Follow the Shadows

Abstract

A workaholic, i was showing signs of burnout. i was told to take a holiday.There's too much work, i argued, but my business partner told me a colleague would cover my role.There's nothing else i want to do, i pleaded, and she suggested i spend a week helping her son in the outback.Sam needs an organizer. someone like you to start his engine, she said in a tone indicating the conversation was over.I had met her son sam several times before when he'd come to town to renegotiate the terms of his mortgage. He was struggling in the drought.Leaving the city behind, i drove ten hours northwest into flat, stricken land. it was wheat country, or so it had once been when fields of grain heads danced under sweet raindrops. When harvests never failed. now it was only parched split earth.I turned at the homestead's sign and drove twenty kilometers over a corrugated dirt road and arrived at a dilapidated weatherboard house. sam welcomed me with an awkward hello. He was as i remembered him. Big and shy. only, now he was unshaven. despondency etched on his face. in a clumsy show of hospitality, he made me a plate of sandwiches and a cup of tea. He showed me to my room at the opposite end of the house to his. sleep saw dreams of white lines and blurred landscape, and i woke to a hot sunrise streaming through my window. the sky bright blue. not a cloud. no memory of rain.I got up and walked through the house to find sam sunken into an armchair, his demeanor drooped like the bull-nose veranda around his house. His broad brow flecked with sunspots and his hands scored.Make yourself at home, he murmured, resigned to my presence.I threw back a black coffee and began by running a damp cloth over every piece of furniture in the house, sinking the red dust into a bucket of hot water. i swept and mopped the floors, vacuumed the carpets, scrubbed the bath scum, and scoured algae from the toilet bowl. the house creaked and groaned, uncomfortable with its bustling intruder. sam watched the dust settle back onto the surfaces i had just cleaned.The kitchen was a health hazard hungry for repair. the walls and shelves tacky with creosote and fat; the stove black with grime. i skipped breakfast and took the ute into the sleepy town, some fifty kilometers west, and bought a bag of sugar soap, a scraper, two brushes, and a drum of white paint. the slow, blowsy shopkeeper looked from me to sam's ute outside and back, and the corners of her mouth twisted into a smirk.Back at the house, i was soon in a sweat as i scrubbed and scraped back the walls. My face turned puce. sam watched my frenzy from his chair, his face blank, impervious. i saw him turn to the window and look at the land outside, shimmering in the searing heat. A gleam flickered in his eyes and then he rose, went outside letting the screen door slam behind him, and came back with a stepladder. He unpacked the cupboards and cleared the shelves. together we painted the kitchen. …