“No,” he said. “We’re not going to die. But we need to eat. It’s been two days.” Ben looked at her. She had thick, dark rings under her eyes. Her nose was snotty. She was skinny and dirty and weak-looking. It was Ben’s fault.
* * *
That morning they ate whatever they could find. They couldn’t hold out any longer. They foraged and gathered. They worked out which things looked less likely to kill them—grass, flowers, plant bulbs—and they used Ben’s knife to harvest the food. Olive nibbled leaves, and Ben found a fat white witchetty grub buried in the soil beneath a rotting log. The feel of it in his mouth made him grimace, but the flavor was nutty and good. He dug deeper into the soil and found two more. They leaked brown water over his fingers, but he ate them quickly, crunching through the skin to the soft, gooey stuff inside. Olive would not try them. She ate the crisp, juicy tips of fern fronds instead, nibbling at them like a pink-eyed rabbit, holding her nose to block the taste. “This is hor-ri-ble.”
They heard a helicopter in the distance and Ben willed it toward them, but they could not see it through the trees and, after a few minutes, the sound deserted them. The disappointment kicked him in the ribs.
They made slow progress, slower as the morning wore on. They argued, and Olive refused to walk. She complained of stomach pains. It was hard to know if it was the river water or the strange foods. Ben carried the money tucked under his arm now that the strap had broken. It was awkward and heavy and it blistered his side.
The money.
Ben had always figured rich people were the very best kind. Lucky and smart and good-looking and happy.
“He’s got six properties!” Dad would say about some guy he had met at a barbecue. “He says the secret is to never sell one before you buy the next. And never get a loan. The banks are the enemy.”
“Right,” Mum would say in the car on the way home. “And how are we going to do that?”
“Leave it to me,” Dad would say.
“Okay.”
Ben believed Dad when he said things like that, even if Mum did not. He knew that Dad would come through in the end. Sometimes Dad would take Ben aside and tell him how rich they were going to be and how big his new business venture was and that a guy he knew at the pub had made heaps on it. “It’s a good product,” he would say. “You have to believe in the product if you want others to believe in it.”
“Definitely,” Ben would say in a really interested way that made them both feel good. This was before Dad had bought the wreckers. When he was still hopeful.
One time Dad was selling a cleaning product that could shine silver better than any other product in the whole world. He showed Ben by shining a 1992 ten-cent piece till it looked new. Ben could not believe how good it was and he knew that people were going to buy crates of it. Who wouldn’t want coins that shiny?
But they didn’t.
“People are idiots,” Dad told him.
Now Ben had $932,300. Fifty thousand had washed away. But he did not feel smart or lucky or good-looking or happy like the rich people in his imagination.
* * *
That afternoon Olive went downhill fast. Diarrhea at first, then Ben noticed a spotty rash on her arms and face. She vomited and cried and eventually she could not walk anymore. Ben carried her on his back with his backpack, his legs weak and buckling, the bag of money grating against the weeping blister on his side.
At some stage Ben noticed that he had stopped speaking to himself. His mind, usually roaring with thoughts and ideas, flatlined, leaving just a deep, grim determination to make it to the cabin. But soon the sun hid behind the hills and the forest turned to shade. Olive did not speak or move now, a deadweight on his back. Just two little koala claws clutching his shoulders. And Bonzo the rabbit hanging limply from her fist. Even Bonzo did not look hopeful.
Ben stopped every ten minutes or so to check on her, to search for her pulse, open her eyelids, to speak to her. He felt that awful brick-in-the-belly fear. Twilight fell into night and he stopped and shook her gently and he said her name and spoke to her as though the words would heal her somehow. But they did not, and she would not take river water or any of the roots or crispy fern frond tips.
“Olive, please wake up,” he said into the murky dark.
He feared that she was as good as dead if he didn’t get her back to the cabin or to some kind of help, and he blamed himself for all of it. He called out to the forest, screamed for help that night for nearly an hour, but his voice fell on nothing and no one. There were only the animals, and he was sure they would help if they could. But they could not.
THE WRECKERS
Gray light crawled into the sky, and Ben came to from a deep, eyes-wide-open doze. He looked down at Olive, who was lying across his lap, limp.
“Olive?” he said.
He shook her gently.
“Olive, it’s day.”
She didn’t seem to care. He watched her chest but he couldn’t see it moving in the gloom. He put his fingers to her neck and found no pulse. Dread shot through him even though he knew that he often had trouble finding his own pulse—and he was alive. He pressed his fingers under the other side of her jaw, and at last he felt the deep throb of her life against his skin and he had never been more thankful for anything.
He looked around.
Today, he thought, and as the word came to him through the gray of early morning, he saw the silhouette of a pine tree.
Ben had not seen a pine tree in days.
* * *
He stepped carefully from boulder to boulder, sloshed into the river, Olive on his back with his knapsack. On the far side of the river, trees gave way to the beginning of the rock wall that he knew from his days at the cabin. He laughed. It was an unhinged laughter that he had not heard from himself before.
“This is it!” he said to Olive. Her cold, grubby cheek was pressed flat to his shoulder blade. She did not respond. “This is it.”
Ben stumbled for ten minutes in the shallows as the river wandered deeper into the pine forest. His knees cried in pain. He could hear the waterfall. It was drawing him upstream, like a fish on a line. Soon he saw a rough dirt path beside the river, and he made good time then.
Ben thought of the police helicopter and he wished he had not been so stupid, had not hidden from the police and almost killed his sister. As he climbed the hill, past where Dad had shot the rabbit, he called out, “Hello!”
Birds.
“Hello!” he screamed.
He could feel the weight of the money rubbing at the raw place under his arm. He would hand it over if the police were there. He would tell them everything. He made it into the clearing and he looked around and he almost cried.
The police were not there and his parents were not there and the car was gone and the door of the cabin hung open. He dropped the money, lurched and swayed to the door, broken from the climb, Olive still on his back. It was mostly empty inside, cleared out apart from the furniture. The food on the shelf, the ice chest—all gone. How long had it been since he was here? Three days, he was pretty sure.
He laid Olive on the workbench, the bench that he had been standing on when he discovered the bag of money in the roof. He cried then. He didn’t care what Dad would say anymore. He cried so hard for his little sister and for his maybe-dead parents and for himself and for the whole state of the world. He cried because he knew that he and Olive would get out of this alive and because, from here on, life would have no certainty.
Outside, the birds heard him cry and the frogs stopped and listened and the trees stood darkly against the morning sky.
The river flowed on.
* * *
Mangled steel. That’s what he dreamed of as he lay on his side on the cold timber floor that night. The wrecking yard. Piles of mashed metal. Carnage. Other people’s problems. When someone took their eye off the road for a moment to adjust the volume and got T-boned by a semitrailer or they ran a red light and mistimed it and hit a motorbik
e, that’s where Dad came in. Other people’s bad luck: he fed off it. He would race out there in the tow truck, pick up the car, come back, hack it up, sell it off, or crush it. He was a wrecker. That’s what he did. He wrecked stuff. Mum helped. Cars, trucks, motorbikes, Ben’s life, their family. Themselves. They wrecked themselves and they left Ben and Olive to deal with the mess.
And now where were they?
His eyes flicked open. It was dark. They had slept the entire day away. Ben hadn’t had the energy to get Olive up to the main road. Not yet.
Olive lay next to him, sleeping on the torn canvas camp bed against the wall. He sat up and looked at her still, pale face and listened to her breathing.
Earlier in the day, they had eaten from a plastic garbage bag in the corner of the cabin, food thrown out on that final night. Food from the garbage was like a royal feast when you hadn’t eaten real food in days. A third of a can of apricots, the can of whipped cream, and an ancient can of baked beans in the back of the scary cupboard at the rear of the cabin. But the cupboard wasn’t scary anymore. He was no longer afraid of the dark or of night noises.
He had given Olive small sips of water from an almost full bottle he’d pulled out of the garbage bag. She took it in drops. He fed her beans. She’d had two mouthfuls before falling into a deep sleep, breathing short, shallow breaths.
Ben had to think. The decisions he was about to make were important. No more bad choices. It was black-dark, and he did not know what the time was. His body ached with cold. He grabbed his backpack, stood, went to the table. Moonlight leaked from the window onto the work surface. He sat on the table, legs crossed, and pulled out his damp notebook and pencil. He wrote down what he thought might happen once they made it back to Nan’s:
Mum and Dad alive. Head out on the run again.
Mum and Dad alive. In jail. Live with Nan or sent somewhere else.
Mum and Dad dead. Live with Nan.
Mum and Dad dead. Get sent somewhere else.
Ben read his list. He had never liked multiple-choice tests. His eyes circled back to the words “Mum and Dad dead.” He could not believe he had written them.
“Not dead,” he said to himself. “Parents don’t just die.”
But parents don’t just steal millions of dollars either. Only they do.
Ben needed to be careful. Needed to make a good choice. Would he become a wrecker too? His parents were criminals, so he must be more likely to become one. Like father, like son. Did he have a choice or was it written in his DNA?
He turned to the bag of money, which was in the corner nearest the door. Broken zip, one handle snapped. Damaged and pathetic. An idea occurred to him. Something he would not write down. Could never write down or tell anyone except, one day, Olive. He would keep it locked in the vault of his own thoughts where no one could steal it. He sat there for a very long time watching the money, turning the idea over in his mind, twisting himself inside out.
Could he do it? Was it right? Did “right” matter anymore?
Eventually he stood from the table. He walked across the room, bare feet on floorboards, to the yawning cupboard at the back. He reached into the blackness of it and he took out a shovel.
THE ROAD
Ben held his arm out straight and stuck his thumb up the way he had seen it done in old movies. He had a feeling that people didn’t use the thumb anymore. Where Ben came from people did not hitchhike.
Olive lay at his feet in the sandstone gravel of the roadside, her head on his bare, blistered foot, eyes closed, saying nothing. That was the thing that worried him most: Olive not speaking.
He listened for the river. As they had walked up the steep dirt road from the cabin he had listened for it till the last. Then the umbilical cord had been cut and the sound was gone. Just Ben and Olive. Now he thought he heard it again, like the distant sound of the ocean in a shell. But the sound was a car. It appeared around the big bend a couple of hundred yards up the road. A small yellow hatchback filled with passengers. As it passed, someone screamed at them from the window.
“Have some water,” Ben said, bending down to offer Olive the dregs of the bottle he had found in the cabin.
She did not respond.
They waited a long time, maybe twenty-five minutes, for the sound of another engine. But what turned the bend was a motorcycle, not a car, and it sped past them down the hill and away.
A week earlier Ben would have been beaten by this, would have been angry and frustrated and scared. He would have thought that the world was out to get him, but now he did not expect so much. Things could not rattle him so easily. Maybe not even death. He would not get carried away with things, good or bad.
After ten minutes another engine, louder, lower. A truck, Ben was sure. In his clouded, tired mind he calculated that there might only be two seats in a truck and some part of him gave up hope, but he looked down at Olive and he knew that he had to stop the truck.
It rounded the bend, a semitrailer with a green cab and dozens of long logs on the back. Ben waved his arms wildly.
“Help!” Ben called. “Stop!”
Olive was startled by the shouting and tried to stand but she faltered and dropped to her knees. Ben wanted to comfort her but he knew that his job was to get them home, to get them to Nan’s. The truck moved past them and there was no way the driver could not have seen them. Ben watched the back of the truck recede, but still anger did not rise up in him.
He coughed heavily. His lungs ached.
Red lights and a deep groan farther on, before the steep hill that led to another faraway bend. The truck’s red brake lights. Maybe just slowing for the hill, Ben figured, but then it pulled to the side, rocks kicking up, blinker on.
“This is us.” Even as he said the words, Ben did not believe them.
Olive didn’t seem to hear him. She was lying down again so he scooped her off the ground, balancing her across his arms as he walked-ran toward the truck, which was still slowing, half-on, half-off the road. Every molecule of energy left in his starving, exhausted, bleeding body went into that run. He reached the truck as it finally pulled up with a sssss and a crunch of tires on gravel. He ran alongside the truck, and the driver watched him in the dirty passenger-side mirror. The door popped open and swung over Ben’s head. The driver—neatly shaven, brown shirt, sunglasses, kind of old-fashioned-looking—met them with a smile. He had good teeth, Ben noticed. He would have thought that truck drivers didn’t brush their teeth very often, but this one did.
“Thank you,” Ben said. He prayed that the driver didn’t recognize them, that he and Olive had not been in the news too.
The driver looked down at them, at their dirty, ragged clothes. “You lost?”
“Sort of,” Ben said.
DEAD OR ALIVE
He listened. With every ring he clutched the phone more tightly. Why wasn’t she home? Nan never went out.
The pay phone was in a timber bus shelter crammed with backpackers sitting on their luggage. Cars crawled by on Kings Bay’s main street. Olive sat on the ground, eating an electrolyte freezer pop from the pharmacy, listless.
The truck driver had let them out at the hospital on the edge of town, had told them that Olive needed to see a doctor, had offered to come in, but Ben said, “No.” Ben and Olive had gone inside, then Ben waited till the truck was out of sight and walked into town, Olive on his back. He couldn’t take her for medical help because he would have to give their names. They might be recognized. Ben had three crisp hundred-dollar bills in his pocket, taken from the gray sports bag, and he bought new clothes for each of them and a bunch of medicines from the pharmacy. He received some curious looks when he handed over the cash to pay but no one questioned him. Dad was always telling Ben, “Money talks.” Ben figured this is what he meant. He tried to heal Olive, and she had eaten. Not much, but she had.
The phone continued to ring. He wondered if the phone might be tapped, if he was putting Nan in danger. He remembered, from a movie, that yo
u could tell if a phone was tapped: you’d hear a small beep or click a few seconds after the call began, when the recording started. But was that a really old movie? He couldn’t remember.
Finally, after almost a minute, “Hello?”
“Nan. It’s Ben.”
He did not hear a click or a beep, but he still didn’t say much. He did not tell her everything. Just that they were alive, that they would see her soon.
And then the question that he was most afraid to ask: “Have you seen Mum and Dad?”
She paused for a long time before she answered.
* * *
At the bus station Ben bought two tickets for the 4:30 p.m. bus out of a machine. A lady with short gray hair regarded him suspiciously from behind the information counter. Ben lowered his head and tried to keep Olive out of sight, hidden by the machine. Ben wondered if the lady had recognized them, if their story had been on the news. How many people knew they were missing? And which was worse—the thought of everyone knowing, or no one?
* * *
The journey down the coast was slow. Olive fell asleep the moment they sat in their stained, threadbare seats, second row from the front. He watched her carefully, wondering if he had done the right thing by not taking her to the doctor.
“Going home,” he said quietly. She sucked her thumb, cuddled Bonzo.
Ben fought to stay awake, sipping a steaming cup of milky coffee he had bought from a machine outside the station. He missed the sound of the river, missed the feel of it, even though he was thankful to be somewhere warm and comfortable. He closed his eyes and tried to hear that shhhhh in the white-noise whir of tires on wet road.
“Click flutter, flutter click,” said a woman behind them, over and over again, her voice low and unnerving. Ben peered through the gap between the seats. She had white-blond hair, messy lipstick. She bit her nails loudly—click tick tick—repeating the words “click flutter, flutter click” again and again.
Across the aisle was a small, straight-backed woman wearing fluorescent yellow jeans and zebra-print boots. Her feet did not touch the floor of the bus. Behind her, leaning against the window, was a man with a skeletal face and wild green eyes that shone bright in the passing headlights. He turned to Ben and asked him something but Ben could not hear the words. Ben smiled, tried not to look scared, and turned away.
On the Run Page 13
