Fusion

by Kate Richards

  our

  our

  because how do you look someone in the eyes if you have something truthful to say without losing it completely, without the fool part of you showing through

  we

  our and ours

  the hunger gives you away

  very possibly yes

  then stop the faultlines opening, these things are buried and buried deep for a reason, buried like your poor sister, nice things are planted on top of the things buried and the nice things are nice for a reason

  only

  if you don’t look into her eyes with your eyes, if you look at your feet instead, then you’re shifty like they told you in the army

  you think you know what hell looks like?

  yes sir

  you have no fucking idea

  yes sir

  which is gonna give up first – your body?

  no sir

  or does your mind give up first?

  eh?

  eh?

  but you grab hold of hope anyway

  don’t you, a glimmer of hope glimmer of hope, a glimmer

  isn’t going to come

  but you have to

  have to find a way to fix things

  make it right

  find a way to live with yourself

  peeled-back

  so you can look someone in the eyes

  and tell it all true

  are you a good person?

  ‘Hear that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Listen.’

  Pounding on the ground, the ground vibrating like the skin of a drum.

  ‘Can you see anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Should we get up?’

  ‘Stay still.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘In case it’s a Dulugar.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A Dulugar. The hairy beast of the night. Red eyes. Smells like rotting flesh. Eats people.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a dreaming story from a long time ago.’

  Louder – the rush of a waterfall and thunder rolling towards us. Christ and I shelter close and still against the trunk of the tree and the wind rises and then the shudder of hooves and heat and sweat is upon us and the beating hooves pass within a metre of us and we feel on our faces the wildness and blow of the horses’ breath and their power riving sound and breaking the crust of the earth. We stop breathing. Then everything fades as they gallop down the other side of the spur.

  ‘I thought about killing him,’ she says. ‘I thought about how. I stole one of his pig-hunting knives and I walked up to him while he was asleep in bed and I pointed the knife right in his face and he opened his eyes and he laughed.’

  ‘But Serene—

  everything’s changed – too much – nothing’s how we thought

  that’s not true

  we are wrong

  are we?

  about everything

  how?

  we are wrong, Sea. Us. All of us.

  only if we let us be wrong

  we don’t have a choice, not now

  nothing has to change

  it already has

  because of this? Hair?

  no

  then why?

  there’s no going back, Sea

  but look at this mess! All over the pillow. All over the sheets. A massacre of hair. Broken off without asking, without care. Left bare. Cold here. Naked. Why?’

  Silence.

  ‘Serene?’

  Silence.

  ‘Don’t cry

  it’s the dream

  stop

  it’s the dream

  just stop it stop it

  the same dream last night as the night before and the night before that. Of what is to come. Death. You’ll know not the hour. Unless—

  unless what?

  there is no unless for us. We’ll never see the sea now

  what?

  death is coming and we’ll never see the sea

  death is coming?

  yes

  who for?’

  Silence.

  ‘Who for?’

  Silence. Tears.

  ‘For Christ? Wren?

  no

  who for then?

  death is coming

  stop saying that

  death is coming

  for us?

  yes.’

  Laugh – hot, derisive. ‘Believing that – that is what is wrong with us.’

  The kinds of silence between breaths, between heartbeats, those of reverence, imagining or listening or peace are our favourite kinds of silence, and we bow before the venerable master of Chinese philosophy, Laozi, and share his belief that, ‘he who knows contentment is rich’. But here, now – we are not content. Wren and Christ have not returned home. This is a new silence of worry and disarray and emptiness while the winter cold snaps at our feet and snaps in our lungs.

  Yesterday we were up early, the night having been full of bumping and restlessness, and we went first into the kitchen. There was no aroma of fresh coffee. The wood stove was dark. The house silent. Wren’s door closed and Christ not asleep on her couch wrapped in winter blankets. We smelt abandonment because we are attuned to the fear of it but we reassured ourself that this time it wasn’t real. We said, ‘Wren will have forgotten the wood stove and the coffee because he and Christ are outside together for the sunrise.’ So we added kindling and lit the stove and put the water on to boil and as we went out we smiled together for the first time in many days.

  Dawn ringing over the mountains is a precious thing, best witnessed all together. It reminds us of ‘god’s grace’, something they spoke of at Hope Home, and we never understood what they meant – until we arrived here and saw the dawn ringing over the mountains for the first time. And the mist rising from the creek in horizontal layers.

  And the kookaburras, rrrlaaah hah hahhah haw rrrrrrrrr. Yellow-faced honeyeaters, heeee ee ee.

  Currawongs, oooowhree! oooowhreeooo.

  Ravens, AWE AWE AWE

  AWE AWE AWE AWE.

  Yesterday morning we saw the dawn and we searched for Wren and searched for Christ through the trees, the fingered and fretted leaves and the swell of colour in the east and the red-breasted robins – sweet sweetsweet – and we found no-one. Every so often their voices came to us on the wind and we called back, we called out to them, where? Where? And there was no answer. Would they leave us? No. Have they fallen, are they hurt? Are they dead?

  No.

  No.

  We walked out into the wilderness and ran through the bog and ran around in circles – should we try searching here? Or there? Or there? We argued a bit and stumped back home again and called for them through the evening till our voices broke. No matter how long or how hard we searched, there was no-one, no answering call, not even an echo.

  Birds don’t sing in the fog. Dawn is completely silent. Shadowless. Light is blue. As I sit up straighter, stiff all over, back and neck twisted, the cold from the fog and earth and night is fierce in my blood and bones. The tree above us is awake too: breathing and stretching, listening, trembling, blooming, shedding its skin.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Can’t feel my hands.’

  ‘Here.’ I pull the glove off one of her hands and slide her hand – so pale and fine-boned – under my jacket and hug it between the layers of my shirt in my armpit, the only part of me with any warmth left. We share the dried apple and oat biscuits. Her face is swollen from weeping. Our water bottles are empty. We finish eating, I fold the tarp we lay on and put it in the pack.

  The baby

  Is it my fault?

  I didn’t know

  I didn’t know, goddammit.

  I didn’t fucking know.

  Stand up and everything spins halfway round, stops, and then spins back to the cen
tre like a compass zeroing in on magnetic north. There’s a compass inside me somewhere. I’ve never once been lost.

  Bullshit

  It’s true

  You’re lost

  We’re not lost

  ‘Damn this fog.’

  ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘Go back down, look for water.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Springs and creeks are fine to drink from. Sphagnum moss acts like a filter as long as it’s running water.’

  Only now I see the carvings on the trunk of the snow gum. Feeling them with the palm of my hand – waves, geometry.

  ‘Look at these.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘I don’t know. They’re really old. See here, where the tree has grown a scar all the way round their edges.’

  ‘Why here though?’

  ‘Maybe this is a sacred place.’

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘We’re on Jaithmathang country. I think.’

  ‘Do the people still come?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She looks up into the branches of the tree though they vanish quickly and throw no shadows, only the fog here with its long thin fingers, only the stifled light.

  ‘D’you think it’s a story? Or – or a signature? A burial place?’

  ‘Like a memorial?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Why would there be a memorial all the way out here, in the middle of nowhere?’

  ‘It’s only the middle of nowhere cos we’re lost.’ I wipe sweat-salt from my forehead. ‘See, right here where we are – imagine this is the centre of the Jaithmathang nation – the centre of country and language and law and knowledge.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘I don’t know. But imagine if the people hadn’t been forced to leave country and if they hadn’t been forbidden to speak their nation’s language. Because a whole world lives in a language and a world dies with a language. Maybe this was once the centre of a nation.’

  She isn’t looking at me. I can’t tell if she’s listening. She traces the carving on the tree.

  ‘The twins say the sky is language and the stars are language and everything in the wilderness is language and the earth has a kind of knowing and its flesh is the soil and its bones are the rocks and mountains and its blood the springs and rivers and its pulse is the ebb and flow of the seas and they all tell stories.’

  ‘But who is listening?’

  ‘That’s the point. We don’t listen much. We miss a lot – truths we don’t hear or see, courage stories, war, survival, dreaming, kindness, humbleness. It’s all here.’

  ‘The point is that we don’t know where here is.’

  ‘That’s true too.’

  Running my palms down the tree trunk, pulling meaning through my fingers to the ground, down on my knees, hands on the grass, bending low – a kind of homage to the ancestors of the land and the elders who were lucky not to ever see a man like me. Lie my cheek on the earth and feel the heartbeat of the earth beneath my bones and lie my good ear against the earth and listen for something rising through the grass like the memory of a grief – old and still painful – calling its people. We sing these stars and we cry them. We cry.

  We have nothing even close to this. I whisper, ‘Can you hear me?’

  Christ says, ‘What?’

  ‘Grieving country for lost people, grieving people for lost country.’

  ‘Who hurt you so bad, Wren?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, who hurt you so bad?’ She reaches up and traces round the edges of my eyes with her fingertips and I close my eyes and she runs her fingers over my eyelids and down my cheeks to my lips. ‘It’s all here.’

  We sit on the edge of the grassy plateau farthest from the sacred tree and the sacred ground around it and I look hard at my boots and blades of grass. If I say nothing, nothing will change, nothing asked or answered, nothing unforeseen or known, nothing hoped for, won or failed. Yet—

  Stand up?

  Speak truth?

  But what good am I?

  Making myself into someone

  Someone she’ll—

  And I’m not yet, haven’t found—

  What good am I?

  Please someone tell me what to do and I’ll do it for her

  Move the trees and the mountains and pull the sky

  Anything

  In the grass, little ants climbing and beetles tumbling and I say to Christ, ‘I found you out here. But really, you found me.’

  ‘Wren.’

  ‘Didn’t you?’

  ‘I don’t – no I—’

  ‘You knew my name.’

  ‘I didn’t – I’m sorry. You want it to mean something.’

  ‘Everyone calls me Hermit.’

  ‘Do they?’

  ‘Not mate, not Wren, not son. I pretend it’s funny.’

  ‘Is it funny?’

  ‘No. I hate it.’

  ‘Well that’s shit.’

  ‘But then you. You said my name. You held my hand. And now—’

  Where you are the sun shines even if it’s not actually shining and when you leave there’s flatness and cold and everything

  Mildewed and rusted and dusty

  You came down that road

  And found me and changed the shape of my heart

  I thought I knew what I was looking for

  I was wrong

  When you are here the world makes sense

  Just as it is

  For the first time in my life

  I’ve come home.

  ‘Oh, Wren,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry.’ She says it softer, sadder, with her hand touching mine and I don’t know what she means.

  ‘I love you,’ and as I say it I hear the need and the loneliness in my voice and even though it’s true, I hate myself for the hunger in me, the terrible hunger with its bleeding and humiliation and stupid, stupid stupid and the clutching and the grinding and the want and take and have and own and hold.

  She.

  She says, ‘Where you are is an in-between place. There’s a whole world out there and it’s good and you’ll find someone.’

  ‘I’ve found you.’

  She doesn’t.

  I get the map and compass from the pack and unfold the map on the ground in front of us. The question of where are we is viable enough to distract her from the rash like a bright blotchy burn on my face.

  She doesn’t love.

  ‘So if we came off the road around about here, we went south first and along there and then back to the road, crossed it about here and headed north. Dunno how far we’ve come all up though.’ I look around but the fog is dense enough to diffuse the sun and there’s nothing in the sky or on the land to help orient me, nothing at all to tell us which way is north or east. She doesn’t love me.

  No-one knows exactly why a single, fertilised egg sometimes splits into two separate embryos, two identical. Twins. If the splitting happens late, say twelve days after fertilisation, the egg might not split all the way in two.

  The book says half of all sets of conjoined twins are stillborn and another third die in the first twenty-four hours after birth.

  The book says one twin is almost always smaller and weaker than the other, with a weaker heart and lungs – a parasitic drain on the other.

  The book says both twins are prone to such things as chronic dyspnoea, oxygen dependency, incontinence, paralysis, contractures, sexual handicaps and mental retardation. ‘Such very defective individuals have little or no hope of achieving meaningful human-hood. For example, they have little or no capacity to love or be loved.’

  No two sets of twins are conjoined in the same way. A letter our father kept from one doctor to another says we are dicephalic parapagus. We looked up the word dicephalic and the encyclopaedia said, two-headed. We looked up the word parapagus but it wasn’t there. So we looked up para- and it said, ‘a
prefix, from the Greek, meaning side-by-side or beyond, and by extension in English: ancillary, abnormal or defective’. And we looked up ancillary and it said, ‘from the Latin for a female slave’. And we looked up pagus and it said, ‘a combining form for severely malformed, usually non-viable conjoined twins with a specified type of fusion’.

  Dicephalic parapagus twins are ‘two-headed, abnormal-or-defective, severely malformed, usually not viable, fused side-by-side with little or no capacity to love or be loved’.

  Are we?

  This is what they said at Hope Home – us a Child of the Devil. Cain killed his brother Abel in their bible and now Cain’s descendants live in the netherworld as two-headed monsters. Is this how Christ sees us? Everyone at Hope Home was sickened, repulsed – their eyes went from soft to hard, coloured to black.

  Is it true?

  We know the how. Is it ever worth asking why? Who decides which human form is good and right and which human form is not? Are we a whole divided wrongly, never to be made whole again? Are there others like us? Are we one with everything or do we share everything? Are we indeed a freak?

  Grown into the body we were born with, our identity developed naturally over all of the days of our life – adapting and practising and evolving. Four ears and two minds capable of listening and learning. So beautiful. So lovely.

  Aren’t we?

  The baby dicephalic twins in the book are squashed and pickled in a jar of formaldehyde and they have skin like clay. Closed eyes. Puffy eyelids as if they’d been crying. ‘Living in a state of chronic sorrow until death.’ Our finger the softest, gentlest touch over the heads of the twins in their formaldehyde jar. O. We are listening, we hear you – everything you kept inside while they measured you up and shot their currents through. We hear you. Now tell us please, at what point did you let go?

  Today the generator ran out of fuel and water has frozen in the pipe between the tank and the kitchen and there’s hardly any wood in the woodshed. We were meant to be collecting wood for days before the first snow but we’ve been distracted. Now we’re hemmed in with pickled vegetables and sealed-tight jars of fruit, two fat wombats shuffling across the kitchen floor in search of apples and the sound of snow falling from the branches of the snow gums.