The World Without Us

by Mireille Juchau

  Where was she located when the fire started? This was Sergeant Entsch, sterner now. All the reports say you hadn’t been seen for hours.

  At first, she’d found it ridiculous – those boys, coming to The Hive to threaten her. Pete was so shambolic and incapable she couldn’t believe he was pulling it off. Plus they were both high. But when they dragged her into the van and tightened the blindfold she thought, this is no game. Even now she can detect the oily, vehicular odour, which adhered for weeks after despite Sulfamylon, debridement and hospital bandages – a sumpy stink that would make her for ever avoid petrol pumps, mowers, tractor tanks and any car with its bonnet open. She’d groped blindly in the back of that van as the men drove. She picked out shapes with her hands. Wrench and spare tyre, jack, zippered bag, torch and lighter. When she called out and heard their affectless answering tone, she’d pocketed what she could.

  She looked at the policemen, blocky shapes shimmering in the air.

  They drove me around, then took me out by the falls and later in a horse field, while they sat nearby, smoking and laughing.

  She did not tell them Peter’s threat – that he’d come to claim what rightly belonged to him. Or that she’d replied, She’s breastfed only. How will you feed her?

  At the news of her pregnancy Peter had become very fervent, crowing around the district. His childhood had left him with a fantasy of repair; fatherhood was a rapid route towards it. But he was homeless, shambolic, a drifter making do – she’d called it off, but kept the baby.

  Later, on the friable grass, she’d watched as the commune bees, abandoning their hives at the smell of smoke, passed overhead in a black mass. The men had gone and the forest was dense with the sound of burning. When she tried standing, dizziness felled her. Her temple throbbed from where it had hit when they pushed her against the van. She reached for where her forehead ought to be, and someone else’s fingers came back covered in blood and ash.

  She came to think the fire was blessed. Maybe even cleansing. A secret part of her was glad the commune was destroyed. Wasn’t she newly forged in that fire, hadn’t she become another person entirely?

  But after, in the hospital, even the gentlest nurse wore a look that said – you’re just another hippie homeschooled from a curriculum of no consequence. Evangeline thought she’d known some things well – how to properly pin a cloth nappy, how to swaddle her baby, that raw aloe and calendula could soothe raging nappy rash, impetigo, eczema – but at St Catherine’s she’d learned she had not. Because of the burns to her chest she could not breastfeed and when the nurses put the bottles to Tess’s mouth, Evangeline heard The Hive women who’d always said, boob is beautiful and best, formula is fucked, even though her supply was low and she’d constantly worried in the commune that Tess was going hungry. When Tess cried, the nurses barely stirred but said, She’ll teach herself to settle. Later, when Stefan showed Evangeline the new farmhouse, she’d thought, He’s teaching me to settle. But was it for their new life in the valley, or for him?

  How about once you reached the river? the detective asked. Why not proceed to safety? Why stay near the fire and endanger your baby?

  His forefinger tapped the table. His smell, cigarette clad in spearmint.

  I was waiting for Tom, she said. I couldn’t go down the mountain alone.

  Her hands were twitching, which was noted with looks. Her skin was burning again.

  Why not? they asked.

  She turned to the grimy window, and stared past the station hedge, starred with flowers. Green lawns. A man jumping furiously inside a rubbish bin. A white dog running up a dry brown hill. A boy jogging by with a huge balloon, filled with many smaller balloons in pearly blue and white. There were worlds within worlds, she thought. The whole time we were on that mountain the town went on without us. Another dissociation. And which was more real? The Pureland steeped in benevolent nature, or the clamouring valley hamlet? She’d looked down on the town every week of her life: the lake’s mercury smoulder, the rippled plots of wheat and lucerne, the ordered geometries of road and house. Once, a skywriter and the cloud-word Virgin, drifting apart.

  The station fluorescents flickered. Her fingernails left bloody crescents in her palms.

  I couldn’t go down alone, she said. I didn’t know what kind of men might be waiting there below.

  The policemen swapped low-browed glances. The fair-haired cracked his notebook.

  Evangeline felt the baby revolve. In her throat the tang of vomit and ash. Soon she’d paint it all – the giant preying bee of that fire; horses dissembling under her touch; the gas company’s steel rigs, arcane pyramids on the denuded slopes. The time that had stopped time. Wasn’t it so outright unholy, wasn’t it an act against all living sense, disinterring what ought to stay fixed underground?

  At the hospital, the mental-health worker had wanted to dig. But Evangeline had not been willing, or able. And she’d kept it together now, for so long, hadn’t she? She was determined not to grant those men her suffering. In the end, it was guilt and secrecy that had done her in.

  As each thought floated up, her eyes darkened, welled, then took on such a terrified cast that the officers grew kind and hushed. One fetched water and handed the cup while the other quipped about baby names, his own father named after a frickin pub! Then, whenever she’s ready, they said, tapping the photo.

  She tried to organise her hair which was still flossy and snagged from sleep, tried pulling her face into some mild expression. She thought of Pip, and how everything had ebbed after her death. How people seemed unconscious actors. And yet, her life before and after Pip ceaselessly called for a reckoning.

  She looked at the van; well, maybe she knew it. But not from the outside. She knew it blindly, by fingertips and smell.

  A DNA sample would determine if the van at the farm was the one in which she’d been abducted. They passed the consent form. A buccal swab. She wrote her name without recognising the hand or the words it left behind.

  Only three people knew what had happened when that fire started, and one of them, it seemed, was dead. She became very grim, thinking of the consequences for all of them, but most of all for Tess.

  A few more questions and then, free to go. Beneath her clothes, the old burns pulling tight. Outside, on the footpath opposite the station, a stranger affixed a blue hat to a dog.

  15

  Closing In

  It was after Pip’s funeral that your mother started carrying the umbrella. Sometimes the sky was clear and threatening nothing. You didn’t like seeing her in town that way. Her face was so shaded that the umbrella looked like it was walking on its own. Sometimes she came home with wet hair in the dry weather, and still you heard that sound of the brolly folding inside itself.

  Your father was often away, following the honey flow. Ironwood at Caster’s Creek, Salvation Jane on Hussaini’s acres. In the northern chemist, you queued with the scripts because your mother would not come in. Two women stared through the window. ‘Is she preserving her skin with that parasol?’ one asked. The other said she was hiding. ‘With artists, there’s a fine line between eccentricity and just plain barking.’ You ran out so you wouldn’t shout. The Maxalt, Xanax and prednisone rattling in the bag.

  The next year, Meg said, ‘It doesn’t make you invisible.’ You’d been silent for just two months. She said it was the opposite. You and your mother were drawing attention. People began to call you shy. They poked you as if you were deaf. They didn’t like how your silence made them feel. You stood outside the headmistress’s office. You brought the crested envelopes home and your mother ripped them open. At first she said, ‘You’ll talk in your own good time,’ and threw the letters away. Later, she spiked them in the study. One day she said, ‘Tess, it is high time for speaking.’

  In the school counsellor’s office your father could not explore your silence. His right hand was red and swollen from bees. He asked Ms Byers if she’d ever tried propolis for her gums. It’s a vegetable mas
tic gathered by bees from bark and flowers. It keeps the hive clean, he told her. On the gums it prevents decay. Ms Byers closed her mouth then and hardly said a word.

  Meg had asthma trouble. She played piano louder and louder, one foot jammed on the brass pedal. She wheezed between chords. Your mother said, ‘She’s wasting her precious breath, speaking for you all the time.’ Meg started sketching her trees bent with top branches growing like roots in the ground.

  16

  Stefan hears the bee, butting itself against the screen door. He’s been stung twice already and his forearm is voluptuously red; the skin has a shine, as if buffed. He applies the bag of frozen peas, checks the swelling, then walks the hall. Are his reactions getting worse? He knows two beekeepers who’ve given it up after becoming dangerously allergic.

  Evangeline’s in the bedroom sleeping. She must have returned while he was loading the hives on the ute. Tomorrow at dawn he’s off to Parson’s orange trees.

  She’s onion-belled now with the child, pouchy around the eyes. Her nose seems wider, changing the whole aspect of her face. Pregnancy can do that. Maybe a boy? He thinks of how she’d let him touch her before the fire, and then after. Her burns were still fresh but she’d moved his hands over all the parts that could still register his fingers, her eyes closed, her face turned away. Before then he’d been stunned at her openness, at how she gave herself with a frank pride, a manner he’d never found before in any young woman. After the fire, though, she was newly wary.

  Once, at the commune, he’d wandered into the Nursery Cell and found Tom Tucker singing in astounding choirboy soprano. The babies – how many? – were quiet, their hammocks all in a row. He’d thought straight away of The Life of the Bee.

  On all sides, asleep in their closely sealed cradles, in this infinite superposition of marvellous six-sided cells, lie thousands of nymphs, whiter than milk, who with folded arms and head bent forward, await the hour of wakening.

  All those infants had caused him concern. There seemed too many for the handful of women he’d seen at The Hive and the even fewer men, and he’d played a game with young Tom trying to guess who the parents were, while the boy stuttered out the names. Just listed the mothers, as if they’d all been born fatherless or maybe Tom didn’t consider fathers part of the equation. Tess was asleep in a corner hammock. He’d pointed, asking the boy, How about this one? But Tom had shrugged as if he really didn’t know. And soon Stefan considered the child his own as he planned a future with her mother.

  Evangeline shifts, one arm under her head. Is she really sleeping? Maybe even this, pretence. Had he taken advantage by choosing her when all she’d known was commune life? By loving her he’d also freed her – she might have been claimed by another; if the commune hadn’t burned she might have got stuck there for ever. But was he any different, really, from Hodgins? Putting limits on her life, bringing her here, not even far enough from her past to forget it.

  She reaches for the paper and, without looking up, says, Four letters?

  Through the bedroom window, the towering gums at the edge of their property, their rusty ribbons of half-shed skin snapping in the breeze. The fresh stump of the camphor laurel, which he’d slaughtered, just because he could not figure, one afternoon, what else to do. The next three days Meg helped stack the wood as he’d corded it. Now we have plenty to burn through winter. It’s good you murdered the tree, Dad, the roots get into the water table. If a trunk is under tension, prevent the saw from binding by first cutting a wide notch in the inside of the bend. Saw a little at a time, slowly, until the trunk breaks. Be ready for kickback.

  Lina.

  She looks up, smiling vaguely. Black pen on her cheek. Her shampoo smell. Ylang-ylang, some peppery note, bergamot. Beneath that, her raw woody scent.

  Four letters, she says, creasing the page into narrow sections. Beside the bed, in a green folder, are crosswords scissored from the paper.

  He stamps a socked foot. Itches his throbbing arm. Bee venom and some other vague pain inching to a crescendo. The room turning bright and unfocused, as if someone were opening and closing the curtains.

  The police had visited again that morning. They’d asked him about The Hive fire. And the young male from the van who was yet to be identified. What did those two things have to do with each other, Stefan had asked. And they’d replied, very smartly, What makes you think they do?

  What is the clue? Stefan asks.

  She looks at him dumbfounded. How will he love this new baby, fired from loss? Reminding him of the time that preceded it, when he’d lowered his youngest into the ground. But babies, he knew, were easy to love; babies were small enablers.

  When she shifts, a yellow glow courses into the room. He holds his smarting forearm over his eyes as he thinks of the virgin queen, everyone busy around her, while she sits at the heart of the hive. Through the window, way off, the leaky outline of Parker’s cabin, backlit, the sun getting low. Even from here so plain to see who comes in, and out. And maybe she likes it that way.

  Despite the tenderness in his body, and how he just wants to lie down with her, he grits his teeth. A neural pain shoots through his head, and merges with that other, persistent smoggy ache.

  Lina, so actually I’m trying to understand. It is some kind of punishment?

  Huh?

  Something missing …

  She puts one arm over her stomach.

  … in your life? he asks. This affair …

  … You think this is about replacing Pip? She shuffles upright, kicks the covers off her bare legs.

  I did not say about Pip! he says, one hand chopping the air.

  She looks down. Maybe ashamed. He can’t tell any more.

  Don’t yell, she says. The girls …

  He shucks his muddy socks off. How can he argue with the spectre of Pip between them? He rolls one sleeve down, then the other.

  We can talk about why, he says, trying to sound reasonable. Why this particular man. A schoolteacher. Maybe he knows some things I don’t. But think about Tess, he says. Think of Meg.

  I don’t mean to hurt you, she says. But when I look at your face I see Pip. So, I look away.

  He ought to be shocked. But he’s briefly relieved. It isn’t hate, or some other feeling between them then. It is at least love that averts her.

  We’re both unfaithful, she says. Isn’t your drinking a way to escape? You don’t like talking about the past. OK. But she’s part of it. I don’t want to forget, even if I have to remember things I’d rather not.

  Total despair, in his eyes, in the downward shift of his mouth. Unfaithful. This word throbs most acutely. He chases down his anger but he has a right to feel it! He thinks of his brother expressing everything, and of himself struck dumb before his father’s casual violence. Compared to all that – his mother’s black eyes, the broken bones, the hours in the hospital making up new stories – this is nothing. Isn’t it, so, so minor? And yet, pain and despair sneak up when he goes about unmedicated. Mersyndol. The new script on his desk, waiting to be filled.

  Just tell me about this one, Lina, he says. Is it mine?

  17

  Jim, heading for town on his bike, brakes, skids, digs a heel into dirt as they pass. She’s in the back of the ute, between Meg and Tess. Stefan at the wheel, driving slowly down the Old Mill Road. Seeing Evangeline, ensconced with her family, makes his stomach turn.

  As they pass, she looks determinedly ahead. Meg’s head is bent. Tess offers a wan smile and Stefan places one finger against the windscreen.

  Jim rears back. Some kind of accusation? He remembers Evangeline’s Stefan knows. But surely the man’s just defending his glass against loose gravel.

  Still, there it is: Stefan knows. Once the man might have waved, he’d invited Jim into his home, left jars of honey at his door.

  Jim takes the longer, shadier route into town, then pedals warily into the frank light of the busy main street. Mums and dads pushing prams, filling hessian bags with supplies, pen
sioners under canvas outside the cafés. You can see from the particular make-up of the crowd that it’s Thursday, when the benefits go into the accounts and back out through the ATMs, all the small businesses busy. Kids ride by on bikes and rollerblades, finally liberated by weather, and the spring break. One waggles a finger at his teacher as he passes. Stay out of trouble, Mr Parker.

  Three kookaburras start up on an overhead wire and for a second he feels he’s the object of their hilarity. Just a bit paranoid, and now regretful about this morning’s spliff. His regular anxiety’s bad enough. Somewhere in town, the Müllers. He isn’t in the mood for another encounter. His breathing short and shallow, his heart palpitating. It’s October the twelfth. Happy birthday, Veronica. You’d be fifty-nine today. He ducks into the nearest shop, greeting June Peterson on her way out.

  Inside a fug of mothball, and damp wool. Across the large room, Heidi Tucker, leaning towards the shop assistant and shouting, Excuse me!

  The Unity Mission is packed with musty clothes, shelves of cheap knick-knacks from the deceased estates, old, dented plastic toys, rows of outdated shoes. No vintage treasure here, Sylvie would say. The poorer towns yielded so little.

  Would you please direct me to Hi-Fi? Heidi asks.

  The assistant – Marlene says her badge – is peering over half-moon glasses. She takes Heidi’s arm and leads her to a plastic chair.

  Sit, we’ll take you up in a sec.

  Is it too much to ask for proper music? says Heidi, agitated.

  Good question, Jim thinks. There’s a terrible furry sound coming from badly wired speakers.

  Let’s look at some gloves while you wait, says Marlene. I put a lovely cerise pair away for you.