Hold Out Your Hands

"I've never been much use in the first ten minutes of anything. Give me a week and I'll have it worked out."

The heat came at me while I was sitting there.

Not fast. It had probably been on me the whole time and I'd had other things to attend to. But I was in a work jacket I'd put on at first light against a Collinsvale frost, and it had soaked through at the shoulder and both cuffs, and it was drying on me. I could feel it going. The mud on my jeans had gone from wet to tacky to pale round the edges, and the crust of it was lifting off the denim in flakes, and all of that had happened in the time it took two people to have a conversation about not going home.

Warm. Dry. Not a breath of wind in it, and the air went into me thin and took something back out on the way.

I got my head up and had a proper look at where I was.

The ground wasn't flat, which I'd had wrong from sitting on it. It ran off in low hills — dunes, more like, long and soft-shouldered, the crests going a paler orange where the light took them and the hollows holding a deeper red. Not one of them with anything standing on it. Not a stick. The whole lot rolled away in that direction until it stopped being anything I could see.

Turn the other way and there were mountains.

Very far off. That blue-grey the Wellington range went from out past Bridgewater on a clear afternoon, except these ran the full width of what I could see and kept going past both ends of it, and they were bigger than anything I'd ever stood in front of. I looked at them a good while, because they were the only thing out there with a shape to it.

And then closer in — a fair way off, but not so far I couldn't see it — there was a heap of something. Low and irregular and broken into blocks, sitting on its own on the open ground.

My chest did something at that. Buildings. Somebody's buildings.

I got up onto my knees for a cleaner line on it and it went to pieces the second I had one. Not buildings. Not anything. A pile of gear on the dirt — boxes, drums, something under a tarpaulin, all of it put down where it landed and none of it put down by anybody who'd given it a second's thought. I'd organised more sites than I could count and I could see from where I knelt that nobody had organised that one.

I sat back down.

That was when I heard the voice.

A woman's, off in the direction of the dunes, muffled and thinned right out by the distance but a voice, unmistakably, calling something I couldn't make out.

"Someone's coming," I said, and I had my hand on Karen's shoulder pressing her down before I'd got to the end of it.

"Don't be such a fool." She shrugged my arm off her and stood straight up out of the dust.

"Hey! Over here!" Both arms going over her head.

"What are you doing? She could be dangerous!" I had a fistful of her jeans at the calf and I was hauling on it, still down in the dirt, hissing it up at her from below. We had four sheep on the place for a while and I once got a ewe off the orchard fence with exactly that grip and exactly that noise, and it had worked about as well then.

Karen looked down at me. The lines were in across her forehead. The deep ones.

"Get up," she said.

I got up.

The woman came in at a jog and slowed to a walk about ten metres out, and the first thing I took in about her was that she was clean.

Not spotless. She had the dust on her boots and up the shins of her trousers and a fine coat of it over her forearms. But her clothes were pressed things. Office things. A blouse with the sleeves turned back twice, and her hair pinned up off her neck — pinned properly, with pins, not shoved up out of the way with whatever came to hand. She'd walked out of something like an appointment, and she'd been here long enough since to have made arrangements about her hair, and those two facts arrived in me together and neither of them was any comfort.

"Hello," she called.

Tall, and moving easily, and not out of breath so much as breathing. She put a hand out toward Karen.

"I'm Glenda."

It was out of me before I had any say in it.

"Now is that good wi—"

Our television died in 1979 and my father brought a second-hand one home in the back of the Kingswood, and the first thing that came out of it was The Wizard of Oz. After that they could not get me up off the floor in front of it. Every school holidays. Every time it came round. I had every word of it at six and I still had every word of it at forty-five.

"Oh stop it!" The flat of Karen's hand caught me across the back of the head.

Fair enough. But I'd had the thought and there was no getting rid of the thought, which was that at least we probably weren't going to run into the other one.

Some part of my head was still working well enough to turn out a joke. It was a rotten joke, and it was at my wife's expense, and none of that was a new arrangement between us. There was more comfort in that than in anything else standing in that landscape.

"I'm Karen." She took the hand and gave it a proper shake. "And this is my husband, Chris."

The glare came off her a little on the last word. Not much. Enough that I noticed.

Glenda turned the hand to me. "Nice to meet you, Chris."

European, the voice. German at a guess, and I'd not have put money on the guess. I gave her my right hand, which was the wrong one, and she took it across the heel where I'd opened it on the wall, and I got through the shake without saying anything and had a look at it afterwards. It had bled and dried and gone over to grit.

We were introducing ourselves. Names and hands, out there, with the dust on everything and the mountains behind us. I did the whole of it properly, the way I'd have done it at a front door in Collinsvale, and the whole time I was doing it something underneath me kept going down and down and not finding a floor.

"Where is Luke?" Glenda said. To Karen.

Karen shrugged. That was all she gave it.

"I don't think he's coming," I said.

"He didn't arrive with you?" The eyebrows went up on her, and something crossed her face that wasn't only curiosity.

"No." Karen's voice had gone flat and administrative. "I don't think this is how he meant for things to happen."

"It was an accident?"

Karen took a breath in before she started, and I knew the breath. It was the one she took before a seminar.

"I don't really understand it, but Luke made the most beautiful colours appear on the back of the living room door. I wanted to touch it, but he told me not to."

"He did?"

It came out of me too loud and straight across the top of her. Because that was the first I'd heard of any of it. My wife had been standing in our lounge with a man putting colours on our door and telling her not to touch them, and I had been forty metres away on my knees in a trench, delighted with myself about a layer of burnt dirt.

"Yes. And then you came bursting through the door and then, well, here we are," Karen said.

She set it down carefully. She set it down where I'd have to walk past it again.

The heat went up the back of my neck and into my ears.

"You're blaming me for this?"

"Well, if you had just come through the kitchen door like you usually do, this wouldn't—"

She didn't finish it. She didn't need to finish it.

I knew exactly why I hadn't come through the kitchen. I'd stood on that mat with the whole far edge of the trench up my arms and made the decision in under a second, and the decision was not about mud. There was a man in the dining room I'd have had to stop and talk to. I did not want to stop and talk to him. And I had a way of getting where I was going that didn't require me to.

"Guys. Guys!" Glenda had a hand up between us. "I don't think this is really anybody's fault."

"Of course, it is!" It came up out of my chest and it did not sound like me. "It's Luke's fault!"

It went out over that dust and there was nothing anywhere for it to come back off. The two of them stood and looked at me. I could hear myself breathing.

"Accident or not," I said, and I brought it down as far as I could get it, which was not far, and the voice went in the middle of the words, "it was ultimately Luke's carelessness that got us into this situation."

"Hmm," said Karen.

Nothing else. Not agreement and not the other thing. She looked at the ground while she made the sound and then she looked back up, and I'd been married to that woman nineteen years and I could not have told you what was in it.

I turned to Glenda, because Glenda had been here longer, and Glenda would know.

"When can we go back home?"

"We're not," Karen said.

"We're not?"

Glenda's eyes went across to her and stayed there, waiting on it.

"This is our home now," Karen said.

"It is?" Glenda and I said it together, in the same shape, which under any other circumstances would have been funny.

Karen's brow came down. She was somewhere else with it.

"Do you remember the times we sat in bed at night and I used to joke to you about those crazy dreams Luke would tell Jane and I about on the bus?"

I did not.

I had her sitting up against the headboard with her reading glasses pushed into her hair. I had the shape of it — that there was a man on that bus who came out with things, and she'd bring them home and lay them out for me, and I'd say something about the water table or the ducks, and we'd both laugh and that would be the end of it. I had the fact of the conversations and not one word of what was in them. I hadn't been listening. It had never once occurred to me that I was meant to be.

You remember, Chris.

It came the same way the first one had. Not through the ears. Sitting in with my own thinking, in the place where my own voice sits, level and unhurried and using my name.

Everything in me went cold in that heat. I looked at Karen and I looked at Glenda and there was nothing in either face. It hadn't gone anywhere near them. It was in me, on its own, and it knew what I remembered better than I did.

I do? I said back to it, on the inside, which was not a thing I had ever expected to find myself doing.

And then it came up from underneath, slowly, out of order, the back end of it arriving first —

I do.

Karen crouched and put her hand flat into the ground and came up with a fistful of it.

"Hold out your hands," she said.

I held out my hands.

"I think it may actually be real."

She let it go from a height, and it came down into my palms in a thin unbroken stream and kept coming, and it was warm, and it heaped and slid off the sides and went on falling past my wrists onto my feet.

I'd had my hands in ground since I was nine years old. It was the one thing on this earth I was properly good at. So I did the only thing I knew how to do, which was to work it.

Fine. Very fine — silt-grade at the small end, and then a sand fraction running through it where every grain was much of a muchness with every other grain, and that meant wind. Water left a mess behind it. Wind sorted. I rolled a pinch between finger and thumb and it went to nothing and left a smear, and there was no grit in the smear worth the name.

No structure. That was the next of it. Soil squeezed up in the hand came together and then broke along its own lines, into crumbs, into peds, because there was life all through it gluing it up and prising it apart again. This did none of that. I closed my fist on it and opened my fist and it simply left. It had no lines of its own to break along.

Nothing in it. No fibre, no root hair, no leaf gone to lace, no cast, no shell, no charcoal. Not one black speck of anything that had ever been alive and then stopped.

And then I put my nose down into my hands.

Two hours earlier I had knelt in a trench in my own paddock and pushed my thumb into a black band and had it up under my nose and known what it was before I'd finished breathing in. Ground had never once failed me on that. It was the arrangement I'd had with it since I was a boy — get my face down into a thing and it would tell me what it had been.

I breathed in and there was nothing there at all.

No damp. No sourness. Nothing turned, nothing rotting, nothing rotted. Not the smell that comes up off a paddock before rain and not the one that comes after. Not the smell of anything. I stood in the warm with my head down over my own two hands, holding a place I had no way of reading, and it had not one single word to say to me.

"Shit," I said.

Karen was already off after Glenda.

"How many people are there? Are we close to the capital? And what of the facility?"

I lifted my head. The words went past me as though they'd been said in another language, and my wife had put them in the voice she used for asking about a bus timetable.

"Capital? Facility?" Glenda's face had opened up. "What facility?"

"You know, the breeding facility," Karen said, as though there were only the one.

Glenda looked at her, and then at me, with nothing at all behind her eyes.

"I don't think Glenda knows what you're talking about," I said.

Glenda's brow came in. She had a think about it, and then she gave us what she had.

"There's only a few of us. We're just a tiny settlement."

"Take us," Karen said.

"Sure," said Glenda.

I tipped what was left of it out of my hands and followed.