The Sky So Heavy (14 page)

Thirty-one

The night begins to close in. We have limited fuel, but if we stop we will be noticed. Lucy navigates the grid of city streets and as it gets darker, we see fewer and fewer people and definitely no other cars driving around. If we want to draw attention to ourselves we are going the right way about it. We come across a shopping centre like a monolith and the headlights catch a giant blue arrow pointing down a tunnel to the car park. A sign from above.

‘Good idea,’ Noll says as if he has read my mind.

The boom gates have already been smashed through. Lucy follows the dark tunnel down into the concrete bunker and as we drive in, shadowy figures scatter like cockroaches in a kitchen. The darkness is broken by the glow of several small campfires. They send breathing light up concrete pylons, illuminating numbers and letters. We stop in LG 2. The figures have all fled. It looks like there might be a stairwell in the northern corner of the car park.

‘Seems we’ve found people like us,’ Lucy murmurs.

We wait. My finger is curled around the trigger of the gun. In the rear-view mirror I can just make out Max’s face. He looks like he could quite possibly be peeing himself, if he hasn’t already.

There is movement in the doorway to the stairs. A group of people emerges, they get closer and I think that’s the point where I stop breathing.

‘They’re zombies,’ Max whimpers.

‘Don’t be a tool. They’re not zombies.’ I’m not entirely sure, though.

The shadows move closer to the car. Then a torch is flicked on and shone through the windscreen. We squint in the glare. The person with the torch holds it beneath their own chin, an apparition from a campfire ghost story. It is an old woman, in her sixties or seventies. She leans down, face in my window.

‘Um, hi,’ I say.

‘Teenagers,’ she says over her shoulder. The group that stand behind her murmurs and some of them drift away.

‘Safe!’ a man bellows across the car park. More figures emerge from pockets of shadow and return to the fires. The woman steps back from the car door as if she expects me to get out. I do. I’m about a foot taller than her and she tilts her wrinkled face up to me.

‘You look very skinny. You should eat more.’

I laugh, I can’t help it. She smiles, but her eyes stay serious.

‘You want to set up over on the side: safer.’

‘Okay.’

‘I am Rosa. I have been here two months. Very long time to live in a car park. You be sensible and you will be alright.’

‘Okay.’

‘Who are your friends?’

I introduce the others.

‘And where are your mothers?’ Rosa asks.

Max starts to cry.

‘Oh my darling.’ Rosa goes to him and wraps his little body in her arms. She strokes his hair and he really loses it. ‘Go,’ she says to the rest of us. ‘Unpack your things. I will look after this one.’ I don’t know why, but I trust her. And it’s kind of nice to have someone else worry about Max, even if only for a few minutes.

We try to arrange blankets on the ground, so we can sleep. A man comes over to us. He shakes my hand and says his name is Alan. He is tall, clean-shaven and his face looks like it has seen a lot of sun. He holds a book in his left hand. On his feet are polished RM Williams boots. He points to two mattresses in a cluster of stuff near by.

‘Use them,’ he says. ‘Folks been gone days now. Not comin’ back.’

We drag the mattresses over to our spot. Alan helps us lug the coffee table from the back of the station wagon. I take to it with the axe and am grateful that we bothered to cram it into the car. Alan tells us we should keep one leg aside and carve a calendar into it. ‘It will help,’ he says. Although he doesn’t say what with.

‘You got a bucket?’ he asks.

‘Um, no.’

He goes back to where we got the mattresses from, pokes around and comes back with a green bucket.

‘When you go out again, get some snow, clean as you can find. Put the bucket by the fire – use the water for washing. There’s toilets in the shopping centre, but don’t forget to take a torch or a candle, no windows in there, dark as buggery.’

I can’t help but think of news stories about disease in refugee camps. Maybe fragranced hand-sanitiser is going to solve the world’s problems after all.

There is no daylight down here. Alan asks Lucy if the clock in our car is still working. He calls her ‘love’ and I wince. But he says it to her in such an old-fashioned way that she beams at him like he is her grandfather. He tells us to honk the horn once when it is seven am and twice when it is seven pm. It helps people cope, apparently.

Rosa returns Max to us and he looks better than he has for days. I make us instant noodles for dinner: one paper cupful each. Noll reads his bible while he eats.

‘Is your family religious?’ Lucy asks.

‘Christian. I’m not a fan of the word religious.’

‘But you believe in God?’

Noll answers yes as though he is perplexed by it.

‘So what’s He doing, do you think, God?’

Noll gives a small laugh. ‘I don’t presume to know the mind of God.’

‘Tricksy. You guys are all very tricksy with your words, good at getting around questions.’

Noll shrugs. ‘I don’t know what He’s doing. That’s the truth.’

‘But you still believe in Him.’

‘I don’t understand Him, but I believe in Him.’

‘Hmm. Good answer, my friend. Do you like God?’

‘I love Him.’

‘But do you like Him?’

Noll puts a forkful of noodles in his mouth and chews. ‘Not right now.’

‘Do you mind talking about this? Because my head is all . . . knotty right now. I’m trying to get a handle on everything and I can’t. I don’t really understand your level of faith, and I’d like to. Like, the thought that it is just us, just dumb humans doing dumb things like annihilating each other, the thought that there’s no one or nothing above us, no one who knows any better than us, that thought is horrifying.’

Noll nods. ‘It absolutely is.’

‘But how can you believe that a powerful God could let this happen?’

Noll hesitates, thinking. ‘The bible constantly talks about how the world isn’t the way God wants it to be and how believers will feel alien here, we will never feel at home because this isn’t our home. And that has always resonated with me. Always.’ He doesn’t look directly at us as he speaks. ‘God doesn’t want this and . . . and I know that it won’t be forever . . . and that is why I am clinging on to God. That’s all it is – clinging. There’s no beauty in it, no eloquence. I’m not offering thoughtful articulate wise prayers every day. I’m screaming at Him to make it stop.’

‘You don’t think that maybe He doesn’t make it stop because He doesn’t exist?’

Noll nods. ‘I just know He does exist. I know it like I know that clouds make rain, that their are nine planets in our solar system––’

‘Eight,’ interrupts Max. ‘Pluto’s not a planet.’

‘Well, that’s debatable too. But as far as God goes, there is no other way it can be, to me. And if I thought He didn’t exist, I wouldn’t bother trying to survive. I would have quietly ended it at home after the missiles when I knew my parents were dead and I knew what would likely come of all this. If you take Him out of the equation, well, I don’t see the point of anything. That’s just who I am. Some say believing is a comfort, a crutch . . . But . . . answering to no one but yourself? I can’t imagine what that would be like. It would be freeing but hollow. A little like what you are saying – horrifying.’

‘What about you, Fin?’ Lucy asks. ‘You believe in God?’

‘Gee, you don’t really do small talk, do you?’

She smiles and waits for an answer.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you pray? Sorry, that’s a really personal question.’

‘As opposed to if I believe in God.’

‘I don’t know if I believe in God. But I’ve been praying lately. I wonder if that pisses Him off,’ she says.

‘Well, He can’t be pissed off if He doesn’t exist,’ I reply.

‘If He doesn’t exist why do we pray to Him?’

‘I think God’s a woman,’ says Max.

‘Right on, my friend,’ Lucy says and Max grins like an idiot. ‘Although I don’t think a woman would ever let this happen to her children. You didn’t answer my question, Fin. God: yay or nay?’

‘My dad didn’t believe in God,’ I say. ‘Mum did, does, whatever. If He is out there He’s doing a pretty shit job.’

‘So you don’t know if you believe or not?’

‘No. That’s my catchphrase for life at the moment: I don’t know.’

We sit and eat for a bit while Max tells us the reasons for Pluto’s demotion.

‘What flavour is this?’ asks Lucy, when he is finished. ‘Hang on, let me guess. Chicken.’

‘Correct,’ I say.

‘Doesn’t human flesh taste like chicken?’ asks Max.

‘Dunno, Maximum. Haven’t eaten anyone lately.’

Max rolls his eyes and shovels another forkful into his mouth. ‘That’s sad, Fin, that’s like a total dad joke.’

I can’t laugh. I try and I can’t. Max looks at me with those big, bloody sorry eyes, like he’s pushed me over harder than he meant to.

Lucy sleeps beside me, one arm across my chest. It’s a scenario I used to fantasise about, although the whole nuclear winter thing kind of puts a dampener on it if I’m honest. I stare up into the black of the ceiling and imagine stars. It’s been months since I’ve heard music, but I play songs in my head. I have so many stored and so much other stuff that I don’t touch.

Thirty-two

I leave as soon as morning comes. It takes my eyes a moment to adjust from the gloomy half-light of the car park. Before I left, Alan told me to be discreet and not let anyone see me come out of the car park. I don’t think anyone does, the street is deserted. I try to move quickly but not quick enough to look suspicious. It’s a fine balance.

Without sunlight the streetscape is a tired palette of greys – even the rubbish over the footpath seems drained of colour. Delicate flakes of contaminated snow drift down from the sky. The snow will stop falling in an hour or so, it usually does. Maybe it’s my imagination, but there seems to be less snow falling than there was the day before.

It doesn’t take long for me to reach my mum’s apartment building. I walk through the shattered front doors and head up the stairs. When I reach her door I pound my fist against it and shout. There is a sound, the scrape of a security chain. My breath stops in my chest.

‘Who you looking for?’

The voice comes from behind me. A woman stands in the doorway of the apartment opposite my mother’s. She wears eye make-up and her hair is neatly brushed. I can imagine her power-walking with a designer pram.

‘Libby Heath, I mean, Streeton. Libby Streeton. She’s my mother.’

‘She hasn’t been there for ages. Some army people came one day and she left with them. Haven’t seen her since.’

‘You don’t know where she went?’

‘No. Sorry. You’re her son?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Thought you might be, you know, an illegal from the West. They got a group of them yesterday, family across the street were housing, like, seven of them.’ She shakes her head. ‘It’s so wrong. I mean, what right do they think they’ve got to come across and take food that is ours?’

‘Um, yeah, I guess. Look if you see my mum can you tell her I came by?’

‘Sure. But, like I said, I haven’t seen her in ages.’

‘Okay. See you.’

I go down the stairs and head back to the car park.

I draw the four of us on a life raft made of two-minute noodles, bobbing on waves as the noodles dissolve in the water. Everyone else sleeps while I sit and try to make a sail out of chip packets.

We have been here maybe three days when, one morning, I honk the horn and someone follows it by calling ‘Wednesday!’ across the car park. Everyone begins to head for the ramp. Rosa walks past us, she clicks her tongue. ‘Rations! Come!’

Alan is standing at the exit telling people to leave sporadically and not to run.

‘Don’t give us away,’ he says. He puts a hand on my shoulder as we pass and pulls me aside.

‘Son, they do spot ID and address checks at the ration points. Your best bet is to run. If they get you, someone else’ll be using your mattress. I’ve been here months now, no one’s ratted us out yet. I don’t think they’ve been given the chance, if you know what I mean.’

I look to Lucy. ‘Stay here with Max?’

She frowns.

‘Only two of us need to go,’ I say.

She raises one eyebrow, looking less than impressed. Then she turns around and heads back down the ramp.

‘We’ll be back soon,’ I tell Max.

‘How come you get to do all the cool stuff?’

‘Max, going out there isn’t “cool stuff”. We’ll be back soon.’

Noll and I leave the car park and head along the street in the direction Alan has told us. Turns out a lot of effort goes into not looking suspicious. I have to fight the instinct to constantly look over my shoulder and check if anyone was studying us for signs that we might be illegals. I put my hands in my pockets because that seems like the sort of thing a casual-feeling person might do. (Not that many people would have been feeling casual in the middle of all this, but I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t be sweating profusely even though it’s about one degree.) I’m doing a better job than Noll, though, who is walking way too quickly. I tell him and he just mutters something under his breath. We round a corner and up ahead, at a big intersection a few blocks away, there is a line of people in the street. We join the queue, neither of us really able to stand still.

There are two army trucks, troop carriers. Guys in camo stand on the backs of the trucks and pass boxes down to the people. Two others stand beside the line, pulling the occasional person out and demanding ID. As they get closer to us I have to keep reminding myself to breathe. They stop at a boy a few people in front of us. He’s maybe a year older than Max.

‘ID,’ barks one of the officers. He has that drawn, hungry look to him, eyes a little too wide like he’s looking for someone to take it out on. The kid feels around in his pocket, then turns and bolts. The officers tear off after him. I don’t know if they were planning to ask me and Noll next. I clench my fists in my pockets in an attempt to stop shaking. We edge toward the front of the line to within reaching distance of the boxes. Then it is our turn and the guy on the truck hands me a box. I look up at him and our eyes meet and I freeze. It is the young guy from the border, the one who gave me back the gun. Noll and I glance at each other. Noll has recognised him too. The army guy pauses for only a second, but I notice it. I take the box and lower my eyes. I am ready to bolt. But he says nothing. He gives Noll a carton of water. Noll looks him right in the eye and says ‘Thank you’. We leave quickly.

Neither of us says a word until we are back in the car park. I drop the box to the ground and let my legs give way beneath me, still shaking with adrenalin.

‘That was him, wasn’t it?’ says Noll.

‘Who?’ asks Lucy, opening the box to see what we’ve scored.

‘The guy from the border, the first one, that put us up against the fence.’

‘He was there? He saw you both?’

I nod. ‘He gave me that.’ I point to the box.

‘He didn’t do anything?’

‘No,’ says Noll. ‘He just gave us these.’

‘Did he see you come back here?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘Nobody followed us,’ says Noll.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Well, there’s nothing we can do if they did,’ I say.

‘We can leave.’

‘Nobody saw us. He didn’t rat on us. I trust him. He gave me back the gun that night. I think he’s okay.’

But I am uneasy for the rest of the day.

In the early hours of the morning Lucy and I lie beside each other in the dark, close, but not quite touching. The fire has withered to a mound of glowing embers. On the other side of me, Max snores softly in his sleep.

‘Have you thought about how we might never see our parents again?’ Lucy asks me, her voice so soft, barely more than a breath.

‘A bit.’

‘I used to be so afraid of my parents dying when I was younger.’

‘I don’t think they’re going to die, Lucy. I really don’t.’

‘You can’t know that, Fin.’

‘I know, I just—’

‘You can’t protect everyone. You can’t protect me.’

‘Luce.’

‘Like today, me staying back with Max while you and Noll go off and get supplies. What’s that about?’

‘I want you to be safe.’

‘What makes you think I can’t look after myself? What? Just because I’m a girl I need you to protect me?’

‘No, I . . . I don’t know.’

‘I saved
you
with a cricket bat, my friend.’

‘I know, I just . . . You saw those guys at the shelter . . .’

‘You think I’m going to get raped or something?’

‘I just want you to be safe.’

She sighs and I think she is pissed off. Instead she takes my hand.

Alan is camped against the wall adjacent to us. He has a swag, a small camp stove and two boxes crammed with books which he has stacked like shelves. He sits with his back against the wall and reads. I go over and ask him what he is reading.

‘Hemingway. Pull up a pew,’ he says, pointing to an upturned milk crate. I sit down and he makes me a cup of black tea. ‘Remember sugar? I used to have it white with three sugars. Not any more, hey?’

I take the warm enamel cup from him.

‘Hemingway was an arse,’ he says. ‘But he could write, gotta give him that. Have a look.’ He motions to the books. ‘You’re welcome to anything you want.’

I scan the titles and stop on the silver spine of
Heart of Darkness
. It’s funny the things that get to you. I try to swallow the lump in my throat. I pull the book free of its neighbours.

‘We were studying this at school,’ I manage.

‘Ahhh, Mr Joseph Conrad – what we are when nobody’s watching. Good stuff. Take it.’

‘Thank you.’

I drink my tea and think how I’ve drunk more tea in the last three months than I have in my entire life. I guess it’s what people do, isn’t it? Like after funerals. There’s something soothing about the normality of it.

Alan tells me that he’s from the country and was staying with his brother when the army first came into the city.

‘They went from street to street, syphoning fuel out of cars in exchange for food,’ he says. ‘Then a month or so back, when things started getting real hairy, they began exchanging food for information on people who were staying here from across the border.’

‘He told them about you?’

Alan shrugs. ‘Left before he had a chance. We were never that close. I was with him because my sister passed away just before all this started, before the missiles and what not. The young fella your brother?’ he asks.

‘Yeah. Don’t know where my mum and dad are.’

‘You keep him close then, won’t you?’

‘I will.’