One of them went inside, to the man she’d knifed, who was quiet now. The other one sat down on the porch, and she heard him light a cigarette. At intervals, he raked the torch across the scrubline. She waited, counted, but she couldn’t predict his timing. Once she thought he must have fallen asleep, and she was flexing her cramped muscles to move when the torch stabbed on again.
She felt the passage of seconds, minutes, hours. Felt Matti moving further out of range, into the unmapped world. Pain came in waves from her ankle. Her body had seized up with cold but she couldn’t risk any movement with him on top of her, listening. These men didn’t feel cold, or fear. They didn’t need to sleep. What they traded in was worth cigarettes. The smell slipped down through the floorboards, sharp and grey, the way Val’s first smoke of the day would reach her in the tent and when she crawled out he’d be crouching beside the ashes of the night’s fire or standing away at the end of the camp, watching the sky. But Val had rolled his own.
Then a bird called from the scrub. The piece of night she could see through the gap was thinning, separating from the land. It would be light soon, and this man or the other one would step down off the porch and see the gap clearly. There would be no crawling away from here.
Before Matti screamed. Before that. Huddled against her, breathing together in the cold, with the torchlight closing in. Her body warm and shivering, her rabbit heart.
Maybe we’re too big.
Shhh.
But maybe I should go over there behind that tree? Mum? Just until he goes past. And then you’ll come and get me, okay?
A magpie sang, a wet sound through the dry, and she realised he hadn’t used the torch after those other noises in the scrub. Because the sky was lightening or because he was asleep? She couldn’t smell smoke anymore, or feel the vibration of his knee through the boards. From the porch there was only a deep stillness.
Her body was unresponsive but she forced it, edging forward in tiny movements. Her ankle hurt like hell and she bit her lip till she tasted blood. When she reached the opening, she lost control of her breathing and the fear nearly kept her down in her hole, but he was asleep or he was awake. She was done waiting.
She crawled out. No sound from behind her. A dark half of her believed he was watching, silent, his finger on the torch or the trigger, giving her a headstart. Fuck him, she wasn’t going to look back. Halfway across the open space between the house and the bush where she’d buried her stuff, she tried to get up and run but she fell back down at the first pressure of her left foot on the ground. Shoved her fist in her mouth, nearly passed out. Just had to keep crawling, dragging the pain behind her.
Even when she was digging up her pack she still half believed he was playing with her, pretending to sleep until she started hoping. But she got the pack on and crawled away. Kept crawling. She only stopped once, when the need to empty her bowels came on so fast she barely got her pants down in time. Cleaned herself with leaves and then started crawling again through sand and scrub, her ankle dragging and jarring, hands and knees cut up by prickly wattle. All through the grey arrival of the tenth morning, through the dust that came and went, hour after hour, heading north, north-east.
When the sun was high, she let herself believe they weren’t coming. The man she’d knifed wouldn’t be travelling this far and if the others were willing to leave him, they would have caught her by now. Or maybe the dust had covered her tracks. Something good from Weather.
She stopped to rest under a couple of mallee trees, took two sips from her three-quarter empty bag and unlaced her boot. She screamed getting her foot out. It was swollen fat, the outer ankle bone obscured. Yellow and purple. The pain when she probed it was wrenching. She took off her vest and wrapped it around a wide piece of bark to make a strap for her ankle. There was no way her foot was going back in her boot, so she tied the boot onto her pack. She ate a couple of ready biscuits, had three more sips of water, then she pulled herself up on the tree and broke off a branch that was V-shaped at the top. It took a couple of goes to cut it down to the right size but after that she could walk, leaning her full weight on the stick.
There were still other people on the road, but not many. When they passed her she felt invisible to them, each sealed up in their private feat of endurance. Her body was a catalogue of things wrong: thirst, pain, lack of sleep, hunger. Her pants had dried and the piss was just another smell but her thighs chafed and stung. Her throat and lips were dry and the burnt side of her face stretched and throbbed under the bandage. Her head ached and she kept having to stop and wait for the dizzy surges to pass. She knew she was dehydrated but what she had left in the bag wasn’t going to make a difference. Walking with the stick hurt her wrist, her shoulders – the whole right side of her felt strained and off-balance.
Li tried not to look at the fence because when she did she saw Matti holding onto the wire, face pinched clean by fever. Mum. Look! But when she finally did look up, she saw something beyond the fence, distantly across the No Go, that made her stop walking. It
