Liner

by James Barlow

  No, only just because of sheer heat. And in one the driver had been trapped and screaming. It didn’t upset him too much except the smell of flesh burning.

  Duststorms in the Northern Territories, followed, to his astonishment, by rain. Huge clouds of red dust enveloping the vast loneliness, whipped by wind and then mixed with rain. Driving with a broken windshield – this along a stretch known as ‘crystal highway’ because of the broken glass which covered it – and rain flying into his face, turning to hail so that he couldn’t see at all and just groped ahead. Soaked to the skin for once. And rain turned the bull dust into red mud. Deep slippery ruts and even his big truck slithering from chuckhole to chuckhole. Skids. Once it could have killed him when his semi-trailer jackknifed, but he’d been lucky. Mud as tough as cement had collected on the truck that trip so that he’d had to stop every few miles for two hundred miles and scrape it off. He’d been saturated and filthy and exhausted by the time he’d reached the next town, where he learned that if the mud wasn’t cleaned off at once it would harden and never come off. Two Italian truckies had materialized and helped him. How nice next day to see the burning sun and Queensland’s fields of sugarcane, tobacco, bananas and bottle trees!

  Across the Nullarbor the endless dusty road of 1,700 miles from Adelaide to Perth, and temperatures of 114 degrees. Shattered windshields and frequent punctures, especially among sedans. Stop to help the baked traveller with two punctures, a shattered screen and an engine boiling its guts out.

  Dusty salt bush stretching to every horizon, parched and desolate sheep stations, the occasional half dozen trees twisted and bent down to the ground before the winds which howled off the Bight.

  Old towns buried under creeping sand dunes. A solitary roadhouse still there, with pictures and newspapers of yester-year fading on its walls like an abandoned museum.

  Rough roadhouses and clapboard ‘hotels.’ Iron bedsteads and paper thin walls, powdered milk and lukewarm showers, if any. No screens in the windows (sometimes no windows). Matches used to light up the pitch-black washroom; even this attracted all the winged insects of the area. Floors of hard earth covered with linoleum and doors without locks or handles. Flies hovering around the mouth and eyes and tickling the back.

  Classless Australia. He’d left England with this in mind, and here at every roadhouse he met men who drove the huge Macks with double-bogeys fore and aft, loaded with sheep or cattle; massive Peterbilts with refrigerated trailers full of beef, pork and fowl; Leyland, Mercedes, Foden, Reo, Dodge, Commer . . . Italians, Germans, Dutch, English, Australians . . . All driving vehicles covered with different dusts that bespoke thousands of miles. All talk was shop, but it was a very long time before Mike had realized that many of these tough men were so strained that they took drugs.

  He’d done the lot, from the Eyre Highway to the Stuart Highway – known simply as Bitumen, a forty-foot-wide ribbon of pinky tank tar stretching the 954 miles from Alice Springs to Darwin through a wilderness. Straight stretches of thirty and forty miles. It was easy to average sixty mph.

  He preferred the roads across the outback. In the Eastern States there were some good highways and he had often done eighty mph, so that sedans had found it impossible to overtake him. He never told Marion. There were plenty of fools, especially near cities. He’d seen quite a few smashes.

  Like the youths in two cars playing hid-and-seek in the Victorian countryside, the sports car being sought doing seventy without lights. A car with headlights had shot across the main road in front of Mike’s semi-trailer, following by a bump. He’d driven a few miles with a scraping noise, remote but worrying so that he’d stopped to see what had come loose. And embedded in the semi-trailer was a sports car with three youths inside. All dead. All decapitated. He had vomited, but it hadn’t really shaken him because he was not in error. If they drove across a main highway without lights . . .

  And the small sedan with driver and passenger, sandwiched between himself and another truck a hundred feet ahead. Everyone doing seventy. The sedan pulled out anxiously, its driver saw a truck racing toward him, waited until it had passed and then pulled out at seventy-five mph – and went straight into the sedan hidden by the bulk of the truck and right behind it. The passenger was hurled straight through the windshield a hundred and fifty feet. The drivers of both cars were very dead, but it was the passenger’s face, sliced to ribbons, that had made Mike sick. The other truck driver had shrugged. ‘Dumb bastards,’ was his comment.

  No one had ever been hurt by Mike, and he’d never been in any collisions. There were times when he’d been stupid with exhaustion and it could have happened, but he’d overcome that with the occasional pill. Quite safe. Harmless. Once a fortnight maybe . . .

  A few beers with two men, laughs, talk about horses, safe, a thousand yards from home, not drunk, it couldn’t happen, he knew he was warm with the booze, but this was no highway. A thousand yards of rough road – a track they’d call it in England – admittedly without street lights. If there were three thousand men in the outback town for the two days horse racing then now, now, at ten thirty at night, two thousand of them were drunk or drinking.

  It had to be him, the careful one, the serious one, not the youths who drove with elbows out of the window and bottles to their lips or with girls leaned across their left arms or kissing their necks. It had to be him, not drunken farmers in vehicles so old they shouldn’t be out on the road, even this road; Mike Burston who had driven hundreds of thousands of miles. Nothing on his mind except to go home and get into bed. No distractions, no girl to heat his mind and body, no quarrel or problem to take away concentration.

  A thousand yards to drive in his own car, slowly, nothing on the road. Two corners, eighteen houses.

  The child ran out straight in front of him. Half past ten at night and a child of four runs straight into your headlights. Right foot stamped on brake, but the kid’s already done it herself, and God only knows what damage the skidding vehicle has added.

  He didn’t know what speed he’d been doing, but it was slow, thirty probably, because to speed you had to consciously do it, nerves and muscles tightened.

  But the condition of his body? Yes, two or three cans of beer inside it on a sweltering hot night.

  Get out, go and see.

  He knew that one half of his life was over. He’d reached the end of something and the beginning of something else.

  She appeared intact. Her face was unmarked except, so far as he could see in the available light, puzzled, confused, wondering what had thrown her so violently.

  And then she began to scream.

  It had torn the flesh off him. He’d started to shake and sweat and pray and gabble. ‘No. Stop. Listen, kid. It’ll be all right. I’ll go and fetch. Please stop –’

  He’d run aimlessly in horror and solicitude. If physical effort, pain, speed, anything on his part, could make a difference –

  The first bungalow. Five startled people, never seen before. Crinkly hair, creased sweating faces, shirt sleeves, vulgar crockery, bottles of beer, no cloth on the table, two kids on the floor, should be in bed, Christ, what if it’s theirs?

  ‘Have you got a phone?’

  ‘What’s up, mate?’

  Words, delays, the suction of words and explanations to draw them into it. Rough practical words when they understood: ‘Doc Harvey’s at the club’ – ‘How did it happen?’ – ‘Must be Beryl’s kid; they oughta fetch her in, Christ, mate, this is gonna knock them outa business.’ And the long sweating moments, ludicrous dialogue on the phone, fools at the other end, and voices in the club making it difficult for whoever-it-was to talk anyway –

  ‘Doc Harvey? Who wants him?’

  ‘There’s been an accident –’

  They’d all gone to stand there and wait, and the kid had gone on screaming.

  ‘Sha
ll I fetch Beryl?’

  ‘Christ, no, she couldn’t take this. Wait till Doc’s given her a job or something.’

  Screams turned to sobs and groans.

  Doc Harvey, not pleased. ‘Why the hell didn’t you get the ambulance? Her back’s broken.’

  Discussion and decisions, rough and ready, outback style; and the kid had been put into Mike’s car and he’d driven to the hospital, drained of strength.

  ‘How did it happen?’

  The doc was the second of many to ask that.

  Explanations to a girl at the hospital, agitation, people coming and going.

  I’d give anything, anything in the world – my health, money, house, car, my sight and hearing if only –

  They took the kid away, but the screaming would go on forever –

  A policeman, shirt-sleeved, hot but calm. Begin again. Explanations, from and for his perspective. ‘Yeah, yeah, I see. I’ll take a look at the car in daylight. Can you leave it here?’

  I’m so tired I just want to die.

  The parents, hers, agitated as he’d never seen faces before.

  I’d give anything in the world, only let me go now –

  They did, and he stumbled home to Marion. She was frightened, didn’t understand his utter exhaustions. It had to be analyzed, discussed. He just wanted to sit still and stare. And the tiny fissures of dislike and widened into open cracks and burst into visible wounds. It all came boiling out, another agony, theirs.

  ‘Why you? Why did it have to be you? Why not one of those dim, coarse, stupid, dull people out there? We can’t stay here, Mike. I hate them. And they’ll hate you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he’d asked.

  He was numbed, incapable of feeling anything outside the area of screams, the panic and horror, the beginnings of appalling shame and recriminations. What else mattered?

  ‘What’ll they do?’ she wailed.

  ‘Who?’ he’d asked, drunk with tiredness and confusion.

  ‘If she dies you could go to prison.’

  Even this hadn’t penetrated.

  ‘Mike, were you drunk?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Nothing special.’

  ‘God, Mike, wake up. It’s serious.’

  ‘I’m tired,’ he said.

  ‘I hope she’s all right. My God, I hope it’s no serious.’

  There was no sleep. They just lay on a bed, sweating, tossing and turning; every quarter of an hour Marion thought of some other aspect, some way they could destroy him. Mike didn’t understand the need to prepare any defence. He had destroyed himself.

  In the morning people came; it had to be talked about. No one could really prove anything because only Mike had been there; he’d been the only witness, so to speak. It was too late now to determine if he’d been drunk. Only his conscience could prosecute him on that account. The marks on the vehicle told little. In the end it boiled down to words, talking about it.

  The rest was up to his conscience and nerves.

  Twelve hours later he’d stumbled again into his own bungalow. A neighbour was in there with Marion, who was pale and strained.

  He was far too broken to hide it or indulge in care. Only Marion was capable of pride or the slightest discretion.

  Even she couldn’t bear to let him just stand there with some new and greater burden. She was aware that he’d been to the police station.

  ‘What did they say?’ she asked.

  ‘Her back’s broken.’

  The neighbour inhaled with pity. ‘Oh, poor kid. Did she die?’

  ‘No,’ Mike told her. ‘She’ll live, I suppose.’

  They looked at him and Marion knew that wasn’t the end of it.

  He said, ‘She’s become a paraplegic,’ and Marion had begun to sob.

  I’d give anything at all, everything I have –

  The old lady said, the long procession of days later, ‘I think I ought to tell you, because she’s a nice girl, Stella. She’s going about with Diane. It worries me. Diane’s in my cabin. She’s a very coarse girl, who swears and blasphemes and reads dirty magazines. Youths keep coming to fetch her.’

  ‘I’ll talk to her,’ promised Mike, but was weary beyond measure. Who was he to talk to anyone?

  Stella sat on Ken Beltz’s knees in the dim light of the Labyrinth Club. She was a big girl and he shuffled about a bit to adjust her weight and move her into a position suitable for exploitation. On two beers this Sheila had lost some inner rigidity. He estimated that on three she’d be crawling over him and on four shrieking for what he had to offer big girls.

  They had been dancing, but it was too hot. She couldn’t keep it up.

  The beers hadn’t cooled her and she was aware of the anaesthetic effect, the subjugation of her self-consciousness. She talked rapidly and with unaccustomed impertinence with a mouth slightly numbed. Sweat filmed her thighs and stomach and trickled between her breasts, saturating her light dress. It wasn’t embarrassing, for no one could escape the heat, and Ken’s shirt was wet and his armpits had the animal smell of hairs.

  She shifted about a little too, so that she could lean over his face and get at his mouth. He recommenced the necking. It was too hot for it, but Stella didn’t wish to stop. It was a situation she wished to exploit, too. It was what she had hoped for – love of some kind, pleasure of a sort, excitement in a tropical evening. It gave tactile delectation to her hands to trace the fingertips across his face and have him bite them. Her situation was corny and the posture clumsy, but it satisfied. He was a quiet passive boy, it seemed. He didn’t throw compliments about, but his response to Diane’s ‘Hey, do you want to meet Stella?’ had been crudely eloquent those two days ago. A frank examination from head to toes and an outright ‘This voyage at last becomes interesting.’

  A feeling she reciprocated, although not aloud. Because he was touched with timidity despite the apparent self-assurance. Left with her, he had almost nothing to say. They got going very slowly on the superfluous inquiries: ‘Where are you from?’ – ‘Where are you going?’ – ‘Who are you with?’ This made Stella less constrained. The other youths scared her. They were too noisy and got too drunk and were then openly vulgar, monopolizing the pool and the ballroom, and if they were attracted to a girl, their demonstration of it was to assumptive for Stella. She was grateful to Diane for the introduction to Ken. Diane was talking to some of the loudmouths now, and she was twice as fast mentally . . .

  ‘Come for a walk?’ Ken suggested.

  ‘Round the park?’ she countered idly.

  ‘It’s too hot in here. We could,’ he whispered, ‘get a bit of privacy out there.’

  ‘You’re about as subtle as the American Marines –’

  ‘Anything they can do I can do better. We could go in the pool,’ he suggested.

  ‘They’ve emptied it.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘You need water to swim in.’

  ‘Who said anything about swimming? Come on, anyway,’ he insisted.

  He was through with the preliminaries. Two hours was more than enough. She presumed there was to be an increase in the tempo of the necking. Her heart boomed with excitement, but her legs were jelly scared. It was the first time the boy, any boy on this ship, had attempted to isolate her. The implication was warming: that she was what he wanted more than anybody else on the Areopagus. She walked with slightly drunken pride because of it. Previously they’d been invariably part of a crowd – and she had been glad of it.

  Ken was a tall, thin youth with curly blond hair. His half-humorous face revealed nothing. Another girl might have considered it a vacuous face, and a third decided it was cunning and with possibilities of vulgarity and bounce. He didn’t
look like a boy who sat around reading Spinoza.

  ‘We’ll take a couple of cans,’ he affirmed. The two cans of beer suggested to her that he was a little in awe of her, scared, and needed the help of alcohol.

  There were quite a number of people – old and middle-aged – walking about with pillows and blankets.

  ‘An orgy,’ suggested Ken, and sniggered – an acoustic smirk which sounded alarm bells in Stella’s mind.

  The Promenade Deck was quite crowded with these people. They had come on deck to sleep because it was too hot to do so in their cabins. ‘Hell,’ complained Ken. ‘The place is as crowded as the Domain.’

  They strolled about and at the stern found a party in progress. There had already been a lot of drinking and the sheer volume of singing and coarse shouting frightened Stella. She didn’t want a noisy party. She wanted romance, hands touching and the moon reflected in an ocean like ink. Here twenty people were making a noise like a riot. She saw that some kids were in deck chairs, necking, ignoring these others. Their postures suggested that it was the kind of necking Dr. de Haan viewed with anxiety – kids in swimsuits with arms and legs locked, shrieks, giggles, murmurs of enjoyment, total indifference to witnesses.

  Others were dancing to a record player. These, too, were sufficiently frenzied for Stella to freeze in inhibition, even dislike.

  There were stewards rushing in and out with trays of beer. Glass shattered, a youth laughed and a girl shouted, ‘You stupid bastard, I’ve cut my feet,’ To this the youth responded indifferently, ‘To hell with your feet. It’s not them I’m interested in.’

  ‘Let’s dance,’ Ken suggested.

  ‘I’m not sure –’

  ‘Ah, come on, Stella. It’s cooler here.’

  ‘I’ve got to go soon –’

  She advanced the proposal hopelessly; she’d never get away; she was committed and it scared her.