The Best Australian Stories (31 page)

Inside, the place is all fake-rustic, with a family of black skillets hanging over the kitchen counter, patchwork quilts on the walls everywhere, and the thousand-dollar appliances you can't use since the grid went down. Nice people, tidy. There'll be a pleasant take here once I get dry. Food? God, I would kill for a can of soup. First I take a pot outside, hold it up to the sky, and in half a minute it's filled for the night. Now I can take off my gear and search for scraps.

The cupboards are bare, nothing, zip. Summer people, they were probably scared to leave anything because of the bugs.

From the living room, I can only see half a field away before it all blurs out to water. There's no wind, so I just hear the rain crashing and crashing onto the roof like pebbles. I take one of the fancy knives, slice into a cushion and eat a few bits of golden foam, just to have something in my stomach so I can sleep.

*

‘Get off my couch!'

I open my eyes to a stick of a woman, standing by my head. She's waving the fancy knife over me. She's wild, all cheekbones, wearing some sort of slept-in party dress and too much make-up. She's standing weirdly, continually shifting to get her bones comfortable, the way people get after a few weeks in this climate without meds. I reach for the blade on instinct and she flicks it, cutting my fingers. Now I'm holding my hand to my chest and a thin line of blood's coming up. I'm mad, but I calculate that I could still take her, if I needed to.

‘See what he's carrying.'

Suddenly, a softer version of her, about seventeen, is on me and she also looks like she wandered away from a dance party two weeks ago and has been in the same dress ever since. They've both got that pulled look in their cheeks, like food is a memory. Again, on stupid instinct, I struggle, which throws the girl off and the mother slashes the air in front of my face and tells me to stay the hell still. Her breath is sour from alcohol. Most of the people out here were proper churchgoers at one time, but most of the churches shut down a while back.

The daughter goes through my pockets and gets my identity card and my pistol, which she throws onto the coffee table, knocking over a glass which falls to the floor and breaks in two. Mother and daughter don't even regard the glass and I realise it's not their house. The mother walks around me, picks up the gun and puts the knife on the counter.

‘Have you got food?'

‘No. I'm stuck here, lost my horse. I camped out, I thought this place was empty.'

‘It's not.'

‘If we can figure out an easy way for you to return my gun, I'll happily move on.'

‘Don't do it, Mum.'

‘I'm only trying to make this calm for everyone. It's my gun, my last bit of personal property. And honestly, it's no danger because there's no bullets in there. In fact, I'd suggest, if you want to keep tabs on me, you're more convincing with the knife. But do what you like, I'm not here to hurt anybody.'

With the daughter watching me (a string bean, also rheumatic, I could toss her across the room), the mother looks into the gun. Without any recognition of the comedy of the situation, she confidently picks the knife back up, while putting the gun on the table.

‘Where are the bullets?'

‘In my pack, which is on my horse. I wish I had it, I could give you some meds. Is there cat's claw still growing around here? A tea of that would make some difference.' There's a blank look and enough of a pause for them to get that I'm not trying to kill them. The mother's shaky hand, the daughter looking back and forth at each of us. I say, ‘OK, now that you woke me up, let's figure out a meal,' and everyone calms down now. The knife is lowered.

The mother is Liz, the daughter is Jenna. I ask Liz what she's drunk on and can I have a taste. She's relaxed now that she doesn't have to kill me so she leads the way downstairs through a hall filled with Mexican tapestries that would get me a decent amount if I could figure out how to keep them dry and get them to a city. Liz takes my hand to bring me downstairs to a dank clay basement. I see two mattresses that have been dragged down to the foot of the stairs and covered with quilts.

‘Why're you sleeping here? It's got to be the dampest place in the house.'

‘Listen.' She's quiet for a second. ‘No rain. I don't mind the water anymore, it's the noise it makes that gets me raving.'

Funny, the sound's never bothered me much. Always made it seem like the weather and people and all of us were more connected. It's the silence, during the few dry months, that seems much meaner to me.

I can make out a wine cellar half the size of the living room, six racks deep, maybe a hundred and twenty bottles on each rack. This I could make a killing on. There hasn't been a proper season for grapes in years. And me without my horse. Five cases of empty wine bottles are stacked in the corner. I take it in, this mother-daughter team alone with all this booze and no food. If I can get them out to some assistance, maybe I can hook up with one of the other guys to retrieve this stuff. Liz uncorks a half-empty bottle of white, hands it to me and says, a little too loud, ‘Sorry, it's not chilled,' like it's hilarious.

Jenna stays halfway up the steps, watching us.

‘It's just me doing the drinking,' Liz tells me, keeping an eye on her daughter. ‘Precious gets her sustenance from rainwater.' This makes Jenna give up on us and head back upstairs. ‘It's for the best that she does. One of us should stay sober.' She laughs, rubbing her elbows, ‘Sad thing is it ought to be me.'

The wine is spectacular for all I know, but I'm so happy for any flavour at all that I knock a swig back fast. She takes the bottle and guzzles.

‘You know what this bottle could be worth?'

She looks at me like I've asked a stupid question. ‘I guess it'd be worth something. Money, maybe?'

Even in the mustiness of the cellar, I can see that before her hair got this dead look to it, and her skin got these new lines, she had a comfortable life. The dress doesn't look that bad. This surviving thing is a recent development for her.

I suggest a trip outside to find something edible before I get drunk. If I can scare up a meal for all of us, she says she'll let me stay. I point out that it's not her house. She doesn't bother responding. I'll stay as long as it takes to get them out. It's my job.

There's a load of flashy raingear, so whoever the owners are, they were definitely here for at least one season of rain. Jenna zips and snaps her mother in until she's just a smear of lipstick breathing heavily into the protective flap of treated nylon.

Then Liz starts belting out ‘Singin' in the Rain'.

As Jenna climbs into her suit, she looks over at her mother and says, ‘You know what? Let's leave you. You're too high.'

‘Fantastic!'

Liz relaxes fully against the wall as Jenna directs me with a glance to the front door. Good, I can start suggesting options to her.

Liz calls out as we go, ‘Don't screw her unless she wants!'

Jenna wastes no time in assuring me, ‘I don't want.' She smells hungry mutt, when she's holding out for a well-fed Labrador. The guys born out here want to build a big ark to save everyone, while I keep one clear eye on my escape route and the other eye on what I'll need to grab before I go. She doesn't seem to get that I'm her only choice, but I suppose that that right there is what's wrong with my way of thinking, as far as she's concerned. Once or twice in these last few years there's been a girl whose mind has come all the way around to seeing things the way I do, that you've got to look out for yourself, but it isn't that often and when it has happened we've each been so bent on survival that we both walked away empty-handed.

Outside, we survey the property for remnants of plantings, but water has already stripped the ground brown, with only a few rotten roots visible. We pick through what might have been edible a month ago and then I lead her into the woods. I don't find any cat's claw and it's clear that already makes me a fraud in her book.

She's got to shout to make herself heard over the rain. ‘It's all right. I've had enough tea. I'll take whatever you find that's edible, but I've got to chew it or I'll go out of my mind.'

There's a small grove of ash pines at the edge of what was the lawn and they're pretty good. I tear off a piece of inner bark for her to try. She nibbles it and gives me a minor nod, sourly accepting that this is what she asked for. She snags her party dress on a branch and rips it getting free. Hopeless.

I turn so I can get into my body belt, where the bullets are, and find a plastic string bag for her to use for collecting. She looks at it and I have to explain that her job is to fill it with bark. She looks like she's about to snarl at me, but then goes to work, pulling strips off in quick tugs. She's no good at this work – any work, I'd bet – and two times I have to show her how to tear off bigger pieces. She doesn't say thank you.

‘Has she been lit since you got here?'

‘She's a drinker.'

‘You can't survive with her.'

‘You're showing me how. I watch what people do. I'm learning, and I'll write it down later.'

‘Good.'

‘I write it all down, everything that's gone on with the farms, too. Families being scattered, friends making enemies just so as to stay alive. I've kept dry paper and each night I write down what happened during the day. I'll write about you tonight, what you taught me but also what you are, making money on other people's losses. People won't take notice of it now, but I'm keeping the pages safe till that time they become ready for the truth. There's no way I'd ever burn my writing or allow it to get wet, regardless of what comes.'

She's exactly the kind of romantic that's got no instinct to make it. She's fighting the tree, fighting the rain, fighting me, and her whole purpose in life is to record every indignity. If she hadn't put me down so fast before, I'd tell her how smart she is and then try for a kiss, but if I did it now she'd like it too much (the trying, not the kissing).

I break off a forked stick from a decent-sized branch and poke into some of the promising-looking holes around stumps that aren't already flooded. Most of the time I pull out a tangled sludge of leaves.

She comes over after three minutes, looking miserable, hunched over the string bag, now half-filled with bark. Water is dripping off her as she stands still watching while I twist the stick into something soft. There isn't a lot of room in those holes, so once I've actually speared some sort of being, I'm able to drag it out. I keep a hand ready to grab it if it comes off, and I pull a wet, squirming, good-sized rat, pretty well impaled. I stomp on its neck so it stops moving, and tell her to relax. She turns away, gagging. We walk back to the house, me holding the animal out on the end of the stick so the rain can wash it clean, her staying a step ahead so she doesn't have to see.

‘You'll be surprised how much you like it.'

She starts really talking then, and crying, though she doesn't think I can see. ‘When my family used to eat at the table, no matter who had done the cooking, there were always three foods on the plate every night – a meat, a vegetable, a starch. Then one by one they disappeared. We complained a lot about the lack of variety when it went down to two foods every night. Then there was just one, whatever was left, that's when no one bothered mentioning it. We had to eat all the spinach for a week before it went brown, and then we had only potatoes because that's all we had saved. Soon it was whatever we could find growing in the wild.'

‘You'd do better in the higher towns, you know. You could go there, for the winter. There's a lot of nice people, country people too. A few days' walk from here. You just have to pull yourself together to do some work.'

She holds out the limp bag of bark as evidence she can work. ‘We'll get by. Besides, they don't want women her age while they're building. She's forty-six, over the cut-off.'

And she's a drunk who'll bring you all the way down with her. ‘You don't understand. This whole area is getting cleared because of the rain. This area is for wildlife, not people.'

‘I guess we'll have something to eat then.'

‘The other animals might not see it that way.'

If Jenna leaves, Liz will wander outside and be dead of exposure within two days, guaranteed. Then I can come back for the wine. It's not a heartless plan; it saves one of them, at least. I continue, ‘There'll be lots of animals using this land, all of them desperate. They'll come inside.'

I see her picturing it, the comfortable weekend house filled with hungry animals.

She stops. She knows what I'm talking about.

‘My father walked off,' she says. ‘I can't leave.'

‘But she's leaving you with every drink,' I say, realising how practised I've gotten at talking people out of everything they care about.

Jenna now stays three steps ahead of me the rest of the way to the house.

Inside, Liz, still in her raingear, has found her way into another bottle. I'd really like to cut her off from what I'm already thinking of as mine. She's broken a stool into pieces and jammed it into the fireplace, and tucked some bedsheets underneath it as her idea of kindling. When we come in, she is rifling through my sidebag, looking for something to light the sheets. Out on her own and she doesn't even know how to make a fire. Liz giggles as I yank the bag away from her, then she sees the rat and goes quiet.

I tell her, ‘Find a better starter than those sheets.' She falls back into the couch with a crack of a laugh. I look at Jenna, to underline my earlier point. She gets out of her gear and tries to energise her mother into hunting for paper. When she gets nowhere she asks me to start the fire. She says please.