The Sky So Heavy

I could feel my throat tightening. I hadn’t talked much about this stuff, wasn’t the kind of thing you could really debrief with Lokey.

By the time we got into town the sky had changed. It was like the sun was being choked with thick orange dust. The sky glowed, throbbing with colour, but it was like it had swallowed up all the sunlight. Everything beneath the sky – the streets and buildings – was monotone. People were standing out on the street looking up, like they expected to see Godzilla crash through the streetscape. ‘Oh my God,’ Lucy whispered. We looked up, absorbed by it. It was beautiful – and wrong.

I wanted to tell him what I meant. I wanted to tell him what I knew about Dad, but that would mean destroying the picture he had of Dad. I couldn’t do it. I knew too much what it felt like to realise your father wasn’t the hero you thought he was. I knew it meant your childhood was over.

I learned that if I could keep my thoughts about Dad focused on the afternoon when I found the letter from Mum, I could almost stem my anxiety about his absence. My anger formed a nice protective cushion. If I let it slide to the other things – those days when he would carry me up the hill on his back or my memory of him slipping me fifty-dollar notes under the table during childhood games of Monopoly – worry would fester in my gut and even though I was so, so hungry, I couldn’t eat.

Mum had said not to go into the city, but I couldn’t imagine that everyone there had been left for as long as us without more rations. The thought that we might have been abandoned was beginning to follow me around and I couldn’t shake it. If Mum was still there she would have a plan. Leaving would mean letting go of the hope that Dad would come back for us.

I thought of that cop in our kitchen trying to get our food. We were different to him, weren’t we? I had Max to worry about. Starvos would have heaps of stuff in there. Heaps. More than enough.

‘What are we going to do, Fin?’

I have no answer.

‘What are we going to do?’

‘I don’t know.’

His voice hardens. ‘You said we would find her.’

‘I said we could try.’

‘You said it would be okay.’ He hurls the words at me. ‘You don’t know anything.’

‘Max . . .’

‘You’re useless! You don’t know anything!’ He shoves me against the wall, catching me by surprise.

‘Max, just calm down.’

‘You calm down!’ He pummels me with his fists. I try to take hold of his arms, manage to get him in a bear hug.

‘Max, calm down.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘We’ll break in and we can stay, wait till she comes back.’

‘What if she doesn’t?’

‘It’s all we can do.’

‘God doesn’t want this and . . . and I know that it won’t be forever . . . and that is why I am clinging on to God. That’s all it is – clinging. There’s no beauty in it, no eloquence. I’m not offering thoughtful articulate wise prayers every day. I’m screaming at Him to make it stop.’

We drift along the streets past houses and a crippled petrol station, shops and a school. The night sky is a void, no light, no stars. We are lost to the universe. We can’t see out. I wonder if anyone can see in.

I hadn’t imagined this calculated surrender. In all those hours spent wondering how the powers that be could do this to people, their own people, I never imagined her as being complicit in it all.

His tears start to spill. ‘I don’t want to die. I’m afraid to die. My parents willingly stayed in a place they knew would be destroyed. They waited for their deaths, they didn’t run away to save themselves. Look at me. I stole food from another man and here I am scrambling around in a car park,’ he motions to the twine in his hands, ‘trying to hold onto this world, this screwed-up world.’