by Kim Lock
‘If you want to bring it around the back—’ the young man made a sweeping motion with his arm ‘—I’ll take a look at that muffler.’ His face broke into a grin. ‘Or lack of.’ His eyes caught on something behind her. ‘Or if you want to eat your brekkie, I can move it for you.’
Mercy turned to see Tate’s uncle Kev bearing a tray with a large steaming bowl of chips, a plate with two pieces of toast, two fried eggs and a fat sausage, sliced up the centre.
‘Oh,’ Mercy said. ‘Did I order—?’
‘Took the liberty,’ Kev said, setting the tray in front of her. Scents of sausage grease and toast wafted up. ‘Figured you’ll be waiting a bit, and you can sit and relax here before the lunch rush.’
Mercy glanced at her phone; it was just before ten am. Outside a plastic bag tumbled across the empty forecourt. Heat haze shimmered off the blacktop.
‘Gets pretty busy around here, weekday lunch,’ Kev added, as if he’d heard her thoughts. ‘We’re the only major stop between Alice and Tennant Creek. Coupla hundred clicks each way. Anyway, eat up. Let bub here see to that vehicle.’
In a daze of nausea mixed with hunger, Mercy handed over her keys. When the Hijet started up the windows rattled in their panes. Mercy watched the little van rolling across the bitumen roaring like a 747; Tate stuck his arm out the window and waved before he disappeared from sight, but she could still hear the engine blaring behind the building, before it finally shut off.
Sitting on the floor at her feet, Wasabi shuffled closer, eyes fixed on her plate. His brown eyebrows twitched.
Mercy was alone again. The sheer volume of food in front of her made her feel slightly panicked. Cutting off a piece of sausage, she glanced from side to side before dropping it surreptitiously to the floor. Wasabi swooped and it was gone. She dropped another, bigger piece. Picking up a chip, she nibbled one end. Salt dissolved on her tongue. She dipped the chip in the bowl of tomato sauce and took another bite. When her stomach began to growl, she took progressively bigger bites, slicing a knife into the egg yolk and watching it melt like butter into the toast. Slowly, the meal grew smaller and smaller on the plate, disappearing between mouthfuls of warm tea. Eating a fresh hot meal with a knife and fork, at a proper table and chairs, in the air conditioning: she felt like she was at the Shangri-La.
With her belly full, the ringing in her ears dulled and her headache fading, Mercy became aware of a stink. Something acrid and petrochemical, like burned fuel. When she realised the stink was coming from her, the Hijet’s exhaust fumes ingrained in her clothing, she groaned. She didn’t have a clean change of clothes—her other set was still dirty from yesterday’s trip to the waterhole with Andy.
She was staring out the window, stomach starting to churn with too much food, when she saw the giant RV pulling off the highway. Cruising up to a fuel bowser, it came to a halt in a squeal of brakes, and out piled two adults, two surly teenage girls and one toddler.
Mercy’s heart stopped. Ann fucking Barker.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Mercy watched Ann cross the forecourt, teen girls scuffing their feet, toddler trailing after her mother like a duckling. As Ann approached the door, Mercy could feel her muscles tensing up, excuses flitting into her mind as she prepared to flee. But flee to where? And in what? The Hijet was somewhere around the back, likely on a jack with its wheels off the ground.
Before Ann entered the store she turned suddenly; her husband at the bowser had called something out to her, and she flung her head back and laughed. One brief moment surging with confidence and nonchalance.
Mercy cast about the store. Could she hide over there, behind the biscuit aisle? Scanning the table top, her eyes lit briefly on the butter knife. Now there’s a headline, she thought: Doctor shivs journalist in outback servo.
The door opened and Ann’s laughter floated inside. Wasabi’s tail began to beat rapidly against the lino.
For a moment, Mercy felt her body curling down in her seat, her face inclined towards the window. She saw herself as if from above, cowering towards the egg smears on her plate. If it was possible to be ashamed of one’s own shame, Mercy was. And certainly, if anyone had the look of a person with something to hide, at that moment, Mercy was sure she did. What a way to advertise that you’re hiding from something, she thought. So, turning in her seat, Mercy looked straight at Ann and heaved up a smile. ‘Hi.’
Ann Barker took her in for a moment before recognition crossed her face. ‘Oh hi!’ she said. ‘From the border crossing. It’s …’ She snapped her fingers, searching for the name Mercy had given her. Mercy went cold as she realised she had forgotten the lie, too. What made-up name had she given the journalist?
‘Merbecca,’ Ann said.
‘Right,’ Mercy said.
‘You had a funky little van, didn’t you?’ Ann Barker glanced out the windows. The toddler began to tug on her shirt. ‘I didn’t see you parked out front.’
Figuring honesty was the best way to continue not to appear suspicious, Mercy said, ‘It’s round the back. It needed … repairs.’
Ann’s eyes widened. The toddler tugged harder. ‘Nothing serious, I hope?’
In lieu of answering, Mercy gave a small laugh and flapped a hand.
‘Wouldn’t have thought they could fix anything here.’ The journalist looked dubiously around the store. ‘But I guess that’s lucky.’ Without breaking eye contact with Mercy, Ann hiked the toddler up onto her hip. ‘Thank goodness for outback mechanics then, huh?’
Mercy thought of Andy, smeared with red dirt, man-bun dishevelled.
‘Yes,’ she said.
Without warning, Ann plopped into the chair opposite, huffing hair out of her eyes. Mercy’s heart ratcheted up into her mouth. Wasabi wriggled forward to lick the woman’s ankles and Mercy shot a foot out to stop him.
‘Food here any good?’ Ann glanced down at Mercy’s empty plate. ‘They ate breakfast two hours ago but, you know,’ she leaned forward, ‘that’s about a thousand years in a teenager’s life.’ The girls scuffed into the store, thongs slapping feet and low voices murmuring to each other. The fridge doors whomped open and closed.
‘Hey,’ Ann said sharply. Mercy flinched, then realised Ann was talking to her children. ‘In or out—not both. Cara, can you tell your sister—’ she half-stood to project her voice across the store, ‘—tell your sister to put that energy drink back? We don’t need her trippin’ halfway across the Northern Territory.
‘Anyway,’ Ann went on, plopping back down. ‘When will you be back on the road?’ She made a steering-wheel motion with her hands. The toddler copied, lifting her little hands as if gripping a wheel.
‘I’m not sure—’
At that moment Tate appeared, sloping through a door on the other side of the room.
‘I’ve found something that should fit,’ he announced. ‘Might take a bit, though. I’ve gotta make some alterations to the pipe. But job’s right, you can be on your way soon.’
Relief flooded over Mercy. ‘That’s great,’ she said, stopping short of kissing the mechanic’s hands. ‘Thank you so much.’
‘That’s lucky,’ said Ann when he’d left. ‘You know,’ she leaned back in her chair and her eyes crinkled, ‘when I met you at the border I could have sworn you had longer hair.’
Automatically Mercy’s hand went to her head. Her hair seemed to be shrinking up into knots.
The journalist gave Mercy a long look, and appeared about to say something when one of the girls appeared, scowling.
‘Gretta’s hogging the iPad.’
‘So do something else.’
‘There isn’t anything else to do.’
‘Read a book. Go for a walk. Here—take the baby.’
‘Go for a walk?’ the girl said, aghast. ‘You mean we’re staying here?’
‘Long enough to get something to eat, sure.’
‘That sucks, Mum,’ the girl said, loading so much exasperation into the statement that Mercy almost said in solidar
ity, Yeah, MUM. Fuck OFF.
The girl stared at her mother. Ann stared back. This went on for what felt to Mercy like a solid ten minutes before, jaw clenched, the girl slunk off, muttering.
Mercy checked the time. It was almost midday. Tate had said soon. How soon was soon? Ann Barker took her phone out of her pocket, set it on the table top, and then fluffed up her short curls and settled back in her chair to read the menu on the wall.
Beneath the table, Mercy’s heels began to jog up and down. ‘You’re staying here the night?’
Ann assured Mercy that she was not. ‘I have a deadline for work and I need to get somewhere with internet service.’
The polite thing to do here, Mercy knew, would be to ask after the other person’s work. But Mercy already knew what Ann Barker did. And there was no way she would be revealing that.
But Ann said it anyway. ‘I’m a writer. I have my own website.’ Then she laughed. ‘Which will fall apart if I’m out of service for more than a few hours.’
Mercy said, ‘I see.’
Finished with the menu, Ann turned back to Mercy. She seemed to be waiting for Mercy to say something—perhaps to acknowledge the enormity of what Ann had just disclosed, entire websites crashing without her—but Mercy’s voice wouldn’t come.
Finally she said, ‘It must be … flexible, writing. That’s … handy.’
‘Oh, it is,’ Ann said with enthusiasm. ‘Although—’ she gave a self-effacing laugh ‘—it’s not so easy, sometimes, because there’s no such thing as anonymity anymore. Not on the internet.’
Mercy swallowed dryly. ‘Right,’ she said.
Ann laughed again. ‘And there’s certainly no anonymity when you have opinions like mine.’
There was nothing for it. The conversation was a railroad the journalist had laid to go only in one direction.
‘You write opinions,’ Mercy echoed.
‘I like to write about all sorts of things—travel, for instance, and I love to cook—but my advertisers always say, “Annie, nothing drives traffic like abortion, vaccination and childbirth. So put us on those articles.”’
Mercy couldn’t respond.
‘Anyway.’ Ann shook her head. ‘What do you do, Merbecca?’
‘I, uh—’ Mercy blanked. Ann was regarding her pleasantly, waiting for her to respond. Lie, Mercy instructed herself. Just make something up. Anything! ‘Well, I—’
She saw it come over Ann’s face. Slowly at first, a glimmer. A frown, then the slow widening of her eyes.
‘I knew you looked familiar.’
Mercy’s stomach bottomed out.
‘Yes!’ Ann clicked her fingers, looking down at the table, and Mercy could almost see the writer’s mind ratcheting furiously to find it. Then, ping!, there it was: ‘You’re that doctor.’
Mercy said, ‘Well—’
‘From Adelaide Northern Hospital.’
‘I think you’ve gotten me confused—’
Ann Barker’s eyebrows rocketed up as recognition flared. ‘You’re Mercy Blain.’
How many headlines does it take to reduce a person’s world to the four walls of their house? For some thick-skinned, shameless individuals who are happy to wear public commentary like a coat, it may be none. Shock jocks and politicians, for instance, seemed to Mercy not only indifferent to howls of criticism but completely incapable of considering that life could be—or should be—anything else. Then there were those sudden media sensations, flaring into newsfeeds and fizzling out just as quickly: a minor sports star in a doping scandal; an illegal au pair pregnant by the married Minister for Foreign Affairs; a reality TV star’s drunk fat-shaming tweet.
But for Mercy, it had taken only a single headline: Obstetrician should never have let dead woman go into labour, husband says. That single piece, tagged to Mercy by a sticky-beaked distant colleague one mid-morning in the weeks after, had been the final stressor, the final assault of adrenaline on her already over-taxed system. It was nothing more than pixels, words on a screen, but it had sucked her up like a tornado. Mercy couldn’t stop following it. The way the comments had run into the hundreds. After everything else that had happened, that single article had made Mercy’s last panic attack so painful, so unbearable, that the outside world became impossible, utterly and exquisitely hopeless.
For a while after that, there had been more than one headline, Mercy knew, and even though she had stopped reading, the messages and emails and tags had found her, anyway.
That single article, written by Ann fucking Barker.
The high ringing sound returned in Mercy’s ears.
‘Oh, no,’ Mercy said with a nervous laugh. ‘I just have one of those faces—’
‘You’ve been MIA for a couple of years,’ Ann said. ‘Where have you been?’
‘I’m really not—’
‘Doctor Blain,’ Ann said, frankly. ‘Come on.’
Mercy felt like she’d walked into a furnace.
Ann snatched up her phone and her thumbs typed in a brief flurry, but then the writer cursed and leaned back to stuff the phone in her pocket. ‘No bloody service. I can’t look up the particulars but from memory you retired. Is that true?’
The line from PR came back to Mercy easily. ‘I’m not in a position to comment.’
Ann smiled. ‘Sure you can. It’s been years. We’re out here together in the middle of the Territory.’ She made a show of looking around the room, opening her palm to the sun-baked forecourt. ‘It’s just you, me and the outback.’
Mercy said nothing.
‘Didn’t it get the coroner’s attention? That must be pretty stressful.’
There was something odd in the way Ann was leaning to one side. She seemed to be affecting a casual pose, looking for all the world like she was lounging nonchalantly in her chair, but Mercy could see that what Ann was in fact doing was straightening her hip pocket so as not to muffle the mic on her phone.
‘Or maybe you don’t remember the delivery? I mean, you would have been attending, what—hundreds of deliveries a year? They probably all start to blend in together.’
Now Ann had presented Mercy with a choice, giving her the option to either admit that she didn’t recall the event, which made Mercy a terrible person, or confirm that of course she remembered Tamara, she would never, ever forget Tamara, in which case Mercy’s decision not to speak to Ann about it made Mercy not only terrible but guilty to boot.
‘But I suppose,’ Ann went on, tapping her lip thoughtfully, ‘women don’t die in childbirth very often. Not in a privileged first world country like ours. That’s got to stick with you. Right?’
The sense that Ann had stopped seeing Mercy—let alone Tamara—as a human being and instead as a source of clickbait was instantly infuriating. The fury came surfing in on top of an undercurrent of fear, but at least the anger was something to cling to. Grabbing onto the floating slab of rage gave Mercy much more oxygen than sinking into the depths of terror.
Mercy’s voice was cold. ‘Of course it sticks with me.’
Ann said nothing, shifting her hip ever so slightly forward. But when Mercy remained silent, Ann went on: ‘You know, generally, medicine is off limits. It’s protected, a no-go zone. Doctors don’t usually find themselves in headlines like that. Not unless they turn out to be, you know, a closet paedophile or something.’
Mercy blinked in horror.
‘But you ended up in the media.’ Ann said it lightly, curiously, like she was still contemplating what to order for lunch. ‘Why is that, you think?’
‘Will you excuse me?’
Without waiting for an answer, Mercy got to her feet, sweeping up the dog and tucking him under her arm. She crossed the store and pushed through the door Tate had earlier appeared through, and found herself in a small vestibule. In front of her was a door to the outside, framed with bright light, but to her dismay it was locked. She rattled the handle and cursed. To her left was a unisex bathroom, and because her only other choice was to return to the store, sh
e went into the bathroom, locking the door behind her.
Blue-tiled walls, a water-stained sink, the overpowering scent of commercial-strength cleaner. Mercy could feel her throat closing, her lungs heaving for air. Her mind threw at her all the terrifying facts: she was trapped in the bathroom, she didn’t know where her van was, and even if she could get on the road, Ann could easily follow her. It was a bloody big country but there was only one damn highway, and they were both on it.
Home was a very, very long way away.
Time unspooled and stopped. Mercy’s heart pummelled at her ribs like a fist. A silent scream bubbled up because she couldn’t get any air into her body. Clambering onto the toilet lid, she groped at the small awning window, pushed it open and shoved her face towards the fresh air.
Mercy leaned her weight against the wall and tried to breathe. The air coming through the window was hot and smelled of oil and fuel. Off to the side, Mercy could see a large shed, sliding doors pushed open and there, propped up on jacks, was her Hijet. A radio was playing and she could see the bright sparks of an arc welder spitting out from under the van.
On the bathroom floor, Wasabi began to whine. He jumped up to scrabble his paws at Mercy’s feet, balanced on the lid of the toilet. She felt his wet tongue at her ankles.
Mercy fixed her eyes on the Hijet, as if she could suck herself into it with willpower alone. She pushed again at the window, and it opened an inch wider then stopped, held fast by a small chain.
Mercy looked down at Wasabi. He stopped whining and cocked his head.
The chain broke easily enough when Mercy hit the frame with her shoulder. The pane of glass swung wide on its hinges. Dropping to the floor, Mercy picked up Wasabi, lifted him to the window, said, ‘Sorry, boy,’ and shoved him through. Then she climbed back onto the toilet lid and tried to hoist herself up, but her arms weren’t strong enough to lift her entire body. Dropping down again, she shoved the sanitary bin under the window and used it to lever herself up higher. Just as she hauled her belly onto the window sill, the sanitary bin crashed sideways. Mercy kicked her feet against the wall. The window frame dug into her belly and then, as she lifted one knee, very painfully into her crotch. Rolling to the side, she fell through the window.
