‘Maybe.’
‘You know what I think? I think he makes you see yourself a little clearer than you would like to. And that gives you the shits. No one wants to see themselves for what they really are.’
‘Do you think it’s alright to do whatever you need to do to survive?’
‘No. No, I don’t. But let’s put it in a bit of perspective, you took some food from another man. You didn’t kill him.’
I don’t say anything.
‘Did you?’ asks Alan.
‘No. I don’t think so. Lucy hit him over the head with a cricket bat. He was going to shoot me in the head.’
Alan laughs, a generous, cracking sound. ‘Jeez. Doesn’t sound like a very nice bloke.’
‘It’s weird, ’cause, you know before all this, he was. I liked him. I’d known him since I was a kid.’
‘Well, I’ve said it before: wars makes us all bastards. Or maybe Shakespeare said that.’
‘You think this is a war?’
‘Oh, it’s a war, son. Only we don’t know who the enemy is.’
Later I draw my mother’s apartment building from memory. I draw it as if it’s full of water, like a fish tank. Through the windows seaweed grows and fish swim. I don’t know why I’m drawing water all the time. But I know that if you breathe in underwater you die.
Lucy knows everybody in the car park by name. She goes around talking to people and joins in with a group of women who sit together and knit. There are thirteen little camps like ours, some are families, some are friends. One group are retirees from the same retirement village. They bribed their way across the border in the village’s minivan. Some families have children. We are the only group of teenagers.
Sometimes in the afternoons there is a soccer match. The four of us play and Max is better at it than I remember. Sometimes there is an argument over a foul and Alan has to step in to break it up. Sometimes things get so heated the game has to be stopped. We lie on our backs after each game, sweaty and panting and looking up at the concrete ceiling as if it were a blue sky.
Noll approaches me after lunch. I am swilling detergent in a saucepan when he comes up beside me.
‘I want to apologise about the other night. I didn’t mean to cause… unease. I know you’re stressed out about your mum. You don’t need to hear me going on about the frailties of the human condition.’
And I feel pissed off again because he has been the one adult enough to apologise and now I feel like a petty kid.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I say. I want to add that I’m sorry for being a tool, but the words don’t come.
Lucy isn’t around in the afternoon. I ask Noll and Max if they have seen her, but they haven’t. I wander around the car park, thinking maybe she is talking with Rosa somewhere, but I don’t find her. Then I remember and I go up the concrete stairs to the shopping centre. As soon as I push open the door I can hear it: the beautiful, delicate notes humming on the air. I walk through the cavern of the shopping centre to the piano. She sits, back straight as a dancer’s, moving her head gently with the undulation of the music. I sit next to her while she plays and when the song is finished she rests her hands on her lap, head bowed.
‘Do you think they’re dead?’ she asks.
‘Who?’
‘My family.’
‘No. I don’t know.’
‘You know, they used to tell me I could do anything, my parents. They said I could be anything, do anything I wanted to do, as long as I worked hard for it. I believed it. I believed that if I worked hard enough I could get a spot at the Sydney Conservatory of Music. I would become a composer because, you know, there are a lot of jobs around for that now.’ She sighs. ‘What a presumptuous dickhead.’
‘How does wanting to study music make you a presumptuous dickhead?’
‘I don’t know. But I thought I was entitled to it. Just like I thought I was entitled to good food and a nice house and nice clothes. My family had three sponsor kids, for God’s sake. Surely
‘Look, I don’t know if you’re a presumptuous dickhead or not.’ Lucy punches me softly in the arm. ‘But isn’t there some philosophy about how it’s the arts that separate humans from animals?’
‘Really? I thought it was not eating our young.’
‘You know what I mean. Just because music and art and stuff doesn’t feed you, doesn’t mean it’s not important. It still kind of makes us who we are. Is that way too corny?’
‘Almost.’ She smiles. ‘You are very sweet, though, you know that?’
‘You say that to all the guys you flee nuclear winters with.’
She leans over and kisses me on the lips. ‘And you still taste good,’ she says, and I feel myself blush, just like that day so long ago on the bus.
Thirty-six
Ration day. This time I head out with Lucy and keep my thoughts about her safety to myself. She hasn’t been out like this in the daylight (I use this term loosely) before. We walk along the street and she gapes at the state of the place, the rubbish, the desperate chaos of it all.
The army truck is parked in the same place as it was last time. The line for food is three blocks long. We inch forward at a glacial pace. The worst part is the cold. It eats at your toes and fingers first, then moves on for its share of your limbs. People grow impatient, sighing loudly and muttering ‘Oh,
‘Jeez, there better not be any illegals here,’ says someone loudly. ‘I bet there bloody is, didn’t take this long last week.’
‘Yeah,’ says Lucy. ‘They’re taking our share, scum!’
People jeer in agreement. I elbow her, only encouraging her more.
‘Should go back to where they bloody came from!’ she says.
‘Too right, sweetheart!’ says someone and everyone else murmurs in agreement. The line crawls forward. Two hours later we are metres from the truck. An army officer hands a bag of rice to a man ahead of us.
‘Is that it?’ he says. ‘That’s a fucking crime!’
‘Move on,’ replies an officer standing beside the line.
‘No, I won’t move on. Give us another bag, that’s a fucking disgrace, that is.’
‘MOVE ON.’
‘I’m not going anywhere, mate, until I get my share. Wouldn’t feed a rabbit on that.’
‘Move on or I will arrest you.’
‘Go on then, arsehole. Arrest me.’ The guy shoves the officer in the chest. Three more behind him join in, pushing and shoving the army guy before he has a chance to reach for his gun. The other officer grabs one of them, punches him in the jaw. And then, like a school of sharks after a drop of blood, the people around us start to yell and push, storming the truck, clambering on, grabbing at food. I grip Lucy’s hand as the crowd surges around us. People snatch food from one another, men throw punches, women claw. Others squeal and cry. We are caught in the thick of people as they screech and scramble, kicking, gouging. Lucy is pulled from my grip by the tide of bodies. I scream her name, pushing against limbs. And then there is a loud hissing sound and a mist of
