The Wish Kin (12 page)

Jeune stands over him. He looks at her, thinks not of his pain, his illness, but looks only at Jeune. He thinks she is the most beautiful creature he has ever seen. How she looks down at him with her strange hazel eyes, how she smiles so that he can see the little gap between her front teeth! And hear her pretty voice as she goodmornings him!

‘How are you?' he hears her ask. It is like a gentle sound that emerges from a tunnel into the open world around. He lets the sound settle on him, lets it fall into his ears and powder his skin. It makes him want to smile, and smile he does on hearing so gentle, so pretty a sound.

‘Gander,' he tries to say, but his voice is thick, unintelligible. He knows she does not understand, hates the fact that he sounds so sluggish.

She strokes his hand briefly then moves away, out of his line of vision. He tries to raise himself that he might see where she has gone but, like yesterday morning, he finds he cannot lift his head at all.

‘He's really sick,' he hears her say. ‘He can't travel.' He hears the door close, low voices murmuring.

His dreams are peppered now with images of Jeune, with Jeune herself, for often he does not know if he is awake or sleeping. He sees her move about him, sees her busy herself with cloths and bandages, sees her sit by his side and play with the smooth edge of the sheet. Sometimes she takes his hand and strokes his fingers with her thumb. And when she looks at him with those strange hazel eyes he cannot look away.

Lydia comes into the room at times, and Moss. Will he does not see. None of them speak when they are with him, as though silence is best for the sick. Strange, for it is as though Jeune's voice has only just uttered the prettiest of sounds, as though she has only just sung the song of a lark or a nightingale. But he opens his eyes, or thinks he does, and Jeune is not even in the room.

At one point in this strange state he hears – but as though from worlds away – the sound of pieces of explosion, of bullets carving the air, of hard metal rounds cutting through wood, glancing off iron. He knows he is worried, anxious, but strangely he does not actually feel these emotions. What is happening? he wonders. He tries to ask the others, Will and Moss,
when they come into the room and start to lift him onto their shoulders. But again, again, he finds he cannot, finds he is yet unable to make his mouth, his tongue, work in the way they should to form the words. He floats above the shoulders of Will and Moss, a silver haze about his eyes, and drifts back into sleep, or something that it is like sleep.

Colm is in his small glass cube, spinning across the black bowl of sky. The stars behind him whisper and give a gentle light. He is curled up: his knees are folded against his chest, his head is quiet and bowed. He is enclosed, restrained. He curls his toes under and presses himself into each of the hard corners of the box, presses himself so that he can feel the containment of it, the tightness and the closeness of this strong, clear shell. On his quiet, sleeping face he feels a smile spread.

He wakes. His legs are pulled up against his torso, his arms crossed over his ankles. It is as in his dream, he realises, except for the softness that cushions his head. There is a smell too. Sweet, like the oranges back at home would produce when they were hanging ripe from the branch. He shifts slightly and feels as he does so a gentle brushing against his cheek. He opens his eyes and he is looking at the world through a curtain of shining copper tresses. He moves his gaze upwards and meets Jeune's, meets her eyes of hazel with his own of blue. She is closer now than she has been before, and he can see not only the little gap between her teeth
and the sobriety of her eyebrows, but too the dappling of freckles across her nose and cheeks, and the gentle cleft in the ball of her chin.

‘You're awake at last,' she says, and her hair brushes again at his face. ‘It's been a long time.'

He smiles at her and finds his voice. It is dry and croaky, but comprehensible. ‘How long?' he asks.

‘Three days.'

Her face is so close, her lap in which his head is cradled so soft. He is blissfully, agonisingly happy.

‘You've been terribly ill. Do you feel a little better now?'

Colm nods. He cannot bear speaking, cannot bear hearing any other sound than that of the voice of this sweet creature above and around him. But he wants her to speak again, wants to hear the silver bells peal once more from her lyrical throat so he makes some sort of answer.

‘My father told me that once men wrote sonnets for young maidens they loved, so that, even when the maid grew old and withered, she would always be beautiful in the words of the poet.'

Jeune throws back her head and laughs. She leans forward once more and her hair falls again over Colm's face. He feels that he is in a copper cocoon, scented with oranges, and that Jeune is his muse. The words assemble themselves in his mind, and the first line of a sonnet appears: Was ever there so fragrant a cocoon!

‘You're a funny boy!' she says. And her voice rings
out like the purest of chimes from the highest of mountains. Colm's limbs feel strange, feel as though he is sinking. And his heart, full of poetry, as though it is about to burst in his chest. Was ever there a voice that told so sweet!

‘We're here.'

Only now, only now when he hears Will's rough voice from the front seat, does he realise that they are in the truck, that they have been driving, and that they have stopped. Jeune lifts her head, taking with her the fragrant copper cocoon. Colm sits up slowly and looks out the window. He sees nothing but small barren rises of earth and a few sticks where houses might once have been.

‘Where's here?' he asks.

‘Where I leave you,' replies Will. ‘Burren.'

The truck stops. Lydia and Moss in the front seat wake and stretch. They climb out of the truck and Colm sees that Lydia's wrist is bandaged, that Moss wears a cotton patch across his previously wounded eye.

‘What happened to you?' Colm asks, worried.

‘Raiders,' says Moss. ‘They came while you were sleeping. Only two of them and Will held them off.'

A memory of gunfire emerges in Colm's mind, a memory of gunfire and of being carried, floating, through the air.

‘Did you carry me out to the truck?' he asks Moss and Will.

‘We did,' says Moss. Colm looks at Will but the
young man is turned away, busy under the bonnet of the truck.

‘Thank you,' says Colm.

‘Come on,' says Jeune. ‘It is too hot to stand out here.'

Will slams down the bonnet and they follow Jeune along a faded path past scattered fragments of rubbish. Colm walks slowly, unsteadily. Lydia takes his arm, gives him strength. He looks at her wrist.

‘Are you gander, Lyd?' he asks as they walk.

‘I'm gander,' she says. ‘I was running and I slipped. Landed on my hand. Just a sprain.'

‘And Moss?'

‘Not sure. There was quite a bit of activity in a short time. I think he may have run into something as we were leaving.'

‘Was it when he was carrying me?' Colm asks.

‘No. It happened after that.'

Jeune stops before one of the rises of earth, before what appears to be a small wooden door set into the side of the little hill.

‘Wait over there,' she says, and points to another of the rises. They position themselves behind it, peer carefully over its crest. Colm breathes heavily, spent from the brief hike.

Jeune knocks smartly on the door. She stands still for quite some time before the door is opened and a woman, youngish and lightly powdered with white dust, appears. There is a brief exchange, then the woman stretches her thick arms around Jeune's neck
and kisses her. They speak further, the woman and Jeune, and then Jeune turns and beckons them to come to her.

‘This is Freya,' she says as the others approach. ‘My aunt.'

She introduces them one by one. Freya nods and smiles to each of them in turn, then leads them through the doorway, down the corridor beyond it and into a deep, cool underground room, cleverly lit by inconspicuous skylights. She brings them cool drinks and plies them with little yellow cakes. Then, when it is clear that they have eaten and drunk their fill, she sits before them with her hands on her dusty knees and asks what has brought them to Burren.

Moss sings sadly the story of that terrible night. His voice is low and quiet, his face almost expressionless. His hands rest unmoving in his lap, and only occasionally does he lift his gaze from the floor. He touches lightly from time to time the grubby bandage over his eye. When he does so he winces faintly, as though he is in some pain. But on he sings and on, of raiders and of gunfire and of Will, brave, brave Will, keeping the intruders at bay with a shotgun from the truck. He sings of smoke, of the sudden flare of brightness, of the gradual realisation of a fire that must be fled. On and on, and Jeune, he sings, is with them now, will stay with them, her home destroyed, her life in cinders, the petrol tanks below the ground a terrible explosion in the night.

Their own little fire beneath the cooking pot burns slowly to ash, the day disappears from the room and Freya lights the candles in their brass holders against the walls.

And Colm, ailing still and tired, his head spinning once again into achedness, slides into semi-sleep, listens to the last of the song through the thickness of his thoughts, through the encroaching booming patterns of his dreams.

When Colm thinks back on his journey from Hirrup's Range to Wonding, he recalls this time at Burren as the happiest. Perhaps it was because of the number of them hidden deep beneath the surface of the earth, which lent him a sense of safety, of protection, and, thence, of happiness. Perhaps it was the kindness of Jeune's Aunt Freya, who mothered them, coddled them, made much of them all, with her kind words, with her generous affection. Or perhaps it was Jeune herself, who smiled at him whenever she was nearby, who walked about the dugout with her long brown limbs bare and dusty from the white walls, who sat by the fire with her copper-coloured hair spilling about her face.

They stay here and they stay here with Freya in her cosy white cave. Apart from the first night when Moss sings of the raid on Jeune's home, none of them
mention what has gone before, or speak of what is to come. For a while it seems as though all of them have forgotten that there is something to be done, that there is a place to get to, that there is much travelling yet to be undertaken. Even Colm, so intent and fixed to this point, no longer wants even to notice the fact that he is not thinking of what is still to be accomplished, and loses himself in the slow, quiet beauty of the days beneath the ground.

And Will is yet with them, days away now from Kulwurra and absorbed in his new life with Freya as though he has known no other. Will has taken upon himself the role of man, the role of provider. He leaves every morning while it is still dark and sets out into the desert in search of food for them all. He returns in the late afternoon with a wallaby, a goanna, a brown feral chicken, which he bestows upon Freya with a look of pride, with a puffing-out of his chest. She kisses his cheek in thanks and serves him drinks, and he sits, weary, whittling away at a piece of wood and listening to the chatter around him.

Once, when he is better, when his wound has healed and the strange weight in his limbs has gone, Colm offers to accompany Will on these expeditions, but he is refused, and in such a way that he does not offer again. Colm is sensitive, canny, and sees in Will a change of some sort, a secret growth. He is quiet, watchful, but is not unhappy with Will's treatment of him.

He stays instead with Moss, who spends the days working in and around the dugout, reinforcing walls, building fences, boring wells. Colm likes the hard, physical work with his friend; likes, too, the times of rest when Jeune or Lydia meets them under the midday sun with a bowl of soup, a cut of bread, an unction for Moss's eye; enjoys the familiarity, the conversation, the laughter. The evenings of sitting together telling tales of the day, and of the days before they knew one another, he considers golden.

And of course he thinks over and over, alone in his bed at night, of Jeune, of the long suppleness of her waist, of the fine sculptured arch of her foot, of the graceful elegance of her carriage. And there in the dark he composes for her sonnet after sonnet after sonnet.

• • •

Lydia comes to him one day, in the midst of this wonder, this brightness. He is splitting wood for the fire, and piling the sticks into a barrow. Lydia carries their lunch in a piece of cloth, and brother and sister sit in the shade of the woodpile and consume the meal together.

‘How many days have we been here now, Colm?' Lydia asks.

Colm is silent. He gnaws at a hard brown rusk and tries to remember. ‘Not days,' he says. ‘Weeks.'

‘Weeks?'

‘I think so.'

The ground simmers beneath the sun. Silvery mares' tails rise from its baking surface. The children draw their legs into the shade to stop them from burning.

‘It is like a dream,' says Lydia. A lone sulphur-crested cockatoo flies overhead, screeching for its lost tribe.

They do not look at one another. Nor do they speak. They finish their meal. Lydia folds the cloth and stands, looks towards the east.

‘How far away?'

‘Far, far.'

Colm watches his sister walk slowly back to the dugout. There is more flesh on her bones, he can see that, and she seems stronger now than she has for a long time. His heart hurts, though, as he watches her. He knows that all is not yet right.

• • •

That night Moss sings to them a journey song, and Jeune dances with her face aflame. She is dressed in a fine sheath of white, made for her by Freya from fabric stored up long ago. The sheath is soft and filmy, like a floating cloud, Colm thinks, and it twists about her body as she twists, falls back from her arms as they move through the air and gathers in folds at her shoulders. She wears pinned to her breast a small silver disc that catches the light and sends bright shafts skating across the white walls. The whole room is dancing, thinks Colm, and he
cannot stop looking at the vision before him, at the light round the room, at the brightness of fire. On and on sings Moss, on and on dances Jeune. The girl fills the space with her brilliance, her whiteness, reaches out to the others, to Freya, to Lydia, to Will, to Colm, and pulls them up on the floor beside her, so all are dancing, all of them, to the wonderful low tone of Moss's song, to Jeune's glorious joy.

What is it that means a person can so close their mind to a past hope they almost forget what it was they ever hoped for? What is it that means a person can turn so completely from this one thing that it's hard to recall it even existed? What is it that means something previously thought of as incredibly important can suddenly mean nothing at all? Colm knows these are the questions he should be asking himself in the dark before sleeping, but instead he lets his mind fall to thoughts of Jeune, pictures and images and feelings that he has gathered in the course of the day, of the days, and stored as though in a chest of dazzling jewels. He feels at night that he is opening the chest, the very chest that has lain hidden on the bed of the sea from before he was born, and that now here he is, slowly easing up the lid, lifting away the tissue of the day, taking out Jeune with her ready smile, with her sober brow, with her strange hazel eyes; Jeune with her bare brown limbs and her face lifted to the sun, walking across the dry desert in the afternoon; Jeune dancing in that cloud of cloth, arms long and slim,
hands pushing up her copper hair, feet stepping beautifully over the dusty white floor.

What is it that means a person can forget all else in the presence of this one fair thing?

Lydia comes to him again. This time he is scraping at the dirt with a spade, marking where he and Moss will dig another of the deep wells that ring the area in their endless attempts to source water. He looks up when his sister approaches, smiles, and takes the package of food from her hands. Again they sit in the shade and eat their meal together. He knows Lydia wants to speak to him of the thing he has been avoiding, but he shifts and darts, dodges her questions, her sharp eyes. But his heart remains troubled, is not true in the way it once was, and he knows things will not last much longer.

But the days, once so dry and hot, now seem bright to him, extraordinary. He walks with Jeune along the boundary fence in the early evening when the heat is lessening, the chill of the night descending. They pass through the old forest where scraps of kindling still scatter the earth, and they gather these into baskets, aprons.

‘What will you do, Jeune?' he asks her one evening as they walk. The sky is low above them. The first of the stars appear like pricks of light on a deepening blue curtain. Jeune's temples are moist from the day, her hair sprigged with brown twigs. She looks, Colm thinks, like some otherworldly creature, like a wood
nymph, perhaps, a dryad. ‘About your father, I mean?' he finishes.

As soon as he says the word –
father
– the word he has barely even allowed himself to think let alone to articulate, he is overcome by an extreme sense of urgency. He hardly hears Jeune's answer for the unexpected tumult that he finds has erupted inside him, for the noise that seems suddenly to be deafening him. His legs tremble, he thinks he will fall. For a moment he feels as though he is standing upside down on the earth, his head into the ground, his feet without foundation in the air. He stumbles, loses his grip on the ground, and grabs at Jeune's arm.

‘What is it?' she asks, alarmed. ‘Are you not well? Has your sickness returned?'

Colm steadies himself, finds his legs again. He is shocked that a single word can have such an effect upon him. But he knows that it is not the word in itself but what the word stands for, what the word asks of him. And he knows, too, that there is little time left.

Jeune leads him, shaking, back to the dugout. He sits by the fire and drinks broth. His hands tremble. Jeune is concerned, strokes his arm, holds her palm to his forehead. Freya fusses about him with cool cloths and strange-smelling unctions. Will stands by the fireplace and looks on anxiously.

Colm is ashamed, embarrassed. He grins, says he is gander, and carries in a load of firewood from outside
to prove the fact. The others look at him, unsure. He keeps grinning, even cracks a joke.

That night, when the fire has burned down and the lamplight snuffed and all of them lie in their beds waiting for sleep, Colm tries to speak of what they must do. He uses the Inner Speech for the first time in weeks.

Lydia,
he says.
Moss. Are you awake?

They answer him,
Yes
.

Then he is silent and doesn't know what to say.

What is it, Colm?
he hears Lydia ask.

He is quiet, uncertain.

Colm?

That is Moss from the room by the door. Colm lies on his back and looks up at the ceiling. The white dust makes its own strange light in the blackness of night.

Are you gander?
he hears Lydia ask.

Yes,
he replies.

Can you not sleep?

Colm shifts in his sheets. He wishes he hadn't spoken. He wants to return to forgetfulness and so does not respond.

Colm?
he hears from the room by the door.

Colm bluffs, tries to think of something else, tries to fool them into thinking it is nothing, that it never was anything at all.

Sorry
, he says lamely.
I wasn't sure if I could still do it. The Inner Speech, I mean. Just wanted to check I hadn't gone rusty.

He feels terrible saying this. He is glad it is dark. He is glad the others can't see him. He knows they would see his lie.

Morning and the shafts of light fall in from the funnels in the ceiling. It is a Sunday, Freya tells them, and as such a day of rest. They walk, the six of them, to the far side of the town, to the eastern side, where the ground rises slowly to a small hill. They climb this hill, climb to its very crest, and look out over the other side. A deep gorge lies below them, a huge fissure in the land rimmed at its edges with green. Beyond this the walls open to a valley, thence, on the far horizon, to a plateau, its faces steep and sheer, its surface a tabletop. Colm is surprised.

‘Are we in the mountains?' he asks. ‘How else is it that we are up so high?'

‘It is strange, this place,' replies Freya. ‘It is as though a shelf of earth has been shaved from its surface, or a great chisel inserted into a crack and a mountain of soil prised out. See there, where the gorge is at its narrowest and a hint of green appears?' And they follow her finger with their eyes. ‘I've often wondered,' she continues, ‘whether there is water somewhere down there. It makes me think of rainforest.'

A picture paints itself in Colm's mind. It is something that he has seen in one of his father's books, surely, but for the moment that it floats before him, he is lost in it, transported. He is standing on a rock above a creek, the water pushing past on either side in small
silvery torrents. The creek is at the base of a gorge whose walls rise up like those in a grand cathedral. He looks heavenward; the sky is a scrape of blue far above him, the air on his lifted face is cool. Fragrant leafy trees tower above him, sift through their canopy the brightness, the heat, that exists beyond this grotto. His heart sings in his chest, his mouth opens and gives voice to his joy.

He sings a future song, there on the crest of the hill with his sister and friends at his side, with the gorge deep below him, with the plateau far to the east. He sings of the creek that he sees in the gorge, sings of it white like running ice moving over the mossy rocks, sings of it carving its way through the stone, making fast through the valley, sings of it forking now and spreading out across the plains, veins and veins of blue in the earth, covering the land and watering it. He sings of the gentle swell of the water as it widens into rivers, deepens and browns, sings of the silt that is stirred up, sings of the fish, the eels, the insects that make their home in its course, sings of the creatures that gather at its shores, that drink deep from its wells, that lift their heads then and trumpet their salute, bay and bark their thanks, their joy. He sings of the salting of the river as it reaches its mouth, sings of the silt changing to sand, of the little shells washing up. He sings of the river's last surge, sings of it fighting over the sandbar, sings of it wrestling with waves. A clash, he sings, white water breaks into the air, the pull beneath the surface
draws it out in threads and ribbons, rips it out from its long-known earthbound bed and transforms it now to the sea.

How much longer, Colm?
he hears as he drifts that night into sleep. He stares up at the ceiling, searching for stars through the little skylight over his head. He does not answer, does not even acknowledge the Speech, but knows by the weight of duty like a stone on his heart that it will not be much time more.

• • •

He walks with Jeune again, this time along the southern boundary of the village where he and Moss have been chopping wood for fence posts. The dugouts are behind them; before them lies a scrap of bush, greying and dry.

‘Your singing,' says Jeune. ‘Tell me about it.'