Out on the track they caught up to me, Denny came one side of me and Rohan the other, and we walked close as a threesome.
‘The man had a gun,’ Rohan asked. ‘Right?’
I stopped and turned on him. ‘What?’
His eyes darted over me, over my chest. ‘You’re hurt.’ He put an open hand on the side of my arm.
‘No!’ I said, jerking back. ‘Don’t touch me! What do you mean – what the fuck do you mean?’
‘I only want to know what happened.’
‘You’re saying it’s only right if he had a gun.’
‘I only want to know. I don’t know what happened.’
I laughed. It was knife-edged. Rohan glanced past me to Denny and a rush of fury overtook me.
‘Don’t look at her!’ I screamed. ‘Don’t ever look at her again.’
‘Give me the gun, Shannon.’
‘Don’t look at her, don’t touch her, and don’t stand there and ask me what happened. How can you ask one fucking question? You put a shotgun in my hands, you tell me to keep watch, you tell me when to eat, you tell me what to think, you threaten to send her away, you make it wrong to love her and you make me watch you fuck her, and then you stand there and ask me what happened?’
‘Give me the gun.’
I snatched it away from him. ‘Don’t think you stayed clean tonight. You were behind every action, the reason for everything.’
Denny touched my back. ‘Here, pass it to me.’
I shrugged her off. ‘And you’d do best to stay very bloody quiet.’
We went back the same way we’d come, stopping by the dead man’s body. There was no gun – not that they could find in the dark, anyway – but I knew there wasn’t one to find. Denny pointed out where I’d fallen and how she thought it had happened; she told Rohan about the wound near my collarbone. They talked again about why we ran into the bush after them and Denny continued to lie. She became conveniently unclear on things. Rohan said they’d talk later. Denny was wrong if she thought Rohan would skim over this; he’d not give up until every thought, every action and every reason were explained and clear in his mind. If he had a sniff, lying to Rohan was impossible.
They talked about what to do with the bodies. I shivered and listened and the dead man lay on his back on the rocks.
Rohan was wired and pointed the rifle at everything. He hissed at us to be quiet as we climbed through the bush. I didn’t play the game Denny did, stopping for him, pretending to be wary. I pushed on, making as much noise as I needed. The rain became misty and I shook uncontrollably. My pain became a wonderful distraction. I’d never been so thoroughly beaten; there was something luxurious about it, a right to lethargy. I could sleep as I never had before and sink as deep as I dared into sobriety.
Halfway across the sheep paddock Rohan went through a plan to check the cabin for intruders. I was involved in some way – I nodded when he said my name, but had no intention of doing anything but sitting and getting warm.
It worked out well, because he and Denny ran ahead and into the cabin, going through the rooms, and this left me to limp up the stairs, walk though the kitchen, and come to a total standstill, depleted, dripping, in front of the fire. Quite impressive, I thought, to make it back, alive, numb, a murderer.
I stared into the glowing coals, thinking how I should move the metal screen and put some wood on, and knowing I wouldn’t. My forehead came forward to rest against the mantle. It changed the point of my shivering, so it all seemed to start in my head and travel down. I still held the gun. Way off in another place Rohan and Denny shut doors and checked windows, and talked in low tones about me. I shut my eyes and my shivering rattled my teeth.
They came into the lounge together, wearing dry clothes, a tour de force ready to deal with the physical and mental challenge I posed. They came armed with a folded stack of dry clothes for me and a first-aid kit and a bottle of Jim Beam. Rohan stood beside me with towel-dried hair and an ashen expression.
‘Shannon,’ he said, and I was drawn from my suspended state by the intrigue of what he would say. He nodded down at my shoulder. ‘Let’s get a look at you then.’
I don’t know what I’d expected he’d say – words to make it right? A long-winded conciliatory statement to prop me up? Yet what he gave me I liked better anyway. Whether he meant to ground everything with his gruff voice and matter-of-fact way, I don’t know, but he did, and I smiled. It hurt.
They set out bandages, butterfly stitches, tubes and bottles, a pair of tweezers, two different-sized scissors, and the bottle of bourbon on the card table. I stepped back while Rohan took away the fire screen and put some wood on the fire. Three shots of liquor were poured in thick-bottomed glasses, and they were put in a line along the mantelpiece. Denny dragged Rohan’s chair around on an angle, closer to the fire, and told me to sit on the arm. She squatted and took off my boots and carefully peeled off my soaked woollen socks; they dripped bloodied water. She made a pile of my wet things on the hearth. Rohan prised my smashed fingers from around the gun; he seemed to understand I could not relax my grip. The gun leaked silty water when he turned it barrel down and looped the leather strap over a square nail in the stonework beside the fire.
‘Your playing hand,’ Rohan said, kneeling before me and looking up.
Odd I hadn’t thought of that, and equally odd the way Rohan held my hand in both of his and turned it gently towards the light to check the damage.
‘You’ve taken some bark off, all right.’
Denny bent to look and Rohan shot her a glance, warning her to suppress her reactions.
‘Can you move all your fingers?’ he asked.
Their bowed heads blocked my view; I stared into the growing flames of the fire and concentrated on making a fist and opening it again. Pain ran in hot flashes up my forearm and the muscles in my palm cramped, but it was the places that I couldn’t feel that worried me, the places where the pain should be. I don’t know if my hand did what I asked it to. It must have.
‘That’s good,’ Rohan said.
Denny’s head ducked and moved. ‘If he’s not done any nerve damage through here,’ she murmured. ‘We’ll have to make sure the hand heals flat.’
Rohan nodded. ‘It’s these two, isn’t it?’ he asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s right down.’
‘A-ha.’
‘There’s really nothing to do but clean it and wrap it,’ Rohan said. ‘Nothing to stitch. Maybe above the knuckle there? Do you know anything about this?’
‘Not a thing.’
‘You seem to know.’
‘No.’
‘Can I have a drink?’ I asked.
The alcohol was a godsend, my appreciation of it irrevocably changed. I drank it like the elixir it was, warm shots straight down the back of my throat.
Denny unbuttoned my shirt and eased it off. There was nothing terribly remarkable about the state of it; it was soaked and torn in a couple of spots, but the dark, red blood left on Denny’s hands after she had put it down was disconcerting. She wiped her hands on a towel hanging of the back of the chair.
My left hand ached if I let it drop, so I held it across my stomach. I’d had a quick look at my fingers, a flickering glance that really saw nothing but a bloody blur. The bourbon was warming me, easing my trembling. My pants clung cold to my skin, but now I’d sat I didn’t want to stand again. My left eye was also slowly closing. I had a better sense of how my face was hurt than any other part of me, and some of this came from the memory of the fall. I could recall the texture of the rock I’d slammed into and the moss and the wet smell of it, and how it bruised my bones and ripped my skin. It had messed up my face from forehead to jaw, but with good grace; no teeth were missing, my jaw was intact, it had left me conscious – just – and there was no permanent damage, apart from perhaps some future scars. You can’t plough face first into a rock and ask for much more than that. I could tell though, by the way Denny and Rohan’s gazes drifted left when they looked at me, that my face wasn’t pretty. The fall might have been God matching up the outside of me to the newly roughed-up interior.
Denny and Rohan closed in on my chest and shoulder, their faces pinched with curiosity, as though what they saw was more intriguing than anything else. I couldn’t look down because their heads were so close; I lifted my chin to give them room to look.
‘Yep,’ Rohan said. I could feel his breath on my skin. ‘Cleaning it will be hard. It’s okay, though. Yeah?’
‘Mmm.’
‘How’d you do this?’ he asked me.
‘I think I landed on a stick, and sort of drove it in with my weight. I fell onto a branch and … then I kept going, and it must have broken off. I don’t know. But there’s nothing stuck in there, right?’
One of them unscrewed a bottle.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
They ignored me and spoke in code to one another.
‘Thinner,’ Rohan said. ‘I’d do it – but …’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I won’t have the same … you know.’
Denny sighed.
‘Don’t think about it.’
‘Enough?’ Denny asked after a moment of silence.
Rohan moved his head as though to look at something. ‘Right underneath.’
The smell of antiseptic drifted up to me. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘Use those,’ Rohan murmured, ‘but you need to …’
They both nodded.
‘What are you going to do?’ I asked. I brought up my good hand to feel for the wound. Rohan pushed it back down. Someone put their icy fingers on my chest.
‘Hold on a tick,’ Denny said to me.
First there was a blade-like rip, then she did something; it couldn’t have been what it felt like she did – jamming two fingers inside a raw hole in me, and twisting – because she wouldn’t do that, would she? I roared in agony and astonishment. Whatever she did lit me up in white-hot pain that radiated out from my shoulder, and whitewashed my vision and winded me. The blood drained from my head as the realisation as to how much something could hurt hit me. She withdrew her fingers and I screamed.
‘There was a splinter of wood still in there,’ Denny said, breathless and with relief, ‘and I had to feel inside to be sure there wasn’t any more.’
‘Head between your knees,’ Rohan said, and bent me over.
I got an idea of how bad the injury was when I covered it with my good hand to keep them from touching it again. Rohan snatched my hand away because it wasn’t clean, but not before I’d felt the length and breadth of it. I couldn’t understand. The place above my collarbone and below my shoulder, in the smooth dip in-between, was not how it should be. It didn’t feel like the whole section should be gaping, slippery and gored. The real pain was right inside me, where Denny’s fingers had been, but I felt what I had and began to put a picture together in my mind that stirred up panic.
‘It’s all right,’ Rohan said, sensing the change in me.
‘No, no, it’s not – and it’s deep as well? I thought Denny said it was a puncture wound –
that’s
not a puncture wound.’ I tried to look down at it, but flinched and leant back with a rush of nausea. ‘It’s a bloody great hole in me! That’ll kill me.’
‘No it won’t.’
‘You’ll have to pack it or something. What’ll we do? You can’t stitch me. How are you going to clean it?’
‘It’s all right. We’ll have a look at the rest of you. Does it hurt anywhere else?’
‘Just get away and leave me alone.’
‘Let’s clean the outside and bandage it,’ Denny said. ‘Get him dry and let him rest.’
‘Dry and drunk,’ I said. ‘So you two can hold me down and try to sew me up.’
Neither of them disputed this. Rohan polished off half a glass of bourbon while I watched him.
They swabbed gently around the wound and all over my chest. There were tender spots everywhere they pressed. I felt plugged into mainline pain, through the hole in me. Mercifully my brain was growing fuzzy; I was left a dazed bystander.
They had to wrap the bandage under my arms, crossing over the wound, to keep the sterile swab firm. I told them I could take my own pants off, then swayed and almost lost consciousness when I tried.
‘He’s lost a lot of blood,’ Rohan said.
Denny knelt on the slate hearth and peeled down my pants; I held her shoulders for support. ‘Not the best time for it, Den,’ I said smiling, delirious.
Rohan drank more bourbon. Denny held out the dry moleskins for me to step into.
I pulled my own shirt on, leaving the buttons undone, and walked to the armchair by myself. I sank into it. The second I leant back against the cushions sleep beckoned, it tugged like a rip in the surf.
From behind my closed eyes, I heard Rohan say, ‘Are you meant to let people who’ve lost a lot of blood fall asleep?’
‘He’ll be fine, Rohan. He’s going to be all right. He can’t have lost that much. He walked back.’
‘I still don’t know how this happened,’ Rohan said. ‘Why didn’t he get me?’
‘Here.’
I heard the tink of glass and more bourbon being poured.
They began to lower their voices so as not to disturb me. ‘Come and let him rest,’ Denny said. ‘He should sleep by the fire. We’ll go get his blankets and pillow.’
‘Why didn’t he call for me? You said you heard something and ran down to him on the veranda – well why didn’t either of you wake me?’
‘I don’t know. It was quick. I came down and called to Shannon and … we saw them and ran after them. It was spur of the moment – how can you say why you do things? Come on, let him get some rest.’
‘But there could have been other people. How do you know there was only two? Why take off into the bush after them? They were running away.’
I opened my eyes.
‘And the woman,’ Rohan continued, ‘now I don’t blame anyone, and know things are different when you’re out there, but I’ve got to ask, why didn’t you just let her go? There’s got to be some reason behind actually running her down. I saw it, I was behind you …’ He glanced over at me and saw I was listening.
‘It’s like that out there now,’ Denny said. ‘That’s how it is. I’ve seen it. If it’s not them, it’s you. And anyway, you said yourself you’d shoot me if I put you under risk. You tell us to be ready for this, to take it seriously. Well, we did.’
Rohan was studying Denny. Her agitation had an edge of impatience that didn’t fit.