The Other Side of Beautiful

by Kim Lock

  ‘No,’ she moaned, grabbing hold of his fat, wriggling body. ‘Stop it.’

  Finally managing to shove the dog away, Mercy sat up. The cat throw slid down and she shivered. Her head swam. The van was filled with light; condensation glistened on the windows and bright, early-morning sunshine reflected off the ridiculously orange dirt, blasted straight through the glass, along her optic nerves and into her brain. How could it be so bright and yet so cold?

  The half-empty whisky bottle was on the floor and the box of Jenny Cleggett on the cabinet. Mumbling an apology, Mercy put the ashes away. She gulped a cup of water and opened the back of the van. In a brown blur, Wasabi rocketed out into the crisp morning air, and she wondered how long this burst of puppy energy would last.

  Flies came in droves. Choruses of ‘Morning!’ reached her as she walked to the bathroom. Mercy ducked her face and swatted flies in reply.

  Inside the amenities block, the air was already heady with pong. Insects buzzed around the iron walls. At the sink she splashed water on her face and asked herself once again what the hell she was doing. It still wasn’t too late to turn back.

  But when she lifted her head, she saw the doorway framing a bright slab of sunshine. Birds were singing. A soft breeze skittered across the earth, lifting dusty golden waves, and she recalled the golden flames stretching high into the night sky above her caved-in roof. She sighed, then wrestled her hair into a gnarled ponytail.

  Once again outside, Mercy could hear idling diesel engines. Sunlight caught on massive wing mirrors as four-wheel drives were aimed towards awaiting caravans. Awnings clacked as they were rolled snugly away and pop-tops whoomped as they collapsed, snapped down tight. Doors thumped; radios crackled.

  Mercy tugged her phone from her pocket. 7.12am.

  ‘Yep,’ a woman was calling out, waving as if directing an aircraft. ‘Straight … straight … left … left … I said LEFT!’

  Mercy needed coffee. And this morning she had plenty. Brightening at the thought of the large jar of Moccona in the van, she hurried back—fielding more waves, more shouted greetings and dutifully conceding that yes, it’s a great day for it.

  As she reached the Hijet the sound of the engines behind her lifted to a roar. Caravans rolled forward, tyres grinding over gravel, gathering speed. Two vehicles swung towards the driveway, creating a brief, tense bottle-neck, before another revved up behind them and the convoy advanced, squeaking, towards the road. The air was filled with the growl of engines as they raced to the highway, square rumps of caravans gleaming in the sun as they disappeared.

  Silence descended. A lone magpie carolled; the dry sticks of a tree clicked together.

  Mercy stood in the empty lot, staring about. In the space of fifteen minutes the park had emptied, and now her battered Hijet stood alone. Wasabi lifted his nose to sniff at the invisible wake left by the hastily departed. Mercy recalled the park manager from Crystal Brook yesterday morning, chuckling over the vans racing from the park. Gotta get there first. Hurry up and slow down.

  Almost another twenty minutes passed before Mercy was finally able to drink a cup of coffee. Having forgotten to clean her saucepan the night before, she had to scrub dried baked bean sauce from it at the brackish tap outside the bathroom block, beneath a sign declaring WATER NOT FOR DRINKING. The underlined NOT made her so nervous she removed all drips, even from the handle, with her T-shirt before pouring in her cup of spring water. On the small gas-ring the water took almost fifteen minutes to come to the boil. Not having any way of keeping it cold, Mercy had no milk, so the coffee was a swirling tar-black pool in her cup and it burned her tongue, but it was coffee, and as she sat in the back of her van, legs swinging, gazing out into the deserted lot and the blue sheet of sky, she felt, almost, the briefest moment of peace.

  Until she wanted a second cup, but realised she would have to wait another quarter hour for the water to boil.

  She fed and watered Wasabi, then made herself a tomato and cheese sandwich. After she ate, she slicked on a liberal coating of deodorant, brushed her teeth, fought again with her hair before giving up and piling it into a bun on her crown. Switching on the front camera on her phone, she let out a shriek of laughter.

  She looked ridiculous. Puffy purple skin surrounded her red-rimmed eyes. A craggy boulder of frazzled brown hair haloed her head; a handful of inflamed red dots scattered across her forehead. Peering closer, Mercy marvelled at her ability to produce the paradox of both pimples and wrinkles.

  Her mother had spent hours poring over a mirror, fingertips reading her skin like Braille. As a young child, Mercy had found it fascinating, her mother’s ability to spend so much time gazing into her own reflection, and had one day decided to try it herself. Dragging the bath stool alongside the cabinet, Mercy climbed up and sat cross-legged on the cabinet top, then began a protracted study of herself in the mirror. After a few minutes she had grown bored, her attention wandering to the row of baskets filled with glossy metallic tubes, squares of colourful packed powders, pots of exquisitely scented lotions. A while later her mother had appeared in the mirror, face etched with rage, and Mercy had been hoisted from the counter by her arm, smacked on her backside and banished to her bedroom for the rest of the day. Her mother liked to recall the episode to anyone who’d listen, proclaiming it had taken her hours to remove all the lipstick and moisturising cream from the mirror. But what Mercy recalled, but never dared mention, was that it wasn’t the mess Mercy made that triggered her mother’s outrage, but what Mercy had wasted. It was vanity that caused her mother to howl You little shit, that lipstick was Guerlain!

  Mercy tossed her phone onto the seat.

  The sign at the Glendambo petrol station read LAST FUEL FOR 253KM.

  Holding the nozzle in the Hijet’s tank, Mercy was considering the sign’s implications when she heard the sound of a vehicle pulling into the bowser behind her.

  ‘Mercy, hiya!’

  At the Scottish accent, Mercy’s grip on the nozzle faltered. The pump chugged to a halt.

  ‘How’s it gaun?’

  The rental camper was parked so close to the back of her van their bumpers were almost touching. Andrew Macauley stood with hands on hips, smiling widely.

  Mercy was suddenly aware that she hadn’t showered in three days.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, fumbling with the nozzle and restarting the petrol flow.

  ‘Did you stop here overnight?’ He pushed his sunglasses up onto his head.

  ‘I did,’ Mercy answered, thinking of the half-empty whisky bottle.

  ‘Maybe I misheard, but I thought you’d said you were headed back to Adelaide?’

  ‘I changed my mind.’

  He waited for her to say more, but she stared hard at her petrol cap.

  ‘Fair enough, then,’ Andy said cheerfully. He cranked up his own flow of fuel, and gazed about Glendambo’s bleak surroundings with an amused expression. ‘Minimalist,’ he said.

  ‘Except for the flies.’

  Last fuel for 253km. Travelling at seventy, that was over three and a half hours. How long could the Hijet go without filling up? She thought again of her SUV, purring along at one hundred and fifteen—that distance would barely skim the top off a tank of premium unleaded. But this thing?

  Home is wherever you ARE. Flakes of paint were peeling from one of the flowers, stone chips marked the green panel. She noticed that the back bumper seemed to be sagging and touched it with her toes; it wiggled. Wasabi was in the driver’s seat, front paws propped on the window frame, tail wagging.

  ‘I had a bit of a fright yesterday, by the way,’ the Scottish tourist was saying. ‘Have you seen those signs on the road saying “watch out for livestock”?’ He lifted his eyebrows. ‘Sound advice, eh?’

  Mercy glanced at the front of his camper, but it appeared free of dents or smears of cow hide.

  ‘Near miss,’ he explained. ‘Good brakes on this thing, thank Christ. Although I gave the auld yins in the caravan behind me a right scare
.’ He laughed. ‘Reaction times all round were impressive, I must say.’

  ‘What about the poor cow?’

  ‘I don’t think it minded at all, to tell you the truth. It just glared at me and wandered off. I got the impression that I was in her way.’

  Petrol gurgled up into the filler and the pump clicked off. She set the nozzle back in the bowser with a clunk and turned again to consider the sign. Once she left Glendambo it would be just her, the rattling Daihatsu and the road (and the threat of wandering livestock) for almost half a day.

  ‘So how far are you going today?’ Andy asked, replacing his petrol cap.

  Mercy touched the mess piled on top of her head, attempting to smooth it somehow. When she lifted her arm she realised her deodorant was not working. No wonder she had her own cloud of flies. She wiped her palms on her jeans, hoping the petrol fumes would drown out any other smells and thinking, right now, she could really use that bottle of Ralph Lauren Romance she had smashed against Eugene’s wall.

  ‘Hopefully further than 253 kilometres.’

  ‘Coober Pedy?’ He stepped closer, looking in the direction of the highway. A roadtrain thundered past, clattering and roaring. ‘Opal mining town, so they say.’

  Well, he had showered, that much was clear. Soap, toothpaste and a hint of something else, alpine and decidedly masculine. Mercy clamped her elbows at her sides.

  And that’s when she felt the first kick of discomfort. Perhaps it was the baked beans; perhaps it was the whisky. Or maybe it was six hundred kilometres of anxiety. Whatever it was, Mercy felt a low growl of gaseous pressure rumble through her insides. Andy leaned himself comfortably on the side of her van, his right arm now looking more tanned than yesterday, and she thought, Oh, god.

  Andy was looking at her, waiting, and Mercy realised as her guts gurgled unmistakably that he had asked her a question.

  ‘Sorry?’ she said, voice strained.

  ‘D’you think we’ll find any opals on the side of the road?’

  ‘Opals?’ The hair on Mercy’s arms was standing up.

  ‘Yeah, you know, 253 kilometres that way.’ He pointed. ‘Opal mining town?’

  ‘Oh,’ Mercy said. She was clenching so hard her voice had risen to a squeak. But there was no more petrol to pump, and they were both just standing there, and there was nothing for it but to start walking towards the store to pay for their petrol. Could she move without anything slipping out?

  Mercy tried to walk normally as they made their way to the shopfront, and she didn’t realise until she had stepped inside that she really should have stayed outside. She had only seconds left. Heat bloomed in her chest as a chill ran down her spine. On the far wall she spotted a self-service coffee station. It was abandoned. Muttering about caffeine, she made a beeline for it. She punched buttons and waited. She turned her back to the machine and affected a casual pose and when the coffee machine let out an eruption of steam, so did Mercy.

  Then she took her coffee, paid, and hurried back outside.

  Last fuel for 253km.

  The Hijet looked so small. While she had been inside, a semi-trailer had pulled up and her tiny van sat beside it like a fly spot on a watermelon. It was even dwarfed in comparison to the Scottish man’s rental camper parked right behind.

  In the middle of the concrete forecourt, Mercy spun around.

  ‘Woah!’ Andy jumped sideways as Mercy’s coffee sloshed over the rim of her cup. ‘You all right—?’

  But Mercy couldn’t stop; she had to keep going, she couldn’t give her mind time to catch up with her. Back inside the shop, she marched to the rear wall. Batteries, ropes, torches … there. Plastic fuel containers. Mercy picked one up, went outside to the bowser, filled the container, returned inside and paid.

  Then she was back in the van, heading towards the highway. For a few minutes Andy drove a polite distance behind her, but when it became clear that the Hijet was maxed out, its juddering top speed reached, Andy tooted the horn and waved as he pulled out and overtook, before he accelerated ahead and, eventually, disappeared into the distance.

  At least with both windows down and the wind buffeting through the van, the petrol vapours oozing from the spare fuel container in the back were blown away. So were any other smells.

  As Mercy drove on, the sun climbed higher over the arid landscape, a fierce, white-hot ball glaring through the windscreen. Wasabi panted, leaning against the seat, and after a while he jumped through into the back, escaping into the shade.

  ‘You really should have a seatbelt on,’ she scolded the dog, glancing into the rear-vision mirror.

  And then she saw the truck.

  Not so much a truck as it was a colossal steel bull-bar filling her entire back window, the word MACK stretched in thick chrome across the grille.

  Involuntarily Mercy’s foot pressed on the accelerator, speeding up as if to outrun a pursuer, but within a few moments it became clear that going faster was not a good idea. The engine whined; the van began to vibrate like a speedboat smacking over choppy water. Mercy eased off, but the bull-bar remained, bearing down mercilessly through her rear window.

  ‘Go around me,’ she pleaded.

  Although they were rounding a long curved stretch in the road, the white lines were broken; it was safe to pass. Mercy couldn’t see any oncoming traffic. Why wouldn’t the truck overtake?

  The immense grille inched closer. Every instinct was to flee, to go faster, but Mercy lifted her foot further off the pedal; the speedometer needle began to ease down. Seventy, sixty-five, sixty. They were now travelling at the speed limit of the middle of a town, but the truck stayed glued up her arse.

  ‘Why won’t you just bloody pass?’

  Then, she said, ‘Oh.’

  In her mirror the bull-bar migrated to the right, and as it did, she saw what stretched behind it. A long—impossibly long—row of gleaming fuel tanks.

  Mercy’s whole body began to shake. She gripped the wheel but it suddenly felt flimsy in her hands, as though she might swerve without even trying. On her right a shadow loomed, blocking out the sun as the roadtrain’s prime mover inched past her open window. If she reached out, she could almost touch it.

  The first tank crawled past. Then came a second.

  A huge stretch of roadtrain now loomed in front of her, on the wrong side of the road, and yet more truck lagged far behind. To her left the gravel shoulder flew past, murderously slippery and dry. All she could hear was the roar of wind and the howl of dozens of huge wheels churning the bitumen an arm’s width from her head.

  ‘Aaargh!’ Mercy cried.

  A third tank eased past. A fourth. The little van rocked and jumped.

  ‘Shiiiiit!’

  After a long time, daylight appeared. Far ahead the truck began to list to the left, a slow, languid movement like a blue whale lazing in the ocean, and Mercy’s speed had dropped to fifty, and kept dropping even as the roadtrain finally pulled ahead. When she looked up, she saw the truck’s indicators flash: left, right, left.

  What did that mean? A threat? A chastisement? A warning that if he ever saw her and her piece of shit van on the highway again he would crush her into the heat-hazed asphalt—and her little dog, too?

  A rest stop appeared. Mercy slowed, pulled into the rest area and clambered out of the van on shaking legs. At first she thought she needed to pee but when she squatted over the grey desert vegetation it was clear a different kind of voiding was in order.

  ‘Crap,’ Mercy said helplessly.

  She didn’t have a shovel, so she scrabbled at the hard dirt with her fingers, which achieved nothing except to graze her fingertips and cement red crescents under her nails. Sweat beading her brow, she picked up a rock and scraped at the dirt, which was exactly like trying to dig through shower tiles with a shampoo bottle. She flung the rock down in despair.

  She would sacrifice a pair of underwear, she thought, pressing her quivering body against the side of the van. But then she remembered that she had only
one pair of pants, and oh god it was about to come out, there was no denying it anymore, and Mercy swiped away a patch of pebbles and that’s where she went, right there on the red dirt.

  That was also when a truck drove past, horn blaring in approval or disapproval, Mercy wouldn’t ever know. But even though her pale naked arse was aimed at the highway, she waved, because that felt like the polite thing to do, and when she was done she tried to wash the ground with cask water until she realised that dying of thirst was probably worse than leaving a little bit of excrement on the dirt, so she heaped up a pile of stones, like a cat in a litter tray, and then she climbed back into the van, crawled into the driver’s seat and once again headed north.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  As Mercy approached Coober Pedy, strange pale cones began to appear on the treeless landscape. Triangular mounds of white earth were scattered randomly about; some of the mounds were huge, grouped together in quarry-like excavations, others were singular and small, barely bigger than anthills, huddled close to the highway.

  Signs began to appear, propped upon the barren ground: UNDERGROUND HOTEL; UNDERGROUND B&B; UNDERGROUND CHURCH. A bold warning popped in bright red: DANGER. UNMARKED HOLES. That one was complete with a series of line drawings of deep shafts and stick figures falling perilously.

  And then, on the horizon, Mercy saw something she hadn’t seen in almost four hours.

  ‘Look, Wasabi,’ she said. ‘Trees!’

  Mercy slowed, indicated right and took the turn-off.

  At first she didn’t have a plan. The trees she had spotted from the highway were limited to a handful of wiry gums clinging to dry soil. Not a blade of grass appeared in the desiccated ground—everywhere was brittle yellow and grey. Rolling through the dusty town, she passed petrol stations, opal shops, chain-link fences around bare gravel yards, more opal shops. Flat roofs, sun-baked lots, and rattling, big-wheeled utes. Many buildings were only visible by their entrances peeking aboveground, the rest of the structure burrowed into the earth to escape the blinding heat: underground restaurant, underground bookstore, underground gallery.