What They'd Been Burning

"The first thing you see of a place is never the place. It's whatever the people there have managed so far."

Glenda set off and we went after her, and inside of fifty metres I understood that this was not going to be a walk at all.

The ground gave. Not soft, exactly — it had no bottom to it that my boots could find. Every step went in past the ankle and then went a little further while I stood on it, and every step I took back out came with a slump of the stuff sliding down into the hole I'd just made, so the country was forever handing back a portion of what I'd given it. On the flat that was tiring. On the faces it was something else. I'd put a boot down and drive off it and get two-thirds of the distance I'd asked for, and then the sand would go out from under my heel and return me a piece of the two-thirds, and I'd do it again, and again, and by halfway up the first of them my thighs were burning and I was hauling air in through my mouth and getting sand along with it.

At home I'd have gone round. That was what I thought about, up there in the middle of it — that anybody putting a proper track through this would run it along the swales and let the dunes get on with being dunes, and there I was working out the alignment of a road that did not exist, across country I had been standing in for under two hours, because that was what my head had decided to do with itself while the rest of me was being punished.

There was a breeze. Not much of one, and it cooled nothing whatsoever, but it was working. It came over the crests and lifted the tops of them away in long thin streamers that ran off downwind and settled, and where our feet went in it caught what we threw up and pushed it out ahead of us, so that a fair amount of the time I was walking into dust I'd made a second earlier. It got into everything. Down my collar and between my shoulder blades where the shirt was already through. Into my eyes, which I stopped rubbing after the second go at it. Into my mouth, where it stayed — dry, fine, faintly sweet, gritting up between the back teeth. I spat twice and gave that away as well, because there was nothing left in my mouth to spit with.

My footprints held. That was the one thing that ground did well. The sand slumped in behind the boot but the print itself sat there sharp enough to read off, the whole tread pattern, and I caught myself turning round to look at them a good deal more often than there was any reason to.

I'd always read ground. It was never a decision. Cross a paddock at home and I'd be taking it in without having asked myself to — what had come off it, and how many, and how long back, and which way they'd been headed and whether they'd been in a hurry about it. Wallaby down the fence line in the small hours, sharp and paired and set well apart where they'd been travelling rather than feeding. Possum through the soft ground by the tank. Cat, which I'd want to know about and go on wanting to know about for a fortnight. A bird down and up again, three toes forward and a scratch behind where the tail had caught. Half of what I knew about my own block I'd taken off the ground the morning after, when whatever had come through was long gone and had left the account behind it.

There was nothing. Not one mark on the whole of that country that hadn't been put down inside the hour by somebody's boot. Nothing had crossed it. Nothing had come out at night and gone back in before light. Nothing had landed on it and taken off again. I went up two faces looking, and it wasn't there, and it was not going to be there, and it went into me differently from how it had gone in at the wall with a handful of the stuff under my nose — because a handful is a sample and this was the whole paddock, running away in every direction that country had, and there was nothing in any of it.

I kept turning round to look at the wall.

It stood up out of the flat behind us on its own for a good long while, and every time I came onto a crest I'd have a look back for it, and there it was, and I'd go down the far side with that much settled. I did not admit to myself what I was doing. I told myself I was taking a bearing.

Then we went up one and over, and partway down the far side I turned round out of habit and there was only the crest behind me and the sky above it, and there was nothing in the sky.

I stopped.

I went back up. Not far — six or eight metres, enough to get my head over the top — and there it was, standing where it had been standing, translucent and steady and entirely wrong, with the dust and the far country showing straight through it. Fine. Good. I came back down and caught them up and said nothing about it to anybody, and I did not go back up the next one, and every crest after that I went over without looking, and that took more out of me than the climbing did.

Somewhere in the middle of all of it I looked down at my own hands.

The knuckles were still split from the trench and the soil was still down in the cracks, black-brown, out of my own paddock, forty centimetres under my own grass. I'd gone at it with the nail brush in the wash-house and it hadn't shifted, the way it never did — it comes out of the shallow parts and stays down in the deep ones and then one morning three or four days later it's gone and you couldn't say when. I turned my hands over and looked at the palms, rasped flat and shiny off the hardwood rails, and there was Collinsvale sitting in the creases of both of them. It was the only Collinsvale within reach of me, and I was walking away from the door as fast as the sand would let me.

The heat had properly hold by then. I'd had the jacket off since the first face and it was over my arm and might as well have been a wet sheep for all the good it was doing me, and I could not put it down. Not couldn't be bothered — could not make myself set anything down in that place and walk away from it. My mouth had gone altogether. A mug of tea with breakfast and a barrow of gravel down to the far edge after it, and now this, and the want of water had stopped being a nuisance and turned into a thing with a shape to it, sitting up behind my breastbone. I got as far as wondering where theirs came from and then made myself leave it, because there was a woman fifteen metres ahead of me who plainly knew, and I could wait until I had some notion of what the answer was going to do to me.

And the mountains never moved.

Walk toward a hill at home and it came out to meet you. The near shoulder swung across in front of the far one, the gullies opened and shut, and the whole thing stopped being a shape and started being a place with parts to it. These did none of that. Every crest I came up onto I looked, and they sat exactly as they had sat — same width across the eye, same blue, same flat unbroken line running out past both edges of everything I could see. I knew precisely what that meant about how far off a thing was. I stopped looking after a while and did not feel any better for having stopped.

And nothing out there made a sound except us. Our feet going into the sand and coming out of it, Glenda's ahead, the breeze working over the crests with nothing to move but more sand, and the noise my jacket made against my hip. I had never once in my life noticed the birds at home. I noticed them out there, by the hole where they should have been. There was never a minute of daylight on our block without something calling somewhere in it — currawong, wattlebird, the morepork after dark — and the want of that had a weight to it, and it sat on me the whole way in.

Karen came up alongside Glenda somewhere along the line and stayed there, and I hung back.

I could hear the shape of it without getting the words — Karen asking, Glenda answering, Karen asking again before the answer had properly finished. Four strides would have put me level with them. I could have done it in three. I stayed where I was with the jacket over my arm and their dust coming back into my face, and I told myself I was keeping an eye on the country, and the country had already said everything it had to say to me.

Glenda came up onto a crest ahead and stopped and waited for us to come level with her, and that was Bixbus.

Down on the flat below there were a couple of tents, and they were not what I'd been braced for.

Not camping tents. Great canvas things, ten-man at the least, standing full wall height with a proper ridge and poles that would want two men to walk them upright. Kit for a mine camp or an army. I'd hired something a third of that size for a Collective survey week one summer and the invoice had made our treasurer sit down on a step. These had come out of crates. Somebody had paid for them, and before that somebody had chosen them, and neither of those was an accident.

The guys were run out at proper angles and the pegs were heavy and driven their full length, and none of it had made the slightest difference, because there was nothing in that ground for a peg to hold on to. Half the lines had gone slack. The walls came in and went out again with the breeze, slow, like something breathing.

A ring of stones with grey ash sitting in the middle of it. Something under a tarpaulin. An upturned crate with nothing on it.

I stood up there with my hands on my knees getting my breath back and looked down at the whole arrangement and could not find one thing in it to be hopeful about.

"Not much of a settlement, is it," I said.

I'd meant that drier than it came out.

It was the fire I went to. The others were still coming down off the crest and I was already standing over it with my hands on my hips.

Grey ash, and a decent depth of it, so they'd had more than one. And down in it a few ends that hadn't gone all the way through. Not wood. A corner of cardboard, gone black and holding its shape until I touched it. A length of pine batten off a packing case with two nail holes still in it and the nails pulled. Something that had been plastic and had stopped being plastic partway along.

They'd been burning their own boxes.

I straightened up and turned right the way round, taking in every direction that country would give me one in, and I did the arithmetic while I turned, and it did not take long and did not want doing twice. Nothing standing anywhere. Not a tree. Not a bush. Not a stick of anything at all. Every scrap that had gone onto that fire had come through a hole in a wall back the way we'd come, and when whatever was coming through that hole stopped coming, the fire stopped with it, and after that these people had nothing to burn and no means of growing any.

Two expedition tents that had cost somebody a year of my wages, and a fire made out of the crates they'd arrived in. Somebody had thought very hard indeed about the shelter and had not thought about the rest of it at all.

I'd spent my whole working life on the one question, which is how ground carries what lives on it. I stood at the edge of a cold firepit in a place with no fuel in it and I could not have told you how any of this was meant to keep going another fortnight.

"Is this it?" Karen said, coming down beside me.

"This is it." Glenda gave it a nod. "Welcome to Bixbus."

"Bixbus?" I said. "I thought we were in Clivilius?"

"Oh." She laughed, a small one, and not unkind, standing in the middle of all that. "We are in Clivilius, but we've called our own little settlement Bixbus."

"Oh," I said.

They'd named it. Somewhere in the last week, between a couple of tents and a fire they were feeding with packing cases, a group of people had sat down and talked about what to call the place and come to an agreement on it. That ought to have gone into me as a good sign. It went in the other way entirely, and I stood there turning it over and could not get at why, except that they'd have needed to stop expecting to leave before anybody thought to give it a name.

I looked over at my wife. She'd gone off somewhere behind the eyes. Not grief and not fright — working. There'd be forty things running at once in there and in a minute she'd come back out holding one of them and it would be the right one, and I'd watched her do that for nineteen years and had never once been able to see how it was done.

Then something moved on my collar.

I got a finger up and brought it down and there it was, going across the pad of my thumb. Six or seven millimetres of it, dark, with an oily green coming up through the wing cases wherever the light took them. Off the plum, most likely. On to the jumper up the ladder yesterday, off the jumper and onto the shirt somewhere in the wash-house this morning, and then the whole of the rest of it on my shoulder — the trench, the argument in the lounge, the door, and out the far side of the world — and here it was on my hand, working along the edge of my thumbnail and trying the air with its feelers and going about the entire business as though nothing whatever had occurred.

Karen was two metres away with her hand out to a dog and she did not see it.

I turned my hand over and let it walk down onto the back of my wrist, and I said nothing.

I could not have given a reason for that. She'd have wanted it. She would have had it in a jar inside the minute if there'd been a jar within a hundred kilometres of us, and she'd have been happier in that minute than she had been since breakfast, and I stood there and watched it go down under my cuff and kept my mouth shut.

It stopped somewhere inside my sleeve and stayed. I had a look at the ground it was going to have to live on, and then at the sky it was going to have to live under, and I did not fancy its chances.

A flap went back on the near tent and a man came out of it, and a dog came out after him at speed.

An actual dog. Small, brown and white, a Shih Tzu, all coat and no legs to speak of, going flat out across the sand with its ears back and its tail up and its whole underside collecting dust as it came.

I hadn't the least idea how badly I wanted to look at something alive until I was looking at it. Something let go in my chest and I very nearly went down onto my heels to meet it, and I was not a man who did that with other people's dogs.

"Duke?" Karen was down in the dust before I'd finished the thought, hand out flat and low for him.

"You know him?" said Glenda.

"Not really." Karen looked up at her. Standing over the pair of them like that, Glenda was near enough Karen's height, which put her tall. My wife had never had to look many women level in the eye.

"I've seen pictures. Is Henri here too?"

Glenda laughed and put a hand out toward the tent. "Over there."

There was a second one back at the flap, same breed and a good deal rounder with it. He'd got about four metres into the same journey, thought better of the entire proposition, and gone back to lie down in the shade under the canopy with his chin on his paws. I had a great deal of sympathy for him.

"Hi," the man said. "I'm Jamie."

He'd come over slowly and stopped a bit short of us. Mid-thirties, and thin through the face in a way I'd have put down to the last few days rather than to how he usually was. He'd slept in his clothes — the seam marks were still across him. His shirt was open two buttons further than a man does his shirt up, and inside the opening was the square white edge of a dressing taped across the top of his chest. A proper one, done by somebody who knew exactly what they were doing. He held himself carefully from the waist up, and when he lifted a hand to us he did it with the elbow tucked in, and he did not take a full breath the entire time he was talking.

"Ahh, Luke's partner," Karen said.

"Yep."

"This is Karen and her husband, Chris," said Glenda.

Jamie's eyes came in a little at that. "Bus friend Karen?"

I had to put some effort into not making a noise. Two worlds, a hole in the back of a door, a desert with no birds in it, and the bus had beaten us here.

Karen laughed. "Yes. That'd be me."

"I'd normally say nice to meet you, but this is hardly a fun place to meet in," Jamie said.

Something went hard across my face and I let it stay there. What a bloody wanker.

And I'd had that dressing in front of me for a full minute by then. Somebody had opened that man up, and packed him, and strapped him, and had done it recently and had done it properly and had done it here — in a place with a couple of tents in it and a fire built out of packing cases. All of that was standing in front of me in a shirt with two buttons undone, breathing shallow so it wouldn't pull.

What I took off him was the remark. I took it whole, and I was still holding it after he'd stopped talking.

Karen's eyes went across the three of us and came back.

"Do you mind if Chris and I take a moment for a quick chat, just us?"

"Sure," said Glenda. "A river runs behind the tents. Might make a more pleasant spot for you."

A river.

I had just walked a long way through ground that nothing had ever crossed, past nothing, under nothing, and a woman standing in front of a couple of tents had said the word river to me the way she might have mentioned a shed.

"Thanks, Glenda," Karen said.

She got me by the arm and hauled. I went, though not on account of the hauling.