Out of Time (5 page)

Late in the morning he took her down a run that he had found for himself a couple of seasons back, an alternative route down Duke's Drop. It involved a long zigzag through trees, ducking a few times to get under low branches, then a tricky bit through rocks and bushes, ending with a real slalom course through small trees and a jump right next to the bottom of the chairlift. The first couple of times down it Ellie was nervous but she quickly gained confidence and was soon keeping up quite successfully.

At about noon he noticed that she was getting wheezy. ‘This had better be the last run,' he said ‘then we can go back and have lunch.'

‘OK, I'm hungry,' she said, pushing off. ‘I'll go first this time.'

‘OK,' James said, watching her lean gracefully into the long turn that took her off the main run and into the trees. ‘She's getting quite good,' he thought, before starting after her. He flicked in and out of the trees casually, then began concentrating on planting his pole as he made each turn. Coming through the small scrubby trees before the jump he had almost caught Ellie, but he was hardly aware of her until he heard a loud crack and the crunch of timber breaking. Looking up he saw that she had failed to duck for the last branch. It had caught her across the top of her head, but she was going too fast to stop. She sailed over the jump out of control, with blood scattering from her scalp. James felt his stomach lurch and his body lurched with it as he lost balance for a moment, then he planted his poles and pushed forwards, over the jump.

While he was in the air he took in the scene below, like a snapshot. Ellie lay in a heap of snow and skis and limbs, but she was struggling to get up, despite the blood that was richly marking the snow. People from the chairlift queue were already starting up the slope towards her. James landed and did a tight and fast turn to stop beside her. As he did so he realised with a mixture of fear and relief that his parents were among the half a dozen people coming up the slope. He braced himself for the storm: it came at once.

‘What on earth do you think you're doing, bringing her down there?' James' father hissed at him. ‘What have you done?' he asked Ellie, kneeling beside her. But
she was crying too much to answer. Blood was soaking through her hair and running down the back of her head, staining her pink suit.

‘Hit my head on a branch,' she said at last, between sobs.

‘Oh, for God's sake,' said James' mother, looking angrily at him. A woman standing with them took her gloves off and began parting Ellie's hair, feeling for the wound. Her hands seemed so experienced that James thought she might be a doctor.

‘Not too bad,' she said after a minute. ‘Head wounds always bleed a lot. Might need a couple of stitches, that's all.' Ellie gave a fresh little splutter of sobs. James noticed, with new guilt, that she was wheezing worse than ever. ‘See if you can get a skivvy or a towel,' the woman directed, standing up. ‘Fill it with snow and hold it on her head while you get her to the Medical Centre. I think you can get there on your own two legs, can't you?' she said, addressing Ellie. ‘I don't think you need the ski patrol.'

‘Have you got your Ventolin?' James' mother asked.

‘Yes,' Ellie sniffled, groping in her pocket for it.

‘I've got a little bag here that might make an icepack,' a man said, producing a cloth satchel from inside his parka. He clumsily emptied it of its contents, which ranged from sunglasses to a balaclava.

‘That's just the thing,' the woman said, as James' father filled it with snow and settled it onto his daughter's head.

‘Well, thank you very much everybody,' James'
mother said. ‘You've been most helpful. James should have known better than to take his sister off the groomed runs. Now,' she said to the man, ‘you must tell us where you are staying, so we can return your bag.'

‘Oh, there's no real need,' the man said. ‘I'm at Michell's chalet, if you happen to be passing, but don't go out of your way. And my name's Herbert, Frank Herbert. You could just leave it at Reception.

‘Well, we'll certainly get it back to you,' James' mother said. ‘James can drop it in this afternoon. And now James,' she said, turning to him, ‘You can go straight over to Running Waters and find the Newcombes and tell them we'll be late for lunch. Tell them we'll drop Ellie at the Medical Centre and then come over, but they're not to wait for us. You can come back to the Medical Centre then and look after Ellie.'

James skied down to the chair lift, relieved to be away. He spent the afternoon hanging around the Medical Centre, and then baby-sitting Ellie back at the flat. Outside, the sun still shone and the snow was a white dazzle.

‘WHEN THE WAR
is over,' the girl with the scarred face thought, as she followed her parents wearily through the city, ‘I'll eat chocolate again. I'll smell coffee. I'll swim in clear clean water.' The handle of the bigger bag was cutting intolerably into her left hand, so she paused again to change the bags over. ‘I wonder how much
weight the human body can carry, and for how long?' she thought. ‘There must be a limit. I wonder if after a while it stretches your bones, or if the muscles tear away from your bones, or what?' She looked up and altered direction slightly, to stay in touch with the weary backs of her parents, a metre or two in front of her.

They were angling across the main square, seeming to dodge by instinct the human traffic: pedlars, beggars, refugees, police and soldiers. A group of nuns hurried past, their faces impassive but their eyes narrowed and concerned. On one of the public buildings a banner still hung, torn by time and twisted by weather. It was no longer possible to read it. Its message, that must recently have seemed so urgent, so important, had been superseded by the counterattack from the south. Nevertheless, the girl tried to read it, to reconstruct the words from the fragments that she could see. At least it was something for her to do, something specific.

She paused again in the middle of the square to change hands. The crowd was getting more dense and for a moment her parents disappeared behind a flurry of grey clothing. The girl gave a start forward, then calmed when the crowd parted and her mother's back came into view, fifty metres away. As she prepared to thread her way through the people again, to shorten the invisible cord to her parents, everything changed. The buildings moved, as though they were not stable and permanent, but instead were made of sand and could be shuffled at will. The ground under her feet shifted and reorganised itself, lifting her as it did so, and causing
her to stumble. The sky darkened to grey, and then to complete black. All this happened in the time it took her to drop the heavier bag and open her mouth. Then a moving wall of air and sound hit her and she staggered backwards. The sound that came with it deafened her: an earthquake of a sound, a whole world of sound, a Heaven and Hell of noise.

She opened her mouth a little further, to scream or cry out, but any sound she made, even the thought of a sound, was blown away by the noise. She saw that the old clock tower was coming towards her: the fact that the vertical was soon to be horizontal was final proof that the world was being re-organized. If vertical and horizontal could be as one, then three dimensional could become two, or one, or four, and life could become death. But before the great mass of masonry could reach her she was struck by an absurdly small piece, a lump of brick, a mere harbinger of the building itself. She dropped to the ground, still holding the lighter bag, unconscious before she fell, knowing nothing of the crash as the two planes at last met. She did not feel her body being picked up by the bang of air, nor did she feel the tonnes of rubble cover her, nor was she aware of the awful airless silence that followed.

She was aware of very little for the next three and a half days.

*

TWO TEENAGERS NAMED
Max and Sybil had arrived to take James out. They did this occasionally. He was not sure who they were or where they came from or why they did it, but he liked their good-humoured chatter and their breezy confidence. On this particular day they walked a couple of kilometres to Rymill Park. Max and Sybil talked across his head but also tried to include him in the conversation. Sybil was a girl who moved gracefully and spoke with a light and lively voice; Max was clumsier but good-natured. He often surprised, with comments of real originality.

They were talking about one of their teachers. They went to the same school, a senior high about five kilometres away.

‘He's got no sense of humour,' Max complained. ‘Were you there the other day? He told us to choose something in the room and paint it. Those were his exact words. So Andrew Reeve chose the back of the door and started painting it blue. Mr Angus was so busy cutting up bits of paper that he didn't notice for ten minutes. When he did he went sick at Andrew. Absolutely and completely el sicko. He tried to chuck Andrew out of the class but when he opened the door he got blue paint all over his hands. It was so funny. I had to put my face under the tap to stop myself laughing. But he didn't see the joke at all.'

‘Strange, that,' said Sybil drily, while James choked back his own laughter. Impassivity, one of his most reliable defences, was threatening to abandon him.

In the park they played cricket, not very successfully
with only three players. But after a while some kids at a barbecue with their parents joined them. That made for a better game but intimidated James, who retreated to the outfield and shook his head shyly when invited to bat or bowl.

They'd been playing for half an hour when Max came to the wicket to bat for the third time. He only had twelve runs from his first two innings, which put him well behind the others. The first ball he got sent him falling back over the rubbish-tin they were using as a wicket, causing much laughter among the kids who had joined them. On the principle of ‘not out first ball' Max was allowed to keep batting. He played the second ball uneventfully without scoring a run. When the third ball hit a bump in the ground and bounced awkwardly Max tried to hook. In doing so he put his left foot in the rubbish-tin. The shock caused him to lose his grip on the bat, which flew into the fire, while the ball popped up in the air to land in a dish of coleslaw that was sitting on a picnic table. Max overbalanced backwards landing with his foot still in the bin and its contents strewn around him.

This was too much for James. He collapsed in helpless laughter, losing control completely. For several minutes he lay on the ground, giggling convulsively. When he finally recovered he lay on his back, gazing at the sky. A ragged mass of cloud was rapidly filling it, from horizon to horizon. His feeling of elation was giving way to fear and embarrassment at his abandonment. At last, however, he forced himself to sit
up and look across doubtfully at the others.

They were ignoring him. To his amazement it appeared that they had not even noticed. They were too busy recovering from their own fits of laughter. Max was ruefully holding the cricket ball between thumb and middle finger while he explained and apologised to the owners of the coleslaw. The bin lay on its side on the ground. The bat had been retrieved from the fire: it was propped against a picnic chair, apparently undamaged. Sybil was on the ground, chewing on a piece of grass and still laughing, watching Max.

Relieved, James squatted on his haunches and found his own piece of grass to chew. For some reason he began thinking of a story he had once heard about sneezing. The story explained why people say ‘Bless you' when somebody sneezes. It had originated in the old days, when people believed that during the split second of the sneeze, the sneezer was off-guard, and the Devil could enter and take possession of the body. Saying ‘Bless you' was a defence against Satan; he would be driven out when he heard those words.

Squatting there in the grass under the cloudy sky, chewing on a dry stalk, James whispered, so quietly that he heard himself in his mind rather than through his ears, two words: ‘Bless me'. Then he got up and walked towards the others.

*

THE TOWN WAS
called Ravenswood. A few dozen people still lived there. Their houses lurked behind patches of scrub or squatted at the end of confusing tracks. The thousands who had lived there in the days of mining madness were represented now by the cadavers of their buildings. Most of these were fenced off, with signs threatening trespassers. In the distance the dust moved like silk, but the town itself was still. Somehow it had taken on the hot dullness of the surrounding bush: the only movement was the susurration of decay.

James climbed through a ragged wire fence into a house that was leaning sloppily to one side and had completely collapsed in the farthest corner. He went timidly up the back steps, testing one to be sure it would not crumble under his feet. There was no door, so he was able to walk into what had been the kitchen. The floor was littered with rubbish and animal droppings. On a wall hung half a cheap calendar and a torn tea towel. A pipe running down the wall led to a broken sink, with one tap still poised at an odd angle above it. In the sink was a smashed beer bottle and a few fragments of soap. James ran his finger along the ledge above the sink. Someone had made that ledge, had carved it out of wood and screwed supports for it. It had taken a few hours perhaps, and made the owner of the kitchen pleased and happy.

James went back into the sunlight and began exploring the garden. Although it was now a sprawling mass of overgrowth it was evident that there had once been order beneath the weeds and wild plants. The
skeletons of a few sheds still stood at the end of the long garden but they were covered with creepers.

Later, James walked up the hill to the Ravenswood Cemetery. This was well fenced and in one corner was a group of new graves, topped with red dirt, flowers, and freshly erected headstones. But the rest of the cemetery was old. James avoided the new section and walked through the old. Less than half the headstones were still standing but even on those many of the inscriptions were illegible. Some had headstones that were now a pile of rubble. And many had no markings at all. A rectangle of half-bricks, glimpsed among the undergrowth; a rusting wrought-iron fence enclosing a mess of weeds; plots where there may or may not have once been a burial. James walked among them slowly, sick at heart. He read all of the texts that could be read. A lot were for children; a lot for men and women in their thirties. Some recorded the awful details of accidental deaths: a drowning; collapsed mine shafts; falls from horses. A woman had been killed in a hotel fire. Some of the inscriptions started with the words, ‘Pray for the soul of. . .', and James did. He didn't know whether to be angered or moved by the humble acceptance of death revealed in some of the verses: ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away'.