“Enough
Water for Seventy Horses”
a short story
by Dheborah Quirke
I
could hear the sound of metal screaming. It was a tortured sound of cold
groans…moaning metal stretching as fumigated grain was poured into the shunted
carriages. Metal against metal. Aching. Pained. It was almost like a muffled
heartbeat, interrupted by a sound like rolling thunder with piercing staccato
screeches. The noise of the saw grinding against the metal of the
car door was making me feel sick. My dad said his teeth hurt when chalk
squeaked.
Tonight she was late. A call came through from the ambulance crew,
warning us to expect a casualty from the nearby Namelkatchem Reserve. Hurry up
Tiffany; hurry up; Joey was thinking. Her night staff nurse hadn’t arrived.
Joey didn’t know where anything was and Tiffany had to do the stock order. A
second phone call came through. Tiffany wasn’t coming. Her car was lying upside
down in the reserve. Driving in the dark, as she came around the bend near the
turn-off to Minnivale, she hadn’t seen the shaggy, damp red kangaroo standing
in the middle of the road.
Joey spoke to the nurse on call, “They were going to be a while. Can you
come in and help me? I don’t know how bad it’s going to be,” she said. “Just
get here as quickly as possible. There has been a smash and my night nurse
hasn’t arrived. I’ll explain when you get here.”
I was cold and
nauseated. Trapped inside the car, I closed my eyes and imagined I was inside
the box. I peeled off brightly coloured cartoon stickers and stuck them over
the inside. A shiny blue streamer hung off the back edge where a little whistle
had appeared on a piece of string. Attached to the luminous orange foam ring on
the right side was a squeaky ball. Two silver cardboard stars shone like
sparkling headlights at the front. I remembered the day it was filled to the
top with polystyrene balls. They squeaked as I moved and they stuck to me with
the static of my body as I tried to swim in them. It was the most colourful,
amazing, joy-filled box.
On my third birthday, I
found a big brown cardboard box in the room my parents got their medication in.
“It’s a magic box!”
said the nurse. She was kind of fat but her eyes twinkled.
“Wow! A magic box?” I exclaimed
with my eyes wide open in excitement.
Northam had no x-ray services for the weekend. There was only one nurse
at Wyalkatchem. The chopper couldn’t come in due to fog. She was given morphine
while she lay on the gravel. It was
raining. A slow, trickle of rain against her face hid her tears.
The
sound cut into her while
the teeth of the cutting jaw chewed the metal. The car creaked and yawned like beast is in agony. She
lay trapped in sound. Then, when it was silent…a hollow, lone bird
sound pierced the
night. This used to be
where the horse teams stopped to rest. The reserve has wagon wheel scars. There was enough water for seventy horses.Tiffany's mouth
was parched.
She tried to swallow and said softly, “I’m really thirsty!”
The box changed shape.
It changed colour. I found surprises. Stickers. Luminous orange dots. Glitter.
Glue. Pendants. Silver shapes. Ball-things. Tiny books with mysterious
pictures. Sometimes, it was invisible.
The magic box made a
tooting, party sound some days. My dad, with sea-weed injecting site
tattoo-colours on his legs, watched me in the box. A tiny colouring-in book
once appeared, with bright, crazy crayons. Slowly…my box transformed into
something magical; wonderful; most fantastical.
Methadone had melted my
mother’s teeth to a marshmallow brown but she was beautiful and fun. She called me Sylus. When she fell over, she would
laugh and say, “I’m just a bit smashed.”
The box made her happy
too.
Jules, my father, and
Susanne’s daily medication was crushed into a white, chunky powder every day at
two o’clock. Taken with a glass of water, it stopped the nausea.
“It keeps us off
heroin,” my mother said. They had to pay for the heroin.
Jules had held a shaky,
loaded hand gun to a terrified girl’s head and shouted, “Drive! Just fucking
drive!”
He served his time in
prison for hijacking and robbery. Mum said she cried every day ... and she refused to wash her hair.The first time, I don't think she washed her hair until he came home five years later.
Before he went back to
jail, he gave me a tiny golden gun on a solid gold chain. I didn’t understand
why. He said it was because of something he did with an axe at a petrol station
when he had to pay for the heroin.
“But dad, you’re not a
bad person!” I said, confused. “You are always nice to me and really friendly.”
I kicked the box and I shouted, “I don’t want your stupid necklace!”
The manager of the
hospital told the cleaner to throw away the box. My whole life collapsed into a
desolate, dark, nothingness. When I walked into the dosing room, the nurse told
me.
“The box is gone,” she
said.
“It’s gone?” I said in
disbelief, “But it’s a magic box. I love
the box.”
When I got home, I
cried. The magic box…was gone.
I reached to touch the
chain around my neck. My finger ran over the chilled, worn surface of the tiny
gun. The ambulance would arrive at the State Trauma unit in two and a half
hours. As the stretcher was wheeled out of the accident and emergency unit, I
caught a glimpse of an old lady who was sitting with her eyes closed in a
powdery blue recliner chair. I could hear a kind of rusty moan. I think she was
singing. She seemed to be picking at some crumbs from a bit of chocolate cake
and had just a hint of a smile on her face. Her lips were moving at the same
pace as the music. She could shut out the pain and go to that
place. It was somewhere she could sing and dance: a place so beautiful. She
had…somewhere wonderful, magical, and most fantastical. She had enough water
for seventy horses.
My shaking jaw felt
like a size seven earthquake. I closed my eyes and poured my soul into their revealing,
salt sea-green rivers. If I was to survive the night inside my shocked, splintered
limbs, I had to find my box …ever wonderful, magical… most fantastical.
By Dheborah Quirke.
(This is not really the true story but the people are and I apologise sincerely to Jules who is in prison for an armed robbery. I wrote this in the hope that his kids turn out to be strong and kind and I will never, ever forget the magic box).
