“Put it on,” you said. “You’ll warm up.”
Your smell of sweat and eucalyptus and dirt filled my nostrils as I put the sweater over my head, the wool scratching at my arms. You had your shorts on when I looked back at you. You took my arm again, grabbing me around the elbow, and led me outside.
The stars were already bright against the fading gray sky. The moon was a slender fingernail. I let you lead me. We were quiet. The only sounds were my boots, and your bare feet, upon the sand. Far, far away something made a single ghostly howl, like a banshee in the dark.
“Dingo,” you whispered.
There were so many thoughts in my head right then, so many emotions. Your hand was close and tight around my elbow, guiding me straight. Some small part of me almost liked it there. I blinked, shaking my head, not wanting to admit it. But it was true, wasn’t it? A part of me was starting to accept you. I wondered, if I gave in to that part, if I leaned into you in return, where would it lead?
“Are you hungry?” you asked.
I shook my head. I stopped and looked around at the sky. It was actually nice, right then, to look at that blackness. It was kind of soothing after all those colors.
“I just want to sit for a while,” I said. “Out here.”
“Alone?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll get a blanket.”
You padded toward the house. I watched your back fade into the dark. I rubbed at my elbows, feeling the sudden chill there. I walked away from the buildings, farther out into the sand. I found a smooth patch with no plants or rocks, and lowered myself onto it. The sand was still warm. I buried my hands underneath the top layers and felt the heat that was stored in the grains seep into me. I pressed my wrists into the warmth. Another howl echoed around the land, and that time there was a reply, another moaning spirit in the dark. I looked up at the stars. More were appearing now, populating the blackness like it was rush hour. I suppose it was, for the stars. There seemed to be as many stars in that sky as there were grains of sand around me. My fingers dug deeper into the grains as the crickets began their rickety whirring around me.
I felt the vibrations of your steps as you returned. You had a gray blanket wrapped around your shoulders and another draped over your arm. You hadn’t cleaned the sand or paint from your body. But the paint had smudged away a little anyway, near your mouth and eyes, on your arms….
You wrapped one of the blankets around me, then handed me a cup.
“What’s this?”
“Just herbs and water. It’ll keep you warm.”
“I’m not cold.”
“You will be.”
The smell of clean, fresh tea tree wafted up on the steam. It was too hot to drink right away, but it was comforting just to hold it in my hands. I bent my head over it and inhaled. I took that bush smell with me as I looked up at the stars. You glanced up, too, scanning the sky like you were reading a map. You nodded a little, but at what I don’t know.
“Got everything you need?” you asked.
You turned toward the house, but hesitated before you took a step. You hovered there for a moment, waiting for me to say something … wanting me to. You clasped your fingers together and twisted your thumbs. I gave in.
“What do you see up there?” I said. I threw my hand toward the sky.
You smiled, grateful. “I can see anything you want.”
“Do you know the patterns?”
“You mean constellations?” You shrugged. “I know my patterns.”
“What do you mean?”
You crouched down to me quickly. “I know the pictures I see up there. I can trace people’s faces, the lay of the land … anything, really. If you look for long enough those stars will tell you everything you want to know: directions, the weather, time, stories….”
You didn’t stand up again, move away, back to the house. Instead you sat down next to me and buried your hands under the sand. You grinned when you saw my boots were buried also. You buried your feet, too. It reminded me a little of when Anna and I used to be tucked up together under the same duvet, sharing the same bed. Those times felt like a million years away.
We were as quiet as the shadowy moths that flitted around us. I reached out and grabbed one; it fluttered against my closed fist. When I opened my hand it stayed there for a moment, bruised, on my palm. It was the color of my skin, tanned and peachy. The moonlight caught the delicate patterns on its wings, swirly and faint. It had tiny furry antennae. Its legs started to twitch, tickling me. How could this thing survive? It seemed so delicate. I shook my hand and it flopped down onto the sand. I pushed at it and it flew away, slightly lopsidedly, ready to fumble around us again soon.
“That moth is early,” you said. “It’s not normally out for a few weeks. You’ve been lucky.”
You smiled, your eyes crinkling at the corners. I looked away quickly, wanting to hold your gaze but nervous of it, too. Some of the stars were winking at me, others were still. I heard the high-pitched chip-chips from dark bat silhouettes, their wings sweeping soundlessly across the velvet sky. Right at that moment it was as if we were the only two people left in the whole world. And I don’t mean that to sound corny; it just honestly did. The only sounds were the droning crickets and chip-chips of the bats, the faraway wind against the sand, and the occasional distant yowl of a dingo. There were no car horns. No trains. No jackhammers. No lawn mowers. No planes. No sirens. No alarms. No anything human. If you’d told me then that you’d saved me from a nuclear holocaust, I might have believed you.
You lay back into the sand, face up to the stars. You were so quiet and still, you might have been asleep, or dead. I prodded you.
“What?” You half smiled. “I’m thinking about the stars.”
“What about them?”
“How everything is both eternal and brief.”
“How do you mean?”
You talked up at the night sky. “I mean, that star far up over to my right is blinking at me madly now, but for how long? An hour or two, or for the next million years? And how long will we sit here like this? Just another moment, or the rest of our lives? You know which one I’d prefer….”
I ignored your comment, glancing instead at the stars myself. “If you remember, I was the one who came out to sit here, you just followed me.”
You propped yourself up onto your elbows. “Do you want me to leave?”
Your face was less than an arm’s width from mine. I could lean across to you, or you could lean into me. We could kiss. You watched me, and I felt your hot, leafy breath settle on my skin. Your lips were parted slightly, dry and cracked around the edges. They needed a little moisture to soften them. I reached across and rubbed away a bit of paint still stuck in your short beard. You held my fingers to your chin. I froze, feeling the warmth of your hand on one side and the tiny beard prickles on my fingertips. What was I thinking? I turned back to the stars. After a moment you let me slip my fingers out from yours, away.
“I just want to sit here,” I said shakily. “You can do what you like.”
“I want to stay.”
I kept looking at the sky, not trusting myself to look back at you. There was a cluster of particularly bright stars, sinking down toward the horizon. They were like a small city made up of winking lights. A highway of bright stars led to them. You saw where I was looking.
“The sisters,” you said. “That’s what some folks call them.”
“Why?”
You sat up, surprised at my willingness to talk. “Those stars were beautiful women once,” you said. “The first women on this land. As they walked through this country, trees and flowers sprouted up behind them; rocks emerged. A river soaked into their footsteps. But then, while the women were bathing in their river, a spirit man watched them. He decided he wanted to keep them as his wives. He chased after them and the women ran. They fled to the only place they thought was safe, the sky. They turned into stars. But he chased them up there, too, turning into a s
tar himself, always following behind.”
You raised your arm and pointed out one of the brightest stars in the sky. “See? He’s there.” Then you traced a line between that star and the cluster of stars you called the sisters. “See it?” you asked. “He’s always there, following the sisters, chasing them eternally … but he never quite catches up.”
I shivered suddenly. “The sisters can never get away from him, then?”
“True.” You tucked my blanket tight around my shoulders. “But they’ll never be caught, either. He’s just behind them, always watching … wanting them. He chases them all around the world. You could have seen him chasing them in London, if you’d been looking.”
“You know you can’t see the stars in London, not really,” I said.
You flopped back down into the sand. “Maybe not. But he’s there all the same. Behind the clouds, behind the lights … watching.”
We sat there longer, me drinking the tea you’d brought and you talking more about the stars. You were right about the tea. Its liquid seemed to spread out under my skin and warm me. “Should I build a fire?” you asked. I shook my head, not wanting anything to pollute the light show above us. You shifted nearer, making me warmer anyway. You showed me some of the pictures you saw in the sky. You pointed out a small cluster of stars you thought looked like the boulders of the Separates, then traced across to two brighter stars for the outbuildings and another for the house; then you pointed out two blue-tinged stars that you said were us. I squinted, tried to see it, too. But all I saw were stars.
“Can you see London?” you asked. “Up there?”
“What do you mean?”
“Can you see the city? The skyline? The bridges? Can you trace them in the stars?”
I scanned the sky. There were so many stars, with more emerging by the second. There were too many stars for anything to seem clear. I followed a few stars up in a line and tried to trace Big Ben in the way you’d traced the shape of the Separates. You rolled over and looked at me.
“It’s funny, isn’t it?” you started quietly. “How you look up there and find a city, and I look at London and see a landscape?”
I frowned, glancing back at you. “What do you mean ‘landscape’?”
“Just everything underneath, I guess.” You rubbed your fingers against your beard, thinking. “All that earth and life, always just under the concrete, ready to push back through the pavement and take over the city at any time. All that life beneath the dead.”
“London’s more than just a pile of concrete,” I said.
“Maybe.” Your eyes glinted in the dark. “But without humans, the wild would take over. It would only need a hundred years or so for nature to win again. We’re just temporary, really.”
“But we’re there all the same,” I said. “You can’t ignore the humans and buildings and art and everything else in a city. You can’t take that stuff away. There really would be nothing then …”
I broke off, remembering what I’d left behind; thinking about my route to school on the double-decker bus, past the museums and iron park gates. I thought about those two old ladies who sat in front of me and talked about EastEnders. I clasped my arms tight around my shins as I imagined what was happening back home. School would be starting again, Anna and Ben would have returned from their vacation, summer would be over. The leaves would be fading from green to brown and settling in the playground. The school corridors wouldn’t yet have the heat turned on, and the cavernous school cafeteria would be freezing in the mornings. Did they miss me there? Was anyone even collecting notes for me? Or had they given up on me by now? I pressed my mouth into the tops of my knees, the tears already on my cheeks. I tucked my face inward, not wanting you to notice. But you sat up anyway and moved closer behind me.
You pressed your hand onto my shaking back. It was warm and solid.
“You’re right,” you whispered, your breath on my neck. “Perhaps there are good things in a city sometimes … beautiful things.”
Then you pulled me toward you. The way you did it was gentle and soft, first picking me up around the shoulders and then guiding me back. I fell into you, and it felt like I was moving in slow motion. You wrapped your warm arms, and the blankets, around me, cocooning me in a snug darkness. I thought of the moth I’d caught in my hand: safe, yet trapped, in the dark of my fingers.
“I’m sorry,” you said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
I could feel you shaking, too. You held me tighter, pressing me to your quivering body and against the sand and plants and paint there. I buried into you, for once wanting something back. Your eucalyptus smell smudged onto me. You reached down and dabbed at my cheeks, wiping wet paint sideways into my hair. I stayed there, curled up into the warmth of your body, under the blankets, like something soft in a shell. Your arms were firm as rock around me. I felt your lips on my hair, brushing against it. Your warm breath on the tips of my ears. I didn’t move away. I thought carefully about the words I wanted to say.
“If we were back in London,” I began, “before any of this, knowing me as you do now … would you still steal me?”
You were silent a long time, your body stiff around me. “Yes,” you whispered. You brushed my hair behind my ears. “I can never let you go.”
You wrapped the blankets around me tighter. I felt your warm, dry hands around my shoulders, your fingers grasping at my skin. After some time, you leaned back into the sand, bringing me with you. I didn’t have the energy to fight you anymore. And you were warm, so warm. You leaned into the sand, and I stayed with my head against you, my cheekbone against your chest. I felt your body relax and soften. I pressed myself into the sand, too. There was still heat in it, even then. You cradled me with one arm and stroked my hair with the other. And you talked. You whispered stories about how the desert was created, sung up by the spirits of the land. You told me how everything was twined together, the whole world around me balancing on a moth’s wing. I shut my eyes and let your voice lull me. Its rhythms were like a stream flowing. I felt your lips again, fluttering against my forehead. They were soft, not dry. And your arms pulled me down toward you, down deep into the earth.
And we slept, like that.
A pale pink awoke me. Dawn. I felt the lack of your heat beside me before I opened my eyes and found you gone. I missed it. I stretched my hand out along the sand: The grains where you’d been sleeping were still faintly warm. Perhaps you hadn’t been gone long and the sand was still storing your heat. The shape of you was indented into it. I traced my fingers down the hollow where your head had been, then your broad shoulders, your back and legs, the sand firm and compacted from the weight of your body. Traces of paint had rubbed off, lingering on some of the grains.
I pulled the blankets around me, shutting out that cool freshness of morning. But already the light was intrusive. My eyelids glowed orange when I closed them. I sat up. Sand was all over me. A wind must have been blowing in the night. Funny, I hadn’t even felt it. I shook out my clothes. There was a line of stones, leading out to a smoother section of sand a few feet away. I followed them.
There were words there, finger-written in the sand. I stood at the bottom and read.
Gone to catch a snake. See you lata. Ty x
I knelt down beside the message and traced my fingers through the x. I rubbed it out, then drew it again. You didn’t seem like the kind of guy to write an x in the sand, a kiss. My stomach twisted, though for the first time it wasn’t from fear.
I stood, needing to move. I looked across to the house, but I didn’t want to go in there. Not yet. What I really wanted was to have your hard, hot arms around me again. I craved your warmth. I hugged myself, rubbing my fingers up and down. I guess people are like insects sometimes, drawn to heat. A kind of infrared longing. My eyes roamed across the land, looking for the heat of a human. One particular human.
I blinked, rubbed my eyes. I was being stupid. But I couldn’t figure it out. I did, and yet I didn’t, wa
nt to be near you. It didn’t make sense. Without stopping to analyze it, I started walking toward the Separates.
I paused by the camel. She was sitting and sleepy. I reached my hand to her forehead and rubbed between her eyes. Her eyelashes blinked against my arm. I sat beside her, nuzzling into her warm dusty fur, and watched the pink and gray of the sunrise. The morning was perfect, still. I heard shrieks from a flock of birds as they arrived at the Separates for their morning bath. I took my boots off and dipped my toes into the sand. I rubbed them against the grains, scratching them. I tried being still for a moment, tried relaxing into the camel and the morning. But I wanted to find you.
I walked barefoot. I tiptoed carefully around the prickly plants and played stepping-stones with the rocks as I made my way around the Separates. Then I saw fresh prints in the sand. Yours. I put my foot inside one of them, the print of your toes and heel surrounding mine entirely.
I brushed my fingers against the rock as I walked slowly around the outcrop. I touched the wavy streaks embedded in the surface, left by ancient streams. A black bird cawed at me from high in a tree, a grating, warning call in that stillness. Perhaps he was warning his flock about me, a clumsy human stumbling across his territory.
I kept going. There was a jagged bit of rock coming up, sticking out from the base of a boulder. I couldn’t see past it. But I could see a pathway around it, a collection of large, smooth rocks to step across. I rested my arm against the boulder for balance, and started to step from rock to rock. The cool stone felt good beneath my feet.
When I had almost climbed around the jagged part, I heard movement on the other side. A grunt or two. Then, silence. It could only be you. I paused, grasping the boulder, my breathing suddenly quicker. Should I step around and show myself? Or just wait there, listening? My ears strained for sounds of you. I heard a faint rustling of leaves. A muffled swear word. Then, silence again. I hugged the boulder.