Four Kilos of Nothing

"I could list everything a settlement needs and get every item on it right, and still leave off the one nobody can do without."

The camp broke up into pieces after the food. It always went that way round a fire once everybody had eaten and nobody had anywhere to be. Paul went off to the ute for something and did not come back with it. Jamie stayed where he was. Karen had got herself in beside Glenda and the two of them had their heads together over something.

Kain came and sat down on my log.

He wanted to talk about the road, which suited me. How wide. Whether it wanted a base under it or whether we could get away with running the wheels straight on the crust once the loose material was off. Where it ought to start. He had opinions, most of them wrong, all of them arrived at honestly, and he listened when I told him why — which was more than a good many men twice his age had ever managed with me.

I was explaining table drains to him and drawing one in the dust with a stick when I heard it.

Underneath the talking. A sound with no shape to it at first — a low rasp, wet at the edges, going up and coming down again in a way that had intention in it.

I lost the end of my own sentence and Kain had to say my name.

It came again, and it had a shape this time, and the shape was a tune.

I turned my head and looked across the fire and it was coming out of Joel.

He was not singing to anybody. He had his elbows on his knees and his eyes down on the ground between his boots, and he was humming, quietly, half to himself, in a voice that had been through what his voice had been through. It came out through the damage rather than round it. There was air getting in at the sides of it that had no place being there, and every time he took a breath I could see the whole line of stitches move on his neck.

He got to the end of a phrase and then went on and put words on it.

"Let us celebrate our story,

The words we've yet to write."

The talking round that fire went out like somebody had turned a tap.

Glenda came up off her log fast enough to knock her own container over, and Joel heard the movement and stopped dead and looked up.

"Please, don't stop. You have a beautiful voice."

She said it plainly and she meant it, and it hung there in front of a boy who had got four words out all evening.

Jamie put a hand on his son's back. Not a push. He laid it flat between the shoulder blades and left it there — and I had felt my own wife do exactly that to me on a rock beside a river that afternoon, and I sat on my log and looked at Jamie Greyson's hand and could not make it fit with one single thing I had decided about the man.

Joel started again from the beginning.

He went round it once, and then again, the same two lines each time, and I understood after the second turn that he was holding it open — going round and round the same short loop so that it did not have to stop.

Glenda had gone into her tent.

She came back out with a violin in her arms.

I sat there and looked at it and did not know what to do with myself.

Because somebody had brought that through. There was a woman in this world with no home and no husband and a supply of drinking water that depended entirely on one man's diary, and at some point in the last two days she had been asked what she needed, and she had said a violin, and somebody had gone and fetched it and carried it through a hole in a wall.

I had spent that afternoon on my knees in the dirt putting an empty container near the top of a list of things I would have traded a great deal for. A bucket. A tape measure. A notebook. Every item on my list did work.

I looked at that violin and I thought, plainly and unkindly and with the whole weight of thirty years behind it: that is four kilos of nothing.

She sat down on the end of the log nearest Joel and got it up under her chin, and drew the bow, and it was awful.

Two notes that went sideways and a third that did not arrive. It had been through the same doorway as the rest of us and had come out the other side with its strings gone slack. She turned a peg without stopping, and then another, and came back in.

And then she found it.

She came in underneath him — not on the tune but under it, low and slow, one long note held while he went round his loop, and then a second one that moved when he moved.

"You know this song?" Karen said.

"Not until now."

She did not look up and she did not miss anything to say it.

I sat with that a while and could not get it to sit still.

Because I understood what following was. Not from the inside — I understood it the way I understood plumbing, which meant I could have told anybody what ought to happen and could not have done one bar of it myself. A player listens a beat behind and comes in where the sense of the tune says to come in, and on a loop as short as that one, anybody with an ear would have had it inside a couple of turns.

She was not a beat behind. Twice she moved before he did, and the note she was already sitting on turned out to be where he was going.

I did not know what to make of that then. I put it in the drawer with the boy and the lagoon and the soil that came out the same in every hole, and got on with listening.

He put the whole of it out on the next turn.

"Let us celebrate our story,

The words we've yet to write.

How we all wound up with glory,

In the world we fought to right."

I was no use with music, and what happened next had nothing whatever to do with the music.

I could not hold a tune. I had been asked politely not to sing in three separate vehicles. At my father's funeral I stood in the second row with the order of service in both hands and moved my mouth, and Helen looked across at me partway through the second hymn and I never did ask her why. Whatever music did to other people had always gone past me at a slight angle and left me standing there admiring the effect it was having on everybody else.

So the tune went past me, the way it always had.

The words did not.

The words we've yet to write.

I had spent that entire day unable to write down one single thing. Depth to crust at eleven holes, and I had said the numbers out loud on a riverbank to stop them getting away from me, and lost the first four before I got to the ninth. A soil that had no business being identical from one end of two hundred metres to the other, and not one figure of it on paper anywhere in this world. Two coins with a walled town on them and a word I had never heard in my life, and my entire record of where they came out of the ground was a cross I had scratched into a rock with the corner of a stolen shovel.

I had kept a notebook since I was six years old. My mother started me on it and I never once stopped, and there were forty-odd of them in a box under the bed at Owens Hollow, and every one of them was sitting in a house in Collinsvale that I was never going to walk into again.

In the world we fought to right.

And that one went in somewhere else altogether.

Because that was the job. It had been the job since I was nineteen years old and there had never been another one. Damaged ground with a lifetime of somebody else's mistakes lying on top of it, and a man with a spade and forty years and a very small chance of handing it on better than he got it. I had stood on ruined pasture in the Midlands and said something very close to that line to a room of people who were not listening — and here it was coming across a fire out of the throat of a boy who had been dead in a river yesterday, in front of five people who had nothing whatever and were going to have to build the lot of it up from the crust.

My eyes went. Nobody was looking at me and I did not do anything about it.

Joel's voice gave out on the last line and went to nothing, and Glenda took the rest of it on her own and finished the phrase and let it go, and then she stopped and looked over at him and put her head down once.

The fire cracked. Nobody said anything for a moment.

"To Joel!"

Luke, out of nowhere, on his feet with a bottle up.

It went through me like a door slamming and I was up before I knew I was moving.

"To Joel!"

And there was my own voice in the middle of all the others, and my bottle in the air, and Kain shouting beside me and Karen shouting across from me and Jamie with his arm right round his son.

It was the first noise I had made all day at the same moment as everybody else.

I sat back down with my heart going and felt about nine years old.

And then I went back and did the arithmetic on the violin, because I could not help myself.

A woman came out of a consulting room in Hobart into a desert with nothing in it. Somebody asked her what she wanted brought through, and she had one answer ready, and she did not ask for a chair or a kettle or a second pair of boots.

I would have asked for a spade. I would have been right, and I would have got a hole dug, and there would have been six people sitting round a fire in the dark on the worst day of their lives with a hole to show for it.

She had four kilos of nothing under her chin. And a boy who had not spoken all evening had just put his voice out into the open in front of the whole camp, and a man who had shouted fuck off across that fire an hour earlier was sitting with his arm round his own son and his eyes shut.

I took the empty container off my knee and turned it over in my hands and did not say a word to anybody about any of it.

The words we've yet to write.

I said the whole verse over to myself while I sat there. Then I said it again going in past the tents, and once more with my boots off.

The same method I had used on the numbers.

And I knew exactly how that had gone.