Juice: A page-turning epic about survival and resilience from the twice Booker-shortlisted author

So I drive until first light and only stop when the plain turns black and there’s nothing between us and the horizon but clinkers and ash.

I pull up. Drop the sidescreen. The southern air is mercifully still this morning, and that’s the only stroke of luck we’ve had in days. I know what wind does to an old fireground. In a gale, the ash can fill your lungs in minutes. I’ve seen comrades drowning on their feet. Clambered over the windrows of their bodies.

I wrap the scarf over my nose and mouth. Hang the glasses from my neck. Crack the door. And step down. Testing the surface as gently as I can. Ankle-deep. To the shins at worst. No sound out here but the whine of our rig’s motors.

Stay there, I call.

I know she’s awake, but the child, slumped in the corner of the cab, does not move. I walk back gingerly to check the trailer. Everything is still cinched down as it should be – the maker, the water, pods and implements – although the days of hard running have left my greens in disarray. The leafier edibles are windburnt, but overall the losses seem manageable. I tap the reservoir to fill my flask. Then, with the glasses, I scan the western approaches. No plumes, no movement. We’re clear.

I try to swipe the dust from the films and panels, but it’s pointless. In a minute or so every generating surface will be furred with ash again. I just need the turbines to trickle in enough juice to get us across.

Back at the cab, I thump my boot heels on the step and climb in. She hasn’t moved, and why that should be both a relief and vexation is beyond me.

We’re okay, I tell her. We’ll make this.

She gazes out across the scorched land.

This place, I say. It was all trees once. I flew across it. When I was young.

She blinks, inscrutable.

It went on and on. Trees beneath us for hours. The smell – you just wanted to eat the air.

She maintains her silence.

Have you flown?

Nothing.

I know you’ve been at sea. Just wondered if you’d been up in a stat.

She shifts and tilts her head against the sidescreen.

It’s really something.

She offers no sign of interest. Sits back, leaves a smear of sun paste on the glass.

But just once, I say, I would’ve liked to fly for the sake of it, not because I was on my way to somewhere horrible.

The sun appears. Molten. Slumped at the edges. Liquifying before us like a burning blimp. Until it rises. Breaks free of all comparisons to become its unmistakable self. Something reassuring. And terrible.

I talk too much, I declare. And you? You never say a word. Once upon a time I never said enough. So I was told.

She gives me nothing.

I know you hear me. You follow my language.

She rubs at the glass and manages to spread more grease than she removes.

Listen, I say. Those men back there, we lost them. No one’s coming for us. This morning we need to get across this ash. It won’t be nice. But on the other side there’ll be fresh country. We’ll move and camp the way we did before. Okay? Until we find ourselves a situation. There’ll be somewhere. We’ll be alright.

The child cranks her head further away. When I take my scarf and tear a long hank from it, she turns back at the sound. I pull the rest of the fabric across my nose and mouth and bind it around the skirts of my hat. And although she flinches, she does not resist when I do the same for her. There’s still dried blood on her brow where she beat herself against the dash. Her pale blue eyes seem more luminous above the mask.

There, I say. Cuts the stink a bit anyway. One day we’ll scrub this cab out. And you won’t just be watching, believe me. So. You set? There’s water here. We’ll eat on the other side.

I lift the sidescreen and set the rig into motion. Trundling just fast enough to make way, but slow enough to avoid stirring up a blizzard of ash.

On and on we go, hour after hour, over country as black as the night sky, across a fallen heaven starred with eruptions of white ash and smears of milky soot.

The vehicle staggers and wallows but keeps on until I’m down to reserve power. And then, as the midday sun drills in through the murk, I see new colours – tan, silver, khaki, bone – and the surge of relief that goes through me is almost deranging.

At the first solid ground I let the child out to privy. She seems energized by the freedom. Though when she’s done, she baulks at being hustled back into the rig so soon. I don’t manhandle her. But I do corral her. And I speak to her sharply. Because I’m tired. And still useless at this. And I really need to put some distance between us and that fireground. So when we finally get moving, the mood in the cab is low, and I’m sorry for it, but soon I have reason to be glad because when the batts finally give out, a hard gust comes in from the south, and the whole rig shakes on its axles.

I climb down stiffly. The kid gets out. I point to the dirty pillars rising into the sky in the distance behind us.

Look, I say. We could have been in the middle of that. But we’re out and upwind, see? That’s not just a lucky escape. That’s us being smart.

I crank out the shade. Set the array.

She watches the ash clouds twist northward. As the wind stiffens, they boil against one another. Then she follows me to the trailer. Watches as I dole out some mash. Accepts the dixy and the spoon. On her haunches, with her back to the wind, she swats away the skirts of her hat and eats. Avidly.

We can’t just be lucky, I say. You and me, we have to stay sharp.

She’s already licking her mess tin clean. I take it from her, give her mine, and while she eats I unlash my swag and roll it out beside the vehicle. Then I take down the bedroll I’ve improvised for her. Unfurl it next to mine. Not so close to make her worry, but near enough to keep an eye on her.

We’re all out of push, I say. Machine and creatures alike. So let’s sleep.

She shovels the last of the mash into her mouth, licks my dixy clean and the spoon also. Gets up, sets both back on the trailer and returns to sit, cross-legged, on her swag. She gazes east, the tail of her hat stirred by the wind.

Suit yourself, I say.

And then I’m gone. Out.

Sometime in the afternoon I wake to a faint keening. And for a moment I think I’m home. With an ailing hen downstairs. The whole flock at risk of contagion. Catastrophe in my compound. And I know I should get up, go straight to the growhouse, but when I open my eyes there’s just the awning shimmying in the wind above me and I’m here, on the dirt, so far south from home. And it’s the kid. Her face smeared with tears. Weeping. For the woman, I imagine, and God knows how much else besides. I reach for her, but she cringes away, so I leave her be and yield, once more, to sleep.

When I wake again the shadows of the vehicle and its trailer are long as safety ropes. The waif kips on. I clamber up, sore and creaky, to get us underway.

Before night falls, we’re into the saltlands. Out on the hard crust, the going is smooth. I don’t even need lights. Except for the dark islands of tree stumps, everything ahead is white.

Once the batts are low, I stop, roll out the swags again and carry the kid to bed. When I wake it’s late and she’s already out, setting pebbles in a circle on the salt. I sit up and look about. The glare is brutal.

You look busy, I say.

She primps her ring of stones.

We can talk about her. If it helps.

She scoops the pebbles up. Shoves them in her dungarees. Gets to her feet.

By day’s end we’re onto higher ground scattered with saltbush and thorny mulga. In the last light I pull up, shroud the rig in camo lattice and decant a quarter-cube for washing. It’s well past time, especially for her, but I take the lead and step behind the rig to scrub down. When I return, my fresh fatigues peeled to the waist so I can air myself a little, I see the kid has assembled another halo of pebbles.

Your turn, I say. There’s clean duds on the trailer gate.

She looks up. Stares at my chest. And I feel suddenly self-conscious. Shamed, even.

They’re just scars, I say. Burns.

She gapes.

It’s different for us, I say. Her skin wasn’t like ours. This is just what happens when skin heals.

I hang the towel and cover up. Then I coil the scarf back around my neck.

You’ll feel better if you wash. Use the soap. I’m going for a walk.

She goes back to her stones as if claimed by them. But when I return she’s clean and her hair hangs damp against the shoulders of her tunic.

At last light, before we set off for the night, she catches me unawares. Just as I’m slipping the tool into the holster in the driver’s door. I’ve finished charging the thing, almost have it secreted, and suddenly she’s there. When she stiffens and steps back, it’s clear she knows what it is.

You don’t have to worry, I say. Don’t think about this thing. And don’t touch it. Ever. Okay?

She lingers a moment. Then she rounds the front of the rig and climbs up into her seat. The cab begins to smell of soap and scrubbed hemp.

Okay, I say, disquieted. Let’s make some ground.

I catch the long, appraising glance she gives me before she settles into her corner. And, despite myself, I wonder at what else she’s seen and endured. If not for the promise I made, I might have broken her neck out of kindness and pushed on alone. But here we are.

I put the rig in gear. We set off through the scrub, over pools of gravel and stands of bluebush, every frame and panel juddering.

In the middle of the night I come upon a track. Before long, I see a light in the distance. I kill the lamps and creep ahead until we’re close enough to scope the place. Just some shanties. Still, promising. But the moment we stop, I hear screams. And laughter of the kind you don’t want to be near. I give the place a wide berth, put a couple more hours behind us.

Next afternoon, another settlement comes into view. Gated compound. Battered shipping containers circled into a stockade. Inside, old hangars and mining habs are set out in rows. In the centre, a water tower. And that gets my hopes up. Until I clock the gallery midway up the tower where sentries are prowling.

We retreat to the cover of a gully to the west from where I can scope the place more thoroughly. Functioning places are rare, but this vill looks harshly governed. Safety never comes cheap.

Still, the prospect of sanctuary isn’t easy to pass up. We lie there all afternoon, wedged into a crease at the lip of the storm gully. The kid never moves. She seems to understand the gravity of the moment, the choice before us.

In whispers, I catalogue every signal of collective enterprise. The food growing. The water bore. The reservoir and piping. I count the solar arrays. The motley assemblage of wind turbines. The harnesses distributing juice from structure to structure. All promising. And yet something about the place makes me uneasy. Sentries are no bad thing, but these blokes are not looking out – their gaze is downward, internal. And it’s only when night falls and the lights come on that I see why. The white domes of the growhouses are bustling with shadows. Which should be a good sign. Folks raising food is an indication of order and co-operation. But even upright, the figures within look slumped. And I know what that means. Once you’ve seen the posture of forced labour, you never forget it.

So we withdraw once more. Blacked out entirely. And beat another careful detour.

We drive east. Keep going like this for two more days. Charging and sleeping under camo in daylight. Travelling slowly at night under the light of one beam.

Until, at the end of a faint and snaking pair of ruts, in stone country, we come into the wreckage of a prospecting camp. It looks deserted. I wheel around for a while. Sceptical, but open to the possibilities. If we’re fated to go it alone for a stretch, we could do worse than a place like this. Yet I remain vigilant. Because threaded between the mine heads and spoil heaps, the trash-filled trenches, the snarls of rusty rebar and sheet metal, there’s a maze of trails. And although I’d like to think that this far south there are still animals at large, I know it’s hardly likely.

Again, I feel a treacherous spasm of hope. Hesitate. Kill the motors and crack the door to sniff the place and listen.

Nothing. Just the lowing of the breeze across the ruins.

I tell the child to stay in the cab. Then climb down to inspect the closest sign of a track. There’s no animal scat. And no bootprints. But these trails are human.

I turn back, gesture to the kid, and she comes.

People dig stuff from the earth, I say. For trade. Or to make things with. This is a mine site. I used to look for places like this in the north. There was always something useful to score if you put the time in and had something to cart it away on. The stuff we uncovered in places like this. I couldn’t begin to tell you.

We walk to a headless shaft. Stand at the raised rim. This hole’s not rectangular like the others. It’s circular. Like a well. We crane a little. Peer down. But it’s too deep and dark to see much.

You know, I say. If it’s not full of water, we could probably live here. Down one of these.

She scrunches her face.

If I could make it safe, that is. No guarantees. But it might be worth a thought. All we need is somewhere out of the weather, something remote and secret. I think this could work.

Which just goes to show, says a voice behind me, that there’s no such thing as an original idea.

The girl starts so wildly she almost sends us both into the pit. I yank her back by the shoulder. She wheels away from the sight of the stranger and sets her face against my breastbone.

Stay where you are, says the bloke with the crossbow.

Mate, I say. You gave us a fright.

Looks that way.

He’s smaller than me. Younger. His left eye is pearly. A greying beard covers much of his face and neck. His cheeks and hands bear the same white lesions you see on everyone, but the scars on his nose and around his eyes are not the work of weather.

We’re just passing through, I tell him.

So you say.

He looks at the child.

She yours?

Yes.

You’re a bloody liar.

She’s not for trade, I say.

So that’s how you got her?

No. Hell, no.

But she’s not yours, is she.

She’s with me. We’re travelling together.

Doing what?

Doing what we can, comrade.

Don’t fucking comrade me, he says. She real?

Would she flinch if she wasn’t?

The hell should I know.

We’re just looking for somewhere safe.

You and every other reffo.

We don’t want to be a problem.

Well, you’re here now. That makes you a problem.

But three’s better than one, right?

Is it?

Of course it is.

Two more mouths to feed, the way I see it.

The crossbow, I say. Service issue.

He says nothing. I pull in a breath, preparing to move, but then I keep talking, buggering on to buy us a few more moments.

So, I ask. Were you any good? With that, I mean.

Standing here, aren’t I?

When an archer is shooting for nothing, I say, he has all his skill. If he shoots for a brass buckle, he’s already nervous. If he shoots for a prize of gold, he goes blind or sees two targets.

Well, smartarse, I already see two targets.

The prize divides him. He cares. He thinks more of winning than shooting. And the need to win drains him of power.

You’re a scream.

Were they still using that when you went through?

What do you care?

We’re both schooled, comrade. We both know what’s right.

Fat lot of good that did us.

Both still here, though, aren’t we? As you say.

For the moment.

Well, after what I’ve seen, I can settle for the moment. Reckon you’re no different.

Reckon away, fella. It’s no odds to me.

Seen any other operators down this way?

Why would I tell you?

Why wouldn’t you?

You’re living in a world that’s gone.

You know that compound west of here?

I’ve seen it.

I don’t want to live like that.

Might be the only way.

If you really thought that, you wouldn’t be here. You’d have thrown your lot in with them.

He scowls. I’m still trying to get a read, looking to pick my moment to jump him.

What’s on the rig? he asks.

A maker. Growpods.

You steal ’em?

Made them.

He grunts.

You got seeds?

I nod.

Where you from?

The peninsula.

Which peninsula?

North.

How far north?

North of Capricorn.

Jesus. What about her?

No idea. I think she’s off a migrant boat. Maybe a slaver.

Those fuckers.

What about you?

What about me?

Where are you from?

Doesn’t matter anymore.

And how do you live?

He sighs.

Really, I say. I’m interested.

Microbial protein, he says.

You can make powder?

He nods.

Why don’t we consolidate?

I don’t need you.

I don’t see a vehicle, any kit.

Think I’d leave my assets in the open? Think I’m stupid?

No, mate. But I know neither of us will see home again.

Cheery bastard, aren’t ya?

So this is either an ending or an opportunity.

Maybe both, he says, hefting the crossbow a little higher.

The child presses against me.

What the fuck’re you doing with her, anyway?

Keeping her safe.

For what?

Jesus, man, to give her a life, why else? When’s the last time you saw a kid?

Are they farming them?

Brother, you’ve been out here on your own too long.

Show me she’s real. Prove it, he says, jabbing the crossbow at her.

The child whimpers and clambers against me, and then, in a scalding rush that runs down the leg of my dungarees, she puts the question beyond doubt.

Okay, he says. Let’s go.

Where?

Turn around.

Comrade, please. Don’t touch her.

I said turn the fuck around.

The kid has her legs snagged in mine. It’s no easy manoeuvre to gets us about-faced. But when I do there’s nothing ahead but the dark maw of the shaft.

He hauls the top rungs up and locks them in place, but the child won’t go down. Simply cannot make herself step over the lip and onto the ladder with her back to the darkness below. And though I feel the point of the bowman’s bolt between my shoulder blades, I need no prompting. I take her in my arms, she latches on to me at the waist and the neck, and I hoist us over, clinging to the rails.

I know I should be using the long descent to frame a plan, to be ready to secure something – a hefty stone, a length of metal – but by the time I get us down, rung by rung, to solid ground I’m so knackered I can barely think and it’s all I can do to lower the child to the compacted dirt and then drop down beside her, panting like a heat-struck fowl.

She peers along the tunnel into the distant darkness. Glances up the ladder at the bowman’s silhouette on its way down. Then back at me. In expectation. As I lie there. Winded and helpless.

When I show her the palm of my hand, I’m not sure if I’m imploring her to wait or begging her forgiveness.

If she’s disappointed, she doesn’t show it. In any event, the bowman drops so quickly, hands and boots barely slowing his fall as he clamps against the verticals, sliding down without touching a single rung, that our chance is gone before I can get to my feet.

He hits the dirt with a thud. Before he’s even turned to face us, he has the bow back in his hands.

Out of puff, old timer? he says, casting about as if he’s seeing the place anew with us in it.

I get slowly to my feet. The child reaches, takes a fistful of my sodden pants leg.

You could’ve had me then, he says.

I don’t want to fight.

Yet.

I’m tired of fighting.

Maybe you’re just tired, full stop.

Both, I confess. Maybe you are too. Because if you wanted to see me off clean, you missed your best chance already.

Who says I want to do you clean?

It’s a long climb up with a weight like mine on your back.

You don’t think I have a block and tackle?

Seems like a lot of trouble.

I can manage a bit of trouble.

Me, I could do with less of it.

He shrugs. And yet here you are.

We don’t have to be trouble.

Somehow I doubt that.

But, as you say, here we are. Still alive.

Maybe I’m just thorough.

Good for you. And for your training.

And maybe I’m a bit curious.

The pair of us? Showing up like this? Who wouldn’t be?

I’ve met plenty who wouldn’t.

Strange days, comrade.

Let’s go, he says.

He palms a switch. A chain of tubes illuminates the chamber, a deep horizontal, high and wide, stacked with drums, coils of hose, some improvised domestic furniture. In the distance, maybe thirty metres yonder, a chain-link barrier.

It’s hard to get a read on the extent of this bolthole, but it feels bigger than what I can see. Some of it looks hand-hewn, but the ceiling bears the broad sweeps of machine cuts. The shoring is steel, the braces hydraulic.

This is some find, I say.

Keep walking.

We do as we’re told. At the wire enclosure, we stop to survey the stacked crates and drums on the other side. It takes a moment to notice the gate. And the lock. The hasp is open.

You want to lock us up?

Do I look like a fool?

You can trust us, comrade.

That’s to be determined.

Fair enough, I say, shepherding the girl forward as casually as I can.

In you go.

The child looks at me. I nod, open the gate and lead her in.

The bowman shuts the barrier behind us and sets the lock. He turns, lays the uncocked crossbow on the table behind him.

You need to know who we are.

That’d be a start.

You want my name?

No, he says.

But you want everything else.

Wouldn’t you?

I would.

So, go for your life, he says. Explain yourself.

The child settles in a soft pool of dirt between some crates. I lower myself to a snap case that reminds me of a transport shell – field kit.

The bowman drags out a chair. He sits with his boots against the mesh, reefs off his hat and raises his eyebrows. And I see the situation plainly. If I can’t get through to him, I’ll need to kill him. But there’s no guarantee I can manage either.

You sound like you’re from the east, so you probably won’t know the place, but I was born and raised on the Outer Cape. North of the twenty-third parallel. It’s a peninsula. Two hundred klicks of rocks and red dirt. Only one settlement – a hamlet of five hundred souls on the furthermost shore, just inside the sheltered waters of the gulf. My people were homesteaders. We lived in the hinterland, out on the plain. In the days when you could still get by in that latitude if you knew what you were doing.

Those were better times, but even then it wasn’t a place for the faint-hearted. The sun ate everything in sight and the salt air chewed through anything that wasn’t. The winds came hard off the range and harder still out of the desert across the gulf.

My mother was widowed early. Raised me on her own. But she was a tough unit. Short. Wiry. Handsome in the way even a son will notice. Grey eyes and a bent-kneed stance that always made her look as if she’d just landed after a jump. Her hair was blonde and buzzed tight, so you only saw it indoors, once the hat and scarves came off. Mostly she went about in a wide-brimmer with neck-skirts and her face wrapped, so it was the steely eyes you saw most, the fierce gaze. Hamlet folks were careful around her.

She had heft, my mother. A gravitas I could sense as a child but not explain. She taught me everything. Not just how to behave and how to work and endure with honour. She gave me my letters and numbers and the stories of our people. Also the sagas. I was eligible for hamlet school and lived close enough to be driven in every day, but she never sent me, and I never asked to go.

We were self-reliant, the pair of us. In country as dry and remote as that, homesteaders had to be. We remained citizens in good standing with the Association, rendered our tithe to the Co-op every year without fail, but to hamlet folks homesteaders were a people apart. Aloof. Difficult to read. Hardarses, I guess.

Our compound was a big, dusty triangle buttressed on every side by a levee of compacted soil and rubble. The winterhouse, set toward the southern bund, was up on stilts and airy. We had good, storm-proof sheds and our growhouses had retractable cowls my parents had designed and perfected before I was born. Across the yard, a low parapet of sandbags and a simple A-frame portico marked the entrance to our summer hab. A cluster of cellars and underground cisterns. All interlinked.

The plain was mostly red dirt, spinifex and gibber. From the verandah of the winter place, you could see the distant sheen of the gulf in the east. Behind us, like some mummified leviathan, the long buttress of the range lay between us and the open sea.

This was all the world I knew. And for many years it was all I needed.

Like every good homesteader, I raised plants, to harvest seeds and sow them anew. I could manage egg birds and grind their shit and bones for the soil we brewed from dust. Alongside my mother, I learnt how to patch a circuit, mend a pump, rewind a motor. There were turbines to maintain and arrays to set and adjust and keep clean. I had to know how to nurse and pamper every species of battery, to capture, store and move water, and from the age of seven I drove vehicles – quads, fork-loaders, flatbeds – for the thrill of demonstrating my competence.

I felt like any ordinary plains child. I figured all of us could read a barometer and find our way home alone from the canyons at night. But the fact was, I didn’t know any kids. Apart from the lame boy, that is, and I only saw him at the beginning of winter when his father, the filmlayer, drove out from the hamlet to resurface our grit-pitted walls and roofs. I was always discouraged from making comparisons with anyone else – my mother was strict about this – but with that crippled boy I didn’t need to be told. And I liked him well enough. He taught me checkers. Beat me most years. But then he stopped coming, and I didn’t ask about him.

I never really felt the lack of playmates or friends. On market days in the hamlet, or special days at the wharf, I’d sometimes encounter other children. I watched them. Carefully. They puzzled me. Disappointed me, really. And they seemed leery of me. Whenever I managed to engage them in conversation or to propose a game, they struck me as opaque. Hesitant. Even dull. They were always seeking consent or confirmation from those around them. They seemed unable to do anything on their own initiative. As I grew older, I saw their parents were no different. Not so much that their circuits were on the fritz. More that they were all set to power-reserve mode.

When I shared this thought with my mother she admonished me, but I detected a glint of amusement in her eyes.

There’s nothing wrong with those kids, she said. And you’re no better than any of them. Their parents are good factors and mechanicals. Sound citizens. And they will be too. Having common interest isn’t the same as having interests in common.

I don’t think they like me, I confessed.

Needing people to like you is vain. So is expecting people to be like you. You and I do what we know how to do, and they do what they can, and everyone’s effort is useful. That’s what keeps us all going. Each of us needs a little something of what the other has – food, water, building materials, parts, doctoring, scholarship, labour. Even the bards and jokers have their place.

That’s a trade?

Of course. Folks need to laugh sometimes. But whatever we do, wherever we live – in a hamlet, in the city or on the plain – no citizen is better than any other.

On this point I never questioned my mother, and yet over time I began to see we prospered in ways few others in our district seemed to. For one thing, my mother would never consent to trade for labour. But how could she refuse help unless we could afford to? My mother was an unstinting worker, almost relentless. She gave the very clear impression that the two of us worked harder than most in the district, and while such a notion was hard to verify, the ache in my bones and sinews at day’s end seemed to confirm it.

We raised leaves and herbs of every kind. Our citrus was supreme. In mild years our hives rendered honey that tasted faintly of coriander. We grew rich crops of tomato, corn, okra, squash and eggplant, and no skin or rind of our fruit ever felt the scalding flush of direct sunlight. The first and only moment our produce saw the open sky was when we hefted crates from the trailer into the shade of the hamlet square.

On the plain, every citizen was the equal of their neighbour. And whether they’d made good trade, enjoyed a bumper season, or been blessed by the birth of a child, most maintained the sort of discretion that forestalls envy. There was gossip, of course, as in any small community, but the virtues of circumspection, modesty, generosity and hospitality were valued and rewarded. Not just by the Association, but by those who belonged to it. Which was all of us.

In the hamlet, as out on the homesteads, there was no talk of caste or rank. Civility was paramount. And while everyone understood that some tradesfolk and homesteaders might be more skilled or gifted than others, and some were wiser and probably more diligent, there was no tolerance for lording or vaunting. So much so that folks neither danced nor sang in public for fear of making a spectacle or appearing to put themselves forward.

There’s no question that hard work was valued and laziness frowned upon, but there was no shame in availing yourself of help, whether you traded for it or were granted it freely by a neighbour. And the Co-op indemnified you from any misfortune that might lead to long-term hardship.

So, ours was a decent life. It was orderly. There was purpose in it. Honour, too. And self-respect.

But although the world was steady in the years of my boyhood, it was not always kind. In the hamlet or out on the homesteads, life was a struggle. Winters were hot. The summers lethal. Nearly every soul you met had white scab, and many suffered pink cankers that ate at them slowly. Locals were hardy and adaptable, but it was rare to see people of great age. And, for reasons nobody seemed to understand or discuss, the number of births had already begun to wane.

At the onset of winter, when folks finally came back up from underground, they were looser in their bearing, almost giddy with relief to be out in the open after so many months of languishing in stifling cellars. Within a few days they’d recover their decorum and go about their work. Come September we’d all be dreading the change of season and the return to life below ground.

As a kid, it’s the big events that take up space in your head. The cataclysms of sudden presence – cyclones, locust plagues, lightning sieges, storm surges, flash floods. But as you get older it’s the stuff that doesn’t happen, the things that fail to arrive, that begin to preoccupy you. Cataclysms of absence, I guess you’d say. Like the years the monsoon failed to arrive. That was when you faced the horrors of running dry. Or worse – poaching in your own sweat, and when you couldn’t sweat anymore, grilling from the inside out.

Most of the year we had desert heat. Hard, roasting, wind-driven. If the air is dry and you’re careful, you can survive temps into the fifties. But when it’s muggy, you’re in real trouble. In the summer there were black-sky days without rain when tropical air rolled in from the north like a hostile force to occupy the peninsula for a week or more. No bunker and no fan could spare you that strangling humidity. Within a few days, even with temps down in the thirties, you’d fall prey to heat fever. The panic of the sickness sent folks out of their minds. Survivors were never the same afterwards. You won’t need telling, comrade. You know it well enough. The ordeal – the indignity of it – robs you of something. Forever after, you’re stalked by the shameful mewling thing you became.

So when March arrived, and the big cells rolled down from the death belt of the tropics, we ran the fans hard and prayed we had enough juice in the batts to keep ourselves alive. A day or two of that was tough. Nerve-racking. But a week might be catastrophic. In the middle of one of those events, if you could think at all, you knew there’d be folks coddling and stewing in bunkers and cellars the length of the peninsula. And some of them you’d never see again. Some died when their hearts gave out. Others destroyed themselves before it got that far. And there was no shame in that. Most folks understood the sensation of being possessed by that dread, those avalanches of panic.

Maybe it’s different where you’re from, but in our part of the world, suicide was frowned upon, though it wasn’t censured by the Association. We were hardy folks, but not heartless. We had a firm conception of who we were, and maintained high social expectations, but we were realists. Or at least we thought we were.

Nobody pretended that plains life was easy. We were at the last margin, at the frontier of the tropics, with the desert at our back. Year upon year we held out. And were proud of doing so. Things were less capricious then, so perhaps we could afford to be. We prized steadiness. Not just in people, but in our world. Because steadiness allowed us room enough to endure and make a life. The problem was, we believed this stability was of our own making. The fruit of self-restraint. And although there was some truth in this, it wasn’t the whole story. We had our golden age in a lull, while the world was just dozing.

High on a ridge, at the spine of the range, stood a rock fig so large and sprawling it was as much thicket as tree. In its winter shade, twenty souls or more could work and rest out of sight. Children nested in its downswept boughs, and bowerbirds stole the buttons off their tunics as they slept. Between the tree’s reptilian roots, their parents mended garments, honed blades and kept watch. At dawn and dusk, they went abroad to hunt and forage on the tops. In summer they followed the roots underground, for beneath the tree lay a cave whose deepest gallery brimmed with sweet water. They navigated the darkness by the feel of those rock-splitting roots, climbing from the light to the water and back. To survive the worst of the heat, they lived in the upper chamber, beneath an open roof and a canopy of limbs and leaves, subsisting on dried meats and fruits in the safety of the twilight.

These were my people. The children of the tree. And although that mighty fig and its water were long gone before my time, the cave remained. And I went to it,