The Best Australian Stories 2010 (36 page)

Nor did she want to discuss it later, when Candice had been driven back to her student house and Hugh had come to bed after showering.

In the morning she told him, as simply as she could. He cried. Her heart was moved until she heard the anger in his sobs. He slapped her ineffectually and turned his back. She patted it quietly and waited for the storm to subside.

‘I'll make jelly for supper tonight, shall I?' she asked.

Really, it was going to be so easy. She couldn't think why she'd been worried.

The Sleepers Almanac

Can't Take the Country Out of the Boy

Joanne Riccioni

The next time I saw her she was on the train, looking out of the window. Her eyes flicked at the scenery gathering speed, catching on something now and then – the back door of a grubby terrace, kicked in and hanging on one hinge, a strawberry-red billboard promising something
Longer Lasting
, a carriage derelict on the sidings, burnt out and skeletal like the carcass of some long-dead animal. She watched the junk of the city surging away. And I watched her.

She didn't remember me. She'd looked up from her book and I'd seen the green of her eyes, waited for them to stall on me and flare with recognition. But they didn't. They just passed aimlessly over my boots, across my chest, rigid with held breath, and over to the opposite window.

She didn't remember me. Couldn't forget her, though, even if I'd wanted to. Here it was again, my life aligning to hers, swinging away and re-aligning, like a needle to the pole. Huh. In Mingindiri I'd have been laughed out of the pub for that one. Fate, destiny, all that stuff – no one has the time of day for it where I come from. In Mingindiri, people are born in their boots and die in their boots, and their boots don't go very far in between. In a place where you wake up to the empty sky yearning above the long slow curve of the earth, you'd think a man would have room for a bit of philosophy. Not in Mingindiri. Livestock diseases, feed prices, new fertilizers, GPS rigs – they were the realities that marked the years. Despite that great flare of blue above, there wasn't room for anything else.

We rocked across the aisle from each other for fifteen minutes out of St Pancras. The gentle sway of her shoulders and knees in the wheelchair marked out the seconds, as I charted the lines of scars on her cheek and neck and on her hands holding the book. White ridges of skin like puckered sealant, closing her up where the windshield had shattered in on her; one long track gathering her top lip right up to her nose where she'd split her mouth on the steering wheel. But it was the eyes that made me sure. The green eyes and that skin, so white she should have had milk flowing through her veins instead of blood.

After I found her, that's what my mind kept sticking on: how wrong the blood had seemed on her face, filling her ears, wandering slowly down her neck and pooling between her pale breasts, as wrong as a red-bellied black coiling in the warm white sheets of an unmade bed. For years afterwards when I was with a woman, I'd be getting off more on remembering the even blanch of that skin than from anything they were doing. Perverted, I know, and I tried to shake it from my head. But, you see, she went inside me like nothing else had for a long time. Funny how being close to death can do that – I mean, make you feel more alive, jump-start part of your brain that had gone flat long ago and make you urgent with thoughts.

I'd first seen her at the Carlisle. I was filthy from dipping and weary with the prospect of another whole week of it ahead of me. And that day I'd seen the years filing out before me as predictable and mindless as the long line of sheep through the channels. She was new behind the bar and there were quite a few of us giving her more than the once-over. She wasn't local, not even Australian, or at least hadn't been for very long. Christ, that red hair and the marble skin and those eyes like some shady pasture seemed exotic out there where everything was degrees of brown, sapped and desiccated with drought. Even the women in Mingindiri have skin as tanned and creased as an old pair of Baxters from the neck up, cuff down. Some mornings in bed with Dee I'd see her hand on the pillow, furrowed and mottled like the bark of a red gum. So she went through us like rain, this girl, and we were sucking her back more greedily than our beers.

‘Hard day?' she asked me when she saw my fingers in my hair loosening dust and bits of dry grass onto the bar. I nodded.

‘Where you from?' I said.

‘Ireland. Waterford.'

‘What do you want here, then?' I asked her. She looked a bit indignant, so I said, ‘I mean, why would you leave a place called Waterford for a dust bowl like this?' She laughed.

‘Ah, ya know. See what's out there,' she said, and even the rise and fall of her voice stirred me up inside like a breeze scuffing through an old shed. Right then, all I wanted to tell her was, ‘Just keep talking.'

*

A week later I found her on the back road to Mundee, all bloodied up and the ute mangled round her, trapping her in from the waist down. And while we waited for the ambos on the hour-long drive from Moree, I got to tell her that. ‘Keep talking, okay? You need to keep talking to me.' Through the open window I held my T-shirt to her face and watched those green eyes rolling up into her head and flicking back again.

*

‘And what is out there?' I'd asked her, elbow up towards the pub windows behind me.

She'd cupped her chin in her white hands on the bar and tapped her cheek with translucent nails, and she'd said, ‘A lot of feckin' chickpeas, for sure.'

I'd laughed. I'd laughed a lot, because no one had made the truth funny for a long time.

‘What? I'm only telling it like it is,' she said.

‘Yeah, you are,' I said.

Then she asked me, ‘Is it true one of the farms up here is half the size of Ireland?

*

The road where I found her ran through that property. My father had managed part of it when I was a kid and the tree she'd run into marked the entrance to the homestead, still over a kilometre away. I'd bike to that tree in summer and climb it to look down the road, a shimmering line of mercury through fields of sorghum and wheat as far as the horizon on 360 degrees. In the holidays I'd scout the perimeters of the stock farm for lost sheep. Sometimes I'd find one or two in the bush, legs skinned to the bone straining on fox traps. Or sometimes there were shivering ewes that had been attacked by feral dogs, their glossy innards seething about them as if they had a life of their own. I'd shoot them with the rifle and sling them in the back of the ute, as mindlessly as taking garbage out to the skip bins down on the sealed road.

*

When I found her she was panting the way those sheep did when they were too far gone for bleating, when the automatic reactions of the body, the suck of the diaphragm or the squeeze of the heart, have become conscious and are all that can be managed. I looked down at the casing of metal crimped about her legs and knew that even if she got out of it alive, she'd never use them again. I could so easily have covered her bloody mouth and broken nose with my shirt, pressed gently and just waited for the paltry remnants of life to let go of her.

*

‘Have you never wanted to see what's out there, then?' she'd asked me while she was stacking the glass washer behind the bar.

‘No,' I'd said. But I'd wanted to say, ‘Not until now.'

She told me about her travels, her plans, how she wanted to see every last bit of the world, her voice lithe and contagious as a child's laughter, until she stopped and snatched her breath.

‘Shit,' she said, holding up a finger pumping blood.

I grabbed a napkin from the bar and wound it about her hand.

‘Broken glass in the washer. Sorry.'

‘What for?' I asked.

‘I got blood on you.' I saw the drops on my shirt where the grimy cuffs were rolled back but I kept my fingers pressed on the napkin around hers until she laughed, ‘You can let go now.'

*

‘Talk to me,' I told her and her eyes twitched and her tongue clicked on her dry mouth like she was about to say something.

‘Can you hear me?' I said. The scratch of the cicadas stopped in unison and I held my breath, listening. Her fingers fluttered in my hand like the wings of an insect.

*

I talked to her. I didn't know what else to do. I told her anything: the rain forecast for the month; the price of feed at auction; how Harrisons had spread flu through their stud pigs so they could monopolise the market with other immune stock. I told her how I hadn't loved Dee, but couldn't leave when she'd got pregnant and anyway where was there to go? I told her how the baby had tested positive for some chromosome defect and I'd convinced her to abort it. I told her how she'd left eventually because she said I treated people no better than fucking sheep. And I asked her again why she'd really come to this hole of a place. Then I ran out of things to say.

*

Her breathing had become shallower, but her eyes under their bloody lids still twitched and her fingers still had the tremble of life in my hand. And then she whispered to me. She tried to say something. Her lips moved in the shape of words but no sound came out. I leant further through the window of the jammed door and put my ear up close to her mouth. I felt her breath on me.

‘Do,' she seemed to exhale.

‘What?' I asked.

‘Do it,' she tapped the words from the roof of her dry mouth like code.

I pulled away to look at her. Her green eyes were half open but as lucid as when she'd leaned across the bar to me and asked my name.

‘Do it,' she mouthed again. Then in a long hiss, suddenly alive and violent, she breathed, ‘Don't save me for this shit.' And she was looking at the bloody shirt in my hand.

*

I yanked away from the car then and stood up too quickly, the blood banging in my head like fireworks.

‘Ah, Jesus,' I said, reeling. ‘Christ.' And I meant it as a prayer of sorts, as much as I've ever managed anyway, not because of what she wanted me to do, but because she'd nailed me. In those few tragic minutes when our paths had crossed again she'd nailed me exactly for who I was: a fucking brutal no-hoper, a hard-arse country boy who might take her out like wounded stock.

*

When the stars cleared from my eyes, the ambos and the firies were there and I sat in the ditch and watched them cut her out with chainsaws and get her in the van. Afterwards one of them checked me over. He took the bloody shirt off me and looked down at my bare feet.

‘Where are your boots, Dean?' It was Johnny Sands, the paramedic from Moree who drank at the Carlisle. He pulled his chin in, scanning me over like I was naked.

‘Dunno,' I said, waving him away and walking barefoot through the dust to my ute.

‘You know you should come back with us. You might be in shock, mate.'

‘Yep,' I said and drove away. And I kept driving for ten hours, until I got to Sydney.

*

I called Johnny two weeks later to ask about the girl.

‘Deano. Where are you?'

‘Construction site. Coogee,' I told him.

‘Look, Dean. She was in a bad way. They had to airlift her to Brissie and she was on a machine. Don't hold your breath. But you did everything you could, right?'

‘Right-o.'

‘And Dean?'

‘Yeah?'

‘Got your Baxters, mate. You left 'em in the ditch.'

‘You keep them for a bit, Johnny, okay?'

*

So you see, I knew it was her the moment I saw her. You never forget something like that, someone like that, even six years later, on the other side of the world. Of course I'd seen her plenty of times before, in my dreams, sucking her finger at the bar or bloodied up and whispering at me from behind the wheel of the ute, her eyes rolling back in her head. And I'd seen her on buses, in shops, passing building sites all over the world. But she always walked away and turned into someone else. Now I was raw with the certainty of it, shaking so much I couldn't sit still and had to lean my arms on my knees just to breathe. The memory of her and the reality of her fused and came at me like a knee to the stomach, until I had to swallow back vomit. When I'd caught my breath and pulled myself together I just stared at her down the carriage, watching her turning pages, rocking with the train, her withered legs rubbery-looking and perfectly aligned as only nerveless limbs can be. I watched every movement as if it was a revelation, like a father with a newborn: the biting of a thumbnail, the stroke of a hand under the fine hair of her neck as she stretched, the roll of her wrist unscrewing a water bottle, the flash of her teeth as she swallowed, and the settling back to the book. All the unconscious, inconsequential movements of a life.

*

As the train pulled into Luton, a steward came to wheel her off. He flicked the brake and rolled her chair backwards, and she caught my eye and held it all the long length of the carriage to the door.