Early mornings, the house smells of wood sap and leftover sunshine. It is the time of year to pickle fruit and vegetables. Before Wren came, we lived on wild-seed potatoes and onions mostly. Now we grow cabbages, carrots, tomatoes, beetroot, lemons and quinces and pears. And we’ll slice and dry the apples and hang beans and garlic from the wood-beams in the roof. Wren gets cash from selling our own bottled lemon liqueur and fruit wine to Sammy Whistle, who marks everything up a heap and sells them on at farmers’ markets. They do okay. Other than growing weed, it’s the only money we make. If we ever had a birth certificate, we don’t know where it is (what would it say?). Wren’s is lost too.
On the east side of the house is the chimney and round the other side is the bigger water tank – one our most precious thing in winter and the other our most precious thing in summer. Indigenous people never lived full time on this land of theirs. It wasn’t just that they knew the country better. They were part of the land and part of the land was in them and even though the mountains were their greatest source of honour and strength and spirit and ceremony, it made no sense to risk everything by being here at the height of summer when the wildfires, kindled by lightning, flew fast and fierce through the eucalypts. You can’t outrun fire and there’s nowhere to hide. In winter the freeze is in the air and in the snow and the water and it finds its way through your skin to your bones and it sets the marrow in your bones.
Snow daisies and trigger plants are a different colour each hour as the sun, in passing from east to directly overhead to west, arouses their petals at new and newer angles. The sun filters through our skin and our skin changes colour from morning to night in the same way. Greyish first thing in the near-dark, milky at breakfast, flushed red-brown spotted, veins bursting at noon, sheened in the afternoon like the peaches ripe in the orchard, dusky when our fingers and toes are uncovered and cold in bed. We have two hearts yet our fingers and toes are stubbornly numb and blue, the littlest ones blue-black even in summer. Perhaps neither heart has its rhythm quite right. Perhaps one pumps the new red-warm blood, puffed up and oxygen rich, into our wrists and ankles. But it never reaches our fingers or toes. It is sucked back by the other heart – too soon.
Wren makes coffee first thing and the smell of it wakes us and evokes a pleasure in us that we imagine is like the warmth of a kiss. Our feet hit the floor in the same way every day and we go to the toilet and sit there and wait and pee and wait to make sure our bladder’s empty. When we were younger it didn’t always work. We’d stand up too soon, one of us yelling o no! and pee running down our legs.
In the kitchen, Wren has his shirt off. There’s a scar running around his right flank, rough and uneven, chocked. He makes his coffee by grinding the coffee beans together with four cardamom pods (green), a pinch of nutmeg, cinnamon and then adding cold water in a small pot and heating it on the wood stove till the air bubbles begin to rise. We let the coffee-mud sink to the bottom of the cups and add a spoonful of sugar and drink it black for all of its smoke and spice. Before Wren came to live here we were starving, we didn’t know how to grow vegetables properly or preserve fruit and it took all day to catch a single fish in the creek. It’s not difficult to remember what that felt like – everything was friable and without good reason tears fell from our eyes and we had too many bones and cold wasn’t a measure of temperature but a measure of pain. Even when spring came and then summer and outside it was warmer – we were always cold. We hardly slept at all.
‘He saved us
he did, he saved us
what do we have to give him?
us?
are we enough?’
Headshake. Half-smile.
‘Are we enough?’
We don’t know.
And then we remember the woman and we can see in our faces in the mirror on the opposite wall that we remember her at exactly the same moment.
But she’s sleeping. For the first time, she looks peaceful. She doesn’t moan when we change the blanket and sheet beneath her. We pack newly washed sheets under her left side and angle her neck and head so she’s almost lying on her right, because once we saw bedsores become ulcers that grew deep through the skin and smelt rotten and never healed.
In the kitchen Wren is pouring coffee beans and peeled cardamom pods, nutmeg and cinnamon into a jar.
‘What if she doesn’t get better?’ we ask.
‘I don’t know.’
‘What’ll we do?’
‘I’ll bury her, I guess.’
We take hold of Wren’s upper arm and wrench him around to face us. ‘Wren!’
‘Sorry.’
‘Are you?’
‘Nobody lives forever.’
‘What?’
‘Sorry. I’m just tired. I can’t sleep.’
‘Are you scared?’
‘No.’
‘Are you scared of her?’
‘No!’
‘Are you scared she’ll die?
or are you scared she’ll live?’
‘Shut up. Both of you.’
‘Then why can’t you sleep?’
‘What?’
‘Why can’t you sleep?’
‘Mattress is lumpy. Bed bugs. Fleas in the sheets.’
‘Wash everything and dry it in the sun and flip your mattress.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Fleas
really?
you’re running away from us, Wren, we know you are
we know you are.’
Wren laughs and turns his back to us and pours in the rest of the coffee beans and cardamom pods and sugar and the flushred comes and comes fast – from deep in his chest, all the way up his neck to his cheeks and we say nothing and the flushred comes on even stronger and we stand still as still and quiet, close, waiting for him to reassure us that none of this is his fault, that he hasn’t stolen the woman from somewhere, that he hasn’t hurt her, that he’d never—
‘I didn’t do anything wrong, all right? If I hadn’t come along and found her on the road, she’d be dead now.’
But we keep standing, keep on standing here, our hip pressing against his thigh.
She is an ivory kind of stillness – all day we’ve watched and waited but she hasn’t moved, hasn’t woken, hasn’t sighed in her sleep, nor are her eyes fluttering behind her eyelids, seeing her dreams. Is this a healing sleep, so deep she is temporarily gone from us into another land? We don’t know.
‘Or is she?
no no.’ Feather under her nose.
‘Yes, breathing
yes.’
But her skin so hot and the sheets wet.
‘Something’s wrong
water, a washcloth, iodine
iodine and salt
eucalypt.’
In the kitchen we gather up the bottle of iodine and one of the packets of salt dried hard and lumpy, and a jar of homemade eucalyptus oil and we pour cold water from the tap into a bowl and all the while our hearts beat terribly out of time – a thump we can feel through our ribs, then a pause, then a rush of painful half-thumps that rise up into our throats and the backs of our mouths till we lean over the sink and vomit.
Afterwards, dizzy, we tiptoe back to the living room and when we lift the sheet covering her body – there it is. Below her left hip where the bruising is at its worst, a shiny red swelling the diameter of an orange, suppurating in the centre, the skin in the centre broken open. We inhale together. Ragged. The smell of it is bad.
‘No
o no
o no
think!
panic does us no good
think
how?
we need help
how?
what do we do?
watch over her
and wait for her to die?
if quiet is not enough, if warmth is not enough, if peace is not enough
nor water or air
if we are not enough
o
we are not enough
then th
ink
is it infection?
yes infection
she’ll die here unless
no
unless
can we?
what?
maybe
maybe
a knife?
to cut her open?
yes, get the infection out
no, salt and iodine are enough
we need something more
what else is there?
maggots
no
yes, maggots
o no, howling inside
howling.’
Breath to breath, that’s how it is. She breathes and stops and in the silence we hold our breath and wait and listen and then she breathes again and then we breathe again. The night is long and the minutes rise and recede with the sound of cicadas shrilling in the grass outside. Sitting cross-legged by her head, moistening her lips with water and wiping the sweat from her face with a cloth, we speak to her softly and low, our lips touching her ear now and then. Beneath the sheet the maggots are doing their work.
Some things are inexplicable to us – romantic love for example – sexual love – the drawing of two people towards one another like they each have a kind of gravity that responds in that particular and precise way to no other. It isn’t quantifiable. We’ve always thought of those kinds of relationships in the abstract, as a kind of alchemy, as mysterious as turning an ordinary metal into gold. One of our second-hand books has paintings in it by the Spaniard Pablo Picasso. Though we know in theory there are many kinds of love, each time we look at the pictures in the book we wonder what is it that he understands so well about the human heart that we do not.
The cicadas have stopped and the darkness is still again. Death or life or life-and-death or life is merely the beginning of death – this is what our land has taught us. Animals are unencumbered and unhaunted by the knowledge that life is finite and death inevitable. People steal and savage and plead so as not to die and still die – run and fight and rage so as not to die and still die – lie and cheat and bargain and blaze so as not to die and still die. No wonder heaven was invented to keep us well-mannered and sane, because without an afterlife of any kind we may – many of us – go half-mad with the knowledge of death.
‘Shhh
what?
hear that?
what?
don’t know, shh shh shh, listen
is it Wren?
no
someone’s coming?
shh, lowish thudding, something higher, rasping, engine maybe, wheels maybe
what’ll we do?’
And here we are now, fighting because we are human and we know some of many things there are to know about death and the thought of those things makes us cold and turns us horribly dark inside, shrunk and afraid until we remember that we are alive – us – in spite of everything, in spite of the knowledge of death. We hold tight to however much of life is left.
‘Breathe, silly
mm-hmm, but
breathe
hear it still?
no.’
The maggots Wren found for us are cleaning her wound of dead tissue and pus. She groans now and again, head back, mouth open, her breath rotting, so we try keeping her lips and tongue moist with cool water mixed with drops of eucalyptus oil. Bathe her hair and her face and her neck and her hands and her feet. We turn her ever so slightly to one side and then to the other. She is certainly thinner.
‘What about a griffin?
yes, so she is, an emblem of Christ
lion – for its fight
she is a lion
and eagle for its flight.’
As the hands of the clock in the living room reach three, we lose hope. The night is at its deepest and is going on forever – it is so deep, a primal darkness, impenetrable, and from which it feels impossible for us – for any of us – to emerge. Even light from the lantern is feeble and hemmed in by darkness, as is our breathing.
Hours ago Wren said, I’m going to bed. And we said, goodnight then. But he is still here beside us and we are thankful because three o’clock is the time when an unbroken cold of despair worms in our veins towards our hearts and a part of us is lost to the cold and silence, we feel only half-human, we wonder too long about death, remember the deaths of other children, every breath of air gnarly in our lungs and once again we see the wild eyes and the teeth of the dead pulsing in the corners of the room for all those hours we were made to stand in the corner of the bedroom at Hope Home – stand very straight and still as still with the dead murmuring in our ears. Back then we were sure of nothing, and as we stood in the corner of the room – there – but just out of reach – were the things we’d done – awkward things, shameful things. They waited for us – circling, salivating – they were ready at any moment to rise up and engulf us.
Wren says we don’t know how lucky we are to have each other to share the heaviness of grief and shame. He says there are enormous things that he’s never told anyone in his whole life because he’s never had anyone to tell. He says they breed in him.
Suddenly our left head flies sideways, ungainly enough to be opposed to the spin of the earth and now time and space and breath and light are spinning in one direction and we are spinning in the other and we can’t see anything at all and we say, both our voices scratchy in the dark, ‘Wren?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What have you done?’
We killed our mother.
‘She’ll be well soon
how can we know?
she’ll be fine soon
it’s bad
not forever, she’ll be well
but she was nearly dying, whatever happened was—
never mind
who hurt her so bad?
maybe it was all an accident
or?
or?’
The day Wren turned up on our doorstep unannounced, it rained and the raindrops were like shrapnel. He sat in the kitchen and told us his story – how he arrived in Swiggin on the long-haul bus and went straight to the hotel and he could hear a fight going on in the bar and a lot of glass breaking and people getting shoved around but he was already burned through and ready to disappear in whatever way he could. He went inside and sat in a corner farthest away from the fight and began drinking.
‘I wasn’t looking to be fixed, just so you know,’ he told us. ‘All I’m saying is I went there to stop the god-awful shakes and wipe the memories blank only I got up to take a piss after a couple beers and knocked into one of the men who’d been fighting and he jumped off his bar stool and yelled something at me and I was well on my way to somewhere else and I didn’t understand him. I said, What? He said, Do you want to get knocked down? I said, No. He said, Come on then. I said, I said no. And then, I dunno why, he put up his fists and he was ducking and weaving left and right and he tried circling round me on his toes and it was all so stupid and I just stood there stock-still and stared at him. Eventually he got bored. Soon as he started to turn his back on me, I punched him on the side of his head – light-like yeah, not a real punch – but right on the temple where the skull bone is thin. He staggered for a bit and then reeled off outside. I felt good then. I went and took a piss and sat back down. The barman came over and asked me where I was from, where I was going and so on.’
Wren stopped his story and looked at us quickly. ‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘I told him, passing y’know through. He shrugged. He said, all right and he stood there in front of me for a bit and then picked up the empty glass and walked away and came back with a full one. I knew it was time to leave when things went blurry. I remember gripping the edge of the table for balance and my hands were all sweaty and I slipped and the men at the other tables watched me fall. They laughed pretty hard.’
‘Did you deserve it?’
‘I guess I did.’
In our garden marijuana doubles up between sweet corn and trellised beans, each row protecting those either side from the sharp
alpine wind. The sweet corn has finished. It doesn’t grow well here – too cold – but we’ve picked the few ears that ripened properly to eat fresh and to pickle with other vegetables for sweetness. Wren digs the failed and wilted cornstalks down into the earth so the cycle of decay and growth will continue. When Wren was a kid he says he didn’t believe it was possible for there to always be an even number of corn kernels on a cob, and he set out to disprove it – before he ate a cob for dinner, he counted the kernels. Always an even number: 820, 742, 788. Wren says he had no friends at school, not one fellow kid he could honestly call friend. He told us this quietly and steadily while he was making wine one afternoon with just the tiniest crack in his voice. We, on the other hand, have never needed a friend or ever even longed for one.
This country isn’t all trees and grasslands and mountains, it holds essential truths that may or may not be visible to the human eye and are unbeholden to human constructs of any kind, like weight or time or distance. With immersion in the whole – fluid as it is, multi-layered, hybrid and ageless – comes a sort of perfection, or perhaps we mean grace.
Fusion Page 4
