Hope Farm (26 page)

All this I saw in silhouette, against the moon-bright rectangle of doorway.

‘Ishtar?' said Miller thickly, and then resumed his humming, his breath-sucking. His black form bent over her bed, great paws fumbling. ‘Ishtar?'

Ian took my arm, pulled. Together, as if one merged body, we lowered ourselves to the floor, began to climb into the space under my bed. Ian was halfway under, his arm unhooking from mine, when I dropped the torch. It banged to the floor and rolled noisily. I froze.

Miller's humming stopped and I saw him straighten and swing round.

‘Ian.' I mouthed the word; it hardly sounded. My pulse hammered in my ears. We were small, we were quick — we could slip past, dash by him. I reached for Ian, pulled at his shirt. I began to get to my feet.

But Miller was there, he was charging towards us, he was filling the tiny doorway, his big arms were out — he had me, his fingers a vice above my elbow. He tugged, and pain rang through my shoulder. My feet left the ground; I bent my knees and landed on the mattress.

He held me like that, kneeling on the bed, my head level with his so I couldn't avoid the hot, rotten breath that spurted from his beard as he ran his hands over my hair and face.

‘It's the kid,' he muttered. He paused for a moment but didn't let go. The light from the window behind me caught the surfaces of his eyes, the wetness of his open mouth. Then, so close I felt his beard touch my chin, he shouted, ‘Where is she?'

I pulled back as far as I could, angling my head away.

‘Where's Ishtar?'

Spit landed on my cheek. He shook me and my teeth clattered. He pushed me down on the bed and then wrenched me up again. I heard a frail mew, then realised I was the one who had made it.

‘I know where she is.'

It was Ian. He had crept past Miller to the doorway and was just visible, a slight dark figure against the lesser shadows.

Miller looked round. I felt his fingers slacken slightly. He reeked. That rank, creature smell that had been in his room, but ten times riper.

‘I know where she is. She's hiding.' Ian's voice was level. ‘I can take you to her. But you have to let go of Silver.'

Miller's huge head shook, slowly, from side to side. His fingers stayed clenched around my arm. His breaths were loud and wet, like a baby's.

‘Well, she can come too, then,' said Ian pleasantly, as if suggesting a picnic or some other benign activity. ‘We can all go together.'

Miller's arm swept back to his side and I was pulled from the bed, scrambling to land on my feet. One of my shoes caught on the edge of the mattress and went flying. Miller stepped towards Ian and I was dragged along. Then, gradually, his fingers unlocked, and I felt the air on my damp skin. He took a fistful of my t-shirt at the back.

‘No running,' he said.

I could just see Ian's eyes — they were fixed on mine. I gave him a tiny nod.

He turned for the door. ‘This way.'

We went slowly this time, along the grey path, through the shadow-dappled bush. The moon wasn't yellow any more — it was high and white, its light cold. Ian led again, followed by me, lopsided in my one shoe, and then Miller, his heavy grip at my back, the heat of his knuckles through my top, his bare toes every now and then colliding with one of my heels. Along to the bridge and over, and then up the avenue of sparser growth that marked the old miners' trail.

Miller resumed his broken humming, and panted loudly. Once, he stumbled, pulling me down with him, my elbow sliding against the wet mat of his chest-hair, revulsion jamming my throat. We got to the two trees, and Ian went between their luminous trunks. I hesitated; Miller barged into me and we came to a clumsy halt.

Ian turned. The pinkish branches between us hung like human limbs bent at impossible angles. ‘Come on,' he said. ‘Almost there.'

I tried to see past him into the clearing but everything was shadows. I blinked and the shadow shapes seemed to wobble and drift, resettling in a slightly different formation. Where was it, exactly? Was it even visible — maybe Ian had left it covered, set up as a trap. ‘Ian …' My voice sounded very small. My pulse was loud in my ears.

‘Come on.' Ian turned back, and took a step.

I strained again to see into the darkness.
Watch him
, I told myself.
He knows where it is.
But I couldn't see him any more.

Miller's fist gave a shove between my shoulder blades and I propped like a panicked horse, head thrown back. ‘Ian!'

‘Come on,' came the call.

Miller gave one of his breathy, sighing moans, and began shunting me along before him as if I weighed nothing. Then something caught at my ankle and I fell forward with him on top of me.

It was the fence. The collapsed fence — I felt its slack lines, the grit of rust on my fingers as I untangled my foot. My heel slipped out of the second sandshoe and I let it go, kicked it away. Miller had climbed off me, to one side, and was on his knees.

‘What …?' he said.

Then Ian was beside me, pulling me up, and I grabbed his arm and squeezed it, one sharp squeeze to send a message. ‘You go first,' I hissed, pushing him, and we were running, and behind was Miller's roar, the heavy sounds of him getting to his feet.

Ian's back, Ian's legs, the soles of his shoes,
one-two
,
one-two
. I knew it was only a short distance, only a few steps, and I watched for him to swerve or jump, staring so hard my eyes felt like they would pop out of my head, every muscle in my own legs electric.
One-two
,
one-two
, and there it was — uncovered, a bigger, darker patch of shadow among the other shadows — and Ian jumped. I saw him hurdle, the arc of him through the air, and Miller was coming with his crashing feet, right behind me, Miller's fingers bumping at my back, just missing, and I only had two more steps to go, one more step, and I was on it, I was leaping, the burning split of my legs opening, the pull of every tendon, the desperate reaching, reaching for length.

Landing, the shock of real, hard ground, jarring my ankles, slamming my knees. But not stopping, shoving up and forward, half crawling, scrabbling across the dirt, away from the feeling of falling, the cold, stale-breathed drop. And behind me, Miller went down.

We heard him, the yelp he gave. We heard the two bumps he made as he hit the sides, one almost straight away, and then another, not as loud, after a long, slow, couple of moments. And then we heard, floating up from very far away, very deep, a final, heavy, wet thud.

I reached for Ian at the same time as he reached for me, and we grabbed onto each other. I bent my head and pressed one ear to his chest, and jammed my shoulder up to block the other one, so all I could hear was the rabbit race of our two hearts running in double time.

We went up, higher, further into the bush. We just walked together, without talking, following mining trails feathered with saplings and bracken, which offered easier passage between the trees.

We passed other shafts with fences hanging, half collapsed, signs blank-faced in the dim light.

I got cold. My feet hurt, and my ankle where I'd scraped it on the fence wire.

Slower and slower we walked, and then we stopped and sat down at the base of a big tree. Side by side we stared into the sifting shadows. The moon was no longer visible, although its white light still filtered through the branches. The stars in the patch of sky above were bright and hard-looking. I couldn't stop shivering.

After a while we lay down, back to back, pressed close for warmth. I curled up my knees and tucked in my arms.

I don't know if I slept but when I opened my eyes the sky had a wash of pink in it. I thought I'd heard noises. I lay still, feeling Ian breathing behind me. Light was creeping into the scrub around us. A bird hopped through the leaf litter, then disappeared under an archway of fern fronds. Other birds called, and when I looked again the pink in the sky had turned to gold.

Then I did hear it. Voices, calling. Not close — down on the other side of the creek. They were calling us.

‘Ian?'

‘Yeah?'

‘Listen.'

He sat up, and I did the same.

Everything hurt — every muscle in my over-stretched legs, my scraped, cut feet, my shoulder where Miller had yanked it. I ached with thirst and my tongue felt thick and strange. I eased my legs straight. ‘We should go.'

‘Yeah.'

We looked at each other. I licked my lips. ‘So what do we …?'

He shook his head, just slightly. ‘We say we went to tell your mum about the fire, and she wasn't there. So then we went to look for her, and we got lost, we got confused, and we slept up here in the bush.'

‘But what about …?'

‘We don't say anything about him. The last time we saw him was at Hope, when he was fighting with Dan.' He stood and brushed down his shorts. ‘Just don't say anything and it'll be okay. Come on.'

We were both whispering, standing close, but we didn't make eye contact.

‘My shoe. It's there. It fell off.'

‘Okay. I'll get it.'

I swallowed. ‘Thanks.'

The voices sounded again.

‘Come on,' said Ian. ‘We'd better go.'

We went downhill, vaguely following the trails, and came out on the main one, just above the turn-off signposted by the twin trees. In silence Ian went in; in silence he came out with the shoe. He handed it to me and we continued walking.

On and on the voices went, bouncing off the water. They had shifted along the creek's bank, closer to Hope. They were men's voices — I didn't recognise them.

‘Should we call back?'

Ian shook his head. ‘Let's get a bit closer first.'

It was strange, hearing my name shouted over and over by an unknown man. As we neared the bridge we both slowed down. A new heaviness descended. I glanced at Ian; he was barely moving, feet dragging, head down. He felt it too, I could tell — the need to wait, to spin it out a while longer, this time, this lull, before we showed ourselves, brought the reality of our secret into lasting, hardened being.

When the bridge came into sight we stopped. Something bumped my hand. It was Ian — his fingers groped at mine, caught and held them.

Then there were feet on the bridge, the flicker of blue uniforms, and they were there, the two policemen — they saw us and came striding over, still calling our names — and Ian let go of my hand.

The ruin of Hope sat like a pair of jaws pulled back to the morning sky, jag-edged, heaped with ash, exhaling breaths of smoke. The ugly mud-brick building, apparently untouched, squatted in attendance. At one end of the row of parked cars was a fire truck; at the other a police car. People stood in clusters, arms folded.

The policemen had been carrying blankets — they'd wrapped me and Ian in one each, and we wore them like cloaks as we walked. At first, as we'd crossed the road and climbed through the fence, they had tried to talk to us, saying rehearsed-sounding things about taking us to our families. They'd stayed close, guiding arms on our shoulders, helping us through the fence wires. But as we moved up the hill, they quietened and fell back, allowing us to walk together, to lead the way.

Going downhill we fell into a rhythm, footfalls aligning, blankets swishing, and a kind of emptied feeling moved into me, a strange, clear, helplessness. Things were going to happen now and I had no control over what they might be. I could only submit.

I suppose if I had been able to think of anything, to predict anything, I might have expected Ishtar not to be there. I might have imagined her vanished, gone at last, having left the night before while it was all happening — the fight, the fire — silently exiting the violent whirl of drama that, at its centre, in its conception, held her image.

What I didn't expect was for her to break from one of the groups of figures, to run up the slope towards me, to grab me in her arms and pull me so close my breath caught and my feet left the ground. I didn't expect her to cry.

Her ribs jumped with her sobbing. Her tears wet my scalp. I was still holding the sandshoe; wedged between us, it smelled of rubber and canvas, of school changing rooms. She hung onto me until I started to resist, and then she let me down and put her palms either side of my face and kissed me again and again and her kisses caught the morning air and slapped it against my skin.

Behind her the smoke, as if lost, as if having forgotten its reason for being, drifted in the gaping space above the remains, the piles of black stuff, the sullen rectangle of the outer foundations, which must have been brick or some tougher, harder timber. The kitchen steps still stood, a lone grey tooth in a rotten, gummy grin; it took me a while to recognise a paler lump among the debris as the fridge, half melted, and shrouded in ash.

‘What happened with Jindi, and the baby?'

‘They're okay.' Her voice broke, and she wiped her face with her sleeve.

I couldn't stop looking at the ruin, the impossible, shocking blankness of that emptied space, the missing roof and walls. Two firemen in uniform stood at its edge, talking with a policeman. One of them pointed into the wreckage and shook his head.