Stolen (17 page)

You were out of the car fast. The camel was making this awful sound, a deep, desperate moaning. It echoed around the desert.

I came to look. “Have you hurt her?” I asked.

“Just her pride.”

Her long neck was circling around and around, her eyes white with fear. I reached up and touched the hairs on her thigh. “Poor thing.”

Quickly, you wound rope around her legs. Then you took a bucket from the trunk, and one of the large containers of water. Grunting a little, you lifted the container up so it rested against your leg, then carefully poured the water into the bucket.

You tried to encourage the camel to drink, murmuring, “There now, easy, girl.”

You were stroking her neck, trying to make her calm. But the camel was just looking over her shoulder at her disappearing herd. She moaned and moaned. She tried moving toward them but you were tightening the rope around her front legs. She kicked out one of her back legs, missing me by inches.

“Careful,” you warned. You sprung beside me, wrapping the rope above the camel’s knee. “Go over to the other side.”

You chucked the rope over her hump. “Pull that,” you said. I pulled. “Harder.”

I hated every second. Each pull made the camel grumble and gurgle and look around at me with her desperate eyes. You were pulling from your side, too. Eventually the camel’s front legs buckled and she knelt into the sand.

“Enough!” you shouted.

You threw yourself onto her hump, pressing your whole body weight down on her. You leaned into her until her back legs crumpled underneath and you were sure she wouldn’t get up. Then quickly, you wound rope around the camel’s knees, tying them so tightly she couldn’t move them.

“That’s cruel,” I said.

“Do you want a brain hemorrhage from a kick to the head?” You scratched the skin above one of the camel’s knees. “There are crueler ways of doing this, believe me.”

I did. You probably knew crueler ways of doing most things. The camel’s moan had grown in volume and desperation. It sounded too loud to just be coming from her; it sounded like the whole desert was joining in. I wondered if anyone else could hear. The rest of the herd were just dots on the horizon again, almost impossible to see. She was still moving her body toward them.

“You’re dreaming if you think you’re going to get away, girl,” you muttered.

All her legs were hobbled and she was tied to the car. It did seem pretty unlikely that she was going anywhere. I wished she could, though. I wished she could break her ropes and gallop after her herd, calling loudly all the way.

“Would you take me with you?” I whispered to her warm, panting side.

I moved around so I could look at her face. Even scared, she had beautiful eyes. Dark and brown with soft-looking eyelashes. She stopped searching for her herd to glance at me.

“You’re trapped, too, now,” I told her. “Don’t bother thinking of escape. He’ll only come after you.”

She dropped her head. Her eyes were on me, watching. It was like she understood. I nodded.

“You and me,” I whispered. “You and me, girl.”

In her moment of stillness, you stepped toward her. You reached up to grab at her face. You had some sort of halter in your hand. As soon as she saw you, she reared her head away, far out of your reach. She roared this time. The sound was monstrous and guttural. You put your hand on her neck, trying to pull her head down.

“Hey, girly,” you murmured. “Hey, pretty girl. Don’t do that.”

The camel hated it. She roared and gurgled and swung her head madly. You just kept pulling her toward you, your strength even winning against a camel. She looked briefly at me again, blinking her long, lovely eyelashes. Then she turned to you, and was sick on your head.

There’s nothing like camel vomit. That greenish-brown, lumpy goop that smells like dog shit and sewers and piss all mixed together. It’s undoubtedly the worst thing I’ve ever smelled in my life. Worse than Dad’s farts. Worse than baby poo. Worse than anything. And your head was covered in the stuff. As I watched, you spat some out of your mouth. You wiped it off your cheek with the back of your hand. You used your fingers to scoop it out from your eyes. Then you leaned over and threw up some of your own.

I wasn’t far behind you. As soon as I caught a whiff, I let go of my stomach. I’m hopeless like that, always sick when someone else is. I had to sit down in the sand and stick my head between my knees, it was that bad. And the sound of you being sick didn’t make it any better. I kept throwing up for ages, longer than you, even. The camel stopped moaning sometime in the middle of all this. She was probably pretty satisfied with herself, probably laughing at us. I wouldn’t blame her. Or maybe it was just the moment when she gave up hope, when she realized her herd was gone forever and there wasn’t any point in moaning anymore.

I rolled over and leaned against a tree. The smell of rotten puke was everywhere. The flies had already latched on to it; they were buzzing relentlessly, dropping down onto the sick and then trying to land on my face. The heat only made it worse, making my head spin. I looked at the sand stretching for miles, but it was hard to focus on it.

The journey back was the worst of my life. Worse even than the one where I was stuck in the trunk, which I can’t remember anyway. Even with all the windows down, the smell was still there, infecting every corner of the car with its foulness. When the sick dried on us, it smelled even worse. Something like foot odor meets sour milk. It didn’t help that the smell was mixing with the squashed-fruit smell from the picnic, which was now spread all over the backseat from your mad driving. We drove with our heads out the windows.

The camel trotted along behind us, obliging on her rope. It was as if she had got us back in some small way, and was happier. I threw up more than once, down the side of the car … thin white dribbles of bile.

The next day you were out with the camel, training her, in a pen you must have made the night before. You’d stuck more fence posts in the ground and wound rope around them, linking this all to the chicken-wire fence already around the Separates.

I came out to watch. You had her head in a halter attached to a rope, and she was following you. She was calmer now, almost resigned. She carried her head lower, and she’d given up on moaning. You were talking to her softly and gently, in words I couldn’t hear or understand. She seemed to like it.

“What do you want to call her?” you said when you noticed me.

“Stolen,” I said. It was the first thing I thought of.

“That’s not much of a name.”

“But she is, though, isn’t she? Stolen from her herd.” I felt bad that I’d helped.

“She’ll learn to love us,” you said quietly. “Did you feel the same about your cat when you chose him from the animal shelter?”

“That’s different.”

You walked over to where I was standing and pulled on the camel’s rope. She lowered her head so that I could pet her. You placed your hand against her stomach, thinking. “We should call her Wobbleguts,” you said.

“That’s a crap name.”

“It’s accurate. Took me forever to clean the side of my car.” Your eyes were soft as they stayed on mine for longer than they needed to. You moved the rope toward my hand. “Here. Do you want a go at leading her?”

I stepped carefully into the pen, taking the rope without needing to touch you. I patted her front shoulder, trying to reassure her. I thought calm words, tried to let her know I wasn’t going to hurt her. She towered over me, all legs and muscle. There was still a faint smell of sick about her, mixed with something else … something dirt and desertlike. She smelled like sand.

“Just walk straight, she’ll follow.”

I took a few steps and the camel came with me. She lowered her head and sniffed gently at my shoulder. I could feel her lips touching the collar of my T-shirt, her warm breath on the back of my neck. Her feet were clomping heavily next to mine.

“You are a lovely girl,” I whispered to her. The bottom of her jaw worked around in a circle, chewing on something. I was surprised at her gentleness, her willingness to give in. It didn’t seem like she was wild only the day before.

“We need to teach her to whoosh down next.”

“To what?”

“Sit. Here, go through the fence again.”

You took her rope from me and pushed me toward the fence. I ducked through it and you shoved her rope back into my hand.

“Just hold it there, firmly. If you’re on the other side of this fence, she shouldn’t be able to kick you.”

Then you tied another rope to one of her front legs and ran it over her hump.

“We need to pull down together,” you said. “She’ll soon get the idea.”

As soon as we pulled, the camel started moaning again. I shook my head at you. “I don’t like it.”

“Camels just make a lot of fuss.” You ran your hand up her neck, and spoke gently to her once more. Her ear flicked back to listen to you. “As soon as she understands what we want, she’ll do it. Camels are like that.”

I wondered if you thought the same thing about me.

My scalp began to burn. I went back to the veranda and lay on the couch. I watched you with the camel, getting her to sit and then stand again, over and over. The sun was warm but not oppressive through the veranda roof; it made my eyelids heavy. Like that, half-asleep, edges of memories came: Anna’s face when she first told me she was going out with Ben, Mum arriving through the door with takeout for dinner, Josh asking me on a date.

I heard the tuneless notes of your whistle. I snapped my eyes open and forced my body into a sitting position. You were walking toward me.

You leaned against the veranda post with a sigh. Your cheeks were slightly red, strands of hair stuck to your forehead. You took out rolling papers and rolled yourself a cigarette. Quickly, you licked the edges. I took my time that day, studying your face, my eyes lingering over your pronounced cheekbones and jaw, your small scar and longish hair.

“I
have
seen you before, haven’t I?” I said. “I mean, after when I was ten.”

You took a drag on your roll-up. There were so many half-remembered things in my head right then: vague images of seeing you around the neighborhood, in the park somewhere, sometime … something else, too. I remembered the way you’d seemed familiar at the airport.

“Why do I recognize you?”

“I told you, I’ve been following you.”

“That’s just creepy.”

You shrugged.

I leaned forward on the couch. “But
I
recognize
you,
too. And that’s creepier. Why?”

You smiled. “I lived nearby.”

“Yes, but something else … that moment when I saw you in the airport, I knew … I knew I’d seen you before.”

My brain hurt with the effort of thinking. I wiped the sweat off my forehead and from the corners of my eyes. I unstuck my thighs from the couch and shifted them to a cooler part. Your broad shoulders were blocking the sun, your T-shirt hanging floppy over the small of your back. You took another drag.

“I met you in the park, remember?”

“How often were you there?”

“All the time. As you know, I lived there for a while … Number 1, Rhododendron Gardens.” You smiled. “Later I worked there.”

“Worked?”

“Yeah, after I’d met you and decided to get my act together. I got a little job as a groundskeeper—maintenance, digging…. I saw you there with your friends.”

“How long ago?”

“Maybe three years ago. I did it for a couple of years … on and off. I liked it.”

I thought back to the park. I could remember where the trees and flower beds were, exactly where all the benches were, too … and the thicker bushes that were good for smoking out of sight. Sometimes I wondered if I knew that park better than my own house.

But I couldn’t remember you in it. Or could I?

“You had long hair then?”

You nodded, smiled slightly. And then it came back: the quiet skinny boy, always on the edge of things, hair falling around his face, the boy who was consumed by his work in the dirt beds.

“That was you?”

“Perhaps, at some point.”

“We used to talk about you. Anna said you were good-looking.”