Lachlan Walter - The Rain Never Came

She looked me in the eye. ‘No worries, boss,’ she said. And then she winked at me.

‘Cheers.’

She dragged herself away and followed after Ishra. Tobe and I sat there for a moment, saying nothing. He wouldn’t look at me, staring a hole into the ground instead.

‘Fuck it,’ I finally said.

‘Hang on,’ Tobe interrupted.

We looked at each other. Despite everything, we laughed.

‘After you…’

Tobe didn’t dare decline my invitation. ‘I’m sorry, Bill,’ he began. ‘Sorry I dragged you into this mess, sorry you got hurt so bad.’ His voice was unsteady. ‘I never meant for things to go to shit. That’s happened too many times, thanks to me.’

I swear he started to cry.

‘I’m sorry.’

I knew that his apology was sincere. But it wasn’t the apology I wanted to hear.

‘No worries, mate.’

‘No worries’, because there were none; that’s just how it goes out on the road. And ‘mate’ because that’s what he always would be.

‘Well, cheers.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘I’ve been sweating it, you know? I wasn’t sure you’d say that. Bloody hell, I’m glad you did.’ He looked up, looked me in the eye. ‘Thank you.’ He lowered his gaze back to the ground. ‘I know nothing I can do can…’

‘Fuck you.’

He shut his trap mid-sentence.

‘How could you?’ I asked.

‘What?’

‘Don’t give me that—you know what I’m talking about.’

I waited for a reply but none came. He was either being exceptionally dim or extremely stubborn. Well, it had been a long time since we had dredged up such bitter memories.

I stared at him, waiting-waiting-waiting.

‘Oh, that,’ he said after a while. ‘Bill, mate, what does it matter?’

I sighed. Last time we had talked about it, when Tobe had returned after all those years away, we spent a long time arguing over what mattered and what didn’t and whose fault was whose and who should have done what. We had talked ourselves in circles, gotten nowhere, eventually come to blows.

I knew who should have done what.

‘It matters because you weren’t fucking there,’ I spat. ‘And because it should have been you, not me. You said until death but you didn’t mean it. The least you can do is keep it to yourself, like you promised.’

Venomous rage poured out of me. It felt good. I couldn’t have stopped it, even if I had wanted to.

‘But…’

‘Don’t even think about it,’ I said.

He was on his feet in an instant. ‘You don’t know what it was like.’

I followed him up, leaning on my stick. ‘How can you say that? She was my sister, and I loved her until the end. Unlike you, you coward piece of shit.’

Years of repressed anger spilled out. The memories hurt, but venting my pain at Tobe made it all worthwhile. He held his good arm at his side, his hand clenched in a fist.

I was suddenly glad that I was near enough to crippled.

‘It wasn’t your fault, Bill. You’ve never got that. It’s my fault, I did it.’

‘Pull the other one.’

It was only Tobe’s fault in the most elasticated philosophical sense of the word. The night my parents chose not to play further witness to nature’s cruel ways—the night they harrowingly tried to lighten the load for my sister and me—lived as a panicked memory somewhere on the border of nightmare. But the memory of what happened to my sister over the following days stayed as sharp as a dead tree on a windless day.

That memory visited me every other night, dulling my spirit, deadening my heart.

‘It wasn’t your fault, Tobe. It was no one’s fault—these things happen.’

I said it reluctantly. I didn’t want to indulge Tobe’s guilt or soothe his shattered ego—I had my own grudge to offload.

‘How can you say that?’

He was screaming it, his face red. It dawned on me that we should have tried to thrash this out a long time ago, after the flared tempers of our tumultuous reunion had settled.

‘I was there, remember? I know what happened.’

‘Then you know it’s my fault.’

‘For fuck’s sake!’

Tobe shut up.

That night, after Tobe and I had managed to detach ourselves enough to begin carefully cutting down my parents’ bodies, my sister surprised us by throwing open the barn doors without a knock or a warning.

She saw us. She saw our parents. She made a tiny animal sound.

Tobe called out to her. She looked her husband in the eye. She looked back to our dead parents. She turned on her heel and ran blindly into the night. We gave chase, running through the darkness. She was quick. So was Tobe.

I lumbered after them, soon lost sight of them.

The memories flicked past, scenes of horror and sorrow. I began to cry and barely realised it.

‘Bill?’

I didn’t respond.

‘Bill?’

That night, that’s what Tobe had been calling out, screaming it at the sky. That’s how I found them. Tobe was sobbing, curled up in a ball. My sister was barely conscious, tangled up in rusty barbed wire, covered in blood. I slapped Tobe together. We untangled my sister, being as gentle as we could. We carried her home. We dressed her wounds. We tried to make her comfortable.

And then we buried my parents.

Tobe disappeared later that night. He told me that he was going outside to take a piss, and he never came back.

‘Bill?’

‘You should have stayed.’

Tobe looked confused. I became aware of how lost I had gotten chasing memories down the rabbit hole. The pent up bile of years past took control, forcing me to tell him what I swore I never would.

‘How could you leave? You know that she called out for you? The last thing she said, before I killed her, was your name. Even then, she still loved you.’

A little piece of me died as I told Tobe the truth I had withheld for so long. He looked at me, a pathetic sadness hollowing his eyes, all his bluster draining away.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘That doesn’t fucking cut it. You didn’t see the look in her eyes as she grasped what was happening to her. But even as the gangrene and infection set in, she still hoped that you’d come back. She wanted you to be there, to hold her hand when it happened, to be the one to do it.’

‘But…’

‘Don’t. Nothing you can say will make up for not being there.’

He seemed to deflate further. I was happy for that. He cried, his chest heaving. His cracked ribs made him wince with every breath, and still he cried.

My anger started draining away. I didn’t have the energy to maintain the rage.

‘I’m truly sorry.’

He whispered it. I ignored him.

‘And anyway, it looks like we’ve got more pressing problems,’ he said.

He pointed at the wasteland. I saw nothing different.

‘Look harder,’ he said.

‘Piss off.’

‘Between the burnt-out tank and the fallen-down guard tower,’ he suggested.

I squinted. Far in the distance was a feather-thin plume of smoke, almost invisible against the all-encompassing blue of the sky.

Tobe’s eagle-eye had done it again.

‘Shit,’ I said.

The last thing I wanted was an interruption. I couldn’t relive that horror again; we needed to sort it out there and then. But after a lifetime on the land, it had been drummed into me that you barely ever get what you want.

A rhythmic squeak broke the wasteland’s ghostly quiet. I turned, saw Ishra and Ruby wheeling out the bandaged bull-roo who had occupied the trolley next to mine. He moaned steadily. Ruby stroked his head without affection. Ishra focused on the burden of the trolley, his old-man body looking like it might give way any minute. Appreciating the fact that I knew nothing about the bull-roo, I turned back to Tobe, hoping that he could answer my questions. But his eyes were fixed on the distance.