The Wish Kin (17 page)

‘We must be careful,' says Moss in a whisper. ‘We must not take too many risks.'

They find their way down through the walls to another level, and another. The cells here are larger, are choked with people, twenty or thirty and only one small bucket between them. The stench from these rooms, of the bodies, of the buckets overflowing with filth, is disgusting. Colm tastes the rise of bile in his throat, feels his stomach lurch, his tongue curl. He swallows.

On the lowest level there is only one room. It is vast, as though it takes up the entire level. It seems to Colm that there are a hundred people in this room. Most of them are lying on the floor, apparently too weak to move about, to talk. Around the perimeter of the room is a shallow channel. This is filled and running with sewage. The people are trapped by their own excrement.

Colm, Lydia and Moss do not wish to linger over this room, not only because of the smell, but because of the horror of what they see. Colm wonders if these
are the same people as were transported by plane.

But still they have not found their father, and Colm feels himself getting worried about it, edgy. There are too many people in the vast room below for him to properly look. He calls to him,
Father, Father,
and Lydia calls too, but there is no response.

Perhaps he is sleeping,
says Moss.
Or occupied with another. There are many reasons, I'm sure, why a person cannot always hear the Inner Speech.

They call and call, hoping for a response. But Moss wants to go back up, sees little point in being here, in the face of filth.

‘But our father may be here,' Colm insists, and Lydia turns also to Moss.

‘We must stay, Moss,' she says. ‘You go back up if you like but we have to stay and look for him. We must be sure that he isn't here before we move on.'

Moss is doubtful. ‘Why?' he asks, his voice a harsh whisper. ‘What difference does it make? It is those in the leather chairs in the great engine room with whom we have to deal. The fate of these people will be the same whether your father is one of them or not.'

‘And what is their fate?' asks Colm, solid now, certain that he will not leave. He is angry with Moss; he thinks now that he has misjudged him, that the boy has, after all, no heart.

Moss looks down, knowing Colm's judgment of him. He slides into Inner Speech, that form of interaction which is so close, so comforting.

They must be released,
he says.
It is not right that they stay in these conditions for another moment. And it is clearly we who must release them. Though how, I don't yet know.
He looks at his friend, at both of his friends, and sees in their faces repentance.

I'm sorry, Moss,
says Colm.

Moss shakes his head.
I'm sorry too.
He looks down again into the horrible room.
Of course we must stay here,
he says.
Of course we must find out if your father is here. It can be done if we are organised about it.

They section the room, take an area each. They begin to scan then, carefully, methodically, and continue to call in the Inner Speech.

It takes a long time. The faces of many of the people are obscured – by others, by the dim lighting, by the angle from which they are observed. The prisoners grow restless, begin to shift, to get up and move about the cramped enclosure. A rattling of keys is heard and the door of the room opens. Several keepers appear. They bark orders, and the prisoners file out of the room. This is a blessing, Colm thinks, and gestures to the others that they join him at the vent over the door. Now they can see clearly the faces of those passing through, can observe them in detail, will certainly see their father if he is there. Colm's spirits mount.

There are so many of them, he thinks as he watches the men and women pass by beneath them. Children too, he sees, and teenagers. He sharpens his eyes that he might not miss his father if he passes.

But why would his father even be in such a room? Surely, if it was as they thought and the Clan considers him a member of the Wish Kin, then they would care for him a little better.

Lydia grips his arm. She is looking away from the door, back into the room, at a man, tall and lean of build, though terribly thin, and with suntanned skin and brown hair. The man is shirtless and is bending over another, helping him to rise. Colm sees the man's back, knows it at once, but when the man stands with his ailing friend on his arm, Colm wavers, uncertain now that this is his father. The man looks so very thin, even unwell, and his face is thick with a reddish fuzz. Father doesn't have a beard, he thinks, but then shakes the thought from his head: for all the men in the room, all the men they have seen imprisoned in this place, have beards. Of course they have. A prison system that does not provide a proper sewerage system is hardly going to provide razors.

So he looks again at the man, the thin, brown man with the reddish fuzz hiding his face, and knows from the stance and the stride of him that it is his father. And he speaks to him, for he has not seen him for so long, and he needs him.

Father!
he says, and Rafe Bell looks up. Though the three of them are in darkness here in this space between the ceiling and the floor, though there is really no way those below can see into the gloom beyond the vent, Colm feels as though his father's gaze has met and held his own.

Colm!
He hears his father's voice like a jewel in his heart, a brilliant blood-red jewel, a ruby of immanence. It sits there, bright in his flesh, warm and buoyant against his pulse. He hears his father's voice, knows it, and is happy.

The sighting of Rafe Bell is a brief one. In a moment he passes with the other prisoners through the doorway, and disappears slowly into the corridor beyond. Colm, Lydia and Moss scuttle silently through their gloomy space, trying to follow the path of the prisoners. This corridor, it seems, is not vented, so they cannot see their father for a time. But they listen closely, follow what they believe to be the sound of shuffling feet, and find themselves on yet another lower level.

Vents break again into the darkness and the children see the prisoners forming into long straggly rows. Rafe Bell, one of the last to leave the cell, is in the rear of these rows, his arm a support to the ailing man beside him. The keepers are standing still and silently against the walls, their legs apart, their guns resting between their feet. The air is unbearably thick and hot. Colm plucks at his sticky shirt, blinks away the drops of sweat that fall into his eyes. He wets his mouth with the dregs of his water bottle.

In front of the prisoners is a vast wall of stone. Images appear upon it of brown earth, of dry spinifex, of electric blue sky. There are creek beds drained of their contents, paddocks parched and without crop,
mountains scourged of every vestige of plant life. Colm recognises these images at once and looks at Lydia; she knows them too. ‘The dome,' she mouths, and he nods, remembering the bare white room with the mirror, the two chairs, the humming holoview, the endless, horrendous images shown them. He knows what is coming next and sickens when he sees that he is right. There are the cattle falling to their bony knees with hunger, the birds dropping open-mouthed and silent from the sky, the mounds of dead and dying sheep set on fire and burning. There are the towns where there is no water, the men brawling, the women starving, the children desperate for moisture.

And now the sounds, the crying, the weeping, the wailing. The cattle moaning, the dying birds gasping, the sheep bleating madly in the fire. The children cover their ears with their hands. Moss's face is pale with horror.

Colm waits for the images to stop. He waits for the images of pain and thirst to be replaced with those of gentleness, beauty. He waits and waits, they all wait, but the screaming and crying continue, the blistering and agony do not cease.

Below, the prisoners stand upright, defenceless. They do not cover their ears or cringe from the horror of the images. Is this because of the keepers? Colm wonders. Of fear of punishment? Then decides it has to be, there could be no other reason. He looks at his father; Rafe Bell is standing as the others, straight, motionless.

But the three young people can bear it no longer – the images, the screaming – and so they move away, crawl carefully through the low space up into a higher level. Their ears resound with the echoes of pain.

In the dimness, the quiet, they talk, work out what to do. Colm wants to speak to his father; Lydia does too.

‘He'll know what has to be done,' says Colm. ‘We can get him out of here and he can deal with things. He's strong and smart. He'll know what we need to do.'

Moss is troubled. He is holding in his thoughts, says only, ‘How are we going to get him out?'

Colm shifts and shrugs, irritated. He does not think this is the point. ‘You're a keeper,' he says. ‘You know their ways.'

‘
Was
a keeper,' replies Moss. There is silence. They are not giving way to each other.

‘Let us at least wait until he returns to the cell,' says Lydia. ‘One of us could speak to him, see what he says.'

Moss is reluctant, but agrees. They sit quietly near the vent, but not near enough to be completely overcome by the smell. They listen for the prisoners' return.

I think the Clan can't decide if Father is a member of the Wish Kin or not,
Colm says as they wait.
If they did, wouldn't they look after him better?

You mean like those further up?
asks Moss, his face a wry smile.

I think this is the cell where they put those they are uncertain of, and maybe those they wish to punish for some reason. The Clan is pretty sure that those further up are Wish Kin. But with these, they are less certain. Father is of some value to the Clan whether he is a member of the Wish Kin or not, but he hasn't cooperated fully with the Clan and so they've put him here until he does.

And why the images?
asks Lydia.

Part punishment,
replies Colm.
Part hopefulness. Someone might yet reveal themselves as a member of the Wish Kin. But there's no incentive for a group as corrupt as the Clan to waste scarce resources on them while they wait.

When the children hear the prisoners shuffle back into the cell, they peer through the vent once again. The prisoners seem even more exhausted, even more drained.

Their father stands with some other men along one of the walls. They are apparently silent. But Colm wonders if they are not deep in conversation, using the Inner Speech. Will it work, he thinks, if I also speak to him? Will he hear me? But he does not even know for certain if the men are conversing, just thinks that they might be.

Father,
he says, softly, testing to see. And again,
Father!

He sees his father start slightly, nod to the fellow beside him and move painfully away from the group. He sits on the floor beneath the vent, head bowed.

My son,
says Rafe Bell.
How do you fare?

Well, Father,
replies Colm.
And you?

As you see, Son.

Colm looks again at the desperateness of the place, and the filth. He is suddenly charged.
Father,
he says,
we will get you out of here! We'll work out a plan!

Rafe Bell is silent, then says,
And your sister? How is she?

Colm is impatient, irritated.
Gander,
he says.
She's gander.

You've done well together, then?

We've done all right but now we have to work out what –

His father interrupts him.
Is your Aunt Ilena here?

Yes, Father. I think she is.

How does she look?

All right.
And then,
Father, we need to make a plan. We need you to tell us what to do, how to get these people out of here.

Son, look at me. I am ill. I can do nothing.

Colm quietens, looks at his father's emaciated form. This is not the conversation he was hoping to have.

Was it really you who spoke to me before, that time coming down from the plateau? I thought I heard you when I crashed into that boulder.

Yes,
says his father.
It was.

And in the plane after. I didn't hear you exactly, but I felt you wanted me to remember what you'd said to me earlier
.

His father stands slowly, shuffles back a little from the vent so that Colm can see his face clearly. He looks drawn, exhausted, but his eyes are steady and serious, his brow determined.

And I want you to remember it now.

A keeper appears, begins to herd the people from the room once again. Colm did not see him approach, did not hear the rattle of keys, the scrape of the door, and is shocked now by the intrusion into the conversation. He wants to say more to his father, wants to tell him again that they'll get him out of here, that his father should organise something, maybe with his friends, the other prisoners, to take on the Clan, to overthrow them, to destroy the hideous engine room on the uppermost level of this underground metropolis. But there is no time: the keeper is already leading the prisoners from the room, Rafe Bell among them.

Father!
he calls, as he sees his parent about to disappear through the doorway and into the corridor.
I need you!

And his father's voice comes back, pure and true.
There is nothing I can do, Colm. It is up to you. Only you can do it now
.

They sleep, for they are exhausted, under the dark sky of stone. When they wake they do not know if it is day or night, for the light here in this place remains dim, a constant, unchanging gloom. Below them the prisoners sleep on, their limbs twisted and pressed against one another for the lack of space. Some groan as they sleep, or call out with dry, strangled cries. Rafe Bell sleeps sitting up, his lap a pillow for an infirm friend, his head bowed in quiet to his chest.

The children are hungry, are thirsty, consume the last of their supplies. They wend their way back to the engine room, to the cave of industria, where, it seems, the time of day makes little difference to the level of activity within those vast stone walls. The workers in their sturdy grey overalls toil unceasingly beneath the great white pools of light spilling from the electric bars
overhead, travel quickly along interlocking pathways fashioned from shiny metal grids, climb ladders of sharp iron tines up, up, up to the very tops of tanks and gleaming reservoirs, plunge weighted lines into these vibrant cylinders, push anodised trolleys loaded with beakers and Petri dishes along slow-moving travelways, confer and discuss, speak in low, muted tones, the voices of sleek oil and spit.

But the dais in the centre of the industria is empty, the leather chairs vacant. No one, it appears, is overseeing the work, at least not from this point. The children look at the shiny upholstery, the smooth lines of authority, the sleek arms of control, and wish that it were they in the seats, that it were they driving the intricate mechanics of industria. For they, naturally, would do it all so very differently.

Their provisions are depleted, their hungry thinking scatty and erratic. They know they need to eat, and soon, so they make their way to the dark upward-reaching tunnel, and begin the ascent.

The air above is sweet after the sourness of below. Colm thinks that he is breathing bliss. They blow out from their lungs the stench from underneath, the staleness and the rank. Overhead the night sky still rests, but the reaches of it, the bounds, are endless. It is a relief to no longer feel closed in.

They eat slowly, a rind of bread, a smear of salty brown paste, and feel the comfort move inside their bellies, the thoughts shift to take their proper place
inside their brains. Colm thinks over and over the conversation with his father, thinks of what he thought was going to be exchanged, thinks in turn of what was actually exchanged.
It is up to you now,
Rafe Bell had said, close in the Inner Speech. When what Colm had wanted him to say was,
Don't worry, Son. It's all worked out. I've got everything under control.
But no, nothing like this. Nothing like this at all.

Moss hands them another rind of bread. ‘You never finished telling me about your father,' he says. ‘About why it was that he left the Twelve.'

‘It's not a very nice story,' says Lydia.

‘Please tell me.'

Moss looks serious, concerned. Colm thinks he is trying to make up for the trouble underground, wants there to be only peace between them. So he speaks.

‘You remember what we told you about the Twelve – the fame, the success. After a while, things began to get worse again because people didn't want to listen. Well, they did and they didn't. They wanted it both ways. Instead of following the principles set out by the Twelve which would have made the system work, people began to consume even more, thinking that, oh, one more of this won't hurt, or a little more of that won't do any harm because, after all, the Twelve are on the job, science has it under control. This was incredibly difficult for our father, incredibly frustrating for him – for all the Twelve, really. The Twelve came under even greater pressure to create more
eco-enhancements, to counter the ever-growing consumerism and destruction the people were bringing about. Our father found this pressure unbearable and then, when he discovered that a number of the Twelve were corrupt, he cracked.'

‘Our parents fled then,' says Lydia. ‘They left the city and hid in the bush. It was a terrible time for them. They were chased – by police and helicopters and everything. Our father had become public property, you see, was considered vital to the saving of the world.'

Colm wipes his mouth, continues the story. ‘They got away and headed south where they established the fortified valley in Hirrup's Range. Our father was still ill at this time, but had plans to begin work again soon, this time with more trustworthy people. He wanted to form a community on Hirrup's Range and was beginning to get better when our mother was killed: a sheet of loose earth slid from the side of the mountain onto the car in which they were driving. Our father suffered a complete breakdown then: he was sure that our mother's death was no accident. I don't think he's ever really recovered.'

Colm stops, broken. He feels wrecked on the inside – at the misfortune of his father, at the death of his mother. His head bows, his hand releases the bread it has been holding. He is far away.

‘Colm,' says Lydia softly, and Colm feels the pressure of his sister's hand on his arm. He looks up, gathers himself, remembers where he is.

Lydia and Moss are looking at him with concern. Lydia seems calm and unaffected by the telling of the story. He cannot understand this. He thinks that maybe it is because she was so small when their mother died, and when their father was ill. He thinks that maybe she can't really remember their mother, or their father as he was before.

‘Are you gander, Colm?' Lydia asks.

‘I'm gander,' Colm replies. He picks up the bread he dropped, dusts it off, looks again at Moss. ‘Our father has never spoken much about that time, just snippets really. I suppose he thinks we're too young, and not ready. But maybe now, after all this, he'll tell us. Maybe now he'll think we're ready.'

A sickness grips him; the knowledge that some unknown thing has to be done, and done by him, is as a lead weight in his gut. He wants to take to his bed, to curl up in his small glass box and spin far, far away. He wants to take to his bed and sleep and never wake up. But he doesn't. He forces himself to stand, to breathe deeply.

‘Might walk to the sea,' he says to Lydia and Moss.

‘Be careful,' they say.

He nods, and sets out around the rim of the tarmac, keeping close to the shelter of outbuildings and packing crates.

At the edge of the tarmac he heaves himself over the line of blocks so that the sea is stretched out unimpeded before him. The tide is low, the beach between
him and the water a good fifty metres across. He walks a little, his bare feet rejoicing in the night-coolness of the sand, then stops at the dark line of water coming in from the east.

It is the strange, grey time just on the edge of dawn. The air, already warming with the nearness of sun, folds in gentle layers about Colm as he stands. He sees the way it is slowly lightening as the sun draws yet nearer, as the sun sends the first of its scouting rays from beneath the horizon into the new land of day. He watches, and it seems that no time passes as the light grows brighter, grows clearer, grows so that he can make out the shape of the headland far to the south, the jumble of rock just to the north. He looks at the lightening day, at the clarity that shapes the oceans and sand, and feels a leaping inside him, an arc of joy.

In the distance, way out to sea, he imagines he sees something. What is it? he wonders. It is not on the water, but it appears to be not far above it. At least, the perspective from here to there makes it seem as though it is not far above it. He gazes at the little thing, stares at it, wonders if it is something of his imagination, something he wants to see, if it is a fleck of dust on his retina, or if it is real. He stares and stares, but the thing is so small that he has no answer.

He knows what he thinks it is. At least, he knows what he wants it to be. Yet he can barely allow himself to think the thought of the thing.

But a voice in his head – his own? his father's? –
prompts him.
What is it?
the voice asks.
Name the name of what it is.
And he listens to the voice and responds, opens his mouth, moves his lips to form the shape of the word, raises the back of his tongue to the roof of his mouth then flicks the muscle round and forward to just behind his teeth to form the sound, breathes out with the saying of it, and says it. ‘Cloud.' The moment he gives voice to the word, he knows that what he sees there above the lightening grey of the sea is indeed that very thing.

At once the dim shape seems to swell, to bloom. Colm watches it, sees how it takes shape and form, sees how its edges thicken and increase. He drags his eyes slowly to bare space on the left of the cloud and watches as the nearest rim of it stretches out in ribbons to follow the same path. He sings and the cloud thickens, grows a fullness, a depth, at its heart.

The day grows lighter. Bands of red and yellow dress the sky, blooden the moving water. A crest of sun appears, flaming, on the horizon. Colm shifts his eyes from the little cloud to look at the fiery spill of colours, but the little cloud does not like this, will not let him look away, and follows again the shift of his gaze so that she, deepening, burgeoning thing, is still in it.

Colm laughs, feels his cheeks burn hot. The little cloud is nearer now than before, and seems larger. She is growing fuller and fuller, for Colm is singing to her once more, and, it seems, she likes this. He thinks for a moment of Jeune, of how she liked his singing too.
Now he sings of the cloud's beauty, for he thinks that as she gets closer and fuller, the wonder of her increases. He sings and watches the frayed thread-like edges of her fill out so that they are like small cloud satellites around a cloud moon. He laughs and sings, watches now the cloud grow pink and fat with expectation – a woman with child, he thinks, a woman with many children. And she, fatter and fatter and pinker and pinker, proud and content with her mad, joyous lot, her brood of blossoming baby clouds, clinging close and expanding her reaches so that there is much of her now, much of her to look at, to sing to, to rejoice in.

A whisper passes through Colm's mind, a whisper of the last time he did this, of the last time he sang to a cloud, to a wisp of mist in the sky, when he was on the beach near Aunt Ilena's house. The whisper reminds him of Moss's reaction, of how the older boy grew anxious, edgy, told him to stop it, to stop with his singing, said that it was not the right time. Another whisper, but from Lydia.
The cloud was answering you,
she had said to him.
It was responding to your words, your melody.
And more, from Moss,
Enough. It is not the right time.

Whisper, whisper. What did they mean?
Enough. Enough.
He'd been edgy, had Moss, anxious.
It is not the right time,
he'd said. But what did he mean? Colm is pulled in his mind, drawn in to the whispering, fractured a little, troubled.

But the cloud lures him back. She is so full now, her children about her growing, grown, so that they are as big as her, so that they are bigger. Where is she now? Colm wonders, for in place of the pretty little cloud is a vast expanse, solid almost, though still flushed pink with the sun.

I know the colour of you,
he sings, and the cloud swells yet further, shows him that she is happy that he knows.

He sings and sings, the cloud blossoms and unfurls, loads the sky with radiant thickness. The sun is fully above the horizon now, is travelling quickly, but Colm can see that, at any moment, it will journey behind the wealth of cloud, will disappear from sight. What then? he wonders. But on he sings, and on and on and on.

And he is right. The sun rides and rides till it finds itself bedded again, after so short a day, beneath the blanket of cloud. At once the light changes, lessens. It is as though it is the first phase of dusk, Colm thinks, or the latter of dawn. He has never seen such a thing before. He has never seen any but the natural course of the day bring down the sun's brightness. It amazes him, this sudden dimness, and in turn amazes him that he could not have previously thought such a thing possible. He looks at his pretty little cloud, now unrecognisable as a vast field of whiteness in the dimming sky, and marvels. How can this be? He listens to the pushing ocean, to the wind in the sand grasses. He cannot believe what he sees, cannot believe what
has just happened. He hears again the whisper, again the words of Lydia.
The cloud was answering you. It was responding to your words, your melody.
He shakes his head at this, shakes the whisper from out of his ears, the thought from out of his mind. But how? he thinks. Such a thing is not possible. But he thinks of the other time when he played with the cloud, and he hears now another voice, his father's, pressing him:
Remember who you are, Colm. Remember who you are.

He lowers his head, draws his gaze from the cloud to the water at his feet.

Why, Father?
he asks.

Still only the insistence of the words.
Remember who you are. Remember who you are.
And then,
Only you can do it now.

It is not his father's voice, he knows. It is the memory of it. But it is the last thing he heard him say.

And so he gathers himself.

‘I am Colm Bell,' he says aloud, his head raised now to the growing bank of cloud. ‘I am Colm Bell, son of Rafe the scientist and inventor, and of Rose the artist; brother of Lydia, my closest companion, and fellow traveller of Moss. I am Colm Bell who loves each of these people, who loves, too, the beautiful Jeune, who wants one day to be with her again.'

The cloud thickens and greys, moves in slowly from across the sea. Colm is terrified by the sight of it, by the awfulness of it and the might. He covers his fear with an act of his will and curls his fingers to fists.

‘I am Colm Bell who ran for hours through the tunnel to safety,' he says. ‘I am Colm Bell who survived for months in the desert. I am Colm Bell who has learned to thread my life into songs. I am Colm Bell who converses in the Inner Speech. I am Colm Bell who believes in the Rekindling. I am Colm Bell who desires that our land be made whole once again.'