I put the truck in reverse and Otto flops forward onto the ground, and there is a squeak from Kelly and I go backwards for a long time, until Otto is standing again, and running for the shed, and I have to hope the things I pulled out of the truck were the right things.
I turn myself around slowly, carefully, see Kelly in my wing mirror, lying on the ground, and despite everything, I feel bad, she is just a dog, and then I go, and I don’t stop for the wooden gate, I smash through it, and it’s so old, it flies off like it’s made of paper. I turn left on the road towards town, and I keep going. I do not look in my rear-view mirror. I drive past the town, in case someone recognises the ute, and then I just drive fast, not seeing more than two cars by the time I have used up a third of a tank of diesel. I can go straight for as long as the truck will take me.
The air is different out here, the sour meat smell is gone, and I keep all the windows down, even though the wind bangs at my ears. The smell is not of old unwashed places or of fat and eggs frying, it is of hot leaves and earth and bitumen. I take as many sharp turns as I can, and wind my way through three or four small towns so that when he comes looking I can throw him off. I wonder in what way Otto will come after me, because I am certain that he will. There’s a possibility that he might call the police, I guess, but the idea of a cell is not so bad. They don’t know me out here.
When it feels like the sun has crisped my eyelids and it has started to edge down over west, I pull into a motel. I park badly across a set of lines, but no one else is in the parking lot so it doesn’t seem to matter. The truck’s engine ticks like a panting dog.
I ask the lady behind the counter if there’s anywhere I can park that won’t be seen by the road.
‘You in some kind of trouble, missy?’ she asks in not a nice way. Her hair is creeping out of the red handkerchief she wears on her head.
‘I’ve left my boyfriend, I don’t want him to find me.’
‘Been roughing you up, has he?’ I nod, and the lady’s face softens. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘pay up-front and I’ll show you round to the back where Eddie keeps the boat.’
I peel off three notes from the roll in Otto’s tin and she’s happy. Once I’ve parked, she gives me a key and also a bar of chocolate. ‘You drown your sorrows with that, missy,’ she says. ‘You get trouble, dial nine and I’ll send Eddie round with a bat.’
Eddie’s boat is a speed boat with a shiny red hull. I am so far from the water, and I think of the smell of it, the winds and the chuck and gulp of water lapping at the fibreglass. I will drive to the coast tomorrow; I won’t stop until I get there and I can float face down in the waves.
‘It’s never touched the bloody sea,’ says the woman, and reknots her hair into the handkerchief as she walks back to reception.
I buy three packets of smokes — they have the kind me and Karen used to smoke, Holidays, like that’s going to trick you — a box of matches and a postcard with a photograph of a dolphin on it from the gas station, and I smoke a whole packet in my non-smoking room. I feel bad after the lady gave me the chocolate and let me park round the back, near Eddie’s boat, but I’m not ready for the outside yet. I prop the postcard up on the pillow and use it as something to look at. It’s hot as hell, and probably the cigarette smoke is not the most refreshing smell, but it feels so good and I push away the memory of Otto’s red little penis.
After the smokes, I have a long hot shower and get into bed still wet so that the ceiling fan will cool me off while I sleep. I dream of the sheep out there alone with Otto and Kelly, and start up in the night with my heart pounding wondering what will happen to them. I sleep again but wake at dawn to throw up over and over into the loo, like I’m turning inside out, getting rid of the chops and the dog hair, Otto’s tongue and Kelly’s mackerel breath. I drink water from the tap in the way Mum used to shout at us for, in case the spider was up there nesting. I drink long hard gulps of it. I watch the day come while I smoke a Holiday and the birds sing and everything smells brand new.
In a servo someone has left behind a newspaper called Shearing World. I get a cup of black coffee and a juice and flick through the paper. There’s a column at the back where they advertise for work, and where people advertise themselves as wanting work. Almost every one has a tick by ‘Experienced’. I can hold a bloody sheep, and I can take its fleece off. Yes, I think, fuelled by the coffee and reaching for my Holidays. I pick a place that sounds busy, and that is far away, Kalgoorlie, and I buy a map in the servo so I can find it. It is nearly two thousand kilometres if I drive to the coast. I also buy three litres of tropical juice and two litres of water. My money should last, I can take my time getting down to Kalgoorlie if I want. Otto has been surprisingly good at saving, there’s more money than I was expecting in the tin. I wonder if I should have just taken half. It makes me think again how if he does find me he’ll kill me.
On my way, I stop now and again to look at how the land changes. The further south I get the redder things are. I get to the coast in the early morning, after a drive through the night, and tread out in the flat water at Monkey Mia. It smells familiar and good. There’s a sign that says SWIM WITH THE DOLPHINS, and about a dozen tourists wearing orange life jackets bob around in the water at the end of a pier. I’m stunned at seeing so many people all at once. A smallish fin flits between them and I can hear them laughing apart from one young girl who screams because she’s terrified. And she should be, that orange’ll be visible to any passing darkness, not just the dolphins. I walk away from them up the beach, far out from the shore, but somehow the water only ever reaches my calves, not deep enough to swim in. Right on the point, a pod of dolphins, sixteen or so of them, come in close to me, and I can see their slick rounded backs and their blow-holes as well as their fins. I wave my arms about; partly I am waving hello and partly I want them not to come too close.
Back inland, at an empty truck stop, there’s a goanna on the picnic table and I sit for a while on a rock nearby and watch him. When I stand up he darts off the table, and rizzles into the scrub. There’s a dunny at the picnic area, but just going near it sets off a bloom of blue bottles and the smell is a familiar one. I go in the scrub and say sorry out loud to the goanna.
I park up on the side of the road, because I’m too tired to keep going the hour and half to the next servo marked on the map. But it’s a jumpy night, and even though Otto doesn’t know what direction I went in, I turn the engine back on, drive onto the plain and park behind a lump of flowering scrub for a bit of protection. The doors are locked and then I sleep deeply, curved to the shape of the truck’s seats, with the handbrake butting my ribs. I wake before dawn and there’s a small dingo not far from the truck, he’s got his paws around the back leg of something that died a long time ago, and he’s chowing down happily. My stomach moves inside me, and hurts. It’s probably time I ate something. I swig on the last of the tropical juice and decide not to ever drink it again, three litres is too much.
When I reach the next servo, everything smells of cooked meat, and it takes me such a long time to choose something to eat, the lady behind the till gets itchy.
‘Something you can’t find, doll?’ I jump.