by Kim Lock
Jules gave Mercy a wink.
And then the window rolled up. They waved, pulled out onto the street and were gone.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Descending a concrete ramp, Mercy stepped onto the sand.
Other than a lone walker and a dog far ahead, the beach was deserted. Heat shimmered up. Mercy could feel her exposed skin roasting and sweating at the same time. Leaving her hessian bag on the dry sand, she walked towards the water’s edge.
The sea was like a lake. Flat and unhurried. Ripples lapped against the damp sand. Mercy shuffled towards the water, letting it touch her toes. She gasped, but not from cold. The water was balmy and perfect. How was it that Bondi, the Gold Coast or Cottesloe claimed all of Australia’s waterside glory? This beach was everything: creamy sand, clear waters, placid and warm.
Except for the occasional saltwater crocodile they coaxed out of the harbour, she thought, and the warning she’d passed on the foreshore for box jellyfish, which can kill within minutes. BETWEEN OCTOBER AND MAY, DO NOT ENTER THE WATER, the sign read. As the warm water washed up over Mercy’s feet, she was very aware that it was late October. She examined the sea, looking for floating transparent blobs, dangerous wispy tentacles, but she could see only sand and ripples. She waded in a little further, letting the water wash up over her ankles. Invisible threats were all around her, she realised. She was surrounded by them in countless numbers; at any moment she could be brutally stung, her body lashed with welts.
But—she also might not. She also might feel nothing but the pleasure of warm saltwater and the sun on her bare neck. It’s true that she could be reckless, thoughtless, and dive headlong into the water and all of its unseen harms—or she could be the opposite: timid, withdrawing and staying on the sand.
Or she could find somewhere in that great in-between, that place of nuance and clarity and balance. That place where she could do her best, do what she needed to do, and not let the fear of pain and hurt, all the infinite what ifs, crowd her mind until she could do nothing but stare longingly from the shore. Hidden away, watching the outside world from inside the walls.
The sky that had only twenty minutes ago been an unblemished sapphire was now knotting with swollen, greenish clouds. An onshore breeze had come up. If Mercy opened the ashes here, they would blow back onto the sand.
Scanning the water, she waded out further. Further still. The shallow sea bed barely sloped at all: no matter how far Mercy waded, the water stayed just above her ankles.
She glanced back at the shore. Where was Wasabi now? Was he crossing the hot tarmac in his dark crate? Was he waiting somewhere in a shed? Was he parked beneath the gaping belly of an aircraft?
With a final nervous scan of the water, Mercy opened the box. Lifting out the plastic bag, she dropped the box to the water, where it floated, butting against her shins. Stepping first one foot then the other into it, she pushed the box down onto the sandy floor. The bottom half of the cardboard darkened as saltwater seeped in, but she felt at least temporarily protected from the water’s deadly flotsam.
Her hands were sticky on the plastic. As she unrolled the bag, a small puff of grey ash lifted up and disappeared. Mercy hesitated. It didn’t feel right for her to put her hand inside; it was too intimate a thing, to touch the ground-up bones of Harry Cleggett’s mother. But somehow, it didn’t feel right to just upend the bag, either.
A strong breeze skittered across the water. In the space of minutes, clouds had boiled up in the sky. Mercy saw a flicker of lightning; a few beats later, thunder rolled. She thought back to that stormy night in Alice Springs, when she had fled the showgrounds at midnight, muffler hanging by a thread. As the thunder had cracked overhead, rattling the van, Mercy had cried out to her dead mother, I’m so tired of never being good enough for you.
Be a good girl. Make Mummy proud.
Turning away from the breeze, Mercy slowly tipped the bag. It would have to be good enough, she thought, that she had loved her mother. Because she was the only mother Mercy had, and Mercy was the only daughter Loretta Blain had. That was what Mercy had to give: eternal love. Forever now, there could be nothing else.
The ashes began to shift. Straightening the top of the bag into a chute, Mercy shook the bag, gently, and a grey stream began to sift into the water. It made the sound of rain. A silver cloud fanned across the surface, rippling and bobbing, and Mercy kept shaking the bag until it was clear the final clumps weren’t going to shift without help.
‘Okay, Jenny,’ Mercy said, ‘after all we’ve been through together, I can do this for you.’
Mercy dipped her hand into the bag: coarse grit, sharp pieces of bone. Scooping up the last handfuls, she flung the remains downwind. Bigger pieces hit the water in soft plops. Another clap of thunder boomed and, despite the heat, goose bumps lifted on Mercy’s skin. When the bag was finally empty, Mercy’s hand was covered in grey powder. Bending down, she dipped her hand into the warm saltwater, rinsing away a mother’s ashes.
‘Bye, Jenny,’ she said, as the last of the powder drifted away. ‘Thanks for coming with me to the other side.’
Thunder cracked. The sun disappeared. The box in which Mercy stood was full of water and the cardboard was falling apart. Wind whipped up a low chop of waves.
Mercy tried to think of something profound to say, some final words to mark the end of Jenny Cleggett’s journey, but nothing came to her. Nothing but silence, and the sound of the wind eddying the water, and the thunder rolling across the sky.
Then Mercy heard it, her own voice in her head but spoken as clear as if it had been uttered aloud: Run.
Run!
It wasn’t a voice of fear. It was a voice of pure delight.
Taking a deep breath, Mercy stepped out of her box. She scooped it, dripping, out of the water and began to run back to the shore. Saltwater foamed her legs and sprayed up her back, wetting her through to the skin as she picked her feet up as high as she could, running as fast as she could, as if she could skip across the surface and avoid all the stinging jellyfish, as if she could float across all the pain that wraps its tentacles and burns into flesh.
As she ran, the wind caught Mercy’s laughter and took it high up into the air.
Here, now
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
It took longer to wait for a taxi than Mercy expected, which meant that by the time she arrived at the airport, she was running again.
Inside the passenger terminal the air conditioning was frigid, and Mercy made it to the check-in counter shivering and breathless. There was no time to change out of her damp, sand-gritty clothes—and besides, all she had to change into was another T-shirt and pair of shorts. The puffer jacket and cat throw were all the way back in her dead Hijet. So Mercy stood in line for security, trembling and hugging herself, and when she was taken out of line to be scanned with a wand and patted down she wasn’t at all surprised—she looked as pale and quavering as someone with a pistol strapped into their underpants might.
‘Have pets been loaded on board, yet? Is my dog on the plane?’ Mercy had asked the young man behind the check-in desk, and he had smiled and assured her that the airline loved pets as much as their owners did and her beloved animal would be very comfortable, don’t you worry at all, which was a reassuring change from the woman at the freight terminal earlier. But as Mercy stood with her arms out to the sides and the wand hovering over her body for anything malevolent, she could feel all that worry leaking back in, seeping like fresh blood through the soft plasters of any tentative, new-found calm.
When it was ascertained that there was nothing suspicious on her person, Mercy was finally allowed to move on. Over the loudspeaker, Mercy heard her flight called. She ran to the gate, one arm pumping, the other gripping her hessian shopping bag as it flapped against her hip. The crowd parted as she barrelled through. If there was anywhere on the planet where you could run as a woman—even a woman as wind-swept, sunburned, damp and salty as Mercy was right now—and not cause even a r
aised eyebrow, it was at the airport.
So as Mercy ran, floppy boots clumping across the floor, an insane, drunken sensation bubbled up out of her chest. Her breath wheezed and salt tightened on her cheeks and up ahead she saw the queue forming at her gate.
Oh my god, I made it!
Joining the end of the line, Mercy bent over, shoulders heaving. A suited man in front of her turned, performed a quick assessment, and stepped forward, giving her a little more space, then faced the front again.
Mercy was grinning at her feet, heart stammering, trying to catch her breath, when another pair of feet appeared next to hers. A man’s feet, in work boots. Pale shins, muscular calves. Cargo shorts, a clean white T-shirt, biceps swelling pleasingly into sleeves. A warm, broad smile. Dark-stubbled jaw and a man-bun.
‘Well, hiya, Doctor Mercy,’ said Andrew Macauley. ‘How’s it gaun?’
And then they cancelled Mercy’s flight.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Murmurs of consternation fluttered along the queue. Voices raised in question as the announcement came over the loudspeaker, and a red box flashed onto the departures screen: Cancelled.
‘What the hell?’ Mercy said.
‘I’m not sure,’ Andy replied, frowning towards the jetway. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, the sky was black and great sheets of rain hurled against the glass. ‘Don’t reckon a thunderstorm would cancel the flight entirely. If they can’t fly around it, they’ll just wait it out.’
‘No,’ Mercy said. ‘I meant—’
But what did Mercy mean? She was as equally What the hell about her cancelled flight as she was about Andy’s sudden appearance. She didn’t know where to look first: at the strained-smiling aircrew who were listening into phones and talking into radios and being swamped by confused passengers, or at the lovely Scottish man who had miraculously arrived at her boarding gate.
‘What are you doing—hang on, I’ve gotta find out about—’
Andy shoved his hands into his pockets and smiled. ‘Probably a mechanical fault. Jet engines don’t have mufflers, though, so don’t worry about that.’
It took a while, but Mercy learned eventually that, yes, there was a technical fault and that, yes, her flight was absolutely cancelled. Waiting in more queues, surrounded by irate, flustered or frustrated passengers, Mercy stood, breathing against her fluttering pulse, because she could only be here now and this too would pass. The next available flight from Darwin to Adelaide was at 12.50am.
Seven hours away.
Wasabi’s tail wagged so happily that his entire body spasmed in her arms. The sausage dog licked her face, butting his snout into her teeth.
‘Okay, okay,’ she said. ‘Stop it, Wasabi. Calm down.’
By the time they had stepped out of the terminal, the storm had eased. The sky was washed pale green and everything was soaked and steaming, but the fierce heat was gone.
Andy’s camper was in the middle of the carpark. Seeing the rental van, rinsed of all its red dust by the rain, Mercy felt a pang of longing for yesterday, or the day before: when she had no phone service and there was no panicked rush and the Hijet was still running like a slow little train. She recalled the sharp, clear scent of the outback, the lazy caw of crows and the morning warble of magpies. How quickly memories take on a rose-coloured tint, she thought ruefully, as she recalled her cold fear at the rest stop outside Elliot, the stomach-dropping sight of Ann Barker standing at the sink, the ear-splitting BANG of the van’s death throes and the terror of being stranded on the highway as the agonising minutes ticked by. But those things, so scary at the time, now had gone. As she stood here in the rain-soaked carpark with Andy and seven more hours stretching ahead of her, she knew that being here now meant the past itself had vanished. It existed only in her mind, which meant it didn’t exist at all.
Crossing the water-strewn bitumen, they made their way to Andy’s van.
‘It’s too convenient,’ Mercy said, ‘that you’re here right when my flight is cancelled.’
‘Convenient or lucky?’ he replied, jangling the keys.
‘Convenient.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘You didn’t do anything to that plane, did you?’
He halted mid-stride. ‘Who’s flattering themselves, eh? Sabotage, wilfully disabling an aircraft—I’d be arrested on terrorism laws. They’d probably string me up by my thumbs, attach electrodes to my nipples.’
Mercy held his gaze. ‘How did you know I was here?’
He held her eyes in return. ‘I caught up with Bert on the highway. When you didn’t show in Katherine, I kept going. I …’ He lowered his eyes to the ground. ‘I don’t know why, but I just knew you’d kept on heading north. I thought it’d be you I’d catch up with, given how slow you were. I just wanted—’ He reached out with a finger and poked her hip. ‘I wanted to make sure you were all right.’
For a moment, all of Mercy’s blood rushed to that point in her hip.
‘But how did you catch Bert?’ she said at length. ‘He went on ahead of me.’
‘Ah, you know them grey nomads,’ Andy said. ‘One minute here, the next minute there. He changed his mind and decided to go over east, or something, and so he was heading south again for a bit. That’s when I passed him, coming towards me. It was not far from—’ He stopped.
‘Far from what?’
He looked discomfited. ‘Not far from your van. I saw it, not long after I saw Bert. He flagged me down. He looked a bit desperate, poor guy. He was worried about you, I think. Actually,’ he said with a soft laugh, ‘I think your van breaking down took the stuffing right out of our friend Bert. I know he thinks he’s some kind of king of the outback, but in reality he’s got so much luxury in his setup he’s a mobile Hilton. He talks big, but I think the most outback he deals with is the dust in his wheel rims.’
Mercy smiled with a sudden fondness, thinking of Bert with all his pockets and his pewter mug, and Pete and Jules in their Dodge Ram, smelling of rose-scented hand cream. Ultimately, isn’t that what everyone wanted? To be comfortable. To live with ease. Some people found that ease in spaceship-like four-wheel drives and caravans with porcelain toilets, some people found ease in prayer, some people found it at the bottom of a bottle. Some people scrambled for it by hiding themselves in a house for two years. And then turning away from the flames.
As Mercy had said to countless frazzled new mothers over the years, all anyone can do is the best they can with what they have, at any one time.
And right now, Mercy had her happy little sausage dog, a Scottish man with a top-knot whose muscled arms she wanted to lick, and seven hours to spare.
‘I wanted to see you again, before you left,’ Andy said. ‘I hope that’s all right.’
Mercy reached out a fingertip and poked his hip. ‘That’s all right,’ she said.
And so, in spite of Mercy’s nerves, she made the best of it.
It was the last sunset beachfront market before the wet season, and it was packed. Traffic crawled, clogging the streets; families strolled along the median strip carrying picnic rugs, eskies and folding chairs. The scent of grilling meat, spices and smoke filled the air, and the thrum of music, laughter and voices beat in Mercy’s chest.
They bought spicy curries in paper boats and drank iced mint tea that was so good Mercy went back for more. They wandered among the crowd, Wasabi weaving at her ankles, inspecting local artworks and wooden knick-knacks and hippie clothing. Mercy bought Andy a small stuffed kangaroo wearing a tiny Akubra hat, and then two more for his children. Andy bought Mercy a pair of ballooning crepe pants with elasticised ankles in patches of green, purple and fuchsia pink, so she wouldn’t get cold on the plane.
‘And if the plane crashes, I can use them as a parachute,’ Mercy said.
‘Both practical and optimistic,’ Andy observed.
When the sky started to glow, the market began to clear. Everyone wandered out of the palm trees, across the grass and over the dunes. Drifting down onto the beach, they stood
about hushed and worshipful like devotees at a temple. For half an hour or more they watched in silence as the sky flamed and blazed and carried on like a show pony before the sun finally disappeared, exiting the stage and leaving a dazzling lightning display far out to sea.
It was so beautiful Mercy didn’t even realise how desperately she needed to pee until it was over and she had to excuse herself.
‘Three iced teas,’ she explained to Andy as she stood, brushing sand from the backs of her legs. She left Wasabi on the beach with Andy and hurried back over the dunes, through the crowd to the bathroom. A familiar song was playing and she sang along under her breath. She smiled at people whose shoulders she bumped into. Someone else was drinking iced mint tea and she stopped briefly to congratulate them on their choice of beverage.
It was only when she was returning to Andy with two cups of pistachio gelato that she realised what the sensation gently ebbing through her was. It was something she hadn’t felt for a very long time.
Normal. Mercy felt, somehow, the glimmer of a normal person.
Mercy felt like a teenager.
Three hours remained until she had to be back at the airport, and her phone was running low on battery so they were driving around the city in Andy’s rental van while it charged up.
Windows rolled down, balmy night air filling the van, they cruised in a loop up and down the main street of Darwin, past bright heaving pubs and bass-throbbing bars. The median age in the city seemed to be about nineteen, and the kerbs were crammed with tottering heels, short skirts and military crew cuts. Mercy had her feet up on the dash and she was laughing so hard she honestly had to pee again. Andy had shifted his seat right back, reclined it so low he could barely see over the steering wheel, and turned up Roxette’s ‘Sleeping In My Car’ on the crackling, tinny radio so loud the speakers were threatening to burst. Mercy sang at the top of her lungs, Andy held one fist to his mouth like a microphone and Wasabi jumped around the back, yapping. Heads turned as they passed. A group of young soldiers whooped. Girls giggled and rolled their ankles.
