The night was broken by a flash of movement, black and white and red like a bad joke. I felt something big hit the bull bar and I pressed the brakes so hard the Minister had to grab the bar above the glove box with both hands. It happened in less than a second. I did not have time to think about my driving, only to brace my body against the spin. But we didn’t flip over. Either luck, or engineering. It was only after we squealed to a stop that I realised I’d remembered not to swerve. We sat in the awful silence for ten, twenty seconds, the time clicked out by the hazard lights.
‘Shit,’ I said. My shaking hands were glued to the wheel.
‘Don’t worry, it’s just a roo. I’ll make sure it’s dead,’ he said, suddenly brightening. He wiped his hands on his knees. I imagined this was what he meant by getting to know the country: taking a story home to impress the gang with his outback know-how. It was all depressingly schoolboy, and he forgot the tyre iron. I unfastened my seatbelt and climbed out of the car.
‘Nothing,’ said the Minister, adjusting his tie. He bent to look under the car. ‘Nup.’
I walked back along the highway, checking both sides of the road. The moonlight was bright enough to see by. I saw a lump on the verge a way behind us, a big roo, but as I got closer I could tell by the smell that it had been dead for a while.
I gave up and turned towards the car. Then I saw the man I must have hit rise in the headlights. He was standing in the middle of the road, beyond the Minister. He was clasping something to his chest. His hand half covered a red patch on his shirt. He looked solid enough. He looked alive. I slowly raised my hand to him in a greeting that I realised might look like surrender.
The Minister was leaning on the car, bored now that he had nothing to club. He was staring at his shoes, probably thinking about getting them cleaned. I was glad he was distracted. I thought I might have time to assess the situation, deal with the injury, cover my tracks.
The man raised a hand to me from beyond the car. It was clenched. He held something in the fist. The red shape was revealed on his chest. My heart raced. I must have hit him hard. I thought of first aid, of broken ribs, and whether or not you were supposed to bandage them. I thought of damage control, media contacts, the name of the journo from the local paper. How much cash I had in my purse. I am a good problem solver. I breathed. I walked slowly, without taking my eyes off him, until I could focus.
It wasn’t blood. It was a shiny pattern on the shirt. I recognised the logo of a Melbourne football team. It was just some man out on the road for his own reasons. Maybe I didn’t hit him. Maybe he was looking for something he dropped. There was a reason. There was a reason he was gone by the time I reached the car. He went somewhere.
‘Mustn’t have hit it hard enough,’ the Minister said when I get back into the driver’s seat. ‘Bounded off into the bush I’ll bet.’
I started the engine. ‘He went somewhere.’ The blood pounded in my ears. The problem seemed to have solved itself. I drove carefully back to town, both hands on the wheel.
In my room at the hotel I opened my laptop and my folder of papers. I stared at the notes from the day’s meeting until they swam. In one corner I’d written the word practical in small capitals and underlined it twice. But I couldn’t remember why.
I stepped outside to breathe some non-conditioned air and blink the words from my eyes. I could hear drunks in the riverbed, the laughter of women. Beyond that, as if through a tear in the night, came the high trill of the division bells. It must have been a car alarm, or simply my imagination, because I was a long way from Parliament House. I rubbed my hands together for warmth.
Beyond the hotel’s artificial oasis I could see the ranges, lit up by the moon. They still looked ugly to me, spoiled somehow, but there were arcs in the rock: patterns formed and broken over geological ages. There must be some logic to it, but I couldn’t see it. I thought instead of what might be upturned, and what kept buried.
The lap
The campervan smells like other people. A brand new air freshener, shaped like a pine tree, is still in its plastic bag in the glove box with the insurance paperwork. But Lucy has cleaned the rented van plenty of times. Eucalyptus oil. Hospital grade disinfectant. No matter what she uses, she can’t completely disguise the traces of previous inhabitants. It’s a residue of old food, smokes, and perfume. The sweet of an apple core left too long. Lucy sometimes tries to itemise these traces, one by one. She often gets back to sleep this way.
Perhaps it’s the residue, and not the anonymity, that she finds comfortable about the campervan. It’s certainly not the mattress, which is thin, foam, and the reason she is awake before dawn. She curls onto her other side, but her thighs ache against the stiff bed.
Lucy used to be a runner. Cross country, when she was young, then distance. She has run sixteen marathons in her life, but none in the last five years. She sometimes imagines that when she gets home there will be a ribbon waiting for her, a white-coated man with a stopwatch, crowds cheering. But she knows there will only be the same people she runs into at the shopping centre.
‘How was your trip?’ they will say.
‘Good,’ she will reply.
Then they will tell her about the sale at the shoe shop, or their niece’s wedding, or their husband’s prostate. Lucy learned early that she won or lost alone, that no one else could ever grasp what she did on that track. To them, it was just going round in circles.
Lucy rises, dresses herself, goes to the toilet block to piss and wash her face. She doesn’t look in the mirror. It’s made of steel instead of glass, and only reflects a vague shape, like an impressionist portrait.
She makes an early start as she does every morning, though there is no rush to get anywhere. She is driving around the perimeter of the country, movement its own destination, heading home in the wrong direction. She has been on the road long enough to have found her pace.
At half past two Lucy arrives in a town. It’s the old kind, where all the shops face the highway, but it has grown back away from the main street. Red roofs extend into the distance, all of them sparkling and new. It’s a mining town now. She passed the scars on the way in: even mounds like alien markings. Lucy parks behind the supermarket. Tonight she needs a decent night’s sleep.
Lucy rations her motels. She does not have as much money as she thought. The feeling of abundance, of oyster worlds and wide open roads, evaporated very quickly. Three months into her lap year, she has not yet made a quarter circle, and finds herself counting the kilometres, marking time the way she used to do when she lived in a house. She blamed a lack of movement for time not passing then. She moves now, and still time doesn’t pass.
Tonight Lucy needs a decent night’s sleep. She can’t manage on the little she’s been getting lately. It would make more sense if she was worried about something, but she seems to wake only to blink at the air and count the traces. It has occurred to her that the campervan is really inhabited by other people, and that they keep her awake to entertain themselves. Lucy knows this thought is insane.
With motel keys in her pocket she feels more rational, knowing there will be a proper shower and an electric kettle and a television. A real night’s sleep. A different set of traces in the morning.
She thinks about the man with the ashes while she carries her bag to her room. She met him at a roadside rest stop a few days ago. It was three in the afternoon – the dead time. At work, this was the coma hour, when she used to need coffee. On the road, it is when you decide to settle for this rest stop or look for the next one. Three o’clock weighs more than two or four. It’s on the cusp of too late.
The man with the ashes was travelling with his wife. It had been their retirement dream – everyone’s retirement dream, it seems, this lap. Inconveniently, his wife had died ahead of schedule. He took her with him anyway.
As he told Lucy about this, the man with the
ashes smiled cheerfully and gestured towards the back of his camper, where no doubt the urn stood bolted to a shelf. Lucy resisted the urge to peek.
‘We have some great conversations,’ he said.
She wished she had thought of it herself. She drove another hour or so before she remembered her ex-husband was still alive.
Lucy has most of an afternoon to kill, so she walks around the town. Behind the main street there is a pedestrian mall adjoining the shopping centre. The mall has a pub at the end, and she would like to go there for a late lunch, but it’s full of men and noise and, besides, asking for lunch at this hour might be deemed unreasonable. She gets a pie from a takeaway instead. There’s a skate park down a side street and she sits on a nearby park bench to eat her meal.
Lucy enjoys watching the young people. She knows that if she were a man, she would seem suspicious here. Women are allowed to watch children. Women of her age, not yet old, no longer young, are, to all intents and purposes, invisible. Lucy likes her invisibility. She is used to it.
She moves slightly on the bench to uncover the marks. stacey is a slut. jaymond smokes pole. The carvings are surprisingly neat. A lot of care has been taken. Lucy tries to remember what it was like before her life filled with echoes. Before she found out exactly what to expect. She can’t recall, but imagines it was a bit like being an animal.
She finishes the pie, traces the curved letters with her finger, then scrunches up the paper bag and gets up. She walks back to the mall and paces, looking at the shops. Eventually she feels self-conscious, walking up and down without buying anything, so she goes back to the motel. It’s still daylight, but she lies down and points the remote at the tv. There’s nothing good on.
Lucy wakes up with the tv and her shoes still on, feeling groggy from the nap, a little out of kilter with reality. Waking in the dark will do that. There is a band at the pub now. She can hear the music from here. ‘Khe Sanh’ rattles across to her, a little tired by the time it arrives but not much quieter. She steps outside to the concrete balcony, sits on the chair provided, and wishes she still smoked.
The man from the next room walks out onto the common balcony and lights a cigarette. She stares greedily. When he notices her, she is embarrassed, and turns her head away. She realises with horror how this sequence of expressions could be interpreted.
‘You like music?’
Lucy nods cautiously. The man has an ugly moustache. It disguises his lips. She judges people by their mouths, but isn’t conscious of this, or of avoiding their eyes.
‘Lucky, cause it’s bloody loud. Like they’re in the same room.’ His voice is lazy, almost sleepy. He smiles without showing his teeth and she decides he is not a serial killer.
‘No ashtrays,’ he continues, flicking his cigarette butt over the railing to the car park below. ‘No one smokes any more.’
Lucy fights an urge to apologise.
He doesn’t go back inside as she expects. He stands with his hands on the railing and looks up at the sky.
‘Married?’ he asks, abruptly.
‘Divorced,’ she says, instead of none of your business.
‘Oh yeah. How’s that?’
Lucy shrugs. In the silence that opens up between them, that yawns, she wants to tell him about the residue in her campervan. But it seems now that it’s not the van at all – it’s her. There are other people’s scents, their habits and behaviours, strewn through her whole life; the traces of people who have been and gone. Her son, her husband, the friends he didn’t like. The people she used to laugh with at work, who forgot about her when she retired. She looks for a word for all of this, and is surprised when she finds it. It’s leftovers.
‘It’s okay,’ she says instead. ‘You?’
‘Selling. Want a drink?’ He hands her his, a premixed bourbon and Coke in a can, without stepping any closer. She takes it and he goes inside and gets himself another one. She notes he has avoided the question and she looks for a ring. There’s a white line on the right finger, which means he was once, or he is hiding the fact that he still is.
The band has switched to playing an upbeat Paul Kelly number about regret. The man’s ‘selling’ nags at her. He hasn’t stated what, but he’s made it sound respectable. She is about to ask him when he catches her curious look.
‘Pharmaceuticals, and don’t laugh, it’s legal. I visit all the regional gps, floggin this stuff.’ He pulls a bottle from his pocket and holds it aloft. ‘Immemex,’ he announces, with a tiny flourish. The bottle has no label.
‘New on the market,’ he explains. ‘It’s supposed to be for trauma sufferers. Shuts down the traumatised part of the brain.’ His voice has altered: the consonants have straightened their clothes, the vowels got up off the floor. But they don’t seem to have the will to stay presentable, and he drops back into his untidy ocker.
‘Supposed to be?’ Lucy’s mouth makes little creases.
‘You want some?’ He proffers the bottle. ‘Chills you out.’
Lucy shakes her head but at the same time her right hand reaches for the bottle, and then there are two, then four pills in her palm. Well, she has stopped for a good night’s sleep after all, and perhaps this is the best way.
She studies the pills while he talks about his job. It doesn’t sound very interesting, driving all the time. She manages to avoid telling him anything else about herself, and he doesn’t ask.
The pills are round – elliptical – with halfway lines, like miniature football fields. She imagines tiny footballers playing on the surface, unaware they are about to be swallowed. She smiles and washes them down with the warm bourbon, feeling like she’s seventeen.
Ah, she thinks. So this is what it was like.
Lucy wakes early, after a deep and dreamless sleep. She packs, then makes herself an instant coffee with the satisfying little sachet provided, and steps onto the concrete balcony to drink it in the morning sun.
‘Sleep all right?’
It’s a man smoking outside the next room. He has an ugly moustache and a lazy voice. She’s not sure about him, so she merely smiles tightly. She finishes her coffee too quickly, clutches her bag and walks to the car park.
‘Hey, have a safe trip.’ He calls this over the railing. There’s a note of resentment in his voice. She’s bothered by this, but not surprised. People always seem to think she owes them something.
If he says anything else, Lucy hears only a murmur like a highway. Her feet mark the lap of an ellipse on the concrete as she digs in her bag for the key.
When she gets in the driver’s seat, she feels safe, high above the asphalt. Everything smells clean and fresh and new.
Plain Indians
They are right on the edge of my vision. I can hear them scattering into the scrub. I stand up, my hands full of scraps. The hands let the scraps fall and are empty. Something rattles in my skull. What is trapped inside my head is like what they are after: a mess of blood and sovereignty.
‘Get away,’ I whisper into the trees, but there is no answer, only the swish of the branches. I remember my horse and curse. I take a deep breath. I listen out for the horse’s distinctive gait, but there is nothing. They must have taken her.
A branch snaps behind me. My ears prick up but I don’t swivel. Sudden movement could spell my death. I rotate my eyes as far to the left as they will go, and then my head. Only then do my shoulders twist until I find the corner of my vision with the Indian in it. He is standing in the scrub, hardly camouflaged, staring.
‘Wayne,’ he says. ‘It’s lunchtime.’
It’s not an Indian. It’s Geoff. Geoff is carrying a white bag weighted with scraps. It drips watery slime onto his shoes.
How can they sit down to eat when the enemy is hovering? The people of the plains surround us. We are so weak, so few now. But we need nourishment. I think of my horse with
her belly sliced open, the ribs exposed, and feel sick.
‘They’ve taken Georgia,’ I say.
‘Who?’
‘Georgia. My horse.’
‘Right-o,’ Geoff says, looking into the scrub. He approaches me, dragging his bag. He puts a hand on my shoulder and I step back, one finger to my lips.
‘Wayne,’ he says again.
‘Listen,’ I whisper. Under the rustling leaves the feet tread, shod in bark to hide their tracks. The trees disguise the murmuring, the sound of the plains people, forming their strategies. I feel abruptly cold. We might already be marked out.
‘You hear it?’
Geoff shakes his head and glances over his shoulder. I can see the others congregating through the trees, each weighed down by a white bag full to the brim. Uprooted children hauling damaged goods. This land is already gutted, the Indians are fighting for a corpse. But if that’s the case, then so are we.
‘They’re here,’ I whisper.
‘Eh?’ Geoff is going to draw arrows with his noise. I put my hand heavily on his shoulder and shove him into a crouch. He lands on his palms and grunts.
‘Is this all you got?’ he asks, gesturing at my white bag on the ground, a few scraps suffocating inside. I am breathing hard.
‘All around,’ I manage. ‘Took horse. Gone to ground.’
‘Oh great,’ Geoff mutters, then adds, more loudly, ‘You want to come and have a steak sandwich? With the rest of us?’ I shake my head, hold his shoulder as he tries to move. I signal again to silence him but he keeps talking.
‘Look, Wayne. There aren’t any Indians, okay?’
‘I’ve seen them,’ I hiss.
‘There aren’t any, trust me.’ He pats my shoulder. ‘Maybe your, ah, horse just wandered off. Went for a walk.’
The Rest is Weight Page 7
