Fusion

by Kate Richards

  When her eyes open she looks wild for a moment and her hands come together under her breasts, cradling something that isn’t there. Wren appears behind us. He looks better, the rash has gone from his face, just a smouldering of it left on his neck above his shirt collar.

  Wren walks past us and says to Christ, ‘Is it okay if I sit here?’

  She flinches and her whole body stiffens but her voice is even and she says, ‘In your own home? You’ve got a nerve.’ Smiles a flash of a smile and now we know she has a sense of humour and we settle on the floor too with our back propped up by a chair and we see Wren smile a flash of a smile back and we see her eyes take it into their starryblue and hold it.

  The room warms. Silence so companionable we don’t want to break it, but Christ is looking at us like she’s waiting for something.

  ‘Is there anything – anything you remember

  anything at all?’

  She takes a long breath. ‘I remember running but I don’t know why. I remember the road. My feet were burning. I was thirsty.’

  ‘What about – where you’re from?’

  ‘And there was a lot of light. And – I was lost, or at least – I don’t know – confused and I think I tripped and got up again and kept running – and then there was no light. Did I hit my head?’

  ‘Are you scared?’ Wren asks.

  ‘What of?’

  ‘Everything.’

  Though he was the one asking the question, somehow Wren is also the one to have answered it.

  She says, ‘No.’ Then, ‘I mean I – don’t think so.’

  Light rain comes down, scattering our sight through the window, refracting the trees and the morning sunlight – colour spreading over us like a warm blanket. But it is just an illusion.

  Christ says, ‘Do you have a phone?’

  ‘No.’

  She sighs. ‘Oh well.’ She sits up a bit. ‘But what about your family?’ She looks at us – confused – and says to Wren with her head tipped to one side, ‘Why isn’t anyone calling for you? Don’t you have friends?’

  ‘Ours is a peaceful life.’

  ‘Lonely?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Wren is saying. ‘We’re happy.’ He’s fiddling with his bootlaces, his ankles and feet jiggling on the floor. Fiddling – one of the things that annoyed his mother. Movement of any kind. He says, ‘We’re really happy.’

  ‘What about a radio?’ Christ asks.

  Wren shakes his head. She raises her eyebrows.

  ‘Can’t get any frequencies out this far.’

  She looks out the window. ‘It’s like a twilight kind of life.’

  ‘No we don’t … it’s not … I mean it’s different, but no it’s not like that, you don’t understand … the reasons … and what happened and the why of … why … thing is, I had to learn to stay alive in spite of … stuff, things and all … and the twins had to learn to survive too … otherwise … well … the thing is, see here … we don’t have to keep on trying to stay alive … here … the wild … we just live, we live free.’

  ‘But aren’t you kind of locked away?’

  ‘Nah. The wild’s in us here. We’re safe. It’s good. It’s all good. Self-sufficient. Everything we need.’ He stands up and we do too, moving light and quick down the corridor to the kitchen and as we go we’re almost sure she says something else. We’re almost sure she says, about love?

  ‘Did she

  no no

  we heard wrong

  wrong

  we mustn’t think that

  no

  and we mustn’t make up stories.’

  Looking up the corridor from the kitchen we see Wren come out of his room with Christ’s backpack. Has he kept it there all these days? He’s holding it up in front of his face and his eyes are closed and we hear him inhaling and then he disappears. One moment we’re in the kitchen and the next we’ve slid back up the hallway and stopped again before the open door of the living room. We don’t feel good about this – this – sneaking. We can’t see them. There’s rustling and sniffing and the fluttering sound of paper, like maybe pages in a book flipped back and forth.

  He says, ‘Something in here will tell us who you are.’

  ‘No,’ says Christ. ‘No I don’t think so.’ Then, ‘I didn’t write this. But I think it is my notebook. I think the person who wrote this is going to kill me.’

  The air around us empties of light and grows cold and the cold ripples out until it fills the house and we remember when one of the children died at Hope Home and we stood in the chapel with his little white coffin on a high bench and its lid was closed so we weren’t sure if he was really in there or not and it was very quiet, the room cold like now and we didn’t know about death then except that we were not to touch the coffin and we must keep very still, so we thought, death is a sterile place – fragile, brittle and breakable – and we worried about the child in that place in case he became breakable too.

  Wren says, ‘Are you sure?’

  We move into the doorway with our hands covering our lips. Wren sees us and points to the notebook.

  We say together, ‘No.’

  Christ says, ‘Yes.’

  We say, ‘Who?’

  ‘It’s a blur,’ she says, rubbing her forehead. ‘Except that. That writing. I know that writing.’

  We sit down opposite. Christ watches us sit. She takes the notebook from Wren and lets it fall on the floor like it’s a dead thing.

  ‘We want to protect you – try our best

  to keep you safe

  for always,’ we say it calmly, softly.

  Her face blooms. Tears spring out from her eyes. And catch in the sunlight, falling from the bloom of her face, of her eyes. She wipes them away with the back of her hand. ‘Jeeeeeez.’ She half-laughs. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Not at all.’ We shake our heads in perfect time: left, centre, right, and she laughs. ‘You are both – you’re – I mean – it’s just – unusual. You’re kind of. Amazing?’

  We sing a little inside.

  But we’re careful. ‘Are you asking us?

  or telling us?’

  ‘Telling you.’

  ‘One of a kind,’ Wren says. ‘One and two-thirds of a kind.’

  ‘One and four-thirds of a kind,’ we say.

  Wren winks at us and picks up Christ’s backpack and one by one he places the things inside it on her lap: the socks, compass, map, the pen and the flashlight and the baby’s blanket – pale blue, covered with silver stars. She looks at the things on her lap but she doesn’t touch them. Then she says, ‘What would I want a compass for? I can’t work a compass.’

  Wren puts the compass in her hand and she closes her hand around it and then turns the dial till the orienting arrow and the magnetic arrow are one above the other and pointing north.

  So we smile, all three of us – the first thing we’ve done together. Smile. Even Christ with the compass in her hand is smiling. The rush of wings in our heads, time collapsing and expanding, the beat of wings – possibility and hope and the way hope sounds like wings – candescent.

  ‘Huh,’ says Christ.

  ‘Huh,’ says Wren. He leans closer to her and folds his hands over hers as they hold the compass. His breath is a bit wild. She looks up at him and laughs and her eyes and his eyes pulse in time.

  Before we understood the word heart we knew that we’ve two of them. Whenever we ran for a sustained while (once we eventually learned to run) and afterwards stopped still, if we put our hands on our chest, through the skin over our ribs, two hearts beat side by side with their own particular rhythm, one much faster than the other and the slower one pausing now and then as though drawing breath or enjoying a moment of quiet rest. We were delighted. And curious.

  Wren brings home boxes of second-hand books from nearby markets – new books and old books, hardbacks with dusty covers, paperbacks with sticky covers, pages browned and mildewed, pages stained with chocolate? Re
d wine? And textbooks and cookbooks and murder mysteries, old moth-eaten encyclopaedia sets with missing volumes, lots of Mills & Boon, Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine Volumes One and Two, The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Reader’s Digest, Confucius and Confucianism. O we love to read. Knowledge is our only kind of power. Wipe clean the covers and spines and open to page one, a new world. Our understanding of most things comes from these second-hand books, from fictional characters, poets, illustrations of bodies and animals and birds. Our understanding isn’t always connected with the right words – sometimes it arrives without words or it is there in the very cool, clear space between words – realisation is a rush of joy, a fierce flash of light, a brilliant colour or a creeping horror – we feel knowing and knowing is more than fact, more than intuition, more than logic, more than bare truth, and so our hearts beat faster side by side, adrenaline and endorphins and all the other hormones mix in our blood, our minds are connected through blood, our nerves fire together whether we’re conscious or unconscious. Not long ago we learned the word synergy and it is now on our list of favourite words.

  The things we read we don’t forget. We have time to think a lot. We think about thinking. Metacognition, that’s what it’s called – thinking about thinking. Meta in Latin means beyond, and beyond is another of our favourite words because it carries with it elements of the fantastical and of freedom.

  There’s enough water in the water tank to wash our hair so we fill a bucket and take it into the outhouse, walking fast with the anticipation of being fresh-washed and clean. We love water even though we cannot swim. Our hair is thick and strong and has a life of its own in the wind and we keep it exactly the same length – just above our waist, easy to reach and plait. Using both hands to massage first one scalp and then the other with our eyes closed, running our fingers over the bumps on our skulls. But standing naked with the sun coming in through the high window, we must look carefully to lather our skin with a washcloth and soap. Arms and legs are thrill-full of feeling – not shared – and belly and lower and all round under to bottom – no-feeling whatsoever for a half of us.

  Wrists, hands, scrub fingernails, left arm, underarm, shoulder, necks, fragrance, curves, hair and pelvis soft soft and bones slow sloooow o drifting up, ethereal, then the cool water pouring over our heads, drowning, tickle and laugh and curl over and laugh and stomp in the suds and sway, thrill of whispery fingertips over breasts and down slowly down, finding just the right – and ah and again, a bit more.

  ‘Still still or fall.’

  And we still and then we see in the little piece of mirror that our necks are angled, muscular, knotted rather than swanlike, our arms are scrawny and our chest is as broad as a man’s, our small breasts are set wide and high, shallow, and our nipples are very pale and there’s nothing of the blown-glass fullness of Christ’s breasts, nor the translucency, nor the perfect spectrum of pinks, nor the o-so-delicate veins. And despite the mildness of the air and the mildness of the water, our toes are still blue.

  To go back now we’ve come this far is impossible. She is in our blood. We hear her heart and feel her heartbeat. It is a wonderful thing – to feel another’s heartbeat. However it is that our blood becomes warm, she is now a part of what keeps our blood warm. She will be well. She will be happy and she will be well and we will keep her – we will keep her safe. She is an earthquake and a bird and we’re healing her till she is whole again. Trees struck by lightning can indeed heal, with water and sunlight and time, even those trees struck deep inside where their sapwood and heartwood are – they heal. Though they carry the scars forever. These are the things we know.

  ‘A drink,’ says Wren.

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Wren.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Christ.

  ‘Medicinal,’ says Wren, winking at Christ.

  We watch Christ watch Wren as he stands up and goes over to the old wooden cabinet and comes back with a bottle three-quarters full of something translucentpinkygold which he uncorks with a deep phop! and he offers the bottle to Christ. She looks at us. A frisson of warmth runs out from our hearts along our inner arms. We nod, we say together, ‘A warning – it’s fire.’

  Christ moves forward on the couch to take the bottle and she grimaces and closes her eyes tight as her left leg turns – she’s suspended for a moment with the pain, still as still, and pale. Then she puts the bottle to her lips and tips it up and opens her mouth.

  ‘God!’ she says, laughing. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Quince liqueur.’

  She takes another swig. Says, ‘That’ll knock someone’s eyes out.’

  We grin. Wren does too.

  ‘Good for the pain,’ Wren says.

  The bottle goes round and it goes round again.

  ‘Where do you get your food from?’

  ‘We bottle and pickle and dry what we can.’

  ‘Your own?’

  ‘Some. Onions and carrots and beets and cabbage

  quinces and apples

  Wren buys tins of tuna and sardines

  tuna, sardines

  and packets of rice too and beans

  o, so many of tins of beans

  and dried ones for soaking

  beer and sweets sometimes too.’

  We watch Wren watching Christ. The way he looks at her, the way he leans towards her. There is wonder in it and something hot and pulsing and something dreamlike and something more – yearning? Lust? He has not earned the right to look at her like that. We all drink, Christ on the darkly red couch and Wren on the floor and the sun in our eyes and the cats stretched long long. After a while Christ turns to us and says, ‘Did your mother know? Before you were born?’

  By the middle of the day we’re all drunk. It’s very comfortable lying here on the floorboards with sunlight coming in through the window soaking-warm our skin and the liqueur bringing with it the same kind of warmth inside. And a softening, a hum, an easiness. Ants tickling in a thin black line over one ankle. Everything shimmery and out of focus – kissed.

  ‘Then,’ says Christ. ‘I mean, but like, how did—?’

  We don’t answer.

  ‘How did you survive?’

  We close our four eyes and see Christ’s lips and her smile and the bit of soul in her eyes and the line of her jaw and her neck and the lovely veins in her neck. She’s just here, just here, breathing the same air.

  ‘Everything to lose,’ we whisper to ourself.

  ‘Everything?

  everything.’

  ‘Why’d you call me Angus?’ Wren’s voice – sudden and husky – broken-up.

  No-one answers.

  We are holding hands.

  Wren’s lying on his back staring at the ceiling. Not blinking. The sound of one of the cats, snoring.

  The sound of sunlight falling through the window.

  A bird calling another bird.

  It’s late when we wake up. Christ is awake, looking from the couch to where Wren is lying on the dusty wooden floorboards. He opens his eyes, sees her. ‘Do you need anything?’

  We sit up to answer him but he’s up now (so fast!) standing next to Christ with his back to us.

  ‘Really gotta pee again,’ she says. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Nonono problem,’ he says. He turns and gestures to us, help. We help her outside to the pit toilet, a good twenty metres from the house with its cover of corrugated iron that keeps it dry but still at freezing point in winter. Wren follows at a distance and sits down in the grass, watching.

  Already evening has come. Wren is still sitting on the grassy slope when we walk back, Christ leaning on our left arm, so we settle her on the grass next to him and then we stand up and wait higher up on the hill behind them. The sun low in the westerly sky but strong and direct, a last summer-bright glare. She chokes on the sun. Closes her eyes tight. So he does too – closes his eyes and sighs and then she sighs and they lie back side by side, breathing together the air of
mountain spring water and eucalyptus oil and snow daisies and swamp heath and wattle and marsh marigolds and buttercups and tussock grass and herbs and mosses. They stay this way for a long time. Like they’ve forgotten us. No. Not true. Have they? No. Forgotten us?

  We stand still as still in our shadow.

  She touches his arm with a fold of her shirt and it is fleeting and yet we see it ripple through him and we imagine it a kind of feeling so acute as to be pleasure and pain both.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she asks.

  ‘Angus.’

  ‘Angus.’ She examines the word with her mouth, rolls it around on her tongue, tastes it and then she sits up very straight and spits it out. Her arms cover her chest and her hands ball up in her mouth and she leans forward and retches and gags and retches yellowbrown bile and saliva and Wren looks panicked and she’s lying sideways, curled up on the ground except for her left leg out straight and we automatically back away till we’re lost into the dark under the verandah and we don’t feel good to be hiding like this, sneaking and listening, but we are curious (painful-like, shameful-like).

  Whisper low to ourself, ‘What’s happened?

  is it a memory?

  of fear?

  of grief?

  or pain?

  pain

  or sorrow?

  sorrow

  or murder or madness or darkness or loss or death or worse than death worse than death?

  worse than death

  like us?

  o no

  not like us?

  no.’

  Christ shudders, her face deep in the grass, and then up from her chest and throat comes a wracking sound like a tree falling, breaking in two.

  ‘He’s said something wrong

  really wrong. What did he say?

  don’t know

  no

  shall we help?

  no, wait.’

  ‘Angus?’ she whispers.

  He says, ‘Sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t. Never meant.’

  ‘Where are we oh god why—’

  ‘It’s okay.’ Wren slides his arm around her shoulder, touching the bones in her shoulder with his fingerpads, her hair falling over his hand.