The Rain Heron Read online

  I found them when I first came here, said Alec. But not like this.

  He had brought me to these graves after we left the aviary. It was a short walk, and the fog had mostly lifted.

  After a breath, he continued.

  When I arrived they weren’t in this spot. There had been a blizzard. Unexpected, out of season. They weren’t prepared. I experienced a mild version of it on my drive up, and by the time I got here most of the snow had melted, but still—it was the middle of summer. It didn’t make sense.

  I found them in their quarters, sitting next to an empty gas heater. Two of their windows had been broken—tree limbs, I suppose. Or wind. Blizzard wind. They were huddled against each other, their backs to a wall. I had to use a hammer to peel a frozen blanket away from their bodies. They were holding hands. They weren’t a couple, not that I knew of—just scientists working alongside each other. But the cold had fused the skin of their palms and fingers together. I couldn’t prise them apart, although I suppose I didn’t try very hard. When the rest of the snow melted and the soil thawed I buried them here. I sent a report, never heard anything back. That was six months ago.

  He said this in a rush, as if he’d been waiting to get it out all at once. It was the first time I’d seen him do anything in a hurry. When he was done he kicked some gravel from the grass onto the plot.

  What were they doing up here?

  He fiddled with the hem of his jacket.

  I have no idea. Something with animals, I suppose. This is a wildlife sanctuary, or it was. Although there were no animals when I got here, not even any corpses of ones killed by the blizzard. They might have been preparing the place for new arrivals. Or maybe they were researching the climate or weather patterns. That’s what makes the most sense to me, and it’s what I want to believe. If they were up here trying to figure out why the seasons have become so unpredictable, then their deaths meant something. But now…

  He looked at me, then back at the aviary.

  I have to assume they were waiting for the heron. For you.

  The wind had picked up, carrying almost all of the fog away, revealing the muted colours of the trees. I met his eyes.

  And you. Why are you here?

  He turned and began walking back towards the compound. I went with him. I thought he wasn’t going to answer me, but then more words rushed out of him.

  I was a hopeless soldier, he said. Absolutely terrible. I hesitated all the time; I hated firing guns; I couldn’t remember formations or procedures. The simplest orders confused me. I was involved in two deployments before my captain demanded I be transferred. They tried to move me to another squad, but none of the others wanted me. I served on one more mission and performed badly, even worse than on my first two, and afterwards I was ordered back to barracks. I was bumped around desk jobs, doing administration, typing up memos, that sort of thing, although that didn’t come naturally to me either. I kept misspelling orders, putting the wrong officers’ names on briefings. Eventually I was told that I was no longer a private—I was a research assistant. I was given a car, and told to report to my new commanding officers at this sanctuary. I didn’t know I was coming here to bury them.

  We were treading past an enclosure filled with empty ponds and black dirt. I usually hated conversations, had hated them even more since losing an eye. But for the first time since my wounding I was not in pain. I was not cold or hot, not hungry or angry. Just hollow—riddled out, scraped raw.

  Why did you stay?

  After I reported the deaths of Gladstone and Ramiro, I waited for a message on the radio. It’s the only thing that works up here. What will they do with me now? I remember thinking. Where will they send me next? I waited and waited. No response came, so I started walking the old trails that cut across the plateau. Late each afternoon I came back to the sanctuary, checked the messages, and would always find nothing. I started taking longer walks. I explored the forest; I crossed the grasslands; I slept under the clearest, cleanest skies I’ve ever seen. Have you ever seen as many stars as you do up here? They’re not easy to leave.

  The longer I went without receiving any orders, the more I didn’t want to return. What would I do down there? I was a terrible soldier. I didn’t even want to be one; I never had. I’d only signed up because I was furious with my mother. I realised I could stay up here, and as long as they didn’t contact me, I wasn’t disobeying any orders. It wasn’t desertion; I couldn’t be punished for it. There’s enough dried food here to last years. I could catch trout in the streams; I could maybe snare a rabbit or two. The coup would go on, or it wouldn’t. The world didn’t need me, and up here I needed only the world. Not the people in it.

  My response came unbidden, instinctively.

  You talk about her a lot.

  Who?

  Your mother.

  What?

  Lines appeared in his face.

  I don’t think I do. And if I do, it’s an accident. I haven’t spoken to anyone in months.

  He stopped walking. We were nearing the middle of the compound.

  What about you? Why did you stay?

  I just got here.

  But surely you have other places to be. Your wound is going to heal and you’ve completed your mission, as far as I can tell. There must be things they want you to do. Places they want you to be.

  How would you know?

  I wouldn’t. But I know who you are.

  He started walking away, fast, the sort of walk that isn’t designed to be followed.

  I may be a bad soldier, he called over his shoulder, his voice cut by the wind. But I’m not a blind one. Not even half-blind.

  I stood still, watching him march, waiting to feel furious. But I felt no anger. I just wondered what it meant, him knowing who I was, and what he thought of me.

  And besides, he yelled again, before he marched his voice out of range. What else is worth talking about, if not our mothers?

  55

  HE WAS RIGHT, of course. I had no real reason to stay. But that night, as I lay in my starchy sheets, I didn’t think about that. The other events of that day revolved in my mind. I couldn’t settle or concentrate on one thing. The deserted buildings. The enclosures devoid of life. Alec. The melting, shifting, misting creature I’d brought to his huge cage, and his sorrow that I’d brought it to him. The frozen scientists who had probably been waiting for it. Alec’s rush of words, his loneliness, his mother. His flash of emotion when I pointed out his repetition of her. My thoughts circled on his story, and ran it alongside memories of my own. His failure in the military; my awful success. I traced my khaki-clad accomplishments backwards, back and back, until I was there on my cold coast, shaking and numb, holding the northerner’s pistol. Everything swirled, and my head ached, until I closed my eye, and the mountain woman chased me into sleep.

  56

  THE NEXT MORNING I found him at the aviary again. He was sitting on the same seat. When I entered the building I saw a flash in the corner of my eye, through the glass. I looked into the enclosure just in time to see the bird disappear into the pool of water. I sat down, again keeping a spare seat between us.

  I supposed he would start talking again. About himself, the bird, his mother, how he’d recognised me. I waited for his words to tumble out, not knowing how I’d respond, if I’d respond at all. But he just sat, sipping at a steaming thermos, staring through the glass. Waves had begun dancing on the surface of the water—small sets that rose on the far side, ran and built across the pool, to fall in small heaves on the concrete shore closest to us. I realised that I wanted him to speak; I wanted to hear his voice again, whatever he spoke about. But even after half an hour, he said nothing. It was as if all the words he’d spilled out the day before had exhausted him, and he needed to replenish his reserves. He offered me the thermos, which sent warmth deep into the flesh of my fingers and palm as I gripped it, sitting still, watching the little waves rise and die.

  57

  IN THE DAYS th
at followed I expected to wake up each morning brimming with purpose and vigour, with a plan to leave, to take his car, to return to the only thing I was good at. But morning after morning, it didn’t happen. I would wake feeling hollowed and light. The thought of leaving, even making a report, brought great thumps of nausea. It took me a while to realise that, along with my eye, I’d lost a fixed point of who I was, and what it was about me that mattered.

  It was around this time that I also realised that I wanted to go on living.

  Instead of the things I would have done had I been my earlier self, I took to joining Alec on his walks. After breakfast, the highland sun still low, I’d follow him on one of the many paths that cut through the gums. Over dirt and duckboards we’d tread, until we reached the edge of the cider-gum forest and were spat out onto the rocky, mossy plains of the plateau. From there Alec would pick out less obvious routes amid the rocks and creeks and tarns, signalled only by carefully piled cairns. We’d walk for hours, sustained by the nuts he kept in a small pack, the forest growing smaller in the distance behind us. There was so much more water out there than I had expected. The ground was full of it, in puddles, bright snowdrifts, ever-soaked mud. It was hard to find dry places to put my feet, but I had my leather boots, so the squelch of each step did not reach my skin.

  Amid all this water were tussocks, heather, moss, a palette of muted greys and greens that revealed more texture and colour each time I ventured out into it. Occasionally highland flowers sprang up, white or purple-petalled, thin-stemmed. Streams joined the soggy landscape together, some brown with tannin, others steely, others the grey of rain and rock. They fed into small lakes, which we skirted, circled, ate beside. The first time we sat down for lunch I looked out over the lake we’d found—small, still, almost a pond—and watched the tiny, agitated birds that flitted from rock to sedge to stem. They were the only creatures I saw during my whole time up there. Alec told me he’d seen small bushy-cheeked mice, and something that had looked like a ferret or quoll, but all I saw were those miniature birds that seemed too fast for this world.

  We talked, more and more with each expedition. Not about ourselves, or our circumstances, or the strangeness and awfulness of what had brought us together. Instead we edged around subjects that people spoke about before the coup—books, films, foreign places—as well as what we knew about the land we were travelling through, which only extended as far as what we were seeing. I came to realise that Alec actually knew very little about the plateau, only marginally more than I did, but his mesmerisation had led him to cross almost every inch of it. It was an obsession that felt, at times, contagious.

  We didn’t always walk out onto that wet, ragged plain. Sometimes we jumped into his vehicle—a dual-cab utility with a large tray—and travelled to climb the bare peaks that sprang from the plateau, or to the high crags of the range that marked the edge of the highlands. These climbs weren’t technically challenging, or even all that dangerous, but we had to help each other over the higher ledges. On these ascents I was keenly aware of my adjusted sight, and the deficiencies in my balance. At times I felt uncontrollably vulnerable, and I only managed to make it up each peak with Alec’s help. He had a soft grip, and he wasn’t notably strong, but he was there, each time I wobbled or gasped or felt my knees tip and my head lurch. At the top we would pause on these hard ceilings of the world, looking out over the high plain that stretched below us, reaching in all directions to the cloud-heavy horizon, before finding our way back to the car, and then to the shelter of the sanctuary.

  Some days—rainy days, cold days, days of snow or darkness—we didn’t walk at all. On mornings like that I lay in bed, or braved the weather to tidy the area around the grave of Gladstone and Ramiro. I had no reason to do it, but on our walks, and in the hours of night, I often thought about them, and saw them in the way Alec had described them, dying in each other’s grip, their palms glued together. I’d think of them underground, composting into each other, and keeping their plot clean somehow became an important thing to do.

  But that took only minutes. We spent most of our time in the inclement weather in the aviary, watching the bird morph and preen, disappear and reappear. On one of these viewings, perhaps a week after I’d arrived, Alec’s words finally came back to him.

  I hit her.

  I looked at him, twisting my neck in the way I now had to.

  My mother, he said. I hit her.

  He was leaning forward, staring at the floor.

  Why?

  He took a breath.

  Remember how I told you I liked animals?

  He gestured at the aviary.

  I always preferred them to people. I struggled to make friends. The crabs, the lizards, any little bird I could find—I found infinite pockets of time to spend with them. We were similar in that way. Great with animals, terrible with humans. So when the troubles started, when the seasons broke, when the jobs disappeared and blame began being thrown in every direction, my mother ignored it all, and told me to, as well. There’s nothing we can do that’ll change things, she would say. But I didn’t like that. Even though I was no good with people, I wanted to help. She wouldn’t listen to me. I was a petulant, shouting teenager. I don’t really blame her.

  I was mad at her, all of the time. The country was falling to pieces—at least, our part of the country was. My school had been closed for six months. People were breaking into shops, robbing pensioners. I was so furious, but my fury had no direction, and she wasn’t doing anything about it. She wasn’t doing anything at all. I had no father, no brothers or sisters, no other family. And my mother just kept on keeping to herself. Closing the curtains, drinking cheap wine. I would yell at her, and she’d either ignore me or tell me I didn’t understand, that there was nothing we could do, that we were best off keeping our heads down and letting people be people. I’d shout, she’d roll her eyes, and outside someone would be beaten and windows would be smashed.

  One afternoon I was walking home from a rally, one of the rare peaceful ones. I passed a cove I knew well. I’d swum and played there my whole life. To me it was a place synonymous with happiness and safety. Only this time, as I walked, I saw four men standing thigh deep in the water. They were carrying poles and splashing about. I stopped, trying to figure out what they were doing. I wish I hadn’t. A grey rubbery slope pushed out of the water, followed by a spray of mist. It was a dolphin. I saw how slowly it was swimming, how laboured its movements were, and that’s when I saw that the water around it held patches of pink. The men had it cornered in the cove, and the lengths of wood they carried were not poles but spears or pikes. I watched them stab the dolphin, watched the points pierce and hook into that grey mound of skin.

  They were hungry, I guess. Most people were. But even so—it was a dolphin. I ran into the water, began shouting. I don’t know what I said. They ignored me at first, but eventually two of them broke off their attack and came towards me. They ignored my insults. They didn’t even really look at me. They just shook their pikes, and when I didn’t back away they dropped them in the water—I remember watching them float—before one of them held my arms while the other hit me.

  When they were done they threw me on the shore. I passed out for a while. I remember hearing the sound of something heavy being dragged over the beach, and the beep of a truck reversing. When I came to fully, the men and the dolphin were gone. The only sign of them was a furrow in the sand, and the pink tinge of the tide.

  When I got home my mother ran to me, asking what had happened. I didn’t lie. I was sure I had done the right thing, but she became furious and began berating me. I was trying to help, I told her, but she said I hadn’t helped anyone, that I was lucky not to have been killed. I got angry. I started shouting. She called me a fool. The next thing I knew she was on the floor, holding her face as my hand hurt.

  I can’t remember the details of what happened next very clearly. It’s hard for me to think about, even now. But I know it felt like I was st
anding there for a long time, and she was lying there for a long time, holding her mouth. It can only have lasted a few seconds, but the memory feels like thirty minutes, an hour. Then what I’d done overwhelmed me, and I started crying and shouting, I don’t know what, and then I left. I ran outside. She said something to me, but I wasn’t paying her any attention as I ran for the door.

  I went back, later, far too late. By then I’d finished my training, and was about to be sent on my first mission—the first of my many failures. But she wasn’t there. Her car was gone; the house was empty. I haven’t seen her since. I still don’t know where she is, or if she’s alive. And no matter how hard I press my memory, I can’t recall what she said to me as I left her lying on the carpet with a mouthful of blood.

  Alec looked exhausted, as if the revelation had sapped a lot of energy.

  He must have kept this quiet for a long time, I thought. Or perhaps he’d never spoken about it at all, or even thought about it, if he could help it. I didn’t know what to say, if he wanted me to say anything. I could feel the space around us expanding to accommodate what I would say. And while I had not just one thing to say but many, too many to keep living with, my flesh seized up, and all I could get out was that my mother had died when I was a child.

  He said he was sorry that I’d gone through that, and I told him it was okay. We spent the rest of the afternoon watching the rain hit the aviary roof, until we became hungry enough to hurry through the falling water towards the kitchen.

  58

  I WENT TO him that night. His bed wasn’t hard to find. I just walked outside and found light glowing through a window of the smallest building in the sanctuary, set back against the cliffs. I stomped through the cold, opened the door, and found a room even sparser than my own. A concrete floor. A lamp. A sink. A table with a single chair. A narrow bed, holding Alec, a book cracked open in his fingers.