Now what?
Now you hop out and clean him up.
But Rose—
Don’t look at me because I’m the woman.
I do Harry’s nappies — fair go.
What a big boy. Now you can do your brother’s.
Orright, orright. Come on, Fish. Stop blubberin. Hop out.
Late afternoon sun slants onto their backs in the roadside silence where only the tick of the cooling motor can be heard, the clink of a belt buckle. Quick kneels to take down Fish’s trousers. He sees the white rolls of fat, the ramshackle patchwork of his undies, and it’s not a body he recognizes.
Fish turns his head aside in shame as Quick slides the shorts off. Quick gags a moment before slinging them down into the ditch, glad his mother isn’t here to see the wanton waste. He pours water over his hanky and begins to wipe shit away.
Bend over, he murmurs, the way he’s murmured a thousand times to Harry.
The size of him, the stubbornness of shit in the black hair of him, the thought of how they’ve come to this threatens to break something in Quick’s throat.
Rose leans out of the window and goes to hurry them up, but closes her mouth. The sill of the car door is warm beneath her arm. Against the back fender Fish’s whole putty body is jerking; his buttocks shiver while Quick hugs his legs shaking with emotion as the wheat bends a moment to the breeze that has sprung out of the very earth itself.
Spaces
In the end they stopped looking for places because there were only spaces out here, and they found some mangy trees back off the road a way where they could make a fire, stretch some tarps from the car roof and fry sausages. The paddocks swallowed the pink pill of the sun. They went quickly grey and cool and then it was dark. The broad patch of uncleared mallee stood shadowy on one side, the luminous wall of wheat on the other. With its long quiet flames, the fire lit Rose and Harry and Fish and Quick while they ate. It warmed them when the sausages were finished, when the bread and butter were gone, the apple cores cast off. On blankets spread on the dry ground, the four of them lay wakeful and dreamy. Above them the black sky looked crisp with its stars and configurations. Dots as worlds, and milky smears as worlds of worlds.
That’s the Southern Cross there, said Rose. It looks better in the sky.
You feel like it’s hanging over you like the top of a cathedral, Quick said with Fish’s arms around him.
Water, said Fish. All the water.
Look, his face is shinin. The moon’s on your face, Fish.
There is no moon, said Rose.
Fish rolled onto his back beaming and the sight of him stirred them deeply. Harry began to snore. Rose wrapped him in an old army blanket and got out a little bottle of brandy. Before long, Fish slept too, shining in the shelter of the tarp with Quick and Rose watching over him, sharing the Chateau Tanunda in little squinteyed swigs.
Remember the night in the boat with this stuff?
Quick nodded.
What do you make of this house business? All the oldies staying on.
I think they’re right, he murmured. I reckon they belong to the place. Gawd, everyone knows that house. They know the shop, our families. It’s like they’ve built something else from just being there. Like — he laughed at himself — like a house within a house.
Yes.
I just couldn’t bear to think of em all leavin and those mongrel developers gettin their hands on it.
Tell you a secret, said Rose.
Orright.
You won’t believe this.
Try me.
I can’t bear to think of any of us leaving. We belong to it, Quick, and I want to stay.
What? What are you talkinabout? What about our place? After all this trouble. Our own place!
I don’t know about our place, Quick. I like the crowds and the noise. And, well, I guess I like the idea, it’s like getting another childhood, another go at things. Think of it: I’m in this old house with the boy next door and his baby, and I’m not miserable and starving or frightened. I’m right in the middle. It’s like a village, I don’t know. I have these feelings. I can never explain these feelings.
But you hate family stuff.
Rose laughed. But it’s two families. It’s a bloody tribe, a new tribe.
Don’t you want to be independent?
Quick, I don’t even know what it means anymore. If it means being alone, I don’t want it. If I’m gunna be independent do you think I need a husband? And a kid? And a mother and father, and inlaws and friends and neighbours? When I want to be independent I retire. I go skinny and puke. You’ve seen me like that. I just begin to disappear. But I want to live, I want to be with people, Quick. I want to battle it out. I don’t want our new house. I want the life I have. Don’t be disappointed.
Quick took a suck on the brandy. Disappointed? Love, I’m putrid with … with happiness. I’ve been wantin to tell you for months.
He rolled a big dry mallee root onto the fire and a carnival of sparks went up reeling. Kangaroos thumped through the wheat invisible. The earth smelt golden.
Why did they call you Quick? I never knew.
Come on, I told you plenty of times.
In the night Quick woke with the moon white on his face, and Fish was awake beside him, kissing him on the cheek.
What’s the matter, Fish? You cold?
The moon was all over his face, or it seemed to be until Quick saw that moony light was coming off Fish himself.
There was a long, steady rustling in the wheat, rhythmic as the sound of sleep. Quick thought of a herd of roos grazing, but it came closer and was too musical to ignore. He propped himself on an elbow and saw a line of figures moving between the trees. Fish sat up beside him and let out a gasp of delight. Quick shook Rose awake and saw the black widening of her eyes. They were children, naked children. Placid faced, mildly curious, silent but for their footfalls, rising from the ground like a mineral spring, following the faint defile of the land to a gravity beyond them, faces and arms, eyes and legs travelling in eddies, some familiar somehow in the multitude that grew to a vast winding expanse, passing them with a lapping sound of feet. Rose sniffed, awake, but none of them spoke anymore, not even Wax Harry who watched curious as the tide of naked children swirled around them, dizzying, heady, making a vortex, an indrawing whirl deeper than exhaustion, until the stars were low enough to touch their eyes heavy, and the great adventure of sleep took them back. The children parted the wheat like the wind itself and took all night to pass.
Soon
Can you see, Fish, see me close as a whisper in the tidespace your longing has made? Pouring through a tiny crack we are, running to the sea which will not fill with us for we came from it and return to it, and this moment they have seen us too, your gift to them, the man, the woman, the baby, a gift bought with pain and shortening. Soon you’ll be a man, Fish, though only for a moment, long enough to see, smell, touch, hear, taste the muted glory of wholeness and finish what was begun only a moment ago down there where the fire crackles by the bank and those skinny girls are singing, where the light is outswinging on the water and your brother laughing. The earth slips away, Fish, and soon, soon you’ll be yourself, and we’ll be us; you and me. Soon!
Stayin
Quick and Rose drove home wild as kids, roaring down the scarp into the city with a happy madness up their noses like lemonade bubbles. Harry and Fish roistered in the back with the fractured light upon their faces.