The Other Side of Beautiful

by Kim Lock

  She has to go. It’s not healthy.

  Mercy clutched Wasabi tighter, lifting him to her chin as she considered the little van. Home is wherever you ARE.

  Well, she thought, presently she was right here on the side of the street in front of her ex-husband’s house. She didn’t have a home, anymore—she had a charred ruin. How could this, where she was right now in this moment, really be home? How could it be that simple?

  ‘Eighteen hundred,’ the old man said.

  ‘Does it work?’ she asked, taking a tentative step towards the van.

  ‘Course it does, love. A little lumpy when she’s cold, but aren’t we all? Otherwise, she runs just fine.’

  ‘Is it roadworthy?’

  The man drew back, looking offended. ‘Course it’s roadworthy. What do you think?’ He stroked the side of the van as though calming a fretting horse. ‘She might not look much, but the seatbelts work—coppers really care about that in particular—there’s not much rust and all the lights work, and the brakes’ll snap your neck, you stomp ’em hard enough. Seventeen hundred, then. Drive a hard bargain, you do.’

  Mercy didn’t have seventeen hundred dollars on her. In fact she didn’t have any dollars on her. All she had was her phone; her purse was melted somewhere into her carpet. The man kept talking and she knew she had only moments left before the fear took her over entirely. She glanced over at Eugene’s house, imagining the scent of perfume leaking from the bricks.

  She is her own problem.

  ‘There’s a gas stove in the back, and a mattress—foam, but good enough—so what else do you need? Tell you what, I’ll throw in …’

  Mercy didn’t hear the rest of that sentence, as the man turned and abruptly toddled off down the driveway. She froze. Was she supposed to follow him? In her head she tried to count the steps back to Eugene’s front door. Twenty steps? Thirty? How many seconds would that take, to be back inside? The man disappeared into the garage and Mercy was evaluating how rude it would be to run away now, when the man reappeared with an ancient folding chair tucked under his arm.

  ‘Here,’ he said, setting the chair on the ground with a clang. ‘I’ll throw this in for good measure. Now you don’t need anything else, love. You’ve got somewhere to sleep, somewhere to eat, somewhere to sit—’ he gave the old folding chair a brief rattle ‘—and there you have it. Home away from home. So where you headed? North? West? Don’t go east—it’s all tourists.’

  Mercy stared at the van. This was getting out of hand. She should apologise to the man for taking up his time and leave.

  Except—where would she go? She heard again the shatter of the perfume bottle breaking, recalled the shock on Eugene’s and Jose’s faces as they had come into the hall and seen Mercy on her knees. Nausea and panic began to roil in her stomach. She forced herself to breathe slowly.

  ‘You want to take it for a spin?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I really don’t know—’

  ‘Sixteen hundred, then.’ The old man laughed and shook his head. ‘Talk about wearing a bloke down. Here, I’ll show you the trick with the door.’ He gave her a conspiratorial smile, as if sharing a secret, and positioned himself at the driver’s door. ‘You lift the handle—’ he did so ‘—and you gotta get it … right … here.’ Suddenly he jack-knifed at the waist, slamming his hip into the driver’s door in a crunch of metal.

  The door popped calmly open.

  There seemed to be nothing else for it; events appeared to be unrolling in front of her entirely of their own accord, ever since her neighbour had pulled her from her burning house. Mercy climbed in.

  The van had only two seats—driver and passenger, covered in cloth the same beige as the outside, with dark green stripes. The gear shift was a long stick with a ball on top. She turned around, peering into the back. The rear seats had been removed to fit in a tiny, L-shaped unit of chipboard cabinets, one of which had a gas-ring stove on the top. Along one side was a narrow bench topped with foam. A seat? A bed? There was barely room to sneeze, but she could see that it was cosy: the way the walls tucked around; the cheery domesticity of the little cabinets.

  ‘Four-speed manual,’ the man was saying. ‘Runs like a real little racehorse, though not quite as quick off the mark. But who needs speed? Slow down, take a good gander at life, I say. Everyone’s too fast these days. Racing around, putting photos of yourself on the internet all day. Why not just enjoy yourself?’

  Mercy felt a squeeze of guilt. She hadn’t been online for days. There would be dozens of notifications, all manner of fear and desperation and outrage. As though she’d summoned it, her phone vibrated in her pocket. A message from Eugene:

  I want to help you but I’m not sure you can stay. Let’s talk tonight. E x.

  She could feel herself falling, slipping down a slope that returned her to old habits, old reliances—old hurts. Suddenly, Mercy felt as if a slab of stone had toppled onto her. She was exhausted, crushed; she was defeated, and tired to the marrow of her bones.

  Mercy surveyed the inside of the van again. An entire living space, perfectly portable.

  ‘Be home wherever you are,’ she murmured.

  The man fell silent. He was quiet for so long that Mercy stopped inspecting the Hijet’s humble interior and turned to look at him through the open window.

  The man was smiling. Tears glimmered in his eyes.

  ‘Fifteen hundred then, love,’ he said. ‘I think she’s saying she’s yours.’

  When Mercy was fourteen, her classmate Lana Nicholson-Dean had owned a pony. The pony was a brown-spotted, bad-tempered thing, short and round as a barrel. Once, on a rare occasion Mercy’s mother had permitted, Mercy had stayed overnight at Lana’s house. Early the next morning, Mercy had sat on the fence rail as Lana’s pony was having new shoes fitted. The farrier, brow dripping with sweat and blossoms of blood leaking into his shirt from a savage bite on his back, had instructed Lana to rap the pony’s forehead with her finger. Right there between his eyes, the farrier said. Perplexed by the hollow thudding sound, the pony had stilled its gnashing teeth long enough for the farrier to drive the nails swiftly into the pony’s hooves.

  This memory came to Mercy now as she pulled out of Eugene’s neighbourhood and onto Main North Road. As the traffic closed in around her, the odd sensation of the Hijet’s engine buzzing away beneath her seat was a distraction, a physical sensation to focus on, to stop her panic from biting hard enough to draw blood.

  ‘Okay,’ she said aloud to herself, ‘I’m just driving home. No big deal.’

  The van rattled, lurching each time she shifted gears. But Wasabi was unperturbed by the van’s clanking and Mercy’s clumsy shifting. The dog sat happily alongside her on the passenger seat, tongue hanging out, eyes wide and darting as he took in all the whizzing-by cars and houses.

  ‘It’s a good plan, isn’t it, boy?’ Mercy said. ‘It’s a little more snug in here than the house, but we’ll get used to it. And it won’t be for long, just a few weeks, I’m sure. Just until the house is fixed up.’ With the campervan parked in her front yard, Mercy had decided, even her view would be the same: she would still see that familiar straggly tree growing beside the footpath; she would still see the neighbour’s green mesh fence and their carport with the half-demolished car. She could still watch the garbage truck sailing past when they forgot to put out their bin.

  Mercy gripped the old steering wheel and tried to unclench her teeth.

  ‘Just driving home,’ she repeated. ‘I can do this.’

  Mercy pulled onto her street. The taut, heavy rope in her chest began to slacken and her breath came easier. There was the small deli she had once walked to for milk. There was the leaning-over mailbox at number eight, there was the dandelion-strewn nature strip of number twelve. And there, just ahead, was the straggly gum tree growing beside the footpath—

  Mercy’s body went cold. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh, no.’

  The Hijet drifted into the kerb, and stalled.

&nb
sp; Skeletal black frames stabbed the sky. There was no roof at all, the walls decapitated and crumbling. The ground was littered with curls of iron, brick rubble and charred detritus. Everything was coal-black, twisted, ruined.

  And the stink. It was a stink of scorched metal; it was the acrid, toxic reek of melted plastics and cold, sodden charcoal. A breeze came straight from the ruined house, lifted Mercy’s hair and etched the stink forever into her pores. Beneath Mercy’s feet the earth was muddy and churned. Flakes of soot ticked and sifted.

  Mercy stood in front of her house and nothing was the same. Nothing was safe. Her ears screamed and her house was the scene from a horror movie. Wasabi sniffed around a pile of bricks, nose searching the ground, and Mercy could not even see where her front door used to be because it was blocked by tangled sheets of roofing iron. Her lounge-room windows were gaping black wounds. As she looked, the charred edge of a curtain fluttered out, and gave the sad, desperate flap of a white flag.

  Mercy dropped to her knees. She put her hands over her face. There was a keening sound, and then Wasabi was there, frantically trying to insert his wet warm snout between her hands and her face. His tongue slurped at her nose, her teeth, her eyelids.

  Mercy scrambled to her feet. Wasabi yapped and bounced around her ankles.

  Mercy fled. Blindly, without thought, without reason—she jumped into the van and drove. She ran as if she could escape her own treacherous, panic-soaked body and into oblivion.

  And that is how Mercy Blain’s view of the world changed from all she could see through her living-room window, to the world she could see through a windscreen. In a tiny beat-up van that was almost as old as she was, with her Dachshund beside her and the wind in her hair, Mercy’s whole world was rattling north along a rural South Australian highway, with only the borrowed clothes on her back, cheap thongs on her feet and adrenaline pulsing through her veins. She had absolutely no idea where she was going, or what she was going to do.

  2880 km to go

  CHAPTER FOUR

  For no other reason than it was the approximate cardinal direction she had been heading since she got out of Eugene’s spare bed that morning, Mercy went north.

  She drove for three hours, legs quaking on the pedals in a way that could have been caused by the van’s engine buzzing beneath her seat or by the fear in her blood. Either way, Mercy drove and drove before she allowed herself any time to think. Adelaide’s northern outskirts came and went, buildings and industry giving way to farmhouses, silos and vast slabs of wheat. Beside her on the passenger seat, Wasabi sat, pink tongue lapping the air as he aimed his snout at the wind rushing through the window. His eyes narrowed in pleasure at the new, exciting and very farmyard smells. The paddocks rolling by alternated between cereal crops, cows and sheep. Tufts of scrubby bushes or sprawling, leggy mallee gums lined the road. The sky lightened to a pale gauzy blue.

  ‘Okay,’ she said aloud, eventually. ‘I guess this is happening.’

  The old man had been curious when Mercy drew out her phone and asked for his bank details. ‘I don’t have any cash on me,’ she had apologised. ‘But I can transfer it to you right away. Only takes a few minutes.’ And sure enough, after the man had insisted she follow him inside for a glass of lemonade and an Iced Vovo, he had checked his internet banking and ‘would you look at that, there it is, strike me down with a feather!’ Then Mercy had signed a slip of paper and the van was hers.

  The Hijet had a top speed of about eighty-five, but according to the old man, you wouldn’t want to be in it when it was doing it, so Mercy sat on seventy and watched everyone overtake her: sedans, trucks, caravans. She was the slowest, probably loudest and most hand-painted thing on the road. Google Maps told her she was on the Horrocks Highway, the A32. That meant very little to her other than the fact that she could roughly point out where she was in the event she needed to call roadside assistance. Which she hoped she wouldn’t. The old man had been a motor mechanic for sixty-five years, he said, and hand on heart, if that van wouldn’t go until the cows came home he’d go hopping to hell.

  Flat grain fields gave way to rolling hills covered with grapes. Quiet, sleepy towns with slumped old pubs passed in the blink of an eye. After three hours, Mercy felt she had churned through enough adrenaline to stop and take stock of her situation. Up ahead, a sign announced a town called Spalding had restrooms, petrol and food, and Mercy knew that if she didn’t want to stove into any innocent oncoming traffic she would have to eat. Low blood sugar and anxiety was an unacceptable combination on the road. Even if she was only puttering along at seventy.

  Besides, it wasn’t just food Mercy needed. At the very least, she also required soap and a toothbrush. A hairbrush. Something to wear on her feet that wasn’t two-dollar thongs. And she would need water, as the few mouthfuls of lemonade she had obligingly choked down at the old man’s house now sat uncomfortably in her bladder and her throat was parched.

  But the question remained: despite how much she needed all those things—food, water, soap—how was she going to go inside a shop to actually get them?

  When Mercy thought of her old self, her self from before it had all happened, she wanted to go back in time and shake herself for taking the simplest tasks for granted. The ability to walk into a shop, for instance, and pay no attention to the shop itself whatsoever. To be able to step into a grocery store with a head filled not with bewildering terror but with banal, everyday thoughts: politics at work; the issues of a current client; what she was going to pick up for dinner. Normal thoughts of a normal person. These were the sorts of things that, two years ago, Mercy would have thought about as she mindlessly picked out tomatoes or salted nuts or socks.

  But then the shops had become as alien as the rest of the world. Her mind had refused to distract itself with everyday banality and instead became consumed with irrational dread simply for being inside her own skin. The world wasn’t safe anymore, it was hostile. And that irrational dread, that sense of hostility, gripped Mercy now as she shut off the Hijet’s engine outside the Spalding Welcome Mart.

  Wasabi looked at her.

  ‘I don’t know, boy,’ she said, crouching low in her seat and side-eyeing the Welcome Mart. ‘I guess we’ll just have to see.’

  For a long time she sat in the van, staring into the store windows, hoping to glean a mental picture of the inside—a blueprint or an escape plan—but all she could see was the streetscape reflected back at her, the hand-painted flowers on the side of the Hijet distorted in the glass. The diazepam she had taken yesterday was long gone. She felt tight as a guitar string.

  ‘Here’s how I see it,’ she said. Wasabi pricked his ears. ‘I have two choices. Go into the shop and get what we need. Or,’ she exhaled forcefully, ‘turn around and go back.’

  I want to help you but I’m not sure you can stay.

  Without warning, her mind threw her an image of Jose, reclined on a pillow, being stroked by her naked husband, hairy legs entwined. Swiftly that image was followed by the picture of skeletal roof trusses, charred black and reaching towards the sky. When, thirdly, she heard the echoes of a shrill voice crying out, Do something, Mercy’s shaking hands fumbled for the door.

  ‘Stay,’ she said to Wasabi. ‘I’ll be right back.’

  Leaving the windows partially rolled down for fresh air, she left the dog and slid out of the van.

  The street was quiet. A magpie warbled from a powerline overhead. From somewhere in the distance came the putter of a lawn mower; the air was warm and still and the sun pressed through a hazy sky. The street was wide, first laid at the time of bullock drays, but there were no cars and Mercy almost expected a tumbleweed to roll past.

  Mercy approached the Welcome Mart’s front doors. Crates along the window were stacked with nets of oranges, bags of green beans and a pile of cauliflower halves. A sign read ALL LOCAL PRODUCE—SUPPORT YOUR FRIENDS! and Mercy suddenly felt guilty. Food miles were a thing, weren’t they? The less miles your food travelled the less y
ou were contributing to global carbon emissions, and she had spent almost two years shopping online, her food trucked for who knows how many miles. Mercy gritted her teeth. There were too many things to feel worried about.

  Pushing open the door and setting a bell jangling overhead, Mercy stepped inside.

  Bread, Mercy said to herself. Bread, bread, bread.

  There, on that side wall. She took a loaf of wholemeal. Okay, what’s next? It was a small store, with two short aisles lined mostly with canned goods. A smaller selection meant easier choices, but less to choose from meant less prompting over what she actually needed, now that she could think of nothing but fleeing the store.

  There: cheese? That worked with bread.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a woman appear behind the counter, watching her. Mercy felt the weight of the woman’s gaze drop over her like a lead blanket. Customers in shops should know what to do; customers in shops should know how to be in shops.

  Mercy gripped her loaf of bread and small block of cheese and shuffled with deliberate slowness along one aisle. She hoped her slow gait could trick her body into believing there was no threat, no reason to run, but it wasn’t working.

  How long would it take to pay for these two items and get back to the van? Thirty seconds, if she didn’t speak to the woman behind the counter. Could she hold out another thirty seconds? But then she realised that if she only purchased bread and cheese she would have gone through all the stress of coming into the store only to leave again without getting what she needed. That would mean she would, inevitably, have to go back into another store—and it couldn’t be this one, the woman would recognise her and that would be embarrassing—and she would have to do it all over again.