Surrender (5 page)

They’ve been careful not to break anything. All around the pit itself, not a twig is bent. The leaf litter has been trampled only with tiptoe. The few spines of weedy grass have been combed through with gloved hands. There’s been no
please
about this, though. Everything has been expected to cough up what it knows.

I’m a shadow on the edge of a cliff, and when I look down I’m looking into the pit. The pit is crude, not the shape of a grave — more the shape of something evolved overnight, like fungus on a tree. The pit is shallow, its flanks lushly dark. It’s empty now, but I know what they found. The bones that escaped the mouse and the fox would have been black as the ground. Rain would have blotted them with waterstars, snails nibbled them hollow as whistles. Roots of saplings would have netted them like fish, mushrooms would’ve used them as bedrock. Worms curled in the cavern of a skull would have been safe from deep rain. Water, soil, bugs, slugs — these would have combined to make rags of the cloth that went with the bones to the grave.

The bones and cloth are forest now; it’s theft to take them away. The wind, in protest, raises its voice. The trees, rustling, agree. Things should have been left where they were, but they weren’t. Oh well.

I ease back into my shadow, having seen what I came to see. I’ve seen how rainwater, sheeting from the cliff, washed away enough soil to lay the bones bare. I shake my head with regret: but for this happening, they would not have been found.

I have seen, not been seen. That’s a sweet way of life. I whistle Surrender like a bird, and we melt away.

And then for a long time I did not see him, though I thought about him often and looked for him in the unlikely places he’d promised I would find him — under the house, on its roof, in the spindly canopy of the eucalypt trees. Sitting beneath the pines at school, watching a lunchtime game of chase, I wished he were there beside me — I wished he were there to run faster than my schoolfellows, to be seen as my fleet and admirable friend. The eccentric reputation of my mother and father — a thing unavoidably inherited by myself — protected me from obvious harm, but as a schoolboy I was frequently the target for the skewed cricket ball, the savagely jerked elbow, the scorn of a farmer’s son. My books would inexplicably vanish; the girls giggled slyly at me. If I answered a teacher’s question correctly, I was mercilessly mocked in the yard; if I tried to please by being doltish, I was tormented all the more. By ten years old I had learned to say nothing, to keep my head sourly down. Inside me, though, I daydreamed of the damage Finnigan could do. My enemies would flee like dogs across the hills, if only he were here. He had sworn to be near when I needed him, the living retaliation for my hurts, but he wasn’t. When, at home, I committed some crime — spilled my drink, broke a plate, went cretinously deaf to what I was told — and found myself kneeling in the corner where I was traditionally sent to contemplate my sins, I remembered Finnigan’s vow to protect and give me courage, and I supposed that he had lied. I might have believed I’d invented him, that I had indeed patted the tiger in the dark, had it not been for the misshapen word carved into the front fence, six small letters on which my faith hung.

And then one day, when I had turned eleven and a long droughted summer was coming to an end, a bushfire sprang to life high in the ranges and for seven legendary days it burned without mercy, skipping the roads in great leaps and bounds, striding across rivers and dams, skimming over firebreaks to rear triumphant in the oil-filled, gravel-dry forests. The sky above the valley was hooded with grease that blotted out sun and stars; the mountain peaks, miles apart, were linked by cathedrals of flame. Men fought their way up the blackened slopes as kangaroos and deer galloped down, their red hides wafting white smoke. Men fought the fire through the days and nights, although there was no night — the midnight sky was luminescent, incandescent, spangling pink, green, yellow, and orange as if the Devil had swallowed us down. The bushfire screamed an unholy hymn, its cavernous voice riding the heat waves. Women stood on verandas in the breathless evenings, staring hopelessly into the hills; the leaping, singing circle of flame glittered in their eyes. The children loitering beside their mothers were slack-mouthed and enthralled. The school was closed, the church was open. Clothes hung on clotheslines were brought in stiff as planks. The mountain farms were evacuated, the stock loosed to run for their lives.

I remember that the sound of the fire was a continual roar — I remember blocking my ears to the boom of eucalypts exploding. For seven days and seven nights, scorched leaves fell as hellish rain. I remember the air smelled of everything that had died, that birds dropped like pebbles from the smoke-raddled sky. I remember a truck with the pace of a hearse and on its tray a horror of bloated remains. I remember the farmers watching it pass and how one of them sagged in the gutter, and rested his head on his knees.

I knew, with the first brilliant flare of sparks, that this was Finnigan’s work. I understood that in these months of silence he’d concentrated his abilities. The fire was Finnigan, talking to me. I hid in my room the day they started saying
arson
. I hunched beneath my bed hearing the air itself burn, praying that our friendship didn’t show on my face. I prayed that, wherever he was, he was better hidden than I. Mostly I prayed, in cowardly panic, that he would stay away from me — that, if caught and interrogated, he would loyally fail to mention me.

The monstrous blaze was extinguished by a storm that first massed in the west and hung for a while, deliberating, before moving its clouds forward like battleships and dourly pouring rain. The fire leaped and darted, wounded by the drops; it changed direction and tried to escape, racing down a hill. In the face of rain the magnificent firestorm became frantic and flimsy as a fawn. The lightning clouds solemnly pursued it. Men took off their hats and let the water slick down their hair. Women on verandas laid their hands to their eyes. There was a terrible noise, the death rattle of a thousand lions. Dragon tails of soot lashed the sky. People came from their houses to witness the fire die. When the smoke and clouds and smog cleared you could see how hungry the blaze had been, how it left in its wake a crisp ebony nothingness that shone — when moonlight touched the naked hills, the blackness of them
shone
. I stood at my window and studied it night after night for a week, maybe two. Fingers of greenery sprouted across the hills then, and the sleekness of the wasteland was spoiled.

It was a month or so later that I crouched in the arbor where my father grew his most finicky roses and, sniffing ash, glanced round to see the firebug standing among the tendrils. His unheralded appearance made me catch my breath; I murmured, “Where have you been?”

He’d grown taller in his absence, but not much; his eyes were still a whiteless, syrupy black. His hair hung in grubby curls at his shoulders, long as a girl’s. His trousers were snaggle-toothed in the hem and his feet still lacked boots. There was a nasty, healing wound on his face. The arbor threw striped shadows over him; his gaze lay weightily on me. He ignored my question and said, “Have you been to the forest? Everything’s charcoal.”

I hadn’t been among the sightseers who had trekked the hills marveling at the fire’s arid legacy — my parents sneered at such easily amused minds — but my father had led a party of important men on an official inspection of the burn, and he’d brought home char on his shoes. “You shouldn’t do things like that,” I said.

Finnigan lifted an eyebrow. “What things?”

“You know. It’s wrong to burn the forest.”

Finnigan smiled wolfishly. “But I’m
allowed
to do wrong things. We agreed, remember? You swore.”

I set my jaw; I was still on my knees. Naturally I remembered our poisonous promise, but I hadn’t expected him to take to his task so dramatically. I reminded myself he was wild and uneducated, and doubtlessly in need of a guiding hand. I said, “But the forest is your friend, isn’t it?”

He pondered this, brushing his knuckles on the feathery petals of a rose, walking his fingers from thorn to thorn. Perhaps he’d never realized it before — that, being wild, other wild things were his allies. He looked across the yard. “When the forest burns, it grows back,” he said. “It grows back stronger than before.”

“Houses don’t grow back,” I answered. “Cows and sheep and horses don’t grow back. All the animals that live in the forest — they don’t grow back when they burn.”

He glanced at me. “They would die anyway.”

“When they’re
supposed
to. When they’re old.”

His brown face flushed. “You can’t tell me what to do.”

“It’s wrong, though —”

“It’s wrong, it’s wrong!” He kicked the earth, wheeled away. “Shut up, you kook! I can do what I like!”

I shrank back into the flowers and leaves. “Don’t call me that. I’m not a kook. You know it’s wrong to hurt things that haven’t hurt you. That’s not the rules.”

“Oh yeah?” wailed Finnigan. “What about your brother? What had
he
done to
you
?”

My mouth snapped shut. “That’s not the same. That was an accident, I told you.”

Finnigan watched me for a moment; his anger dropped away. He lay down on the warm earth, quiet as a pup. “I forgot the story,” he said. “Tell me again.”

My bones are very close to my skin — there’s no buffer of fat on me. I weigh perhaps as much as a small suitcase carrying the necessities of a night. The pillows and blankets that coddle me weigh much more than I do. Yet I lie on this mattress so heavily that I ache, I feel burdened as if by padlocks — I fear that if I fell from this bed I would crash straight through the floor. Sarah shifts and adjusts me regularly, to keep the heaviness from settling; nonetheless my flesh breaks and tears. My brother Vernon had no such careful attention during the course of his short life. The places where bone has broken the skin are the places that remind me of him.

He was born three years before me, but he was never the elder of us — how could he be, when his brain did not develop beyond the small damp cake it had been at birth? I grew up in his birdy shadow, his weak cries familiar to me from my cradle, the peculiar scent of him — his powdery skin, his soaking chin — as recognizable as the smell of smoke. He rarely left his bedroom, having scant propulsion of his own; new sights and sounds excited him, set him howling like a gibbon, a noise my mother found unbearably mortifying and not to be heard by the neighbors. So Vernon was confined, almost always, to a single room at the back of the house, and when I see him in my mind it is always with the walls of the room rising around him, the ceiling, the floor, the door. He could not walk but rather
clattered
, and an inability to hoist himself any higher than his elbows meant the view from the window was largely denied him. He had no strength or freedom.

He was whiteness, like me. His skin was snowy-white. His hair, which my mother kept cropped, was prickly like a summer lawn, wan as schoolyard chalk. He wore nothing but a nappy, which was bleached ivory from dryings in the sun. The walls and ceiling of his room were white, as was the porcelain handle on the door. His eyes were blue, as are mine. His lips were a childish pink.

He was not cheerless. As a boy I was convinced he loved me. He would rattle his cot and snort merrily when I slipped into the room. He was easily entertained with a song, a toy, a waggle of his toes. If I am thin now, he was always thinner, and when he was happy his scrawny arms would wave like the wings of a chick. He could not talk, but he could gurgle, and he was capable of joy.

He could also cry. It was the greatest blight in a blighted life. When he was not gurgling or sleeping he was crying, the bored, insufferable yowl of the tired toddler. It was his natural state of being: wet-faced and snot-nosed, ribboned with saliva, his bland face rosy with a woe he could not explain or comprehend, dribbling out a soulless sound that was, I decided, the sound of the boy-he-was grieving for the boy-he-should-have-been. The idea, I knew, was fanciful. I knew Vernon wept simply because there was nothing he could say and nothing else he could do.

It was this bleating, pathetic, constant noise that made my mother loathe him so. It was his inability to be soothed or commanded or frightened into silence. Vernon’s crying was the most defiant thing my mother had ever encountered. And my mother looked with hatred upon anything that defied her.

Vernon was not a secret — everyone in Mulyan knew of his twilighted existence. To my mother’s and father’s faces, and mine, the townspeople sympathized.
You’re good to your brother, aren’t you, Anwell? It’s nobody’s fault, Harry; these things happen. Beth, you’re a saint
. In the streets of Mulyan, outside the grocer or the auto repair, my father shrugged off such platitudes; at home he feigned obliviousness to the presence of the child. Responsibility for Vernon fell to my mother, who, on the main street, called him her
blessing
and
life’s joy
. At home, he was a curse on her. The people who sympathized to her face whispered, when her back was turned, that she was rightly cursed. I never saw such falseness, such extremes of truth and lie, such coldness of the human heart as I did in those first seven years of my life, when Vernon was alive.