The Sky So Heavy Read online

  I frowned. ‘We don’t have much left.’

  ‘That’s why we’re doing it. You’ll get a lot more.’ He started walking toward the pantry.

  I cut in front of him. ‘I don’t think we want to do that. We’ll just hang onto what we’ve got.’ The thought of some system – a plan, someone making decisions somewhere – was comforting. But something had changed in me. Maybe it was the way my whole world had closed down, had become simpler. I was sharper somehow. Instincts were kicking in and I was running with them.

  ‘No choice, buddy.’ He flashed a piece of paper in front of me. I didn’t have time to read it. Then he took his radio and said, ‘Yeah, this is PP2, just picking up from Bellbird Crescent now. Meet you back up top in ten.’ He clipped his radio back onto his belt and made to move past me. I blocked him again, stepping backward in front of the pantry.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Buddy, I’m taking it. I’ll be back with more this arvo.’ He held my gaze for a second and then tried to push past me.

  ‘You’re lying.’ As I put the words out there my mouth went dry.

  ‘What?!’ His hand now rested on his baton. ‘I have a warrant to seize any food items you have here.’

  ‘Show me the warrant.’

  ‘I already showed you the warrant.’

  ‘That was a library fine or some shit. You’ve got nothing.’

  ‘Mate, move.’

  ‘No.’

  He laughed. ‘If you don’t move I’m going to have to arrest you.’

  ‘Arrest me then.’

  He shook his head and took his radio from his belt. He spoke into it.

  ‘Yeah radio, this is Springwood sixteen. I got resistance, gonna have to bring one in.’

  ‘You can stop playing pretend with your radio. The battery’s flat.’

  He cocked his head to the side and gave me a little smirk. He clipped the radio back onto his belt and took his baton from it. He raised it above his shoulder.

  ‘Give me the food. I won’t hesitate to use this, buddy.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘GIVE ME THE FOOD!’

  ‘No,’ I said quietly.

  I could see the white of his knuckles through his skin as he gripped the baton. He drew it back.

  ‘Put it down.’ It was Max. I didn’t even see him come into the kitchen. He stood behind CSI, two hands gripping the axe.

  ‘Put the baton down and get out!’ Now it was Max pulling the TV cop stuff.

  CSI turned around slowly.

  ‘Drop the baton.’

  ‘No need to get upset, buddy—’

  ‘I’m not your buddy. Drop the baton and get out.’

  CSI didn’t move.

  ‘I’m telling you, dick-face, I haven’t eaten and I’m feeling a bit crazy. I could do anything. I could chop your head off and then Fin and I could, like, barbecue your arms and stuff.’ Max smiled.

  CSI lowered the baton a bit, his eyes looked from Max to me to the front door and back again.

  ‘Just give me the baton,’ I said to CSI, as slowly and calmly as I could.

  ‘Alright, alright.’ He handed it to me.

  ‘Now piss off.’

  CSI walked to the door, Max was behind him with the axe.

  CSI paused. ‘Oh, and it was your dad that we found. He’s in the morgue.’ The door slammed behind him.

  I slid down the pantry door and sat on the lino. ‘Barbecue your arms?’ I tried to laugh. Max didn’t say anything. Eventually I stood up and told him to lock all the doors and windows. He didn’t respond.

  ‘Max, come on. He’s lying. Dad’s not dead.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I just do. Get up. We need to lock the place up. And thanks. You’re pretty scary with an axe.’

  Almost a smile.

  Nineteen

  We didn’t sleep much. The next day I took to the outside table with the axe and chopped it all up. I was getting good with the axe, efficient. Max stood at the back door and watched, holding a knife. I had no idea what he was going to do with the knife if CSI came back. Can’t say that either of us was very experienced in handling weapons. We lugged all the wood inside and stacked it in the living room.

  ‘What’ll we burn next?’ Max asked.

  ‘That.’ I motioned toward the dining suite.

  A truck engine.

  We were out the door and on the street. It was an army truck coming down the hill. I felt my body loosen with relief, we hadn’t been forgotten. People emerged from the other houses, faces barely visible beneath beanies and scarves. Mr White was one of them, but he avoided eye contact. I was just letting the edge of the idea of more food enter my mind when the truck stopped a few houses up the road, outside the Ketterleys’ place. Two army guys jumped down from the cabin and slammed the doors shut. People moved toward them, but the army guys didn’t even look in their direction, walking straight up the Ketterlys’ driveway. If they were bringing food wouldn’t they carry it in? I waited, watching. A few moments later they came back with Doctor Ketterly, his wife and their two kids. One army guy opened the door at the back of the truck. It was one of those ones with a big canvas cover over the back: a troop carrier. The Ketterlys climbed in, then the army dudes got in and the engine started.

  ‘Hey!’ someone yelled.

  I ran up the road to the truck. I reached it just as they were about to pull away from the kerb. The army guys didn’t seem to see me. I slapped at the window.

  ‘Hey, stop!’

  The driver ignored me and continued to pull away from the kerb.

  ‘Stop,’ I yelled. ‘Where’s our food? We’ve run out of food!’

  Neither of them looked at me. They drove down to the bottom of the hill and did a U-turn. As the truck rumbled up the hill toward us, me and some others, Mr White included, went out and stood in the middle of the road, waving our arms. ‘Stop!’

  The bullbar of the truck kept coming toward us, it got closer and closer. It wasn’t going to stop. At the last moment we scattered out of its way.

  ‘Hey! Hey!’ I tried to run after it, but my feet slipped on the ice. I landed on my hands and knees. Blood leached from the heels of my palms. Orange, like rust, smudged on the ice.

  I watched the truck drive away.

  Twenty

  I saw Mick through the window as he was throwing bags into the back of his ute. I went across the road.

  ‘We’re off,’ he said.

  He’d seen the thing with the army truck and said they didn’t give a crap about us. He swung the last suitcase into the back. Zadie and Zac watched from inside the house. I could see them standing in the window. Zadie was wearing her mittens. She pressed her nose up against the glass and looked at Max and me. I waved to her. She waved back but didn’t smile.

  ‘I’ve got all the food we have left: flour, sugar, desiccated coconut. All the stuff I never considered before. Been mixing it with water.’ He laughed and shook his head. He looked at me for a moment, then pulled me into a hug. I could feel the xylophone bumps of his rib cage.

  ‘You fellas take care. You got a plan?’

  ‘Mum’s in Sydney. I’m thinking we need to get to her.’

  ‘Yeah. You can’t stay here.’

  He pressed something into my hand. A key. He cocked his head toward Ellen’s purple station wagon.

  ‘Take it when you need it,’ he said. ‘Can you drive?’

  ‘Not legally.’

  ‘Ha. That’s the least of your problems.’

  We ate the last can of soup. Arnold Wong said to come back when we ran out, didn’t he? Could I go back? If we were going to try to make it to the city, we would need to take supplies.

  I wondered how many others were sick. It was easy to forget that anyone else in the world still existed. Was Mrs
White sick? Had she died? I wanted to go and see her, but Mr White . . .

  What about her dogs?

  Oh God.

  ‘Max, I’m going to go and find more food. Then we’re going to go find Mum.’

  ‘What if Dad comes back?’

  ‘We’ll leave a note.’

  I pushed the key into the ignition and started the car. I reversed it carefully onto the road and turned the wheel so the car was facing up the hill. I pressed the accelerator and it moved forward a little before the tyres started to spin on the ice.

  ‘Shit.’ I hit the steering wheel. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’

  Mick hadn’t put chains on the tyres. And even if we did have some in the garage I wouldn’t know what the hell to do with them.

  The walk took so long. Every step was merciless. I used to be a good long-distance runner. Reasonably good. I did regionals. The running was good but I really liked the end. I liked the moment when you let your body fall onto the grass and you open up your lungs and your head thuds and you know you’ve really done something. It’s like a free pass to sit on your arse for the rest of the week. I loved that first gulp of cool water in my throat. I loved the relief when it was over.

  The walk up the hill felt like the last two hundred metres of a race, after every step I felt that I couldn’t do any more. I stopped halfway up and dry wretched. My guts were protesting, screaming for food

  I made it up the hill. I wanted to sit down, but I’d only have to get up again. There were tyre tracks in the snow along Arnold’s street. People must have started to get out, chains or no chains.

  There was a small cluster of people standing out in the snow. Men. One saw me and approached. He was about my dad’s age. Beard. But then didn’t everyone have a beard now? Everyone but me, it seemed.

  ‘You got food, buddy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where you going?’

  ‘A mate’s.’

  ‘He got food?’

  ‘No.’ I passed him and somehow found the energy to quicken my pace. He followed me. I went up Arnold Wong’s drive.

  ‘You sure about that, buddy?’ said the man. I ignored him. I knocked on Arnold’s door.

  ‘’Cause I got a family,’ he said.

  Everyone’s got a family. The door opened, Arnold looked at me and then at the bearded bloke. I didn’t wait for an invitation. I went in and shut the door behind me.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said to Arnold. ‘That guy’s hassling me for food.’

  Arnold regarded me sceptically. Suddenly I felt like I was on a boat, the ground shifted. I held the wall to steady myself.

  ‘You need to sit down,’ Arnold observed. I was going to aim to do so in a chair, but it appeared I didn’t have time for that. My arse found the floor.

  ‘Put your head between your legs,’ Arnold said. He went into the kitchen and I took his advice. Soon he was back next to me and there was the peel of a can opening. I could smell it. I could taste the baked beans before they were in my mouth. He put the can in one of my hands and a spoon in the other.

  ‘Eat.’

  I did. I ate half, then I breathed and looked up at Arnold who was leaning on the doorframe of the living room. I held the can out to him. He shook his head.

  ‘Finish it.’

  Arnold’s couch was green with brown stripes, the kind of green that lives on the surface of a pond. It was ugly as hell but when I sat down it welcomed me the way the modular thing that Kara chose for our place never did. The whole room was like something out of a museum. The television was one of those ones from the sixties that are encased in wood and stand on little legs. There were walls of books – lots of titles I didn’t recognise – books about Romans and Hebrews and lots of philosophy-type things. A slow-combustion fire glowed in the corner of the room. There was a gap where a dining suite should have been.

  Arnold handed me a mug of tea and sat opposite me. He watched me drink it.

  ‘Were your parents there long, before . . . ?’ I didn’t know where to go with the question.

  ‘Four months. They were advised to come back home two months before the missiles, but they chose to stay.’

  ‘Yeah. Right. They leave you on your own?’

  ‘My uncle was here. He went into the city after the attacks to try and find more information about my mum and dad.’ Arnold smiled. ‘Not a lot of point when you’re talking nuclear missiles. He was supposed to come back, but like your father, he hasn’t.’

  It’s a strange reaction, but I felt myself relax a bit when Arnold told me that. There was something in the fact that we both knew close to exactly what the other was feeling.

  ‘A cop came to my house and tried to take our food,’ I said, after a while. ‘When we still had some.’

  ‘Really?’ He sounded polite, not surprised.

  ‘Have you seen anyone from the army or the SES, anyone?’

  ‘Not for weeks.’

  I felt like I was at a therapist’s, the kind who says very little to get you to fill in the silence. Not that I’d been to a therapist. If we survived this I’d probably need to, everyone would. It would be a boon for therapists.

  I told him about the army truck in my street. He did seem surprised about that.

  ‘I thought they were bringing more food, but they just went to a family up the street and took them away. I tried to ask them when they would bring more food but they ignored me, nearly ran me over.’

  ‘Which family?’

  ‘The Ketterleys. They live in that big-arse place.’

  ‘Why would the army take them?’

  ‘Dunno. The bloke’s some top-notch surgeon. Don’t know if that’s got anything to do with it.’

  ‘We’ve been left behind,’ Arnold said, matter-of-factly.

  ‘Do you really think they’re just going to let people starve to death? I mean, I know it’s starting to look that way, but . . .’

  ‘Think about it. The world has fallen into a nuclear winter. There is no sunlight, no food production. The radiation in the northern hemisphere would have wiped heaps of people out. There’s not going to be any more food imported. There is a finite amount left. The government, the authorities, would have a plan for this.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘A plan that would involve preserving certain people and letting others perish. They can’t feed everyone.’

  I sighed. ‘Do you have much left?’ I asked him.

  He shook his head.

  I had an overwhelming urge to consume a vast amount of alcohol again and looked around to see if the Wongs had a liquor cabinet. I never expected to spend my last days getting drunk with Arnold Wong.

  I put my empty mug down. I saw Death come and sit in the room with us. Just like the dude from The Mighty Boosh: black robes, skeleton hands. How did it feel to starve to death? Did I already know?

  ‘I think me and my brother are going to leave, go to the city. My mum might still be there, she works with the government, disaster response management. I think she’ll know what to do . . . You should come with us . . . More people, more heat, more furniture to burn. There’s safety in numbers.’

  ‘There’s still the problem of food.’

  I tilted my head back against the headrest and closed my eyes. Then the idea came to me.

  ‘I know where we can get some.’

  Twenty-one

  Max wasn’t moving. The house was in near-darkness with only the smoulder of cinders lighting the room. There was a smell, a sweet chemical sort of smell a little like when I was ten and tried to bake Mum a cake using a Tupperware container instead of a tin. Mum had to scrape the blue goop off the bottom of the oven with a butter knife while I stood behind her and watched because I felt too guilty to do anything else.

  Max was curled up next to the remains of the fire. I closed the front door
and expected him to look up but he didn’t move. I said his name. He didn’t move. I said it louder, traversing the sea of bedding that filled the living room.

  ‘Maximum.’ I crouched down next to him and shook his shoulder. I noticed there was a pile of clothes next to the fire.

  ‘Max.’ Tightness gripped my throat and spread into my chest. No, no, no, no.

  ‘Max wake up,’ I instructed him. I put my fingers to his throat without much of an idea where his pulse would be anyway. My fingers must have been cold. He flinched, whimpered a little.

  ‘Max, wake up, buddy. It’s me. We gotta get moving.’

  He whimpered again and opened his eyes, just a slit. I put my hand on his forehead. It was cool, too cool.

  ‘Max did you throw up?’

  He shook is head. I sat him up, holding him by his narrow shoulders. He tried to open his eyes more.

  ‘Dude, you need to eat.’

  He let out a short breath as if to say derr.

  ‘Have you been drinking water?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Man, I told you, there’s a whole cup there for today, you’ve got to.’

  Another slight shake of the head. I sighed. I pulled a can of spaghetti from my pocket, opened it and scooped some out with my fingers. He ate it from my hand. I scooped out more and he soon finished the can. Max flopped back onto the mattress but he must have already been feeling better because he lifted his arm and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  ‘I burnt a lot of clothes, Fin. I’m sorry. I couldn’t . . . cut the wood . . . to put it on the fire. The clothes were . . . right here.’

  ‘It’s okay.’

  I opened another can for Max and left it with him to eat while I gathered up the few clothes we had left. I shoved them into garbage bags and took them out to where I had left Ellen’s car in the middle of the street, pointing up the hill. I threw the bags into the boot. I was going to get that car up the hill. There was no choice.

  I went back inside and slugged the axe into the dining suite; splinters scattered across the sisal carpet. It took a long time. I didn’t have the strength to finish the job, I would have to come back and do the rest. I loaded the wood into the boot along with the coffee table – our last remaining piece of wooden furniture. Shame I couldn’t burn the plasma and the iPod dock and our computers. They were of no use to us. Maybe they could be brewed into a fine soup with lots of salt if things got desperate. If things got desperate. Ha.