Stolen (20 page)

I ran the water, but I made it pretty hot. You sat on the dusty living room floor and waited for me to bring you the bowl. You winced when you dipped your hands in. I smiled. Simple pleasures, small retributions. I picked out an old, scratchy sponge from the sink, one you used for washing dishes.

“This be OK?” I asked innocently.

“You want me to have no skin left?” You rolled your eyes. “Actually, don’t answer that one.”

I brought it over anyway. I crouched on the other side of the bowl. As you swished your hands around, the water turned redder.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” I said.

“Yep.”

“How do you keep them in there?”

“I’m stubborn.” You grinned. “Stubborn as a waddywood. And anyway, pain means it’s healing.”

“Not always.”

The blood kept coming, swirling and curling around your fingers.

“Damn rooster,” you muttered.

You hadn’t started on your arms yet. There were scratches there, too, some of them going up to your elbows. You sighed, took your hands out, and rested them on the side of the bowl. They were pink, puffy as marshmallows.

“You’re going to need to help,” you said. “Please?”

I looked at you. “Why should I?”

Your forehead wrinkled. “Because if I can’t use my hands, then we’re both fucked.” You breathed out quickly, frustrated. “… And I can’t wash them properly myself.” The corner of your mouth slid into a smile as your eyes pleaded with me again. “… And it hurts, Gem.”

You held your hands stiffly out toward me, the same way you’d done earlier. They dripped pinkish water onto the floor. One drop landed on my knee, then started to slide off, leaving a dull brown trail behind it.

“What will you do for me?” I asked quietly.

You watched the drop sliding off my knee, too, keeping silent as you thought. “What do you want?”

“You know what I want.”

“You’re not going anywhere.” You turned your right hand over, and watched the watery blood run down it in streaks. “I mean, what do you want from me, right here, right now?”

You looked back at me. That small action made your hair fall over your eyes. Your sun-bleached strands had grown almost to your mouth. You blew at them and they stuck to your lips.

“Please,” you said. “Anything that’s not about leaving here. Come on, just ask me. I’m happy to oblige.” You leaned forward, curious as a cat. I pulled away. “But first,” you whispered, “before anything, can you get me a towel? They’re in the box in the bathroom.”

“I know.”

I opened the battered tin box beside the bathroom door and got you the towel. As I walked back, I thought about all the things I wanted to know about you … hundreds of things. But to ask them felt like a crime, some sort of betrayal. So I knelt with the towel on my lap, thinking. I was ready to give it to you when you asked, but instead you lay your arms straight down against it, over my knees. I felt the material go damp and warm from your watery blood. Your face was close to mine, but I looked at your arms instead. My legs were tense, tight, like an animal ready to run.

“I want to know how you built all this,” I said eventually. “Where you got the money. If that was you, like you said, in those bushes years ago … then how did you go from that to this?”

I glanced around the room, noticing the cobwebs clinging to the roof. They wound down toward the curtains in such tiny threads, such fragile pathways of life. You rolled your arms over the towel, nodding at the sponge.

“Wash my arms? Please? I’ll tell you then.”

I dipped the sponge into the water and ran it over the scratches. It opened up the gashes further, scouring your skin. You flinched as your brown skin fell away to a pinker, softer skin beneath. I rubbed a little harder. Bits of sponge were getting stuck in the wounds. You were biting on your lower lip, dealing with the pain.

“I got the money a lot of ways,” you said. “I stole at first; I was pretty good at taking handbags from pubs, that sort of thing. But then someone caught me and threatened me with prison.”

You caught my look. You knew that if I had my way you’d be going to prison someday soon anyway. You ignored it.

“I even begged for a while,” you continued. “Stuck my plastic McDonald’s cup on the floor like the rest of them and felt like shit.”

I stopped rubbing. “But begging isn’t enough to make this.” Again, I looked around the room. It was rough and basic, but it must have cost more than some loose change to make it happen … a lot more. “What else?”

You nodded. “I sold things.”

“Sold what?”

“What I had.” You winced badly, and it wasn’t from the pain in your arms. I wasn’t even rubbing you then. “I sold myself for this place.”

“You mean … like a prostitute?”

“Like someone selling his soul.” Your face contorted at a memory. You shook your head, trying to shake it away. “I just did what everyone else did in the city,” you said, your eyes far away. “I chased money, pretended to be someone else to get it. It got easier the longer I did it … but that’s the trap, see? When the deadness gets easier, you know you’re sinking deeper, becoming dead yourself.” You started dabbing at your arms with the towel, pressing the scratches to stop the blood. “Then I hit the big time.”

“A high-class prostitute?” I smirked.

“Almost. I worked for Fantasyland.”

“What, like Disney characters?”

“I could have been one of those, if they’d wanted it.” You smiled ruefully. “I worked as a fantasy escort. I was a professional dater. I went out with whoever wanted me, and I was whoever they wanted me to be: James Bond, Brad Pitt, Superman….” You paused, checking my reaction. “See, I told you I could be Superman.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Yes, but that’s the city—everyone loves to pretend. Especially the rich. Anyway, it’s easy to be what people want: give them something to stare at, nod and smile, tell them they’re gorgeous.” You flashed me your best charming grin before you added, “The three steps to money.”

Again, you smiled. But it wasn’t your charming one this time. It was smaller and sadder.

“And your money? Do you still have it?”

You threw your hands out to the house. “All buried into this wood somewhere, into this place … what other use is there for it?”

“So,” I began, “when you leave this place, you’ll have nothing? No money, no family, no future …?”

Your smile stopped. “I’m not going to leave this place. Ever.”

You stood up, your healing done.

I didn’t sleep again that night. I’d gone to bed with too many questions. I heard your voice just before dawn, murmuring. I tiptoed down the corridor and pressed myself against your door, listening. But you didn’t make another sound. Maybe you were dreaming.

I found you in the kitchen, with the morning sun flooding in through the window and over your skin. You were soaking rags in a bowl of dark brown paste that smelled like eucalyptus and dirt. Your hands were scabby; swollen, too. You took out a rag and asked me to help. As I wrapped it around your wrist, you looked out of the window, impatient to get on with something.

“Gonna be a hot one,” you said. “Maybe even get some rain, one of these days, if we’re very lucky … if it keeps building like this.”

“If what keeps building?”

“The pressure. When the air gets heavy like it is now, it’ll burst at some point. It’ll have to.”

I’d felt the pressure, too. For the past couple of days, the air had felt alive, clinging to my ears like it was trying to get inside and pressing its heat against me. I wondered, sometimes, if I stood outside with my arms open wide and waited, whether the air would press me all the way back home.

You took your hand away from me and tested how tightly I’d tied the bandage.

“Good,” you murmured. You opened a drawer and dug around in it.

“How did you get this here?” I asked. “All this wood and equipment?”

You pulled out a small metal clasp. “I had a truck.”

“That’s all?”

“And time.” You motioned for me to attach the clasp over the bandage I’d tied, securing it further.

“What else?” I stretched the small elastic of the clasp, digging its metal ends into the bandage. Then I kept hold of your wrist until you looked back at me.

“All right.” You sighed. “There is somewhere else…. It’s a shell of a place, really, not too far. Old mine site. I kept stuff there before I needed it. Then I just started building. I started years ago, when I first had the idea, before I even knew I wanted to bring you here, too.”

“Can we go there?” I asked quickly. “This mine site?”

“There’s nothing there.”

“Must be more than here.”

You shook your head. “The land there’s been raped and taken, everything’s dead.”

I coiled away from your words.

“I’m serious, Gem. There’s only a hole in the earth that’s eaten everything up. It’s repulsive.” You opened the door to outside. “You coming?”

I shook my head, my heart quickening a little. If I could only get to your keys, maybe I could find this shell of a place you mentioned. If it was a mine site, there must be people there…. There must be something.

I watched your back as you walked away, toward the outbuildings. Then, for the billionth time, I searched through your kitchen. I was becoming more convinced that you carried the car key on you.

I went to the spare room. I ran my finger down the spines of the books and pulled out a few. There were no maps in them, nothing to tell me where I was. I looked at a book called
The History of the Sandy Desert
and flicked through some of the photographs: the different landscapes and the pictures of aborigines you’d said were once here. I traced their faces, wishing they’d never left.

I pulled out the next book: a field guide to Australian flora. Then I had a brain wave. Perhaps I could figure out where I was from identifying the vegetation around me. I thumbed through the pages. Some plants looked familiar, like the ones in the section on spinifex. I read a line:
Spinifex triodia dominates the vegetation of more than 20 percent of Australia, and occurs in all states except Tasmania.
Brilliant, I thought, I really could be anywhere … except Tasmania.

I opened the cabinet. There was a stringless guitar and a saggy football on the bottom shelf. I pushed them aside and something black and leggy scuttled away, disappearing into the darkness at the back. A thin thread of spider-life hung from the corner. I didn’t look any farther in there.

There was a dirty sewing machine on the middle shelf that looked older than me. I turned the knob on the side and watched the needle move slowly up and down. I wished it would magically sew out some sort of map, telling me how to get home. I pressed my finger to its tip. It was rusty but it was still sharp—surprising, really, considering how old it looked. I twisted the needle until it snapped off in my fingers. I ran it across my palm, tracing my lifeline. I stopped in the middle of my hand, testing myself. Could I push it straight through? How much would it hurt? How much damage could this thing really do?

I heard the kitchen door slam and the sound of you marching through the house. I closed my hand over the needle and shoved it into the pocket of my shorts, quickly shutting the cabinet door and heading back to the bookshelf. I pulled out
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
and waited. You came into the room. Lately you’d stopped asking me what I was doing all the time, and that day was no exception. You just looked at me for a moment before you started pacing, pacing around the room as if it were a cage. You threw your bandaged hands into the air as though appealing to some sort of god.

“I can’t do anything with hands like these,” you said gruffly. “Do you want to go for a walk or something?”

I nodded, thinking of the mine site.