Claire Zorn - The Sky So Heavy

‘I don’t know how to look after a kid.’

‘Please mate. Please. I’ll try not to be long. I don’t know what else to do. I can’t look after the three of them.’ He smiled sadly. ‘I’m up to my elbows in vomit.’

Beneath the beard and the big shoulders, Mick wasn’t that much older than me, maybe ten years. He stood with his feet set apart and let out a ragged breath.

‘Okay,’ I said. I didn’t let myself consider it too long. Max would think I’d lost my mind. I clearly had. After I told Mick I would look after Zadie and he went back to his place to get her, I reassured myself that when he came back I would tell him that I was really sorry, but there was no way I could do it. Except when he brought her around I failed to communicate this with the words that came out of my mouth: ‘No worries, it’ll be fine.’ I found myself standing in the living room with a three-year-old and a giant My Little Pony that was neither mine nor little. Oh, and Max who was somewhere between angry and amused at my stupidity.

‘What are we supposed to do with her?’ Max asked.

Zadie pointed to the fire and said in a very serious voice, ‘Das da fire. You don touch da fire tis vewy, vewy hot.’

‘Yeah, that’s right!’ I said to her in a happy voice.

‘Fin, we’ll have to share our food with her!’

‘We’ve got enough, Max. I couldn’t say no.’

‘No dah.’

‘Whosat?’ Zadie said and pointed to Max.

‘That’s Max.’

‘You Fim,’ Zadie said, pointing to me.

‘Yes, Fin.’

‘Iz snowing outside. Ba you don touch da snow. Mummy touch da snow too much and den she chucked up.’

Zadie sat down on the floor and started to play with the buckle on her shoes.

Max and I looked at each other.

‘Does that mean what I think it does, Fin?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Fin?’

‘Max, I don’t know.’

‘Shit.’

‘Yeah.’

I found our old Duplo in the garage and brought it in for Zadie to play with. That seemed to keep her occupied for a fair while and it was kind of nice having her there. It passed the time. In the afternoon she fell asleep sitting up surrounded by a sea of coloured plastic blocks, so I arranged the cushions from the sofa into a bed next to the fire and tucked her in with my old Transformers doona. She slept for over an hour and Max and I found ourselves just sitting there, waiting for her to wake up. When she did she saw us and started to cry. It wasn’t just a few sobs either, it was distraught screaming as if she was in pain. I checked her all over, looking for some kind of injury but then Max put her up on his shoulders and galloped around like a horse and she seemed to like that.

The darkness was coming earlier and earlier every day and by four-thirty it was pretty much night. We ate dinner at five-thirty because by then everyone had well and truly run out of things to do. I heated up a can of soup on the fire, poured some into a little plastic bowl and gave it to Zadie with a teaspoon. She barely paused for breath as she ate it. When she was done she licked the bowl.

I didn’t know when to expect Mick back. We had both stepped around the subject, knowing it could be hours or days. Part of me wanted to go with him to see what the rest of the world looked like. I couldn’t imagine it.

He wasn’t back by six-thirty so Max and I read Zadie a story and put her into bed. She insisted on hugging the storybook when it was finished and she went to sleep with our hardcover edition of Pooh and Tigger Fly Kites , which can’t have been comfortable.

Later, before Max and I went to bed, I put some more wood on the fire as we could cope with the cold when it went out, but I wasn’t sure about Zadie. Max read an old National Geographic magazine and told me that exposure to radiation is measured in units called millirem. The average American is exposed to three hundred and sixty millirem a year, three hundred from natural sources, sixty from man-made sources.

‘I reckon that’s probably gone up,’ he said and cracked up at his own joke.

I spent the night somewhere between awake and asleep, partially listening for Mick’s knock at the door. It didn’t come.

And the army still hadn’t turned up with more food.

He didn’t even try knocking first, just rattled the door handle and started shouting. We were reading Zadie a story before her afternoon nap. The shouting cut into the room just as we were about to learn what Maisy Mouse liked to grow in her garden.

‘Get out here, you little shits! You little punks! Where are ya?’

Then whoever it was thumped the door and I heard his footsteps leave the front porch and head up the side of the house.

‘Who the hell is that?’ Max asked.

Zadie started to cry. I heard the back door slide open. I got to my feet and met him as he was coming through the kitchen.

‘Where is it, you little shit?’

It was Mr White. The only words we had ever exchanged were a polite ‘hello’ when I used to see him over the fence in the mornings. Now, his hands were fists at his sides, his face twisted with aggression, eyes popping.

‘What?’

‘The wood, you mongrel. Where’s my firewood?’ He pushed past me into the living room. Zadie started screaming.

‘Where’s my firewood?’

He used to get The Australian delivered.

‘What firewood?’

He turned around and grabbed the front of my hoodie. ‘The firewood you little shits stole from my yard!’

Max jumped to his feet, chest puffed. A bantam. ‘Oi!’

Mr White shoved him away, provoking something inside that was curled up and lying dormant until that moment. I threw a punch. I missed. Mr White shoved me into the wall and I shoved him back. In my mind, detached, I stood outside watching the scene and it was hilarious. I was fighting Mr White in my living room. Okay, fighting might not be an accurate word but I was working up to it. I threw another punch. I got him this time, just in front of the ear. He went off – screaming, spittle showering my face, his fist landed in the hollow of my stomach. He’d had more practice then I had. I’d only been in a fight once before, in year five with Jason Esbit and it had involved mainly inaccurate kicking. I wasn’t expecting my next fight to be with Mr White from number seventeen.

‘We don’t have your firewood!’ yelled Max. All this was happening to the soundtrack of Zadie’s high-pitched wail, like a siren or a very urgent ice-cream van. I yelled and pushed my hands into Mr White’s face, not a classic fighting move, but effective. Hell, if I’d had a handbag I would have hit him over the head with it. He slapped my hands away from his face.

‘We’re burning furniture,’ Max yelled. ‘Not your wood.’

Mr White’s head snapped to the fireplace.

‘It’s the chairs from outside. Not your bloody wood.’

He dropped his hands to his knees, leaning forward. His back heaved with his breathing. Max picked up Zadie. Mr White straightened up. He looked back and forth between us, jaw rigid.

‘It’s the chairs from outside. We didn’t nick your wood,’ I repeated quietly.

He didn’t say anything, just turned and walked out the back door, the way he had come in.

Zadie grew quiet. In the afternoon she vomited all over the Transformers doona.

Another day passed. Max sat next to Zadie and read her books.

Water was okay but our supply of food was getting low.

I had never seen such stillness. There was not even the movement of shadow as the day passed. There were no shadows. I wondered where the birds had gone. I wondered if they were dead from the cold. Where do birds go to die? Do they drop from the sky while they are flying – their hearts stopping dead like my gran’s when she was at church, halfway up the aisle to get communion?