The World Without Us by Mireille Juchau

Author:Mireille Juchau
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408866498
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-04-16T08:27:20+00:00

9

Tom Tucker’s recurring dreams embarrass him on waking. In these his father wavers up, a giant crossing a primordial landscape, sweeping trees from his path, wading through lakes as if they were puddles. The man is always headed right for Tom through over-saturated jungles, fetid swamps, limitless canyons. A superhuman, impervious to pain and weather.

These dreams leave him doubly haunted – first by the father who never catches up – then by the penumbra of loss after waking. He snorts salt water from a neti pot. His sinuses get purified, but the dreams clot, sticky and persistent as ectoplasm. He’ll walk out to find his mother spooning Milo into the teapot. He’ll cross the kitchen and butt his head on her bony shoulder over and over saying gently, Stop, Ma, please just stop.

Even before she started forgetting, his mother had always been vague about the details, getting strident whenever he asked about his birth. It was natural was all she’d say. You came out smooth, without a squeak. She’d arrived at the commune with three-year-old Tom, this single mum from two towns away, and soon got devoted making candles, sewing calico bags. She was deft with wicker, and weaving. I love you, she’d say, isn’t that enough? He ought to be grateful, she wasn’t always sure she’d make it up here, a woman alone, she’d say, trembling and marring the wax or breaking a line of cane, so he’d stop himself asking. Who is he then, my father? Where does he live?

Occasional men had come to The Hive and paid Tom small, thrilling attentions, teaching him to whittle a stick into an arrow, build the ziggurat shape for more powerful fires, or how to catch cod in Repentance River, ravelling the guts and cleavering the head. And there was Jackson Hodgins. Good as any father, always there for you, said his mother, biological or not. But asked to play football, or to join the kids on a bush quest, Jack would say he didn’t have time for small details, so Tom, pale-faced, whey-haired stutterer with rope to hold his shorts up, started to believe he was one of them.

When he was eleven Tom was sent up the escarpment with a new resident, Evan. Gather rocks for the frog pond – that was Hodgins’s mission, his morning koan, whatever. Evan Perske had been detoxing since drifting into The Hive two weeks before. He staggered from the Calming Cell, blinking at the sunlight like a wintering mammal. A twenty year old going on fifty. Beside him Tom, stalky, fine-boned, looked newly born.

At the summit Tom surveyed the great silver bales of mist that covered the poky towns and settlements. He could not even glimpse the treetops. This plane of white air had a tension, like the surface of a lake.

The fucken view! Evan flopped down wheezing, and rolled a joint. Where the bloody hell is it?

Tom squatted, stuck out a hand, his eyes fixed on mist. He took a long draw, blew two expert smoke rings into menthol air.

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