White Knuckle Ride

by Alan Carter

  ‘Get that into you,’ he said.

  He said he’d take me to the police station and they’d get me sorted. We’d be there just after dark. He told me to get into the truck and I got in and dropped the sausage onto the seat between us. He stared at the banger for a moment.

  Right in front of me, six polaroid photos of little kids were taped to the dash board. I leaned closer. One of the kids was an Abo, dark navy black, and her eyes were closed. She was pretty and I thought that, despite his white skin, Scurry must have some black blood in him. I touched the girl’s eyes. A narrow glass vase was taped next to the photos, filled with donkey orchids and everlastings. They smelled like warm honey.

  To be friendly, I said, ‘You’ve got a lot of kids, mistah.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, picking up the sausage and eating it. ‘I’m good at getting kids.’

  ‘What are their names?’

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘Geez. What do you care?’

  Folding his sunnies, he gave me a look that’d fry spuds. I ran my fingers over the photos, played them as if they were piano keys. He took a loop of fishing line, sawed it between his teeth and a fountain of spit and rotting sausage spattered the windscreen. He splashed Old Spice on his tongue and under his arms.

  He asked what my name was and when I told him Bugs, he said, ‘Pig’s arse,’ and asked for my real name, which is about as bad as a name can be. When I told it to him, he laughed, pretty much the reaction I always get.

  ‘Care?’ he said. ‘Your name is Care? I’ve got a bleedin’ CARE package in me truck? Strewth. A CARE package from home. Everything a man could want in a little box.’

  His CB radio crackled and I heard ‘… little girl left at the Nerren Nerren water tanks …’

  ‘That’s me!’ I said, sitting up. ‘They’re looking for me!’

  ‘No drama,’ he said and leaned over and turned off the radio. ‘That’s old news. I’ve got you now.’

  He pushed a tape into the cassette player and Mick Jagger croaked something about laying my soul to waste, a song I happen to know because me cousin used to have all the Stones’ records before she barbecued them in the backyard when she went on a religious kick.

  When he smiled, just one corner of his mouth turned up. The inside of his lip was black. He didn’t have any hair or eyebrows and his arms and legs had whopping bald patches. He only had a few eyelashes left. As he was driving, he’d pull out one of those and balance it on the top of the steering wheel. When that eyelash fell off, he got a cranky look on his face, and after a while he’d huff, and pull out another one.

  ‘What are you staring at?’ he said, looking quickly into the rearview and touching the place his eyebrow might have been. ‘You’re not exactly Marilyn Monroe yerself.’

  Which was true — me being an alabaster runt in homemade floral bloomers — but at least I had eyelashes. I imagined him in a blonde wig and fake titties, wearing stilettos and standing over a blower, trying to hold down his flapping skirt.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘how old are you?’

  ‘Twelve,’ I said, ‘in a bit. I’m eleven and a quarter.’

  ‘Really?’ he said, sitting up straighter and squeezing his thighs together. ‘Twelve’s a beaut age … my dad took me to Coober Pedy to look at the opal mines when I was twelve. The miners put quartz on the opals to make them look bigger. If the quartz is on one side, it’s called a doublet, see, and if it’s on both sides, it’s called a triplet. We stayed in a dugout, a house that’s underground, to keep cool. One bloke stuck an entire crocodile skeleton on the wall of his dugout. Hung opal rings on its claws. I nicked one. I’ve got it here.’

  Sure enough, an opal ring strangled his pinky.

  ‘Where’s your dad now?’ I asked.

  He didn’t answer, so I asked again, and he said, ‘Dumb shit fell down one of the mine shafts and I got put in a foster home,’ which was a lie if ever I heard one, to make me feel bad for him.

  Just before it got dark, he stopped to siphon the python and when he came back, I saw that his fly was still half open so I said, ‘Flying low,’ and pointed at his zipper. He flipped me a look like a rat with a gold tooth. I told him it happens to me dad all the time — he’s forgetful — and it’s easy to come out of the dunny and flash the family jewels at someone’s old granny, so I remind him with codes. ‘Flying low’ was one, and so was ‘LBW’ which meant ‘leg before wicket’, or ‘XYZ’ which was ‘examine your zipper’, or ‘are you afraid of heights’, which I told him I was.

  ‘I fell off the balcony when I was five, or maybe my dad dropped me. Are you afraid of heights?’

  ‘Shut up about me fly,’ he said, and plucked out one of his eyelashes.

  I pointed out that his fly was still open and he stepped down hard on the pedal that makes the engine vroom, and then he zipped up.

  This was the first time I had ever ridden in the front of a truck and I liked the way you can’t tell you’re attached to the road. It looks like you’re flying. When you walk, you can see your feet touching the ground, each step gluing you down again and again but in the truck, you couldn’t see any of that.

  ‘Have you ever been on a plane?’ I asked. ‘Or a flying carpet?’

  ‘There’s no such thing as flying carpets. It’s a load of codswallop,’ he said, busy shaving the white stuff off his front teeth with his fingernail.

  ‘Wrong again. I have a book at home that tells all about flying carpets. They gave it to me in hospital when I went to get me lip put back on after dad dropped me. It’s called The Arabian Nights and it’s the best book ever made. All the kids in hospital got books that day. It’s s’posed to make you want to read, when you get your own book.’

  ‘If my old man dropped me off the veranda, I’d have pulled his guts out of his eyeballs,’ he said. ‘Your dad’s a danger to humanity.’

  I thought of all the things I could say that would prove that Dad was a good dad, if a bit forgetful: his gentle brushing of my white hair; his reading my book to me every night — even when we’d had to haul him back from the pub — until him and me both knew every posh word; his dressing up in a sheepskin carseat cover on the way here, to try and rustle a sheep we saw near the road; the way he laughed, and called ‘Gambol!’ while kicking out his hind legs and wagging his bum as our lamb lunch ran away. But I couldn’t say these things to Scurry, mostly because he wouldn’t believe them, but also because it was hard to think about Dad that way … like maybe he really was a good dad or at least trying to be. Also because I’d suddenly remembered the Stranger Danger class we’d been given in Grade One and how we weren’t supposed to chat with people we didn’t know, which it was definitely too late for, so I viciously said, ‘Mum says Dad’s an excellent dad.’

  ‘Excellent candidate for the electric chair, more likely,’ he said, and I decided to change the subject.

  ‘Do you like to read?’

  ‘I hate reading,’ he said. ‘Reading’s for nongs. Who the hell would ever believe in a flying carpet except for a total nong?’

  I touched the photo of the Abo girl with me big toe. She had her dad’s nose. I thought I could see that. I wondered if she liked her dad. If she let him boss her around or if she imagined him in hot pants and a beehive hairdo.

  ‘You know, Scurry, the way you got your belt, your belly looks like a humungous grandma bosom. I tell my dad all the time that if he keeps on drinking beer and eating snakes, he’s going to get diabetes. The way you’re going, that could happen to you too.’

  ‘It’s all muscle,’ he said, patting his gut and giving me a dodgy look.

  ‘Like fun,’ I said, ‘I can hear it sloshing.’

  ‘That’s the cement,’ said he.

  He had a head on him like a sucked mango. Dad’s a bricklayer. I happen to know that cement hardens in ninety minutes and we’d been flying down the road to Katherine way longer than that. I closed my eyes and I could still see the photos of his six little kids, their faces floating and ghosty in that
colourless forest.

  ‘Do your kids like to read?’

  ‘What kids?’ he said.

  Scurry was playing with my head; he thought that kind of thing was funny. Dad did too. I wanted to cry just then, but no. I’d taught Fred and Bill and Chaz and Baz and Flox my special method of not crying and it was this: You picture yourself as a two-by-four. Hitting doesn’t hurt you; names don’t hurt; forgetting doesn’t hurt. Whoever’s pounding on you feels it when they connect, feels the little bones in their hands snapping, splinters from you stuck so far into them that they poke out the other side. Your guts beg them to hit you again, and you smile a wooden smile when they do.

  So when he said, ‘What kids?’ I smiled.

  The truck surfed through the night sky, the flick of light on the marker stakes the only thing to say we hadn’t gone roaring off through the uncharted bush, and the darkness made me itchy. Scratchy in all the wrong places. It felt like something had climbed into the cab and sat down between us. The door wasn’t locked. I could have jumped, flown out into that blackness if I’d wanted to, like an apple core or a beer can. If I’d had an army coat, I might have jumped. It could have worked. The coat could have opened with a phwoop and floated me down. It’s London to a brick that he didn’t lock the door because he thought I wasn’t game for taking a ten-foot header out into the quartzy dust, but that was nothing compared to a swan dive from a second floor balcony. He just didn’t know my history.

  Instead of jumping, I said, ‘Do you want to hear an interesting story? I could tell you the one about Sinbad.’ Which I thought would interest a bloke with earrings.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘It’s in my book.’

  ‘Listen, squid, I wouldn’t be so chuffed about that bloody book if I was you. You only got it because your old man chucked you off a balcony.’

  ‘He might not have dropped me. I might have jumped. I think I did jump.’

  ‘If you jumped,’ he said, ‘why’d you land on your head?’

  ‘You’re yucky,’ I said and I twisted and kicked him as hard as I could in the place that everyone says hurts the most, the toyshop under the awning, and it was squashy there and he screamed, ‘You liddle bugger!’ and grabbed my ankle, reeling me in as the truck swerved to the left and I bashed my head on something. The drying concrete squealed and metal parts I didn’t know the names of ranted as the right side of the truck rose and stars spun down into the window. I thought we’d roll over. I thought we’d have mushy grey brainstuff on our faces, and broken glass for diamond rings, but Scurry didn’t let the truck escape. It bumped back onto all its wheels, and the glovebox sprang open and his polaroid camera fell out in me lap. Black pearls of sweat shone on the camera, smelling of motor oil, trembling before they slid down and bled into me cotton bloomers. I put the camera back, next to the duct tape and the filleting knife, and shut the little door with a click that made Scurry flinch.

  ‘You’re a bastard,’ I said, watching his face in the black reflection of the side window.

  ‘The only bastard you know is the one who dropped their kid off a balcony,’ he said, grinning like a shot fox, and the truck hit a marker. The stake flew up past my window, a comet, or a falling star, just a blur inside my eyeballs.

  ‘They should have locked him up,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t they?’

  I didn’t want to talk about my dad anymore with this mangy bloke with no eyelashes, so I stuck my fingers in my ears and said, ‘Woo woo woo woo.’ Another marker whipped up, hit the silver bulldog on the front of the truck and shattered.

  He yanked my hand away from my ear and said, ‘I bet you told them you fell.’

  Which was the truth. Straight up. I lied to the doctor who asked me how I fell, and I lied to the nurses and, what the heck, I lied to Scurry too. I’m the queen of Liar. But I put me fingers back in me ears and closed me eyes and whispered ‘Woo woo’ like it was a spell, some kind of voodoo prayer that could turn me into someone else. After listening to me for a while, he cranked up old Mick, and lay another eyelash on the steering wheel.

  ‘Scurry,’ I said, ‘I could tell you a different story. Something you’ll like.’

  He didn’t say anything for a long time.

  ‘I could tell you about Scheherazade. She’s the towelhead who told all the stories in me book, a thousand and one stories, one every night.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked, glancing at me and his eyes looked huge and black. He bunged on the brakes and pulled off the road. I didn’t have the foggiest where we were. Somewhere dark, in the back of beyond. He opened his door and told me to get out. The wind from the coast was strong enough to blow a dog off its chain and it thudded in my ears, blew the hairs in me eyebrows backwards, whipped me eyelashes against my dry eyeballs. I could barely suck in a breath, the air rushed by so fast. A sheet of sand peeled off and snapped a few feet from the ground. My shorts rippled, my shirt ballooned, hair lashed my face. I felt my body lifting, my feet barely touching the ground.

  At last, he asked, ‘Why did she tell so many of them stories?’

  He held my wrist so I wouldn’t blow away. I could smell his strong penicillin smell and the Old Spice on his tongue. The polaroid camera, shoved by the wind, hit me, and it smelled like a gun after it goes off. He put his sunnies on.

  ‘Just listen,’ I said. ‘There was once a wicked king, who got married to a different girl every night, and every morning, he’d cut off her head.’

  ‘Hah!’ he laughed, ‘Excellent.’

  ‘I told you you’d like it. It’s your kind of story. Scheherazade offered to get married to him. All the other girls was forced, but she offered. She told her sister to come in the night, and then she told her a story, and the shah began to listen too, because she was a dinkum storyteller. Right when the sun come up, she stopped. She wouldn’t tell the end.’

  ‘Did he kill her?’ he asked and I smelled the old fish stink of the knife.

  ‘No. The shah wanted to hear the end of the story, so he let her live and she come to him the next night, and that night, she done the same thing. Told a story, but not the end.’

  ‘For a thousand and one nights.’

  ‘Yeah. And he let her live because he liked her stories.’

  His voice floated to me, soft in the darkness. ‘They must have been good stories.’

  ‘I could tell you a good story,’ I said.

  ‘Go on then,’ he said. ‘Tell me.’

  The wind shouting through the casuarinas, the strips of hanging bark pattering against the gum trees, the boobooking of the tawny frogmouths, everything, stilled, and the bush breathed deeply, waiting.

  (From You Lose These, short fiction, 2011.)

  DEBORAH ROBERTSON

  THE TRANSFER OF TRACY GREEN

  I had the sharp muscles of captivity but deep down I felt weak. My hair was its natural nothing again. I was untanned and undecorated and since the smoking ban, with regard to all comforts, I was clean.

  Who was I? I was Tracy Green. Thirty-two years old. Prisoner 2159.

  Species: Saltwater Suburban Girl.

  Habitat: Brick and tile, cul-de-sac, khaki grass.

  Conservation Status: Not rare, under no threat whatsoever of extinction.

  Appearance: Five foot five. Skin: light olive. Bone structure that allows hair to be worn short, although in captivity the cut is rough. Differs in this respect from others in the species with bigger hair. Amber eyes with a touch of cat, big feet, long toes. Long fingers that facilitate the wearing of many large rings, sometimes leading to further classification of the subspecies Saltwater Bohemian Suburban Girl, this subspecies characterised by yearning, a dream for another way to be.

  Note: the subspecies classification of Tracy Green has never remained stable. Her taste for tight black jeans and free-form dancing has sometimes led to classification as Saltwater Rock Chick Suburban Girl, but depending upon the cut of the jeans and the style of head movement in the dance, at other times Saltwater Bogun Suburban Girl
has been more accurate.

  It is important to observe that in captivity the wearing of a uniform eliminates the need for fine classification, rendering all prisoners homogenous, and all skins sallow.

  I’ve thought hard about how to describe to you what it’s like being in prison, and I’ve decided that really the only way is to ask you to try to imagine something.

  It’s an airport I want you to imagine, and you have to imagine you’re travelling alone. You’ve reached your departure lounge and there’s been a delay, things are going to take a while, so choose a seat, burgundy or bottle green, and get used to it. Note how far away the rest of the world feels — the place you’ve left and the place you’re trying to get to — there’s no choice but to give in to the moment. It’s a child’s waiting, a child’s submission, that’s asked of you. Can you put aside your book or newspaper and try to feel this, how infantile you’ve become?

  Study the people around you now. You’ll see it in your own face when you go to the toilet and glance up from washing your hands: you look less than yourself. You look dull, you feel grey. It’s something to do with the waiting. You’d gone so fast to get there, and now it’s just the stop, the hanging around, stasis. All the blood and piss in the body slows, life congeals on the face. The lovely become plain, the plain become ugly, the ugly become the ones you hope to God you’re not going to have to sit next to when at last you board that plane.

  You would never have chosen these fellow travellers; you know this and they know it too. It’s partly why no one looks at each other while they wait — these are the people you might perish beside on route to wherever you’re going. The people you might try to save, or be saved by, or sacrifice in order to save your own life.

  Nothing you do now will make a jot of difference to the waiting: it will go on and on. It might get so bad that you want to argue with the girl in the ponytail who microphones the messages of more waiting, but argument won’t help, there’s no chance in hell of anything changing.