‘What?’
‘Nothing. I just remembered something.’
Nathan’s own coolroom had been on the blink for a while, and after several weeks of waiting, the repair contractor was in the area. He’d been due, finally, at Nathan’s place that day, Nathan remembered now as he pulled open the heavy door to the large family coolroom built off the kitchen. The contractor would have let himself in, no problem with that, but Nathan had expected to be there. He’d try to call him.
There was no problem with this coolroom at least, he thought as he walked in, goosebumps immediately rising on his skin. He stood for a minute among the industrial quantities of frozen food, enjoying the temperature, before extracting a beer from a tower of slabs.
Back in the kitchen, he poked his head into the storeroom next door. It was well stocked, he was relieved to see. Not that he’d expected anything less, but if Cameron had been distracted, supplies weren’t something you wanted to let slide. Much like Nathan’s own storeroom at home, it was like walking into a corner store. The shelves groaned with months’ worth of rice and pasta and cans. Lists were pinned to the wall, keeping track of how many of each item was in stock. Everything was in double figures.
Nathan looked around and sipped his beer. He’d need to double check his own stores were in shape if Harry was right about the flood. He should be all right though. Like every other household in the region, Nathan placed his regular supermarket order in the nearest city, and every six weeks a huge refrigerated truck trundled the thousand-kilometre road north from Adelaide with the whole town’s orders. Plan ahead, or pay the price. Nathan knew what he would be eating for every meal for the next six months. He always had enough to get through the floods, especially with it just being him, but if he was going to be trapped, he wanted to be prepared.
He closed the storeroom door behind him, and out in the hall he picked up the landline and called the coolroom contractor. Cameron’s wallet was sitting on the hall table next to the phone, as he’d expected. He picked it up as the call went to voicemail and flicked through while he left a message. A couple of credit cards, some cash. One or two faded receipts from the service station in town. Nathan pulled out the driver’s licence and looked at his brother’s photo. Cameron was not smiling, which was unusual, and he had instead assumed a dutifully neutral look. He still had a hint of humour around the eyes though and Nathan could imagine he’d just finished sharing a laugh with the photographer. Nathan snapped the wallet shut.
He picked up his beer and wandered through to the lounge. The house barely changed from decade to decade. The couch was the same one they’d had since he was a kid and he’d slept on it many times before. It wasn’t bad. He saw that Liz had left some clean clothes folded for him and picked them up. They had to be Cameron’s. Practicality always won out over sentimentality, but it still felt strange to be holding his dead brother’s shirt and jeans.
A plastic Christmas tree stood in the corner of the living room, its lights twinkling. There were already a few presents underneath. Nearby, in the centre of the wall and displayed in a heavy frame that Nathan knew had been expensive, hung Cameron’s prize-winning painting of the stockman’s grave.
It had been a while since Nathan had last seen it and he leaned in to take a closer look. The image caught the grave at sunrise – viewers sometimes mistook it for sunset but Nathan knew from the position that it was morning – with beams of light refracting out from the horizon. Cameron had paid a lot of attention to the way the light played through the sky, with tiny brushstrokes and a rich palette of colour that captured the detail.
The grave itself was almost an afterthought by comparison. Its dark tones loomed in the bottom half of the painting, and its shape was implied rather than explicit. Even Nathan, who knew exactly bugger-all about art, thought he could see why it was so popular. When it had won its prize, he’d read a couple of discussions and critiques online where people had attached all sorts of meaning to it. Light vanquishing darkness, and vice versa. Loneliness, grief, rebirth. Someone had said they could see the hint of the stockman standing in the muddy greys where the light met the dark.
Personally, Nathan had never liked the picture all that much. It was a pretty good painting, he could admit, but it didn’t capture the landscape for him. The contrast between the dark and the light seemed a bit heavy-handed. Whenever he was out there, especially alone, it always felt much more fluid.
Nathan flopped down on the couch and looked again at the pile of his brother’s clothes. They were almost exactly the same as his own – not surprising given that everyone he knew shopped at the same place – but were a size or two smaller. Nathan and Cameron had been the same height since they were seventeen but his brother was – had been – lean and athletic where Nathan was more broad and solid.
When Nathan had found himself alone – not the first time when Jacqui had left, but the second time, the real time – he had passed long hours working out feverishly with a dented old weights set in one of his sheds. After a while, it had dawned on him that no-one ever saw what he looked like, let alone cared. Overnight he had stopped lifting weights and spent the hours instead lying on his couch drinking beer. But it was hard enough to get up every morning in the dark even without a hangover, and the physical work around the property demanded a certain level of strength and fitness, so he’d had to rein that in too. He’d put down the beer and picked up the weights on and off, and had managed to land somewhere in the middle. But he’d never quite got back to what he was.
Nathan looked down at his own shirt, still red with dust, as a shadow passed by the window. Ilse. She was silhouetted in the twilight, reaching up to unpeg bedsheets from the washing line. They billowed and snapped around her in the wind as though someone was running through them. Nathan watched a moment more, then dropped his brother’s shirt back on the couch and went outside to talk to his brother’s wife.
Ilse’s eyes went to the red dust on his clothes straight away. It seemed more obvious somehow out there in the open air than it had been in the kitchen. Nathan could see her considering its origin as her hand stilled on a peg.
‘They’re going in the wash.’
She didn’t say anything, just turned back to the sheets.
‘Listen, Ilse, sorry about that stupid stockman story at dinner. I didn’t mean to upset you.’
She pushed a sheet aside to look at him. ‘I’m not upset because of the story, Nathan.’
‘No. I suppose not.’
She stretched up to grab a pillowcase. They belonged to the girls, judging by the pattern.
‘Leave them,’ Nathan said. ‘You don’t have to do that now.’
‘I do. They’re Lo’s. They’ve been out since yesterday.’
‘It’s already too late then.’ The bed linen would have been dry five minutes after it was put out. The cotton was now covered in two days’ worth of grit. ‘They’ll have to get washed again anyway. Leave it for now.’
‘No.’
‘Then let me give you a hand.’
Ilse opened her mouth as though to protest, then gave a defeated shrug. ‘Thanks.’ She twisted a peg in her fingers. ‘Nathan, what do you think happened to Cam?’
He pulled a sheet off the line and didn’t reply straight away.
‘Did he get separated from his car by accident?’ She stared hard at the peg in her hands. ‘Or did it look like he meant it?’
