We Grope Together

Something was amiss. It had been an okay day, I thought. Sunny, warm, no one starting a fight. We’d been out, my brother and my dad and I. Somewhere up beyond the gate where the village ran out and the nothing started. We’d been out there and it had been a benevolent place, which it could be, when it wanted, and now we were on our way back, the three of us, walking down the lane between the Fisher cottage, low slung and honey coloured on one side, and the high grey wall of the Turner property on the other, walking and swinging our arms and knowing what was in one another’s minds because there was nothing more complicated in any of our thoughts than the happy tiredness of a good day of being safely in the minds of each other.

And then there was the moment. Three abreast, my brother and I on the stony wheel tracks, my dad between on the tussocky grass, my left foot on the ground, my right high in front of me, the weight of my wellies lending a satisfying heft to each forward hurl of the leg, and perhaps we were still too near the nothing, or not near enough to home, because there was the instant when I knew, with absolute certainty, that there was something gravely amiss. I knew because inside me, where I had been open, a yellow petalled tulip splayed in lax faith to drink in the light, I became all at once disaggregated, my petals blown all about, my centre left naked and unprotected, and I felt myself fall through my own gut.

My dad breathed it in first. He was the tallest by at least two feet, so if the Turners had put it over the wall, which they had, it would hit him before it hit us, my brother and I, which seemed unfair given that if some slight had been felt by the Turners, it was likely our doing. He’d breathed it in, a good lung full, before my right foot, with it’s dead weight boot, even made it back down to the ground, and though it wasn’t visible or detectable by smell, though it made no sound and the air still tasted of grass and lichen, I knew that there was a gas, and that the gas was meant to kill him.

“Get Mum!” I shouted to my brother. She was near, of course, just twenty yards off, if you could travel through stone and plaster and wallpaper and emerge unscathed. We were that nearly home! But my dad was on the ground, and still trying to protect me, still breaking to know that he couldn’t, and he couldn’t, not while he was suffocating and straining for air, and a person can suffocate faster than a boy can run inside and fetch help, and besides, the boy, my brother, was still there beside me when I looked up and found myself in the garden. You stick together, I guess, when you go through something like that.

My dad had lived, but what happened, that shapes a person. Shapes a bond. It was the feeling more than anything, that came back to me when I remembered that day. That turning inside out and being blown to the four corners of the earth. That knowing that it can all go away. That doesn’t go away. That stays.

I can’t go into details about how he survived, or what happened between that lane and the garden. I would, if I could, but the important part is that he did, and we, my mum, my dad, my brother and I, were safely on the other side of the world and closer than ever. It binds you, losing everything, so long as you don’t lose one another too.

We had a squat white house with a corrugated steel roof that jutted out around the edges to shade three sides of the building from the sun, and from the rain too, on the occasions that we had some, and we had a vegetable patch marked out with scaffold board edges in amongst the scrubby grass, and that’s where we were, my brother and I, squatting grubby kneed at the edge of the vegetable patch watching my mum and my dad working on something up by the house. My brother and I were always together. A pigeon pair, my mum called us, though I was the elder by two years. It hardly seemed to matter. We had each other and not much else, so what was two years compared to the gap between us and the next person? Oh, I hated him, of course, but not half as much as I loved him. If he wasn’t there to share it all with, “it” would never have existed. No space exploration on the garage roof. No tunnelling for diamonds or polar camping expeditions. Half as many fights, maybe, but an eighth of the laughter, I’m sure. So it was not surprising he was still right there next to me. He always was.

Of course, the gas problem hadn’t gone away. You can move to the other side of the world, but it’s remarkable what can follow. The Turner’s may have had it in for us, but that was only the tip of the iceberg. It wasn’t personal anymore, at least. The gas was indiscriminate now, all encompassing, the destroyer of worlds. Our world. We were among the last. I don’t know what we had been hoping, that in this idyll we might be saved, somehow? Perhaps we hadn’t been hoping. Perhaps we had just been waiting, because what else is there to do, and when we are waiting, what else is there to do than tend the vegetables we will never harvest, and fix the roof and keep the path free from weeds? Most people like to leave things in good order, if they get the chance. Whatever, we were not unsuspecting.

Again, it was my dad who felt it first. Right there while my brother and I knelt in the soil, we saw him sneak round the back of the house to vomit where no one would see. It was slower acting now, the gas. But once it reached us, all there would be was sickening. Days of sickening, right up until death. It was a well-documented process by that time. Most of the people were gone already. This time, seeing my dad brace himself against the wall with one hand and lean over the parched earth to splash his inners into the soil, my self did not fall through my own gut. There are revelations that only come the once, and after that, it is only dread and terror and grief to contend with. I felt them all, but also, I felt most terribly sad. My poor dad, who wouldn’t want us to be afraid or to suffer.

I don’t know what happened the rest of that day. I don’t know how long it was before he had to admit it wasn’t just a little something he ate and tell my mum, and how they talked about telling us, or not telling us, or whether to wait or to do it now. There was a process, you see, for once the gas got you. Pills to stop you feeling it. To stop you feeling anything at all, ever again. One for adults, a half dose for children, and off to sleep, forever. How do you decide when to kill your children? It has to be before you die, of course, otherwise they might not take the pills, and they might live for days, sick and sweating against your inflating corpse. But then, too soon, and they could have had an extra day. An extra day to swing their arms in the sunshine and throw their feet in the air and feel the benevolence of the nothing beyond the edges of here. What if your dose acted faster than theirs? Or if theirs acted faster than yours? Even at that age I felt the horror of it. Deciding. Dosing our small, warm bodies, holding us in the hopes of some kind of synchronicity. Worse for them than for us, I thought. I felt sad for my parents, I really did. But also, I did not want to die. At least, I told myself, at least we will all be together, and none of us will ever need to be alone.

That’s what I told myself when we gathered on the mattress. We had pulled it from my parents’ bed. One double mattress on the floor of the family room, peach quilt in the gold of one last sunset flooding in through the big windows. One last cuddle as we drifted into sleep. We had taken the pills by then. All together on the count of three. Nobody wanted to be last. Nobody wanted anyone else to be last. We had a bit of time. An hour maybe, before the creeping drowsiness became something deeper, and so we gathered on the mattress, my mum, my dad, my brother and me. Together. Except it was harder than expected. Maybe we had been smaller, when we pulled the mattress onto the floor, because now it was hard to make us all fit. My brother and I, we shifted and squirmed in that honeyed light, searching for a place to rest our limbs, a position we could be comfortable in for eternity. I tried my head against my mother’s feet, but my knees were in his chest. He tried to narrow himself on his hip and shoulder, but no one can die clamped like a sentry on his side.

And then my brother decided. He simply got off the mattress, and lay on a small, coverless single nearby. “It’s okay,” he said “you can all have more space to be comfortable.” And I looked at his slight body, always the last, always the softest, always the one to give, brown arms and oversized knees folded onto the bare blue of this other mattress, over there, across an ocean of floorboards, adrift and too far to reach and dying alone so that we could die in comfort, and all the parts of my self which had fallen through my gut welled up and spilled over the edges of me, a black slick of pain and sadness that obliterated the final sun.

When I woke, when I realised that the pills had not done their work, and the gas was just air, and the sun had risen beyond my eyelids, and the noises of the morning were at their full ripeness, I looked over at my brother’s body. I had not expected to find him there, somehow, but there he was, and above me, my mum and my dad, and out of small window at my feet, the silver-green of a stand of eucalyptus, shimmering in the breeze, which I did not remember from the twilight of the evening. I watched a while, flashes of pink winking as the leaves rippled and swayed, and the blue sky behind, that same blue sky, wherever we were. The trees were different, the hills, the rocks, the colour of the soil, but the sky was the sky everywhere we went.

There is more I can’t tell you. How we got here, the only people on earth, or at least the only ones that mattered, far away from the Turners or the Fishers or any body else. How we got HERE here, to this place, which is different from yesterday’s and tomorrow’s. How we made an idyll with four bodies and aluminium walls and a set of tyres, that is only an idyll when everyone believes it to be. How we pierced the nothing beyond the village and the nothing parted for us and closed again behind so that wherever we were there was always something, always us and the sky and something else besides. But I have come to accept that telling it makes for a poor tale, full of gaps and leaps and parts that look too simple, or too complicated, or both.

That morning it was my dad that stirred first. Cat amongst the pigeons. I wasn’t surprised. He sat up, shuffled into trousers, and stepped down, out of the van, and I discarded the book (“Are they too young, for this? It’s only a story”) that was lain across my chest to follow, bare feet cool on the red dirt of morning. I could hear my mum folding away blankets, pushing back the sleeping bed, re-setting the van for breakfast, and my brother telling her about a dream he had had, about cockroaches who got into everything, but I just stood beside my dad in the sun, waiting for it all to happen.