Col considered his options as he steered his ute around a pothole. He was eating Del’s dust now, because she had reached the track ahead of him. The sedan (minus the caravan) was bringing up the rear. Insects splattered against his windscreen, though he wasn’t going fast; you’d have sworn that they were hurling themselves at him, like attack dogs.
‘What do you reckon about this?’ Col asked his companion. ‘Do you reckon this is a good idea?’
John turned his head, slowly. His eyes were dazed and bewildered in deep, bruised sockets. He had been chewing his fingernails.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Do you reckon we should be going to Balaclava station? I’m starting to wonder. Maybe I should’ve – you know – kept driving alongside the highway. Couldn’t be much worse than this.’
John blinked, and then his gaze slipped away from Col’s. Splat! Something the size of a cicada hit the glass in front of him. ‘Jesus,’ said Col.
‘I dunno,’ John mumbled.
‘I mean, it can’t have gone on forever – all that road kill. And this is a bloody Holden WB. It’s not a tin-pot little Asian car.’ The wipers and spray didn’t seem to be doing much good; they were just smearing goo all over the windscreen. ‘Listen – John. There’s a box of tissues in the glove-box. You want to lean out and give the glass a bit of a clean?’
John obeyed, silently. Col noticed, through the billows of dust ahead of him, that there was a dog in the back of Del’s station wagon. It was barking at him, though he couldn’t hear it.
Stupid bloody animal.
‘How are you going there?’
John grunted in reply.
‘It looks a bit better,’ said Col, troubled by thoughts of Elspeth. What if she was waiting for him? What if her crippled memory was actually functioning for once, and someone had told her to expect him, and he didn’t turn up? He wasn’t late – not yet – but he soon would be.
‘I think maybe I’ll turn around,’ he began.
Then he yelled, and slammed on the brake.
He didn’t know what had happened, at first. It was all so sudden, so quick: a great splash of gore across the windscreen. And the bang, which drove them off to the left, into a ditch – he thought for an instant that it had come before the blood. Had he hit something on the ground? Had it been forced up over the bonnet?
No.
‘Shit!’ gasped John.
‘Is it a bird?’ Col was dazed. His shoulder hurt. ‘It flew right into us . . .’
John scrambled out of the ute. Col followed his example, clumsily. He missed his footing on a loose gravel slope, and staggered, and grabbed at a door handle.
Fortunately, the ditch was just a shallow crease in the ground. His front wheels were sitting in it; they had churned two angry red furrows through the dust. His back wheels weren’t far from the track – no more than a couple of metres.
‘It’s a fuckin crow.’
Col looked up. ‘Eh?’ he said.
‘It’s a fuckin crow,’ John repeated, hoarsely. He was staring, white-faced, at the windshield, which was dripping with blood, plastered with offal and feathers. Black feathers. They were glued to the glass, some of them, while others were being whirled away in a light breeze.
‘I wasn’t going fast . . .’ Col faltered.
‘Col!’ It was Ross, hurrying towards them. The young truck driver was coming too. Ross’s sedan had stopped behind Col’s vehicle and had disgorged most of its passengers.
Col began to climb back into his own seat.
‘Col!’ said Ross. He had almost reached the ute, and was slowing. ‘What happened?’
‘Nothing. It was an accident.’
‘Oh shit.’ Alec, approaching from the passenger side, had caught sight of Col’s windscreen. ‘What the hell’s that?’
‘Crow,’ Col replied.
‘Crow?’
Col put his ute in reverse. He revved the engine, but got nowhere. Ross said to him, through the window: ‘You’ll need a push.’
‘Yeah. Right.’
‘Are you okay?’
‘I’m fine. Fine.’
‘What happened?’
All at once, Col heard Del’s voice; he wondered how she had got to him so quickly. He noticed that she was carrying a bloody great rifle with a telescopic sight.
‘What the hell is that?’ she demanded.
‘Crow,’ Alec rejoined.
‘A crow? Hit his windshield?’
‘Are you gunna help us push, or what?’
They were all gathering in front of the ute, sliding into the ditch from every direction. Not Del, however – she wouldn’t relinquish her gun. She kept squinting around, her teeth bared, as Col gave the accelerator another tap.
‘Once more!’ yelled Alec.
Col could feel the pressure of the young bloke’s muscles. With a roar, his ute suddenly moved backwards, its front wheels bouncing over the edge of the ditch, its back wheels ploughing up dust. Col couldn’t see the men who followed him out – the windscreen was opaque with bodily fluids – but he heard them slap the bonnet, and call to him.
‘You’re done, here!’
‘You’re out, Col!’
‘Col, wait! Hang on!’
It didn’t register at first. He felt slightly numb in the head, as if only half his brain was functioning properly. So he turned in his seat, straining to see behind him while he spun the steering wheel.
Have to get back on the track, he thought.
‘Col! Wait!’ This time somebody banged at his door. It was the truck driver, who gave Col quite a scare. The silly bugger grabbed at his window glass.
‘Col! Stop!’
‘Why? What ?’
‘Your tyres, mate. Your front tyres.’ Alec’s eyes looked very green in his dusty brown face. ‘Didn’t you see?’
‘Eh?’
‘You’ve blown your front tyres.’
CHAPTER 15
Peter had clung to his window seat. Despite the reshuffle, he had refused to reposition himself, insisting that he would be sick if he didn’t sit next to a window. So while his father was now wedged between Del and Col up front, and Georgie was squashed in beside Linda (who had surrendered her window seat to Louise) Peter remained where he’d been from the start. Left-side back.
From there, he had a pretty good view of what they were passing.
‘That ridge looks higher than I thought it was,’ Del remarked, leaning forward a little. ‘Georgina? It’s Pine Creek up ahead, right?’
‘Georgie.’
‘Eh?’
‘It’s Georgie. Not Georgina.’
‘Oh.’
‘I don’t know what it is. I never knew the name.’
‘But ya been here before?’
‘A long time ago.’ Georgie seemed to be sulking – perhaps because she had been separated from her boyfriend. John Carr was now occupying her former position in the Harwoods’ sedan; Georgie herself, being smaller and slighter than John, was squeezed into the narrow space beside Linda. Anyone else would have realised that this swapping of seats was the inevitable result of Col’s accident, which had left him without a functioning set of wheels. Georgie, however, appeared to regard her displacement as a deliberate act of provocation by the vehicles’ two owners.
That, at least, was the impression she gave with her brooding pout, folded arms and abrupt answers to perfectly civil questions. She would poke Peter in the ribs occasionally, just to be spiteful, and he would respond in kind. She was worse than Rose. He couldn’t believe that any grown-up would behave so badly at such a time. When she started to walk her feet up the back of the seat in front of her, Peter’s jaw dropped.
‘Don’t do that, please,’ Linda said sharply.
Georgie ignored her.
‘You kids.’ Noel was squirming. He frowned over his shoulder. ‘Stop kicking the seat.’
‘It’s not us!’ Louise piped up.
‘It’s Georgie,’ said Linda.
With a
n exaggerated sigh of disgust, Georgie folded her long legs. She had a very strange dress on – it looked like a flimsy little night gown, all lace and satin. Underneath, she was wearing black leotards.
‘Were you talking to me?’ she drawled. ‘I thought you were talking to your kids.’
‘I don’t have to talk to my kids,’ Linda responded stiffly. ‘My kids know how to behave.’
You’re right there, thought Peter, though he had to acknowledge that Rosie had been whining a bit. Not that he blamed her. She was well and truly sick of driving by now; she was tired and sticky and bored and irritable. They all were. The only difference between Peter and Rosie was that Rosie didn’t know enough to be scared.
Peter was scared. The crow on the windshield – that had scared him more than anything else. It had come out of nowhere and forced Col into a ditch. Why? How? None of the cars had been going very fast, yet the bird looked as if it had been sucked into a jet engine and spat out the other end.
How long would it be before Del’s car hit something?
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Georgie spluttered. ‘Will someone shut that bloody dog up? It’s driving me mad!’
‘Mongrel!’ Del shouted, fruitlessly. ‘Stop it!’
‘Maybe we should give him a dog biscuit,’ Louise suggested. ‘Do you have any dog biscuits?’
‘I will give him dog biscuits, if he’s not careful,’ Del growled. ‘Dog biscuits up the arsehole.’
It had been some time since Peter had even noticed Mongrel’s steady barking. The noise had ceased to bother him much; it was like living next to a railway line. After a while, the squeal of freight trains just fades into the background.
‘These ant hills,’ said Del. ‘I’ve never seen ant hills like this around here before. Yiz ever seen ’em so big? In this parta the world?’
She was addressing Col, who shook his head. The back of his neck was seamed and rough, like elephant hide. He kept clearing his throat.
‘Usually get ’em small, out this way,’ Del continued. ‘These ones are the sorta thing yiz find over the border. Up round Mount Isa and that.’ She sounded faintly uneasy. ‘Bloody enormous, up there.’
Peter, his interest piqued, studied the curious formations outside the car. He could see about five or six mounds, all of them at least as tall as Rosie. They made him think of prehistoric standing stones, except that they were red. Some of them almost looked like big clay statues. In fact the one they were passing (a tall one, nearly as tall as Peter) had a distinct head, with a sort of crown or mitre on it, and a dent for the eyes, and a knob for the nose, and a yawning mouth . . .
His heart skipped a beat, because as the station wagon passed it, the yawning mouth seemed to close. Then his viewpoint changed, and he relaxed. Of course the ant hill hadn’t moved. The change had been in his perspective; from a different angle, in fact, the ant hill didn’t look like a statue at all. Not what Peter would call a statue, anyway. And it was still – perfectly still. They all were. While they might have been teeming with life inside, they had the appearance of dead, ancient, weathered things, like the Easter Island heads or a desert ruin. They were placed, not in clusters, but at carefully measured intervals from each other. Peter wondered if the ants had worked that out. He wondered why the strange, fretted monuments seemed to be trying to tell him something. It wasn’t as if they were standing stones. It wasn’t as if they had any religious or astronomical significance.
They were just ant hills.
‘Look,’ said Noel, glancing over his shoulder. ‘See, kids? We’re getting close to the river.’
‘Creek,’ Del corrected. ‘It’s a creek.’
‘Creek, I mean. We’ll be there soon, everyone. We’re actually getting somewhere now.’
Peter offered up a grudging smile, but Louise seemed unimpressed. She had folded herself into a little ball, knees under her chin, arms wrapped around her chest, shoulders hunched. No reassuring words from Noel were going to ease the nameless fears of Louise and her brother. They had seen the blood on the highway. They knew something was wrong.
Peter couldn’t believe that his father was trying to preserve a façade of normality. They had strayed into an episode of The Twilight Zone, and Noel was talking about getting somewhere? Why on earth did he assume that this ‘somewhere’ was actually worth getting to? Noel might have been an intelligent person, but at present he was almost as deluded as Georgie, who had made it quite clear that she couldn’t understand why they all didn’t just drive to Broken Hill at once, and stop fussing about like little old women.
She obviously didn’t acknowledge her gut instincts at all – not like Peter. Peter had a bad feeling. He had a feeling that they were being driven towards exactly what they should be struggling to avoid.
Because he was trying to remain calm, however, he repressed this sense of foreboding as much as possible, and searched for hopeful signs. The trees were a hopeful sign. They were growing more thickly now – sinuous eucalypts, pale in the sun. They promised shade, water, a creek, a bridge, perhaps a house – civilisation, in other words. They were friendlier than the ant hills. They leaned towards the car, smooth and creamy (though flushed here and there with pink or grey), their leaves rustling, their twisted limbs marred by the odd knot or hard whorl like a boil, like a pimple, from which a sticky red crust showed the path of the sap where it had flowed from an open wound . . .
Peter gasped. He leaned out the window.
‘Peter,’ said Linda. ‘Don’t do that.’
‘I’m just –’
‘Head inside the car, please. It isn’t safe.’
The sap. It was hard to see from a moving vehicle, but Peter could have sworn that the sap was moving too, trickling out of black-lipped slashes in the bark – trickling out like blood, or treacle – unless the play of light was fooling him? Unless the flicker of sunlight through waving branches was lending movement to a frozen cascade?
‘Here we are,’ said Del, and all at once they were crossing a wide stretch of golden sand. It was flat and fine-grained. There were saplings growing out of it.
‘What’s that?’ asked Rosie.
‘It’s the creek,’ Linda replied.
‘Where’s the water?’
‘There is no water.’
‘There’s water,’ Del contradicted. ‘Can’t see it, that’s all. It’s under the sand, if yiz know where to look.’
‘Do you know where to look?’ Peter inquired, and Del cleared her throat.
‘Nah . . . not really. I gotta bit of an idea, but not really. Not like an Abo or anything.’
‘Wait a minute,’ said Col. ‘This isn’t right, is it?’
They had crossed the creek bed and were climbing a low bank, some of which was eroding away. Looking back, Peter saw the tyre tracks that they had left behind them, as clear as footprints on a beach. There were other tracks too (lizard tracks?), faint and delicate, as if a moth had fluttered across the surface of the ground. Beyond these marks, the Harwoods’ sedan was struggling down the opposite bank, its passengers bobbing about like plastic bottles on a choppy sea.
‘This can’t be right,’ said Col, who was waving a folded map around. ‘This ridge is too close to the creek. Are you sure we’re on the Balaclava turn off?’
‘Pretty sure,’ Del replied.
‘Then what’s this ridge doing here?’
The ridge loomed ahead of them, higher than Peter had anticipated. Its ruddy contours were visible behind the treetops; it looked a bit like a wave, rising as sheer as a wall in front of the track (which divided at its foot, one branch heading south, the other north, both travelling between the base of the ridge and the edge of the creek).
‘Hang on,’ said Del. ‘I’ll just pull over.’ And she turned left.
‘Are you sure we’re not on the road to Oakdale?’ Noel queried. He was poring over the map, his head almost touching Col’s. ‘This ridge right here . . .’ (A rattle of paper.) ‘ . . . is closer than it is there.’
&
nbsp; ‘But not that close,’ Col protested. ‘And if it is the Oakdale turn-off, then where was Ascot Vale station? We should have been able to see that. It should have been off to our right somewhere.’
‘Here,’ Del sighed. Her handbrake screeched as the station wagon rolled to a standstill. The engine coughed and died. ‘Let’s have a look.’
Three heads were now clustered over the map, silhouetted against the windscreen. Mongrel was growling. Peter twisted around to watch the Harwoods’ car come to a halt behind Del’s, and the driver’s door pop open. Ross emerged, a frown on his face.
‘Might as well get out,’ said Linda. ‘Kids? Why don’t you get out and stretch your legs?’
‘I’m thirsty,’ Rose complained.
‘There’s juice in the back. We can all have some.’
Stop, revive, survive, thought Peter. Everyone was spilling out into the sunshine. Georgie shoved past Peter and headed for Ambrose, whose linen jacket looked as bleached and creased as an old dish rag. Verlie moved stiffly to the boot of her car. Alec joined Ross, who had reached Del’s door. They both stepped back when it fell open, and she hauled herself to her feet, the map dangling from her grubby fingers.
Even John was stretching his legs.
‘Don’t let the dog out!’ Del warned Linda. ‘He’s in a funny mood.’