Is that thing diesel?

by Paul Carter

  We fell into our usual evening beer-swilling banter, and had a counter meal. Afterwards, I went through my ritual with Betty, and by the time I walked into our shared room wiping grease off my hands with a rag and talking to myself, the boys were already fast asleep.

  The ride to Tambo the next day started with sore heads and no breakfast or coffee. Dan wanted to film the scenery, or ‘go all Spielberg’ as Matt said over the radio. It was just too hot and tiring to wait around, so I pushed off. The arid flat landscape went on and on. This was the first time I had strayed well beyond the truck and the radio’s range; I felt weirdly free, like I’d been released. I wanted to go back and do the whole trip again, but alone, like a few of the riders I’d met along the way. I thought about Clare and Lola, and I wondered how Oswald was getting on; I hoped he was still alive. Then I thought, if he’d gone surely the cattery would have called me on the sat phone.

  Last winter he walked up to the front door of our house and announced his intention to go to the toilet. He has kitty litter, but prefers to poop in the comfort of the front garden. So I got up and let him out, and then my mate Gavin Kelly dropped by. I was standing on our front porch drinking beer and chatting to him when Oswald had one of his absent moments right behind Gavin’s heel. ‘MMMMAWWWW,’ yowled Ossy.

  Gav jumped about two feet into the air. ‘What the fuck’s up with your cat?’

  Oswald was sitting between the roses howling that late night, psychopathic howl: ‘WHAT’S GOING ON WITH THESE GIANT ROSES? . . . WHAT AM I DOING HERE? . . . WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TWO LOOKING AT?’

  ‘He’s got cat dementia,’ I explained to Gav.

  ‘MMMMAWWWW.’ Oswald started digging out huge scoops of earth. It had started raining, but that didn’t bother him.

  ‘Where’s he going mate, China?’ said Gav.

  ‘Well, either that or he’s remembered why he’s digging a hole in the rain.’

  ‘He’s down to his shoulder there, how big does your cat shit?’ Gav finished his beer. ‘That’s a bit optimistic, don’t you think, Ossy?’

  I shrugged. ‘He’s an oilfield cat, mate, he’ll be running casing in that hole next.’

  Gav smiled and we were about to walk off when Ossy suddenly puckered up and nutted one out about a foot away from his perfectly vertical hole. Then he turned around and filled in the hole, patting down the earth fastidiously. He sprinkled leaves over the top and everything. He turned to go and stopped dead in front of his turd.

  ‘Fuckin hell.’ Gav was in hysterics.

  Ossy looked up at us as if to say, ‘Now, how did that happen?’ and sat there in the rain looking at his poop.

  Clare came out onto the porch to get us. ‘Come inside, guys. What are you two doing out here?’

  Gav said the obvious: ‘Watching your cat.’

  Ossy followed us in, soaking wet. We sat down and got talking. After a while, our conversation was interrupted by Ossy. He’d passed out way too close to the gas heater and was now on fire, running through the living room screaming ‘MMMMMMMMMAAAAAAWWWWW.’ He left a burnt-hair vapor trail down the hall.

  ‘Jesus, the cat’s on fire.’ We put him out. Luckily only the top layer of hair was gone, and now so is the gas heater.

  Back on the highway only static came back to me over the radio. Matty and Dan must be well behind me now, I thought. I put my feet up on the highway pegs Matt Bromley had installed, taking the vibrations off my knee to my back. Towards the end of the day a dust storm began brewing off to my left. There were flashes of lightning, and sudden violent wind gusts buffeted the bike. A huge willy-willy formed up ahead, spinning a curved cylinder of red earth into the brooding clouds. I was just happy not to be riding into the sun.

  Every morning I calculated how far we had to travel that day, against my average speed, with a Dan (‘Where’s my . . .?’) factor built in. I had become obsessed with watching the odometer ticking over: the first ton of the day was easy, before the sun got up there and cooked me. The rest of the day was agonisingly slow, the old mechanical wheel slowly rolling over. That afternoon, though, I knew I was less than twenty k’s from town. Hopefully I’d get there before the storm got me.

  ‘Paul, are you there?’ Matty’s voice crackled over the radio. The radio’s range was good for two k’s so they couldn’t be too far away.

  ‘Hi Matt,’ I said.

  ‘Mate, we’ll see you soon in town, at the pub, over.’

  ‘Roger that.’ I thought longingly about a big steak dinner sitting on the countertop waiting for me with a cold beer.

  Soon I was rolling down the town’s main street. No one was about and the wind was hammering dust and tumbleweeds across the road. I parked Betty around the side of the pub and walked into the main bar; it looked very comfy inside and the locals gave me a smile. I could smell a roast. Ten minutes later Dan and Matty stumbled through the door.

  ‘Dan’s made an executive decision to get shit-faced tonight, mate.’ Matt put his hat on the bar and rubbed his hands together.

  The girl tending bar came over. ‘Hi, guys, what would you like?’

  ‘One Pale Ale, one Guinness, a whisky ’n soda, two steak dinners, and a salad roll no butter with chips please.’ Matt smiled.

  ‘She’s hot,’ said Dan, watching the girl walk off to put the order in with the kitchen. ‘So’s she.’ Another young blonde walked past. ‘And another—they’re all hot.’

  Not only did the manager have a very nice pub, he also assembled a bar staff entirely of cute backpackers. ‘Watch and learn, gentlemen.’ Dan put his camera on the bar and within five minutes two of the girls were flicking their hair while Danny was being cute and anecdotal.

  ‘I guess they don’t get too many TV cameramen through town.’ Matt regarded the scene and then his salad roll and chips. ‘Yummy.’ He lifted the top off the roll and started laying chips down in a row. ‘If I never see another shit salad roll . . .’

  We had a ball that night. Dan was hammered and very, very funny. Matt and I spent the night talking to a local guy who spends the day removing all the dead animals from the road. There’s that much carnage out there on the highway that a guy has to drive up and down it all day in a truck collecting bodies. Now there’s a tough job. I sloped off and did my bike ritual before I got too pissed.

  ‘Tomorrow we ride to Longreach,’ Dan announced later in the bathroom while trying to brush his teeth.

  The morning presented itself in white-hot blazing hangover napalm heat. Squinting and cursing, the boys dragged out their bags and loaded up the truck. Betty was good to go, all I needed was a new set of ear plugs to block out Betty’s racket. Without the ear plugs I was deaf after an hour. Sometimes I stopped for a pee in the middle of nowhere in total, outback middle-of-the-day silence and my ears were still shattering the peace and quiet. The residual ringing would last for hours, drowning out a leading question from Dan, filming me while I tried to urinate in peace.

  ‘Sorry?’ I’d say, and he’d repeat it. Still couldn’t hear it. ‘Say again, mate?’

  ‘YOU LOOK LIKE A DISGRUNTLED STORM TROOPER IN ALL THAT RIDING GEAR, HOW DOES IT FEEL?’

  ‘WELL, IT FUCKIN STINKS DAN, COS IT’S 48 DEGREES OUT HERE TODAY, BY NOW IT’S ONLY THE STUBBORN UNDERSTAINS THAT’RE HOLDING THE WHOLE LOT TOGETHER. LOOK AT MY PEE—I DRANK A LITRE OF WATER THIS MORNING AND IT’S THE SAME COLOUR AS THE BIO-DIESEL.’

  We needed a mental health day.

  We did the usual ten retakes of me riding past a particularly interesting tree, while Dan, Matt and I hurled abuse at each other over the radio. Finally Longreach arrived. We had a fine meal, lots of water, and an early night.

  The heat radiated hard invisible waves, zapping my energy. Today was going to be long; the truck was about one k behind me, but Betty’s hellish vibration distorted the image in the mirror, turning one truck into four. No
matter what I tried, there was simply no conventional vibration dampening system that would make a shred of difference to the mirrors.

  I flipped open my visor to wedge a Minty into my mouth. The air was like a slap in the face—imagine sitting in a sauna while someone holds a hairdryer an inch from your eyes, that’s what it was like. ‘Fuck a pig,’ I often swore out loud, or I’d sing, or have long conversations with myself like a mad person with Tourettes. A corner came looming up with a triple banking hard around it, always on the apex. You could sit on the bike for hours on the straight with nothing and no one passing you, then the minute you hit a blind corner, a road train the size of Brussels would be coming directly at you. There was no time to react, other than just blindly hang on and hope for the best. Because of Betty’s very upright riding position, the invisible wall of air displaced by a truck doing 130 k’s would hit me hard. It was often like catching a sack of flour in the chest, while the bike got blown across the road.

  I’d just got settled back in the saddle, the truck was in the right place behind me, my Minty was doing a fair job of removing the rotting road-kill smell and we were purring along at 90 k’s, when the bucket of coffee the French woman made me that morning hit my bladder in a latte tsunami. The usual deal with stopping for a pee was to wait for a proper bay where I could take off the helmet and gloves, unplug the comms, and have a slash at my leisure and in relative safety. But this morning I told the boys over the radio to drive past me and keep going; I would just pull over, hop off, pee, hop back on again and catch up. No removing helmets and gloves; I just wanted to keep going. I checked my right mirror as the boys sped up and moved across to pass, Matt gesticulating mid-story while Dan pointed the camera out the window and angled his head into the viewfinder. As they drew parallel with me, I got off the throttle and slowly applied the brakes together as I pulled onto the dirt. The shoulder was as wide and flat as the road; it looked like it had recently been graded. Betty was about two metres off the road when she slammed to a complete stop.

  Time and adrenalin put you in a weird place. I wonder if there is a word for those moments in your life when accidents happen: that out-of-body parallel universe you enter when you realise you’re going to crash, just before you actually hit something. Time slows down; adrenalin transforms you from a disposable camera into a microscope.

  The information I processed in those split seconds was astounding. If only I could make my brain perform like that all the time. For me, the initial horror—like the spike of a needle—then dissolved into calm hyper-awareness like I’d had a giant hit of Berocca. I was suddenly as calm and detached as at any quiet moment. As my head went through Betty’s windshield, I noticed the odometer read five kilometres; I’d reset it when we left Longreach. ‘Five k’s,’ I thought, ‘that’s not very far out of town for an ambulance to travel.’ My body was thrown forward and to the left; I was obviously getting high-sided and was about to get slammed down on my left side, head first. I thought, ‘It’s OK, the airbag vest will go off now,’ and then my mind flashed to an image of me throwing the vest on the back seat of the truck as we left the coffee shop not ten minutes earlier. ‘Oh fuck.’

  Thomas Mann said it well: ‘We never really learn anything, we just become aware of things when the time and the potential in us coincide.’

  I hit the ground.

  There was a lot of ragdoll tumbling. The brain stopped processing, shut down and rebooted seconds later. I was looking through my visor at a very worried Matt; he was bent over me, slowly lifting the visor open. Warm air rushed in but I couldn’t get any into my lungs. The impact had knocked the air from my body; I could feel my right leg and arm but nothing else. Usually when a rider stacks it, the normal reaction is to spring up instantly and stand the bike up. But I could not raise my head off the dirt. I suddenly felt very self-pitying. Visions of me throwing a ball to Lola from a wheelchair wandered through my mind like a stray dog. ‘Now look what you’ve done to yourself.’ My sanctimonious common sense spoke up at last. ‘Fatigue, not paying attention: cry me a river, you hedonistic wanker.’ Oh God, what the fuck have I done? I tried again to get up but nothing worked.

  Matt put his hand on my shoulder. ‘What are you doing, mate? Lie still, the ambulance is on its way—ten minutes, OK?’ he said calmly.

  I became aware of Dan next to me. I grabbed his hand and squeezed. ‘Don’t worry, mate.’ He faked a smile. It was bizarre to see Dan at this angle without a camera pressed up against his eye. I was grateful the boys were there.

  The ambulance crew arrived, named Mel and Kim, much to Matt’s amusement, then a fire truck, then the police. They were all completely brilliant, and fast. Suddenly there was a tarp between my head and the baking sun, and I heard the bike being carried off. My helmet was removed and all my gear. It was a frenzy of well-trained people, all of them knowing exactly what to do, unlike me and Matt. Once the ambulance arrived, even Dan got straight back to work and picked up his camera. Then came the pain relief, a big green tube, and whooooo the fuck am I.

  Longreach Hospital’s emergency entrance soon loomed up, reflected upside down on the ceiling of the ambulance. I was engrossed in that detached feeling you get with shock and strong pain-relief meds. This was just a movie I’d been watching; I’d seen this bit a hundred times—the gurney passing through several big swinging doors and pulling up next to the machine that goes ping.

  The doctor marched up and said something doctor-ish like: ‘So we’ve had a bit of crash then.’ The green tube was removed and just as fast as I got happy the reality came thudding straight back, accompanied by fear. I was terrified I’d done something to my spine. The doctor asked what happened, and both Matt and I launched into the story while Dan filmed in the background. Suddenly Dan stopped and raised his hand. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. Everyone stopped talking and looked over at him. ‘I’ve got the whole thing on camera.’

  ‘Really,’ said the doctor.

  ‘Yeah, total fluke.’

  ‘Well, let’s see it then.’ The doctor, Matt, Mel and Kim, a nurse, and the dude in the corner who’d been mopping the floor all crammed their heads over Dan’s shoulder to peer into the camera’s little video playback screen. There was a unanimous sharp intake of breath through clenched teeth, then everyone looked over at me flat on my back. The machine that goes ping pinged.

  Longreach Hospital, although abundantly stocked with hot-looking nurses and extremely friendly doctors, unfortunately has no big expensive imaging machines with which to look into the human body for damage. They do however have a radiologist, who wheeled me away to X-ray my entire body. I was then wheeled into a semi-circular room at the end of a long corridor, and a few hours later the doctor reappeared with the good news: I had not broken any bones, though I had cracked two ribs, and torn my rotator cup, a groin ligament and my favourite riding pants. ‘So in many ways it would be easier and less painful if you had just sustained a straight fracture.’ He smiled and flipped over his clipboard. ‘You’re going to be with us for a few days. You’ll have to eat prunes because the pain medication can cause some constipation. We’re also concerned about any internal damage you may have sustained, so for the moment, it’s all about you moving your bowel, OK Mr Carter?’

  I looked over at the hot nurse who had given me morphine about 30 minutes before the doctor arrived. I knew I was grinning like a fool. ‘So I can’t go anywhere till I poop?’ She looked at her shoes.

  ‘Well, yes,’ said the doctor. ‘Remember to try to move about. You’re going to be in a great deal of pain tomorrow, so we’ve given you sufficient pain medication to help you deal with that, and you’ve been admitted as a private patient so you have the whole room to yourself. The boys tell me they’re going to bring some DVDs back for you later.’ I looked over the doctor’s shoulder at Matt, who was nodding and blowing kisses. Dan was doing that thousand-yard worried stare into nothing, the one he pulls when he’s forgo
tten something. Wait for it, wait for it . . .

  ‘Mr Carter, are you OK with all that?’

  Dan’s going to do it. Any moment now, wait for it.

  ‘Mr Carter.’ The doctor raised his voice and snapped me back.

  At the same moment Danny said, ‘Where’s my phone?’

  Right on time, Danny.

  ‘OK, doctor,’ I said. He could have just finished telling me I was going to develop a third eye and webbed digits; I had gone to morphine heaven. Gone. That is, until it wore off.

  There was no self-medicating for me; I had to wait for the hot nurse to squeak her way down the hall to my pain-filled concrete room and jab that vein.

  I woke up suddenly in the middle of the night from a dry, open-mouthed, drug-induced dreamless sleep. For the first few seconds I thought I was in another random donga, back on the road. It was like waking up inside Tupperware, all memory of the fall blissfully blanked. Until I tried to move, that is. The pain I felt in that dark room was more intense than anything I’d ever experienced, and I’ve broken bones before. For a second my eyes saucered as searing, all-powerful pain stopped me from sitting up. I couldn’t even reach the little call button thingy to get the nurse’s attention. Panic shot up and down my spine for a second, so I just lay there in the dark and focused on my breathing. Then I heard her shoes. I think I squealed a little like a Japanese schoolgirl in a Hello Kitty store. Thank God, she heard me, she’s a hot nurse on her way, she’s a fuckin angel, a morphine angel ready to jump on my midnight morphine roundabout, all the way to breakfast. I pictured perfectly poached farm-fresh eggs on toast with bacon and real coffee.

  Instead, as the fluorescent light blinked on I looked up at a different nurse, older and grimmer, Skeletor in a white dress, who promptly shoved a pill in my mouth the size of a breeze block, followed by a straw. She took my temperature—for a moment I thought it was going to be the baby way from the look in her eye—she checked my blood pressure, scribbled on the clipboard at the foot of the bed and marched out, flicking off the light with a curt ‘Try to get some sleep.’