PLEASE REPORT ANY GIANT WOMBATS. BEV.
That is, she was threatening to report my night vision problems to her sister. I should have revealed them anyway, but you could ask any semi driver, or simply examine the skidmarks on those long straight stretches of highway where weary brains had projected hypnagogic nonsense on the road ahead. I was a good navigator, it was proven. Sometimes at night I saw things that were not there.
As we came back to the showgrounds, the cars were leaving at one-minute intervals and the motorcycle cops were revving their Triumph 500s. Our departure slot was in twenty minutes’ time. ‘Just watch me go,’ said Mrs Bobbsey, beautiful, bloodshot, with tangled hair.
2
As we cut across the continent from east to west, the little boy was safe between us in his cardboard box. Bachhuber navigated me across dry beachy land, hills and flats, arid plains of reddish kangaroo grass. There were more trees than I had expected. God knows what murder was buried there, curled up in their roots.
Two level crossings.
At 29.5 a CULVERT and a LONG SINGLE TRACK.
Then a talcum powder dustbowl. Then a switch of soil. We cut between grey banks. We banged over baked clay, into long ruts spiked with rocks and roots. It was said the real Australia is beautiful, but not by me.
My father-in-law was defeated, done, dusted. He had already lost a hundred points but now he was filling up my rear view mirrors. There was no room to let him pass, not even if I wanted to.
The edges of the track were piled high with sand.
He charged at me. I braked. He sat on his horn. My husband ordered me to take it easy, keep my panties on.
‘Don’t speak like that,’ I said.
Bachhuber touched my knee. ‘Bear left,’ he said.
I did so.
There was a worrying suggestion from the exhaust valve, although how could I hear anything above this clatter?
Titch instructed me to let his father pass. ‘He’s just having fun.’ Ha bloody ha, I thought.
‘Pull over for him. Let him pass.’
‘No.’
‘It’s not a race, Missus.’
The road now widened and the Plymouth pulled around us and I saw the cockney sidekick was at the wheel. The big boss was rolling down his window to the dust. I could see his mouth opening and he was signalling for me to wind down my window.
‘He wants to tell us something.’
Bachhuber nudged.
‘DIP OVER CULVERT,’ he said.
‘You’re driving like a girl,’ called Dangerous Dan as we both hit the culvert and I swung the wheel, so close you could not fit a razor blade between the vehicles.
‘I’ll murder him,’ I said. ‘Next stop, I will kill him.’
‘Puss,’ my husband pleaded for his father. I thought, not that. Not now. I have fought for you for years and years. ‘You bloody well support me,’ I said. ‘I’m your wife.’ He patted my shoulder and I thought, you have no clue what I am feeling.
Bachhuber called, ‘GRID.’
The map showed a road but nothing was so definite in real life. It was a cleared strip through scrub, punctuated by washaways, long stretches of sand, sudden jump-ups, blind crests, cattle grids and kamikaze cattle. We had Dunlop on-off road tyres, thank Titch for that. Thank Titch for Mrs Markus too. He expected everything to be overlooked. We could not escape potholes, dead kangaroos, and dust, bulldust they call it. We passed more broken cars than I could number. If dust was fattening I would have weighed a ton.
There was petrol in eighty miles, at Charters Towers. The town turned out to be as lost and broken as those abandoned cars. The main street was occupied by rusty old emporiums, piles of mullock overgrown with weeds and rubber vines, weary unpainted houses set on stilts. The petrol station was an old mill burned down in tragedy, with just a lonely petrol pump remaining.
As we pulled in I saw the old buzzard’s Plymouth stopped across the narrow street. There were the usual rubbernecks standing on the footpath but I had the tyre lever in my hand. I planned to serve him right.
I knocked on his filthy passenger window, just to have him pay attention to his punishment. There was the little Englishman. My father-in-law was behind the wheel.
At that moment I did not know about his heart attack. How could I? When I whacked the windscreen I thought he was alive. That should wake him up, I thought.
I was set upon by rubberneckers. Some oaf got his hands upon my shoulders. I squirmed away, but it was a cattle town with drovers’ men and station agents and they had no trouble removing a tyre lever from a woman’s hand.
Finally it sunk in: he was dead. I thought I did it to him. The windscreen glass was in a thousand little bits and when they laid him down, I heard the sound of his threadbare skull against the footpath. His false teeth were nowhere to be found.
There was a great clumsy lump of policeman, in shorts and long white socks, assisted by the co-driver. Must be a wig, I thought of the little Englishman, of all the things to think at such a time.
I saw my husband was laying his head on his father’s chest. The old man’s eyes were wide and staring, his mouth open. Death had not improved his looks.
All my married life I had worked to protect Titch from his father’s malice and his father had done everything he could to keep his sonny in a cage. It had been the purpose of my life to make sure my husband knew the comfort of being loved. Now it seemed all this had been for nothing. He threw himself on the dead body, in public. There was nowhere left to hide his relentless secret love.
I did not grudge him his grief but I felt none myself. I was a driver in a race that I had sacrificed my inheritance to enter. When I crossed the road to our car I knew we could spare an hour for mourning. But then I discovered our car would not restart, the battery was dead, the regulator not functioning.
I told the little Englishman to find an undertaker. He had blue blue eyes, but they would not look at me. A crowd had gathered, God knows where they had come from. I asked Bachhuber to find the undertaker and he returned to escort me into a dusty store with hats and boots and a wrought-iron balcony around the upstairs floor where she-in-charge-of-haberdashery was also the funeral director.
I had buried my parents within a month of each other. I knew what must be done for Dan. I chose the coffin and the handles. I wrote a cheque for embalming and then we had another three-quarters of an hour to spare. Bachhuber went off to arrange a jump-start for the car.
The haberdasher was cursed with very white skin and was the most sunburned undertaker you could imagine. I wrote her a cheque to ship the coffin to Mrs Donaldson in Mordialloc. Due to embalming there was no ice surcharge. I paid cash for a telegram to Melbourne and I admit I did not wish to be the one to break the news on the phone. That was wrong, I know it. I was not in my right mind.
It was the middle of winter but hot in Charters Towers where, in the shadow of a mullock heap, I found my distraught husband in his nice yellow sweater and his driving gloves lost to all the world.
I held him, but he did not want holding.
I told him everything I had arranged, and that Dan would soon be with Mrs Donaldson.
‘What sort of person do you think I am?’ he asked.
I said I loved him. I would give my life for him and his ambitions. Had done so since day one.
‘I can’t just drive away and leave my father.’
A better woman would have granted this. A saner woman possibly. But I could not permit Dan Bobs to defeat us as he wished.
‘You can’t give up,’ I said.
‘This is my duty.’
I said his duty was for himself, and the family who had sacrificed everything so he could win.
People were listening I suppose. But why should I care who heard me in Charters Towers. I asked my husband what sort of person did he think I was. I had left our babes, for what? I had spent our inheritance for what? Not so I could give up halfway through.
‘Alright,’ he said, ‘then go.’
His eyes were foreign and I thought of my sister who I never understood before. You could be married to a man and not know who he was.
‘Piss off then,’ he said, for the first and last time in his life.
‘Yes, I will.’
‘The regulator is up shit creek,’ he said, as if that were an apology.
I said I would look after that and not to worry and I saw we were really going to be separated and I had never spent a night away from him in fifteen years and I had waited for him in my kitchen, waited for him to come home from Morrisons or Ballan or Wallace or Buninyong, all these years I had held him in my arms. Now I was a cane field roaring in the night, consumed by fire.
My father-in-law had died. My husband had told me to piss off. A willy-willy came down the middle of the main street of Charters Towers, not a big one, only ten feet high or so, a red dirty whirlwind that danced and swayed and seemed to release a stockman from its centre, although doubtless he had simply limped across the street as the willy-willy descended on him. He came to join us on the footpath. He was a black man, tall as Bachhuber with a clean tartan shirt and white moleskin trousers, one leg shorter than the other. I noted his interest in my navigator and saw them talk to one another, the black man being very insistent even as he looked over Bachhuber’s shoulder, with his one good eye.
I made nothing of it, but when the awful moment came, when I abandoned my husband in the street, when he would not even say my name, when I returned to our car to win the race that was not a race, I was slow to realise the black man was in the car.
He had been drinking, I certainly smelled that, and I was frightened of him and Bachhuber would not tell him to get out and so I left Charters Towers, driving very fast, my throat an ache of grief, because I was the wilful one who must do what she had set out to do.
I was in the wrong. I was a bitch. I bawled my eyes out at fifty miles an hour. Bear left, bear right, bear left and level crossing. Two creeks and bend across the railway tracks. My navigator must protect me now.
3
Lord what has happened to me, I thought, I have a crippled blackfellah in the rear and a weeping white woman driving at speeds beyond the law.
Between Southern Cross and Homestead she turned back twice and I thought, both times, thank the Lord, we will all be returned to kiss and make up, and there will be a proper funeral and the children will have parents. But no, no, no she had to win. She spun the wheel and we were once more in the Redex, heading through the dust clouds for Mount Isa, and I had no choice but to call the odometer clicks for the same awful grids and drains. We sped past vehicles fresh from showrooms, now destroyed. We shook and rattled like pills in an Aspro bottle but lost nothing except a door handle, also the speedo cable which might have mattered if the driver had any interest in average miles per hour. My bones were slammed into my bottom. My crown split off my head. We were airborne on the jump-ups and the leaf springs still held out. At Pentland there was mud like sticky toffee, a dozen competitors up to their doors, two extortionists with tractors offering to set them free. Amongst the local picnickers there was a low-slung drover type with a sign: UNDERTAKER PREPARED TO DO ANY DIGGING JOB.
The blackfellah leaned forward expectantly and I caught his yellowed bloodshot eye and thought, I cannot imagine how he sees me. But perhaps that could also be said of Irene Bobs who was roaring down into the field of battle, low geared, high revved, as we growled and banged across the hidden rocks and hurled wet mud over everything behind us, including the crew of Vanguard Spacemaster 53 who had been our mates last night in the pub. So far so good.
There was a post office in Betts Creek est. 1884. Not a soul in sight. Due to the state of the regulator, Mrs Bobbsey left the motor running and rushed inside to make a call to Beverly. The engine had an occasional cough and I thought, no-one will stop to help us if we stall. I put fresh stockings in the air filter.
Dwarfed behind the wheel, Mrs Bobbsey was coughing and spitting and we had four hundred miles to Mount Isa, creek crossings and – worse than that – certain competitors who had disconnected their brakelights to cause accidents behind. No competitor on that leg will forget the dust coating every surface, the drumming violent gibber stones like a malevolent spirit with a sledgehammer clouting the bottom of your car. Back in Townsville they had seemed to think I was a black man. Were they ever-vigilant for the signs of impure blood? Confronted by this ‘education’ I had never felt so lost.
Our rear seat passenger indicated he would be happy to take the wheel which induced Mrs Bobbsey to speak at length, lecturing him on his weight, how much fuel he was using, how little he was doing, and why he would be better off walking in the dust with ‘your mates’. It seems likely she used the term ‘dead weight’.
When I next caught his eye he had turned off all the switches and there was no human signal I could detect. ‘All else being equal, individuals of a given race are distinguishable from each other in proportion to their familiarity or contact with the race as a whole.’ So said someone, long ago. I would wish this was not ever true but at this point of the journey our passenger looked only like a blackfellah and I could see no more except, sometimes, the possibility that he had suffered some surgical incision in his tongue.
We proceeded through desolation, twisting and turning through copper coloured hills. If this was our country’s heart, I never saw anything so stony, so empty, so endless, devoid of life other than predatory kites, circling, while we sat separately contained, our webs of pain and history hidden from each other. We arrived at 89.3 miles from Mount Isa at that dangerous time of day when the roadside cattle spill like underwater shadows and the deep purple of the sky drains into the mineral rocks and the most balanced person might see phantoms. We were at 50.6 CREEK CROSSING 49.8 L/R BEND ACROSS CREEK.
Mrs Bobbsey would never drive into water without first walking it, and for this reason she had changed into her shorts and thus I spied her lovely calves in the pale uncertain yellow headlights, so like her sister in a different situation. The water was almost to her knees.
I needed no-one to instruct me that we would, in normal circumstances, with a functional regulator, have removed the belt from the engine fan. Now it would spray water all over our electrics. We had crossed plenty of creeks since Charters Towers and some of those had been risky, but she had always first walked the creeks, had always plotted the safest course across. When the water had sprayed through the engine, Titch’s treatment of the electrics had been enough to keep our tinder dry.
Now we lurched lopsided down the bank and I felt the sudden water flood over my feet. And yet we would get through, it seemed. We bounced once, twice, then stalled.
‘Oh no,’ she cried. ‘Oh shit and fuck.’
There seemed no point in rescuing the strip maps which we left floating on the floor. We abandoned ship and I sat beside my tiny driver on the bank, listening to the engine hissing in its bath. There was wood smoke in the air but if it was from a bushfire there was no light to be seen, and we were passive victims, watching the dusk swallow up our victory. Mrs Bobbsey slapped mosquitoes on her unprotected legs and asked where was that blackfellah hiding.
I assumed him gone. Why not? It was his country. My reading suggested that he would not die of thirst or hunger. He could get a feed from this red earth as if it were a grocery store.
Soon our Redex competitors came charging at us and we faced another danger. I exhausted our precious torch batteries waving them away from our vehicle. Of course they did not stop to help us. We watched their red tail-lights with the secret panic of children abandoned after dark. They fled from us across the ridge, their headlights washing out across the scrub.
Later there would be a moon, but when the human noise came from behind us, it was pitch dark. Then I smelled the backseat breath. When I realised he was not alone the hair rose on my neck. I sat very still while our former passenger firmly removed the torch from my hand and popped the bonnet and stared at the battery. Mrs Bobb
sey grabbed me urgently. In that moment of extremis I still had room to feel her chest against my upper arm.
‘Tools,’ our man demanded.
‘Don’t give them to him,’ said Mrs Bobbsey. ‘They’ll sell them.’
I did not wish to betray her, but I surrendered the smaller of our two kits. Then I watched as he selected an adjustable spanner and removed the leads from the battery.
‘What is he doing?’ she cried, although she had pushed in very close and knew the answer. We were being relieved of our battery.
‘They’ll sell the lead.’
‘Madam,’ said our former passenger. ‘We warm him.’
‘Bachhuber,’ she cried.
I understood my job as a man, but what was I meant to do?
I gave up our torch to the ‘robber’ as we followed along the creek and then down into what might be a billabong in wet season but now must give good shelter from the wind. Here I made out a band of blacks, perhaps a dozen including children, camping around a fire and two scrawny dun coloured dogs finishing their late afternoon meal.
Our passenger placed his burden beside the fire.
‘Battery he no good,’ he said. ‘Gotta make him better.’
Even if I could have overpowered him it would have made no sense. His two accomplices – one no more than a teenager, the other a sturdy bearded older man – were clearly not afraid of me. They were now dragging some queer wiry logs out of the scrub.
These they placed parallel on each side of the fire and on top of this a piece of rusted corrugated iron.
‘Don’t let them,’ said Mrs Bobbsey, pulling at my arm.
I thought, don’t let them what?
Our passenger picked up the battery and held it out, like an offering, above the fire.
‘Stop him. Willie.’
It was nice to be called Willie, but it was an impractical request and I could do nothing more manly than stand inquiringly beside him.
‘Bush generator,’ he said to me. ‘We stop and fix him, bush doctor.’ It was the first time that he smiled.