The Rest is Weight (UQP Short Fiction) (4 page)

The milk in the sky

The first time I seen Trace she’s at the roadside near the horse paddock, lying in the sun like there’s no work to be done anywhere and I think she’s a bloke. So I sidle up to her, hands on my hips, cause I have to follow every avenue just in case. She’s under a wide brown hat and all I see is this grin come up and then two slight rises under the check shirt. I drop the flirt straightaway when I see.

Well, g’day there, missy
, she says.
Whatcha doin wandering around out here on your own?

Goin home
, I say squinting against the sun.
You?

She sits up, her head close to my knees.
Just blew in
, she says.
For the weekend. Hitched up from town. Trace
, she says, and holds up her hand. I touch it lightly and say my name.

There’s a dance on at the pub this Saturday
, I tell her. I shift my weight, my knees trying to hide.
A lot of blokes come in for it from around. Watch yourself out here, ay
. She nods at me, still grinning, and I step back onto the track, head for the station. My brothers are waiting for me to bring the shopping back. It’s in a calico bag, and the narrow strap slices into my fingers.

She follows me up the track a bit, but every time I look back she’s staring at the dirt or her feet and all I see is the hat. After a while I stop checking she’s there and when I get to my gate and look back all I see is a speck that might be cast by the spots of light and dark on my eyes from the heat, shimmering things. The horse wanders over and sniffs at me, scoffing at mirages.

I put on my dress and comb my hair out, then think again and put it up, pull the fringes behind my ears. I guess I look a bit serious, practise smiling in the mirror. Curtsey like mum showed me. A lot of the blokes come in from bigger stations with money, it’s my turn to catch one. Me and my brothers have a hard time making this place work on our own, now that our parents have gone. I’ll be an old maid if I don’t take advantage. But none of em have struck me yet.

We drive down to the pub in the ute, Frank and me in the front and the other two in the tray with the dog. The boys go into the bar for a quick few, refreshing the sun from their skin with the amber. I clutch my purse, feeling ridiculous in the dress, already got dust on my hem and my shoes. I go inside.

The fiddles are going full tilt, but hardly anyone’s dancing. I wait for one of the boys to bring me a lemonade. It’s still early, not even dark out yet. A couple of dances, a couple of goes around the floor with the neighbours, and before I know it the place is packed and sweaty. None of em strike me. They’re decent enough. I figure I’m just tired.

I go outside to get a bit of air, and see a boot sticking out of the back of our ute. Maybe one of the boys has had enough too. I go and check, but there curled up having a snooze with the dog is Trace.

Ay
, I say,
this is our truck
.
You can’t sleep here.

She hasn’t bothered to change her clothes. The music from the pub comes out: I can hear the lower notes and the thump and sway of boots on floorboards.

Sorry, darlin
, she says, looking over at me from under her hat,
but I get so bored with this shit.

Me too
, I say, without thinking.
I mean . . .
I look around, but the car park is deserted, so I swing myself up and perch on the back of the ute. The moon’s out, but just under half and you can see the milk in the sky. Trace sighs.
Pretty
,
ay
.

If we get talking, it’s just to kill the time between dances while I catch my breath; I don’t notice it’s getting late till someone comes crashing out of the pub shouting fit to wake the sun up. I can hear him vomiting into the planter.
I guess I used to imagine something better
, I hear myself saying,
but I don’t see the point of that now
.

Better than this?
I can feel the heat of her body, it’s kept the day like metal does. She’s stretched herself up during our chat and leans beside me, looking at the moon.
Better than this
, she says, and rests her lips on my shoulder, light so I can hardly feel it.

It’s true, the sky is the best thing about living out here. The bloke vomiting behind us stops; I hear the doors swing open and wait for the clang shut before I speak.
Where did you come from?
I can hear something catching in my throat; her hand’s resting against my back now, but this is the kind of thing you learn not to mention.

Town
, she says,
I had to get going
.

What for?

Oh, some people down there wanna kill me
, she says, and
laughs a big, hearty laugh at the sky.
I had them going for a
while, though.
Her voice drops its pitch.
Got any work for a strapping young bloke?
she growls.

The dog wakes up and sniffs the air, turns in a circle and settles back to sleep.

Oh
, I say. There’s a big gap in the night.
What are ya?
I ask, before I think about it.

Whatever I want to be
, she says.
What are you?

Just
, I say, and my mouth’s full of her teeth. We’re crashed against each other on the warm steel truck bed. Bits of straw in my hair and her hat knocked off. Hands against the soft skin that hasn’t seen sun. The dog doesn’t bother us. Guess I take that as a blessing.

I wake up after the moon’s gone down, cold and with someone talking to my feet.
Wondering where you got to
, the voice says. It’s me brother, the little one.
We’re going home, you right?
I try and straighten my dress.
Yeah
, I say, yawning,
just got tired from dancing
. I can feel his eyes on me, disappointed.

Well be careful
, he says,
you know what some of these blokes are like.
He moves to help me out of the bed but I say,
Nah, I’ll be right – you go and sit up front
. This way I can watch the pub disappear in the dust clouds behind us and sit with my hand between the dog’s warm ears and look for a black spot in the mirage. No Trace.

Things go on as usual and I’m busy with the sheep and the milking, keeping the bugs off the vegies and making sure we’re all fed and washed. I think about Trace when I wash the dishes or scrub the clothes against the washboard. The way my hands get hot in the water and sore from the work. I linger in the laundry some days, smiling to myself. I look down the track almost every day and especially into the long grass when I go in to the general store, but when I don’t see her my stomach does a single lonely backflip.

One day the heat is so strong I ask Frank if I can take the ute to the store and save the walking. He says he doesn’t need it for the afternoon. I take off down the dust track, moving faster than I’m used to. In the store I pick out a few sacks of grain and some tinned fruit, a comic for my little brother, soap, a few bits and pieces. I throw the bag in the front seat and turn the engine on. I drive in the wrong direction, out to the paved road that goes in to town, looking for a black mark against the grass, but don’t see anything much. I might as well drive a little way in, I think. But all I see by the roadside is the odd dead roo, black birds picking at its guts and looking over at the ute to size up if I’m gonna smash into them. They don’t even walk out of my way; they know I’ll go round them.

I reach the town before I know it, and drive through slowly looking for someone I’d feel right asking. The main street has two pubs, a bank, a petrol station, a charcoal chicken place, and a couple of shops. It’s the heat I guess, but hardly anyone’s around. One old fella comes out of the pub and stares at me, grinning. A couple of blokes outside the chicken shop are chucking burnt chips at the flies. I slow down beside them, window wound down, and they stare at my face, whistle slowly. I turn the ute around and get out of there, driving too fast. I plough right into the crows, but they get out of the way.

I suppose I’ll have to answer for where I’ve been. I wonder if the soap is melting in the seat. I have to get back and get the dinner on. I don’t check my speed, just kick up a dust cloud. But I keep driving past my turn-off, looking at the verge all the while for the shape of a hitchhiker.

I stop at night, hours after the sun’s gone down, no clue where I am and no sign of life. I get out of the ute and stand there like an idiot. Out here, the bush beckons you, calling you out of yourself. There’s no moon yet and I glance up at the shooting stars that dot the sky. A couple of mopokes go back and forth in a broken rhythm like the fiddlers play. I can almost hear the dance under the dirt. I don’t know what I’m doing out here. There’s no chance of finding someone in this expanse. Only the chance at drawing breath.

When I get back on the road there’s a faint blush of dawn riding the ridge; it’s a wonder people can sleep through the spooky light. I pull in to the station, get out to unhitch the gate, drive through and get out again to close it. I stand there for a minute leaning on the post, looking out at the familiar road. A bird creaks. It’s almost time to milk. I shouldn’t be here.

Everyone’s asleep when I get back, and I wander through the empty living room to the kitchen, looking at the way the light wakes up the silence. Nobody’s waited up. Things go on as they always do.

I don’t sleep a lot. It’s only been a month. Nothing much happens, so when it does you feel it: changes in the air, in the angle of the sun. I don’t sleep a lot for thinking. Sometimes at night I go out and crawl into the back of the ute, lie there and breathe for a minute, but the air is stiff.

Bloke was round here looking for you
, Frank says over breakfast. I perk up, try not to show it.
Who?
I ask.
Funny little fella
, he says.
Bit of a cheeky bastard
. I smile, hide it under a chewy crust of bread.

Said he’d drop back later
, he says, his eyes on the fried eggs along with a couple of busy flies.
Didn’t catch his name.

The day is long. Without sleep the heat takes it out of me, but I get everything done. By dusk I’m watering the horse, scooping my hand into his trough to wipe the dust from my face. The animal stirs, shies sideways, and snorts.
What is it?
I look over at the road and see a speck of something black growing in the distance. A body walking out of the mirage of heat. I run to the gate.

Well, g’day there, missy
, she says, grinning at me from under her hat. I stare open-mouthed.
What happened to your face?
I say. A thick bloody line runs across it, dried up and dark with dust.
Toldja
, she says, shrugging.
They don’t like me much down there
. She gestures with her head, conserving energy against the baking heat.

Do you want to come in?

She looks over my shoulder and I do too. The boys stand close to the house, each one stopped in his separate task to watch us.
Nah
, she says.
Just came to say goodbye. I’m off up north, get some work on one of those big stations where they don’t care who you are.

Oh.

Her boots scratch at the earth the way the dog does when he’s forgotten where he’s left his bones. She looks me in the eye, grabs her hat from behind, settles it on.

See ya
, she says, and walks off down the road.

I follow her, but just with my eyes. I watch her shape dry up in the shimmering heat. The waves make everything come and go. Squinting against the light, the dust. My throat wells up with the expanse of it. I turn and go inside.

The capital of missing persons

It used to be known as the murder capital of Australia, but these days Adelaide is the capital of missing persons. Are people getting better at hiding the bodies? Or are the victims leaving, deserting the city before the murderers have a chance?

My sister is not a missing person, but she does live in Adelaide. I know where to find her. I have known where to find her for fifteen years: I just had to ask my mother. Mum kept tabs on her although she claimed not to. Mum kept the letters my sister sent with her address on them, though I’m pretty sure she never replied. When my mother went into a retirement village I found Helen’s letters in a shoebox, carefully filed in their envelopes, in chronological order. Her letters petered out; the last one was about six years ago. I threw them away without reading them, but the Adelaide address was already burned into my memory.

Before I left Perth I looked my sister up in the phone book, just to make sure. So now I know that anyone can find her, with almost no effort.

I am driving halfway across the country. Lots of people are doing exactly this, or something like it. Driving across this half, or the other half, or flying across, or catching buses and trains. It’s Christmas. It’s when we make up the distance.

I didn’t stop yesterday except for petrol and to sleep the night in a cheap motel attached to a service station. The sound of trucks and the lights of the twenty-four-hour servo kept me alert. I watched television until late. It was a show about murder, it’s always murder on Thursdays, and I fell asleep before I found out who the killer was. When I woke up this morning I was still wondering who did it.

There’s nothing much to stop at. Ninety-nine per cent of the country is made up of approximately nothing, or nothing I can recognise. You can go down a side track and look over the edge of the limestone at the coast, if you want. The Southern Ocean crashes against the cliffs in broad slashes of white and grey, like a painting. Even when it’s hot you get a sense of the Antarctic chill lurking in the water.

If you look over your shoulder, there’s just the bush, flat and straight, sitting there like it always has. I’m used to it, but it’s hard to explain the empty space to people who aren’t from here.

I work with international students, so I explain things like this to people all the time. The Department looks after them, we help them to adjust. They are all a long way away from their families.

Today, just like every other day, there’s some mad German cycling across the Nullarbor, stoned on the distance. I wave at him as I pass but he ignores me. He’s concentrating on where he is going.

My sister is ten years younger than me. She teaches at a high
school in Adelaide, in one of the northern suburbs with English names. Unless she’s had children since I saw her,
which is not impossible, she’s my last living relative. I hope she hasn’t had any children, though. It will make what I have to say much easier.

I watch that German cyclist disappear in my rear-view mirror. His face is pinched and hardened. He’s taking the distance seriously. But all this space makes some Europeans hysterical. They start to dig for treasure, or they just stand in the middle of the nothing and scream at each other. They’re amazed that they are allowed so much room.

Australians are different. We get sort of reverent in the bush, conscious of spirits. They say it’s Aboriginal stories we’re picking up on, or maybe the Irish in us. Or maybe it’s what happens when you haven’t found any treasure, you’ve used up all your screaming, and you are still faced with nothing.

My sister is missing, but only from me. Her missing is targeted. Like a drone it homes in on me over all this desert. It’s either lost or it hasn’t been told the war’s over.

Up ahead there’s a road-work vehicle with lights flashing on its roof. It annoys me that they’re working on the road now, at Christmas, but there’s so much road they must have to work on some part of it all the time. I slow down, and as I approach the lights I realise I’m annoyed for no reason. It’s not road works at all, it’s a fire. There’s a line of smoke on the horizon ahead. I must have missed the worst of it. The red fire front slides across the country, erasing everything, turning the bush from green to black. So many small animals bolt in front of it that the birds can have their pick. I see them hovering, little specks of predation sailing over the smoke. But I am stuck behind the line.

I get out of the car and lean on the roof to watch. A truck comes rolling out of the east, not a fire truck but a working vehicle, the tank on the back commandeered for today. Men in orange safety vests collude with hand gestures that look like fly-swats. Eventually they wave me through with a similar gesture. I get back in my car and ease past them, smiling at their blackened, sweat-lined faces.

I obey the sign that tells me to put my radio on and drive
slowly through the smouldering scrub listening to wind
warnings. A couple of weeks ago, two trucks got trapped on this highway, fire on both sides. The drivers died. I count my breaths, remember to take them deep. There’s no point thinking about their families.

Before my sister went missing from me we got along pretty well. All sisters fight but the age difference protected us. I didn’t mind taking care of her, but I was glad when Helen grew up a bit, started being responsible for herself.

Then when she was nineteen she started seeing this bloke Colin. Colin was twenty-five. He was from a huge family. He was all right – we didn’t mind Colin – but his family was too big for us. It stretched out across half of South Australia, crossing state borders as far up as Alice Springs and across to Kalgoorlie. It had tentacles and entanglements. He was brother to half the Abos in the country. Helen wanted to marry into this.

She was very traditional, my mother. She said things like, ‘I just don’t trust them’, and ‘What kind of future can you have with someone like that?’ She didn’t mean anything bad by it. It was just her generation, and she wasn’t nearly as bad as my father.

My father had only passed away the year before. He wouldn’t have allowed anything like this to have happened to his youngest daughter. Helen was always his little angel.

Mum was still missing Dad pretty badly I guess; he might have been a hard man but he gave her a lot of structure, discipline, parameters. Without him, she found it difficult to understand Colin, what he was and what he meant.

When I got a job offer in Perth I asked Mum if she wanted to come with me. It seemed like the best answer for everyone: to move out beyond the borders of Colin’s family. Even so, in the west we kept an eye out for people he resembled. For people who called each other brother, sister.

I told Helen I didn’t care either way, that she could marry whoever she liked, that it was her funeral. I promised I would keep in touch.

That was fifteen years ago. That was the last thing I said to my sister.

I reach the line of the fire and drive through it slowly. The wind has dropped and the fire is just a fizz now, like a cartoon bomb fuse. Away to the north, the smoke is higher, and the radio says the wind is changing direction. The radio says they will probably have to close this road. Then it fizzles out. I play with the dial, but there’s no more reception.

I hold my breath as I drive from burned country to living, as if I’m crossing some kind of threshold. But on the other side, I feel exactly the same.

The radio kicks in again at Port Augusta, as I drive past the suburbs full of government housing. I try to find a station playing something other than carols as I navigate the area, but end up with some 1950s crooner, dreaming of a white Christmas.

Weatherboard buildings, identically mistreated, leer like beaten faces from these streets. It’s a wonder they don’t hide them better. I pass a dusty park, a broken swing set. A single unsupervised child spins round and round on a roundabout, her eyes huge and hollow. Then the stink of cheap sausages on somebody’s barbecue. I roll up my window.

A drunk old woman stumbles across the street with a Santa hat on. I brake in time but she still gives me a fright. I try not to stare at her. She ignores me, not even flinching. It’s as if I don’t exist.

I cross the sickly water. The bad smell wasn’t just meat. I want to turn around and drive straight back to Perth, but there’s nowhere to pull off the road, and the presence of other cars travelling at speed makes me sit forward in the seat and hold the steering wheel hard. I should take a break but I keep going. Before it disappears again, the radio news says they have closed the road behind me. I’m stuck on this side, maybe for days.

It’s four more hours before I get to Adelaide, but the last stretch of highway goes quickly. It’s built up, there are mountains and ruined farmhouses to look at, and before I know it I’m travelling through the dismal small towns which are backed up against the north end of the city like traffic.

It goes too quickly. I arrive in Helen’s neighbourhood at two in the afternoon, weary and nervous, just as unprepared for this as I was when I left Perth.

I pull up in the street opposite her house and sit in the car, like a bad actor on stake-out in a television cop show. It’s a nice neighbourhood – I realise guiltily that I was expecting weatherboard housing, broken swing sets, drunk grandmothers and the stink of cheap meat. I was hoping for no children, but I can hear them from here. They are either screaming or laughing, it’s hard to tell. My eyes hurt from the drive. I wait for my head to settle.

Family is a kind of fog that won’t clear, a blind place in the mind. You navigate through it because you must, without knowing where you’re going. There’s no rule that requires us to stick together, and the advantages of doing so are not always clear. I suppose that goes for the species as a whole.

I could waste all day sitting in the car and thinking abstractedly about the idea of my sister. I could attempt to compose the right words to say what I have to say, but every phrase seems to rise lifelessly and fall again from my thoughts like ashes.

I get out of the car and walk up the neat steps. The potted plants and toy-strewn porch, the miniature gumboots beside the door, describe a family at once structured and playful, and I feel a pang of something like envy. I find myself hoping that for some reason I have come to the wrong house. I knock twice heavily on the door with my bare knuckles before I notice there is a doorbell. I wait a moment before I press it.

My sister answers the door while calling out to someone behind her, so when she looks at me for the first time in fifteen years she’s still wearing a natural, intimate smile. It collapses pretty quickly. I watch her try to rebuild it.

‘Helen,’ I say. I shouldn’t have come here.

She pulls me inside by the shoulder, but we don’t embrace. There’s no happy family reunion. She closes the door behind me as though she’s worried the neighbours will see me.

Inside, the house is cool and a little dark. I face my sister in the hallway. Neither of us moves. Neither of us speaks. I have no words for this and my body appears to have come untied. I am loosened from the earth like some kind of vapour. The children have gone quiet; my suspension in their house, my particulate strangeness, has spread through the building like a poison gas.

And then I say it.

‘Mum’s died.’

My sister does not collapse in the way that I did in the hospital corridor when brought this news by a doctor. She puts one hand on my shoulder and her expression wrestles with itself. She looks the same: still a teenager but with more laugh lines, her face already beginning to replicate that of our mother, translated through her own experiences. Her eyes are clear. Mine are cloudy. I look like my father but she has won his stoicism, his quality of bearing up.

‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ Helen says, but we stand in the hallway for another minute, looking at each other. It is a slow process of recognition, as scraps of memory and image fall into place: a childhood photograph of us playing on Glenelg beach, her eyes straining in the sun; a portrait of a great-grandmother, throat enmeshed in some torturous collar; a face my father would make when he’d come home tired and disappointed from work. Then these images dissolve, resolve into the single person before me, this human being my sister, and I am relieved. I realise I was afraid that I would not recognise her at all.

Mum died slow and angry. The sicker she got the more pain came out of her. It came in words and fluids, her sorrows bubbling out of her like volcanic mud. It was wet rage, viscous, and when she passed away her body was left tiny and spent. Cremation seemed superfluous; she might have crumbled easily in a fist.

I thought of bringing her ashes with me, but I never really decided I was going to come. Besides, Mum and I had already chosen the place she wanted them buried: under a rosebush in the memorial garden near her retirement village, beneath a plaque with a simple name and dates, with no sentiments. With no survived-by, no beloved-wife-of.

‘What about Dad?’ I asked her when we were about to sign off on it. I wondered about her loyalties, having survived him all these years.

‘This will do,’ she said. Her tone was firm and final.

We think we are strong in my family. We think we are stoic. But really we are all runaways, selfish and childish. We are only loyal to our own endurance.

They say that having children fixes you and I can see that it has fixed Helen; her anger has been dug out, the gaps sealed with Polyfilla.

There are lots of children around, more than could reasonably be hers. Helen doesn’t say which ones belong to her and Colin. I was afraid there would be children, afraid of telling them they’ve lost someone they never knew. It doesn’t seem necessary now and, anyway, it’s not my responsibility.

We stand in the kitchen and hold cups of hot tea, raising them out of danger when the children run through. They have recovered their noise by now and they glance at me without much curiosity, entranced by their own games. I’m just a visitor, no one of note, an older woman who belongs to their mother in some vague way.