Copyright 2020 Sonny Clarke
It felt like I’d been for walking days not minutes. I looked back over my shoulder and could still see the rusted outline of my truck jumping around in the shimmering heat. Time had stopped and the space around me was deathly quiet. Ahead all I could see was road - straight, un-curving, unending. It cut like a wound through the earth and the sticky black tar at my feet tried to restrain me with each weary footfall. I squinted as I gazed ahead; deep leathery wrinkles in the corner of my eyes. Everything around me was dry and shrunken away. The earth reeled and retreated like a stampede of wild brumbies, burned by the gnarled fingers of that stinging hot air.
It hadn’t rained in years and I mean no rain, not one single drop, not one stray splash of condensation fell from that unrelenting sky. Each time my heavy foot crashed into the ground, another layer of the earths crust would burn up, become airborne and fly around into my face and nostrils causing me to choke and splutter. I was swallowing the very ground I had just trodden on and it was the smooth, powdery taste of that dirty red earth that told me I was home.
It may be strange to say that you can taste a place but it’s true. Sydney, overcrowded since the fires of 2020, tasted like desperation, that sharp metal tang that puts you on edge; it was a dirty, congested city of citizen refugees that hoped our biggest city could save them from what lurked outside its gates. Melbourne had only recently closed down, its people moved out and told to go elsewhere, often convinced to move at gunpoint; the sheriffs had no problem using force to hurry the slow and disabled. It tasted like resignation, a wet musty death mould, that clung to your teeth and was unrelenting on the senses. When I was a teenager, the great fires had torn across the tinder dry forests of the North, leaving nothing but a wasteland and soon our quaint city was declared desert by the Drought Assembly. We headed south; there was nothing else to do. The desert was a plague and we were on the run. The southern cities became more congested and more desperate and smelt worse than ever, a mix of sewage and sweaty dirt clung to people like their skin. The Peoples Army patrolled the streets and contained the surging population of homeless while a dark underground of dissenters began to seethe and plot and plan against a Government that had let them down for what use is a Government when infrastructure and community arts grants were no longer important. There had been plenty of warning that this was coming but the profit addicted corporations wouldn’t take heed. Food was now as scarce as those once dripping profits and people ate anything they could find, our rat plague had hit an all time low and I had not long ago seen a man in an alleyway roasting his own cat. I knew it was his cat because he lovingly talked to it the whole time it cooked, a fire lit in a trash can serving as a rotisserie, the tabby’s belled collar jingling around his wrinked old wrist. He called her ‘Princess Fluffy’ as he stoked the flames.
I had secured my exit from Sydney by illegal means. Anyone wanting to enter or leave the city required a rarely given, state clearance. The official word was that the tough line on ‘moving about’ was to prevent the spread of disease whether this was the entire truth or not, I didn’t know. I suspect that anyone outside of Sydney were in the process of being deserted, left as the other cities were to the mercy of the GCC or the Global Climate Catastrophe sacrificed like an offering to the weather Gods. But the thing about the smell of fear and hopelessness is there is no saturation point. As people panicked more, the smell got worse and the stench in the city had hit an unbearable peak. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I had to leave and face what ever the outside had to offer. It took a week to smuggle me out – a week to cover a distance you could drive in a day but once I was lifted out into the dry salty air beyond the putrid gates of the Capital, I smelt the freedom that I had lost and it was a sweet smelling thing, that freedom.
The muscles in my thighs were starting to burn and I wasn’t sure if it was from the heat or the exercise. I looked up at the depressing emptiness that surrounded me and urged my tired feet forward. I was beginning to rethink my trip. People had warned me not to return to Brisbane but I had no choice; my mother had stayed as the sand washed away the foundations of our home, and I had received word that she was dying. I had to get to her and I had to get there soon.
An hour passed and nothing changed. The black leather of my boots began cracking under the strain of dryness. Dirt seeped into those cracks and festered. I estimated my location from the few derelict buildings that were still standing like weary old men, hunched on the side of the road; the colour of their paint barely distinguishable from the fine dirt that embalmed them. Ahead I would soon see a vacant pit that once was filled with the brown tidal waters of a river that snaked its way around the city’s island like centre. We had called ourselves the River City once. But the lapping luxury of waves against sandstone was now just a distant dream and as I squinted out at the horizon, I had a faint recollection of what the Ferry’s had looked like as they happily swam up and down stream, oblivious to the fate that stalked them. I tried to break the monotony of my march by humming to myself; ‘Memories… misty water-coloured memories…’ My voice was dry and I coughed, then I laughed lightly at the irony of the song.
[A P1]
I was walking because I had run out of fuel for my truck. I had secured the vehicle with several storage drums attached to the back. Petrol was hard to find these days and very expensive but I had bought enough for my journey, at least I thought I had. I hadn’t counted on the storms. The east coast, formerly renown for sunshine and sparkling waves had become notorious for severe sand storms that blew in regularly. These storms killed off any remnants of the old tourist attraction. They were called ‘white outs’ because it was the light golden sand from the coast that blew inland in a battle against the heavy low moving red sands of the west – it was a war for domination over the earth and the tactic was burial of anything in its path. You couldn’t see during such a storm. Sometimes, the scene at sunset was breathtaking - when the deep red dirt shone like trickling blood while the light sand danced frantically and twinkled in the orange sunset above it on the horizon. It looked like millions of enchanted pixies caught in a Tantric dance of deliverance.
‘If you’re going to survive, trick is to stay warm.’ The dark, dry skinned warden of station forty-nine told me as I stocked up with water at the final official outpost. These outposts were more like crypts set into the ground along the highway.
‘Stop yer truck and leave it running.’ He whistled through a mouth full of rotten teeth. I chose a bottle of whisky from a metal supply cabinet, ‘We come up that stretch and remove the sand once a week, but if the storm is bad we’ll bring the dogs out to search as soon as, if yer broke down we’ll find yer but yer must stay in yer car.’ On a tiny scrap of paper he wrote down a radio frequency. ‘Don’t do what yer last fool did Missy and try to walk back here should yer get in trouble, yer end up dingo dinner.’ He spoke like a man who doesn’t get to talk often. It was hard to tell where one word ended and the other started. I craned my neck toward him in order to concentrate on his English and decipher his mutter.
‘Why you gooin up they anyway gurl?’
‘My mother.’ I realised it had been a while since I had spoken to anyone also and felt a great strain against my throat as I tried to explain, ‘is sick.’
Irvine looked at me with sympathy folded into his leathery forehead. ‘You find a doctor?’ I shook my head and he began to search through his cluttered station. ‘You find a doctor…’ He popped up from a pile of supplies and thumped a dusty old leather bag on the counter, ‘Maybe he can make her well.’ I took his bag from him more out of gratitude for his kind gesture than out of hope for my mother. Even if I did make it to her, I doubted there would be anyone skilled still living in the colony – they would have deserted years ago in search of paid work in the Government run areas.
I glanced around the walls as I left the station. Chalk boards were stacked around the perimeter, each designated to display a special tally. This man was fond of keeping statistics and had counted everything from the number of people who’d passed through the station, to the rare brush-tailed possums he had trapped and eaten (he kept the skins displayed like road kill on his walls). He also counted the days we’d gone with out rain and the number of people he’d shot in the name of law enforcement –one of the many jobs he was assigned by the withdrawing Government. Irvine Howard’s preference for Law Enforcement was to use his gun before his mouth – as the large number on that chalk board proved - but somehow I found it comforting to know he was keeping an eye out for me as I continued my struggle home. As I heaved the trap door up to leave, I spied a portrait of the old Queen taped to the ceiling window; it was yellowed from age and sunlight.
‘You know, in the English colonies – they still drive cars and eat fresh food.’ Irvine had caught my pause to look at the Queen. I hadn’t seen her portrait in our republic since her death way before the trouble started. The dusty flyscreen swung as I let it close below me and wondered about the rest of the world. The last I’d heard, England had been reclaimed by the sea and the King was living in France, but I didn’t want to crush Irvine’s hopes.
I drove through the morning. The sunlight was soft for once and warm but I could feel in the air that the furnace was being stoked and soon enough we’d be baking again. I was buoyed by the possibility of passing through the coast storm free. I glanced at my watch – a rusted old wind-up job that outlasted any Duracell, I was only a few hours off the city limits. When I looked up beyond my steering wheel again, I caught a glimpse of a great dirty white wall moving slowly toward me. It had appeared on the horizon in stealth and silent speed. I swung around to all sides and could still see it inching in around me. It made a low growling hum that incited fear in my heart as it slowly consumed the sky and tumbled ravenously toward me. I pressed my foot to the floor hoping to out run it but my old truck was slow and began to bog and spin in the sand. There was no where to go; I was blind. I pulled the truck off as far as I thought the edge of the road might be and left the engine idling. I could be here for weeks, I thought to myself, hoping like hell that the station master was harnessing his dogs and at that very moment planning a rescue.
The heating did little to curb the icy cold that travelled side saddle with the sand and my teeth hurt from chattering. I broke the seal on the whisky and sipped at it slowly. The burning heat of the liquor gave the most pleasurable feeling of escape and I relished its acid trail slipping down to my stomach where it radiated warmth like a ball of lava. The whistle of the wind and the scratching of the dirt against my windows terrified me as I sat alone in the dark getting tipsy and jumping at every noise. I clenched the radio receiver in my hand even though I couldn’t see it to set the frequency. I gazed at the reflection of my dash lights in the blackness behind the windows and raised the bottle to my mouth again but was stopped short by another light, this one outside in the darkness. It wasn’t any reflection; it was beyond the window. This light was like a torch in the storm. It bounced up and down as if someone were jumping on the spot.
I screwed the cap back on the bottle and my stomach turned. I levered the door open just slightly compelled toward the light, careful not to let the rioting wind into my sanctuary. ‘Hello?’ I tried to call out above the din but I doubted someone could hear me if they were sitting next to me let alone yards away through a whirling wind. I levered the door out just far enough to press myself outside. It took all of my strength to keep the door from flying open. I began to wheeze as the sand infiltrated my nose and my mouth. I pushed a few steps toward the light, my arm shielding my eyes from the stinging sand and my mouth covered with the neck of my shirt. I called out to it again imaging someone lost in the horror of the storm. ‘Hello? Are you ok?’ Suddenly I was staring at nothing and I had to concentrate hard to decide if my eyes were open or closed. The light had disappeared and the wind pushed me over trying to bury me alive. I stayed on the ground and dragged myself back toward the truck desperately hoping I was dragging myself in the right direction. The howling whistle echoed painfully in my ears. I could barely make out the interior light of the truck through the roaring air. I struggled inside, coughing harshly and took a long, burning, soothing drink of whisky to cause me to cough the sand out of my breathing tract. I turned back to the window and suddenly out in the darkness the light appeared again and bounced around in the air like a fire-fly. I reached over to the door and pressed the lock down firmly and grasped the radio receiver in one hand, the whisky in the other. I felt like a small child in a dark bedroom of noises and nightmares. ‘Min Min…’ I named the lights with a steady whisper as if naming it might make it go away. I recalled the stories of the ghost lights from old Australia; the stories of the mischievous lights which bothered lone travellers, the forgotten spirits of our ancestors. Since the desert began advancing, the strange phenomenon had been sighted more often on the lonely roads between populated areas. I took a swig of liquor again trying not to look at my companion. I shut my eyes tightly and tried to think of the old days.
Morning finally arrived and brought with it a sharp headache. I found myself slumped against the window somewhere between dozing and awake. I’d only been asleep a matter of minutes but the view had changed dramatically during this time. An orange sunlight had peeked over the flat line of the horizon and the leftover sand sparkled like scattered jewels. I shifted on my numb backside and yawned. The whirling dust had cleared just as quickly as it had arrived. The road outside was deserted, no sign of my visitor in the night. The empty skyscrapers that stood half buried on the sunshine strip shimmered in the distance and welcomed me like a friendly neighbour. My reserve tank was dangerously low.
I leaned out from the window and shoved sand away from the sides of my truck and as I looked out over the road I saw golden piles waiting patiently for their next journey inland. How this world had changed from the carefree spirit of my childhood. If I closed my eyes it was twenty years ago and I could still see the great towering gums and smell the pine trees that had flanked us as we drove along this very same road. We had no cares then and couldn’t possibly imagine a world any different from the one we enjoyed. Our parents would take us driving each summer, towing a caravan to the coast for school vacations that seemed so long and unreal now. I sometimes wondered if my memory was playing tricks on me. Perhaps those trees never really existed and I had planted them in my mind - the seeds of a lie grown in the earth of my subconscious. My thoughts turned to my Mother lying somewhere waiting for me to arrive so she could die and leave this horrid world to the mercy of its ravenous dirt. I remembered looking up at her when I was a child; a halo made of the sun shining around her lustrous long dark hair as she leant back against a ghost gum and quizzed me for a spelling bee. Her voice was sweet and joyful and I was dreamy with how beautiful she was and my heart started to ache severely for her. It had been fifteen years since she had told her children to go south and find hope. In all those years the only hope I’d had was my memories of home and the aging mother that I had not seen in what seemed like a lifetime – a separate lifetime to the one I should have owned. I wondered if I would ever see the world again the way I remembered it.
I grew up in a humble suburb on the outskirts of town; the yards were big and the trees plentifully dispersed throughout wide streets and horse paddocks where kids would run wild until the chorus songs of our mothers called us home with the lowering twilight. The summers were hot and busy and the winters were on the chilly side of warm. We’d run bare feet over hot tarmac pavements, soft wet grass and through clumps of cubby house bamboo. We dreamt of our futures in that very same world and raising our own children in that same bamboo clump; they’d be barefoot and happy just like we were.
I hadn’t even finished high school when it all started to go wrong and the spinning globe we dwelt on began to reclaim all it had entrusted to us. We had taken the earth for granted and she wasn’t going to stand for it. Firstly the papers reported freak weather phenomenon around the world but they were expected to clear up after the El Nina effect had passed. No-one was worried. Then we were just going through a lengthy drought; nothing new in a dry country like ours. We’d been through droughts before and they had always broken. Water restrictions were put in place and people formed gallant committees of awareness. News papers concentrated on these committees, because awareness meant that we were going to be ok. No body wanted to think for a minute that this was not true.
But then suddenly the papers stopped printing; power was cut off to the northern states and communication died; televisions were silent, radios static and mobile phones useless. We were suddenly plunged into the darkness and wondered why we had no warning – no official warning that is. Petrol prices were raised to match weekly wages; cars were abandoned, sometimes burned up for heat. For the first time since my great-grandparents generation we were cut off from the rest of the world. We relied on people travelling through town for information but no-one had any. It seemed the Government had deserted us. Eventually, I too left town only to learn that the problem wasn’t localised as we had first thought and the Governments were scrambling to make a decision on what to do. I grew into an adult while wandering through hopeless city after city filled with transient families looking for answers. They arrived together in great caravans of extended relatives prepared to stick together through thick and thin but as they moved on and things worsened they broke away from each other hoping to save themselves by shedding the number of mouths they had to feed. It became a Darwinian world where only the resourceful survived. Those that couldn’t adapt quickly died. The further south I travelled the more I realised the world as I knew it had come to an awful end and my mind suddenly reanimated old Percy Fletcher.
Percy Fletcher was a slug looking man who was always out to ruin our fun. Every neighbourhood had one such resident– the religious man who always had advice for the rest of humanity. Percy had so many warnings for us that we lost count. He told us not to run on the concrete and to wear shoes outside. He warned us against speaking to strangers and eating lollies but we ignored him because he was wrong and we were children, supposed to eat lollies and wear no shoes. We ran every day on the concrete and nothing bad had happened to us, except for that one time when Jenny Clarke fell on her face and knocked her front teeth out. Occasionally we’d throw dog poop over Percy Fletchers fence to punish him for being so weird and annoying.
But more importantly, I remember the summer he started warning our parents. He forgot about the children and started to call out to the adults from behind his fence. This was the summer that Percy changed from being an eccentric to being dangerous.
‘Born of greed and ignorance!’ he yelled. ‘The pestilence will be born of your own greed and ignorance! Damned will he be whom does not heed the word of God and prepare for the almighty end, for it is neigh!’
Percy began building a cellar under his house and distributing plans around the neighbourhood so others could follow suit. He stocked up with canned goods and all kinds of weapons and supplies. Some of the older boys had seen guns buried in his cellar that only the army would supply. He was preparing for his Armageddon. He believed that he would fight along side God in the final war of the world and be given a first class ticket up to Heaven for his pious ness. The adults laughed at him when they gathered together to smoke and gossip and wait for school children. The police raided him but never found the rumoured guns but then New Depression hit and plunged the already worried world into chaos. Old Percy’s predictions suddenly seemed possible and people started looking to him for advice and salvation. This was his moment in the sun. The Followers of Fletcher had been born. In his eyes he surpassed agent of God and became the Lord himself. I glanced once more at the silent piles of sand that littered the deserted highway and slipped the truck into gear. I pushed on stinging with reminiscences.
I made it to Sam’s garage, the fuel gage just above empty. Sam’s station was on the far end of the approaching highway of the city. Driving, I was just forty minutes away from my destination. It was evident that Sam had gone. The word ‘South’ was scrawled across the boarded up front door – graffiti I had often seen as people attempted to tell loved ones what had happened to them. All over the country people had left scrawled trails, like Gretel’s breadcrumbs showing them their way back home. I left the truck running, worried it wouldn’t start up again and walked up to the shabbily boarded windows and peered inside. The station was empty but for the old racks and shelves that once held food and magazines for caravans of holiday makers that filtered through the Sunshine Coast. I twisted the knob and the door opened with a tired squeak.
Inside I smelled old emptiness. Sam had been gone for some time. I made a quick round of the shelves looking for anything I might take and found a few crumbling chocolate bars and some mints but no water. I didn’t think he would have left any behind, it was more precious than gold. I went outside to the truck again and lifted the fuel pump from its cradle and shook it but only a small ant crept out. It took one look at me and rushed back inside. It looked like a little petrol sniffing junkie, squinting into the sunlight at some hallucination. Even the smallest splotch of fuel had been taken or dried up long ago. I sighed. Progress was exhausting out here. My lips were dry and cracking from the hot wind that constantly blew. I ran my tongue over them dragging with it thick, gluey mucus that made my gums sticky and pasty. I could taste that dirt. I placed the nozzle back on the rusted tank and walked around the back of the station where five huge water tanks stood, a memento of the city rebate scheme – a drive to have the town collect as much water as possible. Most of these tanks hadn’t seen rain at all, let alone been full of it. The last time we’d had a rain storm was the year before the rebate scheme was introduced.
I climbed up the first tank and peered inside hoping for a small puddle of condensation to inject life back into my wrinkled lips before they sunk into the recesses of my skull. The first tank was empty, not even a stain. I climbed up the next one, and the one after that; all of them empty. I climbed up the final tank, a little voice in my head egging me on - ‘If you don’t check it, you know there will be water in there!’ I sluggishly started up the narrow ladder, step by step. My hands gripped onto the stinging metal as I headed for the half way point when suddenly, there was a great banging coming from inside the tank. I was already too far up to jump down but I didn’t want to get any closer to that sound. I began to carefully lower myself to the ground. Step at a time, I descended as the thudding noise from inside the tank continued to rise. The metal rang in my ears and it seemed to be unbearably loud. My feet were slipping on the ladder as I tried to move faster but the noise was getting closer to the top. There was still a sharp drop below me but I decided to jump, the ground was closer than I thought. I hit the dirt with a thud that winded me and for a moment I was paralysed. The noise finally reached crescendo and a man leapt from the top and hurriedly scattered down the ladder. He dropped off and landed in front of me, sitting at the foot of the tank and muttering maniacally.
‘I’ve lost me key, lost me key, anyone seen me key?’ He mumbled as he rocked to and fro not even seeing me before him.
‘Are you ok?’ He seemed old but maybe he was just aged from the desert. He was so shaggy and unkempt he looked like he’d been raised in the jungle. He wore suit pants and a white, buttoned shirt but they were dirty and torn it was as if he had wandered off from his day job sometime ago and got lost in the desert – this wasn’t an unlikely explanation except I couldn’t see how he’d been surviving out here so far from civilisation. He suddenly cried out, then quickly and sharply stopped crying, jumped up and took me by the shoulders. I yelled as he shook me, his grip so tight it hurt. I felt the bones in my shoulders crushing underneath his fists.
‘I lost me key, lost me key!’ He cried and pushed me around in a circle, ‘Do you have a key.’ He suddenly let go. ‘Do you have a key?’ He repeated in a voice that had calmed and sounded familiar.
‘A key to what?’ I asked nervously. My eyes searched through the dirty wrinkles trying to identify the man.
‘The Pestilence!’ He cried out and I buried my eyebrows in my forehead which seemed to discourage the man. He turned and ran off screaming into the distance.
I stood and stared after him, his identity dawning on me when suddenly from the shade of the first tank a Dingo leapt out and attached its jaw to his arms. I was certain now that God had left us. Percy Fletcher fell down beneath the beast and I froze. Part of me wanted to help him but the other part wanted to run while the dog was occupied with its prey. I carefully took a step forward trying to figure out what I should do when the Dingo let out a terrible yelp that pulsed through the thick air and I watched as the old man jumped up and landed on top of the writhing dog. He had stabbed it and greedily started tearing at the wild dogs flesh and stuffing it in his mouth. I quickly looked away, horrified and my breath was laboured and I found myself already running for my truck. I gagged. It dawned on me that I had left the truck running all this time. What precious little fuel I had would surely be wasted and I hoped like hell there was enough left to get me away from there.
I ran back around the station house and could hear the engine still roughly idling. I jumped in behind the wheel and threw my foot down on the accelerator, squealing out of the roadhouse. I put as much distance between myself and my hungry old neighbour as I could, he could have easily made dessert out of me and I wasn’t sure whether I was more scared of him or the threat of the hungry Dingos. I had to find another fuel station and fast. I tapped at the needle over my fuel gauge as it hung suspenseful over the empty line. It suddenly dropped below it and the engine whined and coughed and then it was silent. I slapped the truck into neutral and begged it to coast all the way home but it only made it about five hundred meters down an embankment before it crawled into a ditch by the road and sighed. She was done. My faithful, hardworking, well punished mule was dead and I was stranded, and it was so close to home. I slapped the wheel and let my head fall momentarily onto my hand and tried to cry. There were no tears, there hadn’t been for ages; the drought had dried up my emotions as well as our dams, leaving me only with a cold resilience that had seen me through the hardest times – I called it, my Darwinian resilience. I sighed and grabbed the jerry can from behind my seat. I shouldered my backpack and evacuated. Keeping in mind what I was trying to get away from, I hurried into the dusty burning heat of the roadway heading north. Home seemed so far away on foot, almost unreachable and I had to constantly push myself to keep going.
It had now been two hours since I had left the car and my boots dragged slightly in the dust causing it to cloud up around my legs and catch in the cuff of my jeans. I reached back into my pack and pulled out a water bottle, unscrewing the lid. It was the last of my supply. The price of bottled water, above your rationed allocations had now reached one hundred dollars a litre – the price of the bottle to put it in also just as much. Anything requiring water to manufacture was extremely hard to find. I had one ration coupon left but I was saving that for my mother even though I didn’t know if they received rations this far away from the Government areas. People had since been searching for their own way to make water and the scientists who’d mastered the art of collecting mass condensation where the new moguls of our millennium. I had once seen a kind of water factory in the desert, made out of millions of plastic drink bottles stacked up like cabin logs all sweating under the unrelenting sun. You could see water running sparsely down their insides into an underground collection tank. But you would surely need a million such building to make any decent amount of water. Needless to say, the breakthrough is yet to be discovered.
I didn’t stop walking. I couldn’t disturb the momentum of my legs or they may stop all together. I swallowed the last of the water in one gulp; it was warm and dry like hot dirt and did not cure me of my thirst. It was dead in the middle of the day. The sun was directly above me, a large angry fire that was trying to set me alight. It wanted to see the world dead. I could feel my skin ignite and burn; the top layer of my dermis was shrinking away like the skin on cooking chicken. I looked up to the horizon once more as I felt my mind start to wander and my eyes squinted independently of thought, my eyes would carry me now my body had given up and my mind was wasted. They had finally seen what we were waiting for. I wished so hard that I was already there, that the agony of moving was finally over. I reached out my arm and stretched my fingers as far as possible trying to somehow drag the vision closer to me. The burning, stinging sensation of hot metal on soft skin, I felt it for the second time that day. I held myself tightly to the sign, my hand burning and my body tired. ‘City Limits’ those words were more refreshing than an ocean of drinkable water.
I rested for a moment, using my backpack like an umbrella; the protective canvass shaded my body as it regained its strength, your body gets used to certain punishments after a while and I found mine quite adapted to the delirium of dehydration. While my mind wandered off in some distant fantasy, my body kept its militant pace. It’s one of the ironies of life that at a time when death would bring you wonderful relief from torturous conditions, your body decides to soldier through it and prolong your agony and see just how far it can get you. My steps had become mere scuffles and my calves burnt like a chemical fire. I kicked up dust as I dragged myself along. I remembered a fuel station just up ahead and that was the inspiration I needed to get myself to move quickly as I saw it shimmering beyond me. I prayed that it was still open. My feet hit the sticky tarmac and I looked up at the swinging price board; petrol had hit three hundred dollars a litre since I had left but that sign could have been old and I doubted anyone this far north would have any fuel left to spare anyway. I wasted no time heading straight for the cooling sanctity of the buildings interior. That was when things suddenly went black and for a moment I thought I had died and I felt a great sense of relief.
Hours later I woke with a sudden jolt of disappointment. I found myself disturbed from a long sweet dream of running through vast paddocks of lush green grass, the moist dew wetting my feet and the smell of pollen soaking the air. I woke up in a strange bed and turned my head to the side yawning, a young woman was staring at me. She was a little older than me; I guessed mid thirties and thin, dressed in a baggy pair of grotty overalls. Her hair was cropped to just below her ears, dark and tangled. Somehow through my grogginess I recognised her.
‘You’re Sam’s daughter?’ My throat hurt. I wasn’t sure if my guess was correct, ‘Toni is it?’ I felt guilty for questioning but she had aged over the fifteen years I’d been gone and her young pubescent body had been replaced by that of a beautiful woman and for a moment I contemplated my own body and felt embarrassed that I’d missed out on the experience of being a flowering teenager. Then I thought that my narrow, flat-chested frame wouldn’t have brought me much youthful enjoyment anyway and soon got over my disappointment.
‘Yep, it’s me.’ Her voice was the sweet whisper of someone who tended selflessly to the sick. ‘You passed out on the doorstep, given yourself sunstroke I’d say.’ She reached over and touched her soft hand to my forehead before smiling. Her touch was so wonderful I moaned slightly. It had been so long since another human being had reached out to me in an act other than violence or need. The human sense of touch it seemed gathered strength when it didn’t get used and the slightest stroke from her hand had sent my body into sensory overload. She looked me in the eye and I felt like a child being cautioned by her mother, ‘I do remember you, you know, from high school.’ She said. ‘I remember what you did that last time I saw you… I thought you were so brave. Then you disappeared along with half the rest of the town and well here we are. Who would have thunk it!’ She smiled. I blushed at the innocence of a memory that had stayed with me even though others had long gone.
‘Oh, that seems like such a long time ago.’ I replied and paused awkwardly, ‘You didn’t go to Sydney with your father?’ As I sat up my head throbbed and I felt sickly faint. She reached out again to support me. Her arms looked weak but her touch was strong and capable. She sighed.
‘We didn’t get very far before…’ She looked down at the floor and frowned, ‘Dad’s been gone now for a year. I’ve been staying here ever since, wondering what to do next.’ She looked around the room, ‘There are not a whole lot of options.’
‘I’m sorry.’ She shook her head as if to say that it didn’t matter. ‘I’m trying to get home to my mother. She’s not doing well either.’
‘I’m so pleased to see you.’ She smiled at me and I was relieved for the change of subject.
‘How have you guys been surviving out here?’ I asked, ‘I’ve just come from Sydney. That’s where everyone is now and it’s getting pretty overcrowded.’
‘It’s not too bad. The Government stopped sending rations a little over a year ago. It’s the best thing they could’ve done really. People had to start taking care of themselves. We get travelling vendors coming through more regularly than the road trains ever did. I don’t know how they get hold of their stuff. I saw a man last month riding an old elephant towing his goods in an old wreck of a Kombi Van!’ She laughed as she remembered the sight as if she’d been to the circus, ‘I got this bottle of perfume from him; Traded it for some tractor parts.’ She leaned in so I could smell and then she saw in my face a terror. She reached out and swept away the hair that fell over my eyes.
‘You know life will happen no matter what we do to it. Life tends to find a way to… live, if you get what I mean. I’m reminded of that every night when I look up and see all those beautiful stars spread across the sky. They just sit around and twinkle for billions of years whether there’s anyone here to admire them or not. It’s all life you know…Listen, you’ve been couped up in that dying city for way too long. Out here it’s all about living and being alive. It’s getting the chance to find out what that means all over again!’
She reached down to the floor beside the bed and held up a coffee mug in which a small green plant, no more than a weed had grown in some rather sad looking soil.
‘You don’t always have to concentrate on what’s been lost…. We still have so much to be happy for.’
‘What’s that?’ I asked pointing to the weed she held out.
‘It’s a Jasmine shoot. I’ve been striking a new one every time the grown plant is about to die. I’ve been growing them ever since we said goodbye to mother’s garden, it all shrivelled and dried and then what wasn’t dead burnt in the fires.’ She looked proudly at her specimen. ‘It can only grow so much on the little water it receives and then I take a little cutting off it and start again. I’ve not had any flowers so far, I guess it’s just never strong or old enough to get any – it hardly gets leaves. I’ll find a place to plant it one day where it can grow wild and free.’ She smiled at me and I was lost in the sparkle of her wet ink eyes, ‘I so miss the smell of Jasmine on a wet summer morning.’ She beamed with hope.
‘Toni, there’s no place to plant it you know. I doubt there’s any place on earth left as it once was.’ I felt mean. So what if she has dreams.
‘I’ve heard of some places.’ She reasoned. ‘This can’t go on for ever.’ She cast her eyes softly over my face. It had grown thinner in recent weeks, ‘You need to eat something. Let’s go out to the house.’ She grabbed my hand and pulled me to my feet. My body went willingly to hers and as her lips brushed past my ears I heard her whisper, ‘We will find a way.’
Her tone was reassuring and if for just one moment I could forget all had happened, I could have believed in her dream; I really wanted to believe in it but all that I had seen was evidence that my history on earth was soon to be erased from memory. I couldn’t help thinking about the dinosaurs. They once graced the planet, great and unknowing that their days were numbered – a stupid mistake made in the journey of what ever it was that created life and shaped it and gave it and then took it all away again. I wondered why we suffered so much, was it because in us that life force also created thought and emotions. I wondered if any of the Brontosaurus’ looked up one day and said ‘Damn! This is it and I was kinda liking being alive!’
The shadow of the sand and unrelenting sun hung over my heart and kept my thoughts dark but Toni wouldn’t let me slip away. She would look at me and glow for no good reason and I must admit when she did, a tiny piece of warmth hit the coldness that had long ago settled into my heart. Arm in arm, she led me into the house that was attached to the back of the fuel station and if I’d be the least bit conscious of my thoughts at that time I would have realised that I wanted to stay there forever – I felt like I was at home. We found a family busily packing the contents of the room in cardboard boxes.
‘You’re leaving?’ I never bothered with introductions these days as I seldom met a person more than once.
‘Everyone is love.’ The lady looked up and smiled an unsure smile. Her voice was harsh and grating. She didn’t know what would happen to her family from here and tried hard not to think about it. ‘Toni, there is some pasta in the kitchen left over for our guest.’ Toni let go of my hand (my skin instantly missing her touch) and headed into the next room.
‘The last of the fuel is in our truck, no point staying on here.’ The lady’s husband walked over and looked me up and down. I could remember many years ago when I was just a teenager and he much younger than now – he had been the town prig, always judging people for the way they looked and treating them according – but the way he looked at me now was with sadness and empathy. The crisis had made him one of us and his pettiness had crumbled with society. ‘You’re welcome to ride with us south if you like. Don’t know what we’ll find there.’
‘No thanks, I’m headed into the city.’
The couple stopped to look at me, even their young daughter who had been busy with her colours looked up from her scribbling as if she knew I was a lunatic.
‘Miss, I don’t know what you think you’re doing but you may as well turn back, it’s a ghost town now. Last food delivery came months ago. You never know if there’ll be another. Last thing you want to do is get stuck up here when the Government forsakes the territory, it will be anarchy rules. Why I heard that there are native people wandering around and they’ll club you to death for food!’
The wife came forward unfolding a piece of paper. ‘This letter came. They won’t help us anymore. They’re closing the highway north of the boarder. We won’t be able to get out if things get worse.’ She looked at me desperately. ‘We’ve got to go now – you understand, for the children.’
‘But my mother is dying.’ It was a reason they could argue with.
The man had a grave look on his face. He looked at me with pity and turned away. These people had seen so much loss on this road over the years and their souls just couldn’t take it any more.
‘It’s not far to the city centre now,’ I paused and sighed heavily as Toni returned to my side with the promised tin full of pasta, ‘Is there anyway you can give me a ride?’
The man turned to me again, shaking his head with regret. ‘I’m sorry dear we have to take our children to Sydney.’ He lowered his voice so his daughter couldn’t hear, ‘To be honest with you, I don’t even know if we have enough fuel to get there but we have no choice. It’s now or never. Once the road is cut, we’re as good as dead!’ His voice rose a little too loudly as he made his point and his daughter stopped colouring and looked up at him slack jawed.
I was still and quiet and looked at the ground. After a moment and a mouth full of pasta that my stomach rejoiced at, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the piece of paper that Irvine had given me. I handed it to the man. ‘If you need help stay by your car, someone is out there. He can help you.’
With a deep frown that dragged the edges of his mouth down almost to the bottom of his chin, the man took the paper from my hand, pausing as our palms touched as if he didn’t expect to feel the skin of a stranger again. The ghost tears filter through my eyes again bringing a phantom wetness to my cheeks. I wrote down the address of my apartment in Sydney and handed him my house keys. ‘Getting to Sydney is just the start. You’ve still got to survive it.’ I warned him. ‘It’s not like you remember it or expect. The apartment is just a tin can but its safe and it’s yours if you want it. Make sure you tell nobody in the streets you have it, and don’t let anyone follow you. You also need to get through the gates; they’re not letting in any more people. I can give you some names to mention. They can get you false papers or smuggle you in. Don’t trust anyone other than the people I tell you to trust.’ I warned remember stories I heard of slave trading to the Asian countries.
He took the gift with shaking hands and I walked toward the door determined to continue my trek. Toni followed me quickly and grabbed hold of my wrist.
‘I’m coming with you.’ She said loud enough for the room to hear. The man wasn’t sure what to do but knew that Toni was an extra burden that was not his own, so he let her go and waved his wife to be quiet when she went to call out. His wife heeded his sign but she would never forgive herself for dishonouring Sam and abandoning his daughter.
I had a quick flash of memory; I was a small child running through bright green fields of grass in the warm, friendly sun of a Queensland summer. My dog was barking and running at my feet, my friends giggling and running ahead of me. We were all bare foot and care free, our hair bleached from the sun and our skin olive and glowing. Birds flocked in formation over head. Cockatoos squawked and teased. Oh how we played in those fields of fresh air on long hot days; days we thought would never end and the sky was such a beautiful blue. I wanted to fall into it like the crystal clear stream that bubbled endlessly over bedrocks as it swam behind our houses.
I stood still as I exited the roadhouse and looked around me; the earth was redder then ever before like the land was bleeding beneath me. The sun was bright and glaring menacingly as if it had been the one to stab her; stab the very ground in anger making her bleed, but what was it angry about? How did this place that was once my childhood friend and confidant become so angry at us, why did it turn on us so severely? I reached down and rubbed the dirt between my fingers, the soft red clay stained my hands making me look like the murderer. Perhaps, I thought, I was.
‘Do you ever think that this is our fault?’ I thought aloud but Toni didn’t reply. She too was staring at the luminous red earth thinking of days long gone, a note slipped into her school desk and a promise of a kiss. She wondered what her life would have been like had she nothing more to worry about than her first kiss and all the repercussions of it being from a girl.
‘Ahem,’ the man startled me from my thoughts. He had quietly followed us outside. ‘Miss, I wish we could help you really I do, but… I can at least offer you something.’
He walked over to an old shed and tugged the doors; they looked as if they hadn’t been opened in years. I kicked away the sand that had amassed against them and I helped him heave until they became loose enough to open. The iron creaked under the stress.
‘It’s not much. I can’t even guarantee that it’ll work but I know it’s got a full tank, it’s an old gas engine so it’s no use to us.’ He swung open the door and revealed an old tractor. Toni smiled like a child lining up for a fair ride. ‘If she doesn’t start first time, just loosen this cap a little and try her again. I’m sorry I can’t do more for you.’ I nodded reassuring him that he had done the right thing and more than he had to. I wondered if his daughter would ever know the touch of grass to her feet or know that steely smell of rain before a thunder storm broke. My body ached; I wished to know those feelings again too.
‘Thank you.’ I croaked to the man and Toni gave him a long, sad hug. She said goodbye to the man who’d become her surrogate father when her own father disappeared into the hungry earth.
The tractor slowly dragged us out of the barn and onto the freeway. We drove laughing as the hot wind blew through our hair. It was the first time I could remember having fun in what had become the drudgery of life. Having someone to share the journey with turned it from a plight to an adventure.
‘Toni?’
She leaned in close to me so that we could talk and I felt her arm slip around my waist.
‘Describe to me how the Jasmine smells on a wet summer morning?’ I asked and as she spoke my heart began to feel lighter and my head giddy.
‘Well,’ She breathed in as if she were inhaling the scent and considering it like a wine connoisseur, ‘It smells sweet like sugar has somehow evaporated into the air. It overpowers everything around it and you can smell it for miles around. It smells like little honey droplets of stardust have rained down to earth. It smells… of newness and rebirth.’ She looked at me and could see the smile creeping across my face, ‘It reminds me of my mother, and soft sunshine and happy days, picnicking by the river and how the breeze feels cool on your face when it blows off the water!’ She burst into a loud and uncontrollable laugh and when I breathed in deeply, I thought I smelled the aroma of Jasmine. I looked down at the weed in the coffee cup at our feet. It would never grow old enough to produce the fragrance I longed for but it still lived true to its purpose; it somehow believed in its destiny to be this grand living, perfume making thing.
‘Toni, I think we will find somewhere to plant that little sprout.’ I didn’t care about the odds; I had a dream and a reason to go beyond what I would find in Brisbane. I thought about my mother again and said a prayer inside my head that she would still be alive when I finally reached her.
The tractor grunted like an old beast of burden as it hit the city pavement. We had reached the River City which had been transformed into a desert dwelling. The old buildings that ran up and down the streets named for Kings and Queens had red dirt and white sand piled high up against them; it lapped at their windows strangely reminiscent of a torrid ocean lapping at the shore. It struck me how similar to water the sand actually was and that we really were at no more danger from the sand as we were of the ocean, we were just unprepared for this particular tide.
The city was empty and quiet. I found it hard to believe that anyone was left here. The only movement I caught was a shy dingo that peered at us suspiciously from behind a fire hydrant that poked up out of the sand like a red metal cactus. I was unnerved by the dog as my memories of Fletcher came flooding back but the dingo didn’t want anything to do with us. It just wanted to see that we moved on and left it alone; somehow he had learnt the lesson of his ancestors with regard to people and what a peril we were. I was starting to realise that the animals fared much better from the new arrangements of the world than we did. They were finally ridding themselves of an uneven threat, able to go back to their private, primordial way of life. Perhaps, I thought this was the reason for all the devastation, perhaps it was to get rid of the threat of us and the damage we had done – it was a conclusion I kept arriving at no matter which direction I ran from it. Soon I would have to stop running and face up to my responsibility. The dingo disappeared into the shadow of the hydrant and into the shadow of my memory. I would never see another Dingo, like the Tasmania Tiger, they disappeared into a reclusive corner of the world that Humans had never been able to find – a corner of the world it’s creator kept secret to hide the animals that had suffered too much. I pulled up on Edward Street; it had been recently cleared so I knew someone must still around this part of the city. We headed for the old stone building that had housed the Casino. This was where people had supposedly moved to after the fires of 2020 because it was a solid old sandstone building that had stood for more than a century through colonisation and settlement.
We walked silently along the sidewalk each lost in her own thoughts and anxieties. Our boots randomly hit concrete sending out the odd echoing clap and soon we stood in the empty foyer of the casino, poker machines still sitting blankly and quiet as if just finished for the night. My head was swimming and my mind was playing with me. I thought for a moment that I was actually dying of thirst in some remote desert and hallucinating how the end of my journey would have been if I had survived. Toni stirred beside me and grabbed my arm. Her touch anchored me back into reality. She seemed intent on saving me each time I tried to drift away.
‘It looks empty.’ Her tone was disappointed.
‘Hello?’ I called out, my voice echoed around the halls and returned to us alone. ‘Hello? It’s Jane Fawkner, I’ve come for my mother.’ I received no reply. ‘Someone told me she was here!’ Maybe I was already too late. I collapsed down on the great old staircase, engorged by exhaustion and desperation. I rested my head between my knees and cried but this time my face felt wet. These tears had come from somewhere deep down inside me like an underground river that had flooded to the surface after some great catastrophe and I sobbed uncontrollably; My Darwinian resilience had finally collapsed and my hands were saturated as I wiped my eyes.
‘It’s ok Jane, they must be here somewhere. The streets are too clean for it to have been abandoned… don’t give up. Please don’t give up.’ Toni begged as she fell beside me and tried to consol me. If I gave up now I was giving up on both of us and she couldn’t allow that. I could hear a passion for me in her voice that I didn’t understand. I had been alone for so long that I couldn’t see why an almost stranger would care for me at all.
‘I’ve come so far.’ I croaked. ‘I’ve come such a long way, all for nothing. It’s too late.’ She squeezed my arm as if telling me that she was as good a reason as any for my journey. But I thought if I made my mother well again then the whole world would change and return to what we had before. ‘I just wanted to make things right again.’ I whispered. I thought we’d be young and free again in a country that spoiled us with water and warm sunshine and happiness.
It had been fifteen years since my mother had last seen me and I know the separation had aged her. She had sent me away on a flood of tears - to find some place better than where we’d ended up. Life had always been hard for us; she being a single mother with little means of supporting herself and feeding her children but with the climate change, life had changed and become desperate for everyone. Once I reached Sydney however, I realised the extent of the desperation and prayed for mercy that didn’t arrive from the God I didn’t believe in. The news filtered in - the American continent had been savagely submerged – a new Atlantis, it was lost forever to the floor of the rising sea, its people sated the appetite of old Poseidon who regurgitate their remains on beaches all over the world. Those that took to boats just drifted waiting for a rescue that very rarely came and I heard people tell tales of dinghies full of skeletons washing up on shores, the remains of families still sitting together as if they just waited resignedly for death to come for them, in fact people could been seen doing just the same on dry land. Just sitting down and waiting to die. England had also been washed away but once the waves retreated all that was left was the land that had been there first; houses, cities, roads were all washed into the retreating ocean that churned like some global mouth wash eradicating the plaque of progress. The debris of what had been the greatest Empire in the world was seen for years floating around like broken teeth. I had heard that landmarks were washing up in obscure places. The tip of the Eiffel Tower could still be seen poking out of the ocean off the eastern coast of Africa; it’s heavy iron frame dragged by surging ocean rages like a misplaced chess piece. The iconic Statue of Liberty had landed quite upright on the coast of Brazil. It all seemed so hopeless. I sent the morbid words to my mother and we lost touch in the fallout that followed. The weather phenomenon was dubbed ‘El Finito’ by the crashing weather stations who, like everyone else were starting to wonder, what the point was in doing anything. I kept my head down and existed on the filthy streets of the city wondering when it would all end.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder last month as I walked down George Street in Sydney. Someone tapped me on the shoulder as I walked with a million other people down George Street and asked me if I was Jane Fawkner. ‘Yes’ I said. He told me in a low mumble that he’d been looking for me and I must get back to Brisbane. He told me he had been sent by my mother to find me and he gave me a set of keys for his truck and an envelope full of money and then just as quickly disappeared into the crowd without any further explanation. Had he lingered too long or spoken any louder he could have been killed. I’d heard about the network of people who passed things around the country – he was a messenger who risked his life to keep information flowing through the underground between the dissenters who were plotting and scheming. But politics didn’t matter to me now, I had to get home.
‘Jane.’ There was a voice behind me. I jumped up and was faced with a little old couple who had appeared from somewhere behind us.
‘Yes. I’m Jane. Where’s my mother?’ I was momentarily hopeful.
‘I’m sorry dear, she’s gone.’ The lady reached out, comforting me, ‘She waited, but she was just too ill. Maybe in the old days we could have kept her going but we’ve so little in the way of medicines here now. She didn’t suffer, I assure you.’
I hung my head and stared at my feet. I was too tired and hopeless to even greave any more. My eyes stung as if poisoned by a thousand bees and I thought they might just swell up and blind me. Toni was silent and hurting.
‘I don’t know what to do now. I’ve come all this way.’ I lamented. I felt like I could just sit back down on those stairs and wait forever for my mother to come and get me and take me back home with her.
‘Jane, your mother’s in a better place now, you have to believe that.’ The old lady tried to touch my arm but I pulled away.
‘Like where, Heaven?’ I laughed a bitter laugh. ‘Do you people really think that there is a God? What devil would have done this to us? I dragged myself all this way for the one person that means anything to me and she was taken away from me before I even get here.’ I looked back to Toni and realised that I had crushed her feelings and was immediately sorry for my outburst. ‘I just don’t know if I can go on anymore. I’m so tired of this.’
‘Come downstairs with us. You will see what goodness we have created here. Your Mother left you something very valuable and precious. She would want you to go on.’ The Lady said and motioned to her Husband to take over but I could only think about whether my mother would really want me to continue suffering in this hell. Would a mother that loved her children not rather them die than to suffer so terribly.
‘But first you must be blind folded.’ The old man pulled a length of material from his pocket and displayed it, ‘The location of our new city is secret. Nobody can come in uninvited.’ I was slightly disturbed by this secrecy but my mind was tired and I couldn’t understand anything they were talking about. I gave an uncertain look sideways at Toni who only nodded her head slightly letting me know she thought it would be alright.
‘The only city left now is Sydney and its a million miles away from here; So far away.’ I felt my eyes begin to close without my permission and the old man effortlessly laid the blindfold across them.
‘Come Jane, and you too.’ He reached out for Toni who was still hurting from my ignorant words but she went along with the plan.
‘They never did consider Brisbane to be a real city,’ The old lady giggled and rubbed my arm now she finally had possession of it, ‘But that doesn’t mean we aren’t one. Your mother left you a key dear, a key to the city.’
‘A key?’ I heard the word in the fogginess of my mind. ‘There was a man who lost a key.’ I could feel my consciousness draining and was too weak to fight it off. ‘Fletcher.’ I said and I was unable to see through my blindfold the frown given by the old people at the mentioning of his name.
They guided my broken body away from the staircase. I was slipping into a coma like state. I no longer cared where I was or where I was going. I had given up on this horrid, dry world. I’m not sure where we walked too or for how long, for all I knew we walked around on the spot but after a while I got the overwhelming sensation that I was falling.
‘Jane.’ Toni called out from her blindfold. ‘Are we going down?’ I felt her hand beside me and I reached out and held it firmly. I could tell she was scared and tried to comfort her with my grip.
‘Yep,’ The old man confirmed, ‘You see we found something a while ago and well, we just sat on it and waited. We knew there would come a time when we would be abandoned and left to our own defences. We knew this drought wasn’t going to break. Remember the tunnels we were building under the city to ease traffic congestion about, oh… thirty, forty years ago?’ I recalled the failed roadways and the public furore over the expense. I was still in school then, full of grandiose dreams for my future. ‘Well, the project was halted because of the caves we found.’
‘Caves?’ I repeated as if I didn’t know what they were. We stopped falling and I felt a cold, wet sensation on my face that woke me sharply from my lethargic dreams and I was a little panicked. My arms were taken on either side I was gently ushered forward. I felt Toni’s body placed beside me as the fellow continued.
‘We’d dug down far too deep for the tunnels, the engineer we hired was, well a bit of a joke but he was cheap and we needed to cut expenses.’ The old man started to sound like a politician as he continued and he started fiddling with the knot in the rear of my blindfold, ‘That was partly my fault; I wanted the tunnels to work but didn’t have the funds to exactly do it properly. We thought we’d dug right through to the river,’ He let the cloth fall away from my eyes, ‘Blessing in disguise really!’
‘Oh!’ I gasped as I found myself standing in the middle of a park with green, green grass and manicured garden beds like I had never seen before. There were species of flowers I had not seen since I was in school.
‘Welcome home Jane,’ The old man leant forward and smiled.
His wife continued, ‘You can see why we must keep it secret. If others new about this we’d be inundated with refugees and we cannot afford the influx of people. So far everything is orderly here. Newman was voted Major again this year, he’s so popular with the city folks.’ Mrs Newman smiled at her husband proudly.
I wasn’t paying attention. I had thrown my boots off and let my feet trample over the glorious blades of grass; I fell down on my knees and inhaled deeply into the ground beneath me. ‘It’s real!’ I screamed, ‘But how?’
‘It smells so fresh and beautiful!’ Toni was also on her hands and knees trying to impress the wonder to her memory.
‘Well, like my husband was saying,’ the old lady picked up the story, ‘We found caves complete with an underground river that was not mapped on any paperwork that could be found. No-one knew it was here! We were able to dam the river and create a catchment area that collects run off from a network of underground waterways. Then we devised a plan to bring the city down here. There’s not many of us though, I’d say about five thousand at the last count. But our population is growing.’
I felt a niggling sense of déjà vu. ‘How long will this water last? Do you know its source –is damming it wise?’ I shrugged nervously.
‘Well, it has some kind of tidal flow so it does have a source; It’s not about to dry up. We haven’t had rain here in so many years but that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been raining anywhere. Our scientists think that the river runs up to the top of the country and possibly is collecting monsoonal run off from Asia, which we believe is the most stable country environmentally at the moment. The real issue for us is overcrowding,’ the old man took a serious tone to his voice, ‘That’s why you cannot know where you are and how you got here. Law breakers are taken to the surface and let go and we tell no one in the rest of the country where we are. They think we all wasted away like the rotting city above us.’ This security was nothing new. Sydney had tried the same tactic of exclusion but everyone knew where the city was so wandering refugees became a problem. The Government erected a huge fortress like gate around the city to keep people out and the exclusion was escalated from desperation to all out violence.
I looked beyond the vibrant green park to a dim colony of buildings made from dank and slimly limestone that had nothing of the colour and freshness I was inhaling. The man noticed my stare and like a well oiled Politician tried everything to ease my concerns and sell me his paradise.
‘This park is our newest initiative. We’ve started to drill up to the surface, creating sunlight vents that reflect down through the buildings from the surface. We have fifty more of these vents in the works as we speak and are improving on the technology every day.’ I felt a tapping on my shoulder and turned to face him. ‘Here is your key’ He smiled holding out a shiny gold skeleton key for me. I took hold of the key and managed a smile. ‘Keep it on you at all times. If you report to the administration, that building in the front there – they will tell you where your living quarters will be and what’s for dinner.’ The old couple walked off into the stony distance holding each other lovingly in their arms
**
You see, we have a chance here to start all over again with society and take some lessons from the past. We have a chance to only include the good things that man has created. We tolerate no nonsense here, drug use, perversions, theft and dishonesty – all are punishable with banishment from the community and I believe that banishment from here will spell out certain death – especially when Sydney finally crumbles.
I wasn’t sure if I liked the idea of this supposed utopia and felt uneasy about the conditions of living here. I couldn’t imagine a world filled with all the supposed evils that this powerful man was aiming to exclude from his new reality. I couldn’t imagine a world without the pain of loss, the hunger of addiction and the occasional joy of certain perversions anyway. We always wish for a life without these heartaches but what kind of a life are we leading if we do not experience suffering?
‘Excuse me.’ A little voice came from behind me and I turned to see a little girl on a swing. I smiled widely at the sight of the sweet old past time and walked over to join her.
‘My names Emily’
‘Hi Emily, my name’s Jane.’ We both paused to push ourselves back and then thrust our legs out to bring us swinging up into the air.
‘Jane, we’re getting a swimming pool next week and my mum says I can invite all my friends around for a swim. You can come if you want.’
I closed my eyes and let the cool air of the cave wash over my face as I sailed up to the ceiling and down again in that tiny little green park that grew perfectly under the ground.
‘Emily,’ I breathed, ‘Do you know what a drought is?’ I asked her as I sailed so high I could almost touch the roof.
‘Yes, my brother plays checkers all the time.’ Emily smiled proudly at her knowledge as her ringlets twisted around her chubby face. I opened one eye and looked at her dubiously as she jumped off her swing and ran over to a water fountain, letting the water run freely for a moment before taking a delicate little sip.
I decided to take a walk after dark, or what I knew should have been dark as there in this new underground city that looked more like a movie set from an old theme park, it was really always dark and the only reason I knew night had come was that my watch still worked and told me it was eight o’clock. As my boots thudded along the rock surface that had been trimmed to reminiscently look like a street of what, I suddenly - in that moment there, just realised was the old world – I found a freedom inside me that was hatching like a new life and taking over my soul. I had finally let go of it all; I was letting go of the image of existence that my human condition had trained me to cling terrifically too. I was shedding the sanctity of society. My mother had passed away and the world, for all the good or the bad kept on turning and changing and wasn’t about to stop it, but I stopped and blinked lightly as one does when a certain life changing thought pops into your head – a light switches on and interferes with your narrow sight creating new images on the backs of your eye lids. All this chaos had not happened to wipe humans from the earth but to free them, to free me of the litter of what we call living. Humans were not the meaning of life; humans were just a part of it and had bogged themselves down in the interpreting and conditioning of it. I looked around me at the town that these people were using to anchor themselves in the past and realised that I could let go of the anchor, even if no one else would, I can let go of the anchor and float away in the tide. I walked back to the room I was sharing with Toni and although a little sadness shadowed my heart I knew I was doing the right thing. I took my watch off my wrist and laid it on the bedside table all the while watching the perfect peacefulness of her slumber. This is where her journey was meant to stop, for now at least. I leaned in and kissed the line where her hair met her forehead and inhaled the deep, sweet smell of her locks, I instantly sensed the perfume of jasmine and breathed it into my lungs and the fabric of my memory.
The evening air was chilly when I emerged from the casino where the entrance to the cave had been secreted. In my hands I held onto the mug of jasmine sprout that Toni had so carefully nurtured. I looked above me and basked in the litter of millions of stars; the very same stars that had watched our whole world come and go in a blink of an eye. I remembered a game I used to play when I was young and high. I laid down on the ground looking up to the night sky and spread my arms and legs out and concentrated on the vastness of space above me until I felt like I was falling into the sky. My body felt as if it was truly falling forward, that somehow gravity had been turned off for a moment. I loved the way you could convince your mind of it and my stomach would go weak with motion sickness. I stood up and for the first time I didn’t shake the sand from my clothes, the sand had become part of me, me part of it.
My whole body was compelled forward toward a blackness that seemed never ending. I sensed that I was heading north and from memory the constellations were in the right direction for it. My legs stretched beneath me possessing a new power in their muscles that were created long ago for walking and as I felt myself become suspended in the darkness that enveloped all around me, I thought I saw something bright. Out in front of me toward what should have been the horizon there was a light, like a small torch light bobbing up and down in the air as if suspended from a tree. The light seemed familiar to me and I was drawn to it.
When the sun rose the next morning and Toni had searched for me for hours, she too emerged from the casino door and looked out at the expanse of sand that had swallowed the once urban, brick and mortar landscape. She could see no sign of me and her eyes both squinted from the glare of the sun and wept for her fear. She was afraid for me and worried for herself. As she turned, surveying the emptiness before her, she caught a slight glimmering about a hundred meters away in the sand and quickly ran toward it. The broken bits of coffee mug became quite clear as she neared it. She landed on her knees and scooped up the bits of china at the same time looking frantically around for more evidence of my path but it seemed hopeless to her. Somehow she knew I had gone and could only hope that our paths would cross again. She turned slowly and headed back for the casino .
[A P1]Section below to edit
It felt like I’d been for walking days not minutes. I looked back over my shoulder and could still see the rusted outline of my truck jumping around in the shimmering heat. Time had stopped and the space around me was deathly quiet. Ahead all I could see was road - straight, un-curving, unending. It cut like a wound through the earth and the sticky black tar at my feet tried to restrain me with each weary footfall. I squinted as I gazed ahead; deep leathery wrinkles in the corner of my eyes. Everything around me was dry and shrunken away. The earth reeled and retreated like a stampede of wild brumbies, burned by the gnarled fingers of that stinging hot air.
It hadn’t rained in years and I mean no rain, not one single drop, not one stray splash of condensation fell from that unrelenting sky. Each time my heavy foot crashed into the ground, another layer of the earths crust would burn up, become airborne and fly around into my face and nostrils causing me to choke and splutter. I was swallowing the very ground I had just trodden on and it was the smooth, powdery taste of that dirty red earth that told me I was home.
It may be strange to say that you can taste a place but it’s true. Sydney, overcrowded since the fires of 2020, tasted like desperation, that sharp metal tang that puts you on edge; it was a dirty, congested city of citizen refugees that hoped our biggest city could save them from what lurked outside its gates. Melbourne had only recently closed down, its people moved out and told to go elsewhere, often convinced to move at gunpoint; the sheriffs had no problem using force to hurry the slow and disabled. It tasted like resignation, a wet musty death mould, that clung to your teeth and was unrelenting on the senses. When I was a teenager, the great fires had torn across the tinder dry forests of the North, leaving nothing but a wasteland and soon our quaint city was declared desert by the Drought Assembly. We headed south; there was nothing else to do. The desert was a plague and we were on the run. The southern cities became more congested and more desperate and smelt worse than ever, a mix of sewage and sweaty dirt clung to people like their skin. The Peoples Army patrolled the streets and contained the surging population of homeless while a dark underground of dissenters began to seethe and plot and plan against a Government that had let them down for what use is a Government when infrastructure and community arts grants were no longer important. There had been plenty of warning that this was coming but the profit addicted corporations wouldn’t take heed. Food was now as scarce as those once dripping profits and people ate anything they could find, our rat plague had hit an all time low and I had not long ago seen a man in an alleyway roasting his own cat. I knew it was his cat because he lovingly talked to it the whole time it cooked, a fire lit in a trash can serving as a rotisserie, the tabby’s belled collar jingling around his wrinked old wrist. He called her ‘Princess Fluffy’ as he stoked the flames.
I had secured my exit from Sydney by illegal means. Anyone wanting to enter or leave the city required a rarely given, state clearance. The official word was that the tough line on ‘moving about’ was to prevent the spread of disease whether this was the entire truth or not, I didn’t know. I suspect that anyone outside of Sydney were in the process of being deserted, left as the other cities were to the mercy of the GCC or the Global Climate Catastrophe sacrificed like an offering to the weather Gods. But the thing about the smell of fear and hopelessness is there is no saturation point. As people panicked more, the smell got worse and the stench in the city had hit an unbearable peak. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I had to leave and face what ever the outside had to offer. It took a week to smuggle me out – a week to cover a distance you could drive in a day but once I was lifted out into the dry salty air beyond the putrid gates of the Capital, I smelt the freedom that I had lost and it was a sweet smelling thing, that freedom.
The muscles in my thighs were starting to burn and I wasn’t sure if it was from the heat or the exercise. I looked up at the depressing emptiness that surrounded me and urged my tired feet forward. I was beginning to rethink my trip. People had warned me not to return to Brisbane but I had no choice; my mother had stayed as the sand washed away the foundations of our home, and I had received word that she was dying. I had to get to her and I had to get there soon.
An hour passed and nothing changed. The black leather of my boots began cracking under the strain of dryness. Dirt seeped into those cracks and festered. I estimated my location from the few derelict buildings that were still standing like weary old men, hunched on the side of the road; the colour of their paint barely distinguishable from the fine dirt that embalmed them. Ahead I would soon see a vacant pit that once was filled with the brown tidal waters of a river that snaked its way around the city’s island like centre. We had called ourselves the River City once. But the lapping luxury of waves against sandstone was now just a distant dream and as I squinted out at the horizon, I had a faint recollection of what the Ferry’s had looked like as they happily swam up and down stream, oblivious to the fate that stalked them. I tried to break the monotony of my march by humming to myself; ‘Memories… misty water-coloured memories…’ My voice was dry and I coughed, then I laughed lightly at the irony of the song.
[A P1]
I was walking because I had run out of fuel for my truck. I had secured the vehicle with several storage drums attached to the back. Petrol was hard to find these days and very expensive but I had bought enough for my journey, at least I thought I had. I hadn’t counted on the storms. The east coast, formerly renown for sunshine and sparkling waves had become notorious for severe sand storms that blew in regularly. These storms killed off any remnants of the old tourist attraction. They were called ‘white outs’ because it was the light golden sand from the coast that blew inland in a battle against the heavy low moving red sands of the west – it was a war for domination over the earth and the tactic was burial of anything in its path. You couldn’t see during such a storm. Sometimes, the scene at sunset was breathtaking - when the deep red dirt shone like trickling blood while the light sand danced frantically and twinkled in the orange sunset above it on the horizon. It looked like millions of enchanted pixies caught in a Tantric dance of deliverance.
‘If you’re going to survive, trick is to stay warm.’ The dark, dry skinned warden of station forty-nine told me as I stocked up with water at the final official outpost. These outposts were more like crypts set into the ground along the highway.
‘Stop yer truck and leave it running.’ He whistled through a mouth full of rotten teeth. I chose a bottle of whisky from a metal supply cabinet, ‘We come up that stretch and remove the sand once a week, but if the storm is bad we’ll bring the dogs out to search as soon as, if yer broke down we’ll find yer but yer must stay in yer car.’ On a tiny scrap of paper he wrote down a radio frequency. ‘Don’t do what yer last fool did Missy and try to walk back here should yer get in trouble, yer end up dingo dinner.’ He spoke like a man who doesn’t get to talk often. It was hard to tell where one word ended and the other started. I craned my neck toward him in order to concentrate on his English and decipher his mutter.
‘Why you gooin up they anyway gurl?’
‘My mother.’ I realised it had been a while since I had spoken to anyone also and felt a great strain against my throat as I tried to explain, ‘is sick.’
Irvine looked at me with sympathy folded into his leathery forehead. ‘You find a doctor?’ I shook my head and he began to search through his cluttered station. ‘You find a doctor…’ He popped up from a pile of supplies and thumped a dusty old leather bag on the counter, ‘Maybe he can make her well.’ I took his bag from him more out of gratitude for his kind gesture than out of hope for my mother. Even if I did make it to her, I doubted there would be anyone skilled still living in the colony – they would have deserted years ago in search of paid work in the Government run areas.
I glanced around the walls as I left the station. Chalk boards were stacked around the perimeter, each designated to display a special tally. This man was fond of keeping statistics and had counted everything from the number of people who’d passed through the station, to the rare brush-tailed possums he had trapped and eaten (he kept the skins displayed like road kill on his walls). He also counted the days we’d gone with out rain and the number of people he’d shot in the name of law enforcement –one of the many jobs he was assigned by the withdrawing Government. Irvine Howard’s preference for Law Enforcement was to use his gun before his mouth – as the large number on that chalk board proved - but somehow I found it comforting to know he was keeping an eye out for me as I continued my struggle home. As I heaved the trap door up to leave, I spied a portrait of the old Queen taped to the ceiling window; it was yellowed from age and sunlight.
‘You know, in the English colonies – they still drive cars and eat fresh food.’ Irvine had caught my pause to look at the Queen. I hadn’t seen her portrait in our republic since her death way before the trouble started. The dusty flyscreen swung as I let it close below me and wondered about the rest of the world. The last I’d heard, England had been reclaimed by the sea and the King was living in France, but I didn’t want to crush Irvine’s hopes.
I drove through the morning. The sunlight was soft for once and warm but I could feel in the air that the furnace was being stoked and soon enough we’d be baking again. I was buoyed by the possibility of passing through the coast storm free. I glanced at my watch – a rusted old wind-up job that outlasted any Duracell, I was only a few hours off the city limits. When I looked up beyond my steering wheel again, I caught a glimpse of a great dirty white wall moving slowly toward me. It had appeared on the horizon in stealth and silent speed. I swung around to all sides and could still see it inching in around me. It made a low growling hum that incited fear in my heart as it slowly consumed the sky and tumbled ravenously toward me. I pressed my foot to the floor hoping to out run it but my old truck was slow and began to bog and spin in the sand. There was no where to go; I was blind. I pulled the truck off as far as I thought the edge of the road might be and left the engine idling. I could be here for weeks, I thought to myself, hoping like hell that the station master was harnessing his dogs and at that very moment planning a rescue.
The heating did little to curb the icy cold that travelled side saddle with the sand and my teeth hurt from chattering. I broke the seal on the whisky and sipped at it slowly. The burning heat of the liquor gave the most pleasurable feeling of escape and I relished its acid trail slipping down to my stomach where it radiated warmth like a ball of lava. The whistle of the wind and the scratching of the dirt against my windows terrified me as I sat alone in the dark getting tipsy and jumping at every noise. I clenched the radio receiver in my hand even though I couldn’t see it to set the frequency. I gazed at the reflection of my dash lights in the blackness behind the windows and raised the bottle to my mouth again but was stopped short by another light, this one outside in the darkness. It wasn’t any reflection; it was beyond the window. This light was like a torch in the storm. It bounced up and down as if someone were jumping on the spot.
I screwed the cap back on the bottle and my stomach turned. I levered the door open just slightly compelled toward the light, careful not to let the rioting wind into my sanctuary. ‘Hello?’ I tried to call out above the din but I doubted someone could hear me if they were sitting next to me let alone yards away through a whirling wind. I levered the door out just far enough to press myself outside. It took all of my strength to keep the door from flying open. I began to wheeze as the sand infiltrated my nose and my mouth. I pushed a few steps toward the light, my arm shielding my eyes from the stinging sand and my mouth covered with the neck of my shirt. I called out to it again imaging someone lost in the horror of the storm. ‘Hello? Are you ok?’ Suddenly I was staring at nothing and I had to concentrate hard to decide if my eyes were open or closed. The light had disappeared and the wind pushed me over trying to bury me alive. I stayed on the ground and dragged myself back toward the truck desperately hoping I was dragging myself in the right direction. The howling whistle echoed painfully in my ears. I could barely make out the interior light of the truck through the roaring air. I struggled inside, coughing harshly and took a long, burning, soothing drink of whisky to cause me to cough the sand out of my breathing tract. I turned back to the window and suddenly out in the darkness the light appeared again and bounced around in the air like a fire-fly. I reached over to the door and pressed the lock down firmly and grasped the radio receiver in one hand, the whisky in the other. I felt like a small child in a dark bedroom of noises and nightmares. ‘Min Min…’ I named the lights with a steady whisper as if naming it might make it go away. I recalled the stories of the ghost lights from old Australia; the stories of the mischievous lights which bothered lone travellers, the forgotten spirits of our ancestors. Since the desert began advancing, the strange phenomenon had been sighted more often on the lonely roads between populated areas. I took a swig of liquor again trying not to look at my companion. I shut my eyes tightly and tried to think of the old days.
Morning finally arrived and brought with it a sharp headache. I found myself slumped against the window somewhere between dozing and awake. I’d only been asleep a matter of minutes but the view had changed dramatically during this time. An orange sunlight had peeked over the flat line of the horizon and the leftover sand sparkled like scattered jewels. I shifted on my numb backside and yawned. The whirling dust had cleared just as quickly as it had arrived. The road outside was deserted, no sign of my visitor in the night. The empty skyscrapers that stood half buried on the sunshine strip shimmered in the distance and welcomed me like a friendly neighbour. My reserve tank was dangerously low.
I leaned out from the window and shoved sand away from the sides of my truck and as I looked out over the road I saw golden piles waiting patiently for their next journey inland. How this world had changed from the carefree spirit of my childhood. If I closed my eyes it was twenty years ago and I could still see the great towering gums and smell the pine trees that had flanked us as we drove along this very same road. We had no cares then and couldn’t possibly imagine a world any different from the one we enjoyed. Our parents would take us driving each summer, towing a caravan to the coast for school vacations that seemed so long and unreal now. I sometimes wondered if my memory was playing tricks on me. Perhaps those trees never really existed and I had planted them in my mind - the seeds of a lie grown in the earth of my subconscious. My thoughts turned to my Mother lying somewhere waiting for me to arrive so she could die and leave this horrid world to the mercy of its ravenous dirt. I remembered looking up at her when I was a child; a halo made of the sun shining around her lustrous long dark hair as she leant back against a ghost gum and quizzed me for a spelling bee. Her voice was sweet and joyful and I was dreamy with how beautiful she was and my heart started to ache severely for her. It had been fifteen years since she had told her children to go south and find hope. In all those years the only hope I’d had was my memories of home and the aging mother that I had not seen in what seemed like a lifetime – a separate lifetime to the one I should have owned. I wondered if I would ever see the world again the way I remembered it.
I grew up in a humble suburb on the outskirts of town; the yards were big and the trees plentifully dispersed throughout wide streets and horse paddocks where kids would run wild until the chorus songs of our mothers called us home with the lowering twilight. The summers were hot and busy and the winters were on the chilly side of warm. We’d run bare feet over hot tarmac pavements, soft wet grass and through clumps of cubby house bamboo. We dreamt of our futures in that very same world and raising our own children in that same bamboo clump; they’d be barefoot and happy just like we were.
I hadn’t even finished high school when it all started to go wrong and the spinning globe we dwelt on began to reclaim all it had entrusted to us. We had taken the earth for granted and she wasn’t going to stand for it. Firstly the papers reported freak weather phenomenon around the world but they were expected to clear up after the El Nina effect had passed. No-one was worried. Then we were just going through a lengthy drought; nothing new in a dry country like ours. We’d been through droughts before and they had always broken. Water restrictions were put in place and people formed gallant committees of awareness. News papers concentrated on these committees, because awareness meant that we were going to be ok. No body wanted to think for a minute that this was not true.
But then suddenly the papers stopped printing; power was cut off to the northern states and communication died; televisions were silent, radios static and mobile phones useless. We were suddenly plunged into the darkness and wondered why we had no warning – no official warning that is. Petrol prices were raised to match weekly wages; cars were abandoned, sometimes burned up for heat. For the first time since my great-grandparents generation we were cut off from the rest of the world. We relied on people travelling through town for information but no-one had any. It seemed the Government had deserted us. Eventually, I too left town only to learn that the problem wasn’t localised as we had first thought and the Governments were scrambling to make a decision on what to do. I grew into an adult while wandering through hopeless city after city filled with transient families looking for answers. They arrived together in great caravans of extended relatives prepared to stick together through thick and thin but as they moved on and things worsened they broke away from each other hoping to save themselves by shedding the number of mouths they had to feed. It became a Darwinian world where only the resourceful survived. Those that couldn’t adapt quickly died. The further south I travelled the more I realised the world as I knew it had come to an awful end and my mind suddenly reanimated old Percy Fletcher.
Percy Fletcher was a slug looking man who was always out to ruin our fun. Every neighbourhood had one such resident– the religious man who always had advice for the rest of humanity. Percy had so many warnings for us that we lost count. He told us not to run on the concrete and to wear shoes outside. He warned us against speaking to strangers and eating lollies but we ignored him because he was wrong and we were children, supposed to eat lollies and wear no shoes. We ran every day on the concrete and nothing bad had happened to us, except for that one time when Jenny Clarke fell on her face and knocked her front teeth out. Occasionally we’d throw dog poop over Percy Fletchers fence to punish him for being so weird and annoying.
But more importantly, I remember the summer he started warning our parents. He forgot about the children and started to call out to the adults from behind his fence. This was the summer that Percy changed from being an eccentric to being dangerous.
‘Born of greed and ignorance!’ he yelled. ‘The pestilence will be born of your own greed and ignorance! Damned will he be whom does not heed the word of God and prepare for the almighty end, for it is neigh!’
Percy began building a cellar under his house and distributing plans around the neighbourhood so others could follow suit. He stocked up with canned goods and all kinds of weapons and supplies. Some of the older boys had seen guns buried in his cellar that only the army would supply. He was preparing for his Armageddon. He believed that he would fight along side God in the final war of the world and be given a first class ticket up to Heaven for his pious ness. The adults laughed at him when they gathered together to smoke and gossip and wait for school children. The police raided him but never found the rumoured guns but then New Depression hit and plunged the already worried world into chaos. Old Percy’s predictions suddenly seemed possible and people started looking to him for advice and salvation. This was his moment in the sun. The Followers of Fletcher had been born. In his eyes he surpassed agent of God and became the Lord himself. I glanced once more at the silent piles of sand that littered the deserted highway and slipped the truck into gear. I pushed on stinging with reminiscences.
I made it to Sam’s garage, the fuel gage just above empty. Sam’s station was on the far end of the approaching highway of the city. Driving, I was just forty minutes away from my destination. It was evident that Sam had gone. The word ‘South’ was scrawled across the boarded up front door – graffiti I had often seen as people attempted to tell loved ones what had happened to them. All over the country people had left scrawled trails, like Gretel’s breadcrumbs showing them their way back home. I left the truck running, worried it wouldn’t start up again and walked up to the shabbily boarded windows and peered inside. The station was empty but for the old racks and shelves that once held food and magazines for caravans of holiday makers that filtered through the Sunshine Coast. I twisted the knob and the door opened with a tired squeak.
Inside I smelled old emptiness. Sam had been gone for some time. I made a quick round of the shelves looking for anything I might take and found a few crumbling chocolate bars and some mints but no water. I didn’t think he would have left any behind, it was more precious than gold. I went outside to the truck again and lifted the fuel pump from its cradle and shook it but only a small ant crept out. It took one look at me and rushed back inside. It looked like a little petrol sniffing junkie, squinting into the sunlight at some hallucination. Even the smallest splotch of fuel had been taken or dried up long ago. I sighed. Progress was exhausting out here. My lips were dry and cracking from the hot wind that constantly blew. I ran my tongue over them dragging with it thick, gluey mucus that made my gums sticky and pasty. I could taste that dirt. I placed the nozzle back on the rusted tank and walked around the back of the station where five huge water tanks stood, a memento of the city rebate scheme – a drive to have the town collect as much water as possible. Most of these tanks hadn’t seen rain at all, let alone been full of it. The last time we’d had a rain storm was the year before the rebate scheme was introduced.
I climbed up the first tank and peered inside hoping for a small puddle of condensation to inject life back into my wrinkled lips before they sunk into the recesses of my skull. The first tank was empty, not even a stain. I climbed up the next one, and the one after that; all of them empty. I climbed up the final tank, a little voice in my head egging me on - ‘If you don’t check it, you know there will be water in there!’ I sluggishly started up the narrow ladder, step by step. My hands gripped onto the stinging metal as I headed for the half way point when suddenly, there was a great banging coming from inside the tank. I was already too far up to jump down but I didn’t want to get any closer to that sound. I began to carefully lower myself to the ground. Step at a time, I descended as the thudding noise from inside the tank continued to rise. The metal rang in my ears and it seemed to be unbearably loud. My feet were slipping on the ladder as I tried to move faster but the noise was getting closer to the top. There was still a sharp drop below me but I decided to jump, the ground was closer than I thought. I hit the dirt with a thud that winded me and for a moment I was paralysed. The noise finally reached crescendo and a man leapt from the top and hurriedly scattered down the ladder. He dropped off and landed in front of me, sitting at the foot of the tank and muttering maniacally.
‘I’ve lost me key, lost me key, anyone seen me key?’ He mumbled as he rocked to and fro not even seeing me before him.
‘Are you ok?’ He seemed old but maybe he was just aged from the desert. He was so shaggy and unkempt he looked like he’d been raised in the jungle. He wore suit pants and a white, buttoned shirt but they were dirty and torn it was as if he had wandered off from his day job sometime ago and got lost in the desert – this wasn’t an unlikely explanation except I couldn’t see how he’d been surviving out here so far from civilisation. He suddenly cried out, then quickly and sharply stopped crying, jumped up and took me by the shoulders. I yelled as he shook me, his grip so tight it hurt. I felt the bones in my shoulders crushing underneath his fists.
‘I lost me key, lost me key!’ He cried and pushed me around in a circle, ‘Do you have a key.’ He suddenly let go. ‘Do you have a key?’ He repeated in a voice that had calmed and sounded familiar.
‘A key to what?’ I asked nervously. My eyes searched through the dirty wrinkles trying to identify the man.
‘The Pestilence!’ He cried out and I buried my eyebrows in my forehead which seemed to discourage the man. He turned and ran off screaming into the distance.
I stood and stared after him, his identity dawning on me when suddenly from the shade of the first tank a Dingo leapt out and attached its jaw to his arms. I was certain now that God had left us. Percy Fletcher fell down beneath the beast and I froze. Part of me wanted to help him but the other part wanted to run while the dog was occupied with its prey. I carefully took a step forward trying to figure out what I should do when the Dingo let out a terrible yelp that pulsed through the thick air and I watched as the old man jumped up and landed on top of the writhing dog. He had stabbed it and greedily started tearing at the wild dogs flesh and stuffing it in his mouth. I quickly looked away, horrified and my breath was laboured and I found myself already running for my truck. I gagged. It dawned on me that I had left the truck running all this time. What precious little fuel I had would surely be wasted and I hoped like hell there was enough left to get me away from there.
I ran back around the station house and could hear the engine still roughly idling. I jumped in behind the wheel and threw my foot down on the accelerator, squealing out of the roadhouse. I put as much distance between myself and my hungry old neighbour as I could, he could have easily made dessert out of me and I wasn’t sure whether I was more scared of him or the threat of the hungry Dingos. I had to find another fuel station and fast. I tapped at the needle over my fuel gauge as it hung suspenseful over the empty line. It suddenly dropped below it and the engine whined and coughed and then it was silent. I slapped the truck into neutral and begged it to coast all the way home but it only made it about five hundred meters down an embankment before it crawled into a ditch by the road and sighed. She was done. My faithful, hardworking, well punished mule was dead and I was stranded, and it was so close to home. I slapped the wheel and let my head fall momentarily onto my hand and tried to cry. There were no tears, there hadn’t been for ages; the drought had dried up my emotions as well as our dams, leaving me only with a cold resilience that had seen me through the hardest times – I called it, my Darwinian resilience. I sighed and grabbed the jerry can from behind my seat. I shouldered my backpack and evacuated. Keeping in mind what I was trying to get away from, I hurried into the dusty burning heat of the roadway heading north. Home seemed so far away on foot, almost unreachable and I had to constantly push myself to keep going.
It had now been two hours since I had left the car and my boots dragged slightly in the dust causing it to cloud up around my legs and catch in the cuff of my jeans. I reached back into my pack and pulled out a water bottle, unscrewing the lid. It was the last of my supply. The price of bottled water, above your rationed allocations had now reached one hundred dollars a litre – the price of the bottle to put it in also just as much. Anything requiring water to manufacture was extremely hard to find. I had one ration coupon left but I was saving that for my mother even though I didn’t know if they received rations this far away from the Government areas. People had since been searching for their own way to make water and the scientists who’d mastered the art of collecting mass condensation where the new moguls of our millennium. I had once seen a kind of water factory in the desert, made out of millions of plastic drink bottles stacked up like cabin logs all sweating under the unrelenting sun. You could see water running sparsely down their insides into an underground collection tank. But you would surely need a million such building to make any decent amount of water. Needless to say, the breakthrough is yet to be discovered.
I didn’t stop walking. I couldn’t disturb the momentum of my legs or they may stop all together. I swallowed the last of the water in one gulp; it was warm and dry like hot dirt and did not cure me of my thirst. It was dead in the middle of the day. The sun was directly above me, a large angry fire that was trying to set me alight. It wanted to see the world dead. I could feel my skin ignite and burn; the top layer of my dermis was shrinking away like the skin on cooking chicken. I looked up to the horizon once more as I felt my mind start to wander and my eyes squinted independently of thought, my eyes would carry me now my body had given up and my mind was wasted. They had finally seen what we were waiting for. I wished so hard that I was already there, that the agony of moving was finally over. I reached out my arm and stretched my fingers as far as possible trying to somehow drag the vision closer to me. The burning, stinging sensation of hot metal on soft skin, I felt it for the second time that day. I held myself tightly to the sign, my hand burning and my body tired. ‘City Limits’ those words were more refreshing than an ocean of drinkable water.
I rested for a moment, using my backpack like an umbrella; the protective canvass shaded my body as it regained its strength, your body gets used to certain punishments after a while and I found mine quite adapted to the delirium of dehydration. While my mind wandered off in some distant fantasy, my body kept its militant pace. It’s one of the ironies of life that at a time when death would bring you wonderful relief from torturous conditions, your body decides to soldier through it and prolong your agony and see just how far it can get you. My steps had become mere scuffles and my calves burnt like a chemical fire. I kicked up dust as I dragged myself along. I remembered a fuel station just up ahead and that was the inspiration I needed to get myself to move quickly as I saw it shimmering beyond me. I prayed that it was still open. My feet hit the sticky tarmac and I looked up at the swinging price board; petrol had hit three hundred dollars a litre since I had left but that sign could have been old and I doubted anyone this far north would have any fuel left to spare anyway. I wasted no time heading straight for the cooling sanctity of the buildings interior. That was when things suddenly went black and for a moment I thought I had died and I felt a great sense of relief.
Hours later I woke with a sudden jolt of disappointment. I found myself disturbed from a long sweet dream of running through vast paddocks of lush green grass, the moist dew wetting my feet and the smell of pollen soaking the air. I woke up in a strange bed and turned my head to the side yawning, a young woman was staring at me. She was a little older than me; I guessed mid thirties and thin, dressed in a baggy pair of grotty overalls. Her hair was cropped to just below her ears, dark and tangled. Somehow through my grogginess I recognised her.
‘You’re Sam’s daughter?’ My throat hurt. I wasn’t sure if my guess was correct, ‘Toni is it?’ I felt guilty for questioning but she had aged over the fifteen years I’d been gone and her young pubescent body had been replaced by that of a beautiful woman and for a moment I contemplated my own body and felt embarrassed that I’d missed out on the experience of being a flowering teenager. Then I thought that my narrow, flat-chested frame wouldn’t have brought me much youthful enjoyment anyway and soon got over my disappointment.
‘Yep, it’s me.’ Her voice was the sweet whisper of someone who tended selflessly to the sick. ‘You passed out on the doorstep, given yourself sunstroke I’d say.’ She reached over and touched her soft hand to my forehead before smiling. Her touch was so wonderful I moaned slightly. It had been so long since another human being had reached out to me in an act other than violence or need. The human sense of touch it seemed gathered strength when it didn’t get used and the slightest stroke from her hand had sent my body into sensory overload. She looked me in the eye and I felt like a child being cautioned by her mother, ‘I do remember you, you know, from high school.’ She said. ‘I remember what you did that last time I saw you… I thought you were so brave. Then you disappeared along with half the rest of the town and well here we are. Who would have thunk it!’ She smiled. I blushed at the innocence of a memory that had stayed with me even though others had long gone.
‘Oh, that seems like such a long time ago.’ I replied and paused awkwardly, ‘You didn’t go to Sydney with your father?’ As I sat up my head throbbed and I felt sickly faint. She reached out again to support me. Her arms looked weak but her touch was strong and capable. She sighed.
‘We didn’t get very far before…’ She looked down at the floor and frowned, ‘Dad’s been gone now for a year. I’ve been staying here ever since, wondering what to do next.’ She looked around the room, ‘There are not a whole lot of options.’
‘I’m sorry.’ She shook her head as if to say that it didn’t matter. ‘I’m trying to get home to my mother. She’s not doing well either.’
‘I’m so pleased to see you.’ She smiled at me and I was relieved for the change of subject.
‘How have you guys been surviving out here?’ I asked, ‘I’ve just come from Sydney. That’s where everyone is now and it’s getting pretty overcrowded.’
‘It’s not too bad. The Government stopped sending rations a little over a year ago. It’s the best thing they could’ve done really. People had to start taking care of themselves. We get travelling vendors coming through more regularly than the road trains ever did. I don’t know how they get hold of their stuff. I saw a man last month riding an old elephant towing his goods in an old wreck of a Kombi Van!’ She laughed as she remembered the sight as if she’d been to the circus, ‘I got this bottle of perfume from him; Traded it for some tractor parts.’ She leaned in so I could smell and then she saw in my face a terror. She reached out and swept away the hair that fell over my eyes.
‘You know life will happen no matter what we do to it. Life tends to find a way to… live, if you get what I mean. I’m reminded of that every night when I look up and see all those beautiful stars spread across the sky. They just sit around and twinkle for billions of years whether there’s anyone here to admire them or not. It’s all life you know…Listen, you’ve been couped up in that dying city for way too long. Out here it’s all about living and being alive. It’s getting the chance to find out what that means all over again!’
She reached down to the floor beside the bed and held up a coffee mug in which a small green plant, no more than a weed had grown in some rather sad looking soil.
‘You don’t always have to concentrate on what’s been lost…. We still have so much to be happy for.’
‘What’s that?’ I asked pointing to the weed she held out.
‘It’s a Jasmine shoot. I’ve been striking a new one every time the grown plant is about to die. I’ve been growing them ever since we said goodbye to mother’s garden, it all shrivelled and dried and then what wasn’t dead burnt in the fires.’ She looked proudly at her specimen. ‘It can only grow so much on the little water it receives and then I take a little cutting off it and start again. I’ve not had any flowers so far, I guess it’s just never strong or old enough to get any – it hardly gets leaves. I’ll find a place to plant it one day where it can grow wild and free.’ She smiled at me and I was lost in the sparkle of her wet ink eyes, ‘I so miss the smell of Jasmine on a wet summer morning.’ She beamed with hope.
‘Toni, there’s no place to plant it you know. I doubt there’s any place on earth left as it once was.’ I felt mean. So what if she has dreams.
‘I’ve heard of some places.’ She reasoned. ‘This can’t go on for ever.’ She cast her eyes softly over my face. It had grown thinner in recent weeks, ‘You need to eat something. Let’s go out to the house.’ She grabbed my hand and pulled me to my feet. My body went willingly to hers and as her lips brushed past my ears I heard her whisper, ‘We will find a way.’
Her tone was reassuring and if for just one moment I could forget all had happened, I could have believed in her dream; I really wanted to believe in it but all that I had seen was evidence that my history on earth was soon to be erased from memory. I couldn’t help thinking about the dinosaurs. They once graced the planet, great and unknowing that their days were numbered – a stupid mistake made in the journey of what ever it was that created life and shaped it and gave it and then took it all away again. I wondered why we suffered so much, was it because in us that life force also created thought and emotions. I wondered if any of the Brontosaurus’ looked up one day and said ‘Damn! This is it and I was kinda liking being alive!’
The shadow of the sand and unrelenting sun hung over my heart and kept my thoughts dark but Toni wouldn’t let me slip away. She would look at me and glow for no good reason and I must admit when she did, a tiny piece of warmth hit the coldness that had long ago settled into my heart. Arm in arm, she led me into the house that was attached to the back of the fuel station and if I’d be the least bit conscious of my thoughts at that time I would have realised that I wanted to stay there forever – I felt like I was at home. We found a family busily packing the contents of the room in cardboard boxes.
‘You’re leaving?’ I never bothered with introductions these days as I seldom met a person more than once.
‘Everyone is love.’ The lady looked up and smiled an unsure smile. Her voice was harsh and grating. She didn’t know what would happen to her family from here and tried hard not to think about it. ‘Toni, there is some pasta in the kitchen left over for our guest.’ Toni let go of my hand (my skin instantly missing her touch) and headed into the next room.
‘The last of the fuel is in our truck, no point staying on here.’ The lady’s husband walked over and looked me up and down. I could remember many years ago when I was just a teenager and he much younger than now – he had been the town prig, always judging people for the way they looked and treating them according – but the way he looked at me now was with sadness and empathy. The crisis had made him one of us and his pettiness had crumbled with society. ‘You’re welcome to ride with us south if you like. Don’t know what we’ll find there.’
‘No thanks, I’m headed into the city.’
The couple stopped to look at me, even their young daughter who had been busy with her colours looked up from her scribbling as if she knew I was a lunatic.
‘Miss, I don’t know what you think you’re doing but you may as well turn back, it’s a ghost town now. Last food delivery came months ago. You never know if there’ll be another. Last thing you want to do is get stuck up here when the Government forsakes the territory, it will be anarchy rules. Why I heard that there are native people wandering around and they’ll club you to death for food!’
The wife came forward unfolding a piece of paper. ‘This letter came. They won’t help us anymore. They’re closing the highway north of the boarder. We won’t be able to get out if things get worse.’ She looked at me desperately. ‘We’ve got to go now – you understand, for the children.’
‘But my mother is dying.’ It was a reason they could argue with.
The man had a grave look on his face. He looked at me with pity and turned away. These people had seen so much loss on this road over the years and their souls just couldn’t take it any more.
‘It’s not far to the city centre now,’ I paused and sighed heavily as Toni returned to my side with the promised tin full of pasta, ‘Is there anyway you can give me a ride?’
The man turned to me again, shaking his head with regret. ‘I’m sorry dear we have to take our children to Sydney.’ He lowered his voice so his daughter couldn’t hear, ‘To be honest with you, I don’t even know if we have enough fuel to get there but we have no choice. It’s now or never. Once the road is cut, we’re as good as dead!’ His voice rose a little too loudly as he made his point and his daughter stopped colouring and looked up at him slack jawed.
I was still and quiet and looked at the ground. After a moment and a mouth full of pasta that my stomach rejoiced at, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the piece of paper that Irvine had given me. I handed it to the man. ‘If you need help stay by your car, someone is out there. He can help you.’
With a deep frown that dragged the edges of his mouth down almost to the bottom of his chin, the man took the paper from my hand, pausing as our palms touched as if he didn’t expect to feel the skin of a stranger again. The ghost tears filter through my eyes again bringing a phantom wetness to my cheeks. I wrote down the address of my apartment in Sydney and handed him my house keys. ‘Getting to Sydney is just the start. You’ve still got to survive it.’ I warned him. ‘It’s not like you remember it or expect. The apartment is just a tin can but its safe and it’s yours if you want it. Make sure you tell nobody in the streets you have it, and don’t let anyone follow you. You also need to get through the gates; they’re not letting in any more people. I can give you some names to mention. They can get you false papers or smuggle you in. Don’t trust anyone other than the people I tell you to trust.’ I warned remember stories I heard of slave trading to the Asian countries.
He took the gift with shaking hands and I walked toward the door determined to continue my trek. Toni followed me quickly and grabbed hold of my wrist.
‘I’m coming with you.’ She said loud enough for the room to hear. The man wasn’t sure what to do but knew that Toni was an extra burden that was not his own, so he let her go and waved his wife to be quiet when she went to call out. His wife heeded his sign but she would never forgive herself for dishonouring Sam and abandoning his daughter.
I had a quick flash of memory; I was a small child running through bright green fields of grass in the warm, friendly sun of a Queensland summer. My dog was barking and running at my feet, my friends giggling and running ahead of me. We were all bare foot and care free, our hair bleached from the sun and our skin olive and glowing. Birds flocked in formation over head. Cockatoos squawked and teased. Oh how we played in those fields of fresh air on long hot days; days we thought would never end and the sky was such a beautiful blue. I wanted to fall into it like the crystal clear stream that bubbled endlessly over bedrocks as it swam behind our houses.
I stood still as I exited the roadhouse and looked around me; the earth was redder then ever before like the land was bleeding beneath me. The sun was bright and glaring menacingly as if it had been the one to stab her; stab the very ground in anger making her bleed, but what was it angry about? How did this place that was once my childhood friend and confidant become so angry at us, why did it turn on us so severely? I reached down and rubbed the dirt between my fingers, the soft red clay stained my hands making me look like the murderer. Perhaps, I thought, I was.
‘Do you ever think that this is our fault?’ I thought aloud but Toni didn’t reply. She too was staring at the luminous red earth thinking of days long gone, a note slipped into her school desk and a promise of a kiss. She wondered what her life would have been like had she nothing more to worry about than her first kiss and all the repercussions of it being from a girl.
‘Ahem,’ the man startled me from my thoughts. He had quietly followed us outside. ‘Miss, I wish we could help you really I do, but… I can at least offer you something.’
He walked over to an old shed and tugged the doors; they looked as if they hadn’t been opened in years. I kicked away the sand that had amassed against them and I helped him heave until they became loose enough to open. The iron creaked under the stress.
‘It’s not much. I can’t even guarantee that it’ll work but I know it’s got a full tank, it’s an old gas engine so it’s no use to us.’ He swung open the door and revealed an old tractor. Toni smiled like a child lining up for a fair ride. ‘If she doesn’t start first time, just loosen this cap a little and try her again. I’m sorry I can’t do more for you.’ I nodded reassuring him that he had done the right thing and more than he had to. I wondered if his daughter would ever know the touch of grass to her feet or know that steely smell of rain before a thunder storm broke. My body ached; I wished to know those feelings again too.
‘Thank you.’ I croaked to the man and Toni gave him a long, sad hug. She said goodbye to the man who’d become her surrogate father when her own father disappeared into the hungry earth.
The tractor slowly dragged us out of the barn and onto the freeway. We drove laughing as the hot wind blew through our hair. It was the first time I could remember having fun in what had become the drudgery of life. Having someone to share the journey with turned it from a plight to an adventure.
‘Toni?’
She leaned in close to me so that we could talk and I felt her arm slip around my waist.
‘Describe to me how the Jasmine smells on a wet summer morning?’ I asked and as she spoke my heart began to feel lighter and my head giddy.
‘Well,’ She breathed in as if she were inhaling the scent and considering it like a wine connoisseur, ‘It smells sweet like sugar has somehow evaporated into the air. It overpowers everything around it and you can smell it for miles around. It smells like little honey droplets of stardust have rained down to earth. It smells… of newness and rebirth.’ She looked at me and could see the smile creeping across my face, ‘It reminds me of my mother, and soft sunshine and happy days, picnicking by the river and how the breeze feels cool on your face when it blows off the water!’ She burst into a loud and uncontrollable laugh and when I breathed in deeply, I thought I smelled the aroma of Jasmine. I looked down at the weed in the coffee cup at our feet. It would never grow old enough to produce the fragrance I longed for but it still lived true to its purpose; it somehow believed in its destiny to be this grand living, perfume making thing.
‘Toni, I think we will find somewhere to plant that little sprout.’ I didn’t care about the odds; I had a dream and a reason to go beyond what I would find in Brisbane. I thought about my mother again and said a prayer inside my head that she would still be alive when I finally reached her.
The tractor grunted like an old beast of burden as it hit the city pavement. We had reached the River City which had been transformed into a desert dwelling. The old buildings that ran up and down the streets named for Kings and Queens had red dirt and white sand piled high up against them; it lapped at their windows strangely reminiscent of a torrid ocean lapping at the shore. It struck me how similar to water the sand actually was and that we really were at no more danger from the sand as we were of the ocean, we were just unprepared for this particular tide.
The city was empty and quiet. I found it hard to believe that anyone was left here. The only movement I caught was a shy dingo that peered at us suspiciously from behind a fire hydrant that poked up out of the sand like a red metal cactus. I was unnerved by the dog as my memories of Fletcher came flooding back but the dingo didn’t want anything to do with us. It just wanted to see that we moved on and left it alone; somehow he had learnt the lesson of his ancestors with regard to people and what a peril we were. I was starting to realise that the animals fared much better from the new arrangements of the world than we did. They were finally ridding themselves of an uneven threat, able to go back to their private, primordial way of life. Perhaps, I thought this was the reason for all the devastation, perhaps it was to get rid of the threat of us and the damage we had done – it was a conclusion I kept arriving at no matter which direction I ran from it. Soon I would have to stop running and face up to my responsibility. The dingo disappeared into the shadow of the hydrant and into the shadow of my memory. I would never see another Dingo, like the Tasmania Tiger, they disappeared into a reclusive corner of the world that Humans had never been able to find – a corner of the world it’s creator kept secret to hide the animals that had suffered too much. I pulled up on Edward Street; it had been recently cleared so I knew someone must still around this part of the city. We headed for the old stone building that had housed the Casino. This was where people had supposedly moved to after the fires of 2020 because it was a solid old sandstone building that had stood for more than a century through colonisation and settlement.
We walked silently along the sidewalk each lost in her own thoughts and anxieties. Our boots randomly hit concrete sending out the odd echoing clap and soon we stood in the empty foyer of the casino, poker machines still sitting blankly and quiet as if just finished for the night. My head was swimming and my mind was playing with me. I thought for a moment that I was actually dying of thirst in some remote desert and hallucinating how the end of my journey would have been if I had survived. Toni stirred beside me and grabbed my arm. Her touch anchored me back into reality. She seemed intent on saving me each time I tried to drift away.
‘It looks empty.’ Her tone was disappointed.
‘Hello?’ I called out, my voice echoed around the halls and returned to us alone. ‘Hello? It’s Jane Fawkner, I’ve come for my mother.’ I received no reply. ‘Someone told me she was here!’ Maybe I was already too late. I collapsed down on the great old staircase, engorged by exhaustion and desperation. I rested my head between my knees and cried but this time my face felt wet. These tears had come from somewhere deep down inside me like an underground river that had flooded to the surface after some great catastrophe and I sobbed uncontrollably; My Darwinian resilience had finally collapsed and my hands were saturated as I wiped my eyes.
‘It’s ok Jane, they must be here somewhere. The streets are too clean for it to have been abandoned… don’t give up. Please don’t give up.’ Toni begged as she fell beside me and tried to consol me. If I gave up now I was giving up on both of us and she couldn’t allow that. I could hear a passion for me in her voice that I didn’t understand. I had been alone for so long that I couldn’t see why an almost stranger would care for me at all.
‘I’ve come so far.’ I croaked. ‘I’ve come such a long way, all for nothing. It’s too late.’ She squeezed my arm as if telling me that she was as good a reason as any for my journey. But I thought if I made my mother well again then the whole world would change and return to what we had before. ‘I just wanted to make things right again.’ I whispered. I thought we’d be young and free again in a country that spoiled us with water and warm sunshine and happiness.
It had been fifteen years since my mother had last seen me and I know the separation had aged her. She had sent me away on a flood of tears - to find some place better than where we’d ended up. Life had always been hard for us; she being a single mother with little means of supporting herself and feeding her children but with the climate change, life had changed and become desperate for everyone. Once I reached Sydney however, I realised the extent of the desperation and prayed for mercy that didn’t arrive from the God I didn’t believe in. The news filtered in - the American continent had been savagely submerged – a new Atlantis, it was lost forever to the floor of the rising sea, its people sated the appetite of old Poseidon who regurgitate their remains on beaches all over the world. Those that took to boats just drifted waiting for a rescue that very rarely came and I heard people tell tales of dinghies full of skeletons washing up on shores, the remains of families still sitting together as if they just waited resignedly for death to come for them, in fact people could been seen doing just the same on dry land. Just sitting down and waiting to die. England had also been washed away but once the waves retreated all that was left was the land that had been there first; houses, cities, roads were all washed into the retreating ocean that churned like some global mouth wash eradicating the plaque of progress. The debris of what had been the greatest Empire in the world was seen for years floating around like broken teeth. I had heard that landmarks were washing up in obscure places. The tip of the Eiffel Tower could still be seen poking out of the ocean off the eastern coast of Africa; it’s heavy iron frame dragged by surging ocean rages like a misplaced chess piece. The iconic Statue of Liberty had landed quite upright on the coast of Brazil. It all seemed so hopeless. I sent the morbid words to my mother and we lost touch in the fallout that followed. The weather phenomenon was dubbed ‘El Finito’ by the crashing weather stations who, like everyone else were starting to wonder, what the point was in doing anything. I kept my head down and existed on the filthy streets of the city wondering when it would all end.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder last month as I walked down George Street in Sydney. Someone tapped me on the shoulder as I walked with a million other people down George Street and asked me if I was Jane Fawkner. ‘Yes’ I said. He told me in a low mumble that he’d been looking for me and I must get back to Brisbane. He told me he had been sent by my mother to find me and he gave me a set of keys for his truck and an envelope full of money and then just as quickly disappeared into the crowd without any further explanation. Had he lingered too long or spoken any louder he could have been killed. I’d heard about the network of people who passed things around the country – he was a messenger who risked his life to keep information flowing through the underground between the dissenters who were plotting and scheming. But politics didn’t matter to me now, I had to get home.
‘Jane.’ There was a voice behind me. I jumped up and was faced with a little old couple who had appeared from somewhere behind us.
‘Yes. I’m Jane. Where’s my mother?’ I was momentarily hopeful.
‘I’m sorry dear, she’s gone.’ The lady reached out, comforting me, ‘She waited, but she was just too ill. Maybe in the old days we could have kept her going but we’ve so little in the way of medicines here now. She didn’t suffer, I assure you.’
I hung my head and stared at my feet. I was too tired and hopeless to even greave any more. My eyes stung as if poisoned by a thousand bees and I thought they might just swell up and blind me. Toni was silent and hurting.
‘I don’t know what to do now. I’ve come all this way.’ I lamented. I felt like I could just sit back down on those stairs and wait forever for my mother to come and get me and take me back home with her.
‘Jane, your mother’s in a better place now, you have to believe that.’ The old lady tried to touch my arm but I pulled away.
‘Like where, Heaven?’ I laughed a bitter laugh. ‘Do you people really think that there is a God? What devil would have done this to us? I dragged myself all this way for the one person that means anything to me and she was taken away from me before I even get here.’ I looked back to Toni and realised that I had crushed her feelings and was immediately sorry for my outburst. ‘I just don’t know if I can go on anymore. I’m so tired of this.’
‘Come downstairs with us. You will see what goodness we have created here. Your Mother left you something very valuable and precious. She would want you to go on.’ The Lady said and motioned to her Husband to take over but I could only think about whether my mother would really want me to continue suffering in this hell. Would a mother that loved her children not rather them die than to suffer so terribly.
‘But first you must be blind folded.’ The old man pulled a length of material from his pocket and displayed it, ‘The location of our new city is secret. Nobody can come in uninvited.’ I was slightly disturbed by this secrecy but my mind was tired and I couldn’t understand anything they were talking about. I gave an uncertain look sideways at Toni who only nodded her head slightly letting me know she thought it would be alright.
‘The only city left now is Sydney and its a million miles away from here; So far away.’ I felt my eyes begin to close without my permission and the old man effortlessly laid the blindfold across them.
‘Come Jane, and you too.’ He reached out for Toni who was still hurting from my ignorant words but she went along with the plan.
‘They never did consider Brisbane to be a real city,’ The old lady giggled and rubbed my arm now she finally had possession of it, ‘But that doesn’t mean we aren’t one. Your mother left you a key dear, a key to the city.’
‘A key?’ I heard the word in the fogginess of my mind. ‘There was a man who lost a key.’ I could feel my consciousness draining and was too weak to fight it off. ‘Fletcher.’ I said and I was unable to see through my blindfold the frown given by the old people at the mentioning of his name.
They guided my broken body away from the staircase. I was slipping into a coma like state. I no longer cared where I was or where I was going. I had given up on this horrid, dry world. I’m not sure where we walked too or for how long, for all I knew we walked around on the spot but after a while I got the overwhelming sensation that I was falling.
‘Jane.’ Toni called out from her blindfold. ‘Are we going down?’ I felt her hand beside me and I reached out and held it firmly. I could tell she was scared and tried to comfort her with my grip.
‘Yep,’ The old man confirmed, ‘You see we found something a while ago and well, we just sat on it and waited. We knew there would come a time when we would be abandoned and left to our own defences. We knew this drought wasn’t going to break. Remember the tunnels we were building under the city to ease traffic congestion about, oh… thirty, forty years ago?’ I recalled the failed roadways and the public furore over the expense. I was still in school then, full of grandiose dreams for my future. ‘Well, the project was halted because of the caves we found.’
‘Caves?’ I repeated as if I didn’t know what they were. We stopped falling and I felt a cold, wet sensation on my face that woke me sharply from my lethargic dreams and I was a little panicked. My arms were taken on either side I was gently ushered forward. I felt Toni’s body placed beside me as the fellow continued.
‘We’d dug down far too deep for the tunnels, the engineer we hired was, well a bit of a joke but he was cheap and we needed to cut expenses.’ The old man started to sound like a politician as he continued and he started fiddling with the knot in the rear of my blindfold, ‘That was partly my fault; I wanted the tunnels to work but didn’t have the funds to exactly do it properly. We thought we’d dug right through to the river,’ He let the cloth fall away from my eyes, ‘Blessing in disguise really!’
‘Oh!’ I gasped as I found myself standing in the middle of a park with green, green grass and manicured garden beds like I had never seen before. There were species of flowers I had not seen since I was in school.
‘Welcome home Jane,’ The old man leant forward and smiled.
His wife continued, ‘You can see why we must keep it secret. If others new about this we’d be inundated with refugees and we cannot afford the influx of people. So far everything is orderly here. Newman was voted Major again this year, he’s so popular with the city folks.’ Mrs Newman smiled at her husband proudly.
I wasn’t paying attention. I had thrown my boots off and let my feet trample over the glorious blades of grass; I fell down on my knees and inhaled deeply into the ground beneath me. ‘It’s real!’ I screamed, ‘But how?’
‘It smells so fresh and beautiful!’ Toni was also on her hands and knees trying to impress the wonder to her memory.
‘Well, like my husband was saying,’ the old lady picked up the story, ‘We found caves complete with an underground river that was not mapped on any paperwork that could be found. No-one knew it was here! We were able to dam the river and create a catchment area that collects run off from a network of underground waterways. Then we devised a plan to bring the city down here. There’s not many of us though, I’d say about five thousand at the last count. But our population is growing.’
I felt a niggling sense of déjà vu. ‘How long will this water last? Do you know its source –is damming it wise?’ I shrugged nervously.
‘Well, it has some kind of tidal flow so it does have a source; It’s not about to dry up. We haven’t had rain here in so many years but that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been raining anywhere. Our scientists think that the river runs up to the top of the country and possibly is collecting monsoonal run off from Asia, which we believe is the most stable country environmentally at the moment. The real issue for us is overcrowding,’ the old man took a serious tone to his voice, ‘That’s why you cannot know where you are and how you got here. Law breakers are taken to the surface and let go and we tell no one in the rest of the country where we are. They think we all wasted away like the rotting city above us.’ This security was nothing new. Sydney had tried the same tactic of exclusion but everyone knew where the city was so wandering refugees became a problem. The Government erected a huge fortress like gate around the city to keep people out and the exclusion was escalated from desperation to all out violence.
I looked beyond the vibrant green park to a dim colony of buildings made from dank and slimly limestone that had nothing of the colour and freshness I was inhaling. The man noticed my stare and like a well oiled Politician tried everything to ease my concerns and sell me his paradise.
‘This park is our newest initiative. We’ve started to drill up to the surface, creating sunlight vents that reflect down through the buildings from the surface. We have fifty more of these vents in the works as we speak and are improving on the technology every day.’ I felt a tapping on my shoulder and turned to face him. ‘Here is your key’ He smiled holding out a shiny gold skeleton key for me. I took hold of the key and managed a smile. ‘Keep it on you at all times. If you report to the administration, that building in the front there – they will tell you where your living quarters will be and what’s for dinner.’ The old couple walked off into the stony distance holding each other lovingly in their arms
**
You see, we have a chance here to start all over again with society and take some lessons from the past. We have a chance to only include the good things that man has created. We tolerate no nonsense here, drug use, perversions, theft and dishonesty – all are punishable with banishment from the community and I believe that banishment from here will spell out certain death – especially when Sydney finally crumbles.
I wasn’t sure if I liked the idea of this supposed utopia and felt uneasy about the conditions of living here. I couldn’t imagine a world filled with all the supposed evils that this powerful man was aiming to exclude from his new reality. I couldn’t imagine a world without the pain of loss, the hunger of addiction and the occasional joy of certain perversions anyway. We always wish for a life without these heartaches but what kind of a life are we leading if we do not experience suffering?
‘Excuse me.’ A little voice came from behind me and I turned to see a little girl on a swing. I smiled widely at the sight of the sweet old past time and walked over to join her.
‘My names Emily’
‘Hi Emily, my name’s Jane.’ We both paused to push ourselves back and then thrust our legs out to bring us swinging up into the air.
‘Jane, we’re getting a swimming pool next week and my mum says I can invite all my friends around for a swim. You can come if you want.’
I closed my eyes and let the cool air of the cave wash over my face as I sailed up to the ceiling and down again in that tiny little green park that grew perfectly under the ground.
‘Emily,’ I breathed, ‘Do you know what a drought is?’ I asked her as I sailed so high I could almost touch the roof.
‘Yes, my brother plays checkers all the time.’ Emily smiled proudly at her knowledge as her ringlets twisted around her chubby face. I opened one eye and looked at her dubiously as she jumped off her swing and ran over to a water fountain, letting the water run freely for a moment before taking a delicate little sip.
I decided to take a walk after dark, or what I knew should have been dark as there in this new underground city that looked more like a movie set from an old theme park, it was really always dark and the only reason I knew night had come was that my watch still worked and told me it was eight o’clock. As my boots thudded along the rock surface that had been trimmed to reminiscently look like a street of what, I suddenly - in that moment there, just realised was the old world – I found a freedom inside me that was hatching like a new life and taking over my soul. I had finally let go of it all; I was letting go of the image of existence that my human condition had trained me to cling terrifically too. I was shedding the sanctity of society. My mother had passed away and the world, for all the good or the bad kept on turning and changing and wasn’t about to stop it, but I stopped and blinked lightly as one does when a certain life changing thought pops into your head – a light switches on and interferes with your narrow sight creating new images on the backs of your eye lids. All this chaos had not happened to wipe humans from the earth but to free them, to free me of the litter of what we call living. Humans were not the meaning of life; humans were just a part of it and had bogged themselves down in the interpreting and conditioning of it. I looked around me at the town that these people were using to anchor themselves in the past and realised that I could let go of the anchor, even if no one else would, I can let go of the anchor and float away in the tide. I walked back to the room I was sharing with Toni and although a little sadness shadowed my heart I knew I was doing the right thing. I took my watch off my wrist and laid it on the bedside table all the while watching the perfect peacefulness of her slumber. This is where her journey was meant to stop, for now at least. I leaned in and kissed the line where her hair met her forehead and inhaled the deep, sweet smell of her locks, I instantly sensed the perfume of jasmine and breathed it into my lungs and the fabric of my memory.
The evening air was chilly when I emerged from the casino where the entrance to the cave had been secreted. In my hands I held onto the mug of jasmine sprout that Toni had so carefully nurtured. I looked above me and basked in the litter of millions of stars; the very same stars that had watched our whole world come and go in a blink of an eye. I remembered a game I used to play when I was young and high. I laid down on the ground looking up to the night sky and spread my arms and legs out and concentrated on the vastness of space above me until I felt like I was falling into the sky. My body felt as if it was truly falling forward, that somehow gravity had been turned off for a moment. I loved the way you could convince your mind of it and my stomach would go weak with motion sickness. I stood up and for the first time I didn’t shake the sand from my clothes, the sand had become part of me, me part of it.
My whole body was compelled forward toward a blackness that seemed never ending. I sensed that I was heading north and from memory the constellations were in the right direction for it. My legs stretched beneath me possessing a new power in their muscles that were created long ago for walking and as I felt myself become suspended in the darkness that enveloped all around me, I thought I saw something bright. Out in front of me toward what should have been the horizon there was a light, like a small torch light bobbing up and down in the air as if suspended from a tree. The light seemed familiar to me and I was drawn to it.
When the sun rose the next morning and Toni had searched for me for hours, she too emerged from the casino door and looked out at the expanse of sand that had swallowed the once urban, brick and mortar landscape. She could see no sign of me and her eyes both squinted from the glare of the sun and wept for her fear. She was afraid for me and worried for herself. As she turned, surveying the emptiness before her, she caught a slight glimmering about a hundred meters away in the sand and quickly ran toward it. The broken bits of coffee mug became quite clear as she neared it. She landed on her knees and scooped up the bits of china at the same time looking frantically around for more evidence of my path but it seemed hopeless to her. Somehow she knew I had gone and could only hope that our paths would cross again. She turned slowly and headed back for the casino .
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