Free The Windy Season by Sam Carmody Page B

every shop with all the stuff there in bags on the counter. I know they look at my skinny arse and wonder where I’m putting it all.
    An hour out of Innamincka the big fella has to ditch his bike. Steering head bearings gone and he can hardly turn it, so I have him on the back of mine, feel him killing the suspension. Imagine the bike exploding out on every drop in the track. Bolts and spokes and pistons rifling out into the brush in so many million shining pieces like space junk.
    The President is heavier in more ways than just the guts.
    I think it is the worry that makes him eat like he does. Like a hole in him that he cannot fill and I swear to God he tries real hard to plug it right up but there’s no way of plugging a hole that big.
    And every night he is grunting away and whimpering like a dying man. I listen to it and think it is all the dead speaking through him. God knows there are enough dead fellas who would have something to say.
    I tell the President he has a hole in him that he cannot fill and he just says to me, Swiss, you mind your own business.

Jester
    THAT NIGHT, IN THE SPARE ROOM MICHAEL had prepared for him, Paul lay uselessly alert in the heat, the skin of his back stuck to the bedsheets. He lay on his right side, turned where he couldn’t feel the throb of his heart against the bed. Measuring time between pulses. He listened to the wind outside and studied the bedroom that was still new to him. The room was empty of furniture and the walls were blank. There was just the mattress he was lying on and his suitcase in the corner of the room with his clothes spilling out the top of it.
    There was the familiar grip in his stomach, the ache from a day of purging but also of worrying. Paul had never talked to his parents about it, but for a long time, since he and Elliot were kids, he had worried about his brother. There were times when his brother’s listlessness had drifted into something worse, darker; something that scared the shit out of Paul.
    When he saw Elliot like that he had capered around him like a jester, as though it was his duty to resuscitate his brother’s mood. In those times, Elliot looked at all things, living or inanimate, as though waiting for them to perform. A television show. Food. Paul could sense the pressure he applied to each experience and he took it on, urging them to please his brother, yet they invariably disappointed.
    Occasionally Paul could persuade him down to the ocean. He’d talk up the conditions, the likelihood of finding octopus or groper, the evangelising speech coming out of his mouth almost involuntarily, and if he went on long enough he could get Elliot moving. He’d pull the gear from the shed then herd Elliot into his bedroom, waiting outside as his older brother languidly put on his wetsuit.
    On the short walk up to Swanbourne Beach, at the edge of the Cottesloe marine reserve, Elliot would state what Paul had known all along. That the time of day was all wrong. The ocean was too warm, the sandy bottom barren and exposed. That they’d be unlikely to find anything. Paul willed there to be fish. He could physically feel the urging in his skin, like he was trying to summon the elements. In the water he wouldn’t even be afraid. All he wanted was for Elliot to find something. His brother’s spear became his own. But there would be no fish. The sea would go quiet on them, as if it could sense their desperation. And Paul would feel all the emptiness his brother felt. He cursed the sea under his breath. The sea that had all the potential to make things better would feign lifelessness. The brothers would walk home together in silence, Paul feeling the full weight of failure, and a creeping worry that wouldn’t leave him until night came and he knew his brother was asleep.

Torpedo
    ON SUNDAY PAUL WOKE AT MIDDAY . Fingers stiff. The pillow smelt of shampoo and salt and fish blood. After three weeks he had almost grown used to it. The wind was going outside. He