The Middle of Nowhere

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  He was lying on his side in the dust, one arm flung up over his head, his legs bent as if he was still running, a pool of blood beneath him. But he lay so still that the flies were drinking sweat from his armpit undisturbed. His xylophone ribcage was perfectly silent and still. A few termites still clung to the hairs of his skin. She brushed them off – and felt the muscles flinch.

  “They are gone,” she said. “You can come out now,” – just as if he was under the verandah and she up top reading too scary a book.

  The ribcage did swell then. The fingers did flex, but Fred did not sit up. Comity lay down so as to see under his arm, and his eyes were open, as if he was listening, ear-to-the-ground, deducing clever things about the coming and going of hoofs. “Fred?”

  His eyes moved to focus, but drifted apart again into a blank stare. A tear crawled down the side of his nose. Fred was not feigning deadness; he was dying.

  “We should go to your gunyah,” she said.

  His eyebrows signalled his dismay, his desire to be spared the effort. But Comity insisted. They could not go home, or Hogg would finish what he had started, and kill Fred for sure – Comity too, maybe, because she had seen him shoot down a child. And at least Fred’s gunyah was close by. Besides, without a plan, she would have simply to sit back on her heels and howl like a dingo, and what good would that do? No one would come.

  The mare came. Hogg’s attempts to scare her away had turned the obstinate, idle nag into a nervy foal in need of comfort. She walked up behind Comity, reins dangling down from her mouth to trip her up, and swung her big head against Comity’s back. Do something. Do something, the horse seemed to say.

  So she did. Somehow she persuaded Fred to his feet, crawled between his legs and levered him off the ground astride her shoulders. He transferred his weight to the horse, and Comity looped the reins back over its head and put them into Fred’s right hand. Without straw bale or stirrups she tried using the termite mound for a mounting block… But the mound crumbled under her and a hysteria of termites infested her legs and set her dancing: a dance fit to summon up an army of Tuckonies.

  So she walked beside the horse’s head, leading it towards Miser’s Creek. It annoyed her that she could not remember what Amos called his mare. “I shall call you Horse,” she said, so sharply that the mare tossed her head aside.

  At any moment Comity expected Hogg to come back – to punish her for throwing stones, to return her to the station, to silence her tittle-tattle with a bullet.

  She dared not look round at Fred. Cuts are all right. Sprains are easy if you have a bandage to hand. But holes in shoulders are not. Holes welling blood are distinctly…not. Fred’s breathing was quick and shallow, snatched up every now and then by a jolt of pain as Horse lunged into a dip or stepped over brushwood.

  Comity felt the risen sun begin to scorch her from behind. It was like being watched by a monstrous, blazing eye. Had the Kadimakara broken loose after Fred opened the storeroom door? Or did the Devil-Devil, punisher of wickedness, have her in its sights?

  She had, after all, got her only friend shot.

  Fred’s railcar was a furnace. The metal was so hot it was painful to touch. The interior was a solid chunk of sweltering air. Comity climbed up and lowered herself through the carriage door, to fetch a pan from the sideways stove. By the time she hauled herself out again, she thought she could feel her internal organs cooking inside her like kidneys in a pie.

  “You cannot go in there,” she told Fred, who perfectly agreed. Instead they sat in the brook – or rather the small upwelling of sandy mud it had become since their last visit. Frogs struggled by, clarty with gouts of pink sand. Comity filled the pan as best she could and set it on the hot metal of the carriage, certain it would boil.

  She had also fetched from the train the suitcase with Fred’s treasures in it. She set the wire-rimmed spectacles on his nose, the celluloid collar on his labouring brown throat, the pipe in his hand. The umbrella she opened to shade them both from the sun.

  Why could the cold black night and the sear white day not learn to share? Why did they cling to their differences? Could they not exercise a bit of comity and share out the heat between them? Comity expressed this idea and several others to Fred as she tried to clean the hole in his shoulder. Fred said nothing at all.

  She went to check on the water. It had not boiled. Was that important? Her mother always talked of boiling water as if it mattered, but perhaps that was only for cooking. Perhaps unboiled water tasted bad – which did not matter in the case of a hole. She asked Fred, but Fred only shrugged – started to shrug and then regretted it very much. It could definitely not be good for the flies to be crawling around the hole like that, sucking his blood through their long tongues. She gave Fred the flowery golden spike of a wichetty bush to keep the flies at bay.

  At any moment she expected him to tell her what they should do. Unlike Moses in the Bible, who had wandered about lost for forty years, Fred could find his way around the wilderness. Fred was so much better than Moses.

  “We do not want to go to ghantown,” she suggested, and Fred shook his head in agreement. But Fred did not say what they should do instead. “We cannot go home, I mean, can we?” Comity suggested. Fred expressed no opinion either way, because he had fainted, falling squelchily backwards into the creek, disturbing a vast cloud of flies from the jellied weeds.

  Comity considered tearing up her dress for bandages, but it was dirty with dust and caked in Horse’s sweat. Besides, you have to keep yourself covered up in the sun if you are not Aboriginal or your skin falls off. So she took off her spencer instead and put her dress back on. The spencer was damp with sweat…but very well made and, try as she might, would not tear. Delving into Fred’s dillybag in search of something sharp, she found six stones, a flint lighter, his wizened baby bandicoot, the shells from Hogg’s rifle and some fine wire stolen from Jesus’ gunyah.

  “Thou shalt not steal,” she told Fred sternly, because it was what her mother would have said. “I am most disappointed in you, Fred.”

  But it is hard to be disappointed in your only friend when his eyes are flickering under his lids and his ribcage is all twisted over in the mud. She went to get the kettle and tipped the gritty contents into the hole in Fred’s shoulder, hoping he would not feel the heat, and glad it had not boiled after all.

  “The Wire must be busy,” she told Fred, “or Papa would have come looking.”

  But her father thought they were safe at Calgo Crossing and knew nothing of Fred’s secret gunyah in any case. She could ride home – tell him – fetch help! And have Hogg call her a liar and lock her in her bedroom and stop her ever coming back…? No. Instead, Hogg would seek out the gunyah and…and it would all be Comity’s fault.

  When the day cooled, she managed to persuade Fred that the railcar would be a better place to spend the night. She bent her back for him to climb up onto the side of the capsized carriage. He tumbled inside like a coin into a money box, overturning the crate that served as his bookcase. Much-loved books Comity had mislaid and searched for high and low slithered across the floor.

  “Thou shalt not take another person’s books,” said Comity helping Fred into one of the sideways-tilted wooden seats.

  But it is hard to lecture your only friend when his limbs are jumpy with cold and he groans softly to himself and won’t open his eyes. His head was against the window and she saw his hair quiver as a shudder ran through the whole railcar. Tethered to the railcar, Horse had begun to rub herself against the metalwork and to crib on the reins securing her. The rasp of her coarse hair against the carriage sounded as loud as a ripsaw.

  As the carriage cooled, it clicked and pinged eerily. Comity shivered.

  “Three dog night, verily.” Fred’s voice made her jump. “Feet to the fire. Dogs on top. Plenty big warm dogs. Like Gayfire Bobby.”

  She could almost have smacked him. Mama had read them the story of Greyfriars Bobby, and Greyfriars Bobby had not slept on top o
f his master to keep him warm on a raw wilderness night. Loyal Greyfriars Bobby had slept on top of his master’s grave after he was…

  “Greyfriars Bobby was not big. He was only little,” she snapped. “And sleeping under dogs can give you fleas. I shall light the stove.”

  He did not protest. His teeth were chattering with cold.

  She had his flint lighter. She had the kindling. Feeling about for one of the fallen books, she pulled the pages out one by one, crumpling them in her fist. Opening the stove, she pushed them loosely in. The paper would be gone in moments, but the bindings might burn for long enough to warm the carriage and boil some drinking water. Comity flicked the wheel of the flint lighter and brought its flame up close to the paper… How scared it must be, that flame; see how violently it quivered in her hand.

  A paper ball or two dropped out of the stove in front of her. The snake that had made its nest in the stove pushed its head out through the bank of crumpled paper and looked at her, eyes reflecting the lighted flame, tongue tasting the fear in the air. Comity slammed the oven door with a clang.

  “Too big noise,” said Fred, his eyes opening wide with terror. He had begun to see Hogg’s face in every smear of moonlight on the dirty windows.

  How many other snakes were coiled up in the luggage nets or under the floor or amid the broken clutter of the wrecked carriage? What fruity spiders? What scorpions? What Tuckonies? What ghost camels, what ghosts of those killed in the train crash? Comity climbed onto the backrest of an upended seat opposite Fred, drew her knees up to her chest and sat in a tight, shuddering ball. The image of the snake stayed bright in her mind’s eye. Other monsters began to edge their way in as well.

  “Fred. Hey, Fred,” she asked at some point during the night. “What did it look like, the Kadimakara? You saw inside the store. You must have seen.”

  “I seen in,” said Fred.

  “And?”

  “Not. Nothing,” he said. “No Kadimakara.” And he set his mouth in that way that meant, I was not wrong: someone just changed the truth.

  Like a conjuror’s assistant, she stayed curled up while night drove blades of cold through and through and through the box in which she and Fred lay hiding. Above their heads, above the carriage door which constituted a skylight, shooting stars went over like bullets.

  “Tomorrow someone will come,” she said doubtfully. “Someone who is not Mr. Hogg.”

  Horse twanged her rope and scratched her haunches against the train, fearing dingoes.

  Towards morning, Fred stopped feeling the cold. Fever had crept in at the hole in his shoulder.

  At the crack of dawn, Comity stood up on her seat and pushed the carriage door upwards.

  CRACK.

  On the first gust of fresh air came a crack so loud that she let the door drop.

  CRACK CRACK.

  Gunfire.

  Her hearing dimmed as fear shut off the blood supply. Her mouth, already parched with thirst, ran drier still.

  If it was Hogg out there, there was nothing to stop him strolling right up to the train, climbing up on its side, looking down at her through the windows and taking a slow, deliberate aim. But maybe it was not Hogg at all, but a dozen murderous ghans intent on doing all those things Hogg had described across the dinner table; all those hideous, unthinkable, unforgettable things…

  “We going?” enquired Fred, coughing up the words like phlegm.

  “Not yet,” said Comity, climbing down. “Later, maybe. Does that suit, Mr. Fred?”

  “Byallmean, Mrs. Pinny,” said Fred.

  CRACK CRACK. Again the rifle shot. Had they shot Horse? (There was no more twanging of rope or scratching of hide against metal.) But no thud shook the carriage. No bullet penetrated the roof or floor or broke the windows. Ten minutes, an hour passed, peppered by the occasional CRACK of a rifle.

  Were Comity and Fred meant to surrender? Did the ambusher think they were armed? Or were they simply keeping their victims pinned down, and waiting for Fred to die? It was true: time was not on Fred’s side.

  Comity gathered to her everything she might use to defend herself. It did not amount to much: a dinner knife, knitting needles, a porcelain spearhead. (Boiling water would have been good if she could have lit the stove.) Another hour passed, crazed with the crack of gunfire. Still nothing hit the railcar – only the sun slamming into the metalwork, heating the space inside to cooking temperature.

  What if it was just someone hunting nearby? Someone not Quartz Hogg. What if it was just someone from Kinkindele killing pestiferous dingoes and cats or teaching himself to shoot straight? What if there was help at hand, and Comity was sitting under a railcar seat, clutching a pair of knitting needles while Fred’s sweat dripped on her through the slats?

  “I think I shall go and take a look,” she said, touching his coarse wiry hair. His eyes rolled as they opened.

  Comity climbed up and pushed at the carriage door. Her arms felt feeble, unequal to hauling her up and out. And what if, when her head emerged…

  CRACK!

  Comity tumbled back down and burst into tears.

  “They are shooting at us, Fred!”

  “Yes?” He cocked his head slightly and listened. He did not have to wait long.

  CRACK.

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, no? Listen!”

  CRACK.

  Fred said, “Rifle bird.”

  Half a day wasted. Comity was in a towering rage – with herself, with the rifle bird, with Jesus for playing silly jokes at a time when jokes were not appropriate – not appropriate in the least! Now they must travel through the heat of the day. Now she was so much more weary when it came to Fred standing on her shoulders to escape the railcar; also when it came to getting out herself. She kept her temper fuelled – stupid rifle bird…stupid invention… why should a bird need to make a noise like a rifle? – because temper is a kind of energy…and sometimes you can squash fear with it, like you can squash beetles with a rock.

  Temper helped Comity to get them both up onto Horse’s back. (Horse was not, of course, lying dead on the ground riddled with bullet holes, but had broken loose to drink from the gloopy dregs of the creek.) If only temper made a person clever, then Comity might have known where to go.

  “Ghantown?” she said doubtfully.

  “No,” said Fred, and a wave of gratitude went through Comity. Fred was back on form. Now she need not go to the tintown and she need not be the person who decided.

  “You know somewhere? Somewhere with people?”

  “Verily,” said Fred, his hands sunk in his dillybag, fingering the six smooth pebbles he kept there. “Time to go in Altjeringa. You want to go along me.” It was not a question but a statement. “You want to go in Altjeringa.”

  “Where?” His speech was not very clear any more, and was further confused by a whistling, rasping sound in his throat. “Go where, Fred? Very good, but where?”

  “Trail of Yooneerara. To Byamee’s gunyah.”

  It was nothing but a string of vowels stitched together with spit. Comity’s temper bubbled up again. “Speak clearly please, Mr. Fred. I cannot understand you.”

  “Time to die, lilly-pilly. Got to get to Altjeringa. Like Yooneerara did on his two feet. Byamee is pretty damn old. Reckon I have to shout in his ear: Fred is coming, kubang. You got a space ready by the fire?” He broke off to cough, his forehead resting on Horse’s mane. His spine was so bent that Comity could see the shape of every vertebra: like porcelain insulators strung along the Wire.

  “All right, Fred,” said Comity sternly, pretending she had been asked and not told. “Altjeringa. But not forever. We go. You get healed. We come back again. Like Yoonywhoeversomebody. Or how would I get home?”

  Horse (being the property of the British-Australian Telegraph Company) was accustomed to following the Wire. During tours of inspection, for weeks at a time, she would plod along the shadowline of the overhead cable. Without the Wire, Horse was inclined to stand still.
Comity’s legs grew weary from kicking her in the flanks. Little blisters were starting to rise on her forearms and the backs of her hands. Small wonder Fred’s ancestors had turned themselves into rocks and hills and trees: out here, when the sun got to work, flesh-and-blood was not a good thing for a person to be.

  Horse was not enjoying herself either. That boy is dying.

  “He is not,” said Comity. “We are on a quest.”

  Since Station Four had been built bang on top of the traditional Kinkindele burial grounds, funerals no longer took place there. But Fred did not much care where his body was buried: it was his spirit he was worried about. Would the songlines within the landscape tell his soul the right way to go? Would they give him the energy, too, to press on and get there? Because his ancestors were the landscape – that tree, that rock, that bandicoot – and his ancestors possessed all the magic healing he needed to reach…

  To reach what?

  The far side of death? His mother? Some resting place between lives past and lives in the future? If Fred could have grown to manhood, and been initiated into the mysteries, he might have known more things for certain.

  He began to sing. It was more of a murmur – barely halfway to a hum – but a song is a measure of distance travelled and he knew he must keep track of how far they had come.

  “Why? How far is it to Altjeringa?” asked Comity.

  “Need plenty songs,” said Fred, who had no idea.

  When the singing fell silent, Comity began asking questions. If she could think of one question every mile, maybe she could keep Fred’s spirit from sliding out of his body.

  “Why is your ma not here any more?”

  “She went up to visit her mob. Never come there. Never come back. No sign.”

  Comity knew there were any number of reasons why a person might walk off into the rising sun and never be seen again: an illness, a snake, bad water, wild dogs… “Your pa must have been sad. But at least he still has you!”

  “No father, me. Like Jesus, me.”

  “What, you mean an angel gave your ma the good news?”