SEVEN TEARS

Someone’s humpy was where her humpy was supposed to be. Caddy squatted on her heels at a safe distance and stared at the pile of junk someone had thrown together.

When she woke up at Lanh’s this morning, sweaty and cramped, squeezed into his armchair while he slept on the mattress, she’d decided it was time to find a new home. Since she and Ray had got back from San Francisco she’d been half – maybe even three-quarters – thinking about coming back to Newell, building something on the old spot.

She squatted and watched as a family of Africans – three kids and their dad, it looked like – came out of the humpy and scoured the area for firewood. This was stupid; it was a stupid place to live. She knew that.

‘Hey, mate,’ she stretched up off her heels and waved to the dad. ‘Mate.’

‘What?’

‘It’s not safe here,’ she called across to him.

‘What?’

She walked closer, only a couple of metres away. ‘It’s not safe here, it floods. I used to live right where your place is. It got washed away, just a couple of weeks ago. It happens a lot. Floods. The river.’

‘Thank you. I know. It’s safer than in the city, for them. Thank you.’

‘Yeah. Yeah right. OK. Well.’ She trailed off, gave a kind of half wave and headed back to the footbridge.

She should move back to Yarraville.

She should what? No she shouldn’t. It was a burned-out hell hole. She should move to the city, to Fitzroy Gardens or something.

God, she couldn’t bear it. Fitzroy Gardens? Thousands of other people? All those families. All those children. She should move back to Yarraville.

That’s nuts.

It’s quiet there. We’d be alone.

We?

I mean I. Sorry.

Alone and eaten by mutant foxes. Sounds great!

She could at least go look, she thought. Couldn’t she?

So she didn’t take the footbridge. She started walking along the river, heading south-west. The slick, green slide of the Maribyrnong, punctured every now and again by a popping jellyfish against the surface, cormorants still hanging their wings out to dry on rotting jetty posts, rabbits skittering in the weeds under the road bridge.

Half an hour of walking and the path faded out by the old cotton mill, her way blocked by tumbled fencing and rusted out shipping containers. She headed away from the river, towards where the park used to be. The south sides of buildings were soot blackened, windows cracked or smashed out, boarded up, progressively blacker and blacker until, around where the Commercial Hotel once was, everything was crumpled burned brick and weatherboard, piles of broken buildings. Flattened.

Was there really any point looking? What would there be to see? Just more of this, only worse. Why would she want to see that?

What else was she going to do? Go live in fake San Francisco? It was more than two years and this was the closest she’d been. She should at least go look.

Two years, and no one had even bothered clearing the road. They’d just written it all off, this part of town, assumed everyone was dead or would fend for themselves. Which they had – anything useful and moveable had been scrounged and sold, or used to rebuild. But that still left an awful lot of stuff to pick her way over and around.

There was a crater where the tanks had been and – she skirted round the edge of it, looking for signs of her street – where her house had been. A crater. That’s what there was there. Not even the burned-out shell of her home. She’d picked a bit of gum blossom on her way along the river, trying not to think too hard about what she was doing, and now she threw it into the oily sludge that oozed in the bottom of the hole.

‘There you go, Harry. I brought you flowers.’

She’d been thinking about living in her ruined house. She’d had some idea in her head, hadn’t she, that she could just stay there and perhaps slowly die. No one would notice. She’d be in her home, with her Harry. She could forget all this crap, all this looking for somewhere to sleep, for something to drink and eat, a way to make some money, a place to get out of the sun, a wash. Just forget it. Lie here till some mutant fox or feral cat came and ate her face. That’s what she’d hoped for. And she couldn’t even do that.

Fucking oil company.

At the edge of the crater she sat and stared up at the corpse of the Westgate Bridge, its pylons dangerously crumbled by the explosion, the mouth of the river choked up with chunks of fallen concrete and rusting cars. They’d blocked the bridge off afterwards, talked about repairing it, but no one had gotten around to doing anything about it. No one much wanted to come to the west anymore anyway. Still, the bridge looked good, the setting sun pulling silver gleams from its slumped suspension wires, casting the whole thing soft orange. It was almost pretty.

She needed a place to sleep. She couldn’t sleep here, no matter how much she wanted to, so she pulled her bag back onto her shoulders and headed down towards Stony Creek. She walked west until the black took on a thin green and red sheen, the eucalypts sprouting regrowth and a trickle of water down the creek bed. It didn’t feel safe: any people camped here would have to be insane and desperate, and there were the foxes of course. But considering she’d been planning to die half an hour ago, it would probably do. She found a small copse of trees where she’d be relatively hidden, took her bottle of water and an oat bar from her pack and lay on the ground to watch the stars come out. Down here, by the creek, not so many camps around, and the sky looked almost dark. She could swear she saw three separate stars. Three. Knowing that was about as good as it was going to get, she closed her eyes and went to sleep.

She had expected to dream of Harry; maybe the fire, but hopefully something nostalgic like the two of them on the front step, drinking beer from the same longneck, watching the sun set over the bridge. Instead she dreamed of people pulling themselves from the oily crater, their shadows stuck in the slick mud, shadows tangled around their feet and pulling them back down into the ooze. She stood on the edge of the crater, distributing scissors, and as the people cut themselves free she collected their shadows and boxed them up. Somewhere behind her, Ray was writing numbers on each box with a thick pen, stopping every few minutes to make out with the girl with the pillbox hat. The people kept coming and she couldn’t find any more scissors. The people kept coming and their shadows were dragging them down.

When she woke, her face was still intact. There was a hot wind coming from the north and she could smell bushfires on it, the sun burning red through the first traces of smoke. She rolled onto her stomach, dislodging a cluster of flies, and looked at the poking struts of blackened building, nudging up over the horizon. The shadows were still clogging her thoughts. Was Harry somewhere in Suspended Imaginums? What had happened to his shadow, to Skerrick’s shadow? He probably hadn’t left one. Everything was too black for shadows. She rested her head on her forearms for a minute, allowed herself seven tears. When they were done, she sat up, shook her head and wiped her hands across her face.

‘OK Caroline. What are you going to do?’

Farren. She should get Ray to rustle up Farren. Seriously, that was the way to go. She needed some steady cash. Maybe he’d set her up in an apartment with water, take her out for dinner a few times a week. Maybe they could stay at The Grand again. She took a drink from her water bottle, pulled on her pack and started walking back towards the city, trying to beat the heat and the thickening smoke.