I don’t know what to do, he thought and a comet crash-landed on the earth, except it wasn’t a comet, it was a road train, and it wasn’t crashing it was passing by, and the air was filled with noise and light, and in that light he saw his car, silhouetted against the brightness of the headlights, and as he turned towards it he caught sight of what was standing before him.
He drove for the rest of the night, pulled on a jumper to quell the shake of his bones and drove not fast or slow, watching for anything that might jump out into the road, looking in his rear-view mirror at the dark behind him.
It was just past nine when the fuel ran out. Already the sun was hot on Leon’s knuckles gripping the steering wheel. The spare can was empty when he’d been sure it was full. The drinking water was gone as well and he could not remember doing that. He’d filled it at the drinking fountain at Cobar. The woman from the caravan park had come out, with her hair parted in the middle, and her T-shirt that read GIRLS SAY YES TO BOYS WHO SAY NO. STAY OUT OF VIETNAM and he’d imagined running her head under the tap, holding open her eyes and her mouth, making her see. But then he’d shaken his head and it was back to normal.
‘Right on,’ she’d said when he told her he was headed into the desert. ‘Right on, baby.’ And he’d started the engine and driven away.
The map showed nothing, just the long black line of a road cutting through all that desert, straight as a pin. A night’s drive from where he had last stopped. Up ahead was Quilpie, but that was a full thumb’s stretch north. You were supposed to wait, so he walked in circles round the car, standing tall to try to see over the desert to where someone might wave back at him. Far in the distance was low-lying scrub, a black line on the horizon. Past that all was heat wobble. Cicadas hissed in the brown grasses.
He took out his sleeping roll and laid it over the back window to block out the sun. All the doors were open as wide as they would go but the air didn’t move. It cooked itself on the dashboard and became sweet and hot, and he tried passing the time by opening up one of the books he’d brought with him, but Sherlock Holmes did not stick and he let the book rest coolly on his forehead, smelling the stale moths of the bookshelf at home and trying not to get angry.
His tongue lost the feel of sandpaper and became a small brick in his mouth. Syrup from a can of peaches wetted his lips, but the sweetness got at his thirst and he chewed the peach halves, sifting them through his teeth to try to get all the juice out. When the sun was high and the inside of the car was too much, he lay underneath and wondered what bits of the engine would hold the cleanest water, recited the names of the stations, in order, of the West Central line. A couple of parrots sang out on their way somewhere cooler. Sometimes there was a thump through the ground — a kangaroo, a footfall — but it may only have been the blood in his ears. Sleep came, quick and unexpected, so that he woke suddenly with the feeling that something had changed. The sun had moved and seen to his ankles and shins on its way: they felt burnt and bloody, and they were big and red as peeled plums. With his eyes closed he waited to get used to it, to know that the pain wasn’t going away. His throat was swollen like he’d swallowed an unripe peach.
The sun didn’t burn any more, but sent low rays and long shadows out over the ground. The road was just as long and straight and empty as it had been before he fell asleep, the sand and grass and dirt were the same, deeper in colour from the lowering sun. He opened the bonnet of the car and studied the radiator. You could drink that. It was just water. He stood right over it and saw it shine back at him, put a finger down but his finger was not long enough to touch. There would be no getting it out anyway. He closed the bonnet.
As the sun set, he clambered on to the roof to sit and watch night approaching like a cloud bank. He tried to think of what had brought him out there. Someone would come — there were telegraph poles for Chrissake. They stretched over the red hip bone of the landscape, a measure of how big the space was. The furthest one he could see was a hairline in the distance.
Perhaps, in the dark, it would be easier to spot help. He could flash his headlights on and off a few times, see if it brought anything. But once the dark had settled he felt differently. There were no stars, nothing to see past the nose of the car, and it gave him the creeps. In the far distance a gun was fired, and the noise brought an old heat to his palms and his arms twitched, thinking of the kick of it. His heart beat, steady and loud, and he bit his lips in case he’d imagined it. In the blackness something padded softly round the car. He found his hammer in the boot and repositioned himself back on the roof, the hammer resting heavy and cold across his burnt ankles. The gun sounded again and this time he saw a spark up ahead, far away, but still there. There was something that sounded like laughter in the big space. He felt better. The thing in the dark was most likely a dingo.
It was cold, now, like some bastard was playing a joke, but he didn’t get back inside the car. It was good on the sunburn. What was there to shoot at out there? Kangeroos, he supposed, dingoes, like the one that had passed by the car. When the desert had been silent for hours, something howled far away, one voice on its own, unanswered. He closed his eyes and lay flat, and waited for the cold night to pass.
In first pale lights of dawn Leon slid off the roof and carefully laced his boots, tying them tight over his sunburnt ankles to stop them from rubbing. He put a shirt over his head for shade. In another shirt he packed the remaining tins of peaches, resisting the urge to open one immediately to have the wetness of syrup in him. He looked at the keys in his hand for a moment, then locked the car and began to walk in the direction of the shooting.
Once the car became a spot in the distance, then disappeared behind a swell of heatwaves, he had the feeling that he was stuck on the same patch of desert, that there was a cunningly hidden conveyor belt that he walked against, keeping him in the same spot. His ankles were wet in his boots and he gritted his teeth against the steady shearing of his skin. By the time the sun was fully up the peaches were heavy and his lips were biscuit dry. He took a can and held it in front of him. He held it in front of him for a long time, until the fact had completely sunk in that he had forgotten to take the can opener. He could picture it sitting on the dashboard becoming red hot in the sun. He held the can a little longer, then hurled it as hard as he could along the road. It didn’t go very far, and for a few moments he gathered himself by placing a hand over his eyes and blinking grittily. He picked it up again as he walked past it and noted that it was unscratched. He dropped the peaches out of his shirt and tied it round his waist without breaking stride.
27
There was something about the fifth day that Sal was missing that seemed to put a lid on everything. Five days is a working week. At five days you cannot say ‘yesterday’ or ‘the day before last’. You have to say ‘Thursday’ and Thursday seemed like a long time ago. Frank awoke on the fifth day still drunk from the evening of the fourth. They’d gone back to Bob’s house after looking for her and as Frank stood by his truck, trying to find something to say, Vicky had tumbled out of the house, a face like grey death. She came out screaming and it took him a moment to realise she was screaming at him. She picked up empty bottles that were stacked neatly at the front of the house and started flinging them at him, and at the truck, bellowing, ‘You fucking whore! You killer, you baby-killing whore bastard…’
‘You’d better go,’ Bob advised, catching his wife round the waist as she marched towards the truck, bottle raised.