Nez waited in the doorway as I walked over to the toilet. What looked like the remains of a dead rat sat in the bowl. I would have to get rid of it before Nez saw it and started screaming. I pressed the button. Luckily the water was connected. After a few flushes the rat was gone and the bowl was clean enough.
I collected the toilet roll from the boot, then I wiped down the toilet seat with a few sheets of the roll before handing it to Nez.
She looked up at a cobweb in the corner of the corrugated-iron roof above the toilet seat and begged me to stay with her while she went.
‘No, Nez. Jesus. I’m not going to wait here while you go to the toilet.’
Maybe it was because she was frightened, or just tired and hungry—I’m not sure—but she started to bawl and wouldn’t stop until I promised I would stay with her while she sat on the toilet and that I would look out for any spiders that might come down from the roof.
After she’d finished I got her to scrub her hands as best she could in the murky water that came out of a tap on the wall across from the toilet.
We then left the shed and started to explore the paddocks beyond the silo.
We found a lot of junk lying around, bits and pieces of machinery mostly, and beer cans with what looked like bullet holes through them. Next to the hollow of a shallow dam in a paddock below the silo, we saw the flyblown carcass of a dead sheep. It reminded me of a story I’d seen on TV about the drought, and the pictures of dead sheep and cattle being pushed into a ditch by machines and then buried.
Shotgun shells lay on the ground near the sheep, so I guessed it had most likely been blasted to death rather than died of starvation. Nez eventually got bored of trailing behind me. She complained that her feet were sore, that she was getting blisters, that she was hot, and she was thirsty. She sat down on the ground and wouldn’t move.
I left her where she was and headed back to the car for a bottle of water. I closed the boot, opened the bottle and took a long drink as I looked across the yard to the railway siding. I could see a dirt road led away from the siding. It narrowed before disappearing into bushes.
I took another drink, put the top back on the bottle and walked across the yard to the track. I followed it into the bushes, where it ended suddenly. I was about to turn back when I heard a sound. It was running water. I forced my way through the bushes to a clearing on the other side. I could see a river below me.
‘Nez. Nez! Come over here. Quick.’
The river water was the colour of weak tea and shimmered in the light. I stripped down to my underpants, ran across a muddy bank and plunged in. Nez wouldn’t come all the way in. She took off her jeans and T-shirt, folded them neatly into a ball and sat them on a rock along with her camera. She walked slowly down to the water’s edge and splashed around in the shallows in her undies and singlet while I swam.
Between swims I skipped stones across the surface of the water while Nez watched me from a rock she was perched on. Her job was to count the skips of the stones I threw in my attempt to break what I’d announced to her as the ‘World Freshwater Tor Skipping Championship’.
‘What’s a tor, Jesse?’ she asked, scratching the tip of her nose.
‘It’s a killer marble. An assassin. It’s the prize you’ve got to capture if you’re to have any chance of winning the game. Otherwise it will take you out. It’s like the king in chess.’
She looked at the stone gripped between my fingers. ‘A marble is round,’ she said. ‘The ones you’re throwing are flat. They’re not tors.’
‘They are. At least this one will be. When I break the record, it will be this stone that clinches it for me.’
‘But it won’t be yours, Jesse. The stone will be at the bottom of the river somewhere.’
‘Well, Nez, when you want something bad enough, there’s a price to pay. Always.’
I threw my arm back, pitched the stone and watched as it skimmed across the water.
‘Seven . . . eight . . . nine . . . ten . . . that’s a new record, Jesse,’ Nez squealed, clapping her hands together.
She picked up the camera and pointed it at me. ‘Let me take a picture of the world champion.’
Although I wouldn’t pose for her she took the picture anyway.
My arm was sore from all the throwing. I sat down next to Nez and poked at the bed of mud beneath my feet with the sharp end of a twig as our bodies dried in the sun. She’d taken her shoes off. I could see that she had mud caked between her toes.
I tapped her on the calf with my big toe. ‘You’d better clean those feet before Gwen gets back. She won’t want you putting that mud all over the back seat of the car.’
She wiggled her toes. One or two clumps of mud fell to the ground. She took the twig from me and started drawing something in the mud. It was a house.
‘When will she, when will . . . Mum be back?’
I shrugged my shoulders. ‘I don’t know. Soon I hope. I’m starving. She’d better have something for us to eat.’
I dragged my foot across the rock and again tapped her on the side of the leg. ‘And don’t call her Mum, Nez. You know she don’t like it.’
‘But she is my mum. And she’s your mum too, stupid.’
She finished drawing the house. She was now onto a girl, maybe a self-portrait?
‘Yeah, I know she is. But you’re wasting your time calling her that. She’ll just ignore you. You know that. You might as well whistle her like a dog that doesn’t want to come home.’
‘But I like it, calling her Mum.’
‘Well, she don’t. Makes her feel old, she says. Makes her angry too. So don’t do it. She’ll be in a shitty mood already, and I don’t want her starting on us.’
Nez ignored me as she busied herself with another drawing and whispered, ‘Mum, Mum, Mum’ under her breath. She drew another person, standing next to the house. I had no idea who it was.
When she had finished drawing Nez tossed the twig away and climbed up onto the rock. ‘There’s just one shot left in the camera. Will you take a picture of me?’
All the snooping around and swimming had made us hungry. We got dressed and walked back to the car, where we ate about six packets of biscuits each. My favourites were the Scotch Fingers, while Nez liked the Monte Carlos, so we did some swapping.
I munched on my last biscuit and looked across to the wheat silo. It had a metal staircase wrapped around the outside. I looked up at the sky and back down to the base of the silo. I decided to climb it. I walked across the yard towards the silo with Nez calling after me, ‘What are you doing, Jesse?’ as she stood up and followed.
I put my foot on the bottom step of the staircase. It shook from side to side and knocked against the silo, sending an echo across the yard. Some cockatoos perched high in the gum tree we had pissed against earlier in the day squawked and flew into the sky.
I began to climb the stairs.
‘Are you sure it’s safe?’ Nez called out to me as she gripped the metal rail of the staircase while keeping both feet planted firmly on the bottom step.
‘Probably not,’ I called out as I kept on climbing, without looking back to see where she was.
As I moved quickly around the outside of the silo I could hear Nez calling, ‘Jesse, hang on, will you? Hang on.’
I knew that if I didn’t wait for her I would eventually have to go back anyway. I sat on a step and looked down at the ground, about fifty feet below me. When Nez finally reached me she was wheezing badly and her cheeks were the colour of beetroot. She had the camera around her neck.
I got her to sit down next to me and do the breathing exercises taught to her by a welfare nurse when we were in care together one time. As I counted each breath for her Nez looked across at the ugly scar on the side of my arm, just below my elbow.
‘Tell me how you got that, Jesse.’
‘What, now? We’re supposed to be climbing. Anyway, you know how I got it. I’ve told you a thousand times already.’
‘I know you have, lots of times. But tell me again, please. I’ll count my breaths if you tell me the story about the scar. Please?’
The story was about how I’d fought off a vicious dog that had attacked me in the street one day, when I was about six or seven. As I’d done each time I’d gone over the story, I acted the scene where I’d poked the mongrel between the eyes, forcing it to release my mangled arm from its jaws of rotting yellow teeth. After the dog had retreated up the street, back to the junkyard it came from, I’d looked down at my arm, at the bloodied hunk of flesh that had been almost ripped away.
Nez leaned across to me and traced the jagged scar with a fingertip. She knew exactly what question to ask next.
‘Did it hurt, Jesse? When the dog bit you?’
‘Yeah. It hurt like hell. But not nearly as much as when they stitched me up at the hospital. They couldn’t find no anaesthetic and no small needles, so they stitched my arm back together with something about the size of a knitting needle. It was all rusty and probably full of poison. The same needle had been used to stitch manure bags together. That hurt a lot more than the dog bite.’
‘Is that a true story, Jesse?’
‘What do you think?’
She lightly touched the scar again. ‘I guess so. I guess so.’
I stood up. ‘Come on. I’m going up to the top. You coming or not?’
As we climbed higher and the staircase wobbled and shook some more, Nez grabbed hold of my t-shirt.
When we finally reached the top I stood on a wooden platform surrounded by a wire frame. It was like being in a giant birdcage. I looked through a rotting gap in the floor to the ground, which was now maybe eighty or a hundred feet below where we were standing.
Nez looked up. ‘It’s beautiful up here. So close to the sky.’
I could see the ribbon of highway cutting through the scrub where we’d come from last night, and in the opposite direction, the town laid out as flat and empty as the land around it.
Nez pointed to the town. ‘Can you see her, Jesse? Can you see Gwen?’
I looked down on the map of streets, and searched for Gwen’s red dress. While there were one or two people moving about like ants, there was no sign of her.
‘No. I can’t see her.’
Nez slipped the camera over her head and clutched it in her hands. ‘I’ve got us in here. Gwen and me and you.’
She looked through the wire cage and down at the ground for the first time. The colour faded from her face. She threw herself around me and held on tightly. I was not sure if it was the staircase shaking or just her body. Eventually she took a step back, but kept one hand wrapped tightly around my wrist.
‘Jesse? Are we still blood brother and sister? Like you said we were, that time when we cut ourselves?’
‘Of course we are. You can’t undo that, Nez. It’s like Holy Communion, sort of religious. Our blood is mixed together. It moves around our bodies. Forever.’
‘Tell me about that day again.’
I looked at her white-knuckled grip around my wrist. ‘I’ll tell you, but only if you promise that we’ll climb back down when I’ve finished. Promise?’
‘I promise.’
Nez had just turned five when Gwen told her we didn’t have the same father. She’d just got the sack from a job for taking days off, and would have upset Nez deliberately. When life was going poorly for Gwen she always hurt one of us. It was all she could think to do.
After telling Nez that we were not a ‘legal’ brother and sister, and that we could be separated forever if anything ever happened to her—‘God forbid, Nezzie’—Gwen had gone out somewhere and left Nez alone in the flat. When I got home from the school I had been at for only two weeks I found her sitting on the landing out the front of the flat.
When I asked Nez what was wrong she asked me a question of her own; was it true that we did not have the same father? I couldn’t think of a quick and convincing lie to tell her, so I said yeah it was true, ‘but we have the good half, Nez’.
‘But that’s not right, Jesse. I want us to be the same, not half. I want us to be legal. That’s what Mum said,
legal
.’
She then made fists out of her chubby soft hands and started banging them into her thighs. I knew I had to do something to fix the damage Gwen had done.
I took Nez into the flat and told her to sit at the kitchen table as I searched for a sharp knife in one of the drawers. I then put one hand over the sink and sliced across the top of my thumb with the knife, cutting myself deeper than I needed to.
A red line appeared across the top of my thumb, and then a stream of blood. It tracked along the outside of my thumb, down my arm, and onto the kitchen floor, where the splotches of blood made a pattern on the tiles.
I turned to Nez. ‘Now it’s your turn.’
She got up from the chair and came over to the sink. She couldn’t take her eyes off my bloodied thumb. ‘No, Jesse. I don’t want to do it.’
‘Nez, you just said that you want us to be whole. Do you want to be my full sister, or not? Look away, over at the telly.’
‘It’s not on. The telly’s not on, Jesse.’
‘Well, just pretend it is. Look away. Now.’
I wrapped one hand around her wrist, gripped it tightly and nicked the tip of her thumb with the knife before she had a chance to pull away. Although she could cry easily when she felt a need to, Nez did not shed a tear. She let out a yelp, like a puppy whose tail had just been trod on, but that was all.
I pressed my thumb against hers, and watched as our blood ran together.
‘See. We’re the same now, Nez. The same.’
‘And will we always be together?’ she quizzed me as she watched with fascination.
‘Yes, we will always be together. Always.’
While Nez had been listening to me tell the story, I had been watching a large bird in the sky, maybe a falcon, or even an eagle. Its wingspan must have been ten feet across, maybe more. The bird glided above us then lifted into the air without making a sound or moving its wings at all.
‘Is that the end, Jesse?’
When I looked around my sister was calm.
‘Yeah, Nez. That’s the end. We have to go now.’
She stood up and did a cautious three-sixty-degree turn as she looked out across the land. ‘Do you think she’ll come back for us?’