Listening to the the duster beating gently at the walls, she felt the desire to fall asleep in a house, in a room where people had been, where she could trick herself, in the moment before she fell, that her own breathing was multiplied by three.
She went out to the hallway and brushed the dust from herself and her pack as best she could. Back in the bedroom, she pulled off her rust-coloured gloves and bathed her eyes with gauze dipped in a capful of water. Rolled out the mat and sleeping bag on a solid patch of floor under the window and lay down with her boots on, with the gun and the knife and the torch at her side. She closed and opened her swollen eyes, her tearducts working to expel the grit. After a while she noticed a patch of wallpaper. Great tangled cups of flowers, creamy and tentacled. Magnolias. A flower of temperate climates. Did they still grow anywhere? There had been a painting of the same flowers in a pub where she and Val had stayed for a night somewhere on the circuit. Val had told her their name. He said they grew on trees in the place across the oceans where he grew up. Told her about their sweet cloudy smell and how the flowers would drop and bruise on the ground.
She remembered the pub because they almost never stayed in them. Val was still dry then. A room above the bar with two small squeaky beds and green bedspreads with tiny lumps that she ran under her fingers. The painting was on the wall facing her bed. In the drawer where the Bible should have been she found a paperback with an angry man holding a woman, her dress coming off her shoulders.
Romance, Val said when she showed him. You want to stay well clear of that shite, young one.
A deep verandah ran the length of the upstairs rooms. They could climb out onto it through their window. Val smoked out there and she watched the trucks appear as grey specks of dust that grew into shapes and noise.
She and Val didn’t eat dinner at the pub, they went to the cafe down the road, even though it cost more, but they did eat the free breakfast in the room for guests downstairs. Three kinds of cereal in plastic containers, and milk, and a big curving staircase that she went up and down, holding the bannister like a queen.
But the night before, the shouting and laughter from downstairs kept waking her up and Val was awake every time. She didn’t mind, it wasn’t that different from the circuit camps, but Val minded somehow. When a fight started and spilled out onto the road, he got up and stood at the window. After a while he sang to her, slow and tenderly in his smoker’s voice, a song called ‘The Parting Glass’, and she looked at the magnolia in the moonlight and heard his longing but didn’t understand it, and fell asleep.
Li opened her eyes into darkness. Someone was there. She swung up the torch and the gun in one movement and saw a woman in the doorway, holding an axe. Li got to her feet fast. They stood and watched each other.
There’s just three of us, the woman said.
That sound again, the one that had woken her. She looked past the woman and saw a man holding a baby in the doorway across the hall. It started crying properly, an aggrieved sound that carried. The man lifted it up to his shoulder, keeping his eyes on Li. His palm made circles on its back.
Li lowered the pistol. I don’t have bullets.
The woman said, He has colic. Or reflux. Something.
Her skin and clothes were shrouded in red, the man’s too.
You were in here before, Li said.
The man nodded. We heard you on the porch, so we got out the back way. I had him under my clothes, but we couldn’t stay out there.
Li saw how young they were, how afraid. The baby’s crying was like spoor, it tracked right to them, and an axe wasn’t much. You can have this room, she said.
She took the room opposite, rolled out her sleeping bag just inside the doorway and lay listening for a creak of the floorboards, a rusty hinge, a tear in the blanketed silence of dust. The baby woke and cried through the night and each time she heard the woman shift instantly awake to pat, shush and feed.
In the first fifteen months of Matti’s life Li had sung her every song she knew. Every song Val had taught her, every walking song and shearing song, the fire songs and patching songs. Every song for picking, or waiting by the road, every lullaby. Nothing made Matti sleep but certain melodies calmed her into a listening state. As she got older, she listened intently to the stories in the songs. She wanted to know where they all came from.
One night she said, Sing me one you’ve never sung me.
Li didn’t think she had anything left, but then a fragment came to her from before. She thought maybe her own mother had sung it to her.
Guardian angels
watch beside me
all through the night
And what else? Matti asked.
All through the night. The family in the other room, nothing could harm them. She knew that when she left tomorrow, she would leave the gun behind. She closed her eyes and listened to them breathing.
The duster passed by morning, leaving a silence like earplugs. When Li opened the front door the country was shrouded and the road buried. Dust still hung in the air, fine red particles that sieved down in the dim light.
She changed her filthy bandage for the first time. She bled a little taking it off and her uncovered skin felt raw in the air, but the couple told her
