Page 90

February 24th

You stare at me as you take sips of water.

‘Do you want food?’ I say.

You blink. Has your tongue dried up? You have turned into the land, metamorphosing into rock. Like the Separates, you seem unreal, but here.

I sit all day, watching you sleep, watching you wake and stare at me, watching you sleep again. It wouldn’t take much to smother you, a pillow over your face as you slept: gone. But I don’t feel the raging urge to hurt you that I felt before.

I find some old clothes of mine in the drawers of the room and soak them with water. As it gets darker, I tentatively press them onto your burning skin. When it gets too dark to see properly, I return to the kitchen, darting my hand into the space in the pantry where I’d seen the candles. I fumble about until I touch the sticks of wax, then a box of matches, still full, amazingly. As I pull them out, I imagine the damage that a little box like this could do out here in this tinder land.

I place the lit candles on the bedside table while you sleep. Every sound I couldn’t hear, or didn’t notice in the daylight, is amplified now, instantly terrifying. Wind spits sand at the roof, the walls creak, there is rustling in the corners. I imagine the snake in the hallway coming back to life. How many of the creatures sharing this room could kill me? Could you, still?

I don’t sleep as I sit beside you. I’m guarding against the creatures and keeping an eye on the candles, and I am willing you not to die. I change the wet clothes across your body, and you moan like the wind around the house. I am glad to hear your voice. I drip water on your lips and watch you lick the drops away. Soon your breath is even, your sleep deeper. But if your breath stopped, what then? What sort of person would I be to have killed you like this?

When I have cooled you as much as I can, I lean my head and arms on the mattress carefully, in the same hesitant way I approach Sal. Your breath falters, but you don’t shift away. Areyou scared of me now? You’ve realised I can do anything at all to you. I think I might be scared of me.

Your smell is fiercer this close, burnt and damp at the same time, like musty socks too close to a fire. If I were strong enough, I’d carry you to the pool in the Separates and lower you into the water.

‘Imagine the relief of that, Ty.’

It’s strange to hear my voice in the darkness. But as the wood expands and the creaks in the walls get louder, I keep talking. Maybe you’ll feel comforted hearing my voice, not just the den wailing; maybe I’ll feel comforted.

‘I swam in the pool,’ I say. ‘It was almost as clear as last time. It’d be good for you, too. I heard honeyeaters calling from the trees.’

What I don’t tell you about is the cave at the bottom of the pool, under the rock ledge—the source of the spring. If you do die tonight, or tomorrow, that’s where I will put your body. I will find a way to drag you to the Separates, fill your pockets with stones, then slide you under the lip of the rock, secure you with branches, safe and cool and hidden.

I turn over, resting the back of my head against the mattress, staring at the metal ridges of the ceiling. Finally, I tell you about my life in London, about the letters I wrote to you in the beginning.

‘If I had sent them,’ I say, ‘would you still have forgotten me as easily as you did?’

Your breathing is feather-light; you could be sleeping or awake and listening. It doesn’t matter if you hear my words or not. The act of speaking them into this space—this house we used to share—is enough. I’ll give the words somewhere to rest.So I bring you right inside my world in London: I tell you about my flat and my plants. I even tell you about Nick. Rhiannon might be proud.

‘Maybe it’s all like a kidnap,’ I say. ‘Being taken, having to trust, giving away freedom. Even the good relationships, if there are any…It’s all a negotiation. What you can bear, or not.’

Maybe Nick wanted to own a part of me too. Maybe Mum still does. Perhaps it’s only ever about power, who holds it, who feels comfortable letting it go and when. It’s a balance: how much you give, and how much you take. How much you are happy for someone else to have. I watch your face, the tiny movements around your eyes and lips. Something inside me relaxes.

‘I saw the fox when I returned,’ I say. ‘She’d been waiting, alive after all. She looks like my Sal.’

I tell you about Sal, about how beautiful she is, how wild, and how she comes to me sometimes. How I fed her as a cub, and how she has the biggest, most blazing eyes of all the foxes.

‘Like burning amber,’ I say. ‘She’s wise, that fox—those eyes reveal her wisdom. She’s found a way to live between two worlds: the wild world and the world of the city.’

I realise how much I miss her, as I talk her into being, right here in the space between you and me in the bed. I curl her up between us.