The woman lifted her hand from my forearm then, her face splitting in a grin. Nodding to my pack and sleeping bag beneath the tree, a few feet from the river, she said, ‘You sleep here last night?’
I nodded, thinking of that moving grey croc, a sick swell in my stomach.
She nodded at the water, heaving with crocodiles. ‘You bloody lucky, mate. These buggers just waiting like that.’
She called something in her language to the rest of the group, their combined laughter mixing with the bush birds while I felt the sickness in my stomach rise like yeast. I had not yet read Candide, but I’d absorbed, somehow, the belief that naivety would protect me, despite the evidence.
They waved me off, all of them, as I shouldered my pack and scuttled back to the road. Unwashed, teeth uncleaned, and with the woman’s words ringing after me. I was lucky. Bloody lucky.
I walked in the heat to the highway and waited until a couple picked me up. Her with grey short hair, a clay pendant at her neck; him, hands on his lap in the passenger seat, holding a map up and reciting distances as though it were a competition. They asked me nothing, and I volunteered nothing, and when they dropped me at the Longreach truck stop, I was surprised that she got out of the car and hugged me.
In the trucker’s cafe the waitress waited, clicking her pen against a cork clipboard, her pink uniform slightly stained under the armpits, while I scanned the menu. ‘Vegetarian?’ she repeated, when I told her. ‘You could have an egg, I suppose. Or chicken?’
I had an egg, and I squirted the yolk down the front of my top. I’d packed three singlet tops into my pack, carefully rolled, the way I’d been told to do, everything tucked inside everything else. In Sydney, Sylvie had said, ‘Take three of everything: pants, bra, T-shirt. You can wash in between.’
I scratched the egg yolk off the counter, and then used the end of a teaspoon to scrape the dried yolk from my fingernail. Paid, counting out coins, trying to keep the precious notes in my wallet. The restrooms were outside, a small brick building with a picture of a ram for men and a hornless ewe for the women. The signs said Rams and Ewes. Although I had neither horns nor wool, I went into the Ewes and stripped off my singlet top, scrubbing at it in the cold bore water from the tap, holding my nose at the sulphuric smell. There was no soap in the Ewes, so I squeezed a dab of shampoo on it. Bubbles foamed up in the sink, soaking the whole top. I wrung it out, dripping suds and water onto the stones beneath my feet, and let the wet cotton cool me.
Heat whirred outside, so thick I could almost see the particles twirling, melting together. Sunlight bounced off the glass doors of the truck stop, making diamonds against the words curved over the top of the window, scribbled in thick paint: Burgers! Chops! $5 Monday special breakfast! Truckers discount!
Toddy emerged from the glass doors like a hero, like a sign. Bandy legs, a round gut curving softly over King Gee shorts, sun glinting off the dome of his head. He clocked me standing by the petrol pump, my pack at my feet, water dripping off my shirt, my stolen Ray-Bans on the top of my head.
Truckers back then tended to look tough: tattoos, thickened skin from the sun, broad backs and bellies from sitting up there in the cabin for days on end, darting eyes from the lack of sleep and, sometimes, the ephedrine they took to keep them driving impossible distances in impossible times. Toddy had the curving gut, but his eyes lacked the darting, desperate quality, and I could see only one tattoo: Earth, its oceans shaded in green, the land mapped in dark grey. Later, I asked him about it: why the globe? He grinned into the windscreen, said, ‘It reminds me that the whole world matters. Not just me.’
Already, my brief flash of blindness had started to open me up, to give me a kind of second sight. That’s what I told myself. Across the forecourt, I singled Toddy out. Like a battered dog in the shelter waiting for the human with a soft touch, I waited till I saw that round-bellied truck driver, and then I chose him. We walked towards each other at the same time—me with my hand above my eyes, him squinting directly into the sun.
We spoke at the same time.
Me: ‘Where are you headed?’
Him: ‘It’s dangerous to hitchhike.’
I flashed to that earlier night, a school night, the two boys whooping as we lifted off the tarmac, the bruises that stayed on my skin for weeks after I’d rolled from the car. But this was different. It had to be different.
I had to be different.
I said, ‘I know. That’s why I’m not hitchhiking. I’m asking you for a lift. And if you say yes, I’m going to that phone box over there and I’ll phone my friend in Darwin and tell her your number plate and where you’re going to drop me and what time I’m getting in the truck. If I don’t arrive, she’ll call the police and give them your number plate. If that’s not okay, I can wait for another truck.’
I thought I was so smart, so smooth.
When Toddy laughed, his mouth opened wide and I could see the gaps at the back where his teeth had come out. He said, ‘Better go call your friend.’
In the phone box, I watched the silver dial turn, listened to the empty purr of the dial tone. I moved my mouth and nodded my head. When I climbed up into the cabin of the truck, Toddy said, ‘Okay?’
‘Yep. My friend’s taken your number down, so watch yourself.’
He did that big open-mouthed laugh again.
When he asked me about my friend later, I thought about all those pretty girls, the ones who had me as second-in-command; I thought of Penny and the party and I thought of Sylvie and her long, tanned legs and I said, ‘She’s just a better version of me. Prettier. Funnier. Better.’ I’d trained myself to say it, to get in with the put-downs before anyone else did.
I realise now that when I said ‘better’ what I meant was ‘skinnier’. I was not a skinny girl, and when I tried to eat less, to be thinner, I became consumed with the desire to fill myself with food, to make myself wider, stronger, thicker. My value as a girl lay in taking up less space; I understood this and I longed to be desired, to demonstrate that I had the value required. So, in high school, I fasted for days at a time, drinking endless cups of coffee to keep my appetite at bay. Afterwards, I ate and ate and ate, filling myself until my skin stretched, and my rage was buried beneath layers of fat. The truth was that, like so many girls, I needed to demand more room, not less; but I was not yet brave enough to know it.
It took two days to drive across the border to the Northern Territory, across the wide stretch of the desert with its stars sharp in the unlit sky. The cabin had two sections. When Toddy climbed into the main section to rest, he closed the curtain so I could sleep in the neat bunk behind it. I slept while he drove, then I woke, stretching in the curtained cabin and climbing over the front seat to sit beside him. He asked me about my life, and I told him pretty much the whole truth, or as much of it as I could own. It was the first time, the only time, that I’d spoken it all in a series of sentences. The only time, the first time, that I’d not made up a name, a family, a more exotic version. There seemed no point, stuck in the confined cabin with the scrub spread out in front of the windscreen, as low and long as an ocean.
He insisted on buying my dinner in the truck stops, making excuses about truckers’ discounts and how it was easier that way. ‘You’re keeping me entertained,’ he said, and then turned off the road, drew the curtain across and slept. Sometime in the night, while he was snoring, I climbed out of the cab, stepped down to the ground and stood in my bare feet. The ground was icy beneath me, the dirt forming small crystals that caught between my toes. Earth seemed to flow beneath my feet; I felt that I could hear with my soles, with my toes, with the pores of my skin, felt that the very ground was pulsing in a way that ground did not pulse in the city.
I’d never seen such darkness. The sky was thick with stars, but the black between them was dense, more like earth than sky. I wandered away from the square shape of the truck. Warning images flashed up briefly; scenes from films and books, paintings with lost girls in the bush, stor
ies of wanderers dead and dying because of the brutality of the outback.
But this did not feel brutal.
Growing up, we owned nothing, no land, no house, and we moved from place to place at the whim of landlords. I felt myself to be connected by a whisper-thin thread to any place we lived in, to any story, though I searched through the pages of every book hoping to find someone like me, a story like mine.
Sometimes, though rarely, we would have an outing. A daytrip. We would drive somewhere: a chocolate factory; a mini-castle built in the fifties by a lovelorn husband; a garden shop. There was no wilderness. Nature was carefully contained and curated. It was the best my mother could do: an instructed leisure, facilitated through cars and highways and Women’s Weekly magazines. Gift shops and visitor centres.
Here, I could see no margins, no curation. I walked until I felt the darkness envelop me, until the stars and the earth merged, so that I could barely tell if I was standing on earth or sky. Arms outstretched, I twirled, and it seemed as though the stars washed over me, over my hands and face and feet. Stars seemed to echo on the earth, bright on my feet, as though I were burning in the galaxy among them, and I felt the pulsing of the earth and the strange song of the sky and something swelled in me, something alien. A kind of peace is what it was, a fluttering of happiness and of hope, so unfamiliar as to be unrecognisable.
The windscreen of the Kenwood was wide and clear, and through it I watched the bush turn to desert, and the desert sky turn to an ocean of thick black, dotted with blade-sharp stars. Somewhere between Threeways and Katherine, Toddy asked me if I wanted to drive. ‘No,’ I squealed, ‘I can’t drive.’ God, the terror of it.
‘Here,’ he said, ‘move the gears.’
He tooted the mournful horn while I did, and I laughed like him, open-mouthed, head thrown back.
We talked and talked and talked. Decades later, when the BBC asked me to write a short story, I wrote one about a kind truck driver who missed his mother and unexpectedly found love with a waitress in a truck stop. I’d forgotten about Toddy; I only now realise that it was him in that story, and that I wanted to give him a love story. I wanted to give him something, anything.
It was just before Katherine that we started fighting.
He’d never had kids. Always wanted them, he said. Would have been proud of a kid like me, with my brains.
‘How do you know I’m brainy?’
He tooted the slow moan of the trucker’s horn. ‘Listen to you, you never shut up. Going on with your big ideas. You’re making my brain hurt.’
I smacked him on the arm, and he added, ‘But in a good way.’ His hands clenched the wheel. ‘Yep. I’d be proud if you were my kid. But I wouldn’t let you go off into the who-knows-where on your own. Not without a bloke beside you.’
I said, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Toddy. Like a bloke is going to protect me. It’s blokes who are the bloody danger. Where have you been living, honestly?’
He shook his head again. ‘You just shouldn’t be out there on the road. I don’t like dropping you out here, middle of nowhere.’
‘It’s not up to you.’ And then, although it was patently untrue, I added, ‘I can take care of myself.’
‘You’re just a girl.’
‘I’m as strong as anyone. You’re being stupid.’
Somehow, we were shouting, swearing, slamming fists on the dashboard. Anger bubbled just beneath my skin, waiting for someone to call it up.
‘I’m an adult. A woman.’ Then I said, ‘Jesus. You’re not my father.’ Ridiculous, how easy it was to become an obstreperous teenager.
Toddy’s mouth bent into a crooked shape. ‘I never said I was.’
We drove the rest of the way in a strained silence. I’d calculated that I had enough money for a night or two at the Katherine youth hostel, so Toddy drove right to the door, the long road train curving behind him. He stopped outside the ramshackle building, right by the sign that said YHA.
‘Okay?’ His voice was small.
I grabbed my pack from the cabin. ‘Yep. Thanks for the ride.’ I kept my eyes on my feet while the truck drove away, tooting once more that mournful song.
The hostel was almost full: Danish backpackers, mainly, and one or two Americans. I unfolded my sleeping sheet in the dorm room and lay on it, staring at the ceiling. Dust floated down from the slow fan chk-chking above me. A gecko scratched its way up the wall. Time did what it does, and I waited for something to happen, too tired to move. Eventually, I grabbed a tin of beans and the single pan from the bottom of my pack. In the kitchen, one of the Danish backpackers tossed garlic, herbs and something meaty in a pan, her wrist turning with the ease of a well-weighted hula hoop. She smiled at me with my one tin of baked beans, my enamel bowl. She poured tomatoes into the pan. ‘I’m Eva. Are you Kacey?’
Startled, I nodded, then looked up at the slatted air vents, half-expecting spies to emerge. The fat barrister, maybe, with his wig askew, pointing at me, delighted with further evidence of my wickedness. Hitchhiking, shouting at random strangers etc.
Eva nodded towards the door marked Reception: Office Hours ONLY. ‘There’s a message for you.’
I knocked on the reception door. I had no idea of the time, nor of the office hours. A man in a stained singlet and torn grey shorts opened the door. Grey hair poked out around the top and sleeves of his singlet, curling against the leather of his skin. The grey of his beard was tinged with yellow, as were his teeth. ‘You Kacey?’
I nodded and he handed me a torn piece of notepaper. On it, the words:
Teddy (??) called. Said sorry. Also your friend is not better than you and also you can take care of yourself but make sure you do and please be safe.
Red squiggles surrounded the words and the last three—please be safe—were underlined three times. The man leaning against the door said, ‘He made me read it back to him twice before he’d hang up.’
I folded the note three times for luck, and slipped it into the bottom of my backpack, inside the first page of the F. Scott Fitzgerald stories, The Price Was High.
I don’t remember much of the party. Another party, a different party. This one was in a narrow terrace house, lit with bare bulbs painted with swirls of colour, and we drank riesling from casks, the foil bladders torn from the cardboard boxes and dotted about the kitchen like balloons. There was a wooden table, unpolished, unpainted, wedged against the back door; dinner plates with cabanossi and chunks of cheese covered the table, along with paper cups and ashtrays improvised from coffee mugs and saucers. Most people there wore Dr Martens, the black boots that went halfway up the shin, and the music was Billy Bragg and Bronski Beat. ‘A New England’ blasted out on repeat for what seemed like hours, while we danced and mimed on the tottery stairs.
I did not wear DMs. I wore a dark green linen dress I’d found in a charity shop, a remnant from the 1950s with endless pleats that twirled out when I danced. Black cotton shoes, made in China, and I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to think or feel about China with these people, my new friends. We’d met on a street corner. He was selling Resistance, the badly printed, badly worded newspaper of the Young Socialists. The paper was flimsy; he had it folded across his arm, and a young woman with a perfectly shorn head handed him a new paper whenever he sold one. Which was infrequently. On the far side of the mall, there was another group of them.
The collar of my school blouse had an ink stain on it—I seemed always to be carrying broken pens, seemed always to be splattering ink on my fingers or clothes or papers. He said something witty about the ink, and about the school uniform, and asked me what I thought about Russia, what I thought about Palestine.
He wore combat trousers from an army surplus store and a hessian bag over his hip. When he asked me about Palestine, he leaned down to hear me better, the darks of his eyes almost blending with the brown irises. Brown moppish hair and a slightly crooked smile. The young woman listened too, and we sat on a bench and kept talking until the other group
had stopped selling their papers and joined us. Everyone was equal, everyone deserved power: that was the message of the flimsy newspaper, and that was the message of the combat-trousers-wearing man, and he listened to me, leaning closer and closer, listening to the words that I spoke about a country I knew barely anything about.
The party happened some weeks after that. I’d dragged Sylvie to a Young Socialists meeting at which ten or so people sat in a back room of a different terrace and drank instant coffee and talked about the possibilities of revolution in our coastal industrial town. Sylvie crossed her long legs and refused the instant coffee but later said she thought that one socialist, the one with the combat trousers and the brown eyes and the crooked smile, he was all right. Fanciable. David. David Fox. I think we might have sung ‘Fox on the Run’ while pretending to be him, David Fox, loping around the mall.
My mother had married her small, broken man two years earlier. After they married, I stayed with them briefly in the shack he lived in and then with one of my sisters. Then, when it was clear there wasn’t another home for me, I moved to a hostel in the centre of the city, measuring out meals and eking out coins for the laundry. Over lunch at school, when friends complained about their parents, I laughed along, as though there were someone watching me in the evenings, checking on my progress. David Fox and the shorn-headed girl and their small gang, they did not ask me about my parents or about curfew times.
In the grimy terrace house while Billy Bragg played, I drank paper cup after paper cup of the riesling, and then moved on to cups of fizzy red soft drink diluted with vodka, and then, when I couldn’t walk and could barely talk, David Fox offered to take me back to the hostel. There’s a memory of being tucked into his car, someone clicking a seatbelt across my lap while I laughed; and then of my head outside the car, the breeze like water on my face. When David Fox opened the door outside the hostel I fell out onto the grass and lay there laughing up at the changing sky, stunned by the way the trees moved and swayed against the upside down of the world, and by the way the grass beneath me kept turning, turning. And then crawling to the flowerbed to vomit, trying to hold my perfectly pleated dress away from the dirt, away from the sick.
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