Carrier (7 page)

So goodbye for now, and maybe forever...

I turned the page and stared at the empty lines that Alice never filled.

What had gone wrong? Had Markus not come that night? Had she waited out there all alone in the darkness, at the mercy of those men? The book slipped from my fingers and landed on my lap. Maybe Markus had died that night, along with Alice. The attackers may have gotten to him first, and then Alice. They probably hadn't even gotten to see each other that night.

Tears blurred my vision.

Alice may have died thinking that Markus hadn't cared. Just like Patrick may have felt when he'd arrived at the fence, waiting for those glasses that had never arrived.

With a quick blow, my candle was out. I dried my tears on the bedsheets. Life was unfair. To think that freedom had come so close for Alice. To think that her dream of romance and happy families ended like that, with all the pain and horror she must have suffered in her last minutes. More tears flowed until they turned into silent, heaving sobs that made my whole body shake.

I stopped only, with a jolt, when I heard the unmistakable crack of a gunshot.

The sound sliced through the howling wind and the drumming of the rain on our tin roof.

Patrick.

I leapt from my bed and ran out into the hallway, just in time to see Mum leaning a shotgun against the wall, rain dripping down her face from the curled ends of her dark hair.

My throat closed up so tight I couldn't speak.

Mum looked up and her face brightened into a smile, the kind that didn't quite reach her eyes. My intuition had been spot on when I'd felt unease after dinner. She hadn't softened at all.

‘Just making sure whoever came to visit us today never returns.' She headed for the kitchen, ‘Goat's milk?'

Finally I found my voice.

‘What have you done, Mum?' The tears for Alice were still wet against my cheeks.

‘What anybody's mother would do, Lena, I'm protecting my child.'

‘Did...' I sucked in a lungful of oxygen and swallowed down the bitterness rising up in my throat. ‘Did you shoot him?'

Mum spun around and pointed at me like a lawyer at the accused.

‘Who do you mean by “him”?' She took a step closer. ‘Is there something I should know?'

I backed away. ‘I just thought...with the footprints.'

‘Lena, come back here, now!'

But I was already running down the hall and slamming the door behind me.

Back in my room I paced the floor.

The way Mum had questioned me gave me a small fragment of hope. If she had shot Patrick, she wouldn't have asked me ‘who' I was talking about. She would have known. She would have seen him. Mum must have been simply trying to scare me out of going to the fence again.

Lightening flashed through my bedroom window, illuminating the shapes of two heads.

A strangled gasp escaped my lips.

My heart and body froze.

Thunder crackled beneath the earth.

Another flash came…and the silhouettes were gone.

Staying close to the wall, I edged my way around the room to the window and peered through the gap in the planks, bracing myself for what or who I'd see out there.

A scissor of lightening lit up the yard.

But there was no one there.

I woke up early to the sound of Emma and Charlotte yapping playfully outside. Through the gap in the boards on my window I watched them tussle in the red dirt beneath a bleak sky. Another storm loomed ominously in the distant horizon. I pulled on some old cargo pants that used to be Mum's and a flannelette shirt I had to roll up at the sleeves, silently praying the sky wouldn't crack open for another day or two.

I needed to find Patrick
tonight
. I needed to warn him not to come to Desert Downs again.

Throwing myself into my daily chores helped to keep my mind off two things — the silhouettes I'd seen at my window last night, and the fact that I planned on telling Mum I was leaving. But after I'd completed all of my jobs, I had to face the inevitable and speak to Mum.

She was out in the back, planting root vegetables. I watched as she spread shovels full of compost onto the dirt.

We grew our vegies in flat, wide rectangles of earth, sectioned off with limestone bricks Dad had laid so that the good soil he'd brought out here from the coast in crates wouldn't leach out and drown in the dry red earth. But there wasn't much left of the brown stuff anymore, so it was mostly orange.

‘I just finished straining the cheese and grinding the seeds. The house is tidy and the sink is full of fresh water.'

Mum paused, the shovel midair, and nodded. ‘You seem back to your normal self.'

When I didn't respond, she staked the shovel into the earth and sighed heavily. ‘You know this isolation thing? I only keep you here because I'm worried I'll lose you like Alice. That's all.'

At my feet, a lone soldier ant contemplated a speck of brown soil which had spilled onto the red earth.

‘I know, and I understand, sort of.' My hands began to tremble so I shoved them in my back pockets. ‘But…I can't live penned-in like this…' I met her eyes and swallowed thickly, ‘…anymore.' I shook my head and continued, encouraged by the soft, understanding look in her eyes and the sad half-smile on her face. ‘There's just no point to it all. What are we even saving ourselves for? There's nothing good waiting for us. I'd rather risk my life and maybe find something out there worth living for, than to preserve myself for this nothing life.' When I finished my rant, my chest was heaving and my face felt warm and tight, the blood beneath my skin throbbing.

Mum bowed her head, her dark hair falling to shield her face from me while she chewed what remained of her last pinkie fingernail.
Don't cry. Please don't cry.
A small part of me wondered if I'd maybe gone too far, but a larger part of me just could not shut up.

‘It's time you cut me a little slack, Mum. I'm nearly seventeen. I want some freedom.'

‘You're sixteen and a half,' she said, her voice a monotone.

‘Right, but what I'm trying to say is that I'm only getting older and there'll come a time when you are going to have to let me make decisions for myself.' Dramatically, with wild arms, I gestured to the fence, but Mum merely snorted without looking up. I was losing her. She was reverting back to her old, hard self. I needed the soft, understanding Mum back, the one I'd glimpsed for only a second a minute ago.

‘What if you get sick, Mum? Or what if one day, when you hide away in your room, you never come back out? Or you go out hunting and never return? What then? I won't know where anything is. If our well dries up then I won't know how to find the waterhole and I'll die from dehydration.'

Mum still wasn't looking at me. I slapped myself against my forehead for emphasis, but got nothing, not even a blink. I groaned.

‘Can't you see that all of this — ' I waved my hands at the fence, ‘ — all this locking me up is doing more damage than good?'

Mum bent her knees, squatting over the ground, and began poking the rich, damp planting earth with her index finger and shoving in the chunks of shrivelled potato eyes with a patience and calmness that did my head in.

‘Yes, Lena, I have spent many nights thinking about it. And yes, it seems ridiculous to not equip you with all the knowledge I have, to pass it down, should you find yourself alone one day. But…' she paused and rolled a triangle of potato against her dirty palm, ‘your cousin Alice, when I found her, she was only ten metres beyond the front gate — ten metres, Lena. I don't know what had possessed her to leave the property that night, though I have a feeling it was to meet a boy, but I know that for all her efforts, she only made it a few steps away before those men got her.'

A solid lump formed in my throat and I swallowed it down, trying not to notice the lone tear trickling out of my mother's left eye.

‘She was so badly beaten, Lena. It physically pained me to look at her. Her arms were broken, her legs...in more than one place. Some of her beautiful hair was ripped out of her scalp.' Mum paused and sucked in a deep breath. ‘And they violated her so badly that I think she bled to death, internally, from all the tearing. The footprints showed there were as many as five men...
five
.' She shook her head and eyed me from head to toe. ‘What could you possibly do out there against five men?'

My body turned cold, as though I'd suddenly found myself buried within the cool earth beside Alice's bones — poor Alice who hadn't gotten her chance to run away with Markus.

‘Mum, I'm sorry about Alice, too.' I sniffed and wiped my wet face with the back of my hands. ‘But maybe things have changed. There might be others out there, like us, looking for other normal people. We could all band together.'

Mum pulled her head back and stood up, dusting the sand which clung to her fingers against her narrow thighs. ‘As I said yesterday, I might take you hunting with me, if you don't try anything silly.' We locked eyes.

‘You're still treating me like a kid,' I said, raking my fingers through my hair and shifting my feet.

‘That's right, because I can't trust you anymore.' I knew she was talking about Patrick's footprints by the fence. She poked a finger at my face. ‘Everything you do will be under my supervision from now on.'

A bitter laugh nearly spluttered from my lips. I'd been under her supervision for my entire life so this punishment was nothing new. I sucked in a deep breath and glanced up.

The sky had darkened to blue-black and thunder rumbled somewhere in the north. By evening the second storm would hit. I had to leave much earlier than I'd planned.

‘No, Mum. I'm going out…' More thunder rumbled. ‘…after lunch. I want to find the waterhole,
by myself
. I'll take my slingshot and my knife.'

Mum stared at me, her eyes wet and shiny.

‘Lena, if you do this, if you disobey me...you won't be welcome back.' She stifled a sob and brushed past me, the metal buttons of her shirt scratching against my bare forearm. ‘I mean it.'

I followed her around the veranda to the front door where she'd left her boots and stormed into the house. She was in the kitchen, wiping down her hands in the sink with a wet flannel.

‘Mum, this is ridiculous. So you want to lock me up for life because you're worried for me and want to protect me, but now you're ready to wash your hands of me the minute I say I'm going?' My hands found my hair and I pulled at the short tufts. ‘Dad's and Alice's deaths have made you one crazy, unhappy, lady.'

There was a sudden flash of pain against my skin as my face was flung to the left with the force of Mum's slap. The kitchen bench bit into my hip as I fell against it.

‘Don't you ever...' Mum paused, her chest heaving, her lips trembling, ‘…
ever
, speak to me like that again. Or you'll be one very sorry girl.' She stared down at her hand as though it had an independent brain inside of it, her fingers flexing and curling.

Tears burned to be freed but I held them intact. My stinging cheek begged to be cradled in my open hand, but I stood frozen, my limbs trapped with shock. Mum had always been a bit rough with me, yanking me by the hair whenever she cut it, dragging me by my shirt collar or the scruff of my singlet if she thought I was slacking off in my chores, but she had never slapped me. Now I knew what Alice had felt when Mum had hit her — she had felt alone and unloved and hated, right down to the bone.

‘I'm going to get some things before I leave,' I said, backing out of the kitchen and starting down the hallway. ‘But I'll be back, Mum, maybe not tonight, but in a couple of days. You can't refuse me my own home.' Muttering beneath my breath, I tacked on, ‘Dad built this house for all of us, not just you. He would hate you for this.'

Before I could reach my bedroom door Mum came bounding towards me, her hand hurtling towards my face.

This time I staggered back from the brunt, my shoulder hitting the wall, hard. Emma yapped at Mum and bared her teeth.

Mum stared down at the dingo and back up at me, blinking, her eyes glassy and her trembling hands fluttering around her face.

‘I'm sorry, Lena. I didn't mean to hurt you. It was just a reaction to what you said. I'm so sorry, darling.' She lurched forward to hug me, pressing her bony frame against me, pushing me into the wall, but I slithered out from her grasp and scrambled into my bedroom, slamming the door behind me.

With the hem of my shirt, I wiped my eyes dry while mentally stowing the pain I felt in the farthest corner of my soul. There was no time for wallowing. No time to obsess over Mum's craziness and her lack of love for me.

Emma kept guard while I tossed all manner of things into my backpack; Jeffery C's picture, my pocketknife, my slingshot, my torch, a change of clothes and Dad's jacket — I would need it in the wet weather. It was then that I remembered Dad's glasses.

The hallway was empty and the house silent when I stepped out. The only noise was the scraping sound my backpack made against my back each time I took a step. Luckily, Mum's bedroom door was open, and with a quick wave of my torch, empty too.

Dad's framed photo rested on the bedside table, a moth-eaten doily beneath it for decoration.

Bending down, I examined my father's face. We shared the same small nose, wide eyes and fire-hair, but my sight was one hundred per cent whereas my dad had been short-sighted.

I rooted around in the messy top drawer until my fingers brushed against metal frames. There were two pairs, without their cases, so I wrapped them separately in two of Dad's old handkerchiefs, to keep them safe, before depositing them into the front pocket of my backpack.

‘Bye Dad,' I whispered to the man I had hardly known, the man who I had tried to get to know by reading his medical journals and sci-fi stories, the man who had loved me and had held onto hope for a future, for
my
future`, right up until the day he had died.