Page 43 of All Your Days
Animals have already begun to gather. I can see the twitching nose of a wallaroo peeking out from behind a rock. The water is more tempting than we are scary.
“How the fuck was I meant to know?” Eli fires back at Ryan, launching towards him with fire in his eyes and reddened cheeks. “How did you fuckers not spot it on watch?Useless!”
Ryan steps up to Eli until they are chest to chest, breathing hard and angrily. “You wanna talk about ‘useless’, little man? Why the fuck are you even here, except to fuck around with Jacob—and you can’t even seem to do that properly!”
The petty jab knocks us all out of our stupor. Cale and Malcolm haul Ryan back, while Lou latches onto Eli who looks ready to shred Ryan alive.
“You fuckin’ fuck—” Eli fights against Lou, his yelling spooking off any roos or critters sniffing about for an easy drink.
“Enough!” I bellow, stepping between the pair.
Thank fuck they both stop. I glare at them and then at the water still dripping from the tank.
“Shit happens on the road. But fightin’ ‘bout it is only a waste of fuckin’ time.”
Ryan snarls and my fist curls by my side. I’m rarely angry enough to get in a fight, especially before breakfast, but I really feel like slamming my fist into his face would solve a lot of my problems right now.
“Eli, Lou, do what you can to get breakfast sorted without water. I don’t wanna waste time goin’ back to refill. We’ve got a way to go ‘till the next bore, but we should be fine, so long’s we’re careful with what we’ve got.”
“Yup, will do.” Lou agrees readily, hauling back an angry Eli so hard that his feet scramble on the pebbly ground.
I turn back to the others. “Right, now you learn how to fix the tank. Malcolm, stop it leakin’. Cale and Ryan, see if you can tilt it to the side a bit so the water isn’t right over the hole. I’ll get the equipment from the trailer.”
“—not so bad, means we get on the way quicker, doesn’t it?” I hear Lou reassuring Eli as they potter around the campfire getting things ready.
I wish I had his confidence when we set out for the morning. The tension between me and Eli seems to have bled into the entire group. Even Cale, Ryan, and Malcolm are sniping at each other by the time we get on the road, and I can’t help but be unreasonably angry at myself that the detour has gone to shit the way that it has. All I wanted was to do something nice for Eli.
Nothing improves as the day draws on.
At lunch Malcolm nicks off to take a leak and almost ends up in a fight with a male red kangaroo, only escaping because he had the wits to take his gun with him, shooting a blast—and wasting a bullet—to scare the thing off. Mid afternoon has Cale nearly falling off his fucking camel in a dead faint. The idiot decided to try to conserve our water by not drinking—completely unnecessary and a brilliant fucking way to die while riding a fucking camel through the desert and the sun blazing above him.
Though, to be honest, we probably should have gone back and refilled—even if the extra time would’ve pissed everyone off more. The leak hit our water reserves harder than any of us realised. By the time we reach a bore near our camp for the second night, the tank is nearly dry. In all my years travelling the Outback, fuck, even the country, I’ve never run so close to empty before.
If something had been wrong with this bore, there is no way we’d have made it to the next one. I don’t know how they travelled the desert before the Union dug the wells after the war. I know people lived out here, even before there were cars, but the idea of it feels impossible now. After things went to shit in the world, it took a while for us all to relearn everything the people who lived here first knew for centuries. A lot of people died from things that should’ve been known.
I end up having to take Cale’s shift on watch, considering he’s puking up his guts from heat exhaustion, so there is no chance of him being any use.
In the quiet, I alternate between watching the stars shoot across the sky and the perfect stillness of Eli’s tent.
I can count all the words he said to me today on my hand.
“Here.”
“You want this?”
“Stop—I need to piss.”
“Scorpion.”
The last one was to let me know about a little bastard that was creeping towards me at lunch. I appreciated it.
He’s spoken to Lou. Malcolm, too. And Cale.
On the road today, Lou tried a couple of times to start a conversation between the three of us, but it just died in the arse. And a couple of times, when it was just us two over the course of the day, Lou tried to say something just to me, but he stopped himself. Not subtly, every time there was a sigh and muttering to go with it.
Not sure what’s worse—the disappointment from a man I respect or if we had had the conversation he’s itching to have.
I know what he wants to say. He wants to tell me how ‘we just need to talk’. That it’s obvious that we have ‘affection’ for each other and life is too short to piss it away on whatever tiff or quarrel we’ve had.
