That takes courage
Reckon so
Am I brave enough?
I don’t know
No
Maybe
I don’t know.
She’s still now. We’re both still. Seeing the road out in front of us but not seeing it, and then there’s the man in the rear-vision mirror whom I don’t recognise at all. We share the last oat biscuit that was squashed in my pocket, wipe the crumbs from our bruised knees. I remember my first few weeks in the mountains when I came back from Swiggin with bags of food and other supplies and Sea and Serene made biscuits and showered each other in flour so their hair went white and their eyes shone through their floury faces and they seemed mysterious and regal. They’ve shown me a new way of seeing and given me a place to call home and a purpose within it. I’m very lucky, I know this. We shouldn’t have left like we did without telling them. A lot of explaining to do when we get home and a lot of being brave enough to say sorry.
I’ll have to think more about it. I don’t know the right words yet. I don’t know how the twins will take it even if I do find some words that I hope are right. It’ll be fair enough if they stay angry with us for a long time. Trust is a fragile thing if you’ve not had much of it in your life. The twins are the first people I’ve ever trusted and the only thing better than trusting is being trusted. I think until now they would have trusted me with their lives.
Now I don’t know.
Christ is jiggling her feet, tapping her fingers, restless to get moving. But to an end or some kind of beginning?
She says, ‘Wren, I’m starving.’
‘Okay.’
‘Can we get going?’
‘You can’t go back there. Stay with us. I’ll do anything, whatever you need. Please. Tell me what to do.’
‘I’ve got family in the city. Maybe I’ll start fresh.’
‘Stay with us.’
She sighs, her breath catches halfway.
She says, ‘I see it in you too, Wren.’
‘What?’
‘Same as in my husband.’
‘What?’
‘Rage.’
‘Rage?’
‘In your eyes. Same as in his.’
‘No.’
‘Same as in his, Wren.’
‘No.’
‘I know you don’t want to believe it.’
Silence. The truck smells of dust and petrol and old leather cracked by the sun.
Her whole enormous blooming beautiful life
And her Judgement Day yet to come
Then she says, ‘Imagine it’s your last day on earth.’
‘That’s happy.’
‘You’re lying in a bed somewhere and looking back over your life. What are you most happy about? What do you believe to be true more than anything? Who have you loved?’
‘Jeez.’
I wait for her to smile but she doesn’t.
She says, ‘That’s where your answers are.’
‘I don’t have any of those answers.’
‘That’s okay for now. You’ll find them.’
My hands lie cold in my lap. I’m afraid to open them or hold them out in case there is no answering touch.
She says, ‘The only thing that’s coming for us for absolute sure is death. Everything else—’
‘What will you do?’
‘Start again I reckon like I said, start fresh.’
‘If he comes near you, if he speaks to you or if he ever even looks at you, I will tear his throat out.’
‘The hardest answer to hear is no. But Wren—’
‘I’ll tear his throat out with my own hands.’
‘Wren.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Sometimes it’s the one you have to hear.’
My hands lie cold in my lap.
Cold.
She says very softly, ‘Are you all right?’ And her blueblue eyes are black and rimmed with tears and the sorrow in them is a forever kind of sorrow and I lean over and kiss her and I know this will be our only forever kiss and the earth and the pale stars humburn all round us and then disappear.
It’s true I’m searching for love, been searching a long time, and I haven’t found it. I never knew about hope either but here I am – where I belong for the moment with music in my ears, the music of other lives and places, other worlds beyond fantasy, real people one day I’ll call friend – if I’m so lucky. This is her gift to me – hope – and the answer I’m looking for – a new question – one I’m yet to find the courage to ask. Put my foot down on the accelerator and we take the turn and as we go along the wildness is on all sides and the wildness is inside us too and everything is very clear as if the earth is connected in a tender way to the sky and consciousness is a kind of time in which each moment is really seven billion moments and in one of these moments I’m holding your hand thank you for this chance thank you – we go along together, closer and closer to goodbye – I am here in the truck holding your hand and I am braiding the twins’ hair very badly while they sit outside in the sun and I am in the kitchen with my mother after my father’s funeral. I am in the kitchen with my mother after my father’s funeral with the weight of the padlock locked onto the belt coiled up nice and tight in my right hand. My mother is sitting at the table with her head bowed and her messy face and her eyes red and cold and the house cold. I’m not cold. There are sparrows bathing in the birdbath in the garden. She loved birds, my mother. She loved to see a flock of birds rising – quelled whatever she was doing, her breathing too – and she’d watch them fly up and out of sight. I wonder now if it was because they were so lightweight and so free. I don’t know who my father loved.
‘Ah. I see now.’
‘No you don’t.’
Silence.
‘All these years – but we’ll start again. We’ll find a better way. Yes? Serene?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t mean to take all the light.’
‘I’m not a ghost.’
‘Of course not.’
‘I’m not your shadow.’
‘No, no – I know that.’
‘Can you say it?’
‘You are not a ghost, Serene. You are not a shadow.’
‘Do you mean it?’
‘I do.’
‘I want something that’s mine. My own voice. So you don’t speak for me.’
‘There are no secrets between us.’
‘Haven’t you ever lied to me?’
‘No.’
‘Not one lie?’
‘No. I mean – why do folks lie? They lie to hide a truth about themselves, something that’s ruinous or painful or shameful, don’t they?’
‘Or maybe cos they’re scared.’
‘There’s nothing you don’t know about me. And I’m not scared.’
‘There’s a lot you don’t know about me.’
‘Huh. I guess now that’s true. Do you lie? To me?’
‘All the time.’
‘What do we do?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Look here, Serene – here’s where I end and you begin. Here—
—and here—
—and here—
—
—and here.’
‘Mmm.’
‘See? Like this? This?’
‘I can’t feel anything.’
‘Nothing?’
‘No.’
‘What shall we do?’
‘Will you talk to me?’
‘What about?’
‘Everything.’
‘No.’
‘Please.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Help me.’
‘I’ll think about it some more.’
‘Help me. Tell me when you’re unhappy or – or mad or – because I’ll get it wrong and I want the chance to say I’m sorry and to tell you that I got it wrong and I’ll try again.’
‘I said I’ll think about it some more.’
‘It hurts a lot –
what you did. Because I didn’t hold you back. I thought we were perfect. I mean – we are – we’re more than a whole.’
‘It wasn’t a choice.’
‘Yes it was.’
‘For a long time I thought we were perfect too.’
‘I want a very strong drink.’
Laugh.
‘Two consciousnesses, how ’bout that.’
Laugh.
‘Breathing hurts.’
‘Breathing hurts.’
‘I know.’
‘What a mess.’
Sip. Slow. Breathe. Still. Mulled, warmer.
‘What are you thinking now?’
‘Guess.’
‘About Wren.’
‘O, Wren. No.’
‘What then?’
‘I’m thinking about clocks.’
‘Clocks.’
‘How delicately they’re put together.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Sea, we are a clock. When the parts of a clock fit together, when they’re balanced, the whole becomes a thing of beauty and grace. Even though each of the parts is different. And meaningless on its own.’
‘We are perfect then.’
‘No. That’s the paradox. What if we first honour our differences? And only then try to be better at being a whole.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘We’ll do the best we can.’
‘It’s too hard.’
‘I know.’
‘We need time. I need time.’
‘We’ve got time.’
‘Have we?’
‘Existence is the most complicated thing.’
‘Maybe the complicated thing is how hard we keep hold of it. We keep hold of it so hard it hurts.’
‘Mmm, bruises everywhere.’
‘How do we choose what we choose to believe? I don’t know. That hurts too.’
‘Belief isn’t truth.’
‘No, it isn’t.’
‘Is beauty?’
‘Truth?’
‘Mmm.’
‘Is grace?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘At least we know we don’t know. Even though it hurts.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Conscious unknowing.’
‘Mmm. Being.’
‘Is that what life is?’
‘Being – a state of conscious unknowing.’
‘I guess that’s where wonder comes from. Don’t you think?’
‘Wonderment. Wondrousness.’
Laugh. ‘Ow. Hurts.’
‘Sea. That’s the answer – every day we try – to figure out – how – how to – re-become ourselves.’
‘Re-become?’
‘How we think of who we are is just an illusion.’
‘What?’
‘How we think of who we are isn’t who we are.’
‘In that case, maybe there’s no such thing as you separate from me separate from us.’
‘I don’t know if there is or if there isn’t anymore. Except I can’t live another day without being true to what’s in me.’
‘O.’
‘Do I have a hope?’
‘Yes.’
‘But—’
‘But Serene, maybe it’s not so black and white or so rigid or possessive or so heavy or serious. Maybe it’s fluid – without a shell or a beginning or an end – consciousness, I mean. Us. Ours. Me. You. Apart and together, one self and the other and both and neither.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Like the Dark. Everywhere and nowhere. Life and nonlife. This is how we re-become, like you said. How we begin.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Yes. And until we relearn to balance and find our words, we’ll fall down and get up and the next time fall down a bit easier. And we’ll get up again. Re-becoming.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Are you scared, Serene?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m scared you’ll walk ahead. I’m scared you’ll walk too fast.’
‘How could I?’
‘You could. You’re so much smarter than me, you’re funnier and prettier and stronger.’
‘O Sea. It wouldn’t work. Even if I could. Look at me.’
‘How?’
‘We’ll be – us – a long time, as long as all of time is, as far as we can ever know it. We can’t change how our body works. We have to figure out what we can change. Our body doesn’t have to be what makes us who we are. Our body isn’t our fate.’
‘The main thing is our core isn’t broken.’
‘Yes it is.’
‘No.’
‘It had to break. Or we couldn’t – we can’t go on.’
‘Never. We are healers.’
‘Exactly. We are broken and now we have a chance to heal.’
‘O.’
‘Sea.’
‘Yes?’
‘Do you love me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you forgive me?’
‘I need another drink. I’m still cold.’
Laughing again, this time the wound-up-too-tight kind of laughing, the about-to-burst kind, the splintering kind collapsing into tears, boiling tears.
‘I’m sorry about your hair, Sea. It will grow back. It’ll be beautiful.’
‘I don’t mind it short.’
‘Doesn’t it remind you of Hope Home?’
‘A new memory to erase the old one.’
‘I wish I had your grace.’
‘Of course you can. You will. Without echoes or shadows.’
‘Shall we climb our mountain for sunrise?’
‘Mmm. Yes.’
‘Some people live fine without wild things and some cannot live at all without wild things.’
‘Who said that?’
‘I don’t remember. Was it Aldo Leopold?’
‘We’re wild things.’
‘Yes.’
‘Wild things. Blessed and damned.’
‘In all my dreams I’m a bird. Did you know?’
‘No. You as you are with wings?’
‘No. A real bird. Here, Sea, listen – do I sound like a bird?’
‘No.’
‘O.’
‘Never mind. Serene?’
‘What?’
‘Fly my sister – fly.’
‘But I’m not dreaming now. I don’t know where to start without you.’
‘Begin by the apple trees, go low over the vegetables and the snow gums and gently-gently down to the snowplain.’
‘To the creek for a splash, a bathe.’
‘Water with all its sorrows. Now rise.’
‘Rising hovering falling.’
‘This here and now.’
‘High sweet air and sun.’
‘Dizzy.’
‘Light and light.’
‘High sweet air.’
‘Spirit spiritalis.’
‘Mystery.’
‘Fall into it.’
‘The sweep of the valley below, creek winding, mosses and lichen and clumps of snowgrass. Circling granite tors, Delphic faces, the elders and ancient peoples, spirits looking on.’
‘The flank of the mountain, the sound of it, our mother the mountain.’
‘How many years?’
‘Millions.’
‘Millions.’
‘The universe.’
‘Last light.’
‘Then wombats and wallabies and echidnas and frogmouths.’
‘They won’t mind you.’
‘A flash and a flare.’
‘Yes.’
‘Song for a bird.’
‘A dance.’
‘A kiss.’
‘And now the place of pilgrimage for communion.’
‘There’s a drink buried up here somewhere, a bottle of wine. Did you know?’
‘Apple wine?’
‘Yes.’
‘Alight on the earth and kneel and be still. For the coming of body and spirits and the visible and invisible and imagined, where we are o
ne and two and altogether a part of the enormous Dark and all things unfathomable, a part of life which has been going on from endless ages past and which will go on without us and beyond us for ever and ever, here with the mountain and the little twisted trees and the stones and the dirt and the wind and the bit of light afforded before the sun turns away from us – from you—’
‘—and I kneel before old light, last light, the gloaming, veins in the nether of the sky, the breathing world carrying me carrying me, I’ll honour it, sink down into the earth and be still and hold still the place in our chest where our breath comes from, spiritus lenis smooth, ready for communion.’
‘I love you, Serene.’
‘Are you sad, Sea?’
‘No. Yes.’
‘Here’s my voice singing the last of the sun. Can you hear it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sea?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’d forgotten how lovely it is here. How precious.’
‘How precious.’
‘Where are you now?’
‘Right here. By your side.’
‘O. Ow! Ow. What are you doing?’
‘Shhh.’
‘Ow.’
‘Shhh, it’s all right.’
‘I can’t feel my arm.’
‘Turn a bit more this way. A bit more.’
‘Owwww.’
‘Serene, look at me.’
‘The air’s all gone.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘What’s this wet? I can’t feel my ear.’
‘Don’t worry. O, I can see you now.’
‘O Sea. O.’
‘Look at you, so beautiful.’
‘You’re crying too.’
‘Don’t wipe your tears. Let them fall.’
‘Why?’
‘When you love someone – never mind.’
‘Hmm?’
‘When you love someone.’
We were born in the deepest part of the night when the moon was dark and the clouds low, Venus and Mars were obscured and the stars stopped blinking for a whole heartbeat. When we turned our heads inward to the right or left – thirty degrees – we could see each other’s cheek but not each other’s eyes. For one breath now—
two breaths—
three—
three and a half—
a little shy and then daring enough to look deeply – a miraculous thing it is to gaze into a beloved’s eyes, glimpse another soul the colour of a bit of paradise and to know it is enough, it is everything. Our body isn’t our fate – it glitters and sparks and then wanes, pauses and falls and all that is left is lightness, grace – space for us to gaze boldly and kiss tenderly and hold on until we are ready to give all we have away. And though our smiles let go and hands let go, fingers and toes let go and the sun comes up in the east and the birds begin to sing, our eyes pulse onward. Do not look away or wipe our tears. Let them fall.
Fusion Page 20
