‘Where’s Vicky?’
‘She’s scared Sal’ll come home while we’re out. She’s scared she won’t. She’s been doing circuits round the house, then she gets scared she won’t hear the phone ring an’ she goes back in.’
There was nothing Frank could say, so he stayed quiet until they arrived at the shack.
‘We’ve been all around here. Hundred times. We’ve trawled the bush, the cane. We’ve shouted our throats bloody. Nothing. What can we do?’
‘Look some more.’
Bob looked tired and Frank wished he had something better to say.
Parts of the bush were familiar, but he wasn’t sure if they were real memories or if he just wanted to feel that he knew where he was going. Trees of a certain shape, their branches low and thick, made his pulse quicken. It was unthinkable that they wouldn’t find her. Unthinkable.
He could see that Bob hadn’t slept or sat down for days, his face was dust when it tilted up at the sun, and when he cupped a hand round his mouth and closed his eyes, Frank was surprised at the volume of his call. He looked as if he wouldn’t be able to raise a whimper, but when he coo-eeed it was a howl. Birds echoed back, but there was no reply.
As it turned to evening they stood side by side, peering into the dense scrub that lay ahead of them. It was like a wall, or a net. It was the marker that said, ‘No one has passed through here in a hundred years.’ They stood and looked at it.
‘She’s not here,’ said Bob in the voice Frank’d first expected him to have. Something between a wheeze and a murmur.
‘Yup,’ he said. That was it, then, was it? Sal was little more than a shard of bone now, waiting to be dug up or washed up, bleached in the sun and turned over by the sea. They stood a moment longer taking in the denseness.
Giving it one more go, Bob cupped his hand. ‘Sal! Sal!’
Frank joined in: ‘Hey, Sal! Sal!’
And they stood and shouted, startled a brahmany from its perch and carried on shouting at the brush, like it might turn round and produce her from its stomach.
They sat together on a fallen tree. Bob lit a cigarette, offered one and, although he didn’t smoke, Frank took it. There was a long silence. Next time they moved it would have to be to head back. He could hear Bob’s cigarette burning down with each suck. There was nothing to say. Bob dropped the stub, still red at the tip, on to the floor and looked at it. The ground around it smoked a bit. Frank stood up and crushed it out with his boot.
‘’Stoo damp anyway from the rain,’ said Bob and he put his head in his hands.
‘What shall we do now?’
26
On that first day Leon didn’t stop the car for anything, not until his bladder ached in his back and his eyes began to close with the sting of squinting out the sun. The sky was a dome of white and the road was black and red. There were other cars, but not so many that he had to slow down, there was always space up ahead. As the first greens of evening streaked the sky, he rolled into a motel and crawled into bed without showering.
In the morning he was woken by thumping on the door. The small woman he’d paid for the room the night before stood there in her cleaning smock. She looked him up and down before speaking. ‘Well, I thought you were dead. Anyhow, you’ve slept past twelve, so that’s two night’s board, and you’ve missed breakfast, but breakfast is included, so you can stay tonight and I’ll slip you an extra egg in the morning.’
Blearily, he found his trousers and went to settle up the bill. When he handed over the money, he saw that his knuckles were sunburnt from where he’d held the steering wheel. The woman stood behind the counter and had taken off the cleaning smock. Now she wore a sort of blazer and cat-eye spectacles at the end of her nose. She counted out his money, glancing at him with every stroke, like he might try to back out of the deal. ‘That’s all there, then,’ she said, suddenly flavoured with smiles. He headed back to his room to take a shower. On the way he saw the sign hung next to the vacancy notice, NO VETS and in smaller writing like a whispered threat, WE DON’T GIVE BEDS TO MURDERERS. He didn’t have the energy to do much, so he took the smudgy yellow towel and one of the pillows, tried to leave the room in a mess, but short of throwing the blankets on the floor there wasn’t much to move about.
He drove inland, sleeping in the back of his car at night. It was just as comfortable as a room, he could pull over wherever he liked and it was free. He passed through places with names from another language, where the people nodded to him as if they knew who he was. He raced emus along the open, empty roads and stopped to sit on the roof of the car and watch the sun set. Sometimes he passed only three cars a day. He went through places where everything was canned — canned peaches, canned ham, canned milk and eggs. He visited a banana plantation where he stopped for a milkshake and the thing came in a vase as big as his head. Cold bananas were good. It made him think of the shop, about a seating arrangement inside, where people could pop in and order ice cream and coffee, a Milo Sunday, malted milk and a slice of gingerbread. He looked forward to stopping at these little places, where people looked at your car, not recognising it, where they asked him where he was headed, not where he had been. Further inland these places became rare, and he stopped at each one and filled up on water and fuel, and had an ice cream frozen on to a stick, which he had become partial to. The daytimes were always good.
He’d been on his own a month when the sleepwalking started. The first time it happened he had stretched out in the back of the car, stupefied by the stars. Patterns trailed across his eyes, and he fell asleep deeply and quickly. Then bam. He was out in the open, in the nick, loudly spoken words attached to some dream dying in his mouth. That first time he was only a few steps from the car and he chuckled himself back to sleep, shaking off the panic that had first gripped him, the feeling that he had to get back to the car, or some sand shark would swallow him up. But over the next few weeks things got more serious. One night it was his own voice that woke him up, a bark that echoed back to him three times before he was left in silence again, the car nowhere in sight.
‘Jesus H Christ,’ he said to cover the wild chug of his heart and to fill the empty space. Insects chirruped in the air around him. A frogmouth croaked but there were no trees to be seen. Something bounded off to his right — it could have been a wallaby. Jesus, it would have been easy to wander out into the road. The car turned out to be disguised by a shrub of pigface and with the light of the moon it wasn’t too long before he was back on his safety raft. He locked the doors and lay awake the rest of the night.
Then, a few nights later, he awoke to himself speaking: ‘After the wind, an earthquake…’ and felt for a moment that he would carry on the sentence, as if he knew what he was talking about. He stayed still and opened his eyes, then tried to open them again, before he realised that there were no stars or moon, and the place was black as though he’d been buried. He stretched his fingers in the dark, was aware of no movement. He was back on the black road, a gun in his face, the thing in the space next to him, breathing wetly. The desert was silent, no croon of insects, no nightbirds, just his own breath and heart, and he stayed still for a long time, waiting for someone to shoot him. He crouched low to the ground, picked up a handful of dirt, stood up again, clutching it hotly. Something watched, he could feel it in the dark, the terrible mute animal with big eyes and long fingers. He could smell its mud breath.