A Few Days' Rest

"There's no situation so bad that having a job in front of you won't improve it by about a third."

Nobody said anything for a good while after that, and it was Jamie who put an end to it.

"I better check-in with Joel."

He said it to nobody in particular and there was not much in the way he said it, and he was moving before he'd finished saying it. Up to the first of the big tents, flap back, and he got himself through the gap sideways rather than open it out, and he did not let the light in after him.

I found myself listening for whatever was on the other side of that canvas. There was nothing to hear. Canvas of that weight takes a fair amount of noise to come through it, so the silence meant nothing whatever in either direction, and I stood there listening to it regardless.

"Joel?" Karen said.

"Jamie's son," said Glenda.

Nobody had mentioned a son. I'd had a nephew handed to me, and a partner, and a bus, and names enough to be going on with, and not one of them had been a son. And now there was one, six or seven metres away on the other side of a wall of canvas, and nobody had said whether that meant a grown man or a child, and there was no way of asking it that would not have sounded exactly like what it was.

"He's not been well," Paul said. His eyes went across to Glenda first and came back to us afterwards, which was an order I took note of. "I'm sure he'll be fine after a few days' rest."

"Yes." Glenda gave Paul a look on the way past it. "Perhaps you and Kain would be best moving back in there for a short time."

There were three tents. I'd been counting them since we came down off the crest, because counting was what I did when there was nothing else in front of me, and I had the arrangement worked out already. The first was Jamie's, and now Jamie's and a son's. The second had a stack of things showing through a half-open flap and nothing in it anybody was sleeping on. The third belonged to the two who'd come in on the ute.

And what Glenda had just put forward, out in the open, with the whole lot of us standing round listening to her, was that the two fit young blokes go and bed down in the tent with the one who was not well.

That was backwards. Every arrangement of that kind I had ever come across ran the other way about — the well ones moved out and the sick one got the room.

Paul's face went. Only for a moment, and he had it back before anybody could have called him on it, but it went, and I watched it go.

"We have another tent," he said, and put a hand out toward the ute, and there was a lift in his voice that had not been in it a moment before.

"Brilliant!" Glenda punched the air, and out there, in front of all of that, it was a very great deal of enthusiasm for a boxed tent.

I stood through the whole exchange with my hands hanging and could not get one part of it to sit still. A young man in a tent that nobody had offered to introduce us to. A few days' rest, said by a bloke who checked with somebody else before he said it. The woman who had put that dressing on Jamie's chest proposing to send two more bodies in there, and one of those two visibly relieved not to be going. And every bit of it in the tone of a conversation about who was getting the fold-out bed.

Not one of them was lying to me. If somebody had lied I would have had a corner to get my fingers under.

"Come on," Karen said, and got me in the ribs with her elbow.

I went after her a couple of paces back, which by then was where I lived.

Kain had the tailgate down and was hauling the first box off the tray.

"Looks like they got a little dusty," he said, and blew across the top of it.

The dust came off the lid in a sheet and stood up in the air in front of us.

I stopped and watched it, and I could not have done anything else with myself. It came off flat and then broke apart and started to turn, every grain of it going about its own business, catching the light and losing it and catching it again, and the whole cloud shifted maybe half a metre sideways and did not come down. Nothing that fine ever came down in a hurry. I knew exactly what I was looking at and could have put a settling velocity on it inside a factor of two, and I stood there in the dust and looked at it anyway, because it was the most beautiful thing I had seen since I arrived.

"Here, let me take that," I said.

"Thanks." Kain handed it straight across without a word of argument about it, which I liked him for.

It was heavier than it looked and I got it up onto my chest properly, and the weight of it settling in against me was the first thing all day that had behaved precisely the way I expected it to.

"May as well put it next to ours, I guess," Paul said, and pointed out the third tent along.

I nodded and got moving.

Carrying forty kilos across that stuff was an entirely different proposition from walking on it empty-handed. Every step went in deeper with the load on and came out slower, and I had to lean back into the box to keep the weight over my feet, and somewhere about halfway there the whole day arrived in the small of my back at once — the trench, and the wall, and the sand coming in from the portal, all of it presenting at the same moment and asking what I intended to do about it.

"Chris!"

Karen came after me with a smaller box under one arm, and I could hear her feet going down into the stuff and coming back out of it behind me the whole way over.

I got to where Paul had pointed and went down on one knee to put the box off my chest, and the knee went in a fair way before the box touched ground.

"What do you think?" She set her box of pegs down on top of mine.

The label was printed across the end of the carton — a photograph of the thing standing up on green grass with a family arranged in front of it, and a woman holding a mug. Ten-man. Ridge frame. And along the bottom edge, where the price sticker had been, a clean rectangle with the gum still on it and one corner of the paper left behind.

Somebody had taken the price off before it came through.

"Looks like this is another ten-man tent, just like the other three," I said.

I got up off the knee and had a proper look at what we'd been given to stand it on. Flat, or near enough flat. No fall on it anywhere I could pick, which in country that saw any rain at all would have bothered me, and I had no idea yet whether this country saw any. Well back off the bank — a good deal further back than I would have gone myself, in fact, and that told me nothing except that whoever had chosen the spot had been careful about something.

Beyond all of it the dunes going away on three sides with the crests gone pale on top, and the mountains sitting along the back of the whole business, and the line of the river showing only as a change in the way the ground fell.

"It could be worse, I guess."

"I just don't understand," Karen said, and put the back of her wrist against her forehead.

That was the whole sentence. My wife had a very great many words and had never once in my experience run out of them, and she had run out.

She had the dust worked into every line on her face and a rim of it along her bottom lashes, and she had not complained about the heat, not once, which meant she had noticed it a long while back and had decided against mentioning it.

"I don't understand how any of this is actually real."

I went down onto my haunches and took up two handfuls off the ground, because my hands wanted a job, and it went out between my fingers the same as it had at the wall, and the same as when she had poured it into my palms and asked me to believe in it.

"But it feels real."

And then, for about as long as I was down there, I had the other one laid over the top of it. A cut face with a profile running all the way through it, dark crumbing stuff going down into a lighter horizon and down again past that, worm channels running away through the body of it and root hair inside the channels, and a wind moving in the top of a canopy somewhere above the whole lot. It came up out of nothing and stood on that empty ground in front of me and then it was gone, and there was only the dust again, and my hands were empty, and my wife was beside me not understanding anything.

"I just thought there'd be more," Karen said.

"Well, looks like there can't be much less."

My shoulders went on the way up.

"Come on." She had my arm. "We may as well keep ourselves busy until we figure this all out."

Kain was mid-sentence as we came back across.

"No offence, but maybe you'd be better helping Glenda with the new tent," he was saying to Paul.

"Chris and I can help." Karen was in before anybody had drawn breath on it. "We're used to camping when we go on our short term research trips. Shouldn't take long."

Camping.

There was a two-man dome that lived up in the roof cavity at Owens Hollow and came down about twice a year, and it went up in nine minutes, and one of those nine was me telling Karen she had the fly on backwards. What was lying on the ground behind us was a ridge-framed canvas thing I would have put at forty kilos boxed before anybody started adding poles, with a family on the label and a price on it that somebody had gone to the trouble of taking off, and my wife had just volunteered the pair of us for it on the strength of a two-man dome.

"That'd be great," Glenda said, and the smile that came with it was wide enough that I could not have got out from under it if I had tried.

"This one's on you, dear," I said, under my breath, in her direction.

She either did not hear it or decided against having heard it, and either way we were in.

"Okay." Paul shrugged, and there was not a great deal behind the shrug. "So what am I doing now?"

Nobody said anything for a second. I got half a smile out before I could stop it, because I was waiting for my wife to start handing out jobs to a man she had known about as long as she had known the dogs — and Glenda got there ahead of her.

"You're helping us put up the tent."

"Great. Let's get to it," Paul said, and something crossed his face on the way through that his voice had not agreed to.

I was ready for it. I would have gone at anything by then. There was a young man in a tent that nobody was talking about, and a voice in my head that had turned out to be right about a river, and a wife standing in a dead world telling people it was a blank canvas, and not one of the three would hold still long enough to be got hold of properly.

Poles and canvas and pegs into ground. A thing with a right way about it and a wrong way about it, a start and a finish, and no opinion of its own on anything at all.

I got hold of the box of pegs, and I was glad of it, and I would have been glad of a good deal worse.