August spent the morning packing Prosperous’s shaving cabinet, medicine cupboard and linen press into boxes. She scoured the attic again for Albert’s manuscript though came up empty.
Before lunch she went to see Eddie. August felt light and excited, she thought about the books Poppy had put together and a little lamp of hope began to burn in her guts. She was thinking about the conversation she’d had with Eddie the day before, about summer, the world getting bigger. She wanted to talk to Eddie about how everything didn’t have to end. How she could stay, how they could save Prosperous and the farm, she thought, as she walked up the hill towards perfect Southerly House. She heard a rumble, and in the field she could see Rinepalm trucks entering the southern cattle road, a crane arm bent over a cab, another piled high with what looked like fences and scaffolding, supplies for a more elaborate set-up.
The door was open, but the flywire door was shut.
‘Oi,’ she sang, and let herself in. No wooden surface had been polished in a while, walls were stripped of the landscape paintings, the moulded ceilings were the high home of spiders now.
She walked through the house and found Eddie in the back room. He was wearing jeans, kneeling beside a cardboard removal box.
‘Oi,’ he said, glancing at August and taking a swig from a beer bottle.
‘You on the booze already?’
‘Going down like nails. You want one?’
‘Why not.’ August took her shoes off and walked them back up the hall to the front door. She came back and Eddie passed her an opened beer then put his phone in the top of the tall speaker. Pearl Jam were playing halfway through Ten.
‘Remember this?’ Eddie said, and raised his beer to tap against her own.
She felt fifteen again. ‘I feel like your parents are going to come home and I’ll have to sneak out the back door.’
‘Good old days,’ he said, and stood, stretching out his back. ‘You could have left your shoes on, it’ll be rubble soon.’
She held the beer against her chest, took a breath through a smile, looked around the empty space.
‘You want some help?’
‘Lunch first?’
‘I’m fine.’
He assembled a box quickly, taped its base and threw it at August.
‘How much am I getting paid?’
‘My eternal gratitude.’
‘Everything I ever wanted,’ she said, sitting at the foot of the bookshelf, swigging at the bottle.
After a few minutes of silent packing Eddie asked, ‘You know that book you were reading about the spirits in everything?’
‘Animism,’ she said, hands deep in the box.
‘Do you reckon your pop went to the land then or to heaven?’
‘You mean, do I believe in the afterlife?’
‘That,’ Eddie said, and took the last mouthful of his beer.
‘I think he’ll go somewhere, but I don’t think there’s a heaven.’ August took another gulp and added, ‘Pearl Jam and talking about the afterlife – I really do feel like a teenager again.’
He stood and continued packing from the back of the room, removing spines from wallpaper-lined bookshelves. He shook his head. ‘It’s silly. Doesn’t change anything whatever we believe.’
‘Believe?’
‘It doesn’t change the fact you end up dead, does it? I hate religion.’
August rolled her eyes in his direction. She didn’t think Eddie was stupid, but felt like he’d just never stopped saying the stupid things they’d said when they were young. ‘You hate religion – that’s original. What about all the churches and paintings and poetry?’
‘What about all the wars?’
‘I’m having déjà vu. I think I’ve had this conversation a hundred times and I still think humans would have warred and slaughtered each other with or without religion.’
‘Over land?’ he turned and looked at her with a gravity, but also a question. He moved back to the bookshelf. ‘Or race wars?’
‘Yeah, and even if we all had the same skin tone, it’d be language, and then even if we spoke the same language, it’d be eye shape, nose length, people with thick hair …’
She sat down her empty bottle, got off the couch and stood beside him, lifting a handful of books to pack. ‘How’s your mum doing, really?’
He put another handful of books into the box. ‘She’s okay, I think she’s about done with life, though. She always hated the country.’
‘Australia?’
‘Farm life.’
She looked again around their huge, now-empty home. It was big, as she always thought it was and even seeing it again with adult eyes.
‘Couldn’t have been that bad,’ August said, but guessed it was.
When Eddie was thirteen years old and August was eleven, a black book was swiped from a massage therapist in Broken and lists of names were smuggled around the region. After that loads of parents got divorced. They’d watched Eddie’s mum beat Eddie’s dad with a fresh strip of willow branch as he left the property, but not for the last time.
‘You know they reunited in a way again, when Mum got sick. I guess that happens when …’
He looked tired with trying to work out his feelings, bowed his head into the box. ‘I reckon I liked your pop more than my old man.’
‘Pop?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I reckon he was likeable, that’s for sure. I know I liked him more than anyone else.’ He paused before he spoke again, quieter, gentler. ‘You really thought your mum would turn up?’
August sat back on the couch, exhausted, she knew maternal empathy hadn’t been sealed by the umbilical-cord clip. Enough time as an adult made her know this, but she was confused about what the whole trip meant, what Poppy’s death was supposed to mean. What Jedda missing meant. They’d waited for a death certificate for her, as families just like August’s do. Or waited for an end to a life in gaol. So many people gone and dead – she thought more loss would make the family close, a whole thing again.
‘I turned up.’
He dumped more books and sat beside August, looked at the almost bare bookshelves. ‘I was hoping you would. Do you know where she is even? Your mum?’
‘Last news from Nana was that she was trying to get day release. I don’t think she can leave anymore.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. I think for some people you always find your way home. Gaol becomes like home. Reckon Kooris know how to stay locked up.’
Eddie pulled at a frayed part of his jeans.
‘But,’ August added, ‘I reckon we’re meant to stretch our wings, move around, it feels so natural to travel. I think Mum just couldn’t see herself out of a cage. Maybe she stopped waking up and thinking of somewhere else.’
He lay his arm across the back of her neck, grabbed her shoulder and pulled her into his chest. She let her head rest there. She realised she was desperate to be touched.
‘Families are tricky, Aug. My dad disappeared forever then just shows up for Mum’s finale.’
He ran one hand hard along the top of his thigh as if he were somehow cold in the high thirties.
‘I’m sorry.’
She looked at him playfully, wanted to forget the muddied water, the diesel, the dirt, the flesh that she was beginning to taste and smell again, wanted to wash it out of her mouth. ‘Let’s have another drink!’
‘Ah, you haven’t changed after all!’
She hadn’t, she thought. She still needed to be numb. Her drink of choice was always oblivion. She couldn’t bear to feel so much and they each drank another beer hastily. They wanted the same thing that they both didn’t want to admit.
August walked to the stereo and skipped the song on his phone. ‘Better Man’ flooded through the speakers. The sun was high and streamed through the skylight, a column of white light fell against the way ahead of her. Eddie’s shadow came behind her, his arm reached around her waist and slid the volume up. August sculled the beer while he stood close, not touching her. She stood her bottle atop the speaker and turned into him.
Avoiding his eyes, she looked at his lips as he mouthed the lyric waiting.
August reached her face up and kissed him hard on the mouth. He pulled her so their hips pressed against each other. His mouth was soft, the short stubble on his face brushed around her lips and didn’t hurt.
He picked her up, their teeth bumped. Her toes barely off the floor, he carried her blindly down the hallway and together they fell onto his bed.
They were on their sides, facing each other. He held her around the middle, tight and kind at the same time and mirrored everything she did, and she mirrored everything he did. His hand on her waist, her hand on his waist. Her hand smoothing up his back, his hand smoothing up hers. His lips on her neck, behind her ear and her lips on his neck, behind his ear. It tasted like salt. His breath turned into a groan. His hand on the small of her back, her hand on the small of his and with one hand he unclasped her bra, then unbuttoned her blouse.
A metronome ticked faster through their kissing that was full of wet hot breath and needing. It all felt synchronised, as natural as swimming.
She tugged at his waistband and he stood up flinging each of his cap boots against the wall. Quickly, he dropped his underwear and jeans and kicked them across the floorboards. He stood naked, unashamed, fine hair ringed his nipples, a line spread from his penis almost to his navel. He smiled like a question; she returned the smile like an answer.
From the end of the bed he crawled slowly above August as she eased her neck into the pillows and closed her eyes. He kissed down to a cup between her abdomen and hip. ‘This,’ he said, and licked the skin.
She looked down.
The muscles across his back shifted with the movement of his arms. There was a line of tanned skin at the back of his neck. He unbuttoned the top of her jeans, slipped his fingers between the denim and her like testing the heat of bathwater, as if he feared it was too hot. He kissed her and she flexed her hips away to stop his hand from going any lower, guiding him to stay high. As soon as his fingers touched her clitoris pins and needles started from the bottom of her feet, the palms of her hands, filling out the rest of her body. Like she was being dipped into the stars, like sherbet and Pop Rocks on the inside of her skin. Her legs and arms became heavy, the same way grief felt, and for a moment she wondered whether she was actually feeling sad, and not pleasured.
He kept one hand wedged in against her and took the side of her neck with the other, his mouth on hers was wetter and hotter. Then he rested his face into the side of her neck for a moment. Further down his tongue circled each of her breasts and down again the length of her arm until he reached the hand. He turned his head, opened his mouth and bit into the inner skin of her forearm, softly first and then his eyes looked up at hers as if asking if it was okay, waiting for that little nod from her. August nodded. He bit harder and harder, then stopped and sucked at the skin. Kissed it better. He pushed off the mattress with his lower body and sat at the end of the bed with bent knees, his chest was upright. Above her his fingers worked at the zipper of her jeans.
He looked at her face. ‘I want you, August Gondiwindi.’
‘Wait,’ she whispered.
He stood off the mattress and pulled under her knees to draw her to the edge of the bed and buried his face into the parting of her jean buttons. He kept moving and kissing the curve in her. Kissing what curve he could find.
‘Wait.’ She wanted to be drunk. She wanted not to feel it all, not to become something else, let go, transform. Not to fall into the act where Eddie’s body was just another, blended into the memories and desires and smells of others.
‘For what?’ he looked up from her bare torso. ‘Another ten years? All I’ve wanted – is to do this to you.’ He grunted then. He looked back at her face, she nodded, relinquished.
She groaned and lifted her arm and inspected the bite mark. It was faint and didn’t break the skin. A clearing opened in her mind, in it a memory lodged clear of Jedda and her fighting.
August had screamed out to their nana, she felt the yelp at her throat then, ‘Jedda bit me!’ And Elsie appeared in her mind, she was there in the room telling Jedda off for playing savage, then took August’s wrist and inspected the bite mark on her arm. She could see the front-tooth gap in the skin, the gap that Jedda didn’t have, but that August did. Elsie told the girls to get to the bathroom and there she squeezed a full tube of toothpaste onto the bowl of the sink. Elsie told Jedda to help August put the paste into the tube and told them both, a punishment for August, a lesson for Jedda that, ‘It’s impossible to unsay the things you shouldn’t.’
August wanted to keep collapsing into the sheets, but her mind was tracking. She gently pushed Eddie’s head from her, shifted in the bed and began to tell him that story.
‘Shh,’ he said, and tried to lean her back, kissing her neck, coaxing her to come with him.
‘I don’t want it,’ she said, the words dropping from her mouth like heavy rocks into calm water.
He pushed off the bed swift and stood. His penis, in a spread of fine brown hair, was full and quivered above his thigh. ‘What do you want?’ He looked as confused as August was.
She didn’t know what she wanted. But somewhere she knew she didn’t want the blindness of fucking. Of feeling. Perhaps, she thought, she was too used to feeling the ache of never being satisfied.
‘Yesterday, you said stay. But the tin mine?’
‘Stay in the continent, yeah! Move to the city with me!’
‘And what if Jedda came back here? What if she came home and no one was here?’
‘Is this a joke?’
‘And just forget about Prosperous? Because I don’t know who I am without this place.’ August said the thing before she knew it was true. ‘Because some people have nowhere else to go back to ever. Just the idea of Prosperous here, when I was away, was a comfort. It’s a place I could always come back to. All that childhood stuff, stuff your parents keep for you, stuff from when you were a kid – there’s nothing of that for me.’
He was yelling now, ‘But you never came back.’
‘If I wanted to though, I could’ve,’ and she too yelled. ‘I’m back now!’
‘That’s part of being an adult, August, you make your own place to come back to. You think I want to be in my childhood home forever?’ He slapped his arms against the bed. ‘Fucking hell, August! You want the truth?’
‘Truth.’ She parroted the word. She pulled the sheet over her chest, not knowing at all if he had the answer. Then she whispered, ‘Why are you angry?’
‘The truth! The truth is that I wanted to run away, too. Why did you get to leave? Why did everyone else get to move on but me?’ He threw his arms into the air and slapped them back down on the mattress, paced back and forth near the foot of the bed and punched the wall. Flakes of plasterboard split into the warm air.
He looked at her then, and spoke through his teeth. ‘You want to know the truth? I wanted to sell the property. I wanted to get paid finally. A fucking wage from this constant slog that gave me nothing. I used to work the field and look over at Prosperous every fucking day, waiting for you to come back. You want the truth? Prosperous is a dwelling! They fucking surveyed the property – it’s not even a house! It was a slave yard, August, where all your grannies and poppies learnt to be servants and fence builders and if my fucking grandad hadn’t let the Gondis live at that dwelling, you’d all be homeless drunks like the Vegemite Valley lot. We saved you! You want that truth? I’ll show you the fucking truth.’
He ran out of the room and August threw the covers back to find her bra and get the hell out of there.
He stormed back in before she could leave, yet he was slower, sure now and still naked, and emptied a box of books onto the floor. He snatched a pile of envelopes without addresses on them. ‘I’ve been packing this whole house, haven’t I! Reliable Eddie! You want to know what I found? I found this before your pop died! I didn’t even have the guts to show him! Here! I’ll read it to you!’
He jumped on the bed, standing over her feet. Their legs were touching, their bodies separate. His face was flush with adrenaline, she cowered into the pillows. He pulled out the first small card from the envelope. ‘Thank you for your contribution to the Falstaff Collection. The Museum Australia. Submission: Message stick, elaborately carved with kangaroos, emus, snakes. Number, 1. Dated: 500 years. Axe heads, approximate number 10; Anvil stones, 5. Dated: 400 years.’
His legs were shaking, his hands and voice too.
He ripped out the next card, ‘Submission: Wooden club, elaborately carved with tribal incisions. Number, 2. Dated: circa, 5000 years. Shield, engraved with pattern, Number, 1 70cm × 11cm. Dated: 3000 years.’
He ripped out another. They were both trembling now. The taste was nausea.
‘You want to hit me?’ he screamed. ‘This is where all your culture is! Under fucking glass! The dates! My fuckhead father donated the last one! In 1980 – just before we were born! Submission: Wooden shovel, intricately carved with brolgas, used for digging earth mounds. Number, 1. Dated 7000 years. Milling grinding stones, approximate number, 35; Anvil stones, 7; Fire stones, 30. Evidence of agricultural activity dated: circa, 10 000 years.’
When he’d read the last card he ripped the quilt away from the mattress and slapped the envelopes onto the bed, and walked, inconsolable, out of the room. August pulled the sheet off her body and grabbed her clothes, dressed and ran. They both knew everything had been said.
She hurried through Southerly’s English garden to the other side of the low fence. The dirt was hot, unbearable to walk on with bare feet, but she wanted to feel it, feel the boil of the ground, flinch over the protruding gum roots. She wanted the bull ants to stun her. They fled up the roots instead.
She took a good look at Prosperous from the dirt driveway. It was a relic, not a house. Above it, she imagined she’d spot birds of prey, but no birds at all circled in the white-hot zenith. Only on the roof gutter a lone shrike, cloaked in sun, its head cocked, watched.