Fusion Read online

  About the Book

  Forever entwined, Sea and Serene live isolated in the Australian alpine wilderness, together with Wren – the young man who helps care for them. Each has found peace in this wild, fierce landscape, and they live in harmony, largely self-sufficient.

  One day Wren discovers a woman on the road nearby, badly injured and unconscious. He brings her back to the cottage, and he and the twins nurse her back to health. But the arrival of this outsider shatters the dynamic within, with unforeseen consequences.

  Lyrical and poetic, Fusion is a unique and haunting modern-gothic tale that has at its heart questions of selfhood, dependency, difference and love. It is the compelling first novel by the award-winning author of Madness: A Memoir.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  One

  Two

  Three

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Kate Richards

  Imprint

  Read more at Penguin Books Australia

  ‘Your heartbeats were in my heart and your breath was upon my face and I knew you all.’

  Gibran Khalil Gibran

  ONE

  In the beginning we were a single pluripotent embryo that was so burst-full of genetic potential it considered becoming two embryos and then part way through this most delicate of processes, changed its mind. We were born in the deepest part of the night when the moon was dark and the clouds low, Venus and Mars were obscured and the stars stopped blinking for a whole heartbeat. Now, if we turn our heads in to the right or left as far as they’ll go – thirty degrees – and look to the right or to the left till our eyes ache, we can see each other’s cheek.

  But not each other’s eyes.

  Two perfectly formed skulls, two minds, two hearts, two or three or four lungs – we’re not exactly sure – but below the neck we’re only two in profile, in shadow, our twin heads an echo. As one with the first thrill of desire but divided by the secret areas of the body that are half numb, half electric.

  Growing over the verandah of our home is a muscat grapevine, thick enough that the kitchen, facing east, isn’t sun-flooded but deep-water-flooded first thing in the morning. Pushing our hair from our eyes, blinking, half-blinded by hair and light, we share oatmeal and spice-coffee with our cousin Wren – everything bathed in green.

  ‘Turn it the other way. Ow

  too hot?

  mmmmm

  now?

  no

  now?

  yes – sharpen the knife, hold it careful

  shhhh

  careful.’

  Rising from the table, moving with our rolling fluidity that Wren calls a kind of grace, we put our cup and bowl in the sink and pause in the doorway between the kitchen and the outhouse, backing into the sun, eclipsing it.

  ‘Wren?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘How long will you be gone?’

  ‘Not long.’

  ‘What if somebody comes?’

  ‘No-one ever comes.’

  ‘But what if someone does?’

  ‘The Browning’s under my mattress, magazine’s already loaded.’

  ‘You’re leaving us here

  all alone?’

  He winks at us and disappears and we smile our curious double-smile and smooth down our dark-blue dress with its bateau neck that we widened by ourself with the kitchen scissors. We’re awful at sewing – three of our eyes see very poorly up close.

  At Hope Home we were a Child of the Devil – cloven and deformed – an example to the whole world of evil – the illegitimate spawn of sinners. They prayed for us.

  They prayed that we wouldn’t live long, that death would find us swiftly. We had fallen so low, there was nowhere else for us to go.

  Most of the other children there were mute, some were missing an arm or a leg, some had no arms or legs. Some had faces that were squashed-in or blurred or melted, some had no eyes, we were the only one with two heads. What a strange lump of humanity, what a strange shadow we made.

  Luckily for us, many of the other children couldn’t get around without help, but those who had the use of their legs enjoyed poking us and pinching our skin until it was bloodless and they tripped us and pulled our hair in opposite directions and laughed as we fell over and scrabbled about face down on the floor, laughed louder at our bruises, laughed even louder when we didn’t get to the toilet in time and pee, hot and bright yellow, ran down our legs.

  Wren’s ’58 Austin truck – spearmint green, wooden tray with a rotting panel in the middle that’s going to fall right out if he doesn’t replace it soon (much like a decaying tooth, of which we have plenty) – creaks and shudders even when the engine is off – doors, brakes, gears, suspension. From the window in the living room we watch him get in and he turns the engine over and sets off along the dirt driveway – lumpy and potholed and almost completely camouflaged in long grass, till the turn-off. As the Austin grinds away in second gear, jiggering over the potholes, we try to remember exactly how the road twists and loops back on itself, round and down and round and down and round and off the alpine plateau, away from the undulating snowgrass, snow gums and the granite sentinels we love so much.

  After an hour or so – if we’re remembering right – the road turns into a proper one, gravel, graded by the local council once a month, more often after rainstorms which sometimes come in the early weeks of summer like wildfires, swift and furious, hailstones the size of fists. We like to think of Wren pushing open the triangular side window of the truck, sticking his arm out straight and letting the wind keep it there, not minding the dust or the black flies – while above him the sky darkens and darkens.

  By choice we do not go into town, by choice we never leave here at all. Our only worry in the world is that one day Wren won’t come back. He tells us stories about Sammy Whistle, the manager of the Swiggin Post Office & General Store. Sammy Whistle likes everyone to think he owns it too – he built a house for his family by adding rooms one by one off the back of the store. First a proper bathroom and then a kitchen and then a living area with a wood stove in the middle and then the bedrooms. He puts all his earnings back into the store and the house and the garden. Wren says if the real owners felt like it they could end the lease, evict the family, demolish the site and there’d be nothing Sammy Whistle could do about it. He’d lose everything.

  Sammy Whistle booms, roars, laughs, his breath like a hot wind. Wren’s a bit scared of him – we might be wrong about this – but the fact is, he always comes home from town with his neck and face covered in raised red splotches and little angry bumps that he’s scratched till they’ve bled.

  While Wren is gone we keep our hands busy. Try one way, then this way, holding the thread up in front of us at eye height, straight up, still as still, one eye shut tight. Practise touching the tip of the thread with the fingers of our other hand – index and thumb. It must be a very deliberate touch, but soft. Don’t move or else shhhh still as still, then deliberate. But soft. The first time we overshoot by at least three centimetres and our double-laugh (one high and fine, the other low like thunder) just sets us laughing more.

  Box Head passes by on his way outside and looks at us as though we are children, our four eyes follow the flick of his tail, the flick that says, o you poor silly children. Of the other cats, the most regal is the silver Spirit Cat, and then there’s Bear, still a kitten – found by Wren shivering and lost by Blindeye Creek.

  Box Head has strong shoulders and long legs much like Wren, but Wren’s head is largish and his blueblue eyes are a counterpoint to his hair – not orange anymore, rather the colour of a slice of red gum, newly sanded and polished.

>   One of us pricks the other with the needle. There’ll be blood now.

  As we go into the late afternoon, the flywire outhouse door shuts behind us like old men’s bones. Mountains are bluish above us, ringing our little valley, pulling the sun onto their peaks. Their mystery. Blueblack. Standing so still and so close to the sky. Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry us home, one of us singing the melody of the only song with words we’ve ever known, one of us with a low harmonising hummmm mmm mmm. It’s impossible to tell our speaking voices apart but our singing voices are tenor and soprano, man and woman, side by side, singing, swelling together into the end of the day. Walk to the sun – the way bending us through snow gums beyond the edge of our plum trees and apple trees drooping with late summer fruit, us touching their leaves with the pads of our fingers, them touching us back with the pads of their leaves. Then downhill a little way to the valley floor and Blindeye Creek and the long grass. Eucalypt oil cracks in the leaves of the mountain gums, burns in the sun like menthol vapour. Crossing the creek is easy this time of year.

  ‘Here?

  Down lower, by the pond

  sink there

  look at the sun

  ah

  coming for to carry us home

  carry us home

  hmmmmm-mm-mm-mm-mm-mm-mmm-mmm

  swing low sweet

  stop!

  lips!’

  Laugh.

  ‘Buzzing?

  bees.’

  Careful through the shallow but running water, stones on the bottom are algae-covered and slippery, waterweeds and shadows hide deep holes, hide water come alive and we’ve never learned to swim. On the other side of the creek are thick and springy tufts of snowgrass with bog beneath them. The bog is a hungry animal, it grabs for you with its gullet open wide, sucking you down. One foot wrong and we both suffer – together forever for always and forever, amen.

  In our valley there are no deciduous trees. Snow gums don’t drop their leaves in winter, rather, they allow the weight of the snow to bend their branches towards the ground and snow falls from the leaves by gravity and wind. A different kind of adaptation, we suppose. Look at them o red and gold running down their branches, their trunks the way water runs. Look at the snow gums!

  It’s not an easy climate for trees. The valleys are gentler but the mountains are steep and rocky and the wind uses the few snow gums that do grow on the slopes as target practice and rain washes the soil away in erosive bursts, mini-waterfalls, in late winter and early spring. Then of course there are summer wildfires.

  This land is a sentient being with an enormous elemental power, a fierce spirit – holy and unholy both – above and below, all round and beyond us. The Jaithmathang people, Bidawal people, the Dhudhuroa people knew this well. Thousands and thousands and thousands of years before us. Their songlines still criss-cross the earth where the Lightning folk walked before they all became stars. These are the stars. They are moving across the sky and we are watching them. We sing these stars and we cry them. We cry.

  And then the snow gums – quite solitary – they have old souls, even the saplings. They don’t grow tall. But they reach out to the land around them in a generous kind of way and they understand impermanence: their skins shed in veins of blue and orange and red. Like the sun going down. That’s what we see, walking by them, veins of light.

  Our mountain begins its rise languorously out of Blindeye Creek through the fragrance of boronia bushes and young wattle. About a third of the way up it is still just a hillside and easy to climb, but all of a sudden it leaps up a thousand feet and with each step forward the creek and the valley and our house fall away. The surrounding mountains form a ring that seems endless and impenetrable – fading blue into the horizon to the east and just as far to the north and west. The climb in summer always makes us sweat and slip and slide back down where there’s no grass to hold. Nor are there trees at this height.

  ‘Here and breathe

  breathe

  and still.’

  Thirst in our throats, our heartbeats much too quick. But light is changing, a golden hour coming. A thread of heat haze and the background hummmmmmmmmmm of bees.

  Bees’ wings make a frenetic noise suggesting frenetic activity, but bees are in fact delicate and precise. We wear the same shoes, left foot, right foot for that same kind of precision. If the heels of our shoes are of different heights or the soles – one shiny, slippery, say, and the other with a deep tread – we’d never walk anywhere without falling over, though we experimented when we were young. To sit down on the rocky summit, one of us thinks forward and the other backward – a perfectly timed sinking-down into the earth into the rock itself, ready to be run through by the sun, suspended and reflected here on the mountain – our mother.

  But Wren has not come home. Now it’s so dark the only noise in the sky is the stars. No way to know exactly how long he’s been gone but it feels several hours too long, maybe more.

  Stand out the front of the house and listen—

  ‘Hear anything?

  nothing

  let’s go further down the road

  what for?

  come on

  how far?

  as far as he is

  we can’t walk that far

  but

  can’t

  let’s walk and see

  boots?

  no

  a flashlight at least?

  No – give us away

  who to?’

  Our grassy drive has retreated into the night. Follow it from memory. Trees lean in, listening. Find the end of it and walk on up the road in the dark with the swollen, nearly-full moon our only guide. Hands on our hearts and our hearts boom out in the otherwise silence.

  ‘Stop stop!

  what?

  don’t know, the ground is moving

  a snake?

  maybe.’

  Drop to one knee but we can’t see anything in the grass around us. Stand and regain our balance and are still in the cold bluish stellar light. Dead quiet. No wind through the trees. Stand and listen to the silence and then we go on, stepping slow and light on our toes along the side of the road. At this pace we’ll not get far at all, which is partly deliberate. Wren could be anywhere along the road, anywhere from here to the city and we don’t like the road – at least, we don’t like what it represents or where it may take us. The chance of finding him out here in the dark is awfully slim. But we must try.

  Our own shadow is always more company than we’d like, unless it is in profile. Hold hands. Then the sound of a dirt bike off in the distance and we skitter down in the long grass off from the road, lying faces down and flattened against the earth and wait till the sound moves away and disappears completely. Only then do we rise and walk on – fear held eerily between us like moth-wings, soft and too delicate to touch. The shapes of the trees are etched against the moonlit sky. The deep, long oom of a tawny frogmouth makes us stop still and listen, oom-oom-oom-oom-oom-oom-oom-oom. Look for him in the trees around and above us and he calls again but there’s no silhouette on any tree branch or in the sky.

  ‘Does he see us?

  he sees us

  what does he think of us?

  not much.’

  At last here is the ’58 Austin’s engine rolling over in neutral as though it has stopped in the road. Then it revs and backs up and the gears get shoved around, and then the screech of a gear not slotted in properly and it idles down again. Then more revving and the truck coming up the road and relief in us – not a throb but a glow. It comes up so slow the engine groans and the gears crunch more and slot in awkwardly and the engine groans again and it goes right past us and on. Turn around and follow it, back the way we came. Up ahead the truck turns painfully into the driveway and it goes on. When we finally reach it the engine is off and there’s no sign of Wren – the cabin windows are grimy and the night appears thick and solid and brown and the truck hasn’t had workable headlights for year
s. Open the cabin door, sweat blotting all over the black air and the darkness streaming and the silence awful.

  ‘Wren?’

  It’s too dark to see in the cabin. Inside the house a kerosene lamp flares through the windows. ‘Thank god.’

  ‘Sea? Serene?’

  ‘Here

  here.’

  Wren comes out with a flashlight and runs past us, round to the passenger door of the truck and we follow him.

  He says, ‘I missed the turn.’

  Light from the flashlight shines trembling into the cabin.

  She’s lying across the seat, humped, like a doll flung away by a child in a hurry. There’s an old army pack on her back and a cloth, a pair of blue knickers with white lace around the edges and a water bladder that’s burst hanging off it. She’s not a child but not old either. She isn’t moving. Her face is tungsten white. The pack is knotted tight around her waist and under each arm. Her left leg is lying at an odd angle like it doesn’t belong to her anymore and there’s no-one else here to help us, no sound either, not even wind through the tops of the trees.

  Wren drops the flashlight, leans into the truck and eases her towards him, gathers her in his arms. She’s small – younger than us. Her clothes are stained. Is she bleeding? Is she breathing? She has no shoes or socks. Her eyelids are purple.

  ‘Quick

  quick what?

  get inside where there’s better light.’

  He carries her into the living room and kneels and lies her on the floor. She is so broken.

  ‘Wren?’

  ‘She was lying in the road. I thought she was dead—’

  ‘Who is she?

  what’s happened?’

  ‘—but she’s breathing.’

  Kneel down beside her and flick a hunting knife out of the left pocket of our trousers and it shivers the light and we cut the cords of the pack from under her arms and from across her belly – snitchsnitch – and pull the pack away across the wooden floor. Is she breathing? Pick up a feather, a tiny, downy feather, hold it by its quill under the woman’s nose and the feather – like fire – comes alive. Ah. Now we call on the umbilical cord that connects us and binds us and holds us. The blood that is the same in us. Our double-yolk. Our blood-red yolk. Our life-and-death, fervent-and-furious red.