Angel Rock

Flynn laughed and they both felt a little better for a while.

‘Tom?’

‘Yes?’

‘Why’d they send a chim-pan-zee into space?’

‘They wanted to see if something alive would be all right up there. Before they sent people. It wouldn’t be so bad if a chimpanzee got killed.’

‘Why not?’

‘They don’t understand things.’ Tom shrugged. ‘They wouldn’t get as scared too.’

‘Oh. Tom?’

‘Yes?’

‘Will Dad be mad at us?’

‘I suppose so. Probably.’

They walked for half an hour and Flynn kept grumbling about his stomach. Tom was suddenly dizzy in the head and he had to sit down for a moment to let it pass. Flynn squatted down next to him. He looked worried and then he began to cry again. He was dirty and his shirt was ripped down the front. Tom could see that he’d had a hard night as well, maybe harder than his own.

‘Don’t be a bloody baby, Flynn,’ said Tom, very softly, with no venom in his voice.

It took a long while for his brother’s tears to stop this time and as Tom waited for him the sun cleared the trees and bathed them in warm yellow light.

‘We’ll get home, Flynn. I promise we will. Come on, have a drink.’

‘You promise?’

‘Yep. I promise. Come on.’

Tom walked his little brother down to the creek and watched as he hung his head over the water and drank, on hands and knees, as though he’d been doing it that way all his life.

They spent half the morning walking back along the creek the way they had come. Tom scanned the banks for any sign of where they had come down from the road but he saw nothing he remembered. The sun was soon scorching into them and their stomachs growled without pause. At about mid-morning they came to a fork in the creek. Tom sat down, despairing, but tried to keep his disappointment from Flynn. He was almost certain he hadn’t passed a branch like this the night before. Maybe they’d missed the road altogether. There was nothing for it but to choose a fork of the creek and follow it down to where it must surely join up with the river. He thought about it for a few minutes, chewing his lip, then chose the right fork.

‘Come on,’ he said to Flynn as he started off. ‘Nearly there.’

All that morning they walked by bluegums, tallowwoods and brushboxes and then, in the middle of the afternoon, the country became much drier and the timber on either side changed to bloodwoods, ironbarks and grey gums, and the ferns and dark-leaved palms gave way to kangaroo grass and blackboys. Cockatoos screeched in the trees as they passed. When Flynn grew tired Tom piggybacked him until his arms ached and his legs trembled. Sometimes when the valley they were in straightened out he saw undulating olive bush stretching ahead as far as he could see. At one point they were quite high and he could make out small clearings in the bush and far ahead a column of pale smoke rising vertically into the cloudless sky. His spirits lifted and he shouted and small birds whirred between trees, startled by the alien noise. They headed for the smoke but never seemed to get any closer to it all that afternoon and then a breeze came and tugged it to and fro until it was indistinguishable against the blue of the sky. Flynn was too tired to notice and only too happy to lie down once again to sleep as darkness fell.

In the morning cryptic-eyed geckoes watched Tom wake and stretch his stiff body. He crawled to the water’s edge and drank and then he woke Flynn and made him go to the creek and drink as well. Apart from a handful of bitter-tasting berries they’d had nothing to eat since the publican’s wife at Jack’s Mountain had made them a sandwich and they were both light-headed and weak from hunger.

‘It’s a new day and we can make it,’ Tom whispered to himself.

He was still crouched by the creek when something caught his eye. A fat bluetongue lizard was spread out on a nearby rock, soaking up the morning sun. Tom wiped his mouth, then crawled back a dozen feet and began to search around for a weapon. He scrabbled around in the undergrowth until he found a good-sized stick and then he crept forward, the lizard in his sights. Flynn curled up on the ground and watched him.

‘What you doing?’ he said.

‘Shhh!’

He snuck up on the bluetongue with all the stealth he could muster. When the lizard looked like moving he froze, but when he was barely two yards away it was still in the same spot. He hefted the stick in his hand and wondered how he should attack. The decision was made for him when the lizard curled its body round suddenly to face him, then stuck out its tongue and hissed. Tom leapt up, bringing the stick clubbing down around the lizard – it hissing like a maniac and evading the blows somehow. Tom squeezed his eyes shut and, almost in tears, intensified the barrage until, finally, he felt the stick strike something softer than the rock. He opened his eyes. The bluetongue’s head was bloodied and its legs were doing a slow crawl but getting it nowhere. He sat down, panting and sick to the stomach, and waited for it to die.

He felt Flynn at his shoulder but barely had the strength to turn and look at him, but then he felt his little body slump against him. He turned. Flynn’s face was pale and his eyes were right up in his head – he’d fainted dead away. Tom took hold of his arms and pulled him over to the shade of a tree. He brought water from the creek in his cupped hands and wet Flynn’s cheeks and lips with it and when he started to come round he went back down to the lizard and wondered how he was going to get to the meat without a knife. A butcherbird lit on a rock in the creek and eyed the bluetongue’s carcass.

‘Shoo!’ said Tom, and waved his arm.

He hunted around for a rock with a sharp edge and when he’d found one he turned the bluetongue over onto its back – the scrape of its little claws against the rock making his skin crawl – and eyed the soft, pale belly. The skin was much tougher than it looked and he had to push down hard with the rock, so hard that a burst of evil-looking shit came squirting out from between the lizard’s hind legs. He gagged, turned, retched up the water he’d drunk that morning, and kept retching until nothing more would come. He wiped his mouth and looked down at the rock in his hand. It was streaked with the same dark blood that flecked his hands and forearms and that made him feel even sicker. When he could he looked back at the lizard lying on the rock. Then, in a fit of rage and frustration, he kicked it into the creek. Breathing hard, he turned and walked up to Flynn and grabbed him by the arm.

‘Come on, we’re going.’

They stumbled along for the rest of the morning, Tom holding Flynn’s hand, sometimes nearly dragging him along until, finally, he stopped, curled up in a ball, and refused to go any further. Tom pulled the harmonica from his pocket and dangled it before him. Flynn reached out for it and began sobbing.

‘Give it!’

‘No, you’ll have to catch me first.’

Tom walked off, holding the harmonica out behind him. Flynn stood slowly and came after him. Tom kept him going for most of the day with the same trick. They passed through another deep valley filled with tall columns of flooded gum and turpentine, quiet as a cathedral. Then the deep valley was gone and they were in open woodland once more, the creek little more than a trickle beside them. The day was even hotter than the one previous and there was an overhum of worker bees in the trees around like the sound of heat itself. Every now and then black bird-like shapes fluttered in front of Tom’s eyes and he would have to sit, pull up his legs and put his head down until the shapes went away. He had no experience of death and associated it with sudden impacts and rending of flesh, not this gradual fading, ebbing feeling.

Mid-afternoon they stopped to rest again and as Tom lay in the shade he began to think he could smell wood smoke. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. Wood smoke. He propped himself up on one elbow and looked over at the timbered country on the far side of the creek. He convinced himself, slowly and surely, that he could see the smoke, lit up by broken sunlight, under some trees just downstream. Flynn was quiet beside him. He was falling behind more often now, wanting to sleep, and Tom was having to almost carry him to keep him going. He was starting to have fits of deep, phlegmy coughing as well.

Tom left him to sleep and started off towards the smoke. He stumbled down until the land levelled out and the trees changed again. The creek they had been following disappeared into a swampy complex of tussocky grass and sedges and deep, narrow sluices of water the colour of strong tea. The swamp now lay between Tom and the smoke, which he could easily see now, rising almost vertically into the sky, a small incline just obscuring its source. He set out across the narrowest part of the swamp towards a stretch of higher ground studded with paperbarks. He slipped and fell more than once when the solid footing afforded by the grass failed him and spun him off into muddy depressions laced with stagnant, silvery water. The mud sucked at his feet and as he struggled to free himself one more time his vision suddenly blurred and starred and he fainted.

When his eyes opened a little later the smell of the swamp was strong in his nostrils and he could hear Flynn wailing. He was near-hysterical by the time Tom managed to return to where he had left him. He took him by the shoulders and told him that he’d gone to look for the smoke and had fainted, that he hadn’t abandoned him at all, that he would never do that, but it was a good half-hour before Flynn had calmed down enough for them to continue.

They went down to the swamp with Flynn holding tightly onto Tom’s hand and then they skirted the mud and found that the creek continued its course on the swamp’s far side. The creek was running in the direction Tom had seen the smoke so they followed it down and down until it entered a steep-sided valley crammed with palms and ferns. The creek formed pools they had to climb round and both were soon scratched and faint from the exertion. They stopped and rested by a pool on grey rocks that jutted out of the earth like the half-buried skulls of giants. Across the water, on the far bank, water dragons warmed themselves in the sun. They sat and watched them and the water and Tom saw tiny flowers float past in the current. Somewhere a tree or bush must have been dropping flowers onto the surface. Some looked like drops of blood under the water as if a murder had taken place in a shady upstream bend. A certain peacefulness stole into Tom’s thinking as he sat there, watching the lizards, watching the flowers. It began to replace the gnawing fear and panic which had been close to overwhelming him all day. Although he was very tired and very hungry he welcomed this feeling and its enticement not to worry.

They walked no more that day and as the sun sank behind a saddle in the hills before them – the glow rising up as though a wondrous, golden city existed just beyond the next valley – pale yellow butterflies came and floated all around them, some dying in the water and floating away downstream, and then something – maybe a platypus – splashed and slipped under the surface of the pool, leaving nothing but long, gentle ripples to kiss each bank. It took a few minutes for the fact to dawn on Tom that the sun was setting in the west and they’d been walking all that day almost directly towards it – in the opposite direction to the one he’d intended. He was about to burst into tears when Flynn began to speak, very softly, beside him.

‘I’m hungry, Tom. I want to go home,’ he said. ‘I want to see Mum.’

‘You’ll see her.’

‘You promise?’

‘Already have.’

‘Swear?

‘Yeah.’

Tom licked his thumb, straightened Flynn’s fringe, then brushed dust off his cheeks.

‘You want to look good for Mum, don’t you?’

Flynn nodded.

‘We must be close to a house or something. A road. Tomorrow we’ll find it. Tomorrow we’ll get home. I swear we will.’