Desert Fish (22 page)

I'll tell you something I know about dying. After your breath is gone, your heart retreats until it sits high up in your chest, almost in your throat. Like it's trying to reach your mouth. It would like to speak now that it can rest, but how to get the words out? It's as if it's tired from all that beating, stretching and pushing, all the work of staying alive. I don't know where I learned that. In a book, I suppose, or a magazine. Something I happened to pick up, like the one with the fish. It's not something that ever worried or haunted me. It's just something I know.

The river gathered gently around my feet and then my ankles as I stepped into it. When I was in deep enough, I lowered my body and began to glide. I felt strong. I could swim a whole length of the pool. And this was my place, this river with its rock pools and sandy beaches where I found the best places to swim and brought my mother and father to them.

Soon I was far enough out to see where the water was
drawn downstream, to the weir, and to the rocky shallows beneath. There was a slipway there, for canoes, and a series of tiered pools – fish ladders – descending like hollow steps, from the bulkhead of the weir to the rapids below. At the bottom of each one was a hole through which the water was sucked, quick and furious. They were there so that fish could make their way from the rapids to the deeper pools upriver. Eels and cod. Trout, even. All the fish I'd never seen.

Swimming like that in the cool brown water felt easy when I could see the weir to my left and the bridge upstream. The bank where my mother and father lay looked so close. I had even been able to see my mother's fingers stroking my father's hair. But when I got into the middle I felt the tug of a colder current at my feet. I stopped to tread water, my arms making busy arcs each side of me. But it's so hard to keep moving in one place. I turned onto my back but you have to keep things going in the water, don't you? To keep yourself there. You don't just float. You can't really rest. As soon as I stopped moving there was a wash of water over me. I felt myself slipping into it.

I began to swim again but my limbs dragged me down, the bank felt further and further away. I could see them there, my mother and father, lying on their stomachs, facing away from the water, towards each other, perhaps dozing. I couldn't tell. I knew now that it was too far for me to reach, but I did not call out. Instead I tried to turn back, crawling across the current, swallowing water when
I turned my head to gulp air, my arms flopping against the surface of the water.

I must have tried to shout at some point, I remember how feeble my voice sounded. My father didn't hear me; nor did my mother. A breeze grazed the tops of the rushes that reached out of the water to my left, where the sandy beach gave way to rocks. As I began to sink beneath the surface I felt the weeds about my feet. I tried to push my hand into the air like drowning people do. I called again and again but soon I felt the river in my hair, and the ghosts of the weeds gathered around my legs. It was not dying I was thinking of, even though I knew I could go no further. Instead, I wondered how I would swallow all that water. Would I breathe it through my nose and ears? And would it hurt the first time I did?

The last time I went under somehow someone noticed me. He was on an inflatable raft, one of the teenagers from upriver. He grabbed a handful of my hair and then got hold of my arm, hoisting me onto the raft.

I had my breath back by the time he got me to the bank, even though my legs were trembling. I thanked him and made my way over to where my mother's towel was, exactly as she'd left it. On the other bank, my parents were rising now, brushing the grit from their thighs and stomachs, calmly making their way into the water. Even where I sat, I could hear their laughter drift when they stopped and tussled with each other in the water. I decided I would not say anything about what had happened. I let the air come into my lungs, I put my fingers against my
chest and felt the rise and fall of it, recalling the sensation of the water pressed hard as hands against it. The sky was bright and sharp and there was no breeze now. The river slipped by quietly, as if nothing had happened.

 

I think about that now, as the last of the day's sun draws the moisture from me. How the things that we couldn't say before must rise to the surface and leave us before we stop working altogether: memories, feelings, secrets, like living things, bursting with air.

Pete reaches over in front of me where the water bottle lies. He takes the cap off and pushes his tongue into the thread for the drops that might be clinging there, that he might have missed before. He sobs then. But I don't care. I don't care about the water or the heat. Or about whether anyone's going to come and find us.

I think about that picture in the magazine. I reach for it, smoothing the image out in front of me. I imagine the shrunken pool like a salty pond, then the rush of rain, washing away the sand, hollowing out the flats between the waterholes to make a river. And then the fish rising: gills opening to the fresh new water. Moving again. I wonder how this can be a true desert when rain can come and make a river out of a few pools, and fish can live there.

I'm cold now, and shaking. Pete gets me a blanket from the back of the car.

‘You're sick, aren't you, Gilly?'

‘Yes.'

‘You were sick before, weren't you? Before we left.'

‘Yes.'

‘But you didn't want to tell me.'

He tucks the blanket around me, but I don't feel any warmer. ‘Don't be frightened,' he says.

I close my eyes and remember how my baby came away from me. How having her was like dying and I thought I would never be afraid again. That pain was like feeling everything and nothing at the same time and all I could think was how I couldn't put my hand on the particular part that hurt. She pushed right through me until I forgot who I was. They had to cut me to bring her out.

Perhaps they were right. Perhaps she was strong, despite that bleating cry, the shaking limbs.

When I put her in the sink I lay my hand beneath her neck. The rest of her sank straightaway. Would she float? I wondered. Would she remember what it was like inside me, being suspended there, turning in that strange, thin fluid? I left my hand there, behind her neck and she began to flail. Her arms swilled the water. Her legs seemed to kick and I drew my hand away from her and watched as the water came up over her face. I wanted her to remember, I wanted her to keep that knowledge. But there was no time. They came so quickly, the nurses and the midwife, pushing me away.

What was I doing? What had I done?

My mind was blank.

In my room the nurse who had led me there let go of my elbow and helped me up on the bed, tucked me in.

‘I forgot,' I told her. ‘I forgot how to bathe her.'

‘I'll get you a drink of water,' she said. ‘You will stay here, won't you?'

‘Yes,' I said.

‘You won't go near the nursery, will you?'

‘I didn't mean to hurt her.'

‘I know.'

‘I'll stay away from her.'

‘Someone will be along to talk to you tomorrow.'

‘Okay. Thank you.'

 

It is safe to let her come to me now. I think of her and there is a crawling sensation in my breasts, like tiny threads being dragged beneath the skin. At my feet there is the empty water bottle and the thermos, empty too. My nose is raw and dry inside where dust and the arid air have scoured it. The tears from earlier have left a salty crust around my eyes. My arms recall the weight of her, and I long for her now.

But I couldn't have brought her here with me. She is too new to be in this place with me. Too fragile to be where I am now.

I clasp my arms where she would have lain. I close my eyes. She is weak in the sun. She wails and her cries grow thin.

Some time around now, she'd have stopped crying and
fallen into a fitful sleep, her skin hot, her breath shallow.

I'd have had nothing left to give to her.

Beneath my top, her milk bleeds from me.

‘Gilly. You know we'll die here, don't you?' Pete's eyes are glazed and red-rimmed.

‘Yes.'

‘Aren't you afraid?'

‘No, I'm not,' I tell him.

‘I can't believe you,' he says. ‘I don't believe you're not afraid.' He wants us to be joined now, at this moment. He doesn't want to die alone.

But I mean it. I'm not afraid.

‘Before you came to our house, Pete, something had gone wrong and I didn't know how to say what it was. I didn't have anyone to tell. I felt paralysed. And then I saw you at the river and you came back to our house, and everything changed. I thought things would get better and they did. But then you went away and all I could think of was how to put things right. How to make you want me again. Instead I've gone and done the worst thing I could have. The reason I'm not afraid is because the worst thing has already happened and I don't think I can undo it.'

I look at him to see if he's understood but his head is in his hands and his fingers are rubbing back and forth over the skin of his brow, making filthy streaks. ‘I don't want to die, Gilly,' he says. ‘And I tell you, if I could get out and lick that water you spilled from the dirt, I would. But it's gone now.'

He sniffs and doesn't look at me. He puts his palms together and pushes his hands between his knees. I can see how he is trembling and I feel only pity. No desire. No love, or need. Only pity.

‘I'm so sorry, Pete,' I say.

He sobs.

‘It's okay,' I soothe. My throat feels tight, my arms weak. ‘I'll stay here. I'll wait. You won't be alone.'

He puts his arms around me, lays one rough brown hand at my shoulder, and leans his head on me. His eyelashes brush against my neck. Milk spreads on my shirt now and I wonder how much more will run from me. How much can be left.

I pull the shirt up and unhook the catch of my bra. Pete slips a finger over my nipple where the milk beads and slides down my breast. He licks it away and then lowers his head and puts his tongue there, closing his lips around the place, so it will wet his mouth.

I let him.

‘Don't worry, Pete,' I say. ‘You're going to be alright.'

I put my hands there and press. There'll be little left in me now, but I let him have what I know belongs to her, and I tell myself it's only until I can be with her again.

It's her I'm thinking of. Her breath that smelled pure, of nothing at all. The angry red flares on her skin, raw and new to the air, and the pearls of balled fluff I found when I prised open her fingers. I'm gathering these fragments now, just in case.

My fever is lying low, the man said. There'll be time. I heard him say it when he lifted me into the car. I lie in the back, my head resting on Pete's thigh. He drips a solution onto my lips, sugary and a little saline too. He speaks to the man who's driving. Their murmured words soothe me. Occasionally I open my eyes and blink into the new day.

There were birds at dawn, before we were picked up, hundreds of them flying over us. I heard them. I still had the blanket over me. It was so cold when the night came. I thought we'd been taken somewhere else. I thought I might have died already. Then at dawn the shadows of those birds crowded the windscreen, their noise filled
the car and I thought things might turn out differently after all.

‘They'll be heading for water,' Pete murmured. ‘They'll know where to find it.'

I remembered the fish I'd seen in the pictures. And the birds in Pete's story. My eyes were hot and swollen. I closed them and I heard it then, the low buzz of an engine. I couldn't stand, I could hardly move, but Pete got out and soon I heard the car draw alongside us.

‘She's sick,' Pete told the man when he came to us. ‘She's had a baby.'

I sensed the confusion in the silence. I felt him looking for it, my baby.

‘She left it at the hospital,' Pete explained. ‘But she came away too soon and now it's made her ill.' His voice broke. ‘It's my fault,' he said. ‘I need to take her back to her baby.'

The man muttered as he lifted me into the car but they weren't unkind words. He radioed someone, dimly I heard the static and his blustery voice before he got us into his car and turned it around.

It feels like years ago that I carried her inside me. Twice I let her die. At the motel, talking to Janice, then back there, in the desert. She was only an idea then. I let go of the baby I couldn't have and now I have to let go of Pete.

A blue day moves along the window, powdered with fine red dust, interrupted only once by a high thin cloud, the edges singed with morning sun.

‘Give her some water now,' the man in the front says. ‘If she's kept the other down, she'll take it alright.'

Pete opens another bottle, one with plain water in it. He tilts my head a little. ‘That alright, Gilly?' he asks, tipping a capful into my mouth.

‘Yes.' Opening my lips is painful. The skin there feels thick, as though something has been stuck onto me, and I taste blood. But the water traces a path inside my body, along my tongue and down my throat, and I can feel life beginning in me again.

‘We'll be there soon, Gilly,' Pete says. ‘Everything's going to be okay.'

‘I know.'

He has his arms around me, smoothing his fingers over my dry dirty hair. He lays his hand on my sunburned face and I know he is grateful for what I have done for him.

When telegraph poles start slipping through the view I close my eyes.

‘Soon we'll be there,' Pete says. ‘Hold on, Gilly.'

But he doesn't need to say it. I have come back and I'm in the world again. They'll take me to some place to make me better. Then I'll ask them. ‘Can you bring me to her?' I'll say, and maybe they will. Perhaps they'll see how I'm different now. How I'm ready to go to all the places I must, to belong to her.