by Colin Dray
Dettie’s face was drawn. She set aside her drink and dusted imaginary crumbs from her lap. She seemed to be auditioning to be one of those ladies Jon had just banished from history.
‘Besides,’ Jon said, turning and waving at the makeshift picnic strewn across the table, ‘wouldn’t you rather sit here with us? Enjoy this sunset? Eat a few Jammie Dodgers? Sip from a styrofoam cup? Rather than nibble half a cucumber sandwich with some sorry Jane Austen rejects? Living your whole life propped up on the reputation of dead people you never knew?’
She blinked, slowly, staring at the ground. ‘If there’s one thing the world could use more of,’ she said, ‘it’s good manners.’
He smiled. ‘Well, I can say jolly good and pip pip occasionally, if it’ll make you feel better, love.’ He caught her eye and held it, raising his eyebrows. ‘M’lady?’ he said, and faked a bow.
Dettie’s expression softened and she smiled too.
‘Cucumber sandwiches are gross,’ Katie said.
‘Exactly,’ Jon said, and laughed.
And to Sam’s surprise, Dettie and Katie laughed too.
49
Dettie had put Sam up front with her again, and was telling him about the trip she and Uncle Ted had taken across Western Australia for their honeymoon.
‘And it was just like this,’ she was saying. ‘We’d drive and drive, and stop if we saw something. And at night we’d fall asleep in the first hotel that we came to. We didn’t map it all out, you see. We just went. Like us now.’ She lifted her fingers from the steering wheel, holding on underneath with her thumbs. The road raced towards her open palms. ‘Like explorers,’ she said. ‘That’s how Ted described us. He said your aunty was an explorer. He always said funny things like that.’
Sam wasn’t paying attention, but he kept nodding. He was concentrating on the conversation Jon and Katie were having behind him. Jon was telling her all about England, about their money and their black taxicabs. About his two pet dogs—Yorkies—who had proper little stuck-up British barks, he said. About all the different kinds of slang they used at home.
‘Bollocks,’ he said. ‘That’s another one. See, if you know that someone’s telling you fibs, and you want to let them know, you say, “That’s bollocks,” or “You’re full of bollocks.”’
Katie giggled. ‘Bollocks,’ she said, slowly, plopping out the word on her tongue.
‘And if that person is really thick—you know, stupid—you can call them a berk.’
Dettie’s head jerked. Her lips were pursed as she strained to listen. ‘What on earth are you teaching her back there?’ she called.
Jon looked up and grinned. ‘Nothing, love. Nothing. Just telling her more about the mother country.’
Tugging some slack in her seatbelt, Katie sat forward. ‘I know what bollocks are,’ she said.
Dettie clicked her tongue. ‘Well, I need to concentrate now,’ she said. ‘So if everyone back there could just settle down.’
Her eyes were bulging in their sockets, and when she blinked, her face tightened around them. Sam would catch her starting to yawn, but then cover it up by biting her lip.
For another hour they drove without talking, the trees and the bushes lining the roads getting drier and more withered the further they went. They were actually in Western Australia now, heading towards its capital city, as Dettie kept reminding them. It was hard to imagine what the definition of a city even was anymore. Each town they passed through seemed smaller than the last, hugging the road for a few hundred metres before dissolving away in the distance. Cars seemed to be kicking more dust into the air behind them, and for a while they followed a tourist bus that belched black fumes Sam could taste through the air vents. Above him, the paddle-pop stick boomerang shuddered almost imperceptibly, turning in slow circles. When he got especially bored, he scanned the dashboard, looking over the knobs and dials, settling finally on the radio. He sat forward and flicked it on, raising the volume.
‘—fears that without further information forthcoming on the location of those who have disappeared—’
Dettie muffled a yell and slapped the radio quiet with her palm. ‘We might leave that off for the rest of today, sweetie.’ She chewed her lips. ‘My headache and all.’
Sighing, Sam flopped back in his seat and watched the last ribbons of cloud dissolve beneath the sun. Out in a distant field, thin sheep meandered through the latticework of shade cast by a lone, half-dead tree. They passed another exit, leading off to a town called Madura, where several cars appeared to be pulled up together for a picnic. A sign telling them to Slow Down whipped by, followed by another, larger sandwich board that read: Random Breath Testing Ahead. Suddenly, Sam could feel the car slowing down. Dettie’s breath was starting to quicken. When he looked over, he saw that she was shaking, slumping in her seat, staring at another large sign as it approached them along the road.
It read: PREPARE TO STOP.
A car soon overtook them, and when the truck behind began blaring its horn, weaving across the road, Jon leant over. ‘Everything good up there, love?’ he asked. ‘People seem to think we’re dawdling.’
Dettie was gaping at the road ahead. She murmured, ‘There’s just a—’ Her eyes flashed along the edges of the road. She wasn’t blinking. ‘There’s a stop. Up there. For drink driving. Breath tests.’
Jon ran his hand over his beard. He chuckled. ‘What’s the matter? You nip off to the bar when we weren’t looking? Had a couple of pints?’
The car was moving so slow, veering across the gravel, that the truck sped around them too, beeping furiously. Their motor sputtered, and Dettie’s head jerked as she scanned the highway ahead. Another truck thundered past and Sam could feel the wind of it shake the car.
Jon was still smiling, but his voice had a slight quiver. ‘Love, I think we might want to go a touch faster now, eh?’
In the distance, Sam slowly made out the shape of a parked vehicle and two figures waving down traffic. Dettie saw them too and the car rattled off the bitumen and into the dirt.
Katie squealed. ‘What’s happening?’
‘Nothing, honey,’ Jon hushed. ‘We’re just—what, love?’ He tapped Dettie on the shoulder. ‘Engine trouble? Petrol?’
‘Police,’ Dettie whispered.
The hush and scrape of earth being kicked up by their wheels went on beneath them. Jon looked puzzled. He started to laugh but the sound faded away.
‘Mummy says to do what the policeman tells you.’ Katie’s voice was tight.
‘Shut up,’ Dettie snapped. ‘I don’t want to hear about your mother right now.’
‘Love,’ Jon said. ‘She just—’
‘Shh. Quiet.’
The remains of Jon’s smile hung on a little awkwardly. He glanced from Sam, to Katie, to the flashing lights up ahead, and his eyes widened. When he realised Sam was peering back at him he forced an unconvincing smirk.
The car skidded to a stop. A cloud of dust rose beside Sam’s window and Dettie twisted around. She set the car in reverse and drove backward a hundred metres or so. An oncoming car swerved around them, honking. Katie screamed.
Jon was holding her hands. ‘It’s okay, love. It’s all right.’
They reached a kink in the highway, out of sight, and Dettie skidded, wrestling the car into first gear, and U-turned swiftly onto the opposite lane. Panting, her eyes flashing to each mirror, she sped back the way they had come. The engine howled. The police faded from view. The paddle-pop stick boomerang swung awkwardly, slapping the glass.
50
‘It was nothing,’ Dettie chuckled. ‘I was being silly, that’s all.’ She sipped from a bottle of water and wiped her forehead with her wrist. ‘Now, don’t you kids run off now!’ she called.
Jon was standing in front of her, scratching his eyebrow with his thumb. ‘You just seemed a tad jumpy, love.’
‘Oh, goodness, no.’ Dettie screwed the lid shut. ‘My licence,’ she said, and swallowed. ‘I left it at home. My licence.�
� Her smile crept wider. ‘A couple of thousand kilometres away.’ She giggled, a sound Sam was sure he had never heard her make before. ‘And I didn’t particularly want to turn around and drive all the way back to get it.’
Jon was nodding, but he didn’t say anything. His eyes flickered towards Katie and Sam, who were taking turns sipping from a plastic travel mug.
Dettie had driven east almost twenty minutes before finding a side route over some raw, unpaved roads that led around the police block. She’d spent the detour muttering to herself and telling Sam not to worry, while Jon distracted Katie with a whispered game of I Spy. Now they were stopped on a country lane that fed back onto the highway a few dozen kilometres along.
‘I tell you, I’m a complete duffer sometimes.’ Dettie tossed the bottle through the open door and tugged a cigarette from her handbag. She offered one to Jon, but he shook his head.
Katie, meanwhile, had turned her back on them and huddled closer to Sam, almost pushing him back against a wire fence, whispering, ‘She’s getting really strange.’ Her eyes were wide and wet.
Sam nodded. He felt a drop of water roll down his neck.
‘Have you seen how her head wobbles?’ Katie said.
He looked over at Dettie, who was clutching her cigarette with both hands and leaning on the car. Jon was watching the way her foot kept scratching at the dirt, shuffling it into small mounds and then dusting it flat.
‘I know you wouldn’t have wanted to worry the kids,’ he was saying, speaking slowly. ‘But I think they might have been a little confused.’
‘Oh, no.’ Dettie picked at her tongue as if there was a hair stuck to it. ‘No, they both know they can trust me.’ She nodded.
Katie slurped from the cup and dried her lips with their mother’s handkerchief. ‘I heard Mummy talking on the telephone to Uncle Ben once.’ She leant even closer to Sam’s ear. ‘She said Aunt Dettie needed to go see a doctor. About being sad. She said she probably should have kept going.’
For a moment Sam wondered if that was why Dettie had been so against him visiting Tracey at first. Did it remind her of some therapy she had needed once? But as he glanced up he realised that their aunt was staring straight at them both, her cigarette smouldering in her hand. He felt his chest tighten, and his legs. His whole body clenched in place, electric. When she didn’t look away he raised his arm, timidly, to wave. She didn’t respond, though, and slowly he realised she wasn’t staring at him, but rather was fixed upon Katie’s hands and the small white embroidered handkerchief she was gently folding away.
51
Beneath Sam’s seat, behind his legs, was the cardboard sign Jon had been carrying when they’d picked him up. It tickled the back of his knees, and as the car rumbled along the track, he lifted it up and set it on his lap. Everyone was quiet, and Dettie was watching Katie intently up front, repeatedly wafting her hands away from the radio dial. Jon was staring out the window at the trees and mounds of dirt flashing by, his thumbs buried in his beard, scratching his chin.
Sam turned the sign in his hands, reading it over. On one side was Jon’s large, looping writing in thick black texta, Help Me, I’m British, but the other side was blank. Leaning back down to the pile of papers and wrappers on the floor, Sam found Dettie’s crossword-puzzle book and slipped the pen free from its pages. He tested it on the corner of the cardboard, and then tapped Jon’s leg to get his attention.
Will you come with us to Perth? he wrote, and held the words out.
Jon read the message and smiled, sadly. ‘We’ll see, me mate. We’ll see.’
‘What? What’s that?’ Dettie stretched back in her seat, cocking her ear towards them.
‘Nothing, love,’ Jon said, taking the sign and pen from Sam’s hands.
For a moment they sat motionless as Dettie fretted with the rear-vision mirror. When the car had settled back into its familiar drone, Jon scribbled something on the sign himself. He tapped Sam’s knee with his knuckle and held it out to read.
You asked before…This means SCARED.
Sam looked up and Jon was signing. Both hands were curled up like bear paws, fingers hooked like claws. He tapped them on his chest, twice, the right hand higher than his left. He tapped two times, silently, his eyebrows knotted together.
Sam mirrored the movement back at him, tapping twice. Then again. He felt the tiny flutter upon his chest like a heartbeat.
Jon nodded and turned back to the window. Folding the sign in half he tucked it away beneath the front seat.
52
After pulling into so many service stations Sam had developed a rhythm. As the motor coughed to silence he would tumble out to use the toilet, splash the stickiness from his face, and check his stoma in the mirror, trying to clean the uncomfortable redness that was steadily expanding around his vent. He would then head inside, out of the heat, to check the magazine stands for another issue of the zombie story. There would usually be a glass refrigerator stacked with colourful drinks to lean against for a moment and feel the chill through his shirt. There would always be some kind of fan or, if he was lucky, a rumbling air conditioner, churning the air. And there would be men’s magazines, with waxy-looking women in bikinis and high heels draped over motorcycles that he would have to push aside to find the comic books.
This station was different, though. They had just pulled up in a place called Caiguna, at the only building visible in any direction: a structure standing alone beneath a span of blue sky that had steadily widened the further west they travelled, and that to Sam now seemed to envelope his entire vision. There had been no more police breath tests, and hardly any traffic at all. As they parked at the pumps, the building appeared lopsided, one corner of the corrugated roof sagging by the toilets. As Sam entered he could see that the walls had been built from thin wooden planks that had shrunk, letting the sunlight slip between them. The whole place, inside and out, was painted a bright yellow and looked as though it could crumble in a strong gust of wind. The only reading material for sale was a pile of old car magazines stacked near the door, and everything was covered in dust. The doorways were hung with plastic streamers, and when the shopkeeper emerged from a back room she was wearing a faded blue singlet and guzzling from a beer bottle.
Dettie was outside wiping the windscreen and Jon had opened the boot to pull a change of shirt from his bag. Nailed to the wall above Sam’s head was a two-year-old calendar with curled corners. It looked brittle, flecked with the sunlight streaming through the walls, and in its photograph—a faded image of the ocean—a thin yacht was sailing out towards the horizon. He heard the shopkeeper behind him sorting her papers as she drank.
Dettie had started to fill the car with fuel, watching Katie and Jon make barnyard noises at one another. Katie was a pig, pushing up her nose and snorting, and as she ran past, Dettie watched her, pulling the petrol hose out of the car and holding it limp in her hand. Jon clucked like a chicken as he closed the boot, and Katie mimicked the noise, giggling as she ran. On her way past Dettie, Sam saw his aunt lift the nozzle and very quickly spray Katie across the back with petrol.
Katie stopped. For a moment she stood frozen, her mouth agape, eyes wide. She lifted her wet arms, tugging at her clothes. Then she screamed.
Jon, who was doing up his shirt buttons, looked over. Dettie dropped the hose, ran towards Katie, and grabbed her shoulders.
‘What happened?’ Jon’s voice was almost a shout. ‘Are you all right?’
Dettie was crouching beside Katie, trying to hush her.
The shopkeeper rounded the counter and stepped through the doorway, shielding her eyes. ‘What?’ she grunted.
Sam followed her out.
Looking up at them, Dettie rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, the girl here was flapping about,’ she said. ‘She knocked me and got a splash of petrol.’
‘Petrol?’ Jon knelt. ‘Where? On you? On your skin?’
Katie was howling, wriggling under the damp patch on her shirt. ‘I didn’t touch anything,�
� she whined.
‘We just need to wash up.’ Dettie had to wrestle a better grip to keep her niece close.
The smell had already hit Sam, and Katie was gagging, trying desperately to pull off her top.
The shopkeeper shrugged and waved them inside.
Dettie pushed Katie along, her fingers clamped tight on her shoulders. ‘We’ll try not to be too long, Sammy,’ she said, rolling her eyes and tutting. And as they disappeared through the streamers at the back of the store he heard Katie’s moans as Dettie chastised her for ‘mucking around’.
From behind him, Sam heard a scrape as the petrol hose was lifted from the ground. Jon washed off the nozzle and finished filling the car. He looked at Sam and exhaled loudly. ‘That aunt of yours, eh?’
Sam scuffed his feet, watching as the breeze raised wisps of dust from the ground. He wanted to talk to Jon about Dettie. To tell him he was worried. To explain why he was so scared.
Jon screwed the petrol cap on and slid the nozzle back in its pump. He ran his nails through his beard and stretched. ‘If all the excitement’s died down, I might take a stroll,’ he said, leaning into the car and pulling out a cigarette and a lighter. ‘Will you be good here for a minute, matey?’
Shrugging, Sam stared at the car’s bumper.
Jon wandered down the road to light up, but Sam stayed standing where he was, his eyes still unfocused on the car. He heard a muffled yell from inside the store, then quiet. The car sat in place, encrusted with dust, and a familiar sensation crept over him. There was something wrong with it. With the car. Something was different. Not with the colour or the shape. It was smaller than that. But it was wrong. His eyes flashed across the wheels and the lights and the wipers. Everything appeared fine. Then he settled on the numberplate.
It was wrong. The plate was wrong. They were supposed to have his uncle Ted’s initials, but these letters were different. Unfamiliar. Even the numbers didn’t seem right, though he couldn’t remember what those should have been. He scanned the car again, checked both front and back. It was definitely Dettie’s, but the plates weren’t what they were supposed to be.
