by Mindy Klasky
“God, that’s manure,” said Rachel, leaning out the window. And then, “Can we have some music?” She turned on the radio without waiting for an answer and she tuned it slowly, muttering about old cars all the while. It wasn’t long before Gloria Gaynor was replaced with Gina Jeffries. “Country, gotta hate it,” said Rachel, contentedly. Then “Where are we? Are we through the forest?”
“Last night,” Erin said. “Last night was the forest, and it was small. Just a smidgeon around Edrom.”
“I like forest,” volunteered Rachel.
“I’m sure there’ll be more. We’re driving up the coast to Robertson, but there has to be forest along the way.”
“Coast is wrong. Faster the other way.”
“I don’t know any other way. And I don’t have GPS.”
They argued about routes semi-amicably until Erin gave in. God, she was so tired of fighting over small things. She was tired of everything. Route One was easiest, but maybe other routes were faster. Maybe.
“I’ll head inland at Pambula,” she said.
“No. Now. I don’t like this road. It’s creepy.”
“It’s the Princes Highway, for God’s sake, how can it be creepy? All that sea and all those hills and all that green grass?”
“I don’t like it. Turn around.” Rachel’s voice was impassable.
Erin gave in again, and they went back to Eden and turned inland from there.
“Petrol at Bombala,” said Erin. It was too much to expect that Ms. I-hate-the-direct-road would pay for the petrol.
“Bombala is good. I saw the bubbles in the river there. When I was a kid.”
“The bubbles?”
“A platypus. We’re going to stop and look for a platypus. I want to see it properly.”
“We’re going to Robertson. Today. Job interview.”
“My father’s there. He can wait.”
But I can’t, thought Erin, with sudden realization. I can’t take this waiting and waiting and waiting. I don’t want to go back and be scared, but I need resolution. It’s okay for young Ms. I-don’t-wear-clothes. She’s got twenty years more than me to sort things out. I need to move on. I don’t need to stand by the river in a country town and watch for bubbles.
She didn’t say anything aloud. She didn’t even point out that this road took them through Pambula anyhow. In fact, the car was full of silence. Rachel by turn fiddled with the radio, laid her head against the window, half-dozed, and watched the scenery hungrily. Erin gritted her teeth and got on with the job of driving. She wanted Gloria Gaynor back.
“Wrong way,” said Rachel. “We need Bombala.”
“If this isn’t the right road, then the road you want goes in the wrong direction.”
“You said Bombala.”
“I misread the map.”
“We need Bombala. I need my platypus.”
“Will you pay for petrol?” Erin couldn’t believe how much cheek she had, to ask her passenger to pay.
“Half, I’ll pay half.”
It was that simple. And Robertson was only five hours from Edrom according to Erin’s calculations. She’d used the back of an envelope for those calculations, which was a mistake. It was a forwarded letter, containing his very neat (but imbued with foulness) handwriting. She shouldn’t’ve brought anything from home. Putting this aside, she decided that there was time for a detour. “Okay, we’ll go via Bombala.” She did a U-turn and went back to Eden (again), then took the other road.
Through the forest. Of course it was through the forest. They were inland. Rachel complained. She thinks tree monsters are out to get us, Erin thought. I think I hate this girl, she also thought. Then, If this is adventure, can I find a non-adventurous life?
Adventure was what the interview had been billed as: The job is perfect, but you’ll have to quest to win it. Bring your car, bring your spirit of adventure, come to the wilds of rural New South Wales and discover yourself.
It was the oddest job ad she’d ever seen. It said that the job was in an isolated place, however. A place to hide. Time for bruises to heal. Especially a place to hide.
Only… If this was adventure, she wasn’t having it. If I think hard enough at it, then driving through forest will become mundane. Boring. Safe. She didn’t want Rachel’s forest monsters. She didn’t want any monsters.
Petrol, parking, platypus. That was the order. Rachel wanted platypus first, and Erin wasn’t up to two negotiations in an hour, so she took the coffee money, dropped Erin in the carpark next to the river, and went to get hot drinks for now and to fill the thermos for later.
“Tired of old cold coffee,” Rachel had said.
“We could’ve filled up in Eden.”
“Hate Eden. Platypus!”
And so it was decided.
When Erin returned to the car park, carrying the thermos and two takeaway cups, she found Rachel in the front seat, locked in and weeping. She delivered the coffee and the two sat, the silence broken by the occasional sob, the car doors firmly secured. When Rachel had finished her mocha with extra sugar, Erin asked her if there was anything that she could do.
“Get petrol and go?” Rachel sounded hopeful.
“Petrol can wait. What’s wrong? Should we report it to the police?”
Rachel huddled into her corner and pointed at the river. Erin sighed. Rachel didn’t stop her when she opened the door and crossed the carpark.
The sign said, “Platypus. Beware.” Erin walked closer to the shore to look.
At first she saw the tell-tale bubbles of the animal swimming. Against the tide, thought Erin and smiled to herself. Her father used to sing her a song about Uncle Jim swimming in the duck pond against the tide. If her father had lived to a normal age, would she have been in this position? Possibly. It was her own choice to marry the man after all, and, she realized, her own choice not to leave him sooner when he proved to be trouble. It was consoling to know that there had been choices, even though she made them all upside down and backwards. He had never owned her. She was, as the song said, not his little toy.
The bubbles were replaced by a small body and a head. She smiled. It was the third time she’d seen one outside a wildlife sanctuary.
The body and head became bigger as the platypus swam closer. Its small eyes were round and brown and set just above the beak. They looked back at her with malice. Then she noticed how big the animal was. Then she realized that the shape of the beak was wrong. It was deeper than it should be.
He flapped it open intentionally, manically, monstrously, and showed angular teeth arrayed in rows like a shark’s. He did a backflip, casually, because he could, and landed on the bank. Erin couldn’t help noticing that his claws were razor sharp, that his spur was three inches long, and that he maintained eye contact with her. Clever. Nasty.
She beat a hasty retreat and found Rachel at the driver’s seat, the engine revved.
“Out!” she said.
“Ahead of you, babe.”
“Wrong way!” Erin said, a second later.
“I’m not going back through Bombala.”
“We don’t have a bloody choice, unless you want to go all the way to Eden again.”
“Okay,” and with much display of sulk and not very good car skills, Rachel managed a U-turn and they went through Bombala. The platypus was on the road. In the middle of the road.
“It’s going for us!” said Rachel.
“Stop, now. We have to swap seats.”
And, surprisingly, Rachel did that.
The platypus positioned itself very precisely on that narrow road so that they couldn’t pass. Its claws were out. Its teeth taunted them.
Erin found herself laughing as she started the car again. Such a small animal. It was aiming for the tires, she knew that. Then it would go for the women themselves. It might smash the windows. Or it might wait them out. It would get them.
She couldn’t stop laughing.
Erin calculated that her best bet was to keep the tires
clear. Mr. Evil-Animal hadn’t allowed for her amazing driving skills.
She took the car over the gutter. She turned the wheel hard. The car swung away from the vicious animal. Soon they were on the main road, and clear, leaving the platypus a blob well behind them.
“Well, I never,” said Erin.
“This kind of thing always happens to me,” said Rachel, gloomily.
“Man-eating platypuses?”
“Not that. Strange things. They said if I followed their instructions, they’d make sure that creepy things stopped.”
“And then they stole your father’s coffin.”
“Yes.”
“Makes no sense.”
“None.” And suddenly Rachel was cheerful and put the radio on and they drove for over two hours without any incident at all. They topped up the petrol and bought lunch in Cooma without any gross interference from unnatural wildlife.
After Cooma came Canberra. It was there. Ahead of them. Looming.
Neither of them wanted to go to Canberra, and neither of them knew how to get around it.
“It’s a black dark pit of iniquity,” said Rachel cheerfully. She seemed pretty certain that Canberra was hostile to man-eating beasts. Probably the politicians ate them for lunch.
“We only have to go through it and out the other side,” argued Erin.
“You’re trying to convince yourself as much as me,” said Rachel.
“Of course I am. Everyone hates Canberra. Besides, I’ve never been there.”
“I can guide us using my trusty mobile phone,” Rachel promised.
“Why hasn’t this trusty mobile phone appeared earlier? And you owe me for petrol.”
“Yeah, yeah.” And both petrol money and phone were produced. We could have been there by now, almost, if we’d not gone the long way. Maybe she doesn’t want her father’s coffin.
It took them three hours to get through Canberra. It wasn’t that Canberra was big, it was that Rachel started spouting politics the minute they saw Parliament House ahead. Far left, she was, it seemed. She hated Israel as much as she hated the Liberals. She hated a lot of things, Erin noticed, but confined herself to asking where they turned off. Silence.
After too many minutes of political ranting, the silence was not expected. Erin turned her head to look. Rachel was slumped against the seatbelt, semi-comatose. Erin cursed and turned off and turned off and turned off again until she found a side street.
“Do I ring the ambulance?” she asked.
“Medicine. Small green bag,” was Rachel’s answer.
There were many medications in the bag, along with almost as many prescriptions. Rachel was either a user or she was seriously ill.
“Which?” Erin asked, urgently. In the end she held each up in front of Rachel’s face until Rachel nodded. Three tablets later, both of them sat silent, waiting. Twenty minutes later, Rachel was chipper.
“Sorry,” was her first and surprising word. “Sometimes I need extra medicine—didn’t see the warning signs.”
“Blame the platypus,” said Erin, as reassuringly as she could. “Can I know what kind of illness?”
“No. Hate it. I hate it. Don’t want to be sick. Want to have it not exist.”
Was Rachel running to find her father’s coffin, or trying to run from her own body? Erin felt muse-like as she sat and waited for Rachel to be ready.
“Okay. We can go,” she said, finally.
“Which way?”
“Oh, God, I don’t know. Go back the way we came.”
So they did. And they discovered that the roads around Parliament House were circles around a hill, and that there was one that was not on Rachel’s phone-map and that it had one entrance and no exits.
“This is like the platypus,” said Erin, gloomily, after their tenth circuit.
“The world goes weird around me.” Rachel shrugged.
“Make it get us out of this circle. Look, there’s the Senate entrance again.”
“Wait till it gets to thirteen, that’s a magic number.”
Erin wondered if that was hope she heard in Rachel’s voice, or merely sarcasm. “I don’t want to wait. I want to get out now,” Erin answered.
“Stay in the left lane, and maybe a way will open.”
Erin stayed doggedly in the left lane and a way did not open.
“Let me take over,” Rachel commanded.
Much as she hated Rachel’s driving, anything was better than looping around Parliament House forever and ever and ever and ever and ever… She stopped the car, and the two swapped sides. Seven times around the circle later, and a way opened. They found themselves going southwards.
“North,” Rachel told the car. “Take us north.” She hared off down the back streets around the Mint and eventually found a way northwards, past Parliament House and out of Canberra. “That was something,” she said.
“Do things like this always happen to you?” asked Erin.
“Always. They’re different, though. Each time, they’re different. I don’t know the rules.”
“Maybe you need to be in charge of things. Make up the rules.”
“It’s hard.”
Erin was surprised by Rachel admitting this.
“Because I fight being sick. Always. There’s never a day without pain. I could live forever, but every day will hurt.”
“No cure?”
Rachel’s tone turned hard and angry. “Everyone asks that. As if I’d live with this by choice.” Her hands gripped the steering wheel so hard that her knuckles were white and almost certainly hurting.
“When we reach somewhere interesting and safe, I’ll buy you something to eat,” Erin promised. We’re both poor souls, lost in the landscape. We need cake.
Erin took back the wheel in time for Lake George. “I don’t trust there not to be monsters here,” she explained. “This is the kind of place we ought to find monsters.” Except there were no monsters. It was a lake of grass and sheep and cattle and fence posts. Nothing to worry about.
The promised treat was at Collector, but they hurried past it. “There’s another ghost,” said Rachel, urgently. “Over there by that mound. We can eat on the road.”
“If this is an adventure,” said Erin, conversationally, “then it’s one where all the perils are just out of our way.”
“Except for the damned platypus.”
“Except for the damned platypus. How often does this stuff happen, anyway? And how long has it been happening?”
“All my life. All my fucking life. Things that can’t exist. Chase me, sometimes. Lure me, others. I thought it was the pain, you know, when I was a kid. Doctors diagnosed me and gave me medicines, and sometimes I reacted to them, so I thought it was that, too. Then I realized that it wasn’t. It’s me.”
“You live alongside the real world.”
“That’s it,” said Rachel, wonderment in her voice. “I live alongside the real world. It’s like when we were going around and around at Parliament House. Can’t find a way into the roads everyone else travels.”
“Maybe that’s what you’re doing here?”
“Maybe.”
“Or maybe… You don’t really need a road out. Maybe you’re made for adventure.”
“But I’m sick. Always. Every bloody day of my life. I wake up and take tablets, I eat and take tablets. I take more before I go to bed. And if I don’t…”
“There may not be a tomorrow.”
“No, there’ll be a tomorrow,” said Rachel, bitterly. “I won’t be able to get out of fucking bed. That’s all.”
The road flew past them, cocooning them in the car.
“Me, I’m escaping an abusive marriage.” First time she’d admitted that to anyone in so many words. “And right now I’m thinking that I was trying to run away before having decided what life I want.”
“You mean,” Rachel ignored Erin’s admission, to Erin’s relief, “I can make things nicer and still have them supernatural?”
“I don�
�t know. I only know that you’re making choices and that I’m making choices and that maybe the choices we’re making aren’t in our best interests.”
“Thank goodness you’re old,” Rachel said. “Wisdom is useful.”
Erin wanted to explain. I’m not old quite yet. And I’ve never been wise. But she was silenced by the comment. And that was the problem, everything silenced her. “Turn on the radio,” she said.
“Are we going to stop at the Big Merino?”
“We are not. Imagine what will happen if it stamps down the road and sheds wool.”
Rachel giggled. “Except I think I need a chemist.” She was very apologetic.
“Well, don’t let the giant sheep get us!”
And it didn’t, and they found more food at the bakery in Goulburn and stuffed themselves so full of carbohydrates that any random strange occurrence would float by their bloated bodies and move on to other victims.
The next stop was Moss Vale.
“Motel,” said Rachel. “I’ll pay my share. I don’t want to tackle the mountains after dark.”
“Then why didn’t we go down the coast? We could’ve been there an hour ago.”
“Dunno.” Rachel shrugged.
Erin shrugged too, and they found their room and paid up front and went to explore the town. They found the old hotel and decided to camp out in it and drink themselves stupid.
“You know what I like about you?” Erin found the question confronting. “You don’t say, ‘Don’t drink with all that medicine.’”
“You know your limits.”
“You trust me.”
“With your own body, yes. Behind the wheel of my car, only under duress.”
“You’re my BFF.”
“We’re not even drunk yet, why am I your BFF?”
“Because you let me make my own fucking decisions about my own fucking body. Everyone else wants to help. They tell me what I should eat and that I shouldn’t drink and who I should see and how I should behave, as if doing what they fucking tell me will cure me. And it won’t.”
