The Wish Kin (4 page)

• • •

At breakfast, Marla serves them each a bowl of brown grainy mash and they drink some more of the greenish
brew that they had the night before. Colm watches Joe playing peekaboo with Kiah from behind the chair back. The little girl laughs, high-pitched and joyous, and sends her bowl of food skating across the tabletop. Nobody seems to mind when it falls to the floor. Marla gathers the pieces smiling.

‘When are we leaving, Joe?' asks Colm.

Joe ducks his head down behind the chair and appears again suddenly. Kiah snatches and squeals.

‘Joe?'

Joe thrusts his fat fingers into Kiah's belly and starts to tickle her. Kiah grabs at Joe's hand, laughing.

‘When are we leaving?' Colm says again.

‘Eh?' Joe looks up.

‘We're all packed,' says Lydia.

‘Right.' Joe pats Kiah on the head and looks across to where Marla is feeding Ganan.

‘You're welcome to stay for a while,' she says. ‘Nice to have a bit of company for a change.' She sweeps her hair away from her neck and Colm sees a dark bruise on her throat.

Joe acts surprised and pleased at the offer, but Colm is certain this isn't the first time he has heard it made.

‘Well, we could stay another night or two, just to catch our breath,' says Joe. ‘Long trip ahead.'

‘
You
might want to catch your breath, Joe,' says Colm, ‘but
we
have to get to Wonding.'

‘'Nuther day's not gunna make a difference.'

‘I reckon it will.'

Colm feels strangely strong. It's not like him to challenge authority, but the urgency of their flight is well apparent and he wants to be on their way.

‘For the kids, son,' says Joe. Kiah is sitting in Joe's lap now. Ganan's small brown fist is wrapped around his pinky. Joe's eyes are pleading. Colm feels his momentary resolve fall away.

‘Lyd?' he asks. His sister turns a blank face to him and shrugs.

‘One more night, then,' he says.

The day passes, burning and smouldering around them. Joe, it seems, can't get enough of the children, or of Marla. The four of them sit in the kitchen, laughing together, playing and teasing. Colm and Lydia drift from room to room, opening this door and that. In a long-disused drawing room they find an old deck of playing cards and build card castles, stacking the paper palaces higher and higher until the cards collapse to a slippery sea of kings and queens and aces.

They sleep. Colm dreams of giant rats descending on a town made entirely of cards. He sees the rats lunging forth with their yellow teeth and brutal gums. Joe is there, and Marla and Kiah and Ganan. The adults are afraid of the rats and prod ineffectually at them with spoons and little forks. The rats snap and snarl, and move closer. They stop, though, when they see the children. Their snarling ceases. Kiah and Ganan run forward as though seeing old friends. They jump on the rats and begin to tussle with them, laughing.
The rats, in some strange ratty way, also begin to laugh, and Colm watches them pinch and tickle the children, tickle them so much that their laughter turns almost to tears. ‘Stop, stop!' they cry. ‘Stop!' Their voices shift; they sound less like themselves now and more like the rats. But the rats tickle on and on.

Colm wakes. The room echoes around him as though someone has just called out. He listens into the blackness. The echo falls away, disappears into the stone of the walls, the wood of the floor. Colm is thirsty and walks through the house to the kitchen. He takes a swig of green brew and wipes his mouth. A small cry rings softly through the sleeping rooms and Colm turns his ear to the sound. The echo again sifts gently, this time through the cracks in the furniture, through Colm's own skin and hair. He walks quickly along the corridor and looks in the open doorways. Marla and Joe lie sleeping, their arms and legs laced together. Kiah and Ganan are quiet in a mess of sheets. Colm crosses to the other side of the house where the deck of cards sits solemnly on a shelf. Beside the shelf is a small door – a cupboard, Colm assumes. He turns the handle and pulls the door gently towards him. It is surprisingly heavy and opens slowly. Before him, a flight of stairs descends into darkness. He follows, places his feet carefully on the narrow steps. The darkness folds around him. He runs his hands along the rough walls to feel his way. He wishes now that he had his torch. And that Lydia was with him. It is always better when she is there.

His feet reach at last level ground and he hears again the cry. It is close now, within reach, it seems, so Colm pushes out from the safety of the wall into the dark unknown. His arms flail in front of him, his feet shuffle cautiously forward. He moves about like this, uncertain now of the way back, uncertain even of where the wall is. The cry comes again. This time it is behind him. How did he miss it? He turns, his anxiety overcome by curiosity: for the sound is high-pitched and pathetic, as though made by a tiny child. He reaches out again and his hand finds a large object, hard and solid. He traces its outline. A box, it seems, made of wood. He begins to explore the box's interior. The wood is covered by a coarse fabric. There is much of this, and Colm feels carefully through, seeking the source of the cry which comes again, right here, right beside his hand. He just has to shift his fingers slightly and he will have found it.

‘What are you doing?'

He snatches his hand away, shocked by the sudden voice in the darkness. He sees Marla standing by the stairway, the flame of a small candle illuminating her face.

‘I heard a cry,' says Colm. ‘Everybody else was asleep. So I came down.'

‘Have you seen him?' asks Marla. ‘Have you seen who is in the box?'

Colm shakes his head. ‘No,' he says. ‘It's too dark.'

‘Then let me show you.' Marla walks towards him,
the flame sputtering now and sending ragged shadows across the room. She stands close beside Colm and lowers the candle slowly. Colm gasps, shocked. In the box is a child, very young and very small. His fingers are pink and curl into tiny fists. His little legs and arms beat into the air. His eyes are dark and thickly lashed. But his crinkled face is pointed, his ears opaque and webbed with tiny veins, and his skin is lightly covered with a pelt of stiff brown hair. The child looks like a rat. So much so that, in the darkness and confusion, Colm thinks he sees a scaly tail slide quickly beneath the covers.

‘My son,' says Marla. ‘His name is Turi.'

Colm does not know what to say.

The baby, seeing his mother, reaches out to her and utters again the sad little cry, softer now but just as desolate. Marla sets down the candle and lifts the child lightly into her arms.

‘He is –' Colm swallows, ‘– part rat?'

Marla looks at him strangely and shakes her head. ‘No,' she says. ‘It's 'cause of the toxins. We're built on top of Midgin's old rubbish tip. Cheap land when we got it. We're payin' for it now, though.'

Colm has no breath. ‘That's terrible,' he mutters.

Marla shrugs and kisses the child's crinkled face. She says, ‘I heard years ago about a woman in the Middle Ages contracting some strange ailment and giving birth to a child who looked like a bear cub.'

‘Yeah?'

‘So it could be something like that.'

She sits down on a nearby stool and opens her nightgown. She moves Turi's lipless mouth into its folds. The child suckles noisily.

‘Why does he live down here?' asks Colm.

‘He's sensitive to sunlight and heat,' replies Marla. ‘He prefers the gloom and cool of the underground.'

Colm nods slowly.

‘It's strange,' Marla continues. ‘Things have been different for us since he was born. Easier.'

‘How?'

‘Maybe it's coincidence but we were just about outta water, and I thought that was that, when I saw a trickle coming up through a crack in the floor at the end of Turi's cot. Dug up the paving stones and found a stream, small, but enough for the four of us. Other things too. I got vegetables to grow in a patch of dirt outside the kitchen. Nothin's grown there since my mother's time and then, outta the blue, about six small potatoes and some spring onions.'

‘Maybe things are getting better,' says Colm, though he wonders that he might say this.

‘Or Turi's my lucky charm.'

She looks with all the love in the world at the small creature in her arms.

‘Does Joe know about him?' Colm asks.

‘Not yet,' says Marla. ‘But he will.' She looks up, her tired face for a moment soft and happy. ‘He's a good man, Joe.'

‘He is.'

They say nothing. The child's mouth unclamps from the teat and utters a small cry. Marla turns his face to her other breast.

‘You two,' she says, ‘you're Rafe Bell's kids, aren't ya?'

‘Did Joe tell you that?'

‘No. Figured it out meself. You're the spittin' image of ya father.'

‘Do you remember him?'

‘You bet! Rafe Bell was the most important figure in the country. Far more than any politician or movie star. Everybody loved him.'

‘And the rest of the Twelve? Do you remember them?'

‘Well, your dad was the face of the Twelve, so I remember him more. But, really, we all thought they were going to save the world. Their inventions were incredible.' Marla pauses, looks down at her suckling child. ‘What happened with your father?' she asks, her voice soft now, cautious. ‘He seemed such a good man.'

‘He is good,' says Colm. ‘That's why he had to leave the Twelve.'

Marla's mouth is a sorry line. ‘Where is he now, then?' she asks.

‘Not sure,' says Colm. ‘We're meeting him soon.'

‘You be careful,' she says, her eyes on Colm again. ‘You watch out for yourselves.'

‘Yeah.' Colm shifts, anxious.

‘And if anyone I don't like the look of comes this way after ya, I'll tell 'em you've gone down to Midgin.'

‘Thanks,' says Colm.

There is movement behind them and they both look around. It is Lydia. She glides down the stairs as though she has wings on her feet and stands before Marla and Turi. The child stops at once his suckling and turns to look at the girl. The two stare at each another. There is quiet. The child reaches out his tiny pink hand with its papery nails to grasp at a strand of Lydia's hair. Lydia leans forward and kisses his forehead.

‘Little one,' she whispers. She kisses him again, then gently unfolds his grip from her hair and turns to her brother.

‘Colm,' she says. ‘You must get some sleep. We're leaving early.'

She smiles at Marla and takes Colm's hand. Brother and sister walk up the stairs together and cross quietly through the house, leaving the coolness of the basement and Marla with the babe Turi at her breast.

Colm and Lydia are on their own again, their packs replenished, their bottles filled with brew. Joe is a day behind them at Marla's, content, it would seem, to stay there indefinitely. The morning is quiet and hot.

They leave the road, work out the way by map and compass. They're keen to avoid Midgin and the neighbouring towns and so head east for a time. East and then they will turn north again.

Walking through the low grey scrub, past mounds of red rock, under electric blue sky and with not another soul in sight save his sister, Colm thinks that he could be back at home in the valley where he grew up. The landscape, new and strange yet achingly familiar, presses itself upon him so that he is dreaming as he walks. He thinks about the first time his father took him to the top of Lambeth Pass, a day's journey
through tea-trees and dry grasses, a hard climb over jagged rocks and along a narrow ridge which dropped down sharply on either side into nothing. It was exhilarating, he remembers. The danger, the fear. He remembers looking at his father's broad back, at his strong calves, at his sure and steady step. He remembers his father stretching out his hand to help him over the last steep lip of rock, how he was pulled up as though he weighed nothing, how his father stood with his arm resting around Colm's shoulders, how the brown land stretched out in front of them, and behind, stretched out in every direction as far as the eye could see.

'Currumburri,' said his father, and gestured with his arm to the south. ‘And Jiluka.' They turned slowly, westward and north, as his father separated the areas below them with names and with the straight line of his arm. Nindewang, Bulanari, Wirrina, Coorain, Berramindi, all the way out to the Great Southern Desert.

The Great Southern Desert. Colm has seen pictures of this place in books. Vast oceans of red dirt and sand, rippling for miles, broken with mounds of rock cut in the shape of huge ruddy beasts resting under the sun. The pictures showed a gentle covering of grasses and shrubbery, of stretches of shining water breaking up through the sand, of cool succulent fronds holding veins of green moisture – but his father had told him it was not like that now. There was nothing left, his father
had said. There was nothing but the sand, blowing, blowing, and the rock, hot and dry and spare. Once, when his father was a young man, the desert had been a place that people would flock to, that tourists would arrive at in airconditioned coaches, where restaurants and resorts were located so that all could experience the wilds of the Centre, get a taste for the enormity, the vastness of the country, dabble a little in the idea of a spirituality of isolation, of aloneness. Now, though, no one ventured out there. It was a death wish, his father said. Not even the wildlife had stayed.

Colm breaks from his thoughts and turns to check on Lydia. She smiles at him.

‘I was thinking of Father,' she says. ‘I was thinking of the first time he took me to the top of Lambeth Pass.'

‘So was I,' replies Colm. ‘It must be the country. So like home.'

They walk on. The afternoon air settles and stills. There is no breeze. They stop and take small sips of water from their flasks. They lean in the slim shade of rocks, hoping for relief.

As the sky becomes crossed with slivers of pink, then of gold, their ears attune to a sound apart from their weary trudge, their heavy breath, their thick and heated blood. A whirring sound, it seems, high-pitched and distant. They shift their packs and lengthen their stride and cross the stretch of open country to the base of a small hill. The sound changes as they approach, softens, deepens, becomes slowly melodic. They follow it
around the base of the hill till a rough dirt track opens before them and the sound becomes edged with sadness. Their eyes prickle and itch, but still they follow.

At last it is only a bank of dry shrubbery that separates them from the sound. Even though they are close now the sound is still not loud. They peer through the twigs and see beyond a small clearing. A woman sits, her head and body cloaked in grey, her hair falling in grisly strands from beneath her hood. Her mouth is open and it is from her throat that the sound is coming. Her song continues. She pours it over the small brown bundle that is before her, spills it gently into the hole she is working in the ground with her hands. The children watch her scrape the dust carefully aside and place the bundle into the hole, all the while singing her strange whirring song.

The bundle is covered now with dirt, a small red mound blistering the earth. The woman pats at its surface, her singing softening further, her singing finally ceasing. She leans forward and presses her lips to the mound, holds them there for a long time, then stands slowly, her joints popping, her hips grinding like glass on glass. She shakes the dirt from the folds of her clothes and moves off, her bare feet leaving powdery footprints in the dust. The children wait, uncertain.

‘She looks nice,' says Lydia. ‘She looks like she might be kind to us.'

‘She's grieving,' says Colm. ‘That's her baby in the ground.'

'Doesn't mean she won't be kind to us.'

Colm is unsure but he shoulders his pack. ‘All right,' he says, and they trace the woman's footprints with their own. The tracks take them further around the base of the hill and out across a plain. The air is cooling now, the sun slipping down the sky. The tracks become harder to see in the lowering light, become impossible as darkness settles, so the children stop and eat a small supper of figs. They curl up in hollows in the earth and sleep with night as their only covering.

In the morning they wake and look for footprints, but the wind has blown them away. They walk slowly, examining displaced twigs, crushed leaves, in the way their father has taught them. Their clues lead them at last to a narrow path which quickly becomes a sturdy track then a gravelled road, wide enough for them to walk side by side. And then they are upon a small village, more like a campsite really, with makeshift huts and shanties set out in a vast ring. In the centre of the circle is a large mound of rusting mechanical parts, relics from a not so distant age when fuel was available in seemingly abundant supply, and power at the flick of a switch.

There are few people about. A child sits beside the mechanical mound pushing a small piece of tin through the dirt as though it is a car. ‘Bah bah bah,' says the child, a little boy with a face lined like that of a middle-aged man. ‘Bah bah.' Opposite him a very elderly man sits quietly on the stump of an old tree. He
has a pipe in his mouth which appears to be unlit, but he draws back on it nonetheless and sends out his breath with such eloquence that Colm is uncertain whether there are plumes of smoke to be seen in the air about him or not. A woman in grey appears in the doorway of one of the shanties and looks across the bare patch of common earth to where the child is playing. She is shielding her eyes with her hand, but when she drops it to call the boy, Colm recognises her as the woman they have been tracking. He feels almost overjoyed to have found her.

‘Brae!' the woman calls in a dry thirsty voice. The boy stops his game and goes over to the woman. There is an exchange, just a brief one, before the boy follows the bidding of his elder and enters the shanty. The woman remains outside, her arms folded across her chest, her face lifted to the sun. The light finds its way into the creases of her skin, deepens and sears them further. Colm and Lydia walk forward, shy, for they have seen the woman in her grieving. But she turns to them now and smiles.

‘Welcome,' she says. ‘What currency do you trade in?'

‘Currency?' asks Colm. He is about to say that they have silver and copper pieces but remembers in time what Joe said about people finding out that they have money and stops himself.

‘Figs,' he says boldly, and withdraws a handful of the dried brown fruit from his pack. The woman takes one
and breaks it in two. She hands half to the old man, who places it into his mouth and begins to work at it slowly with his warm saliva and his gums. She herself sniffs at it, first with caution and then with appreciation, before running her tongue over its corrugated surface and tearing off a small segment with her teeth.

‘Good,' she says after a moment of chewing. ‘What do you want?'

‘Water,' says Colm, ‘or directions to where we can find some.'

‘Ten of those fruits,' she says, ‘for two cans of water.'

‘Six,' says Colm.

‘Eight,' says the woman.

Colm counts out eight figs into the woman's hands. She smiles again and gestures for them to step inside her hut. The boy, Brae, fills their empty water bottles from a clay urn. Colm and Lydia drink carefully, evenly.

‘You have come far?' the woman offers.

Colm is about to speak, to tell the woman that they have come from Hirrup's Range, south of Nurrengar. But Lydia speaks before him. She names a town Colm has never heard of.

‘Windirup,' she says. ‘On the west coast.'

The woman shrugs. ‘Never been further west than those hills.' She gestures to the spine of rocks hidden for now by the rough bark of the walls. ‘Are you going far?'

‘Elan Plains,' says Lydia, naming the place where Joe's children had gone.

Again the woman shrugs. The boy approaches and presses himself against her knee. She gathers him onto her lap and he turns his ancient face to her ear.

‘Brae wants to know your names,' says the woman. ‘He wants to be introduced.'

‘I'm Lydia,' says Lydia.

‘Colin,' says Colm.

‘There,' says the woman to the boy. ‘Now you know.'

Brae nods solemnly, then disappears through the doorway. The woman watches him leave, her lips a sorrowful smile.

‘And I'm Ailis,' she says, turning back to the children. ‘What are those fruits? Where did you get them?'

‘They're dried figs,' says Colm. ‘They're from home.'

‘Figs,' says Ailis. Her brow crinkles as though she is trying to remember. ‘I've heard of them but never seen one before. They're very good.'

‘Better when they're fresh,' says Lydia. ‘The flesh is thick and moist, the pulp scarlet and crunchy with little seeds.'

‘Windirup is a good place to have such a fruit. Why did you leave?'

‘These are old fruits, prepared a long time ago,' says Lydia. ‘The crops are thin now. Windirup is like everywhere else in the west. There is little left.'

‘We are lucky at the moment,' says Ailis. ‘Kangaroos were sighted yesterday at Lake Myra, just north of here.
The men have gone there today. We are hoping for a feast tonight.'

The flour bag curtain at the door lifts slightly and Brae appears. His hands are held behind his back and he approaches Colm and Lydia shyly.

‘For you,' he says, and hands them each a trinket. Small, flat pieces of metal, highly polished and cut into perfect round forms. On Colm's the image of a dove is etched; on Lydia's it is the face of a woman, her hair piled high upon her head, her neck strung with beads.

‘These are what our names mean!' exclaim Colm and Lydia of the images. They want to talk to Brae, to ask him about his work, but the boy's shyness overcomes him and he stays with his face pressed into Ailis's bosom. Ailis's hand works its way over and through his brown strands of hair.

‘He makes those himself,' she says of the trinkets. ‘He's very clever. We're very proud of him.'

‘It is fine work,' says Lydia.

They examine the discs closely. Each, they see, has a small hole at its edge and they run lengths of twine through these and loop them about their necks. The discs are cool circles against their skin.

The evening air finds its way in through the cracks in the shanty and Ailis extricates herself from Brae's affections.

‘The others should be back soon,' she says. ‘I need to start the fire.'

Colm and Lydia stand to go.

‘Thank you for the water,' says Colm.

‘Stay and eat with us,' says Ailis. ‘There will be enough for all.'

‘We have few more figs to trade,' says Colm.

‘Today it is only water that costs,' says the woman. ‘Come, help me gather kindling.'

The four of them walk out of the hut. They pass the mound of rusting mechanical parts and the old man who sits silently by. His eyes have closed now against the lowering sun; the cloudless pipe hangs from his lower lip.

Lydia indicates the mechanical mound. ‘Why do you have that?' she asks.

‘There were cars here not so long ago,' says Ailis, ‘and machines for washing and drying clothes, and for keeping food cold.'

‘Frigidairs,' says Lydia.

‘That's right,' replies Ailis. ‘But they were from my father's day and we could no longer power them so they became useless. These remnants are all that are left. Every year the pile grows smaller because we use some of the pieces as tools or ornaments or they rust into the ground.'

‘Funny' says Colm, ‘we had a frigidair at home. It was old but I'm sure it was not as old as your father.'

Lydia glares at Colm. What? he asks with his eyes. Wait, she says back with hers.

Ailis hands Colm a hessian bag and he and Lydia
break from the other two as they search for the dry, crisp leaves that will be the beginnings of the fire.

‘What's the matter?' Colm asks. ‘What's wrong with saying we had a frigidair? And why did you make up that stuff about where we were from? Why don't you want her to know the truth? I thought you said she looked kind!'

‘First,' says Lydia, ‘it was rude to make reference to Ailis's father's age in that way and, second, I think we need to be a bit more cautious than we have been. We can't go telling everyone everything.'

Colm shifts about, scuffs his feet into the ground. He thinks of what Joe said, of how he has no common sense. Strange, when their father is so clever, so everything.