Trails in the Dust

by Joy Dettman

  ‘How are they going to search a few thousand square miles of nothing, Harry?’

  ‘I’m going up there with Ted and Lenny – and Lila. We’ll find her. We won’t stop looking until we do, Georgie, so don’t you go giving up on her. I’ve known her, girl and woman, and she never gave up.’

  ‘She’s damn near eighty years old, Harry.’

  ‘That’s a dirty word. Don’t you go letting her hear you say it,’ Harry said. ‘As far as I’m concerned, she’s alive until I know otherwise. Now you try to get some sleep.’

  ‘When will you sleep?’

  ‘I’ve been catnapping, and Lenny’s driving us up there. I’ll sleep on the way. We’ll probably find her hitchhiking home.’

  He ended the call and Georgie took the phone back to the charger. She’d been drinking coffee all night. Paul’s wine was on the top shelf of the fridge. She rarely drank it but poured herself a waterglass full.

  He’s made himself a Jenny voodoo doll he spends his days sticking pins into, Jenny had once said of the old bloke in the clouds. I thwarted him by living, Georgie, and the old bugger has been out to get me since.

  Keep thwarting him, mate, Georgie thought, and she took her wine back to the couch where she sat watching that Yankee talking-head show.

  EPILOGUE

  ‘Get up and walk,’ Jenny said. ‘Stand up, put one foot in front of the other, then the other in front of it. Now.’

  She wasn’t certain when she’d started talking to herself, but any voice in the dark is comforting and it was good advice. Had she been able to see where to put that one foot in front of the other, she might have taken her own advice. Couldn’t see much right now.

  The darkest hour always comes before the dawn, so they say. She’d had that slice of moon to guide her until shortly before she’d fallen. It had deserted her, as had those pockets of starlight. The sky was currently spitting at her.

  She’d been rained on earlier, not heavy rain but steady rain. Hours since she’d last heard her car. Yesterday. Her mobile, which refused to pick up a signal, had battery power enough to tell her that Tuesday seventeenth had clicked over to Wednesday eighteenth, D-day, delivery day, the eighteenth. She wasn’t going to be in Willama at eleven to hand over her keys. She’d missed her hair appointment yesterday, hadn’t picked up her photographs, hadn’t bought a new mobile. Her old mobile’s battery died at 3:13, maybe an hour ago, maybe more.

  There was no shelter out here. Any trees that had managed to scratch a living from this land long enough to grow old had grown stunted. She had her back to one. Its canopy was sparse.

  Until maybe half an hour ago, she’d been walking, until she’d caught the toe of her left shoe on a stick and landed face down in the dirt.

  ‘It could have been worse,’ she said. ‘I could have broken a bone. If I’d tried to save myself with my hands, I could have been nursing a broken wrist like that old New Zealand chap. He’d tried to save himself with his hands and ended up in hospital.’

  She’d landed on her shoulder, which didn’t feel good but still moved. She had a sore spot behind her left ear she couldn’t blame on her fall, sore ribs too she couldn’t blame on the fall. A few hours ago, she’d had a lump the size of a pullet’s egg behind that ear. It was a patch of stiff hair now. It must have bled. The gouge in her brow had bled. If there was a bright side to that, it was that the branch had missed her eyes. Skin healed. Eyes didn’t. Not that they could see a damn thing. She’d put her glasses on since she’d tripped. Still couldn’t see anything.

  ‘Get up,’ she said. ‘People die of hypothermia on nights like this. Do you want to end up pig food?’

  It would sell a few books. Juliana Conti, believed to have been eaten by wild pigs – after she died of hypothermia . . .

  She wasn’t cold, or her top half wasn’t. She could thank a few ducks for that; her old parka was duck-down padded, wind and shower proofed, and the warmest jacket she’d ever owned.

  ‘It makes you look like the Michelin Man,’ Trudy had said, and thereafter, it had hung behind the laundry door. She’d almost given it to the op-shop the day she’d cleaned out the laundry. Couldn’t do it. There’d been too many good memories attached to it, and if she got out of this, she’d frame it. She’d found two crumpled tissues in one of its pockets and an unopened roll of peppermint Life Savers in the other. They would have been past their use-by date, but they’d saved her life – to date they’d saved her life.

  ‘Do Life Savers have a use-by date?’ she asked the night. These days everything did. Her mobile was well past its. She’d been going to buy herself a modern phone yesterday and get herself a new number. The Telstra shop was next door to her hairdresser.

  That packet of Life Savers told her when she’d last worn her Michelin Man parka. She’d given up smoking a month after Trudy came home, or had given up buying packets of smokes. That’s when she’d hung the parka on that nail behind the laundry door, so she could sneak out at night and walk around to Harry to beg him for a smoke. She’d quit officially three months before actually quitting, though Trudy and Jim had never known it. Used to crunch peppermint Life Savers all the way home, then pick a few leaves from the lemon tree to rub all evidence from her hands.

  She used to do that when the kids had been small, when Granny wouldn’t allow a smoker inside her house. Used to sneak down behind the fig tree, suck her smoke down to the butt, bury it then chew mint leaves and wash her hands with lemon leaves.

  And Jimmy had remembered the scent of lemon leaves on her hands.

  If Jim or Trudy had bothered to go into the laundry, that parka may have given up her secret walks in the night. She could almost smell a wisp of that last cigarette in the collar of that showerproof fabric.

  She’d quit, for the sake of the babies Trudy had been carrying, and because passive smoke was bad for a non-smoker’s lungs – according to Trudy and other experts, though tonight she might have disproved their passive smoke theory – last night. For hours she’d breathed in the fumes of whatever he’d been smoking in his bubble pipe. You can’t see much when you’re driving. She’d smelt it. Raelene’s drug of choice had been heroin. His was probably ice. She’d read about ice that could turn a sane man crazy. A few of the Duffys were on it – and crazy enough without it.

  ‘Although,’ she said, ‘I could have been passively ice crazy when I ran off into the middle of nowhere.’

  She’d expected a fence, a farm, people, warmth, and found nothing and no one.

  No disposable lighter in her parka pockets. If she’d had a lighter she would have been able to see the time on her watch, she could have lit a fire.

  ‘Fires keep wild animals away,’ she said, or they did on television. Australia had no wild animals – no four-legged wild animals. ‘Nothing would burn anyway,’ she said. ‘Bugger the rain.’

  Until last night she’d never seen a wild pig, or not in the wild. They were big. She’d seen one of them ripping the innards out of a dead roo with six-inch-long tusks. That’s where she’d been heading when she’d tripped, back to that road, back to those pigs.

  When she’d started her walk, she’d told herself that if she could do three kilometres an hour, she’d be there by daylight. If she’d been able to walk on that track, she might have done her three kilometres an hour.

  He might have run her down too. Twice she’d thought he’d gone but he’d driven back. Not for a good while though.

  ‘Probably miles away in my poor little car,’ she said.

  She’d done a lot of walking in her time, though little of it alone. Always had a dog at her heels or a kid in a stroller, or a couple of kids holding her hands. She’d walked Jimmy home from the city one day when the tram drivers called a snap strike, when she’d lived with Ray, in Armadale.

  ‘That had to be a six-kilometre hike,’ she said.

  That walk had worn a hole through the sole of her shoe, a cheap shoe. She’d paid a hundred and forty dollars for the pair she was wearing tonigh
t. They had a strip of metal between their rubber soles and their cushioned innersoles – which she hadn’t known about until they’d made the metal detector beep at Tullamarine.

  ‘Take your shoes off,’ a woman in uniform had said.

  ‘There are no knives or drugs in them,’ she’d said.

  ‘Take your shoes off!’

  She’d taken them off.

  She hadn’t paid a lot for her parka. Had bought it at the end of a winter, eight or ten years ago, reduced to half price. Used to wear it all winter until the day of the Michelin Man. She’d bought a new black parka, not as warm but it looked better.

  Her legs weren’t warm. Her slacks felt damp, as did the dirt beneath her backside, cold and damp. She had to get up.

  It was pure luck that she had that parka. She’d made a grab for her handbag, not thinking about her rings but her mobile – and the damn fool thing had refused to pick up a signal. Her bag’s shoulder strap had got a grip on the sleeve of her parka.

  ‘Pure luck.’

  Didn’t have a clue where she was – other than she was somewhere out of Telstra range. She could have been in the backblocks of Victoria or New South Wales. She’d crossed a bridge while diverting around a town. He hadn’t liked towns and had gone screaming mad when her diversion over a bridge had led into another town. She’d seen a part of its name. BAR-something.

  ‘Barmah? Barnawartha? Barham?’

  One of Lila’s litter mates had been bought by a chap from Barham. He’d driven a long way to buy that pup. The smartest dogs ever born, those red kelpies.

  ‘So get home to her,’ she said. ‘Get up and walk. And go back to that track.’

  It wasn’t far off to her right. Three times tonight – this morning – she’d cut back through the scrub, just to make certain she was still walking east and not in circles.

  ‘He won’t come back again.’

  Who knew what he’d do, and why bother anyway? She’d taken her first breath alone in scrub beside a railway line. Maybe the old bugger in the clouds had her written down to take her last alone in the scrub.

  ‘We’re born, we labour, and if we struggle through to old age, you give us arthritis or dementia, or both, you mean old coot,’ she said. ‘You’re probably sitting up there, bathed in moonlight, having hysterics.’

  Talking made her mouth dry and she had to stop doing it. She’d had a full bottle of water at 11:22. There wasn’t much left now, not enough to swallow a Panadol. She needed one. Her shoulder was aching and her ribs. There was enough left in that bottle to dissolve an aspro, which might get her moving – or put her to sleep. She was tired enough. She’d been wriggling her feet until a while ago, as she had on the plane. Too much effort now to wriggle them, and they felt dead. Her legs were sufficiently alive to feel the cold and the weight of her handbag, which was doing what it could to keep her thighs warm.

  She’d have aspros in that bag, and with her good arm she reached for it, then with both hands felt out the top zipper, which had developed a bad habit of jamming halfway open. She eased it past its jamming point, then felt for the inside zipper and her rings.

  Still there. She hadn’t worn them in three months, not since the day of the splinter. Rings and jewellery helped with the identification of bodies, or they did on TV cop shows – and her wedding ring definitely would. Jim had it engraved in Sydney with their names and the year she should have married him. Jen and Jim 1942. She’d worn it in Sydney, called herself Mrs Hooper. Had worn it on her right hand in Armadale when she’d married Ray – until she’d sold his wedding ring, so she could feed her kids – and put Jim’s ring in its place. Not until ’59 had it been sanctified by marriage, though in her mind, she’d been married to Jim since 1942.

  She slid it back where it belonged, slid her engagement ring on, then her eternity ring, relieved that they were on her finger and not in his pocket. He’d taken her wallet. Had probably taken her pills. She’d packed aspros and Panadol in the front pocket of her bag the day she’d flown away. She’d swallowed a few but not all of them.

  The side zipper slid open easily. Her hand found paper. It felt like a supermarket receipt. She pitched it. Found a business card. Maybe that of the London taxi driver. She pitched it too. Like a house, a handbag accumulated too much junk. She found a ticket stub. It could have been from the Venetian opera. Not much use to her tonight. It followed the business card and supermarket receipt.

  Her seeking fingers found a mint, left by a hotel maid on her pillow. She’d been rationing her Life Savers. She didn’t have to ration that mint and peeled the paper from it. Her dry mouth thanked her. She pitched the wrapper and smiled as she composed next week’s or next month’s news.

  Searchers today found evidence that Juliana Conti sat in the dirt cleaning out her handbag before the pigs ate her.

  The Panadol pills were there and easily identified in the dark. They came in sheets of ten and fewer than half were missing from that sheet. She considered them, considered crunching a couple with the mint. They’d spoil its flavour.

  ‘Got you,’ she said, her fingers identifying foil and the shape of two soluble aspros. She closed the zips, placed the bag on her thighs again, peeled the foil from the pills then reached for her water bottle.

  ‘Aspros thin the blood,’ she said. ‘Is thinning frozen blood good for it or bad? It might give it easier access to my extremities,’ she said. Then removing the lid from her bottle, she dropped both pills into what felt like maybe an inch of water.

  She’d gulped down too much when she’d heard her car roar away, when she’d believed herself capable of walking twenty kilometres, but the maniac had come roaring back, the headlights blazing. She’d been rationing that water since.

  ‘There’s not much that an aspro or two won’t fix,’ she said, the bottle to her ear so she might listen for the fizzing to stop.

  No noise out here. Still too early for birds, too late for crickets, too cold for buzzing mosquitoes. She shook the bottle to assist the aspro dance, then listened again until what was in the bottle became silent. The mint, grown smaller, she tucked in her cheek while sipping that lemony, slightly salty liquid. Didn’t sip all of it. Screwed the lid back on and returned the bottle to her bag.

  She was supposed to hand over the keys at eleven this morning. The keys were in her car, and God only knew where it was. Hadn’t picked up her photographs – one hundred and forty-six of them plus double prints of Johanna’s nine London shots she’d promised to post.

  ‘What happens to photographs when their owner never returns to pay for their printing?’ she asked, then replied to her own question. ‘They get tossed in a bin.’

  That photograph-shop chap wouldn’t toss her memory card. He’d delete her grand tour, delete Jimmy and his family, and consider that card payment for time and effort spent.

  She’d planned to go through them last night and remove the shots of Jimmy’s family. Tracy had taken a good one of her and Jimmy, and a better one of her with her great-grandchildren. She could never have shown them to her girls, could never have mentioned Tracy, or Robin, or his voice.

  He was the reason why she decided to buy a new mobile and get a new number. He’d added her old number to his contacts, so he could call her at Christmas time, meet up with her, meet her girls. It could never have happened. When she’d given Jimmy the medals and necklet she’d promised herself that she’d write the end to the Jimmy saga, and if that had meant learning to use a new mobile and giving up her familiar number, then she’d do it.

  ‘Would a new mobile have picked up a signal? Its battery wouldn’t have gone flat,’ she said. ‘Who would have believed when I was young that one day people would walk around with telephones in their handbags, that the entire world would be become reliant on computers?

  ‘Oh shit,’ she said. ‘That disc!’

  She’d meant to bring that manila envelope home with her. She’d meant to chop that disc into a hundred pieces and bury those pieces deep. That’s all sh
e’d thought about on the plane, that disc and those photographs of Jimmy’s family, and Georgie never finding out that her brother and sister had married.

  And she’d forgotten to get that bloody disc!

  It was all there. The heartbreak of her meeting with Jimmy that day in Melbourne, thirty thousand words of it, sealed into an envelope. To be opened only in the event of my death.

  ‘Georgie will open it. She’ll read what’s on it. You can’t die, you malingering old bugger. Get up!’

  It took a while. She settled for her hands and knees for a minute, then using the trunk of the tree she’d leant against, she got her feet beneath her. Stood leaning on the stick that had tripped her and holding on to the tree while stamping life back into dead feet.

  They weren’t dead. Nor was she. She got the strap of her handbag over her hooded head and across her breast, then, using that stick as a blind man used a white cane, she put one foot in front of the other, then the other in front of it.

  And that old bugger in the clouds released his grip on the moon. ‘Let there be light,’ he said.

  And there was light. A little light. Enough.

  Also by Joy Dettman

  Mallawindy

  Jacaranda Blue

  Goose Girl

  Yesterday’s Dust

  The Seventh Day

  Henry’s Daughter

  One Sunday

  The Silent Inheritance

  Diamonds in the Mud

  Woody Creek series

  Pearl in a Cage

  Thorn on the Rose

  Moth to the Flame

  Wind in the Wires

  Ripple on a Pond

  The Tying of Threads

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, institutions and organisations mentioned in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously without any intent to describe actual conduct.

  First published 2019 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd 1 Market Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2000