by Nikki Buick
‘More shells. Get me more shells,’ Step called as he clapped his hands and sat back on his heels.
Pippa jumped up and skipped back along the frothy shallows, searching. It got under my skin how close she and Step had become. I found their cheery, happy, joyful relationship to reek of betrayal. She seemed to have forgotten Dad and had replaced him just as easily as a battery in her DS – slipping off one dad and into another like a t-shirt. I supposed she thought that one was just as good as another. That really bugged me. I had to constantly remind myself that she was younger, and all that, and she didn’t understand the concept of divorce as well as I did. But Dad had loved her so much, she’d been his little princess and her lack of loyalty to him just seemed so cold.
There was a lot that annoyed me about Pippa, not that I could ever express it without being branded ‘the bad brother’, but that one Dad-thing annoyed me more than the rest. The squealing, I could handle. The tantrums were becoming less frequent. And then there was the way everyone fussed over her so much and … I could go on. All this was bearable – but when she changed the subject whenever I talked about Dad, that hurt.
She stopped visiting him in those early days – just cut him out. Even before … before …
Watching them together in that moment caused tears to sag in the back of my throat and I wasn’t sure if I was in pain or just angry. I threw the starfish into the sea, skimming it like I might a flat rock or a frisbee. I laughed as it bounced twice before disappearing. Stuff Pippa. She could find her own starfish.
ON THE OPEN ROAD
Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall became extremely stale after about 200 kilometres. The air conditioning let out a gassy groan, spluttered and died. My skate-shoe jiggled like a nervous inmate on death row. I had always suffered from restless leg syndrome but it was becoming chronic with all the confinement of road travel. The smell of curdling milk oozed from the crusty top of Ranger’s bottle as he bit on the teat and pulled. Step whistled like a madman and Mum’s foot odour wafted back from where her naked, chapped heel rested on the dashboard. Pippa mercifully had her headphones plugged into her ears and merely moved her head in a dream-like trance. The mood in the car was surreal and bordering on insanity but only I seemed to notice. Mum’s phone went off and she looked at it.
‘Prize Home people?’ Step asked.
‘Yes,’ Mum snapped. ‘You buy tickets in one of their raffles once and they hassle you for life.’
‘Just tell them to stop calling you.’ I laughed.
Mum was so gutless. She was too scared to offend some random nobody who was ringing to sell tickets. Like they’d give a crap about someone telling them to stop ringing. It probably happened all the time. But no, Mum would rather ignore the constant junk mail calls than be assertive and tell them to piss off. She’d even gone to the trouble of programming the Prize Home people into her phone so she would know who was calling. It made no sense whatsoever.
‘You never know,’ she smiled stiffly back at me, ‘I might one day want to buy a ticket. Maybe one day.’
I shook my head and went back to looking out the window, staring aimlessly. She was a complex woman.
The relentless spread of margarine grasses and blanched tree trunks worked like the swinging pocket watch of a hypnotist and I drifted off into a light sleep.
Dad and I were driving out on Beaudesert Road. Dad was telling me the story about when he’d gone fishing and caught himself a whopper of a shark. The story changed and sometimes it was a grey nurse and sometimes it was a bull shark. But the way he told it was funny. Like he tried deliberately to make it more outrageous with every telling. I liked sitting up in the front with him, the windows down and the flap of wind running through my hair.
Dad’s voice was a rumble. A low hum like a V8 engine. It was thick and warm and his laugh was like the revving of motors before a drag-race. The shark had ended up on the deck of the boat, thrashing this way and that. The teeth were as big as clothes pegs and razor sharp. Dad was lucky not to have lost his foot.
The milky haze of heat hung over the acres of dried grass as our black Jeep Cherokee cut the dusty road in two.
‘The quote’ll take two jiffys and we’ll go and get some grub, eh?’ Dad grinned. ‘You up for a steak sandwich and chips?’
I made myself jerk awake before the dream finished. I breathed a great gust of air and shut my eyes. It was one of those dreams that always ended the same way. But a bit like Dad’s shark story, each recurrence seemed bigger and bolder. Each time I sank into that particular dream I woke up feeling worse. A knot of nausea gripped my belly.
‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ I groaned.
Step nearly snapped the brake in two.
Bent over double, I stared at the mottled earth and watched the long train of saliva land and crack over a rock, like an egg without a yolk.
‘You’ve never been carsick before,’ Mum said through a nasal, reedy voice that sounded more annoyed than concerned.
The space beneath my bottom jaw felt heavy and tight but I spat onto the ground and blinked back the sting in my eyes. I took a deep breath and felt my stomach settle. I wiped my mouth. ‘False alarm. Sorry.’
Back in the car, we strapped ourselves in and pulled back onto the endless drone of asphalt. The staccato of white lines morphed into one and then two, dividing the northbound traffic from the south. Although it was Pippa’s turn for the window seat, Mum insisted I stay put, in case the chunder decided to make a more technicoloured appearance.
My sister growled under her breath – actually growled like a bear – and gave me some psychotic cross-eyed glare. I laughed and that made her worse. Her skin began to redden and her eyes bulged and the growl became a rabid kind of repressed howl.
‘Hunny’s not sick! He made it up to get the window seat again!’ she snapped.
‘Hunter wouldn’t do that, love. After the next stop, okay?’ Mum said calmly, oblivious to the monster show Pippa had just put on for me.
I pulled a face at Pippa and did some mock gagging to annoy her.
‘Stop it!’ she hissed at me.
I had just learned that to get another shift at the window, all you had to do was use the word vomit. You didn’t even have to follow through. I filed that away.
‘Pippa, the whipper snipper.’ I gave her a wide grin and crossed my eyes at her. That really set her off. Nothing annoyed her more than being called a whipper snipper.
‘I’m not a whipper snipper. My name is Phillipa Estella James!’
‘Still a silly name.’ I smirked. ‘They should have called you Flipper.’
Mum and Dad had named her after some character in a Dickens novel.
‘Better than Hunter. Big man Hunter!’ Pippa jabbed me in the ribs.
‘It’s very distinguished.’ Mum laughed. ‘And stop razzing your sister up, Hunter!’
I’d done enough history, read enough books and watched enough movies to know that the most famous Hunter was Hunter S Thompson, who was a deranged drug addict and writer. He was also pretty infamous for taking eccentric road trips. I watched that seminal, psychedelic movie starring Johnny Depp when I stayed at Jesse’s once, and it had made the life of a gun-toting drug fiend look kind of fun. Mind you, the poor guy went completely bonkers and blew his brains out in real life, so I guess it wasn’t such an ideal existence after all.
‘Did you know that Johnny Depp lived in Hunter S Thompson’s basement for a while and that the furniture was made out of boxes of dynamite?’ I announced to everyone in the car.
‘Where on earth do you learn these things?’ Mum asked.
‘I googled it when I should have been doing homework. It’s still kind of educational.’
‘The walking encyclopedia.’ Step looked back and grinned at me.
I shook my head. Encyclopedia? That was such a twentieth-century thing to say. The i
nternet had made encyclopedias obsolete, probably even before I was born. Step wasn’t that old, younger than Mum by a few years, but he was middle-aged before his time. He whistled and made trumpet noises as he hummed along to the radio. I didn’t know anyone else under 40 who carried on like that!
I put the window down as far as it would go and let the comfort of the breeze wash over my face. It made me feel better. The downside of having the window seat, however, was that the person in the middle got the iPod. I had my own iPod until Pippa threw it in the bath during a tantrum. Now Pippa and I had to share one, which I didn’t think was fair, and it was the cause of more than a few verbal bloodbaths.
Mum had promised we were going to the tropics – jungles and wilderness. But the view that stretched out from every window of the car was of a desolate, thirsty land. The colours you would have expected of trees and grass were missing. There were no rich browns or greens. The ground was the colour of bone and the grasses and dead sticks, relics of crops and trees, were like flaking, yellowing skin. The whole place reminded me of the Egyptian mummies we’d seen at the museum. Dead and drained of moisture.
‘It’s so dry,’ Mum muttered, echoing my thoughts.
Kidney-shaped clouds reached far ahead in the sky as the Range Rover chugged through dung-coloured stretches of brown earth, mottled with the skeletal remains of trees, their dry branches reaching out, begging for a drink of water. Ant hills rose like anonymous tombstones along the gravelly roadside and in the open fields they looked like fragile sphinxes guarding the parched wasteland. The sun-damaged landscape was powdered with dusty grasses and the smell of dried manure wafted through the open windows. Cattle sought out any last clumps of grass and drank at small muddy dams. The occasional fly escaped the heat and buzzed in the car until someone managed to flick it out again.
My bum was numb and the giddy sense of flying was beginning to make me sick again. My head kept dropping onto my chest and then jerking back up as I fought sleep. I felt like a jack-in-the-box. My rash was begging to be gouged out of my chest but I just rubbed it carefully through my t-shirt. The relief felt good but short-lived. Pippa needed to pee and the stench wafting across from the baby’s car seat had everyone begging Step to pull over for a nappy change. He dragged out this torture-by-odour until we were all nearly throwing up in our own laps.
‘Next stop is Yeppoon. We’ll pull in there and head to the beach.’
Yeppooooooo
It was grey and the clouds had drawn a curtain over the sun. It was mid-afternoon and Mum relaxed the rule about sunblock. Give me an abandoned, windy, overcast seaside over a sunny, candy-striped tourist mecca any day. The beach was pebbly. It was like someone had put rocks through a blender on a low setting. The nutty, gritty texture felt better between my toes than the talcum powder of fine sand at 1770. I was a crunchy peanut butter man. Smooth was just wrong.
Mum’s phone went off. ‘Prize Home ticket sales. It’s borderline stalking,’ she huffed.
‘Why don’t you just answer it and tell them to stop ringing you? Seriously!’ I laughed. ‘They’re not going to bite you or hunt you down and force tickets down your throat.’
‘Because I’ve tried that, Hunter. I really did talk to them once and asked them to stop calling but they just wouldn’t listen! I tried talking sense to them. Okay! Okay?’ She turned around to face me and her eyes were fierce.
‘Settle down,’ I mumbled. ‘It was just a suggestion. Don’t be such a psycho.’
She was so touchy. She was always a little irrationally touchy when her phone rang. Like I mentioned before, she was a complex, abstract kind of human being. Her moods lately had been like eggshells – fragile.
The water was weird. The tide was out and after walking for about five minutes towards what seemed like South America, I gave up on having a swim. The water was still only at my ankles. I’d lose sight of land before I even got waist deep.
‘Maybe there’s a tsunami on the way,’ I joked as we trudged back up to the car.
‘It’s just a really low tide,’ Step said, putting his hand on my shoulder. ‘Nothing to worry about.’
I shrugged him off and gave him a look. As if I had actually been scared of a tidal wave! I was kidding. Just making conversation. I hated how he took me seriously when I was joking and got the shits when I was messing around because he’d taken it the wrong way. That guy had his hoses plugged into the wrong taps.
‘What?’ he called after me as I walked ahead. ‘What was that look?’
‘Just leave it, okay?’ Mum said between clenched teeth.
Back at the car, Step announced that we were setting up camp in some remote national park. He spread a map out over the dashboard and stabbed a red pen on a particular point.
‘Red Rock,’ he said triumphantly. ‘Remote, real wilderness. Not some cushy caravan park. It’s on a track up the road from Yeppoon. Stay two nights, maybe. More if it’s nice.’
‘We’ve got plenty of supplies,’ Mum said to her husband. ‘There’s bread and some cans of stuff. We’ve still got plenty of baked beans.’
I blew a huge raspberry. Step laughed. But I wasn’t going for a laugh. I was actually being rude. I was serious. I couldn’t stand baked beans and I couldn’t stand other people eating baked beans either. Particularly Step!
RED ROCK
A brush turkey scratched about the undergrowth but it took off like its bum was on fire when I threw a stick at it. Just to scare it. Not to hurt it. I just wanted to startle the thing. Turkeys were really unattractive birds. They had heads like Freddy Krueger and necks like my late great-grandmother – a losing combination. They were really only good for filling a Subway foot-long and even then I didn’t think they carved up brush turkeys for that. Which left brush turkeys good for nothing, other than throwing sticks at. Mind you, two more days of baked beans on toast and I might have thought about sharpening a spear and finding some turkey breast … I drifted into a fast-food daydream … turkey breast, ranch sauce, cheese, lettuce and caramelised onion on a 12-inch crusty white Subway foot-long roll.
I came back to reality and saw three red-and-yellow heads fussing back over the crackling leaves like a losing football team. The sucker had come back for more and brought his mates. My twiggy missile missed them by a breath. Tenacious and stupid, the morons were back for another round a minute later.
‘Stop it,’ Mum snapped in a constipated voice after I threw another stick.
‘I’m just scaring them. I’m not going for the kill,’ I explained.
‘Hunter. Just take Pippa for a walk, will you? Dad and I need a little space,’ Mum said quietly. ‘To get dinner ready.’
Yep, that was me. The live-in nanny.
I looked back at the yawning awning and into the freshly constructed tent where Ranger lay spread-eagled and sound asleep on top of a blow-up mattress. I must have taken too long to jump to attention because Mum began flapping about like a mime artist, shooing us away and making unintelligible hand signals while mouthing empty words. I interpreted her performance art to mean that she wanted Pippa and me to nick off. Pronto. She clearly did not want us to wake the sleeping infant. Life was easier for everyone when that kid was asleep.
‘Be careful and stick to the paths,’ Step said as he unpacked the back of the four-wheel drive. He was a cliché on legs.
I walked off past the toilet block and down toward the creek. There were no other campers at the grounds, so we had the place to ourselves. The bush was thick with the hum of insects, a drone that sounded like a grand prix. It was the sound of urgency and friction. There was nothing still about the noise and yet the bush seemed eerily motionless, except for the distant trickle of water over rocks. Pippa moved up beside me.
‘Where we going?’ she asked, as if I had some grand itinerary worked out for the two of us.
‘Dunno.’
‘Hey, look.’ She bolted off in
the direction of the creek, her blonde Medusa-like braids dancing about her head. ‘Look, Hunny.’
Pippa was a full-on sister who never let up for a moment. I was surprised Mum went back for another kid after Pippa was born with Down syndrome. I guessed she had to cement her new relationship with Step. Not that having kids had helped much with her and my father, though. Not in the end. In a way it was quite the opposite.
‘Hunny, look!’
Calling me Hunny was just not on. In public I cringed with embarrassment when she called out to me as if I was a boyfriend. Come here honey. Like, honey, I’m home. But there was not much I could do. I’d begged her. I’d begged Mum to explain it to her but if anything it seemed to make her do it more.
She turned back to me, her brown eyes wide and her gappy little teeth glaring from her little round mouth. I followed her hand to a sign by the creek. The universal danger symbol of the circle and cross contained a picture of a crocodile head.
‘You’re kidding me!’ I said. ‘Crocodiles? Here? This far south?’
We weren’t even halfway up the coast of Queensland.
‘Crikey!’ she grinned and gave me a wink. ‘Let’s find a croc.’
Who had replaced my sister with Bindi Irwin?
The two of us kept to the track that ran alongside the creek. It was a wooden bridge with a railing, keeping us high and dry and away from snapping predators. The sign had warned of freshwater crocodiles. It said that although there had been rare sightings of the creatures, the water was generally too cold for crocodiles. Even though the chances of us seeing a croc were slim, Pippa was psyched up anyway.
A rustling noise sounded from the trees.
‘What’s that?’ she whispered.
‘A crocodile!’ I pointed toward the edge of the path and Pippa fell over her sneakers to get back to my side. Her little arms clung about my waist and she pressed her face into my ribs.
