Fusion

by Kate Richards

  As our dress dries, a wedgetail eagle looks down at us from the middle of the sky, great brown wings stretched and silent, then it flies up out of sight like a soul ascending. After a while more we get up and put on our boots and walk to the foot of the mountain, squelching every step.

  Right from the start it’s steep enough a climb that we are up on our toes, leaning forward so as not to slide back down. Here and there a kangaroo bounds off in front of us on those long hind legs that are like a two-stroke engine. Winding around the side of a sheer rock cliff between snow-gum saplings and patches of moss, naked skin on our calves tearing from the heath. We stop and rest and take our boots and socks off and let our socks dry in the sun. Breathing.

  ‘Ready to go on?

  no

  now?

  no

  what’s wrong?

  nothing’s wrong.’

  Sigh.

  ‘Ready to go on?

  all right all right yes, okay now.’

  Near the summit there’s a flatter, grassy saddle and we try to broaden our shoulders and even out our breathing and lengthen our stride and then push on to the edge of the tree line and the final pinch-scramble up the granite tor on all fours.

  ‘When the hounds come

  the hounds?

  we’ll see the hounds from up here, the people, the city people, the Hope Home people, thieves, kidnappers, bitter and cold and whatever else they are

  we’ll be ready for them?

  yes we will

  even if our ribs break?

  yes

  yes

  mind out, watch here

  no

  careful – careful!’

  One step too long, crack our left knee on the granite and slide down the cliff-face a few metres on our belly, swearing as we go, dress filthy now, sweat resoaking our underarms and necks and breasts.

  ‘Ow

  up! up!

  oww

  rise!

  but hurts

  get up!’

  Scramble and balance and stop and scramble some more to the top, chest blowing double its width and breadth with every inhalation. The fight and the freedom we love so much and the high sharp air.

  To the north-west there are clouds banking up on one another, darker and thicker than the black of the night sky. To the east it’s blueblueblue. Turning side to side and marvelling at the strength there is in this sky and the beauty. The mountain breathing in its long slow forever way beneath our feet. Alpine flowers are sparse and delicate up here – small patches of everlasting daisies anchoring this otherwise restless rock and humped grassland.

  As the storm moves closer the birds go silent. No wind either. Everything waiting. Us waiting too. Then a sliver of a crack and thunder rolls out across the boggy plain, pushing in front of it the dense-hot summer air. Up here we’re part of the air and part of the storm and we hear the song in it. No rain yet. Listen and we do. Wait for Lightning, wait for her to show us the way to the sky, to the stars. Here she comes through the clouds, bright-eyed. Thunder responds, flexing first, fists up like a boxer, then punching right into the sky’s face, flinging the air all about and the sound ringing through the ground.

  Wren was maybe fifteen or sixteen when he and his mother visited here for the first time. They came when his father was dying. Wren says they came to quench his mother’s curiosity. We remember the skin of her neck jiggling as she talked, like an echo. She was so much taller than we were and we never saw the top of her head. Most of all we remember her eyes looking down at us – narrowed, very dark. She didn’t offer us help of any kind at all.

  Those times she locked Wren out of the house at night – when he was a much younger child – she told him that he didn’t know how lucky he was. He curled up in the outside toilet, stinky, dank and moist and the roof full of spiders and their cobwebs. He says the darkness moved and spun and rolled around him like the sea, which we can only imagine since we’ve never seen the sea.

  Sometimes she was nice to him and she’d bring him home a bar of chocolate for no particular reason and other times she made him sit at the kitchen table frozen-still for hours, even though he couldn’t think of anything he’d done wrong. The next morning she would say he still didn’t know how lucky he was. Wren remembers every grain in the wood of the kitchen table but he says he’s never figured out what she meant by lucky and for a long while he was bothered by that. Pinched by it. His heart beat too fast – like ours do – but he was always cold. If he said he was sorry and if he asked, what should I have done? She’d reply, the world is full of should, Angus.

  Wren says he didn’t speak many words out loud until he began at school. Even then, talking meant attracting attention and he says that that was never a good thing. He was a fat little boy with eyes too bright and funny orange hair and no special talents. The only attention he received from the other boys was in the form of pushes and punches and trip-ups and wedgies and he was known only for his alarming and uncontrollable habit of going bright fucking red all over. Sometimes he knew why this happened and sometimes he did not.

  No-one else ever called him Angus.

  So when we opened the front door that first time, we paused and he looked at us and we smiled at him – both of us at exactly the same time – they were our best smiles – not one of those bleeding smiles that asks something unknown of you, but sentient smiles, conscious and warm and alive – golden.

  He looked directly at us and he smiled back with his eyes even more than his mouth. He didn’t seem shocked or horrified to see a two-headed wraith-woman in the doorway. He didn’t seem pitying or amused or disgusted either. His face was pale but his eyes sparked and his smile was conscious and warm and alive and golden too. Then we saw his mother and we said together, ‘Hello?’

  And his mother stood on the edge of the rickety verandah with her hands by her sides – clenched so tight they’d turned white – she didn’t look at us but kept her face pointing down at her feet as though the sight of us would kill her and she said, ‘Angus, don’t stare.’

  That was all. But we never forgot Wren’s smile.

  Plenty of ripe tomatoes are still on the vines and we pull a couple of sweet red onions from the ground and we cut a garlic bulb from the kitchen ceiling where a braid of them hangs down from a roof beam. Cutting and chopping and peeling require a good deal of care, knife in one hand and flesh in the other and our eyes – four, yes – but fixed at an angle. We salt the tomatoes in a bowl and then sit the heavy pan on the wood stove and fry the garlic and quarter the onions and add them with some sugar and butter and when the onions and garlic and the sugar caramelise, we drop in the chopped, salted tomatoes, enough for three. After a minute we halve a lemon, take a half in each hand and in unison, squeeze the juice through our fingers and over the tomatoes and then lick the lemon juice from our palms and wrists. The kitchen smells earthy and citrus-sour and tangy-sweet.

  As we sit down to eat the light leaves the day. We didn’t see this half of the storm coming. Outside the sky is close and black and the energy has shifted, it’s tense, not yet burst, possibility here all round us.

  ‘Her?’

  Double-nod. We go into the living room. The cats are out of their basket and wide-eyed. The woman on the floor is the only one still and quiet. The storm is in us and in the cats and it will be in Wren too, wherever he is. The wonder, the interconnectedness of all things. We kneel by the woman.

  ‘Here you are, here.’

  We stroke her hair.

  We stroke her hair and her toes flicker. She moans.

  ‘Only us, shhh, hush now

  the wind is calling

  hear her spirits

  calling

  coming for to carry us home.’

  The kitchen is deepdown dark blue and our right hand only just has hold of a glass as we turn the squeaky tap and wait for water to run from the tank outside into the glass and when it is near-full we add a pinch of salt and a big spoon of sugar and some lem
on juice and stir it till the sugar dissolves. We kneel again and cradle her neck and bring her head up gently and stroke her hair, mindful of the swelling and bruising. She screws her eyes inward like a baby. We put the glass to her lips and rain comes.

  Rain like a band of drummers on our iron roof – so loud we may shout and not hear either of our voices and only now, looking out the window, we spot the box of groceries Wren has left on the grass beside the truck.

  Our run is the very-smallest-bit rawboned, the very-smallest-bit lopsided, but the fact that we run at all is enough. We pick up the box of things with rain pinging off our shoulders, turning our hair into black streams, and bring it inside and go round to the outhouse and strip off our dress that is sticking to our skin and steaming all over. Rub our body dry and put on a clean blue dress that we’ve widened across the chest and neck like all the others.

  ‘Wren?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Everything’s got wet.’

  ‘Grand storm.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, grand storm.’ There’s a tattered towel round his waist, his chest is bare and glistening and his mahogany hair still dripping at the ends – curls almost touching his shoulders.

  ‘You look all right,’ we say, and smile our double-smile as he goes past us up the little hallway. He really does look all right – the brush of his sun-darkened skin on ours burns and the wild-thing stirs in us. Wren says when his mother stumbled on the wild-thing in him, she stopped talking to him as if he was a human being.

  We yell after him up the hallway, ‘Everything’s got wet and there’s fried tomatoes in the kitchen!’

  ‘Ta.’

  In the kitchen we get out Wren’s bowl and a spoon and our white china bowl and two spoons. Wren comes in. ‘Lot of music in that storm,’ he says, waving at the roof. He takes a glass off the wooden shelf and turns on the water tap and waits while the water runs in from the tank outside. He sits back down and stretches his long legs under the table.

  ‘She woke up a bit

  mmm.’ Nodding together.

  ‘Yeah?’ Wren’s lips and tongue and teeth working on the tomatoes. ‘Lot of music in that storm.’

  ‘You said,’ we say, sizing him up with our blue eye, our two green eyes, our greener than blue eye. We look at him as hard as we can. ‘Are you scared?

  you’re scared she’ll die. And

  you’re scared she’ll live

  you don’t want her here. Yet

  yet.’

  He leans further back in his chair. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘There’s something more

  isn’t there?

  isn’t there, Wren?

  what is it?’

  ‘There’s nothing more.’ He finishes the tomatoes and takes his plate to the sink and washes it and unpacks the wet packets of salt and he sets the bottle of iodine and the bandages on the table. Box Head winds his tail around one of our calves. He mewls like a lost lamb and plants his great paws on our left thigh.

  ‘O Sweet

  are you hungry?’

  We push our chair back from the table and stand up and open a tin of fish and Box Head climbs up our left leg till he’s off the floor and his head is at our waist and he takes the whole fish in his mouth gently like a polite child, and we laugh and Wren laughs and we watch him go. He looks ridiculous from behind with the fish sticking out beyond either side of his head, but his gait is jaunty. The old lion in him.

  Palpable heat is coming off her like steam. She’s flushed and her face and neck are burning. A fever. We’re scared of fever. Healers know fever is either the start of something or the end of something. Children died of fever in Hope Home – an infection itself or because they stopped eating and drinking. No-one cared terribly much when those children died. No-one would have cared if we had died there either.

  Her legs shudder under the blanket, bony heels thudthud on the floor.

  Wren rocks from one foot to the other. ‘Hell. What do we do?’

  ‘A bucket of cold water, a flannel, iodine and salt.’

  ‘Oh hell.’ He goes out.

  Her teeth, chtttchtttchtttchtttchttt.

  We unwrap her broken leg, looking for more swelling, fluid, pus, coldness or whiteness or mottling but it is just as bruised and pink and warm as it was yesterday. We fold away the blanket and cover her with a sheet and go into the kitchen and in the high cabinet are our jars of crushed tea-tree and eucalyptus and marijuana – for fever and bacteria and pain, for cleansing, for calming the spirits, for the wandering soul to find its way home.

  Dropper the resin oil onto her tongue, every drop bright. She grimaces and coughs and swallows. Cool her skin, wipe away sweat, fan the light.

  ‘Breathe with us

  deep and slow

  and slow for you and slow and deep for us

  breathe

  hush now.’

  Can we, will she, breathe with the deep? Our own slow way of feeling for veins and energy and aliveness and spirits – not the laying-on of hands, not telepathy, not faith in a god or a manly ghost – a double heartbeat.

  Wren’s here with the ice and water.

  ‘What happened?’ we ask again.

  ‘Dunno.’ His face flushes with an angry red-raw rash and his neck too, and his hair is sticking up and he hasn’t shaved and his eyes are shot with blood.

  ‘You do.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  We stop. Are still. Silent, twisting our shoulders ten degrees to the left so we can stare at him, fold our arms and stare at him.

  ‘Is she dying?’ he asks, ignoring us and kneeling by her.

  ‘Do you know her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you pick her up in town? From the hotel?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you hurt her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Someone has kicked her

  hit her

  scarred her

  not loved her

  Wren?

  tell us so we can heal her.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Her eyes open. She looks straight at us and then she sees Wren and she says, ‘Angus.’

  We are in this instant, lost.

  Outside, the trees are singing. The immense sky in her eyes when she opens them. She said Angus. The name only Wren’s mother called him when he was good enough to be something worthy of a name. So he does know her, and she him. As he gets up from the floor, there’s a tiny smile playing around his lips, something in his eyes is gleeful.

  Her legs have stopped shuddering and her teeth aren’t chattering either, though she’s still flushed and hot and on the outer edges of her closed eyes are droplets of either sweat or tears. We look up to ask Wren for an explanation but he is gone. Now her breathing settles into the deep, slow rhythm of sleep. We sit by her in the nearly dark until her face and ours are disappeared by the night. Then we sit some more until the moon is in the room too, or rather staring in through the windows with its slip half on.

  ‘How will we know her when she wakes?

  will she be a sun or a moon?

  a generator of light

  or a reflector of light?’

  We look out for the moon but now the clouds are between us. Wren says the moon and the sky here are not the moon and sky in the city. We don’t remember the moon or the sky in the city. A possum chitters and another answers, there’s pattering over the tin roof and a pause and then a round of shrieking and a few solid thumps and then nothing. We pad back up the hallway in the dark. One of our eyes has perfect night vision.

  Made from boar bristle with a wooden back, our hairbrush belonged to our mother, and maybe even her mother before. It has no handle but fits perfectly in a woman’s palm. Our hair is long and the shade of brown closest to black. We brush in slow strokes beginning with our scalps and winding down, from the centre to the sides of our skulls and down our back to the curve where our sacrum begins, running our fingers through the tingle and the shiver and the
drawing-out of breath into a sigh.

  We stroke, our hearts pumping the same blood, our brain cells sucking the sugar and the oxygen from our mouths. We have two sets of teeth! Feel this, here. O! Double the hit of endorphins. We have everything beautiful twice.

  Lying down on our back, we bunch the pillows under our heads and run the backs of our hands over our chest, lightly, like a wing, like her hand might run.

  Wren says that sometime around 1900 our great-grandfather bought Snow Lease Number such-and-such from the government – a thousand acres of wild alpine land for grazing sheep in summer. He found the site with the help of the Jaithmathang people, the Dhudhuroa people – following their trails over the saddle between mountains and out along Wild Dog Plain. These trails came alive many thousands of years ago when people followed the stars, clouds, sun and the moon from one sacred place to another. Wren says our great-grandfather did not understand that the land wasn’t the government’s to sell, nor his to buy and own. Our great-grandfather did not understand that the land wasn’t the government’s to sell, nor his to buy and own. Our home was first built from slab and bark with a dirt floor. The wooden chimney and fireplace were lined with stones and other rubble scavenged from around the valley and covered with a plaster of mud. The roof was bark laid over mountain-ash rafters and covered in galvanised-iron sheets.

  There are four main rooms still, a verandah at the front and an outhouse. A pit toilet. But back then the sheep got footrot, flystrike and black disease, and wildfires came through and most of the land was abandoned and the house was left to its own devices and the weather set to work on it. By the time we came along the stone chimney had begun to cave in, the floorboards were rotting away and the water tank was a place for thistles to grow tall and strong. Now the house is safer from wildfires because Wren built a mudbrick outer shell over the wooden boards. We helped carry the sand and soil from the bottom of Blindeye Creek and mixed it with horse dung and alpine grass and creek water and we all slapped it on the walls with our hands, laughing like children, and let it dry in the sun. Our hands dried and cracked too. The corrugated-iron roof is steep so the heavy winter snow slides easily to the ground and Wren widened the sloping verandah on two sides and planted muscat and jasmine and common ivy to keep the summer sun from burning through the windows. Pygmy possums make their nests in the tangle of vines.