We're Not the First

"Once it's out of your hand it isn't yours, whatever either of you meant by it. That goes for a tool, for money, and for what you know. I was slow about all three."

The heat went out of that place the moment the light did.

All afternoon it had been coming up off the ground at me and sitting on my shoulders and running down inside my collar, and now there was nothing left in the air at all, and a breeze coming off the dunes with an edge on it, and I was standing about in a shirt that had dried on me twice.

Karen and Glenda had got themselves into an argument about tomorrow.

Karen wanted a run of test pits close in to the camp, on the grounds that we could not walk six hundred metres up a riverbank every time we wanted to look at something. Glenda wanted to go back up the line, on the grounds that there were thirty markers in the ground up there already and it would be foolish to start again from nothing.

They were both right, which was the difficulty. Karen's plan gave us a working area we could reach in the dark. Glenda's gave us continuity with the only data anybody had. And standing between the pair of them was the one person in that camp who had put a peg or a blade into that ground fourteen times since lunch and could have settled the whole argument inside a minute.

I said something once. I do not remember what. It was a noise in roughly the right place and neither of them picked it up.

Because I had my hand in my pocket, and had done for the best part of an hour.

I had shifted my weight from one foot to the other so many times that there were two shallow dishes worked into the dust under my boots. And every time I moved, my thumb went round the edge of one of those coins and over the milling and across the letters, and off it, and back again. The milling had taken the skin off the side of my thumbnail. I could feel it going and I did not stop.

Twenty cliv.

It had been going round my head since the riverbank and it had worn a groove doing it. Twenty cliv. My two cents. I had made that joke to myself somewhere on the walk home, and it had not been funny then, and it was a great deal less funny by now, and it would not leave me alone.

"What the heck is wrong with you tonight, Chris?"

Karen stopped in the middle of her own sentence and came round on me.

She had dust worked into every line of her face and a grey rim of it along her bottom lashes, and her hair had come out of whatever she had put it into that morning and was hanging on one side. She had been on her feet since before light. She had gone through a wall in her own house, and put up a ten-man tent with a stranger, and knelt in the dirt for hours, and walked twelve hundred metres of riverbank, and eaten out of a plastic container sitting on a log.

And at the end of all of that she was standing in the cold looking at her husband, who had not said one useful word in an hour.

Glenda made a small noise that was very nearly a laugh.

"It's nothing." My other hand went up to my forehead and came away wet.

It was cold enough by then to see my own breath, and I had sweat running down my back.

"Just spit it out, would you."

My hand came out of my pocket before I had settled anything.

That was how it went. Not a decision. A hand.

I had a reason ready, because I had been building reasons all evening, and the one on top was this: the voice on that rock had told me to find the mountain and keep the mission secret, and it had not said one word about anything I might turn up in the dirt on the way to it.

Which was the reading I wanted. I knew that while I was giving it to myself, and I gave it to myself anyway.

I held them flat on my open palm. They were warm off my leg, and my hand was not steady, and I put the other one under my wrist to stop it showing.

"I found these while we were out digging."

Glenda's breath went in hard enough to hear across the gap between us.

"Fascinating," she said, and there was almost no sound in it.

She took one off my hand. She did not snatch it. She picked it up between finger and thumb and brought it in close to her face and turned it over, and turned it back, and her thumb went across the wall on the reverse of it exactly the way I had watched it go across the strings an hour before.

"What are they?"

Karen had the other one before I had finished offering it. She took it the way she took a specimen out of somebody's hand — quick, flat, straight up into the light — because that was what her hands did and they had never once asked her permission first.

"I think they might be coins of some sort." I put my empty hand down at my side. "But I'm not really sure."

"Chewbathia," Glenda said.

She read it off the metal, quietly, to herself.

Then her head came up and she looked straight at me, and it had nothing to do with the coin.

"Yes. It's a coin."

"How do you know for certain?" Karen said.

And Glenda stopped.

Her eyes came in narrow and her tongue went out over her bottom lip, and she stood in the dark holding a piece of somebody else's money and did not answer my wife.

"I think the markings of 'twenty cliv' make it rather obvious," I said.

Which I did not believe for a second. I had turned that word over for the whole of an afternoon and it could have been a place, or a metal, or a dead man's surname.

I said it to get Karen off her. I said it because I wanted Glenda to keep talking.

And under that, one more reason, which I did not look at directly.

Does she hear it too?

Something had spoken inside my own head on a rock that afternoon, in the place where my own voice sat, and I had spent the entire evening watching five people for a sign of the same and come away with nothing. And here was a woman who had picked up a bow and played underneath a tune she had never heard in her life, and who had just read a word off a lump of buried copper and then looked at me as though we had already had this conversation somewhere and she was checking that I remembered it.

"It means we're not alone," Glenda said.

"We don't know that." Karen had hers up at arm's length, turning it to catch what was left of the fire. "This looks quite dated."

"But it must mean that people have been here before us." It came out flatter than I intended. "We're not the first."

And then I looked down at the ground I was standing on.

I had spent that entire day calling it empty. I had walked six hundred metres of riverbank reading it for a wallaby print. I had gone up two dune faces on my hands and knees looking for one bird's foot in the dust and come away satisfied with the thoroughness of it, and I had said so to my wife, twice, out loud.

Somebody had walked across that country with money in his pocket.

And there was a wall on the back of that coin, with the courses picked out one at a time, that somebody had gone to the trouble of building and somebody else had gone to the trouble of putting on the money.

Whatever they had put that wall up against had not been stopped by it.

I kept that one to myself.

"We should tell Paul," Karen said.

"I don't think that is wise."

Glenda's fingers came shut round hers.

"Why not?"

"He is too busy."

Which was nothing at all. It was not even an attempt at an answer, and Karen's mouth went to a line, and she put her hand out with the palm up.

"Perhaps Glenda is right." I reached across and took the coin out of my wife's fingers. "Until we know more about them, there's probably no point saying anything to Paul."

Her hand stayed open.

She did not close it and she did not pull it back. She stood there in front of another woman with her palm up and nothing in it, and then she brought it down to her side.

Because it was mine. Because in twenty years she had never once had to wonder what I would do with anything of mine that she was holding.

"Yes, Paul has enough on his mind with trying to get the settlement up and running," Glenda said, straight in behind me.

"And dealing with Luke," I said.

Which I had no business saying. One afternoon of watching those two brothers move round each other, and a few sentences from Karen about a man on a bus who was clever and did not think things through — and I put it out into the dark in front of somebody who had known the pair of them a week, purely so as to be agreeing with her harder.

"As our delegated leader, I still think Paul should know," Karen said.

"No."

Glenda had the second one out of my hand before I saw her move.

"Give that back," Karen said.

"We say nothing to anyone." Both of them went down the front of her shirt and into her bra, and her arms came over the top of it.

I grimaced. A bra had always struck me as an unfair advantage in a negotiation, and there was nothing else left for my face to be doing.

"That's not really your decision to make." Karen came forward with a hand up.

"Fuck off, Karen!" Glenda got a shoulder into it and stepped back. "I said no."

And that finished it.

Karen's arms came across her chest. She stood there about two seconds. Then she went past me — close enough that I could have had her elbow without moving my feet — and up the slope, and the flap on our tent went back and came down again with a crack of canvas that carried the whole length of the camp.

Glenda went the other way with her arms still folded and did not say goodnight to anybody.

My hand went into my pocket.

It did it on its own, the way it had been doing all evening, and there was nothing in there but the seam and a bit of grit. I went round the inside of it with two fingers. Then I did it again, in case.

I had dug those out of a bank with a shovel that was not mine. I had scratched a cross into a rock a metre across so that I could find the place again. I had carried them the length of that riverbank and lied to my wife's face twice on the strength of them.

Four minutes to give them away. Five to have them taken off me.

"Everything alright?"

Kain had come up beside me. He put a hand on my shoulder, left it there a second, took it off again.

"Yeah." My head was going side to side while I said it, which rather gave the game away. "It's nothing."

He did not go.

He had a bottle of water in one hand, and he stood there next to me looking out at the dark where the two of them had gone, and he did not fill the quiet up. At twenty-two that was a good deal rarer than I had any right to expect.

After a while I found something to say that was not about coins.

"Where do you get your water?"

"Bottled water." He tipped the bottle at me. "Luke brings this in."

And I stood there with the whole speech ready in my mouth and nowhere to put it.

Eleven paces from the nearest of that scatter down to the water. Five or six hundred metres of current between there and this camp. Distance, cover, position — downstream, never up. I had rehearsed it on the walk home with my jaw set. I had sat through the whole of dinner with it. I had been going to open by saying that I did not want to make a fuss and then make a very great deal of fuss.

Nobody drank out of that river.

Six people had been living on its bank for a week and not one of them had gone down and put their face in it, because a man with a device in his pocket had been carrying bottled water through a hole in a wall from a supermarket in Hobart.

The only person in this world who had lain down on his belly at that water and drunk out of it until his teeth ached was me.

And my wife. Because I had not stopped her. Because I had not known.

Three times in one day.

The reasoning had been sound every time. So had the arithmetic. What I had not done, on any of the three, was open my mouth and ask somebody a question.

None of which changed the water. No spring. No tank. No well. Nobody had seen rain. Every mouthful in that camp arrived through a hole in a wall inside a plastic bottle with a barcode on the label, and it arrived when one man felt like carrying it. The day that stopped, six people were going to walk down to that river with a drum.

And the latrine would still be exactly where it was.

I did not say that either. I had been wrong three times since lunch and I had entirely run out of appetite for being certain in front of people.

What I asked instead was the other question I had been carrying.

"Joel."

Kain's head came round.

"His throat," I said. "What happened?"

He looked at his bottle for a while.

"Somebody cut it," he said.

He got it out flat and fast, to have it said.

"We found him in the river. Face down. Paul went in after him." He put the bottle up and took a mouthful and swallowed it. "He was dead, mate. I know what everyone says about that. He was dead. He'd been in there long enough that he'd gone cold and there was no blood in him."

No blood in him.

I turned that over and wished I had not. If there was nothing left in that boy, then it had gone out through the front of his neck while his heart was still pushing it along, and that was not quick, and he was present for the whole of it.

"How long, do you think? In the water."

"Dunno. Long enough."

"And how far up? From here."

He looked at me sideways at that.

"Why?"

"Because things in water move at a rate," I said. "If you know where he went in and where you found him, you know about how long he was in it. And if you don't know where he went in, then knowing the rate tells you roughly where to look."

He turned that over. I watched him do it. He had the same face on that he had had over the table drains.

"Never thought about it like that."

"It's most of what I do."

"Yeah." He gave a short laugh with nothing in it. "Well. Glenda sewed him up. Took her ages. She had to improvise and she just — went at it."

Improvise.

I did not ask what with. I wanted to know, and I did not want to know, and I kept my mouth shut.

He stopped for a moment.

"Then we carried him down to the lagoon."

"And then?"

Kain shrugged. It was not a casual shrug. His shoulders went up and stayed up for a second and then came down, and he did not look at me while any of it was happening.

"And then he wasn't dead."

Neither of us said anything for a bit. The fire was down to a red heap and somebody had put a log on it that was not catching.

"Fucking zombie," he said, quietly.

And then he heard himself, and his jaw set, and he looked at the ground.

"I shouldn't say that. I've been saying that."

"You've had a week," I said.

"Yeah."

I let a moment go past and then asked the only question I actually wanted the answer to.

"Who cut him?"

Kain did not move for about three seconds. Then he lifted the bottle and had a drink out of it that he did not need, and screwed the cap back on very carefully, and looked out at the dark.

"You'd have to ask Jamie."

Which was not an answer, and was not a refusal either, and was very carefully neither.

I had spent thirty years standing in paddocks with men who did not want to tell me what was buried on their own property. Farmers, mostly. Councils. A bloke up in the Midlands who let me walk his back paddock four separate times before he mentioned the drums. There was always an edge to it, and I had learned a long while back that the fastest way to come away with nothing at all was to put a foot over that edge on a first visit.

So I did not ask him again.

"Fair enough," I said.

And he let go a breath he had been holding, and I heard him do it, and the two of us stood there and looked at a fire that was not going to last another ten minutes.

"I'll give you a hand with the road," he said, after a while. "Properly, I mean. Not just — you know."

"I'd take that."

He went off toward the tents. I stayed where I was a bit longer, and my breath was going up white in front of me, and I could hear the canvas moving on the frames all along the row.

Then I started up the slope to the one my wife was in, and put my hands in my pockets on the way, out of habit.

There was nothing in either of them.