Fusion

by Kate Richards

  I’ll follow because I don’t know what else to do. Mouth drier, tongue clamped. Christ, with her funny, straight-left-legged gait is lurching away from the house towards the apple trees and Blindeye Creek lying in the dark beyond them. There is only a weak, white light from the moon. I run till I’m beside her.

  ‘I lost him and now I’m going to find him,’ she says. ‘I will find him. I won’t stop.’ She isn’t crying. She doesn’t look sad or frightened but I know – feel – that she will kill me right this instant if I get in her way.

  ‘My baby,’ she says.

  Oh hell

  What can I do

  Oh hell help

  Help her

  Acrid sweat is coming off her skin – ordinary sweat and fear hormones and salt and grief and blood, a man’s sweat after a hard day in the fields in summer – no – sharper even than that – compressed – potent – female – is it the ferocity of motherhood? Too dark to see anything so I catch her hand and hold it tight to my chest and let my heart tell her I am here.

  Planning escape from Hope Home began on our sixteenth birthday. Us whispering into the night, analysing every possible failure, every possible outcome and consequence. We had one chance. We were racked from the years of curiosity and prodding, science experiment and ridicule – we were strung so taut a dandelion blew into us and shattered us. Our only hope was to attempt a new life as an outcast.

  So we practised. Two weaknesses leaning close against one another create a strength. We taught ourself to run on our toes – soft and fast like a cat – to jump and climb a vertical height, to feel pain in silence, to never give in, to listen to the world around us, to see in the dark, to hide and be silent and still as still – for hours. We stopped minding if we were made to stand in the corner of the shared bedroom through the night. Stopped minding the shouting, ‘Stop your slouching! Stand up straight!’ The whispers through wet lips, ‘Freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek.’

  Instead of the taunts and insults, we heard the ghosts of Hope Home children who’d already died – sucking and swallowing and wailing – and we were determined not to die there too, so we made up a chant and we whispered it, a line each, to each other –

  ‘Is all right

  shhhh

  we are

  solid like mountain

  hush

  is all right now

  shhhh

  we are

  solid like mountain

  free like bird

  free like sky.’

  Over many months we taught ourself to read. We began with simple words like at. We figured out other letters by adding them to at. Vat, bat, cat, sat, mat, fat, hat, pat, rat. Then we moved on to -sh words and-ee- and -oo- and then -i- words which were harder. We stole tins of food. We stole boxes of matches and candles, one by one. We stole a knife. Two knives. We stole loaves of bread and ate the bread and read the words we recognised on the labels, whispering to ourself. We stole a bible from the chapel but the words were too small and sometimes we stole newspapers before they were thrown out and we traced the headlines with our fingers though we never learned to write.

  To build strength in our arms and grip in our hands, we fought the ghosts of the children who’d already died – pummelling until their bodies flew apart and their voices fell back once more into the wind – and we learned how to balance on one leg and how to tip without falling and how to fall down and stay relaxed in the falling, like cats do. We walked beside the high brick walls of Hope Home every day until we were sure of the best place to go over. We ran and hopped and skipped. We were small and whip-thin and we pressed ourself inward to become even smaller.

  From the town we planned to find our way to the mountains any way we could. There would be no going back. We stole tins of fish and baked beans and we stole a bottle for water and a blanket and we had matches and a map and enough coins for a bus fare. The only thing we owned that once belonged to our father was a photograph – a photograph of our mother and father standing together in front of a little wooden house with a stone chimney, surrounded by trees. There was writing on the back of the photograph, and a diagram. For many years we kept the photograph hidden from the other children. It wasn’t until we learnt to read that we realised the diagram was a hand-drawn map of a town called Swiggin and a road twisting and turning all the way up to our mountain. We knew the walk would be long, longer than we’d ever walked before. We tried not to think of hunger and we didn’t know enough to be afraid of the wide, wide world.

  ‘Remember the night it rained

  it rained all that night

  and we slipped in the mud and broke our wrist

  couldn’t tell anyone, no-one to tell

  it wasn’t such a bad break, we were lucky

  pain made us vomit, didn’t it?

  did it?

  pain made us dizzy, our knees shook and we fell over again, didn’t we?

  o

  we couldn’t sleep, could we?

  o

  couldn’t sleep for the pain

  o but remember the night the moon went red

  yes

  they said we were sinners and they said their god was showing us his anger

  and we said no. Their god was crying, he was sad, he was bleeding

  and we asked if their god had a soul

  and they were angry with us

  that was pretty funny

  it wasn’t – we shouldn’t have asked it – after that they knew – how scared of them we were

  but it was a true thing to ask

  it wasn’t

  it was true

  didn’t matter

  it wasn’t true?

  yes

  but now – we love their god-bleeding moon

  do we?

  mmm.’

  Our first morning of freedom was much worse than we’d imagined. There were too many people and they were too loud, too fast, too vivid, too random. There were too many cars, too many lights, too much colour, there was laughter – even when we closed our eyes there was too much light and colour. Everything smelt different – stronger, livelier, sweeter – our mouths rushed and filled with saliva. There was also staring and nudging and pointing and sideways-turning, there were eyebrows and eyes and mouths. The whispering. So we travelled by night, walking a metre or two to the left of the edge of the highway. We lay down to sleep in ditches at dawn and crawled to standing at sundown and walked on. We washed in the creeks we crossed and drank the sweet creek water and scavenged for food on the outskirts of towns. Walk. Stop. Still. Wait. Watch. Steal. Run. Hide.

  When we saw our mountain off to the east at the end of a long night – enormous and silver-blue and breathing – it gave us hope as nothing ever had before.

  It’s too dark. Too dark to see anything but she says, ‘I lost him out there,’ and ‘He’s alive.’

  There is no other option. We set off down the driveway, the truck rolling along in neutral for the first hundred metres, so as not to wake the twins. Dumped in the truck is a canvas bag I’ll wear on my back with food and water bottles full-up and a sheathed hunting knife, flashlight, topographic map, compass and wool gloves and a tarpaulin. I stick my right hand out the window and light the road ahead with a high-power hunting spotlight and I cover Christ’s burning hand in between gear changes with my cold one.

  ‘We took a chance to get out,’ she says, low and hard. ‘We had to run. And we did. All morning. We’d been walking up that road for ages and we were so tired and we walked off the road, into the trees and I put him down in the grass where it was sheltered. I put him down to rest. He was sleeping. It was so hot. I must’ve – I dunno – I can’t remember. Oh god.’

  ‘It’ll be okay.’

  ‘I’ll die if I’ve lost my baby.’

  The temperature has dropped and the vinyl seats are cold and squeaky. The truck smells of petrol and dust. Once we’re below the winter snowline and the grassy plains have given in to forests of woollybutt and mountain gum, I slow up. I k
now this road but everything is either charcoal on black or the spotlight fading into the forest and trees throwing their shadows. The wound on the side of my head is dripping something warm on my neck. We go on, Christ hunched up and trembling in the passenger seat, my head like water over boiling. A baby. Oh no oh please god no. There aren’t any words for this, for a horror like this, no words for the hopelessness of our task, no words for the frantic kind of sorrow I feel, no words for the murder of a child, because if my nightmares are true – yet I don’t know. And even if I thought I knew, even if

  She’s only now remembered

  But

  The dreams

  Weeping in the face of the sun

  Engine stuttered, stopped and the shattered light, the crack of bone

  Mother says you’ve killed me

  Her body on the ground, her blood

  Christ says you’ve killed me

  Her body on the ground, her blood

  Her blood I cleaned away

  Except it hasn’t gone away

  Hell

  Oh hell

  Nothing I can say that I won’t hate myself for later.

  ‘Which side?’ Christ asks, stricken. ‘How will we know which side of the road I came from?’

  ‘We’ll look both sides.’

  She laughs a terrifying, utterly mirthless laugh and I swallow it down with all the panic and shame. We drive on with the dark for company.

  After another hour we’re halfway between home and Swiggin and it feels right – that I picked her up somewhere round here. I stop the truck and get out and help Christ down and we shine the spotlight around, walking slowly along the edge of the road one way and then turning around, and walking back along the other.

  No.

  We go farther off the road, deeper into the trees, stumbling behind the spotlight. Something crashes off in the distance. Something running.

  No.

  We get back in the truck and go on. Stop. Get down and walk – along the edges of the road and a couple of metres deeper through bracken and scrubby heath, the shadows of saplings rising up at us against the light like skeletons come alive, sentient, flaring and then falling away.

  No.

  We go on for a long time, turn around and go back, get down and walk, turn again and go on and then back.

  No.

  The very last line of the horizon is finally paler than the dome of the sky. We stop again. Stand still listening to the silence. Red eyes, both. Sweating.

  No.

  On a little more. Then, ‘Wait. This could be it.’

  I back up. Turn off the engine again and get down and help Christ out of the truck with her crutch and the hunting spotlight, me with the flashlight and pack on my back. It’s impossible to know if this is the right place, if there is a right place. I pin the key to the truck to the inside of my shirt pocket.

  ‘See, I think I came round this corner and you were just there,’ I say, fighting to get the words out before my throat closes round them.

  Christ directs the spotlight along the road and into the trees.

  ‘I thought you were dead.’

  ‘Was a baby crying?’

  ‘God no! No. Nothing. No-one. I swear. No-one.’

  Was there a baby crying?

  Was there a baby?

  We stand in the middle of the road. No moon left. No wind. No birds. No sound at all.

  ‘Let’s start from here,’ I say. ‘See that big tree fern? Remember that tree fern. It’ll be tall enough to spot from a good way away. We’ll look out for it on the way back.’

  The forest undergrowth is unwelcoming. Immediately we trip over hidden logs and stumble into rabbit holes covered by grasses and waist-high bracken. The shifting light from the flashlight as it hits the trees turns shadows into rocks and rocks into shadows. The sun isn’t yet above the horizon and I can’t see anything helpful at all and sweat is wetting up my shirt, knees trembling and eyes blurred with tears for the utter futility of our search. If there was once a tiny child alone here, alone in this scrubby and unforgiving wilderness – then life is a terrible thing.

  Christ says, ‘I wouldn’t have walked this far from the road. I wouldn’t have gone right into the bush, I don’t know it enough. Let’s go back. Which way back?’

  ‘This way.’

  Immediately, she changes her mind. ‘Let’s go in a bit further.’

  ‘We’ll have to double back.’

  ‘Just in case.’

  As the sun comes up I see we’ve come down from one mountain onto another plateau and further into a basin among gorse bitter pea and baeckea, alpine heaths and sedges and young silver wattle. The plants are packed tight as hedgerows, high as my chest like we’re wading through water, dark green and angry. We crouch low to search the ground but the vegetation is too dense and the leaves spike us. We go on in silence.

  It is dreamlike.

  And it’s a while before I realise why.

  The fog has rolled in without us realising, we’ve been so intent on looking down. How silent it is. How fast it moves to cover everything and blot out the sky. How cold it is, ice-cold and wet and thick and solid. It clings, wraithlike, to our clothes, its fingers peeling back our skin, looking for softness, for a way in. Inside us. Our blood.

  ‘You sure this is the right way?’ asks Christ.

  ‘Yeah.’

  No.

  Light shifted from the hopeful pink-gold of dawn to a bitter white. We keep going, pushing through the heath and the fog gnawing at our eyes.

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  No.

  ‘See, there’s the tree fern near where we came in.’

  Crashing through.

  ‘Here we go.’

  There’s no road.

  ‘It should be just here. I’m sure.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘What do we do?’

  I look up to the sky. There is no sky. The fog is even thicker, the quiet even quieter. Everything spins. Panic loops and my sense of direction swings round one hundred and eighty degrees and then back, and then around again like a compass at the magnetic pole.

  No birds are calling the morning.

  Treetops dissolved.

  No wind either.

  Was there a baby crying?

  A baby swaddled in a blanket under the trees

  Alone

  Oh hell

  We chitter forward for a few minutes, stop and listen for the sound of an engine on the road. Nothing. We listen for the cry of a baby. Nothing. We listen for any kind of sound to help orientate us. We walk on and stop and listen – listen even to the fog, but though the fog is breathing, it has no heartbeat and no soul, nor the ghost of a heart or a soul.

  ‘I’m too slow, Wren. My leg is bad. The pain is bad. Stop here. I’ll wait for you if you want to go on.’

  ‘No. We stay together.’

  ‘But where are we?’

  ‘Rest. Then we’ll climb up onto the spur high as we can. When the fog clears we’ll be able to see where we are, or at least see something I recognise – a river, a road, a mountain, a town. There’ll be something.’

  We sink down into the snowgrass. Christ says, ‘I’ll be better once the fog clears. We’ll find him once the fog clears.’

  ‘Sure we will.’ My voice, gravelly. This isn’t what I mean to say. But the wetcold is breathing in between the layers of clothes and its breath goes right through skin into blood, into my mind too. It turns everything blue. Everything blue exept my half-ear that burns and drips red now and then. We sit hunched up in silence for a long while. Then Christ’s teeth start to chatter and I stand up and turn and wrap one arm around a tree and give Christ my other hand while she puts her weight on her left leg with the crutch and then her right leg without the crutch. I push through heath and saplings and hold them apart for her.

  The baby

  Oh god

  What have I done?

  We go on like this, climbing the spur. The g
radient is steep with rocky outcrops that we crawl over and we move forward so slowly the sweat stays wet in my woollen shirt and the cold already there getting colder. But we go shambling on. At the summit there is a small and softly scooped-out plateau, grass shorn like a lawn by wombats and wallabies, a few boulders and one lonely snow gum, its leaves the only sound – pulsing, perfuming, whispering through the fog, its open-armed branches beckoning to us, a place of shelter, safety.

  Dropping the pack, I pull out the tarpaulin and lie it on the grass under the tree. We ease down. I get a water bottle and two pairs of woollen gloves from the pack and we drink and pull the gloves on and hunch up close against the damp and the heaviness of the fog and we stay like this, staring down at our feet, swaying a little.

  ‘Tell me,’ I say.

  ‘Tell you what?’

  ‘Everything.’

  Her hands flutter to her neck and back into her lap. She leans forward, turns and looks at me, holds my eyes carefully in hers and searches for something in me, perhaps humbleness or a knowledge of pain – I don’t know for sure.

  ‘I can see his face so well, even with my eyes closed – the first time we met, he’s got these really good tatts on his shoulders that were all kind of rippling round his biceps – but I think it was his eyes that I – or maybe his – anyway—

  —we met in the bar where I was working when I was seventeen. He was twenty-eight then. I liked that and I liked him. A lot. It wasn’t a Friday-night fling with a boy – he was a man. He was strong in all the good ways. Turned out to be the only time in my life a man I really liked, liked me back.’ She laughs, beautiful and frightening. ‘It’s amazing, I dunno exactly, like the whole world’s singing. Even angels. Waking up in the morning with him beside me, his leg heavy over mine, my hand on his chest as it goes up and down, my face tucked into his shoulder and my lips on the muscles of his arm where they swell … ah I can smell the salt on his skin. Huh. Anyway. I used to like running my hand all the way down his back to his butt cos it curves so nice—’ She shivers – and I think it is a pleasure kind of shiver, which makes me go black and empty and bleeding inside.