by Steven Lang
If a man could do that, sit in one place for long enough saying no then eventually, perhaps, everything around him would cease, all the threads of his life would wind down to zero. It might take years. Life would go on around him, oblivious, but in the end he might be able to look at it passing and see where it was that he fitted in. He could make a choice. For so long he had nurtured the illusion that he was separate and could choose. He had watched people trapped in their lives from the lofty perspective of his own, and all the time he was actually being turned by his own wheel, ground around and around like those blinkered oxen in India. Not only that but the people who were really in charge, it seemed, were utterly indifferent to him, had not even considered him as a person, just something in the way, to be used or discarded as was convenient. That he was important had been his own fantasy. It was, perhaps, an extension of the business about the mountain and the forest going on after he died, or no, not really, because the forest simply was, it simply existed in its own foresty way, unravelling its own foresty business. It was not consciously bending the world to its purpose. There was a difference.
Even as he thought these thoughts he ran, walked, hobbled. His legs did what they were supposed to do, but reluctantly, threatening to throw him off balance if he took his attention away for a second. His feet hurt. Only the creeping night pushed him on.
It was lighter when he reached the creek; outside of the forest cover it was not yet fully dark. He lay on the pale granite rocks with the clear water trickling over them, subsumed with a liquid delirium. This was Gubra Creek. Another kilometre down were some large flat rocks where a fire trail crossed. He had been there before, with Jessica.
He set off again, making what use he could of the extra light to rock-hop, oblivious of snakes, scaring the marsupials who’d come down for their evening drink. He was within an hour of her house. She would give him food and shelter, at least that, before she threw him out. He moved quickly, incautiously, only bringing himself up when he came to the fence, remembering he could not afford to be found.
He took the old fence trail uphill. By then it was dark, even darker amongst the trees, but his eyes had adjusted with the failing light and there was a small moon, five days old.
But the track was not a good idea; trees had grown up in the available space beside the wire and he had to push his way through them and the spiderwebs woven thickly between their branches, their threads sticking to his face and hands. He couldn’t see and his movements made too much noise. With deep repugnance he turned off, entering once again the forest. But at least he was on the Farm; the trees he slipped through were tame, not the wild ones of the previous night.
On the top of the ridge he found the fire trail where it wound above the cleared valley on one side and Gubra Creek on the other. Below, next to the road, would be the main house; he could see the lights of someone’s dwelling on the opposite hill. The trail dropped steeply down onto another shoulder and then another, then joined the road to Jessica’s cabin.
Lights were glowing in the window.
thirty-seven
Suzy hears or smells him when he’s still a hundred metres away. He left her there the afternoon before, when he was going to the main house to meet Carl and Andy. Only a little more than twenty-four hours has passed. She barks, her hackles raised, then runs along the road to meet him, tail wagging madly.
Jessica opens the door of the cabin.
‘Is anyone there?’ she says, standing in the light.
How much he wants her. He crouches, stroking Suzy, trying to calm her with his hands.
Jessica calls out, ‘Suzy, Sooo-zie.’
The dog becomes more excited, yelping a couple of times but doesn’t go back, waits for him, torn between the two people, coming in close, fascinated by his smell.
‘Kelvin,’ Jessica says. ‘Is that you?’
He stands, ‘Yes,’ he says, and walks towards her.
‘Come in then,’ she says. ‘Quickly, before anyone sees you.’
She knew he would come, and there he is, stepping out of the darkness. She wants to touch him, but recoils, confused, stepping aside to let him pass. She closes the door behind him. He stands for a moment by the bench looking at her, then simply collapses.
He’s on the floor and she’s squatting next to him. He’s filthy in a way that is quite foreign to her, as if he has been in the woods for months, living with wild animals, his face scratched and torn, his clothes matted and dark. He opens his eyes.
‘I’m sorry Jessica, I’m really sorry for not meeting you at the airport,’ he says.
She has forgotten about that.
‘I won’t stay long. Can I have something to eat? I haven’t eaten since yesterday, except for some nuts and raisins I got from Carl.’
He tries to push Suzy away but the dog won’t leave him alone.
‘Stop it Suze,’ he says, but gently. ‘Stop it now.’
‘Where’s Carl? What’s Carl got to do with this?’
Kelvin is surprised. ‘Carl’s dead,’ he says.
‘No.’
‘I thought they might have found him. I dragged him out into the creek so that they would.’ His eyes shift away from hers. ‘It was Andy who killed him, you know. He fell down a cliff but Andy – ’
‘No, you’ve got it wrong, Kelvin. Andy’s dead, it’s not Carl.’
‘No, no it was Carl. This is his blood.’ He holds up his arm for her to see but it could just as well be any part of him.
She has not, until then, realised the import of his filth.
‘He talked to me and then he died. He died when I tried to move him, but it wasn’t my fault, I don’t think it was, not that bit anyway. He was already dead.’
His words have a curious effect. He’s on the floor with Jessica crouched over him, the dog snuffling. He tells her this about Carl and she stands up and walks a few paces away. When she turns back she’s crying. Just like that. He tells her Carl is dead and her face simply breaks up, her eyes go red and swell up and actual tears run down her cheeks. She’s keeping her balance with one hand.
‘I’m really sorry,’ he says. ‘I’ve really fucked up.’
Suzy will not be dissuaded. Suddenly Jessica understands what she’s interested in.
‘Out,’ she says to the dog. ‘Outside, now!’ going over and holding the door, the dog slinking outside, tail between her legs, ‘Disgusting animal.’
‘She’s all right,’ Kelvin says. ‘She’s just a dog.’
‘As for you,’ Jessica says, turning her anger on him, ‘as for you, you little shit.’
She looks at him through her tears, pathetic, filthy, and yet something else too.
‘Take those clothes off. I’ll run you a bath. Lucky for you I lit the stove. I’ll get you something to eat, then you can explain yourself. It better be good, that’s all I can say. It better be good.’
She has gone into the lean-to which serves as a bathroom, a place of pot plants and unguents. He can hear the water running into the bath. He is, he notes, lying on the floor.
He was beside Carl when he died. He had held him in his arms. He knows that it was probably the moving of his body which finally killed him. Even then he hadn’t cried. There were no tears in him, only that awful distance.
She comes back and starts undressing him, pulling the shirt over his head. Her cheeks are still wet with tears and her nose is running. For some reason he doesn’t mind that, for some reason this seems to be normal; proper, even. She stands and takes some tissues from the counter. He thinks she is going to wipe her eyes, blow her nose, but instead she comes to him. It’s his eyes she wipes, not hers.
‘Andy’s dead?’ he says.
‘I don’t know for sure,’ she says. ‘But there were some cops down at his place. Special Branch, I think. They were being very coy. The radio said there were two men dead, one seriously injured and one missing. I guess you’re the one who’s missing. They didn’t say it was you but they asked for you. Jim told them he
’d seen you this morning, that you drove my car to the dairy at seven.’
‘Andy was a cop,’ Kelvin says. ‘He was working for Special Branch.’
She takes the clothes to the stove, empties the pockets and then burns them, everything she can find, every last stitch, everything that came out of them, the map, the string, what to do with the knife and compass? She leaves them on the bench.
She stands in the bathroom doorway.
‘Are you an international terrorist?’
‘Is this some kind of trick question?’
‘They said it on the radio, that there was a terrorist involved who was wanted around the world. Is it you?’
He stares at his legs under the brown water.
‘That would be Carl, I guess. It fits. He said he was going to tell me when this was over. He ran off a cliff, Jessica. I was following him.We were running through the trees in the dark and he kept going, straight out into the air. I grabbed a tree.’
He is in her bath, in the hot water and the scent and the safety of her house. Outside is the darkness. She has her hand on the doorjamb, her face flickering between emotions as if it is a physical register of internal thought. There has never been anything hidden about her.This red-haired, pale-skinned woman, perhaps even a little plain, but real, surrounded by her world.
He is taken, then, by such longing for her. Even from where he is, surrounded by all his failings, all his needs, he senses this feeling to be utterly genuine. Even though he is, at this moment, governed more surely by circumstance than at any time in his life, he knows the feeling to be pure, unadulterated and true. If he could choose her, he would.
Carl is the terrorist? Carl is dead? Her Carl. Her Carl who wouldn’t let her love him, who she had loved anyway, who had loved her but wouldn’t tell her because of something in his past. It is so stupid, so vastly, enormously foolish that she can hardly stand and yet there, in front of her, naked in her bath, is Kelvin, delivered, as it were, out of the night.
Is his story equally stupid? Andy was a cop? They were setting a trap? Suddenly she doesn’t care. His body is covered in bruises and scratches. His beautiful body. So large in her bath, the dark hair around his cock and balls. There are great rings under his eyes, his cheeks are drawn. Sleep will fix that. With a shave and clean hair he won’t look too bad, there’s only one nasty cut across the forehead.You could put that down to an accident, a run-in with barbed wire. He will pass muster in a high-necked shirt.
There is so much she doesn’t know about the simplest things. When she first got to Sydney she thought she was hitting the big time, talking about the politics of the possible, but that had turned out to be so much bullshit. Macquarie Street was only about power. Issues were only issues in that they were stepping stones to making someone’s career. For a moment she had been caught up in it, she had even thought she could cut it there.
Then she came back and Jim hadn’t even asked her what happened. Neither had Kelvin. And even though she wasn’t exactly open to questions, she is so disappointed in that, as if what is happening here on this little bit of land is all that’s important. Except that on some level it is. That’s the paradox. These are the differences she has to try to marry. There has been another life going on without her, another life here she has failed to see. She raises her eyes to meet Kelvin’s. She wants to hit him, she wants to hold him. Did she make a pact with God? She can’t remember. Probably it’s best to be on the safe side. She kneels beside the tub, takes the cloth in her hand and begins to wash his cheek.
acknowledgments
I have been blessed with a remarkable level of support in the writing of this novel. I am indebted to my editor Julia Stiles not only for the attention she gave to the manuscript, but also for her early belief in its potential. I am immensely grateful to the Queensland Premier’s Department for granting me the ‘Best Manuscript from an Emerging Queensland Author Award 2004’; would that all states granted writing the importance that Queensland does. I would like to thank David Woolston, motor-mechanic extraordinaire, for his advice regarding motors and their response to sugar in their fuel; Gary Crew, Ross Smith and John Purser for their early readings and comments. Lastly I am more than grateful to my wife, Chris Francis, for reading the manuscript in its numerous different versions. I am fortunate indeed to have someone who offers me such loving encouragement.
