Page 16 of All Your Days
“Nah, yeah.” My voice breaks like I’m going through puberty all over again. “I’m fine. Totally fine.”
He releases my leg, and my sense returns enough to be thoroughly embarrassed. Rather than watch Jacob, I chance a glance around the courtyard to see if anyone else noticed. The guards are too busy with themselves to have noticed—which isn’t reassuring considering they are meant to be on watch for everything—but Lou definitely did. He throws a wink at me and flicks his reins to get his camel moving.
I don’t have time to be dramatic about it. Jacob makes another clicking sound with his tongue, picking up Adeeko’s lead and we’re off, the small camel train pulling behind me with the guards and Lou riding free around us.
It’s a thrilling feeling when we make our way past the final walls of the compound and out of the greater area of TheFacility—I’ve never been further than the fences that mark our boundaries for foraging. Leaving The Facility is something I never thought I’d do. It’s as exciting as it is terrifying and the continuous, unchanging landscape outside our borders is reassuring. It’s the same stony red dirt, the same saltbush scrub and same pristine blue sky decorated with puffs of towering white clouds.
And Jacob. Jacob’s reassuring, too. He doesn’t look at me, not even once, but I don’t think for a second that he’s unaware of me. I don’t know why it’s reassuring, but it is.
Lou travels close by, ready and eager to help wherever he’s needed. And the guards? They are riding ‘point’. I don’t think that usually means racing their camels alongside the track and singing at the top of their lungs. But that’s what they’re doing—much to Jacob’s increasing frustration.
My rolling emotional journey, to accompany our physical one, is not over, apparently. By the time we stop, I’m ready to cry. My arse hurts like I’ve never felt before, like I’ve never known it could, and my thighs shake uncontrollably when my feet hit solid ground.
How the fuck am I meant to survive the entire journey?
I wince and wobble all the way to where Lou is already confidently unloading the things we need for our lunch, while Jacob checks over the camels. The heat and the aching in the lower half of my body makes me unreasonably upset over everything, convincing myself that Jacob is ignoring me rather than just doing his job.
Over the years I’ve always told myself that I resent his attention, but I’ve also always known that I was lying to myself. The lie just made the situation easier to deal with. Moby would tell me to think logically about this. To act like a scientist, and perhaps question why, out of everyone in my life, the idea of losing Jacob’s attention is so upsetting.
I’m not a scientist, though. I’m an artist. And more importantly, I’m a grunt. So I scrub at my cheeks and roll my shoulders, making my way to Lou as fast as my legs will let me.
“What can I do to help?” I ask. It’s a mistake, because Lou has no hesitation putting me to work.
Granted, he gives me the easier job. The recent winter rains have revived the sparse growth of the desert. I’m sent to forage up what I can find to stretch out our lunch. As much as it hurts, the walk does me good, and I manage to come back with enough quandong berries and bush tomatoes to help extend the bread, dried fruit, and salted meat that make up our lunch. Found a couple of lizards and geckos hiding around the place, too. They were less helpful for lunch, though. Scared the shit out of me, too.
Despite getting spooked, the walk does wonders for my head, clearing out the chaos brought on by the emotional past few hours. I don’t travel far from the others, only just far enough to truly appreciate the limitlessness of the harsh, unrelenting, beautiful landscape. I’ve only ever seen glimpses of it from the confines of home. Beyond the road we follow, the land undulates softly, then rises sharply in blocky hills—I think I can even see the glimpses of what could be a creek cutting through the white-streaked red desert. Though it could very well just be a mirage. The heat’ll do that.
Between collecting the fruit, I collect some flowers, too, sliding them carefully between the pages of the notebook I packed. There are several purple flowers that look kind of familiar, a pink bell and the funniest little flower that looks like an egg.
The guard, Cale, snickers when he catches me pressing them between the paper, but I get my own back when I serve their food.
“Gracie was on kitchen duty.” I smile sweetly and drop the burnt bread bun, hard as a rock, into his lap. His disappointment is palpable.
By the time I have to climb back on Adeeko, I don’t feel so fragile about the journey ahead of us. The prospects of it all almost feel exciting. I don’t even mind when Sheba—the camel tied behind me pulling the trailer—pops up next to me, wiping the spittle on her mouth over my shirt in a big, foaming streak.
And absolutely none of my renewed good mood has anything to do with Jacob, now riding close by, and the sway of his body in the saddle. Or the tentative smile he sends my way when I laugh a little too loud at my new, disgusting camel friend.
It must just be heat exhaustion.
Chapter five
Jacob
“Malcolm, unless you wantuninvited critters in your bed tonight, keep your tent zipped.” I shout to the trio of guards still kicking around a football rather than doing anything to set up camp or get dinner ready. Or just be of any use, whatsoever.
“Aye, aye captain!” He calls back with a mocking two-finger salute.
It’s tempting, really fucking tempting, to go nab their ball in the air and gut the thing with my knife. But I don’t give in to the impulse. Even though it would feel really fucking good about now.
If the unrelenting heat from the sun and my constant awareness of Eli isn’t enough on the already exhausting trip, the three guards I’ve been saddled with would be enough to drive me right over the edge.
Them being on the trip has to be a punishment. For me, not them. Not that I know what I did to be saddled with these dickheads. If I had to have a different crew, why couldn’t it be Huey and the blokes I already work with? It’s bullshit. And itdoesn’t fucking matter, because no matter what, I’m stuck with them.
They have absolutely no respect for the land they are travelling, the animals they are travelling on or the people they are travelling with. Rather than following the cleared track that makes the road, they risked themselves and their camels by racing them through the scrubs. Sure, the animals are well trained and don’t spook easily, but there is no guarantee they won’t trip or buck their rider off. And I swear, if I have to put a camel down because it got injured because of their fuckery, the animal and rider are getting buried together.
Huey told me that a lot of the guards think I think I’m better than them because of my experience growing up outside The Facility. I like to think that’s wrong. I don’t think I’m better than anyone or look down on them because of the way I grew up. Fuck—I wouldn’t wish my childhood on any of them.
But this lot tests me. Maybe they should’ve had some harsher lessons growing up to learn some responsibility.
