“It’s Gemma,” I said. “Wake up.”
I felt the dampness of your tears on my stomach, your fingers grabbing tight around my waist, not wanting to let me go. I let you stay like that until your crying stopped altogether.
“I don’t know where I am,” you whispered.
“You’re here,” I said. “In the desert. There’s no one else around.”
You wiped your eyes against my T-shirt, then looked up at me. You saw me that time; you knew who I was. Your whole face relaxed as you focused.
“Gemma,” you said.
I nodded.
“Thank you.”
“You were dreaming; I just woke you up.”
“Thank you.”
After a while you let go. You sat cross-legged on the bed and stared down at the floor. You were twisting your thumbs over each other, embarrassed, I think.
“What were you dreaming about?” I asked.
You shook your head, dismissing me. I stayed there, waiting. The wood creaked around us, and the wind battered the metal roof. You glanced toward the window as if checking it was still there.
“The orphanage,” you said quietly. “The journey in the van, leaving the land.” You glanced out at the night sky and the stars. I looked out at them, too. I thought I could maybe make out the straight line of the horizon, separating the black land from the graying sky. You sighed, running a hand over your face. “You probably think I’m a loony now, right?”
I looked down at you, huddled into yourself. “We all have dreams.”
Your big eyes were shining in the darkness like a nocturnal creature, a creature that needed to be held. “What are yours about?” you whispered.
“Home, mostly.”
“London?” You thought about the word, working out what it meant to you. “How can you dream about that place?” you said. Again, your eyes went back to the window. “How do you love it so much?”
“People love what they’re used to, I guess.”
“No.” You shook your head. “People should love what needs loving. That way they can save it.” You were quiet for a long time then, staring out of your window, just thinking. I walked softly to the door.
Your bedroom was empty when I got up. I fed the chickens. On the way back, the camel lumbered up to me. I scratched her ears, pulling at the fine hairs inside them in the way you had shown me she liked. She rested her nose on my arm.
“He’ll keep you, you know,” I murmured to her. “When I go, in a few months’ time, he won’t let you go, too.” I stroked the fur on her cheek, soft as a teddy bear’s. She chewed in a circle, her rubber lips brushing the back of my hand. “How come you’re so gentle?” I said. “You should be wild, worse than him.” I touched her long, thick eyelashes with my fingertips. She blinked.
I took a couple of steps away from her, but she came with me, following behind. I walked around in a circle, the gentle thud of her hooves staying with me. I stopped and turned to her, wanting to try something.
“Whoosh down,” I said.
I lifted my arm the way you did, and, after a bit of a moan, she tipped forward, her legs buckling underneath her. As her body hit the ground, she sent up a puff of dust.
“Good girl,” I said.
I knelt down to her. Like that we were about the same height; her nose was huge and her teeth rotten. Her sharp, slightly stale smell was strong in my nostrils. She turned her head toward the outbuildings, closing her eyes against the sun. I shifted closer to her and put my arm over her wide, muscled shoulder. She rested her neck against my side. I could slip onto her back like this, roll onto her hump, and ride her. We could gallop off toward the sun.
I rested my head against her fur, and shut my eyes, too. Balls of fire danced behind my eyelids. Right then, for that moment, it was enough just to sit there.
You spent the entire day in your painting shed. It was midafternoon before I plucked up the courage to go and see you. You’d been so different the night before, almost vulnerable…. I wanted to see how you would react to me today. The door of the shed was open a little. I pushed it.
It was bright in that room, and hot; it took me a moment to adjust. The curtains that had been hanging from the window were torn down and bundled in a pile underneath. Sunlight was streaming in, and I saw that the previously fading walls had been repainted with vividly colored dots and swirls; streaks of reds and blacks and browns dashed across them. Leaves, sand, and branches were stuck to some of these colors, giving the walls a texture. If I stepped back and looked at it all as a whole, I could see patterns. A wave of yellow dots stretched across the floor like a sand dune, and circles of blue on the far wall made pools of water. The room looked wild, and reminded me of a story Mum had read, a very long time ago, where a kid’s bedroom had transformed into a wilderness.
You were in the middle of it all, standing on top of a wooden stool, body thrust backward, painting the ceiling. You were wearing only a thin pair of shorts, the material torn and curling over your thighs. Your skin was almost the same color as the earthy brown paint on the wall behind you. You were painting the area above your head with thousands of tiny orange dots. After a while, you took another paintbrush from behind your ear and filled the space between the dots with swirls of white. Only when your paint ran out did you stop.
You turned. Your chest was glistening with sweat, smudges of earth-color all over it. I checked your face, looking to see if any of the previous night’s anguish had stayed with you. But you seemed relaxed and happy. You stepped down from the stool and came toward me.
“Like my painting?” you said.
“What is it?”
“Everything around us. The land.” You grinned. “It’s not finished yet. Every bit of wall will be part of it; me, too.”
“Why?”
“I want to capture this, all this beauty, I want to connect … I want you to see everything the way it is before … while you’re here …”
Your eyes were sparkling. I turned, taking in all the colors and swirls and textures around me. My eyes lingered on a bundle of bright white dots on a black background in one corner of the ceiling. They almost looked like stars, tiny balls of light glinting. Is that what you’d intended? You took another step toward me and I could see grains of sand sticking to your shoulders and down half your chest. I reached forward to touch them. Your skin was as rough and as warm as the dirt outside.
“Doesn’t that itch?”
“It’s only the base coat,” you said. “When it’s fully dry, I can put on the patterns.”
“What patterns?”
You smiled at my confusion. You reached up and pressed my hand against your chest, keeping it there. “Patterns of the land.” You nodded toward the rest of the room. “Just wait until the sun sets,” you said. “This whole room will come alive then.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll see.”
My hand, beneath yours, felt the deep thud of your heartbeat. I quickly slipped my fingers away. You moved your hand from your chest, too, and ran it through your hair. A waterfall of sand fell to the floor.
“Sandstorm,” you said. You shook your head, making more come down, making the sand fly.
I followed you to the door, my head spinning a little from what I’d seen. You placed my hand against your back. Your skin was warm and damp, your spine stretching out underneath like roots.
“I can paint the front of me, but I need something to reach my back,” you said.
I took my hand away quickly. “I don’t want to paint you.”
“You don’t have to.” You turned to face me. “There are leaves near the pool in the Separates, long leaves. Will you get one for me? While you’re there, grab me a clump of moss, too.”
You stepped back into the building, leaving me in the doorway. I balanced on the crate beside the door, rocking it back and forth.
“Come back when the sun starts to set,” you called out to me. “I’ll be ready then.”
You shut the door. I wandered toward the Separates, pretending to myself that I wasn’t really doing what you wanted. I walked slowly, stopping to look at things, pretending the little purple flower I noticed in the sand was the real reason behind my walk. I bashed through the longer grasses with a stick, as I’d seen you do, checking for snakes.
At the pool, I bent under the eucalyptus arm and crawled along the side of the water. I dipped my fingers in, enjoying the sudden cold on my skin. I reached the overhanging rock at the back, the thin dark slit where the moss was. Things rustled around me, but I didn’t move away. I was strangely calm, just enjoying the afternoon laziness of that place. The rock was cool and shaded and I sat still, my bare calves resting against the stone. After a while I felt for the moss, reaching farther into the darkness of the rock and tearing off a clump. I waited as a tiny spider stepped in front of my fingers.
Crawling back around the pool, I saw the leaves you meant, large and juicy-looking. I tore one away from its stem and a milky blood oozed out. I dabbed at it, trying to make it stop.
Heading back, I paused at the chickens. Dick was at the far end of his cage, but when I started talking to him, he strutted up to me. He stuck his beak through the wires and tore a triangle from the leaf I’d just collected.
“Ty won’t like that,” I chided.
But Dick only puffed his feathers up proudly and spat out the bits of leaf. I sat next to his cage, listening to the disapproving murmurs of the hens. Soon a group of frogs started to jangle and rusty-croak, building up into a frenzied chorus.
Then the sun started to dip. It was time. I meandered my way back to your painting shed.
I pushed open the door. The orange light from the setting sun shone through the window, lingering on the walls you had painted. The light picked out the sand grains, making them glitter and wink. All around me was color and sparkle, almost too much to take in. You’d worked quickly, transforming the space. You stood in the middle of it all, your painted body reflecting the light also. Your back was the only part of you not painted. There was a strong herbal smell, like the smell your roll-ups gave out. It was heavy and intoxicating.
You came over to me, reaching for the plants. You were naked. But you were so covered with paint and sand, flowers and leaves, that I didn’t notice right away. The paint and textures covered you like clothes. Your face was a light red color with orange and yellow dots and swirls all over it. Your lips were dark brown. A gray, granite texture covered your legs. Your penis was painted dark amid a section of purples and greens and gray sprigs of leaves. I stepped away from you quickly, looking down at your feet. They were an ocher-brown, with white, veinlike swirls. I stepped back to the door, unsure whether to stay. You looked crazy like that, but beautiful, too.
“This is what I want to show you,” you explained. “The beauty of this land. You need to see how you’re a part of it.” Your eyes were shining blue amid the orange. They seemed out of place, too, much like the sea.
You knelt on the floor next to a dish of red petals. You crushed them, adding water to make paint. You dipped the clump of moss in, then reached behind and sponged it on your back, putting red moss prints everywhere you could reach. Some of the paint ran, bleeding in long, thin rivers toward the floor.
I glanced around the room. There was no rope to tie me up, no weapons. The open door was behind me. I could leave, easily. But for some reason I didn’t want to.
“Light’s going fast,” you said.
You grabbed the leaf, soaking its thick stem in a crumbly black substance, coating it thoroughly. You reached back and tried to press that to your skin, too. You sighed when you couldn’t get it where you wanted, and held the stem out to me.
“Paint the patterns on me?” you asked. “With this?”
“I don’t want to.” I pushed your hand back.
“But the light is fading. I want to do this before the sun sets; then you can see what it all looks like.” Your voice was impatient, firm. You took my hand. You cradled it in the dry warmth of your own, spreading the smudged color from your hands onto mine. The reds and blacks stained my fingers and made a bruise shape on my knuckles.
“Please,” you said quietly. “Just do this for me. You know I’ll take you back. I’ve promised.”
Your eyes glinted with the light, your fingers gripping mine tighter. I extracted my hand and took the stem. I knelt behind your back and dipped the stem into the black paste.
“What should I draw?”
“Anything. Whatever you’re thinking about this place.”
My hand was shaking a little, and a small drop of paint fell off the stem and onto my knee. The end of the stem was sharp and jagged. I placed it against your skin, dug in, and made a dot. You flinched a little. A beam of sunlight streamed through the window, falling directly onto your back. I squinted, my eyesight blotchy.
“I can’t see.”
“Do it blind, then.”
I dipped the stem into the black again. I drew a long, straight line across your shoulder blades, the stem scratching your skin as I tried to make the color stay there. I drew a mess of spikes: spinifex. Then I drew a person, with a stick-figure body and an uneven circle for a head. I drew eyes in the face and colored them in. On top I drew flamelike hair. Then I put a small dark heart in the middle of the body. You reached around and touched the edge of my knee.
“You finished?”
“Almost.”
I painted a bird, flying across your shoulder blade. Then I drew a black sun at the base of your neck, shining over everything. You turned to face me, our knees touching, your face less than a foot away.
“Do you want some?” You dipped your finger into a puddle of bloodred clay, then spread a line onto my forehead. “I could paint you.” You touched my cheek, smudging the clay there, too. “Red ocher,” you whispered. “It intensifies everything.”
You took the leaf from my hand and moved it toward my neck, but I coiled away.
“No,” I said.
You shrugged, your eyes sad. Then you grabbed my hand, jolting me to my feet. I only resisted a little. We walked to the center of the room.
“Now we wait,” you said.
“For what?”
“The sun.”
You pulled me down onto a bed of sand and leaves, right in the middle of all the paint and color. The sun was shining through the window so brightly it was difficult to keep my eyes even half-open against it. And the smell was stronger there, too: leafy and herbal, earthy and fresh.
“Face this way,” you said.
You turned to the wall at the back, and I did the same. With the sun behind us, I could see the way its rays picked out the lighter swirls and dots in the painting, making them look three-dimensional. You reached for a pile of dried leaves and crushed them in your hand, then picked out rolling papers from underneath a rock. You took a little ash from another pile and mixed it with the leaves, then sprinkled this into one of the papers. You sealed it tightly, your tongue darting quickly over it. When you lit up, there was that smell again, that heavy, grassy smell of burning desert leaves: the smell that clung to everything in the painting shed that day. You took a long, deep drag, then passed the roll-up to me.
It was like a tiny burning tree, burning up between my fingers. I rolled it there, watching the glowing red end. For once I tried it; I don’t know why. I was more relaxed that day, maybe, more hopeful that you’d let me go. The burning leaves weren’t as harsh as regular tobacco, but they weren’t as grassy as weed. A subtle, sour herby taste soon filled my mouth and I felt myself breathe out gently, my shoulders easing down a little.
You leaned back onto your elbows. As the sun set farther, the colors became more vivid. A red washed over everything, brightening the darker sections in the painting. Shafts of light lit up the floor, illuminating the millions of painted dots and flower petals there. Reds and oranges and pinks intensified all around us, until it felt like we were sitting in the middle of a burning pit of fire …
or in the middle of the sunset itself.
“It feels like we are in the center of the earth, doesn’t it?” you whispered. “We’re right there among the embers.”
I could feel the heat against my back, sticking my T-shirt to my spine. I blinked to stop the colors from blurring. Black lines and shapes danced before my eyes like the edges of flames. Then the sun moved farther down. Its light reached toward your painted body, turning you golden … making you shine. The sand grains on your arms glistened. I could feel the sun on my skin, too, turning it a peachy orange, making it soft. The whole room bathed in light.
You watched me, your blue eyes floating in the gold. I noticed the black markings on your left cheek, tiny animal tracks making their way toward your hair, walking right over your scar. You reached out and touched the skin on my arm, your sandy fingers brushing against me. It was where the sun was hitting me, where my skin was warmest. You pressed the tips of your fingers against it.
“The light’s coming from within you, too,” you said. “You’re glowing.”
I turned my head and tried to take in all of the painting at once. My head was reeling a little; from the colors and the light, or your cigarette, I don’t know. That room was so different from all the other paintings I’d seen with Mum, so much more real somehow. And yes, I admit it; it was beautiful. Wildly beautiful. Your fingers traced patterns on my arm: circles and dots. The touch of them didn’t scare me anymore.
Then, so quickly, the sun dipped down beneath the window and the colors disappeared. You passed the roll-up to me again as shadows crept over the walls. We sat there a little while longer, until the colors faded altogether. I blinked, passed the roll-up back. The room had turned murky and it was getting harder to see the objects on the floor. I stood up and stumbled toward the door.
“Here, I’ll show you,” you said.
You took my arm. You walked confidently, eyes nocturnal. When we reached the doorway, I felt the coolness of the evening pinching at me already. I wrapped my arms around myself and you went back inside for your clothes. You handed me the holey woolen sweater you’d been wearing that morning.