked the mongrel between the eyes, forcing it to release my mangled arm from its jaws of rotting yellow teeth. After the dog had retreated up the street, back to the junkyard it came from, I’d looked down at my arm, at the bloodied hunk of flesh that had been almost ripped away.

  Nez leaned across to me and traced the jagged scar with a fingertip. She knew exactly what question to ask next.

  ‘Did it hurt, Jesse? When the dog bit you?’

  ‘Yeah. It hurt like hell. But not nearly as much as when they stitched me up at the hospital. They couldn’t find no anaesthetic and no small needles, so they stitched my arm back together with something about the size of a knitting needle. It was all rusty and probably full of poison. The same needle had been used to stitch manure bags together. That hurt a lot more than the dog bite.’

  ‘Is that a true story, Jesse?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  She lightly touched the scar again. ‘I guess so. I guess so.’