The koalas had grown quiet. Only a distant and lonely hoot of an owl added to the gentle rustle of the bush above the bluff. Standing there, by the chair, with the huge moon mocking us, it became clear that Rohan intended to act, that he stood taking in air through his mouth and planned to go back inside.
But watching the side of Rohan’s face, I had the terrifying idea that he was not thinking rationally, or even radically, but that he had calmly decided to turn it into a literal life lesson; that the consequence of a foolish action should not be let slip away.
He lifted the rifle to his shoulder and stepped past me, towards the open door.
Returning to the stuffy darkness of the cabin was surreal enough to dull the fear.
This time we went through the lounge room, past the fire and the two armchairs. The rugs were thick underfoot. Rohan paused before turning left into the kitchen. I was thinking of the sneeze; it was dawning on me that the noise had struck me as small and unthreatening. I grappled with something about it, something that would be plain under any other circumstances, but which eluded me now. I looked over Rohan’s shoulder and saw the shotgun laid on the kitchen table. There was a sheet of notepad paper under the stock. Rohan swung the rifle towards the kitchen and stepped away. I watched the stiff back of my brother a moment, and then looked back to the note. The words left my mouth as they crystallised in my mind: ‘It’s a woman. She’s gone.’
2
SUNRISE CAME LATE
to the cabin. The warbling and twittering of dawn began while the cabin stayed tucked under the night shadow of the bluff. Most mornings it complemented my sleeping hours, having crawled into bed at three a.m. or thereabouts, but this morning I sat opposite Rohan at the kitchen table. We both wore latex gloves and had white dust masks over our faces. We waited for some decent light to read the note again. The shotgun had been wiped with disinfectant and was over Rohan’s shoulder. I held the rifle across my lap.
Considering the events of the evening we had spoken very little. I didn’t know if this was because I was in disgrace for leaving the shotgun unattended or because Rohan was feeling as mystified as I was.
The first rays of sunlight sheared through the venetians. Rohan put his hands either side of the yellowed paper and read the note again. The writing, from what I’d seen, was standard female, with no particular style or excessive slant. The message was blunt: her name was Denny Cassidy, she was a woman, she’d been up here for three months and living at the farmhouse up the back of the bluff, she wanted to live with us. She was alone.
Rohan pulled the dust mask from his face and snapped each glove off. He tossed them in a pile with an annoyed flick of his wrist. I slid my mask down.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘We don’t need them, do we.’
‘She might be infected.’
‘That’s not the point. See what she’s done?’ He nodded towards the kitchen. ‘She’s touched everything – she’s done it deliberately. Taken the meat, touched the fridge, the doorknobs. It’s too late. If she is infected, the damage is already done. And she’s been at it for weeks – we’d be already showing symptoms.’
I took the mask off over my head. ‘But that’s good, right?’
‘She’s watched us. She knows our routines. While you were outside strumming that bloody guitar she was sneaking around the cabin.’
‘Why wouldn’t she just wave the white flag?’
‘You’d let her in? Well,
you
probably would. She knows anyone with half a brain wouldn’t.’
‘But the gun? Why frighten us like that?’
‘To tell us that she can; that she had the opportunity to hurt us and she didn’t. Of course she didn’t – we’re her bread and butter, her safety. This place is the Hilton in the bush, and she knows it. The idea was to prove her goodwill.’
‘She’s taken a knife though.’
‘The knives were to show she knows our system. She’s weaved herself in right under our noses. And it was a way for one of us to touch every knife she’d touched – oiled and susceptible for cross contamination. She’d be thinking to totally eliminate the idea that she’s contagious – or if she is, it’s too late. That was probably going to be this night’s calling card – but you left the shotgun, like an idiot, and the message could be rammed home. I think … I think she took the small knife because it’s foldaway and decent as a pocket knife – while she’s at it, take what she can. Bloody gall, I’ll give her that.’
Rohan passed over the note and I read it.
‘God,’ I murmured. ‘I can’t believe how … how brave she is, to do this. Come in here? Two men, with both of us armed.’
‘Desperate, more like it. And if she is alone wouldn’t you want to be with someone – anyone?’
‘I can’t imagine doing it alone. Although she says she’s only been up here three months, so perhaps she knows more than we do. She might know how bad it’s become, if it’s okay to go back. She’d have to know more than us. If we —’
‘Stop it. That’s what she wants, to get us curious, to have us drop our guard just long enough to let her in. You think about it – look at how cautious she’s been. I’d be more relaxed if she came wandering in with the expectation to be helped. All she’s done is highlight the desperation, the need to fox your way into any safe situation. It’ll be like I said out there. I’ve always said the virus was just the tipping point – with the climate and the economy, it was all ready to collapse.’
‘But we’re gunna let her stay?’
‘For what? She’d only use up our supplies. We don’t know how old she is, how fit. There’s no reason to trust her. Just because she’s done it like this doesn’t mean she’s still not a decoy for a larger group.’
‘We can’t just say no. And, anyway, isn’t she a bigger risk on the outside, with who she could tell? She probably knows about the bunker; she definitely knows we’ve got electricity. All we’d be doing is sending her off with information that could make us a target; what’s to stop her telling others about what we’ve got here? Or imagine if we send her away, never to see another person for years. We don’t know how bad it is.’
‘You can stop thinking we’re the only survivors. It’s thickheaded and stupid.’ The lines around his eyes deepened with thought. ‘It feels too soon to start making contact. I doubt the death toll has even settled.’
‘She’s already made contact.’
‘Yes … she has.’
‘You tell me we protect the cabin and ourselves – act against an immediate threat of danger and no more than that. Self-defence and only self-defence, that’s what you said. Well I don’t see her aiming a gun at us, and she had the chance.’
He tipped his head in regrettable agreement.
‘The way I see it,’ I said, ‘we have to let her stay. We have to do it for our safety and our peace of mind. Peace of mind on both counts: worrying about if she told anyone about us and wondering what it means to turn her away – to deny a person help when we’re so set up. If it’s only the three of us up here, why wouldn’t we pull together? Another person isn’t going to kill us.’
‘You don’t think so?’
‘I mean a third person isn’t going to put us out.’
I took off my gloves and picked up the note.
Denny Cassidy
. She’d listened to me play. Rohan lowered his head, deep in thought.
‘She’ll come back during daylight,’ he muttered, ‘so we’re not jumping at shadows. She left the note to lessen the shock and give us time. Easing in … I don’t know …’
‘How hard must it be to put your faith in two strangers,’ I said, ‘under the circumstances?’
He looked at me. ‘You keep assuming she’s somehow vulnerable – she’s a woman, not a child. And I think she’s weighed it up. She’s watched us for a while. The farm is a good ten Ks down the main track, but probably quite close if you cut through. The road swings round, if I remember right. I reckon she’s come straight through the thick of – perhaps if you follow the creek? So you think about it – if she’s come in over the top and found the bluff, think of the bird’s-eye view she’s got of us. We’re invisible from every other position, but come at us from the top … She’s been sitting up there checking us out and chewing on our bloody chops.’
I suppressed a smile.
‘She’d know all about the bunker,’ he went on, ‘would have seen us come out with food. On a still day she’d be able to hear us talking. If she’s got binoculars she would have been able to bloody-well count the grey hairs on our heads.’
‘Yours, maybe.’
My attempt at light-heartedness had Rohan levelling a cutting gaze. But his eyes grew trance-like and when he spoke his voice was toneless.
‘To find the old fire track down to the backyard she would have had to follow me … There have been times when I thought the baits were moved. On the creek in particular, I’ve felt I’ve been watched. I can’t believe she’s done it for so long.’ He focused back on me. ‘She thinks she knows us.’
‘She probably does. I think it’s good she feels she can trust us. You should too – you’re the one who worries about losing touch with your humanity. By all rights, this is your chance to do the humane thing.’
Rohan wasn’t listening, but his head was angled as if he were trying to hear something. One of his hands hovered just above the tabletop.
‘If you wanted to know,’ he said slowly, ‘what someone thought about you – what would you do?’
I frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘And to spark a conversation about yourself and a situation you want to gauge a reaction on – how would you do that?’
There was the faintest squeak from down the hall. I locked eyes with Rohan. He shook his head. ‘You’d leave a note and hang around to listen in on the conversation.’
‘She’s here,’ I whispered.
‘Right by the door there, I’d reckon.’
Rohan’s hand lifted to hold the shotgun. I swivelled in my seat and saw a woman standing in the hall doorway. She stepped forward and Rohan stood, taking the shotgun from his shoulder.
Her scruffiness hid her complexion and the thick bands of sunlight made it hard to see her as one complete person. Her eyes were on the shotgun, but her lids were heavy, as though it were a great strain to look at it. She was tall, with athletic limbs and shoulders. There was something in the way she stood, closed in and intensely tired, and yet ready to run, that confirmed she was alone.
From across the table I could feel Rohan’s suspicion, but felt none of it myself.
No-one spoke. I thought she might leave; it quickened my pulse and brought me to my feet. I put the gun down on the table and she lifted her face to me. Her hair was dusty brown, short and blunt-cut. She wore torn and grubby jeans and a dark, tight-fitting jumper that was flecked with burrs. On her back was a Slazenger sports bag, worn as a backpack. She could have been anywhere from mid-twenties to mid-thirties, and I wondered how old the two of us looked to her; I’d not looked in a mirror for weeks, but judging from Rohan’s weathered appearance, the way his clothes hung from his body, she might have put our ages well beyond what they were. God knows I felt older than twenty-three.
Rohan spoke and the dimensions of the room changed, shrinking in.
‘Take your bag and put it on the table,’ he said. ‘Then sit.’
He used the gun to point at the chair she was to sit in and I narrowed my eyes, disbelieving. ‘I don’t think —’
‘Shut up.’
Denny didn’t move. Rohan laughed low and bitterly.
‘Still deciding,
Denny
? If you do go, make sure you leave the knife.’
‘Jesus, Rohan …’
‘I said shut up.’
Rohan walked around the table towards her and she backed away at an equal pace.
‘If you can’t even sit when I tell you, we’re not off to a very good start.’
‘Rohan! For Christ’s sake!’
‘Take the bag off and put it where I told you, and then sit down that end of the table. I suggest you do, because I’m not quite sure what to do with you if you don’t.’
Denny backed into a low wooden chest and sat automatically. She turned her head away as Rohan approached her. He stood over her with the gun in both hands.
‘No, not here, over there,’ he said.
Denny’s torso rose with each breath; she kept her gaze lowered. The light was dimmer where she was, but unfiltered, which made it easier to see her face. It was still hard to say if the rounded and smoothed-over features were hers, or if fear and hunger had swollen her face somehow.
Rohan stepped aside to give her room and looked critically over her as she stood and slid off her bag. She held it out by the straps, in one hand, for Rohan to take.
The chance of skin touching skin sprang up electric in the air. The past year was suddenly huge in the room, a squall of everything inconceivable – TV images of speechless reporters, whole populations in panic, the rain falling on empty city streets; but still they were unreal. What was without question was the sovereignty of touch. We did not touch. It had become automatic the minute the virus had landed on Australian soil. It wasn’t a spoken rule; arms could brush, shoulders could bump, and incidental skin contact was repellent but forgiven, but conscious touch – fingertips, a warm hand, a face too close – it just went without saying. Personal space had shrivelled to a hard nut so far inside each body even your own hand on your skin could seem unwanted. So the sight of Denny’s hand, the long curve of her thumb, the dirty curl of her fingers, held out and inviting the chance of Rohan’s touch, became the centre of the room, and everything converged in on it.
Slowly, inevitably, it became a stand-off between them. She had no reservations; it was in her stance, in her expressionless face – as if she’d already touched Rohan. And perhaps she had? While we’d slept, had this woman touched our skin?
‘I said on the table,’ Rohan growled, and cracked the moment clean in half.
Once she sat, the tension eased. The sun was bright in the room. Rohan might have felt guilty for his aggression, as I thought he should, because her arms on the table were disturbingly thin. Her head dropped forward, as if too heavy for her neck. She might have once been beautiful, but what she’d been through looked to have permanently dulled her. For a while we just stood and looked at her. I silently willed her to speak; I thought her voice would be low, maybe raw with tiredness now, but ultimately soft and dulcet. It seemed important to hear her voice before fully letting go of whatever it was I was holding up inside me. I sat at the table and pushed the rifle as far as possible from us.