The Road to Winter

by Mark Smith

  ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Thanks. But tell me, what’s with the growly voice?

  I’m kind of relieved to get it out of the way.

  ‘I had trouble talking when I was little. Something to do with the muscles in my mouth. I guess the last couple of years on my own haven’t helped.’

  She doesn’t say anything, just nods, gets to her feet and backs away down the hallway. I hear the bedroom door close.

  I sit at the table a little while longer, trying to figure whether it’s a good or a bad thing that she’s shown up. She’s brought the Wilders into town—that’ll be a problem. I’ll have to be more careful. No surfing for a while. And I’ll have to take care going out to check the traps.

  She has thrown up a whole new set of problems to deal with. But something else is sitting at the back of my mind too, something that knows how good it feels to have someone here with me, someone to take the edge off the loneliness. But she’s so wary of everything, I can’t even be sure she’ll stay.

  Something else’s nagging at me—the name the Wilder called out from the other side of the river. I heard it loud and clear. Warda. I’ll ask her about it in the morning.

  Later, as I lie in bed, I listen for the familiar sounds of the house, the wind in the big cypress at the side, the ends of the branches rubbing against the spouting, Rowdy snorting and farting and changing position on his blanket. There is something new in the feel of the place now that the girl is here. I can’t even bring myself to say her name out loud yet, but in the dark I roll it around on my tongue. Rose. It has a round feel to it and I have to make a circle with my lips to get the o sound. First just a whisper, all breath. I move the sound further up, away from my throat and it starts to take on the shape of her name.

  Rose.

  When I get up in the morning she’s already sitting at the kitchen table. There are thick scabs on her elbows and a deep, recent cut on the back of her left hand. And there is still the smell of her, sweet and tart at the same time.

  ‘Hey,’ I say. ‘How’d you sleep?’

  ‘Sleep? Yeah, good. First time in a bed for ages. You?’

  ‘Okay. Got up a couple of times just to keep watch. No sign of them, though.’

  ‘We’re safe here, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah, safe enough. We’re at the back of another property. You can’t see it from the road at the front and I’ve blocked the drive with tea tree. It’s only noise or smoke that can give us away.’

  I remind myself to slow down when I’m talking with her.

  ‘That cut doesn’t look good,’ I say.

  She lays her hand palm-down on the tabletop. The wound is deep and the skin around it is red and puffy. It runs diagonally across the back of her hand and is about four centimetres long.

  ‘How’d it happen?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she says. ‘You got anything we can put on it?’

  I don’t press her, heading to the bathroom to get the tube of antiseptic cream I’ve used a couple of times when I’ve cut myself on the rocks diving for abalone. I grab some cotton buds too.

  I settle myself back at the table opposite her and turn her hand around in the light. She winces.

  ‘It’s deep,’ I say. ‘Was it a knife?’

  She snatches her hand back. ‘It’s just a cut, all right,’ she says. ‘I caught it on a branch.’

  I must have completely forgotten how to talk to people without them getting angry. Everything I say seems to be wrong. The whole place is quiet except for Rowdy’s snuffling in the corner. I’m looking at the table and fiddling with the tube of antiseptic.

  She sits on the edge of her chair and places her hand on the table again. Her back is arched and her leg is jigging up and down.

  ‘You should clean it,’ I say.

  I get a stainless steel bowl from the cupboard below the sink. I half fill it with water, pour in a little salt and sit back down, pushing the bowl to her side of the table. It’s like approaching a wounded animal.

  She eases her hand into the bowl and starts dabbing at the wound with a wet cotton bud. When she looks up her eyes bore through me, hard and sharp again.

  She braces her body against the pain, but digs right into the middle of the cut, reopening it so that puss and blood start to seep into the water.

  It’s worse than I thought. ‘It needs stitches,’ I say.

  ‘You reckon?’

  ‘I’ve got Mum’s sewing kit.’

  ‘Just get me the thinnest needle you can find and some strong thread.’

  I bring the whole sewing box and she rustles through it, finally picking a needle and some red thread.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says, ‘but I’m going to have to use some gas to boil the water. We need to sterilise the needle.’

  I’m grateful to have something to do. Seeing Rose at the table with the sewing kit, I can’t help but think of Mum. She used to sit up in the kitchen in our old place, darning socks and repairing holes in clothes. She’d have this lamp on the table and her hands would work away under the light. I can see her there, letting down my winter school pants and joking that I’d need to stop growing soon.

  A few minutes later, I’m fishing the needle out of the boiling water with a pair of tongs and placing it on the table.

  ‘Now,’ Rose says, ‘I need your help.’

  She threads the needle, takes a deep breath and pierces the little ridge I make by pushing the sides of the wound together. I hear the sharp intake of breath as the thread catches, but she keeps pulling. She loops it back and through half-a-dozen times before she ties it off and holds up the thread for me to cut with the scissors.

  As soon as I do this she lurches away from the table, opens the back door and spews over the rail. But before I can even get up, she’s walked back into the kitchen wiping her mouth with her good hand. She fills a glass with water, gargles and spits it back into the sink.

  She sits down, lays her hand on the table and says, ‘Better get that antiseptic onto it, I reckon.’

  I dab the line of stitches with the cream.

  ‘You’re a good sewer,’ I say.

  ‘I’m a shit sewer,’ she says, but there’s no hardness in her voice. ‘Never saw the point of it. Wish I’d learned better now, though.’

  I find a bandage in the bathroom cabinet and hold her wrist while I wrap it around the wound and fasten it with a clip.

  ‘You’ll need to clean it every day and make sure the infection doesn’t spread.’

  ‘Thanks, Mum,’ she says, and for the first time I see how white and even her teeth are when she smiles.

  For a minute we just sit there looking at each other. It’s so much easier when you’ve got something to do. I get the sense she’s weighing me up again.

  ‘How long you been on your own here?’ she asks.

  ‘Not sure. Since everyone else left. After the quarantine. After all the phones went down and the shops were emptied out. Maybe two years. Could be longer. Where’d you come from?’

  ‘We lived on a farm out past Longley. We’—she pauses and takes a breath—‘Stan and Beth and my sister Kas.’

  ‘Where are they now?’

  She hesitates, looking past me to the open window. ‘Kas is out there somewhere. We got separated a couple of days back. It makes me sick to think what might’ve happened to her.’

  ‘And Stan and Beth? Are they your mum and dad?’

  She pauses then and looks straight at me. ‘Kas and me are Sileys. Stan and Beth, they were our owners.’

  I know about Sileys. Asylum seekers. Mum used to talk about them all the time, and they were on the news a lot. The government ran offshore camps for years, detention centres. At some stage they decided to bring the young, fit Sileys to the mainland to work. Refugee reassignment, they called it. Mum called it slavery.

  ‘Were you factory workers?’

  Rose’s voice is calm, tired, like she’s had to explain this before.

  ‘Some went to factories. Doing every shitty job they coul
dn’t get locals to do. Abattoirs. Sewage works. Chicken factories. Kas and me, we were lucky. We got to breathe fresh air every day. And Stan and Beth were okay. They came to the auction at the processing centre and bought us. We were so relieved. There were people looking for young girls to buy.’

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Twelve. Kas was nine.’

  She pauses then and picks at the bandage on her hand.

  ‘Stan and Beth had no kids of their own. They taught us to read and speak English, gave us time off, even took us into Longley to go shopping.’

  I’m looking at the darkness of her skin, the deep brown of her eyes.

  ‘So where are you from? What country?’

  ‘Afghanistan. I don’t remember much about home, though. We lived in a camp in Pakistan for years before…’

  ‘Before what?’

  ‘Mum and Dad, they sold everything they had so Kas and me could get to Indonesia. We went with an uncle they trusted.’

  ‘Where are your parents now?’

  Her head drops.

  ‘I haven’t seen them since I left the camp in Peshawar. This is all I have to remember them,’ she says, reaching inside her jumper and pulling out a gold ring attached to a strip of leather looped around her neck.

  ‘And you’ve got no idea where Kas is?’

  ‘No.’ She hugs her arms to her chest and rocks back and forth. ‘We lost each other on the way to the coast.’

  I still can’t get a handle on her story, how it all fits together.

  ‘So you and Kas were sold to Stan and Beth? What happened after that?’

  ‘Their farm was west of Longley. We lived there for about five years, until the virus came. We thought we’d be okay. We were used to killing our own stock and growing food. We had milk, eggs, and Stan grew spuds. But after a couple of months people started coming out from Longley, turning up at the gate and asking for food. Wasn’t long before they stopped asking. There were people on the road. I don’t blame them—everyone was hungry. But they brought the disease. You know about the women?

  ‘Yeah, it was the same here.’

  For some reason the virus affected women more than men. One of the last bulletins we heard before the internet went down said ten women were dying for every one male.

  Rose sighs. ‘Beth, she was all for helping people, but it meant she talked to them, touched them. Stan would get so angry with her about it. I don’t know why, but she wasn’t affected. Once Stan was killed…’

  She gets up from the table and walks over to the window above the sink. I hardly hear what she says next, it’s so close to a whisper.

  ‘After that it was just Beth and me and Kas.’

  I don’t know what to say. For ages I’ve only thought about what’s happened to me, the people I’ve lost, what I’ve needed to do to survive. I haven’t had time to think about anyone else or what they might have been through. And she said Stan was killed. She didn’t say he died. Before I can ask her about him, though, she pulls herself together and comes back to the table.

  ‘We thought we’d be safer on the farm. You remember all the rumours about people starting to panic, huge queues for petrol and food?’

  I nod. ‘We thought we’d be safe down here, too.’

  ‘Stan had started to stockpile grain in an old tank. And seed potatoes in the barn. But he wanted more. So he went into town…’

  She stops then and leans forward so the hair falls over her face. She does that thing I’m getting used to—flinging her head back and pulling the hair behind her ears.

  ‘Secretly, me and Kas didn’t believe that things were as bad as Stan and Beth were making out,’ she continues. ‘We thought the government would get on top of it, someone would find a vaccine in time. We just had to hold out for a while until things got back to normal.’

  ‘Same here. We kept expecting to see the Red Cross or the army come rolling into town, telling us everything was okay.’

  Rose has taken the leather strap from around her neck and looped it over her wrist. She slides a finger in and out of the ring.

  ‘When Stan didn’t come home Kas and I weren’t worried. He was good friends with Mr Kincaid, the auctioneer at the sale yards, and he’d sometimes stay with him instead of driving back in the dark.

  ‘The next morning was so quiet. I realised there was no sound of cars or trucks out on the highway. There hadn’t been mail deliveries for weeks and none of the neighbours stopped by anymore. When Kas and me came into the kitchen for breakfast, Beth had the rifles out on the table and packets of ammo next to them. I couldn’t believe it. She never touched the guns. Stan used them to shoot sick animals, but otherwise they stayed locked up in the tractor shed. Now Beth was checking them over! She said we had to be prepared.

  ‘Stan didn’t come back that day or the next. By then we were real worried. So we moved bales around in the hayshed to make a space in the middle and we loaded it up with food and blankets and one of the rifles. Beth said if anyone came Kas and I should run straight out there and stay hidden until she gave the all clear.’

  Rose has launched right into this story like she’s been waiting to tell it. I want to pull her up, ask more questions, but she doesn’t give me the chance.

  ‘Then finally, on Christmas Eve, Stan’s ute crawled up the drive. Beth was suspicious so she sent Kas and me out to our hiding spot in the hayshed, just in case. But I couldn’t help myself. I climbed up and peeked through a join in the shed wall.

  ‘The ute came up the side of the house and into the yard. I knew for sure then that it wasn’t Stan. I had a horrible feeling in my gut. Two men got out and looked around the yard. I couldn’t see Beth anywhere but I knew she’d be watching from the house.

  ‘It was a guy called Ramage, and his son, who everyone called Rat.’

  There’s something in the way she says Ramage’s name that hurts her. She’s picking at the bandage on her hand again and her voice hardens.

  ‘Ramage used to run the feedstore in Longley. Stan knew him, trusted him, but he was one of those guys you always thought was watching you, especially the girls. He was a creep.’

  She pinches her bottom lip between her teeth, weighing me up.

  ‘That was Ramage, the one on the trailbike yesterday.’

  I remember the man yelling across the river mouth.

  ‘What was the name he was calling?’

  ‘Warda,’ she says. ‘That’s my Siley name. Ramage always used it. It’s Pashto. It means Rose.’

  ‘What happened after they arrived at the farm?’ I ask.

  Rose sits back in her chair and crosses her arms.

  ‘I got the rifle, loaded it quietly and climbed back up. I could hear Beth’s voice. She was standing on the back porch with a rifle in her hands. The men were about twenty metres away from her.

  ‘Ramage did all the talking, saying, “You here all on your own, Mrs Morgan, or you got them pretty Sileys of yours hidin’ somewhere?”

  ‘Beth raised the rifle higher and said, “Where’s my husband?”

  ‘Ramage said Stan had sent them out here to pick us up. That he’d had an accident in town. Broken his arm.

  ‘I could see Beth didn’t believe him. So she says, “Maybe I’ll keep the ute and you two can walk back into town. Since it’s my husband’s.”

  ‘From behind I saw Rat looking like he was slouching back into the seat of the ute. But through the open driver’s side door I saw him slipping a hand down to pick up something off the floor.

  ‘Now Ramage was moving towards Beth. “Come on,” he says, “let’s put that gun away and talk sensible, you and me. Things are different now. We need to look after each other, those of us that’s left.”

  ‘Rat had picked up a metal wheel brace and was sliding it into the belt at the back of his pants, real slow. He stood up and started circling around to Beth’s side.

  ‘Ramage was still talking, all confident now. “Come on Mrs Morgan,” he says. “You can’t shoot us both
. Why don’t you put that gun down and we’ll all go inside and have a nice cup of tea.”

  ‘I was so nervous and sweaty I could hardly hold the rifle. But I stood up and opened the door we used to winch the bales through. I braced my feet on the ledge and got Rat in the sights. I don’t even know if I meant to squeeze the trigger but suddenly there was a loud bang and Rat collapsed on the ground screaming and grabbing at his leg. At the same time Beth pointed her rifle straight at Ramage, who was looking over at Rat and trying to figure out what had happened.

  ‘“Get off my fucking land,” Beth yelled. She never swore. Never.

  ‘She had her rifle pointed at his head now and she said, “Get your mate into the back of the ute. Now!”

  ‘Rat was rolling around on the ground, screaming. I wanted to shoot him again, just to shut him up. But Ramage dragged him to the side of the ute and rolled him into the back. Then Beth called out to me.

  ‘I stood up in the doorway so Ramage could see me pointing the rifle at him. Beth called to Kas to get the cable ties from the shed.

  ‘Then Beth tied one around Ramage’s wrists and pushed him down so he was lying next to Rat. There was all this blood in the bottom of the tray.

  “I’ll be back for you girls,” Ramage screamed as Beth was about to climb in the ute. “I know where you are. You can’t hide. There’ll be more of us next time. We already got the old man.”

  Rose smiles and shakes her head.

  ‘But then, I’ll never forget it: Beth jammed the barrel of the rifle in his mouth. I’d seen her angry before, but nothing like this. It was like something inside her had snapped.

  ‘“You come near my girls,” she said, “and I will kill you. You understand, you fucking creep. I will kill you.”

  ‘I’m pretty sure I heard his teeth break when she snapped the barrel out of his mouth and got back in the driver’s seat. He was bawling now, saying all sorts of dirty things. Things he’d do to Kas and me.

  ‘After Beth took off down the drive it was quiet. Kas and I stood looking at each other. I reckon we both knew nothing was ever going to be normal again.’

  ‘And Beth?’ I ask.

  Rose takes her time to answer. She shifts in her chair and when she speaks her voice breaks.