Fusion

by Kate Richards

  In her backpack is a pair of smelly woollen socks, a compass, a topographical map, a notebook, a pencil and a flashlight and a baby’s blanket – pale blue, covered with silver stars. No money. The flashlight is dead. All the pages are white and blank in the notebook except the fifth page that says,

  ‘—you’ll not know the hour’

  and the page opposite that says,

  ‘unless—’

  Kneel, our kneeling shadow is the profile of two people. Whole. Still as still. Eyes? Hold hands, a quick and firm embrace of hands. Then we begin to look for her injuries, to see if we might work out how bad they are. Cut off her long pants and her shirt.

  She opens an eye.

  Opens an eye – wet and shot-red. The other is swollen shut. She stares up at us, not seeing us at all. She says nothing. But she’s not dead thank god o please o lord she’s not dead not dead. Wren closes his eyes, rubs his hands over his face and leaves them there like he doesn’t want to look at her and we wonder whether her injuries scare him or if it’s because he knows what’s happened to her or because he has never seen a naked woman lying on the floor – bruising and swelling with round scars like embedded pearls on her wrists and down the sides of her neck. Her eyelids are purple and her left leg looks badly hurt and after a long time Wren uncovers and opens his eyes – they widen and widen and he whispers so low it might just be the wind, ‘Oh. She’s beautiful.’

  ‘Like a bird

  we’ll mend her like a bird

  water and ice

  finger-cold

  something wing-soft

  wing-soft

  whiskey

  her veins like poetry

  her bones

  and her skin

  her symmetry

  like a bird

  yes like a bird

  we’ll mend her like a bird.’

  Wren isn’t looking at us tending to the woman on the floor. He hasn’t left the room but he isn’t looking at us. This is only the second time in ten years that another person has crossed the threshold of our front door, and the first time that the person is (a) a stranger and (b) unconscious. Rub her breastbone and she responds by curling her fingers into fists. We’re quite good at mending things. It is intuition and feeling and seeing. We know how to see all of a thing and we know how to listen and so much is said without words.

  ‘Need

  everything?

  everything we have

  yes.’

  Covering her with a blanket, go out of the room and pour two shots of apple liqueur in the kitchen and drink them and then we sit with her all through the night – warm water becoming cool water and a feather and our hands mark time and mark the changes in her breathing and the wounds on her body. She has suffered a forceful injury, a blow or a fall. She has suffered slowly too, some time ago.

  At Hope Home we watched how the nurses splinted and bound the broken bones of the children so we splint and bind her poor leg in the same way so it’s immobile and closer to straight. Warm a pan of water on the wood stove and pour it into a jug and gather up a towel and a cake of milk soap and clean the dirt from her face and bathe her swollen eyes. Wren watches us without speaking. There is an orange-round lump low on the side of her skull. We bathe her torn and blistered feet and her hands. Her hands. Delicate, long-fingered, neat defined bones. But her nails are broken and dirty. Sing her a lullaby just above a whisper. And when the sky through the windows changes from black to darkest grey to the middle of grey, Wren disappears.

  ‘Hunting rabbits hunting rabbits – or maybe it’s our singing?’

  Laugh low.

  Now we sit cross-legged by her head. Together we communicate by thought alone, feeling each other’s thoughts as they rise and fall like heartbeats, the warmth and cold of them, the love and fear in them. This is our gift.

  With our left hand, we cradle her head. With our right hand we run the warm water through her hair. It is gritty. Wash out the dirt and blood with the milk soap and let the water run again and in the water her hair streams like a light emerging from the darkness, palest yellow.

  Out the back of the house is a pit toilet and further back a shed with a portable diesel generator and a copper-pot still for making spirits and fuel drums and shovels and pliers and hammers and boxes of nails and screws and old glass jars and several sharp axes. The shed has a corrugated-iron roof and double doors opening in the middle, tied closed with rope. Not very secure, but it doesn’t matter. No-one ever comes here. Our driveway is a faint track covered in long grass, winding between snow gums and the taller alpine ash. Coming along the dirt council road, if you don’t know where to look for the turn-off you won’t see it.

  In the shed we pick things up from the work table and take stock of their weight and put them down again and wander on, picking things up and putting them down, smelling the old eucalypts and the rust and the dust and the iron on our hands and when we get to the end of the table we turn around and sit down on Wren’s polished-wood bench and try to get our feet warm by taking off our boots and holding our toes in our hands. One of our feet in particular is always cold. As soon as our toes are warm enough in our hands we put our boots back on and tie the laces – over under through pull tight loop around pull through loop pull tight – and go back out into the early morning and here’s Wren’s truck with its green aluminium body in a glare-off with the sun and a corner dented and one of the front lights newly shattered and something dried red on it and our breath clips and staggers because we remember at Hope Home how there was once a crunch of bone and a face and a second hit, another crunch of bone, brittleness – an awful spray of blood steaming up, much too red.

  ‘Who is she?

  too early to say till she wakes up

  too early

  her face is sad isn’t it

  even with her eyes closed, moulded somehow with sadness

  young and old, both

  a riddle

  lost, pale and smooth, drowned almost

  but not serene either

  not seen much sun

  no

  no

  she might look different when she’s awake

  mmmmm

  sad dreams perhaps

  more than that

  she’s hurt

  very hurt

  and something else

  what is it?

  don’t know

  until we can heal her

  can we?

  given time

  she’ll need time

  and then when she wakes up and sees us

  yes sees us

  yes

  soft and still

  us – us soft and still

  and calm so

  because she mustn’t try to run away on that poor leg

  no

  not when she sees us.’

  Beside the wood stove is the woodbox, empty of wood. And the stove, lined with fine ash and a fine hint of warmth, an aftertaste.

  ‘On the edge

  yes

  standing on the edge.’

  Wren has piled logs neatly in the woodshed where Box Head and the Spirit Cat and Bear sleep in summer – those nights they haven’t already snuck in through the outhouse and curled up on our mattress on the floor. We love sleeping close to the earth. Some summer nights we sleep best of all on a tarp under one of the snow gums, the grass still warmed from the sun, another tarp over the branches above us so dew doesn’t soak us through by morning.

  ‘How we interpret the world is up to us

  is it? Yes it is, up to us

  so risk is a relative thing

  so it is, risk, what is?

  things have been set in motion now

  yes

  don’t know what things

  not yet

  shall we check on her then?

  in a bit, let’s wait here a bit.’

  Lean down to the woodpile, arms low, palms up, slide under a log, finger memory, steady, lift, repeat. One splinter deep in the
flesh of one hand and adrenaline floods from one brain into two lines of blood and two pulses thud like tears. In the kitchen we set the logs carefully in the stove with enough room between them for the fire to breathe and rise.

  Leaning in to her, she smells like milk soap even though she’s covered with a sheet and a blanket, and the smell of her rises and now it is more than we first thought from that first breath. It is living, it is spice and the clean edge of salt and sweet fruit – breathe her in more and more till our vision turns monochromatic and stars prickle in the corners of the room.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Wren asks from the doorway.

  We never hear him walking about the house, his steps are so light. He doesn’t hear our footsteps either. Wren moves carefully to accommodate his overly long feet. The rest of him is, in our eyes, beautiful. When he speaks, the muscles gather tight around his jaw and out along his collarbones, dense, burnished, and his hands move like birds. Blood swells in the veins in his neck and his eyes cut through everything – through us too. His forehead wrinkles up while he’s thinking and then eases, settles back, sunburnt and vanilla-smooth.

  We say now, ‘Checking she’s breathing.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes are you going to take her back into town?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She was miles away from Swiggin. Anyway, I don’t reckon we should move her again.’

  Shift around to face him.

  He says, ‘How come if she’s broken her neck? Or her back? An’ now we go and paralyse her?’

  ‘Surely all the damage is already done.’

  ‘I’m not taking her.’

  ‘Where did you find her exactly?’

  ‘On the road. Around halfway home.’ He drops his eyes from us, walks over to the other side of the room, to the darkly red couch and sits down and unrolls the paper bag of our homegrown weed and gets out cigarette papers and he rolls a joint and lights up.

  ‘Wren

  ice and four big bandages and another bottle of iodine

  ice and more kerosene for the lamps and four big bandages

  and a kilo packet of salt and some aspirin

  a kilo packet of salt.’

  ‘Mm-hmm mm ’okay.’

  But the weed must have already sunk in – he stretches and floats off somewhere. Wren is stubborn and dreamy and beautiful and – at times like this – exasperating. But we love him.

  Sighing loud so he may hear us, we go out and sit down in the snowgrass cross-legged and a pair of flame robins alight on a branch of the tree above us. Sit very still. The robins dive down into a puddle of water and bathe and then the male puffs his flame chest and sings his song – a series of high notes descending in groups of three – and the rather drab female considers him for a while with her head cocked to one side.

  ‘Here,’ we nudge Wren awake with a cup of coffee. He sits up looking woozy as if the room is spinning around him. The wind is in the trees outside and the cats are asleep in a basket by the fireplace, a mash of fur and paws and tails and ears. The woman is still on her back on the floor. We’ve never tried to heal a person before but we’re good with possums and young wombats and baby kangaroos and birds of all kinds. Wren finds them injured or abandoned and he brings them home and we tend and salve and soothe and feed till they are well, or with even greater care, keep them warm and quiet while our tears drip onto the floor and we watch over them while they die so they’re not alone when they die. No-one should be alone then.

  The woman moans and turns her head to the side and we glance over to her and then back to Wren – the way he’s looking at her – there’s spirit and heat in the way he’s looking at her. Something catches in one of our throats.

  ‘Going now,’ he says.

  ‘Okay

  salt and iodine and the bandages

  don’t forget the salt

  don’t forget

  is the Browning loaded?’

  Houses straggle along the road into town, the older homes have been there much longer than the last time we saw them – which was at least ten years ago. They’re made of clay and mud and brick and they sit low in the ground like they’re sinking under it, their verandahs touching the arms of chestnut trees, willows and old English apples planted by the early colonists. Wren likes to tell us about the fibro homes in the town itself – skinny and flaky and slammed up against each other, some of their yards full of long grass and the skeletons of cars, others with lawns and hedges mowed and trimmed to look like they’re made of plastic instead of living things. Tells you what about the people living there, Wren says. He parks the truck in the main street furthest away from Sammy Whistle’s store and the rest of the shops. Once, with the weed still singing in his blood, he opened the door into the main bar of the hotel and went in for a drink. It’s dark inside the pub, he said to us, even in the daytime. We’ve tried to imagine the hotel bar and all we can come up with is the hall with the narrow trestles where we ate at Hope Home, everything in darkness and the children in their wheelchairs leaning their bony elbows on the benches, their unblinking eyes flat as the floor and their terrible red tongues lolling in pints of beer.

  Wren says the boys in the hotel talk about girls and their other mates and swimming in the river below the town and riding dirt bikes and buying second-hand cars and looking for work and looking for fights. They call each other bro. ‘You went to the Zombie Bar? one asks another. It was dismal. We need more girls there mate, otherwise it’s all skanks – Yeah. Jo was maggoted by the end. He reckoned he was gangsta-as. Boring-as. They laugh. Hey! How many times did I go down the river and you weren’t there? – It was freezing, bro. Yeah, well. Anytime that mad redhead picks on me or wants a fight – Yeah? – I go take a nap.’

  The way Wren remembers their words in all their detail – his own voice just a little disparaging and fever in his eyes – it seems to us that he wants to be like them very much. We guess he’d like to be the wittiest member of the group, coming in at just the right time with just the right reply, smart-but-not-too-smart, maybe getting slapped on the back by his friends. Laughing. Buying another round of drinks and laughing and throwing nuts in the air and catching them in his mouth and shrugging like it’s nothing. Maybe him doing the backslapping too, hard enough for them to feel it on their bones. Him and his friends. Him – to – to be something – to be a good mate – to be a good friend – to be. We’re the only one to know his loneliness.

  Folding back the flannel sheet and climbing onto our mattress at night we see a wall of our room and half of the ceiling and part of the floor. Our room and Wren’s room are just long enough and wide enough to fit a single mattress with walking space on one side and a rough-hewn side table and kerosene lamp on the other. Our room, next to the living room, has another flannel sheet closing it off from the hallway because we don’t have an actual door. Some nights we sleep at the top of the mattress and some nights at the foot and with Wren’s help we nailed a mirror to the centre of the ceiling. Growing up we didn’t have a mirror. Mirrors, they said at Hope Home, encourage vanity – though we don’t know why anyone worried that our reflection would make us vain. Nor have we seen our soul in a mirror nor the soul of another person, but mirrors possess a kind of magic nonetheless.

  Looking in a mirror is looking into each other’s eyes and looking into each other’s eyes is to seek and to find what is true in us, the prayer and call and cry and fright and song in us. To know we’re alive together. Lying on the mattress on our back with the lamp on, looking into each other’s eyes and bending our arms over our chest so our fingers meet, cupping our breasts, then holding hands.

  Holding hands is a shining thing.

  We talk about the woman in whispers.

  ‘Is she thinking or dreaming? dreaming

  she’ll think she’s dreaming when she sees us

  or fold us into her dreaming

  mmm-hmm

  we’ll be a part of her by the time she
<
br />   even before she wakes up

  mmm

  there?

  not there

  there?

  mmm, there. O. A little more, a little quicker – mmmmmmmmm is it like catching fire from inside out?

  maybe

  or is it like love?

  no – not like love.’

  In the last days of summer a few apples are still on the trees, full to bursting of sugar, just right for moonshine. Wombats and rabbits and eastern grey kangaroos and their smaller, compact cousins, the swamp wallabies, are our perfect orchard lawnmowers – they work at night and are silent apart from the soft rhythmic pulling of grass and the chewing. We walk on through the trees, snap off a couple of apples and put one in our dress pocket and crunch through the other and the flavour and sweetness burst in our mouths. We take off our boots and socks and sling them over our shoulder and tiptoe over the stones of the creek bed where the water’s running about half a metre deep, so clear we can’t actually tell its depth until we’re right in it. Even in the middle of summer the water is shuddering cold. It runs down from merged springs much higher up in the mountains where at night the temperature can still drop below zero and snow settles on the peaks year round. Our feet are white like bone in the creek, shifting with the current and the wind brushing the top of the water – there and not there and there again.

  We go on, tiptoeing and trying to keep our balance a way along upstream against the flow, we’re so careful of where we put our feet that we forget to look forward to the creek bed ahead and we go down to our chest – in the cold of it we shriek and stumble forward, our legs raggedy – the water unperturbed running round us and past and then the fright of it passes and we’re grinning now, laughing now, faces to the sun, sun pooling in our eyes and flaring and draining away. Holding tight a handful of the reeds that grow long along the banks, we haul our body up. Crawl through until plumes of alpine grass, browned off this time of year by the sun, replace the reeds. Tipping the brown swill out of our boots with dead skin and sweat and dirt. We lie back in the grass, our breath straggled and uneven. The light so bright we can taste it. Cicadas in waves.