Tobe and Ruby sat next to each other on a worn park bench. They were deep in conversation, as thick as thieves, as buddied as bushrangers. Two unfamiliar backpacks sat at their feet. I hobbled along as quickly as I could, the pain in my side getting worse with each step.
‘G’day,’ Tobe said.
‘Yeah, g’day,’ Ruby mimicked.
I faked a smile. I needed a sit down more than I needed to stick it to Tobe straightaway.
‘Hello Tobias, hello Ruby. How are you both?’ Ishra asked.
I collapsed on the bench. For a brief moment, the world blurred. Someone passed me a canteen. I drank deep, slopping some water down my front. The ragged tear of my breath was all I could hear.
‘Bill, are you okay?’ Tobe asked.
Ruby took my hand and took my pulse. ‘He’ll be all right, but he’ll have to take it easy for a while.’
‘Very good, Ruby. Well done.’
Ishra’s voice was full of pride, exactly as Louise’s had been. I smiled a sad smile. Tobe beamed at me. Did he even remember what he had done? Did he remember what he had told Ishra?
I weathered my storm—what I had to say was only for Tobe. The bastard.
He fidgeted in his seat. Ishra seemed happy to amuse himself by looking out at the wasteland. Ruby kept still and quiet. An awkward silence fell.
The silence steadily grew heavier.
‘Right, then,’ Tobe said.
Ishra smiled at him. I looked on, bemused.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Ishra said to him. ‘If you need anything, I’ll be gathering your fellow patient and sorting out your transfer papers.’
Ruby looked at him strangely. I understood why—his last few words were alien; they had no meaning out in that scorched, dying land.
‘I’ll see you all when Old Reliable arrives,’ he said as he shuffled away.
It was only then that I caught on to where we were: an old train platform, kept in good repair despite the ravages of time and the dry, protected from the sun by a heavy roof. A bluestone ticket-office-cum-waiting-room stood behind it, its wrought-iron fixtures and handrails dull.
‘So, here we are again,’ Tobe said.
I didn’t reply. I wondered if he understood why. The awkward silence returned.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said after the silence had stretched out and become uncomfortable.
A soft breath escaped me, a deflated sigh of relief.
‘Look, give me a sec,’ he continued. ‘Ruby?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Would you mind, ah, lending the Doc a hand?’
She looked me in the eye. ‘No worries, boss,’ she said. And then she winked at me.
‘Cheers.’
She dragged herself away and followed after Ishra. Tobe and I sat there for a moment, saying nothing. He wouldn’t look at me, staring a hole into the ground instead.
‘Fuck it,’ I finally said.
‘Hang on,’ Tobe interrupted.
We looked at each other. Despite everything, we laughed.
‘After you …’
Tobe didn’t dare decline my invitation. ‘I’m sorry, Bill,’ he began. ‘Sorry I dragged you into this mess, sorry you got hurt so bad.’ His voice was unsteady. ‘I never meant for things to go to shit. That’s happened too many times, thanks to me.’
I swear he started to cry.
‘I’m sorry.’
I knew that his apology was sincere. But it wasn’t the apology I wanted to hear.
‘No worries, mate.’
‘No worries’, because there were none; that’s just how it goes out on the road. And ‘mate’ because that’s what he always would be.
‘Well, cheers.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘I’ve been sweating it, you know? I wasn’t sure you’d say that. Bloody hell, I’m glad you did.’ He looked up, looked me in the eye. ‘Thank you.’ He lowered his gaze back to the ground. ‘I know nothing I can do can …’
‘Fuck you.’
He shut his trap mid-sentence.
‘How could you?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘Don’t give me that—you know what I’m talking about.’
I waited for a reply but none came. He was either being exceptionally dim or extremely stubborn. Well, it had been a long time since we had dredged up such bitter memories.
I stared at him, waiting-waiting-waiting.
‘Oh, that,’ he said after a while. ‘Bill, mate, what does it matter?’
I sighed. Last time we had talked about it, when Tobe had returned after all those years away, we spent a long time arguing over what mattered and what didn’t and whose fault was whose and who should have done what. We had talked ourselves in circles, gotten nowhere, eventually come to blows.
I knew who should have done what.
‘It matters because you weren’t fucking there,’ I spat. ‘And because it should have been you, not me. You said until death but you didn’t mean it. The least you can do is keep it to yourself, like you promised.’
Venomous rage poured out of me. It felt good. I couldn’t have stopped it, even if I had wanted to.
‘But …’
‘Don’t even think about it,’ I said.
He was on his feet in an instant. ‘You don’t know what it was like.’
I followed him up, leaning on my stick. ‘How can you say that? She was my sister, and I loved her until the end. Unlike you, you coward piece of shit.’
Years of repressed anger spilled out. The memories hurt, but venting my pain at Tobe made it all worthwhile. He held his good arm at his side, his hand clenched in a fist.
I was suddenly glad that I was near enough to crippled.
‘It wasn’t your fault, Bill. You’ve never got that. It’s my fault, I did it.’
‘Pull the other one.’
It was only Tobe’s fault in the most elasticated philosophical sense of the word. The night my parents chose not to play further witness to nature’s cruel ways—the night they harrowingly tried to lighten the load for my sister and me—lived as a panicked memory somewhere on the border of nightmare. But the memory of what happened to my sister over the following days stayed as sharp as a dead tree on a windless day.
That memory visited me every other night, dulling my spirit, deadening my heart.
‘It wasn’t your fault, Tobe. It was no one’s fault—these things happen.’
I said it reluctantly. I didn’t want to indulge Tobe’s guilt or soothe his shattered ego—I had my own grudge to offload.
‘How can you say that?’
He was screaming it, his face red. It dawned on me that we should have tried to thrash this out a long time ago, after the flared tempers of our tumultuous reunion had settled.
‘I was there, remember? I know what happened.’
‘Then you know it’s my fault.’
‘For fuck’s sake!’
Tobe shut up.
That night, after Tobe and I had managed to detach ourselves enough to begin carefully cutting down my parents’ bodies, my sister surprised us by throwing open the barn doors without a knock or a warning.
She saw us. She saw our parents. She made a tiny animal sound.
Tobe called out to her. She looked her husband in the eye. She looked back to our dead parents. She turned on her heel and ran blindly into the night. We gave chase, running through the darkness. She was quick. So was Tobe.
I lumbered after them, soon lost sight of them.
The memories flicked past, scenes of horror and sorrow. I began to cry and barely realised it.
‘Bill?’
I didn’t respond.
‘Bill?’
That night, that’s what Tobe had been calling out, screaming it at the sky. That’s how I found them. Tobe was sobbing, curled up in a ball. My sister was barely conscious, tangled up in rusty barbed wire, covered in blood. I slapped Tobe together. We untangled my sister, being as gentle as we could. We carried her home. We dressed her wounds. We tried to make her comfortable.
And then we buried my parents.
Tobe disappeared later that night. He told me that he was going outside to take a piss, and he never came back.
‘Bill?’
‘You should have stayed.’
Tobe looked confused. I became aware of how lost I had gotten chasing memories down the rabbit hole. The pent up bile of years past took control, forcing me to tell him what I swore I never would.
‘How could you leave? You know that she called out for you? The last thing she said, before I killed her, was your name. Even then, she still loved you.’
A little piece of me died as I told Tobe the truth I had withheld for so long. He looked at me, a pathetic sadness hollowing his eyes, all his bluster draining away.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘That doesn’t fucking cut it. You didn’t see the look in her eyes as she grasped what was happening to her. But even as the gangrene and infection set in, she still hoped that you’d come back. She wanted you to be there, to hold her hand when it happened, to be the one to do it.’
‘But …’
‘Don’t. Nothing you can say will make up for not being there.’
He seemed to deflate further. I was happy for that. He cried, his chest heaving. His cracked ribs made him wince with every breath, and still he cried.
My anger started draining away. I didn’t have the energy to maintain the rage.
‘I’m truly sorry.’
He whispered it. I ignored him.
‘And anyway, it looks like we’ve got more pressing problems,’ he said.
He pointed at the wasteland. I saw nothing different.
‘Look harder,’ he said.
‘Piss off.’
‘Between the burnt-out tank and the fallen-down guard tower,’ he suggested.
I squinted. Far in the distance was a feather-thin plume of smoke, almost invisible against the all-encompassing blue of the sky.
Tobe’s eagle-eye had done it again.
‘Shit,’ I said.
The last thing I wanted was an interruption. I couldn’t relive that horror again; we needed to sort it out there and then. But after a lifetime on the land, it had been drummed into me that you barely ever get what you want.
A rhythmic squeak broke the wasteland’s ghostly quiet. I turned, saw Ishra and Ruby wheeling out the bandaged bull-roo who had occupied the trolley next to mine. He moaned steadily. Ruby stroked his head without affection. Ishra focused on the burden of the trolley, his old-man body looking like it might give way any minute. Appreciating the fact that I knew nothing about the bull-roo, I turned back to Tobe, hoping that he could answer my questions. But his eyes were fixed on the distance.
There was nothing behind them—he was lost somewhere in his head, silently mulling over words he never should have heard.
‘G’day,’ I said to Ruby and Ishra, giving up on Tobe.
Ishra stopped the trolley and its squeaky wheel; in the quiet, I noticed the rumble of the approaching train, more a feeling than a sound.
‘Hello, William.’
‘Bill, nice to see you back on your feet,’ Ruby said, smiling cheekily.
I didn’t return her smile. The bull-roo moaned again and then started to twitch. Ishra halted the trolley and passed a small plastic case to Ruby.
‘If you will.’
‘Cheers, Doc.’
She took the case, cracked it open. A gleaming hypodermic needle sat inside. She deftly plucked it out, rolled up the hulk’s sleeve, swabbed his forearm with something, and injected him with something else. Her hand didn’t shake as she administered the sedative.
‘Well, that’s that,’ Ishra muttered.
Ruby passed back the needle and then sprinted to Tobe, somehow feeling his distress.
‘You okay?’ she asked.
The dead embers of his eyes briefly flickered with some kind of life. ‘No worries.’
The fire died out again. He stooped slightly, reached for Ruby. She stared at him quizzically; he looked like he was about to cry.
‘Please …’ he said.
Ruby hugged him, comforting him in a way that I don’t think anyone else could. Theirs wasn’t the knock-about familiarity of old mates or the unbreakable bond that comes from sharing a life in drear and seared desolation. It was the silent understanding of a fellow soldier, a fellow survivor.
I looked away. I wasn’t meant to witness their moment.
I waited. The plume of smoke became more a thumb than a finger. The rumble steadily grew louder.
‘Right, folks, sorry that you had to see that.’
I looked back at Tobe. He was standing a little straighter, seemed a little more together.
‘You okay?’ I asked, unable to help myself.
‘Yeah, mate, cheers. Anyway, we’ve got more important things to worry about.’
‘My thoughts exactly,’ Ishra said. ‘Now, remember what I said earlier, don’t give them a reason to …’
His words were drowned out as the train sounded its horn to warn us of its approach. Its blare echoed across the wasteland, scaring into flight a flock of magpies.
‘Never mind,’ Ishra said to himself.
The behemoth slowly pulled up alongside us, belching smoke. It was a jerry-rigged monstrosity held together by spit and string, the same as everything else nowadays. Awed, I silently watched as a hulking, diesel-powered engine car crawled past us. On its roof, a handful of Creeps in shapeless sand-coloured tunics kept watch from a fortified gun nest.
A dozen or so carriages snaked behind the engine car, each one sporting cracked timber walls and windows covered in mismatched boards. A long line of rusty shipping containers hung on behind them. The train was so long that it overhung the far end of the platform.
‘Wow,’ Ruby said, drawing the word out.
That was enough to break the moment—Tobe, Ishra and I all laughed a little. Ruby looked put out, but there was no way that we could explain our laughter to her.
‘Thank you, Ruby,’ Ishra said. ‘I will miss you.’
That didn’t just kill our tiny cheer; it desecrated its corpse as well.
The train stopped with a shudder, one of the Creeps in the gun nest rapping a rhythmic pattern on the steel roof beneath him.
‘Please, leave this to me,’ Ishra said.
‘No worries.’
Tobe spoke for us all; there was no argument there.
The door of the first carriage flew open. A dozen Creeps strode out, a tall and lanky bloke in the lead. Cocky and self-assured to the last one, none of the Creeps drew their guns. They ambled over, taking their time. Behind them, a last Creep rolled a stainless-steel supply box towards the ticket office.
‘G’day, Doc,’ the lead Creep said, lifting up the visor on his cumbersome helmet.
‘You’ve got to be kidding me …’
I had gotten it wrong; the lead Creep was a woman. But then, in full body armour with helmets on and visors down, they all looked the same.
‘Hello, Captain. How are you today?’ Ishra asked.
One of the other Creeps mockingly echoed Ishra’s rounded tones.
‘What’s this, Doc? A couple of holdouts, a cripple and a kid? That isn’t much of a catch.’ She laughed. Her eyes flicked over us as if we were nothing but meat. ‘Right, then,’ she said.
I wanted nothing more than to turn tail and run like the proverbial. Tobe caught my eye, shook his head slowly. Ruby stared at the ground. Tobe reached out with his good hand. One of the Creeps casually reached towards his pistol. Tobe ruffled Ruby’s hair and then raised his arms in surrender, grimacing in pain, wrestling with his sling.
Ruby said nothing, did nothing, kept staring at the ground.
‘So, Doc, what’s the story?’ the captain asked.
‘Well, it’s exactly as you said, apart from the “cripple” comment. We’ve got these two holdouts.’
Ishra waved at Tobe and me. We didn’t meet the captain’s eyes.
‘This young lady.’
Ishra waved at Ruby. She didn’t look up.
‘And your compatriot here.’
The bull-roo on the trolley didn’t even moan.
‘What happened to him?’
The rest of the Creeps were eyeing us warily, their hands now on their pistols. The fear I felt became ice; sweat drenched me without warning. Tobe caught my eye. He shook his head once again.
‘A dog attack, I do believe. Prior to the arrival of these three.’
Tobe smiled. I didn’t know why.
‘How bad is it?’
‘Well, the dog apparently savaged this poor man’s face. It’s doubtful that he’ll ever see again. He’s under sedation, and will probably need to stay that way until he can get proper help.’
‘Can do. After the camp, it’s express to the line.’
I whistled. Tobe groaned. The captain paid us proper attention. She dismissed Ruby and me almost instantly, but seemed to puzzle over Tobe. He smiled a broken-toothed smile, winked through his puffy eye.
‘G’day,’ he growled.
The captain humphed through her nose before turning away. ‘Load them in, boys.’
Ishra looked at us a last time. ‘Please, take care. William, Tobias, Ruby—know that you will always be in my heart.’
The captain’s faced curled with a question at the mention of Tobe’s name, but soon relaxed as Ishra thrust our transfer papers at her and snatched her attention.
‘They’re all yours,’ he said.
‘Thanks, Doc.’
The captain looked me in the eye and smiled, tucking our transfer papers into a pocket of her body armour.
‘Please, be kind,’ Ishra said to her.
‘You never know, I just might.’