The Other Side of Beautiful

by Kim Lock

  Just driving through town was making her thirsty and hot. The sun was belting directly through the windscreen onto Jose’s black skinny jeans.

  And here, Mercy realised her supply shopping was not complete. At Port Augusta all she had purchased to wear were spare undies and a puffer jacket. The only shirt she had was Eugene’s red Kombi T-shirt and her only pants were Jose’s jeans—and they almost hadn’t made it, she thought, recalling her helpless gut-clenching stop on the roadside earlier. Going north, it was only going to get hotter. Her single T-shirt was only going to get filthier and the jeans only more unsuitable. Two-dollar thongs weren’t exactly outback-savvy footwear, either.

  A familiar sign caught Mercy’s eye: VINNIES—an op shop. She followed an arrow up a side street, where a break in a corrugated iron fence pointed her up a sloping driveway.

  Mercy found herself in a sudden oasis. Under a cluster of gum trees stood a little mud cottage, walls the colour of caramel. A shrubby garden nestled against the cottage, bordered by a ramble of stones and spattered with shade.

  Parking under a tree, Mercy shut off the engine and stepped out of the van. She stretched her arms above her head, the muscles along her spine shuddering. She lifted Wasabi out and set him on the ground, where he trotted to relieve himself beneath a bush. When he was done she tied his new lead to a veranda post in the shade by a plastic container filled with clean water.

  A dry breeze clacked through the trees, cooling the sweat on Mercy’s skin. The back of her T-shirt felt damp from pressing against the seat for so many hours. Tucked away up here, in a shaded patch on a hill away from the road, Mercy felt a peculiar sensation. It took her a long minute to realise what it was: simply, an absence of nerves. She was waiting for anxiety to sweep in, clouding her mind, bringing its urgency and dogged single-mindedness. But, as she warily made a scan of her body, she noticed it wasn’t there. Not yet, anyway. Instead she felt something like a careful, quiet waiting. A pause—but there was nothing in it. No expectation.

  ‘Weird,’ she muttered under her breath.

  Wasabi twitched an ear, then settled his belly onto the cool concrete.

  Mercy went inside.

  Though an air-conditioning unit blasted valiantly from the wall, the inside of the tiny store was only a couple of degrees cooler than outside. The air was thick with the scent of musty fabric, laundry powder and old carpet. Crammed racks of clothing clogged the floor and the walls were covered with framed paintings, cross-stitches of country houses, mirrors, clocks.

  Mercy stepped into the sea of clothes, hangers catching her shoulders and screeching on the racks.

  ‘G’day, love. Where you from then?’

  Mercy glanced around. The voice had come from somewhere on the other side of the room.

  ‘Looking for anything in particular?’

  Tentatively, Mercy rose onto tiptoes but saw only swathes of fabric: colours, patterns, greys that probably used to be white. She said, ‘Shorts?’

  ‘This way.’

  ‘Sorry, which way?’

  ‘Take a left, dear, at that big stuffed bear.’

  Mercy reached the end of a rack and propped against it was a gigantic teddy bear. Matted yellow fur, glassy brown eyes; its forepaws were stitched to a basket in its lap. The basket was empty, and Mercy was briefly filled with an inordinate sadness at the idea of this bear condemned to forever hold an empty vessel. Casting about, she spotted a bunch of faded silk flowers in a vase.

  Mercy glanced from side to side. She still couldn’t see the owner of the voice. Lifting the flowers from the vase, she slipped them into the bear’s basket.

  ‘He’ll like that.’

  Mercy jumped. Right behind her, a saleswoman, ostensibly. A kind of ample floral sacking draped over one shoulder and knotted beneath the other. Greying, stout, and smiling as if Mercy was a friend she hadn’t seen for twenty years.

  The woman grasped the fur on the bear’s crown and tugged him upright. The bear obliged, sitting up straighter.

  ‘Oh yes, that’s much better.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Mercy said. ‘I just thought …’

  ‘Where’ve you come from, then?’

  ‘The van?’ Mercy pointed, but any view outside was obscured by mountains of clothing.

  The woman gave a generous laugh. ‘Good one, love. You’re up from Adelaide, then?’

  Mercy nodded. The woman was watching her with such frank, non-judgemental warmth that Mercy almost confessed it all, there and then in the Cooper Pedy op shop: the fire; the not-technically-ex-husband; the lurking voicemail that she still hadn’t listened to and all the awful shit it would dredge up. The not having been able to leave her house for two years.

  ‘Shorts,’ Mercy blurted again.

  ‘Right you are.’ The saleswoman beckoned Mercy to a nearby rack. ‘Take your pick, love. You’d be—what, size twelve, fourteen?—here we go. Now, they’re all clean, of course, and in good condition. Some people, bless their hearts, just leave rubbish in the donation bin, torn and stained. It breaks my heart but all I can do is throw them out. I can’t have anything not up to scratch for sale; that wouldn’t be right, would it?’

  ‘No, I suppose it wouldn’t.’

  ‘Oh, would you look at these?’ She lifted a hanger from the rack with a hoot. ‘Have you ever seen so many sparkles?’ She laughed, then looked abruptly mystified. ‘Goodness knows where these would’ve come from—no one round here in their right mind would wear something like this. Must’ve been a tourist up from the city dumped ’em.’ She shoved the pair of glittering silver hot pants back onto the rack. ‘Now, here’s something you’ll like.’

  She held up a pair of cut-off jeans. The denim worn pale blue, the hem a fringe of fraying threads. They were so short the inside of the pockets protruded out the legs but the fabric was soft and stretchy, and Mercy imagined the air swirling through the van as she drove, cooling her bare skin.

  ‘I’ll take them.’

  The woman rifled through the rack, handing Mercy several more pairs: a multi-pocketed khaki number, reminding Mercy of an archaeologist kneeling in pits of dinosaur bones; a simple pair of grey running shorts; and a pair made of dark brown linen with a wide bow at the front. Shooing Mercy towards a curtain in the back corner, the saleswoman insisted Mercy ‘try before you buy’.

  ‘And if you like ’em, love,’ the woman went on, head buried among the hangers, ‘I’ll give you two for the price of one.’

  Mercy looked at the price tag on the pair of denim cut-offs, a torn scrap of card affixed with a safety-pin: $2.

  The change room was a broom handle with a sheet draped over. A shard of mirror leaned against the wall. Nerves flickered in Mercy’s belly as she drew the sheet, but she imagined Wasabi just outside, sitting patiently, waiting for her. She pictured the dappled shade and the pretty garden tucked against the walls. And when she pulled off her hot jeans, she sighed with relief.

  ‘You staying in town?’ the woman called out.

  ‘Just passing through,’ Mercy answered, hopping on one leg.

  ‘That’s a shame. There’s a film at the drive-in tonight.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Never mind. It’s just all local miners going anyway, probably not your type.’

  Mercy didn’t know if she had a type anymore.

  ‘You gonna try some noodling before you go?’

  Pulling on the pair of brown linen shorts, Mercy banged her knee into the wall. ‘Some what?’

  ‘Noodling, love. You can fossick through the mullock heaps anytime you like. Plenty of folks find opals in the miners’ leftovers. Just watch out for open shafts. Whatever you do, don’t walk backwards if you’re taking photos.’

  ‘Is that what all those piles of white sand are? Mullock heaps?’

  ‘Yes, love. That’s what comes out when the shafts are dug. Plenty of good opal chips in there—some townsfolk make a good enough living just picking the scraps up off the ground.’

  ‘Wow,’ Mercy sa
id. The brown linen shorts were giving her a ferocious wedgie. She yanked them off.

  ‘Of course, it’s not just opals in the shafts, unfortunately.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Plenty of bodies, too, I’m afraid.’

  Mercy froze, one foot in the air. ‘Bodies?’

  ‘Sad, isn’t it?’

  ‘Do people fall down often?’

  ‘Yes and no. Some fall; others get pushed.’

  The hair on the back of Mercy’s neck stood up. ‘Pushed?’

  ‘Sorry, dear, I shouldn’t be saying morbid things. Don’t let an old bird like me scare you. We’re a lovely bunch here, truly. It’s just some unsavoury types think the outback is a good place to dispose of their … rubbish.’ She sniffed, and Mercy could hear what sounded like real tears in the woman’s voice.

  Mercy saw herself in the shard of mirror. Red-eyed, wild-haired: she had the look of a caged thing. ‘I guess everyone’s got their secrets.’

  The woman sighed. ‘Too right, love.’

  Mercy hurried out from behind the sheet. She had decided on two pairs of shorts: the denim cut-offs, which she left on, bundling Jose’s black skinny jeans into a ball, and the grey running shorts.

  A large bin was filled with shoes held together in pairs by rubber bands. Mercy rooted around in the bin, fishing out squashed strappy sandals, sad old pumps (who wore pumps in an opal mining town?) and more thongs until she found a pair of floppy leather lace-up boots, tongues lolling like a dog in the sun. The boots were half a size too big, but far better protection against snake bites or bindi-eyes than her supermarket thongs. She also grabbed another T-shirt, pale pink marle with I ♥ SYDNEY above a screen print of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

  ‘Good one,’ the saleswoman said, motioning to the T-shirt and tapping the side of her nose. ‘Act like a tourist, people might give you a bit of space.’ She chuckled, counting out Mercy’s change.

  Mercy stared at her. How did she know? Could the woman tell, just by looking at her, that Mercy was crowded by everything? That everything—the whole world—had piled on top of her and she couldn’t breathe anymore? She pictured bodies crumpled at the bottom of mine shafts; judging by the amount of mullock heaps she had seen, there were thousands of open shafts out there. Hundreds of kilometres from anywhere, at the bottom of a vast, ancient inland sea. Each human life was so tiny, so ephemeral, compared to the inescapable march of time, the earth, infinite space.

  ‘There you go, dear.’

  The saleswoman held out a weathered hand, change for a twenty sitting in her palm.

  ‘Keep it,’ Mercy said. ‘A donation.’

  The woman blinked, cleared her throat. ‘Well, good on you, love.’ She closed her hand. ‘It’s all for the hospital.’

  A beat passed. Fighting the urge to hug the saleswoman tightly, Mercy turned and left.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The treeless landscape went on and on.

  Mercy drove, stopping to drink water, eat an apple or nervously splash petrol into the tank. In every direction as far as she could see the earth stretched out, rocky and bare beneath the never-ending sky. Which meant, of course, that whenever she needed to pee, there was no privacy. No trees to hide behind, no bushes or thickets of shrubbery in which to tuck herself away from the eyes of the highway. Just spiky grasses and creeping saltbush all the way to the horizon. When she pulled off the highway, all she could do was take a long look in both directions, listening hard for any traffic, and then, crouching next to the van, go as quickly as possible.

  The earth slide-showed a glorious palette of changing colour. Sometimes the soil was bright orange, sometimes a rich blood-like scarlet, sometimes a pale sandy yellow. But always: flat, wide open. A moonscape. When Mercy stopped she heard the breeze whispering across the open land and imagined it unimpeded for hundreds of kilometres, finally reaching her to wrap around her legs and lift the sweat from her brow.

  About two hours on from Coober Pedy, the landscape changed again and wiry shrubs began to spring up. The soil deepened to the colour of rust. Overhead a low blanket of silver clouds drifted in.

  Mercy drove on. The Stuart Highway might have been crossing some of Australia’s most remote outback country but it was never quiet. She was passed in both directions by a steady stream of caravans and trucks, campervans and sedans that sped by in an instant and were gone, almost as quickly as they had appeared.

  The sun wore a track through the sky, until it began to sink in the west, flaring hot through the passenger-side window. After a very long, straight stretch, the highway began a gentle curve to the west. A sign appeared, displaying icons for bed, fuel, food—even a police station. MARLA, THE TRAVELLERS REST. POPULATION: 72.

  ‘Whatcha think, boy?’ she said to Wasabi.

  The dog sat up, lifting his snout to inspect the air.

  ‘A rest sound good?’

  Wasabi blinked at her, then yawned.

  Mercy looked in the rear-vision mirror.

  ‘What do you think, Jenny Cleggett?’

  Mercy intuited the silence as satisfied.

  She eased off the accelerator, flicked the indicator and followed the signs into town.

  Town was probably a generous moniker, Mercy thought as she rattled into the fifty zone. She was following a caravan with Grey nomads: age is an attitude not a condition across the back.

  She rolled through a roadhouse forecourt giant enough for roadtrains, past a bar with a row of saddle-bagged motorbikes parked out the front. Faded red Coca-Cola signs, a strip of pay-phone boxes. And everywhere—caravans. Big caravans, small caravans. Long vans with jacked-up suspension and checkerboard plating, low vans with gauzy curtains and swirly decal. Squat four-wheel drives, dusty four-wheel drives, shining expensive beasts of four-wheel drives.

  A strip of tree-studded lawn edged the forecourt, and Mercy nosed into the shade by a picnic table. The Hijet puttered to a stop. Heads turned. She tried not to notice.

  It was almost five thirty; she had been on the road more than eight hours. She thought of that morning in Glendambo, making coffee in her saucepan, and it felt like a month ago.

  When she opened the door to climb out, the mess of her hair scraped along the roof lining. It moved like a solid entity. She touched it; it felt like a pile of carpet. She scratched at the grit in her hairline and her fingernails came away crusted with red dirt.

  For a few minutes Mercy stood out the front of the roadhouse, partly watching Wasabi trotting about, partly watching the shopfront and its lazy bustle of travellers. It appeared that the roadhouse was in fact a grocery store, petrol station, café, bar, motel and caravan park all rolled into one. Several more caravans pulled in, stayed a few minutes and drove off again, disappearing into the park around the back.

  ‘Rush hour,’ Mercy muttered.

  There was no avoiding it; she had to go in. Bracing herself with a few deep breaths, she hurried across the asphalt, op-shop hiking boots flapping at her ankles, tied Wasabi by the door and stepped inside.

  Mercy selected supplies: a fresh loaf of bread, a packet of chicken flavoured freeze-dried rice, crackers. In the van she still had a few apples and one lone tomato that she could slice the bruised patches off, but she would have to throw away the lettuce. Though she longed for fresh food, the selection was limited to a few browning bananas, hard, pale tomatoes and bags of potatoes she had no way of cooking if she didn’t want to spend hours boiling them in her tiny saucepan. Which she didn’t. So, at the fridge, Mercy selected a decadence she would eat straight away: a tub of strawberry yoghurt.

  Approaching the counter, Mercy picked up a brochure from the stand. According to the stylised map she was east of the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands, over 1000 kilometres north of Adelaide, and less than 160 kilometres south of the Northern Territory border.

  She was almost in the centre of the continent. She felt a little sick.

  A tremor shook her hands as she paid for her groceries and a campsite for the
night.

  It was as Mercy had feared: the caravan park was filling up. Unlike Glendambo’s dusty gravel lot, the park here was a square of lawn dotted with shade trees, surrounded by a picket fence, backing onto the endless bush. Prime vanning real estate.

  When she reached twenty-one caravans, Mercy stopped counting. She parked in her allotted site, trying not to think of the gathering horde of grey nomads with which she would be spending a long, dark night deep in the outback. Instead, she focussed on the hungry growl of her stomach.

  She opened the back door, letting in the warm late-afternoon air. Though she could hear doors thumping, footsteps crunching and voices murmuring, she couldn’t see any other caravans. From the back of the van, her view was a strip of lawn, the back fence, and the desert scrub beyond it. The setting sun burnished the red soil and leeched the scrub silver.

  Kicking off her floppy old boots, Mercy sat on the floor of the van and let her legs dangle out the back, flicking her toes against the grass. She slid forward until the earth felt solid and sure beneath her feet. At the edge of the park, a group of local Aboriginal kids were playing in a swimming pool. Slim bodies jumped and splashed, shrieks echoing up into the sky. She waited for her pulse to settle.

  ‘You made it!’

  Pocketed shirt, beer belly: Bert. He appeared without warning around the side of the van, clutching a pewter mug in one hand, the other tucked into his waistband.

  ‘The bus running well?’ he asked, lifting one foot to prop it on the Hijet’s rear tyre.

  ‘Very well, thank you,’ Mercy said. Orange dust coated the wheels and clung in a fine film over the side panels. The green panel now looked more of a dark brown, but she could still read the hand-painted Home is wherever you ARE.

  She said, ‘How is your … um …’

  ‘Cruiser? Ahhh.’

  If she wasn’t mistaken, Mercy thought he grew a little misty eyed.

  ‘She’s a magic bus. Just magic.’

  ‘That’s …’ Mercy didn’t know what it was. She assumed he used magic as a metaphor for something wondrous—the vehicle was phenomenal, perhaps. Out of this world. It seemed a rather hyperbolic way to describe a tow vehicle, but Mercy did have to concede towing and caravanning in general was an area about which she had proved to be fairly uninformed. After all, she was driving a near-forty-year-old van with a top speed of eighty-five from one side of the continent to the other.