The Other Side of Beautiful

by Kim Lock

  DARWIN 1094.

  ‘Look at that, Wasabi,’ Mercy said, shifting into top gear. ‘If we were driving a normal car, that’s only about ten hours. We’re almost down to three figures! But we’re not in a normal car, are we, boy?’ She ruffled the fur on his head and Wasabi thudded his tail on the seat. ‘We’re in no hurry.’

  With the smoky-sweet breeze caressing the bare nape of her neck, the scent of soap and sunscreen rising from her skin and her belly full of The Devil’s Marbles Hotel’s eggs-and-bacon breakfast, she could almost believe it. No hurry. Free of time limits.

  No looming date.

  Termite mounds cropped up, rising between the grass and scrub like brown-robed old women. Some were only feet from the blacktop, and as she drove on, Mercy felt a strange admiration for those brave ants imperious to the churn and bluster of the highway. They were here now, without time, and fearless.

  Heading north, the highway passed right through Karlu Karlu. The morning daylight painted the marbles a different shade to the brilliant golds of the evening before; now they were paler, colours of sand and rust. Mercy drove through the valley remembering the fiery sunset, pools of warm shadow and the feel of Andy’s hand in her own.

  An hour and a half later, Mercy found herself slowing for the first fifty zone she’d driven through since Alice Springs; five hundred kilometres later and she was once again capable of breaking the speed limit. And of driving at a speed that let in clouds of flies through the window.

  Tennant Creek—named for yet another European explorer’s exultation over a water source—was a flat, spread-out town, split up the centre by the highway. Mercy stopped for groceries (water, canned beans, rice crackers, oranges) then pulled into a service station to top up the fuel tank.

  She was paying for her petrol when her phone buzzed.

  If you get this, please call?

  Eugene had never been known for the verbosity of his text messages, but this one was particularly skimpy. Mercy’s thumb hovered over the call button. The night before, Mercy had said everything she wanted to say. She had hung up feeling eased, washed clean like linen. Maybe he had things to say now, she thought. Maybe it was Eugene’s turn to get things off his chest, to take responsibility and apologise. Or maybe he was angry at Mercy for opening up a dialogue he didn’t want, especially at two am.

  Her screen displayed only one bar of service. A voice call would be irritating for them both, patchy and dropping in and out. Besides, Eugene had used the fairly non-urgent if and a question mark—desultory enough for Mercy to click the screen off and shove the phone back in her pocket.

  If only he hadn’t used that question mark.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Driving out of Tennant Creek, Mercy passed a woman walking along the side of the road. Barefoot, in a colourful flowing skirt, the woman carried a young boy up on her shoulders, her hands clasped around the child’s feet.

  Leaning her elbow on the window frame, Mercy drove one handed, watching the woman and child disappear in the rear-view mirror.

  Once, Mercy had lifted a newborn baby to its mother’s chest and the mother had uttered in a terrified voice, ‘I don’t know how to hold it.’ The mother’s hands had fumbled to clasp the tiny slippery body and the infant’s head had flopped and thumped over the woman’s swollen breasts. It was true: the woman had not known how to hold her baby. Unpractised and clumsy, her elbows had stuck out as she stared wide-eyed down her nose, her face etched with fear as if on her chest was not her own new baby but a gigantic tarantula.

  Mercy had seen all kinds of mothers: competent, confident mothers eating a sandwich with one hand while breastfeeding with the other; teenage mothers whose babies shot out like slippery fish while a clutch of girlfriends slurped Frozen Coke in the corner; women having their first baby in their forties: studious, well-read, questioning everything. Into the hospital women came in droves, waddling, panting, moaning or nervous and eager-eyed, waiting to be told what to do or growling not to be told what to do. But if there was one consistency among all these women—happy, scared, confident or even ambivalent—it was that they all wore their pregnant bellies with a look of ease. Even those huge women whose spines crunched and ankles ballooned tight, they all looked as though they should be pregnant. Like they couldn’t not be pregnant at that exact point in their life, no matter how willingly or with what fore-planning they had gotten there. It seemed to Mercy as if everything in the universe had conspired to end up at that moment, where Mercy was catching a baby, blood-slicked and blue, from their body.

  Mercy squinted into the mirror, but the barefoot woman and child were gone. A four-wheel drive and caravan overtook her; Born with nothing, it read. Still got most of it.

  No matter how Mercy had tried to explain it to Eugene—this sense that when women were supposed to bear fruit it happened naturally—it was something he had never been able to understand. ‘IVF is hardly natural,’ he’d argue, ‘plenty of women go through that,’ to which Mercy would reply, ‘Yes, but it happened. You see my point?’ To Eugene, married couples had kids. It was simply what they did, like mowing the nature strip and paying the bills in a timely manner. And to Mercy, women who were meant to had kids, like they were meant to breathe and blink and grow hair. Even if they were scared.

  Mercy wasn’t meant to have a baby. Two miscarriages wasn’t a lot of miscarriages compared to some women, but for Mercy those two early losses had been enough to tell her she just wasn’t meant to have a child. Medicine had trained her as a scientist—rational, logical—but her mother had trained her to know that maternal love could be heart-breakingly conditional, and for Mercy, two miscarriages was enough to put a firm stop to the idea of ever passing that conditional love on. Nature had warned Mercy, and so Mercy wouldn’t ever be pregnant again. Eugene had been crushed. And the irony of her husband then choosing a life partner who happened not to have a uterus would not have been lost on Mercy had life not then thrown her that entire life-shattering week, and by then irony was something Mercy couldn’t care less about.

  It didn’t mean, however, that Mercy couldn’t look at a mother–child pair—a barefoot woman carrying a child along the road, hands clasping little feet to her breast—and feel that deep heart swoop, that tug, that reminded her that maternal love was inexplicable, and fleshy, and as pure and simple as it could be sickeningly complicated.

  Mercy sighed, and her breath tugged away in the breeze.

  ‘Wasabi, stop that,’ she said, as the dog began to lick his crotch, as if he could hear her musings on reproduction and decided to check if his testicles had miraculously grown back. He desisted with regret.

  Mercy realised she hadn’t steered for a very long time. Lost in thought, she had travelled for an hour in a straight line, and for as far as she could see ahead the highway continued to roll dead straight, disappearing into the shimmering horizon.

  DARWIN 780.

  Late in the afternoon, the speed limit reduced and a tiny town approached. Mercy noticed the afternoon sunlight looked different. The landscape had changed: colours were sharper, the vegetation more lush. Through patches of bright green grass the soil was the colour of dark blood. The heated air felt thicker; low banks of cloud smothered the sky.

  Elliot was another blip on the highway: fuel, a pub, a tired-looking caravan park tucked off the highway. And it was as Mercy turned off the highway and onto the service road that she saw, through the trees, Ann Barker’s RV.

  ‘Bloody hell.’

  She kept rolling along the service road, too afraid to put her foot on the brake in case Ann happened to glance up and see her: the doctor she had slandered, the doctor she had impossibly run into in the middle of nowhere, the doctor who had climbed out a service-station window and travelled for two hours along a dirt track to escape her.

  Scattered weatherboard buildings trundled past the windows and the end of the Elliot service road approached, curving back towards the highway. It was late in the afternoon; Mercy was tired a
nd hungry. She needed a place to stop for the night—but Ann Barker had already laid claim to it, this particular place of possible rest. There was an irony in that, too, Mercy thought—that the unforgiving opinions of the world could not be avoided, no matter how literally you isolated yourself.

  The highway approached. The service road rose up to rejoin it, and Mercy found herself once again staring down the endless stretch of bitumen. The next town was one hundred kilometres away.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Clouds continued to thicken across the sky, closing over the sinking sun and casting an eerie green pall over the earth. The road turned the colour of slate. Mercy switched on the headlights, but they provided little illumination of her next options. On the passenger seat, Wasabi sat up and whined, giving her a meaningful look; he needed to stop.

  Grabbing her phone off the dash, she glanced at the screen: no service. She cursed and tossed the phone down. About thirty minutes had passed since she’d left Elliot; could she just turn around and go back?

  But. Ann fucking Barker.

  A few drops of water ticked onto the windscreen. The clouds had turned bruised-looking and angry. Wasabi whimpered again.

  ‘Darn it,’ she muttered.

  Her foot eased off the accelerator. She would have to turn around. The next town was still over an hour away, and even then, what if there was nowhere she could camp? She recalled driving nervously around Alice Springs, finding everything booked out or pet prohibitive. Journalist or not, Mercy needed to stop.

  Easing onto the brake, she was looking for a smooth patch of shoulder where she could turn the van around when the headlights lit up a sign.

  REST STOP 2KM.

  Mercy looked at the dog. ‘Two more minutes, boy. Let’s hold on.’

  The rain held long enough for Mercy to pull into the rest area, and then it poured. She could see it coming from the west, a dense grey sheet of water sweeping towards them across the scrub, then meeting the windscreen and the roof of the van with a patter then a roar. She hastened to roll up the windows and the insides of the glass quickly began to fog. Startled by the downpour, Wasabi flattened his ears and she petted his head but after a few minutes he returned to his original complaint and began to whine with urgency.

  Clambering into the back, Mercy found the puffer jacket she hadn’t needed since leaving Alice Springs, threw it over her head, and climbed out into the rain.

  The heady scent of wet earth rose to greet her. Water pattered into the red sand, warm drops dripped off the jacket and onto her elbows. Wasabi trotted off into the downpour and she hurried after him.

  A small tin shed housed a composting toilet, and after Wasabi had relieved himself by a post, Mercy went inside, taking the dog with her.

  The rest area was deserted. Three poles held up a triangle of iron sheeting and Mercy took shelter beneath it, hugging her elbows to her sides in spite of the warmth of the air.

  It rained for a long time. The setting sun was hidden by the dark bank of raincloud and the light gradually faded. Muffled roars came as trucks passed on the highway, wheels hissing through water, but by the time the rain eventually eased the highway had turned quiet. Insects came out in the grass and bushes, clicking and shrieking. Water dripped and a dull humidity clogged the air. Ravens cawed in the trees; a pair of them, huge and blue-black, hopped across the rest area, their cries moaning out into the evening.

  Mercy brought the Hijet close alongside the desultory triangular shelter and sat inside the van, chewing her lip. As the light disappeared, her belly churned with hunger and a growing unease.

  Recently, Mercy had seen headlines that one of Australia’s most notorious serial killers had died in jail. The victims, all hitchhikers, had been found buried in shallow graves, their bodies filled with bullet and stab wounds.

  Mercy thought now of how many times the outback had thrown up murderous mystery, how many times she had sat safe and quiet in her city home and read the terrible, scandalous stories with the comforting security of distance. Sometimes, those people who had been claimed by the outback were never even found, their deaths only implied through their disappearance, any searches or investigation futile against the vastness, the isolation, the impossible remoteness of the space.

  Sitting in the back of the van, Mercy opened a can of baked beans in ham sauce and as she emptied the tin into the saucepan, the red drip of sauce reminded her of blood. She gave Wasabi a handful of kibble and waited for the beans to heat, but her hunger had leached away with the last of the sunlight.

  ‘You’re being silly,’ she scolded herself, and opened the back door to let in the fresh, damp air. ‘You are perfectly safe.’

  But of course, that wasn’t precisely true. She wasn’t perfectly safe. This was not some irrational, supermarket-based anxiety playing tricks on her mind in the toilet paper aisle: this was real. She was alone. She was a very long way from home.

  People did meet their death out here—stabbed, shot, stolen. From the time Europeans had first trawled along this route more than a century ago, searching for water and naming things after themselves, brutal massacres had followed in their wake.

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ Mercy shouted, dropping her spoon. Ham sauce splattered her T-shirt and Wasabi looked up from his kibble. ‘This is not helping.’ At that moment, a roadtrain began its long haul past on the highway and Mercy took the growl of its engine and the churn of its ninety-six wheels as a reminder that she was not that removed from civilisation.

  And then she remembered that the serial killer who had recently died in jail had snatched all of his victims from the side of a major highway. She slammed the back door closed, locked all the doors, and when she ate, beans quivered on the spoon with the shake of her hand.

  Mercy awoke in a murky dark. Disoriented, and with her lower back aching, it took her a moment to remember where she was—the rest area; fleeing from Ann Barker back at Elliot. Somehow she had fallen asleep sitting up on the bed, leaning against the wall. After eating she had not intended to fall asleep right away; Jenny Cleggett was still in the cabinet beneath her. Wasabi was curled up asleep at the foot of the bed.

  In the dark, music was playing. Loud, plaintive vocals and the whine of electric guitar echoed out in the blackness.

  Mercy froze. Where was the music coming from?

  The volume was suddenly turned up even further as cymbals began to crash and a drum beat thudded. The vocals began to shriek.

  Mercy peered out the back window but all she could see were stars. Heart rising into her mouth, she crawled along the mattress towards the driver’s seat and slowly lifted her head.

  On the far side of the rest area, a row of spotlights blared from the roof of a vehicle, illuminating the scrub in stark pools. Mercy could only make out the shape of the vehicle but its large wheels, blinding spotlights and the chunky squares of rear cages were enough to strike metallic fear into her mouth: it was a pig-dog ute. A hunting vehicle.

  Silhouetted in the spotlights was the tall, dark figure of a man. His arms were raised, his feet planted wide, and he was howling along with the guitars of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway To Heaven’.

  The highway was silent. All the grey nomads would be tucked safely away in their parks for the night; now, the road belonged only to long-haul truckies on amphetamines.

  Certainly, for Mercy, fear had been a daily companion. For the past two years, fear had draped itself like a scarf around her neck and stayed put, no matter how much she tried to take it off. But this? This was something other than fear. At the sight of that male figure silhouetted in the spotlights, the sound of the electric guitar yowling out into the night, at the understanding that the highway was silent and unfriendly, Mercy felt not a rush of irrational, consuming terror, but a very calmly voiced, clear and simple threat: If you don’t leave now, you will die.

  It wasn’t an anxious what if, it was a certainty. It was knowledge. For once, Mercy’s fear did not seem like something to try and overcome, but
something to listen to. Respond to. Something she should obey.

  A cold sweat broke out on her temples as she tried to climb into the driver’s seat, keeping her body as low as possible in the windscreen. Because what if the man looked over to the Hijet and saw movement? He must have seen her van when he drove in, surely, and it occurred to her that maybe he had stood and watched her sleep, waiting for her to awake before he made his approach.

  Her movements woke Wasabi, and he bounded up the mattress and clambered over the seats, trying to lick her face.

  ‘Not now, Wasabi,’ she whispered. ‘Down.’

  But the dog wouldn’t be dissuaded. He darted and panted, he bounced back and forth as Mercy tipped her upper body forward over the seat and tried to bring her legs over. His paws landed on her face; his tongue slurped at her ears.

  ‘Wasabi, no!’ she hissed. He ignored her. The music continued to blare, drums rumbling and guitar screeching.

  Somehow, she had contorted herself into the driver’s seat upside down. Her legs were up where her spine should be, and her spine was down where her bum should be. Drawing her knees to her chest, she tried to roll undetectably sideways but her shoulders jammed under the steering wheel.

  Wasabi let out a string of loud, playful yaps.

  The music went silent.

  ‘Shit.’

  Wrestling herself out from under the steering column, Mercy sat up and fumbled for the keys. She looked up and saw the figure standing there in the spotlights, unmoving. She couldn’t see his face. Was he looking at her? She thumbed the ignition but the engine didn’t start: it was cold. Tugging open the choke, she tried again and the engine chug-chug-chugged but didn’t catch. She looked up and saw the figure start to move. He was walking towards her.

  ‘Shit!’ Mercy repeated. Pumping the accelerator, she pleaded with the van, ‘Come on, start.’