The Other Side of Beautiful

by Kim Lock

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  One leg took the brunt of her fall, then her knee and wrist.

  For a long minute, Mercy lay gasping on the ground, pain jarring through her bones. Wasabi came over to lick her face. She sat up; her right palm was grazed and her knee was scraped open and oozing blood. She winced as she brushed grit from the wound. Her wrist throbbed. Then, remembering the journalist waiting for her inside, Mercy got up.

  She limped across the gravel lot. Overhead the sun beat down and the gravel radiated heat. Cars were strewn about in varying stages of dismemberment: some missing doors, others without wheels—one small car was missing its entire front end. Columns of tyres lined a chain-link fence matted with dried spear grass.

  Inside the shed, the Hijet was propped up on an angle, two wheels in the air and, from underneath, Tate’s legs protruded. Mercy flashed back to yesterday, when she had brushed Andy’s leg with her hand; she recalled his bleeding head and the voices rising out of the bush calling for Wasabi. Mercy picked up the dog, clutching him to her chest.

  Tate was lying on a wheeled mechanic’s creeper. Over the fizz and crackle of the welder and the radio blaring on the back wall, Mercy could hear him whistling. She said, ‘Hello?’ but was too afraid to make any noise that Ann might hear, which meant it was too soft for Tate to hear, either.

  ‘Hello?’ she tried again, louder. She was standing next to Tate’s legs now. Remembering the dull smack Andy’s head had made on the underside of the van, she didn’t know how to get Tate’s attention. She was clearing her throat to try a loud hiss when Tate shifted, spotted her and scooted out.

  ‘Hi,’ he said, sitting up on the creeper. ‘You finish your lunch already?’

  Mercy glanced back at the roadhouse.

  ‘I’ve got a bit of a problem,’ she said.

  Tate paused, a look flickering across his face. Steeling himself for the complaints of a white city woman.

  ‘There’s someone inside that I need to get away from,’ Mercy told him. And then she found herself telling him the rest. Not all of it—she didn’t want to assail the guy with her whole sorry tale of incinerated houses, gay ex-husbands, death and despair—just enough of her brush with the media and subsequent need to avoid it that his face changed from apprehension, to understanding, to something close to amusement.

  ‘So,’ Mercy said when she was finished, ‘I don’t suppose I can hide out here until you’re done?’

  ‘Well, it’s done.’ Tate stood up and wiped his hands on a rag. ‘So as much as you’d be welcome to stick around,’ his face broke into a smile, ‘you can take off if you want.’

  Mercy staggered with relief, until she remembered that the highway was right out front of the roadhouse, and there was only one highway, and she could outrun no one in this thing, not even a heavy luxury RV.

  Tate seemed to know what she was thinking. ‘But listen,’ he said, tucking the fifties she handed him into his pocket, ‘if you’re looking to keep your head down, don’t take the highway.’

  And then Tate told Mercy where she should go.

  The track was hard-packed, carved into orange dirt and stones, with deep drifts of sand piled along its shoulders. As Mercy juddered along, glimpses of the highway flashed between gaps in the scrub, before the track wended its way east and it was just her, the bush track and the enormous sky.

  Mercy was too rattled to be terrified. Her knuckles were white on the wheel and she leaned forward, every muscle tensed, because if she eased back in her seat the bumps mashed her vertebrae together like an accordion. Tate had shown her the welds in the new muffler—thick bands of cooled molten steel—but Mercy held her breath against each rock that pinged against the undercarriage, each deep rut that swallowed the wheels.

  Running mostly parallel to the highway, Tate had told her this track went north for over a hundred kilometres. If she wanted to she could take it all the way to Karlu Karlu, the Devil’s Marbles.

  Which was precisely what Mercy did, for more than two hours. For two dusty, fly-strewn, bone-jarring hours, she clattered along a dirt track, hidden from the flowing artery and prying eyes of the highway.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  People smuggle worse things every day, Mercy told herself. Weapons over borders. Human beings in shipping containers. Balloons of heroin up rectums into prisons. As far as smuggling outrages go, a sausage dog into an outback hotel room was a minor offence. But as she stuffed Wasabi into her hessian shopping bag and unlocked the door to the room out the back of The Devil’s Marbles Hotel, Mercy felt like she was sweating through Customs with a suitcase of marijuana.

  It had been a long drive from Ti Tree. By mid-afternoon Mercy had re-joined the highway, which, after two hours thumping along a dirt track, felt as if she were sliding onto butter. It had been another hour on the highway, nervously checking her mirrors for rogue journalists, before she reached the southern outskirts of Karlu Karlu Conservation Reserve, and there, off the highway beneath a fringe of tropical palms, sat an outback pub. Steep pitched-iron roof, shadowed veranda, campsites and cold beer. It wasn’t until Mercy was in the air-conditioned front bar and asking after a campsite that she realised how desperately she wanted to get out from under the sky. She wanted four walls, a door that locked: she wanted the outside to stay out, if just for a night. With the freakish, one-in-however-many-million chance meeting with a single opinion writer had come the weight of an entire aggrieved, hurting planet, and Mercy felt pinned like an insect to a board, run through the thorax by sharp wire for all to see. So she heard herself asking for a room, and told herself that she had done far worse things in her life than take a small dog inside a small room into which dogs (or any animals, for that matter) of any size were not supposed to go.

  Glancing both ways, she stepped through the door and closed it quickly behind her. The lock gave a satisfying click.

  The room was simple, with bare white walls, a rickety bedside table and a lino floor, but to Mercy it felt like a palace. It was clean and smelled of fresh laundry. The inside of her van, along with sweaty human and dog, still gave off the faint pong of exhaust and was covered with a layer of red dust so thick even the box of Jenny Cleggett, tucked inside the bed cabinet, was starting to turn orange.

  Mercy lay back on the fluffy quilt and let out a soft moan. Spreading her arms and legs, she wriggled deeper into the mattress with pleasure. She had just decided there was never a more wonderful invention than the inner spring mattress when she heard the water start in the shower next door and a man’s voice break into song.

  Mercy sprang up, face flaming. Wasabi was sitting obediently on her towel on the floor, looking at her.

  ‘Lie down,’ she hissed, as if someone might see him through the window. After a long moment the dog obliged, resting his chin on his forepaws. The man was still singing; Mercy couldn’t make out the words but the tune was vaguely familiar. She was desperate for a shower herself, but the idea that she and this unknown singing man would be naked at the same time, mere feet away from each other, made her insides squirm. So she sat on the end of the bed. She picked grit from the still-smarting graze in her knee. She scratched her thighs: the sunburn was beginning to heal and it itched like ants were nibbling her skin.

  A laminated note in the bathroom reminded patrons to Please be mindful of our precious water, and Mercy imagined banging on the wall and pointing it out to the singing man, until she remembered the illicit sausage dog on the floor and bit her lip.

  Finally the water next door shut off, and the man went quiet. Mercy dragged a reluctant Wasabi into the shower with her, and although she could have soaped and scrubbed for a week she kept it to two minutes. To counteract the smuggled Dachshund she would otherwise be a model guest, so she pulled the plug of hair out of the drain that was both hers and Wasabi’s, and plenty that wasn’t, then wiped the cubicle clean and dry.

  Finally Mercy squared herself in front of the mirror—the first proper mirror she had looked in since Marla, three d
ays ago.

  Her curls came from her mother: loose springs that Loretta Blain had always worn in soft honey-coloured waves about her face. But she had never let Mercy wear her own curls the same way. Every morning of Mercy’s primary school years, her mother had scraped Mercy’s hair into a tight braid, gelling back each loose wisp. For years Mercy’s nickname had been ‘Ten Pin’ because her head resembled the smoothness and shine of a bowling ball. When she had come home crying one day because Stuart Hoggarty had slapped her head and yelled out, ‘Gutter ball!’ her mother had laughed until her face turned pink, then told Mercy she had no sense of humour. When Mercy reached her teenage years and her mother could no longer exercise the same amount of control over Mercy’s appearance, Loretta Blain instead resorted to taunts and sneers. Trying to impress someone, are we? or The eighties called and wants its hair back. They were never overt insults, nothing her mother could be condemned for. If Mercy became upset, that wasn’t because of the joke her mother made, it was because Mercy was too sensitive.

  Mercy ran her fingertips along her jaw, stippled with tiny bumps: she might have her mother’s hair but she had her father’s chin, square and pronounced, where her mother’s was pointed like a fox. Her arms and neck were a patchwork of sunburned pink and T-shirt white; purple crescents sat beneath her eyes but her eyes were bright with fresh air.

  Mercy turned away from the mirror.

  Only eight kilometres north of the hotel was the sacred site of Karlu Karlu.

  ‘You’ve gotta see the Marbles at sunset,’ the barman had told Mercy when she paid for her room. ‘You can’t come all this way so close to sunset and not see it. It’s spectacular.’

  Mercy was reluctant to leave her room, but the barman had a point. Two days ago, three hours south of Alice Springs, Mercy’s heart had squeezed as she passed the turn-off to Uluru, a further three hours’ travel to the west. Australia might have some ancient, world-famous attractions but they sure were a bloody long way away from each other, Mercy thought. If only the same could be said for its journalists.

  So Mercy once again shoved Wasabi into her bag. Cracking open the door, she squeezed her head out, checked both ways, then hurried to her van. Overhead the sky was already turning pink. A handful of caravans were parked in the campground out back and Mercy could hear murmured voices and the snick of van doors, but otherwise the outback was huge and still.

  Mercy drove with both windows rolled down, letting in the warm evening air, scented with far-off smoke. For ten minutes the highway rolled up and down, left and right through rocky ridges, before the land opened out in a wide, shallow valley. Thin columns of smoke rose lazily in the distance. And there, just off the edge of the highway, were the first glimpses of the giant granite boulders.

  Mercy slowed, turning onto the access road, and as she rolled along more boulders revealed themselves, turning gold in the late afternoon light. Huge round stones, smooth as eggs; some sat alone on the grass, taller than two men; some were the size of a child, tumbled against one another, and others towered in enormous piles, storeys high, one on top of the other in a mammoth ancient jumble. Shadows plunged in cracks and crevices.

  The access road ended in a dirt carpark dotted with picnic tables. A few vehicles were scattered about. Mercy pulled up a short distance from another van just as it was reversing out, revealing beside it Andrew Macauley’s rental camper.

  ‘It’s a small world, eh?’ Andy said, strolling over.

  ‘I’m beginning to understand that,’ Mercy replied.

  Mercy and Andy sat on top of a picnic table and watched the sun go down over the valley. In the sacred site pets were permitted only in the carpark and Wasabi was tied to the table leg; Andy had offered to stay with the dog while Mercy walked around the trails, but Mercy had said no. She couldn’t leave him again.

  Mercy watched the setting sun paint the boulders all shades of fire and felt both awed and very small. Here she was, breathing in land old as creation, traditional and important country for its Aboriginal custodians for all time. Geology explained the impossibly balanced piles of granite as the remnants of once-molten bedrock rising up, cooling, then eroding away and Mercy felt keenly how very short a human life is in comparison to the earth. But rather than being terrifying, something about that thought was deeply comforting. No matter what happened, you were always going to be cradled by the earth. It wasn’t possible for it to be any other way.

  When the sun had slipped below the horizon and the marbles were the colour of cocoa, Mercy said to Andy, ‘I’m sorry for taking off so suddenly, back in Alice.’

  He turned to her, surprised. ‘That’s nothing to apologise for. You’re free to go where you like.’

  ‘I know. But still …’ She shrugged.

  ‘D’you often apologise when you haven’t done anything wrong?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered with a rueful laugh.

  ‘Why?’

  Mercy twisted her fingers, eyes on the glowing horizon. All that remained of the sun was a gold band. ‘Probably my mother.’

  They were quiet for a time. The gold band thinned, then was gone.

  Mercy took a deep breath and held it in. Then, slowly, she let it out. ‘On the Tuesday, Eugene left. Then on Thursday, I found out my mother had died. And then on Sunday, a pregnant woman died in the delivery suite.’ Mercy paused. Her heart was beating very fast. ‘I was the obstetrician on call. She was under my care. This all happened two years ago. Within the same week.’

  Andy was quiet.

  ‘Six days, that’s all it took. Everything was normal and then, a few days later …’ Mercy spread her hands and left the sentence unfinished. ‘I’d never had a panic attack before. I didn’t recognise what it was. It wasn’t like what I’d always heard.’

  ‘What was it like?’

  Mercy frowned, trying to find the right words. ‘It’s hard to explain. Everything just felt suddenly … wrong. Like, really, catastrophically wrong. Because fear usually comes from something, right? Like, standing on top of a tall building, or seeing a snake, or whatever. But I was at work, the same place I’d been every day for years. Nothing scary. But they kept happening.’ She paused again, watching a small lizard dart over a rock. ‘And then when I knew what they were, I started to become afraid of the attacks themselves. Terrified, actually. Because things like deep breathing, identifying the thought pattern and changing it—all that stuff we’re taught? It didn’t work. It’s like my brain leaked out my ears and I was nothing more than a skin full of existential horror.’ She looked down at her hands. ‘You can’t be a doctor without a brain.’

  Andy remained quiet.

  ‘I told myself the same thing I’d tell a patient: “Of course you’re anxious.” A marriage break-up, the death of a parent, and the death of a patient under my hands, all in the same week? That’s enough to send anyone’s adrenaline and cortisol levels into orbit.’

  ‘I’m sure it is.’

  She looked down at her hands. ‘I tried different therapists, counselling and CBT. But nothing seemed to work. I couldn’t find a solution. They kept telling me to give it time, that I had to be willing to do the work, but I just couldn’t … It’s like I didn’t know how to exist anymore. I thought I was losing my mind. The world wasn’t safe. Nothing was safe; nowhere was safe. I couldn’t even human.’ She smiled sadly. ‘And I couldn’t take tranqs at work.’

  Andy touched the cut in his hairline. ‘Maybe not.’

  Mercy recalled the sound of the thud from under the van. ‘Does it hurt?’ she asked sheepishly.

  ‘Nah, it’s all right. Go on.’

  Mercy watched a star blink into the sky, then another. ‘Everyone kept telling me it was just trauma. Lots of people experience trauma. And then there was the media …’ She shook her head, refusing to give that part any more of her attention. ‘It only took a few months but it got to the point where staying in was easier than going out, because staying in was the only break I got. The only break from the fear. I fel
t like such a hypocrite, because I can’t tell you how many times I told anxious pregnant women, or even their partners, “anxiety is made worse when you give in to it”. God,’ she said with a bitter laugh, ‘only someone who’s never actually experienced ongoing panic could say that. When you’re in it, the only thing you want is relief.’

  ‘That’s all anyone wants, isn’t it?’ Andy said. ‘To live with ease.’

  Mercy looked out over the boulder-strewn valley. ‘Her name was Tamara,’ she said quietly. ‘She was so close to having her baby, and then she said she couldn’t breathe, and she was saying she was going to die. It all happened so quickly. I tried … but I couldn’t—’ Mercy stopped, swallowing. She stared into the stars until her vision blurred them all together. ‘I had four minutes to get her baby out. It wasn’t enough. They both died.’

  She heard Andy’s breath falter. A mosquito landed on her hand and she didn’t brush it away; she felt the tiny sting as it drew up her blood.

  ‘Her partner kept saying, “Do something.” I can’t stop hearing it. And I keep seeing the police officers at my door, before they told me my mum was dead.’

  Then the mosquito lifted as Andy took Mercy’s hand in both of his. His warm fingers laced into hers, sending sparks of electricity up her arm and across her scalp. He ran a hand over her wrist, up her forearm and squeezed gently. Mercy’s heartbeat went into her hands. Minutes passed where they sat, watching the stars come out one by one. Andy’s thumb traced a soft line back and forth on her own.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ he said in a thick voice. ‘That’s all just so—fuck me, I’m really sorry. That’s just utter shite. And then your house burned down? I mean … Christ, Mercy.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Can I ask though …’ He paused, studying her face in the last of the light. ‘You said you feel the need to apologise because of your mum. Is that because she died? Were you close?’