Читать книгу The Hum of the Sun - Kirsten Miller - Страница 9

Ash was the eldest and his brother Zuko was the youngest, with a girl in between. A child named Honey, golden and sweet, she was a tiny slip of a girl who coughed too much and whose lungs seemed always damp with a morning mist that never cleared. Her hair was always awry. His mother had once ripped the bottom of a red dress and used the strip of fabric to tie the ends of Honey’s hair after she’d braided it and sewn the braids close to her head with thick dark thread. Ash remembered Honey playing in the dry dirt with a rag doll wrapped in her arms, coughing. He remembered her carrying plates for their mother, or stamping on the soapy washing when there was still water in the borehole. He remembered her playing with sticks and stones and laughing, and he remembered her growing still. Growing quiet. Growing thin. Growing hot. She lay around and stared with eyes as big as stones, as though she knew what was to come.

“What’s wrong with her?” Ash asked.

His mother washed a cloth in cold water, wrung it out with her hands. “Her lungs are weak,” she said. “When Honey was born, she could barely take a breath to make her first cry.”

“Take her back to the clinic.”

“They ran out of pills at the clinic. They’re bringing in new pills to try, for both of us,” his mother said. “Who knows when they will arrive.”

“They can give her an injection.”

Yanela looked at him, her eyes dark moons, both full and distant.

He remembered the girl in his mother’s arms as she carried her into the river to cool her down. Honey cried little. She seemed to disappear bit by bit. Silently. She seemed not to know her own family any more, until one morning they rose with the sun and only her body remained.

The sounds of his mother’s voice reached the roof of the dilapidated house and rose further to the skies beyond. If it were possible to call his sister back, his mother’s voice alone would have done it. Even his brother’s persistent humming was silenced by the sound.

Later, his mother took a cloth and wiped his sister’s face. Yanela cleaned her arms, her legs, her hands and her small feet. She took the red dress and ripped another ribbon from it and tied it into Honey’s tight hair. Honey didn’t open her eyes. She didn’t smile or reach for his mother’s face. Ash began then to comprehend death – that nobody ever returns. His sister was gone, for sure.

Zuko shrieked and cried and played with the light that appeared through the cracks above the door and where the roof failed to meet the walls of the house. Ash waited for his mother to silence the boy, to hold up her hand or to speak sharply, but Zuko was left just to be.

“Come here,” his mother told them. They stood and watched as she wrapped their sister’s stiff body in the red dress, covered it so her head vanished along with her arms, her legs, her little toes. It might have been a pound of potatoes she handed to Ash, or a drowned cat. “You carry her,” she said.

“Where to?”

Yanela remained silent, her mouth a line as she took Zuko by his hand and pulled him upright. She opened the door and led the boy out into the dry day. Ash followed with the weight of Honey’s body in his arms.

Yanela stopped at the small shed and opened it with her free hand. With the light that fell across the floor, the rats scattered. A spider’s web blinked. “There,” she said, “that spade over there, get it and we’ll take it with us.”

“But . . .” he held up the bundle that took up both of his arms. His mother looked at Zuko, and let his hand go for a moment. In one move­ment, quick and calculated, she entered the shed and grasped into the dark corner for the spade. Zuko didn’t try to run. She strode off towards the ground beyond the trees at the back of the house, deter­mined, spade in one hand, while Zuko trailed like a small satellite at the end of the other. Ash followed with his burden to wherever his mother wanted them to go.

Yanela dug for the whole of the morning. Sweat dripped from her nose as the sun arced in the sky. She pushed rivulets from her forehead with the palm of her hand.

“Let me help you,” Ash told her.

“There’s only one spade. You might be growing, but I’m still stronger than you.” His mother glanced at him. “It won’t always be that way.”

“You think I’m slow?”

Zuko chased butterflies. He laughed at their wings in the light, and lay beside Ash on the ground to examine grains of sand between the blades of grass. Yanela dug.

“Why don’t we have a funeral for her?” Ash asked. His sister lay in a heap a way off, wrapped in the velvet dress, her hair spun out and mingling with the grass like dark cobwebs.

“There’s no money,” his mother said. “Funerals cost. All that food and drink. The whole community would want to come, or what’s left of it. I haven’t had work in months. I’m tired of talking to people.”

“You’re not like other people, Ma.”

“No, I’m not.”

“And we’re not like other families.”

“No,” Yanela said. “We’re not.”

Zuko approached Honey’s body and carefully pulled the fabric aside. Ash glimpsed his sister’s face, waxen and still and cold as a doll’s. His mother threw the spade aside, lurched herself out of the hole and grab­bed Zuko by his wrist, stuck her finger close to his nose as if to chastise him, but then she stopped. She looked at him too long and pulled him to herself. She held him close and tight while Zuko’s forefinger wrapped itself in her hair, curling and turning it like a corkscrew, over and over until it was tight. He pulled his finger out and watched the coil bounce. He shouted and banged his head against her forehead. Yanela’s eyes smarted, but she swallowed her emotion for her child.

Zuko had been different with Honey. He had melted whenever she was near him. His cries would soften to a low-pitched moan, his eyes grew slow and sleepy. He liked to nuzzle his nose into her neck, or to lie with his head on her little belly. Now he looked at her body like a quizzical bird. Yanela sweated through her tears as she dug the grave a few metres away. “She’s dead,” Ash told him.

Yanela stopped. She wiped a sheen of sweat from her forehead. “Quiet, Ash,” she said. “He doesn’t know what dead means.”

“Of course he does. He’s not an idiot.”

“Don’t use that word.”

“Maybe he thinks she’s sleeping.”

Zuko knelt, and stuck his face into his dead sister’s neck.

“Zuko! Don’t let him get too close, he’ll get sick as well. Move him away from there,” Yanela said. As quick as a hare, she was out of the hole. She dived towards his brother, scooping him up and carrying him across the pine needles and sandy floor to place him at Ash’s feet. Zuko laughed and flicked his fingers into the air, examining the spaces between. It was a game. He giggled and moved on all fours, pretending to be a monkey, back to his sister’s body. “For God’s sake! Get away from there. Ash, keep your brother away. I have to dig this hole.” There was no-one else to help his mother. When his sister was sick, Ash had cooked the rice and cut the vegetables from the patch outside while his mother had barely left Honey’s bedside. He’d dressed Zuko and combed his hair and kept him entertained outside to allow them both some sleep. He’d missed school many times. Then he stopped going altogether. Zuko did nothing but mess his pants and throw his food over the floor for Ash to pick up. Zuko was strong, too.

Ash moved with his brother to the base of a tree. He sat with Zuko as though he were a sack of corn, his arms across the boy’s chest, to keep him away from their dead sister. Their mother picked up the spade and went back to her hole. She dug. She looked at Ash and paused, mid-shovel. Zuko struggled to get free. “Don’t hold him so tightly – you’ll hurt him,” Yanela said.

Ash released him, and Zuko ran back to his sister. Their mother shouted at Ash and went to fetch the small boy and brought him back to the tree. The game went on, until the hole was dug. Back and forth, back and forth, Zuko and Ash, until their mother threw the spade across the ground and wiped her hands on the front of her pretty dress that was badly in need of a wash anyway. Ash noticed how the fabric fell on her legs and outlined them. They seemed too thin. “Come on, boys,” she said eventually. “It’s time to say goodbye to your sister.”