The Hands (5 page)

‘An hour to dig myself out of sand. Then I had to refill three times.'

‘The whole drum?'

‘Yes.'

‘Well, go get showered. I'll make you some eggs and bacon.' He pulled himself up out of his seat.

Trevor was too tired to talk, argue, think. Murray watched as he shuffled across the room. Watched his shoulders, slumped, and his head, looking at the ground; saw how he dragged his feet and how his hands and fingers hung heavy and lifeless. ‘You okay?' he called.

‘Yeah.'

‘You're getting too old to do that by yourself.'

‘Who else is there?'

6

Aiden lived in a converted storeroom on the second floor of Mercy's halls-of-residence. It looked out across a memorial garden, surrounded by dead lawn, lined by black-spotted roses that shed their little bit of perfume in the early evening, taking him back to Bundeena, and Fay, fiddling in her garden. It was a small room with a divan and no-nonsense mattress, cupboard, wardrobe and desk. There was an old aluminium lamp with a ring of little stars cut out of the shade. He often studied each of the five-pointed constellations and wondered how they'd been punched so clean.

He was sitting at his desk, reading a slab of words on his laptop; words he'd put there; words that made less sense the more he looked at them.
As the volume increases the surface area increases too. But at some point the volume gets bigger quicker
 …

He studied these last few words:
gets bigger quicker
. Or should it be, he thought, gets bigger faster, at a faster rate, quicker rate, increases more, grows much faster? Do I, really, care?

He looked at the ring of stars and counted them. Nineteen. Shouldn't they have added up to an even number?
The volume increases at a faster rate than the surface area
. That's it, he said to himself, re-reading the sentence.

His eyes drifted out to the roses. Brother Symes was sitting on a bench, reading. He noticed his gold crucifix, and his Jesus hands and face and voice, blessing them like he really cared. And if it wasn't God's songs for his people and prayers and A-fuckin'-bide with me it was the perfect surface area-to-volume ratio.
If the discolouration can be calculated carefully …

He stared at his laptop and the little camera watching him, still. Smiled. Good morning, Mrs Lawrence, he said, as he returned to the living room at Bundeena.

What are we working on this morning? Mrs Lawrence, his old School of the Air teacher, asked.

A practical report.

Go on.

He started reading but she interrupted by saying: Third person, past tense.

He shrugged. The thing is, I don't really care, Mrs Lawrence.

Aiden …

I'm nearly old enough to leave school.

What would that achieve?

I could help Dad.

You'll be able to help him soon enough. But if you neglect—

So what?

Aiden pressed backspace and his words (some he'd spent days sweating over) disappeared. When he was finished and the screen was blank he looked at Mrs Lawrence and said, That's what I think of Biology.

You'll have to do it all again, she said.

No, I won't.

He looked up at the Brother, pulling his undies from his arse.

I can keep failing, and they can keep nagging, he explained. Eventually they'll get sick of it and let me leave.

He looked at a few small stars floating above his desk. Leaned forward, opened his window and called out, ‘What's up, Bro?' Then shot back behind the curtain.

Harry was still sitting at his classroom computer. Carelyn had made him dress for school, as she had Aiden, every day of his primary school years: his SOTA polo shirt, navy pants, socks and shoes. Lessons wouldn't begin until teeth were brushed and hair combed. And the background was always carefully controlled. No ironing piles or unwanted television. Chris was kept outside, mostly, and Murray was banned from singing or playing music.

It was morning assembly and Harry's year level (sisters from another station, a boy half an hour from Port Augusta, another from a wheat-sheep farm on the Eyre Peninsula) was running the assembly. Harry had taken charge. The others (he told his parents) weren't good for much. The sisters were always in their pyjamas, sucking ice-blocks, despite the fact that Mrs Lawrence was always on at them. The other boys just seemed to stare at the webcam and occasionally nod. Murray thought they were all inbred.

One of the sisters was having a birthday. Harry led them in a round of
Happy Birthday
and said, ‘So, Shakina, could you tell us what gifts you got?'

The little girl smiled into the frame that contained their five faces. ‘What?'

‘What gifts did you get?' Mrs Lawrence repeated.

‘Oh … Mum's made me a dress, and a couple of CDs, and Aleisha,' and her sister sat forward so her head took up the whole frame, ‘she got me a thirty dollar gift card.'

‘Are you having a party?' Harry asked.

‘No.'

Then he read out his weekly quiz: the questions Carelyn helped him write every Wednesday night. ‘Number one,' he said, as the others scrambled for their books and a pen. ‘What is the second-biggest city in Queensland?'

The sisters looked at each other but the boys just stared at the screen.

‘Well, what's the biggest?' he asked, and Shakina said, ‘Perth.'

He turned and looked at his mum, sitting only a few inches away. She rolled her eyes and said, ‘Don't tell them. Move on.'

‘Number two,' he continued. ‘List the highest common factors of 24.'

Silence, again.

After the quiz they shared their news (Shakina's dad due an operation on his knee, the latest from
Australian Idol
), then he closed the assembly and Mrs Lawrence played a clip of the national anthem (complete with sheep flocks, a one-legged Aborigine and a Bondi lifesaver with a tattoo of the Queen).

Later, after a morning tea of Fay's re-warmed scones, Chris joined Harry at the computer. It was the weekly ‘Meet My Family' session. Harry had worked through each member of his family three, four times, always avoiding his cousin, until one day Carelyn said, ‘What about Chris?'

Mrs Lawrence got things started. ‘Mr George … perhaps you could tell us about some of the jobs you do at Bundeena?'

Chris just looked at Harry.

‘Go on,' Harry said. ‘They just want to know a bit about you.'

‘Well,' Chris began, hesitating, ‘I help out around the house.'

Silence. The two girls and the farmers' sons watched him. Shakina managed to keep her mouth closed. What is he, she was wondering, a retard? Around the house? What about the farm, the animals?

‘I help Harry with the chooks and the veggies.' He indicated in case they were unsure who Harry was.

Silence, again. And then Shakina, unable to hold it in any longer. ‘What do you do during the muster?'

Chris stopped to think. ‘Sometimes I do the counter, so they know how many they've loaded onto the trucks.'

But Shakina wasn't happy with that. That was something you got a kid to do, not a man. ‘So you don't do the rounding up?' she asked.

‘No.'

‘Why not?'

Everybody felt the awkwardness: Mrs Lawrence and Harry, the other kids and their mums; Murray and Fay, sitting on the lounge, and Carelyn, sewing a button on a shirt.

‘It's sorta hard for him,' Harry told Shakina.

‘Why?'

‘He got a … injury, when he was a kid.'

Shakina still wanted to know. ‘What, kicked by a cow or something?'

‘Everyone does what they can on a farm, don't they?' Mrs Lawrence said.

But Shakina just stared at the oldish-looking man, unsure.

Chris bowed his head. He could feel them staring at him, thinking, deciding. This, he remembered, is why he'd given up on the School of the Air after only six months. In those days it hadn't been so bad. Just the radio, and the school books he couldn't make any sense of. But his fellow students (and back then there'd been twenty in a class) had somehow been able to tell. Although he was hundreds of kilometres away from them, they somehow managed to tease him. Not with actions, or words, but pauses, and questions they knew he wouldn't be able to answer.

Chris, what sort of tractor's your dad got?

Eventually, he'd retreated from the radio they'd set up for him and Trevor. Murray and Morris had said to Fay, ‘Go on, make him do it,' but no matter what she said, Chris had refused to go anywhere near the black box. ‘I don't understand what she's talking about,' he'd tell them.

‘You just gotta sit and listen and answer a few questions,' Murray had said, but it didn't make any difference.

Miss, Chris reckons he's got a dozen girlfriends
.

I didn't say that
.

And he's kissed them
.

No
.

Chris looked at the small black eye. ‘I have 187 videos,' he said. ‘I've watched them all at least ten times.'

Harry gently bit his lip.

‘What sort?' Aleisha asked.

Chris's face lit up. ‘War movies … and thrillers, like
Mission Impossible
.'

Silence.

Fay took a deep breath. She stood and walked over to her son. Mrs Lawrence and the other students watched her growing bigger in the background. She put her hand on his shoulder and said, ‘Well, kids, Chris is gonna come and help me now.'

As they all thought the same thing. As they watched, as Fay led Chris out, towards the laundry.

And Shakina said, ‘Is that his wife?'

Trevor returned to the shed. He went inside and studied his newly repaired roof. ‘Right.' Turned to a pile of old timber, took out his tape and started measuring. Most of them were too short, but there was a piece of pine that looked long enough to replace the rotten eaves that supported the busted gutter. He secured it in his vice and started sawing. Moments later he stopped and sat down, looking at the pictures of Harry's hand. Looked at his own hands: liver-spotted, freckled, wrinkled; the pink, splotchy undersides marked with impossibly short lifelines. ‘I'm so tired,' he said, leaning forward so his head almost touched his knees.

‘Right!' Realising action was the only solution, he jumped up. Grasping the saw, he started working but stopped before he was half-way through. Placed his body in the darkest corner of his shed, sliding down until he was sitting on the floor, curling into a familiar tight ball. Breathing deeply, once, twice, before repeating: ‘I'm not feeling so good.'

There, in the darkness, he was nine years old again: ‘Well,' Murray was saying to him, ‘the first thing is, you gotta learn to drive.'

‘Now?' he asked.

‘Yes, now. What if we're on a bore run and I have a heart attack, or slice me leg open?'

Trevor just looked at him.

So they climbed into Fay's EH and he settled in behind the wheel, watching and waiting for his dad. ‘I can't see.'

Murray went around to the boot and found a rug for him to sit on. When they were ready, he said, ‘Start her up.'

He turned the key and the motor crunched and growled.

‘The clutch!' Murray said.

‘I can't reach it.'

Murray shook his head and pulled the rug out from under his son's arse. ‘There, how's that?'

‘Now I can't see out.'

Trevor, curled in his dark corner, could still see his dad's face. Angry, of course, but he knew it was all show, and bluff, and even gladness that he was still too small to reach the clutch. He wiped a single tear with his sleeve.

‘We'll give it six months,' his father was saying, ‘or maybe we'll try on the tractor.'

He remembered wanting to talk to his father, to touch him, to hold him; on the hard, meaty part of his arm, perhaps. He wondered why they only talked about castration, and practical issues like clutches and molasses.

The hands were young, and always would be, and he would be reaching out for his dad, willing him to lead him across the paddock that stretched to their private horizon. Harry, too, who, he suspected, was thinking much the same thing.

The crew's hut had taken a battering over the years. The walls had been made from lengths of pine, but these had dried and peeled in the sixty years since Bill Wilkie had put them up. Tired of the muster team's complaints (up until then they'd slept on the porch), he'd spent three weeks (with a little help from Morris) building it. It had an iron roof, which had rusted, but stayed in place over the sixty winters and summers it had sat, mostly empty, between musters.

The box sat at the bottom of the hill at the end of a dolomite path that snaked down, between more native pine trees, from Fay's garden. It was away from the business of the house, so both the Wilkies and the team could maintain their own routines, keep their own hours and have somewhere to go when the disagreements became arguments.

Harry was sweeping it out. Someone had left both doors open and sand had blown in and gathered around the walls. The gaps between the floorboards were so big that all he had to do was sweep and the sand would fall through. Chris had joined him, and he'd sent him back to fetch the shed broom. As Murray often explained, the most important thing was to keep Chris busy. He only made problems when he had time to think.

He used a shovel to scoop the piles of sand and throw them out the front door. ‘Mum said I shoulda kept the doors shut,' he said to Chris. ‘I can't see how it's my fault.'

‘It's not your fault.'

‘Every time something happens.
Harry, why did you leave it there?
' He studied Chris's actions, his big arms, his slow strokes, the way he had to think about every movement.

‘Chris?' he asked.

‘Yes?'

‘How did it happen, when you got hurt in the muster that time?'

Chris didn't walk to talk about it. How he was standing behind a steer, prodding its rump with a length of hose, when it kicked him in the face. How he fell to the ground clutching his broken jaw with its four shattered teeth and a mess of blood covering his hands. How Morris and Murray had shouted at him, called him
stupid boy
and
simple fool
before wrapping his face in someone's shirt, driving him back to the house and, in the middle of a muster, when they could least afford to, driving him all the way to Port Augusta hospital.